Glister

by John Burnside

  “Don't worry,” the man says, “I'll leave a space for you to breathe.”

  Morrison is in a state of panic now, but he cannot move. He cannot do anything. Soon he will be unable even to speak.

  “They used to wrap people up like this,” the man says, “back in the old days, as a treatment for tuberculosis. Did you know that?” It's like having a conversation with an over-friendly barber: the man even cranes sideways and looks into Morrison's eyes to make sure he is listening. It means something to him, this story. He has planned this carefully, and the story sits at the center of it all, like a spider in its web. “Tuberculosis isn't just a lung thing,” the man continues, once he is satisfied that he has Morrison's attention. “It affects the bones too. They would leave people in these casts for weeks, to prevent deformities. To straighten them, so to speak.” He pauses—and Morrison detects a wistfulness in that pause, as if the man is remembering something that had once happened to him. “It would drive them crazy, of course,” he says. He steps back to look at his handiwork. “A little more here and we'll soon be done,” he says, though Morrison isn't sure if the man is talking to him, or to the boy in the shadows. He can already feel the bandages drying around his arms and legs. He's in a body-size cast now: soon it will all be dry, and he will be like one of those tuberculosis patients of old. Will it drive him crazy? Will it straighten him? Is that what this is about?

  The man returns from the bucket. “Yes, it must have been a living hell,” he says. “For the patients, I mean.” He works quickly now, building up layers, solidifying his creation. Finally he runs out of bandages. He bends to Morrison's face. Only the nose and the eyes are still exposed. “Don't go away,” he says.

  Morrison wants to look round, to see where the boy is, but already he can't move. All he can see is the man, walking away with the bucket, walking into the darkness, where he stays hidden for some time, before returning with another bucket. The man sets this bucket in the exact same spot as before and begins his work again. “Enter ye in at the strait gate,” he says, and continues as he binds Morrison with the bandages, going quickly, building upon the framework he has already created. “For wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” He stops speaking and stands back. “There,” he says. “You're done.” He looks at Morrison. Far away, there is a sound, a small sound, the flutter of a bird, or wind through a broken casement, Morrison cannot tell, but it's not a significant sound, it's not someone coming to the rescue. Still, the man stands a moment, his head tilted to one side. Now, though, it's silent again, a silence that seems to deepen and broaden the longer the man listens, as if he were making this silence happen, simply by giving it his attention. Morrison listens too: for a moment, they are joined together in a fleeting complicity, two men in a room, listening, waiting; then, suddenly, shocked that he hasn't seen it before, he realizes that this man, this speaker of Bible verses, is the one who killed Mark and left him suspended in the poison bower. He is the one who took the other boys, the one who killed them all and, now that speech has been taken away from him, Morrison desperately needs to ask why he did it. Why the boys and, now, why this, when the man knows that Morrison is innocent. Now he can see that, in this man's mind, something has been achieved by this ritual of bandages and Gospel, just as something was achieved in killing those children. He thinks of the verses the man had quoted and, for himself, he adds in the one that seems most significant, for this moment, for this act. He wants to say it aloud, but he can't, because the plaster-of-Paris bandages are already thick around his face, already beginning to dry, and his mouth is set, speechless. All he can do is repeat those verses in his head and look this man in the eye so that, perhaps, by some effort of will, he can communicate his thoughts. “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” he begins, putting everything, all the life that remains to him, into the thought. “For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” Morrison is not a churchgoing man, in any meaningful sense, but he knows this passage from Matthew, he knows it well. It is written along his bones and along his veins, and in the well of his skull. “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.”

  All this time, the man has been watching him. Morrison even thinks he has got through, that the man really is hearing the verses that Morrison is thinking. Finally, however, the man leans in and fixes Morrison's eyes. His look is questioning, like the look the teachers would have when they punished him in school, a look so full of self-righteousness that he would always refuse to dignify it with a response. After a moment, the man says, not loudly, but loud enough so Morrison hears it clearly through the bandages: “I'm giving you time to repent yourself,” he says. “Use it well.”

