The Brothel Creeper: Stories of Sexual and Spiritual Tension (6 page)

At last contact was established with the outer world. An envelope was pushed under my door. I snatched it up and read the message inside. Moona wanted to see me. I washed and shaved and wore my cleanest clothes and made my way to the address she had given. Festivals were in progress everywhere. I was smothered with kisses and adorned with flowers. My route took me to the edge of town, the old industrial zone. The warehouse where the resistance had conducted its plotting had been converted into a palace. An immense sunburst flag flapped lazily above the ramshackle roof.

Guards marched me to a room at the rear of the building. Moona sat behind a desk littered with charts. Among the flowers that filled the room I noted a telescope on a tripod angled at a high open skylight. She had been an astronomy student at the university and I assumed she planned to recommence her studies. The truth was less innocent and I had a vague feeling something was wrong even before she glanced at me.

“You are our new leader,” I said simply.

“Don’t congratulate me,” she replied harshly, rising from her chair and clutching one of the charts. “We are living in dark times, darker than any that have gone before. We have been so ignorant.”

“Why did you send for me?” I asked.

“I need your advice. As you should be aware, the entire world is a single organism, but it is not the only planet in the solar system. There are others. Take a look at this.”

She offered the chart to me and I approached and studied it. “It doesn’t seem very significant.”

She snorted. “How can you say that? These are the current positions of all the planets in our solar system. As you can see, our world is alone on one side of the sun, the others are grouped on the far side.”

“I still don’t follow you,” I admitted.

“What are they doing there? All together, huddled like conspirators. Gossiping about our own world, plotting and scheming against it, leaving us out.”

“This is a joke,” I responded.

She slammed her fist down on the table. “How dare you doubt my word? Our civilisation is in danger from vast forces. They are whispering behind the sun.”

I glanced away from the chart and shook my head. “Earth might be a living organism but all those other planets are dead worlds. And planets don’t conspire against each other, the concept is ridiculous. Power has deformed your mind. Come home with me Moona.”

She sneered. “Measures must be taken to protect ourselves. The first step is to declare Martial Law.”

I felt at last I might achieve something worthwhile. “Don’t do it!”

Her sneer was replaced by a smile. “Thank you. That’s all I needed you for. I always knew you were weak and I intended to do the opposite of whatever you advised. Tonight the laws are going to be changed, but the danger we face is greater than anything Colonel Bones had to deal with, so we must be even stricter. We will start by outlawing public gatherings of
one or more
.”

I blinked. “That doesn’t make sense.”

She moved away and approached the telescope, standing immobile and staring up at the skylight, resting one hand on the apparatus, her muscles tense as if she was preparing to make a sudden leap through the roof into the sky. I waited for her to move or speak but her position and attitude did not change. I turned on my heel and walked briskly out of the palace. I had no more desire to see her again. As evening drew on, the first stars appeared above me and I hurried home to avoid catching any of the abominable twinkle in my eyes.

I thought about Moona as I lay on my bed. Her attempts at dissolving individuality into the greater mass of the entire world had backfired: it had simply redefined our planet as an individual, solitary, alone in space, and this cosmic loneliness was vaster by far than the loneliness of a single man or woman in society. If ordinary paranoia is the result of isolation then the principles of her movement, the ideals of the revolution that had overthrown Colonel Bones, had accidentally generated a far greater paranoia, a paranoia never possible before the belief that the world was a single organism. The consequences would be terrible.

My food had run out but I waited eight days before leaving my apartment in search of supplies. The shattered innards of my radio had not been swept off the street: I had hurled the device out of the window in contempt after hearing the declaration of Martial Law a week earlier. The city was almost silent. On the first lamppost I noticed something curious hanging from a length of twine. I hurried past. In the park there were similar objects: propped against trees or arranged on benches, many had even been planted in the flowerbeds. They existed apart, separate, removed from their owners by some brutal surgery.

