— When you don’t understand something, Someone, continue as if you did, it will come clear later. You with your five geometries should know that. Instead you enmesh the mathematical process with verbal pedantry and tangential arguments.
— Dad, oh dad, ma, stop it, you two, look what you’ve done, dad, you’ve clogged the boat. Look at the weeds! Look, ma, we’ve got all stuck.
We have. The engine has stopped chugging and gives only an occasional cough or splutter of exhaustion. Rushes enmesh the rudder, embrace the boat, fall like a net over the cabin door. We can hardly climb out and the sun rides high and hot.
— Well at least that echoing moon has gone.
— I could go down and cut the weeds with my delicate needles.
— Don’t you dare, Dippermouth, for one thing the leeches would suck you out of existence.
We have reached an impasse, Something, Dippermouth Blues and I. Clearly they lay the tangle in my words. Clearly they expect me to disentangle us.
— Well at least something has clarity. How do you want me to do it?
— Reflect, Someone. Dive into your reflections.
— I have none.
— Precisely.
— But the leeches. The leeches will suck me out of existence.
— You have strength to spare. Surely you can give a few corpuscles.
— What, in my condition?
— Your wound has healed. Don’t you remember what the Travel Agent said? Time heals, spacetime heals faster.
— The Travel Agent! How many light years away did he guarantee that? I’ve had forty-eight thousand million wounds since then.
— Reflect, Someone, reflect.
I reflect. The sun bakes but does not drink the river dry for me to cut the weeds. I reflect. It hurts. It burns. Dippermouth ticks away silently and the ticking silence taps each neural cell. Something falls asleep under the growing net of weeds. She falls away from me and my inadequacy ticks on silently and hurts. The higher the temperature the faster the vibrations and consequently the higher the frequency of the radiation emitted, so that devices like the brain become unsuitable on account of the inertia associated with matter of relatively large mass, which now produces nothing more startling than the fact that in this type of communication the echo decreases with the fourth power of the distance between two bodies, rather than with the square. I think furiously as the sun moves down the sky. She said something about causality, but then it only pretends to cause, like actors, to save the appearances. I think more coolly as the cool returns. After sunset the degree of ionization in the lower layer of my atmosphere falls off through the recombination of ions and. the higher layer then reflects, less dense, with fewer collisions. The darkness creeps along the water through the weeds. Dippermouth ticks loudly now and Something has fallen away from me into a separate darkness, under the net of weeds. I could fly off now on my relative lack of attraction between two bodies, out of my bondage, my responsibility to her if any, after all I didn’t ask for her stretched hand. I didn’t choose the way, I wanted only opaqueness, nothingness. I didn’t order these complexities, these secret laws and her priggish mystifications. The darkness cools my thoughts, the darkness chills me and I feel alone. Something, say something, I can’t bear the silence. Dippermouth ticks away, grinning his permanent sleep at a quarter to nine, a quarter past three, who knows, she does the knowing around here. The new moon suddenly cuts through the dark looking remarkably like Planck’s constant over two pi times the square root of minus one.
I reach for the square root of minus one and snatch it down. I dive into the darkness that chills my bones. Under the water I cut hard at the weeds with the sharp blade, all round the boat, I cut and the weeds float away. The leeches cling to me and suck my red corpuscles, leaving me the white. Once every minute or so I come up to breathe, and the weeds bar my passage. I choke. Get off me. Help. Hold it, your breath, I mean, cut, hold it. Ah, breathe away. The sky looks black without the moon’s square root of minus one, totally black and even the stars and galaxies have receded at the speed of light, heaven knows where, she does the knowing around here and she has fallen away from me. I dive into the darkness and it chills my bones. Under the water I cut hard at the weeds, all round the boat I cut, and the weeds float away one by one. The leeches cling to me and suck my red corpuscles, shifting me into the x-rays of the spectrum until I feel so faint I want to die again for lack of white light. Once every month or so I come up to breathe, but the weeds bar my passage and I choke, get off, get off, hold it, your breath, I mean, cut, breathe away. I dive, I cut, I choke, I faint. The leeches suck, the galaxies recede. Once every year or so I come up to breathe, and as I breathe away the sky lightens a little each decade.
The day breaks with a cough and splutter. I faint and wake at dawn and dive again and cut the last remaining weeds around the rudder. The spectrum has turned green and bright. The leeches suck my last few red corpuscles and I long for the replenishment of oxygen from the yellow dawn which I see through the spectrum but can’t reach. I kick the boat for one last push of strength and float into the dazzling light that chugs alone and down the river away from me, smaller and smaller.
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 two moons, two planets possibly, but the layers of my atmosphere distort the light waves travelling through it and upset the definition, even perhaps the distinction between one solar system and another.
— Ssh. Can’t you see the notice on the stairs says silence?
— This one has a ticking quality. It hurts.
— Keep quiet, Dippermouth.
— Or creaking. As of a coffin-lid opening.
— Get up then, and climb out. Let me give you a hand.
— I fear your hands.
— These hands that drew you in out of your drowning thoughts?
— You did it … with your hands?
— Well, not entirely. I lassoed you. How do you feel?
— Fifty thousand million years old. Like a White Dwarf.
— You freed us, Someone. Thank you.
— Don’t mention it.
— Oh, but I must. I always mention it when you do something proud. You worked so hard. Say thank you to your father, Dippermouth.
— Thanks, dad. You did us proud.
— What creaked, Something? I heard a creaking noise.
— Only the cabin stairs, Someone — Dippermouth coming down the stairs.
The face framed in the round window of the door radiates something silently and vanishes, leaving its peaks and flat lines of anxiety to trail rapidly across the dial like the nervous handwriting of a distant nebula. It comes from way beyond the visual range, in which the layers of my atmosphere distort the light waves travelling through it and upset the definition of what, my death or my amazing recovery? You died, you know, the staff nurse says the sister says the doctor and the surgeon say all filled with stupid pride at my achievement. They speak in strip-cartoon, each standing inside a square room with accusing remarks attached to their mouths like gall-bladders. But what do they accuse me of? Achievement arouses envy. I remember that. People try to pull you down in countless little ways. They have certainly pulled me down. I can’t move. You haven’t tried. But any fool can undermine confidence in achievement, why, I have done it myself, to my patients, for instance, whose names I have forgotten, and to my wife, a word in here, an edging remark there and I’ll do it again no doubt. But why should they do it to me? Why me?