‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll give it a try.’
Krishna seemed galvanised, sprang up from the desk to take her money—more than she had expected, considering all the special deals. His voice had returned to deeper normal.
‘I’ll only charge you the basic now. You can pay the rest at the end, depending how long you stay in. Right—just sign this form disclaiming all … That’s the way. Now how about some little extras—self-motivation tapes, for instance?’
‘I … I beg your pardon?’
‘Listen While You Float. We’ve got over two hundred different titles here—any problem or fantasy that’s bugging you, we can take care of on cassette. And there’s a dollar off every one you choose. Stop Nail-Biting, Start Living, The Joy of Sobriety, How to attract Money To Yourself …’
‘Er … no thanks.’
‘Or there’s music if you prefer. Angel Voices—that’s a real gentle one. The Upper Astral Suite is more way-out, and the Pathless Path creates a sound environment which takes you right out of your body into …’
‘No, really. I don’t think …’
‘We’re offering Celestial Odyssey tee shirts at almost one third off. Red, blue, yellow, green or brown. Or there’s black with a silver logo. That’s ninety-nine cents extra.’
‘M … Maybe when I get out. I’d like to try the tank first.’
‘Okay, come this way. I’ll take you to the shower-room. We like you to wash off all body oils and make-up before you float. Follow me, please.’
Morna followed, almost changed her mind when she saw the state of the shower-room—puddles of water on the floor, sodden towels discarded in the corner, basin stained and cracked. The lights were still dim—just as well, perhaps, or she might also have spotted a tide-mark round the bath, other people’s matted hairs clogging up the plughole. It was the first American bathroom she had seen which was not immaculate.
Krishna passed her two unironed yellow towels and a grubby plastic shower cap. ‘Call me when you’re through and I’ll take you to the tank.’
Morna nodded, removed her clothes, still in a semi-stupor. She ran the shower cold across her shoulders. Perhaps that would wake her up, bring her to her senses. It wasn’t too late to change her mind. She could simply put her clothes back on and march out of the place. Even if she lost her money, it would be better than enduring some damn fool or dangerous experience. She grabbed the towels, opened the door, poked her head out. ‘Krishna,’ she called.
He was there so quickly, she suspected he had been watching her through a secret spyhole. Perhaps he turned himself on by luring women into showers and then gawping at their naked bodies.
‘I’m sorry, but I’ve decided not to …’
‘Through with your shower? Great! I’ve put you in tank number three. That’s a lucky one. The last guy who went in there stayed in seven hours and saw the face of God, and the girl before that …’
Morna was jogging after him, barefoot and only half covered by the skimpy towels, trying to interrupt him, panting to keep up. ‘Look, I didn’t realise the time. I’ve got to …’
‘Right. This is it.’ Krishna opened the door of a small low-ceilinged room, lit only by a glimmering table lamp shrouded by a towel; the one small window totally blacked out. There was nothing in the room save the tank itself, a black rectangular box which brought to mind both a dog kennel and a front-loading washing machine, somehow incongruously fused.
The room smelt strange—not incense any more—a less pleasant smell of must and damp, stale bodies. She doubted if it had been cleaned in the last month, or even year. It was too dark to see the cobwebs, but she suspected they were there, could feel crumbs beneath her feet on the threadbare matting.
Krishna had lifted the hinged lid on the tank, revealing an oblong hole and darkness. She had been mistaken. It was nothing as wholesome and hygienic as a washing machine, or as harmless as a dog kennel. It was a coffin—her coffin—and any second she would be inside it with the lid closed, buried alive. She darted away, fumbled for the door handle.
Krishna scooped her back. ‘Everybody’s nervous at first. It’s natural. All it means is you’re fighting your own hang-ups. You should really have had a tape—one of our Fight Stress range, or a Pre-Float Relaxation Session. There’s one dollar eighty-five off those. Okay, okay, we’ll skip the tape, but just try and relax—like let go of the tension, right?’ He looked none too relaxed himself, fingers tapping impatiently on the lid. ‘Come on now. Just step in there and lie back, like I said. Get out of your fear, put your mind elsewhere.’
