The Carp Castle

by MacDonald Harris

  The Captain’s badgering of Erwin only rarely gets a word out of him. If he can get him to mutter even some piece of drivel like “Superman” he feels it’s quite an accomplishment. Now, to his astonishment, Erwin articulates a whole sentence.

  “I’m not very interested in making babies, Captain.”

  From behind, the Captain squints narrowly at his right ear. He needs to approach this subject carefully. “But you are interested in loving, eh?”

  Erwin stares fixedly at the compass.

  “If you go on loving women, Erwin, you end up making babies. Most of the time.”

  Still no response. It is impossible to tell from looking at the back of Erwin’s head what he is thinking.

  The Captain says, “Of course there are two sexes.”

  Erwin makes a slight adjustment with his wheel. The pin on the compass, which has strayed for a moment, comes back into the center of the N.

  The Captain whips around to look at the altimeter behind him. “What’s your altitude?” he barks at Starkadder.

  “Three thousand, sir.”

  “No it isn’t, it’s thirty-two hundred. Ten degrees down elevator, and when you get her to three thousand, mind your business and keep her there.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Your job is not to try to translate our German, from the tiny bit you learned in whatever school you went to, but to watch that altimeter and turn the elevator wheel.”

  “Yes sir.”

  The Captain isn’t sure that Starkadder knows any German, but it won’t do any harm to scold him a little about it. He doesn’t care to have anyone listening to his conversation with Erwin.

  “Tell me frankly, Erwin. Man to man. Sans blague. What is your opinion of women?”

  “My opinion?” Erwin turns his head enough so that the Captain can see his white eyebrows. “I have no particular opinion of women. All girls are pretty much alike, Captain. A couple of bumps up here, a guitar-swelling down there, assorted eyes and hair, but not much difference. They have one more hole than we do, but that’s because we make one do for two, a clever arrangement when you think of it. A man is a very fine thing, Captain.”

  Better and better.

  Erwin goes on, “Now you tell me something, Captain. Man to man, as you say. Do you think Madame is right and there is this place with palm trees and love birds at the North Pole?”

  “That’s a very interesting question, Erwin. Everything depends on that question, doesn’t it?”

  “Well, Captain?”

  “Is there a God, Erwin? Where did we come from? Where are we going? Does man have a soul? What is consciousness? I exist, but do you exist? How can I be sure? What is an atom, Erwin?” Erwin shrugs without turning from the wheel. “You want me to answer your question, but you don’t know the answers to any of mine. There are lots of hard questions, Erwin.”

  The Captain does have an answer in his mind to Erwin’s question, or something like an answer, but it’s not the one that Erwin expects of him. Is the world heart-shaped? Actually the shape, as Moira describes it, is more like a persimmon than a heart. He thinks of his own secret self, and the shape it has, unknown to anyone in the outside world. If the human soul is not shaped as the authorities say it is, then perhaps the shape of the world isn’t either. The strangeness of the shape on Moira’s banner is nothing to the strangeness of his own nature, of the filaments of desire that connect him with the others. Further, he knows as a navigator and an amateur scientist that if the world were persimmon-shaped no one would be able to detect this, since our measurements of the earth are based on the assumption that it is a sphere, and would therefore be erroneous if it were not. He also knows that, according to a recent theory, light is bent as it passes around heavy objects. It would be perfectly possible to navigate a dirigible around a persimmon-shaped earth not knowing that you were doing so, since all your measurements and bearings would be bent inside your mind, which would thus be distorted in exactly the same way the world is distorted from its spherical shape. Of course, the dirigible itself would have a dimple at the top and a hanging nipple at the bottom, but you wouldn’t be able to detect this either, since your eyesight and your whole system of perception would be bent in just the same way. As a matter of fact, the Captain navigates the League of Nations not by looking at a sphere but by looking at a flat piece of paper. The distortions caused by this arrangement are enormous, but also negligible.

