Love as a Shattered Kaleidoscope |
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A beach: windswept, bleak and overcast, features of the cliffs dissolving in a white spray as though being erased from the world.
Windswept kisses from an eroded rocky headland.
Nowhere.
I remember this place. Walking through a barren town to a blank white beach and a flat grey ocean. It felt like the end of the world.
5
It was a windy night. Dark silhouettes and jagged shadows of swaying trees against the windows. I was alone at home when the telephone rang.
“The pictures are moving again,” said a cryptic voice, and then hung up. It was Hugo. I knew he wanted me to come over, tonight, soon as possible.
Hugo lived in a house that was once the residence of an eccentric architect; he had designed his opulent dwelling with a creek and waterfall running right through the middle. The upstairs corridor was a boardwalk, with Japanese style bridges into the bedrooms. The lounge room was a foyer in which the final cascade of water showered into a circular pool, with large orange goldfish swimming around.
I pulled up outside his house. The front steps climbed beside a large, deep pond that flowed out from under the walls, swirling like a subtle maelstrom. From here the creek trickled away unassisted down the slope.
Hugo greeted me at the door with troubled restraint. “It is a windy night to be travelling outside,” he said. “Sarah is out tonight, practising for her musical. Can I get you a drink?”
“Thank you,” I said, following him in. He passed me a glass. I sat down on a lounge overlooking the waterfall.
“So how was the journey?” asked Hugo with sudden cheerfulness.
“Fine,” I said.
“Traffic wasn’t too bad?”
“No.”
“The weather is quite cool, what?”
“Hugo,” I cut in, “you said the pictures were moving?”
Hugo frowned solemnly. He seemed dismayed that I should have brought it up, even though he had brought it up initially. This was the third time he had called me over on some mysterious and bizarre pretext. I knew he was prone to panic attacks when his wife was out. He had also become convinced recently that his house was haunted.
“It started about a week ago,” he said quietly. “Just in the photo over the fireplace. I didn’t know what to do. Since then it has only worsened. It’s affected all the pictures. All the photos I have of her are now blurred. It’s like she is disappearing from the past.” Hugo winced. “We cover up our mistakes, move on and don’t speak of them again… The past anyway is a fictional representation that changes by the minute according the present.”
He said the last bit off-hand, as though everyone knew this.
He handed me a photo and I saw he was right: there was a blurred figure where once there was a person.
“We can’t keep ignoring this,” I said. “We have to get to the bottom of it. Do you have anything else of hers?”
Hugo frowned.
“I keep some of the old memorabilia in the attic,” he said. “You can have it. I’ve no use for it myself; I keep it only as the bonds of memory dictate. That you can’t throw away what has happened to you.”
I rose from the couch to go upstairs. He held out a hand for me to stop.
“But it would be better if we did not have to go. The boundaries of that room have been seeping.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, but it was starting to worry me.
We climbed up the creaky stairs to the attic. Shaded lightbulb on the landing divides everything into black and white, like an old film.
“This room, the attic, we gave over to the ghosts,” Hugo explained casually, opening a rattly door. There is a strong wind blowing here, despite the tiny window being fastened shut. Your hair blows wildly around. “It is nothing, just a draught,” Hugo lies. Rustling sound and whistling through the cracks. Sense of desolation.
“It was a compromise,” he admitted, from outside. “They would have taken one of the rooms anyway. So we gave them here. We don’t come up here much.” Old memories. Dust. Faded photo books flapping in the breeze. Keep out sign. Leave it to them.
“We piled up all the old scrapbooks and diaries, photos and things that might remind us, into the room, and locked it shut. As the dust piled up and the years took our guard away they moved in.”
The room is a chaos of personal possessions. Mouldy cardboard boxes spilling out ancient Christmas cards. Years of nostalgia. Hugo lifted one large box in particular, amongst the debris of miscellaneous accumulations, and took it back down the stairs with him, making a careful point of locking the attic door behind him.
On the landing he revealed more.
“Ghosts are an infestation like any pest – silverfish, white ants, dust mites, roaches... These creatures live off scraps in the dark, unkempt corners of apparent cleanliness. Ghosts, on the other hand, live off nostalgia. The dark-closet secrets in an otherwise spotless life. They feast off the scraps of our memories up there and gorge like vaporous parasites, on our photo albums and diaries. We keep them at bay only by feeding them more, fresh memories and token souvenirs to keep them occupied. Or else they might break out and harass the rest of the house with their deathly intensity.
