The Rhymer

by Douglas Thompson

  Cold though the night is, to hear ourselves better over the buzzing fizz of talk around us, we walk out onto the quayside and sit on a capstan each, to preach each to each our plans to transform our lives and shed our former skins. You are so beautiful… I venture, in this mysterious maritime illumination, if you would forgive my voicing such an indiscreet rumination.

  Her eyebrows lift. Oh that old chestnut. How tedious to be judged constantly by one’s looks. Do you and other men suffer the incessant indignity of the knives of stares? Yet some women must it seems, and is that fair? To be hunted and observed everywhere, insidiously and unawares? I am like a mobile statue with a living soul entombed inside, and all the fools I meet project their childish fantasies and dreams onto this blank canvas which is not me at all, but just the accidental shell that I am wrapped up within. Our appearance is but a random roll of dice, and yet the shallow Pierrots of this world pursue this phantom half their lives, descending into vice on its account. If this is life as God intended, then politely, prithee, count me out.

  Such words of truth to hear at last from such a mouth is a relief enough to make me shout with joy. Her sad eyes gaze worldly wise, world weary and austere, through me to the core as none before and I at last have nowhere left to hide. I must confide you speak as one who has sneaked into the attic of my head and read the diary of my mind… I reply in shock, I have been blind to the possibility that a soul as lost as I could be hidden so close at hand, and we could wander unknown to each other forever through this darkened land. But aren’t some men likewise cursed by the adoration of girls frivolous and shallow, fixating on their matinee idol surface, entirely unaware of the depths, pleasant or unpleasant, which wash in waves below, resounding between unknown shores? Do not despair, for surely there is hope and grandiosity in Nature’s plan that has spanned so many millennia to bring us to this here and now as never before?

  Perhaps, but higher genius though reality may yet be, let us not suppose that it is of necessity symmetrical… She answers, tilting her head as to weigh it all with scales calibrated and metrical, We have but one heart each for instance, and it does not sit at our centre, nor do the appendix and spleen. All is skewed, perverse, adrift and obscene in the obscure constellation of human life, a project underway on the scaffold of the universe, too vast for any perspective to reveal. Women by and large, listen to the voice behind the mask, while men see no further than its surface and do not think to ask. What is the task then? –the grand enterprise of which we all fall short? The ultimate gesture and last resort?

  My retort is of a sort not verbal or ineffectually intellectual but instinctual for a pleasant change: I find that I have done something deranged and taken her in my arms and kissed her. The dockside mist like a clouding of the brain swirls in slow drifts around us as I vanish blissfully into this sustained osculation. Wheeling of stars across the heavens and aggregation of centuries like sediment. From my mortal impediment I am freed and chained all at once by the spark of concern that once lit burns in the brain and floods the veins of two organisms reaching out towards each other, two trees straining to intertwine their branches. Both enflamed and drained in the aftermath, I discover something astonishing as we withdraw and pull away: a loud cracking noise, a shudder and a shiver, as if all the mechanistic cogs of physics are giving way in dismay. With not a little pain and confusion we see that both our faces, interlocked and bonded, have now peeled away. My damaged metal mask, impacted into hers, and now both falling to the cobbles in disarray. Crash, crumple, gasp and tumble. Our reaching hands encounter and entangle each other’s, bending over. And looking up, what do we see now of each other’s true appearance? Eyes widening, nearing revelation, our disparate throats break into ululation.

  But the warehouse doors are thrown open, light spilling out in sickly yellow degradation, our recent scene sullied by observation. Dirze’s retinue of hired muscle emerge and tussle with my Aphrodite before I’ve even caught her name. And pushing me back, administer to me the same brutal treatment. Defeat, even in the moment of triumph. I cry out after her, but get a fist in my face to focus my thoughts and my dental health plan. Second-best as ever to my dread brother. Where are you headed with her, you fuckers? –I shout, spitting out a canine and a molar. Hands over her mouth, she is dragged away kicking, but her eyes meet mine one last time. And that is enough to determine my mission, for all eternity.

