SYLVIE'S RIDDLE

by WALL, ALAN

  And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. In the relative world of mundanity, he had reached the actual speed of creation. The photons of genius were being emitted from him, and we were left behind to study their traces, since we are unable to travel with the same velocity.

  'There was a long tradition before modem optics really began with Newton, which interpreted vision as coming from inside; we projected a light upon the objects we saw. The light then was referred to as lux, not the lumen of modem physics. Now I would suggest that we have retained this discredited concept hermetically, in our notion of genius. Over the next week I want you to look at the photographic iconography of genius. That includes the world of popular culture. I think you might be surprised at the recurrent patterns of expectation and portrayal. '

  Go and sit in the chair and start talking. I'm going to bring you into focus, Mr Treadle.'

  So they began, with John working out how to make Owen out of focus, while the world around him came back in. And Owen spoke, haltingly at first, whenever John prompted him. John had made a list of topics, of which Owen knew nothing.

  'Tell me about sex, Owen. How much do you remember about that?'

  He couldn't be sure whether John was planning on using this as actual footage, or merely experimenting. It was like psychotherapy, with a camera instead of an analyst. The curious thing was how he knew, even as he spoke, that he was out of focus.

  'Sometimes walking down the road you'll see not women, but breasts. Breasts and thighs. With women attached. And what is it? A triangle between their legs. A little delta.' For some reason he halted at that word, and explored it. 'Delta. Fur-pelted. A crop of tiny hairs like a miniature forest. This would have been where the armies would come, wouldn't it? The old invasions up the estuary. Nothing softer, no safer homecoming. Cunnus.'

  And your father used to do it with local girls down by the cemetery. Must make you wonder sometimes if you have any half-brothers or sisters walking the streets of Swansea.' John had never played this game before and Owen was not sure he liked it.

  'When I was in my teens I met one or two of them. The women, I mean. Some of them not far off my own age. None were attractive. My old man was. A tall slim bloke with thick black hair, a bit like mine, I think. I reckon he picked the ugly ones, knowing they'd be grateful for the attention. I don't think he ever had much trouble pulling. In terms of impregnation, I wouldn't know.'

  'Staying with fecundity, you don't have any children of your own, do you?' You son-of-a-bitch, John. Owen faltered, and John with one twist of his finger brought his face into sharp focus for the first time.

  'No. Sylvie was pregnant once, as you know, but there was the miscarriage, and ... things weren't going very well in our marriage at the time and ... the doctors said it was going to be difficult, maybe very difficult and… there'd be a course of treatment whose outcome couldn't be guaranteed and ... the subject never seems to have come up since. We both got on with our work. People do, you know.'

  'When you say that things weren't going very well in your marriage, would that have been because of your various affairs?'

  'Possibly. '

  'So it could be the case that your wife decided to concentrate on her work, rather than taking the course of treatment, because of her lack of trust in you as a husband and future father.'

  'It's possible.' John was finding interesting angles here by sliding in and out of focus. There was a curious dialogue going on between images and words.

  'Do you ever think that you might be reproducing the behaviour of your father? Going down to your own cemetery for your own knee-tremblers? Sometimes the cemetery is memory itself, and you have to bury it all down there.' Owen had now fallen silent, and as John brought the lens slowly into focus, the camera registered the tears slowly coursing down his cheeks.

  Five-Star Hotels of the Spirit

  At any time, day or night, a minimum of five thousand people will be visiting Lady Pneuma's website at the Delta Foundation. That's what her publicity said. They were enquiring about spiritual progress, the falling away of earthly appetites, the movement towards transcendence, the domination of the world by materialist ideology, the one true elemental, which is air, the domicile of light, the home of the angels, Mary's lovely molecules of aquamarine parthenogenesis. Her voice when she spoke on the screen was smooth and syrupy, enough nutrition in it to feed any hungry flock of five thousand. Only ever dressed in white and blue, the colour that contains all colours, and sky colour, vision colour, Mary's colour.

  Many of the pilgrims were frank. They could not make what Pneuma called the passage; they could not escape the pain, the gut-writhing pain that resulted from their withdrawal from the dark matter of food. It was as though the wretched substance had too great a hold on their spirits. Was it possible that some might be unworthy? None were unworthy, replied the transcendent Lady, none. All could make the passage, but not all would find it easy, and not all could do it at once. She herself had not found it easy. The golden flesh her body now boasted had once been white, anorexic, withdrawn. The light had only started shining through it from the inside once she had made the passage, the first one of the modem age.

  The world was snares; it was a locked sepulchre of snakes and trumpets. No one should feel unable to follow her, but it might take time. For those still encountering problems, there was a new DVD, available from nowhere except the Delta Fellowship. Its price of £30 was not unreasonable, given the love and dedication which had gone into its making. The first edition had sold out completely.

