I was dumfounded. I put my hands to my cheek, wondering if she had really kissed me or not. There had been something so insubstantial about her. And then I realised that she had gone.
I walked tentatively forward, into the shadows at the rear of the garage, but could find nobody there. The one door I came across was locked, and when I went back out into the street I could see no lights elsewhere in the building. I knocked sharply on the entrance door to the taxi business but there was no answer. I could not see Mathilde’s slight, retreating form walking away up the rue de Vieuville, or in the Place. I went back to the rue des Abbesses but she was not there either. In the distance there was a gendarme and I considered going to him for help, but I decided otherwise. It was probably the same man I had reported to before and I knew he wouldn’t be sympathetic.
And anyway, Mathilde had told me to stop looking for her and Bernard. I walked reluctantly to the shelter of that Guimard canopy to the Metro and continued on down the steps. I decided that the following day I had to start looking for another job. I didn’t care what it was, or where, just as long as it was not near the rue des Abbesses.
A False Impression
I had to go outside. The air in the room had grown almost unbreathable from the cloying smoke; a mixture of hashish and incense. Normally I revelled in such an atmosphere, in the artificial light and warmth. Living up there on the edge of the moors I had a house with solid stone walls at least three feet thick to keep out the elements. The windows were few and small, shuttered and curtained. In that place where I worked I was cut off from the outside world; space and time were reduced down to one room measuring ten feet by ten. Normally that suited me just fine; I could work undisturbed whenever the mood took me, and for as long as I felt the need to continue.
But on that particular night, in the hour before dawn, I felt a sudden and overwhelming requirement to quit the room, to leave my house and go outside. I can’t claim that I had a presentiment of what would happen. I don’t think that it was anything but the merest chance that sent me out on to the moor that night, at that exact moment.
It was bitterly cold, but still and clear. The air was like a knife in my throat and my lungs felt as though they froze with the indrawing of every breath. I had been drinking wine but any feeling of intoxication immediately departed. The hoary scene before me was dominated by the full moon that hung low and close, every detail of its surface brilliantly and clearly etched. It was so bright that it hurt my eyes.
I was idly attempting to examine the lunar maria, the plains once thought to be seas, when I felt a sudden and fundamental jolt in the earth. I found myself lying on my back on the hard ground with no memory of having fallen. But I had no interest in how I had come to be in that position for I was concentrating on the profound, aching, rusty reverberation that I could still hear and feel. The jolt itself had lasted only for a moment, but the dull ringing aftermath, a sound almost too low for the human ear, seemed to be so horribly revealing. Like some vast echo-location device, it measured out significant dimensions, surfaces and materials. It implied depths, heights and volumes. It all seemed to offer a sudden insight into the universe around me.
I was convinced it was that momentary, revelatory understanding that somehow allowed me the brief glimpse beyond the curtain of darkness, into and beyond the night sky I knew and had taken for granted. It was as though the great and complex mechanism that held everything in its place was briefly, if dimly, illuminated.
I saw, or sensed, the way in which our planet, and all the others, were slowly grinding their way around the universe, each heavenly body impossibly heavy, badly lit by distant suns. I knew for certain that ancient rails kept them to their course. I could not understand why nobody else had ever realised this, but I had always been told that in space there is meant to be no sound so we cannot hear the eternal din, the monstrous shrieking, of machinery that is not properly maintained. The jolt I had experienced was some small fault in this colossal mechanism as the earth made its way around it.
I immediately thought of the orrery that once had pride of place in my late uncle’s study; the curious device in various metals that illustrated the relative positions and motions of the planets and moons. But this was nothing like his heliocentric model with the heavenly bodies at the ends of brass arms. What I had seen was infinitely more complex, more like a great three-dimensional astrolabe. I had been vouchsafed a vision of the universe as it really was; a monstrously clever and elaborate, if perhaps over-designed and out-of-date, feat of engineering. How far it reached into space I could not tell. I was sure that those reverberations were continuing to return as echoes from unimaginable distances, just too muted now for me to able to hear them.
Lying upon the frosty ground, looking up into the darkness, I hoped in vain to catch another glimpse of what I had seen. By pressing myself flat to the surface of our planet I hoped to feel any further jolts, but nothing so violent came again. After a while, however, I could almost sense an infinitesimally low vibration that seemed to confirm that our planet was indeed a giant sphere rolling around on gargantuan tracks.
As my mind assimilated this revelation my senses lurched and it was as though I was suddenly clinging to the underside of the earth, looking down and ever down into the black space below me. It seemed impossible to believe that physical gravity was keeping me in place; I was mortally afraid of falling off the world.
Eventually, however, the cold of the ground started to seep into me. Flesh and bone began to ache and I knew that I had to move or risk perishing out there on the moor. It took a great mental effort to trust to the concept of gravity, the illusion of ‘up’ and ‘down’, and to work with it by rolling over onto my front and pushing myself back up and on to my feet. I retreated shakily and unsteadily into the house, my eyes always on the heavens. Only the extreme cold finally forced me to pull myself away, to go inside and close the door.
