Invention of Dying, The. Brooke Biaz

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ ships all this was going. Along the wharf. Being lowered on ropes to the jetty.

      And all would have been fine, or as fine as it might have been. Today you could probably visit courthouses in other parts of the world that are lined in the swirls of blackwood that were brought down from Upper Yool at that time. Convicted thieves in Germany, perhaps, and Sweden maybe, where crime is almost unheard of but when it is heard is monstrous (something of the northern heritage, some say), would at this very moment be hanging their condemned heads in the presence of those swirls and feeling from their radiating wisps the depth of their malfeasance.

      You could go out now and purchase from an antique store in Chipping (near prim Piping and Lively Limping, in lovely outer London town, down by the parlor and the palace and other things), china cabinets of fine yellow brewt, one join melding so perfectly with another (because the brewt from that part of The Communion Islands was, indeed, the most usable brewt of all). You would barely even see where one length ended and another began. And you could still detect the aroma of camphor in the wood. You could watch as the Senate in Silesia was meeting around the government’s giant philfond table and know on its sturdy legs an entire Silesian population could be held up against the flow and tempests of time and economics.

      But all this is impossible, because of lack of foundation, an absence of true life. To cut a long story short, that wharf collapsed.

      Those traveling timbergetters had built their structure on nothing. Nothing was sunken before it, and nothing was built on nothing to create, despite the physical appearance, absolutely nothing. That structure was little more than a bunch of sticks jabbed determinedly into our grey ocean mud. By the end of the first day it began to sway, back and forth; but those crazy sailors only took this as evidence of a rising Communions sea and simply worked faster, brought more wood to the wharf, continued on regardless.

      The captains of the two ships—the Prince Leonard and the Clipper Monteroy, so called - were asleep in their mahogany cabins. It is said (By whom? Who knows!) that their plan was to sail right through the next days to deliver their loads to their faraway homes. There’s a nice turn of phrase! The swaying wharf only reminded their slumbering be-hatted selves of the lolling coast around Och O Loon Reach and the outer (or is it Inner?) Hebrides, where there are no reefs and there are no calms, and the water is abundant and icily welcoming. Chances are they were dreaming, so content they must have been with their plans.

      But that wharf with no life, built on nothing, had other ideas. So it collapsed. And it took those ships down with it.

      First that Monteroy went down, and then that Leonard was sucked into that swirling, wet, distant, grasp. The collapsing wharf took several teams of sailors too, who had stopped on the plank walk in the early evening, no doubt to contemplate their transient work and, no longer sending their huffing steam into the night air, were soon sent plummeting toward their ultimate destination in our Communion Islands sea.

      Some of those visiting ax-wielding sailors did survive, though. Back on the land. But with their ships sunk and being hundreds of tangled miles from our then small township of Panapoon, and even the tiny outposts at Store Cove and Yawl. All succumb to deprivations we today can only begin to contemplate.

      We still find their bleached skeletons propped against philfonds and down beside babbling brooks, to this day. And why? Why is that? Because theirs was a modern construction built with no attention to origins, no address to the life of the Communion Islands which, not to put too fine a point on it, was all around them. Had those fine trees they were busily felling been given their voice they could have told those visitors plenty.

      “Live!” they’d have said. “Life!”

      And: “While we trees may not speak, we just as well could as we declare what might be, or how existence grows.”

      Something like that. Lord knows, I wouldn’t deem to speak on their behalf.

      Likewise, had the redstone cliffs of The Yool been consulted, instead of just ignored, except by the Communions Golden Gulls that nest there and hatch their goldlings in sun kissed seagrass beds, and feed them on errant crabs and string weed and so forth, they could have reeled out enough evidence to build an entire stable metropolis. But no!

      So what, I wonder more generally, of all the travelers and chance merchants who have made their way here to the Communions over time, the fortune hunters, the speculators, the opportunists? What is their role in our story?

      If we each are not inherently evil - and my evidence suggests this has to be true: that we homo sapiens are good by inclination or inherited substance and it is only circumstances that . . . —suffice it then, that Death already had her assigned role too, and a no less human one, I might add.

      I think of her there in my small plane seat, tall black pompadour beneath a bright green bergère hat in that case, turned toward the rattling window, her shoulders narrow and bony but undoubtedly sturdy. I hear her voice lassoing the sand around Panapoon and the slippery wet rocks of that mighty shore. I see her firm dark index finger pointing down at the Burdekin hills as I tip the plane on its aft wing and swing us slowly, elegantly, to the West, me in the sun and bat-loving Death in the shadowy dark.

      I see her stride, her black case bulging abruptly, the suited men she meets, their earnest discussions, the cusp of hands, the furrowing of brows, her radar eyebrows twitching, her looks to the horizon as we stand on the edge of the runway and a tropical storm teems now over us. I think of the young clerk and his mountain dwelling family below. I think of our new town buildings being built down by the sea and up in the mountains.

      I could pretend this can be captured in preliminary sketches and serious meetings: “Mining at Cuuk Town”, “Establishing a Tourist Center at Panapoon”, “The Future of Spiny Lobsters in the Bay of Constance”, “An Airstrip for Residents of Finch Hole”. The inevitable zonings and committees, the issuing of contracts, island developments near and far (such as in Cloud Mountain, cloudily and Old Town, venerably, and Cape Constable), the digging of clay, the bringing of stone, the news stories, “Communion Islands Rise”, ‘Houses Built in the Hills”, “Young Future”, “Healthy Here in Shelton Valley”, the rising façades of our futures, the coral shell crusts for the seafront benches, pink and black and white, the peaked arch thropthorn doors of the rising hotels, the smoke of tree loggers, the seafront small against the now towering cococan marble of the Regional Council Offices, flaked gold and deep blue as it is, the white brick, the iron gates of and, the basalt foundation stone of a brand new elementary school.

      I could describe this languid, stumbling rising of a future, arriving day by day, week by week, month by awe-provoking month. But I best be reminded, as others have been reminded, that we are confronting Death.

      Figure 7.

      2b. Certain Sounds

      (named with regard to that denied human sound: gurgling)

      Within the ears of a young clerk’s family a world of futures opened up, much as a newly growing town in The Communion Islands begins to extend the boundaries out from a front door or its vibrant new future emerges from the opening of a freshly sealed window. The young clerk was, by genetic heritage, a good listener. Death would soon have her attentive audience.

      Some ear researchers (I’ve heard!) say that there is an initial surge, like electricity, as you enter the auditory realm, and then a cusping, or clasping. Some [Drs Manning and Morton, 1971, apparently] have compared this to the effect of leaving The Earth, to the attitude of space travel: the first lift, the push through the atmosphere, the heat as you move through one layer of air after another, the СКАЧАТЬ