by Ian McDonald
He saw the thirty souls clinging like bats to each of the fellows on the tram. Some carried the likenesses of those ancestors sewn onto their clothing, becoming flashing kaleidoscopes of faces and memories amongst which their own features seemed pale and ethereal, so much less substantial than the watercolor miniatures, sepia prints, and Instamatics of the dead which dangled from their coats. Others concealed in their vest pockets the mummified memento mori of generations dead: a finger, a lock of hair, a perfumed letter, a toenail, an eyeball in a vial of brandy; while yet others conducted animated mumbled conversations with unseen correspondents. From these latter he learned that the houses of the populace contained within themselves a second, separate house: the household of the dead. These Dead Houses were identical in every detail to the houses of the living save that the horsehair settles by the hearths were empty, the dinners stood uneaten upon the dining tables, and the immaculately laundered and perfumed bed linen (Flowers of Corruption, of course) was never wrinkled, never soiled. All this was held in perpetual readiness for the unseen, unheard tenancy of the congregation of the dead.
He left the funeral party shortly before the tram, swinging and swaying with gathering insobriety along the iron rails, arrived at the terminus outside the iron gates of Pleasant Prospect Cemetery. He had heard from the peons of the outlying regions of some of the more grisly pre-interment customs and had no desire to participate in them. He tarried only to see the bier of the dead man he now felt he knew better than the living placed upon the shoulders of the pallbearers (by tradition one dark, one fair, one red, one ginger, one brown, one gray) and borne through the becherubed gates into the shadowy land of pillars and crucifixes, monolithic steles, and the headless pillars of those that died young. The closest relatives fell into line behind the coffin, each carrying one of the five sacred elements which must be buried with the corpse to ensure the soul safe passage past fairy and imp and pitchforked demon of purgation to the land of Ever-youth. Spoonful of ashes, turd of horse dung, drop of menstrual blood, thimble of spirits, clod of good green turf. Such an uncertain and perilous business, this dying.
He turned away from the iron gates of Pleasant Prospect and chose a path which would lead him out of the City of the Deathless Dead. He wandered past the graveyards and Patriots’ Plots, past the grand palazzi the dead had built for themselves and the grim tumbledowns to which they had condemned the living. His thoughts turned to things seen and unseen, the nature of mortality.
The dead, he concluded, were endlessly jealous of the living. And because the dead could never again hope to possess life, they sought to drag life down to lie close with them in the grave. In their never-ending demands for reverence and veneration, for sacrifice and patriotism, for ritual and observance, they drew life down into death and so were comfortable with it. He saw the shape of the world the dead had bequeathed the living. It had the semblance of a tube of brightly colored glass, the most delicate and fragile glass possible to human science. All around this glass tunnel was a deep, dark void filled with whispers. Those who walked the narrow fragile tunnel did so knowing that at any moment the glass might shatter beneath their feet and drop them into void.
The dead are all around you, spoke the whispers, and every day, every hour, our numbers swell.
Presently it began to rain, the expected rain which fell on the City of the Deathless Dead, a thin, cold, penetrating rain that soaked him to the bone within moments but which miraculously washed the air clean of the stink of the black funeral roses.
* * * *
Third to speak was the quiet man, the long, thin, pale one who bore about him the unmistakable stigmata of sickness in early life. Nervous of demeanor, he had held silence during the first two stories while his comrades grunted and muttered in recognition of some detail, some triviality, which reminded them of their own experiences. He chose to begin his story with a short autobiography.
* * * *
THE CITY OF VIBRANT SOULS
HAVING, IN HIS sickly youth, read exhaustively every available Baedeker, Berlitz, and Guide Michelin, he had formed a fanciful notion of this city and its mercurial inhabitants and had vowed, upon his sickbed, that one day he would certainly visit this numinous, radiant place. When I am old and wise, he had said, when I have majority and maturity enough to appreciate what I see.
