Quilt (14 page)

You were seeing things, you see that. You frame a reconstruction: you’re hallucinating, had a funny turn coming back into the house, big day, big decision to sell the place, things perhaps all too quick, calling in the estate agent straight away and his speed taking the pictures, falling through the ladder, getting the sale rolling, as he said, with luck find you a buyer before we even have the brochure printed.

– It’s the word ‘Alzheimer’s’. Its very anachronicity produces the future it traces. Do you think I’m crazy? The moment I say it my mother looks at me, her soul collaborator, innocent little girl’s blue eyes she had even when she had completely lost the plot, but looking at me now in complete possession of her senses, entirely derailed by my use of this word, as if I have made a mortally serious mistake and something is being ripped, carefully but very fast, from the top of my brain. I say Yes, I see, Mother, it’s not your word, and I’m in tears now and scarcely conscious but we’re standing embracing one another, and then I’m lying on the floor. I have wet myself and my mouth is full of the taste of blood. I’ve bitten my tongue, I realise, coming round, and I see no sign of her or of the paper, the coffee mug, cigarettes or
ashtray, not even a whiff of tobacco smoke remaining. I take a shower and feel cold, as if I’m dead myself, like Clarence: as if I were drowned.

Sometimes in a pool you can see one ray has sort of sidled up along the substrate and come down on another, sort of half-covering her. There’s nothing sexual about it
per se
. It’s like you can’t tell if they’re even aware of it. I remember when you suggested they are curiously insensitive in this haptic dimension: they can flop down on a heater, not realise, and get burned. But then they also seem to sense more or in other ways than we do: they are always a turn or more ahead of the game. I guess it’s not so incredible. They have massive brains proportionate to the rest of their body-size. They’re a great deal more
intelligent
, whatever that word is supposed to signify, than sharks, and sharks are supposed to be pretty smart after all.

It’s so difficult not to project onto them what you are thinking and feeling. You see this
motoro
, Mallarmé for instance, lying down as in a bid for amatory adventure, spreading out over Hilary, and Hilary doesn’t seem to care an iota, being apparently quite fulfilled in the serenity of the substrate, vaguely nosing perhaps for a morsel of what you dropped into the pool half an hour earlier and Mallarmé, having settled like a spaceship, then does absolutely nothing. You think: why do that? Is it chance that Hilary’s at rest just where Mallarmé came down? Is there some surreptitious motive, is it just being friendly or is there nothing in it at all, you can’t help but picture
with a smile asking yourself, when someone sidles up to you and lays most of their body area on top of you?

And there’s something about these creatures that really makes me flip, like a kind of stratifying of the universe which is, after all, in the language of astrophysics, remarkably flat. Watching rays you get to feel this in a truly spooky way. We have shared this, I think, from the beginning. It has to do with the realisation that people have such a ludicrously anthropomorphic ego-projective perception of everything. They can’t so much as glance at a fishtank without thinking of being them, inhabiting a watery world of swimming, floating, shimmying through the depths. What must it be like, you think to yourself, to have the constant noise of that water-pump and filter system, the endless inanity of nosing up and down and burrowing in the substrate, and eating whatever is provided when it is provided, and flopping on a
fellow-creature
if that’s how the mood takes you, or burying yourself in gravel: what sort of a life is
that
? And then at the same time you come to experience this quite different thing, the murky registration that, in terms of deep time, in terms of the actual timeframe of life on the planet, half a hiccup ago you were a lungfish yourself. You were decidedly less imposing-looking, but you were a not dissimilar sort of creature yourself. At which point you dimly sense a sort of vast retelling, a turning shadow cast out over the waters in the flickering light of which the projection actually goes
the other way
, and the refractively aleatory antics of Mallarmé with Hilary, no different now from how they would have been a couple of hundred million years ago, show us frankly what or who we are.

