The Carnival Trilogy (31 page)

Billionaire Death turned from me to Peter. He knew my voice. He remembered the voice that had addressed Peter and outwitted Doctor Faustus. He felt the time had come to make me aware of his wealth and his power.

‘I have received billions and trillions to gain the eyes I
possess
.’

‘You mean you are rich enough to have
paid
or spent billions …’

‘Not so.
Received.
Death never pays. Death receives. My eyes reflect the accumulated receipt of love’s death wish. My eyes are the substance of all atmospheres that pour into me. I do not spend, Robin. I receive. The cheaper life is, the greater the undervaluation of the mystery of life – the more it sings to me in all sorts of fashions and follies, the more it grieves for me – the less it resists theatres of extinction and the destruction of species and populations.

‘Who really cares, Robin, how vast are the sums civilization devotes to weapons of destruction? Life is cheap, so spend, spend, spend on fashions of death becomes the refrain that falls into me and fills my treasury.’

He paused and placed upon me the imaginary and brooding vistas of his unwritten music in which I saw through his eyes the terrible opera of an age. ‘From the last two World Wars alone I pocketed billions of royalty. Calculate the astronomical sums spent on the war poems written in the trenches! How much did it cost civilization to bring a handful of poets there and throw a sunset/sunrise blanket over their eyes? I plucked those eyes out of their heads and planted them in mine.

‘Imagine what it costs Redbreast Robin to maim a child or a man or a woman in a bombed city. I have reaped imaginary harvests and Ghost knows what in Vietnam and the Lebanon.’ He turned and pointed to an imaginary bed on which I dreamt I saw three children dressed in Alice’s masks – the mask of Beirut, the mask of Belfast, the mask of Jamaica. They oscillated or stirred in the hospital of infinity.

He saw me staring at the Jamaican mask. ‘Oh that! Just a
pittance. People were stoning one another and the little female mask ran on the battleground and was killed. How much did it bring? Let’s see.’ He plucked a blur of stones from his brow and chest. Blurred stones in the photography of pupil and orb in Death’s majestic eyes. Jagged. Sharp. They had cut to the brain. I looked at the child again and wondered whether she had seized love’s death wish with her last breath.

‘You said a pittance,’ I spoke helplessly. ‘Just a pittance.’

‘Oh yes, a pittance,’ Billionaire Death repeated. ‘Let’s see.’ He adjusted his imaginary eyes and I saw angry bodies breaking a surf of cane and vegetables upon a glowing hillside. Their arms were slashed but it did not matter. I saw hands coated with dust digging the sun from the hillside. The broken stones from the hillside lost their glow as they were lifted and flung.

‘Say five hundred dollars for loss of crops,’ said Billionaire Death, ‘their loss, my gain. Twenty dollars for each hillside stone. A stone has fossil value in geologic space. A score of stones. Twenty by twenty. Four hundred dollars. Five plus four. Nine hundred dollars. Make it a round sum for a child’s life – a thousand dollars.
Death’s
a
banker,
life’s
a
…
life’s
a
…
life’s
a
…
life’s
a
bloody
pauper.
’
His voice, I suddenly realized, seemed to have stuck in his throat. A hiccup of a song in a child’s breaking breast.

Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.

Death pulled the window down upon the frightful scene and brawl I had witnessed through his eyes. But not before leaving on the windowsill a pair of glittering scales and the stone from the hillside that had killed a child. Peter and I placed Alice’s ring on one scale and the stone on the other. They drew level in perfect equilibrium, perfect equality in the heart of light.

‘I wonder,’ I said to Peter, ‘what Death received on behalf of Alice and Miriam the afternoon they drowned? (And I with them?) It couldn’t have been much. Alice had spent virtually every penny. And there were debts as you know. Miriam’s little theatre would have fetched but a pittance. Yes …’ I found myself brooding on the word
pittance
,
‘just a pittance.’

I stopped. Peter was silent.

