The rugged woman we had picked up glanced back and came over. “Have I seen you before?” she asked the girl. But the child returned to hiding and the woman said, “This place looks familiar.”
She seemed to be awaiting some response and I told her, “I don’t know. I may have seen a painting somewhere that depicted a similar scene.” I did not tell her that in the painting there were blue beings and bazaars with men and women attempting impossible feats. Instead, I asked, “If it’s familiar, do you know where our destination might be?”
“This is the only road, so we have no real choice,” she said. “Are you a mortician, by chance?”
Her question surprised me. “I didn’t know there was one in this script.”
The bus seemed to be gathering speed. I got up and looked to the front and saw that we were approaching what seemed to be, from a distance, a dried-up lake. “Perhaps you should slow a bit,” I shouted from the back.
Down we went. Faster and faster. Balzac and Fingers seemed excited and the Conductor was leaning over the driver. The girl now got up from beneath the seat. “There are people there. You will kill them, you crazy man.”
I was about to tell her that the place was abandoned when I saw a group dragging a perfectly camouflaged sandy-coloured canopy. There were four of them, two on each end, and when they noticed the vehicle bearing down, they dropped the canopy and scattered. The basin appeared to be windy and the canvas convulsed like a dying animal before it took off, kite-like. We were heading straight toward the group. Now the girl was screaming. The vehicle lurched, seemed to hang in the air, straightened and settled on its side with a series of bangs. We were all flung to one side and the bus was enveloped in dust, much of it seeping through the windows.
By the time we had managed to climb onto the seats, the air in the bus was so hazy as to be opaque. Everyone was coughing. After a couple minutes, I heard Balzac’s voice. “This is amazing. What were these men doing in this blighted place?”
My mind turned to the girl. “Hello,” I called out and when there was no answer, I grew worried. I felt around and stopped only when I touched the leg of the rugged woman for whom we had stopped.
“Copping a feel?” she said. “This may not be the best –”
“I am searching for the child,” I told her roughly. “Can you feel her?” I stumbled onto my knees and felt around more carefully this time. This is my fault, I thought. I had fooled myself into believing we were following a movie script, that we would find our way out of the terminal into a town, that I would once more be among rational men and women, that the child’s talk of escape had been more than childish fantasy, but all I had accomplished was this disaster. Unless there were players hidden from sight, I was certain this could not be staged. I heard the front door creaking open and Balzac saying, “If Kurt was here he would have unbolted this trap in no time.”
“I cannot calculate our coordinates in this dusty place.”
“I think we have arrived at a portal. All the red dust...”
“Where is the driver? The Inquisitor?”
“We should be looking for the child,” I fairly screamed out. “She’s gone!”
“Maybe she is beneath a seat. I can lasso her with my rope and drag her out and hog-tie her.”
“This is truly amazing. I feel obliged to announce that we are trapped. There is a herd of something out there blocking my path. Buffaloes and elephants.”
Everyone grew silent. After a while Fingers said, “I wish Kurt was here.”
There was another period of silence. The air inside the bus was now hot and rancid. I heard the Stenographer wheezing badly.
Someone said, “We have exactly twenty-five minutes before we drop dead.”
Another whimpered, “A sweet-sweet mess.”
“Where is the Conductor?” Balzac shouted his name but there was no reply. “He’s gone, too,” Balzac said. “How did they get through?”
I pushed my way past Fingers to the front and tried to step out but staggered back when I hit something that was coarse and pliant. It took a while before I realized it was the canopy, which had completely covered the bus. “It’s the tent covering,” I said. “We need to crawl beneath it.”
One by one, we crawled out. The man who claimed to be an arithmetician counted everyone several times. I glanced around for the girl but she was nowhere. Some distance away, I noticed half a dozen sails spread on the ground and secured by pegs. The ends flapped in the wind and I walked toward the spot, hoping the child had hidden there. Someone was saying, “It looks like we interrupted something big.”
“Were they building a vessel?” Toeman asked excitedly.
“I think we should try to find the girl,” I pleaded.
“I don’t understand where she could be hiding. This place is so flat. Do you think there might be tunnels? Maybe the men who were putting up this tent dragged her through.”
“We should look for the girl before anything else,” I insisted.
“It will take us precisely six hours.”
“Then it will be too late.”
“Maybe I should have fasted this morning.”
“Can anyone see the driver and the dirty man we picked up?”
“I am a cosmic detective but I do not have my implements. I left my belt behind.”
“This scenery here is amazing. Is it on the other side?”
On and on they went and I realized that Dyenne would most likely be gone for good by the time they settled on some course. I set off on my own. I expected someone would follow me, but when I glanced back I saw they were still arguing so I walked at a fast pace toward the closest laid-out canopy or whatever it was. When I got to the spot, I realized that it had not been secured with pegs but with rocks placed on the edges. I walked from one end to the other, feeling with my feet for a covered tunnel. Just to make sure I lifted the ends and peered beneath. “Hello,” I shouted.
