“I still do not understand….”
“You do understand,” said Black Marsden fiercely. “You have seen flies vanish into Knife. Slain or consumed at a stroke.”
“Who the devil do you think you are?” thought Goodrich but he said nothing, stung into silence by Marsden’s ecology of spirits — flies vanishing into Knife. And Marsden sensing the mood of the hour drew a veil over his brow like a corrugated hand in a rubber glove. “The poor beggar who has lost his memory represents worlds which have been consumed without rhyme or reason. And the very desert of human consciousness cries out that tabula rasa slate is the theatre of the uninitiate. Blind murder is a species of blind love.”
He dived into his breast-pocket, pulled out a photograph which he passed to Knife. “I want you to study this,” he said.
“Why?” said Knife taken aback, “it’s nothing … nothing … it’s a desert … is it some sort of joke?”
“Study the joke.” Marsden was drunk. “In joking deserts A-Bombs have been tried and explored. The ghost in the Bomb is the soul of the desert. There are human deserts — in our great cities, everywhere — which serve as sociological blackboard to correspond with scientific blackboard or deserts of species. Each desert becomes an invaluable place where peculiar trials are conducted. Thus the function of the desert is written into some of our most sophisticated advances. Without the human desert where would we establish our sociological fetishes? Without the desert of species in which life has become meaningless or extinct where would we research our A-Bomb fetishes?”
“I haven’t a clue,” said Knife and hummed atrociously off-key “The answer my friend is blowing in the wind”.
Black Marsden was laughing soundlessly. It was an astonishing volte-face from the implacably serious role he had been playing. Goodrich was astonished by the merriment of blood which popped out in his cheeks. Red cherries of dark laughter. His face a moment ago, as he spoke of the theatre of the uninitiate, was white as chalk above his bristling blackboard beard. Now it were as if Knife, at a single stroke, had cut a hole in the black forest and a young man’s self-mocking lips shone in an old man’s face.
“I would like to insert a huge cherry into the black-and-white cake of my play,” he said to Knife and Jennifer and Goodrich. “Sort of judgement day cake. How many bites into a monstrously peopled canvas reddened by ageless suns — how many bites into the cherry of the risen soul — will god take? Millions and uncountable millions will stand before him. Will he judge a score of millions at a glance?”
Knife shrugged his shoulders.
“Perhaps”, continued Black Marsden, “he will visualize millions at a glance, millions of wasted lives, his eye tunnelling to unravel biases of life. And so you see my dear Goodrich there is nothing so horrifying after all in your scarecrow eye. It means you do have the seed of judgement day scenario in you … look at me and tell me what you see.”
*
Black Marsden had risen to his feet. He seemed close now to curious exhaustion and leaned upon Knife for support. The amazing incandescent fertility of expression to invoke chalk, red cherries, coal seemed to come from within him and through him.
One saw through him into the most diverse filaments of flesh and imagination (stratospheres as well as atmospheres of spirit) in which one’s dreams were intensely real, intensely active and alive. This was the phenomenon of Marsden’s personality. And yet I found myself bound to resist, in some degree, such an order of fascination. Who was Marsden to snap his fingers, as it were, at me? To dip his fingers and features into every wasting or wasted dye or pigment of existence?
I knew the logic of midnight to noon private confessional diaries, unsung or unheralded doodles and sketches — men of chalk, men of coal, the beggar as king; and my early suspicions returned that Marsden may have stolen into my room and tapped my book of infinity.
But even as the suspicion strengthened I was filled with a different kind of alarm. Who could be so acquainted with my innermost dreams of criminality, of divinity, love of humanity as well as hatred of humanity except a chimera or projection of myself? Who could unravel so intimately, so quickly, at a stroke and a glance the intricate labyrinth of a diary?
Thus I found myself riddled and torn by the possibility that Marsden (whether as doctor, thief or judge), Knife (whether as beggar or assassin), Jennifer (whether as Gorgon or open-ended beauty) were wholly unreal, wholly non-existent. Or wholly related to a terrifying trial of indwelling bias and community, a terrifying scrutiny of indwelling truth so unpredictably fierce and real it could likewise expire in a flash, faint or fade into the innocent floorboards one trod. My head was spinning with a fabric of invisibles — the invisibles one endured in one sense (logical empirical unreality), or in the other sense (illogical immanent reality).
Marsden was speaking—“Excuse me, Goodrich. I find myself suddenly stricken with exhaustion. I am an older man than you think.” He gave his weird smile. “Much older than you think. I am compelled sometimes to rest a little.”
I stepped forward wishing to put my hand on his arm (which Knife had relinquished for a moment), assure myself beyond a shadow of doubt that he was both solid as well as visible. But he kept me at arm’s length. “Knife will see to me, Goodrich. It is kind of you nevertheless.” Knife’s deadpan matter-of-factness was unbroken and as he and Marsden left the room I was filled with the curious sensation of fading blood, of the most beautiful and the fiercest phantoms I desired and yet could not reach. I could not stop myself crying out aloud when they were gone: “They are not real. Not real at all.”
“Very real. Very real,” said Jennifer. “Ask Mrs. Glenwearie. She knows we are real. She has to feed us like children. Do you know, Clive,”—I sensed she was teasing me—“I want a child. I do.” She came right up to me now and I desired to touch her, hold her. But I was afraid my hands would go through space, pass through her body. “How is your hand?” she asked suddenly. “There is a red line on it.”
“It’s nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all.”
“It’s real,” she said. “That thin red line.” And kissed me with lips so pliant and soft I felt the tip of her tongue on mine. She drew back instantly as I sought to put my arms around her.
“You are a cunning one, Clive. Come now, confess. First a kiss to prove me real. Then something more to prove me even more real. Then more and still more. How permissive is reality? Is there an end to the question of proof? Mardie would say it’s the dance of many veils. Do you know, Clive, I am to play Salome in Mardie’s theatre? He wants me to play a thoroughly virtuous Salome.”
“Virtuous? But surely that’s a violation of the part….”
“Quite so,” said Jennifer and she mimicked Marsden. “What is virtue? Virtue is a succession of violations towards the seat of love — towards the possession of head or heart. Virtue is a cruel insistence on a property of reality.”
As she mimicked him I could indeed hear Marsden’s voice speaking through her, schooling her for Salome through his phenomenon of personality.