I felt her lips upon mine. The kiss of all loves and all true lovers.
SEVEN
THE SCENE CHANGES. We are now in the elaborate promenade of Prospero Mall. Emma pulls a veil like the sea around her eyes. She slips away but not before depositing a note in the pocket of my coat. I pull it out. The note is faded as if it had been written long, long ago. In an age of childhood when we were encouraged by Miriam and Alice to write letters to one another about fabulous journeys to the ends and the beginnings of time. I smooth the note slowly and read:
Dear Robin,
The next leg of your journey will take you up the Mountain of Folly. And Peter’s assistance will prove invaluable. Do not ask me how I know! Let us say we are privy to one another’s secrets. We are, if you like, lovers in infinity. When Peter lay beside me on the beach before the ambulance arrived I dreamt it was you! (Aunt Miriam says I am an imaginative letter writer.) What I have to say now will come as a shock. Peter’s addicted to three bands in the sacred wood. One is Calypso’s and Tiger’s band which he joined a year or so after your imaginary (it seems so real now – or is it in the future?) death. The second is called the rocket-crucifixion band. The third is Faust’s circus band.
Peter joined the rocket-crucifixion band and Faust’s circus band not very long ago and decided not to give his own name this time but to use an alias. Indeed he used your name – Robin Redbreast Glass. A parcel of cheek! Shocking alter ego Glass cheek! Faust calls him Robin! So don’t be surprised when he addresses him by your name. Miriam says it’s a kind of test between ‘remembering’ and ‘forgetting’ when you climb. Peter, of course, chose your name because it was dead simple. He knew everything about you. It was easy to secure your birth certificate and to answer any questions that Faust might ask.
Faust (he calls himself Doctor Faustus in Prospero Mall) has his surgery – as it is called – at the end of the Mall.
Surgery! An odd name, I know, but it relates to Faust’s alchemy (Aunt Miriam explained things about alchemy), his phantom nooses, phantom crosses, and also (this is important) ‘a shift that is occurring in the priorities of Billionaire Death from whom Faust borrows capital to invest in themes of simulated immortality.’ (I have copied this last from a dusty old book that W. H. reads when he assists Aunt Miriam in staging our plays.) The shift – the book goes on to say – in the priorities of Skull extends through all generations. It’s a frail shift – the book says – but it may build up suddenly into a creative breakthrough. I like that. Don’t you? (W. H. says we are becoming literate imaginations!) The Mountain of Folly, for instance – according to Alice’s legend – has been riddled or penetrated by the vision of a hospital of infinity in which refugees of spirit may reside. (I am a bit frightened by all this, aren’t you? But excited.)
The book also says that the poor doomed people in our theatre of Skull may no longer be doomed as before, that the hospital of infinity is an unexpected blessing in coming space programmes.
On the other hand I heard Tiger growling, ‘it’s too damned early to be sure.’ Things may slip back again. A lot may depend on you and Peter when you climb the Mountain. It’s up to you to save them. And I shall do my best. Remember me.
Emma
PS One thing more. Make your way to Faust’s surgery. You will find Peter there and hear news of the rocket band in which (Miriam whispers) Faust has an interest.
I folded the letter with care and replaced it in my pocket. Dateless Day Infinity Road had brought me now to the end of the Mall. I heard Doctor Faustus’s voice just above me in the Mountain of Folly.
‘Don’t fall this time, Robin. Take your time. It’s a new invention. It’s a new rocket nursery in the stars. A new band blew up above Skull on its way to Mars. Lives were lost. But you can count on me now. So take your time, Robin.’
I was on the point of protesting – ‘I am not a member of a rocket band or of Tiger’s band for that matter.’ And then I recalled Emma’s note from long, long ago in Miriam’s childhood theatre. How remarkable that a childhood/adolescent love affair should blossom into a female priesthood and nourish the resurrection body. What a shift, a frail shift, yet intimate revolutionary breakthrough into the prospect of a divine Communism in which all generations reflected one another at the heart of anguish yet consummate wisdom.
I recalled Emma’s note. Faust was addressing alter ego Glass Robin in Peter. And yet was he not also speaking directly to me, my absent body yet dream-presence, dream re-entry into the theatre of life?
