She touched my lips at last as if to heal them. I recalled the games I played at School. I recalled not only rough-and-tumble soccer but sonship games, fatherhood games in College which seemed now to have happened a century ago in past futures, future pasts.
‘Farewell, fare forward, dearest Francisco.’ She had vanished.
*
This was the cue for the footsteps that I had heard earlier to resume their pitch, their curious dark ascent and descent upon the ladders and stairways in the crumbling of the Void. The crumbling of the Void was living Bread. The crumbling of the void was living Wine. The crumbling of the Void was Rice, but a Drought persisted everywhere despite a key that one possesed to the rehabilitation of living landscapes.
I turned into the cell. The Prisoner had sliced a loaf of Bread. He gave me a thin slice which slid between my Masked lips. I felt a new current of flesh enlivening them as I ate the Bread.
He gave me a sip of Wine.
There was a bowl of rice which sweltered under an electric bulb in the cell.
There was a newspaper on the floor of the cell with the following headlines:
DROUGHT HITS VILLAGES UNDER THE SIERRA MADRE
MEXICO
AN EAGLE’S FLIGHT FROM BONAMPAK
MOON LANDSCAPE
DECADES WITHOUT RAIN
CALL FOR A SAVIOUR
I translated SIERRA MADRE as ancient mother of the Americas and consort in bygone ages of the Prisoner-God of Devil’s Isle. The expression MOON brought my heart into my mouth. Heart of Bread. Was not MOON an arena of duels between Eagle-knights and Tiger-knights? Had not Deacon lassoed the Moon Horses and their riders (giants of chaos) and lodged them in a Coffin in the river dam of Crabwood Creek?
My Dream-book — I perceived now — was a net of associations of ‘pasts’ and ‘presents’ and ‘futures’ in which one could trace an immense and subtle transference of Masks such as I had glimpsed in the Nether World, in Limbo Land, in the Cave of the Moon, and elsewhere, in the aisle or street beneath the window of the cell. Its ramifications could never be absolutely seized but it brought into play a wholly different epic fiction from conventional European fiction, an epic net which embraced Europe as well — an epic net conversant with the European Conquest of the ancient Americas but antecedent to European models. Thus one could sense uncharted equations between the Prisoner-God of Devil’s Isle and a vanished Prisoner or husband of the Mother of the Americas whose body lay in mountains and valleys and rivers even as it reappeared in peasant Virgins and Animal Goddesses …
My heart was filled with sadness. ‘I speak with a sorrowing, inner tongue,’ I said to the Prisoner, ‘born of the coming wedding feast and a Drought of Spirit that hangs over the occasion. Deacon first met Marie at the end of a drought in the Courantyne savannahs when the rains came as if to ward off the perennial sickness of the globe that would erupt again and again in the elements. A Drought of Spirit affects the ancient peoples in the Americas: a Drought as well in the elements, a Drought in space.
‘Memory theatre fictionality is the life of the Mind to create “pasts” and “futures” into an uncanny cellular net in Body and Womb and Brain to ignite self-recognition in the recognition of a saviour amongst us. For if one is spiritually blind one cannot see. Mind entertains the creation and re-creation of a saviour … And Drought cannot be taken lightly — wherever it occurs — in Memory theatre. Drought is a bonfire — if not Bone Fire — to illumine skeletons of Dread, to illumine other bonfires of genius and grace, that flare in the cells within us and around us. We are on fire with grace sometimes, with dread sometimes. We are fever and drought. We are sick. We are well. We are the genius of the Rain God when we respond to interventions of fire, and differentiations in the fabric of fire, in the keys to rain, the harvesting of rain, that we may possess in the body of the Law of heaven.’
I had seen the Pagan Body in the Nether World. Now I sensed — in the comedy of the Law — differentiations in the Body of heaven.
Where was the Inspector, the laughing Inspector? Did he not hear the shuffling footsteps that had begun again and were swarming into the Prisoner’s cell? Had I unwittingly inserted my key into the lock of the cell with the crumbling of the Void? I was unsure. I was uncertain of my own responsibilities in this moment.
Had I brought them (those echoing footsteps) with me from the Orchestra of the Nether World? Were they solid ghosts clad in familiar leather? Were they agents of sacrifice in ancient art and modern science summoned by me and by the Prisoner in the cellular chemistry of life-in-death, death-in-life?
The half-shuffling, half-dancing footsteps ceased. The pause gave me a chance to attempt to scan the crowded room around me which seemed hollow yet full. The cell had become a seminal bubble and the ghost of Einstein was reflected in it. He rubbed shoulders with the newspaper headlines that had blown up from the floor of the cell into a ballooning SIERRA MADRE or mother of the ancient Americas in the Shadow of a bonfire lit by ghosts.
I thought of concentration camps in Europe — during World War Two — which Einstein had escaped in coming to America. But the ember of flame in the cell was the first signal of the coming death of the Prisoner. What a differentiation between murder in Nazi cells and a sentence that a surrogate God or Prisoner passes on himself to justify the genius of fire, the genius of the Atom, to which Einsteinian mathematics had been an invaluable key.
It was over at a stroke.
Einstein had vanished, the Prisoner consumed. His bones overshadowed me as though they were the architecture of ancient mothers and fathers, young brides and bridegrooms.
The crowds were upon me now. Would they tear me limb from limb? They knew me. No, they did not. They saw me as the tyrant-angel Deacon. They lifted me shoulder-high and bore me out of the room through the fire.
On one hand history would say that they had liberated me. On the other hand I knew my escape was the result of the Prisoner’s deed or will or legacy in electing me to play the role of Deacon.
I did not trust the swarming members of my constituency whom Deacon had once locked in a Coffin. They had seized their freedom. Or had it bestowed upon them by a reluctant Prisoner-God whose ashes were now the celebrated robe of the furnace. How strange! I wore the heirloom or suit my mother had given me: the robe of august slavery.
I knew they saw me as the one to bring a fortune to the land when Marie conceived. But still I was out in the open air and the ashes glittered like stars in broad daylight, stars from which I had fallen.
I saw the Doctor waving at me in the Shadow of the bonfire as though he stood on the Constellation of the Scorpion.
I saw Mr Mageye waving a banner of Prometheus. It was one of the props that he intended using in the showing of a film he had shot of Deacon and Jonah and tricksters associated with Virgins and with august slavery and with wars in heaven.
Supreme entertainment!
He would show this in the Banqueting Hall that the Doctor had provided.
*
Marie was painted black as she lay in bed. But when I touched her black became the feathers of heaven. Deacon had fallen upon her with the outstretched wings of a Vulture. Each feather was the imprint of their original embrace. As though the Vulture was the primordial Scavenger of the flesh of burnt Gods and Deacon knew — beyond a Shadow of doubt — that she was the Prisoner’s daughter. Not burnt flesh was hers but sculpted thighs, born of fire, to match a beak of lightning that brings rain upon the parched earth. She conceived Deacon’s child in that instant.