From my bed in Miriam’s house I could see the sky and the sea. I could see Peter and Emma whose lives my mother saved. It was they who brought the news to me, messengers of the roaring laughter of the deep through which they came. I could see the wall and the floor and the window that Miriam used as a stage from which to launch her chapel perilous plays in which I had participated, forever participated, even before I was born, or time appeared to begin.
The blanket and the sheet she erected as a curtain were now missing. Yet they lay on me. I was in them. I was in the sea. I was their being of Sleep. I was the absent players, absent body yet present relic of memory. Sleepwalking relic on a wave of Sleep where my mother played a role that was to recur again and again within my dreams. Dream chapel perilous under the sea as a prelude to chapel perilous of the flatlands, chapel perilous Skull, chapel perilous of the Mountain of Folly, chapel perilous of space.
The boat sailed across the floor. It cracked. Was it a fist of wind shaking the house? Was it the floor that heaved, was it the boat? One of those unexpected tremors or earthquakes that shook the magic wood across the years. Just a tremor but it drove the boat upon the reef.
Fever inflates one’s perceptions of things. High fever. My finger grew large (or was it small) as a tooth clawing at a rock. My lung ballooned and I dived at a bird skimming a wave. The weather suddenly changed. The window on the stage shook. Tiger overturned into a ragged chest, ragged inner sail, inner curtain, ragged cross-currents. Alice bobbed up in Tiger’s tail and swam with Peter and Emma to land. She swung back and dived through grandfather’s ring to save the others. It was the last I saw of her from my wave of Sleep. I held her close. She fell into the Glass of time. Timelessness.
*
Within a year I packed a ghostly pork-knocker bag, secured a spiritual compass, sharpened my drowned ghost-pen, and set out into the sacred wood to make my way in the world, the hollow world, and in the multi-textual regions of space.
The old house in which Alice, Peter, Emma and I had lived belonged now to strangers. Before I left I scouted in a cellar in Miriam’s playhouse and little theatre (occupied now by W. H.) and unearthed a trunk of masks from Tiger’s bobbing chest on a wave of Sleep.
I recalled our last New Year’s Eve party (celebrated in Hogmanay style), my echoing voice in Miriam’s at midnight.
We twa hae paddl’d in the burn
Frae morning sun till dine,
But seas between us braid hae roared
Sin’ auld lang syne.
‘Where is laughter?’ I asked Aunt Miriam. ‘Laughter’s mask?’ but she hid her face in the seas. I saw her tears despite the running waters but these too were woven into another mask in Tiger’s broken body. I left it there out of tenderness and respect. At the bottom of an old man’s cargo of dreams when he revisits the past.
My eye fell on another mask on which W. H.’s shadow fell and this I pulled from the trunk. Shadow and substance. It imbued me with a sensation of renewed inner substance, inner fictional being.
‘I am a stranger,’ I said to the mask of Shadow and Substance in which I was reflected even as I reflected it.
‘Why a stranger?’
I looked at it closely. It was indeed a mask that I knew as if from a great distance. I knew I would come to inhabit it in the future as ageing fictional author in fictional youth, fictional character mirroring and mirrored by transformative relics of memory. It was the mask in which I would write my life, my fictional autobiography.
It was adorned by the tooth I had seen in the chapel of the sea, the tooth I shared with all creatures, a tooth sharper than any pen that I would come to possess. It had eaten its lines, its poetries, its scripts, into the flesh of my spirit. It had cut a long ravine along my brow. It had cut chasms and gulfs. It had shaped my mouth, my lips, to register the miracle of innermost address, innermost self-judgement. It was the tooth of judgement day, ceaseless judgement day I both longed for and dreaded.
‘I am a stranger to you,’ I said to the mask. ‘I reflect you and that is all. I wander the highways and byways of time in search of a gesture that rejects you entirely. I loathe you. I loathe the future. I want to be eternally young, eternally strong.’
‘Can you reject the future?’ the mask replied. ‘Even the dead must reckon with the future if there is to be justice, justice for the unborn son, the unborn daughter, the unborn stranger. You call yourself a stranger! Even the dead … Much more so the stranger who comes from the dead, dead fictions, dead legacies, dead traditions, that are not as dead as they seem but alive, alive as a threat or a challenge we have not yet absorbed, alive as revisionary fabric, revisionary truth.’
The mask paused but continued before I could speak: ‘I am the future in which you will write of this moment, this present moment, and of the past. I am you when this century draws to a close. I am you in the twenty-first century. I am the memory of the future. You are fortunate, Robin Glass.’
‘How so?’ I demanded. ‘I am a stranger. Of that I am sure.’
‘A fortunate stranger,’ said the mask. ‘To speak through the stranger in yourself means this: you are actually in the present moment and yet outside of/beyond the present moment by a fraction — shall I say — by an edge … But that is enough to be in the world yet to move by a fraction above the chaos of the world; it is — let me put it this way — to see yourself in an infinite body lying still with Alice and Miriam and the other children in the sea yet, at liberty, by a hair’s breadth to approach yourself as in a play, relate to yourself in the memory of the future, be in yourself yet move — as I have said — just a fraction beyond a stranger’s death, out of your stillness, your death. One day you will come upon Peter and Emma in the stranger city of Skull that stands upon a simulated arch or bridge between true voice and true ear, true response to the everlasting intimate stranger in yourself.
‘Ah Stranger! you move within yet without yourself. You dream in every age of the womb from which you came as if the womb were a theatre of existence and you are steeped in it even as you surface from it or fall to the edge of time, visionary backwards fall, visionary downwards fall, visionary upwards fall, visionary forwards fall. To transform the vertigo of a stranger birth, a stranger death, in yourself is to fall into the resurrectionary/revolutionary Glass of your age …’
Ghost’s voice faded. For it was Ghost I suddenly saw masquerading as my future self.
I looked at Ghost and knew, despite everything he had said, I loathed his appearance, his sagging cheeks, his age, his apparitional freedom. Yes freedom! One is afraid of the coming of old age because one hates one’s stranger capacity for freedom, for spiritual justice through and beyond one’s trappings, cultural trappings, etc. One dreads the heartrending call of supreme insight, the pain and the anguish of stranger maturity, the slow but inevitable dissolution of the ego, the dissolution of the proud but unfree state or body in its tantrums and rages and incurable desires. One dreads a true marriage with the stranger beloved in all creation — a beloved creation one may learn to touch anew, to sense anew, to know anew beyond all self-deception or arrogance. A beloved creation that astonishes, disturbs: it brings a mirror into the heart of creaturely terror and addictive lust. It asserts anew within the perversities of ambition a necessary quest for the foundations of religious hope where one least suspects these to exist. For some unaccountable reason I thought of poor Emma and Peter. What had they made of their lives, of their survival? Would they disturb me profoundly (yet illumine my quest for religious hope) when I came upon them in the city of Skull?