The Bird Out of Space and Time (Part 2).

2.  Occultism in the High Rises.

1.

                I should have been at my very lowest ebb that summer, but for some peculiar reason I felt content.  Well, perhaps content would be overstating the case.  It would be better to say that I was untroubled.  My days were characterized by that particular kind of languor which neither troubles the soul, nor ever stirs it to any great pitch of excitement.  For most people, accustomed to life’s stressful rhythms of tension and release, such a period of extended suspension is hardly the most satisfactory mode of existence.  For myself, however, I was forced to conclude that such a lifestyle held an undeniable attraction.  To live without the customary stresses and pleasures of the active existence is burdensome in many respects; and yet while other muscles and faculties atrophy, the imagination is stirred to a strange, languid pitch of creativity, and subject to slip periodically into a state of placid ecstasy, a sensation like that of surrender to some exquisite painkiller.  Now, I should say that though I felt myself to be in perfect equilibrium, it may have appeared from the outside as though I were depressed, or undergoing some kind of bipolar fugue.  Such things are difficult to judge objectively.

                The main upheaval, of course, was the cooling off of my relations with Catherine.  That may seem like an oddly impersonal way of describing it, but the whole business was itself every bit as chilly and impersonal as the commonplace implies.  Our relationship had come to an end without a bang, with scarcely even a whimper.  We’d simply grown bored of each other.  In some respects, it was a relief to end a relationship of eight odd years on such cool and amicable terms, but it’s hard not to feel a little cheated when you’ve spent a large sum on liquor and have no hangover to show for it.  Most couples, I imagine, are subject to this type of boredom in their relationships, but stave it off by having children.  Typically, that’s the next leg of the adventure.  This, however, was not an option for Catherine and I; we regarded the idea of having children as being as inexplicable and unseemly as that of joining a cult, or espousing some alternative medicinal theory that the respectable newspapers frown upon. 

We had that, at least, in common.  So there was nothing else to it.  Magnanimously, I insisted that Catherine should remain in our house, while I would find a new place to live and continue to pay my share of the mortgage, until a more permanent arrangement could be arrived at.  That, more or less, was how I found myself living in the only three-quarters finished luxury apartment/mixed-use quarter by the dockside quays.

 

                The Harrington/Sheldrake Quarter was one of those wonderful follies which had been dreamt up during the property boom; dreamt, it should be added, with such keenness that most of it was actually built before anybody woke up or came to their senses, and thus it stood incomplete as a memorial to the strange fancies and manias of a time past.  It was an ambitious project which sought to transform several blocks of mostly derelict industrial yards into a sleek, all-purpose urban living space.  The central square was composed of four gleaming high rise towers that punctured the sky like glass hypodermics, and overlooked the rest of the complex: a wooded park, twelve smaller apartment blocks, an artificial lake, and a drop leading down into a massive square gouge in the landscape, where concrete foundations had been laid, and work abruptly ceased when funding for the project dried-up.  The high rise towers had their own supermarkets, cafes, gyms, and crèches, and one of the office complexes contained a large, open plan area which had been nebulously labelled “a cultural space.” 

                I have never fully understood what drew me to the Quarter.  To begin with, I’d always been fascinated by different styles of housing.  I remember that when I was a child, being driven around the countryside by my parents, something about houses always puzzled and intrigued me.  A house was something which it was apparently obligatory for all adults to own, or aspire to own – a house and a little patch of grass, a neat row of trees to hide behind, or peer through.  To an adult, such a thing is perfectly natural, but a child always longs to creep under the hedges and fences, to make a beeline through other people’s lawns and backyards like a cat in the shadows.  Growing up, houses retained for me some sense of that essential strangeness – that potent variety of strangeness that hides under the most ordinary and familiar surfaces.  Paradoxically, houses seemed to aspire to an appearance of emptiness and abandonment, and to a sense of mystery – like the adult personality, they frequently resembled a shell which had been constructed to hide something.  What was it they sought to hide, in their appearances of order and homogeneity, of stability and calmness?  What happened in those houses that you never visited, whose interiors you would never see?  

           Later, when I lived in the city, I developed a particular obsession with high rise apartment blocks.  Stacked one atop the other, with their little balconies replacing gardens, they transformed the once organic business of living into a mass-produced commodity and strange kind of public exhibition.  That was the thing that really captured my imagination about them: the way their balconies and windows positioned the once private act of living in a public space, and framed it like a painting or television screen to be perused by passing strangers.  I couldn’t purge from my mind the notion that the apartment block was like a behaviourist’s laboratory, a lattice of glass cages whose occupants were unaware of the vast, clinical eye which surveyed their meagre world at a glance.  Yet, at the same time, I found there to be a certain austere glamour and beauty in the idea of the high rise; the notion of living in a space which was at once private and public, in such close proximity to people who would remain as anonymous as the strangers on trams and buses whose direct gaze we labour to avoid.

