It would be one of those
years where nobody could imagine what was going to happen next.
There was a certain eeriness infusing everything, owing to the
conjunction of two events, on the surface unrelated to one-another:
the death of the Mars astronaut Gabriel Summers, and the sudden
return from obscurity and subsequent death of the glam rock icon
Tillinghast Nebula. These events we imagined to be unrelated on any
kind of literal level; in a subterranean logic of symbol and
coincidence, however, the conjunction was bizarre, and pregnant with
troubling resonances. Tillinghast Nebula's first big hit Mission
Command (Radio Silence from the American Capsule) was a
moon-landing novelty record about a doomed astronaut. In fact, when
the Martian mission fell apart, and it first became apparent that
Gabriel Summers would be stranded alone on the Red Planet, many
people evoked the memory of Mission Command and
its powerful depiction of a sympathetic, almost umbilical connection
between humanity and the astronaut which they are powerless to save.
The
connections went deeper, however, as Tillinghast had always presented
himself to some degree as an alien marooned on our
planet, as isolated in his own way as Summers' was in the arid
desolation and radio silence of Mars. Tillinghast, though he had
referenced many cosmic locations, real and imaginary, during his
sci-fi glam rock phase, would always be associated primarily with the
Red Planet. Then there was the timing of the events. Elor Summers,
the venture capitalist and space entrepreneur announced in August
that the Mars colonisation project had suffered a series of tragic
set-backs, which resulted in the death of fourteen of the
colonialists, leaving only his own son Gabriel alive. It was surely
around this time that rumours first began to circulate on Noosfeed
that Tillinghast Nebula was emerging from nearly a decade of
seclusion, putting the finishing touches to a new record that would
be released early in the coming year.
All
through September and October, the world watched Gabriel Summers, the
loneliest man in the solar system, via the video feed from TOTO, the
robot rover that followed his every move, beaming back his daily
struggles to millions of tablets and phones across the earth. The
signal was one way; owing to the disastrous malfunction of Elor
Summers' experimental technologies, we could not communicate with
Gabriel. We could not tell him how much love we had for him, how
ardently we hoped that he would persevere, and find some measure of
happiness and reward in his isolated existence on the Red Planet. We
could only watch the TOTO feed, hoping perhaps, by the same implicit
belief in sympathetic magic which prompts people to cheer at athletes
on a television screen, that the global force of our emotional
investment and concentration, the perfect synchronisation of our
hopes and desires, might somehow travel the vast distance between
earth and Mars, another signal bouncing invisibly across the
blackness.
How
was it that our emotional lives had became so entwined with the
fortunes of the lonely astronaut? For years, it seems to me, all our
minds had been blurring together, ever since Noosfeed superseded all
the previous search engines and social networks, and gradually we
spent more and more of our days scrolling through this vast,
fragmentary hive mind. Though few of us cared to acknowledge it, we
no longer consumed books, magazines, or news in any conventional
sense of the term; rather we contributed our share to an endless
stream of transitory points of emotional engagement that were always
moving downstream, a ceaseless flow of ironic hieroglyphics,
Pavlovian arguments, and conspiratorial rumours that moulded our
minds, and melded them together until all experience seemed vacuous
unless it could be shared on Noosfeed, and our private consciousness
felt either valueless, or something precious which we could no longer
regain. In this fashion, our minds had ebbed together in a communal
retreat from a world which seemed beyond our ability to understand or
exert any control over; a world which we all felt intuitively was
falling apart and coming undone while we shared our piecemeal,
opiated Noosfeed dreams.
