Black Marsden (8 page)

“Do you realize,” said Knife, “that it’s 45 degrees F. in the shadow of some of those rocks over there? Walk a couple of hundred yards or so away, however, into the sun and the
thermometer
picks up and reads 72 degrees F. It’s about 75 to 80 on this strip of road where we happen to be driving now. Not too hot really.”

“Not too hot,” Goodrich mimicked, mopping his brow. “Your Authorities do have a sense of humour, I must say. What sort of genius is this Director-General who now addresses Namless?”

“Geni-ass of place,” said Knife repeating his dead pan lesson. “Hee-haw. Hee-haw. The sky’s the limit. His voice echoes in the stars. The Strikers in Namless had not dreamt of such a thing as the collaborative echoing repudiation of a whole system of values, the collaborative half-mocking repudiation of a whole way of tasting the world, a collaborative sickening to death of the world in high places and low until it crept up on them unawares. In the way sometimes a whole community suddenly finds it has been pushed—pushed into irrevocable decisions—pushed into
extremes
—pushed into something it never visualized in the
beginning.
It’s the whole mysterious aroma of self-judgement,
combinations
of corruption and establishment, effects of tyranny and revolution, an incalculable league of elements, over-ripening of parts…. Namless was convinced when the Strike started that it knew what its material demands were—real wages etc. Then all of a sudden something
ripened
in its head—the very palate, the very roof of existence changed. The bray of god became not only the voice of the people but the music of the spheres. Apuleius the Great.”

“There he is,” said Goodrich half-dazzled, half-confused. “I thought I was dreaming but there he is.” There was a long pause as he stared at the pinnacle or needle of rock he had seen before and which now came back into view as Knife’s taxi swung or rattled on its ribbon of road.

“I need to fill up,” said Knife as if he had not heard or had misunderstood Goodrich. “Time for petrol.” He drew up and got out of the car. Goodrich stepped out too, stretched his legs, tried to look elsewhere, think of something other than the climber he had seen. After a while Knife said: “The tank’s full. And I’ve checked on the radiator. We’re ready to go….”

“There’s a man or something or other up there,” Goodrich cried. He spoke with an effort as if the words were torn from his lungs; closed his eyes as if it had been a strain to see. Perhaps it’s the atmosphere, he thought, the place is saturated with depressed memories. Everything’s too rare or too hot. Or perhaps it’s that damned opium. “There’s a creature up there,” he insisted. The words bled in his mouth. “In that needle of rock.” Knife waited like a stone designed by Marsden, a walking stone, a talking instrument, a guide into the future. Goodrich felt sick, a blend of nausea and embarrassment, the taste of robot hallucination. Then Knife cut the air with his hand, spoke softly: “Didn’t you see him before?”

Goodrich opened his eyes. “I saw him a little way back.”

“But you said nothing.”

It
was
no
business
of
mine,
no
business
of
mine
at
all
,
Goodrich almost blurted out but he controlled himself and explained: “I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure at all.”

“And now?” asked Knife.

“He’s there.”

“Good for you, Mr. Goodrich,” applauded Knife. “It would astonish you if I were to tell you how many people pass through right here in the shadow of this rock and look the other side. As they would on the pavement of a great city when a poor devil drops at their feet.”

“Are you suggesting…?”

“I am suggesting you have scored one for the road, Mr. Goodrich. Good shot, sir,” said Knife. His voice was so riddling and soft it was impossible to tell whether he was stating a fact or recording a miracle of science, a miracle of compassion. “Except that here—unlike a pavement in a great city—here on this road to Namless—the poor devil up there is a rare kind of robot with which the Director-General has begun his experiment.”

“Robot!” Goodrich was half-astonished, half-prepared for this.

“But of course,” said Knife. “It’s a miraculous refinement of the dinosaur of ages (the collaborative nexus of sex and love, striking man and risen-up god)—the roof of heaven in our mouth.”

Goodrich did not reply but looked up again at Marsden’s ascension robot outlined against the sky. It’s funny, he thought, I think of her now, my poor mother. She used to wear that odd oppressive perfume, a slightly burnt odour at the foot of the cross on Sundays in church.

