Empire Dreams (25 page)

The wind from Africa whirled the dust through the streets of Tangier, rattled the blind, swirled the notes of an Islamic chant through the open window of Room 317. It made Hannah smile. Dreadful, a twenty-seven-year-old smile on an eighty-eight-year-old face. I see it yet.

“Still good, Morrisey. Still the magic.” She spoke with the voice of cancer. “It’s coming, Morrisey. I know this body too well not to know it.”

My fingers strayed to my trouser pocket and the uncompromising cylinder of the hypodermic. A friend from the Red Crescent had given it to me, and enough morphine for the job.

“Hannah …”

“What is it, Morrisey?”

“Have you ever thought of …”

I could not say it.

“Suicide? I know what you’ve got in your pocket. You can’t hide things from an ultra, even a sick old ultra like this one. Thanks for the thought, you meant it sincerely, but you see, I’ve already committed suicide, slow suicide, the moment Dr. MacKinley took my three hundred dollars. I’ve had thirty-three months, that’s more than most. A thousand and one nights of wonder.”

“You knew?”

“We all know. It’s the bargain we make: to burn our lives away in a flash for a glimpse at the whole of the moon. And I’d make it again, Morrisey. It’s a devil’s bargain, but this is living. Give me your hand, Morrisey.”

Her skin was hot and dry like the skin of a snake; there was fever under it. She closed her eyes and her body stiffened, as if soul-electricity had burned along her spine.

“Now,” she said. “Now now now now.”

And I was taken up.

I felt the earth turn ponderously beneath me, embedded in the greater, grander turning of the orrery of the stars, in turn wheeling to the vast gyrations of the Universal spiral like some Sufi saint in contemplation of God, like some fool on a hill

… the triple helix of space, time, and consciousness spun in the great void of Unknowing in a dance of dervishes …

I listened to the chamber music of the atoms and the clear, cold harmonics of the fundamental particles which lawed them together into the grand, incoherent arpeggios of quantum theory …

1 felt ten million years of past stroke my skin with the intimacy of the racial Lilith: I tasted the earth of Africa, the bone dust, the ashes of the years spread like dung across the land; I smelled time was and time is and time yet to be and the corrupt stench of my own dear flesh, ultimately, comically, mortal …

I saw the whole of the moon.

For an instant.

Just for an instant.

I was lifted to Godhood and walked in the footsteps of the ultras.

All this, just for one single, searing instant. Then I was brought low, I fell from heaven like Lucifer and never again will I know as keen a loss.

The final spasm of the stroke had snapped Hannah’s neck. Even as I watched, her claw hands opened like flowers, relaxing into death. Her eyes had opened, some blood had trickled from them. I closed them with small centime coins.

As I left, the flock of ultras, knowing beyond knowledge that Hannah was dead, descended around the bed, squabbling and mobbing and pecking, pecking, pecking.

I waited in the lobby. I tried to remember the light and the fire, when Hannah had set the world-weary cafes and clubs alight with her poetry. I could not recall a single word. So much unspoken, so little said.

It was late, very late when the ultras brought down the dreadfully small bundle wrapped in white linen bands. A Peugeot station wagon was parked by the side entrance; they slipped the tiny, tiny corpse into the back. I followed in the Mercedes taxi and the night wind blew cold on me through the jammed-open sunroof. I followed through the empty streets of Tangier, I followed out into the hills to the west of the city, I followed to a long moon-white beach by the Atlantic.

There they burned her. The ultras gathered around the flames and spoke among themselves in hushed Jam whispers. I stood apart: separate, alien. Above me Arcturus rose, vain guide-star. I saw faces lit by the fireglow, the faces from the New Fariq Hotel, Armand the chauffeur and the pale woman who had played the other synthesizer to Hannah’s improvisations. And I saw Ruthie, and I imagined clay in her eyes, in her hair, slapped across her breasts, her belly.

If she saw me she did not choose to recognize me. I did not desire her to do so, for what could we, an ultra, a flatlifer, ever have,
ever have had
, in common?

