The House of Rumour

by Jake Arnott

  ‘Massive stroke.’

  ‘Oh, Christ.’

  ‘You know we fell out in the sixties. Then five years ago I got this manuscript from him through a Cuban guy living in Florida. We started working together again, on this post-utopian thing. We kept talking about meeting up. In Mexico. Well, we left it too late.’

  Larry took a long swig from his glass.

  ‘Hey,’ said Mary-Lou. ‘Go easy on the limeade.’

  ‘Don’t worry. It’s not a problem for me any more. I hardly drink at all these days.’

  ‘All the more reason to go steady.’

  ‘Sure.’ He rattled the ice in his mojito and settled it on the table. ‘All those people we knew from the film. Gone. Sharleen, Nemo.’

  ‘Come on, Larry, let’s not get maudlin.’

  ‘Jack.’

  ‘What?’ Mary-Lou frowned.

  ‘Jack Parsons. Well, he did the special effects, remember?’

  ‘Oh. Yeah.’ She stared off into the distance.

  ‘You never got over him, did you?’

  She looked back at Larry.

  ‘Let’s not talk about Jack.’

  ‘Okay, okay.’

  Larry drained his glass and handed it to a passing waiter.

  ‘Can I have another of these?’ he asked. ‘Mary-Lou?’

  ‘Sure. A glass of champagne, please. How’s Martin?’

  ‘He’s good. He’s living up in Seattle. Working as a sound technician. I don’t see so much of him these days.’

  ‘And you? Still writing?’

  ‘Yeah. Another novel. Not sure where it’s going. I’m calling it The House of God.’

  ‘Good title.’

  ‘Yeah. Could be the best thing about it. But, you know, there is something I want you to see. Something I wrote a while back.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yeah. Something I wrote for you.’

  Their drinks arrived and Larry chinked his glass against hers once more.

  ‘This is like being back at Clifton’s,’ he said. ‘Me trying to impress you. You know, that’s what my writing career was really based on.’

  ‘Zagorski, the limeade is making you sentimental.’

  ‘In mojito veritas. You were my inspiration.’

  ‘Okay, okay. Let’s change the subject.’

  ‘Okay. Well, you know, this film is really dumb, but Danny’s quite an interesting guy.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Danny Osiris. Yeah, quite an interesting guy. He believes in all this UFO nonsense, just like Sharleen used to. But he gave me this strange manuscript. Sort of a story but it refers to some crazy stuff that happened in the war.’

  Larry was trying to focus but the rum was fuzzing his mind.

  ‘Mary-Lou, wasn’t there a woman called Astrid at your commune in Pasadena?’

  ‘Now you’re losing me, Zagorski. You’re talking about Astrid?’

  ‘Yeah. German woman. Fortune-teller.’

  ‘Astrid, yeah. What about her?’

  At that moment a production assistant from Multiversal Pictures came up to the table and told Mary-Lou that the director would really like to meet her.

  ‘Sure,’ she replied. ‘I’ll come over. But look, the writer of the original is here too. Why don’t I bring him with me?’

  ‘Er, yeah,’ the assistant replied with a doubtful shrug. ‘Sure.’

  The director of the Fugitive Alien remake was earnest and full of respect for Mary-Lou. He was barely in his thirties yet astonishingly cognisant of 1950s pop culture. And he knew all about her television work on shows like The Scanner. Mary-Lou struggled to include Larry in the conversation, but she knew that people rarely want to talk to the writer.

  Larry hovered and continued drinking. At one o’clock Mary-Lou said she wanted to go.

  ‘Are you staying, Larry?’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘Then, come on. I’ll get them to order us cars.’

  They went down to the foyer, arm in arm, for support as much as anything else.

  ‘So good to see you,’ Larry said once more.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Come and have lunch with me.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You promise?’

  ‘Larry, of course I’ll have lunch with you.’

  ‘Soon then.’

  His car arrived first and she walked out to it with him. He put his arm around her. At first she thought he’d lost his balance as she felt his hand catch hold of her shoulder and pull her closer. Then he kissed her. At first he simply meant to brush his lips against her cheek but instead his mouth found hers. It was clumsy but passionate. She tasted rum and mint and lime juice.

