The Rhymer

by Douglas Thompson

  Oh, but she is not forgotten. I find myself saying, as the two of us stand to leave, not quite able to believe the unbidden words slipping from my mouth, as we shake hands with Blackwell. Stockbridge looks at me askance, aghast, then retrieves the save like an expert goalie, quelling an advance. You keep her memory eloquently alive, Mister Blackwell… and now you’ve shared it with us also, for which we are most grateful. Slowly, and wholly chastened we depart that holy shrine to lost love and time, wherein a flame endures to whose poignancy none but the hardest heart could be inured.

  *

  Now the afternoon hurries on, the light grows weary… we must go see your friends and seize your new destiny as a talked-about painter whose fortunes are on the rise. –I hear Stockbridge say this by my side as we stroll, but I am still miles away as the roll of thunder on a distant horizon. I am in strange turmoil, and if pressed could not attest as to what constituent parts my conflicting thoughts comprise.

  You know, the good Doctor takes my arm, I am alarmed as to how quiet you’ve become today, and odder still I’d say you’ve even started rhyming less, that might be significant, but quite of what I cannot guess.

  Bless you, Doctor, for your concern, but I believe my ailment is no more mysterious, and indeed no less, than what is customarily called Déjà vu. Perhaps my alleged new status as an artistic parvenu will do the trick to lift the gloom and restore some conversational hilarity between me and you.

  Could you be Leermouth? Stockbridge punts the awful question, the looming chasm, intimidating phantasm, then throws me a lifeline to quell my spasms, –or one of his other victims perhaps, of whom we know there were a few, not all of which the police ever found to speak to?

  I know not, I sigh, I have forgotten, as was perhaps that poor girl’s desire, all regret and epithet of years past apt to make me sad or tire. And only to the present now or future, can my heart aspire. I am drawn forwards as by angels singing to whatever revelation awaits me next, in punishment or recompense, my task to shed one final mask.

  *

  So I only had to ask. Or disappear, dispense with fear. Now here I am at last outside an art gallery solely dedicated to my work, I can’t believe my luck. Look, there is my name (or one of them at least) proclaimed across the launch-night banners. I stammer as I cross the threshold, full of disbelief. T’would almost be relief to find it all an error, the mouse in me recoils in terror. But there they are, straight up ahead: canvases and pastels I recognise as mine, strange and yet familiar, glimpsed dimly from some other time. And Mustafa and Kettering, muttering in a back room, catch sight of me and come running out, overjoyed: Ithir! What miracle is this? We all feared you drowned or dead!

  Indeed! We lock in a tri-partite embrace, nearly bang our heads. It is as if I have been dead and now return to mourn at my own burial.

  Much better than that by far, you silly old goat! Here, let me take you by the hand and throat, and squeeze the life half out you to check all’s real about you. –Kettering exclaims, until we descend to calling each other disrespectful names, as was our habitual game of old. Dirty gypsy bastard, old dead-beat rock-and-roller, we laugh and holler.

  You have changed I see, old friend… Mustafa marvels, and writ upon your face are all your travels. In fact, hold on, the very shape of your nose and brow, the colour of your eyes. How can this be? –Your soul re-housed in a vessel of a different shape and size?

  I cannot understand it either, and have learned it’s better not to even try. Besides, after a drink or ten, who truly recollects the face of men? ’Tis our spirit and our voices about tonight we should be rejoicing. I did not know I had done so many oils, how noble of you to build such a monument of the spoils of my abscondment. And what uncanny luck that I should chance upon you in this arrondissement. Here, in fact, how could I forget? –I owe this very meeting to this friend here patiently waiting throughout this greeting, Doctor Horace Stockbridge.

