Monument Maker, page 53
Scott took a huge, triumphant draw on the joint and they both burst out laughing. He poured them both another glass of wine. Did you ever work in a titty bar? Muldoon asked him, and they both broke up all over again.
Where was I? Scott said. Okay, fucked and being fucked. Now think about lying in bed in the morning in that blissful post-coital state. Your wife gets up, say, or whoever it was you were fucking, I’d hate to presume, and you can hear them next door, perhaps they’re singing to themselves under their breath or putting away last night’s dishes. You turn over in bed and you feel the weight of the mattress, holding you up, the way it curves around the shape of your body, the feel of the blanket, the soft weave of the wool, the delightful cold silk of the trim, you feel it wrap itself around you. Where are you?
There is a form of mutual exchange here, between what you think of as you and what you think of as not you. Really there is one experience, but that one experience, which is really nothing, if you want to get deep down into it, relies on two, on duality, on duplicity. Really, when you are lying in bed after sex and feeling that beautiful warm, cosy sensation, it is like a duet, between what we have come to term animate and inanimate. One facilitates the experience and—this is the thing—vice versa. The blanket is given its particular characteristics by this incredible opportunity of communion, which the coming together of both “you” and “it” have facilitated. Do you see what I mean? Experience isn’t one-way. We think it is, we have fallen for that, but no experience is divisible from the components of that experience. The blankets truly are warming, are comforting, are gentle. You are being covered and they are covering you. And there is something else born in their mingling.
Let me put it another way. When you look back, say, when you remember, what is it that you remember, and where are you? Memories do not contain you. Most times you are nowhere to be found. Memories do not consist of you seeing yourself, there, in the centre, cut off from everything all around you, sealed in. You don’t look back and see yourself standing there. You recall what was around you, what was outside you, and how that chimed with what was inside at the time. Yet you say, that was me, I remember. What are you remembering? Are you putting your body back together, piece by piece? Or are you reassembling the world, as it was? So, you see, you, when you think about it, tend to find yourself out there. And it’s just as correct to say that out there finds itself in you. Is the water gentle as it ripples against the pier? Well, I think so. But you know, he said, laughing, I’m a perfect fool.
Scott stood up and untied his dressing gown. The light, transparent days of summer, which now reliably spanned May to October, had transformed Scotland into an earthly paradise. The dark hills stood illuminated in the distance, the trees like crystals seen through pure, clear water. Scott’s torso criss-crossed with scars. He looks like a cadaver, Muldoon thought. But he talks like he’s the happiest man alive. Scott walked, with some difficulty, it appeared, and stood staring down into the water. The light played across his features, his face now translucent, and clear, in the light of the water. Then he turned to face Muldoon and fell backwards, grinning, into the water.
My favourite thing is to urinate on myself when I’m in the water, Scott announced. It’s the most futile fun you can ever have. Muldoon started to laugh, and he took off his own clothes and leaped in beside him. Scott’s wife Barbara appeared on the deck, carrying a tray with salad and bread and cheese. Oh, you’re in the water, she said, and she took a seat at the table and stared out at the two of them.
Scott lay on his back, floating in the sun, but Muldoon suddenly felt self-conscious. We must look like two boys to Barbara, he thought to himself. What is a boy to a woman?
Is a boy the grace of men? Some kind of gentle consolation for all the layers of armour in a man’s life?
These were the kind of thoughts that went through his head as he stood with his feet on the soft sand, the water caressing his shoulders. He looked at Scott and at Barbara and he pictured a man’s life lived backwards, beginning in carefree senility, and with the blessings of old age, and progressing through manhood and marriage and questions of purpose, and ending in the easy dissolution of all bonds, in simple pleasures and naive communion, girls restored to their mystery, boys gifted with disinterest.
But frontways forward life had its own graces: the grace of senility, the grace of the shutting down of memory, the grace to slowly dull the sex drive, to reduce the possibilities, the grace of unconsciousness and coma, the grace of the blood slowly seeping from the brain, the grace of the ruptured vein and the slow, soft dissolving of all that we were. That’s how his own father had died; softly, bit by bit, in an ambulance.
You were asking about fountains, Scott said, as they dried off. It had taken him an age to climb out of the water, with Muldoon and Barbara both helping him. Yet he had seemed so light, so weightless, that Muldoon had pictured him climbing straight up the ladder to the heavens, like an Indian rope trick, until from below he simply appeared as a speck in the sky, a child’s balloon.
In the occult literature, fountains are everywhere, Scott said. They’re up there with peacocks. And gardens, of course. Do you know much of the sixteenth-century occultists John Dee and Edward Kelley?
They travelled the aethers in communion with heavenly and infernal powers. How they ever got the idea of the aethers is anyone’s guess. Aether means pure sky, the very air that the gods themselves breathe. Dee and Kelley travelled on God’s breath, which is probably the closest you can get to the tip of his tongue and of course on his breath were other words, which in turn combined as intelligences, or intelligibles, if you like. Many of these intelligences appeared as fountains. Life itself appeared as a fountain, an eternal upflowing or outflowing. The fountain was flanked by light and by fire. These are the three worlds, according to Dee: the super-celestial world from which comes the light of the spirit, the second celestial world, where we have the fountain of life and the soul, and the elemental world, from which Dee says comes “the Invincible, heavenly yet sensible fire by which is digested and ripened that which is comprehensible.”