It is scarcely seven weeks, still less than two months, since the funeral. A week, a month, whizzing in an hour. Every noun is another ephemeroid. Time pop. No more thought bubbles, never again. I miss him and worry more than I can say. He speaks sometimes with his usual lucidity but at other times he sounds somehow off, difficult to follow, obscure. And too often I can’t reach him at all. Where have you been? I thought you said you’d be around today? Don’t you remember I said I’d call at this time?

I tell him he has to see a doctor.

– About the episode?

He calls it the one-off episode, like it was a special edition of a TV show. He assures me he will go. And then for three days I hear nothing. Three oceans. He doesn’t answer the phone, he doesn’t respond to emails. I send half a dozen text messages imploring him to let me know he is OK. On the fourth day he picks up the phone and sounds normal. He asks how I am, apologises for not being in touch earlier, he’s been out
a lot, tootling about in the motor, he says, picking up supplies for the rays.

– I’m onto a new project, he says.

– What about the doctor?

Silence. Then in a dipped voice:

– You’ll be just like the rest of them. You’ll think it absurd. I have a new theory of ghosts. It’s been staring me in the face.

His voice sounds strained. I try to reassure him:

– Of course not. I’m listening, my love.

Then he pitches off again:

– I was down at the Tea Party… Oh!

– Whatever’s the matter?

– Oh, my god! It’s happening again!

– What are you saying?

– It’s the rays. I noticed it last time we talked and now it’s happening again. I was just feeding them some bits and pieces of left-over salad from the fridge. They were tranquilly engaged with that, chomping away, then when the phone rang…

– Yes, when the phone rang?

– It’s as if your voice, that pristine chapel, held in place, hello?

Another silence.

– Are you there?

– It’s like a choreography written in water. When you speak they raise themselves up, as if braced by something deep inside your voice. They were busy at the lettuce but the moment I say ‘Tea Party’ they all break off, and when you go ‘Whatever’s the matter?’ perk up their noses and pulse upwardly through the silvery light of the pool, in a shimmy of adoration. They miss you.

I laugh, a bit apprehensive, unsure how much of this is his English sense of humour.

– I miss
them
. You were at the Tea Party…

– …having a coffee and veering about on the net, I came across all these images of rays, you have to see them. They’re stunning. But then there’s something that’s terrible. It sickens me. It’s from somewhere, some hunting grounds I want to say, off the coast of
your
country. I
don’t
want you to see this. It’s like the forbidden photograph in Barthes, the most important one, he doesn’t reproduce. It’s almost a hundred years ago and there’s this moustache-twirly sea captain standing in front of a dead ray that’s been yanked up on a crane, perhaps an old fire-engine winch. It’s a manta. A ‘giant devil fish’, as the silly caption exclaims. It measures seven metres across and weighs eight tons. For me, it’s a photograph of photography. It’s a puncturation of the punctum. It’s a riddle, a true riddling: a punctum everywhere you look. It’s the astonishing, majestic corpse of a manta, bigger than any living creature. It fills the frame and it’s full of bullets: it seems the creature caught its hunters rather than vice versa. It comes with strings attached.

– Strings attached?

– Strings, lines, ropes, yes: it got caught up in fishing lines and the noble captain and his trigger-merry men had to shoot it twenty or thirty times to be confident it was dead, but it’s a picture that shows you the ropes, the way everything is rigged. The colossal creature is strung up: the iconography of a lynching is unmistakable. And the captain is standing proprietorially alongside, pointing with his right forefinger, in case you might otherwise not notice the – I was going to say, elephant in the room.
Like a tenting to the quick, now dead, his digit is itself a wound.
Ecce Manta birostris
. Another wound, but not the last. And can you guess what he’s holding in his
other
hand?

– His gun? A cigar?

– At first glance it looks like a paper plane. But it’s a baby manta, rigid, barely ten inches across, stillborn, proudly extracted from the mother at the creation of the massacre. And then the eye…

– I, ego?

– No, this isn’t about the ego. The eye of the
photograph
. It’s a way aloft, unnoticed at first amid the ropes and crane, against the tall deadwall blankness of brickwork that forms the backdrop to the whole picture. Only one is visible, but it’s the mother’s eye, and it’s looking at you, just as though it were alive.

