ROWAN-6
In the days following my vision of the man and the girl in the cave, things were great.
Then, things changed.
Dr. Mulgar arrived one day, and I, informed by Romulus of his approach, had warned Mind to be ready to show me something at my signal (which were the words, “Now, Mind!”) and had situated myself on the couch in anticipation of his usual interrogation. He was having none of our usual routine, however. Beaming down upon me, he said, “None of that, today, Romulus, we’re going to celebrate your birthday! How’s that sound?”
It had been at least fifteen days by then since he had told me it was my sixth birthday—“Five years and a quarter by the normal reckoning, to be sure, but who’s counting?” he had said—so it seemed to me a little odd to make a big deal about it now, but celebrating a birthday sounded like something good, so I effected a wild-eyed excitement that I flattered myself was almost equal to Dr. Mulgar’s ever-present fervor.
He laughed and told me, in the way adults tell children things that are supposed to impress or excite the children, that we were going somewhere special. He was in an ebullient mood. He blindfolded me—“It’s a surprise, Romulus, it’s a surprise,” he kept saying—and taking my hand, led me out of the house for the first time in my life. The first time in my memory, at least.
I had seen the outside on the Grail, I had been in a simulacrum of the outside a few times at the end of the bright road; but even with the blindfold on, I realized that those experiences had been the palest of representations of the real thing. Light came through the blindfold, diffused, I suppose, in such a way that it seemed to be coming from every direction at once, and with such a vibrance, a stirring of life, almost, that it seemed right off as if I’d stepped into a magical, an unreal, place.
This feeling was accentuated by the fact that the sun warmed me and a breeze touched the skin of my face and arms and neck, moving the hair on my head, rubbing me, caressing me, I imagined, though of course I had never been caressed; and when I breathed, air rushed through my nostrils and into my lungs like, I imagined, a thousand tiny elves whirling brooms around, purifying and cleaning and opening, ahh, yes, opening: the lungs opened up like they’d never opened up before, sucking in freshness and what seemed at first like a very pleasant odor but what was really nearer to a fresh odorlessness. At the same time, my ears were catching an incredible array of different sounds—several different species of bugs buzzing or screaming, birds chirping or calling, leaves scraping against one another, the breeze tunneling in a whistling whisper through the creases of my ears. It was overwhelming, even with the blindfold on.
Dr. Mulgar led me along hard ground, and suddenly the wind and sun and sound were gone, and I was sitting on a soft seat, like the couch, in a warm, windless, dark, enclosed place. Indeed, quite warm: I started to sweat after a minute or two sitting there. Dr. Mulgar was nearby, I heard him breathing and fiddling with stuff, half-talking to himself. Then I had the vague sensation that we were moving, and I thought, oh we’re in a horse drawn cart (something I’d seen on the Grail), and yet I heard no horses’ hooves, nothing but a dull whirring. Every half-minute or so, Dr. Mulgar would pat me on the head or the knee and say, “We’re almost there,” or something of the sort, but he never explained what was going on, so I remained in a state of utter confusion, though not so overwhelmed as I had been upon first stepping into the open air of the outside. At some point, I had the vague sensation that we were slowing and then coming to a stop, and then I heard Dr. Mulgar bustling about, followed by the sound of something metal unlatching, whereupon coolness engulfed me, and again, Dr. Mulgar took my hand, led me once more into the overwhelming magic sun, air, and sound of the outside (accompanied now by a vague roar which seemed the very engine of the world), across a hard floor or ground, extremely lush carpeting, back to hard, now uneven, ground, finally guiding me to a stop.
“Here we are!” he said, and removed my blindfold.
A structure—another house, perhaps, much bigger and more extravagant than the one in which Romulus and I abided—was behind me. I never actually saw it, whatever it was, but I knew it was big. I think I saw the ends of it, its wings, if you will, out of the corners of my eyes, or out of the corners of the corners of my eyes, if you know what I mean: I knew something large and hard and inanimate was behind me, though because we were facing the sun, we weren’t in its shadow. I felt its presence. But I never saw it: Dr. Mulgar had situated me in just such a way to behold the scene he wanted me to behold, which did not include this structure; and once I had beheld the scene, I was so boggulated that I never took note of anything else. I suppose it’s possible that I saw the building, noted its appearance in a side chamber of my awareness, and that what I remember as a sensing of something large behind me was actually a seeing of it that I don’t remember. However, I have no mental image of what it looked like, only that it was large. In any case, I was standing near it, but facing away from it when Dr. Mulgar took the blindfold off.
At first, dazzled by the sun, I saw nothing but light. But, my eyes adjusted with the quick physical adaptation of the very young; and had I thought I was overwhelmed by sensation upon first exiting the house, I would have laughed at my naïveté. I had seen a hundred pictures of the outside on the Grail, many portraying areas more grand than this one, but they had not prepared me for the real thing. Some of the grandness of a picture or a painting comes from having been there. Not there, in the place the picture reveals, or even somewhere as grand, but there in the sense of somewhere that is of the same essential material as that place, so that you have some feel in your being for the place portrayed beyond a cerebral recognition of what or where it is. Never having been out of my little house, I had no feel in my being for what the outside world was like, and therefore pictures of magnificent places were wasted on me to some extent. I had seen the sky in paintings, but even in the hands of gifted artists, without having seen the real sky with my naked eyes, the sky in those paintings was just blue paint, essentially. The scintillating crackling skimmering wallop of reality had not yet readied me to appreciate replications of it. (A bonus, then, of going outside was that afterward, perusing paintings on the Grail was more fun, because I could put myself in them. If a painting presented an exotic, remote, or even fictional setting, I now had an anchor, a frame of reference, something that would allow my brain to build the place around me.) I had seen the outside at the end of the bright road a few times as well, but it just wasn’t the same; those Mind-given visions were more like paintings—three-dimensional paintings in which there was movement and smell, but which had a comparative unrealness to them when laid alongside the real thing.
