by Ashly Graham
As Hamlet might have said, before he went wacko, the bosses would avow that there were no more things in Central’s heaven and State’s earth, Horatio Bonvilian, than were dreamt of in his philosophy. For his were realities, not dreams. That other Greek word, kudos—“softened expression”, per W.W. Skeat, but used colloquially to mean glory, praise, or renown—would be far too weak an epithet to bestow upon 4285∞; for of course he would zoom through the top of the alphabet to infinity. As the supreme intelligence behind this most amazing combination of deductive and practical accomplishments, at the name of Hugo Bonvilian, per the hymn by Caroline Maria Noel, at his name every knee should bow, and every tongue confess him king of glory now…and proclaim him not just Emperor, and a god, but the god, the Big Freakin’ Cahuna himself.
The man formerly known as Hugo Bonvilian 4285 would just be known as ∞.
In his office, Bonvilian had pinned to the wall behind his desk Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem The Lady of Shalott. Ever since studying it in English class at the Academy, he had been mesmerized by the cadence of the verses; as he had been by the same poet’s Tithonus. Whenever he was worn down by the round-the-clock intensity of his work, re-reading those lines inspired in him fresh reserves of energy. They encapsulated the sense of emotional stasis, the perfection of stillness and the stillness of perfection, so much better, he thought, than Keats’s stab at timelessness, Ode to a Grecian Urn. The image of a maiden, whether she be the Lady of Shalott in poetry, or Gloria Mundy in life, was preferable to any design on a clay jug. Similarly, Tennyson’s much lengthier Idylls of the King, because it adopted an episodic rather than a narrative structure, he considered superior to Sir Thomas Malory’s treatment of the Matter of Britain in Le Morte D’Arthur.
The facts are simple: the fairy Lady of Shalott lives in a castle, on an island in the river, with “four gray walls, and four gray towers”. Rather like the Exeat Institute, in fact, but not like it at all. No description of the Lady herself is given, and all that is known about her is that she is under a curse: she cannot look out of her casement window, let alone descend from her tower and participate in life, without being destroyed. Her immortality is contingent upon her only being able to survey reality in a glass, darkly. All she can do is view the world at first remove as it is reflected in her mirror; wherein, as the poem puts it,
...moving thro’ a mirror clear
That hangs before her all the year,
Shadows of the world appear.
Night and day, the Lady weaves on a magic web everything and everybody that she “sees” passing below on the highway that leads to Camelot, transmuting lively shadows into the “colours gay” of her art, and thereby translating them into second remove: from common labourers and field workers, in their wains and on foot, and shepherd lads; from courtiers and their pages to funeral processions…and, most importantly, the procession of knights, including the famed Sir Lancelot with whose image the Lady has fallen in love, and their squires and damosels.
As to the name, the “Lady of Shalott”: it was fortunate that Tennyson was unfamiliar with Malory’s original for the Lady, who was called the Fair Maid of Astolat, because it gave him licence to invent a rhyme for Camelot and Lancelot. Otherwise, because none of the Knights of the Round Table had a name that went with Astolat, the poet’s muse might have been restricted to suggesting a limerick about an Astolat lady called Pat who thought the Lancelot knight was a twat, and in choosing a sirrah from the view in her mirror, she preferred what she’d seen of Sir Pratt.
The poem is about reflections, and oppositions: the fields of barley and rye that lie on either side of the river; the wold and the sky. The mirror-line of the river, the natural mirror that runs through the poem like a meridian, represents the artistic paradox that life only exists in what is refracted by the mind’s eye; and that reality is death. The Lady is so mentally besieged and affected by the repeated vision of Lancelot, that her precarious sanity is upset: “I am half sick of shadows,” she says; half sick only, for she already possesses the romantic side of Lancelot in her heart and mind; what she lacks is the physical half.
As much as the Lady yearns to look directly at the object of her desire, she knows that to do so will destroy her. When she gives in to her emotion, and mortality descends upon her, the pace of the metre and language quickens…becomes lively:
She left the web, she left the loom,
She made three paces thro’ the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She look’d down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack’d from side to side;
“The curse is come upon me,” cried
The Lady of Shalott.
