Empire Dreams (26 page)

The Calculation of
Pi
to Its Utmost Decimal Place
. (Still undergoing printing.)

The Autobiography of God
.

The Collected Future History (or Histories) of the World (or Worlds)
.

The Biography of Every Man, Woman, and Child Who Was, Is, or Is to Come
.

And when done browsing through the towering stacks, this casual reader might obtain, for a small reference fee, a printout of any fact he could possibly desire to know. Thus he might carry home (as casually as the daily gossip sheet) among those facts, his own biography and, by his fire that night, with his wife and children about him, read in it the exact place, time, and nature of his own death.

* * * *

After a time of meditation in which each traveler reflected upon what he had heard in the mirror of his own experience, the second storyteller spoke. He was a short black-haired man, possessed of a relentless dark energy and a voice that carried far into the encircling dark and troubled the ghosts, a violation of the night.

THE CITY OF THE DEATHLESS DEAD

HE HAD PASSED
through the City of the Deathless Dead in the early summer when the black funeral roses were budding on the cemetery walls. Peculiarly, there had been no rain that day, which surprised him, for he had been told that the rain fell continuously on the City of the Deathless Dead. Since early in the morning his wanderings had been channeled and directed by the arbitrary twistings and turnings of the towering walls, his journey overshadowed by lofty cenotaphs and obelisks. Past the porcelain mausoleums of the noble and the green-mounded potter’s fields of the lowly he steered his course, past paling-defended wall vaults piled so full with generations of interments that the bottommost coffins had split and splintered their oak and leather seams, baring corrupt limbs, hanks of hair, gnawbones of vertebrae to the rude gaze of the living. He walked and he walked and he walked until the decaying perfume of the threnodic roses (known sentimentally by the people of the city as
Flowers of Corruption
) so overwhelmed him with its sickliness that he felt he must clear his wits with clear, cold water from a memorial fount.

Here he encountered the funeral party. Great and famous must have been this departed soul whose open coffin rested amongst wreaths and posies behind the glass of the municipal funeral tram, for coffin and tram were decked with ribbons and bouquets and bunting in patriotic colors which added a touch of not-inappropriate gaiety to the somber black plumes and wrought-iron sprays. Recognizing an opportunity to familiarize himself with the people of the city (both living and dead) and their ways of life and death, he had joined a huddle of black-banded mourners at a municipal stop and boarded the mourners’ car.

High was the conviviality in that streetcar! Bottles of incendiary brown spirits were passed from hand to hand, and lengthy eulogies were extemporized by the cortege of relatives, friends, well-wishers, and curious upon the deceased and his interminable chain of Glorious Ancestors: the patriots, rebels, insurrectionists, freedom fighters, and warriors of destiny in whose footsteps the deceased had trodden so faithfully all his earthly days. A True Son of the Four Green Fields, he was, a Martyr in the Endless Struggle for Nationhood. Eyes misted with maudlin sentiment, and from deep in the anguished caverns of the soul had broken forth wailing, keening laments counterpointed with laudatory ballads, improvisational and open-ended so that fellow mourners might add their own verses of mawkish, patriotic doggerel.

Every soul aboard the tram, he had learned, could boast a lineage of ancestors as lengthy, glorious, and, of necessity, as patriotic as that of the man in the next car. Indeed, all had been taught as children the catechism that their true homes were their coffins, that humdrum lives might be rendered glorious by a patriotic death, as had the man’s in the next car, struck down—while placing green branches on the catafalque of an insurrectionist ancestor—by a treacherous heart that had turned to pure fat through a constant diet of pan-fried food. The essence of patriotism, so declared the catechism, was to love one’s native soil enough to let one’s life leak out upon its ungrateful green sod.

“Look, stranger, we are the people of the City of the Deathless Dead,” they said, “and we carry upon our backs, each one of us, thirty dead souls. Thirty lives, two thousand years of accumulated living. And not for one instant of respite can we lay this burden down, though it stoops our backs and twists us, for the dead hurry us and lash us with their constant demands of endless respect, endless veneration. Thus our squalid tenements squat beneath the skirts of the cemetery walls and we live out our hunchbacked lives in the shadows of the round towers and high crosses and alabaster harps which once through Tara’s halls, beribboned with ragged colors, and this is the question we ask, stranger; it is, Why do our dead, whom we loved in life and love all the more in death, hate us so much?”

