The intimacy of Carnival murder executed in a closet, in Charlotte’s crocodile bag, gave way all at once to blazing coal (as if we had flown around the globe from Iron Age sugar mills in black canals to electronic faeces). Johnny arose. Thomas and I stood now somewhere in the roof or the palate of the crocodile, under its night-sky eyes or stars. The inmates of the caves had ceased to trundle crocodile and were cooking their night-time meal in the open barracks of the plantation.
Johnny seemed oblivious of their activity, but they called out to him as to a foul emperor they adored.
“Hey Flatfoot Mask, hey Strong Boy, you drunk or what? You lips stick together or what? Say a damn word. You don’t hear we praying to you night after night as we sit on coal?”
Flatfoot Mask saw nothing, heard nothing, he was already a dead man, and his progress was so slow that Thomas and I had ample time (like an archaeologist, an anthropologist, excavating the body of space, assessing its cracks, its crevices) to inspect the coal pots on which the natives cooked and in which the lighted eyes of darkness shone to miniaturize far-away storms blown by cosmic winds in the anatomy of god. Strips of iron or some nameless metal rested on each coal pot and these supported a frying pan, in some instances, or a vessel with rice or a saucepan with beans or with meat for those who were phenomenally lucky.
The strips of iron created the effect of a laced mask. Within each open segment of the mask, the deposit of an animal face glowered at us. The coal sometimes lay lumpy and naked in its concave bed. Tripods were then constructed above it from which the saucepans hung. Where neither tripod stood nor mask lay above the eyes of the crocodile, the long arm of Carnival had fashioned a metal bar or spit.
Thomas felt himself masked by their vulgar and banal appetite, vulgar and banal spit. So much so that he led me under the eyes of coal, in the crocodile’s grasp yet hidden from it, on the blind inner side of the crocodile’s skull, as if he possessed a cosmic faculty or guideline born of a globe or planet that defecates in space, cooks in space, apparently beneath, apparently above, the light-year stars.
It was this profound “beneath/above skull and anatomy” of the plantation Inferno that gave him a route through time of which the keepers of the coal pot and the chamber-pot were unaware. And that was just as well. For whatever their complaints, or unanswered prayers, Johnny was president and revolution was taboo. And yet for one moment when we passed by they seemed to look up at unseen Thomas like a dog lipsticking its wounds. Such was their presentiment of the androgynous miracle of Carnival revolution.
Flatfoot had now gained the lantern moon under the donkey cart and Thomas said to me that his vertical descent into the underworld sky of the canal, upon bandage, through absurd crocodile belly, lipsticked dog, within the shell and the roof of coal, beneath/above the stars, had ceased and revolved into horizontal arm or axis of Carnival. He felt a commotion in his stomach. He felt faint and dizzy. He had scarcely eaten a scrap or a morsel since his flight from the foreshore in search of Masters. And the sight of food had enlivened and sickened him.
His phallic entrails akin to the Milky Way were turning. Sparked basket of pubertal sex. He had glimpsed the marble woman’s breasts. She stood in her cave. He glimpsed her through the radii of the spokes in the donkey cart wheel. She, unlike the others, was cooking her meal inside as if each spoke that passed through her were a spit to toast meat or milk. Or so it seemed to Thomas with his masked eyes glued to her. In point of fact she was engaged in peeling sweet potatoes. She had shed her dress for a low petticoat. Her statuesque limbs and breasts revolved slowly in the wheel of his eyes like a slow motion legend of storm. She had anticipated Johnny’s flatfooted approach and her humours, her tensions, obscurely matched his. Flatfoot cried through the revolving door, “Where the damn Boy who smash the egg? I see you with he in the Market-place today.” The woman watched him. She tested the strength of the net she had flung over him. Thomas perceived through the wheel that she was unsure. Johnny was so drunk he seemed capable of rending every garment, uprooting every spoke.
“Who tell you all this?” she asked, playing for time.
“I hear. I hear. Not from you but I hear. You take the Boy home? You see he parents? You make them pay?”
“He has no parents,” the marble woman said quietly. “But he promise to come back and pay in gold.” It was a joke. Thomas hoped Johnny would see it and desist from uprooting the wheel.
“No parents?” Flatfoot exploded. “Is what cock-and-bull story the Boy spin you? He’s a white Boy though he coloured. He got white parents.”
“I tell you he’s an orphan.”
“Orphan hell! I know what orphan mean. It mean he cycling with mother in bed. Orphan hell!” Johnny glared around the cave as if he were searching for someone.
“You filthy, Johnny. You in my bed every night. I pray to you to believe …”
“I don’t believe. I know. I know what you up to with Boys, golden Boys. A piece of gold for an egg!”
“Johnny, you dead drunk,” the marble woman said sharply. Her voice was sharp but tired, peculiarly downcast as if Johnny’s “dead drunk” condition matched an area of stalemate in her at the pit of a wheeling imagination. She had changed, she was more vulnerable than ever, she was without an audience. It came as a shock to perceive this. In the Market-place with an audience to cheer, to applaud generously, she had been inventive enough and able to net the czar’s fist. With Thomas, she had been versatile enough, perceptive enough of a wheel of creatures he brought with him, the dancer Aunt Alice, the fleet-footed Masters, and me, divine clerk or biographer of spirit, who needed their guidance. But now that she felt she had lost us, on her own with the idiot giant, she fell on her knees, as if the wheel had been uprooted, had indeed fallen flat; she seemed to pray, she seemed to fumble for HE SAYS, SHE SAYS, she seemed unnaturally docile. And the flattened wheel almost made her believe she was the individual solitary whore, the individual rotten whore that the idiot giant said she was. She was the wife and mother of orphans in a polluted, stilled universe.
“No rotten gold,” the czar said suddenly. “Give me gut-deep money, bloody money, carve me honest money.” He raised his fist to strike but Thomas could stand it no more. He tugged at the wheel, it resisted, he pulled again, it moved, it spun, he felt it turning into a community of mutual spaces, mutual creatures. He jumped miraculously through the wheel from “beneath/above” and seized the knife on the table, raised it so quickly it knitted afresh the net that had been rent, and then with a sensation that her hand was in his, he plunged the dagger into Johnny’s frame.
As the blood came I wondered if it were true that the wheel was turning. Thomas was dizzy all over again, he stroked it, he stroked the woman’s prayer. The blood was true. The transfigurative wound or revolution came within an ace of realization but in his immaturity, her immaturity, my immaturity — in the way we were locked into self-perpetuating order and primitive habit — the revolution eluded us again. The woman sprang to her feet. She was still, she could scarcely speak, and then she found the voice of terrible oracle. She wrung her hands.
“O me god, Johnny the czar of Russia, he dead.”