The intensity of the Lady’s first-hand experience is thrilling and palpable, and so strong that it bursts the tensioned bubble of her existence. Ejected from the symbolic tower, she joins the sequential flow of humanity below that she has observed for so long; literally to immerse herself in the river that bears everything away in the current of Time. She lays herself in the boat that becomes her bier, “robed in snowy white |That loosely flew to left and right”...there it was again, that counterpoint, that balance, that equilibrium, but this time she is moving...down to Camelot where Lancelot, unaware of his role in the episode, joins the wondering crowd and muses that, “she has a pretty face”.
That river line, Bonvilian now knew, was a metaphor for the Word’s middle letter, the palindromic fulcrum or pivot that Stink had referred to, wherein lay the solution to the greatest crossword puzzle of all, that of Creation. And the tower was the monument that he, Hugo Bonvilian, must create and occupy as he directed implementation of his vision for the New World. As Tennyson put it in the Idylls, “The old order changeth, yielding place to new.” Bonvilian’s tower would not be a metaphorical one, and instead of being accursed like the Lady he would become an Immortal, and acknowledged as the reality poet who had been predestined to write prescriptive formulae for the anthology of the Universe.
In so doing he would be ever mindful of Dante Alighieri’s pronouncement, in De vulgari eloquentia, that “The proper subjects of poetry are love, virtue, and war.”: Bonvilian’s poetic love for Gloria; the virtue of his belief in his eternal association with her; his undeclared war against any who might dare to come between them.
The Exeat’s Director decided to leave Stink, or Scrag, or Sputum, or Scrap’s cerebellum intact a while longer to employ in doing crosswords at the Farm. Although each of them had served a much more useful purpose without knowing it or having a hair on his head touched in the name of science, all four would live to squirm another day as proof of the theorem.
Instead, 4285J rushed from his own room on the hidden side of the mirrored wall at the Farm, back to his office. There, after flossing and brushing his teeth and tongue twice to get rid of the Tarnish, and with a clear head, he began to plot a schematic of how he would fill the Void, and still the rapids that led to the Niagara Falls of oblivion. No, the Victoria Falls, one had to think big.
Replacing Past and Future would be a sempiternal Present, a Present where one might as easily meet one’s great-great—to the power of a hundred—grandchildren, as visit ancient Babylon when Nebuchadnezzar was still King of the Chaldeans; or Egypt, to gaze at Cleopatra where she sat forever in the splendour of her Shakespearean barge, looking, as Hugo Bonvilian was sure that Cleopatra did, like Sister Gloria Mundy 2042M’s ugly sister.
Chapter Seven
In the middle of the ward, the resident physicians of Bonvilian’s praetorian guard gathered around their chief, and Nurses Clott and Pipette set about removing the trays of needles and swabs from 2042M’s Euthacart. The scene was reminiscent of Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp.
As the group formed, Director 4285D—it was the “crossword enlightenment”, as Central called it, which had vaulted him from J to D Class—assumed the power of a queen in the centre
of a chess board. The tubes of his stethoscope were doubled around the Nehru collar of the black surcoat that he had started wearing, since his assumption of the Exeat Institute’s Directorship, in place of the standard consultant or registrar’s white one. A haemostat was tweaked to the lapel. The garment, one of a dozen, was already faded from dry-cleaning to remove bloody stains, but the italic letter D, embroidered in white thread, was bright on the breast pocket.
As Bonvilian looked up at the ceiling dome he did up a couple of the buttons without looking at them, so that they were uneven.
It was because of the gentle rays of coloured light from the dome that the ambience on the ward, rather than being that of a chamber of horrors, was not macabre. Here there was no whiff of the sepulchre or mausoleum; of the vaulted crypt filled with skulls and bones and funeral urns containing the ashes of the departed; a halfway house to the hereafter that echoed to the voice of St Michael: How you are, I was, How I am, you will be. Here the atmosphere was more like that of an old religious hospital, staffed by wimpled nuns.
