Lucia's Masks Page 13

  To his distress, he nods off. What wakes him is Candace’s shout: “Socks!” he hears her cry out. “I’ve found socks.”

  He can all too easily picture her hopping from foot to foot. He groans aloud.

  When he sleeps again (inside the house, with his feet against the door) he dreams of a donkey with Candace’s face. Strapped to the beast’s sides are panniers stuffed with pairs of thick woollen socks. He is also in the dream, as the donkey’s master, driving her on with sharp goads to the flanks. The dream donkey howls. The Outpacer jerks awake, a cold sweat prickling his chest under the burlap of his gown.

  He feels the silence of the house circle him like a noose. In his former life, he could have plucked from his personal pharmacopoeia some vial or pill to obliterate the day’s vexations. He recalls one drug in particular that seemed to render him weightless, where he thought he floated above the stamen of a closed lotus. When the flower opened, he had no doubt he would look out through the eyes of some god or other, the cosmos swirling in a mesh of black and silver at his feet.

  But how far indeed has he progressed from that voluptuary he once was? Is he not still shallow and vain?

  Even today, had he not wondered how Bird Girl reacted to him when his hood fell away? It was seconds merely, but long enough for her to get a good view. The thought did cross his mind as he saw her eyes widen. Does she find me remarkably handsome? Irresistible even? And only then did the salient question strike him: Does she recognize me from my antics on those cursed sky-screens?

  He had been famous once. Or “infamous,” as he now realizes. He had belonged to the spoiled and feted elite whose images dominated the mammoth sky-screens spread above the City’s crowded streets. The EYE’s official line was that the sky-screens gave the rabble dreams to which to aspire: a cushioned, perfumed idyll where pleasures never cloy, where all faces and bodies are flawless and no one ever grows old. He saw through the sham. He knew the sky-screens’ vacantly glossy productions were designed to keep the populace in a malleable, vegetative state. And why not, if it helped the indigent to endure their miserable existences? Why not?

  Besides, it was foolhardy to turn down the EYE’s invitation to join the sky-screen roster of scintillating celebrities. One never knew where a refusal might lead. A precipitous and inexplicable drop in one’s financial holdings perhaps. Or a lethal microbe invading one’s personal water supply.

  So he had become one of those gods in the sky, sporting, diving, dancing, savouring delicacies, even making love for the arousal of the watching plebs below. Foolishly he had agreed to allow the boys from the EYE’s propaganda department to bring their cameras into his bedroom. He had performed sexually for them only twice, slithering and panting with some particularly luscious Love-Girl on black silk sheets. But he had forgotten that the sky-screens also transmit smells. What is it about our own odours, even the stink of our shit, that makes us want to hug them to ourselves, keep them wholly intimate? An invisible tent of self.

  So that he had felt plundered, raped even, when he found himself by chance one day on the street, staring up at a gigantic, three-dimensional image of himself. There was his brown-tipped cock entering the Love-Girl. There he was, teasing the rim of her hole with the glossy head of his prick. Teasing and teasing, so that she did genuinely moan and cry out and shudder. She was an exceptionally ripe girl, he remembered, full-breasted, the cheeks of her ass like cinnamon moons. She smelled of oranges and of cloves. She had a look of the Levant. Of course, he did not remember her name.On the screen in the sky, he saw his cock plunge into her, her buttocks tensing under his iron grasp. Then he smelt it, caught the potent whiff of that most personal of a man’s scents. The salt pong of his semen wafted in the air around his head. He felt invaded, wronged, violated, and ashamed.

  A voice cried out in a language he had not heard for many years: Aidez-moi! Aidez-moi!

  It took him a full minute to realize the voice was his own. He was on his knees, his clipped fingernails scratching at the piss-encrusted pavement, and he wept as he had not done since he was a boy.

  Yet even then he did not really see. That incident was not his revelation on the road to Damascus. Although he never again allowed their cameras into his bedroom. But in all other ways, he continued to live as he had always done, sealed off from the bestial happenings on the City’s streets, chauffeured about in a silver-plated, armoured car.

