The Brooke-Rose Omnibus (29 page)

–Well, no. The doctor says –

–The journalists.

–What journalists?

–He’d better rest now, dear.

The gall-bladders sail into space, filled with galling remarks. The worms in my head squirm and the inquisitor sharpens his beak. Don’t you remember anything? I
understood
more inside the coffin. The elasticity of shock counters the elasticity of pressure, for instance. The mass of matter resists, yes, you could call matter resistance.

–Quite. Yes, I suppose you could.

He sits at his big office desk in the admin department behind a battery of telephones in ivory, blue and grey, between two scaffoldings of metal trays like rectangular hammocks. Two secretaries tap their harmonised morse beyond the door with a round window in it. So that they can see, he says, and tell my wife, that I don’t get up to anything. He sits at his big desk and surrounds his ponderous person with diagrams, curving graphs, zigzags in red elastic, rising black bars of various heights, sliced silhouettes of people and regiments of rectangles with little coloured cards in them representing something or other that he has his tabs on.

–You see, I have a sort of scientific method too. One can’t deal with people on this scale otherwise. I like to know at a glance who works on what programme and what progress they make.

–Can you see that at a glance from where you sit?

–Why, certainly.

–You have long sight.

–Well, you as a doctor should know. But I have no intention of wearing glasses. Useful thing, long sight.

He emanates only apparent brightness. Some fifty million years or many more have run him out of hydrogen, shrunk him inside his ponderous person, increased the internal pressure and temperature so as to form heavier human elements and hence a fall in temperature, collapse and a flinging out of heavier elements until it settles down as a small bright star of high density and degenerate matter that weighs a ton per grain, like a White Dwarf. But the silent words rebound only against myself though their internal combustion pushes me along. I close my staring eyes to avoid the issue of my weariness, so he says how does it feel exactly now, Larry, with no curiosity idle or
otherwise,
to show he understands. Time heals, he says, and the scalpel scrapes into my pain.

–I can’t sleep. To avoid the issue of my death and amazing recovery, I toy with scientific trivia. Quite, he says with a paternal pat in his voice on my psychogeometrician’s head and the telephone rings. An ivory conversation ensues, surrounded by diagrams and thin zigzags in red elastic and sliced silhouettes of people which he sees at a glance from a long distance. And people operate the buzzer that operates a female voice beyond the door with the round window in it and the voice announces someone or other waiting to see him. My dear chap, he says, I only follow my instructions and whatever I had asked him to consider as to some astrophysicist or other and his personal problems remains unapprehended or dismissed. I may not know much about psychiatry but I do know what people want.

–Do you, Stance?

–Stance? Why do you call me Stance?

–Sorry. For some reason I find it hard to remember people’s names.

–Well, not to worry, what do names matter?

–Sometimes they help to hide things.

–Things? What things? You should know better than that, you deal with people too. Or would you consider yourself one of them, the scientists, I mean, who only think of things, complexes, chain-reactions, oscilloscopes,
equations?

–Equations operate through people too.

–Thank you, Someone, thank you.

–Don’t mention it.

–Oh, but I must. I always mention it when you do me proud. Don’t you remember anything?

Yes, I remember Something who sits now by the window in a shaft of street light cradling Dippermouth gently in her left arm. She bends over him and then with her right index finger slowly dials the big hand of his face right round, and then the little hand half round, and the big hand a quarter round, the little hand three quarters round. Dippermouth ticks unevenly in impulses and she listens carefully, staring into his face. She gets up, lays him down lovingly in the cot the hotel has provided, croons a little over him, bends down, to kiss him and comes back to bed.

The face framed in the round window of the door radiates silently and vanishes, leaving its peaks and flat lines of anxiety to trail swiftly across the dial, until the pain behind the eyes resolves the nervous handwriting to an optical image. The city has all the idyllic beauty of a happiness sequence. Small streets wind up and down, giving shade and high echoes. The houses kneel and join hands in white arches, slender bridges, parapets, open windows and cast-iron balconies with people leaning from them and talking to each other in the quiet tones of evening. Old women sit in doorways, watching, possessed of something.

