In Paradisum (more Kaspar stuff)

Life as we would now understand it came to a choking end over the spring of 2044. The underground paramilitary wing of a pressure group lobbying for a decrease in the global population, despairing of progress through political means, released a virus targeted at removing all those with a blood type other than AB- - thereby destroying more than 99% of the world’s population and leaving as many people across the globe as had existed in Germany at the time of the virus’ release. By a staggering oversight, this virus happened to decimate the group itself, leaving the world short both of humans generally and of homicidal lunatics specifically.

Kaspar reflected on this as he sat, smoking his pipe, on Hampstead Heath; June 17, 2044, was his 62^nd Birthday.

Aleanna had perished in those horrible days, expiring toward the end of April, and Kaspar had wept for her for a time, wept sorely. Summer came, though, and quiet started to settle around him, and Kaspar found a peace that surprised and pleased him. He pictured Aleanna without sadness now, fond memories tinged with pain only in their last days together. She had tolerated him, and come to love him, and he would remain grateful for that to the end of his days.

The thing, however, that most appealed to Kaspar about his brave new world, apart from that lovely quiet, was that he no longer needed to be tolerated. He sought understanding from no-one, not least because he saw no-one from whom to seek it. He had spend the last four days walking to London, just so as to see this view on his birthday, and could count on fingers and toes the people he had seen. Armed in anticipation of greater numbers, he had instead found the capital deserted; as the worst came, many had crawled away from the city in the hope of escaping the disease, only to die instead in Romford, Norwich, Reading, or a smaller place, Colne Engaine or Shere. So there was almost no-one here to sully the summer-holiday school hall of London.

Looting, a perilous activity in March, was commonplace and peaceful now that so few remained; Kaspar still left some change in each abandoned store as he topped up his tobacco stockpile, reasoning that he was unlikely to have much use for the British Pound before his erupting cells claimed his life. A barter culture, he supposed, would spring up when things returned to something like normal.

He was not worried about who would run things, because no-one had shown much aptitude for it before. Kaspar assumed that the protected blood type would be spread evenly across the populace, hopefully preserving enough engineers and so forth to prevent nuclear meltdowns, but he didn’t find himself particularly troubled by the possibility that this was not the case. The tobacco and the sunshine and Aleanna

s memory and the skyline, some plumes of smoke rising darkly but unthreateningly, like a child’s Halloween mask, absorbed his whole world. Kaspar smiled.

Bartering what? Tinned goods, he guessed, at least until some industrious folk revived agricultural practices. The livestock still seemed healthy; animals seemed largely unaffected by the socially conscious plague. Each thing, thought Kaspar, carries its own end with it; perhaps the whole race had had this close encoded in it from the start. Kaspar wondered whether that was his thought, or someone else’s. Maybe Aleanna’s. Oh well. He puffed, found the embers out, and slowly tapped out, refilled, relit his pipe, enjoying the each stage and the smell and good god the tie, the ease of it all. Winter would be harder, he thought, and took a long, calming breath.

Splinters

I’ve always been interested in the idea that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die because, as I see it, if it does, you don’t; you’d just shuttle back and forth between your birth and your impending death forever as replay absorbed replay absorbed replay. Sure, to the casual observer you might be seen to die, to hit that pavement or that car or that internal, biological wall, but your personal time would, like one of Zeno’s arrows, be reduced to infinite splinters, your end unreachable. As a child I thought that this might be what caused déjà vu, and whenever I felt that strange little itch I wondered how many times I’d been through my own story, and whether I’d remember any more next time round.

During my unfortunately prolonged adolescence, as the fear of death that was to gently asphyxiate my life slowly took hold, I yearned for this eternal, purgatorial recapitulation to be our fate, but no such luck. Just before you die – at least where death comes suddenly, inevitably, and gives you just enough time to recognise it – the main sense is of mental paralysis, as if something has thrown you totally off your train of thought. If anything comes to you, it is likely to be supremely trivial; you are much more likely to think of an uncompleted chore or remember something that made you laugh a few weeks before than anything to which you can cling. It is very difficult to get a real hold on the fact that you are about to die, and where you would hope for a memory of your lover or your child or anyone who once mattered to you, you are likely instead to die thinking of nothing much at all.