  ‘Hey.’ She gave a little laugh as she pulled away from him.

  ‘Oh.’ The shocked look on his face, just like the teenager she had known. ‘Hey, I’m sorry, Mary-Lou.’

  ‘Get outta here, Zagorski,’ she said and pushed him into his car.

  A week later they met at a restaurant by the broadwalk in Venice Beach. Larry chose the spaghetti alle vongole; Mary-Lou ordered a cheese omelette and a salad with no tomatoes.

  ‘No tomatoes?’ Larry asked. ‘You allergic?’

  ‘No, well, it’s this diet I’m trying. The blood-type diet.’

  ‘Blood type?’

  ‘Sure. It’s based on the theory that blood types evolved at different eras of human development. Type O is the earliest, hunter-gatherers, so if you’re that blood group you get the proteins: meat, nuts. A comes next, which is the type that evolved when humans started cultivating so As should eat vegetables and cereals. I’m a B and us Bs were nomads, pastoral people who lived with their herds. We’re pretty omnivorous and we get to eat dairy.’

  ‘Nice. But no tomatoes.’

  ‘No. No shellfish neither, so I won’t be picking at yours.’

  ‘A diet based on blood type. That’s insane. You believe in it?’

  ‘I don’t know, Larry. It seems to work for me, that’s all.’

  ‘It’s just some mad idea.’

  ‘So?’

  She gave him a cold stare. He ducked his head a little.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be so dismissive. What do I know? And look, I’m sorry about the other night. My behaviour. Too much free limeade.’

  ‘I hope you didn’t kiss me like that just because you were drunk.’

  Her mouth widened a little into an arch smile. Larry grinned and shook his head.

  ‘No. But I shouldn’t have been drunk. I’ve put all that behind me. That time we met in the late seventies, God knows what I must have been like. I was clean for fifteen years. I did the meetings and everything.’

  ‘AA?’

  ‘AA, NA, the lot.’

  ‘And they got you through it, right? The Higher Power stuff?’

  ‘Yeah. I know what you’re thinking. I didn’t really believe in it.’

  ‘But it worked for you. For a while.’

  ‘Yeah. Point taken.’

  Their food arrived. Larry looked over at Mary-Lou’s plate as it was set down in front of her.

  ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘That is a lot of dairy.’

  ‘The thing is,’ he went on after a few mouthfuls of pasta, ‘what we believe in just seems to get smaller and smaller. Diets, therapy, exercise regimes, support groups. Little superstitions. We worship household gods.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with that.’

  ‘But there used to be so much more. You know what really bugs me? People going on about “the planet”.’

  ‘You’re not saying global warming’s unimportant?’

  ‘No, no, just that phrase. When did it become the planet? Singular. Definite. Like there aren’t any other planets or something. It’s like an admission of defeat. We used to dream of going to other planets. Now?’

  ‘Jack used to dream of going to the stars,’ Mary-Lou murmured.

  ‘Yeah. And you know the last time people went out into space? I mean, going properly out of orbit.
Apollo 17, 1972. We’ve got all these satellites whizzing about up there but most of them are just looking back down on us. It isn’t space exploration, it’s a sophisticated surveillance system. The planet. It’s positively pre-Copernican.’

  ‘Does it really matter any more?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mary-Lou. Nemo used to have this theory of interstellar socialism.’

  ‘Now, that is insane.’

  ‘Official policy of the Posadist Fourth International. At least it was bold. Utopian.’

  ‘We all had crazy ideas at one time or another, didn’t we?’

  ‘And that’s what this story I wrote is all about.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The one I told you about. The one I wanted you to see. Can I send it to you?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she replied with a hint of dread in her voice. ‘Sure.’

  After lunch they took a stroll along the broadwalk and looked out at the ocean.

  ‘I must have walked this path a million times,’ said Larry.

  ‘It’s a beautiful day.’

  ‘Do you have any regrets, Mary-Lou?’

