He was flushed and jittery and unaware of his lateness. Cyrena had been waiting outside, thinking that perhaps it had been her mistake. When she saw him, she knew it wasn’t.
He was wearing exactly the same clothes as yesterday only now more rumpled, as if he had been sleeping in them. Also he had not shaved and smelt strongly of the Abdulla cigarettes that he continually smoked.
“Very well, my dear, are you ready, shall we proceed?” His voice was tighter and had the edging resonance of an overly tuned stringed instrument: the gut near snapping, the wood ready to warp.
“I think perhaps you’d better sit first and have some water,” she said. “You seem a little fatigued by the walk.”
“Fatigued, yes, a little. By the walk, yes.”
They sat for a while and he became calmer, his tremor replaced by a continual perspiration. She wondered about the wisdom of “the magic” while he remained in this condition. After smoking three cigarettes, he announced that they should begin.
“About blindness, isn’t it?” he asked uncertainly.
“Yes.”
She took him into the stillness of her bed-sitting room and he sat her half reclining in a chaise longue facing the bright window. He pulled up a bentwood chair by her side.
As soon as he started the rhythmic suggestions of her weariness, they both relaxed. He had been speaking for less than a minute when she slumped, deeply asleep. He was amazed. It was obvious that the suggestions and preparations of their previous session were still embedded and active. They had survived all these years. The beautiful woman growing around what had been seeded in the miraculous child. He spoke softly to her to confirm the depth and saturation of her condition. Then he leant forward and whispered forcefully, “Cyrena, I want you to tell of blindness.”
The words had barely left his lips when she responded, as if she’d been waiting forever to be asked.
“It’s like now, it’s everything balanced in the innards. The depth and colour of everything kept inside where it all belongs. Out there on the other side of my eyes it is only described, roughly modelled in too much stuff.” Her voice and language fluctuated between the girl and the woman. Her words captivated him. “The blindness always meant it was mine before. Now it is shared and dirtied by others, who add nothing to it. Most don’t even know it’s there.”
“Are you saying it was better before?” he asked carefully.
“Yes. I have seen too much now. People also want me to see inside them with the light they bathe in and breathe every day. Before, I chose to let people in and then felt them close, now there is no choice—my eyes are hollow with all the taking.”
There was stony silence for a while.
“Cyrena, are you talking about your eyes or your heart?”
“I don’t know, one might be the other. They are both pumps.”
Marais was becoming excited by her answers.
“Cyrena, perhaps you should separate them.”
“How?”
“You must let go of the hurt so that you may see clearly.”
“I want to go back to the inside light, there was no hurt there.”
“But you were a child then, the pain you speak of comes to all of us as we grow and walk towards death. It comes from life itself.”
Her face moved and altered as she listened to his words.
“Cyrena, the hurt you are feeling is nothing to do with sight, it is a symptom of humanity itself.”
“I wanted it healed.”
“What, my child?”
“My sight. I wanted you to take it away like the forgetfulness in that lady’s legs.”
The impact of her words jarred him and the morphine shadow wanted to take him home. He gathered the words and started to close the session.
“Cyrena, I could never do that, it would be a sin.”
“A sin.” She pondered the word like a pebble in her closed mouth. He was just about to bring her out when she spoke. “I saw the tree again last night.”
“Tree?”
“The same one you stopped me seeing before.”
Marais had no idea what she was talking about.
“You did not want me to see the invisibility there, you made it go away.”
It must have been something from their first session all those years ago. But he had forgotten the details in the time in between.
“Last night,” and here she opened her alarming eyes, “we were both there, at the tree. Close your eyes and you will see it too.”
Marais had nothing to say.
“Close your eyes and join me. Come here.”
His mouth felt rubbery and heavy, as did his eyelids.
“The tree is waiting. Do you see it black against the bright sky?”
And he did, behind his closed eyes. Deep in his eyes the tree of vein stood proud and defiant in negative.
