Jonestown (8 page)

I hesitated for a long while and then I found the confidence to speak.

‘I would say,’ I began hesitantly, pulling a loose thread from my Nemesis Bag and letting it fall to the ground, ‘that all the ingredients of uncertainty that you stress, Mr Mageye, are woven into a car crash – as into the wreck of the
Argo
– into …’ I hesitated … ‘into wars and rumours of war across the sea, into submarines and the shadow of fleets patrolling the Atlantic seaboard of South America. No wonder the Old God hovers in
space only to be seized by the Inspector and placed in a cell.’ I stopped, but then it occurred to me to lay bare my heart to Mr Mageye. ‘That Prisoner or Old God wrestles with the Doctor and the Inspector to claim Marie as his Virgin daughter …’

There was much more that I wished to say, my desire for Marie even before I met her, my jealousy of Deacon, but Mr Mageye interrupted – ‘Look! there they are.’

It suddenly occurred to me – as in a Jest of Dream – that my jealousy of Deacon had helped to flesh out the occasion, to give content to both Deacon and Marie in the backward sweep of years since I began to write. There they were indeed, large as life, within the raining, mist-filled savannahs in which Mr Mageye and I stood invisible to them.

We were I calculated halfway between Crabwood Creek and Port Mourant.

Deacon was naked. The tattooed Scorpion Constellation shone darkly on his child’s arm. On the other monstrous, heroic arm stood the double star Aldebaran associated with Taurus, but the Bull had been overturned into Horses on the Moon. I was able to draw close to him with Mr Mageye’s assistance and to read every pore in his body.

Deacon had abandoned his school uniform to come into his own as the masterful child-bridegroom who secures the Virgin of the Wild on her appearance at the end of every long, searing drought when the rains commence.

Deacon had paused as if locked into the thread of my glance. But he shot forward again in my Dream-book. Mr Mageye (Camera in hand) was out of sight – as on a film set – and I (in my Nemesis Hat) kept in touch (though I was invisible to him). Such are the wonders of technology and science within futuristic strategies of the Imagination.

He ran with a miraculous stride. Amazing to maintain his stride on the slippery path that he had taken. But the long drought had hardened the ground. The water table was low and it would take a day or two at least for the soil to change into an ankle-deep rich overflowing sponge.

The rain swept all around as if sky and cloud had been broken
in cosmic theatre to provide a Waterfalling shower in the eye of the Camera down which Deacon had floated and come when he fell as an infant in space. Now he was in his tenth cosmic year and destiny was to equip him with a lasso to seize the Horses of the Moon and bring them showering and hoofing their way to Earth.

I saw the affianced child-bride in the corner of my eye. The rain swung into an encircling perimeter around her, the rain lessened, the ground acquired the look of a mirroring, flat wave as if a portion of the sky had fallen to the ground.

Deacon saw her now clearly. She was naked as he was. She too had abandoned her uniform, a child’s nurse’s uniform which the Doctor, her adoptive father, had given her to wear when she assisted him in the Port Mourant hospital after school.

Deacon stopped upon the perimeter. Carven into momentary astonishment. He had not seen her naked before. He knew her from school but she was not the same child that he took for granted when the Doctor-God and his savannah parents met to seal the promise of selves (savannah-self, Godself) in marriage.

His lithe body responded to hers by sheathing itself all at once in wings that blew around him as if a bird, an eagle, a fluid eagle, perched on his head in a fountain of mist as the rain appeared to boil around his ankles in the rising heat of the soil.

Marie began to dance on the mirror. She danced upon a portion of sky, skin of the shining rain on the ground. Her feet were suddenly and lightly and mysteriously laced with three threads that fell from my Nemesis Hat. They were the colour of velvet. Yet the springing grass of slenderest blades of rain were silver. The blades of grass from my mother’s grave levitated and fell from the sky. The blades of grass from Mr Mageye’s grave levitated and fell from the sky. Despite such beauty I was stricken by heart-rending grief. I felt the strangest foreboding. And I would have fired a bullet – if I had possessed one – at Deacon and swept his affianced bride into my arms.

Deacon moved and edged his wings into the mirror on which the Virgin of the Wild was dancing. A long plait of loose hair fell down her back from the nape of her neck to her waist. It was the colour of the mane of a Moon-horse that shook itself and encircled
my head. Why me? How was I tied to her? By what fate, or trial of spirit, or torment of freedom?