  It is also on flat pieces of paper, the pages of books, that the soul is described by theologians and other experts. Their Mercator’s Projection leads them far astray, to imagine that the soul has only two dimensions, whereas it has at least three and maybe six or seven. The Captain intends to show nobody the paper of his secret desire, still less the thing itself, which is shaped like a phallus which is also a heart. He is Captain Georg von Plautus, an honorable veteran of the Zeppelin service and commander of a dirigible.

  Feeling in the pocket of his fleece-lined coat, he produces a monocle and screws it into his eye-socket. He has never worn such a thing before in his life, and he is surprised how painful it is, and what a severe look he has to maintain to keep it in. “D’you like that? Ha ha! D’you like that?” he barks with a grisly grin. Erwin turns to look at him. “The Prussian spirit! Discipline. Nobility. Honor. Achtung! Wir sollen zu Gioconda fahren!” He glares at Erwin through the lens.

  “Captain! The Engländer!” says Erwin cautiously.

  *

  At lunch the salon is full of a chattering throng, excited by the proximity of Gioconda, where it is rumored the League of Nations will arrive later in the afternoon. Everybody is there except, of course, Moira, and somebody else is missing too, but Eliza can’t figure out who it is. She and Romer are at their usual table for two with their heads bent together, talking in an undertone so the others can’t hear them. Now, after their escapade on the gas-bag the night before, instead of holding hands they rub their knees together under the table. The bracing air of the north gives them an appetite. They are served consommé, then coquilles de turbot Mornay with button mushrooms. To drink, the usual Temperance Nectar. The steward serves them with insolence but with skill, carrying four plates on his arm at once.

  Romer, who seems to be in an excellent humor, is twitting Eliza about the free love they will enjoy once they get to Gioconda. “Suvamana. All love all.” He rubs his hands and leers.

  “Not us. I love you and you love me.”

  “Moira says we must all mingle our qualities to produce the ideal spirit. It’s our duty, Eliza, no matter how repugnant we may find the idea.”

  “Oh Romer! That’s not what she meant at all.”

  “I rather fancy Joan Esterel myself. Her tiny hands and ears. Her little form all hung with gold.”

  “Stop it!”

  Eliza hates any mention of her. Then, thinking of something, she looks around the salon again.

  “She’s the one who’s not here.”

  “Who?”

  “Joan Esterel. What are we talking about?”

  “And then there’s Moira herself.”

  “Romer!”

  “You said yourself she might want to love everybody.”

  “I didn’t! I just wondered.”

  “If she offers her love to everyone else, how could she neglect her metaphysician? The philosophy element would be lacking in the suvamana.”

  “Romer, hush. Someone might hear you.”

  “As for the bourgeois concept of monogamy, everything will be totally different in Gioconda. The transvaluation of all values, as Nietzsche said.”

  “Romer, do you really believe there is such a place?”

  He looks at her oddly. His bantering manner disappears. “And what about you?”

  “I asked you first.” After a moment: “I believe in Moira. How could I not believe in her? She cured my body. Nobody else could. All the doctors. And she did it just by looking at me.”

  “Faith healing. The power of mind over body. Everybody knows i
t works under some circumstances. But we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about whether Gioconda exists.”

  “Well, tell me, Romer! Do you believe it or not? For heaven’s sake! You’re the one that’s supposed to be the thinker.”

  For a while he doesn’t speak. He only gazes at her searchingly, as though the answer is to be found not in his own thoughts but in her face.

  “I believe that Gioconda exists, on the Astral Plane. If there is an Astral Plane, then Gioconda exists.” He looks around the salon and speaks with a kind of nervous energy, a tone she has never known in him before. “When I’m in a séance, in the darkness with those green lights glowing, when I hear her voice, when her countenance speaks to me and to me personally, I become a different person, a finer person, a person of wisdom and understanding. I take off the crude skepticism of the university as though I were shaking off a garment.” How well he speaks, she thinks, with a glow of admiration, of love! “I believe. I never knew before I met Moira what it means to believe. It’s not just something that happens in your mind. You become a different person. And that person is a finer one, more virtuous, more powerful, and wiser.”

