Monument Maker, page 32
The man in front of me was a Scot. My arse is tanned, he said. He had been beaten so badly that he had taken a stroke. One of my bollocks too. A line ran down the middle of his body, bisecting his penis, marking the paralysed half from the half that still had feeling. A divided man. We’re all just prawns in their game, he said. Did he mean pawns or sardines? I said prawns, didn’t I? he spat. What did they do to you? he asked me. They drowned me, I told him. What happened then? I gained powers. What kind of powers? Prophecy, I told him. ESP. I’m sticking with you, he said. Truth told, it was the first flexing of my new ability, my first glimpse of what the future had in store. What about me? he asked me. What’s up ahead? Your arse is tanned, I said. But for your bollocks there’s still hope.
In Greece we were handed over to the Italians, whose regime, despite the word of history, was even more baroque and officious than the Germans,’ except on one count. We were held in a prison in Acronauplia in the city of Nafplion, high on the cliffs, staring out to sea, at the very edge of the world, it seemed to me. Here I committed the first of my identity frauds where I posed as a savant for the authorities, a shell-shocked basket case who in truth held his real identity card wrapped in a plastic bag and stuffed up his anus, which, unlike the Germans, the Italians never searched.
I gibbered and I drooled and I wept, none of which was entirely put on, as a lipless and lidless shark, come ashore. We were ten men to a cell, at first, which wasn’t comfortable but was viable, somehow, and amongst them was the paralysed Scot I had met on the boat whose name has eluded me ever since. I sat in the corner like an oracle, which is what I became, a mascot too, a reminder and a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God. The Oddity, they called me. I didn’t object. I was the subject of an experiment, by my fellow prisoners and by God Himself. Using sheets of toilet paper and ash from the stove they would draw simple symbols and ask me to read them with my mind. A dot, I said, a circle, a line, a triangle, a square, a heart, a house, a simple church, a penis, a pair of tits; it wasn’t hard. The men marvelled.
Outside the window the sea and the sky formed a blue rainbow and it was there that we drew ships from out of the past and out of the future, the flotilla that would rescue us, the ship we went down in, the ship we set out in, ships with names like curses or like books of The Bible, Exodus, Grace, Damnation. We ate cold watery soup with the consistency of freshly melted snow and some of us crumpled paper into balls—salted them, if we could—and dunked them in the soup in place of meat, swallowing miraculous cocks and churches and tits and triangles.
If he can read the future, someone said—they often spoke about me as if I were somewhere else—then surely he knows what’s going to happen to every damn one of us. He doesn’t read the future, another said, a dark boy with a patch on his eye and no top on, he reads minds. It’s not minds, a third one said, an Irishman with thin wiry hair and sullen eyes and permanently pursed lips, it’s remote viewing, it’s like seeing from a different place, a different angle. So you’re saying his mind’s up there somewhere, the first one said, up there in the corner of the cell, up there in the sky? Where’s your mind? the sullen Irishman asked him. Right here in my head, he said, and he rapped his finger against his skull. Aye, well, two minutes ago it was between the legs of a dirty whore. You’re not wrong, the first one said. Looks like we’ve got another remote viewer, the second one laughed. Seriously, the first one said, let’s stop with the games, let’s put The Oddity to use. They turned their heads towards me in expectation. I let a long line of drool fall from my mouth. Then I cast my mind into the future.
The war is over, I tell them. It is 1947. I am disappeared, I am dead. I live in a small one-room apartment on the outskirts of Athens, which I pay for with odd jobs and begging. Most days I walk the three miles or so to Syntagma Square in the centre of the city, where I stand motionless for hours on end, my right arm extended, my military ID in my hand, an upturned cap at my feet. This is what I looked like, once, I tell them, though of course I don’t speak it. I remain in silence. One day my ID is stolen from me, snatched from my outstretched arm by a passer-by who runs off into the crowd. Now I am a monument, which in Athens makes me a tourist attraction.
