by Ben Okri
‘It wouldn’t be like her though,’ Jute said.
‘I thought you said she was a manic depressive?’
‘Jim, who isn’t?’
‘I’m not,’ said Sam.
‘I’m not either,’ said Husk.
‘I’m just manic,’ said Jim.
‘Maybe something to do with her father,’ said Husk.
‘What about her father?’
‘They were close.’
‘Is he dead?’
‘No.’
‘Dying?’
‘No.’
‘Then why did you bring up her father?’
‘I just did,’ said Husk defiantly, staring back at everyone.
‘How pointless can you be?’ said Propr.
‘As pointless as I like.’
Silence followed.
‘Maybe she’s got a secret illness.’
‘Like what?’
‘Cancer.’
‘At her age?’
‘I know someone who’s got cancer at twenty-three.’
‘That wouldn’t explain why she’s completely disappeared though.’
‘Maybe she’s been kidnapped.’
‘By who?’
‘Malasso.’
‘Who’s Malasso?’ asked Propr.
‘Shut up!’ said Jim.
‘Why would he kidnap her? What for?’
‘Maybe she’s rich.’
‘My assistant camera girl – rich? Unlikely!’ said Sam.
‘Maybe she’s part of some terrorist group.’
‘Why would she be a terrorist?’
‘Why not?’
‘Anybody can be anything these days, but the terrorist angle is too far-fetched,’ insisted Jim.
‘We’re talking about her as if we don’t know her,’ said Propr.
‘Do you know her?’ asked Sam.
‘No.’
‘Do you?’ Jim asked Sam.
‘Vaguely, but come to think of it, no, not at all. She’s very efficient, and works hard, that’s all I know. And is good company.’
‘Has she got suicide in her?’
‘We all do, don’t we?’ said Husk.
‘Speak for yourself,’ came Propr.
‘I don’t think so,’ answered Sam. ‘There’s something too happy about her.’
‘It’s the happy ones you have to watch,’ said Jim.
‘You’re right,’ said Jute. ‘All the really happy people I know have attempted suicide.’
‘Were they happy before or after?’ asked Lao.
Silence followed the question.
‘I’m not sure,’ replied Jute eventually.
‘Why is it relevant?’ asked Jim.
‘Because,’ Mistletoe said, speaking for the first time, ‘because Riley is standing right behind you, looking quite happy.’
23
A hush fell on the team as everyone turned slowly around. They beheld Riley standing there, like a pixie, with an almost angelic expression on her boyish face. Her eyes were bright and wide open like a baby delighted by ordinary wonders. And her smile was fresh and frank, like the smile of children found playing in the woods. She had a look of such pure happiness on her face it gave the impression that she was a little deaf. Everyone stared at her in disbelief and astonishment, except Mistletoe and Lao. Something, a sort of light, radiated from her, transforming her. The radiance didn’t last, but, for the moment that it was there, Riley appeared as her best possible representation. She had a sort of transfigured presence of her own joyful spirit, a transfigured afterglow. It was peculiar. And in that moment Jim drew a startled breath, and Husk recoiled in fascinated horror, and Jute gave a strangely exultant cry, as if a secret suspicion had been confirmed.
The silence deepened. The carriage darkened briefly as they passed through another tunnel. The train staff came rattling by with trolleys to collect the food and drinks, the cups and leftovers. Soon they were at the far end of the compartment. Riley didn’t stop smiling the whole time.
Then Jim, in a very hurt voice, said to Lao:
‘You mean you knew she was here all along and you didn’t tell us?’
‘Not all along.’
‘But she was here for some time?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you saw her?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Standing behind me?’
‘Quite.’
‘And you actually let us go on and didn’t tell us?’
‘Sure.’
‘Why? Why?’
‘It’s quite straightforward really,’ Lao said cheerfully. ‘It’s just that I think it’s a good thing for people to live posthumously.’
‘Posthumously?’