  She laughed.

  ‘Very few. I don’t even regret marrying Walter.’

  Walter Nugent was an advertising executive she had wed in 1961. The marriage had lasted three years.

  ‘I often wonder how things might have been different,’ said Larry. ‘A change in direction here or there. Those little jonbar points of life.’

  ‘Yeah, but regrets?’

  ‘I guess not. I wish I could have saved Sharleen somehow.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And I wish I could have explained quantum mechanics to you that night.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Remember? That night we got drunk on slivovitz.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  ‘Hell, I really wanted to impress you. But listen, here’s this great new theory. Danny Osiris told me about it, you know, the English guy in the remake. Guess what? Turns out the universe is a hologram.’

  ‘A hologram?’

  ‘A complete memory system encoded onto a flat plain. All of reality is projected from a distant event horizon.’

  Mary-Lou stopped and turned to him.

  ‘Larry, do me a favour.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just shut up and walk for a while.’

  Three days after that a large envelope came in the post for Mary-Lou. Inside was a brief note from Larry and a manuscript. She made herself a cup of coffee and sat down to read it.

  THE CITY OF THE SUN

  by Larry Zagorski

  None of us in Heliopolis knew quite when it was that the nightmares began. A sense of unease and disquiet had descended over every district of the city. Perhaps we had all nursed dreadful visions in secret for some time, unwilling to admit to the terrors that haunted our sleep. For months, maybe longer, we suffered a double burden: the horror of these unconscious phantasma; the guilt at their concealment. For here everything is held in common.

  The knowledge of these dreadful spectres of the mind finally became public at the fourth Council of the New Moon when a woman called out to the whole assembly that she could bear it no longer. She spoke of an incessant dream of confinement, of being shackled and lying on a damp and befouled mattress. The walls of a dungeon that ran with slime, with an evil, all-pervading stench. Worst was the consuming darkness, a sense of years spent seeing neither light nor sky. A mere tremor of fear ran through the Council Hall at first, that instinct of revulsion in the face of madness, a condition that can seem as contagious as any other disease. But it was not long before we were in doubt as to the soundness of our own minds.

  At night I dwell in the depths of a ruined world! cried one, a living death, damned between perdition and oblivion. Another accused our unnamed creator of being oblivious to our pleas. Then at last came a shocking outcry against the sun itself. I address my prayers to you, it began, to see you risen in glory, but if I honour you, great sun, more than any other thing, why should I be condemned to cold and darkness? You give life and movement to the meanest worms; the pale snakes turn to life at the touch of your rays. I, in my misery, envy their wanton play.

  Though nothing is considered blasphemy in Heliopolis, this final statement had the ring of it. For ours is the City of the Sun, and the sun forms the centre and very meaning of our existence. As it provides all energy in nature, so we harness it as our chief source of power. We worship it through reason rather than superstition, as the bright countenance of our unnameable creator. It has never forsaken us and yet now in the few hours when our world turns from its face we are plunged into hopeless fright. In days given to freedom and enlightenment, thoughts of darkness and imprisonment made no sense and curses against our beloved sun seemed plainly absurd. Yet all the peculiar words and utterances used in these lamentations were dismally familiar.

  At once our Council resolved to pursue the meaning and, indeed, the very cause of these nightmares. The authority of our great city is divided equally between Power, Wisdom, and Love. Power sees to the security and defence of Heliopolis, Love to its care and nurture. So it was left to those of us in Wisdom, which concerns itself with the liberal arts, sciences, mechanics and our education, to institute an investigation.

  In the beginning we tried to define the substance of these dreams. In Heliopolis we consider the knowledge of the senses to be above the knowledge of reason, so we looked within ourselves. We called witnesses and analysed the description and the strange choice of language used in recollection. It all sounded utterly alien yet disturbingly memorable and we feared some terrible prophecy. Something existed beyond yet we could not apprehend it.

