New Writings in SF 8 - [Anthology]
Page 15
It was 1000, and Joe Schultz, deceased, was reclining in a luxurious bed, in one of the most luxurious hotels in the Greater Danbury area. He had got there by the simple expedient of reaching across the end of the desk, behind the recepto-clerk, and taking one of the two keys in a slot nearest him. Check-out time was 1400, European style, he knew from the high-priced ads, following the news-fax. He might have seven hours of uninterrupted sleep, he figured, but if he were interrupted, so what. For Joe Schultz had found the solution to his problem. It had been right there in front of him all the time, if he had only stopped thinking like a good, law-abiding citizen. The real tip-off had come when the robo-cop, good law-enforcement officer that it was, had broken down under the onslaught of conflicting information. When it apprehended a moving, living lawbreaker, it seized and identified both ID card and offender. Joe knew little about the information patterns of such machines, but he lay there in delight, imagining what had gone on. Offender carried card of Joe Schultz. Joe Schultz was deceased. Offender was identified therefore as .. . Joe Schultz. Joe Schultz was deceased. Offender was alive. Offender’s card there identified him as . . . Joe Schultz. Pluooi! And if he preferred, he could always stay absolutely still, to be carted off to the morgue. He squirmed and stretched into a more comfortable position, drifting off into sleep as he envisioned the clothes he would secure, the foods he would eat, the places he would sleep. In the immense peace of the truly free, Joe Schultz lay, dead to the world.
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* * * *
VISIONS OF MONAD
M. John Harrison
A new British author, with a brilliant piece of modern writing, takes a look at the “inner space” of the mind as his central character makes the transition from reality to unreality. Or could it be the other way round?
* * * *
One: Identity
Bailey: supine on the studio floor—head pillowed on hands, phallic cigarette—watching the girl Monad apply paint, to ten square feet of canvas with a palette knife. Monad: nineteen and self-possessed, painting with her whole organism, in swift, precise movements; Monad in pale blue, nubile.
* * * *
It was late afternoon. The light in the studio was turning brown: puddles of late-September sun dappled his scruffy clothing. Bailey had done nothing all day but lie on the floor, smoking steadily, near to unconsciousness. Nor had he done anything more than eat or sprawl on the studio floor or make love in a lax, inert fashion for a week. Lately he had taken to sleeping for thirteen hours out of the twenty-four.
By contrast, the girl had filled half her canvas. Her technique was good—positive and self-possessed as her body—but her objective was unclear. In all probability, another week would elapse before anything coalesced from the slash of chaos on the canvas. Bailey was not interested in the process of creation. He would view the result with the eye of a professional, and she would bow to his judgment, accepting the validity of his critique without question. Because of this submission in the face of authoritative sources, she had little chance of becoming a true artist. Bailey knew this, but did not tell her. Until such time as the picture was complete, he would remain silent. S.D. had left him very little concern with such matters. Since leaving the Institute he had not touched a brush. He had abandoned his own studio in Holloway.
He saw himself as caught in a twilight period; an Orpheus of the concrete city, suspended between the Hades of Sensory Deprivation and full, sterile awareness of the outer world. His psyche hung in a limbo fashioned partly from the total awareness of itself to be found in the Tank— with its lack of tactile sensation, its constant subliminal noise level, and its amorphous lighting—and partly from the complete perception of things to be found in the loud life of the city. Consequently, he lacked drive.
He had left the Holloway flat for two reasons. Hollis, who headed the S.D. research team at the Institute in W.1, had been pestering him with daily tests—orientation, motor response and the like—and he had become angry with this nagging interruption of his thought processes. The second reason was less concrete and by far the more powerful of the two. He had felt an indefinable need for a liaison, and a need to forge a link between his wandering mind—floating, drifting in its amniotic fluid of ab-reality—and the city. Monad, who loved him, had become that link, an anchor-chain mooring him to the reality of her society, her beatnik painters and poets and parties. He had moved in with her and refused even to return to Holloway to collect his mail.
His lassitude had ceased to worry him over much. At first he had tried to defeat it, and had returned to his earlier love of poetry when painting ceased to interest him. He had immersed himself in the works of Eliot and Thomas, and attempted to exorcise the blankness in his head by writing it down. He had finally given up. His last poem, an attempt to carry the work of the pre-nineteen-fourteen Imagists to its fullest extent, had read, simply:
gethsemane
He had begun to realise his problem, then. He had gone into the S.D. experiment to escape the broil of conflicting actions and concepts in which the city had threatened to suffocate him: he had come out of it with Nirvana—and a vision.
So he lay on the studio floor as the light turned brown, watching Monad’s body. When it became too dark to paint, they ate and then made love. Monad was happy.
* * * *
Morning. Monad in pale blue, shopping in a supermarket. Monad among the chattering, dull women, a denim-hipster dryad. Bailey: lying on the double bed, watching his hands tremble and not seeing them.
