The Sleep Corporation

By Douglas Thompson

By turns wistful, haunting and macabre, 'The Sleep Corporation' is a major collection of thirty-one stories by Douglas Thompson, a self-proclaimed 'Glasgow Surrealist' and one of the most original and individual voices to have emerged in the field of British speculative and dark fiction over the last fifteen years. "Thompson is a short story writer and novelist of almost unparalleled skill. This is an extraordinarily gifted writer whose lines are infused with poetry" Charles Packer - Sci Fi Online

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Nov 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781326467036

Douglas Thompson

Douglas Thompson is the bestselling author of more than twenty books. A biographer, broadcaster and international journalist, he is a regular contributor to major newspapers and magazines worldwide. His books, published in a dozen languages, include the television based anthology Hollywood People and top ten biographies. He divides his time between Los Angeles and London.

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The Sleep Corporation

tHE SLEEP CORPORAtION

tHE SLEEP CORPORAtION

tHE COLLECtED SHORt StORIES OF

DOUGLAS tHOMPSON

Copyright © 2015

The right of Douglas Thompson to be identified as author of this publication has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents act 1988

The authorial rights of Allen Ashley Lucas regarding his contributions to this publication have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents act 1988

Copyright © Douglas Thompson and Allen Ashley Lucas 2015

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-1-326-44480-8

The rights of those appearing in this publication has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents act 1988

Cover Art © Douglas Thompson 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means without the prior written  permission of the publisher, not be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

Published by theEXAGGERATEDpress UK

http://exaggeratedpress.weebly.com/

RAYMOND AND ARLENE

The day Raymond lost his job he walked, smiling, towards Arlene in the street: holding out to her a hand-written letter, his notice of redundancy. The exhilaration of freedom or sheer hysteria gave his face such an expression that Arlene thought he must have won the Lottery. She read the letter and they embraced. Nothing seemed to matter right then, and they walked home hand in hand, carefree; the burden of responsibility lifted.

Strolling through the park, the sky was filled with wild evening colours. Birds sang, everything seemed peaceful and harmonious for just a moment to Raymond, in a harsh, imperfect world. Opportunities seemed to open up before him, the chance to make a change in his life. He almost felt as if he were walking on those clouds, lifted by a light of reckless optimism. But to Arlene, the sinking sun was already dragging her heart down with it, her affection shying away from the oncoming darkness: the hardship and bitterness she knew that life can always keep in store.

Windows glinted gold and mysterious on the grim towerblocks across the river. LET GLASGOW FLOURISH -said the inscription on the derelict Victorian fountain they walked by: vandalised, headless statues spray-painted with the anger of the unheard. They walked past the monument protected by warlike barbed wire, no water flowing from its crumbling stones.

Further on, Arlene stopped and pointed up at a tree: look, -she said, -those colours are incredible. Raymond marvelled. The tree was split perfectly down the middle: one half pink and red leaves facing into the sun, the other half black and barren branches. It was September, the end of a strange Indian Summer, and autumn catching up fast like an unpaid debt. Arlene ran to pick up some of the fallen leaves from the ground: autumn casualties from the cold north side of the trunk. Raymond watched her stand for minutes just peering into the snaking complex of veins of the golden leaf she held in her hand, trying to read its patterns like a palm perhaps. Raymond gazed in wonder up into the branches, the mute gesturing limbs of that stricken giant.

Arlene was 37, and separated from her husband; with whom her daughter and grand-daughter now lived. Raymond was 11 years younger, an emotional-adolescent dropping through life, falling unhappily in love time after time. To Raymond, Arlene represented experience, stable motherly affection. To Arlene, Raymond offered excitement in some nostalgic way; a reminder of the taste of youth, late recompense for her 15 years wasted in loveless wedlock.

At night they would lie awake and talk, exploring fantasies. He would try to define her beauty: running his face across her skin, searching for the aroma of her body until he could name it; peach, honey, electric tobacco. Once in return, she lay for minutes inhaling through the hairs on his chest until, eyes-closed, she at last announced his scent: CEDAR. Next day they had visited the Botanic Gardens and Arlene laughed while Raymond stood and embraced a huge trunk of CEDRUS LIBANI, his nose pressed deep into the fibrous bark. Through Arlene, Raymond somehow expected to discover his identity, while Arlene looked only for some happiness; to forget herself.