Morna crawled into the opening, felt blackness clutch at her hair, slimy tepid water close around her ankles. She tried to struggle up again, grab Krishna’s hand. ‘No, wait! Don’t go. It’s dark. I …’
‘Just float. There’s only ten inches of water, anyway, and it’s so buoyant you couldn’t drown if you wanted to. Remember what I told you—there’s eight hundred pounds of Epsom Salts dissolved in there. That’s better. Let your head go. You’ll get a stiff neck if you hold it up like that. Great! I’ll come back in a hour and see if you’re doing all right. I don’t want to disturb you if you’re into your own space. I’ll just tap on the door, okay? If you want to come out, say so. If not, I’ll check back later.’
‘No.’ Her voice sounded muffled, strange. ‘I don’t want even one hour. You don’t understand. I …’
He couldn’t hear her, had already closed the lid, plunging her into now total darkness. The room was soundproof, he had told her, so she couldn’t even hear his footsteps retreating down the passage. Her neck was stiff already, but she was scared to let it go. The water was over her ears, soaking her hair, might run into her eyes. She was floating, miraculously, but it didn’t feel secure. She might tip and overbalance, submerge her face. She dared to swallow—the sound deafening in her throat, except she had lost her throat, lost all her boundaries. There was no hot nor cold, no night nor day—no winter, summer, outside, inside, body, mind. She was afraid of her own fear, could feel it rising like the water. It could flood her, overwhelm her. Fear of the blackness, three-dimensional blackness pressing down like a blindfold. Fear of the confinement—shut up in a box, only eight foot by four, nailed down in a coffin with no light nor sound nor …
No—there was a sound—the roar of her own heartbeat drumming in her ears. It got louder, louder, until she was nothing but one gigantic heartbeat, rumbling through the tiny space like thunder with no lightning flash to rip apart the darkness.
She couldn’t breathe. What about an air supply? Krishna hadn’t mentioned that. Her grandfather had been imprisoned in the Great War. He, too, had died before she was born, but she had heard his story—shut up in solitary confinement for endless days and nights, cornered with his own excrement. She could feel his panic added on to hers. Her cell was smaller than his, further underground. She could die of panic. No one would hear her if she screamed. She would simply continue floating, a white corpse in the blackness. Krishna might never return and she would slowly rot and crumble, decay into black nothingness herself.
Almost without thinking, she crossed her arms on her chest, overbalancing a little, splashing water in her eyes. It was difficult to lie like that, made her neck ache more, but it was the pose the nuns had recommended when you went to sleep. If you died in the night, you were more likely to bypass hell if your arms formed the Sign of the Cross. Neil had hooted when he heard. ‘It merely stopped you frigging, that’s all.’ Neil didn’t understand. They had been far more interested in touching the hem of Christ’s garment than in touching themselves.
She wasn’t ready to die, in any case. There were things she had meant to say to Chris, hadn’t found the words for yet, things she wanted Bea to understand. She groped out her hand, felt it brush the coffin lid above her, the enclosing walls each side. She could almost see the clogged earth heaped on top, levelled by the grave-diggers, hear the echoing silence as they stomped away. She closed her eyes, returning her arms
to her chest, lurching in the water, feeling its strange clammy density buoy her up again. Better to accept her death. No more panic then, no more dull ache in her shoulders, no drowning, suffocation. Just gradual self-extinction. There was peace in it, a peace she was experiencing already, beginning to creep over her as she sank back, back, let her head loll free. She was still aware of the pounding of her heart, but now she was the pounding, was the darkness. She was seeping through her own boundaries, losing her outlines, dispersing into drops of the same black heavy water she was floating on.
