Monument Maker, page 55
She is asleep, Amanda’s father explained. Come, he said, let us confront her together. Amanda’s mother wept, Amanda’s sister moaned. Together the two fathers entered the girl’s bedroom, where they found her naked on the bed, asleep in a shallow pool of water, her pale white skin covered in a thin layer of seaweed and sand, her long wet hair spread across the pillow and with a small garland of flowers now wilting in her hand. Why, if I had not known it was your daughter, Bascomb’s father turned to him, I would have reckoned it was Ophelia herself. Turn away your eyes, man, Amanda’s father demanded of him, lest you too are tempted by the light! It’s not my eyes that must be stopped, Bascomb’s father returned, but young Ophelia’s here. We must tear out her eyes and put in two eyes of wood.
Amanda woke with a start and leaped from the bed, throwing the blankets around her naked body. She stood in the corner of the room, panting and silent. We have not come to ravish you, Bascomb’s father announced, at which point Amanda’s father began to sob, silently, in sympathy with his daughter and in horror of the situation. But something must be done. You were seen in congress with a demon last night, lit up in all descended fires. No, Amanda protested, it’s not true! Who says this against me?
My son, the seer, encountered you both on the beach, locked in an unearthly embrace. You intend to deny it when the light of your passion lit up the entire village and drove the very dogs to distraction?
Your son, Amanda replied, is a human vegetable. Better take the dogs’ word than his.
Very well, we shall take the word of the dogs. In which case we must still put out your eyes.
Father, Amanda burst, and she ran to her father’s side and begged him to soften his heart. She was wet to the touch and smelled of the depths. It was as if her body were turned inside out, her father thought, and he couldn’t bring himself to hold her. He pictured the viscous texture of newly exposed organs, the mucus of the heart, the terms of the womb, and he felt himself overcome. My darling, he said, what have we done to you that you would seek solace in the arms of Satan’s infernal army?
I bathed in moonlight, swam in the fire of the stars, that is all!
And what of the glowing man in whose embrace you appeared to expire?
A phantom, a trick of the light, an escapee from the collapsed maze of Bascomb’s mind!
And what of the lights, the testimony of the dogs?
Father, it was the brightest night of the year, is it not the peak of midsummer? The stars were joyous in their revelling, the moon itself pregnant with delight! I was drawn to their frolic, it is true. But no more did I embrace a man fallen from the sky than I gave myself up to wantonness.
At the very least this is idolatry, paganism, Bascomb’s father spat. Confine her to her room. We will take a group to the sands tonight and we will make vigil for the return of the creature ourselves, God help us.
With that, a mob was raised. Donnelly, Gilhooley, McIntyre, Peebles, Washington, Robinson, Bart, Peterson, McPheat, all gathered under the leadership of Bascomb’s father. They stood outside in the dwindling light and they watched the skies with trepidation. It was decided that Bascomb himself would lead them to the spot and as a precaution they fixed a long, heavy rope around his waist. That way we can safely use him as bait, his father explained, and everyone agreed it was a splendid idea.
At the last minute Amanda’s father joined them, to see, face to face, “the author of her fate.”
As the sky grew dark they made their way through the trees, Bascomb out ahead, connected to the mob by the length of rope. The women of the village huddled in circles to watch them go, this strange silhouette, now lost in the woods.
They came to the beach. It was true what Amanda had said, all of the stars were out, and the moon lit up the tempestuous water. The mob stopped at the edge of the trees and fed the rope out. Bascomb walked to the edge of the water and then into the water until he was knee-deep in the water. Then he looked up. Above him the figure of an oversized man hovered in the air, although his genitalia did not identify him as such. Behind him, attached to a sort of silver umbilical, spun a huge globe of light.
Bascomb began to cry, softly, and the man descended a set of invisible stairs and embraced him.
Don’t worry, my darling, he said. There was nothing you could have done. With a blood-curdling scream the mob burst from the trees and set about him. They pierced his side with a pitchfork and his guts fell out. They hacked at his neck with an axe. They wounded where his genitals should have been. He fell into the shallow waters, whereupon Amanda’s father straddled his body and repeatedly thrust a large broken knife into his chest. Just as suddenly everything was still. The body of the man from hell lay mutilated in the shallow waters, unnameable viscera bobbing in the tide, the waters now a fetid electric-blue. Suddenly there was an ear-splitting roar and the great globe of light that hung above the ocean seemed to contract inwards and swallow itself with a sound like the sky being torn apart. Locked up in her room, several miles away, Amanda heard the sound and felt that her own heart had been rent in two. She threw herself down on her bed and she tore at her hair and bit the inside of her mouth.
