The Ground Beneath Her Feet (55 page)

There’s no message, he says.

It’s not paradise, he says. It’s not so very unlike here. What I catch glimpses of through the shredding—and I’m starting to see more
clearly—I’d call them variations, moving like shadows behind the stories we know. This doesn’t have to be supernature, it doesn’t have to be god. It could be just—don’t ask me—physics, okay? It could be some physics beyond our present capacity to comprehend. It could just be I found a way of stepping outside the picture. There’s a Pop Art dance pattern piece by Amos Voight, he says. An Arthur Murray School affair with outlines and arrows, left foot right foot, you get up on to it and follow the steps. Except in this case at a certain moment all your weight’s on the foot you’re supposed to move. So the pattern doesn’t work, it’s a joke, a trap. Unless you take a foot off it, change your weight and continue. You have to break the rules, deny the frame story, smash the frame. There’s this Russian word, he says.
Vnenakhodimost
. Outsideness. It could be I found the outsideness of what we’re inside. The way out from the carnival grounds, the secret turnstile. The route through the looking glass. The technique for jumping the points, from one track to the other. Universes like parallel bars, or tv channels. Maybe there are people who can swing from bar to bar, people who can if you understand me channel-hop. Zappers. Maybe I’m a zapper myself, he says. Exercising a kind of remote control.

Remote controls for tv sets were new then. They were just beginning to be used as similes and metaphors.

What’s it like, she wants to know. The other world.

I told you, he answers, feeling the onset of the weary blues. The same only different. John Kennedy got shot eight years ago. Don’t laugh, Nixon’s President. East Pakistan recently seceded from the union. Refugees, guerrillas, genocide, all of that. And the British aren’t in Indochina, imagine that; but the war’s there all right, even if the places have different names. I don’t know how many universes there are but probably that damn war’s in every one. And Dow Chemicals and napalm bombs.
Two, four, six, eight, no more naphthene palmitate
—they’ve got another name for that too, but it burns little girls’ skins the same way. Naptate.

He says, there’s a ton of singers in sequins and eyeliner, but no trace of Zoo Harrison or Jerry Apple or Icon or The Clouds, and Lou Reed’s a
man
. There’s Hollywood but they never heard of Elrond Hubbard or Norma Desmond, and Charles Manson’s a mass murderer, and Allen Konigsberg never directed a picture and Guido Anselmi
doesn’t exist. Nor do Dedalus or Caulfield or Jim Dixon, by the way, they never wrote any books, and the classics are different too.

Vina’s eyes have been growing wider, she’s been emitting suppressed little giggles of disbelief, she can’t help it.

The Garden of Forking Paths
, he says, naming her favorite nineteenth-century novel, the interminable masterwork of the Chinese genius, the former governor of Yunnan province, Ts’ui Pen.

What about it? Don’t tell me they don’t …

(She’s actually angry: this is the last straw, her face says.)

No such book, he says, and she slams fist into palm.

Damn it, Ormus, and then she controls herself, doesn’t let her thoughts slip past her lips:
This is a joke, right. Or else you’re really mad
.

He reads her mind anyway. All my life, he says—and there’s despair dragging at his voice, distorting the way it sounds—it’s been the empire of the senses for me. What you can touch and taste and smell and hear and see. All my speeches in praise of the actual, of what is and persists, and no time for the airy-fairy. And now here in spite of it all are fairies from the fucking ether. All that is solid melts into fucking air. What am I supposed to do?

Make it sing, she says. Write it with all your heart and gift and hold on to the hooks, the catchy lyrics, the tunes. Fly me to that moon.

He sings other men’s soft, muffled odes into her consoling breast. You are my sunshine. I’m a king bee. Hold me tight.

Music will save us, she comforts him. That, and, and.

Love, he says. The word you want is love.

Yeah that was it, she grins, caressing his cheek. I knew that.

Will you marry me?

No.

Why the fuck not?

Because you’re an insane person, asshole. Go to sleep.

The world is irreconcilable, it doesn’t add up, but if we cannot agree with ourselves that it does, we can’t make judgements or choices. We can’t live.

