Once a study at the back of my house, the floor’s centre is commanded by a rotting old couch, its stuffing lanced and thrown hither to the wind’s fey dance. But there are lockers here and safes, which though rusting have proven too heavy to give up their place in two long decades. Nor indeed their secrets. And I alone know where the keys have languished. Reaching my hands under rotten shelves I nearly think all is lost and taste my panic. Then at last, my fingers stop and repeat, as reading Braille in disbelief. I bend down and retrieve a little key, miraculously dry and uneroded, protected by the work of spiders.
Then by the moon’s light now rising above the windowless shards of a façade like a heartbroken face, I unfold a sparkling net of electrodes, a jiggling jellyfish of twilight stars, and lift it to my head with slow ceremony as a priest donning his vestments, a judge preparing to pass sentence. And the lab pack and the dials, the vials of chloroform, and even batteries. All are here and safe and dry and their time has come at last as I lie and sink into the rotting scum of soaking cushions, and throw my head back and reach for the dial… and turn. And turn.
The house comes alive briefly in an explosion of light, a soft effulgence of grace pouring over my face and burning out my features. The wound on the back of my head, the ache in my heart, time heals all sutures, as walls rebuild themselves, stones lifting magically into the air like birds to take their rightful places in walls. I am shot, not into the future, but deep then deeper into the past, in fact perhaps whatever destination my equipment took me last.
Twilight again. A world seen dimly as through a haze of deepest cobalt blue. I wear strange attire of tights and belted tunic and cloak, walking through corridors of dark carved wood. I am quite well-to-do, some sort of count or prince. I walk out onto the battlements of my tower, and look all around me with an exultant glower. A beautiful wide coastline spreads before me looking north, somehow familiar but changed, simple land of peasants undisfigured by industry. My pastime is to gaze into the future, suitably inspired and deranged by nefarious substances procured for me secretly by a local witch who I had spared from the bonfire in return for her services, a clandestine apothecary. I write down prophecies upon wide rolls of parchment with a feather pen, a quill is what I will call it. For a bed I have a four poster carved for my grandfather, shot through with little holes of woodworm. The roof beams click at certain times of year with death-watch beetle. For a toilet I use a hole in the wall, discharging straight out towards the grass surrounding embankments below, chilly in winter.
I am laird over all the surrounding lands. Vassals come to greet me, pledging fealty and I reassure them, gripping both their hands. And from still further occasionally, indeed across all the known country and even across the seas, curious visitors come to hear me speak and discuss with me the substance of what I have spoken before. And here is what’s important, since some can neither read nor write, to help them memorise my words: I speak in rhyme.
I wake suddenly with a terrible jolt. Faces about me in the twilight ruins all look down laughing and shouting, deranged in firelight, a gang of little demons. One of them swings a piece of wood with several nails protruding from it towards my head and I cower in fear, protecting myself with one hand, but with the other: turn the dial again in panic. Groan…moan… heaving of machinery whining, idling, struggling, breaking down, its work beginning then failing, damaged or incomplete.
I stand up and dust myself off. I am in the ruins of the old house again. I reach up and find the hairnet has caught fire and fused itself onto my scalp. I reach my hand down onto my breast, and again some intense heat has caused a small explosion that has severely burnt my chest. The dial is fused. And yet I feel no pain. Indeed I feel quite light-headed, sprightly. Night has lifted somehow, though I can think of no way to judge how much time has passed. Dawn now licks around the horizon, an early morning, the first perhaps of summer. I remember only one thing of importance: that I must head north and as fast as possible, to find Thea, my Aphrodite, where she reputedly resides in Suburbia. I remember, from what feels like many years ago, the map my friend Weasel drew me in chalk upon a wall. The quickest route to Suburbia is due north through Urbis, the peculiar centre which unvisited, has until now haunted my every distant horizon like a recurring dream, while somehow always remaining unimagined and unreal. Before the sun comes up too far and streets begin to throng and someone apprehends me for all the things I have done wrong, I must away with haste. I am Nadir in this place, so let us leave it, and leave behind my face.