Everywhere I went I encountered more limbs, jawbones, parts of torsos, ears and eyeballs, teeth. I realised they were not on display, they did not serve as warnings of punishment. They were not examples. They were simply the individual units of crowds that had been dispersed, crowds of one. Then I turned a corner and found myself facing a policeman. In his hand he held something much sharper than a truncheon. He cast an eye over my whole body, pointed his weapon and cried:

“Break it up! Break it up immediately!”

I fled. He was in no position to follow. More than two thirds of him was missing, moved on elsewhere, isolated in its own space away from the other parts it had always associated with. Paranoia was heading toward a new extreme, a position where even groupings of cells would be defined as a conspiracy. I kept running and took refuge in a doorway. The door was unlocked and I entered.

It was the bicycle shop. The gears, wheels and chains had been replaced with sinews, bones and organs, the shelves stacked with limbs. My first reaction was horror but then I understood that the new government had already defeated itself. By separating a single person into many parts and giving each one of those parts the status of an individual, the regime had dramatically increased the population of the city and decreased the amount of space in which those parts might exist alone. Gatherings had become more likely, not less. In a crowded world, crowds are always more possible.

I rubbed my hands in glee for I had finally found a worthy role to play. Whether all these body parts had been deliberately stored here by the authorities or whether they had accumulated through an oversight was irrelevant. They formed an illegal gathering, the first blow against the tyrant Moona. I would lead the coming revolution. I addressed my new comrades and urged them to prepare themselves for yet another utopia. The hearts at least took heart, or so I believe. The stink of reality had finally returned. Clearly I was a born leader, for although there must have been a hundred tongues in the shop with me, mine was the only one that did any talking.

The boat broke open like a nut. That is a lazy image, but Jason didn’t yawn. He splashed in the water, comparing the blue of the sky with the blue of the ocean. The differences were considerable, but unimportant. Then he realised he was standing on his wife.

He moved his leg and she floated to the surface, gasping, her tanned face gleaming, and for an instant he saw a frantic mermaid made of bronze but hollow and filled with air. Her mouth was close to his ear but he heard only bubbles exploding, bubbles without written words in them for him to read, though the accident certainly resembled a cartoon tragedy. Ships don’t come apart quite like this, neatly, cleanly. There had been no sharp rocks or raging storms. Everything was still calm. The salty taste in his mouth was his own blood. He spat and shrugged.

Henrietta was the only complex object between him and the horizon, but he was facing west and knew the tropical sun must set eventually, with stars to follow, so other interesting items would appear in due course. He wasn’t completely stuck with her. There might even appear sleekly strange flying fish to glide over their heads.

He turned to look at her. She desperately clutched her pearl necklace and the quivering muscles in her hands caught his attention. He gazed at the loop of pale globes and it suddenly resembled a string of miniature bathyspheres returning from a series of hazardous missions in the depths of her cleavage. He gulped. Then his tension seemed to erode itself, lapped to nothing by the wavelets that tickled his armpits.

“That was rather unexpected,” she remarked.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Your cheap yacht was a waste of money,” she said.

“I’m not taking the blame!”

“You ought to. Always pinching pennies. If you want good quality, you have to pay for it, that’s the rule.”

He gritted his teeth. “But did
they
spend all their savings on sophisticated hulls? Or did they prefer to take the risk of sudden annihilation in pursuit of a dream of fame and adventure?”

“To whom are you referring?” she demanded.

“The ancient mariners, of course!”

“You are modern,” she pointed out, “and a banker.”

He sighed. “True enough. I admit there’s a difference. All the same, I like to gamble with my fate. I do many daring things. Sometimes in the office I neglect to answer the telephone or twist paperclips into animal shapes. I’m a maverick. You married me for that reason. On this occasion I decided it was prudent to buy a yacht from a dubious looking fellow whom neither of us had met before. That’s how I live.”

“So you say. And now we’re going to drown.”

He digested this. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t fret too much, Jason. You’ve done me a favour. My existence with you was exceptionally dismal.”

He studied her face and understood that she was serious. This insult was a massive puncture wound in his honour, and his dignity deflated like a dinghy ruptured on a swordfish nose. The odour of rubber was probably imaginary but the sense of sag was real enough. Henrietta had dismissed the decade of their marriage without a blink.

