by Lewis, D. F.
*
Greg grabbed Beth by the hand as they left the environs of their earthcraft’s pylon—without bothering to think that the meter needed inserting with an unknown currency of coinage.
“That’s for others,” said Greg, eventually, to himself, vaguely recalling the duty of parking fees on or within the scarce resources of a finite earth but also that he and Beth were simply crew members, not owners of the earthcraft.
The streets radiated as streets (i.e. as gaps between) from the area sparsely planted with pylons to other areas where more cavernous buildings clustered around thicker clumps of variously-sized pylons—some pylons with craft tethered, others empty, and a few currently being roosted by kite-shaped birds with large black plumages. In the distance, the ambiance of a city built as a patchwork of overlapping quaint village-scenarios was disrupted as the rims of giant Angevin tanks were spotted in an apparently camouflaged industrial estate unglinting in the bright directionlessness of Sunnemo Cathedral’s broken shafts through stained glass.
Greg and Beth, however, were window-shopping on a much lower level, as they passed through a precinct where some earth-stripped caves were neatly thin-roofed and glass-fronted. These contained the hardly static wares of a thriving chamber of commerce even if the gaps between these ‘shops’ were deserted... window-shown to any chance passers-by breaking this empty pattern. One labelled Sudra’s Shoes brought a wry smile to their lips as they inspected the various jingle-toed items of footwear.
They dodged into something labelled Cavé for some refreshment, hoping that any necessary payment by unknown coinage would be subsumed by serendipity.
Inside were two non-descript locals of short standing whose conversation Greg and Beth began to overhear—during which they decided to intervene with convenient questions, convenient to real visitors such as Greg and Beth themselves and to any possible vicarious visitors coiled on their backs like old-men-of-the-sea. Convenient if the conversation made any sense beyond its semi-conscious ability to refine sense into nonsense, or vice versa.
Beth was described in an unreported part of this exchange as middle-aged, buxom, pretty face scarred with frown-lines, still perky enough to lift her head above the narrative parapet. Greg remained naïve despite a mature aura of be-whiskered pink chops. He still tried to maintain his own identity in face of all attack to divert it elsewhere, but all descriptive resources remained counter-productive in this direction, whatever or whoever took up responsibility for them.
Crazy Lope: Where’s the air from, then?
Go’spank: Sea air—it’s sort of caught by the melting tectonics, you know, internal tsunamis carried within caches of air-movement made from noise.
Crazy Lope: Don’t understand. Words don’t do much for me. Any words. But specially those words. Where do words come from?
Go’spank: The words are like moving air, too, or fingered sound. Words are what drift through it. Tricking the above, the below and the across… (Laughs.)
Greg: Been here long?
(Crazy Lope seems perturbed at the interruption.)
Crazy Lope: We’ve been here longer than you two. We’ve been taking the washing in.
Greg: Taking the washing in? Is that a sort of password?
Crazy Lope: If you don’t know it’s a password, then it’s not a password.
Go’spank: Or if you think it’s a password what’s it a password for? The whole background of black noise is just one never-ending password, perhaps. (Laughs.)
Beth: (Frowning) How do they put up with all that here?
Crazy Lope: I block it out. Or rather the blocks block it out.
Go’spank: Dream blocks, yes.
Greg: Ah, but I was brought up to believe dreams were a sickness. They are perhaps defence systems, I see. Rather necessary evils. Yet so much depends on the gaps or streets between the dreams. Are we in a dream now or a gap?
Go’spank: Wish we knew. And if we did know how would you know we knew?
Crazy Lope: Wish You Were Here. Shine on Crazy Diamond.
Beth: It seems you can’t talk properly without, you know…
Go’spank: I know… It’s difficult. Conversations are obstacle courses rather than proper communication. And to say all those words “I know… It’s difficult. Conversations are obstacle courses rather than proper communication” has taken a lot of effort and concentration. I’ve never been able to say anything sensible for this length of time before, or perhaps this exact length is my personal best so far.
(The noise of a distant explosion is carried further than it would otherwise have been by sound atmospherics of the moment, as the other Cavé customers do runners.)
Greg: What’s that?
Crazy Lope: What Go’spank just said.
Go’spank: Yes, an air cushion, even an air tsunami perhaps.
Beth: (Flicking a speck of dried mud from her eyelid) There’s no noise now.
Crazy Lope: Probably the next few minutes’ of noise has turned into silence because it was crowded into those earlier few seconds when the jolt came.
Greg: Sounded like a bomb.
Go’spank: No, I think it was condensed background noise of the sirens in time-shift from a period to a moment. Lope was sort of right, for once!
(Beth sniffed at the drink she had been brought by an attractive waitress who turned all heads.)
Greg: What are you two characters up to here?
Crazy Lope: Bringing the washing in. Told you. (Laughs.)
Greg: Yes, but…
Go’spank: (Squeaking like a grey mouse and pointing at Beth in the waitress’s wake) I like your wife, Mister. She’s nice.
(Beth frowns deeply but her eyes receive the information of such admiration with a glinting smile.)
Go’spank: Can we show you round?
