“Me?” Masters felt his misgivings were being confirmed. “What did I do?” He smiled secretly, self-mockingly, with sudden pleasure that enormous as his powers appeared to be he was helpless in this instant and could not see into Jackson’s mind and read the tale of James whom he (Masters) — it would seem — had pulled back from the pit. Jackson was having a late tea break close to noon and he drew Masters to a table. “You gave him some damn frozen bubble to wear on his chest, remember?”
Masters had forgotten. “Did I?” then he remembered. “Something from Waterfall Oracle, shaped like a horse?”
“Horse, yes, he was driving home on the highway and dropped off into a doze at the wheel. When he wake he was in a kind of ravine, at the bottom of an embankment. The car lay on its back.”
“Good god,” said Masters. “I see it, yes I do.”
“Not a scratch. Sound as an unbroken egg. He was clutching the bubble horse. It had saved him. He remembered the dream he had had the moment he fell asleep. You were there, it was a river, you were a huge bubbling horse under the car. The rapids of history. He was about to topple into a pit. But you kept the car on your back. He saw your face through the windshield. You broke the fall, you broke the rapids. You let the car down softly though it had overturned. You saved him. What a Christmas gift!”
“A dream,” Masters murmured. “Just a dream. I am no magician.”
Jackson chuckled. “Ask James for his wife and he would consent, Everyman. The way he talk when I see him last night! He find religion in a dream. It was real. He would fall down now and worship you, Masters, more than he love Madame Guillotine who fill his pay-packet when the week end. And that say a hell of a lot.”
Masters could not help smiling again and this partially broke the gloom that encrusted him, encrusted his mind, the mind of Lazarus. “Tell James,” he said softly, “to remember he’s no puppet.”
Jackson was puzzled. “Puppet? What do you mean?”
Masters did not reply. What did he mean I wondered? James is a bloody puppet, I said to myself. Did he not …
Jackson waved at a tea lady. “Coffee or tea, Everyman?”
“Coffee, please, milk, sugar.”
If the world knew that Lazarus had returned to the Carnival of history and was eating a prosaic biscuit with Jackson, coffee, milk, sugar, millions of puppets rich and poor, fat and thin, would vote for him. Vote for him, yes, but not because of the genius of love or resurrection. No, through fear. A vote of fear. Puppets of fear. Yes, fear! Fear of the bomb, fear of the grave, perverse hope that he was the ultimate weapon, he would lift the sentence of death from them and they would bounce back, he would lift the sentence of death, if not war or famine or starvation from mankind.
“Masters, what did you mean when you said I must tell James to remember he’s no puppet?”
Masters started. He glanced at me where I stood in the shadow of dream protesting that the cyclist who ran into my father was … He had forgotten what he had said to Jackson. He touched his mask and remembered. “Ah yes,” he said at last, “I meant that James may have been saved by my gift but he had to give something of himself in return. There are two — indeed three and four and many more — sides to the bubble of resurrection.”
I saw he had turned from Jackson and was addressing me. “I could not save your father, Weyl, by reaching back through the bars of time, but he saved me. I enlightened him nevertheless about his pagan body. I sustained his case. I helped him to evolve a little, to move on. That is the function of originality. Unless one brings originality to the resurrection theme it is hollow, it is impotent. I saved James. He liberated me when he jolted my memory. I saw a mere newspaper clipping — a mere clipping I say — but remember it had been fired into originality on his brow.”
I protested. I hated James. “He is a bloody puppet,” I cried. I turned to Jackson. “Tell James, Jackson, he was a lucky devil when Lazarus pulled him from the pit, but I know who he is. He rode my father down in Brickdam. And then he came to the funeral with a wreath. He was filled with fear, I tell you, Lazarus. The wreath was nothing but a hollow crown. He is a bloody puppet, a bloody puppet.”
“Easy, easy, Weyl,” said Lazarus gently. “The distinction between the bloody puppet and the art of freedom cuts deep. So deep our hate resurrects and, as it does, the bloody puppet is as much ourselves as the man or the woman we hate. Freedom should mean freedom from past fear. We have nothing to fear but fear itself in the resurrection of hate. That is the complex stake in all puppet resurrections that torment us, that chasten us in depth, in every aspect of our lives, in every encounter with Memory, every confession we make, every protest, every longing we cultivate or suppress, every chain upon which we dangle that brings us round and round and round again to know ourselves in dreadful part, in complex whole … My dear Weyl, remember my gift to you is the wages of descent into hell/ascent into heaven, every shade of emotion, however bitter, however terrible or sweet, that makes us prize the arts of freedom as originality to revisit the past and not be confounded or conscripted by the sorrows, the waste, the terror of time, partial time, whose biased face is the resurrection of the puppet, whose stranger, unfathomably whole face is the resurrection of life.”
*
Masters left the factory clothed in my resentment still and entered a phase of existence that was haunted by dubious women. Or so it seemed to me — to my jaundiced mind — when I compiled notes upon him in 1958, 1959, and succeeding years. Now — when he addresses me anew as resurrected paradox, dead king — I see everything quite differently. I see their inner significance with sudden perception or shock. Masters the Fourth wore the Carnival mask of Lazarus in a loose characteristic way that overshadowed Masters the Second and Masters the Third in my dream. He came into the money he had been awaiting from the sale of his New Forest properties not long after his encounter with the devil and with James whom he had rescued from the pit and whose wife he was to pursue. Her name was Aimée and she came to see him not long after Masters’ conversation with Jackson and with me.
Even now — within the labyrinth of resurrections that Carnival Lazarus unravels — I find it difficult to describe her. She was a very attractive woman in a curious downbeat fashion. She was listless yet susceptible to faint rhythms of hysteria and animation (the phenomenon of faintness that adorned her apparition within structured non-feeling made her survival or arousal all the more preternaturally vivid). Her faint arousal from a grave of non-feeling incorporated something of the lightning brow of Jane Fisher the Second with whom Masters slept on the day he died in 1982. And that meant that Aimée was also possessed by a resemblance to Jane Fisher the First who stabbed Masters the First in New Forest.
Despite or because of all this Aimée remains a shadowy figure in my mind as I cling to Masters’ chain of existences in the past, in the present, in the future that is also the biased present, the unfulfilled past. Indeed it is this astonishing preternatural light of shadow and time that makes her unique in retrospect. She came to him in an evening veil, post-Inferno, early Purgatory, a new fashion that sold well in Oxford Street. Upset veil. Weeping shawl. Faint abandon. Edged hysteria. Her perception of James’ accident differed in tone from Jackson’s tale. James may have caught religion in dreaming of the horse that saved him but Aimée had caught the downbeat aroma of guilt distilled from flowers and soil. It lay upon Lazarus’ nose and brow like the vestige of a cloud. Slightly vulgar expensive perfume perhaps, slightly mystic. Aimée shopped without economic bother in Resurrection Road. James — as a skilled Madame Guillotine operator — earned a good pay-packet that she supplemented in a nightclub. She swore with a flick of her wrist — so gentle no bones were broken — that she had been responsible for James’ accident.