Authors: Stephen Chan
As I rose every time, in that barren hospital, me seated – trying to sleep – in a broken airline chair, the moon and the leaf-bare branches outside, whenever my mother stirred. And if, as was reported to me at distance, my father died with great dignity, almost grace, my mother was seeking to exceed him before my very eyes. Night after night it takes, this difficult business of dying, and I did not send the white warrior. The white warrior was there, face to slow-breathing face, and the warrior could not help in any way whatsoever. But she would stir and smile. ‘Are you still there?’ I am still here. I am always there, sometimes under the cold moon thinking of a rock ledge in Croatia, sometimes thinking of the fires of the Ormeau Road in Belfast, where the killings began so soon after I left, thinking of a British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland wearing her wig, recovering from brain tumours, and looking at my mother who was told there was no recovery, her hair slowly clumping out by handfuls, lying in Middlemore Hospital in her elegant turban, emaciated, a view beyond the branches of a car-park frozen in mid-construction, and there is her son, he’s flown twice from the other side of the world, and he is wearing a badge that lets the night-guards let him in, clutching his thermos and his blanket, and this strange son, so antique in his rebellions, is leaning over her, constantly checking the red light on her morphine drip, and looking away at the moon, the fully-chilled winter’s moon, his first winter here for more than a decade, his second winter in more than two decades, and he is talking in what sounds like Arabic to the spirits of Heaven.
Months later, there would be a legacy from Croatia, unasked and problematic. It almost killed him, so grace-ridden was its intervention. But it was, not a moon girl as such, but a girl of a moon of a far-off star, who let him be small, very small. And when he was small enough – no longer a dean, a great scholar, a grandmaster, a provider, a facilitator, a supporter, a pillar of his entire world and all its dimensions – she held him without a word, his hair an exhausted storm across her lap, weeping in her wordless touch like a motherless child.
And this was how he became, the English winter after the New Zealand winter, very tiny. Everything that was manly shrunk. By day he continued, as a matter of course, arguing against the world. Later, this child would come to a lap where his enemies could not see, would not believe, his tininess. He called her ‘Little Ra’, the little sun, the little sun you could see from the little moon of the little star so many impossible years of light away.
It was misunderstood. Every successful prying eye misunderstood it. Carnality had nothing to do with it. It was a lost sister of a lost family from a lost cosmos who understood what it was to have a patient heart against all odds and, one day, after a mother dies, the odds mobilise and say to the patient heart that every inheritance of the world and the resurrection is theirs alone. One day the mother will rise, touch her head and find her hair has grown again, and only the patient heart will be excluded from heaven’s miracle.
He remembered he had read that only the small ones can enter the Kingdom of Heaven. And this was not his effort, this is what he naturally came to be, small, tiny, reduced and, when he was small enough, there was this door, and seven seals surmounted the door; and there were engravings on the door: long-haired warriors, blinded, their swords broken, falling before the light of an angry, excluding and forbidding Heaven.
He awakes suddenly. Still in the hospital. The morphine light is still flickering. His heart is racing. What has gone wrong? The urine bag is still attached. The drip is still dripping. All the paraphernalia of dying is in place. The moon’s still out there. He stumbles into the corridor. The night-nurse smiles at him. There are children’s drawings
behind her desk. There is a toucan pinned on the wall. He stumbles downstairs, knowing the corridors by heart. A quarter mile away he finds the coffee machine, presses the buttons in his half sleepwalk. It scalds him awake. He is alone in a dark refectory and his clothes are thick with what seems like very cold water. He touches his forehead. It’s wet too. He takes a second cup. The first bird of the dawn sings. In two hours, a brother or a sister will relieve him. He will go home, to the mother’s empty home, the seaside patio as bare as a rock, the small island reduced in its birds, and he will stop at the gymnasium on his way, to hammer out his tears and misery, eat takeaway won ton from the mall, sit huddled in the shower for hours, and later at night again do it all again, come with a blanket and thermos again, night shift. He volunteered to do most of the night shifts, after the visitors had gone, so many not wishing to speak to him, no, better after they had gone, but the mother would be exhausted by them, and he never, in all those nights, had a confidential hour, never received a blessing, he just monitored the morphine, helped the nurses measure out the steroids, was there, was just there, and his own family said to him that, because he once painted red in the east, he could never be there when Heaven brought the mother back, back and home, and his heart was just breaking in the terrible hospital, and he had to be great and strong before this implacable Heaven, and there was nobody outside dreams who could even imagine the mouse-sized man who wore his badge of admission every night before the security guards, creeping up the long stairs to his broken seat to begin his broken vigil over his broken mother, and he did not curse Heaven, but he scowled at it like a great injustice and, when the dream reconvened – all his dreams reconvened – he saw that one of the falling angels was the white warrior bleached almost to invisibility, out of memory, vaporised… just out of memory. Oh my mother, oh my mother, when you awake in your resurrection, all unrighteousness ended, and even the memory of the unrighteous wiped away, will you even remember briefly, faintly, your lost son who fought for the small ones of the world, lost his way to become something almost called a great man, and who is growing small again in this life, since he will be debarred from your next? I pray
Heaven will let you keep a haze as my memory, something indefinite at least, rather than lost entirely, and will you know that haze is me, who watches over you in the night, a crippled soul, lost and without a sheltering hole?
