Jerusalem

by Alan Moore

  he’s in the frosted ruins of a dream-dive somewhere up above the causes and effects, an eighteen-month-old child wrapped in his scrawny arms, both doing what dead people do instead of sleeping. Overhead, eye-straining ice geometries drip liquid hyperspheres, each carefully-spaced splash and plink in an enhanced acoustic, overlapping with delay and so convening into sparse and accidental music. Night being a fixed location on the endless avenue they rise after what they feel is sufficient rest and spend some time in fashioning a sack of wolfskin, so that they can take most of the Puck’s Hats with them as they travel on towards the gold eruption of a daybreak. Fortified by their respite, the old man runs in loping Muybridge strides, each pace a minute or two long and glaciated hours of floorboard vanishing beneath his dirty feet. The Hat-sack tied about his neck provides a furry saddle where his jockey bounces nude and laughing, making fists around reins of white hair and shrieking down the bore of history. Without constraints of flesh or Downstairs-physics they accelerate to reach a gallop in which the succession of the days becomes a strobe of jet and opal. Sometimes clustered specks flash by and bowl away into the slipstream, other people, other ghosts, but few and far between and never in sufficient numbers to necessitate more than a lazy veer in Snowy and his granddaughter’s blurring trajectory. The phantoms point and stare at the bare patriarch as he streams past them with his shrivelled tackle roiling and a conjoined cherub growing from his shoulders. Thundering, his footfalls measure the blind phases of the moon, pound through the centuries until he can detect a subtle shift of colouration in the passing everscape, cold alabaster gradually suffused with virid notes of thaw. He curbs their terrible momentum, slowing so that every step falls on a Sunday, then upon a splashing molten sunset, then ten minutes past the hour and finally he brings them to a standstill in the strange recovering tropic of the instant. Lifting May’s almost unnoticeable weight over his head he sets her down onto a felt of moss that would seem to have colonised the formerly ice-varnished floorboards thenabouts, and in that newfound temporal vicinity the ancient and the baby stand and look about them. The immense arcade has in these latitudes regained a little of its structure and complexity, suggesting dream-life and therefore an at least partly renewed population in the under-territories. Massively enlarged imaginings of trading posts seem once more to have blossomed at the distant edges of the immense corridor, and towering edifices of yard-in-diameter bamboo, places of worship or – conceivably – academies. Unlike the bleak polar austerity of vision which prevails only some several hundred-year leagues back along the line, however, these appear more intricate and equatorial in their decoration. Feather sprays and stylised monster-masks proliferate. There is a building like a kettledrum as big as a gas-holder, made from tree-bark greatly magnified and covered in a vast swathe of fluorescent snakeskin, with the once-Victorian canopy above partly restored by cable-thick lianas past which white diagrammatic clouds uncrumple on the graded grenadine wash of the sky. Tugging the loose skin of her granddad’s thigh, May points out that the giant trees protruding through the recently defrosted floor-holes are now banyans and the like, a stippling of vermillion flecks upon their high flyover branches that she thinks might be comprised of parrots. Furthermore, she observes that the outsize apertures from which they sprout are now no more rectangular but are arranged in dizzying rows of circles and ellipses, stretching off in the untrammelled distance with long hanging-garden fringes of dank moss and creeper trailing down into, presumably, the mortal huts and shelters of the world beneath. Although in the unchanging climate of Upstairs the pair no more experience an increased warmth than they had felt the cold of the more arctic reaches, they see evidence of a fecund and humid dreamtime everywhere about them. Here and there in saucer-pools between the growths of lichen there are meta-puddles straining for a third dimension, twisting upward in translucent sheets to form a thing of intersecting liquid planes much like the fluid reproduction of a gyroscope before subsiding. Something like a butterfly flaps wearily into the rising higher-mathematic steam on damp and heavy wings, a polythene bag snap and flutter rustling away between schematic fog-drifts of extrapolated vapour. On waxed tureen leaves, plump polyhedral droplets sparkle and display impossible refractive indices, Koh-i-noor perspiration, and eventually from out of the concealing vegetable shadows there emerge the period’s distinctively-adapted spectres: future shades stepped hesitantly from aetheric foliage to engage with these outlandish new arrivals, with these travellers from faraway antiquity, these representatives of an almost forgotten species. With a flinching and uncertain catlike tread, the Second Borough’s new inhabitants approach across the mossy suede, none of them more than three or four feet tall, hairless and gleaming bipeds with engraved or crenulated skins of a profound, light-drinking aubergine. Their voices when they speak are shrill and piping while their language is at first incomprehensible, and yet to Snowy’s mind has an inflection that is not dissimilar

