Jonestown (11 page)

‘Have a glass of rum, Francisco,’ said Deacon. ‘Rum mixed with poison. Or is it milk mixed with cyanide? No idea how the ridiculous thought flipped into my skull. Memories of the future when we build Jonestown! Where in God’s name is Jonestown? I’m drunk.’

I thrust the poisoned drink from me. But it was as if Deacon’s prophetic eyes stood in my head now and Ahab’s doomed voyagers were being toppled by a misty grave-digger into a mass-media pool.

I pulled the eyes from my head and flung them into the Pool. Carnival Lord Death snatched them up and popped them into his mouth. He held them there for a moment or two as if to test their immunity to poison that Deacon had inherited from the Scorpion. ‘They’re worth a million dollars at least,’ he cried. ‘Indeed much, much more. Insurance for dead or living actors’ eyes is priceless. Perhaps not as high as a dead footballer’s legs or a punch-drunk boxer’s wrists. Role models – who knows? – may fetch a billion on the Day of the Dead.’

‘What’s that? What’s that?’ cried Deacon. ‘Whose voice is that?’ He glared at me and the sockets in his head – with their Eagle’s glare – seemed wonderfully hollow. Jones was slightly
mesmerized
. It was a brilliant performance on Deacon’s part. He slapped
me on the back. ‘It’s a rotten world, isn’t it Francisco? Can you play the role of a saviour?’ I shrank from him. He was mocking me. He was mocking himself. He was mocking role models.

He was pointing to the tattoo on my arm, the tattoo of Lazarus shaped like a T inscribed on Bone.

‘Play a surrogate Lazarus Francisco in the Milky Way, in the Virgin’s Pool, cohabit with innocent brides in the misty Pool, all in anticipation of the birth of my son when I return to wed Marie. She’s but a slip of a dancing thing now – a princess in my eyes – on a distant coast.’

It was as if the skies had fallen in on my head.

No, No, I wanted to scream as the naked misty-bodied throng jostled together in the grave of the Pool. Had I not seen them in that light (though I had forgotten it all) on the Day of the Dead when I lay on a pillow of stone at the edge of the Clearing?

To be survivor Lazarus – even in Jest – to play such a role is to know that the part involves an inner marriage to a resurrectionary Womb, inner eyes in a resurrectionary Womb, inner organs in a resurrectionary Womb, inner intercourse with Virgin, wilderness space, that may bring new birth to the Self (within a Sorrowing humanity); to contemplate such a role is to tap resources of forgotten initiation into a bridegroom or a fool as much as into the foetus of a saviour in order to acquire the strength to stand at the bar of time …

Mr Mageye saw my distress. ‘See the funny side of the sacred, Francisco,’ he said. He spoke softly for my ear alone on the Bridge with the Camera. ‘See the funny side of Deacon. Alas he knows that from birth, and his exposure in the savannahs, he began to play the role model of Fate.
You
have been tied to him as a Fool to be taunted and insulted and reviled. You (and the society to which you belong) must suffer his bouts of arrogance, and drunkenness, and bad behaviour. It’s Fate, it’s the role model of Fate, in the theatre, in the duelling arena, in sport, everywhere, when a civilization is addicted to violence as ours is. Only a Fool may absolve Deacon of the burden he carries …’

Mr Mageye saw my incredulity, my dislike of the label Fool …

‘Look at it this way, Francisco. You are an apparition in time on
the Bridge above the Pool. You stand beside me. You are an apparition in time down there beside the Pool. So you may entertain the comedy of having many fathers. The Frenchman’s Catholic ghost for instance. Your mother’s great-great-
grandfather
and husband. Carnival theology. And why not? Such surrogacies break the spell of divine human incest and bring us into the mystery of freedom … Freedom confesses to the partiality of all parenting dogma which it entertains as sacred, human theatre …

‘When the sky falls treat it as manna from heaven and crumbs from the bodies of role models (Jones is a cult model, isn’t he?), the heroes, the monsters, that we feed upon in our gluttony for abuse at the hand of Fate …’

I was filled with fear, comic fear, uncanny fear, the fear of creation, of the possibilities of creation, the possibilities of fiction. Models of fiction cemented in the eighteenth and the nineteenth century are sacred in the twentieth. Sacred eighteenth-century, nineteenth-century linearity. But I was attempting to rewrite the past from the funny side of sacred, imperial time, from a futuristic angle that breached linearity. One drew one’s characters from the grave of time, they migrated backwards from the future
nevertheless
into the past, susceptible to one’s knowledge now (however flawed) of the past futures to which one belonged. The funny side of time in the future. Such is the resurrectionary, comic consciousness of the Fool Lazarus whom I sought to invoke in my texts though I knew without a shadow of doubt that Church and State showered him with fortunes and riches to keep him safely dead … This was the substance of my fear, my uncanny fear, as I wrote my Dream-book, as I sought to build Memory theatre …

There was no way around such fear except divine comedy and the acceptance of Fate, the abuse of Fate, the abuse of Prejudice, the abuse of Predator.

