“Is this true?” asked Goodrich.
“What?” said Marsden. “Is what true?”
“Oh forgive me — it’s nothing at all — I was thinking aloud.”
Marsden laughed and Goodrich felt sudden anger: anger at the shroud or pallor of history to which he was indebted in forms beyond tabulation or classification. It was one of Marsden’s agents or mistresses — he thought perversely — who had conducted the dream scene by the wall….
“Lazy bitch,” said Marsden.
“I beg your pardon.”
“It’s my turn to ask forgiveness, Goodrich. I too have been thinking aloud. Jennifer should have been down early. She can be a fiend at times….” There was a calculated venom in his voice and Goodrich’s attention was drawn to a nearby table on which lay an African hunting knife in its sheath. “Ah,” said Marsden, “that’s Knife’s knife. The one with which he will kill me.”
“Kill you?”
“In the theatre.”
Lucky Knife, thought Goodrich, and an almost irresistible desire tickled both his hand and his heart. Irresistible desire to unsheath the African hunting knife, lift the shaft to his chest and turn the point towards Marsden. Then stab. What a river of blood would flow down Marsden’s vest, what scarlet bank of fanaticism in sackcloth and ashes. What scarlet river in black-vested camera. What a flag of joy, of release, of revolution, of liberation. What a hand would be his to stab the very bank and beneficiary of loves.
Marsden reached forward and covered Goodrich’s hand with his. “What about a drink, old boy? The bottle on the mantel-shelf is empty. Whisky cheers one up.”
“I felt quite cheerful this morning. I confess I am now depressed.”
“My dear Goodrich….”
“I dreamt …,” he stopped.
“Dreamt? What did you dream?”
“I thought you knew. You seem to know everything.”
“Goodrich! Me know everything?” He laughed. “Tell me your dream.”
Goodrich recounted his dream of Marsden’s blind mistress and the verdict of acquittal….
“Ah — a good dream but good dreams are also dangerous as you know yourself. You need to guard against a tendency to over-compensate….”
“I don’t follow.”
“For example, how do you see me this morning?”
“I see you in relation to my dream — I find myself indebted to you.”
“Ah! quite so. You have given me money, yet you are indebted to me.”
“Schizophrenic, isn’t it?”
“Goodrich! Dear fellow. What a word. But perhaps you are right. We are all schizophrenic in some degree or other. In your dream of acquittal there exists, for example, a mysterious court, a mysterious dawn or a mysterious sunset. Depends on how you relativize or relate the two. But as you can see now that isn’t so easy and you may be overwhelmed by what I call myself over-compensation ritual — over-compensated sunset or over-compensated dawn. You start out in the first place with a feeling of over-stimulation and then you begin to feel cheated, miserable, drained on one hand, or endangered out of all proportion on the other. You are steeped in an over-compensated sunset (the end of an age with its pollution symbols etc.) or over-compensated sunrise (the dawn of an age with its revolutionary overdrafts etc.).” Doctor Marsden was laughing now with the air of an inimitable clown, philosophical and therapeutic masquerade.
“No wonder, Goodrich,” he said, “that you project it all on me: as many project it all on you: in your eyes at this moment I am seen as one acquainted with all your fears, your hopes, your dreams; everything I say appears to anticipate or express your innermost dreams. No wonder I have become the one who taps your telephone, spies on you, reads your diaries, who threatens, in fact, to rob you of a private existence. You may shout on the rooftops about this or that enemy but it’s really a secret power of choice which you fear to lose … or to surrender of your own accord for the good of the state to me or someone like me (you will rationalize it in different ways according to your temperament).”
Knife came into the room at this juncture. There was a toothpick in his mouth and he spoke in muffled rude parody of Marsden’s head of state. “Let there be a grave economic landslide or projection in the wind, and everyone believes a totalitarian monster is born.”
Goodrich failed to see the joke and took him seriously. “Distinctions and choices and sanctuaries exist,” he muttered, “in the civilized world anyway within law and economics and other institutions, the church, the university etc. etc.”
“How right you are,” said Marsden. “The sanctuary is so perfect, each area or discipline so self-sufficient, that over-compensation ritual is the most natural thing in the world. A natural enlargement of one thing at the expense of the other. For some the U.S.A. is an economic sanctuary. For others South Africa is a political sanctuary. For others Cuba a revolutionary sanctuary.”
“The law is a sanctuary,” said Goodrich.
“The body of the law marches on. Yes. I know as head of state. Step by step in some parts of the world it shrinks into the self-conscious enlargement of political institutions which may even claim, mark well, to be bastions of freedom….”
Beehive Knife shrugged. “I give up,” he said laconically. “I give up.”
“Give up!” Marsden appeared to be startled, stroked his beard in Goodrich’s mind and mirror. “Give up to the theatre. What a capitulation that would be.” He growled and laughed. “The play within a play which repudiates the play of bias.”
“Do you mean,” said Beehive Knife matter-of-factly, “that the theatre will now gobble us up, become a modern sanctuary?”
“The ground of the theatre is not a sanctuary since it evokes step by step a curious ironic decapitation of over-compensation ritual. Step by step we are fused into ironical contrasts subsisting on each other. We are fused into ironical self-portraits, furnitures and parts, into our own omniscient obscenity, property or solipsism. We ripen, yes ripen beyond every sanctuary.”
“Into whom or what?” asked Goodrich.
“Into an abnormal head, abnormal state, abnormal clown, abnormal self-trial. Surely that is self-evident.”
Goodrich stared into the mirror in his sitting-room which caught the reflection of the sky outside the window and also the furniture inside the room so that it seemed to rain the very objects around him….
As I stared into the mirror — as into a private page in my innermost book — I was immersed in that still rain of shared toys and objects dispersed into the sound of a passing car, aeroplane, the rattle of a windowpane: the scarecrow rain of the twentieth century. Only yesterday it was, I recalled, I had seen a small boy step from his bicycle into a space suit. Marsden’s head of state I now thought, sketching absurdly, stood upon that boy’s feet and stepped into his space suit (innermost sanctuary in an alien universe) which unrolled itself into his future and mine as far as eye could see. I was possessed by that dual child — the head-of-a-man-on-a-child in Black Marsden’s Space Suit: the sanctuary of a modern Narcissus which transcended all ages….
“Goodrich,” said Marsden. “Have you heard what I have been saying? You seemed lost in that curious mirror of yours. Is it convex or concave, by the way?” Goodrich gave a start. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was thinking of a child in his space suit with a large head on his shoulders whom I saw on the street corner yesterday. He could have been your son, Marsden.”
“My son. What an idea.”
“There was a resemblance. I recall it distinctly. A childish resemblance of course. And by the way perhaps I should mention that in addition to the space suit he was playing at Hogmanay with a couple of other children. He held a piece of coal in his hands with which he had put a beard on his features. Perhaps he had seen you passing.” Goodrich could not help laughing. “He was playing the dark man you see who crosses the New Year threshold into the Moon.” Goodrich stopped. Marsden’s attention was riveted upon the door where Jennifer stood. She had come into the doorway so silently that no one knew how long she had been there. A pregnant silence descended in which the very raining objects in the mirror seemed suddenly to curve, to tauten like a new wave stilled afresh by the camera, hypnotic camera.