Twelve Nights

by Andrew Zurcher

  ‘The House of the Two Modes, Razzio’s garden, the largest and most complex plotting board in the world, the place of pure being!’ he said.

  Kay could barely hear him over the cacophony. A column of trombonists snaking round from his right pushed their way directly between them. She flattened herself against the door and looked about while Will, suddenly transformed again, followed the musicians, shimmying along behind them. He couldn’t stop laughing, and Kay found that she couldn’t stop smiling, just to see it. Entirely wiped clean, at least for now, were all the hours of anguish and waiting, the long, groggy stretches in the Pylos pension, the everlasting night and day of the journey across Italy, with its weird moonlit shapes and surprising, nauseating bends. She felt the intensity of her conversation with Oidos slipping from her, too, like a shore retreating as her little boat started to toss on Atlantic swells. For a few minutes she drifted without purpose around the huge but inviting open garden, surfing its surges, taking it all in. Here, as a group of animatedly chattering men in long tails strolled out of her path, she happened upon a great oval fountain surrounded by a pool of shimmering water; just beyond it, her fingers still cool from the fountain’s water, she nearly collided with a column of waitresses filing across the lawn bearing huge covered platters in hefted hands; yet further, a row of children sat on a row of chairs, gripping jacks in their hands as they watched the game of two older girls; there, further on, in among some bushes, a man reclined on a chaise longue, fantastically exotic birds perched all around him, singing to them in a melody of clicks and warbles. In one place she paused for some minutes just outside a circle of poorly dressed men and women who seemed, as they sat erect on the grass, to be debating some question to do with plotting boards; with delight Kay watched agile and expressive hands describe in the air the perturbations of their thoughts. In another place she found the trombones, no longer snaking but still belting out their brash lines in a huge and deafening horn section, itself only one part of an orchestra, apparently being led by a tall man atop a podium, his hands milling in the air. Will lay sprawled among the trumpets, his feet still tapping out the inescapable rhythms.

  Kay crouched at his ear. ‘Is that Razzio over there?’ She pointed. ‘The one leading the orchestra, I mean!’

  Will goggled at her, then just shook his head wildly; but, seeing that this was only going to prompt her to further questions, he climbed to his feet and motioned for her to follow. Through the presses of people and the profusion of obstacles – tables, chairs, bushes and trees, more fountains, little grass huts, here and there a canal – Will led her purposefully until, drawing up under the shade of a trellised grape arbour, he ducked gracefully into a corner and sat lightly on a secluded bench. Kay sat beside him, taking in with relief the now muffled fanfares and muted roars of conversation, while she perched in the cool respite of the half-light. Will smiled and stretched out his arms and legs, then let it all flop and threw back his head. He wound in a long, expansive breath, and seemed to hold it for a moment.

  ‘Now that,’ he said in a gush, ‘is what I call being.’

  ‘Then what do you call this?’ Kay asked, almost as a reflex, without consideration.

  Will sat up, his eyes bright and alert. ‘This?’ He gestured around at the vines, the shadowy beams of wood and the cool brick walls. ‘This is actual life.’ With an arch flick of his eyebrows and the grin that had become, since their arrival, his new feature, he slumped back on to the bench and pulled his hood over his head, and then further over his face, while he began to hum contentedly. ‘This is life, life, life,’ he said again after a few bars.

  Beyond the arbour, over the heads of scores of moving wraiths, Kay could still make out the elevated platform, covered by a sort of arched stone roof surmounted by a steeple, from which the single wraith seemed to be conducting the action of the garden as if, somehow, he controlled it. She watched him for a few moments while Will breathed deeply, inhaling the warm, social air around him. He was jittery, exhilarated, sharp. All of a sudden, Kay thought, he was behaving out of character. She almost didn’t trust him. She almost felt abandoned. All around them, in the heavy, wet, cool air, the grapevines coursed up and down the trellises, climbing, hanging, reaching, performing delicate but muscular acts of balance and poise. Kay followed them through the shadow, picking out their interlaced strands and drawing with her eyes the routes from root to fruit again and again, as far as she could see. She braced herself.

