Why is he there? Why can I see him every night? Why does he reach across the universes towards my binoculars, when the sun has gone down and it’s easier for me to see?
Why are his features so prominent in the sun? Does he need a large nose to breathe in there? What does he breathe? Does he inhale and exhale the energy of the sun, the living and the spent, the living and the spent, all his breathing days?
Why can I see him in the sun, his features moving beneath the skin of the sun, at one with it, like a sort of parasitism of elasticity, coiling and sparking inside the mess of thermonuclear fussing of wasted energy that is the sun?
Why does he never get burnt?
Why is everything so curved out there? Why are the straight lines so permanently bent?
Is it perhaps when the sun is beyond the curve of the horizon and the line of sight of my binoculars arcs round to capture him that he is born again for the day again?
Why can I see the sun, even though it is below the horizon?
Is he being born or is he a prisoner? Is that why the flame-flaps of the sun grow ragged and transparent and the bits of his face poke through but don't burst the bubble and every stretched particle of skin looks like a scream?
How does he feed himself in there? How does he excrete what he feeds upon? Does he feed on the sun? Does he shit into the sun? Is that what living in the sun means?
Why does he never get burnt? Or is he burnt all the time? Is he burnt and healing all the time? Or is he burnt and never healing, permanently in pain and disfigurement? Or is he immune?
What does he do in there?
Why does he never get burnt?
Is he a giant? Or has the sun become diminished?
Is he repairing the sun? Does the sun need to be repaired? Why does that happen? Why would anyone wish to damage the sun?
What causes the sun to stretch and his features to disturb but not part the surface?
Why can’t I see him when the sun is up? Is it because the sun is so bright? Is that why it is only when the sun is beyond the curve of the horizon and the line of sight of my binoculars arcs round to capture him that he is visible?
Is he the same one as yesterday?
What does he think about? Is he not lonely in there? Is that why he peers out, looking for a mate? Is he reaching out to me, peering into my binoculars, begging for friendship?
Why do I feel the heat every time he looks at me?
Why are my eyes panda-burned from the binoculars every night? Why have they recovered by the morning?
Is he me? Is that possible? Is he me? Is it possible that he could be me but I not him? Am I watching myself watching myself?
Has he imprisoned me? Am I doomed to let my eyesight zoom and curve across the elongated stars every night?
Why is it so hot in here? Why is it so hot in here?
Twisted Desire
Gnats fly in spirals
And never hit each other
Having such sweet tendency
For repulsion
Midges
Collide all the time
Not many know this
But the midges know
The midges know yet continue
Crashing in the dusty air
(Midges know what love is)
Gnats
Woo each other forever
Platonic
Courtly
Midges spend lives
Of constant irritation
Wedged between the rough
And the tumble of their cravings
In the place where the gnats fly
The air is disturbed
(Disturbed, refreshed and healthy)
In the stagnant land of the midges
The bite-free man is king
(So we are always ruled
By the indigestible)
Listen, we have to go to Shallowland some time today but we are putting it off. Not an easy venture for my messed-up buckos and me, but an essential one. Interrogation knows of no no-go regions, and we know where to go. It is out on the northeast corner, way past Far Flung, transitional, non-residential, non-industrial, permanently beneath the wrong weather, a sort of rejected annexe of the city. What is there? We don’t know, but we are tasked, as the prevalent jargon has it, to find out. Some of our people have been there, but they return with no memory. You go under the arch to Shallowland, and all ideas evaporate. What we do know is that it was, and presumably still is, almost building-free - imagine, almost building-free in this squeezed-up city of all places! - hence the name.
Listen to me. It is going to snow. I can smell it.
Listen. We are here now. On the way. I am thought-recording this, in case we forget everything. We go along this unstretched heap of stone and brick that supports no living human in sight. There, of course, but not visible. Building buildings, not people buildings. Long straight alleyway. Leading to Shallowland, the place where no one has any ideas anymore. The marchway to the archway. To a clearlined cut, a boundary-change of territorial power. OK, so now we're there and it's an as-I-suspected sort of place. But the sailor isn't here. Not him, so that's one thing. Snow still. I can still smell it. Why? (And every time I do, the scar on my head stings.)
The sailor is not the problem. Not really expected here. Too serene a place, too desolate. Not enough buzz and noise for him to lose himself in. Nice to be rid of the little shit for a change. No, the problem here is the idea of another one, the idea I can not get out of my head because the scar is lodged there on my temple, evidence incontrovertible of a flicked-knife passing in the night. And what a night that was, the night far off when I first knew who I was. Revenge sharpens you up that way. Guides you to your destiny. In my case, a uniform and a destiny of routine and tramping the streets.
