by B Catling
It had been Ghertrude’s first time with another. She felt tired and exhilarated. There was no blood – she had taken her own virginity many years before. She had learned the conclave joys of auto-satisfaction through hours of practice, and used the secret acts to inform her clandestine ways. She was proud of her self-sufficiency, the way it elevated her above common appetite. The day was a fissure in her containment, one that she would monitor with precise care.
Ishmael lay sprawled across the bed, ecstatic and soothed by his own pleasure, feeling his male dominance rise for the first time on the third floor. He reached out for her as she moved away from him, his fingers just touching her hips as she grabbed her coat and prepared to leave. He wanted to say something warm and appreciative, but did not have the language. Beneath his heart, there was a subtle and churning bonding, and he wanted to be able to stroke and soothe her with its gentle fire. She left him, unrelieved of his thoughts, and hurried downstairs to the bathroom on the second floor, where she had prepared a douche of alkaline salts.
* * *
I feel as if I have been asleep, asleep too long. My dreams, if they are dreams, are always in advance of my sleep, awaiting me to continue their tale to unwind their continuity. In daylight, they ache continuously. I have become bewildered by their closeness and my distance. I have been swallowed to this spot of land, the previous arrows stitching the way to here. I cannot see the bow, which must have fallen beneath me, lying somewhere in this place of contradiction, where it smells of snow and glows humid. My feet had held the ground before, but now I am unattached, and the roots and sinews of my pain nag at my hope in dopey, vague wafts. I am being erased by familiarity, the sense of knowing this journey from before. The arrow’s path has made me as vacant as the half-light landscape around me.
There she moves; there in the scrub grass, wire and rotted paper, she turns towards my hand again. I have been too slow on this journey, the air and sky has seduced me. No blood has been shed, and history cannot move without this. I have to cut the light with blood, let her exhale and twist in my hand. Tonight, I will divide a life and paint the future road glorious. Enough of these shallows: the cities lie on the other side of the great forest, and I will burn my way towards them. She is in my hand, demanding arrows and distance.
I loosen the first blue arrow into the evening, towards the first star, which has risen over the lip of the world and would set amongst the far-off trees. The arrow I release stole its colour from the Bunga telang, which grew at the edge of our garden. Its small, vivid flowers give it a female instinct that brushes the curve of the day, telling me to stop at this place and use the last moment of its light to set my direction for tomorrow. I do this as the breeze freshens, and its coolness reminds me of sleep, like a whistle towards an impatient story.
* * *
With a fine sable brush, he corrected the moment of death, magnified the tiny errors and removed them. After his focused labours, the crashing horse would be perfect.
Horses had guided his life and crippled his journey. He had agreed to create the last set of images to kill the horse. When his brain was on fire, all those years ago, after the stagecoach had overturned and the solid rock that collided with his skull had rearranged his head, he saw them all the time, galloping in headaches, their iron hooves sparking the dendrite fuse-wire. He saw them cantering, all turning to white, eyes rolling savage. He heard them walking, their echo mocking the vacant night streets below his hospital bed. They paced his beginning and his demise with an equal, measured step. He had been empty before the accident, a man filled with vapour, aimless and devout, seeking a place in the world where he might gain weight and merit. When the speeding stagecoach had tripped on the unseen root, it had spun into the air and splintered, mangling and spilling all the lives it carried. He alone survived, tossed amongst the wrenched luggage and the broken, kicking mustangs. He had cut himself out of the canvas, a petticoat staunching his head, blood swooning clear of the hooves that were now running against the sky, trying to gain purchase on the dying clouds.
The court had awarded him funds for a new beginning. On some of the papers, he altered his name again, to match the glitches and eruptions in his new brain. He was topping up with existence, and it pleased him. By the time he saw the doctor in England, he was becoming known. Only the best was good enough for this rising stalwart of art and science.