Yet for all my fascination, I never got to live in an apartment block.  As a student, I passed through a succession of run-down Georgian dumps, and then Catherine and I moved into the suburban semi-detached which had been our home for the past five years.  A year or two prior, work had begun on the Harrington/Sheldrake Quarter, and the tram I took to the university passed by its construction site every morning.  Although I would have been reluctant to admit it publically, the development fascinated me.  It represented a corrosive ideal which I found oddly seductive: an aesthetic of beautiful, streamlined emptiness; a dream of money and intoxicating, even rapturous, surface pleasures; a setting for warmly-lit, drug-fuelled revelries and soft, opiated recuperations, whose regrets and sad vows were always replaced by fresh, renewed appetites, by new surrenders to giddy night and gaudy vitality.  

My odd attraction/repulsion towards the Quarter was perhaps cemented by a photo feature I came across in one of the weekend supplements.  The television personality Roger Grady had purchased one of the towers’ penthouse apartments.  With prematurely greying temples, rugged features, and athletic build, Grady co-hosted the daily Afternoon Break show with the bubbly, voluptuous brunette Deborah Kelly.  He was pictured enjoying a light continental breakfast on an expansive roof garden.  Flanked by rectilinear decking, potted trees, and the gleam of distant skyscrapers, he wore off-white, slim-fit chinos, desert boots, burgundy golf sweater, and a navy windbreaker.  “BACHELOR BREAKFAST”, the caption read, “TV personality coy about relationships, says gruelling work schedule doesn’t give him time to wine and dine.”  Although Grady and I would later become very close, after a fashion, back then I regarded him with nothing but contempt and derision – the sort of contempt, mingled with a degree of unpalatable and unacknowledged envy, in which we tend to hold successful media personalities. 

My disdain for Grady had a more pointed resonance, however.  During my more indolent student days, I developed a peculiar erotic fixation with the deceptively anodyne landscape of afternoon television.  Though maintaining a veneer of cheerful, wholesome banality, I began to detect in the afternoon scheduling a subliminal language of potent, transgressive eroticism.  I saw a video once of a politician’s speech with all the words edited out.  What remained were only the breaths between each sentence, and the look, at once panicked and solicitous, which signalled the commencement of each fresh utterance.  It seemed to me, watching this video, that the body has its own compulsive, hidden language which it constantly seeks to smother and subdue by speaking, by losing itself in a stream of words.  In the split seconds between speaking, the person appeared like a frightened animal, poised and alert, ready for fight or flight – then the words came, a tension was released, and a sort of torpor ensued.  Speech, for all its marvellous efficacy, so often assumed the characteristic of a compulsive, hypnotic defence mechanism.  Although I knew, in a sense, that the idea was perhaps more poetic than literally true, it seemed to me that a vast, hidden reality might emerge through the removal of the spoken word from news broadcasts, political rallies, debates, even everyday interactions.  Bodies would dance about in perpetual, skittish motion, faces freeze in the naked panic of pure, silent being; shorn of all its ultimately hollow and officious verbiage, the landscape would become a pristine, sandy shoreline, washed by inhalations and exhalations of tremulous living breath.  (I suspect that it was partially this earlier intimation of a secret language of the body which made me so receptive to Grady’s theories about the mysterious Green Language.)

I believed that the afternoon light variety programme would provide an ideal test case for these theories.  Scrubbed of its banal pleasantries, I was certain that Afternoon Break would reveal the true mercenary sexuality that it subliminally communicated to housewives and the unemployed.  That being said, my theories regarding the hidden erotics of afternoon television were never exhaustively developed, and may have been simply a by-product of my puppyish and mildly masochistic infatuation with Afternoon Break’s host Deborah Kelly, whose coquettish relationship with the camera thrilled me with its cold impersonality. 

Roger Grady, on the other hand, I found to be an irksome distraction.  Even by the standards of light entertainment, he struck me as a failure.  His bonhomie felt particularly forced, and his commitment to the variety format sorely limited; he made no attempt, for example, to hide his sullen masculine boredom during the fashion and cookery features, and was sometimes palpably rude to the guests who accompanied small animals or children.  The feature in the weekend supplement detailing his purchase of the Harrington/Sheldrake penthouse thus further exacerbated my feelings of contempt and submerged jealousy towards Grady, and solidified the ambivalent glamour which the Quarter held over my imagination.  Strangely, though, my destiny was becoming intertwined with that of Roger Grady. 

Long before I would move to the Quarter, and Grady make me the sole confidant of his inexplicable occult project, there was that strange, endlessly suggestive night in which I found myself attending a party at his feted penthouse.

      2.