When Ormus Cama saw his vision, he revealed himself to be a true prophet, and I say this as a dyed-in-the-wool unbeliever. I mean: he was genuinely ahead of his time. We’ve all caught up now. He isn’t here
to see them, but the contradictions in the real have become so glaring, so inescapable, that we’re all learning to take them in our stride. We go to bed thinking—just a random example—that Mr. N— M— or Mr. G— A— is a notorious terrorist, and wake up hailing him as the savior of his people. One day the islanders inhabiting a particular cold wet lump of godforsaken rock are vile devil worshippers swigging blood and sacrificing babies, the next day it’s as if nothing of the sort ever occurred. The leaders of whole countries vanish as if they never were, they’re miraculously erased from the record, and then they pop up again as talk show hosts or pizza pluggers, and lo!, they’re back in the history books again.

Certain illnesses sweep across large communities, and then we learn that no such illnesses ever existed. Men and women recover memories of having been sexually abused as children. Whoosh, no they don’t, their parents are reinstated as the most loving and laudable people you could imagine. Genocide occurs; no it doesn’t. Nuclear waste contaminates large swathes of entire continents, and we all learn words like “half-life.” But in a flash all the contamination has gone, the sheep aren’t ticking, you can happily eat your lamb chops.

The maps are wrong. Frontiers snake across disputed territory, bending and cracking. A road no longer goes where it went yesterday. A lake vanishes. Mountains rise and fall. Well-known books acquire different endings. Color bursts out of black-and-white movies. Art is a hoax. Style is substance. The dead are embarrassing. There are no dead.

You’re a sports fan but the rules are different every time you watch. You’ve got a job! No you don’t! That woman powdered the President’s johnson! In her dreams—she’s a celebrated fantasist! You’re a sex god! You’re a sex pest! She’s to die for! She’s a slut! You don’t have cancer! April Fool, yes you do! That good man in Nigeria is a murderer! That murderer in Algeria is a good man! That psycho killer is an American patriot! That American psycho is a patriot killer! And is that Pol Pot dying in the Angkoran jungle, or merely Nol Not?

These things are bad for you: sex, high-rise buildings, chocolate, lack of exercise, dictatorship, racism! No,
au contraire!
Celibacy damages the brain, high-rise buildings bring us closer to God, tests show that a bar of chocolate a day significantly improves children’s academic performance, exercise kills, tyranny is just a part of our culture so I’ll thank
you to keep your cultural-imperialist ideas off my fucking fiefdom, and as for racism, let’s not get all preachy about this, it’s better out in the open than under some grubby carpet. That extremist is a moderate! That universal right is culturally specific! This circumcised woman is culturally happy! That Aboriginal whistlecockery is culturally barbaric! Pictures don’t lie! This image has been faked! Free the press! Ban nosy journalists! The novel is dead! Honor is dead! God is dead! Aargh, they’re all alive, and they’re coming after us! That star is rising! No, she’s falling! We dined at nine! We dined at eight! You were on time! No, you were late! East is West! Up is down! Yes is No! In is Out! Lies are Truth! Hate is Love! Two and two makes five! And everything is for the best, in this best of all possible worlds.

Music will save us, and love
. When reality bites, and it bites me almost every day, I need Ormus’s music, his take. Here it is in my hand, shining like a National guitar: “Song of Everything” ’s the track I’m choosing, the first song he wrote in America, at Tempe Harbor, within days of his arrival. I’m sitting here at the end of time with my good friend Mira Celano—and there’s a lot to tell you about
her
later in the program—so, Mira, this one’s for you.

Everything you thought you knew: it’s not true. And everything you knew you said, was all in your head. And everything you did and everywhere you went, well you never ever did that and you were not sent. I think you’ll find we’re trapped in someone else’s mind. Yes I think you’ll find we’re trapped in someone else’s mind. And it’s only make-believe but we can’t leave it behind
.

Everything you think you see: it can’t be. There’s just me
.

Darling there’s just me, just me
.

In a time of constant transformation, beatitude is the joy that comes with belief, with certainty. The beatific bathe in almighty love, wear smug grins and play their harps and acoustic guitars. Safe in their cocoon from the storms of metamorphosis, the blessed give thanks for their unchangingness and ignore the leg irons biting into their ankles. It’s eternal bliss, but nix nix, you can keep that jailhouse cell. The Beats and their Generation were wrong. Beatitude is the prisoner’s surrender to his chains.