Their first consultation was in the hospital by the river, at London Bridge. He was early for the appointment; this was something that happened constantly. He deplored tardiness and overcompensated for it in every aspect of his life. He would rehearse the most trivial of deeds: framing the minor in advance of its time; having keys in his hands four streets away from home; talking under his breath to have a convincing answer to questions that would never be put to him. He forced himself to stop on the bridge and allow the slowness of actual time to catch up to his velocity. Placing his hands on the gritty stone, he looked down into the frantic activity of the Pool of London; cargo ships were moored three-deep along its banks, their masts creaking against a spiny forest of cranes and the new verticality of the smoke from the steamers, all extending higher than the buildings that clung, crablike, to the land; dozens of barges obtusely nudged and grated each other in the restless tide and the wake of commerce; hundreds of small craft ferried to and fro, carrying pilots, passengers and information. Every surface seethed and bristled with working men; stevedores and lightermen moved tons upon tons of goods, and exchanged cargos in what looked like ceaseless confusion.
At times, the river could not be seen at all. The vast activity smothered it, and the detritus it bred was like a rough woven carpet, heaving over a secret turmoil. It was impossible to believe it was the same river which so gently flowed through his home town. In Kingston, its broad ripple gave reflection and beauty, it was for fishing, idle boating and rumination. There, you could smell its vitality. The tar, smoke, sewage and proximity of Billingsgate gave the stretch in front of him a very different signature.
He pulled the great watch from his pocket and flipped it open. It had been the only thing he had kept of his family whilst on his travels; they had given it to him to ease his departure and secure at least one dimension in the distant colonies. He squinted at the Roman numerals. Time had finally caught up with him, and he started to walk briskly towards the Surrey Side.
William Withey Gull was on schedule. His consulting room sat high on the brow of the building, facing the river. The spire of Southwark Cathedral and the dome of St. Paul’s could be aligned from his oriel window.
Like them, the two men were almost cartoon opposites: Gull, opulent, padded, slick; a man grounded and in possession of his life; he retained the bones of his labouring family, held them in check with fine but simple tailoring; he wore his growing eminence in saturated gravity. Muybridge, lean and dry, a longing husked in doubt; frowning himself into biblical status; nervous, darting and ill.
They shook hands, each gauging the other. Muybridge sat, and proceeded to relate his medical history: the condition of his skull since the accident, the shifts of perception. Gull stood behind him as he talked, examining the cranium of the agitated man, feeling the words reverberate beneath Muybridge’s scalp. He held the cup of the occiput and moved his hand forward, until it felt the ridge in the bregma, the overriding bone. He fingered the coronal suture, sensing its tension under his controlled pressure. The motion of his square hands under the long, matted hair made it look like a bizarre tableau of ventriloquism; he moved them further forwards to determine the displacement or division in the nasofrontal suture. He then sat back down behind his Jurassic desk, and began to make notes of his observations.
‘Was it your face that took the impact of the crash?’
The patient put his hand to his face and covered his eyes and forehead. ‘Here,’ he said.
‘Tell me,’ the surgeon said, ‘when you came to after the crash, what sensations did you feel? What sensory images do you remember?’
‘I smelt cinnamon, and everything was blurred, like a double exposure, for days.’ His hand fingered the scar where the bone had peeped through that terrible day. ‘Cinnamon and burnt leather; a numbness in my hands; and the horse. I was lying on the earth, near one of the dying horses, staring at it, as it lay on its back, a slithering superimposition of many bodies, multiple legs outstretched. I did not know which of us was upside-down.’
‘How do you sleep?’
‘Badly. Sometimes not at all.’
Unsurprised at the answer, Gull nodded and made a mark in the open book on his desk.
‘Is that a bad sign?’ asked Muybridge.
‘No, not for you. Sleep is a complex matter, the body only needs an hour or so. But the mind requires more, and so the soul sometimes becomes involved, and greedy.’
‘I’m not sure I understand, Dr. Gull.’ But before Muybridge could press his confusion, Gull had sealed the matter and continued in a different direction.