– Sounds terrible. It reminds me of something I was reading recently about hypnosis. Just as you can never be sure someone under hypnosis isn’t merely pretending to be, so a dead eye in a photo might be a
trompe l’œil
too. I’m sorry. But I was asking you about the doctor…

– No, my dearest, I’m telling you about the new project.

– But I’m asking
you
about the doctor…

– You wouldn’t believe what I’ve managed to do here. I’ve been working at it day and night. It’s a new pool.

– What do you mean, a new pool?

– Well, not ‘pool’ exactly. More like ‘donut’. Ah! They’re doing it again! Incredible! When you said you were asking me about the doctor, when you put the stress on ‘you’, they started choreographing you again. Hilary gave this sort of twitch of grace and went sliding, jetting
up the side of the glass, coming to rest virtually on my face here, while Taylor took to shuffling in the substrate. They’re directly responding to you. If you were here you’d understand. When
are
you going to be here?

– You know this, I told you: I can’t get across for another month. Donut?

– Remember last summer? The marvellous donut-shaped rays’ enclosure at the aquarium in Barcelona? And then when we got to the place in Boulogne – what’s its name?

– Nausicaa.

– The very same. You remember the eagle rays at Nausicaa?

– Don’t tell me. You’re building a donut-shaped pool for eagle rays in the drawing room.

– How did you guess?

– Could it be because last time you deigned to talk to me you were telling me all about how you had got the estate agent in and how you’re putting the house on the market and now you’ve come to the realisation that the property will be much more attractive, especially to families, if most of the ground-floor accommodation is taken up with touchpools for rays?

‘Touchpools’ is a mistake. Creepy, it’s as if I’m losing touch with
him
.

–
Touchpools
?

Exasperated and uneasy, I am starting to apologise, but he cuts me off:

– I changed my mind. I realised it couldn’t be done. I’m keeping the house.

I’m inclined to query this (how can he afford it? what about his job?), but he’s irrepressible now:

– You want to know about the doctor? Exactly. Everything’s fine. My brain’s entirely normal: that was their actual phrase. I signed up in town as a temporary resident and saw the doctor and he set up a hospital appointment for me the very next day. It was like being in a very slow washing-machine. And then the letter came through from the consultant just yesterday. I’m all clear. I’m
entirely normal
! But here’s the thing. And it has to do with the photograph I was telling you about. It’s about ghosts and nakedness and superimposition. When I signed on at the local surgery I’d expected to see the GP who saw my father, but actually it was the old one, the other one, the doctor who used to be our family doctor, twenty years ago. Dr Scrivens is his name. He’s always given me the creeps. My mother couldn’t tolerate the thought of him and when she began to decline, through the disintegration of days and years following the point at which as she told me she was losing her marbles, she connected keeping her health with not seeing this doctor, and then the question came up of her seeing him. It would have been a sort of declaration that she was certifiably off her rocker. The whole prospect terrorised her. It delayed for weeks the very idea of getting her seen by anyone at all. In the end my father managed to get her transferred to another doctor. But then on some later occasion, to do with a graze on her leg that would not heal, my father took her along, sitting with her in the waiting room before guiding her through the door when called, virtually into the arms of Scrivens. Floating
face-up
in Alzheimer soup was she by then merely oblivious? Or did seeing this object of terror somehow return
her
to life, in the way that sometimes a tiny incident or chance
encounter can trigger a massive recuperation, if only for a moment? All of this only comes back to me now when I find myself in the same trap. I am at the surgery and before I realise what’s happening there I am, just six feet away from him, and of course he has been expecting me, he’s had time to prepare, but our encounter is the strangest phantasmagory, his eyes shifting eerily into focus like binoculars on a death-camp. Naturally he smiles, and I too. It is Scrivens, unmistakably, twenty years later yet miraculously aged, as if from a fairytale. And perhaps he, almost completely gray-haired,
fainter-eyed,
experiences from head to toe the passage of a similarly wayward vibration: I will look twenty years older to him too. And any second, I know, because now it comes back to me, he’ll do that thing with his eyes, that ocular passover, coming out with the standard portrait, the medical gaze that all doctors are trained to impose. But for that crystalline split-second slice of replay, in which we set eyes upon the other, I’m seeing Scrivens in my mind’s eye seeing me, double strangers both, outstaring ghosts. That’s when I have this eureka thing, and I realise my theory.

