I knew that I stood in the greatest danger, that the Prisoner stood in the greatest danger, that there would be a rush into the cell that we occupied.
Positions occupied by frozen actors and frozen actresses in the theatres of time move or shift and acquire a different emphasis in Memory theatre.
For instance I had forgotten in my moving to the window of the Prisoner’s cell, and on looking down into the street, that I had perceived Carnival Lord Death dressed in a nobleman’s robes of a bygone age.
I saw them now afresh as he stirred, discarding robes and replacing them with the suit or heirloom that my mother had given me and which I had lent to Jonah Jones. The grave-digger (who adopted the Mask of Carnival Lord Death in Limbo Land where I had met him) had acquired the suit when he ransacked Jonah’s house and sought to push it into the Jonestown river. Yes, these were the robes or the suit that I saw from the window of the cell. A wind blew on Lord Death’s back. I thought I heard the dead lace or fabric vibrate enlivened by Dread.
Yes, there was no doubt now that Carnival Lord Death was clothed in rich attire, in my mother’s gift. The Prisoner, on the other hand, was in rags.
I glanced back into the cell and dreamt that I saw once again — in Mr Mageye’s futuristic Camera — the Prisoner’s bones providing a shield over mine, over my head, my face. As though God’s death were my sacred life. An uncanny, almost savage, sensation! Intrinsic to Communion. Intrinsic to the eating of Bread and Wine.
Within Bread, within Wine, is the mystery of Bone: Bone adorned with Flesh.
I was subject to a dazzling glory and terror that I was unable to translate. Bone is a hieroglyph of sacrificial Phallus, sacramental sex, and contemplation of a honeymoon with the bride of humanity.
Were these signals of the crumbling of the Void? Perhaps they were. But I had a far way to go to insert a key into the many doors within the Prison of the Void, a key — that one could so easily despise — for it had fallen out of the split, laughing side of the Law.
Comedy is chastening therapy when one scans the Void, the intricate theatre of the Void, as one begins to unlock a variety of doors that are relevant to the pact between the Prisoner, absent Deacon and me.
ABSENT DEACON. I had said it before but unthinkingly.
Now the full force of his absence came home to me. Deacon had not returned for his wedding day.Did I hear the echo of laughter as the Law split its side all over again?
Comedy is chastening therapy. Comedy sometimes portrays consequences born of hubris.
Deacon had died in Jonestown. I had seen his body on a rock under the Waterfall beneath the Cave of the Moon in which I had sheltered on the Night of the Day of the Dead when I had fled into the Forest and narrowly escaped plunging headlong into the sawyers’ pit.
Deacon’s body lay on the rock beneath the Cave. I saw it distinctly when daylight came.
No laughing matter. Why then the echoing tracery of the laughter of the Law? Such laughter sometimes jars, it seems inappropriate, it seems irrelevant. But then for no graspable reason it becomes a shuddering music, it may break one’s heart. Deacon’s heart broke in his last moments, broke with inexhaustible tenderness, inexhaustible love for Marie, inexhaustible hope of heaven’s forgiveness …
He (Deacon) had overcome Jonah when he fought him in the Mask of the Eagle and the Vulture Knight in Maya style.
No one knows what circumstances of remorse brought such a winged career to its apparent close. Had it been a straightforward accident as my death in the sawyers’ pit would have been? Had he tripped into the ravine — as I nearly did — under the Cave at dead of Night?
Heroes run in parallel sometimes with the vague footsteps of hapless multitudes murdered on the battlefield, or in concentration camps, or in Jonestowns around the globe, and are on occasion the victims of obscure Fate upon ladders and stairways into the Void.
Deacon’s flying, falling ghost was alive I was sure within the crumbling of the Void, exposure in the Void, but he (or it) had not returned to Port Mourant to celebrate a replay of the wedding to Marie in Memory theatre. And yet in choosing an actor to play the part the Prisoner knew how compelling was the life of the ghost in the actor’s revisitation of truth. In choosing an actor to play the part — an actor such as myself — the Prisoner knew the turmoil of his or my emotions, my jealousy of Deacon, my love for Marie, my insight into his last moments when he slipped through space onto the rock. However apparently fictional those insights were they could make all the difference within imaginative truth to the motivation of the life of the ghost in me. I was to play absent Deacon in Memory theatre. I knew the ghost was alive in me, with me. I was alive, it was alive, in a strange concert of understanding to be sparked by the Prisoner and a multitude of shuffling footsteps around the globe.
I suspected that though Deacon had not returned his ghost in me was also in Mr Mageye’s Camera …
Absent Deacon — played by me as Present Deacon — would prove a formidable engagement with humanity, re-visionary specialities of humanity in heaven and upon earth in myself …
He (Deacon) had dreamt of immunity to pain. No wonder he got along well with the Doctor and turned his back on the Prisoner on the day when a bonfire flared and the Prisoner was consumed and broken on a Wheel of revolving arms and legs set in motion by Deacon’s constituency.
Immunity, Deacon declared, should be a factor in godhead when humanity turns violent. Immunity was consistent with the humour of falling angels, perpetually falling, but immune to pain, because of inoculation with the political and economic venom of the Scorpion Constellation.
No wonder Deacon possessed the ear of the very constituency he had buried in a Coffin but which arose from the Nether World to lift him shoulder-high on his wedding day.
I did not believe a word of such immunity but it was a joke of sorts that raised a laugh in a gathering of tricksters who tricked Scorpions into play, biting play, with no ill effects. It was akin to walking with bare feet upon coals of fire. It was akin to feats of conquest upon earth and in heaven. Above all it was a foretaste of the Sleep of the Virgin on honeymoon day and night, a Virgin inevitably surrounded by tricksters of every culture and pigmentation, by furies real and deceptive, true and false, that climb into her arms and the arms of her bridegroom when she lies with him.
Deacon’s investment in such humours of immunity empowered him, he declared, to go anywhere, to do anything. He was committed to climbing Roraima (which is infested with Scorpions) in order to unearth a great treasure for Marie’s first-born child and for his constituency. This was his boast in 1954. My mind was a furious, tormented blank about Marie’s first-born, my mind was tricked into lapses of Memory in playing the role of absent Deacon. But of one thing I was sure within the information that I received from Deacon’s ghost.
Deacon, in his last moments, had experienced the pain of laughter in the body of the Law. And this filled him with Dread, filled him as well with an immensity of love for the child Marie had borne and whom he had equated with a great fortune or treasure to be secured by strategies of venom within his veins.
He saw the hollowness of such power. It seared the mind in his wings. It seared the wings in my mind. For the shock seemed — in some incalculable way — a part of my own trauma when I narrowly escaped the Grave in Jonestown.