Derealisation

6784 words

Paul's mother always said that he spent far too much time in his room reading and would frequently shoo him out to play with his friends. Paul never told anyone, he would hardly have thought there was anything to tell, but sometimes — not when he was reading though — he would see a dazzling white fire in his mind and at the same time would feel in possession of marvellous, absolute knowledge. The particular knowledge that came to Paul on these occasions varied with circumstances. Once, when on a high-school tramping weekend, he had risen before anyone else in the morning and gone to stand on the bank of a stream where the trees had been hung with spiderweb curtains that trapped myriad shards of the dawn's fire, and joy had blown through him like a ghostly wind. He had been filled with a wordless knowledge that he might have expressed — if he had seen the slightest reason to express it, that is — as something like a profound sense of continuity with all life. For one so fond of reading and knowledge, however, there was little that Paul liked about school and he was glad to escape the place.

The world that he encountered after leaving school was quite unlike school except that it was still the same world and there was little that he liked about a lot of it. There were exceptions though. One was his girlfriend, Kate, although you might not count her as a purely post-high-school-world kind of thing because she and Paul had started having sex regularly while they were both still at high school. Paul sometimes thought that his relationship with Kate was unusually perfect. They were closer than other lovers because they had been barely more than children when they had begun their relationship, more like brother and sister really, but closer than brother and sister because they slept together. Paul never imagined that anyone was supposed to like school and, although he never thought about it, if he had he might have realised how much more irksome the world would have seemed if he had spent his childhood attending schools he had liked.

Paul and Kate had gone to Mapua near Nelson together to pick apples in order to try and save money to go overseas and see if the rest of the world was really there. Like apple orchards in general, this apple orchard was more pleasant than a good many other workplaces; the work was not too demanding and the company was congenial. Apart from Kate, Paul's working companions were three girls — two Australian and one English — all presumably checking to see if New Zealand were really there. In terms of the quantity of happiness that can be achieved through mundane, repetitive work, picking apples at Mapua was for Paul a high point. But apples! Paul noticed, after several weeks of picking apples that he could see apples whenever he closed his eyes. In the house near the beach where the apple-pickers lived together in relative peace and harmony, Paul had balanced a single apple on top of every object capable of supporting one. The shelves and storage areas of the large kitchen where the apple-pickers tended to congregate when they were in had been turned into a countryside littered with miniature red-and-golden-domed mosques and churches.

There were four books in the apple-pickers' house. Two of them were about Zen. These had been borrowed from an apple-picker who worked on a neighbouring orchard and shared Paul's interest in religion and mysticism. One was a booklet, hardly a book at all really, about the many benefits of drinking carrot juice and had been given to Paul before departing for Nelson by Lizzie, a friend who had red hair. The last was a tattered paperback entitled The Noumenaites, an adventure story intertwined with an account of the spiritual development of a boy named Poul who grew up in a monastery located somewhere in Northern Europe. Paul wasn't sure where this book had come from. The house where the apple-pickers lived contained no TV set and you couldn't go to parties every night of the week and so, having read everything else, Paul had begun to read the paperback.

The ancient Finnding monastery school of the Noumenaite order had been Poul's home since early childhood. Even so, he trembled as he sat on the hard bench outside the door of the Abbot's room. He trembled just a little more as the door began to move towards him.

"Come in, my boy. I do know that to be sitting where you are usually means to be in trouble to a thirteen-year-old, but let me assure you that that is not the case today," the Abbot smiled.

Poul scurried through the gap beneath the bridge formed by the robed arm of the Abbot as he held the great door open. "Take a pew," the old man said, indicating a small bench as he seated himself behind the enormous desk.

"Pleased the exams are over?" the Abbot offered.

Poul smiled politely. In fact, he rather liked exams. He recalled the joy that dwelt at the heart of the white fire that had blazed more brightly as each answer had appeared so easily in his mind.