A year before she met Raymond, Arlene had moved out from her husband’s flat to be housed by courtesy of the City Council, on the fourteenth floor of one of the many concrete monsters that sail through the grey skies on the hills around Glasgow. The first night there, she had cried like a child, facing a future that seemed as bleak and stark as the unfurnished room around her. Later of course, her daughter began visiting regularly, patching over the fresh wounds, not bringing too much unwelcome news of the estranged husband. Soon Arlene filled her flat with all the domestic ornamental junk that most human beings crave: fluffy sofas, crinkly curtains, picture-clocks, porcelain figurines, the stage-props of the play of life.

Raymond’s flat, in contrast, existed at this time in a state as close to penitential as he could keep it: bare white walls and aluminium blinds, grey carpets, no curtains, no ornaments. It was as if he were a monk or a prisoner; as if he were only waiting for real life to begin. With nobody to love, his preference was to listen to music and watch the slow and delicate progress of the sun’s rays across the walls, the rigorous geometric shadows thrown by the blinds. He had gone there for solitude, but over many months this prize became a poison: loneliness. He began to notice the advance of many hairline cracks where the tenement walls were gradually subsiding. Later he would try to patch them over, just as Arlene would each morning cosmetically re-plaster her lovely face: concealing the wrinkles, dyeing and tonging her hair, the hour-long ritual before facing the world.

So Arlene walked into the stark simplicity of Raymond’s room, the only beautiful thing there, something to be contemplated. Some summer mornings he would wake up and run a single chaste finger over her perfect white skin, wishing he were a sculptor, or an artist with some charcoal and a sheet of cartridge on which to sketch her sleeping. A bath would be running, some sad cascade of notes falling from the radio, yellow light pouring through the blinds. With her eyelids closed she achieved an expression of peace and self-containment; as bewitching to a young man as it was unattainable. Raymond’s eyes would move up to rest on her clothes draped over a chair at the window; her Summer Outfit, from the showroom where she worked, a pattern of a thousand tiny white flowers scattered over the deep blue cotton of her dress.

And so Raymond and Arlene assisted each other for a while in some kind of mutual escape, as all lovers do. Some lies in love are beautifully far-fetched, while others are merely difficult to sustain. It wasn’t long before Arlene’s curiosity began to call Raymond to account for his inconsistency. Why, if he loved her, had she not been invited to meet his parents? What would they believe he could have in common with a shop-assistant, a grandmother? What did they have in common in fact, except loneliness -which is never enough, never anything in the eyes of those who have forgotten its torments. Arlene began to goad Raymond to argue with her, but found it frustrating, impossible. His feelings for her were not a substantial practical thing to him, open to adaptation or negotiation. Rather, they were some childish dream of paradise, an abstraction. He never questioned her Saturday nights on the town with her friend Lisa, talk of men who chatted them up, suggestions of other liaisons.

They were moving into the phase of arguments. To Arlene, Raymond’s redundancy was only the final step in a downward spiral she seemed to sense within him. Self-pitying, self-deceiving; his view of himself as some kind of tragic, fallen hero was unbearable to her. It seemed so vain and middle-class compared to the authentic miseries of her own background. Was he really interested in her? Or was she just some kind of mirror of intimacy? At least the other men in her life had understood her, albeit that they had abused that knowledge. Her father’s drunken sexual proddings before she was old enough to understand, her husband’s power games degenerating by degrees into rage and habitual rape. Always at the end there had been her face pressed in desperation towards some immutable wall, the taste of her own tears and blood. But she had survived, and proven to herself that she was real. Perhaps in the end, even pain is more tolerable than the suffocating vacuum of worship.

