by Arnold Zable
Heart pounding, I set out in search of Demos. I found him standing on the stone staircase, on the upper platform. I dashed up the steps to snatch him away from the precipice, and in my excitement, lost the fragile balance, and woke to the books open before me. Despite the brevity of the encounter, I was certain that with practice I would extend my conscious dreaming.
I left my job at the cafe and put my affairs in order. I had accumulated enough money to see my family through a year or two. I returned, day after day to the domed room, and as soon as I entered I followed the same procedure. I retrieved books from the shelves, opened them out on the oak desk, and bent forward as if reading. I closed my eyes, and soon I was descending, spiralling back to the illumined landscape.
On each descent I held the dream a little longer, and on each landing I located Demos a little sooner. The doors of memory had been prised open and I was overtaken by a whirl of images. I glimpsed Demos in the backyard shed, and saw him bent over on a winter’s day, inspecting the stormwater drain, wondering where the torrent of rainwater had vanished.
I found him in the rooms of the Ithacan Club, passing from table to table, feted and embraced in the arms of the brotherhood. I stood by his side at the front window of the house in Brunswick and watched hailstones plummeting to the road and front garden. The sky was an eerie grey, the street lit by flashes of lightning. We hurried outside during a lull in the storm, gathered the hailstones and scooped them into our mouths before they melted.
As if detached from my own being, I observed him seated on my shoulders as I carried him through the streets, teaching him to count by the numbers of the houses, odd numbers on one side, evens on the other. I came across him sitting on the stone steps of the ruins and, moments later, on the doorstep of our house in Brunswick. As I had when he was alive, I sensed his solitude, his evolving awareness of life’s mysteries and terrors.
The images lingered long after I woke and, like a film restarting, resumed as soon as I returned to the ruins. With each descent the images were more lucid, and with each awakening, the words in the books before me, clearer. My eyes inadvertently took in individual sentences and, in time, entire passages. My passion for knowledge edged back. I sought out books that probed the mysteries of sleep and dreaming, and I drew up lists of words that depicted states of the psyche: hallucination, fantasy, hysteria, apparition and trance, phantasm and delusion, automatism, delirium.
Again I agonised at the impossibility of becoming fluent in the new language, my limits as a self-taught man, but each term added a little to my understanding. I was regaining my will, propelled by an urgent need to know the workings of the mind, and the indifferent logic of fate. But as if mocking my efforts, with each successive descent the pain of longing intensified. The images of Demos were inextricably linked to the landscapes of Ithaca. There were times when I awoke short of breath and perspiring, and doubly cursed as I realised that I had been wrenched away from both my son and my childhood landscapes.
I made inquiries at the offices of shipping companies into the cost of passage to Ithaca. I wrote to Stratis and announced I would soon be joining him. I sketched designs of the marble I would lay on my mother’s grave to replace the stone that Stratis was tending in my absence.
Fotini dragged me back to earth. Never before had she raised her voice in anger. ‘Our son was buried in Australian soil,’ she shouted. ‘We are duty bound to tend his grave, to light the lamps and erect a stone, and to replace the wilting flowers. To leave him would be a betrayal. It is our sacred duty to preserve Demos’ memory.’
With my way back to Ithaca barred, I panicked. Fotini and I were condemned to remain on foreign soil. I now understood that nostalgia was an infernal ache. ‘We must dissect words to know their essence,’ Old Niko had shouted. I located the word in dictionaries of etymology and traced its origins to a Swiss doctor named Johannes Hoffer. In 1678 Hoffer had coined the term after learning of the strange illness of a student from the city of Berne. While studying in Basel the young man began pining for home. His illness became so severe he was on the brink of dying. When told he was being sent back to Berne his condition improved, and by the time he was on his way home, he had fully recovered.
Hofer named the condition nostalgia, derived from the Greek nostos, the return, and algos, meaning pain: the pain of longing for the return. It was an affliction of the imagination, a disease of both body and spirit. Doctors identified the symptoms as a ringing in the ears, wandering pains in the body, palpitations, paleness in the complexion, severe headaches and high fever.