*
Then in time to the border twixt Sylvia and Urbis I come, marked by a distinct diminution in the abundance, not of buildings, but of trees. We are heading inwards you see, towards the conurbation, the great conflagration of a million hearts and minds, hastening together in doubt and loneliness and eagerness as to what they’ll find. Towerblocks. Neon nocturnal mirrors flicking on and off throughout long nights, that offer back vistas of yellow portholes with faces at them, searching and lost as ourselves. Are we wanted, are we desired? Are we discarded, left upon the shelves? What is it we seek to sell each other in this vast Halloween ball of a power-cut supermarket, polythene bags over our heads? Suffocating for attention, miming SOS? Or simply suffocating, trying to save the mess. Is loneliness the burden or the prize? Is hell ourselves or all the rest, everybody else, closing their eyes?
I am in the thick of it now. A real city rises up around me with its inhabited cliffs. Huge interchanges and bypasses behave irrationally, trying to confuse my feet, throw off the humble pedestrians like ticks from their writhing serpentine skin, black and shiny, slithery in sodium and halogen light. Why is morning so paused and delayed? Does pollution haze this domain so thickly that even sunlight and happiness cannot penetrate its glaucous depths? The roads are still quiet, so I take to their middle when the pavements get obstreperous with me. I begin to remember landmarks with surprising clarity. Visual cues bringing memories like bells ringing through the fog. I am heading home suddenly, legs trotting, with the certainty of a once-faithful dog.
A railway bridge with elaborate Victorian girders, a library with a fine copper dome, some old Georgian townhouse with a plaque commemorating a notorious murder. Locked groomed gardens in the centre of a fine residential square. Soaring spire of a gothic university, soot and time-blackened stone, still floodlit, the shadows of night not yet shaken off. Taken over, as if slotting down into hidden rails, I hasten along avenues and boulevards, remembering some walk… to work perhaps, habitual ritual mind-imprinted over many years, anticipation rising as the jaws of Pavlov’s dog. Each vista I turn a corner into, I seem to remember a millisecond before it clogs my eyes. And then at last I glimpse my prize, but not as I thought… the university faculty where perhaps I worked, but something else, more immediate, here in front of me, some urgent memory clothed in murk: a refurbished old hotel, of industrial era brick and clay tiles. This means something important, my heart rate is rising, a blockage in my brain throbbing with a floodtide of meaning dammed up behind it.
I stop and stand in the street in front of its dread façade looming up seven stories above me, and know at last I stand in hell. Cars in the street either side of me are not moving, but neither are they empty. Drivers and passengers are frozen still, eyes and mouths open, halted upon a word and phrase. Gradually I understand this city’s peculiar silence and its haze. I step forward and climb the steps, and know and expect the familiar face of the receptionist, remember the colour of her hair and eyes, the cut of her clothes. She too is frozen of course, as are a handful of other guests in poses of movement to and fro across the entrance hall with its chequered marble floor and dusty vaulted ceiling. I move close to each standing guest and run my hand in front of their eyes, check their mouth for breath. And as I rotate around them a peculiar phenomenon unfolds itself: a very fine black line runs down each of their backs from the crown of their heads and across the outside of their clothes, as if they are each simulacrums imperfectly composed. Something M
ustafa said about life not being real begins to echo through me, making me feel sick and scared.
I am unprepared for what happens next, as leaning nearer to the black line across the back of a teenage girl’s blonde hair, the blackness expands into a growing dot then fills my vision and draws me in. Slurping, sliding of reality, as if stumbling on a fatal riverbank. Her entire body becomes as some masquerading costume I can live and breath within. I look out through her eyes, see the whole view of the reception hall around me, can hear my own blood and heartbeat amplified as if I’m trapped inside an echoing dungeon. I panic and try to scream and by accident more than skill find I am ejected backwards to where I was, outside her again. Shaken, shivering, I move around the large space of the marble hall, circling like a wounded predator or hounded prey, holding my breath, tiptoeing, as if I am about to wake these strange sleepers. Oh that I would. What’s worse is somehow knowing that I never could. Here we are, I try another, then another, a middle-aged man, an old woman, I find the spot on the back of their skulls and feel it expand for me and draw me in. Inside each time is a strange silence and suspension, broken only by the din of my own breath. I try to calm myself, and beyond this begin to feel their lives, their memories and intentions, the hurried rivers of their consciousness, frozen in spate, hopeful, despairing, happy or irate. I panic again, too much, this overwhelming knowledge flooding me, I leap back out and back away, closing over my watertight doors, my mental gates.
