That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote

by K. J. Bishop

  Though it could have been that she had simply forgotten the real world’s geography, I wondered if she had never known where Zanzibar was, and had made up the story about her origins. I didn’t mind. Who ever tells the truth in V? Besides, when half the veebooters you meet are pretending to be vampires and ETs, a not-quite-Zanzibar seems a modest fiction. And perhaps she had deliberately put her Zanzibar in the wrong place.

  We went down to the beach via a stair between walls covered in scarlet bougainvillea. It was your smooth white sand and coconut palms kind of beach, with lulling, sparkling wavelets, and parrots and gulls for colour and noise. Efficient shark programs patrolled the water. I’d never seen a single porn bottle or other spam object on the sand. Melusine used the beach as the portal for an open art gallery she subscribed to. A lot of rubbish washed ashore, as you’d expect, but so did beautiful and intriguing pieces. She took what she liked, including some of the rubbish, and put it in a room at the top of her tower.

  I followed her down to the cove where the daily quota of offerings came in. Several dozen items lay in a bed of seaweed on the damp sand. I stored my shoes and sat down with my feet in the waves while Melusine looked through it all. I was always interested to see what took her fancy.

  Today she set aside a dramatic photo of sunrise on a Mars base, a barrel of cartoon monkeys that performed acrobatics when you poured them out, and a short film, in a framed screen, of a young man lying nude on a sofa, sleeping fitfully and sometimes waking and speaking to the camera. But her find of the day was a rosewood cane with an ivory tiger’s head for a knob. She gave a low whistle when she noticed it, and lifted it out of the seaweed with a look of delight. She pointed out the realism of the materials and the fine detail in the carving, and handed it to me so that I could feel the weight and texture of it for myself. It was heavier than I had expected. I could imagine swinging it in a brawl and cracking the kneecaps and skulls of the less well equipped. The ivory beast was roaring, showing its teeth and a long dark throat. Its expression was more than ferocious; it was horrid. I handed the cane back to Melusine.

  ‘I think he’s a man-eater, don’t you, Zack?’ She jiggled the tiger’s head at me.

  ‘What an evil thing. He certainly looks annoyed about something.’

  ‘He is angry because he doesn’t exist, except here. An angry ghost.’

  At that moment, in her avatar’s subtly changed expression, I saw things I didn’t remotely understand. I was almost frightened. I wondered whether the human race had changed a great deal since her day.

  ‘The maker’s muse must have been some hooligan or loony he met on a dark night,’ she said. ‘I like that idea.’

  ‘He or she,’ I said.

  I thought she probably liked it for much the same reasons that I liked her, but I felt too shy to say such a thing. She took the cane and the other three offerings and left the rest. The sea would take them back. I played porter, carrying the items of secondary interest, while Melusine carried the cane like a royal sceptre. She stopped once in the street on the way back and flung her arms wide, pointing the cane towards her tower. She cried:

  ‘I am the Boss of Zanzibar! Tribute is sent to me from far lands and my desires are the law!’

  She only just managed to finish this pronouncement before we both started laughing.

  ‘The drones ought to be cheering,’ I said, looking at the faces in the street, some of which had turned towards us.

  ‘They’re not programmed to care much about what I do,’ she said.

  ‘Well, I’ll cheer you then. Hip, hip, hooray!’

  Her smile stiffened in place and I realised her mood had changed.

  She was happy again by the time we returned to the tower.

  In the highest room, which she called the Lost and Found, there was a great amount of stuff from the beach, all in disorder. Much more was in storage, represented by boxes and suitcases. She did a bit of filing while I was there, and put her new acquisitions on display, except for the cane, which she took with her as we descended to the tea room. My time warning plughole gurgled.

  Melusine sat with the cane across her lap.

  ‘Tell me honestly, do you really believe a person accrues reality as they age?’ I asked her over a final drink.

