the icarus tree
(6,159 words)

Published in ‘Glasgow 2020’ (Demos, 2007)

              To Albert Ayler    

Darkness and heat covered everything, but from the darkness, came chanting. A woman in her late twenties burst into the chamber, tripped over the leg of a large, rectangular table and fell headlong. On the table was a storm-lantern, an ashtray, a half-empty bottle of liquor and a crumpled-up newspaper. A man emerged from the shadows and lit the lantern and with it, a slim cigar. His face seemed to Leila to be obscenely long, the skin, smooth, waxy, yet the hint of a beard hovered around his jowl and his eyes gleamed like sapphires. In pinstripes and with a tightly-knotted red tie, he looked thirty-five, maybe forty. The floor felt rough and warm beneath her cheek. She could see her disheveled reflection in his shoes. Just as she got her breath back, he crouched down and blew smoke into her face. As she coughed, the chanting subsided. The walls of the oval room were covered with WW2-era ads – the big blonde faces, the bound-back hair, the concentrated gaze at infinity, the etiolated glimmer against the sky of anti-aircraft guns - but she noticed in the murk of the back wall, a full-sized, framed reproduction of what looked like a Dutch master.
Mind if I smoke? he smiled. His voice was pitched deep.
Leila got up. The chamber was around seven metres high and twenty in diameter and the door through which Leila had entered now seemed to have vanished into the long shadows cast by the lantern.
These pictures… from my great-grandmother’s time.
Leila shuddered, though it must have been over ninety degrees. She lifted the lank, black strands out of her eyes.
            How far down is this?
He laughed.
            Drink? Smoke…?
Leila’s head began to pound as she tried to remember.
            I was running. But first, I was walking.
            Walking, running? Do you even know who you are?
            I am Leila Morris, born twenty-…
He imitated her.
            I am Leila Morris.
He was close now, his breath seared her skin. She closed her eyes. A familiar scent, difficult to place. He spoke so quietly, she thought she might be imagining it.
            You are dancing, remember?

Circling his cigar through the air, he began to hum a World War Two tune. Eyes still closed, Leila found her spine beginning to follow his movements as though he was a snake-charmer and she, a serpent. Shadows waltzed around the room.
            You are dancing, slowly, languorously, in a park by the banks of the old river. All around you, the city.
He was behind her.
            Through the branches of dead trees, the evening sunlight cuts across your skin. Yet you are far away.
            I was walking through a summer wood, and the night was coming down, the trees, pressing in. I am trying to run. There is something behind me.
The chamber smelled of desiccation, as though like an Egyptian tomb for aeons it had remained sealed to the outside world.
Leila wiped the back of her neck.
            Faster, faster I run until the leaves become bricks and I am in a tunnel, going down…
He broke in.
            You remind me of a woman I once knew.
He ran his finger along the line of her eyebrows.
            Shuffled cards with her during the war. Can’t remember which war.
Leila twisted away. Yazid was wistful.
            She was born in the forest, in a bed of leaves by a smoking mill.
He shifted his cigar into his left hand and extended his right.
            Yazid, card shark, stock trader, general animal.

Leila did not take his hand and began to explore the chamber. She flicked through the newspaper. He let his arm fall and tipped ash onto the floor. Her voice frayed.
            How did you get here, Yazid?
I was strolling through the tamed, deciduous countryside, aye, through the forest where long ago some king had his eye taken out.
He laughed, a strangely feminine laugh.
Through the assonant song of the brown thrush or the red breast or the blue tit, I came upon a door in the ground. At the centre of the door was a large brass ring. I knelt and pulled. Everything was light.

For the first time he seemed discomfited, his movements, jerky, uncertain. From his jacket, he took out a paper, carefully folded it, then removed a silver phial, unscrewed the top and tipped a small amount of white powder into the fold. Closing one nostril, he threw his head back and snorted, thrice. He put away paper and phial, smoothed back his hair and straightened out the soft cotton of his suit. He re-lit his cigar and brought out a pack of silver-backed playing cards which he began to shuffle. Through the cigar smoke, that scent again. Still puffing away, he fanned out the pack. Tentatively, she ventured a hand.