  With that, he is gone, moving off into the darkness, disappearing for a few seconds, then reappearing in Morrison's line of vision, walking away into the dark again, accompanied now by the boy, who must have been there all along, watching, listening. The two vanish for a long time into the darkness, and Morrison thinks he is alone now, frozen, suspended in time and space, and the panic is almost impossible to bear—like the panic of Thomas à Kempis, when he was buried alive, only worse, since Thomas could at least fight, he could claw at the lid of his coffin, he could scream and moan and pray. Then, when the panic has built to a point at which Morrison feels he might lose consciousness and fold into some kind of mercy, he sees directly ahead of him, where there had only been darkness before, a bright circle of light, fiery, brilliant, utterly inexplicable. For a moment, that is all he sees; then, as his eyes adjust to that sudden brightness, he sees two figures, the man and the boy, walking into this brilliant light, walking into the fire and disappearing into its radiance, as if it had been their natural element all along, sparks returning to the light, flames returning to the fire. It is a terrible moment and, even after all they have done to him, he feels afraid, for them as for himself, because surely they know what they are doing, surely they know that they are walking into the fiery flames of hell, never to return, but to be extinguished, forever.

  Then, just as suddenly as it burst upon his eyes, the brightness vanishes and the great room is dark again. The man and the boy are gone, lost in the flames, and Morrison is alone.

  HEAVEN

  WHY IS HEAVEN SO BRIGHT? WHY DOES THE LIGHT BLIND US? IN ONE story I heard, the first thing the soul wants to do, when it gets to heaven, is to turn and look back toward the life it left behind—but then, if it did, if it could, it would see that everyone it ever knew was still in purgatory. And then heaven wouldn't be heaven anymore. No matter how beautiful heaven is, and even though the soul understands how terrible the old life was, it wants to go back, because of those others. Not because it loved them, or cared so much about them, but because they are calling out from where they are and the soul can't shut out their voices. It belongs with them. It belongs to the earth.

  And this is why heaven is bright. This is why it is blinding. So that we can never look back.

  The Moth Man hadn't said anything, after he'd shown me the machine he had constructed from his father's notes and drawings. He didn't explain anything, or tell me what was going to happen to me when I passed through the portal. Maybe he had tried to put something into words when he first brought me to the room, but I was still drunk or whatever from the tea and I didn't get what he was saying. Whatever he said or didn't say, though, he didn't explain anything. This isn't that kind of a story. He didn't take hold of my arm and say, “Quick, come with me. I'll get you out of here,” like Harrison Ford in some adventure movie. He didn't sit me down and run through the plot, filling in all the gaps, like Hercule Poirot or Sherlock
Holmes after the mystery has been solved and the criminals have been taken away. He didn't explain the mystery because he was the mystery, only he was the counterbalance to the mystery that had gone before, the first step in a new beginning. Like the crazy photographer says, in Apocalypse Now: he was yin and yang, thesis, antithesis, synthesis; he was the dialectic in the form of a living, breathing friend. And I still call him my friend because that was what he was. To begin with, I thought I knew him, but then I saw that, even if some of him was old, even if he came, in part, from the world I had known before, he was also new: an unforeseeable new creature, suddenly released from some secret hiding place to walk and breathe and act, as if for the first time. Like Ariel, maybe, at the end of The Tempest. He was a friend, but he was another kind of friend, like the friend you imagine you're going to have, but never quite find, all the way through your childhood. A friend who's so close, he might as well be you—and maybe he is, in a way. You're partly him, he's partly you. He knows what you don't know and you see what he misses.

