by A. S. Byatt
Round a corner, they came upon the fake moon. It dangled from the root-roof by an insubstantial aluminium thread, and appeared to be a kind of lopsided silver-coated balloon shrinking and wrinkled where its inflation was failing, painted clumsily with grey-blue fake continents, craters and oceans. It gave off a miserable light, like inadequate fluorescent tubing in cheap canteens.
Sitting on heaps of rags were three people he recognised, though as he recognised two of them, one in a ghastly flesh-pink nightgown, one in mouldering pyjamas, he saw that the Syzygos was right, they had faked their faces. They lifted their arms rather uselessly towards him, like rag dolls who could not hold a position. They had dirty feet which looked more successfully like flesh than their almost prosthetic cheeks and brows. The third figure was full of rude health. Her hair glistened, her eyes glittered, her mouth and nails were crimson. She sat at her ease, and stretched out strong arms towards him, as if to embrace him. All sorts of creatures ran in the damp sawdust around the ragheaps. Earwigs, slugs, blind white snails carrying their spiral houses. And scorpions. Fat and pink, black and busy, tawny and rusty, their energetic tails curved.
His mother began to speak to him. Her denture was still half out of her mouth, and she gagged and yammered and her words clacked on her false teeth. Eva said, I can interpret her speech. We, the Mothers, welcome you. We feed the sap as it rises, and we alone—we alone—help you ... she doesn’t say, what we help you to. But I know.
His mother clacked a little more. His sister managed to lift a limp finger to point out her bruises. Even when the dead speak, he saw, they do not breathe. He did not know speech without breath could be so obscene. Eva, alone of the three, breathed, long, slow, sleepy breaths, filling out her great breast, pumping air, in, out, in, out.
This place has a bad smell, he told the Syzygos. I do not like this woman, he said, in his mind, to his twin.
“It isn’t a question of like or not like. She cannot be rejected. You will need her. She is what you need. She is not what you see here. Or there. She is. You must take in what you do not want, to finish the Work.”
Next, as he remembered only in snatches, the Syzygos, smiling whitely in the light of the fake moon, took out a knife and dismembered him. He felt no pain, indeed he saw the process—the expert flaying, the stripping of nerves, the coiling of living organs in a series of strangely coloured earthenware bowls and vases—more through the eyes of the Other, than through his own body, which felt no pain, only an increasing bewilderment and sense of scattering and loss of coherence, of which his fits had been a mild premonition. There came a point when he was a cleanly-scraped living skeleton, with red films clinging to living ivory, looking curiously out of the bone-box of his head. The Syzygos said that now he would also part the bones from each other, and build them into a cairn, from great to small. “And if you can reassemble all these parts, and thread back the nerves, and hook up the muscles,” said the smiling Syzygos, “you will find you are able to mount the tree, and go up as high into the heavens as you have come deep into the foundations. And then you will see in the sky how to prepare for the mystery that will be enacted and the consummation that will come.”
His own voice clacked out of his own bloody teeth.
“And if I cannot?”
“Why then, the flesh will decay and after a time the bones will roll apart, or be dispersed. But I think you can do this. You are ready.”
And he reassembled himself, trembling, hearing in his head the fatthighed boy of long ago, singing, dem bones, dem bones, connected to ... It was all precisely lived, the fingers at the end of the arms above the rib-cage collecting the pelvis, attaching the hips. He squatted under the roots, and spread his skin over the slippery bloody surfaces of his breast and buttocks. Then he found he could stand, and his strength was inordinate, and his senses were sharpened so that he heard worms, miles away, sifting loam, and the top point of the tree rattling in a light wind against the night sky. And he climbed, surefooted as an ape, agile as a tree-frog, bursting through the crust like a blind mole, who became a marmoset, a snake, a lizard. Up he went, and up, and the real moon beat about his head with floods of silver, and he stood on the very top of the tree and crowed and crowed at the dawn.