  In the City of the Sun we have lived in a state of permanent happiness, health and virtue, and we had considered ourselves resolved to a calm understanding of life. We count the world to be a living thing. As is said in the old song of childhood:

  The world’s a book where the eternal Sense

  Wrote his own thoughts; the living temple where,

  Painting his very self, with figures fair

  He filled the whole immense circumference.

  And in this way we have built our city: divided into seven circles, each arrondissement named for the planets as they orbit the great central temple of the sun. Everywhere there are walkways and galleries adorned with mathematical figures, definitions, propositions, equations. There are botanical gardens and illustrations of every known creature. Samples of common and precious stones, minerals and metals are displayed. There are projections on every wall. The temple of the sun is domed; above the altar hangs a globe of earthly representation; in the vaulted ceiling stars are depicted in their different magnitude, with the powers and motions of each expressed separately in three little verses. Heliopolis is a wondrous machine dedicated to the art of memory and simply by walking through it all the arts and sciences may be learnt. Indeed, this is how we educate our people and sustain our culture. Now for the first time we felt lost as we promenaded its pavements and avenues, finding no answer there to our maddening dilemma.

  We had hoped that by openly expressing our nightly derangements we might banish them, or at least that the sharing of discomfort might bring its moderation. Instead there came a despairing magnification of our collective woe. The nightmares became ever more brutal and intense. Our imaginations now conjured tortures of the body, torments hitherto unspeakable with curious names: corda, coccodrillo, polledro. The agonising suspension by rope, the hideous spectacle of being stretched to breaking over a wooden horse. The worst of all was called by some cruel muse la veglia or ‘awakener’. Here we are tied above a bed of wooden spikes in such a manner that only the strength of our arms prevents our lower parts coming to rest on them. The harrowing memory of forty hours of this grim punishment was imprinted on our minds.

  And as we continued to investigate these torments we were possessed with a feeling that it was we who were being questioned. But if some entity had become our inquisitor, we coul
d not comprehend the nature of this vile interrogation. A few of us demanded that a confession might be offered so that the agony might end. Elsewhere a rumour spread of a man among us who had endured the forty hours of la veglia without ever having revealed his secret. When challenged no one actually knew this person by name, only at some second or third remove as is common in the reporting of gossip. It made no sense in any case as it would not be possible to endure such hideous treatment at the hands of anyone in the City of the Sun.

  Indeed, it was decided that the source of the nightmares was another realm entirely since their barbarity was inconceivable to our dominion. They must be a communication from another world, a distant star or planet. We do not doubt that there are worlds beyond our own and account it foolish to believe otherwise. So while our astrologers scanned the heavens for any new disturbance in the cosmos, others of us in Wisdom proceeded to our Great Library.

  This treasure house often appears neglected amid all the palaces in Heliopolis and it is true that so much of our experience is read through life that we have scant need of it. The world is our book and our city a sublime school whose very walls form pages of knowledge (as children we learnt the alphabet from its walls as we walked around it). There may be endless volumes, copied with countless errors, but we can read from the one true original. The guardians of the Library have been working for many years on the Great Encyclopedia, and even they confine their individual study to a mere handful of books in a whole lifetime. It is said that it is not the reading that matters so much as the rereading. Nevertheless we cherish all books, especially the unread ones, for who knows what secrets they might yield one day? And as we count the world our book, might not other worlds be other books, strange and unprecedented?

  So it was in the unfamiliar sections of the Great Library that we decided to search for evidence of life beyond our own reality. Guided by its guardians, we began an examination of works of speculation. The countless books consulted on this matter included: Lucian of Samosata’s True History, which describes journeys to the moon, the sun and the morning star; Of the Wonderful Things Beyond Thule by Antonius Diogenes, which contains similar references; Al-Farabi’s Al-Madina, al-Fadila featuring an ideal state; the Arabic grimoire the Picatrix, which contains an account of the miraculous City of Adocentyn with a central sun temple that projects planetary colours from its lighthouse; the Letter of Prester John, which reports an Earthly Paradise and various mirabilia: endless possibilities of other worlds and also the disturbing prospect of non-existence. We were particularly perplexed by Thomas More’s Utopia whose very title means ‘no such place’.