  *

  By the time the two shepherds found her, Alex Gregory had passed the point of recovery. She was now so enfeebled that her organs had largely ceased functioning. The men could not believe the sight before them, the little bundle of bones and parched skin she had become. They could not understand what had brought her so low. One of them had a mobile. He phoned the emergency services. A helicopter arrived within half an hour, but the paramedics' attempts to re-hydrate her and put some glucose into her body by means of a drip were to no avail. She died twenty-four hours later in hospital. By then her father and mother were at her side. She never regained consciousness, and so was unable to answer the urgent questions her father wanted to put to her.

  A week later he was given the book and the DVD, The One True Elemental and Lady Pneuma Speaks. The following day, in an attempt to combat his grief with activity, he started reading and watching. He started making notes.

  'Is this why you starved yourself to death, my darling?' he asked. Mr Patrick Gregory, one-time policeman and now the owner of Lex Security, decided to discover the precise factors which had led to his daughter's death. He would look upon Lady Pneuma and the Delta Foundation with the same dispassionate, forensic eye with which he'd focused on so much else in his life. But he couldn't pretend there wasn't a sharp, personal edge to this particular inquiry. Someone was going to pay.

  Three weeks later, he had read every word Lady Pneuma had ever written (or at least everyone still available) and seen all the performances on video and DVD. He had used some old contacts in the Metropolitan Police to check out a few things for him, and had been given a contact in the Inland Revenue (presently conducting their own investigation) who had proved particularly useful. He didn't know Detective Inspector Gregory (retired), nor had he heard of Lex Security, but he had been told about the death of the man's daughter by their mutual contact. And he felt no obligation whatsoever to protect Lady Pneuma, aka Rachel Askarli, from anyone or anything. Why should he?

  And so Patrick Gregory became Detective Inspector once more. He studied his materials. Included among which, one of the few other things in that bothie apart from Alex's ever-shrinking body, was her diary from the last six months of her life. After reading this through twice, he realised that there was one other person he wanted to confront, apart from the female apostle of inanition. There was also a man he wanted to see and talk to.
A man who lived in Chester.

  Confessional

  When Owen walked into the room, he saw John adjusting the camera on its tripod. The chair was already in place. The light was coming through the window. Owen wished he were somewhere else, anywhere else.

  'Ready, Owen? If you want to sit down we can start.' So Owen sat and they started.

  'Most people live inside their memory the way they live in a country or a family. But you leave yours periodically, the same way an émigré leaves a country or a home-breaker leaves his wife and kids. Have you ever thought about that?'

  'No.'

  'Have you ever wondered if your anterograde amnesia is a form of escape? It has happened a number of times in your life now, hasn't it?'

  'Yes it has, and no I haven't.'

  'You never forget words, do you Owen? You have more words at your disposal than any other human being I've ever met, but the words seem to get disconnected from their referents sometimes. Do you think this might have something to do with the way you privilege the words over the realities they're meant to disclose?'

  'What do you mean?'

  'I seem to be doing a lot of talking here, when you're the one who's meant to be coming back into focus. I'm just the lensman. I mean that if a man is sufficiently taken with his own use of words, sufficiently immersed in his own rhetoric, then he runs the danger of finding his own words more real than the reality they might express. Perhaps they become the only reality he recognises. That would amount to a psychosis. Or do you believe that the artist has the right to re-create reality?'

  'It's not a right, it's a duty. What do you think Picasso did?'

  'Well, in those minotaur images we looked at in Down In The Cave, I would have said that what makes them so moving is precisely their relationship to reality. The relationship between the minotaur and the artist is evident.'

  'The minotaur is both the victim and the victimiser. He both kills and is killed. Enter the labyrinth and you're a marked man.

  'Or woman. But then Picasso was telling a kind of truth, surely. We see in the minotaur's eyes, in the desperation of his desire, a kind of hopelessness in the man too. Isn't this a kind of truthfulness, which is one way of talking about the obligations of memory? Isn't the word truthfulness a way of saying that the obligations of memory are inescapable, in art or out of it?'

  'Picasso also said he could look directly at the sun. He was the only man who'd ever lived who could stare at the sun without having his sockets scorched. Am I in focus at the moment, John?'

  'No.'

  'How out of focus am I?'

  'Not sure there's an effective terminology for degrees of unfocus.'

  'Is the world behind me in focus? The canals; the roof tops; the old mill?'

  'Yes.'

  'Well, I suppose if a man can't be in focus, at least his world can be.'

  'And his memory, Owen? Can he leave that in a warehouse, I wonder?'

  John twisted the lens and Owen was in sharp focus for the first time during the whole of that shoot.

  'A warehouse. Memory in a warehouse. Was that where they were screaming then?'

  'Only one of them was screaming, Owen. Don't you remember? You wrote the scene and insisted on playing it out that way. I could easily have made do with a few emblematic shots and some montage, but no, you had to have the screams and the scene in situ. You only hit her with the whole thing ten minutes before we had to do it. You only hit me with the whole thing at the same time. Don't you remember? I think you do remember, Owen. You can't do such things in life and then discard them by cutting the memories loose. I don't think that's truthful. And you always insisted it was the truth we were after.'

