Читать книгу Malchus - Charles William Johns - Страница 6

I walk across the West Common, towards my father’s house. I had drunk just enough to transform the pervasive sirens of police cars into an indifferent whir. I label the sirens ‘city sounds’ and in doing so I can successfully compartmentalise the fear that such sirens bring. Once successfully compartmentalized I can proceed to shut down that particular part of the brain. I had drunk one less than my limit (I wanted to drink that last one, to resolve it) and so I could continue acting amicably; so I could act like myself before the incident.

There is nothing more guilt-invoking than a beautiful summers day. It is as if-in appearing that one day too late-it were teaching you a lesson; “look at what you could have basked and folicked in, if only you were a free man”. Instead the sun sticks to my skin and clothes, makes everything all too apparent. The sun is always the first to spot a criminal, it shines on me the most. It’s irritating obnoxious rays of transparent clarity also reflects itself inside the human being, in the bad conscience. That bad place inside of all of us (and most hidden from ourselves) transforms into a prism, cleansed out by the kaleidoscopic beatitude of natural light. This light, affirming itself as the ‘clear light of day’, that light which makes us hate what we have done in the night. This light, working itself into my pores, trying to clean me out!

One can get carried away in the night, it is almost advisable that one go down with the sun into an evening of confusion, where one cannot distinguish between feelings and forms, where one does not know who one is, who fools themselves into thinking that he is part of the night itself, an expression of it. When there is no clear light of day anything could happen, and you can blame it on the stars or the chugging of a freight train. Where one is standing there, half-drunk, wondering whether their desire can outreach their territory, whether it can soar above the small town that conditions them, whether it can reach beyond the train tracks, and you say to yourself “did a part of me leave with that passing train”? One may truly burn at night like a firefly but one must hide like an antique rug in an unused dusty spare room when the sun comes out, when the sun comes up to judge its denizens, spotting the dust particles that now appear dancing in mid-air from the archaic movement of trouble that came with the eventide. The sun ascends to witness a broken world, and the morning appears as if a group of guilty children saying that “it was not us”.

I walk as quickly as I can to my father’s house wishing I were a dog that could take the many subterranean, un-colonized trails that have escaped human sight. Several metres before I reach the front door and I hear a siren that pierces into my nervous system. I halt. The siren starts and stops as if it were intentionally trying to get my attention. Is this the siren that gets me? How do you know which siren is yours? Is it a siren that only you can hear? Is it that siren which is in sync with the beating of one’s heart? Are they the same thing? The moral alarm of the subjective heart mirrored by an automaton that thinks it is carrying out the word of God, the word of the State. The archaic heart deep within weeds and ancient ivory, tormented by the tower blocks of police sensibility.

I react, all at once. I am scarred. The fear, not on the surface of the heart but underneath somehow-the hearts underbelly. And the stomach, suddenly impregnated with fear as if it were a giant heart itself-a whale’s heart in pain-mourning. This is my siren. How do I know? It is oriented towards me, it knows my location, it is trying to catch me much like the sirens of the sea. And what does this encounter actually designate? When the internalised fear of being caught is apprehended by exteriority. What is this exact point where paranoia is affirmed by fate? It is so hard not to comply with fate, it is rather like trying to stop yourself from crying-“let it out, be caught, the worst is over”. Am I somehow safe then? No, I go to jail!

The police car drives past me. It was perhaps even an ambulance. I cannot know anything in this perpetual state of anxiety. I would rather let innocent victims die from severe wounds out on the pavement than see police cars and ambulances parade themselves around the streets I walk upon quietly.

I go round the back of the house. Underneath the plant pot on the table, just as my father had said, was the backdoor key. I let myself in and immediately grab the garage key which has been placed thoughtfully upon the kitchen windowsill. I muttered the words I told myself the following night; that it had been “at least forty eight hours since the incident, and if someone wanted to arrest me then they would have done it by now . . . and it would be good-possibly even healthy-for you to accept working for your father this morning-which entails listening to old classical music on vinyl in order to discern whether any of them are scratched ( and hence thrown in the ‘discard’ pile), or, clearly audible (perhaps excellent, excellent +, even possibly near-mint) and hence fit for re-sale”. I would listen to these records in a shed far far away from the crime scene, in a respectable estate, as if I were a completely different person unaffiliated with the crime. Perhaps I had knocked my head, been diagnosed with amnesia. Perhaps I could simply act like I had amnesia, for the rest of my life, or , perhaps, if I try hard enough, I could lose myself in classical music, be drawn into the circle of its repetitions, and forget who I am.

