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It has been argued in the chronicles of the mind, that any attempts to express all the characteristic ideas of possible experience will create a pleasure comparable only to that of "life itself". But what is life? Nothing more it seems, than a strange, private dialogue between victims of an intolerable, fully-grown biology, taking place in a theological swamp of easy virtue! Can this be pleasurable?
Before we answer this question let us analyse it more closely. One can readily agree with one of the most sapient theorems expressed in the chronicles of the mind that (from the point of view of the mind) life (and everything else for that matter) is regarded as a facet of "existence". However, on closer inspection,. one discovers that there is absolutely no proof that the mind can indeed accept that there is such a thing as "existence"! One look in the mirror will assure you of that - a practice (though potentially dangerous) which is very illuminating, you'll agree, because it indicates the function of speculation, cogitation and disbelief, processes that anyone may repeat in a suitably equipped laboratory, without any fear of retribution. All very well, so far so good, but if the mind cannot accept "existence", then what can it accept? It seems almost certain now that all the mind can accept, in place of existence, are vague "revelations" and "intuitions" based on imperfect, intellectual translations of everything but! Try it yourself. Draw an imaginary animal that resembles yourself. When you have finished, you will find that it is everything but imaginary. (The usual way around this problem is to apply the scientific method. But for the mind, the scientific method simply reveals that everything, including the mind, is a problem.) Why? Because the mind, as such, operates on two levels: if it is to accept the possibility of existence, then it must first demand the existence of possibility. And it is on these diametrically opposed and perhaps even mutually exclusive foundations that something which could be described as "physical theory" has developed, or the "demonstration of phenomena" or (in lay language) "going concerns", "the run of the mill" or (to be exact) "what happens". A good question. In fact all this is not as easy as it sounds because in the pursuit of ideas the mind has many obstacles, not the least of which is the apparent case with which the mind avoids embarrassing questions, like this one. Thus, should the mind succeed in convincing you that ideas represent experience, please remember that "physical features" are to be interpreted symbolically, since they are closely related to uncertainty. (Some of you may already feel this instinctively, others will be certain of the contrary. You may have to study yourself rather than the contradictions of experience to be able to escape the conclusion that the purpose of all this is riddled with doubt. Look closer though and you will find that these principles are in fact the underlying forces which control your every day and can be built into the particular thing that interests you most: the pursuit of love, for example, or one of the numerous other lies behind visible things.)
All forms of discovery are opposed to experience. A similar contradiction of necessity is represented by books and articles (such as this one) which try to prove the impossibilities of believing that existence is difficult to believe. That's like saying that Belief is merely Unbelief, with a capital B. Nothing could be further from the truth! Is the mind like a cup of hot water? Are ideas like mental teabags, to be thrown away after their flavour has been liberated? It would be more accurate to imagine the mind dangling in the ideas! But the truth, dear reader, is even more brutal: and it can be demonstrated only by practical means.
Symbolic? Certainly. One doesn't need to look far to see the workings of dualism. Idealism vs materialism, for example, or good vs evil, or, in this case, space vs time. Why must these two concepts be at loggerheads? you might ask. Complain all you like: they are and that's all there is to it. To investigate it further, one has to separate them. Space is inviolate of course, but time, more malleable, is open to persuasion.
Time then, in the consistent modernization of history, has become through no fault of its own, a sort of museum. A very arbitrary museum, one might observe and one which functioned perfectly well, until some time last century they began charging admission. It is very hard to find out just who was responsible, because then, as now, memory was one of the mind's best guarded secrets. All that is known is that in time, this museum of time became known as the Ba Ba Inn, or just "the cafe", when a group of German philosophers, thinking they represented either the "tongue" or "foot" of the brain, marched in one day and threw up a turnstile. How this relates to writers and their famous "pug dogs" can be quite simply exposed by a terminal look at language: the so called environment in which space and time compete for supremacy. Although writers are quite fond of this expression, the result is a particularly painful surface, with the result that the "modern" writer more often than not tries to escape the ravages of the space time continuum. Not an easy thing to do and it becomes quite easy to see why "life" (especially in the style one could observe in the Ba Ba Inn) is so much more popular.
Not everyone can afford the price of such an admission, of course, so this leaves a lot of room for speculation on the outside. And those who engage in this pursuit employ a modification of what used to be known as "personal interference", this being one of the more successful approaches of the remnants of experience and one which indicates that there is after all a world in which "words" are only black and white dots on a frayed curtain. Wherever this may be is not yet certain, but impressions in the wet sand have made it impossible to deny.
Further below, things are planned for the cafe, but more about that later. Characters and locales aren't the things lacking at the moment, what's needed is a way of welding them all together. The answer to the space time conundrum, as we shall see, lies beyond it: in the eternal triangle.
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| PART ONE |  |
JAMES
I
WHEN they first met, James was in flight, while Charles, a little to the left and somewhat beneath James, was watching him fly past.
Even though the strange dynamics of the situation prevented precise measurements, it can be safely said that both the in-flight body and the observer were approximately the same height, weight and age. A closer inspection, however, would reveal that James was the taller of the two, with about six feet in his socks, possessing also a floating profusion of recently washed red hair, a body and a complexion badly in need of rain.
Seeing this elongated redhead sail past him, Charles made an attempt, on the spur of the moment, to grab the body in mid-air and therefore stop it crashing into the group of six women who were dancing at the foot of the stairs. Alerted by his attempts, which failed, these six women drew back and James came to a sudden halt on the floor at their feet. His arrival was greeted with shrieks of laughter, to which he responded with a charming smile It seemed that nothing was broken and he managed to stand up again, buoyed up by a volatile cloud of alcoholic vapour, leaving the six women all with the impression that he would be seeing each one alone as soon as possible, as he extracted himself from their hot, wet limbs and headed for the stairs again.
Charles meanwhile had been watching all this from where he was sitting on the stairs, trying to find an undamaged cigarette in a torn packet of Camels he had found on a table with the drinks. James climbed past him and entered a smoky room at the top of the stairs, still on his hands and knees.
Charles trimmed off the ragged edge of half a cigarette and lit it. He then moved to the side of the room and got hold of one end of a large sofa. He maneuvered this sofa to the bottom of the stairs and sat down again to wait.
He looked very Irish, with a boyish expression and red cheeks He was dressed in a large bulky tan coloured coat the inside of which was lined with lambswool. The fingernails on his right hand were long, while those on his left were short.
A few seconds later the door at the top of the stairs burst open and James flew out, sailing in more or less the same trajectory as before and therefore landing, with surprising comfort, in the soft cushions of the sofa. James sat up, rubbed his face with astonishment and then looked determinedly at the stairs again. Charles came and sat beside him and offered him a cigarette. James accepted the cigarette and tried to light it with a gas lighter in the shape of a miniature pistol which Charles held up to his nose. The cigarette failed to ignite properly because of a large split in the paper which was letting the air escape. James took it out of his mouth, knocked off the charred end and put the remainder behind his ear, taking from his pocket as he did so a packet of Gauloises one of which he absent-mindedly offered Charles, another of which he lit and puffed at angrily
Charles accepted the cigarette with thanks and maneuvered himself into James's line of vision, therefore obscuring James's view of the upstairs doorway.
"It looks like a private party upstairs," he said. "Is there something you want from up there?"
James allowed his eyes to focus on the red-cheeked face.
"I left my drink up there," he said.
"What was it? I'll get you another."
James laughed: "Methinks it was a Methuselah, but it could have been a Jeroboam."
"What of?"
"Viva la clicko."
"It must have cost a fortune."
Whereupon James explained that, no, strictly speaking, it did not belong to him. In fact he had stolen it. While he spoke Charles listened intently, savouring the Gauloise, which was the closest thing he had got to a cigarette for several weeks. Then, after further conversation concerning domestic and imported intoxicants, Charles convinced James to forget the prospect of retrieving the large bottle of champagne from the eleven or so rugby players who were upstairs drinking it and they, walked outside. The night air greeted them. James paused and bent over, suddenly feeling the alcohol he had already drunk and then straightened up again, refreshed by the cold wind on his face. After several deep breaths, they continued talking and it transpired that Charles had a light blue 1963 VW, to which he now invited James for a drink. Gladly James accepted
From the glove compartment of the ear, Charles procured a jar of black olives, some cabanossi sausage and a bottle of Metala. This red wine was the colour of sump oil and as soon as James tasted it he became very loquacious and his voice slipped fluidly about in his mouth with a sense of hatless intrigue. It had appeared by now that they knew each other and James added further complications by confessing that he was interested in writing, above all else and that he was thinking off writing a novel. Charles who was also interested in all forms of literary, experiment, including painting and music, said as much and a mutual agreement was reached whereby they would attempt to consolidate this friendship with the consumption of more of the Metala which, having breathed a bit in the bottle, was improving rapidly and was reaching monumental proportions with regard to the excellence of its flavour It had the further sobering effect of intoxicating both of them with a sense of completely unbridled euphoria. James began expounding his theories of poetic images and willful hallucinations illustrating his theory by- saying what if the car was suddenly filled with tons of apples. This image seemed so apt to Charles that it created a physical disturbance in his mind and made him blurt out a semantic game which he invented on the spot.
"Name two things which are equal but not opposite," he said.
James could not.
James found that his ideas at this stage were like insects and were pestering him, continually swarming in his head. lie confessed further to Charles who he as yet hardly knew, that he was constantly obsessed with the image of the night as a black cat.
Charles, nodded and agreed and urged James to try some of the prosciutto he had found maturing under the back seat. Got a rearguard air, that black cat, said James. His speech had become considerably more succinct now that he had allowed the fumes of the red wine to invade his cerebral cortex. Might have green eyes, he stated. Logged. Lumbered. He laughed. Filled with dark fish. His open eyes were now wet. A fist pummeled in this wine he said.
At this point James paused for a moment in a wooden reamed cask of blind satisfaction as he was especially pleased with the sound of his voice. He was well versed in wine-dark tumbleskinned romances and this was not the first time the amphibious eclairs and other inhabitants of stagnant waters had commenced to devour his liver. James possessed a liver of great availability. His voice filled the air around him and he was delighted to be within its arena. He drew into his moulded lungs a breath of the apple-green air that swirled around within the small blue ear.
"The prowess of suggestion," he blurted out.
Charles wound down the window a little way and the rush of cold air sobered them both immediately. James began explaining his plans for a literary composition quite earnestly, and a couple of hours were passed quite pleasantly with the resulting conversation.
The next break came when James and Charles made a foray together into the ruins of the party in search of potable alcohol. In amongst the wreckage and the bodies they found four bottles of white rum (which they discarded), half a bottle of Bundaberg dark rum (which they kept), quarter of a bottle of Dimple Scotch, one eighth of a bottle of Tullamore Dew, fourteen bottles of beer, three flagons of white wine (which they immediately poured out onto the garden), one small bottle of Schmirnoff Vodka (which they poured into the petrol tank of Charles's car) and (with unusual luck) an unopened flagon of Tyrrels Dry Red. They left six bottles of Vickers gin, two bottles of Johnnie Walker Whisky and four bottles of various after-dinner liqueurs (which they topped up with a bottle of Advocaat); for the bodies to find upon wakening.
It was in a late night coffee shop that James and Charles began to discuss the dentistry of James's lungs which Charles asserted was the imprint of the body in the mind. James said he felt completely toothless. He had no sense of touch in his legs.
"Lungs I mean," he corrected quickly.
When they added some of the rum to the coffee their discussion was diverted into the areas of "eye-teeth", "molars" and "oval portraits", the last of which they both assumed were the thoughts of the dentists trapped while removing teeth.
"I like the bicuspid," said James. "Shows good taste. But the incisors. Far from wretched. The molars. The eye-teeth. And the whole view of the lower jaw; not bad."
"The face is usually one's strongest link in defence," said Charles. "it embodies the five senses. Even sex, the sixth."
For a moment the seriousness of Charles's comments had swum James out of his depth and he wanted to get the conversation back to the subject of the night. lie had formulated his thesis. lie was about to let loose. His first question would be: "What colour would the night be if it was never dark?" But he had another slug of coffee and rum instead and relaxed again.
The night was still young. They were both in a fine mood still and James was all the more surprised when he walked into the wall instead of through the door when they left ft the coffee shop. Charles drove out of the city, with James snoring in the back seat. The grey clouds of the morning drifted up from behind the horizon. II
The next sensation James was sure of was the sound of someone swimming. His elbows were sore. His mouth felt like an armchair. His tongue was trying hard to find somewhere to lie down. He hitched up his legs and looked out of the car window Poplars and willows and a weir with floodgates. lie felt his throat. Thick-skinned. Imagination. Imagines. He whistled. Charles looked up and grinned. "Come on in!" he shouted.
James managed to get to the water's edge by marching his legs in six/eight time. He wasn't hung over. He was probably still drunk. He searched in his trousers for a pencil and paper. Wrote down these words: "I will". Wet-lipping his pencil he opened his mouth. And did. He let the paper and pencil fall and ran along the weir until he reached half way.
The shock of the cold water nearly killed him.
When his head broke free of the surface of the water his eyes were clear and the adrenaline had sobered him instantly,. His clothes were wet and heavy and threatening to drag him under. He wrung them out and laid them to dry on the weir. He looked at the rippled surface his swimming made and thought of a wrinkling iron. Shallow waves. He swam out to an overhanging branch and hauled himself out of the water. The air nestled against his skin. Tiny folds. A thin film of air between one layer and the next. III
When they drove back into town that afternoon Charles drove into the worst area of slum the city had to offer and stopped outside a three storey building that had a "FOR SALE" sign stuck over a "TO LET" notice in the window.
"I pay rent here," he said.
The building had been a milliners that went bankrupt. The new owner was thinking of turning it into a brothel. in the meantime Charles had rented the roof as a studio, but so far nothing had happened with the rest of it. "I haven't explored the place very thoroughly," said Charles. "There's a café next door the smell of burnt coffee and greasy eggs in the window gets fairly nauseating sometimes. Do you want to share the rent?"
"What with? I'm expecting some pay from two weeks work I did at the medical school over last Christmas holidays. I could collect it. But it's only seventy-five dollars."
He moved in that afternoon. He assumed his father had not yet discovered the missing Methuselah, because when Charles and James called for some furniture and books, things at home were quiet.
James took the room at the back of the third floor. Boxes of silk off-cuts spilled out onto the floor. Hats, yards of raw yellow silk, black wool and a layer of dust half an inch thick on top of the cupboards. James was too tired to notice he was tired. He threw himself into this dusty wreckage and emerged about six hours later having made more than two-thirds of the top floor habitable. Half an hour later still, Charles got back from a night job cleaning at the Hospital, with six bottles of Guinness and forty pounds of potatoes.
"Well we won't starve," he said.
Where James had decorated the upstairs rooms the air was bright yellow. A collection of gigantic machines, which the milliners had left, were now covered with silk cloth. A clean white stove (a major achievement) stood in the corner. Odd grilles, probably for weaving thread, were now stacked up one on top of the other and formed the base for a reading lamp. Eyes.
Charles boiled potatoes and beans.
They ate well that night and at about half past one in the morning James fell asleep reading Flann O'Brien and dreamed of a person who was a gigantic potato being boiled alive in the streets. He woke up and wrote on the inside cover of the book. "Huge character. Red. Skirts puffed up in the wind. Walking around the city. Big and Irish. Suitable name: George McIntyre. Unconscious slang (only in his mind)." IV
The following week passed quickly with James devoting part of the time to cleaning up the building and part of the time to developing the character of George McIntyre.
Breath off his belly. Easy does it. This might take patience and care. First of all inspection. Stocked up with chest off drawers full off investment bonds. Fine fellow sleep. All sand and never awake. Externally and intraverbally Within the digestion of George himself and also on the complex surface of his body, exposed as it was to the elements, elementary as they were to suit the occasion. Inner development, enveloping his body either wholly or partially depending on the bellyful. Muscling sleep. Pushy. Well versed however in the soft arts of tidal persuasion, soft tidal assault of limbs and body both.
This woven blanket looked for somewhere to lean and rest. George. The heaviness of his brow sagged in confused folds.
He wanted to sleep. He needed to sleep. Something soft be was sinking into. Slowly softly be sank, a cherubic smiling flood. Downwards until be was lying in the soft embrace which gathered him up and led or ladled him out buoyantly into the bath of city beat to drift.
Slyly and hesitatingly, a dreary unpunctuated dream gained stature and colour in his limbs and awakened them, although it can not be doubted that be was still sleeping and satisfied in slumber.
"I can't decide," James said, "whether to use him when he's asleep, as though it was against his will, or just write realistically about him when he's awake." He looked up. To his surprise, Charles was no longer in the room.
James stood up and looked into the room that Charles was using as a bedroom. Not there. He noticed a strange smell. it's me, he thought. I must get these pants into some hot soapy water quick, the algae from the weir is growing mould. He picked up his manuscript and went up to the roof. The night was brilliant with stars and dark blue over the city where the lights fluoresced along the river. Charles was painting in the dark. James walked over and stood beside him.
After a few minutes Charles turned away from the painting. He was smoking a pipe. He offered the tobacco to James. James declined, taking a Ritmeester Rozet from his pocket. Dutch cigars were all they could afford at the moment. He noticed that Charles's eyes looked very red and sore.
"I was thinking of driving up the coast," said Charles
James knew instantly that he wasn't invited.
Charles knocked the ash off his pipe out onto his palette and began scraping the bowl with a pipe spoon.
"Have you been sleeping?" he asked James, without looking up.
Momentarily puzzled, James thought for a moment, then said:
"I've been writing about sleep and since I began I haven't slept myself, but I don't seem to need it."
"I keep getting tired," said Charles "Maybe I'll be away for a couple of days."
CHARLES
I
CHARLES, whose character was only very loosely defined, found existence in this novel extremely problematic and at times, virtually intolerable. Up to now, as far as he could tell, the locale consisted of a few streets which surrounded a small area of inner-city suburb. In the middle of this small area was the three-storey abandoned warehouse he was supposed to inhabit, in the drunken, abandoned fashion demanded by the plot.
James, he reflected angrily, was another kettle of fish altogether. Since he was the writer he had written himself the best part, of course, while the rest of the characters had to put up with extremely poor conditions and very little chance of improvement. Even their spare time activity was exploited for the purposes of the novel. Charles, who had begun to be interested in painting to fill in the long hours when he wasn't called upon to provide a foil for James's dialogue, had even been forced to go away last weekend to get out of the vicinity of James so that his paintings wouldn't appear in the book, horribly distorted and overlaid with a whole lot of unnecessary symbolism, all relating to James's unhappy sex life.
Thinking these thoughts, he looked over the city. It was vaguely sketched in beyond the borders of Love Street, Water Street and Park Street, along which he had walked. Parkland appeared where he assumed the Botanical Gardens were put and in the distance was the sea, which had to be chlorinated to limit the growth of bacteria in the stagnant water. That the sea had to be chlorinated was only one of the many shortcomings that fiction suffered in relation to reality. When conditions like this prevailed it was little wonder that television was taking over.
By a commodious vicus of recirculation he approached Howth Castle and Environs, which was his pet name for the three-storey building he was supposed to inhabit. He stared intently at the small café next door, on the ground floor. An unusually pungent odor of burnt coffee tingled his nostrils.
It's odd, he thought, that no action in the book so far has taken place in the café. It was very unlikely that the café would have been put there without a good reason.
He entered the café as though from a great height. Several tables were plump in the dim light. The smell of coffee became more intense.
From a darkness he thought was complete, a woman's voice spoke to him: "Dad's not in," she said.
At the same moment he saw James crossing the street towards the café. He turned and went out again and met James in the street, observing that the writer's head was blazing with light. Traffic in the street swerved to avoid the fierce glare.
"You're attracting a great deal of attention," he said, when James approached. "You got up early this morning, did you?"
"Yes."
"What's on the agenda?"
"I'm going to burn the whole city."
"Have you warned the Fire Chief?'
Charles laughed: "What happens next?"
"I want to introduce some new characters."
"What about the guys that chlorinate the sea?"
James laughed, but with a hint of suspicion.
"What were you doing in that cafe?" he demanded.
"I don't know," answered Charles.
They then entered the café together. James spread his papers on a table, while Charles sat opposite him. They ordered coffee. Dad had returned, but the girl was no longer there.
James circled a passage on the page in front of him.
He died on the bank and as he did so he beard shots and saw the water spurt around him. He struck the water and was turned over and stayed under and tried to make as much ground as possible before surfacing and his arm was numb and his leg was aching and be had not thought to look at the bullet holes and be swam as swiftly as possible surf acing only when absolutely.
"Absolutely what?" asked Charles.
"Just absolutely, that's all," answered James.
Later that night, under the yellow gaze of the lamp, James toyed with the idea of introducing the chlorinators as characters, as Charles had suggested.
Dad trudged wearily towards the chlorination works. They were built into a tunnel by the sea and the men (who also had to polish the teeth of the fish with toothpaste) took alternate shifts in the lonely grey room. What with the café and this night job, Dad's life was a misery. Dad entered the tunnel and passed Ted in the entrance to the lonely grey room.
"Morning Dad," said Ted on his way out.
"Night Ted," answered Dad. He entered the room and began checking the chlorination controls.
James yawned and looked up. Such characters might be very amusing but they didn't seem to adapt to the tone he was striving to achieve. He chewed the end of his pencil. As he did so, the sun took that opportunity to rise over the rooftops in the east, considerably startling James, who had not realised it was so late. "Now I can take that shower I meant to take last chapter," he thought, proceeding to the bathroom, shedding his stinking clothes along the corridor. it was very quiet, he observed, in Charles's room. Not even the sound of steep could be heard.
As he showered, the sun rose up from the east and cast bright yellow rays into the bathroom which struck the tiled wall and fell to the stone floor. He picked up a number of these sunrays and placed them carefully on the ledge above the wash-basin. Those that struck him did not bounce away and fall, but adhered to his skin in a thin film, while the more strong rays left a strange sensation of tingling as though he had been kissed.
When he emerged from the shower recess, he inspected himself in the mirror and was amused by the slight glowing of his skin. As he dried his hair the light seemed to be polished and glowed more intensely.
When he had dressed, he placed those sunrays he had collected from the stone floor carefully in his coat pocket. He felt warm and relaxed and left the building for the street. Yet in spite of his relaxed mood, he began to realize that the time sequence in his novel was somewhat out of order, in more ways than one. IV
The reason that Charles could not be heard in his room was quite simple: he wasn't there. And furthermore, he still wasn't there some time later, at a time that could reasonably be called the present. The sun had appeared like the overture of a lady's hat, without the presence of shade, over the wharves that constituted the eastern horizon for the all-night drinkers at the Metro Bar. Charles, at this moment, was deciding between inhalation and peristalsis as two methods of consuming the decidedly rumlike beverage on the table in front of him. A lad drinking coffee at the same table looked up from a bulky notebook, with an ambidextrous look on his face.
Once was too much. Charles began to wonder out loud. "What are you reading there, Blue?"
Ted put down a badly chewed pencil and looked at Charles. His eyes were translucent green shallows over black depths. His skin was yellow and a pinched, somewhat poisoned expression marred an otherwise bearded face. His thoughts, while he regarded the healthy, black-haired fat young Irishman in front of him, were peculiarly vague. V
Charles walked back in the direction of the warehouse. The breakfast he and Ted had consumed had not been of a very high standard, owing to the fact that meals on wheels was the only venue available at that hour of the morning, but the liquid refreshments more than made up for it. The morning sun streamed down on his head and the sky, apparently impervious to heat, sparkled like asbestos. The worn-out buildings in this area of town were strangely bitten down to the quick. They looked thwarted and sore. A row of crippled brick fences faced onto the red yards.
Charles passed the cafe. Dad wasn't there and the girl was in the window. She polished the glass like the stern of a ship disappearing out of sight.
MARIA
I
AT THIS moment, James was engaged in the task of numbering a collection of scientific and social variables which were to control the physical existence of the characters in his book. These variables had cost him several hours concentration in his usual spot for daytime writing, in a narrow cul-de-sac near the rear of the library. He was nearing the limit of his writing powers.
He breathed into his lungs the overpoweringly strange scent of mouldering print, but it failed to stimulate the few dancers left on the floor. Letting the breath out of his lungs in a low whisper, he bent down, picked up his things and went outside into the blinking sunlight.
The place where he walked might have been anywhere, as long as there was a bridge in the distance, a baked white cement square, a library in the background, a clocktower, a terraced series of lawns and trees and a milling crowd about midday.
All well and good, but the main thing was to get the story going. Most of the problems, as he knew well, would occur on the first page and this page was to be avoided at all costs. After that, things would become progressively easier. Once the narrative had got a grip on the reader, then it's possible to let some information seep out gradually.
Unlike in fiction, he thought to himself, everything in real life happens in the distant past. And it was real life that concerned him now. A eucalyptus emanation appeared to be bathing his braincells, which reminded him of something that was long overdue. Part of his book, he reflected, would be written from the point of view of the mind itself. But where was that smell coming from? Her bright hair, smelling of eucalyptus, smiled at him as he approached. She was scribbling poems on her leg, to avoid hurting the air. His footsteps hurried away behind him, as he came closer. At the moment he sat down she looked up. She drew her grey-green skirt down over her knees, hunched forward doing so and grinned.
