The house sits in a picturesque valley. One might credibly feature this landscape in a calendar on Grandma’s bathroom wall, above the towel rack. Cory herself chose the place. Ralph went along with the plan. Ralph was not motivated by the need for beautiful surroundings, but he supported Cory’s desires, as long as they fell within the bounds of probability. The neighborhood conformed to the middle class model. But there was a nearly unseemly degree of verdancy flickering in the gaps. The trees bloomed with green leaves and pink flowers. Bushes propagated into corners perhaps not initially meant for them, but were allowed to appropriate the space. For the sake of their beauty. A beautiful thing sometimes gets away with more than might seem probable. A beautiful thing, after all, brings a smile to Cory’s face. And Ralph might call that in itself a beautiful thing. Cory loves Ralph for his knowledge of her need for his knowledge.
He has Liam in tow. Liam is soccer age. His shirt is filthy. Cory demands the clean-up. Liam demands a sandwich. A compromise is reached. Gobbling ham and bread, Liam kangaroos up the stairs. The yellow jersey dangles from his shoulder as he disappears from view. But no one is watching the view. A long kiss. Relief. A forehead resting against a collarbone. Cory rubs a tiny seven softly against Ralph’s chest.
What happened?
It’s Harold.
Did you visit him today?
The room is golden at this most perfect moment of the day.
I did. He’s dying.
Silence. A hand moves up her spine, and fingers clasp the back of her neck. I’m sorry, honey.
The doctor said they could keep him alive for a while longer, you know, machines, but there’s no guarantee.
Mmm. Is this going where I think it is?
Yes. I have to make a decision.
I’m sorry. His largeness envelops her. She feels encased. Protected. The nicest feeling she has experienced all day. For a moment, she forgets her name.
I love you.
Ralph tightens his hold. Thank you, honey. I don’t know what I can do, but you know I’ll support whatever decision you make. And whatever you need, I’ll do what I can.
Liam yells down from above. There is no towel. Someone is required to bring him one. He is naked and wet. Ralph pulls back and shrugs. The lovable arch of his eyebrow. The goofy moustache curled over a conspiratorial sneer. Cory runs her palm down his arm. One last caress. Ralph jogs up the stairs.
Cory sifted vegetables in the wok. Sharp, salty smells stroked her cheeks and stung her eyes. Onions hissed angrily while the peppers relaxed into the oil. Mushrooms waded through the crowd, mingling and nodding smoothly to acquaintances. Mushrooms were the jazz musicians of vegetables. Hepcats in hats. Onions were the angry evangelicals, seeking the conversion of everyone near enough to catch a whiff of their pungent preacher. Peppers put forth little effort, but they contributed to all proceedings in which they played a part a soft undercurrent of clever snark. Juicy Jon Stewarts of the wok. Cory would drug them all into equanimity with an extra dose of peanut oil. Ralph loved the peanut oil. Liam professed indifference to all things culinary, but Cory’s practiced eye could easily detect the quickened pace of his fork’s glide into the great gluttonous crevasse whenever she went heavy with the peanut oil.
Sadness and remembrance, sunk beneath the bliss of cooking, rose back into her lungs while she ate. Ralph and Liam discussed the numerology of celebrity birthdays. Cory’s food crawled across the floor of her stomach. It gasped, coughed, and died beneath the coffee table. A sticky mess she would confront later in the bathroom. Ralph and Liam divided the remnants from her plate between them. Ralph’s hand brushed her dangling hair back over her shoulder.
The radio DJ was obsessed with Bossa Nova tonight. Pleasant strings strode into her brain and rearranged the furnishings. Dimmed the lights. A contralto hum and a chanteuse’s suggestive smile. The tang in the air, burning incense, a clove cigarette. Stars through the window. Faraway honks and the rumble of engines. The romanticized Other. Longing for it. A world without a man in a bed.