                This was a few years ago.  The good times, I suppose.  Things with Catherine were fine, and I was new enough to my work at the university that I didn’t yet find it oppressively tedious.  The financial crash was a couple of years away, and still an unthinkable contingency in most people’s minds.  Money was everywhere in the psychosphere – the allure of it, the smell of it colouring the horizon, its particular mania festering in the communal imagination like an adolescent’s first discovery of sexuality.  It was a Friday, I think.  One of those summer nights where the sky acquires a certain crisp, electric sheen that merges seamlessly with the artificial glow of the city, bathing everything between the heavens and gutter in an ambient florescent haze, like the warmth of a distant, universal technology.  The streets were filled with buoyant revellers of various types, beaming shoals that milled together and overlapped unpredictably in the evening’s loose and carefree momentum.  I was drinking with a small group of my students, and at about eleven, a sleepy, neurotic rich girl called Esther announced that she knew some people who were going to a party in Roger Grady’s apartment.  We all distained the world of minor celebrities, of course, but the opportunity to swim briefly in their ego-inflated fish tank seemed too good to pass up, so I very quickly found myself wedged into a taxi with Esther, two other girls, and a handsome, sullen boy named James, who played bass in a band called Four Flies on Grey Velvet, and maintained such an astringent air of aloofness that I was never certain if he was arrogant or merely slow-witted.  

The girls were talking in rapid staccato bursts amongst themselves, while James and I sat in awkward silence. 

“Why are you called Four Flies on Grey Velvet when there’s five of you?” I asked, to make conversation. 

James shrugged. 

“It’s just a name.  Or George could be the grey velvet.” 

We were moving along the river, past pleasure boats and sodium orange walkways, the vacant, dreaming plazas of financial complexes, through the iron clockwork of an ancient, slate grey rolling lift bridge, and then we could see it off in the distance: the dream of the Quarter in its full nocturnal vibrancy, its jewelled gleam dancing on the surface of the river, and jutting proudly into the irradiated night sky.  I was drunk enough already to feel like I was floating, disembodied, along a current of events, but everything after that was dreamlike, seductive and strange.  We disembarked from the taxi, and ambled along a walkway that skirted the artificial lake, until we came to a stairwell that led up into the main courtyard.  Once inside, we were dwarfed by the towers. 

I have always found the experience of that courtyard difficult to describe, and wondered at how the architects achieved its vertiginous effect.  Looking up, you had the sense that the towers were not horizontal, but rather sloping diagonally toward a point, like the interior walls of a pyramid.  The buildings wrapped their balconied walls around your visual field, as though they were floating on the air above you, and slowly closing in upon themselves.  It was strange vista, somehow very appealing to me: the business of living arranged into geometrical and aesthetically spartan grids, uniform and rectilinear, yet set at some oblique, gravity-defying angle that made the whole structure feel weightless and dizzying to contemplate. 

While I was taking all this in, Esther was ringing her friend, looking up into the distant blackness where we envisioned Grady’s penthouse in full, sybaritic swing.  After a long delay she finally got through, and following an even longer interval, a tiny, energetic, wide-eyed girl appeared at the door, miming greetings, apologies, and various other emotions as she struggled to open it.  We entered a mezzanine with a concierge’s desk and vast, antiseptic jungle of brittle-looking shrubs and bushes.  Two well-dressed, middle-aged men with matching bald heads and mutual affectation of professional serenity sat at the desk, staring into the shrubbery as though it contained the threat of a creeping indigenous militia.  The new girl ushered us into an elevator.  “This elevator is specular,” she said, “listen to the music.”  The elevator was playing Mason Williams’ Classical Gas, so we yo-yoed up and down a couple of times, the girls attempting a rudimentary go-go dance, while James and I did our best to avoid their failing limbs.  The next track the elevator played was Nights in White Satin by the Moody Blues, but the song’s mood of laden, almost cosmic eroticism seemed to bore the girls, so we finally made our way to the apartment.

The party was everything, I think, we could have hoped for: a feast for anthropologists of the near future, and a carnival of vacuous delights and strange delusions of threadbare grandeur.  The apartment itself was dimly-lit, with small groups slumped everywhere in a deep trance of chemically-heightened sincerity and seriousness, spitting paragraphs back and forth like animals who feed their young by regurgitation.  We passed briskly through these baying lotus-eaters, and went out onto the roof garden, where the main energy of the party was focused.  A sound-system was playing a mixture of dance anthems and Bryan Ferry ballads (then enjoying a brief, semi-ironic vogue due to their inclusion in an innovative series of tampon advertisements).  LED striplighting bathed the roof garden in a cool, blue sheen, making the revellers appear like holographic ghosts projected against the penthouse’s dizzying vistas of city and star light. 

We found a place at the fringes of the crowd, and the new girl went back into the apartment to find some glasses, but we didn’t see her again.  I occupied myself breaking the crowd down into its constitute elements.  There was a smattering of television personalities, their melodic voices emerging out of the white noise with the sickly familiarity of a favourite song travestied by pan-pipes.  I saw the host of a popular household DIY programme, seated by himself in the throes of some kind of drug-induced panic attack.  He was breathing deeply and evenly, and drinking pint glasses of water that seemed to flow directly out of his pores.  Throughout the night, he would cyclically return to the festivities with a demonical second wind, leading each time to a relapse into his former condition, until he was finally laid out on a sofa with a small electrical fan positioned near his sweating temples. 

