YESTERFANG Part Two

An upright egg, as large as an average nine-year old child, was half-hidden by its own whiteness against that of the snow and half-revealed by its oval sky-reaching sensuality as a shape: almost pliable, despite the shell.  A foreign form amid the natural rough-hewn carpet of frozen precipitation. 

The egg watched the three human figures disappear through the archway, watched them via a little chink of a crack towards the top of the shell, whence a tweaking beak also cutely tried to emerge.  The egg itself and the owner of the beak (within the egg) seemed to be two separate conscious beings.  The wide-wheeling form of a white vulture loomed (along with its even larger shadow) from the sky and eventually settled beside the egg, whereupon its fanged beak proceeded to dig into the shell from the opposite direction to the tinier beak within it – and the whole egg imploded with a slime of red and yellow … a new muckheap to landmark the terrain, with the half-eaten semi-formed creature that constituted part of this very muckheap slowly dying amid an elastic scum of wasted life. Meanwhile, the vulture took flight, now with increasingly lumpy attempts to soar, after a semi-satisfactory feed upon its premature prey.

*

Jawn gaped at the vision that confronted him.  He felt he had trekked for many miles, whilst another part of himself believed the transformation had been instantaneous.  The snow had disappeared and he viewed a city bare of any such white insulations of privacy.  He believed this to be a miraculously thawed London.

As if reading his mind, Sarah (still holding his hand) said: "Welcome to Lewis."

"Julie, having now released her shared of hand-holding with Jawn during their unquantifiable rite-of-passage added: "Lewis is not on the snow-line.  Not disguised by weather. Here it's what you see is what you get."

Jawn laughed.  He had somehow heard of the Isle of Lewis in the Hebrides, those Western Isles of Scotland, including its capital Stornoway, whereby, for him, there was some root racial memory threading back to some of his ancestors - a family of four (parents and two young children) in nineteen-seventies England - who had holidayed in Lewis, the year before holidaying in Glastonbury.  But now – as Jawn watched its first impressions unfolding -  Stornoway seemed to have become a vibrant modernistic city instead of its original state as a simple isolated market town for crofters and fishermen. No connection with his ancestors.  No connection, even, with itself.  Certainly none with him.

Sarah pointed into the distance as a long helicopter like a red railway train from those far-off days of seventies England soared into view … skimming the rooftops with hardly a clatter.  He even doubted  it was a helicopter, although one of the girls assured him it was. Not so modernistic, after all, as a city, perhaps, as there were old-fashioned TV aerials on chimneys which the flighted vehicle nearly clipped. Looking more closely, after the vehicle had landed, the brickwork and shapes of the city emitted a certain tang of architectural accidents in misapplied surveying so typical of England during the nineteen-fifties and sixties.  An overview of sentiment that did not derive from Jawn, but hinted at by the otherwise light gabble of his two attractive friends

Not only was weather here not instrumental in the city's character as it had been along the snow-line, Jawn also noticed no weather whatsoever, unless one called a sunless blue sky a type of weather in itself.  The temperature was temperate.  He shrugged, as the girls (still gabbling) led him down towards the edge of the city, where the red 'helicopter' had settled.

*

I had fallen in love with both Sarah and Julie.  I hadn't told them.  Nor, doubtlessly, were they competing for my affections! 

============

VALUE by Hiver Jawn

*

The next stage in the process was to attend lessons in fiction writing.  Jawn sat at the back of a large musty classroom using one of many ranked and age-seasoned desks with sloping lids upon which to rest one's work. There was a large window overlooking the houseboats on a creek which this place called Lewis boasted at each edge of its conurbation.  Many of these houseboats were derelict, but not as derelict as some that had already sunk into the mud over the years when the tide was out. 

The ever-blue sky promised sunshine.  Night was without stars or moon, but by that time Jawn was taken back to his foster home, where it was not the acceptable behaviour to have bare windows to look from.  Just the chitchat of peers. Broken by reward periods of windfarm spirituality as they listened to the vanes spin from the direction of the chimney-flue. One could only hear the vanes spin, never watch them as they only spun at night. Then to bed in a dormitory where most, if not all, were kept wake by each other's snores.  Or so it seemed.

Jawn remembered the day he had written 'VALUE'.  Julie had kissed him.  A delight he imagined he still felt as a tender caress on the cheek where she had lightly planted this kiss.  Sarah was over the moon with the subtle tantalus of its ending which readers thought they understood, but when in bed that night, they knew they would never understand.  There was no doubt that Jawn had passed his audition with flying colours.

When they left the red portakabin office, he was sure the surroundings had changed and that he had just exited into the city's centre itself not into its outskirts.  They took him to a pub, where the girls had cocktails and, bearing in mind his age, a soft drink for Jawn. 

He rarely saw the girls after he was transferred to the foster home – but when he did, it was by seeing one of them, if not the other, among the crowds in the streets.  He'd wondered how deep the affection each girl had for the other girl.  He wouldn't have minded if their mutual love was the reason for either of them failing to get closer to Jawn himself. But he once thought he saw Julie in the street arm in arm with a man.  He kept the whole dormitory awake that night, not with snoring but with weeping.  Till he fell into a dream about a white vulture.

