The Brooke-Rose Omnibus (33 page)

–Twenty-five to five. Not bad going for a beginner. My first operation.

–Oh, Someone, thank you. I thought I’d lost the square root of my time.

–You love Dippermouth best, don’t you, Something!

–I love him … as the first born.

–What about Gut Bucket?

–I love him too.

–And me?

–Of course I love you, Someone, you know I do. But love has different aspects.

I love Potato Head. The only child of mine so far I have actually felt reborn, she fills me with a tenderness that brims right out of me whenever I see her. At twelve years old she seems remarkably small, but Something tells me this comes from her weaker sex and she will grow in effort, rather than time and space. Gut Bucket stares anxiously, as if ready to receive her death inside his shining depth at any moment.

The café looks remarkably large for the edge of the town. Perhaps the centre lies at the circumference, or in the left focus of an ellipse. The people come and go, good people, or pretend to, meeting professional friends who can count and therefore know them better than those who merely profess friendship but can’t read inscriptions or secret laws like momentum equals mass time velocity. Hands shake, smoke wisps, voices swim for dear life. Some sit in corners writing the story of their death and amazing recovery but they don’t include me because the patterns in the table’s dark grey marble makes no sense and time has chipped the edges so that I pour the molecules of my tenderness into Potato Head. May I wish you a long life and many good years after. I thought I recognised you. Thank you for coming back.

–Thank you for recognising me. A little recognition can do a lot for a man with a wife and three children.

–Three? Only three? Tut-tut, the rich live young. I deal in local stuff. I never go anywhere, I just fill up the buckets and do the irrigation around here. The cistern doesn’t work, you see.

–Couldn’t I help? You helped me. I have acquired a little surgical talent since I saw you last. So I climb on the lavatory seat and lift the cistern lid. The water trickles loudly in to fill the tank and never stops, and never fills the tank. Let
a
stand for the tank’s cubic capacity,
c
for the speed of light, and in no time at all you have eternity or
thereabouts.
The ball has got unhooked and dropped right down into the empty bladder which explains the gurgling sound. Pliers. Scalpel. Fingers. Wire. Needle and thread. A simple operation. Out it comes. But what, no ticking? His heart has stopped, Someone. Oh dear. No, no, I’ll massage it. Fingers. Ah. Thank you. Gently, now gently does it. Touch and press, lightly dip, not too deep, lift the tip and touch, press, dip, lift. The gurgle leaps back like a clock-tick heard after a heavy concentration, wire, needle and thread. The water trickles into the empty bladder and the ball rises slowly on its surface. I pull the chain, the lavatory flushes full, I flush with pride, the attendant with overwhelming gratitude. I step down from the podium and he shakes my hand. You’ve done me proud, he says. Gut Bucket dances with delight and thumps his thorax, you’ve done it pop, oh pop, look, listen.

The whole town flushes with delight. The streets move quickly full of signs and wonders in mass morse. Somewhere up in the centre Base Headquarters disgorge the twisting teleprinter tape that flows its messages, commands,
instructions
to the citizens. Lazarus check known as quote Larry unquote has restored repeat restored the flow of energy stop read communication unread despite some degree of clogging in the system still three cheers hip hip for Lazarus and his daily friends good people all stop new para without end.

The ticker tape whirls its welcome and the streets move fast with people in mass morse. The jerking rhythm smoothes itself into canals and I help Something with Potato Head in her arms onto the punt. Dippermouth still pale from his operation ticks away quietly on the front cushion and Gut Bucket jumps in after. They trust my navigation for I can’t go wrong on the punt-wide canal with houses
hurraying
on each side.

When we come to the T-bend in the meadow we can’t turn without breaking the punt in two. We’ll have to call the canal-pilot. Something says what a bore, I don’t want white monks breathing down my neck. But the white monk patters down the white monastery steps and doesn’t breathe at all, he belongs to a silent order, good, I collect silences, and takes a flying leap into the back of the punt so that the front, with Something, Dippermouth and Potato Head rises up dangerously. He steps left a little to steer the front over the T-bend then steps right a little to steady it. Then he runs down the punt and dips it over the T-bend and into the canal again, a bit too steep, for the punt fills with water. Something grabs Dippermouth but in the shock loses Potato Head who falls into the canal. Quick, Gut Bucket, bale as fast as you can.

