The Cloven

by Brian Catling

  “Very well, my dear, are you ready, shall we proceed?” His voice was tighter and had the edging resonance of an overly tuned stringed instrument: the gut near snapping, the wood ready to warp.

  “I think perhaps you’d better sit first and have some water,” she said. “You seem a little fatigued by the walk.”

  “Fatigued, yes, a little. By the walk, yes.”

  They sat for a while and he became calmer, his tremor replaced by a continual perspiration. She wondered about the wisdom of “the magic” while he remained in this condition. After smoking three cigarettes, he announced that they should begin.

  “About blindness, isn’t it?” he asked uncertainly.

  “Yes.”

  She took him into the stillness of her bed-sitting room and he sat her half reclining in a chaise longue facing the bright window. He pulled up a bentwood chair by her side.

  As soon as he started the rhythmic suggestions of her weariness, they both relaxed. He had been speaking for less than a minute when she slumped, deeply asleep. He was amazed. It was obvious that the suggestions and preparations of their previous session were still embedded and active. They had survived all these years. The beautiful woman growing around what had been seeded in the miraculous child. He spoke softly to her to confirm the depth and saturation of her condition. Then he leant forward and whispered forcefully, “Cyrena, I want you to tell of blindness.”

  The words had barely left his lips when she responded, as if she’d been waiting forever to be asked.

  “It’s like now, it’s everything balanced in the innards. The depth and colour of everything kept inside where it all belongs. Out there on the other side of my eyes it is only described, roughly modelled in too much stuff.” Her voice and language fluctuated between the girl and the woman. Her words captivated him. “The blindness always meant it was mine before. Now it is shared and dirtied by others, who add nothing to it. Most don’t even know it’s there.”

  “Are you saying it was better before?” he asked carefully.

  “Yes. I have seen too much now. People also want me to see inside them with the light they bathe in and breathe every day. Before, I chose to let people in and then felt them close, now there is no choice—my eyes are hollow with all the taking.”

  There was stony silence for a while.

  “Cyrena, are you talking about your eyes or your heart?”

  “I don’t know, one might be the other. They are both pumps.”

  Marais was becoming excited by her answers.

  “Cyrena, perhaps you should separate them.”

  “How?”

  “You must let go of the hurt so that you may see clearly.”

  “I want to go back to the inside light, there was no hurt there.”

  “But you were a child then, the pain you speak of comes to all of us as we grow and walk towards death. It comes from life itself.”

  Her face moved and altered as she listened to his words.

  “Cyrena, the hurt you are feeling is nothing to do with sight, it is a symptom of humanity itself.”

  “I wanted it healed.”

  “What, my child?”

  “My sight. I wanted you to take it away like the forgetfulness in that lady’s legs.”

  The impact of her words jarred him and the morphine shadow wanted to take him home. He gathered the words and started to close the session.

  “Cyrena, I could never do that, it would be a sin.”

  “A sin.” She pondered the word like a pebble in her closed mouth. He was just about to bring her out when she spoke. “I saw the tree again last night.”

  “Tree?”

  “The same one you stopped me seeing before.”

  Marais had no idea what she was talking about.

  “You did not want me to see the invisibility there, you made it go away.”

  It must have been something from their first session all those years ago. But he had forgotten the details in the time in between.

  “Last night,” and here she opened her alarming eyes, “we were both there, at the tree. Close your eyes and you will see it too.”

  Marais had nothing to say.

  “Close your eyes and join me. Come here.”

  His mouth felt rubbery and heavy, as did his eyelids.

  “The tree is waiting. Do you see it black against the bright sky?”

  And he did, behind his closed eyes. Deep in his eyes the tree of vein stood proud and defiant in negative.

  “Come.”

  He was by her side in the high dazzling fields. Under the tree with something hiding in its branches.

  “Now ask again,” she said.

