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5.0 out of 5 stars
"Memory" lingers well after the reading, Jun 6 2002
By A Customer
On the fifth anniversary of his sister's death, 19-year-old Jonny Dart is looking for someone. He is drunk and beat up and searching for someone he has not talked to in five years but with whom he shares a moment he cannot forget. He is searching for Bonny, the only other witness to his sister's death. He manages to stumble through the streets to the house where her parents live. Drunk and bruised and bloody is not the best way to show up at someone's house asking for their daughter's address, so instead they have a friend take him to the nearest main road where he can catch a taxi home. But Jonny never makes it to the taxi. He wakes up the next morning on the traffic island where he was dropped. Sick and disoriented and with little memory of the night before, he begins to wander. "Suddenly, with childish horror, he saw another movement in the [storefront] glass...Something rippled towards him... another inhabitant...A stunted person in a long coat was pushing a supermarket cart along the diagonal opposite to the one he was taking. A moment later he made out a short, thin old woman wearing a hat like a crimson chamber pot without a handle. Strands of grey hair hung around her ears... He hesitated and stood completely still so that the old lady could walk past him, but instead she cam right up to him, staring at him, smiling, as if she were waiting for him to begin a conversation. Jonny remained silent. In the end she was the one who spoke first. 'Are you the one?' she asked." And so the first of many small events of fate or destiny or some strange supernatural power occur to pull Jonny Dart into Sophie's surreal world of missing memories, mistaken identities, misplaced people and a world out of time. Jonny thinks he will just follow Sophie to her home, to make sure she gets there safe, but when she invites him in for a cup of tea (which she never remembers to put the tea in) he is sucked into a world which to Jonny is both repulsive, fascinating, and strangely comforting in its disorder. He is immediately assaulted by the smell, the possible sources of which are too many to sort out: Sophies many, many cats that share her house, unwashed dishes, wet bedsheets, perhaps the dead bird in the pie plate which has occupied the refrigerator for who knows how long or maybe it was just Sophie herself. Nothing is as it should be in Sophie's house. Cheese is in the soap dish. The pigeonholes of the desk are occupied by an assortment of eggshells, orange peels, an old toothpaste tube, a crochet-covered coat hanger, and hair curlers. The only food to be found is the tea-less tea and several opened bags of cookies. But the "as it should be" world is something Jonny longs to escape, or maybe it's that he's never felt a part of it, and he feels a strange kind of comfort and safety in the unnatural order of Sophie's house. More than once, Jonny decides to leave, and more than once something prompts him to return. He becomes Sophie's reluctant yet self-appointed protector, and the forces that pulled him into Sophie's world of lost memories lead him at last to Bonny and through his own haunting memories.
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