Soon the ground leapt away from the car’s tires; and he could twist round to stare back at the face of the hill.
As he’d suspected, it betrayed the infolded overhang of catastrophe. The shape of a letter S. Naturally no one could freewheel down such a hill. . . .
Later, he woke briefly in hospital, his head tur- baned in bandages, as seemed only reasonable after an operation to excise the posterior pons area of the brain. He found himself hooked up to rather more equipment than he’d bargained for: catheters, intravenous tubing, wires and gauges proliferating wildly round him.
He stared at all this surgical paraphernalia, curiously paralyzed. Funny that he couldn’t seem to move any part of him.
The nurse sitting by his bedside had jet-black hair, brown skin, dark eyes. He couldn’t see her nose and mouth properly—a yashmak-like mask hid the lower part of her face. She was obviously an Arab girl. What else?
He shut his eyes again, and found himself dreaming: of, scrambling up a cliff-face only to slide down again from the overhang. Scrambling and sliding. A spider in a brandy glass.
MY SOUL SWIMS IN A GOLDFISH BOWL
This terrible cough. It tears me apart every morning when I rise, like a dawn wind: the cold of morning meeting the warmth of the night and sucking it out of me. That’s the picture I have of it, as though I’m sleeping in some yak tent on the high steppes somewhere, not in a town flat. It’s been happening for over a week now: ten, fifteen minutes of convulsive, hacking strain; irritating to Mary, who thinks it’s deliberate, a mannerism, a parody of middle years, a protest. It’s all dry; nothing comes of it.
The Doctor tapped my chest last night, harkened to his stethoscope, peered down my throat. Nothing. Congestion? Something stuck in my windpipe? No. Tonsillitis? No. Digestive troubles, tickling the coughing reflex misleadingly? None that I’ve noticed. He has me booked for an X-ray, but the possibility remains, as Mary believes: habit spasm, hysteria. Myself doing it. To protest at something in our lives, in my life.
So it comes. In the bathroom, the awful hurricane from within. And I grip the firm white washbasin with both hands, as lungs implode and eyes bulge, as I shed tears of blood (so I fancy). Will I burst a blood vessel this time? Will I have a heart attack?
And at last, at last, this morning I do cough up something. Something quite large. Rotund, the size of a thumb nail. It lies squirming on the white enamel. Phlegm alive.
What is it? I wonder in disgust as the tears clear. Part of my lung? A living gob of lung, still breathing the air—fresher air out here than in my chest? It pulses gently, wobbles, throbs. It’s alive. What on earth is it?
A cancer, a tumorous growth, still growing fresh cells, unaware that it has lost its host? Some other unknown parasite that has been living in me? Surely no such thing is known. Look, it still quivers with undoubted independent life.
An abortion, a thumbnail foetus has erupted not from the womb (which obviously I don’t have) but from my chest, and rests there, still alive. Some spirit of sickness, finally exorcised, which my bloodshot overstrained eyes somehow perceive—in the style of some juju witchdoctor who spies out the soul of the disease. The Philippine faith healers supposedly pull impossibilities, nodules, out of the body to cure it. . . Have I, then, become a healer in extremis? Can I march up to sick people now, plunge my hand into their bellies and chests and tubes, and haul out their diseases, alive and squirming? I prod it with my finger. Wormlike, it contracts, bulging another way. Yes, it’s a living being—or antibeing. Dare I wash it away? Or should I shuffle it into a matchbox, keep it prisoner?
I tap the plug in the sink, wash warm water in—and it floats, swims around like a sluggish tadpole.
“Mary! Come and see! I’ve coughed something up. It’s alive!”
She comes to the bathroom, then, and peers into the bowl.
“Can you see it, Mary? Here!’’ I poke it, and it tumbles over in the warm water, rights itself. “You do see it, don’t you? Say you do. It came out of me just now. It lives.’’
“Oh I can see it.’’
“Maybe that’s the spirit of the sickness. I’ve coughed it out at last?’’
“It isn’t that, Tom.” She backs off, her expression diffident. “Don’t you realize? It’s your soul. You’ve lost your soul.”
“My. . . soul? You’re joking! How can it be my soul?”