  Anyone passing by her room would have heard nothing for the next few hours. Would have seen an oddly matched couple just sitting as if in prayer or meditation. Because now they talked only inside their heads, he had entered into and joined her trancelike state, the bastion of hypnotist and patient having been breached. Both riding a Möbius strip of altered suggestion, a magnetic ticker tape that ran through the grooves of their consciousness, sending questions to answer questions to answer questions, mind reflecting mind through the blank sides of spinning mirrors. It was somewhere in there that her future was glimpsed and the purpose of imagination became simple and as fundamental as a hammer or a bowl. He could almost grasp it, but the morphine had ruined his hold, smoothed out the sucking lines of identity on his fingers, so that nothing would ever stay held again, all things would fall useless from the grip of observation that had defined his life. He began to see what was hiding in the tree and knew that for her sanity he must become blind. He opened his eyes, his eyes opened him. He fell into the room of his waking. He shuddered and let out an involuntary noise. He must have dozed off for a second or two. He was getting old. He needed to consult the needle again.

  “The tree,” she said.

  “Yes,” he barely answered.

  “Last night we sat beneath it and you gave me a halo of golden living insects. It sung with their hard little wings and made my head sing too. You said you did it to turn me backwards and now you say it is a sin.”

  Unease gnawed at crusted cells of abused memory. In their last session something had been wrong. Something displaced.

  “Well, I am not taking it off, I can feel and hear it now.”

  “Cyrena, I am going to count to seven, then you will awake refreshed and without the sadness that you brought here today. One.”

  “It’s like a spinning wheel in the fairy stories…”

  “Two.”

  “The spindle’s going very fast…”

  “Three.”

  “The bobbin sucking the light out of the tangle in my head…”

  “Four.”

  “The flyer’s tugging me away from now…”

  “Five.”

  “The orifice sucking me…”

  “Six.”

  “The mother of all hammering…”

  “Seven, take it off and awake.”

  She put her hands up to her head and he instantly remembered the strange gesture that she had made before. Then she slid back on the couch, her eyes rolling and her body pumping in little orgasmic spasms as she flickered into careless sensual moaning. Marais picked up one of the loose bedspreads and placed it over her twitching body. She had turned on her side, demonstrating the swooping landscape curve of her hips. She was unaware of his presence as he turned away to mop his soaking brow and intimidated the morphine’s dominance with his delicate erection. Slowly she gathered herself and again became an occupant of the same world as he. After a while she sat up and saw him.

  “What happened,” she said dreamily, a smile dappling her lips. The deep hot space behind them mocking in its pretend modesty.

  “You told me of your troubles and said that see
ing was not easy for you,” he said distantly, as if through a telephone.

  “Oh,” she said, standing up and brushing the wrinkles out of her skirt.

  “And a dream you had last night about a halo.”

  She picked at the loose strands of hair that had escaped from her sculptured bob.

  “Really? I don’t remember that.”

  “A halo of insects.”

  “How unpleasant,” she said. “It sounds more like one of your dreams than mine.”

  Now it was her turn to splash some vinegar.

  The trancelike session had not helped as they both supposed it might. To the contrary, it had set up a bristle fence between them. Too much had been exposed, too many roads seen and all their openings available only in a lost time. Over the next few days their meetings became awkward, his time and concentration becoming erratic, her frustration and need making her stumble. The advice she absorbed was no substitute for the love she so desperately craved, and his attachment was progressively slipping the physical world, the desires of which he rarely noticed.

  He made the effort to see her off at the landing strip. Again they agreed to keep in touch, to write frequently and plan another visit soon. Neither of them believed it and sealed the untruth with a chaste and fumbled kiss, while the props from the plane caused an impatient wind that worried at her held-down hat.