  ‘I thought we came here because we were going to try the integration again. You said Razzio had a huge plotting board, the biggest in the world, with wraiths moving instead of stones, and acres of grapevines …’ Kay’s voice trailed off as she suddenly realized where she was. She looked around, then down, expecting to see the lines of the board under her feet, there, in the arbour where they sat. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘and out there, and all those wraiths out there, all of them –’

  ‘Moving on the board!’ Will said chirpily.

  ‘But where are the lines?’ Kay asked, almost of herself.

  ‘Oh, they’re all around you,’ Will answered, again chirpily, from beneath his hood. ‘But they’re very small, and you have to know what you’re looking for. Every blade of grass is part of the line, every pebble, every brick – and don’t think Razzio’s board is flat – no, it runs in every direction. In Razzio’s garden, even time is laid on the grid, and every second is part of the line. To understand it, even to glimpse how you might understand it, you have to think of yourself as a spider that spins webs out of choices and hangs them between this, and this.’ He held up his right hand, his index finger jammed against his thumb. ‘But Razzio has the keenest eyes in the world, and he can’t be outplotted.’ Will sighed happily, and Kay almost thought he might start humming again. ‘Which is why it’s so relaxing being here,’ he added after a moment. ‘One doesn’t bother even trying.’

  Kay thought for a minute, hard. ‘So you mean,’ she asked, ‘that we’re on the board right now? And so our movements, and even the time we take to make them, mean something to Razzio?’ So you mean I’m some kind of pawn on a huge chessboard? That Razzio is playing me?

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How can that be?’ She frowned. ‘How can he know what we mean when we don’t know ourselves?’

  Will sat bolt upright, his eyes so wild that Kay regretted her question.

  ‘That’s just it,’ he said merrily, spookily. ‘That’s just it. How else could he know what we meant, except at the moment when we least knew ourselves? Oh, I hadn’t realized I was so tired!’ he said, and settled back into his hooded slouch.

  Kay waited another minute as she wondered what Will would do. It was a long, quiet minute, the more painfully silent for the pulsing crescendos of voices, music, and what sounded like footsteps that lapped like the ocean’s waves against the shore of the arbour. Will slumped motionless but for the steady rise and fall of his chest. How do I find them? How do I get home? ‘So you’re not going to help me do this? You’re not going to help me find Razzio?’

  ‘Find him?’ Will objected abruptly. ‘We’ve already found him. He’s the one who let you in. Or, I should say, the one who put you on the board.’

  ‘You mean that butler person is Razzio?’

  Will whinnied. ‘The butler!’

  Kay considered this for a while. She found herself slightly annoyed to have her expectations upset. ‘Then who is that tall man directing the orchestra?’

  Will sat up, pulled back his hood and faced her squarely. ‘I’m sorry, Kay. I’m not being helpful. This is Razzio’s house because everything that happens here means something to him. He owns this place. But that’s all he does. You could hardly say he lives in it. Maybe if he lived in it, Phantastes wouldn’t hate him so much. Everyone else – all the wraiths, all the causes, they live here – like us, they’re on the board. That is, everyone else but two, and they are Razzio’s closest advisers. Inside, somewhere, is Oidos – she –’

  ‘I’ve
met her,’ said Kay. Her voice was flat. Will looked sharply at her, as if she had been bitten by a snake; but immediately his face softened.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Oidos dwells in the place of pure knowing. But in the place of pure being, on the platform just there –’ he pointed to the place where Kay had just been watching the conductor – ‘that’s Ontos, the other of the two modes. He’s not on the board. That is, he is, but he’s fixed. He doesn’t move. I don’t think he has ever moved from that spot, at least not while Razzio was plotting. That is, he moves, but his motion is a reflection of the being that is all around him. It’s not only the instruments that follow his lead; everything that is, does.’

  ‘You mean he is conducting us?’

  ‘Yes, exactly. Good. He’s conducting us. And everyone else. And everything else. Or maybe they’re all conducting him.’