As rich and varied as the colours of the stained glass were, it was only at night, when the fluorescent lights were off and there was a full moon, that the little panes came fully alive, backlit by the moon and illuminated like a planetarium of psychedelic stars.
Although the incongruous elegance of the stained-glass ceiling dome never failed to annoy Bonvilian—worse, he found its influence disturbing—his eyes were always drawn to it. He had heard of Louis Comfort Tiffany, whose creations it resembled, and despised him on more than aesthetic grounds. Comfort! The word, originally meaning strength, was anathema to the environment; his environment, where the only comfort was the deftness and delicacy with which he wielded his scalpels, as in a former life he had a fencing foil, and the Impatients’ consolation that their ordeal would soon be over.
Today the dome must have held his glance too long, for when 4285D looked down again he felt...not quite uncomfortable, but discomfited, and hot. He ran a finger round the inside of his collar and looked covertly about; fortunately the staff was still scurrying about making preparations.
To steady himself he mentally ran through, as if it were a catechism, the key phrases of Subsection Thirteen of the Citizen’s Code, Article Two a), which stated that all religions, credos, myths, legends, cults, beliefs in the supernatural, superstitions, bandying of woolly metaphysical concepts…anything that impugned Central’s secular supremacy…were forbidden. In case anyone should be in doubt as to what that meant, the Expurgatory Index, a supplement to the Code, listed the penalties, which left both little and much to the imagination, for participating in proscribed activities.
The Director knew them all by heart. Nonetheless he felt a sudden hatred and contempt for the bureaucracy that encumbered his life. His genius required assurance of complete latitude in decision-making. The Project was by far the most complex problem ever to confront humanity; without doubt what lay at the core of life was the core of his life’s work, and he could not be expected to home in on a solution with the certainty of pigeon as it arrowed to its loft from thousands of miles away.
Bonvilian was distracted by the fat buzzing of a bluebottle fly in the windows; and the insect was answered by another somewhere else. Having marked the first unhygienic intruder, 4285D’s eyes flickered in search of the second. Spotting it, his eyes narrowed and he became spider-still; it was sitting on the tip of Impatient Squiggle’s nose, brushing its wings with its legs. This the Minotaur took as a suggestion that Squiggle was the one he should devour next, as his plat du jour, instead of bothering to refer to the à la carte ward menu in the hand of Nurse Clott 1473T; and the Director was amused by the thought that the staff would take the choice as being scientifically based. Gastronomically Squiggle was small and bony, crudités to the Slimfast Châteaubriand of yesterday, and the offal from Spore’s thorax that the Director had dined on two days ago.
Observing the direction of her superior’s glance and knowing what it meant, Nurse Pipette 5749T prepared to supervise the insertion of the needles, and attachment of the external veins of tubing through which bright primary fluids would course into Squiggle’s vitals. Soon everything was properly connected. Also divining without being told who had been selected, Sister Mundy 2042M swung the Euthacart alongside Squiggle’s bed.
The small crowd parted to admit their swaggering chief to its centre and 4285D, doing up several buttons of his coat with the holes out of alignment, advanced to the foot of the iron bedstead, and detached the clipboard that bore the chart of Squiggle’s final statistics. The staff exchanged glances; the Director’s insistence on manually entered records instead of computer-printed sheets taxed their technologically oriented abilities, and one did so little handwriting these days that legibility was difficult to achieve.
Bonvilian scanned the details and yawned; visions of Gloria Mundy and Colonel Bonvilian, VC and bar, on African safari together had kept him awake longer than usual the night before, and deprived him of REM sleep. He had taken a sleeping pill at three a.m.; but after the soporific kicked in he had a very strange dream in which, unarmed, he was required to defend his lady love against, in quick succession, a charging rogue male elephant; a wounded man-eating lion; an enraged bull water buffalo; and a twenty-foot-long crocodile with teeth on its teeth. It was a series of challenges that Hercules, Perseus, or St George, or even the three together, would have found daunting.
