The Carnival Trilogy (19 page)

It was this elusive distinction between noon as universal artifice and sliced bread of reality that sobered the Carnival dead king Masters – if he needed sobering at all – and drew him to perceive how close his shadow was to all industrial revolutions, ghost towns, ghost factories, ghost cradles, all hollows, all realms, within the emotion of transplanted arousal of spirit.

Double arousal. Transplant. Resurrection.

It was a liberation yet a burden, transplant/resurrection. He perceived the sadness of a world that was resourceful yet deprived, he perceived the roots of aching memory, the cave, the nursery fable that the dead bring on their backs to be patented anew in Santa Claus commercials, the study, the skin transplants of Christmas, the masks, the oddest commotion in aroused blood, the humour of lust, as workers idled a little and contemplated their coming holiday.

It was the objectivity of Lazarus-spirit, yes, but in the reanimation of mystical organs, it evoked vistas of shocking illusion, shocking power to be all things to all men, power to deceive the corruptible with the corruption of magic. “Oh mind of Lazarus,” said Masters, “what a temptation it is: to see through all things, all peoples, to rule with the power of the grave.”

He looked across the apparently real, the apparently artificial light of noon and waved to one of the West Indians he had come to see. He had cultivated a good accord with the two operators of Madame Guillotine but was astonished – despite his insight into the powers he now possessed – when Jackson, the older operator, rushed across tempestuously to greet him, to seize his magnetic Lazarus hand, and to shake it staunchly with a great demonstration of affection. Affection? No, something else. It was awe, I dreamt. Expectation of wonders. “I sorry James ain’t here to greet you, Everyman,” Jackson cried, “he had a narrow shave. Lucky devil! He swears your magic did the trick, that you pulled him back from the pit.”

“Me?” Masters felt his misgivings were being confirmed. “What did I do?” He smiled secretly, self-mockingly, with sudden pleasure that enormous as his powers appeared to be he was helpless in this instant and could not see into Jackson’s mind and read the tale of James whom he (Masters) – it would seem – had pulled back from the pit. Jackson was having a late tea break close to noon and he drew Masters to a table. “You gave him some damn frozen bubble to wear on his chest, remember?”

Masters had forgotten. “Did I?” then he remembered. “Something from Waterfall Oracle, shaped like a horse?”

“Horse, yes, he was driving home on the highway and dropped off into a doze at the wheel. When he wake he was in a kind of ravine, at the bottom of an embankment. The car lay on its back.”

“Good god,” said Masters. “I see it, yes I do.”

“Not a scratch. Sound as an unbroken egg. He was clutching the bubble horse. It had saved him. He remembered the dream he had had the moment he fell asleep. You were there, it was a river, you were a huge bubbling horse under the car. The rapids of history. He was about to topple into a pit. But you kept the car on your back. He saw your face through the windshield. You broke the fall, you broke the rapids. You let the car down softly though it had overturned. You saved him. What a Christmas gift!”

“A dream,” Masters murmured. “Just a dream. I am no magician.”

Jackson chuckled. “Ask James for his wife and he would consent, Everyman. The way he talk when I see him last night! He find religion in a dream.
It
was
real.
He would fall down now and worship you, Masters, more than he love Madame Guillotine who fill his pay-packet when the week end. And that say a hell of a lot.”

Masters could not help smiling again and this partially broke the gloom that encrusted him, encrusted his mind, the mind of Lazarus. “Tell James,” he said softly, “to remember he’s no puppet.”

Jackson was puzzled. “Puppet? What do you mean?”

Masters did not reply. What did he mean I wondered? James is a bloody puppet, I said to myself. Did he not …

Jackson waved at a tea lady. “Coffee or tea, Everyman?”

“Coffee, please, milk, sugar.”

If the world knew that Lazarus had returned to the Carnival of history and was eating a prosaic biscuit with Jackson, coffee, milk, sugar, millions of puppets rich and poor, fat and thin, would vote for him. Vote for him, yes, but not because
of the genius of love or resurrection. No, through fear. A vote of fear. Puppets of fear. Yes, fear! Fear of the bomb, fear of the grave, perverse hope that he was the ultimate weapon, he would lift the sentence of death from them and they would bounce back, he would lift the sentence of death, if not war or famine or starvation from mankind.

