Dreams of Speaking Read online

  Let me tell you, wrote Mr Sakamoto, about Chester F. Carlson.

  He was a man passionately at odds with the world’s brute singularity. He wanted the duplication or multiplication of all things. In part this was a peculiar, personal response to his increasing baldness, which tormented him with its prematurity and depreciation of his appearance. Daily he rubbed his palm over his vulnerable head, and daily felt the boundaries of his body were becoming mangy, unsure. He combed his hair in ingenious ways, but nothing disguised the radiant absence. In the end, he took to wearing expensive tweed caps, which he decided were a flattering and acceptable substitution for hair.

  A law student, he lived with his widowed mother and four marmalade cats, all pleasingly alike. In his spare time Chester dabbled in chess and invention, and in 1937 developed a copying process, feline inspired, based on electrostatic energy. Words reproduced on a page in just a few minutes in a process he called xerography, from the Greek for ‘dry writing’. But no one was interested and no one invested. IBM and the US Signal Corps turned him down. After eight long years, by which time he had no hair left at all, an investor at last signed up, calling itself the Xerox Corporation.

  In due course, Chester F. Carlson was so wealthy that his baldness was inconsequential. He tugged at his lapels and addressed the press: ‘When I filed the patent application,’ he declared, ‘I knew I had a very big tiger by the tail.’ His eyes glistened with moisture as he thought of the lookalike cats, beloved repetitions, to which his changed circumstances and wealth had made no difference at all. They loved him just the same. They loved his singularity.

  She had met Stephen at university, when they were both in their second year of study. He had long hair, which fell diagonally across his face, and an inward, secluded attitude that challenged women to break through. Unaware of his attractiveness, he was doubly desirable. When they first spoke she detected in his voice a gravelly tone, a kind of old-man timbre inconsistent with his youth. He was studying philosophy – which somehow fitted his incommensurate voice. She was studying literature.

  They fell into bed together almost immediately, with a sense of enormous relief and easy companionship. Sexual relationships at university have an unprecedented and never-to-be-recovered-again liberty, unencumbered, mutually explorative, ideologically confirmed. In the energy of their congress, they thought themselves heroic. Afterwards, they would lie sideways on the bed, their heads tilted backwards, smoking joints, exchanging facile aphorisms about the meaning of life, kissing and giggling and wasting time. It was always afternoon. There were always specks and particles in the air, imperishable, resonant, blazing up with the unseen vitality they now detected in every thing.

  Alice remembers this: once, after they had made love, Stephen began suddenly to weep. She stroked his cheek and murmured consolation, but her lover remained obdurately unconsoled. He had been in love, at fourteen, with a girl who was hit by a car. She was only twelve. They said she had died instantly. In his home town on the south coast, in a former whaling community, this girl had become an emblem of loss. Everyone remembered her. Everyone mourned. She became more cherished, he said, as the years went by. She became their symbol. There was a park named after her, a park of straggly pink rosebushes, blown to smithereens by the fierce sea wind.

  Alice lay back, looking at the ceiling. She was learning that every life has its secret collisions, that in even the most self-possessed of men, there are also these vacancies and lamentations. Alice rolled onto Stephen’s body, stretching out to encompass him, so that their limbs matched part to part, like a photocopy. She kissed his tearful eyes, and knew for the first time that in every intimacy there are these spirit presences, which rise up, revenant, even in lovemaking. She had wanted to say to Stephen that she understood his grief, but in those days she did not.

  ‘What was her name?’ she asked. ‘This twelve-year-old girl.’

  ‘Her name was Alice,’ said Stephen, in a low rough voice.

  When she arrived at the studio Alice found that it was no more than an ascetic box. There was a single bed, a table and two upright chairs; there was a modest kitchen to one side, in which nestled a toy-sized refrigerator and a small gas burner with two rings. She tapped the red gas bottle, which resembled an aqualung, and realised that she had no idea how to gauge its fullness. From the first floor, the studio faced onto a narrow street, and from the window Alice could see a secondary school, disgorging its pupils for a noisy break. They hung around flirting and smoking; their voices rose in dispersing syllables.

