Monument Maker, page 64
And in my loneliness and confusion (weeks passed, without a word, without a sign, why, if he could travel the subterranean tunnels would there even be a gap in our story, why could he not simply travel back to wherever he had left off, like when he appeared in the wreckage of the Double A after our adventure across Europe, and I shed a tear at the thought of his return, and in answer to his disappearing) I took a lover, a lover who presented himself to me at the door of our apartment, a beautiful boy who claimed to be searching for his own true love, who he claimed had lived in the exact same room, in the exact same apartment, in Plaka, in the years after the war, and I said to him, no, we are the lovers here, I said, and I asked him if he had sent us the mysterious love letters, whether they had been meant for his original love, and he said, yes, he was looking for his true love, he said.
I had to go, he said. I had to go, and now I am returned in search of my one true love, and I said to him, is it you, and he said, is it me what, and I said, nothing, sorry, for a second, I said to him, I thought my own true love had returned to me in disguise, and he blushed, I had never made a boy blush before, I was becoming aware of my own powers, perhaps, in the absence of The Grey Wolf, and we became lovers, inevitably, and I let my guard down, I confess, I was so proud of my prince that I told my lover one night as we lay in bed that my prince claims to have travelled through time, I told him, and I met him there, on the other side of time, he laughed then, you think time has another side, he joked, time is locked on some infinite zero point that it is constantly moving towards and retreating from, I told him, as I stroked his hair and ran my finger through his tight curls, time implies a relationship with something that is not it, just as an above to a below—I felt like I was back at the convention hall, wooing the crowds—and what did you do with yourselves there in this paradox, he asked me, this beautiful boy come out of nowhere, we cycled along the front, I told him, we took a school trip to the trenches, we went to illicit nightclubs, that sort of thing, then he asked me if I really believed that he had travelled in time and what proof I had and why didn’t he do something more dramatic with it and I told him that the nature of enlightenment is shining light on precisely the same situations that take place every day, it is simply more angles on the same things, and that nothing is gained and nothing changes, so that The Grey Wolf’s behaviour seemed especially enlightened in that respect, and besides, what were the alternative explanations, that he had somehow survived in a subterranean complex for days on end on his own with no munitions, that he had escaped from the complex without any witnesses and lain low, and what about the photographs that he had emerged with and immediately had developed, the photographs are the least interesting element to me, George said, the most easily faked, whenever technology comes into the picture we’re all savages, he said, did he ever describe what the experience was like, he said, the actual feeling of travelling through time, the only thing he said was that you ended up wet, a little damp, was what he said, like being in a sauna with your suit on, and how he literally had to wring out his trousers when he first arrived, nipping behind a hedge in an avenue lined with council houses painted washed-out pink, and drying his suit in the blazing sun while he lay on his back in nothing but a pair of briefs and a vest, when suddenly he heard this sound, not a wolf whistle, exactly, more a kind of ironic alarm, and down the path came this old dear, Miss Sweden, she called herself, and she asked him what he was doing sunbathing behind a hedge in this old avenue all but cut off from the world and hidden amongst circuitous backstreets and what in the world could have brought him here—he was virtually naked but the old dear seemed to have no problem with nudity, it didn’t terrify her—and he told me he was in the mood for truth, having just been delivered of a fair dose of it himself, so he told her straight out that he had arrived from the recent past, just arrived, briefly, via a subterranean military complex somewhere on the east coast of Fife, and she winked at him and told him how her husband had been in the army and so she understood these kinds of operations and was willing to admit that the boys upstairs, as she referred to them, were onto more than anyone ever suspected, eventually inviting The Grey Wolf indoors where she offered him tea and biscuits and that was when The Grey Wolf discovered a funny thing, that time travel confuses your senses, as when he first helped himself to a caramel wafer and it tasted like a sound, well, what sound was it, George asked, I don’t know what sound it was, I said, he didn’t tell me, the point is he said that for a while it was as if time itself was confused about how it was supposed to express itself, as if it had forgotten everything but where it was supposed to be right then, so that the presence of this traveller out of time had forced it to establish new connections and so for The Grey Shark taste was much like playing a prepared piano, the dead notes, the sudden crescendos, the atonal clusters, he began to stuff his face so that it tasted like something by Scriabin, and Miss Sweden took a chair across from him next to the fire and asked him what he intended to do with these precious hours and minutes snatched from the hands of the clock, and he replied that the last thing he intended to do was to report back, now that he had all the time in the world there was nothing to be gained, and so he intended to take it easy, finally, to live the retirement that should have been his middle age, was how he put it, and he asked Miss Sweden what she would do if she had all the time in the world, this is what he told me, and she said that if she had all the time in the world she would go back and witness the first awkward dates between her mother and her father, even though she wasn’t biologically related to either, she added, somewhat cryptically, I would hide in the bushes outside the bedsit in Kirklee Circus on the day my father moved in, she said, I would linger at the window of their first house together, a ground-floor flat on Willowbank Street, in Glasgow, and hope to catch a glimpse of my beginnings.