Yazid grabbed her wrist and pulled her closer. Suddenly, two people entered the chamber. One was in police uniform and she strode towards Yazid and yanked the cigar out of his mouth.
No smoking down here, sir.
She threw down the cigar and crushed it with the heel of her boot.
Gases.
Embarrassed, Leila drew back her hand. Yazid sneered.
And who are you? A canary?
The man placed a hand on the uniformed woman’s shoulder.
Hawwa. I found her in the Tube.
Beneath the layers of foundation, Leila made out pits and scars, the odd mole. Hawwa wore her dye-brown hair bound-up behind her police cap like an extra cerebellum and this, and her air of authority, made her seem taller than she was.
Now wait a minute, Aban. You were wandering, lost, down there in the darkness, and I pulled you up into the light.
Halleluiah!! Praised be the Lord! Strike up the organ!
Everything he says has two meanings, Leila informed Hawwa.
I know the type. Snake-tongues.
Yazid interjected.
These cards were hewn from the Silver Tree.
The Silver Tree? Hawwa seemed startled. Leila could see the wrinkles now.
Yazid pinched Hawwa's cheek.
Oww!! How dare you!
He began to light another cigar.
And you, Aban, you just stand there like a weak old man!
Aban did not look like a weak old man. He was as tall as Yazid, though of bulkier build. The lower part of his face was silvery-grey. Yazid rested his cigar on the edge of the ash-tray, unbuttoned his jacket and began to shuffle the cards.
Ah! We like our little games, don’t we, Leila.
Leila ignored him. Aban swigged at the booze. Yazid waved his cards at Aban.
I see you, screwing slowly with the trains rolling past and the beatific, matriarchal ghosts of WACCI and WAAF looking on. Hot jazz, big trombones. We’ll meet again… Every action has its consequence, down through the generations.
Leila broke in, quietly.  
Sorry we disturbed you, Aban.
You are the intruder! snapped Hawwa. What were you doing here?
Leila sprang up and shoved the policewoman aside.
None of your business!
Don’t you lay your filthy paws on me!
Yazid came between them.
Subway swingers, eh? He winked.

Hawwa began to pace around the chamber.
We need only the strong-hearted, the long-boned. Iron and steel and firm, thin lips.
Aban stared at the floor. She was unstoppable.
The story of our civilisation is basically that of continuous progress, with perhaps… one or two hiccoughs.
As her speech progressed, Yazid mimed as though he was being shot several times in the chest, but she seemed not to notice.
            We were simply better at everything. The world as we know it would not be as we know it if we had not known more than they knew.
Yazid whispered into Leila’s ear,
The Armada is coming!! Ah, Leila, looks like we’re in it together.
Leila shifted away from him. Aban sighed and looked searchingly at Yazid.
We just wanted space, privacy, silence. These hands drew concrete from the earth. We pulled the strings of rational magic and made the snake of fate dance upon its tail. Every pebble was symbolic of the whole. Our anchor, Heisenberg's many brains, his uncertainty, our guiding principle. Through pure ideas, we fashioned homes, offices, factories, forges and our song was the song of the blacksmith.
Hands-on-hips, Leila guffawed.
So it was you who put up all this crap!
Yes, well, I am an architect. Bridges are my specialty, and skyscrapers - bridges to the sky, you might say. It didn’t quite work out the way I’d planned. Costs, concepts and people had to be… rationalised.
He brightened up.
But the parks are the redeeming feature. I personally picked seeds from the banks of the three original rivers: Tigris, Euphrates and Styx. I planted the first spade into the hard, biochemical earth.
Leila swung her arms and whirled balletically around the chamber.
I love parks, the breeze on my skin, the sunlight flickering through the leaves.
She stopped beneath the gaze of the WAAF officer, shuddered, and drew her arms around her body.
But here, I feel as though I am in a coffin.
We could sit down, have a drink and I could explain it to you, Aban offered.
Glaring at Leila, Hawwa looped arms with Aban. 
Sorry, love. He’s busy.
I was just offering the girl a drink.
Leila went around to Aban’s other side and she, too entangled herself triumphantly.
Yes, thank you. I would like that. Let’s go for a tipple and you can tell me all about the castles, the monorails and the bridges.
Yazid drew in the air with his cigar.
They lead from nowhere to nowhere.

