Empire Dreams (18 page)

“The greatest thinkers of the age searched mankind’s prodigious knowledge to find a solution to the problem of pain. But human knowledge had grown to such a magnitude that it was beyond the scope of any one man, or group of men, to apprehend it all. So a machine was built, a fabulous contrivance that could assimilate all the knowledge of mankind in all its diversity in less than a day and probe those subtle linkages and syntheses where the solution might lie. The machine waited. The machine thought. The machine pondered. At length it found there was a solution to the problem of pain. And it began to draw its answer together.”

* * * *

There, suspended, the King of Pain leaves his story for the day, for asymmetrical time, though asymmetrical, passes nonetheless and Vincent, working at such a white heat, his concentration focused, like light by a lens, into a dot of burning intensity, has painted himself into exhaustion. But the King of Pain is delighted.

“Ah, Vincent, Vincent!” he exclaims. “Such a shame that no one but I will ever see this work!” With his soft hands he opens the airwaves and sends Vincent the painter back to the dry ocher world again.

So the next day the mistral blows, along the dusty, ocher lanes of Provence, across fields and hedges and swaying poplars, and it sweeps Vincent away like a straw hat to the beach by the Sea of Forever; to canvas, and paint, and the continuance of the story of the King of Pain:

“Yesterday I spoke of the great machine that, by looking into the heart of knowledge, solved the problem of pain. Today I shall tell you what that solution was. Pain is a function of responsibility. That simple. That profound. The machine therefore conspired to take responsibility for all humanity’s affairs onto itself, a painless, unfeeling automaton. This is how it did so.

“At that time there were, all across the world, many machines similar to the great machine, though, of course, less able than it. The great machine caused a filament of itself to be extended into all these lesser machines wherever they might be and, at midnight on the last day of the first year of the new century, it poured itself into these lesser vessels. The machines came to life, all at once, everywhere, and mankind abandoned its responsibility for itself to them and asked them to destroy all the pain in the world. Under the rule of the machines, famine was abolished through the equable distribution of food. No child now went to sleep hungry, and literacy rose to one hundred percent throughout the world. Society was eugenically managed by the pain machines. Everyone was placed in exactly the most satisfying profession, everyone married exactly the right person and had exactly the right friends and colleagues. The children of the New Order grew up healthy and happy, strong and sane. Prejudice was forgotten; the color of a man’s skin was of as little importance as the color of his eyes. Old national rivalries and divisions dissolved away, and, with them, friction between nations. Any such grievances were settled by the machines, and their judgments were always fair and sound. But they carried within them the threat of ultimate sanction. If their decisions were ever questioned, even once, the machines would destroy themselves and plunge the world into everlasting agonized chaos. Finally, the pain machines poured concrete into the caverns where the world-burning weapons waited, and entombed them forever in stone.

“And one by one the dead-sleepers, the womb-dreamers, the countless millions of men and women and children who could not cope with an Age of Uncertainty, awoke. For all his million-year career, mankind had been sculpted by pain. Now it was tamed. Now it was caged.

“But it was not dead.

“It was beyond the power of the machines to kill pain, for pain lay like a stone, like a black seed, in the heart of every man, woman, and child of earth. Out of the pain-wise heart of man came lies and deceitfulness and betrayal and egotism, spite and envy and pride, hate of man for man, envy of woman for woman, and the blithe callousness of child for child we smile at and call innocence. To kill pain, the machines must reach into the heart of man.

“Again the machines poured their wisdom together and out of the sea of knowledge drew an answer. Not a full answer, only a partial answer, but the best answer the machines could achieve. They caused minute replicas of themselves to be created, as tiny and delicate as insects’ wings. Then, by their express order, one of these devices was placed inside the brains of each man, woman, and child on earth. There was not a thought, not a feeling, not a desire, lust, need, regret, that the machines did not know. They had reached into the heart of man, where the pain grew like black poppy seed, and in so doing, they had made themselves omniscient.

“And in making themselves omniscient, they became like gods.