He saw the thirty souls clinging like bats to each of the fellows on the tram. Some carried the likenesses of those ancestors sewn onto their clothing, becoming flashing kaleidoscopes of faces and memories amongst which their own features seemed pale and ethereal, so much less substantial than the watercolor miniatures, sepia prints, and Instamatics of the dead which dangled from their coats. Others concealed in their vest pockets the mummified
memento mori
of generations dead: a finger, a lock of hair, a perfumed letter, a toenail, an eyeball in a vial of brandy; while yet others conducted animated mumbled conversations with unseen correspondents. From these latter he learned that the houses of the populace contained within themselves a second, separate house: the household of the dead. These Dead Houses were identical in every detail to the houses of the living save that the horsehair settles by the hearths were empty, the dinners stood uneaten upon the dining tables, and the immaculately laundered and perfumed bed linen (
Flowers of Corruption
, of course) was never wrinkled, never soiled. All this was held in perpetual readiness for the unseen, unheard tenancy of the congregation of the dead.

He left the funeral party shortly before the tram, swinging and swaying with gathering insobriety along the iron rails, arrived at the terminus outside the iron gates of Pleasant Prospect Cemetery. He had heard from the peons of the outlying regions of some of the more grisly pre-interment customs and had no desire to participate in them. He tarried only to see the bier of the dead man he now felt he knew better than the living placed upon the shoulders of the pallbearers (by tradition one dark, one fair, one red, one ginger, one brown, one gray) and borne through the becherubed gates into the shadowy land of pillars and crucifixes, monolithic steles, and the headless pillars of those that died young. The closest relatives fell into line behind the coffin, each carrying one of the five sacred elements which must be buried with the corpse to ensure the soul safe passage past fairy and imp and pitchforked demon of purgation to the land of Ever-youth. Spoonful of ashes, turd of horse dung, drop of menstrual blood, thimble of spirits, clod of good green turf. Such an uncertain and perilous business, this dying.

He turned away from the iron gates of Pleasant Prospect and chose a path which would lead him out of the City of the Deathless Dead. He wandered past the graveyards and Patriots’ Plots, past the grand palazzi the dead had built for themselves and the grim tumbledowns to which they had condemned the living. His thoughts turned to things seen and unseen, the nature of mortality.

The dead, he concluded, were endlessly jealous of the living. And because the dead could never again hope to possess life, they sought to drag life down to lie close with them in the grave. In their never-ending demands for reverence and veneration, for sacrifice and patriotism, for ritual and observance, they drew life down into death and so were comfortable with it. He saw the shape of the world the dead had bequeathed the living. It had the semblance of a tube of brightly colored glass, the most delicate and fragile glass possible to human science. All around this glass tunnel was a deep, dark void filled with whispers. Those who walked the narrow fragile tunnel did so knowing that at any moment the glass might shatter beneath their feet and drop them into void.

The dead are all around you
, spoke the whispers,
and every day, every hour, our numbers swell
.

Presently it began to rain, the expected rain which fell on the City of the Deathless Dead, a thin, cold, penetrating rain that soaked him to the bone within moments but which miraculously washed the air clean of the stink of the black funeral roses.

* * * *

Third to speak was the quiet man, the long, thin, pale one who bore about him the unmistakable stigmata of sickness in early life. Nervous of demeanor, he had held silence during the first two stories while his comrades grunted and muttered in recognition of some detail, some triviality, which reminded them of their own experiences. He chose to begin his story with a short autobiography.

* * * *

THE CITY OF VIBRANT SOULS

HAVING, IN HIS
sickly youth, read exhaustively every available Baedeker, Berlitz, and Guide Michelin, he had formed a fanciful notion of this city and its mercurial inhabitants and had vowed, upon his sickbed, that one day he would certainly visit this numinous, radiant place. When I am old and wise, he had said, when I have majority and maturity enough to appreciate what I see.