  His avowed hedonism, and the multifarious designer pharmaceuticals, conspired to hide from himself what he was. He particularly favoured chemicals that intensified the charge of every kind of erotic experience, and the hallucinogens that dissolved not only time and space and the structure of matter, but also his actual sense of a separate identity. And of course, his entire fortune was founded on illusion. Not smoke-and-mirrors or wearisome sleight of hand, but something far more insidious — the illusion that actually invaded human consciousness, and planted the spore that left its host moribund.

  As a young man, he had watched the spread of this fungus with disdain. A virtual reality machine in every home; a compact model for the bedroom. Marketed first as “dream machines,” and subsequently as “wraparound reality,” the craze rapidly became a social addiction. Live your most secret fantasies. Touch the breast and vulva of your preferred goddess. Put your finger inside her. Have her do your will. Taste her saliva and her sweat. Quake in pleasure. The marketing goads were the old reliables: sex and violence. One highly vaunted product — popular with males of all ages — put the viewer inside the skin of a wolf. The scenario was in fact a thinly disguised vampire fantasy. The victim was invariably female and young.

  Slick marketing exploited crass desires. At the age of twenty-two, he had railed against people’s stupidity. He sees his young self standing on a table, left arm raised as he drunkenly harangued his equally drunken companions. “Who remembers the great masters — Kieslowski, Godard, Bertolucci, Tarkovsky? Who knows now the wonder of sitting in the dark, while the images spin out and around us, enlarging a world that is no longer dark, bringing a vision that satisfies what men once called god-hunger? Who now knows the catch of the breath as the last credit rolls away, and you grasp the fact that you have witnessed something infinitely mysterious — and proof absolute that we human beings do indeed have souls?”

  Yes, he had once been that young and risibly idealistic. But he could not fault his own obsession. For obsession it had been. He would go without a meal in order to rent a rare video from the ever-dwindling number of outlets catering to “archaic tastes.”

  He would watch scenes that magnetized him over and over, running the film back and freezing the image, unplucking the disparate elements, marvelling at the composition, the use of colour, tonality, chiaroscuro. And so he remembers . . . an undulation of saffron silk as a banner is loosed from a dark parapet; a woman’s sorrowing face reflected in a rain-beaded window pane. Or a gauntly elegant man in a dress suit, who wades hip-deep through a spa bath, cradling a lit candle between his palms, striving to keep the flame alive.

  That had been his objective too, once upon a time. He had wanted to keep that flame of the great masters alive. But fate interfered. He had inherited wealth and it had been his undoing. He sees that clearly now.

  His inheritance had come as an utter surprise; the lightning bolt that later made cinder of his dreams. He had had a lover — no, more a keeper — an older woman whom he serviced with his hard body and supple hands. He had not known she was dying. She had kept her secrets as meticulously as she did her person. In his case, the classic human irony had proven true: it was only when she had gone that he realized the depth of his affection for her.

  She left him not just a substantial financial fortune, but also stocks in a company renowned for furthering the “exact mimesis potential” of virtual reality technologies; specifically, the digital spooks that stimulated human taste and touch receptors. He found himself on the company’s board of directors, drawn into the lair of the monster he had once abhorred.
Inevitably, he emerged transformed. Wealth corrupted him. Power corrupted him. He served the monster where once he had served the flame.

  He discovered he had a gift for cunning scenarios. Because if the public taste for simulated gore and pillage and orgy was insatiable, so too was its thirst for plot. Climax was not enough in itself. There was still a deep human hunger for the sequence of steps that led to the climax. And then? And then? And then? In the beginning, when he still bothered to analyze what it was he did, he had thought this hunger for story a good sign. Here perhaps lay a seed for the possible redemption of humankind. Perhaps — just perhaps — people would at last tire of climaxes that were mere simulated explosions.

  In those early, self-deluding days he had hoped the “virtual reality audience” might eventually hunger for Art, and for the transcendent joy one feels in the presence of mystery and symbol. He had even tried for a time to deploy in his scenarios visual images that had once conjured up so much more than they were: a fluted glass of ruby wine; a round loaf of crusty bread set on a scoured table; a house painted the shimmering green of poplar leaves in spring, with cut-out gables like lacework.

