Mr Cassini

by Lloyd Jones

  But why Cassini? Why not Jones, or Hughes, or Davies?

  Cassini’s Ring is a dark and divisive region within the rings of Saturn, so he thought it was appropriate. He was into the stars. He looked through his telescope every night. There was something else, too. The Cassini mission to Saturn is a voyage of discovery, and the probe had to shimmy through Cassini’s Ring at one stage to get to the other side. Duxie saw parallels with his own life…

  He wanted to get to the other side?

  Yes, he wanted to make a fresh start. He said he’d had enough of it all, the angina of the past. He quoted a man called Fernando Pessoa – madness isn’t the failure to make sense but the attempt. He said the water was still seeping into him but he was almost full. The water had reached his head. He could hardly move by now, he was so heavy with it. Some of it was coming out of his pores.

  This has cropped up in our conversations before, hasn’t it? People with holes inside them…

  Yes, he said he could see other people around him who also had holes inside them. He would point to someone and say look at the holes inside her, there’s almost nothing left…

  Did he discuss this in more detail?

  Not really, but he did mention a man called Castaneda. This Castaneda bloke wrote about a Mexican wise man called don Juan. He met him in the desert. In a certain mental state this don Juan could see people in a different way.

  A mystic?

  Castaneda described him as a Man of Knowledge.

  And how did he see people differently?

  He saw people as fibres of light. He said they were like white cobwebs, very fine threads – circulating fibres. He described people as a luminous egg-shaped mass of fibres.

  On drugs, probably.

  Yes, he certainly liked a smoke.

  And Duxie – was he on drugs too?

  He had been in the past, I’m sure of that. He’d tried to fill those holes inside him with lots of things – alcohol, and drugs, and food too. But that day in the snow he was clean, I’m sure of that. He said he wanted to do it without anything inside him.

  [Olly, I’m full up again. The twenty-one years are up. Can you make the water come out now? She would give him one of her inscrutable smiles. They had reached the end of the trail. She would have to perform one last act before they could finish the story. She would look at him with affection and compassion. His little-boy arms, small and white. His little brown gloves. This won’t be painless, Duxie, she’d say. I’m afraid you’re going to suffer a bit. Duxie, you’re going to experience a little death…]

  Take me through that last hour. What else did you talk about?

  He mentioned that book, Water-Divining in the Foothills of Paradise. He went over it again – how the author had found interconnecting wells and then went deep into the mountain to find their source. He’d emerged a totally different man. Duxie felt that the same thing was going to happen to him. Sounds to me like a little death, I said.

  Little death? I thought that was how the French describe a climax.

  Yes, there are similarities. But the little death which I’m describing is different. It’s almost the same as a real death but you survive – just about. If a frog becomes completely frozen it actually dies. But when the thaw comes a special mechanism kick-starts its heart again. A little death is something like that, only in the mind.

  And what happens then?

  You start a new life. All that stuff from the past is flushed out. You get to grieve for the past and forget it all in a few hours.

  You make it sound like a faked death, or a crab shedding its shell.

  In a way it is. But it’s a fake death of the soul, not the body.

  So how did you plan to execute this little death?

  I held my hand out and gave him the onion. I told him to hold it to his eyes. He couldn’t cry at will, like Gielgud. But I had to get rid of all that water inside him.

  The onion was a kind of ignition key?

  Yes, I wanted him to cry for real – to cry for the past. I wanted him to cry for all the interconnected griefs he hadn’t cried about before. I got the impression that someone had blocked up all his tear ducts. As if a well had been blocked up with concrete…

  [Olly would find a small patch of ground on which they could sit, but the area would be so small they’d have to sit up close together on the tartan rug, hip to hip, and he’d get an itchy bottom from the heather stalks. She’d shove the onion into his hand while she unpacked the sandwiches he’d made earlier. She’d put some big red apples on the grass; yes, there had to be some apples.

  ‘What’s the onion for?’ he’d ask. Perhaps she was going to put some in the sandwiches.

  ‘Just you wait and see,’ she’d say. And all they’d hear as she munched her butties would be the lonely sound of a distant curlew, a bleating of phantom sheep hidden away in sphagnum mossbowls, the sound of time itself winging backwards a thousand years, for Duxie would hear Olwen’s little-girl cries on the wind, coming from long ago, coming from her birthplace among the Welsh hills.

  She’d point to the snowflakes, she’d say they looked like butterflies made from icing, and they’d fly like butterflies too, wavering and changing direction in the air.

  Snow as congealed water. Tears as congealed emotions. Ice patterns on the ground: beauty for nobody’s eyes, beauty because it was there, never to be a commodity or an adornment. By then the snow would be spinning a cocoon of silk around them.

  We’re in the vortex, he’d think. We’ll be inside the prism soon. The little white room.

  ‘Are you ready?’ she’d ask. He’d waver and stutter. But she’d hold his hand in hers.

  ‘Duxie, just trust me. I’ve done this countless times before. You must become a child again.’

  Singularity.

  He’d try to put her off one last time. ‘Can I make a wish?’ And she’d hand him a gold coin, a type he’d never seen before, and he’d flip it into the lake, make the biggest wish he’d ever made in his life, even bigger than the wish at Ffynnon Eidda.