Toward dawn the ultras dispersed. I remained, rubbing hands in the early morning chill, and the wind rose out of Africa, lifting the seagulls, chasing the ashes down the long white beach. And I felt the red wind blow through me and shake things loose and out of me they came, tumbling like birds blown on the wind, the words; Hannah’s legacy to me. Words wind and ashes. I will use them well, Hannah. I promise.

WHEREVER, WHENEVER, TWO
or three are gathered together (some Silk Road caravanserai, some neon all-night diner, some airport transit lounge, some snow-shrouded Trans-Siberian railroad halt, some Chaucerian pilgrims’ tavern, some russet-walled medina), there the City of Stories may be found. Wherever, whenever travelers meet; whenever, wherever the stories of their travels are told (exchanged like bartered spices or caged songbirds), there its caravans and pavilions halt in their perennial migration; invisible to the eye, of course, but none the less real for being insubstantial, for the stories out of which they are woven are the most real things in the universe.

There were five of them, gathered together against the night, a fragile fellowship of warmth and unique experience. As custom demanded, they agreed that each should tell of the marvelous places he had encountered on his travels. By the comparison of each man’s story, they might together arrive at some common insight into the way of the world. So they drew themselves into a circle around the fire and turned their backs to the wind which blew from around the edge of the world. And drawn by the fire, yet afraid to draw closer for fear that its light might reveal their insubstantiality, the ghosts gathered and encamped and the sound of their voices was like long wind in tent ropes.

The big red-haired, red-bearded man offered to tell the first story. His comrades nodded their consent. After pausing for a moment of recollection, the big red man spoke into the firelight.

* * * *

THE CITY OF LOGOS AND RHEMA

HE COULD NOT
properly name the city he had visited, for, that city being founded wholly upon the Word, its name was forever changing; a stream of nouns, verbs, and adjectives, an oceanic mantra of syllables ever-growing, ever-expanding as the city grew and expanded. For the people of
BarraboomriverrunAnnaLiviaPluribelle …
deemed it the greatest of sins that the name of an object should be lesser than the object itself. Thus their word for something as contemptible as a
chair
included a brief résumé of the various activities for which it was designed, a short description of its general appearance, and a mutable modifier to indicate the various varieties of wood which might be used in its construction. If such a humble object as a
chair
possessed such a name, how then could the name of the city be any less? For the name of the city to be lesser than the city itself was to demean the city it named.

No less than their city were the citizens: each carried round with him like rosaries great necklaces of names: sons-of, brothers-of, nephews-of, uncles-to, fathers-of, grandsons-of. And, as by common etiquette names must be exchanged upon meeting in the street or upon a crowded omnibus or in the congested laneways of the bourse, the social intercourse of these people was a lengthy and verbose affair.

The city stood upon a river. Not a river of dark, oppressive waters commingled with the excreta of the populace, its beer cans, dead dogs, and abandoned shopping trolleys; rather, a river of words, an onward-flowing stream of consciousness without source and apparently without destination, a babelogue of voices flowing ceaselessly from future to past. Like some hypothetical Venice of the mind, the city was founded upon words and it was an unspoken but universal tenet of faith among its garrulous millions that their words were the literal foundation of the streets, squares, and commerces; that if the stream of dialogue should even for one instant be interrupted and silenced, in that same instant the city would cease to be. They believed the City of Logos and Rhema was maintained solely by its people’s constant definition and description of it. “I’ll meet you in Commercial Court …” “Well, there I was a-roving out on Fairview Avenue …” “Two o’clock, St. Stephen’s, be there, wear a green carnation …” Streets, alleys, malls and markets, bourses and bibliotheques, commerces and courts, constantly rang with the city’s vocal remembrance of itself.

