Authors: D. F. Lewis
Susan
: I have a funny feeling, that it’s not all over. Surely, Sudra is coming back. That was a dream—that part—wasn’t it? I was told it was a dream.
Mike
: Who by? No, that was not a dream, I’m sorry to say. Nothing is a dream when underground. Although, I suspect the zoo was not all it was cracked up to be when we were told it was dreamless. We should have guessed. The zoo is not underground. (Mike nods to the unseen interviewer.)
Amy
: Since my change, I’ve taken nothing for granted. I don’t even take myself for granted. At times, I think the city itself is coming after us—a suicide-bomb strapped to its waist, ready to blow the Megazanthus and its coreskin to smithereens.
Mike
: A suicide-bomb? That must be the covered-market, then?
Amy
: Yes, one must assume so. And I once dreamed I operated a car bomb near the bridge. It was terrible.
Arthur
: We must get back to the Drill. I know Nemo had many muskets stowed in a cabin somewhere. I heard him tell that to one of the businessmen when he thought I was too far away to hear what was being said.
Susan
: Surely muskets will be like flea-bites on an elephant when the city arrives!
Mike
: There’s no telling. Sometimes things are more symbolic than physical. I learnt at least that during my tour of narrative duty.
Amy
: (smiling) You mean you
know
things? I’m sure I don’t, even though I’ve been programmed to know everything.
Mike
: I don’t think any of us even approach knowing anything.
Amy
: But you know you were meant to be a hawler, if everything had gone to plan?
Mike
: Hasn’t everything gone to plan, then? I don’t even know what a Horla is, after all this time. Something to do with time and memory and dragging things from deep inside one?
Amy
: A hawler is many things. It also means dragging things from inside other people as well as from yourself.
Mike
(Remembering the incident with Captain Nemo): Well, I think I’m beginning to understand. It’s like loving rare beef... as a sort of symbol. Hmmm.
Susan
: Don’t forget the birds. That angel in the core reminded me of a huge diseased bird. Despite the good it was doing to its nestlings.
Arthur
: But there’s no doing good simply for the sake of doing good. At the end of the day, the whole thing is being driven by the milking of Angel Wine from the Core, and selling it up the line. (Nodding to the interviewer) …Yes, I know that’s unproven, but it makes common sense.
The interviewer then left the grocery, someone who had been hidden by the TV cameras rather than revealed. Even as he left, his cape concealed his real configuration as truth or fiction. The four Drillmates’ conversation continued after the arc-lights were switched off, but we have no means to continue our surveillance of what they said.
*
Mike questioned himself. He realised he was a hawler—had always realised this perhaps—but now he knew it wasn’t because he had previously been a hawler, but because he was about to become one. Self-identification by an as yet unproved anticipation was a dream-fixing he needed to address. It all seemed a very unsteady grounding for a vocation or a raison-d’etre. Mike remembered his step-daughter Sudra as she began to practise walking in her carpet coat. She took delight to tease him with her imputed beautiful body hidden beneath the dumpy beige covering and the ungainly yellow clod-hoppers on her feet—clogs, in fact, that were on all their feet.
Now Sudra was gone. All of them were now on the point of going, also. One thing that had been established: the earlier belief in ‘carpet apes’ in attendance upon the Angel Megazanthus was wide of the mark. The whole setting of the Core had turned out to be more angelic, more spiritual than any of the surviving visitors had ever hoped. Either the scurrying apes that catered for the ablutions of the Angel had never existed in the first place or—if they had once existed albeit in a mere state of nemonymity—they had since grown into Agra Askans (like Lilliputian Yahoos into giant Brobdignagians). If the latter version, any history books in Agra Aska had been expunged of such evidence. A textual exegesis or, if not, perhaps the strobe theory of history was a true one, after all. As it turned out, the primary-source evidence pointed to the Angel effectively caring for its own ablutions as well as for the ablutions of its wing-wrapped nestlings within the Coreskin, as part of the incubatory process involved in the constant orgasm of angevinisation. It even nursed its own wounds of disease as they intermittently grew scabs and subsequently ruptured with blurts of depressurised pus. A self-sufficient
moto perpetuo
state of parthenogenesis. A recurrent dream of mutual self-healing made real by retrospective hawling.