It
was a natural, then, that our emotional lives, already concretized as
a single, amalgamated entity by Noosfeed, could become affixed to
that of the lonely astronaut. Feeling subconsciously that society
and culture had reached a dead-end spiral on planet earth, we could
look to Gabriel Summers as an embodiment of our collective hope that
mankind might perhaps succeed elsewhere in the universe. That we
could start afresh; that we would not renew the same mistakes, the
same interminable tragedies, which had marred our earthly cradle, and
sapped our great promise. This was the scale of the burden we placed
on the astronaut's shoulders; we had made him an every-man figure
whose great ill-fortune and sufferings would be a test by which the
whole worth of the species might be judged. Just as our own lives
had become increasingly artificial and untethered from tangible
reality, Gabriel Summers existed in world of hyper-reality: in the
brooding, blasted landscape of the dead planet, and the daily
struggle to survive and remain sane, there was no distraction of any
kind from the sheer facts of his existence.
We
watched him as he worked on the terraformed pavilion which would
provide food when his supply of protein pills ran out. We shared his
appalling loneliness, the deep troughs of his despair, the moments
when he contemplated suicide. Our moods followed precisely after his
in their every ebb and flow; you could feel it in the air when
Gabriel smiled at TOTO, and faced the chores of his day with courage
and equanimity. Market fluctuations, crime and suicide rates, the
fashions and sexual currents of big cities, everything on earth
became entwined with the distant activities of the lonely astronaut,
with subtle nuances in the language of his space-suited body, with
rocks and patterns glimpsed in the ochre dust of the dead planet.
When Gabriel began to speak of a presence encountered out
there in the brooding Martian valleys and desert expanses, even the
world's most ardent atheists thrilled privately with the notion of
experiencing the emergence of a new religious gnosis, specific to the
Martian environment. The night that he told TOTO that Mars was
thronged with ghosts, we wondered if his sanity was slipping away
again.
In
those same days when Gabriel Summers spoke in halting whispers of a
host of Martian ghosts, the world was also stirring with the rumoured
return of Tillinghast Nebula, the decadent glam rock icon from the
Golden Age of Pop. Tillinghast had all but vanished for a decade; no
records, no tours, even his sporadic acting career had dried up.
Nevertheless, the mystique of the ageing pop star grew if anything
more palpable in the years of his absence. The myths of his youth
were renewed, and we almost began to believe again that he might
really be an alien. Born in the same year as the flying saucer, and
finding his first flush of fame in the shadow of the Apollo
moon-landing, Nebula would always be identified with the complex web
of anxieties and desires surrounding the figure of the
extraterrestrial. Early on in his career, he found some happy
serendipity in the double-meaning of the word star: the
distant luminescences of the night sky, and the new type of humanity
created by the mass media. The star in the sky was a vast thing
rendered tiny by great gulfs of interstellar space; the star in the
media landscape was a relatively insignificant thing (a person like
any other) magnified to giant proportions by some alchemy of
technology and fantasy.
Just
as the journey to the stars had been regarded as an apotheosis in
outer space, Tillinghast reasoned that the ascension to the status
of an icon in the media age could be an apotheosis of inner space.
The surrealists dreamed of collapsing the distinction between the
unconscious and the world of everyday reality; the star achieved this
by reifying his private fantasies, and making them the communal
fantasy of his audience. Tillinghast was particularly obsessed with
the archetypal story of a being who descends, either voluntarily or
by misadventure, from a higher realm to a lower one. In the lower
realm, he is a messianic figure, a teacher, and a subversive
disruptor of social mores and conventions. Like all
mystically-minded rockers, Tillinghast was particularly enamoured of
the figure of Dionysus, the exotic outsider-god who foments an
ecstatic, underground gnosis in woodland groves and hidden places, a
new mystery cult whose sacraments are irresistible to women,
hysterics, and other figures marginalized by the dominant society. In
the twentieth century, this fallen god had to be an extraterrestrial;
Superman had proved that. So Tillinghast created an image which was
androgynous like Dionysus, but also bizarre and otherworldly, like a
fashion-spread from some other dimension, normally only accessible
via magic mushrooms or psychotic episode. The image was repellent
and absurd to the middle-aged gate-keepers of dystopian orthodoxy,
but held a instant, talismanic power over the still protean
adolescents.
