Chapter 15: Litanies

"Hey, McGhee, guess what?"

"Hmmm?"

"They're playing our song at Notre Dame today." Olney was leafing through Hyper Hebdo, the weekly entertainment guide. Sunday morning again, and they were fed up with museums.

"Our song?" Maggie looked up from a Time magazine article on neurochemical imbalance as the probable cause of chronic inattention. "At Notre Dame? What song?" Irritation would have crept into her voice if she had been more awake.

"Jehan Alain's Litanies."

"Eh? Whose what?" The magazine slipped from her hands. Maggie lay curled up in a corner of the lounge, surrounded by fluffy pillows. She felt warm and cuddly and still half asleep. What was he going on about.

"You know, I played the record for you at Crusty's. He composed organ music." Olney launched into a tuneless rendition of the Litanies by repeating a rhythm-less morpheme. "Dee-de-de-de-de-de-de-de-dede-de- dee-dee. Sound familiar?"

"Hmmm," she said vaguely. Maggie was paying more attention to the organ music between her legs. She wanted Olney to pull on her distended little stop with his lips. She gave it a gentle jolt with her thighs. That man! He always wanted to do it in the mornings, when she wasn't so interested. If only he could have been a night person in this respect, like herself. It seemed foolish to start the day with an act that made you relax. But at night, what could be more luxurious than drifting into soft, squishy sleep after making love with Olney, or any other man, for that matter. It took her breath away to think about it. But now--wouldn't you just know it--that she felt like being taken in the warmth of the morning sun, surrounded by all these fat, comfy pillows, he was determined to be energetic and make life miserable by forcing them to go to a freezing cathedral. And he'd win, the selfish bugger. Maggie shifted a pillow ever so slightly.

"Come on, Poot, wake up. We absolutely have to go. It's a whole program of his music. He's one of my favourites."

"Oh!" She sat up, irritated at last. A rare sunny Sunday shown through the windows and she wanted to spend it in the parks. As for organ concerts, well, if there was one thing she hated ... surely he couldn't be serious. They'd nearly frozen to death in the little church at Invalides over the New Year. Olney had gone on and on about that Hector Barleyoats and how he'd always practiced on the organ there. As if anybody cared. She gave her pubes one last squeeze. "Does this mean I have to sit inside another clammy church and have my ears split by another clamouring organ?"

"Notre Dame is heated," Olney said helpfully. "Has vents in the floor."

"What about the bombast ventilating my brain?" Her interest in classical music of any type had last flourished during childhood, with daddy's boxed set of musical masterpieces. Later, more rowdy years had altogether removed the climax-ridden genre from life's circumjacent amusements.

"Now, now, sweetheart," Olney oozed. "You'll enjoy it, I promise." He was determined to go; he'd even go alone if necessary, though the consequences might not be worth it. Old Hell-On-Ten-Toes there would surely grind him to a heel for deserting her on Sunday.

His own interest in "serious" music was more extensive; during the few years he spent in salaried slavery, Olney had collected over five hundred record albums, mostly by twentieth century composers. Yet he found it difficult to follow the lugubrious efforts of the ones still living. Perhaps the three hundred year era--from Bach to Stravinsky--was coming to a close. With the exception of the emerging school of minimalists, contemporary music struck him as being a dilettantish rehash of traditional forms, or, for the most part, devoted to enforced complexity that resulted in sinister, unlistenable music. Olney was no expert, but the tonal systems being used in his day seemed incapable of expressing any but the direst of death knells. He admitted the human race might be enjoying the last phase of a decimating entropy, but why wallow in it? Music should rouse the emotions (without sentimentality, of course), not deflate them. He found the music negative to the point of being in bad faith. Especially since be had begun to listen while stoned on LSD. Indeed, few composers from any era had survived inspection by the Great Altered State; under the macroscope of chemical Isness, the form and content of their superficial artistry quietly collapsed under its own weight. In the end, many of his old favourites were lined up in a closed wing of the hall of memory, fierce and melancholy busts on marble pedestals, all forgotten, all covered in dust.

For all that, Olney still liked organ music. He wasn't passionate about it, but during several impecunious winters in Europe he'd developed the habit of attending free organ recitals whenever he could. He especially liked going to the ex-churches in Holland. It gave him a keen sense of blasphemy to spring for a Heineken during intermissions.

