Imajica - The Reconciliator Part 26

There was a weight of sorrow here Jude didn't comprehend, but she had the means to ameliorate it on her tongue, and for all Celestine's cruelties Jude wasn't about to withhold the news.

"Sartori isn't dead," she said.

Celestine had turned her face to the wall, but now looked back at Jude. "Not dead?"

"I'll find him for you if you want," Jude said.

"You'd do that?"

"Yes."

"Are you his mistress?"

"Not exactly."

"Where is he? Is he near?"

"I don't know where he is. Somewhere in the city."

"Yes. Fetch him. Please, fetch him." She hauled herself up the wall. "He doesn't know my name, but I know him."

"So who shall I tell him you are?"

"Ask him ... ask him if he remembers Nisi Nirvana."

"Who?"

"Just tell him."

"Nisi Nirvana?"

"That's right."

Jude stood up and returned to the hole in the wall, but as she was about to step out Celestine recalled her.

"What's your name?" she asked.

"Judith."-"Well, Judith, not only do you stink of coitus, but you have in your hand some piece of flesh which you haven't given up clutching. Whatever it is, let it go."

Appalled, Jude looked down at her hand. The curiosity was still in her possession, half hanging from her fist. She pitched it away, into the dust.

"Do you wonder I took you for a wh.o.r.e?" Celestine remarked.

"Then we've both made mistakes," Jude replied, looking back at her. "I thought you were my salvation."

"Yours was the greater error," Celestine replied.

Jude didn't grace this last piece of spite with a reply but headed out of the cell. The mites that had exited Dowd's body were still crawling around aimlessly, looking for a new bolthole, but the flesh they'd vacated had upped and gone. She wasn't altogether surprised. Dowd was an actor to his core. He would postpone his farewell scene as long as possible, in the hope that he'd be at center stage when the final curtain fell. A hopeless ambition, given the fame of his fellow players, and one Jude wasn't foolish enough to share. The more she learned about the drama unfolding around her, with its roots in the tale of Christos the Reconciler, the more resigned she was to having little or no role in it. Like the Fourth Magi, expunged from the Nativity, she wasn't wanted in the Gospel about to be written; and having seen the pitiful place a king's testament had come to, she was not about to waste time writing her own.

13.

Clem's duties were done for the night. He'd been out since seven the previous evening, about the same business that took him out every night: the shepherding of those among the city's homeless too frail or too young to survive long on its streets with only concrete and cardboard for a bed. Midsummer Night was only two days away, and the hours of darkness were short and relatively balmy, but there were other stalkers besides the cold that preyed on the weak-all human-and the work of denying them their quarry took him through the empty hours after midnight and left him, as now, exhausted, but too full of feeling to lay down his head and sleep. He'd seen more human misery in the three months he'd been working with the homeless than in the four decades preceding that. People living in the extremes of deprivation within spitting distance of the city's most conspicuous symbols of justice, faith, and democracy: without money, without hope, and many (these the saddest) without much left of their sanity. When he returned home after these nightly treks, the hole left in him by Taylor's pa.s.sing not filled but at least forgotten for a while, it was with expressions of such despair in his head that his own, met in the mirror, seemed almost blithe.

Tonight, however, he lingered in the dark city longer than usual. Once the sun was up he knew he'd have little or no chance of sleeping, but sleep was of little consequence to him at the moment. It was two days since he'd had the visitation that had sent him to Judy's doorstep with tales of angels, and since then there'd been no further hint of Taylor's presence. But there were other hints, not in the house but out here in the streets, that powers were abroad which his dear Taylor was just one sweet part of.

He'd had evidence of this only a short time ago. Just after midnight a man called Tolland, apparently much feared among the fragile communities that gathered to sleep under the bridges and in the stations of Westminster, had gone on a rampage in Soho. He'd wounded two alcoholics in a back street, their sole offense to be in his path when his temper flowed. Clem had witnessed none of this, but had arrived after Tolland's arrest to see if he could coax from the gutter some of those whose beds and belongings had been demolished. None would go with him, however, and in the course of his vain persuasions one of the number, a woman he'd never seen without tears on her face until now, had smiled at him and said he should stay out in the open with them tonight rather than hiding in his bed, because the Lord was coming, and it would be the people on the streets who saw Him first. Had it not been for Taylor's fleeting reappearance in his life, Clem would have dismissed the woman's blissful talk, but there were too many imponderables in the air for him to ignore the vaguest signpost to the miraculous. He'd asked the woman what Lord this was that was coming, and she'd replied, quite sensibly, that it didn't matter. Why should she care what Lord it was, she said, as long as He came?

