Monument Maker, page 41
We arranged a first meeting with an emissary at a small town on the coast some miles from Athens. It may seem abhorrent to you, but I gave my word to keep the precise location of our terrible doctor’s practice a secret. I gave him my word. Yes, the emissary informed us, the doctor was skilled in facial rebuilding and in the removal of faces. During the war, in a secret laboratory in a death camp, he’d had a stunning collection of perfectly preserved faces mounted on his wall which had unfortunately, he said, been destroyed by the camp’s barbaric liberators.
I removed my mask for him to see. Ah, the emissary marvelled, he will love you! You are a gift, my friend, he said.
The day before we left for the procedure, which took place on a private island off the coast of Greece, I visited my favourite prostitute in Athens for the last time as a monstrosity, or so I believed.
That night I made love to Mariella with a new sense of abandon, although I still wore my mask. Afterwards we lay together in silence for quite some time. A bird sang in the middle of the night, the same three notes, again and again. What can it be? Mariella asked me. I wanted to ask her if she wanted me or if she wanted her husband, but the die had been cast and I knew there was more at stake than simple jealousy or rivalry. A feather on the breath of God, wasn’t that the phrase? Besides, I thought, as I stood in front of the mirror in our bathroom for one last time, who was I at this point? A pupa, an indeterminate stage, a man in transition. I stared at myself some more and retired to bed beneath an open window where the night bird continued its forlorn song.
We arrived at the small town on the coast whose name I am sworn not to divulge. There we were met by the pasty emissary, who was wearing a disconcertingly loud dogstooth sports jacket and whose long hair had been greased back with Brylcreem. He believes this is an assignation, Mariella said, he thinks he is in espionage. It will be necessary for you both to be blindfolded, he said, looking at us over the top of his thin spectacles. We climbed onto the boat, a small motorised affair, and the driver, a fat Greek thug, slid a pair of black pillowcases over our heads.
The heat was stifling, and it was difficult to breathe. I tried to track our movements, to estimate the general direction of our approach, but it seemed to me that the fat Greek driver was deliberately out to confuse us, turning back on himself again and again, approaching our island in a series of ever-increasing circles that made it feel more like orbiting a planet.
After what I would estimate was just over an hour he killed the motor and we floated into a shallow bay. The scene that greeted us when our blinds were removed was remarkable. I have never seen such lush, green foliage, such a mixture of wild and cultivated plants, towering all around us and running up a steep incline topped off by a building that I came to find out had originally been a plague hospital but which now resembled nothing more than a strange modernist church with high windows and battlements along the top that looked like stone antennae or crooked crosses. As we were led up the steep path I was taken aback by the intense life of the vegetation, which almost felt animal, the deep green of the grass, the reds and blues of the flowers, the huge swollen seed heads. The Nazis experimented with flowers too, I thought to myself.
The doctor, whom I will simply call The Surgeon from here on, was waiting for us on the wide patio dressed in a white leisure suit and with a rust-coloured cravat. He rose to greet us. Ah, he said, I see someone has already unwrapped my present. I wasn’t wearing my mask.
Mariella, he said, it is good to see you. This put me on guard, I admit. Was this camp old Nazi a friend of hers? When I asked her afterwards she said I had misunderstood him, that it had simply been a generic greeting, that there was no implication of prior knowledge, that was the exact phrase she used, no implication of prior knowledge. He came up close to me and offered me his hand. He stared into my eyes and ran his gaze all over my face as if taking in an old master. Do you have the photograph? he asked Mariella. Yes, he nodded, yes, I think we can make this work. A most excellent choice, he said to me, but before I could explain that choice really had very little to do with it he put his hand up and signalled for silence. Really, he said, I regard this as more of a restoration than a rebuild, you understand. I didn’t, but before I could protest he signalled for silence again. Have you ever heard of the Turin Shroud? he asked us. It’s a terrible fake, he said, but really that isn’t the point.
I gather you were in the war, The Surgeon said as we sat down to coffee and cake on the patio. Weren’t we all? I replied. Oh no, The Surgeon replied, I wasn’t in the war at all. I took advantage of the war, yes, perhaps, I was on the sidelines of the war, certainly, but I was never in the war. I dealt with, how do you put it, the by-products of the war, as it were. The war was a great opportunity for The Surgeon to hone his skills, the emissary, whom I will simply call The Weasel from here on, said. I struggled to get the cake into my mouth. Eating cake will be a much simpler affair with your new lips, The Surgeon reassured me. As will kissing the girls, he said, and with that he winked at me.