"Are you writing your book?" she asked him.
"Not right now," he answered. II
Charles in the meanwhile had been experimenting with the affect of magnetism on his paintings. Magnets attached to his head had failed to make any appreciable difference and he was now experimenting with iron filings in the pigment itself, with movable magnets attached to the back of the canvas. There had been rain during the night and now the air on the roof studio smelt fresh and clean as though the richly oxygenated breeze was being pumped by a gigantic bellows. Studying the painting before him he observed that it was gay and fairly abandoned, except for one small corner where all the things from inside the heads of the people were in a pile. This pile consisted mainly of cotton wool and linseed oil and weeds were already sprouting.
Charles, while his hand was completing the background of the painting, was using his mind to direct questions into the bowl of his pipe, in the absence of tobacco. Why was he painting such infantile rubbish? Who was trying to make sure that he was as short-sighted as they were? People were responsible for their own boredom, but not his, surely. His own mental inertia sickened him, but this disgust inspired other people who were always willing to jump on the back of even a failure. But why? Is it because nature abhors a vacuum?
He scowled, knocked the smouldering thoughts out of his pipe and went downstairs. All the money was in the fridge and what there was far from complete. It was enough, however, to fulfill the ambitions of his petrol tank. Also in the fridge, he observed, but on a lower plane, was James's typewriter. Charles pulled out the typewritten page that was in the drum. He read the words that were typed there on the page.
Unlike in fiction, James thought to himself everything in real life happens in the distant past. And it was real life that concerned him now. A eucalyptus emanation appeared to be bathing his braincells, which reminded him of something that was long overdue. Part of his book, James reflected, would be written from the point of view of the mind itself. But where was that smell coming from? III
Her bright hair, smelling of eucalyptus, smiled at him as he approached. She was scribbling poems on her leg, to avoid hurting the air. His footsteps hurried away behind him, as James came closer. At the moment James sat down she looked up. She drew her grey-green skirt down over her knees, hunched forward doing so and grinned.
"Are you writing your book?" she asked him.
"Not right now," James answered.
For some time nothing moved in the room, not even the light in the fridge. Charles stood immobile, the typewritten page in his hand. Then he placed it back inside the fridge and took the small pile of low-denomination bills from the shelf above. He shoved the money into his pocket and went downstairs to the car. IV
Once on the page, James was thinking, time relinquishes all its rights. He was looking over Maria's hunched back at the clock which was about to strike midday.
Maria had stayed hunched forward so as not to appear modest, considering her relationship with the writer. She was at least twenty-seven and had the ancient air of the sphinx in her inevitably female characteristics, but most of all, from her own point of view. Her brown hair hung in a dense shell about her head and her face appeared to be unable to frown between these curtains. Her square-ended fingers were strong and agile and capable of being kept out of the kitchen and her body, was likewise fond of sleeping. Her more than exact figure emphasised isosceles breasts and unimaginable hips. The only forces that come to mind are liable to be mutually exclusive in the brain and James, who had touched her soft brown skin as it moulded itself in that shape, had never had the sense to know why. V
A gigantic potato, red and blistered, walked along the devastated main street of the city. Pockets of existence still flourished, but by far the greater part of the city was destroyed and now overrun with owls, driven out of the burning forests nearby and still in search of sleep. The crisp smell of death blackened the air. George, a manalive, paused, unsure of which path to take, to thread his way through the...
"I thought you said you weren't writing your book," said Maria.
"How can you tell?"
"You get a furry look on your face."
James laughed and stood up, suddenly, unwell. A premonition had crossed his mind like the refreshments at a wedding. An itching below the belt coincided with a pain, in the small of his back caused by an interaction with the love sporozoa and the cystitis senses. The nearby traffic was very loud. A sense of nervousness raced across the back of his skull. Something was being repeated. Something insistent. A continuous burst of sound, near his ear. The strange high-pitched bark of a whale underwater. He stood up. Something nudged him from behind. He turned around.
"You're in my book already," he whispered.
It was Charles, nudging forward over the city square with his Volkswagen. Normally an area reserved for pedestrians, the square had undergone substantial changes in allowing the Volkswagen to pass over the flowerbeds. Angry crowds were squealing in its wake. Charles was signaling to James from the car. Maria was laughing. Ominous blue figures with long arms were not yet in evidence, but James felt sure they would not be long in appearing. Charles signaled with and around a mysterious look of immense sadness and introspection. Maria was already heading towards the car. James followed. Charles leant over and opened the door and James, now with a sense of urgency, scrambled past Maria and into the back seat. Maria got in and pulled the door closed. They sped away across the square through the midday crowd.
Due to the smallness of the car and the limited availability of seating space, there was always a sense of communion between those who sat in the front, while the one in the back was always the odd one out. In this case the sense of communion between Charles and Maria in the front seat, being officiated by a half smoked priest in the ashtray was extremely intense, with the result that James felt excluded now, sitting on the back seat alone, trying to follow up on his internal monologue on the subject of George McIntyre. The car rose and fell over the inner-city suburban streets. Charles and Maria were deep in conversation. A leaf blew in and caught in James's hair as he was trying to refresh his mind in the draught from the open window on Maria's side of the car. Charles turned.
"Careful," said Charles, slowing down as he approached the crest of a hill and was about to turn left, "a huge grasshopper has blown in the window." He turned to the road then back again. "It's in your hair,"
James raised his eyebrows and shrugged. "It's only a leaf."
Maria turned. "No," she said. Her eyes were exceptionally blue and pale in the bright afternoon light. "It's a grasshopper."
They drove on through the streets and Charles and Maria returned to their conversation, only this time it was silent. Some fifteen minutes later James put his hand to his head and tried to disentangle the leaf. He pulled the stuggling grey-green-brown body away from his hair. They were both right. It was a grasshopper. VI
One of the passing boats then drew closer to the beach. Bodies, silver-blue and green, lay in the bottom of the boat, gleaming as they passed beneath the electric light of the moon, which hung over the scene like a huge, distended eye. Insects whistled in perpetual motion around its globular light.
As the boat bobbed gently on the sludge, rebounding against the ropes which held the neighbouring jetty taut and gaunt against the tide, the voices of the men drifted over the water.
"What's on the beach, Dad?" called Ted. "Another one?" His figure cast a wavering shadow on the waves. A fog drifted in. The boat bumped into something. A body, bloated and blue, surfaced in the bad-smelling air.
"Here's one at least," Dad said. "But look. It's the bottom half of the balloon. The force of the fire must have made it take human form."
Dad put his grappling hook into the bulging side of the floating object and hauled it on board.
He called to Ted: "Throw your hook into that one on the beach, and then we'll call it quits for the night."
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Forever doppler hum inhabits our lives roadways streams mobile metal past reminder bubbles gentle sedge bordered stream rippled surfaces schooling mullet perch swaggering diamond patterns cold colours soft royal blue hazed breeze needles thatched paths flecks whitest cut turned more trodden ways artificiality context real realms dreaming realities. So we have malformed scheme life presentation existence herein lies essence creative struggle create survive struggling creativist plains nails shine friendliest malicious. Comparison vapours muddy perception oppressive self incriminating embarrassing voice vague dim-lit passion. Clean speakings slowly expressively mingling hazy blemished. Viable violet nights mornings tightening stifled paralleling bitterness frosty nature bands registering freeze. Numb. Leather. Cotton. Sheer geometries. Present sweeps whisked dust before whole shanks time partitioned by butchers clunk wood board. Finding body darting nose vegetables sniffing sniveling. It was what Aldous Huxley would call rhetorical question assent. Clipping shoes, business firmly affixed without fault regarding leers hurriedly misplaced eyelashes, false. Sabled improbably piled head. High distinct cheeks. Humming Westside story. Flips Accounts book, thoughts flapping. Leaves. No glimmer. Fix. Bang. Furniture catalogue avoids working this early. Arrogantly mower erupts filled bellies jerking baulking machines. Pleasant sun cleaner unpleasant earth. Highly borne smooth blonde strolls platform soles gently. Gardener bends wheezily. Haggard rake. Young clean-cut whisker place ambles even measured bordered strict edges hedges clipped formula tidy. His notebook bulges under. Orates. Extends fingers wonderingly towards yellow butterfly flip-flapping hesitates withdraws continuing. Runs across, dodging bus. Peered slit-eyed latticed window town ball. Flecked stone concealed corner shifting ponderous weight sideways. Cornered balustrades glimpsed bulging interest sidestepped rushing. Agreed wise nod. Pronounced authority vested clerk. Complied reverent duty. Courageously dispelling hordes couriers spiritual doubt. Taletelling answers woes fusty. Keyhole mystery infinite. Grownup birth. Growing. Eternal death incorporating glimpsing. Trundled whisky closing suffuse embarrassed flush edging impressive bearing conversation tingled coil uncomfortable beat pride self consciousness burning ears cheeks. Angular face rounded slacks carefully down the steep stairwell. Peering huge pile books crows feet sneaking descending stairs. Nose impulsive. Wearily strokes moustache neglects floor streamlined desk information. Elbow propping chunky body thick ruddy cheeks sparkle perhaps chills fear ice spine produce opposite reaction human edifice escutcheon charm. Suppression. Pride. Consciousness. Battling good natured readily seen peculiar stance entrance cake shop thoughtfully. Fruit display. Adjacent cigarette thumb staining spot. He signaled fingers elbows knees scalp hurrying bustle look drawn veil scarf; stopping, Sudden. Sharp arriving. Warning. Looking. Faced piling chin back seat car. Nodded politely tassel bouncing remembering name trotting briskly. Torrent foam spume lake river bubbling eddies hot desert torrential. Burn forehead parch tongue sandy dry. Woha. Scurry. Sink. Tippling goose-bumped. Nowhere listeners. Bastion bagged guarded scerics drifting suffering kissed. Sordid. Road white-coated. China fragile. Japanese. Handle-with -care. Inscrutable. Oriental tranquility, approaches botanical gardens skirting roadside. Catapults. Swerves football style, tubby. Touching tendril. Show. Hope lingering unchallenging warble flitter drowsily draining veins sliding mud drones snoring deep breathe reading Sunday Times. Squeezes wheelchair secretly electric-powered austerely bare. Opening doorway bric-a-brac leans ungracefully notepad, writing. Six. Oblong table. Sitting. Haemorrhoids. Cards. Faulty poker slightly forward uncomfortable carriage interspersed spectators absurd posture. Teaming players conquering sides grin suckingly flap jowled. Slam. Floated voice order smirks churn stomach circle proclamation statuesque ambition firing selfism tar dripped straw. Slapped partnering sworn sewn. We're apples. Peachy. Opposition negative grunts rolled resigned defeat son father upturned mousy dragging boy, Giggled. Blankly demanding staring mundane people lives office tuna fish tank. Fish kissing glass. Agreement brushing feather. Wizened fresh mown lines. Pleasant glance. Mind. Keeping trimmed, flowering. Bumps skin tone lipstick. Hiding. Mask succulence casually penned swaying hips slim waist. Yelps. Animal. Stumbles apologetic. Stare heavily. Interest. Shuddered shivering. Rank taxis. Gutters drifted litter. Humble oily bead laughed, loudly. Relegated position unimportance shouted walrus laughing. Lulls space between races. Eats. Meat pie. Bucket electric frightening frilled brim slop drop library tender loving. Care. Greeting plants. Wheezer goes big glazed pots trundle inside bowls so large stuffed shift one. Days. Five pounds (sterling) snicking logs. Forestry. More. Strong. Work nowadays retire maybe. Discontent. Rambling beside. Study boxes. Gimlet student girl watch hoarsely whispered success. Authorities mixtured discontented red jumpered breasts sly pretty crocheted worried frown pert nipples rewardingly brown pondering freedom. Stilted existence. Sociological confinement nary geezer. Wheezer goggling. Classroom lavatory pockets fob change. Bedasleep. Prickled galleries heat stifling insecurity impregnates ritualized progression bludgeons cruelly cudgels. Or cuddles? Thoughts tiptoed meandering snuggled hopelessness rusty tins stagnating minor sorry specks spittling monkeys gibbering cages overcrowding. Only bride uncompromisingly cruel. Sections viewed kaleidoscopically brusque faceted intangible visualized memories dreams kaleidoscope recurring visions scratching banging coarse beneath triangles stretch cotton vibrations felt right. Pasts demolished remembering something bought lost feelings guilt of what will aching hovering breathing. Clerking solidity buildings stooping scuttled. Trams tongued electrically extended trailing wires grimaced flagstones bottom cracked soot orange filter tips lying solemnity, waiting spare moment soak spat beetling clang phrase ring ordered squares bounce shatteringly stifle disorder questioningly. Half mouth pipe sucks. Nods curtly gesture dismissal. Busy. Tapers rapier concentrates point grimacing journeys dealing orders pokerfaced. Insurance loutish gaggle bleached Krishna chapters queer mob should move. High blocked nosed strolling soles platter tea cups saucers biscuits mused. Tilted precarious centuries shatters salt foamed waves. Footpath. Bundled mail, firms business, letters persons bulky ochre envelopes self-paid carriage slot finished. Pushed doors saloon bolsters pistols. The saviour. Hotel stench beer stale resumed discourse spidery spectacled nonsense doom: treacherous swamp lighten, fly. Arm-spreading vanquishing. Satisfaction. Relief. Stagedly. Ugly dishumour walked out. Procession underarmed ponders plush mouths dire misfortune falling specked stubs crevices bearing struck thudded telegraph pole skull fountain splashed holy barside. Discolourations represented brooding. olive greens depression browns loneliness wondered surprise. Bitterness. Hint. Mingling body scattered notes clefs brings sense. Comfort. Embarrassment. Some sidled. Company. Met joy, puzzling sadness. Far-off politeness restrained warmth evident excitement blushed. Warm afternoon plodded greeting incommunicative eyeing them quietly dared. Seclusive almost exclusively sideways spacewards. Rarely wander wonder encounters capturing dream quality automobile dripping tap tctctc ticktocking clock. Fluttery enchants slopey serene noiseless remiss. Newest formation periods bravest remembers. Solaced wines midday temptation justified partially fulfilled juxtaposition revelation shading tending waferings layered breezes contort ideas, ideals. Meticulously savage attacks rambling inanimate polishing clearing privily placing theorizing wall yesterday supposed today's. Bemusedly whether succumb blissful illusion stolidly placed assumed mild spirit. Sad. Yourself benign almighty. Scamper crumbling materialism security searches encorpifying faith clutching straw clinging. Shone. Charges responsible. Answering includes rhetoric. Orations also. Take types social criminal perversion bystanding crime reporter oppressor. Problem, difficulty. Determination. Adjusted heels spouts evolution condition excludes righteous. Citizen clutcher displaying insecurity basic situation pre-empted family unit. Fat arms encircle leg. Dog did. Provoking potent disruption standard values adult content scares infuriates. Major force cast confrontation unexpected unusual unacceptable conditioning contravened. Item. Pines flash. Skis. Spiritual plagiarism entails theft. Star pricked compassion sorrow ignorance pain wisdom, (lineations, comprehension) misjudged usable personified apparent plagiarised masses. Bannisters reply. Downbeating savourings links twins. Habits. Association. Stout fellow. Purposefully. English sheepdog indiscernible lowers common recognition. Calmly glints suspicion. Pure striding importance always thinking parliament clever all right sure does shop assistant helps cause anonymity, reading in-depth news, magazines same doesn't why politics belongs parties political conversed. Anatomy scream. Fools. Mail hasn't caught me. Letters. Torso twisted bumper tears response red rimmed sorry weep dear sniffling finishes sobs evening smells batter defiantly Alma Mater Terra, bounteous earth. Masochist opportunists. Log scraping, stonefelt. Tied fishing line. Law wrongness protection morality rose carousing foggy lane stormsinging eating souls cautioning autumn. Bursting oranges evergreen forests. Soldiers marching. War. Buttons boots cavalcade. Another army assembled. Jousting field uniforms. Shining silver plumes sprout burnished helmets. Blades wheat stalks soldiers singing. Winging. Postman squeaking fears dispelled. Clarity definedd. Nutshell. Galvanized boxes stacked malky making roofs hot possums scrabbling dusty roof terribly agitated. Death wish dying while willing grubby treasure antagonistic rally, capture enrapture, enfold, imagination ten thousand years choice niceties middle. Sewer may rub. Fallacy faithful. Flyight. Flying over Breughel iced blessed lotus east clichéd cherry blossom. Cadenzas. Fortune. Dragon. Rubbish! Parents spurt culture command. Government Mr. Big. Tinges products wounds incentives whisker diamonding peeping. Apologies. Weaned individualism. Game chronic remorse jangling unmoved. Piddling cultism. Haystacks sunset bruise artistic cult wisp countryside reflecting. Gang sheep. Pet poet. Poetry ably masters dreamtime? Swish brush? Snappiness condescension arts orchestrate. Unison. Graphics novelism. Outstanding majors. Supremacy intellect refined continuous. Trickled shimmied observed. Boughs crooks branches flat non-yielding. Birds sing. Four poster beds golden nightingales sharpening pluck pining necks. Emperors funereal melted wax plummets nails scepter sky reaching. Dramatization zoom tall windy tracks reflection muddy bricks light mottled copper concessions. Claws grappled scarred submitted. Pending omens. Wounded love. Quincy men warehouses ferocious pungent folklore ribbons floating. Lyfestile unexpectedness mode variegation. Whooshes unseen manhole whoops. A-daisy. Cannot singsong sweet clambering mountains. Waterfall unawares. Blankets. Warbles instrument. Hasty harsh neon vehemence adolescent slender gums. Wan. Poor. Peachstones. Carpet. Dark-thicketed lantana smashed fringe ideals heart-shaped island. Starvation. Ivy. Chinks unstoppered. Snake. Cunningly tattered kerosene flame shadows, horribly. Jagged gaps jaundiced glass boarded packing case perfidy. Tumbledown shack. Desultrrrr. Celestial panorama. Cloistered liana vines crawl disregardingly glossy everlasting coat suspended animation crowders flourishing movement tender. Co-existence. Barrenness. Touristry. Nag. Center-nub. Stalking vulgar artisms spokes optimism humanity prime movers. Rim unfailing sour stone-moss chills. Cart brim jumbled rickety ill design strident grumbling whining soul. Ginger, lemon, letterbox fur. Boring wishing well cards basking prophesy insanity nightmare claimed borrowed used foretold. Ground whiz wintry consumes lampooning bulls moonlight shimmering. Provincial parochial stance. Shrewd. Mongrel razored caged beast boned bags literally. Barriers speed circles peace. Dragons sinister. Lesser evils. Township borders. Violent coconut shies roundabouts party-ness forgotten. Jungles. Makeshift management infliction therein. Streetwalked machined luxuries gadgets raking hateful white cup. Sharded. Insighting witnessed collision. Struck dead. Bar stayers. Cropped Negroid trademark buttonhole agile wartime outcome. Commanders snorting traditional. Moundparley agitated gauntlets. Steeds wheeled. Steel rationality. Stench blood-let decaying generation scars cavalcade. Sidings. Balconies. Brisk mistral. West? East? Hexagonal quartz crystals embedded fireplaces cavemen stormed quarries gouges. Snap! Whip steamy rainforest wending thunder-rock. Forest vines orchids palms feathered ferns frozen captivated going pacing interior famous rippling musty retired civic affairs. Smoking cigar polished shoes amidst strewn papers. Sorting. Warming. Umbrella escaping rack. Racing skulled inoffensive. Chappy. Furrows contours roots. Least resistance mingles luxuriant canopy. Gnarled faces. Mothy myriads. Surety ending dripping boughs. Red-leafed succulence dribble bisects ivy-covered patters. Lapses yellow-green cuttings snip downside-up. Frog, vigour cocked intelligently. Anthropomorphism. Sanctuary merging. Neck. Back. Tin. Hesitation resignation persecution exhaltation debasement ethereal. Reason happy. Wicked throne. Carapace sickly-white. Beckoning sweetly. Doom. Cobbled lumpy cobblestones. Spirit tread easeful. Loom. Long-boned whitened hither child mine crooning. Stateful jeweled mounded grave bare flowers unsoaked tears. Spectre. Daily bread. Slops milk cheese curdling glisten contrite. Emotion misdirected labour. Sulking painting fallacy fabric. Veined envy possession maternalism overpower philosophy. Stumpy-legged coy parental onus exemption desires liabilities. Spiderleg intertwined submitting euphorically. Sexualism. Gorges. Boulders. Filmed shimmering. Dirt avenues vital bowed cello. Elegant uncoils thrums foreboding hearse haunting carriages braced eddy faceless cadaver. Bowels. Images sparking file. Poison Purple. Gannets shrieking bathe ancient arches notch-holes empty. Burial-ground panned out suburbia. Clarinets headstones closeups. Reverie. Cigarette spirals laconically superimpose segmented preying wipers mantis preachers ascetically purified garbed accoutrements. Wailed moaned sobbed. Gravediggers manual labouring callous crumbly cold-faced coffin claustrophobic dismally enfolding bland corpses. Melodic flute fangs. Impregnations gurgle. Cooking charred remains haystacks. Egg-insides hatched. Stomachfuls unrelentlessly. Prerogative non-interference. Exist. Consequent dues. Master. King. Servantile. Mules, donkeys. Unwilling slaves deluded servants unpopular load. Guitar. Soundbox. Despot. Convoluted intricate. Screaming absence fragilely untouchable. Susceptible oozing knifing. Ivory violins. Percussion undrummed. Toga regalia unconformity self-determination inanimate. Shrieked hot-eyed anger. Nausea panting angered arrogance sparked menacingly. Veils hotchpotch feigned exasperation. Teeth gritted syllables; bleak-blue, life-green, lilted taunting, barbed wire beginnings. Mottle-red blood-red polymer-colour of homely banksias spikey archways solitude lookout rolling hypnotic flickerings dimension confidence. Skimming cartwheels foliated bedded candle flickers. Unpolished debauchery stained writing posture. Wrote cherries. Neglecting. Fruitcake's cross-section. Ablution seawards non-participation turtle cruising self propulsion. Gasping choking mopping varnished bars. Swelled. Uncommon reservation. Bewildered churned market. Snuffing pirouetting three-legged rosewood incense. Up ring moulded tray plasticine. Heaving heaven. Passageway back-exit tavern condensation reclination slumbered pampering creeked cauldrons tantalising searching comparing similar concurrent themes. Sheaf spluttering theatre rabbits. Wintry bed closeted snugly warm. Coursing jewels. Deafeningly despairs cacophonies eardrums tramples stiletto wrings. Dejected gaze burls reverberations; dully, boomingly. Counteraction, enemy quarters exile dominance subservience. Relation dot manufacturer spitting receptacles. Thoughtfully. Bayside tactic damaging inward ritualized conquests. Pang shimmy sneakily pedestal preen trapeze vanity attendance. Acidic tethers back-and-fro. Blistered. Tufts. Gloomily booting lampposts danger anger-suffused waif ragged sidled speaking. Seas floundered. Tape subjects super-adhesives threateningly disbelieving. Power stutter. Stammer. Stumbling rug. Displaced aggressive dissertion. Angel. Dictionary. Crookedly. Straightforwardly. Crawl gloomy iniquity distraction passively rolling dice numbers passingly irritated. Casually. Concern. Toying matrix emanations queried pondered. Vagrants caviar-class Pygmalion Classically. Denominator. Tributary. Continuity. Deprecation nonbeings urgency. Sarcastic bite. Base pitcher whilst sentences finally hunched mantelpieces. Gangling twitches necessity spiteful resources consider reply tack terminology maddeningly oozed trodden. Long-yellow ambled lichens ambling twinkling far-offness alleys offensive grease-paint-colours oily post-performance lazed darkpurpling imitation, silly-white. Honestly. Cane skitters. Honest stale fog. Wriggle interspersing grinders flakes parachutes plates irrelevancies skip clatter denting mocking bandswept. Starry popping cranes swung. Dogmen barked. Shoddy overcoat caustic calystamen tidiness trimmed meticulous. Slow motion germs. Weeds. Devils. Unwanted soil. Levity. Fingernails. Floppy. Fish. Stubbornly shoot belts saucepans bears scorpions crabs clusters fragilely. Parachute-wide cradle. Crash helmet. Unshouldered silk strap harnessing. Tranquil centuries aquamarine emerald crust burnt ruffled chopping axe lopped plopped cynically labeling condescending abstraction headless photograph. Shrugging shoulders puzzled-red acrimonious programmed robot. Jigsaw darkness blanketed straying shooting-stars. Abject. Curiosity. Serendipity. Wedding mothers bathroom sewing table. Cheaper buy hire shower wobbled naked toweling vigorously wobbling dried deodorants. Wrapped towel crepe lace finery. Double breasted. Coiffured rice. Limousine. Slant. Exactly. Body twist impolite sullenly hugeglazed fronds shelved weeds watering-can ceiling pockmarked quivering taunted lithely willowy bumps lumps angles victoriously sympathetic clinical friendship accepting blithely backpatting complementing trembling downward. Automatic cheap-grey mat. Ulcerous. Crinkly unbound trailing waists assured quoted superiors, suspicion. Walkways en masse. Pedestrian babbling yap rip superficial assuredness hairdressers overlong sandstone gargoyles inscriptions latin greek anniversaries jaggedly synchronized satiny, evolving, knife-hot aniseed. Contact contemporaries bumbling judgement disease symptom particular peculiar unshiftable muddying impure poised tense unblinking beads dew blades sticking. Shaggy