The classes were well-ordered and strictly conducted.  The teacher – as a first impression – was a very strong authority figure.  It was only when one looked more closely at her face that it was realised that she was relatively young and pretty.  Her bearing had given her inauspicious age.  Jawn enjoyed it when she leaned over his desk to look at his work, judging his work as if he were drawing a picture and thus immediately able to assess the gestalt of lines that produced the picture.  Instead, they were spidery lines of handwriting that she scanned and so quickly judged.

"That's promising, Jawn," she said with an uncommon smile.

"Thanks, Miss."

"I hope you will be able to manage a sad ending this time.  Happy endings never happen in life."

He knew, however, that his masterpiece called 'VALUE' did have a happy ending, although it was interpreted by others to be downbeat.  He would never have passed the audition with an ending of overt happiness.  But it was happy enough for Jawn.

The teacher's ways of expression were in keeping with the mission statement of the class: "Confront, don't accept."

The economies of Lewis depended on fiction being downbeat and constructively depressing, if not confrontational.  Horrific in its implications if not in its slasher gasher violence or monstrousness.  Ghosts with a sense of their own potential subtly to eroticise.  Not a method of brainwashing but a certain instilling of a bleak mysticism that kept the masses indoors within their brown studies.  This replaced the invention of TV as a represser of the masses.  Visions of creativity buoyed up upon the sound of spinning vanes.

Jawn wrote things with sad endings that he never showed to the class teacher.*  Perhaps he took the mission statement far too literally, even to the extent of confronting confrontation itself.

* example here:  http://simplon.blogspirit.com/archive/2006/09/16/the-meaning-of-life.html

*

I  had to leave the place called Lewis sooner than I expected.  I renewed acquaintance with Sarah.  Julie was mysteriously no longer on the scene.  And Sarah's skin appeared thicker, perceptibly wrinklier, as if she had been through a lot of heartache.  She maintained a youthful beauty, including the sleek charms of her race and colour, and at my then age of 22, I radiated an admiration towards her, one that I now wore like a badge of reciprocity, as I had learnt to be more confident about my own attractiveness as a human being.  This was despite my earlier disaster with the young teacher of fiction.

Indeed, it had been a one-night stand with the teacher in her place near the pier.  And I threw sickies thereafter as I could not bear her near me any more.  It was the beginning of my downfall in the city. I slouched most days around the backwaters eyeing houseboats to see if any were habitable, when I should have been in the classroom. I stopped writing altogether. But I always returned to the foster home, where I now stood out like a sore thumb amongst delicate fingers.  My sexual act with the teacher was barely describable, even within the realms of fiction.  It was neither erotic nor romantic.  It was because I had never done anything like that before, I suppose.  I was confused.  And she expected the pungent soul of my fiction also to be apparent in my own body.  She must have been bitterly disappointed at my clumsy pre-maturity. She, I guess, must have aged over night, and became again the humourless authority figure I had originally assumed her to be.  Prior to that night, she, too, had been innocent.  I never learned her real name.  Or which bits were true, and which not so true.

Sarah, on the other hand, found me down by the pier (why was I there that day so close to the teacher's house – through guilt? hopes of meeting her again?).  It was off-season.  No day-trippers or saucy hats or laughing children with candy floss.  Just a wind off the turgid creeks.  Wind?  When had the weather returned?  I must have been so beached upon my own emotional breakwater, such matters had passed straight over my head.  It was symbolic of deeper things.  The return of weather along with a sense of reality.  A sense of futility.

As I say, I suddenly spotted the dark face of Sarah as it glistened like mangled eels between two piles of fishermen's netting. 

"Hi," I shouted.

This was not the first time we had experienced such a chance encounter in recent months.  I never mentioned Julie. Nor did she.

"Hi, Jawn.  You look sad."

"There are no happy endings."  I laughed as if this statement was just that – a happy ending.

"Had enough?"  Her face smiled, the teeth standing out with the striking whiteness of our earlier times together - against the skin that framed them.

"I don't think this place was what it once was," I said.  "Or it never was what I thought it was.  You see, I dreamed last night of a wardrobe and a lion…"

Sarah looked knowingly.  She must now be in her thirties, I guessed.  And I yearned for her arms to enfold me.  Not as a mother, but as a lover.  Instead, she quickly got up, took my hand (as of old) and we walked down the windy pier together as if there was an expanse of sea at its other end instead of creeks.

*

"Can I ask where you got this?"

"It came down to me from my father.  It's just been stuck in a cupboard and, since you were coming here, I had a sudden urge to bring it along."

"Well, I'm very glad you did.  For the benefit of the people at home, I'll describe it.  The camera's view of it on the screen is simply not enough.  It is a painting, of certainly some age, but difficult to pinpoint the era, as the style is not one I recognise.  Layered in certain areas are some very precise mountings of a complicated design, which must have taken the artist months, if not years, of careful application.  It is breath-taking the scope of the work to turn a painting into a texture of real life.  If you look at the surface sidewise on, you see – or at least think you see – images of items that are not depicted in the design proper.  Even the frame, as you can see, if you look here […] contributes to the full effect.  Where do you think your father got it from?"

