by Ben Okri
And when he stopped screaming, he stopped falling. And when he opened his eyes he found himself bathed in the most splendid black starlight. And up above, like a forgotten god of the mountains, a towering colossus made of primal light, was the startling presence of the great archangel of invisibility.
One moment she was there; the next moment she was gone. Her presence was so brief that it seemed a lightning flash of eternity had passed through him. When the great archangel disappeared, leaving a glorious intensity of lights in the giant spaces she had occupied, with her wing span alone seeming to cover the entire island, he felt that he too had become completely insubstantial, and mightier. He was not sure how, or in what way.
‘I don’t understand anything at all,’ he said to the wind.
‘Don’t try to understand,’ the voice, his guide, said to him. ‘Understanding comes beyond trying. It comes from beyond.’
‘Beyond where?’
The voice stayed silent.
6
He was still wondering about the places beyond, from which understanding comes, when he found himself at the foot of a fabulous bridge. The bridge, completely suspended in the air, held up by nothing that he could see, was a dazzling construct, composed entirely of mist. He was bewildered by the insubstantiality of the bridge. It too seemed to be made of light, of air, of feelings. He was afraid to step on it lest he would plunge down below.
‘What holds up the bridge?’ he asked his guide.
‘Only the person crossing it,’ came the reply.
‘You mean that if I am to cross the bridge I must at the same time hold it up, keep it suspended?’
‘Yes.’
‘But how can I do both at the same time?’
‘If you want to cross over you must. There is no other way.’
‘And what lies below? I mean, if I should fail to hold it up while crossing what would I fall into? I ask because I do not see any water underneath.’
‘There is no water underneath.’
‘What is there underneath then?’
‘Only those who fall know. And they have never returned to tell anyone else. We have our legend about what lies below, but the legend takes the form of a riddle which you must answer before you can be admitted into the palace.’
‘So am I to make this crossing alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what about you?’
‘I will be waiting for you on the other side.’
‘But how will you get over without crossing?’
‘That is something you can learn if you have crossed the bridge once. Not everyone learns it, of course. And many have forgotten; and because of that they have perished. On this island of ours learning what you know is something you have to do every day, and every moment.’
‘In the places where I have been, forgetting is what you do every day.’
‘Too much forgetting led to our great suffering. We always have to relearn here.’
‘I have noticed also that I have grown heavier.’
‘On our island heavier is lighter.’
‘But if I am heavy will the bridge bear me?’
‘If you can bear yourself, the bridge too can bear you.’
‘And I must cross this bridge?’
‘Yes, you must cross the bridge.’
‘And if I do not cross?’
‘You will be nowhere. In fact, you will be worse than nowhere. Everything around you will slowly disappear. Soon you will find yourself in an empty space. Then you will stiffen. You will lose all life. You will become the image of what you essentially are. Then, not long afterwards, half dead and half alive, unable to breathe and unable to die, you will become the statue of your worst and weakest self. In the morning, you will be collected by the garbage men and set up in the negative spaces of the city as another reminder to the inhabitants of the perils of failing to become what they can become. At night you will dream that you can move, and you will wander about in your own inferno, muttering strange words to those too idle to do anything else but listen. You will aid the island by becoming, at night, one of the negative dreams that test and tempt those who might receive prizes from the Academy of Integrity. I assure you, it is better to try to cross that bridge and fail, than to not try at all.’
Not long afterwards, he became aware that his guide had gone. The bridge was now invisible. He found himself looking into an unfathomable abyss.
7
He stood at the foot of the invisible bridge, with Time howling around him. He was filled with dread. He could see nothing beyond the abyss. He couldn’t even see the other side of the bridge. He could no longer imagine his destination.
As he stood there, transfixed by the impossibility of going back or moving forward, he became aware that things were disappearing around him. An inscrutable mist seemed to be effacing the glass cupolas, the golden spires, the palace of mirrors, and the splendid marble facades of the island’s incomparable streets. The mist seemed to be wiping out the divine forms which he had glimpsed in the moonlit air. As the mist effaced the colonnades and the marvellous ruins, the glowing hills and the chessboard universe, he realised to his horror that even the road behind him was becoming nothingness.
Time howled from the abyss as the creeping emptiness slowly enveloped the visible world. The emptiness began to devour even the sounds in the air and the mirages that his eyes had conjured in the mist.
‘I did not come from nothing, and I will not die in nothing,’ he said to himself.
But nothingness was blooming all about him in his unwillingness to cross the invisible bridge. Soon the empty spaces creeping towards him became a sort of white wind. The white wind blew away the foundations of the street, blew away the cypress trees, and even the gaps between things, upon which he had fixed his gaze, in the vain hope that while things disappeared the gaps between them would remain.