For
Tillinghast, the story of the rock star as alien messiah could only
end in one of two ways. In some versions, the alien is destroyed by
his own fans, dismembered and consumed as a transubstantiated body, a
host or plasmate of some indecipherable future sexuality. In the
other version, he is destroyed by his own ego, having become tainted
by the lures and deceptions of the lower world. Lost in a stupor of
satiation and boredom, he gazes forlornly at the stars he has lost,
never to be regained. Working around variations of this basic mythic
template, Nebula created a dizzying variety of science fictional
personae during the height of his fame: Technical Tilly the
Erotic Scientist from the Crab Nebula, Apollo Elsewhere and
the Venusian Teddy Boys, the Diamond Android Geisha, and so on.
After the glam boom faded, an increasingly cocaine-frazzled
Tillinghast went through his “Germanic phase”, a period marked by
his obsession with Wilhelm Reich, the “Odic Force” theorized by
Baron Carl von Reichenback, Nazi occultism, and the so-called “Berlin
school” of experimental electronic music. In a notoriously erratic
Melody Maker interview, Nebula declared that the Apollo 11
Lunar Module was “clearly an Orgone Accumulator, part of some
Masonic rite.”
In
the late 70s, Nebula hired a crack team of Philadelphia soul session
musicians to record The Unmoved Mover on the Dance Floor, a
concept album that boldly mixed earthy disco grooves with Scholastic
metaphysics. On that record, his persona was a mysterious
Gatsby-like figure who haunts various discotheques, elegant but
aloof, dancing without passion and seemingly enslaved by an elusive
memory. Occasionally, he brings revellers back to an LA mansion
where sombre cheetahs lounge by the swimming pool, and a sinister
valet, stationed in the rest room, spooks revellers by declaiming in
a neutral voice: “Welcome to the Villa of Ormen.” When
the guests enquire as the whereabouts of the host, he replies:
“You've swallowed it.”
In
the 80s, tapping into the new Zeitgeist of conspicuous consumption,
Nebula reinvented himself once again as the Thin White Speculator (or
the Tycoon Who Sold the World to Off-World Interests). A sinister,
bespectacled figure clad in Armani, the Speculator amassed his vast
fortune through a series of technologically advanced patents which
transformed the world: a 3D Projector Hi-Fi System that rendered the
Pop Star obsolete; Aseity, the lucid dreaming
aid/anti-depressant drug that replaced film, television, video games,
and even politics to a large extent; Impolex R, the new synthetic
fabric whose colour changes in tandem with the mood of the wearer,
leading to a post-privacy era in which monogamy is obsolete due to
the immediate blatancy of sexual arousal. In this anaesthetized new
culture inaugurated by the Speculator, everybody wears skin-tight
Impolex R onesies, transforming the streets into an impressionistic
riot of fluctuating mood-tones; people engage in open sexual
encounters in office cubicles and sub-way trains, before retiring to
the seclusion of their conapts, where they drift away on ultra-vivid
Aseity trips, complex Choose Your Adventure
psychodramas aided by New Age music and 3D Hi Fi visualizations.
The
Speculator himself continues to wear Armani (on the few occasions
where he had worn an Impolex R onesie, it remained stationary in an
unearthly shade of deep purple, suggesting the presence of an emotion
unknown and utterly indecipherable to other human beings.) He plays
the market without passion, and sits at restaurant terraces, watching
the sand fall through an hourglass which he carries at all times in
his briefcase. Like all Nebula's latter personae, there is an air of
abstraction and aloofness, a suggestion of an alien who has completed
a fact-finding mission, and now longs to be repatriated back to his
homeland. Earth time, however, is much slower, and the memory of his
homeland is diminishing, day by day, becoming fragmentary, dreamlike,
the subject for a work of art or a tremulous religious faith. At the
end of the album, Tillinghast has come full-circle; the Speculator
has resolved to become a cosmic glam rock star, in order to shake
humanity out of the glazed stupor his off-world technologies have
inaugurated, and to provide for himself a mythic record of his
homeland which will survive his own forgetfulness.
