Black Marsden (9 page)

“I fear I am no economist. I do not understand.”

“Neither am I. I merely repeat the dark rumours, the dark rumours of time. The
Dark
Rumour
is our newspaper in Namless and it says that with each economic hand-out within the
proverbial
nation-state the effects are to consolidate the proverbial middle class and to attract to it new and successful elements from the proverbial working class.”

“I belong to that proverbial middle class myself. Is it such a bad thing after all?”

“Thus a kind of human economic bastion is created within the state,” Knife went on as if he had not heard Goodrich, “against every so-called revolutionary underground. In the same token I read in
Dark
Rumour
of an economic hand-out by South Africa to Malawi.”

“How does
Dark
Rumour
editorialize this?” Goodrich was half-exasperated, half-fascinated.

“As the first step in the African continent towards a totalitarian brotherhood of man where black and white masters may well begin to sit at the same high table and feast on the same side of the fence. It’s an old story, of course, in the American hemisphere except that there it’s become patently absurd when every human economic bastion proves but another face to the American dinosaur of the twentieth century.”

“And is this the reason for the entry of the Director-General?”

“Ah,” said Knife in his dead pan voice which laughed in the dinosaur’s sleeve, “Namless has become (quite unwittingly, quite unselfconsciously) the repudiation of self-conscious ideologies. Perhaps therefore it is a laboratory of startling contrasts which intrigue the Authorities immensely. There is an emergent
philosophy
of revolution bound up with a re-sensing, re-sensitizing of dead monsters—the spatial potential, the architectural caveats and potentials at the heart of such apparent monsters—if one is to begin afresh from the hidden grassroots of a new age and
not
succumb to the inevitable temptations, the inevitable monolithic imperatives.”

“Are you quoting from
Dark
Rumour
?”

“I always quote from
Dark
Rumour.
I have no opinions of my own. I cannot afford such a private luxury.” He cast a
contemptuous
eye at Goodrich’s diaries. “There is a guerrilla theatre now in subconscious league with the very formidable intelligences that once sought to wipe it out. Thus it is in a position to
immortalize
itself at last within foundations sprung from the decay of the very barbarous death-dealing capital it once feared.”

Knife’s bus rattled and Goodrich was aware of a change of scenery.

It was the same world as yesterday but a curious subtle
fleshing
(if that was the right word) appeared upon the rocks. Perhaps, thought Goodrich, it was something to do with the light.
Whatever
it was—light or film of new vegetation—it had subtly awakened the landscape, the bones of the landscape, as a sleeping but treacherous giant stirs refreshed by age-old cataclysmic dreams. (Once there had been an earthquake, once a volcanic eruption across Namless. Once—once only in living memory—there had been a shift of ice down the mountains burying an entire village.)

On every hand Goodrich could see those bizarre clusters he had noted yesterday, cathedrals of rock upon which he had seen his phantom, the Director-General’s rare robot lying upon the
pavement
of heaven while everybody flashed past at great speed and looked the other way. Now the change of tone affected these too—both cathedral clusters as well as pavement spires or dinosaurs in the midst of the pace of infinity—a slowing down rather than speeding up of the light….

They (the rock clusters) all subtly moved as if one detected the most curious refugee church of mankind in action, walking bones, uprooted bones all fleshed by an avalanche where the very nature of things ceased to be a self-conscious theme and became the subconscious theatre or liberation of men from fanatical pursuits. Thus there was a submission to movement, yes, in cultural phenomena of Namless Theatre—but so intuitive, so
unspectacular
—it became an
opus
contra
avalanche.

This sensation of liberation accented by unspectacular tokens of place and time began to occupy Goodrich enormously. Looked at in a certain light he saw the walking bones of mankind
disappear.
Looked at in another light he saw the flesh upon the bones as a unique contrast or animation which created an abstract void or disappearing dancing bone.

