by Ian Watson
The sight of the sea calmed him, and his eyes wandered to the horizon, settling on the pure curving line there: visible proof of the shaping and definition of the world, a rationality that bound the ever-inchoate muscles of the sea. A smoke stack from some ship hidden below the horizon drifted very slowly south.
Suzie leaned across the railing, her jacket hanging open. Under the thin fabric of her blouse, hidden till now by the frills, he noticed two firm threads. Brushing his fingers under her scarf, he drew up a small silver pendant cross.
“I thought you didn’t—?”
“I saw a devil,” she grinned, unconcerned, “so maybe there’s a God, who knows? It’s only an amulet, Mike, a lucky charm. I wear it to please my mother. She still thinks a bit superstitiously about nervous… upsets.”
He let the chain slide back again.
“It doesn’t mean much to me compared with the solidness of this pavement or this rail!” Her knuckles tightened on the bobbly metal; a scrap of paint Baked off against her finger nail, exposing some underlying rust. “See, this is real… Lovely, good and solid. The cross is just Sunday School gimcrack—an electroplated childhood mood. Something from before, from long ago. I’d actually prefer there wasn’t a God, Mike. Just the world, no more. It’s enough. Don’t worry, I shan’t become a nun! ‘All things bright and beautiful’,” she sang, “ ‘just exist, that’s all.’ Look down there.”
A dog was racing circles round a man, leaping up at the leash he flicked, whip-like, at it. A dog—or was it a lion? With its white mane, leonine flanks, wasp waist, tight naked little bottom? Its master had shaved it from the waist downwards, to grow a lion’s mane round its chest and neck. Waist, thighs and bottom shone so smoothly in the sun; it might have been shaved this very morning by the lion tamer. The man cracked his whip, sensing his white thin-hipped lion racing round him, leaping, snarling. In love with that white lion, he caught it a stinging Sick on its naked flank so that it scampered into the bright ripple of incoming tide, stamping up a spray of electricity. Leaping light, electric sparks, white muscled buttocks.
The man threw out his chest, laughed and laughed with the giant poodle.
“And of their existence,” she said firmly, “there’s no doubt.” Suzie kicked the lowest rail emphatically with her shoe; and Michael winced, recalling something else… an incident outside of time, outside of causes. Involving one Helen Caprowicz who had maybe died in a car crash somewhere in upstate New York—whose life and death he’d dreamt, collectively, out in the open. The sea drank up the memory. It was only an improbable event, one that had only tended to exist and had now become quite improbable.
“When they stop existing they become lovely soil and grass and other solid things,” she added.
The lion tamer swung up his left arm to look at his wrist watch. He whistled for the dog, turned and trudged from the sea towards a flight of stone stairs. As he left hard wet sand behind and waded through the softer hinterland his footsteps grew more laboured, his bearing more sluggish. He sat at the base of the steps to empty his shoes. By now he’d become demoralized, as if the joy and energy generated a few moments earlier had drained away through the soles of his feet. The white lion wasn’t affected by the journey through softer sand; it still capered, kicking up sand in the same electric way it had kicked up spray. Yet now that its owner had capitulated, it was plainly just an overgrown poodle with bare shivering flanks and a shaggy grotesque mane…
“Let’s visit the funfair,” she suggested.
• • •
So they fed fruit machines in the bowls of the white Zeppelin. They paid a Laughing Sailor doll locked up in a glass case to rock from side to side guffawing at them. Clutching the red firing button on a periscope they fired orange torpedo tracks through green gloom at merchantmen hauling from island shelter to island shelter. The orange tracks foreshortened away, with a ratchety putter, and the background sky fit with a red clanging volcano of pretended destruction. They steered a crane over a turning treasure island of trinkets, rings and dried-up cigarettes, trying to snare the single banknote pinned to a wooden cube; they grabbed up a cigarette instead. Although it was stale and the tobacco tending to fall out of the end, they shared it, taking a few puffs each.
