So as melancholy darkness falls once more in the town of trees, I make my way I know not where, guided as by my feet on rails. Horror, guilt, still lurches in my entrails, but exhilaration, exultation also pumps my blood, with all that that entails. I have triumphed somehow, or taken off some blindfold and walked out clearly into truth. Or nearly, so I feel, for as darkness falls so also a veil is lifting, all my perspectives shifting. I begin to recognise all the landmarks around me, to walk with greater purpose than before. I turn corners with confidence and each time spot a building here and there that seems different, has been replaced at some indeterminate date, but know not how I come by this knowledge.

Things get darker and my heart lurches. I pass two churches that I sense once told me I was nearly home. Then here at last I chance upon what Horace described to me as Rome. A large ruined house behind demolition fencing, brooding dark and pensive. Interspersed with many trees self-sown and grown wild for twenty years. Tall cypresses and junipers weave in and out of broken window casements, thick roots of ivy sprout from cracking walls. Collapsed roofs undulate in seas of broken tiles, through which umbrella pines soar in artistic poses languid and wind-torn, lovelorn and forlorn. Grave-like guarding dead dreams in eternal hope of dawn. The rain is on now, and drips like tears from the eaves, and a few leaves alike, in a slow fountain of picturesque decay and degradation, falling, follow suit. Is summer getting tired already, chastened, hastened by autumn’s pursuit?

I steal through a gap in the fence torn by miscreant children or foxes, and climb a wall or two, then go in through a window. My mind’s eye flashes every so often like neurons firing, phantom glimpses in vision’s periphery of how this house was once, before time’s sly intrusion and derision, debased it, exposed, as by a surgeon’s cruel incision. Painted plaster fragments on wall, glimmers of smashed glass, crumpling fans of delaminating lath. Fungus of rot and sprays of graffiti proclaiming gang rites. Discarded needles, condoms, and tights. Oh the delights of forbidden forgotten places. Children, adolescents, villains. I can almost see their faces, even without my wires to dangle. Then I come to the place where all confusion untangles.

Once a study at the back of my house, the floor’s centre is commanded by a rotting old couch, its stuffing lanced and thrown hither to the wind’s fey dance. But there are lockers here and safes, which though rusting have proven too heavy to give up their place in two long decades. Nor indeed their secrets. And I alone know where the keys have languished. Reaching my hands under rotten shelves I nearly think all is lost and taste my panic. Then at last, my fingers stop and repeat, as reading Braille in disbelief. I bend down and retrieve a little key, miraculously dry and uneroded, protected by the work of spiders.

Then by the moon’s light now rising above the windowless shards of a façade like a heartbroken face, I unfold a sparkling net of electrodes, a jiggling jellyfish of twilight stars, and lift it to my head with slow ceremony as a priest donning his vestments, a judge preparing to pass sentence. And the lab pack and the dials, the vials of chloroform, and even batteries. All are here and safe and dry and their time has come at last as I lie and sink into the rotting scum of soaking cushions, and throw my head back and reach for the dial… and turn. And turn.

The house comes alive briefly in an explosion of light, a soft effulgence of grace pouring over my face and burning out my features. The wound on the back of my head, the ache in my heart, time heals all sutures, as walls rebuild themselves, stones lifting magically into the air like birds to take their rightful places in walls. I am shot, not into the future, but deep then deeper into the past, in fact perhaps whatever destination my equipment took me last.

Twilight again. A world seen dimly as through a haze of deepest cobalt blue. I wear strange attire of tights and belted tunic and cloak, walking through corridors of dark carved wood. I am quite well-to-do, some sort of count or prince. I walk out onto the battlements of my tower, and look all around me with an exultant glower. A beautiful wide coastline spreads before me looking north, somehow familiar but changed, simple land of peasants undisfigured by industry. My pastime is to gaze into the future, suitably inspired and deranged by nefarious substances procured for me secretly by a local witch who I had spared from the bonfire in return for her services, a clandestine apothecary. I write down prophecies upon wide rolls of parchment with a feather pen, a quill is what I will call it. For a bed I have a four poster carved for my grandfather, shot through with little holes of woodworm. The roof beams click at certain times of year with death-watch beetle. For a toilet I use a hole in the wall, discharging straight out towards the grass surrounding embankments below, chilly in winter.

