Empire Dreams (17 page)

In these dreams the sun speaks to him. It calls him its child touched with divine madness, and shows him its paintings: a hat caught in a tall treetop; a rose pierced by a silver thorn; a king upon a burning throne; a raven with a cherry in its beak; a crown in a cornfield, the sky dark with birds of ill-omen.

See, Vincent, says the sun, these are my paintings of you. Are they not fine, works of note and merit?

When Vincent awakes, the canvases of the night are still with him and he packs them up with his own canvases and brushes, his oils and easel, and takes them out with him onto the roads of Provence, into the heat and the dust and the scent of wild thyme and the yellow sun. When he has walked quite far enough he sets up his easel and his canvas and paints until the shadows grow long. He paints until the images of the night are emptied out of him, for he fears that to nurture them in his imagination will surely bring the black birds of madness flocking round his soul. When he is drained, as empty as a summer well, he looks at what he has done and sees his bold colors, his solid brushstrokes of red and green, his beloved blues and yellows. He sees the sun captured on canvas and remembers his teacher at the Academy in Paris. “Who are you,” the man had asked, incredulous before potato-faced peasants and Bible-black skies of Borinage. “I am Vincent the Dutchman!” Vincent had replied, and remembering that in the evening-shadowed byways of Provence, Vincent the Dutchman smiles and signs his name in the bottom left-hand corner.

One night, having surrendered to exhaustion, an image comes out of the heart of the sun like none he has ever seen before. He stands upon an endless shingle beach by the side of a silver sea. The air is filled with the knocking of the rolling pebbles and the cry of unseen seabirds. Beyond the silver sea a haze of sick yellow smoke clouds the air, as if the billion belching chimneys of some world-encompassing city, some universal Borinage, were pouring a blanket of filth to hide the sun. In the far distance, along the beach, is a tree springing from the sterile shore and as Vincent begins to walk towards it he sees that it bears both blossom and ripe fruit, and its leaves are both summer-green and withered brown. Beneath this tree a man is seated. His face cannot be distinguished, so great is the glare reflected from the glass sea, but from his posture he seems absorbed in musings. But as Vincent draws closer the man looks up and Vincent is shocked to see that it is not who he thought it would be. It is not himself.

* * * *

And then there are the days when the mistral blows from the north. It bows the trees to the ground before it and ruffles the cornfields like cat’s fur and dries up Vincent’s soul, sending him a little crazy so that he puts big rocks on the corners of his canvases to hold them to the ground. When the mistral blows, the brown-leather people of Provence clap their hats to their heads and wonder at this crazy foreigner who paints when the wind is in the north and who is always, always, peering into the sun as if looking for something hidden in its glare that no one else can see. He is looking for the windswept hat and the pierced rose, the king, the crown, and the raven. He is looking for the beach by the shining silver sea. He is looking to see if the dark freckles on the sun’s face are only the birds of madness diving down for him.

Oh, Vincent is crazy, yes, Vincent is mad, and Vincent fears the madness around which the round earth rolls more than he fears the black realisms of death. He fears his sanity blowing away on the mistral wind like an unweighted canvas, like a hat snatched up into the branches of a high tree—his hat! his hat! his favorite straw hat, snatched from his head by the cold, dry wind from the north and whisked teasingly along just above the grasp of his reaching fingers. It hurdles hedges, leaps stone walls and whitewashed pickets. All the brown-leather people crease up into wrinkles of laughter at the crazy Dutchman chasing after his jumbling, tumbling hat. Then a final wintery breath from out of the Low Countries whips it straight up, high beyond his snatching fingers, and sweeps it along above a line of flowering walnut trees until it capriciously fails and deposits bis hat in the topmost branches of the tallest tree.

“Damn,” says Vincent, and with a Dutchman’s stubborn single-mindedness he sets about the recovery of his hat. He can see it there, held tantalizingly in the branches of the last tree in the row. How long since Vincent last climbed a tree? He cannot remember, but climb this one he must. The yellow sun beats down upon his head, and standing in the middle of the lane Vincent thinks he hears the mewling of white gulls—yes, and the crashing of surf upon a shore, how can this be? and instead of the hard-packed provincial earth beneath his feet he is sure he feels rolling, sliding pebbles. He is running down the lane, he is running down the beach; he breathes harder now and with each breath he inhales the fragrance of wild thyme, yes, but also the great salt of the ocean. Before him he sees not a row of tall walnuts, but a single tree, impossibly both blossoming and bearing fruit, its leaves both green and brown. In the branches of the tree is his hat. Beneath it sits a man who rises to greet him.

