Monument Maker, page 54
By the time she arrived at the hospital Scott was no longer conscious. He had been awake when he arrived, the nurse said. She had asked him if he knew where he was. She declined to say if he replied.
The sheets were pulled up to his neck so that he appeared as a disembodied head. His face was lost in the white of the pillow; translucent, painted on. There was a halo like a pale shadow around him. He’s dwindling, the doctor said. It sounded like an errant schoolboy, Barbara thought, deliberately wasting time. They asked her if he required a priest to perform the last rites. Best to cover all bases, she thought, and she agreed. He was the most miserable priest she had ever encountered: gruff, unpleasant and with a monotonous way of talking. Not the best argument for the priesthood, she thought.
He laid his hands on Scott’s head, Scott’s papier-mâché head, she thought, don’t crush it. He began the Commendation of the Dying. Barbara didn’t recognise any of the passages he quoted. Then he walked off and left the two of them alone. Barbara touched his face. Then she leaned over and kissed him. He still smelled like himself. Every so often his leg would kick. He could be paralysed down one side, the nurse had told her. My baby, she said, and she cradled his head in her breast, my poor little baby. Don’t die yet, she said. Please come back to me. But secretly, in her heart, she knew that now was as good a time to die as any.
o
When Peter Muldoon was only twelve years old he developed a terrible stammer that lasted until he was a young adult. Stammer is a word that is used to encompass many different and unrelated difficulties with the articulation of words. In Muldoon’s case, or so he claimed, he had actually developed an allergy against a certain letter of the alphabet. It made him sick. It was the letter D. Words that ended in D were especially problematic. The end, say. This made things difficult, as you can imagine. Many words ending with the letter D signify things that have happened or that are over. Respired is to have already taken a breath. Retired is to be all over. Hammered is to be already drunk. Convinced is to have fallen for the argument. Perplexed is to have not understood. However, minus the ability to articulate a D, Muldoon could never have completed the first half of this sentence. So the absence of a D in his vocabulary, or, more properly, on the tip of his tongue, meant that he lived—or more properly, live—in an eternal present. Respiring, retiring, hammering, convincing, perplexing, all of these were no problem. But a word like dead, as you can imagine, became a complete impossibility. Should he attempt to articulate it, most people would believe that he was instead merely pausing in his speech: ea, eh, eh?
As an artist, which is what Muldoon became by the age of seventeen, his condition presented him with myriad opportunities. His friends encouraged him. They compared his condition to that of a young castrato. Your voice could break at any moment, they told him, make the most of it.
At this point Muldoon made the decision to remove the letter D from his writing. He became, if you like, Peter Muloon. If Peter Muloon ha written this sentence then it woul rea like this. Or more like this.
Of course, his art tutors thought he was faking it. They believed him cannier than he was in reality. There were many artists who had made the decision to live in the past. There were many students at the art school who dressed in tweeds and wore plus-fours and who went home to garrets without heating or electricity. Who scorned cars and who walked everywhere, who wrote with calligraphic pens dipped in inkpots. Who used Brylcreem on their hair and who wore moustaches.
But it would be difficult to name an artist who chose—or was chosen, arguably—to live in the present. However, Muldoon himself rejected the use of the word present. Rather, he claimed, I was force to be prior. Either way the lack—or forfeit—of one letter seemed to make all the difference.
In order to incorporate this perpetuating lack, which is what Muloon called his early paintings, perpetuating lacks, he began to work in text-based pieces, primarily. At first he would paint odd gnomic phrases, black on white, things like “Efuse /Unphase,” and of course people would read them as though a phantom D had been dropped. A perpetuating lack, Muloon explained, is something that even when it isn’t invoke is implie or transpose through the very knowlege of the existence of the lack. It’s like having a club foot, he said, or a eforme face, an everyone interpreting everything that happene in your life in the light of that. They will make lepers of all of us, he said. That was hard to misinterpret. But had he said, I believe in me, people would immediately assume he was having a crisis of faith in himself. The perpetuating lack would add a D where it could and send all of Muloon’s self-belief packing into the past.
Of course, there were many amateur psychologists amongst his friends and family who attempted to account for Muloon’s horror of the letter D. It wasn’t difficult to seek out a David or a Donald in the family or at school or in the vicinity of where he had grown up whose very presence, it was then implied, had been toxic to the young boy. The usual explanations were bandied about: sexual abuse; fear of castration; domineering father; suffocating mother; the pitfalls of toilet training. Muloon himself pointed to his obsessive reading habits. I didn’t like to finish a book, he said, when in reality he said, I in’t like to finish a book. This made little sense, really, as books don’t always end in D. Indeed, E may be just as common. The last book of the Old Testament, for instance, ends in an E, with a curse. The last book of the New Testament ends with an N, with an amen, predictably. Moving to literature, Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, of course ends, unsurprisingly, with an A. James Joyce’s Ulysses ends with an S. So you see, from this brief examination of literature, that Muloon’s claim is unlikely. Unless he was primarily reading pulp. Of course, he could simply have meant that he didn’t like to get to the en. Which, if you think about it, is how the New Testament ens.