When will the operation take place? Mariella asked him. Oh, in a few days, The Surgeon replied. I will of course have to take preliminary measurements and I will have to sketch the rudiments, the basic topography, on our friend’s face here. Those were the words he used, “rudiments” and “basic topography” and “friend.” In the meantime, you should make yourself at home. All my hospitality is at your service. Is it true that this island was once a plague hospital? Mariella asked him. Yes, that is true, The Surgeon admitted, but that romanticises it a little, I’m afraid, or is that just me? In less prosaic terms it was a hospital for infectious diseases. However, despite my remodelling I would like to think that some of the original ethos remains and that we too provide a place of succour for the wounded and the maimed.
I excused myself and The Weasel led me to my room, on the top floor, with its own balcony and a view out across the island and beyond. I had expected to be able to fix my co-ordinates by the islands around us, perhaps even a glimpse of the mainland in the distance, but to my consternation there was only a single other island to be seen, a tiny, uninhabited companion just to the north.
Had we really travelled so far? As I scanned the island I could make out a cluster of semi-industrial buildings somewhere to the east, assembled around another small cove. Why hadn’t we come in that way? Elsewhere the island seemed almost impassably rich with huge, fleshy flowers and technicoloured flora, a grotesque bridal bouquet fallen from heaven. I could see The Surgeon down below, seated next to Mariella. They seemed to be deep in conversation, though it was impossible to catch what they were saying from so high up.
Was she crying? At one point she held her hands over her face and shook her long dark hair, at which The Surgeon stood up from the table and went to embrace her. As he embraced her I saw him signal to someone behind her back, just out of sight. I was becoming increasingly unsettled. I snuck from my room and began to explore the rest of the building.
The top floor appeared to be entirely residential, a long corridor running the length of the building with identical doors on either side, although, as I was later to confirm, there only appeared to be windows and balconies on the west side.
A row of windowless rooms facing east on the top floor made no sense.
The second floor was lit up in a pale undersea-blue, giving the impression of being somewhere below sea level while still clearly suspended in the air.
All of the doors I attempted were locked, but as I went to try the final one it opened slowly from the inside, and I secreted myself behind a pillar as The Weasel emerged wearing what appeared to be a bloodied white apron before locking the door behind him.
I’ve neglected to mention the most striking feature of this second floor—I was stationed on the third, you understand—which was the presence, along its entire length, of perfectly preserved animals in large glass cases.
Some of them I was able to recognise, a red-throated diver or loon, as they are known, who have the most uncanny of mating calls, stood awkwardly upright amidst a diorama of cliffs, seashells and netting, its feet I noticed had both been pierced, as if once upon a time it had been fixed to the spot and there were holes where it had torn free, there were snakes, inevitably, coiled motionless around branches or beneath huge fake rocks, there were larger animals too, a vicious-looking wild boar, owls, a huge pair of deer, and, most unnerving of all, a terrible fake monkey, and by terrible I mean awful, kitschy, cute, macabre, truly awful, propped up in a jungle scene, the kind of monkey a child might win in a raffle, not realistic at all, with a huge dopey smile and big button eyes, the kind of monkey with a name like George, I thought to myself.
I stared at it in morbid fascination. Everything else seemed so particularly realistic, so authentic. I confess that I became troubled by George, as we shall call him for now, this terrible toy monkey in a fake zoo beneath me, beneath the waters, at night. Of course, I thought of the film that Donald had made, the film of the zoo in ruins, but I searched for a black stork in vain.
The first floor was completely sealed—I guessed this was where The Surgeon’s operating theatre was located, due to the presence of a light that would go on and off above the door—as was the basement, which appeared fitted with heavy blast doors. Someone intends to sit out the end of the world, I thought to myself, and then it occurred to me that we were on an ark, a great floating ark with every species of fauna and wildlife preserved, and that the rest of the world had disappeared beneath the waves and here we were, two by two, me and Donald or me and George or me and Mariella.
On the ground floor there was a huge indoor swimming pool, lit up from underneath, so that the water appeared electric.
That evening we ate dinner on the patio, served by a pair of elderly kitchen staff who had seemed to appear from out of nowhere.