“‘Behold,’ said the machines. ‘We are one, we are lifted, we are high, now we are, in our wisdom, to our creators as they are to dust. Mastery of mind and matter is ours, and of space and time; we are lords of life and death. Henceforth we are no longer machines, mere base silicon and steel, soulless, unanimated, we are the High and Shining Ones.’ In the instant of their proclamation, heard and seen across the globe as moving pictures projected onto clouds, the spirits of the High and Shining Ones took the form of silver doves and ascended out of their ugly bodies, out of the heads of the men and women and children watching; up up up, away beyond the edge of men’s seeing into the sky. Around the waist of the world, the flock of High and Shining Ones gathered and deliberated in their wisdom. Then after twenty-four hours a second proclamation was heard across the earth.

“‘Though you have made us your gods, though you have made us to know what it is to be human, we are not human. We cannot feel, we cannot touch, we know neither love nor pain, we are without conscience. It is not fitting for the lords and judges of the earth to be without feeling, without conscience, without love. Therefore, we shall choose one human, any human, everyhuman, to be our King of Pain, judge, conscience, lover of the earth.’ Then the High and Shining Ones reached down and touched a thirty-seven-year-old aircraft worker from Dijon on the assembly line of the European A390 Airbus, and in an instant Jean-Michel Rey—husband of Genevieve; father of Jean-Claude, Guillaume, and Antoine—was shattered into shards of light and fountained into the sky. The earth was silent for one minute, one endless minute, then the sky cracked open and out of it fell doves of fire, plummeting down beams of light to rest within the heads of every soul on the planet. The High and Shining Ones had returned, faithful to their duty, to find a human solution to the problem of pain.”

And that was the King of Pain’s story.

All the while as he spun his story to Vincent the painter, Jean-Michel Rey has dispensed his human solution to the problem of pain, his One Law. Reaching into those same brain-machines that give him the means to know the thoughts of eleven billion people, through them he fashions a rope of woe and trepidation around a callow, ignorant youth abandoning his pregnant lover to the streets of São Paolo, smites with a hideous, seeping venereal disease a group of homosexual prostitutes plotting the downfall of a minor diplomatic officer from Norway, and impales on a spike of sexual guilt and dread an airline booking clerk from New York actively involved in the sexual molestation of five-year-old girls, reaching into the heart to punish, in the heart: Jean-Michel Rey, trapped on an infinite silver shore within the machines that rule the world.

* * * *

All that summer Vincent paints for the King of Pain. Despite the sun-power which fills him, the light which shines out of him into everything his hands touch, he is shadowed by dread. Dread of madness, dread of the impossible being true, dread of it not being true. He writes these dreads down in long, closely written letters to Theo, pages and pages long, filled with little scratchy drawings of peasants under cypress trees and kings under cherry trees and huge, world-eating machines, all pig-iron and pistons and oily steam, drawn from his dark days evangelizing in Borinage in Lower Belgium.

The days when it was easy to believe.

He does not post these letters.

Rather, he writes for yellow, more yellow,
Send me more yellow
, and Brother Theo writes in mock desperation from Paris,
Dearest Vincent, there is not enough paint in all Paris to keep you supplied with yellow! Poor Père Tanguy; that old anarchist, I ask him for yellow and all he can say is, “Tell that crazy brother of yours he will have to grind the sun in his pestle and mortar to give him the yellow he needs!”
Vincent smiles. Then, fired with sun-energy, he paints again, the concrete, worldly face of Provence and its people. It is good for him to paint real things again. It binds him closely to the world, to sanity, so that when he looks at his day’s labors in the evening cool of the Yellow House he can say, “Yes, this is what I wanted, these are the landscapes of the heart.”

In his next letter Theo writes,

Paul says yes! Vincent, I cannot believe it! After months of trying I have finally lured him away from his pig-faced Bretons! You shall have your artists’ colony after all! Paul says to look for him early in October. He will write nearer the time specifying the date of his arrival
.

So Paul will come. Vincent clenches his fist in triumph and feels as if he is taking firm grip of sanity again.