“Masters, what did you mean when you said I must tell James to remember he’s no puppet?”

Masters started. He glanced at me where I stood in the shadow of dream protesting that the cyclist who ran into my father was … He had forgotten what he had said to Jackson. He touched his mask and remembered. “Ah yes,” he said at last, “I meant that James may have been saved by my gift but he had to give something of himself in return. There are two – indeed three and four and many more – sides to the bubble of resurrection.”

I saw he had turned from Jackson and was addressing me. “I could not save your father, Weyl, by reaching back through the bars of time, but he saved me. I enlightened him
nevertheless
about his pagan body. I sustained his case. I helped him to evolve a little, to move on. That is the function of originality. Unless one brings originality to the resurrection theme it is hollow, it is impotent. I saved James. He liberated me when he jolted my memory. I saw a mere newspaper clipping – a mere clipping I say – but remember it had been fired into originality on his brow.”

I protested. I hated James. “He is a bloody puppet,” I cried. I turned to Jackson. “Tell James, Jackson, he was a lucky devil when Lazarus pulled him from the pit, but I know who he is. He rode my father down in Brickdam. And then he came to the funeral with a wreath. He was filled with fear, I tell you, Lazarus. The wreath was nothing but a hollow crown. He is a bloody puppet, a bloody puppet.”

“Easy, easy, Weyl,” said Lazarus gently. “The distinction between the bloody puppet and the art of freedom cuts deep. So deep our hate resurrects and, as it does, the bloody puppet is as much ourselves as the man or the woman we hate.
Freedom should mean freedom from past fear.
We
have
nothing
to
fear
but
fear
itself
in
the
resurrection
of
hate.
That is the complex stake in all puppet resurrections that torment us, that chasten us in depth, in every aspect of our lives, in every encounter with Memory, every confession we make, every protest, every longing we cultivate or suppress, every chain upon which we dangle that brings us round and round and round again to know ourselves in dreadful part, in complex whole … My dear Weyl, remember my gift to you is the wages of descent into hell/ascent into heaven, every shade of emotion, however bitter, however terrible or sweet, that makes us prize the arts of freedom as originality to revisit the past and not be confounded or conscripted by the sorrows, the waste, the terror of time, partial time, whose biased face is the resurrection of the puppet, whose stranger,
unfathomably
whole face is the resurrection of life.”

*

Masters left the factory clothed in my resentment still and entered a phase of existence that was haunted by dubious women. Or so it seemed to me – to my jaundiced mind – when I compiled notes upon him in 1958, 1959, and
succeeding
years. Now – when he addresses me anew as resurrected paradox, dead king – I see everything quite differently. I see their inner significance with sudden perception or shock. Masters the Fourth wore the Carnival mask of Lazarus in a loose characteristic way that overshadowed Masters the Second and Masters the Third in my dream. He came into the money he had been awaiting from the sale of his New Forest properties not long after his encounter with the devil and with James whom he had rescued from the pit and whose wife he was to pursue. Her name was Aimée and she came to see him not long after Masters’ conversation with Jackson and with me.

Even now – within the labyrinth of resurrections that Carnival Lazarus unravels – I find it difficult to describe her. She was a very attractive woman in a curious downbeat
fashion. She was listless yet susceptible to faint rhythms of hysteria and animation (the phenomenon of faintness that adorned her apparition within structured non-feeling made her survival or arousal all the more preternaturally vivid). Her faint arousal from a grave of non-feeling incorporated something of the lightning brow of Jane Fisher the Second with whom Masters slept on the day he died in 1982. And that meant that Aimée was also possessed by a resemblance to Jane Fisher the First who stabbed Masters the First in New Forest.

Despite or because of all this Aimée remains a shadowy figure in my mind as I cling to Masters’ chain of existences in the past, in the present, in the future that is also the biased present, the unfulfilled past. Indeed it is this astonishing preternatural light of shadow and time that makes her unique in retrospect. She came to him in an evening veil,
post-Inferno
, early Purgatory, a new fashion that sold well in Oxford Street. Upset veil. Weeping shawl. Faint abandon. Edged hysteria. Her perception of James’ accident differed in tone from Jackson’s tale. James may have caught religion in dreaming of the horse that saved him but Aimée had caught the downbeat aroma of guilt distilled from flowers and soil. It lay upon Lazarus’ nose and brow like the vestige of a cloud. Slightly vulgar expensive perfume perhaps, slightly mystic. Aimée shopped without economic bother in Resurrection Road. James – as a skilled Madame Guillotine operator – earned a good pay-packet that she supplemented in a
nightclub
. She swore with a flick of her wrist – so gentle no bones were broken – that she had been responsible for James’ accident.

