Empire Dreams (22 page)

“And in three days they returned and put him into a suspension pod and flew him to Thanos and he was gone. At first I received letters and phone calls and reports from him and the business boomed. The Simulator has lines to the outside world and the dead can conduct the business they did in life. Being dead hadn’t impaired his business acumen in the least.”

“I’m reminded of Sylvia Jenke, her
In This Still Life
series of tone poems.”

“But have you noticed,” she said intently, “how abstracted the works of the dead are becoming? I wonder, is it because their reality is just a computer simulation? In one of his letters my brother told me of how he had once taken a boat out of the harbor and sailed away toward the mainland but the nearer he drew to shore the hazier and more indistinct it became until he must have crossed some invisible boundary and there was nothing. No boat, no sea, no town of Aghios Georgios, no body, no self, just … void. Then he looked back, wherever ‘back’ might be, and there it was: Thanos, floating in a little bubble of air and sea and sunlight in the midst of void.”

From the battlements above drifted the vigorous sound of Greek folk music: Iyra and bouzouki and flute and clapping hands. It sounded wonderfully real and vital.

“Then there was a shift in the void, and he was back in the boat on the sea and the sun was shining and there were the blue hills of the mainland before him.

“He said in his letter that he must have gone beyond the limits of the simulation, over the edge of the world into the nothing beyond.” She looked up to the source of the lively music. Up there people were whirling and stamping their feet and whooping in glee. “I sometimes wonder what it’s really like.”

“They say you can do anything, be anything, you wish.”

“As long as you stay within the limits of the simulation.”

“True. One freedom bought at the expense of another. My wife told me in her letters how she spent each day, swimming and playing tennis and playing bridge and talking. She said you could drink all day and never get drunk, eat as much as you liked as often as you liked and never be full or fat. And of course, there were the wonderful imaginary companions she could conjure up when she tired of conversing with the pick of the world’s finest and richest minds. After that she stopped writing.”

“Yes, my brother stopped writing too. I can’t help wondering if this dream-life is jading after a while? Perhaps the dead find their blunted appetites turning to more introverted, bizarre pursuits?”

I remembered the dead man dressed in the woman’s body who had talked with me in the ruined town. I remembered the dead woman in the Charnel House who told me that bored people develop strange pastimes. I remembered the figures waltzing under the olive trees and realized that the dead danced with the dead and the living with the living.

“We mean nothing to them,” I said. “They live in their own world where they make their own rules and their own relationships and the love we feel for them is forgotten.”

“I began to realize that years ago,” the woman said, “but I kept coming back each year until this All Hallows’ Night I met my brother and greeted him and he did not even recognize me. He looked straight through me and all the love I felt for him just poured out of me onto the ground and was gone.” She looked around her. Her eyes were dark. “I hate this place. It refuses to die. The lepers; they died and their past died with them and their bones and skulls became a part of this island—but the dead that don’t die, they haunt this place, they hang over it like a shroud!

“If you came here on any other day of the year, if you could slip past those smart sailor-boys who carry German machine pistols on any other day of the year, you would find the streets empty and the courtyards deserted and the houses crumbled and still and the dust thick under the olive trees, but you would feel the presence of the dead all around you; you would hear whispers of their casual conversations and their idle small talk as they swim and sail and play their phantom games of tennis in computer simulation while their restored bodies lie in underground tombs, awaiting this one day when they can walk amongst us and remember what a real world is like! We aren’t important to them any more, but our reality is! We remind them of the ghosts they truly are.”

She was quiet for a while after her outburst. Then she said quietly, “Shall we go from this place?”

I took her gently by the arm and together we left the quiet place on the ramparts. We came to a small taverna under the branches of a cedar tree and here we sat by a private table and talked and drank raw, resinous wine while the Dance of the Dead whirled past us. We talked of many things and after a while danced to a swing band. We laughed a lot. We found a tiny restaurant in a disused boathouse and ate grilled red snapper straight from the spit, burning our fingers on the hot flesh. We watched jugglers and acrobats and joined hands and danced in a ring to the tune of a Greek folk dance half as old as civilization. We stood on the beach by the embers of a dead bonfire and watched the breeze from the sea whipping the soft gray ashes away from the glowing coals beneath. We drank ouzo and watched the dark hills of the mainland grow in definition in the gray predawn glow.