  More hands are shaken as the doctor joins the group, bottles cracked open, everybody cock-a-hoop. The wine and stories flow and bit by bit my spirits take to the air, as standing by the stair I dimly register the first guests entering then more thereafter, much hilarity and laughter. My private view, my vernissage, parvenu and ingénue, my soirée a la carte and sur le plage. Premier étage. But oh, behind this visage, how my soaring spirits turn like an eagle and venture out too far and high into my own sky and by and by I find myself more distant than I would have planned or desired. All the voices and faces turn to one, one vast auditory hallucinatory hum, a cacophonic choir. I find myself drawn, glass in hand, to stand before my own pictures puzzling over their deeper meanings. It is as if I hear a bird cry, plaintively keening, something lost, a knife-sharp fragment of returning meaning. Every face on each canvas bears some resemblance to Rachel Blackwell, or is it to some other woman looming in memory or obsession? –Cynthia, Gladys, or my brother’s Aphrodite, on whose trail I’d rather be tonight if I were half so drunk and twice as sprightly? And figures lying on chairs without their hair, and nets across their faces fixed in sleeping grimaces, and everywhere symbols scattered as if plundered out of shopping trips through history. Crosses, swastikas, runes and Sanskrit interweaved in symbolist mysteries older than time and maybe older, someone is talking at my shoulder. Kettering, whittering, he’s reading my thoughts like psychic join-the-dots, or has been creating them, weaving them with his own verbosity, like hypno retro gresso-whatzity:

  Who was that girl who was all over you at the end of that show in Oceania on that last occasion? I last saw the two of you vanish into that goodnight together, arm in arm for all the world as if you’d been like that forever and all set to sail off down the river. Then bang! There was noise, confusion, gunshots even, you were banished, leaving. Famished for news we’ve been since. What did it mean can you evince? That bold stramash so close to the Feast of Stephen.

  They took her… I mumble… the sharp-toothed rats… my brother’s orthodontic rodents, I should have seen the portents… but no fear I’m on the trail and won’t fail to find her, or if you find her first please do remind her… I say from behind my haze, gazing into a glazed bottle and emptying its contents.

  And next, minutes or hours gone by, its hard to say, I find Mustafa at my side, painting pictures in my ear with his melodic brush of words. It is good to see you my friend, but consider if you would, our mutual acquaintance Kettering as he is stood there at the other side of the room, entertaining what company he can about him gather...

  What about the good fellow? I ask, blurry.

  Consider how little jealousy he feels towards you, although this is your show and not his, and your paintings are selling like proverbial hot bagels. You’re getting praise and acclaim tonight of a level which he has craved for years. And yet, I see only joy in his heart on your behalf. A man cannot fake such light-heartedness, such a smile and such a laugh.

  Yes, that is good. I admire the man, but I’m not sure I grasp your point entirely…

  As ever, Ithir, this is about you and your brother. Would you feel so little jealousy towards Kettering were the roles reversed? –And did you, when he was flourishing and you were but his assistant, his under-study, factotum, back in Oceania? You see, you are well-rehearsed in negative emotions. But didn’t I tell you once how your soul is being weighed? Or was my point too subtle, or the metaphor flawed by which it was conveyed? You are fond of asking what the point is of all this game, and yet perhaps you have been told the truth already but simply did not recognise its name.

  Mustafa… I have changed already under your teaching, altered as clay by a potter’s hand. And you must know I seek a woman now, love itself, whom I have glimpsed, a fragment fallen from heaven. Is that not proof enough that I have honed my arrow towards the holy straight and narrow?

  Ithir. This whole word is but a construct, a stage play in which even I am merely scenery devised to test your soul. So it is for every man and woman as they strain their eyes, crossing fog-clogged bogs to seek the
ir prize. Never mistake life for being real. Only the soul must be your goal. To cleanse it and find truth, to face everything, each charge, each crime, each indictment, and tally up the balance-sheet of your own folly. To unlock the magic box in which we’re trapped and be released into enlightenment; the trick is not to win out over others at all, but to lose beautifully. Your greatest painting, your ultimate work of art, is your self, and suffering your only brush, the only thing to make your colours lush. You must renounce hatred and jealousy before you can complete your odyssey…

  *

  And so these words, out of so many echoing others, become the ones that assail my waking state the next day, well after noon, in some luxurious boarding-house my kind friends must have booked me into, using all my fresh windfall funds from spectacular sales. A knocking on the door is waking me, and rising unsteadily I let Doctor Horace in. Are you fresh and rested Nithna?

  I nod my head. Something close, a few stops up from dead. Have we a mission today? –I feel something of that ilk slopping round my head.

  Indeed. We go directly to jail without passing go, I believe, although there are a couple of other locales within my notes into which we could have poked our noses if our reposes had but ended sooner.

  Like?