Olney first heard the music of Jehan Alain at a recital in Den Hague, given by the composer's sister, Marie-Claire Alain. He was living in Amsterdam at the time, a prisoner of the poverty he'd arrived with. His old friend, Jan Dibbets (upon whom Olney had bestowed the honour of being host and chief money lender, Netherlands Division), loaned him twenty guilders for train fare, and another ten for admission. To Jan, giving up portions of his hard earned money for the sake of Olney's entertainment needs was worth it. To have an occasional evening to himself, free of the manic anxieties of his American friend was like a holiday. For Olney, the chance to hear a composer other than Dutch favourites Sweelinck and Buxtehude was worth the asking.

According to the program notes, Alain had been killed in action during World War II, at the age of twenty-nine. Listening to the young Frenchman's music, Olney had fallen to thinking about his own life, about the recent spate of impulsive choices leading him to the moment. He realised these choices were mostly based on a yearning for dangerous impasses, where knowledge and inspiration were often inaccessible and largely beside the point. He knew a fruitless life like his could go on and on, while the lives of heroes and artists were so often snuffed at the whim of evil jingoists. While Mme. Alain played her brother's music, Olney wept for the unclear fate of the human race and his own life, and for Jehan Alain, whose genius and gentle humanity had been destroyed by a deranged elite.

"But look outside," Maggie protested. "It's nice for a change. Why spend the afternoon in some dreary mausoleum when there are so many parks to walk in? There's a special feel to Sundays in the park, a real family kind of day."

Olney nodded smartly, as if she'd just spoken the One Certain Truth. "Sunday feels special, all right. It makes you feel like committing suicide. And all those families only makes it worse. You know how they work against us. We're not a family. It's bad enough we have to deal with their hysterical boredom at the museums, but to have our few moments of peace in nature shattered by caterwauling children, snarling fathers and mewling mothers? It's downright unhealthy. They're much too affective. Either you feel sad because you're an outsider to all that stability they so rigidly adhere to, or, stepping into their shoes, you're overwhelmed by the anxiety of having given up any creative energy you ever had in order to make ends meet. And all for the purpose of breeding. Quelle honte."

"Oh, stop exaggerating. Can't you ever make a point without going to extremes?"

"What's wrong with getting some fresh air on Monday? Or Tuesday or Wednesday? We don't work and the parks are always free. Anyway, you might like the music today. It's not raucous. Remember how you liked it back home?" She hadn't, but didn't remember, either. "Lovely contemplative themes," he said. "Come on, McGhee." He put his arms around her, hoping for the usual submission, but her pout was resolute. "Aha," he said, "I get it." He stepped back, looking her square in the shifty eyes. "You want to feed the ducks, don't you." She looked away. "You'd give up a pat on the back from Christ Himself, if it interfered with your ducks."

"Jesus would be happy to feed the ducks with me. It's only inhuman old sybarites like you who hate small, defenceless animals. And I like feeding them on Sunday too. Except that you eat all the bread and there's never any crusts left."

"Yes," he boomed. "I eat all the bread in order to deprive those quacking imbeciles of nourishment. And let me tell you," Olney's voice, Wellesian in its basso richness, trailed off here to the tail end of a gasping expiration, "that I do not regret it." Maggie, her breast in no way heaving by way of response to his Thespian delivery, stared daggers at him. "Ok, you win," said he, the white flags of his upthrust eyeballs shining brightly. "Tell you what. We'll buy a brioche for the ducks and then we'll catch the métro for Notre Dame. Sound good?"

"A bri-oche!

§§§

Olney slung the last bits of baguette at the quackophonous maelstrom below. "There," he said with forceful petulance. "Satisfied? They would gluttonously eat every crust of bread in Paris, all the while trying to bite each other to death. Is this really your idea of a pleasant time?"

"I'll admit they're a little aggressive."

"Of course they are, and why? Because sops like you show up once in awhile to feed them. Imagine a cage full of children fighting over candy bars tossed inconsistently by visiting do-gooder ducks. Can't you just see it? Inside the cage a melee of screeching greed and outside such a snippety quackety-quack as to make your inquiring UFO throw a hard U-turn and head for home.

"Incidentally," he continued, quickly changing the subject before she attacked his gnashing hyperbole again, "I forgot to mention, the concert doesn't start til after five, so--"

"After five? Then let's--"

"Hold on, let's still go to Notre Dame, but while waiting for the concert we can have a merguez-frites at a little place I know, and then walk around the Ile St. Louis," talking faster now as Maggie began to hop up and down from promenadus possibilis interruptus, "where I'm told there is a purveyor of the best ice cream this side of Florence." Caught in a hop-up by this suggestion, she seemed to perch in mid-air for a moment.

