Getting it in the Head. Mike McCormack

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СКАЧАТЬ had to eat and puke up before I could handle it. It’s like some sort of spiritual training, I suppose.’

      He was obviously struck by the clarity and truth of this last formulation and he furrowed his brow, presumably to make certain that he was not deluded. He seemed satisfied.

      ‘Yes, that’s what it’s like – like doing some sort of penance or spiritual training that leaves you in a condition where you are capable of experiencing something momentous. But the experience is a dangerous one. If you survive it you know you have arrived at some limit within yourself and are almost God-like. But if you fail, it brings death and disaster and you are as well never to have started. I doubt that there are too many people in the world who would be able to survive it. It’s a real discipline, an affliction, a thing of inspiration.’

      It made her smile to hear the old man explain his gruesome talent in such mystical terms. Did he truly believe that this was what lay at the centre of his craft? She did not dare ask. Now that he had found sense and reason in it, it would be nothing short of wanton vandalism for a complete stranger like her to start picking holes in it. If he was happy with his explanation, and it seemed that he was, then so be it. Suddenly the old man seemed flustered. He began doing something complicated with the hem of his coat. She wondered had he forgotten something, had he told her the full story? Was there one more detail to reveal, probably a shameful one, before the story was complete? He rose up to look at her and he was very agitated, wringing his hands.

      ‘I am sorry,’ he stammered. ‘I am sorry but I could not help it.’

      She was startled. A premonition rose within her that a pleasant experience was going eerily wrong. If it was going wrong then something of it had to be rescued so it could be remembered with joy.

      ‘Don’t say sorry,’ she pleaded. ‘I’ve enjoyed myself. Don’t let it end like this.’

      He nodded his head with what seemed to her an odd type of respect and turned to make his way over the grass. She followed his thin back with her eyes until it disappeared off the grass and around a corner into a side street.

      That night, for the first of many nights, her dreams were covered, structured and dominated by glass. Beneath her feet the ground had the cold, intractable feel of a synthetic surface. Overhead the sky curved like a piece of engineering and her cries bounced back from it without release. Food was placed in her mouth but it splintered and crackled treacherously. It made her mouth bleed and the droplets fell and clicked onto the ground as beads. But what terrified most was the feeling that she herself was made of glass, a glass that was warm and molten and pliable and that would continue that way until the day of her death when it would solidify and she would be struck rigid in that unyielding and unchanging topography.

      She woke the next morning exhausted from a profitless sleep and when she faced her breakfast her whole being baulked in revulsion. At work, the nausea continued all through the morning and at midday on the bench she gagged on the first mouthful of her sandwich. When evening came she pushed away her plate in disgust and decided to go to bed. A twenty-four-hour bug; come the morning it would be gone.

      That night her dreams were more complex. Some of the fragmented images from the night before had coalesced into a decipherable narrative. She was attending some religious ceremony in a church which had the polished sheen of obsidian. A priest of some persuasion was berating his congregation from a pulpit, exhorting them to recognize the sacred in all about them and in the least among them. He harangued his congregation on this theme for a while and when the Eucharist came he raised the flesh of Christ into the air not as unleavened bread but as a scarlet disc of stained glass. He put it in his mouth and brought his teeth down hard to fragment it. He raised his head to the roof while swallowing. He then distributed similar discs to the faithful who came to the rails to receive the flesh of our Lord. All of them returned from the rails with blood seeping between their lips or trickling down their chins. When it came to her turn to receive, the priest bent over her and told her in blood-flecked words that it was not for him to give her anything. She would receive in another way and when she did it would be not just for herself but for the whole world.

      Next morning, after refusing her breakfast again she made her way along by the canal to work. So early in the morning it seemed as if the colours and textures of her dream had carried over into the morning light. The sky was streaked with vermilion and the gold of the early sun was giving way to an all-pervasive blue. Passing by the cathedral she was struck by how queerly it was lit at this time of day. It seemed lit from within by some numinous presence and the light fell from its windows in great shafts which seemed to converge upon her. She wondered how the windows of the western nave seemed to be suspended there in the morning light, standing out from the stone structure, vibrant like elongated stars. She could see the Christ Child, the Virgin and Joseph. The Child seemed to luminesce there in the silence with a life of its own. It seemed to reach out to her with some command, some imperative that would brook no avoidance. With an effort she wrenched herself from the spot but for the rest of the day she was haunted by that image of the infant saviour. It seemed to have scorched itself so deeply on the front of her mind that she could not get a focus on any of her work. Her indexing went badly. Nothing she touched fell into alignment and her mind wandered so much it was a relief when the day ended. But before leaving, on a dark intuition, she went to the reference section and took down a book, The History and Origins of Glass. She flicked through it and read how stained glass was manufactured and installed. She read for an hour and on her way home bought a hammer, a pliers, a mortar and pestle.

      That evening, for the second day, her body refused food. Looking in her cabinets at the boxes of food a nausea rose within her and she had barely enough time to make it to the sink. Her stomach was so empty she suffered acute agony in retching. She sank to the floor in a foetal position, lathered in sweat. It was at this moment that an awareness formed that she was suffering from some sort of inverse inspiration. She could feel a hollow running the length of her whole being, waiting to be filled. Two days without food and she could already feel her strength ebbing from her, a tide that would leave her stranded like a dried fish if it continued. She would have to do something fast or she would be soon totally lost to this hunger.

      She rose from the floor like one who had been felled, and gathered up her coat and tools and made her way into the night. She reeled through the streets like a drunkard until she came to the cathedral. In the grey streetlight coming off the nearby bridge she saw Joseph in the stained glass window offering out the Child to her with both hands.

      She would have to be quick. Cars whizzed by on the bridge and it would be disastrous to draw their attention. How could she explain this excruciating hunger that had her refusing food and craving something fatal. She grabbed a down-pipe that ran in the shadow of a buttress, offered up an abortive prayer for its solidity and began to climb up hand over hand. It was easier than she had imagined and she knew instantly that this new-found agility was part of the whole neurosis. In the darkness and her heightened condition she moved confidently, hand over hand, finding toe-holds in the sheer limestone wall. She stopped for a moment on the ledge to draw breath and then moved at a crouch over to the window. She straightened up and was at last faced with the Child. It seemed now that in climbing the drainpipe, the concentration and physical effort had sapped away an essential part of her resolve. Either that or it was just shameful awe in the sight of the Child’s gaze that persuaded her to avoid Him totally and remove marginal pieces instead, doing as little damage as possible to the window. She took out her pliers and began to prise out the lead strip from the framework close to the stone. Once she had a grip on the lead it tore out easily and she quickly managed to remove four lozenge-shaped pieces. Through the hole she could see into the dark interior of the church where the red sanctuary lamp glowed and the faint aura of the tabernacle door. But she did not wait, her hunger was crying out. Feeling the eyes of the infant on her back, burning his rebuke, she moved over the ledge and with the glass and pliers pocketed, shinned down the pipe to the ground. Once hitting the ground she loped homewards like a released animal.

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