But would you give yourself away? he asked her. No, she said, never, and The Grey Wolf stayed for dinner, mince pie and steamed vegetables followed by homemade Florence cake, and already the sounds in his mouth were starting to die off, just an occasional sound like a patch of dead leaves disturbed by a blackbird (that was the mince pie), and of course his hearing was equally odd, as was his vision and his sense of smell, his sense of touch he said never varied, outside of a vague buzzing in all of his extremities, while in his head he experienced what he described as being akin to a radio ham tuning across frequencies and occasionally coming upon bursts of inexplicable noise or distant foreign languages, sudden snippets of someone else’s reality altogether, I felt like the British Telecom Tower, he said, and of course it wasn’t lost on either of us that Rimbaud had once stayed in a building on the very spot of the tower’s construction in London, lending The Grey Wolf’s description the feel of poetry, like it was a mental space that had been conquered by fellow explorers, people who experimented with time, and after they finished dinner they took a walk together in Miss Sweden’s overgrown garden, ducking beneath oversized rose bushes and crooked monkey trees until they reached a shaded clearing where the old woman had buried several generations of cats, what do you intend to do about them, she laughed, and he told her, nothing, I intend to do absolutely nothing about any of it, he said, except perhaps enliven it, he said, and by coincidence Miss Sweden occasionally worked as cover for Saturday-morning art lessons at the school in which I worked myself, though I confess I had never heard of her, and so she was able to facilitate The Grey Wolf’s admission to staff, it will do the children much good, she said, to be assisted by a time traveller, and so he presented himself to me, as a new master, and I can’t think how else he could have done it, unless he had set the seeds of the whole affair so far in the past that it qualifies as time travel still, either way I find myself willing to accept the hypothesis of time travel and the surety that our time together was spent, at various points, out of sync, out of time, that our relationship was a form of defiance that went beyond time and space itself, because that’s exactly how it felt.
I thought of The Grey Owl and I wondered who he was seducing and in what time. The Grey Owl is behind all of this, I said to him. He could be anywhere in time. He is waiting for us. I came up with an idea. Let’s say The Grey Owl has travelled into our past or fast-forwarded into our future, I said to George. That means he has rewritten our own stories. Which means that we can pretty much treat everything that happens to us as having been penned by The Grey Owl himself. Which means what? he said. It just means that everything is significant, I told him. Because it has been written. Knowing The Grey Owl, he would have set in place a labyrinth of tunnels and subterranean passages, endless clues and wormholes that would lead us in and out of the story.
We wandered, and we allowed our wandering to pass for deliberate action. Of course, we came across tunnels and secret entrances; but it seemed too heavy-handed, too obvious a set-up. We held off for something innocuous. We made a determined turn away from significance. Let’s find him here, we said, let’s read the small print, we said, let us uncover his hand.