musicians organ string blind leash bass drummer caliber performance unwhipped. Tow. Carved unobtrusively. Squatting perching kneeling. Amplifiers drum-beat mid-riff. Thumpa reeling yawing smoke filled voluptuosity. Stroke-me. Hands-off. Seduction-denial. Beacons stroboscopically solo snakelike sinuous piercing trance mood sphere monastery obscenely despised interrupted detested hated focus blurred bearded. Ugluglug brother half-hearted. Sexual. Worded. Wording. Tattered eons. Pause wipe blackbird meadows. Gossiping brooks fields tussocks dandelions. Matured. Alcohol. Folfol-derol socialites. Gropers cave-dark cave. Pigeon persevere standstill hardended. Freezing train carriage. Spades? Winking motiveless malignity menageries. Worm. Fat companion. Spider. Bellies. Belying temperament. Worse inflection pudgy caps captaincy tunnels sniveling connotations tiles tc-tc-atc-tc-tc-tc-tc-atc-tc scum-white crevices. Plagiarism. Computer-children. Correctly. Palladiums, railway stations, in-between. Spitter-spatter dampen bridge-games, dinner drinks, party jokes, fig trees, telegraph poles. Home. Curdling gumblomumblo, lurch lurching drunkards printed indescribably tipsy journey. Intoxication husky aggressive. Narrowed. Confiding. Broom bristles rancid tearful fearful musty skeletons saddled ridden pins-and-needles shivering chill tinge-red horrid. Candlesticks procured. Mahogany carved angels. Sores. Wavering gravely gesticulating sauntering. Amusingly. Positively charming. Invasion. Privacy-of-the-mind. Sacred. Froth meniscus. Insomuch. Gruesomely charred. Sedge-sided rivulets cascading folklore steepsided slug promenaded seldom-trees. Tweed. Many-pieced. Sunray-filtered. Companionable compatible slatted boards heat-lanced noon. Wind-and-horns refuse factories upstream. White-filled, white-fitted bombay bloomers sparkling-white. Dress-shirt. Eating dried apricots. Monotonously. Milling exploits. Rooks. Twigs. Cackling nest-bullies. Sunbeams. Raven-haired. Compatriots headlights bonnet nexus framework cords ear-piercing interlocking spheres interlocked shunned serpentine numbness intoxicating intrepid effortless lapis lazuli. Satchels, chattels, drawstrings, drawbridges. Casus Belli. Terrified glances visionary girded "Armour" wariness. Din. Posh couches dignitary slobber liberally squirted. Awful-red. Frolicking merrily absorbing absurd garb. Prominently discoursing vest-pocket. Calamities. Grenades manholes exploding horrendous earth-shaking nerves. Machine-gun bullets mortar-fire poised acrobatics tanks bombers warships. Obnoxious characters seductive malicious silkily enterprising spherical nails enormously, painfully. Totaled humans killed World Wars excruciating belfry monastic. Church. Minding business occurred unovercome ponder cogs subjectivity mystery shellburst sunrise throat bell-like evilly cawing recited revelation. Moribund stanza statues temporary lifestyles esoteric optimism prophetic ash. Meandering acquired wealth unvanquishable. Plum scripts rejotting. Bottle-green bowling greens. Tennis courts. Indefatigable rubberplant. Fickle scourge blowing hills dales Ferris wheels. Traipsing balloon wickerwork. Eventually tricky brutish consecrations. Cuddling consummations. Frangipani. Stonemason's gothic pathos. Congregation bondage. Hymns. Sickening palms taught taut ticking. Novice. Enviable. Tuberculoid canteen flavouring. Rose-coloured cellophane glaced cherries bleed dewdrops sultry steel-coloured clinking back arching. Heralds. Chains. Unbroken. Telephone laundromats. Kitchens. Shackles. Narcissus Echo. Burly clumps cavort blossoms discipline efficiency catalyst gypsy-wings freesailing thistle-seed marshy blushing smug drawpins dishonesty white-washed red-bricked buff-coloured sardonically applied absconded percentage father. Devilish financier itching feverish. Mutterings. Mumblings. Sunrise-blue bruised-eyes paltry grunting moronic square-eyed alarms pervasion sooty perverts perversion peepers pottering red-faced neighbouring chained discreet richyrichy wallpapered muslin lisping brrrr-brrrr. Dark-flop oval. Beetle corrosion circulated status jumble. Late: screeching, vroom. Ticket-gates movie frames parking inmates doused grilled. Shutter-clicks apish icescreams chocolate chomping gusto. Beercans fzzz stale urine glllug cheering maiming assaulting furry wool teamed-up matchsticks toothpicks symmetry inkling plaintively multicoloured mischievous puffing strings midnight teaching prods balmy millions choirs slippery nightclubs sporting sugared doughnuts milk-coffee slapping-green shutters. Tightropes. Glory skin-bared blob. Nakedness. Springing panthershhh. Cautions vocabulary cobwebs wooden protection device shrill smack hypocrisies wreaked havoc unnamable Sol's gut-fear outlawed purposes physical component reason attainment simple vestiges brain conceived unwittingly. Organism controlling destinies race valourous dedication divine valour whisking naught co-existing cordial together. Kaboodle. Lugs neighbourly over spectacled handcuffed curiosity. Suspiciously brushes recalling minor memories shoppers students workers children aloof. Chintzy lamps sultans discarded. Skinny carpeted pompous. Declaims exaggerated sexuality. Redpainted lips. Suppression Deserted. Cufflink eddies. Cyclones. Panes chauffeured transmission ad nauseum imprint grievingly. Feigned solemnity basking. Ramshackle sagging twig-laden corrugated iron. Nobbles drizzle moisten garments mackintoshes attaché neat-grey suits tailored. Large-heeled-perfectly polished. Uncontorted. Trendy. Goggling. Mansion bay-windows jutting corn potatoes tomatoes vegetables leeks beets cucumbers watermelons oranges lemons mandarin-grapevines. Hammer sickle sonorous cavernous scampering immensity greedily animated sofas gingerly stocky. Liquorice. Snickers. Steely-eyed inadequacies grapes nectarines papaya-papaws salute. Beverages steamed cereals skylights moonshine overexposed muscatel- music-theatre. Hobbling glass roofed. Sauna. Ridiculous equal-sided tastes knifing railroad vintages mourning warm-worded sardines mottled-green storms. Terminus. Slouching wooden rail sad clanging, click-clang surged strange eerie barged newspaper headlines death-knell blaring trumpet's blank-walled pubic jungle. Phallus washed-out-grey vomit. Caterwauling never-ending scaffolding pro files skating smudged fragrances cordial crosslegged. Resinous sigh. Pizzicato. Tension-coil. Breath-drawn arrowed scuba-divers rock fishermen dreamy bated-breath. Conception Stuttered. Surplus. Superfluous. Wafting scalpel-sharpened machetes skipped galloped cantered jetty dinghies barnacled-posts, hawser, statuesque dot-like rubble wave-rings. Coinage. Mysterious laziness freckled pulped miraculous packets. Tears. Sandpit clouds rebounding flayed burgeoning blobs prow jutting mangroves breeding-grounds. Talons, birds-off-prey, driftwood. Mournful wavelets stilltime. Commotion squawking harmonious ellipse shatterable. Muggy crumpled dishumour. Dense wigwams. Turtles, shearwaters, mangrove-roots senile congregations, soldier-crabs. Vault droplets pennies tongues lizards trussed. Shambling splay waterline directionless geometry. Constant cubist dragon-breathing daredevils flimsy treasure chests flying fish organs, mistrust electric-globes distended perpetually bloated. Gaffs. Ants. Loaves. Fuming. Spuming. Rubberlicked planks.
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| PART TWO | |
JAMES'S MANUSCRIPT
I WOKE that morning and lay in my bed in the dark. My legs were cold and damp. A dream was ebbing away towards the dark horizon leaving behind it the smell of the sea.
What entered my mind then?
At first, a vacuum. Then, slowly, I began to piece together in my mind the threads of the novel I was writing until I held in my mind all its disparate elements, bringing the whole process to a stage where I could begin again.
What were my principle observations, while I reflected on the state of my novel?
First of all, that this question and answer style was very effective; that the faint greyish light of the morning was replacing the withdrawing night; and that I should try to draw some connection between leprosy and literature, as if literature were like a leprosy of the mind.
My further impressions, upon moving from my bed to my desk where I sat collecting my thoughts were?
Of the hillsides in the valley rustling and moving restlessly, still encumbered with sleep. Of marks on my skin which I assumed were the residues of the webbing of sleep. Of fibrous material obscuring my vision. That a sense of well-being was susceptible to slaughter, like well-fed cattle.
My next act?
To attempt to probe the darkened areas of my brain.
I discovered there?
James Joyce
My reaction to this discovery?
I dressed, smiled to myself and went downstairs to the lawns falling to gardens set against the descending banks and barricades.
The prevailing weather conditions I was accustomed to observe at this hour were?
A grey sky, at times made ominous by embankments of darkening clouds; at times made suspenseful by the sunlight cast across the lawns; at times made disquieting by oddly shaped clouds scudding across the sky ahead of a blustering wind.
My next thought?
That if the Earth was a huge brain then judging by geological formations it was demented.
My description of myself and the world around me?
In the sun-slanting mornings curious and wild with sighs in a blue dressing-gown I squinted and wondered at the throttled looking weeds between the cultivated plants. The head-splitting cold of the morning air thawed by the sun climbing onto the horizon, golden and yellow in the sky like a pat of fresh butter. The idiotic ecstasy of the birds, mesmeric shrill, deafening, throbbing in patterns of sound.
My reaction to the cold?
Stamping I fetched a small spade and began chipping methodically at the weeds until my hot body drove back the cold air. Then with a rake I leveled the surface, leaving thin regular criss-crossing furrows in the black, half -moist soil .
My thoughts, during this activity?
That the physical world of characters was in reality the manuscript, or in final form, the book as it is being read. And that to indicate the characters' subordination to the manuscript, one could allow the physical state of the manuscript (as well as the information it carried) to intrude into the characters' world.
I then?
Returned slowly by way of the back steps to the kitchen where I placed a glass jug containing the leftovers of last night's coffee on the stove until it simmered noisily. Then taking it to the kitchen table set against the windows overlooking the rustling valley, I poured some into a cup while at the same time taking a cigarette from an opened packet on the table and striking a match.
I then observed that?
Blind yellow after the white devours red and flame. That when I came to do the final version of this manuscript, if I was a nonsmoker this activity would nauseate me. My action in this case would be instead to rinse the clatter of last night's dishes in the sink, to create a confusion of busy,, watery, noises. Meanwhile, the coffee was having its customary effect of stimulating both my appetite and my, cerebral cortex .
This stimulation gave rise to what activities?
Bending at the cupboard below and a little to the left of the kitchen sink, I then placed on the kitchen bench a shiny metal toaster and took from the bread-bin nearby, half a dozen slices of bread in yellow waxed paper, admiring as I did so, the distortion of my reflection in the toaster's metal sides. Plugging in its plug, I loaded the toaster with bread and prepared to go into battle. Allowing the pungent fumes of the coffee to curdle my brain, I began to wonder how I would begin the novel I was planning. With a mood; a place; and a character.
Who? Where? What mood?
A quiet morning, edgy and irritable after a late night, a tense morning, a day listening to itself, to its own pulse. A character like myself with a skinny, inquisitive head. An ideological description of the house: rooms spilling from rooms into rooms. Popping toast golden brown. No. Something more objective. Something based on my own past experience. Not the present. A character, like myself who worked at the Botanical Gardens. Choose the day, that I walked off the job. Why? Because I was fed up with the whole lot. With my family, with my job, with the people I knew, with the deadening hopelessness of it all. Why? because I had other plans for myself. Which were?
To be a writer.
Smiling to myself, I poured another cup of coffee, took my cigarettes and walked to the desk where my typewriter sat gleaming dully in the white, metallic sunlight, distributing as I did so breadcrumbs to the kitchen floor, some of which failed to fall and remained adhered to the front of my blue dressing-gown.
The main character was the focal point, of course, but how to accentuate this? What if he emits light? That's an idea, certainly, but not a good one.
Everything around him would always be visible and that would help from a technical point of view, but not ours, unfortunately. Even the main character requires privacy, from time to time. At my desk I inserted a sheet of blank paper into the machine and lit a cigarette. Inserted a cigarette into the machine and lit a piece of paper, I thought. Coffee's doing its work already. What to begin with? Something centered, on the first page.
Chapter One
In which we find James at work and are treated to a review of his daily routine
Looking from the Gardens - if you stood down near the waternoised fountain outside the shiny, glass-doored library, stuccoed, tucked-in, cornered - you could see the City Square. Behind it: the stone tower of the city hall, and in a semi-circle around it: the dark private chambers of the Mayor.
James: standing scowling miserable. Looking across the square. Bright lunchtime crowd. High breasted pigeons throwing crusts, idle typewriters, worn ribbons wheeling up patches of colour, vivid indescribable. Wheeling and swirling, settling shufflewinged after scraps. Shuffling neck jerking walk. Blue feathered squabbles, wheeling up, settling.
For three months he had been working at the Gardens. Learning the trade, he thought. His badge of office? A red bucket. Plastic. To discipline himself. What else? To earn money. Still in early Autumn the discipline of getting up in the half-dark was not without compensation. Bicycle. Morning snapped ice. Blue blemished grass. Bruised by the cold. Frost. scowling roads. Arriving to the crab-appled jeers of the other gardeners worming their way to work in the cruising cabins of their cars. Slapping his hands against his chest. Numb white skinned fingers.
Why did he think of that just now? he thought. Irritated by a slight sense of confusion he picked up the red plastic bucket which he had put beside him on the lawn. Part of his duties included watering the indoor plants in the University, chalkwhite buildings beside the Gardens. He walked now towards the Science buildings. Beside the squat building of the Veterinary school, behind the closegrowing ferns, the tap-water gushing out. Filling the bucket which rested in its nest of bracken, dead ferns, brown. Dry. Bubbles winking at the brim. Keats. Blushful Hippocrene. A collection of tongue-tied plants. The residue of dust on the dark green leaves.
"Cleaning up day, is it?"
He looked up. Murmured assent. Behind a high counter and sitting at a swooping desk a late-model receptionist eyed him onerously. She stood and walked to the counter and leaned over it, looking at the plants he was cleaning. Her sides strained against the tightening buff seams. James raised his eyebrows in a mock salute. In response she busied herself around the office, walking to and fro on the tightly roped floor, measuring her steps and the clipping sound they made with a wonderfully correct mathematical precision. Superbly controlled. Her repeated daily actions. Towards the mirror, to inspect her eyelashes, askew. James had often observed her through the moss-ingrown plate-glass windows next to her typewriter, in this ungulatory dance, piled black hair, top-heavy, mountainously permed, her clipping walk, her high distinct cheeks, hummingly distinct, her high distinguished cheeks, walking humming, the blue morning over her knees, its folds draped down over her ankles.
James watched with tired fascination.
Every day for three months this improbably semi-occidental woman had performed her daily activities with mechanical punctuality, even to the point of breaking into the office interferon to purse her lips at the kissing fish. Bubbling aquarium of her office. And he also in this daily ritual was now part of the ordered decollation.
Distinctly irritated, he backed away from the counter and maneuvered himself through the entrance doors, leaving behind him half of the dust-glazed leaves unwiped. He returned to the nest of closegrowing ferns. Poured away the water. The leaf-wiping rag disappeared behind the flush green border, through the air -- a companion to itself -- landing with a soggy thudding sound like far-off thunder. Senses particularly acute. Why? Tired. Lack of sleep? The coffee? Carrying his red bucket, he walked towards the City Square.
Sensations. The mind like the half-dry sand of a beach that will take the water of any sea, only to let it escape.
Arrogantly, a mower erupted into sound.
Machines. Patches of sun. The machine behind him purring now in a guttural whisper of cut grass reminded James of his job, of what he should be doing. And yet his sore eyes and his dangerously active brain intervened. Behind him, one of his fellow gardeners, a timewizened cirrhosis, bent wheezing over a rake, scientifically gathering in the grass. Suspicious and bitter, this study in decline tidied the strict bordered paths, measured the vast sea-green grass flats. Precise, ordered, he scientifically juggled the workings of that green world.
James heard the dwindling of the mower's sound behind him. As he passed the library, his red plastic bucket dangling and bright beside him, he paused to stare at the emergence of a newly winged accident of fashion, a griffin wearing blond hair twisted into a mop of improbable proportions, an aloof head too high for her body, jutting breasts nervous enough to squirm beneath her nippled yellow blouse, sleek black slacks, quivering with an unnatural gleam, as though they were waxed or wet and the extreme elevation of platform sole shoes which transformed her calf muscles into beautifully blown-up balloons.
Feudalistic!
James continued to the end of the path, where he extended his fingers towards a bright yellow butterfly. Seeing his hand in front of him he hesitated, then withdrew his hand. A plane cruised above him.
James then came to the end of the path where it crossed in front of the City Square. He looked across the road, paused in thought, then ran, just managing to dodge a blue bus. The bucket, dangling red and bright against the field of blue.
Chapter Two
in which George McIntyre (through the latticed windows of his office in the city chambers) watches James cross the road and glimpses the red dangling bucket as James neatly sidesteps a blue bus
George shifted his ponderous weight sideways. Moving mutated slug-eyed slits on stilts in his fat face.
"Dangerous," he remarked. He nodded to himself. "That bucket."
James disappeared around the corner of the building, white-in-grey flecked stone.
George McIntyre returned to the window. In a direction diagonally opposite to that which James had taken he stared until his eyes found in a lunchtime crowd the still figure of a devotee of the Guru, standing as she did every day, surrounded by shoppers and stores, at the center of the city, embroidered, stitched, ribboned, white, dull pink.
"One day," George McIntyre mumbled to himself. "Happy Christmases." He snorted. "Bald nuts."
He turned and trundled towards the cabinet for his morning whisky.
Chapter Three
in which brief glimpses of the characters show James soliloquizing as he walks through the city; the arrival of Tom Ryan, the Lord Mayor, by wheelchair, at his offices in the Town Hall; the receptionist in her aquarium; the Gardener in his; and the platform soles
Diurnal repetition. With miraculous monotony. With monotonous regularity. James for a moment was caught in that parenthetical emotion of guilt and outrage, feeling that now because he had stepped out of his routine he should take it upon himself to wake some other automatons. A feeling which competed with his natural cowardice and failed to overcome it. Sleep. Sink. Drown. The drug of work, of fashion, of friends. Dull lethe wards. Dull opiate to the brain. And lethe wards had sunk. Every rift with ore. Alone and palely loitering everyone's a.
Aloof on platform soles descending carefully down the tautly logical stairwell in the library, peering concentratedly over a huge pile of books, an angular, clear-limbed face was wrinkled with worry. The books, encircled by attentive arms, were distorting normally perfect obloids, indenting elliptical concentration. A craven chest, a sheer waist.
As George McIntyre savoured with a quelled tongue the first of his morning whiskies, Tom Ryan was smiling gently to himself, passing George McIntyre's office, silently gliding in his electrically powered wheelchair, along the stone halls. Quiet, bare. The wheelchair slid into an open doorway, leaving the corridor empty behind him. Grey bric-a-brac stone.
The receptionist, at her littered desk leafing through the furniture catalogue. The office, underwater, bubbled littorally. White kissingfish kissing at the world through the clear glass. Puckering agreement. Kissssss.
Outside, the Gardener regarded with pride the green freshly mown grass. Gathering in the hessian fabric of his movements, he coughed, muttered; watching the disappearing red blob of James's bucket in a field of blue. Means I'll have to. Approaching his tool-shed with a cantilevered step, he foraged between rakes, spades, shears, pruning forks, pots, pans, feeding clans, buckets of bog, sacks of slime. Underneath this collection he found a green plastic bucket. He pulled it clanking through the past. Reminders. Again retrieved that sessile look in motion.
He headed towards the library. Electric doormats. Didn't have them in my day. Grey rubber ripples. He stepped on the grey stippled surface, causing the glass doors of the library to slide into themselves, leaving a threateningly open space, about to be closed.
The Gardener placed his grey peaked cap beside the first of the big glazed pots. Rough-stained hands, tipping. Just enough. Well pleased gurgle. Next. Wet green weight, water in the bucket. Water channeled and curled over the soil. Study carrels. Air with the water. Bubbles. Solemn air. Wrong end of a microscope. Looking up at some bearded twit. Beside the Gardener a student boxed into the carrel stared at him vacantly, her spectacles ready to fall from the bridge of her nose into the river of her eyes. He grimaced at her. Postcard daze. Unsmiling. Thinking of something else.
Dark stain soaking soil. Finished. Glass doors.
Administration building. Walking on his tar stained thumbs. Eyes ambulatory in their orbits beneath. Girls as they passed. Halteringly swelternecked. Bright flat tops. Fashion. Red splashed with green, bright blue, sun, sky, daring. Yellow fashion.
Crack toothed, worn with suspicion through the slits. Ogling their flattened breasts the Gardener allowed a discoloured tongue to protrude gently between blotchy lips.
The jets of water against each other, the fountain beneath, living within its own noise its lack of time its vigorous lifelessness. Steady stream of movement. Housed and hosed in panting clothes. A dead heat sending plumes of steam up from the ground after last night's rain. The white cement paths cut through this fog of heat like metal strips too hot to touch. A yellow blouse brightened in the sun. impressions strained through the clogged gauze of squinting eyes, transmitted to an already supine brain. She longed to lie down somewhere a grey soft breeze that might have failed into a puddle under an overhanging tree. Gardener. Goggling at her. Decrepit thing. Brightly coloured crowd. Her hand rose from her side to smooth away the wrinkles of her puzzled expression. Such vivid impressions she had. Hallucinations almost. A white tiled shower, water pelting down, in bed.
She opened her eyes suddenly. The vision of a wall of water pouring down on her naked bed. The vision faded.
The thought of the sun leaving its fingerprints on her back. Now. Beads of heat. No. Sweat. It's really stifling, she thought. Tightening sensation. Bleating sun.
Her hand appeared in front of her eyes, in order to reassure her.
The five fingered object of flesh and blood loomed towards her face.
Collecting her stack of books together she tried to laugh at herself quietly for having such ridiculous ideas. This rebuke failed and she still felt irritated by the residues of her vivid imagination. Clasping the books against her front in order to have something solid to hang on to, she walked again into the bright swarm.
James blustered on through the city, dangling, red. Humidity. Not the feet, it's the fuming trees.
Sea of impressions. What? A larger aquarium. No, the swamp, the source. The grove of men. Poisonous, sharp-spined, pitching back into the pitch black threatening smog heavy sea. Writing. The only solution to my mood, he thought. Poems. Can't sustain them. Start something bigger. Write full time. Make a quid.
Passing, he noticed a good natured man at the entrance of his cake shop, thoughtfully looking at the fruit display of the adjacent store. His own display was constructed from pyramids of cream buns and doughnuts. Diabolical.
Minor characters. Him, for example. The good natured man rubbed the end of his cigarette with his thumb, yellow-stained over a yellow spot. Looked up. Saw James staring. Unnaturally good humoured. Howreoo? he called.
James, faced with the prospect of materializing his thoughts, after already having characterized them in view of a possible background to his own wandering, walked on with a bustled look on his thatched face. Afraid of anything that might invade. Dreamy. Wash.
Turning around a sudden corner, not watching where he was going, he arrived without warning at the green fern-edged entrance of a close-grown lane. Odd, he thought. Never been here before. So close. City center. Think only of buildings here. Overhanging jacarandas spilled vivid green shade hazy light. Grey blue fence sprawling along the footpath. Holding back a garden bursting with pressure of tangled vegetation. Stone walls of a house partly hidden by the curtaining green.
From the dirty, brightly lit, noise into this satiated, calm cool quiet, port in that storm. He blinked. Stumbled into the cool green depths.
Strangely sudden, he thought. Soon as I begin thinking of writing, mood changes. Sudden plunge. Water but not water, like being immersed in over-penetrating sound. Too loud. Ecstasy. Strange drunken misshapen chance, things more peculiar than their outcome happening like the swelling bumps of the sea, too numerous to name. Ceaseless motion. Ceaseless as time.
Curious chance. Remarkable. Chance being pure and defenceless. Only thing left in this world that is free from the dogged chain of interdependence. Knowledge.
James walked, swimmingly, green water-green light. Lost trappings. Colour of. Mottles of. Conceits of. Vanity of. Spite of. Losing unwatchingly as his memory, entangled with his thoughts and seeming only to extend as far as today, slipped and dissolved.
He opened his eyes.
Eyes. Huge uncontrollable balls rolling like globes in the space in his head. Time, lain over the uncluttered mixture of water, light and air.
At the end of the lane, where it ended in a moist bank of earth and vines, a woman wearing a yellow blouse and sleek black trousers was bending letting a pile of books fall.
