Chapter 30: The Shape of Silence
Two people on the near-full bus to Dublin were wearing Explorers. Normally, I wouldn’t have noticed them, dismissing them as show-offs. Now I studied them with a question in mind: what it would be like to share their dreams? One was a podgy male, about seventy-years-old. He was almost bald but with a circle of grey around his head, like a medieval monk. White shirt, no tie; charcoal jumper.
‘You’re very kind,’ the elderly monk said to the ample-sized woman beside him, a woman who was doing her best to squeeze into a narrow seat and make room beside her. Dublin accent. Kindness in the timbre of his voice. This man wasn’t so bad. Further along, as I looked at my seating options, I walked past a small Muslim woman who was wearing an Explorer over her teal headscarf. Silver marriage ring. Young though. Her cheap, blue jacket was zipped up to under her chin. She had the dislocated gaze of someone whose mind was in VR rather than with us on the bus. Again, I felt no objection to sharing her dreams.
Where would this technology take us? Would there be celebrity dreamers? People whose dreams were so fabulous the public couldn’t wait for them to go to sleep? Probably not. Probably, other people’s dreams were going to be boring and cringe-inducing. What mattered to me was the possibility that my own experience could be replicated, that everyone could find the Celine within themselves: creative and libidinous; insubordinate, wise and the antidote to having our minds filled with the fog created by living in a capitalist world.
As Celine rose towards the forefront of my being, I suddenly thought of Dad. My stomach clenched. Why was Celine bringing him to my attention?
Once settled in a seat beside a middle-aged woman who wore sunglasses even in the greyness of the day and whose hair was dyed black, I took out my phone and there was the answer. Twenty messages and a dozen missed calls from Dad. They began as measured in tone, turned angry, then furious, and, finally, the last text, was resigned.
Remember you offered me €50k? Well, I’ll take it and you can forget all the other texts.
Deal. What’s your IBAN?
He replied right away.
I’ll do that transfer today. Then we are cool, right?
Yeah.
Fifty thousand! It was a huge figure and yet I felt a lot better for the exchange. That I would be relieved by such a transaction and much happier within myself was knowledge that came easily to Celine but which I found hard to accept. Daniel and I had lived in relative poverty for too long not to feel the loss of the money. Yet as soon as I started justifying myself – “Those were my accounts really; it was my art he was dependent on for their success; that he and I had nothing in common” – as soon as these rationalisations filled my thoughts, then I was lying to myself. I was pushing aside the core fact that I had taken something he valued from my own father, possibly even swindled him. And that fact remained bobbing up from the depths of my mind, no matter how I tried to push it back down.
Tempting as it was to take out my own Explorer and watch a movie, I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. And I still wasn’t over my prejudice against Explorer users as show-offs. So I spent most of the long journey sinking into daydreams and trying to prod Celine into communicating with me. She wasn’t interested in idle chit-chat. When I fell asleep, however, wondering about Neo and whether he was after me, I had a dream that I was in a shopping mall when all the shutters suddenly came down. Around me, the people were American and they were burning their IDs in a bin someone had set on fire.
‘Hurry. Yes, you; you more than anyone, need to destroy everything that says you aren’t from here.’
I woke up knowing I had been given a very clear answer.
Back in the Ringsend squat, I found that Amanda had moved out, leaving the upstairs room to Daniel and I. Since he was out of the squat on the other side of the river, teaching at the Writers Centre, I had the bedroom my myself. Well, to Celine and I. And that suited me well. The room had plenty of natural light and for hours I drew on my sketchpad with pencils and ink. Each time I felt that my momentum was faltering and that I should take a break, a new impulse took hold of me and compelled me (outside of my own will) to touch charcoal or ink to paper. Each time I turned to a fresh, white, page, I became transformed by the possibilities.
I’ve attended two performances of John Cage’s Silence 4’33’’. The first time was by a trumpet player who put it on the set list for a laugh. The audience did, indeed, laugh as he lifted his instrument and pointed it this way and that, without actually sounding a note. As a joke though, four and a half minutes of silence is too long and I was thoroughly bored by the end. The other time I experienced Silence 4’33’’, was a completely different experience, sitting in the cheap choir seats at the National Concert Hall with Daniel beside me. That time a full orchestra and conductor performed Cage’s work and it was surprisingly musical. All those instruments, capable of moving you to tears, were poised, right on the cusp of sounding a note. My imagination, primed by Beethoven and Shostakovich, heard dark and dramatic openings. Daniel heard the first ominous drumroll and notes of Siegfried’s Funeral March. Every musical idea was there, just a heartbeat away, ready to crystalise, to assume an audible form. And like the potential for the spontaneous appearance of matter from vacuum, the silence was a rich, dynamic silence, full of potential music that each of us in the audience that night momentarily brought into existence in our own way, in our own minds.
Every blank page of my sketchbook was swirling with energy and images. I just had to release them.
Only when the light had begun to fade and I heard the heavy steps of my lover in the house below did I start to pack up my pencils and inks.
‘Cyn! So good to see you.’ Daniel, glowing with happiness, wrapped me in his arms and tumbled us both onto the bed.
That night Amanda, Daniel and I met again in a dream, this time mine.