Leila and Aban began to dance a slow waltz. Yazid followed them around, playing an imaginary violin. He whispered to Hawwa,
She’s quite gone, poor dear. Too many loose screws.
Hawwa folded her arms, knitted her brows.
Not a bad dancer, though.
Leila was racing.
I could come to love it here! Imagine the two of us, trapped for ever and ever. No past, no future. Just the moment.
I thought you didn’t like darkness, whispered Aban.
Love ‘n’ hate: a hair’s breadth.
They all stopped dead, but the dancers’ fingers remained entwined.
Don’t imagine too much, Leila, Aban said.
Leila disengaged and began to pace around him.
Do you not desire to lose yourself in the unmapped conduits beneath the city you built? The deeper you go, the more you know. That evening, I was dancing through a fluttering pergola of leaves…
Hawwa moved to stand in her way.
Are police officers, the reluctant guardians of this Silver Age, to be denied even the possibility of love? Aban and I wished to partake of a moment’s privacy, away from the cameras and the iris scans and the plastic hoardings, to be awake yet unwatched. We traced our way through manholes and barbed wire and along varnished bricks until we could no longer hear the crowds and somehow, we ended up here. There was a way in, so there must be a way out. I have it in my head… somewhere.
Yazid clicked his heels together and rendered an exaggerated salute.
Ah! The dark blue surge through your veins, the bobbed hair, the body armour, the row of bright, silver buttons, waiting to be unplucked…
He put his finger to his lips.
            You have the right to remain silent…
Hawwa continued.
This was not what millions down the ages gave their lives for. Our sacred hearts’ blood, flowing down dark channels into the silver stream, our dreams, lucid bullets, fired through the Empyrean.
Yazid raised his arms like a conductor. He sniffed the air, twice.
I feel an epic coming on. Raise a symphony of the nation!
Yazid began to conduct maniacally. A distant rumbling sound came from above. His music ended suddenly, leaving him contorted. Wrists crossed over at his back, he shuffled towards Hawwa.
O Great Woman-in-Blue, harbinger of Peace and Salvation, please, for the sake of Truth, Beauty and the Nation, loop your iron hoops around this poor flesh! Frisk me and take me down, down, into your cold darkness.

The rumbling sound grew louder. Everything began to shake and tremble. The lantern-light flickered on and off.  Hawwa went into official mode.
Do not be alarmed. It is merely the trains, running on time.
It is my life, coming after me, Leila whispered.
You’re not so important, love. I see your type, day in, day out, dead and blue in the gutters.
Leila went up close to her face and spat out her words.
Fascist cow!
Yazid clapped in camp fashion.
Ah! So city and yet also sturdily demotic, almost bucolic! Fascist cow! The night dance begins!
How about that drink, Leila? Aban persisted.
Oh no, Yazid broke in. You cannot depart so soon, father. First, we must play our game. He began to shuffle the pack.
I don’t play cards.
Suddenly, Leila was a coquette.
Why not, Aban? I think it might be fun.