They found him out on the moor, wounded and unconscious, with bleeding mouth and broken nails in the peaty dust of the heather. They carried him back to Dun Vale Hall, which seemed to him for two days to be an unknown place, full of unknown people. On the third day, at dawn, he opened his eyes on a washed world, and saw Ruth, sitting beside him, watching. She was wearing a pallid garment, with a square yoke, and pleats falling like a gym-slip or perhaps a Greek garment, down and out. He liked Ruth, on ordinary days. He liked her fastidious face, her reluctance to speak. He moved his bruised tongue to tell her she was a maiden of light. She appeared not to hear, so he stirred himself, and said it again, more clearly. Her eyes were wet. She brushed them with the back of her hand. He told her not to cry, he was back. She nodded, and her tears ran more freely.
From Brenda Pincher to Avram Snitkin
Writing to you, Avram, is a real act of faith by now, quite as irrational as the increasing fervour in this place. It’s all building up to something, and I’ve been racking my brains to remember what. I’ve got no access to any library. As I seem to remember, lots of more recent cults have been sort of cemented together by things like group sex, or the leader having the right to sleep with everyone and beget lots of children. Our situation is odd, because the leadership is sort of split. We’ve got the Ram who is genuinely ecstatic, and also genuinely ascetic, and then we’ve got good old Gideon, who likes to be cock in his own midden and I think doesn’t always understand how he got to be involved in the Ram’s thing.
It is all to do with women, of course, either way. Gideon is here because Clemency deserted, and Clemency’s here because she’s in love with the Ram, in the way all the women sort of are, including those Gideon fucks. I expect they lie there imagining Gideon is Himself, but the old fool is far too self-satisfied to imagine that, though he may have to, in the end. Some of the men are in love with the Ram, too. The Ram went away on a spiritual journey a week or two ago (time isn’t real here)—i.e. he had a quite severe epileptic fit—and came back with all sorts of new instructions and prohibitions and practices. Most of these are to do with making things physically harder for ourselves. We now do an awful lot of digging and carting—we are building a bloody great fence to close us in from the contaminating dirty people out there. Also we get to eat less and less because there’s a sort of competitive fasting instituted by the Ram, who says the body thrives on self-denial. Elvet Gander chipped in with the info that experiments on rats and anecdotal evidence from long-lived tribes in the steppes had proved that eating markedly less led to longevity. The not-eating bit has hurt Clemency F. since her great contribution to the community was buns and biscuits. But she’s regathered herself and now makes exquisite little soups and vegetable platters containing almost no calories, which are ceremoniously and very slowly chewed. What with the digging and the not-eating, I’ve become very trim myself. You wouldn’t recognise me, you old slob, and I’m enough of a Ram-groupie to feel a positive distaste for the idea of all those fatty folds of your overindulged belly—though sometimes I cry for you in the night, Avram, sometimes I’m scared, why don’t you write, you bugger?
Because I’ve got trim, I do understand that you can get on a sexual high as well as a spiritual high with a lot of hard work and not-eating much. I lie awake thinking how blissful a good long fuck would be. I lie. I lie awake like all the others imagining the Ram has chosen me to so to speak break his fast on, that he’s come into my bed-cupboard and is standing there smiling gently with his cock swinging up and I hurt inside with wanting him to touch me, my poor bloody vagina grips and grips on nothing (sometimes I help it, but it doesn’t help). Listen, Avram Snitkin, you shit, I’m writing you porn to show I’m not part of all this even if I’m ethnomethodologicall
y committed to observing it from inside, and also to punish you, because you never answer. If I didn’t know you, I’d have given up long ago, because anyone sane would suppose they ought to take a hint and realise the letters weren’t wanted. But I do know you, and I think you’re just sitting there stoned and smiley, thinking how funny it is that I’m getting in such a state here. Well, it isn’t, damn you, damn you, Avram Snitkin. It isn’t funny, it’s scary.
What happens to cults, and this isn’t a therapeutic Group now, it’s a full-blooded cult—is that they implode. They’ve got nowhere to go but up in smoke, the theory goes. They get more and more intolerant of deviants and more and more in synch.—including things like menstruation, wch I’ve tried to do a bit of research on, but so far failed. Everyone does wear more and more the same clothes. White sort of lineny shirts and dresses. There’s a girl here called Ellie who was a “patient” of Gander’s—we’re not allowed to speak of patients now, only spiritual explorers—and she’s kind of invented a very new complicated technique of embroidering white on white. Suns and moons and grapes and daisies (day’s-eyes, apparently) and other Manicheeish things. With all sorts of knottings and satin stitch (I bet you don’t know what that is, I didn’t) infinitely time-consuming. All the chairs and tables and beds are slowly getting covered with bits of white stuff with all this white stitching on. White with secret little bloodstains of course, the poor things prick themselves, it’s classic. Overdetermined. Then there are special ways of drinking water. And good old Canon Holly’s poetry readings of seventeenth-century poems about seeds of light and things. He reads like a creaky hinge, but this place is at the moment awash with charity and everyone listens lovingly.
