The Brooke-Rose Omnibus

by Brooke-Rose, Christine

  –How do you know, says my wife on the quick verbal uptake for lack of deeper satisfaction, that he wants to travel in a jiffy?

  Laugh, I thought I’d died.

  –So you saw Joshua, says Stance in his best interested voice which amounts to a casual shrug.

  –How very odd, says his wife. I can’t remember her name either. What did he do?

  –He played on his trumpet.

  –Really?

  –No, not Really.

  –Don’t laugh at us, darling, we really want to know. I mean, in time of course. When you’ve rested, it will all come back to you. Things do.

  Lazarus mocks the world with Joshua and his trumpet goes round the world in black and in bright lights. I watch myself in my wheel-chair watching the world through a rounded screen. Fifteen thousand for my exclusive story.

  Fifteen thousand million miles of no story in the psychotic handwriting of diffuse turbulent gas and ionized hydrogen on a small screen.

  –I’ll fix it in a trice. How do you know, says my wife repeat performance. I wish I could remember her name. Everyone has a name although he calls her nothing in the private banality of their untender story. I have a name and no story. I only want a little silence.

  –And you shall have it, darling. I’ll take you to Bermuda. Fifteen thousand! Or – you can go by yourself if you prefer.

  –Where the remote Bermudas ride, Stance quips happily and he rides my wife already in the nearby remoteness of his ulterior motive which I read like the distant stars.

  His wife can’t hope for an eternal quadrangle from me. I suppose she also has a name, everyone has, but I feel sick so please don’t bombard me with your particles of anxiety and you kindly stop puffing your cigar-shape at me.

  –My dear friend, of course, why didn’t you say? Don’t worry, however, I’ll fix everything before you have time to think and his wife archly says how kind.

  –I don’t want to go to Bermuda. I want to stay right here and work on my equations. And you shall stay here with me and look after me.

  –Of course darling, if you want it that way. But the journalists –

  –They’ll tire of it as soon as they’ve tired me out or no doubt before. I only want to cock my giant ear and listen to the total darkness in case it emits particles of light.

  Lazarus gives his message to the Citizens of the World. Read the Daily Sphere tomorrow. As told to your favourite reporter, Tell-Star. Lazarus’ own sick handwriting photographed for you by telescopic camera in World Without End tomorrow. Read World Without End tomorrow, yesterday, today. Read Lazarus’ message in Sayings of the Week, no, I remember only total darkness, no, I remember nothing.

  –Why did you tell them nothing?

  –What? Leave me alone. I only want a little darkness.

  –I can’t leave you alone, Someone.

  –Why not?

  –I can’t trust you. And besides, I belong to you.

  –You do?

  –Why did you tell them nothing, Someone?

  –I didn’t. I told them … Something.

  –You went much too soon.

  –But the journalists came.

  –They came for me, not you. But you never listen.

  –I lost … Something.

  –You lost your equations, Someone.

  –I remember now. I’ve had such a peculiar dream.

  –I know.

  –Oh yes, you do the knowing around here, don’t you?

  –I don’t know your equations, Someone.

  –Have I lost a point, then?

  –I tried to help you.

  –But I had such an odd dream. Things come back.

  –Yes, things do.

  –I dreamt I died, and came back to life and could read people. Good people.

  –Really?

  –Yes. No. Not Really. What happened to Dippermouth, Something?

  –He took after you, for three years. Now he takes after me.

  –How did he take after me?

  –He had your opaqueness. Now he has, to some extent, my transparence.

  Dippermouth toddles into the room on tiny golden legs. The needles on his big moon-face point horizontally at a quarter to three and he gives a gurgling laugh like a chime.

  –Can he talk?

  –At three years old? I should think so.

  –Say something, Dippermouth.

  –Hello, dad. Wanna see something, dad?

  –But I can see her, son.

  –No, I mean something great, real great. Can you read, dad?

  –I can read dials, Dippermouth.