She has brought me back to life and I walk wide-eyed, listening to the gestures of the city.

–Look, they’ve advertised you everywhere.

–What!

The picture dances at me on every poster, standing in the middle of an amphitheatre, holding a spellbound audience of Blue Giants, bright cepheids, Red Stars, White Dwarfs and all my patients ever by means of large circular gestures, gestures like triangles, gestures like parallelograms and squares. No one can hear a word except inside my head and in the spheric empty space immediately around. The acoustics cork the space, the microphone has died, the sound-waves can’t get through the layers of my atmosphere. I talk in silent bubbles like a goldfish in a bowl, contort myself in gestures but the crowd soon tires of circles, triangles and squares. They cannot hear the words that rebound in my head but I can hear their grumbles, groans, hisses, yells, their slow clapping and stamping of feet. Then the bull comes in, hoofing up cosmic dust, aiming straight at me with his huge and pointed horns. I hold my terror out at him and plead with sentences that curl around him and bounce off the crowd in rhythm like a drum. I contort myself, create situations, strike attitudes and make circular gestures in wild colours. The crowd screams for my blood. Does everyone want my miserable corpuscles? The bull lunges at me, plunges his horn into my midriff, tosses me up and throws me at the crowd that yells and sits on me, good people.

Something bends over me.

–How do you feel?

–Terrible. Oh, my God, why did you have to do that?

–I didn’t do anything.

–No, you left me to it.

–You had an omen, Someone, you must take note of it.

–If you think I can sit here calmly and interpret omens! I died, I tell you, I died.

–You seem to make a habit of it.

–Why do you keep testing me, Something? What have I done to you? What have I to do with you?

–We belong together.

–I thought you called this the happiness sequence.

–No, you did, Someone.

–Lulling me into a sense of false security. What do you expect of me, for heaven’s sake? Who did you dial last night? Who do you work for?

–For you, Someone, only for you. For us. I feel so proud of you.

–Proud of me? Ha!

–You killed the bull.

–I didn’t. It killed me.

–You always drop the curtain before the end of the show. How do you expect us to communicate if you don’t let the argument develop? Get up, look at yourself, you haven’t even got a scar, except your old one, your birthmark, such a nice little birthmark too. Get up, look around you. Look, listen, Someone, take in, and think about what you see. Something who bends over Dippermouth in the hotel room that night, that day, that night. She bends over him and dials his face with love and anxiety. I don’t know what she sees in him. He ticks away with his irregular morse and it ticks through my neural cells along the muscles of my exasperation with her. That night, that day, that night the messages change their chemistry of atoms and the rhythm quietens to a sullen poison. Get up, look, listen, Someone, and think about what you see.

–Get up. Look. Listen. Think. All right, I have listened and thought. Thought this. That I go my own way from now on. You understand?

–I understand.

–Don’t suppose … I mean, I hope –

–Goodbye, Someone. Say goodbye to your father, Dippermouth.

–See you, dad.

He does. He sees me in the amphitheatre, all dark and empty now, watching the harvest moon big and balanced on the outer rim of hi, dad.

–Go away, Dippermouth, I want to think.

–Can I think with you, dad?

–No, I don’t want you.

–But you’ve got me, dad. Sometimes, of course, I’ve got you, ha!

–I don’t care who’s got whom. Go away. She should know better than to send you.

–She didn’t send me, dad, you’ve got me. The alarm may go off at any minute.

–What alarm? I haven’t touched you.

–You’ll have to wake up, though, everyone does.

–As if I believed that. Wicked stories to frighten kids like you. I haven’t done anything.

–You’ve done me.

–I haven’t touched you.

–No. You’ve forgotten me, haven’t you, dad?

–I haven’t forgotten you. I just want you to shut up.

–I shall scream for attention in five seconds from now, just like you deep inside yourself.

–I never scream for attention.

–Everyone does, dad, things come back, boomerang, boomerang, three two one zero. He dips his mouth and screams.

