There was a crash in the distant waterfall, a muted explosion, a back-firing engine, water on rock. A collision! Was it a bus, was it a car, was it a cyclist, was it a dray-cart in a parade of ancient vehicles? Carnival gait of redressed machines, bus into masked cyclist, car into masked dray-cart, led me to ponder whether I saw or did not see someone crawling out from under a wheel …
“Hey you, give me a hand here. Stop dreaming.”
Masters was back upon his chain from Waterfall Oracle. We stood in the factory, lapsed noon had fallen back into the brilliantly lit night of the cave. A stack of guillotined sections of metal had slipped, half-crashed, onto the floor and needed to be shored up again.
Two West Indians who had come to England in the 1940s and worked with the ground staff of the RAF, operated Madame Guillotine. They were, Masters surmised, around forty, his own age (or two or three years younger perhaps). It was a responsible job. He had been assigned to them. Not as an operator. He was unskilled in the slicing and the execution of metal. His job was to collect the sliced sections and transport them by degrees across the factory to a corridor where they were treated, passed on, treated and fashioned again, before being passed on once more to the assembly line.
There had been an acute shortage of labour and that was how it happened that a great stack of guillotined material had accumulated over the past week. It was this that had partially crashed on the floor to jolt him back from the Round Pond. His first task was to deplete the pile. Though it had been restored it seemed on the verge of slipping again.
“Go easy‚” he was told. “Tricky beast. Use them fucking gloves over there. It’s a night’s job to get it half-way down.”
The night (the factory day) wore on under its manufactured stars and suns. It was during the midnight (the midday) lunch break that he was conscious of peering through another lapse into the faces of his two companions as if day sliced night night day. He knew them in that light. One of them. He had seen him somewhere ages ago. Carnival time. It heightened and sharpened an inner profile, an inner memory, of redressed faculties. It was the edge of blood, the inner sweat of the sun, in an unfamiliar yet familiar shadow of light, that made him know he knew one of them though he could not remember where or when it was that they had met. Perhaps it was the ordeal of unaccustomed labour in transporting the metal with gloved yet wretched hands that evoked some placeless connection between them. He could not say.
Gloved wretchedness was the driving force, the itch or the climax, of industry. It illumined a cloak of savage or savaged memory that ties the worker’s hands, the worker’s bruised body, to his task with almost religious, fatalistic devotion. The sweat of industry was a phenomenon of darkest coniunctio, the marriage of man and material, boulder and boulder upon a chain that stretched from heaven to hell over which he had ruled in Plantation New Forest but as a labourer now himself — tied to Madame Guillotine — the sweat of intercourse infused him with a sensitivity that seemed to split and break every prick, every gloved nail.
His gloves were already cut to tatters — a dead king’s, a dead bridegroom’s, from the grave. He held them up to me, a living bridegroom, a Carnival mask of parallel dream.
Within a fortnight, the mask of the body, darkest coniunctio or marriage to industry, had forged a new skin, a new glove, a new letter that seemed to run at the edges of bone into english letter, french letter, welsh letter, irish letter, west indian letter — and all the other gloved accents, sexual imprecation, blasphemies, curses, one hears on a factory floor.
He was unable to place or identify the West Indian he thought he knew. Perhaps he was deceiving himself. Perhaps he was seeking to create a lapse into fictional memory in order to make game of the night’s/day’s labour. Lapsed night was day. Lapsed day was night. The lapsed unfamiliar was familiar. The lapsed unknown was known.
Each man secretly played his own game of lapses or doorways into time with the devil. Religious devil. Religious pay-packet. So much for rent to keep the devil from the door, so much for the motorcycle or the motorcar to outrun the false shaman, so much for the devil’s cigarettes, for lovely beer, so much for vistas of the Round Pond within the pools in which El Doradan millions shone, so much for hire purchase …
There were moments when the devil took a worker by surprise in the game they played. Was it the worker’s mask or the mask of the devil that crumpled a little? Was it the worker or the devil who seemed to lose his grip? The dual mask slipped and another face appeared, slightly ecstatic, slightly depressed, slightly dark, slightly brilliant, vaguely attuned to home thoughts (an Englishman’s home is his castle), home thoughts of wife or mother or child. Then the castle would darken into irrational siege, irrational casualty, injury, the unemployed, the unemployable.
“You’ve never had it so fucking good,” the devil said to me. “Masters has bequeathed you his wages. Why are you moping, making up fictions?”
The roof of the great hollow cave of a factory was littered with arc lights, manufactured suns, some with moon satellites but in a particular area of the lofty cave there shone a single star that an educated wag had christened Vega. This was devoid, as far as waggish eye could see, of the rings or planets circling Earth’s sun.
Factory Earth therefore, the wag declared, need fear no competition from planets around Vega, the nearest sun in space and time to Planet Earth’s sun.
It was light-year comedy and Masters was well acquainted with the importance of such games to preserve morale within the work forces of Factory Earth and Plantation Earth and to humour or lighten anxieties within a fiercely competitive world. In Vega — in the arc-light of Vega within the cave of the factory — lay the narrative seed of a constellation within a twentieth century biography of spirit. It was a seed in parallel, through distances of psyche, with the hunter/huntress Orion and the male/female Crab nebula.
Such seed of necessity, such predilection for games, was a form of telepathy between worker and worker around the globe. Long before mock-constellations or satellites, invented by science, encircled the earth, cultures had invoked their own satellites and images in the stars through which they bridged distances and separations and spoke silently to each other. They saw without proof each other’s masks, they felt without touching each other’s edged tools, they pooled each other’s tears in the ghost of rain and made a sacrament of vision. The telepathy of the soul. They peered into the night-time live-coal eyes of the crocodile stars in search of a modern telescope to place in Thomas’s hands long before Thomas dreamt of investigating the wounds in the body of space.
Late in November Masters found himself staggering under Vega with a satellite bride of metal from Madame Guillotine in his arms. He was suddenly visited by a revelation that was to be confirmed by science. His mind lapsed into fiction and he saw that there were foetal rings and planets around Vega and that these constituted not just a competitive threat to Factory/Plantation Earth but a new wheel or foothold for life should the golden chain to which he clung be so apparently severed or blasted it flung him — it flung him — through one of its links on to that wheel. HE COLLAPSED AND FAINTED.
This was his first minor heart attack and it was to bring him face to face with the devil. It was time to say goodbye to the factory. He fell through the floor upon his golden chain (or was it up into the roof of the cave?) and lay at the edge of a great fire within a chain of reversible gravities, ups/downs, downs/ups, in Waterfall Oracle. He raised himself nevertheless to his feet to confront a gentleman with a smooth, polished mask.