Mouroir

Bump in the Night

They drive down the deserted highway, the powerful engine of the Silver Phantom humming, headlights spewing the darkness, probing ahead, illuminating just the immediate ribbon of dusty road, eliminating any sense of the reality of the landscape around them: as if moving down an isthmus of security. Their backs to the North, always with their backs to the North, the North with its horrors and its violence, its uprooting, its desolation; the North always at their backs, the North ever just behind them, dragging their North with them wherever they go, extending it. They have long since become insensible to the dust filtering into the car, caking their nostrils, forming with the perspiration a sediment in the lines of their bodies. In the dark one doesn’t write the dust. It is hot. It is always hot. It has always been hot. The land is hot, the road is hot, the stars streaming down the face of the night must be hot — hot and white as headlights moving down highways from a North. Of course it is impossible to escape from the unseen.

Of course it is impossible to escape from the unseen, she thinks. Her thoughts have become jumbled and fragmented with the monotony of trying to escape down the road. We are all just hot and dusty thoughts, she thinks. She thinks: I am a thought thinking itself and not existing when the thinking lapses; Fagotin Fremdkörper steering the car, willing it away from the North, is a thought here in the dark next to me; and all the other itinerants gone ahead of us in their dust, and those who still may escape, may still follow us — they are thoughts too if I bother to think them. She moves over the seat, wants to stretch her limbs in the limited space, doesn’t try too hard because always there is the dust in eyelash and armpit and between suspender and stocking. She thinks: we must reach Laputa; ahead must lie Laputa; at the end of the road where night unravels Laputa must be. Safety? Asylum? Exile? Release? Then? No North? The North, the North is moving down in a rush behind the headlamps. She tries to think herself. But she thinks odds and ends of previous thoughts, the crust, flimsy words.

Before leaving the North she had been a courtesan. Many of her race had been courtesans, the unattached ones, the indolent: the country was rich, affairs flourishing, pleasure at a price appreciated though easy enough to come by. Of course the others, the indigenous caste, had been simply whores. But her calling had necessitated a given learning and her craft had similarly been an education. From her aspirants she had taken some words; to these words she tried to fit thoughts. She is tired now. She thinks: fleeing is not the correct environment for feeding the nous. She thinks: I must get away, even if only with this taciturn Fagotin Fremdkörper, but how I regret the days which have fallen behind for ever. That is what is known as laudator temporis acti. In Italics. And now I am dust. She thinks: I am taking my thinking and myself with me, my Lares and Penates, but my thinking makes of my being a felo de se. It is the North. No doubt. It is the heat. It is the night. It is the hope, feigned or real. It is death we flee with, latent, lulling, seemingly innocuous. A passing matelot, for whom she had nearly developed a fancy (wasn’t his name Thibon, Gustave?), had told her that one should not run away in order to be free. “If you fly from yourself, your prison will run with you.” And since she’s not leaving the self behind, she thinks, it must mean that the self is death. It must be the words larded with a strange life. And she thinks: we must get to a latrine soon-soon or my bladder will burst.

She says to Fagotin Fremdkörper that they will have to stop somewhere for there is the need for a crinkle and tinkle, and he answers that it won’t be long now, that he knows of a halfway house where they will find all the amenities, refreshment and fuel too, because they cannot continue for much longer like this; and that the place is quite near really, that it is a warm and welcoming joint run by a friendly compatriot, that at least must still be so. (“All things have not turned to dust.” And: “The alternative is too ghastly to consider.”) She attempts to extract conviction from his assertions, she sits up straighter and she reflects that she’s conceivably feeling quite feverish from fatigue and perhaps this nice travellers’ inn could serve her a cool febrifuge. She thinks: I’ll say “f-f-f-ancy that!” And then she thinks further that f’s are really funny because they are so ferociously inquisitive, like the heads of wind craning over tall grass. She looks down the beaming blind headlights and decides that she will get out of the car when they reach this haven, what the hell, even if her creased clothes and caked visage are infra dignitatem.

But when they reach the service station the buildings and premises are dark. She feels her heart a black word in the throat. Fagotin Fremdkörper doesn’t dare use the hooter of the car: the North is still with them and nowhere is safe nowadays. He doesn’t have to — a man steps out of one of the dark buildings, cautious. It is the owner, the sympathetic compatriot, morose, with an unkempt moustache. Fagotin Fremdkörper has turned off the engine and they sit immobile in the sudden swishing silence of the immense, dry and glittering night. Yes, but certainly, the innkeeper assures them, they may have some petrol. Although. And he glances around him at the dark as if he suspects informers lurking there. No one is to be trusted any more, he says. I have seen them all pass by. Not many more to come, I should guess. Hard times, hard times. Yes, perhaps I still have a few litres. My last. All taken you know, and never to be replenished. Don’t know why I’m still hanging on. He pushes a feeble expectorating sound out into the night: his docile and hollow laugh. But where shall I go? Laputa? I see them come and go, I’ve seen them going, they are going, it is all gone. But look, he says, I shouldn’t be hanging around if I were you, all these informers you know, and he listens, listens in the dark. Let us whisper. No but look, he also says, making a vague movement with a hesitant hand — why, if you’re bushed you may stay the night: there are a few other — ah — travellers waiting in their cars back there. Back there must be a parking space behind the barns where landaus and spiders and traps and barouches and calèches and coaches and phaetons and victories and hearses and buggies and ox wagons used to be housed in days of yore when visitors were curious tourists who had to be amused at so much a head. They can hear a rapid soft shuffling sound coming from a darkened barn. S’s are snakes. What is that? She asks as she decides to get out and relieve herself words and all.

Out she gets of the car, disturbing dust unseen in the night, and asks: what was that there? The shrouded sound. Squeak of unoiled springs. Then the silence. Fagotin Fremdkörper in the car. The hostelier, turned, cock-eared, taut. Fear.

A moan and they all start running. From the other conveyances people come running. Someone has a torch at hand. Into the barn. Beam picking out spokes, sudden glint of rim, dust, more dust. Furtive movements somewhere. An animal panting. “Quiet!” Listening. More people thronging into the barn. Thoughts, she thinks. Not even words. “Got’em!” “Damn bastards!” Hysteria there. “Bloody Blacks screwing!” What? Where? Yes, a couple of Blacks it would seem, taking refuge here — having moved in from the North? — but how, afoot? — and softly fornicating in the dusty dark. “Aarrgh!” “Get ’em!” Thrashing, grunting, flesh against wood, panting, bodies in dust. “Out here!” “The beam!” “Put off that light you stupid idiot. Want to attract the others?” “Quiet!” “Quiet, gentlemen!” (Pretension is better than cure.)

The gentlemen are quiet. The sordid and confused movements in the dark. She lets down her panties, squats, relief without thinking, and the hissing sound of it. A form is dragged out. Must be the male, straining against their arms. Kicking of legs. Body against body. Dust unnoticed in the night. A post or some upright part of an ancient vehicle somewhere. A rope. Panting and grunting. The vague shapes silhouetted against the glow of stars. Blows. Thumps. A tightening. Figures moving back, one remaining trussed and twisting. A tightening. Twang of line. A gasp. Silence. No. A gurgle raucous, prolonged, full of spittle, dying away with life. And then, soft at first, but rapidly scaling and soaring through the mark and up into the night: the wild wailing of a woman. Star-sound.