He attained majority and maturity, and on the first day of each new spring, he would say, This year, this year I will go. Nothing will stop me, this year. But each year he failed to go. He had devised a compendium of excuses why he could not visit the city
this
year. Chief among them was his fear of disillusionment. He feared that the City of Vibrant Souls which stood solid and enduring on the fertile plains by the edge of the Eastern Sea could never match the City of Vibrant Souls which floated vague and idealized upon the fertile plains of his imagination. There is no disillusionment greater than that which damns the greatest dream. Yet the city shone before him, calling him from his lofty pinnacles of prevarication. As years passed and, like fine wine maturing, he deepened within himself, he thought, Can the agony of disillusionment really be any worse than the agony of unrequited desire? Thus one autumn morning he packed bag, passport, and the guidebooks of childhood mornings and went in search of the City of Vibrant Souls.

From the moment the honey-tongued cabby swept him and his bags out of the arrivals lounge into a hackney more akin to a public house than to a public conveyance, and thence into the stream of life that was the City of Vibrant Souls, he knew that his illusions would not be shattered. Indeed, the city and its people were far greater than any fancyings of his adolescent sickbed imagination. The City of Vibrant Souls seduced him, bound and gagged and finally dominated him like some Montgomery Street rubber Venus with a whip.

The fat barrow-women bawling their wares in the street markets, the doe-eyed waits begging alms in palms on the Ha’penny Bridge, the giggling gaggles of girls admiring dresses and their own reflections in boutique windows, their bubbling chitchat of boyspartiesclothes opening in him an empty, nostalgic desire; the brawling braggadocio boozers picking fights with noncombatant lampposts; the painted
bella donnas
whistling low come-hithers from upper-story windows; the ox-shouldered gangs of streetfighters filling the narrow cobbled closes with their stale, aggressive pheromones; the sudden flurries of vivacious, rowdy music from a dingy side alley as street musicians struck up on ocarinas and bouzoukis; the jugglers, the plate-spinners, the bunco-boothers, the prancers to fife and tabor; the aged, tooth-free balladeers, one hand cupped to ears as if listening critically to their muezzin-calls of sentimental returns to Fair Ardbo and laments to the Rose of Faithless Love; the good-natured constables in the covered arcades who, when asked whether such an art gallery, whence such an Oriental coffeehouse, prefaced their directions with a comprehensive list of the various ways
not
to go … all was as he had always dreamed it might be. Like that latex domina, the people of the City of Vibrant Souls teased him, delighted him, frustrated him, and brought him to the edge of fulfillment only to leave him with pain and emptiness.

How stunted his life seemed compared to these lusty, vital people. How he longed for the secret of their casual mastery of living, how he longed for a life as rich and full as an Old Master hung on a gallery wall.

Thinking that somewhere in its past he might strike the taproot of the city’s Tree of Life, he delved into the history of city and people, their gaudy lives of raillery, rakery, wining, dining, wenching, gambling, dueling, and practical joking on the epic scale. He read the life of one Beau English who, leaping from his salon window into a waiting phaeton, drove it to Jerusalem and back for a bet. He studied carefully the records of the Rakehell Club, that circle of dissolute gentry whose lives of spectacular debauchery and decadence (one of their company, having shot a waiter for slow service, found him charged to his dinner bill at five hundred florins) climaxed in their setting light to the house in which they were disporting themselves so that they might savor a foretaste of the hellfire to come. Springing from every page came lust, rapaciousness, cruelty, spite, and greed, yet also elegance, sophistication, courtesy,
bon mots
, style, and a delight in the refined things of life. The beaux and bucks who at dawn blazed at each other with dueling pieces and at night drank themselves stuporous in perfumed whorehouses were those same who from their town offices planned the art galleries, the auditoria, the covered markets, the gracious green gardens, and the avenues of immaculate red-brick townhouses which so characterized the city. He came to understand that two seemingly irreconcilable principles guided the life of the city: one which delighted in the base, coarse, and gross aspects of being; the other which took pleasure from refinement and good taste. Now he was enlightened. Now he saw the elegant fashions; the viperish wit; the sudden, sword-flashing tempers; the beautiful shops and townhouses; the lust for litigation, for a fight, a dare, a bet, a life-staking wager; as manifestations of these guiding principles, this paradoxical yin and yang of taste and crudity.