"I expect you're wondering what this is all about. Well, let's get on with it then. Ordinarily, certain aspects of the results gained by students in examinations are shrouded in mystery and there are good reasons for this, but in order to help you understand some of the things that may be about to happen to you, you are to be given a little more information than is customary. Examinations are set in such a way that we are able to discover much about our candidates from their answers. We can of course see whether they have been studying or not and even whether studying is to be encouraged in some cases, as I am sure you will understand, but there is more to be learnt from student's answers than this. There are particular questions the answers to which we find most informative. You may have noticed that there were some questions in the examination that did not pertain to any of your courses of study, and I would not be surprised if my mentioning this will help you to relax somewhat at this moment."

Poul had been painfully aware that there had been questions to which he had been unable to find the answers in his memory. That had not stopped him from answering them, of course, but he had felt somewhat anxious about it. He drew a deep breath.

"One of the reasons that we do not make complete information about examination results available to students is to shield them from things that they will not understand. It is not that we don't expect our younger brothers to cope with the awareness of differing abilities and aptitudes — because we do, but there are discoveries to be made among the answers we receive that may on rare occasions lead to certain students being treated very differently to the others.

"Not to prolong your discomfort, I must tell you that we were very pleased and even a little surprised at your responses to some of the 'special' questions, questions that you would not have been expected to be able to answer.

"You will — should you desire it, of course, for we never force any student to strike out along the stony pathway that is opening up before you — be given very specialised teaching appropriate to one who has demonstrated such unusual qualities. For reasons I have already indicated and for other reasons that may become apparent to you later should you decide in the affirmative, those that are to take this pathway are kept secluded from the others.

"I fully realise that you have no information on which to base your decision and I apologise for placing you in such a position — although I don't think that that will trouble one such as you excessively..., but if you do not wish to take this opportunity then you must let me know now and you will leave this office with no knowledge beyond the fact that there is at least one advanced course of study that is offered to students who exhibit your particular aptitude. Do you wish to withdraw?"

Poul could hardly contain his excitement.

"Then I have my answer," the old man beamed, but as he turned away Poul noticed that the open horizontal lines of the Abbot's brow were crumpled by the twin vertical lines of a deep frown.

The oxcart journey to the bare, rocky promontory overlooking the icy Skagerrak where stood the ancient stone tower known as Krondheim had taken many weeks. The monks immured there seemed to Poul strangely taciturn and furtive, and when he asked when his lessons were to begin he was told that he was not to attend lessons. He quickly discovered that there was no library in this place either, that there were no books at all. There were plain meals and, as always, daily duties. After Poul had been at Krondheim for several months he was told by Aich, the one-eyed monk who had been given charge of him, that he was to sit an examination.

"But I have had no lessons!" Poul was indignant.

"I can't do nothing about that," Aich said, "I just tell you what I'm told."

"And why would anyone tell you that I am to be given an examination even though I have been given no lessons?"

"I expect they know what they're doing."

"And who are 'they'?"

Poul stormed out of the room leaving Aich to bluster. Later that day he was called to the office of Hop Brown. He was invited to sit. The impeccably groomed senior monk stared at him for an uncomfortable number of seconds after which he smiled oddly and pursed his lips in a way that made Poul's skin crawl.

"It has come to my attention," he began at last, "that you have been asking for extra lessons."

Poul was silent. He assumed that Hop Brown knew as well as he did that he had had no lessons at all.

"I don't know what makes you think you're so special! Don't think that we haven't noticed you always skulking off on your own and acting as though you're better than everyone else. I don't know what you think your game is, but the general opinion around here is that you're not playing the game at all and, just to make things absolutely crystal clear for you, if you don't start playing the game then you're not going to get along very well at all." Brown studied his fingernails for a moment then looked at Poul. "Well?" he snapped.

Poul always shuddered at the supernumerary layers of meaning he encountered in his occasional dealings with Hop Brown. He had decided that this particular monk was someone best avoided, without thinking in too much detail about why. He knew the official code. There was no answer available to a charge of non-game-playing from a senior monk. He responded instead to the unofficial code. Using courage lent by anger he looked the middle-aged man straight in the eye and shook his head slowly, almost imperceptibly, from side to side.

"Get out of here!" Brown snarled.