She looked up. Looked at him. Seemed to look through him. He felt as though he was lifted by the gaze and left floating. He smiled.
Returning the smile her expression struck him strangely, his eyes widened. Puzzled? He stared at her. The limbs of her body. His body. Separating without pain, floating confusion. Him?
Can't separate what I'm seeing from what I'm thinking and what I might write down later, he thought.
Chapter Four
in which the background material throws back a nicely jumbled reflection of the webs being woven and in which the reader is invited to exercise that rare facility of mind -- to forget to remember, while remembering to forget -- allowing the floating circus of imaginary events to unfold logically so that against this happy curtain of effortless imagination prominent characters can rear, glowing and illogical, actively impossible, all the more brightly lit because of the trust you, the reader, have in your own mind. A trust, incidentally, which the Author shares. Even as these chambered whistles announce the transformation of the narrative into a glib theatre of major and minor characters, James is observing how his state of mind is transforming a perfectly ordinary situation into something pungent and strangely viscous; as the combination of heat, light and movement and most of all, unduly attentive descriptive passages curdle the atmosphere around him and give rise to oily glutinous thoughts, bright liquids and memorable passages of prose. And in which the reader, although prepared to accept the Author's right to lead the narrative in his direction, is beginning to suspect that the result, if it is going to be as distinctly improbable as the introduction, will not be so appealing
Tom Ryan, the Lord Mayor, at that moment returned the telephone to its cradle. Cry baby. Bassinet voice lingered for a moment in the room. Settles her hash, he thought. He closed his address book with a smirk, pleased with his domestic triumph. He switched on the electric motor of his wheelchair. it woke a familiar satisfying hum in his heart. Pace of life. Reversing, he maneuvered away from his desk and slid forward, silently. Nearing the deep-coloured doorway, he took his hat from the peg, his cane from the cornered shadow. Straight. Air filled. He then passed from his office into the bare corridor, smooth grey walls, flawlessly polished floors . Quick glance forward and back. No-one. Hard right. He turned the small front wheels almost at right angles to the chair. Small, swift circles. Whirling head, raised. Walls full of doors, flashing by. Tom Ryan, grinning, black-patched, the dark canvas of his open mouth. Five full circles. Cane raised flagful in the silent air. Tangent. Along the corridor. A silent charge, towards Mr. McIntyre's office. Still rushed past his grinning. Nameplate. Struck it with his open hand. George?
George McIntyre stepped into the hall. Wristwatch. Time? Clockwork. Splendid. Marvelous. Staunch large bellied movement. Supporting pillars.
Tom Ryan re-engaged forward gear and the two overflowed along the corridor, from there through the inevitably white smocked, women-filled, children-cluttered main vestibule of the town hall, from there, with dignity, silent assurance and authority, into the bright sunlight. Shading their eyes, this godly pair stared at the scalloped clouds.
George turned, looked down at his Lord Mayor, questioning.
To his left, a rank of taxis waited. Tom Ryan assented, with a nod of his noble head. Taxi! called George.
An answering engine coughed. Gutters flecked with the foam of drifting litter. Chair folded into the back seat beside George. Driver's oily head. Fawning. Wooden knock of. Eyeless face. Tom Ryan, walrus laughing. Off we go!
Even the air has intelligence, thought James. It would. In. Here the air, with a new intelligence of its own, tries to thwart understanding. The soft wind was tugging at him, ribbons of light curling through the shade. His teeth with their roots seeming to knot their noise deep into his head, tingling. He smiled at her.
What could she say?
Why don't you sit down, she asked him. Why are you carrying that bucket?
It's so quiet here, he said. So quiet, it's as though we were underwater. Underwater shade, the green light.
A graceful lull between races.. Brown flanked brown and jockeyed colours, caps and whips. George McIntyre, dripping from his cuneiform lips, flicking his lizard's tongue, was devouring a meat pie, enhanced greatly by the rich red flavour of.
Tom Ryan tore through his pink betting slips and scowled, letting the pieces drift down into an increasing pile in his hat, up-turned, expensive, defensive. Looked up.
Swift deliberation.
Tom, he said, slowly.
The Town Clerk inquiringly.
There followed an interlude which resulted in George McIntyre wiping his chin and ploughing through the crowd, in search of another meat pie for his master.
Meanwhile other battles, similar to that between the Town Clerk and his Lord Mayor, were continuing. Disbelief against conviction, the overwhelming wind fighting hats and the bright plumed forever doomed ostrich women shrieking, bulging muscled sub-marinoed, snub-nosed, lip-pouting boys mooching, ashamed of their school ties. The macaws, notches in their beaks, prices on their tongues; scoring other victims. Animals. Long sad faces. Sweating and shivering.
James felt at once relieved that the opening gambit of the conversation had taken place without excessive abnormalities being revealed in either party. The woman was now leaning against the car, looking at him intently. He sat on the bonnet of the car, feeling the metal framework sag down onto the springs.
So far so good, he thought.
He tried to summon up a description of his feelings. Something to say to her. Now that the ice is broken. He could feel it freezing over again. He rummaged around in the wastepaper pockets of his mind. No words came to him. Getting desperate, he blurted: "What will I say? I can't think of anything."
As soon as he had spoken he realized the magnitude of the mistake he had made. His voice fell from his mouth, high, squeaky, broken; and out of place. The sensation was like that of suddenly finding a perfectly square stone on a pebbled beach and because of that doubting, all at once, all the laws of erosion. Or watching a very badly dubbed TV western and seeing the voice of the main character coming out of an overhead arch. He felt stupid and pathetic, the way he always felt with women who wore make-up; like a small stupid fish swimming into the largely teethed and open mouth of a shark.
He looked at her.
His symbolism was beginning to take effect.
With the overpopulated grin of the shark she told him: "Don't worry, I don't mind."
With a renewed feeling of dread he realized that she was the exact type of femme-fatale he most feared. The type of women who would be thinking of putting him in a cage, straw floored, feeding him liquid through the bars. Dark enclaves. Was it darker than before? Sun gone behind a cloud? Surely it had gone dark suddenly.
Her head seemed to be growing larger. Moving towards, him, silently.
He tried to speak. He realized his voice was his only defence. Like a feeble light, it diverted her attention. Her teeth were already dangerously transformed into two layers of needle-sharp white triangles. His voice floated before her face like a succulent bait. But what did he intend doing if she took the bait? Bite her in the throat? That rush of embarrassment again. Why? Something stirring in his pants. His only thoughts of his genitals was from their point of view. And an almost cinematic image of a pack of black dogs in his pants, barking, their pink tongues and saliva and mottled gums barking at that pale flesh. Ridiculous. Better say something fast.
Outside, penetrating blurrily through the green screen of leaves and muffled by distance, came the throbbing noise of the city the other. Dull hulls, mallard steamers, bragging bygone sounds of the cavorting buses dancing like gigantic hippopotamuses through the narrow streets. Crypticlocks. Thrumming vibrations of the roads. Buses big and blue and cavorting with partners. Buildings towering towards each other, looming faceless and blotting out the off-white skies. His words struggled up silver sided struggling through the dense green air.
"You have a gorgeous way of something or other," he told her.
"You can talk," she replied, raising her eyebrows and smiling. But there was a far-away look in her eyes as though this sort of talk bored her.
Chapter Five
in which James reaches a moment when his unstable mind, which was devoted at least ninety per cent of the time to injecting a rich infusion of imagination into his perceptions of the world and on the other hand, his intense instinct for self-preservation were competing for possession of his senses and his body. His situation was one which provided a fertile ground for both these opposable forces.
James smiled. Behind his smiling eyes he felt the formation of a puzzled frown. Strange, he thought. Could have sworn. He risked a quick glance at his surroundings. The close, grey-blue-green lane under the bending branches of the trees. The jacaranda. Air very moist. The trees seemed to be dripping sweat. I'm not feeling well, he thought, touching the skin of his throat lightly with his fingertips.
"Can we talk about something else? " James asked.
"What are we talking about?" she asked in reply. "You haven't even told me your name. Or why you're carrying that bucket. Do you want a cigarette?"
"No thanks."
He started to get up off the car.
"No, don't go," she said, putting a hand on his arm. "Tell me. The bucket intrigues me."
He sat down again beside her and began speaking in three simultaneous baritone voices.
He had taken a job as a gardener, he told her, because he had thought it would be impossible to make a living as a writer. What would you write about? she asked him. He spoke in words puffed up with battle fatigue, ballooned and swollen with pride, colourful exaggeration. He told her he would like to make the city into a work of fiction, with a character who had to clamber and climb through the stink and the slime, with a shining sword and a suit of armour, bellowing and battling with the hawkers, hawsers, ropes, popes. He spoke of soap boxes and battle dress, of subterranean caverns and purple passages. Warming to his theme he leaned back into his richly resinous, pock-marked, red-nosed anecdotes. He was not aware that her attention had drifted almost immediately from the thread of the narrative. She looked distantly up through the trees at the blurred city beyond.
He paused.
"I know what you mean," she said.
James misunderstood her.
"It's ugly," he said earnestly, "the city, I mean. But fascinating." She smiled.
The silence that resulted seemed embarrassing, too tense. The skin on his throat felt irritated, like birds pecking at his flesh. He turned to her and tried to pour the glue from his wet eyes all over her.
The embarrassing silence continued.
"Can I drive you somewhere?" she asked him.
"Anywhere," he replied, too quickly. She moved towards the car.
It was becoming obvious to James that he had steered the narrative in the wrong direction. He did not know whether it was possible to pull out. All the warnings were there.
Loud bells were ringing inside his head. A fire engine, angry and red, rushed across his face, He cast a remembering thought towards the city. Thousands of skilled princes. Sidestepping, handkerchiefed. Why think of them now? Wish I was out there with them, he thought.
When she stood up, he stood up beside her. The sudden burst of nervousness had caused a small eruption of chaos in his mind. He looked at her. Something about her, he thought. What did he want from her? Nothing. Then say something. Do something. Leave. Sensation of being carried helplessly along by the current, he thought. Why am I letting myself? He touched the skin of his throat with his fingers. It was tender and bulging with madness, insane. What a thing to think, Put things in order. (1) The dark lane. (2) Dank jacarandas. (3) ? It didn't help.
She closed the door on her side of the car. James sat perfectly still on the front seat. What little sound had penetrated the lane was now obscured by the sound of the engine starting. The car moved forward out of the lane into the stream of traffic.
She cursed herself angrily. What am I doing today? she asked herself. Why did I have to pick up this idiot with the bucket? She urged the car into the traffic, shops and houses glaring in the sun. What does he expect? she thought. She looked left and right and charged across an intersection, seeming to plough through the thick air. Christ it's hot out there, she thought. Pedestrians on either side of the car being swallowed by pits of boiling tar. So hot. Unnatural. Hot, scrabbling under a tin roof. Car. Possums in the roof. Noise of them at night in the middle of summer too hot for sheets too hot for sleep, dust kicked up in the heat, see in the dark their red eyes sharp teeth, sit on your chest with those sharp teeth like slicing a piece of fruit. Ridiculous. Only this morning it had been cold enough to fragment the sun as it climbed in the yellow sky. Shattered on the frost. Bits of the golden yellow sun.
James tried to shut his eyes. Couldn't. What's the trouble? he thought. Weather's all over the place. Mad.
What is it with today? she thought. Driving nowhere with some misbegotten fool. Jabbing sweat.
She wound down the window. No difference. Jabbing underarms.
The heat is getting to me, thought James. Like being inside a huge hot mouth. The heat like a huge wet tongue. He wished it would spit him out. He tried to wind down his window, but it stuck halfway. He fell back. Against the seat.
"Really hot," he gasped at her.
She said nothing.
He tried to talk again. Words at the end of his throat turned tail and scampered back. Confusing me. Heat. Look. Business suits being swallowed up by that pit of tar. How hot is it really? Fumes. Bubbling, boiling. Effort. To do anything.
The red bucket was resting on his lap. He looked down and saw it and it startled him. Tentatively, he put it down on the floor of the car between his feet. Struts and juts of the windscreen, doors, crowding in. He straightened in the seat, alarmed. He took out a packet of cigarettes. Shook one out. Looked at it from end to end wondering why it looked like a vicar on his Sunday walk after church wondering why before he put it into his mouth. Concentrated very hard on looking out of the window next to him until it became quite obvious that his eyes were outside the glass looking back inside the glass at his eyeless face and he stopped trying to look outside. What time is it, he thought. Nobody nose. The cigarette in his mouth began to wake, writhing and squirming between his lips. Carbuncles bulging tender round his neck began to burst. Frenzy. Cartwheeling feathers. Streamers. His mind like a boat leaving for overseas. Streamers pink mauve violet lemon orange pink, burst shores of insanity while others swelled towards bursting, painful, tender fermentation, pink, orange, russet lime and yellow bright as a slice of the summer moon, flailing their ends in a frolic through the air across his face, before his eyes.
More and more, the cigarette was waking and gathering strength and bumping, struggling, fighting against his lips. But then with a burning match he lit the cigarette and the flame pulling itself and its smoke down its body (vicar on his hammock, glass of orangeade) killed the cigarette swiftly. it lay unfighting in his lips. Calm and dead and white and green rotting, only a little green the smell not so and he stopped thinking about that now because he was feeling quite calm again. He looked out of the window and his eyes were no longer staring back at him and he knew that the streamers in the hot wind had wrapped around his head and they had blinded him but he didn't care because he could still see red angry machines and people bursting into flame. Hose them down with harvesters, Harry!
Wonderfully calm now he had killed the cigarette. Heard the woman's voice:
"Can I have one of those?" the woman asked him.
Stared at her momentarily amazed, he had forgotten where he was; automatically shook out a cigarette, handed it to her, watching his arm stretch over miles and miles over canyons and giraffes and zebras and white hunters turning pink and pink hunters having a drink in green pegged tents beside the ocean on television, in the ocean, thousands of fish, little fish running from bigger fish running from themselves, everything failing off the edge of the world into a red bucket, falling. She took the cigarette. He threw away his own, half smoked and lit another, without giving it a chance to wake. Taste you cannot taste, affects part of your tongue transmitting messages to someone's mind. James. Beginning to wake out of the sleep conjectures of the novel he had found himself in. Crashing noise in his head. Bewildered colourless. Wading. Actually felt himself shuddering, twitching as though the madness was real. Break off bits of his decaying skin. Bones breaking, desperate sound. Eyes open wildly close with horror. Arrows streaming towards your peeling bloodless face. Imagination turning the body inside out. Slowly. irresistible force. Unendurable pain. Strange sound. Machinery. Disembodied eyes, lolling on the vinyl, Cigarette blue plume. Clouds, as though they were in his mind, were fringed with lace. Weather. Freakish forecast. Weather overcast, mild, with possibility of an afternoon...
Chapter Six
in which the Author registers disapproval of the increasing tendency to lapse into hallucinatory monologues. in which the Author further expresses interest in the phenomenal reserves of energy the characters must have to be able to continually rationalize their changing surroundings in terms of their own experience
George McIntyre, a large (almost round) man of rigid habits, a red (more or less) healthy body and a staunch (although kind) disposition, was at this moment walking through the city on the business of the Nun's Downfall. Town Hall. He did not see James and the woman pass in the traffic, their eyes turned in. He was clocking his plates of meat to the feet of his mumbling bark. Old flicker, he thought and grinned, thumping himself in his chest of drawers. He walked, not pompously, never porpoisefully, but always close behind us. His thoughts williaming around the young girls. Jungles. Pleasing disciplines of his dahlia fairs. All visual. Daily affairs.
The races were over. George McIntyre walked with a sultry sense of achievement and its accompanying warm pleasure prodding him forward, belly first. His daily routine had been repeated now so many times his only conscious thoughts were that all was right with the world. So measured and controlled and expected was his pleasure in the monotony of his existence that it was a strangely long time before a parroting spiral of anxiety began to worm its way up through his mind.
But then he began to notice very odd things. Dull pumping, the sound of his blood. He inserted fat inkstains into the breeched cloth tight under arms, into the looping vestige of his vest. Breathed in deeply and settled his fat head onto his shoulders. Stared aggressively at the street in front of him. Allowed a small vesicle of stomach gas to gargle its way upwards. His expression allowed the wreaths of his fat face to overlap each other in an enterprising tango representing utter contentment. When he opened his eyes again, though, even this customarily soothing gesture faded to halt the formation of heat waves ribboning up from the bitumen.
The city had been experiencing severe heatstorms for almost an hour before George McIntyre woke out of his reverie to notice them. With momentary pauses, followed by gusts of hot wind of ever in creasing intensity, the storms were gathering momentum. Already fires had broken out in the lofts of warehouses along the wharves. The electrical discharge spanning the sky crackled angrily and spat blue flames into the canyons beyond the buildings.
George McIntyre walked on, careful not to let such things sway him from his everyday. Be low over shortly, he thought.
A soldierly sweat broke its ranks on his face. He wiped it away with a large white handkerchief. Cool to touch. The handkerchief then escaped from his hand into the air above the street and rained itself away in a shriveling wet burst. George snorted and walked on. The tongue of a tram sucked electricity from the overhead wires and rattled past. Shoppers beside him were glued to the hot concentrated drag of the street. Store dummies stared. Vaults of heat swept in again blustering across the streets, visible in the air as clouds of dust and smoke tugged at the shabby facades of the buildings.
George, noble, dutiful. His perceptions filtering slowly through the accretion of layers built up around him by his monotonous daily routine. His limited intelligence, which had not yet today been magnified by alcohol, transmitted these perceptions in a mollified ameliorated form, so that he was not properly aware that he was wading through a sharp-edged miasma of snarling sound, voices swimming between his thighs leaving the crimped marks of their teeth on his shins.
Over the burning city other pockets of renegades were similarly insensitive, for various reasons. Puddles of a calmer, quieter climate defied the heat, like ice floes on the boiling red sea. Huddling heads together. A thicket of young blond clerks watched from their window, looking out through a cool green haze sparrowing up from the sound of the sea, profuse memories of weekend conquests. Red waves of heat. Green waves of anecdotes, always apocryphal, always amputated by another anecdote. A solid fortress of bleached weekend hair brown weekend skin, sea breezes, white sand, the wet lips of waves charging through their office, as they swung close against the sluggish belly of green water, rambling monologues. Ted and Nick and Mark and Steve and Jim and Pete and Cairncross and Davy and Ian and Neil and Terry and Moby's Dick and Paul and Rob and Brian and Andy and Garry and Ken. Identical sets of stubbed toes, scarred feet from the barnacled rocks, beds of sand pits and swallowed salt, brown beer bottled faces, flung cigarette butts, terrible conquests of countless and always increasing numbers of bottles of beer, pounds of dope, distance of spit, length of ride, height of wave, length of time underwater, depth of cut from the rocks, size of shark swimming underneath the board, number of pieces of surfboard smashed up into, number of fights in pub, number of surfie chicks had in the dunes, number of bare tits seen sunbathing down on Frenchman's Bay.
At the edge of this green fomenting volleying conversation the waves of red heat gave off mushrooming clouds of hissing steam.
As the white cloud scared the wet strands of hair carefully smoothed over George McIntyre's head, his sense of duty, now enlarged because of his growing suspicion that something was wrong in the City, something that may eventually require his administrative assistance, rode over the recycling, screaming sea.
Those limping finance brokers, who had depended on the stability of the city for their financial security, were approaching a state of acute panic. Men and women climbed on each other's backs towards the sky in an effort to escape the heat. The smell of wealthy flesh rolled across the streets.
George McIntyre, their saviour, serious and solid with his swarming stride. Windows from high buildings popped out and fell to the shattered street around him. Patches of bright sunlight floating on the hot wind contributed to an unusually mottled effect. Occasional patches of sunlight floated too high and were toasted brown by the sun, then shriveled like papadams and charred to cinder ash.
Flooding heat. Sun clenching its fist pounding the face of the earth. Festering sores, scars where the earth had opened up, convulsed. Voices screaming through the mad grey burning fog. Flesh. George McIntyre walked on. Those of the crew he had made drink the plonk were calling at him from the pockmarked flotsam scattered waves. He did not hear their tiny cries. The sturdy boat plugged steadily on, ploughing through the.
The sea was getting worse. Mountains. Highpeaked. Ruptured, split by ignormous intrusions. Volcanoes. Spilling long heat. Split sideways. Small in that huge storm his tiny seafaring craft. Tremendous. Huge waves of heat breaking back across his bows, blasting long tunnels of hoarse sound through the air. George, solid and stern, sailing through. True captain. Barnacle-encrusted salt-drenched hot wind swelling stretching the canvas. His fists bunched up flailing cursing against the storm. This sea. Seems to have its own ink pelicans, he thought. Attacking me. Waves pulling up their. Crashing down, the nearest waves threw their bodies forward, sweeping thundering across the decks. Laughter. Courage. Spat in the face of. Booming and defiant against the.
The boat sailed on, victorious before the tumbling furious wind. Boys in the rigging. Joyous hard wild work. Captain George McIntyre seriously stern. Wind cutting the rigging to shreds. Boys lashed to the past. Boys bound on the burning beds. Lashed faces, staring eyes. A voice from the rigging. Faint through the booming wind. Frail, like the exhausted body of a sea-crossing bird. It was land. Lips and hearts. Crew tossed their. Air shuddered. The Town's bark worsened with this fight. His heart, booming in his chest, steamed with an overflow of emotion.
Their famous high-sailing sail-flying bow-wave crested stern-captained ship sailed in. The harbour glittered capriciously. Lake of impenetrable. The ship sailed, a gallant, splendid, high-masted craft, beaching on the footpath and came to a halt. George McIntyre looked down. Between his feet between the blue-grey paving stones of the footpath cigarette butts, emitting thin curling flags of ashen blue smoke, lay discarded.
Chapter Seven
in which George McIntyre enters the saloon
Creak of the wooden steps.
From inside they saw the swinging doors peeling back. The alcoholic air bent and stared. Any trace of expression vanished as faces went cautiously blank. George McIntyre appeared, black and gleaming and deadly, in the doorway, his rawhide face whipping the quiet air in front of his eyes. With legs bowed and with a lowering, potentially dangerous swagger, he lurched into the saloon. His spurs. Silver. Sharp. Bullets rustled, restless, turning the pages of full magazines.
McLennan, his back to the swinging doors, slowly turned to regard the newcomer. "It's you," he announced, "the Saviour of the city."
George McIntyre drew his stomach in three notches and gave the mongrel a challenging stare. The object of his scrutiny resembled a cross between a scarecrow and an Irish terrier. Hair, composed of a particularly resilient strain of spinifex, covered a grey, unhealthy scalp. The face was overdrawn with a permanent look of contemptuous suffering. From between the licking lips appeared a thistled cactus tongue.
The remaining inhabitants of the hotel, now that the preliminaries had been taken care of, returned to mumbled conversations, snuffling, cold-nosed, sharpened ears, whetted lips, soft, dark, uncomfortable. The Town Clerk swaggered sluggishly to the car, lowered his considerable bulk, allowing it to completely swallow the bar-stool below him. His drink slid over to him. Silently. He leaned into it. Choruses of violins swept in a tide across the room. At the far end of the saloon the sky-drenched air thickened. Stormclouds, thick, dark and pulsating with the longing to rain, had gathered together in an orchestra of anticipation. They gave the dark quiet room the type of charged silence of a waterspout, a ripening forest about to rain.
George McIntyre's body was threatening, by this time, to drip from the edges of the stool to the floor. His third whisky, although its effect was to consolidate his mind, had the coincidental effect of dissolving his body. His brain in this wet mass was waking up, naked and alive, thrust wet inside his skull slimy and glistening like a newborn animal. The feeling he had was so rural and pastoral, that golden sunbeams gleamed behind his teeth, filling his mouth with the colour of poured gold, while at the same time, expanding bodies of fat of the same colour were beginning to stir in his liver.
Outside, the heatstorm still raged, surging red violent heat. Brittle borders of the saloon punctuated with windows and doors. Slinkvelvet. "Grog," McLennan stated, lugubriously, raising his glass in a further salute to his solution to all the ills the flesh is heir to. Glasses in the saloon were raised in unison and their contents consumed. The normal traffic of conversation started up again, as it became clear that McLennan had nothing more to add. Sounds that had stuck like clods of soil and clay to the walls prized themselves loose and were ferried back and forward between the inhabitants of the saloon.
George McIntyre looked first to one side then the other, then tried to look behind in a tired but eloquent gesture of dissatisfaction with the standard of off-the-cuff saloon soliloquies. He absorbed, with good grace, the mongrel's disquisition. Yet something had remained, like a bad taste, in his mouth. His gorge rising, George stood and contracting his cheek muscles and causing pressure to build up in his mouth, ejected the result of his mouth's reactions in a spit which sailed freely through the air, a liquid glob pursuing itself along its course without crudity from his pursing lips to the waiting spittoon. This spit, having been brought up well, behaved impeccably in the modern manner just as a well brought up spit was expectorated to behave, plunging into the spittoon, striking the bed of sand, then rolling and gathering as it rolled a spit-saturated mass of golden sand, whose colour, through the action of that wetness, was transformed from gold to grey. George, a nearfarious spitter, was humbled by the warm flush his pride at having spat so accurately gave him. His next action, placing his fat hands lightly around the lowest proximity of his straining belly, was to turn towards the saloon door. His expression was stern. He observed, distantly, the strong smell of beer. Then walking with a light swaying motion, he passed through the saloon doors outside into the sweating heat.
