The Brooke-Rose Omnibus

by Brooke-Rose, Christine

  –Well at least something has clarity. How do you want me to do it?

  –Reflect, Someone. Dive into your reflections.

  –I have none.

  –Precisely.

  –But the leeches. The leeches will suck me out of existence.

  –You have strength to spare. Surely you can give a few corpuscles.

  –What, in my condition?

  –Your wound has healed. Don’t you remember what the Travel Agent said? Time heals, spacetime heals faster.

  –The Travel Agent! How many light years away did he guarantee that? I’ve had forty-eight thousand million wounds since then.

  –Reflect, Someone, reflect.

  I reflect. The sun bakes but does not drink the river dry for me to cut the weeds. I reflect. It hurts. It burns. Dippermouth ticks away silently and the ticking silence taps each neural cell. Something falls asleep under the growing net of weeds. She falls away from me and my inadequacy ticks on silently and hurts. The higher the temperature the faster the vibrations and consequently the higher the frequency of the radiation emitted, so that devices like the brain become unsuitable on account of the inertia associated with matter of relatively large mass, which now produces nothing more startling than the fact that in this type of communication the echo decreases with the fourth power of the distance between two bodies, rather than with the square. I think furiously as the sun moves down the sky. She said something about causality, but then it only pretends to cause, like actors, to save the appearances. I think more coolly as the cool returns. After sunset the degree of ionization in the lower layer of my atmosphere falls off through the recombination of ions and. the higher layer then reflects, less dense, with fewer collisions. The darkness creeps along the water through the weeds. Dippermouth ticks loudly now and Something has fallen away from me into a separate darkness, under the net of weeds. I could fly off now on my relative lack of attraction between two bodies, out of my bondage, my responsibility to her if any, after all I didn’t ask for her stretched hand. I didn’t choose the way, I wanted only opaqueness, nothingness. I didn’t order these complexities, these secret laws and her priggish mystifications. The darkness cools my thoughts, the darkness chills me and I feel alone. Something, say something, I can’t bear the silence. Dippermouth ticks away, grinning his permanent sleep at a quarter to nine, a quarter past three, who knows, she does the knowing around here. The new moon suddenly cuts through the dark looking remarkably like Planck’s constant over two pi times the square root of minus one.

  I reach for the square root of minus one and snatch it down. I dive into the darkness that chills my bones. Under the water I cut hard at the weeds with the sharp blade, all round the boat, I cut and the weeds float away. The leeches cling to me and suck my red corpuscles, leaving me the white. Once every minute or so I come up to breathe, and the weeds bar my passage. I choke. Get off me. Help. Hold it, your breath, I mean, cut, hold it. Ah, breathe away. The sky looks black without the moon’s square root of minus one, totally black and even the stars and galaxies have receded at the speed of light, heaven knows where, she does the knowing around here and she has fallen away from me. I dive into the darkness and it chills my bones. Under the water I cut hard at the weeds, all round the boat I cut, and the weeds float away one by one. The leeches cling to me and suck my red corpuscles, shifting me into the x-rays of the spectrum until I feel so faint I want to die again for lack of white light. Once every month or so I come up to breathe, but the weeds bar my passage and I choke, get off, get off, hold it, your breath, I mean, cut, breathe away. I dive, I cut, I choke, I faint. The leeches suck, the galaxies recede. Once every year or so I come up to breathe, and as I breathe away the sky lightens a little each decade.

  The day breaks with a cough and splutter. I faint and wake at dawn and dive again and cut the last remaining weeds around the rudder. The spectrum has turned green and bright. The leeches suck my last few red corpuscles and I long for the replenishment of oxygen from the yellow dawn which I see through the spectrum but can’t reach. I kick the boat for one last push of strength and float into the dazzling light that chugs alone and down the river away from me, smaller and smaller.

  Silence says the notice on the stairs and the stairs creak. Or something creaks in the absolute dark, the notice having come and gone like things. Someone creaks, levelling out nails perhaps with the pronged side of a hammer.