  Bleeding and stumbling, mumbling profanity and inanity, I pursue as best I can along the many quays and piers that Dirze’s demons make their retreat along. One even produces a gun, a few blocks along once we’ve left the throng, and shatters the brickwork of each doorway that I duck inside and hide in. Until gaining ground they reach a harbour with the tide in and all flee on board a boat and hoist their anchor. The wankers. No doubt Dirze himself is in the cabin at the centre of their infernal machinations, poring over a nautical chart and devising some new stratagem of the heart and soul to confound my longing. But he bolts the stable door too late, and fate it seems has turned the tide. For wounded and breathless as I am, and collapsed at the water’s edge, now I have glimpsed my salvation in another soul tormented as myself. Now I am deathless and where once I was outcast, I understand belonging. I am of this world again at last, and destined to master it. Do not ask one who has once tasted it to abandon it: the elixir of life I mean, unleashed between two beings, which opens a door to immortality, the ability to transcend and escape our sordid physicality. Undaunted, I climb down a harbour ladder and steal myself a boat and paddle, and although I may be slow and addled by fog, with hard slog I will achieve my goal I know. I will never be alone again, and this thought gives me the strength of ten men and the patience of a hundred. I set sail, and will not fail to regain the treasure my brother has plundered. I shall grace these shores no more. When night next lifts its veil, I will be in Sylvia.

  ~

  Swishing of tree leaves. A forest breathing like an enormous lung. I wake up and am overjoyed to find a shingle shore crunching under my beached rowboat, and immediately stand up and fall over. Sea legs extraordinaire, I am debonair for all of the two seconds that my limbs can bear, then violently sick, pebble-dashing the pebble-dash. I have reached land at last, after many days adrift between the maddeningly myriad islands of that watery suburb behind me to find myself here, here. But it is queer to see trees and cliffs and mountains again, the glorious glens and valorous valleys. Have they missed me as I them? Again, I try to stand, and faring better, take my first steps on dry land. Then turning to take my leave of the ocean’s mirror, I recall with a shiver that I have lost my face and have no idea yet as to with what it has been replaced. I retrace my paces then kneeling find a pool of still water in a quiet space and wait, wait… for the breath of the breeze to cease and reveal to me who I am. There kneels a man, a lot like me, unshaven and dishevelled, with a backdrop of trees. He seems vaguely familiar, but a mirror is an inversion, a perversion, a carnival trick. Only the girl with whose face I collided has seen where my soul resided. Oh that we might have had long enough so that in me she confided.

  Pine trees everywhere, evergreen and deciduous, evoking residual religiosity, tall as the pillars of a cathedral nave or choir, but I stand at the crossing now I sense, enchanted with Nature’s incense, the smell of sap from porous bark. Hark, is that a singing bird I hear? Spring, if not already here, is near. No more to fear, I will banish winter darkness from my soul’s long year. For I have found my Aphrodite and seen the hope to banish all my tears. And if I found her once, I know I may again. But what of men? They occur everywhere, spontaneous as trees, half so useful and less inclined to please. An infestation of every nation, they try my patience. And as I pick my way over roots and rocks, I see a roadway not far off enough, and realise with tired eyes and sighs that I must interact with humankind again. Onward, then. Headfirst into the lion’s den, the dread domain of men.

  Hard-packed stones then tarmacadam, over many miles, if truth be told, do much to reconcile my he
els and toes to the comforts of the road, as opposed to the rolling mulch of roots and leaf mould. And picking up a pace, oh joy, I am no longer cold, but nurtured sweetly by spring springing in its buds and shoots all around me, the tweeting of birds alighting in branches, delighting and astounding. They fill my soul with music of sweet anticipation, and adrift on Nature’s tides I am as a refugee arriving at the borders of Her nation, my passport the memory of the face and voice of Aphrodite. I will be part of life, its orbiting satellite no longer. The sun shall feed my hunger.

  An unfortunate metaphor perhaps, for all too soon I feel an ache in my knee-caps fit to lead me to collapse, and reaching the outskirts of a town, lest I fall down, find my way to the first available tavern and sit myself down. I say a town and yet the effect is more as if the occasional cottage in the surrounding woods have multiplied and aggregated in number by slow degree until there might be said to be more brick than timber, and tiles than leaves. Tall trees abound in Sylvia and its populaces show their faces as might squirrels and foxes or birds in boxes, peeping that is, upon one’s business, before returning to their profits and losses. Can I help you sir? –A portly barman intones from some height upon my exhausted limbs, and I eye him apprehensively before suggesting my age-old jest, a test to see if he’ll buy my bargain. Have you a musical instrument, I hazard, a violin say, or a flute, a cor anglais, oboe or violoncello? A pianoforte, harpsichord, or clavichord?