"He never told me but I get the impression it was passed down to him ... and there were secrets attached to it.  Vague tales of a disgrace.  And many legends associated with a distant relation's romance with … what can I say? ... someone with whom he should not have had a romance."

"Hmmm... Well, we can't speculate – especially as it might take away from its effect if it doesn't stand alone for what it is.  I must say I am very excited.  We don't usually have such striking objects – of obvious great value – to examine on this programme.  I can only relate it a to a period of art of which I've heard but not had the time or resources to follow up. I don't know if you can see, with the combined effect of the images (both frontward and sideward), a face, where one moment there were trees and the next buildings of some oriental character.  A face of a woman, that sort of evolves from shadows."

"Yes, when I was a child I had nightmares about it.  I saw all manner of things at different times.  Perhaps that's why it was eventually left in the cupboard.  To put paid to the dreams."

"I'm sure if we put this to auction, we would expect ... I don't know.  It should be insured, I'd say for 250,000 pounds."

"Good God!  You're joking.  Did you say 250,000?"

"Yes, at least that.  Would you allow us to get some other experts to look at it.  But wait, is this a signature here...?"

"I've never been able to make one out."

"I just glimpsed some letters just now as the camera lights reflected in a certain way.  Doesn't look like a real name.  Ah, yes, H.I.V.E.R .  That's French for Winter.  J.A.U.N.  Yellow?  Hmmm.  There <i>is</i> a yellowish haze to the patina.  I wonder if that's a signature or a title or just an accident of the light or a deliberate mystery. I don't know. The whole thing reeks of fabrication and if it wasn't for its obvious potential for provenance and undeniable great age, I'd say it was a deliberate attempt at obfuscation.  A modern artefact steeped in sepia and combed against the grain to look older than it is.  No other words, really. I'm not usually so imprecise, as you know, after all the years on this show.  Yet, the charm is winning. Its authenticity so real.  A vexed texture that is quite unfathomable.  So difficult to nail down.  A magnificent conundrum.  It's not a winter scene, that's for sure.  It's too dry ... too, clammy, what did I say, yellowish.  A bit like complex straw in places. But difficult without getting it out into natural light away from these cameras. In any event thanks for bringing it in.  You've made my day."

"You've made mine!  Thanks."

*

The 'painting' was lost in transit, before being inspected by other experts.

Or it became a prized exhibit that millions made pilgrimage to view in its purpose-built gallery in London.  But the snow only allowed a few of them to reach the frozen banks of the Thames, where the gallery was sited.  Worldwide criss-crossings of many new snow-lines did nothing to prevent the onset of stay-at-home tourism where art could only be seen by electronic means.  And books printed domestically from their only source on the internet by some new method that many called publication-on-reading. 

Or it was proved to be worthless, indeed a modern fabrication to give context to the crazy ideas of its creator.  He lived in a gas-generated city far beyond the edge of civilisation as we know it.  In fact his whole head was full of yellow gas that could only escape by manipulation of his lower vents.  An inner world that stank to high heaven.

Or it never existed at all.  It was just another configuration of fantasising dressed up as magic fiction.

*

At least  Jawn would be fully aware of its provenance at inception if not of its future beyond its source as something he created and left behind as a yester-egg for later discovery by others if not by himself.  It was his fiction-writing become visually textured.  In the same way as music was fiction injected straight into the vein, the 'painting' would derive (once completed) from fiction made into configured tree bark and stained by the weathering of the yellowy el niño that prevailed in the city where he next visited after vanishing beyond the end of the pier in long-forgotten Lewis: so forgotten literally nobody at all remembered its name. 

Equally, Jawn and Sarah were simply ideas from the furrowed head of the teacher who proceeded to erase them wherever she could find references to their existence: an easy process because all text had been forethought, late-labelled and written with a Cumberland pencil.  She loved Jawn more than she could ever remember.  But tears told a deeper story, tears she could never quench.  Her students could only then write happy endings, in misguided attempts to help her apparent plight.  Meanwhile, she had failed to find a single reference to Jawn and thus failed to erase it.

*

There was a boat at the end of the pier.  A fishing dinghy abandoned for the night at its fragile mooring, luckily still holding fast, but not for much longer.  The creeks had been overridden by the sea in a repeat performance of 1953; lobster pots loudly tapped against the pier's oaken legs, legs that in turn creaked and even splintered in the renewals of swell; ghosts of breezes had been the instigators of the weather's insidious return to the realms of climate; ghosts of real people to crew the dinghy towards as yet invisible coasts where the sea gradually thickened into land; and monsters beneath its hull lightly knocking the sea-seasoned planks as the dinghy plied the channels with moon-dripping oars.

Whether the monsters fully followed the whole voyage with their under-knocking is answered by the fact that Sarah continued to glimpse their horrific faces beneath the waves outside of slumber, outside of dream, outside even of creativity itself.  They were monsters true.  And the era of Jawn's pilgrimage towards eventual completion was now entering a monstrous phase, beyond the help of mortals, beyond even the help of nurses specially implanted there to hold his hand.  Without even a kiss farewell, she slipped gracefully and gratuitously off the end of the dinghy when he wasn't watching … and the softly plashing grooves of land-stirred sea now took the impetus from the mis-rollocked oars and eased him (alone) towards a cityscape of complexly textured straw and gesso ill-ventilated with turgid air-currents.

