Nemonymous Night (31 page)

When Greg had finished the sound-shaving process, he relaxed back into the newly undisguised welters of Chamber Music, waiting for the doctor to return following a set period of mind-confinement... to test whether any of the process had actually ‘taken’ and Greg was satisfied with the plug of his own recovered Gregness.

Shattered mirror:
Do you know what the first sign of madness is? Being told you have hairs growing in the palm of your hand... and then looking for them!

Greg stared at his smooth inner-hand and saw a tiny hard knot in one pore which he feared might pre-figure the future tenacity of a feather.

*

Beth had been going through a feminine version of this process in a neighbouring Chamber but the facts are far more inaccessible since the various methods were privy only to the women themselves and to their beauty-sleep mentors. It is to be hoped, however, that she had removed any restricting characteristics concerned with any mutual identity-envy between her and her sister Susan.

A low-key end to what was a crucial soundfest.

*

When Greg and Beth emerged from their respective chambers of re-asserted identity, they immediately fell into each other’s arms, with a renewed love surging through their veins—not so much reminding them of their old love as it once was but showing them the potential of their new love as a cathartic transformation of their old love... as a crystallised plug of wisdom to replace the angst that used to fill the growing hole of disappointment gradually and ineluctably encroaching upon them in recent years, to blot out what was once possible between them by revealing what was now possible again in the enhanced wonders of sheer togetherness and love for each other as well as for life itself.

The sirens had momentarily ceased their wailing, whilst the citizens were singing a Bach Cantata. Not stage-managed so much as the natural spontaneity of a flashmob.

Many gazed up into Klaxon’s undersky, shading their eyes from a newly radiant Sunnemo, in fact two Sunnemos as one had emerged from a blindspot to become each other’s ghost and symbolic of the love between Greg and Beth. Within the glowing skin of the master Sunnemo could be glimpsed the silhouette of the Angel Megazanthus itself slowly and repeatedly folding and unfolding its wraparound wings, a vast king in yellow, or a nesting mother-bird, or a token of a horror vision now made divine.

A scattering of hot-powdered
Angevin
fell from the two cores like Christmas snow.

*

Bach’s Cantata draws to an end and the sirens resume, as Greg and Beth, hand in hand, continue their adventures of self-discovery within Inner Earth. He would need to visit Klaxon’s cleansing chambers regularly for the Gregness of Greg to prevail. And to tussle with the Tenacity of Feathers.

*

Beth stared up at Sunnemo—and she wondered whether the Angel Megazanthus within its eggskin owned a sensory capacity equivalent to her own selfhood. Beth was the salt of the earth, full of natural Essex feistiness. She was so deeply in tune with things that she didn’t understand she was in tune with, even her wondering about this fact took place without it touching the sides of her own selfhood’s intellect (or lack of). A process that could only be addressed by the arts of fiction or fantasising. Imagining imagination that could not exist without multiple imaginations plugging in socket to socket. A power of imagination (a strength to dream) that could only be possible following contact with the Flew. Flown the next nest. Brain with new wings. Mind with old ones. Beth Flew. Greg Flew. All flocking together towards or from the Klaxon chambers as a positive migratory force of flight.

So, in short, did the Angel Megazanthus have its own ‘consciousness’? Or did it manoeuvre its wings as part of some parthenogenetic spontaneity... or of a mysteriously insidious instinct of twitching or tweaking parts of itself to prove to any observers (such as Beth and Greg) that there was indeed a real creature lurking within its shape: pulling its own strings from within itself. Beth thought about one of her friends from school. Rachel Mildeyes (as she was known to peers and teachers alike). Everyone loved Rachel. She had a self-creative gloss that girls like Beth could never aspire to. Nevertheless, Beth was one of Rachel’s best friends... sharing those secret feminine moments that remain an enigma to most men.

