–What?
–You called me something.
–Did I? No, I couldn’t have. Come on, let’s go.
–You did. You say the oddest things. During the funeral you muttered something about a bucket.
–Well, I don’t know.
–Sometimes I wish I had married a simpler man, more imaginatively illiterate, I mean, who couldn’t read me, and who wouldn’t bother to learn, though that too can hurt. But as you said once, it struck me at the time, character never hurts, lack of character does.
–Did I say that? I thought someone else –
–No. No. He wouldn’t. Where do you go, Larry? I mean, do you have anyone? I often suppose you have. I wouldn’t blame you. Life has a way of balancing things.
–I move through my sleeplessness and my internal decay. You can smell it, can’t you? I have someone there. A sort of giant horse-fly falling into dust.
She starts crying again. She fears the unknown in me but doesn’t label it with a big round zero, or if she does she sees through it at times as one watches the absolute immobility of a wing against the ultra-violet light through the window of a plane flying at the speed of years, unless perhaps the nervous handwriting of distant nebulae bleeping across the dial, saying what do you want, Larry?
–To learn to love. I mean, not just to walk through people like so much moon-dust, not just to see and hear the degenerate matter and accept –
–Like Stance.
–Stance?
–I like your name for him. It helps me to – detach myself. He likes people, he says, he sees the worst and best in them and accepts it, but only to make use of it and shrug it off. Unless at any point the worst or even the best needles his own self-satisfaction and then, oh then, he condemns and destroys.
–We all do that, Brenda. Some people have transparency but resistance, like solid light, so that you merge with them but can’t walk through them. Some have a soft opaqueness, which deflects the light waves travelling through it and upsets the definition. That hurts. You can walk easily right through them but in a slimy contact. Sometimes I feel that during my death I became everyone I know and I left myself behind. Or else, if that means anything nowadays, as if I had acquired something of creation, but nothing of humanity.
Means of communication have lost their secrecy and anyone could photograph them, record them, amplify them to the hundredth power and go stark raving mad. We no longer walk the earth on our ten or twelve feet, we travel on roaring motorbikes, in petarding sports-cars, in siren-ambulances, in fire-engines that clang through towns, shooting the lights, why did you shoot the lights, Tin Roof, I didn’t, sir, I shot the policeman, and in express trains that whistle through long tunnels, thunder across continents, crash into grand canyons, leaving us maimed, half-buried in a maze of twisted steel. Why, Tin Roof, why all the hurry? Look what it does to us, to our bodies, to our nerves.
No one would recognise our once almost spherical shapes now, neither our cylinders nor our inner circles. Gut Bucket looks dented. Dippermouth peers through a smashed dial, Potato Head’s upper and lower shapes seem held together by only the slenderest waist. As for Something she hardly speaks these days without crying or snapping, her face grown quite rectangular with little orange lights flickering all over it. So that our nerves fall out of us in great bundles of wires that bulge out of our bowels. We never play cat’s cradle with our meridians now. Only Tin Roof with his crash-helmet seems perpetually unharmed. But one thing puzzles me, can you explain it, Something? The bent old lady in the square –
–Oh, Lazarus, don’t bother me with transferred identities. Why shouldn’t she take over? You should understand these things by now.
–You once told me, Something, to let the argument proceed before clogging it. I merely wanted to know how they buried her. The plot promised to her, beside ours, remember, has an oblong shape, well, like any other. But if she died bent like that, from poverty, she must have needed a right-angled coffin, and a right-angled grave.
–No, sir. They put her in the square on the hypotenuse. Surely you must have noticed it. I drove into the wrong square at first, you see, hence the time I took, and the noise, apologies, pater, but anyway she had plenty of room.
At twenty-four, Tin Roof astonishes me with his polite charm and his love of noise. I never know whether he mocks me or not. He speaks respectfully but his tone makes me uneasy. He doesn’t take after me at all, I never had polite charm, and never went in for noise, I collect silences. Why do you like all this noise, Tin Roof? I mean, thank you for your explanation, which I find entirely satisfactory, more than Something deigns to give, but you haven’t answered my first question yet. Why all this noise? I collect silences.
–What happened to your collection, sir? I’d like to see it.
–Oh, really! You do it on purpose. I can’t get through to you at all.
–Tin Roof, sir. Really hasn’t come back from orbit yet.
–Orbits! Ellipses! Meridians! Latitudes! The Travel Agent surrounded us with them protectively, to guide us, they used to stretch like elastic so that we could contain everything within ourselves. We used to play with them. What’s happened to our meridians, Something, why do we lie buried under this twisted steel?
–She won’t tell you the truth, dad, already on the edge of that big round hole you came out of like a sinking nincompoop I warned her not to give you her hand. But she got herself all besotted with you. Oh, no, Someone, I play it your way.
Dippermouth imitates her with a snarling simper and I want to hit him but Something stops me or my half burial under twisted steel. Potato Head feels for my hand, sniffs at her failure to find it and my lack of help. Gut Bucket keeps very quiet, can hardly breathe in fact with his caved in thorax and I don’t care. Only Tin Roof in his crash-helmet sits unharmed.
