54 Big Bang: return of the giant ship
Seven o'clock in the studio, and Rik installs us in our places, in our accustomed black: she hidden in her tiny cupboard of a sound booth, and I on my tall seat. With Evelyn's assistance he runs through his customary last-minute technical tests, some of which involve technicalities I don't understand but whose occurrence I look forward to and actively savour, for the incomparable rush of imminent performance that they herald. Since we have already laid down Big Bang's opening instalment yesterday in the form of our song of death, today's short second instalment requires no tension-building lead-up from a dark stadium with just a silhouette of me, but will instead plunge us straight back into the midst of our trip. This time, therefore, the lights around the three angled cameras are already shining straight at my face. As when on stage between spotlights and footlights, I can thus see little of what is in front of me, beyond the light that fills the air itself and picks up tiny dust motes. On a level with my eyes I can just about make out those three all-important black circles which, it is to be hoped, can see me about a thousand times more clearly than I can see them: I decide to take it on trust that Rik has remembered to take off the lens-caps... "What are you grinning about?" Alaia's voice breaks in gently from the sound booth, and I recall that she has a high-definition monitor right in front of her displaying every flicker in my face: she must have seen something related to my reflection just now about Rik's taking the lens-caps off. "Yes, don't forget I have a monitor in here," she says... So she saw that as well! I wonder whether I am really that transparent?... "Yes, you're that transparent," she replies.
I laugh aloud. "OK, you in the airing cupboard there, so let's keep up that level of attentiveness to me. We need to keep on dancing toe to toe, here. D'you think you can keep up?"
There's a snort from the sound booth: "Honey-buns," she says, "the question is, can you keep up with me? My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard, but d'you have the stamina, babe? You got the wing-span to fly with the eagles? We'll see, sugar."
"Bring it on, baby," I reply, "bring it on."
"I do love your work, Jaymi, my petal—love your work."
"Love your work too, pumpkin." (This kind of trash-talking is something we used to slip into in the rehearsal studios in New York, in what now feels like a former life. I'd forgotten it, but it's lovely to be picked up unexpectedly by it and just carried along.) "So, to confirm we're in sync, my sweet: when we wrapped up here last time, I believe we'd just got to where you sloped away a sudden hundred miles to a cavern where a different moon sets, pale and vast above a tiny crash of waves, and majestically you vanished—right?"
"Yes we did, my love," she says, and an electric surge of warmth suffuses me. No doubt seeing this surge through one of the cameras or on his own monitor, the unseen Rik, somewhere beyond the lenses ahead of me, begins his countdown from ten. This is not what was promised; there was meant to be a tad more dialogue and a few minutes of focusing before the countdown, as there was yesterday. But he's spot-on in his decision to throw us into the deep end: my exchange with Alaia had just the energy that I require to summon up the return of the giant ship, and that she requires in order to follow me. Oh, he's good, he is—like Jason said he was.
OK, now it's easy, bring it on. The countdown ends. From my eyes I feel the pull of photons streaming, turning digital in camera and shooting out to north, south, east and west through the air across the sky around the world. Every single viewer then is off alone, town to town, continent to continent: through the slums of Rio or beneath the Arctic Ocean, to their own bright heaven or their own torture chamber. What I myself believe in, while they're drowning in this gaze, they cannot know. The make-up round my gaze is bright and sharp and rich as amber, while the gaze, cold-blooded as an angelfish, flutters cool and alien. The combination deifies and makes of me an icon on the screen—a creature born of exquisite light, inaccessible, a fever dream beamed from the most elite suites of the airwaves.
Meanwhile Alaia's voice is like electric music spilling out through my eyes in all directions, rich and unstoppable. Gleaming machinery unfurls from this gaze, to fill the stadium. Note by indefatigable note, I unfurl it, adding to this city of machinery—silver insulator-cones, glass wires, pylons of platinum and red pipes pumping in an everlasting symphony of movement. I swirl around amongst it, come upon a porthole, stand in it with hands and feet splayed within its circle, and peer down. Underneath me are the outside walls of the great ship I conjured up in Sound & Vision. West across the ocean, the sun presses down in a wet sprawl of sunset and sinks through a giant hole of liquefied red; while thousands of miles underneath this, the Burma Lagoon bubbles silently and twinkles at the pale scintillation of dawn on its surface.