Of
all the personae Nebula adopted, perhaps the most bizarre and
uncharacteristic was David Jones, the timid, unfulfilled working
class youth he played in his film debut Looking Glass (1975).
Written by Nebula in collaboration with its director, the ill-fated
Kenneth Anger associate Chris Arlington, Looking Glass was
a mediation on the nature of fame and the perennial theme of the
doppelgänger. David Jones is the polar opposite of
Tillinghast Nebula: a shy and repressed young Londoner who works as a
night porter in a slightly seedy East End hotel called the Sheldrake
Inn. David was raised by his over-bearing mother Janis (Diana Dors),
his father having died in WW2. He has an older brother who has been
hospitalized for some unspecified illness, probably schizophrenia, a
tragedy which hovers unspoken over David's relationship with Janis.
At
the start of the movie, David is twenty-six years old. He has just
separated from his wife and young child, for reasons never clearly
specified, although Janis harangues him for “not being a bloody
man.” Becoming alienated from his boisterous, going nowhere
friends, and crippled by shyness towards the opposite sex, David
begins to slide into a depression. Suffering from insomnia, he works
by night in the hotel, and by day walks the streets aimlessly,
brooding over the apparently unending litany of humiliations that his
life has become. One day, he wanders on a whim into an antique and
curio store. Inside the shop, he pauses to look at his reflection in
an art-Deco mirror. The image that greets him, though clearly that
of his own face, is a completely different person in every other
regard: a glamorous, otherworldly and androgynous figure, with long
hair, elaborate make-up, and an expression of self-confidence
bordering on mockery.
Alarmed
by the apparition in the mirror, which seems to manifest his own
latent potentialities and submerged desires, David runs out into the
street, and finds himself in a London somehow different from the one
he is familiar with. Hair and clothing styles have changed;
news-paper headlines adopt a peculiar tone, and the billboards
advertise unrecognisable products that appeal to desires more
commonly suppressed. Many people stop and stare at David, and soon
he realizes why: there are posters everywhere for the androgynous
double he saw the mirror, who seems to be some kind of pop-star
called Tillinghast Nebula. The attention from the pedestrians
becomes more intense, and he hears their whispering voices amplified
like the drone of an angry beehive:
“Is
that him?”
“It
can't be him, he looks normal.”
“It
must be him, look at his eyes.”
“The
hair is completely different.”
“He
must be in disguise.”
“They
do that sometimes, to see if they get noticed.”
“Tillinghast...is
that you?”
“He
was a bloody poof on Top of the Tops.”
“It
is him.”
“Tilly,
over here!”
“Over
here, Tilly!
Panicked,
David starts running, and a sequence of rapid, jagged cuts suggest a
nervous breakdown of some kind. He comes to back in the antique
shop, looking at the mirror again, but now his reflection has
returned to normal. The proprietor, a tall, elderly gentleman with a
kindly, if distracted, expression, addresses him from the counter:
“I check the looking glass myself, Sir, from time to time, just to
make sure I haven't gone anywhere since the last time I looked! But there
I be, always looking back at myself. You'd have to be quick on the
draw, Sir, to beat the man in the mirror! It's a queer life for him,
though, no? First thing in the morning and last thing at night,
grooming and washing and shaving and squeezing spots and scrubbing
and looking, Sir, looking very intently, as though either of
you knew any better who the other really was. How does he occupy
himself in-between times, that's what I wonder. Does he simply sleep
all day, in a quiet, empty mirror world? Or does he have his
freedom, Sir, while you're not at the mirror, his freedom to wander
around in a empty world, all the while perhaps wondering why you get
to live in the real world, and he only in the looking glass one? It
occurs to me, Sir, that the man in the mirror must resent us
bitterly, we who he must imitate in all our private moments, in our
vanities and insecurities. It seems to me that sometimes people
change, abruptly, without any apparent cause. Well, Sir,
might it not be that their reflection found a way to take a hold of
them, and swap places? What would a reflection do, I wonder,
given autonomy over a real body? I think about these kinds of
things, Sir, when the shop is quiet.”