I’ve got my theory about how it will begin to implode. Gideon can’t rampage as he does without it bearing fruit—to move from an animal to a vegetable metaphor. And then what? Since it isn’t his wife he fucks. Then what? One of the real brain-teasers of this situation is that the Ram doesn’t appear to know what Gideon gets up to. Maybe he sort of lets him do it for him by proxy so to speak, but that’s an ethnomethodologically untenable theory, and I oughtn’t to advance it without evidence, wch I don’t have.
Another thing that I think will happen is that we shall get shut in. Right in. We’re building this fence. I can foresee when the Ram ceremonially locks the gates, and the sheep stay in, and the goats are despatched into the outer moorland. At the moment there’s still a lot of coming and going. That funny Blake man Richmond Bly comes and goes, he looks sweet and puzzled. The Vice-Chancellor’s horrible wife pays sinister visits and reads people’s palms (well, not really, she casts horoscopes). I think much depends on Elvet Gander. He’s like me, so to speak, professionally interested in it. He goes away and gives talks and things, but less than he used to. I think he’d resist enclosure. But he’s on a kind of high with it all—it’s his way of stepping over some boundary, of going on his own spiritual journey, he might feel he had to want to see it through. He likes that Ziggy Zag, who is quite often stoned himself and in need of a helping hand. I think we could do without him, but his singalong evenings like Canon Holly’s recitations, are part of our ceremonious normality. Some of the Quakers are quite good at all that—as though it came naturally to see everything with a religious contemplative eye. They still have little gatherings for outside youngsters, who come to hear stories and make things out of cardboard and such.
The thing is, if and when, we get shut in—with a fair possibility of starvation, for we are not feeding ourselves a subsistence diet—what do I do? The project is fucked if I miss the (I presume) final act. But it really is scary. It’s like one of those boxes you see on pylons, saying Danger High-Tension Wires. Keep Out. But I’m in. And I get my letters out to you, and you don’t answer them, you bastard. Unless they’re all secretly going nowhere, and being read and judged by a committee consisting of the Ram, Gideon and Gander. No, they aren’t, that’s sheer paranoia induced by group mentality. I’ve put almost all in post-boxes myself, haven’t I? So why don’t you write, you bastard, you bastard. What am I going to do?
Chapter 21
There is nothing like hard work for restoring gloss to the plumage, glitter to the eye, a strut to the stride. Luk Lysgaard-Peacock began somewhat grimly to prepare his half-thought-out paper on the cost of meiosis, and found himself trying to stare through a shining swarm of relevant and irrelevant facts and figures. This was a time when some scientists were beginning to ask distinctly awkward questions about the adaptive benefit (if any) of sexual reproduction (as opposed to parthenogenesis, or budding) in the Darwinian scheme of things. The answers they were offering were profoundly unsatisfactory—and therefore intriguing, and maddening, and exciting.
Luk read studies of the dissemination of clouds of elm seeds and scattering of cod-eggs. He read about the life-cycle of the aphid, which produces parthenogenetic clones until its last days, when it produces males, and mates with them. He read about the slow distribution of strawberries and corals, about the habits of sessile beings like oysters, as well as elms, about competition for territory, crowding, and the frequency of death in its relation to the number of offspring of cod or starlings, minute marine beings or snails. He studied hermaphrodites and clones. He went into precise details of arcane research on generations of ants and cockchafers, and tried to come to grips with theoretical models of distribution, competition, statistical advantages, handing on of genes and chromosomes.