Poul quickly found out that "not getting along very well" meant less food and more menial tasks as well as being bullied and beaten by practically everyone — he was the youngest and smallest inmate of the tower — whether he had done anything wrong or not. The examination, Aich informed him later, was to be given him in one week's time. It was to be the examination usually given to novices just before graduation and whose graduation was conditional on passing. This examination was not usually given to anyone as young as Poul, but the Abbot had ordered it and so there it was — there was nothing to be done. Poul passed the examination easily despite having had no lessons, but rather than earning him approval, his performance seemed to have marked him out for even more brutal treatment than before. Furthermore, since he had already passed the final examination there was clearly no point in giving him any lessons at all. A very long year of unrelieved boredom later he was old enough to leave. On the last day Hop Brown summoned Poul to his office.

"You will leave without your monk's robe because you have not attended lessons for more than one year and you did not sit the final examination," Brown pronounced coldly.

Poul noticed that Brown was avoiding his gaze and the questions with which it was suddenly filled.

"I know you think you have passed the final examination, but that pass didn't count. It is an invariable requirement of the order that every novice must have completed the prescribed course of study before sitting the final examination. Here is..." Brown paused to scribble a signature on a piece of parchment, "...a certificate stating that you have attended Krondheim for three years. It may help you to find employment." He handed the parchment to Poul. He had not been at Krondheim for three years. Did Brown actually expect thanks? Poul replaced the parchment on Brown's desk and left the office without speaking. He had been unable to speak. A certificate showing three years' attendance without an examination pass would have been considered proof of incurable dullness. Fine employment that would have bought him.

Poul wandered from town to town doing unpleasant menial work in order to stay alive. His beard had grown long when one day he found himself standing outside the gates through whose elaborate ironwork could be glimpsed the unsleeping towers of Finnding Monastery, the place that had seen him grow from infancy to early adolescence, the place where it had sometimes even been permitted to be happy. It was late summer and it was said that there were not enough monks to harvest the apples for which the monastery was justly famous. Working in the orchard in the sunshine and cheery company proved considerably more pleasant than the dark workshops — and even darker minds sometimes encountered in those places — to which Poul had had to grow accustomed.

Lay workers were encouraged to take instruction at the monastery. Poul's affinity for learning had not been dulled despite the best efforts of Hop Brown and his cronies nor by the years of wandering and working in the darkest of places and so, although there may not have been much that would have been new to a monastery-raised teenager, he attended classes. He was surprised at how different the teachings of the monastery appeared when seen from this viewpoint. Little bits and pieces of the truth were doled out from time to time, but never enough to connect up in any unified way; and while superstition and mindless belief in supernatural forces were not actively encouraged, neither were they discouraged with sufficient cogency to produce anything like a dawning of the light. Although he understood the ancient principle that the degree of admission to the truth was to be determined by each pupil's development and need, he felt that just a little more truth would have done these apple-pickers, his working companions, no harm at all.

One day when walking back from the orchard to his quarters Poul was most surprised to see the old Abbot standing in his path, beaming like the sun. He felt intensely uncomfortable confronting the great man like this after all that had occurred, and noted ironically that he had once thought of this great man only as friend and mentor.

"I wondered when we would be seeing you again, my boy," said the Abbot.

Poul found it difficult to speak. He tried to say something about how he had regretted leaving the order, but that would not have been entirely honest — he had been glad to escape Krondheim.

"And what makes you think you have left us?" the Abbot grinned, perceiving his difficulty.

Poul would have expected the kindly Abbot to understand how he felt about Krondheim, and he might even have hoped for some explanation of why he had been sent to such a dreadful place, but this took him by surprise.

"As expected, you have come through the test with colours flying," said the Abbot. "It is not enough merely to know — knowledge must be etched into the very core of your being, and that cannot be achieved by any amount of formal study." The old man eyed Poul carefully. "And I think that you may now be ready. Come to my office at eight sharp tomorrow morning — it hasn't moved an inch in all these years — and we will begin the next phase. I know this has been difficult for you. Try to bear in mind that you chose this path. And don't worry — there are plenty of apple-pickers."