I dive for Potato Head who has sunk like a stone. I grope blindly about, find her and swim for dear life up through the murky water, where furry caterpillars crawl, stones float in gall, green horse-flies flurry past my lips and ears, I hand her dripping to her distraught mother. Something bends over her, whispering or breathing perhaps the kiss of life. Will she die, dad, Dippermouth ticks anxiously as Potato Head’s transparent shape absorbs the sap. She mustn’t, she mustn’t. Let me see her, dad, I haven’t seen her yet. And he smiles his ten to two smile at Potato Head who splutters, coughs and breathes. She has small eyes, one closed, the other oozes an unseeing tear.

–They’ve blinded her!

–No, Someone. She came blind to us. Or almost blind.

–But –

–You never noticed. I didn’t like to tell you.

The punt drifts on up the canal. I let it drift. Gut Bucket sits alone, baled out, on the flat prow. Dippermouth ticks away with his mouth trembling at twenty to four, twenty past eight, who knows, like the lock-gates we come to sailing into their open arms. Something calls out, Jonas, Jonas, we’ve arrived again.

Jonas has lost his horn, his voice, he says in gravelly tones, Ah’s keep nothing, Ah sure done swallow an oceanful of sand crossing Jordan in dat big big fish.

–You do keep things, Jonas, I know you do. Try, Jonas, try, just enough to let us through.

Jonas gives a big sigh, then clears his throat with a great grinding wheeze that closes the lock-gates behind us. In his gravelly tones he sings the blues of life as we sink
imperceptibly
with the surface of the water in the punt-wide lock until the bar of sky seems far, very far up, Jonas peering over the brink like a harvest moon.

–You will tell posterity, won’t you?

–Tell them what, Something, how my heart sinks?

–About yourself, Lazarus, yourself and me.

I said to my soul shut up.

At last the second gates open their inverted arms and I pass out into the lower canal. My wife lies quiet beside me. Her left arm accolades my chest and her face burrows into my right arm. Awake she doesn’t come so near, she flinches from my breath that smells of my decay. I crumble
internally,
my inside body feels like a giant horse-fly falling into dust.

I fear a second death. The first came easily unawares, but to have to do it all again, and without quite remembering just what, except a certain blindness, deafness, inability to speak perhaps through a cleft palate or something, fills me with terror. And yet I fear a second life more than I fear my death. Why me, I fear those fumbling, healing hands, why couldn’t you let me lie in my silent decay and darkness? I have acquired a painful sensitivity to noise, to radiation and to the taste of love degrading itself away in men and in myself until it levels itself completely and no shocks occur, no movement and no life around my staring eyes and I work out the square root of my time.

My wife lies at my side not flinching from me in her sleep, but I can hear the poison of his unimaginativeness race round like gall and choke the permutations of her chemistry as the little orange lights flicker above the programming of her basic urges with Erase, Shift Count, Inhibit, Pot Drawer and things like that during and after the banality of their untender story, so that she snarls more and more nastily as nothing radiates through the layers of his atmosphere, the high density, low luminosity of
degenerate
matter, as in a White Dwarf me? Impossible, I belong to the main sequence. Or, more likely, what did you expect, a Blue Giant?

I wonder if the taste of love on other planets degrades itself away until no shocks occur, no movement and no life. Their handwriting reads nervously on dials, but then it all depends what you expect to see or hear, for the world cocks a posterior horn at distances, blocking its blood vessels, nerve fibres, muscle spindles, tendons and ganglia with primitive acts and noises. Sometimes I think that during my death I became Stance. Stance? I mean, you know. I had to perhaps, in order to understand the half-baked men you choose. I don’t choose them, they chose me. Well. I should feel flattered, and do in a way, that you never give me a rival I can take seriously. Yet in another way I would feel more flattered if you did. Rather than waste yourself. You, with your, what? well, energy, imagination quite fertile and experience, oh, experience, she says, the full scepticism of the scientist in her, flattery, education, and things like that, they teach us nothing, we start with zero each time, treat it as something and in no time at all we have an infinity of humiliation or thereabouts, which perhaps we need in order to start back at zero. Something always comes out of nothing. And I remember, what, out of time somewhere I have a daughter.