There was a gaggle of pretty young women whom I guessed to be occupants of the glittering and eternal limbo between modelling and acting careers.  We saw two hulking, radioactively tanned beefcakes making gauche advances towards the women.  The beefcakes were the stars of a type of programming which was very popular at the time – one of those shows that documented the peccadillos of a vulgar working class nouveau riche.  (I’d seen them on television once, waxing an antique dealer’s scrotum and asshole as part of their weekly challenge.  It was suspenseful enough, I thought, although the effect was largely achieved through clever musical cues and editing.)  There was a small contingency of older, middle-aged men in attendance, a group of property speculators and lawyers whose cold, dead eyes were trained on the younger women, making rapid, intuitive calculations of their blood-alcohol levels.  They were talking to a telegenic economist who would find far greater fame after the crash.  (I overheard a snippet of the conversation:  “That’s the thing, nobody knows Sheldrake!  Nobody’s ever even seen him!  He could be just a name on a piece of paper for all anybody knows.”)  The festivities jumped to an even higher plateau of boisterous vitality with the sudden arrival of the aging and fearsome comedienne Maxi Mediumwave, fresh from performance in a children’s pantomime downtown.  Maxi burst onto the roof garden still in character and full costume – a black-hearted pirate queen with cutlass and ersatz parrot lolling on her shoulder - accompanied by a retinue of garrulous dames and ebullient, exotic male dancers who hung beneath her jutting chin like a gaudy necklace.  Even Roger Grady – clad in a sports jacket and blue jean combo which I felt was frankly beneath him - appeared notably energised by this spectacular entrance.

Although the other party-goers were inclined to ignore us for the most part, we were nevertheless able to absorb something of the drift of their conversations.  There were many whispers swirling around regarding the fortunes of the Harrington/Sheldrake Quarter itself.  The funding for the project was only then beginning to unravel into a labyrinthine paper trail of loans whose securities transpired to be other loans whose securities then echoed recursively into infinite spirals of nothingness.  The main item of gossip that thrilled through the roof garden that night, however, was the most recent high profile tenants rumoured to have purchased an apartment in the Harrington/Sheldrake Quarter: identicals Bradley and Lucius O’Leary, known in the pop world as the Iguana Twins.  The Iguana Twins were the latest sensation to emerge from television’s talent furnace Idol Assembly-Line, having scored an unexpected Christmas number 1 with their auto-tuned reggae travesty of Bob Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall. 

Cultural theorists argued that there was an insoluble explanatory gap surrounding the Iguana Twin phenomenon.  Children and young teenagers adored them, but nobody old enough to articulate their thoughts cogently could even begin to understand the appeal; hence the Twins operated in a realm which could never be adequately quantified by the adult brain.  Most adults chose to regard them as an alarming manifestation of sociological decadence and creeping mental atrophy, while others suggested that they might in fact represent a new species of mutant genius, whose brilliance vibrated at some higher frequency to which adults no longer had access.  Androgynous, with handsome, gaunt, sepulchral features, the Twins seemed to embody the indecipherable sexuality of some future epoch.  They frequently wore contact lenses that turned their pupils blood-red, a gimmick which gave them the aura of a pair of ailing, homesick extraterrestrials. 

They spoke in a strange, insular stream of consciousness which often descended into a fully-blown nonsense language of their own invention: Shally Shindig, Cassa Zoom Boom! was a well-known expression of triumph in their private argot.  They were, however, master manipulators of Noosfeed.  In one of their most ingenious capers, they posted a sinister-looking close-up to their Noosfeed page, with the caption WHICH ONE OF US IS THE BAD ONE?  This provoked a furious debate amongst the cognoscenti which was still on-going.  Naturally, exotic Noosphere rumours swirled around the Iguanas, ranging from the easily falsifiable (that they weren’t really twins, but rather a pair of genetically unrelated narcissists who‘d augmented an existing resemblance with cutting edge surgical techniques emanating out of the Balkan region) to the more speculative and elusive (that they were part of an ET acclimatization programme, designed to gradually make the public comfortable with the appearance and presence of extraterrestrials, or, alternatively, to lay the groundwork for an imminent programme of clandestine inter-breeding.)

3.

                We didn’t stay too long at the party that night.  We were really only there as anthropological voyeurs, our intention being to sneer inwardly at the worthies as they sneered outwardly at us.  As fascinating as the spectacle was to contemplate, the atmosphere only became more oppressively manic and unfriendly as the night wore on.  Two events, however, remain etched in my memory, and are worth briefly noting.  The first was a rather unpleasant imbroglio which erupted between the two beefcakes.  Excluded from whatever supply of low-quality cocaine was circulating freely among the inner circle, they had responded by becoming balefully drunk.  One minute, they were engaged in a slurred, incoherent argument, the next lunging at one-another with explosive ferocity. 