Muloon’s breakthrough piece was when he was commissioned, at the age of twenty-three, to contribute a public artwork that would be displayed on the side of a building next to the motorway just outside the centre of Glasgow. At first the city council proposed the use of the wall of a large warehouse to the west of the city. But Muloon petitioned to have his work displayed on one of the huge gasometers at Provan gas works to the east of the city. He imagined a work that would expand and contract, rising up and down according to the volume of gas stored inside. The city agreed, somehow, and in the summer of his twenty-third year, on a particularly wet and stormy afternoon, the art was unveiled. In huge black letters on a white rectangle, Muloon had written “You Too Will Isappear.”
o
In the wake of Robert Scott’s death many characters came out of the woodwork with tales to tell, the most controversial of which was a previously unknown first wife who claimed that Scott had been a child abductee. Sophia Clark was a professional violinist and amateur novelist who had published a series of UFO “romances” with titles like The Hovering Heart, I Won’t Let You Down and Three Times a Lady. She did not claim to be an abductee herself, rather that throughout her life abductees had been hopelessly attracted to her, “like a moth to a flame,” she laughed, and winked her eye.
Still, it was her first time in space. Adam Aros had invited her to give a presentation on Robert Scott’s previously undocumented early years after Scott’s widow Barbara had confirmed her description of three circular “burn marks” on Scott’s chest, which Barbara said Scott had claimed were caused by a boiling kettle that someone had thrown at him during a dispute in jail. Sophia, inevitably, disputed Barbara’s account, claiming that Scott had told her that he had received these same burns during some kind of investigative experiment aboard a flying saucer.
Space makes me giddy, Sophia announced. But luckily I brought along my giddy pills. She offered Aros a small blue pill. What are these? he asked her. Betty Hills, she said, and she shrugged. Aros declined. Stick, bubbly, she said. Sophia was five foot one with a shock of black wiry hair. And she had a mouth on her. What have you been up to since you arrived on The Advance? Aros asked her. Not much, she said. I got the grand tour and all that shit. Mostly I’ve been sleeping and having sex.
Who she had been having sex with wasn’t exactly clear.
I have to ask you a question, Aros said. We want to know if you will submit to hypnosis.
What the fuck is the point in that? I’ve never been on a flying saucer. I’m not the one with the experiences.
It’s just to verify your story. There are a lot of rumours about Scott doing the rounds since his death, as I’m sure you are aware. Your story could be of seismic importance to our own mission.
And what is your mission? Sophia asked him.
Listen, Aros said. I knew Scott a little myself. Before he died we became friends. It was me that invited him to give a talk to The Advance, a new vision of man in space. I thought of him as a religious man, true, but a freethinker nonetheless. He talked about new gods. He talked about the final death of Christ. But he never mentioned aliens. I want to know why not.
Think about it, Sophia said. His death coincided, almost perfectly, with the arrival of alien life.
Yes.
Well, think about it.
I am thinking about it.
Think some more. Maybe he was a cocoon.
That doesn’t make any sense.
Maybe I’m a cocoon.
That make even less sense.
Well, in that case, why do you want to open me up? Why do you want to get inside me? You want to hypnotise the hell out of me so that there’s no one home while you poke about inside, see what’s secreted itself in there, see what’s growing.
Something’s growing inside you?
Something’s always growing inside you, honey, she said. Otherwise there’d be nothing new under the sun. Listen, she said. I took a vow, I can’t go into the specifics, but I was involved, let’s say, with a group where we had to take a vow never to allow ourselves to be hypnotised. Never. Under any circumstances. And you know, I never have. I don’t engage with television. I don’t use mobile technology. I don’t care about interactive movies or sex games. I have a filter on my brains, she said. I only let in what I decide to let in. Plus all that other stuff that you have no choice over. But I’m going to let you in. Hypnotism is when you’re all caught up in someone else’s game. And you couldn’t possibly play me.
o
There are a lot of cats in here, Sophia said, though she more droned it than said it. Ever since Evans had put her under she had been talking in a weird robot voice that everyone thought was a put-on.
Cat shit everywhere, she said, in a steady, monotonous voice. The place needs a good clean.
Where are you? Evans asked her.
Good question, she droned. I’m . . . She paused. I would say that I was back in the garden.
Where is the garden?
Everywhere. No, wait a minute. Paris.
Who’s in the garden?
Good question, she droned. I would say that there are three people in the garden.
Who are they?
