Mirrors in the Deluge Read online

  “Now I will confess something that might make me seem unduly naïve or perverse, namely that I wanted to proceed in this simple style, like a carefree gypsy, for the entire duration of my journey. It was a romantic notion I had of myself, a foolish one too, but I believed I had the stamina to truly become what I wanted to be. To travel and lodge in comfort seemed a betrayal of my aspirations, and that is why I rejected the funds given by my friends, though I had no wish to hurt their feelings. They would never know of my poverty until I returned, eventually, to reclaim my treasure and pass my old age in luxury, saturated with worldly experiences.

  “Naturally, this was a gross misjudgement on my part. Walking everywhere in one pair of shoes and sleeping rough in all seasons is horribly taxing; a way of life that toughens the body and mind in one way but weakens both in others. I became a beggar, a scavenger, a thief, but by the time I was at my lowest ebb I was already too far from my home city to contemplate an easy return. Plus I could not bear the thought of losing face in front of my friends and neighbours. I resolved to keep travelling but with an adjustment to my procedure, an adjustment that would reduce the area to be covered by a fellow now in a state of malnutrition, but without loss of knowledge of far places...”

  Although I had planned to remain silent during his tale, I found myself asking, “And how did you accomplish this?”

  He winked behind his pale blue lenses, first his right eye, then his left. “I used proxies! My system is simplicity itself and has served me admirably ever since, or at least until I met you. I no longer hope to visit in person every land in the world. Instead I walk in a straight line – as straight as possible – until I meet a stranger coming the other way. I hail him and ask for information regarding the lands that are ahead of me but behind him. When I have heard everything there is to be said, I commit all the details to memory and then I abruptly change my direction.

  “I change my direction always by ninety degrees, no more or less, so my progress consists of a series of right angles. The question you are about to ask is: how do I decide to turn left or right? First, I ask the stranger for a low value coin, then I toss this and consult the result. Heads means right, tails means left. If the stranger refuses to give me any charity, I use another method: the direction of the wind, the croaking of frogs, there are innumerable ways of choosing. I never turn back, never retrace my steps – that is a rule I refuse to break. The ground I tread must always be new.

  “You consider me a little cracked in the head? But my system is an effective method of travelling mostly by hearsay. For a poor man it is a beautiful abridgment and compression of the great outside. It saves my poor bones much toil and my feet much wear. I see what I can see with my own eyes but I also borrow, in a manner of speaking, the eyes of those who have gone to places I never have and never will. This is not cheating, it is merely a form of good management. And one day, purely by chance, I will find that I have gone in a giant loop. I will see my home city on the horizon and enter it with a light heart, my long journey completed, my ambition fulfilled.

  “And that is why I asked you to tell me about the places you have just come from, so that I might change my direction again at this very spot, heading east or west depending on the toss of the coin for which I would ask. But as you are disinclined to talk to me, I will pass you and continue south until I meet another traveller who is more obliging. Nonetheless I wish to thank you for your patience and attention. Who knows how long I must continue in this manner? I am exploring a maze with no real walls, the corners I turn are invisible, and the centre of this labyrinth is also the place where I entered. So now I will bid you farewell and leave you in peace.”

  He took a step forward and I held up my hands. “Wait!” I cried.

  “Yes?” he wondered.

  “Your story has touched me,” I declared, “and I will save you the trouble of tramping any further in that direction. Behind me lies a high range of mountains and beyond the mountains is a vast plain and at the centre of the plain stands an extinct volcano. In the crater of this volcano is a lake and at the centre of the lake is an island on which has been built a shining pyramid. The pyramid in hollow and full of stairways that lead to terraces where musicians play strange instruments through the night. They do this in a vain attempt to stir the volcano into life, to awaken it, to cause it to explode and propel the pyramid into the sky and towards the stars. For such is their faith.”

  “That is very curious,” he replied, “and I am pleased to learn of it. Now I will beg a coin from you in order to change my direction.”

