Twisted Light

By Merlin Cullinan

Em, the mysterious and mischievous art maven, is at the heart of this captivating tale.

The action takes place over 24 hours, but the illusionary Em has mastered the skills of time travel, and leads us to several places at once, across different centuries. He deals in Arts with the power to influence the life and work of artists like Monet ...while dealing with hungry customers in the art world of the 21st century.

This story is about how ideas are planted, shaped and passed on to others. And just as some ideas travel faster than others ... twisted light can travel faster than normal light, according to the physicists.

When you look at something in the light, what do you see? What is it that makes you see things the way you do? Is it all simply a play on perception and perspectives? Seeds of ideas will linger to haunt you long after you've finished reading.

We follow Em's magical trail from one focused point in Portugal, across continents and through centuries, desires and dreams, real and imagined characters, all the way back to where we started.

Some say that light is simply packets of information ...like mEMes ... See how Em twists light to his advantage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Legend Press
• Release date: Oct 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781785071041

Book preview

Rumi

Headlights

We come across a man searching for new ideas, and new ways to communicate them. He may or may not be a version of Samuel Morse in a number of possible stories and parallel universes. He has a dream in which ideas are germinated and spread in intriguing ways. Light will reveal itself as a mysterious manipulator and carrier of information and knowledge.

The boat sailed on. The sea had settled into a blue calm. The man lay still in the cockpit, eyes closed, skin cooking slowly under the salt crust. No irises to divine messages. Beneath the lashes and the lids another world enacted itself, performing its own final act to an absent audience. An unexpected broach had made the beam butt his head. Il Petere had resumed a course, almost trimming herself, shaking off the spray and irritation. There would be nothing more to do until they all reached the harbour directly ahead, the dark hulled yacht and her dulled partner.

Before he had come back on deck, a simple act spoiled by time, the man had made another log entry, another marking out of place, another attempt at giving sense to passage. Was this a journey with a sense of purpose, a point? Was this a voyage with the promise of discovery the men in the Club had boasted about? The latest version of Blind Homer in a fresh light? For answers we’d need to look at the man himself, who’s in no position to answer. But look around and deduce what you can from the contents of the saloon below.

On its shelves were drawings, sketches, elements of a portfolio, the etchings and doodles and notes of a mind trying to work out a form of the mechanics of man, beast, and machine. These were interspersed with written projections about the ways things could be, things which had yet to pass, the tantalising dreams of machines altering the definitions of time and distance, the teasing notes behind scribbled formulae suggesting proofs of theories, hypotheses from different points in time and place. Was this a form of temptation? Was there anything original here?

It would still be difficult to tell, without more clues about where we might be here, at what precise moment we are in. But there’s no one to decide that for us in this picture. As soon as we imagine the way things look, they will instantly be placed, and the references on paper or papyrus, on photographic paper or digital screens, will also be locked in a time. Were there any other connections in the spread of materials around the saloon, references to Monet and Morse, images of people and events, to give a different point to all this? Was he alone, linked, officially bonded, childless, old, hairy, crazy, competent, well known, fat, preoccupied, passive, a fugitive? Some of these states could be assessed more easily than others. The information we can construct from this, it was once said, goes between the material and the abstract, the real and the ideal, a catalogue of possibilities. Was there a version of Morse, Samuel, as a portrait painter, hungering for fame, looking to close the gap between stimulation and response? And what got us to this scene in the first place? Questions. Questions. We need to see. We will never understand anything until we have found some contradictions, say the thinkers. The boat sailed on. Time to meet the commentators. See what’s going on.

~

37.0906636N 8.452921800000012W Local Time 1030

Headlights

We first meet the elusive Em in Portugal, a place that bookends action over 24 hours, and lifetimes of events in between. Aletheia Fama turns up, looking for a missing traveller in the coastal village.

