Like Thomas’s, Masters’ eyes were glued to the ladder. Ladder or giant wheel, giant heartbeat within deceptive hollows, deceptive heavens, and with hope beyond hope and hopelessness of true heaven. As he stared through the gate he saw the shadow of Alice gesticulating, warning him, but much more unexpectedly and oddly vivid was the face of the West Indian operator in the factory whom he thought he knew but had been unable to place. He shook the ladder or gate now, and it dawned on him then, as a sudden wheel rattled, who the operator was. A faded newspaper floated down the rungs of the ladder and settled on a cyclist’s brow. That was it. That was the man! Here was the young cyclist who had collided with Martin Weyl in Carnival year 1939. A College Boy then, seventeen years of age.
Masters studied him closely, unable to trust his luck, unable to believe that after so many long weeks in the factory cudgelling his brains, now at last he remembered, now at last, upon the first rung of the dying ladder of an age in his body, he knew the identity of his fellow worker.
The newspaper floated a little in a breath of wind. It was brown and faded. It lacked the meticulous print of the “leaves of grass” in Purgatory’s Who’s Who. But despite this the picture of the young cyclist was impressive as skeleton or ivory or bone that had been browned — if that were possible — by heart’s fire. Parchment invisible heart’s fire. He (the cyclist in bone-brown fire) was wearing a cricketer’s blazer and flannels. His features were curiously round as if ready to bounce … Ah yes! the plague of the heart that cuts into the soul of a brilliant athlete and makes him bounce into eternity. Masters knew him, yes, unmistakably. He had seen him running in the College grounds to catch a ball falling out of the sky from Philip Rodrigues’ bat. Ball. Heart. Bat. Philip of Spain. Remember? The Venezuelan high jumper! Masters was jolted through Carnival ladder of heaven to perceive the young cyclist clutch at the handle bar of his machine. He pulled his brakes hard but was unable to stop. He collided with the half-sleeping, half-dreaming advocate of a pagan body that Martin Weyl was.
Advocate of a pagan body. How curious to see it like that, in such a light, with one apparently Christian foot on the rung of a ladder, of a gate, a palatial ladder, a palatial gate. As if that pagan body might restore his (Masters’) dying heart, might be of advantage to the kingdom he had glimpsed with mask glued to ladder and bar.
Then came the additional shock. Martin Weyl was flung into the centre of the road. It was too late for him (Masters) to reach out and save his friend. He felt that if it were not for the acute pain in his chest he could have done it even now after nearly twenty years. He could have reached back through a hole in time and saved him. He could have reached through the ladder. He could have seized Martin by the hair, by a grain of fire, and saved him. But no! The dray-cart, the startled horse or mule, was upon him. He was dead. But that was not the end of the matter. Too late to save him but not too late to be saved by him, by the friend he dreamt he may have saved.
He was assured after his apparently total recovery on the last day of November 1958 that the heart attack he had suffered had been a minor one despite the hole or lapse or black-out into which he had fallen. But he knew differently when he stood in the palace gate or ladder pointing to the bride of heaven within a cricket bat or cricket ball floating toward Vega in space. In part he was saved by the shadow of Aunt Alice, by her ageing Bartleby humour, crumbling gesticulation through the bars of heaven, and by the cautionary mask she provided for the young, sensuous flying Alice whose wings encircled Quabbas, the young fiery Amaryllis to whom I made love when Masters descended into the Inferno. Aunt Alice cautioned him not to be tempted by the brilliance of such fiery intercourse; to turn back to archaic Earth, to seek to wed the museum of the elements that needed him still. She pointed to Martin Weyl, to his Carnival posture — under wheel or horse or mule — as advocate of a pagan body.
“Yes,” said Aunt Alice, “too late to save your friend but not too late to be saved by him, to have his pagan confessional heart lodged in your breast.”
Her shadow had solidified. She seemed suddenly to become a divine gossip — how else may I describe it? — of heaven. “Do you know, Everyman,” she said to Masters, “that he’s still toiling away at his precious ‘charisma of the law’ theorem?”
“That was the main plank in his defence of the red prince,” said Masters. “I recall how passionate he was — the law is valid, he said, indispensable, even in Purgatory and hell, not to speak of heaven — but because of territorial imperatives, absolute or rigid frontiers above and below (on sea, land, in the air), there is a hideous charisma, a moribund authoritarian fixture of emotion that bars or excludes even as it confines peoples. Moribund it may be, he declared, but in actual practice it remains terrifyingly constant and it underpins all liberal codes — even those liberal codes that attempt to argue sensibly that security is mutual, never one-sided.”
“Ah yes,” said Aunt Alice Bartleby, “if I were allowed, my dear, to take you up and through the ladder, I would show you where he sits writing day and night. Sometimes I find him arguing with a judge, the shadow of a judge, who assumes all sorts of shapes. Sometimes the judge looks like young Weyl, the son judges the father. It’s too absurd! It’s a dream. It’s amazing. His own son sitting there with Amaryllis.” Aunt Alice was laughing and weeping, I thought.
“Sometimes,” she said sombrely, “he plays the scene of his death all over again. Like a kind of cosmic cinema. Why, bless my heart, there he is now. He’s descended the ladder! He’s playing the scene. Look! There’s the newspaper cyclist. There’s the ancient donkey or horse or mule, the wheel, the cart.”
There he was indeed. I saw him, my father. I could see him through the bars of the ladder, even through Aunt Alice Bartleby’s solid, gesticulating, crumbling shadow. It was as if an unforeseen rumbling of the law made itself manifest in his advocacy of a pagan body. His frame, his chest, was suddenly rent before my eyes to illumine savage unconscious realms in which the innocent advocate pays for the guilty court he addresses. Was he falling — as the wheel caught him — through the ladder of the sky from a murdered aeroplane to illumine territorial charisma he had sought to unravel, had he been shot to ribbons under the divinity of the sea’s ladder to illumine Carnival bandages, had he been crushed on a battlefield to illumine a mask of shell?
He had paid the price for deliberating upon territorial imperatives to an indifferent, largely insensible court. He had become the savage hollow he sought to explicate and unravel. He had been broken on the wheel. He had trespassed beyond conventional pavements into the traffic of deadly highways. Or so it seemed to me as I contemplated Masters on his chain that wound itself into many worlds, past, present and to be.
My father had defended a pagan El Doradan whose hideous imperatives could be traced far up, far back, into ancient fires when statesmen-priests broke the organ in their victims’ chest and offered it to the sun or — should the sun fail — to unknown fires far out in space, to foetal plants around Vega.
Such charisma, he argued, had survived within the civilization of twentieth-century age as the reverberating shock of pagan body-ritual of which we were oblivious. Witness our predilection for black-out Carnival and games of nuclear holocaust we have played with computers, with robots, fallen numbers, surviving numbers, underground caves. And thus it was not to be wondered at that humanity, in its subconscious or unconscious advocacy of the body as fodder for the State, was articulating an ancient ritual dressed up in the vestments of purist obsession; it was not to be wondered at that societies were suicidal and accident-prone, and that even those who wrestled to enlighten us with parallel formations fell asleep and stumbled under Christ’s Trojan donkey or resurrection mule.