I tried to slip out of the cell but the Inspectors caught sight of me and drew me back.
‘Not so quick, Francisco. I saw you crouching there in a corner. You can’t deceive the magus of the Law!’ He was smiling with self-mockery I dreamt as he spoke. Then he turned grave and cool — not harsh — as the key which had fallen out of his split, laughing sides. ‘You must confront the Prisoner, Francisco.’
I turned and saw the Prisoner’s calculating and extraordinary eye upon me. He was measuring me. Already I sensed he knew me differently from how I knew myself. My best tactic was to strike out boldly, to speak boldly.
How did I see him?
‘I see the Prisoner,’ I said, ‘as the eponymous hero of the Void which he has endured in all religions for ages. He swims, he is one-in-many, many-in-one, he is a Jester like Mr Mageye, he appears to escape, he runs, he appears to drown but he surfaces again and again. It is said that Jonah Jones is his perverse twin. Perverse, yes, that is true. He loathes cults. He is aware of the Virgin Ship and the huntsman Christ. They are new phenomena of Spirit in his aged sight I would imagine. That’s my guess. So much so he fears for the peasant Virgin Marie whom he claims as his daughter. He sees her as subordinate to the wealth of civilization and therefore liable to become a pawn in the game of religious freedom.
‘Let me tell you, Inspector, that I see the poor Prisoner — within the backcloth of the poverty-stricken Guyanas — as so imbued now, in my Dream-book age, with the mathematics of Chaos that some reluctant sacrifice on his part, some cruel rending sacrifice, is impending — I have a dark sensation of what it is — which bears on the fate of freedom …
‘I say “reluctant” for the Prisoner would prefer not to be involved. He would prefer his daughter to withdraw from the marriage to Deacon. And I tend to agree. I am jealous of Deacon. But I feel it is now all too late and that the Prisoner, Deacon and I are bound together in a curious pact that resembles the pact between Deacon, Jonah and me but differs profoundly. Yes, twin-pacts they are but how they differ! The pact with Jonah led to the holocaust. The pact with the Prisoner leads I feel to an intricate dismantling of the Void.’
‘Does the Void exist here,’ cried the Inspector, ‘on these coastlands? Great Europe I would understand as pertinent to a theatre of the Void, or the great United States, or the great Soviet Union that was and is in “futures” and “pasts”. But here on these poor coastlands?”
‘The Void has been here for generations. Take it at a basic level. They are deemed flat, are they not?’
‘The coastlands you mean?’
‘Yes, I mean the coastlands. They are deemed as flat as commonsense prose or journalism. Commonsense engineers decided long ago in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the cotton estates and the cane-farming estates, the sugar plantations, were to be laid out in rectangles and squares. As a consequence they smothered the breath-lines in a living landscape. And when the peasant rice fanner came into being he had to contend with disfigured catchments, in the coastal river systems, that would occasion excessive floods and droughts for him. The sugar barons escaped, for they had empoldered their lands into a one-sided paradise …’
‘I do not follow,’ said the Inspector.
‘It’s simplicity itself, but as always simplicity is a complex achievement, isn’t it, for it involves us in a net of profoundest inter-relationships, re-visionary relationships. Nothing is to be taken for granted. We are at liberty now to see that the landscape is not flat …’
‘Not flat?’ cried the Inspector. ‘But I still think it is.’
I paused and considered how best to explain simplicity’s complexity, complexity’s simplicity, to him.
‘Have you heard of spirit-levelling?’ I said. ‘An odd term I know. Spirit-levelling encompasses the use of dumpy-levels, theodolites, surveying instruments etc. A wholly new reconnaissance of the coastlands brought to light apparently minor but significant watersheds and drainage lines which — when perceived in relationship — were of extreme importance. They offered the contours upon which to build a redistributive alliance of canals, drainage, and other works orchestrated into the living landscape to provide a genuine intercourse between the art of science and the life of nature within a theatre of diverse cultivation and achievements. It has not happened, it never happened, it still is not happening. Instead the Void!’
The Prisoner stared at me with what seemed a baleful eye.
‘Where in hell did you learn all this, Francisco?’ he cried. ‘Was it in hell or in San Francisco College? Or was it in the Nether World? You have touched me on the raw. My hands are bruised from battering against the Void. The Earth is flat in the Void. But it rears its flatness up into irredeemable structures, unchanging institutions, unchanging parliaments, unchanging human nature. I have battered my hands raw. So perhaps it’s time for me to die.’
‘So have I,’ I cried. ‘So have I. I bruised my fists when I arose from the Grave in Jonestown.’
‘Jonestown? Jonestown?’ said the bewildered Prisoner. ‘Where is Jonestown?’
I almost bit my lip. I was in the past now, not in the future. I had returned to the past from the future. I was back in 1954. I had learnt to survey the breath-lines in living landscapes from my Skeleton-twin who made no bones about the articulation of ridges and watersheds and contours in the Paradise of the Rain God.
‘Oh nothing,’ I said quickly. ‘You of all Prisoners situated in the Void should know of mixed “futures” and “pasts”. After all they are but frames. We speak in the framed word of God but the unfathomable Creator, the untranslatable Creator, cannot be framed.’
‘I am a framed God,’ said the Prisoner. ‘Have I not uttered a dark sentence on myself? It’s time for me to die!’
‘Language is deeper than its frames or Gods who claim to be an absolute God.’ I stopped. Did I speak in arrogance or in simplicity’s faith in an untranslatable Creator? ‘The resources of a living language sustain a re-visionary dynamic. There is real continuity running out of the past into the future. But such continuity cannot be lodged absolutely in the frames and the dogmas of the past. For then the past becomes an invalid. Even the Doctor in the Hospital knows this if he is to see through the masks of his patients, pigmentations, creeds, whatever, to their essential disease … But he exploits them. He turns away from his daughter’s fiery glance when she plays at being a nursery princess in a sick world.’
‘What is the future, Francisco Bone? I know — or think I know — the past. The past becomes extinct unless we live it in the life of the future, freedom’s future — however disastrous freedom sometimes seems — and freedom’s reconnaissance of the past. A jealous man like yourself, Francisco (jealous of Deacon), who slips into cells, and hides in bushes, may have something priceless to offer. Your diminutive being is a recommendation of collective involvement with others yet divergence and capacity to see what others — even myself — may fail to see. What is the future, Francisco Bone?’
The Prisoner was tempting me I knew, he was flattering and testing me I knew. He was seeking to discover whether an element of paranoia might not reside in a diminutive survivor such as myself. Is not paranoia another wall or factor in the prison of the Void?