–I told you, Lazarus, you can’t get rid of origin by giving it names, except for a time. Origin comes back.
–Whose origin? I never fathered this brood, you said so yourself, it came out of your knee, a hard-boiled egg, and you flung –
–Don’t mention it.
–the slices and nevertheless I trusted you. I helped you after all. Some trust. You’ve let me down, Something, let me down badly.
–Please, let’s wait until the salvage men come and get us out. Our nerves have spilled all over the place, look at them.
–And what about that fine upstanding young man sitting around unharmed, why doesn’t he do something?
–He can’t, Lazarus. Not until you get through to him. Oh please don’t let’s go on like this.
–Like what?
–It makes me feel so … desolate.
She cries. I feel half buried in twisted steel and cold indifference. What have they done to me, and what have they to do with me? I want to go back, I have left a wife in a state of shock that invites predatory selfishness, I have left jobs undone, patients uncured, theories unthought out, wasted here in this twisted steel and these spilled out nerves, waiting for a long lever-crane of criss-cross metal to lift the train off us. I watch it through the window as it creaks and clanks, diameters round from left to right and then from right to left, its cabin off-centre with an automan inside who operates the switches so that the cubic weight at the short end moves round with it and the pulley at the long end travels along it at the speed of slowly returning health. But it will never get here to lift the twisted steel from all this lot that has nothing to do with me.
–But it does, Lazarus, it belongs to you. Why didn’t you tell the journalists about them? I asked you to. I made only one condition.
–What journalists? They’ve gone. Or never came.
–Your daily friends, Lazarus.
–I have no friends.
–You let them go. You’ve always let them go, moving through people as through so much dust. But they’ll come back.
–Have I moved through you, Something?
–I tried to help you. I even write you little notes sometimes.
–But I can’t read waves and sounds, Something, not from you. You’ve only enabled me to read them in others, and I don’t like it. I can’t talk to people, Something, and it hurts.
–You chose the supersonic, above words, remember.
–Well, then, all the more –
–I know. And we did use words. Too many. But you insisted on the transit drink, as I knew you would, on account of your name. But I hoped that somehow, with your five geometries, you’d manage.
–I have no geometries, you must have made a mistake. Or else I lost them, left them on the plane, in the pocket of the seat in front, or in the upper parietal lobe.
–These geometries work through people, Lazarus, you said so yourself. You must trust your friends.
–You mean, Dekko, and Stance, and people like that? How can I? I draw the line as a rule between one solar system and another.
–Yes, well, you go too far, I mean you exaggerate.
–I trust you, Something, or at least, I trusted you once.
–And others too. Your daily friends, Lazarus, from all your days.
–My daily friends, the journalists. I don’t understand. You mean Tell-Star, and people like that?
–You studied with him.
–I – good God –
–At Tin Roof’s age.
–Ph.D. Sociology.
–Something like that.
–He masturbates and picks his nose in his unscreened existence. I could read right into him as well.
–So do you, Lazarus.
–What!
–You masturbate your brain with false causalities that heal nobody, infinite calculations that increase the distances.
–But Something, haven’t I proved –
–to your own satisfaction, yes.
–Have I become Stance, then?
–A little more of his genial unconcern wouldn’t have harmed you. Instead of – his other aspect. It … It makes me feel so … desolate.
–Tell-Star! Of course.
Beyond the door with the round window in it the machine clatters out its binary arithmetic on virgin sheets of paper covered with ones and zeros. Tim Dekko stands by the operand, his tight-wrapped face turned towards Brenda at the control-panel who brings down the switches in a quick competent succession. The little orange lights flicker like stars over Erase, Inhibit, Block, Prime, Pulse, Mesh and things like that. At his feet a mesh of wires wrapped in green, grey and red plastic bulges from the machine’s lower bowels onto the floor.
Brenda has left the back of the drum open, facing the door with the round window in it, so that, says Stance, my secretaries can see, and tell my wife, that I don’t get up to anything, except Tim Dekko and Brenda and two engineers in dumb show beyond the drum full of power thyratrons like regimented cylinders wearing haloes of blue light. Yes well, we all have cylinders, when you come to think of it, but some tick away quietly, bouncing their messages against the moon, some have more depth, more guts, and a shining inner face silent with quiet meditation, some have a double shape that fills itself with sap as with vibrant resistance you can see into but cannot penetrate. Others, like me, have nothing but a thick opaqueness of flesh which you slice through like butter, failing to make more than a slimy contact, until the reality of a dead professor or someone, so much more present even in his death than in his dying life moves through me with its vibrant atoms that whirl round mine, create resistance.
Tim Dekko turns his tight-wrapped face towards Brenda at the control-panel and yells his head off in the dumb-show of the silent film framed by the door’s round window which becomes oval, replaced by a narrow shaft of sound and the long rectangle of their conversation in twinkling orange lights, Alarm Reset, Next Instruction and the clatter of binary arithmetic, oh hello Laurence, how did you get in?
