But now I muse on truth, I realize, having listened in my long, long life to many, many conceptions of it, spouted by wizened philosophers, mystic crones, foolish striplings, mendacious tyrants, &c., &c., I’ve lost all faith in the idea. Born and raised during the Age of Reason’s dotage, in the city, which, though not its cradle, had been the beating heart of the nation that spawned its most fervent torch-bearers, my youthful education was based on its central tenet, the idea truth could be approached through the painstaking observation of phenomena, a second-hand idea taken from antiquity, first proposed by a scholar who wished to refute his teacher’s mystical idealism, just a taunt in a squabble, or so the legend goes. After attaining adulthood, though, I was disabused of the notion; by the late twentieth century, empiricism was discredited, little more than a pedagogical tool, a fable for children. As a way of understanding the world it had proved untenable. After its ruin, folk, frantic to make some sense of their lives, sought solace in myriad wayward metaphysics whose divers assertions about the nature of knowledge and truth led to an epoch of warring systems, and the silent and apparently immobile soil of the Enlightenment era was suddenly riven with flaws, and the ground once again stirred under humankind’s feet.
Since that time, I’ve realized history is rife with disparate ways of making sense of things, each with its own definition of truth, that it’s only the brief span of mortal life that gives it the appearance of stasis, stability…Well, perhaps I can best explain by giving examples.
I once spent many years in Naufana, a place that lay amid sun-seared tracts of red sand. Just east of it, on the other side of a long dried-up river, was another city, Ghadis. They’d both once been thriving stops on the Silk Road, famed for their wealth and the richness of their cultures. But Ghadis had been laid waste by pestilence centuries before I first saw its ruined minarets and cupolas fretted from the rising sun, was then desolate save small lizards, with electric blue markings, basking on its roof terraces and in its public squares. And though Naufana still thrived, it was no longer rich, in wealth or culture; its fine skyline of spires, copper domes, azure-tiled roofs, belied the peril, filth, and wantonness of its streets. The city’s rulers adhered to a doctrine, established at the time disease stalked Ghadis, which proclaimed all illusory and nothing true; therefore, everything was permitted.
At another time, I lived a while in a city sprawled along one bank of a broad river delta, a city whose name I cannot recall, a place also infamous for vice, though its obscene carnality arose perversely, not due to the permissiveness of the regime, but to spite the diktats of despotic leaders, who, in thrall to a school of philosophers that proclaimed the truth of all things, in terror of that fullness, and intent on maintaining the submissive ignorance of the populace, prohibited everything. When the tyrants fell following a popular libertarian coup, and were hung, along with their associates, senior military personnel, and members of the secret police, from the city’s famous green, fluted lampposts, all descended into sheer turmoil and licence, and the place, formerly so gross, so solid, waned to a wraith. A few, perhaps a lucky few, were struck down by a wasting sickness; their innards putrefied, they aware, in great pain the while. A sallow smother of fog settled like a pall on the city; it was hardly possible to see your own hand in front of your face. Then came the sleeping plague; swathes were struck down. I fled.
Though its name is lost to me, my recollections of that place are perhaps starker than those of any other I’ve ever lived in, save London. I think of it, and the memories come glaring, clamouring, jostling, reeking, tanging.
The Olde Market, with its colonnade, its roof, panes of grimy glass, the bustle of the crowds, the babel of the butchers, grocers, fishmongers, and spice vendors crying their wares, the pungent scents and garish colours of the produce. The frieze over its entrance, of a horse floundering in a mire, flies pouring, in droning mass, from its gaping throat, an incident from the city’s foundation myth, whose meaning no one ever managed to make clear to me.
The rooming house I stayed in, which was on the edge of the city, in the gloom of a stark bluff, Promontory Wall, its ramshackle Carpenter Gothic, turrets, steep gables, leaded windows, warped cladding, flaking discoloured whitewash. Inside, the air was stale, there was a film of dust over everything. My room was shabby and drab, the bedclothes were tattered, the sash window, filth-rimed, bulb, bare and dim, carpet, threadbare, the soft furnishings, reeking of tobacco smoke, the maple wardrobe and bedstead, stained the shade of old bone, the dressing table’s veneer, badly chipped, the mirror, dark-specked. The sole ornament, an icon of St Christopher, the dog-headed St Christopher, hid a peephole, a squint into the squalid bathroom next door. The ancient landlady, whose shrunken head and wisps of stark white hair brought to mind a dandelion clock, gambled away all her savings, all the rent she was paid, playing rummy with a bizarre antiquarian, couldn’t afford to keep the place up. The sole other long-term tenant of the place, the rest of the rooms were let by the hour, and then but rarely, was a leech of some kind, who carried his doctor’s bag, black scuffed leather, always, and looked always forlorn.
