— I don’t know, darling. Nobody knows these things.
— Oh, things … Have people come?
— Well, no. The doctor says –
— The journalists.
— What journalists?
— He’d better rest now, dear.
The gall-bladders sail into space, filled with galling remarks. The worms in my head squirm and the inquisitor sharpens his beak. Don’t you remember anything? I understood more inside the coffin. The elasticity of shock counters the elasticity of pressure, for instance. The mass of matter resists, yes, you could call matter resistance.
— Quite. Yes, I suppose you could.
He sits at his big office desk in the admin department behind a battery of telephones in ivory, blue and grey, between two scaffoldings of metal trays like rectangular hammocks. Two secretaries tap their harmonised morse beyond the door with a round window in it. So that they can see, he says, and tell my wife, that I don’t get up to anything. He sits at his big desk and surrounds his ponderous person with diagrams, curving graphs, zigzags in red elastic, rising black bars of various heights, sliced silhouettes of people and regiments of rectangles with little coloured cards in them representing something or other that he has his tabs on.
— You see, I have a sort of scientific method too. One can’t deal with people on this scale otherwise. I like to know at a glance who works on what programme and what progress they make.
— Can you see that at a glance from where you sit?
— Why, certainly.
— You have long sight.
— Well, you as a doctor should know. But I have no intention of wearing glasses. Useful thing, long sight.
He emanates only apparent brightness. Some fifty million years or many more have run him out of hydrogen, shrunk him inside his ponderous person, increased the internal pressure and temperature so as to form heavier human elements and hence a fall in temperature, collapse and a flinging out of heavier elements until it settles down as a small bright star of high density and degenerate matter that weighs a ton per grain, like a White Dwarf. But the silent words rebound only against myself though their internal combustion pushes me along. I close my staring eyes to avoid the issue of my weariness, so he says how does it feel exactly now, Larry, with no curiosity idle or otherwise, to show he understands. Time heals, he says, and the scalpel scrapes into my pain.
— I can’t sleep. To avoid the issue of my death and amazing recovery, I toy with scientific trivia. Quite, he says with a paternal pat in his voice on my psychogeometrician’s head and the telephone rings. An ivory conversation ensues, surrounded by diagrams and thin zigzags in red elastic and sliced silhouettes of people which he sees at a glance from a long distance. And people operate the buzzer that operates a female voice beyond the door with the round window in it and the voice announces someone or other waiting to see him. My dear chap, he says, I only follow my instructions and whatever I had asked him to consider as to some astrophysicist or other and his personal problems remains unapprehended or dismissed. I may not know much about psychiatry but I do know what people want.
— Do you, Stance?
— Stance? Why do you call me Stance?
— Sorry. For some reason I find it hard to remember people’s names.
— Well, not to worry, what do names matter?
— Sometimes they help to hide things.
— Things? What things? You should know better than that, you deal with people too. Or would you consider yourself one of them, the scientists, I mean, who only think of things, complexes, chain-reactions, oscilloscopes, equations?
— Equations operate through people too.
— Thank you, Someone, thank you.
— Don’t mention it.
— Oh, but I must. I always mention it when you do me proud. Don’t you remember anything?
Yes, I remember Something who sits now by the window in a shaft of street light cradling Dippermouth gently in her left arm. She bends over him and then with her right index finger slowly dials the big hand of his face right round, and then the little hand half round, and the big hand a quarter round, the little hand three quarters round. Dippermouth ticks unevenly in impulses and she listens carefully, staring into his face. She gets up, lays him down lovingly in the cot the hotel has provided, croons a little over him, bends down, to kiss him and comes back to bed.
The face framed in the round window of the door radiates silently and vanishes, leaving its peaks and flat lines of anxiety to trail swiftly across the dial, until the pain behind the eyes resolves the nervous handwriting to an optical image. The city has all the idyllic beauty of a happiness sequence. Small streets wind up and down, giving shade and high echoes. The houses kneel and join hands in white arches, slender bridges, parapets, open windows and cast-iron balconies with people leaning from them and talking to each other in the quiet tones of evening. Old women sit in doorways, watching, possessed of something.
She has brought me back to life and I walk wide-eyed, listening to the gestures of the city.
— Look, they’ve advertised you everywhere.
— What!
The picture dances at me on every poster, standing in the middle of an amphitheatre, holding a spellbound audience of Blue Giants, bright cepheids, Red Stars, White Dwarfs and all my patients ever by means of large circular gestures, gestures like triangles, gestures like parallelograms and squares. No one can hear a word except inside my head and in the spheric empty space immediately around. The acoustics cork the space, the microphone has died, the sound-waves can’t get through the layers of my atmosphere. I talk in silent bubbles like a goldfish in a bowl, contort myself in gestures but the crowd soon tires of circles, triangles and squares. They cannot hear the words that rebound in my head but I can hear their grumbles, groans, hisses, yells, their slow clapping and stamping of feet. Then the bull comes in, hoofing up cosmic dust, aiming straight at me with his huge and pointed horns. I hold my terror out at him and plead with sentences that curl around him and bounce off the crowd in rhythm like a drum. I contort myself, create situations, strike attitudes and make circular gestures in wild colours. The crowd screams for my blood. Does everyone want my miserable corpuscles? The bull lunges at me, plunges his horn into my midriff, tosses me up and throws me at the crowd that yells and sits on me, good people.
Something bends over me.
— How do you feel?
— Terrible. Oh, my God, why did you have to do that?
— I didn’t do anything.
— No, you left me to it.
— You had an omen, Someone, you must take note of it.
— If you think I can sit here calmly and interpret omens! I died, I tell you, I died.
— You seem to make a habit of it.
— Why do you keep testing me, Something? What have I done to you? What have I to do with you?
— We belong together.
— I thought you called this the happiness sequence.
— No, you did, Someone.
— Lulling me into a sense of false security. What do you expect of me, for heaven’s sake? Who did you dial last night? Who do you work for?
— For you, Someone, only for you. For us. I feel so proud of you.
— Proud of me? Ha!
— You killed the bull.
— I didn’t. It killed me.
— You always drop the curtain before the end of the show. How do you expect us to communicate if you don’t let the argument develop? Get up, look at yourself, you haven’t even got a scar, except your old one, your birthmark, such a nice little birthmark too. Get up, look around you. Look, listen, Someone, take in, and think about what you see. Something who bends over Dippermouth in the hotel room that night, that day, that night. She bends over him and dials his face with love and anxiety. I don’t know what she sees in him. He ticks away with his irregular morse and it ticks through my neural cells along the muscles of my exasperation with her. That night, that day, that night the messages change their chemistry of atoms and the rhythm quietens to a sullen poison. Get up, look, listen, Someone, and think about what you see.