The water deepened. How strange that she had felt herself confined. She was adrift now on a vast ocean, the immensity of a fathomless sea beneath her, the million million miles of sky above. Something bumped against her thigh. A ship? A meteor? Her own hand. She heaved it out of the water—the hand of a corpse, heavy, waterlogged—held it out in front of her. She could feel the fingers swelling, pulling out of themselves like the tentacled eyes of some gigantic water-snail, growing so massive, so unwieldy, she could only let them fall again. It was no longer hand but claw—the claw of some huge prehistoric crested beast dragging its cumbersome limbs across dark and silent swamps, as one endless aeon heaved into the next. Except time was rolling backwards. She was losing crest and claw, drifting back, back, until she was some watery creature with neither limb nor brain nor eye. Just a cell, a blob. The roaring noise she had mistaken as her heartbeat was the groan of the world as it crept back to primeval slime. That, too, died away. Now there was only embryonic silence, the expectant hush before creation.
Her foot touched against the edge of the tank. No foot, no tank. It was the edge of the world she had encountered, a world still cold and barren, still waiting for the flash and roar of life.
She tensed. Someone was tapping on the world, trying to break it open, hatch it like an egg. She could hear the echoes ripping up the blackness, disturbing the eternal silence. Creation would only bring confusion—light and pain, the trap of time, the maze of consciousness. She had escaped all that, shed them like a skin.
‘No,’ she muttered. ‘Go away.’
The tapping stopped. She let herself sink back again, realised suddenly that the world as she knew it was colossally absurdly tiny, their whole galaxy but a single microbe on the one spiked eyelash of a vaster universe, their earth’s four and a half thousand million years nothing but a sneeze, a second, in its illimitable unfolding. She still had to travel backwards through countless ages where time meant nothing as millennia dwindled into seconds and seconds blossomed into slow infinity; where there was no longer any difference between air/water, sound/silence, darkness/ light. She felt a perfect peace, a perfect emptiness.
She closed her eyes, felt herself falling through the lids, down down down into infinite and echoing nothingness.
Chapter Twelve
It had stopped raining. Morna emerged into the street, blinking against the glare. Everything was shining—puddles reflecting sunlight, glass refracting light. She was glass herself, transparent, with nothing left between the two clear panes of her body. Her brain had been taken out and rinsed, held under ice-cold running water, her eyeballs polished, mouth re-hung.
She crossed the street, branched right, then left, right again. No longer lost, she was drawn towards the centre of the city, seeing not squalor now, but beauty, space. Trees were in blossom, pink and white confetti loosened by the breeze, drifting into puddles, embroidering the plain grey paving stones. Waifs and misfits had all gone home, replaced by handsome vigorous people, a newly created race with smiling faces, shimmering clothes. The sun itself was new, beaming raw and radiant in a freshly valeted sky.
She turned a corner, gasped at the upward rush of a skyscraper, the ever changing movement of the city reflected in its glass. Solid shapes were bent by it, distorted—lights, sun, flashing signs, all swallowed up, disgorged again. There were lorries in the glass, rumbling towards chimera buildings, writhing, disappearing, transmuting into cloud. A second glass-clad tower block swapped its fifty dazzling storeys with the first, merged, refracted, then snatched its outlines back again. Morna watched, entranced. She was hemmed in now by skyscrapers, magnificent—man’s new cathedrals, but dwarfing man who made them.
‘Excuse me.’
She swung round. One of the race of gods, dressed in silver grey and shining, had stopped to speak to her, a guide-book open in his hands.
‘I wondered if you could tell me the way to the Museum of Science?’
She shook her head, unsure yet whether all her faculties had fully returned. Sight certainly; hearing yes, since she had grasped what he had said, even registered his accent as well-modulated English, but speech …?
‘Or are you a visitor yourself? The first person I asked was Australian and the second Serbo-Croat, judging by his accent.’ He laughed. ‘I hoped with you I’d picked a native.’
‘No,’ she murmured. ‘I’m English—I come from Surrey.’
‘Good Lord! So do I. Godalming, near Guildford. How about you?’
‘Weybridge.’ Morna looked up again to where one proud building soared beyond its fellows, lost its head in cloud.
‘We’re almost neighbours, then.’ He followed her gaze. ‘Been up there yet? The view’s spectacular. I did it yesterday. See the lift. It goes up on the outside of the building. You need strong nerves.’
She looked where he was pointing. A tiny black object was clinging like an insect to the sheer precipitous wall. Suddenly, it moved, as if it had sprouted wings and was soaring up, up, up, until she was craning her neck to keep track of it, reeling with the speed, watching it dwindle to a speck as it reached the dizzy top.