Yazid splayed the deck face-down before her. Girlishly, she picked a card and held it close to her chest. Aban and Hawwa followed suit, guardedly and they all sat cross-legged in a circle on the floor. Yazid closed his eyes.
In the Beginning, there was darkness, and God moved upon the face of the waters.
Leila spoke insistently.
In the beginning, I was running through the woods.
Hawwa was cynical.
And someone was following you, right?
The wood was filled with singing, said Leila.
A thousand choirs, said Yazid.
Aban pointed at the door.
I’ve had enough of this.
He looked at Leila.
Coming?
Aban got up and walked to the door. The handle did not budge.
Yazid opened his eyes.
What did you see in him, Hawwa?
There was another earth-tremor and the four of them jumped up and were flung around the chamber. The cards scattered and Leila began to sob.
We're all going to die!
Yazid laughed.
Yes. It is the truth. Someday, we shall all be dust, blown off a counterpane by the breath of a fly. Bzzzzzzzz!!!!!
Her voice trembled.
Do you know the way out of here, Constable?
Yazid interrupted.
Amongst the rubble and bone of the catacombs, she will plant incriminating evidence, raise false flags. Relax and enjoy your new-found privacy. The here-and-now is all there is.
But Hawwa wasn’t buying it.  
You’ve been very wordy about the rest of us, yet we know nothing about you.
Yasin poked Hawwa in the ribs several times as he talked.
We put you in your place that you might maintain us in ours.
Shuffling the cards, he walked away.
I can spot a liar one light year away, maybe two.
Yazid spun around.
 Ah, so you’re not one of those neurotic detectives who wear beige raincoats and spend all night shadowing the rubber wheel, drinking espresso doppio and monitoring infidelitrous liaisons.
Reality is shifts. Reality is forms, filled rolls and inauthentic fish ‘n’ chips. Reality is a marble slab and six feet of earth.
Yazid went up close to Hawwa and began to tinker with the buttons on her jacket.
Reality is nine-tenths of fantasy. Or is it the other way around? One minute, the city is around you, above you; buses, monorails, microwave radiation, all the cons of modernity; and the next…
He clicked his fingers up close to her face, startling her.
… Gone! And you’re back a hundred years, or a thousand, and everything smells of jasmine, rose, lotus. Bones.
Yazid half-closed his eyes and moved away. He took off his jacket, rolled up his shirt and began to perform a belly-dance around them, touching the posters as he went and quietly singing, Habibi Ya Habibi!

Leila broke in.
I saw it, in a dream. A building suspended, ninety-nine floors, by a fast-flowing river. Thirty thousand tonnes of steel, twisted, reinforced, impregnable, resistant to a Force Twelve Gale. In an earthquake, it swings. And growing beside it, a great, silver tree. Two people on the blade of the ledge, poised on the wire, silent like angels.
Hawwa became distressed and ran up to Leila and held her by the arms.
No! Stop! Please!
But she went on.
A million years ago, this chamber was the surface and there were no people, no dreams, just trees, beasts and mud. Sunlight through a dragonfly’s wing. And so it will be, again.
She cupped her ear.
Can you not hear it, the bullock-cart that clatters backwards through time? The layers of the city, laid like dead lovers, one upon the next? As the buildings and bridges collapse and fold like playing-cards, as the Great Black Friend rises above the rim of His horizon, it is the last thing we shall know.
Aban began to gather up the cards.
            Look, he said, they’re all aces. The whole pack, aces. No-one can win.
The strange chanting began again. Yazid held the lantern up before his face.
A circlet of stars! A quickening flame.
He was whispering.
Breath, wind…
He blew out the flame.
Darkness.