“Come.”
He was by her side in the high dazzling fields. Under the tree with something hiding in its branches.
“Now ask again,” she said.
Anyone passing by her room would have heard nothing for the next few hours. Would have seen an oddly matched couple just sitting as if in prayer or meditation. Because now they talked only inside their heads, he had entered into and joined her trancelike state, the bastion of hypnotist and patient having been breached. Both riding a Möbius strip of altered suggestion, a magnetic ticker tape that ran through the grooves of their consciousness, sending questions to answer questions to answer questions, mind reflecting mind through the blank sides of spinning mirrors. It was somewhere in there that her future was glimpsed and the purpose of imagination became simple and as fundamental as a hammer or a bowl. He could almost grasp it, but the morphine had ruined his hold, smoothed out the sucking lines of identity on his fingers, so that nothing would ever stay held again, all things would fall useless from the grip of observation that had defined his life. He began to see what was hiding in the tree and knew that for her sanity he must become blind. He opened his eyes, his eyes opened him. He fell into the room of his waking. He shuddered and let out an involuntary noise. He must have dozed off for a second or two. He was getting old. He needed to consult the needle again.
“The tree,” she said.
“Yes,” he barely answered.
“Last night we sat beneath it and you gave me a halo of golden living insects. It sung with their hard little wings and made my head sing too. You said you did it to turn me backwards and now you say it is a sin.”
Unease gnawed at crusted cells of abused memory. In their last session something had been wrong. Something displaced.
“Well, I am not taking it off, I can feel and hear it now.”
“Cyrena, I am going to count to seven, then you will awake refreshed and without the sadness that you brought here today. One.”
“It’s like a spinning wheel in the fairy stories…”
“Two.”
“The spindle’s going very fast…”
“Three.”
“The bobbin sucking the light out of the tangle in my head…”
“Four.”
“The flyer’s tugging me away from now…”
“Five.”
“The orifice sucking me…”
“Six.”
“The mother of all hammering…”
“Seven, take it off and awake.”
She put her hands up to her head and he instantly remembered the strange gesture that she had made before. Then she slid back on the couch, her eyes rolling and her body pumping in little orgasmic spasms as she flickered into careless sensual moaning. Marais picked up one of the loose bedspreads and placed it over her twitching body. She had turned on her side, demonstrating the swooping landscape curve of her hips. She was unaware of his presence as he turned away to mop his soaking brow and intimidated the morphine’s dominance with his delicate erection. Slowly she gathered herself and again became an occupant of the same world as he. After a while she sat up and saw him.
“What happened,” she said dreamily, a smile dappling her lips. The deep hot space behind them mocking in its pretend modesty.
“You told me of your troubles and said that seeing was not easy for you,” he said distantly, as if through a telephone.
“Oh,” she said, standing up and brushing the wrinkles out of her skirt.
“And a dream you had last night about a halo.”
She picked at the loose strands of hair that had escaped from her sculptured bob.
“Really? I don’t remember that.”
“A halo of insects.”
“How unpleasant,” she said. “It sounds more like one of your dreams than mine.”
Now it was her turn to splash some vinegar.
The trancelike session had not helped as they both supposed it might. To the contrary, it had set up a bristle fence between them. Too much had been exposed, too many roads seen and all their openings available only in a lost time. Over the next few days their meetings became awkward, his time and concentration becoming erratic, her frustration and need making her stumble. The advice she absorbed was no substitute for the love she so desperately craved, and his attachment was progressively slipping the physical world, the desires of which he rarely noticed.
He made the effort to see her off at the landing strip. Again they agreed to keep in touch, to write frequently and plan another visit soon. Neither of them believed it and sealed the untruth with a chaste and fumbled kiss, while the props from the plane caused an impatient wind that worried at her held-down hat.
He stood in the shade, his hand over his eyes, thinking only of his next fix as the plane floated away into the perfect sky and she bit her eyelids hard closed against the salty failure.