Tales and Imaginings

Throughout most of my life, at intervals and very slowly, I have written pieces of fiction. Now that they have bulked up enough to be called a collection, it is a curious experience for me to read through them. Do I recognize their authors? I seem to enter a room of mirrors situated at various distances into the past. This young man aglow with the Orient, this dweller in European cities subject to metaphysical aftershocks, this Atlantic hermit with his mate, this word-logged pet-loving contemplative – none is exactly me, but I can see that each to a degree is
responsible for me. And so I bear a reciprocal responsibility and want to take their shortcomings on my shoulders. Hence the decision to publish their works. Most of them are I-pieces, and their narrators are another source of anxiety, for I cannot totally disown them either, despite deploring their nihilistic tendencies. But because in the past I have published so much
factual
, celebratory, useful writing, I hope to be excused for giving rein to dark themes and dubious moods in some of these tales and
imaginings
– knowing, however, that once they leave my desk they are essentially on their own.

TIM ROBINSON

Roundstone,
June
2002

Persimmon despite his bulk went through the crowd like a
blackbird
through branches. Struggling in the confusion caused by his passage, I couldn’t catch his bellowed comments on the sights that flashed forth, evoked and dismissed by his potent gestures. I would have escaped from my self-appointed guide had he not already made himself indispensable by rushing me into this tangled
quarter
of the city. At one point an old woman curled up in a basket snapped at my ankle, and I lost sight of him; then the maze of frayed and patched dwellings parted to reveal him, momentarily static, at the foot of a great staircase leading up to the temples which hung over us like rosy evening clouds. ‘Young man‚’ he said, mopping his brow with his newspaper, ‘time is short; let us
imagine
we are at the top. The balustrade as you see is
a huge snake that descends the hill in seven undulations, and shades us here with its seven heads. Up there, a last coil of its tail encircles a little
viewing
-platform, from which I now lean out so that my stomach broods over the city like a thundercloud, and by running my
fingernail
along the principal thoroughfares I elucidate what lies before your bewildered eyes.’

‘Wait‚’ I cried, ‘one fact please, just as an example. Back there we
passed a man sitting by a coil of rope smouldering away at one end; why was that?’

Persimmon’s gaze rested heavily on me for a moment, and then was lifted towards the pinnacles above. ‘In comparison with my rich conception of this city, some fragments of which I may
c
ommunicate
during this morning, such queries dwindle into triviality; spare me them.’ He upended an empty oil-drum before me, and achieved an oratorical balance upon it. ‘Grasp the ground-plan first,’ he cried, turning himself into a declamatory, rotating signpost. ‘We are looking down upon a holy-mountain mandala-city, a simple and symmetrical structure of square within square extending both inwards and outwards beyond the limits of vision. It answers our enquiring eyes with a universal statement, qualified by the idiosyncrasies of millions, as if
the Absolute had its portrait done in
fingerprints
.’ A small audience of naked children had gathered, and when Persimmon fell, very slowly and without disarticulating his syntax for a moment, they received his declining trunk into their arms, gathered up his scattered small change, and restored it to him with grave politeness. ‘The principal product of this propitious clime,’ he continued, supporting himself on half-a-dozen small springy bodies, ‘is symbolism, the consumption of which is
strictly reserved for tourists.’

Later, as we stood on a mud-bank to watch the river changing its course millimetre by millimetre, we breathed more slowly; I told
Persimmon
about my missionary great-aunt, who had left her small
savings
to me on condition I spent it in coming here to see a festival commemorating the Creation, which had impressed her long ago.

‘And how long are you staying?’

‘Just five days; that’s another condition of the will.’

‘A lady of extraordinary wisdom!’ judged Persimmon, already in motion again, treading heavily from boat to boat across the crowded river. ‘The conditions of her will are the conditions of
your vision; they are the magnifying glass through which, in your five days, you will discover a lifetime.’ His rhetoric bobbed and gleamed before me as I lurched after him, pushing through lines of washing, apologizing to the diminutive families that stared up at me from the bottom of each boat like the contents of trampled nests. ‘Five days! That calls for the concision of a novella; allow me to state its theme without preliminaries. The unique attribute of this city is to wear in the present the aspect of a memory; fragmentary, contingent, a temporal discontinuum of moments like pearls unthreaded by cause or purpose! Is this so? At first, certainly; and for reasons your commonsense will furnish. The daily life of the natives appears to you full of mysteries. Do not enquire; mysteries are hard to come by nowadays. Again, for you things lack names; and I will not provide them. One chooses between remembering an object or its name. I recommend that you preserve the pre-adamite clarity of your senses. The landscape of a memory, then; grasp that, and know where you are.’ Reaching the opposite bank, Persimmon stopped suddenly, the mud immediately closing over his shoes; he turned his face back to where I rocked on the brim of the last boat, and with a pedagogical look he demanded, ‘Now, what were your very first impressions, say at the airport?’