Stretches and swirls of grass and flower, ferns and tall broad-leafed plants, partitioned by curling paths of red brick, lay before me in an indecipherable design of beauty, ending at a distant, magnificent curved wall of many-colored stone behind which trees thick with green leaves rose, it seemed, to the very sky. The sun capped these trees, like the flame above a candle in a way, but so bright, so all-illuminating, so blazing, that it seemed to me that surely people must live their lives in constant awe that something like it existed.
It didn’t seem real. I knew of it, I had read about it, I had seen it, on the Grail, and in my Mind-visions, and I knew that later in the afternoon it would fall behind those trees, but it was so beyond description—a ball of fire lighting the entire world!—that at some level I couldn’t accept its existence. Reading about it, seeing it on the Grail, it was just something to memorize and tell Dr. Mulgar about to prove to him I had read what he had asked me to read. I didn’t have to accept it; it was outside of my existence. But here, with it shining down on me, warming me, it was part of my existence, and since at some level I couldn’t accept the reality of it, my mind reeled. I wasn’t thinking to myself, “That ball of fire cannot exist, and therefore since without that ball of fire no life could exist, nothing here can exist, I cannot exist,” but such was the wordless direction of my thought, such was my wonder and confusion. Yet even while denying its reality in this near-unconscious way, I accepted it utterly, as well, accepted the impossible because I could see it, I was experiencing it—and accepted, thus, that nothing could be impossible, and my body welled with a sun-like blaze that gave way to a full-body tingle that didn’t just last a second or two, but remained indefinitely, mystery and magic pervading it from toe-tip to head-top.
The sky itself, above the trees and around the sun, lightest blue and striated with wisps of cloud, was so much grander, more beautiful, more vast and empty (notwithstanding the clouds), than it had seemed on the Grail that I had to blink, and blink again, in a blind attempt to get my eyes to assimilate it, or even to focus on a section of it, to see it.
“Come on,” Dr. Mulgar instructed, guiding me forward onto one of the curling paths through the yard, or garden, whatever you’d call it—the yard-garden. Dizzy, my body filled, still, with an uncontrollable tingle that vibrated through me almost from head to toe, I stumbled and fell, got up still staring at the sky, and stumbled and fell again.
“Something, eh?” Dr. Mulgar said, steadying me before I could fall a third time. I couldn’t gain my balance. I was like an infant. My heart thudded, I saw color and light, I heard insects and leaves and our footsteps, I felt the breeze caressing me, as it had when I’d first stepped, blindfolded, out of the house, I felt the skin of Dr. Mulgar’s hand against the skin of my own hand; but it all was as from a distance, another place. An odd chasm, or veil, had arisen between the reality before me and my senses. The blue endlessness and the full-body tingle were as much as my senses could handle, and everything else became peripheral. I noticed that I was walking only as a background sensation as we traversed grass and stone, came to steps, and went up them. One moment, I was beholding the yard, and the next I was on the far side of it, standing atop the curved wall that surrounded it.
From the other end of the yard, the immense trees had appeared to be right behind the wall, but in fact a span of a hundred or more steps separated the wall from the forest. Occupying that span was a wide river swift as a falcon, roaring softly, the source no doubt of the sound that I had heard and thought of as the engine of the world when we had arrived at this place.
I knew of rivers: Just as the Grail had provided me with the knowledge of the sun and of the sky, it had shown me rivers, and explained what they were, how they were formed, and so forth; yet just as with the sun and the sky, to see one in person was mind-boggling, indeed unbelievable. It, this river, completed a triumvirate, you could say, of unimaginable infinities, begun by the sun and sky. It wasn’t as overwhelmingly all-pervasive as the sky or the sun, it wasn’t everywhere, it was contained by the boundaries of shore and shore, wall and forest. Yet, perpetually moving as it was, as it rounded the trees curving out of sight, making an island out of the forest, new water coming in torrents, replacing the old water with an unending supply, and as I stood there gazing down at it (dizzy, still, Dr. Mulgar steadying me with one or both hands at all times) its soft sparkling yet powerful roar, as well as its playful and yet irresistible movement, and its spirit, both ancient and new-born, seeming to be in everything else—in the sounds of the bugs and birds, in the wind, in me—it felt to me every bit as infinite as the sky and sun. Looking at it, the full-body tingle, which had been subsiding at last, resumed, changed subtly—less dizzying, more lightening. Later, when I was back inside, my insides still felt weightless, flooded, my organs and bones replaced with something ethereal, light itself perhaps. My heart seemed to be beating at twice or three times its usual rate, yet at the same time almost not to be beating at all; and I was filled with a peaceful excitement, a tranquil ebullience. My nose and bowels were alive with a cool heat; I felt like breathing in, forever.
Thereafter, I could not be satisfied with the indoors.