When her father had finally fallen drunk to the floor on the last night before he left her and her sisters forever; she had kicked and kicked into his stomach as he slept, empowered, almost loving that release, requisitioning his violence as her own. When her husband had shouted Ya Fuckin’ Whoor.., after her as she left him, her cheeks had burned not with shame but with anger among the astonished crowds on Sauchiehall Street. Her victory had been later: to take in her hand at last the key to a home over whose threshold no brute could ever pass again, to meet her daughter there on her own terms, in silence and dignity. All these were real interactions, engagements, although fraught. But Raymond, even in his lovemaking, seemed far away, abstracted and diagrammatic, like a famished stranger stopping over for a day, or a cartographer of the heart eyeing a distant horizon. Perhaps it came down to this distinction: was she a woman to him or Women, a desirable generality, an unknown quantity in an equation he could not resolve?

Such restlessness and calm. They would sleep and wake all night in short intervals between cigarettes and sighs. They lay with their heads together, then woke and mumbled about their dreams, finding that they had inhabited each other’s subconscious. Two creatures struggling in distress, limbs shifting and interlocking in changing combinations. Foes and allies, in some obscure conflict with the invisible. Even arguments could become a kind of game for them, after which Raymond wept into her blonde hair with her back turned, drugged on her hairspray and perfume as she began laughing.

Raymond could have read the signs in their dreams; he recorded them scrupulously every morning, pen and paper always at the bedside. His dream of a lunatic escaped from an asylum, clinging to the stone sill outside his flat, trying to get in; then impossible windows appearing in the walls, holding sunlit views of the countryside around his parents’ suburban bungalow. Arlene’s dream of three faceless men in suits waiting for her in the basement beneath the showroom where she worked. Raymond’s dream of he and Arlene lying together on the floor of his parents’ bedroom, while Arlene sang in her sleep a high-pitched siren song as a stream of flattened grey old women came pouring out from under the wardrobe like smoke or ghosts. Arlene’s dream of her and Raymond wandering together around a supermarket with an empty basket. Of talking to her mother in an old house, while somebody tapped at the window, a stranger waiting outside beyond the drawn curtains.

These were their nightmares, the contents of their cognitive attics, which Raymond recorded without understanding at the time.

*

After he lost his job, Raymond looked for others. Seven interviews in the first two weeks, something to boast about, then a gradual source of shame as months went by without an offer. Without the torrent of cash, booze and rich food pouring through them, Raymond and Arlene had to live modestly. They talked more, came to see each other as they really were, and ultimately did not care much for what they saw.

The day they split up, Raymond woke up at Arlene’s flat to see her standing at the bedroom door, like a hundred times before. Somehow this time she was transfigured, like a ghostly apparition. Sitting up, he noticed how old she suddenly looked. Garish blue eye-shadow slightly overdone; tacky, concealing age, almost coquettish. Her deathly pale skin, her Winter Uniform of black jacket, skirt and stockings on for the showroom. Trim, restrained, nearly funereal.

And then he succumbed to the habit, such a familiar habit by then, as he stirred from under that impossibly huge duvet cover. He moved in response to her words, mechanical, expected words, as he reached for his clothes:-

Raymond, that's time to get up now... I’m leaving in ten minutes... I’ve made your coffee.

In her living room mirror their figures united briefly, a brittle cameo.

Don’t smudge my make-up, she rebuked him, eyes indignant. And that embrace was like a pleasantry dispensed, perfunctory. Raymond’s lips moved, miming something utterly banal that he could hardly hear:

-you’re a good woman...

But you can’t really believe that, can you? -she asked, almost to herself, -what with all that grief I give you half the time?

Her eyes turned to meet the mirror again, checking her hair. And Raymond’s eyes followed hers: shoulder behind shoulder, coats on, they seemed suddenly like travellers, but setting out for what? Not through the door and out into this morning, he thought, but through the mirror this time, and there into the future.

The ice of severance was in the air and yet, as Raymond stared from the window onto the frost-tinged streets far below, he felt no bitterness towards her. He felt anaesthetised, detached somehow, scientific.

As they walked down to the bus stop hand in hand; his naked, hers gloved in black, Arlene paused to crush with her heel a single brown leaf sparkling with frost, and pointing down at it, she said:-

Listen... listen to that sound it makes... crunch, crackle, like fire or paper. Quite dead and dried out, crumbling quickly into dust.