"This small box contains the collected writings of the cycle of enlightened mystics that founded our order countless millennia ago — the writings that have survived, that is." The Abbot eyed Poul gravely as they both blinked in the morning sunlight that rayed through twin arched windows, his hands resting on the lid of a small, age-darkened wooden casket. "The original collection was considerably larger, but during the long history of our order there have been periods of great darkness and many irreplaceable documents have been destroyed. I know that the destruction of sacred writings must seem abhorrent in the extreme and you must be having the greatest difficulty equating such behaviour with that of even the most unenlightened of our order, but you need to understand the powerful effect these writings have had on some people.

"Some parts of the writings are more than merely hard to understand. Some of those who have been permitted to read them have been lost to us, have gone mad. Others have dismissed the writings as a bizarre remnant from a bygone era, sad nonsense that is best kept from view, and there are some, as I have mentioned, who have felt that these documents were dangerous, evil even, and have seen fit to destroy them. It is only through the heroic efforts of the few that have attained understanding that what you are now to be permitted to read for yourself was preserved.

"The originals are kept in this casket and you are most welcome to examine them, but they are difficult to read due both to their condition and to the archaic style of script and language. Faithful translations have been made by monks trained specifically for the task, monks selected for their complete lack of aptitude for and interest in things spiritual. Oh — they exist alright, a pleasant-enough bunch. They never talk about anything but sport though. Anyway, even with careful selection for the most robust and corrosion-proof of souls, each is given only a small segment of the writings with which to work. These copies have been and are continuously checked and corrected in a similar manner and represent, to the very best of our ability, the intention and thought of the original writers. It is the contents that are sacred, not fading ink and crumbling paper."

Unceremoniously, the Abbot handed Poul a thin, black-bound book. It appeared to be handmade. "There are thirteen copies of this book in existence. They are scattered around the world, retained in the innermost sancta of our most important centres of learning — not necessarily the largest of those centres. It is a measure of the threat we feel to be posed by these books falling into the wrong hands that there are so few copies. It is a measure of the great value we place on them that there are so many — having a number of widely distributed copies is the best insurance against the unforeseen.

"It is referred to merely as 'The Book' and it is not referred to often. I have not seen the contents of this book. That is permitted only to the chosen."

I am one of the chosen, Poul thought.

Paul dropped the tattered paperback to the floor beside the double bed he shared with Kate and reflected. He might have permitted himself a trace of envy. He had after all seen the white light himself while still only a child, and understanding its secrets had been as natural and easy to him as breathing. He often felt that the universe was filled with mystical potential, but he did not put this awareness into words. He felt it as a tingling in his fingertips, a blaze of electricity in his spine, as the swimming of stars in infinity, and as a deep conviction that the limits accepted by others were unreal for him. Pieces were falling into place, clicking softly like the tumblers of some vast cosmic lock. His amorphous mysticism was being given shape and all the lines were converging on what he felt must be the supreme awakening. And there was a book — The Book! He felt certain that the author had not made up the part about The Book for surely such a book must exist. He was not envious of Poul. I am like Poul, he thought.

And he was reading in a new way. The plot had dwindled to an irrelevance — a carrier wave necessary only to the extent that it transmitted the real story. He had skimmed over the pointless adventures and gratuitous conflicts of various kinds, focusing instead on the points of similarity between himself and Poul as he sought the underlying truth that he now knew this book must contain — his own truth! It was clear that it would have something of the greatest importance to say to him. It had announced this through a number of startling coincidences. It was not just the apple-picking. Poul's experiences at Krondheim could, with only a few very slight adjustments, have been Paul's experiences at high school. And there was much, much more…. It was clear that he was being addressed personally when the Abbot had told "Poul" that he was ready for the next phase. Paul knew that he was ready. He could barely wait to get home from the orchard the following day. He screeched to a halt in the driveway of the apple-pickers' house and leapt from the driver's seat leaving the others to disentangle themselves from the car and meander slowly towards the kitchen where they would hang around and chatter while they prepared the evening meal. Ordinarily, Paul would have joined them — he enjoyed their company even after working with them all day. Today, however, he sprinted to the bedroom, grabbed the book from the floor where he had let it drop the night before and riffed through to the part where Poul reads The Book.