–What do you mean? Of course you have a daughter. Patricia. And a son, at college. Have you forgotten them?

–Oh, yes. I mean, no. I only remembered …

–Did you dream something?

–You know I never dream.

–You mean, since your training analysis, you’ve trained yourself to forget. You know research has shown everyone dreams –

–No. I mean that someone has deprived me of my dreams, during my death. As if I had left something behind. I know it sounds odd but –

–Yes, well it does. You get odder and odder. Ever since –

She lapses into silence, avoiding the issue of my death and amazing recovery.

–But, what I meant to say, about Professor Head –

–Professor Head? What’s he got to do with it?

–I don’t know. Forget it.

–Well, we all need father-figures, she says with
self-disparaging
simplicity. They come and go just as fathers do, or pretend to. They don’t have to have character as well.

She wastes herself, out of a feeling that I waste her, but energy works that way. I don’t know what wastes me, my eyes full of something I can’t remember, my eyes that see like giant posterior horns cocked by the world beyond the red shift of people’s inmost essence which with the
degradation
of intensity, as speed increases, means that less and less of the light actually emitted reaches us. Look at it this way, Laurence, we tap the silent telephones of outer space, but only, if I may put it simply for you, with a pin through an apple. The rest of the universe has gone for ever in both space and time, beyond our reach. How can we hope to photograph creation?

He holds the calculations an inch away from his eye and peers at them through five-dimensional glasses.

–I feel a great concern, Laurence, about our friend, Tim Dekko.

–His work, you mean, or –?

–Both, both, my boy, they always go together. Life balances all things, as you well know. He has begun to diverge, to lean a little towards the Steady State Theory, in opposition, of course, to me, but clearly he forgot the master-card when he fed in this stuff. These permutations make no sense. No sense at all.

–Couldn’t my wife put them through again when he goes home? He needn’t know.

–Home, yes. Nice home he has. Attractive daughters, wife. Pity.

–But Stance won’t get anywhere with her.

–Stance, you call him? Yes. Good name. Good man, too, except for, well, we all have our weaknesses. Still, as you know, life balances all things. Dekko asked for it, yes indeed, poor man. Can you help him at all, Laurence?

–I don’t seem able to get through to him, sir.

–Quite so. Quite so. He waits for me to die, poor man, to step into my shoes. Well, that would help, certainly. But unfortunately I can’t exactly choose the moment. You didn’t, did you, Laurence?

–No, sir.

–No, no, I thought not. Though one never knows. I don’t imagine you chose to come back either. Dear me, these doctors keep one alive far too long, so tiresome for promotion, when one has played out one’s genius I mean. Of course I could retire, no doubt he thinks I should. D’you think I should, Laurence?

–No, sir.

–Hmm. In the old days one died before retirement age, of pneumonia, influenza, anything could do it. What did you die of, Laurence?

–My heart stopped, sir. I mean, forgive me, during an operation. They opened me up quickly there and massaged it, so they told me, but in vain. Apparently.

–Ah yes, indeed. I have no memory for physiological detail these days, despite my own ailments, or perhaps on account of trying to forget them. Dear me, how did we get on to this, most unscientific, ah yes, Dekko.

–I don’t know the way to his heart.

–No. No. He does wrap it up, rather. How shall we peel away those outer layers of atmosphere, Laurence?

–Perhaps, well, through recognition. A little recognition can do a lot for a man with a wife and three children.

–Not to mention, yes, well. Couldn’t you, perhaps, with your unsettling eyes, decoy the blonde?

–No, sir.

–No, I thought not. And nor, of course, can I. Pity that Stance … a most unmathematical man, balancing things the wrong way about. Well, well. Recognition, yes. Though recognition usually adds further layers to people. But how can we recognise him, Laurence? I’ve tried praise at every turn, even when I disagree, but he absorbs it straight into those tight layers of his and gives nothing out. Besides his work falls off.