Lanark: a life in 4 books (11 page)

“… is the pie that bakes and eats itself …”

“….. is that which has no dimensions…..”

“… is the study of the best …”

“….. an exacting game and requires patience…..”

They entered a great hall where the voices were drowned in a roaring which swelled and ebbed like waves of cheering in a football stadium. Crowds poured over the circular floor from tunnels on every side and disappeared through square doors between the tunnel entrances. Among white-coated nurses and doctors Lanark saw people in green dustcoats, brown overalls, blue uniforms and charcoal-grey business suits. He looked upward and staggered giddily. He was staring up a vast perpendicular shaft with gold and orange light flowing continually up the walls in diminishing rings like the rings of a target. Munro gripped his arm and led him to a door which opened, then slid shut behind them.

They were in a lift with the still air of a small ward. Munro looked up at a circular mesh in the middle of the ceiling and said, “The sink, please. Any entrance.”

There was a faint hum but no sense of movement. Munro said,

“Our corridors have confusing acoustics. Did you ask something?”

“Why do people only walk in one direction?”

“Each ward has two corridors, one leading in and the other out. This allows the air to circulate, and nobody goes against the current.”

“Who were the people in the big hall?”

“Doctors, like you and me.”

“But doctors were a tiny minority.”

“Do you think so? I suppose it’s possible. We need engineers and clerks and chemists to supervise lighting and synthesize food and so on, but we only see those in the halls; they have their own corridors. They’re a strange lot. Every one of them, even the plumbers and wireless operators, think their own profession
is
the institute, and everyone else exists to serve them. I suppose it makes their work seem more worthwhile, but if they reflected seriously they would see that the institute lives by purging the intake.”

“Purging the intake?”

“Doctoring the patients.”

The lift door opened and Lanark’s nostrils were hit by a powerful stink, the foul odour he had first noticed when Gloopy vanished in the dark. Munro crossed a platform to a railing and stood with his hands on it, looking down. To right and left the platform curved into distance as though enclosing an enormous basin, but though searchlights in the black ceiling cast slanting beams into the basin itself Lanark was unable to see the other side. From high overhead came huge dismal sounds like a dance record played loudly at an unusually low speed, and from the depths beyond the railing came a multitudinous slithering hiss. Lanark stood at the door of the lift and said shakily, “Why did we come here?” Munro looked round.

“This is our largest deterioration ward. We keep the hopeless softs here. They’re quite happy. Come and look.”

“You said I need see nobody whose problem is not a form of my own!”

“Problems take different forms but they’re all caused by the same error. Come and see.”

“If I look over that railing I think I will be sick.” Munro stared at him, then shrugged and re-entered the lift. He said to the mesh, “Professor Ozenfant,” and the door closed and the air softly hummed. Munro leaned against the wall with his hands tucked into the opposite sleeves. He frowned at his shoes for a moment then looked up with sudden brightness saying, “Tell me, Dr. Lanark, is there a connection between your love of vast panorama and your distaste for human problems?”

Lanark said nothing.

The door opened and they entered another huge roaring ceilingless hall. Pulses of sound and bright air beat down from above and flowed out into the surrounding tunnels with crowds of people from the surrounding lifts. Munro led the way to a tunnel with a block of names on the wall by the entrance:

They sped along it hearing bodiless voices conversing among the clamour:

“… glad to see the light in the sky …”

“….. frames were shining on the walls …..”

“… you need certificates …”

“….. camels in Arabia …..”

“… annihilating sweetness …”

They reached a place where half the names were printed on one wall and half on the other, and here the tunnel forked and diminished. It forked and diminished three more times until they entered a single low tunnel labelled ozenfant. The red glossy curtain at the end opened on a surface of heavy brown cloth. Munro pulled that aside and they stepped into a large and lofty apartment. Tapestries worked in red, green and gold thread hung from an elaborate cornice to a chequered floor of black and white marble. Antique stools, chairs and sofas stood about in no kind of order with stringed instruments of the lute and fiddle sort scattered between them. A grand piano stood in a corner beside a cumbersome, old-fashioned X-ray machine, and in the middle Lanark saw, from behind, a figure in black trousers and waistcoat leaning over a carpenter’s bench and sandpapering the edge of a half-constructed guitar. This figure stood up and turned toward them, smiling and wiping hands on a richly patterned silk handkerchief. It was a stout young man with a small blond triangular beard. His sleeves were rolled well above his elbows exposing robust hairy forearms, but collar and tie were perfectly neat, the waistcoat unwrinkled, the trousers exactly creased, the shoes splendidly polished. He came forward saying, “Ah, Munro, you bring my new assistant. Sit down both of you and talk to me.” Munro said, “I’m afraid I must leave. Dr. Lanark has tired of my company and I have work to do.”