‘You mean, you can … go in that? That high and …?’
‘Oh, yes. It’s one of the attractions of the city. Says so here.’ He waved his guide book. ‘Want to try? I wouldn’t mind a second ride.’
She stood there, silent. This was a stranger, so she shouldn’t talk to him, yet a shining stranger, created out of slime, and growing wiser, purer, as he received eyes, hands, brain, tools, soul. She had watched the process in the tank.
‘We could have a drink together—drink a toast to Surrey. There’s a bar at the top with quite the finest view in all LA.’
She was still wondering how to refuse when he took her arm, guided her across the street and up some steps. The glare of sun on glass faded into the gentler light of silk-fringed lamps, as pavements softened into pile, trees scaled down to potted plants.
‘Right, up we go.’
The lift doors closed behind them. She didn’t even know his name. Supposing …? There was a sudden leap from in to out, wall to sky, as the lift ripped through the fifth-floor roof and catapulted onwards, on the outside of the building now. Fear fell away, her stomach fell away, as streets, traffic, trees, were left behind; buildings flashing past her, the clouds themselves looking close enough to touch.
She hardly knew that they had stopped. The stranger had to push her out and she walked in a daze towards the huge glass windows encircling her like a cage. There was no sense of being confined. She shared that cage with the whole stupendous city and its suburbs, glittering in the glass, spreading around, beyond, beneath her, in the scarlet shock of sunset. How could it be sunset, the new-born sun already dying? She had set out in the morning, lost great chunks of time, let them break off and float away like icebergs in a treacherous sea. She clutched at the wall, dizzied by the carousel of streets below, the tiny coloured cars strewn like children’s toys. Skyscrapers clustered all around her. She was no longer looking up at them, but staring into their gleaming polished faces blushing in the sun. She walked slowly round the circle, each window opening up a different vista, a new slice of gold and scarlet. Beyond it shimmered haze or smoke or ocean, lost in the horizon, blurring into sky.
‘Stunning, isn’t it?’ The man was following her, stopped when she did, gestured to a table. ‘Well, how about that drink?’
She nodded, needed one, sank into a padded vel
vet chair. He pulled his up beside her. ‘I think it’s time we introduced ourselves. You first.’
‘I’m M … Morna,’ she said uncertainly. Was that still her name or had she been re-created and re-christened?
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Morna. Like Lorna, but with an M. Morna Gordon.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Morna. I’m David Attwood.’
‘David?’ She knew then it was meant. Not just the same Christian name, but a surname which also started with an A. She had posted him a valentine, across miles of land, endless miles of ocean, and he had received it already, sent her a reply. Even in the tank, she had felt his guiding spirit, glimpsed mysteries, unfathomables, things he had hinted at in his talk at the retreat. She glanced up at her companion. The two were in no way alike. Her David was taller, leaner, more intense. She could hardly have described this man, or reported the colour of his eyes and hair with any accuracy. It was not just that she was blinded by the sun, but her perceptions were still blurred, her mind adding a gloss and resonance to everything she saw. She must simply be still, let him talk until her world had stabilised. It was enough that he was a David.
‘I don’t normally drink cocktails,’ he was saying. ‘I’m a whisky man, in fact—but they’re bloody good up here. I can recommend the Top Of The Tower. That’s vodka-based with …’
‘You choose.’ She didn’t want to talk, rather gaze out at that astounding scarlet skyscape, that new and brilliant creation—busy freeways reaching out, doubling back, engulfed in pink-tinged cloud. The bar was revolving very slowly like the globe itself, spinning through the stars. There were no stars yet, only the tail-lights of jet planes meteoring past. Man had moved from slime to Concorde in one afternoon.
‘See that building with the sort of greeny sheen? That’s my hotel. I thought it was tall until I came up this high. My boss stays here, in fact, but it’s too pricey for mere underlings. The only reason I’m in LA at all is that he went down with some kidney thing the day before his flight left. Rotten for him, but quite a chance for me.’
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