The Brooke-Rose Omnibus (32 page)

–What?

–Peeling. It hurts.

She puts the orange down.

–Do you sleep all right?

–Yes, I think I sleep.

–Do you dream at all?

–No. I never dream. Stop spying on me.

–I don’t. I mean, I’ve stopped. I only-oh darling, if anything you spy on me.

–Do I? How?

–I don’t know. I don’t know why I said that. Your eyes. Your eyes seem to, see things.

–They feel, sort of hollow.

–Yes, they look hollow, but then, after all – And so big, Larry, so big.

–Like dish-telescopes.

–Well, not as big as that.

–As if I had other eyes, turning inside. Or perhaps these turn inwards. Can you see my pupils?

–Yes, Larry. Huge pupils. Do they give you drugs here?

–I don’t know what they give me.

–I must speak to the doctor about that.

–Don’t speak to anyone, least of all to Stance.

–Stance?

–The Travel Agent.

–Travel –?

–Grave-digger.

–All right, all right, my darling, don’t worry. Nobody wants to harm you. They’ve done a wonderful job.

–All things and civilization considered.

–Yes well, I know, they made a huge mistake. But then you can’t altogether blame them. You did die, you know.

–Did you really die, dad?

–Dippermouth.

–You do say funny things, daddy. But mummy warned me.

–Mummy? Whose mummy?

–Mine, daddy, me, Patricia.

–Oh. How did you get in?

–They said I could. I came out top at school. Ten out of ten for maths and biology. Oh, and current events, nine. And that in spite of getting only seven for religious
instruction.
I hate r.i. Did you hate r.i., dad, and English, and history? I do. But I came out top all the same.

–Good. One feels better when one comes out top.

–Did you come out top, dad?

–I suppose so.

–Martin’s gone back to France. But he knows you’ve come through.

–Through what?

–You died, you know, says the nurse says the sister and all the rest, speaking in strip-cartoon, each in a square room with accusing remarks attached to their smiles like
gall-bladders
to be continued in our next. Did you really die says Dekko in the subsequent square moving from left to right, I don’t believe it in another ring attached to his tight mouth, it has a perfectly good scientific explanation. But the explanation vanishes from right to left in the dark as he stands in the cubic room with trite remarks inside an onion round his rimless glasses, tight layers that don’t peel off and make no maps of contours. My wife sends her regards. Would you like anything, grapes? I brought you flowers … I mean she sent them … From the garden … You’ve seen our garden, haven’t you … I hope you will come and sit in it and rest … You don’t have a garden, do you. Or an expensive mistress though your wife, ah, but then I do all the work, I discovered the formula, Head took the credit. Died, he should have died, for heaven’s sake, Laurence, don’t look through me like that, it frightens me. Don’t you sleep well here?

–Yes, I think I sleep.

–You mean you don’t know? Don’t they give you anything?

–I don’t know what they give me.

–My dear chap, how does it feel exactly, says the next square affably, and talks of people it likes who go to bed with names I have never heard of, bringing them in from outside myself like mares lassoed by non-existent radiations. How can people get so messed up and contorted, the square room says, it doesn’t understand, really, marriages broken up, divorces, nervous breakdowns, why, for what, and it heard, the other day, the square room says, in confidence mind you, and the story floats between the layers of
atmosphere
inside the square room and upsets the definition. Well, I suppose you know all about that sort of thing. I mean you live on it, don’t you, but still the square room doesn’t see why people should get things so out of
proportion.
The square room wouldn’t. But then the square room has long sight.

–Perhaps you have never died.

The square room shrugs and says something or other and stays or moves perhaps to the left like the others. Unless it sharpens its beak, what exactly do you mean by something for the benefit of our viewers could you translate. The scalpel scrapes into my pain, the worms in my head squirm, but I have lost my five geometries.

–I suppose men find it easier to move in space and time than in effort.

–Do you mean men or man, sir?

Stance quibbles the professor with oppositions and Bermuda smiles remotely behind the whirls of smoke. Surely man, as such, puts tremendous effort into moving through both space and time. Indeed, look at him, reaching the moon, bouncing his codes against the planets.

