— I didn’t ask for any moons.
— Sometimes I wish I had married a poorer man, a man less well endowed, I mean.
— D’you know, these square roots don’t taste too bad. Not very satisfying, though.
— Coo — na — ska.
— Quite right, Potato Head, cube roots. Bright girl.
— Say, pop, we could live on cube roots for ever, couldn’t we? Let one run up and another run down, take any number, to infinity.
— Well, they leave me with a hungry hole.
I sense the chasm there beyond the trees ahead with the round lake of heavy water. I fear the presence of the dead fat woman with the heavy buttocks on my chest and the busybody hands that rummage in my pain, deliver me of great weights which go off into orbit only to return, heavier still with infinite calculations raised to the fifth power. The daybreak reached however meets us at a great height, looking over the sloping woods, not into the round pond of heavy water but down at a distant square house with the roof right off. Inside a large square room surrounded by a narrow corridor an old lady walks about, bent almost double, wearing a flowered house-coat.
— The quaternity, Something murmurs and starts to cry.
— But Something, she has white hair.
— How did you know, Lazarus, have you learnt to see?
— Come, we must go down.
The firmness of my tone dispels her sudden fatigue. Yes, yes. We must go down. Yes. Let’s go down.
She speaks busily, brusquely. What have I done to her? I have not seen, not heard, I have quenched her with my quibbling, absorbed her into my opaqueness. I move through my sleeplessness and my internal decay, where I have someone and I don’t know who. A sort of giant horse-fly falling into dust, who radiates and writes me little notes unsigned which I don’t read, losing points all the way.
The white-haired lady, bent double in her flowered house-coat welcomes us in dumb-show and Potato Head translates. La-ka — Alalala. Foo-dra.
— Thank you, thank you, we can do with some real food. We love you too.
— Lavava. Da-gra-basa-ya.
— Yes. I remember, the man said you had inherited the patch of earth next to ours. Thank you for recognising us. A little recognition can do a –
— Fa.
— Four? Already? When do you expect him?
— Soo.
— Will it … hurt?
The old lady and Potato Head both put their hands to their ears.
— I see. Yes. I thought so.
She hobbles round among her antique furniture and tapestries. The blue flowers on her house-coat smell of lilies and carnations. She takes my hand and leads me to a tapestry embroidered with the Whale and River constellations, the Serpent-Bearer and Cygnus whose Deneb shines brighter than fifty million suns, fifteen hundred light-years away and yet no brighter than Vega in the Lyre like fifty-two suns twenty-six years away. Gug, says Potato Head. It draws up to reveal a corridor full of doors, the first of which opens on a young man who sits on a divan in a small square room. The top half of his head stands open like a casserole lid and he spoons out the contents of his brain to eat it. He smiles for it tastes good. She shuts the door and leads me to another, behind which the same young man sits on a divan bed repeat performance. Each door, all round the corridor, reenacts the same scene until at last we reach the opening in the tapestry and re-enter the large square room where Something looks anxious.
— I don’t think you should have shown him how. He did the others in unconsciousness.
— Not all of them, Something, not Potato Head.
Who feels for my hand so that the sap of her new strength flows into me.
— A little consciousness can do a lot, you said. Surely you want me to see and understand?
— I can’t bear you to suffer.
She starts crying again. What have I done to her? Dippermouth toddles up. Dial me, ma, you’ll see, you’ve just lost contact, ma, dial me, please, you haven’t dialled me for so long.
She takes him on her lap and dials him through her tears, the big hand a quarter round and so forth listening carefully to the uneven morse and staring hard into his face.
— I can’t hear. I can’t see through my tears.
Potato Head holds my hand. Ya, she says.
— I know. Here, Gut Bucket, stand close, you’ll come in useful for the placenta. Dippermouth, stay with your mother and keep trying. Potato, don’t lose my hand.
The old lady comes towards me and pushes me onto the divan with her bent head. My face from the lower level looks into hers, my eyes watch her sensitive hands as they take up the knife and cut carefully along the eyebrows and around above the ears. The noise deafens my brain. The houses on the distant edge of the world’s ear laugh like asses’ jaws, the giant trumpet blares, the walls come tumbling down. The top lid of my head opens up slowly and with a trembling hand I take the offered spoon. I ladle out the food from inside my casserole head and hand the spoon first to Potato Head, who takes it to her mother. Something sips at it disconsolately, then gulps, and revives. She gets up, comes towards me with Dippermouth ticking weakly on her left arm and the spoon in her right hand. She dips the spoon into my head, feeds Gut Bucket, then hands it back to me to dip into my head again and feed Potato Head myself. Potato Head grows strong and takes my hand. She feeds me with the spoon. One for mummy she says in silence or perhaps in her glug language which I now hardly notice. One for pa … pa. One for your Sweet Potato. One for Dippermouth. She feeds me like a child. The blood drips into Gut Bucket who stands in a deep double meditation full of my placenta and smiles a beatific smile. But the noise crashes through me still. Dippermouth now fed revives. He dips his mouth with a loud creak, twenty to four, got you, twenty past eight, twenty-five past seven, and on until my eardrums burst and his mouth joins itself to form one vertical needle that swivels with a screech in one wave-band round the dial, emitting a whole agony of gunfire as the boys come roaring through the screen on motorbikes, swerving and bending low, their white crash-helmets like big moons in orbit, falling down out of orbit, vanishing, falling, crash.
He walks into the room in black leather and white helmet. He lifts the transparent vizier, looks at me and laughs.
— How do, pater, he says in a mock-Victorian voice, or else mock-army, who knows in all that noise. Tin Roof reporting for duty, sir.
The way devised by Professor Head to obtain recognition for his junior colleague Dr Dekko consists in dying before his time like a great clumsy oaf. Nor does he undergo any amazing recovery and the pain of mine clatters through me again, shaking the giant decaying horse-fly of my internal body, sending its anti-atoms in a whirl of mass morse along the fibres of my loneliness.
The sequences of happiness, hurt pride and social conversations which I hear in advance or backwards have not included this, only the scent of lilies and white carnations round him on the coffin. I have groped blindly into him, feeling his complex meridians with my fingers but failing to massage a few more moments of my unwanted time into them. In death too his transparency has resistance but his strength now escapes me along the procession of respectful mourners, as long and detailed as the journalists’ obituaries and as surprising. It forms an elongated mosaic of bent heads from many countries, government departments, towns, universities; editors, television producers and interviewers, students, scholars and unknown beneficiaries of his publicly diffused, learning, of his privately diffused kindness, housewives, nurses, business-men, shopkeepers, poets and scientists, three daughters and their children, two sons and theirs.