  These feeble efforts came to nothing. His natural cynicism reasserted itself. The public did not want plot for story’s sake. They did not care about symbols. They wanted a stuttering sequence of events, slippery stepping stones that prolonged their anticipation of the final debacle. “And then? And then?” was merely a kind of torturous foreplay, self-serving and self-indulgent.

  The resonance of things greater than themselves — of wine and bread and gabled houses — had no place in the world where he now lived. So he had forsaken his dream of artistry and become a consummate hedonist. For many years, his only goal was to indulge his cravings for evermore intense and novel sensations, liberated from the burden of remorse.

  Then he had found himself caught up in a wretched twist of fate. He heard about a study group dedicated to the work of the twentieth-century genius, Antonin Artaud. As a student, he had read about Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, a kind of extreme staged drama, using gargantuan mannequins and masks, and all manner of outrageous sights and sounds. The goal was a deliberate derangement of theatre-goers’ senses so as to unleash the full powers of the unconscious. This idea still intrigued him, intellectually at least. He wanted to experience those heady insights Artaud described as emerging from “dark matter,” liberated by the “engine of cruelty” this idiosyncratic theatre celebrated.

  When he applied for admission into the study group’s tightly guarded circle, he found his looks an asset. At his interview, several of the women made their desire for him crudely evident. He had another distinct advantage — or disadvantage, he was to think later — that smoothed the way to his initiation. This was his physical resemblance to the French dramatist as a young man.

  He sees again in his mind’s eye the Man Ray portrait of Artaud in profile. The playwright looked like an ivory god-head floating in his primeval chaos. His eyebeam tunnelled through the generative smoke, fixed on the tempests and conflagrations of his own imaginings. An enlarged version of this portrait dominated each of the Theatre of Cruelty’s meetings, except for that last fatal gathering when every wall was smothered in black.

  In that room, he had been party to an act so nefarious it had etched itself on the tissues of his brain. No drug, no drink, no daunting physical risk, could erase the memory of what he had done. Remorse (or was it guilt?) gnawed at his gut. His dreams became torture rooms in which he was flayed alive and worse. He had thought he would go mad. At his worst moments, he had seriously considered self-murder. What stopped him was an atavistic fear of what lay beyond death. Did this make him a coward? He thought not, particularly as the form of penance he chose, pruned of all artificial supports, seemed often as punitive as any imagined afterlife could possibly be.

  He had plunged into penance as a man might plunge into churning water so as to douse the flames consuming his body. He had not thought the consequences through.

  Examining his conscience, now naked and vulnerable as a peeled egg, he realizes he had even taken a selfish, childish pleasure in his disguise. Readying himself for departure from the City, he had put on his gown (left over from some best-forgotten costumed orgy) and studied himself in several of his full-length mirrors.

  He had thought himself a handsome penitent. Vanity had dogged him even then. Throughout his cosseted, mature adult life he had seen himself reflected in many mirrors: strikingly handsome still, lean and slightly louche. His features were those of a wolf who had mated with a particularly gorgeous woman. He had long recognized this and exploited his innate magnetism to the full. His dark-blue eyes took people aback. They were among the finest weapons in his arsenal of charm. As was the fleeting smile that both discomfited and fascinated his admirers. It set a fleeting twist upon his lips that might betoken irony, bemusement, or a penchant for cruelty.

  He emanated danger and had learned by his early teens just how powerful an aphrodisiac this was. It had secured him plenty of sexual conquests, and that edge in the business world essential to survival. But there had been occasions — under the influence of especially potent hallucinogens, for example — when he looked in the mirror and was terrified by what he saw. The lineaments of the wolverine straining beneath the skin. A crown and cape of spiked flame around his head and shoulders. He had to turn away from his own image, and tell himself consoling tales about his flame-tipped charisma. This was true enough. He was charismatic. He did have abundant, erotically charged allure.