The curious flock to see me. They stand some distance off and stare or they sit on a bench and look at me sideways through their sunglasses. Occasionally a small child bursts into tears at the sight of me. I am given a name, they call me The Oddity (the men nod in agreement at this, they knew this already), and soon I begin to attract regulars, silent companions, an old man with blue piss-stained trousers and a beige tank top and a drinker’s nose who sits on a bench across from me and nods, occasionally, in my direction, a pair of swallowtail butterflies that return to me three days running and that brush my face like eyelashes (but weren’t butterflies only supposed to live for a day?), a young man who sits on a low wall and sketches me from a distance, a budding Goya or a Pablo Picasso, though you probably won’t get those references (never heard of them, the men say, get on with the story), and finally a woman, an older woman, a graceful woman with prematurely grey hair, a sophisticated woman, who lights a cigarette and unlike the other ones looks me in the eye, my blazing eyes, my eyes that are filled with dust and sand and blood and mucus, my eyes that are fixed open and that smell like planets (what do planets smell of? one of the men asks. No idea), and I look back at her and for the first time in my life I don’t see a reflection, I see something else, another person, for the first time (he’s never seen a person, the men ask themselves, what is he talking about?) I see something that is not myself and it’s as if all my suffering amounted to nothing.
On the way home I feel a silent joy in my guts, in the soles of my feet, for the first time. Finally, one day, she comes over to me. She tells me she recognises me. It’s far-fetched, I know, but hear me out. My face was created, I want to tell her, I wasn’t born this way, though surely she knows that. Then I realise that perhaps she is talking of deeper things, like when two souls meet or two fated lovers or twins separated at birth (it’s a romance, one of the men nods, I knew it), and I grant her the possibility that, yes, there could be some form of recognition, even with my face as it is.
When she leaves she takes my heart, which as I have intimated was shrunken and in revolt and by this point the size of a raisin, and leads it up stone stairwells and along sandy backstreets and past tall apartments with washing hanging out to dry and secretes it in a studio on the top floor of a three-storey building that leans into the sun in Plaka, a great plant-filled conservatory with a
glass roof and with paintings piled up and facing the wall, she couldn’t bear to look at them, her life’s work, so she had turned them away and instead looked to her plants for solace and companionship, although she was very beautiful, she could have chosen another life, could have embraced society, but like me she was chosen, she was marked somehow and my heart told me (it reported back, the Irishman with the sullen eyes nodded knowingly) that this was what she recognised in me, the shark that never blinks and that never rests, and I returned home to my own room, which was on the ground floor and which let in no light, and I lay on my bed, on the dirty white sheets, and fell asleep with my eyes open beneath a damp cloth and with the image of this woman fixed on their surface and I dreamed of the war (damn, said the third man, who had a tattoo of a harp on his arm, I thought it was all over) and I saw the war from above, the movement of troops, the convoys like a shadow on a lung, the burning cities like a bruise on the thigh of a beautiful woman (that’s how it felt, sometimes, the Irishman with the harp agreed), and I felt a great sense of gratitude, for every death, for every ship sunk (wait a minute, the boy with the patch and with no top on cautioned him), and for a moment, just for a second, I became reconciled, I let it go completely, I gave up, in other words, and in that moment my heart came back to me (a raisin, the Irishman with the harp nodded) and told me where it had been, told me of its adventures (a talking raisin, the boy with the patch said, you couldn’t make this up), and I reinstalled it in my chest and boys it was filled to the brim, let me tell you, it was overflowing, even, and what’s more, it was in charge.
The Scot with the tanned arse interrupted me. It’s memory that predicts the future, he said. He’s doing nothing special. All you need to do is remember. I’m only seventeen, the boy with the eyepatch said, what have I got to remember? Doomed youth, the Irishman with the harp said, there’s a poem about that. Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes, he quoted, shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes. You can remember that? the boy asked him. I learned it at school, he said. I can hardly remember anything before the war, the boy said. Does that mean I’ve got no future? What do you see for me? he asked me. I thought for a moment. Liberation, I said. That’ll do me, he said, and he clapped his hands. Is that what happened to you? he asked me. Yes, I said, yes, I was liberated by the war. Do you fall in love with the woman? he asked me. Then, putting his hands up to his face: what does she smell like?
At this point I still don’t have a nose, I tell him (he grows his nose back, that’s something, the Scot says), but her name is Mariella Visconti and she looks the way women used to look before the war (see, he means in our memory, the Scot nods), their cheeks filled with rosy colour, their little bird noses, their fine hair, their delicate wrists, the slow movement of their arms, their perfume, I don’t doubt, though at this point in time, in the near future, my olfactory ability is less than nil, but still a cloud hangs around her, a cloud of colour, a lilac mist that she moves around inside.