‘I will not die in nothing,’ he said again, as he watched the world slide away from him into an avalanche of invisibility.
Soon he felt himself standing on the last remaining patch of earth in the whole world. Soon he felt himself on the last ledge of a precipice. Soon he felt his senses falling under the beautiful seduction of the abyss. Out of its enigma he heard soft susurrations and gentle whispers, as of voices murmuring consolations to the last man on earth, who thought himself damned. But when he listened more attentively he thought he could distinguish low songs, sweet tender choruses of the abyss calling him into the happy home of the world-effacing white wind.
For a moment, he was blissful. For a moment, he was seduced. The abyss seemed the perfect place to rest, the safest harbour from so much anxious questing after visibility. It seemed the true home he had been seeking all his life. Slowly, in his mind first, be began to succumb to sleep. Slowly, in his body next, he felt himself falling. There was a grace and a loveliness in his dream of falling. Then, just before he succumbed completely to the song of the abyss, it occurred to him that the nothingness that was devouring the visible world was now beginning to devour him.
In the space of a moment, he felt himself turning to stone. In the space of another moment, he saw himself as a negative statue, with a vacuous happiness on his face. The vision filled him with horror.
‘No, I was not born into nothing,’ he cried to himself, as he made one last effort to rally his mind.
And when he looked about him with eyes already heavy-lidded with the sweetness of falling, what he saw made him cry out with infernal dread. Years later, he would remember that terror also has its enchantment and its uses. It was the terror of what he saw that probably woke him up to the last moment of his old life.
8
All around emptiness bristled like a snow-drift. The white winds whipped the last spaces on the highest mountain and all he could see below was the pure whiteness of oblivion. The universe had collapsed on itself and he stood on a tiny patch of earth that had turned white like a frosted mirror. And in his ears, he heard the happy wailings of th
e devouring wind. He was becoming nothing. He was dissolving into negative space. And he felt it was worse than dying. At least with dying he would be falling away from the world into an unknown. Now he was falling from nothingness into something more horrible than nothing.
Even the moon had gone. The absence of the archangel had left him in the loneliest place in the world. There was now nothing behind him, and a bridge of dreams before him. He felt that he was living the meaning of his life for the first time.
In the space of that defining moment, he noticed that the bridge had suddenly become visible. He was about to move when the bridge became invisible again, tantalising him.
The wind had begun effacing the frosted mirror beneath his feet when the bridge appeared again, but in the form of water. Then it turned into a bridge of stone. Then it turned into a bridge of fire. And he knew instinctively, as the white wind began to efface him out of existence, that if the bridge turned from fire into anything else he would be doomed forever in nothingness.
Screaming as he had screamed when he fell into the abyss of invisibility, he ran onto the bridge of fire.
9
He half expected to fall through the flames. In his panic he had forgotten his fear that the bridge might not be real. He fled across the bridge and slowly became aware that the faster he ran the less distance he covered and the hotter the flames were. It occurred to him to slow down. He proceeded to walk. His panic changed. The heat from the fiery bridge lessened. He gained some confidence from the curious fact that the fire seemed to bear his weight.
Then he noticed that the slower he walked through the flames of the bridge, the greater the distance he seemed to cover, and the faster he seemed to move. He was beginning to enjoy these strange little discoveries when he remembered that the flames were supposed to burn him. In that moment, almost as if he had created it with his fear, he felt the unbearable heat from the railings and girders of fire. He felt himself burning. He felt his feet and his back and his hair and his face sizzling in the midst of the red and blue tongues of fire. He turned and started to run back in a new panic when suddenly the dancing yellow flames raced down from his hair and began to consume his flesh.
Howling, he threw himself on the floor of the roaring furnace all around, screaming into his own maddened agony. Burning all over, feeling himself turning cinderous, he jumped back up and was about to leap off the bridge into what he hoped was the perfectly cooling water of the abyss when something changed all about him.
Suddenly, he felt himself flailing and kicking, turning and sinking into the liquid floor of the furnace.
Confused, thrashing about, he found himself beginning to drown.
Halfway across, the bridge had turned into water.
10
Bewildered by the sudden flooding of the bridge, he started to swim. He swam in a panic, forgetting what his guide had told him – that every moment he had to relearn what he already knew. And so the faster he swam, the slower he moved, till it appeared as if all his confused efforts only succeeded in making him go backwards. He resisted this paradox of motion with all his might and all his fear, and soon found himself near the beginning of the bridge again.
It was only then that he remembered the mysterious quality of grace that his guide had hinted at. And he remembered only because he didn’t want to have to go through it all over again, making all the mistakes of his confusion. So he swam more gently, more slowly, and he wasn’t at all surprised that this made him travel faster through the water.
