Things in Heaven and Earth

By Merritt Abrash

Floating bricks poetically changing color? The authentic deed to Londons St. Pauls Cathedral for sale at a street market? A mini-nebula transported in a fish-and-chips bag? British Telephones most darling operator enmeshed in the Eternal Wheels inexorable circuit? All these and more events fill one week for Winslow, who descends each morning from the north balcony of Liverpool Street Station into a surreal London. His many journeys on the Underground confront him with a bewildering assortment of troublesome passengers, bishops, engineers, agitators, enforcers and formidable matrons, along with the exasperating spirit of Descartes and the mockery of an unsyrnpathtic Deity. All concludes to Winslows satisfaction, however, with Liverpool Street Station created anew under his admirably humanistic ordering.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Dec 31, 2008
• ISBN: 9781463467456

Merritt Abrash

Merritt Abrash was well positioned to write Absurdist Angles on History: Three Plays, thanks to a background in both history and playwriting. His historical expertise centers on areas receiving absurdist treatment in the first two plays: nineteenth century Europe, and the First World War. The third play, “How It All Might Have Ended,” – about nuclear catastrophe – was professionally produced at the Berkshire Theatre Festival under the title “Postscript.” Abrash, a former fellow at the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, has written on art history, utopian studies and science fiction as well as diplomatic history. Since retiring from teaching, he has published a novel, Mindful of Utopia, with 1stBooks Library.

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Things In

Heaven and Earth

Merritt Abrash

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© 2008 Merritt Abrash. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 12/29/2008

ISBN: 978-1-4389-1822-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4634-6745-6 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

I

This, Winslow mused, is a puzzler. He imagined it framed as a question: how can the bricks in the walls be changing from tan to red? Or,

How can bricks

Change wall

From tan to red? Or,

How

Change tan bricks

Red?

So that’s what happens, he thought. Shorten prose enough and it becomes poetry. He debated whether to enter this revelatory insight under P for poetry or P for prose. A coin toss settled on P for poetry. He proceeded to file accordingly, but the puzzle of tannish morphing into reddish remained unsolved. Perhaps the becoming is autumnal? Yes, that must be it. The bricks are changing to an autumnally appropriate shade, assuming, he cautioned, that it is, in fact, currently autumn.

A brick broke into Winslow’s brooding by wedging out of the wall and floating lazily-leaflike downward. He watched it drift to the floor. When he looked up again, showers of bricks were descending in leisurely spirals. Soon nothing was left of the walls except supports and braces. He had barely begun deliberating whether the balcony on which he stood was safe, when a pack of janitors emerged below with shovels and long brooms. They used the brooms to sweep the bricks into piles and the shovels to fling them up at the walls, which rapidly recomposed.

Winslow was filled with admiration for such janitorial dexterity. He thought it only right to compliment the superb flinging, but before he could do so the janitors had retreated as quickly as earlier come forward. He looked around for someone with whom to evaluate the significance of this singular sequence. No one was near, so he deposited money into a public phone and pushed the button for Operator.

Yes, sir? an operator inquired in a sweet voice. How pretty she must be! thought Winslow.

I’ve just been watching the janitors, he said. Could you tell me what season this is?

Why, it is autumn, sir.

And could you tell me where I am? he asked with some hesitation, fearful lest the intimacy of the inquiry offend her.

On the north balcony at Liverpool Street Station, sir, she replied with a hint of kindly concern.

At Liverpool Street Station, in the autumn! Information others might keep classified, he reflected, yet freely granted by this lovely girl. You’ve been so movingly helpful, Operator, that I take the liberty of beseeching you to fulfill my dearest dream by straightway joining me here.