But was he the same man, my past assailant and my present quarry? He had been, it is alleged, the most pure of spirit. It is also alleged that he has been corrupted, and it is our job to find out the how and the why.
As ever, we are muddling through. This is the eureka trajectory. The idea and then the slog. The clear sight then the muddle through. Same as it ever was. It is just a piece of work, but it seems like several ages.
As usual, we have to pass over water to get there, to clear the bridgehead to Shallowland itself from the street that leads to this world where there are no ideas. At the entrance, an old man whispering a book. Cross-legged on the ground. Whispering the words that go through a funnel and collide onto the page. We look. He whispers. We stand on the parapet to read. Over his left shoulder only. Maintain the etiquette. So we know where to go. If we can trust him. One of our number tries to take the book. The old man whispers. The one of our number lets go, shrieks, spittles the burn on his hands. Almost falls in the water. We push him away, towards the destination. There’s always one. Amateur heroes. Incoming no-nothings. Eventually they learn. Eventually. I pay the book whisperer. A bunch of wrecked bladder seaweed from the police farm. Only payment he recognises. Squeeze the gel out of the pods down his throat later. Not addictive, but - encouraging - shall we say?
We approach the arch and the wind gets up and sucks the gate inwards, away from us, and we go beneath the arch, and enter the realm of Shallowland, and our ideas desert us. There is a single square, with tall, tall buildings, almost taller than anything else in the city, and thin as a backdrop, a single square with a wellhead in the centre. Nothing else, just a stretch out on practically every side towards the marshes, and the scream of waders and the algae-choked roar of the sea and a high wall the full stretch of the boundary we have just crossed.
We muster enough braincells to decide fan out and they disappear, out towards the insect-strewn seagrass and whatever lurks there.
I sit on the wellhead. Wait. There is no one there. And then there is. It is he. A shaped invisibility. A jagged re-patterning of the shadows. Incorruptible. Incorruptible evil. The demonic pure at heart.
I have nothing to see, but we gaze blankly at each other. Blank eyes to pure blankness. Pure blankness back to blank eyes. The scar on my temple aches.
And all throughout, the wisp-clouds of Shallowland scudding like small change thrown across the sky.
Why am I here? Why are we stand-off-staring, waiting for the other to do us harm, to reach out in friendship?
Nothing is said. But thoughts seep in to me, and the problem is not of memory, because I feel the thoughts but don't know them, so they are never there to be remembered. At least I am learning something, useless though it might be.
And all throughout, something banging against an inside courtyard wall, metal against stone in the scoured air.
How can I get the memory out of my head, even though I don’t know what it is?
And all throughout, the swoop-paths of the birds swathing the air like invisible bandages.
The air is constricted, my breathing blocked and gulping. I can tell that his is, as well. We are that close.
Something is somewhere, in him, in me, or just here, trapped between these air-leaking walls. I can’t reach it, and neither can he. We have him tagged as evil, but maybe he is still the most pure of spirit and it is just we who can’t reach his wavelength. But maybe the purer the spirit, the purer the evil, like a flawless bottle of grog.
I feel something of him edge into me, sparking across the scar, welding into my brain. I feel the power, like heat from the sun burning through my window on a summer duty morning. I feel my eyes changing colour.
But maybe, this is a personal collision, this is what I alone am here to meet, and others would meet someone different, with different pain and different past baggage and a different absence of different memories.
And all throughout, the smell of unseen snow clouds massing over the unglimpsed ocean.
He still says nothing. Throughout, he has said nothing. And all throughout, the city edging around its daily business, turning nothing into nothing.
And then he is gone, like a shadow whitewashed from a wall.
And a single insect puncture at the bottom of my shin, diagonally balancing the old scar with a new one. I catch the bite-beetle in a regulation official empty match box. Interrogate it later.
I leave the square with the feeling of something imprinted on my brain, something delicious and dangerous for the future. The sea air is a bite to the throat.
I wave to the milling dead-beat-feet buckos and we meet up again, they loud in disappointment, I silent. We come out now, and the book whisperer is still there, holding the funnel to his ear, sucking the book back into his brain. The wrecked bladder pods are empty. No help there. As ever, we are on our own, and temporarily clueless.
We clump back towards headquarters, the spittle-handed one of our number scowling back at him. The snow is almost here. I have started to limp. I stop at a grog shop window and check my reflection. My eyes are their original colour. At least, those of my reflection are. My scar still throbs. Tomorrow then, perhaps. Perhaps return on my own. Check out the beetle. Wade through the amnesiac records. The slog begins. The eureka trajectory. Persistence in a righteous cause brings reward. My reflection agrees. Let's hope so. Otherwise, it's back to down in the dumps and swimming to nowhere.
No comments:
Post a Comment