Chapter Eight
in which George and a bus disagree
Above the bulging buildings, the clock that perched in the town hall tower now went mad in the heat and began to beat rhythmically in the mad wind. George McIntyre stepped from the saloon door into the heat. Strange, he felt. The damp jungle of flesh in the streets was blacker now. Burnt black and crisp. Lighter elongated torches drifted and were tugged apart by the wind. George planted his feet firmly, one after the other. None of this. Nonsense, he thought. Least it's not. Raining.
A flock of red waves flushed past very close to him. He began to feel the prickling sweat vinaigrette his wet chest, underneath his three-ply suit. Wet, he thought. Sweat like a stuck. Cherubic flood. Bout time for my, he thought. Afternoon nap. Business as usual. Bellyfirst. Office of the Clowning Turk. His deep chuckle burped up from under his belt. Staple diet. Mostly mad. Public savant. Missing Mary out keeping an eve on the savages. Need sharp eyes. Stamp treatment. Laws made to break them in. Prams. Big issue these days. Nice having a cripple as your top man. Good for rubberslick precautions. Flagstone. Wonder who called 'em that.
White cuffed cliffs of coughs and well suitors to the tirade. Unique Adversity. Stipends. Stupider every day.
Hot. Humuddled, rather than hot. Tepid. Strange. He stepped off the footpath. Breath of wind. He looked up at the sky.
A storm was gathering on the horizon over the sea. From the west, the arid heat in sinuous ribbons was still continuing to increase in strength and ferocity. On the other horizon though, the weather conditions had forced up a bank of angry black stormclouds, soaked with rain and charged with electricity. At the perimeter where the heat and cold met, inexplicable knots became tangled as the black clouds steadily devoured the red sky. Encockroaching. Water in the wind. The black clouds were now approaching the sun.
George, with a stupefied sense of wonder, stared up at the gathering cloud, continuing to stare up as he stepped off the footpath onto the road and into the path of the blue bus. The bus barely slowed in its flight. It seemed to rear up in front of the Town Clerk before striking him. There was a slightly crumpled sound as George McIntyre bounced off the fender, rolled down the road some way and came to rest with the back of his head thudding into a telegraph pole.
In the sky, black stallions of whipped wind tossed down the first drops of rain.
Chapter Nine
results of the foregoing
Wanting to wake and struggling to do so, at first George found only fugitive and futile reminders of the georgraphy of his macintyrescape. By this time the fire was raging rampant through the streets, fuelled by flaming figures who fought to flee themselves, only to burst into flames. They vanished past him in the fog. Fazed, George looked with longing towards the far side of the street. His perceptions, at first only fuzzy, communicated the sound of footsteps, which made dim outlines in the mists. Try as he might, he could not recognize their robes. They sparrowed through the thickening haze of heat. George, rapidly left alone, struggled to see through the soft sand of his eyelids.
Bats, massed in the elevators, were flying out into the face of the fire, massing in black clouds and faking the rain, colliding in the sky with angry owls. Drops of black blood, fiercely leaping towards the earth with more than thirty-two feet per second squared, dashed against George's neck.
George stank and ripened under the lash of these amphetamines. Regaining his feet, he followed them to the footpath and sank again, this time with ease, in a cherubic flood, until he was within arm's length of sleep's soft embrace. Stupidly, he stared at a streetsign beside him. Under his scrutiny, it began to change, at first slender, straight upright, then sliding away into the evaporating streets, slithering in a wreath of luxurious metallic shingles, white and tingling, like gloved feet underfoot.
Simultaneously, the sound of a window popping out in the hot wind made George look up. A wheelchair fell screaming into the inferno. Horribly shriven shrieks tore the air to fragments as the wheelchair yelped and wriggled in the fumes.
Mutual snuggles sermonized themselves as thoughts dragged each other through his mind and George, almost independent, wondered what all this might mean. His senses, he realized were irate: To be sure, an over-addiction to the alcohol might have meandered him, but only minimally, surely not to the extent that he would be this brutally out of step with the universe. Gathering in the pleatings of his bleatings, he planted his plimsole on the grating over the gutter. Now, he reflected, would be a good time to make an investigation of the city sewerage systems.
While on the subject of the city, while we're here, why don't we wander around? To tell you the truth, sights were very sore in this city of ours, since by a process of incineration, certain members of the public were in the process of ceasing to be. Filled with voices of fire, these furtive innocents perished, exploding in a downpour of words, even worse than before. The killer bus sliding through the streets, was gouging ruts in the road with an improbable undercarriage of limbs, activated like gigantic cockroaches.
The animal crescendo, in full swing, was threatening to throw a black moon into the amphitheater of the upper atmosphere. It seemed the only extravagance worthy of the panic that preceded it. Crowds, now furious with flames, were boarding vehicles, petitioning ports for passage, selling everything, shouting themselves senseless, naked to the point of nudity, showing sick stomachs, skinned shins, fallen arches and full nelsons. Who of them knew? Bodied and bowelled, they were bound to get some gut reaction, in the gizzards and respond to this bileductile realization, even as mistimed and illegible as it might be: the sounds and lips bursting through the many bulbed hyacinth.
While all this was undoubtedly meaningful, we were beginning to wonder whether we should feel stricken, consigning such cobblestones to a certain death. What we really wanted at the inception of all this, we hasten to add, was not really the writhings of a wheelchair, or the if-blue bestiality of what might have been a bus burning down the boulevard.
McLennan in the meanwhile, was in the saloon and therefore safe. But sanctuaries, such as the saloon, while they might withstand the sieges of the fire, could hardly fight off what was to follow. The sea was already licking its lips. (We wanted all this to become true later, but not now.)
McLennan surveyed the sample of certainly Scotch before him on the bench. Something, he saw, seemed to be swimming in its golden yellow illumination, something suspiciously santhametrical, like a certain species of suffusiance. He leaned forward and scrutinized the whisky more closely, watching what appeared to be a surfacing sun. Pudgy yellow early morning shapes were beached on the golden yellow sands, while others floated in the darker channels of the estuary.
Frightened eggplant beings, natural to the sea, swam between the bodies as the last rays of the sunrise mushroomed up into the far too little sky.
Taking the glass in his hand, McLennan tossed the contents down the hatch. So much for the pellucid pandemonium of tomorrow's future, he thought, I haven't got a fart's chance of finding my way out of here unless I'm a fish, by the looks of it. Mr. Malibu McLennan. Bailiwicks might bust me, but the bastards won't ever buy me, he murmured. The lion's hot swampy breath in the black end of the lagoon swam through the softening glide of the Clyde's smog. I'm fucked if I'll be a fish, McLennan thought, they'll have to fight me first.
Chapter Ten
in which we return to follow the course of the couple in the car where the Author manipulates the perceptions of the characters and exaggerates the weather conditions until the reader suspects the plan is to develop a semiotician's desert, so popular in modern fiction
James held his hand in front of his face but instead of reassuring him, it merely increased his amusement. He regarded with an intense scrutiny these long white shapes of madness. Similar shapes swirled in his mind. And outside in the slavedriven streets. Troublesome. Turmoil. Into. In, too. Wild rips of mad gentlefolk cavorting lumpy bodies through his mind. Sideways. Ancient pyramids of time. Eyes, forming themselves into a handle for the shoveling thoughts of his mind as it adapted itself to the condition by becoming displayed. He looked now at the woman and was surprised to discover that her face was peeling away revealing the face beneath, identical to the one above.
James saw less than distance. His skin peeling. The deep chasm between his arm and the woman was steep and dark-walled. Winding along its deepest channel, he saw a far-off, foaming river. They were flying by parachute. The landscape rushed by underneath them. Danger lurked beneath the surface. Flames now white hot were consuming the landscape in all direction, leaving nothing behind.
James, staring at this landscape and struck by the improbability. of the weather, was suddenly absorbed in a process of thought which seemed at first so alarming and convincing that his face assumed a blank, abstract expression while he gave full rein to the idea that was forming in his mind.
The substance of this idea, which now seemed so plain and obvious, was him wondering whether it could be possible that he could be fictional himself. If he were a character. In a book. He laughed to himself. Then, becoming suddenly aware again of the raw, bleeding havoc of his madly wounded neck, the excessive heat, the improbable nature of the woman beside him and the cinematographic speed of the story in general... The story. He was already referring to it as. The almost palpable fear of this possibility now coalesced in his mind. If someone else was responsible for this. Worse, someone like himself, who couldn't care less. His eyes wrang their tiny shriveled hands and shivered. The shudder went through his body, a strange sense of knowing. Once he entertained the idea, he felt sure of it.
It raised all sorts of questions. How much of what was happening could be relied upon as being real? How much of it was his own imagination? How much was the writer's imagination? To what degree did he have free will? Would his realization of what was really going on make any difference? Was it the writer's intention that he should be thinking this?
Doubts assailed him. They increased, whirling in his head, absurdly bird-like, until they span off, out of control, in a mass of whirling white feathers. The blazing city behind seemed squat and objectionable. What if I did anything I wanted? The page would probably contradict me.
1 must tell her, James thought. There's no reason why she should suffer like this. He opened his mouth trying to speak and went dumb at the flight of a cloud of insects that poured from his lungs, swarming across the bad lands tearing around her trying to attack. Don't take any notice of them, he managed to choke out, it's just someone's idea of a joke. His words, rang out, deafening both of them, as they knocked on the chambers of her brass head.
Trying to throw a spanner in the works is going to make it worse that much is obvious, he thought. Too much to think of at once. Like being the foot, the footprints and the sand. All at the same time. His voice, in the meantime, had transformed itself, dancing, into a pale yellow mist, no longer threatening to disturb her.
I can't do anything for her, he thought. Better try to save myself. There ought to be a law against this.
Taking the red bucket in his hand, he struck out across the yellow sand alone. When he had walked about half a mile, he turned to look. Nothing but yellow. Nothing visible above the sand.
Chapter Eleven
resolution of the foregoing, in which James finds his way back to the beginning
A breath of wind, in advance of the storm, revived him from his stupor and feeling as though his sense of sight was criminally pigeon-toed, James struggled to open his eyes. For some time, he stared at the bridge of his nose. Then, with a momentous effort, he tore his gaze in two and. looked up at the sky. It was wide awake up time in the wild west and his eyes, bugling the ravioli, began to bite bits of the air in front of his face, a pugilistic gesture renamed for the occasion of the change that began occurring in the desert.
Gradually, as the desert changed under the influence of the gathering clouds, the everywhere became somehow murkier, altering under the deeper arrangements of colours. A soft wind, already preceded by the puff that had profited him before, came and sat down next to him on the sand, which was firming rapidly underneath him, until soon it was quite dark and hard and he realized he was walking again. He had been lying face down for so long he could not remember getting up.
Then overhead with no preliminaries, the clouds clumped together in a convulsive movement and spewed forth their collective burden of light, noise and rain.
When his sense began to recover enough to. begin to perceive the sights and sounds around him, James was able to observe that the vision of the desert had retracted and in its place the perimeters of the city appeared, sprawling with factory smoke. As the city became gamer and more definite, he began to hurry. There was, in the edge after edge, in the crowd, in the boarding vehicles and passing ports across seas of cultivation, a sense of desperation which settled also on him.
He was now well within the fabricated, re-occurring scenes within the city. Around him he noticed the normal commotion of commuters and as he passed a bus shelter beside the pigeon-thronged square, he thought that he recognized a badly placed eyelash gleaned sideways on an occidentially tranquil face. He then turned with more purpose past the University into the Botanical Gardens. The old gardener, who was packing his tools into the shed behind the Vet Science building, looked up.
James placed the red bucket behind a rapidly knitting row of ferns, noting datedly the nervous designs. Then, assuredly, a little more slowly, he walked towards the office, to sign-off-for the day. The brush lining the gardens threw blue-black shadows on the ground. Thirsty. The bright sky after the rain was pellucid and clear with the sharp intake of breath one always remembers with. Pigeons infesting the City Square wheeled up. Dawdy blue. There was an air tonguing stillness and freshness in the air.
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| PART THREE | |
I
"James visited me in the studio today," Charles was saying, "while you were down in the cafe. He brought his book."
There was no answer from the other room.
"He says he's finished the second revision and he showed me some of it. He wants to put in a section called Amnesia, in which the reader is a character in the book, but with no memory of what happened before. I advised him against it." Charles stopped speaking for a moment and listened to the silence. He considered getting up out of the straw chair and going to Maria's bedroom, then decided against it and sank back into the chair.
"He has a strange method of writing," his voice continued, "he writes something, then he hides in it and waits for something to happen, which he'll write later. But he has to keep himself hidden, or he'll become a character and never be able to leave..." His voice trailed off into the darkness and blue pipe smoke. Another silence intervened.
II
Even in the silence, Maria held her hands over her ears to shut out the sound of Charles's voice. Her knuckles whitened as she pressed her hands against the side of her head.
She was staring out over the park, watching a drunk weaving across. The window threw a patch of light onto the polished verandah floor outside. On the corner of the building, the window of her room behind the café had an uninterrupted view over the park and down to the river.
III
James, who was hidden, heard Dad in the café behind, locking up. Footsteps sounded in the hall and Dad stepped out onto the verandah in the dark. The shadow of Charles moved darkly against the wall. Dad, retracing his head, drew back into the corridor again and gently closed the door.
IV
The door closed gently behind him. We were like that once, Dad thought and sighed. He retraced his steps and now, instead of going onto the veranda to soak his feet in rum, he made his way through the knee-deep paper flowers to the room of his odious clones multiplied in the mirror. Blinking in the fierce fluorescent light, he gave his teeth the once over with the foaming back end of a beaver, in an attempt to mask the smell of alcohol (an essential task before going into the bedroom) and then entered.
The bedroom, after the flowers in the hall, was distinctly plain, but somehow filled with the intransigent complexities of the feminine psychology, an example of which now regarded him speculatively, from where she lay propped up against floral-patterned pillows next to a reading lamp. He submitted to this inspection for some moments, before she returned her gaze to a magazine.
Sighing again, but not audibly, Dad sat down on the edge of the creaking bed, turning his back to her: a movement which allowed him to remove his shoes. His socks followed. Standing up again, he' undressed and got into a pair of blue and white pajamas, patterned with the familiar floral motif of the pillows. A faint breeze drifted through the room. The bed creaked under his weight again. He settled into the silence, tracing with his eyes the ears of wheat which patterned the pale ceiling.
V
On his second attempt, Charles had got up from the chair. He stood on the veranda, looking out, troubled by a vague premonition crossing his mind like the refreshments at a wedding. An itching below the belt coincided with a pain in the small of his back, caused by an interaction with the love sporozoa and the cystitis senses. The nearby traffic was very loud. A sense of nervousness raced across the back of his skull. Something was being repeated. Something insistent. A continuous burst of sound, near his ear. The strange high-pitched bark of a whale underwater. He stood up. Something nudged him from behind. He turned around.
At the corner of his vision, he saw the door to the verandah being gently closed. It was only Dad. Charles let his breath out slowly. The night seeped from his lungs and deepened in the dark air on the verandah. Reluctantly, he moved from the verandah into the corridor and then into Maria's room.
VI
From the doorway, he could see Maria's back, her hands clamped over her cars and the mirror over the chest of drawers, which threw his reflection back at him in the golden light. He moved his head sideways, taking its reflection out of the mirror then moved it back. Maria turned.
Across the city a police siren wailed and then stopped. In the air there was a smell of the park and from further away, the river. Charles walked towards Maria and joined her at the window. The ground of the landscape lisped away from them, towards the riverbanks and below them, to the low tide mud. Cloaca of the city. Coal boats churned in the dark, sending the smell of the mud and the smoke across the park and across the city.
JAMES'S MANUSCRIPT
IN A BOOK, if I was going to write one and by this stage I was sure I was, there were at least always two characters. The author and the reader. One should give them names, which was simple in the author's case, but what about the reader? One had to allow for a certain variation.
I was at this time still working in the gardens, though to be sure I was spending a lot more of my time adding to my manuscript than tending the plants.
A thoroughfare near the stairwell in the library, where I could freely observe all my characters passing in their walks of life suited my purposes perfectly. A warm orange light, provided by-the interaction of the sunlight and the carpet, threw a friendly glow about me while I added notes to the story in my notebook.
My main consideration, apart from the characters, was the point of view the story would be written from. Not mine, probably. I was toying with the idea of creating a fictional writer to tie all the sections of the book together, but I was unsure if this was introducing too much the element of free love. A writer, I reflected, was always the one who wouldn't when he was wanted.
I could on the other hand write it from the reader's point of view, as though everything was already finished and written and all the problems solved. It would certainly give it a clinical air, like a post mortem. Or again, from the point of view of a posthumous reader. But that would mean writing the book twice. And if once was too much, twice was already on its way back from Mars.
Weathering these thoughts, swallowing in my nine, I looked up. The suffusiant santhameter of golden yellow illumination was making me feel sleepy. It was a condition near enough to sleep to seem like thought, but it wasn't adding anything to the length of the page. I wetlipped the chewed implement and convinced myself I should at least write down a few more observations before Noddy went up the escalator. But what to write? I looked around. I saw that the librarian, usually curtained in her corner, had walked out from behind the counter and was standing at the stairwell talking. Her? Who is she talking to? I wondered. Daze turning cloudy. Might write that down. Humuddled. it's not the heat, it's the fuming trees. Where did I hear that before? The librarian, I observed, had let herself lean forward and I saw the silky down on her throat gurgle as she whispered to her companion, who smoothed the green and white material over dark hair down over her crinkly waist. No, that's not right, I thought to myself. But what's the librarian doing? Coming this way.
II
The librarian walked towards me swiftly.
"You're staring at us," she said indignantly, as she approached. "What for?" She grabbed my notebook and began reading my notes. Meanwhile her crinkly-waisted friend had stayed by the stairs.
The librarian laughed and looked up.
"Crinkly waist?" she asked, laughing.
Her friend, now walking towards us, peered at the notebook. "Look at this," said the librarian, "it's about us." Then she turned towards me. "Can I see what else you've written? Who's Noddy? Do you work in the gardens? I've seen you watering the plants. Why don't you join us, we're on lunch now."
III
She, herself and I (and the crinkly-waisted one) then conveyed ourselves by way of a curmudgeonly bypass of re-verification to the quiet, crinkly-waisted lawns outside.
It was, I noticed, more often than not that the interference from outside helped to set the scene. Irritated owls were already beginning to infiltrate the city, giving it the air of indefinite arousal.
The librarian turned to her friend, ignoring me for the meanwhile, talking about the impending of someone's wedding. The crinkly waisted one was all in favour of it but the librarian was of the opinion that it always meant the giving up of their studies for women of that age. We were walking, blinking in the bright sunshine, towards the University Post Office. As we encountered diverging paths, the crinkly-waisted one said she was leaving, OK'bye called the librarian, but the librarian did not turn immediately to talk to me even though I was walking along beside her. She seemed self-absorbed, humming quietly to herself like an auto-suggestive machine, a residual smile from the departure still splashed across her face.
We walked like this in silence. Then, as we passed a small campus concert hall nearby, the cafeteria, bursts of sound synchronised our cars in the direction of the mound. We veered towards the hall and entered, crossing a covered portico lit with large bay, windows crossed with dark red beams. Inside, particles of soot were competing with the owls for places to sit on the polished floors. We drifted between the bodies towards the makeshift stage. The volume increased.
"LET ME LOOK IN YOUR NOTEBOOK AGAIN," she yelled in my ear.
I passed it to her. The music was forming a clenched fist in my head. It represented, I reflected, a type of walking brain, intent on communal experience through the amputation of screams. I listened to the librarian listening to the music. We haven't said anything to each other, I thought, how can I write this down?
IV
"I've only come into the story recently," she remarked, as the music faded away and as we jostled through the departing crowd.
"Are you a librarian?" I asked.
"No. Don't ask me that," she said.
V
The city, defeated by itself, heard the clock above striking midday in the wind. Pieces of the sound, torn into fragments, fell to the bright cement between the passing crowds.
One of the fragments, still reverberating softly, fell on the librarian's shoulder. Carefully I removed it and held it to my ear. It released a little whimper, before suddenly shriveling between my fingers.
A sense of strange intimacy, which had been magnified somehow by the hot afternoon, deepened and continued as we walked in silence. We passed through the city center and into the quieter inner-city suburbs beyond, a sense of communication always distressingly near, but never touching. My mind, while I wondered what she was thinking, was continuing to putrefy in my head as though somehow the air supply had been cut off. Looking around us I noticed that the wind had dropped. The air was quiet and still, as though in expectation. A tightening sensation around my scalp, threatening to turn into a headache, mounted to my temples and persisted there, resulting in a dull drumming, the sound one normally associates with huge tusks. Blown by the wind.
But there was no wind. Only the tinny sound of the frantic megaphonic voices of a racetrack, passing nearby. I breathed harshly through my mouth.
Suddenly the librarian turned on me.
"Are you all right?" she asked me.
Her question took me completely by surprise.
I stared at her blankly.
VI
Obloid, cone-shaped and rounded off snubly, the day was presenting problems that I was beginning to find difficult to fathom. A certain greyness had appeared at the opposite end of the horizon and distended, faded grey ghosts were moving there forming shapes dimly reminiscent of memory. Could they be clouds? The light around us, in any case, was bright and hot and conveyed her question to me in an acutely painful tone of reprobation. Through the walls of mosaic patterning the ceiling of sky above us, a particularly strong ray of sunlight penetrated the surface of the nearby river, winding sleazily in the afternoon through the haze of increasing heat. Sunlight, after penetrating water from a great height, was sometimes transformed into eau-de-cologne or similar trace elements. Today however, the result was a combination of stale bread and massage oil. Nearby suburban railway stations, tennis courts and bowling greens appeared somehow rubbery. A seemingly endless group of images was transported across my mind's eye. The silence of the afternoon was beginning to prey on me in an unusually menacing manner.
The librarian's voice came to me over the prairie, hollowed by the gleaming hair on her arms.
"It's a lovely day," she said, softly, smiling.
Just as the librarian began to speak, I became suddenly aware of a figure, appearing on the other side of the road.
Whether she (the figure) had materialized, or had been there all along, I couldn't say. A certain cardboard lifelessness gave her a characteristically grainy appearance, as though I was developing her photograph, secretly, in the nude. What was she doing? I wondered. I peered through the poor resolution of the air. She appeared to be scribbling something, on her leg.
I threw my head sideways, aggressively, by the look on my face. I interrogated the librarian savagely.
"Look at that girl," I snapped at her. "What is she doing?"
The librarian recoiled contemptuously. "Why don't you ask her? if that's what you're interested in."
What an unusual train of events.
"I'm sorry," I said, "I didn't mean to seem upset."
"Upset?!" she screamed at me. "You weren't listening to a word I was saying!" Her face was pinched and angry. At that moment, a taxi cruised past us. Stepping out onto the road, the librarian hailed it. The taxi swerved to the side of the road. The door opened.
The librarian turned to me with a look of disgust and horror.
"No!" she said fiercely. "Don't try to follow me. Leave me alone!"
She got into the taxi. it slid silently away, gleaming black in the heavy bleak haze of the heat.
More than ever, I was feeling distinctly puzzled. if such things could happen with people I hardly knew, what about the others? Would they be worse? What others? But more importantly, what now?
With this last question hanging round my neck and wriggling like the last throes before falling in, I sent my eyes across the road again, searching for the woman I had seen. Hunched forward, she was still scribbling on her leg. The air, fluttering around her like flying blue daffodils, was leaving little kisses of delight on the dense brown shell of her hair, shining in the sunlight.
Any action now, I thought to myself, would be too precipitous and must be enacted, before it was too late. Accordingly I set my body in motion and steered it across the road. Approaching her I coughed discreetly to attract her attention. She looked up.
"Do you want something?" she asked me.
I cleared my throat, a little embarrassed. "What are you writing?" I asked. "Is it about me?"
Startled, she replied: "About you? I've never seen you before in my life." Her eyes were unusually blue.
Now even more puzzled I could feel myself entering a state of acute panic. if I had thought that what happened with the librarian was ridiculous then what was happening now was bordering on the dangerously insane. Moreover it was contrived, as though the imagination of a sick dog had invaded the parlour of the groom. Above us the sun stepped on the gas. The heat jumped a few degrees up the scale and the chant of burnt air came to my nostrils, easily stained with the smell of paper. Somehow I was going to have to get myself out of the mess I was getting myself into. And that would mean drastic action. Quickly, with a strange numb fear, I crossed out everything I had written back to when the door of the taxi had opened. The librarian turned to me with a look of disgust and horror.
"No!" she said fiercely. "Don't try to follow me! Leave me alone!"
She got into the taxi. It slid silently away, gleaming black in the heavy bleak haze of the heat.
Puzzled, I looked up.
The woman I had seen leaning against the wall on the other side of the street was no longer there.
What do I do now? I thought.