She retreats from me. Detaches herself. The bathroom is very white and clean and clinical, like a surgery. The thing in the sink circles, executes a flip.
“What else can it be, Tom? What else lives in you? What else could you lose?” She peers at me. “You’re soulless now. The soul’s quite a little thing, you see. It hides inside everyone. Nobody ever finds it, it’s a master of disguise. It doesn’t have to be all together so long as its atoms are spread out around the body in the right order, one in this cell, one in that. But yours has clotted together, it’s condensed itself—and you’ve just ejected it. Lost it.”
“But,” I poke the thing gingerly, “what gives you such certainty? Such conviction!”
“You don’t feel certainty any more? That’s because you’ve lost the thing that gives conviction, faith, belief. I know. Because I still have mine, spread throughout the whole of me. But yours has been narrowing and congealing for months now. It went from your lips, your heart, your fingers. It went from your eyes, from your belly, from your penis. It’s been retreating, pulling in on itself all these months. I know,dear/’
“Supposing,” I grip the bowl, “for the sake of argument this is my soul, do I scoop it up and gulp it down? Do I get it back inside me that way?” The living object somersaults, ducks under water, surfaces lazily. It seems to have no particular sense organs or organs of any sort or limbs. It’s all just one and the same thing. A living blob. Does it eat? Does it absorb energy?
“Can I reincorporate it?”
“Unlikely. It’s too dense now. You’d only eat it, dissolve it in your stomach acids, excrete it out. Parents lose their children, mothers lose their babies from their wombs, you’ve lost your . . . Well,” she shrugs, “it’s gone its own way now, Tom. It’s outside you.”
“Is this some cruel joke of yours? Do you really hate me so much? Have you been hating me all these years without telling me?”
“Hatred, dear, doesn’t apply if the soul is gone; nor love. Besides, how could I possibly love or hate that? But life goes on, obviously. You’ll have to look after it, Tom.”
We have what used to be, once, a goldfish bowl on top of the drinks cabinet in the dining space; now a flower bowl with a posy of anemones, artificial ones of silk. The goldfish died after a few months. Of loneliness perhaps—if a fish can feel lonely. Of emptiness, and the horror of the empty world being so bent round upon itself. I can’t very well flush my soul down the drain, like an abortion, can I? Even if there’s only the merest suspicion that it really is my soul. So I take the bowl, laying the posy on the dining table—then rush back in panic in case Mary pulls one on me. My soul’s still there. Mary’s back in the bedroom, humming, putting on makeup. I scoop my soul carefully into the bowl, add more water, remove it to the safety of the drinks cabinet beside the little drum of daphnae, undiscarded year in year out. Do I feed it on daphnae? It appears not to possess a mouth.
“Mary—I’ve put it in the bowl. Please be careful, won’t you? God, the time! Do I go to work on the day I lost my soul?”
“Don’t worry, Tom, it’ll be safe. Today’s like any other. Better than a pet rock, isn’t it—a pet soul?”
A pet. But it looks nothing like a pet, any more than an amoeba could be a pet. There it is, a huge amoeba, afloat, semimobile, doing its own thing oblivious of me. Goodbye, Soul, for now; I’ll be home at six. Don’t get bored, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.
It circles, rotates, pulses a bit.
Mary will get her hair done, then pick up the food and wine for the meal tonight; Tony and Wanda Fitzgerald are coming round. Brittany artichokes, steak and
strawberries, I suppose.
So off to work I go. While my soul stays at home.
If Mary put the bowl on the cooker and heated the water up, I wonder would I feel the searing pains of being burnt alive? Agonies at a distance? I should have found a better place for the anemones.
However, no such agonies arrive. Indeed, all day long as I examine my sensations, I feel very little sensation indeed. I coast in neutral. Things get done. I entertain a client to lunch; does he notice that my soul is absent? Apparently not. I wonder whether other people really have souls at all—perhaps I was the only one? After lunch I call in on impulse at a church. I ring the confessional bell, I pull the curtain. This is how I believe one goes about it. I’ve no practical experience of such things.
“Yes, my son?”