"Andiamo, alors," she said, grabbing his hand on the down-hop. Olney was astounded by her suddenly perfect pronunciation in the two troublesome languages.

"Parli anche Italiano?"

"Eh?" said the Canajun girl, pulling him swiftly to the goal.

§§§

The friterie was just beyond the darkest heart of the Latin Quarter, at the foot of Rue St. Julien le Pauvre. Nearby, the Square René Viviani looked across a sliver of Seine to Notre Dame.

"You are about to be treated," Olney predicted, "to one of the two best sandwiches in the world--at your expense, bien sûr. But brace yourself, it's hot." The cafe was little more than a hole in the wall. The food was tasty and, owing to its Islamic origins, dangerous. Olney had yet to be sick from eating North Africa's famous merguez sausage, but just après-snack, his stomach often felt as if it contained great air locks--each large enough to hold a whale-sized butterfly--which for some time would roll and pitch in the effort to bear him upwards unto vistas not experienced since Gambetta's valiant balloon flights over the Prussian lines of 1870.

He bent ungracefully to give their order to the buxom blonde behind the take-out window.

"We'll eat in the park," he told Maggie, explaining that the cafe was too small, you could never get a seat, and anyway, it was a weird place. On his second visit, he'd decided to step inside for a sandwich and a beer at the counter, but once past the door he'd suffered an instant attack of vertigo. The two dingy walls and blackened ceiling seemed to be heading pell-mell towards a doll-sized table at the back, beyond which, he was certain, lay the terminus of the final perspective. A tiny counter with four seats extended directly in front of him. Beyond the last seat the room's volume seemed to shrink by a third. He knew if he stepped past the end of the counter he would suddenly be three feet high; one more step would make him an inch. Just tall enough, perhaps, to sit comfortably at the little table, which, he then noticed, sat in a pool of unearthly light. Adding to the confusion and nausea caused by this spatial warp was a cellar door that gaped open between the speeding wall to his right and the last two counter seats. In order to avoid the bottomless horror it promised, the hero would be forced to grasp either the counter or the shoulders of the customers. Olney was outside in a flash.

"Of course we'll eat in the park," Maggie said angrily. Hadn't he heard her say she wanted to be outside today?

"Vous voulez d'Harissa?" the grande serveuse asked.

"Oui-oui," enthused Olney. "Beaucoup."

"What's 'ahreesa?'" Maggie asked grimly.

"Hot sauce, honey." La Lorraine, as one of the customers called her, had placed four garish looking sausages on the grill, and now dropped a generous quantity of sliced potatoes into a basket, which sank in a sizzle of suddenly awakened oil. Olney began to salivate.

"The merguez sausage," he informed his companion, "in common with certain products in the synthetic fabric industry, is constituted of 100 per cent unknown ingredients. Many have speculated; few have inquired. Encased, as you can see, in a routine prepared intestine, the combination of strange fleshes presents to the hesitant eye an as yet unclassified shade of pinkish red. In my opinion, it resembles the flayed--"

"That will be enough," Maggie said, "don't say another word."

The beeg-uh blond-uh sliced two half baguettes and put the four pieces on the grill, fluffy bellies down. Moments later she swabbed the toasted results with a smear of Harissa, North Africa's contribution to a worldwide chili lust. To this gaudy display she added two merguez each and a load of pommes-frites. Salt, mustard and more Harissa then topped what, to Olney, was possibly the best sandwich in the world, save, he had to admit, for crunchy peanut butter, mayonnaise and chopped red onions, with a side of jalapeños or yellow chili peppers.

Maggie was aghast. She preferred soft little sandwiches like brie and butter on toast. Her small delicate fingers held the barbarous concoction gingerly as they walked to a bench in the Square Viviani. If Olney would keep his mouth shut, she might even eat it.

The park was residence to the oldest living tree in Paris, a false acacia several hundred years old. The tree also lived at the Jardin des Plantes, depending on which guidebook the mystified tourist consulted. How it lived in both places at once was a riddle posing no end of discussion at the Club des Fauteurs Typographiques. Olney and Maggie were just as happy the tree lived in the Square Viviani, since there it stood, leaning and root-revealing, to their left.