As the condition deepens, the patient is overwhelmed by involuntary images of the homeland. Some are driven to bouts of insanity and delirium. Soldiers fighting in foreign lands were said to have died from the disease. Entire battalions were infected, especially after incurring losses in battle, and recovered on being told they were to be discharged and sent home. Inmates of prisons, exiles and refugees, those who could not return to their native lands, were doubly afflicted.
There were some who saw it as a nervous disorder, or an aberration of memory. Others argued it was an indulgence, and urged the afflicted to fight against the invasion of their memories. I did not care for the disputes. My nostalgia was a living reality, and my lucid dreaming, a state more enticing than wakefulness. Resorting to forgetting, as some doctors advised, was an act of betrayal. I wanted to fuse the past with the present, and to move at will between them.
As in earlier years, I wandered the city after the library closed and allowed myself to be swept along by the evening crowd. Images of Demos and the Ithacan landscape invaded my waking state. I followed an infant walking hand-in-hand with his father, hoping he would lead me to Demos. The borders between reality and dream were collapsing. The sight of a bluestone wall gave way to lucid images of walls on the site of Homer’s School. Flights of stairs to the entrances of cathedrals metamorphosed into the flights of stone steps in the ruins. In my delirium I saw the streets as passages, running between stairways leading from cave-like entrances to the hidden labyrinths of the city.
I stepped from the pavement into a vestibule, climbed a flight of wooden steps and found myself in a theatre foyer. I purchased a ticket and was ushered to a seat in the darkened auditorium. The curtains parted to an oasis of palms, hanging over the walls of an oriental courtyard. A train of camels was silhouetted on dunes rising on a desert horizon. The scene, stage-lit, appeared as luminous as the landscapes of my lucid dreaming. A magician, dressed in a robe stepped onstage to an oriental melody played by a flautist.
I cannot recall the acts performed that evening, nor the names of the performers. It was the first of many shows I would attend over the years. The acts have coalesced into a succession of crystal gazers and flame eaters, contortionists, card sharks, ventriloquists and vaudevillians, crooners, conjurers, clairvoyants and cancan choruses. Apparitions stepped in and out of elongated mirrors, and a woman in a white gown levitated in a horizontal position. The head of a girl was severed and restored, a silk scarf transformed into doves and parrots.
A magician danced with a skeleton, while a gold-eyed owl perched on his shoulders. A semi-naked fakir swallowed a length of thread and packet of loose needles, and regurgitated them neatly strung together. Flowers were propelled from paper cones, and single seeds planted in wooden boxes, grew before our eyes into trees dripping with oranges. Cards disappeared up sleeves and reappeared from vest pockets. Kings of hearts were transformed into jokers, and aces took flight and changed direction. Mind readers located nominated cards blindfolded, and exposed the thoughts of audience members.
At some point during that first performance I snapped out of my stupor. I shifted my focus from the stage to the audience, surveyed the spectators, and observed their varying states of scepticism and surrender. I saw how desperately they wanted to be lifted out of the ordinary. I saw how much they yearned to return to a state of childhood, and imagined Demos viewing the performance. He was seated on the front steps as
I had so often seen him, in awe at life’s mysteries, and I understood he had lived long enough to sense the wonder, yet not long enough to be disillusioned.
By the time I left the theatre I felt a sense of composure I had not experienced for months. The performance had broken the spell of my illusions, and hinted at my future vocation. It allowed me to discern the fine distinction between dream and reverie, appearance and suggestion.
One practice in particular drew my attention. From the moment I saw it performed I sensed that hypnosis, like lucid dreaming, was a means of accessing lost landscapes. I had climbed the stairs in a delirium and left, hours later, with the first inklings that I could help others afflicted by grief and nostalgia.
The following morning I returned to the domed room with renewed purpose. I located books on the art of conjuring, magician’s manuals, performers’ memoirs, entire volumes devoted to mind-reading and hypnosis. I was still assailed by attacks of panic at the loss of Demos. It could not be otherwise. Yet there were extended periods of clarity, and, moments beneath the dome, when the rays of the sun finding a way through a porthole fell on an open page. And in the glow there was warmth and sustenance, and the elation that accompanies new understandings.