  –Good dad! You give real daddy-answers, don’t he, ma?

  –Doesn’t, Dippermouth.

  –Oh, but he does. You read my dial, dad. What does it say?

  –A quarter to three.

  –Quarter past nine. Got you! Now watch.

  With a creaking noise that reminds me of something, Dippermouth dips and dips his mouth to twenty past eight, and with a louder creak dips on to twenty five past seven and on until my eardrums burst and his mouth joins down into itself to form one vertical needle that oscillates painfully on half-past six. Then with a screech it swivels as one needle half round the dial to twelve and the cowboy shoots his way across the screen on a white horse in a cloud of dust. The homestead burns. A sheep trots past the foreground and the naked blonde pours out of the flames with screams. The cowboy yanks her up onto his horse now blackened with the smoke, gallops away and Stance comes nonchalantly out of his hiding-place, smoking a big cigar. Good man, he says, can you repeat, we’ll do a take this time. Why didn’t you have your camera on, the cowboy asks, galloping back, I can’t repeat perform indefinitely. Well, I wanted to film the conflagration first, we’ll mix you in, don’t worry. Shoot. I yank the blonde again onto my saddle and gallop off the screen. Good man, he says to my wife, I changed the decoy blonde, he never noticed, this one will take him far. How unscholarly says my wife to confuse the records. Don’t you respect history, science? Things, he says, I have no interest in things. I like people. Now, my remote Bermuda, ride me. So he does call her something, and in the privacy of their banal untender story they go into a clinch. The needle chimes the romantic music of the spheres and then goes cloppety-clop around to half past six and with a creaking noise that reminds me of something slowly opens back to the disarmingly triumphant smile of Dippermouth at a quarter past nine.

  –Quarter to three! Got you. What did you see, dad?

  –I saw … my wife.

  –Well! You sure saw something stupid!

  –I saw remote Bermuda ride on Stance.

  –You read what you want into it, Someone.

  Dippermouth dips his mouth a little in disappointment.

  –All that Bang Bang I gave you and you only saw Kiss Kiss. Oh dad!

  He creaks with disgust and I cover my face with my hands.

  –I can’t bear it, Something. I keep losing points. Why do you do this to me?

  –Smile, Someone.

  –No, you smile first.

  I smile, it hurts and Dippermouth creaks back to a quarter to three.

  –Quarter past nine! Got you.

  –Good people! Good children. Now put away your camera, you mustn’t tire your little excrescent scar, dear boy, or I’ll have to swaddle it up again in bandages. Let me see –

  –Madam, you shall not sit on me, no, I won’t have it, stop, get off!

  –My dear good man, why should I sit on you? Stop yelling your head off or you’ll lose it, and then what will you do?

  –What shall I do, Something?

  –You leave my dad alone, fat grandma.

  –Oh you dear pretty boy, what do they call you?

  –Dippermouth Blues, fat grandma.

  –Well, Mister Blues, I congratulate you, why, I would hardly have recognised him since I dragged him out of you. Let me see now, how has your little flan fared since then?

  –Don’t touch me! Take your hands off me!

 
; –These surgeon’s hands that saved your life with all their skill?

  –I fear your hands.

  –My dear good man, you understand nothing. I shall flounce out in a fury if you go on like that, and then what will you do?

  –What shall I do, Something? Take me away, where can we go?

  –Where would you like to go, Someone?

  –Anywhere, away from her fat hands rummaging in my scar, from her fat buttocks about to climb on to me, from her huge weight.

  –No weight climbs on you, Someone, weight only consists of the attraction between two bodies. Use your head. Lift it up. Do try to use your eyes and ears. You never look, you never listen. I made only one condition, but you didn’t keep your promise.

  –I don’t keep anything. Even my point, I lose it all the time.

  –You have a point, Someone. I assure you.

  –Has she … has she flounced out?

  –Yes. You hear what you want to hear.

  –All that Big Bang I gave you, dad, and you only saw Steady State.