What convinces me that he is having a breakdown? It is not when he goes on to outline the beautiful bareness, as he calls it, of his theory. Nor, perhaps more surprisingly, is it a few minutes later, when he drifts off into what, to anyone else, might seem demented singsong.

It is a question of veils, capes, sheets, shrouds, cloaks, blankets, quilts, mantles.

It’s too crazy for a cult. He realises that. And it might indeed remain for centuries illegible, incomprehensible or even imperceptible to the general public.

But a ray doesn’t constitute an analogy or ‘lively metaphor’ for a ghost. Rather, it is the other way round: it is necessary to think spectrality
starting from the ray
. There is no ghost without a trace of the ray. Everything that might be identifiable with the singularity of a living cape or gliding sheet comes back to this. Put crassly, the pallid underside of a ray is not
like
the bed-sheet whiteness of a spectre. The ray is at the origin. It’s the originary spook. Plato was already onto that, in the ray haunting Socrates and Meno. What people call the Gothic is a kind of anamorphic manifestation of the effects of the ray. The whole sprawling industry of ghosts and vampires is, in truth, largely a
ray-phenomenon.
Any moderately reflective reader might notice the importance of cloaks, mantles, shrouds, shawls and so on in the Gothic novel. It is necessary, however, to realise how integrally, how inextricably, this motif is folded into the figure or property of the ray, the living blanket or quilt. The bat is a red herring, in fishy phrase, dried and smoked, tried and tested, a making small and manageable of what is neither. What haunts is of greater scope, more minatory and dangerous,
all-enfolding,
from another element.

Broadly speaking, the
manta
and the
vampire
(or ‘vampyre’, in its earliest orthography) emerge at the same period, in the first half of the eighteenth century. That the latter (a fantasy) seems to owe something to the former (the real) might veritably be classed a no-brainer. We don’t know when exactly the word ‘manta’ (meaning
‘blanket’ or ‘cloak’) was first used to designate the rays now linked with that name, but it appears to have been originally used interchangeably with ‘quilt’. In Socratic spirit it is tempting to construe ‘quilt’ here in its other sense, namely as a reference to that point in the throat at which swallowing becomes involuntary, but Antonio de Ulloa in his
Voyage to South America
(1758) writes of the ways in which the negro slaves off the coast of Panama are fastened with ropes and forced to fish for pearls, ‘and the mantas, or quilts, either press them to death by wrapping their fins about them, or crush them against the rocks by their prodigious weight’. This is as shocking an evocation of the reality of slavery as it is a fictitious and absurd description of mantas. Despite their often great size, manta rays are of course completely harmless. De Ulloa goes on: ‘The name manta has not been improperly given to this fish, either with regard to its figure or property; for being broad and long like a quilt, it wraps its fins round a man or any other animal that happens to come within its reach, and immediately squeezes it to death. This fish resembles a thornback in shape, but is prodigiously larger.’ It seems unlikely that, for all his luminous childlike gifts as an actuary of the imaginary, Lewis Carroll had the ray in mind when he frabjously unveiled his portmanteau but, once the double meaning of ‘manta’ is registered, it seems equally difficult not to envisage such a creature in the bag, so to speak, or lurking at any rate under his cloak. It is a question of a new imaginary, not a regression into the vagary of animistic belief, a restituted primitivism, but a thinking of the ray as a force, a trace, whether buried or dancing, in a quite different understanding of the spectre
and the wake. Like a dream of excarnation without any possible fossilisation, dream as impossible fossil, there is a naked cape and it is alive. Rays to the ground: starting off in the substrate. It is a matter of a new teratology, an enantiodromic animism that is radically non-theological, nanothinking through the ray.