Brenda, whose name has re-acquired her shape, walks by my side in tears. Next to her Mrs Dekko sobs at the passing of her plump virtue and of a great example, whose junior colleague Dr Tim Dekko, peeled of appearances and tense with mixed emotions, looks whiter than the lilies and carnations on the coffin.
I pull up the flowers of my sorrow on the way and every stem comes up with a big root alive like a wriggling lizard, rat, or mole that gnaws at my decaying interior body. I fill myself with earth and pour it down into the grave. Something of me gets lowered with the coffin and I shall obtain no answer to the query of my second life or any other.
The one-stance man has not attended the funeral for he has but one stance. He sits behind his telephones and trays, inventing his own indispensability with red zigzags, curves, black bars of varying heights, regiments of rectangles filled with coloured cards, sliced silhouettes of people. I never go anywhere, he says, or perhaps alas I can’t leave my office. And the secretaries tap their harmonised morse beyond the door with the round window in it. So that they can see, he says, and tell my wife, that I don’t get up to anything.
— He never did find much time for the elementary courtesies, except when he hoped to get something out of them. Well, what do you expect, a Blue Giant? No conversation occurs except in the distracted atoms of her neural cells that race round in mad morse, a special relationship, he said. Oh that. But a special relationship requires a special radiation, you should know that by now. I did, I refused him on that ground alone at first. I made it my one condition. Ah, but you inhibited him from the start, of course he bent the laws and quibbled to win points in such circumstances. What circumstances? Those of your contempt. So she snarls useless reproaches at his opaqueness for in this type of communication the echo decreases with the fourth power of the distance between two bodies and no conversation occurs except as poison racing round in mad morse along the fibres of her fury at her own limitation, standing beside the grave where something of me got lowered, what did you say?
— What?
— You called me something.
— Did I? No, I couldn’t have. Come on, let’s go.
— You did. You say the oddest things. During the funeral you muttered something about a bucket.
— Well, I don’t know.
— Sometimes I wish I had married a simpler man, more imaginatively illiterate, I mean, who couldn’t read me, and who wouldn’t bother to learn, though that too can hurt. But as you said once, it struck me at the time, character never hurts, lack of character does.
— Did I say that? I thought someone else –
— No. No. He wouldn’t. Where do you go, Larry? I mean, do you have anyone? I often suppose you have. I wouldn’t blame you. Life has a way of balancing things.
— I move through my sleeplessness and my internal decay. You can smell it, can’t you? I have someone there. A sort of giant horse-fly falling into dust.
She starts crying again. She fears the unknown in me but doesn’t label it with a big round zero, or if she does she sees through it at times as one watches the absolute immobility of a wing against the ultra-violet light through the window of a plane flying at the speed of years, unless perhaps the nervous handwriting of distant nebulae bleeping across the dial, saying what do you want, Larry?
— To learn to love. I mean, not just to walk through people like so much moon-dust, not just to see and hear the degenerate matter and accept –
— Like Stance.
— Stance?
— I like your name for him. It helps me to — detach myself. He likes people, he says, he sees the worst and best in them and accepts it, but only to make use of it and shrug it off. Unless at any point the worst or even the best needles his own self-satisfaction and then, oh then, he condemns and destroys.
— We all do that, Brenda. Some people have transparency but resistance, like solid light, so that you merge with them but can’t walk through them. Some have a soft opaqueness, which deflects the light waves travelling through it and upsets the definition. That hurts. You can walk easily right through them but in a slimy contact. Sometimes I feel that during my death I became everyone I know and I left myself behind. Or else, if that means anything nowadays, as if I had acquired something of creation, but nothing of humanity.
Means of communication have lost their secrecy and anyone could photograph them, record them, amplify them to the hundredth power and go stark raving mad. We no longer walk the earth on our ten or twelve feet, we travel on roaring motorbikes, in petarding sports-cars, in siren-ambulances, in fire-engines that clang through towns, shooting the lights, why did you shoot the lights, Tin Roof, I didn’t, sir, I shot the policeman, and in express trains that whistle through long tunnels, thunder across continents, crash into grand canyons, leaving us maimed, half-buried in a maze of twisted steel. Why, Tin Roof, why all the hurry? Look what it does to us, to our bodies, to our nerves.
No one would recognise our once almost spherical shapes now, neither our cylinders nor our inner circles. Gut Bucket looks dented. Dippermouth peers through a smashed dial, Potato Head’s upper and lower shapes seem held together by only the slenderest waist. As for Something she hardly speaks these days without crying or snapping, her face grown quite rectangular with little orange lights flickering all over it. So that our nerves fall out of us in great bundles of wires that bulge out of our bowels. We never play cat’s cradle with our meridians now. Only Tin Roof with his crash-helmet seems perpetually unharmed. But one thing puzzles me, can you explain it, Something? The bent old lady in the square –
— Oh, Lazarus, don’t bother me with transferred identities. Why shouldn’t she take over? You should understand these things by now.
— You once told me, Something, to let the argument proceed before clogging it. I merely wanted to know how they buried her. The plot promised to her, beside ours, remember, has an oblong shape, well, like any other. But if she died bent like that, from poverty, she must have needed a right-angled coffin, and a right-angled grave.
— No, sir. They put her in the square on the hypotenuse. Surely you must have noticed it. I drove into the wrong square at first, you see, hence the time I took, and the noise, apologies, pater, but anyway she had plenty of room.
At twenty-four, Tin Roof astonishes me with his polite charm and his love of noise. I never know whether he mocks me or not. He speaks respectfully but his tone makes me uneasy. He doesn’t take after me at all, I never had polite charm, and never went in for noise, I collect silences. Why do you like all this noise, Tin Roof? I mean, thank you for your explanation, which I find entirely satisfactory, more than Something deigns to give, but you haven’t answered my first question yet. Why all this noise? I collect silences.
— What happened to your collection, sir? I’d like to see it.
— Oh, really! You do it on purpose. I can’t get through to you at all.
— Tin Roof, sir. Really hasn’t come back from orbit yet.
— Orbits! Ellipses! Meridians! Latitudes! The Travel Agent surrounded us with them protectively, to guide us, they used to stretch like elastic so that we could contain everything within ourselves. We used to play with them. What’s happened to our meridians, Something, why do we lie buried under this twisted steel?
— She won’t tell you the truth, dad, already on the edge of that big round hole you came out of like a sinking nincompoop I warned her not to give you her hand. But she got herself all besotted with you. Oh, no, Someone, I play it your way.
Dippermouth imitates her with a snarling simper and I want to hit him but Something stops me or my half burial under twisted steel. Potato Head feels for my hand, sniffs at her failure to find it and my lack of help. Gut Bucket keeps very quiet, can hardly breathe in fact with his caved in thorax and I don’t care. Only Tin Roof in his crash-helmet sits unharmed.