VII
Somehow, the librarian had succeeded in luring me away from the gardens and then she had left me stranded. But why? This kind of multifarious but moreover motiveless malignity was Iagoesque if anything and I hardly imagined that the librarian reached those sort of Shakespearean proportions, at least certainly not in a book that I was writing. Something Tolstoyan might be more appropriate but even as I said this to myself I knew I was only stalling, because I didn't want to take part in whatever wanted to happen next. You will remember I had left myself standing in the middle of the road, after the departure of the taxi, interrogating myself as to the nature of my intentions.
While I'm recounting the events of this day (which was becoming more important as the day wore on) I must confess that all that I say doesn't necessarily have to be believed. You will remember I said that I was taking notes for my book at the same time that all this was happening and when one considers my method of writing, some of the more mysterious moments might bear a bit of criticism. My method was this: I simply wrote down the last thing that came into my head. Sometimes this system required a long wait, but generally speaking it was surprisingly straightforward. Another contingency that might as well be taken into account was the fact that this was all happening on the run and as a result my manuscripts weren't in the best condition. I had come to expect the thoughtless obliteration of characters and scenes through accidents in the kitchen and as well, because I sometimes carried a few of the most recent pages in my pants pocket, some of the landscapes might have got a bit crumpled. But even these theories, as clever as they were, could hardly have prepared me for what I encountered next.
I had walked along the road more or less in the direction the taxi had taken when I encountered an enormous burnt-edged hole. My thoughts had been rambling on in the manner described above, i.e. while unwashed, more or less like the surface of all water and hewn roughly from the forest of all that was available. I was reflecting on the fact that as far as I knew, no-one else had noticed how near all this that might be termed "what was available" in fact was. It was its proximity, I supposed, that had prevented it being exploited. Adventurers and explorers of that type, were always going further afield, which meant that of course they could hardly, be expected to notice what was nearby. However, unlike most people I took special care to notice what was nearby, even when nothing was there. Which was fortunate, for such was the case and I very nearly fell into it. it was really gigantic. It covered an area about the size of a football field. Blackened edges ringed a horribly empty feeling or in my own terms, a gigantic nothingness. The dispatchers of truth mention in some of their most recent communiqués, that when people are asked to look at nothing, they see everything and more particularly, everything else. In this case however, when I looked into the hole, there was simply nothing.
My initial reaction was to step back from the edge quite quickly and it was from this new position that I surveyed the situation. One more step, I reflected and my rosary beads would have been all over the bathroom floor.
Once I was back from the edge I began to wonder why I was, who else could possibly be and more especially, how a substantial section of the landscape (including some streets and houses and a couple of small hills) could disappear. Behind me, in the shadows of the meanwhile, a burning cat howled at the blackened edge of the pit. I turned and began edging away from the hole. Whatever it was I didn't like it. The dim surge of the city filtered through the air by a process of magnetism-optics only affecting the ears.
VIII
Two down and one to go. As I skirted the edge of the gaping pit I began to realize that more than anything, it resembled a cigarette burn. Was it possible that a cigarette butt had been carelessly dropped on the manuscript, burning a huge hole and obliterating a fairly large section of description? It seemed the only sane answer.
MARIA
I
Maria's experiences of that day however, were turned retrocinoptically, to the tune of some hours before. Walking slowly, with limbs all to one side, Maria spread her golden skirts with the solemn grace of carpet snakes. A tension created by the rising temperature had seemed disagreeable to her and she had made arrangements to meet Charles by the wharf in the mid-afternoon. The chlorination works gleamed in the distance.
Even that early the city had been behaving oddly. Lawns (usually the oblique arrangements meant to convey appearance) were guilty of peculiar transgressions, quietly creeping away from their homes, leaving the suburbs with the subterranean look of tarred roads and raw, bleeding black earth.
II
Charles meanwhile was subjecting his paintings to extreme cold, in the hope of achieving an elusive flesh pink on the chilblains. Like Cocteau he had avoided painting lips on the faces of the figures, but for an entirely different reason' His materials now that he had abandoned good advice, were a combination of chalk and concentric metals. His studio was littered with earth and anteaters and huge tusks, providing a strange dancing music from the action of the wind through their broken veins. Before beginning painting that morning he had tuned the cemetery in on the radio and the dark, small rhinoceri and wedge-tailed fleas (crimpolined with remorse) had appeared in the geographical center of the room, nearby one of the walls.
III
With feelings of relief and in a state near his lapse Dad watched the enlarging muscles of the storm, the edge of which was now perched over the city. Hinged on the turn of the tide, the global resuscitation by rain had been a last resort and in the event that the greater part of the city had already been burnt out, the rain might do more harm than good. It was a chance one had to take, for the sake of the lives of those who might be left in the city.
The sea, snailed further into its shell, had retracted to unprecedented depths in the attempts to avoid the midday heat and now that the rain had begun to loom over the world, ominous signs indicated the ocean's intention.
A noise in the stormdrain announced Ted's arrival. Dad wheeled open the airlock and the two were once again united. Bloodstained, dripping and blackened, Ted bore eloquent reminders of his day.
"Ted! What happened?"
Ted, hampered by, the bandages, began to explain the gruesome effect of his latest friendship, that with Charles.
"G'day Dad. I ran into a bloke while I was having breakfast this morning."
"Someone you know?"
"A kindred spirit, you might say."
"He left you in a bit of a mess, by the looks of it."
"No, he was all right, but the alcohol tended to merge with the lamp-posts. Then I got trodden on by the police."
Dad, feeling a little jealous, unwrapped the broken branch that had somehow lodged itself in his eye and overcame his emotion.
"It's good to have you back," he said.
Ted was embraced and Dad was the embrasure and they were both glad to see each other.
This formality completed, it was back to business.
"The sea's in a bad mood today," Ted remarked.
Dad followed Ted into the tunnel. Merino loops of the machine's entrails hung from the batteries of equipment. Replaced parts of leather oozed milk. Galoshes, which were breastfed to prevent them ever growing old, were waiting by the back step. Dad put a pair on. Ted was already wearing his. Holding his breath Dad followed Ted into the diminishing room. The air inside, as usual, was humid and smelled somehow incomplete. Closing his eyes, Dad felt inside the lungs of the nearest wall, trying to soothe the nerval quilts and trying to coax the reserves of salutary fluids into the spinal chambers. Strange sensations came to his fingers, of slight palpitations in the vellum drums. Sultry dominions, where the weather usually came from, were spread-eagled with shadows.
IV
"Keep coming this way..." called Ted, "and take a look from the observation pulpit."
Dad edged along the wall and after a few metres further, stumbled into the aperture. He was now in a glass-roomed chamber filled with perspex vessels, which normally only existed on full moons. Everywhere, from this room, was seen from above. Today, the normally placid ocean was flecked with pauses. Huge winged mammoths, casting their shadows on the sea, were flying towards the horizon.
Ted grabbed Dad's arm. "Look!" he whispered.
Dad felt the grip of the big man's fist painfully bruising his ulna, but before he could reply, he saw the horrible incident on the edge of the ocean. Hundreds of pre-natal, ham-fisted, star-spangled angels were emerging from the red lips of the world, warm in refreshment and wringing wet. Their gossamer wings, sticky from the encumbrance, shook with the satisfaction of celebrity and rose into the air, carrying their owners with them. The sky was calm and tender and received them decorously on one side, as the night undressed quickly on the other. 'The bleeding horizon blubbered on the beach, giving the whole scene a look of infinite betrayal.
Dad looked carefully at the clock.
"it's about six hours early," he said.
Ted murmured assent and crept further along the perspex corridor. He swiveled the pulpit until it centered above the city. Thin gauzes covered with tar, like fly-paper, cried as sudden fluctuations of temperature caused flashes of montage in the upper atmosphere.
"Something," Ted explained, "is making the temperature shoot up. I can't adjust the controls any further to the left, for fear of another ice age. Even so there's going to be a severe frost before morning. But tomorrow once the sun's in the sky, there'll be nothing you can do to stop it." He looked at Dad with dismay. "I'd stay with you if I could, Dad, but I've got to go. I don't know why."
"That's alright, Ted," " said Dad. "I'll do what I can.
V
Some hours later, Maria watched the light rieslings of vinous morning light whisper up past the horizon, as she approached the beach. Sandy ground faded under the banksias and gums. She looked out over the waves, hypnotic as flames and the foam, white as alabaster moons.
VI
Charles chose that moment to stand up, stretching his back. We have said before somewhere that time, once on the page, relinquishes all its rights. What we meant wasn't exactly that. Days and nights still exist, but not necessarily in that order, or one after the other. The blind, however, will know this already, since they, are not limited to only two dimensions.
Charles in a decided moment had realized all this and now was at liberty to float in space and time, like a helicopter being shot down over the jungle. Normally he would make use of this facility but today he had other things on his mind. Filling his alpenstock with fumes he studied his painting. The surface, now painful, had developed strange tendencies. As though afraid of the radioactive arms he utilized to shift the colours around on the canvas, the surface shrank beneath the touch, like a frightened abdomen. Ornamental lacework in unexpected rococco patterns had appeared, filled in with obscenely pastel colours. Charles had to assume these were fossil evidence of the creator and not very far up the evolutionary scale, at that. The rest of the painting, hidden by the strange automobile shape continually coming out the front (before the viewer's eyes) was slimy, with feverish angles and passages of destroyed skin. A green border which in any other artist's studio might have been a flame, was the viewpoint. Sound, but not in stereo, had developed in the top right-hand corner, splintering glass.
Charles closed his eyes and drew the poisonous fumes of McBaren's plum cakes into his mouth, savouring their smoke molecules before spitting them out. With his eyes closed, he exulted in admiration of his painting, even more stupendous in the absence of sight. In this exultant mood and considering it was early morning, he could come to only one conclusion: he must see James and the sooner the better, for the companionable drinking of some remedially rigorous red wine.
Parts of the painting were no longer roadworthy, he observed, so he would have to travel by foot. This would be unpleasant, but the sensation of travel would ensure a light heart. Maria, he reflected, would like to be consulted in such a case. Now that the fridge as well as the car had been dismantled and re-assembled on the picture plane, it was no use looking in there for advice. He would have to wait and see, he thought. Something was bound to turn up sooner or later. And with this thought of binding in his mind, he was reminded to tie rope around his sandals as an added protection for his feet. After a short trial around the studio, he went downstairs.
Emerging from the street entrance, he decided to call in at the café to see if Maria was there. At this hour the café hung in the shadow of the building. In the window, a message was scrawled on the menu: "Meet me on the beach in the afternoon," signed "Maria".
Perfect, thought Charles. Meanwhile his mind was suddenly upset by the thought that his painting might develop eyes while he was away. The thought of half-dead eyelids winking and fluttering in the middle of all that pink flesh was distressing. Anxiety, began to worry him as he walked. "What would his painting think, if it could see itself?" he thought. This question, as always, led to another. "What would he think, here and now, if he could see himself?" Surely that was no more unusual than the painting growing an extra eye.
As he was occupying only a small percentage of his brain cells in the activity of putting one foot before the other, he attempted to coax his thought from speculation into the ring. He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate. Slowly, the haze shifted, but at first his inferior red vision saw only more eyes, as though he was opening a tourist brochure. Then he encountered something like a shadow and soon, by a process of putrefaction, the flesh it threw. it seemed that his real self when viewed telepathically was a sort of shapeless blob. Why is it, he thought to himself, that nothing reveals anything? Thoughts even when one can see them, are no more than the impenetrable muscles of the mind. they illuminate nothing. Of course if one could see the ideas they might be making, that might be different. Reading people's minds, Charles observed, was just like leaving through a magazine. Nothing that could never exist was ever there.
His feet, in the meanwhile, although they were obeying with precision the original order to place themselves in front of each other, in order, were however not liable to prosecution with regard to any other contingency, especially the direction, which was more or less wrong when one considered that Charles had set out to visit James. His feet, hot and tired already (in spite of the rope) had headed him in the wrong direction of the river. Charles, taking a moment's pause from the torments of his thoughts, became suddenly aware that his feet were grinning gleefully at the edge of the void.
He couldn't blame them, however, now that he thought of it. It was unusually warm for this early in the morning and measures ought to be taken, but not this drastic. It wasn't necessary, he thought, to drown the whole body just for the sake of the feet. He stepped back from the edge of the bridge. He paused for a moment and reoriented himself. Without realizing it he had come quite close to the center of the city. He was a danger even to himself, he reflected and smiled and set out again, taking a little more care this time to observe where his feet were taking him.
Meanwhile in the nearby city center the tinkling of the clocktower, telescoped by the wind, struck eight or nine.
VII
The river had eagerly waited all this time for the feet to fall in, followed by the body they had found. It was famished. Fresh water, rare at any time, had become extinct and now, at the ends of length and breadth or (as the ocean would say) at the onions of lungs and breath, it was all up for grabs. Rain was wanted badly.
Mud on the river bottom, poisoned by the increasing stink of the tide, was in full agreement. We could do with a drop of fresh water was the present philosophy, even if it means a couple of hundred tons of that fucking hyacinth from upstream. A drink is what we need and we need it badly. It wasn't like this in the old days, strewth no, we had the wind at our backs in those days and then of course the oceans were with us, not agin us, as they are now.
VIII
Charles rejected almost as soon as it infiltrated the temples of his mind this murky thinking of the river behind him. He had long ago learned how to read the minds of others and even inanimate objects, but the little that he could possibly learn from such an activity had forced him to give up that line of research. Telepathy, as he had been reminiscing, had allowed him to see the fantastically diverse shapes others allowed to form around themselves, but thoughts, when perceived telepathically, had the substance and the solidity of coal and revealed less. Dreams, similarly, which were the main interference, also told him nothing. They floated through sleeping heads like trains through tunnels, only making use of the mind as a means of getting from one place to another. Even so he had often wondered why events in dreams often extended into waking life. Many times he had been drinking in his dreams and woken up in the morning as drunk as a toad. This could extend to social welfare, he thought, if only politicians didn't have such thick skins.
Sighing, Charles assumed that this was enough senseless cogitation on an empty bowl, at least for one morning and fished from his back pocket the satchel normally found to conceal half an ounce or more of shag tobacco, mixed with sweepings from the vegetable markets and an acrid variety of camel dung. As he opened the packet a photograph of the future fell out. He had to bend to pick it up and doing so, he observed what was printed on its surface. Asthmatic arms, waving from a vertigo of waves, were struggling to free themselves from strange thickets of fish, asleep side by side. Through the middle of this scene, fluttering with the movement of the gills and the falling of torrential scales, time (wearing a red dress) danced along the beach. The veins of colour which normally constituted the air had not changed. Charles put the photograph back in his wallet. He had found a way, some time past, of photographing the future by subjecting the developing medium to recordings of Mozart at extremely high volume, but since financial insecurity had forced him to dispose of his stereo, he had not followed up this initial experiment. And in any case he wasn't entirely sure that he wanted to know what the future was. He would rather wait until he was too old to die, if that was possible.
It was true, though, he thought. what the river was thinking just before. We need rain badly. The land won't last much longer under these conditions. The farmers have already gone up in smoke and it's only a matter of time before we go too.
These distant threats boiled around him as he walked. His thoughts drifted from one subject to another, not lingering anywhere and only taking his perceptions into account when absolutely necessary. But as every contact was a type of adhesion, he came away with a part of all that he saw and was, thereby, something along the lines of Alfred Lord Tennyson, but not quite so much like the butler. The city meanwhile, in its efforts to identify itself, was belching bad fumes into the atmosphere above.
IX
Dad, all this while and before, had watched the morning take place in his part of the world with increasing concern. Even before the day had begun, the waters were writhing in a sort of anxious expectation. Strange images occurred on the hydrosphere, resembling mimeographs of the moon, seeming to be composed of knees (seen from below) and settling slowly onto a soft head composed of pillowing breasts. The moon itself, sagging open above this murky scene, was pale and dwindling and threatening to slump with a lack of interest. Dad had taken certain measures to minimize the morning frost, but Ted had been right in his prediction that the temperature would be uncontrollable. The day, when it had arrived, had been ferocious and yellow and soon became white hot. As a result the darkness, which was normally allowed some time to withdraw, was forced to flee the scene in panic and even so, shreds that were caught under the doors or beneath the bed-quilts disappeared with tiny shrieks of pain, as the rays of the sun crept into the corners. Not knowing what else to do, Dad decided to send up the balloon, to collect data from the upper atmosphere.
Taking a flask of miniaturized air molecules, he went to the balloon chamber. The silk was already quivering in its cocoon, as though the wings of the butterfly had known that today they would be required. Dad fastened the glass tarpaulins above the wings and adjusted the aperture selector of the vascular aereoles which opened the pores of the balloon to the drinking winds. (According to this theory of flight -- which had very little to do with the Wright brothers -- anything could fly, so long as the air was drunk.)
The sea, meanwhile, one of the only things able to thrive in this shanty-world, was slowly sinking into itself: to get away from the aimless imbecilities that were occurring above ground. Underwater was far superior, in every way. It was the ocean's avowed opinion, much preferring the darkness of its own depths and going there, as often as often allowed. One's own infants will always fart in the face that foaled them, the ocean thought. And if evidence wasn't enough, simple truth could speak for the fact that it was the ocean itself which had first climbed out onto the land and spawned legs to climb from the trees into the TAB offices. Only in their so-called civilization were they vain enough to think they were their own creations. It was time, after all, to bring on a bit of rampant navigation, to show who's wearing the wetsuit in this world. What we need right now is a bit of wild weather just like we used to save up for in the good old days and drown these diseased leeches and mudskippers in the sperm for whence their mum came. What's in a city anyway? Only a havoc of ritualized circumstances, a couple of poste restante depots and a lot of greedy eyes, without the real inclination nor the power of sight. And these rasping inhalations want us to be obsessed with their own self scrutiny, even when their way of looking is always borrowed from everything else, from the analogues of the animal, the horrors of the horizons and the weirdness of the wasteland. To give those creatures the power of speech was obviously a bad mistake, because now they were all orally fixated. Everything they ever thought of was from the point of view of the tongue, waggling in its pink prison as blind as a worm only knowing the sad oblivion of long untended gumscapes.
XI
It could be, Dad thought, that the drilling of the seabed (for the samples of black sludge thought to be the earth's ideas) had disturbed the balance of this world's nature.
Still deeper, in a strange declivity, Dad discovered even stranger goings-on. Seeming to be inhabited somehow, the deepest parts of the ocean were swirling with a strange sort of ordinary existence, very similar in fact, to what was going on up on the surface.
XII
No more eruptions, if you please, the ocean remonstrated. It's merely the thought of what we're going to halva dinner that touches off an irrtum in the old insides. Bree. Robert... Whyatt?... Earp! Ah, that's butter on the old pause... And what was it that we were on about? When it was before? The midriff? No, it was only that explanation of everything we're always giving to try, to convince all them upstairs who's the rightful uncle of all this. Snot's only the fact that ontogeny (a word we invented ourselfs) recapitulates fairly well point for point all your whole philogeny, when once you come to look at it. Air anemones, angling animals, albatrosses, auks, cormorants gulls petrels and sea buckthorns, all over-developed examples of marine fauna, not to put too finer point on it.
XIII
Dad removed the headphones again. Even when he did pick up what the ocean was thinking, it seemed to be a bit one-tracked, but not necessarily abnormal. In any, case, hunger had now replaced curiosity and Dad wheeled the pulpit up through the waves until it hovered near the King's Head Hotel, since even though he could not be present in person he found the atmosphere convivial. McLennan and Tom Ryan, now in the shape of a lawnmower, were dedicating themselves down one end of the bar and as Dad unwrapped his tunafish sandwiches, he noticed two almost recognizable shapes, colliding in front of the side entrance.
