Little Doors (20 page)

The little hand of Geopoliticus Child is warm and alive in Dali’s own. “What makes you so sure you are dead?”

This reply gives Dali pause. He recalls his intuition upon first stepping from the egg that this was only the final hallucination of a cooling brain, a time-shifted pseudo-life that would unravel and disintegrate along with his expiring neurons … Can this be what his diminutive Virgil means?

As if sensing Dali’s hesitation, Geopoliticus Child says in his sweet voice, “What if you have been spirited away by superior beings? Taken from your deathbed to another world? The agents of your fate might be a race other than man, whose members wish to preserve your life amid familiar and reassuring scenery.”

Dali snorts. “Wellsian nonsense! Even I, the great Dali, know that such talk is piffle, fit only for hypergonadic adolescents.”

“I merely propound the theory. Believe what you wish.”

During their talk, the two travelers have drawn closer to the lonely tower by means of strange and disconcerting physical and temporal shifts. Stopping now a few feet from its walls, Dali can see that the structure’s doorless base is cracked, the stucco crumbling, revealing the sand-colored bricks beneath. Above, the sky has gone hyperxiological: composed of some colloidal substance, infolded and wrinkled on itself in a non-Euclidean manner, studded with nails, coral and teeth.

In the upper floors of the tower are square openings. A single iron rod extends across the middle of each.

In one opening, leaning on the rod, is a naked woman.

Her left forearm rests on the rod, while her right hand clasps her left bicep, thus framing her pendulous full breasts, the nipples of which are perfectly round cherry-colored marbles that float above the skin. Her hair resembles that of Botticelli’s Venus. The iron rod cuts athwart her pubis. She is not entirely naked, for she wears seamed black nylons and scuffed brown loafers. Her left leg supports her weight on the ball of her foot, raising that foot from her shoe. Her right knee is bent, the tip of the right shoe balanced on the stones of the tower floor. Around her in a cluster float bulbous phallic horns.

Her joints are curiously configured, almost as if her limbs could be detached.

The tantalizing woman calls down to Dali. “Come up here, Painter, and consummate our alchemical wedding, the union of mercury and sulphur.”

Dali feels a creeping paralysis and a desire to submit to the beckoning of this siren. At the same time, he wants to turn and flee. But he is aware that this is the first obstacle on his path to Gala, and must be conquered.

Suddenly Dali realizes that his head is level with that of the Geopoliticus Child. He has shrunken to a child himself, clothed in a blue sailor’s suit, clutching a hoop and thighbone. Ah, the Spectre of Sex Appeal!

Dali summons his innermost strengths and addresses the woman. “Young Virgin, autosodomized by your own chastity! You can lean on and play with the unicorn horns morally, as was practised in the time of courtly love! But to embrace the fiery Dali would result in your destruction!”

The woman postures invitingly. “I am unafraid to try it. What of yourself? Climb between my legs, Painter, and see what happens—if you dare!”

Dali quivers with a wash of lust, fear and anguish. He stirs toward the tower, ready to scale its walls with bloody fingers to reach this artifact of his own devising, supreme attractor crafted to his own tastes. Images of rolling her detachable nipples between his fingers inflame him.

At the last moment, however, through some deep access of resolve, Dali instead hurls the thighbone at the temptress.

It hurtles end over end through the space between them, finally smiting the Young Virgin upon the forehead.

At the instant of contact, the woman and tower vanish.

Dali looks down at himself; he has regained his adult stature and nudity. He turns to share his triumph with Geopoliticus Child.

The child is gone.

In his place is a giant black ant fully as large.

Dali notices that he and the ant now stand on a beach lapped by a broad sea. Wedged into the sand is a canted wooden crutch holding a black telephone receiver, which trails a wire that ends in midair.

Before Dali can question the ant about the disappearance of Geopoliticus Child, the phone begins to ring.

Dali lifts the receiver off the crutch. “Hello? Yes, who is it?”

Gala speaks. “It is I, Salvador, she who veils herself and walks in mystery.”

“Gala, Gala, my dearest, where are you, how can I reach you? Tell me.”

“You are doing wonderful, Salvador, without any instruction from me. Just remember the paranoiac-critical method.”

“Of course! A spontaneous method of irrational knowledge founded on the critical interpretive association of the delirious phenomena will see me through, as always! Thank you, Galutschka, thank you! Once again, you have put me in touch with my true self!”

“Goodbye for now, Salvador. If you just persist as nobly as you have been, we shall be reunited soon.”

There is a click, and a noise like the sound of sardines frying fills the earpiece.

Dali turns to the magnificent ant. “I assume you are to lead me in place of the child.”

“Yes,” answers the ant. Its voice, unlike that of Geopoliticus Child, is a harsh rasp.

“Onward, then, Admirable Atta!”

The ant and Dali begin to walk along the subtle sands.

Soon, they come upon a scene of frantic activity.

The conquest of the tuna.

In the marine shallows a party of heroic unclothed figures struggle with enormous glaucous tuna fish. The men are composed of golden and silver whorls of energy. Some have visible brains like coral. They grapple with the slippery dying fish, stabbing them with knives and spears. Blood runs from the fish, and from the hemolactic nipple of one of the men, staining the water. On a headland, a group of reserve fishermen watch complacently; a naked woman balances on one leg, like a stork, and hides her face. Gulls screech overhead.

Dali pauses to admire the barbaric commotion. After a while, the ant speaks in its mordant rasp.

“How appalling men are! Why can they not be as the noble ant, and scavenge for their sustenance?”

“Both ants and men make war, as I indicate by their conjoined presence in Autumn Cannibalism. Therefore, ant, do not preach. Remember: the hard and the soft must be equivalent in classic work.”