They dared the House That Jack Built Wooden floors bucked and heaved underfoot as mechanical muscles flexed and unflexed beneath the planks, imitating the swell of the sea. They kept their balance. A narrow corridor tried to pull them apart, one side of the floor jerking ahead while the other side jerked back. They held together. Another floor slewed sideways under the wooden walls like a scythe; only a strip of dirtier wood down the centre was safe. They survived, unreaped. They laughed at themselves in distorting mirrors: blown up into balloons, pinched in at the midriff like dumb-bells. They turned into Siamese twins. It didn’t matter; the shape distortions, like the treacheries of the floors, were simple deceptions, trivial snares, creaky old practical jokes. With a siren wail, a draught whipped up their legs. Suzie gasped and giggled but she was wearing no skirt to be whirled in the air around her waist, revealing old time nylons and suspenders; the funfair’s repertoire of tricks was out of date.
Finally a moving belt carried them down and out through rotating drums which banged together, bounced apart then bounded back again. It was like entering a car-wash. With upright rollers for… crushing cars! Michael hesitated only briefly before bunching his fists before him and riding down the belt, bursting the spinning drums apart—which weren’t quite as light as a feather, since he slightly sprained his wrist on them. He laughed as loudly as the sailor in his glass case. Look, we have come through.
They emerged from the zeppelin; now it was hot. The beach was getting crowded. Territories were being defined and consolidated with deckchairs, sand castles, transistor radios and beachballs.
They sat outside a low white stucco hotel, built in Art Deco flats and curves, and drank pints of John Smith’s bitter at an iron table.
They walked on. They ate fried haddocks, wrapped in last week’s newspaper.
They caught a bus to Bean Head and walked on beyond, between grass-laced dunes and sea; the sands were deserted this far from town. The tide line was spotted with cork, worm-holed wood, sea coal, dried bladder wrack, knobs of green glass. They beachcombed; he found a razor shell, took the comb from his pocket and slid it into the horny case, then slipped the shell and comb into his pocket. A warm breeze from off the land teased milk teeth from the waves. Oyster catchers sprinted and scattered into the wind.
A line of tilted concrete blocks straddled the beach from the dunes right out into the water, to foil advancing Panzer tanks which never came.
The real world.
• • •
“I suppose in a sense we all got something out of it. Barry Shriver found his proper niche as one-man ginger group to nag NASA to visit the backside of the Moon—even if lie didn’t get the appropriate junk to haul round the lecture halls… So now he can spend the rest of his life accusing them of suppressing evidence. Bloody Deacon got ‘illuminated’—now I suppose he’s off on some secret pilgrimage. And you got an amulet to wear. Which is more than I could winch up from treasure island back there!”
“Oh no, Mike, don’t you see, I got the whole world given me—more tangibly than I ever gripped it since I was a kid! This world had grown fuzzy without me realizing it. It was like a bit of muzak I’d been humming without paying attention to. Maybe I needed a shock… the absurdity of what happens when you don’t hold on to everything that’s really there. That leaching away was turning me into a sort of merry automaton—like a musician on automatic pilot because he’s bored with the piece and the conductor. I swear from now on I shall play every single note! My own horror slapped me in the face, and made me be again, I gained everything there is. I regained it. The sharpness of things. The scrupulousness.” She whistled a tune: it was the Queen of the Night’s aria from The Magic Flute. Her pursed lips reached and achieved the highest notes of a
ll. A cross wind was chopping the rollers up into ignominious fluffy things now that scampered and scrapped childishly. All the deep undulatory rhythm was hidden under a coat of icing—neutralized, for a day of play.
“Can there really be such a thing as a contagious nervous breakdown? A whole group of people failing in their duty to reality?” she asked. “There must be. And I was vulnerable, oh yes! I wasn’t really plugged into the world, you see? My points weren’t making contact. What did you get out of it, Mike? Apart from…” Briefly her confidence sagged. She looked haunted and bewildered, unable to accommodate the datum or neutralize it. “Apart from a trip to America,” she said quickly, “What did you get?” A challenge, now; a demand.
Michael looked at Suzie and he thought: Why, you of course. He said nothing aloud, but she laughed anyway.