“Father, I’m sorry but I don’t know the right routines. The formulas. What one does. I’ve never been in a confessional before—”
“If you suddenly feel the call, plainly there’s a need. What is it?”
“Father, I’ve lost my soul.”
“No soul is ever lost to God, my son.”
“Mine is lost. To me. Well, not exactly lost. No—I still have it in a sense, only it’s not in me any more—”
Useless. I stumble out.
Work.
Home.
Mary’s hair is exquisite, if over-precise. I smell the tarragon in the Breton sauce prepared for the artichoke leaves, and hurry to the drinks cabinet, heart thumping, absurdly fearful that my living soul is chopped into the sauce with the tarragon leaves. So vulnerable I feel with my soul detached from me; yet at the same time curiously I feel very little about it . . . But no. My soul still circles slowly there, aloofly. I prod it. It ducks, bobs up again, like jelly.
Tony and Wanda arrive. I pour gins and whiskies.
“Whatever’s that?” asks Wanda, pointing.
Mary smiles brightly. “Oh that’s Tom’s soul.”
Everyone giggles, even me.
We sit down. We eat, we drink. Conversation does its glassy best to glitter. Smoke fills the air. Mary places the bowl with my soul in it on the dining table as we drink coffee and some odd beetroot liqueur from Rumania. My soul circulates. Tony offers it a stuffed olive on a skewer, the olive being the same size as it is. It butts against it, declines the offering; how could it nibble it? When Tony withdraws the olive I look twice to ensure that by some slight of hand he has not exchanged my soul on a skewer for an olive bobbing in the bowl. But all is well.
“It really is his soul, you know,” says Mary. “But don’t imagine it feeds or thinks or does very much! It’s just something that is.”
“An essence. How existential,” nods Tony. After a while my soul is relegated to the top of the cabinet again. Where it rotates, quite slowly, mutely in its bowl.
After a while longer its presence seems to overcast the evening; Tony and Wanda leave rather early, murmuring excuses. It’s disconcerting to see someone’s soul, looking just like that and no more. If only it was radiant, with wings! A hummingbird. A butterfly . . . But it isn’t, alas. This
miracle, this atrocity, this terrible event is too small and simply protoplasmic, too tadpolelike. Where is the amazement? Where is the awful revelation of loss? And this is why I know now, with absolute certainty, that my soul does indeed swim there in the bowl. Lost to me utterly; so utterly that not even a thread of awe or a spider’s strand of sickness unto death can connect me to it.
Such is the nature of real loss, irreparable total loss; no possible attachment remains. So it is true that I am soulless; for there it is. Just that and no more.
While Mary rinses plates, I sit patiently watching it as it turns, and turns, limbless, eyeless, brainless, mouthless, turning nevertheless, occasionally ducking and bobbing in its tepid water in the bowl.
My soul, oh my soul.
THE ROENTGEN REFUGEES
Auroras flickered overhead: dancing spooks tricked out in rose and violet and orange veils, only vaguely held at bay by the daylight, returning every night in their full . . . should one say glory?—yes, it was glorious ... or rage?—yes, it had been rageful. Every night, sheets of mocking pseudoflame put all buf the brightest stars to flight, preluding that not so distant day of the Nebulosity when the whole visible universe might be reduced to a few dozen light years in volume and the art of astronomy die, except for chance glimpses through vents in the swirling skirts of thin, bright gases.
They rode a military halftrack driven by a soldier called Kruger, hosted by the vulgar Major Woltjer.
“Did not ought to have been Sirius!” Woltjer glared over his shoulder at the four passengers, accusing them of incompetence—though they weren’t astronomers or physicists.
“This here is Smitsdorp Farm we’re moving onto now.” His eyes lingered on Andrea Diversley—pressed too tight up against the Indian geneticist, with her arm round his waist. Such shameless affront to his Afrikaner principles in the presence of other whites! His gaze raped and whipped the Englishwoman for it. Yet apartheid was such an unimportant thing nowadays, when you came to think of it!
“Did not ought to have been! What do you think, Miss Diversley?”
“True, Major, the Dog Star played a dog’s trick on us.’’
“Well, did it not so?”