A Sphere Inside a Cylinder
I am a boy named Liam. “LIAM” had always been his name, although each time he reminded himself of it, a warm surprise in liquid form trickled through his tummy. A boy named Liam. How does a name attach itself to a body? His mom would say she did that. Not possible. She could only have been a conduit for a crafty agent from an ancient cult. The name asserted itself from its station in his body in countless levels, stacked and tiered. Organic complexity accreted to the slurry of syllables, vowels sublimating consonants in a broth overflowing the tongue, but the lips clamped down at the last second to prevent their escape to an external space. The roundness of a vowel was a tunnel through the mouth, however. Someday the “M” would fail, the tone erupt, that perfect vertical oval of an “A” blown out at light speed into the horizon, a bubble of “AM.” Before the advancing convexity, the veils of the earth’s atmosphere would scatter, and into the endlessness of space, expanding to infinite size, the oval would balloon into a sphere, retaining a boy at its center, encapsulating existence finally inside the purest of shapes.
I love the sphere. The sphere of the soccer ball. The sphere of his head. The sphere of each breast above his mother’s broad tummy. The sphere of the world. The spheres of his testicles. His four fingertips a sphere sectioned into quarters. The fingertips of the other hand. The social sphere. The blogosphere. The sphere of orbit, the sphere of the eye, the sphere of surface tension in a soap bubble. The sphere of the Universe, containing all spheres. All the spheres in the Universe. The sphere of the mind, containing the Universe. The sphere of the Universe, containing the mind. The sphere of joy, a nerf sphere with ragged ruts dug out. The sphere of sorrow, a crystalline sphere smooth as the veneer finish of his mother’s mahogany wardrobe. The simple sphere of all existing things mapped onto x2 +y2 +z2. Topologically, there was no reason to deny that possibility. Thus, the sphere of existence.
The sphere of zero, which also is the center of the sphere! If the sphere is misaligned, then merely shift the axes.
A sphere to be lived in. A sphere to be admired. A sphere to float along the vector of a current. A sphere to bounce through an irreplicable path. A sphere to travel and be still all at once, merely by revolving.
Beauty. Love. Concupiscence. Destruction. Holiness. The Church.
Worship of—
From his ceiling hung a string, taped there long ago when a plastic spider was required to dangle spookily. No trace of the spider now, but the tip of the string would tickle his neck or alight on his nose at unexpected moments. Every incident occasioned a giggle. He loved the string. It had been there for years. An image crept through his mind, just behind the retinas, the spider, black and oily. But he truly could not remember the spider. He believed what it had looked like, hanging there, he believed the floating vision, but this image could not be mapped upon a memory. It stood aloof and dry, unmoved by the eagerness of his brain to draw it in and soak it in a chemical pool until it was drowned and preserved.
Seven was a crucial number. He had been here seven years. His first letter was “7” rotated. When he wrote “L7,” a perfect square was made.
I am L7, a sphere inside a square. But not a square. Rotate “L7” in the horizontal plane, all the way around until containment is complete. You have made a cylinder. Liam, aged seven, a sphere inside a cylinder. A beautiful object. His innards quivered to behold it. His organs surged against their forms to liquefy and pour themselves into that sublime mold, to become, themselves, the very shape of his name and age.
I am special, a sphere inside a cylinder. His foot kicked the soccer ball with the certainty of this knowledge. For this reason, every kick was executed flawlessly. Not everyone could see that. The feat went unremarked at games. Sometimes, the energy of his perfect kick embedded itself within the ball for later expression, resulting in the goal’s credit being assigned to some other boy when his kick inadvertently jogged loose Liam’s spectral contribution, whi
ch truly was the factor that sent the ball into the net. Liam was equipped with the generosity required not to resent such misattributions of skill. But I am the one that scored.
I am special! All spheres were the same, essentially. The sphere of “LIAM” was equivalent to the sphere of the Universe. The sphere of joy, the sphere of sorrow. The sphere of all existence, indeed, inside a cylinder that was “L7.”