                        ************************************

The disordered chant was silenced by a long, human howl. Hawwa stepped forwards and began to address an imaginary crowd.
It grew right there, in the park in the middle of the city. Its trunk was barely thirty centimetres across and yet it grew hundreds of metres into the air so that its topmost branches were level with the tallest of the buildings. The Silver Tree was an impossibility in a rational landscape. It mocked our city, our civilisation, which was the most advanced in the history of the world. As it grew it reminded us of our mortality, our limitations. All my life had been about the focusing of the will. In search of perfection, the architect had fused the human with the inhuman – but along with the wondrous buildings, there came this infernal tree! And no-one seemed to bother! But I saw it, every day I saw it. And I knew that it would have to be destroyed. And so, one dark night, beneath a low, bitten moon, I took a saw and a spade and, there, in full dress uniform, I climbed over the high walls and dropped down into the park. The trunk was tough, green and alive, it tore the skin of my hands, but I was determined. I watched the tree as it teetered and then fell into the water. I rubbed the dirt, sap and blood off my hands and went down to the rail by the slowest, deepest part of the river, and gazed down into the darkness for what seemed like hours.
Hawwa pulled her hands into a gun-shape and spun around in an arc.
And that's when I saw it. The head, floating in the water. Now, I've seen all kinds of stuff. But there are limits. And when the eyes turned around in their sockets and fixed their gaze on me and when the mouth opened and began to speak, that was somewhat beyond my limit.
After that, the Head appeared in all the stations of my life. Every time I tried to fall asleep, it would whisper in my ear. And always, it would be smiling as though at some private joke. They say that a city is like a tree – the roots go down as far as the branches go up. Aban pretends to logic and rationality, but he and the city he built are seamed through with weakness, compromise and ugliness. Without us police, it would all fall apart. Yet I was in love with the failed architect, with the man and with his buildings. And with one building in particular. Ninety-nine storeys high, by the river, by the Silver Tree.
That night, I climbed the ninety-nine floors of Aban’s skyscraper. I was searching for the architect. And still, the head yabbered on and on, even unto the edge of the dawn. From the ninety-ninth floor, I watched the light break over the world’s rim. I felt the cool breeze rise from the river and envelope me like a silver hand.

She began to pace around the chamber in ever-decreasing circles.
Even in the darkness of the deepest pit, there is always a sliver of light.
She stopped, and from the holster at her hip removed a gleaming, silver revolver. She caressed the gun and then spun the barrel.

                        ***********************************

Leila was running a silent film on a battered metal projector. Aban entered the chamber. She stood up. They embraced and kissed several times, ungainly at first.
Why do you watch these?
She shook her head.
I can’t remember…
Aban put his arm around her.
It doesn’t matter.
Leila took both his hands in her’s.
In these dark, echoing crypts, we fell in love.
His lips tasted salty, but were warm. Like his heart, she thought and then she dismissed the sentiment. She pointed upwards.
Listen, Aban! Do you not hear it? Did you not hear it as you modeled the city on the chambers of your mind?
Aban shook his head.
A river, flowing into concrete and glass. Humanity becoming the world. The world, becoming human. Underneath, the city is seamed through with these dark tunnels, these possible stations. As the icebergs melt and the surface of the world burns with war and solar radiation, the only refuge is here, in the bosom of the earth, in the clutch of cold stone and old music.
Do you still dream, Leila, of the world above?
As I watch the films, they begin to alter. I no longer know whether I am seeing what was there, or what I would like to see.
Perhaps, now, there is no difference.