“He had learnt I was carrying on with another man under Nightbridge,” she said. “That’s the name of my club. I saw he was upset the morning he left. But I thought nothing of it. He was always so quiet, you know, and I felt the cloud would blow over.”

“Is Nightbridge a cloud that blows over?” asked Lazarus.

“You know what I mean,” she said. “Don’t be mean to me.
We need to deceive each other a little, some of the time if not all of the time, don’t we? I’ve come to you because he thinks the world of you and he’s changed and I’m worried he may do something bad to himself.”

She was weeping, half-genuine guilt, half-stifled, ominous pleasure. He passed a handkerchief to her. She dabbed her eyes. Her features were a mixture, a paradox. Fragile, eggshell solid, exotic ghost, natural but artificial body, the strip-tease of the soul that made her a great success when she danced in the Club Nightbridge.

“What do you think I should do, Lazarus?”

Lazarus looked intently at her. “The accident,” he said softly, “happened in the late afternoon when James was driving back home. Not in the morning when he left you. Is it not possible that something else, someone else, not you, Aimée, was on his mind?”

“He was brooding all day,” she protested, “all day.
It
was
me.
He’s a careful driver. He drives so smoothly I could stand on the bonnet of his car and be safe. I could dance …”

“I know you can,” said Lazarus.

“It’s ridiculous but he says if he hadn’t dreamt of you at the last moment he would have died. What about me? Suppose I had been sitting next to him, and I had dozed off too, would I have lived?”

“You would have danced with me,” said Lazarus, “on Nightbridge stage. I am the grave’s living understudy. I could take the place of your lover. James wouldn’t mind.”

Aimée had not heard Lazarus’ response which was spoken under his breath. She cried, “And that’s why I have come to see you, Lazarus, in case James spake of me to you. I need help.”

Lazarus looked at her even more intently. He saw beyond lucid dream that she was worried about James. And yet there was something else she desired, something that infiltrated her guilt. Was it that James’ sudden accidental death would have freed her, would have been a legacy to her to construct his epitaph in dance and to bring her Nightbridge lover home?
Would it have given her, James’ death, the impulse to dance with greater mourning/ecstatic abandon than ever before?

To care for a loved one, yet desire his death, is nothing new. Her guilty desire to see James dead was true but – if anything – it strengthened the bond between them. She needed him. She needed him to fill a dual hole in her affections. She needed him sometimes fictionally dead, concretely alive, sometimes concretely dead, fictionally alive. The knowledge of his presence at home or at work –
performing
the daily, the nightly chores – gave spice to her
Nightbridge
affair. The deception she practised prepared her for the greatest figure, the greatest dance, she would ever perform with the grave’s living understudy.

“Look, Aimée,” Lazarus said at last, “I assure you there’s no need to feel guilty about James. He’s a quiet customer, as you know, and I know from something he confided to me in the factory …” he hesitated then plunged on, “that he was having an affair with another woman.”

“Another woman?” Her eyes were incredulous. Lazarus had stunned her. It was the first cue she received in respect of the coming dance.

“Yes, yes, you see it was not just you he was upset over. There was another woman! She threatened to leave him. She wanted a car and though his pay was good he couldn’t manage that. He hadn’t yet paid for his own car. He showered her with gifts but she said no. Time to draw the curtains on their little act. On the day of the accident she left him for good. He was upset, yes, and if he’s downhearted now it’s because he’s
sober.
One can be quiet as hell and still
drunk
inside. Some quiet people commit some terrible crimes! James is sober now. Not just quiet. He’s fasting. His stomach aches. He survived but he knows what death is. No more cannibal promiscuity if death sobers one, mind you, it isn’t always the case, death is also a heady champagne, ask any fast driver. James is truly sober now. No more cannibal promiscuity, each intent on eating the other’s wages of body and soul.”