A woman was sitting in an air pocket with her hands clasped around her knees. She was so frail that, for a moment, I believed it may have been the girl but when I crawled through, I saw it was a painfully thin woman wearing some sort of blinders. “Hello. I am looking for a child.”
“There is no child. She is gone.”
Beneath the canopy, the woman’s voice sounded like the cry of a dying bird. “Did you see her?” I asked. She said nothing and I added, “She jumped off the bus and there is no sign of her. There were men putting up some kind of tent but they, too, have disappeared. Did you see the girl or the men?”
“There is no girl, no tent, no men, no bus.”
I now considered the woman was blind and had been trapped beneath the canopy. She looked sick, too, clutching her knees. I asked, “Is there something wrong with you?”
“There is no girl.”
“Yes, I know that. But she was with us on the bus.”
“There is no girl. Why don’t you understand? I was a wet nurse once.”
“A what?” She hunched herself tighter and I told her, “I am going to look for her. I think you should come, too, or you will suffocate under this canvas.”
“I am safe here. The light outside will erase me. Leave me alone, please.”
“Are you one of the actors? Were the men putting up the canopy creating a stage? I should have thought of this before.”
“Yes.”
“Did you say yes? I can barely hear you.” She seemed to nod at my question. “So all of this is part of an act? All pre-arranged and staged?” She nodded once more and I didn’t know whether I should feel relief that I was not trapped with a group of madmen or disappointment that my hopes of escape were now further complicated because I was caught in this mess of a film. “Do you know how it’s going to end?”
“It never ends but this time it may be different. Everyone is here too soon.”
“Before the set was built?”
“Yes. Too soon.”
She seemed so confused that I told her, “I am going to get the child
. Are you sure you want to stay here?”
“I am only here.”
“Well...okay,” I told her as I crept out from beneath the canopy.
“Did you see the girl?” The woman with the medallion was standing outside the canopy. “Is she hiding in there?” she asked.
The group soon came up to her side. Lolo stooped and made his way inside the canopy. “There is no one here,” I heard him shouting a few minutes later. He emerged, dusting himself.
“There was a woman inside,” I told him. He shook his head and I told the group, “Let us try to shift it. If we all hold an end, we might manage. Everyone hold an end and walk toward each other.” The arithmetician began counting as we all lined up around the canopy. It was quite heavy and because of the breeze, it took a while before we were able to get it off the ground.
“Walk to the left.”
“Walk to the right.”
“We cannot do both at the same time.”
“Hold it over your head.”
The canvas flapped violently in the air and when some of the group loosened their hold the rest were forced to do likewise. It took off and flew like an airborne ship. Unexpectedly, I recalled a poem or story of three men. Wynken, Blynken and Nod. My retrieval was interrupted by the medallion woman who said, “There is no one here.”
“Maybe she has covered herself with sand.”
“Like a lizard.”
“An armadillo.”
“But she will suffocate.”
“What should we do?”
“We should smoke her out and hog-tie her.”
“There was a woman here,” I insisted.
“We need to be seated now,” an unfamiliar voice directed.
“Who are you?” the so-called countess asked the newcomer, who I saw was wearing a battered hat. “Were you on the bus with us?”
“I am the usher,” the man said as he limped closer to me. “Do you have your tickets? I can get you a group discount.”
“The girl...” I tried to remind the group.
“How old is she? I can get her in half-price,” the usher said.
“There is no girl,” Tiffin said.
“No woman,” Knife added.
“Maybe they got caught with the wind. My calculations tell me it’s eighty knots per hour.”
As they continued their debate, going this way and that, asking questions in the manner of infants and offering their own tangled responses, I felt a wave of tiredness that was so sudden and leaden, it felt as solid as twin planks on my shoulders. And from this great exhaustion, I recalled awakening in the terminal with no idea how I got there and who I was. I recalled the insistence of the others that I somehow was connected to their presence there. I remembered their veneration of the ledger and its subsequent loss. I thought of the fire in the smoker and the dream of the three men who insisted I was a paranoiac who had co-opted others into my madness. I recalled the girl who claimed that I was a part of a group whose memories were stolen or transplanted and Kothar babbling about the same thing, more or less. And I thought of the woman who I had imagined just a few moments ago, vanishing. I walked away from the group before they could involve me in more of their folly.
Other recollections crowded my more recent concern; memories I could not understand and which were, therefore, useless. But for the first time I was in the picture. I saw myself, almost unrecognizable, writing phrases over and over: Today is a new day and Nothing exists until we deliver our verdict and The past is just a place not yet visited. Other memories, accompanied by flashes of light, flared and died so swiftly they left only the taste of the emotions to which they were tied. Neglect, shame, apprehension, anxiety, helplessness, calculation, guilt, indifference, absolute emptiness. If the girl’s claims were right, we would never know who we truly were because there would be all these other influences bouncing around and jostling for prominence. Our thoughts and decisions would never be directed by our own experiences but through the urgings of strangers. Uninvited boarders and lodgers. In a way, we were strangers to ourselves.
Maybe she was right. I was – and had been for a long time – a stranger to myself.
