Bedlam and Other Stories

by John Domini

  It was not gelatinous, like her. Just the opposite. The ground beneath our flight turned out to be a badlands of sheetrock, with canyons and buttes absolutely razor-edged. Fierce magnificence; I will never forget it. Unlike my murmuring indoor death, this one was crystal, exposed to the weather, silent. The single feature against the ivory strictness of those rises and falls was a repeated series of stiff lines, chiseled into the rock. I never learned their purpose, those lines. But we would cross them at regular intervals, since they ran everywhere, even up the sides of the tallest butte. Going past these markings, always at the genial pace of a tourist, Ul ‘Lyu and I resembled a hawk carrying a rabbit as it flew across a row of telephone wires, the bird slowed by its heavy prey.

  When my arms grew tired, she preferred to rest on top of a butte. Her flying ability, so far as I could tell, never suffered wear and tear, though she would occasionally plump herself onto the rock next to me. Then, the usual gabbing. And my usual lame steering clear of the one question I wanted most to ask. Through all our early talks and flights, also, the grinding borders of our two worlds continued to sound, distantly. But we went a long time, over whole continents of her lined place, before we ran into others like Ul ‘Lyu. Yes, they were very few, these round creatures. Even during my most lonesome waiting, my own way of life had not seemed so unpopulated.

  “I suppose,” I said once, as she lowered me towards a butte-top, “loneliness could be part of your principle. Your principle for living and dying.”

  “Baby, I just don’t know.”

  Her face was directly above mine. She smiled and the colors within her glimmered and blinked, making me feel as if somewhere within my chest hung a sloppy lower class of beast that I myself was carrying.

  “After all, Baby,” she went on, “it could be that in my world something like myself was split into two people. Ooo, or ten people”

  I had to look away. My God, her merciless speculations. My knees buckled as soon as my feet hit the white slate.

  “Baby, when I was alive, I could have been schoolteachers and dogs and….”

  But at last we did meet up with others of her kind.

  There, what a spectacle. In a wanton symphony of talk, Ul ‘Lyu and her countrymen bobbed on the air, catching riffs of excitement off each other until I cried out that my arms were killing me. I was set down, gently, but thereafter the conversation riffed on, rattled on, astonished me on and on. Never mind that, when they rested against the tough ivory landscape, Ul ‘Lyu and her fellow-talker looked as ordinary as two scoops of ice cream stuck on a kitchen counter. Nor did it matter that some had female faces and some—yes, at first it cut me deep to see—had male faces. Together they improvised as if the physical universe was no more than a choice of walls and rougher surfaces they might bounce off without end. They began, say, with how my arms must have felt when I’d said they were killing me. Then the two impossible creatures were just gone. From sodomy to bananas, from the Arabian look of a certain cathedral to the way the mind goes black under the pressure of a thumbscrew. Talk, talk, talk. I would put in what I could. I’d try to be good company. But always, soon, I’d be left behind, literally a hanger-on.

  And so I began to think long thoughts. Because what could you count on, with these people? “Good company” in the usual sense meant nothing here. Nor did “love” itself. The others in this world, yes, shared Ul ‘Lyu’s puzzling familiarity with the details I recalled from my own universe. Sodomy, yes, and bananas. But their connections left me dizzy. More than once, they left me disgusted. Therefore what could I rely on, what could I trust, in such bewildering party chit-chat? Hanging beneath their talk, I began to wonder what I was worth.

  Now, these bad moments always had an end. After the worst and most stupefying conversation, after I hung drained and positive I’d made the wrong choice, then with a particular extra beauty in her voice Ul ‘Lyu would thank her friend and, always, lift me away. With us would rise my nincompoop of a heart. Oh Ul ‘Lyu, you may not have known your principle, but I knew mine. We flew; we flew. Timeless freefall. The bee and the rose set loose together. Flying again, I could ask:

  “Ul ‘Lyu, why do you stay with me?”

  Stay with me: oh was I a cripple. I still lacked the strength to ask straight out whether she loved me.

  “Don’t be silly,” she’d say. “I stay with you because you’re different.”

  But that wasn’t an answer. In fact Ul ‘Lyu, for all your ability to talk, it wasn’t you who gave me the answer.

