S. Naudé - The Alphabet of Birds

He takes a sip of coffee. She too. It is scalding, as if being heated by something in the air.

Cornelius goes on. How would a project look, he considered, whereby repressed dreams are brought to light? In what kind of workshop could one have the Self welded to the Unknown? It had to be a fearless project, he decided, a hard, impersonal scheme. The polar opposite of the psychotherapist’s couch, that subdued little laboratory where the core structures of bourgeois life get tattooed into the deeper tissue.

Communion with Infinity — that was his urge, that was the ultimate purpose. He had to strip off his skin, layer by layer, had to feel the feculent air on raw flesh. He wanted to see the city like an insect, from below. He would become a disciple of the terrae incognitae, he would learn to carve out the subterranean city map, the networks of sewage tunnels and cellars, on the Soul. And, if he were to discover that the Soul does not exist, then on the Intestines.

He felt his way in the dark. The methods were banal, the means were those available to the novice. One realised there were levels here, he explains; one had to be patient.

Level I were the nightclubs, the hollows that lie like catacombs under Victorian rail aqueducts in South London. Halls like caverns where men were dancing shirtless, slick with sweat that would rise in steamy vapours and hover in front of their faces.

‘You smell it, those places, the fragrance of mud or fungus or roots. The smell of fresh blood. The first hint of Escape. Somewhere behind it, beyond consciousness, you suspect the strong fresh aroma of Freedom. And beyond that, further yet, Oblivion.’

He shows level II with both index fingers.

There, in shadows behind a torch, at a tunnel entrance, the guide was beckoning: Infinity’s pharmacist. You held out your hand and allowed yourself to be led. The route, with its multiple stations, had been prepared for you. The pharmacist-guide pointed out the entrance. But the trip was yours alone. Cornelius tried out the mind-altering things. All right, it was no longer De Quincey’s 1820s, and laudanum wasn’t available in every corner shop. But alternatives were plentiful. All the usual, those that stimulated the dopamine levels especially — the short, powerful kicks. Whatever he could lay his hands on he took. MDMA, GHB, crystal meth, ketamine, the lot. The music was tight as a drum and hard as rock. Boundaries, whether cellar walls or human skin, became permeable.

With his finger, he writes a III on the table.

Sex was now exclusively with men, as frequently as possible and with as many as possible at a time. Palms against cold walls, electricity shocking through the spine …

Ondien lifts an eyebrow, her voice an octave higher than earlier. ‘All those women who answered your phone in your days of tight collars … Who’d have guessed?’

He places a chocolate on his tongue, continues.

He understood the role of chance, and risk, where it concerned capital. But he wanted to know about randomness: random meetings, random losses. He found himself in flats, rooms and places that astounded him, emerged from waking dreams not knowing where he was or how he had ended up there. Whether it was high above or deep below the city, he could not tell. A factory, a power station. Burnt-out gasworks. Places smelling of rust, of vinyl, where concrete rubs you raw, where dripping water causes limestone stalactites to hang, where the sweat and saliva of a little crowd would drip onto you.

‘I took stuff that would wake up every fibre, that would keep you awake for twenty hours on the torture rack. After the tenth hour you gaze at the men who are waiting with hard hands. You decide you can flay yourself with your own muscle power, can tear open the carcass and give it up for slaughter …’

Cornelius’s eyes glow coldly.

He never knew, he goes on, from which direction — and whether — the morning light would come. It took a long time before it appeared, the light, from behind all the bodies, from behind the weight of boots.

‘Every morning I saw the morning sun rise over a new city.’

For a while he remains silent.

‘Level IV?’ she wants to know.

His eyes change. One night he locked himself out of his flat; the concierge was already off duty. The rest of the night he walked in the rain, arms stretched out, face upwards, probably thirty or forty kilometres. Round and round, in wide circles. A spiral outwards and a spiral inwards. The entire time a certain paragraph from De Quincey was circling around in his head.

‘Wait, I’ll find it for you.’ He fiddles with his iPhone, finds the passage on the internet. He reads with a clear voice:

‘The sense of space, and in the end the sense of time, were both powerfully affected. Buildings, landscapes, et cetera, were exhibited in proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive. Space swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. This, however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time; I sometimes seemed to have lived for seventy or 100 years in one night — nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that time, or, however, of a duration far beyond the limits of any human experience …’

He puts the phone in his pocket and looks at her, the glow of the lava lamps against his cheek.

‘While I was walking through the city, I looked up, and the rain was metallic, like quicksilver on the skin. And then it filled my nose, unmistakeably: the smell of Freedom. I had graduated to the next level. I was almost there, just short of Oblivion.’

He sits further forward.

‘There were moments when I hesitated, in the dark amongst bodies, in the scorching light of a stranger’s flat. When I thought: this is the furthest I can ever venture from our childhood places on that farm.’

He looks up. He is speaking with a boy’s voice now.

‘Yes, it was the greatest distance I could put between me and that Free State garden with its nasturtiums. But, wherever I found myself, with all those things in the blood creating images inside the skull, I only needed to think of that garden to cause nasturtiums to grow all around me: over the walls, ceilings and floors of the strange room I was in. Over rust marks and water stains. Over graffiti and soot. And, when our mother’s singing voice swept through like wind, the flowers would tremble lightly …’

He coughs drily, finds his grown-up voice again.

One evening he was in a club, he continues. He bought weightless crystals from a blond man in the toilets and deposited them on his tongue amidst chrome taps and steel urinals. The dance floor was cool and bright, air was being pumped in through tubes against the ceiling. The music was as brittle as glass. The floor like a mirror, the ceiling like a mirror. He froze. He saw her approach across smooth muscled shoulders: a floating goddess. She introduced herself: Mater Lacrimarum.

‘She stopped right above me and addressed me: “Cornelius!” “How do you know my name?” I asked. “You must praise the worm,” she said, “and pray to the wormy grave.”’

The following morning he awoke next to a beautiful young Saudi, Cornelius recounts. On his other side on the bare mattress was a young man from Berlin with tattoos on his forearms and the eyes of a stag.

‘Coffee?’ he asked the swarthy Saudi.

The man shook his head. ‘It’s Ramadan.’

‘Do you know Mater Lacrimarum?’ Cornelius wanted to know from him.

The man shook his head. He poured a glass of water from the fridge and gulped it down.

‘Do you know Mater Lacrimarum?’ he wanted to know urgently from the Berliner, but there was no answer.

Ondien waits for Cornelius to continue, but he is done.