Where are the kitchens? I asked The Surgeon. Oh, they’re on the second floor, he told me, there’s a service lift that connects them to a utility room at the back of the manor. That was the word he used, manor. We drank beautiful Greek wine and the main course was a stew of venison and black olives. I drooled the food back into my plate as I ate it. The Weasel seemed particularly disgusted. I was used to it. I wondered if he had slaughtered the deer himself, behind the closed door on the third floor, or perhaps he had simply butchered it. The idea of bringing live animals to the island just to be killed seemed far-fetched, even in the circumstances.
Have you done many of these facial reconstructions? I asked The Surgeon, but I found myself slurring my words even more than usual, unable to articulate even the simplest of phrases. I’m getting worse, I thought to myself, I need this work more than ever. Restoration, my boy, not reconstruction, The Surgeon corrected me, but yes, I have restored many faces. Many faces, he said, and he glanced around the table.
For the first time I felt myself gripped with fear, a fear that ran like a cold liquid injection up through my stomach. I don’t feel well, I explained to the table, though the words were disappearing one by one. Don’t worry, The Surgeon reassured me, I’m afraid that it’s all perfectly natural. We have a big week ahead of us. I took the liberty of dosing you with a slow-release pre-med. It’s better this way, he reassured me. You’ll find it much more comfortable. I need to lie down, I said, or at least I think I said it, as The Surgeon instructed the two kitchen orderlies to carry me to a lounger on the patio and to lay me flat on my back. I gazed up at the blur of the sun as if I was already beneath the knife.
This is too much, the Scotsman with the tanned arsehole burst. We were back in the prison yard during the war. I can’t believe all of this is going to happen to you, he said, aren’t you afraid, aren’t you nervous, knowing what you know is up ahead? I’m resigned, I told him. It’s hard to explain, I said. In a way it has already taken place. That monkey really gets me, the Scotsman said. Fuck that monkey. I saw The Surgeon talking to the monkey, I told the Scotsman, I saw him taking tea with the monkey. Fuck no, the Scotsman said. What was it doing out of its case? Are you sure you weren’t out of your head on the drugs? I can’t be sure of anything, I admitted, but I recall a conversation between The Surgeon and the monkey.
They were sat at the table, in the afternoon, The Surgeon and the monkey. There was a single cloud in the sky and they were arguing about what it best resembled. A crocodile, George the monkey said. What was his voice like, the monkey’s voice? Like it was filled with sawdust. The Surgeon disagreed, he said that the cloud best resembled an idea, not a living thing. Where were you at this point? I was lying on a deckchair, in the sun, out on the patio. How did the monkey arrive, was it carried to the table or did it walk there on its own account? It just appeared but it had soft feet so there was no way you could have heard its approach. What did the monkey, sorry, what did George say to that? He said another word, he said the word alligator. What was The Surgeon’s response? He said, wild geese overhead. What did George say? I think he asked him if that was some kind of Chinese poem, admittedly I was in a haze at this point. It’s an idea and a living thing, The Surgeon said. That’s a poem, George told him. Then he pointed to the cloud again, he raised his stuffed arm, which ended in a rudimentary hand that best resembled a mitten, being a solid palm with an opposable thumb, and he said another word, he said the word reptile.
Then the cloud began to change, I watched it change in front of me, it seemed to be sprouting legs, it seemed set to scurry off into the blue. The Surgeon raised his arm and pointed at the changes. Cockroach! he said, and both he and George laughed. What was the monkey’s laugh like? It wasn’t constricted, it was resonant, it wasn’t what you would think, it wasn’t high-pitched either, like a chimpanzee’s, it was a real belly laugh. Then George began playing the fool or acting like a monkey, one of the two.
As he sat up in his chair he began making terrible inarticulate noises with his mouth and scratching himself all over but especially under his armpits. Then he pointed up at the cloud, which was constantly changing shape by this point, and he shouted, fleas! at which both he and The Surgeon collapsed in laughter.
Then all of the life went out of the table and they both just sat there in silence as the cloud dispersed and they were left with the blue of the sky and the blue of the water and nothing in between.
I was drifting out of consciousness and having my own terrible dreams about animals, about white horses and cows, from what I can remember. When I looked around George had gone, had padded off on his silent feet, and it was just The Surgeon who was left and who looked at me with an expression that said, you’ve been dreaming of animals, haven’t you?