Yet this city did not stand alone upon the Rhema, the spoken word, like Adam balancing for a thousand years upon one foot. There were other words, strong, silent words, solid words, unspoken words; the words trapped like fossilized sea-snails on paper pages, layered in Morocco-bound strata and marshaled into great synclinoria upon mile after mile of sagging oak shelving. These were the Logos: the written words. Holiest of all, these written words. Whole libraries were settling into the subsoil beneath the accumulation of folio, quarto, demi, foolscap, A4, parchment, hammered vellum, plain photocopy, bond, bank, and carbon. Day by day, hour by hour, new volumes were added to the stupendous mass of words yet still the paper chase showed no sign of coming to a weary end. From the typewriters, quills, and word processors of myriad authors in myriad chilly garrets reams of paper scrolled, spewed, thundered upon the city like a second flood.

Oldest and most revered of all the city’s books was one housed in a special carrel in the Great Library. Ancient beyond antiquity, its name was of such a lineage and length that it would have taken weeks to complete it. Therefore it was only, ever known as the Book of Shining Things. One glimpse of the fabulously illuminated folios within was conviction enough that the shorthand was justified. Lifetimes of monastic devotion had handcrafted impossibly intricate spirals within spirals, lattices within lattices, archangels within archangels, words within words in the purest golds, silvers, and carmines. So precious was this book, so ancient and delicate the luminous parchments, that on any day only two of its pages were ever on display.

On account of this, the scholar who wished to study all of the Book of Shining Things had needs be a man of rare patience and humility. Each day he would join the line of gowned Reading Fellows which stretched out of the Great Library, across the cobbled Quadrangle, and around the massive (and considerably subsided) Repository of Modern Classics. There he would wait patiently shuffling forward just a footstep at a time until the time came, just before the Great Library closed at dusk, for his glimpse at the illuminated pages shining like angels’ epistles in the afterglow, the gleaming knotwork a graphic representation of the convoluted soul of the City of Logos and Rhema. And to know it all, he repeated this ritual come hail come shine every day for two and a half years.

Second only in importance to the Book of Shining Things was a novel written by a madman and exile which was kept in a tower by the side of the sea. Upon this book, small enough to fit into the coat pocket to be read on a rapid-transit train or public omnibus, the city and all its millions were profoundly divided. Half the populace hailed it the ultimate epiphany of the Modem Man (whatever he might be), a golden galleon asail upon the stream of consciousness. Half the populace damned it a carbuncle, a dag of fecal material clinging to the rump of the Body Literary, a Cultic Toilet book written by a toilet man with a toilet mind. So fierce and irreconcilable were the opinions held that districts, streets, even houses and families, were sundered into warring factions on account of this book. Yet all were agreed upon one point. It was that, though written in exile, its descriptions of the city were so detailed, and of such precision, that should the day ever dawn when the Babel of voices ceased and the city, unremembered, forgot itself and vanished, it could be rebuilt brick by brick, stone by stone, from the words of the book in the tower by the edge of the sea. Yet this was as much a tenet of faith as the dependence of the city upon the Word for none, not one, of the massed millions who praised so Heaven-High and vilified so Inferno-Deep the book had ever read so much as a single sentence of it.

Inspired by this volume which contained the whole city within it (the Greater subsumed within the Lesser), the Bibliosophists of the city libraries had devised a scheme whereby the whole universe might be contained within the covers of a book; indeed, less than a book, a single cartridge of taped instructions for the language machines. The simplicity of the concept verged on the inspirational. Working at the superspeeds characteristic of such devices, the language machines could continuously juxtapose the words and syllabic groupings that are the foundations of language in accordance with the rules of Universal Grammar to create new words, new syllabic groupings, new phrases, new sentences. The overwhelming majority of those sentences would be the veriest nonsense but once every few billion throws of the grammatic dice a meaningful phrase might be coined, a sensible sentence, a coherent paragraph. In the dueness of time every possible permutation of language would have been explored and every possible book that ever could be written, written.

The name the Bibliosophists gave to this project was the Ultimate ‘Cyclopedia. In terms of the Greater subsumed within the Lesser, it far outstripped even the book in the tower by the sea, for every book that ever could be was stored all on one small cassette of flimsy magnetic tape.

These were the names of some of the books the casual reader might find on the shelves of the Ultimate ‘Cyclopedia.

The Questions, and Answers, to Every Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Issue that Ever Has, Does, or Ever Will Vex Mankind
. (Numerous Volumes.)