By Blood We Live
Page 78
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On he goes, without hope. The whole poem is this going-on without hope. Stanza after stanza. You get lost in it. The landscape gets increasingly hideous:
Now blotches rankling, coloured gay and grim,
Now patches where some leanness of the soil’s
Broke into moss or substances like boils;
Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him
Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim
Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils.
Was it a baby?
I seemed to come-to, suddenly. Must have fallen asleep reading. There’s a part of you finds it funny, fascinating, consciousness just dipping out and wafting back in like that.
There was that scene in Dracula, I thought, when the Count brought the baby for the three vampire women to feed on.
There was the night I held a baby in my big dark cradle hands, wondering if I could kill and eat it.
The subject is prone to anxiety about infants, my inner therapist said, bored. Boredom for the therapist is the end-point of all therapy.
I actually shook myself. To wake myself up. I was stupidly determined to finish the poem. (Though the memory of Devaz curled up on his bunk came back, suddenly. Bloomed in my head like a big cold flower. Tomorrow I would have to try to speak to him. How was I only just thinking this? My own dumb belatedness appalled me, though the soothing bedroom said Don’t be so hard on yourself. Had I been drugged? Everything here seemed out of sync with itself. For a moment I found myself wondering if even Konstantinov and Natasha … No. They were all right. The pounding love and pounding vigilance testified. Christ, what was wrong with me? I thought of the way I’d just sat down alone in the library when I arrived, just sat down like a moron and asked for scotch and picked up the goddamned book. As if I was waiting to meet a minor dignitary.)
Roland, utterly hopeless now, crosses the stream to find himself confronted by an impassable mountain range.
For, looking up, aware I somehow grew,
’Spite of the dusk, the plain had given place
All round to mountains—with such name to grace
Mere ugly heights and heaps now stolen in view.
How thus they had surprised me,—solve it, you!
How to get from them was no clearer case.
But I knew. The thing is you know. All readers of this poem know, by the time they get to the mountain range.
Yet half I seemed to recognise some trick
Of mischief happened to me, God knows when—
In a bad dream perhaps …
My head felt swollen and hot. Wulf, sick of all this reading, had started up again, torn through the scotch-and-codeine gauze and was raking me with foul-tempered kicks and swipes. The nearness of my own dream, my only dream, the dream to which I’d been reduced, was like a deep space very near me—like a vortex opening in the bed: fall through, let myself drop softly through and there would be the vampire, the sex—paradoxically dense and transcendent—the dusk beach and the black water and the handful of stars.
Burningly it came on me all at once,
This was the place! Those two hills on the right,
Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight;
While to the left, a tall scalped mountain … Dunce,
Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce,
After a life spent training for the sight!
The words wandered, sprouted insect wings, buzzed and whirred away. All the day’s separate madnesses I’d absorbed without protest grew back in me to their proper unassimilable size. It was as if I’d let the hours and days put one by one more and more soft heavy things on me, and now was realising too late that I couldn’t breathe, that I was suffocating.
You’re just exhausted. This is just tiredness, Lulu. I imagined my father telling me this. I imagined I was a little girl. I felt small, at that moment, in the big bed. The dream pulling me like a black hole. I was going to go into it. There was no not going into it.
What in the midst lay but the Tower itself?
The round squat turret, blind as the fool’s heart,
Built of brown stone, without a counter-part
In the whole world …
Of course you know. The whole poem’s a piece of escalating déjà vu. Like falling in love. Like falling in love.
Roland stands looking up at the Dark Tower—and you realise that until this moment in the poem you’ve never wondered what the point of finding it is. It’s a quest—yes—but what will be gained by its fulfilment? The poem doesn’t tell you and you don’t ask. When you start reading you sign the contract. Like the contract you sign with life.
And when he does find it? This thing that’s all but killed him and sent every one of his companions to their bloody and debased ends?
… noise was everywhere! it tolled
Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears
Of all the lost adventurers my peers,—
How such a one was strong, and such was bold,
And such was fortunate, yet, each of old
Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.
There they stood, ranged along the hill-sides, met
To view the last of me, a living frame
For one more picture! in a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew. “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.”
70
Justine
THE WHOLE THING so far had been me catching up to my own stupidity. In the cab from the hotel I realised I didn’t even know if he was here. If he was home. I had the landline number. Why hadn’t I just called? Because I was scared of hearing his voice? Because hearing his voice would remind me—just like Leath’s had—that I was nothing?
But I had his voice in my head anyway. Had had it ever since. His voice in my head and the bump of his heart beating against me. The heart that felt as big as a bull’s head.
He lived in a house on a hill fifteen miles southeast of Bangkok. Google Maps got me as far as an aerial shot. I couldn’t drag the human figure in for a street view. Satellite showed a red roof and a paved yard—salmon pink—with colourful plants in big tubs. A small pale blue swimming pool. I thought of how every time a TV ad wanted to show you success they showed you someone in a lounger by a pool drinking a cocktail. All the pools in satellite aerial looked like blue mosaic tiles. I thought how I wouldn’t ever see a pool in sunlight again. Not in real life. I imagined how weird it must have been for Fluff to have lost daylight thousands of years before there was TV and photography and the Internet. Before proper paintings, even. I’d asked him what it felt like seeing daylight on film. He said at first it was a miracle. He said he cried when he saw his first movie in colour, just sat there with tears streaming down his face. Then after a while it was like breathing recycled air.