“But something has discontented them lately. The howling from upstairs is louder than just the wind in the cracks, the door keeps creaking open, the locks pulled silently aside. They are breaking out, but slowly. The boundaries of that room have been seeping.”
I had to track down Ariel. See if the same thing has happened to her, or if this weird effect is limited only to photos of her. “Do you have her last address?”
“It’s in there somewhere.”
I emptied out the box of memoirs and searched through, bugs and spiders scuttling away each time a new layer of dust was unearthed. I pulled out a letter from her.
“How long do you think we have?”
“I’m not sure what time means anymore,” Hugo replied unhelpfully. He was gathering together a box of junk -– movie tickets, paid bills, magazines -– and preparing to take it upstairs.
“More scraps for them,” he explained. “They’ll become distempered if I don’t feed them something new twice a week. This should keep ‘em occupied for awhile.”
6
Ariel was moving house when I paid her a visit. Large items of furniture being carried out by anonymous workmen in identical overalls, revealing bare plaster walls beneath. I sat down on a couch opposite her, but was soon forced to move by the workmen when the next van arrived.
Her smile at the door was warm and lovely. “How are you? It has been years since I last saw you!”
Her front room was crammed full with furniture and boxes, piled up to the ceiling in jumbled, unsteady columns. Boxes pressed against the window, miscellaneous junk and possessions stacked out on the street. The workmen would walk between us regularly as we drank our tea, carefully attacking the piles, narrowly avoiding bringing the whole thing down on us all.
“It is weird seeing you again,” she admitted. “You and Hugo were so close. I’m glad you are still friends. I never wanted things to work out the way they did.”
“It’s in the past now,” I said with a forced smile, and then laughed at the terrible irony of what I had just said.
“I’m glad he has a wife. I remember Sarah, she seemed very lovely.” She reflected. “I’m happy now, too. My husband looks after me. We’re very happy.” She seemed to say it mechanically.
“What about your art? Your poetry and paintings?”
“I don’t do that anymore,” she said. “The kids keep me far too occupied.”
I feel I know her, and yet I don’t recognise her. She is a different person; she has a normal life, a normal husband, a normal job. Is this the price of knowing anyone, even briefly? The person I used to love is gone, transformed by time and distance into an unrecognisable shape. Hugo was right. The past is not safe. The events we built our lives, our selves upon, are shifting into unstable new forms.
This is what I feared. Not animosity, just nothing. No passion, no tension. No memory of grander emotions. We carry out a routine, soulless conversation, our hearts already occupied, no trace at all -– not even ashes -– leftover from the fire that once seemed like the whole world.
3
They were demolishing our old neighbourhood, tearing apart houses and replacing them with ugly, subdivided town-house complexes. Suburbia that had always bloated on its complacent tranquillity had never seemed in such turmoil, as though enacting on a physical scale some deep, inner religious or philosophical crises of the inhabitants.
They are demolishing the building you work in. While you are still working in it. Every day the hallway to the office is shorter, the walls are eaten by the sky, until there remains just a skeletal staircase and an uncomfortable room, attached on a limb, at an angle, like an awkward tree house, lurching in the breeze, that shakes on its fragile pivot and rains clods of dust and grit. The archives and storerooms either side have been eaten away. Papers and files still flap about in the breeze, little birds and butterflies. There is no room for the past. A great machine with a claw stands ready at either end of the building, impatiently waiting to demolish the present too.
This is not the first time. It is, rather, the usual technique. There was a house nearby, an old house, historic, protected. They couldn’t touch it. So the developers dug around it and under it, leaving the house on an island pinnacle, accessible only by a gangway. Finally they dug away the last foundations and left the house suspended in the air. (It promptly fell to the ground and smashed.)
I walk in to the one remaining room, the main office, and even as I step through the doorway the machine outside strikes and pulls off more of the stairway.
It may be difficult getting back down.
Inside the office are piles of files, layers of papers; an endless flow of paperwork like a waterfall across the room through various sized “in/out” boxes. What are these important tasks? They come in through the top window, fax and printer, post box and pigeonhole. The room is a pipeline; the objects frozen for a moment in passage mean nothing out of context. Like one second of a symphony, or a single frame of a movie. You would have to follow the whole trail to make sense of it, and that is much bigger than any person.
Nothing is the same. It has all changed, leaving false impressions like illusory watermarks in the sand. There you are, here am I -- but it is all different. All I have is some bizarre, beautiful memories that do not fit the facts. How can I live in this confusion: knowing the truth is hidden far behind impenetrable depths of subjectivity? I want to tell you why it’s over. Why I don’t feel the same. How you’re not the same.