In the English winter that followed, he had another instalment of the dream. Anton said he would do it for him. Make the trek for him. Sick of life and wanting to understand, if not the mysteries then, as he said, the local mysteries of this quadrant of this administrative sub-region of the universe. But, ah, said Stephen, how will you make the trek? You never took the spiritual disciplines. ‘I can recognise the terrains,’ he replied; ‘I have had premonitions of the terrains of Heaven.’ The terrains of Heaven are vast, said Stephen, and contain detours, false avenues, and neighbourhoods composed only of penitents. The bureaucracy of Heaven is slow. Millennia will pass before an apology is transacted. ‘Only if you are polite enough to wait,’ said Anton.
And this is how Anton did it. A single bullet through his temple at the apex of his meditation and the soul, hitherto constrained by his lack of knowledge, slid free while smiling. That soul would henceforth have no home, neither in a body on earth, nor a suburban address in the vast sky that opened up to it. Ha, said Anton-soul, circumventing the border guards with their emblems of spinning swords; observing the immigration queues, the immigration desks with good behaviour stamps for lifetime passports. Ha, it said, taking the shape of a soul-pilot and just walking through, Air-Anton, the easiest thing he had done. Not even strategy, it said; even Heaven has a place for swagger. It was preening now, but there were angels everywhere, so Anton disguised the preen, assumed the shape of a burnt stablehand recovering from the Crusades, retraining as a networker of Heaven’s great cyber-maze, found a starry terminal and began his work.
Stephen knew his anger fuelled the dream Anton sent. But Anton worked first to mitigate his anger, not overcome it, because Anton understood only too well the sublimated angers that exclusion brings, and knew the mechanics of how these angers rise in the gorge and cannot be stuffed back into the twisted, labyrinthine anatomies of their home. The angers might condition the dream, Anton thought, but must not overwhelm it.
My brother, Stephen, here in Heaven the weather is fine nearly all the time. There is indeed lyre music piped all over town. There are no fashions, but there are never bad skin or bad hair days. You would have to give up going to the gym since, strictly speaking, you do not have a body any more: it’s a simulacrum. The soul projects a shape so that the demands of space may be accommodated. At no time does it need the shape, but the filling, nicely, of space is a politesse of Heaven. Therefore no more food or wine either. Nor sex, I guess, although there may be computer simulation of that: the memory, after all, is part of the soul.
That’s not as silly as it seems. The moon girls are part of a programme. I can pirate a disc, send them to the future Antons of the world – and about time too. Don’t you know I loved Elizabeth as well and saw, from afar, always from afar, the Beatrices of my prior to cosmic life, in the jungles of New Guinea and the Philippines, where I modelled exactly your own perfect adventures? Next time, for me. Am I being deconstructive? We are the fools in the gods’ machine. They, themselves, are simulacra. But the creations have taken on lives of their own and, to do that, they must first rule other lives, and you and I, my brother, are dreamt, merely dreamt, and they have learnt to tailor the dreams, just as Zeus sent dreams to Agammenon, and we are the films in a headset, their eyes locked into a screen. Stephen, there are no blind people in Heaven. Where do you imagine yourself as you receive this? You’re on a JAL flight to Japan and New Zealand. You almost broke the machine, that’s what you did. That’s why no image of you fits any more. You’re making eyes at the stewardess?