To the receptionist now, I return my attention and go to stand at her side and her back, and stepping into her mind as if into a cinema hushed in a Saturday matinee, I retrieve her memory, a picture of me taking a key from her, being given a room number, a few minutes before. I go to the lifts, remembering all too well the way, and press the button. Peculiarly, it works, as if machines are immune to this sleeping beauty spell. And yet, if it would only stop and entomb me halfway through its journey that might be more relief than I can tell. Rather than to face what’s coming next. But time is an inexorable ocean here. Doors opening, the sixth floor hallway, the carpets, the faded paintings on the wall, all too familiar as if seen only yesterday, but haven’t years gone by? Surely? Someone wake me from this childhood nightmare before I cry out, before I… die.
The room is unlocked of course, something I must have thought through once, and there in the middle of the room is… myself. As in a mirror but real, in three dimensions, seated on a chair. I spin around, look at the wardrobe mirrors and am relieved (or am I?) to see myself there standing, two versions, this one I am and the other seated, frozen. Not unreal, not dreaming, but seemingly alive, I strive to make sense of this contrivance. And yet, I’m denying the truth before my eyes even now. The red specks on the carpet, the spray in the air behind him. I rotate around my seated self. No need to look for a way in, for the back of his head is gone, and in his mouth a firing gun.
I know that in a second I will run to the en-suite sink and throw up violently, but for the moment I remain in a spell of ultimate fascination, recognising even the dull metallic sheen of a bullet poised in air, exiting my head and taking with it: fragmented brain matter to splatter, everywhere. Scared? Why should we be, how can we be, when we have ventured beyond such a final revelation? God lets us off with shock it seems when we stumble upon what is above our station to take in. Reality breaks in. No more hinting. Sprinting. My stomach erupts and I am crying out in the toilet, hands upon the porcelain. The universe exploding from its core of primal thoughtless pain, my whole being pouring down the drain. I regain composure at last and wipe my mouth, and looking in the mirror, suddenly jump and turn about. Phew. Nothing’s changed. This deranged world is filled with living tailors’ dummies, but more terrible than their stasis would be if they were to move again somehow. I need to get away from here, outside this nightmare, to somewhere there is no one to confront me with their frozen deathlike scorn. I am surrounded by the dead it seems, disguised in living form.
I go to the window, part the curtains and am somehow relieved to see that the cars below have not moved, that the zombies are inert and harmless. Then I see them. Even after this, the strangest thing of all, the only moving creatures perhaps in all of Urbis apart from myself: two adult deer, a hind and stag with pure white coat and horns are walking down the street between the cars. And in slow dreamlike motion, inevitable as drowning, they pass the hotel then halt and turns their heads to look up, up at this window and at me. Instinctively, I scrabble for the window hooks and hoist the bottom sash open, thrust my head out into the much-needed fresh air, and call out some crazy wordless cry, forlorn and hollow. They walk on and turn again, more knowingly than any animal ought to, as if to say: follow.
And I do. I must. Running, hurrying, not so much struck with fear now as like a hunter, a man consumed by lust for the most beautiful woman in all creation. The deer are the key. To follow them, to find and touch them, then I might be free… of whatever this is, of whatever foul spell Urbis has done to me. I flee the doomed room with one last glance at the bloodied, halted parody of me. At least it seems I will not rot, no flies and maggots defile my image with their vile machinations. Acceleration. Down the corridors and down the stairs, taking no chances this time of this strange stage set’s rules catching me unawares. Out through the echoing marble hall, my footsteps clopping in melancholy thrall to this appalling scenario, absurdity, necessity to follow, calling out in the street after white deer already cantering, moving out of reach.