  I don't really know him, though. He isn't who I thought he was, he isn't even who I thought he wasn't. All that time, I didn't even know his real name. I just called him the Moth Man, because that was who he was for me: the Moth Man, the man who belonged to the woods, part of the landscape, flitting from one place to the next, coming to rest for a while then moving on. I never knew where. I never thought to ask him his name, or where he lived, or whether he had any family, other than his father—but then, who cares about names? Who cares about some address somewhere, or the tax disk on a van, or whether he's on the electoral roll? He doesn't belong to the Innertown, I know that much, but it never occurred to me that he might belong anywhere other than the woods. If I don't know anything about him, it is because I never wanted to know. Not about names and addresses and such, anyhow. I'm not saying he wasn't the person I thought I knew when we were out in the woods looking at plants, or sitting at his campfire drinking strange tea, it's just that there is more to him than I had ever seen, but I suppose you could say that about anybody. I remember John telling me about this girl he knew, back when he was a teenager: she worked in the music shop where he used to go, whenever he had money to buy records, and he was maybe in love with her, only she was older, and really pretty, and John didn't reckon he had a chance with her so he didn't say anything, he just went into the shop and bought his record, or maybe he ordered something that they didn't have, so they could get it in for him a week later, and he was very formal, very proper in everything he said and did, so she would never know she had this secret admirer. This kid. While he was telling this, I remember my mind was racing ahead to some kind of punch line, like maybe in that Romain Gary story where the guy can't work up the courage to talk to the beautiful woman who lives in the apartment above his, even though he passes her on the stairs every day. He can't think of anything to say, so he doesn't say anything and he just gets lonelier and lonelier, till in the end he's sitting in his cold little room and he can hear the woman upstairs having loud sex with someone and he's so desperate, he's so wretched that he hangs himself out of sheer loneliness. And you have to know already—it's part of the plan of the story that you know already because these things are already written, that's what makes it all so dreary and pitiless, you have to know that, when the police come to file a report and haul the body away, the concierge tells them the woman upstairs is dead, she's taken poison and died in agony, writhing about on her bed, moaning and crying. Etc., etc. Only that wasn't John's story at all, it wasn't one of those all-in-the-diffidence-that-faltered stories at all, it was worse, in its way, because it was just one of John's stories, part of real life, where nothing's ever happening, because nothing ever does. In this story, John keeps going into the shop and standing there all tongue-tied and helpless for months and then he goes in one day and the girl is gone. He doesn't want to ask where she is, in case he betrays himself, but the guy behind the counter volunteers the information anyhow, how she has died mysteriously in the night, just two days before, a twenty-year-old woman dead in her bed from some obscure disease that has the same effect on the lungs as drowning. This is what he tells John, and John can see that he wants to tell it, because he knows John's secret, everybody does, because John is just this obvious boy in love that they're all having a laugh about, and now the guy, who's called Dave, wants to see how John will take it. And John bursts into tears, because he really was in love. In love enough not to have wanted anything, in love enough not to have said a word. And of course when Dave sees this, he feels bad and he wants to give John something to go away with, some scrap of information about the girl—her name was Kate, I think, but I'm not sure if John ever told me, or whether I just thought it, because in the story she sounded like a Kate. Kate Thompson. Or maybe Katie. Anyhow, Dave tells him that, when they were going through the girl's things afterward, they found a hammer, a plane, a fretsaw, all kinds of tools, mostly still in their wrappers, tucked away in the drawers of her cupboard under the sweaters and socks and bras, a complete set of tools for a carpenter or something, only they'd never been used, and it looked like Kate or Katie had been buying them one at a time over months or even years, because some of them had the receipts still in the bags and the dates were all different. That's what the guy, Dave, had told John, to make him feel better—and that was what John remembered years later, when he told me the story. That, and the words the guy had repeated to him, in that poky little record shop that smelled of vinyl and warm dust, all those years ago. “People are strange,” Dave had said and, when John hadn't said anything in reply, because he couldn't think of anything to say, he'd said it again. “People are strange, true enough.”