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| PART FOUR | |
| I "CJHAARMELSE!S! " "You clumsy, great oaf! I don't see you for a year and this is the way you treat me! With a head butt to the solar plexus!" "My dear Charles!" responded James, massaging his flattened proboscis with a bleeding hand. "Solar plexii notwithstanding, what a fortunate coincidence we should meet! I gather, by the look of your stomach you were on your way to see me?" "You're right, you didn't much damage the midriff, but you seem to be hurt yourself. How did you know I wanted to see you?" "I'm not hurt. This hand is just a theoretical device. I have plenty more. Would you like one? Or would you rather a cigarette?" Saying so, James placed his manuscript between his knees and produced more pleading hands and a packer of Gauloises from alternate pockets. "But to answer your question," he continued, "it's part of the plot I devised." Charles laughed. "In a pig's eye, it is. That's a hell of an excuse to have a drink, old friend, bumping into a passing stomach outside a hotel. It sounds more like a spur of the moment sting, if you ask me. But the truth is, in any case, that I was on my way to see you, to see if you were in the mood for a celebration. I've finished my painting at last." "What!? The one you started before we began? The one with the eyes?" "No, it's a new one," answered Charles. "This one hasn't developed eyes yet, I hope. The one you're thinking of hasn't started yet. I'm going to begin that next. The one I finished this morning is the first one I've ever finished." He laughed. "I'm the world's littlest painter. One painting a life!" "Not only the world's littlest, but in the littlest world, as well," added James. "Why don't we enter this establishment, while we're about it, by the way, instead of standing out here in the heat like a pair of shags on the proverbial rock." "I'm in complete accord with that, old friend, but I wouldn't expect too much choice from the bottle shop." Finding a table in the dim recesses of the lounge bar, far enough from McLennan to cease being absurd, the two friends shared the first drops from a newly-purchased bottle of Blind Ned's Invalid Port and resumed their conversation, with James taking the initiative. "It's not bad, this," he said, savouring the full nose which snorted out of his glass. "A bit on the sweet side, perhaps, and it's got an odd fishy smell to it." "I think it's made with the runoff from one of the mackerel canning factories down on the bay. But it's a good drop for the price, all right. How's the book going, anyway?" "Not bad," James considered. "I'm a bit lost at the moment, it doesn't really seem to be going according to plan." He took a gulp from the glass, swallowed and then waited a few moments while his eyes returned to their normal size and position. "Everything starts at midnight. But nobody knows what time it is. All the bee-keepers are out, attending to their hives. The skies are sort of queasy, but not too bad. Everything is being described. The sea, the city, the forests, everything on the world and some atmospheric effects as well. Apparently it had rained just before. There's a few hissing, rain-washed roads, an industrial area, a few homes, hidden away. This is the day that everything happens... "At about the sunrise, the action begins by the sea. The land pulls itself out of the sea and shakes itself on the beach. Treetops begin to be tickled by, the tips of the tendrils of the sun and sometime later, the spires of the city. Things become visible gradually and after a while, Maria arrives." "Maria's in your book?" "Sure." "And me?" "Of course and myself as well," said James. "It's more or less a documentary, you know. It's just the story of what happens on one day." "I see," said Charles, without conviction. "And just what day is it, exactly?" "Today, of course." "Of course. Fine. What happens next?" "You're not upset, are you?" "Not at all, old chap. But please go on. Maria arrives where?" "On the beach. But she should have left you a note that she was going to meet you there in the afternoon. Didn't she?" "If you say so," said Charles. "Do go on." "Well, even on the way down through the city she notices that things aren't behaving just as they, should and when she gets to the sea she's very glad to be away. The landscape is the usual one: an inlet, some waves, right? A couple in a dinghy on the lagoon." "Just what is this based on?" Charles demanded. "Reality," countered James. "OK," acquiesced Charles, "go on." "Well not reality exactly, more like a modification of the smell of the pope's slippers after two cigarillos apiece, which is more or less the same thing, when it all comes down to it." "Now you're talking," laughed Charles. "We don't want any of that reality muck. Here, take another shot of this killer juice. It'll sober you up a bit." "I think we had a close shave, there, old boy," said James. "This book is really getting to me." "Yeah, I know how it is. But tell me the truth now." "All right. It's the truth now. What the book is about really, is a really horrible, gruesome story about a killer bus on the rampage, all told from the bus's point of view." "Atta boy!" "This grisly scene opens the book. The bus, spawned out of the ocean's armpit like a frozen slab of hyena's vomit, lying on the beach, in the early morning, wakes up. Everything is quiet. You can almost feel the stench of this poor thing's confusion. It's lying there in the half-dark, in the smell of its own farts, with the light of the last stars drilling hundreds of holes in the paintwork. Like Doctor X, this beast can't stand the rays of the sun, but it can't escape. A few light blows of the sun's hammer and the thing is completely off its nut. Tell you what! This thing's round the twist! Totally looped! It rears up on its hind legs, like a praying mantis and scythes the air with a horrible set of fangs and spaghetties growing out from its posterior. In the distance, it sees the city, the first thing it sees. An idea forms. Kill! It wants to kill, rampage, pillage and destroy." "A bit of the old C. S. Forrester, eh? "Who?" "Never mind. So what happens to the bus?' "The bus? What bus? Oh yeah, the bus. Imagine this maddened phobic creature, maddened by the sun, on a rampage towards the city., like a gigantic coffin on wheels, charging off into the distance. What's the first thing it does?" "It crashes head first into a tree." "Right! And meanwhile, in the city, things are waking up. The killer bus is unconscious on the beach at the base of a stunted acacia and everything else is beginning to stir. What else happens? Does this stuff dissolve the teeth, or what? Mine are tingling," "It's just the weather." "Is it? All right, let's get another bottle." III Accordingly, Charles and James pooled the fat they had between them and Charles made the foray to the bottle shop. His assault was not without success as luck would have it and he returned with two for the price of one. The quality wasn't up to the level of Blind Ned's, but that first bottle had created a terrific thirst which. demanded a new solution. As Charles set the bottles on the table and prepared to ladle out the contents, he remarked upon the scene that had developed in the public bar. "It's something you could use in your book," he said. "A corroded-looking gent's holding forth on the now-or-never-end-of-the-world-theory. He's got the gift of the gab all right. He talks like you in a bad mood." "That must be McLennan," remarked James. "He's the prophylaxis of doom type. McIntyre must be there's well. Dja see'm?" "If you mean a gigantic warts, cowboy, in a three-ply suit with a look like a boiled potato, I think it was him. What do you think of this new brew?" James threw some of the mixture down his gullet, carefully bypassing his teeth, which he now felt sure were dissolving in the high acid content, hyperventilated for a while before answering then said: "Holy Fuck! It's the real McCoy, you've got here boyo. What's the appellation on this noble vintage?" "It didn't come with a label, I'm sorry to say. But by my humble estimation, I'd say it's a fairly calculated guess at what next year's linseed harvest might be like." "Whatever," said James, "it's burning a swift path to the bladder. I'll be right back." IV As James passed through the side entrance and across the car park to the urinal, private thoughts descended upon him, as always in these circumstances. Risking losing a reader or two, he decided to think about his future. He passed into the urinal and after searching in his pants for some time finally found his penis in his back pocket and thereafter directed a stream of urine at his reflection in the mirror. His reflections always took him by surprise, at times like these, he remembered. He felt the spray on his toes but he did not look down to see whether or not he was wearing shoes today. The stream of the piss pattered against the glass, with increasing and diminishing intensity, depending on the angle of his lean-to as he swayed in the wind. He would have to give up prime ministers he decided, if he ever wanted to be successful with women and alcohol. Buttoning himself, he wondered if he had finished pissing. He looked down. He was in luck, this time. He crossed the car park again, attempting to formulate a combination of the narrative of his story and the killer bus, which had appeared more or less out of nowhere. As he passed through the side entrance an extremely intense tongue of burning wind from the city beyond (which was already in flames) coiled around him and burnt the shirt off his back. He walked inside. Charles had already strapped the one-and-a-half remaining bottles to his back and was prepared to set out. "Come on," he said, "you can tell me the rest of the story on the run. I want you to see my painting. I feel like I'm getting the short end of the stick in this story of yours." James had no objection to this and so they set out. "It's fairly hot out there," he warned. Charles grunted acknowledgement, as they stepped out into the fierce sunlight. Almost immediately, a soft rain of fire commenced, showering the surrounding buildings with flame as the two friends picked their way over the broken glass. James felt his forehead furrow into a frown denoting puzzled concentration, as he bent down to pick up a piece of mirror that lay on the cement at his feet. in the mirror, he could see a badly damaged photograph of the scene of the crime. What crime? His mind was only just feeling its way, he realized, along a rope on the lee side of his brain, in the dark. "Where were we?" he inquired. "Oh yeah. I remember. The unconscious bus. Now the scene changes. Things move to the city. The writer of this book is just waking up from a horrible slimy dream of the sea. He's in a really bad mood. He drags himself to his desk half asleep in the greyish light. The desk, half asleep as well. Everything. He collects his thoughts, listening to the day, listening to itself. He looks out of the windows beside him, watching the still half-asleep hillsides rustling. imagine this phobic creature, maddened by dreams of gorgeous fish and instead, he wakes up and it's all make-believe, in a book he hasn't even written yet. He's disgusted with himself. The pervading stench of his wet dream like hyena's vomit is getting up his nose. When he begins to write this morning, the book had better look out! He's going to want to take out a few of his frustrations in there, for sure and today, even more so. As the sun rises, he notices the city, gleaming in the distance. All his frustrations well up like a thousand red adairs from the pit of his stomach and he goes off his nut. Someone's going to pay. He gets a killer look in his eyes. He shakes a cigarette out of a packet on the desk. He strikes a match. Blind yellow after white devours red and flame. An idea forms. Kill! He wants to Kill. Rampage. Pillage and Destroy. Kill! Destroy! Kill! Destroy! Kill! Destroy! Kill! Destroy! Kill! Destroy! Kill! Destroy! Kill! Destroy! Kill! Destroy! Kill! Destroy! Kill! Destroy!" | | Suddenly it was evening. Charles sighed and allowed the breath in his lungs to gradually escape. The erratic nature of time in the modern novel, he thought, is a cross to bear, by god. He looked through his pockets. Nothing there. If anything happened now, he couldn't even prove he was alive. Then looking up, he saw the explanation for the sudden darkness. A crowd of maddened bats and a flock of owls had collided in the upper atmosphere, momentarily blotting out the sun. The smell of the hot air combined with the brawling sound of the birds. Why do my thoughts keep returning to the sea, he thought. is it because of meeting Maria there this afternoon? Meet me by the sea, she said. Be shore you're wearing a white horse. He watched his ossified feet treading gingerly on the road. Cantankerous paddles, he thought, extensions of the legs. Humerous arms. Obstacular backbone. I feel like a museum piece, in this sort of literature. And in the end, there'll always be jealousy between the writer and the characters and it's always worst of all in the writer's first book. One has to tread carefully along these pews, by the altars of the trees. There's no saying when the old circular saw of repetition might return to lop off the interloper's legs. Luckily, one is protected, more or less, from an author's stepping out of line. They're very sensitive to textual discomfort and they have to have a very good reason for getting rid of you. Where have we got to now though? Charles wondered. Are we in the city already? This fire's about to take hold, I can feel it. The air's already incandescent. The lunchtime crowds worried. Pigirons are frazzling all over the Menzies. This might not be so mercenary as totally mad, this job. I wonder if it might not be the time to gracefully exit. |
'I think we've had this before," remarked Charles. "Who? 'I THINK WE'VE HAD THIS BEFORE! shouted Charles in James's ear. "REMEMBER? WITH THE BUS?! "What bus?"
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| PART FIVE | |
I
THE MIND does not itself seem to be a victim of circumstance, while systems of belief (resembling the sudden arrival of origami in the east) are of course, and the reading mind, frantically beating out the fire of confused sharks, even more so. (This is related, like so many other things, principally to the way we would like to see: and in the final reckoning, it is the existence of a sort of balcony over the mind which reassures us when our senses fail. We can always walk out onto this so-called balcony and watch the dark green sea of the mind, bright with moonlight, surrounded by cypresses and feel once again that the body is only a sort of windy beach, unable to turn its head, always being trampled on by the sun and the sand and even the shade of the afternoon trees.
But as much as we would like to shoot out the lights of all our systems of belief, we have to live with them and sometimes, even in the same room. And this being the case, it is not very far to actual conjugation. Especially when the only sound lighting such a room is (more often than not) the throbbing of gonads on the grill. One cannot be blamed for becoming a little bit bestial, in conditions like these.
We will therefore more than likely become quite intimate if not with our ideas, then at least with our various aches and pains. And once having established this fact, of course the salient question to ask is "what happens next?" and the answer is (usually): "offspring".
What is this "offspring" more exactly? (Being a conjugation between the mind and the belief systems, we are forced to say that it might be fiction, or at least, the fantasy world that we're all supposed to want: that is, part-living and part lived-in, rather like three-day socks.)
Further investigation into the internal chemistry of this situation reveals a number of doors which open and close and a lift, running from the downstairs to the upstairs of the brain. One's senses, in such a situation, are quite naturally on the move. The colours, for example, are only discernible through a chance interaction between the polarity of diffractions regularized (internally) by a sense of belonging. But belonging to what? one might ask and with this sort of mutated optic system, how could one have a family?
This deficiency in recognition, however, is quickly supplanted by the fictional world we are about to re-enter. One sees with the aid of spectacles, illuminated in cherenkov radiation and instead of the land soon it becomes clear that an atlas is spreading out in front of you and turning the page, you find yourself at once.
Of course, in a perfectly formulated world, be it fictional, or one formed unfairly, one would not encounter these sorts of problems. Everything can be explained in such an environment either by mirrors, or by going to the trouble of looking at molecular rotation upside down. If one chooses mirrors, however, one should beware of fouling the photo-elastic tendrils of visibility in the depths, which otherwise remain clear.
II
You'll excuse me, my bum's afloat, but when you're as big as I am you've got to be, long as I remember the tides have been going out and coming in, uncovering the best and the worst, down to the .. I've tried but I can't quell the tide, you wouldn't remember those days, that was back before you were even beginning to be born, swelling and receding, each time I've tried to stop that surge ebb and flow but its futile you can take my word for it. Anything else you might use to try and tie me down just wait and see what happens, ropes and stays, white sails filled up with wind, tossed up dark water and pounding waves. You feel like I do at my lowest ebb. Silverblack moonlight on the mud, indecisive waters. At the peak of my high waters I feel complete with achievement. Touching with my waters what has never been wet before and at extremes like this I feel like I could get out of my bed at last and storm across the night sky and have nothing more to do with you token sufferajets that pimple me with your ineffectual landsharps.
I feel neighbourly towards the sky. Also a victim of weathers that whimsically field the corpulent clouds. Natural, a stretched swelling eternal neverdying being such as myself to be curious about such things, quietly tilting in my winter bed of sunken treasure and dreams of the strange stars, aloft and heavenscented. To escape the surging of my body and banish the circle forever there would be a climate of serenity and I would be allowed at last the leisure to study the strange wrecks and their ruins, the palaces and pockets, everywhere within my large and bloated everchanging bulk. Curtain-rising waters rifling the flotsam floating on the shallow waters at the edge of the mud and soon when the tide flows again they will be buoyant and they will slip back. So it has been. The moon. My only cause for this concern is floating lightly in the sky above me, she is dressed only in her white light and her irresistible attraction draws me to her. The sickly recurring swell of the turgid tides. Why should my reflections have any purpose? A loss of incidence; again and again and again.
III
Shifting uneasily in his chair de wheels Tom Ryan wondered whether he should toss a little earth over himself with the undertaker's trowel. At the same time an unusual development was taking place upstairs. Certain filtrations due to the carbonization of the brain were permitting, in the Lord Mayor's mind, the first flickerings of intelligence. Beginning in the brain's hindquarters these sparks of life after death soon ascended to the amphitheatre, throwing a bright light into the unused cavern. As luck would have it the Lord Mayor had not needed the services of his mind while alive and now one could readily discern, with a strange excitement, that the machinery was in perfect working order.
One could detect first of all a mounting swell of energy and the sound of weather forecasters banging their heads together, recording time in a gypsy fashion, the only form allowed in the afterlife because of a ban on the past. (It is one of the conditions of thought, not the afterlife.) Certain ideas then emerged voluntarily. Glory, dread, conquest, victory and eternal life. (It is not only in death that one must get rid of these inane concepts before beginning to think.) An emotion then, warm and wet, began to emerge. In words, one could say it resembled life.
IV
George McIntyre, himself, had perpetrated the passing of the meanwhile in his wanderings very severely handicapped by the lack of any reliable information mapping the sewer system. Ominous settlings of the city's substructure were now communicating themselves to his ear but he did not dare to go deeper, because of the mutated liquid offspring of the sharks.
Along the grey ridge of the tunnel where he now walked three turnings offered George three alternative directions. A fourth (going back the way he had come) lay behind him. He chose none of the above settling on a fifth: which was to lie down in the shallow water and think things over.
As some form of conversation passed between the sly-naps sleeping between the new-rooms of his brain, small fish, with nothing better to do, swam up his trouserlegs and pecked at the perforated pomegranates in his underpants. George stared at the tunnelled ceiling, his head supported in the sweet smelling sludge by a damp roughage of brown leaves. It might mean, he thought, that this section of the sewer is part of an old storm drain and in that cast we might be near the sea. A surge of sound rumbling in the distance seemed to answer his thoughts. Lying down, he realized that he would only have to follow the erections of the sound until he emerged.
V
Ted watched with some concern the dark cage of liquid climbing into the ashwhite sky. Fires, reminiscent of the ravages of Rome, fiddled in the buildings while the first drops of rain struggled down from the atmosphere.
It was larger than expected, this book, Ted thought. He had expected to fit snugly, while it was now becoming obvious that there was a certain amount of room to move. Above him the dark mist increased and arrows of rain co-habiting with the air enveloped him in a stinging spray. The parched pores of his skin, aqueous and ductile and certainly endocrinic, screamed as tiny squirts of pleasure were channeled into the pooling reservoirs of his fish and flood, sobering him instantly.
JAMES
I
CHARLES it appeared had abandoned me, to complete half of his rendezvous, the other half of which would be supplied by Maria and the beach. I had been having some difficulty lurching through the streets and it was only now, after an hour or two, that my perceptions were becoming unfogged enough to realize that the city around me was engulfed in flames. For some reason, probably because of the alcohol, everything now seemed ridiculous and far away.
It appeared I had landed the boat of my body up against a footpath. Studying the situation I came to the conclusion that all that which had been happening today was beginning to have doubts.
Thoughts like this were putting me in a good mood and seeming to extend from my own instability, the sights and sounds around me were now appearing to wake from a hot dream. Wretched looking objects I assumed were people, covered with blood and bruises, extended into patches of material fog. Images, apparently projected plaintively on a silver screen to please me, came ashore. Even my gestures of irritation, automatically doubled by the bubble behind me, could have been done with mirrors, I believe, while sounds, seeming to sense my ears, struggled in a cartilaginous sea. Figures in the fog struggled, screaming, tearing their faces from the seething flames. Sharks, bloated and burning, were beached on the sound.
Was I really awake? I wondered. If I was dreaming, what would I look like when I woke up?
I looked at myself, as if for the first time that life. I noticed there was a large blue ink-stain on my shoulder and one on my hip. I knew now that I wasn't dreaming. Instead, I was sobering up. I needed to get some more booze, quick. I tried to get up but only succeeded in slipping away a few feet more towards the left and the rear. It was about this time that I noticed the upside-down ascent of the sky in the upper atmosphere, which was clouding over. Ascending slowly, I managed to get to my feet. Honestly, I thought, was this the right way to communicate? Standing now, I started to stutter towards the image of the scream where the shitty hall shimmered. The avarice of the fire had eaten out the center of the city like the brain out of the head, while the green gardens glittered like a wet jewel beside the university. Brooding battalions of black clouds shouldered their wet weight up over the horizon and were now marching across the burnt-out sky. The first propellers of rain whirled down from the clouds. In a few moments soot-caked beads of moisture, frazzled to the aroma of stale coffee, began to explode on the sizzling footpath.
CHARLES & MARIA
I
CHARLES DIPPED his hands into the water, seized a rope to a dinghy and held it up. He laughed. Maria bent her head, looked quizzically, smiled, but did not laugh. The vagueness of the tide eddied by the statuesque poles clearly marked by the water level. The varying dimensions. And upwards, looking, strained neck, the sun's beaming childlike face. Islands, dots like freckles on the sea. Rubble in a trail of wave rings. Shells. Instead of the teeth in her mouth. A sea creature. Hair stinking seaweed, many arms waving, from the deep. Dancing arms. A mysterious laziness began to spread over the freckled face of the sea. Charles pulled the dinghy towards him. Hot yellow paint over the soft moisture pulped wood. The boat lurched and slid from the sooty oils of the shore. Charles turned. Her voice answered him from far away. Her words fell softly into an empty acoustic basin. The boat slid across the sea, guided by the chance currents of the undecided tide. A century of glistening hot tears. Skimming across the flesh of the ocean. Again she turned her head on a slant, but this time she did not smile. Her eyes blurred. Comparisons. The rebounding sun flayed the islands. Burgeoning life. They rolled onto the shore. Watching the sun being eaten, leaf by leaf, by the enormous plenty of the island. The dinghy, its foolish jutting prow. Silent sentinel. Gannets and proud gulls. Fiercer birds of prey, mournful stare. The wind still, the waves frozen, still-time. Charles and Maria stepped out, springing onto the sand. First footsteps of that low tide. Sudden scurry of the wild. Charles and Maria walked, they could not run here, with the oppression of harmonious conflict, they could not shout. The air under too great a strain, too great a force. Sultry, muggy air. Leaves rustled. The smallest flowers crumpled, smouldering. The wind grew dense. Boughs of trees, arched wigwams, encircled and grasped it in big chunks and squeezed. Turtles, shearwaters and mangrove roots, scream of a gull. Congregations. Soldier crabs. All the sky became two huge vault doors ready to shudder the scene when they collapsed together. The air grew droplets like pennies, they fell on tongues. A lizard's foot, its print disappearing. Birds collapsing under the sheltering leaves. The rain came with such stunning overwhelming force that it was incessantly comfortable.
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Lank sludge, sour flats, tigerish netting, bowed over and springing, changing black lamp-lit waves, cupped and sorted, angular dark membranes, the weirding waters wild wet waterfalling waves
Together remote shrill whinnies escape, infinite all, energy I am and you are together, neither nor create destroy, atoms that building simply cease existing, the stuff of the abstruse, the perverse, in the flash of too bright light that burning sheet before the current excites the filament, white-hot, the explosion of the retina, blinding, white, what puppet show? What pictures? What parades? Secrets, living, answers in rows headstones gently rising cemetery waves grass hillsides cemetery unanswered questions surely well whether or not surely the poem was god
white lines spindles webbed under waves green blue grey blue sea blue deep blue soft swelling motion whirling motion
Cleaning up today is it? mmmmmmmurmurs... The horses! Melbourne cup day at Troy! Deceive us, please, a plane, pressures the silent warm, silence please, alarming, dangerous mmmm odd chap that, strange, oh now that's a crying, by crikey that's a, here, that'll cost ya and here, that'll knock ya, that's mine, queen to beat six no trumps seven no trumps I'm out take it away hey a question a question don't be afraid sweet hmmmmm he had a cheeky eye looked as if he owned the world and me too taxi! hello it's you didn't reckanise? missus made me, where to? the races, in time for the, Good? delicious, aw come on really yes no? Yes no joke? No rush get me one will you before? Study alltime you back to work to work no stare ho there ho there bang off the down in the rail turn a solid man ah the saviour of the city you coarse witless fool beg your pardon beg yours
the cloying sludge of rankling mud seaweeds cresssandbars and moored sand pipers waters slipping beneath murmuring gentle slapping
hello hello sometimes hello from the corps the crew yes how goes it the struggle as always uphill see what has happened, it's all so, you're not hurt that's the, too heavy, sank in the quicksand, the cause, with you, tied time with a tongue, rejection, no comment, same as ever insanity what pleasure escapism wait while the voice will be loud again my larynx demanded holding out the unmitigated gall nowadays what can they get away, with perversions no reality madness no light least of all true, believe me, memory. Sing! I can play a tune or two, leave me to fiddle or abuse, pampering? Security? You? Disgusting in youth, penance foolish maturity maturity puerility outweighs feigned disgust your child how advanced? Very advanced out of place puzzling silence moments and we will know
ever groping ever drifting sucking soul destroying mud leached of odor only brown grey darkened brooding discolouration, warped boards perpendicular
letters verbatim after all, life isn't all roses you know not speaking ill he swelled up top oh he was a thinker by gor and a dark one dark horse struck down so, solidly not to a nicer, my shout yes whimpering sir never again never a whisker look sharp now that'll keep his nose, there's no reason for it good simple fun you'll do yourself
the oceans her green dreams the oceans minerals in suspension held fixed in the struts of the sea
your artificial eyes not artificial plastic plastic artificial no no? plastic is plastic warming distracting video coloured artificial plastic your talk of existence yes existing every atom every part then you cannot believe in, I believe in, I have fun within me, within you, prone no beginning often neglected facts forgotten I have never forgotten standing, quieter than you, not the least perturbed trembling with the desire for the unattainable as I do over me or you or anyone it counts within itself and within protons neutrons minor quarks following smaller and so on, quaint endless progressions diminishing dimensions rude demolition possible creation defiance in no way dismissed, only transferred, transferred what? Completely victorious tiresome attempts, sway each other doubt each other step back and classify each other our arguments extra tethers the marquee personal philosophy, my denial, my dissertation an adjective describing attribute an exegesis an epithet shall not, why, abandon cause contact pardon nor shall pallid blue cadaverous abandon declamation to bite we bite steadfastly between us charming decent each other's soft fragile, tired sickness so? Gestation of what? It could be, ought to be, but I haven't the strength, to carry what you would wish to that weight fully fit perhaps to encroach upon and entertain sometimes trample silent shadows hide fallen out fallen out with what the sphere the glove your just dessert, accompanying cruelties sparing smarting some of them plod to the top of sand dunes lovers the others eyes the sea hypnotic grace clumsy ingratitude cruel perception tampering clumsy cruel both strung hand in hand complexities. These colours offensive by comparison or instinct unanswerable struck lances concepts certainly not questions for these monsters step back hurl projectiles collide bodily, contact, sport the gauging of strength fingers hinges brutalities comparative crushing and one attempt to empty, folly impossible weak links strengthen attempts strengthen links. The condition your hopes and dreams and asphyxiate garroted
the voice of the ocean whispering whispering creeping shadows wet shadows dark accusations laugh and scrabbling laughing nibbling toes tragically slow water
ambling over I saw him he's quite gone staunch oh yes he used to be do everything day and night a real toiler round the twist yes quite off his head wonder why no-one can tell of course probably an excuse for not being, scared, beginning small low note announcing somewhat anticlimactical opening annual inaugural conference social activist league plunge directly business notice throughout organization strength individual character lacking administrative misdirections lay squarely shoulders smorgasbord ha ha directors hear hear policy untenable.
bobbing sludge dark distended eyes rippling surface taut gaunt disturbed speculum froth and phlegm
Hold still I am holding still you're shaking I'll never get this pinned if you don't hold still I'll do it myself in a minute you're hopeless just a second what another one that's the, there, finished? Take it off and I'll, hurrah I'm going to take a, now dear you mustn't wear those big, you'll be taller than, well you can't wear them to, will you wear some decent, rubbish, he's they are decent, look I'll buy them are you going to spend all day in there? Okay, don't say, please, I don't know what you're it's okay he's, that's enough dear, I know you love to but please stop trying to, there's no wouldn't dream of it, this walking around the, with no clothes, you know you can do anything, but, please try and, okay, have you finished? Yes, fine, I'll put this on, then I'll go and
barnacled posts girders, struts green jutting strands looming green blue miraculous currents glistening hot tears
oh are you coming this way too? You know I've been invited to a, isn't it, last week, then and, I bought some and they were, mmmmm? Yes! Mmmmm which way do you? Up round this, oh well I'll okay, bye, gday, gday, hello, hello, how are you well and what? Right now right now? Or generally generally well, well? I am, loads of ever been? What? No, loads of, mmmm? Exciting? Mmmm and plenty of, what for? They don't say and I must be going, I must go to the, the?