‘When the rocket blew,’ Faust continued, ‘it opened like a cross. It tautened into a rope. I saw it through my ancient eyes in the workshop of the gods. My ancient eyes that blaze like a comet at the end of time, the beginning of time. Who can say which end, which beginning? I have forgotten so much, have forfeited so much, to become the comedian of the machine in this end or beginning of time.’
It almost seemed to me as if Faust were pleading with Peter and me. ‘It tautened into a marvellous rope, Robin,’ he said.
He stared at Peter from his windowsill above the Mall. A wind blew down the Mountain of Folly. The terror of his smile was lost upon Peter but I was aware of it, all the more aware of it after the mystical laughter of which Emma had spoken (our arms around one another by the sea). I saw it lucidly now (as if for a moment I had borrowed Faust’s ancient eyes, Faust’s remembering/oblique forgetting eyes, Faust’s Quetzalcoatl eyes in which were entwined the marriage of heaven and earth). I saw the backward shift, the forward shift, the folly, the creativity, the parallel laughters of the universe, the laughter of grace and mystery for which one pays dear, the laughter of the electric machine, of mechanical stimulation, one buys cheap.
‘You know, Robin,’ Faust said to Peter, ‘I like to think of my surgery as a window upon heaven. Except that heaven’s changing. (Indeed the workshop I knew in ancient times has long vanished.) The crucifixion’s changing. Technology’s changing. And quite frankly I’m not sure what investitures the devil now wears. If there’s a shift in the radius of a star, in the radius of the soul, who can say on which side one’s bread is buttered?’ He pointed to a plate on his windowsill and I read: Doctor Faustus, fallen angel from the workshop of the gods, ambivalent sceptic of the purposes of evil, reluctant doctor of the soul. He was smiling with the blandness of his forgetting/remembering eyes and I felt a chill. ‘I am on Emma’s side, Robin,’ he said.
He saw my disbelief and continued to press his argument. My disbelief? No, Peter’s. ‘For the fact is, Robin, if I’m not careful I shall have nothing to work with – the materials I employ will become sterile – I shall lose everyone and everything. And live in an empty shell from which labour has vanished, machines doing everything, thinking machines, acting machines, killing machines. And so let’s seek a lull in our space wars on earth and in heaven. A respite from computer voices and computer generals and computer admirals in the twenty-first century. Let’s give ourselves a chance to define our terms anew, rehearse the technologies of the crucifixion. Turn them round and round, upside down, downside up, make a rope, a rope and a rocket cross into heaven.’
I saw he was playing with Peter, playing with some ancient design of hope he may have abandoned. He was wooing him with the irreverence, the self-mocking humour, for which the comedian of the machine was universally famous. He knew he was taking a risk, that there might be something in what he was saying that Peter might remember and take to heart but this was a chance he had to accept on behalf of the new spatial cross of humanity. ‘Come, come, Robin,’ he said to Peter, ‘I’m on your side, believe me. We’re making the world safe for mankind. I’m up here to receive you. You’ve hesitated long enough. Seize the glory rope and climb into heaven. I promise you no one will burn this time.’
I kept still and virtually invisible beside Peter like a child playing hide-and-seek in a resurrection cupboard. I saw what Emma had meant. I saw the curious pitch, the curious darkness of a spiritual irony within a destitute world enriched by
the oddest parallels, sophisticated technologies running side by side with rickety cupboards, barrels, worn blankets, sheets, chalk to make a seam or line on diagrams of the sky and the sea depicting the intimate recesses of ‘remembering’ and ‘forgetting’ – all substance of the shoestring budget of childhood theatre.
Priorities were changing but so peculiarly, so involuntarily it seemed, that the resurrection body could easily be lured from its true seam or true line in the heart of creation with promises that only It (masked Peter and masked me and others of linked generations) could make valid in the light of the rehearsed values within the deaths of Alice and Miriam and grandfather and others lying in the refugee sea or in the refugee forest or up in the refugee stars (their untenanted graves memorialized in a pork-knocker barrel on earth).
For we had been empowered in our nursery rhymes to weigh the doors and windows of heaven, to knock on them and seek assurances of the nature and the meaning of value.