  But that — he reminds himself yet again — was the man he had been, superficial, self-obsessed, and ripe for corruption. He is another being now: a server in a monk’s garb who must do his penitential duty, if necessary onto the day of his death. Protecting these five — now six, if he counted the old woman — was his elected duty. He was their Outpacer.

  He had croaked his wish that first night into Lucia’s ear. She was on fire-watch duty, the only one of the five awake. What a hapless, mismatched crew he had thought them. The three women seemed the most competent, and resolute to survive. Although the boy Chandelier showed evidence of problem solving, prompted by instinct alone perhaps. They needed him more than he needed them. (Or did they? Was this assumption just his old arrogance at work? He must strive to keep this in check, along with so many other shortcomings in his far from exemplary character.)

  Lucia had not flinched when he spoke into her ear. She was remarkable. He thought only a cat could have heard him approach. He had come up behind her, swift and silent on the balls of his feet. He moved with such stealth, he had time to count the vertebrae visible beneath her shirt. Her eyes widened when he bent down and spoke his name into her ear. That was her only reaction. Her eyes widened, pulling the night deeper into her soul. Her eyes were black as sloes.

  He had stepped back two paces, and walked round the camp-fire, directly across from her, so that she could take in what he was. She raised her exquisitely moulded chin a little, looked at him and nodded. Her mind was quick. She grasped the meaning of the monk’s gown right away.

  He was lucky it was Lucia. Any of the others might have screamed at the sight of

  him. His monk’s habit could trigger nightmarish visions. What lay beneath the shadowy cowl? A face horribly disfigured, hacked at and badly healed? Or a sucking vortex to grind you bone by bone?

  Lucia, with her swift intuition, had looked at him and seen the inexorable discipline of the monastic life: the rising before dawn, the prayers on one’s knees on hard floors, the meagre repasts, the labour in garden, granary, or library. Above all, she saw his willingness to do penance. It would be done. It would. Somehow, he would compensate for the abhorrent sins of his past.

  He knows the hateful animal still inhabits him, despite his monk’s guise and honest desire to do penance. The animal’s muzzle presses into his brain; its claws scrabble in his bones. The animal wants out. He must keep it in.

  At these times, when the
unrelenting guilt makes him quake, he wonders whatever possessed him to come into the midst of these innocents. Was it loneliness? Or the magnetism of Lucia? Had he simply wanted to hear the sound of his own voice? Or rather, hear himself speaking to beings who might respond and thus affirm his existence?

  No, not his existence. His self. It is not a word to which he has given much thought over the past several years.

  The hour is upon him again when he must seek out a landscape of pain. He will bear it in the understanding that it is only a minuscule part of his atonement. He will behave as the Outpacer must. He will keep the rapacious beast inside him at bay.

  Chapter Seven

  Which Circle of Hell?

  I CANNOT RECALL IF DANTE HAD a Circle of Hell for the slothful. If he did not, it was probably because he knew sloth is its own punishment.

  There is something about this old stone house, or perhaps the ground on which it stands, that induces a torpor in me. I see signs of this in the others: in Harry’s increasingly long daytime naps, and in the way the Outpacer sleeps at night in the hallway with his feet against the door instead of maintaining his invisible cordon outside. I too am failing in my duties. I am neglecting my watch because we have fallen into the foolish assumption that if we are inside the house, we are safe. I go out foraging less and less — even though I know fresh berries would be more nourishing for us than the insipid canned pears in their viscous syrup.

  Worst of all perhaps, I feel estranged from my clay. I moisten the small precious ball I brought with me and roll it again and again in my palm. But it generates no spark in me. I cannot feel the vital pulse of yearning, either in my fingers or in the clay itself.

  I wish we were on the road again. I wish I had never found this house. I believe there may be some mephitic element in the atmosphere that is corroding my will. Every day I promise myself I will speak with the others about how we can solve our basic conundrum — this most pressing problem we leave largely unspoken. We cannot move on toward the north and leave the old woman behind. Yet how, in practical terms, can we take her with us? As far as I know, she can barely walk at all. How she coped on her own before our arrival will likely remain a mystery.