So Bright

It happens like this. At some point on any given day, at seemingly random intervals and with no discernible pattern, I will notice something slip. This is the only indicator, and it usually comes so close to the start of the episode that it affords me little or no time to brace myself. A finger fumbles on a keyboard or a mug drops or someone stumbles. At first I imagined that this started it, that a small wrongness opened a door for a greater one, but now I believe that it is not causation but correlation, the seeping of the wrong time into my world - the first soft wavelets of the change unsettling one or a few things before the full effect has time to spread out and engulf everything. Soon colours alter and fade, stone-washed and pastel, and no sounds come.

A man stood on the curb ahead of me drops the mobile phone into which he was talking. The phone is safely cradled in his hand, but without the pause that seems in one's mind to precede an event or the segue that indicates cause, it’s dropping to the floor, as if hand and phone moved at different speeds. About half-way down, the object will accelerate unnaturally. The man’s expressions, his reactions, will pick up pace; now I have about ten seconds to find somewhere safe before the rest of the world is shifting so fast that I can’t move. People’s faces are a good guide, because they are changed by the sudden rapidity of movement; blinks and glances build a blurred cataract over the eyeball and a purple stain above and below, as the lids move too fast; the teeth of a person sat in conversation seem to become liquid, leaving trails. It is not that their time has become fast, but that mine has become slow; I solidify and become brittle, and they all carry on as before. I drop out of their world, unable to keep up.

An episode can last seconds or days; I think they may be becoming longer and one day I shall be imprisoned forever, though I cannot say. I have seen others, sometimes, trapped like me. Their eyes are so bright in a world of muted shades. Someone held for the first time can be destroyed so easily, stuck in the wrong path, confused, panicked, trampled by a stampede of commuters, or ripped through by paper airplanes and tennis balls that move like the inexorable bullets of bathos. You have to find a place devoid of people as quickly as you can, and it is the hardest thing you can ever do because you are running to save your life and being held back ever more with each passing moment, until you freeze, suspended in mid-air as you fall down a man-hole, jammed in a disused doorway with your trailing leg left dangling dangerously in the street. No one can see you more than five seconds in, because you fade from their sight like a myth, unless they were staring at you when it began. Then you are locked for them like a bronze sculpture in a square, and they cannot understand why you are rigid, why you cannot move or talk, or why no-one else can see you there.

The first time I saw another it was a young woman; she was crouching beside a small tree in a park where I was lying under a bench. Her eyes, so bright, were fixed on me, feeding me with hope, and we watched each other until it passed. As it receded I rose from my hiding place and ran, my limbs gradually building up speed, my body flooding with relief and with the freedom of my sudden fluidity. She seemed as though she might flee but she stayed ever so still, almost as if she were still trapped, until I wrapped my arms around her in disbelief and she yielded to me.

We talked for days, barely sleeping or eating. She had first felt time go wrong as a small child; a vase fell and her mother, running from another room, could not see her by the time she arrived. The police nearly trampled her while they searched the house. She was better than me at hiding, more used to it. She told me that there were many others trapped, but that she had never before seen two people begin and end a phase in synch. It seems romantic and absurd but it felt like a sign and I wanted to hold her to me and never relinquish that grasp because she was mine and we could always hide together.

Her eyes, so bright, transfixed me as she told me of her loneliness, of her fears, of the way that she used her slow time in her mind. She talked of the unparalleled joy and the incredulity she had felt as she watched me crawl under that bench opposite her tree, and of how she had locked her gaze upon me so as to see whether we were released together, and then I heard a door slam too loud and her eyes glazed with buzzing motion and her teeth began to drip and cling to each other and her hands blurred into a solid arc, and I tried to scream but it was too late and my mouth would not move and no sound would come. I saw her face recoil too fast with the sudden realisation that she was alone as before, and I knew that my frozen mask, unable to respond, must have made her feel sick, as I did. She left and I could not cry for three days, because for three days I could not do anything except replay in my mind those eyes, so bright, clouding over.

