Imbroglio

by Andrew McEwan

Ramch, decided Ramch, needed a place to lay low for a while. He pointed with his great sword at a large, bulbous pineapple atop a precipitous indigo stack and declared, ‘There! There I’ll rest my bones and count my fortune! There I’ll hear the entreaties of the damned! There I’ll roast children, gnaw on their limbs and stitch their hides, wash in their blood and fill my belly with their entrails! There I’ll die!’

  Die?

  ‘And there I’ll wake, Michael,’ he added in a whisper, ‘another man.’

 

  He decided to lose himself in his portfolio.

  This meant a long drive and several days juxtaposed with a nature both legitimate and artificial. The woods were always a good place to start. He parked under a Douglas fir he’d once slept in, needles in is shirt, and with the parcel on his lap contemplated the arboreal, the leaf and bark, green and brown of a kingdom moist and dry, as full of life as death, a silent laboratory occupied with the manufacture of noise.

  The sun offered shade.

  The sun interpreted a spectrum of waves, bouncing colours off one another and pushing together space and shape, forcing Michael to squint. Light was omnipresent, refracted through the car windows and further mauled by his spectacles, those he was required by law to wear whilst driving, but which he was accustomed to putting aside when bipedal, never desiring to see into a distance that had no end, scared of those possibilities and his ability to manage them. Too much information overwhelmed. A limitless panorama required discipline, a steadfast approach to the visual deconstruction of the universe, its rebuilding an undertaking he’d always felt, if not incapable of, then neither obligated to.

  Easier to let things bleed…

  But who was he kidding. The universe was out there, manifold.

  He left the box on the driver’s seat and departed the car. Immediately birds shuffled amid foliage spiked and broad. They were sentries, guardians of a vegetable demesne he wished to access. An architect of branch and grass, Michael was familiar with their scrutiny. The birds watched everything; they were the messengers, the scribes, the storytellers whose prose was both written and oral, impressed in the mud of sun-dried pools, pushed from the throats of magpies, words of deeds that were ever accurate, explicit in form and detail. Nothing escaped the birds attention. Their many eyes were as one. Seeing everything, they missed nothing. No falling tree or shitting bear went unregistered. The birds made it real.

  Neither trusting nor owning a watch he was unsure of the time. The many shadows colluded to make a mockery of such concepts, a debunking of the man-made which made him feel at home. The sun flickered, interfered with by clouds, flirtatious belles whose frills and tresses were made to tease; they danced with their lord, knowing he would burn them away, but under whose magnificence they were helpless, as sheep wet from the stream, to be wrung by a kind butcher, their fleeces quickly shorn. They gambolled, these weightless pillows, counting themselves fortunate. They shone light and dark, stained blue and red where they’d been mounted, impregnated by the ram of hot and cold, come lambing, waters broken, to bleat and moan. They fashioned lightning, the meek clouds, producing thunder and rainbows.

  Loud and beautiful.

  And the smells, the countless odours. Animal and vegetable, the smells crowded him like penitents, each with his or her story, a point of incidence or origin, a conglomerate of airborne desires, emotions that had a common core. Along with the colours, the smells were there to seduce, flies and bees, pigeons and squirrels, third parties in a sex war, a struggle for propagation and survival. They made him sneeze, his own noise quickly swallowed by the wood, drowned in soughing branches and running water.

  He tripped, broke his fall with his hands. The earth was dust dry, then mud wet a few paces farther, squelching as he approached a stream.

  Water rushed over a concrete lip the purpose of which was long forgotten, its construction, like that of the toppled walls nearby, belonging to another century, or at least the beginning of this one. The bricks were yellow and powdery, older than the trees, as if the woodland had been overlaid. Michael thought of looking for an edge or tear and lifting that veil, but he shared his direction with the water, which after its own fall disappeared into a tunnel. This was his point of entry, one of many. Beyond was a darkness adorned.

  First with Christmas lights, twenty or thirty tiny bulbs snaked round a pine, bright echoes off fire-resistant baubles and (probably toxic) glitter balls. Presents beneath, an Action Man tank for starters, Action Man himself with his coarse blond hair and facial scar somewhat out of scale in regard to the Scorpion…but who’s to complain? He’s waited a long time. Tired of them plastic boots, he sits his arse in the tank and points the way. No more perambulation for this toy! Crushing the enemy under caterpillars, swivelling his turret…what more does a soldier need? Especially if he’s eight years old.

  Second with…

 

  ‘What say you, Michael, is it too tall to climb?’

  ‘On horseback maybe.’

  ‘And on foot?’

  ‘I would say that then the horse has an advantage.’

  Ramch laughed a victor’s laugh and slapped him on the shoulder.

  The infantry shuffled.

  The warrior considered these, and, making his mind up, killed them, attracting the attentions of six giant crows.

  ‘Now, let us see if my plan works.’

  A negotiation followed, with Ramch bartering each corpse. The crows were unruly and did not care for conversation, but having bloodied their beaks they listened while he made exchange: transport to the pineapple atop the indigo stack in return for the meat, which he stood over now like a spiky pink tattie bogle.

  Suspicion high on both sides, they agreed.

