Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness

by Mike Allen

  It was almost an anticlimax to get back to college and discover that, during his weeks away from Jus, Martin had found “somebody else,” which “somebody else” he was going to marry.

  When I first heard about it, Jus had to restrain me from stomping round to his place to bawl him out for his treachery.

  She got over it quicker than I did, because Richard came along. He lasted nearly six months, until he suggested it could be more fun if he invited a friend to join in. (Jus wasn’t against the idea in principle, as she explained to me, but she was deeply offended by the presumption.) I had a nostalgic weekend with Tabitha—to hell with worries about infection—and then, later on, another; her field of expertise had shifted to Keanu Reeves, and I couldn’t help feeling she was on a potentially fatal slide. Who next? Adam Sandler?

  After Richard came Derek. Then another Martin. I didn’t like Nigel very much—he didn’t last long—but Nick and Peter were both excellent choices, I felt.

  For my part there was Annette, in whom I was quite absorbed for a full semester; where Tabitha had taught me a lot about fucking, Annette patiently and with considerable skill and versatility taught me virtually everything I know about lovemaking. She was also a very dear friend; Jus had to put a lot of effort into consoling me when Annette and I broke up.

  And then there was Jennifer. I adored Jennifer and probably we could have spent the rest of our lives together, a perfect match; but she wasn’t the other half of me. I told Jus this one night, and over the next few weeks we combined our ingenuities to let Jennifer down as lightly as was possible, so that in the end she thought it was her idea for us to go our separate ways after graduation.

  Because graduation was where Jus and I had got to in our shared academic career.

  My relationship with Jennifer—more specifically, the realization by both Jus and myself that it would be wrong of us ever to expect anyone else to substitute for, to approximate for, the other halves of the Jusjohn organism—brought about in both of us what used to be called a paradigm shift.

  We talked the last of it through one afternoon after we’d got home to Lampitt from college for the final time. Neither of us had jobs in prospect, and our parents were contentedly permitting us to be lethargic for a few months about chasing opportunities—my dad might have thought differently, but he’d died during our previous semester at Rembrandt. We were sitting by the edge of the Greenemill River, watching butterflies—this was in the days before the river got so polluted by the Sharplet Chemicals plant, which had just started construction a few months earlier.

  Jus slowly twirled a pale blue flower between the fingers of her two hands, hoping a butterfly would be attracted to it.

  “You know something, darling?” she said.

  “Know what?”

  I could see on her face that she was taking her thought to completion before speaking it. I almost knew what the thought was.

  “We’re virgins,” she said at last.

  “Yes,” I said.

  In strict dictionary terms, of course, neither of us was—Tabitha and Martin and Jennifer and the others, even Nigel, could have told you that (and Nigel probably would, in great detail for the full length of a bar-propping evening)—but in truth that’s what we were.

  We were virgins to one another.

  The two parts of the Jusjohn creature had experimented both physically and emotionally, but they’d done so separately—independently.

  I lay back flat on the cool, slightly damp grass, my hands behind my head, and gazed at a couple of small white clouds and a dissipating jet-trail that ran alongside them.

  “We should maybe someday do something about that,” she continued.

  “Someday,” I agreed.

  It wasn’t really so important, after all. Because in another way we weren’t virgins to each other at all. No two people, it seemed, had ever been so closely and steadfastly entwined; even that was understating it, because we weren’t two people, just one.

  She waited a few moments before speaking again. “John, we’re going to spend the rest of our lives together. I thought maybe we could do that without physically living together, especially when I was with Peter, but then . . .”

  “It was the same as with me and Jennifer,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Could have been a marriage made in heaven. Really it’d have been the wrongest thing you and I ever did, if we’d let me marry her.”

  “Yes,” said Jus again.

  A green butterfly meandered briefly above my nose and then sailed on breezes only its wings could detect towards Jus. I raised my head and followed its indecisive flight. It pirouetted around the blue flower, which she was now holding determinedly still, and then landed on it.

  “Look,” she breathed.

  “We’re making love,” I said, just as softly.

  In a minute or less the butterfly tired of the bloom—at least, that was the way someone else might have seen it. In reality, it had pulled us back into the unity of the Jusjohn, it had made our love for us; the fine and delicate task done, it was free to grace other flowers, other lovers.

  Neither of us spoke for a long while, then:

  “There are practicalities,” she said. “If we’re going to get married, I mean. Parents to tell, that sort of thing.”

  I chuckled. “It’s hardly going to be a surprise to them. They think we’ve been living together—I mean ‘living together’—these past three years.”

  “Yes, but they’ll still want the formalities to be observed. And they’ll want to be able to think they helped us fix the date, and gave their blessing, and—oh, all the usual shit.”

  She stood up and brushed with one hand at the back of her jeans. With the other she threw the blue flower down onto the slowly moving water of the Greenemill. It floated a few yards downstream, and then was taken by the eddy formed around a moss-covered rock that broke the surface. As we watched, the abandoned bloom bobbed once, bobbed twice, and then was pulled under.