He attained majority and maturity, and on the first day of each new spring, he would say, This year, this year I will go. Nothing will stop me, this year. But each year he failed to go. He had devised a compendium of excuses why he could not visit the city this year. Chief among them was his fear of disillusionment. He feared that the City of Vibrant Souls which stood solid and enduring on the fertile plains by the edge of the Eastern Sea could never match the City of Vibrant Souls which floated vague and idealized upon the fertile plains of his imagination. There is no disillusionment greater than that which damns the greatest dream. Yet the city shone before him, calling him from his lofty pinnacles of prevarication. As years passed and, like fine wine maturing, he deepened within himself, he thought, Can the agony of disillusionment really be any worse than the agony of unrequited desire? Thus one autumn morning he packed bag, passport, and the guidebooks of childhood mornings and went in search of the City of Vibrant Souls.
From the moment the honey-tongued cabby swept him and his bags out of the arrivals lounge into a hackney more akin to a public house than to a public conveyance, and thence into the stream of life that was the City of Vibrant Souls, he knew that his illusions would not be shattered. Indeed, the city and its people were far greater than any fancyings of his adolescent sickbed imagination. The City of Vibrant Souls seduced him, bound and gagged and finally dominated him like some Montgomery Street rubber Venus with a whip.
The fat barrow-women bawling their wares in the street markets, the doe-eyed waits begging alms in palms on the Ha’penny Bridge, the giggling gaggles of girls admiring dresses and their own reflections in boutique windows, their bubbling chitchat of boyspartiesclothes opening in him an empty, nostalgic desire; the brawling braggadocio boozers picking fights with noncombatant lampposts; the painted bella donnas whistling low come-hithers from upper-story windows; the ox-shouldered gangs of streetfighters filling the narrow cobbled closes with their stale, aggressive pheromones; the sudden flurries of vivacious, rowdy music from a dingy side alley as street musicians struck up on ocarinas and bouzoukis; the jugglers, the plate-spinners, the bunco-boothers, the prancers to fife and tabor; the aged, tooth-free balladeers, one hand cupped to ears as if listening critically to their muezzin-calls of sentimental returns to Fair Ardbo and laments to the Rose of Faithless Love; the good-natured constables in the covered arcades who, when asked whether such an art gallery, whence such an Oriental coffeehouse, prefaced their directions with a comprehensive list of the various ways not to go … all was as he had always dreamed it might be. Like that latex domina, the people of the City of Vibrant Souls teased him, delighted him, frustrated him, and brought him to the edge of fulfillment only to leave him with pain and emptiness.
How stunted his life seemed compared to these lusty, vital people. How he longed for the secret of their casual mastery of living, how he longed for a life as rich and full as an Old Master hung on a gallery wall.
Thinking that somewhere in its past he might strike the taproot of the city’s Tree of Life, he delved into the history of city and people, their gaudy lives of raillery, rakery, wining, dining, wenching, gambling, dueling, and practical joking on the epic scale. He read the life of one Beau English who, leaping from his salon window into a waiting phaeton, drove it to Jerusalem and back for a bet. He studied carefully the records of the Rakehell Club, that circle of dissolute gentry whose lives of spectacular debauchery and decadence (one of their company, having shot a waiter for slow service, found him charged to his dinner bill at five hundred florins) climaxed in their setting light to the house in which they were disporting themselves so that they might savor a foretaste of the hellfire to
come. Springing from every page came lust, rapaciousness, cruelty, spite, and greed, yet also elegance, sophistication, courtesy, bon mots, style, and a delight in the refined things of life. The beaux and bucks who at dawn blazed at each other with dueling pieces and at night drank themselves stuporous in perfumed whorehouses were those same who from their town offices planned the art galleries, the auditoria, the covered markets, the gracious green gardens, and the avenues of immaculate red-brick townhouses which so characterized the city. He came to understand that two seemingly irreconcilable principles guided the life of the city: one which delighted in the base, coarse, and gross aspects of being; the other which took pleasure from refinement and good taste. Now he was enlightened. Now he saw the elegant fashions; the viperish wit; the sudden, sword-flashing tempers; the beautiful shops and townhouses; the lust for litigation, for a fight, a dare, a bet, a life-staking wager; as manifestations of these guiding principles, this paradoxical yin and yang of taste and crudity.
