The Fountains of Neptune (American Literature (Dalkey Archive))

by Ducornet, Rikki

  “ ‘Now Totor is up the coast with the lobster boat, Karl Marx, and by the time he gets back, the photographer has proposed to Odille. Totor’s so good he sees no evil in the news, tells us his nephew – that milky, bespectacled dainty – has “tamed the vigorous tart.” Vigorous tart! Our own Goddess of Fesaninity! Our own Demoness Fornicatress! Yesh! Odille and the photographer is married a month and she’s already fuckin’ Thomash! Thas why Thomash a’ways claimed the boy waz his!

  “ ‘But Odille, she insisted that the father waz the short-sighted photographer. They fought about it, Thomash an’ Odille, an’ maybe that day out on the water that’s what all the shouting was about. . . . What the Cod saw wi’ his li’l telescopical . . . through the glass . . . through the glass.’ Toujours-Là put his hand to his throat and squeezed. Then he laughed; he laughed until he coughed, choked, spat up a thread of green bile, and, exhausted, once more fell asleep.

  “Those were his last lucid moments. That night as Death raked him over her bed of cold bones he raved, shrieked the names of ‘shit-arsed captains, King Squid and the Harpoon,’ and ‘shit-hole ships: the Nautilus, the Adam’s Rib, and the Typhoon,’ and all the ‘shit-house whores’ he’d ever had: ‘Hairy Cyclops, Oyster Roxanne, Salt Sally’; and all his favourite ‘piss-ant poisons,’ the ones that tie the testicles in knots, or tear the optic nerve to shreds, and suck reason from the mind like marrow from a bone. He belched, he brayed canticles of agony and hymns of fever; the room reverberated with his final gasps. Then, rising with a shudder, Toujours-Là shouted for the last time: ‘A FINGER FOR THE CAPTAINS! A FINGER FOR THE WHORES! A FINGER! A FINGER! FOR GOD!’

  “As the Cod’s wife closed the dead man’s eyes, the Marquis sang the song he had heard the sailors sing at the Ghost, the Galaxy, and the Snail and Shark. When he threw back his head, the tendons of his neck were traced in blue shadow. I never forgot the words:

  “ ‘She was our sea of trouble

  our water of life;

  she was all our dirty weather;

  everyman’s wife.

  She was all our shipwrecks,

  black moon and evil star.

  Yet she shined upon our lives

  like the lamp above the bar.

  She drank us down like water –

  our mischief was her cure; she!

  Our mastaba and our lure!

  O holiest of terrors –

  strongest drink and reddest meat –

  the wasp’s nest of that woman’s sex

  was sweet.’ ”

  CHAPTER

  16

  Winter came, windy and wet. Mornings, K read in her study while I sat in bed meditating upon the lithographer’s observable universe, my lotto cards, redolent of fixative and ink. K had uncovered more cards in the bazar; I now owned ten sets: six hundred and forty images.

  I played a game of solitaire, obscuring a card’s eight pictures with eight others pulled blind from the pack of cardboard duplicates. When I turned these face up I saw, often with a shudder of delight, what chance had brought together: hawk and spyglass; cossack and compass; Cyclops and Manticore; ferret and wasp. Memory book and music book, these images produced a concordant chiming, if only I looked at them long enough.

  At winter’s end, a violent wind ripped through the roof of the spa. It tore off dozens of slate tiles and scattered them across the gardens and lawns. Chimney bricks plunged into the attic. These minor disasters coincided with renewed entreaties from America; K was being urged to offer a series of conferences on the theme of what she called, “metamusic.”

  She was tempted by the change, and by the money – far more than what we needed for repairs. She insisted I go along. Because of her book I had become famous; it troubled her that I was not eager to share in the limelight.

  “Illness is self-containing,” she argued. “And shrinking from the world only causes it to shrink. Aren’t you curious? We are to take a jet-propelled airplane.” I cringed. “Would you prefer to sail?”