  “Take my hand,” she said, “as we walk back to tell the others. I want your hand in mine.”

  * * *

  And, still, “Jus” is the name this stranger has just used to the woman behind him in the room, the woman who seems clearly to be the mother of his child.

  The child whose father is called John Sudmore and has my voice.

  He’s speaking to me again, but I can’t hear his words through the cacophony of my memories. And then the memories in turn are superseded by the rush of my thoughts.

  I can believe in many things, but one of these is not that there is a creator god—still less one who, not satisfied with having brought his universe into being, continues to tamper with its course of events. Nor can I accept the idea espoused by some of the quantum scientists that each and every moment of our universe sparks off a myriad other universes, each defined by a single one of all the different outcomes of all the different events a moment can contain. Yes, I can conceive that this might happen, that the passage of every instant of time is characterized by near infinite creation; but surely all those other possible universes that are generated are like pairs of virtual particles—springing spontaneously into existence but then instantaneously returning to the base level, the nothingness, as they annihilate each other. In the case of universes, the base level is the universe we know, can see, can test, can probe. The almost infinitude of individual alternative possible existences persist for barely a quantum of time before they all converge back upon the base level. In short, I can no more believe that the universe creates and re-creates itself than I can believe in the creator god.

  So the idea that I might have somehow dialed into an alternative reality, where there’s an alternative John Sudmore who married an alternative Justine Parland, does not even enter my mind as a possibility; well, as a possibility, perhaps, but one to be instantly dismissed.

  Yet I do believe in creations, and I do believe in gods.

  I believe in all the little gods we ar
e.

  I believe in the power each one of us has to create a future so forcefully that it imprints itself irrevocably upon the fabric of spacetime, or whatever it is that forms the substrate of reality.

  And I believe that my younger self did that, creating for himself a future that, while it was not my future, was nevertheless so vital that it has played itself out . . . somewhere else.

  Somewhere that I’ve just accidentally phoned.

  None of this can I even attempt to explain to the man who’s now back on the line speaking to me. He’s inquisitive as to who I might be in relation to himself; his suspicions assuaged, now he’s trying to work out if maybe we could have had a common ancestor. Do I have a great-aunt who was called Julie Petersen before she married and became Julie Halstread? Was my father’s name Clive?

  Of course, the answer to both questions is “yes”, but I’m not going to tell him that.

  Instead I babble: “Look, I’m terribly sorry to have disturbed you. I got a wrong number and then . . . well, I don’t know what came over me, claiming I had the same name as you, and all that stuff. Must be the heat. Heat and boredom—the twin curses of telemarketers. Make us do funny things sometimes.”

  And so on. I’m hoping Mrs. Baldeen isn’t picking up too much of this.

  He says nothing for a moment, and to fill the silence I speak again, unable to stop myself.

  “Give my love to Jus.”

  I put the phone down as quickly as I can, even though he’s talking once more, his curiosity now fully aroused.

  I swivel my chair and stare straight into Mrs. Baldeen’s eyes, which are cold and gray. They remind me of the way I see the world. I could never explain to those eyes why it is I can believe in the little gods—the little creator gods who are us.

  And now I’m back walking home across the fields with Jus’s hand in mine, birdsong in the air, long grass and occasional tough wildflowers swishing at our ankles.

  We didn’t speak much as we ambled together, just once or twice an “I love you” or a warning to steer around a cowflop. I don’t think I’ve ever been as aware of existence as I was then; it seemed as if Jus’s presence was a lens that focused onto me messages from every atom of the world. I was as one with everything, though most of all, of course, with the warmly glowing sun alongside me.

  And then it all began to change. The first I noticed of this was when the knowledge arrived in my mind that things had been changing for some little while. The day wasn’t as welcoming; the breeze didn’t caress my face with the same tender attentiveness; the wildflowers had paler, dirtier colors.

  And the grip of Jus’s hand, so firm in mine just a few moments ago, was subtly fading.

  I glanced up at her. She was still there, of course, but the face which had been so emphatically full of life, so very present, was now a texture of floating shadows, a pattern of light and dark that seemed to have been serendipitously thrown together to take the form of a face. Through her smile I could see a cloud that hugged the horizon.

  I came to a halt.

  “Jus!” I said desperately.

  A gust of the breeze ran through the unkempt grass, the rustling of the blades drowning any reply she might have made.

  We turned and walked on together—there was still enough of her in the air beside me for that. It was as if I was being accompanied by strains of an orchestral piece so faint that I couldn’t quite make out what music was being played. The touch of her fingers against mine was a grace note so elusive that you barely notice it, yet would notice it were it not there.

  I suppose I should have been feeling some sort of grief, but what was going through me was too profound for that, was beyond grief. Loss—yes, there was an aching sense of loss that seemed to make heavy every part of my body, slowing the pulse of my blood and the sparking of my synapses, chilling my skin. Pain, too—the ghost pain felt in an amputated limb. But more than anything else what I felt was acceptance.

