The Age of Magic

by Ben Okri

‘One person’s consciousness, read by the universe…’

  ‘Bearing witness to all of us.’

  ‘Maybe there’s a spiritual black box in us that is decoded when we die.’

  ‘So books should be lived to be read.’

  ‘And life should be dreamt to be lived.’

  Lao laughed. ‘You’ve got me talking,’ he said. ‘What are you hiding? I feel like a bomb that’s been delicately defused. Where did you go? What are you trying to divert me from?’

  ‘Only from how much I love you,’ said Mistletoe, joining him in the pool of light.

  14

  They made their way back to the hotel through the gentle darkness of the town. Near the clock tower, a night-bird flew low overhead. The whirring of its wings reminded them of something ethereal, something they used to know but couldn’t now remember. They were a little tired.

  In an obscure way they felt they were being initiated into a new reality. They had become fond of the night-town, and had made it a small part of themselves. They felt they had become part of the town too, part of its dreams. In the town’s black box would be recorded the fact that they had been there. They had breathed deeply there, and hadn’t merely passed through. They liked to think that its night would always recognise them.

  15

  Lao was struck by Mistletoe’s strangeness on her return from the place beyond the bridge. There was an alien sensuality about her, something new that awed and aroused him, even scared him a little. She seemed transformed. She seemed, in some way, magnified.

  As they made their way back, breathing deeply the lake and mountain air, he kept glancing at her, but she was silent.

  16

  As Mistletoe dressed for bed she became aware of a change. Her mouth was dry, her breathing awkward, her heartbeat irregular. Her hands quivered lightly and she felt as if she had a mild fever. Curious colours swam in her eyes. She felt a little dizzy.

  She slipped into bed, and listened to Lao’s breathing in the dark. A dark red heat poured from him. She noticed that he was lying heavier on the bed beside her.

  When his hand brushed her nipple it tripped a switch and she came alight. He touched her belly and his hand seemed to burn through her. He lavished on her body indirect touches and bitter-sweet sensations flooded her brain.

  She became aware of places in her that could only have been concealed there by a god with a sense of humour. Adrift on warm currents, no longer of this world, she became aware of him gliding into her. He loved her with gentleness and strength, stroking her neck, praising her face with his hands, till she was broken up and began a low rhythmic wail. She was a little overwhelmed with being the adored focus of such power, as he rose and fell. She felt certain now that there was a heaven and that it was here, in her body. The universe was in her and with each movement it unfolded to her.

  Somewhere in the night a stray rocket went off. She must have been shouting, for his hand was cupping her mouth. Lost to all reason, she wanted to encompass him with beautiful obscenities.

  She suddenly learnt surrender, and broke through all her barriers, and destroyed his control. In an ecstasy greater than his anguish, he raced towards her, and disappeared into her universe, and afterwards into a long dreamless slumber.

  Book 5

  A Shadowy Presence

  The alchemy of Arcadia worked on the group in unexpected ways. Malasso was one of those ways. Had they all created him? Was it true that he was a group entity? Whatever he was, they had empowered him. They endowed him with influence, nourished his personality, enriched his agency. They made him the deity of their journey. Through their fears, fantasies, secrets, and undefined creativity they made him a minor demiurge.

  He grew with their breath. Their thoughts filled out his insubstantial form. Their desires were his gains. He acquired might from their floating dreams. Moving between two realms, he was both visible and invisible. Mirroring their blind alternation between dream and waking, thought and things, he became the master between – the master they had brought with them. With their ungoverned wishes they gave him the key to their destinies on the journey.

  Unwittingly they conferred on him the power to shape their stories: he could influence whatever happened to them as they travelled through the myth-charged spaces to Arcadia.

  His powers grew as their thoughts intensified. Through them he was now clothed in pure energy. As they were, so was he. When they were negative, he grew; when elevated, he flew. He sowed mischief with their weakest thoughts; he amplified such thoughts, made them real, and gave each fantasy a form.

  He was their ambiguous genie. And because his power came from their hidden source, he was a monarch of their minds. Darkness and sunlight were to him equal nourishment.

  1

  After dinner, Jim called on Sam to inspect the results of the filming so far and to plan the work of the coming days. Sam was exhausted and a bit drunk and had been reading his Camus in bed when Jim came by. They talked about the helicopter shots planned for the next day, views of the mountain capped with snow and mist. Sam was particularly looking forward to the challenge of dangling upside down, in harness, while filming.

  On his way back to his room, Jim stopped at Husk’s room. She was talking to someone in London and abruptly slammed down the phone and burst into tears on Jim’s shoulder. But she quickly pulled herself together. She made no explanation of the phone call or the tears as they went through the logistics of the next day’s filming, the hiring of the helicopter and van, and the provisions needed. When he was satisfied that everything was in hand, Jim asked if she needed help and Husk assured him that she was fine. She led him to the door with a thin smile, and shut it after him.