A town straddling a grid of streets, US-style; a cold and windswept corpus of grey, broken where concrete parted to let tarmac through. In the interior of a café about fifty metres ahead of me, a lively crowd create a soundscape of laughter and clinking glass that penetrates the rushing noise of the wind caressing the edge of the skyscrapers. Rectangular shadows congregate to form darkness ahead, even though the day at my back is bright white. Darker and darker grows the town the further I look along the street ahead of me, though darkest of all is the chamber of electric light that is the café. Under the sweep of a purple awning there is an open doorway, leading to the room where a man once announced that he only wanted to be friends with the girlfriend who had arranged a huge party in the venue for the man’s thirtieth birthday. To commemorate that frantic, sorrowful day a dartboard has been suspended a little way inside the café and it is with purple-fletched dart in hand that I draw back my arm.
Watching with eyes that were weaving from me to the cafe like a car aquaplaning in the wet, Celine simply gave a kindly touch to my shoulder after I throw the dart with the utmost effort only to see it being lifted far away from the café by the powerful wind. Of course the attempt was hopeless. The small missile was never going to reach the dartboard, even if I had a thousand tries. In order to retrieve the dart (now transformed into the kind of plastic, purple ball that dogs chew on), Celine and I set out to climb up a house to a slated roof.
The house is quite out of keeping with the rest of the city, more 1950s corporation home than modern office block. A man is already there with a silver stepladder that is tall enough to reach the gutter of the roof edge. The ladder trembles as he ascends and I am uneasy for him.
‘Be careful,’ says Celine. ‘It’s not…’ Her sentence is incomplete as the man falls to smash his head on the hard, cold pavement. The horror of the moment of the man’s death – a fall that was particularly tragic as it was only just beyond my ability to interpose myself – was mitigated by Celine commenting, ‘ascents take practice.’
Hand in hand, we are effortlessly on the roof, where I retrieve the ball. ‘That was Daniel’s other half, wasn’t it?’ I observe.
Celine gives me a sly glance. ‘His other ninety-nine percent.’
Now we are jogging. Proper jogging, with sportsware and expensive runners. I have never done this while awake but I like the sense of community with those who were also exercising in what has become a park. Martin Doherty, TD, is there, running in the counter-clockwise direction and so passing me every fifteen minutes or so. Despite his increasing shortness of breath, he gives me a respectful greeting every time every time we meet.
‘Shall we run together?’ says Amanda, who has come up on my right and continues on a little faster than me, obliging me to adjust to her pace. This is her means of taking charge. It is natural for her to take charge and I suddenly understand why she recoils from a submissive sexuality that she is afraid of.
‘You don’t like me,’ Amanda asserts, directing her remark to Celine, who is on my left. In her favourite form of Oscar Wilde, Celine is skipping effortlessly along the path and has a book in her left hand, a long-handled cigarette in her right.
‘The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what she does not believe in, is a purely literary product. She was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.’
Amanda looks at Celine as if she might strike her and would have struck her were I not between them. Her face is white, her eyes becoming bloodshot.
‘That’s cruel. Do you call me another Robespierre?’
‘Lenin was thirty when I died and unknown to me, otherwise I would be even more cruel.’
Celine’s answer throws her, and Amanda falls behind us by a few steps to regain her composure.
‘When we went to bed with Daniel, what was on your mind?’ I ask, placing my feet quietly as I run.
‘Pleasure,’ Amanda answers.
‘When you were creating your dream free app and giving yourself the power to insert your own messages into people’s dreams, what was on your mind? Did you see yourself as just as controlling as Neo, or did the sheer numbers, the millions, whom you intend to influence, deaden the truth of it all?’
For a second Amanda freezes at the audaciousness of the question and I halt too.
‘How did you know?’ she asks, looking me up and down. ‘You’re no coder.’
‘I didn’t until now,’ I say unflinching, determined to stand my ground. ‘But Celine seems to have known for a long time.’
‘I’m not Neo. I have different values. Good ones,’ protests Amanda.
Celine roars like a lioness getting to her feet. ‘In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And you shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love you and despair!’
‘Good one,’ I laugh.
Amanda starts to jog again, looking ahead of her, like a woman trying to imagine her future.
‘I looked forward to this dream… to being with you,’ she says without turning.
‘I looked forward to it, also.’
‘Daniel and David are lost,’ says Celine, ‘I’m going to help them.’ Addressing me with affectionate eyes, she adds, ‘you’ve got the hang of this.’
Have I though? For, not long after Celine’s departure, I find myself having to run up a steep mud bank and through a narrow gap in the earthen rampart to where a crowd of people are waiting with the intention of going downwards as soon as Amanda and I have gotten out of the way. Committing myself to charging up the earthen track I am delighted to run through the dark gap at the top and reach the people there. My self-congratulations are premature though: the path remains steep here for one more step and I lack the momentum to crest the height. I’m teetering and might easily find myself falling back, sliding down through mud and unable to ever get up to this higher level. All it would take to stabilise me is the slightest touch from one of the people nearby. A butterfly, landing on my sleeve would assure my success. Yet no one cares.
A push at my back and I fall forward, so relieved that I feel as though my veins are filled with joy, not blood. Who is my benefactor? A handsome male in a toga. He is in his twenties (probably), with short, caramel-coloured hair. His right hand is extended downslope, where he clasps Amanda by the wrist. His left reaches for me and I pull him – and her – up. Immediately we are clear of the path, the crowd flows down it like the gains of a sand timer.
‘Thank you,’ I say to the man. ‘I’m Cyn.’
‘You can call me Amandus,’ The expression on this face is sombre. He’s not joking. Amanda and Amandus. That cannot be a co-incidence.
‘You share her mind?’ I ask.
‘She floats on a surface. I am the depths.’
‘Good to meet you Amandus. Do you agree with Amanda giving herself the power to influence people’s dreams?
‘Of course.’