God in every sphere. Infinite loci, one centerpoint. Body and spirit.
His mom worshiped at an altar that was not inside a church. His dad respected but did not comprehend religion. I, myself, am God.
Timelines
Nina Allan
It is five-past three in the morning. When she opens her eyes the first thing she sees is the black-and-gold Westclox alarm clock that stands on her bedside table. She loves the clock for the sound it makes, its tinny rattling, wheezy as an old man’s breathing. She loves its round convex glass with the gilt frame surrounding it, also its face, which lights up in the dark, that samphire-green, marshfire glow. She has always seen the clock’s ability to illuminate itself as a minor miracle. She cannot understand why it does not arouse a similar excitement in other people.
“How does it do that?” she asks.
“It’s luminous,” her mother says, in the same tone of voice she might use to say ‘its face is black’ or ‘it is made of metal.’ Ginny knows the word luminous already. She wants to know how it happens, not what it is called.
She had set the alarm for three-fifteen so she could be sure of waking up in time for the holiday but she never oversleeps, she has woken up anyway. She cancels the alarm, turning the clock with its back to face her and sliding across the small brass lever in its crescent-shaped opening. She pulls herself into her clothes and then puts on her wristwatch. It is a Timex Girl’s Wristwatch, with a round white dial and a black leather strap. At night she keeps it on her bedside table, still in its original case, a leatherette hinged-lidded box with a hump of blue velvet inside to keep the watch from sliding around. The watch was given to her as a birthday present by her grandmother, the first grown-up gift she has been given.
She presses the watch against her ear to check that it is still ticking. The watch’s mechanism fascinates her. She pictures the cogs and wheels turning inside, like the moving parts inside the Westclox alarm clock only smaller. Sometimes she likes to imagine that the watch has a secret inhabitant, a tiny driver, smoky-voiced and grubby-cheeked, like the engine-stoker she saw once in a television documentary about old steam trains. She thinks of him tapping the pins securing the mainspring with a neat gold hammer, checking the flow of seconds on his time-gauge, shaking his head.
We have an early start this morning. It won’t do to take any chances.
She sees no reason why her miniature engineer should not exist. She has been introduced to the world of the microscope through her science lessons. She knows there are plenty of things the human eye cannot see.
She goes out into the hall. The door of her parents’ bedroom is open and as she stands there in the orange glow of the overhead ceiling light her mother emerges.
“Have you washed?” Her mother speaks in a whisper because her brother is still asleep, a cramped insistent bundle of bright blond hair and blue pyjamas. Nothing short of a bomb going off would persuade him to wake at this hour. She resents the way her mother never makes him get up until the last minute.
Ginny nods. The nod is a lie, but one she knows she will get away with, at least today. From inside her parents’ bedroom she can hear the voice of her father talking on the telephone.
“It’s up there now, just look out the window. Don’t tell me you can’t see it?”
There is a short silence then he laughs and says something about a light in the sky. Ginny doesn’t understand what he’s talking about. She asks him about it later, when they’re all up and dressed and in the car.
“What was it?” she asks.
“A you-foe,” says her father. “Unidentified Flying Object. A flying saucer.” The engine coughs once and then starts.
She doesn’t believe him. He has never been very good at telling stories. She wonders who he was calling at three in the morning, too early to be telephoning anyone except in an emergency. Her father made the you-foe sound like an emergency, but she senses it was just an excuse to make the call.
