1

“It’s a lovely wall, we’ve got no complaints there,” an elderly woman said to her companion, who nodded absently.

I blinked, scrunched up my nose and wondered where I was.

For a few seconds, I watched those two women shuffling along a riverside path. They leaned towards each other, talking intently, and comingling their colourful sundresses. But when I blinked again, the women had disappeared. An invisible stage magician must have twirled his cloak because I was suddenly staring at two men preparing to fish in a brownish patch of water.

I wanted to look for the two women; I already missed them. I also wanted to examine my surroundings, but my head felt extraordinarily heavy, so I just stared at the new apparitions in front of me. The two men unfolded lawn chairs in the shade of a Maple tree, placed a tackle box and bait bucket on the ground and leaned two rods against the trunk.

One of the men was extremely old and he sat down with great care, bending limbs almost as thin as the tubes in his chair frame. The man’s skin was flat and frayed like the nylon seat webbing, so when he leaned back, he looked like a second chair, stacked on top of the first.

The middle-aged man must have been his son because they had similar features. The middle-aged simulacrum baited a hook, cast the rig far into the water, then passed the rod to his father. The old man’s fingers wrapped around the cork handle like curls of paper.

Then, the son cast his own line, sat down, and inclined his head towards the old man as their chairs stretched like cats waking up.

“Oh yes, it’s a lovely wall,” I heard a familiar voice say, somewhere to my left.

My neck was a jumble of mismatched gears, but I managed to smile and slowly turn towards the sound. The two women, the ones I had seen when I first opened my eyes, were still plodding along that stone pathway. They hadn’t vanished, just moved outside my constricted field of vision. Both women favored their right legs, as if convalescing from identical injuries. They carried folding chairs, hooked over their arms like purses, and pointed at various trees, choosing a spot to sit and stare at the water, themselves.

“We’ve no complaints, there. It’s a lovely wall.” They paused underneath an enormous Willow, snicked their chairs open, sat down and sighed. “No complaints at all.” Then, yellow and green-budded tendrils obscured them, like a beaded privacy screen. I took a deep breath and rotated my head back to the fishermen.

“Thank you,” the older man said. He had a surprisingly firm voice. He slowly extended one cluster of paper fingers over the tackle box and bait bucket, to squeeze the younger man’s wrist. They seemed utterly content in this little parkette, with their lines in the brown water, one taking care of the other, and their chairs making small animal noises.

The scenery in front of me was both familiar and strange like a landscape in a dream. The river was broad but probably shallow because black branches protruded from the surface quite a distance from shore. Erosion must have snatched some trees from the bank and anchored their corpses in the mud. In fact, the nearby Maple was leaning towards the water like a swimmer trying to work up the nerve to dive in and join his friends.

I looked down, mildly surprised to discover I was sitting in a lawn chair, as well. I must have fallen asleep in the sun and was now struggling to crawl back to consciousness. A book was open on my lap: Remarkable History of the Sextant by Admiral George Fielding Elliot. I seemed to be halfway through the volume but couldn’t remember anything I’d read.

I tilted my chin up a few degrees, and my skull moved in small, discrete increments.

The opposite riverbank was lined with golden bullrushes. Blackbirds with bright red shoulder patches flitted amongst the stalks, and ducks poked at floating pondweed. Beyond the tangle of shore plants there was a sloping farm field covered with a thick, low-growing crop, perhaps soybeans.

A dozen enormous wind turbines stood in that field like robot space invaders, patiently awaiting orders. Their blades turned very slowly, finding wind currents a hundred feet above the ground. There was a line of spindly trees at the back of the field and beyond that, purpled by distance, was the wall.

I might not have noticed the structure at all, if those women hadn’t mentioned it several times. The wall was remarkable, but it was also strangely unobtrusive, like a bank of clouds or an escarpment ridge.

In the direction I was looking, the wall was at least a mile away. It was quite tall, perhaps seventy or eighty feet, and had a scalloped top, a series of large semi-circles that looked like cake decoration. The wall gently curled beyond my peripheral vision.

I raised my right arm and stared at the hand hanging from the end of it. The appendage seemed almost as strange and remote as the wall. I moved the hand towards my face like a crane operator manipulates a boom, and used stiff fingers to massage the muscles under my jaw. Whisker stubble made a soft, scratchy noise.

I forced my head left again, like a damaged tank turret, and looked past the Willow tree where those two elderly women were sitting. I saw a small, paved parking platform and a row of waterfront cottages. The wall traversed the river, there, like a gigantic dam, and brown water flowed into a dozen semicircular depressions, that might have been intake portals for a hydro-electric generator. Those openings had canted metal grills to deflect debris, and an orange buoy-line that warned off careless boaters or swimmers.

But there were no boaters or swimmers.

This section of the wall was close enough for me to see a distinct pattern of horizontal and vertical lines. The colour was variegated, brown, grey and green, with lighter splotches near the top where it was weathered.