Why, of course, sir. As soon as I’ve plugged Capetown into Irkutsk. Her smile as she disconnected was so thrilling he hardly knew how he could survive waiting for her. Compared to such an ordeal, deciphering changeling bricks was child’s play. Operator, so darling, so pretty, and on her way to him! She alone perdurably consequential, of the millions traversing the station for untold generations! Winslow leaned over the balcony railing and looked below. There were masses moving in every direction, manifesting willful mindlessness. But, candor compelled him to note, they looked not at all like ants in a hill, or microorganisms in a Petrie dish, or molecules under a microscope. He grittily fended off similes and metaphors assailing him on all sides. The people below were no more and no less than what they were, just as bricks had proven to be no more and no less than autumn leaves.

And even as he stared, a noticeable slowing of movement made the swarm below still less like those of the traditional model. Signs of stress infiltrated its advance from the multitudes of Point A to the infinitudes of Point B. Many of its myriad legs could be observed pumping with increasing difficulty. So, Winslow thought, time hereabouts shows signs of slowing, doubtless an equivalizing reaction engendered by the eagerness of my waiting. Action, quickly, before hope itself comes to a halt! He hurriedly put more money in the phone and pushed the button for Operator.

A man answered. Yes, sir?

Has the pretty Operator I was speaking to left?

Indeed, sir, immediately after you called.

But she has not arrived!

An obstruction, perhaps, between here and Liverpool Street Station.

An obstruction, on British Rail? On the London Underground? On every approach? Winslow asked with slashing skepticism.

It may be, sir, was the unperturbed rejoinder, that she took a route beyond the company’s awareness. However, the records clearly inform that the operator departed with the sincere intention of fulfilling a relationship momentous for both of you.

Winslow was relieved. He hung up the phone and gazed at the train schedule board. Each row began with a number, except for one reading Express for Operators. So that’s where she is, he exulted in the nanointerval before the truth dawned that he had not the slightest idea whether express meant instantly, very soon, or ten yards ahead of the local. Perhaps, he hoped in desperation, the morass of uncertainties will be diverted if I immerse myself in a newspaper until Operator’s arrival.

The day’s papers were on racks at the news agent’s stand. Winslow wondered whether the Daily Smash or the Afternoon Usual would pass the time more quickly. As he removed a copy of the Afternoon Usual, from the train shed came the sound of trains traveling safely at prescribed speeds. That held little promise as distraction. He replaced the Afternoon Usual and unfolded a Daily Smash. The entire front page was taken up by a ghastly photograph of a horrendous train wreck, and from the near distance Winslow heard a mountainous sound of metal colliding and huge objects toppling. Before he could turn to page 2 and read the assuredly appalling story, a distraught trainman with begrimed face came in from the platforms. What is all that noise? Winslow called down to him.

A horrendous crash! answered the trainman, raising a face contorted with impotent grief. Passengers lying about dead and injured, a sight to congeal the blood! And most piteous of all, among the dying an operator, a delightful girl, saying in a fadingly sweet voice that she was on her way to the man with whom she was to fulfill her fondest fantasies!

Winslow’s breath caught in his throat. Was she pretty? he asked falteringly.

As pretty an operator as was ever staffed, making yet more poignant the awful tragedy of her fate. But, he cautioned, alerted by tears poised to plunge down Winslow’s cheeks, there were, evenhandedness requires it to be noted, other tales as sad as hers. Men, women and children— Winslow shut his ears to the trainman’s caveats, preferring to be left alone to dwell on Operator whom he would now never know, the only vestige of their dreamt delights his sacred duty to preserve her memory against the creeping decomposifying effect of locomotive entropy itself.

He grasped the balcony railing and sonorously addressed the multitude below. We will observe a minute of silence in commemoration of Operator, so cruelly plucked from our midst. All the travelers stopped where they were. Men took off their hats and women wiped tears from their eyes. Children ceased their silliness and grew more mature. Seconds went by in an orderly way, until suddenly a hostile voice challenged, How will we know when the minute has come to an end?

You will be so informed by me, said Winslow solemnly.

"How will you know?" asked a yet ruder voice.

By keeping faithful track, said Winslow, unshakable in pursuit of his bounden duty.

How can you do that? a third cried out in deep despair. Don’t you see that the clocks are running slow?

