In the corner of the right eye, the neighbour is gone. At dusk the alexandrite is green. In daylight it is bluey-green, at night a pinky-mauve. At the moment it is possible to take one’s choice, cyclamen for example, on the dark velvet skin. In the corner of the right eye the neighbour is pale and Scandinavian blond. His head leans against the wall and he stares vacantly ahead of him, into the eyes of the Governor perhaps, compulsively. There is thus no obligation to disturb the air with errors and platitudes. The Governor listens to the shuffle of feet and the murmur of male voices and the squeak of metal hinges and the banging of metal doors, not to mention the multiplied buzzing of flies. The shaft of light has slipped down the dark face, bandaging the mouth and leaving the nose quite flattened. The nose is a broad-based triangle with the two nostrils wide apart, rounding the lower angles. Sooner or later the identity will be called out and the occupation demanded.
— I was a degree-collector.
— A what — collector? Speak up. You mean garbage?
— Bachelor of Haematology, Doctor of Apologetics, Bachelor of Oscillography, Doctor of Metallurgy –
— And Master of None?
— Master of Arts, Fellow of the Society of Royal Urologists, Fellow of –
— We have you down here as a schoolmaster. Iranian. We have you down here as a welder.
— Oh well it all comes to the same thing in the end.
— Don’t be impertinent. We haven’t built you up yet. There will be a period of initiation. The important thing is in the holding and the aiming of the instrument.
Through the round goggles the sparks fly out. The situation is highly inflammatory and demands constant reappraisal. In white helmet and round goggles Mr. Marburg the butler emerges from behind a metal screen, Mrs. Mgulu has sent for you, he says in an ominous tone, will you kindly step this way. What is it? What’s happened? It is not for me to say, I am her servant and I do not exceed my frame of reference. She has sent Olaf with the vehicle for you. The number of the vehicle is insignificant. The vehicle moves swiftly and smoothly across the blue landscape. The sun flickers through the tall quick acacia trees, increasing the neural electricity to help the oscillograph.
Mrs. Mgulu steps out from behind the bedroom screen, wearing a mauve silk dress and golden shoes. Her arms are made of iodine crystals. Her stiff black hair is coiled up high and smells of fixative. The alexandrite set in gold looks sea-green in the left nostril.
— It’s your wife. It’s Lilly, she’s very ill. Dr. Lukulwe is doing all he can. I’m afraid it’s the acute, fulminating type.
Behind the screen the black fingers tap the flaccid white flank. The eyes and gums are bleeding. The gums look purple and the face pale green. All round the bed the microscopes point down like conventional weapons, and the glaring lights are hot.
— Lilly, Lilly, it’s me.
Lilly is deaf and blind.
— I’m so very sorry.
But Dr. Lukulwe is only a psychoscopist, a charlatan, he will make her worse, he will make her suffer with his machine, please get a real doctor.
— Real? What is real? His eyelids are the right colour.
— Please let her die in peace without self-knowledge that is false, built up by instruments and the minds behind the instruments.
— Oh but it bears a close resemblance to the real thing.
The gesture is one of careful examination. The doctor’s eyes are those of an inspired pedant. The doctor’s black eyes gleam with triumph inside the pinky whites, the triumph perhaps of a fanatic inventor astonished to find that his invention works.
Up on the monitor the jellyfish are writhing inside one another, disintegrating and reaggregating into different patterns in depth as well as width.
The gesture is one of helplessness, palms flat and facing upwards briefly, paler, almost pink, and heavily lined with past mistakes and present prospects.
— It is important to fill the body’s reservoirs with minerals like potassium and carbohydrate complexes found in sea-weed, so that radio-active minerals of a similar type are then absorbed and passed straight out.
— But doctor, it is quite evidently too late to do that.
— I said it would have been advisable.
— What exactly is the cause, doctor?
— There you go again with your sick talk. Don’t you understand that in paleontology the beginning of a new organism cannot be observed, because at the beginning it is not recognisable as a new organism and by the time it has become one the beginning is lost. I have already told you, diagnosis merely prognosticates aetiology.
— You mean, you remember me?
— There are records. You, however, seem to have forgotten.
— But Lilly, but my wife, my wife is not a paleontological specimen.
— The rule is universal in all fields. It is a scientific law.
— An article of faith.
— Until disproved. In the meantime, we are content to know how the thing functions.
— What thing?
— Anything. Society. Life. The universe. God. The unconscious. A land-reclaimer. I must go now.
— But doctor, the patient.
— Oh yes. Blood transfusions would help a little. Ease her at least. May I see your group card? Hmmm. Pity. Won’t do at all. I’ll have the right Colourless blood sent from the bank at once. You nearly forgot her yourself, didn’t you?
— Doctor, please, why her? She’s led a selfless, blameless life.
— I am not a theologian. Goodbye.
— Camille, show Dr. Lukulwe out will you. You stay here. Goodbye, doctor. Listen my dear, I’m the same group as Lilly. I know it’s not allowed, but really it’s too absurd, isn’t it, I mean I can understand it the other way round but what harm can good healthy Melanian blood do to Colourless? Even my husband, Dr. Mgulu, who stands on a narrow Nationalist platform would applaud from a human point of view. Now I’m going to lie down here, you must help me with the needle and straps.
It is more difficult to find the vein in the arm that is made of iodine crystals than in the sick white arm, where the blue vein stands out like a rampart, calling out the grey-blueness of the flesh around it.
The rectangle of light ripples on the wooden table. The wrinkled wood inside the rectangle seems to be flowing into the wrinkled wood outside it, which looks darker. If the source of light were not known to be the oblique ray of sun filtering through the slightly swaying beads over the doorway, the wrinkled wood might be thought alive, as alive, at any rate, as the network of minute lines on the back of the wrist. But the minute lines on the back of the wrist do not flow as the wrinkled wood seems to flow. A microscope might perhaps reveal which is the more alive of the two.
— the essential amino-acid tryptophan combined with potassium iodide and the sodium salt of glutanic acid plus a minimal addition of di-iodo-tyrosine. Take two once a day or according to advice from physician. Oh dear where’s the fly-swatter?
— Lilly, who am I, what was I?
— D’you want to go to bed? There isn’t much time. I have to be back at the house at half past two.
The squint seems not so wide, so blue, in the luminosity thrown by the oblong of flowing light on the red stone floor. The static eye fixes the empty bowl of gruel, the mobile eye is static too, reproachful perhaps or full of wonder or puzzlement or anticipation, without which it would be indistinguishable from the static eye. Some of the gruel’s globules remain attached to the rounded white sides of the bowl which looks like the inside of the moon. The stone floor is a red river.
— I must just rinse the bowls and spoons and scrub the pan.