  The coffin lid creaks open. Voices hang on a glimpse of two moons, two planets possibly, but the layers of my atmosphere distort the light waves travelling through it and upset the definition, even perhaps the distinction between one solar system and another.

  –Ssh. Can’t you see the notice on the stairs says silence?

  –This one has a ticking quality. It hurts.

  –Keep quiet, Dippermouth.

  –Or creaking. As of a coffin-lid opening.

  –Get up then, and climb out. Let me give you a hand.

  –I fear your hands.

  –These hands that drew you in out of your drowning thoughts?

  –You did it … with your hands?

  –Well, not entirely. I lassoed you. How do you feel?

  –Fifty thousand million years old. Like a White Dwarf.

  –You freed us, Someone. Thank you.

  –Don’t mention it.

  –Oh, but I must. I always mention it when you do something proud. You worked so hard. Say thank you to your father, Dippermouth.

  –Thanks, dad. You did us proud.

  –What creaked, Something? I heard a creaking noise.

  –Only the cabin stairs, Someone – Dippermouth coming down the stairs.

  The face framed in the round window of the door radiates something silently and vanishes, leaving its peaks and flat lines of anxiety to trail rapidly across the dial like the nervous handwriting of a distant nebula. It comes from way beyond the visual range, in which the layers of my atmosphere distort the light waves travelling through it and upset the definition of what, my death or my amazing recovery? You died, you know, the staff nurse says the sister says the doctor and the surgeon say all filled with stupid pride at my achievement. They speak in strip-cartoon, each standing inside a square room with accusing remarks attached to their mouths like gall-bladders. But what do they accuse me of? Achievement arouses envy. I remember that. People try to pull you down in countless little ways. They have certainly pulled me down. I can’t move. You haven’t tried. But any fool can undermine confidence in achievement, why, I have done it myself, to my patients, for instance, whose names I have forgotten, and to my wife, a word in here, an edging remark there and I’ll do it again no doubt. But why should they do it to me? Why me?

  –I don’t know, darling. Nobody knows these things.

  –Oh, things … Have people come?

  –Well, no. The doctor says –

  –The journalists.

  –What journalists?

  –He’d better rest now, dear.

  The gall-bladders sail into space, filled with galling remarks. The worms in my head squirm and the inquisitor sharpens his beak. Don’t you remember anything? I understood more inside the coffin. The elasticity of shock counters the elasticity of pressure, for instance. The mass of matter resists, yes, you could call matter resistance.

  –Quite. Yes, I suppose you could.

  He sits at his big office desk in the admin department behind a battery of telephones in ivory, blue and grey, between two scaffoldings of metal trays like rectangular hammocks. Two secretaries tap their harmonised morse beyond the door with a round window in it. So that they can see, he says, and tell my wife, that I don’t get up to anything. He sits at his big desk and surrounds his ponderous person with diagrams, curving graphs, zigzags in red elastic, rising black bars of various heights, sliced silhouettes of people and regiments of rectangles with little coloured cards in them representing something or other that he has his tabs on.

  –You see, I have a sort of scientific method too. One can�
�t deal with people on this scale otherwise. I like to know at a glance who works on what programme and what progress they make.

  –Can you see that at a glance from where you sit?

  –Why, certainly.

  –You have long sight.

  –Well, you as a doctor should know. But I have no intention of wearing glasses. Useful thing, long sight.

  He emanates only apparent brightness. Some fifty million years or many more have run him out of hydrogen, shrunk him inside his ponderous person, increased the internal pressure and temperature so as to form heavier human elements and hence a fall in temperature, collapse and a flinging out of heavier elements until it settles down as a small bright star of high density and degenerate matter that weighs a ton per grain, like a White Dwarf. But the silent words rebound only against myself though their internal combustion pushes me along. I close my staring eyes to avoid the issue of my weariness, so he says how does it feel exactly now, Larry, with no curiosity idle or otherwise, to show he understands. Time heals, he says, and the scalpel scrapes into my pain.