What was the true seam or the true line that Peter and I needed to understand in our ascent and our overcoming of the Mountain of Folly?
I gave Peter a slight nudge and at last he gripped the rope and began to ascend to Doctor Faustus’s surgery. He drew close to the windowsill. Faust leaned out to seize him. I shouted.
‘Peter,’ I cried (and forgot to call him Robin), ‘swing away from the rope or the cross to the true seam in the wave of rock.’
My forgetfulness in this instance may have saved Peter’s life. Faust hesitated for a fraction of an instant. He had heard my voice as if it came from nowhere yet from another source, another line, another thread in space. He was taken aback by all this (by the repudiation of his deadly rope) and by the name ‘Peter’ of which he was unaware. He knew only of ‘Robin’. Who was Peter? Nobody (or absent body) was Peter. Impossible parallels! And in that flash of lightning bemusement that fell over the Mountain of Folly Peter slipped from Faust’s grasp as if he were made of Glass: made of alter ego Robin Glass, alter ego kingdoms of space.
As he gained the seam or divide in the wave of rock I remembered my earliest temptations threaded into the first time I dreamt I heard voices and sounds. I remembered how I had succumbed to the temptation to seize the kingdoms of space. Had I then – without knowing it – stored up a shift in the priorities of life and death? Had I anticipated Faust in miniaturizing the creation in myself? Had I been in league with my grandfather’s revisionary book as I now stood in league with Emma’s Peter? I had stored, I felt now, in frail treaty with the past and the future, a lightning caution by which or through which to outwit the comedian of the machine when he sought to pull all generations into a window of heaven that was ambiguous if not false, an enchainment of the mind if not an extinction of the soul.
A political parable of mind and soul born of childhood remembered visions in an age of dangerous superpowers professing the good intention out of cunning self-interest, the good life out of expedient design.
Peter and I pursued the seam in the wave of rock until a glimmering window in the Mountain of Folly, like a flag one sticks on the moon beneath a black sky, and a white imaginary sea spelt our approach to a ward in space from which Billionaire Death inspected the cosmos. His imaginary eyes met mine. They were shockingly large and black and deep as if I mistook a West Indian black-coated vista of Mars for Columbus’s Venusian India. I tried to adjust my world-weary resurrected gaze within those imaginary eyes. I dreamt I saw them change and turn subtly green, subtly marvellous within love’s murmuring death wish on earth ascending to the hospital of space. I thought of sunset as if it had been painted on a child’s ball in the depths of space at the heart of a long summer vanished day when imaginary veil upon veil of light speaks of the birth of unremembered glory. I thought of the imagination of twilight at the heart of equatorial sunset and the cry of a vanished bird when the rustle of wings ties one’s breath into a feather that floats unconsumed into the darkness.
I thought of the sensation of pain and of benevolent oblivion. I was confused, bewildered, by a sensation of music, a sensation of beauty (as if an unwritten symphony shrouded my eyes, unwitting revolutionary creativity entertained by Billionaire Death). And I recalled Emma’s perception of laughter’s mask as she lay in my arms by the sea. Her perception, I knew, was also saturated by the imaginary cry of an incredible bird born in the workshop of heaven at its margins with the waste land. And I was struck now in Billionaire Death’s presence by what seemed an intermediate vibration between parallel musics of which I already knew: Emma’s dear music of mystery and grace and the cheap music of the electric machine in the circus of hell. Now – between these parallels that were so unlike one another – lay the imaginary chord I had glimpsed in Billionaire Death’s eyes. Love’s death wish. It was as if in seeing this, hearing this, I glimpsed again a reluctant shift in the priorities of life and death.
‘Life is blind spirit, death is love,’ Billionaire Death said in the voice of a strange organ. I knew I must shake off the dreadful fascination and responded almost without thinking: ‘One needs to convert love’s death wish into generations that are capable of such intimate rapport with one another’s frailties that love leads them through death not into oblivion’s space adventure. Life leads them into spirit as if the passage through spirit is the infinity of invisible spirit itself.’
Billionaire Death turned from me to Peter. He knew my voice. He remembered the voice that had addressed Peter and outwitted Doctor Faustus. He felt the time had come to make me aware of his wealth and his power.