“That’s really corny!” (He stroked her hair.) “We should make love, Mike. There’s not a soul about. We should make contact again… Get plugged in.” She winked lewdly.
“Come on,” she ordered. So they climbed to a hollow in the dunes, a cup of soft sand lipped by marram and fern grass, veined with purple cranesbill. From that dune crater they could just spy the main mass of the sea if they craned, their necks, though sands and separate waves were hidden. He shed his anorak, she her jacket They spread them out.
They were in perfect key this time.
None of the old problem. Nothing premature. Michael made love with an almost mechanical perfection.
In the midst of their love he raised his head briefly and stared out to sea through the grass. A ball of golden light bobbed about above the waves far out. But the Sun was in the west, not in the east. That ball of light was neither the Sun nor the Sun’s reflection…
Looking away, he buried his face in her red hair; inhaling, he possessed her—who now possessed herself.
It was only an afterimage of madness. An aftersensation, not on the retina but in the mind’s eye…
Inside Suzie, then, he died the little death. When he looked again later, the ball of light had vanished. It wouldn’t come back, he was sure.
They got dressed, hiked back along the sands to Bean Head and caught the bus into Sandstairs again, where the streets were packed with holidaymakers trooping homeward.
Thirty-Four
Absently, Mary Deacon unlocked the glass-fronted cabinet and removed one of the fragile Goss Ware curios: a miniature china cruet bearing the town crest of Caernarvon. She held it quizzically between thumb and forefinger, then let it fall. It bounced, unbroken, on the carpet. So she trod on it: it crushed easily.
“Please don’t.” John’s voice caressed, but from a great distance, from another world. “If you’d been where I’ve been—”
“Oh, I know that I’ve only ever been on ordinary holidays!” She removed a tiny jug in the shape of a harp: a Victorian souvenir of Aberystwyth. “Can the tourists on the Moon buy these?” she asked tartly, and dropped the harp. Hitting the broken cruet, it cracked in half, emitting the only note it ever had or would. “They’re mine, so I’ll do what I like with them! Oh, they only cost a few pounds each. They can’t be more than a hundred years old. What’s a hundred years to sweep away? Or love? Or a family? Or a career? Where’s my souvenir?”
“Career?” Deacon frowned. “The Vice-Chancellor only said he wanted to speak to me.”
“He’ll ask you to resign, quite rightly too.”
“This time I didn’t give any silly interviews—”
“Friend Shriver did. And what about next time, John?”
He shrugged. “I could use some free time. I’ve got a lot to think about. I might have to write a book.”
“To guarantee you never get a decent post again? If you must burst out, why couldn’t you have had some sordid little affair with a secretary? So much simpler.”
“Something is bursting inside me.”
“Like a rotten appendix?” Discriminatingly Mary selected a tiny bowl.
“Please stop doing that.”
“Oh, I love doing it. The name of the game is wanton destruction.”
No doubt she would carry on breaking her curios in the same restrainedly discriminating manner for as long as he stayed in the same room as her. Killing her hostages one by one. Her own hostages. Wounding herself exemplarily, as Bonaparte (or whatever its name had been) had nearly wounded itself to death on the Moon—in an alternative reality which had now readjusted itself, renormalized. The false infinity was gone; the real world had swept back tidally. Except that… the glimpse of infinite underlying shores stayed with him now forever.
He walked through the house, out of the kitchen door into the garden, and stared up past the great horse chestnut tree overlapping from the neighbouring garden, its flower candles deliquescing into decayed pink confetti on the lawn. The sky was flocky with cumulus; a light plane buzzed overhead.
Shutting one eye, he watched a little floater in the vitreous humour of the other eye traverse that sky-blue screen like an aerial jellyfish…
An impairment in his vision.
The universe must envision itself, he reflected, if it is to erase itself and become Void again. It must model itself, through the agency of life—whose nature was therefore metaphorical: all theories, belief systems and experiences tending towards that envisioning, but only in parable form, built out of the things of this world. Life was a vehicle for approaching the Void-Awareness which was the true tenor of existence; which was the meaning behind meaning—beyond definition, or object and subject, or effect and cause. Life was the literal meaning of the world, for just as long as the true meaning evaded life. In the meantime, therefore, one lived the metaphor of one’s life. One sustained the world. That was the task.
