“If you keep this up the roused spirits will be upon us.”
I jumped. It was the performer. “I am sorry. I think I am lost.”
“So it shall be in the beginning and so at the end. The situation that presages our existence and the last one that slips away with us.”
“I meant literally. I am lost. I can’t find my house.”
“First you have to find yourself.” His voice was low and melo-dramatic like an actor’s. His statement even sounded like a line from a movie. “Let’s look at it this way, brethren. You are no less than the man you imagine yourself to be.”
“Are you practising for your next show?”
“We are forever practising, but to what avail? Will we be ready when we are called upon to account? But to get back to your question. You are no less than the man you imagine yourself to be and no more than the man you would like to be. You are who you are at this moment. Nothing more, nothing less. A man standing on a three-foot piece of earth. Is he changing while everything around him remains constant or is it the other way around?”
“Again, I have no idea what you are talking about.”
“There are no easy answers, my friend. If there were, bodies would be piled up in never-ending heaps. We need this itch is what I am saying. Decrees and destiny. It’s a harlequin spin, I tell you. A prescribed solution would stop you dead in your tracks. And that is where you would remain.” He grinned and his eyes seemed more sunken. “There are no coincidences and no luck and no randomness. What there is, if you will allow me, is wilful blindness at all the connections floating before us. And the consequences. There, I have said my piece and I feel no better for it. My work here is finished and I must move on. We will meet again, though I must say that the time and place is not completely within my purview.”
While he was scratching his dog’s neck, I asked him, “Did we ever meet before? Your voice sounds familiar.”
To his dog, he said, “Did you hear that, buddy?” He loosened his hold on the collar but continued talking to his dog. “When you have travelled around for as long and as far as we have, you develop a feel for things, don’t you? Let’s say you are sitting at the back of the bus, minding your own business and thinking dog thoughts, and lo and behold, who should enter but the very man you are looking for. The question arises as to what measures you must take, wouldn’t you say? Should you seize his soul or should you carry him to his abode? And since you are a dog, are you willing to spark the blood of someone you are authorized to protect? These are important questions when you are fighting for the very people who misunderstand your mission.” He walked a few steps then turned to me. “I am going to break all the rules here and tell you that nothing is complicated if we adjust the angle. What you are looking for is closer than you imagine. It always is.” He walked toward the cathedral and I was about to tell him that the door was securely locked when he added, “But you are going in the wrong direction.” He fished out a huge bunch of keys and opened each of the locks. I followed him inside. “Spring cleaning, brethren. The seasons are upon us.” He kept up his jabber as he walked through the building, which was much bigger than the front had suggested. He went into a little room and emerged wearing a frock. “Have you ever studied a man without faith, brethren? His face is slack and purposeless. If you look long enough you will notice the eyes swollen with greed and the lips trembling in anticipation of some perversity. If you look even longer, you will see that every square inch of this man is marked by envy and dissatisfaction. Listen to how such a man talks,” he said, moving about with a rapid stride, adjusting lectionary, cruet, paten, ciborium and other objects. “You can actually hear the schemes swishing around. For such a man has a heavy tongue. Now tell me this – are you a man of faith?”
This was an interesting question to which I had never previously given much thought. Eventually I told him, “I cannot be certain.”
“Then you are lost.”
“I cannot dispute that. What are you doing?” I asked him as he tried to adjust the lectern.
“Replacing everything to their correct positions. We need these markers is what I am saying. We cannot shift things to suit our present circumstance and I will tell you why. Are you ready? It is because forgetting comes naturally to us. There, I have said it.”
Eventually he came to a vestry and opened its back door. Red light, splotched and speckled, flooded the place. I backed away, reeling from the burning odour of sulphur and coughing into my hands. I was about to sit to settle myself when I heard another cough from one of the pews and turned to see three figures sitting close to each other. “Hello,” I called out. “I didn’t notice you all there.” My eyes were still burning and I could not distinguish their faces.
The middle man said, “We notice what is convenient at the moment.” His voice was so stifled and ponderous I asked if they were monks. The man on the left, shorter than the others, seemed riled up with my question. The middle one patted him lightly and continued, “We are here to gauge your progress.”
The only thing I could say was, “Really?”
“Yes, really,” the man on the right said gloomily.
“And would you mind revealing your prognosis?” I assumed they would offer some theological nonsense, but one by one, in tandem, they began to explain that although my memories were not repeated in three-month cycles as I claimed, they were in fact disjointed and the connections random and arbitrary. They seemed to be suggesting that this was not uncommon with extreme paranoiacs. One of them said, “A bit here and a bit there with no true understanding of precipitating events or consequences,” while another added, “There was no sequencing or pattern and so no objective reasoning and analysis.” Finally, I heard, “Your memories were never lost after a specified period. Rather you lost the ability to make connections between everything that you recalled. The only connecting thread was your willingness at encouraging others to participate in your paranoia.”
“And who might these others be? I must be very persuasive.” I wondered how they knew of my memory loss.
The little man tittered and said, “Ordinary people coloured by your own obsessions.”