The rock coloured bitch resorted to her customary tactic and sat down firmly on the sand. Each time Em had looked at the beach from the roof of the building, from his unaccompanied perspective, the animal had disdained the ardour of the local dogs. These had agreed a rotation order for courtship approaches, but every advance failed. They turned to other distractions, stealing old chicken pieces from behind a grill, dodging stones which tried to clip their ears, arriving at the ends of arcs defined by the arms of little boys, thrown from the safety of the rocks in front of the boats. The dogs barked, sniffed, acknowledged the source of their irritation. Curiosity completed, it was time for another cycle of courtship to begin, and the bitch was back in their sights.

Em had already tracked the path of the sun across two panels of a parasol. With slow blinking sluggishness he concluded he’d just witnessed the bitch’s sixth evasive action of the day, and it wasn’t yet ten in the morning.

The shutters on what he’d termed Revelry Row, up along to the right of where he was sitting, were either still locked or just having the sleep squeezed from their runners. Rising owners were preparing for the fresh day’s catch of visitors, most of them obliging with open pockets and Venetian minds.

The Portuguese refreshment was harmless enough, sitting on the table quietly sunning itself. Em’s hand swept languidly across his brow, and droplets of sweat fell into the glass, the taste enhanced. Heat and liquid fought to transform all they touched, the edges of Em’s book slowly turning translucent, limp. When the sun was tempered with the slightest of sea breezes, Em was pulled between the contents of the story and the changing presentation of the book itself.

Under the glare, the ink smelled of oil. The type lay along the page in uneven rows, its sense sublimated to the bed of letters. Sunlight threw into relief the papers’ contours, hairs and fibres a hedge for the nestling words. Em considered the form of these printed words in their minutely forested surroundings. He was reminded of the power of focus, of the magnification of his sensory receptors under sunlight. What could be done with it all? It was full of perceptual redundancy. Em liked this thought, and smiled at its pretentiousness.

This is one of the ways Em thinks. It is one of the ways Em connects. It is one of the pieces Em is a part of.

Picture. Frame, someone sitting on a white chair. It has wooden slats which induce a constant level of discomfort, a chair never experienced by its conceiver. Em is concerned to avoid casting a shadow beyond the edge of the parasol. He is fitting into the surroundings, sitting in another season’s clothes, twitching his toes in another year’s sandals, noting how time passes really slowly when there’s supposed to be only another twenty minutes to go.

On the roof of the building in the village, tucked into the rocks between two coves on the coastline, sits the creator who’s found another fickle link in literature’s fabric. Em reflected on the way he’d assembled several books of fiction randomly, read them in no predetermined way, and found the writers not only grappling with the same ideas, but cross referring to each other’s specific works and names as well. Borges kept coming back. A living thread he’d found. Was this any more than the mutual flattery of a peer group? Was it something to do with a Universal Thought? When it is a Universal Thought at hand, connections can all be different, differently constructed, differently wired. It was nothing new. It was the same as it ever was.

Em set himself another question, because it was time for that kind of titillation. What is the significance of the connections between the random works he’d been reading in the last four days? They were novels and short stories by, well, other than Borges, and maybe Davies, that’s by the by. They were all people he was acquainted with. Was Em searching for the source of a new connection? Was he forcing a different kind of connection? Why should there be a connection anyway? If there wasn’t a connection, what’s the importance of there not being one? Very philosophical, or curiosity tingling, or nothing, to carry on with these thoughts.

This was what was beginning to place him apart from the others who were within range of him. Their curiosity was much more challenged by ways of harvesting the little happiness they could from their immediate surroundings. But for every one, they were all trying to get connected in some way, somehow, to catch up with the day.

Detail. July. There is nothing in the time to help resolve Em’s self-made dilemma.

The real dilemma, hiding underneath, was in choosing how to influence the outcome of the dinner that would happen tonight. At the party, before the moment, Em moved his head slightly to counter the sun’s fractional shifting. July is a particularly good month for this place; he had heard a regular visitor say.

Em now pondered this. It was by far the easiest alternative that had presented itself to him in the last few minutes. How many times have you ever heard it said that such and such a month is the optimal time for anywhere? And, by the way, if you’re going there you must see so and so and such a one. And if you’ve been and didn’t then you should have done and must do next time. How Dickensian.

