Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe (29 page)

At the end of a rather chaotic row of chairs in the back of the room, one member of the audience stirred in his seat. As Tressor slowly approached this figure, with vague thoughts of rescue in his mind, he noticed that its eyelids were shut. Without delaying for an instant, he began tearing at the webs which imprisoned the victim, speaking words of hope as he worked at the horrible mesh. But then the closed eyelids of the bound figure popped open and looked around, ultimately focusing on Tressor.

“You're the only one,” said Tressor, laboring at the webby bonds.

“Shhhh,” said the other, “I'm waiting.”

Tressor paused in confusion, his fingers tangled with a gruesome stuff which felt sticky and abrasive, intolerably strange to touch.

“They might return,” insisted Tressor, even though he was not entirely sure whom he meant by “they.”

“They
will
return,” answered the other's soft but excited voice. “With the moon they will return with their wonderful music.”

Appalled by this enigma, Tressor began to back away. And I suspect that from within a number of those hollow sockets, four of them to be exact, the tiny eyes of strange creatures were watching him as he fled that horrible room.

•   •   •

Afterward Tressor visited me night after night to tell me about the music, until it seemed I could almost hear it myself and could tell his story as my own. Soon he talked only about the music, as he recalled hearing it somewhat dulled by a closed door. When he tried to imagine what it would be like to have heard the music, as he phrased it, “in the flesh,” it was obvious that he had forgotten the fate of those who did hear it in this way. His voice became more and more faint as the music grew louder and clearer in his mind. Then one night Tressor stopped coming to visit me.

Now it seems I am the one who cannot sleep, especially when I see the moon hovering above our city—the moon all fat and pale, glaring down on us from within its gauzy webs of clouds. How can I rest beneath its enchanting gaze? And how can I keep myself from straying into a certain section of town as night after night I wander strange streets alone?

INTRODUCTION

It was late and we had been drinking. My friend, a poet who can become very excitable at times, looked across the table at me. Then he revived a pet grievance of his as though I had not heard it all before.

“Where is the writer,” he began, “who is unstained by any habits of the human, who is the ideal of everything alien to living, and whose eccentricity, in its darkest phase, turns in on itself to form increasingly more complex patterns of strangeness? Where is the writer who has lived out his entire life in a prodigious dream that began on his day of birth, if not long before? Where is the writer from some molding backwater of the earth—the city of Bruges itself, that withered place which some dreamer has described as ‘a corpse of the Middle Ages that sings to itself from innumerable bell-towers and lays bony bridges across the black veins of its old canals.'

“But perhaps our writer's home would have to be an even older, more decaying Bruges in some farther, more obscure Flanders . . . the one envisioned by Bruegel and by Ensor. Where is the writer who was begotten by two passionate masks in the course of those macabre festivities called
kermesse
? Who was abandoned to develop in his own way, left to a lonely evolution in shadowed streets and beside sluggish canals. Who was formed by the dreams around him as much as those within him, and who had satiated himself with recondite learning. Where is this writer, the one whose entangled hallucinations could be accommodated only by the most intimate of diaries? And this diary, this journal of the most unnecessary man who ever lived, would be a record of the most questionable experiences ever known, and the most beautiful.”

“Of course, there is no such writer,” I replied. “But there's always Drapeau. Out of anyone I could name, he most nearly meets, if I may say, those rather
severe
prerequisites of yours. Living the whole of his life in Bruges, keeping those notebooks of his, and he—”

But my friend the poet only moaned in despair:

“Drapeau, always Drapeau.”

EXCERPTS FROM THE JOURNAL

April
31
,
189
—

I have noticed that certain experiences are left to languish in the corners of life, passed by like waifs on the street, as if they should be dissuaded from circulating too freely among legitimate persons. Since childhood, for example, not one day has passed in which I have failed to hear the
music of graveyards
. It sounds everywhere I go—a resonant chorus that fills the air and sometimes drowns out the voices of those who still live. And yet, to my knowledge, never has another soul on earth made mention of this ubiquitous singing, which vibrates even in the currents of our blood. Is the circulation of upright society so poor that it cannot carry these dead notes? It must be a mere trickle!

