The Fabrications

by Baret Magarian

  He stretched his mighty arms out to heaven and addressed the sky.

  ‘God is big. I am free of the pestilence. The plague! La peste!’

  Oscar glanced down; Ryan Rees had already started shrinking.

  The sensation of soaring Oscar had expected didn’t materialize. The balloon felt strangely passive; it was merely a chamber passing through space, unmarked by any sense of discernible power.

  At first it felt as though he was standing on top of an impossibly tall building somehow unanchored to any foundation; furthermore, this building was not even connected to the planet which now seemed to be left behind in a serene whirl. Because the balloon was drifting with the wind it was impossible to discern any sense of its having independence from it; rather, the wind was part of the vessel, as integral as the burner causing the canvas to shudder and flutter sporadically. Oscar looked down again, feeling a certain indefinable unease and anxiety, and made out Rees’ arms, waving frantically. Oscar knew that the man below was angry but the anger seemed strangely abstract, as though it was the anger of someone in Beijing.

  But in another moment all his feelings of dread had vanished. And then the journey started to grow magical.

  After that no one, not even Béla, said anything. They were beguiled, wrapped up in the same voiceless wonder. Giselle clutched her teddy bear, wearing a serene smile; Béla’s ebony locks fluttered in the wind; a cigarette dangled between Angelica’s lips, but she was too surprised to light it. The pilot was occupied with the burner, which gasped and choked like some antediluvian monster, pushing the rate of ascent. Oscar’s eyes told him they were moving – he didn’t feel it – as they climbed higher. Below buildings and bridges continued to grow smaller and more unreal, turning into the appearance of cardboard models. From this perspective everything gained new meanings and shed the old ones. Oscar found it hard to equate the matchbox patterns with real people with worries and hopes and dreams. Row upon row of houses, miniaturized, packed delicately together. This was society, uniform, full of lines: horizontal and vertical tokens of order, but stripped of any suggestion of idiosyncrasy, rendered small, crushable. From up there civilization was no longer able to mask the fatal hint of futility which underlined it. But there was clarity, catharsis in this realization, and Oscar was filled with spectacular benevolence, and waves of beauty passed through him. He felt as though he had been granted entry into the clouds and the stained-glass colors of the sky, placed side by side with nature, allowed to ride in tandem with it. Mental malleability was matched by the plasticity of this new universe. The freedom to think great things was created by the freedom of space.

  Najette’s face flashed through his mind, her glittering eyes portals into dreams. He slipped through them, to the other side...

  He looked past the cluster of intestinal pipes and tubes fitted to the burner and into the envelope above, a majestic, circular dome.

  Still they climbed, higher and higher, until the balloon had reached its greatest altitude and from their vantage point, moving as somnolently as a cloud, London acquired its final pitch of insignificance. Suddenly everything was very clear. After all the hectic, supine clawing at beauty one thing awaited.

  He could make out the Telecom Tower, a small candle. Underneath them, the Thames was a blurred, dull line. It must have been stirring with life, but it was impossible to discern any of it. He glanced up at the partially obscured sun, its light growing warmer and more golden. As if to oblige it, the clouds pulled back and rays spilled unbroken across the basket. As his eyes grew accustomed to the brilliance it seemed that up there the light was different; it was closer to him, almost tangible. He put out his hand and allowed it to revolve in the luminescence. Very slowly, when he was sure the others were looking away, he eased himself onto the edge of the basket. He waited there for a moment. Or centuries.

  He slipped into the nothingness below, and instantly became a speck, turning and spinning in the void.

  He was moving quickly. In the burning, coalescing space, patterns could not be retained. They came and flashed and were lost; thoughts and impressions conjured up by them vanished.

  The footpath was narrow but his feet were wedged to the pedals and his hands glued to the handlebars so he had control, so he was gliding, a flash of moving light in the forest, caught in the fast dropping sun. The cycle reached a steep decline and sped down it.

  And now he was in an opening. He spied the trees around him until he was satisfied he was alone. A silver lake. He crept in, naked, unobserved; the light dimmed, the clouds raced. He felt the water pour over him, until immersion in it was perfectly right. The water’s sound was melodious; it reverberated in the deep, where no life stirred but silhouettes stretched like spindly fingers. He turned and saw a woman standing in the water – she must have been there all along, and yet he hadn’t noticed her. The edges of her hair skimmed against the water. He couldn’t see the face. He motioned toward her. Distance collapsed.

  And then, with a shivering sweep, the lake began to tremble. Its transparency turned black; it became a watery bruise. The pleasure which had glowed in him in his watery grave of awakening died. Then she was gone.

  He opened his eyes.

  He wished he could re-enter the dream, find again the nameless woman within it. He felt so light, bathed in sweat. When he moved them he could not feel his limbs. He wanted so badly to be saved by a deep sleep, a real sleep, awaking to find he was truly rested.