‘Do you know,’ I said, ‘when we drew level with Billionaire Death’s hospital and treasury I remembered my pork-knocker library, every morsel and text into which I dug. I used to play, remember, I was a grave-digger in the magic wood. What are those books worth now? Another pittance.’

‘Enough,’ said Peter, ‘to bring me a bed in space. And the flavour of being cared for and caring for others. Books of a certain kind – written and revised (as you would say) by the hand of the magical dead – have anti-gravity substance. Death may laugh at them but they have a place, an original place, on his scales.’

I scarcely heard what he was saying except that my books had secured him a bed in space. ‘You?’ I demanded. ‘Bought you a bed?’

‘Why yes me and
alter
ego
you in a manner of speaking, Robin,’ said Peter mildly. ‘How could I be here ascending the Mountain of Folly, how endure its riddles in the heart of a dying age, except I had died to the machinations of Skull? A creative dying! A shared mask with the dying living in every theatre of conscience.
Emma’s
alive.
She wears the mask of an archbishop in
AD
2025. Her coronation’s today. Eighty years old. She like ourselves was born in 1945 when the Bomb fell.’

‘But when I dreamt I saw you and her in the tunnel … She dropped an ancient letter in my pocket and you were a book in her hand whose pages she turned …’

‘You were digging in your library and theatre of Sleep, Robin. You saw her through Death’s quantum eyes. And the quantum imagination risks everything to know the truth. Death becomes something of a classic when we fictionalize it, the classic penetration of all our ills and a revolutionary moment in our submission to the resurrection.’

‘You have not understood, Peter!’ I cried. ‘I am saying that when I saw her I sensed something, I sensed a struggle with ancient plays and texts and letters – I knew she was worn – she confessed her difficulties of an intimate nature – but she seemed so incredibly close to my immortal youth, immortal drowned Glass youth and mirror of space through which all things flit in the alchemy of the imagination.’

‘I know, I know, immortal Robin. The machinations of Faust. Beware of the Glass that may mesmerize you. And yet in another light immortality is the comedy of a changeless romance between true, inner flesh and true, outer spirit. Immortality is a feather in the Nightfall of the sea and the land. A feather by which we know that a stone and a ring and other relics that seem unequal may float and link themselves into a chain. Infinity’s chain. That that chain remains unbroken despite everything is our slender passion and hope of the transformation of injustice that we inflict on ourselves and upon others. Should it sever then we are lost. Then we fall into the abyss. But it will not, it cannot.’

His words were the cue for us to move up to another room in space. Ghost had given this ward or room to his chauffeur of infinity who was tinkering at this moment with the rocket of which Doctor Faustus had spoken, the rocket band that had fallen from the sky.

‘It’s a fast car,’ I said to Peter. ‘It’s a still drum or band or something yet it’s moving at a fantastic speed. How can anyone hold on and work! Gravity’s – anti-gravity’s – miracle. I see it as if my eyes are glued into a camera yet flying in a moving fast photographic lens and object in a dark night beyond Mars and Venus.’

‘Planets are ailing fast cars in the hospital of infinity. They’ve been struck by giant meteors. A meteor’s a
BOOM, BOOM
,
DOOM, DOOM
band. This rocket fell at the foot of the Mountain of Folly. Then it was transported here. And it’s flying still on a film. Such is the genius of Faust.’ Peter was joking with his usual solemn, long face that I knew from long, long ago when we drew planets with chalk on blackboard in Miriam’s
childhood
theatre.

‘Each planet is the car of an imaginary greatness. Greatness rides again in the West! If you and I sit still, Robin, and wait long enough we may enter into orbit with Alexander and Napoleon and Captain Cat from
Under
Milk
Wood.
’

‘Captain Cat is crying,’ I said. ‘Do you remember that line? Captain Cat is dancing to the music of a sad Rosy guitar.’