‘Is Lazarus – you call me Lazarus Deacon – a Colonial Fool in a so-called post-colonial, post-imperial age? I do not know. If he is he must die and die again and again and each resurrection will prove abortive … Unless … Unless …’

Deacon was outraged. He had been drinking rum and
Coca-
Cola
all afternoon at the swimming pool with its misty embracing bodies.

He had also caught the drift of Mr Mageye’s conversation with me.

‘Fuck the Frenchman’s ghost,’ he cried. ‘Fuck you, Francisco. You are a Fool. Your mother was a Fool.’

‘It’s the Frenchman’s fortune which brought you here on a scholarshp in the twentieth century.’

‘I am the peasant, legendary father of the Americas. Folkloric father. Ask Marie to whom I am betrothed. We need a different Economy …’

Jonah Jones had had enough. He knit his brow like an ancient thunderer and struck the frame of the Milky Way until it shuddered as if to the rumble of an earthquake.

‘Nonsense Deacon,’ he cried. ‘Blue-blooded puritans are the fathers of the Americas. I am your father and every fucking bastard’s.’

He had been drinking too and swallowing the women in the Pool with his drink. Their reflected bodies sprawled on the glass in his hand. His rage melted and he laughed in Deacon’s smiling teeth.

‘You Francisco, you Deacon, are my sons. Together in the New World we will forge a new pact and build a new Rome unlike the Pope’s Rome. I nearly said Poe’s Rome. Poe was a racist. But never mind. He’s a genius all the same! Would you not agree, Francisco? Troy, believe me, has been sacked and Rome turned its back on the Jews when Hitler marched into Poland. Berlin and Paris and London have suffered bouts of racism and fascism. Fascism is the death of the Imagination. IMAGINATION DEAD IMAGINE.’

I wanted to shout to him from the Utopian Bridge. I wanted to shout a rain of questions at him as he swallowed the women in the Pool. I wanted to shout across a chasm of generations but my tongue froze, and his ear – for all I knew – was sealed.

I wanted to shout within my own grave of memory – as though I too lay on the sick bed of civilization in Port Mourant hospital. But I was a diminutive survivor and my voice was weak and small. Though I sailed into the past with knowledge I had gained
from the future, the queer and the funny side of knowledge served to show how much – beyond reckoning – I still had to learn.

I wanted to shout to him – within my own grave of memory – as though I too had died in Jonestown: ‘Have you, Jonah, rid yourself of the disease of fascism?’

I wanted to shout: ‘I know little or nothing except that I survived …’

‘How is it,’ I said to Mr Mageye, ‘that one knows so little yet dares to write fiction’s truths, the hardest truths to garner?’

Mr Mageye laughed. ‘Fiction is not tautology. Fiction,’ he murmured, ‘must diverge within itself from itself to be true to itself. Or else it becomes the mimicry of fact, the shell of fact …’

‘How do you see my Dream-book, Mr Mageye? You are my magus-Camera Man, you transcribe my Dream-book into
cinematic
dress, into ghost-theatre – you are a ghost yourself – but I have no idea whether it’s simply a technological or cannibal appetite in ghosts, capitalism’s ghosts, when they swallow fictions indiscriminately; or whether there’s more, there’s freedom, there’s liberation for fiction in the Camera.’

Mr Mageye acquired his peculiar air of the Sphinx with which I was familiar. But this time a new element tended to emerge. I perceived an almost calculated look of interwoven spectres upon him as he placed his hand upon the Camera.

‘Who can say what may prove to be the role of the Camera in future ages?’

‘But yours is a futuristic Camera …’

‘Ancient visage of time as well, Francisco, in hidden chambers of the heart and mind where figures peer at us dressed as mystical astronauts. That’s in my Camera as well. Deacon would call it celestial mathematics.’

I was startled by the Jest which gave me food for thought as one glimpsed a rare temple of the human body …

Mr Mageye was smiling with a deceptive gravity, a kind of inner levitation of the imagination lifted his features as if his smile took him up into a laurel wreath above his grave in Albuoystown.