I was particularly drawn to the writings of Robert-Houdin, the legendary father of modern magic. I devoured every line of his writings. He had founded a theatre in Paris in 1845, where he performed with the use of mechanical devices, called ‘automata’, that he had designed and constructed.
In his memoir he paid homage to his mentors, and the magicians who had preceded him, and in his manuals he passed on his experience and knowledge to future performers. He was an actor playing the part of a magician, he wrote, a showman as much as illusionist, the son of a watchmaker, who strove for precision. He elevated magic from the fairground to the theatre, and acted the role of scientific lecturer to distract the audience from his deceptions.
Inspired by his writings, I formed the delusion that I could make a living as a stage-performer. I bought juggling balls, silver hoops and trick ropes, and whiled away many hours in the backyard shed practising the deft movements required for sleight of hand. I attended meetings of the Australian Society of Magicians and met both seasoned performers and amateurs. I had deserted the Ithacan brotherhood for a fraternity of tricksters, lured by their passion for the mind.
Inevitably I met Will Alma, the most well-known of Melbourne magicians, an expert wood turner, electronics maestro, and perfectionist. Alma invited me to his business in South Melbourne, and took me on a tour of his props workshop.
He had been born to a family of magicians, he recounted. His father toured Australia as Pharos the Magician, accompanied by his wife, the Floating Lady. Pharos disappeared on tour and abandoned the Floating Lady and the infant Will. Alma’s mother forbade him to follow in his father’s footsteps, but the lure of the stage was far greater. He performed card tricks at the age of fourteen at a church concert and knew instantly that it was his calling. The Floating Lady gave him a hiding, but the Amazing Will Alma was on his way. He toured the rural circuits, performed in the capital cities, and learnt many times over that an audience prefers to be mystified rather than enlightened.
All the while Alma was enticing me with his products. The display window of his shop was neatly arranged with meticulously crafted models of illusions: an electric chair, a guillotine, a woman suspended on the tip of an upright sword, a false-bottomed cabinet. By the time I left, I had placed orders for a kit of tools and Alma’s levitation apparatus.
I stumbled out weighed down by books and manuals, a human skull, a disembodied hand, a magician’s baton, and instructions on how to construct a performance. Alma had advised me to specialise in skills that matched my temperament. I should first adopt a stage name, and in choosing the name I would be able to construct monologues that cloaked my deceptions. I should order the sequence of acts accordingly, and complement the script with a matching backdrop.
I knew immediately what the backdrop should be. I drew outlines and commissioned a stage artist to paint it. I spent my dwindling resources on materials and worked for months on set constructions. Against the fierce protestations of Fotini, I trained Sophia as an assistant. She was seven years old, young enough to enter into the performance with a child’s innocence, yet old enough to acquire the skills with practice.
After a year of preparation, I hired a city theatre and an assistant, and engaged a veteran vaudevillian, George D’Albert, to provide comic relief. D’Albert had not performed for years and was grateful for work at a time when, due to the rising popularity of cinema, vaudeville was on the wane.
The entire Ithacan brotherhood made its way from the clubrooms to attend the opening performance. Mentor has lost his senses they whispered, as they milled about the foyer. The death of his son has pushed him over the precipice. But I remained certain that even the sceptics would be impressed by the backdrop.
When the curtains parted, the theatre was plunged into darkness. Standing in the wings I heard the first gasps of recognition, as the spot-lit backdrop unravelled like a scroll of parchment. The artist had, as directed, painted a hamlet of stone houses, huddled on the slopes of a mountain, not far from the summit. A sea hawk hovered over the panorama, scanning the landscape. In the foreground, Hellenic walls rose from the undergrowth, in the shadows of a cypress grove. A flight of stone steps ascended against a rock face leading nowhere, and beyond the slopes, stretched the sea and the skies of twilight.
I allowed the audience time to take in the scene before making my entrance. Emulating engravings depicting Robert-Houdin in performance, I had oiled my hair and parted it down the middle. Dressed in tails and dark grey trousers, a light grey vest, and a bow tie over a starched white shirt, I attempted to assume his easy manner. I was acutely aware of my foreign accent and hoped that it would add, as Alma had assured me, an exotic touch to my stage persona.