Winslow held up an imperious hand. I serve as clock for you all. The throb of my blood and regularity of my breath bring to my consciousness elemental echoes of the cosmic rhythms of immutable time. The questioners, awed, subsided. Seconds continued to pass until breath and blood throbbed fulfillment of a minute. He curled his hands around his mouth and sounded a plaintive bugle blast, signaling the world below to resume.

He felt keen satisfaction, tinged with somberness though it was, at having inspired mass tribute to the pretty Operator. Of course, it was impossible for the travelers to appreciate the full sublimity of her reality. Actually, he corrected himself, of her ethereality. Yes, that was it, the very word, ethereality! It fronted his mind like a beacon, capable, if viewed without fear or favor, of illuminating the human condition through its humanistic ubiquity. How fortunate, he murmured to himself, that every word has its own meaning!

On the station floor his words were repeated in a stately surge of men’s voices deep, women’s bold, children’s eager. A declamation rose once and again, Fortunate, fortunate, fortunate that every word has its own meaning! Travelers from everywhere in the station advanced toward Winslow. We bring you all our words, they cried out with deep emotionality, crowding into the space directly below and depositing words in a pile soon reaching to balcony level. He marveled at how the world upwelled through the pile, words dancing alluringly before his enthralled mind. In joyous wonderment he reached over the railing and seized words from the tower’s top. First came but, followed by these and are and only and words. His brows knit in apprehension of sinister subtexts lurking behind these artless words. Hastily he thrust them back on the pile, which with a cacophonous roar collapsed under their incorporeal substance and splintered into jangling reverberations from the station walls. Travelers rushed to and fro frantically retrieving words and listening to be sure they had recaptured their own. At last all were back where they had started, clutching their accustomed words, and Winslow could breathe easily amidst the restabilization of the universe.

Nevertheless, he noted with alarm, the cat is out of the bag. Words are only words, façades obscuring reality, true grounding elsewhere, the quiddity obscurely beyond. In the midst of his mulling, a philosopher of modish premodernity muscled into his mind too suddenly to be unthought. Nothing more need be known, the uninvited presence declaimed, than that cogito, ergo sum. That must be Descartes, Winslow realized. Indeed, verified Rene, I think, therefore I am, condescendingly translating his mantra into English in case the consciousness which had incautiously summoned him lacked classical training.

But Winslow was not so easily outmetaphysicized. Those are mere epistemological acrobatics, he informed Descartes with a dismissive snap of his mental fingers. Was the sixteenth century really so simpleminded? In truth, he expected better of the French. A person could just as justly say, "I think, therefore I am not!" One cannot be aware one is not unless one thinks the thought, therefore, if one’s truth is that one is not, one is necessarily thinking it. If not able to think not, one cannot be thinking am, either. Descartes retreated in vertiginous confusion while Winslow, satisfied with his foray into the fundamentals of human existence, started down the stairs as the start of the pilgrimage which would bring his revelation to the grateful attention of all humankind.

But no sooner did he set foot on the station floor than he was accosted by a stately woman in the elegant garb of a bygone age. My family is compelled to flee to Varennes! she exclaimed. They await on the platform. What train will get us there, sirrah? Speak up!

Winslow studied the schedule board and made an apologetic report. A trip to Varennes requires changes of train, as well as a brief swim where a crossing is under repair.

What? We are to encounter delays in our flight? Why, that is just what they may be hoping we do!

Who are ‘they’, if I may so ask? he asked.

The woman threw back her exquisitely refined head with a mirthless laugh. It would hardly suit them to let us know, would it, after all! You will take my well-bred word for it that they might be anywhere between here and Varennes, waiting breathlessly to seize and return us to imprisonment at the hands of the swinish multitude. Find us a through train, varlet! I insist!

Winslow dutifully reviewed the board but found no change in its stark message. Be assured, milady he assured her with utmost conciliatory intent, the Directors will hear from me about the discommoding inadequacies of service to Varennes! For now, however, it would be wise for you to buy tickets for the next train in the appropriate general direction.

