Authors: Stephen Chan
I imagine you, I imagine you. I have found the programme, said Anton. Imagine with the last concentration we shall share. I shall be sent to the Hebrides of Heaven and you back to the circumscribed earthlands.
She sits, composed, in this programme. She sits composed as a memory may be serenely composed, dreaming out of her own memory a future of being united with all she remembers – hair grown – but, in fact, because she is a memory, she is perfect, hair perfect.
Dream always of your mother, said Anton, fading, for if you always remember her, she cannot in Heaven’s own law ever forget you. The technicians of heaven can only fade you to an outline of a memory, an outline, faded… faded… Exist, Stephen, exist… Dream your life… The game is up for Anton’s bold incursion into a peri-Heaven of the skies – the machine itself is a dream and there are no laws for a dream except grief.
He had a son by the woman, dark-eyed, who came to him from Croatia, a son by the Little Sun.
The young man grew without his father. It was as if he became fully grown without living a history. Anton’s son grew in the same way. They walked, naturally, paths that always seemed constructed like an eight. It seemed everyone had had sons, and all the sons had grown straight and tall and walked their curved paths with straight backs. Always, also, these sons faced into a breeze, and their landscapes were mountains and cliffs.
‘Where are our fathers?’ they demanded one day. So they set out, having no schools or other work to hinder them, and came to a land of
ravines filled with ice. They did not feel the cold. The artist who drew them, panel by panel, kept them shiver-free.
They came across one deep ravine and, at its bottom, through nineteen years of ice, they could see the encased, frozen shapes of Stephen and Anton. It was as if Heaven, having tired of their ceaseless assaults on the invisible city, had suspended their efforts very simply. One of the parents is trying to transfuse energy and warmth into the other. Stephen’s palm is on Anton’s back, in the old Chinese way of transfusing energy. The great block of ice seems to be pulsating and a faint blue glow is implied by the artist.
When the sons of the dream heroes came across the grave of their parents, they came across a memory frozen in time. These are our parents. This is the evidence we are sons. They look like us, as if ice freezes away the lines of age. They were not old when they died, but now they look like our brothers.
The son of Stephen and Ra climbed into the ravine. We are the sons of the dream heroes, he thought. Somehow he passes through the ice until he comes to a last great block, the mausoleum in which the parents are encased like exhibits. Even the hair of the parents is frozen as if it all took place in an instant – suddenly removed from the wind-tossed plain of Heaven.
There is a tattoo, wrote Stephen-Ra afterwards. There is a tattoo girdled around his lower back, climbing over his ribs to his right pectoral, and clutching at last at his shoulder, a thorn-studded small flowering rose; a Chinese ideogram set within its branches – ‘remembrance’, which also means ‘remember me’, ‘remember my suffering’. Their gaze is upwards, but in Heaven, there is nothing to see.
The JAL seat was very uncomfortable. Economy was hard. The audio wouldn’t work, and JAL didn’t serve saké any more. His stewardess
was European, but spoke Japanese. She wore an apron-dress, not a kimono. An endless film of Bruce Willis strutted across the screen – silently at least – and at Narita, he hired a dayroom without windows and finally slept. He awoke without the laryngitis that had afflicted him since the death of his mother, and he saw he was transferring to an Air New Zealand flight, and the broad accents of his homeland would greet him – pinotage wines that would be too heavy, a main course of pasta, lamb and parsley cutting – all so predictable, there was nothing subtle about this land and all its artefacts, but he smiled, walked, well-showered and shaved, to the concourse and looked at the great plane through a huge window. He went to a restaurant and ordered soba. He wanted at least to shit a piece of Japan in New Zealand. He smiled wickedly. For the first time in untold months he smiled wickedly. A Japanese girl raced up a gangplank, threw off her JAL colours and put on an Air Zealand blazer. And her accent, he thought, would be as wide-hewed as a Kauri tree, under which his mother’s father had sheltered in his dream of a golden plain and gold-washed streams.
