Fantastic Metropolis

‘Remember when you were young and I told you how there was no life without fire, how Prometheus had stolen fire from the gods, how fire comes from the sun, so all life comes also from the sun? Men had sought the secret of fire through the centuries, and long long before they understood it, they knew how to make it. Men can usually do things before they understand what they are doing.

‘Air they thought an element, something indivisible into any smaller components than itself. It was the great Lavoisier who discovered it was a composite. He dispensed with the imaginary—he got rid of phlogiston. He realised that when phosphorus burned, it married the air. That was why the resulting acid was heavier than the original material before the fire. Up to that time, everyone had thought when something burned, it merely fell apart, disintegrated into bits of something simpler. Now they came to understand that when it burned, it became even more complex than before. Phosphoric acid is richer in complexity than phosphorus itself.

‘Now once we could understand oxygen, we could understand fire, for at last we were separating the world into its true colours, and we started to build up our table of the elements. Now we could read for the first time the world’s signature.’

His face had become bright by now, and I knew the source of that illumination. I know where the dead lights live. I watch them as they circle me each night. Osiris had taught me the secret of the hieroglyphs, and enough of his own tongue that I could understand him when he spoke. The demons wear masks of flesh and dress themselves in kindly laughter.

We ate at the Ship Inn that evening and I prevailed upon him to continue.

‘Imagine, Richard, the shock the world felt to learn that the four fundamental elements acknowledged since antiquity, earth, water, fire and air, were in truth all compounds. Even water, that homogeneous and transparent substance, turns out to be a compound, an invisible complexity. The scientists had to learn to separate and measure, to see water but to discover deep at the heart of it hydrogen and oxygen. And fire was a process, an intermarriage between things of a dissimilar nature, a miscegenation breeding hybrids.’

The god was angry that what he had put together in such flames of love and hatred should be divorced in this way by men with glass flasks and retorts, holding up their paltry scales to the one great eye of the sun. And the evening sun now started to settle its gold rays on my father’s affable features through the window, focussing at last. A walk outside, I suggested. Why not a gentle stroll amongst those signatures?

‘Geology is simply another way of reading the matter at hand,’ my father continued as we walked. ‘Many of the formations about here originate in the cretaceous period. The surfaces of earth are like ancient languages,’—he actually said this, as though I still needed any further sign—‘waiting for us to come and decode them. We are surrounded by the mute script of the inanimate world.’

Inanimate! Not a diplomatic word to use before a mighty god and his creation. I took the spring knife from my pocket and jumped upon my father. No Richard, no, he shouted, fear lighting his eyes finally with the one true flame. Their greatest disguise is kindness. The old man was stronger than I had expected, though, and protected his throat with some vigour. It was the throat I was directed to, for I had already made countless drawings of all my relatives with their throats cut, opened for the spirit to enter, but despite my clawing and my kicking and my slaps I could not release his grasp. And so, failing my instructions in this one respect, I merely stabbed and stabbed and stabbed again. Stomach, groin, breast, thigh. The blade plunged and the wounds spurted, then another patch of flesh appeared for severing, and all the time his whimpering entreaties. No, Richard, no. Arteries gushed like little crimson springs. I could smell the sweetness of his blood upon me. Then he who had tried to steal the name of father finally lay still, with no more words tripping from his tongue. The sun licked his new red trophies and fell silent too.

From thence to France, where my razor nearly did find a throat to enter. And then asylum years began. Which, they tell me, will not end, for it seems that I must leave here dressed in pinewood.

I try to explain to the doctor but he has an omnicompetent smile too, and cannot see them all around as I can. Sometimes tiny, sometimes huge. They can block out the whole sky at night or creep like bacteria with shrivelled wings into the orifices of your own body, waiting there, preparing the machines of torture. My visitations.

Intermittently the pharmacopia: they sink a rainbow in your blood and dry out for one afternoon the ceaseless grieving drizzle in your soul.

They are filing out now to the green yards but today I shall stay here. I lift this tiny brush and permit my hand to make the immense journey through the air towards the picture. Already that lady’s breasts are huge and pointing to a different purpose than the one she keeps her face for. There is a gigantic calcium deception trapped inside her bodice. Already the patriarch is half-blind with the shadows of his years. I painted so often the figures of that lost time of translation in the forest, with Oberon and Titania: so quick bright things come to confusion. They turn the witching night to tinsel for their window decorations.

The daisies’ brilliant faces are exploding into wisdom. Watch now as the fairy feller brings his axe down on the hazelnut. If he splits it the first time, how many new worlds do you think will fly out? And am I to be left here alone again to witness them?

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“Richard Dadd in Bedlam” by Alan Wall appears in his fiction collection Richard Dadd in Bedlam and Other Stories (Vintage, 2000).