The questions lasted for twenty minutes. Then the surgeon moved across the room to one of his glass-fronted cabinets and selected an instrument from within. He carefully wound its clockwork mechanisms and strapped it onto his patient’s head. It was made of brass and glass, with a delicate set of folding blinkers and mirrors, some darkened by plating. The surgeon pulled up a chair to face his patient, and adjusted the metal discs, close to the sides of Muybridge’s worried eyes. Both his hands worked the device, bringing his face so close to Muybridge’s that each could smell the other’s breath. Tiny ratchet clicks announced the adjustments.
‘It’s a peripherscope,’ the surgeon explained. ‘It should interest you, being a scholar of the optic world.’ He then moved his chair and physically turned the patient’s head towards the oriel window, setting a clamp on his neck and chin. ‘Just like one of your photographic portraits,’ he said mildly. ‘Now, look through the central panel of the window and focus on the dome.’
The patient wanted to correct him about the old-fashioned portraits, in which the sitter was secured in a metal frame, held still while the slow camera collected their deathlike image. He had long since dispensed with such artificial contrivance. He would explain his experiments in chemical preparation of film, he would…
‘The dome, please!’ the surgeon demanded. The middle pane of glass was different to the rest, clearer, with a greenish hue. The distant dome was framed in its bright confines. The patient stared. ‘Now, please, do not move, just stare at the dome.’
These were the surgeon’s last words, as he paced from one side to the other, behind the patient. He touched the headset, activating spinning discs and minute reflections of light, almost out of vision, like the suns and moons of distant planets, contained in an unstable darkness inside the corners of the patient’s eyes. A night which shimmered with endless space, drawing light particles from inside his vision, from his surroundings, even from the glowing dome. Outside, time was changing and the tide of the seething river had turned back towards the sea. Something in the space between the double dome fluttered and shifted in unison.
When the motors were stopped and all movement ceased, the day had vanished. He sat in a twilit room, growing chilled as the stars rose outside in the frosting air. Gull lit a lamp and put a shawl about the patient’s shoulders, gently removing the device from his head. He sat, unclamped and stiff in the wooden chair, his attention still fixed on the oriel window.
‘Please, make yourself more comfortable, Mr. Muybridge.’
The surgeon’s voice seemed far off and above him. The continual, dull pain in his head had gone and he felt exhausted. A growing sense of euphoria was making him feel curiously weightless.
‘It’s the angels,’ Gull said. ‘The angels of silence that hide between the whispering gallery and outer dome of the Cathedral. They have crossed the Thames and are fluttering in your head, it’s quite normal to feel a little dazed.’
He smiled broadly at Muybridge, who was gripping the surgeon’s words like the same vertiginous handrail in the gallery of St. Paul’s.
‘Your eyes are, miraculously, undamaged. The zygomorphic bones of your face conducted the impact of the accident backwards and upwards, into your brain. I surmise that the force of the shock was considerable, but caused no long-term structural damage.’ Gull leant back in his leather chair and looked dramatically into the photographer’s gaze. ‘There may be side effects,’ he said, ‘but I think I might have alleviated or at least diluted those this afternoon. The peripheral vision and its territories of sight and sense are virtually unexplored. My device measures and takes litmus of their emotional potential, their mental humours, do you understand? I have also made some inward adjustments, without the need of the scalpel or the saw.’
He got up and made the necessary movements to conclude the meeting. As he conducted Muybridge towards the door, he said, ‘Are you planning to return to America?’
The photographer nodded. ‘Eventually.’
‘I would do it soon, if I were you. Better to be in a landscape away from people for the next few years. Make pictures of that wilderness, force your sight and your imagination outward. It’s better for you.’
They stood either side of the door, their handshake passing through.
‘Will you send your fee?’ Muybridge remembered to say.
‘No, I think not,’ said the surgeon. ‘We will meet again and I might have a favour that needs your skills.’ He smiled again and gave his patient a white envelope. ‘Read this in the future,’ he said, and closed the door.