Before anybody knew what was happening, they were rolling around on the ground in a powder-keg clinch, laying waste to Grady’s avant-garde outdoor furniture.  Everybody seemed more amused than alarmed, however, and the girls eagerly filmed the action on their phones.  Any doubts that the videos would become a minor sensation on Noosfeed were immediately vanquished when a seething Maxi Mediumwave threw herself into the fray, jumping atop the beefcakes and making a very valiant attempt to pry them apart.  This peculiar struggle continued unabated until Mediumwave’s parrot was decapitated under the weight of one of the beefcake’s shoulders.  “Look what you’ve done!” she shrieked, her face suddenly like a mirror cracking in slow motion.  The desecration of the rubbery bird shocked the two brawlers into sobriety and contrition; I think I saw a tear streaking down one of their cheeks, but I could have been mistaken.  The situation very rapidly diffused itself after that.  Mediumwave’s coterie flocked around her, and commenced an apparently familiar ritual of coaxing her febrile nervous system back to some kind of equilibrium.  The beefcakes apologized profusely to Grady, who seemed to regard the whole incident with a blasé, amused glint in his eyes.

                While this first incident was ultimately comical in nature, the second I recall as having something sinister or even portentous about it, although I cannot quite put my finger on the source of this impression.  There was a sudden flurry of excitement at the border of the roof garden, where a group of girls were looking over the edge, and pointing excitedly at the opposite tower.  The crowd surged over to the glass balcony walls, following their frantic directions.  Standing on an opposite balcony some eight or nine storeys down was the unmistakable shape of the Iguana Twins.  The rumours were true.   The first twin stood erect with his hands on his hips, and the body of the second was set at a peculiar slant, as though he were about to fall over, or take off at a sprint.  There seemed to be no motion whatsoever in either of them.  They wore matching white outfits, and their faces, though heavily shadowed, appeared blank and expressionless.  Despite the distance, their red eyes shone very brightly, looking like the eyes of a fox startled in the flash of an old Polaroid camera.  The apartment was dimly lit and the light had an eerie quality which suggested some kind of cold-storage facility.  Everybody waved, and the model/actresses called down Shally Shindig, Cassa Zoom Boom! and other Iguana nonsense at the top of their lungs, but the Twins retained their unearthly poise.  They seemed to be presenting themselves as an object of contemplation, as some kind of ambiguous Ying/Yang symbol. Then they jerked briskly awake, and strolled back into the soft, ultraviolent light of their apartment like disinterested gods.  I felt somebody nudge my shoulder gently.  It was one of the lithe dancers from Maxi Mediumwave’s coterie, wearing an uncharacteristically solemn expression. 

“Which one do you think is the bad one?” he whispered. 

“Lucius,” I replied instantly, with an odd sort of conviction that came out of nowhere.

                

We left shortly after that.   The elevator, as though receptive to the mood’s downward turn, was playing Procal Harum’s A Whiter Shade of Pale.  We appeared ghostly and insubstantial in comparison to our ascent, and the song’s lyrics reflected the wispy, enigmatic impressions that were gathering in our minds, struggling to cohere.  In the taxi home, we were mostly silent.  As she neared her stop, Esther nudged me.  She produced something from her bag, and held it up to the light so I could see it.  It was the head of Maxi Mediumwave’s parrot, whose passing was destined for brief Noosfeed notoriety in the days to follow.  Separated from its body, the parrot’s features were lifelike and conspiratorial. 

“You’d think it was going to speak,” Esther said, smiling. 

Continued shortly.    

Image of Toronto condo towers found here.      

The Hourglass of Aeons (Part 3)

Part 1, Part 2.


3.

Kadmon explored the lower floors of the apartment tower before commencing his climb.  The foyer of the building was designed after an architectural style many centuries old, and common to various districts of Ah-Pook Nar.  In the visionary literatures of the city’s mystery cults, the most common characteristics ascribed to the otherworld were those of temperance and fecundity.  So many holy men and anchorites had been vouchsafed glimpses of this green and riotously fecund world, and so consistent were their descriptions, that many believed that it was to such a garden that the righteous soul wended after death, so as to enjoy eternally all that bliss only rumoured to the poet’s fancy in this life.  So as our world must be ever senescent and arid, so that fecund world was always in the full bloom of its youth, possessed of a miraculous soil from whence exotic foliage and fauna rushed as from the awestruck imagination of a young god.  Architects and artisans became much preoccupied with this vision of vegetative and arboreal exuberance, designing their artefacts and buildings after the manner of plant-life as it was observed in the tropical pockets, and imagined in the flights of the anchorites and fantastic painters.  Thus, the foyer of the tower was conceived as a garden: the concierge’s office and domicile was an oval shape that evoked a hillock, and a black, wrought-iron stairwell curved around its sides like a draping foliage, with a balustrade fashioned after a network of roots and a handrail which affected a curling, inquisitive vine.  In every detail, the architect had eschewed straight-lines and idealized simplicity, emphasizing an almost mystical notion of dense, organic growth and vitality.  On the wall behind the stairwell, a frieze depicted the exuberant forms and alien hues of a fantastic shrubbery which the climber surmounted like a butterfly as he ascended. 