A ramshackle warehouse, empire of a surly rag-and-bone man, paths leading to it barricaded with broken garden furniture, wrecked statuary, and rusting lawnmowers. A sign over the entrance read, ‘Flea Circus’. Inside, beneath a gyring fan, were shelves heaped with bric-a-brac.
A bar, the Anaconda, worn linoleum, filled with chess players hunched over their boards, haruspices worrying at entrails, and opera music, coming from the jukebox.
A library, in a grand building that had once, long, long before, been a ducal palace, which had a few shelves of rare occult texts tucked away, and a phantasmagoria in the old wine cellars. One time, that same antiquarian who was always besting my landlady at cards, took me down there and showed me some weird scenes. Among them a barren plain strewn with animal bones and girded by sawtooth mountains; giants, human frames, but beast heads, fox, magpie, raven, rat, pike, and blowfly, stalking a city, bleak, beset by wastes, streets choked with sand drifts; and a photocopier, a common piece of office equipment from the era of my long-ago youth, for producing facsimiles of documents and images, but this one containing wetly pulsing viscera, seen through an open hatch in its side, and standing on a plinth, in a temple, a place of sacrifice.
I also recall, in that city whose name I can’t remember, a massive dome under a louring sky, a former railroad museum, long before closed, standing empty.
And a masked orgy (towards the end, after mores had been abandoned for abandon) in a foursquare town house, gluttony, heavy drinking, drugging, and, later, a snarl of sweat-slick flesh, beastly rutting, a farmyard pungency, laced with acrid reeks, groans and yowls, antique furniture tumbled about.
And (and this is the last thing I saw before my flight) row upon row of the seats of a cinema in the red light district filled the dreaming afflicted, snoring, snorting gurgling, whickering, awash in the kaleidoscopic light of the porn movie playing, in silence, on the screen. These victims of the sleeping plague had glucose IVs in their arms, and their urine, soaking into the upholstery, pooling under the seats, gave off a high cloying stench.
The philosophies which held sway in Naufana and the city whose name I can’t remember, are, of course, extremes on a spectrum; in my life, my long weary life, I’ve lived in countless other places, each with their own metaphysics of truth. In many of them, it was unstable, in flux; these places are the weirdest of all my experience: Tainaron, the City of Insects; Ambergris, the City of Saints and Madmen; Ashamoil, the Etched City; Uroconium, the City in the Waste.
But I must go on, indeed, find I must again apologise for a lengthy digression; it’s my hope, though, that it’s not been pointless, that I’ve shown how, if you live long enough, it becomes clear there is no single truth, only a proliferation of divers ones, all merely convenient constructs. Therefore, I think it best I set down my memories of the time I was bane-racked without trying to thresh fact from figment.
When I came to after that, it was late in the day, the sun a faint reddish stain on the clouds still wadding the sky. I’d been roused by the cawing of some crows that had settled on the turf near me. I felt, if anything, worse than before, was frail, too weak to move much. My feeble efforts to scare off the birds, faint hissing, stirring the fingers, was met with croaks that seemed almost derisive, and I was terrified they, thinking me dead, meant to tear at me with their jetty beaks. But they just strutted, preened their feathers. Then one took flight, flapped, wheeled, alighted on my belly, and, wings outspread, throat juddering, kecked up a seed, sowed it, with its beak, in my navel. The flock then took wing, all at once, flew off.
I lay there while the seed sprouted, put forth a shoot. The shoot grew into a midget apple sapling, swift. Then its roots delved into my innards. I groaned, strained, but could do no more than flutter my hands weakly at the end of my arms, couldn’t pluck it out. Growing, aging, the tiny tree clad itself in foliage, blossomed, fruited, shed its leaves, fleet, many, many times over. The sun, sinking to the horizon, found a break in the cloud cover, and the tree cast a shadow that crept up over my abdomen and ribs. Then, when the tree’s crown, no bigger than my head, occulted the dull red orb, it was blighted. At the beginning of one of its hectic springs. The buds it put forth withered. Its bark split. Lurid, tallowy growths groped forth from the living wood. Foul galls swelled blasted limbs, then burst in a hail of pale grubs, which fell on my belly, burrowed beneath my skin. I closed my eyes, howled, passed out a third time.
