Not Now: Death, Dreams & Reasons for Living

by Sam Smith

  "I am going to paint the damn things."

  51

  Meffo is pointing at me. (I am surprised that I can remember so well what she looked like.)

  “You are an only child." It is a bittersaid accusation.

  "Hardly my fault," I, smiling, part-spread my arms.

  Meffo turns smugly from me to desert man,

  "Point proven?"

  "Point is not proven!" he roars at her.

  Island man rolls exasperated eyes, says nothing. The other two continue to glare at one another.

  "What's the argument?" I ask, seeking to pacify. Both turn their glares on me.

  "Typical interjection," Meffo says.

  "Overconfident overweening," Desert man says.

  "I'm not."

  "Don't argue!"

  "Let me explain," Meffo switches on a smile. "In every society every establishment looks after its own, who are those who do well out of that society. They, consequently, despise those who dissent from that society. So too the deluded, the craven orthodox, all those who just want to rub quietly along; they all resent anyone who upsets their cosy little corner, anyone who goes against the accepted tide."

  "Which am I?"

  "You ask questions."

  "How else..."

  "See!"

  All three are smirking triumphantly at me. This makes me angry. I am about to give voice to my indignation when island man holds up a finger.

  "Careful," he says. "You are an artist, and all artists — aware of the insubstantiality of their art, of its dependence on artifice and illusion — they all own a fear that, sooner or later, they are going to be found out."

  "Onion

  layers of deceit." I quote a poem I haven't yet written.

  "Exposed as frauds," the other two, disregarding me, chime.

  I open my mouth to pursue the poem,

  "Possibly..."

  "Weight out of proportion to height," Meffo looks me over.

  "It's not."

  "Ego's certainly out of proportion to intellect," she scores a point.

  "Friendship has to be paid for in units of solitude," Island man unhappily shakes his head.

  "Yes," Meffo nods sadly. "There's an early desolation comes to intelligent children."

  "Sorry," Desert man cocks his head at me.

  * * * * *

  I awoke weeping, feeling hopeless. Rufena, next to me, slept on.

  52

  All that I had to give me guidance in the constituents of paint was my notepad's abbreviated encyclopedia. And then it used mostly chemical names, which weren't of much use to me on a primitive planet like Arbora. It did mention though that albumen had at one time been used as a glazing agent. Albumen — I had to look up most of the words — was egg white.

  I asked Sririsl if I could have a few eggs, tried separating out the yellow yolk from the transparent white. On my third attempt I succeeded. I then mixed some forest clay in with it, got the mixture to a dark brown consistency; and I wrote on the bedroom wall with the mixing stick — because she wasn't with me and writing of her made her as if with me —

  ‘I

  delight

  in her touch’

  I then proceeded to embellish this triangular (old habits die hard) poem with little flourishes. Despite the many curlicues, however, brown soon came to bore me.

  For my next colour I mixed up a whole egg, followed the curlicues with slippery yellow. Which was an enlivening improvement. I'd also, while concentrating, bitten the other end of the stick. I proceeded to use this frayed end as a primitive brush.

  Sririsl came in after lunch to see what I'd done with the eggs. She smiled at the poem; which I realized had a different meaning to her, and probably now to the Knowledge. While for Rufena it would probably have, despite Sririsl's input to the Knowledge, a different meaning again. Poetry, therefore, I thought as I wandered off to the forest, here continued to be an imperfect means of communication.

  I found some purple berries that late afternoon, added that colour to my growing painting, long lines now coming out from the centre and cutting across the others.

  Rufena arrived late that evening, stayed the night, was tender with me.

  Green I found easiest to get from the squashing of a succulent leafed plant. Blue proved near impossible. Flakes of a soft stone ground down gave me a greyish blue, which didn't come close to matching the many blues of the sky.

  Sririsl paid me many visits. So too Rufena. I thought of them both as cameras for the Knowledge — come to record my progress. Although both did make helpful suggestions about colours. Rufena brought me a fungus that turned a bright red when squeezed. That brightened up the wall.

  Knowing where to stop proved most difficult. Some part of a painting could always be improved. What had begun as decoration was, the more I worked on it, becoming expression.

  53

  The wind lifts me higher above the forest.

  I look to my wings. Black feathers. And beyond my wings two of my brothers riding the wind with me.

  Joy!

  I flip, tumble, go spinning like a black ragged leaf down the sky.

  "Brother! Brother!" the others call from above, come tumbling after.

  The forest spins on the axis of my big grey beak.

  Seeing a glade I swoop down into it, up the other side, call,

  "Brother! Brother!"

  And up they swoop behind me, our beaks dividing the air. Over all the forest we are conceited supreme.

  * * * * *

  Many of us are feeding on a tract below.

  "Brother! Brother!" we call.

  They cast a look our way, continue with their march across the land. We three, each with a pirouette on the pivot of our beaks, drop to the sides and the rear.

  * * * * *

  We feed.

  * * * * *

  A presage of wind whispers down the grassheads. A low murmur of anticipation rouses the flock. We spread ourselves into the soft face of this wind. Yes, we are the best.