Knife was silent. And soon they drove off (or pitched, it seemed, on their ribbon of road) into an oppressive landscape, a rickety sensation of perfumed, burnt spaces within a cathedral of rocks.

*

Before nightfall they drew up at what seemed a wrecked
farmhouse.
“We shall spend the night here,” said Knife. “The road is primitive so I doubt whether we’ve done more than a couple of hundred miles.”

Goodrich was glad to get out, stretch his legs again. The setting sun blazed upon the rim of a mountain in a ripe canvas painted
TROPICAL
: a magnificent ripeness of colour or rain of perspectives or climax of a waterfall in a majestic furnace. Yet from another angle that canvas seemed to shed on the stage of earth
MEDITER
RANEAN
distinctions of individuality which invoked in each mound or thing its own separate sun or soul, redness was the delicate soul of red, greenness the delicate soul of green, purple was royal purple, blue was the essence of blue, diamond was cutting diamond, pearl was buried in pearl. Within these two extremes of tropical ripeness and mediterranean individuality, sky and earth seemed to revolve into a globe upon which the sun sank forever for those souls now departing this life into the wilderness of the Pacific they had always longed for (as their nameless scene, their nameless place of greatness), rose forever for others who set sail never to return from the wilderness of the Atlantic they had always dreamed of (as their nameless scene, their nameless place of greatness), buried its god forever in solipsistic nights of the Amazon, skimmed like Freya’s hair forever in solipsistic days of the Arctic.

The wrecked farmhouse stood like a charmed shell in itself, mediterranean and individual, though bathed in a curious glow as if it had been uprooted and would swim, at any moment, towards the tropical canvas of heaven and towards some waiting soul to be ferried from one extreme to the other. There were pools of light like individual blinds in the cracked glass of window-panes. As Goodrich drew closer he observed the mutilated façade
resembling
now an Indian blanket woven into all weathers and colours, the map of an alchemical robot. Then suddenly he was confronted by another dimension of accumulating effects—the ravages of uprising and repression, a gaping eyeless room from which—his nostrils began to quiver involuntarily—a dying, still-burning (it almost seemed) odour came.

“I think perhaps,” said Knife, “it’s best to bed down out-
of-doors.
We have blankets in the house. There’s a woman on the premises.”

“A woman,” said Goodrich astonished.

“She comes and goes,” said Knife.

“But how—on what?”

“Ass-back. Horse-back. Mule-back.” Knife shrugged.

It occurred to Goodrich that on his long journey that day—an immensity it seemed to him now—he had seen a few wings circling far overhead but not a foot on the ground.

“There are animals around,” said Knife as if he read his thoughts. “That’s how a hidden population travels. We’re lucky to come on wheels.”

The great curtains of tropical night were descending upon the Director-General’s mediterranean stage. In the western sky it was steel, a steely avalanche raged. In the eastern sky it was dark, a mysterious avalanche descended and a kind of perfume came from the stars. Goodrich’s nose wrinkled involuntarily (as it had when he sensed the burnt room in the farmhouse) and he
wondered
if, by any chance, the woman of whom Knife had spoken had returned and stood somewhere in the darkness. He discerned her already with sensuous eyes on the tip of his nose. Then Knife came out of the farmhouse with an armful of wood. This he arranged on the ground, applied a match, fanned the flame. “That’s better,” he said at last. “By the way there’s no sign of the woman. But if she’s around she will come out sooner or later. Now for some food.” He set up a rude tripod, hung a pot over the fire into which he poured water, rice, peas, vegetables. Then he opened a can of beef, emptied it into a pan. Goodrich followed the preparations as if they were a ritual harvest, a harvest of food and fire within man and nature, the smell of food and the smell of flesh, cosmic essences, cosmic drama. Conquest of the stars in the roof of one’s mouth. An army marches on its stomach to recruit posterity, and birth is a trauma of subsistence.