“Let us agree to disagree. Meanwhile, we must continue.”

The pair leave the ferocious fishers behind.

For some time, they walk along the vacant shore in silence. Dali becomes preoccupied with his thoughts. Assuming he does reach Gala, what will happen? What is the purpose of existence here in this new dimension? Is it all some lugubrious game? Is—

Suddenly, without warning, an enormous pair of lips forms and opens in the sand beneath Dali’s right foot. His leg plunges into the gullet up to the thigh, before finding purchase on the palate.

At once the teeth and lips close, severing Dali’s leg.

Dali screams in pain.

The mouth vanishes, leaving Dali lying on the beach with an amputated leg.

Slowly the pain diminishes to a barely tolerable level. Dali looks reluctantly at his shortened limb. There is no blood. The leg looks as if it has been missing for years, ending in a scarred nub.

“The real shadow of a lion threatens me,” says Dali through his grimace of sustainable pain. “But I will persist.”

Dali notices then that the ant has deserted him. Helpless, he decides to await its return for at least a while.

He is not disappointed. The ant soon reappears, bearing in its mandibles a crutch. Gratefully, Dali takes the crutch and uses it to lever himself up.

“I have always maintained that for slumber to be possible, a whole system of crutches in psychic equilibrium was needed. But I never thought I would require one in reality.”

“We must continue,” says the ant unsympathetically.

Dali stumps awkwardly onward.

They pass a row of sharks with their snouts out of the water. Each second, a flounder leaps from the water and slides down the throat of one shark or another like a letter down a letterbox.

“The sharks of time eat the soles of memory.”

“Possibly. Possibly not.”

Reaching a huge cliff whose spill of wave-slapped boulders blocks further progress both along the beach and in the brine, Dali and the ant turn inland. Soon the sea is but a memory.

They reach a stagnant pool, flanked by ochre buttes, as storm clouds begin to congregate overhead. A huge decomposing stone figure sits in the pool, head bowed. A marble hand rises from the earth beside the pool, bearing an egg from which sprouts a white flower. Small ants crawl upon the hand.

“One moment,” says the oversized ant. “I must speak with my brothers.”

The large ant moves off to rub antennae delicately with the small ones. While Dali waits, he notices a lean dog chewing a portentous bone. He attempts to pet it, but is repulsed with a growl.

“We all complacently savour the narcissistic odours of every one of our drawers,” muses Dali ruefully.

The ant rejoins Dali. “I have the information I need. We can go on.”

“Where?”

“To see the Christ.”

“But of course!”

Detouring around the buttes, Dali is led onward by the ant.

The heat of the desert is suddenly overwhelmingly oppressive. Dali wishes he were again by the sea. He wipes sweat from his brow and continues.

Pausing to look up, Dali sees a mirage—what he fervently hopes is a mirage—high in the atmosphere.

Gala, naked, lies on her back upon a flat blue rock. Snarling tigers leap through the air toward her, and the bayonet of a hovering rifle seems ready to pierce her flesh. The total effect is one of menace constrained only by the thinnest of threads.

“Quickly, ant! I feel Gala is in some danger!”

“Let us take this car then.”

Dali becomes aware that they have halted by a low free-standing rock formation. Projecting from the rocks, its rear bumper fused into the granite, is an open-roofed touring car, a 1931 Packard. The car is overgrown with flowers and greenery.

“How, ant, how? The car is one with the rock!”

“You must free it.”

Dali moves hopelessly to the rear of the car, inserting himself partly between it and the rock wall. Planting his crutch and single foot firmly into the friable earth, he leans his left shoulder against the vehicle, and strains against it. The car does not move. Dali pushes harder. His guts feel ready to spill out, like those of the crucified tuna. He releases a deep rumble of simultaneous frustration and denial of failure.

With a crack the car comes free of the rock, intact.

Dali falls forward with its release. When he picks himself up, the ant is already seated behind the wheel.

“Lacking a foot, you cannot drive.”

“That is incontestable.”

“Then I shall.”

“Very well,” says Dali, and climbs into the passenger’s seat.

The ant engages the clutch and they move off.

After some miles, a gigantic floating figure becomes visible low on the horizon. As they near it, it comes to fill the whole sky above them.

It is the Christ pinned to a hypercube. His body floating above the bronze geometry and taking the place of the essential ninth cube, according to the precepts of the mystic, Raymond Lull. Christ is surrounded by antimatter angels, as befits his status.

The plain is now an onyx checkerboard shadowed by the immense figure. The car’s tires hum smoothly along the pavement. The ant is forced to brake far in advance of where it wishes to stop, so frictionless is the surface.

At last though the car is motionless, below the feet of the Christ.

Looking upward, the only features of the Saviour’s face that Dali is able to see are the Saviour’s titanic underlip and nostrils.

A resonant voice that vibrates the whole world thunders out: “Who disturbs me?”

Dali stands up in the car, cranes his head backwards and shouts upward, in pitiable imitation of the voice of Christ.

“It is I, Dali, your humble explicator, and glorifier! I have come seeking Saint Gala.”

“Leave me alone with my suffering. Your quest is trivial compared to mine.”

Dali becomes angry at these words. “You pompous clod! How dare you deny Dali! What did you ever accomplish, compared to my work?”

“Don’t blaspheme,” warns the ant. “His mercy is strange and unpredictable.”

“This is my universe!” roars the angry Christ. “I brought it into being with my suffering. It is a cognate of my Father’s creation. You are here only because I opened a crack for you at death.”

“What nonsense! I would rather believe in aliens! Look about you! Everything here has sprung from my splendid brain. Even your agony is depicted according to my conception.”

The Christ is silent for a moment. “You have a point there,” He says at last. “I must think about this.”