  I reached into my pocket and found my smallest coin. He accepted it and threw the flimsy disc high, catching it in his palm and squinting. “Tails. That means I go east.” And he turned and made ready to set off.

  “Wait again!” I called to his profile.

  “What?” he muttered.

  “There is no point travelling east,” I explained, “for I have also been there and can tell you what it is like. The ground becomes damper and damper until you enter a stinking marsh. There are no cities to be found, but men build nests from reeds and the women lay eggs just like wading birds. Childbirth is an incomprehensible notion to those people. Also they speak the language of snakes and all words, even those of welcome, are a hiss.”

  “Utterly bizarre!” was his response, “but I thank you again for this information. According to my principles I will travel west instead.”

  “But I have also been there,” I quickly added, “and I can inform you that it consists of a steadily rising slope that becomes steeper and steeper by imperceptible degrees until it is a vertical wall. So gradually does the gradient increase that the unfortunate wanderer does not realise he is walking up a sheer face until he stops for a rest. At that moment gravity takes over and he plunges back down to a messy doom.”

  At this the man with the blue spectacles made no audible comment but I thought he mouthed the words, “I am stuck.” Certainly his expression seemed to confirm this interpretation, but I am no expert at the reading of lips and could not be absolutely certain. He glanced left, right, forwards and back, shuffled a few paces one way, then another, but always returned to the same lonely spot. I smiled and raised my hand in a salute.

  Then I briskly turned on my heel and hurried back the way I had come. But after half an hour I had second thoughts and looked over my shoulder. He was still there, a forlorn dot. I sighed and returned to him and I will always remember the look on his face, the indecision and bewilderment. Then he suddenly blurted:

  “I cannot move... My rules! I am stuck!”

  I nodded, pleased my earlier guess had been proved correct. “May I have my coin back?” I asked. He handed it over mutely.

  I turned again and doubled my pace, my heart thumping, until I reached the city that was my home. With luck I would never need to return to my boring job and boring friends. Three outrageous but simple lies had freed me from the prison of my former life. Only one crucial task remained. I made straight for the foulest fountain, glanced around to confirm nobody was watching, and dipped my arm into the slimy waters as far as my elbow. The bag of gold was there and now it was mine.

  Gold, Myrrh and Frankenstein

  “What’s the name of the play?”

  “It’s called ‘Horseplay’ and is about horses at play. At least that’s what it should be about with a title like that.”

  “I looked in the newspaper for a review but couldn’t find one anywhere. I don’t think it has been reviewed yet.”

  “I don’t trust reviewers myself. They are a snooty bunch with agendas of their own. Let’s go and watch it anyway and make up our own minds. It’s better than staying indoors again, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose so. Come on, then. To the theatre!”

  The streets were deserted.

  Myrrh and Gold walked from one puddle of light to the next and dried their photon-drenched feet in the shadows where no lamps on poles glowed. It wasn’t cold but there was a little
persistent wind that blew dust around corners, like granulated businessmen late for work.

  “No one goes to the theatre these days.”

  “I don’t think anybody does anything at all anymore.”

  “Apart from us maybe?”

  “Not even us,” grumbled Gold.

  The houses that they passed had no windows. Or rather they had none facing onto the street. Fashions had changed. All windows now faced inwards onto central courtyards that were completely surrounded by the four sides of a building. It was the way it was done now.

  They reached the centre of the town in about twenty minutes. There were no shops and no pedestrians, no traffic and no policemen, no signs of human life and none of any other kind. It was a perfectly intact wasteland. But here existed the last of the secret places of amusement.

  The theatres. Half a dozen of them, faceless but bristling with energy on the inside, full of make-believe and break-belief, with living actors and live music and deadpan ushers, pastel props and the magic of illusion, gateways to other worlds that were artificial but also intensely real, for their contrivance was perfectly integrated with the fabric of the world outside, pictures that enhanced the frames that gave them definition.