More heavy rain woke me. It was night again. The eerie midget apple tree was gone, my belly, though paunchy with the bloating of the poison, was unriddled. I felt a little better, could just stagger to my feet. Though my face throbbed, was swollen tender. My clothes lay where I’d cast them off, and I struggled into them, soaking though they were. Then I shambled into the forest, about where I’d seen the tribeswoman enter it. I felt sure she was dead, it was a fell bane, but wanted to find her body, bury it, keep the scavengers from glutting on her flesh. I searched a short time, but then weakness overcame me once more and, oppressed by the gloom, I left the forest as fast as I could stagger. I’d thought the tribeswoman wouldn’t have got far before succumbing, but it seemed she was tougher than I’d supposed.
Out in the open once more, I found the rain had eased off, though a fine drizzle still fell. The blackcloth of night was slightly washed out, but this didn’t cheer me much, it would be a dismal day, the cloud too thick for the sun to burn through. Then, looking to the south, I saw black shapes moiling against the grey; the clan returning to see whether their scheme had worked, and, if it had, to gloat.
At first I thought of flight, but I was too, too weary, and reasoned the tribe, not finding our bodies, would figure their scheme had failed, that we’d not eaten the poisoned food, and maintain their pursuit. I decided, then, to stay, feign death; though it burns, I can hold my breath for hours before my body finally sucks in a lungful unwilled. And my black and bulgy face would help with the impression. It would be fraught, but I thought worth trying, for if they were cozened, then, I’d be left alone. And, I perhaps had a little fight left in me, if it came to it. So I lay down, sprawled on the sodden ground, gazing vacantly at the clouds racking by overhead, waited.
I lay there some time, seeing the forms of strange beasts in the clouds. A skein of geese passed by. Then I heard footsteps a little way off, took a deep breath, stilled the rise and fall of my chest. A short while later, grim snarling faces were hung before my bleary dull fixed stare, jerked away. I was peered at, prodded, spat on, beaten with fists, kicked, but did not flinch. Then the tribe turned away. Askance, I glimpsed them gathering the brown-capped mushrooms that had sprouted from the dank earth overnight. Only the leader remained stood over me, staring down, grimacing. Then, as I lay there, under his gaze, a large beetle blundered into my neck, clambered up, over my chin, scuttled, on spindly legs, over my filth-caked beard, and across my cheek. Its feelers tickled the insides of my nostrils, its mandibles raked my skin. Then, cresting the ridge of my cheekbone, it crawled down into my right eyesocket, and stopped in that sheltered spot, the chitinous plates of its abdomen scraping my cornea.
I couldn’t suppress a shudder. Paling, breathing in sharply, the chieftain hunkered down at my side. I was on the point of struggling to my feet, staggering off, as fast as my weak legs could carry me, though I feared I’d not make it far, when the leader put his hand on my shoulder, mouthed something. The workings of his jaws and lips were, of course, meaningless to me, but his kindly expression made his meaning clear enough. I don’t know why, but I felt I could trust him, made no move to flee. And he reached out, plucked the insect from my eye, cast it away. Then he got to his feet, turned, addressed the tribe. They stopped picking mushrooms, listened. He spoke at length in that strange tongue, which sounds, to my ears, like the low rumble of a distant snowslide, like a capercaillie’s jeers and taunts, the clucking in the crop, the clacking of the beak, like children throwing stones at the windows of an abandoned house. After his address was concluded, the tribe struck out south, left me alone. I lay there a while, stock still, before falling into an uneasy sleep.
Some time later, night came swaggering in from the east, and day, faded and frail, turned tail and fled. I tried to crawl to the shelter of the trees, but, drained, couldn’t make it, resigned myself to sleeping out in the open. But, though I was enervated, my brain was feverish, and my repose was fitful – sporadic bursts of slumber, long stretches of hectic wakefulness. I was roused from a bit of snatched sleep by an owl’s screech, woken from a dream of London, as it was in my youth, but clinker and ash, folk, with charred flesh sloughing from their bones, stumbling in the streets. I shook my head to clear it of this nightmare, then looked up at the sky, saw a meteor shower in the east.