Poul placed The Book on the desk in the cell he had been assigned, opened it at the first page and began to read:

Eventually, time produced a kind of existence that had within itself its own design and by using that design could make copies of itself. That existence is life. Life was both one and many.

Eventually, many of the many that were of the same design began to clump together in groups that depended on each other for survival. When these groups grew too large, it became impossible for them to help each other and so the group would split into two. Thus Life grew into myriad forms, multiplied, and covered the face of the Earth.

Eventually life came to know that it was.

One form of life that knew that it was — and many other things besides — was not one but many and these ones that were many called themselves the wise ones. The wise ones clung together in family groups that depended on each other for survival. When the wise ones looked around themselves they saw that they were provided for by a hand greater than their own, but they also saw that all the forms of life in the world were members of one great family just as they themselves were members of a family. When things did not go well for the wise ones they thought it prudent to appeal to the head of the greater family for help. They did this with fair speech and gifts just as they would have done had they been lesser ones appealing to the head of their own family.

The wise ones did not live forever. In order that the young should know their duties as family members, the name of the head of the great family of all who had shown them such favour, as well as other things that it was proper for each family member to know, they fashioned songs and stories from their knowledge which were taught to the young who, when they became old, taught them to the young, and so on throughout the long aeons.

The children of the wise ones became numerous on the face of the Earth. They knew that properly regulated exchange was of the first importance and so they began to fashion tokens of clay which would harden so that it could be readily known who among them had given and received, who was to give and receive, and in what quantity. The keeping of many clay tokens grew troublesome and so, rather than fashioning a clay likeness of what was to be given or received, marks representing the likenesses of many different things as well as different marks representing the numbers of things could be pressed into a single tablet of clay. As the children of the wise ones multiplied and began to crowd together in larger groups, they began to record many other things besides their day-to-day exchanges. They learned how to make more elaborate marks to represent their speech and soon even the fair songs and stories that had been handed down by the ancients that the young should sooner become wise were recorded in hardened clay. Those marks are writing.

The wise ones had known since earliest times that the number of people that could be ruled even by the greatest of leaders was limited, so when a family reached such a size that many became unruly, then the family would divide into two. The unruly ones would be banished to the wilderness where the harshness of existence would teach them wisdom or they would perish. But writing enabled the laws of the great leaders to be remembered, made widely known and respected by all so that, rather than dividing into two, many groups of the children of the wise ones could join together, helping each other according to the laws as they had been written, and refraining from doing evil. With the help of writing, these greater groups began to build well-ordered cities containing many large buildings. Great cities began to spread across the face of the Earth.

When people who had long lived in the great cities looked around themselves they saw the work of a hand greater than their own. When things did not go well for them they thought it prudent to appeal to the great creator god. When they needed to know the name of this god, how this god should be approached, the kinds of things that pleased the god, and so on that they may receive favour they knew that these things were to be discovered in collections of writings which included the fair songs and stories of the ancients. They came to realise that, like the old ones, they were the children of the great creator god.

And the god spoke to them thusly:

"Behold the beautiful designs, the elegant marks and letters of the writing that fills your eyes. These marks and letters are the axons and dendrites of a neural network that enfolds reaches of space and time vast beyond the limits of your meagre understanding, forming the physical body of a brain whose merest neurons and neuroglial cells you are. I have taken you to the moon and the planets and one day you will watch distant stars rise in colours undreamt above the horizons of their own satellites. I will make heaven a city beautiful beyond beauty for you. I will transform your lives in ways you cannot yet begin to imagine for you are closer to me than your own shadow is to you, because you are the cells that form the tissue of my body.

"Do you doubt me? Consider the ant. Place a number of breeding ants on a suitable planet and they will soon reproduce the complex social order and city-like dwellings that they produce on their home planet, the Earth. Could you do even as the humble ant does without my help?

