by K. J. Bishop
Nor was there a shortage of doors, marked with green signs, exiting the tunnels. I decided to follow someone who appealed to me, and if they went through an exit, to follow them. If I encountered someone who appealed more, I would switch to following that person, as long as it was possible to do so discreetly. Sometimes I had to let opportunities go, when to suddenly change direction in order to follow someone would have risked drawing too much attention. I simply did the best I could.
After a few hungry and footsore days of this, one of my stalkees left the tunnels. When I followed (after resorting again to the pretence of tying a shoelace so as not to be too close behind), I found stairs that led up to the cheaper end of the casino mall, where there was a food court. The door at the top where I exited was lettered Only Authorised Personnel on its other side. Before letting it close I looked around to see if someone else like me was nearby, hoping to go through, but there was no one. After I had eaten and rested, I wandered through the shopping mall, found the atrium and climbed the stairs, and so came to meet the talkative woman. She spoke to me first, while I was leaning on the balcony, watching the light-show year cycle through for the third time.
‘This is a holy place,’ she said. She had been writing in a book covered in red velvet, which she closed and put away in her handbag as she spoke. ‘It’s a place of sacred energy. Only our poor whitefella sacred, mind you. In effect, a cathedral.’
I believed I knew what she meant. ‘A place of soul,’ I suggested.
‘I knew you’d understand,’ she said. ‘Too many people don’t get it. Come and sit down. You look tired.’
I sat. She kept talking about the casino.
‘Maybe I should go in there, then,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for something.’
‘You mean someone,’ she said shrewdly, ‘don’t you? But you’re not thinking about them quite as much as you used to. Are you sure you’re still sincere in your quest?’
I felt guilty. You were still on my mind, very much so. I wanted to find you, and I didn’t want to find someone else instead of you. But somewhere along the path, I’d left behind the feeling that my own being was defined by yours. If anything, yours was defined by mine. I had lived so long without you that to say I couldn’t live without you would have been silly.
‘One might consider,’ the woman said, ‘the influence of your work with the Department. It distracted you with the allure of procedure. In the bazaars, you imagined your goal in terms of a conclusive distraction. You committed mental adultery with the mansions, just because they were there. Passionate yearning for the unattainable is hard to sustain. You have to die, or go mad; or find something else, a good enough diversion. Like this,’ she said, gesturing at the atrium, where the coins of summer were dropping again to the strains of a cool oboe.
I wondered how she knew these things about me. Even I didn’t know about the Department, although it sounded familiar.
‘It’s because I know you,’ she said. ‘I know plenty about you. For instance, you didn’t like the demons. You didn’t appreciate the humour in the situation. Poor things, they just wanted to be in the story. A bit of comic relief. You didn’t have to knock them off like that.’
‘Do you know so much about everybody?’ I didn’t intend to feel sorry about the demons. If I didn’t have much of a sense of humour, too bad. The thought occurred to me that nothing would be liable to distract one’s mind from an important purpose like a sense of humour.
‘Some people.’ She stood up, and beckoned me to stand too. We looked down at the atrium. ‘Him,’ she said, pointing to a gentleman who was climbing the stairs. He was dressed in metal armour, and had a face so solemn as to be woeful. Behind him came a smaller, muddy person tottering under the weight of dozens of shopping bags, on which I could see prestigious brand logos.
‘He’s looking for a grail,’ she said. ‘Or a graal. He doesn’t know if the damn thing’s a cup or a plate or a stone. He thinks it could even be a sword. Well, that’s wrong. If you get the sword, you can be king. If you get the grail, you meet God and enable a regeneration of the world. And there’s a car. If you find the car, you can have the lover who haunts your heart. These things transform your being, you see. If he can’t find his grail soon, he’s going to look for an honourable death. Not sure how he’ll manage that here.’
I wanted to know more about the car. ‘Are those things all obtainable here?’
‘What does it mean to possess something? You can own a thing without having it, and have a thing without owning it.’
The knight and his servant reached the top of the stairs and turned towards the hotel.
‘He’s losing heart,’ the woman remarked. ‘He’ll take anything now. Hospital corners, wigwam wheels, wall sharpeners… there are some things fated to be lost and found and lost again on memory’s endless roundabouts.’
I mentioned that my own memory was poor. ‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘you can tell me where I was before the desert.’
‘I can’t recall your childhood for you. I can hardly recall my own. And who can remember before they were born? Don’t worry about it. Desire is wasted on the past. Listen, I’ll tell you something for nothing. Don’t waste yourself on this person you’re chasing. It may not even be a person. There’s hardly a single thing that isn’t something else when you look at it a different way. Have you ever thought,’ she asked, startling me, ‘that someone might desire you? That someone’s following, back behind you, trying to see where you’ve gone?’
‘No, never.’ The startled feeling left me quickly. I wasn’t interested in the idea.
‘Snakes and ladders,’ she said. ‘You can take your token off the board, you know, and throw it out in the back yard. Let the grass have it. The ladder of lights takes you up, the old snake takes you down. Where does a lawn take you?’
