something truly magical and inexplicable. He had, it seemed, cracked the arcane art of the spin and speed rotation of the casual throw. He had mastered something so unique that no one even dreamt it was there to be mastered. His new ability, his mastery of a completely new and original skill, put him in an unfathomable class, a different space. And not even Jackson knew how to deal with it. Sedgewick’s airy achievement made Jackson’s legend seem ordinary, without allure, without mystery, without romance. Such was the mood that day.
Sedgewick, meanwhile, remained himself – simple, ordinary, plain. But the space he occupied was transformed by that strange knack of coolly flicking a ball with a twisting wrist movement. And the ball would travel , spin mysteriously, endlessly, up slopes, down, round, through obstacles, as if aided by an unseen power, right to the unexpected hole, in an art so fiendish that it amounted to sorcery. …
Perhaps rumours are a parallel kind of reality.
The Golden
Inferno
1
THE HOUSE WAS a country, and in front of it there was a gutter. And the gutter was clogged with things which made the air foul to breathe. There was a dead cow in it, with feet sticking out from the muddy water. This poisoned everything. There were thick books drowned in the gutter. It was suspected that there were dead human beings in there too, their arms also sticking out, barely discernible. A hospital bed rested, lopsided, on all this poisonous detritus. And on the bed were people who were ill because of the foul ness of all that was concealed in the gutter and which was now leaking out to the whole world.
In the country that was a house I saw thousands of tables and pallets. On them were innumerable men and women stricken with a disease for which, as yet, there was no cure. They were an inferno of bodies, of dying people, in a nightmare from which there was no awakening except death. The rows of them seemed infinite.
On a stand, before a platform of dignitaries, the archbishop kept repeating the same words into a microphone:
‘This is a husband and wife thing, a thing between husbands and wives.’
He didn’t seem to know what else to say. He was trying to simplify the problem so that it could be dealt with, section by section.
Crowds of people were gathered. They had a tragic air.
The plague had plunged the world into gloom.
2
They eventually woke up to the dead cow and the drowned books and the dead bodies in the great gutter in front of the house that was a country. A world-famous popstar took an interest in the house and drew more attention to it. This made the house more conscious of itself. It took a lot of time for this to happen. Children played near the gutter and caught a mysterious illness and died. For a long time no-one did anything. All pretended the problem wasn’t there. Or that it wasn’t a problem.
On the tables and pallets women were naked and dying in the nightmare grip of the merciless disease. One woman was making sexual motions, writhing and making love to the air. This is not because it was what she wanted to do, but because the motion eased her agony.
There was a mist over all these bodies writhing like the condemned in a hell that no one has ever imagined. Millions of them were on the path to perishing. The world watched them die in their lonely mute agony.
Someone’s thought circulated in the air, but was not expressed. Someone inwardly evil. The thought went: they should all be killed.
Who can harbour such a holocaustal notion, such a genocidal vision?
3
We had to watch them in their long lonely deaths. We tried to prevent more people from joining their numbers. So many thoughts circulated in the air. Some extreme, some spiritual, some practical, running in the underworld of our grief:
‘We must change. Sex cannot be the angel of death of a whole people. If we master desire we will be transformed. We will become masters of ourselves, the magnet of a beautiful new
Sedgewick, meanwhile, remained himself – simple, ordinary, plain. But the space he occupied was transformed by that strange knack of coolly flicking a ball with a twisting wrist movement. And the ball would travel , spin mysteriously, endlessly, up slopes, down, round, through obstacles, as if aided by an unseen power, right to the unexpected hole, in an art so fiendish that it amounted to sorcery. …
Perhaps rumours are a parallel kind of reality.
The Golden
Inferno
1
THE HOUSE WAS a country, and in front of it there was a gutter. And the gutter was clogged with things which made the air foul to breathe. There was a dead cow in it, with feet sticking out from the muddy water. This poisoned everything. There were thick books drowned in the gutter. It was suspected that there were dead human beings in there too, their arms also sticking out, barely discernible. A hospital bed rested, lopsided, on all this poisonous detritus. And on the bed were people who were ill because of the foul ness of all that was concealed in the gutter and which was now leaking out to the whole world.
In the country that was a house I saw thousands of tables and pallets. On them were innumerable men and women stricken with a disease for which, as yet, there was no cure. They were an inferno of bodies, of dying people, in a nightmare from which there was no awakening except death. The rows of them seemed infinite.
On a stand, before a platform of dignitaries, the archbishop kept repeating the same words into a microphone:
‘This is a husband and wife thing, a thing between husbands and wives.’
He didn’t seem to know what else to say. He was trying to simplify the problem so that it could be dealt with, section by section.
Crowds of people were gathered. They had a tragic air.
The plague had plunged the world into gloom.
2
They eventually woke up to the dead cow and the drowned books and the dead bodies in the great gutter in front of the house that was a country. A world-famous popstar took an interest in the house and drew more attention to it. This made the house more conscious of itself. It took a lot of time for this to happen. Children played near the gutter and caught a mysterious illness and died. For a long time no-one did anything. All pretended the problem wasn’t there. Or that it wasn’t a problem.
On the tables and pallets women were naked and dying in the nightmare grip of the merciless disease. One woman was making sexual motions, writhing and making love to the air. This is not because it was what she wanted to do, but because the motion eased her agony.
There was a mist over all these bodies writhing like the condemned in a hell that no one has ever imagined. Millions of them were on the path to perishing. The world watched them die in their lonely mute agony.
Someone’s thought circulated in the air, but was not expressed. Someone inwardly evil. The thought went: they should all be killed.
Who can harbour such a holocaustal notion, such a genocidal vision?
3
We had to watch them in their long lonely deaths. We tried to prevent more people from joining their numbers. So many thoughts circulated in the air. Some extreme, some spiritual, some practical, running in the underworld of our grief:
‘We must change. Sex cannot be the angel of death of a whole people. If we master desire we will be transformed. We will become masters of ourselves, the magnet of a beautiful new
Similar Books