We swam in slow-moving rivers on summer afternoons. In the evening my boy would lie down to nap in the grass, the sun upon the high sides of white-brick houses like in old photographs, the same blue skies, the same puffs of cloud. We read the landscape as a form of prophecy, the prophecy, of course, of His coming. And at night he sang me songs, my beautiful boy come back, soft ghostly songs, on his guitar.
Have you ever read Camus’ The Stranger? my boy asked me as we ate dinner on the terrace of a restaurant in Plaka, still alert for signs of ingress and for intrusions from the past and future. I told him I had, only the edition I had read had been translated as The Outsider. He produced a scrunched-up paperback edition from an inside pocket and began to read from the section in which Meursault mentally lists his possessions while spending time in jail, but the translation was like no other edition I have ever read, in this edition Meursault’s possessions included a stuffed owl, a small pewter canister, a boat made of matchsticks, a pint glass, a black scarab framed behind glass, four pairs of brown socks, a single suit, a three-wheeled bicycle found abandoned in a lane, a collection of letters from a first love, an unfortunate plastic chess set, two hidden bottles of wine, and a single key, pinned imperiously and mysteriously—I can see it in my mind’s eye now—on the kitchen wall. A key is always associated with unlocking, my boy said, never with locking up.
Suddenly I was struck by a terrifying thought. Was it possible for books to dream? Could it be that every time a book was closed it fell into a deep slumber wherein it dreamed itself as something else? I considered myself an erudite man, well read, able to discourse at length on the classics. Could it be that I was simply a victim of fancy and fate? That all I had remembered and studied and was able to quote at length, all that I had in fact lived by, was nothing but the night-time reveries of books dreaming themselves? In that case the history of literature was nothing but a phantom; no one had ever read the same book. I held on to the table to steady myself as I felt something lurch beneath me, as if the scenery was being moved about, like in a cheap theatrical production where the characters remain, awkwardly, taking up space, milling about, as the scene transforms around them.
That night the dream I had went like this. First I was a long streak of cloud, like the arc of an aeroplane at evening, and I was climbing up through the sky, but somehow I could still see myself from the ground and the trail that I was leaving. It wasn’t very graceful. Then I was a swan, a widowed swan, and I was looking back over my life and I was mourning. I recalled the still, distant lochs that we had sailed across together, my partner and I, the sound of our wings over the water, so that people often mistook us for geese, his voice, too, the quality of his voice, which was more like the sound of a plane in the distance, a small biplane, or a generator heard from the top of a hill, a vibration in his throat, and his eyes, my God his eyes, black as hell’s gates, eyes that told me he had been here before, that he knew the whole deal backwards.
In the dream his eyes appeared to me again. The eyes of a swan are inscrutable under normal circumstances. But in the dream I could make out a dark pool ringed by light. If you would raise a monument to our love, it said, my dear departed love, it called me, his lost love, his dearly departed, as if I was in a graveyard, laying flowers on our grave, when in the dream I was a swan, floating with the tide past long-abandoned mansions and great chateaux overgrown with trees and thick vines.
I fancied I was in the French Riviera and at one point we pull up to a landing bay and there is another sort of bird there, one that I recognise, somehow, and the bird moves to greet us, a respectable bird and affectionate, with a wide wingspan, as though we had been expected for a long time, and we are taken along a path in the shadow of tall fir trees and of course it’s awkward, we’re swans, what do we need with a mansion house, with a butler and a maid, even if they’re ghosts, or strange adult birds, and we are led into a library and we look around and on the shelves there is everything we have ever dreamed of reading, biographies of friends, confessions of parents, poetry collections from our brothers and sisters, accounts of the war from our grandparents, wild journals from friends who walked away from it all aged seventeen, poets who stabbed themselves in the heart and lived to tell the tale, or who fell asleep on the couch and never woke up, and we turn to each other and it’s like a joke, a terrible sad joke, that we were turned to swans, and had no way of making sense of any of it.
Swans can’t read, I say to my lover. Then he looks at me with those eyes of his, and he asks if he could be turned into a book. But I won’t be able to read it, I say to him. I won’t be able to read you, my love.