‘Napoleon’s too fat to dance. The car or the ship or the chariot or the planet on which he lies is a dusty or a waterlogged campaign. It needs to be refurbished with glory. And as a consequence Ghost is driven to employ an army of doctors, chauffeurs of infinity, engineers, programmers, etc., etc., to build new beds, new experimental bunks in tanks, in submarines, in aeroplanes. New cannon poking out of featherbed pillows.’

‘Employment,’ I cried, ‘it’s employment for millions.’ But then I was stricken by the unemployment of the soul. ‘What is greatness,’ I asked Peter, ‘if the soul itself falls into disuse?’

‘And another thing,’ I said, ‘where lies the unbroken chain, the slender hope of which you spoke, in the débâcle of greatness that threatens to break the back of the earth?’

‘It lies in this seam we are pursuing
through
the Mountain of Folly,’ said Peter. ‘Look! Captain Cat is dancing. Old as a crafty waste land seer but not fat.’ And as he spoke I remembered the lament of Tiger and Calypso in the magic wood. I also
remembered
Tiger
,
Alice’s boat, that had toppled into the breaking sea. I remembered Tiresias, the seer, whose spectacles I now placed on my eyes like a tourist under a black sky. I saw the negative film of Thebes, I saw the negative film of ancient walls under the sea through which
Tiger
fell. I saw Napoleon’s negative crown and Alexander’s sceptre and Captain Cat’s tombstone floating with Alice’s ring and with the stone from a Jamaican hillside. Except that they lay now far below the Wave on the glittering scales that the fictionalization of Death had brought to me.

It was an uncanny vortex. The flotsam and jetsam of empires! Everything moving fast yet still. Everything balanced yet
toppling
.

‘All I can say,’ I began but stopped and appealed to Ghost. He saw my plight and put words on the page of my lips.

‘All I can say is that the scales are set to weigh an imaginary substance, the imaginary substance of greatness that lies in a fabric we can never wholly grasp.

‘When I saw the ring and the stone in equilibrium at Death’s window I was involved in a religious equation between violence (the slain child) and sacrament (the ring). It was as if the speeding universe slowed for a moment into marvellous poise and equilibrium of spirit within relics of memory. But higher up now – with Ghost’s chauffeur – I cannot dodge or escape the fact of chaos (and so must relate to it as a factor in the marvellous equation of spirit): must relate to it through history that expands into the vision of the seer, visionary motion in motionlessness, the ironies of full employment yet the unemployment of the soul; and this involves me as much in the day I was drowned – when the boat
Tiger
sank – as in the day ancient Rome fell or Byzantium became a mirage and Greece vanished.

‘Imagine the refugees of spirit across the centuries. Imagine the marriage of turbulence and stillness in every dying mask, imagine vast waves and still bodies, moving hordes and etched caravans against a sky that topples into space. Imagine the literacy of the seer at the heart of chaos, a literacy that reads the beauty of God in every delicate web within the seamless robe of eternity.’

*

Seam and seamlessness! Peter and I had pursued the seam or the delicate web between remembering and forgetting faculties in our ascent
through
and
above
the Mountain of Folly.
Through
and
above
!
Within
and
without
!
Here lay the paradox of the seamless garment upon Emma’s shoulders. Peter vanished. I thought I saw him ascending the wave of the rock and then it was as if his shadow melted into the air.

‘I shall take you through the city,’ Tiresias said, ‘to Emma’s coronation. It’s quite an event. Sculpture, song, dance. Millions
all over the world, in villages, on mountaintops, in valleys, in bars, in hotel rooms, may be able to view it. I shall take you in a little while. I am not sure her brother Peter fully approves. After all he is her twin. He played in Tiger’s band. He became the pope of the calypso. An odd title I know. But it’s common knowledge that the calypsonian bands adorn themselves with curious titles. The name I bear (Tiresias) figures as you know and once or twice I have danced with them, danced the dance of the twining snakes, half-man, half-woman. The seer needs to know, to see
everything
from within the heart of chaos – if that is at all possible.’

‘You were speaking,’ I said, ‘of the bands.’

