In the blind reflected square that emptied within the night, the ghost of a woman now moved. Her gown splashed. Splashed rivets of rain, lightning. Lightning on earth the emperor had forgotten, friction of elements Idiot Spark recalled now, the friction of glimpsed seed-within-ghost-within-womb-within-sun.
She was wet to the skin. Indeed — the Fool felt — she was, in this respect, as indifferent to the rain as the emperor’s night monument above was indifferent to the sky. And it was this indifference that led him, as fallen priest of light, to glimpse the possibility of a connection between their bodies though divided in apparent substance. Emperor Stone above. Ghost Woman beneath. Hollow shelter, imperial majesty, on his high pedestal of night. Ghost womb, splashed gown, in her blind square of sex.
BLIND SQUARE OF SEX. Blind connection of Stone Rain in Battered Dress or glimpsed repudiation of passive man-condition to passive woman-condition in hollows of culture within the passing night, passive fashion-plate wired to fashion-dish, love-bird to sales-bird.
The rain was lessening now and the mutual indifference to each other embodied in Emperor Rain and the woman in the square slipped like a skin from one to the other in the Fool’s sparked eye. So that in the degree that the emperor rain knew her as his naked monument within her naked flesh, so too the Fool knew her as spark within ghost.
The shape of her back loomed up before him, the movement of her hips, window dressing of absent dawn in the light of a passing car, emperor’s patrol.
Half of her was reflected here (monumentalized here); half darkened there (glimpsed there)…. Back a light, front a shadow. Blind conception of dawn. Window dressing of dawn, emperor’s mistress in a nameless city.
She moved across the square, came to a dress shop at which she stopped to anticipate an electric dawn, moved on and turned a dark corner. The Fool wondered whether she had deserted him. He in turn began to desert Emperor Rain’s passive reflection of out-thrust arm, out-thrust foot, passive reflection of coercive embrace that made her look unutterably forlorn but a moment or two ago within the night’s connection of stone rain, in battered dress, buried in the heart of nameless sleeping citizens, nameless whoring citizens, nameless dead cities.
In the same context he glimpsed himself too as incredibly forlorn, a spark in a drift of stars under the emperor’s foot. And as he followed her it was with a sense of the difficulty of finding her, of moving arms and legs that were heavy with the emperor’s indifferent tread, the emperor’s patrol of law indifferent to love, love indifferent to law.
Perhaps he was sustained by an irony, the irony of his fall, of his need to descend into implacable assumptions of fate’s ruling objects of indifference to arts of subjective freedom.
He came to the lighted dress shop at which she had stopped briefly and turned the corner she had taken. It was a narrow street leading vaguely uphill into an unfamiliar district.
The rain had ceased except for an occasional drizzle from an occasional tree. A cosy street in broad daylight he imagined, antiques, stationery and illustrated books. Filled now after midnight with wraiths, the wraith among wraiths of half-electric, half-envisoned flesh-and-blood he pursued. Was death impending upon nameless futures, nameless highways, square of emperor death into which nameless citizens fell as counterpoint to sexual dawn’s implicit room for others to be born in a new light?
She paused for an instant (he was sure it was she) at another window with illustrated books. Then slipped into the shadows again that lined the street with old old ghosts of light.
He too soon came abreast of the illustrations that had held her, a moth to a candle, and stopped, a spark for an eye.
A large book was open to display two illustrations. He read—“Above: The sacred city of Teotihuacán (the name in Aztec means ‘the gods were made here’). Below: Masks of wind serpents and rain serpents.”
He moved on after her along the narrow street, beneath a vaguely lighter sky that seemed now a segment of paint drawn from Teotihuacán’s Way of the Dead and laid now over a glimpsed mosaic of twentieth-century cities into a Way of Satellites.
He caught another reflection of her along the street. A door was opening. She was caught herself in beam and torch, animal staring into a bullet. The door closed. She was gone. He quickened his pace. Came to the vicinity of the door. Closed fast. For a moment he was uncertain. Had she gone in?
No. There she was. The rattle of a tin on the pavement. There she was. Reflected crackle, tin drum of pavement. Outlined afresh by orange streetlamp. Clockwork herald of dawn. Herald of garish beauty shed by the streetlamp like a light that dresses cell and prison and bed into sacrificed elements invoked by her, commodities of operational death and sex.
He hastened after her with a sense of mutual chasms now growing indifferent to each other in the struggling uncertain light — blind square of sex, blind square of death.
It was still quite dark and he almost missed her when she turned suddenly to the left. He followed as quickly as he could emerging this time into a wider avenue.
At first he thought he had lost her. Then hardly believing his good fortune he saw she had stopped at a coffee wagon. There was a rude awning attached to a vehicle beneath which a few stragglers, workmen perhaps on night-shift and dawn-shift, tramps, homeless scholars, heretic souls had gathered.
There was another wagon at the edge of the avenue also serving coffee. The arrangement was perfect. The Fool stopped and ordered a drink. She stood a dozen or so yards away and he was in a position to observe her without betraying his curiosity.
The couple of workmen beside him were grumbling about a strike or a lock-out, an ultimatum they said.
“Tired,” said one. “My day will never come.”
“Your day, mate,” said the other, “is bloody revolution and that will never come until the workers tighten their belts, bloody well fast …” The rest of the conversation was buried in obscenities. The Idiot was distracted from his own mission. Filled also with a sympathetic hunger.
“Revolution,” he cried. “What is revolution?” He had not intended to speak but the question issued of its own volition almost from his tongue. Perhaps it had been carved there, branded there. The workmen turned, stared at him. They were a little astonished, even nonplussed, at his intervention. But they knew the oddest characters with the oddest question on their lips slept rough and roamed the streets.
“I agree”, said the Fool seeking to placate them and justify himself, “that politics is the art of sacrifice.”
“Who makes the sacrifice mate?”
“Who indeed,” the Idiot parried. “Even in the most humane democratic systems there comes a moment of deadlock when the ruling voices of the day on every side of the fence, labour, capital, government, trades unions, you name it, declare themselves utterly determined to do something. And we know when they say that that each and all really mean somebody will get the chop, somebody’s ripe to be sacrificed on the altar of the day in the name of economic and political expediency. Somebody’s head is beginning to grow increasingly indifferent to another body’s heart in order to ensure that the right cause, as each reflects it, will triumph, the right victim prosecuted (or persecuted) in order to provide a large enough capacity or proverbial enough skin to promote what is known as the unity of mankind …”
“Bloody revolution,” said the workman turning a deaf ear to the Fool. “You come back to what I said. Bloody unity.”