Yet for all his embracing of the two principles, the natural ease with which the people lived them eluded him. Unable to reach down to the root of the Tree of Life, he turned instead to the sap, the vital juice which coursed vigorously through it. Drink. Drink. The City of Vibrant Souls floated upon a quagmire of alcohol: the drunkard was a national hero, the public alehouse a national institution, and the national beverage (a black, velvety glass, seductive and subtle, brewed close to the ancient River Gate of St. James, in, of course, the largest brewery in the world) a national asset of stellar proportions. It had long been mooted by pundits and wags that it was impossible to cross the city without passing tavern or alehouse. The traveler, in his Dantesque descent into the amber underworld of the empty glass, learned the truth of this sad observation. Glass after glass poured down his throat in a kind of latter-day water-torture while around him the five A.M. voices raised loud in song and scandal. Wives bemoaned husbands, husbands bewailed wives, misunderstood adolescents begrudged everyone, on and on and on and on and on until his hurdy-gurdy head spun like the merry-go-round in the Phoenix Gardens and the friendly constables, incongruous angels of merciful deliverance, came banging nightsticks on the roof beams and calling, “Home, home, everybody home, morning comes early and there’s time a-plenty then: everyone sup up and get out, ladies and gentlemen, come now, have you no homes to go to?”
One winter morning a-wander amidst the animate sculpture of the eccentrics of Pearce Park, he discovered he could not remember how he came to be there. This was not the blessed amnesia of inebriation, with subsequent hangover, mortification, and final expiation; whole pieces of his self felt as if they were slip-sliding away like crumbling cliffs; crashing, cascading, dissolving into the salt sea of subjectivity. He was losing himself. He could not remember who he was. The city had driven him mad, and he cowered beneath the suddenly terrifying sky, a crazy man among crazy conductors of invisible orchestras, crazy women with cubes painted on their faces, crazy men, bare-chested in the frosty morning, eager to converse upon whatever highbrow issue might take their fancy. And he was no different. All that he had been had flowed away; he had melted and re-formed: his speech, his gestures, his facial expressions, deportment, mannerisms, all had melted into a creature of the City of Vibrant Souls. He had attained his desire, he had become a limb of the city, and in so doing had lost himself. For the deadly truth was that through centuries of playing the world’s clowns, the world’s characters, the world’s individuals, the people of the City of Vibrant Souls had been cracked open by this relentless striving to be something they were not, and their personalities had all run out and drained away into the sewers. Personalityless, the people therefore took on those stereotyped personas which the visitors (not tourists, never tourists) expected of them: the drunkard, the brawler, the lover, the rakehell, the eccentric, the street-poet, the whore, the hurdy-gurdy man. Each day, each soul rose a featureless blank to be stamped with the mold of others’ expectations, stamped and re-stamped and re-stamped and re-stamped and re-stamped, five, ten, twenty brief lives, until at last sleep relieved them of the burden of being. And now he would be like this: each day live and die a dozen times, each night be washed clean of the remembrance of what he had been. And he saw it all as if touched with the glowing wand of a Lorarch. He gave then a great cry, a despairing cry, that made even the eccentrics forget the self-absorbtion of their roles. Madman, lover, streetbrawler, drunkard, itinerant, fortuneteller, he would run and run and run and still the ground would slip away from beneath him as the forgetting took away all he had ever been and ever known. One step forward, one step back. Straightaway he departed the City of Vibrant Souls, never speaking a word, never catching an eye, for fear that the slightest spark of communication might draw another phantom life into being, light a blank face with animation. He left, and never returned there, for there is a spiritual death more terrible than that when the illusion is too much more than the truth, it is the death when the illusion is too much less than the truth.
* * * *
Then into the firelight spoke the fourth traveler, a mousy man coiled like a stock whip, bright with tension and quiet anger. And this was the tale he told.
