‘Name of God,’ said the driver. ‘What an outburst! After all that surely there must be empty space inside you. My word. There’s something about a road. One thinks, one talks. The van eats up the miles, the soul eats up the miles. At the port I’m picking up some wooden crates. In the crates is the machinery for a new press for the local newspaper. The editor’s wife ran off with a salesman. So he needs new machinery. That’s reasonable. With his new machinery he will print the news. This one is born, that one died, so-and-so is opening a bakery. Maybe even the news that he is married again. All of this comes out of what is now an empty space. There are depths in this. It’s a lot to think about. From an empty space the future. If there’s no empty space where can one put the future? It all figures if you take the time to think it out. It’s a pleasure talking with you. It’s doing me a lot of good.’
Boaz-Jachin wiped his eyes, blew his nose. ‘It’s a pleasure talking with you,’ he said. ‘It’s doing me a lot of good.’
28
The man in the bed next to Jachin-Boaz was sitting up crosslegged, writing on a foolscap pad a letter to the editor of the city’s leading newspaper. ’With our Sanitation Department on the job regularly cleaning the streets,’ he wrote, ’is it not astonishing that so far no measures have been taken towards resolving the problem of image accumulation? The private citizen, however diligently he may divest his home of mirrors and however carefully he may cover windows and polished tables, has daily to encounter public mirrors, shop windows, and innumerable reflecting surfaces from which decades and scores of years of faces, his own and those of strangers, peer out impertinently to mock him.
’As a law-abidding citizen and ratepayer…” He stopped writing. He had been aware of figures moving past his bed towards the french windows, and now he looked up. Three patients were standing at the windows looking out at the lawn. Two male nurses who had been sitting in chairs stood up, looked out, and sat down again.
The letter writer got out of bed and walked over to the group at the window, sensing at once that they shared a secret from which the nurses were excluded. He too looked out for a time at the lawn that was green and golden in the afternoon sunlight. Then he came back and sat down on the edge of his bed, looking at the sleeping Jachin-Boaz. He stared at him fixedly, and after half an hour Jachin-Boaz opened his eyes.
‘Is it yours?’ said the letter writer. ‘It must be — you’re the only new arrival.’ He had a small aristocratic moustache and goatee. His eyes were pale blue and very sharp. ‘What do you feed it?’
Jachin-Boaz smiled and lifted his eyebrows interrogatively. The powerful tranquillizing-drug dose had left him sluggish, and the question did not immediately make itself clear to him.
‘The lion,’ said the letter writer, and saw Jachin-Boaz look somewhat more alert. ‘It is your lion, isn’t it? It seems to have arrived with you.’
‘It’s here?’ said Jachin-Boaz.
‘Walking about on the lawn,’ said the letter writer.
‘Everybody sees it?’ said Jachin-Boaz.
‘Only a few of us. Those who did and were on the lawn when it appeared came inside directly. Some of the staff and a number of pseudo-nuts are still outside with it, quite blind to its existence. I must say it seems a well-behaved animal. It isn’t bothering anyone.’
‘I don’t think it takes notice of everybody,’ said Jachin-Boaz.
‘Naturally not. Who does?’ said the letter writer. ‘As I was saying, what do you feed it?’
Jachin-Boaz became wary and sly. Hold on to everything you have, said the sunlight slanting down the wall. He didn’t want anyone else to know what or how much his lion ate. ‘How do you know it eats?’ he said.
The letter writer’s face flushed. He looked as if he had been struck. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I beg your pardon.’
In a flash Jachin-Boaz understood that it was as if one duke who owned a rare and expensive motorcar had been rude to another duke who happened not to own such a car. He blushed. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘He should have six or seven pounds of meat a day, six days a week. I’ve been feeding him beefsteak, but not regularly.’
‘Something of a supply problem,’ said the letter writer cosily. ‘I don’t suppose that he could accustom himself to shepherd’s pie and toad-in-the-hole? Meat is a bit thin on the ground here.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘Actually, it may even be possible that he can do without food altogether. He’s real enough, but not in the ordinary way.’
‘Quite,’ said the letter writer stiffly, as between dukes to whom such things need not be explained.
Jachin-Boaz fell silent. He did not want to see the lion just now, and he began to think about the other people who could see it. Already this other man wanted to feed it. Jachin-Boaz began to get a headache. ‘Why can they see it, the others?’ he said, speaking to himself but saying the words aloud.
‘Sorry about that, old man,’ said the letter writer. ‘But you’ve got to expect that sort of thing here. After all, why have they put us in the fun house? The straight people agree that some things are not allowed to be possible, and they govern their perceptions accordingly. Very strong, the straight people. We’re not so strong as they. Things not allowed to be possible jump on us, beasts and demons, because we don’t know how to keep them out.
‘Others here can see my faces and they can see your lion, even though you may want to hug it to yourself like a teddy bear. If your lion weren’t possible you’d be happy to share the impossibility. But people get very possessive about possibilities, even dangerous ones. Victims become proprietors. You may have to grow up a little. Perhaps you’ll even have to let go of your lion one day.’
‘And your faces?’ said Jachin-Boaz.
‘They accumulate faster than they can be taken away,’ said the letter writer smugly. ‘There’ll always be more.’
‘Lovely,’ said the man who had just returned to the bed on the other side. Empty-handed and in bathrobe and pyjamas, he appeared to be fully and impeccably dressed and carrying a tightly furled umbrella and a respectable newspaper. ‘Lovely,’ he continued. ‘Lovely wife, children, home, weather, central heating, career, garden, shoelaces, buttons and dentistry. All modern conveniences, or nearest offer. Lovely bank lessons, music account, lovely miles to the gallon. Lovely ‘O’ Levels, ‘A’ Levels, eye levels, level eyes. Lovely level eyes she has and sees through everything but.’
‘But what?’ said Jachin-Boaz.
‘That’s what I mean,’ said the tightly furled man. ‘The butness of everything. I don’t go home any more. Goodbye, little yellow bird. That’s the cracks of it, sweetheart.’
‘Crux,’ said Jachin-Boaz.
‘Show me a crux and I’ll show you the cracks,’ said the tightly furled man. ‘You’re not talking to squares now, darling. Don’t try to slide by on crossword puzzles and ninety-nine-year leases. The blank spaces are bigger than ziggurats here, and it’s a long long climb. Deeper than a well.’