The dinner was nice. The next day I took her for breakfast to the restaurant that goes around and gives you a view of the whole city and then to the public market and then on a ferry. We had a pleasant, affectionate quiet two days and then she went back East.
We’ve been writing each other lately – for the fist time in years more than the obligatory birthday and holiday cards and a few remarks about the weather – and she sent me old family photographs, talked about being a widow, and being misdiagnosed for years (that’s what it seems now) and about all sorts of old things: my father, my being in the school play in second grade, going to summer camp, getting moths to sit on her finger, all sorts of things.
And the Little Dirty Girl? Enclosed is her photograph. We were passing a photographer’s studio near the University the other day and she was seized with a passionate fancy to have her picture taken (I suspect the Tarot cards and the live owl in the window had something to do with it), so in we went. She clamors for a lot lately and I try to provide it: flattens her nose against a bakery window and we argue about whether she’ll settle for a currant bun instead of a donut, wants to stay up late and read and sing to herself so we do, screams for parties so we find them, and at parties impels me toward people I would probably not have noticed or (if I had) liked a year ago. She’s a surprisingly generous and good little soul and I’d be lost without her, so it’s turned out all right in the end. Besides, one ignores her at one’s peril. I try not to.
Mind you, she has taken some odd, good things out of my life. Little boys seldom walk with me now. And I’ve perfected – though regretfully – a more emphatic method of kitty-booting which they seem to understand; at least one of them turned to me yesterday with a look of disgust that said clearer than words: ‘Good Heavens, how you’ve degenerated! Don’t you know there’s nothing in life more important than taking care of Me?’
About the picture: you may think it odd. You may even think it’s not her. (You’re wrong.) The pitch-ball eyes and thin face are there, all right, but what about the bags under her eyes, the deep, downward lines about her mouth, the strange color of her short-cut hair (it’s grey)? What about her astonishing air of being so much older, so much more intellectual, so much more professional, so much more – well, competent – than any Little Dirty Girl could possibly be?
Well, faces change when forty-odd years fall into the developing fluid.
And you have always said that you wanted, that you must have, that you commanded, that you begged, and so on and so on in your interminable, circumlocutory style, that the one thing you desired most in the world was a photograph, a photograph, your kingdom for a photograph – of me.
The New Rays
M. John Harrison
M. John Harrison (1945–) is an award-winning English writer best-known for the quasi-fantastical Viriconium Sequence of stories and novels. His most recent works have been in a science fictional mode, with Light (2002) managing to be contemporary, futuristic, and deeply weird. Harrison is known as a consummate short story writer for his ability to wed the supernatural or the suggestion of the supernatural with deep psychological portraits of flawed people. ‘The New Rays’ (1982) fuses weird science with Harrison’s usual devotion to place and character. His work has influenced many writers, including Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, and Clive Barker (all included in this anthology).
When I first arrived here it was after a hideous journey. We were ten hours on the train, which stopped and started constantly at provincial stations and empty sidings. It was packed with young conscripted soldiers shouting and singing or else staring desperately out of the windows as if they wished they had the courage to jump. We got one cup of coffee at a halt in the Midlands. In the confusion of getting back into our seats I took out the little gilt traveling clock which W.B. had given me the first time I was ill, and somehow lost it. A young boy pushing his way down the carriage helped us look for it. For a moment he seemed to forget where he was; then he looked round suddenly and lurched off. I was inconsolable. Two nights in succession I had dreamed the name of a street, Agar Grove.
We arrived late in the afternoon, just in time to watch the city dissolve into black rain, water and darkness. During the night I woke up and had to go down the corridor to the lavatory. The hotel was cold and squalid at that hour. There was a gas leak. When I looked out of a window some men were digging up the street. It was still raining.
The next morning I had my preliminary visit to Dr. Alexandre in Camden Town. I was reluctant to leave the hotel, and delayed by pretending I had lost my money along with the clock. ‘Perhaps the young soldier stole it. Anyway we can’t afford the taxi fare.’ Then I went to the wrong address and banged on the door until W.B. lost his temper and we had one of our typical quarrels in the road. I told him that the journey had confused me: but really I was frightened that Dr. Alexandre would prove unsympathetic. In the end he drove off in the taxi, shouting, ‘I wash my hands of you. It was you who wanted to come here.’ I went immediately to the right house and stood on the doorstep, not wanting to go in. After I rang the bell I could hear scampering and laughter inside, followed by a faint drumming sound as if a machine had been switched on and off.
Dr. Alexandre had a beautiful crippled girl who answered the door and acted as interpreter. Through her he told me that he could effect a complete cure. I didn’t believe that for a moment. Everything seemed suddenly useless and shabby – although the clinic itself, with its odd maroon décor and chromium lamps, seemed nice.
To get rid of this depression I had a cup of coffee at the corner, then went to a picture gallery for the rest of the morning. In one or two small rooms at the back they had an exhibition of new artists. I was particularly struck by a picture of a woman of my own age. The background was a buff-colored wall with two trees in front of it, completely flat trees which looked as if they had been pasted on to the wall. Behind this, from a ledge or balcony, two more flat trees emerged. They were all lifeless and stunted. In front of them a youngish woman was sitting listlessly, her sullen unfocused stare the same color as the wall, her throat swollen with goiter. Everything was flat except her throat, which had a massive, sculptural quality.