That night after work Arlene phoned Raymond, and broke it off. -Surely it’s not a surprise to you, is it? -she asked. The conversation was long and painful, filled with empty phrases and unanswerable silences. I hope you won’t walk past me in the street if we meet, will you? -she said.

Next day Raymond walked out into a grey, drab world. The Indian Summer was over. The wild blue skies of recent days had subsided. Everything was gaunt and dead. Even autumn’s golds and reds were lost. Blackened fingers of trees scraped numbly at the sky.

Walking in the park he passed the tree which Arlene had marvelled at only a month beforehand. He remembered how she had pointed at the perfect split between one half of fiery orange leaves and the other of black branches. Glancing back at the tree, he noticed it had no leaves at all now.

*

Six months later, he met Arlene in the street. Or rather: eyes watering, throat dry and choked, he attempted to walk past her. You were going to just ignore me there, weren’t you? -She exclaimed.

You think so? -he asked, his lips twitching suddenly with an unexpected smile, some surprising happiness or mischief rising inside him. His vision cleared as he met her eyes, his breath came easier. They stood and talked in the early spring morning, sunlight blinding Raymond’s eyes, not particularly enemies, probably allies. I feel bad about you, she said, nudging him gently.

Don’t, he laughed, -don’t.

But Arlene was losing her job, she told Raymond. The showroom’s latest round of redundancies. What will I do? -she asked, Lisa's alright, she’s got Brendan to support her...

Relax, Raymond told her as he had told himself, it’s a chance to change your life for the better, just think of all the opportunities.

So they parted amicably, and Raymond walked on in peace, up the long slope of Sauchiehall Street, towards the indifferent office towers of Charing Cross, to just another job, thinking he had not really changed his life much. Perhaps he felt happier now, or more free, at least. A cool wind whispered overhead and the tethered boughs of the precinct trees released a slow rain of blossom on the April air. He was surprised to find so little awkwardness or bitterness inside himself. Summer seemed to beckon at the street’s end and he was reminded for a second of the lightness he had felt as a child at play. A sense of being at one with your body, closer to the earth, breathing with the grace of an animal. Without past or future, foreboding or regret.

Arlene paused to look at his diminishing profile, his solitary figure, strangely self-contained. It shocked her now to think that he was closer in age to her own daughter than to herself. Just as for her daughter, she felt a momentary pang of responsibility; what had she lost or stolen that he was carrying away now? Some relationships can shed light that reaches out beyond the short span of time in which they grow and die. She wondered if their gift to themselves had been this strength to be alone. There are after all, good and bad ways to say goodbye forever to a lover in the street.

She lit a cigarette and smiled to herself, while she waited outside the familiar shopfront now plastered with Closing Down signs. The morning streets were still empty, but her mind was full of crowds and voices like the beating of wings.

FALLEN WOMAN

Look: a falling figure hits the water and half the world collapses inwards. Lurching of heart and lungs. Towerblocks double-over in pain, bridges spin round in half-recognition. The wind gasps and the leaves of trees panic hysterically. The river runs up to tackle you and greets you with a smack. The brakes of a few cars scream abruptly. But the newspaper stands won't shout about it. Your fading trace on the river’s surface is three lines of lonely print on the late edition.

I row like a madman towards you, because it is my job to save people from themselves. And like a madman I have learned to love the lives of strangers. My chest aches with the tasks I ask my arms to do: but the rhythm of my lungs is louder than the waves beating the boat. A crowd is gathering on the bridge to view your slow demise: a flurry of limbs gesturing wildly. Like the roots of a tree turned upside down: I know you are growing downwards, reaching out for death.

This sudden weight of water and cold facts. You never knew how ice could fill your veins: this agony of lack of air which shocks your brain into fast forward. You see the world ripple and distort above you. Fact and fear collide and shatter into silver fragments which clog your eyes and ears, fill up your mouth with bitter filth. See the green lichen on the sweating stone arches now: the angry bridge lunges at you and batters into your face, throwing you under again. The water turns red with your blood. You hear your teeth break over the death-roll drumming of your pulse.