Balzac was not a brute, Fingers not a spectral detective, and so forth. The three dream-men had suggested that I was a writer who used my imaginative talents to colour and shade the more gullible among us. They may have been half right; I was certainly not a writer who had influenced anyone into forming a team, but it was not unlikely that, in seeing all these men and women in the manner I preferred, I might have encouraged their simulations. And someone, at some point, must have encouraged mine. Kothar, the maddest of the mad, had grasped a fragment of this bitter truth.
Whether it was my confusion, or my tiredness, I cannot say but I almost stumbled to the ground. I heard voices. “Don’t bother. There is no girl,” I shouted.
“You, my friend, are amazing. I did not see that coming. I am flabbergasted.”
“But didn’t we all see her on the bus?” This was the medallion woman and I desperately hoped she would be less pliant than the others.
“Which bus?” I asked as I walked away.
I heard their voices behind me.
“He’s right.”
“Which bus?”
“Which of the three?”
“There’s another bus.”
“And another behind it.”
“Which bus?”
“A tent is going up, too.”
I ran away from them, falling to the ground and picking myself up once more. On the third fall, I felt blood running down my nose but I kept running with the hope that they were all wrong and there were no buses and no tent; I hoped I would turn to find I was alone in a field and I would continue walking until I reached the end, however far that may be. And at the end, I would discover that I was either dreaming or I was deranged and I would simply reawaken or accept my derangement. I would not question my current state and not wonder about what was real. I would be awake and drowsy or mad and happy. And thinking this, I felt a deep relief as if all I had held back during the last month was now solidifying and rising to the surface. For the first time, I wanted to be so truly out of my mind there would be no chance of me hoping to recover my memories.
I remembered someone telling me that there was no point in a life because all lives were repetitions of small acts decorated with beguiling significance. I remember boasting of my ability to focus and think in patterns and anticipate. But none of that was important now. It was time to close the curtains, to fall asleep, to give up. And so when I turned briefly and I saw the group running away from me and toward the canopies that were being tugged open and upward, ballooning before they were stabilized, I refused to be either alarmed or astonished.
I paused for a moment, but only for a moment to see a huge tent being formed. There seemed to be a row of buses and caravans and from each of these vehicles shuffled out passengers who appeared to be guided by men in white cloaks.
From a great distance I heard Balzac saying, “This is truly amazing.” And what sounded like the tap of a finger on a microphone and a voice amplified by a speaker saying, “Prepare to be amazed. Witness the spectacle of a man driven to multiple worlds of darkness and despair.”
I resumed running so I would hear nothing.
“Brought back to the beginning,” the voice boomed. “Which of the six worlds will he be thrown into? Stay with us to find out.”
“Can a man without wings propel himself to the heavens? Wait for it,” the voice cajoled.
There was a ringing in my right ear and I felt light-headed from the heat and my exertion.
“Wait. It’s coming now.”
“Shut up,” I mumbled. I wanted to part from this. I was simply a crazy man experiencing another hallucination. “Shut up! Leave me alone!”
“Here it comes.” I was now speeding faster than I would have imagined, not stopping even when I heard a terrible thunderclap followed by the sound of expelled air. Faster now. I saw wa
ter barrelling out from the sides of the basin as if it were a giant dam coming apart. The ground grew slippery from the water and I fell several times. Soon the water was around my knees and then my chest. I flailed away and when I felt the current taking me back toward the group and the amplified voice and the caravans, I dived and swam against the flow. I did this several times and I believed I was making some progress until the undercurrent grew too strong for me. I tried to maintain my direction but the current turned me around and on my back. Something brushed past me and I saw it was the girl. I tried to shout to her and swallowed mouthfuls of sulphurous water.
I dived once more, but the water was too murky now and when I surfaced, the current spun me around. I stopped resisting and just tried to keep afloat until the flood abated. But it was surging and waves erupted from beneath and lashed me so violently I could feel the sand abrading my skin. Surprisingly, the microphone was still functioning and I intermittently heard the recorded voice saying, “I touched them and they felt pain. But they grew used to the pain and turned it against me.”
My chest was burning and I realized the water had turned salty. But it was clearer now and I saw dark shapes tossed around, animals from the caravan that must have been swept away by the flood. I saw what appeared to be a boar and a bull and a giant fish with fanning scales. Then they were all gone. I was tiring and I had no idea how long I had been struggling. The others must have surely drowned as they were on lower ground. But what about Dyenne? When I surfaced, I tried to stupidly call her name and swallowed mouthfuls of salty water. I vomited and took in more water. I could no longer feel my legs either from fatigue or from dizziness. The current must lead somewhere, I thought. There is no point in struggling.
I closed my eyes and forced my body to go limp. Every now and again, I crashed against an object and I had this sensation of being simultaneously dragged down and pulled upward. And in these jolting arcs, I imagined I saw – trapped within their own trajectories – Balzac and Fingers and Kothar and the other members, and the group of tiny seniors I had seen at the terminal, and men and women I could not recognize. I saw the usher trying to hold on to his hat and another man so old and pale he was almost transparent. Everywhere, bodies seemed to be tumbling.
Adjacentland Page 28
