There was a delay and an argument when I came to pay my fare. The army money was acceptable, but the banknotes were too high in value. Change had to be found, and the disgruntled ferryman made me wait for it. By the time I was free to explore the ancient boat we were a long way out to sea, and the warring continent I had left was a black outline on the southern horizon.
* * *
I was returning, at last, to the Dream Archipelago. In the days of mental torment in the military hospital, when food had seemed to shout abuse at me, and light sang discordant melodies for my eyes, and my mouth would only utter pain and hurt, my consolation lay in the Dream Archipelago. I had been there once before, on my way to war, and I urged, and was urged, to return.
“Visit the island of Salay,” a rehabilitation orderly had said, over and over. “On Salay the food is the most exotic in the world. Or Muriseay. Or Paneron. Do you remember the women of Paneron?”
(I remembered nothing then, only the agonies of twenty-five years of life, transmuted insanely to colours and smells and pain.)
I remembered the women of Paneron while I sat on the deck of the ferry, but the thought of them did not attract me. Nor did any woman who was easily accessible. There was a woman sitting near me, a young woman. I had been idly appraising her, and she noticed, and my stare was returned forthrightly. It was a long time since I had had a woman, and she was the first I had noticed. I turned away from her, wanting to choose, not to accept the first woman who stared back at me.
I was returning at last to the Dream Archipelago, and I knew where I would go. Not to Paneron, although I had been there and sampled the women, nor to Salay, nor to any other of the islands the troops most often visited. I did not count myself above the others, nor was I seeking an esoteric experience for its own sake, but I was walking again on the path of a long-forgotten memory, one which had returned to me by the insane medium of my illness.
On the island of Winho there was a girl who spoke like musk, who laughed with the texture of spring-water and who loved in deep vermilion.
It was five years since I had been to Winho. The troop-ship had put in to Winho Town for overnight repairs, and a few of the officers were allowed ashore. That night I had taken a whore, had bid for her against a local man, and with my soldier’s pay had bought her for twice the usual rate. I remembered the hour with her for a time, but since then there had been many whores and I did not think of her much. In my illness, though, I had remembered her again, the memory made more alluring by the associative images of the synaesthesia.
On Winho, in the Dream Archipelago, I would find that girl. Her name was Slenje, and I wanted her again.
* * *
But Slenje was dead.
Winho Town had been occupied by enemy troops for several months when they opened a new front in the Archipelago. It had been liberated with the other islands, but as our troops blasted their way back into Winho, Slenje had died.
I became obsessed with finding her, and for two days I paced the streets of the town, searching for her and enquiring about her. The answer was always the same: Slenje was dead, was dead.
On the second day I had another attack of synaesthesia. The white-painted cottages, and the lush vegetation, and the streets of dried mud, became a nightmare of beguiling smells and flavours, terrifying sounds and bizarre textures. I stood for an hour in the central street of the town, convinced that Slenje had been swallowed: the houses ached like decaying teeth, the road was soft and hairy like the surface of a tongue, the tropical flowers and trees were like half-chewed food, and the warm wind that came in from the sea was like fetid breath.
When the attack was over I drank two large glasses of beer in a local café, then went to the garrison and found an officer of my own rank.
* * *
“You’ll suffer from it all your life,” the officer said.
“The synaesthesia?”
“You ought to be invalided out.”
“I’m on sick leave now,” I explained.
We were walking through the courtyard of the castle where the soldiers were garrisoned. It was suffocatingly hot in the sun, for no breath of wind could reach the deep yard. The castle battlements were being patrolled by young soldiers in dark blue uniforms, who paced slowly to and fro, ever alert for a return of the enemy. These guards wore full battle-gear, including the heavy gas-proof hoods that covered their heads and faces.
“I’m trying to find a woman,” I said.
“There are plenty in the town.”
“A particular woman,” I said. “A whore. The locals say she was killed.”
“Then find another. Or use one of ours. We’ve twenty whores in the garrison. Keep away from the local women.”
“Disease?” I said.
“In a sense. They’re off-limits to us. No loss.”
“Tell me about it.”
The officer said: “We’re fighting a war. The town is full of enemy infiltrators.”
I looked at him carefully, noting the bland expression as he said this.
“That’s official army policy,” I said. “What’s the truth?”
“No different.”
We continued to walk around the courtyard, and I decided not to leave until I heard a fuller explanation. The officer talked of his part in the Archipelago campaign, and I listened with simulated interest. He told me that Winho Town had been occupied by enemy troops for nearly two hundred days, and he detailed some of the atrocities they had committed. I listened with real interest.
“The enemy performed…experiments here,” the officer said. “Not with the synaesthetics, something else. Their laboratories have been dismantled.”
“By you?”
“By staff-officers.”
“And what happened to the women?”
“The local people have been infiltrated,” the officer said, and although we paced about the sun-hot courtyard for another hour I learned no more. As I left the castle, one of the black-hooded guards on the battlements fainted from the heat.