I am laird over all the surrounding lands. Vassals come to greet me, pledging fealty and I reassure them, gripping both their hands. And from still further occasionally, indeed across all the known country and even across the seas, curious visitors come to hear me speak and discuss with me the substance of what I have spoken before. And here is what’s important, since some can neither read nor write, to help them memorise my words: I speak in rhyme.

I wake suddenly with a terrible jolt. Faces about me in the twilight ruins all look down laughing and shouting, deranged in firelight, a gang of little demons. One of them swings a piece of wood with several nails protruding from it towards my head and I cower in fear, protecting myself with one hand, but with the other: turn the dial again in panic. Groan…moan… heaving of machinery whining, idling, struggling, breaking down, its work beginning then failing, damaged or incomplete.

I stand up and dust myself off. I am in the ruins of the old house again. I reach up and find the hairnet has caught fire and fused itself onto my scalp. I reach my hand down onto my breast, and again some intense heat has caused a small explosion that has severely burnt my chest. The dial is fused. And yet I feel no pain. Indeed I feel quite light-headed, sprightly. Night has lifted somehow, though I can think of no way to judge how much time has passed. Dawn now licks around the horizon, an early morning, the first perhaps of summer. I remember only one thing of importance: that I must head north and as fast as possible, to find Thea, my Aphrodite, where she reputedly resides in Suburbia. I remember, from what feels like many years ago, the map my friend Weasel drew me in chalk upon a wall. The quickest route to Suburbia is due north through Urbis, the peculiar centre which unvisited, has until now haunted my every distant horizon like a recurring dream, while somehow always remaining unimagined and unreal. Before the sun comes up too far and streets begin to throng and someone apprehends me for all the things I have done wrong, I must away with haste. I am Nadir in this place, so let us leave it, and leave behind my face.

*

Then in time to the border twixt Sylvia and Urbis I come, marked by a distinct diminution in the abundance, not of buildings, but of trees. We are heading inwards you see, towards the conurbation, the great conflagration of a million hearts and minds, hastening together in doubt and loneliness and eagerness as to what they’ll find. Towerblocks. Neon nocturnal mirrors flicking on and off throughout long nights, that offer back vistas of yellow portholes with faces at them, searching and lost as ourselves. Are we wanted, are we desired? Are we discarded, left upon the shelves? What is it we seek to sell each other in this vast Halloween ball of a power-cut supermarket, polythene bags over our heads? Suffocating for attention, miming SOS? Or simply suffocating, trying to save the mess. Is loneliness the burden or the prize? Is hell ourselves or all the rest, everybody else, closing their eyes?

I am in the thick of it now. A real city rises up around me with its inhabited cliffs. Huge interchanges and bypasses behave irrationally, trying to confuse my feet, throw off the humble pedestrians like ticks from their writhing serpentine skin, black and shiny, slithery in sodium and halogen light. Why is morning so paused and delayed? Does pollution haze this domain so thickly that even sunlight and happiness cannot penetrate its glaucous depths? The roads are still quiet, so I take to their middle when the pavements get obstreperous with me. I begin to remember landmarks with surprising clarity. Visual cues bringing memories like bells ringing through the fog. I am heading home suddenly, legs trotting, with the certainty of a once-faithful dog.

A railway bridge with elaborate Victorian girders, a library with a fine copper dome, some old Georgian townhouse with a plaque commemorating a notorious murder. Locked groomed gardens in the centre of a fine residential square. Soaring spire of a gothic university, soot and time-blackened stone, still floodlit, the shadows of night not yet shaken off. Taken over, as if slotting down into hidden rails, I hasten along avenues and boulevards, remembering some walk… to work perhaps, habitual ritual mind-imprinted over many years, anticipation rising as the jaws of Pavlov’s dog. Each vista I turn a corner into, I seem to remember a millisecond before it clogs my eyes. And then at last I glimpse my prize, but not as I thought… the university faculty where perhaps I worked, but something else, more immediate, here in front of me, some urgent memory clothed in murk: a refurbished old hotel, of industrial era brick and clay tiles. This means something important, my heart rate is rising, a blockage in my brain throbbing with a floodtide of meaning dammed up behind it.