  His eyes glint at her.

  “When I believe, I know that with another step of faith I too could travel in my Astral Body and visit the angels in heaven. I strive to make that step. But the séance ends, I go out into the world, and I see that it was only darkness and tricks of light, the power of sex, which she turns through her legerdemain into a magnetism that pulls at the puppet-strings of the soul. Another day dawns. I’m the same person I was before, and the world is the same too.”

  “So you don’t believe?”

  “How can I say I don’t believe? Those things that happen in the séance really happen. I know the answers to all the questions I only studied and pondered in the university. I am satisfied and sated, I am content with myself and with the Cosmos. Something glows inside me, the possibility of my own perfection, the possibility of a happiness without conditions. And then—”

  “And then?”

  “The lights go on. I see that she is only a woman. My university training is too strong.”

  “But it was Moira who brought us together. Through her power. We owe our love to her.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “Yes I do.”

  He shakes his head. “She has bewitched us into thinking that. We both fell into the Guild by accident, and then we fell in love. That was something we did. She didn’t do it. But now she wants to use our love for her own purpose. For her plan. It’s a magnificent plan, if Gioconda exists. But if Gioconda exists, then our love doesn’t exist.”

  “Romer, what do you mean?” She is terrified.

  “Moira is a form of love. Her power is a love-power. But I have to decide whether I love you or Moira. Whether my fate lies in the real world with its pleasures and pains, or in the invisible and occult, the Astral world.”

  “You can’t have both?”

  “No. If one exists, the other doesn’t. Two things are possible. Either she carries in her a spark of the divine, or she is mad. When she speaks of going to Gioconda in her Astral Body, I know that this has happened. She is telling the truth. The question is whether it happened inside her own fevered brain or somewhere else.” He stops as though he has lost the thread of what he is saying.

  “But—our love.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know whether it exists or not.” He is curiously detached. “If there is a Gioconda, then we’re not real people, only her love-puppets. She says the real world, the world of flesh and blood, the world we know, is only maya, illusion. If she’s right, then anything we do in the real world is maya and doesn’t happen. She says we believe there are five senses but there’s a sixth sense, and there may be a hundred. If that’s so, then the first five, the ones we love with, aren’t important and only something to be surpassed.”

  He holds up his two hands to show her, as though they were symbols of great importance. Then he seizes her hand and holds it. “If you feel me doing this, and you believe I am really holding your hand, then the senses are real,” he says excitedly. “The senses of our love for each other, of our embraces. Do you believe that we really did make love last night on top of the gas-bag? It seems like a dream. But if we did—if it really happened—then there’s no Gioconda.”

  “There’s no love without the senses?”

  “Isn’t that true?” His glance pierces her; his desire for her seems to radiate from him like electricity.

  “I suppose it is,” she says wistfully.

  “As much as we may regret it.” His mouth twists; he seems to be in an odd wild mood.

  “Romer, it frightens me because all this is just—your logic.”

  “Just my logic?” He smiles.

  She capitulates to his superior male argument, which runs rough-shod over her like a stallion. “Then there are two worlds. And only one of them can be real.”

  “Her Astral World, or the world of our love. Bliss or lust, to put it crudely. It’s one or the other. We’ll soon find out.”

  “Romer, which do you want?”

  “It doesn’t matter. It will be one or the other regardless of what we want.”

  “Romer, I want our love.”

  “You don’t want Gioconda?”

  “Not if we can’t have both.”

  He makes a funny kind of laugh. “But it’s out of our hands, isn’t it. If Gioconda is real—”

  “Oh, Romer.”

  They are both silent for a moment, and then she says, “Suppose Moira knew we were thinking all this.”

  “She does.”