  Lost in a romantic vertigo as I was, I didn’t notice just when the faraway roar of overlapping heavens stopped. Only, as I dreamed along to the calliope hum of her belly, during one flight or another, I noticed the familiar noise was gone. Ul ‘Lyu’s world had broken clear of my own. I had become, in short, truly dead. Then began the visits by other dead worlds.

  I couldn’t say just how many visits there were. Ul ‘Lyu and I remained capable of entertaining ourselves, despite my doubts. We didn’t tour every last one of these traveling cemeteries. But unquestionably the number of dead worlds passing through hers was high. Two destroyed ways of living, it seems, emit compatible fields of magnetic despair. When Ul ‘Lyu’s stony place ran into mine, that was an accident. But actual dead worlds mingle often. For myself, the numbers alone told the story: awesome numbers, sobering numbers, deeply upsetting stuff. Far more universes had collapsed and been set free than I would have thought possible. And now to feel repeatedly the form of their sadness, to blink as clouds of ghosts darkened our sunstruck flights, to watch the hammered shapes of catastrophe pass again and yet again over the badlands below…. Let me describe only one.

  Out of nowhere, once, a seeming warehouse-full of colored streamers, party streamers, started to pass “upwards” through the white rock. They kept rising, past Ul ‘Lyu and myself, till they disappeared into the sky. Unfortunately, however, we couldn’t communicate with whatever creatures gave life to this swiveling forest of celebration. They didn’t speak. But after a while I discovered I could tear off strips of their souls for myself. In my hands the bits of green or gold or orange streamers still made no sound, gave no word. But they wriggled and flipped over comically. When I let them go these strips of color again leapt into the sky, and again took up their rising, even as they continued to wriggle and twist. So we passed the time, in a never-ending New Year’s Eve. For those rare days I enjoyed a superiority over Ul ‘Lyu, simply because I had fingers and a thumb. But then came the moment when the first streamer finished passing through. Then we saw the way it tapered off into an elongated wet tip. Then we recalled how, at the start of their visit, the “upper” ends of these creatures’ bodies had been bulbous, permeable like a sponge, and also wet. Wet beginning, wet end. At last we understood. Ul ‘Lyu’s world had been penetrated by a universe of enormously long tears.

  “No!” I cried after the discovery. I buried my hands deeper than ever in Ul’Lyu’s jelly. “No no no. What have I done?”

  “You were cruel,” my mysterious lover said. Mysteriously neutral again and yet mysteriously forgiving me. “Destructive and cruel, Baby.”

  But that one case isn’t enough. That one case provides only the woeful melody of these passersby; it lacks the startling coloration added by the mind’s orchestra at each new visit. Let me describe another.

  We saw also a type of dead which came not from somewhere in deep space but from out of a history I recognized. Not from dead worlds, that is, but from dead civilizations on my own world. One such group crossed the landscape here in the form of statues, statues of men only, half-rising from chambers of marble or alabaster. My own history, dead and wandering! Now all right, yes, I could understand the theory involved—or I could after I’d done with my shameful screaming and carrying on round and round the top of another small butte. In time, I could understand how these statues represented a philosophy, a system of gods, that had passed out of existence. Yet I thought further. Might I not once have worshipped these marb
le gods myself? And, stranger still: since the intense worship of a given principle creates its own heaven, then the number of heavens could go on forever. There could be a heaven for one soul alone.

  No. No those two cases together also fall way short of the whole effect, the percussive attack of surprise after surprising visit, the counterpoint of horror and lunacy. And the numbers. Let me describe them all. In my memory, clustered around Ul ‘Lyu and myself, these dead souls appear like nothing so much as an overbearingly lit-up bar-&-grill at sundown. Among the slick stains of spilled brew and the rotating advertisements, I can identify, glumly, the workaholic commuters and city types, the skanks and nerds and the ones merely bent out of shape, and I watch them all getting a buzz on during Happy Hour. Happy, oh yes, happy. For not only did Ul ‘Lyu waltz through these visitors with her customary light step—that much I’d expected, that much I loved her for. Also, strangest and worst of all, these blasted cinders of a former belief claimed to be more or less happy. If they could talk, their tune was always more or less the same.