December is a particularly good time for this place he mentally mouthed to no one. It probably is too, and he wondered for a second just how different a particularly good time it would be. Assuming for now that July would have to settle for being the most propitious of times, he returned to the main menu of musings.

Below Em in the hall of the building supporting him sat groups of people at different points on a curve of experience, defined by their arrival and departure dates. The truly suffering, from Em’s point of view, were assembled like subjects from medieval visionary paintings. Ravaged by sun, food, drink, friends and relatives, they were determinedly hollow eyed. Others were standing, in twos and threes, practising different styles of distancing themselves from each other, while one or two loners moved around the whole space, untouched by events outside their own preoccupation. The atmosphere was infused with an almost collective desire for all the other spirits floating oddly over the floor to vanish, their ghostly vaudeville show as appealing as the memory of the seasickness many of them had experienced the day before on their sardine fuelled boat excursions.

From another perspective, the scene looked like one of those times shortly after a sudden natural disaster, when shock dictates behaviour, when there is a dim recognition that something has taken place, but no understanding. This, thought Em, would be how Al would see it.

Al was the one to call in for sharp observations these days, and her tongue would enjoy sprinkling these with spices from the more scatological sections of her chosen lexicon.

Al was not, in her well-practiced description, the victim of people’s distorted attitudes towards names. She was named Aletheia Fama, and the compression simply stuck as the lazy sought a way to get her attention.

Em knew her because she had worked, in a way, for him. Soon she would be taking up the baton from him on her own, since he would have other commitments. She was now helping people who wanted to travel, to see things, differently. Em had Paul tell her that she would always seek out people who craved the unusual. It was a perfect match. He called them all The Searchers. They needed to find something elusive, something not everyone else could see, and make it theirs, briefly. He knew exactly who could provide such experiences. It was easy.

Few questioned the origins of the groups he had nurtured that specialised in this domain. How would they know? In various guises they seemed to have been around for years and years. Their presence stretched into the remotest of areas, and well-seasoned travellers, latter-day adventurers and experience collectors all, appeared to have heard of, or had some friend who had used, the group’s diversely named offerings. There was a style of operation that looked silky smooth, but Em knew that even within such an ordered state there were occasional snags. There was also the need to introduce surprises. That was why Al found herself looking at the natural disaster below Em. She captured the scene in a memory fringed with fresh expletives.

She was looking for a missing traveller. This figure had gone two days before. The journey to the coast from Lisbon was feasible, and there had been the note, but the search so far had resulted in the guest still being undiscovered. There would be a reunion, but it would have to wait until the appointed time. Al made another sweep of the hall she had entered. She decided in her own terms that it was like the field station of a battleground, but before she could complete another new description for herself she was returned to reality by the crash of a pair of children who had slid across the marble floor and met the resistance of her marginally softer kneecaps.

In a moment of benign self-congratulation she realised she had just saved the angels from a more solid encounter with a closed wooden door. Then the pain made its point, and a muffled O died on her lips, the children giggling as they ran off, pittapatt, oblivious to their good fortune.

Em knew where she was, and thought she’d say something characteristically subtle like Jesus Fucking Christ watch out will you.

Imagine, he said to himself, those seven words opening a play, beginning and ending here. Imagine the scope for interpretation, for meaning, for feeling. Each word lovingly analysed and signified. Like ‘Halt! Who goes there?’ Centuries of scrutiny from scholars whose intellectual imaginings would have brought their writer not a single restless turn in their partner’s second best bed. Old Bill still snoring next to Anne.

Now there’s a place that records the patter of feet. A cottage just outside an English town, with the oven they baked their bread in, and a table shiny as a glass from the rubbings of inquisitive little fingers, hoping to draw out the past captured in its sheen. And there was the twang of the guide, intermingling fact and fiction, telling us all how small they were, the obviously little people.

Al recovered and moved towards a place that looked like it was dispensing one way tickets to hell, judging by the looks of the recipients of the pieces of paper being presented to them. She contemplated the official behind the desk, who was perfecting a style of obnoxiousness most travel books routinely describe as the behaviour of the often shy and reserved locals.