“The entire world is undergoing some terrible metamorphosis,” I conclude. “Changing shape before our eyes, until there is no evidence for what we remember things used to be, so we start to doubt our own minds. I’m thinking of packing up and leaving. All this change, I’m not sure I can take much more.”
You nod calmly. “Nothing is fixed. But this is a blessing as well as a curse. Life is constant change. It is a flowing tide, like a river. You have to stop resisting change. Resistance is causing blockages in the river.”
Just then the whole room shakes, a crack appears in the wall.
“How do you expect me to trust this kind of process?” I ask, pointing at the impending destruction around us. “How do you expect me to believe it will protect us, something so much bigger than two single people?”
An awkward silence follows. What can you say when you don’t believe in what you have, when you don’t trust each other? And so we have nothing more to say to each other. Shadows breed in the empty spaces between us. Philosophical doubts and uncertainties fill every unbearable pause. It’s all gone. You are not the same person I knew. So what happened to her? Did she even exist? And if not, how can I, a person you once knew, be said to exist either?
“I’m finishing at about three or four,” you say, glancing at the growing crack. “I can meet you then?”
“I hope the building lasts that long?” I remark.
“This is happening everywhere,” you assure me, “There are whole industries emerging to capitalise on every transaction of energy -– including destruction. But I am glad you came to see me today. This is a fixed point, a life raft in the tides of confusion.”
I don’t quite believe you. I never really will again.
And in the background the sea of traffic rumbles and groans: great waves of cars rolling and crashing against the shores of the city; trucks groan mournful echoes against the endless friction; drowning pedestrians wailing in eternal anguish; the cacophonous crescendo drowning out our words like the white noise of life, the ever-present chaos underneath our façade of order.
“I can’t come tonight. I won’t. Why re-live it? Why pretend?
Actually, I would like to. Maybe I can.” I seem to have said both sentences, yes and no, at once – like an ambiguous phrase that carries two contradictory meanings within; like the map of a quantum particle spinning several directions at once; a wavefunction with two completely different properties. I wonder what will happen tonight, whether I will follow both contradictory courses of action at the same time.
“You make me so sad sometimes,” you say.
1
There is a wasps hive buzzing in the downstairs room. I can hear them inside the walls, crawling out the cracks, more and more every day. I can hear the buzzing as I descend the spiral stairs into the downstairs living room, and every day it is a bit louder and busier, the swarm becomes an elemental tempest, a fury of angry stinging air.
I’ve tried in vain to get rid of it. I don’t know how they get in or where they come from. The hive itself remains unseen, somewhere in the spaces between the walls, growing and pulsating as the workers and soldiers multiply.
Something is killing them; they lie dead in piles like black dust on the windowsill and couch covers.
7
So I visit my old friend Howard. Letterbox labelled No. 0. He works a secret job at some scientific institute, which he says gives him so many ideas he is left with a surplus at the end of each day, which he tries to expend in bizarre hobbies and activities.
He has been expecting me and, as he opens the door, nods, and mutters under his breath, “Something to show you... Something odd been going on. Something not right. Clue. Downstairs.”
I try to talk to Howard about the latest news, but he looks about distractedly and ushers me toward the spiral stairs. “How about a dip in the downstairs?” he offers. I agree.
Howard used to have a pet octopus in a tank downstairs, but as the octopus grew larger it required a bigger tank each day, until eventually Howard decided it easier to flood the entire downstairs. The octopus roams liberally, while Howard generally keeps to the upstairs. He built a staircase to the top level and installed a new front door. Extra electrical insulation. Looking into the downstairs windows is like looking into a fish tank.
Burglars have run into unexpected difficulties with his property.
The octopus is not exactly friendly, but neither is it completely inhospitable to visitors.
It is warm summer day and the water a very pleasant temperature. Dress in diving gear and descend the stairwell. The paintings on the wall shimmer once you are under, like crossing a magical barrier. Looking into them the distinction between two and three-dimensional reality seems near irrelevant. The textures have a new translucence. Swimming about the drowned rooms is an eerie feeling. Paddle through the living room, frozen from time, the bookcase full of soggy decaying ideas, clots of words floating around like clumps of seaweed. (The more broad-minded of the authors accepting their new situation with a smile.) The wall angles are all soft and flexible, melted wax. You feel you can bend the rules of the world.
This is my haven when the world seems full of sharp angles and rigid facts.