Fragments of Kaspar Stuff

When his parents split, Kaspar was distraught. He tried desperately to put it in perspective; he had heard storied of, and indeed known, children who had suffered much greater pains than he; indeed, as he would come to realise and, to an extent, already know, Kaspar had led a remarkably untroubled, even idyllic existence, a charmed childhood untouched by violence or poverty or hunger or fear or even a threat of any of these things; but your appreciation of any emotion can only be measured against the scale of your own experience. While the abstract spectrum of life’s possibilities stretches ever more impossibly to each horizon, Kaspar knew only his own little patch, comfortably toward the happier end of the range; for him, the end of his parents’ marriage was like suddenly developing the ability to see into the infrared.

I met Kaspar in Hyde Park in the summer of 20--, as we stood side-by-side watching the sun set over the Serpentine from the bridge at its western end. The wavelets graded away from milky black under us to shimmering pinks and off-whites around the island and the silhouetted pedaloes, bisected by a broad spit of blind white.

Just before the sun fell into the bank of clouds, there to enrich them with rubies and gold, a seagull flew towards us, banked and turned in the near-lilac overhead, and swooped low, following the narrowing white line and rising, a black kite, just as the sun dropped. The line became shorter, burnished. Herons skidded in, their undercarriages bobbing gently beneath them, and now the lake was awash with lapping pink, blue, white; the sun held itself a moment, a blazing amber setting false fire to the landscaped treetops, and fell away over a flotilla of origami seagulls.

Peace

There is a place where angels tread, and it is between our world and nothing. Sometimes time gets stuck, and then I can see them walking between us and through us. Their movements have a grace that is just a little beyond human, but they are very much alive. They have wings and dress in white, and of course they glow strangely, because that is what an angel should do. Their eyes, though, are not marble, or frescoed plain, but sharp and bright with irises the colour of amethysts. Nor are they, as I had always presumed, asexual androgynes, but male and female, sensual, tactile, and perfumed, a little like warm lilies. They hold people in their arms and whisper, stroke their cheeks and smooth their brows. They are among us at all times, and mostly we cannot feel them or hear them, and it is a shame, because they could save us, I think.

When time stops, colours change: they feel bright and old, the sea in the sunshine, the shining skin of a grandmother’s hand in your memory of childhood. People, frozen thus, take on a ridiculous aspect, for human faces only make sense in perpetual motion. In the twilight where angels move I am surrounded by carnival masks, the macabre playthings of a childish taxidermist. The angels move freely, unnoticed, unhurried. Some talk to each other, though I can never hear what they say; some touch each other and smile, great shining smiles that speak of such a capacity for joy. I do not know if anyone else sees, or knows; no-one ever speaks of it, though I understand that it would make potentially embarrassing dinner-party conversation: ‘Well, there were a couple of angels in the office trying to calm James down, you know, James from Archives, only he was frozen too so I don’t really know if it was working’, you would say, and everyone would stare indignantly at their cutlery as if it had just asked them to turn the music down. Perhaps one day I’ll do that, raise the topic over the braised whatever, ask for the salt and talk of angels. Everyone should talk of angels.

The first time I found that the world had stopped, I could only barely see them. It was more an intimation of presence and motion, a religiously unfounded hint of unaloneness, glances of light in the corner of my eye, shadows. Each time thereafter they became a little clearer, resolving themselves gently; for the last few months they have been perfectly visible, violating all I once knew blatantly and unashamedly. Sometimes I think that they know I can see them; perhaps we are not supposed to, which is why, I guess, it so rarely comes up at dinner parties.