When I awoke the following day my first thoughts were of what I had seen in that hour before dawn. The experience was imprinted clearly on my mind but I reasoned that it had to have been a dream.
I had slept through the morning and it was now early afternoon. The sky was clear, an almost translucent blue that seemed so close to disclosing what had been fleetingly visible to me in the night. I stood out under the vast expanse of sky staring into it in vain.
I could not quite shake off the memory of what I thought I had seen, but after a while my thoughts turned to food. I had not eaten in over thirty-six hours and was ravenously hungry. I had intended to go down to the village for provisions the previous day but my work had swept aside all such considerations.
Grudgingly, but with little real thought for my errand, I left the house and took the accustomed track down off the moor. The views that had been so important in bringing me to this place of isolation did not properly register. I didn’t even look at the unmade track where my feet must have found a sure path without me consciously realising that they did so; my attention remained resolutely on the vault of the heavens.
I prided myself on being a rational man, and I knew that long hours of work sustained only by hashish and a little wine must have clouded my perception and judgement. I knew that the combined effects of hunger, drugs and alcohol must have been responsible for the hallucination. But I was not able to simply dismiss the idea of the universe being such a ramshackle and Heath Robinson affair.
I continued walking down off the moor and was coming into the wooded valley. I would normally have followed the beck that ran down into the village, but at the small footbridge, for some reason, I looked up into an old mountain ash. I was distracted by a story I had once heard about William Blake seeing a vision of angels in a tree.
My thoughts were disordered. It was hard to distinguish between hallucinations and visions, I told myself, and like religious beliefs, were often given credence by otherwise sensible people. I would have called them delusions. I would certainly have put into that category the story of wha
t I thought I had witnessed if anyone else had reported it to me.
I thought of Blake’s angels, and God, and wondered where any divinity could possibly have been in the universe I thought I had seen? It wasn’t a question I would normally have asked myself. I am an atheist, but as a purely academic consideration, I wondered where God would have been in that cosmos of colossal spheres rolling around on convoluted and rusty tracks? Hadn’t I looked on it all and described it to myself as ‘unmaintained’? My initial thought was that there was nowhere in the vast mechanism for any deity to hide away. But there still remained the question of who, or what, would have created it all, and why?
These distracting and troubling thoughts may have been the reason I continued on down the overgrown path rather than over the footbridge and along the rather wider track that I would normally have taken. My distracted mind was not on my immediate, physical surroundings, but after a while these did intrude. It had become so muddy underfoot that I nearly slipped and fell, and I found myself having to push through ancient, vigorous and half-dead brambles if I was to continue on to the village, which I did. I had to look about me and consider where I was, and seeing the shape of the hills I decided that I would simply reach the village from an unaccustomed direction.
And this is exactly what happened, but the aspect that the village finally presented to me was wholly unexpected.
I thought at first that the buildings I came across were simply derelict. This would have been surprising as this part of Northumberland is relatively wealthy. The normally picturesque village is a desirable and sought-after location; the buildings are well maintained. I was walking along a path that led me to the bottom of the village green, where the houses were large and comfortable, but they appeared to be façades held up by a framework of buttressing timbers. I passed between them to emerge into the centre of the village I knew, and looking back the houses then presented an entirely comfortable and lived-in aspect. All around me everything was as I would have expected it; a man was walking past the war memorial with his dog, there were a few cars, and the post office and general stores were a couple of hundred yards ahead of me.
I turned and went back down the path, doubting myself, but no, the buildings immediately around me were, as I thought, just façades. The matter distracted me from my previous thoughts, and as I walked up to the village shop I finally had to put my mind to what I was going to buy. I felt in my pocket for the assurance of money; there was enough for my immediate needs.
A neighbour was leaving the shop as I entered it and we acknowledged one another. Inside I collected together bread, tea and biscuits, taking them to the half-deaf old woman who habitually sat at the till. I paid for and bagged-up my goods and went out having exchanged only the mechanical pleasantries that were required to effect the sale.
On the pavement again I looked down at those houses and saw how they still appeared as substantial as all the others from that angle. I had never taken that path between them before so I would not have known about the illusion they presented. In fact, I had never taken any path to the village in the past other than my habitual one down the track over the footbridge. I couldn’t help but wonder what else I hadn’t noticed about the place.
I didn’t really want to acknowledge any suspicions to myself, but I decided to follow the road back down towards the garage and I turned up another small alley between it and a building that purported to be the local office of the Farmers’ Union. The garage seemed to be substantial enough, but its neighbour had only two walls between which, normally out of sight, was simply a patch of waste ground.
Retracing my steps and going across the green I intended to investigate a driveway that appeared to lead up to a builder’s yard; that too was an illusion. When I walked back up to the shop I could see how everything had been constructed to look entirely realistic only from those angles at which I would normally have seen the village.
I strode up to the shop and threw open the door. There was the old woman behind the till as usual.