She takes me home, inevitably, my heart has already all but moved in (a grape, is that what he said it was? the Scot asks), and I move into a spare bedroom with all of my possessions, which at this point is a pair of trousers, a grandfather shirt, a pair of sandals, my old robe, a pot, a cup, a toothbrush and a sliver of carbolic soap (just like in jail, the young boy laughs). From my window I can see people sitting at tables outside the restaurants all along the street, talking and smoking and drinking wine and eating fish, couples with their arms round each other, old men in the sun.
Why are her paintings lying on the floor and pushed against the wall? the Scot asks me. Why, if she didn’t like them, didn’t she just burn them or rip them with a knife and throw them away? I’m getting to that, I say. It’s all tied up in what we’re doing right now. Mariella finds out that I can see into the future. How does she know? the young boy with the patch and no top on asks me. Can she hear us talking? No, I reassure them, don’t worry, I’m the only one that’s there. That’s not how it feels, the boy shrugs. That’s understandable, I reassure him.
The point is she was interested in spiritualism herself. Before the war she was involved in a group that practised what they called “spirit painting” (sounds weird, the Scot says), where they would gather in her room underneath the great glass ceiling of her conservatory with nothing but the stars up above their heads, nothing but the stars and the planets, excuse me, and satellites also and comets and maybe even alien craft who knows and they would attempt to communicate with disembodied beings (do you mean the dead? the Irishman with the wiry hair and the poorly executed tattoo of a harp that might as well have been the gates of heaven on his arm asked), not just the dead, there’s more than the dead that we can’t see, I said, there are things that have never lived or that live on different frequencies from ourselves, frequencies that we are not naturally attuned to but that we can somehow, through will and breathing exercises and sex, even (now we’re talking, the Scot with the tanned arse and the half-cock and the paralysed bollock announced), tune ourselves in to, almost like a wireless, if you like.
The point is that when you painted one of these entities, these things from another dimension, which of course did include the dead and the dearly departed as well as strange things that resembled squids and amoebas and octopuses, that was the weird thing, the denizens of the aire, as they called them, that’s air with an E, boys, often resembled the denizens of the deep, as if down below were the same as up above (mate, tell me about it, the Irishman with the tattoo that really was quite amateurish shrugged, I used to work in the submarines), and when you painted them, or so the ladies of the group believed (women, the Irishman said, and he nodded and he rolled his eyes), it was all ladies that were involved, ladies only, everyone else was too busy gearing up for war, and they believed that once they had painted the visitor, let’s call it, the communicant, let’s say, that it became somehow trapped in the painting, imprisoned in the very weave of the canvas, in the frequency of the colours (colours have a frequency? the Scot said, come off it. Light has a frequency, the Irishman said, sound has a frequency, colour has a frequency too, get over it. I wish my bowels had a frequency, the Scot replied), though trapped perhaps is too strong a word, they didn’t mean to do violence to this thing from another galaxy, though really it was the same galaxy, just a bit removed, it was more like they provided a field in which it could manifest, it just happened to be static, of course if they could have had access to a movie camera that would have been a whole other thing completely, because that way the entity would at least have had some kind of movement, some kind of space to move around in, even if it was just the same set of movements repeated again and again, though of course it could go backwards and forwards in time, if it wished and if the projectionist was amenable, but with a painting it just sort of sat there and vibrated, which of course is a form of movement, but a subtle one, which is what frequencies do, if you think about it, they vibrate, which is akin to dancing on the spot or more properly around a spot because if you were to zoom in to their movements, if you were to truly get down to their level, you would see that their movements, actually, their dance, was titanic, was earth-shaking, relatively speaking, so what I’m saying is that these things weren’t trapped any more than an atom is trapped in a bit of stone, they were as alive as stone (as alive as stone? the boy with the eyepatch burst, that’s dead to me!), but the difference is that they had been drawn out from the aire, air with an E, boys, they had been translated into our reality, and that was an act of magic.
