Looking at our faces you might have said we were all feverish and half mad, and perhaps you would have been right, but Helen’s book made us feel we could rip the stars from the sky and write the world anew. For the first time I saw how I might write a book about the Kiona. I even made a small outline of how it might be shaped. And just these few words in my notebook made many things feel possible.
There was a pale violet light in the sky when Fen read the last pages, Helen’s final push toward the understanding that every culture has its own unique goals and orients its society in the direction of those goals. She described the whole set of human potentialities as a great arc, and each culture a selection of traits from that arc. These last pages reminded me of the finale of a fireworks show, many flares sent up at once, exploding one after the other. She claimed that because of the emphasis in the West on private property, our freedom was restricted much more than in many primitive societies. She said that it was often taboo in a culture to have a real discussion of the dominant traits; in our culture, for example, a real discussion of capitalism or war was not permitted, suggesting that these dominant traits had become compulsive and overgrown. Homosexuality and trance were considered abnormalities now, while in the Middle Ages people had been made saints for their trances, which were considered the highest state of being, and in Ancient Greece, as Plato makes clear, homosexuality was ‘a major means to the good life.’ She claimed that conformity created maladjustment and tradition could turn psychopathic. Her last sentences urged acceptance of cultural relativism and tolerance of differences.
‘Written by a true deviant,’ Fen said, tossing the last page down. ‘A true paranoid deviant. She gets a little hysterical at the end there, as if the whole world’s just about to go down the gurgler.’
Nell caught me looking at her. ‘What?’
‘You look like you are trying to follow about nine different strands of thought.’
‘More like forty-three. We should go to bed before our heads explode.’ She went down the ladder to drape a banana leaf across the bottom rung, which discouraged visitors. ‘All right. We are closed for business until further notice.’
Fen drained the last of the rubber wine into his mouth. It dribbled down his chin and he wiped it with the back of his hand. He took off his shirt, scrubbed his armpits with it, and tossed it in a pile for Wanji.
‘To Bedfordshire, my lady,’ he said in my accent, taking her arm as they moved to their room. ‘Nighty-nighty.’
I went off to my mat in their study feeling a bit like the family pet who’d been put outside for the night. I lay awake as the animals woke up first, snapping branches and blundering through leaves and hollering out and the greeet greeet greeet of the monkeys, then the humans, coughing, grunting, whining, shouting. Cackles from the women going down to their canoes and their paddling and their songs that carried across the water. Gongs and scoldings and laughter, the thunk of gulls into the water and flying foxes smashing into trees. Finally, I fell asleep. I dreamt I was on an ice floe, squatting like a native, carving a large symbol into the ice. But it was melting, and though I carved deeply—something with two lines crossed in the middle, a glyph representative of whole paragraphs of thought—the ice was turning to slush, and my feet slipped into the sea.
I woke up to the sound of writing, the scrape of the pencil and the softer susurrations of the hand following along. I rolled over, expecting to see Nell at the kitchen table, but it was Fen. He didn’t stop. He didn’t see me watching. He bent close to the paper and his face was contorted in concentration, and he held his breath for far too long then released it through his nose loudly. If I hadn’t known better, I would have said he was sitting on the loo. When there was stirring in the bedroom, he stopped, gathered his pages, and left the house with them.
Nell came out wearing what she must have slept in, large cotton pants and a light green shirt. She fixed us tall mugs of coffee with evaporated milk, and sat where Fen had been. I didn’t know if it was ten in the morning or four in the afternoon. Light came through in slits and spackles from no particular direction. I felt like a boy on holiday from school. She sat with both feet up on her seat, her mug on one knee. I sat across from her, Helen’s transcript between us.
She bent one corner of the pages with her thumb then let them tick slowly back into place. ‘She was always writing a book, but after a while, I began to assume she’d never finish it. I thought I’d moved past her in that way. And now—this makes mine look like a child’s scrapbook of souvenirs from a trip to Cincinnati. She’s done some head-splitting thinking here. While I’ve been collecting pretty little stones, she’s built a whole cathedral.’
I still felt the tension of the dream in my body, the symbol I was trying to etch in the softening ice. It struck me as funny that she aspired to create a cathedral and I had struggled to carve out one symbol.
‘You’re laughing at me and my pity party.’
‘No.’ I thought of the story she told me about running out of spit in the closet. I could see that four-year-old so clearly now.