The ribbon of road wound now around an enormous basin in the land and the sensation Goodrich had was of overhanging features in the very action, the very process of collapse as bones or rocks hung upon the very rim of abstract void or flesh in
intercourse
with light or space; a delayed action, a delayed precipice. That was the first sensation he had.

But as the taxi swerved further along the road to face the basin differently, another sensation occurred. Now the action had happened. The rocks were in helter-skelter embrace and pursuit of each other until their appearance was blurred in their mad love affair with light and space.

There was a third vision or sensation as the road swung and they began to ascend. The air seemed saturated by a dream—a film—an almost transparent cloud of dust which came over the rim of the basin and drifted across Namless Theatre. Goodrich felt an irrational correspondence with the “milky way” when the spaces between the stars are filled with a nameless cloud of particles; but now one was looking not up—not vertically into the spaces of night—but horizontally into the spaces of day. The delayed action of the rocks before they plunged possessed its quintessence here: quintessential shock or deliberation of
movement,
seminal ruin, seminal catastrophe.

The actual plunge, the helter-skelter mad embrace and wildest conviction of drama, of an action leaving no trace, possessed its quintessence here: quintessential cloud or seminal tree of relief….

These dual seminal proportions drifted effortlessly now at eye level across Namless Theatre like the epitome of movement or flesh of movement, the quintessential contours of all stages and movements before and after actions and times. In it were the grains of the precipice, Goodrich mused; in it were the grains of relief, self-reversible architectures and collaborative phenomena. It seemed the enduring rising and falling blanket of lost worlds sleeping endlessly, broken endlessly, endlessly over and done with. It seemed also the dream of an unborn, waiting to be born age….

The ribbon of road along which they travelled continued to ascend gently and after a mile or so, a new almost weighted stillness was added to the presence of the rocks in the basin below; they (the rocks) stood now less upon the rim of the basin and more clearly within the contours of an ancient lake or sea waterless now as a desert. Goodrich was fascinated by this transparent sea within a terrestrial cloud on the bed of which the rocks clustered into cathedrals and palaces, circles of repetitive fate or natural doom. There was a great perhaps terrible charm to that buried rock-city or petrifaction of times from the height they had now reached….

It came upon him suddenly—this sense of great danger—of a timeless assassin standing at his elbow.
There
,
said the assassin,
lie
my
charmed
circles
forever
and
ever
….

And yet as the dark figure addressed him secretly, mockingly, privately (at the heart of his secret book, upon a private page memorized inwardly for insertion into his diary), Goodrich was aware of a deeper enigma, a curious privilege to dream (and to be able to support and unravel the dream) of the assassin. Yesterday perhaps the charm, the terror, the fascination of it might have been insupportable. Today—since his immersion last night in the Samsonian mask of the bull, the curious
light
upon the horns of the bull—he could endure the danger of coming into the
neighbourhood
of death-dealing masks and gods.

He could endure that danger since a quintessential warning kept echoing in his head like an
opus
contra
naturam,
an opus contra ritual, an ironic placement and displacement of the sheer natural burden of action—the sheer natural order of love, hate and revenge, parasitic feuds and dooms. It was this quintessential
motif
inherent to vanished landslides which
drew
that rock-city or rock-cluster together upon the bed of the sea. In drawing them together therefore something moved, the very stillness still
moved
endlessly though it appeared to stand contrary to movement itself in monumentalizing a precipitate theme into a stasis of reality.

It was this infinite movement within and beyond an almost overwhelming fascination with stasis—this subconscious parallel between his present frame on the road to Namless and that order of things at the bottom of the lake—which made the terrible charm of internalized or externalized assassin a bearable theme….

“My god,” said Goodrich almost without thinking now—jolted out of his thoughts—“I have seen him again…. Stop.
Stop
.”

Knife drew up at the side of the road.

“There’s someone or something,” said Goodrich, “lying there—who resembles yesterday’s creature—I saw him there—in the bushes.”