–Yes, look at him, says Bermuda less remotely, and the words rebound from inside the map-like contours
emanating
from her, filling the room, the street no doubt, the entire sky. Their internal combustion has pushed her out of their banal untender story that throttles her. Stance’s wife sips her drink and looks with glazed eyes out of an angular attitude in the depth of the sofa.

–I meant something a little different, the professor says gently, or pretends to say inside the latitudes and longitudes he shows to men. Let’s put it this way: below the visible to the naked eye you have infinite degrees. Any amount can occur between mineral matter and nothingness. Why not above the visible?

–Any amount of what?

–Oh Stanley! Why do you pick on words with a pretence of sharply pursuing an argument you merely clog?

–Come, come, Brenda. What do you mean? As a mathematician you should define your terms.

–I speak with perfect clarity.

–I have noticed that when people say a thing has perfect clarity they merely wish it had. Brenda, what’s got into you?

–Any amount of shock and pressure, the professor continues, ignoring the opaqueness between them. Despite his small eyes, one of them almost blind, the other watery, he has an undoubted presence on the screen of social intercourse that flickers its arpeggios like harp-strings up and down our subliminities. The elasticity of shock should equivalate the elasticity of pressure. The mass of matter resists. You could call matter resistance.

–Quite. Yes. I suppose you could.

Stance looks into his glass darkly, holding it distantly at the level of the nice little individual flan through which his sensibility photographs the world. You scientists talk of things, and matter, and energy, as if divorced from people. Well of course even I know you can’t detach energy from matter, but still, you go too far, I mean, you exaggerate. I have no interest in things as such, I like people.

–Do you, Stance?

–Stance? My dear Larry.

–I beg your pardon, Stanley. For some reason I find it hard to remember people’s names.

–Well, not to worry. What do names matter?

–I think they do, as a matter of fact, wouldn’t you say so, Laurence? We of course use mostly symbols and infinities of calculations. But you give names to the dead satellites in the complex geometry as you called it, of the human soul. They tell a story, given to people at birth.

–I have a name but no story.

–Nonsense, my boy, everyone has a story. A tender or untender story.

Remote Bermuda looks out with her naked eye, suddenly in an anguish only I can see. And Professor Head perhaps, who closes his blind eye and cocks his giant telescope to catch the radiation of the bursting galaxies. But Stance’s wife sips her drink and looks with glazed not naked eyes. She cannot hope for an eternal quadrangle, though she bombards the square room with the particles of a vague discontent. Don’t you remember anything, no dream even?

–No, I never dream.

–Darling, everyone dreams, even those who don’t remember, you of all people should know that.

Remote Bermuda, Brenda, there, her name returns, fills out the square room with her naked eye and honest vulnerability. She wastes herself, and thinks that I waste her, but energy works that way. I don’t know what wastes me. My second life, my death, my amazing recovery. If you had infinite time, professor, I toy with scientific trivia to avoid the issue of my silence, wouldn’t energy degrade itself in the natural way it has, and level itself completely? Then you’d have no shocks, no movement, no life at all. As in a White Dwarf, you told me.

Dr Tim Dekko and his plump virtuous wife sit side by side, she trying frequently to engage remote Bermuda in domesticities, taking her curt impatience with a pleasant smile, he holding his expensive decoy blonde tightly inside himself, wrapped up in layers of mathematical appearances.

–But we don’t have infinite time, Bermuda quips
determined
to reject her working self from which I have borrowed findings and put me in my place with pure feminity. What has that to do with us, with me?

–Ah, trust a woman to ask such a question. Come, Brenda, you can do better than that.

She both flinches at and revels in his smirking banality. I like life, she insists straight into him, I like shocks and movement.

–Yes well, you have a point, he concedes lethargically. I like life too.

–What do you mean by life? How dare you talk of life to a man who – who –

His wife’s stuttering accusation, thrown sharply out of her angular attitude in the depth of the sofa, bombards the square room with the particles of her anxiety. Stance shrugs.