  But she sees him smiling and says, “You’re joking.”

  “I’m always joking. It’s a mistake to take anything I say seriously.”

  “Aunt Madge Foxthorn is watching us. She’s the one who knows everything we say.”

  “You’re imagining it. She’s just a bossy old lady. That thing on her forehead isn’t some kind of magic spyglass. It’s just a neoplasm full of cartilage, and some cerebralspinal fluid.”

  “Ugh! Don’t talk about it.”

  “Only primitive tribes believe that a bodily deformity gives you some kind of power.”

  “She’s still looking at us. Romer, she’s getting up and coming our way!”

  Aunt Madge Foxthorn, carrying her reticule looped over her arm, makes her way through the half-deserted salon and stops at their table.

  Her egg floats in the air over them like a planet. She doesn’t bother with small talk. She says, “Eliza Burney, your dear friend Joan Esterel. You’ve shared so many rooms with her that you must know her quite well.”

  Eliza looks back at her.

  “Do you know why she has a file?”

  “A file?”

  “She carries it about with her wherever she goes.”

  Moira is alone in her cabin, picking at a little white meat of chicken and a blade of asparagus. Next to the plate is a small glass of Temperance Nectar. While she eats she leafs through the second volume of Swedenborg’s Arcana Celestia, which is open on the table before her. She turns a page, skips a paragraph or two, and goes on. Her attention wanders and she finds herself looking out the slanted window at the sea below. Her cabin is the only one on the airship with a window. Even the Captain, the only other one with a cabin to himself, has no window. The sea looks to her like Infinity as it might be drawn by a geometrician whose imagination extended only to two dimensions. It has no features at all, unless its very featurelessness is a feature.

  Then she notices something moving on it, a dark racing shape. The sea itself has changed too; the gray has become a steely blue with swirls on it like traces of oil. The sun has burned through the overcast, and the shape is the shadow of the dirigible, racing along faithfully to keep it company. She watches it for a few moments. It occurs to her that the stains on the sea are perhaps from the body-oils of its animals, whales, seals, and grampuses. All is one, life is a single
pulsating union; flesh and blood, the sea, air, and stone are the organs of a single vast Soul.

  She could ask the Captain about the greasy sea. He is a person who interests her in many ways. From time to time, for reasons which are not entirely clear to her, she has beamed her True Vision in his direction. She knows him to be a noble soul. Piercing through the accidentals of his exterior, his uniform and his Prussian stiffness, she has seen inside him a radiant column of ardor resembling that of a saint. Her Vision has fled far back into the past, to his childhood, and seen there a soul driven by a single burning dream, to soar from the earth, to elevate his flesh through the power of ether, to rise upward into the rarified atmosphere of the Empyrean. Can that Child be reawakened? Yes, and the Child might persuade his later self, the man he became, to doff his uniform and don the raiment of his Astral Body.

  Oddly enough, she has never asked herself what will happen to the dirigible and its crew once they arrive in Gioconda. It has seemed a matter of indifference to her. The flying machine is mere matter, something she has no more use for; let it float away once it has accomplished its purpose. As for the crew, most of them are persons of very little spirituality. Now it occurs to her that, considering the special qualities of the Captain which she has discerned with her True Vision, she might make an exception for him and invite him to stay with her and the others in Gioconda. Somebody else in the crew could steer the League of Nations back where it came from.

  But what might she say to him there? How might he and she comport themselves in this transfigured atmosphere? Would he really take off his uniform and put on, say, the burnoose of an Arab sheik, would he and she take hands and vault in circles through the flowers? It is a perplexing idea, not to say disturbing. She ponders over this. As she meditates, her eyes fall to her plate, and to her surprise she finds that the chicken meat and the asparagus are gone; the plate is as clean as if it had been washed. She glances at the diamond-encrusted gold watch on her wrist, then she snaps the book shut and goes to her closet to wind a scarf around her neck.