‘Yes, and to hear what other people think of them while they’re alive. It’s good for all concerned. Frees people into the truth, and all that.’
‘I think it’s downright mean of you.’
‘Only because you feel bad that you spoke your true feelings about her and she heard. You feel bad because you’ve been freed of your friendly hypocrisy.’
‘You are the most pompous person I’ve ever met…’
‘Besides, it was such a pleasure.’
‘It was nastiness.’
‘No, it taught me how much and how little other people’s opinion of one matters. None of your opinions mattered about her a jot. You could have been talking about a complete stranger – me, for example. Anyway, she wasn’t there that long, and barely heard anything. You can shuffle your guilt back into its cupboard. Besides, haven’t we all got work to do?’
Jim turned to Riley. His face was faintly touched with sweat; it glistened. His eyebrows met, forming a sort of double bridge. His despair seemed to have partially diminished, or he was, for now, much less aware of it. And with some annoyance in his voice, he asked Riley:
‘Where were you?’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, you, for God’s sake.’
‘Here and there,’ said Riley with that charming smile of hers.
‘Listen, we’ve been looking for you all over the damn place, in every single compartment. We thought something horrible had happened to you. Now you just show up here like that. We demand an explanation. Where were you?’
24
Riley’s smile grew more dazzling, more beautiful, and thus more mysterious. There was something uncanny about her. It was almost as if she were a shining angelic impersonation of herself. She didn’t seem right somehow. It felt to the others as if a more beautiful persona had replaced her. She seemed possessed and taken over in some sublimely sinister way. It made most of them uneasy – uneasy with themselves, as if beholding one of the most peculiar mysteries of all, the miracle of self-transformation. For Riley seemed indeed transformed, as if the light of an odd revelation fairly hovered at the back of her head. And yet there she was, the same as ever. It was spooky.
Riley, looking briefly out of the window, her eyes returning, settling on Jute’s for a silky moment, then on Sam’s, then squarely on Jim’s, then turning misty, nostalgic, forgetful, dreamy, said:
‘I disappeared. Vaporised. Was abducted by aliens. Vanished into thin air. Disappeared into a pinpoint of light. Was possessed by an idea. Taken over. Locked in a brilliant space. Devoured by God. Released. Overcome.’
‘You’re talking gibberish,’ said Sam.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, still smiling, like a harlequin’s assistant. ‘Do you want the truth?’
‘Yes,’ came voices, almost in chorus.
Riley looked around, and for the first time seemed embarrassed.
‘I don’t know where I went. I blanked out and vanished and I feel wonderful. It’s like I’ve been in a most wonderful dream.’
‘What was the dream?’
Riley stared at Lao for a while.
‘I can’t say yet. It’s so recent and so strange. It’s probably of no importance. What I mean is that I can hardly remember. Was I gone for long?’
‘Only for a couple o
f micro-seconds,’ said Jim mockingly. ‘You weren’t missed at all. In fact, aren’t you supposed to be doing something?’
Riley snapped out of her stupor, her beautiful stupor, suddenly. Her smile vanished, her light disappeared. Her dazzle dimmed. And her alert work persona took over. She became instantly efficient, alert, quick, and eager. Soon she was darting from camera case to camera, cleaning, preparing, loading, engrossed, like a printer’s assistant. And about her every movement, her stoic and cheerful efficiency, and the absence of that angelic expression, about her now there hung the mystery of where she went, and where she had been.
25
Filming was resumed. Lao made several addresses to the camera. The team preferred him in profile. They said that the lights did something odd to his complexion. He bore the gentle hectic ordeals of filming. He stared often out of the window. He contemplated Mistletoe’s reflection, envying her freedom to conjure on paper dreams and dances, free forms and frozen forms, to create while travelling, to live in a delightful reverie, with that smile on her face, like the sphinx in sweet contemplation on a pleasant afternoon with no one around to trouble its lion-headed shadow on the Egyptian sands. And Lao, thinking of her sphinx-like nature, her being half in expression, and half in impression, smiled. Jim said:
‘That’s the most beautiful smile you’ve ever given to a camera, Lao.’
