A sensitivity upon calloused form — god’s fly, god’s prick — that I had never perceived before created a minute constellation, a minute star, within the blaze of the sun. I was aroused to face the edge of that minute prick of visionary light within the blind wheel of dawn. It was a feather that tickled a bruised nerve back to life in my slain companions, though they remained unconscious of it. Masters awoke. His blind/seeing eye mirrored my lucid dream, lucid fly.
With dawn the lucid fly withdrew to heaven but left its disturbing light deposit upon the surface of the river. It was a light, an awakening, that differed from every other awakening that Masters had known. Light was imbued with a sensitivity that seemed to promote an aching sadness in silver and gold rays of the sun. That ache, that subtle pain, was a novel and incalculable experience. It put into reverse all models of sensation I had known. These had been adorned by flags of feeling whereas this aching light behind my brow arose from a genuine perception of non-feeling in me and others that had been illumined by the atrocity of a fly upon a dead man’s eyeballs.
“Why lie to myself when I am dead?” Masters was half-joking, I knew. He turned and stared at me from the duck’s back on which he sat, duck’s feather as wide as the river of the sky but retaining the point of a quill he placed in my hand.
“The truth is,” he said, “dip into me for the obsolescence of blood. I’m frozen. My planetary script is frozen. But‚” he hastened to add, “it’s a realistic advantage like witchcraft in this benighted corner of a foreign river, foreign ocean of space. Look how strong I am. Frozen blood gives me a stalwart frame. Look! Amaryllis is ill. But I lift her in my arms. She’s sad and that makes the universe all the heavier. Where would I be — how would I cope — without frozen blood to boost my flesh and strengthen my bones?
“Long, long ago on the Arawak foreshore I saw the eye of a fish mirror the light years. Now it’s the eye of a fly that winds its net into the abnormal repose of this child! I may have seen miracles in my time but have been blind to such abnormality upon a child’s fragile body. Take her. Love her. Your future bride of freedom and fate. I promise you she will unfreeze. She will return with you. She will help you through difficult times. She will be your guide in the future when I am gone. Wait and see. I will restore her to life. The others will die again and again and not know they are dead.”
He seemed so terribly upset I felt I should say something. “Why blind?” I asked. “Why did you say you were blind?”
“I was blind to our companions the first afternoon we set out,” Masters confessed. “And it was not until last nightfall and this strange sunrise that my eye pricked, and I saw how little of abnormality I had ever seen, how little of the abnormal world in which I lived I had ever truly felt. She is your future wife … remember my words.”
“But why?” I asked again, unable to think of anything else to say.
He gave a slight shrug like the ripple of cloth upon the abnormal psyche of stone that possessed him. A slight wind blew in the wake of sunrise upon the abnormal river of El Dorado.
“Not so astonishing,” he said, “when one thinks soberly upon things. We’re all in the same boat, Weyl. Aren’t we — it’s a popular enough cliché — on the same burning ship of the globe?
“But how much do we feel, can we feel, are we really able to feel of the abnormality of peace in a century of war, the abnormality of food in a century of hunger? We think we know repose but do we know the sudden repose of a dead child like this in a bombed house? She will return. She will live. Take her, love her, my dear Weyl, when the time comes.”
He paused but I felt myself unable to speak. I was staggered.
“I say at last quite brutally, quite honestly, my dear Weyl, that I have established defences against abnormality, my own abnormality to which I am largely blind, and the abnormal and sudden repose of others. I have subsisted on noise — noise is normal, the noise of traffic, aeroplanes, everything — I have listened to the noises of television and radio, the noise of canned gunfire, incessant chatter; but the stillness that follows an explosion, the lightning stillness, the bizarre reverie, the bizarre visualization of the flight of the soul from sudden stilled monument, still body — that I have run from until now.
“Confess to it all, my dear Weyl, and in so doing, let your abnormality become a paradox, a moral vision of insensible power, insensible strength. Let abnormality mirror itself in abnormality to see through itself, let your abnormality match or subtly inflame Amaryllis’s, so that you see each other’s fragility. Then you will sustain her, she will sustain you. Such sustenance is the soul of love, love’s shelter at the edge of abnormality that is perceived, confessed to, and therefore subtly transfigured within the fiction of the self.”
As he spoke he struck a sudden match and I watched its reflection flare in Amaryllis’s eyes — as if this were the first impulse to restore her to life — the impulse of a human dawn within the glare of the sun that had increased in the stream of the drought-river at our feet.
Masters settled my future wife in the boat. We had scarcely set out when there was the sound of a shot and her father, the anthropologist, fell dead at our feet. No one knew. No one saw the hole in his temple. No one remembered the clash with an Amerindian tribe, the people of the red prince, and their anger at events in New Forest. No one saw the slice of the bullet save a faintly aroused Amaryllis and blind/seeing Masters and me (also faintly aroused from contagious abnormality).
It was as if Amaryllis accepted the guilt for her father’s death (as I had accepted myself as my mother’s slayer) and slid her fingers in his dishevelled temple. She saw him now in several lights within the flare of Masters’ match in the kingdom of the dead.
The first light disclosed him as abnormally alive though dead. That was how the rest of the crew saw him. She herself saw him faintly aroused, alive beyond the abnormal cloak he wore in the others’ blind sight, a live thread of mind in her sight, a thread that pricked her fingers like a needle and wound its way into the anthropology of the pagan soul. She also saw him faintly, very faintly, in a deeper, farther, stitched dimension of soul, a thread of spirit this time (rather than mind), true spirit, true life. That farther vision of spirit faded and the match that Masters had lit into a needle pricking aroused flesh settled upon the prospect of “mind” the prospect of investigative research her father had pursued into the “pagan soul” (as he used to put it in his lifetime). In settling upon “mind” the match endowed his investigative research with new life, it imbued the dead man with a mental life beyond the apprehension of those in the boat who were conditioned by a repetitive cycle of deeds that seemed absolute, a repetitive cycle of violence that seemed immortal regime.
She (Amaryllis), in slicing her ailing father’s leaves of brain (as I had sliced my mother’s body and breasts) — in slicing them with a match, stitching them with a divine needle — subsumed the bullet he had received (as the writer’s quill, the painter’s knife and brush, subsume the savage light of the sun) and drew forth a number of volumes that her father had written on earth and which he began to busy himself with all over again, to rewrite, to revise now, in Purgatory.
Such volumes were a deed, the deed of the anthropologist’s mental life and — however illusory they were — they foreshadowed the life of spirit, true spirit, he had not yet achieved though Amaryllis had glimmeringly perceived it as his goal in a foreseeable but distant age when he would truly come alive past all abnormality of mind that is oblivious of spirit as the well-fed are oblivious of the starving.