  to the burr in the Blue Anchor, stepping fresh into its midst from Chalk Lane and the bright, throat-scorching air: Boxing Day morning. Stamping crusts of snow from off his boots onto coconut matting, bristles beaded with meltwater, the young roughneck feels heroic, mythical, though not for any reason he can put his weather-deadened finger on. The winter brilliance outside is strained through net curtains to diffuse into a whey where cigarette smudge rolls in drifts of mottled sepia and blue. Clustered in threes and fours around their tables, polished islands floated on the fug of beer-breath and tobacco, Easter Island adults stare contentedly into their glasses, into silences that punctuate the measured drip of anecdote. Made breathless by the season children swirl excitedly about their parents’ knees like tidal currents, carried by convection into other rooms or cobbled back yards glazed and slippery with frozen piss. Snowy takes off his coat and chequered scarf to hook them on the black iron quaver of a hat-peg just inside the pub’s front door, his flat cap joining them once he remembers that he’s wearing one. Temperature differentials between the interior and Chalk Lane without have cooked his stinging ears to bacon slices, with his now-concluded walk along the winter track from Lambeth carried there behind him in a regal train of circumstantial ermine. While ostensibly he’s here visiting unemployed shoemaker cousins off in one of the outlying villages, he knows he’ll never get there after a chance interruption to his travels due to occur shortly, with this latter assignation being the true reason he is rubbing circulation back into his hands in the Blue Anchor, the true reason for his journey: this happenstance port of call, in only a few minutes, will become the backdrop against which he first sets eyes upon the woman who will be his wife. Here in this very second, on this spot, Snowy has stood and brushed his palms together as though trying to kindle fire a billion times before, endlessly shaken the same tread-imprinted casts of snow onto the same coarse doormat. Every detail, every fibre of the instant is so perfect and immortal that he fears it might collapse beneath its own ferocious onslaught, its own holy weight in bottle-caps and meaning. He attempts, not for the first time, to characterise the singular elusive flavour of the morning, to attach words to an atmosphere so fragile and impermanent that even language bursts it like a bubble. There’s a subdued chapel softness to the conversation, somehow murmuring on the same waveband as the settling talcum light until the two phenomena cannot be usefully distinguished from each other. His distending nostrils cup the fugitive and unique savour, a bouillon of hops and curls of smoke like shavings of sweet coconut; a dilute memory of roses misting on the womenfolk, a spirited pretence of scent, recently gifted. On the cold and glaring day here is a sleepy satisfaction, a contented languor like a blanket hung upon the optics, on the long-untouched and taciturn piano, draped in falling folds over the seated families and something like the afterglow that follows when you’ve had it off, the strain of Christmas and the stress of the performance done with, no more worry that somebody might be disappointed. Spilled pine needles, brilliant emerald in the kids’ grey socks. The lovely greed and the indulgence in
a viscous mixture with the calm of temporary belief in the nativity, and nobody at work. The most exquisite quality is the apparent transience and seeming brevity of the respite, a sense that soon the shepherds and the sexless swan-winged things with golden trumpets shall be bleached to absences on white card by the January sun, not long until the painted carol singers with their tailcoats are retreated through the falling flakes back to their comradely and crystalline decade where no one ever lived. The pace and fury of the world appears suspended and invites the thought that if the globe’s alleged chain-gang requirements can be paused thus far, then why not further? He can almost feel the moment’s sediment, cloudy sienna churning up about his trouser bottoms, wading for the bar to get his elbows on the wood, to work his shoulders in amongst the turned backs and bray out his order for a pint of best. The owner swivels ponderously from his busy register to study Snowy with amused annoyance and there’s something in the man’s face that is more familiar and has more impact than the other countenances on display in that establishment, which in themselves all harbour the before-seen look of Toby Jugs. Viewed through his lens of telescoping time he realises that the publican’s pale eyes and rubber folds of chin are made more recognisable by all the future meetings that the two of them shall have: the landlord is premembered. Barely have the words father-in-law begun to formulate themselves in his snow-globe awareness than around the corner from the other bar she comes, explodes into his story with a swing of green skirt and some casual remark about a barrel that needs changing. Yes, of course, the emerald dress and fat fake pearls around her throat hung on grey string, it all comes back to him in a beloved rush, this woman that he’s never seen before and when in a few minutes time she says her name’s Louise he’ll say “I know”. He won’t say he’s with her dead granddaughter six hundred years away