Thirty years after he had helped storm an American consulate, had been transfixed by the moon, had been excommunicated by the elders of a far congregation, Stephen came again to the scenes of his crimes. An email message, sent to successive last-known addresses across Africa, advertised in newspapers, and passed on with coded warnings via intermediaries in case it originated from a still vengeful police and security service, finally reached him in Nottingham. Those still alive, it said, of those who stormed the consulate, were to have a reunion. He bought a ticket, he saw great circles looping like single calligraphy stokes.
Thirty years ago, Elizabeth, already as much in love with Grant as with him, together with Grant, escorted him to a house near Mangere, in Onehunga where, having already been sentenced by magistrates for sitting still, he now faced a tribunal that probed him on the etymology and arcania of truth, and told him he had moved too far. From that
day, his relationship with his family had been compromised. Living abroad was an honourable device as the years passed. Now the email said that Grant, too, was still alive and living in New York. And he would close, he said, the circle of his family with his own
close-of-circle
ink; and he would come to his mother’s still unmarked grave and dig a rose for her too; and he would sit by the sea and breathe, just breathe in and out all the melancholy continents of his runaway years, and fix them to the spinnaker of a yacht in the sea beyond Rangitoto.
It had been on television. That’s where his family and the elders had seen it. He was wearing a camel blazer he had borrowed from his father. A flower in his buttonhole matched the jacket as he was, armlocked and bent-over, dragged out. His thinly-moustached face spoke an anti-war slogan to the camera before he was hauled off screen to a cell without windows. Afterwards, he went to live in Gibraltar Crescent, to be near the great trees of his childhood, and briefly made love to a woman with a child’s body, as her other suitors homed in on the frail beauty of the revolution. He lost her, well, he lost her, and some of those who loved her would be at the great reunion. Geoff was organising the great reunion. On board a flight to New Zealand, a Pacific dawn breaking, alone awake, sipping his whiskey and writing, a Chinese man in a black suit, his hair tied back, with lines on his face, was regretting he had left his frock-coat in London, and wondering about the measures of sartorial splendour and revolution. But Robespierre, after all, wore them and when his turn at the guillotine came, the cameras would have – if cameras could have – caught the slow moment perfectly.
As cameras would catch Rangitoto now. Glass of wine in hand, he sits on the restaurant terrace, trying to breathe, managing to look, just look, the ozone so thin he wears dark glasses all the time, and sun filters in his aftershave, so that if he must burn he will burn slow, even his eyes burn slow. His eyes are a camera lens. They take in Rangitoto.
His brain replays the videos. This has been his life: the replayed slow-motion image. Imagine a wave the size of Rangitito. He imagines it on the terrace, orders another wine, the dream hero eats salad and drinks wine, filters the lens, if he flew against the wave today he would fly… how? More futilely. But it was always a futile charge. It was always futile.
The tide washes in. Hello, tides. Sparrows eat at his feet. Yachts glide by Rangitoto. Time has glided by. In his white shirt he is almost a stone where he sits. A tourist takes a photo of him. He is looking out forever. There is usually a melancholy horizon line. Today there is a dormant volcano. He is filming. He is filming. Gradually fire rises then dances from Rangitoto, and all of Auckland is cheering that, at last, fire is dancing. The harbour turns orange, then red, and the sky is a sunset like no other. A White Warrior feels slumber subside, the sunset colours him. He is young and red again. His sword paints the beginning of his long history.