I stop and stand in the street in front of its dread façade looming up seven stories above me, and know at last I stand in hell. Cars in the street either side of me are not moving, but neither are they empty. Drivers and passengers are frozen still, eyes and mouths open, halted upon a word and phrase. Gradually I understand this city’s peculiar silence and its haze. I step forward and climb the steps, and know and expect the familiar face of the receptionist, remember the colour of her hair and eyes, the cut of her clothes. She too is frozen of course, as are a handful of other guests in poses of movement to and fro across the entrance hall with its chequered marble floor and dusty vaulted ceiling. I move close to each standing guest and run my hand in front of their eyes, check their mouth for breath. And as I rotate around them a peculiar phenomenon unfolds itself: a very fine black line runs down each of their backs from the crown of their heads and across the outside of their clothes, as if they are each simulacrums imperfectly composed. Something Mustafa said about life not being real begins to echo through me, making me feel sick and scared.

I am unprepared for what happens next, as leaning nearer to the black line across the back of a teenage girl’s blonde hair, the blackness expands into a growing dot then fills my vision and draws me in. Slurping, sliding of reality, as if stumbling on a fatal riverbank. Her entire body becomes as some masquerading costume I can live and breath within. I look out through her eyes, see the whole view of the reception hall around me, can hear my own blood and heartbeat amplified as if I’m trapped inside an echoing dungeon. I panic and try to scream and by accident more than skill find I am ejected backwards to where I was, outside her again. Shaken, shivering, I move around the large space of the marble hall, circling like a wounded predator or hounded prey, holding my breath, tiptoeing, as if I am about to wake these strange sleepers. Oh that I would. What’s worse is somehow knowing that I never could. Here we are, I try another, then another, a middle-aged man, an old woman, I find the spot on the back of their skulls and feel it expand for me and draw me in. Inside each time is a strange silence and suspension, broken only by the din of my own breath. I try to calm myself, and beyond this begin to feel their lives, their memories and intentions, the hurried rivers of their consciousness, frozen in spate, hopeful, despairing, happy or irate. I panic again, too much, this overwhelming knowledge flooding me, I leap back out and back away, closing over my watertight doors, my mental gates.

To the receptionist now, I return my attention and go to stand at her side and her back, and stepping into her mind as if into a cinema hushed in a Saturday matinee, I retrieve her memory, a picture of me taking a key from her, being given a room number, a few minutes before. I go to the lifts, remembering all too well the way, and press the button. Peculiarly, it works, as if machines are immune to this sleeping beauty spell. And yet, if it would only stop and entomb me halfway through its journey that might be more relief than I can tell. Rather than to face what’s coming next. But time is an inexorable ocean here. Doors opening, the sixth floor hallway, the carpets, the faded paintings on the wall, all too familiar as if seen only yesterday, but haven’t years gone by? Surely? Someone wake me from this childhood nightmare before I cry out, before I… die.

The room is unlocked of course, something I must have thought through once, and there in the middle of the room is… myself. As in a mirror but real, in three dimensions, seated on a chair. I spin around, look at the wardrobe mirrors and am relieved (or am I?) to see myself there standing, two versions, this one I am and the other seated, frozen. Not unreal, not dreaming, but seemingly alive, I strive to make sense of this contrivance. And yet, I’m denying the truth before my eyes even now. The red specks on the carpet, the spray in the air behind him. I rotate around my seated self. No need to look for a way in, for the back of his head is gone, and in his mouth a firing gun.

