Jonestown (29 page)

Deacon was deaf when he set out, deaf to the splintering crash of the banqueting hall. But his ghost within a ghost – that I had encountered on the stage of Memory theatre – inhabited my Ear in the Mask and I heard the sound of black-out salvaged lives myself in the orchestra of space. Yet my mind was still a blank with regard to the journey I was making and my return to Port Mourant or Crabwood Creek and the newborn Child. Deacon had returned to greet the infant in December 1954. Deacon had returned nine months to the day that he set out. I knew all this in a kind of calendrical, mechanical version of colonial fortune, religious as much as ideological expectations of El Dorado. But abysmally enough – much as I exercised such expectations in the Play – I could not see myself returning in the Mask of Deacon.

Commonsense Memory theatre declared I was required to return within the ground of the Play. Even as the saviour-Child was called upon to manifest himself. After all (I touched the solid, fantasy, theatrical or dramatic
persona
and Mask I wore) I possessed lines, did I not, to utter to Marie – lines of greeting as I bore great wealth in my hand – on seeing her newborn Child in the Play. But even as I touched the Mask, and sought to confirm the wealth of El Dorado, a shudder ran through my frame and I knew (without knowing how I knew) that some peculiar hidden text or change in the Play had been inserted into my dangerous revisitation of a past year I should have remembered in all its details. Dangerous revisitation of past times!

Past time carries within itself (when revisited in numinous truth) hidden textual crises relating to debts left unpaid by those whose Masks one wears. Those debts may incur facing – in this instance – Deacon's judges which would then become
my
judges in the altered textuality of the Play. Why judges? What crime had Deacon committed for which
I
must pay in standing within his shoes and his Mask? Ghosts are real in Memory theatre as the frame one inhabits gives way to undreamt-of apparently
immater
ial
truth. Such immateriality is a challenge to the core of materialism one takes for granted as the real world …

A shudder ran through my frame as I felt myself ageing. The Mask had aged in the grave of space, cradle of space. Grave and cradle were extremities in counterpoint to assert a medium of epic, well-nigh untranslatable ghost one seeks nevertheless to translate through hidden, eruptive texts within the Play of civilization. I was curiously alive at the heart of untranslatable counterpoint between all extremities.

How old was I in cosmic humour, cosmic theatre, in revisiting the past? In 1954 I had been twenty-four years old. In 1994 (when I was on the verge of completing – or apparently completing – my Dream-book) I was sixty-four years old. Deacon was also
twenty-four
in 1954. I had sailed back in time from 1994 to 1954 and should – as on all previous voyages with Mr Mageye – have resumed my youth (or the youth of Deacon whose Mask I wore) in the Play of Memory theatre. I should be as old as Deacon was on his wedding day and on his departure for Roraima. Surely the matter was simplified by the fact that Deacon and I were the same age.

Was there an outer textual age, an outer textual ghost – which Deacon and I shared in the music of space – even as he had inhabited my Ear and released the imagination of anatomy infused to leap into well-nigh indescribable counterpoint between all ages?

Mr Mageye would have laughed at such dread yet comedy. Divine comedy ages stars or imbues them with paradoxical youth in the astronomy of science upon the immense depth and canvas of space.

So perhaps light-year comedy in theatres of archetypal time brings characters into play which are vessels of simultaneous age and youth. A Jest! Think of the grey-bearded children in the banqueting hall. But on this occasion it was an omen of mystical terror, cloth of hair and flesh, unravelling attire that I scarcely relished. Would I disappear, would I vanish soon, as Mr Mageye and the Prisoner of Devil's Isle had done? Yet I enjoyed (if ‘enjoyment' was the term) a curious lightness as if Mr Mageye were raining cards upon me which he had kept up the sleeves of his robe as he discarded his dress. They fell on the Skin of the Predator that I had spread upon the Ship of Bread.

At last the crumbling yet resuscitated Ship – crumbling, salvaged Ship – arrived beneath an apparition of Roraima, as the great Rock of ages may have been geological aeons ago, when Roraima pulsed and rolled in space in the form of a giant waterfall, a giant card of transience and transition and appearance from Mr Mageye's deck. Transience and solidity are interchangeable features in the Carnival gamble of resources which we need to approach with sacramental identity and care … I felt the necessity to measure such sacrament by leaping into space myself (as if I had fallen out of God's pack of cards) but was held in check by my desire to secure a fortune for Marie's Child …

From the hills around the Apparition of Roraima I saw the natives of this Sky-region descending. They moved at a slightly awkward pace attuned to the lame who voyage upon the comedy of light. Light-year feet tend to stumble upon nursery ladders in space.