  He stood in the shade, his hand over his eyes, thinking only of his next fix as the plane floated away into the perfect sky and she bit her eyelids hard closed against the salty failure.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The spirit voices told Tyc to split them and keep both alive. Although there was much less of their sacred one, he obviously had all the power and soul of life. The other was nothing but a head on a withered stick—a puppet, a ghost coat of a man. So she assumed that Oneofthewilliams wanted it kept alive out of pity and some unknown loyalty. But as time moved on and she saw more and more of them, she began to change her mind. Slowly, bit by bit, she suspected that it might be spite. To keep the fragment of a man alive so that it might be aware daily of its miserable demise, its worthless attachment to the world of the living.

  Oneofthewilliams was quiet and powerful in his hut. He was carried out every day to the sea. To touch it and hold the sand. Or to the edge of the Vorrh where he fingered the leaves. He had the arms and hands to do so, and they were expressive and fluent even though some fingers had been lost during his arrival. He did not need legs anymore, nor did he need a mouth, eyes and ears, or any other part of the face or head that tasted and commented on the outside world. His extended neck had what it needed, swollen and solidly bound to it. Mostly hindbrain and inner cortex. The Wassidrus got the frontal lobes, all the memories, the eyes, and the facial parts that made the voice work. Unfortunately, that was the only organ that was not healing properly. The most surprising to Tyc was the heart and the spine. Oneofthewilliams had told her how to do it and it had sounded like madness, but it worked so far. The hollowed bamboo and the wildebeest heart sewn into the demon half of the rib cage. The sad human heart lived in the sacred one. It was scarred and doubtful and occasionally it needed to be massaged through the thin walls of skin and fascia that made a lumpen drumskin over it.

  In an afternoon that was filled with noise the Wassidrus opened his eyes to the gentle touches and not-so-gentle probes that he had been experiencing for the last twenty minutes or so. Outside, the children were playing and the wives were laughing and shouting at one another from across the sun-bleached yard where they gutted fish, standing at separate tables. There was a great optimism, bright in the bright air. The prone figure opened his eyes, still expecting to see his imagined arms warding off the intrusions of his dream. But this was no dream. It was a nightmare of reality, because the only hands and arms he found were those that were engaged in the real act of touching him all over, and they had once been his. For perched opposite him was his bisected other half, being held on the bed by the strong arms of two servants in blinding yellow robes. There were so many arms that he became confused, and the lack of any to use himself was intolerable. For a moment, still bleary-eyed, he thought he was in the presence of some octopus being or a Shiva or Kali deity. It was only when he recognised what used to be him feeling where his genitals should have been did he become truly awake and stare at the thing before him. The servants held it because if they had let go it would have rolled off the bed. It had no legs and rested on a kind of built-in pillow under its fragment of skinny rib cage. He was reminded of a toy he had once seen in a birdcage in the house of one of the higher members of the Timber Guild. A small ivory man with a rounded bottom and a carved laughing face. It was there to keep the caged bird amused. Having nowhere to fly, nothing to fuck, and even less to sing about, the demented creature could only eat and “play” with this toy on the shit-stained floor of its gilded prison. The insane bird would continually attack the grinning effigy of its jailers, pecking the resilient bone with all its might, butting it with vicious purpose. The figure rolled over on its half-spherical weighted base and then rolled back up again, causing the screeching creature to attack again in a greater rage. This little repetition could last for hours until the bird was exhausted, the painted mouth of the figure still grinning. The thing that lolloped forward to touch him again had the same balance as the torturous toy. But no smiling face. It had no face at all. From above the oddly broad shoulders and the sickeningly familiar arms, the neck rose and thickened out to a flat lopsided appendage that looked like a badly made beret or the cap of a shrivelled mushroom. A thick binding of the same yellow material that the servants wore seemed to keep it all in place. Why did he see this all so well and recognise it as once being part of him? This thing obviously saw nothing and looked as if it barely had consciousness at all. What could possibly exist and function in that socklike vestige of brain? Why had he been given all the senses? All the memories? He groaned it as a question mainly to himself. At the sound, the servants lifted the body off the bed and set it on the ground at a safe distance. The fingers of the thing instantly sought the offered palm of the right-hand servant. They skipped across his open hand like an electrified spider, the servant nodding all the while. He then bellowed out a name. And after a moment or two an almost naked child entered the hut. The servant spoke quickly with pronounced effort. The now-serious child turned towards the bed and approached. He looked at the Wassidrus and said, “Oneofthewilliams is telling you that in some soon days you will be well enough to leave and never return.”