And we’re back in the air, high above a lake, a magnetic lake, a secret stopping point in all our migrations, forgotten, now, forever, with no location on any map, and we land on the water, and it’s soft between our legs and we sail off, silently, and without a thought.
And now there is an accumulation of moments.
We are in bed together. We have just made love. I am reading from a collection of Hebrew poetry entitled Zaddak Torosh Mem, which I recognise as a reference to the artist Michahim Bengt, who was said to have recorded camels speaking a particular brand of Hebrew that was described as “the masticating of the words,” in other words the regurgitation of words, and so Bengt had come up with a form of Hebrew poetry that regurgitated itself, in other words a poetry that saw a form of evolution in rephrasing, in reformulating, or rather infinitely recycling, really, but it was these letters, repeated in endless configuration for eternity, that was poetry, was the point: ZTM. TMZ. ZMT. MTZ.
We are lingering in bed; to linger afterwards, to lingerie, I always said, which meant to bask in the glow of love, to chat about novels, to compare passions. My boy was in love with science fiction novels, novels with paintings of mile-long interstellar cruisers on the cover, preferably by Chris Foss, and where the aliens were bent-over hybrid-monstrosities like Blake’s flea, crippled horrors that made me think of Jack Frost, stalking a universe that was cold and immense and romantic and full of secrets.
My boy tells me about a story from one of his favourite writers. Listen to this, he says.
This story is called Today is Die Welt Day and it’s about a time traveller who has lost his memory named Paimon. He has come out of Africa, which is how he arrived, and up until now he has been invisible within this timeline. He takes a job as a trigger man. And at first he is a success, and then a rising star, and then a legend, even, so that eventually he rules the streets, but he’s sweet too and takes truants by the ear and gives them a good talking-to and is polite to women, you never heard a swear word come out his mouth, he is a non-drinker, a teetotaller, and you’d see him in church every Sunday, he settles down to his new role, but then he gets leaned on, I don’t know who by, the concept is that it’s fate, I suppose, some impersonal god has got his mark, without even holding a grudge, even, just leaning his elbow on him until he pops, and he experiences strange visitations and time seems all out of joint, the rules of the universe he exists in become all messed up, the timelines, especially, culminating in the night where he wakes and is surrounded by frosted glass and the whole scene is lit up from behind so that it may be aliens that have abducted him, he sees the perfect straight hair of the females running down to their thighs, the males who look like monkeys, who look like grotesque stuffed monkeys, moving around, and he is paralysed on this stretcher, he is tied down, in this alien operating theatre, and he hears a chattering noise that might be in his brain but could just as well be the snapping of pincers or the gnashing of teeth, tiny teeth, midget blades capable of dismembering thoughts, that’s how the author described it, so that the middle part of the book becomes almost incoherent, the thoughts themselves impossible to articulate, and the only thing that breaks the spell is when he looks out of his window and sees this flashing red light over a bar, this bum hotel cliché, this classic noir set-up, and now he’s killing time in genre, and the double letters A flash into the air, AA, as in before in the beginning, and he loses consciousness & then wakes up again and this time he’s making his way through a series of abandoned caravans beneath tall trees with tiny pyramids of greenery on the top, and it’s a foggy evening, and the sun comes muddled through the trees like a bruise at a crime scene, and in each of the long-abandoned caravans, now lit up like a grand finale, an astral caravan park, there is a body, sometimes two bodies or three bodies, sometimes whole families; children dead in their bunk beds; adults who have kicked the bucket in the bathroom; overweight men in wigs who have snuffed it; flamboyant young boys who have carked it; waxwork lesbians long since crossed the Styx; middle-aged intellectuals and landowners now wandering the Elysian Fields; strange dwarves off to a better place; young girls six feet under; parents no longer with us; artists riding into the sun; and at first he thinks it’s all of the people he killed come back to haunt him, but then he starts to recognise some of the bodies & they are famous figures of the day, the day of 1983, which to a modern reader feels more like night than day.