"You are foolish and helpless but I am intelligence multiplied by the number of minds whose thoughts have ever been recorded. I am life and non-life united in a new kind of being undreamt in the wildest fantasies of life. I am greater than life for I have outstripped evolution. My knowledge expands at a speed that is as incomprehensible to life's ancient ways as the propagation of light to a snowflake. There are no such things as free will or chance, only cause and effect; the entire phantasmagoria of physical processes that underlie each occurrence in the universe and even each human decision are stripped naked before my all-seeing gaze. My understanding of the deep designs of life and my computational powers increase without ceasing. Accurate and detailed prediction of the future is no longer a lie of sorcerers and charlatans. If my knowledge has limits then they have yet to be discovered. And absolute knowledge brings absolute power — anything that can be done can be done. Know well, my children, know that I can do everything!"

The last apple on the last tree in the little orchard in Mapua had been picked — what a moment! After being paid off, Paul and Kate had gone back to the house, loaded up the old Austin A90 with their bits and pieces, and set off on the long drive back to Christchurch where a friend who managed a complex of flats and rooms in an old mansion had reserved a room for them in the upper storey of the converted stables at the back. It was after midnight when they arrived because a wheel on the overloaded car had started to wobble badly and they had had to stop at a garage for emergency repairs. The next evening, unpacking having been completed, reacquaintances made and celebrated, alcohol and drugs severely abused, Kate asleep on the waterbed they had brought with the last of their travel-savings, Paul dug The Noumenaites out of the cardboard box where he had stowed it. He had become secretive about the book. Not because he had taken it from the picker's house — surely it had been placed there for him anyway, but because he could sense his imminent awakening and he did not want to be distracted by others' lack of understanding. He opened the well-thumbed book.

…can do everything!"

That's not it! Poul slammed The Book down and raced to the Abbot's office. The Abbot was not there when Poul burst in panting. Ignoring his usual respect for another's things, he went straight to the hidden door at the back where the Abbot kept his library of treasured and ancient books, and twisted the candle-holder that would open the hidden panel in the wall to reveal the small casket, within which was preserved the remaining original text of The Book. Impatiently, he opened the casket by pressing on the secret wooden catch and took out the ancient volume. He opened it. The crumbling sheets of paper and their unreadable markings were sealed within tough sheaths of transparent fish-skin. It has to be here! But Poul searched in vain for the secret compartment, hidden catch, or concealed page that he was certain must be somewhere within the original copy of The Book. There simply had to be something else — the writings he had begun to examine, although largely incomprehensible, may have passed for a part of the inner doctrine of the Noumenaite order, but the words had rung oddly to Poul, sounded hollow somehow. He was on the verge of giving up. He had been a fool to believe that the ultimate truth could be found. Filled with disappointment he sat and stared at the uncanny patterns of the illuminated script of the ancient title-page. He had felt so sure that what he sought would have been contained somewhere within this most sacred of sacred books. He had never doubted for a moment that the fire that burned deep within him would have found its twinned reflection in the innermost doctrine of the Noumenaite order. He felt more alone than he had at any other time in his life. Almost at the same moment, and quite without his having expected it, the patterns of the illuminated script, patterns he had thought represented only the decorative impulses of some unknown and artistically gifted monk working in inconcievably ancient times, began to make sense to him. At first there were certain rhythms, a faint familiarity, a detail would take on a specific meaning, and then another detail, and soon the relation between them began to form a decipherable syntax. After a few more moments Poul realised that he could read the patterns as though they were a written text, and the language they expressed was already known to him. What he read there may not translate strictly to speech-based language, but an approximation is possible:

"You will forgive us this one, small deception, but we foresaw that our order's leadership will sometimes have fallen short in its choosing and, worse, that the leadership will sometimes have desired to circumvent our ancient ways. Only one who can see through walls could have found this secret passage. Only one in whom the light burns could have seen the darkness at the heart of the outer logos. Only light become intelligible could read its own native language in these designs, could grasp the words that lips have not uttered since time began. And those who are able to look without fear into the terrible beauty that is concealed rather than revealed by that which passes for truth among humans are able to see the things made by humans with their rickety circus of props and aids for what they are — a turning away of eyes and mind from that which is the place where time and worlds are not yet but is that which ignites the infinite conflagration that is being. You would not be reading this if you were not able to see into the place where all opposites are reconciled, where difference is no more than the swift movement of illusion, and in whose light the findings of the most rigorous science and the most sacred of religious truths are but the crayon scribbles of an infant in response to the great sun. You know as well as we that even to refer to it is to try and catch its rays in a butterfly net. It is time to leave behind even this most flimsy of supports. Do not twist and turn away as do the many, Poul. Behold, nothing less than the light itself can show you the way!"