How is it done? The shared experience, in different faiths, of Stephen and Anton: if you look back, in a reverie look back, then, like the Shinto priests on a southern Japanese island, not prevailing much against the more Chinese Buddhist beliefs of the natives, you shave the body, oil it, dress the hair with antique resins, wait while meditating for skin and scalp to absorb it all, don the yellow robes – you are naked underneath – and enter the labyrinth of questions. There are three inquisitors. They are not attired by ritual, but you are attired by ritual; your body has never felt more holy. This is what you are good at: the ritual sacralisation of the body, the sacralisation of the ritual. But they are there to probe the mind and to suggest a relationship between the soul, your soul, and their mind. They are minded to expose a boundary line, to clarify it, then to suggest how you edged and edged and then, one day, jumped it. Nothing blue where you jumped, they say, you have leapt into a void. Salvation had been offered, salvation was refused – the jump refuses it, leaves it behind – and this is, they say, the repudiation of grace, the one unforgivable sin. They are Heaven’s
ministers and, in the manner of magistrates anywhere, say no tree will flower this or any night for you. The gates of Augustine’s city cannot be permeated by you and if you permeate one, the endless inner defences will always mean another gate. One day, the city guardians will catch you, capture you, by a translucent gate, you looking in, nose pressed and peering, ha, straining for glimpses, a family member on the other side, and your footsteps thus far will be deleted. Only, as you sit before the tribunal, the three elders, archons, you are resolute. Repentance was offered, repentance was refused; you do not yet know what it means. It means origin is refused: how you grew up in a refugee family, claiming so little, hoping for so much, looking at a university tower. No one else in the family goes to the university. They look at you as a warning. You chose the tree of knowledge – of good and evil (they remember only the warning against knowing evil) – rather than life in Heaven’s wide-enough programme. But, because you grew together, look, it was a struggle, the early years were poverty, you had only one another. This is what knowledge finally excludes. So you seek after knowledge, books and paintings are your furniture, and the rest of your life is spent under the robes you wore that day. You keep oiling the hair and body, washing and washing, and the robe fades to white, bleached from all the washing, and you learn to girdle a sword to the waist, in winters trim the robe with fur, and you wander the wide world, donating furniture whenever you move on, the phantom haunting the world’s conflicts, flying and flying, not really empty in any accepted sense – you just feel weightless, unanchored, and you search for a woman to hold you down, to sleep at night, her head on your stomach. One day the right one will come.
Under the fire of Rangitoto, the sky, he felt a colour seep into him. It dyes him, even refreshes his blood. He stands, he knows how he will enter the reunion. These, too, are long-lost brothers and sisters after all and, after all, they were there for him after the archons had stripped an origin from him. It begins here: Anton’s almost silly sit-in at an outpost of an imperial giant, on camera; and, now, the archive opens itself.
It is held at the university. He wanders it like a phantom; impersonates a local professor; through the French doors of the senior common room, opening straight onto a lawn, sees the ghosts of a couple lying on the shallow bank. Is it a great oak that shelters them? The boy is Chinese, thin then; and the girl hardly seems to breathe. It is autumn. Leaves cover them. White-haired dons walk around them and smile at the youthful, simple love. It is simple, this youthful love.
And, as he climbs the high stairs, the breathless girl is there again, waiting to be slowly lifted up. Suddenly, a moon appears, and it is full as he drives by the great harbour. Decades have passed, and he is standing on her terrace. There is a long, curved bench of highly polished timber. He thinks it is rimu wood. He doesn’t know – it is just the first thing that comes into his mind. A spirit is thanking him for all the care he took of her. It helped me live, says the spirit, all the subtle gallantries, the constant subtle gallantries. He is amazed. He never thought them subtle. He was just burning to love her full and to be requited part. Part would have done it. A green-steering knight wandering a great forest, seeking out a giant to have the giant cut off his head. It was just a promise. Here is my head. Here is my heart. The spirit gives him back, at last, his heart.
When he unblinks, the sun is there again. An elder is at the top of the stairs. This is where he was told that the order to excommunicate had come through. ‘I felt I had to tell you, at least face-to-face,’ the elder said, taking off his glasses. Thank you, the younger man had replied. It is a kindness.
Now he gains the top of the stairs. The youngest brother has not come to visit him. He imagines the tall man in a black suit, the jaw line the same, but the hair short, the body not mortified. He says to the imagination: will you let me pass? The imagination permits him.
Thirty years after he lost his heart, told he had lost his soul, lost an origin; thirty years after he sought to reclaim these, found parts with fault-lines pencilled in, Stephen came at last to the reunion. Slightly late, spirits had delayed him and the fear of having to make a speech – what could he say? – he heard, behind the doors, the laughter of ordinary families, sons and brothers, he had to put his dark glasses
back on, he had taken his father’s cufflinks, artificially compressed diamonds, a dark linen suit, he knew how to walk in. It had better be with bold steps, he said.