Ignoring the undercurrent of ridicule I addressed the audience: ‘Tonight we will witness the wonders of the mind. We will rediscover the power of dreaming and come to understand that we live in a world of illusions. We will retrace our childhood landscapes and explore the wisdom of the ancients.’
I introduced my stage-name, Asklepios, the god of healing. For two millennia, healing sanctuaries known as Asklepeions were scattered throughout the Hellenic world. ‘In times of crisis and illness,’ I continued, ‘patients undertook pilgrimages to the sanctuaries, and placed themselves in the care of therapeutes.
‘The sanctuaries were a retreat from the frantic pursuits of daily life. Massage, bathing, performances of music and drama, quietened the soul and brought patients into a unity of mind, body and spirit. When the patients were considered ready, the therapeutes would usher them into sleeping caves known as abatons. The ancients understood the healing potential of dreaming,’ I contended, ‘but all that remains of the sanctuaries are the ruins you see behind me.’
Wearing a white dress, Sophia skipped onto the stage and lay down on the floorboards. I covered her with a silk sheet and at the command of my baton she rose horizontally. I kept her suspended on the silk sheet, waist height, for several seconds, parallel to the stone steps in the backdrop. As I drew the sheet away, Sophia vanished mid-air, as if propelled into the skies beyond the precipice.
Invented at the turn of the century by the Belgian magician, Servais Leroy, the Garden of Sleep, as the act was called, was an illusion dependent on wire supports and special lighting. I was relieved that despite the creaking of the wires, the illusion seemed to have been performed without mishap. I resumed my monologue, expounding the power of hypnosis.
‘Hypnotism is a science,’ I insisted, ‘and as science it is subject to investigation and an ongoing exploration of the subtle distinctions between levels of consciousness. Recent advances in the science of hypnosis,’ I declared, ‘confirmed what has been intuited and practised by the ancient therapeutes.’
On cue, my assistant stepped from the w
ings with a caged bantam. When the bantam stumbled onto the boards, the audience broke into laughter. Undaunted, I hypnotised the bird by drawing a straight line before it. Within seconds the bird toppled over. The laughter grew louder. Observing my predicament George D’Albert bounded on stage. He launched into a routine of jokes and impersonations and made it seem that my act had been planned as a comedy.
When D’Albert completed his performance, the theatre was again plunged into darkness. A black curtain concealed the Ithacan backdrop and my assistant, dressed in black, to render him invisible, finalised the props for the next item. The stage was dimly lit with blue footlights. By my side stood a barrel. I rolled it forward and invited a member of the audience to confirm it was empty.
The lights were dimmed further, and with a wave of the white baton, I drew out the hypnotised bantam. Again, the show threatened to turn into fiasco. Working fast to stifle the laughter, I drew out a skeleton and danced it across the stage, followed by a succession of violins. The instruments floated to the wings and vanished. I upturned the barrel to show it was empty and when I placed it upright, Sophia jumped out and bowed to the audience.
After an intermission, I stepped back on stage and lectured on the science of mind-reading, then distributed six envelopes to members of the audience, and asked them to seal a small object inside them. ‘Psychometry,’ I intoned, ‘is the art of divining facts about its owner from an object.’ I instructed my assistant to blindfold me. He handed me the envelopes and I identified the contents of each one—coins, a purse, a business card, a page from a notebook—and described the person who had sealed it.
It was not difficult to perform the deception. I had long rehearsed the association-of-ideas method of remembering appearance, and the envelopes contained nicks in a pre-determined order that enabled me to deduce who had received them.
After one last interlude from George D’Albert, I returned to the stage for the finale. In my right hand I held the baton, and on the palm of my left, the skull. ‘Since time immemorial,’ I declared, ‘mankind has struggled against the forces of evil.’ My assistant appeared through a plume of smoke, in a red cape and black tights. Horns protruded from a mask. Flexing his muscles, the devil knelt down, and drew a pistol.
