Authors: D. F. Lewis
Greg could just discern the tannoy-system strung with wires that had emerged from the earlier hawl-pulleys as part of one giant soundweb of communication—and the tannoy’s loudspeakers themselves were shaped like large human ears rather than the more normally acoustically-efficient cones. A decorative system that didn’t lose its irony in the transit from symbol to reality. One clockwork-type of tannoy (it needed to be kept wound up to keep its emissions of noise at full swell) was so violent in these emissions that it was fast burying itself into the ground... as if extreme sound was a downward motive force of drilling within Inner Earth, as well as being a wind-source, even a tornado torque.
The wailing was now deafening—now several blocks away from any possible firewall of dreams. Greg often witnessed Klaxonites passing by along the paving-slabs with huge muffs on their own ears—and others were clambering on the thinned-out roofs of some newly externalised cavities or chambers to restore any sound-proofing lost in the thinning process. Large coats of a glue-like substance were being ‘painted’ over all visible tectonic cracks that pavy-crazed this their growing ‘internet’ of homesteads. Yet, Greg felt that Sunnemo’s intermittent emissions of daylight—if that was what it was called—would later give a better view of these customary tasks of the natives amid all the daily wear-and-tear caused by both automatic and clockwork tannoys, which would be useful since he later intended to write a semi-scientific, semi-autobiographical book about his time in Klaxon City as well as his childhood elsewhere, attempting to fill in any gaps later.
As if the thought had transgressed some stewardship of dream that Edith was currently nurturing, the word ‘book’ in Greg’s thought evoked some literary talk on her part:
“Marcel Proust’s book treats of separate selves of one individual through a cross-section of time. Sometimes the selves interact, without understanding they were selves (or cells) of the same person. Nothing strange in that. Though we owe Proust a lot for his fiction and such ground-breaking concepts.”
“Pessoa, too,” added Clare.
“Yes, and Joseph Conrad had a feeling that there were so many layers of intention…”
Greg wondered how he could hear them talking—not that he was terribly interested in the content of the dowagers’ literary musings—if the wailing tannoys were so deafening. It was as if noise not only produced air movement or downward proclivities of twisters, but also a means to transfer thoughts inside such air movement without the use of speech, but retaining a disguise of speech. He tried it out:
“What are those chambers?”
He pointed to some unusually constructed areas uplifted into a huge portholed lobe of swollen earth membrane.
“They’re the Healing Chambers.”
Greg and Beth were taken into one. There they found creatures that evidently had once been human like them—but now suffering from Bird Flew. Each body (including face) was currently being cream mudbathed with
Angevin
(this being a new discovery of its curative qualities in addition to its known dream-masking) to remove feathers at their root so they would not return. Each patient—to have been admitted to this particular chamber and its specialist healing process—had been forced to show the depth of their illness by actually proving they could fly: hence the name of their disease. One of them was in such a state of desperation that, having once flown, he or she needed to show, so as to be treated, they couldn’t fly any more: a method that necessitated the painful process of plucking. Those that were incurable and more intrinsically (indelibly) Bird Flown or still-Bird-Flying (albeit only in dreams) were forced from their beds and frog-marched next door to what was called a Lethal Chamber.
One patient was jerking in his or her bed—as if pitifully trying to fly from within the heavy quilt. The nurses—who themselves were not dissimilar to human-like ostriches—continued, undeterred, the painful process of plucking that did not seem out of place amid all the wailing noises.
As Greg and Beth left—after their tour as tourists—they spotted a long winding queue of hopping creatures leading to one of the notorious Lethal Chambers. Some hopped a few feet into the air and then flopped back. Greg averted his eyes. None of this would go in the book.