I do not know if time stops, or if I fall out of it; the effect is of everything halting suddenly. The length of each instance and the intervals between occurrences are unpredictable; the first time seemed days long, while on other occasions it varies from a few moments to several months. Once, and once alone, I felt frozen for something like years, decades; so long that I first gave up hope of awaking, and then gradually forgot that life had ever happened, that there had been anything other than this isolated thought before an interminable showreel of angels and mannequins. Still I struggle to divine what is memory and what is imagination from that lifetime of pause. Ah, but angels. Never can you fall out of love with angels once you have seen them. Faces of sky and hands of wind and eyes of stars, a touch like a falling leaf and a voice like music that sings through your bones and all the ages and a presence like the home you have searched unwittingly for through all the long years of your life, an unexpected Ithaca.

There is an angel that walks with me now, at my side at all times. She holds me and explains things and takes away my many fears, except the one that I might lose her. All the light of the world shines through her, and her hand lies so lightly. Her tread is a finger on your cheek.

I stood frozen where angels walk when she appeared directly before me and walked forward and brought herself close to me. Her hand on my face, her voice in my mind, her eyes in my heart. I know that you can see, her voice said, and that you fear. These were not her words, nor do they have the weight of what she said; they are merely a transcription of the meaning of what she spoke, a scribbled melody only vaguely redolent of the symphony from which it is taken. She spoke in my head with image and sound, soft and simple and infinite of meaning. Peace, said her voice, and my head rang with it, tolling a sound to calm the landscape of the whole universe.

She stroked my hair and the colours changed back, not in a snap as usual, but slowly, my foot falling to the ground as if cushioned, and the world swelling back to life.

It was strange not to see her fade away, through translucence to transparency and then nothingness, as the world phased to the fore, as the lens of my life was refocused. She simply stood before me, her hand on my head, her smile eclipsing those who passed and the buildings around and the sun itself, and peace, peace, the voice still echoing in my mind but now, gentle, in my ears too, a sound of the world, cutting effortlessly through car engines and vendors’ shouts, of the same stuff as them. Her hand fell to mine, and I had so many and no questions, because peace, peace.

We walked, hand in hand, like soft glass, her hand, for many hours, silent and smiling. Once, I pointed at a small beauty, the sun hitting the windows of an old building, and she laughed, a half-full wine glass tapped by a fingernail, warm and clear and soft, like a waterfall in a cathedral.

By the river, that day or another, as we stood wrapped in my thoughts, transfixed by water, I felt panic rise and silence break.

‘How do I know you are an angel?’

Her smile subsided only slightly and her eyes showed serene insight and affirmation and peace. ‘You do know. You have seen and you have felt. Doubt will pass’, and she smiled that wondrous smile and her skin was so soft. ‘I know you struggle with what seems new and untold, but you have seen us move and heard my voice, and you know’.

Warmth took me but I felt a rebel urge, spite and envy and fear. ‘Angels can fly’, I said. ‘Fly’. I hurled myself over the wall and into the water many metres below. As I fell and she stayed, I felt taught, overstretched. The water slapped me like an errant child.

I fought my way heavily to the surface to find her standing on the water, wavelets lapping her bare toes. The bricked channel built around the river rang with her beautiful laugh, and her eyes gleamed brighter than before; as she offered me a hand, I felt ridiculous and loved and weak and strong in her, and peace.

The Sea

The sea is grey and flat and there is no-one else here. You stand at the water's lapping edge, your feet half-drowned and your legs half frozen as the wind tries to undress you, tearing at your hair and your clothes with unseemly haste while your toes curl round pebbles and your left trouser-leg slips a little. Rearrange it or ignore it? Perhaps you should skim a stone as a child might, or maybe you could run along the shore and feel free, share a moment of trite liberation with no-one but nature and me. You could wade forth into the sea, ungainly but unbowed, caring not a jot for the trousers or the woollen jumper or your watch; maybe, at chest depth, you will discard them with an unconscious flourish, and swim out with no care for the return journey.