He glanced up at the middle man, who added, “An extreme form of prejudice, you might say.” He uttered an unnecessary sigh and added, “You, sir, have succeeded in fusing your life’s work with your actual life. Now would you be kind enough to tell us your name? Is it still Remora?”
“I believe you may have confused me with someone else.” A name came to mind, Cake the frog. Instead I uttered the name of the dead calypsonian. “The Tawny Leopard. But I am more interested in the tall man who walked through the vestry’s door. I followed him here.” The impish man stood on the bench and both his companions pulled him down. “He was here just a minute ago.” I wished I could see their faces more clearly. “I believe he is a performer or something.” The man in the middle folded his arms against his massive chest and his companions did likewise. I waited a minute or so for some clarification and when they said nothing, I told them, “I am going after him. I believe he may have found a way out of the town.” I was surprised by my declaration, although I suppose it had been my intention all along. So I left the three men in the pew and walked toward the vestry.
10 THE HARLEQUIN SPIN
On the vestry’s wall was an engraving of a half-dozen fused figures, their eyes cast upward. I went inside and noticed a swaying rope attached to a bell on the rafter. I half expected to see the performer dangling there but it was more likely he had gone through the thick wooden door at the back. I headed in that direction, opened the door and was buffeted by a powerful breeze blowing up spirals of what smelled like carmine particulate. It was peculiar that I would know this, I thought, as I shaded my eyes with my palm and saw miles and miles of field that bore the same reddish hue as the dust.
The edge of the town! Inside one of the town’s houses, I had seen a snow globe of a man chain-strapped to a rock. When I shook the globe, he seemed caught in
some atmospheric agitation, and, looking at the world outside, I saw a similar kind of turbulence. I took a deep breath and stepped outside. The air reeked of sulphur or iron pyrites that had been pulverized and the mere thought of inhaling this poisonous dust made me nauseous, but I pressed on. I must have walked for about twenty minutes before I came to a bus terminal with sketches of birds on every inch of the glass. I stumbled to the enclosure and saw the man just beyond the terminal. He was holding his animal loosely and seemed unconcerned I may have been following him. Perhaps he felt secure in the presence of his pet, and for this reason, too, I kept my distance. While I considered my next move, I realized that what I had mistaken for birds were really the hats worn by bushy-bearded men whose faces were arrayed in a circle. In the centre was a naked woman, the men looking away from her. My error was due to red blots on the glass, but also to the odd style of the drawing: thick brush strokes and intersecting dots that brought to mind the electrical crackle that might precede an explosion.
I heard a distant whine, like an underground turbine, and I noticed the man watching the road. When the bus appeared on the horizon, it seemed quite tiny; and focusing on the vehicle, I saw how much the surrounding fallow resembled bloated pillows as if air had been pumped from underground in precise instalments. The man whispered something to his dog and stepped into the middle of the road. For a moment, I feared that the driver would knock him down, but the bus stopped at the last minute. The dog bounded in, pulling his owner to the last seat. When I followed, I saw that the driver was the man who claimed he was a mortician. But now he was wearing an eye patch and he pretended not to recognize me. He seemed a bit annoyed and I wondered if it was because this abandoned town lay on his route. I asked where he was headed but he ordered me to my seat with a wave of his hand. I looked around for a coin receptacle and finding none, took a seat in the middle. The bus pulled off with a lurch that flung me forward. I remained in that position, leaning on the backrest before me just so I could surreptitiously keep an eye on the dog, and when I heard a low grumbling, I glanced back and saw man and pet conversing. The bus bounced along at a steady speed and in my forward position, I soon dozed off.
I awoke from a dream of monstrous animals with metallic claws and a sequence of explosions and limbs scattering in elegant patterns. Walking within this carnage was a frail woman with a mask and some distance behind, a little girl. All the scenes were contained within frames, like a cartoonist’s sketch pad. It took a while before I adjusted to the fact that I was actually on my way out of the town. How often I had dreamed of this! Just to be sure, I looked back and saw the man waving to someone outside even though there was not a single person in sight. He got up in a rush and began pounding the window, and the driver, clearly annoyed, brought the vehicle to a stop. The man ran out of the bus, leaving his dog behind. I looked out hoping it was the woman, Soma. The driver slid down on his seat, opened an aluminium Thermos and withdrew a revolver that he smelled before replacing it. As he was doing so, the passenger returned, his cap and coat covered in white dust. The bus pulled away and I heard my co-rider slapping his coat and talking about “a mighty combustion” and “a vanished dryad” to his pet. He quieted down when we came to another stretch of derelict farmland but resumed his conversation as we approached a town that was as grey as the previous settlement had been white. The entrance to the town was through an archway on which someone had written Major Manor.
The name seemed familiar, but I could not recall the broken-down grey buildings with steel pipes protruding from jagged concrete. Most of the buildings were – or had been – high-rises and although there was no one on the roads, the lanes and byways must have been congested with people at some point. We entered a thoroughfare with a series of open manholes.