Buy tickets? Expose our identity to whomsoever may be watching? Winslow writhed under the lash of her displeasure. Here, she said, reaching into her regally embroidered handbag, "is money with which you will buy the tickets, and bring them to me as I watch from a prudent distance!"

She moved off to one side while he hurried to comply, thrusting her money under the ticket wicket, and ordering, Family to Varennes, one way, please.

The agent frowned. Those transfers and switchbacks take a lot of time, buddy!

Winslow raised himself to his most prepossessing height. "It is in the name de le roi, you fool! he hissed even without sibilants. You need expect no preferment at Court if you fail to execute this commission tout de suite!" As the agent set cringingly to work, Winslow glanced toward the woman presumed to be watching from a prudent distance. But why was she was speaking into a public phone instead?

The tickets were soon ready. He paid for them, but before he could move to deliver them, a squad of burly men approached. They must be the they of whom the woman spoke, he realized, and they have come to seize her just as she feared. Betrayal of so genteel a woman grieved him deeply. And betrayed by whom, he wondered? The ticket agent? A spy elsewhere in the station? Or perhaps—a thought stabbing him to the quick—a clue he himself had inadvertently dropped? He prepared himself for the soul-sickening spectacle of raw injustice violating delicate innocence.

But instead of moving on to the woman, the squad stopped in front of Winslow and spread out to surround him. Burly men seized his arms and inquired rudely about whom he was buying tickets for. His frank and honest explanation about the family’s trip to Varennes aroused only scorn and contempt. It so happens, said the leader of the squad, that an anonymous woman of attested integrity just telephoned to say that a man matching your description in every detail could be found buying tickets to a place no one has ever traveled to from Liverpool Street Station! Not only that, he continued, exchanging knowing winks with his comrades, she assured us you would try to evade justice with an explanation deserving only of derisive laughter. The entire squad laughed derisively. Winslow desperately looked around for the elegant woman who alone could verify his story, which actually was rather implausible now that he thought about it, but she was no longer to be seen. O fickle grand dame, he thought miserably. How I miss my faithful Operator!

The squad marched him away. Where are we going? he asked. To the Institution for Chronic Simpletons and the Congenitally Disobedient, he was told, where the likes of you belong! Winslow’s only comfort in this disquieting turn of events was the prospect of finding himself in a setting tranquil with trees and grass and gamboling farm animals, the kind of place where public institutions serving the troubled were ideally located. But the Institution for Chronic Simpletons and the Congenitally Disobedient proved to be situated only in a few cramped rooms off the station balcony. The burly men marched him through the entrance, under a handsomely carved pediment on which Congenitally was misspelled. He was thrust before a cold-eyed woman of tempting yet perilous allure whom they addressed as Matron.

Is he a simpleton or disobedient? she asked curtly. I am neither, Winslow interrupted testily, I am a responsible citizen over twenty-one years of age and demand that my rights be respected! We will see about your so-called rights, Matron articulated in scornful accents, pausing to dismiss the burly men. That will come later, however, since your fellow residents are about to leave on an outing.

An outing for the residents! So perhaps, Winslow thought, he would have trees, grass and gamboling farm animals after all. But he was disappointed anew to find that the outing would be only to the British Rail and Underground platforms right there in Liverpool Street Station. Furthermore, it soon became clear that Matron referred to residents only to deceive social science research infiltrators, when in fact the proper designation was inmates. Come along now, she ordered, snapping open the door lock by trilling a musically coded Open sesame! in its direction.

Informing her charges that, There is a great deal to be learned today, she herded them out of the Institution and down the station stairs. All descended to the train shed, where a train crew, preoccupied with masticating sandwiches abounding in cucumber and watercress, indifferently explained how trains worked. The simpleton half of their audience listened open-mouthed in bewildered non-comprehension, while the disobedient half dashed down the platforms seeking opportunities for sabotage.