How should he proceed? By heedlessness? So that the world could go on?
Ah, but he had grown heedful.
He stared up at the sky, hunting for his own self regarding him through some extraordinary entry point—where he had once already been. He did not find himself. That floater in his eye suddenly seemed like a necessary imperfection to full vision, which let life go on; a blind spot which must be there.
Maybe heedlessness was best, after all.
He went back into the house, to Mary in the lounge.
“Maybe we could try something else entirely?” he suggested. “Maybe we could run a market garden, or manage a pub?”
His wife recoiled, as though slapped.
“I hardly think so! That’s even stupider and crueller.”
“I can’t go on doing the same thing. It’s all changed, Mary.”
“At least you can remember my name.”
Memory; the tag of past time in the mind… Which could sometimes come unstuck. Which had done so when he looped back to Shep’s death and Suzie’s torment and Michael’s initiation—becoming alien, capable of being anyone or anything at all while the “Khidr mode” lasted. He had really seemed to dart about through time, then, being someone other than himself—yet retaining a sense of himself, even so.
He recollected the UFO flight carefully again. He’d been aware of who he was; yet he had fissioned—split apart—and had been hunting for himself. When he caught up with himself, the flight ended, and he was back in the ordinary desert.
So, in his flight, he had evaded not only the time-tag but also the ego-tag that must be time-bound to the present, glueing attention to the ongoing world. Yet he had done so without real loss of identity. Other connections could be made within the network of existence. One could travel through space-time. Yet ego is the loading stabilizer—the baseline. Ego constantly pulls one back. Roof brain chatter glues one to the present moment; the clichés of existence. Chatter under a roof… What other way of living is there?
“I think I’ll walk over and talk to the Vice-Chancellor at home,” he decided.
“What now?”
“No time like the present,” he smiled, knowing how untrue this cliché was. “I must get out, Mary. I need to take a walk and think.”
• • •
The stranger appeared from behind the pillar box us Deacon neared the corner. Deacon wasn’t paying much attention to the street, and hadn’t noticed him till then. The man wore a dark suit, dark spectacles, a tie with an emerald box hedge pattern. He held a map. A street plan. His face was suntanned, sharp and dark. Somebody from abroad hunting for a flat.
“Mr Deacon?”
How did he know his name? Deacon stared at him.
“We’ve met before, John.”
.“Have We? Where?”
The man consulted his map. “I was looking for you.”
“You won’t find me on a map!”
“Ah, this is a special map, John. An extraordinary one.” No car turned into the street and nobody walked along it. Not even a dog or cat prowled by. No birds were on the wing. Time might have stopped, or slowed to a snail’s pace.
Deacon peered at the map. It was the street plan of a strange city with no obvious place names on it, nor scale to it nor key to the symbols used. A maze of a city. Was this Cairo, or Isfahan, or Akhetaton? Or some city on an alien world? Or a city not yet built? Or an invisible city which existed and always had existed just beyond some borderline?
“I would introduce myself,” the man murmured. “But really, I have no name, though I’m known by many names…”
A man free of false ego? Someone who could travel the whole manifold network of consciousness events? Just as Deacon yearned to… The city plan seemed to contain within itself the complete circuitry of the Lemegeton of King Solomon, all its channels and thoroughfares properly linked together, with whole suburbs of permutations and interlinkages. This was a city that he would dearly love to inhabit. It seemed infinitely detailed. The more that he gazed at it, the more there was to see. He read its mandala palaces, its pentacle plazas, its cabbalistic ziggurats, its courts of symmetry which were at once places, scripts, and ideas: locations that dissolved into ideas more substantial than brick or tile, into self-generating patterns which spun the city forth from its own idea of itself. He read its water gardens of many depths. He read its mutating mazes: for the city was alive, and thoughtful, constantly evolving. The city was the higher patterning awareness.