  The fellow’s brows furrow as rainclouds gathering to ransack a mountain top. He opens his mouth in wrinkling perplexity, but I continue for him: Or a virginal, muselar or spinet perhaps? A terpodion, uranion or melodion? A penny whistle? Now his eyebrows lift and he tries so speak again but is thwarted by my further interjection: Or a celesta, an octobass, or lira da braccio? A kazoo would do, or even a jew’s-harp or harmonica? I’ve even been known to fetch a tune on a twelve-inch ruler or wineglass with a wetted finger. Fair enough, I can see I’m getting nowhere so I shall not linger…

  Wait! –Cries out an eaves-dropper before I come a proper cropper, standing up with the barman’s hands grappling for my collar. Can you play an accordion?

  A squeeze box, by crikey, why do I always overlook the most likely? Throw one my way and I shall entertain you mightily and cordially, accordingly. Phew… food and drink I think and a pile of straw to recline on nightly. I hoist the heavy instrument of enlightenment and set the grace notes spinning to cancel out my imminent indictment for vagrancy. Like ripples, I soon marvel at the waves of sound lapping at the surrounding ears and passing on out into vacancy. The human soul is constantly astir it seems, enflamed as an itching skin, and fond of being soothed by an external agency. Eternal exigency, this soporific balm to calm the savage breast or suck its nipple like a tipple famed for its astringency, smelling salts, the brandy glass, the draught liqueur for all contingencies. Awaken! And in its wake, we are each uplifted, reminded of the divine elixir for which we are all vessels. Wrestle no more, but let it in, let it pour.

  Then in the door, after four hours or more, forty-six tunes, three pints and two legs of boar, there walks a face I can’t quite place, some unextinguished acquaintance relinquished from before. Distinguished? By Jove, yes! It’s the good Doctor Horace Stockbridge, bedecked with dishevelled spectacles upon his nose, and looking a little morose, indeed in need of refreshment and repose. The state of your clothes! I intone, nearly standing on his toes, What roughshod tangle you’ve been dangled in, do please now hasten to disclose…

  Do I know you? –He responds, wide-eyed. And of course I’ve half forgot the morbid procedure by which I periodically change my facial features. What a strange creature I am. Inimical inimitable physiognomical anomaly.

  You used to get on with me. And indeed took me into your home. My name then was Nithna or some such blether. But I am averse to being tethered to arbitrary nomenclature or sedentary leisure. Peripatetic being my pathetic epithet of preference. Do forgive me if I’ve invaded your privacy and shot to fuck your frame of reference. It is good to see you again, Doctor. I beg forgiveness for my hasty exit stage left last and thank you heartily for all your kindness of the past.

  Nithna?

  Nadir, they seem to call me here now. Queer, I know, all this ebb and flow of labelling. I’ll be tabling an amendment to the central committee, if I ever find one, on this and many other topics, before I go into that goodnight and all that shite. What brings you here tonight into this prefecture, and in such a state of sartorial dishevelment?

  It is you! I’d know your incessantly obsessive rhyming any time and anywhere, your alliteration in any nation, your onomatopoeia in any…

  Come, come, Doctor, you can leave the verbal athletics to me, we wouldn’t want our audience to think us a pair of epistemological epileptics, would we?

  Quite so… And Stockbridge looks around over the bridge of his nose and spectacles held on with loose elastic, observing that he has become the spectacle at last now the music’s lapsed. The bar customers are all agape to hear at last a clue of my identity and his. Well, I’d sooner piss in their glasses. Follow me and we shall quaff our ale outside where we can escape the venal ears of these loutish lads and admire instead the asses of passing lassies.

  Toss it back, the cold beer splashes. Stockbridge I surmise is in some mess stickier than a barrel of molasses. Hands shaking he asks: Lassie’s asses? You never spoke like that before, Nithna. Have your dormant drives been awakened or am I mistaken? Some incident of intimacy, oceanic or obscene, drawn your attention to the primal scene?