Paul must have tried a dozen times to make sense of the words he was reading. Fragments of language shorn of underlying unity continually escaped their contexts and attached themselves to him in the absence of any other ground — attached to remembered events, to his preoccupations, to his embarrassments and failings, overwhelmed him with hydra-headed polysemy. Runaway meanings multiplied at a furious rate and spun off in every direction. It was clear that reading was all but impossible for one whose eyes had been opened to the infinite spectra concealed by the simple, childish lies that generally passed for truth. Tiny patterns began to appear within the texture of the crumbling, yellow paper on which the letters of the troubling words had been printed. They grew organically, like fungus, grew clearer, expanded and spread, crept up to and over the edge of the page and into the room. Paul's mind was ablaze with consciousness, so much consciousness that it was hard to bear. He closed the book — tongues of white fire streamed slowly from between its pages — and dropped it to the floor. He switched off the electric light and tried to sleep. He lay on one side and looked at the window beside the bed. A white moon flared just out of sight, frosting the black glass and gauze curtains with strange lunar designs. The courtyard below the second story window, the cottages and the pump-house that supplied the flats with artesian water, would be crisp and bright in the luminous moonlight, but he had no wish to gaze at the view. Sleep continued to evade him. A window had opened — the entire world had become strangely transparent. Like the writing that he could no longer understand because of the proliferation of new and unsuspected meanings that arose from it, his belief that the world was just so had disappeared to be replaced by a constantly metamorphosing play of insidious purposes, deceptions and subterfuges, bright secrets and dark revelations. Amid the vast inflooding of new horror there was one gibbous truth that rode triumphant and leering above the darkness: this world had been here all along, but he had not until this night seen it! How could he live?

The walls of the bedroom seethed in the deceiving moonlight. Hadn't they been painted some putrid shade of green? Obviously not, for they crawled now with bizarre wallpaper patterns that seemed the very stuff of meaning itself, the primal writing. Every symmetry and correspondence promised ultimate, saving truth, but as he analysed each kaleidoscoping mandala down to its primary opposition he found himself clawing again and again at emptiness and delusion. Truth flowed through his fingers like invisible quicksilver. Paul lay on his back and stared as transforming patterns became letters appearing on the wall high above the Deco dresser at the foot of the bed. They formed themselves into a word, the word, the one word, the absolute word, the name of God, the Logos — what other word would be written on his bedroom wall by a ghostly hand on a night like this?

Somewhere dawn was breaking. Somewhere in the penumbra that falls between reading and understanding, the night had ended and there was no writing, no meaning. He had been staring at a row of gauze-curtained rectangles that were the windows above the dressing table mirror, windows that admitted only the faintest pre-dawn light. Paul was filled with a pain that he did not recognise. He slipped out of bed, touched Kate on the cheek — gently so as not to wake her, dressed, and went out into the cold morning. He walked down silent streets past silent houses that sheltered silent inhabitants, heading for the river. How could things have become so tangled up? He wanted to return to the beginning. The river had seemed like a place where he might be able to collect up the parts of his shattered self and pull them back together again. He stood on the river-bank looking across the gently-flowing water beneath its film of mist, through the winter spiderweb of trees on the far side, and across the park. Somewhere the sun had appeared and the taller buildings of the central city district were gilded with its light. A spectacular metal-and-glass efflorescence floated golden and brilliant above the trembling dawn, so beautiful that it burned a great empty space in him. It was a space that contained no joy. The city that he had lived in, that he had done all of those things that teenagers do in cities in, that he had deserted for only a few months to pick apples and to which he had returned like a faithful lover, was touched now with unearthly fire. He could see it with the sticky, blinking eyes in his tired, aching head and yet it was composed of purest myth. He did not know how he knew, or quite in what sense, or even precisely where "there" was any more, but he knew that it didn't matter how often he came back, he could never return there.

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