by Tim Robinson
‘Perhaps that was a mere traveller’s tale‚’ I suggested. ‘On the other hand, although such a mode of transport wouldn’t do for the city, it seemed quite natural for the jungle. I suppose your contraption didn’t believe the bit about the talking fish? I’d be interested to know if it thought I took all that slippery mud too personally. Maybe the sunset was in bad taste? There are other questions a machine like yours could usefully answer. To whose absence, for example, would it attribute my loneliness? The sense of defeat I found in Dark – was that a projection of my own hidden forebodings, or a reality evoked by the contrast of my unquenched youthfulness?’
But Midgley’s attention seemed suddenly to have turned inward, leaving his surface inert. Little flecks of music were drifting in from the enormous afternoon preparing outside. I freed myself from the dead circuitry and stood up to stretch. ‘Wake up, or we’ll miss the procession,’ I said, and stepped around him to the door. Some connection was restored in his interior; he seized a fat briefcase and ran after me down the stairs, crying, ‘I’ve remembered what it was I had to show you. You’ll be amazed!’
I stepped through the invisible surface separating the cool sharp wax-polish smell of the hallway from the sleepy erotic scents of the white and purple pyramids of blossom in the courtyard. Daytime fireworks were scattering noisy black stars above the rooftops. Midgley was waving a photograph before my eyes; it was a mere blur in the dazzle. ‘It’s your opium-dream,’ he cried, capering around me in triumph.
‘What do you mean? Taken by action-at-a-distance?’
‘No, I ran back here to collect the apparatus, and arrived at the opium-shop just as you were going under. You are the first person ever to have his dream photographed; I hope you don’t mind.’
‘I’ll tell you that in a moment,’ I said. At the corner of the crowded street stood a man holding a bush; while Midgley bought one of the leaf-shaped festival programmes impaled on its twigs, I crouched in its shade to examine the picture. It was indistinct, but I could make out a naked girl, on a beach, grinning, and waving some blurred object. ‘What’s the innuendo in her hand?’ I asked. Midgley shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘It’s your dream, you know.’
It was hot; I began to shout. ‘My most idle reverie has more profundity than this! It’s nothing but a dirty postcard from your own subconscious!’
Midgley twitched the thing out of my hands and gave me a reproving look. ‘You can’t argue with science, as I’m sure you will realize upon reflection. My part in this was merely to clarify certain indications the layman might overlook, and which in fact Persimmon brought to my attention. Anyway she looks like the girl you danced with that night; it’s to be expected you should dream of her.’
I grabbed the card back; the blotchy bulbous creature didn’t look at all like Nit. I tore it into little bits and flung them into the gutter. After a moment of paralysis Midgley dived to collect them. As I strode off into the crowd I heard him wailing after me, ‘How many pieces were there?’
*
A number of twisted alleys threw Midgley’s intrusive images off the track, but as soon as I rejoined the crowds lining the procession route I saw Persimmon looking down at me from one of the hundreds of windows in an immense office-block. There was someone at every window; why had my eye immediately met his? He beckoned, apparently offering me a share in his vantage-point, but I pretended not to see him and turned back into the quiet parts of the city emptied by the pull of the festival. Soon I found a small shapeless open space at the juncture of several narrow streets; in its centre a tree had transformed itself into a little forest by dropping dozens of minor trunks from its branches to the ground. The earth was trodden hard into warm brown paths winding among the pillars of the tree; some fat grey monkeys slept fitfully in the branches. I leaned against the central trunk, where it was cool and shady. In the high wall opposite me was a gate; its delicate lattice of wood was broken in places. On either side of the worn step in front of it slept a small plump crocodile, blindfolded with moss. Above the wall I could see among foliage three people in bright yellow robes, climbing ladders to gather fruit; I could just hear their murmured talk. Further back in the little courtyard a gilded dragon marked the corner of a temple roof. A gong sounded, once, very deep and mellow. The priests came down from the trees with their baskets, and were hidden from me by the wall. The gong stroke came again, and then there was silence.
I could hear flies buzzing. I stepped round the big tree-trunk and met a dreadful stench. A pig’s face, stripped from the bone and flattened out like a mask, was fixed to the tree-trunk by four nails; blood had collected and dried in the hollow of a stone below it. I jumped into the sunshine and hurried through the deserted streets to join the crowd.