When I got back to the hotel W.B. had gone, leaving a note which said, ‘I know you are frightened but you have to have some thought for other people. Write to me when you have settled in.’
I can describe Dr. Alexandre quite easily. I have the feeling that he can help people but also the feeling that he is an unscrupulous impostor. He is the kind of man who wears a dark suit. His eyes are blue and demanding, quite unintelligent in the wrong light. He is frightened that soon he will be repatriated or interned. He has a soothing voice but one which, you sense, could easily say: ‘I cannot have you here disturbing the other patients if you do not give me your full cooperation. We are in this together. You must cooperate with me fully and then we will make good progress together against your disease.’ When the lame girl translates for him she unconsciously mimics his fussy gestures.
The new rays are intermittent and difficult to focus. When they come they are sometimes the stealthy gold or russet color of a large, reassuring animal; sometimes a wash of rose like a watercolor sunset. (I warm to these particular rays and, despite the knowledge of the pain to follow, allow them to comfort me. I feel no time pass, I feel no physical sensation at all; I am laved, washed quite clean, and experience nothing.) But most of the time they are a blue-black color which fills the bare treatment shed with shadows and imparts to the teeth and spectacles of Dr. Alexandre and his assistant a kind of jetty gloss. They come with a desultory buzzing which you feel in the bones of your jaw; or a drumming noise which rises and falls, the sound of heels drumming briefly on an iron pipe, sometimes near, sometimes unbearably far away. It is the sound of loss, and the giving up of all dignity. Dr. Alexandre and his assistant put on their goggles and nod at one another.
It appears now that they are not even sure where the new rays are from. The discovery
was accidental, and took place many years ago in some laboratory where it was ignored. Since he does not yet fully understand the nature of the rays, it’s entirely possible that Dr. Alexandre will kill me sooner than my disease. Standing there in my dressing gown, feeling sore and violated by the laxatives which are an important part of the treatment, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud at this idea; but when I tried to explain, the lame girl thought I was making a complaint and refused to translate. I was embarrassed.
At the hotel I sat in the bathroom trying to write a letter. Two cockroaches crawled from under the carpet and crawled back again. ‘Dear W.B., When I try to imagine you at home in our lovely house all I can remember is one yellow chair and the smell of Vinolia Soap.’
On treatment mornings I get up early and walk through the rainy streets by the river, or travel aimlessly here and there on the Underground, so I have some part of the day to remember unspoiled. We aren’t supposed to eat and drink for five hours before a treatment, but all my good intentions go by the board in warm damp cafés at Baker Street or Mornington Crescent. At that time of the morning no one speaks to you. All you have for company is the image of yourself in the steamy mirrors behind the counter, a woman younger than middle-aged, in a good coat, drinking another cup of coffee to stop herself fainting on the train.
Off a corridor at the back of the clinic there are two or three pleasant little waiting rooms. They are very modern and aseptic, with contract furniture, aluminum window frames, and a bed over which is stretched a white plastic sheet: but the walls are a cheerful yellow and you can switch on a little radio. You undress here. After a few minutes Dr. Alexandre’s assistant comes in and gives you a kind of bluish milk to drink, explaining that it will clear out your insides and at the same time coat them with a paste which will attract the rays. He goes out of the room and you begin to feel dizzy and nauseous almost immediately. Soon you have to choose between the sink or the little lavatory with its yellow paper on a roll. You can’t lock the door in case you faint. By the time he comes back with the wheelchair you are too tired to stand. He will put your clothes away and help you comb your hair and then wheel you out to the treatment shed.
The shed has a sour concrete floor sloping to a drain in the middle. It is cold and, unlike the waiting rooms, retains the smell of vomit, rubber, and Jeyes fluid. It occupies a muddy open space thirty yards behind the main building. This is for reasons of safety, claims Dr. Alexandre. I suspect he is afraid of accidentally curing passersby, but you cannot risk a joke like this with the crippled girl. ‘The doctor is so sorry for the present inconvenience to patients,’ she translates earnestly. ‘He hopes they will not complain.’ And she gives me a savage stare. In fact I quite like the shabby bit of garden which is the last thing you see before you go into the shed. A few lupins, gone desperately to seed, add something human to the clutter of duckboards thrown down hastily to prevent the wheelchairs and builders’ barrows from bogging down in the mud. There is often a fire burning here, as if a gardener or workman were about, but you never see him.
