Jonestown (30 page)

‘What are you up to, Deacon? Do you think you can deceive us again? What Dream-book?'

‘Please,' I asked. ‘Come to the point. Tell me why you have arrested me and what this trial is all about.'

‘You live in and out of your Dream-book, Deacon,' they said with a harsh voice and humour like keys grating in prison locks. ‘
Well
it's
time
to
come
out
and
stay
there.
'
They were mocking me I knew.

But there was more to it than the bite of mockery. There was a long and incredible pause in which Silence entered my voice as I confessed.

‘Yes,' I agreed, ‘come out, it's true, on the other side of Dream, the other side where Dread stands. The trial. The judgement. On the other side of Dream.
Not
the other side of the grave. On the other side of Dream one lives, one
is
beyond all “beyonds” within a measure of measureless counterpoint between all extremities.'

My judges remained severe, unrelenting. Even as my
Skeleton-twin
had rebuffed me, but I knew now that rebuff and severity were part and parcel of extremity. How else would the immensity of counterpoint between all places, all extremities, prevail if one's judges were less than severe?

‘We tell you straight,' my judges cried. ‘Forty years ago, Deacon, we helped you to gain a fortune.'

‘I have no fortune. I am poor.'

They ignored my remark.

‘We helped you to gain a fortune,' they insisted. ‘Roraima is the mother of Scorpions. The dread and fourth Virgin …'

‘On the other side of Dream,' I confessed. ‘There she teaches me that Love can scarcely be borne, it is so infinite. It is Compassion,
yet beyond all riddles and expectations of Compassion.'

‘We do not know what she teaches you, Deacon – you who claim to have fallen from the stars – but she taught us that without inoculation with the venom of the Scorpion you would be unable to climb the Rock …'

‘A misreading of the Scorpion Constellation,' I said. ‘On the other side of Dream Roraima, the dread mother of Compassion, heals Mankind with and through all creatures in whose obscurity of soul repentance is the farthermost evolution Mind – despite its addiction to cruelty – may begin to contemplate …'

My judges were smiling now at the Fool I was.

‘We see you
do
recall the folklore of your region. So much for your plea of amnesia.'

I was stung into protest. ‘I never said I had forgotten
everything
. Partial amnesia. I had not forgotten
pain
, mental pain, and this was enough to keep me going and to give me the impetus to put myself in the shoes of the people of Jonestown on the Day of the Dead in a Play of extremities that sought to come abreast of their and my predicament. They were alive in me. So was Deacon in a variety of particularity. And Jonah …'

I stopped for an instant under the veiled gaze and unsmiling lips of my judges.

‘Deacon,' I said, ‘was the father of Marie's Child. This I knew, this I remembered. But – here's the rub in eclipses of Memory that I had to endure – I suffered a void or a blank as to what actually happened to their Child, what illness. Child mortality throughout this century and past generations has been high in the Guyanas! Malaria is a species of predator. The building of Jonestown I knew was a kind of memorial for Deacon. But even there the circumstances grew vague for me after the holocaust. How to blend a memorial to a Child with the inferno! On the other side of Dream perhaps where I now stand … Jonestown was a memorial for me too when we started building … A memorial to my mother and the beggars and children she cared for in
Albuoys-town
. Once again how to blend a memorial dedicated to care with hell or the inferno. On the other side of Dream where we may arrive in the life of the Imagination … So you see there were
eclipses and gaps in Memory theatre that I sought to fill within an original enterprise back into time yet forwards in changing dimensionalities of past time.
I
am
not
Deacon.
Can you see?'

‘You are Deacon. We won't be deceived again. We helped you …'

‘How did you help me? How did you help Deacon?'

‘We
helped
you
by
arranging
for
an
Arawak
Doctor
or
shaman
to
inoculate
you
with
the
venom
of
the
Scorpion.
Roraima is infested with scorpions. It is also a garden of rare treasures, exquisite plants, leaves, exquisite fossils of the soul of living landscapes. You were at liberty then to climb the great Rock, or mother of the Guyanas, to climb with scorpions riding on your back, on your limbs, at your throat. You were immune to their bite. Immune to pain. Their bite was nothing. It was as if you reached into and climbed Nothing. You climbed the greatest living fossil
Apparition
that takes us back to the rock of ages. You rifled it. You secured all you could carry. You secreted gold in your mouth, in the crevices of your body, everywhere.
We
helped
you
and
we
warned
you.'

‘Warned me?'