 Yet, Kadmon reflected sadly, only now in its cloistered and malodourous decay had it attained the status of a living garden.  The thief’s arrival in the foyer sent startled rats scurrying away to darker nooks and crannies, and spiders to the hazy centre of their dense canopies.  There were people, too, in the gloom: addicts of scorpion venom lay writhing in small groups on the floor, having been transported in mind back to the predatory stillness of vastly ante-human geologic epochs, to silent, unseen worlds of crawling arthropods, reptiles, and tentative amphibious mutations.  (Certain scurrilous apothecaries treated the venom of scorpions and snakes so as to produce a potent and highly addictive narcotic.  During the peak of such venom trances, the users frequently experienced visions of the nascent earth, wherein they saw grotesque organisms and unimaginable vagaries of natural form whose existence went unrecorded in the fossil collections and taxonomies of the most learned naturalists; whether these were true intimations of the primeval earth, or journeys to atavistic regions of the brain alone, no man knows.)  An old woman sat at the foot of the stairwell, whispering some litany of prayer, malediction, or autobiography to herself.  Kadmon was some measure piteous of these poor, blasted souls, but he recalled the old wisdom of the streets which held that he who interrupts bad fortune invariably incurs it upon himself; and so he left them as they were, and began to explore the lower floors of the tower.

Here the thief found no means of egress to the main stairwell, but much to trouble his soul besides.  In an apartment on the third floor, he discovered a skeleton sprawled causally on a couch.  The forgotten remains were almost invisible at first, having been so thoroughly coated with dust and mold and the industry of spiders and cockroaches as to fade beneath the gauze of the room's gloomy ambience, like those hidden and troubling presences that certain artists have woven into the borders of their scenery, so as to startle the viewer after a long perusal.  In such a manner did Kadmon long ponder the couch and its elaborate tracery of dereliction, until all at once the underlying form became apparent, and thus frozen where he stood, his eyes became fixed on those points of deeper gloom that once had gazed upon this earth.

Kadmon was deeply shaken by the sad condition of the remains, for though he had seen fresh corpses many in the course of his adventures, never before had he encountered the human form in its final and unindividuated state, and fresh corpses trouble the soul only so much as a living body in deep repose, but no man, however robust, has looked for the first time upon the face of a skeleton without experiencing some woeful presentiment of the universality of all human destiny.  Being well-traveled in the city of all cities, Kadmon had heard many diverse views as regarding mortality and the existence of the soul.  Some wise men avowed that the body were like a strange district in a vast city, and the soul a migrant who comes a passing through it, so that upon his arrival the migrant cannot speak, for he knows not the native tongue, and cannot act, for he knows not the proper custom and manner of that place, and hence must pass a long spell wherein all things appear threatening and inexplicable to him, until he become familiar with the ways of the district, and by that time he will be ready to take to the road again, and it might occur to him as he departs that everything in that district were as passing strange as ever when he first arrived; or so as that metaphor went.

And as to the soul's destination upon leaving the body, some said it went to supernal worlds beyond the vast heavens, others to abysmal caverns in the fiery depths of the earth, and others yet that it returned to the earth to live a new life in a different body, and so has lived so many lives as ever men lived upon the earth, but at the passing away of each individual incarnation, the soul then found itself in a pitiless, parched desert called the Valley of Forgetfulness, wherein all the company of souls were herded along by a troop of masked Heirarchs who followed after them on camels, and those Heirarchs would never stint in goading the souls onwards, until gradually they became forgetful of all their prior incarnations, and so until they remembered nothing at all but that weary existence of trudging through the Valley; and this treatment persisted until the soul collapsed from utter exhaustion, and therewith sank deeper and deeper into the sand, and thus falling as through the funnel of an hourglass, was channeled into its new incarnation in this world, and wherever two people experience a powerful attraction upon first meeting, it was reasoned that they had walked alongside one another in the Valley of Forgetfulness, and forged some silent bond therein, and when the soul had lived so many lives that it was never made forgetful in the Valley, and acquired such strength that it could walk without stint through the desert, then that soul became one of the masked Heirarchs who goad the others on, and if it became anything further after that, no man knows.

Yet there were others in worldly districts of Ah-Pook Nar who regarded all these as foolish tales, reasoning instead that the soul were a thing which existed only by virtue of the body's vitality, and no airy traveller who merely tarried there in the midst of its journeying from hence and to whence no man knew.  These worldly sages thus regarded all life as a species of transitory good fortune, that man could but enjoy to the best of his faculties, knowing all the while that the strumpet at the wheel might withdraw her indulgence as whimsically as ever it were first granted.  And yet there were worldly sages of an even more extreme cast of mind, who held to the very ancient doctrine that soul never existed in the first place, but rather were a kind of delusion or prolonged dream experienced by inanimate matter, and this theory held that just as an ugly young maid or gallant might, under the distempering influence of wine, conceive themselves to be handsome and utterly ravishing, so did certain types of inanimate matter become inebriated by the chemical reactions which determined their unique composition, and hence conceive the transitory illusion of having a vitalized, individual, and willing existence; but, just as the unfortunate young maid must awake from her distemper to find her amorous designs unfulfilled and her appearance as imperfect as ever nature designed it, so must all matter eventually awake from its dream of individual existence, and realize its true nature as being blind, undifferentiated, and inanimate.  (Some philosophers had refuted this position by reasoning that if soul were a drunkenness of matter, then it would follow that the drunker matter became, the more it would become ensouled and self-aware, but since the opposite were observed to be true, and soul became more like to inanimate matter the more alcohol it imbibes, hence it must be that soul were rather a sobriety of matter than the loss of its faculties.)