  Jim went to his room but, finding that he felt agitated, he decided to go out for a walk along the silver shores of the lake. He needed the walk. Underneath his efficiency, Jim was troubled by the latter part of the conversation at dinner. The talk about Malasso had been niggling away at him. He had not liked the idea of a shadowy presence hovering over the group, haunting them in diverse ways. He had particularly not liked the notion of this shadowy figure being a group entity, created by the sum total of the underlying attitudes and negative energies of the group.

  The lake shone in the dark. It made him think of Avalon and the magic lake from which came the sword Excalibur, and to which it returned. The mountain was indistinguishable from the night. It was the quality of night which gave the lake its shimmer. As he stared at the lake Jim had a keen desire to leap into it, to sink right to the bottom and rest there. Perhaps he would find the lady of the lake and she might have a spell to cleanse him of his troubles.

  The impulse to leap into the lake and rest in its depths was a strong one, and it surprised him. For when he examined it he found that it was a covert desire for death.

  He had gone quite far on his walk, past a pier and some illuminated boats, when he heard a voice. It was a sweet and airy voice. Had someone called out his name? He saw no one. The darkness suddenly became sinister. Then he heard the voice again, faint, distant, seeming to rise from the lake itself. He turned round and hurried in the direction of the hotel, horribly aware of something following in his shadow, something that glided, and whispered, but which vanished when he turned round. He began to run, and felt a cloaked form above him and glimpsed in his panic a masked face. He was glad when he made it through the front door of the hotel.

  Back in his room, the door firmly shut, he conceded that there might be something to the notion of a group entity. He didn’t think Malasso was that entity. Malasso was quite real to him.

  2

  Jim tried to sleep, but couldn’t. His mind was agitated. He was annoyed with himself for having revealed to Lao the story of his encounter with the Devil. He couldn’t understand why he had done that. And had it happened to him, had it been an elaborate life-like dream, or had the encounter itself, so fantastic to the conscious mind, taken on an imaginative quality to protect him from the reality of it? He ha
d been drawn into talking about it by a mood that had been taking possession of him, a mood that got worse the further they advanced on the journey to Arcadia.

  In the coach, during the long drive from Basel, he had, among other things, been engaged in the writing of a list. He found it soothing and cathartic to enumerate all the things he hated, all the things that made life unbearable. He found it helpful to compile such a list. It saved him from himself. It was a kind of purgation.

  He had been making lists like that for a long time. The first list began in the years of his first failure. He had spent considerable time and energy making his first film, and when it sank in the quicksand of indifference, he began compiling a private list of the intolerable things in life. He developed a clear eye for humbug in modern society, for things that diminish the magic of living. After that, whenever he suffered a failure he consoled himself with an elaboration of his list. It grew to be very extensive. If he had had the rigour or leisure of a Bouvard or a Pécuchet, he might have compiled not a dictionary of received ideas, but a dictionary of negations.

  While filming, wherever he found himself, whether in a hotel room or on a train, he expanded his list with the passion of a connoisseur. After his list-making, he would fall into a kind of reverie.

  3

  The list he had made on the coach, which culminated in the words KILL MALASSO, was written as if under the influence of a malignant moon. He had written:

  I hate people who are confident and who have everything worked out.

  I can’t stand smugness.

  I can’t stand young people who are cocky, and older people who are snobs.

  I am infuriated by people who just happen to have umbrellas when it starts to rain.

  I can’t stomach people who are too happy, and who have perfect lives.

  I can’t stand the newly successful, the newly famous.

  People with regular features are quite intolerable.

  Tall men are tiresome.

  Short confident men are exasperating.

  The eager and the enthusiastic drive me to distraction.

  Women with cold eyes give me the shivers…

  But none of this was what he wanted to write.

  Then he had written:

  KILL MALASSO.

  Then he had told Lao the story he had told no one else.

  Since he had set out on the journey to Arcadia, instead of life becoming more harmonious, it had become more fierce.

  4

  Unable to sleep, he felt that shadowy presence again. It was now in the room. Before long Jim found himself occupied by a mood alien to him, an eviling mood. But it couldn’t have been so alien or it wouldn’t have found a place in him.

  The mood had much to feast on in his soul. It fed on his life-long timidity, his failures and resentments and envy. It fed on that bile that formed out of having lived most of his life below his potential. It fed on the success of others, on his secret cowardice.

  He got out of bed and fetched his notebook. He had to get rid of his obsessions. His inwardly directed anger had to be turned outward, free at last to express itself instead of feeding on his entrails. He had to get the poisons out of himself, get them out in words, so he could see them. A list was the only thing that could help him sleep. It was a way of escaping his narrow condition. Then, a little relieved, he might find rest.

  He lifted his pen and, with the shadowy presence hovering over him, and the dream of Arcadia inside him, he began to write.

  Things that make life intolerable

  People with no patience.

  Idealists, dreamers, fantasists.

  Small towns.

  People who pride themselves on their realism.

  Materialists, mystics, atheists, agnostics.