* * * *
When the girl suggested a shopping expedition, Bailey roused himself from his torpor and agreed. He got as far as donning his battered cord jacket and walking with her to the front door. But the door opened on the street and the perspective of the street brought on his vision. The shift, the change of key was as immediate as a tropical dawn: the street—a perfectly ordinary brown stone hangover from Victoriana—faded into the street, the long, sweeping vee of his hallucination. He shook his head wordlessly at her. She nodded sympathetically and flirted off alone, swinging the shopping bag to some young girl’s rhythm in her head.
Bailey shut the door after her and leant on it for a minute before he made his way carefully up the stairs. He had to be careful; not only did the stairs get mixed up with the vision; becoming a sort of out-of-phase corollary of it; forcing him to consider whether he was placing his feet on them or some miasma in his head: but also, the return of the hallucination always stimulated certain motor defects that had originated from his stay in the Tank. After the experiment, he had been unable to walk a straight line; he now had difficulty in guiding his foot to the next step of the stair. Some curiously detached part of him laughed dryly: Hollis would probably blow a fuse if he could measure Bailey’s hand-tremor rate at this moment. There was no doubt that sustained sensory deprivation had a far more lasting physical effect than Hollis had suspected.
He sank on to the bed and relaxed his grip, allowing the hallucination to swamp him. Exterior noise—the rumble of heavy waggons on the main North Circular drag, shouts of children in a school yard—cut out completely. He watched the bedroom fade from around him. First, the titles of the books on the shelf: Robert Gittings on Keats became a dark blur, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings a red one; the shelf slowly sidled out of existence. The nude portrait of Monad above it followed. The last thing to go, sucked into greyness, was Monad’s joke. Written in four-inch block-capitals on a sheet of white card, it was placed on the north wall, facing him. The legend exclaimed irreverently:
IT’S ALL STOPPED HAPPENING
Monad’s appreciation of sexual innuendo was overt.
Then there was nothing but the hallucination, etched in grey-green on grey.
Bailey was standing in the middle of a road. His feet were placed on either side of the unbroken white line which extended in front of him without a curve. The horizon, too, was a perfectly straight line, clearly visible and unfogged by distance; an horizon a child might ha
ve drawn, dividing its picture into two equal, symmetrical rectangles. It existed merely as a dividing line: a separation of empty, light-grey sky and sick-green earth.
This sharp definition was repeated where the sides of the road met its surroundings. There was no sign of a kerb; nor was there gutter or peripheral vegetation: solely a precise, geometrical line.
Visually, that was all—a flat, three-tone landscape, unrelieved by vegetation or building; the white line running unbroken up the centre of the road to its vanishing point.
However, the Perspective—Bailey’s mental shorthand describing the whole sensation—was not completely visual. There were auditory and tactile manifestations as well. As soon as the noises of the city faded, and usually before the visual component of the dream was anything like completed, Bailey would become aware of the wind at his back. It was cold and hard, and it sang: a single, clear, unadulterated note.
The dream became reality. Slowly and stiffly, Bailey, impelled by something nameless within himself, unable to contradict its orders, began to walk towards the vanishing point of the road. The wind pushed him steadily along, a cold hand in the small of his back. The objective side of his mind stopped commenting on the scene from its vantage-point of consciousness and turned subjective. Utterly caught up, he walked without thinking anything ...
He had been walking for an hour when Monad reasserted the other reality, the existence-pattern of the “normal” world. She shook him gently and he stopped stumping fixedly to the unmentionable vanishing point. The wind died. There was a moment of disorientation in which he struggled to be part of one continuum or the other, flailing with his limbs to establish his whereabouts in space and time. Then, as he succeeded in focusing the microscope of his mind, the bedroom swam into sudden clarity. He looked with interest at its walls, as if they were new to him, noticing the details he had not seen before. There were faults in the study of Monad. He tried to remember who had painted it.
The girl took his trembling hands to her breast, warming them. They were not trembling through cold, but the maternal gesture was gratifying. Suddenly, he remembered who he was and what he had been doing, and for some reason the knowledge made him cry like a baby.
* * * *
Monad the hostess, in a studio full of people: talking animatedly of Bailey, as if she possessed him. Bailey: lounging with the inevitable cigarette, surrounded by beards and corduroy trousers—half-listening to young men discussing his poetry. Monad: out of denims for once: Monad the nymphette in a pale blue shift of silk, college-girl-madonna.
* * * *
Earlier that day—the second after Bailey’s latest walk along the perspective—the girl had scribbled: happy birthday, Hiroshima on the studio wall and invited a gaggle of intellectuals to a party. There were about thirty people crammed into the room, mostly earnest young men from art colleges. A good proportion of them had gravitated towards Bailey to compliment him loudly on his recently published Recollections of a Piebald Unicorn. He found their vital, enthusiastic attention pleasing, but was embarrassed to discover that he could not recall half the poems in the slim volume. They were all relics of his pre-S.D. days; hard to reach. His experiences in the Tank had blocked off a great deal of his memory. Another thing, he reflected, that Hollis had neglected to investigate.