When they had eaten Knife offered Goodrich another cup of Namless beverage. “Come on,” he said when Goodrich refused. “I know it makes you feel a little sick at first but you need it in this part of the world. Trust me. I am a seasoned campaigner.” Goodrich capitulated and swallowed a mouthful. Soon he had another and another. He kept a sharp eye now (scarecrow sharp with the Namless beverage) upon the shapes of night beyond the fire. Still there was no sign of the woman. Knife had spread the blankets on the ground. It was inclined to be somewhat misty but on the whole quite warm beside the fire, under a blanket.

Knife was off the moment he put his head down but Goodrich was so tired his senses were keyed up upon the borders of sleep in associative parallels and faculties. There was a gentle sighing wind and the sound of a shaking door or a window from the wrecked building. Also a hooting noise, an owl or some other creature. And an occasional twitter and sparking like a fire of crickets in a clump of grass.

He counted god’s sheep, felt no sickness this time from the Namless beverage but tension, almost an ague, the sense of his own limitations, the sense of ripening into the Director-General’s comedy of relations.

Then it was between curtain and curtain of night he saw the woman emerge from the farmhouse. She came straight over to him but he found himself unable to move, curled tight into the ripe scene he had become. She began to undress methodically and as she stood in profile against the fire, her head in shadow, he dreamt he could see with the severed eyes of his nose the pointed eyes of her breasts. Then she turned to face him.

An animal-smelling face nuzzled into him but it was not the woman. It was not a dog. It was not a sheep. It was the
constellation
of the bull, Goodrich exclaimed, the tall bull of night on its knees beside him with the longest horns he had ever seen reaching into the stars. They picked him off the ground and held him steady. He wanted to lie back, curl up again. He was about to slump when the bull pushed him forward, caught him between its horns, braced him with its forehead, pushed him on again. Now he was pushed on the forehead of the bull straight upon her: upright coitus—upstanding coitus—into which she had been drawn upon the head of the bull between the upright and upstanding pillars of night.

Pillars of night which he (Goodrich) had uprooted (so it seemed to him now). In one sense (it was true) they had uplifted him, pushed him off the ground into her thighs, between her thighs; in another sense it was his Samsonian avalanche, his uprooting of everything into a collaborative revolution of establishment.

A toppling world and yet he clung to the pinnacle of fear, the pinnacle of hate, the pinnacle of love, sleepwalking bull of night, the gigantic robot of sex which now bestrode space like the genius of the avalanche.

The question returned—had he been uprooted by her,
decapitated
by her into the head of the bull, or had he devoured her, his severed eyes in her body, his uprooted lips to her lips, his uprooted tongue to her tongue, his uprooted spire…?

Had he pushed her or had been pushed by her…? This was the question raised by the Director-General of Cosmic Sex as though in constructing his gigantic robot of night he was intent on fathoming the dinosaur of an age—the Strike of man against himself as a narcissistic function of economic ritual….

“Oh god,” said Goodrich as he awoke shuddering with
newborn
terror. “Oh god.” His blankets were awry and he felt the acute mystery of born, unborn existences.

*

When the sun was high Knife and Goodrich set off again in the rickety taxi along the ribbon of road. “I believe,” said Knife, “the woman I told you of may have gone on to one of the stations ahead of us along the road.”

“Who is she?”

“I thought you knew,” said Knife in his dead pan voice which made it difficult to tell whether he was serious or laughing up his sleeve.

“How should I know?” Goodrich was annoyed. He recalled the ague of his dream.

“Blankets,” said Knife soothingly. “So many of us sleep in the open. Comfort comes from blankets. Also from food, needless to say. She cheers our blood along the road. There is a population in these parts—a depressed population—whose survival seems to matter to her.”

“Where are they—the people she cares for?”

“Always on their guard. Each and everyone who comes from outside is suspect and they do not easily approach strangers or new arrivals. The Director-General has his agents, you see, amongst them, amongst us all. It’s (to put it mildly) a testing time. For example, despite all the talk of revolutionary theatre which one hears of these days there are totalitarian rumblings as well. There are some who venture to say that the new offer the Authorities made—the economic hand-out they were prepared to give is a sign of the times.”

“Sign of the times? What do you mean?”

“Sign of a totalitarian economic theatre. That is what I mean. Wealth may come to Namless in the wake of the Director-General but that wealth may well reflect a totalitarian brotherhood or economy of man.”