  It was difficult to precisely explain the appeal.

  In any system of chaos and fluctuation there will be pauses of indefinite length where order or even stagnation seems to be the rule, but this rule is just another arbitrary variation in the flux. The city had entered such a time of fake calm, of pseudo-structure, when the fires were lower, in hearts too, and all the loudest atavistic urges were sleeping soundly.

  Myrrh asked, “Which theatre is it?”

  “I’m not sure. It could be any of them, all of them perhaps. Maybe the play will be shared equally among them.”

  “I can’t hear anything, no voices or music.”

  Gold strode towards the nearest building and glanced over his shoulder, as if to test her eyes with his receding grin, but she was capable of counting all his teeth at this distance and she followed recklessly, throwing back her head with a laugh that was a muted chomp on a rising glissando, one and half octaves in range. She joined him at the entrance.

  They pushed open the ponderous doors together.

  Inside the lobby there were shadows and litter, but the shadows had been neatly arranged as though tidied by a team of cleaners. The litter that made smaller shadows between the bigger shadows of the baroque pillars and rococo pargets was scattered randomly, but not alarmingly so.

  Gold and Myrrh squinted at the low intensity bulbs.

  “The lights might have been left on. They don’t prove that anyone is here right now. Let’s not get too excited.”

  “With respect, I was born excited and it’s my nature.”

  “Then continue as you please.”

  “Shall we go into the auditorium? Circle or stalls?”

  “A private box, I think...”

  Up the broad stairs they swept, and the bulbs in niches of the walls were smaller and weaker the higher they went, but their eyes adjusted accordingly. At last they found the discreet red plush door that led to the most important box in the establishment and they passed through and emerged on an enclosed platform that was like a boat on a dark sea of contrivance.

  They peered over the side, dangling hands in murk that should have been wet but was dry. There were long tassels that hung down from the exterior of the box like seaweed ropes or jellyfish tentacles. The rows of seats below were curious coral reefs and perched on them were giant seahorses that shimmered in the currents of gloom and crepuscular light that flowed down the aisles, swirled over their heads, lapped the elevated stage.

  Myrrh blinked beautifully at Gold and gestured.

  “Are they real? Are they alive?”

  “I don’t know,” he whispered back, “but if they are papier-mâché heads it’s still an impressive and special sight.”

  One of the horse heads down below turned to look up at them, but it may have been a coincidence, a mindless motion of springs and oiled bearings rather than the deliberate movement of a sentient being.

  The curtains began to open, noiselessly but with a solemnity that was so much louder than sound that Myrrh and Gold both winced slightly before their faces became blank servants of patience and mild anticipation. The horse heads were all facing the same way now, but one opened its wide jaws to receive the ice cream that a limb that might terminate in either a hand or a hoof – for it was too dark to be certain – lifted up to its mouth.

  “Imagine biting instead of licking!” shivered Myrrh.

  Gold chewed his lower lip.

  The curtains had now drawn fully back and something was being lowered from the flies on cables. A man? But no, not quite, not at all. A torso, head and arms, or rather many human torsos, heads and arms, amalgamated into one. This was a variation on the upper half of a man, a diversification, some sort of weird fusion, interracial and ranging the full spectrum of athleticism and age. Young strong arms, flabby weak ones, ancient and sagging, at least two dozen of them, protruding at all angles from the chests, backs and stomachs, with a profusion of variable heads too, sprouting like hideous blooms from extra necks or directly out of patchwork flesh. And this descent into the proscenium had the casual and inexplicable horror of an undeserved nightmare.

