Martin Kovan

 

The Traveler

It is an obscure town. There are ox-drawn carts as well as techno-coloured motor-scooters moving in the streets. A place where, as they say, worlds collide. There aren't worlds anymore, there is not even World. There is only space, reduced to a supposition, and time stretched so thin that it must either be nothing at all or preternaturally vast, bled into unreal infinities.

The traveler in the travel-agent can't concentrate too well on what the man is telling him. The accent, like playing children, trips in his ears, and the over-attentiveness of all his associated colleagues hanging over his shoulders in a biblical group. They all want to know what the traveler could potentially say, which particular world he comes from. They already know his native country, have perused, at some length and repeatedly, his sorry passport, with its over-exposed photograph of identification. As if in incrimination - both the photo, more a police mugshot that makes him naked and vulnerable, and their perturbed response to it. It is in their interests to identify and weed out any potential fraudulence, the better to protect their own nation from it. (In the same way different drivers on the mythologically over-congested roads will violently motion to the traveler to keep to the pseudo-marked road-crossing, as he attempts to thread a Sisyphean way inside the onslaught. Does the driver genuinely believe a marked-crossing is there? Does national pride rise so easily to such deluded heights?)

Because behind the travel-agent's back is a panorama-sized poster of a famous feature of the traveler's hometown. He has, in his life, grown up, learned, loved, sung, cried, and nearly died within close proximity - even inside - the famous architectural marvel. It has a mythology of his own nervous system, thrown back out to him, from the low-resolution graphics of the reproduction that are nevertheless able to concretely offer to his gaze, immediately, not an intimation but a literal open sesame onto another reality. Those minute and prosaic details of the scene are among the most embedded reservoirs of private imagery he knows: the corner by the streetlamp - an old-fashioned iron throwback, and incredibly, the very same one, that he once leant against in a twilight adolescent discomfort, picking at its paint, waiting for the girl who might have been - no, actually was - the very first he - ; and there it is, some fifteen years later, offered up to his visual cortex to wreak havoc in the synaptic zones of memory, as if they have been given a dangerously fertile protein-hit of stimulus - a phosphorescence of associations that flux through biological and immaterial nexus-points of personal history such that he is definitively removed from the present circumambient universe. Then realising, what is personal about my history, when it is advertised as such everywhere, in the most fly-bitten and surreal of contexts, what is present about this particular set of sensory data-bits when they will likely be reproduced for public exhibition in, for example, the Antarctic basin or a crater of Mars in some not-too-distant and universally-touristified 'future'? What is surreal? - this isn't strange, after all, this is normal, real, waking life. As it has always been. Yet by evidence of his senses the traveler considers either normal perception is inherently strange, or strangeness inherently normal.

He had, back in that clammy-handed age, waited for her, smoked a precocious cigarette, picked at the under-dried paint of the streetlamp (yes, he almost shakes his head, it is the same one: if he could magnify the picture he would see the scratched area that he could claim as his handiwork, his alone) - he had waited, had gallantly paid for the tickets, impressively avant-garde music to be performed in this same famous, uncanny structure, by an orchestra that if he listens closely he can already hear tuning up, right inside the travel-agent's office. (At another time it was a famous Russian poet he had arranged for them to hear, and because she wanted instead to go drink in a bar, he had foregone. As this event, which did not occur, is not represented in the revelation of the image on the wall, it must be omitted here as well. And yet already he considers that even omissions are compelling stories in their own right - and even though it was something he didn't see, and could never have known was worth the effort, missing the Russian poet remains right up to the moment in the obscure travel-agent's office, the biggest regret of his life. Something he didn't do, for something he didn't experience, that he can now never know was, or was not, a potential, as they say, life-changing event.)

By now it will be expected the traveler has to a certain critical point left the building, though his body remains apparently firmly fixed in it, and space-floats instead in psychic amniosis. The travel-agent and his idolatrous hangers-on lean into the picture in pious suspension: they are saints, surely, and the travel-agent gently opens out his hands in supplication to his poor customer, a tied-bow of compassion on his mouth: Sir, sir, please, what can we do for you?