I run and run, my heart and lungs pumping, seeing the deer wait and turn then gallop down a fresh street, weaving between static buses and cars. The sky above me, the early morning light still seems as frozen as the people. Am I dead? –I ask myself, and if so can I ever tire? And certainly I feel unusually fit and light of foot. Indeed, if dead, I scarcely ever felt this good alive. Diving past the windows of a bus, I glimpse within: arrays of frozen faces and slow for a second in morbid fascination. Those half-dead eyes numbed by dread anticipation of their morning’s humiliations and slaveries in return for meagre pay, the dim hope of happiness at the week’s end, return into the arms of those who suffer boredom as they do, rocking each other together like crying babes. Then in the reflection in the glass, I see as a reminder the white stag’s ghostly form pausing, circling again, drawing me on. We reach a shopping mall and the horned phantom hastens up the steps and lures me in. In early morning light, boosted by insipid electric illumination I run past shoppers clutching bags, a little girl kneeling to pat her dog. Am I dead? –I ask again, and pause to run my fingers through the curls of her hair and that of her dog. Warm and comforting, some kind of foundation stone my mind is reaching out to clutch. Are they still alive but in another time stream? And if so then what am I to them? My strange momentary touch an eerie breeze from nowhere, a blessing from an unseen angel that a lifetime’s reflection will never reconcile with rationality? Up ahead, I hear a bellowing, a stomping of hooves, an impatient butting of horns against shop windows. I must away.
Across a bridge now the white hind and stag lead me, and down below in some great gulf I see motorway cars paused and interwoven in a pall of pollution, misery and frustration, suspended in solution. Now trotting down broad stairs, I jump three at a time, trying to catch up, to catch my guides unaware. They turn and face me and the stag lowers his horns and scliffs his hooves, sparking off the granite slabs. Instinctively I recoil against the steps, clutching the handrails. His cold eyes line me up for a second for some fierce trajectory, considering it. Then he throws his head back as if laughing, snorting, and turns and speeds away with his mate in tow, both looking back. It’s all been a game, a ruse, to disabuse me of my illusions of any power, powerless before their greater power, his horns, his glower.
The game goes on for hours, across car parks, housing estates, railway lines. The deer lead me past workmen with dust-masks on, feet poised on pneumatic drills, a square full of pigeons being fed by an old bag lady, each bird frozen in a thrilling trill of flight and feathers, I le
ap up and pluck some flecks of bread out of the air into my mouth. The bread tastes real, reminding me sweetly of the belief that I am still alive. I must hold onto this. If I lag behind, the stag and hind contrive to find me and flush me out. I cross a sport court filled with ladies working out in tight Lycra. The beads of sweat are a glorious eternal glow upon their foreheads. The frozen eyes like those of china dolls, fixed on thoughts of their day ahead, I slip behind one, looking for the black line and try to hide within her head. Inside it’s nice but soon I hear the stag’s bellows and jabbing at my heels. I who thought I was the follower am now the put-upon and hounded, the betrayed.
At last, noticing some tiredness in my limbs, we approach the northern outskirts of Urbis. I grab a roll and a can of juice from a street vendor’s stall, and laugh aloud to think I could have taken anything I’d wanted in this city for free. I take some coins from a frozen passer-by’s pocket and toss them behind me in payment, a joke only for me. The deer wait at the street’s end, heads bowed, frowning, disregarding of my clowning. The endless domain of tarmac is breaking up, and again I begin to see more forest. Strange wastelands of abandoned warehouses, reclaimed by regiments of trees. I see them differently now, from this weird perspective of halted time. The trees are ransacking man’s work, just as violently and methodically as man thinks he’s fighting back and controlling the wilderness. Except the trees are slower and stronger and more ancient, and will win. It is all a battle, grander and more exquisite than I ever could have seen, and there in front bound my heralds, ice white, supremely beautiful and clean, horns and hoofs brashly trashing branches and fences in their stride like pulling curtains, tearing veils aside, sniffing out the lost places where secret truths may hide.
The Rhymer Page 17