The air is hot, enveloping, it presses down. The lavender smells pale and sickly along the edge of the hot air. Is there a story? Ah, that’s another story. But is there a story behind the story? That’s a very good question. I congratulate you on having avoided the trap. Imagination is a function, not an organ, it is an energy but can get sick and cold and radiate no warmth to stronger bodies. Mr. Swaminathan, you don’t have to explain. Sometimes it is kinder to explain at the beginning. But when and how did it begin, your nod just now meant nothing. That’s a very good question. Diagnosis always prognosticates aetiology, as you well know.
The weeds are scattered all over the scorched earth. They have to be raked up into the pile. The heat beats down. The green hose slithers in the dried-up grass towards the brass tap in the wall, the water spurts and flows into the blackened ashened earth. The fire crackles like rain on a stone pavement, the falling water patters. The funeral pyre of human hair smoulders gently on the marble floor. The banisters weave circles round it, unfurling its minute particles over the dried-up grass. It is important to hold the instrument like a conventional weapon and to aim correctly. You cannot bend a jet of water but you can make it go round the corner in a way. You can hold the weapon like a microphone and answer into it.
That is how it all began. There is a secret but it is not a story. It is not possible to witness the beginning, the first ticking of the metronome, because all you are entitled to assume is that it would have been as now described if it had been seen by minds with the kind of perception man has evolved only quite recently. Those that cannot grow with it must die.
The fire leaps up bright orange, with a yellow shower, circles of red, oh, close your eyes, relax but grip the instrument and hold it up, well up, let it gush forth from the deep sphere of our being and reach up for the sky before it turns to spray its dust over the fire that crackles, leaps up bright orange, open your eyes, the sun hits the back of the neck, the dust fills up the head, bombarding the cells that run amok, emitting helium particles until the human element disintegrates and radiates into the huge consciousness of light, under the eyelids a gold triangle, a yellow shower, circles of orange and the head goes leaden, grey in a hundred and sixty micro seconds, three million two hundred and thirty one thousand six hundred and forty two years one hundred and seventy three days point nine. And a billion more besides. We are merely marking time and time is nothing, nothing. A moment of agony, of burning flesh, an aspect of the human element disintegrating to ash, and you are dead. But that’s another story.
Such
Silence says the notice on the stairs and the stairs creak. Or something creaks in the absolute dark, the notice having come and gone like things. Someone creaks, levelling out nails perhaps with the pronged side of a hammer.
The coffin lid creaks open. Voices hang on a glimpse of five moons, five planets possibly. The layers of my atmosphere, however, distort the light waves travelling through it and upset the definition.
— Yes, well, you go too far. I mean you exaggerate.
— I draw the line as a rule between one solar system and another.
— Can’t you see the notice on the stairs says silence?
— I can. I collect silences. This one has a special creaking quality, as of a coffin-lid opening.
— Get up then, and climb out.
The five moons unless planets perhaps hang about anxiously as the stairs creak out of the grave. The planets move in their orbits and the orbits surround me like meridians in slight ellipses. One of them says lie down, I shall dissect you now.
They force me gently on my back, head down the stairs. The heavy woman sits on my chest with her huge buttocks in my face. Her skirt rides high and she sits reading a book propped up on my thighs. The men and women go up and down the stairs that creak and she says don’t worry, they only play at going up and down, like actors. Soon the curtain will fall.
— You don’t have to choke me! Get off! Help! Help!
— Good boy. You didn’t cry. I’ve found out all I want for the moment.
— What, for heaven’s sake?
— Oh, nothing for heaven’s sake. But you have an interesting excrescent scar in the middle of your belly, beautifully shaped, perfectly round and flat, just like a little flan-pudding. An individual flan-pudding. I checked it with the book. You may go now.
Between each desk of the amphitheatre the floor sinks like a blanket of interstellar cloud. The silence has a creaking quality.
The girl-spy on the outer orbit stretches her right hand.
— Quick, step out here. I only have one hand.
On her left spiral arm she carries a row of quintuplets.
— They opened up my knee, and found a hard-boiled egg inside. I scooped it out, it hurt, and I flung the slices away like discs, but they came back in their orbits and now I have to carry them.
— Can I help you? You helped me.
— Well you could help me to hide them. If the journalists find out I won’t be able to do my work.
— What work?
— My secret work as a girl-spy. I couldn’t have helped you without it.
Three of the planets shift, one onto my right arm, two onto my left. She keeps the other two.
— Shouldn’t we get them baptised?
— Oh names, she says, what do names matter? I can tell them apart.
— Don’t you have a name?
— Do you need to tell me apart?
— No, but I’d like to call you something.
— All right then, call me Something.
— Wouldn’t you like to call me something too?
— Oh, no, we’d only get confused. Besides I can’t call you by your name, not yet, you see, it frightens me because it means you have to go back.
— But I don’t know my name.
— You will. In the meantime, if you insist, I’ll call you Someone. Since we help each other.
— Thank you, Something, thank you.
— Don’t mention it.
— All the same, I think we ought to get these baptised. You never know.
— But I do know, I always know, remember that, Someone. Still, if you want it, Jonas will do it for us. We’ll find him by the Travel Agent’s swimming-pool.
We do. Jonas and his Jovials play primitive jazz on the opposite edge of the pool, which slopes down to the deep end, quite empty. We step in at the shallow end, walk across diagonally and climb out by the ladder at the deep end. The men and women all around us cross the pool, go up and down the ladder and the steps. Don’t worry, they only play at going up and down, like actors.
— What shall we do without water?
— Stop fussing, Someone. Jonas does it with music.
He does. He places the first planet on the end of his trumpet, lifts the instrument to his big mauve lips and sobs out Gut Bucket Blues to the rhythmic counterpoint of clarinet, bass sax, trombone and drums. Gut Bucket moves off into his orbit. Jonas places the second planet on the end of his trumpet and plays Potato Head Blues, then, with the third, Tin Roof Blues, then Dippermouth Blues with the fourth and finally, to change the style, Really the Blues. Really follows his brothers into orbit.