  "Hawk! Hawk!" comes the cry. My flank. I and two brothers rise to the hawk’s round soaring wings.

  "Go! Go!" we shout at it. But it is slow.

  I undercut, steal the air from its wings. My brother comes from above, drives the head down.

  The brown hawk tries to slide the wind. My other brother unrudders it.

  The hawk dives worriedly to leaf-top. But we are masters of the wind, none better; and we plummet behind, watch it go low and shamed.

  With the pleasant croak of talk we play, returning, slip the wind around and under us.

  "Brother! Brother!"

  We see the flock and drop.

  * * * * *

  We are sitting in our one tree, many of my brothers. We can feel the coming wind in the pores of our beaks.

  We are not impatient, know that this wind, like every wind, exists solely for our pleasure. And it is coming to us.

  "Brother! Brother!" We lift each from the tree as this new wind lifts us. We are many. We are free.

  "Brother! Brother!”

  * * * * *

  My shouting turned on the lights, awoke me.

  Still in the dream, wishing myself back in the dream, I was surprised to find myself again waking in tears; and I wondered at the enormous sense of loss that I felt.

  54

  I didn't like going alone to my bed at night. I wanted to wake mornings with Rufena beside me.

  Lying awake at night, frightened of dreaming, I told myself that I didn't want to spend my every waking minute with her, rather — as we went about our separate concerns — I wanted to meet her at moments throughout the day — to touch, to kiss, to go smiling on our ways.

  On the back of my head I rattled my fingers. Clickety, thump, stop.

  Lying there, looking up at the grey shape of my painted poem, I wanted to write poem upon poem about her; and I smiled shamefully into the dark at the inanity of the verses that the poet in me wouldn't let me write.

  "Mov
e in with me," I said in the same bed next afternoon.

  "Why?"

  "So you can be with me more."

  "Why?" smiling.

  "Because I love you."

  The conversation never got any further than that. Not that day.

  We sat by the lakeside the next afternoon — I on a low rock, she between my legs with my arms around her, her arms around mine — both of us looking out over the slow light on the water.

  She had said she was tired.

  "It's all this walking. Move in with me."

  "My work is there."

  "Your mother said you could do it equally well here."

  I was confident that Rufena would eventually agree to come, that it was just a matter of keeping on, that this was but a token resistance — for the sake of respectability, of modesty. (Though Sririsl would have me believe that neither modesty nor respectability had ever entered Rufena's considerations.)

  "I'm just not sure," Rufena sighed. (Weary of the subject?)

  Parts of the forest had a yellowish tinge. Autumn soon; and after that winter.

  "Of a cold night we could keep each other warm."

  Rufena squeezed my arms. Encouraged I said,

  "I could help you in your work."

  "I'm not sure that I want to live my mother's life in my mother's place."

  Of course, I cursed myself for a fool, for the daughter it would be like giving up her independence, returning to her mother's territory, mother's rules. And I knew that Sririsl would be all too keen to have Rufena here; and that that in itself could be a deterrent.

  Parents always like their children to follow in their footsteps, even to making the same mistakes. The children, though, don't necessarily want a repeat life, want their own. And there I was actually asking Rufena to move into her father's house.

  "I'll move into the settlement with you."

  "No-one suicidal there."

  "Isn't here anymore."

  "So what," she lay her head back to smile up at me, "will we do?"

  "Move somewhere else?"

  "On this planet?"

  "Why not? It's a good life here."

  "What's so good about it? People are killing themselves."

  "Why?"

  "Ask them." She returned to looking out over the water.

  Was that a reprimand from the Knowledge? Through her who couldn't bring herself to criticize me? Who didn't herself want me to leave for the home elsewhere of a potential suicide?

  Next moment I had the physical sensation of my heart swelling as I realized that Rufena was telling me to go away and do my job, that she did not want to move in with me, that — for the moment — I was required only as a lover. (Lovers tend to dramatize.)

  And what was wrong with being wanted only as a lover, I asked myself. And I didn't know the answer, except that it wasn't enough and I didn't know why it wasn't enough.

  Over the next few days a distance, a hesitation came between us. Lovers newly in love are usually spontaneous of speech, touch, laughter. And suddenly there was little laughter, much covert studying of the other.

  I was at a loss. Still Rufena came, still we made love, still we were kind to one another, even played hide-and-seek occasionally as of old; but something had gone. Trust? Commitment?

  Our love had stopped, that's what had happened. I wanted our love to progress, to grow, to follow its own course. Rufena, though, had called halt at a stage where I didn't want to halt.

  I could have done with a confidante other than my notepad — my self-pitying maunderings didn't make sense to me. Or rather they did make a sort of sense, but they didn't gain my own sympathy.

  Sririsl, knowing her own daughter, would have owned the perfect shoulder for me to cry on. Except that anything I said to Sririsl I might just as well have said to Rufena; and I suspected anyway that Rufena resented my relationship with Sririsl. For that reason I didn't want to say anything to Sririsl that I hadn't already said to Rufena in case Rufena thought that I was favouring her mother to her. So that self-censorship came between Sririsl and I as well.