They sat facing Notre Dame. The Sunday sun burned like a hot plate in the cold winter sky. Passing noon a couple of hours ago, it was busy now chasing shadows from the cathedral's near side. Finials and crockets leapt into light from behind the tour occidentale. People strolled in little clusters below, content, in the rare and lovely weather, to wander without destination.

Olney hunched forward. His legs were spread wide, elbows firmly planted on knees. He gave the sandwich plenty of room to drip, for nothing could remove the stain of Harissa sauce; its essential oils adhered to whatever they touched throughout the many sequences of All Time. As he chomped into the big sandwich, red ooze ran over his palm and onto his wrist, threatening the frayed cuff of his favourite shirt.

"Watch out, stupid," said Maggie, "you're getting that rat poison all over you." She picked at her chips. For each one she carefully introduced to her mouth, two found their way to the ground. In no time, alert pigeons came-a-bobbin' from the four corners of Paris, some winging it all the way from Versailles.

"Don't worry about me," he said, "I know how to eat these things. Say, why do you have to encourage those asinine birds?" Olney kicked dirt in their faces. "Woody Allen is right. Pigeons are flying rats and it's too bad this isn't rat poison. Why can't you like nice animals."

"You hate ducks and pigeons because in your last life you were some lowlier varmint that got ate by them."

"Low blow. Here I show you the best sandwich in all of France at the best shop in all of Paris and you act as if it were offal."

"It is awful. Who knows what's in it."

"I don't understand how you can call this offal when you're the one who eats chicken feet. Talk about gagging the maggot. Little knobbly knuckles encased in sizzled chicken skin with the hairs still sticking out, yagghh. And not only do you freely ingest the deep fried toes of barnyard fowl, but you positively go rigid over innards. Weeeird, is all I can say. How would you like it if someone ate your liver. Or worse, your heart. Organs are very personal things, close to the soul. Amputate a lamb's leg and he'll go on living. But eating his innards is backbrain magic, only one step from eating human organs: heinous cannibalism. And besides, all those organs taste awful."

"Aw, full off," she said, slinging a handful of soggy chips at the winged rodents. "Why can't we, just this once, have a normal conversation. I mean, is it asking too much?"

By way of serious response, Olney's memory zipped back to the time he taught English as a native speaker in central Turkey. He used English 900 as a textbook and the same punch line kept coming up in drill after drill: "I really don't know."

He repeated it to Maggie.

Olney's laughter had been contagious and soon his students were giggling with anticipation at each new section, which offered exercises similar to:

By the way, why are   /you/  /they/  shitting in my hat?

Jane: How many are there in your family, Charles?
Charles: There are five of us in my family, Jane.
Jane: Why are they queuing to shit in my hat, Charles?
Charles: I really don't know.

"Well try, you turkey." Maggie was fed up, though Olney was just finishing. He shoved the last soggy mass of sandwich into his mouth. The ground between his widespread legs was spattered and pigeon-ready. He picked up the remains of nearly two packets of Miss Helen and lobbed them into a trash barrel. Maggie stood up, snorting with disgust. "Let's go and have some of your ice cream. Wonder what it'll taste like."

§§§

Olney's informant proved right. They strolled around the quais happily licking their cornets de crème glacées and marvelled at the lovely day. Crossing the Pont St. Louis back to the Cité, they stopped to watch a series of takes as a model turned and loped along the bridge. Olney's body stiffened as he admired her superior beauty. By the time she'd made a dozen heroic attempts to play the fresh and cheerful gazelle, he had memorised the lines of her body. "That girl has the most exciting fibulae I've ever seen. Such dedication to being beautiful. How she must suffer from not eating the crap we take for granted. Oh, how pure must be her glistening insides." The final take was accomplished at last and she limped off-bridge with her photographer. Olney himself was limp from the ordeal. He wondered how many bridges, streets and cul de sacs in Paris were in constant use to adorn the pages of fashion magazines.

"You have a dangerous obsession with female parts," Maggie said, as they arrived at the Place du Parvis, in front of Notre Dame. "You're always talking about ankles and kneecaps and elbows and jugular veins and hipbones and the like. And now it's 'glistening insides'. What's at the bottom of that statement? And you accused me of cannibalism for eating chicken feet."