‘We warned you, Deacon, that inoculation with the venom of the Scorpion forbids intercourse with women, with your Virgin wife Marie,
it
forbids
your
touching
an
infant
in
the
cradle.
It's the curse of El Doradonne Midas secreted in Roraima …'

‘Oh my God,' I cried to heaven.
‘I
remember
now.
I see now through Deacon's blind eyes in the Play on the other side of Dream. He forgot the shaman's warning. I remember. I see through his blind eyes in the Play. The Play's the thing, the real world beyond all real worlds.
That
is
the
innermost,
outermost,
vocation
of
trial
and
judgement
in
fiction.
Or else fiction is dead. One must re-imagine death as a live fossil apparition. Imagination Dead Imagine. Deacon returned on the day that the Child was born, he lifted it into his arms. He felt himself superior to all curses. And the infant stiffened in his arms. A stone leaf grew where its face was, the face of the Child at the edge of Roraima. I saw it yet I did not see it in the exquisite garden of treasures, the most precious treasure of which is the soul of living landscapes
which we abuse at the drop of a hat. Nemesis Hat! How can I bear it? How can I bear such knowledge in the Play? On the other side of Dream where a measureless counterpoint exists between all extremities …' My eyes were light but I was weeping.

‘When the news of the death of the Child,' said my judges, ‘seeped through to the waiting populace they turned upon you with a vengeance. They sought to tear you limb from limb, Deacon.
You
had become their Prisoner. But you escaped with the Titan's (Jonah's) help. He was able to bar them out. He was an American! We warned you but you forgot or ignored the curse.' They stared at me with a veiled but savage humour. ‘Did you suffer another Eclipse of Memory, Deacon, when you lost the Child and were driven from your wife? You hid in the Shadow of a great Cat that covered the sun. Rich folklore, Deacon, but you won't deceive us again. We have brought you out. Out into broad daylight in the setting sun …'

‘I am not Deacon,' I cried for the last time in the Play.

‘Who then is to be tried and judged? If not Deacon, who? Does no one claim the part? Is everyone innocent, no one guilty or responsible?'

I was still. I was a mere Colonial. Not an Imperialist. My limbs had aged nevertheless under the burden of Eclipses of Memory. Are Colonials the only potential creators of the genius of Memory theatre? I was weak but I had gained the other side of the Dream.

‘Who then are we to judge?'

‘Judge me,' I said at last. ‘I am here before you. I have nothing. I am poor. Judge me. It is no accident.'

They took me without further ado to the edge of the cliff. The sun was still high though setting on the Skin of the Predator. It shone there, it was imprinted there. It was alive. It fell with me, the Predator fell with me, when their hands, the judges' hands, drove me over the edge of the cliff. Black-out music. Black soul music. I fell into a net of music, the net of the huntsman Christ. The Predator peered through me, in me, but was held at bay in the net. We stood face to face, Dread and I, Predator and I. Old age and youth parted and I was naked in the lighted Darkness of the Self. The Child rode on the Predator's groaning back. Lightness
becomes a new burden upon the extremities of galaxies in which humanity sees itself attuned to the sources and origins of every memorial star that takes it closer and closer – however far removed – to the unfathomable body of the Creator.

Wilson Harris was born in 1921 in the former colony of British Guiana. He was a land surveyor before leaving for England in 1959 to become a full-time writer. His exploration of the dense forests, rivers and vast savannahs of the Guyanese hinterland features prominently in the settings of his fiction. Harris’s novels are complex, alluding to diverse mythologies from different cultures, and eschew conventional narration in favour of shifting interwoven voices. His first novel
Palace of the Peacock
(1960) became the first of
The Guyana Quartet
, which includes
The Far Journey of Oudin
(1961),
The Whole Armour
(1962) and
The Secret Ladder
(1963). He later wrote
The Carnival Trilogy (Carnival
(1985),
The Infinite Rehearsal
(1987) and
The Four Banks of the River of Space
(1990)). His most recent novels are
Jonestown
(1996), which tells of the mass-suicide of a thousand followers of cult leader Jim Jones;
The Dark Jester
(2001), his latest semi-autobiographical novel,
The Mask of the Beggar
(2003), and one of his most accessible novels in decades,
The Ghost of Memory
(2006). Wilson Harris also writes non-fiction and critical essays and has been awarded honorary doctorates by several universities, including the University of the West Indies (1984) and the University of Liège (2001). He has twice been winner of the Guyana Prize for Literature.