A
few years pass. David starts working as a clerk for a legal firm,
and marries again, this time to art teacher Sara (Jane Asher). Bored
and frustrated by his work, however, he continues to brood over a
sense of missed opportunities and life passing him by. “I was
meant to do something,” he tries to explain to Sara,
“something else, and I was meant to be somebody else, but I
missed the boat, somehow.” Sara, meanwhile, growing resentful of
his passive, reclusive nature, begins an affair with older PE teacher
Reggie (Stanley Baker).
One
day, while David is waiting to cross the street, an immaculate
limousine pulls up alongside. The window rolls down, and once again
he is presented with his double. The androgyne, looking frailer than
before, is clad in a tuxedo, and rests his chin on a cane, cradled in
brittle, twitching hands. He is accompanied by two women: an African
with sharp cheekbones and large, limpid eyes, and a voluptuous
red-head in witchy bohemian rags. The women point at David and
laugh, but the androgyne regards him with a peculiar, quizzical
expression. The window rolls back up, and the limo drifts out of
view.
Over
the course of the following weeks, he begins to see the androgyne
more frequently. Passing by an art gallery with an all-glass facade,
he sees his double holding court, surrounded by Japanese conceptual
artists and beautiful, vacuum-eyed pleasure seekers. On another
occasion, he chances on the androgyne scurrying with a group of
revellers from a taxi to the foyer of a once elegant hotel. This
time, he is disguised as a mime, and his entourage a boisterous group
of medieval mummers; they sprint into the hotel like nocturnal
creatures startled by the daylight. Each time their eyes met, the
double regards him with the same puzzling expression: a look not
quite of recognition, but more of one grappling with the elusive
meaning of some anomalous presentiment like a deja vu. Bizarrely,
the locations in which these encounters take place – the art
gallery, the hotel, an apartment block – can never be found again,
suggesting some kind of fleeting intersection between the real London
and a phantasmal reflection of the city, a double like his own, alike
and yet subject to an alternate destiny.
David
returns to the antique shop where the first apparition of the double
took place. “Yes, I remember you, Sir, indeed I do. You were
quite taken with a looking glass, Sir, and stared into it for such a
long while, as though you were are at the pictures! Where is the
mirror now, Sir? Well, it was actually sold not long after the very
day you yourself were admiring it, if you can believe that. One of
my most esteemed customers, a visitor, Sir, a foreigner with
very refined and unusual tastes.”
At
this point, David's life is at its lowest ebb. His first wife is
happily re-married, and his son, now six, barely recognises him. His
own marriage is disintegrating into a nightmare of silence and
recrimination. To add to his increasingly tenuous grip on his
identity, Janis has started to confuse him with his mentally-ill
older brother; “You should be more like your brother David,” she
keeps telling him. While his own life falls apart, he becomes
increasingly fixated on his double, and the idea that it is the
mysterious androgyne who has stolen all the opportunities which
should by right have been his. His double gets to live out all his
dreams – his fantasies of sexual indulgence and wealth, fame,
beauty and brilliance – while he is forced to endure only the grey
daylight, the drudgery and disappointment by which such flights of
appetite and imagination acquire their full lustre and intensity. He
becomes obsessed by the notion that he must kill his double, and
destroy the thief, the imposter, who had stolen his destiny.