* * *
Night was falling when I returned to the town, and many of the people were walking slowly through the streets. Now that my quest to find Slenje was over I was able to see with a new clarity, and observed the town more objectively than before. The tropical evening was still and close, and the breeze had gone, but the oppressive heat could not by itself account for the way people moved about. Everyone I saw walked slowly and painfully, shuffling along as if lamed. The hot night seemed to amplify sounds, but apart from occasional voices, and melancholy music coming from one of the restaurants, the only noise was that of the painful footsteps.
While I waited in the street, standing in the same spot as before, I reflected that in this stage of my recovery I was no longer frightened of the synaesthesia. It did not seem odd to me that certain kinds of music should be visualized as strands of coloured lights; that I should be capable of imagining the circuitry of the army monitoring equipment in terms of geometric shapes; that words should have palpable textures, such as furry, or metallic; that strangers should exude emotional coloration or hostility without even glancing my way.
A small boy ran across the street, and darted behind a tree. He stared towards me from behind it. A tiny stranger: he exuded not the nervousness his manner indicated, but curiosity and playfulness.
At last he came out and walked towards me, staring at the ground.
“Are you the man who was asking about Slenje?” he said, and scratched his groin.
“Yes,” I said, and instantly the child ran away. He was the only quick movement in the street.
A few minutes passed, and I continued to wait. I saw the boy again, running back across the street, zig-zagging through the shuffling people. He ran towards a house, then vanished inside.
A little while later two girls came slowly down the street, their arms linked. They walked directly to where I stood. Neither of them was Slenje…but then I had not hoped. I believed what I had been told, and knew she was
dead.
One of the girls, with long dark hair, said: “It will cost you fifty.”
“That’s all right.”
As she spoke I had caught a glimpse of her teeth. Several of them appeared to be broken, giving her a sinister, demoniac appearance. She was plumper than the other, and her hair seemed unwashed. I looked at the second girl, who was short, with pale brown hair.
“I’ll take you,” I said to her.
“It’s still fifty,” said the first girl.
“I know.”
The girl with the broken teeth kissed the other on both cheeks, then shuffled away.
I followed the second girl as she headed down the street towards the tiny harbour.
I said: “What’s your name?”
“Does it matter?” It was the first thing she had said to me.
“No, it doesn’t matter,” I said. “Did you know Slenje?”
“Of course.”
We turned into a narrow sidestreet that ran up the face of one of the hills surrounding the harbour. No wheeled vehicles ever used this way, because every so often there were shallow steps. The girl climbed slowly, pausing at each of the steps. She was breathing heavily in the humid air. I offered to take her arm, but she snatched it away from my hand; she was not hostile, though, but proud, because she gave me a quick smile a moment later. As we stopped at the door of an old house, she said: “My name is Elva.”
She opened the door and stepped inside.
I was about to follow her when I noticed that a number had been painted on the door: 14. It caught my attention because ever since my illness I had had strong colour-associations with numerals. The number 14 had a firm association with blueness…but this had been painted in white. I found it disconcerting, because as I looked at it the number seemed to change from white to blue, to white again. I knew then that another synaesthetic attack was beginning, and, anticipating the worst, I stepped quickly into the house and closed the door behind me, as if putting the numeral out of my sight would forestall the attack.
As the girl switched on the light, my mind cleared and the synaesthetic attack faded. I recoiled from the disturbing images of the lapses, but they were now a part of me. I followed the girl up a flight of stairs (she went slowly, placing one foot beside the other on each step), and I remembered Slenje’s vermilion lovemaking. I tried perversely to will the attack to return, as if the distraction of the synaesthesia would add an extra sensation to the act of sex.
We came to a small bedroom by the top of the stairs which, although close and airless in the heat, was clean and tidy. It was lit by a single light-bulb, which glared harshly against the white-painted walls.
Elva, the girl, said: “I’d like the fifty now.”
It was the first time she had faced me as she spoke, and in doing so revealed the inside of her mouth. Like those of the dark-haired girl, Elva’s teeth were broken and jagged. I recoiled mentally from her, this sudden fastidiousness making me uncertain of what I had been expecting. Elva must have noticed my reaction, because she smiled at me with her lips lifted away from her teeth: then I saw that they were not broken by decay or neglect, but that every single tooth, upper and lower, had had a piece broken away from it in a clean line, as if with a surgical instrument.
I said nothing, remembering that the enemy had occupied the town.
I reached into my pocket, and took out the money.
“I only have a hundred,” I said, and slipped one of the notes from the wad, returning the rest to my pocket.
She took the note.
“I have change,” she said, and opened a drawer. For a few seconds she searched through it, and while her back was turned I stared appraisingly at her body. In spite of her physical affliction, which gave her the movements of an old woman, she was very young, and I felt pity for her, mingling with the sexual desire which was even now making itself felt.
At last she turned, and showed me five silver ten-piece coins. She placed them, in a neat pile, on top of the dresser.