  Thomas Leermouth’s former home, a ruin now I believe, as grandiose and mysterious as Rome.

  And all roads have been leading there, is that it?

  Not quite the carrot for you as your brother and his ingénue, unless your priorities are changing. Its time you put an end to your estrangement, him and you, lest all this friction end in your derangement.

  I thought I started out mad and ill in your estimation, or have I misunderstood the arrangement?

  Whatever. You’ve reminded me of something your friend Mustafa said last night. Deep fellow that. Something about time only being comprehensible when we remove its vector. He’s expecting to see us again tonight, I hope you’re not planning on doing anything unsightly today at the police station to get us expelled or extradited?

  I only want to get my business expedited. A name, a location, for my new flame. I must trace her before I forget her face.

  Very well. Let’s go. I’ll show, you tell, if you promise to quell your anger well.

  *

  Another constabulary. Describing it would involve invective and diminutives fit to exhaust even my vocabulary. Drab and drear and dreich, and full to the brim with the uniformed uninformed, who fill out forms ad infinitum. Dear Doctor Horace does his bit, chatty patter to butter up the batty copper in charge, congratulating him for not leaving the dreaded Zenith Learmot at large. And could we interview him as part of our study, cue the ridiculous Swiss aside, believing he has had some contact with our unnamed amnesic patient.

  Truth be told I feel exultant, triumphant and ancient, being led into the room in which my brother faces me at last through iron bars. I can unlock these gates, the superintendent offers, if I lock the outer doors instead.

  Please… Horace snorts, do not put ideas into our head. Better to keep him at a distance in this instance.

  Whatever, Plod shrugs, I’ll leave the keys beside the chair, now I’ll go get out your hair.

  Silence descends as Zenith wakens stiffly from his thin foam mattress on the floor, and glances over us and behind us sees the gently closing door. Brother, I’ve been expecting you. Does it please you now to see our fortunes so reversed at last? His smile makes me flinch. The power of his personality, his apparent magnanimity shakes me somehow like a psychic strip search. Who is this clown you’ve brought with you?

  Doctor Horace Stockbridge, sir, at your service. The good doctor steps forward and thrust his hand through the bars.

  Zenith laughs aloud. Your personal shrink! How very quaint. Without warning he takes and twists Stockbridge’s hand round rapidly, thrusts another hand through the bars around his throat and strangles him expertly until he faints, then lets him slump to the floor. I stumble back in horror, frozen in inactivity, falling backwards onto a seat. The keys… my mind races, are still over by the door. Zenith’s eyes follow mine minutely, reading me. That’s right, he smiles, sweating, exulting. Your every thought is known to me, brother. You can’t hide your weakness and cowardice from me, even here in a city of so many trees to duck behind. Your triumph doesn’t taste so sweet does it? Revenge tastes empty in your mouth, because really you wish you were me, wish you had my audacity and strength. You don’t want to kill me or crush me at all, or whatever snivelling fantasy you’ve been harbouring half your life. You want to become me, but you can’t because you lack the balls. We’re like man and wife, you and I. Different but contrapuntal, yin and yang. Come on, come over here and strangle me. Prove to yourself and me that you know how to kill, that you’re up to the challenge. Then maybe, just maybe, you’ll be worthy, you can call yourself cruel and brutal enough to harbour my appetites, to exact and realise your will. That’s what success is, brother, a triumph of the will. Because most people out there, ninety-nine percent, are little sheep, waiting for a shepherd, good or bad they can’t tell the difference, someone with all the decisiveness and willpower which they sense they lack. You see, the good lord in his wisdom doesn’t seem to have handed out much initiative and leadership. They’re in mighty short supply. And mighty indeed are those who realise that and cultivate it. And wanna know the most self-empowering and decisive act of all? To kill! To kill, brother! To defy life itself…

  Zenith kneels and begins to twist Horace’s neck and I panic, run towards the door to raise the alarm, but Zenith rasps: Stop! Bring me the keys over or I’ll break his neck. Can’t you hear it clicking already? Just another few notches round and you’ll hear the lovely sound, a fatal weakness in the human design, this narrow vulnerable canal to the brain through which everything must flow. Death is almost instant I’m told, from a relatively simple blow.