*

It looked hot here, but so intense in its own belief that it wasn't hot it made Jawn believe it was simply cool not baking hot at all.  And he heard a distant friction of sound against sound, gradually more tuneful: delicate and conversational like Chamber Music for string quartet, as he was taken to a woven billet beside the tangled bulrushes of a dried-out river basin, where this music served to replace the water-current with a soporific siesta of day-wide semi-consciousness.  In search of lost time. 

*

The next day, I discovered the stranger in his hammock drifting slowly from side to side against the more unnatural swings he was trying to instil out of pure contrariness towards what he thought was the capriciousness of gravity.  The jaundiced complexion – after the sea voyage in a mere dinghy – seemed to have now blushed back towards rude health.  He actually smiled as I approached the wickerwork den in which I had billeted him overnight.  His first night in Proust. A night of creaking dreams.

It must have been hotter than he expected because, I could see, he had covered himself with dried reeds to the extent of sweating several pounds off his bodyweight.  Last night, I thought he was about thirty.  Today, I'd guess he was in his early twenties.  However sudden his body changes were, he seemed to have taken them in his stride.  Time goes at different paces along with the self that experiences it. And I saw the stranger's self today was quite different from last night's self.  But not to the extent of becoming a changeling.

I am his Nurse, older than my years.  I am also a family cook. But, in my youth, I was an example of the delicious young females he'd likely find irresistible: one of those timeless quiet girls, shapely, too, as they bowled their hoops along the old-fashioned promenades before taking rides on one of the butterfly yachts as it skimmed the Ravellian water surfaces.  But now, I'm stouter.  More motherly. 

As I officiated over the stranger's shaving, I admired his body.  Never too old to look!

He wasn't sure how to take the joke, but the toy electric-shaver I gave him played music as he rubbed its business-end over his cheeks and chin and under the nose.  A tune that – he told me – reminded him of the <i>Pavane for a Dead Infanta</i>.  He eventually laughed at the device.  Proust had no electricity, in any event, battery or otherwise, and the rubbing had started a clockwork device inside not dissimilar to a music box.

I ignited the gas flames on a portable hob to heat a basin of water, so that he could have a wet shave.  Meanwhile, I guarded the blade with my life, before he was ready to test its magnetic powers of self-sharpening with each scrape he took.

The stranger, after he had been scraped, needed to be spruced.  Later he was due to meet the Count.

"I have to make thee pretty for Proust city," I crooned, as I took the mascara pencils and small tubs of rouge from among my store of oils and unguents and precious powders and disinfectant wipes.

*

When he saw the painting in the London Gallery, he could not believe his eyes.  This was just like his dream.  He had been there.  It was a real place despite the abstractions evidently employed to disguise it as a work of art.  Under an appliqué of teased papyrus he glimpsed a small beetle at rest.*  He went to inform one of the gallery officials that the whole place was probably infested with crawling life even to the extent of the works of art themselves being invaded by foreign bodies.  The official's face – under the peaked hat – listened to the complaint with patience.  So patient, he didn't know when the complaint had ended, and thus failed to respond at all ... failing also to recognise that the complainant's face had foxed rather than blushed with anger.

*When the official finally investigated with tweezers – upon realising the relative enormity of the complaint – it is said that he discovered the art parasite not to be a beetle as such but a small shiny black egg, leathery to lick.  He passed it to the museum's natural history department for further investigation.  Tomorrow a full report will be given to the authorities.  The complainant is being kept informed.

*

When Count Congo arrived, Jawn was surprised that this was no fey gentleman in a portly decorated suit from turn-of-the-century Anatole France.  He was slim, decidedly manly-by-penchant and concerned to betray no quirks of behaviour that condemned him to any possible caricature (effeminate or otherwise).  However, he was accompanied by another gentleman who did resemble the inverted archetype of a person that Jawn had expected the Count himself to have been prior to seeing him.

"This is Lord Egg," said the Count. 

Lord Egg himself strutted about heavily in a baggy black uniform sparkling with medals that he had obviously not won in any war for bravery.  He simpered like a huge woman.  He examined Jawn in his hammock as if visiting a patient in a hospital. 

 Count Congo eventually asked Lord Egg to leave the vicinity.  Lord Egg was obviously only expected to meet Jawn briefly and then leave, as if simply, by his presence, to bring out the Count's own sharper articulations by contrast.

As the Count prepared to conduct the interview of the stranger-he-did-not-know-was-Jawn, Jawn himself saw that Lord Egg was crouching in the willowy shadows of darker yellow waiting to see if the Count failed in his endeavours to draw any salaciousness from an otherwise dry-baked cake that Jawn first appeared to be.  Congo and Egg were rivals in love if not appearance.  Their respective ranks unclear.  Perhaps they took it in turns to make the first attempt at conquering any innocent stranger who happened to sail into Proust on a chance tide.