I know that in a second I will run to the en-suite sink and throw up violently, but for the moment I remain in a spell of ultimate fascination, recognising even the dull metallic sheen of a bullet poised in air, exiting my head and taking with it: fragmented brain matter to splatter, everywhere. Scared? Why should we be, how can we be, when we have ventured beyond such a final revelation? God lets us off with shock it seems when we stumble upon what is above our station to take in. Reality breaks in. No more hinting. Sprinting. My stomach erupts and I am crying out in the toilet, hands upon the porcelain. The universe exploding from its core of primal thoughtless pain, my whole being pouring down the drain. I regain composure at last and wipe my mouth, and looking in the mirror, suddenly jump and turn about. Phew. Nothing’s changed. This deranged world is filled with living tailors’ dummies, but more terrible than their stasis would be if they were to move again somehow. I need to get away from here, outside this nightmare, to somewhere there is no one to confront me with their frozen deathlike scorn. I am surrounded by the dead it seems, disguised in living form.

I go to the window, part the curtains and am somehow relieved to see that the cars below have not moved, that the zombies are inert and harmless. Then I see them. Even after this, the strangest thing of all, the only moving creatures perhaps in all of Urbis apart from myself: two adult deer, a hind and stag with pure white coat and horns are walking down the street between the cars. And in slow dreamlike motion, inevitable as drowning, they pass the hotel then halt and turns their heads to look up, up at this window and at me. Instinctively, I scrabble for the window hooks and hoist the bottom sash open, thrust my head out into the much-needed fresh air, and call out some crazy wordless cry, forlorn and hollow. They walk on and turn again, more knowingly than any animal ought to, as if to say: follow.

And I do. I must. Running, hurrying, not so much struck with fear now as like a hunter, a man consumed by lust for the most beautiful woman in all creation. The deer are the key. To follow them, to find and touch them, then I might be free… of whatever this is, of whatever foul spell Urbis has done to me. I flee the doomed room with one last glance at the bloodied, halted parody of me. At least it seems I will not rot, no flies and maggots defile my image with their vile machinations. Acceleration. Down the corridors and down the stairs, taking no chances this time of this strange stage set’s rules catching me unawares. Out through the echoing marble hall, my footsteps clopping in melancholy thrall to this appalling scenario, absurdity, necessity to follow, calling out in the street after white deer already cantering, moving out of reach.

I run and run, my heart and lungs pumping, seeing the deer wait and turn then gallop down a fresh street, weaving between static buses and cars. The sky above me, the early morning light still seems as frozen as the people. Am I dead? –I ask myself, and if so can I ever tire? And certainly I feel unusually fit and light of foot. Indeed, if dead, I scarcely ever felt this good alive. Diving past the windows of a bus, I glimpse within: arrays of frozen faces and slow for a second in morbid fascination. Those half-dead eyes numbed by dread anticipation of their morning’s humiliations and slaveries in return for meagre pay, the dim hope of happiness at the week’s end, return into the arms of those who suffer boredom as they do, rocking each other together like crying babes. Then in the reflection in the glass, I see as a reminder the white stag’s ghostly form pausing, circling again, drawing me on. We reach a shopping mall and the horned phantom hastens up the steps and lures me in. In early morning light, boosted by insipid electric illumination I run past shoppers clutching bags, a little girl kneeling to pat her dog. Am I dead? –I ask again, and pause to run my fingers through the curls of her hair and that of her dog. Warm and comforting, some kind of foundation stone my mind is reaching out to clutch. Are they still alive but in another time stream? And if so then what am I to them? My strange momentary touch an eerie breeze from nowhere, a blessing from an unseen angel that a lifetime’s reflection will never reconcile with rationality? Up ahead, I hear a bellowing, a stomping of hooves, an impatient butting of horns against shop windows. I must away.

Across a bridge now the white hind and stag lead me, and down below in some great gulf I see motorway cars paused and interwoven in a pall of pollution, misery and frustration, suspended in solution. Now trotting down broad stairs, I jump three at a time, trying to catch up, to catch my guides unaware. They turn and face me and the stag lowers his horns and scliffs his hooves, sparking off the granite slabs. Instinctively I recoil against the steps, clutching the handrails. His cold eyes line me up for a second for some fierce trajectory, considering it. Then he throws his head back as if laughing, snorting, and turns and speeds away with his mate in tow, both looking back. It’s all been a game, a ruse, to disabuse me of my illusions of any power, powerless before their greater power, his horns, his glower.