Now it was an hour before dawn, and he was trudging across Waterloo Bridge because he'd heard the psychopathic Tolland had usually kept to the South Bank and something odd must have happened to drive him across the river. A faint clue, to be sure, but enough to keep Clem walking, though hearth and pillow lay in the opposite direction.

The concrete bunkers of the South Bank complex had been a favorite bete grise of Taylor's, their ugliness railed against whenever the subject of contemporary architecture came up in conversation. The darkness presently concealed their drab, stained facades, but it also turned the maze of underpa.s.ses and walkways around them into terrain no bourgeois would tread for fear of his life or his wallet. Recent experience had taught Clem to ignore such anxieties. Warrens such as this usually contained individuals more aggressed against than aggressive, souls whose shouts were defenses against imagined enemies and whose tirades, however terrifying they might seem emerging from shadow, usually dwindled into tears.

In fact, he'd not heard a whisper from the murk as he descended from the bridge. The cardboard city was visible where its suburbs spilled out into the meager lamplight, but the bulk of it lay under cover of the walkways, out of sight and utterly quiet. He began to suspect that the lunatic Tolland was not the only tenant who'd left his plot to travel north and, stooping to peer into the boxes on the outskirts, had that suspicion confirmed. He headed into shadow, fishing his pencil torch from his pocket to light the way. There was the usual detritus on the ground: spoiled sc.r.a.ps of food, broken bottles, vomit stains. But the boxes, and the beds of newspaper and filthy blankets they contained, were empty. More curious than ever, he wandered on through the rubbish, hoping to find a soul here too weak or too crazy to leave, who could explain this migration. But he pa.s.sed through the city without finding a single occupant, emerging into what the planners of this concrete h.e.l.l had designed as a children's playground. All that remained of their good intentions were the grimy bones of a slide and a jungle gym. The paving beyond them, however, was covered in fresh color, and advancing to the spot Clem found himself in the middle of a kitsch exhibition: crude chalk copies of movie-star portraits and glamour girls everywhere underfoot.

He ran the beam over the ground, following the trail of images. It led him to a wall, which was also decorated, but by a very different hand. Here was no mere copyist's work. This image was on such a grand scale Clem had to play his torch beam back and forth across it to grasp its splendor. A group of philanthropic muralists had apparently taken it upon themselves to enliven this underworld, and the result was a dream landscape, its sky green, with streaks of brilliant yellow, the plain beneath orange and red. Set on the sands, a walled city, with fantastical spires.

The torch beam caught a glint off the paint, and Clem approached the wall to discover that the muralists had only recently left off their labors. Patches of the paint were still tacky. Seen at close quarters, the rendering was extremely casual, almost slapdash. Barely more than half a dozen marks had been used to indicate the city and its towers, and only a single snaking stroke to show the highway running from the gates. Moving his beam off the picture to illuminate the way ahead, Clem realized why the muralists had been so haphazard. They had been at work on every available wall, creating a parade of brightly colored images, many of which were far stranger than the landscape with the green sky. To Clem's left was a man with two cupped hands for a head, lightning jumping between the palms; to his right a family of freaks, with fur on their faces. Farther on was an alpine scene, fantasticated by the addition of several naked women, hovering above the snows; beyond it a skull-strewn veldt, with a distant train belching smoke against a dazzling sky; and beyond that again, an island set in the middle of a sea disturbed by a single wave, in the foam of which a face could be discovered. AH were painted with the same pa.s.sionate haste as the first, which fact lent them the urgency of sketches and added to their power. Perhaps it was his exhaustion, or simply the bizarre setting for this exhibition, but Clem found himself oddly moved by the images. There was nothing ingratiating or sentimental about them. They were glimpses into the minds of strangers, and he was exhilarated to find such wonders there.

