white
roses
(1,540
words)
To
Nasreen
The sun beat down on Morrison's
chest, searing the hairs and the delicate white skin beneath,
and raising it into painful blisters. Although his eyes were
shielded with a black mask, Morrison felt the glaring yellow
orb pierce through the thin skin. He shifted slightly on the
couch, trying to ease the discomfort. Outside his head, the
sun went off, leaving an image of white roses behind the leaves
of his lids. A voice came from somewhere. Exasperated. Tolerant.
"I told you not to move. The beam'll hit the wrong bits.
Damage healthy tissues."
Morrison apologised and then wondered why. It were his tissues
which would be burnt. His 'bits'. And the beast had probably
spread everywhere, in any case. Micro-metastases. The seeds
of sin. Just as they had lain in his body for decades, pretending
to non-existence, while all the time they had been busy, patterning
their form into a mimic of his own. A crazed marionette. They
had duplicated every sinew, each line of enervation, every
bone contour of that which he had called himself. And from
the pit of his entity, silently in darkness another Morrison
had emerged silently. As he moved, as he thought, another
millimetre of him died, while the beast spread itself over
the dead cells, just as once he had hewn his destiny and spun
his power over the murdered dreams of others. The sun went
on again. This time, he closed his eyes.
****************
Forty years earlier. A cargo ship in the middle of the Arabian
Sea. On the deck, Morrison, a young Morrison, mends rope.
Across the planks, narrow-eyed dreams slither between sunbeams,
trapping the air beneath their coiled weight. The dreams of
a deckhand. In the glorious vault of heaven, in the hidden
stars, the loon sun, all of his illusions swept around one
thing. Money. The blood of life. That was why he had run away
to sea. Had abandoned everything. Shed it, like a skin. To
end one life, and begin another. The ocean with its great
blue seethed with riches; it had drawn him in its undertow
to far-off, unknown shores where fortunes were waiting to
be made by the one-in-a-million. That's how he saw himself:
a man among many; beneath his feet, time ran with the waves
along the hot planks of the deck. He felt a leap in his chest.
He had caught the eye of the ship's bursar. Had learned all
about the running of cargo vessels. Soon, he would get a job
on some exotic shore, as assistant to an assistant. Morrison
was on his way.
****************
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The light circled into his body,
spinning dissonance amongst the sinews. Six courses. Twelve
treatments per course. Palliative. No chance of cure. No
glimpse of redemption. Morrison made micro-movements with
the ends of his fingers, while continuing to hold the rest
of his body utterly still. It was as though the sum of his
life-force were held within the ends of his being, the skin
of his soul. His fingers had served him well, from bilge-pump
to VIP lounge. With his hands, had he cast the nets of fraud
upon the high seas. And the fish had always been there for
the taking. Fat and silver and stupid. And the years had
slithered in the slime beneath his feet. Money was gut-dirty.
And Morrison had revelled in it. Had eaten its filth. Had
become its detritus. Morrison, like shit had risen. Smuggling
was his trade, the clandestine transference of materia solidica
from one port to another. Life on the Black Market. Everything
from opium to transistor radios to the cast-off cases of
used bullets. No item was too inconsequential, no deal too
low. Morrison was generous in his trawl. He did not discriminate.
And he had always kept one step ahead of trouble, had leapt
adroitly from one country to the next. Like he was leaping
now. From one body, to its replica. From one life, to its
imitation.
****************
The swish contours of a VIP lounge in a Texan airport. Mobile
phones everywhere. Symbols of power in the Age Of Attaché.
Morrison, surrounded by acolytes. Points on the web. Glistening
silver teeth. The new wife he had enticed away from her bourgeois
marriage, glittering by his side. Long, blonde hair. The skin
he'd always pined for, on the sweltering, egg-frying decks.
But it had not been a Paris elopement, a derangement of the
senses. Like everything else in his life, Morrison's love
had been measured. Created with a view to all the possible
consequences, every convoluted ramification. The most auspicious
path was always the only path. And so it had been with Blanche.