‘The lizards on the ceiling‚’ I said, momentarily suspended, and thinking fast, ‘and the spoons in the coffeebar each holding a minute reflection of the big electric fan overhead.’

‘Correct!’ cried Persimmon, uprooting himself with a great sucking convulsion, and wafting me ashore with a wave of his arm. ‘Quite correct! The reversal of gravity, in fact, as one might expect, everywhere being the antipodes of somewhere. In that case I will show you around; this evening we will visit the Happy World, which is
a dance-hall, a fairground, a what-you-will, and where you may well meet a nice girl. After that what we old China hands call the opium parlour would be an instructive visit.’ He continued to
plan as we clambered up crisscross timbers onto the busy road, and squeezed along between slow columns of lorries piled with some blackish rotting substance. He had to go sideways to allow his
gestures
the space they demanded; he coughed and wiped his eyes in the smoky crevices
of the traffic, but his voice carried well over its roar. ‘I cannot mediate the surrounding jungle for you; that you must experience for yourself. However, I will arrange a trip for you to a friend of mine, a rubber-planter up in the hills near the temple ruins, which you can visit en route. Where are you staying, by the way?’

‘At the YMCA. It’s very cheap if you share a room.’

‘Then no doubt you have met young Midgley, who has been staying there for some months.’

‘In fact he’s my room-mate.’

Persimmon looked at me, and then through me down
suddenly-opening
vistas of speculation. ‘And how do you get on with that remarkable being?’

I hesitated; ‘Is he a friend of yours?’

‘You may speak evil of him to me‚’ answered Persimmon, sitting on the edge of an immense gutter in the middle of the road, and swinging his muddy shoes and socks in the swift clear water. The traffic groaned and rattled on either side of us.

‘Well, of course I only met him last night, when I was tired after the flight, but he’s not exactly the ideal room-mate …’

Persimmon interrupted: ‘He showed you his own method of erecting a mosquito-net, and left you shut in with a mosquito all night. From six
in the morning until two in the morning, going the long way round the day, he hops like a molecule!’ – Persimmon combined a demonstration with capering in the sun to dry his footwear – ‘When you wake in the morning, the room is full of the dials of his diabolical engines; a hundred suns dazzle
you; you rub your eyes, wondering which is
Midgley’s expressionless face with its
gloomy moustache; but he is
under your bed taking by telepathy your temperatures oral and rectal; he computes the difference, divides by your intake, and in a trice he is in possession of the length of your gut! You ask me his history; we will lean against the shaded wall of this police station, the only building in this
neighbourhood
strong enough to support me, and I will gratify your curiosity. The person we speak of
came out to a big firm here as an expert in time and motion; he soon demonstrated that the local supply of those commodities immeasurably exceeds the demand, and they sacked him forthwith. He then devoted himself to the automation of his own life story, but got no further than the
invention
of, if I remember aright, a thumb-sucking machine. Defeated by his own humanity, he retreated to plantlife. And the outcome? A beautiful paper flower; when floated on water it folded itself up into a small hard pellet and sank like a stone! Another of his
projects
is a catalogue of the contents of this city; thus finite minds conceive their tasks as finite. We know better. Enough of such
western
wisdom! I must be about my business.’

‘What is
your business?’ I enquired, as Persimmon began to wave and shout in the direction of a group of rickshaw boys
dozing
in their vehicles on the other side of the road. 