Beth wondered if everyone’s special friend—someone they recall with deep affection (remarkably without appreciating quite how deep)—populated the shape that was Angel Megazanthus. She imagined Rachel looking down upon her now—in Klaxon—as she and Greg wandered aimlessly from chamber to chamber, yet learning cumulatively the lessons of imagination whilst living within imagination’s creation (fiction, fantasy or dream) as real people. Most fictions contained fictional characters... or once real people—now ceased to be real people (if retaining their real names)—fictionalised as fiction characters. Yet, strangely, Beth and Greg retained their hard-won, hard-worn identities as real minds and bodies while living and dreaming—unfictionalised—within a full-blooded fiction. A fiction shot through with reminders of itself via fluctuating volumes (from silent to strident) of Klaxon’s noise.

Stub of Pencil:

Rachel Mildeyes peered through a slit in Sunneskin, feeling her huge wrinkled, webby wings on the outside of her body (joined to her but not strictly hers to use) lift slowly like imperfect flaps of her own skin merging (like shuffling cards with cards) into the sinewy membranes (half-cooked, but de-blooded, meat and/or poultry) of Sunne’s last underlayer of surface skin. She felt herself to be a core but also a core’s innards—but could a core have anything within it without the innards becoming a new core?

Beth laughed at the whimsy of such imaginings in the air about Rachel spotting her from aloft. It was bad enough living within imaginings without adding to them with one’s own imaginings!

Greg asked why Beth was laughing—giving her a peck on the cheek in honour of their lately rediscovered love of and for each other—and as he did so, they happened to pass a lobe or dune near to new chambers about to be on their list of visits whilst here in Klaxon—to learn about preparations for war and other hand-to-hand conspiracies.

“Nothing really. Just an old schoolfriend. She was funny and I just remembered an old joke we had together.”

“Rachel, you mean? You’ve even forgotten to send her Christmas cards in recent years. Life by-passes friendships sometimes.”

Rachel shrugged, reading ‘time’ for ‘life’ in what he had just said. Greg smiled. Indeed, meanwhile, Klaxon was soon to be at war with itself—a fact that had been lost sight of, one that needed addressing because, as visitors, they owed it to themselves to get their loyalties sorted out like coloured threads in the eventual textured pattern of carpet pre-destined for their feet to walk. Captain Nemo had not briefed them about these dangerous inter-tribal machinations before leaving the now pyloned earthcraft. And here was Beth talking about an old schoolfriend! “Women!” he thought—and laughed at and against his own instincts.

*

Beth:
Now we’ve rediscovered our love for each other, I get the feeling that they’re splitting us up again by forcing us to be on different sides in a war.

Greg:
I didn’t understand all this about a war, until someone mentioned it in a cavé the other day... off the cuff almost. Klaxon seemed so peaceful when we first arrived.

Beth:
(Laughs) Peaceful!

Greg:
Well, you know what I mean. Citizens at peace with each other, at least, if not with this flipping racket of air signals! (Laughs, too.)

Edith:
The war was second thoughts, I gather. Things were getting too boring... and tension
is
required for anything creative to work properly. Even Proust realised that as he created friction as well as fiction between levels of time.

Clare:
And of sexual acceptability. Between levels of it, that is. Grinding levels sparking off further frictions... and spinning.

Greg:
How do you ladies cope with seeing everything as if it’s in a book? It’s enough for me to get my head round reality! Isn’t this place bizarre enough already without fictionalising it? This war, for example. I hear it’s where a person becomes a Flew person and those who are not Flew are still themselves—and they open veins in their bodies to see if they can merge the meats between them—coming together in hugs that blend as genuinely as hugs of love always tried to be.

Beth:
Or sex. Not love. Yet, it’s a war. That’s what I don’t understand. It’s not a love-in.

Edith:
A love-between?

Clare:
That’s a better expression—a love-between, but the meats weren’t meant to merge, because some people have become poultry—some even giant insects—leaving some other people as genuine human meat. And when they try this love-blending business, the meats reject each other. Like transplants in the old days.

Beth:
Captain Nemo always spoke about something called Human Coning when we were all getting here on the earthcraft. Perhaps that was a misprint—I mean a mispronouncement for what you’re talking about. War because the cones or clones don’t ‘take’. I’m talking beyond myself, now. But do you know what I mean?

Clare:
I think so. It is only possible to understand rarefications like that if you fictionalise them—which brings us back to where we started.