“Madness!” says Vincent, dreading that he has walked off the round world into the swirling chaos without hope of return. “Madness.”

“Hello, Vincent,” says the man beneath the tree. He is very French, very elegant, very charming. “I have wanted so very much to meet you.”

“Madness!” cries Vincent, “madness!” Behind him the silver sea crashes on the beach and the pebbles roll and knock, poised between being mountains and sand.

“Would you care for some wine?” asks the man beneath the tree. “It’s a curious vintage, but most refreshing. Sit, sit.” Vincent sits on the hard round pebbles. From somewhere Vincent cannot see, the dapper French gentleman generates a bottle of light rosé wine and two glasses.

“Good health,” he says and tilts his glass to Vincent.

“I’m afraid I cannot toast you, my host, because I do not know your name, nor the name of this place you have brought me to.”

“This is the beach by the Sea of Forever,” says the man beneath the tree, once again folded into his dream-familiar posture of cross-legged contemplation. “It is a preview on history, a belvedere of memories, a high place created by the machines, the High and Shining Ones within which I exist, from which I may survey all that is past and call it from the memories of the machines to renewed life.

“I am Jean-Michel Rey, better known to my own age as the King of Pain. Quite simply, in a world where all pain has been brought under the control of the High and Shining Ones, I am Conscience, and Judge. Conscienceless themselves, the machines sought conscience, and thus an aircraft worker from Dijon is King of Pain, omniscient, and, I fear, near omnipotent. Listen, Vincent; there is one law, a simple law, I am a simple man; there can
be
only one law in a pain-free world where the heart of man is as wicked and unredeemed, alas, as it ever was. The law is that he who causes pain to another shall be punished. With pain. This is my Law, Vincent, simple, even crude, and through the High and Shining Ones I enforce it. In the gulf between the achieved and the yet-to-be-achieved, I depend: conscience, King, dare I say, God?

“So, Vincent. Ah, you have not brought your paints and canvases. That is a pity.” The King of Pain rises from his seat and reaches down Vincent’s hat from the branches of his tree. “You see, Vincent, of all the artists and painters to whom I have access through the memories of the High and Shining Ones, it is you, and you alone, that I wish to paint my portrait.”

* * * *

This is the way that Vincent paints the portrait of the King of Pain. In the morning he arises from white sleep, and with canvas and easel slung across his shoulders and his paints in a fisherman’s tackle box beneath his arm, he lets the mistral blow him where it will, down whatever lane or byway it chooses. He knows that all lanes and byways run ultimately down to the Sea of Forever and the man who lives beside it, where the sun always stands two hours past the noon and its light is as yellow as com. There Vincent paints. As he squeezes ridges of bright, bold pigment onto the canvas, the King of Pain speaks of many things, as people who sit for portraits are wont to do.

“To be King of Pain …” says the King of Pain at rest beneath his tree, “have you any idea of the implications?” Vincent neither confirms nor denies the question, for the questions a king asks himself only a king may answer. “But, Vincent, have you ever given thought to what it is I must do?” And by means of self-answer, that King of Pain that Vincent cannot see, the King of Pain that dwells within the machines, wills penetrating guilt upon a woman in Tientsin who left her detested husband to die in a burning house, spears a corrupt young computer-systems analyst from Atlanta with piercing stomach pains, torments a selfishly ambitious career girl from Duisburg with dread of death and annihilation, and prods a newspaper sub-editor who is cheating on his lovely, saintly wheelchair-bound wife over the edge of the Sydney bridge to smash like an egg on the clean blue waters of the harbor.

“So it goes, Vincent,” says the King of Pain, mercifully closing the doors of pain and punishment before Vincent’s eyes. “I have done what I can to stop men from hurting each other, but I cannot reach into the heart, for where there is freedom there are always those who will abuse. And sometimes I fear that I am no better. And so it goes on and on and on, the pain and the suffering and the dread and the guilt. There must be a better way than crime and punishment.” Then it is as if a cloud has passed over the King of Pain, and behind it the sun. He asks, “Do you know why I chose you of all history’s artists to paint my portrait?”