“There’s no doubting it.” I looked back and saw that the man with the dog had moved two seats ahead. A couple minutes later, I heard some shuffling and turned to see him closer to me. His jacket was torn off at the shoulders and the decals and stickers on the pockets and collar reminded me of a dream, or vision, of overturned and burning vehicles similarly decorated. I could not see his dog and I hoped it was securely tied. I noticed the driver glancing in the rear-view mirror and I feared he would stop his vehicle and order both of his passengers out. I felt I should establish some connection with him so I mentioned the emptiness of the bus. He glanced back, but too quickly for me to gauge his expression. It was the man with the dog who answered. “If you pay attention, brethren, you will see faces everywhere.” In the confined bus, his voice sounded low and hollow – like spare iron poles beating against each other – but this made his statement seem even more ridiculous. When I glanced around instinctively, he added, “Not like that. You can’t see anyone like that. Let’s take it to the field outside.” He must have leaned forward and I felt his breath on my shoulder. This intimacy was disquieting and I shifted in my seat and looked out the window. “What do you see?” What I saw was a mountain ridge with light-coloured seams that were too regular to be natural. Perhaps they were roads and the cottony balls were pack animals. “Would you like to know what I see?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I see a procession of people. What’s the word? A kerry-van. A kerry-van moving slowly along. Maybe they stopped right there.” He knocked on the glass and I made out a ripple in the land, two parallel valleys that crested into a maze of interlocking trees. It was some distance away and I was about to answer when the bus pulled up and the driver got up and stared sullenly at us. He seemed set to say something but instead he adjusted his cap’s peak and limped outside. “If the driver knew there were a hundred faces following him, do you think he would still take a leak here and deface this sacred ground? Why is it sacred, you ask? The answer is that every burial ground is sacred. It does not matter whether death comes blindingly from above or creeps invisibly like a wildcat, thinning out the infants and the old. It’s all the same. But everything carries a consequence.” The word consequence rolled off his tongue lightly and I felt that this was an important word to him; one he had nestled in his mind for a while, pulling it out every now and again.
The driver returned, pushed in his gear and the bus rolled off. “What about you? Do you live around here?” I asked the man.
“That’s a good question and I have only one answer for it. My answer is that I am just tripping like a nomad. Or a paladin to be more precise. I move from world to world, restoring the unbalanced to their rightful positions.”
I tried once more. “Do you belong to this area?”
“Belong. Now that is the sort of word that is not in my dictionary. Can I tell you why? It’s a word with boundaries. Do you see what I am getting at, brethren? No? Well, let me explain. It’s a trap word.” I noted the rhythm in his voice and I realized that what I had first mistaken for richness was really the rustic quality of a man who talked to himself a lot. “It’s like this. If I ask you where you belong, you have two choices. You can answer quickly or you can speak the truth. My quick answer is that I belong everywhere because that is the life I know. The other answer is that I belong nowhere. I own nothing and no one has a claim on me. I am, if you will allow me, sacrosanct. Do you follow? On another note, did you see that stump there?” He tapped the glass. “Well, I have to inform you that it is not a stump but a totem. I don’t expect you to notice this in the night so don’t take it as a criticism. As a matter of fact, I am still waiting for you to answer my question.”
“Would you mind repeating it?”
“If it will make you any happier I can strive to do exactly that.”
“Go on.”
“Now that sounds more like a demand than a request. The question is what if you see connections that don’t yet exist? Are you a madman or a visionary? But there is a bigger question looming.” He pulled the dog’s ear and whispered into it. “Should you bite your tongue or howl to the heavens with the full knowledge you are heading toward a crucifixion? There are always consequences.”
He began to m
urmur to his dog and I looked out the window and tried to establish some familiarity, but the rolling fields offered no information. “Where is the bus going?” I asked him.
“We are going exactly where you expect. Not a fathom more, not a fathom less.”
I tried again. “Where does the route lead?”
“A route is a sticky business, brethren. It can lead to the future if you are willing to risk the mountains and to the present if you keep on a straight line. Don’t ask about the salt pans and craters unless you are interested in the commencement.” His attention was caught by a Ferris wheel and he added, “There was a truck stop there. Grew into an amusement park because the truckers often rode with their families. Was like a little piece of magic if I am allowed to exaggerate. But magic only works when you can’t see what’s coming next. Same with miracles, I have to add.”
“What happened to the park?”
“Trucks stopped coming is what happened. People expect families to always appear the same as if they are trapped in photographs stuck over a fireplace.” There was a new note of anger in his voice. “Nobody asks the most important question of all. The question is what happened? What happened to all the people who lived here at one time? What rules were there in the nights? What did they speak about when they awoke in the mornings? What was the breakfast arrangement like? What were they thinking during that early morning dip in the river? What did they see in the water? Trouble arising from upstream? No one asks the important questions. Not-a-body! But there are consequences. Do you know what keeps me going? The rule breakers, that’s what I am talking about. They must be rubbed out. The spirits pelted away so the hosts can get a second chance. And when the spirits return, I will be awaiting. There, I have said it all.” He patted his dog and whispered in its ear.
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