One
morning, David is seated at a bench in Hyde Park, and Tillinghast
Nebula joins him, the pair sitting in silence for a moment before
Tillinghast speaks:
“I
first saw you many years ago, when my career was just taking off. I
was on acid and made the terrible mistake of just wandering off down
the street without anybody to mind me. People were staring at me, of
course, and recognising me, and that felt good at first. But after
awhile I started to hear their thoughts, buzzing in my head, and it
was driving me crazy. Some of them wanted to fuck me and some of
them wanted to be me and some of them wanted to kill me and some of
them just wanted the frisson of interacting with a famous person. I
had this utterly depressing realization that I was nobody, and
the reason they reacted to me in that way had more to do with their
own lives – with how some awful Machinery had narrowed the horizons
of most people's lives down to such an extent that the celebrity –
any celebrity - became a focal point for all their emotions, their
fetishes, the commodity dreams that the Machinery had been beaming
into their brains since they were children.”
“I
had a panic attack, and I think I started running. When I came back
to my senses, I'd taken refuge in an antique shop. I wandered over
to this mirror, and when I looked in, I saw you, not myself,
and yet I knew you were myself. I knew it was real, too, not
the acid. So a few days later, I bought the mirror, because I knew
it wasn't any ordinary mirror. Among dealers of antiques and rare
books, you see, there are sometimes magicians, who hide magical
objects among everyday things – cursed books, music boxes that
induce somnambulism, puzzle boxes that summon demons, things like
that – knowing that certain sensitive people will be drawn to them.
That mirror, I eventually learned, was a gateway between worlds.
You needed to position it in different places, and eventually you
would notice one detail in the reflection that was different, one
tiny detail that told you that you were looking into a different
world. In time, you developed the capacity to pass through the
looking glass, into the other world, taking parts of your world with
you. But we had seen each other – that's why our different
worlds became intertwined.”
“When
you pass through the looking glass, you learn that there are a
multitude of different worlds, each of which is essentially the same,
but each of which actualizes different possibilities. In each of
those worlds, there is a different you, experiencing an alternate
destiny. All your dreams, nightmares, strange fugitive memories,
sensations of deja vu, are all fragments of the other lives you are
living concurrently in different dimensions. Another you endures
your worst fears; another enjoys your keenest fantasies. There is a
kind of economy, a balance, of destinies and desires, gratuities of
fortune and grief, ranging across an infinity of forking paths and
permutations. You and I make one-another, you see; I am a creature
of your longings and fantasies, and you are a creature of my fears an
insecurities. The star and his public. I know you feel that I have
taken something from you, but in reality, we only give to one
another. We weren't brought together to kill the other, but to
take one-another's place.”
It
transpires that Nebula had been dreaming for years of a perfect
escape from the chaotic and insular world he'd created around
himself. Having become one of the most recognisable faces on his
world, he grew obsessed with the now exotic and unattainable quality
of anonymity. To walk down a street without exciting the
drama and burden of people's expectations, projections and fantasies
was a distant memory, an act of impossible magic like some conjuring
trick he once knew but could never re-learn. Everything he'd
achieved, in the end, had imprisoned him: consigned him for life to a
cloistered world of sycophants and acolytes, mind-numbing and
life-threatening indulgences, fame and drugs making his mind into an
all-enveloping fishbowl, a mansion with sprawling, maddening
corridors, mirrored walls, and no exit.
David
returns to his wife, and tells her that he needs to go away for a
short while to clear his head. He promises that things will be
better when he returns. He visits Janis, joining her on the balcony
of her flat. “I'm going away for a little while,” he says.
“You'll not go anywhere”, she laughs, “too fragile you are,
afraid of everything. You'll not go five metres from the door
without needing somebody to hold your hand. You should be more like
your brother David, you should.” He had Tillinghast then adjourn
to a decrepit, shadowy Kensington town house, and we watch in a long,
ingeniously edited sequence as they swap identities, David becoming
the glam rock icon, and Tillignhast the shy, melancholy clerk and
cuckold.