"Say, we're still early," ejaculated he, hoping to divert her attention from such disturbing though succulently tantalising probings. "Gosh, look up there." He pointed to the topic-laundering sky. White puffs of cloud played in the latening blue, searching wistfully for an impressionist to sketch their passage. "Wow. And look down here." Directly below Maggie's feet was a plaque denoting the central point from which all distance was measured in France.

"Imagine that," she said.

"Yes, indeed. If you were astride a bicycle in, say, Arles, and the road sign read: Paris: 729 kilomètres, the distance ticker, which you had deftly attached to the front wheel, would read that very figure when you arrived, several days later, on this very spot."

"Ah-er-le?" Maggie instinctively tuned out his gobbledygookian verbiage, except for the city name, which somehow stuck. She tried repeating it by softly howling the first syllable. Her tongue curved dangerously backward on the second, as if some sort of mal were on its way.

"If you think 'Arles' is difficult, try 'Reims.'" Olney gunned his voice box, double clutched it for a screeching getaway and sped through the proper noun like an eight-axle SAVIEM.

"I always thought it was pronounced like 'rhymes.'"

"Yes," he said, haughtily in the know, "of course you did."

"You sound just like a stuck-up Frenchman, you prig." She clutched his shoulder, looking around with a worried frown. "You better watch it. People will notice your puffed up chest." She stepped back, appraisingly. "Come to think of it, you always did look like an inflated rooster."

"Yeah, well you're a goose," he said lamely, stung un-tout-petit-peu by her reference to his fowl-like neck. "Maggie the Goose."

"Gaggy the Gander," she hooted back, and stuck out her tongue. An old woman sitting on a nearby bench looked up briefly at the bickering foreigners. Her interest flagged immediately.

"See?" Olney hissed. "You're the one attracting attention."

"I am not."

"You are too."

"Oh, let's go inside, y'big bozo."

§§§

A few years before, Olney had visited the cathedral at Chartres. The minute he stepped inside its portals, his eyes had widened upon the blackest blue of deepest space. His body felt frictionless, as if he were gliding in a vacuum. Yet the vacuum held an intangible charge, as if a universe were being conceived, its birth and all of its secrets still contained within a mote of nothingness. When he stood before the great windows, he looked up with a larval soul. The light from the world shown through them and through him and was absorbed and regenerated by this creation of man on orders from eternity. The Powerhouse hummed all around him and he was suddenly afraid of the God he refused to believe in.

By contrast, Our Lady of Paris was rosy and welcoming, perfectly balanced; she lived in the City of Light.

Maggie took his arm and together they circumambulated the interior. Before the statue of St. Denis, she said: "I wonder what he would think of all the hookers on the street named after him."

"If he was a Mariolater typical of the times, he probably had his own stable."

"Olney! You can't say things like that in the most famous church on earth. They'll come back on you." Although Maggie's parents had overlooked religion in her colourless upbringing, she still felt a sense of propriety and fear within the strictured structures of hallowed belittleness.

"Nonsense. In fact, I suggest we enter one of these little chapels and copulate sweatily. As did the prelates of old." Maggie punched him on the arm for his blasphemy while the good saint looked on.

They found a seat in the nave, near the transept. Olney felt the sound was better there; organ music needed to fill as much space as possible.

"Another thing I hate about organ concerts," Maggie bitched, "is that you never see anything. You're staring at people's dandruff while the organist is above and behind you, completely out of sight. It's stupid. I don't want to look at people's messy hairdo's."

"Napoléon was crowned here. Did you know that?" He knew she knew, but he wanted them to stop talking for awhile. It was impossible to enjoy modern French organ music if your mind was racing. Maggie took the hint. They settled back and watched the tourists strolling through. The Americans were easy to spot. Over-amping as usual, they punctuated fixed expressions of aptly rapt awe with a repertoire of verbal hysteria: "Oh, my God, Ern, will you look at that window." Two groups were being lectured by tour guides, one gaggle moving to St. Denis. "Decapitated in Montmartre," droned the guide, "the pious bishop miraculously trudged on, holding his head in his hands ..."

Organ concerts were well attended in Paris, the nave was gradually filling up with an assortment of people. As he watched them intently, Olney leaned over to Maggie. "Now, here's a decent lot. Completely unlike those morning churchgoers who sit through their devotions coughing and sneezing at one another. No, these are people who love the arts. A small contingent of humanity, I'll admit, with the rest out there grinding their political axes to oppress out of crackpot ideologies or simple greed."

