The Golden Cut

by Merl Fluin

  Now they were running headlong. Their feet slapped; their head swivelled left and right. A thing with teeth screamed at their back, close but out of sight. Their breath snagged beneath their collar bone. The tunnel shot downwards. Gravity span their legs and feet until running became falling.

  Strands of yellow hair wrapped themselves around their thighs and raced into their mouth and down their throat. They retched and coughed. They hit bottom and their palms were scraped raw on rows of screeching teeth.

  TJ took her thumb out of her mouth.

  They both sat up on the bunk. “You’re ok,” she said, “you’re not hurt.” She got up and took a glass rod from a bundle of blankets, placing it on top of her own bunk before lying back down alongside Cowhead. “Back to sleep now.”

  TJ watched Cowhead’s eye and listened. Twice the glass cracked. The sound was deadened by the soft walls. Once she saw the eyelid start to flicker, but when she lifted her head to check the rod it was still broken. She looked again and found it intact this time, but now the eye was still and Cowhead’s breathing was deep and steady. The next time the eye started twitching, TJ ignored the broken rod and put the thumb in her mouth.

  A jumble of images without sound or texture or odour: dark rock, broken ground, a scuttling beetle, a shuddering blur of moon.

  TJ got off the bunk and went out of their cell, along the halls, past the staircase and into the abandoned laboratory. She stopped at the bench and inspected the piles of broken instruments, picking through it all with her fingers. Among the debris there were also many intact pieces: flasks, glass rods, bottle stoppers shaped like rhizome bulbs, delicate glass models of invertebrate creatures in brilliant colours. “It’s no good, though,” she said to herself, lifting up and putting down a long glass rod. “I’ve no idea which were whole and which were broken last time I was in here. I wasn’t paying attention, goddam it.”

  She selected a round-bottomed flask, emptying its viscous contents onto the floor, and also chose an intact glass rod and a flat disc of black polished glass larger than her hand. Cradling them against her chest, she carried them back to the cell and wrapped them in a blanket. Then she placed them on the floor beneath her bunk.

  “What’s that?” Cowhead asked sleepily.

  “A clock. You ok?”

  “I woke up and you were gone.”

  “Sorry. I won’t go again tonight, I promise.”

  TJ lay on the narrow bunk beside Cowhead and pulled her close. Cowhead’s shoulder blades rubbed against TJ’s breasts. “I’ve got you. Be brave, like you used to be brave in the ring.” She stroked Cowhead’s biceps. “Remember that, girl? You were so brave and bold, like you were fearless. Cowhead the Wonder Horse. Remember? Be brave and go to sleep, and we’ll find a way out of here. I promise.”

  ***

  This was a different tunnel. The makeshift puppet head was on their fingers. The Directrix was watching them with raised eyebrows. Their legs shook and their breath came in ragged gulps, but Cowhead stayed asleep on the bunk while TJ stroked her back with her free hand, the other thumb wedged in her mouth. In the tunnel, they stood their ground.

  “I know you,” said the Directrix. “You’re not Eleven Twenty-Threes.”

  “No, we’re not. But we’ve picked up some of their secrets.”

  “Then you must be in trouble with them.”

  “The way Cantos is in trouble with you?”

  The Directrix clacked its jaw. They waited for its reaction. It cackled abruptly. “You can put down that silly puppet head, we don’t need such gimmicks. Let’s just talk, adept to adept.”

  They sat together on a porch swing in the sun. The Directrix’s little legs dangled in the air. “Adept?”

  “What’s your path?”

  “We don’t understand.”

  “Your teachers?”

  “Oh, you know.” They shifted in the seat.

  “Ah, I see. A wild practitioner. You’ve left the World to walk the path of the Fool.”

  “We don’t really understand what’s brought us this far, if that’s what you mean.”

  “The true causes of all things are invisible.”

  “Then how do we know what anything is?”

  The Directrix waggled its eyebrows. “The Companions of the Rosy Hours say it’s all written in the stars.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Is it? The Eleven Twenty-Threes say that we think and behave thus and so because of events during previous reincarnations that we can’t remember. The Star gang believe that the repertoire of our nightdreams comes from childhood experiences that we likewise can’t remember. Since all these views ascribe effects to invisible causes, what’s to say that one is more correct than the others, or than ascribing them to chance, or mathematics?”

  “Well, invisible or not, you’ve certainly got Cantos on the run,” said Cowhead and TJ.

  “Not really, or at any rate not while he keeps himself awake. The state of consciousness that results from permanent sleeplessness is what gives the Eleven Twenty-Threes their ability to alter waking reality.”

  “Cantos told us not to sleep when we left home. We’ve been awake ever since. We did start to do be able to do things.”

  “His powers must have been diminished by his being alone for so long. The heart of all mystery cults is collectivity. He needed you to connect with him in a feedback loop. He didn’t bank on you developing so fast, or on you hooking up with other Eleven Twenty-Threes. And certainly not on this.” The Directrix gestured towards them with open arms. “You’ve combined wakeful visioning with night-time dreaming. Extraordinary. I want to know how.”