  He yearned to get up, out of bed, but he couldn’t energize his wasted limbs. He pictured the inside of his body, its contents spilling out in a dark line, forming a tunnel of indistinct, palpitating curves; and within the tunnel another tunnel formed, his intestines unravelling; and there at the end, his stomach, dripping with fluid, and then his heart, his spleen, his kidneys, floating in the starry desolation of space. Then he imagined holding a brush to each organ, wiping each of them with one serene movement. They tumbled back into his body, which had miraculously opened and closed itself, leaving no visible traces or scars. And in his skull his brain had been dusted over also, doused in pure oxygen. For so long it had felt like that skull had been stuffed with cotton wool.

  He stared at the tubes feeding into him. He peered around with sightless eyes.

  What was he doing here?

  And where was the rain?

  Light.

  Starting slowly – a suggestion, brittle in the bowels of his brain, buried as if by folds of dead skin, folds reaching back, stretching out to the earth, buried beneath his feet, in the bowels of the earth; he was falling fast, as if through an elevator shaft, a weight in the earth, the light persisted, would not give up now and he had gone some way towards the light world.

  And – again, once more, more distinctly, the voice cried: How had he got here?

  The antiseptic curtains, a cold plastic landscape sealing him from the world. The ward with its bays, the smell of bleach, of disinfectant, the hospital with its ailing life. He was making a trap, had devised a labyrinthine trap for himself, had written himself into this perfect nightmare, had drowned, had died, was already a ghost, a memory. He asked: Was that what the afterlife was? Memory? Were dreams the afterlife, or windows into it, or were they merely the afterimages of the day? Or was that what the afterlife was – afterimages of life, still persisting and the memory of those who were missing brought them back, made them real, as in the terrestrial mind, which could also be a maze so he needed to step out of his mind, that menagerie, this trap he’d devised? What did he think he was doing and he needed to turn towards the light finally.

  Because he was sick to death of this; he was sick to death of being so enamored of death, of this skeletal morbidity, of being a living corpse. What did he think he was playing at? Because now canopies of gelatinized tears turned into angels; they soared and held a sheet aloft at each of its corners, beckoning to him, preparing to wrap him, dry him, a child after bathing. So he wanted an apple; he wanted an apple with a glistening hide, wanted t
o take a bite out of it, its juice spitting half way across the room; or he wanted a plum, an egg – anything to rescue the poor steel barrel from its vacuum.

  This trembling inside him. He struggled to name it. He’d forgotten it since it had been absent for so long: an ancient friend who’d moved away, how dare he? And he didn’t have him in his phonebook anymore but he’d heard the friend was back now, so...this trembling.

  And light, save me, hold me, ‘til my tears are spent.

  I want bottled light I want time I want to taste the sweetness of life, to be marinated in it because I can recognize beauty and it’s all around me and it’s there when I’m not looking, I want to be wheeled out of here, and beauty hides in ambush and strikes me down with infusion of color, it’s everywhere, in the glassy film of eyes, in tentative smiles, I used to walk across fields of wheat, wipe my mouth across my sleeve, get muddy, a schoolboy in the sweaty field. I see configurations of clouds but I don’t want to swim through them anymore thank you, I’d rather watch from my gravity-weighted seat, and when the voice rises like flames I can slip into a smoking jacket or go for a run, re-admit my body, run through warm waves on the beach or make sand castles; I never did that, I have to make up for lost time, I have to find my smile, there’s so much to do, I’d better hurry up, catch the sun’s corona ablaze in the sky, or the smell of onion soup, I’m going to have to find her, win her back all over, God I’ll have my work cut out, the great big ladle (I love ladles) and the smell of cut grass, or toast the way I like it, to share it with someone, or the first taste of wine, the light of the moon, a voice rising and becoming tendrils, fingers, ribbons of flame.

  Baret Magarian is of Armenian extraction, from London, and lives in Florence. In London he was a freelance journalist and contributed articles to The Times, The Guardian, The Independent and The Daily Telegraph. He has interviewed such diverse figures as Peter Ustinov, the brilliant actor-director and raconteur; John Calder, iconoclastic publisher of eighteeen Nobel prize winners; and Salman Rushdie, the celebrated novelist. He has worked as a lecturer, translator, fringe theatre director, actor, and nude model. He is also a composer of piano music in the vein of Jarrett and Alkan and draws on the tonalities of Armenian music. His fiction has appeared in World Literature Today, Journal of Italian Translation, White Fly Press, The Sandspout, and Sagarana. His most cherished dream is that his writing might be a conductor and transmitter of light.

  The Fabrications is published by Pleasure Boat Studio: A Literary Press. This press was founded in 1996 by Jack Estes and William Slaughter and has only recently been moved to Seattle, Washington, under the new guidance of Lauren Grosskopf. In addition to literary works published under the Pleasure Boat Studio name, the press also includes mysteries under the imprint of Caravel Books, non-fiction under the imprint of Aequitas Books, and poetry under a separate division called Empty Bowl Press. Please take a look at our website at www.pleasureboatstudio.com.