  Nor was I able to call up Leon and confide in him. My being in his power meant that he could not have my trust. Because if I confided to him my many little anguishes he might judge me unstable and withdraw me from the planet. Then I would lose my Rufena altogether.

  Those late summer days I was, in a word, unhappy. When I should have been, to all outward appearances, one of the happiest young men on any world.

  Almost every day Rufena came to visit. We'd swim, go for long desultory walks — two naked innocents abroad in a forest paradise. She'd help me with my self-imposed chores on Sririsl's behalf. Or she'd watch me paint; and we'd talk, make love. Not every day. And those days she didn't come I missed her like a part of me was missing, like I was incomplete without her.

  Overcome with love I could think only in terms of love.

  "She has another lover," I accused Sririsl when, for three days, Rufena hadn't appeared.

  "No." Sririsl had consulted the Knowledge. "Transporter is due. Her stocks are low. She is tired. Needs to rest. She loves only you."

  And I had to believe her, could not doubt the frank delivery of that information. And yet, alone again in the night, alone to myself, looking up to the painting on the wall, I felt that I was being deceived by everyone.

  Being on my own so much in that room, being untouched, the words of the poem came to mock — to scoff at my insularity, my trustingness, my naiveté. So I painted the words out; and I started another painting on the living room wall.

  55

  Rufena passed no comment on my obliterating the words, other than to ask why, as she did of everything else new that I did. I said that I'd done it because, seeing the words all day every day, they'd kept falling around inside my head, tripping up my other thoughts.

  Rufena accepted that, studied the beginnings of my new painting.

  I'd started off simply with an idea for a checkered design. It was to have brown verticals, horizontal yellows. Then I had found myself doing smaller designs within the squares, the painting beginning to take sense from itself.

  "You're using autumn colours," Rufena told me.

  Standing back I saw that there were a preponderance of yellows and reds. This led me, for a while, to try to actually paint a forest scene on the living room wall, made me look at the changing colours of the forest, to try to imitate the grey/green of many of the trunks, the dusky green of conifers. Then I became, again, beguiled by the colours and shapes on my living room wall; and so the picture grew.

  While it grew, while I worked at the wall, Rufena sat or stood behind me, and we talked.

  The painting itself, this new method for me of communication, often led one of us to remark how very little we knew of one another. For her benefit, her amusement, I acted out aspects of the comedy of human manners. Thus were many of our conversations punctuated by laughter.

  In answer to many of my questions to her, however, I sensed a guardedness beyond the pause of Knowledge consultation. Or was that, I questioned myself, simply the silly suspicions of an occasionally thwarted lover? I didn't know.

  Behind me, as I worked, was the simple enigma of another human being; who also, because of the taken-for-granted Knowledge, was unused to reading behind what a person might say, might do, what a person might be implying... She still owned too a lingering childish delight in the novel ability, with me, of having secrets.

  Irritated, dissatisfied with my painting one day, I said,

  "I can't stand secrets."

  She made no response until I glanced over my shoulder.

  "We don't have any secrets." Rufena's voice was as sad as sad could be. "We don't know how to have secrets." She added resignedly, "Just ask."

  I felt sorry for her, guilty for making her sad, yet such is love I said,

  "Ask what?" I stubbed my stick-brush on the wall: "I don't know what it is that you and all the others know. That," I stabbed at the wall, "is one ve
ry big secret."

  Three days later she answered freely enough about the Nautili.

  As the Talkers had left behind Humankind, she told me, so they had also left behind the Nautili.

  "We had to belong only to ourselves. Not to you. Not to the Nautili."

  The Nautili had pursued them, had not wanted the link between the two Knowledges broken.

  "Why flee though? Why not stay and come to terms?" (Coexistence is still the basic creed of all Space.)

  "There is no coming to terms. No stasis. The Nautili creed is endless expansion. Add to that their assumed specie superiority, the absolute priority of themselves, the individual subordinated to the mass, and you'll see that we had to leave. We learnt, as Talkers, that we are more than the use that others put us to. All Nautili are their function. As a people we had to be solely ourselves, create our own destiny."

  For the hybrids, though, flight had been difficult — with their every thought the Nautili had been pre-warned. Thus, to escape, what the hybrids did was to send out individual scouts beyond the limits of the Knowledge; and, when those scouts found a new place, they sent back an empty ship, with a pre-set return course. The people then entered the ships and, not knowing where they were bound, they fled to a station or a planet where another ship, sent back by another scout, awaited them. They entered that and had proceeded to their next destination. And so on...

  The Knowledge told of the Nautili perishing in the pursuing ships.

  Such ruthlessness, such desperation frightened me. Frightened me on the days I looked into Rufena's eyes and saw no love there. Or was I only thinking that?

  Still she came to visit.

  56

  A healthy 19 year old when aroused I wanted sex. In love with Rufena, aroused by Rufena, I wanted sex with Rufena. Rufena did not always want to have sex with me.