It is not merely the streetlamp, or the crushed cigarette at its base, or the lilac-tinged expectancy of her wispy hair as he already imagines it colluding with the air of buses and mundane office-workers to come meet him there - it is the patch of ground itself - a mere patch of ground - where even earlier, a whole decade earlier, he had dropped an ice-cream and watched it oozily ingested by the flagstones of the iconic national landmark, on one of those excruciatingly torrid and torpid days of summer of which his entire childhood (when did it end, exactly?) seems to have consisted. A few other children had laughed, perhaps, it didn't matter, and his father had gone to buy him another. But the effect, the implosive but subtle force of reality leaves a trace, on the stones, in his eyes, his hearing: the laughter, the gulls in the air, the archaic chugging of the ferries churning through the green-bellied water of the bay, his father's heavy working-hand that itself smiles as it hands the sticky smaller one another experience which moves off into other encapsulated territories, an oneiry that requires a different talisman to summon its exact resurrection.

Because what is happening to him is not second-hand. The experience of re-entry into other time is not a cognitive rehearsal of something he makes intentional effort to conjure. It is utterly, frighteningly real. It is already there in pure exactitude and unshakeable fidelity. He is there as she comes, more than an hour late, they smoke cigarettes, cough and stare at the thrashing water of the bay - (the waves are there, too, in the image on wall) - and when in the purple density of late-twilight he tries to - ; he suddenly conceives of something he has neglected, of loyalties divided, and wonders if it would be best to leave the travel-office, step outside to hail an ox-cart to deliver him to the further reaches of the constellation of Orion - but would he be safe there, would it make any difference, would his memory and its absurd and beautiful mnemonic devices - in image and sound and smell - follow him to an already indefinite unraveling of the soul and its compulsive demands? He neither wants nor doesn't want to remember; - it is there now, of course, the most recent but because the most recent the most hidden finger on the trigger of his conscience: the wall is there, the same stretch of sea-wall (it was especially deluged with pigeon-droppings, and someone had left Korean graffiti - or was it Russian, he isn't sure now - on its rough surface). The argument - not even an argument, nothing is said, which makes it worse - has taken its inevitable course, the last argument doubtless, where nothing can be said and everything recriminated, a non-conversation in which after the wine they walk together down to the harbour, the beautiful building is there, and yes, he finally says something: "I'm leaving in three days," he can't smile, though she must hear it, so she can ask him "Where will you go?" "Everywhere, I think; wherever I need to go...to...get away."

"From what?"

"From all of this," he drops his hand, "everything around us."

"From this, you mean," she smiles at him in the night-lights of the shunting ferries, the bridge high-arched over human misadventure.

"Yes, from this," he says.

It gets late, they each need to be elsewhere. "You know, maybe fifteen years ago, this is where you first kissed me - d'you remember?"

He doesn't nod, nor does he smile. She whispers something he doesn't hear, and walks away from him, leaving him by the wall. He can see it there, again, in front of him. Mute, as if still expecting an answer from him. It is the wine, or memory, something tediously necessary, but he gets up on the wall and stands with his hands in the air and stretches them, into nothingness, there is nothing up there, that is where the traveler will go, up into vast space, air and freedom. The force and solidity of this wall, the vast breadth of bridge, the exquisite white unfolding of the miracle-dome above him will be sand, far under his feet, not even sleep in the eyes of someone who has ceased to dream of a life he has never lived.

But he has, as all lives are lived, and he has, as everyone has, lived all of them already. Dream, not an artifice, is only another kind of memory. It is only his mind that has dreamed all of them, including this one. This is something he has not known before now.

The travel-agent lets him go, when the traveler gets up and leaves the little shack of a building, with some beneficence. The wordless minions fold their birdlike hands in blessing. They don't see him as he steps into the dust and holds out his hand. The driver of the ox-cart does though, sees the tears singing from his face, and though he has seen many travelers before, he has never before seen one that has come quite so far.

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