Read Online Dreams of Speaking by Gail Jones - Free Book Online Page B

writing a biography, he said, of Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. (The word sounded like ‘terror-phone’.)
    â€˜The telephone’, Mr Sakamoto said, leaning forward, ‘is the most metaphysical of all technologies. It reveals and it effaces, it is fulsome and forsaken, it enfolds and estranges.’
    Alice listened with delight to this little speech. It was as if they shared a minority language. Or harboured a hidden secret. Or a freakish enthusiasm.
    â€˜Yes,’ she said. ‘I am writing, among other things, about the extraordinary existence of the telephone. I am writing a book – trying to write a book – about modern things: Xerox machines, neon lights, photography, astronauts.’
    This work sounded meretricious, almost childish, as she announced it. But Mr Sakamoto beamed approval.
    â€˜So we must be friends!’ he declared. ‘We must be friends! I am so pleased to meet you, Black, Alice Black.’
    Alice liked the sound of her name with the l’s abraded.
    It was such an easy meeting. Friends are an intersection, a route back to the world. Alice could not have foreseen that this Japanese man, this man, she would discover, who was sixty-eight, not seventy-five, from the city of Nagasaki, would greet her with such openness and affinity that it would be impossible not to befriend him. He too seemed responsive to something in Alice’s manner – not just her project, but the earnestness of her isolation, the dedication to an intellectual cause, the pleasure in supposing the usual arcane, the familiar compelling. If there is a magnetic aspect to sensibility it is evident in friendships that arise from these merest conversations and shreds of sentences, talks that align particles of self in a sudden, energised correspondence.
    Alice remembered at some stage that she had seen the video clip of ‘Instant Karma’. Yoko Ono wore a kind of bandage across her eyes, thick and white, as if she were not simply blindfolded, but wounded, or even blind. There were words on cards and peace-symbol armbands, and Lennon, with a thin beard and alazy tambourine. In front of the band, dancers were bobbing arhythmically, under strobe lights. They wore Carnaby Street gear and had fixed expressions. Alice had no idea what year this performance was from: it was something lodged in her girlhood, something as almost forgotten and as lost as a beached whale.
    Mr Sakamoto fell back to sleep. Alice watched him rest his face in his hand, arrange his pullover as a pillow against the cold surface of the window, and then re-enter his own seclusion. He looked calm, she thought. Wise. When they arrived at the station he awoke with a jolt and was instantly communicative.
    â€˜We must talk, Alice Black, about this world of modern things. This buzzing world.’
    Mr Sakamoto gestured around him at the hubbub of the train station, with everyone rushing helter-skelter for the exits. He offered Alice a name card from his wallet and wrote on it the phone number of his hotel. Since she did not have a card, Alice scribbled her name and email address on a slip of paper.
    â€˜Soon,’ he said, reaching to shake her hand once again.
    Mr Sakamoto turned into the crowd, walked a few paces and then looked back. He waved extravagantly, with a kind of Florentine flourish. Alice waved back in a huge reply. They were already mimicking each other, already blithe in their friendship.

    Dear Alice,
    Forgive me for taking so long to answer your letter; things here have been getting on top of me.
    It’s been a particularly hot summer – yesterday was 40, oppressive, and everyone was grumpy and short-tempered in the heat – and then there is all this talk of going to war with Iraq, which seems madness on almost any pretext. I fear – what do they call it? – the ‘collateral damage’ of women and children and theghastly sense that superpowers will once again play