*
Stub of pencil:
The word ‘indelibly’ was added in brackets. It may be rubbed out later. I hope not. Despite the culling that followed the plucking, I shall ignore this topic for the moment. I shall instead treat of other matters. Greg and Beth had earlier visited the Megazanthine Core so couldn’t really visit again. Yet there is a theory, as I may have mentioned already, that having produced their seed for the Angevin-bank when in company with the Hawler they were accidentally born again from that seed in re-transit—logically entailing that they never went to the Core in the first place: or that they never existed at that time to warrant their later existence beyond the fiction of their original creation. Only fiction, indeed, is able to cope with such concepts. Thanks to fiction, we are able to address the possibility—which may have never been addressed otherwise—that they could revisit the Core and thus bring back the rarer forms of Angevin needed to counter Bird Flew here in Klaxon but also in the surface cities of London, New York etc. Only an overtly illogical possibility of such a revisit could be the catalyst for the aforesaid rarefication of refinement in the Angevin process, one necessary for the ultimate virus-buster of them all. It was like a scientific process of Parthenogenesis (coincidentally the first book in the Bible)—whereby creation’s re-ignition is possible by means of creative imagination rather than by years of empirical scientific study—with cells revisiting their earlier carcinogenic selves to restore them to health. A shorthand for much else. I cannot be clearer at this stage. And I hope nobody rubs this out, simply because they don’t currently comprehend it.
*
Greg and Beth were offered a chance to view more specialist operations upon Klaxonites who were suffering from a version of Bird Flew deeper than their own bodies, with diseased feather-spindles spreading their cancerous spike-ends unto the soul itself. Beth, even with her hard-nosed Essex-girl image, was reluctant to accompany Greg on this part of the tour. So Greg—putting himself in the hands of a masked surgeon—was taken on his own to not a Lethal Chamber as such, but something far worse. Lethal Chambers would at least staunch the pain eventually.
Here Greg saw a patient—etherised upon a table—presenting a pink wasteland of body surface tussocked with Bird Flew. Apparently, this patient had earlier indeed managed flight as high as the highest pylon of the city, only flopping to earth with a wing-stressed bounce—because, otherwise, a mercifully heavy fall from flight would have ended his illness there and then. Illnesses tended to die with their patients. Except in the most diseased cases.
The surgeon was wielding a instrument like a pen-torch that emitted a beam of siren-sound more intense than any hearing could bear if that hearing had insufficient dream protection—which, luckily, had been provided for Greg by one of the dream stewards from Klaxon itself. Edith and Clare had washed their hands of the matter, pretending that it was impossible to offer such protection, but, if the truth were known, they simply didn’t know how to do so. The dream steward who actually took over from the dowagers, in this respect, was a character by the name of Blasphemy Fitzworth, once cat’s meat salesman in Victorian London, who was so full of makeshift dreams he was able to find one perfectly suitable for concocting a particular madness that produced impossibilities such as engendering Greg’s immunity to the shrieking ‘pen-torch’ surgical instrument.
The patient himself was resistant to any application of
Angevin
ointment to help with humane plucking. So, the surgeon (equally protected by one of Blasphemy Fitzworth’s dreams) aimed the ‘pen-torch’ beam of sound towards the most obtrusive of the rooted feathers and seared hard at its clawhold for some hours, as Greg watched the surrounding flesh sizzle and then melt away from the column of healing key-hole sound. Eventually, the surgeon could yank the feather-spindle from its tenacious grip on the patient’s bony soul-matter. Only the patient’s resultant wild screaming at the top of his voice was the final danger of sound-deafening proportions to any onlookers. But, with that withstood, the surgeon and Greg left the patient to recover for a while—before they returned to attack the next feather’s root in a long line of such feathers carpetting the patient’s flesh.
*
Greg learned a lot from being allowed to watch the urgent Chamber Surgery that was required in view of the advancing Bird Flew throughout Upper and Inner Earth. He was told, however, there were equivalent physico-psychological operations which in fact could benefit himself. Greg was aware that the purpose of his visit to Klaxon was indeed twofold—or even threefold—i.e. to have a holiday break, to record events regarding the spread of Bird Flew for posterity and to cure himself of unGregness (or Greg Flew). Klaxon, with all its bespoke chambers of good medical practice, comprised the only symbolic literary clinic/health retreat in the Magic Mountains of Inner Earth. And his illness was not being Greg. And he wanted to be who he was by right of identity and body recognition, i.e. to be Greg, and not anyone else. To rid himself of this disease of the slipped liver.