Greg: (suspiciously) If you like. We shouldn’t leave our pylon too far behind in case it, you know, can’t be found again.
They left into the relative outside using strung hawl-pulley hooks as direction-finders (the cost of the Cavé bill blandly settled during a gap between two intersecting dream-streets) and they all looked up at the newly blackened sky-cavity, with Sunnemo Cathedral’s fantasy light-source as a fairy castle nesting in a violet cloudscape now just a dull beige disc not unlike the coin just exchanged in the Cavé for a packed lunch.
Greg and Beth wondered why their two benighted companions now kept calling each other Edith or Clare in some new game of nemonymous passwords.
*
Stub of pencil:
My head’s led from the diseased wood of the Canterbury Oak that wraps me. And there is much for me to think about. Can a planet from which I am able to be thus created, i.e. one called Earth, be more than just the head of the person who first imagined it? An Earth from the Ear to the Ground
Who first imagined this Earth? Meanwhile, who imagined the head that imagined another head like the Earth? The thought extends both ex-ends of the dynastic ribbon of reality from first cause to last effect and realises (with both ends now missing or sharpened away) that imagination is not the best tool for imagining reality because reality is unimaginable being already there in an unimagined state. To imagine an unimagined reality would be to corrupt it or create it as a new imaginary thread through a headless head. Then this single thread, by an uncontrollable volition, would stiffen its sinews to masquerade as an imaginary weave of many threads bearing the tread of a head-leased, heavily head-led reality... the only sort of reality that causes the bodies of its inhabitants to grow cancerous.
I find that, without the Earth on which to be born with a head and to fill that head with learning and to experience or express life via its means, the same head creating the Earth needed another head to create it. Or have I already said that?
Klaxon City being a dynasty rather than a single city on a plain, Greg and Beth—our Essex couple, our salt of the earth—now are indeed (through the imagination of imagination that in turn can summon a new strength to dream novel-ly wit
hout the use of fiction) invested with the background noise of spirit needed to reconfigure their existence as new visitors to the Megazanthine Core whilst having already visited it once before—a fact which, effectively, was imaginable because they had ceased to exist as real people having once entered it as a by-product of producing the creamy Angevin or Angel Wine and thus became their own seed without having created the seed in the first place. It takes two to retro-tango.
*
As Greg and Beth left the environs of the Cavé, they decided they were being escorted by two child-sized stick-figures who used Sunnemo’s closure as a light source (with silent drapes) to feed their own emptiness from anything but manipulative bone... to feed it with charcoal drawings from another pencil stub that had a point of incipient darkness for any shading. Like a lost cartoon by Leonardo da Vinci combined with one by Walt Disney who now lived (from death) in such cross-hatches foreign to the smooth technicolor he once so relished. Yet these creatures maintained the dulcet tones of Edith and Clare—which gave a sense of comfort, especially as in their prior Lope and Go’spank modes their voices had been far too shrill.
Greg could just discern the tannoy-system strung with wires that had emerged from the earlier hawl-pulleys as part of one giant soundweb of communication—and the tannoy’s loudspeakers themselves were shaped like large human ears rather than the more normally acoustically-efficient cones. A decorative system that didn’t lose its irony in the transit from symbol to reality. One clockwork-type of tannoy (it needed to be kept wound up to keep its emissions of noise at full swell) was so violent in these emissions that it was fast burying itself into the ground... as if extreme sound was a downward motive force of drilling within Inner Earth, as well as being a wind-source, even a tornado torque.
The wailing was now deafening—now several blocks away from any possible firewall of dreams. Greg often witnessed Klaxonites passing by along the paving-slabs with huge muffs on their own ears—and others were clambering on the thinned-out roofs of some newly externalised cavities or chambers to restore any sound-proofing lost in the thinning process. Large coats of a glue-like substance were being ‘painted’ over all visible tectonic cracks that pavy-crazed this their growing ‘internet’ of homesteads. Yet, Greg felt that Sunnemo’s intermittent emissions of daylight—if that was what it was called—would later give a better view of these customary tasks of the natives amid all the daily wear-and-tear caused by both automatic and clockwork tannoys, which would be useful since he later intended to write a semi-scientific, semi-autobiographical book about his time in Klaxon City as well as his childhood elsewhere, attempting to fill in any gaps later.
As if the thought had transgressed some stewardship of dream that Edith was currently nurturing, the word ‘book’ in Greg’s thought evoked some literary talk on her part:
“Marcel Proust’s book treats of separate selves of one individual through a cross-section of time. Sometimes the selves interact, without understanding they were selves (or cells) of the same person. Nothing strange in that. Though we owe Proust a lot for his fiction and such ground-breaking concepts.”
“Pessoa, too,” added Clare.
“Yes, and Joseph Conrad had a feeling that there were so many layers of intention…”
Greg wondered how he could hear them talking—not that he was terribly interested in the content of the dowagers’ literary musings—if the wailing tannoys were so deafening. It was as if noise not only produced air movement or downward proclivities of twisters, but also a means to transfer thoughts inside such air movement without the use of speech, but retaining a disguise of speech. He tried it out:
“What are those chambers?”