Mariella took me upstairs. I told her nothing of what I had seen. We got off at the second floor. Have you checked out the animals? I asked her, and I led her across the huge echoing hall lit up like undersea. Look, I said, and I pointed to the macabre stuffed monkey behind the glass. Look, I said, that surely isn’t real. She put her face to the glass. It’s a costume of some sort, she said, of course it’s not real. Look, she said, you can see fastenings on its back and on its arms, it was made to be worn, by a performer of some sort. A performing monkey. It’s probably an antique, she said. You can see where it has been reconstituted, that’s the word she used, reconstituted, you can tell by the different qualities of the hair. They’ve had it stuffed.
The Surgeon is a collector of eccentricities, she said, as she took my hand and led us to our room on the third floor, where I barely slept, not, as you might suppose, due to nerves about the operation that was to take place the next day but truly because the monkey, George, had taken up residency in my brain.
I recalled the empty mansion and the deserted streets that I would walk in my mind through my time of imprisonment during the war, the rooms that stood for memory, and I came to wonder if I hadn’t lost myself in a theatre of my own devising, a feeling of space dislocated in time that the drugs undoubtedly encouraged, that I had confused the timelines so completely, with my comings and goings, that they were now breaking down and subject to invasion, from out of the past, from out of mockery, from out of wild speculation.
The next day I was wheeled, alone, into the operating theatre.
Mariella and I said our goodbyes. She put her head on my chest and she wept. She told me things I no longer remember and then waved and blew kisses at me as I disappeared. How had I come to be here? It was all so extravagant. The theatre appeared more like a Victorian observatory or the set of an uncanny funfair than an operating room. Along one wall were arrayed a series of thick pipes that resembled a church organ but with a round, fully movable mirror attached to the end of each. The Surgeon informed me that they were used to focus starlight and moonlight and the light of the planets, that it was crucial that the transformation take place according to the movement of the heavens, according to what he called “deep time.” After all, he said, every nativity is written in the stars.
What I had taken as crooked crosses or battlements atop the hospital were actually a series of precisely calibrated telescopes. Remember, he said, when we look out on everything we came from, we are looking into time as well as space. He slid the stretcher into place beneath a canopy of bright, almost blinding lights, strategically situated around what appeared to be a run of film projectors.
First, The Surgeon said, we must map the basic topography. The central projector clicked into life and the photograph of Donald appeared on a screen just above my head, superimposed upon my own terrible wounds. I say terrible because it was only in the moment when his face met my own, an elegant ship from the future touched down on Mars, that I realised the extent of my alienation from the ways of men.
I removed my mask for him to see. Ah, the emissary marvelled, he will love you! You are a gift, my friend, he said.
The day before we left for the procedure, which took place on a private island off the coast of Greece, I visited my favourite prostitute in Athens for the last time as a monstrosity, or so I believed.
That night I made love to Mariella with a new sense of abandon, although I still wore my mask. Afterwards we lay together in silence for quite some time. A bird sang in the middle of the night, the same three notes, again and again. What can it be? Mariella asked me. I wanted to ask her if she wanted me or if she wanted her husband, but the die had been cast and I knew there was more at stake than simple jealousy or rivalry. A feather on the breath of God, wasn’t that the phrase? Besides, I thought, as I stood in front of the mirror in our bathroom for one last time, who was I at this point? A pupa, an indeterminate stage, a man in transition. I stared at myself some more and retired to bed beneath an open window where the night bird continued its forlorn song.
We arrived at the small town on the coast whose name I am sworn not to divulge. There we were met by the pasty emissary, who was wearing a disconcertingly loud dogstooth sports jacket and whose long hair had been greased back with Brylcreem. He believes this is an assignation, Mariella said, he thinks he is in espionage. It will be necessary for you both to be blindfolded, he said, looking at us over the top of his thin spectacles. We climbed onto the boat, a small motorised affair, and the driver, a fat Greek thug, slid a pair of black pillowcases over our heads.
The heat was stifling, and it was difficult to breathe. I tried to track our movements, to estimate the general direction of our approach, but it seemed to me that the fat Greek driver was deliberately out to confuse us, turning back on himself again and again, approaching our island in a series of ever-increasing circles that made it feel more like orbiting a planet.
