Date sent: Fri, 15 Feb 2002 23:55:07 -0500 From: Alan Harnum Subject: Dream Blue Birds (Damask story) To: ranma@KU.EDU * * * DREAM BLUE BIRDS * * * "I am quite far from understanding." "Course you are, guv," the raven said. "You rigged it that way, after all, so, naturally, you shouldn't be understandin'." He raised an indigo-feathered wing and poked his pale blue beak beneath it. "S'quite simple, really; you took some pieces of your brain out, mushed 'em up into this here fruit, and created me to take care of it." The raven indicated the blue apple with his wing, nearly knocking it off the balcony railing. Damask hurriedly grabbed it. "Mmm, yes," he said. "This does indeed look like my work. But why would I do such a thing?" "Dunno, guv," the raven said cheerfully. "Perhaps you thought it a capital idea at the time. Castin' off the past. A fresh start. Everyone dreams of it from time ta time, but you've got the power to make it happen." Damask looked back into the bedroom, where Michelle and Atsuko had finally fallen asleep in each other's arms. The ambiguity of their positionings to an objective observer--lovers, or mother and daughter?--appealed to his aesthetic sense. He was a musician, not a painter, but had the urge to do a sketch all the same. "My life begins with Michelle-sama," he said quietly, turning back to the raven on the railing and unconsciously polishing the vivid flesh of the apple against his jacket. "Everything before that is a dream. A nightmare from which I finally awoke." "Tsk," the raven said. He cocked his head to the side and regarded Damask with one glittering inkwell of an eye. "Self- pity, guv, that's what this is. One of your great weaknesses." "Hardly, mmm, the only one. A ha. A ha ha ha." "Course not. Yer a weak man, guv. A decent chap, but ineffectual. 'I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be'. One of our favourites." "'Our' favourites?" "Indisputably, guv. You made me. Ektor am I, a part of you. Caretaker of yon blue apple, and the side that lost the debate, such as it was." He preened his feathers and took a short hop along the railings. "S'understandable, really; you were very lonely. Hackneyed it sounds, I knows, but you just wanted someone who would really love you. Not an uncommon thing. And you found that right quick here." He chuckled. "Or, at least, you found two kindly ladies--one of them a proper Jocasta, I've got ter say--able to convince you that sex with them for the rest of yer life could be a pleasant existence." "Mmm." He raised the apple up to eye level and regarded it as one might a skull. "Go on," he said softly. "'Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very', mmm, 'soul, and there I see such black and grained spots as will not leave their tinct.'" The raven chuckled again. "'Purpose is but the slave to memory', guv. 'Most necessary 'tis that we forget to pay ourselves what to ourselves is debt.'" Damask leaned one hand on the balcony railing and held the other, the one with the apple, out into the air beyond. "Aye, guv," said Ektor. "Drop it and that's the end of the matter. But you can't do it, can you? No goin' back; you've tasted of the fruit already, or had it shoved into your mouth more like." "The stupid ignorant man," Damask whispered. Tears gathered in his eyes, blurring his vision. "He ruined everything." The raven coughed with laughter. "Guv, you think he's a stupid gent now, take a bite out of that apple." Damask uncurled two of his fingers from round the apple, holding it from a fall with only ring, little and thumb. Ektor looked at him nervously. "Come now, guv," the bird said, not unkindly. "You knew it would come to this. Yer not entirely without strength or self-knowledge. You made the apple. You made me. No runnin' away, guv; as recent events have proven, it's not going to be all fun and games for you here. S'why I showed up, you see; you called." The apple fell like a stone. Faintly, from the cobblestones below, there came a profound squishing. "Ah, guv," Ektor said sadly. "Dammit all--OY!" A quick wringing of the neck. A sudden gaping of the mouth. A pythonic bulge in the throat. Then, after picking a stray pinion from between his teeth and swallowing it down with the rest, Damask sat down on the balcony floor and quietly began to digest. "Mmm. I see," he murmured. He began to cry in earnest, without sound; soon enough, the tears were pooled all around him. They dripped between the bannisters of the balcony and fell to join the splattered apple down below. "Dear Lady Deirdre; were you truly fond, or only using me? Sweet young Horatia; what ailed thee? Lady Juri; where else might we have gone together?" Names, names, so many names; he hit the memory of waking up in Dworkin's lab with all his power gone, and despaired again; he collided with VENIR 2.0 toppling again and again upon the bed of marbles, and smiled; he exploded into his single ill-fated voyage aboard Captain Demetrius's sub, and felt a contempt so great it might well have withered his soul. It seemed complete. True. The pieces fit. But were they all of them there? All of them real? Where was the ending? Where was the bridge dividing There and Here? What had gone wrong? "Oh, Mother," he said softly. "Mother, Mother, Mother..." He remembered binding himself to the tree and playing at heroism in his youth and failing and being a toy and the tree and the wail of a saxophone and pain and a sister and a tree and Dara Devan Diana Demetrius (what was with all the dees?) Ivan Angus Tess Meredith Joan Dante Walker Finn Horatio Juri Gideon Uncle and a tree and Mother and falling onto a languid post- coital Deirdre (an image of surpassing loveliness) and running with his/her hand in Horatia's and the tank (the damn tank) and the surprised bearded face with the bullet in the brain and the sexy vampire women and the confession and the tantric trumps and the Keys and the dildo and the tree and Hector (I can make no new thing, he thought sadly, but out of old things I may make such things as have the semblance of novelty) and the gopher-beetle and the flies wasps birds and Mother, Mother, Mother. Michelle stirred. He heard her stir. He was a vibrating sensuous wire, drawn taught and plucked; hurriedly (even as he recalled Ryoko, her inexplicable hate, Fisher, his so-called sister, Blind Joe death mishandling his