Winslow chose to remain aloof from both listeners and dashers. Matron approached him announcing, We are going to ride the Underground to West Brompton. He was instantly suspicious, since West Brompton was best known for its large cemetery. Highgate, she continued, enjoying his evident unease, is an equivalent possibility. An even larger cemetery, he realized with a quiver of alarm. A further alternative, she continued with unbridled impishness, would be Kensal Green! The largest cemetery of all, he thought on the near edge of panic. Flailing about for a life-preserving alternative, he proposed Why not an excursion to Moorgate? as if it were the most natural notion in the world. How thrilling that would be for we residents!

Matron eyed him icily, hardly to be taken in by either his questionable grammar or the pallid concept of traveling a mere one stop away, to a station notoriously lacking in cemeteries. There is little to be learned at Moorgate, she reproved him. Having duly engaged in democratic consultation, I hereby declare West Brompton to be—the winnah!

Ignoring Winslow’s congeries of extreme stress symptoms, she assembled the inmates and led them down escalators to the Central Line. They were sternly commanded to cover their eyes against the suggestive theatre posters on both sides. Winslow peeked between his fingers and made mental notes about the performances he would attend when released from the Institution. But that might be years off, he realized, at which time none of these performances might be available. He accordingly attached a protocol to the previous mental note, mandating a return to the escalator years off to see what performances were being offered then.

The inmates boarded the Central Line train. The chronic simpletons gazed through the windows in wonderment at walls rushing past, while the congenitally disobedient placed whoopee cushions on empty seats. Notting Hill Gate was where they would transfer on the way to West Brompton, but how much more interesting, Winslow thought, other stations along the way might be. Detraining against Matron’s wishes was surely out of the question, however, and he resigned himself to mere observation of the boarders at each stop. At Bank, these were only low-ranking clerks carrying baskets of banknotes, but at St. Paul’s, the Bishop of London entered with his Pharisitical Retinue. The Bishop, fully accoutered in ecclesiastical regalia, lost no time in skillfully wielding his crosier to deter the disobedients away from further whoopee cushion placement. Do not violate the Commandment, he declaimed, ’Thou shalt not provoke gross noises in the Underground!’

Winslow could not recall that particular Commandment. Is that the original King James translation, Your Grace? he asked brightly, thinking what a feather in his cap it would be to engage in theological discussion with the Bishop of London. But Bishop ignored him, concentrating instead upon settling his sanctified bulk onto one of the cushions. The disobedients grinned expectantly, but the only noise emitted by the cushion was a short paragraph from the Apologia ecclesiae Anglicanae.

Winslow persevered in his attempt to converse with Bishop. Where are you headed on the Central Line, Your Eminence?

My presence is awaited at a burial service in West Brompton.

My destination as well, interjected Matron. The cemetery there provides a meaningful educational experience for chronic simpletons.

Indeed, agreed Bishop, and would be even more so if experienced in conjunction with profundities of the sort with which I illuminate birth, death and the marginalia in the middle.

I scent a symbiosis, said Matron, batting her eyelashes with the chaste coquetry suitable for converse with a Bishop, with both of us seeking to propound enlightenment in darkest West Brompton. Should we not merge our intentions in the interests of uplift?

What she is careful not to say, Your Profundity, Winslow interrupted maliciously, is that to her brood of congenital disobedients, your utterances will offer mere entertainment tending toward outright hilarity!

Bishop looked down his nose at both Winslow and Matron. Neither education not entertainment is at issue in my cemetery orations, my children, he orated, but only the destiny of immortal souls! All the inmates, overhearing, instantly stopped what they were doing and clustered attentively at Bishop’s knee. You may wonder, he addressed them in shepherd mode, why we bury the deceased instead of leaving them where they fall. Simpletons and disobedients stared at each other, having never wondered any such thing. It is because, O innocent ones, (the simpletons responding with gratefully beatific smiles while the disobedients farted derisively) the confusion endemic to the day of resurrection will be considerably simplified if the resurrectees are gathered in a discrete number of specific locations. The inmates squealed in enlightenment.