“No, my friend, you must stay some minutes longer! A patient is about to turn salamander, an always impressive spectacle. Sit down and I’ll show you.”

He gestured to a divan and stood facing them and dabbing his brows with the handkerchief. He said, “Tell me, Lanark, what instrument do you play?”

“None.”

“But you are musical?”

“No.”

“But perhaps you know about ragtime, jazz, boogie-woogie, rock-and-roll?”

“No.”

Ozenfant sighed. “I feared as much. No matter, there are other ways of speaking to patients. I will show you a patient.”

He went to the nearest tapestry and dragged it sideways, uncovering a circular glass screen in the wall behind. A slender microphone hung under it. He brought this to the divan pulling a fine cable after it, and sat down and said, “Ozenfant speaking. Show me chamber twelve.”

The neon lights in the ceiling went out and a blurred image shone inside the screen, seemingly a knight in gothic armour lying on the slab of a tomb. The image grew distinct and more like a prehistoric lizard on a steel table. The hide was black, the knobbly joints had pink and purple quills on them, a bush of purple spines hid the genitals and a double row of spikes down the back supported the body about nine inches above the table. The head was neckless, chinless, and grew up from the collarbone into a gaping beak like the beak of a vast cuckoo. The face had no other real features, though a couple of blank domes stuck out like parodies of eyeballs. Munro said, “The mouth is open.”

Ozenfant said, “Yes, but the air trembles above it. Soon it shuts, and then
boom!
”

“When was he delivered?”

“Nine months, nine days, twenty-two hours ago. He arrived nearly as you see him, nothing human but the hands, throat and sternum mastoid. He seemed to like jazz, for he clutched the remnant of a saxophone, so I said, ‘He is musical, I will treat him myself.’ Unluckily I know nothing of jazz. I tried him with Debussy (who sometimes works in these cases) then I tried the nineteenth-century romantics. I pounded him with Wagner, overwhelmed him with Brahms, beguiled him with Mendelssohn. Results: negative. In despair I recede further and further, and who works in the end? Scarlatti. Each time I played
The Cortege
his human parts blushed as pink and soft as a baby’s bottom.”

Ozenfant closed his eyes and kissed his fingertips to the ceiling. “Well, matters remain thus till six hours ago when he goes wholly dragon in five minutes. Perhaps I do not play the clavichord well? Who else in this wretched institute would have tried?”

Munro said, “You assume he blushed pink with pleasure. It may have been rage. Maybe he disliked Scarlatti. You should have asked.”

“I distrust speech therapy. Words are the language of lies and evasions. Music cannot lie. Music talks to the heart.”

Lanark moved impatiently. Light from the screen showed Ozenfant’s mouth so fixed in a smile that it seemed expressionless, while the eyebrows kept moving in exaggerated expressions of thoughtfulness, astonishment or woe. Ozenfant said, “Lanark is bored by these technicalities. I will show him more patients.”

He spoke to the microphone and a sequence of dragons on steel tables appeared on the screen. Some had glossy hides, some were plated like tortoises, some were scaled like fish and crocodiles. Most had quills, spines or spikes and some were hugely horned and antlered, but all were made monstrous by a detail, a human foot or ear or breast sticking through the dinosaur armour. A doctor sat on the edge of one table and studied a chessboard balanced on a dragonish stomach. Ozenfant said, “That is McWham, who is also unmusical. He treats the dryly rational cases; he teaches them chess and plays interminable games. He thinks that if anyone defeats him their armour will fall off, but so far he has been too clever for them. Do you play any games, Lanark?”

“No.”