“Look,” she said, pointing. Columns of figures were climbing the alleyways and staircases that wound up the island. Bright costumes, bare skin, they moved up the winding stairways and along the limestone cloisters and ramparts of the Venetian fortress: the dead returning to the Underworld.

We reached the stone jetty just as the first rays of morning touched the island. The last of the dead entered the necropolis and the brass gates closed behind. I knew that last figure.

And she had once known me. But now she had returned to the land of the dead, that bone-dry landscape where she lived other lives and loved other loves. The island seemed to throb beneath my feet as the pulse of power built that would strip soul from body and send it whirling back into the Simulator while quiet, patient machines carried the discarded flesh back to its underground chamber and gently restored it.

I blinked, shuddered, banishing the vision. The boats were arriving to ferry us back to the mainland. It was for us as for the ancient Greeks; only the living may return across Styx and only on the condition that they bring nothing back from the domain of the dead. I looked at the woman beside me, then at the bulk of the island. The sun was strong now and the fairy-lights in the olive trees glowed wanly.

“Let them go,” I said at length.

THE BEACH IS DESERTED
. The ultras are gone and I am alone with the gulls and the ashes and the wind, the wind that blows out of the heart of Africa. The old, red, crazy wind blowing from the ancient heart of man. That is why the people fear it. It shakes out the ghosts and the old, old things that we tell ourselves we have forgotten, the crazy wind.

Seagulls and ashes. The wind fans the embers into a red glow.

Blessed craziness. They have a word for it in Arabic. They have a word for everything in Arabic, and every word has four meanings; one true, one contrary, one holy, one obscene.

And which had Hannah Tellender been?

All. None. A woman. An ultra.

And this flatlifer, alone in the dawnlight on the uttermost edge of Africa, crouching by the embers with the wind whipping the ashes up into his eyes and his mouth? We were, in the end as in the beginning, more than strangers. Aliens. Ultra and flatlifer. Lovers. Ashes.

* * * *

Strange. To begin one woman’s story I must go back to another. To Ruthie and the night she took me to the Rififi Club to see Hannah perform. Whatever the relationship between Ruthie and I, it was a vague, ill-defined entity. Most of the time it was no relationship at all. A draft-dodging exile with Nicaragua nightmares dredging a dirham from the diplomatic schools and American bars of Tangier, obsessed with the ghost of Bogart; a teenage beach-girl with a permanent bikini line, a round-the-world airticket, and Daddy’s Gold MasterCard hovering in the twilight zone between mainstream society and the world of the ultras. What better definition of our relationship could I give? What was remarkable was not the quality of the relationship but that there should have been one at all.

“There’s a new group coming in from Spain Thursday.” Ruthie’s was a well-known face at the Rififi, the preeminent Tangier ultra club. A face held in mild contempt by the ultras who passed through its Moorish doors, for they had seen her type of coward in a thousand ultra bars in the thousand cities of the Soul Circle. The girl who wanted, and feared, nothing more than to pay five hundred dollars to Masrurian the Dream Doctor down in the medina and have him slip a jolt of DPMA up the back of her skull. “Hannah Tellender, the ultra
improvisatore
. Even you must have heard of Hannah Tellender, Morrisey. She’s giving a recitation, if that’s the right thing to call it. It’s a must. Everyone who’s anyone is going.”

In a sense we were each other’s salvation—I Ruthie’s from the agony of choosing: ultra, flatlifer; Ruthie mine from the patriotic penitence of the Mermaid Cafe. A night of color and light and self-loss in the ultraworld which orbited far far above our heads in return for restraint, presence, and an excuse not to have to decide, not tonight. That was the contract.

Outside among the beer cans and cheroot wrappers, the
basiji
, the ubiquitous Swords of Islam militants called the Holy Judgment of the One God down upon the blasphemers who likened themselves to divinities. Most of them I knew by sight if not by name. Inside, on the Rififi’s postage-stamp-sized stage, a tiny woman with lasers on her wrists reached through the streamers of smoke to show everyone the universe she held in the palm of her hand.

Hannah Tellender. The ultra poetess.

She gasped, all of a muck-sweat under the pin-spots.

“Thank you. Thank you. Hey … ho. It’s hot in here. You’re a good audience. It’s always kind of nice when you come to a new place and the people take you into their hearts.”

Ruthie pressed forward toward the foot of the stage. I braved the cocktail glasses, nasal inhalers, cinder-tipped black cheroots, to snag her arm. She barely registered my presence. I have seen that same expression of rapture in the eyes of Coptic women praying, in the eyes of Orthodox icons.