They made their way back for a yard or two.
There
it
was.
There he was—a sprawling figure ten feet or so from the edge of the road. His feet stuck out from a straggle of bushes which lay across his body: his head was obscured by the shadow of a rock. As they came closer Knife exclaimed with dead pan factuality:

“He’s been brutally disfigured.” He stopped. Goodrich was behind but all at once he, too, could see for himself the man’s beard black-looking and rotten-looking with dust and sand where the body had been pulled along the ground. The eyes in that dragged, bearded face still seemed to see, curiously sardonic and without illusion in death.

“I guess someone hit him before he could blink,” said Knife. But his words were hollow as a shell of water playing over a duck’s back and piping—as though quills whistled in the man’s beard—a warning tune. “Hit him,” said Knife (echoing bluntly the dead man’s complaint), “with a heavy stone or a piece of iron or something.”

Goodrich was unable to say a word. He felt a resistance in his throat as the dead man’s eyes resisted sight and Knife’s sharp documentary edge to events grew intuitively blunt. He was
suffocated
by something Marsdenish (the shadow of Marsden
stretching
into the past and into the future of Namless Theatre)—a sense of the familiarity and unfamiliarity of the murdered man: a sense of shared existences masked by the frame of death which dared even then to turn the ultimate riddle of life into a self-mocking duel between a phenomenon of personality and degrees of feeling and non-feeling temperament as the chill of being four or five hours dead settled upon the thing on the ground.

“I fear …” said Knife and stopped. And Goodrich was startled by the flicker upon those sharp features. Startled, too, by the cracking and lifting of the constraint which had lain between them since their
Dark
Rumour
conversation earlier in the day. Indeed if it were not for the partial blunting of sheer rumour—and the growth of a peculiar insight into the hollow naturalism of an age which they instinctively shared—he would have been unable to bear or support the savage hollowness of Namless he had begun to glimpse behind Knife’s face. The dead pan public to which he belonged—the dead pan loss of all freedom of opinion or choice—the waiting game at the soul of every instrument, instrumental man, instrumental woman—seemed to flicker in that public hollow: public servant of a regime, hollow desire to overthrow that regime, public alliance with an establishment, hollow desire to act against that very establishment.

“Whom or what do you fear?” asked Goodrich at last.

“I fear,” said Knife as in a dead pan dream, “that the weapons I carry in my hand may come to mean just this.” He stabbed the dead man’s head with his foot. “A blunt instrument between the eyes, a sudden blow, the sudden extinction of everything. It must have been very sudden for him. What was he doing or thinking I wonder when they seized him?” It was an odd reflective question Goodrich thought to come from Knife. “He was an intelligence agent. I know that much. Would you believe it? On the
Director-General’s
staff. Like myself. We have often, on certain missions in Namless Town, shared the same rooms. Also …”—his voice fell to a whisper—“he was a member of a secret orchestra or
revolutionary
avant-garde.
Perhaps he double-crossed them.”

“I.Q. of the double-cross, left, right, left, right,” said Goodrich and felt instantly ashamed for stabbing, in his turn, the
intelligence
agent from an
avant-garde
orchestra.

“And you, Mr. Goodrich,” Knife became quite savage, “I take it you know what
you
have done?”

“Done?” Goodrich was bewildered.

“There’s a rule at sea which holds good for land. When you spot a dead man floating towards your ship you button your lip.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You button your lip or it’s up to you to haul him aboard, stitch him in canvas with a cannon ball at his feet and fire him back into the sea again.”

“What are you driving at?”

“There’s a bucket in the back of my car,” said Knife.

“Bucket?”

“I didn’t bring a fork or a spade. But the bucket’s there. Take that and dig a hole in the sand.” The devil of rumour between them had been blunted but something else—the devil of
command
—had appeared.

“To hell with you,” said Goodrich all of a sudden. And he felt relieved for bringing it out into the open—a gathering regiment of vessels (intelligences of judgement and fear—pipes, trumpets, bassoons), cracked skull or chest or bucket—the inevitable marches of the robot living into the abstract orchestra of the dead.