  I preferred not to go at all. America was at war in Indochina. I wanted nothing to do with a country at war.

  “Would you sleep through all wars, Lauschen,” K teased me gently, “and never wake up? Do you wish to be God again, Nicolas? Simultaneously dreaming and being the world?” I did.

  We are all ghosts, I thought, reflecting upon those photographs of vanished people and places I had seen at the museum. As K and I speak together in what we call the “present,” is my past any less real than hers?

  “I just need to think,” I told her, “to continue my little games of remembering.” In fact, my decision to remain behind was hastened by a desperate desire to dream. And to dream without a witness.

  K sensed the danger. She said: “The world is populated with living beings, dearest, each exceptional, each unique. Therein lies its richness. Now that you have joined us, let love lead you. It is the best the world, any world, has to offer. Yet –” she considered, “solitude can be nurturing and I can understand that you are eager to see the world with your own eyes. Without a meddlesome old lady in your way! Only, promise to remember always: the password is life.”

  She then recounted a brutal incident from the Second War. In the spring of 1944, a Nazi officer kicked apart the spa’s beautiful door of cut glass. As K stood on the threshold in her nightgown, trembling “not with fear, Nini, but anger.” the officer saluted her and said: “Murder is the password.” But he did not kill her. Instead, he tied her to a chair and gagged her with a handkerchief into which he had spat. And he blindfolded her.

  Then needles were thrust into the veins of her “sleepers.” In her mind’s eye she could see the poison enter the skin just under the cobbler’s ear. She saw the lovers, still clinging together, collapse like a house of cards to the ballroom floor with a hiss. She felt her sleepers’ lives drift away one by one, as if a flock of birds had taken wing; she could hear Death beating the air with wings.

  A great fire was set in the driveway. Even K’s rare zoological books were destroyed – those with the hand-tinted plates she had so often described to me in detail. At the foot of the stairs the sand had melted into a pool of glass fantastically coloured by the ashes of a pygmy princess, her hair in spiralled plaits, straddling the neck of a blue elephant; of a woolly rhinoceros caked with red dust; of pomegranate trees swarming with butterflies; of purple rats knotted together by their tails. There were other things just as wonderful: copulating serpents, their scales and eyes set like gems; and a toad as large as a man’s head whose voice could be heard thirty miles away. A tiny figure stood on a mountain, listening.

  Only one book survived. It was the book which precipitated K’s initial vision of “metamusic,” so essential to her understanding of my case. Its name is The Virtuous Abyss, and it is described at length in The Fountains of Neptune.

  Her recollection of this terrible night evoked a memory of my own, which surfaced in the form of an evil dream the night preceding K’s departure for America. This memory I described in detail at breakfast, the last meal we were to share for many months.

  Rose had owned a cat. One day I came into the kitchen just as it was giving birth beside the hearth. Her kittens slid from her body, contained in pearly sacks. A crimson cluster was caught to each, like the corals of some fabulous sea. It had seemed to me that the kittens had been laid, like soft, translucent eggs; precious eggs like those described in a fairy-tale. Beneath the glistening shell I had seen them palpitate and twitch.

  One by one Rose lay the kittens in a large mixing bowl she had set outside the kitchen door. There she had made a nest of lethal rags soaked in ether. The births were swift and easy and the kittens never once awakened from their sleep.

  K became very concerned.

  “Nicolas!” she cried. “How I wish we’d had a chance to talk about this before!”

  “For weeks the cat searched for them,” I continued, “calling and calling.”

  The cab began to beep impatiently in the driveway, ready
to take Doctor Kaiserstiege to the train for Paris. She held me close for a long moment.

  “You are my only child,” she said, her eyes wet with tears. I, too, was deeply moved and only then aware that it was happening: K was leaving me. I kissed her wet cheeks and in that instant realized as I never had before, that this ancient woman, so loving and so strong, had been my life, my breath, my voice.

