I imagined a couple of old people, who had lived a life of experience, a life of having their own children, now faced with a granddaughter, eight years old, a granddaughter they had not been told existed till now. But how could they say they knew how to bring up children if their own children had kept this secret from them? Good well-bred sons and daughters would not have such secrets from those who had borne and bred them, surely. And if there was one eight year old grandchild, there may be others of different ages. Different ages, within reason. Within the reason of sane numbers from a single generation.
But I also imagine that this so-called granddaughter of the old couple might be the tip of an iceberg. Thousands of eight year olds waiting to claim them as grandparents. Maybe millions, trillions, or an infinite number, all of them pieces of a whole, pieces of eight, all trying to join up and become a single eight, a single eight year old called … called by what name?
‘How many eights make eight?’ thought the male half of the old couple whom I was imagining, as he woke up from being awake in his mansion by the Murakami Shore. Sometimes, being awake was more indefinite, more blurred and dreamy, more dozy, more anything than the act of dreaming-itself-while-sleeping. Without being awake one could not visualise the dream being dreamt. This dream about having an eight year old granddaughter who seemed more real than the fact that his own children had never had children of their own. He had woken with the sense that he was a seasoned and experienced grandfather, yet his eight year old granddaughter outwitted him at every turn. She had outwitted him, it now seemed, by pretending she did not exist at all.
I now imagined that he had memories of buying pink things at outset for the baby and then dolls and other things, until she wanted electronic gadgets to play with. He had always prided himself that he had been a very good grandfather to his own pieces of eight. But as he lay there, now fully awake, he could not even recall her name. The name of his pieces of eight. He sweated with sudden deep anxiety. He could not remember her face and at eight years old, children usually had developed distinct faces, their characters already partially formed, their bodies become a self-consciousness, their minds a distinct phenomenon of projection in the world. So how could he possibly have forgotten how she had grown up and the nature of the person she now was. And how one day she would yearn to inherit her grandparents’ mansion.
But she had become a nothingness that he tried to fetch back by opening and shutting his eyes, then turning to his wife, the grandmother of the child, the child he could only call pieces-of-eight as the only name he could muster. Pieces of eight, pieces of eight, like a parrot making sure it could still speak, if not understanding what it was speaking. Like a child slowly waking up from being a baby, and learning to talk, step by step. Except this experience for him was not gradual. He had woken up as a new grandfather — a sudden revelation. A sudden shock of self-identification. Pieces of eight, pieces of eight. His brain was now working overtime.
But now I imagined he had a period of regrouping after being asleep. He waved his hand back and forth in front of his eyes to make sure he was still awake. Then he managed to speak aloud as further proof of being awake.
“Are you awake, Silly Milly?” At least he remembered the name he had called his wife right from the opening gambits of their relationship generations ago. Such remembering was a start. It sounded as if she were still asleep. She surely would know whether they were grandparents, as well as parents. Maybe he had imagined it all. Imagined even the existence of his real children who had married but not had children of their own. Well, not yet, anyway.
“What did you say?” Milly motioned. Well, at least he was right about his own name. He did not have one. He stayed silent with happy relief. Quit while you’re winning, he thought. I am me. I am he who I believed myself to be. But how to ask questions about things he should already know? About his eight year old granddaughter whom they had probably been baby-sitting the evening before. Eight o’clock was her bedtime. He knew that. She had to be in bed by eight, or else. But he then remembered a nightmare when the clock never reached eight but hovered between six and seven on the cusp of eight forever. His granddaughter was far too clever for him. A smart cookie. Well any granddaughter belonging to him and Milly would bound to be smart. Someone who can even make the clock stay in a permanent state of it not being a child’s bedtime. He could now almost see her cheeky face as she mentally forced the big hand of the clock back and back. A kinetic power. That irresistible smile, very much like Milly’s smile, that odd chuckle, that disarmingly silly way of repeating words like a parrot. As she pointed at his wooden leg.
Wooden leg? He couldn’t remember having a wooden leg. He lifted the bed quilt cover in the dawn light and peered down into the darkness that it covered. He tried to put his hand down to feel his legs one by one. One by one. How many legs did he have? Was he in a Frank Kafka story? Woken up as something with eight legs? A sudden revelation. A shock of self-identification. If I continued to imagine him, as he lay there, beside his smiley wife Milly who had gone back to sleep, having shrugged off his attempts at a silly conversation about pieces of eight. Eight is the perfect number; on its side it is a leminscate of infinity, an endless figure of eight. Once having been a maths teacher, Milly now dreamed of the number eight. Other numbers are available.
Eight creatures faced him, as he pulled the homemade quilt higher to his chin. A parrot with eight colours like its own quilt of feathers, a giant spider, a pink elephant, a computer tablet that seemed alive with an electronic voice responding to human voices, a baby’s cot like a mouth opening and shutting with its barred cage of teeth, a large doll (from the his mansion in Victorian times) that now believed it was alive not dead — this doll sitting on the lap of the girl who in turn was holding a clock the lugubrious tick-tock of of which she continually seemed to count the ticks and tocks however large the number of ticks and tocks she might eventually reach, plus one other creature that he failed to recognise but worthy to be one of the pieces of any nightmare. But had he counted these creatures correctly; were they more or less than eight? Each time he tried to count them, he was distracted or outwitted by the girl whom he assumed to be his granddaughter and whose own counting made him forget his own numbers. As if senile dementia had finally arrived, he thought.
I had stopped imagining all this. It was all happening without me. It was as if I had never existed at all. And only the re-reading — or even the re-writing — of this account might prove it had been myself creating it from imagination. But no longer. And what happened next was beyond my control. It was down to the so-called grandfather either to wake up or die. That would be the only way it would stop. Or the only way the clock would start again. In time for bedtime.
Meanwhile, each of the eight creatures in turn explained to the so-called grandfather their existence, their hopes, their dreams. The doll, the elephant, and the others, even the clock joined in with a voice separate from its ticking. The girl herself stayed counting off the clock’s undercurrent of ticking, her face as blank as a child who had not yet formed its own face, nor its own personality, even after eight years of life. Yet he now felt more confident. The creatures obviously respected him, as if they knew he was their maker. He could no longer be outwitted. He was in control of his own life. And just before he fell asleep, perhaps for the final time, the girl smiled as if at someone she truly loved as a granddad. Like a small human being blooming into maturity with a sudden release of life’s power as a separate person. A new limb to replace the phantom one. Pieces of eight became an everlasting whole. A life rewritten as the double loop of a smile.
Other lives are available. Other creatures of nightmare, too, one by one, and still counting — indeed, the so-called grandfather still counting his legs, but he got stuck at six just as Woolf’s Ramsay was ever stuck at Q in the alphabet. It was a paradox that Zeno eventually got to Z.
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