He was beginning to enjoy the serenity in this discovery when it occurred to him that he was swimming in the air, in an illusion, in a dream, and that at any moment he would fall through the water into the dreaded abyss below.
He had barely completed this thought when he found himself in midair, with voices crying around him, with demons rushing past his face, whistling songs from his childhood. He noticed strange beings with green eyes, riding on yellow horses, drifting past his gaze. He was surprised to find people wandering past him in the air, dressed in blues and reds, with a distracted look in their eyes.
As if in a mist, he saw whole peoples rising from the depths of a great ocean, rising from the forgetful waters. Then, with a fixed and mystic gaze in their eyes, he saw them walking to an island of dreams. There they began building a great city of stone, and within it mighty pyramids and universities and churches and libraries and palaces and all the new unseen wonders of the world. He saw them building a great new future in an invisible space. They built quietly for a thousand years. They built a new world of beauty and wisdom and protection and joy to compensate for their five hundred years of suffering and oblivion beneath the ocean. They had dwelt as forgotten skeletons on the ocean bed, among the volcanic stones and the dead creatures that turn into diamonds, among the fishes of wonder that never come to the surface to bathe in sunlight. He noticed that there is also light in the depths.
He saw all these things as he flailed in midspace.
Then he realised that towards the end, the bridge had turned into air, and into dreams.
11
He marvelled at the dreams, and at how clear they were. He marvelled at the people who had risen, as if from a millennial sleep, from the ocean bed that had been their home. And he was filled with wonder at the great and enduring beauty of the new civilisation they had built for themselves in their invisible spaces. They had built it as their sanctuary. It was the fruit of what they had learned during those long years of suffering and oblivion at the bottom of the ocean. They had built a fabulous civilisation of stone and marble, of diamond and gold. They had constructed palaces of wisdom, libraries of the infinite, cathedrals of joy, courts of divine laws, streets of bliss, cupolas of nobility, pyramids of light. They had fashioned a civic society in which the highest possibilities of the inhabitants could be realised. They had invented mystery schools and rituals of illumination. They had created an educational system in which the most ordinary goal was living the fullest life, in which creativity in all spheres of endeavour was the basic alphabet, and in which the most sublime lessons possible were always learned and relearned from the unforgettable suffering which was the bedrock of their great new civilisation.
He was stunned by the beauty of their eternal sculptings. Their paintings were glorious: they seemed to have reached such heights of development that the works imparted the psychic luminosity of their artistry in mysterious colours, concealed forms, and even more concealed subjects.
Awed by their majestic festivals, astonished by the infinite ways in which everything done in the civilisation was touched with wisdom, and inspiring of passionate delight, he found himself soaring in the dreams of this mysterious people.
He had never been so happy as he was in the great dreams. His joy was so intense that he became aware of himself in the air, invisible, a pure vibration of bliss, a bird of light. And he wondered how long he would exist in this beatification before he would find himself falling back towards the stones of a familiar reality.
He had hardly completed this thought, floating above the dreams of the cultivated hills of serenity, when he felt himself falling. He was falling through the air, with the beautiful visions drifting away from him. And his fall was so strange that when he found himself on solid ground, standing there as if he had never made a single motion all his life, he was completely surprised.
He did not have to look to know that the bridge had become solid again.
12
When he did look back, however, he found himself at the end of the most magnificent bridge he would ever see. He thought of it as the bridge of self-discovery. It was a great marble bridge with gold incrustations and diamond girders. Sweeping over the air in a majestic curve, it seemed to be made of a substance that created its own light. Its light irradiated the seven hills.
He was still marvelling at the bridge and at the curious nature of his crossing, when he became aware of the silent presence of his guide.
‘I don’t
think I will ever understand,’ he said.
‘Understanding often leads to ignorance, especially when it comes too soon,’ replied his guide.
‘But if I don’t understand how can I carry on?’
‘It’s because you don’t understand that you carry on.’
‘But I have to make sense of what I have just experienced.’
‘When you make sense of something, it tends to disappear. It is only mystery which keeps things alive,’ said his guide, patiently.
It was the patience in his guide’s voice that made him look back. When he looked back, he was astonished to find that the bridge had disappeared. It occurred to him that he had somehow managed to walk across emptiness. For the first time, touched with a magical humility, he realised the nature of the small miracle he had enacted in his life.
Making no allusion to his crossing of the abyss, his guide led him into the city of the Invisibles.
Book 2
1
They went down stone streets, with silence echoing about them. The city was empty, but he felt presences everywhere. He couldn’t explain it, but it seemed the air was watching him.
In the darkness the buildings loomed like materialised dreams. They seemed like great constructs on a giant stage set. He felt small amongst the mighty stone edifices.
They went into the city at the most mysterious time of night, when footsteps were heard and no one was seen, or when a song would drift past in the air, disembodied.