  –I can’t sleep. To avoid the issue of my death and amazing recovery, I toy with scientific trivia. Quite, he says with a paternal pat in his voice on my psychogeometrician’s head and the telephone rings. An ivory conversation ensues, surrounded by diagrams and thin zigzags in red elastic and sliced silhouettes of people which he sees at a glance from a long distance. And people operate the buzzer that operates a female voice beyond the door with the round window in it and the voice announces someone or other waiting to see him. My dear chap, he says, I only follow my instructions and whatever I had asked him to consider as to some astrophysicist or other and his personal problems remains unapprehended or dismissed. I may not know much about psychiatry but I do know what people want.

  –Do you, Stance?

  –Stance? Why do you call me Stance?

  –Sorry. For some reason I find it hard to remember people’s names.

  –Well, not to worry, what do names matter?

  –Sometimes they help to hide things.

  –Things? What things? You should know better than that, you deal with people too. Or would you consider yourself one of them, the scientists, I mean, who only think of things, complexes, chain-reactions, oscilloscopes, equations?

  –Equations operate through people too.

  –Thank you, Someone, thank you.

  –Don’t mention it.

  –Oh, but I must. I always mention it when you do me proud. Don’t you remember anything?

  Yes, I remember Something who sits now by the window in a shaft of street light cradling Dippermouth gently in her left arm. She bends over him and then with her right index finger slowly dials the big hand of his face right round, and then the little hand half round, and the big hand a quarter round, the little hand three quarters round. Dippermouth ticks unevenly in impulses and she listens carefully, staring into his face. She gets up, lays him down lovingly in the cot the hotel has provided, croons a little over him, bends down, to kiss him and comes back to bed.

  The face framed in the round window of the door radiates silently and vanishes, leaving its peaks and flat lines of anxiety to trail swiftly across the dial, until the pain behind the eyes resolves the nervous handwriting to an optical image. The city has all the idyllic beauty of a happiness sequence. Small streets wind up and down, giving shade and high echoes. The houses kneel and join hands in white arches, slender bridges, parapets, open windows and cast-iron balconies with people leaning from them and talking to each other in the quiet tones of evening. Old women sit in doorways, watching, possessed of something.

  She has brought me back to life and I walk wide-eyed, listening to the gestures of the city.

  –Look, they’ve advertised you everywhere.

  –What!

  The picture dances at me on every poster, standing in the middle of an amphitheatre, holding a spellbound audience of Blue Giants, bright cepheids, Red Stars, White Dwarfs and all my patients ever by means of large circular gestures, gestures like triangles, gestures like parallelograms and squares. No one can hear a word except inside my head and in the spheric empty space immediately around. The acoustics cork the space, the microphone has died, the sound-waves can’t get through the layers of my atmosphere. I talk in silent bubbles like a goldfish in a bowl, contort myself in gestures but the crowd soon tires of circles, triangles and squares. They cannot hear the words that rebound in my head but I can hear their grumbles, groans, hisses, yells, their slow clapping and stamping of feet. Then the bull comes in, hoofing up cosmic dust, aiming straight at me with his huge and pointed horns. I hold my terror out at him and plead with sentences that curl around him and bounce off the crowd in rhythm like a drum. I contort myself, create situations, strike attitudes and make circular gestures in wild colours. The crowd screams for my blood. Does everyone want my miserable corpuscles? The bull lunges at me, plunges his horn into my midriff, tosses me up and throws me at the crowd that yells and sits on me, good people.

  Something bends over me.

  –How do you feel?

  –Terrible. Oh, my God, why did you have to do that?

  –I didn’t do anything.

  –No, you left me to it.

  –You had an omen, Someone, you must take note of it.

  –If you think I can sit here calmly and interpret omens! I died, I tell you, I died.

  –You seem to make a habit of it.

