CHAPTER 4
I Show You Plenty Ghosts
WE HAVE ALL HAD THE EXPERIENCE OF FALLING ASLEEP FOR A minute and then having what seems like an entire night of dreams. Often, these dreams act as a solvent to our day-to-day consciousness—a disbursing, confronting carnival of images and incidents that take us out of our familiar being and into fantastic new (or suddenly remembered) realms. Other times, we find ourselves not swept away from what we had been focused on before falling asleep but drawn closer, so that we seem to pass straight through the matter that was on our mind, merging with it. Such was the experience Lloyd had in the few short minutes of refuge and release that overcame him when he slipped back into his coffin as his parents were rising.
His mind was so aroused by what had transpired with the Quists and the vigilantes, the secret writing of the Ambassadors, and the lethal force of the Spirosian Eye (all of which, of course, had come close on the heels of the time-distorting effect of the Vardogers’ music box and the questions raised by the accelerated decomposition of the cannibal dog), that even though he was drained of physical energy, his thoughts ran back over his night episode. The conundrum of the Eye seemed momentarily impenetrable, so he ended up sifting through the things he had said to the Quists—the idea that the twins’ symbol system may have been treated by some process to create the illuminated effect. This, at first, had seemed to be the most logical explanation. He had even offered suppositions about what type of materials might be involved. Then he heard again in his sleep the remark made by the equine-countenanced girl: “The markings change!”
At the time, he had been aware of some taut string of conjecture her words had stroked in him, but there had been too much happening to address it. Now, in the serial stream of hypnologic clarity, this assertion began to resonate more explicitly. He realized that her remark was like the instruction on the Vardogers’ music box. Initially, he had thought it said one obvious thing—referring to the glowing effect of the writings. But it may have meant something both more literal and miraculous. Since he had first come into possession of the box, a vague thought had passed back and forth in his mind—that the symbols and characters seemed to move or shift with different examinations. Without the technology to duplicate the markings, it was impossible to decide the matter objectively. All he had was a foggy but needling impression that he had so far not had the energy, leisure, or privacy to explore.
The Quist girl had called his attention to it again, and now, in the twilight morning of half-sleep, he was able to at least contemplate the notion without prejudice. The idea of markings carved on a box, which were able to be altered—or to somehow alter themselves—was on the surface absurd. But suppose one had the suspicion that they did. What if this idea lingered and no matter how many times the writing was consulted one could not with absolute certainty feel as if the suspicion had been dispelled? This alone said something important about the symbol system, Lloyd felt. This was, in fact, a fundamental part of its uniqueness—that every time you confronted it, it seemed new and all the more indecipherable.
Yet if it were just a matter of impressions one could argue that the sense of change and movement was due to the foreignness of the markings. The whole world was like this. Birds arrange themselves like musical notes on the rope between trees where you hang washing. Are they the same birds you saw yesterday? Are they all the same? Do all humans appear as un-differentiated and interchangeable to other undomesticated species? This question sent him down a long corridor of speculation, and at the end of the corridor was a painting.
The impression one had that the Ambassadors’ writing underwent some kind of alteration (perhaps continuously, perhaps not) struck him as no more extraordinary than a painting that seems to change color and mood depending on the light, which brought to mind again the story that St. Ives had told about the paintings in Junius Rutherford’s possession. These apparently innocuous works of art, when observed over time, possessed very odd properties. It was not the effects their surface created that changed but the deeper structure, the very subject matter—or so his friend with the mechanical prosthesis had insisted.
As outrageous as the things the gambler had told him were, Lloyd acknowledged that there was a kind of consistency to them—and consistency, whatever form it takes, is always the hallmark of something one should pay attention to.
To Lloyd, the “painting phenomenon” was a transformation analogous to what he imagined occurring with the twins’ secret writing—and what the horse-faced girl may have been alluding to. The amount of space, the frame for each, did not change, but what happened within the frame did, over time. Time was the crucial element. Time and the observer, of course. Without someone to observe the changes, would they occur?
His mind had often spun around this perennial question of philosophy and perception. But now he saw that there was another aspect. There was the much more subtle yet still intensely practical issue of how the presence of a perceiver changed the event or object viewed. If, for instance, one was willing to grant some occult instability to the twins’ writing, what was it that triggered the changing? People, when they know they are being watched, behave differently from when they think they are alone and unseen. They perform. Could it be that in some way the markings were performing, and that the increase in their luminosity was influenced by the number of people and the intensity of attention paid? This would suggest that there was something important about his own particular participation, for the markings had shone brighter when he made physical contact.
This chain of thought brought to mind a comment his mother had made years before, when the husband of one of her herbal-remedy patients had asked with mock seriousness if she honestly believed ghosts were “truly real” or if she was just being colorful and folksy and thought that they were “creatures in the mind.” To Lloyd’s surprise, Rapture dropped the usual white accent she used in public and replied, “Show me now where yer mine true ends and de worl’ begins, I show you plenny ghosts.”
Something about ghosts. And time.
Ghosts and time were intimately related, and yet profoundly disconnected. For what were ghosts but people who had stepped out of time—who were now immune to time—watching from outside, interacting with the world but no longer of it?
What would the world look like outside time? Lloyd wondered in his sleep. What would human culture look like—or sound like—outside language?
Time was change. The glyphs of the Ambassadors seemed to be constantly changing, except for the spiral symbol that looked like a tornado. So their language had something to do with time.