Now blotches rankling, coloured gay and grim,
Now patches where some leanness of the soil’s
Broke into moss or substances like boils;
Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him
Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim
Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils.
Was it a baby?
I seemed to come-to, suddenly. Must have fallen asleep reading. There’s a part of you finds it funny, fascinating, consciousness just dipping out and wafting back in like that.
There was that scene in Dracula, I thought, when the Count brought the baby for the three vampire women to feed on.
There was the night I held a baby in my big dark cradle hands, wondering if I could kill and eat it.
The subject is prone to anxiety about infants, my inner therapist said, bored. Boredom for the therapist is the end-point of all therapy.
I actually shook myself. To wake myself up. I was stupidly determined to finish the poem. (Though the memory of Devaz curled up on his bunk came back, suddenly. Bloomed in my head like a big cold flower. Tomorrow I would have to try to speak to him. How was I only just thinking this? My own dumb belatedness appalled me, though the soothing bedroom said Don’t be so hard on yourself. Had I been drugged? Everything here seemed out of sync with itself. For a moment I found myself wondering if even Konstantinov and Natasha … No. They were all right. The pounding love and pounding vigilance testified. Christ, what was wrong with me? I thought of the way I’d just sat down alone in the library when I arrived, just sat down like a moron and asked for scotch and picked up the goddamned book. As if I was waiting to meet a minor dignitary.)
Roland, utterly hopeless now, crosses the stream to find himself confronted by an impassable mountain range.
For, looking up, aware I somehow grew,
’Spite of the dusk, the plain had given place
All round to mountains—with such name to grace
Mere ugly heights and heaps now stolen in view.
How thus they had surprised me,—solve it, you!
How to get from them was no clearer case.
But I knew. The thing is you know. All readers of this poem know, by the time they get to the mountain range.
Yet half I seemed to recognise some trick
Of mischief happened to me, God knows when—
In a bad dream perhaps …
My head felt swollen and hot. Wulf, sick of all this reading, had started up again, torn through the scotch-and-codeine gauze and was raking me with foul-tempered kicks and swipes. The nearness of my own dream, my only dream, the dream to which I’d been reduced, was like a deep space very near me—like a vortex opening in the bed: fall through, let myself drop softly through and there would be the vampire, the sex—paradoxically dense and transcendent—the dusk beach and the black water and the handful of stars.
Burningly it came on me all at once,
This was the place! Those two hills on the right,
Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight;
While to the left, a tall scalped mountain … Dunce,
Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce,
After a life spent training for the sight!
The words wandered, sprouted insect wings, buzzed and whirred away. All the day’s separate madnesses I’d absorbed without protest grew back in me to their proper unassimilable size. It was as if I’d let the hours and days put one by one more and more soft heavy things on me, and now was realising too late that I couldn’t breathe, that I was suffocating.
You’re just exhausted. This is just tiredness, Lulu. I imagined my father telling me this. I imagined I was a little girl. I felt small, at that moment, in the big bed. The dream pulling me like a black hole. I was going to go into it. There was no not going into it.
What in the midst lay but the Tower itself?
The round squat turret, blind as the fool’s heart,
Built of brown stone, without a counter-part
In the whole world …
Of course you know. The whole poem’s a piece of escalating déjà vu. Like falling in love. Like falling in love.
Roland stands looking up at the Dark Tower—and you realise that until this moment in the poem you’ve never wondered what the point of finding it is. It’s a quest—yes—but what will be gained by its fulfilment? The poem doesn’t tell you and you don’t ask. When you start reading you sign the contract. Like the contract you sign with life.
And when he does find it? This thing that’s all but killed him and sent every one of his companions to their bloody and debased ends?
… noise was everywhere! it tolled
Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears
Of all the lost adventurers my peers,—
How such a one was strong, and such was bold,
And such was fortunate, yet, each of old
Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.
There they stood, ranged along the hill-sides, met
To view the last of me, a living frame
For one more picture! in a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew. “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.”
70
Justine
THE WHOLE THING so far had been me catching up to my own stupidity. In the cab from the hotel I realised I didn’t even know if he was here. If he was home. I had the landline number. Why hadn’t I just called? Because I was scared of hearing his voice? Because hearing his voice would remind me—just like Leath’s had—that I was nothing?
But I had his voice in my head anyway. Had had it ever since. His voice in my head and the bump of his heart beating against me. The heart that felt as big as a bull’s head.
He lived in a house on a hill fifteen miles southeast of Bangkok. Google Maps got me as far as an aerial shot. I couldn’t drag the human figure in for a street view. Satellite showed a red roof and a paved yard—salmon pink—with colourful plants in big tubs. A small pale blue swimming pool. I thought of how every time a TV ad wanted to show you success they showed you someone in a lounger by a pool drinking a cocktail. All the pools in satellite aerial looked like blue mosaic tiles. I thought how I wouldn’t ever see a pool in sunlight again. Not in real life. I imagined how weird it must have been for Fluff to have lost daylight thousands of years before there was TV and photography and the Internet. Before proper paintings, even. I’d asked him what it felt like seeing daylight on film. He said at first it was a miracle. He said he cried when he saw his first movie in colour, just sat there with tears streaming down his face. Then after a while it was like breathing recycled air.
