The Disestablishment of Paradise

by Phillip Mann

  The music was just beginning the penultimate poem, and the boy, older now, having waded into the pale grey sea, was beating the palms of his hands flat onto the water and singing, ‘If the Lord of Love on high . . .’ Hera settled herself further into the pilot’s seat and checked for any messages that might have come in while she was away. There were none. ‘Quits his mansion in the sky . . .’ She peered out into the darkness about the craft. No moon had risen yet. In a couple of hours or so the mo led silver and grey face of Tonic would rise to be followed some time later by the smaller golden Gin. But for the moment the darkness was total, as though the windows had been painted over, as though the small ship was stranded at the bottom of a well.

  ‘If he comes, my soul to save,/ Will he find my lonely grave?’ The music lingered while the voice soared, like a bird riding the wind up into the sunshine. It was a beautiful evocative moment, sad and brave, and Hera loved it. The voice faded, leaving only the wash and flow of the sea as the boy waded deeper. But then the water became dark and rough while storm winds grew.

  ‘Stop the music, Alan.’

  ‘There is one track remaining.’

  ‘Later.’

  The sound of the waves died away.

  Hera stared into the darkness. Then she reached out and switched on the beacon light and bright landing lights. Revealed about the ship was the scattered rubbish left by the storm. Nothing moved. The wind had completely gone. At the edge of the parking lot she could just see the first fringe of Tattersall weeds, their flowers pale, leached of their colour by the light from her beacon. It was like looking at an old still photograph, or a stage set. The stillness was unreal. Something should be moving, a leaf drifting down, a whirl of dust . . . something.

  What happened next needs explaining. Hera was not aware of it at the time, but Paradise was already beginning to work its way deeper into her mind. The consequence was uncertainty and a turmoil of the spirit. The following are Hera’s own words of explanation as I recorded them in my studio.

  Hera What then? I turned round and looked out through the windows behind me. But it was all the same landscape, the same still photograph – light fading to darkness, and it was the darkness that finally held my attention.

  Olivia Were you afraid of the dark?

  Hera Not afraid, no. I have dived, remember, in vast caves beneath the surface of Mars. Sometimes I slept in the water, cocooned in just my survival suit. I can cope with darkness – like it, even – but this darkness had a different quality about it. More . . . tangible, somehow. I thought of our ancestors, for whom a flickering fire at the cave mouth meant warmth and security. How well I understood that. And I thought about my beacon, pouring out the photons at the maximum speed an object could attain.

  Olivia Were you aware of a change in yourself?

  Hera I think so, but it was not like hypnotism. I seemed to see things more clearly . . . and symbolically too.

  Olivia Go on.

  Hera The beacon light . . . I imagined the edge of that light cutting into the darkness of space. Light pushing back the darkness. The known pushing against the unknown. The assertive yang against the passive yin. But no matter how hard yang pushed, no matter how much yin yielded, mystery would always remain, for the boundary between them could not be crossed. I began to cry then, because I think in my heart I knew that, despite everything I could do and offer, I would always be the outsider.

  Olivia Hera. You don’t have to—

  Hera You see, I knew . . . I knew that this longing I felt towards Paradise, a longing which pre-dated my coming to the planet by many years, was profoundly irrational. And then when I found Paradise, well! Sometimes the yearning was so strong that I had to find a quiet place alone while the mood worked its way through me. I was so powerfully aware of the life current of the planet that it hurt . . . but it was a sweet pain too. And it made me act foolishly sometimes, like the time I stretched out on the ground in the forest, arms spread, face in the earth, and prayed to the planet, wanting it to loosen my stiffness, enter me in some way, fill me, temper me, chasten me, bring me some understanding and relief . . . Don’t look like that, Olivia! I know what you are thinking. I know how resonant these words are of . . . and that is their truth. Ecstasy, like love, is finally indivisible. Like it or not. Have you not acted foolishly from pure emotion sometimes?

  Olivia This is not my biography. I’ll tell you when we are off the record. Did you ever talk about this to anyone?

  Hera Shapiro. Once. But listen . . . I knew I was not mad. To be irrational sometimes is not to be mad. Is it? To be able to feel a divinity in a place is not mad. To be in love is not mad, is it? But, if it is a love unrequited? In verity, that is hell! To be aware of divinity is one thing. But to be ignored by that divinity is terrible. Though I might knock at the door, I might not be bid enter. That was what I feared above all, Olivia. In my darkest moments, I knew that I might just be wrong. Paradise might just be a world, unique indeed, but one that I had dressed with my own desires and vanity.

  Olivia Yes. I can see the danger. And we do that, don’t we? Dress things up. But doubt is often the companion to faith, so I am told. Go on with your story.

  Hera Well. The other strange thing is that even while these thoughts spilled through me, I nevertheless had a sense that they were . . . I don’t know the word.

  Olivia Induced? Abstract?

  Hera No. More like . . . liberated. Like when you face something terrible and it leaves its mark but fades. I knew that revelation does not come just because you want it. I mean, waiting for revelation is like waiting for someone else to do your dirty washing – you’ll wait a long time. But then I thought of a phrase that my father often used, ‘Fortune favours the prepared mind,’ and I thought, Do I have a prepared mind? That stopped me in my tracks. It was as though I had been looking at a painting of someone I did not know, and then suddenly realized it was a mirror.