The game goes on for hours, across car parks, housing estates, railway lines. The deer lead me past workmen with dust-masks on, feet poised on pneumatic drills, a square full of pigeons being fed by an old bag lady, each bird frozen in a thrilling trill of flight and feathers, I leap up and pluck some flecks of bread out of the air into my mouth. The bread tastes real, reminding me sweetly of the belief that I am still alive. I must hold onto this. If I lag behind, the stag and hind contrive to find me and flush me out. I cross a sport court filled with ladies working out in tight Lycra. The beads of sweat are a glorious eternal glow upon their foreheads. The frozen eyes like those of china dolls, fixed on thoughts of their day ahead, I slip behind one, looking for the black line and try to hide within her head. Inside it’s nice but soon I hear the stag’s bellows and jabbing at my heels. I who thought I was the follower am now the put-upon and hounded, the betrayed.

At last, noticing some tiredness in my limbs, we approach the northern outskirts of Urbis. I grab a roll and a can of juice from a street vendor’s stall, and laugh aloud to think I could have taken anything I’d wanted in this city for free. I take some coins from a frozen passer-by’s pocket and toss them behind me in payment, a joke only for me. The deer wait at the street’s end, heads bowed, frowning, disregarding of my clowning. The endless domain of tarmac is breaking up, and again I begin to see more forest. Strange wastelands of abandoned warehouses, reclaimed by regiments of trees. I see them differently now, from this weird perspective of halted time. The trees are ransacking man’s work, just as violently and methodically as man thinks he’s fighting back and controlling the wilderness. Except the trees are slower and stronger and more ancient, and will win. It is all a battle, grander and more exquisite than I ever could have seen, and there in front bound my heralds, ice white, supremely beautiful and clean, horns and hoofs brashly trashing branches and fences in their stride like pulling curtains, tearing veils aside, sniffing out the lost places where secret truths may hide.

We reach the boundary at last where Urbis runs out and Suburbia begins. Suddenly the weather lifts and shifts, weak haze turns to early summer morning light, scintillating bright. I hear birds begin to sing, as if some button has been pressed, the pause released, and now here’s the thing: Up ahead, as the deer both go through this elusive border, I see their colour wash from white to reddish brown. They trot a little more, then stop and turn around, watching me as if proud of this little trick. I feel some change come over me also, and look down at my chest and hands, but can find nothing tangible, only a feeling of joy as the clouds depart and the morning light expands. We have escaped the urban sprawl and reached green fields and moorlands.

My deer skip ahead and a new lightness fills my steps. I recognise this place, the outskirts of Suburbia where I started out my journey what seems now like oh so long ago. Soon I will reach the little town square and ask directions, give out a name, look for the girl named Thea and hope that my brother’s last words were not said in evil or in jest. Pray that she remembers me with such fervour as I her. Would that be too much to aspire to? On this summer’s morn, with all of Nature rising up in joy around me, birds and flies making busy haste, the scent of effulgent life bursting forth in flower and frond, it does not seem beyond the scope of hope that I might find her face again. Her grace, her tenderness that lets my spirit finds its calm at last.

Blast. I should have known fate would have a wicked card or two still shimmied up her sleeve. I can’t believe my eyes. Quelle cruel surprise. A van comes racing over the hill, the stag pauses on the tarmac, takes one last look back towards me, and is killed. Horrid sound of abrupt collision of bone and metal. I even hear the driver swearing from his open window, slowing only for a second, concerned for his beloved bodywork. His handiwork is done, Nature’s miracle unworked in a second of ignorance. My blood boils in my veins, I cry out and run forward, leaping over clumps of bracken. When I get there the road is quiet, the culprit long gone over the next rise. I kneel and touch the warm furred flesh, smell the red leaking blood. My guide was just a deer it seems, no more or less an angel or a miracle than any other, and yet truly: that is miracle enough. My eyes fill with tears.