Now Kadmon, having heard such diverse positions advanced one with an equal conviction to the other, had never before feared his own death, nor given much consideration to the subject in general.  It was in the nature of migrants to regard all beliefs as merely a kind of local colour and custom, a whim both of the city's sprawling geography and the dying earth's vast and scattered inheritance of old ideas and poetics of mental exertion.  But now, face to face with that piteous and forgotten skeleton, Kadmon found it difficult to shake the conviction that this life must after all be everything that he would ever know or experience, and this idea, once so viscerally suggested, had left him altogether frozen and unable to act, shocked rigid by the sense that if each passing second were a lessening of all that time in which he could ever exist, then no action seemed exalted and meaningful enough to pass each precious and irretrievable instant.  And in this condition he remained for some time, until another speculation of the sages passed fortuitously into his mind, and acted as a curative.  Just as they endlessly debated the nature of mortality and soul, so also the sages advanced various theories regarding the identity of those tiny points of light in the night sky which people called stars by dint of long habit, and which exert such a peculiar fascination to people in all parts of the city.  And Kadmon had heard one speculation as to the identity of the stars which he found peculiarly appealing, and it was that each of those tiny points of light was in fact a sun just like our one, only at such a great remove in space as to appear like a grain of sand, and about all those other suns circled worlds just like ours, and thereupon lived men and women lives just like ours, and they too looked upon the tiny points of light in the sky and wondered at them, for though every story on this world were being told an infinity of times throughout the heavens, yet all were separated one from another by such vast gulfs of space that only by tiny, flickering beacons of light in the night sky could they know of the other's being, and hence each world must become preoccupied only by its own immediate stories; and though it offered no rational solution to Kadmon's dilemma, yet he derived on odd kind of comfort from the notion that somewhere else in the heavens, a thief looked upon a skeleton and mused just as he did, and in some of those other worlds he were the man who had passed away forgotten and the forgotten man were the thief, and though the thief's questions were never answered yet somewhere they would always be asked, and somewhere, always, Kadmon the thief were interrupted in the midst of his adventure by melancholy ruminations upon discovering the forgotten man.  With this thought, he stole briskly out onto the balcony, and commenced his climb to the wizard's apartment.

The bulk of the climb merely required that he hoist himself from one balcony to the next immediately above it.  There were, however, stretches where the apartments had no balconies, and here Kadmon was forced to shimmy along a narrow decorative ledge to climb up the tower's dense network of arid vines instead.  Down below in the square, the elders watched the thief's skillful climb in silent appreciation, the people of Ah-Pook Nar being inclined to admire any skill for its own sake, excepting that of sorcery.  Finally, one of the men spoke.  "The thief climbs well enough", he said, "but should he fall, I will show him only so much sympathy as the ground does."  The others laughed, happy that a sense of infallible dignity had once more been restored to their preferred course of inactivity.

Continued shortly.

Images by Sidney Sime, from monster brains

   

The Hourglass of Aeons (Part 2)

 

Part 1.

2.

The precise origins of the Hourglass are lost in the shifting sand of many pasts, as are the beginning of all things in the Dying Aeon.  There is, however, a story which is told by certain reptilian tribes regarding the creation of the world, which goes as follows –

In the beginning, there was only the great snake Abdu, resting in his endless coils.

 

And Abdu knew all things, for the only thing that could be known was Abdu, and Abdu was happy resting in his endless coils, snoozing but never falling fully asleep, his vast, bejewelled eyes pulsing in his wakefulness, and dimming in his drowsiness.  And Abdu was happy resting in his endless coils, knowing all things.

And many aeons of our time passed Abdu in this happy state, until there came a time when his eyes started to pulse less, and grow dimmer all the time, and Abdu knew that he had grown tired of knowing all things, and that his eyes would soon dim out altogether, and then there would be nothing, for Abdu would be asleep, and there could be nothing ever to wake him again.  And then a momentous thing happened, which none of the Hierarchs or theologians have ever understood, though they have discussed it long into the night, and tramped their feet bitterly into the sand.  Abdu resolved that instead of knowing everything, he wanted to know one thing from another.  Alas, being all things, he did not know how he might differentiate one thing from any other, but as his thoughts on this question remained unresolved, they hardened and congealed into round orbs that fell about his coils in great clusters.  And since Abdu did not cease thinking on the problem of knowing one thing from another, those orbs grew limbs which allowed them to move about and work upon the problem which Abdu had set them.  And Abdu became quiescent then, and as the deathless one drifted into abeyance, his sleepy thoughts formed a kind of fine vermilion dust that drifted through the air around his coils.  