The octopus is always moving periodically to a new nest. At the moment the octopus has its nest in the cupboard in the old bedroom and it stares at us with wide unblinking eyes as we float past, eight spidery tentacles circling like an organic underwater bicycle. We are nearly out of the way when it lurches forward, swishing through the water toward us to see what is going on, who has entered its territory. We stop still. I am used to friends’ dogs barking at me like this, but…
“Rreally!” I remarked through the snorkel, “this occtoppus should know mme by now!”
It backs away, looking satisfied. Squirts a cloud of ink as a kind of arrogant greeting.
The bedroom furniture is all floating loose. The mattress waving on its own, ripples. The lamp like an inverted anchor, climbing on its leash to the ceiling. The television in the corner looking outdated.
Howard swims up next to me. A gasp of bubbles gurgles from the mask. I realise he is talking to me.
“Wwwe ccccouldn’t ttttalk uuuupstairs,” he explains in a disarmingly gargling voice. “Itt iis nnot sssafe ttthere aaanymore.”
I can barely make out his words, but still I try to answer.
“Whhhhy iiis itt nnnot sssafe?”
“Yyyou were ffolllllllowed…”
“Bby whhhoo?” I slur.
“Your mmemmmorrries are brrreaking loose…”
“Whhhat?” I snap.
“The ppast has ffound you.”
“This iss rridicullous!” I exclaim. “Wwe ccan’t ttalk dddown hherrre. Ii ccan’tt hhearr yyou ccclearlrly.”
Howard nods. We swim up to a space in the stairwell where there is air. We take off the masks.
He resumes his exposition in a normal voice. “As I was saying, imagine if events in the past are not locked in their place, but have the power to change themselves around, to escape their frames and roles and pursue the present. Like animals that feign stillness when you look, only to dart around when your back is turned. We will all soon be pursued by false memories. And where will we be then? For if the past isn’t permanent, if it isn’t fixed -– then where are you, in the present? Living a lie. Everything you know is uncertain, everything you based your life on might change -- might have already changed -- everything you are might be rendered meaningless. That’s why we had to talk underwater. Like sound and light, time itself travels slower underwater.”
I was staggered at the enormity of what he was suggesting. “But this could be catastrophic. Our whole lives will fall apart if the past changes, if it’s not secure. It’s the foundation we base the entire present upon.”
“Exactly. It’s almost as though a simple mathematical sum like 2 x 3 had a completely different answer every time you did it. Suddenly all certainty, all security is gone. The past is the science we build our lives upon, on the trusting assumption that it is fixed and done with, and that it really happened that way. If our memories mislead us, then what will we do when the past catches up with us?”
“You speak as if these memories from the past have conscious intentions.”
“They are simply trying to catch up with the present. They act blindly. All the things you buried, all the things you dealt with and finished with, will come back to haunt you, ‘unresolve’ themselves, free of the chains of being done, free of past tense.”
“I don’t understand how this can happen,” I said in disbelief. I was drying off. Howard suggested salad for lunch. He handed me a bowl and led me to the verandah. I notice how much like my own house it suddenly looks.
“Consider that in Western society the concept of time is arbitrary and very largely our of own invention. We’ve imposed a fictional constriction on the four-dimensional world (the fourth dimension being, of course, time) by ordering it into this unnatural, mathematical time-continuum – rather like the tight corsets worn by ladies in Victorian times imposed an unnatural constriction on the waist and lungs. You see, by ‘under-acknowledging’ the past, by sweeping it out of the present and out of sight, by burying it and moving on as quickly as we can, by denying that things were ever different, refusing to acknowledge the past ever existed, and forgetting everything, we’ve created a serious imbalance in the true time-continuum. With the rather catastrophic consequence that the past itself is attempting to correct and restore the balance by invading the present. And who knows what will happen then?”
Out the back is the abandoned lighthouse tower Howard was working on, when he went through a phase of being obsessively nostalgic for the ocean. We climb up it to eat lunch, looking over the nearby hills as the afternoon sun slides down. The sky is gone.
And in the background a swell of evil clouds blooms out from an unseen horizon, filling the sky like a large dark hand swimming towards us.
It was raining without clouds today. A warm blue in the heavens, but weird large wet raindrops were being blown in from some distant, forlorn gloomy skies.
It is to time to move on. I’ll leave just after sunset. I can’t wait here any longer. The other day while demolishing a neighbouring house they unearthed a human jawbone. I don’t want to wait around to see what else they uncover.
Playing with a concept. Time-travel. What if the dimension of time was completely removed and I was free to skip and circle between scenes of my life aimlessly and at whim?
I would go back to how things were, and make one different choice.