  amongst a company of purple men whose heaven is an indoor jungle, strutting naked in the mirror-Eden of this lapsing world. On those occasions when the great unfolded garnet of a sun is visible beyond the mile-wide nets of creeper covering the stupefying avenue, the solar orb seems larger than it did. May thinks that this is caused by higher levels of particulates in the slowly transforming atmosphere resulting in an increased scattering of light, rather than by an actual amplification of the star’s dimensions. Riding high on her grandfather’s bony shoulders she is borne aloft through massively expanded bottle-trees, pregnant with hyperwater, and amidst the timid press of violet pygmies like a baby queen. The fatal marmalade from Sundews of big-top diameter is hers to taste, so that she shortly has a motorcade of monster dragonflies trailed iridescent and suspended in her wake, sharp iris or sour jade, darting to lap her sticky chin. Strolling in the arboreal centuries with gaping, fascinated future-humans in their shrill mauve entourage they are the giant ghosts of an earlier paradise, chalk-white and prehistoric, by some means arrived along the Attics of the Breath from an unreachably far latitude that is no longer even legendary. In gradual increments they come to understand a little of the native spectres’ trilling speech that rings and shivers in the dripping, crystalline delay; in the exploded echo. One word at a time they piece together something of the antic history that has informed these bald and embossed after-people, foraging their wild Elysium: a changing climate and depleted ozone-belt have, it seems, relatively swiftly compensated for the temporary arctic chill caused by the failure of the Gulf Stream, in a mere few hundred years. The current era is a tropic intermediary stage, when all the planet’s lingering rain and vegetation is restricted to the warming Polar Regions that are thus a last abode of earthly life. With dwindling resources and a limited habitable environment, even a much-diminished human population cannot be sustained without severe modifications. These have been accomplished by re-engineering in some fashion the essential mortal blueprint, with mankind as a result much smaller and possessing cells imbued with photo-active chlorophyll. The lustrous eggplant colouration and the intricately corrugated skin designed to thereby maximise its surface area are features bred into this new strain of humanity, who supplement declining rations of available organic sustenance by gorging upon the abundant sunlight. Snowy and his infant charge eventually deduce, from such fragments of anecdote as they are able to translate, that these whorled and embellished near-indigo miniatures have a truncated life expectancy of less than thirty years before ascending to the higher pastures, to the ultrasonic flutter that is their term for Mansoul. This strikes the sinewy old man as woefully curtailed and his juvenile passenger as more than generous, a minor argument between them while they wander further down the fern-defeated promenade with its viridian dapple and extended perfumes. They pass on through blood-burst dawns afire with parakeets and bullion sunsets that electroplate the pair in liquid gold, pausing at last to make camp in the rustling midnight furlongs where a faceted extravagance that May identifies as Hyper-Sirius is visible against pitch black beyond the vine-macramé overhead. Their bivouac consists of monstrous bottle-green leaves bent across a mossy hollow and secured by thick black thorns, there in the metaphysic tropics after man. On rising, after the short walk to morning, they discover what appears to be a growth of Puck’s Hats sprouting from an unidentifiable corroded mass which Snowy thinks might be a fallen ceiling-girder. Once again the astral fungi would appear to have adapted to their changed environment, developing new features so as better to entice the altered humanoids of these sun-flooded purlieus. This latest variety is, in the pair’s opinion, the most thoroughly unappetising yet. The overlapping succulent and pale feminine forms that typified the earlier displays have been replaced here by a similar arrangement of abnormally large insects, lamp black and yet iridescent if they’re turned against the light. The eye-pips are now faceted, and an experimental nibble at a snapped-off thorax has both of them spitting and complaining for some several time-miles at the vinegary flavour, near impossible to rinse away. At their next rest-stop, in the umbra of a towering and dilapidated kettle-drum construction, they unfurl their wolfskin sack to feast on the albino ‘snow queen’ blooms that they’ve collected a few centuries back up the track. At May’s suggestion they spit the pink seeds into the undergrowth about them, so that there might be a colony of fungi that are edible established here for the return trip, when the two of them are heading back this way from the far end of time. Invigorated by their breakfast of anaemic beauties they resume the journey once the little girl is set again upon the bronzing saddle of her grandsire’s shoulders. Blurring down the arcade of forever, May remarks that they are passing fewer huge masks and gasometer-sized bongos, fewer purple people. She recalls