Jake Arnott - The House of Rumour

‘Does it really matter any more?’

‘I don’t know, Mary-Lou. Nemo used to have this theory of interstellar socialism.’

‘Now, that is insane.’

‘Official policy of the Posadist Fourth International. At least it was bold. Utopian.’

‘We all had crazy ideas at one time or another, didn’t we?’

‘And that’s what this story I wrote is all about.’

‘What?’

‘The one I told you about. The one I wanted you to see. Can I send it to you?’

‘Yeah,’ she replied with a hint of dread in her voice. ‘Sure.’

After lunch they took a stroll along the broadwalk and looked out at the ocean.

‘I must have walked this path a million times,’ said Larry.

‘It’s a beautiful day.’

‘Do you have any regrets, Mary-Lou?’

She laughed.

‘Very few. I don’t even regret marrying Walter.’

Walter Nugent was an advertising executive she had wed in 1961. The marriage had lasted three years.

‘I often wonder how things might have been different,’ said Larry. ‘A change in direction here or there. Those little jonbar points of life.’

‘Yeah, but regrets?’

‘I guess not. I wish I could have saved Sharleen somehow.’

‘Yeah.’

‘And I wish I could have explained quantum mechanics to you that night.’

‘What?’

‘Remember? That night we got drunk on slivovitz.’

‘Oh yeah.’

‘Hell, I really wanted to impress you. But listen, here’s this great new theory. Danny Osiris told me about it, you know, the English guy in the remake. Guess what? Turns out the universe is a hologram.’

‘A hologram?’

‘A complete memory system encoded onto a flat plain. All of reality is projected from a distant event horizon.’

Mary-Lou stopped and turned to him.

‘Larry, do me a favour.’

‘What?’

‘Just shut up and walk for a while.’

Three days after that a large envelope came in the post for Mary-Lou. Inside was a brief note from Larry and a manuscript. She made herself a cup of coffee and sat down to read it.

None of us in Heliopolis knew quite when it was that the nightmares began. A sense of unease and disquiet had descended over every district of the city. Perhaps we had all nursed dreadful visions in secret for some time, unwilling to admit to the terrors that haunted our sleep. For months, maybe longer, we suffered a double burden: the horror of these unconscious phantasma; the guilt at their concealment. For here everything is held in common.

The knowledge of these dreadful spectres of the mind finally became public at the fourth Council of the New Moon when a woman called out to the whole assembly that she could bear it no longer. She spoke of an incessant dream of confinement, of being shackled and lying on a damp and befouled mattress. The walls of a dungeon that ran with slime, with an evil, all-pervading stench. Worst was the consuming darkness, a sense of years spent seeing neither light nor sky. A mere tremor of fear ran through the Council Hall at first, that instinct of revulsion in the face of madness, a condition that can seem as contagious as any other disease. But it was not long before we were in doubt as to the soundness of our own minds.

At night I dwell in the depths of a ruined world! cried one, a living death, damned between perdition and oblivion. Another accused our unnamed creator of being oblivious to our pleas. Then at last came a shocking outcry against the sun itself. I address my prayers to you, it began, to see you risen in glory, but if I honour you, great sun, more than any other thing, why should I be condemned to cold and darkness? You give life and movement to the meanest worms; the pale snakes turn to life at the touch of your rays. I, in my misery, envy their wanton play.

Though nothing is considered blasphemy in Heliopolis, this final statement had the ring of it. For ours is the City of the Sun, and the sun forms the centre and very meaning of our existence. As it provides all energy in nature, so we harness it as our chief source of power. We worship it through reason rather than superstition, as the bright countenance of our unnameable creator. It has never forsaken us and yet now in the few hours when our world turns from its face we are plunged into hopeless fright. In days given to freedom and enlightenment, thoughts of darkness and imprisonment made no sense and curses against our beloved sun seemed plainly absurd. Yet all the peculiar words and utterances used in these lamentations were dismally familiar.

At once our Council resolved to pursue the meaning and, indeed, the very cause of these nightmares. The authority of our great city is divided equally between Power, Wisdom, and Love. Power sees to the security and defence of Heliopolis, Love to its care and nurture. So it was left to those of us in Wisdom, which concerns itself with the liberal arts, sciences, mechanics and our education, to institute an investigation.

In the beginning we tried to define the substance of these dreams. In Heliopolis we consider the knowledge of the senses to be above the knowledge of reason, so we looked within ourselves. We called witnesses and analysed the description and the strange choice of language used in recollection. It all sounded utterly alien yet disturbingly memorable and we feared some terrible prophecy. Something existed beyond yet we could not apprehend it.

In the City of the Sun we have lived in a state of permanent happiness, health and virtue, and we had considered ourselves resolved to a calm understanding of life. We count the world to be a living thing. As is said in the old song of childhood:

And in this way we have built our city: divided into seven circles, each arrondissement named for the planets as they orbit the great central temple of the sun. Everywhere there are walkways and galleries adorned with mathematical figures, definitions, propositions, equations. There are botanical gardens and illustrations of every known creature. Samples of common and precious stones, minerals and metals are displayed. There are projections on every wall. The temple of the sun is domed; above the altar hangs a globe of earthly representation; in the vaulted ceiling stars are depicted in their different magnitude, with the powers and motions of each expressed separately in three little verses. Heliopolis is a wondrous machine dedicated to the art of memory and simply by walking through it all the arts and sciences may be learnt. Indeed, this is how we educate our people and sustain our culture. Now for the first time we felt lost as we promenaded its pavements and avenues, finding no answer there to our maddening dilemma.

We had hoped that by openly expressing our nightly derangements we might banish them, or at least that the sharing of discomfort might bring its moderation. Instead there came a despairing magnification of our collective woe. The nightmares became ever more brutal and intense. Our imaginations now conjured tortures of the body, torments hitherto unspeakable with curious names: corda, coccodrillo, polledro. The agonising suspension by rope, the hideous spectacle of being stretched to breaking over a wooden horse. The worst of all was called by some cruel muse la veglia or ‘awakener’. Here we are tied above a bed of wooden spikes in such a manner that only the strength of our arms prevents our lower parts coming to rest on them. The harrowing memory of forty hours of this grim punishment was imprinted on our minds.

And as we continued to investigate these torments we were possessed with a feeling that it was we who were being questioned. But if some entity had become our inquisitor, we could not comprehend the nature of this vile interrogation. A few of us demanded that a confession might be offered so that the agony might end. Elsewhere a rumour spread of a man among us who had endured the forty hours of la veglia without ever having revealed his secret. When challenged no one actually knew this person by name, only at some second or third remove as is common in the reporting of gossip. It made no sense in any case as it would not be possible to endure such hideous treatment at the hands of anyone in the City of the Sun.