"Olney, you just indicated ..."

"You know, one of the strange things about life on earth is the periodic lack of oppression. Small minded conservatives and their reactionary henchmen have not always held power."

"Olney ..."

"Only too rarely among your bloody far-flung eras of moribund philistinism does there come a few decades of peace and good will, where your decent, compassionate human beings manage to get the upper hand. Like the people here."

Maggie jabbed her elbow in his ribs causing him to cough theatrically. She gave him a wilting look, along with a condensed "Shut up." It worked and the spontaneous rave was aborted. Reflecting truthfully, he had to admit that the concert was free and people especially enjoyed Notre Dame because of its floor heating. Those who had jockeyed for seats near the vents relaxed in their stocking feet. No other cathedral in Paris was heated by more than the convened warmth of living bodies.

People were settling down, the concert was about to begin. The winter sun had long since dipped below the horizon, taking its diurnal inclinations with it. Now it was late afternoon in the cultured latitudes, and two slices of the cultural pie ... the one, Mr. Olney Garkle, shifting recklessly through the gears in search of a suitable alpha wave; the other, Miss Margaret Bebette, resigned, relaxing and ready for a snooze ... snuggled together as best they could on the hard wicker seats.

Unannounced, the organist began the concert with Litanies. The chatting navites were electrified by the very first notes. Maggie twitched noticeably. Olney sat bolt upright, called to glory. Here was music to help you along the frightening road to a peaceful reward, to that little cottage behind the hill. Unable to restrain himself, he started to whistle along (as an American, what choice did he have?), but Alain's music was all over the place. Only the virtuoso whistler dared include such irregular accents in his repertoire.

Sonority filled the great cathedral; people sat tense and alert. Perhaps some of them, like Maggie, felt ambivalent. "I appreciate your interest in refined music, cheri, but that sure is hell on the ears," she might have said. Fortunately, Olney exulted, most were made ready by it. He half expected the congregation to rise in supplication to the tinnitic deity housed therein, moved, as they must be, by Alain's music into thinking He would hear them at last and make life good and just. Olney looked at his sweetheart. Her nervous system vibrated from the train-like frenzy of the work's stringendo. No doubt she would prefer earplugs to Alain's genius and His Magnitude's visitation.

The next piece calmed the pressing fold and allowed the Windbag on High to return to His fitful sleep. The Choral Dorien brooded along stone walkways high above Time. Inside the music, Olney felt himself, or someone he had once been, walking in the shade of immense white walls. The sun glimmered in the deep blue sky. As he walked, he yearned to make his experience of the world induce an inner experience of its Creator. But Alain's thoughtful, elegiac harmonies kept bending his head with sorrow. There, out of time, it was impossible to attribute anything that had ever happened to a Governing Body.

Alain had originally composed Trois Danses for organ. When World War II broke out, he was busy rewriting it as a symphonic poem for orchestra. This manuscript-in-progress was with him the day he was killed. He and a fellow soldier were driving a three wheel motorcycle near Saumur when the Germans blew them off the road. In the silence that followed, Alain's manuscript was blown beyond the spinning wheel of the side-car into the fields along the Loire. As the story is told, peasant children later found some of the pages and giggled over the funny looking marks. The rest of the manuscript disappeared, disintegrating into rain and time.

With the reedy opening of the first dance, Joies, Olney fell into a reverie about his own tangos with rain and time. He feared them both. Caught in a paralysing downpour in the buitenlands of hitchhikery, Time became the enemy. Time was always the enemy. He never believed there was enough of it to do what had to be done. Time gave him a feeling of despair, a feeling that proscribed every endeavour. The only thing it really allowed him to do was drift. But when the rain came, he panicked. Even with an umbrella--so important to his well being--the rain still bounced up at him. It leapt from macadam and soft shoulder to drench and muddy his pants and glue them to the emaciated calves of his fearfigure as he begged for a ride from the cars hissing by. And with each passing minute, Time was bringing the day down to some point of isolation, with forests of doom closing in for the kill.

The only time normal people got caught in the rain was when it didn't matter. If they were dashing across the street from one warmth to another, or out of petrol along Automobile Association AutoRoutes, or properly dressed and herding sheep. When Olney got caught, it was because he was acting out the pathetic exploits of a Parsifal manqué. From there to bumhood was a short step to an infinite drop. Olney knew that too many twilights in the rainfall of time and he would be stuck there forever.