Only you’re not the bruised samurai any more. Just the besuited failed-seeker-after-upgrades, drinking green tea, descending upon a bereaved family to reclaim your rights against exclusion. But you can’t do it. The machine is broken. You are out of programme. In effect, without dying, you are dead, Stephen. You and your life are just fictions fallen from the sky.
There is a way of taking control of dreams, said Stephen. Anton’s laconic commentary will do for me more than infernos could.
He meditated. It was hard. So long since he clasped his hands in the circle pattern, controlled the breath. The breath was strange. What is this air? There was a filter across his face. A blue fish came. He couldn’t do a ceramic dragon. He wanted a white horse. There’s no programme for white horses anymore, came a far-off retort from the wall. He banished the commentary. He constructed the horse. He constructed its mane. He constructed its snort and toss of the head. He constructed a plain of Heaven. Not enough. Nothing moved. He wasn’t even the Dürer of the skies. Dürer at least got the horsemen of the Apocalypse right. He refiled Dürer. That was it: he had to imagine his own files of himself and of Heaven. He had to imagine Heaven as a great computer. He had to send Anton the files. Especially as Anton had reported that in Heaven’s files, the dead await resurrection but, within them, no white warrior existed – expunged from Heaven’s memory. This, said Anton, when he saw what Stephen was proposing to do, will be the greatest hacking-in job of all time. But, first, Stephen had to circumvent the great defences of the Heavenly City, forward watchtowers, defensive turrets, the portcullis of the gods, and the circle-spinning swords of very beautiful angels who had sworn allegiance to the immaculate keyboards of One Truth. And then, before giving Anton the files, he had to replace a circuit board, just one circuit board, that would allow Heaven to recognise his programme, accept his file; and, even then, Anton had to devise a code to let the programme play. White, breathed Stephen, the password is White.
It is a long trek across the plain because the emigré is learning to walk without flesh. A very great city grew from the plain. Its walls were like a suburb of streets, and they surrounded a city of suburbs of streets. The walls and the towers were festooned with angels, and the angelic swords, even in their scaffolds, breathed a roseate hue that came with Heaven’s dawns – only it was not the walls that reflected the dawns but the steel at the side of their guardians. Dawn. A stranger was approaching the walls. He must have seemed to those inside to have had wings of leather.
There was no gate in the walls for him. The more he walked around the walls, the longer the walk became. There was a nightfall in Heaven. He kneeled and began his meditation. His hair cascaded over his white shoulders. He was looking at the part of the plain at his knees. No dust clung to him. At night, he thought, the walls become invisible – not permeable, but invisible. He would at least see into the Heart of Heaven.
But, at the moment of invisibility, like an aurora, a great parliament cast off the day’s shadow and appeared in the sky. 144,000 senators sat on a great disc and, at the disc’s centre, raised, composed in his expression as if he heard the music of stars, sat a luminous figure of Christ. Only, he knew, it was not Christ but a representation of Christ, the partial clone, the copied programme for this part of Heaven, an icon for the worshipping 144,000, a number drawn from an ancient Kabalah, but powerful enough to justify, to bless, having first resurrected all 144,000. And not a scar, nor a sign of spear’s crippling thrust decorated this Christ. He ruled and reigned with an insouciance that only a lack of sacrificial history could bring. His place was the disc and his role was to sit upon a throne of green flames. There was a pilgrim of sorts on the plain, kneeling naked before the spectacle of rule, his leather cloak floating in the winds of Heaven, and no one looked at him. Unable to change his guise, no portal of the invisible city would open to him.
Anton, breathed Stephen, I cannot come further to reach you. The
walls are invisible, and the city itself flickers from pink translucence to its own invisibility. It is your eyes, said Anton. They are taking away the programme of your eyes. Close your eyes. Imagine me. Do not look at the 144,000.