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Pierre. "There's nothing physically wrong with him.
He's bright. Look at him taking it all in, cunning little bugger "
Pierre gestured questioningly at the house, where the telephone kept on
ringing. But Eileen wasn't paying attention. She stared from her husband to
the child in its ill-fitting clothes. Pierre shrugged and went indoors to take
the call.
"Do you mean this kid is yours, Chris?"
"Why yes! Who's else?"
"But . . . when? How? Is this what you dragged Pierre here to witness this
shabby domestic intrigue? This petty tit for tat. After you've been away such
a time you can only produce this gesture you petty hateful nobody!"
Vidya stared at her face twisted by anger. His fists
balled up inside his gloves. His body arched against the restraint of clothes.
He writhed about like a snake in Sole's embrace as the cold air stung his
face.
Sole stared at his wife. Her outburst puzzled him. It seemed so paranoid and
irrelevant. He hadn't even been away
'such a time' it was less than two weeks.
"I didn't screw some bitch foreign nurse if that's what you think! Vidya is
the child of my my mind."
"So Peter isn't a product of your precious mind? A cruel trick, Chris,
bringing Pierre here to rub it in."
"That's an accident, Pierre being here. Honestly. My God, why should it be a
trick?"
"Can I see into your heart any better than you can yourself? Do I know why
your subconscious needs a set-piece like this?"
"Setpiece? What the hell are you talking about!"
"Pierre arriving. Then your dramatic entry with your 'real' child in your
arms. That's a child of the mind is it? I can't compete with that. What on
earth is a child of the mind!"
The boy's eyes flashed from Sole to his wife and back again. The electricity
of words flowed between them, and he fed on it greedily. Sole had to hold him
tighter as his limbs flexed and he twisted about in his arms. It was all
emotional nonsense Eileen was talking. It didn't make sense. The idea of
bringing Pierre here hadn't been that at all. It had been generosity. An
attempt to give her something, not take something away, or humiliate her.
"I don't suppose I can stay here anyhow. Have you got the car keys? I'll have
to take him somewhere else."
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"This is beyond me. You just . . . simply . . . amaze me."
Sole began to feel a curious light-headedness.
Eileen was receding into the background. The house, the car, the landscape
were all changing subtly. Still there, but different.
He was still seeing familiar things; but seeing them as though this was the
first time he had set eyes on them. The
familiar things were at the same time infinitely strange and fresh. They had
taken on an unsettling double life. Their colours were faded and at the same
time bright. Their shapes fitted in neatly to his customary picture of
things and simultaneously were oddly distorted and foreshortened as though the
rules of perspective were being interfered with.
The house, as well as being a house, was now a giant red box of plastic
bricks. The car was a Volkswagen saloon
and also a great plastic and glass spheroid of no very obvious function.
Eileen stood before him a flat figure posturing on a screen suspended in
mid-air.
Beyond, a barren plateau stretched out into infinite distance, unable to
terminate itself with any solid boundary.
Panic mounted in him as he searched for the boundaries that ought to be there,
and were not. The most he could locate was a circular zone of confused light,
very far away. Or was it very far away? Or very near? He couldn't tell and
when he tried to concentrate on the problem, the world flashed in and out at
him, frighteningly, growing alternately very large and very small. In that
confused zone far off, lines of sight broke down and vanishing points
stubbornly refused to vanish. He tried to fashion a wall out of that medley of
lights and darks far off but the wall, half-
completed, flowed in at him and out again, flexing and contracting about him,
as though he had been swallowed by a soft glass stomach he could see
through and the stomach walls pulsed in and out while its acids nibbled at his
bare skin, licking it with a harsh invisible tongue.
From this unbounded, menacing plateau sprung at intervals stiff towering
giants, balanced upon great solitary legs, waving their hundreds of arms and
thousands of fingers slackly overhead.
Above their reach was more of the great opaque stomach its foggy depths were
coloured blue, up there. They fled away and raced towards him, compressing him
to a tiny spot, then inflating him till it seemed his head would burst with
thinking of it.
Then he did an impossible thing.
He twisted about, in fright, in his own grasp; for an instant, saw both
himself holding, and himself being held  saw the Self that held him, and saw
the Self he held; the two sights superimposed on one another. Almost as soon
as it formed, this double vision fell apart, and the two states began to
alternate separately before his horrified eyes.
Rapidly, the two versions of Himself speeded up their substitutions of one
another quickening pace till they were flashing before his gaze like a film
and producing a sickening illusion of continuity but continuity in being two
separate places at once.
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Soon the visions fused again and he was holding on to himself, and struggling
against himself, not knowing which was the true state.
As before, the double vision shattered. He was Sole the Man staring in fear
and nausea into the Boy's eyes. But these eyes swelled into deep pools.
Mirrors. Saucers of glass. He could see himself reflected in them, at the same
time as he saw himself through them.
In their depths a whirlpool spun frantically on its own axis, sucking
everything in to a vanishing point that never vanished but only grew fearfully
dense with light with all the sights it was seeing yet couldn't find a way to
discard from attention.
He wore the sky close as a hat. He knew the moil and coil of wisp clouds
barely visible in the blue, intimately. His fingers branched the branching of
the trees. His tongue tasted one by one the rows of brick teeth in that closed
red mouth of a house that would swallow him, swallow him. And, at the very
same time, he knew he was already
swallowed, by the pulsing translucent stomach of the outside world.
This world flipped, into a new state of being.
It fell apart from lines and solids into a pointillist chaos of dots. Bright
dots and dark dots. Blue dots, red dots, green dots. No form held true. No
distance held fast. New forms making use of these dots in entirely arbitrary, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]