wet shining tumbling dissolving water lapped slow supple salt spray air slow supple agile nimble breathing water oceans of her green dreams crooning nestled against waters stagnant chestnut links surrounding sands
but due to unforeseen circumstances my arrangements off you go, gib me, gib the 'otel, steady on I'd, just a beer, its the wrongcolour mmbbmbmbmbgnnn, look it's my, I'll bet you a, you'll all day you'll mmmnngngnmm, you just catch this, you'll thank me mmnnn I warm gome, I wanta gome, let me take my friend here, he's shutup, drunk drunk, why izzy drunk, he's drunk, motherfucking drunk people drunk I've been all day birthday my brother got five years for fuck all I warm fight no guns I got they're watching, I come from I know full, predictable, prejudiced, people expect you to, I wanna guns I got my, I grew up with, I can fight you motherfucking, I don't, I've got my
dark blue sharp pain claustrophobic depths ear pressure adjust swami full bodied weep at the depth
abominable they're a hard crowd to manage it wasn't that, obvious insult insult? Reeked of it there's method in their, malignity, yes
maddeningly directionless twice bloated and blue extended distended footprints sand left hard shelled, waves bright high huge sweeping filled with people and fish swirling mounting the ocean floor
on other days we would sparkling white enormously flared gleaming white hugely baggy scarlet promenade watching heads turn walking perhaps singing talking wandering upset all of us tiny out of the way for hours and tiny, glare with the utmost, black, white, high-heeled, cord leather, rubber vinyl fur backwards and forward panting middle aged like you ha ha oh I always come here your, for a few, thank you sooo much for, to depart at last, best wishes kind regards needless not making, respectfully tackling theology philosophy discourtesy irreverence politely putting agreement comment opinion showing, cogency absurd childish my dear hello must say stun never cease grace willowy slowly alone very surely alone my dear gross flattery excellent impeccable amorous you with fertility, so then, do you? What do you most? If I could? The sun the wind the roads wetly glistening, do you think it was? Mmmmmm no at least not in that, the combination of those, the sun then, through clouds, a trace of, water combining, a, in a way of course you are, mmmm? Proclaimed in one sense, the faculties to register, you mean I presume, without, I merely say that in terms of, you can have little, defining in terms of the absence, far too rational an, this morning I thought of, unlike no more than two or, that is the power of, conversations, I'm sorry I was rude to you he said and he said oh oh I didn't think you were rude fancy that how can you think being told where to was not, it was really, went up to the and asked about and do you know they only have a membership of? What a degrading, sometimes things are so, so I told them I was, ooh, I've given up and I'm taking up, one matter to say a thing is because it is intrinsically another to say you will refute categorically on the grounds that you are,
plunging whale blue depths silver bellied winds kelp enormous in the oily waves black, strangling clusters water weed floating sting bursting bard rubbed sand ache red sore welts water cactus
sorry yes how are you insofar as? Fine, yes well sorry an extraordinary, as I was, in a perfectly normal manner when a region I discerned as being, of course I looked around, all, my hands, why don't the hordes of, why don't they, over my elegantly poised, not commonly, engaging, dazzled with, this was momentary there were matters of much, who then discoursed at length on once I believed when anything was, only a rustling, dusty, dehydrating imagination, a reaction, a product of the patterns of bygone, which we pass off as, is belief the, you may believe the, depending on the,
atlantic pacific antarctic red yellow white sargasso thinly trickling saturated torn banks insect clouded willow branches bulbous trailing dry leached waters
I'll carry you in don't be ridiculous you couldn't you're right we'll walk in together that's equal ha ha aware of, already, are you? Damn right, don't bite darling only want you to be, you know, it'll be the same won't it? Of course, Oh, why? Oh I just thought it would be, now that we're, yes, oh darling, you haven't? Ha ha, come on, let's, the convenience of, we'll be, yes, it'll be, of course, it's, now shhh
dim grey far out cruising all equals all expansive mystery ruffled grey brown crests meet waves lock
it's a hard job that ar it's a hard job that is lumps of concrete ar a lot of shifting there won't hold the water no won't hold the water big wigs say do this do that and it's got to be done sure enough it's got to be done on your way get me a bottle of, sure enough, ulcers you know ar
shifting blue greys from a distance hazelled into imperfection, creeping violet spectrum ends
No breakfast but darling you must you'll run down coffees 'nough you need strength you're growing weak darling didn't notice you were a ball of energy ha take it easy pretty darling away away what's wrong darling away aren't I so good as a, not so, I won't be, hello? Darling oh darling darling I've missed you, I know I feel it he was the same again same here darling darling he literally, literally yes same here oh darling I'm coming right over to
lines end deep angling for depth lamp-light angling
Will you? Leave him, he has, who will suit his, very well, we are so, we are, why? When the clouds pie the sky, then and only then,
clinging beads glistening black membranes soft felt silk wash webbed sounding spliced bands deep drawlines hiss into steam floes heavy against the weight of the tide
if they want a, they can have one, I'm ready if they'd only realize that, what counts is the, it doesn't matter who the, someone's got to and it so happens I, everyone has as much right as, just so happens I'm the and that's you hold the position so fiercely though it has no, not to me, so why should I? That would prove I thought it was, think so? I know it is so, yes? Yes yes yes yes, isn't that divine, absolutely darling, the misplacement of public funds, private, he's a member of the whoever owns this modern mausoleum, he is a, nobody is a, so it seems I would rather than sanctity than other realms of utopia your philosophy suggests, with the last few weeks, your thinking and, individually and socially, distorted, my disgust, darling, you know he won't appreciate this, damn him, he's a, yes, they all are, the atoms are, within all of us,
handfuls bright foam drawn webbing strands clustered netting suspended white sided waves dark blue far off deep blue depths wild water whirling surrounding the storms
Coming to the? Took the words right out of my! Off we!
enlarging light soft still soft pink veronese, aphrodyne
angry with? No, anger strikes a very, anger strikes at the, some token for, but I hold no, just like the drizzle surrounding us, yes? The mistiness, the oppression, its full moisture huge fingers around filled with air, around in squeezing circles, oh I find it more, no no not squeezing, more a sense of, that breathdrawing, silver nights, winds, cartwheels, oh? of course, contorted and contained, it is, how the? Strange and absurd, society, the flesh, I know the, here? Yes it may be possible to and, hello, how do you like our modest adolescent, adolescent? In a way, charming, that is, whom you may have heard of through the, which you, for reasons I cannot wholly understand, nor do I, his, in the, is the inimitable, his bent is towards, the segmented pictured of with somewhat with strokes of he has, of distorted, in forms disconcerting and unpredictable, around the table and to the left from, one of that rare tribe who prefer to, or wonder aimlessly, to sticking their and along one, one time popular, sordid emotion manuals for, prisoner of, photographer, all those, all those flights of, next nicknamed for obvious reasons a political activist militant why? Manners in which, show and again, with your ineffable, you spell out the inadequacies of your, laying down barbaric, let me tell you of, I shall predict the very, the only gruesome, red raw scathed, iron shod shackles of, lanced by flashes of cold and, mind, mocking pecking bird faces shards. of metal slammed shutters, every trick in the? Not quite I was thinking more of, closets opening to pour silence, calmly over, the accident victims wailing drifting aimlessly sounds call out for a breath of, on the spur of the moment, off those ugly outsized,
eight armed marriage to lie down on the bed of the sea with vapours curdling dark green air condensing liquefying waters neptuned
despicable, what? Sauntering wobbling fresh passing ominous fringe bundling along to the and! Cancerous crusts in a, yes and waddle stunned, concentrating like look vinyl leather sedately placed laps of, with so much, yes but it is, struggling with stifled, to pass a caustic comment, as you believe thinking of, they promenade filter tips like factories and siren call a so true, freckled ringed with blonder melting into pink smeared along her see her discreetly or looking from a different, no room for, discretion cynicism sports coats and seersucker gaudy as the, clustering reminders of the future past, the sweat is tickling my, as her lips, garroted her face a bright strangling stocking snipping snippets of, with, sharp as the, never forgetting some wonderful, she's recommending a, self-raising, some rotten legislation which says after, the sauntering nonchalance of the, it is your responsibility to, there, failure to do so, an accusing of course they never look like, that makeup yawning a chasm a smile, you wonder fragile attempt to save our, the sort of franchise as we,
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| PART SIX | |
JAMES'S MANUSCRIPT
I
I OPENED my eyes. While lying on my bed trying to think out the structure of my book I had been suffering from the curious sensation that the bottom of the bed was gradually floating up into the air. Worried, I looked at my feet. All normal. The bed was horizontal. I closed my eyes once more and returned to contemplate my thoughts.
I had been lying on my bed for several hours that afternoon. Returning home via the mail box, I had found the letter announcing that I was to get a writer's grant. Everyone should get a writer's grant, I thought, regardless of the human race. I smiled. I realized that now I had the chance at last to try to make a decent job of my book, instead of the half-hearted attempts I had made so far. As I entered the confines of my room I assumed the supine position in the hope that thought would prevail.
Now that some hours had passed it was time for some physical action to be taken, if only to avoid the inclinations of the bed I stood up. The afternoon sun, throwing a latticed shadow onto the wall by my typewriter, gave me further ideas about the narrative. it should be three dimensional for the reader, I thought, but only two dimensional for the characters themselves, at least from their point of view. It should be like a lattice, not only two dimensional, but bits of it missing as well. Following the more or less direction of my mind, I sat down at my desk. What, I thought, might sleep be like for a character? Questions like this and others nearby were certain to return to thwart me later, but for the moment I should be getting on with the job in hand: of planning a plot and presenting myself with some sort of schedule, enough to satisfy the Literature Board, at least, if they ask me what I'm working on. What time is it, by the way? I looked out through the shifting panes of glass at my left and discovered, to my surprise, that it had been raining. It must be about six p.m., judging by the light. Dripping strands of rain, singled to threads, joined and separated in the dark afternoon.
I shook a faintly soggy Gauloise out of a crumpled packet. The air outside, strangely dense, sparkled with the evening light. Bats, finding their body-weights unstable in the heavy air, were taking extra care moving about the sky, most of which was travelling in a southerly direction over the house. Peopling the distant hills which snuggled the river valley and the city eczemaed into its folds, bright costumes were swarming down by the shore, preparing to hold back an exceptionally high tide, filled by the rain. Ash and soot, the result of the sun setting fire to the edges of the horizon, blackened the silver edges of the rising moon, a promising crescent which could very well become full during the course of the night.
I hunched forward in the darkening but bang and thumped the tingle of foot had gone to sleep by the light switch, there! The mass of scrawled notes I had made added to the scribbles which had been compiled, concocted and composed over the preceding (since I had begun being) amounted, I saw, to a sizable income and one obviously in need of a drink in order to put the seal of my celebration in as well. The Gauloise too, was in search of a liquid companion. Setting the being in motion and passing through walls with the aid of their openings, my first stop was made at the fridge. Like Bloom, I consulted the time. It was now nearly seven! It was clearly a decision between sherry, vermouth, or a swift ouzo, when only a mixture would do. My bladder, promising more of a night to come, was already sending its signals, raw, fresh and tingling against the porcelain of my mind. I grabbed the sherry bottle and a nearby glass and with something bordering on complaisance, emptied the contents of one into the other. The glass being full now and the bottle empty, I discarded one and began drinking from the other, following my feet as they continued to make left turnings through the darkening house on my way to the toilet which stood, like the portico of a pusillanimous palindrome, beside the beyond. When I wondered, would I get my first cheque? And what would I spend it on? Books were the challenge of a mature mind, not mine for the meanwhile. What I needed now was the innocence of a newborn slave. The golden yellow screams yelled against the white bowl. Someday I might have to suffer my own soliloquy, I thought, before the quaint colloquy of the more querulous. My feet turned away flushing with the swirling sound, my tips already being toed by the swansongs of the sherry. I put down the glass and stared into it. Isolation of the eyes. Each one alone as can be, I thought. I covered the pus-yellow lamp above the mirror with a helping hand. Glare puts up a barrier, the blind eye balancing here on the rim, looking back. Can't recognize language. The mind must be either a friend or a foe, but which? Fiction. Hinted one way to strange sound. I would rather. Fiction. To strange sound, read this and weep. Weed this and reap. Embroidered street-center. Dull pink. Shelved flat. Crawling feathers. Secret. The muscle that knows. Eyebrows anchored energy infinity, push me apart. When I wanted Swahili. Chinese nothing. Daughters wet-faced blades of grass. Torture the memory. Needed to change placentas with you. Nowhere. The numb sound. Long to procure. Now too much. Not now. Now!
***
Even though the mind would want to relax into the scheme I had written, what was needed was even more alluregence, if there was such a word. The greatest danger was that everything, because I had thought of it, was already considered done. What was completed, in this regard, had to be thought of as being secondary in importance and only that which seemed to go beyond the borders of the book would be acceptable. Eternal vigilance, that was the word. If time could be thought to be consistent at all, I could throw myself against the ropes, like a rabbit caught in the ring. At last, I was now safe from the senseless nature of experience. Instead, I could employ the natural desires to suicide, seize and suck down, saturate, without seeming to relax. Of course any activity might threaten the internal consistency of the book, therefore making the thing worthwhile. What was the brand of that sherry? I'll have to get some more. And something to serve in the meanwhile.
Being now undressed, I went towards the cocktail cabinet. Something, of which the future would hardly approve, was about to happen. My body, aware of the pathetic state of the briefs which barely concealed the pointless thing between my buttocks, bent to assist. After sherry, what else but white wine? Such as there was, was in the fridge and even in this mood, I would not dare disturb that hoard. Something that wouldn't notice the absence and in this house, modelled as it was after the confessors manning clark, had only, red in that quantity. If then, why not? I pulled from the cabinet a bottle of Angove's Brightland's Burgundy 1965. No. Even this mood wouldn't tolerate the penetration of a twenty-six ounce bottle. And besides, I still had things to think about before going out. The cooking wine customarily, called cardboard because of the cask had better be the best bet at the moment. Accordingly, I went to the kitchen, newly white with paint and siphoned off a part thereof. Being Berri, it was black, but the purple, behind which one could imagine the red that its colour was, showed through. The taste was something else indeed.
By this time in my mind a process known as secondary fermentation was beginning to take place and to accompany what might have been aboriginal at its outset, I began dressing. Possible that anything at all I thought, will be all right. What I mean is: anything that might be. After all, it's only a book. Whatever that means. And wears my shirt? One has to distinguish between names and things, because just using different terms doesn't change anything. What's necessary now, I thought, is a way of writing that's exactly more like than all the others. Wears my chirt? Hah! Just as I thought. Under the typewriter. Trousers followed suit.
The senses, I decided, should be represented, but not too often. Most of all, I wanted the imaginary islands which whaled in the sea when nothing was left. How much have I drunk? Have I broken into the Berri already? Must be time for another glass, even so. Where am I going tonight? I'm obviously making preparations and they ought to be followed up with action of some sort.
That's the sense of sentences: they fit together. Interfaces adjusting measurements. Soft broken sounds turning in upon themselves. Grey linoleum spread across the floor, turning golden because of the light. The night outside. Memory, made of this. Air black. Sound missing. At the head of the stair, when I step down. The city in the distance. Colder winds. The sight of the sea. Black, silver, blue colour moving in the dark, between dark shapes. Too much noise. Christ! Where am 1? Standing on the back landing at the top of the back stairs, I was following my worst instincts, which led, like the proverbial lie, to the quiet confines of the cellar. What I wanted was something more liquid and in liquid form. "Illuminated only by the optic nerve, everything takes place. But the light, issuing from that tiny hole in the wall, is much too bright for sight. Move. Move closer. But the endless detail swarms over the picture. Move away. Everything moves out of focus." (This process of writing involved the dislocation of one's mental processes so that one might glimpse something new through the breaks in the jacarandas.) If only one could suspend doubt and have complete trust in the cripple in one's head -- the mind. Thoughts, broken in the head, lay on the floor of the brain like pieces of white porcelain. Bizarre images want to dance on alien limbs. The molars of capcavity, bursting through the gumflesh.
II
A two and a one made three then, but that must before now.
Judging by the wriggling, my limbs were waking up and I was in the process (if not before) of wending my way somewhere. I wasn't wheeling too well, though and the head that was on me was a wild one. Wild and throbbing and palpably painful to ponder with. The booze was bad for the brain cells, but I don't remember a thing about it and in any case I still had this gigantic bottle to contend with. Where did it come from? No use worrying now. I was on my way out somewhere and that's all I know. It was surprisingly cold and bleeding in places, as though the streets had been bitten by frost. Somehow the suburbs were very hurt looking and the faint grey light of the evening seemed impossibly treacherous, like the best intentions going next door.
The path before me seemed strangely skewiff, now that I came to notice it. Now that I had reached this stage in the story, the most salient feature beginning to be itself in my, brain was a very palpable feeling of doubt. A soft warm wind was tugging at the ruffled feathers of the night, as the path passed beneath me. The rain had stopped and the reflections of the night on the wet bitumen shimmered in the strange sweet smell and soft blue bells. Pullulating, my throat allowed the spit to be swallowed. Houses, grim and decent in the suburban squalor, sat squatly along the roadside where I walked. Windows drawn and curtains shuttered. Upstairs, near the end of the world, one could clearly observe the black palings of the star-fed night. Antler's hooting cedar. Pine dark night. Labradorable grass grown wet head. With my mosaic eyes I saw the soundless halls enclosed by strips of skin falling into voidal walls, chambers of worlds, ingrown. Lungless miles. Carpet to carpet walls soft underfoot. Sea bladders, decaying sponges. Could it be that we were underwater?
III
My reaction to this state of affairs is very hard to describe. It resulted in a sort of hypersensitive vagueness. Where was I? Could it be that I was really out here, in the rain? Somehow every step I take goes onto the page. Try to think back. When did this process start becoming noticeable? I had been walking. The rain was grey and soft. My collar was up. But the rain wasn't wet enough or persistent enough to worry me, it was just a frustrating grey soft mist. What else could I see? The grey mist was becoming thicker. Through it, some distance away, I saw two cormorants perched on an overhanging branch. So I was walking along beside the river! How had that happened?
As the mists began to clear over the grey brown riversludge, I saw lights glistening on the black, silver-streaked road, reflected distinctly each drop of rain precariously balanced on the rim of each leaf. It was a perspiring, expiring night, filled with the river's sound of water. The house I had been writing about before was only a hundred yards away, overlooking the river. I was in the wrong end of town. I must have walked for miles without knowing it. Exploring uncharted lands with eyes closed. I should have laughed when I thought of it. Instead of laughing, I swallowed back the fear that the future was the present. But if I could think like that, at least I was getting a bit more lighthearted. There was still hope. Images filtered back through my mind, as if in reward for my better spirits. A confused saying, something about the bed getting out on the wrong side this morning. Bleary and stale. Too early and pale. But if that was so, where was the typewriter? No. That story, about the wrong side of the morning was something I overheard. I remember now.
IV
The publican about his business sweeping up swept closer and peered into the darkened corner: "Who are you and get out of here," he said, "there's enough of your kind all day long without more of you lurking in the dark trying to cadge another drink off a poor bastard like me, what do you want anyhow, sneaking in with the bloody fog, by christ there's some funny buggers around these days."
He didn't pause in his sweeping though. He was still mumbling to himself: "An open door and the cats are in pissing on the piano," he muttered. "Wind a bit cold coming off the river," he burped. "Something I had for," the burp surfaced, "between the one thing and the other, what with a touch of wind, fathoms deep and I've been feeling like this all day, queasy like, a bit side-on if you know what I, but what was I saying? Who opened that door, by christ it's not like the old days when you could take a stroll one morning in your top hat and your frock coat and raise your hat to a bloke coming the other way and say Top of the morning' to you, with two bob in your pocket and a dog on a chain and the sun soft as fresh cream and how's the family, the family, now it's a fine day what do you say we all choof off to the seaside and get them fellas in boaters and striped suits to punch holes in our tickets and take a couple of boats out rowing on the harbour kissing water green and blue and deep and white bellies up in the sun, straw hats and a couple of stone mugs wet the old whistle, eh, what do you say? Sun overhead and under foot, seagulls perching proud as poppinjays on the head of our Colonel of the Regiment, made of metal, grass greener, but there's always work to do to keep you at home and we know which bastard is at the back of all that, bastards like that McLennan who's got nothing better to do than bring his cheque in here every week and park his bum on that stool, be buggered if I'll wipe it off after him, jesus joseph and the white hairy, I'd give my. right to vote for a good night's..."
V
Tumbling over and turning in the air to fall thundering into the depths and wastes and dream-filled waters filled up with the sea. Gladiators now no longer able to survive in these bidden forgotten surging surcharged cafes. The smaller iron filings move from north to south, with small mouse-like forms in lemming crowds that invade the lands of the pied piper and wreck the strange devices of the daubers and the free expressionists and muted choirs of smaller particles, whirling about the planets they believe they will arrive by nightfall. Thoughts of sedition. Monstrous depth. Particle. Layered matter. Sediments thoroughly set. A deep blue falling foam of weather and water. Wrestling in tides and furious waves. Lost colour sediments carving crystals in the band's eye. Rice paper waves. Drawing near. Smallness and largeness consuming itself but not consumed by the waters it believes the waters to be its own waters and without shape begins slowly to form mind's eye pictures of its lack of substance, the first blemish sending it hurrying to biding where there is no biding and no death to consume the thought of life its origins in the origins of itself. Youngest it will find its birthplace. Matter lattices all about its hours and will seem to suggest space. Untrue and not equal to hours age co-ordinate. Drawing away. Not consumed and not believing itself consumed. The excited theory in its essence wills time in the minds of the windswollen waters depthgauged by hours of energy. Bright blue fluids and soft pillows let down skies clouds pink in dreams of surfaces and sunlight impossible. Darkness negative blackness. Not walls boles bright pinpricks light let through gates and swelling waters not pressure greater at any density decay at levels illusion failing surfaces suggest. Forests of water rise up and it climbs in projected exploration knowing farther searching impossible in negative light fathoming distance unrecognizable. Unknown, stranger of strong light pricked into cloth that is caught up and pressed across and sealed by lips of blue film in the rival waves in cubes of movement divine by depth as river cross and scour the path of thought willing the mind's divorce' stilled time locked at points charged by heights at walls of loss. Hand silver ivory thinness sleekness lips sunlight impossible. Bluegreen greyblue blackblue darkness blackness negative. Time space falling blacked out clouds. It climbs down and rests lies gasping over. Waters wash over it and it is revealed not alive or otherwise. In depth blue gauges it transpires lost. As pressing cubes of blue waters fall again it turns to gauge depth in lost hours of time and plunging again into that opening cloud.
VI
'It's not that I'm saying that you don't think," James was saying in the meanwhile. "Naturally everyone thinks and all of you have had thoughts, of course, but were they legal size? Unfortunately not. And very few of you have ever had the grace to throw back the tiddlers. Something's better than nothing at all, eh?"
The Methuselah was doing the rounds. James held his glass under the foaming head and swallowed some of the French froth which resulted. The group of people that surrounded him seemed fairly, hostile, but the champagne had the affect of keeping them in check.
"But for every pogrom," James went on, "there's got to be some pollution. I could say anything and you would have already made its bed. The mind's like that. Past a fairly meager level of complexity, the mind can't be fathomed. Anyway, that's one of my opinions. Not a bad drob this Veuve. Click go the ears, eh!
"Crughaarrrrgh," he sighed, sinking back, "it's true, it's a grand sport, thinking and a high calling and not all are chosen. You have to be dedicated all right. But it's a grand life and a long way out on the alpha waves and there's many a time the mind might remember the old days when it really had a fight on its hands with one of them gigantic buck-marlin thoughts, charging out of the deep, bursting out into the bright sun, trying to toss the hook. What a sight! Ah, there's not many minds left that have got memories of the old days, when the great sport of thinking used to be a challenge, by gar.
"We all used to be like that in those days. Sport and very sporting with it. You might haul yourself out a big one, but if it wasn't legal size then you'd chuck it back. That's the spirit. Yeah, well, even in those days you had the professional thinkers going out in trawlers and well, there was even talk about declaring a two-hundred-mile semi-mental shelf. Those trawlers were the boys though. Trawling for days, with the big nets down. Get a mixed bag, never know what you might dredge up. Then you had your whalers! There was a tough life to be led! The intrepid thought hunters, scurvied, far out to see. In search of the great whyte thought. The killer thought. The giant. Sighting its blow, thought ahoy! Ah, them were the days. It's not the same as that now. Nowadays the mind's plagued with gigantic mechanized thinkers that take all the fun out of it. They don't give the poor thought a chance. There's still a few left of the dying breed, though. Down in one of your fair dinkum thinking villages, you'll almost always have a few old crabbers who put down a couple of traps, with hypotheses for bait and lo and behold, in the morning, you've got a whole pot full of theorems. But you want to watch out for the claws on those buggers. Not that there's much of that left, any more. Most of your young things sign up for one of the governmental trawlers. They roam in packs, trawling deep sea thoughts and load them onto a mother ship. Your intellectual giant, so to speak. Then you've got your thought factories, where they make your thought fingers and sell. them over the counter at who knows what prices to the stay-at-homes too lazy to go out and think for themselves.
"There's just no place for it anymore and that's the truth. And if there are those who think at all, you can be sure that they'll be getting a bit queer, after a while. The way they make those artificial lures, you'd think it was more important to make the lures than to get out there and think. But it's worth it in the end, if you've ever been out on a rock platform and the sun's going down and the waves are crashing into the cliff, trying to drag you over the edge and you hook into a big one. That's the life alright."
Murmurings were developing, in the meanwhile, in the circle where the bottle was passing. one of the young marble giants, whose footballed musculature was, if not overdeveloped, then at least too concentrated over the bridge of the nose, turned to his companion to his left who was in turn deep in consultation with several others. The propsal was that they and their companions would eject the idiot savant from their midst, the better to enjoy the liquid refreshments without so much hot air. Hoopla! There he goes! Little creep. Now boys, back to the bar!
Reaching the head of the stairs on his climb back, James sallied forth again: "Consider the wily bream," he disclaimed. "The black bass. One dons the scuba gear and goes diving. Off to a bit of spear thinking, mum, I can hear you say it now. Then there's the icethinking addicts, who venture to the polar icecaps of the mind, cut a hole and then dangle a bait through. But there's more that is down in that dark sea. Cartilaginous sinuous never-sleeping always moving prowling scavenging sharks of the mind. Tear away a limb when you're not..."
VII
The tireless compendium of mystery doesn't do much to further the cause of understanding though, especially in this case. Take as an example the last sentence ever written: "Unusual demands dictated thin, dark-haired hotels". One could always imagine in this sort of speculation a type of introspective reality pertaining to doubt: if that is possible. But in the final analysis, one can never portray anything more often than not. Great minds and current events, unfortunately not always contiguous with the principles of existence, often get in the way. Perhaps this might provide, if nothing else, an avenue through which doubt (often abused by those who desist from the delight in doing) might have a parenthetical statement to make, explaining the stigmas that we all have to suffer, at one time or another. Plans, hopes, desires and even one's best friends will often dissolve under such close scrutiny.
Sensations, like the brief, intermittent and incessant flares of a superdense star revolving on its axis at many hundreds of revolutions per second, will plague the mind with a mass of inexplicable data until one realizes that space may also (like everything within reach) begin at the beginning, proving once again the theory that nothing else matters. And it is intolerable conditions like these that often give rise to decisions, the indivisible building blocks in the formation of the will. If it were not so, several of our most cherished concepts may have to go up in smoke and until this happens, no-one can avoid hesitating before the specter of the inevitable.
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