Hazel-bright eyes, a nose flayed out ever so slightly at its
lower ends, just enough to become part of her broad smile.
A slender, white neck. All things which Morrison prized in
a woman much as he would have valued the same attributes in
say, an Old Master or a fuel-injected intercooler. Morrison
was not hung up on material goods. They were never status
symbols. They were not the end. Cars, real estate, trees,
birds, women, wives - all were tools which, like some Midas
magnate sculptor, he wielded in his lifelong attempt to create
the real edifice of his existence. His deep raison d'être.
Himself. Morrison needed to create himself. And when everything
around him had become part of that plexus of being which was
Him, only then might he be satisfied. But since such creation
was unending, relentless in its purity, Morrison would never
attain contentment. Swimming through the ocean which had spawned
him, he was uncontained, impermanent. He'd wanted to use her
as bait for his clients. A kind of Lycian whore-wife who might
glitter and entice lucrative business deals. Smugglers among
smugglers. A coterie of Bluebeards. The cutlass, strapped
and ready. And she had been drawn away from the salaried toil
of the middle classes, pulled to his exotic world of jet-set
cocktail tarts and satellite phone sewer rats. Morrison's
world. She'd given him a child. A daughter. Hazel-eyed and
bright as a gem. But she had refused to play the role. Had
wanted to be wife and mother and glamour figure without a
price-tag. She hadn't fitted into his scheme. They had begun
to argue. To hate. And then, she had threatened him. Taped
his conversations. Hidden the tape in a bank vault. Threatened
to expose him. To finish him. She was strong-willed, his paramour.
****************
Morrison heard the beam zap
irregularly. Each pulse destroying millions of cancer cells.
He was dying. Slowly, he was becoming a meal to the cancer
which was himself. Like God, he had erected an image of himself
and like God, now he must die to the image. He smiled, and
the beam resumed its regular thrumming vibration, running
deep into the back of his head.
****************
[top]
She
had met her murderer. So she would not suspect him when
he arrived at the door, one blasting summer's afternoon.
Deserted streets. Empty sky. The tape in the vault remained
cool at a fixed temperature of ten degrees Celsius. As she
was tortured, her limbs broken one after the other, her
three year old daughter, his daughter, screaming in nightmare
around her, her head was shaven, her skin scorched with
expensive American cigarettes. And finally, she was strangulated
and hung from a wooden curtain-rod. Blanche stayed there,
in the sweltering heat of a Texan August, for four days
and three nights. Eyes hazel, no more. Somehow the child
had managed to crawl past her mother's rotting body, eyes
hazel no more, through a crack in the window, and out into
the hollow street. The tape remained at ten degrees, Celsius.
****************
The machine began to sound like a rocket about to take off.
Morrison chuckled. Of course, he'd got away with it. He'd
been in with the rich and powerful (the two being always
the same, one a manifestation of the other, a bit like the
Father and the Son). He had been their smuggler, it had
been a symbiotic dualism. He had invented a history for
his daughter, and for the world. When, some time later (and
for completely unrelated reasons to do with some tax law
or other; it had, Morrison mused as he lay in the container,
been easier to get away with murder than tax-evasion) he
had to leave the State, he'd leapt from one fatherland to
another as he had done, countless times before. It was no
big deal. Another country. Another woman. Another life.
He was infinitely adaptable. A paragon of evolution. And
now, he was shifting internally, the neutrinos of his soul
re-organising into a new pattern of survival. He could do
this, could shift his being through the multitudes, because
at his centre, in the core of every particle, there lay
an emptiness which could never be sated. The demon within.
Faceless, non-existent. And therefore, holy. The machine
rose out of human frequency and into that of rose petals.
Morrison smiled, there beneath the unseen sun, amidst the
fields of white roses and the gleaming white petal tumour
in his head smiled with him. They were awaiting the Resurrection.
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