Yazid entered the chamber, cradling a large tin.
A veritable parliament of baked beans!
Aban smiled.
That’s very useful, Yazid.
Yazid moved closer to Leila.
I really don’t know what an attractive woman like you sees in a nuts-and-bolts man.
He fixed Aban with a stare.
I found the plans under your pillow, Aban.
Aban’s smile vanished.
Leila looked questioningly from one to the other.
They… they were Hawwa’s, Aban began. My idea was for a series of elliptical structures that would subsume the whole of the city, each structure nestling inside the next. Everything was calculated down to the last yocto-metre.  It would circulate, it would sweat and discharge, excrete and secrete. And it would dream.
Yazid cut in.
The component parts of which would have to come together at a certain point in time in order not to collapse and destroy the entire city. The domino effect, yes?
It was quite safe.
Safe as eggs ‘n’ sperm, you mean!
The homeostasis was dependent upon many variables.
Variables, like marbles, tend to roll downhill.
Aban was suddenly passionate.
A totally integrated city-state, animate and inanimate beings united in a loose and ever-changing plexus of existence. It was a vision for the future! For ever.
Utopia, in a brick, Yazid laughed.
He went over to the wall and slapped his palm against the old posters.
You went grey, planning all this. It took the best of you. And the worst.
Leila stared straight up into the cold distance of the wartime heroine.
This place, it heals one, she whispered.
Aban’s voice trembled.
I met the policewoman at the city’s heart. She rose like an angel in a pillar of silver…
Yazid smiled.
Your memory fails you, sweet geometer.
… directing the flow, from on-high.
A traffic-cop!
I would go there at the same time every day.
High noon.
I watched her lift her arms, turn her body, nod, scowl slightly at the chaos: White face, black eyes, a silent sage. She gave me direction.
Yazid clasped his hands across his chest and sighed. Aban did not seem to notice.
We seemed perfectly matched, our hands like those of waltzers.
Yazid got up, stretched his arms.
A woman, a city, a symphony!
She had knowledge. She had plans.
The plans I found under your pillow.
She told me she had dug them out from the Police Archives.
They were hatched in concrete, many years ago.
Leila glanced from one to the other.
What plans, Aban?
Aban’s eyes were streaked with red.
Thousands of directives, in search of the perfect State.
Yazid held up a thick bundle of papers.
Full of Castilian colons.
Give me that!
Aban tried to snatch the bundle from him but Yazid forced him down and back against the edge of the table. His thumbs met around Aban’s windpipe.
No, Yazid!
Leila screamed and grabbed Yazid’s arms.
But he threw her off and tightened his grip. Aban gurgled and his head fell back.
You wrote the language of the city, but each word held within it the seed of its own destruction.
Aban managed for a moment to free himself.
            I built bridges, not chains!
At the centre of all truths there is a great lie. In a fundamentally unequal society, it is not possible to conceive of real harmony. Therefore the harmony must be enforced.
Leila launched herself at Yazid, but he cast her down easily and leapt onto Aban’s back. Hawwa entered the chamber.
Let him go!!
Her hair had turned silver and streamed like a waterfall over her shoulders. Her cap had gone. She aimed her pistol straight at Yazid and spoke slowly.
Let him go now, or I will shoot you.
Yazid laughed.
Has your brain gone for a walk? There is no holding things down any more. The coordinates that once were fixed have all begun to dance. Chaos rules! Creative destruction. Constant war. And so we witness the birth-pangs of a new Cosmic Order!

Hawwa fired, once. But Leila had rushed into her and the bullet smashed into the ceiling. Hawwa swung at her and Leila fell to the floor and was still. Dust and rubble came down onto Yazid’s head. Aban sprang free and began to nurse his neck. His voice was grit.
Put down the gun, Hawwa.
Hawwa pointed the gun first at Yazid and then at Leila. She shook her head, slowly.
So you can stay here, with your little whore?
Leila struggled to her feet and began to limp around the chamber. Blood matted her hair and trickled down the left side of her face and her eyes were glazed over.
It was a sunlit evening. I was strolling through the garden of the city. I was dreaming of another place. Of larks, and emptiness. In the distance, the undulating forms of the hills, the ringing of church bells. Then a breeze got up. The leaves began to dance crazy dances. Cold, cold, cold.
She drew her arms around her.
Running now, running from the city, from its past, its present. I loved her. I thought I knew every beat, every pulse of her body, her soul. I thought we would dance together, through the night.
Hawwa broke in.
A light in the sky made me raise my head from the street-level piss-crap. There, on the ninety-ninth floor, I saw the mason.
Aban’s voice spirit-leveled.
I had taken up residence on the top floor of the unfinished building. Every morning, I would await dawn’s beauty: the river, curling like a vine towards the far horizon, giving off tributaries like roots. It’s amazing how little food one requires, up there, in the sky.
Leila was breathless.
I was moving down a tunnel of darkness. The leaves were pressing in.
Aban circled the table.
For years, I had gazed at the Silver Tree, I had watched it grow. I had gazed for so long, the backs of my eyes had burned with its light. And I dreamed of building a city in the image of the tree. A city of impossible elegance. Yet even as I forged the polis upon an anvil of iron, bar by bar I felt run beneath my fingers like sap beneath bark, some essence that I could never wholly know. The bridges we built have led only to fields of battle.
Hawwa was like a djinn. Her voice was fire.
The only silver is in the pips on my shoulders and the metal of my gun.