It's
dawn when they've finished, and Tillinghast begins experimenting with
the mirror, positioning it in different parts of the room. Finally
placing it at a slant on front of the fireplace, his eyes dart
rapidly from the reflection back to the room itself. “There we
are,” he says finally, “look.” In the mirror, he shows
David a narrow tracery of cracks on the reflected ceiling that aren't
present on the ceiling above. “Focus on that detail,” he
instructs, “look at it very carefully, and then look at your own
reflection. If you do it properly you'll start to feel like you're
actually in the mirror, not out here. Once that happens, it will be
time to go through.” After performing this meditative exercise for
some time, David begins to experience the vertiginous sensation of
his point of view shifting from outside to inside the mirror; one
moment he is looking at the reflection, and the next at Tillinghast
and himself as though through a window from the outside. Eventually,
he feels as though he has morphed fully into a reflection, a pristine
creature of light that only attends upon a physical body.
Tillinghast has his arms on his shoulders now, nudging him gently
through the looking glass. “It's a little disorientating at
first”, he whispers, “but there's only one way to learn how to
swim.”
Through
the looking glass, David Jones (now Tillinghast Nebula) experienced
all his fantasies in a giddy rush, and died shortly thereafter, a
glorious rock n' roll suicide. The real Tillinghast Nebula retired
into the seclusion and anonymity of David Jones' life, eventually
raising a family with Sara and living to old age. As he got older,
the memory of his hedonistic adventures as the glam rock icon began
to fade, remaining only as fragments of an otherworldly carnival, a
free festival which he'd attended only his dreams, his youthful
dreams of a golden age when high technology made stars and rockets,
and new gospels that were written in radio signals and received by
television antennas.
Late
in November, the tragedy struck, throwing a pall over the world.
Millions were watching the TOTO feed as Gabriel drove the Mars Buggy
at a brisk clip along the edge of a very steep, rocky slope, faithful
TOTO hurtling after him. Many people subsequently claimed that they
felt a palpable tension, even before Gabriel parked the Mars Buggy,
but I suspect that this was only with the benefit of hindsight. Why
did the lonely astronaut stop the Buggy, and start clambering up the
slope? We will never know. The most common theory is that he saw a
metallic object glinting up there, and went to explore. Others have
argued that the flickering light source on the slope is merely a
camera artefact. Whatever the explanation, his behaviour becomes
peculiarly rash. TOTO cranes his head upward, and we watch Gabriel
clambering almost frantically up the cliff-face. He pauses from time
to time to look back, and we can only read our own interpretations
into the expression of the tiny, pixillated face in the space helmet.
Then
everything falls apart. A foothold crumbles beneath his feet, and
Gabriel is tumbling back down in a hail of dust and stones, his arms
failing and clutching the air. The millions watch, frozen, hapless.
They are telling themselves that Gabriel will be okay, that he will
pick himself off the ground and make some self-deprecating joke.
When he is about half way down, however, we hear a sickening crack;
his space helmet has struck a boulder. We hear those fast, heavy
breaths; those dying breaths that filled the world, and haunt it ever
after. Now he is on the ground, crawling towards the Buggy, a
desperate bid to get to the spare breathing apparatus. He gets so
close to salvation, so close it is almost a miracle. TOTO observes
the struggle with a detachment that seems preternatural. Gabriel
reaches the Buggy, but by then it is all over. He slumps against the
vehicle, positioning himself so that his body, arms outstretched like
a saviour, faces TOTO, and the eyes of the world. TOTO, following
his programme to keep Gabriel in his sights at all times, has not
moved since. Nobody wants to look, but nobody can turn their eyes away.
We tuned in on a nightly basis, charting the rapid decay of our idol,
the symbol of our hope. The scene was one of utter stillness,
interrupted only now and then by older Martian rovers that sauntered
eerily by, carrying out the functions of obsolete reconnaissance
missions, programmes they would follow until their circuitry finally
burns itself out. In that vast, lonely backdrop, we watched
Gabriel's beautiful face become shrunken and discoloured.
One
day, we tuned in, and the transformation was complete: only the skull
remained inside the space helmet. The image was complete now, like a
painting or a religious icon, which conjoined in the one crumpled
figure the dream of the stars and end of all dreaming flesh.
Continued shortly.
