Exchange Place

Revelation

The rain was still pouring down from an apocalyptic sky. I heard the Albert Clock strike the half-hour, the same reverberating note that struck me so many times over the years, giving me that next half-hour of grace before I saw the person whom I was to meet, half an hour in which the words would come to me unbidden as I wrote them down; and I remembered countless other times writing ecstatically in a notebook, whether under an awning in the pouring rain or on the sunlit terrace of a café, scribbling for months, for years, circling round a theme that only gradually discloses itself, pages covered in words, arrows leading back to other words, words crossed out, addenda, corrigenda, pages flickering behind the page I write in now. I flicked through the previous entries.

It seems like a dream, or so it seems now when I look back at it, I had written days ago, a week ago, a month ago. The entry bore no date. Only now am I waking up to it, in a manner of speaking, said the entry. What led to it? It all depends how far back one goes. Did it begin here, in this blink of an eyelid, or elsewhere, in another? So it was written.

Contrapunctus XIV, I had written. Journeys in fractal land are arduous. Mandelbrot: ‘length’ is not something that can be meaningfully specified. Mandelbrot quotes Edmund Whymper on mountaineering: It is worthy of remark that … fragments of rock … often represent the characteristic form of the cliffs from which they have been broken.

I am wearing a pair of Oxford brogues by ‘K’ shoes of Kendal, 1960s vintage, bought on eBay, I had written. I looked down at my feet. I was wearing them now. They had been barely worn yet when I put them on I could feel the imprint of another’s foot upon the insole, and I wondered who had walked in them before me. Kendal in the Lake District, I had written, Wordsworth country, the poet striding for miles up hill down dale as the words came to him unbidden and he cried them aloud with every step he took. There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, the earth, and common sight, to me did seem apparell’d in celestial light, the glory and the freshness of a dream.

I paused from my writing and looked up at the sky. The rain had ceased and a sun pale as the moon drifted through the clouds. I felt that sensation of a migraine aura steal over me once again. The brickwork of the building opposite was charged with pattern, brick and mortar interstices undulating like a piece of music. I closed my book, took up my briefcase and walked out into the street, spellbound by everything I saw, the gutter heaving like a river in spate, the manhole covers under my feet like heraldic shields laid down by a forgotten empire. When I looked up I saw domes and cupolas, battlements and parapets gleaming on the skyline of the city under the leaden clouds, and my route now seemed preordained from some distant epoch. A car-horn sounded ceremonially and my whole being shimmered with the knowledge that the atoms of my brain had been forged aeons ago in the stars, billions of atoms forming dense thickets of neurons and transmission cables endlessly communicating, more active often in sleep than in waking life.

I walked towards my destination along the route that I had taken for many years, and with every footstep I took, I watched the city unfolding herself in all the beauty and the glory of her detail. And I heard the words of John the Divine, And the twelve gates of the city were twelve pearls; every gate was of one pearl; and the street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent glass. I walked among the people invisible to them, the apparition of these faces in a crowd, and I looked upon them, and I knew these nameless ones for all they knew me not. What was my name? Where was I coming from? Where was I going? I was this John, and that John, and the other John, and I was everyone and everything around me. I was yet to write the book in which all would be revealed, these lives of which I was the author, but now my path was clear, I knew the words would come when the time came, and I was filled with exaltation.

Before I knew it I was sitting under an awning outside the Morning Star. I ordered a Pernod with ice, a jug of water on the side. I poured water into the spirit and watched it slowly change from clear to cloud. The little miracle never failed to please me. I rolled a cigarette and took out my notebook. I lit the cigarette and took a sip of Pernod. I checked my watch and then thought to check the Omega I was to show my client. Both were almost exactly in synch, the second hand of the Wittnauer sweeping a little in advance of the Omega as if leading it on into the future. Beautiful watch the Omega, I was loth to part with it, maybe I could fob him off with the promise of something he would think better, a Rolex which if not exactly fake had been compromised by what they call reconditioning, covers a few sins invisible to the untrained eye. I put the Omega back in the briefcase and wrote in the notebook: I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, which is, and which was, and is to come. As I did so there was a flash of lightning followed by an almighty peal of thunder, and it started to pour rain again. It dripped from the awning spattering the words I had just written; but no matter, I moved to a more sheltered spot, taking with me my accoutrements of drink, tobacco and briefcase, and continued to write the first words that came into my mind. I heard them spoken from afar and I was merely setting down that which was dictated by another, my pen struggling to keep pace as word came after word. What thou seest, write in a book, said the voice.

My roll-up had gone out and when I made to relight it, I glanced up and saw a figure sitting in the shadows under the awning. He too was drinking Pernod, an unusual enough occurrence in Belfast. Paris, yes, but not here. His face was obscured by the brim of his brown fedora, but all the same there was something in his bearing that looked familiar to me. Nice suit he was wearing too, a brown tweed not unlike the one I had looked for just before I went out. I could do something with this, I thought, but put it to one side for future reference as I kept writing: And I went unto the angel, and said to him, give me the little book. And he said unto me, Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey. So absorbed was I in writing, I did not see him coming. When I looked up he was sitting before me, his face still hidden by his hat. He set a briefcase on the table. His hands were trembling.

He raised his head and looked at me. There was a flash of lightning and I saw myself looking at myself. My heart gave a great leap. Who was I? Everything went blank.