  I pick up the keys and find I am walking back slowly, like a zombie, a damned puppet working to his command. I feel the edges of the keys with my sweating slippery hands, their edges and serrations, their points and tips. Approaching suddenly I lunge and thrust the sharpest with all the force of my body behind it, straight into his throat. Aiming for the jugular, whoever taught him anatomy it seems, taught us both.

  Hiss and froth of blood in blinding spray across my eyes. Letting go of Stockbridge, Zenith’s grabbing me instead and smashing me against the bars with terrifying force, trying to crack my skull or crack the gate. Making hideous hissing sounds now, he’s reaching for his face to remove the keys. Both of us slick with blood I try to beat him to it and our hands interlock, fingers interweave about the keys. Tell me, I say, who the girl was, her name and where she is, where to find her…

  What girl? –He rasps grotesquely, spraying blood like a fatal lisp.

  The one I got talking to in Oceania, before your thugs took her away, long brown hair, blue eyes, said she was from Sylvia originally… tell me.

  Zenith has the upper hand on the keys now, although his strength is fading. Thea… he says… her name is Thea, you’ll find her in Suburbia… if you hurry.

  Hurry? Suddenly he punches me hard in the face and I recoil violently across the room, the back of my head striking the wall. I nearly black out for a second, and when I open my eyes, incredibly, the cell behind the bars is empty. I stand up and stagger forward, thinking perhaps Zenith is on the floor, hidden by the slumped form of Doctor Stockbridge, but there’s nobody there. I look down at my hands, covered in blood and see that, stained very red and almost unrecognisable in the midst of my palm: I still hold the keys. I go over to the gate and check the lock but it’s not been opened. Confused, reeling, heart still racing but sensing some kind of peculiar release and freedom, I kneel and take Horace’s pulse. He’s still breathing.

  Stepping away backwards slowly, dumfounded, disbelieving, I reach the door and turn the handle. And leave, leave. Walk then run and run until I can scarcely breathe. Blocks away I collapse into some green copse, strea
ked with sweat. But to kill one’s self is not so easy, I’m breathing yet. But am I dreaming or has there been some change? Deranged beneath the beating sun, it seems my dual has been murdered by our duel. The jewel I clutch in my hand: blood-red, is better than any diamond or ruby, the key which I have won. I am no longer twin it seems, but one.

  ~

  So as melancholy darkness falls once more in the town of trees, I make my way I know not where, guided as by my feet on rails. Horror, guilt, still lurches in my entrails, but exhilaration, exultation also pumps my blood, with all that that entails. I have triumphed somehow, or taken off some blindfold and walked out clearly into truth. Or nearly, so I feel, for as darkness falls so also a veil is lifting, all my perspectives shifting. I begin to recognise all the landmarks around me, to walk with greater purpose than before. I turn corners with confidence and each time spot a building here and there that seems different, has been replaced at some indeterminate date, but know not how I come by this knowledge.

  Things get darker and my heart lurches. I pass two churches that I sense once told me I was nearly home. Then here at last I chance upon what Horace described to me as Rome. A large ruined house behind demolition fencing, brooding dark and pensive. Interspersed with many trees self-sown and grown wild for twenty years. Tall cypresses and junipers weave in and out of broken window casements, thick roots of ivy sprout from cracking walls. Collapsed roofs undulate in seas of broken tiles, through which umbrella pines soar in artistic poses languid and wind-torn, lovelorn and forlorn. Grave-like guarding dead dreams in eternal hope of dawn. The rain is on now, and drips like tears from the eaves, and a few leaves alike, in a slow fountain of picturesque decay and degradation, falling, follow suit. Is summer getting tired already, chastened, hastened by autumn’s pursuit?

  I steal through a gap in the fence torn by miscreant children or foxes, and climb a wall or two, then go in through a window. My mind’s eye flashes every so often like neurons firing, phantom glimpses in vision’s periphery of how this house was once, before time’s sly intrusion and derision, debased it, exposed, as by a surgeon’s cruel incision. Painted plaster fragments on wall, glimmers of smashed glass, crumpling fans of delaminating lath. Fungus of rot and sprays of graffiti proclaiming gang rites. Discarded needles, condoms, and tights. Oh the delights of forbidden forgotten places. Children, adolescents, villains. I can almost see their faces, even without my wires to dangle. Then I come to the place where all confusion untangles.