But why were they turned to the wall? the Irishman with the crummy harp asked. You haven’t explained why she was so forlorn about them. Forlorn? I said. She was heartbroken. She had received messages from the other side, she had seen the obverse of God’s plan, she had trafficked in angels, she had seen through the illusion, which is literally to be disillusioned, to be robbed of it, and here she was, on the other side, and nothing had changed. Revelation changes nothing, I said, except to render the past and future irrelevant. She had thought to receive some blessing, some good news, some word of God. But things went on exactly as they had been, even as her apartment came to resemble an otherworldly zoo, an occult aquarium, a diving bell.
What about you, though? the young man with the eyepatch said, now squatted on the floor of the cell and rocking back and forth on his feet. She wasn’t expecting that, maybe you were the good news, maybe you were sent by God? Never mind that, the Scot said, turn over one of the paintings, let us see what these things look like. Go on, the Irishman with the harp said, give us an eyeful of the word of God.
I wait until Mariella has gone to the store. It’s my first afternoon alone in the apartment. I wander amongst the plants, the cacti, the vines climbing the brick walls. I open a book at random then I put it down. I stare down at the holidaymakers in the street below. I stand in the shower and let it massage the back of my neck (he’s playing for time, the Irishman says), my whole body stings. I change into a dressing gown and I walk back to the living room as the rain starts to fall on the glass roof. I stand next to the paintings piled up against the wall. I am assaulted by memories, but I force them back down inside me. I take the first painting and I turn it around.
What is it? the Scot asks. What does it look like? Tell us, man! The men stared at me in silence. It is a painting of a topless young man with an eyepatch. Fuck, that’s me, the young man with the eyepatch said. That means I’m fucking dead! I’m fucking dead, he repeated. I’m fucking dead. Wait, he said, you told her about me, you described me to her, and she painted me, right? Or wait a minute, how do I know you didn’t paint me and then stash it there and are now pretending it was one of hers? Talk sense, the Scot said, he’s making the whole thing up, he could have put any one of us in the painting.
Ask him something else, some historical detail that he couldn’t make up, the Irishman said. He could make up anything if it’s in the future, the Scot said, how would we even know? The young man with the eyepatch just sat there, he was in shock. Who wins the war? the Irishman asked me. The Allies, I said. What happens to Hitler? Dead by his own hand in a bunker in Berlin. What about Goebbels? Dead, too, in the same spot. Churchill? Victorious. Speer? Arrested. Himmler? Dead in a cell. Göring? Committed suicide the night before he was to be hanged.
He doesn’t even pause when you ask him, the young man despaired, he doesn’t even blink an eye. Wait a minute, the Scot said, let’s ask him something that we can verify, let’s ask him what happens tomorrow. Good idea, the Irishman with the pathetic harp said, and he crouched down in front of me and looked straight into my eyes. Tell us, brother, he said, what happens tomorrow? We’re in jail, I shrugged, more of the same. Damn, he’s got us there, the Scot said, and he ran his hand through his hair and spat on the floor. Tell us something specific that happens tomorrow, the Irishman demanded, something small. Okay, I said, I spill some of my pathetic soup on the floor. Okay, the Irishman said, let’s see. Don’t be an arsehole, the Scot said, all he’ll do now is he’ll deliberately spill his soup tomorrow and make it seem like he predicted it. Tell me something I’ll do? the Scot said. But then all you’ll do is deliberately not do it, the Irishman said, and try to prove him wrong. But if the future is written, the Scot said, then surely there’s no way I can avoid doing it? If you knew you were going to die at a certain time and at a certain place, then surely you would just not go there? But avoiding not going there would be exactly what you were meant to do, the Irishman said, because the information you were given made you act in a certain way, which is the way you were supposed to act, which is the way the future had to be. There is no way of getting out of it, the Irishman said. If he says that you will do something tomorrow and then you do it, then he has made you do it. If he says you will do something tomorrow and then you don’t do it, but you deliberately do something else instead, then he has made you not do it and do something else instead. Just like he trapped me in that damn painting, the young man with the eyepatch said. And now I’m in it no matter what happens. Okay, okay, the Scot said. From now on, listen, keep us out of the future. I don’t want you making me do things and making me avoid doing things. Keep it clean, he said. You asked me to turn over the painting, I said. Okay, the Scot said, but from now on keep us out of it. I’ll do my best, I said. Tell me, though, the young man with the eyepatch said, tell me. I’m all tied up in it. Ask the lady about me, ask her what she knows. I will, I said, I will, I promised him.