Firstly, dreams were a sickness in themselves, because if you suffer from too many dreams, this adversely affects any residual waking life (if any), and can be classed as a sickness, till one is cured by losing any ability to have a waking life to
be
diseased... or by ridding oneself of the cancerous growth of such dreams altogether through treatment in the Klaxon Chambers of Body/Mind Commerce. It made sense at the time, i.e. at that stage of raw dreams that Greg was suffering precisely when the disease was defined or diagnosed in his case. Any diagnosis essentially depended on the dreams prevalent at the precise astrological epoch of the diagnosis itself. And other considerations of planetary transits and mind/body interaction. So it was an art rather than a science.
Secondly, dream sickness featured dreams
about
sickness—such as dreaming of bodily nightmares that—given just a single stretch of imagination—could even beset the dreamer whether the dreamer had this dream or not.
Thirdly, there were dreams created by tablets that were prescribed for any mind’s debility during waking (non-dream) life, i.e. tablets that changed the patient’s personality, changed the you you were or were ever likely to be or have been.
Greg was sick of all such dreams. They kept recurring like bad pennies of the mind—until that night in Klaxon when the doctors chose to use some of their skills on curing Greg instead of those dreaming patients spiked from outside the dream by the feathered arrows of a real disease spread by birds in waking life.
Even Man needed a retort.
Greg smiled at the latest inexplicable non-sequitur. “I’m sure I can live without dreams,” he said as he self-hypnotised an attempt at persuasion that he had fully woken up—at the same time as he found himself emerging from a particularly numbing dream that had eased some of his pain. However, even more painful were the dreams that meant nothing or, worse, were filled up with nonsense or, worse still, created plugs for products such as Death—thus creating the need for yet other dreams to neutralise them, i.e. spamicidal dreams or dream redoubts.
The doctors had given him a sound-torch similar to those employed in gouging out patients’ feathers, but this one had to be self-operated on his own body, by stroking it up and down like an electric razor—applying the focussed sound on the flesh, starting with the face, as he began to delineate a full limned-out Gregness of Greg with the help of a magnifying shaving-mirror which he had earlier used in the daily ablutions of attacking his own bewhiskered pink chops.
Greg:
What next?
Greg-in-the-mirror:
You could try the left ear. It’s far too large or cauliflowery for real Greg... yes, that’s it, ah, that’s nice. Spread the torch up and down. Do I look more like you now? It helps with the noise of the sirens, too, the earhole closing up with a web that dissolves the sound before it hits the inner drum. Pre-empting the kick-in…
Greg:
I didn’t know I had such a big ear. I felt I loved Beth but she surely couldn’t have loved me with an ear like that. (Laughs.)
Greg-in-the-mirror:
Don’t delay with such things. You now quickly have to rub out the Mikeness from Greg’s mouth and then the I-ness of I from each eye.
Greg:
(Waving the sound-torch up and down over his face) Good as done. But it hurts the eyes…
Greg-in-the-mirror:
But you can see us better now and we can see
you
better through them.
Greg:
Windows of the soul.
Greg-in-the-mirror:
That’s a bit trite! More a two-way filter than a window, I’d say.
Greg:
What next?
Greg-in-the-mirror:
The whole body needs to be done eventually. A nip and tuck to bring back the sleek English lorry-driver that you truly were. Get rid of all the irrelevancies of flesh and identity. Bring in the washing to untense the washing-line of your true being.
Greg:
As each minute passes, I feel the real Greg is becoming me again.
Greg-in-the-mirror: Or vice versa.
Greg:
But
who
are you?
Greg-in-the-mirror:
Just a reflective sounding-board. Don’t worry about me. I have no axe to grind.
Greg:
(Turning away from the mirror) I hope so. I really hope so. I’m no longer Mike. No longer the false I that I never wanted to be in the first place, despite the sense of security being an I made me feel.
Greg-in-the-mirror:
(From behind Greg) A
false
sense of security. But, thinking about it, you are still not talking like a lorry-driver, are you. Argghh! (Glass crazes over as if in a psychological road crash.)