It sounded as if the procession was coming at last. People were pushing and jumping to see, and the crowns of the palmtrees lining the ceremonial way were full of children. A boy squeezed through the crowd and stood before me; a dozen big lizards of pleated paper hung around his neck, and two more ran along behind him on strings. By twitching the strings he made the lizards dart at my ankles. One of them ran up the others back as if in copulation, and the boy looked up at me with a doubtful grin. Immediately a man pushed him aside, handed me a peacock feather, and dragged the boy away. The crowd swirled around me. Someone snatched the feather out of my hand. Nit appeared at my side; she put her hands in front of her face, the palms towards me, and said, ‘You come to house, see from window.’
I struggled after her slim figure, which slipped easily through the crevices in the swaying mass of people. She stopped in front of a row of pedlars hung about with trays of fruit, and bought from each one. We went down a side-street, and then along an alley between rows of small wooden houses that leaned together. She climbed the steps of the last of these, pushing aside the cane mat that hung in place of a door. ‘Surely the procession doesn’t come down here?’
‘Very important street‚’ she said. ‘Everybody come down here.’
The little house swayed slightly as I stepped into it. The ground floor was hardly more than a wide verandah over the edge of a small canal; I could see water glinting through gaps in the floor and between the bamboo hangings that formed the opposite side of the room. A little boat lay propped on its side in the middle of the floor; someone had broken off in the middle of repainting an eye on its prow, leaving a paintbrush resting in a saucer of red lacquer. There was little else in the room, just a mat in one corner, a few things that might have been bird-cages or fish-traps, and an old gramophone.
Nit had climbed a ladder into the room above. I lingered a moment, peering out at the motionless water. A row of small boats was moored against the factory wall that formed the opposite bank. Each boat had a roof supported on four poles and made of overlapping leaves like tiles. I could see the boatmen drowsing in the shade, while their womenfolk cooked fish over bowls of glowing charcoal.
When I climbed the ladder I found that Nit too was blowing smouldering charcoal into a flame. This upper room had no windows, but the wall on the canal side was a screen of fretted wood; drops of sunlight lay in spirals on the floor. I took off my shirt and felt the coolness of the room on my body.
Nit had bought two of each kind of fruit, and we knelt on the floor, the basket between us, to eat them. She peeled off the curious geometrical husks one by one and showed me each fragile liquid shape in the palm of her hand: two suns, two stars, two crescent moons. She knelt symmetrically, and when she passed me a little cup of tea with her left hand, her right hand moved slowly in the air as if to preserve this symmetry. Then she put both hands on her knees, palms up, and smiled at me.
‘You remember Nit all yesterday?’
‘I thought of you very often.’
‘You come to dance again?’
‘I have to go home tomorrow, I’m afraid.’
She looked at me in silence for a few moments, and then jumped up and ran to empty the husks out of the basket onto the embers of her
little fire; immediately an invisible forest sprang up in the room.
There was a blanket spread out on the floor in one corner. I lay down among the trembling stops and commas of light, and watched her as she darted to hide our two small cups behind a screen. As she wriggled out of her dress I closed my eyes and lay very still. A few moments later I felt the electricity of her hair touch my cheek, and then the light kiss of her breasts against my body. I put my arms round her as she lay against me, and I held my breath. At first her touch lay across a knife-edge between pain and delight; I felt the tendrils of her nerves and mine twisting together, and suddenly all my blood turned into pure amazement. She opened, I entered; at the same time I could hear children splashing in the canal and a dog howling in the factory opposite; then we were shaken one against the other, and my body breathed out years into hers.
As we began to fall into our separate worlds again a quiet conversation started downstairs; I hadn’t heard anyone come into the house. Nit lay under me with her eyes closed. The warm muddy breath of the canal came and wrapped us together; I kissed her eyelids and touched her lashes with my tongue. She put up her hand to my face without opening her eyes, and then the weight of her sudden sleep pulled me down to lie and watch a knot of sunlight glow in the filaments of her hair, an inch from my eye.