And I am nearer you now. I calculate the tides and currents and the path I know your agony will take. You thought your death would be unique, but the river denies you even this. I have seen so many cases like yours: but if the water is strong enough it will carry you over that whirlpool, that eddy will hold you but may set you free. The onlookers shout and plead impotently: a sad choir of dispossessed children swollen with the grey grief of pregnant skies. Behind them, I see Calvin’s brittle city, hungover with beer and rain: raising itself blear-eyed above a bed of overgrown railway sidings and the rusting bones of shipyard cranes.

The hurt and shock have released new chemicals in your brain. You are surprised to feel less and less. You almost drink the river. Learn to turn to meet your death with open arms. And as your weight begins to drag you under, you turn your bloodshot eyes to heaven in gratitude. At last, the punishment and suffering are over, Father. In a blinding light of harmony and grace, you are finally able to forgive God. You are four years old again, with blonde pigtails, running across a summer beach to catch up with Daddy: he is a swaying ice-cream coloured flame. Panama hat and fawn canvas shorts. His sand and biscuit smell is the colour of the sun.

But now I have reached you and throw the rope around you. My boat tips and nearly capsizes, but I haul you half-aboard and distant voices cheer. Somewhere a siren wails and you vomit water into my face, stinging my eyes. I can feel your pulse. You cough and gurgle, your chest rising and falling in spasms. I reach down beneath the water to grab your waist and pull you up. But suddenly your knee hits me in the face with surprising force. You bite my hand and the boat lurches. As I shout in pain, my face hits the surface and water floods my mouth and nose. The boat is over. I catch one last gasp of the world above before I am enveloped in silence and the crushing pressure of freezing water. I can feel your body jerk, still fighting me as reality spins out of control like a broken Catherine Wheel. Lights and fragments of thoughts assail my mind. I know ten feet of rope is wrapped around you and me: with an iron grapnel tied to the end. We are sinking.

You are angry with me. You detest this stranger who tries to spoil your perfect death. Who wants to steal your sacred glimpse of peace with his overpowering chains of male authority. You try to kick my groin, but you are weak against the weight of water. Your mind is fogged by pain. You see my face and are pleased to see my fear and confusion: now we have so much in common. You hate my eyes and spin me over. Upside down against the tide and gravity we sail towards oblivion together. In my grimacing face you see every man who ever wrote his arrogance upon you. The bristling bulls drunk on pride, who wore you on their arms bruised black and blue like a cheap tattoo.

Six seconds and nine feet down. You’ve stopped struggling and the coils of rope relax. I try to organise my scattered thoughts but the thrashing of my heart and pressure in my lungs sends waves of panic through my blood. My shirt collar is shrinking and choking me. With a free hand I tear it open. My eyes bulge with disbelief. I know I have approximately a minute and a half to live. I try to find the end of the rope to struggle loose the tangle. Your straggling fronds of seaweed hair hit my face soundlessly. I push through them and your right hand grabs my ear. I meet your white unblinking eye: blue china dish of the upturned sky rippling with ailing light. Bloodshot sun tired to death: a spinning wheel of horror rolling off the edge of the earth.

You push my chin back and roll towards the blackness gladly. The flickering patterns of weed beyond my twitching shoulder become a burning city night: neon signs and sizzling cars. Laughing teenagers, lipstick and miniskirts. The secret codes and games which won you any man you wanted. The bars and clubs and cigarettes. You kissed the unflinching faces of beautiful dream-boys. The movie-idol posters on bed-sit walls. Behind the paper-thin masks you never saw the writhing insects: black fungus of damp rot. Desire: a wriggling can of worms inside the mind. The users and losers struggling for supremacy on a bed of lies in a darkened room. You fall deeper.