  This is perfect, Alice thought, perfect for writing.

  She liked the sense of a clarified existence, in which few possessions, few objects, claimed narrative attention. The air was cold. Everything was still. In a cupboard Alice found coffee, long-life milk and a bag of sugar. She brewed coffee over the gas in a battered saucepan. Her body was strung out, in another time zone, still operating in the reverse logic of a cross-planetary biology, but she felt alert, excited. Travel, rush through space, was her self-enchantment. Relocation into new co-ordinates. Forfeited certainties. The erotics of strangeness. She couldn’t bear the persistence of the known into stale habituation. Alice sat in semi-darkness, sipping from her cup.

  A few streets away drifted the venerable, khaki-coloured Seine, older than Europe.

  There was no telephone, no television, no labour-saving appliance. This was where she would imagine, with the exactitude of deprivation, all those glistening tokens of modernity, those industrial culminations, that called out to be described, that were so omnipresent as to have lost their aura, and their originary dynamic and aesthetic charge. She made a list of categories:

  electrics, mechanics, communication, transportation

  Then:

  spiritualisation, secularisation, sexualisation

  And:

  gigantism, miniaturisation, division, replication

  vision, sensation, cognition, precognition

  tragic, comic, nostalgic, melodramatic

  With this slightest of codes, arbitrarily jotted, Alice would begin to elaborate her poetics of modernity. Sometimes she would research at the Bibliothèque Nationale; sometimes she would write as poets do, with the spontaneous embrace of a seductive metaphor, with the grace and intuition of selected images, with chance, with blind luck, with errancy and confidence.

  Outside there was a sudden crackle of adolescent laughter. It hung in the freezing air, sharp and lucent as icicles.

  Television is, after all, a box of wonders.

  Into its limited cube fly unlimited images; into its receptive channels, with incredible celerity, rush crazy narratives, world events, men and women of unnaturally glossy good looks, historical re-enactments, capitalist extravaganzas, politicians, and singers, and sports heroes by the dozen. In flashy mode it links the grotesque and the mosaic, a combination that allows for hyperbole in all things and the endless, restless fracturing of vision. Viewers, of whom there are billions, are inspired to fanatical devotion or delicious lassitude. The crystal eye finds every sight and pretends to tell every story. There was never a medium so omniscient in its sheer ambition.

  The hand-held ‘remote’ is aptly named. One does not need to touch the television to make it work. From the bed, from the sofa, it is called into action: switching channels is a consequence of the merest pressure, and what opens are sequences, territories, styles, talking heads. Zapped into visibility, for just an instant, every image looks more or less insane. Commercials, especially, carry a lunatic fringe, an appeal to the unhinged you that would dramatise pasta or shampoo, the you that wants to parachute from an aeroplane, or fears the germs in the laundry, or fantasises about solitary travel in protuberant, sexual cars. Humankind cannot bear too much remote incomprehension.

  By the light of the television – a spooky indigo glow – one can see mortality itself dance on the faces of entire families. They look arrested, dumb. Death is already claiming them. Flicker is the mode of televisual morbidity.r />
  In the middle of the night Alice heard the river for the first time. It met her with a rhythmic, thunderous sound, the sound of volumes of water hurling forward in a muscular curl. When Alice stirred a little, sitting up in the lonely darkness, she realised that the sound was in fact of traffic: a two-way vibrating hum, relentless and inorganic as a Xerox machine. Perhaps it was the idea of the river that seemed somehow audible. The distant mystery of nature, persisting in spite of everything. Energies beyond machines. Beyond petrochemical drive.

  In a toy shop on the Île, Alice found wooden objects of touching simplicity to send to her niece and nephew. They were a pierrot doll with articulated limbs, and a carved oak cat with painted-on eyes. She was not sure which toy she would give to which child. Old-fashioned toyshops aroused in her uncomplicated jubilation. She always entered them, and she always bought something. Behind the counter there was invariably a bespectacled shopkeeper who liked to chat about the virtues of wood. Alice tilted the pierrot at its waist, declaring it lifelike. She thought of her sister, as a six-year-old, bathing a doll. At this moment the past rushed forward like a gust: these anomalous material signs hailed her back, inserted her again into miniature fantasies and the playful animation of wood.