*
Great waves shifting slowly on the horizon became small as they approached the shore, and dwindled to rods of glass on the sand. The ripples retreated and swelled, and rolled away to become mountains. The girl in my arms came out of the sea, serious, smiling; she walked towards me with a gift in her hand, a photograph which I was to see. Behind her the waves were beating at the rim of the sky.
*
Slow gongs were pulsing, some streets away. Transparent fingers of sunlight reached across us into the shadows of the room. Nit had turned away from me and was curled up in her sleep; I moulded myself to the curve of her back, with my face in the warm darkness of her hair, and took her two small breasts in my hand. Her voice came sleepily: ‘Were you a virgin, before?’
After a while I answered, ‘Was I? I’m afraid I don’t remember. Go back to sleep again.’
V
The streets were being hosed down; burnt stalks of fireworks were swept into the gutters by bright arcs of water that hissed and twisted among the feet of the crowd hurrying to work. Persimmon was at the airline office even before I was. Through the glass door I saw him, sipping a small black coffee and instructing a naked child in double-entry bookkeeping. He looked up, closed a great ledger and came out to help me watch my suitcase being flung onto the roof of the coach.
Inside the coach a heap of torn banners, crushed paper lanterns and trodden masks was stirred by the awakening of two late-sleepers, who began to bundle these relics of the festival together and burrow among them for their own clothes. Persimmon’s gaze lent the spectacle a certain weight. The pile of rubbish fumbled its way processionally along the coach and became jammed in the narrow exit. Under the shouts and kicks of its guardians or tormentors it quaked and was convulsed, and spewed itself out in a multicoloured flood of mismatched feet, clocks, stars, grinning pigs and somersaulting fish.
‘Tawdry evidences!’ said Persimmon. ‘Let this be what you carry away of yesterday’s high solemnities; something not achieving the dignity of a memory, perhaps, and yet as near to a memory as anyone deserves who was not actually present. I must say there is something elusive about you that makes me wonder if I should have squandered all this effort shaping your experiences.’ He gave me a reproving look, and when the two celebrants of the mystery, dancing with laughter, fell out of the coach onto the heap and began to stamp it into the mud, he moved to interpose his thickness between me and the equivocal sight.
‘Well, your great-aunt’s little hoard is dispersed into the general flux, and you return to your textbooks. My further existence I commit to your memory, with some misgivings. Midgley, if you forget him entirely, will not be missed. Dark, as you probably realize, was merely my own more relaxed, weekending, self.’
‘I realize no such thing‚’ I began, but Persimmon raised a heavy finger to indicate a tiny figure appearing at the end of the street: ‘Here comes the measurer of all things! Midgley is the only man I know who consciously obeys the laws of perspective. When your coach leaves, remember to look back; his ‘dwindling with distance’ is unforgettable. What a strange lot we are! What odd names we have! You will have to write about us. Failures of characterization you can disguise as shallowness of character, confused intentions as the intention to confuse; as your co-author I may say such things. The unpublished novella is the most forgiving of art-forms.’
‘And if I publish?’
‘I fear no one will recognize us. Not even you.’
Persimmon turned away abruptly, and greeted Midgley with: ‘I’ve given him my parting gift, so what about yours?’ Midgley began to slap at his numerous pockets as if hoping some suitable small parcel might materialize. Then his face cleared; he produced a bulging pocketbook. ‘There’s something here you might care to remember me by; it’s a definition of the word “sky”.’
I read, neatly penned on a small card:
SKY: The apparent locus, oblately spheroidal in form, of high-altitude meteorological and visible astronomical phenomena.
‘Thank you, Midgley; that’s really very nice. And it makes me feel I should apologize for tearing up that photograph. In fact I wish I had it now.’
‘Don’t worry!’ Persimmon interrupted. ‘He has plenty more photos like that; don’t you, Midgely?’
Midgely turned an anguished, beseeching face towards him.
‘Of that girl?’ I asked.
‘Of that girl.’
I looked at Midgely’s moist eye and burning brow, and said, ‘Don’t tell me any more.’
‘No, you know just enough‚’ agreed Persimmon.
Midgley shifted from foot to foot, and changed the subject: ‘And which way do you go from here?’