In another chamber a thin priest with intensely miserable eyes sat with his ear close to a dragonish beak.

“That is Monsignor Noakes, our only faith healer. We used to have lots of them: Lutherans, Jews, Atheists, Muslims, and others with names I forget. Nowdays all the hardened religious cases have to be treated by poor Noakes. Luckily we don’t get many.”

“He looks unhappy.”

“Yes, he takes his work too seriously. He is Roman Catholic and the only people he cures are Quakers and Anglicans. Have you a religion, Lanark?”

“No.”

“You see a cure is more likely when doctor and patient have something in common. How would you describe yourself?”

“I can’t.”

Ozenfant laughed. “Of course you can’t! I asked foolishly. The lemon cannot taste bitterness, it only drinks the rain. Munro, describe Lanark to me.”

“Obstinate and suspicious,” said Munro. “He has intelligence, but keeps it narrow.”

“Good. I have a patient for him. Also obstinate, also suspicious, with a cleverness which only reinforces a deep, deep, immeasurably deep despair.”

Ozenfant said to the microphone, “Show chamber one, and let us see the patient from above.”

A gleaming silver dragon appeared between a folded pair of brazen wings. A stout arm ending in seven brazen claws lay along one wing, a slender soft human arm along the other. “You see the wings? Only unusually desperate cases have wings, though they cannot use them. Yet this one brings such reckless energy to her despair that I have sometimes hoped. She is unmusical, but I, a musician, have stooped to speech therapy and spoken to her like a vulgar critic, and she exasperated me so much that I decided to give her to the catalyst. We will give her to Lanark instead.”

A radio said
plin-plong
. Ozenfant took one from a waistcoat pocket and turned the switch. A voice announced that patient twelve was turning salamander.

Ozenfant said to the microphone, “Quick! Chamber twelve.”

Chamber twelve was obscured by white vapours streaming and whirling from the dragon’s beak, which suddenly snapped shut. Radiant beams shot from the domes in the head, the figure seemed to be writhing. Ozenfrant cried, “No light, please! We will observe by heat alone.”

There was immediate blackness on which Lanark’s dazzled eyes projected stars and circles before adjusting to it. He could hear Munro’s quick dry breathing on one side and Ozenfant breathing through his mouth on the other. He said, “What’s happening?”

Ozenfant said, “Brilliant light pours from all his organs—it would blind us. Soon you will see him by his heat.” A moment later Lanark was startled to feel Ozenfant murmuring into his ear.

“The heat made by a body should move easily through it, overflowing the pores, penis, anus, eyes, lips, limbs and fingertips in acts of generosity and self-preservation. But many people are afraid of the cold and try to keep more heat than they give, they stop the heat from leaving though an organ or limb, and the stopped heat forges the surface into hard insulating armour. What part of you went dragon?”

“A hand and arm.”

“Did you ever touch them with your proper hand?”

“Yes. They felt cold.”

“Quite. No heat was getting out. But no heat was getting in! And since men feel the heat they receive more than the heat they create the armour makes the remaining human parts feel colder. So do they strip it off? Seldom. Like nations losing unjust wars they convert more and more of themselves into armour when they should surrender or retreat. So someone may start by limiting only his affections or lust or intelligence, and eventually heart, genitals, brain, hands and skin are crusted over. He does nothing but talk and feed, giving and taking through a single hole; then the mouth shuts, the heat has no outlet, it increases inside him until … watch, you will see.” The blackness they sat in had been dense and total but a crooked thread of scarlet light appeared on it. This twitched and grew at both ends until it outlined the erect shape of a dragon with legs astride, arms outstretched, the hands thrusting against darkness, the great head moving from side to side. Lanark had a weird feeling that the beast stood before him in the room. There was nothing but blackness to compare it with, and it seemed vast. Its gestures may have been caused by pain but they looked threatening and triumphant. Inside the black head two stars appeared where eyes should be, then the whole body was covered with white and golden stars. Lanark felt the great gothic shape towering miles above him, a galaxy shaped like a man. Then the figure became one blot of gold which expanded into a blinding globe. There was a crash of thunder and for a moment the room became very hot. The floor heaved and the lights went on.