Winslow felt compelled to raise a sensitive point. What about ashes in urns on mantelpieces? he asked.

Bishop curled his lip in priestly distaste, then seized a megaphone from one of the Retinue and addressed his co-travelers. Satan has dispatched an emissary into our midst! he thundered. A wave of terror lapped up and down the car. The Retinue leapt to their feet, singing savage hymns to the Lord, and advanced on Winslow from all sides. With presence of mind honed by the desperate conditions of human existence in this vale of tears, he seized the crosier from Bishop and a rolled-up copy of Metro from the floor and formed then into a crucifix thrust boldly into his attackers’ faces. As a backup in case of cross malfunction, he dictated at high speed the twenty-six paragraphs of his last will and testament into the ear of the nearest inmate, unaware that the recipient relied upon was severely mnemonically challenged. The precaution was in any case superfluous, since the Retinue, crucifix-transfixed, slunk back in unhallowed disarray. Winslow triumphantly tucked away his spiritual trajectile for use during the next Show and Tell at the Institution.

He reseated himself and was just dozing off when a scruffy fellow carrying a large object boarded the car at Marble Arch. The object unfolded into a portable lectern, behind which the man stationed himself in lecture mode. As we stand here at the Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, my friends— he began, only to have Winslow interrupt with This isn’t Hyde Park, having first glanced out the window just in case.

It is by extension, mate. Wherever worldwide a speaker reveals the iniquities of institutions, there is Speaker’s Corner.

Are you referring to any institution in particular? asked Winslow, choosing to put aside locational implausibilities in hopes of eliciting informed criticism of the Institution at hand.

One of the very worst, replied Speaker passionately, gripping the lectern in a fierce dudgeonish chokehold. The Institution for Chronic Simpletons and the Congenitally Disobedient, more inhuman even than hypocrisy’s ancestral abode, the Anglican Church!

Seize him! Bishop ordered the Retinue.

Remove him from the train at once! added Matron. Winslow wondered how, even if seized, Speaker could be removed at once, since the train was between stations. But he reckoned without Bishop’s wizardly gestures springing open the doors as the train slowed at Queensway station. The Retinue promptly thrust Speaker and his lectern out into the rainstorm just then drenching the end of the platform. Winslow experienced empathetic dampness in consequence of Speaker’s plight, but speedily dried off when he saw the lectern adroitly reversed into a beach umbrella.

So much for Speaker, but his bold words did not fail to leave their mark on Winslow’s emerging sensibilities. Arriving at Notting Hill Gate, Bishop, Matron and their followers left the train, climbing stairs and traversing corridors to the escalators. From the escalators they went through more corridors to the District Line platform. As they waited there, Winslow was struck by a thought he was sure would impress Bishop. This underground way-wending through claustrophobic tunnels and up stairs is sort of analogous to traveling in Hell, don’t you think, Your Illustrious?

Far from being impressed, Bishop pinioned Winslow with a stern rebuke. You have evidently not been studying your sacred texts, O impious imp! Tunnels in Hades have neither lights nor handrails, nor can one go up stairs since their direction is exclusively downward, just as stairs to Heaven go exclusively upward. I might add, parenthetically, that we need not concern ourselves with escalators, since they are not to be found below the highest reaches of Purgatory.

But, Winslow persisted, even in Hades, one can go up the same stairs that go down, can one not?

The severity of censure intensified. "No, one can not, my horrifying heretic ab initio! In Hades stairs go only down!"

Winslow pondered this as they boarded the train to Earl’s Court. Given the irreversibility of directionality as a given, he said cautiously, does that not mean there were no stairs on which the fallen angels could descend from Heaven when expelled?

Bishop could scarcely control his wrath. It will hardly be your destiny to find any fact whatsoever about Heaven, my doom-destined Deity-damned disbeliever! Winslow had to