I felt as if I were alone in the city, with the vacant illuminated shop windows, the darkened homes, the deserted pavements, the glowing advertisements. I felt a ripple of my awareness spreading outwards, encompassing the whole of London, centred on myself. I strode past the rows of parked cars, the uncollected refuse bags, the discarded plastic cartons and drink cans. I hurried through intersections where traffic lights changed for absent cars, past walls defaced with spray-can graffiti, past shuttered offices and gated Underground stations. The buildings stood high and dim around me.
Ahead was the prospect of islands.
23
I was imagining Seri was on the ship with me. After leaving Hetta, my temporary refuge from the clinic, we had called first at Collago, and I knew it was possible she had boarded there. I stood amidships while we were in the harbour, covertly watching the passengers embark, and I had not seen her among them; even so, I could have missed seeing her.
For the whole of the voyage, from Hetta to Jethra, via Muriseay, I was glimpsing her. Sometimes it was a sight of her at the other end of the ship: a blonde head held in a certain way, a combination of clothes' colours, a distinctive walk. Once it was a particular scent I associated with her, detected almost subliminally in the crowded saloon. A name kept coming distractingly to mind: Mathilde, whom once I had mistaken for Seri. I searched my manuscript for some reference to her.
I prowled the ship obsessively at such times, looking for Seri, although not necessarily wanting to find her. I needed to resolve the uncentainty, because in a contradictory way I both willed her to be on board the ship with me, and not. I was lonely and confused, and she had created me after the treatment; at the same time, I had to reject her worldview to he able to find myself.
This delusion of Seri was part of a larger duality.
I was perceiving with two minds. I was what Seri and Lareen had made me, and I was what I had discovered of myself in the unaltered manuscript.
I accepted the uncomfortable reality of the overcrowded ship, the circuitous passage across the Midway Sea, the islands we called at, the confusion of cultures and dialects, the strange food, the heat and the stunning scenery. All this was solid and tangible around me, yet internally I knew none of it could be real.
It scared me to know there was this dichotomy in the perceived world, as if to stop believing it could cause the ship to vanish from beneath me.
I felt prominent on the ship because I was central to its continued existence. This was my dilemma. I knew I did not belong in the islands. Inside me I recognized a deep and consistemit truth about my identity: I had discovered myself through the metaphors of my manuscript. But the outer world, perceived anecdotally, had a plausible solidity and confusion. It was random, it was out of control, it lacked story.
I best understood this when I considered the islands.
It had seemed to me, as I recovered from the operation, that as I learned about the Dream Archipelago I was actually creating it in my mind. I had felt my awareness of it spreading outwards.
At different times I had imagined it differently, as comprehension changed. Because I was limited in my imaginative vocabulary, I had built up my creation slowly. At first the islands were mere shapes. Then colour was added--bold, clashing primaries--then they were bedecked with flowers and swarmed by binds and insects, and encrusted with buildings, impovenished by deserts, crowded with people, choked with jungle, lashed by tropical storms and swept by surging tides. These imagined islands at first bore no nelation to Collago, the place of my spiritual birth, then one day Seri had passed the apparently innocuous information that Collago itself was a pant of the Archipelago. Instantly, my mental construct of the islands changed: the sea was filled with Collagos. Later, still learning, I continued to modify. As I developed what I called taste, I imagined the islands from aesthetic or moral principles, endowing them with romantic, cultural and historical qualities.
Even so, endlessly modified, there had been a neatness to my concept of the islands.
Their reality, as seen from the ship, was therefore changed with surprise, the true relish of travel.
I was entranced by the ever-changing scenery. The islands changed, one from another, with latitude, with subsea geology, with vegetation, with commercial or industrial or agricultural exploitation. One group of islands, marked on my charts as the Olldus Group, was disfigured by centuries of vulcanism: here the beaches were black, the rising cliffs loose with old basalt and lava, and the mountain peaks jagged and barren. Within the same day we were sailing through a cluster of unnamed islands, low and tangled with mangrove swamps. Here the ship was visited by innumerable flying insects that stayed, biting and stinging, until nightfall. Tamer islands greeted us with harbours, a sight of towns and farmland, and food that could he bought to vary the ship's limited menu.
I spent most of the daylight hours at the rail of the ship, watching this endless passing show, gorging my senses on the gourmanderie of the view.
Nor was I alone; many of the other passengers, whom I presumed were native islanders, showed the same fascination. The islands defied interpretation; they could only he experienced.
I knew that I could never have created these islands as a part of my mental imaginings. The very diversity of the visual richness was beyond the making of anything except nature. I discovered the islands and absorbed them, they came to me from outside, they confirmed their real existence to me.
Even so, the duality remained. I knew that the typewritten definition of myself was real, that my life was lived elsewhere. The more I appreciated the scale, variety and sheer beauty of the Dream Archipelago, the less I was able to believe in it.
If Seri was a part of this perception, she too could not exist.
To affirm my knowledge of my inner reality, I read through my manuscript every day. Every time it made more sense, enabling me to see beyond the words, to learn and remember things that were not written.
This ship was a means to an end, taking me on an inner voyage. Once I left it and stepped ashore, and walked in the city I knew as "Jethra", I would be home.
My grasp on metaphoric reality increased, and my inner confidence grew.
For example, I solved the problem of language.
After the treatment I had been brought to awareness through language. I now spoke the same language as Seri and Lareen. I had never given it a thought. Because I had come to it as to a mother tongue I used it instinctively. That I had also written my manuscript in it was something I took for granted. I knew that it was spoken, as first language, by people like Seri and Lareen, and by the doctors and staff at the clinic, and that one could make oneself understood with it throughout the Archipelago. On the ship, announcements were made in it, and newspapers and signs were printed in it.
(It was not, however, the only language in the islands. There was a confusing number of dialects, and different groups of islands had their own languages. In addition, there was a sort of island patois, spoken throughout the Archipelago, but which had no written fonm.) The day after the ship left Muriseay I suddenly realized that my language was called English. That same day, while I was sheltering from the sun on the boat deck, I noticed an ancient sign riveted to the metal wall behind me. It had been painted over a dozen times, but it was still possible to make out the slightly raised lettering. It said: _Defense de cracher_. Not for a moment did I mistake this for an island language; I knew immediately that the ship was, or at some time had been, French.
Yet where were France and England? I searched my charts of the Anchipelago, looking for the coastlines, but in vain. Even so, I knew I was English, that somewhere in my perplexing mind I had a few words of French, sufficient to order drinks, ask the way, or refrain from spitting.