  Hera felt suddenly weary. Words and questions! Words and questions! For a moment she put her head in her hands. Then she sat up and banged her fists down on the control desk. There was a time when she would not have had to ask that question about having a prepared mind. Or if she had asked it, the answer would have come back as a resounding YES. But now the simple symbolic truths that were her only understanding when she was a girl were crusted over with doubt and fear, anger and worry. What had happened to her in all these years?

  She knew there was no going back. The innocence and simple sensuality of childhood is a consequence, in part, of ignorance. But she was a grown woman, in her fifties no less. Time to grow up. But how? How?

  Back to Hera.

  Hera Sitting there, feeling cornered and compromised, I suddenly felt a deep anger well up inside me. You see this was what was happening. I was not really in control. I was like ashes that glow when they are fanned.

  Olivia Who was doing the fanning?

  Hera Wait. I have never known a fit of anger like it. The first victim of my anger was myself. I was angry with what I was, with what I had let myself become. Angry too with being an angry, frantic woman. Angry for what I had lost. Angry I had squandered my gifts. Angry I had lost my innocence. Angry with Saturn because . . . because! Angry with my mother – so energetic and distant. Angry with my father – so slow and patient. Angry with Shapiro – that smug, drugged, clever bastard. Angry with the god I didn’t believe in. Oh, how I would love to slap him about the ears. Angry that I needed gods at all. Angry with darkness. Angry with Paradise because it held me trapped and took my love and left me hungry . . . . HOORAY!!!! I let out a great scream of rage. And that woke Alan up.

  Olivia I can imagine.

  Hera ‘Hera,’ he said, in that sweet rational voice, and I roared at him, ‘And you keep out of it too! Bloody go to sleep or turn yourself off or something!’

  Olivia And?

  Hera Nothing. He didn’t reply. But at least I felt better for the outburst. I sat there in the silence. Nothing. No ideas. No thoughts. No will, my
mind a block of wood. Then I reached forward and, with one sweep of my hand, I switched out all the exterior lights.

  Blackness outside. Nothing to focus on. But something surprising. Something quite unexpected and quite wonderful. Hera found herself staring at her own ghostly image reflected in the window. She could see herself seated upright, one arm extended, while about her was the small cabin, which glowed, lit by the softly illuminated desk and the cherry-red control lights. But there was more. She could see the reflection of the windows behind her, facing out to darkness, and framed within those windows was the reflection of her back . . . and behind that, smaller and more faint and slightly raised – but there nevertheless – was again the reflected image of her face . . . and so on, and so on. These images, each slightly out of phase, each getting smaller and dimmer with distance, curved up . . . and up . . . and on to infinity . . .

  She and they seemed to be waiting for something.

  What a strange moment that was! Quite beautiful and unforeseen. Hera knew that she was facing herself in a different way. She had been here before – in this quiet space where the mind, like the retreating sea, starts to yield up its monsters. Hera was not by nature a quitter. She was a woman who could learn. Having reached an impasse, it was necessary that she start to climb back. Slowly Hera felt her mind ease and her thoughts start to flow.

  The billions of Heras looked on.

  To herself she said, I think a prepared mind must be a peaceful mind – always patient but always ready. I think it is one that is not troubled by paradox. It is like Yvegeny’s bird that flies above the storm. I closed my eyes, summoning the music, and my mind rested on the image of the seabird that hung still in the sky, and then slid gracefully down the face of the wind until it almost touched the breaking waves before soaring up again into the sunlight. It seemed to make no effort but was in complete command. How I would like to be that bird! But I learned that a prepared mind is effortless too, and that is its strength.

  Aloud she said, ‘Let me find that mind. Let my time on Paradise be a time of discovery and a time of pleasure. I might have got everything wrong in the past, but that is all right so long as I can walk away with contentment. I am so tired of being clever. I am so tired of being angry. Let me just be for a while, and if I can be of service here, then I count that a bonus, a rich reward. I might have to learn to freewheel for a bit. But that is what I want – to stop pedalling for a while – and I want to stop peddling too. Stop hawking my wares? Let me go about my business. Do what I can for Paradise. And if a call comes, let me be ready. And if it does not come, let me be ready for that too.’

  Hera did not know the moment when her mind had slipped from speculation to prayer, but when the words stopped she was content just to sit, her mind feeling spacious and dark and curiously alive. She might have stayed in that state for some time, but something made her open her eyes. It came to her like a sigh from outside.

  Immediately she was aware of movement. The blackness outside her windows was changing to a rich and mo led green. The nighttime glow of the plants of Paradise was slowly returning, and the landscape was gaining depth. High on the hill she saw a group of candle palms, always among the brightest, pulsing gently as they shed the surplus energy of the day. Above the foothills of the plateau one or two stars were peeping out. At the edge of the parking lot the deep dark blue flowers of the Tattersalls were nodding in a light breeze, their petals picking up and reflecting back the small light from the sky. She could see the outline of their branches as if lit by moonlight, though no moon had yet risen. Closer to her, on the ground, the dead plants and leaves had begun to glow as their fibres softened and deliquesced, their juices flowing back into the soil of Paradise.

