Bruno’s Dream

3

Nigel, who has been sitting cross-legged on the floor outside Danby’s bedroom, listening in the darkness to Danby and Adelaide talking together, rises silently, elegantly, his legs still crossed. There is nothing more now to be heard within except a counterpoint of snores. He glides up the stairs to his own room, enters, and secures the door.

It is dark in the room. The door is locked, the curtains thick as fur. Deep somewhere in the darkness a single candle is burning. Nigel in black shirt, black tights, rotates without stretched arms. The furniture against the wall is sleek and flat. The brown walls fold away into receding arcs about the glimmering sphere where Nigel turns and turns, thin as a needle, thin as a straight line, narrow as a slitlet through which a steely blinding light attempts to issue forth into the fuzzy world.

Concentric universe. Faster and faster now sphere within sphere revolves and sings. The holy city turns within the ring-of equatorial emerald, within the ring of milky way of pearl, within the lacticogalactic wheel, the galaxy of galaxies, that spins motionless upon a point extensionless. The flake of rust, the speck of dust, the invisible slit in the skin through which it all sinks down and runs away.

The candle has grown into a huge luminous cylinder made of alabaster or coconut ice. It glows palely from within and impulsates and breathes. Nigel has fallen upon his knees. Kneeling upright he sways to its noiseless rhythm song. In the beginning was Om, Omphalos, Om Phallos, black undivided round devoid of consciousness or self. Out of the dreamless womb time creeps in the moment which is no beginning at the end which is no end. Time is the crack. Darkness upon darkness moving, awareness slides from being. Vibrations clap their wings and there is sound. An eye regards an eye and there is light.

In the dimness he is squatting huge and blocks the sky. Little hands vibrate like hairs but he squats huge and broods on self. His idly stirring foot may crush a million million while he scratches, fidgets, brushes away a myriad buzz of littlenesses whose millennia of shrieking are to him the momentary humming of a gnat which between two fingers he idly crushes as he squats still and broods on self.

The humming light is waxing, the mountainous black is waning, the screaming is swelling into a harmony, a dazzling circlet of visible sound. Two indistinct and terrible angels encircle the earth, embracing, enlacing, tumbling through circular space, both oned and oneing in magnetic joy. Love and Death, pursuing and pursued.

The sounds diminish and in the empty pallid azure the golden quoit spins away. At last, it has become a spot of radiance, a stain of gold, a fading flash, a laser beam, a single blinding point of light which absorbs all light into itself. The colourless soundless silence vibrates and sways. He is near. Nigel trembles pants and shudders. His wide-open eyes see nothing, he, Nigel, the all-seer, the priest, the slave of the god. Time and space crumple slowly. He is near, He is near, He is near. They fold and crumple. Love is death. All is one.

Nigel clutches his heart. He gasps, he groans, he reels. He falls forward on his face on the ground, his forehead strikes the floor. His eyes are screwed together against the glaring dark. The presence is agony, punishment, stripes, the extended being tortured into a single point. Annihilation. All is one.

Later, far away in another world, an old man calls out, calls out, then weeps alone in the dark slow hours of the night. With magnified precision Nigel hears the calling and the weeping. He lies prostrate upon the floor of the world.