Cruelest Month by Ernest Buckler

Author:Ernest Buckler [Buckler, Ernest]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55199-509-0
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 1977-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19

In the bedroom, Rex stood chained to himself. He had no more thought of returning with the extra shells than if some intervening disaster had rendered his errand absurd. When word of a death is brought in, you don’t go on with your charades.

He looked at his face in the mirror. Where was everyone? Sheila. Everyone. All the people that face used to be the passport to. He studied it closer and he saw that the face his mind had kept seeing as his was gone. You had this feeling that you could choose how your own face looked, but you were wrong. It went its own way.

His eyes went a little wild. Sheila wouldn’t have believed them. It was strange how she could read Bruce’s greater complexity with such precision and be so often wrong in the sureness that she knew Rex through and through.

The gears of his flesh began to grind. He knew what was coming. One of those attacks – that Sheila knew nothing about. That launched themselves with such silence and stealth.

He felt the orchestra of dismay begin to take their places in the pit of his head. In the time it took him to draw the window blind, something dropped an eyelid between him and touch. The very objects in the room became their own corpses. He moved from the mirror to the bed.

He lay on his side on the bed, huddled in the shape of a question mark. One eye was pressed against the pillow. The other he covered tight with his hand. But it was only in appearance the cataleptic mask of flesh asphyxiated with grief. He lay like someone bludgeoned, but it was not stun. It was the ungrammared agony of him who has never shipped any oars for that dead sea which comes to everyone, when the ‘breeze of others’ attention veers from your sails to their own – come there now and transfixed there in the very eye of a hurricane loneness.

He was encircled by an absolutely naked hush in the things around him. That terrible escapeless hush when sounds are without echo, objects without shadow, words without inflection, touch without touching.… The sun comes out, but it is still there. Move, run, its boundaries move with you. Shout, and it is still there, unpierced. Put your head in your hands, it gets in behind your hands. Close your eyes, it gets in behind the lids. Lie down to sleep, it springs up from the pillow into the dark of your mind. It was exhaustion so that when you lie down exhausted you still have the feeling of having to stand up exhausted. It flayed the very casings off his thought and sense.

Flensed of its casings his mind’s eye saw in the dark of his skull like a cat’s.

It fragmented into a swarming hive of headlights – one for each of the locomotives of flash-thought that began to race along the infinite rails of his brain, himself a passenger on all of them.

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