Vincent shrugs, swirls scarlet lake onto his canvas.

“Because I have seen the future, Vincent, it is my past, and I know that you will be greater than anyone. Anyone. Your paintings will bring joy, and pain, to the hearts of millions. You will live forever, Vincent!”

“I will be famous, I will be a success?” asks the painter who has never sold a painting.

“Vincent, generations yet unborn will adore you!” The King of Pain smiles mischievously to himself and the airwaves ripple and Vincent blinks out of sleep to find himself on a sunny roadside with red poppies waving in the flat field and the sun streaming down from its position two hours past the noon. As he walks home through the cornfields, along the lanes lined with cypresses, Vincent begins to dread whether it had all been a dream of one kind or another. A King of Pain, a beach by a silver sea, a tree? A world ruled by machines where “Do unto Others” is the sole law?

No no no no no.
Fantaisie
. Vincent knows how much worry there has been in the past months, how much he has had to drink to hide the worry, how little he has been able to afford to eat. Vincent knows how shallow and brief have been his dreamful sleeps. Vincent knows that a man can only spin himself so slender before he snaps, a thread blowing in the wind.
Fantaisie
, then. This is what he tells himself:
fantaisie
. But, if
fantaisie
, then an uglier truth underlies it.

The madness.

He fears the madness is at last pushing its way to the top of his mind, heaving these images up around it to form new landscapes of insanity in which he may become lost. That night Vincent lies in his wooden bed in the Yellow House and dreads and dreads and dreads. He knows that when he sleeps, the madness is always there, roosting on his bedpost like a dark bird of ill-omen, and when he wakes, it is there, flapping along behind him as he walks the lanes of Provence, so high it is only a black dot in the vault of heaven, but it is there. It is there. He can hear it singing to him: a simple riddle. Either the King of Pain is the first manifestation of madness, or he is real.

Vincent does not know which he dreads more.

And the airwaves swirl and he is back, back on the beach by the silver sea, back by the tree whose leaves are both budding and brown, whose branches both blossom and bear ripe fruit.

“No,” says Vincent. “No no no no no.”

“Yes,” says the King of Pain. “Oh yes. Welcome, Vincent. I have work for you to do.” And as Vincent works, dabbing thick, sour blue and yellow onto his canvas, the King of Pain tells him a story.

* * * *

THE KING OF PAIN’S STORY

“MINE WAS AN AGE
of great beauty and greater violence. An Age of Gold when all knowledge could be a man’s by the simple expedient of his reaching out a hand to take it. And with that knowledge came mastery over all things, for knowledge was power. Yet that same knowledge carried a shadow and that shadow was fear. For the same knowledge that gave men mastery of all things also gave them mastery of powers of destruction so total that the earth could be scoured clean of every living soul ten times over and fused to a bead of cracked black glass.

“So the people lived their rich and plentiful lives in the shadow of the second death, the racial death more terrible even than the individual death, and their tall, strong, well-fed, well-schooled children grew up twisted and deformed in the heart: bitter, fearful, and pain-wise. For even on the streets of their own marvelous cities, even in their comfortable, well-appointed homes, pain found the golden people and punished them: crime, violence, child-abuse, unemployment, debt, addiction, alcoholism, murder, bad politics and worse government, injustice, despair, depression, pain, and death. And all the while, the universal death slumbered underground in its granite halls and turned, fitfully, in its bed at the bottom of the sea.

“The Age of Uncertainty. That was what the scholars and sages proudly called their times. But for all their wisdom they did not name it truly, for it was in truth an Age of Certainty; the certainty of pain, the certainty of more pain, the certainty of fear. The century drew to its close, and all across the world men and women found they could not face a future of fear and pain and change, unceasing change, uncertainty. So they ran away from it, into the one place where the fear and pain and uncertainty could not find them; into themselves. They returned to the womb. They curled into tiny fetal balls, men, women, children, and withdrew into a state of catatonia from which there was no awaking. Thousands, millions, whole cities and nations curled into the dead-sleep. Like a new epidemic it threatened to engulf all humanity, a racial death as sure and certain as the fires beneath the earth.