December
24
,
189
—

Two tiny corpses, one male and the other female, rattle around that enormous closet in my bedroom. Though deceased, still they are quick enough to hide themselves whenever I need to enter the closet to retrieve something. I keep various odds and ends in there, stuffed into trunks or baskets and piled all over the place. I can't even see the floor or the walls any longer, and only if I hold a light high over my head can I study the layers of cobwebs floating about near the ceiling. After I close the door of the closet, its two miniature inhabitants resume their activities. Their voices are only faint squeaks which during the day hardly bother me at all. But sometimes I am kept awake far into the night by those interminable conversations of theirs.

May
31
,
189
—

After tossing about for most of the night, I went out for a walk. I had not gone far when I became spectator to a sad scene. Some yards ahead of me on the street, an old man was being forcibly led from a house by two other men who were quite large. They had him in restraints and were delivering him to a waiting vehicle. Laughing hysterically, the man was apparently destined for the asylum. As the scuffling trio reached the street, the eyes of the laughing man met my own. Suddenly he stopped laughing. Then, in a burst of resistance, he broke free of his escorts and ran right up to me.

“Never speak out,” he said frantically, almost weeping. “Never say a word about the things you know. I can tell by the look in your eyes.”

“But I am just an ordinary person,” I said, seeing that his captors were approaching.

“Swear!” he demanded. “Or they will have us all.”

By then, however, his pursuers had caught up with him. As they dragged him off he began laughing just as before, and the peals of his laughter, in the early morning quiet, were soon devoured by the pealing of church bells. It was at that moment that I decided to heed the old man's warning and disguise certain perceptions of mine in the language of whimsy. Or leave them out altogether from these pages on the chance that someone might find them while I am still alive.

August
1
,
189
—

As a child I maintained some very strange notions. For instance, I used to believe that during the night, while I slept, demons removed parts of my body and played games with them, hiding my arms and legs, rolling my head across the floor. Of course I abandoned this belief as soon as I entered school, but it was not until much later that I discovered the truth about it. After assimilating many facts from various sources and allowing them to mingle in my mind, I was prepared for the realization. It happened one night as I was crossing a bridge that stretched over a narrow canal. (This was in a part of town fairly distant from where I live.) Pausing for a moment, as I routinely do when crossing one of these bridges, I gazed not down into the dark waters of the canal, but upwards into the night sky. It was those stars, I knew that now. Certain of them had been promised specific parts of my body. In the darkest hours of the night, when one is unusually sensitive to such things, I could—and still can, though just barely—feel the force of these stars tugging away at various points, eager for the moment of my death when each of them might carry off that part of me which is theirs by right. Of course a child would misinterpret this experience. And how often I have found that every superstition has its basis in truth.

October
9
,
189
—

Last night I visited one of the little theaters that operate hereabouts and stood at the back for a while. Onstage was a magician, his shiny black hair parted straight down the middle, with full prestidigitorial regalia about him: a long box to his left (moons and stars), a tall box to his right (oriental designs), and before him a low table covered with a red velvet cloth littered with diverse objects. The audience, a full house, cheered wildly after each trick he performed. At one point the magician divided the various sections of his assistant into separate boxes which he then proceeded to move to distant areas of the stage, while the dismembered hands and feet continued to wiggle about and the decapitated head laughed with a piercing intensity. The audience was at great pains to express its amusement. “Isn't it incredible!” exclaimed a man standing beside me. “If you say so,” I replied, and then headed for the exit, realizing that for me such things only provoke my rage against a world that applauds trumped-up illusions while denying or demeaning those that create the very lives they are living. No
real
illusion will ever gain their favor, or even their attention. They would rather be bound inside a heavy chest wrapped with chains and thrown into the deepest waters. As would I.