  At the same time a trap in the stage floor had slid open and the lower half of a man was rising up from the depths. But again, this lower part wasn’t just a pair of legs and a pelvis. It was a herd of legs, a swarm of feet, as if photographs of a crazed dancer had been superimposed, a cluster of thighs and calves, a mob of shins and ankles. And the bare feet rapped their toes on the wooden boards of the platform it was planted on, which ascended smoothly until it was level with the stage and clicked into place. Then the other half descended precisely onto the gaping and sticky wound that was the summit of the grotesque waist and a horrible sucking noise confirmed that a tight seal had been made. The creature jerked, snapped open all its eyes, smiled at itself.

  From the wings, left and right, came two wings on the ends of extendable rods. They were enormous, feathered like those of an angel but also ribbed like those of a bat. They slotted into position somewhere on the communal back of the abomination. The rods were retracted rapidly.

  Gold and Myrrh strained to see what would happen next.

  The creature tensed dramatically.

  Then it began speaking. It uttered words from every mouth it possessed, all of them, and the result was cacophony. Different accents and tones, strident and gentle voices, high and booming, crooning and harsh, mocking and wistful. Some words were in languages unknown to Gold and Myrrh. Occasionally the mouths would seem to make sense, two or more of them would speak the same word at the same time, producing a choral effect.

  But most of what followed was an indescribable babble.

  And the monster made gestures.

  It acted, performing many separate roles simultaneously.

  Overlapping polyrhythmic theatre...

  It flapped its enormous wings and flew in short hops around the stage but it was too heavy to soar over the audience.

  Myrrh and Gold understood that here at last was a universal thespian, the conglomerated actor, manufactured from parts of all the human actors who had formerly inhabited and worked in this city, the sprawl known as Spittle, and that the idea and intention – neither of which worked – was to distil and concentrate the entire history of the art of the play into a single digestible experience. But it was beyond assimilation, outside appreciation, futile.

  The audience began grumbling and this agitation and dissatisfaction made the storm of confused sound seem buoyed up on a drone, something substantial that threatened to sweep away the pandemonium and the multifaceted actor who generated it on a tide of vituperation, repel the being into the shadows at the rear of the stage, where abandoned props from other performances doubtless lurked like mantraps to cripple some of those limbs and heads. Bu
t the monstrosity on stage refused to sag under the onslaught. It acted harder. It moved and gestured, winced and blinked, chortled and wept, hammed it up to an extreme point where flesh itself seemed to be speaking and pleading.

  The overworked mouths began to dribble, streams of saliva pouring over teeth or through the gaps between them, and the rate of flow increased and kept increasing, as if this absurd living thing, this experiment of some impresario and dabbler in dark science, was leaking and draining, spurting and spraying away at high pressure all the inner soup that gave it structure and definition. It might have deflated utterly, like a massively mutated bladder, had not the demands of the contradictory physical movements of the many roles tore it apart first. There was a ripping sound, the visible stretching and tearing of fibres, and one by one the arms fell off the shoulders. Then the ankles twisted and snapped, the necks broke, kneecaps rattled onto the stage, eyeballs popped out to roll around on the boards and be stamped flat by disintegrating feet.

  But still the mouths drooled and now the saliva was pouring over the lip of the stage and into the auditorium, as if the stage itself was a huge mouth and the appalling actor inside it merely a confused and solidified jamming of words, the utterance of an overexcited prophet or lunatic, petrified by a malign alchemy that transformed not only sounds into things but also the echoes and overtones of those sounds. The horse heads snorted in alarm.

  All at once the audience members had jumped up and were allowing pure panic to rule them, to guide their feet, which Gold and Myrrh now plainly saw weren’t hooves at all. The heads were indeed false. Some crumpled in collision with each other, one or two even fell off to expose the frightened human visage beneath and mouths that poured drool of their own.

  Leaning even further over the side of the box, Gold and Myrrh felt little surprise when the entire structure broke off from the wall and they plummeted down into the mêlée like two explorers in a bathtub going over a waterfall. The box landed upright with a violent shudder and they stood dazed and bruised as the tassels entangled themselves around the arms and necks of a dozen panicked audience members, who began bolting for the exit.