As Gloria shrank behind him, the Colonel held his ground in front of the charging elephant. To his well-disguised relief, affrighted by his stern aspect, handlebar moustache and monocle, the pachyderm peeled off a tusk’s length away and disappeared into the bush.
Encouraged, Bonvilian dismembered the incoming lion by grabbing its forelegs as it sprang for his throat, and ripping its ribcage apart.
By now debonairly confident, his technique with the buffalo was to dive as it tried to gore Gloria in the river, where they had taken a moment to cool off, and interrupted its lunch. Surfacing behind the beast, the intrepid colonel jumped on its back, twisted its neck by the horns until it fell over, and drowned it; thereby ending its ambition to undergo anger-management treatment and be hired as a breeding bull to sire the buffalo cows that produce the milk used to make mozzarella cheese.
Dealing with the crocodile involved a sequence of strangle and wrestling holds, and a large number of tooth extractions performed with a camping tool. Before waking up, Bonvilian also recollected later receiving in the mail a cheque from a Mr Kwanpen, a manufacturer of crocodile leather products, in Singapore, upon Kwanpen’s receipt of the Crocodylus niloticus that he had sent to supplement the Singaporean’s supply of the premium saltwater small scale Crocodylus porosus skins his company used to make ladies handbags.
That night back at camp after his labours were over, Bwana Bonvilian, modest in victory, flicked a poisonous garter snake off his canvas chair, sat down and accepted the quadruple whisky and soda without the soda that Gloria handed him. Rolling him a cigarette, she lit it between her full lips, and placed it in his wry thin ones, then sat on the ground beside his chair with her knees drawn up to her chin gazing at him adoringly as he relaxed his tired muscles and restored his tissues.
Regretfully 4285D emerged from his reverie and gave Squiggle an appraising look.
‘How are we today, Squiggle? Not too under the weather, I hope, or nervous? A little squirrelly...or squiggly…perhaps?’
The Director waited to confirm that his attempt at humour was as infectious as nothing else was on the ward, and there were several dutiful ripples of amusement from his audience…one more than usual, and the bluebottle on Squiggle’s nose took off back to the windows to join its partner. Suspecting that his own flies might be undone and showing, Bonvilian held the clipboard over his private parts, squinted down the ward to divert everyone’s attention to whatever he might be looking at, and glanced down in case he had to surreptitiously adjust his dress. The only thing that he saw was that the top of his coat
front was buttoned incorrectly; but there was nothing he could do about that now without appearing foolish.
‘Squiggle.’ 4285D spat out the name like a memorial tablet, divulged a hand from his pocket, and snapped his fingers. ‘Clotho, Lachesis!’ The two nurses, having no idea what he meant, smartly advanced two steps on either side of their immediate superior, 2042M, hoping for clarification. Although Gloria did not move or say anything, a muscle twitched in her right cheek.
The Director, it appeared, wanted to show off a little learning: ‘Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos...girls, they were the three Parcae or Fates who controlled the process of birth, life, and death. The Cruel Fates they were called, because of their impartiality. The first Fate, Clotho—you shall be familiar with the name from that of the longevity gene—drew each thread of life from her distaff, for Lachesis to spin on her wheel and measure off. Atropos then cut the thread with her shears. We continue the tradition here. Now that I and you have stood in for Clotho and Lachesis in bringing friend Squiggle to this pretty pass, as usual 2042M shall now perform the role of Atropos with her customary professionalism.’
4285D tapped a finger on one of the little bottles of coloured liquid on the Euthacart, thus indicating his choice for Sister Gloria to fill a syringe from and insert the needle into her choice of Impatient Squiggle’s veins. By a stroke of incredibly good fortune for Squiggle, the choice of drug signified that he was to be put to death quickly and painlessly, because the pharmacological experiments that would follow required his corpse’s data to be unimpaired by the throes of agony. Many of the other bottles contained chemicals that enhanced the Impatient’s experience, or prolonged it. But on this occasion the medics surrounding the bed would be observers, rather than participants in the unequal struggle of restraining the Impatient as he was vivisected.