  As the story approaches its end, I am still thinking of Morrison as a gift. The Moth Man knows our local bobby hasn't killed anyone, but he also knows that in its own, very particular Innertown way, the policeman's offense is too grievous to go unpunished, the most extreme form of an offense the whole town has been mired in for decades: the sin of omission, the sin of averting our gaze and not seeing what was going on right in front of our eyes. The sin of not wanting to know; the sin of knowing everything and not doing anything about it. The sin of knowing things on paper but refusing to know them in our hearts. Everybody knows that sin. All you have to do is switch on the TV and watch the news. I'm not saying we should try to help the people in Somalia, or stop the devastation of the rain forests, it's just that we don't feel anything at all other than a mild sense of discomfort or embarrassment when we see the broken trees and the mud slides, or the child amputees in the field hospitals—and it's unforgivable that we go on with our lives when these things are happening somewhere. It's unforgivable. When you see that, everything ought to change.

  That's why the Moth Man does what he does to Morrison. Because Morrison knows that it is unforgivable even to be innocent when the lost boys are vanishing into the undergrowth all around us. It's unforgivable not to know where they are, even if it's impossible to know. Morrison knows that it is unforgivable for a child to disappear without a trace, and that is both his worst sin and the beginning of his redemption. Because it is a redemption, or the beginning of redemption, that scene the Moth Man so carefully stages in the Glister room. At the time, I can't be expected to understand that. I think of it as a punishment, pure and simple. I don't know how limited Morrison's involvement in the murders has been, but the Moth Man knows. He knows better than anyone, but he makes his terrible gift anyway. Had I known then what I know now, I wouldn't have accepted it— but then, if I had known then what I know now, I would have known that the gift isn't meant for me. It's meant for Morrison. Grotesque as that might sound, it's still true—for how else would a man be released from hell, if not through some terrible, but mercifully terminal agony? In his way, the Moth Man is building Morrison a refuge. When he so carefully and thoughtfully binds him in that plaster cell, he is constructing a sacred place where the guilty policeman can be set aside and so, eventually, absolved from the si
n of the world. This is how he sees it, I know, but it's only now that I see what a burden it must have been to him.

  So he gives me Morrison as a gift, but he doesn't care about it. Right from the beginning, he is thinking about the Glister, and how he will show me the way through. Not to get me out of here, but to get me farther in. All the way in. But he is patient too and he can see that something has to be done, that the old life has to be closed down. So we take Morrison, and we bring him to this enormous room, just fifty yards from the Glister. Which is what, exactly? A door? A portal? What is on the other side? I don't know, and to tell the truth I don't even want to think about it. I just know that, when the time comes, I will pass through and then I will be all the way in.

  I didn't know if Morrison was the killer at the start but, by the end of it all, when we leave him there in his cast, I know he isn't. Nevertheless, he was implicated, he made some of it possible, so a little bit of justice has been done. Now it's up to the Innertown to carry on that good work. They will have to get themselves an angel, and go up to the Outertown and wipe off the white marks on the lintels. Or they could just stop collaborating with the powers that be and start playing a new game. Make up some new rules, and forget all that touche pas à la femme blanche stuff. But that's up to them, it doesn't have anything to do with me anymore. Dad is dead, a collaborator in his own misery all his life, a sleepwalker I was never able to shake awake. Now I am tired, and I'm not at all sure I have the heart for anything else, so my friend arranges the thing with Morrison, and by doing this he lets me see that, sooner or later, justice will be done. We shake Morrison awake, giving him the tools to judge for himself how far he is from heaven. Then we walk away and leave him there to rot.

  They say that, if you want to stay alive, you have to love something. Though maybe love is the wrong word after all. Maybe you have to be something. Not some big shot, or somebody's baby, or anything like that. Not smart, or beautiful, or rich. Not famous or dangerous. You just have to be. I don't know if that makes any sense, right at this moment, but I have the feeling, as we stand in front of his strange machine, that we are about to find out. I don't see what he does to open the thing: to begin with, it's just a round door in a metal wall, a rusting metal door with letters I can just make out, all flaky and vague amid the rust and dirt,