Now, let me ask you this, Scott said in a voice that seemed a little uneasy, have you ever heard of Area 47?
Is that the place where the American government was supposed to have kept all its aliens?
Scott broke into laughter. Ha ha, well, yes, you might say that, but no, that’s not what I’m talking about. Area 47, or so they say, is an area of the brain the size of a small finger that seems to relate to what they call creativity within constraints, whatever constraint might mean to you: the outline of an idea, a diagram, a sketch, a novel, a poem, a song, a notational system or a deadline, perhaps, a timescale.
You see, and this is counter-intuitive, but the less information you have, the closer you get to only having very bare bones with which to work, the more likely it is to result in inspired extrapolation. Too much information results in breakdown or gridlock. Even though we, as humans, think that more information is beneficial, we want more of it, we presume it will help. Constraints, you see, inspire a form of loquaciousness. Skeletons are what we hang things on. Area 47 is a place of bare bones and it is also an island battlemented by stone. You want to understand the significance of fountains and peacocks and gardens and stones? Find yourself an island. Fortify it.
o
Adam Aros pulled up his WordPool and started to type: The first impact was felt all along the Victory Gardens when the Spanish ship, Aboyos, came under attack on Saturday 20 April 2099 at approximately 3.14 SST, he wrote. There are books on Saturdays, it came back. There is a lore of days.
There had been a series of impacts. For almost three minutes the hull of the Aboyos had been assaulted with what staff variously described as high-impact weapons, meteors the size of cannonballs, intensely focused beams of light, a rain of marbles, terrible hands and fists, a torrent of debris, space junk, industrial jackhammers, catapults, slingshots, cluster bombs, guided missiles, drones, nuts, bolts and machinery. The British-designed hull had survived intact, but on a spacewalk afterwards a delegation described it as looking uncannily like the moon: pocked and cratered and with deep hollows that resembled dead oceans. There hadn’t been enough time to scramble any defences and, besides, the Victory Gardens, the earth itself, had never experienced, or fully prepared for, an attack from without.
At first cameras appeared to reveal nothing but streaks of light, travelling at incredible speeds, emerging, seemingly, from nowhere. Further out, however, a pattern could be discerned, a series of lights that came to be known as the Luna Armada, not just because they resembled a ghostly naval fleet when blown up to maximum resolution, but also because they resembled moths, their “sails” or “wings” a pale translucent green, moths rising up, or angels, their wings extended behind them and on their wings what appeared as eyes, Horus-like whorls of colour, of black and red and pale yellow and white, and there, in the centre, a chthonic, pond-scum green. They appeared to rise up, slowly, moving in and out of formation until they cohered in a single point like the foggy film of a planet, before disappearing altogether.
The Victory Gardens were set on a war footing with no idea when or from where they might strike next. But not everyone was preparing for an assault. Aros gave a speech, an impassioned one. He argued that they had no right to treat the Luna Armada as unequivocally hostile. Think of a moth, he said, attracted by the light, hurling its broken body, again and again, against a bulb, against the glass of a window. We have made our presence in the universe known; we have signalled our interest in becoming full galactic citizens. With the ring of the Victory Gardens we have lit up the earth. Think of wild horses. Think of dolphins. Who would have believed that one day we would harness and ride on the backs of these incredible creatures, separated from us by a gulf of biology and physiognomy? A gulf that truly is as vast as the great distances between the stars. Who first thought to swim with dolphins? Remember, he insisted, they did no serious damage, they took no lives. This is first contact. How did we picture it? That they would arrive bearing gifts, following our star, like the three wise men? That they would knock on the door and ask for passage? Well, they knocked alright. Now we must be very careful how we answer.
Of course, there were dissenting voices. What of wolves, some said, what of lions? Would you have us make of them as dogs? There were suspicions, too. What about Spain? someone asked. Why them in particular? It may just have been their position at the zenith, their place in the wheel at that moment. But the rumours resurfaced. What of Spain’s ongoing petitioning for full lunar colonisation? Hadn’t the impact been compared to a map of the moon? That was far-fetched, Aros came back. People see what they want to see. It’s the equivalent of staring at the sun up here; after a while you start to see the moon superimposed on everything. Besides, in that case, why did this Luna Armada not go straight for the moon itself?
Perhaps they came from there, someone said.
Look, Aros said, the whole world is right now mobilising its combined military might in anticipation of an attack. We’re here on the front line. We have a great opportunity. Let them worry about the military logistics, the potential for catastrophe. Let us stay true to our guiding principles. What do we have to lose? This is the moment. Let us welcome them as brothers.
Or tame them as animals, someone else joked. But it wasn’t funny.
