I dive for Potato Head who has sunk like a stone. I grope blindly about, find her and swim for dear life up through the murky water, where furry caterpillars crawl, stones float in gall, green horse-flies flurry past my lips and ears, I hand her dripping to her distraught mother. Something bends over her, whispering or breathing perhaps the kiss of life. Will she die, dad, Dippermouth ticks anxiously as Potato Head’s transparent shape absorbs the sap. She mustn’t, she mustn’t. Let me see her, dad, I haven’t seen her yet. And he smiles his ten to two smile at Potato Head who splutters, coughs and breathes. She has small eyes, one closed, the other oozes an unseeing tear.
— They’ve blinded her!
— No, Someone. She came blind to us. Or almost blind.
— But –
— You never noticed. I didn’t like to tell you.
The punt drifts on up the canal. I let it drift. Gut Bucket sits alone, baled out, on the flat prow. Dippermouth ticks away with his mouth trembling at twenty to four, twenty past eight, who knows, like the lock-gates we come to sailing into their open arms. Something calls out, Jonas, Jonas, we’ve arrived again.
Jonas has lost his horn, his voice, he says in gravelly tones, Ah’s keep nothing, Ah sure done swallow an oceanful of sand crossing Jordan in dat big big fish.
— You do keep things, Jonas, I know you do. Try, Jonas, try, just enough to let us through.
Jonas gives a big sigh, then clears his throat with a great grinding wheeze that closes the lock-gates behind us. In his gravelly tones he sings the blues of life as we sink imperceptibly with the surface of the water in the punt-wide lock until the bar of sky seems far, very far up, Jonas peering over the brink like a harvest moon.
— You will tell posterity, won’t you?
— Tell them what, Something, how my heart sinks?
— About yourself, Lazarus, yourself and me.
I said to my soul shut up.
At last the second gates open their inverted arms and I pass out into the lower canal. My wife lies quiet beside me. Her left arm accolades my chest and her face burrows into my right arm. Awake she doesn’t come so near, she flinches from my breath that smells of my decay. I crumble internally, my inside body feels like a giant horse-fly falling into dust.
I fear a second death. The first came easily unawares, but to have to do it all again, and without quite remembering just what, except a certain blindness, deafness, inability to speak perhaps through a cleft palate or something, fills me with terror. And yet I fear a second life more than I fear my death. Why me, I fear those fumbling, healing hands, why couldn’t you let me lie in my silent decay and darkness? I have acquired a painful sensitivity to noise, to radiation and to the taste of love degrading itself away in men and in myself until it levels itself completely and no shocks occur, no movement and no life around my staring eyes and I work out the square root of my time.
My wife lies at my side not flinching from me in her sleep, but I can hear the poison of his unimaginativeness race round like gall and choke the permutations of her chemistry as the little orange lights flicker above the programming of her basic urges with Erase, Shift Count, Inhibit, Pot Drawer and things like that during and after the banality of their untender story, so that she snarls more and more nastily as nothing radiates through the layers of his atmosphere, the high density, low luminosity of degenerate matter, as in a White Dwarf me? Impossible, I belong to the main sequence. Or, more likely, what did you expect, a Blue Giant?
I wonder if the taste of love on other planets degrades itself away until no shocks occur, no movement and no life. Their handwriting reads nervously on dials, but then it all depends what you expect to see or hear, for the world cocks a posterior horn at distances, blocking its blood vessels, nerve fibres, muscle spindles, tendons and ganglia with primitive acts and noises. Sometimes I think that during my death I became Stance. Stance? I mean, you know. I had to perhaps, in order to understand the half-baked men you choose. I don’t choose them, they chose me. Well. I should feel flattered, and do in a way, that you never give me a rival I can take seriously. Yet in another way I would feel more flattered if you did. Rather than waste yourself. You, with your, what? well, energy, imagination quite fertile and experience, oh, experience, she says, the full scepticism of the scientist in her, flattery, education, and things like that, they teach us nothing, we start with zero each time, treat it as something and in no time at all we have an infinity of humiliation or thereabouts, which perhaps we need in order to start back at zero. Something always comes out of nothing. And I remember, what, out of time somewhere I have a daughter.
— What do you mean? Of course you have a daughter. Patricia. And a son, at college. Have you forgotten them?
— Oh, yes. I mean, no. I only remembered …
— Did you dream something?
— You know I never dream.
— You mean, since your training analysis, you’ve trained yourself to forget. You know research has shown everyone dreams –
— No. I mean that someone has deprived me of my dreams, during my death. As if I had left something behind. I know it sounds odd but –
— Yes, well it does. You get odder and odder. Ever since –
She lapses into silence, avoiding the issue of my death and amazing recovery.
— But, what I meant to say, about Professor Head –
— Professor Head? What’s he got to do with it?
— I don’t know. Forget it.
— Well, we all need father-figures, she says with self-disparaging simplicity. They come and go just as fathers do, or pretend to. They don’t have to have character as well.
She wastes herself, out of a feeling that I waste her, but energy works that way. I don’t know what wastes me, my eyes full of something I can’t remember, my eyes that see like giant posterior horns cocked by the world beyond the red shift of people’s inmost essence which with the degradation of intensity, as speed increases, means that less and less of the light actually emitted reaches us. Look at it this way, Laurence, we tap the silent telephones of outer space, but only, if I may put it simply for you, with a pin through an apple. The rest of the universe has gone for ever in both space and time, beyond our reach. How can we hope to photograph creation?
He holds the calculations an inch away from his eye and peers at them through five-dimensional glasses.
— I feel a great concern, Laurence, about our friend, Tim Dekko.
— His work, you mean, or —?
— Both, both, my boy, they always go together. Life balances all things, as you well know. He has begun to diverge, to lean a little towards the Steady State Theory, in opposition, of course, to me, but clearly he forgot the master-card when he fed in this stuff. These permutations make no sense. No sense at all.
— Couldn’t my wife put them through again when he goes home? He needn’t know.
— Home, yes. Nice home he has. Attractive daughters, wife. Pity.
— But Stance won’t get anywhere with her.
— Stance, you call him? Yes. Good name. Good man, too, except for, well, we all have our weaknesses. Still, as you know, life balances all things. Dekko asked for it, yes indeed, poor man. Can you help him at all, Laurence?
— I don’t seem able to get through to him, sir.
— Quite so. Quite so. He waits for me to die, poor man, to step into my shoes. Well, that would help, certainly. But unfortunately I can’t exactly choose the moment. You didn’t, did you, Laurence?