–I think we should forget that. It has a perfectly good scientific explanation, as Larry of all people knows very well. Wouldn’t you say so, Dekko? You must admit –

–I don’t admit. I agree.

But his wife’s anger still disturbs the flickering
harp-strings
on the screen of social intercourse. I wish I could remember her name. They call each other of course darling in a deep hate that has degraded itself like energy to
indifference
and of-course-darling suits them both. She says of course darling you’d say everything has a scientific explanation, although you have no science, you lap up other people’s. Well, yes, why not? unruffled. Scientific facts never hurt anyone, whether visible or invisible to the naked eye. I mean, until the politicians get hold of them. Surely you make, put me right, professor, you make suppositions merely as working hypotheses and curled up in the
opaqueness
of his unradiating complacency I see or hear the whole argument in advance that will lead him into
self-contradiction,
stop, and discard them with no love lost between you when they outlive their working usefulness. You can’t do that with personal survival.

–No, you can’t.

–I mean, of course darling, you can and do, but the personal element may torment you. Don’t blame me.

–Nobody blames you, Stan. His wife’s anger has restored Bermuda’s calm. May I have another drink? But she has a point, you know. Professor Head says even equations have a personal element, and operate through people too, well, in a chemical way of course they do, but –

–Quite. You can’t detach energy from matter, can you, professor?

–But you can’t call people matter! Mrs Dekko pipes bravely out of her plump attractive simplicity and Stance looks at her with sudden sexual interest. Even Tim as a scientist would admit, I mean agree, that people have minds, emotions, mystery, something unique, well, an essence.

–You see, Sally my dear, you have to use the word something. People’s essence, as such, bores me. We all communicate through things, superficial things mostly.

–I thought you had no interest in things. You like people, you said.

Now that it has come, I feel for Stance as my wife, quick on the verbal uptake for lack of deeper satisfaction, wins her point. He flounders out of her contempt with an echo that has bounced from her before, merely to watch how they operate through people, he says.

The scientist works wonders with the precision of his language. He arabesques his way through the equations of energy contained until the chemistry of anger and hurt pride lies quietly balanced in the test-tube, on a dial, on a page that turns a new leaf full of squares and lines
intersecting
, circles, tangents and cubes, curves too, and the light turns the days into a fifth dimension. It hurts. How do you feel? she says.

–Ghastly. I think I died.

–You seem to make a habit of it.

–I can’t help it. It happens all the time. It hurts.

–You had an omen, Someone. Think about it, absorb it. Didn’t you take down the inscriptions?

–Good heavens, here I lie half-dead and you expect me to sit up and interpret omens. In my condition.

–Get up, Someone, you haven’t even got a scar.

–I feel choked –

–Dippermouth swallowed his bubble-gum. All his machinery’s got clogged and time has nearly stopped. You must act fast.

–Why me?

–You’ll have to operate, quickly, Someone. You know the five geometries.

–Do I? … All right. I’ll need Gut Bucket then.

–Okay, pop.

–Stand still, Gut, and wipe that grin off your outer face. Now, let’s lift him up, gently does it. Pliers. Scalpel.
Screw-driver
. Forceps. There, you can see the gum between the teeth of the wheels. Spittal. Smooth it in. Gently does it. Pliers. Scissors. Out it comes, whoops into the bucket. Spittal. Oil-can. Screw-driver. Needle and thread.

–His heart has stopped, Someone.

–Oh dear.

–He said he’d die before his time, you great big clumsy oaf.

–No. No. I’ll manage it. Fingers. Where did you put my fingers. Ah. Gently does it. Slowly, slowly. Touch and press and touch and press. Lightly dip not too deep, lift the tip. From a long long way away the heart-beat moves back into consciousness like a clock tick heard again after a clockless time of heavy concentration. Needle and thread. Wipe sweat. Screw-driver. There all done.

–Oh thank you, Someone. Thank you.

–Don’t mention it.

–Oh but I must. You’ve done him proud, hasn’t he, Gut Bucket?

–You’ve done okay, pop. You’ve sure done him fine. He looks pale, though, and Ms mouth dips right down.