Fifteen seconds and twelve feet down. I think of my wife and baby. If I can’t get free I’m done for. In my mind’s eye, I see them waving to me from a distance. Outside the open door of our whitewashed cottage. Maria’s blonde hair blowing in the wind. But I can’t see her expression. Is she crying or smiling? Oh God, I can’t breathe. I’ll never breathe again. But that tree in the garden, the one I forgot to prune last autumn: in my mind’s eye, I see its branches grow and change. Growing next to Maria and the baby: the tree becomes a gnarled emaciated man. Tall and dark and strange he lays his slender branches on her shoulder. Tickles her pretty nose with his little green leaves and reaches down to kiss her. She laughs and I fall deeper.

You feel me struggling with the ropes. It doesn’t matter. You don’t hate me now: we are united in your perfect plan. Clutching my throat you look towards the iron grapnel below us which glimmers in the dark green half-light. You think of a silver needle winking in the moonlight in a hushed back street of crushed beer cans and broken glass. The impassive face of the full moon: cold and unfeeling, becomes the sight of banknotes exchanged at night. The exhilarating rush of heroin made your body a white sheet: soft and compliant, folded over in submission. But always the cold mornings of sweating panic and the next hunt: police-car-conscience following you down dead-end streets.

Thirty seconds and fifteen feet down. The crushing weight of water is an enormously heavy black coffin. I am being lowered into my grave. Above me I see the turf is frayed along the graveside, roots and fronds of life severed arbitrarily by the spade. The mourners wear black suits and ties, but Maria stands in a long white nightdress and my baby son wears a Halloween mask. But the hands of one of the pall-bearers slips and the rough rope burns his hands as it runs. I am loosening the rope at last. I am nearly free. I refuse to die.

Your fingers are in my hair, you are losing consciousness. You are lying on your back in a rented room being worked on by the fifth slavering drunk of the evening. He groans like a whale and his whisky breath burns your ear. Watch the peeling plaster ceiling shaking. The Irish labourers drilling for Guinness with their pneumatic lust. You disgust yourself. But you are one fix behind reality, two blocks short of self-respect. You pass out.

Forty seconds and seventeen feet down. I loosen the rope and the grapnel falls towards the river bed. Still enough air in my lungs to survive, I turn towards the roof of pallid daylight where the living used to live. I kick off my boots and trousers, take hold of you again. Your black hair crosses your sleeping face like a clock hand, and I grip your waist and lunge towards the surface. I curse your weight and tear your shirt and fight the panic and impatience. I think of my wife. We are in bed on Sunday morning and I am shaking her to wake her up. I can smell buttered toast and bacon. The baby is crying and his nappies need changed.

You have escaped. You roll over into forgetfulness. You feel beautiful and unspoiled. You are lying in a warm soapy bath, or the amniotic fluid of your mother’s womb. You are naked and left alone. You are the river itself. Long and smooth reclining under the lather of summer clouds. You light a cigarette and the factory chimneys smoke slowly. The city is calm and friendly around you. Buses rumble and children laugh. Somebody’s coming to take you home to the quiet suburbs. They’ll pull the curtains and send your friends away. They’ll sing you to sleep.

I break through the surface, and light and air and sound explode around me. I vomit and convulse violently and someone is dragging me from the water. I hit the hard floor of a boat and double-up and cough and gasp. My breaths are pushing like a football crowd at the turnstiles. I choke. Jesus Christ. I speak. Jesus bloody Christ. Is she alive? Don’t talk. Keep breathing deep. The bitch tried to kill me. More cough and splutter. And look at her: lying on the deck. A policeman sucks her breath and jolts her chest. Mouth to mouth like a kiss. I laugh. The world blinks and the bridge sways with cheers and gasps. She is breathing. Unconscious, but gurgling with water and air and life. I don’t know why a good-looking woman like that should try and kill herself. Maybe that’s exactly why, I say. What? Looks of incomprehension. A real sleeping beauty. They move and tear her shirt and bare her left arm. I see the blue-black stains around her swollen veins. Looks like she pricked herself with a needle alright.