  ‘It is my opinion,’ she said, ‘that in a young person the soul projects itself out onto the world, casting about for receptive surfaces. The half-formed identity needs to see itself in order to check on its progress. Every day it hopes to glimpse the mysterious telos towards which it senses itself travelling. The soul comes to the face and leaves signs of itself there first of all. To read the soul in the face requires a mirror, of course, which is why youth is forever peering into the looking-glass: natural curiosity, rather than vanity, is the reason. If the hand becomes involved it writes graffiti. Generally speaking, everything a young person writes is graffiti. Ochre handprints on a cave wall.’

  I tried not to feel insulted.

  ‘I think some people really do see that glimpse in the mirror,’ she went on, ‘and then they know who they are and what they’re going to do, and they do it. But not everyone gets the glimpse, and when the years go by without it there’s just a gradual process of becoming used to one’s uncertain self. Perhaps I could say that the soul goes native. The territory of one’s own identity never ceases being strange, but it ceases being exotic. It’s then that you stop seeking your own reflection so obsessively. Then a wonderful thing will happen. The soul begins to turn its focus around, until it has swung a hundred and eighty degrees. When this state is achieved, you’re finally seeing the world. You become receptive. Not receptive like a child; children are simply programmed to be sponges, and they can’t help it. I mean that you stop insisting on working, doing, giving, making, teaching, nourishing. You’re glad to stand at the other end. You stop wanting to make an impression on the world and start hoping the world will make an impression on you. And the world obliges. It soaks into you. It puts its weight and history into you. It makes you real in a way that you, standing heroically by yourself, cannot hope to do.’

  I smiled slightly. ‘I guess I’ll have to wait and see what happens.’

  ‘You will.’ She thrust the cane at me and roared – a big cat’s roar she’d pulled out of a sound library. I jumped in my seat, which made her laugh.

  ‘I have to go,’ I said.

  ‘See you again, Zack.’

  She waved, and I faded myself out.

  Next time I visited, we went flying. Melusine had a birdflight program, but I preferred to just float, so that was what we did. We drifted over an archipelago of islands that extended beneath us as we rose higher through mild, gauzy wind currents. Bird calls and snatches of sea shanties peppered the air.

  We returned to a mattress on a wooden balcony halfway up the tower. The midday call to prayer was rising from the town. Melusine had shut her eyes against the sun.

  ‘I’m tired of most people,’ she said, ‘but not of my gigolo. Do you mind me calling you that? You’d be my gigolo in the real world.’

  ‘You’re a dreadful old woman.’

  ‘I am,’ she agreed. ‘A dreadful old woman who lives in a dreadful town of golems and likes dreadful things.’

  ‘Except for me. I’m nice, and you like me, I hope.’

  ‘I do like you. Sooner or later you’ll get tired of make-believe and won’t want to come back; but that’s all right. It would be sad if that didn’t happen to you.’

  We lay silently for a while. The muezzins had finished their song. Melusine opened her eyes and rolled away from me to look through the rails of the balcony.

  ‘Zack, I’ve been living up high for so long. Would you believe that when I was a young woman I lived in a tower? After Zanzibar I went to university in France. I went down to Marseilles on holiday and met a man who lived in an old lighthouse. He was a lazy fellow and always poor, but I fell in love with him enough to marry him.

  ‘I was married for thirty years, until my
husband left me. He heard mermaids singing on a spring night and went down to the beach and waded towards their voices until the waves closed over his head. On nights after that I sometimes glimpsed their long cold tails flashing in the water, but I never saw my husband again. I saw so many strange things. I saw ghost ships, and even Leviathan. The top of his back, turning through the water. Those black ridges rolled for half a night.

  ‘A woman from the sea took my son, too. A year after my husband died there was a terrible wreck. A big cruise liner. My son and I watched it happen. Somehow we couldn’t make ourselves turn away. Perhaps the world asked us to witness. No survivors were found that night, but in the morning he found her lying there with the kelp. She was from Athens. He went back there to live with her.