  –But–

  –Quiet, both of you. If you don’t take care, Someone, your atoms will become totally random and unable to impart uniform motion to others. Now concentrate, please, look, listen, organise your energy, listen at least to the absolute immobility of your own heat death, if it must occur. A little consciousness can do a lot.

  The house crumbles around us. All the houses fall with a loud neighing from the edge of the crater and down through the twisted branches of the cork-trees with great creaks and crashes, down the immeasurably tumbling steps into the middle of the crater, which opens up and engulfs us all, Something, Dippermouth Blues and me.

  We play cat’s cradle with our meridians, slowly, soothingly, and it quietens the neural cells in their untempered morse along the growing muscles of my love for Something. Soon we have wrapped ourselves and swing gently in our hammock. The boat chugs down the river and Dippermouth sings in a cloppeting counterpoint to the drum-like moon that bounces back his signals.

  –What’s happened to the others, Something?

  –You mean the journalists?

  –What journalists? No, I mean the other moons.

  –Oh, them. They’ll come back in time.

  –Which do you think will come back next?

  –I don’t know.

  –I thought you knew everything, Something.

  –Well, not everything. I only follow my instructions.

  –Secret instructions, girl-spy?

  –If you like. But they get bent and broken.

  –You mean I break them?

  –Well, when you break your word, it creates density and upsets the definition. And that confuses me.

  –So I lose a point again.

  –You win points too, Someone.

  –I do?

  –Yes.

  –Does it mean, then, that you lose points when I win?

  –All things have a balance. But sometimes we win points together, Someone.

  –Like now?

  –Like now.

  –I love you, Something.

  –You don’t have to say that.

  –I don’t say it out of necessity but from freedom of choice.

  –Freedom can mean the bending of a word, even to breaking point.

  –Oh, don’t start proving your point again.

  –I haven’t any points to prove, Someone, you have. I only follow my instructions.

  –Who gives you your instructions? Why don’t you tell me things?

  –But you have no interest in things as such, you said so yourself.

  –Did I? Me, with my five geometries? I thought someone else said that.

  –No, you did, Someone. You show such idle curiosity. For a psychogeometrician, I mean.

  –Would you prefer a busybody?

  –At least a busybody really wants to know.

  –My busy body feels so tired. You’ve tired it with your secret laws, for forty-eight thousand million years or so, like a White Dwarf, you said so yourself. What do you expect, a Blue Giant?

  –You chose the way, Someone. I told you it would take a long time. You build up such atmospheric resistance.

  –Me? Resistance? But I love you, Something.

  –You don’t have to say that.

  –Haven’t I proved it?

  –To your satisfaction.

  –I do everything you ask. I play it your way.

  –Oh no, Someone, you make me play it your way. You chose opaqueness. You don’t hear things, you see what you want to see, you insulated the crater of your ear with cork –

  –Me! But the surgeons did that, and the fat woman, I didn’t want it, I yelled, surely you –

  –It all comes to the same thing, Someone, you with your five geometries should know that. And so I find it hard to get through to you. The layers of atmosphere distort the light waves travelling through it and upset the definition.

  –Even like now?

  –Even like now.

  –I feel so tired, so tired.

  –Would you like Dippermouth to show you another film?

  –No. Perhaps. Where do you suppose this boat will take us?

  –Wherever you want it to take us.

  –You sound jolly helpless, I must say, for a girl-spy. Why don’t you follow your instructions and your secret laws?

  –I follow them.

  –Or have you lost contact with base? Base! Ha! Now I understand. When you say you follow your instructions you mean you follow your base instincts. Well, why didn’t you say so? All this talk of laws and meridians within, you had me quite perplexed. Good girl. Come let me rouse your base instincts.

  The hammock slowly diswraps us as I rouse my ascendancy over her and we separate into people observing each other in the act of love, good people. I prove my point and feel as pleased as a turkey-cock.

