“What the devil?” said Masters. “Where in god’s name am I? Who are you?”
The devil chuckled. “You called me first,” he said, “so here I am. A mask — the self-same mask — can be worn by parallel angels and monsters.”
“Did I call you? I have forgotten.”
“It’s a game of lapses of memory,” the devil said. “Read the newspapers around the globe. See how they put gory morale into their customers’ breasts — the spy games, the war games, the sex games, the power games. But sometimes a foul, a hideous lapse, is declared and the game almost ceases to exist.”
Masters was stricken with the masquerade of the devil as something or someone he had summoned to play death and life and rebirth. In calling him, in saying “What the devil?” — albeit in the way one cries, “Oh god” or “To hell with you” — had he indeed, however involuntarily, invoked a fiery response in the cosmos, fiery death threatening him here on Earth, on one hand, fiery rebirth, foetal circulation of life around Vega, on the other? If the game stopped with a dreadful foul here on Plantation and Factory Earth would it start all over again somewhere else upon the wheeled chain of mutated spaces, mutated fires?
Masters felt an undoubted attachment to, a longing for, the great beautiful fire beside which he stood with the devil. That longing stemmed from a curious hollowness and depression within him, a desire not just to be purified in hackneyed senses but to be rendered therapeutically impure, therapeutically mixed game (water and fire), so that the measure of his cosmic disease would match the sacrament, or miracle, of a cure. It was a formidable equation between “impurity of the game” and “sacrament or cure” (as if one were integral to the mystery of the other), and it made him see fire as a wonderful bride, a wonderful game, to be embraced, to be courted, to be loved. He lapsed through holed time. It was 1945 in New Forest. He had just donated blood to the Brickdam Alms House and to the State Hospital. The doctor (attired in calendrical mask 1945) who had drawn the blood resembled the devil of Vega’s fire (calendrical mask 1958). Reversible memory, the future in the past, the past in the future. Waterfall Oracle. Delph’s blackboard/white chalk. They were both polished, courteous plantation gentlemen. Except that the plantation doctor in New Forest was Carnival black, the devil (or daemon of souls on Vega) Carnival white.
The doctor in the State Hospital rubbed the dead king’s arm with a piece of cotton wool, offered him a drink, and then, seeing how little affected he was by the blood-letting ritual, ventured to ask him whether he (as a prince of the estate) would take the lead in signing a petition.
“What petition?” asked Masters.
“I need cadavers,” said the doctor bluntly. “Freely donated. Sign please!”
Masters was not sure that he had heard aright. “Whose cadaver?” he asked. He was drawn to the devil’s fire, he was drawn by a lust for purification and yet he shrank away now within a confusion of place and mind, heart and soul, science and religion.
“Whose cadaver?” the doctor repeated. “Why yours, of course. Sign here and I will give you a card marked Atonement. Keep it in your pocket as your good deed to the State. I shall then be able to claim your royal frame in collective instalments, the State’s kidneys, the State’s lungs, the State’s blood bank, the State’s everything.” He shook Masters’ chain.
“No, no, I’m sorry,” the dead king cried quickly. “NO!”
“What, what? Don’t you see that if you — a prince of the State — gave your frame, it would inspire millions?”
“They would give their souls,” the devil confessed.
Masters felt guilt. He had given royal blood. The royal sweat of industry. The royal guilt of industry. He had given all these. But his compulsive desire to marry or to wed fire created a terrible beauty in parallel with a terrible danger and as he resisted the devil’s temptation the fire retreated a little into an organ of mystery that overruled all blind gift of body or soul before or after death in the name of pure science or in the name of pure religion.
“I am a rude king,” he said at last to the doctor, “a king who descends and who labours.”
“I know. I know. That’s why I ask you, of all persons.”
“You do not understand,” Masters said.
“Understand what?”
“A king is reborn for humanity’s impure sake …”
“What the devil does that mean?” the doctor cried.
“Let’s put it like this.” Masters was fencing with the devil. “A king sharpens the sword of religion and science in fire to test how incorrigible is his suit of hate or love, his longing, his insane longing, to wed the bride of heaven. Does he give his earthly body to science because he loathes it, hates it, or adores it for selfish, cynical heaven’s sake, cynical rejuvenation of worn out, obsolete, royal organs in a manufactured Paradise where lust is both eternal and incorrigible?”
The doctor did not know whether to express approval or alarm or disdain. One word stuck in his throat. “You said incorrigible. Why incorrigible?”
“If the fire of religion or science becomes incorrigible lust, incorrigible lust for purity or purity’s goods, if the beauty of art becomes so absolute that it cancels the marriage of the impure body to the impure body, impure ages to impure ages, impure cultures to impure cultures, then it means that the prospect of rebirth, therapeutic rebirth, falls into the void and in that case what use is it, doctor, for you to patch up a wretched soul in the name of wretched eternity, to patch up a wretched society in the name of wretched purity, by cannibalizing the constitution of a dead king?”
The devil was so outraged he could scarcely speak. Purity that masks the extermination of others, pure religion that masks fanaticism, pure science that masks its military consequences, unfreedom and terror, absolute mechanics that mask exploitation, were his bastions and they had been stormed, it seemed to me as I hung upon Masters’ chain, at a heart’s blow.
“The values of a civilization,” said Masters a little pontifically, as if to rile the devil, “need to rest on something much deeper than the mechanics of a frame to prolong the semblance of sovereign life.”
The doctor found his tongue at last. “Is it impure science then, impure art or religion, impure societies, that you favour?”
“I favour the saving desolation of spirit that differs from, though it resembles, despair; I favour the mystery of shocking truth or starkest spirit penetrating and reassembling evolutions, and then it is possible for a king to confess to native evil as inseparable from change — inseparable ingredient in the conscience of wisdom or maturity and change — to confess also to native bias and partiality as bitter travail, and to yield himself in ailing person and deed, through prayer and through necessity, to transfigurative dismemberment/remembermentand rebirth in community and of community.”
The devil vanished as if he had been ousted but the riddling frames of temptation and revelation had not ceased and Masters found himself at the foot of a great palace that rose out of the hollow depression of a half-breathing, half-breathless organ or heart that plagued him still with parallel fires, the fire of the healer, the fire of the destroyer. He placed a tentative foot on a rung in the palatial ladder and recalled, in that instant, Thomas’s animated mask of curiosity glued to the bars and segments of the Alms House gate in New Forest through which he observed Aunt Alice dancing for her supper with faltering yet inimitably courageous steps.