Hannah Tellender stretched her arms above her head and sighed. “Okay. Okay. Who’s next? Who’s next? Anyone got anything? Anything, just fire something at me …”

Ruthie gazed up at the tiny woman and whispered, “Radio Marrakech.”

“Radio Marrakech. Radio Marrakech.” The ultra poetess closed her eyes to summon the Muse. The two musicians manning the Rififi synthesizers waited, fingers touched to keyboards, for their cue to their own improvisations. “Radio Marrakech.” She crossed arms and ankles and giggled in glee as fans of laserlight sprang from her projectors. “Okay, Tangier. Radio Marrakech.” She brought her wrists together and down. I gasped: where the fans of laserlight crossed, ephemeral holographic interference patterns shimmered. She clapped her hands, clap clapclap clap clapclap clap, each handclap an explosion of lightshards. The ectomorphic phantoms on the Prophet Nines pounced upon the beat, scooped up the beat, and rammed it through their machines. And the Rififi Club exploded!

A holographic dervish whirling in a jellaba of laserlight, she danced, snapping her body round and around and around to the rhythm of the driving synthesizers and her extemporized, ecstatic poetry.

“Oh Arthur, Arthur, Dervish D with the leather turban! Clay between your terra-cotta toes, Arthur, clay, red dust: do your teeth glint, like Valentino (again and again and again the Sheik), like Bogart, will they always have Paris?

“Axial hub of the city (commercial spiritual political amen amen amen): square of souls, squared souls, the sum of the square of the souls on the hypo you use is equal to the sum of the squares on the other side. Round gravesockets, plug-in saints, skull-rooted teeth of
Tyrannosaurus oedipus sultan
: on the final Day of Judgment, on the day of all souls (round, square, soulful), on the day, on the day, on the day when God says, ‘Well, how about you?’ on that Black Thursday, will you be there, Arthur? Plucked from your covering of warm grave soil like a tooth from a sultan’s skull; clay between your toes, clay between your teeth, red clay of Africa, neo-barbarian!

“Ochre. Ochre. Ochre. Ochre … primeval pulse-beat, call sign of radio, Radio Africa, Radio Marrakech: ochreness abounds. And if I had an aerial, a minaret, a spire, a lingam, what soul juice could I not draw down from God? Rock ‘n’ Soul with a minaret between my bounding breasts. Look at the jets, Arthur, the jets, dropping their bombs between the minarets, bounding, bouncing bombs, Arthur.

“See! The minarets falling!

“See! The spires collapsing!

“See! The lingam wilting … melting … falling … falling …

“If I had an aerial, an aerial ten thousand miles tall, I’d run up the aerial, run up the aerial, run up the goddamn aerial, swing and sway and swing and sway and swing and sway until it came down in Marrakech, in the Square of Souls, inverse Rapture for the Judgment Day.

“Clay Arthur, the clay man, red dirt of Africa, Bogart-toothed, are you ready for the Judgment? Is your soul stropped for my shriving as I come sliding down the aerial down down down from heaven, ten thousand miles of aerial, to judge you, Arthur, find you wanting?

“Your soul music. The glint of your skull-rooted teeth, emotional dinosaur. An ocean away you stand planted in red soil: spirit-weed of the Rif, of the Kif. From my bi-plane apartment I watch you, Arthur, in Marrakech, in the Square of Souls, square-souled Berber. Dust and snow. Dust and snow! Behind you the Atlas: High Atlas, atlas of the world: God, how much longer will you carry the world on your shoulders?”

The synthesizers hissed into silence. The spray of moiré patterns froze, faded.

I could not move.

None of us could move.

Then a cry from the door, a smash of breaking glass, a blossom of flame brought us crashing down. The crowd packed into the Rififi surged, shrieking. Somewhere, somewhen, I had lost Ruthie’s hand. I snatched up a fire extinguisher hidden beneath a table, not to deal with the leaping flames enveloping the rear of the club, but as a weapon. The anger. Never very far from me, my personal demon, a thorn in my flesh. I stood swinging the extinguisher, ready for an enemy, any enemy. Screams, dervish whoops; by the burning Moorish doors shadow-play demons struggled with the bouncers, overcame them, and crashed forward in a wave of table-turning and chair-smashing. Panicked patrons stampeding the fire doors jammed me hard against the edge of the low stage.