New intriguing paths opened up before him, new flocks and herds of relevant bodies flew and ranged and lumbered across his field of vision. He was only averagely good at mathematics. He needed help in formulating his questions, let alone in answering or amending them. He began to waylay and buttonhole John Ottokar, asking for more time on the great computer than was allotted, taking John out to drinks and persuading him to help turn questions of the reasons for life, death, reproduction and immortality into elegant equations and satisfactorily crunched numbers. He bombarded the patient—and largely silent—John with a great many more urgent sums than could ever conceivably be adumbrated in one paper in the Body-Mind Conference.
On his way to and from the computer, he met Jacqueline, from time to time, also carrying bundles of punched cards and sheaves of print-out. The air between them was still full of ice splinters. He asked if her work was going well. For a moment her face was transfigured by satisfaction. Yes, she said, yes, she was really getting results. There was a spring in her step. A month ago, he would have found this selfsufficient hurry personally wounding. Now, he transferred his attention back to rotifers and rotating winged seeds.
One evening, rather late, John Ottokar came to his flat to deliver a delayed heap of results. Luk, who had been talking agitatedly at John for weeks about Darwinian altruism and selfishness, ruthless self-propagation and the harmlessness of cloned slugs, noticed for the first time that Ottokar looked unwell. He had grown his shining blond hair to shoulder length. It was very clean, and he tended to hide his face behind its curtain. Luk said he was afraid he must have been overworking him, asked him in, and gave him a glass of whisky. He had been watching the television news, student protesters at the LSE, government wrangles over unofficial strikes. As John Ottokar took his glass, Through the Looking-Glass swam on to the screen, fireplace, glass box, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Frederica Potter in coral and white silk. Luk remembered that Ottokar was, or appeared to be, in some way involved with Frederica. He had once referred to her as “my girl-friend” which had struck Luk as a singularly inept way of describing this angular person. Because of this, he did not spring to his feet to turn her off. John Ottokar stretched out his legs, settled into the arm-chair, and stared impassively at the screen. His look was, Luk considered, morose.
Frederica’s guests for the evening were Roy Strong and Lucinda Savage, a photo-journalist, who wore a business-like jumper and dark-rimmed glasses. The object for discussion was an Elizabethan miniature of an unknown lady, whose fine face, soft gold curls, beautiful
ly gleaming pearl necklace and ear-rings, over blue velvet, against a background of evergreen leaves, briefly filled the whole screen. The person of course was Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, and the idea to be discussed was, Frederica announced, “Resemblance and Reproduction.” This idea was Wilkie’s, one of his more arcane ones.
The three talked well enough about Elizabeth’s portraits as icons, the fact that most were copies of copies, not attempts to copy the Queen’s face directly, the mana that attached to her portraits, which, Roy Strong pointed out gleefully, were objects both of veneration and witchcraft, as if she could be stuck to death with pins and needles. The photo-journalist, predictably, went on to discuss the reluctance of certain cultures to be “taken” in snapshots or photos, the belief that each reproduction, each copy, took from, or thinned, the life of the original. Frederica said that this was so, there was something unexpectedly alarming about one’s image being loose in the world. They talked about the iconic nature of the endlessly replicated face of Che Guevara, hanging in student rooms, in squats, in guerrilla tents.
Frederica tried, as Wilkie had wanted her to, to start a discussion about the different words. Likeness. Resemblance. Reproduction. Replication. We all have our own faces, she said, and yet we are all constructed by the endless replication of the family genes, so that we also have the family face. Luk’s attention was caught by this, possibly not very meaningful, ploy, simply because it slotted into the jigsaw of his own thoughts about clones and diploid zygotes. Roy Strong spoke of the family resemblance between Elizabeth and her Tudor brother. The photographer mentioned Andy Warhol, who was making icons of repetition, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, who were already mechanically reproduced icons. Marilyn flashed across the screen in silvery greens and oranges, grape-purples and shocking pinks. Roy Strong said he had chosen the miniature because it was so clearly a portrait of a singular person, with her own history and attitude to the world, none of which was so far discoverable, and yet, there she was, and, even though the painter’s style conferred a kind of likeness on all his models, there she was, unique. Frederica said brightly that every day on the underground she looked at all the faces, and they were all unique, unrepeatable. She sounded, for her, almost saccharine. Luk however felt friendly towards her, because she had touched on his own problem. If human reproduction was not sexual, the persons on the underground would resemble each other like the black slugs Arion ater.