Deacon seemed to glide and reach for her hair upon the fantastic mirror. He swept it from my brow even as – with a mocking glance – he seemed to nail it into the space where I stood invisible to him. The nail pierced me to the Bone. I cried for immunity to pain such as Deacon appeared to possess.

Marie swirled and the nail fell from my head into Deacon’s wing. He may have felt no pain in the Shadow of the Scorpion but he stumbled and was unable to bind her to him in this instant of a doubling of stars in the sky or mirror on the ground, Aldebaran’s twin stars in which I played an invisible role, twinned to a fallen angel.

The lessening rain and slightly clearing sky brought the pool of the Moon onto the ground. Deacon darted forward as if he flew or danced on water – his wing free again – and he held the Virgin’s hair at last. But when he sought to draw her to him, in the theatre of the Moon, she dazzled him and thrust him away. They encircled each other, sometimes upon the perimeter within which they danced, sometimes upon an upright Wheel as though the flat circle or perimeter inclined itself into a vertical dimension, a wheeling dimension.

Step by step the Horses of the Moon materialized as a turbulent extension of the Passion of the dance. A haunch grafted itself into the archetypal momentum of cavalry of fate. Such apparently insoluble archetypes were native to ancient and modern
civilizations
and they drew Marie’s Wheel in the dance.

Horses akin to Cortez’s troop fleshed themselves into a scale of grafts within apparitions on the Moon.

Horses akin to Genghis Khan’s hillsides rose into shoulders and necks around the edges of the Moon.

Eyes of flashing, poisoned gold sprang from the bodies of Alexander’s infantry upon Darius’s wheeling chariots beneath Marie’s fleet foot.

From every corner of legend and history arose an assembly of the parts of engines of flesh, jigsaw cavalries, ribs, equine muscularities, bunched muscles, grapelike memories of blood,
tanned, leathern proportions, giving substance to the terrible Horses of the Moon within which Deacon and Marie pursued each other in their dance.

No horses in Chichén Itzá but the dreaded Chac Mool possessed the countenance of a Chimera, half-human, half-horse. Chac Mool was a signal of militaristic atrocity in the Maya world and it foretold the decline of a civilization.

Who were the riders, who were the giants of Chaos upon such Horses? Were they Deacon’s kith and kin in heaven and upon earth? Were they Marie’s dangerous host and accompaniment of furies? Furies are omens, signatures of uncanny foreboding, and they tend to arrive hand in hand with Virgins of the Wilderness whose untameable spirituality in nature is misconceived for brute violence.

Were the riders princes of Carnival Lord Death’s regime in theatres of history, were they dictators in South America, were they solid, stable riggers of elections in Nigeria and elsewhere, were they Amens or Amins, were they gagged priests, gagged popes, gagged bishops, bankers, statesmen, scientists, crusaders, evangelists?

Or were they shepherds from times immemorial, poor
labouring
folk in the savannahs of Guyana since El Dorado fashioned its whip to encircle the slaves who dug the earth, rode the earth from cradle to grave with an eye on the stars for the coming of a saviour, a saviour susceptible to miscasting in the theatres of Church and State, miscast as warrior-crusader-priest?

The poor, labouring, awkward folk seemed to Mr Mageye and to me to combine dictatorship and feudal features in themselves as they rode the Horses. They were also uncanny judges of themselves and others. They were submissive to Deacon now as they rode the Horses, rode the lotteries on the Moon, rode expectations of fortune on the Moon, but I felt – as though I were on trial – that they were capable of breaking themselves, melting themselves, reshaping themselves, in order to judge him in themselves, bring him before them on the Moon.

‘Why the Moon?’ I asked Mr Mageye. ‘Why not the Earth?’

‘In a Universe that quarrels with itself in Carnival sciences the
Moon is a ripe theatre, the Moon drifts to Earth, drifts into a sphere of incredible theatre and gravity, a space-station, if you like, within a quarrel of dimensions that plague us …’

Marie was now under the hoofs of the Horses ridden by controversial, pathetic, victimized, victimizing, paradoxical
self-judges
and giants of chaos. She slipped through them unhurt but saw the danger to humanity in the triumph of the warrior-angel that Deacon was. She was now betrothed to him as the dance confirmed. It was too late to turn back. She was destined – according to folklore legends – to bear him a child, the people’s promised child that would herald his departure from her, in dread circumstances, to build a new Rome in South America in alliance with an American warrior-priest from San Francisco and
left-handed
Bone from Albuoystown.