  There was a no answer to give, what could be said? The hands moved again, making forms and shapes in space, and tapped out understanding to the nodding servant, who whispered to the child.

  The solemn child again turned and spoke.

  “The sacred one says you will have a servant to feed and carry you from place to place and that you have already met him before.”

  There was a blockage of the light in the door as another entered; a large bald man came before him. He bowed towards Oneofthewilliams and the child spoke to him very slowly. The response was totally unexpected and seemed nauseously out of place. The large man started giggling uncontrollably and spoke a few unintelligible words in a voice that belonged to a young girl. All eyes now turned towards the Wassidrus. The sacred one made a final gesture of opening his hands and the child said, “This is Kippa. You once tried to kill him. Perhaps now you will be nicer.”

  * * *

  —

  Apart from the love of his unknown daughter, Oneofthewilliams shivered out a great mass of other information, including that of another holy man. Father Lutchen was an old man with many truths and many lies, equally skilled in the wisdom and treachery of magic, who lived in the crime called Essenwald. He had tried to harm Modesta. This man should be punished to the same level as Father Timothy should be celebrated and sent home.

  Two warriors who had experience outside the tribe were given the task
of retrieving Father Lutchen. Tyc explained to them that they wanted him alive. They were given the tribal name of Essenwald and a scent of his whereabouts there.

  Mumt’r and Blincc took the commission eagerly, knowing the wisdom of being in praise and the penalty of being in failure. They were paddling hard towards the white man’s town, without a doubt or a question. They chatted and bounced on the waves of their esteemed journey. They came in through the river that is shadowed by high gaunt cliffs. The water here was fast and occasionally ran shallow over flinty pebbles. Their sea canoe was not prepared for such inconsistencies and many times they had to step out of it and guide its considerable weight to deeper waters. They walked through the same shallows where the assassin Tsungali attacked Peter Williams. They passed under the humpbacked bridge and its row of disreputable cottages. They paddled until they smelt the city around the next bend. They stopped, holding the boat against the pull of the water with backward strokes of their oars while their silent eyes assessed the situation ahead. Then without a word they made for the shore, found a beach with long reeds nearby, and hid the canoe, fastening it with pegs and ropes and stealing charms. They gathered their weapons and found the path. The previous humour that had driven them through the bobbing water was now gone. The path still swayed with the motion of the water as they adjusted their land legs and walked to do the serious business in the alien hive of stones that loomed ahead them.

  * * *

  Old Father Lutchen sat gloomily looking at the model of the Adam automata that the Valdemar brothers had made to hug the city’s guillotine. He touched the small model of the ingenious articulation of the wooden leaves that triggered the terrible axe. It had been instigated by his influence, the same way that he had compelled them to design and construct the cathedral window. He had also instigated and coaxed their even more sublime work in the Chapel of the Desert Fathers. And now it had all changed, their path deviated to corruption and blasphemy. True, it was he who had brought the desire of the Timber Guild and the city’s authorities to their attention and consideration. But he had expected that they might have conjured and designed an instrument of compassion and calm to aid and soften the continual grim action of the municipal guillotine. He never dreamt that they would create such a device. A machine worse than the mechanical axe itself. The monstrous automata they had devised was an outrage of biblical lore that extended the sufferings of the convicted felon while dragging even greater crowds in to gawp at the sickening act. It wasn’t guilt that he felt; he had given up that mockery of emotions years ago. It was how his part, his manipulation, had become so deformed. This was the work of the subconscious mind that he thought he’d had under control. After the execution of Ishmael Williams, he had washed his hands of anything to do with the Adam machine, denied ever speaking about its conception, construction, and operation.