And the orbs began to gather all the vermilion dust that drifted in the air about them, and pile it into great heaps on the scales of Abdu.  But how can we differentiate one grain of this sand from another they wondered, for it is all the one thing?  After much disputation, the orbs resolved that though the individual grains could not be differentiated, it might be that if sand were moved from one place to another, then the sand in the first place would be one thing and the sand in the second another.  Hence, they set their ingenuity to constructing a device which might keep the sand in constant or near-constant motion.  They created a vast glass structure composed of an upper and a lower bulb, connected to one another by a narrow central funnel, and they filled the lower bulb with the sand of Abdu’s restful thoughts.  About the bulbs they erected a container like to the grandest temple ever raised by mankind to honour his gods: the glass was enclosed by cyclopean foundations and pillars, adorned with hieroglyphics that none but Abdu would ever understand; and the whole structure was connected to a machinery of levers and pulleys which allowed the hourglass to be turned and the slow falling of its vermillion sands initiated.

And when the sand started to fall, Abdu’s eyes gleamed once again, and the Hierarchs and theologians of those tribes tell us that ever since that moment, Abdu has lain contentedly in his coils, watching the sand as it falls slowly through the great celestial machinery which they call the Hourglass of Aeons.  And they tell us that the stars in the heavens are but grains of sand in this Hourglass, for all time and space as we know it are contained in the disordered thoughts of Abdu as they fall from the higher bulb down to lower; and when every last grain has finally come to rest in the bottom bulb, our world and everything we have ever known will come to an end, and then the orbs will rouse themselves to turn once more the great machinery, and the elements of the last world will once again be intermixed and set in falling motion, and many people will remember having lived other lives prior to this one, and remember the character of other worlds contrary to this one, some better and some worse, and those people will remember aright, for many times has the Hourglass of Aeons been turned, and many contrary worlds has it created, all composed of the same core elements, and the visions men see in this world, and the exotic artworks which they create, are but memories of the previous admixture of sand which fell through the Hourglass, or an adumbration of the next, and no one knows how many times the Hourglass of Aeons has been turned, none save Abdu, happy resting in his endless coils.

This antique tale provided the mythic prototype for the talisman which had found its way into Ah Pook-Nar.  It had been fashioned long ago by reptilian craftsmen as a miniature model of the celestial hourglass celebrated in their ancestral legendry.  The sand in the hourglass was deemed to be the key to its peculiar narcotic effects.  This sand, Kadmon had heard, was a bright shade of vermilion red which shimmered and sparkled with a lustre unlike that of any naturally occurring mineral.  Some avow that its origins were meteoritic; others claim that a mystic once awoke from a profound trance to find himself clutching two fistfuls of the mysterious sand, like a keepsake preserved from a fading dream.  Whatever its origin, gazing at the sand as it fell through the hourglass had a peculiarly mesmeric affect: the gazer lost all consciousness of time, and became wholly absorbed in vivid hallucinations and fantasies.  Having existed for centuries in the open desert, the lizard people’s perception of time differed radically from that of city dwelling humans; knowing only the great, brooding silence and essential homogeneity of that terrain, their sense of time had gradually become less insistent, and more mystical and undifferentiated in character.  Hence, the effects of the hourglass were less pronounced on them, and they used it as a kind of oracle.  In the district of Malrudia, upon the roof of whose ziggurat men have strenuously cultivated gardens and pasture land, the priests slaughter lambs and oxen and profess to divine the course of future events in such patterns as the poor beast’s ruptured entrails assume; peasants in Kadmon’s home in the north-east cast straws to point them to enigmatical verses which were said to be the mathematical equations by which some elder demiurge composed the fortunes of men; even worldly migrants practised a form of random divination whereby they accepted the next sight or happenstance the city presented to them as an oracular cypher, thus making of the whole city a sacrificial beast whose ruptured gut was a disordered dream of things yet to come.  In such a fashion, the old reptilian priests and chieftains consulted the hourglass of aeons, until at some point its reveries lead them astray, and their tribes were dispersed and the hourglass itself lost in the sand with all the other fragments of untold aeons.

Eventually, the hourglass was discovered by a group of Diggers, and found its way into Ah Pook-Nar, where it quickly acquired a notoriety for leading wealthy aesthetes into lives of opiated dissipation and hermetic squalor, and yet the more lives it destroyed, the greater grew the mystique surrounding its visionary potency.  A group of gossiping thieves told Kadmon that the hourglass had fallen into the hands of an obscure wizard, and in its prolonged absence from the open market, it had become an object obsessively coveted by certain collectors, aesthetes, and hedonistic adventurers.  Some even avowed that the Autarch himself desperately wanted to add the hourglass to the library of inexplicable technologies and ancient totems which he and his processors had patiently accumulated over the centuries, as though in the hope that all would one day be found to be parts of a single and all-powerful divine contraption which might ensure the perpetuity of their reign beyond the eventual death of the New Sun.  

Continued shortly.