He envied her ability to edit intricate experiences into a score of simple words surrounded by clear spit. There were never crumbs in her saliva, an enigma of drool that also deserved admiration. However mad she may have turned, he decided, no speck of stale food would ever dry on the bib of her straitjacket. It was time for a thin ironic smile: his original plan to commit her to a lunatic asylum had been abandoned when he had first reluctantly accepted she was incurably sane.

That was many years ago. Other schemes to rid his life of her had also failed, unless a sequence of minor annoyances can be grouped together as separate parts of a single long slow destruction. But they can’t. He had only stopped short of hiring a professional assassin because he didn’t know how to contact one. He suspected she had also tried to dispose of him and failed in almost the same way. That would explain the little pains that had bothered his entire span as a husband.

But now she had revealed that dwelling with him in full health was the worst punishment! His efforts to strike at her had all been wasted. His time, money and hopes were flecks of foam on waves already gone. Instead of weakening his survival instinct, this negation of everything he had lived for gave him a perverse strength.

“In that case, my dear, shall we strive to save ourselves? If you truly were so miserable, your preservation will give me great delight. I want to prolong your suffering indefinitely.”

“It’s too far to swim back to the island.”

“I agree. But we only need to stay afloat until help comes. Nobody knows our position, true enough, nor that we are even out here, and I had no time to send a distress signal by radio, and this is hardly a busy shipping lane, but all the same a vessel might pass and spot us. Stranger things happen at sea. I’ll name some of them, if you like.”

“You really are an idiot,” she hissed.

“Hardly a positive response!”

“But how can we avoid sinking and drowning when we are too fatigued to tread water? I’m already aching.”

He answered at once, “I’ll build a raft.”

Shaking her head, she looked at the empty sea. The yacht had been filled with objects but all of them had sunk with it. Jason had lashed down every loose item on deck, so they had only the clothes they wore. Shorts for him and a satin dress for her. She was obsessed with this garment and had been posing with it in front of a mirror when the boat snapped in two. The fabric was inappropriate for the climate, not to mention the situation. Yet it seemed a fine sort of shroud, elegant, sleek, rippled with deep colour, like the ocean that would soon open as a tomb to receive it and her. This blue dress might serve for a sail, but not for a hull. For that, there was nothing. Not even a spoon bobbing loose from the galley.

All had gone down, falling in graceful oscillations to the abyssal plain, where ophiuroids and scotoplanes played dark unruly chess with themselves as pieces. Littering that limbo.

Better not to think about the creatures at the bottom of the sea! Better to remain optimistic, undefeated.

“My dear, a raft is our only chance.”

“You really are the limit, Jason. Do you hope to grow your fingernails at an accelerated rate, bite them off and use them as planks? Is that how you’re planning to manufacture a vessel?”

“With a suggestion like that, you have the audacity to accuse me of being an idiot! But there’s something else I want to talk to you about. Can’t you see that shadow moving below…”

She looked and nodded. The shadow grew larger, refracted to an irregular shape. Jason assumed it was a shark and decided to scream, but before the note formed on his tongue the shape broke the surface and revealed itself to be a wardrobe. It must have worked itself loose from the cabin where it had stood. Only half watertight, it was leaking and soon would sink a second time and never come back up.

The door was shut but the key was still in its lock. Jason swam to it with bold strokes while Henrietta blushed. Her embarrassment was puzzling, for here was something tangible that might provide temporary support until its buoyancy was compromised.

He hugged it by extending his stiff arms to their fullest extent. Then he recoiled. A knocking came from within. Henrietta shrugged unconvincingly at this, but Jason clambered onto the object and turned the key. The door opened and a man leapt out. The water gushed in to take his place and the wardrobe plunged under again.

“Who are you?” Jason spluttered.

The newcomer blinked, grinned, floated confidently. His exposed teeth were perfectly white, like unwritten books without covers. His hair was a mass of oily curls. He was handsome and arrogant and unexpected. “You are a stowaway!” accused Jason.