Paradoxically, the large amount of whisky he had drunk, had, far from numbing his brain, brought him one of the moments of insight he experienced with mounting infrequency. He began to ponder. Exactly why had he consented to take part in the sensory deprivation experiment? Precisely what had driven him to seek two weeks isolation from the world and forced him into the negative stimulus of the Tank? The young men were eclipsed much as the bedroom had been two days earlier. He concentrated. The answer came readily, but it was not simple.
There had been ... too much.
He had been . . . sick; ill with the complexity of life; a malady with the city as its symbol. Pleased by this vague success, he began to probe for a tangible, a more solid memory upon which to found the architecture of his rejection of the things that had surrounded him. He delved, and came up with the diary. At first, he could picture only its cover and spiral binding. He took another drink and deliberately let the image of the book blot out his environment. Then, having satisfied himself that the memory would not dissolve, he reached out delicately and opened it.
* * * *
January 7:... finding it more and more difficult to sleep; my brain rushing round in neurotic circles; thoughts like a speeded-up tape recording, gibberish until I (I? No. Until Gardner’s depressants . . .) slow them down. The city has revealed itself as the nigger in this stockpile; although whether it is actually the root of the malaise, or just a convenient scapegoat upon which I project my inner turbulence, I cannot tell...
* * * *
January 13: At its simplest level, the city is a maze in four dimensions, a purely physical ant-heap; over-large, over-complex and over-populated. I am continually frightened that the size and complexity of the hive will one day cause it to implode, to fall in on itself in a million slivers of coloured glass and lumps of rotting concrete. Yet, this fear aside, I catch myself wishing it would do just that: anything to escape this incredible multiplicity of directions and vectors. I hardly dare leave the studio; outside, it becomes impossible to choose from a thousand ways to go; I lose my identity immediately and travel blindly, in a frantic nightmare of Underground maps and back streets. This morning I set out for Reynolds the Publishers in East 4, with the “Unicorn” manuscript. I came to in Kingsbury, shivering feverishly and wondering why I had gone there.
* * * *
January 15: The cause-effect relationship is distorted surrealistically among all these lives and thought-patterns. Nudge a man in Greek Street, Soho, and he falls off a pavement in Plumstead; drop a stone in the Serpentine and a ship goes down in an Adriatic storm; bombard your target nucleus with neutrons and happy anniversary Nagasaki. Every action presents myriad side-effects, which are unpredictable. I cannot make a decision for fear of its unnoticed, incalculable results.
* * * *
February 1: This must stop. Gardner the head-doctor tells me to leave the city before I break down (Before? He has yet to see me at night, wincing and twitching at every sound ...) Today he brought with him a man called Hollis who thinks he can help me. I must be taking up too much of Gardner’s time for him to fob me off with some pinch-penny researcher who can’t afford to buy a subject for his experiment.
Hollis outlined his ideas as neatly and precisely as he is groomed and tailored. Unlike Gardner, who acknowledges art, he is the brusque, clipped epitome of science; the all-British owl-eye of the indigestion advertisements. I asked him why he hadn’t gone to the spiritual mecca of all researchers, across the big water, and he started a long spiel on Britain’s world-position before he realised that I was gently sending him up. The temperature of the room dropped considerably.
However, to give credit where it is due, his experiment is attractive: it offers a fixed course, or at least, a chance to search for one. There is a possibility that during the experimental period I will be able to pin down a concept that does not have as many heads as a hydra. Hollis warned me that no one is quite sure of what effects sustained disconnection from reality will have on a person. I am afraid I earned another black mark by laughing at him ...
* * * *
Bailey allowed the diary to fade out. The party took its place, noisily. Somebody refilled his glass. He considered his position, relating it to the events leading up to Hollis’s appearance.
Obviously, he had found his “concept” in the Tank. Its representation, its ideograph, was the Perspective. Unfortunately, it seemed to have become as much of a fixation as had the complexity of the city before it. He was strangely unmoved by the knowledge that he had exchanged one neurosis for another, a frenetic maelstrom for a degenerate stasis. He ignored it in favour of a question that had flashed, vivid and unbidden into his brain—
> What would happen if he reached the vanishing point?
The prospect was fascinating.
* * * *
Two: Nativity
Extracts from the private journal of Dr. James Hollis, Head of Dept. 4, the Guirand Institute, London, England:
* * * *
February the fifth: B. arrived at the institute this morning, disguising his almost pitiful gratitude for this opportunity under a thin cloak of artistic smugness. He was examined during the day and found to be in only mediocre physical shape. He is, as Gardner noted, extremely disturbed and on the verge of nervous collapse. I begin to have second thoughts about using him, but there are no other volunteers.
February the sixth: B. reacted to S.D. in the expected fashion. A short time after we had settled him in what he facetiously calls “the Tank”; checked his respirator and nutrient drip; and begun to pipe the subliminal “white-sound” through his ear plugs, he fell asleep: a reaction confirmed as normal by Vernon at Princeton, during his “Black Room” experiments in ‘54.