Back in his quarters, Aros put a call through to his wife. Hi, baby, he said. Baby, she said, is everything okay up there? I heard they were sending up the military. And what are they going to do up here? In space the military are helpless. They should stay down on earth, out of our way, where at least their guns work, instead of gurning out the window up here. We’re all helpless right now, it’s like being born. They’re going to have to get used to it. What’s the atmosphere like down there?
Oh, you know: euphoria, mass panic, jubilation, paranoia, religious fervour, civil unrest.
So, business as usual?
Ha ha. That’s funny. There was a huge revival meeting on Glasgow Green. They think it’s the beginning of the rapture. Your friend Robert Scott was on television. He was quite good, actually. He was on some talk show alongside some politicians and religious figures and philosophers and scientists. They billed him as a defrocked priest and he burst out laughing. He said the events of the past few weeks have effectively defrocked every single member of this panel. It’s funny: it’s the scientists that are the most flummoxed. And they admit it. I always thought when we first encountered intelligent life that it would be religion that would take the hit. But they think it’s holy war up there. They think it’s judgement coming down.
What else did Scott say?
He said we need a new mind. He said that approaching the future with a mindset from the past is like dreaming inside a dream. That’s how he put it.
Dreaming inside a dream, Aros said. But that’s it exactly. There’s something on the tip of my tongue, a song, a piece of music. I can’t shake it. I’m telling you, Sarah, I’ve had this feeling ever since I arrived up here. It’s as if what is taking place is somehow written over what’s come before. As if back of here there is another sequence of events holding everything in place, a scaffolding or a skeleton structure, but like an arrangement of music, that’s what I keep feeling, like a melody on top of a melody, but a forgotten melody, somehow, like this is some kind of strange counterpoint to a melody that has somehow been dismembered, transposed by time. Yet somehow, inexplicably, it remains harmonious. It’s as if the Victory Gardens themselves, this circle around earth, is just another layer of the dream. And there are gaps, openings, where the Luna Armada came through, a pause, a second’s cessation that works as a kind of tunnel. When you watch the footage of the Armada, these distant lights, these luminous wings moving in this grand distant formation, intertwining with each other and floating up, it’s impossible not to think of silent music, not to see it as dance. But who is the dreamer?
Who is the composer, you mean? Sarah said.
Who is the creator? Aros replied. But really, think about it, is a dream dreamed? Who dreams dreams? There is only the dream.
o
Over the weeks and months that followed first contact Adam Aros was visited by a series of unnerving waking dreams. He would rise from sleep to a succession of short-lived blanks, of subtle erasures and momentary removals. At first it was a framed painting that hung on the wall of his bedroom whose subject had been replaced by a rectangle of blank, piercing white. It took several moments before the peasants, busy at harvest, were returned to the scene, as in the lifting of an all-enveloping blizzard. Other nights it was his obsessively organised book collection that disappeared from the shelves, replaced just as suddenly as if by some supernatural sleight of hand. Then the planets themselves went out and came back on. Through his window the moon, for the blink of an eye, or more properly the beating of a great wing, became a black hole in the sky.
As always, when moments of breakdown threatened to overwhelm him, Aros resorted to painting his way out. He painted the ghost moths of the Luna Armada, their translucent wings, their invisible eyes.
In order to internalise his experiences of nocturnal dislocation he painted the moths as white on white, their delicate wings as see-through veils, as though they lay draped like a thin film across the eyeballs themselves. He dressed his sleeping quarters with these compulsive portraits, these deep seeings.
He wondered if, when waking from sleep, whether the moths themselves might appear, might rise from the canvas—from the eye—and make themselves known. Form from out of nothing, he reasoned, and nothing from out of form. But they never rose. Of course not, Aros told himself. He rose from his bed and pulled up his WordPool. I painted the moths but they never rose, he wrote. They are trapped, it said. They are imprisoned inside of me.
o
Robert Scott’s condition was deteriorating. Three days ago he had suffered a stroke in his cabin at Loch Awe. Barbara had found him on the floor in front of the couch, unable to move. Get some nets and some ropes, he had instructed her, you can haul me in with that. He was clearly confused. Barbara called an ambulance, but it took an hour to get there after they arrived on the opposite shore by mistake. Barbara stood helpless on the deck, her poor husband talking to himself inside, giving constant instruction on how best to raise him from the floor, the flashing lights of the ambulance across the dark water, turning the night sky blue. It’s an ice cream van, Scott said. It’s my brother Gregor in an ice cream van. He has come to rescue me. She looked at Scott, curled on the floor, his legs pulled up tight against his chest. He looks like a little boy, she thought. They took him out on a stretcher and he asked her for water and she filled a baby’s bottle for him. How else could he drink it lying down? The ambulance sat outside for some time. Barbara watched from the window. Now she was unable to move. Is he dying out there? she wondered. Is he dying out there in the ambulance? Still she didn’t move. The medics told her to follow the ambulance in her car when they left. Until then she stood at the window and imagined her husband, pictured the interior of the ambulance, tried to imagine the loosening of his thoughts, his face from above, the wonder and terror inside him, the harsh light, the green uniforms of the medics, bent over him, the coded conversation. You have become a little boy, she told him, and she held the ambulance in her arms.