Can you tell me where Il Castillo is? She asked without an accent.

It is where you see it.

Under different circumstances Al would have been delighted to consider this Eastern promise, but today had been detailed as directness day, and this wasn’t fitting the mould.

And where might I see it? She responded, moving her vowels to within twenty miles of the official’s otherwise debatable heritage.

A finger pointed over her right shoulder, and then its connecting hand and arm withdrew with a fey flourish. Presuming the dialogue to have discontinued, the official turned to concentrate on a quaint adding device on the hotel’s reception desk, both certain and satisfied that the service so far delivered would epitomise correctness well into the next century, whenever that came along.

Out of the building, Al looked up to where the wilfully patronising finger on the end of the wilfully patronising arm had pointed.

Il Castillo was two thirds the way up a cliff edge road. It wasn’t a castle, it was a hostelry, but its clientele did appear to consist of urbane locals, the food didn’t appear to be garnished with the almost ubiquitous local sauce, and there was wine that looked like it had seen the inside of a bottle at some stage in its life.

The reason Al knew about this place was that its name, and a time that confirmed a rendezvous, had been scribbled in small letters on the back of the note the missing figure had left behind, the only indication so far of where something might turn up. Going there early wasn’t really in anticipation of an unexpected encounter with the stray traveller, more a way of confirming that for now she had married something concrete to the abstractions of the rest of the note, and she could begin to believe there might be an end to the disappearance in sight.

It wasn’t yet a matter for any sort of official authority. After all, the missing person hadn’t concealed anything, hadn’t left without any kind of trace. But Al was not used to losing people like this. Her group’s itinerary had not been planned with this diversion in mind. Things were about to change, because she was more used to finding things, rather than people. Like what was concealed in unusual packages, ancient palaces, searches in what many assumed to be long abandoned places, the things behind things. People puzzles were different. Initially she had wanted to pass off the disappearance, to stall, either by telling her group that a guest had simply left the tour for the moment, and they would continue, or by waiting just a while longer to see if the guest would make further contact, before the date specified on the note, and explain there was nothing to worry about.

But apart from the reference to Il Castillo, and the time, she had been more intrigued by the other words printed on the back of the note itself, and her curiosity had been primed enough after a couple of hours to make her excuses to the group and temporarily hand them on to another helper. She explained the need to give support to a guest who had to make an unscheduled diversion, and this was taken on trust. There was one set of sentences she kept coming back to:

Between the square and the circle the perspective lies. It is where the truth lies. The answer is not in the lines, but a line must be drawn here. There is something happening through you but the action is beyond you. You are part of the action, but you can’t see it. I can. You are apart.

In the rest of the message in a minute typeface were a couple of comments about the sunset you might see from Il Castillo, and that was it.

Having got to know about the disparu, Al realised that the riddle could, as intended, be tempting for him, in the right circumstances. What did this guest have to do, and was this just some kind of invitation, or something else? Or if not for this reader, who was the message really addressed to?

She wasn’t fond of timewasters, but she remained sufficiently sure there was a reason to find out more about the mysteriously worded message. What it was would come to light soon. She peered into the depths of the dining room, looked once more at the food described, and decided to explore other things until the evening, when she would let the riddle reveal itself.

Em, meanwhile, from his point of contemplation, had elected to let the sun resolve his dilemma about the connectivity of the books he’d been reading. He fell half asleep under it and encouraged a soft reverie served up by the rapidly rising temperature.

New kinds of connections could be made again. For now, he replayed a piece of music he had heard, behind his closed eyes, and tried to remember the positions of all the stars he’d seen as he’d sat in the same spot the previous night. He was trying to avoid the call of the street below.