  She’d say: ‘Duxie, can we get on with it now?’

  And he’d hold the onion right up to his eyes, as the snow drifted and swirled around them, he’d hold it close to both his eyes, rub his eyelids with the stinging white flesh, but it wouldn’t work.]

  You tried to make him cry with an onion?

  Yes.

  What happened? Did it work?

  No. Nothing at all happened. The onion failed to make him cry. I urged him on, told him that many brave men – even Scott of the Antarctic himself – were quick to cry. But nothing worked. He was still full of water; it was still oozing out of his skin.

  So we sat there together and we had our picnic in the snow. That’s not quite correct. I had a picnic in the snow. He was unable to eat by now. Too full. And by the time I’d finished my sandwiches there was a new urgency. Duxie needed to get to the end of the story. Completion. It may have been the light – that orangey smoulder before big snow – or it may have been tiredness, but it seemed to me right then that he was beginning to change shape.

  14

  THE TIDE COMES IN

  The interview tapes (4)

  I’d like you to carry on with the story. Can you describe how it ended?

  I think we both entered an enchanted state. In reality we were sitting on a small island in a tiny Welsh lake, but in our cocoon of snow, sitting in perfect silence, each of us lost in thought, we were living – briefly – in a magical land. We were children again.

  I suppose you saw the similarity to Afallon – it’s almost too obvious to mention.

  Yes, clearly. But he told me also about a former paradise on Earth called Hyperborea, at the very centre of the Arctic Circle. I’ve looked it up since. In Greek mythology it was a country of rich soils, soft azure skies, gentle breezes, prolific animals, and trees which bore fruit all the year, even in winter. Discord and sorrow were unknown. The inhabitants were the earliest members of the human race and they liv
ed for a thousand years. They were a happy race, compassionate and contemplative. They died, eventually, by diving off a certain rock into the sea after full and happy lives. In some legends it was a land where white feathers fell continuously from the sky.

  It was still snowing on your little island?

  No, it had stopped by then. The clouds had cleared suddenly and we found ourselves in a wonderland of blue skies and gleaming snow, crisp and absolutely white.

  [It was an island of dazzling fantasy. The snow was uncontaminated, not even a bird’s footprint had marked it yet. When the sun shone in the Arctic, polar bears were known to lie on their backs with their limbs in the air, drinking in the yellow spirit. Duxie would feel like doing that now. Yes, he would do just that. His breath would frost the chilly air; it would become a white balloon drag-anchored to his mouth, a cartoon bubble waiting for the right words to form in it – the words he’d want for this moment. Another balloon would float above Olly’s mouth and he’d think of Salomon Andrée, a Swedish explorer whose balloon had come down in the Arctic ice-pack, condemning him to a rare death: the polar bear meat he ate in a vain bid to survive had contained a tiny parasitic worm, which had eaten him alive from within – a disease called trichinosis. Andrée’s remains – a pair of legs and part of a torso, without the head, were found propped up against a rock on White Island, 200 miles east of Spitsbergen, 33 years later. Duxie would wonder if he too had worms riddling his insides, slaloming along his silvery viscera. Perhaps the worms would bore through his skin soon and he could join the circus as the Rainbow Man; fine jets of spray, tinged with all the colours of the rainbow, would arc all over his body. The water slopping around inside him would be released. He could see the headlines now:

  RAINBOW MAN FEELS A HOLE LOT BETTER

  WATER DIFFERENCE A DAY MAKES

  CIRCUS FREAK WORMS HIS WAY TO THE TOP

  Yes, he’d be famous.

  Then he’d almost go to sleep, a little polar bear with his paws in the air. The earth would lie underneath him still, exactly the same in form and content, yet it would have disappeared completely. Just like his childhood. He would feel its bumps and hollows pressing and yielding underneath him. Righting himself, he’d wiggle a hole with a finger through the snow between his legs: yes, he would see again the coarse grass and soft rushes of the uplands, pressed flat to the ground. A hint of sadness would creep into him; his body would have made a little hole of destruction in the snowscape already.

  His mind would wander.

  A Himalayan panorama, scrimshawed in carved ice, would open up in his mind’s eye and a few garbled sentences from the Tibetan Book of the Dead would come to mind:

  O nobly-born, thy breathing is about to cease; and now all things are like the void and cloudless sky, and the naked, spotless intellect is like a transparent vacuum without circumference or centre. At this moment know thyself and abide in that state. Thine own consciousness – shining, void, and inseparable from the Great Body of Radiance, hath no birth nor death at this moment. Sounds, lights and rays are experienced. These awe, frighten and terrify, and cause much fatigue…

  Olly would smile and flick her fingers with a sharp fillip because she would have a wonderful surprise for him: seven figures would appear over the brow of their little island and form a circle around them. The seven Rainbow Messengers! Of course! They would be there to witness the end of the story. They would be frolicsome, in festive spirits, pushing and jostling each other playfully. They would be dressed in their best garb: shoes fashioned from the finest Cordovan leather, with gold buckles; shimmering tunics in all the colours of the rainbow. They would each represent a component of memory: sight, sound, touch, taste, smell. Tears and laughter too. One of them – Orange, perhaps – would tease him, saying:

  Duxie fellah, you’ve poked around in the earth, with your holes and your wells. You’ve even dabbled with fire on the top of Pumlumon Arwystli, but you haven’t once mentioned wind, and he’d blow with all his might, and a strong wind would come swirling down around them, scattering snow in their eyes, and Orange would laugh until Olly said that’s enough now Rainbow Messengers, behave yourselves…

  The seven Rainbow Messengers would clap and titter; one of them might produce a Bible and read:

  They went across the lake to the region of the Gerasenes. When Jesus got out of the boat, a man with an evil spirit came from the tombs to meet him. This man lived in the tombs, and no one could bind him any more, not even with a chain. For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry and cut himself with stones.

  When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and fell on his knees in front of him. He shouted at the top of his voice, ‘What do you want with me Jesus, Son of the Most High God? Swear to God that you won’t torture me!’

  For Jesus had said to him, ‘Come out of this man, you evil spirit!’

  Then Jesus asked him, ‘What is your name?’

  ‘My name is Legion,’ he replied, ‘for we are many.’ And he begged Jesus again and again not to send them out of the area.

  A large herd of pigs were feeding on the nearby hillside. The demons begged Jesus, ‘Send us among the pigs; allow us to go into them.’ He gave them permission, and the evil spirits came out and went into the pigs. The herd, about two thousand in number, rushed down the steep bank into the lake and were drowned…

  Duxie would thank the reader, and he would remember that the Mr Cassini of his dreams was possessed by demons, and had a pig living in his back garden. A hush would come upon them. The Rainbow Messengers would cease their chatter and Olly would look serious. She would point towards the way they came, across the water, towards the coast. She would say: Look at our wake. What do you think this means?]

  What happened next?

  Nothing happened for a while. We were frozen, too amazed to do anything.

  The cold was getting to you?

  No, it wasn’t that. It was something else – something marvellous, more beautiful than anything I’ve ever seen. The ground glittered with colours – reds, and blues, and violets, and greens… we were suddenly in the middle of an extraordinary, fantastic display of lights, flashing and gleaming.

  An optical illusion?

  It was an illusion of some kind, perhaps, but I think maybe it was caused by the sun playing on the snow, being refracted through the ice-vanes all around us on the rocks.

  Did Duxie say anything about it?

  He laughed… no, he gurgled. He rolled over onto his back, pointed at the sun and gurgled like a baby.

  Definitely on drugs, then?

  No – as I’ve told you, I’m positive he was clean that day.

  Why was he behaving like a baby, then?

  He was stupefied by the colours – we all were. It was like being in one of those discos with a light show coming from the floor beneath your feet.

  Did he talk?

  Yes, he said something about the colours. He said look, Olly, you’ve unwoven the rainbow.

  What did he mean?

  He thought I’d separated all the colours and put them into individual bands. They were his past coming towards him, all the separate elements of his life converging at that precise spot. That’s what he seemed to believe.

  You’ve mentioned the word prism before. Was that what he meant?

  Yes, that’s exactly what he meant. He said he was inside the prism again. Near his white room.

  White room? What did he mean?

  He’d mentioned this white room before. He said he’d been in it twice before in his life. I got the impression that it was a near-death experience on both occasions.

  Did he say when?

  The first time was when he was a kid, the second time when he was in his late twenties.

  But he didn’t remember his childhood, that’s what he said, isn’t it?

  Perhaps he wasn’t tellin
g the whole truth. Perhaps he remembered more than he cared to say. I got the impression, once or twice, that he was playing a version of the Thousand and One Nights, telling himself tales to keep himself alive. I simply don’t know.

  Did he say anything about this white room?

  A little. He said it was a place with two doors. It was a place where you sat on a low white bench and you only had one decision left in life. There was only one decision left in the whole world, and it was a simple one.

  [He would make a special chocolate cake, full of devious contents. But he would have no hunger left. After the water had all gone, his interior would be empty again.

  O nobly-born, when thy body and mind were separating thou must have experienced a glimpse of the Pure Truth – subtle, sparkling, dazzling, glorious and radiantly awesome, in appearance like a mirage. Be not daunted thereby, nor terrified, nor awed. That is the radiance of thine own true nature. Recognise it.

  Sitting next to Olly on a small island in the middle of a lake in the middle of nowhere, he would wonder: should he ever take drugs again? Powdered or parcelled into tiny tombstones of white marble… the opiates which had kept him permanently on the threshold between two rooms. Earlier in the day, as he sat on the toilet, he would have rolled himself a supersize joint in case he became flakey during the day. But now, after rooting around for it in his shirt pocket, he would toss it into the lake. Wouldn’t all this be enough in itself, without any special effects? And Olly… she would be so disappointed. She’d be looking at him and she’d be laughing, flicking the snow around her into the air, watching it cascade back to earth in small explosions of beauty. Trying to help him. She would thrust the onion into his hand and he would try again, but nothing would happen. They would sit in the snow with a ring of white water around them. Waiting for something to happen.]