  There was silence for a few moments and Owen's face became concentrated in the way that it did when he was really working. John kept the image in focus. We can go back out again later. But this was the image of the return of memory, and he wanted it sharp. He had assumed that the moment of memory's return would be redemptive; now he realised it might be tragic. Make for a better film.

  'It was my hand, wasn't it, gripping her, keeping her in place, though the camera couldn't see that, could it, John? We'd set the shot up so that I could be invisible, holding her in place. You used the hand-held camera, so the confusion was part of what we were filming. She trusted me so much. "You'll be there, won't you, Owen?' She kept saying that, and I kept saying, "Yes Alex, everything is going to be fine." The softness: that's where they want their hardness to be. It's the delta where everything goes in, and I suppose everything comes out finally. So many shouts. They were Romans, weren't they, and Serbians, Soviet soldiers in 1945 entering Berlin, Japanese conscripts in Manchuria with their comfort women. Their uniforms didn't matter. We had those anonymous baggy suits made for them with camouflage markings. A warehouse with a concrete floor Could have been a basilica, a transit hut, any house of detention in any town, at any time. That was the point wasn't it, to show the way history kept repeating itself. She didn't have any shoes on, did she, Johnny? It must have been cold for her; you know. Those hard men moving in. Heading for the triangle, the delta. They were going to get into that, even though the woman the triangle led into wanted to keep them out so badly. And her cries were real now, weren't they? This would be superb, wouldn't it, John, when we saw the footage afterwards? The awards would roll in for this one. A genuine passion play of our time.' Owen was smiling now, an oddly detached, entirely uncheering smile.

  Very slowly, John Tamworth slid the camera out of focus, and let the video continue running, with a shadowy blur in front of it, now fallen silent.

  The following morning, Owen tried to look at himself in the mirror, but he couldn't find anything there. Alex had told him some story, he remembered, about how it was a Taoist doctrine that evil couldn't look at itself in the mirror. The silent shriek of recognition abolished the looker. But it wasn't that. Each time he looked in the mirror his own face kept being replaced by that of Alex Gregory. He could even hear the gentle fluting of her voice as she said to him, 'Oh come on, Owen, you wouldn't really ask me to do that.' He had asked her though; more than asked her, hadn't he? Even held her in place while the images were made.

  As he stood looking in the mirror, John Tamworth was knocking on the door of Sylvie's house.

  'I need the coat. The greatcoat you told me about.' They sat together in the kitchen drinking coffee.

  'It feels bad, John.'

  'It is bad, Sylvie. Somebody died this time. Owen wants to make a film about memory. Maybe he wants to turn his life into a film, the way we turned Alex Gregory's death into one. First we filmed it, then she lived it. Died it. I don't know. I want the greatcoat. The one he always wears when he switches off the lights inside and goes walkabout.'

  'What are you going to do to him, John?'

  'Make him real.'

  'By turning him into film?'

  'That's how he made Alex real. Altogether too real.'

  'What's happening with Deva?'

  'Don't know. Not going to be easy, is it? Have you seen it yet?' She shook her head.

  'Should I?'

  'Don't ask me. It's very powerful. Too powerful maybe.

  Images should keep their distance. Don't expect to be eating popcorn. You'd choke on it. Where's the coat?'

  'Down in the cellar.'

  So they went down together. He folded it over his arm. The tabloid newspaper was still sticking out of its pocket.

  *

  Deva. Deva Victrix. A Roman goddess of war. She urged her troops on to slaughter. Chester, the city of the eagles, had been named after her, and the river still carried her name. The Severn was Sabrina. The Romans couldn't be in a place for a week before they populated the landscape with their gods. Gods in the sky, gods in the earth, goddesses in the trees, nymphs flitting back and forth, trying to escape the impregnating force of the big powers, never succeeding except by taking a different form entirely, taking on a different life. Metamorphoses. Vibrant constellations. Picasso was at
home with this. He was the Ovid of the visual arts. The world of the Vollard Suite is a world of Mediterranean classicism. Ancient sculptors lay back with a glass of wine and a Roman beauty. Nakedness is a form of aristocratic languor. But breaking in to the world of plinths and memories and draperies and afternoon divans awaiting their sumptuous nudes, the minotaur arrives. So what's his place in this landscape then?

  Not at home, that's for sure. Is any labyrinth a home? He is an asylum-seeker in the halls of a chilly culture, a vagrant appetite that can't be accommodated inside any museum. He is a hunter hunted. His animality cannot be denied, but neither can his intelligence. He is an animal who understands that what intelligence he has dooms him to extinction, but sadly for him he can't escape his own intelligence. Not only must he die, but he must watch his own dying. Sometimes he seems to be more of a man than the other men around him. But those horns of his will dig in to the flesh of others. The appetites cannot be put for ever out of focus, however intelligent the minotaur's eyes might be. His intelligence is at least in part an acknowledgment that he can't disown his own desire.