And Lao held the smile, thinking, as if stumbling on the truth for the first time, just how much we are our own photographic plate, thinking how the thought becomes the thing, thinking of the spiritual chemical power of thought that he had scoffed at so much, the notion, romantic and impossible, beautiful and magical, that you are what you think, that your thoughts take form in reality. And he wondered much about the successive overlay, combinations, qualifications, and the complex mathematics of all the thousands of different thoughts and their mixed materialisation either on the face, in the character, or in the lives of the thinkers of them. Does nature work out an arithmetic mean of all the thoughts, much like the bank calculates the mean of all your savings, debts, overdrafts, interests, and deposits the average in your account, or subtracts it? Is the visible life the deposit of all one’s thoughts and deeds? Lao was smiling as he was thinking. He felt he had quietly entered a great open secret, a hidden law familiar to all, believed by some, practised by a few, a law as true and clear and as unalterable as the laws of motion, or the fact of gravity. Lao was smiling, and being filmed, as the train drew slowly into the city named after the feckless youth whose audacity in choosing between three goddesses unleashed the destruction of Troy…
26
Pandemonium descended on the crew. Like an army fleeing its camp, or having to make a hurried crossing, the crew gathered its cameras, boxes, sound equipment, luggage, and sundry loads off the train, working in a frenzy, till station hands came and helped, for a fee. And feverishly, as if the city were a bus about to depart to the past for ever, the crew hurried to complete disembarkation. Everybody busied themselves. Lao, normally languid and distant, seeing his role as distinct from the filming crew, threw himself into fetching and carrying; and so did Mistletoe. All hands were on deck. Soon transition was effected from train to platform, from motion to stillness, from being hurtled through space to being substantial in time.
But there was no chance to catch a breath. Passengers streamed past everywhere. There had to be filming too of the arrival, the disembarkation, the passage through immigration into Paris. And the camera had to tell its lies, taking the same shots over and over again, till it looked like the truth. And Lao bore it all with the wily serenity of an Odysseus appreciating, on the journey, the truthful beauty of the camera’s lies, and finding much in common with it within his own nature, so deeply committed to truth, so deeply understanding of the circuitous ways in which truth must be planted in the world in order for it to persuade, to fascinate, to capture the imagination, and to grow into an active force in the world.
27
And then, with all the bustle, the counting of luggage, and re-counting, with the crew members lost in work, they all forgot Jute’s terror, and Riley’s magic disappearance. Even Jim forgot his own near lachrymosal despair. Work had become god, directing their souls to outward goals. Everyone was lost to him or herself, except Lao, who had to make an awkward crossing, a crossing as difficult as fording a deep cold river. For now he had to ford human perception. He had to cross a terrain in the minds of people. He had to submit to one of his life’s endless trials – the trial of colour.
He prepared himself for materialisation. For, on the whole, in the living moments, minutes, hours of self living in self, of his being dwelling in his being, of simply living in his life, Lao was almost never aware of himself but as a human being; and even then he seldom thought about being human, but merely was. His thoughts lingered and dwelled in realms humorous, realms philosophical, realms fictional, realms financial, when worried, as often he is, about finance. He dwelled in realms sensual and sexual, loving the body as much as the spirit, and loving the body of woman more than all other forms. He dwelled in realms of pure abstraction, thoughts without objects, dreams, notions, childhood moments lost in time’s betrayals and exile. He dwelled in calm lakes with swans, in calm skies, with the birds of the clouds, among leaves and flowers of summer. He dwelled in the great suffering of millions in their broken places, in neglected continents. He dwelled in films loved, on faces that moved him, in books and paintings and music and art works that shaped him and shape him still, mostly in book-worlds, where things are real because abstract. Oh, he dwelled in the happiest realms of the spirit when not aware of it, and cultivated his cynicism as a perfect mask when not aware of his intrinsic happiness. But seldom did he dwell in the nature of colour, and colour differences on the great globe, because he lived, in spirit, within humanity’s abstraction, within the oneness of it. He believed, deep down beyond thought, that all are one.
