— You sound very professorial if I may say so, for a business man. Do you think the proposed aid to Sino-America or even to Seatoarea would help to solve the problem?
— I’d rather not comment on that.
— So you’d prefer to see a definite economic association with Chinese Europe?
— Oh no, I’m against that.
— Why?
— Well, it wouldn’t be in our interest, would it?
— What about you, do you have any views on the situation?
— Yes. Compulsory blood-tests, permissive death and compulsory birth control. That’s the only way out. I mean it’s not fair to burden us with their mutations is it?
So torrid, so tender. The face lying upside down, the eyeballs holding back their black nucleus from the attracting orbit of the street below. A group of men shuffling about beneath them, near the steps of the Labour Exchange. The black mannequins in the dress shop to the right, wearing red and orange, dance in arrested motions, protruding their behinds. To the left, on the big poster, the teeth are agape in rigid horror, or pleasure as the case might be. One brown face opposite is as lined as a walnut, with a toothless mouth that says, We had a dream. It’s a disgrace.
— Yes sir, can you speak up a bit. What’s your occupation?
— I’m an old man. My face is lined as a walnut and entirely surrounded with white hair. My face stands out in stark serenity.
— Could you speak up a bit? Straight into the mike, that’s better. It’s a noisy street, isn’t it? Now, which way are you going to vote tomorrow, dad?
— When I was a young man we had a dream, of universal brotherhood. We were all going to work side by side in partnership, the strong helping the weak. Nobody was going to be afraid. Nobody was going to take revenge, revenge was for primitive people, and we had rapidly become civilized. There’s always as much to be thankful for as angry. What’s happened to all that? Why aren’t we helping those who have now become weak? We only pretend to help. What are we afraid of? Why have we fallen away from the dream?
— Well, we can’t get into a theological discussion here, I’m afraid.
— Theology! You tolerate the gods as you pension off old men. We did the same. We always learn too late.
— Thank you very much. What about you? What’s your occupation, sir?
— I’m a hairdresser.
— Do you approve of the satisfaction campaign?
Or, alternatively,
Mr. Swaminathan stands on the steps of the gazebo, swaying gently from one foot to another.
— You might have found it in a garbage-can, for all I know.
— Mr. Swaminathan, excuse my asking, but how do I know you are the managing agent, and not, say, in import and export?
— If we start with conjectures that have the highest possible informative content or — which has been proved to be the same thing — the lowest possible probability, and if we test these conjectures with the greatest possible severity, those which survive the tests will acquire the patina of prestige that traditionally attaches to knowledge.
— Yes, but does it bear any relation to the real thing?
— Well, it’s only a crumpled piece of paper after all. By hand, it doesn’t mean anything.
When you want somebody
Scrap it.
The thyroid will be scarlet. It is about the life-size of a pear, and a tenth the size of the spleen, which increases progressively and usually painlessly until it fills most of the abdomen. The shapes on this side of the facia-board are quite geometrical. The note requires an answer, of polite thanks merely, but an answer. By hand. It won’t mean a thing. Dear Mrs. Mgulu. Thank you very much for all the trouble you have gone to on my behalf. I am most grateful and will make every endeavour to serve you to your greatest satisfaction. To the best of my ability. The green trapeze lies side by side with the white square, its slanted line touching the blue triangle. I hope you will have every reason to be entirely satisfied. I am most grateful and will endeavour to serve you to the best of my ability, which I hope will satisfy you in every way. Which I hope will not cause you any further trouble. Yours truly.
Mr. Swaminathan stands on the steps of the gazebo and sways slowly from one foot to another.
— It’s only because the builder is ill and the job is urgent. There shouldn’t be any objection but I’d keep quiet about it, you know.
— Mr. Swaminathan, why are you afraid of employing me? What is this pressure, this barely spoken discrimination against us?
— Us? Who’s us? You’re imagining things.
— Good. Make him say the obvious, it’s easier to conceive the reply. The reply must be passionate and deeply moving. On pronouns for example. You used to be Us and we used to be Them, to you, but now it’s the other way about. Why? We tried our best. Oh, we brought you syphilis and identity and dissatisfaction and other diseases of civilization. But medicine too, and canned ideas, against your own diseases. And we couldn’t bring you radiation leukaemia or chemical mutations, because we absorbed all the chemicals ourselves and must have spared you only just enough to immunise you. Or else you had an ancient strength inside, that we couldn’t corrupt. We were whited sepulchres and never came to terms with our dark interior, which you wear healthily upon your sleeves, having had so little time to lose touch with it. Now we are sick. Is that the reason? Is that why you are afraid, afraid of our white sickness?
The rhetoric is vain, the passion pale and disengaging. Even inside the mind that pours it out in silence Mr. Swaminathan stands on the steps of the gazebo, swaying slowly from one foot to another, failing to identify himself with suffering. The process is known as alienation, and yet the passion hurts, seizes the body at the back of the neck somehow, in the medullary centres, down the glosso-pharyngeal nerve perhaps, or the pneumogastric, at any rate forward and down into the throat, which tightens as enlargement of the lymphatic glands occurs and pain spreads through the chest, aching and down into the stomach, nauseous. Sooner or later it will reach the spleen, which will increase in size until it fills most of the abdomen, remaining firm and smooth, however, on palpation. The onset is insidious and well advanced before diagnosis. Prognosis poor, continuing to a fatal termination. Splenectomy contra-indicated, treatment unsatisfactory, no therapy, but the blood-count, marrow biopsy and glandular biopsy will furnish a firm diagnosis. These organs on section appear grey or reddish grey, packed with myeloid cells, mainly polymorphonuclears and immature cells such as myeloblasts, promyelocytes, myelocytes and metamyelocytes. The psyche on section appears grey.
From this position in the gutter, the paving stones look large as tables. The trousers widen slightly at the bottom, most of them brown or black. Shoes are dusty or caked with mud. It is like being in a forest. The trees run away as the flagstones vibrate. The thing is a long distance away. A seismograph might perhaps reveal, but the curving jaw of the street crumbles further up, swallowing the insect crowds. Some people are always left, kissing the gutter. Darling, they’re playing our tune.
The wiggly oblong resembles nothing but a wiggly oblong, to be pencilled on to the pink piece of perspex beneath the facia-board. From this position, Mr. Swaminathan, I love you.
It is important to believe in the bowl of steaming gruel. A microscope might perhaps reveal animal ecstasy in the innumerable white globules that compose the circle, but the gruel tastes hot and salty on the soft palate at the back of the mouth and flows hotly down the digestive track to the duodenum. Sooner or later the white globules will feed the corpuscles in the blood stream, occasioning continual traffic jams and innumerable collisions. The wrinkled wood is quite static in the pool of light, which overspreads the table and transfers itself on to the still and red stone floor. The table casts a large rectangular shadow on the red stone floor, flanked on one side by the tangential shadows of the empty chair at the end to the left. Next to these the body’s shadow makes a bulging growth on the clean line of the rectangle. It is swallowed up from time to time by the moving shadow of the occurring conversation. The door is shut behind the hanging beads and to the right of it, on the top shelf, the recipes stand side by side, on gaily coloured tins.