Trentham, meanwhile, is chattering.
I must recall, he says. Surely I’d know if I shot something so—so beautiful. Trentham’s a pacifist—“I couldn’t even hold a gun, much less fire one”—and talkative. Eddington says he’d make a first-class wrangler if only he kept quiet. Instead, he’s just an able computer. The talkative are more alone than they realize. It is their talk that drives listeners away. The mirror underneath the antlers shows a listening room.
The fire is lit. Red-faced and self-conscious, he turns to me. “Now, don’t look down. I don’t want you to faint again.” Kneeling, he loosens my plimsolls. “Trust you to tie a frantic knot…” He pulls a large white handkerchief from his pocket and reaches for the safety pin fastening my shorts (“Sorry, but I need this.”). He works away, pulls off a blotchy sock. I look up hastily, assess the volutes in the ceiling rose. “No real damage.” The dressing’s comfortable. It is the sense of imposture that worries me, the feeling that I’ve changed; that I’m a variant, not altogether the same man who went out for a run; that Trentham isn’t Molyneaux; that it is difficult for manumitted souls to find a new body. But necessary. With no body, what is there for them to do?
“Sorry,” he says, his voice soft now, considering the done and the undone, sliding both hands along my thighs. “I think I might need this as well.”
After, he stretches out on the carpet. Arches and rolls onto his back, his hands and wrists pushing catlike at nothingness. He yawns, baring his teeth, showing the pink and yellow of a tongue coated with me. The trouser pleats, the creases on his white shirtsleeves are hewn. Only his tie, pulled down an inch and trailing on the carpet like a cinder path, seems lax. His ease at being animal blots out the deed. Function trumps memory. I hear the grate agree. The flames draw near. Somewhere inside them Salomé and cowled figures, grappling with every kind of ecstasy. A coal cracks. Bodies fall from smashed windows and footsteps scatter through the streets. Someone is pointing at a row of naked prisoners. The scene wavers, one flicker of one flame, and soars into the chimney breast. Gone, but the picture still exists, between the world and me. A glimpse of charnel seen from someone else’s point of view, perhaps.
I think of all the many different points of view that are the plural aspects of a singular phenomenon. Chomolungma and Mount Everest—the same mountain from two valleys. Convergent perspective.
Trentham is sorry, but not very, that he forced himself on me. I say I didn’t mind. It was his impression I couldn’t object—I looked half-paralyzed; I seemed numbly to want to be reduced to sheer reflex. It made him “terribly greedy.” He grins, swallows, and says:
“What is it like, Alec—to come round from a faint?”
I give the best answer I can, hasty and vague. The moment of the faint itself I can’t retrieve, whereas the waking up from it is revelatory and fresh, a sort of boundless reacquaintance with being. You were nothing and suddenly you find a form again, solid among the flagstones and the poplar trees.
For just a few moments, you don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to send messages to nerves or limbs. You don’t have to hunt, eat, survive. Nothing about you lying there, wherever you have fallen down, describes a need. The instant of repose floats on, a swan almost in flight, stroking the water with its feet. You’re tied to everything and everything is part of you, until you hear watery voices in the distance and the intersections of the poplar canopy express a thought: though there is only one river, it has two sides, and you’re on one of them.
The feeling this is true, that you are separate, alone, brings you around. You give a short heave of responsibility for sensations. You shift and cry.
Your mind has registered, or made, the whole wide world, in which it finds to its surprise it plays a very minor part. One lying by the scraper at the gates. How small you are. How limitless the earth and overarching sky.
I make a glib comparison. “It’s rather like writing a book only to read the proofs and find yourself mentioned—dismissed—in the footnotes…”
“I’ll open this window,” Trentham says airily, gets up and lets a pulse of organ music in: a cadence from Communion, the bourdon rolling wide and deep across the college lawn, rattling the glass. He frowns. “But no one thinks a character inside a book has actually written it?”
“And yet the author is a part of his material. It’s paradoxical, that’s all.”
The thing with fainting is, you feel abundantly aware, at first. You seem to have creative will, except you can’t do anything. And when you can, when you’ve a body to command again, your state of mind alters. It’s forced into moments, a step-by-step account, this foot goes here, then this foot over there…
“I’m glad I’ve never fainted. It sounds horrible. Well, horribly mechanical.”
It’s as if Trentham heard me thinking to myself.
“Perhaps it is. Mechanical, I mean.”
Why is that so troubling, to him? The first thing that we find, when we grow up, is that our inner life’s unthinkable to anyone else; its secrets are invisible. We look normal and that’s enough, as far as others are concerned. The semblance of humanity is all the evidence we’ll ever have for it.
Trentham looks out of my window, one finger laid across his lips. The small theater of the fire is playing something from an ancient repertoire.
A scene from childhood in the flames. I lie awake. Sometimes I reach over my truckle bed and turn the world on when I cannot sleep, and look at it, where it half-glows. Its magical suspension, in and on the canvas of the night, pleases and soothes. What else lies hidden in the dark? Nothing. The loneliness of the globe’s largely unobserved motion is what makes it so beautiful. I look at World, revolving imperceptibly, and douse the light.
My parents are annoyed when they discover what I’ve done.
“It’s wrong,” my mother patiently explains, “because it has a non-zero value, and anything with a non-zero value must come into existence.” The spiders tiptoe down my back. “And that means matter, mass, and lives and hopes and—look at it, it’s crawling. Alec, think. Think of the suffering. It might look pretty now, darling, but wait until it catches something. Or dries up.”
White cloud drifts over the oceans. Impossible to think of anything so perfect drying up.
“Nothing’s impossible,” my father says. He brushes the canvas. The world spins, blurs, wobbles, and slows to show a different aspect. Where the continents were green-brown and adrift in blue, they now glare red. The world is red and black, an unalleviated dead terrain. My father’s hand draws itself on a sheet of acetate. I can’t remember what blue is.
The fire freezes. The organist’s last chord is stuck, the congregation’s mouths gape red and wet. My lover reaches out of the window and plucks the sun like a grapefruit. Grinning, he weighs it in his hand. It dulls. He puts it back. It shines. His eyes are double stars. The hairs upon my neck salute. My stomach falls.
“But Alec,” Trentham says, “I’ve always understood. I know exactly what you feel and think.”
A swan mid-air, beyond the open casement but half-patterned into diamonds by the lattice of the one closed pane, strains motionless in space.
The mirror—ah! The mirror’s not a mirror but a torrid eye, swiveling whenever Trentham turns, as he turns now, the only moving object in the room.
He’s changed. He’s partly transparent, a flowing space. The skin, the hair, the teeth, the clothes, the form all there but haloed, double-registered. Around him stillness; in him fusion and echo, the voice radioed, whispering. My erstwhile lover has been cancelled out. This is False Trentham, insisting. This is the messenger I’ve heard climbing the stairs, the knock, the door ajar.