  Jus and I had shared our sandwiches and our selves sitting on the low wall outside the school. Once or twice our hands had brushed, the touch as light and insubstantial as the feel of her hand in mine now was. In her eyes I had seen my future; I had read it in its entirety, page by page, word by word, and I’d joyously accepted it. All the afternoon, through classes that were mere blurs, I’d pored over its pages, reading and re-reading, living, a story in which I was one of the main protagonists—part of one of the main protagonists, part of the Jusjohn organism.

  At the end of the school day I’d danced home, cheeks radiant with excitement, with life. For once I’d been communicative over the dinner table with Mom and Dad, telling them that there was, you know, this girl I’d met, and maybe they would like to meet her too, could she come to dinner on Friday, perhaps? She was really nice, they’d like her a lot. I saw my parents exchanging glances, glances that said something like, “He’s always been too shy to tell us about girls before. Maybe this one really is a cut above the others. It’s about time. Remember when we were like this?” And I didn’t care that there was something a little patronizing in all this.

  That night, although I’d expected to lie awake for hours thinking of her, expected when at last I did fall asleep that I’d dream of her, in fact I dropped right off and dreamed of pirate ships and cabbages and kings, and I didn’t wake until the alarm clock shrilled at me. I’d have eaten no breakfast at all if my mother hadn’t stood over me.

  Even though I reached school twenty minutes early—an unheard-of over-punctuality in my life to that date—I was far from the first to get there. Already there were little huddles in the corridors, many earnest faces, some of the girls in tears. “The new girl, the new girl, the new girl,” the echoes whispered along the walls.

  The new girl had been waiting for her dad to pick her up in his car after school the evening before when a truck had swerved because old Fatso Berringer had been drunk at the wheel again and it had plucked her from the sidewalk as neatly as the clawed hand in one of those fairground machines might pluck up a trinket and it had carried her on its hood for fifty yards or more before crushing her, and the life out of her, against the wall of the hardware store, blood falling onto the splayed pages of the books that spilled out of her satchel so that it was unlikely even the thrift store would now accept them for resale.

  I lost a month of my life after that.

  It was all a dreadful mistake, you see. I had already read the story of the future and, in it, the character called Justine, or Jus, was very much alive. If she’d been killed by a drunkard’s truck, that story would be negated before it had even started. Yet the story was the truth; I knew it was. The falsehood was what people were telling me. Those kindly people, the new friends who suddenly appeared, Mom and Dad, the doctors—however well they were intentioned, they were lying to me.

  Or, if they were not, I would make it so.

  And I did.

  I insisted to reality that the story would be told, that if reality itself would not tell the story of its own accord then I would do so for it.

  And I had done that, too. I had lived the future that I knew to be the truth, and Jus had lived it alongside me.

  Yet now she was fading from alongside me. Now, after nearly a decade, the conviction that had made me mold reality to suit my wishes was ebbing. And the sign of this ebbing was that Justine ebbed.

  What was it that scattered my concentration? Was it the prospect of finally announcing to our parents—my Mom, Mr. and Mrs. Parland—that the fusion of the Jusjohn organism, so long established, was now to be formalized? Was it that my mind couldn’t embrace the clash between the two realities? Was it, and I’ve hardly ever dared admit this to myself, that I didn’t, at the core of me, really want our unity to be recognized by the world? Could it even be that my emotions rebelled against the thought of finally making physical love to Jus, that I was repelled by the notion?

  I don’t know. I still don’t know.

  But I know that as Jus and I strolled slowly h
ome across the fields she trickled out of my existence as fine dry sand might trickle away through my fingers, until by the time I got home all traces of her had vanished. And I was entirely at ease with this—on one level.

  “Did you have a good time down by the river?” asked Mom as I kicked the mud off my boots. And: “Isn’t it about time you got yourself a steady girlfriend to go on these walks with you, John?” And: “I’ve made a meat loaf for supper. Dad should be home any minute. I’ve already opened him a beer. Would you like one too?”

  Yet on another level I wasn’t accepting of the new non-Jus future at all. The Jusjohn being was still there. There could never be a Pollyjohn, or a Veronicajohn, or a Katiejohn, or . . .

  I say that I live alone in my apartment. But that’s not quite true. Sometimes Jus is there also. I have never seen her or heard her, but there are times I walk from the cramped kitchen into the cramped living room and I’m aware that the sound of her laughter has been there just a moment before.

  None of this could I have said on the telephone. None of this can I ever hope to explain to Mrs. Baldeen’s hard gray eyes.

  I stare at the phone. Will I be able to pick it up again and call Bill, as I originally intended?

  I’ve been living a wrong existence, I now know, since that afternoon when we walked home from the river.

  Parts of the truth I got right, parts I got wrong.

  As I was washing my hands and going back downstairs for the beer Mom had poured for me I assumed, as I’ve been assuming ever since, that the future I’d created was somehow the lesser reality, the subsidiary one—that the primary reality had reasserted itself, compelled my version of creation to converge back towards the mainstream of time’s flow. It had chipped my conviction, then stood aside to watch it crumble.