The Nurse was also present in a secondary shadow by a frond of torn parchment.  Yesterday, Jawn had managed to claw himself from the darkness of mixed motives towards some position of empathy by seeing himself through her eyes via his own eyes.  Today, she seemed to be fully aware of the whole tableau vivant (the interacting ballet of desire and mimed confusion), even without Jawn's empathic help.  She was the manipulator without needing any particularly adroit people-skills other than an air of womanly wisdom to organise affairs like a conductor of an opera composed by Poulenc or Debussy.  Today she looked more like a Nun than a Nurse.  Certainly not the family cook she yesterday pretended to have once been.  More Shakespearean than Proustian.

She soon departed to fetch the tea to accompany the plate of cake that the hammock-net had steeped in yellow sleep most of the previous night.  Her infusions of oriental leaf were currently giving off a burning haze in her ancient kitchen having earlier been thus fired into existence by the hob's brightest gas-ring : piping hot within the capaciousness of a priceless samovar that came from an even more writerly precinct of preciousness than Proust city itself.

*

The scientist carefully prodded the dead beetle with his stethoscope with no idea of the context of any apocryphal findings so was quite gulled into believing it was what the earlier part of the sentence said it was: a beetle.  How it had infested a work of art in a gallery was neither here nor there.  His religion was amply provided with proof of nearly everything.  A scientist-with-faith was so convinced of his faith that even its unscientific nature was sufficient to increase its strength time and time again by circles of powerful kaleidoscopes of convincing illogic that even plain-spirited logic itself could not withstand.

An art parasite, therefore.  Things that fed off creativity like worms in sculptures or spiders that climbed the staves of music or one-bee bee-hives within blown bookspines.  These seemed so natural he needed no further empirical delays.

But the 'beetle' wasn't dead.  He heard it breathing within the leathery outer-casing of itself that was also itself as well as its container.  By dint of such expression, it was clear that scientists were thus evidently clearer thinkers than fiction writers.  And he smiled in pride as he proceeded to search with some difficulty for one of his precision instruments of surgical investigation. 

*

I managed to fetch up on the 'beach' of mixed sea and land that presented the edge of Proust's coastline.  Don't put words in my mouth!  Yet, I sense my thoughts – these thoughts – will one day be turned into writing, crystallised into print … and I can only hope the translation does justice to the original.  I hope there are no half-measures with regard to the truth of my thoughts, with regard to their narrative thread as a record of what actually happened to (and of what I actually thought as) Sarah.  And I repeat: don't put just any old words into my mouth!  I'm worth more than that.  Neither put any colour in my skin, no beauty in my face, no shape in my figure, no intention into my gratuitousness of free will, no faith into my frame of aspirations, no love for Hiver Jawn than simply that of a mother for a son or a lover for her lover or a subject for her personal version of what many call God.  Only I know the truth of why I slipped silently from the boat into the sea, allowing Jawn to travel onward to the next city in solitariness.  Only I can keep such cards close to her chest.  Only I can check the verities of time and endlessness.  The rudiments of myth and melancholy.  And, yet, none are my words.  They are, at most, my own thoughts, perhaps, in someone else's words.

I managed to stagger into the fibrous jungle as yet uncleared to make room for further city.  The gloom made the jungle's basic hues too dark to see, but I guessed them to be shades of yellow, as if stained by some internals gases of the world via rock-hid geysers or warm-water springs in the form of miscoloured blood.  Sea-water still dripped from my dress, clinging to me as if I had never known anything except innocent nudity all my life.  I heard groans.  I saw a human shape strewn between the woody fangs of deadfall plant-life.  It was Jawn, I soon discovered.  He was not aware of my presence.  His face bore the mark of teeth.  His limbs, too.  Half-chopped, with clumsy attempts at half-healing by means of lint and gummy plaster.  His belly showed signs of being penetrated completely by teeth.  At first, I assumed it was a wild animal that had attacked him. Or tried to eat him.  Remains of a loosely-woven net was round his left leg, a part of him that remained visibly untouched.  His tongue was half-chopped, too, as with a knife, showing a neater cut.  Crumbs as if from pastry or cake crusted the outside of his nostrils.  He snorted deeply as if finding it hard to breathe … or bleed.  The wounds barely revealed evidence of a clogged stream of blood – so much so its remains were mere flecks of a spent sluggish flow hardly worthy of the word seepage let alone haemorrhage.  There was more an appearance of flesh desiccating or crumbling out into a muckheap of curded yolk kept for centuries.  His eyes were filled with tealeaf tears, evidently hot to pass as he winced at every weep.

I did not dare look below his belly or higher than his thighs.

And yet, none are my words.

I wondered whether I could help.  I am no nurse.  I may not even have been there at all.

*

The gallery was dark as an even darker figure ghosted with a heavy pace towards the famous 'Yesterfang Panoply' between the margins of its intrinsic frame … then very carefully (so as not to awaken any shrill siren of sensed intrusion) it re-inserted a piece of the work's clumsy jigsaw beneath the subtle appliqué of hardened fibrositic flesh-tints.  The work was back as one. Its pest repositioned. The pest of all worlds. The work was now re-become an aesthetic gestalt that nobody visiting the gallery had noticed wasn't what it should have been or what it once was.  With beating heart but now lighter feet, the figure left without attracting the notice of any alarm by ill-thought touch or broken radar beam.