With his gaze following the journey of pictures, he'd lost all sense of his own direction, but when he turned out his torch to look for the lamplight he saw a small fire burning up ahead, and in lieu of any other beacon he made his way towards it. The fire makers had occupied a small garden laid amid the concrete. It had perhaps once boasted a rose bed or flowering shrubs; benches, perhaps, dedicated to some dead city father. But now there was only a pitiful lawn, which barely greened the dirt it peered from. Gathered upon it were the tenants of the cardboard city, or some part of their number. Most were asleep, bundled up in their coats and blankets. But five or six were awake, standing around the fire and pa.s.sing a cigarette between them as they talked.

A dreadlocked black squatted on the low wall beside the garden's gate and, spotting Clem, rose to guard the entrance. Clem didn't retreat. There was no threat visible in the man's posture, nor anything but calm in the garden beyond. The sleepers did so quietly, their dreams seemingly kind. And the debaters around the fire spoke in whispers. When they laughed, which they did now and then, it wasn't the hard, desperate noise he'd heard among these clans, but light.

"Who are you, man?" the black asked him.

"My name's Clem. I got lost."

"You don't look like you been sleepin' rough, man."

"I haven't."

"So why you here?"

"Like I said: I got lost."

The man shrugged. "Waterloo Station's over in that direction," he said, pointing roughly back the way Clem had come. "But you got a long wait for the first train." He caught Clem's glance into the garden. "Sorry, man, you can't come in. If you got a bed, go to it."

Clem didn't move, however. Something about one of the men at the fire, standing with his back to the gate, rooted him to the spot.

"Who is that, who's talking now?" he asked the guard.

The man glanced around. "That's the Gentile," he said.

"The Gentile?" he said. "Surely you mean Gentle."

He hadn't raised his voice in order to name the man, but the syllables must have carried on the tranquil air, because as they went from Clem's lips the speaker stopped talking and slowly turned towards the gate. With the fire burning at his back his features were hard to make out, but Clem knew he'd made no error. The man turned back to his fellow debaters and said something to them Clem didn't catch. Then he left their fire and walked down to the gate.

"Gentle?" his visitor said. "It's Clem."

The black stood aside, opening the gate to let the man he'd called the Gentile step out of the garden. There he stood and studied the stranger.

"Do I know you?" he said. There was no enmity in his voice, but there was no warmth either. "I do, don't I?"

"Yes, you do, my friend," Clem replied. "Yes, you do."

They walked together along the river, leaving the sleepers and the fire behind them. The many changes in Gentle soon became apparent. He was of course far from certain of who he was, but there were other changes which were, Clem sensed, profounder still. There was a plainness about his speech, and about the expression on his face, which was by turns disturbing and calming. Something of the Gentle he and Taylor had known had gone, perhaps forever. But something was on its way to being gained in its place, and Clem wanted to be there when it was: to be the angel guarding that tender self.

"Did you paint the pictures?" he asked.

"With my friend Monday," Gentle said. "We made them together."

"I never saw you paint anything like that before."

"They're places I've been," Gentle told him, "and people I've known. They start coming back to me when I've got the colors. But it's slow. There's so much filling my head"- he put his fingers to his brow, which bore a series of ill-healed lacerations-"confusing me. You call me Gentle, but I've got other names."

"John Zacharias?"

"That's one. Then there's a man in me called Joseph Bellamy, and another called Michael Morrison, and one called Almoth, and one called Fitzgerald, and one called Sartori. They all seem to be me, Clem. But that's not possible, is it? I asked Monday, and Carol, and Irish, and they said people have two names, sometimes three, but never ten."

"Maybe you've lived other lives, Gentle, and you're remembering them."

"If that's true, I don't want to remember. It hurts too much. I can't think straight. I want to be one man with one life. I want to know where I begin and where I end, instead of going on and on."

"Why's that so terrible?" Clem said, genuinely unable to see the horror in such expansion.

"Because I'm afraid there'll be no end to it," Gentle replied. He spoke steadily, like a metaphysician who'd reached a precipice and was calmly describing the abyss below for the benefit of those who couldn't-or wouldn't- be with him there. "I'm afraid I'm joined "to everything else," he said. "And then I'm going to be lost. I want to be this man, or that man, but not every man. If I'm everyone I'm no one, and nothing."