I climb to the ship's highest bridge, raise my arms and dance, slow and stately, by myself. I'm nearly home now, alone—away from the noise and exhaustion of people. There's space above my head going upward forever, and beneath the ship's keel, ocean depths. In blissful liberation of aloneness I shout, across the scarlet-flashing surface of the grand Pacific plains stretching radiant for thousands of miles in all directions. I shout aloud to no one in the night, from my tanker's bridge, and yes—I'm almost home, away from Earth, away from life, and bound for better, higher, cleaner planes of empty nothingness forever! Oh, bliss of death and sweet dissolution, at last...
Before I say goodbye, though, I'll take a final jaunt in the rowboat and trail my hands one last time in the waters of this small green planet. So I work the oars and strike out on black twinkling wavelets under stars, in the rowboat, for two solid hours, till the ship is just a hyphen floating free on the horizon. I pull the oars in, lie back, get comfortable and listen to the water's slosh and sway against my boat's wooden sides. A dragonfly flicks in lazy arcs across my vision. The hyphen's tiny lights shimmer subtly, when I turn my head to face the right; but over on the left, just the ocean shines, out from this boat to the edges of the world where it leaps into nothing at the calm black horizon.
I reach in my pocket for my matchbox, and sniff the soft air—salt water and the scent of unseen harmonies. I strike a match, let it flare, hold it up, then toss it out from the rowboat. It curves up and out and down, as if in slow-motion. Where it breaks the water, there erupts a soundless plume of pale flame rising curling, swaying, higher up, and higher still: although its root remains here, its tip rises in a rocket path, to lick the highest stratosphere. This signal meets the gaze of that mountain up on Mars whose side-lit contours form a face that stares across at us—you know the one. I move the boat towards the flame's root. The face winks and smiles, with an eyelid volcano and an earthquake of the mouth. Leaning from the rowboat, I whisper my reply by the flame's root. It sends my whisper upward, all the way; then the flame demurely falls, from the upper stratosphere to a point beside my rowboat, and vanishes at once with a gurgle and a puff, sending out concentric ripples through the slick black water where it fell. I breathe the night, thrilled to be escaping from the world so soon, and thrilled that my last conversation here possessed the scale and grandeur that it should have done. I take up the oars again and row at leisure, back to the beacons of the hyphen ship floating at the shiny black horizon, for two solid hours; and I climb aboard.
The aperture in each of the three lenses shrinks to a pinpoint, then disappears.
---------
For some nice reviews and interviews about The Imagination Thief, in The Guardian and elsewhere, see http://www.rohanquine.com/press-media/the-imagination-thief-reviews-media/
For a quick synopsis of it, see http://www.rohanquine.com/home-the-imagination-thief-novel/synopsis-and-characters-list-the-imagination-thief/
For the 12 Films in The Imagination Thief, see http://www.rohanquine.com/video-books-films/12-films/
For the Audio-book version and the Video-book version of each of its 120 mini-chapters, see http://www.rohanquine.com/home-the-imagination-thief-novel/audiobook-tumblr-wattpad/
For links to the retailers, see http://www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-imagination-thief-novel-ebook/ and http://www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-imagination-thief-novel-paperback/
And for its Amazon pages, see http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Imagination-Thief/dp/0992754909 and http://www.amazon.com/The-Imagination-Thief/dp/0992754909
The Imagination Thief is about a web of secrets, triggered by the stealing and copying of people's imaginations and memories. It's about the magic that can be conjured up by images of people, in imagination or on film; the split between beauty and happiness in the world; and the allure of various kinds of power. It celebrates some of the most extreme possibilities of human imagination, personality and language, exploring the darkest and brightest flavours of beauty living in our minds.