Part II

The Pest Of All Worlds 

Peter Brueghel was the most perfect of his century; this could be denied only by the ignorant, by a rival, or by someone knowing nothing of his art. He was taken from us while still in his full manhood. I hardly know whether to incriminate death, which perhaps thought him old enough, considering the matchless talent it had observed in him; or whether Nature feared to see herself disdained, since he had imitated her with so much art and talent.

-- from Ortelius' funeral oration for Peter Brueghel

When the stranger's mangled body turned up amid some fast growth by undergrowth, Proustians scratched their heads in wonderment and worry.  Most strangers simply passed through the city and were never seen again.  Egg and Congo were normally far more discreet about their conquests and rivalries-in-love.  This case could cause a scandal – noised even as far as the snow-line itself.  So they decided to export the problem to the very place where – if it got to hear about the true circumstances of the stranger's demise – most recrimination-by-law would be at its most severe for Proustians such as Egg and Congo … and for those authorities who turned a blind eye to the activities of Egg and Congo.

Sending the body there – with brazen disregard for the possible repercussions of so doing – would hopefully divert any suspicions towards other parties … even to the extent that, when History eventually turned its eye to these times, blame may well be attached to the place that received the body rather the one that sent it.

So, with due decorum to the backdrop of music from Parsifal, the funeral procession proceeded from Proust City towards snow-line London where, it was rumoured, the body-when-a-person had started life as its first memory … beyond the reputed blades that spun within the emptiness that preceded initial consciousness.  Only a few managed to reach that stage of exifugal incarnation.  Nobody knew what happened to those who were caught by the blades and scattered to every corner of emptiness.  Perhaps they lived as ghosts, not bodies.  But these, again, are concerns of wonderment and worry that beset us all, not only Proustians.  And if there is nobody to wonder or worry, then the wonders and worries soon disappear, as they did that fateful day of eschatology and burial.

The white vulture, so typical of the skies above such processions, continued to hover ominously as the caravan – of men on wheels and on beasts, some on foot, others on hoof, some carried like bodies to keep the real body company – entered the incipient snowcrust near London.  It was an intrinsically solemn sight, even though many uninvolved spectators thought it to be a circus in transit between pitches.

Rather than become bogged down in rutted yellow slush that indicated a premature big-freeze often prevailing at the cusp of no-snow and snow, key processioners took the body on their shoulders and advanced into the city with their burden before the full onset of a widening winter.  The others would either freeze into white-impacted sculptures (that no worms could penetrate) or cuddle enough to wreak warmth from fabricated love: legends for History to pick up (or not) at its whim.  Fiction washes its hands of them.

*

There is a famous painting that depicts a funeral service in the snow, between the smooth sloping walls of white redoubts constructed upon or supported by  the skeletons of ancient churches.  The body is being lowered into a hole evidently deeper than the snow itself.  Lowered, too, are the heads, of those that watch.  One art historian has propounded that most bodies of that age were simply buried in snow, as the snow never melted and was as deep as any normal earthen-grave in snowless climes.  Why this body needed to be buried even deeper than the snowbed remained a mystery about which the painter had not given any clues in his or her design by subtle or blatant symbol. But who knew how subtle?  And, by the false perspectives of the painting's design, who knew how deep?

One spectator threw a touching memento into the pit, fleetingly glimpsed before it was closed up with further snowfall.  It was not a moving picture.  How indeed can the images in a painting move?  But many critics praised the skill of conveying the illusion of movement in the throwing arm.

The painting was taken for granted, in the same way as many famous paintings in galleries worldwide have simply existed by being hung there.  It was later believed to be a late Brueghel.  Only to be further superseded by  theories that it did not exist at all except in a fiction about other fictions.  But exist it surely did by dint of faith in existence by description.  And if it exists, someone must have painted it.  No point in theorizing otherwise.  Its residual fame rests upon the illusion of the throwing arm being demonstrably shown as having been achieved by only one brushstroke.

***

Exactly when the stranger's slow deep burial happened – by London snow with many similar strangers bowed in attendance – another burial took place among the mounds of Sutton Hoo within Deben's view.  Which came first, the burial or the mound?  All is for the pest in the pest of all possible worlds.

And all burials join hands across the land.

They had dragged an ancient boat from the river – still wet, raw and planky – and, by means of a feat not dissimilar to Stonehenge, transported it with dire difficulty through its own ploughed furrows and planted it as the future's rounded grassy swelling to serve as the body's final resting-place, along with all the necessaries and curios and hanging-bowls with which any superstitious  death, in those days, was gifted … likely remnants of artefacts for future art-lovers to cherish as funerary arrangements towards the day that they, too, might survive the encroaching pest.

And the gas bubbles in the blood by inverse disbleeding of a vampire is the nearest one can approach what happened next.  Although it didn't.