  Fireworks.

  Back garden explosions.

  Rockets whose cardboard bodies could be found scattered days after their launch, spent gunpowder receptacles charred and crushed.

  Catherine wheels. Flaming implements of torture; the precursor to a beheading.

  Roman candles, jumping jacks and bangers, all manner of pyrotechnic mischief visited upon the earth, the sky bright with saltpetre and roasted metal, the cat under the bed and the love apple - christened such by the nurse who’d made him blush so many years ago - in the emergency ward.

  London lights in the back pocket. A splendid blue and green corona encompassing his loins, which frazzled.

  Thirteen years old. He could still see her smile as she unbuttoned his jeans. Fear made real.

  And thirdly…

  From the air Purgatory was resplendent. Stretching forever, it rippled.

  Balloons could be seen, or perhaps huge gaseous whales in the distance, improbable leagues from where Michael dangled, talons through his shirt. Floating cities, some inverted, hung suspended from a ceiling he knew to be there, but which was obscured by the Doppler effect of intervening realities. To his rear the brick desert softened with perspective, coming to resemble a tongue, while beneath, the blue pitched like a sea of old copper kettles, tarnished and shot through with steel rivers, partially buried, like the tines of a fork through a mouthful.

  The pineapple swelled as they neared, revealing features impossible to see from the ground, hundreds of irregular doors and windows pocking its segmented skin, balconies and walkways girthing the enormous fruit at whose crown sprouted a cupola of greasy, truncated leaves.

  ‘Ahoy!’ bellowed Ramch, kicking his legs and waving his sword. ‘Anybody at home!’

  The cupola revolved like a gun port.

  The two crows supporting him flapped impatiently, crashing wings. Feathers spun to ground.

  Michael feared the worst. Either they would be blown from the sky or dropped by the birds, whose argumentative cries were directed as much at themselves as those they’d agree to carry. But the pink man seemed unconcerned, repeating his halloo as his flesh tore; that of the horse, also, clumps of muscle and skin rending where it ha
d been pierced, for neither Ramch nor his mount – the burden of three crows - wore clothing of any sort. They had only tissue to grip, whereas the crow bearing the love apple had a cotton-polyester mix.

  Night descended.

  As sudden as that, catching even the birds unaware. The pineapple was lit, glowing from within as if from a million birthday candles. It radiated a lush citrus hue that bathed the aviators in a warm, kindly wash, mellowing even the crows, who hovered on the up-draught, black eyes gleaming wetly. Ramch laughed in triumph, as if he had called down the dark. His sword shone a pale red, its after-image visible like a poor animation as he coaxed the birds nearer, stabbing with the long blade until he fixed it in the fruit’s leathery rind; and so anchored, took his own weight, directing the crows to release him.

  Michael too, who fell head first onto the rounded dome, scrabbling for purchase on the puckered castle surface before colliding with a narrow balcony. Similarly, the war-horse floundered, somehow managing to stay on its feet as it skied the sloping pineapple wall, hooves cutting trenches before it came to rest against a protruding balustrade.

  He felt his head and it hurt.

  The pink man dropped beside him, smile visible, sword left implanted above.

  Ramch pushed open the French windows and stepped into the yellow, disappearing without a word. The interior space, an irregular room, was glazed as if with a coat of varnish, or hard syrup, the flesh beneath this veneer the pineapple’s own, lush and striated, with just the hint of movement, that, on closer inspection, proved to be the slow passage of juice. The candles stood in niches about the walls and the floor invited him to take his shoes off. There was an ornate double bed, ribs instead of springs and no blankets, stood on legs that were legs, the scaffolds thereof, bones long stripped of ornament, cracked and pitted femurs to the front, to the rear tibia and fibula intermeshed with radius, ulna and humerus, fastened with scapula and clavicle to form a headboard that just lacked a head.

  And then there was the door, open to a hallway golden and curved, itself assembled from teeth. Molars and incisors crushed…

  Thirdly.

  Beautifully.

  Disastrously.

  Aged twenty.

  He fell in love.

  A girl with big earrings the centre of his cosmos, her lighthouse disguising rocks, a Siren’s illumination no man could resist, the scraping of his keel as the loss of his oars, incidental to the kiss.

  An inexplicable phenomena, the desire to fall down holes onto sharpened sticks. Scar tissue the least of it, a mere consequence, pain’s long echo but a reminder of the original impalement, that pain not so much remembered as experienced over again with each subsequent infatuation, love guarded now by cynicism and a willingness to resist, to separate, eking out a sexual existence from the core of need and want.

  Carving, in effect.

  Art from death.

  His heart broken, Michael Tomatoes had immersed himself in paint and wood. A necessary awakening, he busied himself with tools, drawing, sketching, modelling and remodelling, fashioning anew, a psychosis of dreams motivated by a desire to shape, the image, when complete (never finished), to walk and talk, laugh and cry, love and lose, not in his stead, but in the stead of self, self apart, as an expression of his being divided. Art and artist.

  Death from art.