We’re finished here, Bascomb’s father announced, but not before he took a stick and speared one of the misshapen organs that washed up on the shore like jellyfish. Blue blood, he said, and he pointed to the deformed mass as it released its terrible cargo. This man was not one of God’s chosen. At which they turned and headed back to the village, this time dragging Bascomb, in tears, behind them.
The next day the body was gone. There was no trace of the crushed and speared organs, of their uncanny electric-blue secretions, nothing to mark the scene of the crime except a series of oversized footsteps that almost seemed burned in the sand and that appeared to lead out of the water and through the trees and back towards the village. That was when the stories began.
o
Peter Muldoon paced the corridors and viewing galleries of The Advance alone. In space everything echoes, he thought as he passed looping corridors that turned on themselves like strips of spaghetti, bubbled windows like the eyes of amphibians, deserted hallways like underground car parks. And then there were the stars: oppressive, omnipresent.
Tomorrow he would give his first talk as “artist-in-residence.” It seemed even phonier now, more futile, in the light of the Luna Armada and in the revelation of his own gods. But what to say? I stand at the centre of the world, something portentous like that. It was true. But then, hadn’t it always been? Every artist wants to redraw the universe so it more closely orbits themselves, or their conception of it, as it stands, right?
That’s all you are now, he laughed to himself, a successful artist.
He made his way to the canteen and ordered an Irish coffee. Through the window small ships came and went, bringing military reinforcements, evacuating civilian personnel. There were soldiers stationed all around, even in here, pointlessly displaying their weapons. It was all so ridiculous, what did they intend to do?
Here you are, he heard a voice from behind him burst. It’s you, oh my! Muldoon turned in his seat. A small woman with an explosion of black curly hair put her hand on his shoulder. She looked Jewish, he thought, bookish. A little eccentric, but with the buzzing energy of a small planet. An unravelled red scarf hung round her neck like the frazzled tail of a comet. Look at me, she laughed. Here I am!
And you would be? he said.
Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot we haven’t been introduced yet. I’m Sophia, I’m the secret wife, she beamed. I appeared out of nowhere after the death of Robert Scott. I was his partner, his confidante, his co-conspirator. She took a seat across from him. And I’m a lover of abductees, she winked.
I met his last wife, Barbara, Muldoon said. That bitch, Sophia mock-spat. Then she cracked up laughing. I was just about to say, how do you like it in heaven, she laughed. But we’re not there yet! How do you like it in space, is what I meant to say. Every little boy dreams of being an astronaut, right? Of walking on the moon, of speeding through the galaxy in a sexy space suit.
I’ve walked on the moon, Muldoon said.
How was it?
It was weird, actually. It was almost kind of a let-down.
How can the moon be a let-down?
I think it’s because I was there.
You mean your very presence gave it a sense of bathos?
Yes, in a way. Muldoon laughed, awkwardly.
Sophia nodded and looked at him with understanding.
There was some kind of disturbance at the bar, some kind of argument going on. He saw the soldiers move in and separate two elderly men. That’s what it has come to for the army, he thought, breaking up disputes between pensioners.
Feelings are running high, Sophia said. There’s a lot at stake. Some of the stories that people have lived their entire lives are about to come undone.
It feels like that, Muldoon said. Then he paused. It’s true that you can’t escape from yourself, even when you are on the moon. I’ve had this feeling my entire life, in a way. But I could never bring myself to admit it. It would be like cancelling the future, it would be like saying there is nowhere to go and nothing will ever get better.
You could just as easily say that nothing will ever get worse.
That’s the thing, Muldoon said, and Sophia watched as a thin trickle of coffee ran down his beard, it sometimes feels like things are going one way, or, wait, let me put it this way, that things, outcomes, moments, are hanging on a precipice, are teetering at the very edge of . . . something . . . the edge of the end or the edge of a descent, the end of something, like when you come to the end of the land, and you’re in a vehicle and the vehicle stops halfway over the cliff. There’s either stability, or there’s collapse. And stability, temporary stability—because the wind is whipping up and the cliffs are giving way—is all you can hope for.
How did you become so gloomy?
Through good fortune, Muldoon smiled. Through achievement, through success, through finding myself at the centre of the world. You know when you’re on holiday, and you’ve looked forward to it for so long, and you’re escaping your day-to-day worries, you’re getting away from your hellish job, from bad weather, from dull day-to-day strictures like you shouldn’t drink that much, or you shouldn’t spend that much? You know when you look forward to it so much, so much, and then, when you’re there, in the back of your mind you realise that really you don’t feel any different, even with all this free time, even with your worries far away in another country, on another planet, that in the midst of happiness there’s this same underlying condition, this . . . boredom. This constant desire to be other than you are, which comes up against this feeling that is impossible to change, this growing realisation that there is nothing worth running towards and that nothing can be held in your hand, at least nothing that will make any difference. People drop out, they disappear, and we envy them. They gave up, we think, maybe that’s the key. Giving up, letting go, becoming one of the invisible.