Amid the merging mulch of boat-boards, the body's still intact gold-buckled belt was all that remained of the curios in the stranger's grave and of the stranger's body itelf  (other than its residual cancerous substance not dissimilar to the muck that modern household drains collect if left uncleaned for long) … and the archaeological excavation that had revealed this fact became, in turn, the exhumation of the darkest fears already harboured within the minds of the diggers so slowly digging.  Young eager modern hearts felt, in turn, as if they had become a fulsome form of inward fizzing flatulence that no amount of bodily vents could possibly expel, even given the dawning fact that filters could work both ways.   

The gold-buckled belt's unique clip device was designed in such a clever way (presumably to prevent grave-robbing) that the only possible method to have opened it for removing the belt from the waist was for the wearer to have first breathed in. 

***

The bank of computers was flickering and some screens showed the same screen as others, others not.  There were only two operators: both women, one black, one white: pretty as well as at their prettiest age.  They had continually to change seats rather than take advantage of any network.  The set-up was ostensibly ultramodern with sleek flatscreens and optimal programmes, whilst retaining the appearance of being antiquated, with feeder-consoles of too much weight and size ... and programmes that were never quite fast enough to fulfil their promise as the slickest or latest.  The two women were clicking furiously into many Search Engines for the word 'burial'.  And half the screens in use at any one time were in a variable state of freezing (even crashing) whilst the search widened to every corner of the known web.

"The one in Hoo had no yester-pod planted with it at all," said one woman, with too much of an air of studied inwardness for the other to be able to articulate it back to herself.  Neither wanted to disturb the concentration of the other. "There was a mask buried … hmmm … a yellow face-mask that nobody found during the initial excavation…"

Eventually, as each Engine fizzled to a halt – its hits done – their conversation became more animated and interactive.  A music with its own conductor.  The  two one-sided conversations had been more like 'avant garde' configurations of sound with no meaning at all when laid  across each other like transparencies of talk.  Now, later, they knew what each wanted to say and what each wanted to hear in reply.

"Did you know before that there was an Engine for the pest?"

"And for the past!  'In Search of Lost Time'. 'Remembrance of Things Past'. Titles like that - or there or thereabouts.  But, even so, I agree it's difficult to access archives that never existed at the time simply because the web hadn't even been invented when they were first created."

"That doesn't stop us trying!"

"I found a completely white site with just the burial mound itself delicately picked out towards the middle like a geometrical figure.  I dug into it like this…" (and she prodded with the mouse several times upon its mat) "… and, see, the body had gone.  But the pod was still there.   The ground was bubbly, little yellow eruptions of gas.  No smell on the site.  Not sure this computer can find smells.  But yellow does seem to be an important colour in this whole thing."

"You're right.  I found another site where I saw things as they actually happened in real time via a webcam.  Houseboats on a yellowish creek.  But the church had no grave mounds so I didn't bother to search further there.  But, then, I had a brainwave ... a long pier-like structure stretching out into the cold-looking haze did give me the idea that in this particular case it could have been a burial at sea!  Had you thought of that?"

"Not really.  It can't be called a burial, can it, if you just drop the body into the sea?  And we'd have to fish around forever just to find the pods!"

"There are places where the sea and beach sort of mingle like a yellowy soup.  If the body's dropped in a place like that then it would be a burial of sorts, wouldn't it?"

"I suppose so."

"Oh, one thing I keep meaning to ask – do all these burials need to have happened at exactly the same time to count?"

"I'd've thought so.  Can't you move the webcam to look at the sky, try and do it with your mouse and see if there are sea-gulls flying or vultures?"

"I could give it a try.  But what would that prove?"

"It was mentioned in training, wasn't it?  If you see a vulture, dig deeper to see if the body has wormed itself specially deep from what it sees as danger.  Even if it has become a vampire already, it still fears the white fang.  It needs to make the fang a thing of the past by entering a different time zone, and the easiest way is by means of 'antipodal angst'.  I think that was the expression."

"There are too many expressions they didn't explain properly during training."

"Hmmm – I sometimes wonder if there is not a webcam 'trained' on us!  Or if there is someone even at this moment 'digging' for us! Excavating for excavators!"

Their conversational music degenerated into girlish laughter.

***

It didn't go anywhere.  A bedrock whereby no body could have escaped except upwards. The body must still be there buried like a ghost with the visible remains of its cancer making it seem if it was buried forever with the cause of the body's death itself outlasting it.

"Hey!  There's nothing here except stinky muck!" shouted an eager student girl, commissioned to discover the tomb of the unknown soldier.

Her boyfriend gave her an excited kiss on the cheek as they playfully managed to cordon off the area of the digging as soon as they realised that this could be an important historical site.  Then they scooted off to find the professor so that he could give the grave his imprimatur of archaeological provenance.

"Is it Hiver Jawn himself?" asked another girl meeting them halfway.

"Yes, it could be."

"All the burials were for the same person, the same body," a loner student shouted across the field with a degree of impatience, being a stern clump-eyed individual who was jealous that he had not stumbled upon the find himself.  Knowledge made him unknowledgeable with the confusion caused by frustration that others were less knowledgeable than him.  Nobody knew his name.  But he was a student that everyone thought everyone else knew.