  The death of their way of life?—I would ask, sadly.

  Oh, no big thing—They’d come back.

  Over and over, up down and sideways, they denied carrying any leftover ideals.

  “It became an injurious doctrine,” the marble men told us, in their profound marble voices, “continuously striving to be pure.”

  “There’s only so much light a body can put up with,” an aluminum creature told us, with a rattle in its vowels. “Light, light, light. Do you think the rocks noticed while I was there trying to shine my brightest?”

  “One realizes after a while that the concept, funny, covers too large a spectrum of related ideas.” This was an unusually delicate group of beings, made of what appeared to be nylon and rotted fruit. “One tried, but one never understood all the complexities.”

  These creatures could communicate only by inserting a kind of appendage, an olive-colored nylon filament, inside each of their listeners. When the point had gone in, just below my diaphragm, there’d been no more than a moment’s pain. But now, as the creature began explaining itself, I suffered a pang of jealousy from head to toe. Ul ‘Lyu, at the nylon touch, had started to warble.

  “One realizes after a while,” my filament spoke just before I violently jerked free, “that life goes on.”

  Life goes on! Those last words in my belly meant more to me than all our other loose talk with the dead put together. For in that one simple shock of jealousy, after the uncounted arousals and depressions brought on by these visitors, I’d perceived at last the unique hold I had on Ul ‘Lyu. Now I kicked and tugged like the worst spoiled brat of a child. I hauled her away. Behind us, the freed points of the nylon people waved feebly. But I wouldn’t allow Ul ‘Lyu to watch; I shrieked and yanked with both wrists….

  Really, it embarrasses me to recall the scene, these days. Even after all that’s gone on since. But with more weeping, more low opera, more hysterics than ever before, once I got Ul ‘Lyu away from the nylon people I made it clear all over again that I loved her.

  “Don’t be silly, Baby,” she said many times. “Oh, you are silly.”

  But no, Ul ‘Lyu, no I wouldn’t stop. I knew what I’d just at last perceived. Because you remained always yourself, my winking, motley darling. During a thousand visitations from dead worlds everywhere, we’d met no one so irrepressible as you, so uncaring as you. Yes. While the other ruined creatures looked on amazed, you would make pleasant conversation about, say for example, waking at night in a barracks to hear two soldiers buttfucking a third. Any ghost in earshot was struck dumb. Meantime I would stand there, or hang there, smiling knowledgeably. That’s nothing, my look would say; what you just heard was nothing for my Ul ‘Lyu. So what if these other dead worlds had learned to put on a thick skin? Not one of them, Ul ‘Lyu, not one that we’d come across yet could match your range. Monster girl, what did you know about caring? You asked the aluminum people what it felt like to be torn apart. You asked the men in their alabaster chambers whether, as their world collapsed, any of them had slashed their wrists. Innumerable times, in fact, I’d watched you poking and prodding, drilling for any new sensation. And now that the nylon filament had poked you, now that for once your guts had been converted to mere talk, now I understood. What you saw in me was precisely that thing I’d feared made me bad company. For you, I was the one grip on true feeling. Among the cool talk of destruction, the flick-of-the-wrist way these people could dismiss hopes they’d once believed they would live off forever, I alone offered genuine caring. Ul ‘Lyu, I was your touchstone.

  So I screamed, I wept. It embarrasses me still to think of it. I ignored the little insults that would have stopped my tears in their tracks before this. I showed Ul ‘Lyu what feeling was.

  And soon enough, sure enough, she was responding: “Ooo Baby Baby, I love you.”

  I think I noticed in those very first words the falseness, the utter vacancy, of what she was saying.

  “Ooo Bay-bay, yes I do.”

  I couldn’t help but notice. She sounded exactly like one of those vapid soda-pop love songs I could remember from when I was last a teenager. I could almost hear the sappy strings, the faked echo effects.

  “Ooo Baby, I love you-ooo too.”

  But I wept on, drawing the promises out of her.

  I should have realized what would happen. No insight, no matter how genuine, no trick no matter how devious, could have blocked every possible way I might lose her.