In the black and chaotic moment when the rays arrive, Dr. Alexandre and his assistant struggle into their loose yellowish rubber suits and round tinted goggles. Once they are covered from head to foot like this all their kindness seems to be replaced by panic. They grab you roughly: there is no turning back: up on the table you go, trembling as you help them fasten the straps. Before you can open your mouth they force into it the vile rubber wedge which stops you biting your tongue. The focusing machine has already begun to buzz and rattle faintly as it picks up the initial burst of rays. Soon the whole hut is vibrating. Dr. Alexandre stares at his watch: he wasn’t ready for this: there’s real panic behind those round blue lenses now. Hurry up, he urges you with gestures. Hurry up! You bruise your feet pushing them into the stirrups. A thick vibration like the taste of licorice creeps into your lungs and along your spine. The buzzing has invaded you. Black light splashes across the room. Here it comes, here it comes…
If you are getting your treatment free of charge, you have to agree to have it without an anesthetic. You mustn’t pass out.
Through the most abyssal vomits and discharges, when the rays seem to be laying down a thick coat of poison in every organ, you can still hear the urgent, earnest voice of the crippled girl. ‘Are you conscious? Can you raise your head? Are you aware that you have lost control of your bowels? We must know.’ Into your field of vision, blackness spraying off his smooth goggled rubber head, bobs Dr. Alexandre’s assistant, anxious that nothing should escape the record. And into the exhausted calm after the blue-black shower has abated and all three of them have taken off their goggles, the uncertain foreign tones of Dr. Alexandre fall, and you must be awake to answer his questions.
Sometimes the rays don’t arrive at all. What bliss to be let off with a cup of tea in the reception room and told to go home again!
A fortnight after I got here it turned foggy, first a black fog, then a yellow one which filled the streets like gas; but I didn’t miss a treatment. One of the blue bodies got out and drifted about in the garden for a while before it was caught. There was such an expression of puzzlement on its face: as if it knew it had been in the garden before but could not remember when. After a while a man came out and pushed it back into the treatment shed, grumbling and flapping his arms.
The same day I fell asleep on the train on the way back to the hotel, and dreamed I was disembarking from a ship. When I went up on deck with my case and umbrella, a cold wind came off the land and blew my hair into my eyes. It was just before dawn, and the funnels of the ship were dark against a greenish sky like heavily worked oil paint. Down on the shadowy quay muffled figures waited for the passengers. Everybody except me knew where to go and what to do. I shuffled forward, trying to pretend I knew too. The sun rose while the queue was still slowly leaving the ship. The land never seemed to get any brighter. When I woke up somebody had stolen my red gloves, which had been on the seat beside me.
W.B.’s letters, full of solicitude and domestic calm and ‘the dark woods lighted so mysteriously by the white boughs of the ash trees when I take my evening walk,’ drove me out into the fog, to the picture galleries and cafés. I couldn’t stay in the hotel on my own; they look at you so accusingly if you are ill and on your own. In a café nobody notices you at all. You can eat your piece of sponge cake, read your letter, and leave. ‘Seventy pence please.’ ‘Fifty-two pence please.’ And you go out with the simple vision of a human face turning away forever, into streets which seem to be populated with wounded soldiers – big, lost-looking boys whose surprised eyes stare past you at something which isn’t there.
‘I’m feeling so much better,’ I wrote untruthfully to W.B. The rays seemed to have settled in my bones like a deposit of poisonous metal, and I could hardly get out of bed the day after a treatment. ‘And I get on well with the other women.’
Actually we have no time for one another. Despite our diversity we are all very much alike – a desperate, frightened bunch, concentrating on the only important business we have left, which is survival. We exchange nods as we are hurried along the corridors by wheelchair, too self-involved to speak. In the common room – where without turning your head you can see a countess with ‘anemia of the brain,’ the mistress of a discredited novelist, and three young prostitutes seeking a cure for some new venereal complaint – we sit like stones. Many of the others have been here for a year or more. If we have a social hierarchy, these old hands are the cream of it. They have their heads shaved once a month so that their hair doesn’t soak up the smell of the treatment shed. They ‘live in’ and look down on the outpatients, whom they call ‘weekend invalids.’ Through their stiff cropped stubble, which gives them as surprised a look as the wounded boys in the streets, I perceive the bony vulnerable plates of their skulls.
When the blue bodies get loose they sometimes wander into the clinic itself, as if looking for something. One evening when the fog was at its height, Dr. Alex
andre’s assistant took us downstairs to see one. They were keeping it in a small room with white lavatory-tiled walls. It was supposed to have been left on a bench, but when we arrived it had somehow fallen off and got itself into a corner among some old metal cylinders and stretcher-poles. Its face was pressed into them as if it had been trying to escape the light of the unshaded overhead bulb. Dr. Alexandre’s assistant ran his hand through his hair and laughed. What could he do, he seemed to be asking, with something so stupid? He pulled it back on to the table where it lay blindly like a mannequin made of transparent blue jelly.
‘Come and touch it,’ he encouraged us. ‘There’s nothing to be frightened of. As you can see it has no internal organs.’ It was quite cold and inert. When you touched it there was a slight tautness, a resistance to your fingertip similar to the resistance you would get from a plastic bag full of water; and a dent was left which remained for two or three minutes. When one of the women began to cry and left the room, Dr. Alexandre’s assistant said, ‘They have no internal organs. They are not alive in any way medical science can define.’
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories Page 131