  His heart was broken. Often he explained this to himself; perhaps a justification, or a rationalization of why, on such days, he found himself in the black tunnel, trailing his feet through freezing water, feeling with his hands what he could not see with his eyes, expunging via the passage that feeling of guilt - guilt itself an expression of anger, anger at himself, no longer separable, no excuse or schism sufficient to remove painter from painting, sculptor from sculpture…the two inexorably bound, whether they agreed or not, whether they enjoyed each other’s company, whether they desired nothing but pain and separation. To create anything it was essential to trust, and in trusting, someone or something, a chosen or given medium, risk loss. A poet’s metaphor, he thought: at the end of the tunnel was either death or life, meaning choice.

  Jokes apart, he’d loved since, and would again. It was easy. Distance was no object, in time or space. All of it was in his mind, a universe of the imagination he could if he wished get serious about, yet one he preferred to dismantle and reassemble in every manner of guise, from Sublime to Ridiculous and back, a journey through unmapped Bathos.

  Tourist guides there were aplenty. Illustrated walks, brochures, a change of face and boots everything a person required to be on the trail, visiting such places as Maybe and Somewherehereabouts, stretch marks round nasal cavities where had been born works of brain and fingers, products of that same imagination grown too big for his skull, indigestible mind-fare he’d dropped and mostly forgotten about, the progeny of whim and lust. Madnesses, his children, both good and bad, alive and dead, beyond count now, living and killing on a macrobiotic scale…

  ‘What’s that you say?’

  ‘I was talking about dieting.’

  ‘But you’re not fat; you’re skinny.’

  ‘Thanks…’

  ‘I mean – for health reasons?’

  ‘No, I just want to starve myself; see how that feels. I’m looking for a kind of spiritual clarity.’

  ‘You’re nuts,’ she told him.

  ‘Thanks again.’

  ‘You’re full of shit.’

  ‘I know. I want to shed that. It’s what I’m getting at.’

  ‘Through not eating? Tom…’ She was exasperated. ‘I don’t understand you.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  ‘You’re being deliberately difficult. I feel you want to push me away. But I’m staying.’

  ‘You are?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’ It was an honest question. A big one.

  She answered immediately.

  ‘I have absolutely no idea.’

  Shaking her head she looked like a Alsatian, but without the dribble.

  Momentarily, he forgot her name.

  …Eating in order to prolong life. Sustenance from enlightenment from meditation from a vegetable diet. With claws.

 

  Ramch, he intuited, had used the door, accessing the pineapple’s inner rings. But for what purpose?

  In Purgatory, a halfway house, composed as it was of both guilt and innocence, the only reasons were personal; it was the unresolved that found themselves here. What quandary then, drove the pink man? And what of his own?

  All he could remember was the blonde child.

  Loose on the road.

  A draught through the windows nudged him onward and he left the room with its bed of bones, following the corridor, a winding descent past other doors, varying in construction from twisted soup cans to complicated ball-bearing clocks, each he guessed of a similar inch thickness to the door of teeth, but all closed, with no obvious handles. There were doors of marbles and doors of fish tanks, narrow aquatic realms occupied by tiny octopuses and miniature submarines, doors of bent plastic straws and doors of stone, vertical layers of slate interposed with granite and marble, like a section through a tree. Set at irregular intervals to either side, they appeared more solid, more tangible than the walls, whose bright niches imbued the pineapple’s interior with a pleasing yet insubstantial feel. The walls might melt but the doors remain, ingresses beyond which stretched infinite rights of way.

  Michael took his shirt off and dropped it; his trousers, socks and underpants. He stood naked before the most surprising and largest door of all, placed at the end of the corridor and manufactured from rodents, stuffed rats and voles, mice of several species, guinea-pigs, hamsters and gerbils. Small and large, black, white and brown, they were fitted like rocks, snug pieces arranged by shape, aspects of death pieced together, teeth bared, hairless tails coiled round backs and legs, feet grasping and eyes reflecting the last they’d seen.

  Afraid to k
nock, imagining the surface merely frozen, needing only his breath to warm it, he nervously scratched his balls.

  The door opened from the inside. A short man wearing a bath towel emerged, dark skin contrasting with the thick white wrap about his waist. He smiled and sucked his gut in, nodded at Michael and muttered a hello before quickly escaping up the yellow corridor, whistling to cover his embarrassment at having been discovered so. Not that Michael cared. He stuck his foot in the jamb as the door swung closed and listened to the throaty gurgle of a toilet cistern. He entered the bathroom, mundane if spacious, wondering what he ought to do next. Was he unclean? Should he shave? Neither his bladder nor bowels troubled him. He couldn’t recall last eating or drinking. Had he been either hungry or thirsty in the past he was sure he would have felt compelled to satisfy those urges. Presented now with tiles, porcelain and chrome, the harshness of his environment disturbed him. There was no comfortable vagueness here, no soft edges or easy contours. This was a well lit, dangerous reality; thus stark.

  And cold. The back of the door was a white laminate, smooth and hard with no hint of its compacted mammalian outer side. But what was or wasn’t out there didn’t matter in here. In here only the fittings, the taps and shower curtain, toilet seat and scales held any import. These were all things he might use, or not, depending on his needs.

  He remained though, unsure of those.

  Eight: Removed