‘I have received billions and trillions to gain the eyes I possess.’
‘You mean you are rich enough to have paid or spent billions …’
‘Not so. Received. Death never pays. Death receives. My eyes reflect the accumulated receipt of love’s death wish. My eyes are the substance of all atmospheres that pour into me. I do not spend, Robin. I receive. The cheaper life is, the greater the undervaluation of the mystery of life – the more it sings to me in all sorts of fashions and follies, the more it grieves for me – the less it resists theatres of extinction and the destruction of species and populations.
‘Who really cares, Robin, how vast are the sums civilization devotes to weapons of destruction? Life is cheap, so spend, spend, spend on fashions of death becomes the refrain that falls into me and fills my treasury.’
He paused and placed upon me the imaginary and brooding vistas of his unwritten music in which I saw through his eyes the terrible opera of an age. ‘From the last two World Wars alone I pocketed billions of royalty. Calculate the astronomical sums spent on the war poems written in the trenches! How much did it cost civilization to bring a handful of poets there and throw a sunset/sunrise blanket over their eyes? I plucked those eyes out of their heads and planted them in mine.
‘Imagine what it costs Redbreast Robin to maim a child or a man or a woman in a bombed city. I have reaped imaginary harvests and Ghost knows what in Vietnam and the Lebanon.’ He turned and pointed to an imaginary bed on which I dreamt I saw three children dressed in Alice’s masks – the mask of Beirut, the mask of Belfast, the mask of Jamaica. They oscillated or stirred in the hospital of infinity.
He saw me staring at the Jamaican mask. ‘Oh that! Just a pittance. People were stoning one another and the little female mask ran on the battleground and was killed. How much did it bring? Let’s see.’ He plucked a blur of stones from his brow and chest. Blurred stones in the photography of pupil and orb in Death’s majestic eyes. Jagged. Sharp. They had cut to the brain. I looked at the child again and wondered whether she had seized love’s death wish with her last breath.
‘You said a pittance,’ I spoke helplessly. ‘Just a pittance.’
‘Oh yes, a pittance,’ Billionaire Death repeated. ‘Let’s see.’ He adjusted his imaginary eyes and I saw angry bodies breaking a surf of cane and vegetables upon a glowing hillside. Their arms were slashed but it did not matter. I saw hands coated with dust digging the sun from the hillside. The brok
en stones from the hillside lost their glow as they were lifted and flung.
‘Say five hundred dollars for loss of crops,’ said Billionaire Death, ‘their loss, my gain. Twenty dollars for each hillside stone. A stone has fossil value in geologic space. A score of stones. Twenty by twenty. Four hundred dollars. Five plus four. Nine hundred dollars. Make it a round sum for a child’s life – a thousand dollars. Death’s a banker, life’s a … life’s a … life’s a … life’s a bloody pauper.’ His voice, I suddenly realized, seemed to have stuck in his throat. A hiccup of a song in a child’s breaking breast.
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.
EIGHT
Death pulled the window down upon the frightful scene and brawl I had witnessed through his eyes. But not before leaving on the windowsill a pair of glittering scales and the stone from the hillside that had killed a child. Peter and I placed Alice’s ring on one scale and the stone on the other. They drew level in perfect equilibrium, perfect equality in the heart of light.
‘I wonder,’ I said to Peter, ‘what Death received on behalf of Alice and Miriam the afternoon they drowned? (And I with them?) It couldn’t have been much. Alice had spent virtually every penny. And there were debts as you know. Miriam’s little theatre would have fetched but a pittance. Yes …’ I found myself brooding on the word pittance, ‘just a pittance.’
I stopped. Peter was silent.
‘Do you know,’ I said, ‘when we drew level with Billionaire Death’s hospital and treasury I remembered my pork-knocker library, every morsel and text into which I dug. I used to play, remember, I was a grave-digger in the magic wood. What are those books worth now? Another pittance.’
‘Enough,’ said Peter, ‘to bring me a bed in space. And the flavour of being cared for and caring for others. Books of a certain kind – written and revised (as you would say) by the hand of the magical dead – have anti-gravity substance. Death may laugh at them but they have a place, an original place, on his scales.’
The Carnival Trilogy Page 27