My head clears and I stand up, backing away in recognition. I know this moment from before. I have come to some crossroads. I am expected to hoist the bleeding deer onto my shoulders and carry it down into the town centre of Suburbia. Expected? Who watches me here? As if in answer, I hear a rustle from the bracken and branches and glimpse a pale figure in a thicket nearby hurrying away. The hind bereaved, torn but resolved to leave her mate behind? I cry out and move about, trying to get a decent view, a better angle through all the tangle. I refute fate’s repetition. I will not hoist the bleeding carcass, but find out who observes me. I run along the road then see her at a turn in the woods: a woman in a long white dress has left the thicket and is hurrying across an open field, looking back occasionally in fear, hoisting the lower reaches of her cotton above the rotten mud. I have not forgotten. Her head is a glowing blonde or red. No, it is a light, no face at all. The lady Elissa moving ever further away, getting smaller. Just like the deer, does she mean for me to follow? And then in a strange moment she turns one last time before vanishing over the hillside, beyond which I know Suburbia nestles, and seems to whisper this phrase straight into my head (or perhaps it is but the wind among the nettles): Desire Is A Mirage.

Is she an oracle, a sphinx, a witch, a mage? What are we to make of such an aphorism? And yet, gazing upon the fond curves and lines of the backlands of Suburbia, the stage set of superimposed planes of hedgerowed fields and moors, I find the answer is there filling my eyes: horizons, and all that they comprise, have led me on through all of life’s great enterprise. We travellers are but stooges tossed upon the twisting back of Nature, a great she-serpent who lures and then awaits us, always contriving lest we become complacent with her fleeting prizes, to replace one race instantaneously with another goal, another face. You feel malcontent as you grow older with these deceptions? Have faith, her embrace in death is no disappointment, but more warm and more of an anointment than all the tawdry treasures of earthly wealth. She loves you as only a true mother can, modestly, misunderstood and unrequited, and with stealth. Her immortal gift is not the laughable po-faced sham paraded by religions, but being born again continually, recycled and resplendent in all your atoms.

And so, at last, I am laughing. Alive in the sunlight and not daunted or worried by life’s strange riddles and repetitions. I break the pattern, I do as I please, free will is sweet. Leaving the road, and skirting the trees, I cross the field towards where last I saw Elissa. And in time I arrive at the top of the wooded ridge and look down into the valley beyond. Suburbia lies there, tranquil, familiar and fond. But now among the trees to my left I notice something new, which if I knew of once, its memory has long gone and this reacquaintance feels fresh as a breath of wind. A ruined tower, medieval at least, its ramparts interwoven with branches and bowers as if wrestling slowly with an ancient beast. Again, that déjà vu, the feeling that this picture has been renewed many times in many lives. I turn back to the horizon and there it is, the memory explained. That sea out there was once much further in. I dreamt of this in a ruined house in Sylvia, connected to that odd machine. It was the life of a seer many centuries ago. That tower was not so tumbled and jumbled then, but a well-built thing whose walls I walked and dwelt within. I venture closer and find a plaque of explanation, faded somewhat, but lovingly engraved, by the National Trust for the erudition of dog-walkers and jogger-stalkers:

 

The Ruins of the Tower of Erceldoune

 

Legend records that this site was once the palace of one Laird Thomas Learmonth, known to history as “True Thomas” and “Thomas The Rhymer”. He was said to have had the power of prophecy, gifted to him by the Queen of the faeries, who he met and kissed one day whilst out alone in the woods, and spent seven years with in her kingdom underground before returning to this world as if no time had passed. Thomas was said to have predicted the death of King Alexander the Third, the battle of Bannockburn and the union of Scotland and England under a king born of a French queen. He predicted that London will one day sink beneath the sea. Later in life, a servant came to tell him that a mysterious snow white hart and hind had been seen, walking along the streets of the village outside his tower. Thomas knew this to be a sign that the queen of Elfland was calling in her side of the bargain at last, in return for the powers she had gifted him. He quietly left the castle and followed the deer out of the town and was never seen or heard of again.