It was impossible to make sense of the wall, so my brain occupied itself with trivial observations and inferences instead. The wall obviously predated its spindly-tree border, but it wasn’t centuries old, like a medieval castle. In fact, the structure looked modern and utilitarian, an assemblage of interlocking panels nested within metal rails. It was the kind of thing that might be used, on a much smaller scale, as a sound barrier near a highway.

The wall was thin, at least the edges of the semi-circular scallops gave that impression. Of course, it might have been bulkier near the base.

I rotated my shoulders, shifted position in the lawn chair, and turned back to the fishermen. The old man’s colourful float was now darting about the surface of the water. When his son nudged him, the old man cranked his reel handle. The younger man got out of his chair and stepped down to the riverbank to help land the fish. He grabbed the line and pulled a wriggling perch into the air. The fish had a brilliant yellow belly and glistening black side bars. Both men smiled, the fish was unhooked, and tossed onto the grass near the trunk of their shade tree. The perch flopped several times as the younger man re-baited the old guy’s hook and re-cast.

“How’s the fishing?” A stout lady materialized, from the right. She stood with her hands on her hips and squinted at the men.

“Not so bad,” the old man said. He waved at the fish twitching near the base of the Maple, and I noticed there were several other fat perch in the grass.

I wondered if I had been periodically falling asleep and missing bits of the action.

“You’re going to have a nice fish fry tonight,” the woman said then waddled along the path towards the spot where the river flowed through the wall.

“Yes, yes, yes.” I could only see the back of the old man’s head, but I could tell he was smiling. “There’s nothing better than fresh, pan-fried perch.” The man’s words instantly evoked a memory of crispy pectoral fins that snapped like potato chips when bitten.

I had no idea where that memory came from. I had no idea where I was, or why I was sitting in a small park staring at a patch of brown water. I didn’t know whoI was either, but that deficiency didn’t make itself known until later. The strangest thing about my situation was the sense of calm in the face of so much potential angst. The mention of a fish fry made me feel slightly hungry, but even that physical need wasn’t pressing.

I glanced down at the book lying in my lap, but I could no longer read the title because all of the letters had somehow wriggled into unfamiliar positions.

Maybe I’d suffered a stroke, or some other brain injury that impacted my language centres.

But I didn’t feel particularly ill, just a little stiff. Perhaps the letter-scrambling was nothing more than a response to eye strain.

I immediately checked the top of my head for a pair of reading glasses. Nothing but hair. I checked the folds of clothing underneath the book, then let my fingers trail through the nearby patches of grass, but they only encountered an empty take-out coffee container.

Gingerly, I stood up. My legs felt strong. I did a deep knee bend, then repeated the action, one leg at a time, lowering my body about a foot. I opened and closed each hand and each eye individually. There wasn’t any one-side paralysis, no tell-tale muscle twitching.

But it was disconcerting to have a book title turn into a handful of writhing bait worms. I rubbed the stubble on my chin again. I hadn’t shaved today, perhaps not for several days.

I sat down again, and my chair creaked in a friendly way.

The fishermen’s bait bucket had the phrase “Two Dozen” written on it in red, blocky letters. I was able to read that; perhaps the colour or distance was helpful. Or maybe my bout of alexia was just a momentary spasm. I decided to take another stab at the Remarkable History of the Sextant but, strangely, couldn’t locate it.

Admiral George Fielding Elliot had vanished.

I’d justput the book down when I stood up to do my knee bends; it should be floating somewhere nearby, not missing in action like a ship piloted without a sextant.

This wasn’t the muzziness one might expect after waking up from a nap in the sun, this was more like a real medical crisis. Bits of the world, both significant and trivial, were playing hide and seek.

I imagined a nurse gently questioning me as if I were a badly injured patient, newly-arrived on the ward: “Do you know where you are, right now, dear? …Oh, no, you’re in a hospital…Do you know what city the hospital is in? No…that’s the wrong country. Do you know why you’re here? …No, that’s hardly likely, is it?”

There was obviously something wrong with me but at least the impairment had limits. For example, I knew what a hospital was, and I knew hospitals had employees called nurses who asked condescending triage questions. I knew the creature flopping on the parkette grass was a fish, and an unusually large specimen of a specific species. When I looked at the wall, I knew it was a wall, not a cliff, or part of a building, and I could speculate about its age and how it was constructed.

The wall’s purpose eluded me, but at least I was aware that things tended to have purpose, I wasn’t quite as badly off as the perch gasping and dying in this alien environment.

I scratched the beard stubble.

Yes, walls have purpose. I listed a few possibilities: walls keep some things out and other things in; for example, they reduce highway noise near over-priced subdivisions; they also delineate property; they defend borders; they warehouse zoo animals and criminals.

But generally, walls weren’t as tall as the one looming to my left.