It was a prophecy that was unclear to her. Unclear to me. I should have remembered the past in coming from the future but the trauma that I suffered in Jonestown had wiped a page or pages from my mind and those blank spaces or chapters filled my Dream-book with renewed foreboding.

‘Am I left-handed Bone?’ I cried. I should have known better than to indulge in self-pity. Mr Mageye did not reply. A
Sphinx-like
look came upon his face, a gentle hand on my brow…

Marie slipped through the Horses’ hoofs even as she saw the danger. She saw – within her untameable beauty – the grief in the Womb of Space (when space quarrels with itself and becomes a potential series of battlefields).

I drew close to her and succeeded in helping her secure a triangular seat within the Wheel even as it spun.
I
swore
she
saw
me.
She turned her mysterious and wonderful and grateful eyes upon me.
She
knew
me.
But then I wondered. Did she mistake me for Deacon whose shadowy Mask fell upon her? Winged, Shadowy Mask? Black? Yet pale and silvery as the feathers around his Beak?

I placed my shoulders to the Wheel and gave it an additional push. It flashed. It flashed through the limbs of the great Horses and their riders. And she was gone in a flash. Back to her nurse’s uniform in Port Mourant Hospital.

Deacon’s venom rose with Marie’s flight and helped to harden his heart for an enterprise that lay before him: the capture of the Horses of the Moon and their riders …

He had secured a long thread of hair from Marie’s head. The rain had ceased and he would need to take full advantage of the respite to perfect the task on which he was engaged and the lassoing of the Horses.

Their necks gleamed as he lifted the glancing hair from the bride of the wilderness. That hair was curiously part of the topography of the landscape. It had been plucked as much from the map of his Brain as from the Virgin’s body.

It glanced and stood before him as upon a draughtsman’s sliding scale of uprooted contours and tributaries, the slenderest, coiling fabric of recalled rain coursing alive after the long drought through the savannahs.

Coursing alive along the Crabwood Creek in the moonlight pouring through broken clouds.

‘I read in the
Carnival
Argosy
in 1939,’ said Mr Mageye, ‘that engineers were contemplating diverting the tributary to the Courantyne River known as Crabwood Creek into an enclosure, or giant spatial lasso, so to speak, for horses and cattle to prevent them straying onto and grazing upon the rice fields.’

As he spoke to me I saw the extraordinary congruence of apparition and concreteness in the Camera of the mind within the Jester of history.

Deacon held the wilderness hair and lasso in his hand as if it were the sliding uplifted creek itself coiling upon its fragile, serpent’s tail.

He whipped the serpent in the air with an engineer’s bark, a peasant boy’s ambitious dream and cry and prayer for the marvels of technology.

The wilderness lasso fell around the Horses’ steaming necks in the moonlight. They shuddered and bundled themselves together uneasily but on the whole they were content to be mastered by an angel from the stars.

Mr Mageye studied – as upon a platform of invisibility separating him from the action of a rolling film – the amorphous,
magical roles a child plays within the hidden uniform of a man already shaping itself into existence within him and around him. The amorphous magic in the psyche of a child is the sponge of growing pains, trauma, the trauma of deprivation, the trauma of acute longing for power, the power to rule, to execute gigantic projects that may symbolize glory or ashes in one’s mouth unless one learns to see deeply into the cinematic theatre of cells and blood in mind and heart.

‘Such a beautiful – however grief-stricken – theorem is the psyche of a child! Capsuled into childhood is the latent marriage of Brain and myth, feud and grace, terror and dance. Deacon’s obsession (which may also be yours, Francisco) surely was plain to you as a lucid dream when he studied engineering and politics in San Francisco College.’

Horses and Giants of Chaos came towards Deacon now. He lengthened his tributary lasso, he pulled hard.

It seemed as if it would snap into Virgin blood on the Moon but it held.

He relaxed his grip into a wide-angling – almost gentle – invocation of space and drew animals and riders across the perimeter of the Moon into the river catchment of Earth and along the line of the creek. It was a remarkable procession that invested the heights of the Moon with the qualities of a watershed upon which distant falling rain escalated upon a mountainous cloud and then glided on both flanks into space.