  Kay watched Ontos spin and dip, his arms swaying in repeated arcs in a motion contrary to that of his neck. His body undulated like a wave, at the same time rippling like the sudden accelerations that pulse through a murmuration of starlings. His slow dance, rhythmic, silent, was the most beautiful she had ever seen. She could hardly speak.

  ‘It’s mesmerizing,’ she said.

  ‘It is,’ Will agreed. ‘It’s the purest form of plotting, a complete embodiment of everything we’re doing on the board, and a reflection of it. In a way, you could say that everything Oidos knows, Ontos is. She keeps in the place of pure knowing a collection of things that record whatever you could know about the wraiths who walk on Razzio’s board. But in the garden Ontos lives out that knowledge as body, as movement.’

  Kay thought about this for a second. Her mind gave up.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘He feels who we are,’ said Will at last. ‘What we’re made of, where we’re going, what we mean. I guess only he knows what it feels like. But I’m glad someone does.’

  He feels what we’re made of. Where we’re going.

  ‘Can I ask him? What where I’m going feels like?’

  ‘Kay, you can’t, it doesn’t work like that –’

  But Kay had already stood up.

  As she approached the platform that bore the gyrating form of Ontos, his lean body reflecting so much sound, heat, light and movement, she could feel the pulse of the garden begin to rise within her own blood. Though it neither knelled nor beat like a sound, it rushed in her ears; it had no taste, but her mouth was full of it; she felt nothing but air against her skin and grass on her feet as she passed towards the dais, and yet that air seemed charged with a new pressure; and she closed her eyes against the smell and held her breath against the light, and, with what seemed like the last awareness in her consciousness, she knew that she had crossed the stretch of grass and was climbing the worn stone steps up to the platform.

  After that there was neither after nor that. She had no sense of time, no fears, no regrets. Deep in a trance, she never knew how she stepped into the centre of the dais; she never saw Ontos bow to her, give way to her, withdraw from her and, retreating down the steps, take his place upon the grass; and she never felt the complex contortions through which her body moved as, for three hours and more, she danced to the causes in the garden of the House of the Two Modes, the centre of their being and the author of their movement.

  War

  ‘Kay. Kay.’

  I am not Kay – I am not – I am –

  ‘Kay. Wake up.’

  Kay opened her eyes and saw only painful light. She squeezed them shut again and noticed that she had swivelled her head violently to the side.

  ‘Let her sleep, Will.’

  Phantastes. Will. What am I doing?

  ‘She’s been through an ordeal,’ the old imaginer said.

  Kay opened her eyes again, determined to see the light.

  ‘Hello in there,’ said Will. He was smiling very near her face in an encouraging way. Kay felt grass beneath her hand where it lay beside her, but her head was resting on some sort of cushion or pillow, and there was a blanket drawn close around her shoulders.

  You are always with me when I’m lost.

  ‘You gave us a fright,’ Will said. Kay recognized that she was lying on the ground, and that Will was lying next to her, looking into her eyes.

  How long have I been asleep? How long, how long –

  ‘How long –?’

  ‘Overnight. About nine hours. But you haven’t been asleep the whole time.’

  ‘That is an understatement,’ said Phantastes. Kay saw that he was sitting at a large stone table a few metres away. He was watching her intently. He looked concerned.

  ‘Do you remember anything at all from … before?’

  At Will’s words a hole seemed to open up in the world and Kay began to fall through miles of air. Her body lurched out of her control and her arm shot out to grab Will’s – anything to hold, anything to give her purchase in this world, anything to ground her in the sunlight, on the grass.

  Help me.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he said. He was soothing her. ‘I’ve got you. Maybe don’t think too hard about it. Let it in slowly.’