  Cynics like Lao.

  Multinationals.

  Dictators.

  Blind belief in democracy.

  Third world debts.

  Ignorance.

  Bad education.

  Too much education.

  Romantics.

  The world weary.

  People who judge only by past performance.

  People without imagination.

  People who don’t make up their own minds, but are led like sheep.

  People who believe everything they read or hear.

  All those who don’t love what they do.

  People who don’t like their lives, but dare not change it.

  Manipulators.

  Monopolies.

  Malasso…

  5

  Every such list is a narrowing of options. Every such list shows how it is no longer possible to live. The act of writing is an act of creation. Psychologists say that writing something down facilitates its fulfilment.

  Without him knowing it, Jim’s lists, accumulating from year to year, became increasingly more severe. Without knowing it, the lists bricked him in. They made his life prickly with contradictions. He was in effect writing himself out of the broad script of life. Rejecting so much, out of vengeance, he had turned against happiness in life. He was secretly at war with himself. No one would have suspected this.

  Outwardly jovial and polite, never angry, incapable of a fine manly rage, the kind of rage that lets the world quiver for a moment at a potential for violence or genius, Jim was nice because he was scared.

  Lao suspected what lay behind this soft-spoken aspect of Jim, and loved to ruffle it. But he never suspected what it concealed. Too much concealing of true feelings leads to their compression, to rage beneath rage, masks beneath masks. Only in his lists did Jim reveal the depth of his concealment.

  His lists were never about what he loved, what he wanted.

  He had made his life a mirror of dissatisfactions, a veil of evils, and that was why the journey to Arcadia appealed to him. He longed to pierce the veil of evils, to crack the mirror of dissatisfactions. He wanted to believe in something. He wanted to act, to make the world right. He wanted to love life again.

  Then came Malasso – Malasso who distilled into his featureless power and malignity everything Jim ever felt trapped by. Then came Malasso – the manipulator of the last free act of which Jim felt capable. His film.

  He became doubly obsessed: with the Arcadia journey, and with Malasso, its antithesis.

  6

  With new inspiration, Jim felt that making lists wasn’t enough any more.

  When a man like Jim comes to the end of his list-making he has nothing left but suicide or murder, despair or action. Now that he had at last identified Malasso as the chief enemy of his work, Jim had come to the end of an old road and knew he must build a new one, or perish. That was probably why he spoke with such passion about will.

  The alchemy of Arcadia was cooking him, driving him mad.

  He must do something, or die of not doing. He must transcend Faust, and solve the enigma of the Devil.

  7

  Jute had often dreamt of falling in love, and never had. She had been in a few relationships and had pretended to be in love, but had never really felt it. With time she had just stopped pretending. She withdrew into a shell of withered emotions. Before she knew it she had dried up and could no longer feel very much, not even the death of her mother with whom she had not been very close.

  The drying up of her heart did not trouble her at first. She barely noticed it. An immensely practical person, she accepted herself as she was, and got on with things, and never complained. She didn’t really care.

  But sometimes, between activities, at her desk or walking home, she would suddenly stop what she was doing and stare into space till her eyes filled with tears.

  These moments of unconscious weeping were becoming more frequent. They were becoming embarrassing. She would be at an editorial meeting, listening to programme proposals, when she would unexpectedly well up. Sometimes she didn’t notice her own tears till someone asked if she was all right. Then she would have to rush to the ladies’ to refresh herself.

  It was as though
she was not feeling what she was feeling; as though behind her back someone was working the wells of her emotions. Her boss had suggested she see a specialist, but she had refused for she believed nothing was wrong with her. She put it down to overwork. She put it down to many things.

  One day the proposal for an Arcadia journey came up for discussion at the meeting. Jute was listening to the presentation when once again the tears began flowing.

  ‘If you feel so strongly about this, you should take it on,’ her boss said.

  She hadn’t been aware that she was weeping. She excused herself and by the time she got back from the ladies’ it was decided. She hadn’t chosen the journey, somehow it had chosen her. In fact, she despised the idea of the journey. She considered it sentimental. She would rather die than be sentimental.

  8

  The oddest thing had happened to Jute that evening. She had fallen in love, instantly, with the owner of the hotel, Hans. She liked his genial face, his sparkling eyes, and his fine moustache. She liked his old-world, small-town good manners. When they arrived in the hotel foyer, when he smiled at her in what she thought of as a special manner, she felt something awaken in her that had not been there before.

  She became shy in his admiring presence. She felt his eyes on her and felt warm all over and wanted to escape and wanted at the same time to stay there under his gaze. When she tried to speak her voice became a croak and her mouth turned dry.

  Bewildered by her own feelings, she felt she had been bewitched.

  9

  Like all truly adorable people, she did not think herself beautiful. She wore ungainly glasses to emphasise her plainness. It was difficult to flatter her, so men found her formidable. They feared her before she feared them. This was confirmed when they came up against the solid brick wall of her personality.