I said to her: “Elva…please keep the money. I must leave.”
I was shamed by her degraded state, ashamed of my use of her.
Her only reply was to lean down by the side of the bed, and turn the switch of a power-point. An electric fan whirred round, sending a welcome draught through the stuffy room. As she straightened, the stream of air flattened the fabric of her blouse across her chest, and I saw that behind it her nipples were erect.
She began to undo the buttons of her blouse.
“Elva, I cannot stay with you.”
She paused then to look at me. “You regret your choice?”
Before I could answer, before I had to answer, we both heard a sudden cry coming from close by. Elva turned away from me at once, and went to a door on the opposite side of the room. She went through, leaving it open behind her.
I saw that beyond the door there was another room, small and dark, filled with the whining sound of insects, and in it was a tiny bed. A child had fallen from this and lay on the floor, crying. Elva picked up the naked child—it was a little boy, no more than a year old—and held him to her, trying to soothe him. For a few minutes the boy was inconsolable, tears running down his bright pink face, saliva glossing his chin. Elva kissed him.
I saw that the little boy, in falling from the bed, had landed on his hand, for when Elva took the hand in hers he screamed with pain. Elva kissed the hand.
She kissed the fingers, and she kissed the palm…and she kissed the tiny, puffy wrist.
Elva opened her mouth, and some trick of the bright light in the main bedroom made her white chipped teeth shine out momentarily. She brought the little boy’s hand up to her lips, and then took the fingers into her mouth, sucking and working her lips forward until at last the whole hand was inside her mouth. All the while she caressed his arm, making tender, soothing noises in her throat.
At last the little boy stopped crying, and his eyes closed. She laid him on the bed, drew the covers over him and tucked them under the mattress.
She came back into the main bedroom, closing the door behind her.
* * *
Elva took off her clothes, and so I undressed too. We climbed into the bed, and in a while we made love. Elva kissed me passionately as we roused, and I explored her mouth with my tongue, discovering how each of her teeth had been fined to sharp edges. She bit my tongue and lips gently, as she had bitten the hand of the little boy, and there was a great tenderness to her.
She sobbed when we had finished, lying in the bed with her back towards me, and I stroked her hair and shoulders, thinking I should leave. Our union had been brief, but for me, after months of forced abstinence, memorable. There had not been Slenje’s vermilion passion, for the synaesthetics had let me alone, but Elva had been expert and seemingly affectionate. I lay with my eyes closed, wondering if I should ever return to her.
From the next room there came a quiet whimpering noise, and Elva left the bed at once and opened the interconnecting door. She peered at the child within, but seemed satisfied and closed the door again. She came back to the bed, where I was already sitting up, preparing to dress.
“Don’t leave,” she said.
“I’ve had my time,” I said, my thoughts at variance with my words.
“You are not here for time,” she said, and pushed me across the bed again.
She straddled me, kissing my neck and chest, letting her damaged teeth run tiny harmless scratches across my skin.
I became aroused again, and tried to roll her over on to the bed beside me, but she stayed above me, continuing to kiss and suck my skin.
And it seemed to me, as her mouth found my rigid organ and took it deep inside, that there was a sudden sense of lemon pleasure, and the liquid, sucking sounds of her mouth became like a hot pool of stagnant voices, endlessly circling…
I felt a sudden terror of the synaesthetics, knowing that I became unable to tell reality from falsity. I had a vision of Elva’s mouth, lined with tin
y knife-blades, closing around me, slicing into me. Her tongue, licking and stroking, had the consistency of mercury. I looked down at her: I saw the bobbing head, hair tangled and strewn across my body, and in my synaesthetic torment I visualized her as some monstrous animal, chewing into my gut.
It was the most hideous image of woman. Struggling against the madness of my visions, I reached down with my hand and laid it on the back of her neck; her hair fell across my hand, like the shaggy fur of an immense animal, but I stroked her, feeling the shape of her head and neck, concentrating on the reality of her.
And in a moment I found I could distinguish the reality of my other sensations. She was sucking me with the greatest gentleness; I remembered the hand of the little boy, I remembered the light touch of those teeth as she ran them across my chest.
I began to love her, in a way, and very soon I reached a climax.
* * *
I said, when I had dressed: “Take a hundred.”
“Fifty, we agreed.”
“Not for that.”
She was still lying on the bed, face down, and her hair was blowing in the cool stream from the electric fan. I noticed that the skin on the back of her legs had been damaged in some way: there was a pattern of scars high on each thigh, and behind the kneecap.
I looked at the five silver coins lying on the top of the dresser. “I’ll leave them there anyway. Buy something for the boy.”
She sat up and came slowly over to me, her pale skin blotched with red from where she had lain. She took the five coins and slipped them determinedly into the breast pocket of my shirt.
“Fifty.”
That was the end of it.
From the next room I heard the sound of her child again, who was waking. He was muttering contentedly to himself. Elva heard him too, because she looked briefly in that direction.