But was not a written language always about time? A fixing and freezing of a spoken language? In his dream state it occurred to him that he had assumed that the markings and carvings were transcriptions of the alien tongue the twins seemed to share. Their behavior had suggested that they understood each other’s sounds. Because the one was so bizarre, he had made the link to their markings; it was not surprising that a method of transcription would appear alien, too. What had puzzled him was why they needed to write. If no one else could understand their language, what was the point of writing? They could speak to each other.
Looking at these assumptions now, he saw that people often write things down for their private benefit. (He did.) To make things clearer for themselves. To prioritize. To remember. Or for other as yet unknown people to find and read. To teach. What were most books? Messages written in the hope of being found and decoded. Perhaps the brothers were trying to teach people their language, only it was hard to find a suitable student.
Something about ghosts. And time.
In his trance state, Lloyd slipped through the hierograms and the phenomenon of their luminosity for a moment, back to the Martian Ambassadors’ speech and the question of what things would not just look like but sound like outside or in some new relation to time. Yes, there was something about ghosts and time when it came to the twins. And tornadoes—or at least the tornado that they had dropped out of.
He spiraled around and around, trying to cut through the shame and guilt he felt about his actions toward them, to hear their voices again, to visualize the changes he had imagined in their hierograms. Why was it that the one symbol that seemed the most representative of dynamism—the spiral icon—was the one element that he was certain remained constant?
It was not a letter like A or Z. It was not even a unit of meaning, he thought. It was …
It was a kind of system unto itself. A value system for interpreting all the other symbols and their relationship to each other. Was that it?
He could not grasp onto the mechanism. All his young life he had sought out with instinctive acuity the essential elements of machine operations and physical processes. He was a born engineer, with a pathological curiosity. Now he was seeing a whole new world open before his dreaming eyes—the possibility that behind and inherent in language were mechanisms equally as real as the physics of a slingshot or the chemistry of a beer vat, but far more mysterious and perhaps much more powerful.
If one could connect the mechanisms of language with ballistics and pharmacology, optics, harmonics, hydraulics and medicine, mathematics and music. If one could master the secrets of symbols and syphons, surgeries and solar energy. If one knew the exact point where the mind ended and the world began, and could render it …
Who would need projectiles if they had mastered that enigmatic science?
He glimpsed then, for just a flutter, a symbol so potent that it was beyond all representation of other things and ideas, but alive unto itself. Inclusive and yet apart. Because it was the Whole—simultaneously inside and outside itself. Not the word made flesh but the word made time—and the ghosts made flesh.
That was what the spiral of the twins was, perhaps. That was what he had caught a flicker of that night with his beloved Hattie.
A key and a keyhole, too. And if one could pass through the spiral one could look back and see and hear the secret language unified and clear. He fixed his mind on this and sent himself outward, imaginatively trying to enter the spiral, to gain the other side. And then …
Swirling strings and flowering fractals of ideograms and morphemes exploded before his eyes, as if the dusty leather-bound tomes he had pored over in Schelling’s bookshop had opened all at once inside his head. He saw Egyptian hieroglyphs, lush brush-stroked Chinese characters on long, unwinding scrolls. Arabic poems tiled into mosaics. Greek and Hebrew letters hammered in stone. Alchemical and astrological symbols. The tracks of animals in tar pits—the silhouettes of bison and ibex on cave walls—musical notes, tattoos, hand signals, constellations. Complicated chains of numbers twined into lattices that in turn formed the skeletons of fabulous beasts like gryphons and unicorns, whose emerging flesh and scales then took on the mesmerizing puzzle patterns of still more figures—radiant angels and ghastly demons, horned-bone shaman masks and polished metal armor made of tinier masks made of geometric shapes that were the visual representation of still other numbers, coalescing to build vast temples and coliseums of notation that grew and glistened like sentient crystal systems. On and on the symbols rained at him, blossoming into jungles of unknown significance—metamorphosing into monsters and monoliths, titans, totems, face cards, and pieces in forgotten games.
But through all the pictograms and treble clefs repeatedly appearing amid the empires of equations and alphabets was the insignia of the Vardogers’ clawed candle, and the tornado emblem of the teratoid twins—a spiral choreography suggestive of conceptual aggregates and psychological associations—which was something entirely different. As different as the momentary flare of a firefly in a bean row from the electric haunted hieroglyph you would see if you could follow its whole life—every single pulse and drift of wing—and hold it in your mind as easily as that one blink. It was as different as the bending of the youngest blade of grass in a fifty-acre field from … the wind.
The wind made him think of his ghost sister, Lodema, and he recalled where he had got the notion of building shrines to her that summoned and revealed the subtlety and power of the unseen breeze. It was because of the old Wyandot man back in Zanesville, King Billy.
King Billy made moonshine and talked to himself, but he knew the tracks of every animal, from a field mouse to a fox. He knew when to fish with hellgrammites and when to use night crawlers. He could tell you the time of night by smell. He read the world with his whole body, his being so embedded within it that he was always on the page that was being written. All around his shack he had rigged up nets of tinkling beads and spoons. King Billy called them “ghost traps.”
Lloyd saw them again in his dream, feathered, jagged—warning, intriguing—sometimes invisible, depending on the light. They kept away bad spirits and busybodies. They defined Billy’s property, reflected his view of the world, and provided decoration. Insects and animals interacted with them, like the shadows and the seasons. Lloyd saw them again now as like the symbols of the Ambassadors. A living web of meanings that marked where the World becomes Mind. Where the Word becomes Time. Where the Ghosts become Flesh.