He revived, touched his side where the dagger had lodged. He drew Jane to him. Does the originality of love, however elusive and curiously distorted, cohere, or gain substance, in every theatre of the dying? Carnival had not yet come to London in 1957 when Masters arrived. Twenty-five years ago? He could scarcely credit it. Truer to say twenty-five ages or paces had drawn him closer to the art of dying he sought as his supreme goal. Such art or such a goal involves a penetration of masks that stitch into being a universal and complex Carnival or capacity for shared wounds, shared ecstasies, between past and future through living actor and hidden force.
Masters touched her eyelids and her lips as if he drew her into a performance. He seemed all at once immensely privileged, she felt herself curiously addressed by fictional reality. At first she wanted to pull away from him as if he were a dirty old man, poet or seer, but something indescribable held her, the obscure bond she had felt before, obscure stitched fabric through which he sought to trace the essentiality of other features within her, upon her, the essentiality of a kiss like a scar to which one succumbs again and again.
“Something puzzles your will, my dear,” he said, “some trace of longing you have entertained from childhood into adolescence, some trace of deepest ambition to shed accumulations of deprivation, to become a different creature, disciplined yet abandoned, the subject of lucid dreams in that you dream but still know you are dreaming, ageless child in self-surrender to species of fiction. I can see what is happening. I know within my own doomed flesh. A fever, a drought, possesses you. Is it not so?”
Jane sought to pull away but did not do so in the dream.
“Half-oasis, half-desert. I know. I have been there many times. I understand. Our, or my, birthday performance seems unusual, even perverse, but in point of fact it is a veil I seek to part within you, a veil you hug to yourself because you fear the world and its censure or ridicule.
“If you were a famous actress, yes, then you could be human and divinely mad or unveiled on the stage. You could murder … Society would allow you to play at being possessed by someone as drunken as me whose lines you would utter to enchanted audiences.
“So the world’s ridicule is hypocrisy or veneer, a device men and women don as chattering parrots and apes of the birth of creation that they too fear. Their fear is as great as yours.”
Jane could not make up her mind about the wound of fear. She toyed with the dagger in Masters’ flesh.
“Have you not noticed how politicians, journalists, economists, interviewers, interviewed, who appear on the box, suddenly become, as they confront the spectre of a wounded age” — he touched her hand as he spoke — “mimics of involuntary vice or virtue, a mimicry instigated by the originality of infected being? Something claws at them and unwittingly they utter the Sermon on the Mount to the unemployed or their eyes twist into another mask and they become noble, they cry like Old Testament prophets for the return of the death sentence. You are puzzled. Humanity is uniquely infected by legends of judgement that conflate all professions, all sciences, all vocations, into theatre of the Word or the Wound. The Word is the Wound one relives again and again within many partial existences of Carnival.”
She could not be sure she had heard or understood everything Everyman Masters was saying to her. The bond of confessed partiality and biased personality between them gave her a sudden sensation of privilege — if not divine right — reserved for a minority establishment. The sudden privilege to become “great” and “famous” was both heaven and hell. Her shadow arose, her shadow descended. She was naturally deprived but infected now by Masters’ drunken sobriety. He was drunk but infected by her pigmentations of spirit as if spirit needed to haunt the wedding feast and the funeral with elusive feminine water from a dagger of wine in god’s side. She was naturally common-sensical but infected by his uncommon illness. He was wise but infected by her capacity to twist the daemon’s tail. She was naturally young but infected now by his scent for ageless reserves of fiction. His power to hold her close to him as the soul of the cosmos lay in an immediacy of spirit to invoke greatness in a life such as hers that seemed remote from conventions of fame within which the so-called great actors or statesmen of history mimic universal death or love as they pursue statistics of world hunger, world charity, nuclear wealth, nuclear poverty.
“Ah yes,” he said pointing to the dagger and the wound that she (as newborn famous actress playing another woman’s shadow in the Carnival of history) had inflicted on him twenty-five years or ages past, “there was no reason to stab me. You were joined by your husband when you dealt the blow though you told me, when you invited me to your house, that he was away fishing at sea. I was innocent. You mistook me for someone else who had done you a great harm. I was game to be slaughtered. The wound I received was my first human/animal death, human game. Innocent as I was, there was guilt, another man’s guilt for which I paid. I was lucky to know this. Lucky I say, for others continue to die without possessing a clue about why they are hunted. Think of men and women from all walks of life who become victims, innocent victims. Their lives and deaths accumulate into statistics of motiveless or meaningless crime. How to identify those who are guilty, acquit those who are innocent! How to perceive the morality of Carnival within a universal plague of violence! That is our play. We shall descend, ascend, we shall travel around the globe. A first death and a second dying now as I embrace you, my dearest enemy, my dearest love. These are the facts on which the judgement of spirit rests.”
TWO
News of the death of Everyman Masters in the summer of 1982 was a great shock to me and to my wife Amaryllis. We were younger than Everyman by fifteen years but he had been a close friend for as long as I could remember. He and I sailed from New Forest in 1957 on a converted French troop-ship that offered us economic berths to Marseilles from where we made our way to London. I was twenty-five then, he was forty. I began that very year to compile notes of his life. In the wake of the news of his death in 1982, I was possessed by lucid dreams that intermingled fact with imaginative truth.
Amaryllis ascended above the stage of Carnival and said to the dead king Masters that he should return into my fiction and become my guide into the Inferno and the Purgatory of the twentieth century world. I dreamt that his Carnival body, slightly burnt mask, slightly smoking dagger of Napoleonic age, had come to light out of a cave of darkness when his cleaning woman visited his apartment. She screamed. The police came masked in alligator skin. He had been stabbed by an intruder. Nothing had been stolen. There was money in drawers. Untouched. Ornaments, pictures, clothing. Untouched. There was a glove and a fur coat on the floor. They had been pulled from a wardrobe but flung to the ground. The fur coat was stained with blood.
A dagger is a tool one associates with cloaked assassins and the necessity for complex security around every larger-than-life personage, great phallic masks, presidents, millionaires, upon the stage of history. Masters was a plantation king, he had been an overseer on the estate of New Forest.
I remembered his drunken command to me on his birthday, when we sat in the pub for the last time. “Write a biography of spirit as the fiction of my life.” He was poking fun, as usual, deadly serious fun. It was then that he mentioned the woman he had seen moving into the apartment above his a week before his birthday. She had lifted her hand to her forehead and thrown back a shock of coal. Her brow was elongated. It was an involuntary gesture, yet obscurely premeditated. The whiteness of her skin shone like human lightning. And I recalled as he spoke Orion’s severed hand in the Inferno painted on a wall of his bedroom. It was a severed hand like a glove over Masters’ body. A woman possessed it, New Forest Jane Fisher; she had inserted her hand into the glove. Were female hand and male glove tokens of addiction to the androgyny of the hunt, addiction to hermaphrodite beasts, dragons, slain by he-knights and she-knights of old?