True, he had learned to live as a hermit, a recluse, and had as little contact as possible with the ugly things that induced suicide upon his soul. He had found this truce effective, this de-materialisation useful, this exile within England practical, this exile from colour grading a liberation, so that his mind could wander and be strong, and not burn with rage and self-doubt externally induced, but strong with the spirit soaring, free and powerful, like the mind of a child, or the casual notions of an Alexander on a quiet afternoon between momentous battles, serene master of the battles of daily life. He, Lao, dwelled thus, in a splendid unreality that made reality malleable, because he had come to secretly understand that all individual reality is unreality, and that we make our world with our thoughts. And with irony he thought of himself as a man and artist of the spirit and the world, a lover of the world, a giver and a learner, and a hundred noble and not-so-noble and sensual things beside, a dancer to life, a scholar of the serious and the light things, a poet, a thinker, a sexualist, a warrior, a fool, a free man, a broken-off island of God, a mind charged with the grandeur of all minds, a spirit courageous, a laughing being of joy, a divine victim, a clown concealer of discoveries and powers, but seldom, seldom, indeed, did he think himself a being, a man, a figure, reducible to colour, only to colour, definable only by colour, to a place on the spectrum, a light impression negative on eyes that in the hearts register such negation. He seldom allowed it, and when it happened, when he felt himself being painted into being, becoming only a colour, not a simple complex human being, like everyone else, when he felt this reduction, he experienced the strangest sensation of being snatched, for a mortal moment, away from Eden, into unreality, from childhood games and freedoms into adult imprisonments, from the hidden bliss of all creation into the eye’s historical grading of pigmentation. Often it was not acute or violent or hostile, often it was merely being invented as an exotic, being projected upon, with the skin as a celluloid fantasy or nightmare, or a celluloid remembrance, or desire, or distrust, or illusion.
But now, with entry into Paris
before him, facing the army of immigration control as he had done before in his life, sometimes with disastrous results, Lao felt himself materialise from the realm of pure being, of reverie, of selfhood, or the thoughts of happiness or despair, of money or love, of travel or wishing to be home, the vast run of human thoughts, that spin and merge, that dance and twine themselves through life’s moments – he felt himself materialising from that realm of normal humanity into a state that Camus called ‘humiliated consciousness’: the consciousness of being automatically suspect, automatically distrusted, automatically de-humanised, less than humanised, demonised, because of colour differences, because of variety in nature’s canvas, because of history, the eyes, what people read into the skin, illusions.
Lao approached his materialisation from pure selfhood to defensiveness with annoyance, with irritation. He called Jim aside and said:
‘This journey is a quest, and in all great quests there are always trials.’
Jim was hassled. Sam wanted Lao in a shot with passengers streaming through immigration control. There were problems with the baggage handlers, and the heat, heavy-laden and multiplied by all the engines and the absorbent metal and the breathing concrete all around, exacerbated the general irritability. Jim said:
‘What are you getting at?’
Lao said:
‘There are invisible lines that society sets up which make some people more visible.’
Jim snapped:
‘Stop being so damned philosophical. Get to the point.’
Lao said:
‘I’m being philosophical to stop me being angry.’
‘Angry about what?’
‘There are many many invisible lines in the world. You cross the line without noticing it. You are unaffected by it. For you there is no line, no chemical reaction, no danger of being humiliated, insulted, bundled up and thrown out, shouted at, animalised, locked up in a back room with a gag that eventually chokes and kills. You wander through it all so unknowing. But if I go past the line a chain reaction is set off. The line is meant to weed out people like me, different people. The line trips me up. I get detained. I get questioned. It is a question of pigment. It makes pigs of people. My innocence is my crime. I am condemned at birth, because of a different sun.’