I hit him hard across his stupid dial. The needles oscillate violently, swing round with a loud creak, the alarm shrieks then goes suddenly silent, the whole machinery slows down to an intermittent tick as Dippermouth falls and all his brain uncoils over the crumbling stones of the amphitheatre ground. The creaking of the hands turns to a rattling splutter until at last the ticking comes to a full stop. The harvest moon rides high and silent as I sit and howl at it like a child of three.

My wife visits me every day, I think, how do you feel, she says, and things like that. She brings me grapes and oranges. The grapes I suck the pulp of, leaving the deflated skins they won’t allow me to swallow, I remember that. The oranges she peels for me in segments and it aches the muscles of my heart to watch her but why me?

–I don’t know, darling. Nobody knows these things.

–Oh, things … Have people come? The journalists.

–What journalists?

–He’d better rest now, dear.

The gall-bladders sail into space, filled with galling remarks. But what do they accuse me of? I haven’t done anything. The worms in my head squirm. I remember –

–Yes, darling?

–I remember something.

–What, darling? Try to remember. The psychiatrist says–

–The what?

–The hospital psychiatrist.

–Oh, no, not that. Tell him to go away. I know the names of things.

–Of course you do, darling. But he says – well the surgeon says you mustn’t talk, and the psychiatrist says you must, otherwise the shock –

–will … counter … the elasticity … of pressure.

–Something like that.

–Something …

–Yes, darling?

–The spheres … it all goes round.

–Close your eyes. Try to remember. He said I should, I mean, that, with me you might …

–So you still follow secret instructions?

–Not secret, darling, not against you. For you. Nobody –

–I must … exercise my … meridians.

–Yes?

She writes things down in a small book. She dials secret numbers and works out the laws that I have bent and broken, the shock will counter, mass times velocity, time heals, and things like Larry, it all came as such a shock.

–Pressure.

–But the man said he couldn’t sleep, he swore he’d seen you breathing.

–I breathe all the time, unbeknown to you.

–I know, darling, you did, you do. I gave you the … kiss of life, Larry. But he said you’d breathed before. You looked so dead, darling, so very dead. Three days. It came as such a –

–shock.

–And then they didn’t believe me.

–No, they wouldn’t. Not without photographic evidence. But she wouldn’t allow me. Breathe in, she said, madam, you shall not sit on me.

–Sorry.

She removes her hand from my arm. She dials secret numbers and listens to the laws transmitted from the centre. Who do you work for now?

–Who? Larry, I work in the same place, for Professor Head. In the automation room. Don’t you remember anything? Oh yes, the little orange lights flickering like stars on the big grey control panel, each over clear white lettering that says Hot Spots, Erase, Inhibit, Alarm Reset, Auto Man, Emergency Off, Next Instruction and things like that. And the face in the round window of the door leaves a trail of anxiety bleeping across the dial in flattened lines that bulge suddenly into peaks like the nervous
handwriting
of distant nebulae. It comes from way beyond the visual range, in which the layers of my atmosphere distort the light-waves travelling through it and upset the definition. But something creaks, the coffin-lid opening, Larry, can you remember that? You see, the man said, the man from the hospital morgue I mean, he said he couldn’t sleep. He’d let you go and they’d nailed down the coffin. So he went to see the doctors but –

–Those hands …

–Yes, they’d signed the certificate. So he came to me and, well, they thought I’d gone out of my mind with grief. But I had my rights. I insisted … Oh Larry. I nearly had you cremated.

–Now, now, my dear, you promised. I thought I could trust you.

–I couldn’t help it, doctor, he wormed the story out of me. Surely, surely, well, what difference does it make?

The strip-cartoon of cubic rooms with the gall-bladders in them slips to the left. You could raise the cubic room to the fifth power simply by letting A run down and B wind up and adding the pyramid numbers. Then the strip story would end to be continued in our next life where I have no name but darkness. They have removed the scaffolding of tubes around me, out of mouth, throat, wrists, belly and private parts. I must have died since then. They have removed the great big chromium drum that gurgled to the left and the dials behind, where someone read the nervous handwriting of all my atoms and jotted down their infinite calculations. But what do they accuse me of? Why me?