The students gabbled. There were several theories about vampire-killers and how each version of Jawn (having visited several writers' sites with their own stories to tell about him) was buried at different stages in his life from along the fictional spectrum that had been set up variously within and without mutual consultation between those responsible for each slant on his supposed existence.  A spectrum of death without the earlier life to support any subsequent death at all, let alone a spectrum.  It made more sense to those willing to widen their brainstorming to contain nonsense as well as the deeply serious repercussions of not brainstorming at all.

Each tomb or hive or pod or egg were dropped one by one in a 'paper-chase' of muckheaps along a yellow brick road … leading from clue to clue towards darkest Africa, counting each forgotten footstep from Congo to Zanzibar as if each were an earth-embedded beacon to light the future … downward if not along.

Away from the city after which he was named (or vice versa), Rider Haggard galloped upon a wild stallion of flying hooves towards the towering rough-hewn stone-carving that was his own gnarled and barren face overlooking, like a mountain, King Solomon's Mines themselves.  Dive-bombed by vultures whiter than the blazing sunless sky.  And She-who-must-be-obeyed stalked into view, holding the youngest version of Jawn that had managed to remain unburied.

"Welcome, Rider, to the next stage," she-called-She said.  "The hunting and hounding of the dreaded pest in the motor of carcinomal disease.   The God in the Machine.  Deus ex machina.  Tabula Rasa with no easy ready blank to scrawl over. Here…" (and she indicated the latest Jawn to be unhived) "…we have the hero you can call your own to use as you wish with words if not deeds.  The best pest-hunter of them all.  Just seek out Lovecraft and Poe and other writers of Horror in their namesake cities to accompany you towards this worthy goal that all worlds will thank you forever more for trying to do than for not doing at all because you knew you'd fail."

In ripping yarns, there were no diseases at all.  This would be no ripping yarn.  No boyhood adventure.  This was a story built on muckheaps rather than imagination.

And  Rider  took Jawn from the black lady … and, then, as man and boy, mounted on steeds that snickered at even the slightest whisper in their pointed ears, they both set out to find the cities where writers factored in the same cities to help hold our future bones in sacred literary groves growing skeletons not trees.  Cities of Fiction.  Cities that hid the pest.  As well as the past itself.  The pair of them needed to exhume every trope till they reached the pest – a pest not nesting at the core-of-things (where the angel megazanthus was meant to nest) but on the edge – at the periphery – along the circumference – where we writers already worked around it without recognising it as the pest.  Till the Coming of Jawn.

Jawn thought Rider resembled a man he had once forgotten forever.  But Jawn was now too young to have ever known him in the first place.  Or till later.  And the question remained – would he be able strictly to remember someone he had not yet been able to forget?

And the young students, still gabbling, eventually reached the professor who smiled at their crazy brainstorming.

***

The haggard-faced comrade-in-arms for a young impressionable man now grown slightly older than the boy whom she-called-She had transferred so lovingly (as a mother would) into the man's care, was intimated, within past passages, to be Congreve, but nobody, including Congreve, knew he once was Congreve, except the words themselves stating the fact. The nobody-words that nobody read.

Any relevant memories had vanished piecemeal into the open sky because there were no restraining burial keeps to keep them together in an understandable form. And the various vultures themselves had ignored the passage of memories floating away beyond even their own side-eyes' soaring scrutiny.

Memories needed a present as well as a future to exist at all.  And this was already the past. And so Congreve and Jawn  no longer sought the past, because the past was here – here and now.

"Jawn,", said Congreve, with a smile, as their two steeds cantered side by side, "we shall call it our quest for the pest – no longer a quest for the past, not a search for lost time nor a remembrance of things past, because that stuff's old hat, because the true past, once accomplished, once lived, once forgotten, is a past that's marched too far for any quest to reach.  So we gradually change the past, by changing the purpose of the quest itself.  With this success in neutralising the past with altered goals beyond its own reach, we now seek the pest instead, the pest we should always have sought if it had not been for the similar words confusing us … so that we can then eventually quench the pest's poison and stymie its eternally foreseeable ability to bleed mankind dry with its cancers and other diseases of mind and body…"

Congreve laughed.  This was a speech he had learned from a book.  Jawn joined in the laughter, without understanding why.  He just enjoyed the comradeship simply for what it was – and for the sense of boyhood adventure. It mattered little what or whither the quest itself.

Congreve continued: "…and we need to gather forces from the dark imaginations of world literature to work with us as counter-spies or clandestine triple bluffs and so forth against the pest that already believes it has got them in its own pocket working against us!"

Jawn wasn't listening.  He watched the distant horizon as his own particular tutelary vulture created a rorschach blot with a meaningful twist of shape indicating a doom that – like Congreve's words – Jawn failed to understand.

He simply thought he once had memories of this man he now knew as Rider stolen from him – and Jawn had once been to the police to report these memories missing and the police told Jawn that they could not do anything about it since, as far as they could tell, no crime had been committed.

*

CONTINUED: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/yesterfang_part_three.htm