Today, as they sat by the Balsam River on their last day together, Mike was trying to persuade Susan that he should enter the Coreskin paired with Amy as ‘young lovers’ rather than with his wife (i.e. Susan herself) of many years’ standing:
Mike
: Who would go in with Arthur, if not you? Amy is his sister, after all. That would not be right, I’m sure you would agree, Susan, love. I think we lose all consciousness once we’re in there, anyway, and so you won’t know it’s not me that you’re paired with. I love you, I have always loved you, Susan, but now is the time to crystallise our love at the precise moment of separating. Our love would be diminished by continuing to conduct it as just a tawdry echo within the Core under the surveillance of the Angel…
Susan
: (Tears in her eyes) It’s meant to be more than just an echo. Did you actually say echo? It’s supposed to be more than just sex. It’s a culmination of all we’ve been together. (She has a musket on her lap and she fiddles absentmindedly with its trigger.)
Mike
: But it’s a bit of a cheat, anyway, Suse. We’re meant to be young lovers when we go in and we’re—what are we?—fifty or so? It’s not as if we’re taking the whole thing seriously. It’s just for show. Amy will need my protection once inside…
Susan
: I thought you said we lose consciousness of who we are…
Mike
: I know, but we remain who we are even if we don’t continue to know who we are. (Mike’s own eyes are suddenly glassy with tears, as he pretends to watch a Riverboat moor in the distance.)
Susan
: I don’t understand, Mike, I really don’t understand. If we don’t know what we know when in there, it won’t matter if Amy and Arthur go in together paired as brother and sister, will it? They won’t know that they’re sister and brother. I would really be happier going in with you, even if I don’t know it’s you afterwards. I’d feel safer. More able to return the love given to me by whatever you turn out to be within the Core.
Mike
: I think I really must... go in with Amy. And we ought to go in soon, before... you know… (Looking at the musket on his own lap).
Susan reaches out to give Mike a kiss, but he turns his head away. But, eventually, he cannot help himself—as he and Susan hug farewell... forever.
*
Amy looked at her brother’s ear—and laughed. He may not even be able to get into the Core at all with such a wide obstacle as an appendage. She kissed him farewell. A little prematurely, as it turned out.
They both now looked at the long queues of Agra Askans leading up to the Core—and they couldn’t understand why they themselves were in a shorter queue, so short it was just the two of them. Perhaps they were in a more important queue, albeit one leading to a different part of the Core. They wondered if they were doing something wrong or had been misdirected. They couldn’t see Mike or Susan. They expected the older couple to have been in the queue already. Amy wasn’t sure why but she
already
knew she wasn’t the Amy she thought herself to be—even before entering the Core. Otherwise she wouldn’t have earlier consented to going in with an older man like Mike, leaving Susan with no choice but the mixed blessing of Arthur and his big ear. Earthur, she called him, as a joke.
The other queues were now tailing off in a different direction with much ruckus, like the contents of a zoo on holiday release.
*
In the days before the sudden jolt had stolen the light from Beth’s cabin in the Drill, Greg and a few other nebulous businessmen were entertained by Captain Nemo in the corporate lounge, a select area on board that boasted viewing-windows close to the leading-edge of the bit-tip—allowing vistas when the storms of the Drill’s off-detritus didn’t obscure them with the moving rubble of confusions or lies. A bit like this book where I’ve invited you to stand at its own viewing-windows in its select, very select, Corporate Lounge of plot and counterplot.
The proceedings were a combination of a scientific lecture upon what they were seeing through the windows and pure holiday entertainment, all laced with cocktails. But that was the past. If any of these characters still existed, they didn’t even stir like ghosts in the calm latency of spiritual birth-pangs let alone in full-blooded existence as ghosts proper.
*
Dream Sickness: is this being sick
of
dreams or sick
with
dreams? Perhaps, both, but one can only be certain about the existence of the former state. And as I approach the end of the book, I am quite aware that I am sick of dreams, as you are, no doubt, also sick of dreams as well as lies, ghosts and so forth... having endured, although voluntarily, such rituals of passage from surface to core.