  From some unmarked place high overhead, at some unmarked point in time, there arrived a dead population of singers. The music, however, was different from Ul ‘Lyu’s; it wasn’t accidental. In the shape of trumpets, more or less the consistency of brass, these new singers flew into the chalk-bright air of my adopted world. Around their distant bodies the sky became a mottled blue and green. I too was intrigued, during those brief moments before I realized the danger.

  But then those trumpets began to play, then the bells of their horns grew and shrank according to the demands of their song…and then at once my Ul ‘Lyu began to respond. Of course I wouldn’t have minded if she’d merely wanted to talk. But something extra came into her electric hum, while the trumpets sang. I felt—oh, something extra. I felt the iron surfaces spreading once more against my palms, my fingers.

  Ul ‘Lyu, trying to sing, went higher. The first time it happened, as she struggled for the tune, it became obvious that she would forget me if I let her. But, my bright bird, talented as you were, you couldn’t master the art right off. I did manage to survive pass after pass of these visiting trumpets. I did get to see how, below us, the buttes and canyons would shrink to no more than wrinkles in the white sheetrock, marked from end to end by the irregular intervals of five grouped lines. Against them, our shadows were dots.

  For the music was different from Ul ‘Lyu’s. In order to play with this new kind—in order, it seemed, to communicate at all—she had to work. Ul ‘Lyu began by simply trying the melody. Then since the trumpet-people seemed uninterested, my lover turned to harmony, to counterpoint, or to adding a baroque, quasi-woodwind flourish. Yes, of course I took note of every least modulation. I was desperate for any chance at regaining her. And very pretty, Ul ‘Lyu, your work was very pretty. With each additional music lesson you put a new crack in my heart. Moreover the trumpets, also, must have liked something of what they heard, because they returned for pass after pass. At the edge of her sky, the brass ghosts would swivel like snakes and come back for another attempt at the combined symphony. And the more my lover tried to round out the score, the more metal she became.

  Ul ‘Lyu, Ul ‘Lyu. I…

  I don’t like to think, now, of the humiliations I went through to get her attention. Maybe the Powers on my world, inside their shuttered stalls, can identify gradations of pain. For myself, however, there is only a single, seamless ball-bearing of shame that rattles up and down the spine as I recall my excesses. I will admit I shouted till the
muscles of my lungs were weary. I will admit that, with forced jealousy, I pointed out that the trumpet is considered a masculine instrument. Whenever I succeeded in tearing Ul ‘Lyu away from her music there followed pitiful bawlings of “true love, Ul ‘Lyu, true love.” And there are tricks even a cripple can do. By the end I was injuring myself deliberately. I kicked my feet bloody, against the metal that emerged while she tried to sing. Heaving myself up like a man pulling himself onto a tree branch, I cut my forehead open. I could even bash my nose against her iron self, until I was swallowing blood and mucus.

  But ah, untrue love. Yes I might as well have brought out a couple of clowns, with feet like a duck and triangular purple eyes, one playing a weepy violin and the other a cracked accordion. Because Ul ‘Lyu, I led you on. I never for a moment tried to damage my hands or arms. I kicked and flopped and shook, but I never risked losing my grip.

  At last, however, I played the wrong trick.

  “Ul ‘Lyu,” I asked her at last, “what attracts you to them?” I lay on my belly, then, along the top of another harsh butte she hadn’t wanted to visit. “What, Ul ‘Lyu?” My face was buried in my arms. She floated overhead. I gasped unnecessarily. “They can’t give you what I can.”

  “No, my Baby. No they can’t.”

  But from the sound of her voice, I knew her face had rotated away from me.

  “Tell me!” I snapped back my head and then brought it down onto the rock, hard enough to start tears. “Tell me!”

  “I…Baby, I don’t know.”

  Oh, but part of her did. Something in her voice drew my head up from my elbow again. Half-stunned and weeping, I could nonetheless see that her iron surfaces were already beginning to emerge as she answered my question.

  “I don’t ever know,” she said in a heartbreakingly familiar way, “why I‘m up there singing.”

  Ul ‘Lyu, Ul ‘Lyu.

  I should have realized. It’s no excuse that I myself can’t sing, that I heard music but no other form of communication from the trumpets’ playing. No excuse, because after all this time I should have known that whenever my Ul ‘Lyu strove to imagine, to give voice, she was driven by the same essential mystery.