* * * *
THE CITY OF DIVINE LOVE
THE CITY WHEREOF he spoke he gave the name Great Theosophilus, which, being translated from his native tongue, meant “The City of Divine Love.” It is a city, he explained, of wide and luminous boulevards, of columns and architraves, of soaring spires and exalted domes, of cavernous grottoes and arcades of noble statuary. But beyond all its architectural graces, Great Theosophilus is a city of bells. Endless bells. There is never an hour of the day when the bells are still and silent in their campaniles and pele towers, not even in the wee wee hours of the morning when Death is accustomed to come stealing through the broad avenues of the City of Divine Love; even then the curfew bell tolls the demis and quarters, and the halberdiers of the Civic Guard set their timepieces and pray, huddled in their cloaks against the night chill, that slinking Death may slip them by this night. Matins, lauds, primes, sexts: the bells ring out across the steeples and cupolas of the city, and rising with their notes, like flocks of singing birds, the prayers of the populace aspire heavenward.
The orations of the guilded craftsmen in their Guild Chapels, the rosaries of the washerwomen bowing and bobbing among piles of white laundry on the Florinthian river-steps, the catechisms of the children at their desks beneath the rods of the Teaching Brothers, the lections from the Books of Hours of the wayside faithful felled to their knees by the tolling of the iron Angelus bell: all these spell one shining word—Constancy.
Constancy, this is the watchword of the City of Divine Love; constancy equated by eclogues and theosophists with Continuity. The City of Divine Love has been designed in its every facet to be a continuous hymn of praise, a never-ceasing ever-ascending paean from basilica and chaptery, conventicle and cathedral, minster and sacraria to God the Panarchic. And God the Panarchic in turn shines His Divine Favor (after His Unique Fashion) upon the city of Great Theosophilus for its great faithfulness. For while the Divine Person is, by definition, Omnipotent, Omniscient, and Omnipresent, He has nevertheless deigned to be slightly more Omnipotent, Omniscient, and Omnipresent in certain places or objects than others, namely, the mortified flesh of His Dear Saints. So that the Divine Light might not be lost with the expiration of these Dear Saints’ Immortal Spirits, the bodies of this Blessed Number are reduced to their component members, hallowed, canonized, and laid to rest in elaborately constructed shrines, grottoes, and holy wells, provided and maintained by the munificence of certain wealthy individuals and trade guilds.
Thus enshrined, the relics are venerated and offered solemn concelebrations of Mass Lofty and Mass Lesser: the Novena of St. Anthonius’s Foot (Dexter); the Perogation of the Head of the Blessed Mandy, the Solemn Mass of Peter’s Part … The corpse of the saint may rest in dismembered disarray in a dozen churches and subchapels; here a heart, there a hand, here a head
, there a torso, and together Priesthood Elect and Great Laity bow down to worship in frenzies of religious ecstasies. Not even the corruptible flesh of the Christic Salvator Himself has been spared this process of dissemination and devotion: Christic eyeballs, Christic fingernails. Christic spleens, even Christic prepuces (of which there are three, each claiming ultimate authenticity), are numbered among the most sacred of relics. Certain mystagogues have calculated that there are sufficient pieces of the Christic Salvator to assemble one and a third human beings. And there are sufficient fragments of the True Crucifix (upon which the Christic Salvator bore the transgressions of mankind) to fill a small basilica.
So that the pattern of stale custom and thus vain observance may never be established, the parishes, deaneries, and sees regularly exchange their objects of veneration. Ensconced within caskets of consummate craftsmanship, heavy with jewels, precious metals, and costly brocades, these holy relics are borne shoulder-high in solemn procession through the avenues and boulevards. Borne aloft by brothers of the trade guilds which have taken corporate and various vows of obedience to the particular relic—the Shoemakers the Foot of St. Basil (Sinister), the Optometrists St. Charleroi’s Eyeball (Dexter), the Amalgamated Guilds of Civil Servants and Revenue Employees the Hand of St. Matthias Tax Collector (open, palm up)—the reliquaries are taken to their new, temporary resting place in some St. Xevious Innocens or Blessed Johann the Sacrist or Basilica of the Sacred Molar (Federated Guild of Orthodontists and Dental Employees ‘86).