  ‘So then I was alone. A lot of people tried to persuade me that I should move down into a cottage, or an apartment in the city. They couldn’t see why I’d want to stay in the lighthouse. But I liked it. Over the years I had come to need the sea and the sky around me. I was halfway to being a bird, and the lighthouse was my eyrie.’

  As she wasn’t looking at me I didn’t have to worry what my face was doing. But then I just shrugged to myself. If she was a little mad, what did it matter, really?

  ‘You know, when I had a body and lived in my lighthouse, there was nothing between me and the rim of the universe but vanishing waves. I never grew tired of that enormous sea.’

  Instead of pointing out that the Mediterranean wasn’t enormous, I said, ‘You didn’t think of it as your enemy?’

  ‘Oh yes!’ she answered, speaking so fiercely that I almost flinched. ‘It was my adversary. I never forgave it. But still I had to accept what it gave me. I couldn’t deny the beauty of it. I had become very stubborn. For the rest of my life I would insist on existing as though I stood naked in a gale, feeling everything. Every day was a sequence of overwhelming impressions. Once I saw albatrosses migrating. There were millions of them. I thought the whole sky was clouded, until I realised it was afoam with white birds… The sky gave me that, and in a way the sea gave me even more. If you ask most people, they’ll say, if they’re honest, that they dislike images of things that live in the deep fathoms of the ocean. They want alien life to be on other planets, not their own. But I love the idea of there being things that will never be revealed to anyone. Don’t you think there’s enormous power in a secret that will never be told?’

  ‘I do,’ I said. I felt caught up in her words, to a degree that surprised me.

  ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I wasn’t really expecting you to believe me, and you don’t have to believe me now, but when I lived in the world I spoke with old fishermen who told me of things they threw back into the sea with a curse and an invocation to the Virgin. Things the water brought, that made no sense to them. I believed them. The sea is the great alchemist. I still sometimes wonder what it changed my husband into. Does his eye roll around like a golden wheel in front of a vast barnacled fin? For a long time I felt like a child. Many things bemused me. I felt I could believe anything.’

  I decided to make her a present. I was no artist, but that wasn’t going to matter, since I only had to give two objects some basic properties and put one within the other. Since there was no way to make it end up in her quota from the gallery if I uploaded it there, I slipped it into the seaweed while she was looking at something else and waited for her to notice it.

  She had already chosen a couple of pieces before she picked up mine. It was a blue glass bottle with something inside it which couldn’t clearly be seen.

  I watched her try to work out what it was. First she held the bottle up to the sun, but the glass became more opaque in the brighter light. She tried to remove the stopper, but it was fixed and wouldn’t come out. She shook the bottle a few times. It made a windy sound, then a sound like a crackling fire, then one like wheels rolling down a wooden corridor. She took the bottle over to some rocks and tried to break it. It was unbreakable.

  She kept it. She made no comment about it at all, which disappointed me a little. If she had seen me planting it she didn’t drop a hint.

  The last time I saw her we’d been flying low over the beach and town and were sitting on the sand, watching the sky turn from blue to hibiscus-orange and pink as the sun went down. She was gripping the tiger-head cane and her hair was flying around in the evening breeze off the sea.

  ‘As far as I know, I’m the oldest person in the world.’

  I tried to work out how long we had been seeing each other. It came as a shock to realise it was over a year. I hadn’t told her I loved her, because I couldn’t imagine what my childish love would have meant to her.

  ‘Will you do me a favour?’ she asked. ‘Will you keep on accepting the world, and not turn into one of those deplorable young people who are too arrogant to really receive anything except filthy lucre? Will you promise?’

  ‘I’ll give you a definite maybe,’ I said, obscurely pleased with my flippancy.

  ‘I get a sense of vertigo, sometimes,’ she said. ‘When one is standing on a cliff, one can only look back so many times. That which is below pulls.’

  I switched on, at last, to what she was trying to tell me.

  There was no way my emotions could have registered properly on my face. And I couldn’t find anything right to say.