Smoke from Yazid’s cigar seemed to fill the chamber.
So, architecto, this morning, as the sun rises, you want to throw yourself off the ninety-ninth floor of your tallest skyscraper. You are an angel, flying through the sunlight. The world runs before you, around you, inside you, then contracts to zero.
On the ledge, I felt a movement at my back.
I was an office-worker, high in a tower, the great human resource.
Leila swigged twice from the bottle of booze, then threw it at the wall, where it smashed and tore the WAAF poster, the cream complexion suddenly bleeding port wine from its left eye.
Redemption was a burger and a smiling, Californian actor, blown to five times human size. That morning, I saw something move in the building opposite. I went over to the windows. The windows that can never be opened.
And you saw her arrive. Aban’s lover of ninety nights.
Leila held Aban’s head between her hands and pulled him close. Her fingers streaked blood onto his cheeks.
 I was there as your dreams began to dance. You turned the dead shopping-malls into living, breathing spaces, you ploughed swords into the swelling concrete and drew them up as orchards, waterwheels and joyous maqamat. You wished to turn the city into a musical composition with no beginning and no end, a city that would run through time and space and spirit. For centuries, we have been rising, you and I. I was there with you in the deep, dark dungeons of the Grand Duchy, I danced in the socialist sunset as the piano faded into the silence of the Bomb and I was there as the great dreams of capital foundered and broke apart on the silver altar of war. And I was watching you, that day as you wavered on the ninety-ninth floor, the breeze blowing your hair backwards as though it was the breath of your long-dead mother. Perhaps it was my gaze that drew you to this. We had never met, yet I felt as though I had known you always. I, too was broken as she snapped the trunk of the tree. My blood flowed, silver and red, into the earth and down, into the river. Perhaps, eventually, to the sea.
Hawwa’s voice ballooned with panic.
The electricity of my thoughts was disturbed. Something possessed my soul!
Leila turned to her. Spoke quietly.
When you broke the Tree, you released Yazid.