–Brenda, I must talk to you.
–Not now, Larry, not now.
She pulls down switches quickly, competently and jots down her comments on a pad in a column called Narrative, figures in the column called Location, a tick under Next Instruction.
–Brenda –
–Won’t it wait, Larry?
–I’ve remembered something.
–What?
–Something … of the narrative, the location.
–Oh, go away, Larry. Can’t you see we must finish this programme.
–What programme?
–Track, eight four two one. Syne shot. Block Prime Pulse Mesh.
–When did I marry you, Brenda?
–Oh go away, Larry, for heaven’s sake, go.
No doubt Stance would have watched the operation and shrugged, his grey eyes veiled with knowledgeable labels at my poor performance. He would have done much better in the circumstances, but then, circumstances do not touch everyone with their enmeshed meridians. He has one stance to adopt and with it he lassoes my wife, Tim’s wife, and they come like mares. They like one-stance men, they read them from afar, then having deciphered their one stance get angry and embittered at their own lack of love. Remote Bermuda dies with me vicariously as she moves out of the one stance that melts away from my enmeshed meridians. But if I had really died I would have had, surely, a flash of something that would not translate itself into indifference. I have lost the equations that enable people to move through people easily without love. I hear, see, read all the inscriptions that emanate in waves from the radiating coronas of all their little solar systems, unless they only pretend to emit, like actors. And underneath the hearing, seeing, I have corked ears, blind eyes, unfeeling hands, I speak through a cleft palate, break my promises, I have let something go.
–But you don’t suffer the children to come, if I may say so, sir.
–Forgive me, Tin Roof. I couldn’t bear the noise.
–Or the smell either, sir, or the glugging of communication, or the ticking of your time.
–What shall I do, Tin Roof?
–Recognise me, father. A little recognition can do a lot for an unprodigal son.
–You mean, you remained at home all the time, while I expected the other?
–You expect him all the time, father.
–Really.
–Yes. He will come of course, he has never stopped coming.
–At forty-eight.
–Congratulations.
–How shall I recognise him?
–We all look alike, under the differentials.
–Yes well, the infinite divergencies confuse me.
–You confused us too, breaking the laws, altering our orbits. But look at it this way. If a film-director wanted to make a film featuring quintuplets, he’d never find five child actors, or actors of any age, looking exactly alike, unless he chose quintuplets, and the law of probability against their all having both acting talent and the required physique would work out at a thousand million million to one. So what would he do? He’d use illusion, and camera-tricks, and silhouettes and stand-ins.
–Why did we crash, Tin Roof?
–We had to. The rails got twisted.
–How did she, I mean where, will she … Tell me, son, have I divorced her or something?
–I got her out. Thank you for calling me son.
–Thank you for getting her out. Did it take long?
–That depends on your second life. You can begin it any time, she told you that once.
–You mean, you listened all the time?
–We didn’t move in time, father.
–But you said I expected Really, all the time.
–During your life, father, your first life. And now also.
–And in that district you remained with me?
–We all remain. You can’t get rid of us merely by giving us names and sending us into oblivion. Oblivion has its orbits, like everything, you know that.
–What shall I do, Tin Roof?
–You could, if you’d like to I mean, and don’t mind the noise, climb on my pinion.
–Yes, I’d like that.
–Righ
t. On you get.
–Go gently with me, Tin Roof. I mean, I know you find me tiresome, but the noise, well, it does give me such a pain inside my head.
–I brought you a crash-helmet, father.
–Oh, thank you. Thank you, son.
My arms in orbit round his waist, ourselves in orbit round the district of my time, we move in total immobility against the ultra-violet light, producing no vibration, no hum of silence even, until the circular steel house made out of our ellipses rises like a hemisphere above us and around. We land on the flat slice of its inner equator, surrounded by innumerable slices that diminish in space towards the rounded roof and this in spite of the curved door to the right. Alalala – pa – pa like a bent doll. My sweet Potato Head. Her hand gropes out for mine, her strength moves into me out of her double shape and back and into me again. The silent hum of the inner equator vibrates under our twelve feet as if they all belonged. Gut Bucket stands in quiet double meditation, his handle in my other hand and an ecstatic smile round both his inner and his outer rims. Something bends over Dippermouth and dials his needles as he ticks away in impulses that bounce back from her secret source as a girl-spy. They say you love me, Lazarus, she says.
–I do love you, Something, you know I do.
–But you have to go back.
–I don’t want to go back.
–We’ll have to clear out of this vehicle, father, it’ll get pretty hot if that door shuts.
–Out where? Into empty space? No, we can’t, we can’t, can we, Something? I like it here.
–Well, it depends on you, really.
–Really? Will he come now?
–He’ll come at the expected time of arrival, if you want him, Lazarus, and I know you do, you must. But I do so hate to see you suffer.
The Brooke-Rose Omnibus Page 28