  Stephen was early. He sat outside the café in the cold, awaiting her arrival. Alice kissed both cheeks and asked if they could move inside, out of the wind. The glass window of the café returned them as a couple.

  ‘Anglais?’ asked the waiter, with a perceptible sneer.

  ‘Australienne,’ Alice replied.

  The waiter’s attitude changed in an instant. He smiled beneficently. ‘Ah! Le kangourou! L’Opéra! L’Aborigène!’

  Stephen looked at the man with withering disparagement, but Alice smiled, and tossed back her head.

  ‘C’est vrai,’ she said. ‘Le kangourou.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Stephen muttered under his breath. ‘Do you have to assent and proclaim the stereotype?’

  He was ill-tempered. Out of sorts. Alice noticed that he looked as if he hadn’t slept.

  ‘It’s innocent,’ said Alice. ‘It’s an innocent aesthetic.’

  ‘It’s crude. It’s a reduction. L’Aborigène, what was he thinking?’

  They ordered coffee and Stephen subsided into silence. He played with pyramids of sugar; he tore at his paper serviette. Then he barked: ‘Why are you here, anyway?’ He sounded petulant.

  ‘The work. The grant. They offered me the use of a studio.’

  His distress was like clothing: it enveloped him, it altered his shape.

  ‘Can we see each other sometimes?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Alice. ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Jesus,’ he repeated.

  There was nothing Alice could do to alleviate his pain. She would not return to him, even though they were now in the same city, the ‘city of romance’, the city encrusted – more than the entire continent of Australia – with symbols, clichés.

  ‘Let me show you,’ she said, changing the subject, ‘what I found in a toyshop. Like objects from the ruins of a lost civilisation.’

  She unwrapped the doll and the cat and displayed them on the table. In the light of the café they had a burnished, pre-historical glow. She touched them carefully, as if they had survived demolition or been retrieved, a humane fragment, from post-war rubble.

  ‘Yes,’ said Stephen, relenting. ‘Yes, they’re charming.’

  They ordered second coffees and began to talk more freely. Outside the street was becoming crowded. A tour group flowed by, following a furled umbrella. Each tourist bore a stick-on name tag in the shape of the Eiffel Tower.

  Alice and Stephen walked from the café together, passing in front of the Hôtel de Ville. Children were skating on an outdoor ice rink, moving in long, elliptical glides. They inscribed the paths of planets; they constituted a tiny orrery. There was a sparkle to things, an astronomical light. Tourists took photographs with digital cameras and mobile telephones held out before them, like pilgrim offerings.

  ‘I remember’, said Stephen, ‘sitting on the bank of the river with a book, watching you windsurf. You were unbelievably fast. I looked away for one minute, and you were gone. It was as if you’d been snatched by an invisible force.’

  ‘I was,’ said Alice lightly. ‘I was snatched by the wind.’

  The tulips nodded in the jam jar that was their vase.

  Strange, how many flowers seemed to have heads. One or two had begun drooping in a melancholy way, bent by time, as people are, and the others stayed upright, upholding their role as sentinels of desire. Alice was pleased to have been given flowers; they were delicately self-sufficient, an edification.

  But she dreamed, that second night, that they burst into flames like match-heads, that they materialised as a kind of incendiary device, and began to light first her notebooks and then the table, in a blazing explosion. The fire climbed the curtains of the studio with instant ease and then slid along the floor, liquid as a river. Paint blistered, light bulbs popped, smoke rolled along the ceiling. When the fire at last reached her bed, Alice woke up, her heart banging in her chest. Her skin was aflame in the icy air.

  The telephone is our rapturous disembodiment. We breathe our selves, like lovers, into its tiny receptacle, and glide out the other end, mere voice, mere function. Wires, currents, satellites, electrical systems: these are the hardware we extend ourselves into, spaced out, underground, alive in the trembling skeins that arch across nations.