Or you could take a few steps back, dry your feet with your socks, pick up your shoes and tramp back to the car, turning just once to look at the flat unending sea reflecting a slate sky laden with black puffs of cloud, bizarrely threatening as cotton wool rolled in soot. You could open the door, pull on your shoes and swing yourself into position just as the rain came down, closing the door, turning the key, flicking on the lights and the wipers in one swift movement, forgetting the sea as you look over your shoulder to reverse out of the gravel car-park.

Your mousy hair is criss-crossing your eyes when the rain starts and the sky cracks above you. You pull your arms around you and feel the drag of wet wool on the skin of your upper arms. Laugh just a little as your sinking trouser-leg completed its descent and plops gracelessly into the water. Your legs are sharppained now as you shake with laughter and drops sting your cheeks. Have you ever swum back stroke with the rain on your face? Let’s. You turn and walk backwards into the sea; you can just see the car, there, through the downpour. Stumbling a little, you wade back until the water is at your waste, your breasts, your neck, then roll your head back, bring your legs up, try to wipe the hair from your face, close your eyes, and start to swim. Open your eyes from time to time, it’s hard in the rain but it’s worth it. Keep a steady pace, stay with me. Don’t rush, you’ll tire and find yourself stranded in sight of land. Breathe. Gentle. Rest your arms and legs each as needs be; if you’re tired we can stop and float a while. It should have stopped raining by now, eased off a little. The water’s still so calm. Can you feel me? My hand, there. Stay. Hold my hand and we’ll float awhile. Don’t look back, don’t. What are we doing? Like stupid rubber ducks. I wonder how deep it is here. Is the wool too itchy? Are you too cold? Let’s go again, stay close. It’s letting up a little, you should be able to keep your eyes open. Don’t look back, please, it will make this so much harder. Come here. You do the legs and I’ll do the arms, keep your head on my belly. Your hair tickles, don’t laugh, I love you, don’t look back, I love you, keep kicking.

Kaspar's Dream

On the day that he would discover that he was dying, Kaspar sat in a park, reading and feeding pigeons and trying to think of anything except the possibility that his own cells were in revolt. It was early spring, and in three hours time he would be told that there was hope, that he had a good chance, that perhaps he could live for several more years. He was 61, and the pigeons’ iridescence flickered delightfully in the clean light.

He thought of Aleanna, at home and unaware that in six hours her husband would return to her to not tell her that he had cancer. He thought of her now, reading undoubtedly, occasionally raising her eyes to the strange silver light of those days as it glowed against the window, wondering whether and when and what to eat, and thinking of him, ignorantly thinking of her well husband as if he still existed. He hunched over his book to hold the pages down as the wind rose, and felt tiny prickles of rain against the back of his neck. He thought of Aleanna not feeling this feeling as he raised the curls of hair from his nape and exposed the skin to the wind, the drizzle, and the warmth, and wished she were with him to feel this and to hold his hand, and wished that he could bring himself to tell her that his body was a traitor and he would have to go soon.

He remembered a dream from many years before. In the dream, he walked into a living room – theirs, but not theirs – to find Aleanna sitting on the couch, reading an old leatherbound book. She lifted her head from the book, looking straight ahead, and then turned her face toward Kaspar – one movement, slow and fluid, no extraneous motion, like a brand new machine – looking at him with grey eyes. She said ‘I can’t read this anymore,’ and opened her mouth wide to reveal a 20 pence piece on her tongue. This she removed and offered to him, before returning to her book, once again in that single slow movement, a divine crane moving without hesitation. Thereafter she would periodically remove a 20 pence piece from her mouth, placing them gently beside her on the sofa as she read; some came forth easily, others were coughed up; she started to look as if the effort were making her ill; she raised her head again, nervously this time, and her eyes were bright blue but bruised, and she opened her mouth despairingly and it was full of twenty pence coins, and she vomited them and vomited them, wretching so much that a rupture seemed inevitable, and he rushed to her but she could not stop vomiting the coins over him; trying to sob but only bringing forth shower after shower of twenty pence pieces.