  And what if, I thought with panic, I am only a thing of her own mind? My confusion was such that I hid my face in my hands and did not see her enter the cab; nor did I see her wave goodbye. When I looked again she was gone, as if she and the cab had been transmuted to dust.

  After her departure I peeled off my clothes and soaked for the rest of the day in das charybdische Sprudelbad - K’s celebrated tub, the one the Americans call “The Kaiser Milkshake.” The tub’s shell-shaped womb is the perfect environment for those who need comforting, and the sound of the foam – churned to a milky froth and sent cascading over the body from feet to chest in the manner of a gently pounding surf – has a soothing effect. Like a hermit crab soaking in a secret compartment of an empty shell deep in the body of the sea, I lay in the tub and thought how I might one day expand to occupy the spa’s every tub and room and furnish them with what K calls “an active, an inventive life.”

  Yet, contradictory feelings submerged me. I suffered pangs of self-loathing for what I feared to be a morbid need for solitude. I felt light, exhilarated, and even giddy because – aside from the housekeeper who would prepare my lunch before leaving for the day – there would be no one to account to but myself.

  Soon the postcards K sent from Manhattan and then Dallas were pinned to the bathroom wall: cities of glass and metal, which the steam curled at the edges.

  A penny, K scribbled on the backs of each, for your thoughts.

  I answered: Often I see the world dissolve beneath a great weight of dust which falls softly like a sooty snow. I hear it sifting down from space – just as if a gigantic hourglass had ruptured. Is Time a mouth spitting soot in my direction?

  Dearest, she replied, don’t be so hard on yourself. After all, you’ve cheated Time most of your life. The dreamer’s clock barely ticks at all!

  Sometimes, I wrote to her, the world appears to me as did my father’s face beneath the water – as an object coveted beyond a dust-laden pane of glass.

  So much is inaccessible! K answered. And the mind is constantly appealed to by Mysterious Others riding swift and thin as atoms in the air. We brood and would take a deeper look. And we dream. Dreams are our networks to a faster, brighter world. . . .

  Sometimes, I wrote back, the junk shop window is wiped clean by a fairy hand and I see the world shining like a newly laid egg. I look into a forest of edible trees rooted in rock candy and recall what the world was like when all its maps were charted by Totor. How it unfolded, untouched by bitterness; how it stretched, marvellous and untried, to the horizon. Even the Cod’s wife’s pewter bar was miraculous then. And the Snail and Shark’s foxed mirror.

  My dearest Nicolas, she wrote, how not to brood? The spa’s walls are stained by rain, and every ceiling is as split and swollen as the spine of a moulting snake. The floors are encrusted with grime and the husks of insects collect in drifts beneath the stairs. Americans complain incessantly of their allergies; fortunately neither you nor I are allergic to dust!

  When the wind blows through the broken windows those bodies scatter, I wrote to K, and I see maps of mandibles and wings! Or some plan for the making of a man, or a model of the gardens of Eden. I am fashioning myself of this dust and of the mud I make with my tears. I would build us a moat of tears!

  CHAPTER

  17

  In dreams light and shadow do not depend upon the sun and moon, but have lives of their own. Ominous hazes give way to the blazing light of midday; it is the emotions which illuminate the world, and a day which begins at night may end at noon. Reflected upon the face of the adulterer, the friend, the stranger, midnight has the same luminosity as noon. Dreams, like the cinema, favour artificial light.

  - from The Fountains of Neptune

  Each morning in das charybdische Sprudelbad I anticipated my possession of the spa – just as I imagine a man looks forward to a new mistress, investing his expectation with unrestricted fantasy. I wondered if Doctor Kaiserstiege had known that I wanted to be alone not only because I was ready to function as an autonomous being, but because I intended to plunge back into an ocean of phantoms – would she have gone away?