That’s difficult to say. At a guess I would say they are father, mother and son.
Who are you?
Stupid question.
I’ll ask it anyway.
The daughter, obviously. Listen, she said in a hollow, automatic voice. This isn’t about you.
Are you talking to me? Evans asked her.
You’re the only voice.
Where am I?
Good question. In the kitchen, perhaps?
Where’s Scott?
With his mother and father.
In the garden?
Obviously.
Okay. I want you to ask Scott something.
He’s speaking already. Can’t you hear him?
I thought you said I was the only voice?
That is correct.
But it isn’t about me.
That’s true.
What is Scott saying?
How far is it to heaven?
How far is it to heaven?
Yes.
How far is it to heaven?
How far is it to heaven.
Okay, well, that’s unanswerable.
Next question.
Ask Scott about his abduction.
You just did.
Scott was taken to heaven?
Our true heavenly nature is fire unsound.
I don’t understand.
That is why our lives and loves are ruled by heavenly fires.
You mean fate?
Fate is a blimp, a weather balloon.
Did Scott have contact?
Yes, he touched it. There were burns on his body. And on his penis.
On his penis?
Yes. They removed it and they put it back on again.
In heaven?
If you like.
You said you were Scott’s sister.
I am the sister of all the disappeared.
o
This excerpt from Sophia Clark’s The Hovering Heart:
Amanda’s cruel parents forbade her to go to the beach after dark. The lights of the previous three nights were the talk of the village. And the outlandish man that had appeared from beneath the waters. He had appeared naked for all to see but not as a man might. It was more that he radiated his maleness than wore it. To Amanda, who encountered him first, beneath the tree on the beach, he appeared as a god. All my life I have dreamed of you, she told him, as he held her head to his chest. To be returned to you, my prince.
My darling, he said, in a strange, uninflected voice, I have crossed the great divide to be with you. In that time, I have seen stars rise up and fall from the skies to their doom. I have travelled through cold wastes, through timeless heat. I have seen the old gods pass and be renewed. All the while you were the ship of my heart. He ran his curiously translucent hands through Amanda’s long dark hair.
In his fingers she could hear the rushing of his blood, louder than the tide that stormed across the sand.
Even the wind, it seemed, raged in protest against their meeting. Some will call it unnatural, our love, the man revealed. They will say that we defied the order of things just to meet like this, this once, forever. Oh, don’t say it is only once, Amanda cried. You are the first man I have ever loved. And I recognised you immediately, as soon as you emerged from that great ball of light that hovered over the ocean and threatened to turn back the tide. I knew you were meant for me and always have been from the beginning of time! Oh, my man, she swooned, and she wept. I cannot stay for long, the man confided. A heavenly love like ours must destroy us in the end. For this moment I have given my all. Now be gone from me, my darling. We have three more nights in which to celebrate our love, three storm-tossed days to dream of it. At which he let her go and she appeared to fall down, softly, into the warm, wet sand, like a butterfly, or a leaf.
But they had been seen. Bascomb, the village idiot, whose head, rumour had it, had been caught in a heavy door as a little baby, and whose eyes had been forced to either side of his head like a seal, had followed the lights during one of his nocturnal navigations and had spied the couple’s unearthly embrace from behind a tree.
The next morning rumours were afoot. The stars come ’own, Bascomb told his father, who at first slapped him around the head and damned him for being a retard. The man hel’ the woman in his light, he cried, which drew another blow from his father and an upping of his condition to the level of spastic. The hovering heart, he wept, the hovering heart came ’own and kisse the girl! And what girl would this be? his father asked him. It were Amana, Bascomb cried. It were Amana with the long hair hanging ’own. That harlot, his father spat. Now he was interested. He made enquiries with the neighbours. Oh aye, Mrs. Bustard said. There were lights in the sky alright, over by the beach, they were; didn’t you hear my dogs barking? Had them in a terror of a fright, it did.
I’m afraid I sleep with my ears bunged up and my eyes blindfolded ever since the passing of my good wife, Bascomb’s father explained to her. As a result, I saw and heard nothing. My beloved son, however, saw everything.
Bascomb’s father made his way to Amanda’s parents’ house and told them the terrible news. They were grief-stricken and the fear was in them. I suspect witchery, Bascomb’s father told them, but with the powers of the priesthood invested in me, we may still have time to turn back the advance of Satan’s hordes and their possession of your daughter’s tender body. These are wild claims, Amanda’s father returned. And all turning on the word of, if you’ll excuse my pardon, a simpleton that looks like a fish. An angel touched him on the head when he was born, Bascomb’s father corrected him. And now he has the power. God drew him to that storm-wracked beach last night for a reason. To witness the fall of your daughter and her wanton congress with demons! Where is she? Bascomb’s father demanded. I tell you there is still time. I only want to help her.