  “And we want to get the hell out of Alexandria. Can you help us?”

  “Well,” said the Directrix, “it does sound as if we might be able to come to a mutually beneficial agreement, doesn’t it?”

  31.

  They were in the paddock on the grounds of the hacienda, in the middle of a thunderstorm. Rain ploughed the ground into furrows that teemed with animalcules. Pelting white light erased the sky. The act was well under way.

  Dressed in circus skins that shone like wing casings in the blaring storm, TJ vaulted and twirled on Cowhead’s back, or perhaps it was Cowhead who danced beneath TJ’s body. Each of them flashed around the other, like a sword with two blades. TJ’s fingers merged with Cowhead’s mane, fingernails unravelling like hair on spindles of bone. She cartwheeled, and her feet plunged into the flesh of Cowhead’s haunches. Her legs slipped down inside Cowhead’s legs; her silver shoes became Cowhead’s silver hooves.

  A plume of lightning rose from the centre of the paddock. It shot up and looped back to describe a huge spiral in the air. The spiral span and grew into the vision of a tunnel boring through empty space.

  TJ’s torso arched high above the arc of Cowhead’s back. The two of them became one, a continuous rim of living matter like the lips of a screaming mouth. The spiral of lightning slid through the rain and clamped around the screaming lips.

  A black tongue appeared at the centre of the spiral. Its slick probing tip entered the mouth and swept along Cowhead’s back and TJ’s arms, breasts and belly. It gave off a stench of blood and decay, shit and rotten beans.

  TJ retched, then howled as invisible claws wrenched her body from Cowhead’s and dragged her into the spiral.

  She was inside a burning building. The fire raged blue and white, but there was no heat in its flames, and no matter at its root. The charred building was in unchanging ruins. She could make out the remains of a bar, door posts, a ravaged staircase beyond. It was the Two Slits. The flames hissed and rumbled, but the air smelled clean.

  Her arms and legs were bleeding. She sat up and realised that one of her hands was inside the mouth of a huge bearded homunculus that lay on the floor beside her. Without removing her hand, she shifted around to sit cross-legged and placed the homunculus’s great dark head in her lap. It suckled her fist placidly. She stroked its hair and began to croon: “I’ll s
ing you One song, green grow the rushes-o...”

  “A breakthrough,” said the Directrix. “Or a catastrophe. I don’t know which.”

  “Both,” said Irrie Corrie. “And the only way out of Alexandria in either case.”

  “This had better work,” said TJ. “Is this really the Slits?”

  Irrie Corrie and the Directrix burst out laughing. “You want out of the hacienda, right?” said Irrie.

  “Of course.”

  “You want to stay here?”

  “After what I’ve just done? No, I don’t want to fucking stay here.”

  “Goes for me too, if that makes you feel any better,” said the Directrix. It turned to Irrie. “So now what, does she just walk away from Alexandria and keep walking?”

  “She can do that if she wants, but it means leaving Cowhead behind in there...”

  “Well, it won’t kill her,” said the Directrix drily.

  “Sure about that?” asked Irrie. “Cowhead will be both dead and alive in there until someone gets her out. Same goes for you, come to that.”

  “Oh, I’m neither of those anyway.” The Directrix’s voice was cheerful.

  “I’ll get her out,” said TJ. “And I’ll get my revenge on the motherfucker that put us both in there in the first place. Cantos fucking Can. I’m going to kill that bastard myself.”

  “And how do you propose to do that?” said the Directrix. “With the Golden Thigh his power is immense.”

  “We’ve got the Mouth of Hypatia, haven’t we? Can’t we defeat him with that?”

  “It’s a sacred thing, not a trick gun for settling scores,” said the Directrix.

  “Tricks are sacred,” said Irrie.

  “Don’t you dare,” said the Directrix.

  “Or you’ll do what?” said Irrie.

  The Directrix clacked its jaws.

  “Ow! Don’t bite,” said TJ to the homunculus.

  IRRIE: Let’s think this through a little bit. TJ, how does the song start, the one Cantos taught you?

  TJ: One is One and all alone and ever more shall be so.

  IRRIE: But in the song there are two ones, aren’t there? How does one become many?

  TJ: By adding something else, I guess.

  IRRIE: But there isn’t anything else. There’s only one, all alone.

  TJ: Well, then, by splitting itself in half so that there are two.

  IRRIE: Yes, that works. But if it splits in half there are now two identical ones. That creates two, but we still don’t have difference, only sameness.

  TJ: Not necessarily. The One could split into two unequal parts, instead of two equal halves.

  IRRIE: Yes. And keep doing the same, I suppose, each unequal part subdividing into more unequal parts. That would certainly produce many. But there would be no relationship between all these crazy odds and sods, these unequal bits of all shapes and sizes.

  DIRECTRIX: And anyway, many and difference are still not enough. The essence of any mystery cult is not just multiplicity, but collectivity. The many all have to be different from each other, sure; but together they also have to form a larger whole.

  IRRIE: Exactly. So consider this: what if you take the one and divide it unevenly, but in such a way that the two parts are still in proportion to the original whole?