The policewoman gazed tearfully at Leila and then at her own palms. She was almost whispering.
My hands were bleeding sap. I’m… I’m sorry.
Yazid smiled.
Ah! Blame it on the vegetation. Burning bushes, witches’ brushes, bad-hat hawthorn tree. Governor, polizei, subway humper, torturer, Executioner, Holy See. You forget that all the while, through darkening centuries, you were working only for me.
Leila fell against the poster. She was clutching the side of her head as blood dripped through her fingers onto the floor. 
I remember now. Before the tunnel, there was the tree. I was naked in the night air and I was gazing into the fast-flowing river, when…
Hawwa’s eyes gleamed with tears.
I once saw a man fall from a great height. His face was perfect.
… a dark shadow, behind me, moving ever closer. I am shivering.
Yazid moved towards Leila.
It was fun. Chasing the night dancer down into the belly of the earth.
Heavy breath, upon my neck. That scent…
They say that a hanging woman smells hyacinths.
The air is still. There is only the rushing of the water. By the stump of the Silver Tree, I catch my breath. I grow sleepy.
If the djinns don’t get you, the CO2 will.
A man’s hands upon my neck!
Yazid placed his hands lightly around her neck. Rolled his thumbs in their sockets. His voice was almost seductive.
The spirit of the city, between my palms.
My breath, seeping away like mist off water. Everything is darkening, fast.
He lifted his hands away.
Yazid, murderer by occupation, torturer by inclination. Card shark, stock trader, general animal. Grain by grain, I snort my way to heaven.
You killed her? Hawwa was aghast.
Death is quantum. Besides, my dear copper, you are one to talk. Pushed your silver-headed lover off a window-ledge, ninety-nine floors up?
I did not push him! He… he jumped!
But he changed his mind, and stretched out his arm. At that moment, he needed you, Madame Polizei.
I tried to save him! I tried…
Quelle musique! 
Aban shook his head.
It’s us. We did it.
The gun shook in Hawwa’s hands.
If… if I kill him now, perhaps everything will return to normal. We will all go back to the way we used to be. This was just a period of madness. Such things are necessary for a society, from time-to-time.
No, Hawwa, said Aban. All roads lead to the ninety-ninth floor.
Leila wiped the blood out of her eyes. Yazid was grinning from ear-to-ear.
After three thousand years, the djinns will run free!
Aban stood in front of her.
            There is no light, no silver, no knowledge. It’s all just shuffling cards.
Hawwa handed her gun to Leila.
In the chamber of this revolver, there lies a single, silver bullet, distilled from the innermost sap of the first Silver Tree.
Yazid seemed almost gleeful.
Little people! There is no ‘Outside’. There is no ‘Surface’, no light, no day. No future. There is only Now - and that passes before we know it. The whole world is built on a battlefield. One way or another, everyone makes bullets, swords, bombs, fire. The cities, the financial centres, the governments… in essence, all are about nothing but war. Yet soon, we will be coming to an end. History will end and through the purity of power will we attain a glorious rapture!
Leila ran her finger over the contours of the metal.
Yet I would not exchange it for anything. The living city, with all her contradictions, her wet underbelly, the dark chambers of her heart. Through storms, she trundles on…
Yazid stepped out in front of Leila and assumed the crucifixion position.
Go on then, my love, give me the silver!
Hawwa urged her on.
This way, we will cross the bridge between memory and delusion. Through this one act, the world will become whole again.
But Aban intervened.
You cannot change history with a silver bullet.
Leila looked up at the WACCI woman on the wall.
 The power of any building lies in its emptiness. The strength of any society lies in that which remains unthought.
Give it to him now!! Hawwa shouted.
Yazid gazed straight into Leila’s eyes. He stretched out his right hand, pulled on the barrel, allowed his lips to fall open just enough to permit its narrow bore to enter, reached down with his left hand and pulled the trigger.

******************************

Darkness and heat descend upon everything. When the light from the storm-lantern again becomes visible, the wartime posters and the Dutch master have vanished. On the back wall of the chamber, I am painting the skyline of a postmodern city in red, but the skyline is also teeth, eyes, brain, guts; it is the city as living being. In the distance, there is a tree, a peasant, perhaps some light in the sky. The buildings, cars, birds, trees are intact and society has resumed its quest for perfection. But the Silver Tree has gone - or perhaps it is just that we can no longer see it. We cannot rid ourselves of the past and its dualities, we cannot forget what we are, and yet perhaps through them, like dogs, horses and birds shall we sniff and crow our way to a facsimile of heaven.

Hawwa enters the chamber and rests her hand on my shoulder. Then Aban comes in, holding a scroll. We are the little people and these are the threads that bind us to one another. This is the spirit of the city. Beneath the sun, we do not see the circle of light in the sky. Aban unfurls the scroll on the table and in the guttering light of the storm-lantern, we begin to pore over it.

Silently, from the shadows, you enter. For a while, you stand aside, watching us. Then you take the silver-backed cards from your inside jacket pocket, you shuffle the deck and smile broadly, that old, old smile of yours and you splay the cards out towards me. Now at last I remember the ancient dance, the scent of burning rocks. For I am Leila, Lilith, I am the root, the source, the One who draws the world in her own blood. And however many times you steal away my life, my city, my dreams, like the spinning lights of the universe my dance will never end.

[top