Was this the Sky-river which Deacon had entered in his travels in 1954? I felt awkward myself as my feet and limbs aged into unpredictable youth and vice versa in a counterpoint of
concordance
and dissonance. I turned the riddle of age once again around in my mind. When I sailed back to Albuoystown from Jonestown I had assumed the age of nine (rightfully mine it seemed in 1939) except that two fingers were missing from one hand. And that was a signal few – if any (except Mr Mageye) – perceived as the mystically changed age of the body when it revisits the past in numinous character and truth. One slips into
elusive frames akin to a deck of cards raining in space when one revisits the past.

A deck of cards (celestial mathematics Deacon would have said) fall apparently randomly, haphazardly, upon the Skin of the Predator in Memory theatre. My body is amongst them now, old, young. The Ship of Bread is amongst them now. Eclipses appear within the Sky of the past (Eclipses of Memory) which one revisits and sees
through
historic blinds or curtains: such Eclipses have immediacy in the Dark of the Mind, the Mind of Memory, the Mind of history. Memorial stars appear over the cradles of humanity and arch in the neighbourhood of Eclipse. Such curvatures of light were apparently non-existent in the past to the Eye of history.

When the alterations in specialities of time, in the bristling life of the Predator that one touches in oneself, through oneself, beyond oneself, appear negligible, as negligible as a smashed, ghostly finger that one brings from the future into the past, one is (I am) inclined to dismiss or underestimate one's trespass in space in the body of dreams and the scars that remain after every encounter with life in space. Such encounters slip from
dream-memory
but are revisited upon us in the fierce games that we play on Earth, games that sometimes shatter us into a revelation of inner, textual bodies, outer, textual bodies, inner tongues, outer tongues. But one misreads – in the flat, mechanical word – the intensity and the extensity of the Game, the Game of resurrection within and beyond the Grave of space. That is my Play of staggered yet orchestrated imageries …

Every misreading on my part stirs the Breath of the Predator into the pulse of another random fall from a deck of cards. In addition to a ghostly, sliced hand (that may attempt to sort the cards I receive) I suddenly find incalculable time imprinted on the gaol of flesh, the youth of flesh that I treasure. Imprinted on my Mask! On Deacon's Mask when he fought as an Eagle-knight, an Eagle-angel, with the Titan Tiger Jonah! And still one may seek to deny an orchestration of self-confessional, self-judgemental
imageries
and their inevitable counterpoint but changing roles of appointment with the Predator whose claws are visible
everywhere
in a wounded universe. The epic repentance of the Predator takes us beyond the framed and flat word into the Virgin-archetype and the rhetoric of intercourse with reality shorn of violence in the illimitable (however apparently black-out) music of counterpointed universes into which we may leap.

Giant rocks and waterfalls and precipices on the Virgin deck of space intermingle with the Predator's random, chastened pulse. Such is the riddle of my Play (my Play, Deacon's Play, Mr Mageye's Play?) in its Virgin transgression of frames of terror.

I turned at last to confront the Apparition of Roraima in geological time. I felt the scars of rock and waterfall and fossil grain in my bones and upon my skin in their eclipsed encounters with apparently inhospitable space, inhospitable grave.

Diamonds and gold seemed to bubble at my fingertips as I reached into the inhospitable grave of Roraima in its long and dangerous sojourn through geological ages to acquire a perch, an Eagle's fierce perch, within and upon the watershed between the floodwaters of the Amazon and the torrential rapids of the Orinoco.

On the Eagle's beak I saw a glistening network of Scorpions that seemed to aid me – within eclipses of Memory – in the acquisition of gold from the rock of ages, the waterfalls of ages in great Roraima.

Extraordinary plants and flowers shone with teeth and brilliant flowering, repetitive lips in the Shadow of the Scorpion
Constellation
… Yet when I reached again nothing was there. Nothing itself was a fossil apparition in space. Much depended on the apparently random fall of the deck – its corresponding imprints upon oneself – if one were to reach into time past in the present relived moment for an incalculable storage of wealth that had evolved and accumulated. The hazards and dangers varied with apparently random imprints that made time past accessible in tangible form when one rifled secret hoards in fire and rock and water and space.