  TJ: You’ve lost me.

  IRRIE: Take a line and then cut it into two uneven segments. But imagine that the ratio of the small segment to the long segment is the same as the ratio of the long segment to the whole original line. Got it?

  TJ: Um...

  IRRIE: And imagine that you can keep doing that indefinitely, splitting each segment into further segments that all maintain the same ratio. Each new segment will be a different length from the others, but the proportional relationships will stay the same. Got it?

  TJ: Um...

  DIRECTRIX (EYES ROLLING): Yes.

  IRRIE: This is what’s called the Golden Cut. It’s an old numbers trick, and it’s very sacred.

  DIRECTRIX: In which case, how does it help us rather than Cantos?

  IRRIE: Let’s try to trick the trick. I think we’re all agreed that dreams plunge us into a more profound reality than ordinary states of consciousness, even if we may differ over whether the most effective kind of dreaming is sleeping or waking.

  TJ: Sleeping dreams are just chaos.

  IRRIE: No such thing as chaos. Just different levels of order. Even sleeping dreams have rules. Isn’t that right, Directrix?

  DIRECTRIX: Yes, that’s right. We call them the rules of condensation and displacement. Displacement means that a dream image is always a hidden representation of something else. Condensation means that one image in a dream can represent many different things at the same time. Those are the two mechanisms that build the dream.

  IRRIE: They’re the dream laws of physics.

  DIRECTRIX: Bloody pretentious way of putting it.

  IRRIE: Luddite. Anyway, the same laws apply to waking dreams too. Waking dreams is just another name for magick. It’s about becoming able to perceive worlds that are otherwise invisible. Condensation and displacement: not one alternative reality but many, sprouting multiverses in disguise, all hidden inside each other.

  TJ: Like you, the first time I saw you? Hidden inside me?

  IRRIE: Like all of us. Like everything in this hacienda. All those grimoires and alchemical texts Cantos combed for clues: they were the clues. Decknamen and dispersion: hide your meanings behind an image, and scatter those images in a book that seems chaotic but is really a miracle of order. Alchemy, magick, fantasy, dreams: choose your poison, it’s all the same. Imagination is the only ontology.

  TJ: You mean truth is fiction? (SPITS ON THE GROUND.) Fuck that shit.

  DIRECTRIX: No. She means imagination is neither fiction nor fact, it transcends both.

  TJ: This is pointy-headed bullshit.

  (IRRIE AND THE DIRECTRIX EXCHANGE A LOOK.)

  DIRECTRIX: I have to confess, I still don’t get where the Golden Cut comes in.

  IRRIE: The one and the many. Condensation and displacement. Don’t you see?

  DIRECTRIX: Oh!

  IRRIE: Right. Condensation is how the one becomes many. Displacement is how the many parts retain an ordered relationship to the whole. The Golden Cut embodies the dream laws of reality – the golden laws of imagination.

  DIRECTRIX: But it’s numbers. Eleven Twenty-Three stuff. Maths isn’t proper magick.

  IRRIE: Of course it is, dumb-arse. Maths is entirely imaginary, after all.

  TJ: No. Numbers are facts.

  IRRIE: Show me a number.

  TJ: Here: the number five.

  IRRIE: That’s your five fingers, TJ, but it’s not the number five. The Golden Cut is 1.6180339... or 0.6180339... I could draw the simplest diagram and show it to you. But the numbers I would need to express it are infinitely long. Those numbers are not facts, but they are true. Mathematical truths are simultaneously both discovered and invented, and as such they are the purest examples of the ontology and epistemology of the imagination.

  TJ: When do we get to the part where I kill Cantos?

  IRRIE: The Eleven Twenty-Threes are mortally afraid of zero. The sweet round O of an open mouth, a hole that’s also a whole: that’s going to give them the willies, all right. Even the mathematical symbols for the Golden Cut are loops cut with vertical lines. What if we split the Mouth of Hypatia with the Golden Cut?

  DIRECTRIX (SCREAMING): The mouth was all that was left of the blessed Hypatia’s body after those bastard Christians cut her living flesh from her bones! You want to cut that too? Never, never! It’s more than a sacrilege, it’s a murder!

  TJ: Shut up, Directrix. I want to hear this.

  IRRIE (COMPLACENTLY): Destruction is creation. Sometimes we have to kill our darlings.

  DIRECTRIX: I’ll kill you, you numbers whore.

  (IRRIE AND THE DIRECTRIX HAVE A FISTFIGHT AMID THE FLAMES OF THE TWO SLITS. TJ SITS AND WATCHES FOR A WHILE, THEN GETS UP AND WEARILY
CLIPS THEM BOTH AROUND THE EAR WITH THE HOMUNCULUS, WHICH IS STILL CLAMPED AROUND HER HAND. SHE SITS BACK DOWN. IRRIE AND THE DIRECTRIX RETURN FROM THE FLAMES.)

  DIRECTRIX (WAGGLING ITS SINGED EYEBROWS): Later, Irrie Corrie.

  IRRIE: Bite me.