‘What is going on here?’ I demanded of her and she smiled back vacantly: ‘It is a clear day, isn’t it? But very cold.’
‘Never mind the weather. What’s happened to the village?’
‘Snow? Oh, I shouldn’t think so.’
Understanding, of a sort, seemed to be offering itself. I walked through the shop and pulled opened the door that should have led to the private part of the building. Rather than some parlour, or even a storeroom, there was simply a rough, overgrown and rubble-strewn patch of land. I stepped out and looked back at the building which only existed insofar as it provided the illusion of a shop.
Back inside I was going to question the woman but decided on the futility of it. As I went out of the door a car drew up and a man I recognised got out with his red setter. Now, I had exchanged words with him in the past because my mother had been fond of setters and I had learnt that he bred them. It was always an easy topic of conversation. We would inevitably discuss the weather first, and then his dogs.
‘This village is all a series of façades,’ I said to him without any preamble. ‘The whole place is like some film set. What’s going on?’
The man nodded gravely and looked around him: ‘I think snow unlikely.’
‘I didn’t mention snow. I want an explanation for this sham village.’
‘My oldest bitch gave us a nice litter last week, but I think it’ll have to be her last,’ he said.
This angered me. He had left his keys in the ignition of his car, as was the local custom, crime being unheard of locally, so I told him I was taking it. He made some further comment about his blasted dogs as though sticking to a pre-rehearsed script. He didn’t stop me getting into his car and starting it up. He simply walked over to the shop as I familiarised myself with the gears. I turned the car around and drove out towards the Hexham road. In the mirror I saw him go into the shop without looking in my direction.
After a couple of hundred yards I noticed a single-track road that ought to lead me in the direction of somewhere called Cross Keys. I had never had any reason to take it before; I only ever took the route towards Alnwick and the main road. I was struck by my predictability, my habit of only ever moving in accustomed grooves and tracks through life, and for once struck off in a wholly new direction.
I drove the car up past a large stand of fir trees to a small summit that I recognised as forming a part of the view from my own house only a few miles away. From this alternative angle it looked different, but the outcrop of rocks along the ridge were a local landmark. The road took me around them, and then to a crest that would give me a view that I didn’t recall ever having previously seen.
But there was nothing there. The road stopped and everything beyond was a bleak, barren plain of dun-coloured rock.
I don’t know how long I spent staring at the desolate scene. Eventually, without thinking, I was able to reverse the car down the track to where it could be turned around. I drove back to the village and left the vehicle by the green where I had previously abandoned my bag of shopping. I picked up my groceries and strode off towards my house on the moors in a state of shock; it was remarkably easy not to think about what I had seen; not to consider the implications.
Standing up at the kitchen table I ate some of the food mechanically, tasting nothing. I fetched in fuel and relit the fire in my study. Already it was getting dark and I shut the doors, shuttered the windows and lit my incense. When I felt warm and secure again I opened another bottle of wine and crumbled hashish into my pipe.
I had seen the artificiality of the universe the previous night and had refused to believe it. Now, however, I knew the truth and it caused me to re-evaluate the whole of creation. If that had been all then it might have been a task that I was equal to. And asking where God might be found in such an unimaginably vast mechanism would have simply been an interesting academic or theological question.
I really think that it would have been possible to come to term
s with the revelation, but then I had tried to drive along that unfamiliar road. I was still considering myself to be one of millions inhabiting the surface of the globe with our creator, whoever or whatever it was open to question. If there were no God, as I suspected, myself and the whole of humanity would have come to terms with the idea, I was sure. If, in fact, the existence of God was somehow proven by what I had seen in the heavens then perhaps I might have even found some comfort in it. I had honestly felt able to confront either possibility.
But this was an altogether different prospect; the universe did not seem to have been created for mankind in general. It appeared to have been constructed purely for my own benefit!
I could not now afford to think of the Creator as some academic argument. Now that I knew the universe had been fashioned with me specifically in mind my relationship to the Creator was of spectacular importance! How should I begin to address the idea? How would I begin to address my God?
But then the other possibility struck me with an almost physical blow. If there was no God, if whoever had constructed the universe around me was now absent, then I was alone; truly and profoundly abandoned!
In my almost hermetically sealed room, stone-built, ten foot by ten, I had to consider my situation. I could not leave that sanctuary until I had come to a definitive conclusion. Then, when I next walked out under that artificial sky I might know how to act. Either I would be ready to address my Creator, or the universe would belong solely to me and I would have dominion over it.
Gala Gladkov’s Exquisite Process
When I heard the knock at the door on that Friday afternoon in early December I was in my workshop at the back of the house. I was carving some panels that were to form the backs of a set of chairs and the last thing I wanted was an interruption. Still, I thought, the caller might be for Anna rather than for me, and I decided to ignore the summons. After putting off the job for several weeks I had finally got down to the work and I was hoping to finish at least one panel before I gave up for the weekend. It was a surprisingly bright afternoon and I was enjoying not working by artificial light.
Leave Your Sleep Page 19