Why did he put himself at these crossroads? so often in the middle of nowhere at sundown, with the next car his last chance. Up to now, the car had always stopped. He'd sure stretched his luck. But maybe he hadn't stretched it far enough.

Hey, whaddya mean by that remark?

He had often tried to find Rock Bottom's White Light, but people were always saving him. If he cared to admit it, he was persevering, not for the White Light, but for them.

Bullshit, Jack.

Olney could endure until he dropped--not caring that tomorrow might be a repeat of today's on and on to nowhere--because he could always count on this evening's last-minute arrival of some swooping angel to provide him with a full tummy and a warm bed.

I'm a hero, fuckuh. What is this shit?

Yes, Olney knew someone would always be there to rescue him. Still, his deepest, truest self yearned for that ultimate encounter with the "death before death." A rebirth out of his misery. He was sure he could handle it.

Yeah, well ... of course. Whadja think?

But to the people who knew him, and even to Olney himself, the question still remained: Was Olney Garkle a Parsifal manqué?

No-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o ...

At least he'd been trying. Sometimes. Most people slept right through it all, preferring to hospitalise their minds with chump channel TV. Olney hated sleep. It took away a third of his life. He wasted enough waking hours, why lose another eight to limbo? A few winks every night was all he should need, just enough to let in a few advisory dreams which, upon waking, he could quickly discard. Yet, merely getting there was a problem. It seemed he'd spent half his life trying to get to sleep. As for the other half, he'd spent it sleeping too long. So much was in the hands of anything but his own will. As for Time, Olney whimpered before it and was afraid.

His thoughts followed the organist from the sombre Deuils to the finale. Luttes moved like an armoured god through the karmic night of his soul, scattering little devils as they frolicked and whipped each other with forked tails. Old Kings Lear proclaimed and frothed upon molten crags above them, while Olney, the relational data base of past lives burning in his hands, marched in the god's shadow.

Indeed, so great was his karmic debt that spiritual creditors from each and every lifetime were climbing over one another to garnishee this one. At the kernel of his core was a resolution to pay them all off. But the sentient being that was currently named Olney Garkle--still emerging fuzzily in the darkroom of existence, where emulsions worked on the intractable snapshot of the universe at his moment of birth, and especially on that trio of planets forming an ineffectually equidistant grand trine--knew that life itself was a debtor's prison. For every chain removed, two more were added. Unless he pushed himself to the furthest edge. To this end he lived in the footsteps of The Fool. It was habit by now. Being penniless was the next best thing to being rich; all that dreary in-between was a spirit killer. Imminent destitution tended to clarify universal meanings, although, let's face it, he shouted to that tucked-away kernel (as the music ended and Maggie looked at him with heart-rending apartment-longing), it mostly took him on a bucking four-wheel-drive through the existential dread.

Intermission. People stood up--Maggie among them--to relieve their sore bottoms from the penitential chairs. Olney was still trying to run the gauntlet of a thousand Peter Pains when she pulled at his sleeve. Yes, he agreed, it was time to go.

The outside world was as cold and dark as midnight. "But it's not even six," Maggie complained. "I hate this time of year." She shuddered in her duffle coat. Hood upon head, she looked très trecento: bent figure in a gloomy woodcut.

"No evidence a sun even exists," Olney added. "Where's the evidence? You call those paper bushes and cardboard trees evidence?" The words shot from the side of his mouth like irritable spikes of elderly stool. "Let's go."

On the métro, Maggie fell asleep on his shoulder. Whis-s-sh, went the roar of passing darkness. Better than the crushing pressure of toppling earth, he thought, grateful for the underground shield of air: one had a chance. At least this "crossroads" wasn't twilighting its way toward extinction-by- dawn; he was already saved ... if that's what he meant by "extinction" and "saved." Still, it was an edgy juncture, and new divergencies were arriving daily. Either way, he didn't have enough memory of himself to shift the focus to no more karma. Imagine that! Hey, Great Mother, wait for me ...

The apartment was his last chance ride for the time being. All what-if immediacies were removed by the safety of samsara. And so was the urgency, the overloaded circuitry obsessed to be free. Riding the elevator to the cozy womb of their hermitage, it occurred to him to buy a file and start sawing at the bars of his Grand Trine, so he could at last step out of the darkroom and act upon life.

§§§

Chapter 16:
"...de la musique avant toute chose..."

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