Like a feather on the breath of God, Sophia said.
That’s a nice way to put it. People always envy successful people, famous people, celebrities, pop stars. And no one can understand it when, again and again, they go insane, they take an overdose, they hang themselves in the garage. But achievement is the worst thing that can happen to you, because you find there’s nothing there, it means nothing, there is nothing to be achieved and there is nothing beneath your feet but a long, long drop. At least if you never get to where you’re going, you never realise it was a phantom all along. You’re left believing there was a point, a stopping point, a destination. You just never reached it.
You’re talking about heaven, Sophia said. It’s no wonder we had to dream it up. It’s either that or endlessness. An ocean without an island: what a thought! Tell me, Sophia said, and she leaned in closer to Muldoon, would it be any easier to be dreamed? Think about it. To be dreamed up means there is ground, down there, somewhere, the ground of the dream is the dreamer itself, right? That’s why the dream is so seductive, right?
Do you believe the WordPool is real? she asked him.
Muldoon sat up in his chair. What? Of course it is.
You think it really works?
I’m really not sure. I always avoided getting one myself, at first. I was superstitious about it, I guess. Everyone is, even those that use it.
What if I told you I invented the WordPool? Sophia asked him. What if I told you that I wrote the book in which the WordPool appears?
Muldoon froze in his chair. He felt his memory turn itself inside out. Then he felt like he was drowning. He crossed his arms and held hard to his own body. He caught his breath. Finally he asked her. Are you Xstabeth? he said.
I made you so you couldn’t say my name, she said. Then she stared at him without a word.
But I painted you, he said.
Say my name, she said.
Go, he said.
Down below, just behind her, the earth turned in silence.
Sophia got up from the table, pushed her chair back, and walked away.
o
The glow of Adam Aros’s handheld WordPool lit his face like a
vampire in a bad movie. Godforsaken island, it read, a great earthly
love is all that will sustain you. Aros had been at it all night, freestyling, mind-blowing, trying to get to the bottom of it. And this is where he wound up. A godforsaken island. He had dreamed of being unable to walk forward, of the effort being crippling, and in his dream he turned around and walked backwards towards his goal, suddenly released from the weight of the future. He climbed through trapdoors, crawled through tiny impossible tunnels on the edges of things, scaled ladders at uncanny angles. In his dream his home was an impossible trapdoor in the sky that he was forever approaching, backwards. Something had broken, in the WordPool, in Aros’s brain. Just like water, he wrote, time will find the weakest spot. After that, the deluge. So I step from my ship into my own city, came the response, which is the kingdom of heaven, where I with all the righteous shall enter out of so great a tribulation. Where is the locus of control? he asked it. Area 47, it read. Where is Area 47? The whole world is a hospital, it returned. Where is the entranceway to play? he asked it. Then it went dead. I’ve exhausted it, Aros thought, I’ve killed it, and in a triumphant fever he lay back on his bed and laughed and laughed and laughed.
o
Aros met Muldoon in the antechamber of the great debating hall, which was more of a bubble than a hall, really, a great transparent bubble with nothing but endless space above or below. Muldoon’s presentation was to take place in an hour. Aros looks ill, Muldoon thought, Muldoon looks haunted, Aros thought. What’s the story with Sophia? Muldoon asked him. A fraud, he said, a fruit loop. Evans had a team put her under, and there was nothing there. She seems to have made up the whole thing.
I’ve remembered something that happened on the moon, Muldoon said. That’s what I’m going to talk about.
The moon is a balloon, Muldoon announced to a half-empty auditorium. After all, who cared about the thoughts of an artist and poet, now that reality itself had the veneer of the fantastic? The moon is a balloon, he said, the earth’s plaything, let go, the toy of our childhood. When we first looked up, there it was, staring back down, into our cot, into our hospital bed. It was easy to mistake it for our father or our mother. Back then there was no difference. But really, it was we who gave birth to it. Just as in the story where the earth gives birth to the moon through its side. The earth is made fertile by the stars. I chose to paint the stars. I painted them in new formations, I gave them new names. But I first saw them, first realised them, when I visited the moon. Because of the moon, every child dreams of colonisation and of sexy space suits. There were some laughs around the room. I was unremarkable in that regard.
I travelled to the moon, illegally, to join a protest against the building of a second spaceport in the Sea of Tranquillity. There was the promise of riots and of some good bands on the bill, which is what every adolescent dreams of.
Again, there were some awkward laughs.
The Treaty of Twelve had attempted to close the moon to civilian traffic after the first wave of protesters arrived, but the moon wasn’t a nation state with borders and boundaries and fixed entrances and exits—at least not yet!—and so there was really no way to stop the fleets of handmade ships—Snowdrops, they called them—swarming across the face of the moon.