Snakes and ladders again. Repetition of an unusual element indicated – to speak accurately, made – an opening, like placing two posts to make a gateway. I wanted to say ‘anywhere’, or ‘home’, but a mental warning bell told me I needed to be a bit wilier. I needed to ask for a little more. If I was to earn you, or win you, I’d better show I’d been paying attention.
‘A driveway,’ I said.
The day was overcast and windy. The streets mazed around seemingly without any reason, as the ground was completely flat. They branched, looped, hairpinned and turned circles. This area of the city was so new that it wasn’t in the street directory. I say ‘city’, but it was city only in the sense that it wasn’t countryside; or rather it was countryside, a great paddock, in the process of being turned into a suburb.
It was another land of mansions, these so new that many sat on bare earth with string marking where the lawns were to go. The houses were grouped in clusters separated by fields. Some of the fields hosted billboards advertising the homes that were to be erected there in the near future. Both the built and the unbuilt were a long way from the exuberant follies near the Medina, which I had driven past on my way out here. I counted only four or five very simple, very similar designs. They reminded me of the houses children draw when they are young and want to convey the idea of a house before they have learned to observe architecture. Here was uniformity reminiscent of the desert city I had visited when, chasing the cure to a malaise of the heart, I had gone overseas. I would have taken them for housing built for the poor, had each home not been as large as a block of six or eight flats. I read the billboards: 5 bedrooms, 3 living rooms, 2 rumpus rooms, ‘laid-back living’.
This was a large country. I imagined it would take a long time to fill it up with rumpus rooms. Perhaps the lack of character and distinguishing features in these new dwellings bespoke a relaxation, a giving up of the attempt to bring the history of other countries here. They certainly suggested a love of the first three dimensions and disinterest in the fourth.
As for the streets, they appeared to have established their layout during an all-night bender. Their illogical twists and turns might have been
following tracks made by wandering beasts, lunatics, or devils; and, as if to make up for absent history and myth, these rambling roads bore the names of gods, heroes, monsters, characters from legend and folktale, and distinguished persons from the old world. They were arranged in sets, one group of streets with Arthurian names, one with names from the Arabian Nights, and so on, as though someone had hoped that the Age of Chivalry, with unicorns and dragons, perilous enchantments and good manners, or the Baghdad of Harun al-Rashid, with its Gate of the Willow Tree, Gate of Darkness and Gate of the Moon, its riches in treasure and poetry, would be brought into being on this ground through the agency of these captions. And who was I to say it would never happen?
I could hardly recognise this country as my own. But I had grown up not far from here, in a modest house near the freeway to the airport.
Now I was back, and looking for a job.
I’d found something in the Western Mirror, a tabloid I’d picked up on a train. Between the lonely hearts and the auto ads, my eye was caught by this:
MUSEUM OF APERTURES. OPENING FOR A CARETAKER. EXPERIENCE WITH DOORS AND WINDOWS NECESSARY. KNOWLEDGE OF FAUCETS, DRAINS, INTERVALS, CAVITIES AND ORIFICES A PLUS.
There were no contact details. I tore the ad out anyway, carefully, making a neat hole in the page.
And through the hole, on the next page, in a box hidden among advertisements for floristry courses, I saw:
32a STREET OF ALL THE OTHERS, NEWMEADOWS WEST. NO PHONE YET. SUNDAY 11 A.M.
It was Sunday today. I navigated by following the names of guides and conveyors, such as Ariadne and Charon, and those of the sleeping princesses and others who were objects of a quest.
Coming to the end of Hermes Avenue, I turned left into Rapunzel Street, along the further part of which I had already driven. Passing the street from which I had first entered Rapunzel, I completed a counterclockwise circuit of six streets. I intended to go to the end of Rapunzel and turn right, where I hadn’t yet been. However, as I completed the circuit a thing of great interest happened. All the street names around me changed. The layout and the houses I passed remained the same as before, but the streets bore names from the Qabalah. Coming to the end of Rapunzel, I checked the sign and saw that it was now Hod Street.
I abandoned my plan to turn right, and drove around the circuit a second time. The street names altered again, now to delightful titles from the texts of the alchemists, like Green Lion Lane, Crescent of the Peacock’s Tail, Corascene Dog Court and Armenian Bitch Alley.
These shifts were both heartening and disheartening; they suggested that there was a way to find the Museum of Apertures, but also suggested that I faced an intricate search and might run out of petrol before I had worked out the route. I assumed that at some point I would need to leave the main circuit and drive up a side street.
The nomenclature of the streets passed through the Tarot, the I Ching, the language of astrology, the Yoruba oracle of Ifá, and even Enochian chess, with a Fire Board Drive, a Water Angle Way and a Servient Square.
The next time around the language was that of arithmetic, with the street signs featuring not words but sums.
I nearly missed the clue. I had to brake hard to avoid starting around the circuit another time.
I have said that cledonomancy requires the practitioner to be on the alert for puns, amongst other things. If sums were somes, mightn’t the way to others be through them?
Perhaps it was tenuous reasoning, but my instinct approved it. And the instinct has a better appreciation of these connections than the reasoning mind does. If I did not believe that, I would have applied myself to learning only conventional methods of navigation.