The following morning a hand on my cheek woke me. Peering about blearily, I saw there was someone crouched down by me. I blenched, but then, rubbing my eyes, saw it was the tribeswoman. The feeling of having known her sometime in the past, which I’d remarked when she first accosted me, but forgotten since, returned, this time stronger, more disquieting. But then, recalling I’d thought her dead, gladness chased that uncanny tremor from my brain (I wonder now whether, perhaps, she bears a resemblance, in certain lights, to a long-ago acquaintance). Then I felt another moment’s wariness, lest she was a figment or devil, but she seemed real and truly herself, and so she’s proved to be. I can only assume she spewed the poisoned food soon after fleeing into the forest, and that this saved her. She’d found and put on her clothes, so I knew she’d recovered her wits. She smiled at me, then reached out, took my hand. I was relieved she’d forgiven me the brute way I’d acted when deranged by the bane.
The poison lingered in our blood, and it was only after resting several days that we felt strong enough to move on from that place. I was then seized by an urgent need to recover this document, this typewriter. I sought to convey this to the tribeswoman by means of gestures, pointed to the south, sketched the outline of the Ark in the air with my forefinger, mimed typing. A look of fear came into her face, and she shook her head; frantic, I got down on my knees, looked up at her in mute appeal. She still shuddered, but I went on with my mummed pleas, beseeching, and finally she cast her eyes down; I’d won (thinking of this now, I am
filled with anger at my folly, and guilt over wearing her down). Rightly chary, though, she insisted we ensure we’d food and water to last a while, before setting out. As that land abounded in good things, this was easy enough. We snared rabbits and hares, shot birds down out of the trees with a sling made from a leather thong, cured the meat by smoking it; spent many hours digging up tubers we knew were good to eat; collected and dried mushrooms; picked nuts and berries; and made several waterskins, sacs stitched from deerhide, then proofed with a mix of tallow and beeswax, which we filled from a stream.
Full provisioned, we set out, headed for this hulk, this monstrous, rusting carcass. On reaching the north bank of the estuary, early in the morning of the fourth day, a day cloudless and bright, we concealed ourselves in the same brake of rushes we’d before hidden in, watched the ship. We watched for hours, saw no signs of life, save a cormorant that flapped up from the river, alighted on the portrail, and perched there a little while before flying off, wings outspread to dry in the warm sun, shuffling now and again. Sometime after the sun had passed the zenith, we swam across the river, went aboard the Ark by means of the gangway, which had been lowered. The deck was strewn with char and ash; everything we’d gathered to make the place a home was burnt up.
I crossed to the shipping container I’d concealed my typescript and typewriter in, entered, saw them where I’d left them, in the corner, went over, took them up. The tribeswoman, who’d followed, but waited outside the container, picked up a clinkered long bone and idly clanked it against the ridged metal walls of the container. Lifting the typewriter, I saw, which I’d not noticed before, a number of symbols scored into the floor beneath. They were vaguely familiar, but meant nothing to me.
As I turned, typewriter under one arm, bundle of paper under the other, a blast shook the ship. The tribeswoman yelled. At first I heard, ‘Cunt!’ But then realized it must have been some guttural exclamation in her tongue. I ran outside, saw we’d been gulled; I’d led us into a trap. A fiery missile had struck the twisted wreck of the wheelhouse; a billow of smoke rose from it, as black, writhen, ravelled as an ancient yew. The tribe, it seemed, had been hiding, watching; some moiled about, readying again the catapult, which they’d set on a hill amid the reeds, a little distance off, and the rest were crossing the flats headed for us. I turned to the tribeswoman, was unable to meet her eyes. But she’d choked her rage, merely shrugged her shoulders, smiled wan. I don’t know whether she’s truly forgiven me, but she’s given me no looks of reproach these last weeks, even as inanition has racked her. I, though, have cursed my rashness again and again. I’ve also wondered often how the natives guessed we’d be likely to return to the Ark – why they were lying in wait for us. All musings lead me to one dread conclusion. Even assuming the chieftain betrayed me, the tribe would have had no reason to assume I’d return to the Ark; only someone who discovered my tale, and was able to read this long-dead language, would have realized I’d risk all to get it back.
The Wanderer Page 18
