‘In a very womanly way. What’s the matter, Caroline? What’s bothering you?’
‘Nothing in particular; I just wanted to come here because sometimes I like to be in a place where what’s outside me isn’t too different from what’s inside me.’
‘I guess that’s why I like it. But you don’t look as if desolation is your thing.’
‘Maybe that’s my problem — I look like a lot of laughs but I’m not. Let’s go to the mini-cine and watch something old in black-and-white — Brief Encounter maybe.’
We went to the mini-cine near the Q-BO SLEEP, found an empty two-seater that reeked of beer and semen, and punched up Brief Encounter.
‘Oh God,’ said Caroline as the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto came in over the credits, ‘look! The very first thing you see is a train hurtling away from you in great clouds of steam, then a train coming towards you, then Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson sitting at a table in the refreshment room at Milford Junction and that awful woman chattering so they can’t even have a proper goodbye. Their story begins with the ending of it. That’s so true, it’s so much the way life is.’ She began to sniffle, brought a box of tissues out of her shoulder bag, and settled back to enjoy the film. When Celia Johnson, trapped in a compartment with the dreadful Dolly, said to herself, ‘Nothing lasts, really — neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long,’ Caroline wept openly. ‘Oh shit,’ she said, ‘that gets me every time.’
I hugged her and kissed her and she made little comfortable noises and told me more about the film which I too had seen several times. ‘Their story begins when he takes a bit of grit out of her eye, he opens her eyes to something she hadn’t seen before. She knew what was happening by the time they’d spent their first afternoon together at the pictures; and it was obviously one of those things that just couldn’t be but it’s so sad and I cry every time.’
After the film we had dinner at Mikhail’s Bistro where the prices are higher than those at the Qwiksnak but the Quasi-Protein is pretty much the same except for the sauces. Afterwards we walked around the spaceport not talking, just being with each other in the echoing silence. At Hubble Straits when I wasn’t with Caroline and I thought about her, the picture that came first was always her walk: it was a walk that pleasured the eye, a noble way of moving. As we slowly strolled with her arm linked in mine and our bodies touching I felt proud to be the one she walked with.
‘What do you want out of life, Frem?’ she said.
Again I saw the figure in the blue coverall tumbling over and over, drifting in deep space, pictures frozen in its mind. ‘I want to be the whole me, whatever that is.’
‘Then you’ll have to remember all that you’ve forgotten, won’t you?’
‘It’ll come back when it’s ready, I guess.’ We didn’t say any more about it then. It was after midnight when we got to the Q-BO SLEEP. We found a double, punched in our IDs and our wake-up time, cleaned our teeth, washed our faces, undressed, and crept naked under the thin grey blankets — two bare forked creatures holding each other tight with a great blackness all around.
10
They call it stormy Monday,
But Tuesday’s just as bad.
Back at Hubble Straits next morning the Level 4 continued and Caroline again produced the hypno session transcript. ‘Maybe if we go over it once more something will come back to you,’ she said. Her manner seemed to suggest that now I was ready to be good and perform as required.
‘Why should anything more come back to me?’
‘Maybe you haven’t such a tight grip on yourself as you did the day of the hypno session.’
‘Do you mean that our trip to Badru was meant to loosen me up?’
‘Not really. But I did think that maybe some of the walls were down.’
‘Do you remember, Dr Lovecraft, in Hamlet, where Hamlet shows Guildenstern a recorder and asks him if he can play it?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Guildenstern says no, he can’t. And Hamlet says something like, “If you can’t play a simple instrument like this, how do you think you can play me?”’
‘I’m not trying to play you.’
‘You say you’re not but you are.’
‘What’s the big secret here, Fremder? What is it you don’t want to look at?’
I could feel it growing huge in me but I didn’t know what it was. ‘I don’t remember.’
‘I believe that you don’t remember but I think you don’t want to remember and I think you could if you wanted to.’
‘You’re welcome to your opinion, Dr Lovecraft.’
Things became distinctly cooler between us after that. We didn’t sleep together again after Badru but Caroline didn’t give up on the Level 4. Sometimes she attacked the physical symptoms of my problems: the best neuro specialists in Physio/Psycho did many EEGs and VC scans but they couldn’t find anything organically wrong with my vision so I had to go on looking at things past bright circles of emptiness.
The Caroline-and-me thing didn’t grind to a complete halt; sometimes we had drinks and dinner together at the Hubble Bubble. The light there was dim and retentive and the pianist in the lounge was Wasny Flim whose ‘Planetary Fade’ had been Top of the Charts when Judith and I saw the owl. He was a small dark man, all slants and angles like his music. Under the spotlight his eyes were closed and his head thrown back as he wove his wistful intervals through the shadows and the circumambient murmur. And always beyond him receded the black sparkle of space in which the flicker docks and Mikhail’s Snackdome regularly came and went together with the Hawking Threshold light, Ereshkigal, the seven Anunnaki, and Inanna’s Girdle. When Caroline and I came to the lounge at the end of the first week he was playing ‘Where or When’ and talking a throwaway vocal in the Sun Ra manner:
Some things that happen for the first time,
Seem to be happening again.
‘Maybe there’s no such thing as a first time for anything,’ said Caroline. ‘Maybe the same things keep happening over and over.’ Her voice was lower than usual and she wasn’t looking at me. Flim and his piano continued to suggest that we had met before and laughed before and loved before but who knew where or when? 24 HRS — FREIGHTERS YES, said Mikhail’s Snackdome silently.
I’ve mentioned before this the little tribunal of the dusk. There’s no dusk at Hubble Straits but the little tribunal were sitting anyhow, this time as twelve eagle owls, each on a child’s coffin. Please, I said to the mind that had spoken to me of the everything-fear and the all-terror, tell me how to be.
To my inner eye came white mist on the ancient waters of time’s beginning but there were no words as the Snackdome came round again.
‘Freighters yes,’ said Caroline. ‘Everybody’s carrying some kind of a load.’ I let that lie there. She held up her empty glass and I signalled the waiter to bring two more of the same.
‘One more river to cross,’ said Caroline as she looked into her fresh gin-and-tonic.
I didn’t ask her what she meant. We had several more of the same; the bright circles of emptiness in my vision spangled into soft focus and the effect was not unpleasant.
‘Maybe this will get us to Level 5,’ she said. ‘Level 4 certainly hasn’t amounted to much.’
My head was singing:
PACK UP ALL MY CARE AND WOE,
HERE I GO, SINGING LOW,
BYE BYE BLACKBIRD.