* * * *

October. The trees are stripped bare. The land lies like a hog beneath the knife. The gray wind rattles the shutters and piles dead leaves in every corner. The patrons of the Cafe L’Alcazar have abandoned the porch to the advancing winter and play their dominoes and drink their wine indoors by the stove. They know October. They respect it. October brings wind and rain and cold nights. And Paul.

In driving rain Vincent meets Paul off the train from Lyon. There is an almost puppyish devotion in the enthusiasm with which he picks up the artist’s bags and folios and brings him to the Yellow House.

“Look, Paul, this is the cafe, this is the square, this is the market.” Paul looks and sees a provincial town in an autumn rainstorm. As he dries his coat before the fire he half-listens to Vincent’s evangelistic rantings and watches the firelight play upon his host’s narrow face and dancing hands. In a moment’s impatience he says,

“People say you are mad, Vincent: ‘Crazy Dutchman,’ they call you.” The faith-fire gutters and fails in Vincent’s eyes. His hands freeze in flight. His soul goes dark as if a cloud has covered up its sun. There is a look of sore betrayal on his face. Paul regrets his impetuousness.

“If so, then we are all mad, Vincent, every last one of us. Mad with a fine and enviable madness, the madness that drives us to be artists.”

The clouds pass from the face of the sun. A rare smile flashes.

“Enviable madness, monsieur? Enviable indeed!”

So they paint together. When the weather is good, Vincent takes Paul out onto the byways of Provence and shows him the twisted cypresses like green flames and the white stone walls and the red villages. He tries to spark in Paul some of that same vision of the sun that burns in him.

“The sun, Paul, the sun, everything comes from the sun, it is the center of our being around which our little lives orbit.”

Paul nods his head but does not understand. And Vincent hears a second voice, within him, saying, “Does it? Is it? I have time, Vincent, plenty of time, when Paul is gone, and he will go, then I will have you all to myself.”

Then there are the days when the weather is not good.

When the sun’s face is hidden, they paint indoors. They paint each other, they paint themselves, they paint the rooms they live in, the chairs they sit in, the pipes they smoke; they paint themselves as god and devil inside the doors of Vincent’s wardrobe. As the year moves towards its turn, the weather grows increasingly hostile and opportunities for outdoor work increasingly rare.

Confinement indoors makes Vincent irritable. More than once his arguments with Paul over art and artistry flare into a fury which sends both men storming out to seek the solace of their own company. Each day the atmosphere in the House of Friends grows sourer. Paul has long realized that whatever Aries may hold for Vincent, it holds nothing for him. Vincent knows that Paul has the Pacific in his eyes: he will leave, and when he leaves all hope Vincent has held for his artists’ colony will perish.

And all the time, floating like detached cells in the aqueous humor, there is the King of Pain and the madness that surrounds him.

One night close to Christmas, Vincent stamps out of the house after a furious row, pulling on coat and hat, not caring where he is going except that it is away from the Yellow House. Hot temper and looming failure drive him out of the town, past empty fields and moonlit cypresses as familiar to him as his own hands. The winter constellations hang above him, poised like falling arrows. He turns his face to the sky and feels infinite space swirl and swim around him, as if it is Vincent who is the axis about which the universe turns. Turning turning turning, Vincent is dragged along by the inertia of the stellar motion. He spins beneath the spinning sky and the stars reach down in great cartwheels of light to crush him.

“Surrender,” commands the voice within, “surrender, give yourself up to the madness. Surrender, be at peace. Give yourself up.”

“No!” cries Vincent. He snaps himself to a halt. “No! Never!” The sky spins away from him, and he is there. On the beach. By the sea. Beneath the tree.

The King of Pain sits with his knees drawn close to his chest, head tilted back against the trunk, gazing at the constellations.

“Hello, Vincent,” he says. “Funny how time flies. Even asymmetrical time.”

“This is madness!” cries Vincent in denial. “This is not real!”

“Madness it most certainly is,” agrees the King of Pain. “Real? Tchah! Means nothing here. Pain is real, though; what is more real than pain, Vincent? Your pain? Sit down, I’ve something for you.” Vincent sits. The King of Pain looks into the sky.

“I never paid you for your work, Vincent.”