‘Genuine relics of fake holy men, fake fountain-pens of genuine makes. Imports and exports, you might say; also transistor radios, for which the girls here have neat fingers. I’m a busy man, always sprinting over the roofs of cars in the traffic jams, even jumping from housetop to housetop in areas where I am unlikely to be
recognized
. Now, as you see, all these rickshaw boys have slipped off down various alleys at the sight of me, so I will walk with you as far as your YMCA, which is
just round the corner, and then I must take wing. As we go, I will summarize your morning’s findings. In a word, the very structure of your experiences renders them
time-resistant
; when you come to write them up you will not have to wait
like the early-to-bed Parisian memoirist for some flimsy secondary quality to recall them all. An observer less analytical than you might have said, the structure of a dream – and would have been mistaken. One person or thing does not become another, as seems
unremarkable
, natural even, in a dream. No, here as elsewhere ‘each thing is what it is‚
and not another thing’. To the natives of course it is just another city, another Bangkok, Penang, Malacca. I have been here thirty years, and so to me too its main aspect is that of a traffic problem. There is
your YMCA; lunch awaits you, and an afternoon nap. I will collect you at sundown tonight. You have no time to thank me, as I am already running for that tram. Farewell!’

The clinging rosy wraps of a daylight drowse began to tatter under the intrusive thought-processes of Midgley’s number-machines; through a wispy hole his angular image was admitted into the
reluctant
depths of my sun-drenched darkness. A little bubble of
awakeness
formed around this irritant particle; the pearly sphere swelled until it enclosed me.

Mellow sunlight winked around the edges of the drawn
curtains
. Midgley was explaining one of his instruments. I sat up and shook my head; the morning came back like a flock of bright birds looking to be fed. I decided to speak rather than listen.

‘An acquaintance of yours rescued me from a band of robbers today.’

Midgley opened a notebook and asked, pencil poised, ‘What was his name?’ When I answered ‘Persimmon’, he sighed, and shut his notebook. Then he opened it again: ‘And the robbers?’

‘A crowd of kids swarming round me; naturally I don’t know their names. They were waving newspapers in my face, and under the newspapers their hands were diving into my pockets. Then this
stout gentleman appeared and beat them off with the airmail
Times.
He’s going to show me round a bit.’

Midgley looked solemn. ‘Although Persimmon is a very good friend of mine, I should warn you that he is
methodologically unsound.’

‘Then I’d better not mention him in my letters home. What form does this unsoundness take?’

A little pool of sunshine came into being on Midgley’s
apparatus
. He poked at it with his finger; it trembled and fled.

‘Let me give you an example. When I first came here he tried to persuade me he could predict all my actions. I naturally set out to disprove his claim by doing unexpected things, but he would never admit that they were unexpected. I’m a very methodical person, and I found it very difficult to think of new things to do, or find time to do them in. I decided to do one peculiar thing every day. I kept it up for a month; that’s how I lost my job. Then Persimmon told me he had only done it to exercise my imagination. I don’t need imagination, as it happens; this device I’ve been working on will make imagination obsolete. I only need to buy a battery for it, and it’s ready for testing. However, I won’t trouble you with an
explanation
of it, because you wouldn’t take it seriously.’

‘Why shouldn’t I?’ An explanation seemed inevitable. In the meantime I decided to get up.

‘Because you’ve been talking to Persimmon. He tells such lies about my work that nobody takes it seriously; I don’t know why he does it, because my experimental work complements his intellectual investigations perfectly. This device is an example; it’s based on an idea he threw out, and which he encouraged me to develop to the point of applicability. But his way seems to be to turn the
unbelievable
into reality, and make the reality appear so fantastic that nobody believes it.’

As I pulled on my trousers I looked at the little pyramid of
metal and glass; four legs, three switches, two dials, and a flexible tube sprouting from the top. I tried to wash my slight irritability away in a basin of tepid water. ‘Please tell me what it is‚’ I said, lying down on the bed again.

‘I have already told you; you must have been asleep. It’s a device for recording dream-images. I expect that sounds a little far-fetched to you.’

‘No, on the contrary, I find the idea reassuringly unoriginal. What’s the little tube on top for?’

‘That is to be inserted into the sleeper’s ear.’

‘Really? Now if
I take that seriously, I am led to ask if you couldn’t plug another tube into the other ear, and so get a
stereoscopic
picture?’

Midgley turned away and stood peering out through the gap between the curtains for a moment. Then he started again: ‘The suggestion shows your complete misapprehension of the principles involved. Let me begin at the beginning.’

‘No, wait, a more profound question occurs to me. Surely
anyone
sleeping with that thing plugged in his ear is going to have rather odd dreams?’