Seil Kor’s eyes opened and flashed at the speeding trees as they hurtled past. The Frenchman could not remember his name or why he was clinging on to his cold, hard body. He knew he loved him, but not why. The terrifying situation was exacerbated by the stranger’s mad eyes. He tried to look away, but the movement made him slip again. He was sliding in a black, sticky pool that was blood or sap, viscous and sickening. Thin rain had made it spread and stretch, the darkness taking away its identifying colour. He had been shaken to the side of the prone man; he wanted to reach out and close the lids of the snatching eyes, but the train jolted and he grabbed hard at the chain instead, scared of being thrown clear. The flatbed juddered and swayed more violently, its cargo of butchered trees shifting and straining against its fetters. He knew if the chains came loose they would both be crushed, or swept over into the racing night to be broken like kindling against the tracks.
He gripped the staring man and began to sob. His heart hung like a pendulum in a long, hollow case of hopelessness, abrupt shudders discordantly jangling the weights and coiled chimes which whimpered and knocked, while the other man’s eyes ticked away all life.
Sleep was further away than the city, and he dared not let fatigue cajole him. The trees grunted and struggled, shifting the weight of their enormous carcasses again. He tried to focus on the stars, but the engine’s smoke and the vibrations made them bleary and out of focus. He knew he was lost if he could not anchor his mind. He thought of his mother, and of Charlotte; he must not let their memory be erased. He even conjured some of the faces and bodies of the street boys, but they would not stay, and his purchase slipped away. He looked for God, and was considering Satan, when his genius spoke up to save him. His books! Those unique works of fiction, and the one he would write next: the very thing that made him significant had almost been forgotten in the wrath and momentum of this, his mad time in exile from them. He should not have been in this dismal forest, putting his life at risk with ignorant savages. All he needed was a locked room, ink and sheets of virgin paper. This was his anchor, and he embedded it with the few scraps of energy he had left. He instinctively knew that memory and imagination share the same ghost quarters of the brain, that they are like impressions in loose sand, footfalls in snow. Memory normally weighed more, but not here, where the forest washed it away, smoothing out every contour of its vital meaning. Here, he would use imagination to stamp out a lasting foundation that refused the insidious erosions buffeting around him. He would dream his way back to life with impossible facts. He gripped the man and the chain harder as they thundered towards dawn, the chapters unpeeling across the wet miles.
He came out of the nightmare into the nightmare. The scream of the whistle and the blistering sun illuminated worse than he had dreamt. He had no idea why the floor shuddered, why he held on to a dead man who stank of vegetation, or why he could not wake out of it. The train was slowing, the first signs of civilisation beginning to show. Fences and enclosures appeared by the side of the track, cut into the edge of the forest, which seemed to be loosening its grip on the land. Slower still, and the huts began to clutter and swarm around the track, gradually gaining height and culture. The shrill train braked, piercing its arrival to the approaching city. The corpse’s head jolted to one side, its marble black eyes staring at nothing. The Frenchman looked away with a regret that he could not explain, as the train slouched to a halt in the steaming station. He did not see that the wet, black orbs were still moving, still actively flinching to grab at any motes of light or meaning.
Loose, weird men arrived at the side of his flatbed and immediately started to tear and jostle at the chained trees. A man with red hair and a stiff uniform walked down the platform towards him. ‘Get off!’ he demanded.
The words had a magical effect. He slithered away from the trees and the corpse, off the flatbed and onto the station’s hard, steady ground. The red-haired man pointed him to the exit, down towards the engine where well-dressed people in clean attire milled about.
His legs buckled and shook, refusing to forget the agitations of the journey; indeed, they insisted on continuing them, acting them out on the motionless platform. His upright carriage reinstated itself outside the station, but he dithered in small, clotted circles. Hadn’t he forgotten something back there? Was he supposed to be alone? Wasn’t there somebody he was waiting for? Had he a bag, or a stick, or…?
An hour later, unclear and unreminded, he was on the road leading into the centre of the city. Sunburnt and ragged, his robes besmirched in all manner of filth, the hurrying citizens eyed him in disgust and gave him a wide berth as he stumbled on.
Charlotte was drinking tea on their balcony when she saw him. She had been vacantly gazing across the crowd for days, trying to distract her worried mind, when the source of her anxieties teetered into her vision. She dismissed the possibility at first, for the man zigzagging below was dressed in some kind of native clown costume; a ludicrous beggar, overdressed to draw attention to his serious mental plight. Then she recognised something in his trampled gait. She stood up, retrieving the binoculars which sat on the table beside her and pressing them to her hope. The haze and the dirt attempted to dull the lenses, but beneath them, his features still showed: the eyes, lost and trawling the street, seeking something familiar, something concrete. She rushed downstairs and ran through reception, calling out to the concierge: ‘Bring help, it is monsieur, he is hurt, bring help!’
When she reached him, he came to the end of his abilities. He stared at her for a second more, then fainted.
Three days later, he awoke, cool and clean, floating in the still, starched whiteness of fragrant sheets. The smell of their fresh, laundered brilliance painted the inside of his mind with perfectly chilled milk. One of his hands began to search under the blanket for a forgotten thing beside him.
‘You are safe now, Raymond.’ The voice was soft and confident, radiant and restful. It seemed to come from the entire room. ‘The doctor has given you something. Now you must rest. I will bring you some more beef tea shortly.’
The words made no sense, but soothed him back into slumber. A huge, brown cow stood next to the bed. It wobbled, balanced comically on train tracks made of meat jelly, as the doctor sat below it, pulling at its udders; streams of hissing tea jetting into his white enamel pail. He filled his syringe from the steaming fluid. It misted the glass tube of the instrument, filling the room with its moist, bovine vapour. The cow smiled through the fog with the most natural expression of quiet delight.
The rooms on the first floor had been squalid; now, their interior was simple and immaculate. The surrounding streets and alleyways teemed with the shiftless poor, the disposed and representatives of every tribe on earth, trying to scratch an existence outside the livid ghost of the old city wall. It was perfect. No one was known, and no one wanted to be. The seething carapace kept the clean, anonymous rooms shielded and safe.
The flat was carefully divided. The bedroom and parlour were Josephine’s; a small kitchen joined them to the long, open room beyond. A huge window jutted out of its centre into a blind courtyard. It worked as a skylight, and made the room light and airy, even when it was full of gloomy machines and boxes. This was Muybridge’s studio and workshop; his darkroom was built-in at the far end.