I had come within metres of the changeover point in the circuit. Those good instincts of mine cautioned me that to turn the car around would disrupt everything. Fortunately there was no one behind me, and I put the car in reverse.
Twisting around to see to my rear, I looked for streets whose names were division sums with remainders. Such leftover amounts, I thought, would qualify as ‘others’. I had to drive backwards for about a kilometre before I came to such a sum, but it was a good one: 22/7 Street. Quotient 3, remainder 1.
The numbers in the sum and its answer inspired my confidence: 22, the number of paths on the Tree of Life, letters in the Hebrew alphabet and trumps in the Tarot deck, a number bespeaking the searcher’s instruments; 7, so magical that Aleister Crowley called it ‘a most evil number, whose perfection is impossible to attack’: 7 is a number that can curdle milk and cause beasts to be born with two heads, but is also the number which permits miracles to occur: it rules changes and changes rules, and is rightly called lucky; 3, even luckier, is the number of riddles and wishes, the number of sufficiency and fulfilment, the number of beginning, middle and end, the number that governs all outcomes and completions, and the number on the count of which action is taken; and the 1 remainder was one other – a certain enough pointer, I persuaded myself, to the Street of All The Others, all being one and one being all, as the masters never tire of telling us; and 22/7 was of course an approximation to Pi, that number which by its frequent and sometimes surprising appearance in diverse mathematical formulae and equations – from the well-known formulae for the area of a circle and the volume of a sphere to Einstein’s general relativity field equation and Schrödinger’s wave equation – offers the message that the universe conspires to pick its own locks.
I backed up to the street and turned.
22/7 Street was very long, and its specialness seemed to be confirmed by its being perfectly straight. It took me out of the built-up area and into the fields with the billboards. I could see a single house, quite a way in the distance, towards which the street was leading. I felt that all was going well. The house would be the museum, I was confident. I waited to see the name of the street change.
However, 22/7 Street remained 22/7 Street all the way up to the door of the house, which was one of the poor-looking mansions. But there was no ignoring the sign painted in gold letters on one of the front windows: MUSEUM OF APERTURES.
‘No jobs here,’ said the bleached and sunburned woman who answered the door. ‘All our positions are filled.’
‘But what about this?’ I asked, showing her the ad.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘this isn’t the Street of All The Others, is it? This is the Museum of Apertures, 22/7 Street.’
‘Then you mean that this isn’t the only museum of apertures out here?’
She shook her head. ‘Why would you think that, you goose?’
I sank. I felt a lot worse than I should have. A mere caretaker’s position shouldn’t have meant so much to me.
Perhaps she felt sorry for me, because she invited me to come inside anyway. ‘Have a look around,’ she said. ‘We have a fine collection.’
Inside, the house was painted in a pink that matched her sunburn. The collection was housed in cabinets around the walls.
I could not judge whether the collection of apertures was a fine one, never having seen such a thing before. There were keyholes cut out of doors, empty picture frames, the eyepieces of telescopes and kaleidoscopes, broken teapot spouts, gun barrels, toilet seats, the eyes of needles, letterbox slots, grates, loops of cloth that appeared to be arm and leg holes cut out of clothing, various bits of dried organic matter that I didn’t care to pore over, and a great many other hollow and perforated objects of no great rarity.
In the next room, however, the tour became slightly more interesting. The room was small, and in it were displayed only seashells (an assortment of univalves and complete, partly open bivalves). The woman took a paper nautilus down from a shelf.
‘Look at this,’ she said. ‘I call it my legless sailor. Do you know what haunts it in the creature’s absence? Everything else in the cosmos. It’s only nature’s sense of practicality that imposes an ending on the spiral; mathematics would have it go on growing forever.’
The next room she led me into was completely empty.
‘In here we keep our purest exhibits, those without any extraneous matter,’ she stated, and gestured towards the middle of the room: ‘There, before you, is the Gate of the Willow Tree from the wall around the palace precincts in old Baghdad. And there, by the right-hand wall, is the grave of King Arthur. That little one in the corner is the open top of Pandora’s Box, and there, there and there are openings of one, two and four inches in three of the Doors of Perception. Next to them are the muzzle aperture of the rifle that shot President Kennedy, the aperture of the noose by which Ned Kelly was hung, and the lunette opening of the guillotine that killed Marie Antoinette. Up to your left is our small but very important collection of the gaps that occur between integers, the finest example being the gap between seven and eight. We are presently negotiating to acquire the gap between zero and one, which will go in that place you see there without a gap in it yet.’
I liked this room the best so far.
‘These are marvels,’ I said.
‘We have two more,’ she informed me. ‘Two special openings. They are kept by themselves, in a locked room, because they are potentially dangerous. But since you’re a connoisseur, I’ll open the room for you, if you wish.’
I said yes; I could not possibly leave without finding out what these two special apertures were.
The room she showed me into was medium sized. Jutting out from the rest of the house, it had windows on three sides, two to a wall. All of them were covered with blinds. On a lectern between the windows in the wall opposite the door was a book bound in red velvet. There was nothing else in the room.