 

So. That makes me feel gey queer. I best be getting out of here. No sign of Elissa, or is that a flickering white light down there I see, twinkling for a moment, or just the windshield of a car in summer’s heat? I recognise her lighthouse, ornate glass palace on the distant outskirts of town, perhaps I see a door closing there as she withdraws herself, her trail of breadcrumbs having brought me home at last, my heart aghast. Her work is done. But my business lies elsewhere. Time for my feet to take me roving, scrambling, winding down, towards the edges of the well-appointed back gardens of privileged Suburbia, where happy complacency reclines intent on mowing and pruning neat-away each scowl and frown. Why fight it, just because we know in our guilt-ridden hearts that in night time on some other side of the planet or indeed the city, someone else is knifed or drug-addicted or suicidally drowned every minute? Don’t spoil our garden party with your rage, Nadir. Poverty and inequality are old as Carthage, part and parcel of civilisation’s thrills and spills. It’s just the vanity and ignorance of the privileged that kills. Let them satisfy me that they have seen and wept and understood, and I might consent to pass them by with my bloodied deer, my hoisted rood.

At last, my feet bring me full circle, back into the quaintly cobbled pedestrian precinct of Suburbia. And truth be told, after the cold nightmare of Urbis, I am overwhelmed just to see so many living people moving happily about. Their every breath is joy and celebration, life’s music manifest in endless invention, organised and harmonious as Bach, unfolding in mathematical precision across the stars, the confident beauty our planet has birthed. I feel as if I have walked right around the Earth, on these same humble feet, just to bring myself back again, exhausted, to this street. Everything looks the same, or does it? Can we be sure, gone once around the globe, that what we return to is the same? Or does not every journey, through time as through space, necessitate a different view, a different face? The statue of Athena is there, the war memorial, brassy, dipped in blood. But she is goddess of wisdom as well as war. A contradiction only a virgin could contain. I see now the hope she lifts skywards in her cup of flame, is not the glorification of bloodshed, but the hope that blood once spilt has not been so in vain. I stop and kneel. I am humbled. I must begin again.

A mumble at my side. I open my eyes and rouse myself back to everyday life, the Saturday crowds swirling past in tides. I am looking at a face I know. It is Weasel, grown older now, more grey and bent, the light within his playful eyes somewhat dim, but still brimming enough with mischief for me not to doubt it’s him. I stand and we embrace without reserve. Weasel, my dear friend. I am so sorry that I left. I thought it was you I hurt, when in fact I left myself bereft. Why do we not understand friendship until we forsake it and it us? Why do we miss that it itself is all, the prime ingredient even in what we call true love when the tide of age has swept all the dross away?

Zenith, he says, it is splendid to see you in these parts again. But you best be careful. Do you not see the scowls and scolding looks from all these passers-by, who recognise you from their televisions and Sunday papers? Zenith the racketeer, extortionist, drug-smuggler and rapist?

What?! I am stunned. What name did you just call me by?

Shhh! Don’t make me shout it louder. Did you not see that fellow passing there? Doctor Tolleson…remember him? I’m quite sure he identified you well enough, but chose to play all anonymous and gruff, averting eyes for fear of being recognised as once your confidante. Zenith, times like these you find out who your real friends are. Invariably ne’er do wells and losers with nothing more to lose like me, scarred and discarded, ancient and patient as trees. The likes of us, hit rock bottom, with nothing to lose, can do just as we please.

I gaze after Doctor Tolleson, older and greyer too as it happens, but something odd occurs to my eyes that makes me shake my head in disbelief, as if struggling to dispel an optical illusion caused by some contusion. He looks so like… another doctor… Stockbridge, and come to think about it, even Weasel, he looks… no, it makes no sense. Confusion for a moment, then I regain my composure, cover up my exposure, remember my mission and my most urgent disclosure. Weasel, I’ve come back here to find a girl I met in Oceania, who I’m told has found her way here. It is a small enough place and I recall you always had your ear so near the ground that folk were apt to stand on your head and crack it like a chestnut. Thea is her name, an unusual enough refrain and appellation for these parts. Is such knowledge outwith or within your crazed domain?