Smitsdorp Farm seemed to be recovering its grass cover adequately by contrast with barrens they’d passed. Far too adequately perhaps, here and there. These patches would have to be looked at later—and the soil, the grubs, the insects, the micro-organisms. Right now, their route was towards the low hills where some of the irradiated seeds that had been stored in the open and sown in control strips had produced some exceptionally high yields, but might be genetically unstable or even nutritionally undesirable.
Woltjer tried his best to shame her into untwining from the Indian; but she only shrugged.
“It isn’t my field of study, Major.”
Tired of twisting his neck round, he stared ahead over the rolling ravaged acres of a farm that would never support grazing herds again.
“Scientists!” he snapped.
So what did he mean by that? wondered Simeon Merrick, who was sitting behind Andrea and her Indian next to the taciturn, defensively chauvinistic Swede, Gunnar Marholm. That sci- ! entists of any breed whatever bore some responsibility for events in the interior of the Dog Star?
Disaster. Yes. But amazingly, in the event, it hadn’t been Mankind’s doing, After so much scaremongering about nuclear warfare, the running down of resources, overpopulation and pollution—all kinds of doom sketched out for the nineteen eighties—disaster, when it had come (as everyone obscurely sensed it must: that was one constant in everyone’s calculations), came wholly unpredictably, from a source wholly external to Mankind’s affairs.
Yet how could it be external? Was it not an illusion to think of it as external?
What hath Man wrought, that God in his Wisdom should permit—no, engineer!—this cosmic event? That He should so dislocate the order of the heavens and the order of life on Earth?
What hath Man wrought, ten years ago, that should finally tip the scales of God’s estimation? Simeon hunted back through the decade before for some exemplary evil—that eluded him.
What earthly events could have prompted the terrible explosion of the Dog Star, as absurdly shocking to the astronomers as it was to this Afrikaner soldier Woltjer? What sequence of sins? Perhaps simply too many people had stopped believing in God?
Ridiculous! No single event or set of events could decide God’s mind. (Yet, recall the Cities of the Plain, Simeon, remember Sodom and Gomorrah! Those had reached a crucial point, attained a critical mass of sinfulness—they had gone too far!)
Surely the modern God was no such petty dictator, petulantly setting fire to a star to scourge his sons and daughters?
It just had to be the whole trend of human history; of accumulated sin. Sins such as South Africa itself. Sins of exploitation and segregation. And yet, and yet, fr
etted Simeon, wherefore Dear Lord Thy choice of this special moment in time? And why wasn’t it the Whites who had died? Why wasn’t it the rich and powerful who perished? Why was it the Blacks, the Browns and Yellows? The poor, the wretched of the Earth. Why was it they who disappeared? Why was it the Major Woltjers of this world who came through—going down the deep mines which their wealth came from, for the first time in their lives, and sheltering there, while above ground the black miners took the peak dose of 8,500 roentgens, and died? The same pattern was repeated all over the globe. The embarrassing querulous voices of underdevelopment were stilled forever. It was the developed peoples of the world who had the resources and the technology to survive. The “Cleansing Operation” he’d heard the supernova referred to in Jo’burg by men like Woltjer. Cleansing operation. All political and moral embarrassments cleared away by the charged particles that followed on the heels of that flare of light, which itself gave only the briefest months of warning.
The Clean Up. Why?
And still Woltjer was angry at Andrea’s tenderness to this Indian, who’d had the impertinence to survive, and who now accepted these white liberal caresses with such greedy nonchalance.
“Did not ought to have been!”
“No, indeed,” Gunnar Marholm said brusquely, to silence him. “It did not, but it was. So are we to blame, somehow? Is science? Don’t you know that it all happened several times before in Earth’s i history? Look in the geological record, man! You’ll find mass exterminations of fauna there. A probably acute dose of 500 roentgens every 300 million years. A single dose as high as 25,000 roentgens once since pre-Cambrian times. Agreed, it was an unfortunate star to explode. Being so near us. Giving such a high peak dosage.”
Simeon looked out of the window at the recuperating earth. The blessed sight of renewed 1 chlorophyll. But amongst and around, lay a hundred skeletons of cattle, tattered hide still clinging on white bones.
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