  As if she were peering round a corner or blinking against a bright light, Kay allowed herself to glimpse in snatches what she could remember of the preceding night: the conversation with Will in the arbour, the sudden resolution to talk to Ontos, striding across the grass towards the platform, and then – which was strange, like a dream – a feeling of seeing or having seen many things at once – things that didn’t so much happen in order, but because of one another. And among it all there was a strong sense of movement, of her own body turning in on itself, like a flower with petals growing and blooming not out towards the sun, but inwards into the stem of herself, as if she were all the light and the bud were opening into its own middle, its own core. And round that corner like planets in a ridiculous jig spun so many perceptions that it tired and dizzied her now to try to see them – the way it hurts deep between the eyes when you try to read the signs on a station platform while the train is passing by at high speed.

  ‘Do you remember anything?’ Will asked.

  With effort, Kay sat up. ‘What happened?’

  Will had scrambled to crouch beside her, and with a strong hand placed gently on her left shoulder he kneaded reassurance into it.

  ‘You occupied the place of pure knowing,’ he said. ‘It’s as simple as that.’

  ‘It’s as unprecedented as that,’ said Phantastes.

  ‘What Phantastes means is, Ontos has never allowed another wraith to take his place on the platform,’ said Will. ‘To be honest, we didn’t think it was possible. We didn’t know what would happen. And you – we don’t even know who you are, really.’

  In the pit of her stomach Kay felt a strange twisting of pride and nausea.

  ‘For three hours, pretty much exactly, you moved on the platform just as Ontos might have done – but it was completely different from Ontos, too. When Ontos moves, everyone and everything moves around him as normal, as if he is just its mirror. But when you stood up there last night – every wraith in the garden, every cause, seemed to turn inwards. No one spoke, no one acknowledged one another. It was as if they had all become entirely engrossed in themselves.’

  Will was silent. His eyes, which had been on the grass as he traced the blades with his finger, looked up at her. ‘Do you know why? What made you fall into a trance? What did it feel like to you? Do you remember?’

  Kay breathed in deeply. She closed her eyes and let her head rock back on to her shoulders. Nothing. She lifted her face up to the morning sky, feeling the sun pushing bright and warm through her eyelids.

  ‘I remember just one moment,’ she said. ‘It seemed like a long moment, like a dream. In that moment I looked into Ontos’ eyes. It seemed like I was looking into deep, phosphorescing pools. And in the same moment I felt like two hundred arrows being shot from a single bow in two hundred different directions. Two hundred arrows that pierced through two
hundred different people, and I was in them all, sticking in them all. It was awful.’

  I remember your eyes well enough.

  Kay could feel tears, hot ones, starting in the inner corners of her own eyes.

  ‘And all the arrows – every arrow drove right into the stomach, right into the navel of one of the causes. But they weren’t arrows. They were shards of something like glass or mirror, and they were cords – something that tied all of us to one another – and I felt this incredible pain tearing out of me, as if everything in me were heaving to get out, as if I were going to be turned inside out, and –’

  ‘Kay,’ said Will. His hand tightened on her shoulder. ‘You don’t have to remember.’

  I remember your eyes well enough.

  Kay stopped, and opened her eyes, and looked at Will, and at Phantastes. Beyond them, twenty metres away, the causes were milling about in the garden, waking, drifting, chatting. She saw Razzio in his waistcoat standing among them, stealing glances at the three of them at the table. He looked preoccupied and nervous.

  ‘The worst thing about it was that, even though it was a terrible pain, a tearing pain, I wanted it. Even though I hated it. Because it wasn’t just pain. It was joy, too. And they were both there, pain and joy, at war inside me.’

  Pushing himself towards her, Will leaned in and wrapped her in a warm hug. He swayed them from side to side in a slow pattern like a tall tree in a distant breeze.

  ‘Will, what does it mean?’

  Because his head was almost resting on her head, Kay could feel the words in his throat, the deep vibrations that she knew were true. ‘You went to Ontos with that question, the question about what you are doing, what you should be doing, what your purpose feels like. You shot that question out in hundreds of different directions last night. Even I felt it. Every cause on the board turned within, as if they were all staring at themselves, as if they were all suddenly intensely curious about their own being. For a long moment, for hours, they all seemed –’ he paused, and breathed – ‘self-conscious.’