He stopped his even stride and turned to Clem, putting his hands on Clem's shoulders.

"Who am I?" he said. "Just tell me. If you love me, tell me. Who am I?" "You're my friend."

It wasn't an eloquent reply, but it was the only one Clem had. Gentle studied his companion's face for a minute or more, as if calculating the potency of this axiom against his dread. And slowly, as he scanned Clem's features, a smile plucked at the corners of his mouth, and tears began to glisten hi his eyes.

"You see me, don't you?" he said softly. "Of course I see you."

"I don't mean with your sight, I mean with your mind. I exist in your head."

"Gear as crystal," Clem said.

That was truer now than it had ever been. Gentle nodded, and his smile spread.

"Somebody else tried to teach me this," he said. "But I didn't understand." He paused, musing. Then he said, "It doesn't matter what I'm called. Names are nothing. I am what I am in you." His arms slipped around Clem, into an embrace. "I'm your friend."

He hugged Clem hard, then stood away, the tears clearing.

"Who was it who taught me that?" he wondered. "Judith, maybe?"

He shook his head. "I see her face over and over," he said. "But it wasn't her. It was somebody who went away." "Was it Taylor?" Clem said. "Do you remember Taylor?"

"He knew me too?" "He loved you."

"Where is he now?"

"That's a whole other story."

"Is it?" Gentle replied. "Or is it all one?"

They walked on along the river, exchanging questions and answers as they went. At Gentle's request Clem recounted Taylor's story, from life to deathbed, from deathbed to light, and Gentle in his turn offered what clues he had to the nature of the journey he'd returned from. Though he could remember very few of the details, he knew that unlike Taylor's it had not taken him into brightness. He'd lost many friends along the way-their names mingled with those of the lives he'd lived-and seen the deaths of many others. But he'd also witnessed the wonders he'd painted on the walls. Sunless skies that shimmered green and gold; a palace of mirrors, like Versailles; vast, mysterious deserts and ice cathedrals full of bells. Listening to these traveler's tales, the vistas of hitherto unknown worlds spreading in all directions, Clem felt his earlier ease with the notion of an unbounded self, going into some limitless adventure, falter. The very divisions he'd happily tried to persuade Gentle from at the outset of this report looked tempting now. But they were a trap, and he knew it. Their comfort would smother and hobble him eventually. He had to unburden himself of his old, stale ways of thinking if he was to travel alongside this man into places where dead souls were light and being was a function of thought.

"Why did you come back?" he asked Gentle after a time.

"I wish I knew," Gentle replied.

"We should find Judith. I think maybe she knows more about this than either of us."

"I don't want to leave these people, Clem. They took me in."

"I understand that," Clem said. "But Gentle, they can't help you now. They don't understand what's going on."

"Nor do we," Gentle reminded him. "But they listened when I told my story. They watched me paint, and they asked me questions, and when I told them the visions I'd had they didn't mock me." He stopped and pointed over the river towards the Houses of Parliament. "The lawgivers'll be coming there soon," he said. "Would you trust what I just told you to them? If we said to them that the dead come back in sunlight and there are worlds where the sky's green and gold, what would they say?" "They'd say we were crazy."

"Yes, And throw us into the gutter with Monday and Carol and Irish and all the rest."

"They're not in the gutter because they had visions, Gentle," Clem said. "They're there because they've been abused, or they've abused themselves."

"Which means they can't cover their despair the way the rest can. They've got no distractions from their pain. So they get drunk and crazy, and the next day they're even more lost than they were the day before. But I'd still rather trust them than all the bishops and the ministers. Maybe they're naked, but isn't that a holy state?"

"It's also a vulnerable one," Clem pointed out. "You can't drag them into this war."

"Who said there's going to be a war?" "Judith," Clem replied. "But even if she hadn't, it's in the air."

"Does she know who the enemy's going to be?" "No. But it'll be a hard battle, and if you care for these people you won't put them in the front line. They'll be there when the war's over."

Gentle pondered this for a time. Finally, he said, "So they'll be the peacemakers."

"Why not? They can spread the good news."

Gentle nodded. "I like that," he said. "And so will they."

"So shall we go and find Judith?"

"I think that'd be wise. But first, I have to say goodbye."