He pointed to some unusually constructed areas uplifted into a huge portholed lobe of swollen earth membrane.
“They’re the Healing Chambers.”
Greg and Beth were taken into one. There they found creatures that evidently had once been human like them—but now suffering from Bird Flew. Each body (including face) was currently being cream mudbathed with Angevin (this being a new discovery of its curative qualities in addition to its known dream-masking) to remove feathers at their root so they would not return. Each patient—to have been admitted to this particular chamber and its specialist healing process—had been forced to show the depth of their illness by actually proving they could fly: hence the name of their disease. One of them was in such a state of desperation that, having once flown, he or she needed to show, so as to be treated, they couldn’t fly any more: a method that necessitated the painful process of plucking. Those that were incurable and more intrinsically (indelibly) Bird Flown or still-Bird-Flying (albeit only in dreams) were forced from their beds and frog-marched next door to what was called a Lethal Chamber.
One patient was jerking in his or her bed—as if pitifully trying to fly from within the heavy quilt. The nurses—who themselves were not dissimilar to human-like ostriches—continued, undeterred, the painful process of plucking that did not seem out of place amid all the wailing noises.
As Greg and Beth left—after their tour as tourists—they spotted a long winding queue of hopping creatures leading to one of the notorious Lethal Chambers. Some hopped a few feet into the air and then flopped back. Greg averted his eyes. None of this would go in the book.
*
Stub of pencil:
The word ‘indelibly’ was added in brackets. It may be rubbed out later. I hope not. Despite the culling that followed the plucking, I shall ignore this topic for the moment. I shall instead treat of other matters. Greg and Beth had earlier visited the Megazanthine Core so couldn’t really visit again. Yet there is a theory, as I may have mentioned already, that having produced their seed for the Angevin-bank when in company with the Hawler they were accidentally born again from that seed in re-transit—logically entailing that they never went to the Core in the first place: or that they never existed at that time to warrant their later existence beyond the fiction of their original creation. Only fiction, indeed, is able to cope with such concepts. Thanks to fiction, we are able to address the possibility—which may have never been addressed otherwise—that they could revisit the Core and thus bring back the rarer forms of Angevin needed to counter Bird Flew here in Klaxon but also in the surface cities of London, New York etc. Only an overtly illogical possibility of such a revisit could be the catalyst for the aforesaid rarefication of refinement in the Angevin process, one necessary for the ultimate virus-buster of them all. It was like a scientific process of Parthenogenesis (coincidentally the first book in the Bible)—whereby creation’s re-ignition is possible by means of creative imagination rather than by years of empirical scientific study—with cells revisiting their earlier carcinogenic selves to restore them to health. A shorthand for much else. I cannot be clearer at this stage. And I hope nobody rubs this out, simply because they don’t currently comprehend it.
*
Greg and Beth were offered a chance to view more specialist operations upon Klaxonites who were suffering from a version of Bird Flew deeper than their own bodies, with diseased feather-spindles spreading their cancerous spike-ends unto the soul itself. Beth, even with her hard-nosed Essex-girl image, was reluctant to accompany Greg on this part of the tour. So Greg—putting himself in the hands of a masked surgeon—was taken on his own to not a Lethal Chamber as such, but something far worse. Lethal Chambers would at least staunch the pain eventually.
Here Greg saw a patient—etherised upon a table—presenting a pink wasteland of body surface tussocked with Bird Flew. Apparently, this patient had earlier indeed managed flight as high as the highest pylon of the city, only flopping to earth with a wing-stressed bounce—because, otherwise, a mercifully heavy fall from flight would have ended his illness there and then. Illnesses tended to die with their patients. Except in the most diseased cases.
The surgeon was wielding a instrument like a pen-torch that emitted a beam of siren-sound more intense than any hearing could bear if that heari
ng had insufficient dream protection—which, luckily, had been provided for Greg by one of the dream stewards from Klaxon itself. Edith and Clare had washed their hands of the matter, pretending that it was impossible to offer such protection, but, if the truth were known, they simply didn’t know how to do so. The dream steward who actually took over from the dowagers, in this respect, was a character by the name of Blasphemy Fitzworth, once cat’s meat salesman in Victorian London, who was so full of makeshift dreams he was able to find one perfectly suitable for concocting a particular madness that produced impossibilities such as engendering Greg’s immunity to the shrieking ‘pen-torch’ surgical instrument.
The patient himself was resistant to any application of Angevin ointment to help with humane plucking. So, the surgeon (equally protected by one of Blasphemy Fitzworth’s dreams) aimed the ‘pen-torch’ beam of sound towards the most obtrusive of the rooted feathers and seared hard at its clawhold for some hours, as Greg watched the surrounding flesh sizzle and then melt away from the column of healing key-hole sound. Eventually, the surgeon could yank the feather-spindle from its tenacious grip on the patient’s bony soul-matter. Only the patient’s resultant wild screaming at the top of his voice was the final danger of sound-deafening proportions to any onlookers. But, with that withstood, the surgeon and Greg left the patient to recover for a while—before they returned to attack the next feather’s root in a long line of such feathers carpetting the patient’s flesh.