I picked up the first record from the pile of records left out for me and put it on the turnstyle. Sibelius quartets. After the steady, slow confirmation of needle and shellac a perfect quartet gradually formed. At first one viola cutting through a space set up for melody, acutely and angularly it created one wall of sound. A violin giddily sprung from underneath this first wall, in a gap between the floorboards, or on the floor I myself was sitting on. It began to say something but then it wasn’t sure, and began to partly form another wall. Then a cello resounded as if it were already in the room/song but waiting its turn. It became the soil and then the floorboards, and finally a third wall. I looked out upon my father’s garden from inside the garage, through the garage door I had left open. Finally a single violin soared within these three walls-“the shrill of this violin was me” I thought to myself. As quickly as it had affirmed its place within the room it suddenly transformed into a police siren, one closer than ever before. The quartet had lured me into the security of song (like how a scared child sings to itself in the woods to keep itself company). I got up and headed towards what felt like a giant hole filled with sunlight and nature. I stood there, on the threshold of the garage door, painfully (I had no shoes on and the threshold dug into the soles of my feet). I stood completely upright and spread my arms out as if I were composing Sibelius’ quartet. Siren upon siren proliferated, each glimmer of the sun cascading and reflecting off all objects from the ground up, showing that they were part of everything, welcoming everything. And the police? What did it matter now? Every part of nature expressed an immanent force equal to the power of the police-expressing a similar law. Everything was perpetual incandescence, I could not see where one started or began. Rising and falling, contracting and retracting, accumulating and dispersing through one unitary rhythm. Every reflective surface, whether window, tarmac, vase, drop of dew, collided together and resembled the rear-view mirrors of police cars. And within such windows-reflections of reflections-lay cool policemen and policewoman made up of complete prosthesis; simulated in uniform, mediated by walki-talkies, covered in hats and chiselled features like terrifying cartoons, and in one breath-like any great composer-I changed the universe.

Standing still upon this threshold, with bruised soles, I took a deep breath, and much of the world came in with me;

A woman in high heels walking down a boulevard, a butcher cutting meat, a skateboard leaning against a concrete pillar, a cat falling asleep, a couple walking into a cinema, an old man undressing, a clown in repose, a teacher walking towards his car after a long day at work, the sound of a family of sparrows in-between the footsteps of an angry teenager crying, a stainless steel water fountain, a child kicking a football, a man upon a step ladder . . .

When I finally exhaled I had forgotten how long I had been standing there, whether it was the true exhalation to the first inhalation, or whether I had been breathing steadily for some time. Everything had changed, only Sibelius had stayed the same. The women’s high heels cracked and broke apart, she fell, and the beads on her handbag scattered everywhere conceivable, forever irretrievable. The butcher had cut his thumb off and a fountain of plum coloured blood sprung out and covered bits of meat. The skateboard suddenly began to lose grip of the column, dropped and caressed the pillar before rolling away. The cat yawned and started licking itself. The cinema-goers stopped still before the automatic doors, which appeared broken. The old man heard a scream from across the road. The clown thought about his mother and why he called her Diana and not mother. The teacher got a sudden erection. The family of sparrows transported to another neighborhood as if they had entered some crack in the fabric of space-time. The teenager crying saw a girl in yellow laughing. The water fountain was vandalized abruptly but articulately. A kid in phoenix scored his first goal. The stepladder fell.

Everything balanced on a moment, as if time were a series of edges that one fell from. It stopped being a problem which side you fell, as long as it were downward.

I was mid-way through eating an apple when I had first thought there to be a police car outside. I stood on ‘that’ threshold for a few moments and then returned to the record player to put on Benjamin Britten’s Nocturne. When I continued to chew the apple it tasted differently from the one I was eating before.