Happiness, now, that’s something else again. Happiness is human, not
divine, and the pursuit of happiness is what we might call love. This love, earthly love, is a truce between metamorphs, a temporary agreement not to shape-shift while kissing or holding hands. Love is a beach towel spread over shifting sands. Love is intimate democracy, a compact that insists on renewals, and you can be voted out overnight, however big your majority. It’s fragile, precarious, and it’s all we can get without selling our souls to one party or the other. It’s what we can have while remaining free. This is what Vina Apsara meant when she spoke of a love without trust. All treaties can be broken, all promises end up as lies. Sign nothing, make no promises. Make a provisional reconciliation, a fragile peace. If you’re lucky it might last five days; or fifty years.

I offer all this—the airplane terror and doubt, my own post facto musings, his lyrics (which some British professor calls poetry, but then there’s always a professor; to me, set down on the page without their music, they seem kind of spavined, even hamstrung)—so that you can have a sense of the amazing realizations to which Ormus Cama was quickly coming. He’d been given a second chance at life, a second act in a country whose citizens’ lives famously don’t have second acts, and he had concluded that he’d been allowed back for a purpose. Chosen. He was struggling for other language, language that didn’t imply an allower, a chooser, but the inertia in language is hard to resist, the inexorable advancing weight of its accumulated history. And all this had filled him up with new music. He was bursting with the stuff, and now that we know the stuff he was bursting with, the image of his arrival in America—that pale man in his mid-thirties with haunted eyes, still gaunt-faced and dressed in crummy bluejeans—feels like a hinge moment, around which turned so much that would become our shared experience, part of the way we saw and constructed ourselves.

Ormus Cama sees the mighty pincushion of Manhattan puncturing the haze of the high dawn air and begins to smile the smile of a man who has just discovered that his favorite fiction turns out to be no lie. As the plane banks and drops he recalls my father Vivvy Merchant’s love of Queen Catherine of Braganza, through whom Bombay and New York are forever yoked together. But this recollection fades almost at once: because from the start it was the cloudscrapers of the isle of
the Manhattoes that pricked Ormus’s heart, he shared my mother’s dream of conquering the sky, and never itched for the thronged streets of Queens, its bazaars bustling with the polyglot traffic of the world. Vina, on the other hand, Vina whom Ameer Merchant loved, never ceased to be a street urchin in her heart, even when immense celebrity forced her into its glittering cage. But New York, for Ormus, was from the beginning a doorman, an express elevator and a view. You could say it was Malabar Hill.

The city is temporarily withheld, however: in the words of Langston Hughes, a dream deferred. Yul Singh has arranged everything—documents, permissions, limousine—and has placed one of his country residences, for the purpose of “decompression,” of effecting a “soft landing,” at the disposal of the “lovebirds.” This it’s a hell of a place which I say so myself, the winery there makes a powerful Pinot Noir, you two should take time out, drink some wine, think about the future, which okay you’re not so young Ormus but the old guys are doing okay, you catch my drift, there’s potential, and with Vina beside you she’s a doll I don’t have to tell you and that voice of hers like a fuckin’ steamer horn pardon my French, it could work, no promises, it’s down to the material which I don’t have to tell you you should get to work on right away, but what the hey, take thirty-six hours, take two days, you wouldn’t believe the line of talent at my door, longer every day, you know what I’m saying, forget about it.

Ormus receives this welcoming monologue (in which Yul Singh’s tongue is shown not to be as clean as he once claimed) on the car phone in the back of a black-windowed stretch driven by one of the legendary tribe of Colchis factotums, those Americanized heavies of Punjabi descent who are Yul’s bodyguards and chauffeurs, bouncers and valets, accountants and lawyers, strategists and enforcers, publicists and A&R men; who dress in identical black Valentino suits and molded shades; and who are universally known, though never in their imposing short-fused presences, as Yul’s Sikh jokes. Will Singh, Kant Singh, Gota Singh, Beta Singh, Day Singh, Wee Singh, Singh Singh, and so on. If these are not their real names then everyone has long forgotten what those prosaic handles might have been. Ormus and Vina’s present companion is the aforementioned Will. I’ll be taking you as far as the
helipad, he says, barely turning his head. Mr. Yul’s personal Sikorsky will take care of your onward journey today.