This building’s principal benefit was its position. Sitting up on top of it, most of the town was screened off, the effect of the light shining up from the streets at night, or the glare from the other buildings in the day, greatly reduced by a dark water tank between himself and the raised edge. The flat roof was an ideal place for anyone with an imagination and the need for convenient access to liquids, which could be brought up stealthily from the floors below. It was easier than walking a mile along the coast road to secure an only slightly darker spot for reflection. The present reverie faded as waves of female voices subsided and Neptune the Mystic returned to its state of enigmatic quiescence at the close of his memory’s performance of The Planets Suite. Full consciousness returned to Em through the purely mundane tickling of sweat trickling over the rim of his navel.

He arose, leaving his drink to continue its basking, and entered the darkness of the building, squinting along its corridors. After four days, he’d developed a credible ritual for confounding the door lock, and was able to enter the cool sanctuary of his room unnoticed. Yesterday’s sand clung morosely to the bottom of the bathing area, and a mirror revealed a drying, bleached face. Parasols don’t do it, Em thought.

The village he was in was reaching the end of its protracted levée. Even the latest of the late attractions in the principal street was now open and ready for business again. Ready for the renewed onslaught, lobsters displayed themselves. Prices were keenly compared. Several creatures wound up embarrassingly red, vying with their consumers at the sharp end of the sunburn spectrum.

For those still in a state of transition from Bosch to beach, there was brisk business picking up in one spot, where sensitive stomachs were encouraging less sensitive senses to acclimatise to another ingestion of potent liquids. Parties not primarily driven by survival were rummaging around more solid offerings, looking for whatever it is people look for when they are far from home. There was multilingual laughter, and a general hope that all would end well, eventually.

Whether the immigrant owners of an idiosyncratic source of food at the far end of the village would concur remained unanswered. A glimpse of faces through a window only revealed a paleness disclosing the impression that somehow it was all somebody else’s fault that they came to rest here in this place of pestering sunshine.

Back on the pocket beach, with charcoal heating through, the first of another catch of fresh sardines was being readied for cremation. Il Castillo sat in torpor above the scene, contemptuous of the treats and trappings of the main street below, of its traders falling over themselves for the flighty drunks and dreamers, its unsubtle schemes and schemers.

The rock coloured bitch wandered up from the sand and gave Al’s tender knees a salty sniff. She lay down in Al’s shadow, and proceeded to scratch herself with her left rear leg. A couple of the local dogs glanced at their familiar target and decided finally to approach another prospect. A large group of people looked on the verge of completing a meal. Hefty leftovers looked promising to the four doggedly determined eyes. The bitch could wait.

A waiter cleared the rooftop table of the empty beer glass and wondered who might have left it there.

Em felt he’d got a reasonable picture. The twenty minutes had gone. Al was well on the way to the moment of conversion. On the journey we shall move from sweeps to spots, from panoramas to particles. It was time to change.

~

48.856614N 2,35222190000001777E Local Time 1830

Headlights

We move to Paris, where Paul and Arielle meet for dinner to catch up on mysterious matters of undefined consequence. It appears Portugal is also going to have a significant role to play in their lives soon.

Paul Personne had been in the French city for two days. The night he’d arrived he wasn’t surprised by the speed of the journey into the centre from its outskirts. This was the result of a combination of the quietness stemming from the city’s anticipation of the next day’s anniversary, the end of a German occupation, and the desire of his driver to maintain a high ranking in the secret drivers’ hall of fame, where speed limits were never to be touched, even tangentially. This man would go far, though his grasp of the physical limitations of his mode of transport appeared to be weak. The driving feat would have brought home a Grand Prix in the nineteen thirties, and Paul wondered whether it was all really for the benefit of the driver’s alert yet reticent companion, an Alsatian dog of confident proportions.

Paul, on this journey, was treated to the transport provider’s philanthropic lecture on the state of his country’s government, the accidentally unfortunate and only recently marred record of his local football club, and the current argot for his fellow drivers’ collective absence of the driving skills he so manifestly believed he himself demonstrated. Sacré Coeur, cooed Paul. That meant only another three miles, or two minutes, to the welcoming site of his Parisian refuge.

Over a customary drink, he sighed at his intact state, perused a newspaper, and thought about the coming hours, which were almost all to be his. Not that