  –Would you like to read my dial now, dad, says Dippermouth when he can get it in edgeways. His voice bounces off the moon as from a drum. I give him a paternal pat which sets off the alarm.

  –Stop it, dad! Stop!

  –Sorry, son, sorry. There, no harm done. Stop, says the moon.

  –No harm! Just you wait, I’ll probably die before my time, you great clumsy oaf.

  –How dare you talk to me like that? Oaf, says the moon.

  –Well at least I tell the truth. Not like ma who’s got herself all besotted with you, truth says the moon, already on the edge of that theatre, sotted with you the moon says, that big round hole you came out of like a sinking nincompoop –

  –What do you mean, round hole says the moon, you warned her? How? Compoop the moon says.

  –I warned her. Not to give you a hand.

  –What! And, says the moon.

  –But, oh, no, Someone. I play it your way.

  The moon says your way as Dippermouth imitates his mother with a snarling simper and I want to hit him but Something stops me. The atoms of our will-power collide a little in a short-drawn battle but the well-being in the pleasure of my turkey-cock has drained me and I defer to her with a flourish of face-saving. Dippermouth’s dial now saved grins mockingly at a quarter-to-nine or the alternative and dips into his creaking oscillations as the boat chugs down the river.

  The boat chugs down the river through the weeds that enmesh its chugging progress. A crocodile slowly slices the forewater. The decoy blonde runs screaming from the burning hut and leaps into the river. The crocodile slowly slices the rearwater towards her. The fat unshaven captain nonchalantly emerges from his small square cabin and watches the decoy blonde struggling in the weeds with the crocodile slicing the water towards her. He throws out a life-belt at her, or a lasso perhaps, and draws her towards the boat, slicing the water quicker than the crocodile. He yanks her dripping onto the boat-deck and she faints into his arms. Now I remember they did all this before, on a big liner, with the other blonde. I played detective but took no notes or pictures by way of evidence, relying on my brain which couldn’t r
etain the immense complexity of plot and motivation. Good man, says Stance, can you repeat, we’ll do a take this time.

  –You only see what you want to see, Someone. Why do you want to see this tripe?

  –It has a certain disconnecting charm. Anyway, if you see it too, you must also want to see it.

  –I want to know you better by looking through your eyes.

  –And through Dippermouth’s dial. You mothered him after all.

  –You fathered him.

  –I really don’t see how.

  –You don’t see anything worth while.

  –Worth whose while?

  –Your while. My while. You try to live without causality, pretending that each moment has its own separateness, that anyone might come or go in that one moment like an electron. Why, you might as well ask for the moon.

  –Oh dear, here we go again with your mystifications.

  –I speak with perfect clarity.

  –I’ve noticed that when people say a thing has perfect clarity they merely wish it had.

  –People perhaps. You like people, don’t you? You have no interest in things. But people consist of things.

  –Oh come, Something, I have a high regard for you. You know I have. Anyway stop throwing that phrase at me. It doesn’t apply to me. I didn’t say it, someone else did. He did. Stance. The man in the film.

  –When you don’t understand something, Someone, continue as if you did, it will come clear later. You with your five geometries should know that. Instead you enmesh the mathematical process with verbal pedantry and tangential arguments.

  –Dad, oh dad, ma, stop it, you two, look what you’ve done, dad, you’ve clogged the boat. Look at the weeds! Look, ma, we’ve got all stuck.

  We have. The engine has stopped chugging and gives only an occasional cough or splutter of exhaustion. Rushes enmesh the rudder, embrace the boat, fall like a net over the cabin door. We can hardly climb out and the sun rides high and hot.

  –Well at least that echoing moon has gone.

  –I could go down and cut the weeds with my delicate needles.

  –Don’t you dare, Dippermouth, for one thing the leeches would suck you out of existence.

  We have reached an impasse, Something, Dippermouth Blues and I. Clearly they lay the tangle in my words. Clearly they expect me to disentangle us.