“He’s my lover,” corrected Henrietta.

“You smuggled him on board without me knowing?” Jason wailed, his fists beating water into foam.

“Clearly I did,” agreed Henrietta.

“And kept him a secret all this time?” he growled.

“That was the easy part. You spent so much time with your compasses, charts and other navigational aids, forever recalculating your position, that you had no opportunity to observe
my
positions. And I tried plenty of them. Carlos took me at every angle known to geometry. The creak of the boards you kept complaining about was really the groaning of our hammock as he serviced me under your feet.”

Jason looked at Carlos, but the blink and grin combination appeared to be that fellow’s only reaction to anything, his sole comment on the cosmos and all its properties. Henrietta now began to drift closer to her illicit lover as if caught in his emotional riptide.

Jason stopped punching the sea and whimpered, “But how long has this sordid romance been going on?”

Henrietta’s cheeks were no longer crimson. She was defiant. “You should be more specific than that,” she said, clutching her lover, entwining her lithe arms and legs about him. “Which part of our affair are you alluding to? Love isn’t homogenous. The best parts have been going on for years, right under your dripping twitching nose.”

“I must confess to some astonishment.”

And that was no lie.

“A dose of surprise will do you good,” Henrietta remarked, “even though it has arrived somewhat late.”

But Jason was shaking his head at something else. “My nose may twitch, but it never drips and never will. It was dried up forever by an island curse long before I met you. I was with a local girl then, Amelia her name was, the daughter of a plantation owner.”

“What do I care about any of that?” Henrietta barked, her dress billowing around her and her lover like the hood of a jellyfish. She kicked her legs and so altered course. South now.

A memory burst deep inside Jason’s brain, poured its juice along the arid channels of his mind, flooded his dry cerebral corners. São Tomé more than three decades ago, still in the grip of a paranoid regime that had banned the smoking of cigarettes on the shore in case the smoker was a spy signalling to a submarine with the glowing tip. Amelia’s generous form enveloping him in the scented dusk, fireflies drifting through the open windows of the shack, a guitar playing softly somewhere, the pounding of the surf on the rocks and a ripple of laughter from a porch.

Suddenly the door was flung open and her father stood like an outline cut from a lunar eclipse, reddish and bruised, a face daubed with bloody circles that might be craters, a neck hung with a dozen seashell necklaces. Pointing directly at Jason’s nose with the index finger of his left hand he began a song that would have been foolish in a film or book but had an awful resonance in this balmy reality. Then he danced a few ungainly steps, forward, backward, bowed politely, closed the door.

“What did he do?” Jason had whispered.

“He cursed your nose,” answered Amelia, collecting her clothes, turning away from him, her firm dark body as remote to him now as the mainland, that continent hulking unseen over the eastern horizon, the less benign face of the equatorial dream. She would leave and he would never see her again. It was an unspoken certainty.

“That story happens to be true,” sighed Jason.

“Just your nose?” asked Henrietta.

“He didn’t dare curse the rest. The government wanted to discourage the old beliefs, to penalise sorcerers and put them in jail if all else failed. It was a strange time, very oppressive.”

“I remember those days,” mumbled Carlos.

Jason shivered and hugged himself. He did those actions both in the past and in the present, so the memory was a mirror image across time of the man who remembered. Then he grew ashamed, angry with himself for sharing his experience with his wife and her paramour, but they hadn’t understood much from his actions and he was safer than he realised. He noticed how they were drifting further away every minute.

Another object abruptly erupted from the depths.

Not a wardrobe this time, but a barrel. The empty one that Jason had kept in the storeroom behind the galley. It bobbed on the surface like a section of butchered whale, sparkling with brine, blowing mist through the bunghole in its side, moaning sickly. With powerful strokes Jason reached it, wrenched off the lid, caught a figure that tumbled out, fixed his mouth to hers in a kiss imparting both life and passion.

“So it didn’t contain rum,” sneered Henrietta.