After what I would estimate was just over an hour he killed the motor and we floated into a shallow bay. The scene that greeted us when our blinds were removed was remarkable. I have never seen such lush, green foliage, such a mixture of wild and cultivated plants, towering all around us and running up a steep incline topped off by a building that I came to find out had originally been a plague hospital but which now resembled nothing more than a strange modernist church with high windows and battlements along the top that looked like stone antennae or crooked crosses. As we were led up the steep path I was taken aback by the intense life of the vegetation, which almost felt animal, the deep green of the grass, the reds and blues of the flowers, the huge swollen seed heads. The Nazis experimented with flowers too, I thought to myself.
The doctor, whom I will simply call The Surgeon from here on, was waiting for us on the wide patio dressed in a white leisure suit and with a rust-coloured cravat. He rose to greet us. Ah, he said, I see someone has already unwrapped my present. I wasn’t wearing my mask.
Mariella, he said, it is good to see you. This put me on guard, I admit. Was this camp old Nazi a friend of hers? When I asked her afterwards she said I had misunderstood him, that it had simply been a generic greeting, that there was no implication of prior knowledge, that was the exact phrase she used, no implication of prior knowledge. He came up close to me and offered me his hand. He stared into my eyes and ran his gaze all over my face as if taking in an old master. Do you have the photograph? he asked Mariella. Yes, he nodded, yes, I think we can make this work. A most excellent choice, he said to me, but before I could explain that choice really had very little to do with it he put his hand up and signalled for silence. Really, he said, I regard this as more of a restoration than a rebuild, you understand. I didn’t, but before I could protest he signalled for silence again. Have you ever heard of the Turin Shroud? he asked us. It’s a terrible fake, he said, but really that isn’t the point.
I gather you were in the war, The Surgeon said as we sat down to coffee and cake on the patio. Weren’t we all? I replied. Oh no, The Surgeon replied, I wasn’t in the war at all. I took advantage of the war, yes, perhaps, I was on the sidelines of the war, certainly, but I was never in the war. I dealt with, how do you put it, the by-products of the war, as it were. The war was a great opportunity for The Surgeon to hone his skills, the emissary, whom I will simply call The Weasel from here on, said. I struggled to get the cake into my mouth. Eating cake will be a much simpler affair with your new lips, The Surgeon reassured me. As will kissing the girls, he said, and with that he winked at me.
When will the operation take place? Mariella asked him. Oh, in a few days, The Surgeon replied. I will of course have to take preliminary measurements and I will have to sketch the rudiments, the basic topography, on our friend’s face here. Those were the words he used, “rudiments” and “basic topography” and “friend.” In the meantime, you should make yourself at home. All my hospitality is at your service. Is it true that this island was once a plague hospital? Mariella asked him. Yes, that is true, The Surgeon admitted, but that romanticises it a little, I’m afraid, or is that just me? In less prosaic terms it was a hospital for infectious diseases. However, despite my remodelling I would like to think that some of the original ethos remains and that we too provide a place of succour for the wounded and the maimed.
I excused myself and The Weasel led me to my room, on the top floor, with its own balcony and a view out across the island and beyond. I had expected to be able to fix my co-ordinates by the islands around us, perhaps even a glimpse of the mainland in the distance, but to my consternation there was only a single other island to be seen, a tiny, uninhabited companion just to the north.
Had we really travelled so far? As I scanned the island I could make out a cluster of semi-industrial buildings somewhere to the east, assembled around another small cove. Why hadn’t we come in that way? Elsewhere the island seemed almost impassably rich with huge, fleshy flowers and technicoloured flora, a grotesque bridal bouquet fallen from heaven. I could see The Surgeon down below, seated next to Mariella. They seemed to be deep in conversation, though it was impossible to catch what they were saying from so high up.
Was she crying? At one point she held her hands over her face and shook her long dark hair, at which The Surgeon stood up from the table and went to embrace her. As he embraced her I saw him signal to someone behind her back, just out of sight. I was becoming increasingly unsettled. I snuck from my room and began to explore the rest of the building.
The top floor appeared to be entirely residential, a long corridor running the length of the building with identical doors on either side, although, as I was later to confirm, there only appeared to be windows and balconies on the west side.
A row of windowless rooms facing east on the top floor made no sense.
The second floor was lit up in a pale undersea-blue, giving the impression of being somewhere below sea level while still clearly suspended in the air.
All of the doors I attempted were locked, but as I went to try the final one it opened slowly from the inside, and I secreted myself behind a pillar as The Weasel emerged wearing what appeared to be a bloodied white apron before locking the door behind him.