  Ahh doctor, your perspicacity is greatly penetrating to the point of gratingly enervating. Next you’ll be asking how often I’m masturbating. Truth be told I did encounter a certain girl who set my poor love-parched soul a whirl on another island of your archipelago, but no sooner were we matched than she was snatched by a batch of my dread brother’s brutes to return her to his nefarious seraglio. My fate was sealed by that intaglio. And so I found myself here, pursuing the boat that stole my Aphrodite. I pine for her nightly, unsure now how to find her, except perhaps to track my sibling, dribbling avaricious demon that he is, dripping semen from his three foot penis. But enough of my deranged estrangement and failed amorous arrangements, what of you, good doctor? –You seem more out of sorts than me, to whom such resorts to desperation are merely standard medication.

  Good gracious, Nithna, your life is never simple. Your psychic state sounds positively stifling, beside which my own predicament is trifling. I was merely mugged by thugs who I caught rifling through my case. They stole all my money, I’m told it’s commonplace in this disreputable district. I’ve informed the authorities and given a description to the police who helpfully tell me it was all my fault for not using a padlock and leaving it unattended for enough milliseconds for them to have the thing upended. I was insured, so bar a few minor injuries I am inured to the whole sorry escapade, and grateful they did not stick a stiletto in my aorta to sabotage my badinage. But anyway, the uncanny thing in all of this is the reason I came here on this ill-fated journey at all. It was because I came across a notice in a newspaper announcing a forthcoming exhibition here in Sylvia by a mysterious new artist masquerading under the name of Ithir The Rhymer. Curious moniker I thought, then I saw his cryptic biography and portrait, but by some wild trick of photography this artist looked like our Nithna, miraculous man from nowhere washed up on the shores of Oceania. So I packed my bags and set out to find you anticipating many enquiries and dead-ends then by some weird godsend, after a perfunctory mugging, the first tavern I stumble into has you, or you claiming to be you, your name and face all changed as by a wipe of the lens, quite deranged really this little set-to straight out of the blue. Just what am I to do? –Or to make of this, or this indeed? He brandishes a crumpled poster folded and rolled, whipped from his pocket and torn from a wall with which he’s recently collided.

  Jumping J-J-Jehoshaphat… I stammer, discomfited and disjointed to the point of fainting, casting my jaded peepers over an
image of three of my own paintings, now I too am agape at the manic machinations of fate. I scan the small print for explanation of this situation and there in a corner spy two names that flick everything into focus, clearing the smoke of hocus pocus: “Kenneth Astley Kettering and Mustafa Hakim request your company at an exhibition of their esteemed missing colleague, protégé and auteur manqué, Ithir The Rhymer, whose paintings have been hailed of late as ‘heralding a new movement’s vanguard” (–Scunthorpe Times Literary Standard).”

  You see? Stockbridge exults, steadying me now as much as I him, leaning together like a monument to muddleheadedness bifurcated at the shins. Slim, the sinew of reality to which we cling, which brings us on its whim in due course from one moment to the next and thence to enlightenment. This is the very exhibition which I’m seeking out, no doubt, and you the maestro the world is hungry now to learn much more about…

  The world and Scunthorpe, so I see. The hyperbole of marketing never ceases to astound me. Ground me, before my head sails off across the sky like a nylon Hindenburg in search of a pylon. This is all very well and good, but I would rather find the aforementioned dame, find love than fame, set my brother straight in all his debauched and raucous games than stick around and wallow like a pig in mud in the newfound notoriety of my name.

  Stockbridge puts a steadying claw upon my sleeve. Back up, old man, the two are scarcely opposites but apposite in fact in extremis to the task at hand. Have you not seen the news? Your brother, if such he be, is held captive in this land, in a jail not far from here I hear, indicted for tax evasion, drug trafficking, conspiracy to battery, murder and myriad other peccadilloes. We can go and interview the scoundrel there…

  Interview? How so?

  Ahah! But now you see the real reason why I risked the roughing up by those ruffians’ hands in striving to retrieve a reprieve for my grievously onerous and laborious paperwork… Stockbridge produces an official and legalistic looking pink file from his tattered attaché case. My contact in Switzerland, whom you may recall I alluded to in psychoanalytic sessions, while domicile at my erstwhile island abode… Erno Schwitzer, esteemed and well-connected as an enormous octopus with testicles everywhere…