26
in the house of Tip Top…
On their journey through the territory of the Daughter of Bones, Hermes and Harvey pass a very faded, sagging corner shopping centre and stop in at a diary advertising Tip Top Ice Cream and Hot Pies. Hermes brings out some credits – since, naturally, Harvey is broke – and they have an ice-cream, served by an Indian shop-keeper who greets them in the Hindu fashion, his palms together in front of his chest, head inclined politely. A skinny child sits behind him, staring at Harvey with hungry eyes.
“Our moment of meeting is brief,” The shopkeeper says with a friendly smile, scooping up the ice cream. “It-is-difficult-not-to-think-about-eternity-in-such-moments.”
The child’s eyes fix on the ice-cream.
Harvey assures the shopkeeper that nothing could be further from his mind. As he takes the first lick of his ice cream, he feels blessed. Whatever the signs, he’s mobile again after some long, strange incarceration in the rathouse. There is glow, ripping through his blood- stream, making a halo out of every step. The veil is left behind to eat away at the remains of the rathouse, and the rathouse was in another lifetime. Let the old Daughter of Bones do her work over the cauldron; Harvey is surrendered to his fate. He is so surrendered to his fate that he gives away the toy .45, his only protection, wooden and illusory as it might be, to a brown skinned wide-eyed child who is staring at him.
He’s quite forgotten about his gun, and the fact that it is made of wood. It is that polished ebony that makes it look real.
The shopkeeper eyes the gun.
Let the child have it and play his phantom games, Harvey rhapsodises; it is a foolishness and an encumbrance. Let a terrorist’s bullet blow his head away on its ruthless journey to splatland! Let Hermes lever open his mind and let loose the demons! For the moment he’s blessed right here, under the glowing Sign of the Hot Pie in the House of Tip Top.
And it’s all good.
In this surrendered state, there is nothing between Harvey and the universe, the universe and itself; ice cream, the very essence of sweetness, grey the essence of mist. When the ice cream is finished there is nothing between his mouth and his fingers but gray opacity. He tries to remember where he has come from and where he is going, but relevance is lost to movement. Travesty flies by on every side; streets, intersections, vacancies, steel-glass erectiles, statues without heads, empty shop fronts, abandoned shopping malls and the lament of silence.
And, phasing in and out, the clamour of the Day of Delight echoing through a crazy house of mirrored glass. Above, the chromatic whisper of helicopters. (They will never give up.)
What if he went into the hag’s cauldron, if he just sat down and merged himself into the icy radiance of that seething mass of unfulfilled souls? Fuck! he’d just take what passes for his chances like everyone else. He’d open up a conduit to history and loot his own past, if he could find it, find out who he was.
As he is turning to leave the shop a magazine cover catches his eye. The Matrix. One of those lurid, alternative science magazines that goes on running stories about UFOs and crop circles as if the twentieth century had never ended. Sure enough, there was something on the cover about Steven Hawking and the alternative universe theory. Ha! What did they know? He opened the magazine and glanced at the contents page. There was an article in there written by himself. Harvey Evensong: Consciousness and temporal logic, a hoax exposed.
He doesn’t have to loot his past to find out who he is, who he was; he already knows. He was a mathematician. He paid his dues by cracking the alternative universe theory, and had come up with the diversity equation based on Shrodinger’s paradox. The mathematical insight that blew chaos theory into order. Hawking and Wheeler were right! For every dead cat, a live rat. Every time a quantum of energy changes its state, a new universe is created. He came close to providing an equation for human consciousness, which is constantly creating and annihilating universes, but had not got that far.
Then his diversity equation drew the gaze of the Lion King, and one morning he woke up to find five Sleeping Beauties standing around his bedside. There was nothing beautiful about them, but for their immaculate appearance and a certain implacability. They spoke to him and each other as if they were all clones. They explained to him the true nature of the hoax, while the Lion King sucked his mind out through wise, golden eyes. Even the spirit world now boasts its terrorists. And, in the service of his new master, he had invented something. A very simple device. Obvious but profound. But not even four patches of glow could restore it to memory. He’d need five, maybe six, and then there was no guarantee. At that point memory would give way to overdose and quantum flux. Always, it is a losing battle.
Harvey knows that his connection, this memory, this act of coherence in terms of his past, only comes to him in moments of glow intoxication. But the price he pays for these moments of memory is time itself, the temporal logic, for when the glow has faded, the illumination of memory itself will turn to grey, and the insight lost to the creeping veil. Soon he will no longer remember this moment, the article he wrote in The Matrix.
Considering these various aspects, their orbit and dimension, Harvey moves into an ecstatic state in which all things lose hold of their names and release them; time zones and light patterns lock and interlock as they move across the outward thrust of the streets into the further suburbs. Sound comes in cubes.
Nothing can harm him with the Spring Maiden at his side.