‘But to be serious,’ he continued, ‘the Camera is possessed of an organ that cannot – in all honesty – encompass all the textualities
of your Dream-book. It measures its limits nevertheless – I speak now in purely technical terms – within those variable boundaries. It pictorializes concrete happenings but imbues these at the same time with far-reaching and meaningful hiatuses and gaps that
speak
for themselves. The tears that the Virgin weeps, for instance, in poor people’s hospitals become an eloquent pool of milk at which dogs lap and in which rich men and women swim. Eloquent pool! Not straightforward eloquence. Dogs lap, their teeth flash into famine-stricken multitudes that we harbour in our unconscious. Feed my sheep. Feed my dogs. Even as you gorge yourselves on sex. Do you recall the creation of loaves of bread and fish in the Gospels from scraps and crumbs? A multitude was fed. The wonders of mystical science and hungry spirit, hungry ghosts, that can take many shapes around us and in our bodies, shapes that breed excess, or shapes that address us within the gaps of self-centred technology.

‘A hiatus lives within all models of technology. A chasm exists. We tend to turn our backs on this within patterns of realism that we reinforce into absolutes. But the hunger of the spirit grows, the hunger of ghosts everywhere, and excess may turn by degrees into death-dealing prosperity …’

*

The Pool of Tears – into which I had dived – faded and I was back in the poor people’s hospital.

Marie was dressed in a nurse’s uniform. It was too large for her and her head rose above it with the eagerness and pathos of living, carven wood from an El Doradonne tree, wilderness
flesh-and
-blood child and twentieth-century peasant child. It was the custom or inbuilt tradition of the Golden Man or King of El Dorado to open doors in the oxygen bodies of trees (this was ancient El Doradonne Cinema) and to sculpt emerging Shadows into the retinue of his court, his civil servants, the members of his family, the labourers in the fields …

Marie was playing a princess of ancient El Dorado in a hospital play. The patients were enlivened by the sight of a nurse’s uniform as the robe of royalty.

I was overjoyed to see that her tears had ceased. The dog had
lapped the milk and retreated to the side of his master who lay on the floor. The incongruity of the over-size uniform brought the occasion alive as though the princess’s large dress sheltered a multitude of workers who were kith and kin to royalty.

Such was the game of El Doradonne Cinema, ancient, modern synaesthesia.

There was a cradle on a table beside the chair in which Marie sat. The cradle was empty save for a beautiful toy, a wheeled chariot (each wheel one-eighth of an inch in diameter) within which lay a minute cherry from a flake of blood-wood in a Christmas tree.

‘The Wheel is the gift of my father to civilizations,’ said Marie.

I was invisible but a part of the Play and I spoke aloud from a corner of the hospital under the Shadow of Mr Mageye’s Camera.

‘El Dorado never possessed the Wheel or the Christmas tree. Labour was hard as nails. Bare hands pulled rocks and stones into pyramids.’

The Doctor-God arrived on the stage above Marie.

‘It’s true,’ he confirmed, ‘I am the ghost of an ancient
medicine-king
in olden times. My voice is scarcely heard nowadays. I am a king, a ruined king, yet I am worshipped in this hospital as a free spirit. Science is a free spirit. The Wheel remained a toy in my ancient kingdom. I never found the means to make it available to brutalized labourers. Indeed the labourers in El Dorado may well have been on another globe or planet. Cherries and Circuses were my promise to them, bountiful drugs and prescriptions and harvests and games to come. But alas the gap between heaven and hell continued to widen. Why this was so I could not tell. I knew there would be an uprising sooner or later. El Dorado was paradise on earth, it was heaven … War in heaven and upon earth! But I brushed this aside as rubbish. And even if it happened the cradle remained my enduring hope. It would fly through the air on hidden wings, hidden wheels. Yet I remembered I had reduced the cradle and the Wheel to a toy that the princess played with. I had never found the means to employ them differently. And future generations, it occurred to me, might do the same. Thus it was that I grew a blood-red Christmas tree in El
Doradonne forests. Are not ghost-kings – such as myself – the true originators of Christmas? They appear in your Dream-book, Francisco, as magi of medicine, of law, and of the Camera. My dream now – which you may share in this hospital (I do not know) – is that medicine (the science of medicine) may extract the venom from brutalized species and brutalized labour through intercourse with the Scorpion Constellation. That venom would be converted into a serum or a medium of inoculation to achieve immunity to pain.’