Follow me, Zenith, he says, wrapping his cloak around him and rolling his eyes around his shoulders like a penitent hoisting boulders, dramatic spy and thief in his own warped beliefs, taking me away from the now faintly-menacing crowds with a sense of palpable relief. Somewhere in the background I glimpse an antiquated bicycle creaking across the precinct, leaking oil like a dream of a memory of someone called Mary, limping up and down like a steampunk penny farthing, painful to watch and startling the starlings. Through many leafy lanes and avenues Weasel leads me past the hum of bees in hedgerows and the gently-heard clickings of tennis balls on secluded lawns and ice in jugs of orange squash on silver trays. Oh Suburbia has changed so blissfully-little as ever, since I’ve been away! Until at last we part again on a quiet doorstep, promising to meet up again that evening and strike up the old tunes together as of old, providing music in the pubs for the despairing and the cold, rekindling the warmth and romance of life’s dance in limbs grown loath and weary. Your face we might have to disguise, mind… he says, with a false moustache or a blind man’s glasses. That should help gain the coin and pity of the lassies.

Alone then, I ring the doorbell and wait. Weight. The tolling of ancient bells as of a church spire lost beneath the sea. Oh please Fate bring back my Aphrodite, Thea, across the waves of all my trials and travails, redeem our suffering as a madman marooned on an island spots white passing sails. The door opens and we both sharply take in our breath. Such recognition is both life and death. Out of sorts and full of tears, she retreats suddenly into the darkness of her home, but significantly I notice when I stop shaking… she has not closed or locked the door. This test, this enigma, is of my own making. I walk tentatively in, and hear her crying, and crying out a name. A husband, her husband? As I enter the living room, I hear footsteps cascading down the stairs, but more light and joyous than any adult. A beautiful child runs to her side and buries his little head among her arms and chest.

The sun is out, the patio doors drawn wide. And there in due course Cynthia and I sit side by side on wicker chairs, each grown older, each grown wise. Why did you leave me, Nadir? Did you not hear afterwards that I was pregnant with your child? I sent out letters, messengers everywhere. But my husband despised me for the betrayal. Who could fail to understand that, or blame him after all? You ruined me, you brought about my fall. I was thrown out on the streets, reviled by this hypocritical town. I set out to find you, to deceive you, to bring you down. The most successful artist of his generation who had discarded me like a circus clown. And now around us, look at all this devastation, emotional debris, see how love thwarted has brought all the world come crashing down. And then you have the temerity, the incivility, the imbecility, to turn up on my doorstep declaring your undying love. Are you the same person or an impostor seeking to foster my son and rekindle my blighted love? Could two people forgive each other such transgressions? Would such intercession provoke celebration or laugher I wonder, from those who watch above?

The birds are singing sweetly, the bees going about their business with the confident patience that built Babel and Babylon. Our lives are short and all too soon we will be gone. The child plays at our feet among the geraniums and phormiums, in two voices, one stern and harsh, the other soft and sweet, fighting some imaginary battle or engaged in heated debate, one wishing to give peace and kindness, the other, afraid of rejection, seeking for such weakness to berate. He is two people I see, not yet fully formed or unified, his duality a fluid and dynamic state. He has his father’s eyes… Cynthia smiles, the first touch of sunlight returning to her eyes.

…And his imaginary friend, I append, understanding finally that in order to begin, I at last, the whole charade of self, must dissolve and end. I reach out my hand and close my eyes, and somewhere out there among the blind heat of summer, as when I was a boy lying in June meadows with my eyes closed and watching the changing patterns behind the lids: I ask and hope that there is love and tenderness up ahead, in the sky or in the world, in the indescribable excitement of another human being’s heart. Let me live and let me play my part. I have always seen the future, that is easy, but not the goal. Only now have I truly seen inside another person’s soul. We are here to carry each other, lame and frail, across this darkened land. I feel the touch upon my finger tips at last. She takes my hand.

I am Zarathustra. True Thomas The Rhymer, old timer, social climber. The supple shuttle of the present, master of the warp and weave, the bobbin through which the loom of time speaks, threading and knitting and sewing all past and future into my fabric, my soul. Black as coal and light as long white summer nights. Red hot and melancholy blue. I am Nadir, I am Zenith. And so, dear reader, are you.

~