November
1
,
189
—

From the earliest days of human life there have existed persons, almost all of us in fact, who hold that the visible world is only a mere mote in the totality of being. Everything we witness is thereby translated into an indicator of an unseen order of being that expresses itself by means of the gross materials we perceive with our senses. Hence, it may seem that a tree is not a tree but a signpost to another realm, a spectral thing full of strange suggestion; that a house is not a house but a threshold by which we may pass into another home, one more suited to our nameless yearnings; that an empty street at twilight may intimate another side of existence, one that complements this side of things and consoles us for its imperfections.

But is there really another world that overshadows ours? Who can say, and why should we care? We might just as truly claim that worlds which seem resistant to our sensory detection are but parasites of the only mystery there is—our own lives. That we benefit by our unknowingness is not an uncommon idea. It is also not a welcome notion to those who would believe our destiny to be presided over by invisible powers. This is the suspicion we must never attempt to verify: that the whole of creation might best be pictured as an untenanted room filled with the echoes of nothingness. Why should this condition, this intimation of the unreal, be insufficient for our spiritual requirements?

January
1
,
189
—

There is a solitary truth which, whether for good or ill I don't know, cannot be expressed on this earth. This is very strange, since everything—outward scenes as much as inward ones—suggests this truth and like some fantastic game of charades is always trying to coax the secret into the open. The eyes of certain crudely fashioned dolls are especially suggestive. And distant laughter. In rare moments I feel myself very close to setting it down in my journal, just as I would any other revelation. It would only be a few sentences, I'm sure. But whenever I feel them beginning to take shape in my mind, the page before me will not welcome my pen. Afterward I become fatigued with my failure and suffer headaches that may last for days. At these times I also tend to see odd things reflected in windows. Even after a full week has passed I may continue to wake up in the middle of the night, the semidarkness of my room faintly reverberant with a voice that cries out to me from nowhere.

March
30
,
190
—

Out of sheer inattentiveness I had stared at my reflection in the mirror a little too deeply. I should say that this mirror has been hanging in my room for more years, I would guess, than I have been on this earth. It's no surprise, then, that sooner or later it would get the edge on me. Up to a certain point there were no problems to speak of: there were only my eyes, my nose, my mouth, and that was that. But then it began to seem that those eyes were regarding me, rather than I them; that that mouth was about to speak of things outside of my knowledge. Finally, I realized that an entirely different creature was hiding behind my face, making it wholly unrecognizable to me. Let me say that I spent considerable time reshaping my reflection into what it should be.

Later, when I was out walking, I stopped dead on the street. Ahead of me, standing beneath a lamp hanging from an old wall, was the outline of a figure of my general size and proportions. He was looking the other way but very stiffly and very tense, as if waiting anxiously for the precise moment when he would suddenly twist about-face. If that should happen, I knew what I would see: my eyes, my nose, my mouth, and behind those features a being strange beyond all description. I retraced my steps back home and went immediately to bed.

But I couldn't sleep. All night long a greenish glow radiated from the mirror in triumph.

No Date

I had just finished a book in which there is an old town strung with placid meandering canals. I closed the book and went over to the window. This is an old town, if medieval may be thought old, strung with placid meandering canals. The town depicted in the book is often enwrapped in mist. This town is often enwrapped in mist. The book's town has close crumbling houses, odd arching bridges, innumerable church towers, and narrow twisting streets that end in queer little courtyards. So has this one, needless to say. And the infinitely hollow bells in that book, tolling the arrival of each lambent morning and sullen twilight, is the same as your sounding bells, my adorable little town. Thus, I pass easily between one town and the other, pleasantly confusing them.

Oh my storybook town, how privileged I have been to suffer a few brief chapters in your sumptuous history of decay. I have studied your most obscure passages and found them as dark as the waters of your canals.

My town, my storybook, myself—how long we have held on! But it seems we will have to make up for this endurance and each, in our turn, must disappear. Every brick of yours, every bone of mine, every word in our book . . . everything gone forever. Everything, perhaps, except the sound of those bells haunting an empty mist through an eternal twilight.