  You see: I wanted to distil the essence of the past. To recreate its transient substance. I entertained this possibility: that the present is suspended between two vibrations, and Time a concerted music which can be captured just by reaching for it with the mind.

  I wanted to dwell upon the past unimpeded. I wanted to dream again and just as shamelessly. Ever since awakening I had felt like a gravity-bound alien dropped to Earth from a lighter world. I had come to look upon my passage through limbo as a state of grace. (Later, much later, K admitted that she had been aware of the danger. “But it was what you wanted, Nicolas. And it was time for you to live, as you wished, and with risks.”)

  Empty rooms have their character – rather like a patient who has left all effects behind and lies naked beneath a white sheet, stripped down to the self’s essential bone, waiting for health or for death. The rooms spoke to me, sometimes in whispers, sometimes in groans. I heard them reverberate with screams and shuddered to hear them weep.

  As the perforated wheel of the constellations turned, I attempted to people the spa with all the passion of my untried heart and the freakish power of my brain. I began to feel at ease in the spa’s sprawling maze. The shell does not shrink, I wrote to K, the crab gets fatter.

  This was my stage and these my props: an obelisk lost among the trees; a staircase carved of shadow; the worn marble of abandoned floors soaking up a landscape reflected in windows desperately in need of washing. An empty cabinet smelling faintly of cordials. An attic as vast as a cathedral. The hot cubbyholes of chambermaids. Balconies green with wind-sewn weeds, their rotting balustrades. Overgrown topiaries battling above the quiet pool where I saw my own reflection as beaked as any heron’s. The gazebo where – on a life-saving whim of K’s – I once slept tranquilly as lethal chemicals were injected into the veins of her other patients, her library set on fire. Seasons simultaneous: fall’s spring and winter’s summer chased in fragments down the hall or – captured and cut to pieces – stuck burning to the ceiling.

  As I explored the spa, I attempted to see the rooms as they had been. Each room was a hieroglyph which I had to decipher. This became my way of reconstructing a past, a memory, a life.

  The spa was my inscribed tomb. I plumbed its precious mystery, the dark surfaces of its midnight floors, the walls washed clean in the early-morning light. I strained my ears to hear the small toccatas of forks and pressed my face into the threadbare drapes angling, like Bottlenose, for dispersed perfumes.

  I was my own archaeologist. I populated the empty opera house, a place as silent as sidereal space, with tootling, sequined women and their bowing-and-scraping mates. I imagined that adulterers agitated the bougainvillaea, that maidens hung suspended in the waters of the wells, and – as I stood alone in one such cratered room – I dreamed of women soaking naked, their hair tucked under turbans; I conjured their fresh voices, their laughter mingling with the sound of running water.

  I evoked the conversations of aristocrats and artists, the eccentric demands of arthritic spinsters in the massage parlour, the intense humiliation (as K described it) of an aging widower whose jet-black hair turned green under the sun; the haggard profiles of diplomats gossiping in their pyjamas.

  In a white room where the cobbler once hammered out his shoes, the air still smelled of leather. And I wondered to think that as I lay dreaming of baboons the world was ravaged twice by war.

  One night I awoke to the sound of the cobbler’s hammer and knew I had succeed
ed where all other mortals had failed, except, perhaps, the great necromancers of ancient days. . . .

  Ghosts resist the senses. They sublimate walls, annul calendars and clocks; their scorn of time and matter is legendary. Within a month I had raised a figment with my mind, and, as I crept down the hall towards the cobbler’s room, I savoured the sounds of a conjured hammer striking the volatile essence of a shoe.

  When I stood in darkness before the open door it was as if the air had gelled. Radiating reflected moonlight it quivered. The cobbler, mad, muscular and stooped, materialized holding a hammer in one hand and in the other a green shoe. I knew, although I cannot say why, that the shoe was intended for Odille. I felt a weight lift from my heart when this vision, like a reach of sand undone by water, collapsed.