She thinks about this for a while but then lets it go. It is interesting but not important. The important thing is that they are going to France; that in a little over three hours they will be on the ferry. Outside it is dark and silent, a fugitive world of curtained windows and grey front gardens. The main road is eerily empty, a polished black band of tarmac, and soon they are on the dual carriageway heading for Newhaven. Her eyes catch at the road signs: “Give Way and To the Ferry” and “Exit Ahead”. In the dawn light they read like a message meant especially for her, some private code for freedom or escape. She has begun to learn that words are magical tools, that she can use them not only to describe the world but also to bring things into it. The little watch engineer is like this; one moment he is just a thought, a squirming at the back of her brain like a maggot inside an apple, but the more she thinks of words to describe him the more he becomes alive. She clothes him with words, laying on his oil-stained boiler suit and scruffy black cap as she used to lay the flat cut-outs of dresses and jackets on the paper dolls in the girls’ fashion books she had once enjoyed but was now outgrowing. She knows he will always exist now, whether anyone can see him or not.
Her brother is still mostly asleep. She lays her forehead against the window glass, staring out at the goods lorries, the cats’ eyes, the low humped buildings of the ferry terminal. The inside of the car smells of tarmac and new morning and its own worn leather upholstery.
*
Her grandmother kept the watch in a pillowcase behind the wardrobe as a precaution against burglars. It was a silver half-hunter, and had belonged to her father, Ginny’s great-grandfather, Raymond. It was the only thing of his she had left.
“It doesn’t work,” said her grandmother. “I took it to a clock man once, he had a shop down by Goring station. He told me it wasn’t valuable enough to be worth mending and that I would be wasting my money. The shop’s gone now, it got turned into a butcher’s, I think. I haven’t been up there for years.”
The watch was about two inches across, and contained in a round silver case. The silver tarnished easily; when Ginny first saw it, it was the same dull brown as the beach pebbles her grandmother used to decorate her garden.
“Can I clean it?” asked Ginny. She was ten years old.
“Are you sure it’ll be worth the trouble? You’ll get black stuff all over your hands.”
When Ginny insisted, her grandmother gave her an apron to protect her clothing then sat her at the kitchen table with a tin of Silvo metal polish. She showed her how to apply the polish by smearing it in a thin layer over the surface of the watch case and then removing it by rubbing with a cotton rag.
“Let it rest for a minute first,” she said. “Give it a bit of time to get to work.”
Ginny read the side of the tin and learned that the Silvo worked by dissolving the metallic salts that formed when the silver came into contact with the air. She was captivated by the process, by the newspaper spread out on the table, by the pungent smell of the Silvo, which her grandmother said contained a substance called ammonia. Once she acquired the knack of it, she found she enjoyed cleaning not only the silver half-hunter, but her grandmother’s silver butter dish and biscuit barrel, as well as the brass candlesticks and ashtrays that had come from her grandmother’s childhood home in Croydon. The brass was an unkind metal, and even the most dedicated scrubbing produced only the faintest of lustres. But Ginny found the work soothing in its repetitiveness. She was happy to sit at it for hours, while the kitchen radio played quiz programmes and her grandmother chopped the vegetables for supper.
Her grandmother was still young and cheerful, but h
er hands were dry and wrinkled from lack of care. In warmer weather her veins stood out like worm casts. She had a gold dress watch, which had come down to her from her mother, Ada. Unlike the silver half-hunter it worked perfectly. It had a delicate soft low tick, so sweet in tone it was almost like music, and a gold bracelet that expanded to fit the wrist.
There were a lot of clocks in her grandmother’s house: an electric alarm clock in her grandmother’s bedroom, a battery-powered wall clock in the kitchen, a mahogany bracket clock that was kept on top of the sideboard in the dining room. There was also the cuckoo clock in the living room, brought back by Ginny’s grandparents from a holiday in the Black Forest. It had heavy brass weights shaped like pine cones, and was wound by pulling down on a chain, rather like the chain of a high-cistern lavatory. The cuckoo clock worked, but as it grew older it became less reliable, and if the weights were tugged in a certain way the plastic cuckoo could be forced to appear. It was forbidden to tamper with the clock, but this only made it more of a temptation. Ginny’s personal record was fourteen consecutive cuckoos, although her brother once memorably made it run to twenty-six.
Dadaoism (An Anthology) Page 13