Edith:
So, what are we saying? As in Proust we need really long sentences to manage the concepts properly—whilst conversation is inevitably staccato. Like this.

Greg:
All I know—is that the citizens are in two warring groups—yet simultaneously paired off as love-partners
between
each group. And they want us to nail our colours to one mast or the other. In fact, Crazy Lope and Go’spank are already involved. Up to their necks.

Beth:
Not only warring, Greg, but
viciously
warring. The combatants are tooth and nail. Almost tearing each other apart—sinew by sinew. Both sexes, each sex with a different sex, or both the same sex together. It does not seem to matter to birds or insects. I could never tell their genders, in any event.

Edith
: Proust hinted at all this in
Swann’s Way
.

Clare
: Needs careful exegesis, though, Edith.

Beth
: Do they have any weapons—others than their bodies, I mean?

Greg
: I saw a skirmish outside one of the Lethal Chambers. The sirens sort of joined in, increasing their pitch—as a cover for the weapons. Or to imitate the weapons, perhaps.

Beth
: Old-fashioned muskets.

Edith
: More than just muskets. The muskets, if they
are
muskets, had mouths—when they were popping. Muskets that were insect-like whatever the meat they grew from.

Greg
: I’m sure there is more to the shape of the words themselves, if not to their meanings. Mask, Masque, Mosque, Mosquito, Musketeers, Mousquetaires. I seem to have lived with these horrible words every night when I dream. In fact, I’ve not really thought about all this before
outside
of a dream.

Beth
: Old-fashioned dreams. There are no such thing as old-fashioned dreams any more. Fictionalised dreams are—well, I’m beginning to think that fictionalised things are actually more real—more tenable—than non-fictionalised things.

Greg
: Hmmm. I always preferred reading non-fiction because I thought it was real.

Beth
: We are alone. This is frightening. True horror.

Edith
: Don’t worry, Beth. We are all in this together. We have been from the start. We visited you in your flat all those years ago, when Arthur and Amy were playing in the garden.

Clare
: That’s when we knew we had to protect you and each other.

Beth
: But now we have to fight a war. Nobody warned us about that, when we signed up for the trip.

Greg
: We could get back to the Drillcraft. And persuade Nemo to leave early for Agraska. Which pylon? I’ve forgotten.

Edith
: (Turning to Clare) Sunnemo is a place in Sweden—Hawler is a place in Kurdistan. The surface is alive with places like that. Proust lived on the surface once. Many poets flew in his wake. Fin de Siècle.

Clare
: Yes, Dumas’
Black Tulip
, too. Characters without depth. Silhouettes. I think to use the word ‘cardboard’ about fiction characters is demeaning.

Edith
: Indeed.

*

Sunnemo released its demonised shafts of rainlight along the Inner Earth gutters surrounding the City of Klaxon. The sirens whined out their customary warning to earthcraft sailors—as the war was about to enter a cyclic moment of intensest victory or defeat. Consequently, the Canterbury Oak became as silent as the deadened or unwound stridency of buried toys—as it no longer needed to summon up the soundchecks that, given a slightly altered scenario, would indicate the impending challenge-and-response already in full bitter sway before the chance to record it was given.

I stood again beneath the very gravity-logged Oak, from where I had first viewed Klaxon all those clockwork ratchet-clicks ago. The ear shape of the City had, by now, become a mass of new dunes or lobes, some inflamed as with a disease from further inward to where even Inner Earth itself failed to reach. Millions of citizens in various stages of Name Flew were currently in individual hand-to-hand combat, comprising two armies both with their lethal plugs in the pylons... and, by dint of the power vacuum provided by the resonating echoes, it was difficult to judge which inter-combatant belonged to which army of ready-opened body-gaps bearded with feathered veins.

All the catacombed or labyrinthine out-buildings had retained their vulnerable chimneystacks despite the sideways weapon-like sound-torch gravities gushing along every channel of combat between shuffling individuals of volitional war-strength—and the organic structures built into or around these chimney-flues were remarkably still intact but many now had growths of coxcomb or wattle. From each roof, they crew long, they crew wildly at the fast denemonising of Sunnemo into Mount Core. Its Megazanthine flames like wings half-lit the embracing sky around me.