Gavin Corbett - Green Glowing Skull

Robert merely indulged him to begin with (the syndicate had paid them handsomely), but soon he was enthusiastically encouraging his employee. He, Robert, was an ‘imaginist’, he told Rickard. He scrunched up his eyes, walked in figure-of-eight circuits, and told Rickard that he thought the company was ‘finally going where I’d always wanted it to go; we’re getting to a level now, Rickard. I think we stand on the threshold of a new conceptual framework for non-augmented non-experiential eventfulness.’

Hearing such gobbledegook from his boss had a sudden and profound effect on Rickard; it was then that he realised that the thoughts he had been notating were not even his own. They had merely been transmissions, intercepted unknowingly, and sent on their way again. Arrogance had buried the deep but incandescent conviction that the thoughts were false ones, and just because the thoughts had been smoothly transcribed into a language that he couldn’t, as a human being, understand, didn’t make them any less false.

Other truths crept up on him. He was not what he had become. He touched his hand to his computer that always remained cool; he had never cared for these machines and the intangibles that floated between them. He preferred those other intangibles, the ones that no one was ever sure about: romance, imagination, the soul. And of tangibles, he liked, so he told himself, their limitations: the limitations of the analogue world, as he had known people describe the world just gone; and words on his clodding tongue, his voice sounding stupid, vibrating through bone and fat.

And so he was lowered in a great bell into the place of his imagination, where was to be found his soul anyway. The bell sealed off a circle of earth and the air inside was laden and spicy. The air only grew heavier and heavier with the traces of the dead, and, constantly circulating, gave life to the dead. Daylight came down through an ocular punched in the top and sealed off again with glass. Landed and sucked to the earth now the bell was a redoubt. Passages made of wood and hair and regurgitated paper clung to its outsides, their floors sloped in an outward-falling pitch. The passages layered and pleated the space that they carried and let in something of the outside air. The permanence of the central redoubt, the certainty of its form, the security that came from knowing it would give shelter in a catastrophe, only showed up these passages for the flimsy constructions that they were. Because of the breadth of the bell around which they wound, and because they were never built to expedite at any rate, a walk in the passages could result in lengthy and spiralling journeys. In them were encountered many lost men. They had grey and glassine faces. They came here in their distress and confusion and built the place in the shape of this confusion. They hobbled on crumbling ankles and with the pitch of the floor. Their walk was catching; caused Rickard to palm the walls. Pictures of golfers and golf holes came off in his hands. Books on business — only ever books on business — tumbled from the shelves. Some of these men had business plans, or ideas that would contribute to a larger business plan. Apart from this that they had in common — their confusion, and, for some, their business plans — they shared nothing. The point of this sanctuary was that they would be left alone in it, another silent node in a network. Rickard imagined all the nodes in the network silent and anxious, across the world. More and more he thought of these nodes as fortifications spread widely through hostile territory. Increasingly he was aware of contingencies for a future conflict.

He found himself opening a door, and then another door, and exiting the clubhouse. He was in an alleyway filled with trees whose spring blossom gave off a smell of cats’ urine. One end of the alleyway was open to the street. He came out on to the street and walked northwards and westwards and adumbrated certain thoughts he had about the coming conflict.

Meanwhile he arrived either inexorably or with militant purpose at what he considered the enemy omphalos. On the way he thought of himself as a basking shark, but not in the usual way that he thought of himself as a basking shark. Denny often encouraged Rickard and Clive to think of themselves as basking sharks. A basking shark was basically an immense cone that was nothing if not for the water that flowed around and through it. Stretching his ribs and muscle and circular cartilage to the maximum extent the singer could be in balance with his medium — external, eternal feeling — until he became the medium. The idea was to give oneself up to the currents of feeling and let them have their way. But taking the temperature of the outside air Rickard had felt nothing. And so he simply became a basking shark that was either numbed by intent or dead and given up to other currents. But that was not to say he could not at a future time find feeling on the air: the leaders of one side in this coming conflict would do well to remember that all on their side were owners of special human gifts.

He observed the tourists in the plaza in front of the Puffball Store gathered in clusters like seahorses on the sun-warmed reef. Among the seahorses glided sharks — not basking sharks, but clean and consolidated species like mako sharks or great whites. His eyes alighted on one young man — in a plain blue T-shirt and baggy brown trousers and glasses with thick frames and carrying a shoulder bag — who might have been the very emblem of this type if he did not move as sluggishly as he did smoothly, and whose beard was as untidy as it was neat. Rickard had tended to think of the combatants on one side as Youth, or Whites, or Sharks, and on the other side as Lived, or Blacks, or Eagles/Owls, but he would come up with better names, because this young man exhibited none of the characteristics of a shark.

It was easy, too, to identify the one person who, in the glut of his totality, was firmly on the other side: the flushed and flabby sixtysomething standing on the spot, dabbing from one foot to the other, owing to fallen arches, or to feeling lost, or probably to a combination of the two. This was a creature to be pitied, and naturally to be allied with. What was he doing here? This man had come to the plaza to see what all the ‘fuss’ was about. Now he knew what the ‘fuss’ was about. The ‘fuss’ was a fuzz that rattled along every nerve and told him on a sub-awareness level exactly what it was about. For now, and likely until such a time as violence shuddered him to full knowledge, all the man understood about the ‘fuss’ was a sadness. At some time in the past, this square, for this man, had been the most public of New York’s public spaces. Perhaps like others he had dreamt of one day announcing his fame here. He didn’t know what form this announcement or fame would take, just as he didn’t fully understand why neither of these would now happen. All he could clearly picture was a bunch of sad carnations in his own terrified hands. Both he and Rickard had made their way, on this day, each for his own reason, to this seditious detail on an enlightened planner’s map.

As Rickard had walked to this part of the city, directed upwards, he came to appreciate what a bloody battleground narrow Manhattan Island would be. The island would be divided more or less into a southern section and a northern section. The stronghold of one side — Youth, or the Whites, or the Sharks — would be the south. The stronghold of Lived, or the Blacks, or the Eagles or Owls would be the north. Enclaves of Lived in the south — such as where he’d just come from — would be relentlessly attacked. Youth’s bases were scattered across Downtown, and off the island altogether, but its holy site was right on the front line, here, in Midtown, there –