I had clearly no apparitional key – in this instance – to secure a fortune in apparitional diamonds and gold from apparitional Roraima. Were I to return in a hundred years or a million years I
would then perhaps be able to trespass into fire and rock as if I had arisen from the Grave. I would have conversed with life in the universe for the necessary key. Or perhaps I would fail again, be driven to retreat again, and return again through eclipses of Memory theatre …

Scylla and Charybdis were Clashing Rocks but there were Swimming Rocks in Roraima or fossils imprinted with Vegetable gold that I tried again to reach but it seemed to reside on the
sickbed
of the Predator and within some unfathomable music or orchestration of the powers of Love within the Virgin …

I knew I could not seize the Vegetable gold but my mind and heart were light in my ageing body …

It was then that I was seized by the natives I had seen upon the hillsides. They were masked judges and I was unable to tell who they were. Their slightly halting, awkward pace made me wonder whether they were as old or young as I, lame or leaping as I.

It was a consolation to dwell upon such thoughts. Surely they would question me and let me leave. But they seized me roughly and bore me up a hillside towards a cliff-top above the Waterfall.

When we arrived they took the Skin of the Predator from me and spread it on a table.

‘We caught you red-handed,' they said, ‘with your hands in the Roraima till, Deacon.'

I wanted to laugh as if their utterance was a joke but I knew it was no joke. I flung out my hands from my body.

‘Nothing,' I said. ‘I tried to reach into what I saw. There was something there. It seemed at one stage to nestle in my fingertips but it melted, one assumes, for there was nothing there though I swear there was something. It was like a sunset and a sunrise within the breaking, crumbling Void of the universe. They are nothing, but when they harden yet run within volcanic space they become a black river of gold.'

I tried to brazen out my predicament in the light of the severity of their veiled faces, veiled eyes, unsmiling, bitter lips.

‘Liar,' they cried in unison. They seized me and pushed their fists into my pockets. I felt their fists opening like roses or crabs and in an instant they came forth with gold and diamonds that
were strewn on the Predator's Skin into neat piles and heaps.

‘Liar,' they repeated. ‘Where did you get this?'

I was utterly astonished and unable to reply.

‘Soon you will tell us, Deacon, that you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth and that you sold this in your infancy, infant unconsciousness, for a fortune.'

‘Mockery is not proof,' I cried. ‘I tell you there was nothing there.
You
have
framed
me.
'

‘
We
have
framed
you
?'
They spoke with fury and deliberation.

‘Well you must have done so,' I cried. ‘For there was nothing there.
And
I
am
not
Deacon
.'

‘Ah! we were waiting for that. We knew you would deny it all.'

‘Deny what?'

‘Deny that we have caught you at the scene of the crime. You couldn't keep away, could you, Deacon?'

Where and what I wondered was the scene of the crime? I stroked the Skin of the Predator. In the dying afternoon light it shone with disturbing beauty. There were idyllic portions in the Skin where sheep and lambs seemed to graze
and birds flew. There were portions that gleamed with swords and shields and armour. There were portions that appeared to invoke the launching of ships, the arrival of Cortés and Pizarro in ancient America.

‘Where is the scene of the crime?' I demanded.

‘You are a cunning devil, Deacon. You would distract our attention from the fact that we assisted you to garner a fortune from Mount Roraima forty years ago.'

‘I know Deacon was here forty years ago,' I agreed. ‘But I am not Deacon. He was seeking a fortune for Marie's Child through whom he intended to rule his people. It was a kind of folkloric contract with the stars. They were savannah people. Up to all sorts of tricks and bargains. But Deacon was marked out from the day he was found in the savannahs and adopted by the entire community. A fallen angel! I know all this. I know that he fulfilled, in the eyes of the peasantry, some expectation of leadership if not kingship. He was pretty ruthless. His betrothal to Marie, for instance, was a national event. A small nation,
needless to say! But does size matter? Does the size of Bonampak or Rome or Jerusalem or Bethlehem or Tula matter upon a deck of raining cards in which a kingdom or a hamlet may become the eye of a storm? The truth is I suffered from partial amnesia and severe trauma after the Jonestown holocaust. I slowly began unravelling the trauma as I made my way through Limbo Land to New Amsterdam, where I was well enough to begin my Dream-book and to sail in the company of Mr Mageye.'