  Then she became aware of a ripple of light moving slowly over the hills. It was so faint that she could only really see it if she looked to the side, but it was there and it was getting stronger. This was something she had never seen before, on Paradise or elsewhere.

  Quickly she switched out all the cabin lights. The reflections vanished and the view outside became clearer.

  She watched the line of light move down a distant hill like a cresting wave, getting brighter as it approached. She looked for the source of the light, having concluded there was some beam playing over the trees, but then she saw that it was the forest itself that suddenly glowed and faded, as though a current had briefly touched the roots as it swept by. She realized too that this energy field, or whatever it was, would pass by her or through her, and there was nothing she could do but wait and watch. But she was not passive, not a block of wood. She was conscious and alert.

  As it came closer, she saw the trees jerk and rear and at the same moment they shone briefly. At the perimeter of the parking lot, one Tattersall weed flailed so vigorously that the branches broke, scattering flower heads and petals onto the concrete.

  It was at that perimeter, where the concrete began, that the light was lost. There were no trees or bushes to reveal it. But still something advanced. A swirling of something like smoke, but heavy, like a gathering wave of dark water, flowing towards her.

  Her head shaking in denial, Hera watched as the tide of darkness slowly advanced across the parking lot. It absorbed her light and sent back no reflection. It approached the SAS and Hera felt her spirit shrink inside her.

  The darkness swirled up outside the windows and then flowed into the SAS as though the walls did not exist. It rose quickly through the floor, enclosing Hera’s legs – which felt nothing – and then the control panel vanished and with it her hands. Her last conscious thought as the tide rode up over her was the wish that she was wearing something more substantial than light cotton pyjamas. Then she shivered violently and her throat was so dry that, though she wanted to call out, she could not.

  The shivering was no more than a spasm and ended as soon as the darkness had passed through her. Hera found herself in a blackness more total than anything she had ever experienced before. She put out her tongue but could not feel her lips. She lifted her hand but could not feel her face. Indeed, her hand seemed to pass through the place where her face should have been. She could feel no chair supporting her, nor solid deck plates beneath her feet. She was a point of consciousness, that was all, and the wonder of it was that she did not feel terror. She was denied the dimension of terror, but her mind . . . her mind seemed as clear as a polished mirror. She could think positively and was self-aware.

  In that state Hera tried to open her mind to whatever presence had embraced her, dark or not. She was, in a way, eager. If we translate her desire into words, it comes out something like ‘I am.’ Or even ‘I will.’ Or at its most brazen ‘I am willing.’ But if this offer was heard or understood, nothing answered.

  Instead she felt herself twisted, wrung out like washing in a strong woman’s hands, but without pain. And then her mind was ‘rifled’. That is the very word that Hera used when recalling this moment. Memories were lifted from her. There was no rhyme or reason that she could detect. Passive, she yielded up some of her most intimate memories.

  The first memory was of an event that had occurred during a trip to old Europe. Her mother was attending a conference in the Alps and took little Hera with her for company and to show her some of the grand sights and old treasures before it was too late. They were at Chartres and already stonemasons were at work taking the cathedral down. Her mother was standing in the aisle and she pulled some wooden chairs aside, making a loud scratching sound on the stone floor. Flamboyant and theatrical as ever, she pointed at the dark slabs and said, ‘See, that is where the pilgrims crawled on their hands and knees to gain forgiveness for their sins. Faith can make people do strange things, Hera.’

  This memory was replaced by one of her father, stooping over his plants at Angelique-over-Io and cutting into the wood of a rose so that he could insert a small closed bud. His knife was very sharp. It could cut your finger without your knowing, as Hera had already discovered to her cost. He finished the graft an
d wrapped the joint with tape. ‘Does it hurt the rose when you do that?’ asked Hera. To which her dad replied, ‘Not if you are careful and not if you are quick. Think of it this way: you are giving the roots something to do, something to look after – and they like that.’

  The next memory was very brief. Hera standing on a table, a bit drunk, with a bottle in one hand and her rolled doctoral certificate in the other. She seems unsure which to drink from.

  There were many other memories that were plucked out and discarded, but one of the strangest came last. Hera saw herself as an older woman. She is seated in a strange room. There is another woman with her who is just standing up, her tumbling red hair held in place by a plastic comb jammed in at an odd angle. Her face is merry but wears marks of suffering too.

  That is all. In later years Hera always wondered who the other woman was. And now she knows. Me.

  How long she was held in the blackness Hera does not know. At one point she wondered if she might be experiencing the celebrated life-flashing-before-the-eyes experience. If so, it seemed very relaxed.

  And then there came one final spasm of shaking and she saw redness before her and felt a sudden startling pain in her hands. The darkness moved on. Solidity returned.

  Hera opened her eyes. She was still in the cabin. She found herself leaning forward, her breasts pressed flat on the control panel, her elbows splayed and her hands clasped together so fiercely that her nails had pierced her skin. She immediately felt ridiculous, as though caught in an indecent posture.