I’ve neglected to mention the most striking feature of this second floor—I was stationed on the third, you understand—which was the presence, along its entire length, of perfectly preserved animals in large glass cases.
Some of them I was able to recognise, a red-throated diver or loon, as they are known, who have the most uncanny of mating calls, stood awkwardly upright amidst a diorama of cliffs, seashells and netting, its feet I noticed had both been pierced, as if once upon a time it had been fixed to the spot and there were holes where it had torn free, there were snakes, inevitably, coiled motionless around branches or beneath huge fake rocks, there were larger animals too, a vicious-looking wild boar, owls, a huge pair of deer, and, most unnerving of all, a terrible fake monkey, and by terrible I mean awful, kitschy, cute, macabre, truly awful, propped up in a jungle scene, the kind of monkey a child might win in a raffle, not realistic at all, with a huge dopey smile and big button eyes, the kind of monkey with a name like George, I thought to myself.
I stared at it in morbid fascination. Everything else seemed so particularly realistic, so authentic. I confess that I became troubled by George, as we shall call him for now, this terrible toy monkey in a fake zoo beneath me, beneath the waters, at night. Of course, I thought of the film that Donald had made, the film of the zoo in ruins, but I searched for a black stork in vain.
The first floor was completely sealed—I guessed this was where The Surgeon’s operating theatre was located, due to the presence of a light that would go on and off above the door—as was the basement, which appeared fitted with heavy blast doors. Someone intends to sit out the end of the world, I thought to myself, and then it occurred to me that we were on an ark, a great floating ark with every species of fauna and wildlife preserved, and that the rest of the world had disappeared beneath the waves and here we were, two by two, me and Donald or me and George or me and Mariella.
On the ground floor there was a huge indoor swimming pool, lit up from underneath, so that the water appeared electric.
That evening we ate dinner on the patio, served by a pair of elderly kitchen staff who had seemed to appear from out of nowhere.
Where are the kitchens? I asked The Surgeon. Oh, they’re on the second floor, he told me, there’s a service lift that connects them to a utility room at the back of the manor. That was the word he used, manor. We drank beautiful Greek wine and the main course was a stew of venison and black olives. I drooled the food back into my plate as I ate it. The Weasel seemed particularly disgusted. I was used to it. I wondered if he had slaughtered the deer himself, behind the closed door on the third floor, or perhaps he had simply butchered it. The idea of bringing live animals to the island just to be killed seemed far-fetched, even in the circumstances.
Have you done many of these facial reconstructions? I asked The Surgeon, but I found myself slurring my words even more than usual, unable to articulate even the simplest of phrases. I’m getting worse, I thought to myself, I need this work more than ever. Restoration, my boy, not reconstruction, The Surgeon corrected me, but yes, I have restored many faces. Many faces, he said, and he glanced around the table.
For the first time I felt myself gripped with fear, a fear that ran like a cold liquid injection up through my stomach. I don’t feel well, I explained to the table, though the words were disappearing one by one. Don’t worry, The Surgeon reassured me, I’m afraid that it’s all perfectly natural. We have a big week ahead of us. I took the liberty of dosing you with a slow-release pre-med. It’s better this way, he reassured me. You’ll find it much more comfortable. I need to lie down, I said, or at least I think I said it, as The Surgeon instructed the two kitchen orderlies to carry me to a lounger on the patio and to lay me flat on my back. I gazed up at the blur of the sun as if I was already beneath the knife.
This is too much, the Scotsman with the tanned arsehole burst. We were back in the prison yard during the war. I can’t believe all of this is going to happen to you, he said, aren’t you afraid, aren’t you nervous, knowing what you know is up ahead? I’m resigned, I told him. It’s hard to explain, I said. In a way it has already taken place. That monkey really gets me, the Scotsman said. Fuck that monkey. I saw The Surgeon talking to the monkey, I told the Scotsman, I saw him taking tea with the monkey. Fuck no, the Scotsman said. What was it doing out of its case? Are you sure you weren’t out of your head on the drugs? I can’t be sure of anything, I admitted, but I recall a conversation between The Surgeon and the monkey.