My own worst dream or nightmare is quite mild. I worked hard to gain the qualifications for University entrance—much to the pride of my working-class parents whose son was beginning to embark on something quite beyond their understanding or ambition. Such humility prevailed in those days—forty years ago. People like me simply didn’t go to University. Once there, I ended up doing reasonably well, despite going through a potentially bad middle period during the three-year course when I began to sleep long into the mornings, skipped lectures/seminars/tutorials—and only managed (with the help of my then future wife) to salvage the situation by the skin of my teeth. Upon this bare survival of academic growth I managed to consolidate my studies towards the endgame of Final Exams. In my worst nightmare, by contrast, I do not manage to salvage the situation: a long-term recurring dream where I didn’t bother to look at the various noticeboards to establish what essays I should be writing for the course seminars etc.—whilst everybody in authority seemed to remain silent, failing to alert me to my missing gaps. I sat back and occasionally wondered how easy it was to keep up at University, together with experiencing a nagging doubt that things were slipping away from me. A recurring dream, a recurring denial, but I always woke up—to realise that I eventually did get a good University Degree and the dream was quite false, perhaps not a real dream at all, but merely me dreaming a dream, although what this ‘dream’ left with me was a feeling that it had been very nearly correct in its interpretation of a past reality, hawled forward for me to suffer unduly by a process of Proustian logistics.
This book is in honour of that recurring dream, in the hope that it gratefully
remains
a dream, and that, as a dream configuring new dreams, doesn’t mutate into a worse dream, perhaps forever, to become a dream threaded with the surfaces of reality.
*
Amy’s doll was an ugly one. It buried itself in the garden amid the discarded remains of her brother’s latest ‘experiment’. This memory was in complete denial of the fact that inanimate objects could not even be
imagined
to be capable of carrying out this act on their own.
The beings who chased themselves and each other through the Italian Villa (which once belonged to the famous writer Lope de Calderón)—to the sound of a clockwork helicopter—were involved in an eager game of creative hide-and-seek, where hiding was tantamount to a complete revelation of concealment by even outshining the shiniest scatter-orange cushions upon a Proustian verandah.
The mud-bath was empty of finely-sieved loess—empty even of crude mud—revealing a frighteningly naked middle-aged lady lolling in its emptiness... looking up into the Agra Askan half-sky and expecting her Matinee Idol to arrive from its wide-screen scree.
Vacuums strobed. Carpet-bombs flowed in a sootstorm or blitz upon the unsuspecting pinnacles of the Straddling Cathedral—an advance guard for man-city itself. The Core rose above itself, flinching in half-defence, half-attack towards the half-sky’s scree—as the last few pairs of young-lovers boarded its ark of exquisition. That was the Core itself. The odd tread of strangers. The final Happy Hour. Half price
Angevin
in plastic mugs.
Crippled kites still managed to fly erratically upon tenuous tethers across the flank of the Core, often blindly crashing into its shimmering yellow-white surface, finally stuck like thinning long-pigs within its dull beige under-surface, becoming miscoloured broken needles in search of empty stitches.
The Power to Imagine is the first Act of Creation.
Mike pointed his musket into the yellowing scree of the half-sky—as if he simply knew the approach of downward doom. His bullets crackled pathetically—weakening, strobe by strobe, into a shuddering shadow that massively man-stained the lightning-lit roof that arched physically between inner horizons.
Photo-negative Sunne Stead possessed a swivelling pair of deep penetration-eyelights of darkness.
The River ran with spillage or simply seepage from the straining Core, white-ribboning its surface currents—whilst redness ribboned along any competing under-surfaces.
Mike had just handed Amy in towards the inner sanctum of the Core where Angel Megazanthus lifted its welcoming wing to each sacrifice to which it, in turn, sacrificed itself. Mike was still holding her hand, while still brandishing the musket with his other hand, ready to embark himself upon the encroaching Drill-hallucination that the Core was fast becoming, complete with internal spinning bit-tip nipples or sousipedes instead of feathers.