  Finally, fumbling, I said, ‘Are you thinking of… going away? Because–’

  She put her finger on my lips. ‘I’m afraid I am. No, I put that wrongly. I’m not afraid at all.’

  I looked away. Looked at her world. The holiday-brochure beach. The sky, dimming, popping out stars.

  I suddenly, selfishly, wanted her respect, and I hoped that the profile I’d turned to her was somehow looking tough and untouchable, as if I were deigning to show her for the first time that I had secrets of my own, to which she could not expect to be made privy.

  ‘I thought we could fly back to the tower,’ she said. ‘Unless you’d rather fade away now, with my last perfect day?

  I looked back at her, shaking my head. ‘I’d rather fly.’

  I received a letter through the Barclays remailer from a firm of attorneys in Lausanne, informing me that a recently deceased person of undisclosed identity had left me a small sum of money and a V property account, fees paid for the next century.

  There was also a personal message, on gilt-edged vaper in sloping script that I liked to think was her real writing. The note proved to be infused with her chypre perfume when I read it again in the tower:

  My dear Zachary,

  Life is not one thin story, but as many as you wish to tell. We walk the plank, and dare the ocean. Aren’t we funny creatures?

  I shall remember you with love, if memory remains with me, if I remain.

  Melusine

  There are mysterious bottles floating in the oceans, jostling with the spam.

  I haven’t decided what to do with Melusine’s world yet. I’ve been going through all the stuff in the Lost and Found, looking at the things she chose to keep, discovering something like the shape of a hollow where she had lain in the sand of other people’s minds.

  I’ve been making copies of the blue bottle and uploading them to the gallery. I’ve spent a lot of time on this gesture, because although the bottles all make the sounds of the sea and a murmuring town, the secret, inaccessible content of each one is unique, and made with care and all the skill I have.

  DOMESTIC INTERIOR

  The plump egglet, white as Galatea, on the birdroom shelf dreamed that it was, for instance, not a peacock but a great clash, as would produce a sound like a huge chandelier falling in a butcher’s shop, of viridian and turquoise armies. As to who would pay the bill, it was certain that she collected car headlamps and tail lights to hang on anyone’s Christmas tree but her own, which was mortgaged to a disagreeable lion with a wooden head. He was disagreeable because his head made him boring and therefore easily omitable, indeed vomitable, from most people’s thoughts.

 
He was, however, devoted to his mother, who lived in the walls and communicated to him in melodic and dramatic sighs that became particularly expressive when she reminisced (and she did little else) about her youthful desire to live in a terrarium with a china pagoda that was to have housed a thimbleful of the ashes of her entirely wooden lover, who died after catching fire staring at the sun in a set of commemorative spoons.

  If a combustible creature wishes to take leave of the world thus, it is best to do so in a blue room, facing south, without clothes on, though gloves may be worn.

  It is also very elegant to wear gloves in the bath; then one’s hands easily become amorous starfish that attach themselves to one’s face and breasts in good-natured, pentacular, leathery concubinage. To watch the sun rise between the rays of a starfish is to remember something blunt like a bull, but diaphanous, without weight, that danced before your eyes once in a fever, when others of your own race were still mute hieroglyphs, sand and surf not even dreams in the driveway. It rightly belongs in the cupboard with the saved jars – but how it resists! Like a Ferris wheel it is unexpectedly strong. It will probably break away and get up to who knows what stormy feast of narcissus…

  VISION SPLENDID

  I. Strathgower, central Victoria, 1953

  ‘They must have been pigeons,’ said Lillian Heap, one of the older girls, affirming the logical explanation. The careless set of her body – a well-furnished, freckled woman’s body in the fawn school uniform – declared against other possibilities.

  To the short and stocky girl with recently-cut black hair who stood, equally fawn, on the dry grass bordering the tennis court she said, ‘Are you coming, Joan? Or are you going to stay and wait for the flying saucers to land?’