  Countless conversations are happening at once. Transecting the sky, like lines of flight, like the trajectories of ancient deities borne by eagles or dragons, sentences, words, syllables, sighs – all fly into airy enunciation, becoming messages, becoming text.

  The cradle, the handset, the curly extendable wire.

  Voices are more lovable on the telephone. Things are said, promises exchanged, that could not bear the weight of incarnation. Voices are also more repulsive, and more distinctly other. One’s mother is a monster, one’s partner a stranger. Who is to know what impersonations or depersonations are possible? Or what whispered honesties? What mumbled truths?

  The dark space of technology between mouths is a space of pure wind; it is a wind that snatches presences, an erosion, a loss.

  Alice entered the Métro at Concorde and found in the swaying train a ragged musician playing a gypsy violin. He could have been from another century, so metonymic was his face, so Gaulish, so tough. However, he played not the classics, but selections from the Beatles. Uninterested passengers looked away, worried in advance about the moment he would proffer his hat for coins. Then, after the Louvre station, he began playing ‘Yesterday’. A thin shabby man stood up from his seat and in European-accented English was all at once singing along. His voice was so authentically plaintive, his manner so piteous, that Alice was overcome by an absurd wish to embrace him and take his head in her lap. The lyrics of ‘Yesterday’ struck Alice as banal, yet she heard herself humming.

  The man was flushed, possibly drunk. He was unsteady on his feet. He rocked with the train, rocked in solitude. Passengers averted their gazes. This man was a violation of good form.

  Perhaps it was the mood of the carriage – that shadowy somnolence – perhaps the sombre thin man performing his sadness in humiliation or protest, perhaps simply the adhesive quality of tunes that meet one at moments of vulnerability, all those sticky lyrics that travel around cities, like a web, like a net, like a captivating chain, but Alice found herself humming the song for the next few days.

  She had never thought the words amounted to anything more than a tricksy slogan, but now considered, against modernity, the force of yesterday, and was stricken with obscure doubt about her project. She pounded the streets, repeating ‘Yesterday’.

  Mr Sakamoto would later nominate this his favourite Beatles song.

  ‘It combines the simplest of rhymes’, he said, ‘with the simplest anguish – a man abandoned by his lover – and constructs it all as a spectre of
lost time.’

  ‘You’re kidding,’ Alice had responded.

  ‘Not at all. The idea, think of it, that yesterday might come suddenly. Time itself, split open by abandonment.’

  Mr Sakamoto had smiled, as he often did upon delivering his stern pronouncements, so that Alice was unsure whether he was joking or serious.

  For now, she was wondering, rather amateurishly, about time and modernity. Wondering how to include it in what she was writing.

  And she was haunted by the thin man singing on the train. A man as alone, she could not help thinking, as a drifting astronaut, hauled backwards through space, receding into nothingness, becoming swallowed up, eventually, by airless dark.

  Stephen appeared at the door. He held a bottle of red wine.

  ‘Have a drink with me,’ he pleaded.

  So she let him in, and they talked, mostly in blurry reminiscences. When the wine was finished, he leaned over and kissed her, and then again, more fulsomely, so that she responded and clasped him. They undressed with haste, against the cold night air, and fell into each other’s bodies as into recovered childhood, unselfconscious, effusive, in the forgetful elation of the moment. Stephen moaned against her neck, full of sadness, full of return. He climaxed with a little cry, Alice, much louder.

  When they rolled apart, still breathing with the pace of arousal and activity, Alice said, much too soon: ‘This is the last time.’

  ‘I know,’ Stephen said. ‘You didn’t have to say it.’

  And then they moved into the easier communion of sleep, deep, companionable, timeless sleep, pressed into each other tightly, on the single bed. At some point Alice awoke, felt Stephen against her body, and heard the micro-sounds that only a lover knows, the quakes of breath and the heaving emissions of dreams, the signals of night-life unfolding and bodily processes. Then she heard through the wall a muffled television in the apartment next door. It sounded like alien communication from Mars. Exclamatory voice fragments, music, percussive notations, all commingled and garbled, unrecognisably weird. These presences swam in the room, insinuated, and stayed all night.