‘Ah yes, the bands! There’s the black Napoleon band. There’s the Persian Ayatollah Alexander band. There’s Peter’s band. Indeed, as I said before, he was the pope of the bands in Skull until his death the afternoon that you met him in the tunnel. Emma would tell you he had been ailing for some time. Ailing science, ailing religion. No wonder Doctor Faustus warned him of a meteor rocket, a meteor drum, falling from heaven. Part of his trouble was that he was a bit of a woman-hater. A long-standing taint in the body of our civilization. It fouls the nest of religion. And of economics though you wouldn’t think it at first. But what is the soul of the unemployed but an implicit extension of the whoredom of money we cultivate subconsciously? I tried, therefore, to mediate between him and the whoredom of money long, long ago – when Greece and Rome were doomed – by egging on Frog to play an inferior modern Ulysses and magistrate and pygmy shadow of the giant of the heartland.

‘In that way I involved
you
,
Robin Redbreast Glass, as the son and the heir of a divided tradition. It was the best I could do in the licentious theatre of Skull. Thus it was that I edged myself into half-man, half-woman masks (even Ghost is not immune to such masquerades) in my mimicry, in my rehearsals, of divine equilibrium that is beyond our grasp. All this, by the way, is implicit in Emma’s book which she attempted to read to you in staggered passages when you met in Dateless Infinity Day in your dream. Emma’s theology vindicated my and Ghost’s disguises. It is rooted in the necessity to bring a sacramental urgency to the ancient and perennially fertile body of sex. Not promiscuity, not cheap stimulation. But something we scarcely
understand. The miracle of the senses, touch, taste, echoing waves and particles and penetration.

‘Her task, from this day forward, is
to
make
the
body
of
the
resurrection
beautiful
to
the
woman
in
the
man,
the
man
in
the
woman.
It’s a formidable vocation.
You
should know that, Robin. You lay with your head on her breasts by the sea.’

‘Was it not Peter who lay with her? I was drowned, Peter had been saved.’
And
yet,
even
as
I
spoke,
I
did
seem
to
remember
…

‘Peter, yes, but your shadow slowly took shape out of every refugee of spirit. Took infinite and rehearsible form. It drew Peter into imitating you. He took your name, remember? Alias Robin Redbreast Glass. He was universally popular in Skull in love’s death-wish bands. All fanaticism is rooted subconsciously in love’s terrible death wish! But by degrees you triumphed. Your original sensuousness, your true passion, triumphed. And by the time Emma came to write her intimate book of you and Peter after your death it was
you
she drew into her arms. Your true passion in nature. And then by degrees in your ascent of the Mountain Peter himself – despite his discomfiture, his reservations – was imbued by the miracle of equilibrium between all genders, all opposites.

‘I put it crudely of course. But you know the subtleties of chaos and history that you have drawn into yourself Robin Redbreast Glass. Peter too was converted but he’s her brother. He’s fixated in a kind of incest. When brothers and sisters marry – whatever the traditional or dogmatic excuse – it’s incest. Or if not incest it’s purity masturbating. And there’s been enough of that I say from my standpoint in the underworld. And that’s where I come in as your guide, Robin, on this day. You need to descend from the Mountain and to start from below in your voyage into a new unity.’

I looked up the Mountain. I missed Peter. I missed the pope of love’s death wish. I had never, I confessed to myself, seen him in that light in the magic wood or in the theatre of an infinite rehearsal of values but I was now prepared to accept the guidance of the stranger seer who stood between the deformities of the popular religion of the bands and the sacrament of sensuous marriage between heaven and earth for which I had suffered in the sea and on the land.

*

Tiresias led me down the Mountain along the other side of the seam and within the hospital of infinity. I caught a glimpse of ailing stars, of meteors gouging holes in planets, of ailing moons and constellations, of ailing civilizations far out in space whose residual and imaginary glow had been simulated by Doctor Faustus, the reluctant doctor of the soul.