instrument, the Yellow Sign), he stood to his feet and composed himself. Michelle unwound herself from Atsuko's embrace with practiced care and sat up on the bed. "Damask?" she called softly. Damask walked back inside. "Yes, Michelle-sama?" "Weren't you going to go to bed?" "I was just about to. I was taking some air, Michelle- sama." She nodded. "Are you all right?" He smiled wanly at her. Not a truthful smile, but the wan one an actor might adopt. "Are any of us all right, Michelle- sama?" "No." She looked down at Atsuko, sleeping, and reached out to brush a curl of hair away from the older woman's cheek. "No, I suppose not." Damask sat down beside her and, because it seemed the right thing to do, put his arm around her. She curled up against him almost instantly. He felt an almost painful protectiveness, coupled to an almost shameful desire; was this love? Perhaps, or the seed of it. He remembered what Juri had said about this place. How she had preferred it in some ways. "The heroes were easier to like, and the villains more clearly foul" had been her words. He kissed Michelle's cheek. "Good night, Michelle-sama." "You can stay if you want," she murmured. "It's a big bed." "No." He stood up. "I shall go to the quarters assigned to me with the others. It is not right to play my favourites. I was only here with you to play music for you until you slept." He glanced at his guitar case, leaning against the wall by the door. "But you are my favourite." She winked at him saucily, and he blushed. "Only because I am new," he said with a cough. He left hurriedly, before she had the chance to embarrass him any further. He could not imagine putting his arm around anyone from There. Being spoken to There in such a way. Inconceivable. Trust? Love? Friendship? Alien words. Perhaps unremitting darkness must eventually turn upon itself, devouring. Cliched metaphors of "no shadow without light, no light without shadow" occured to him. He wondered again just what had gone wrong. Had he not cared enough for the universe? The universe for him? 'Not with a bang, but a whimper.' A winding-down, like a top that spins at first with tremendous speed and then, inevitably, begins to lose its equilibrium, tilts to one side, then another, and finally falls, spiralling epileptically upon the earth for a time before coming to a complete halt. How quickly I have come, he thought, to accept what may be entirely untrue as true. Might this not be another plot of this foe who waits to assail Michelle-sama's family in the day that is to come? Might I now have become a tool of the foe, like Captain Demetrius? But wait, and think upon it: is it not entirely in keeping with yourself, Damask, your chameleon-self, your fluctuations, to perform such an act, to trepan yourself and rip away the hurtfulness of memory like a cancer, but not to have the will and ruthlessness to go all the way? Or does it seem only to have been in keeping with yourself in the wake of the eating of this raven-fruit? He patted his stomach, where Ektor (once a part, always a part) was still digesting. Memories flitted back to him, cold fireflies: the taste of mint ice cream on a birthday (how insufferably Proustian, he thought), the exact number of times his mother had kissed him in a way that seemed more than perfunctory (seventeen). As he walked down the hallway he remembered a poem he had liked very much and recited it softly under his breath. "I cannot bring a world quite, mmm, round, although I patch it as I can. I sing a hero's, err, head, large eye and bearded bronze, but not a man, although I patch him as I can and, hm, reach through him almost to man. If to serenade almost to man is to miss, by that, things as they are, say that it is... oh, dear, what comes next?" Unfortunately, it escaped him, and he turned his mind to the issue of whether or not he owed Captain Demetrius an apology. On the one hand, the man had helped to save his life against Fisher's terrorists; on the other, the man had nearly got him killed through mathematical and/or tactical incompetence; on another hand (he almost instinctively grew another hand as his thoughts drifted this way, but stopped himself), the man might well have saved his life again against the tank (the damn tank); on yet another hand, even in another universe, the man somehow managed to get him and Michelle-sama and Michelle-sama's father and how many others to suffer Juri's fate (Here had a Juri too, but with memories of There flooding back, the Juri of There grew to primacy in his mind, overwhelmed the other)... "In final conclusion, the man is a stupid, arrogant, self- centered, self-pitying, self-involved fool." He paused. "But to whom do I refer? Ah, mmm, 'There's the rub'!" Again, a flicker of poetry. "Ah, but to play man number one, to drive a dagger in his, er, heart, to lay his brain upon the board and pick the acrid colors out, to, mmm, nail his thought across the door, its wings spread wide to rain and snow, to... curses." Seventeen bars of Bach interrupted and concluded, always his very favourite in all the world. He reached the door, turned the handle. Inside it was very dark. The bodies of the other men sprawled all around. He found a place to sit in an unoccupied corner. He took off his glasses, folded the arms in, and tucked them in his pocket. "Its wings spread wide to rain and snow," he murmured. "It's wings spread wide to rain and snow." Eventually, despite his intentions not to do so, he fell asleep. He dreamed of blue birds. Millions of them. They were flying against the sun. They were passing from There to Here. The surety of their Being was such they had no need of Memory to define themselves. He half-wished he could be like the blue birds of his dream, and knew full well that he could not. There to Here (he twitched uncomfortably in his sleep; one slim leg stretched out) was a journey of no distance for them. Not so for him so far; the Damask of There was not, could not be, the Damask of Here. Perhaps that was what had caused him to make the choice he had; if it had been a choice; if it had not been merely an experiment. But what was Damask of Here without Damask of There, beyond a joke, beyond comic relief, beyond a fool? Hesitantly, Damask of There took steps towards Damask of Here; hesitantly, they clasped hands. The blue birds shrieked. Millions of them.