The great German cathedral had two towers that should have been twins, but irrational time had delayed one, causing a fluctuation of ideas to warp its mirrored principle. Some shards of fashion and theology had dented its skeletal helix, making the thin needle twist out of symmetry with its sister. A slim, silver bridge joined the towers near their apex and highlighted the subtle difference between them: one tower had the clock, the other the bell. Each month, a trumpeter would celebrate the moon from the dizzying heights of the slender walkway. The pang luna ceremony, one of many that were the responsibility of Dean Casius Tulp, had been imported along with the stones, the design and the meaning of the great church.
(Many of the natives of the area also believed that the freak changes in the weather had been smuggled in with the invaders. It was certainly true that a new cold infested the nights in the winter season. Frost had been seen for the first time after the spires had been made, and different kinds of clouds now lurked above their spikes and tried to swallow the moon. But nothing ever changed in the Vorrh; it seethed in heat and ignored any rumour of ice.)
The dean stood in the whistling, circular room with the pallid musician and one of the younger wardens. They were all panting. After climbing the forever spiralling stairs, pointed clouds of silvered air wheezed from them into the cold chamber, two hundred feet above ground. They were like so many arctic fire-eaters: none had the energy to talk, which made their steamy speech plumes all the more vacant. They were giddy, faintly nauseous and desperately trying not to think about the space below. The inexperienced warden had already opened the arched door onto the frost-covered walkway, which trembled and sang with the wind. The musician was becoming the same colour as the platform from which he would perform tomorrow.
Tulp spoke first. ‘It’s perfectly safe,’ he said. ‘This weather is very unusual, never seen the like of it before, just like the Old Country. Your music will be heard all the better under these conditions, it will sound out across the whole city.’
Nobody moved or wanted to think about tomorrow, and everybody had forgotten the Old Country. Their thoughts were about the grip of their shoes, the strength of the floor and the little bit of their own personal gravity that enabled them to resist the wind. They clutched the railings, the walls, or anything of a solid nature, with a fervent vigour.
Ghertrude’s bright head appeared through the floor and startled them with its ease. ‘Here are the keys and the moon ring, f
ather.’ She climbed into the room with a wave of excitement that made the men grip their supports even more firmly. Giving the ancient velvet bag to the older man, she turned into the blast from the open door and, in purposeful joy, walked towards it and out onto the bridge. The men’s insides shrank, their spines and stomachs slivering over the threshold and plummeting, with the imagined falling girl, towards the hard, cobbled ground. She was laughing as the wind plucked at the fur of her collar and her hair to make another jealous imitation of fire. ‘I can almost see to the other side of the Vorrh!’ she yelled. ‘Look at the people, like ants!’ Her shoes rattled on the slender metal as she tapped her feet in excitement. She only had one hand on the silver rail; the other waved towards the abyss. Nobody went out, and nobody would have ever dared to look down. It took some effort to get her back into the tower.
She had been fourteen at the time, and had begged to be given the job of organising the moon call every year. After ten days of incessant pleading, interspersed with silent, certain haughtiness, the dean had given in and she had been awarded the position: the first woman and the youngest in history.
Now, all these years later, she stood again on the bridge and gazed out over the city. Flocks of birds were wheeling below, their shrill cries caught in the rising chimney smoke. Further down, a warren of business squirmed in the mud. She looked down onto 4 Kühler Brunnen, lit by the slanted rays of the afternoon sun; into its courtyards and odd-shaped garden; at its shuttered windows and what she knew to be inside. She pictured him, like a flea or a speck of grit, hard and senseless, encrusted into the upper rooms. She thought how tiny his eye would be from here. Looking at the streets that he would never see, she shivered at his growing need to walk in them. A raven crossed her view, circling the roof under which he paced or slept. It landed and looked down into the garden. She grinned at their telescoped comparison, then thought of God peering down at her petty elevation. This was a fancy that she did not care for, and she switched to more practical matters, deciding to go to her parents for dinner that night. There were a few more questions to be asked about the old house.