MOVING VEHICLE

Open: a wild summer day and a blue sky of infinite hope. Streaks of white vapour high up. Dreamy cumulus foamed with the hot connotation of every sunlit day remembered. And four people travelling in a car by the coast. Young: still fresh-faced, but numbed now with the approaching sigh, the hard lines of sombre adulthood. Half-feared, half-wanted: the ensuing funeral of marriage, family, middle-age and boredom. But just now, still: four heads poised above the warm seats of a moving automobile; statues, busts, adonises. Four people pure, golden, untalkative; features frozen in the thrill of speed. And young still, almost young in the bright excitement of a sunlit season. The smell of leather from the cooking seats, the glow of sun in a curl of hair still encompassing the mystery, the sparkle: of light on distant waves, of the glittering sweat of warm lust, the salt thirst for living.

And they go on moving. Music flowing from the machine, immersing them in the glow of youth. In the speeding car: strange twentieth-century tin can with living-room armchairs. Four poised, enthroned god-faces survey their changing kingdom through the tilted screens of glass. Yellow fields and rolling trees tumbling down to unseen rubble shores: turning tides, rotating coastlines, as the car goes on moving. Mysterious, horseless carriage, invisibly powered like a living being which carries four people forward: thoughtlessly through their time and space, churning up their past, their doubts and ambitions. And their lives secretly calculated in the tiny turning numerals in the dashboard: the casual unthinking hours counted out like a cricket score, for romantic or career success to be ruled upon, later.

Under a big daylight moon: stark skull-face surveying the yellow fields, the controlled petrol explosion continues under the bright tin can with the four statues dreaming. Moon-face: twentieth century god looks down, controlling the blue waves and the pulsing blood ardour of the two silent females. Moon: rocket-torn, flag-slain moon looks down with the sadness of America; murdered Kennedys and white-gown barbiturate stars. The spirit of broken technology, severed ancestry: all burns and roars in the power beneath these statues’ feet; like the gasp of Cape Canaveral or Hiroshima, carrying youth on the polluted wind of uranium, over the dead fields, the forgotten villages and fishing ports of their forefathers. The away-day youth survey the tourist showcases of their tribe’s homelands, the sugar-glazed toy-towns of their history: and do not feel the shock, the severance. The peculiar collision of miracle and tragedy, hope and emptiness which is their century. The four people, unwitting messengers from the obscure past: cannot feel their link with the fallow fields, the torn nets of the past which hurtle by them. Their cathode-ray brains flicker vacantly with the second-hand emotions of a vicarious generation.

But still they know how to love –don’t they, at least? -from their soap-opera scripts of standard emotions? The yellow warmth of the cornfields, the rolling greens of ripe trees: these quicken their pulse and make their hearts hang open dog-thirsty with the wide hope of longing, gladness to be with each other. The four figures turn from time to time, as the hurtling car changes gear and takes corners and embankments: and a blue eye rests fondly upon a glowing cheek. A single soft hand still reaches to touch the idle fingers of another. And they think they love each other. Or love their visions of themselves confirmed by each other: but their very delusions are what give them beauty, the majesty of nature in the numb tin can racing over fields of forgetfulness.

Four people, of whom one drives. Call them Bold, Dawn, Wise, and Faith. Bold drives, steering the tin-can; his brain detached as the mechanical procedures of the engine redefine his actions, punctuate his consciousness. Dawn beside him, her hand on her lap occasionally twisting and changing as if driven by some irrational patterns in her dreaming brain. What does she think of? Memories, future plans? And Wise on the back seat, his broad arm draped gently over Faith’s shoulder. Do they think and wonder, as their eyelids flicker in the drowsy sunlight, glances rotate through the fluid landscape? Do they burn their past or buy their future with the churning wheels and the hypnotic ticking of the mileometer? They are suspended, hovering beyond responsibility and before regret, held in a state of grace floating between heaven and earth. Not knowing their destination.

And now Dawn is drumming her fingers. Tapping her feet to the rhythm of the music on the machine. The long ribbon of chromium dioxide turns slowly inside the cassette mechanism: secretive, unseen. Like the road they are driving on: the tape must have a finite length, a beginning and an end, but here in the middle with the emotion and intoxication of sound: the music is total, eternal, shuts out all knowledge of before or after. Dawn half-sings a word or two: American words chanted in the liturgy of youth-dogma. All four, the smiling statues, tap or move imperceptibly to the promise dispensed in that music. America affirms their purpose for