They were sat at the table, in the afternoon, The Surgeon and the monkey. There was a single cloud in the sky and they were arguing about what it best resembled. A crocodile, George the monkey said. What was his voice like, the monkey’s voice? Like it was filled with sawdust. The Surgeon disagreed, he said that the cloud best resembled an idea, not a living thing. Where were you at this point? I was lying on a deckchair, in the sun, out on the patio. How did the monkey arrive, was it carried to the table or did it walk there on its own account? It just appeared but it had soft feet so there was no way you could have heard its approach. What did the monkey, sorry, what did George say to that? He said another word, he said the word alligator. What was The Surgeon’s response? He said, wild geese overhead. What did George say? I think he asked him if that was some kind of Chinese poem, admittedly I was in a haze at this point. It’s an idea and a living thing, The Surgeon said. That’s a poem, George told him. Then he pointed to the cloud again, he raised his stuffed arm, which ended in a rudimentary hand that best resembled a mitten, being a solid palm with an opposable thumb, and he said another word, he said the word reptile.
Then the cloud began to change, I watched it change in front of me, it seemed to be sprouting legs, it seemed set to scurry off into the blue. The Surgeon raised his arm and pointed at the changes. Cockroach! he said, and both he and George laughed. What was the monkey’s laugh like? It wasn’t constricted, it was resonant, it wasn’t what you would think, it wasn’t high-pitched either, like a chimpanzee’s, it was a real belly laugh. Then George began playing the fool or acting like a monkey, one of the two.
As he sat up in his chair he began making terrible inarticulate noises with his mouth and scratching himself all over but especially under his armpits. Then he pointed up at the cloud, which was constantly changing shape by this point, and he shouted, fleas! at which both he and The Surgeon collapsed in laughter.
Then all of the life went out of the table and they both just sat there in silence as the cloud dispersed and they were left with the blue of the sky and the blue of the water and nothing in between.
I was drifting out of consciousness and having my own terrible dreams about animals, about white horses and cows, from what I can remember. When I looked around George had gone, had padded off on his silent feet, and it was just The Surgeon who was left and who looked at me with an expression that said, you’ve been dreaming of animals, haven’t you?
Mariella took me upstairs. I told her nothing of what I had seen. We got off at the second floor. Have you checked out the animals? I asked her, and I led her across the huge echoing hall lit up like undersea. Look, I said, and I pointed to the macabre stuffed monkey behind the glass. Look, I said, that surely isn’t real. She put her face to the glass. It’s a costume of some sort, she said, of course it’s not real. Look, she said, you can see fastenings on its back and on its arms, it was made to be worn, by a performer of some sort. A performing monkey. It’s probably an antique, she said. You can see where it has been reconstituted, that’s the word she used, reconstituted, you can tell by the different qualities of the hair. They’ve had it stuffed.
The Surgeon is a collector of eccentricities, she said, as she took my hand and led us to our room on the third floor, where I barely slept, not, as you might suppose, due to nerves about the operation that was to take place the next day but truly because the monkey, George, had taken up residency in my brain.
I recalled the empty mansion and the deserted streets that I would walk in my mind through my time of imprisonment during the war, the rooms that stood for memory, and I came to wonder if I hadn’t lost myself in a theatre of my own devising, a feeling of space dislocated in time that the drugs undoubtedly encouraged, that I had confused the timelines so completely, with my comings and goings, that they were now breaking down and subject to invasion, from out of the past, from out of mockery, from out of wild speculation.
The next day I was wheeled, alone, into the operating theatre.
Mariella and I said our goodbyes. She put her head on my chest and she wept. She told me things I no longer remember and then waved and blew kisses at me as I disappeared. How had I come to be here? It was all so extravagant. The theatre appeared more like a Victorian observatory or the set of an uncanny funfair than an operating room. Along one wall were arrayed a series of thick pipes that resembled a church organ but with a round, fully movable mirror attached to the end of each. The Surgeon informed me that they were used to focus starlight and moonlight and the light of the planets, that it was crucial that the transformation take place according to the movement of the heavens, according to what he called “deep time.” After all, he said, every nativity is written in the stars.
What I had taken as crooked crosses or battlements atop the hospital were actually a series of precisely calibrated telescopes. Remember, he said, when we look out on everything we came from, we are looking into time as well as space. He slid the stretcher into place beneath a canopy of bright, almost blinding lights, strategically situated around what appeared to be a run of film projectors.
First, The Surgeon said, we must map the basic topography. The central projector clicked into life and the photograph of Donald appeared on a screen just above my head, superimposed upon my own terrible wounds. I say terrible because it was only in the moment when his face met my own, an elegant ship from the future touched down on Mars, that I realised the extent of my alienation from the ways of men.