Persimmon answered for me, with a voluminous gesture: ‘He expands in all directions, leaving us, it appears, to drown in our own watch-springs. In terms chosen from your well-furnished store, this Time and Space will become a street-corner on an Electron in an Atom of his most inward Nucleus. Come! Those two drunkard magicians have finally settled for the workaday masks of busdriver and conductor; you are about to leave. No need to remind you never to come back; the past is the most unrevisitable of cities. Bow for me before the tomb of your great-aunt! Wave, Midgley, wave!’
The coach roared and shuddered. Persimmon and Midgley were sucked from me into the vortex. The city folded its petals and sank like a stone.
So and Springrice
Late in one of the thousand autumns of the Autumn Empire, the family So, lacking in both wealth and learning, entrusted what they had of either to the youngest son and sent him off to find the world and bring it home. How huge that world was, they didn’t know. Between the City of the Emperors and the provincial capital, the highway touched the sky three times and wintered in a desert; to the provincial capital from the little town So had heard named but had never visited was half the length of a river; the way from So’s village to that town which even an Emperor might forget, was choked with many years of leaves. And yet such a distance was a mere step in thought to the grown child with hopeful eyes who was scattering those leaves in his eager striding. Among the leaves, deeply nested, lay a skull. It didn’t sleep; it ached with emptiness where memories used to be. ‘Who was I?’ it wailed, as it did whenever anyone passed by, but its dried-up voice was lost in the rustling leaves. Then So’s foot jolted it from its resting-place. ‘Don’t follow me!’ cried So, seeing it roll and bounce after his heels; but the bubble of bone jumped on a thin wind to his shoulder, and gripped his ear in its teeth. ‘Who was I?’ it hissed. ‘Who am I? If I had my memories I could lull myself to sleep. You must swear to help me, or I shall never let go.’
‘I know nothing; how can I help you?’
wept So.
‘Swear!’
So faced each of the corners of the Empire in turn. To each corner he said, ‘May I die upon this spot if I fail to answer this skull’s questions.’ The skull then loosed its hold on his ear and fell back among the leaves.
‘There are a few withered scraps of learning still remaining inside me‚’ it said. ‘Take them, study them – they may be of use to you – find out where I could have gathered such unheard-of stuff, come back and tell me what you discover.’
So bent down, crooked his finger into an eyesocket, and pulled out a muddle of spiderweb. He squeezed it into a pellet before the wind could tear at it, and stuck it into the middle of his topknot. Then he kicked a few leaves to cover the skull, and marched on.
He marched, with a stride he felt already becoming legendary, through a land in which legends lay as thick as autumn leaves, until a long time later he came to the Imperial City, or at least to the Examination Halls which ring it about and hide its splendid mysteries from those who have not yet shown themselves worthy. After a hungry night in the forest fringe he presented himself, one of a vast number, before a door which was flung open at sunrise to admit all comers to the day’s examination. After being stripped, searched, and scrubbed, So, like the others, was led to his cell and locked in. There awaited him a bowl of drinking-water, an oil-lamp, the writing implements, and the Question, sealed in a hollow bamboo rod. Without pausing even to pray, he pulled the wisp of silk from the rod, and read on it the words, ‘What day of the week is it in your dreams?’
Long after noon So was still pacing his cell wondering why in all his many remembered dreams he had never looked at a calendar; he cursed himself for neglecting such a simple preparation for the days of greatness that had dawned in so many of those dreams. He beat his forehead against the wall in despair; a little object fell at his feet. The skull’s wisdom! He blew upon the close knot, and under his breath it unfolded into leaves and scarves and wings as delicate as the smell of dew, covering every surface in the cell with a clinging web of words. ‘… No silk supports the ink of the dream, no stone bears its chisel-marks, nor can one cast bronze from its mould; unlike life, and even unlike memory, the dream is nothing but what is attended to, for it is the creation of that attention. Even a painting of a dream cannot dream of a dream, as a simple question and its answer show: does one dream in colours? Only if one dreams of colours. In the contrary case the question does not arise. Similarly the dream day is not necessarily one in a sequence of days; only by dreaming of hope or memory can one be sure that that day is not alone in all the endless darkness of time. But here again either alternative can only be awakened by a question, and if the dream does not ask, the alternatives sleep together in peace