  –Why do you keep testing me, Something? What have I done to you? What have I to do with you?

  –We belong together.

  –I thought you called this the happiness sequence.

  –No, you did, Someone.

  –Lulling me into a sense of false security. What do you expect of me, for heaven’s sake? Who did you dial last night? Who do you work for?

  –For you, Someone, only for you. For us. I feel so proud of you.

  –Proud of me? Ha!

  –You killed the bull.

  –I didn’t. It killed me.

  –You always drop the curtain before the end of the show. How do you expect us to communicate if you don’t let the argument develop? Get up, look at yourself, you haven’t even got a scar, except your old one, your birthmark, such a nice little birthmark too. Get up, look around you. Look, listen, Someone, take in, and think about what you see. Something who bends over Dippermouth in the hotel room that night, that day, that night. She bends over him and dials his face with love and anxiety. I don’t know what she sees in him. He ticks away with his irregular morse and it ticks through my neural cells along the muscles of my exasperation with her. That night, that day, that night the messages change their chemistry of atoms and the rhythm quietens to a sullen poison. Get up, look, listen, Someone, and think about what you see.

  –Get up. Look. Listen. Think. All right, I have listened and thought. Thought this. That I go my own way from now on. You understand?

  –I understand.

  –Don’t suppose … I mean, I hope –

  –Goodbye, Someone. Say goodbye to your father, Dippermouth.

  –See you, dad.

  He does. He sees me in the amphitheatre, all dark and empty now, watching the harvest moon big and balanced on the outer rim of hi, dad.

  –Go away, Dippermouth, I want to think.

  –Can I think with you, dad?

  –No, I don’t want you.

  –But you’ve got me, dad. Sometimes, of course, I’ve got you, ha!

  –I don’t care who’s got whom. Go away. She should know better than to send you.

  –She didn’t send me, dad, you’ve got me. The alarm may go off at any minute.

  –What alarm? I haven’t touched you.

  –You’ll have to wake up, though, everyone does.

  –As if I believed that. Wicked stories to frighten kids like you. I haven’t done anything.

  –You’ve done me.

  –I haven’t touched you.

  –No. You’ve forgotten me, haven
’t you, dad?

  –I haven’t forgotten you. I just want you to shut up.

  –I shall scream for attention in five seconds from now, just like you deep inside yourself.

  –I never scream for attention.

  –Everyone does, dad, things come back, boomerang, boomerang, three two one zero. He dips his mouth and screams.

  I hit him hard across his stupid dial. The needles oscillate violently, swing round with a loud creak, the alarm shrieks then goes suddenly silent, the whole machinery slows down to an intermittent tick as Dippermouth falls and all his brain uncoils over the crumbling stones of the amphitheatre ground. The creaking of the hands turns to a rattling splutter until at last the ticking comes to a full stop. The harvest moon rides high and silent as I sit and howl at it like a child of three.

  My wife visits me every day, I think, how do you feel, she says, and things like that. She brings me grapes and oranges. The grapes I suck the pulp of, leaving the deflated skins they won’t allow me to swallow, I remember that. The oranges she peels for me in segments and it aches the muscles of my heart to watch her but why me?

  –I don’t know, darling. Nobody knows these things.

  –Oh, things … Have people come? The journalists.

  –What journalists?

  –He’d better rest now, dear.

  The gall-bladders sail into space, filled with galling remarks. But what do they accuse me of? I haven’t done anything. The worms in my head squirm. I remember –

  –Yes, darling?

  –I remember something.

  –What, darling? Try to remember. The psychiatrist says–

  –The what?

  –The hospital psychiatrist.

  –Oh, no, not that. Tell him to go away. I know the names of things.

  –Of course you do, darling. But he says – well the surgeon says you mustn’t talk, and the psychiatrist says you must, otherwise the shock –

  –will … counter … the elasticity … of pressure.

  –Something like that.

  –Something …

  –Yes, darling?

  –The spheres … it all goes round.