Sometimes, when Aquinas walked into rooms crowded with people whom he knew or did not know, he felt his robes of pragmatism dissolve to ash around him. He felt naked, revealed as a usurper with a price on his head. A dream of fair women loitered behind his eyes, whispering to him their delicious temptations, their neverending needs.
Aquinas did not suffer with nostalgia for the dust of youth but he did fantasize his past into a remoteness, into something less peculiar that it had been. Aquinas was ill at ease with society. It was not however, a simple question of having been born out of time – there was no world more rich and certain than the one inside his own head, and daily life was a challenge only in being (often) unlivable.
Enumerating his deepest desires Aquinas found them to be so startlingly pure and simple as to appear almost childlike. The truth was something quite else, for it was his unquestioning desire for perfection which militated so aggressively against the messy commonplace of the world, the ruined, second-rate world. This desire for perfection was Aquinas’ narcotic, otherwise he could not have endured the ritual of being slowly undressed by the vulgar hands of imperfect experience.
There were, certainly, moments of rarified exuberance. The opening salvoes of a new love affair, the first hearing of a virgin band, terrified yet surrendering to the audience and its expectations, the tumbling syllables of an as-yet unwritten song, spilling like quicksilver towards the transfiguring chorus. But despair, the despair of others and their own desires, crept in at dawn and he found himself dispossessed on the threshold of a discovery that he had been certain, this time, was his.
Dion was sitting in Rudyard’s with Aquinas and Charlemagne, the powerhouse bassist for the Billets Doux. The two were discussing the local music scene, how bands were dropping like flies in the demilitarized zone. It was a subject on which the two waxed eloquent, if not always in unison.
Charlemagne and Aquinas had been friends since the days of their rosy youth, now shrouded in the soft velour of legend. They had met in some interior room, on the outskirts of the city’s academic ghetto, the ghost of Christopher Marlowe hovering like an unclean presence just above their heads. While others had gone off in search of El Dorado, the two comrades had remained behind, waiting for Godot.
As Dion sat, watching the refracted light from outside rusting his pint of Bass to burnt orange, the pub seemed to grow quiet around him, voices softening to a faint rat-like scratching heard on the other side of the wallpaper, the jukebox damped down to a monotony of submarine echoes.
He felt, and was conscious of the external symptoms of coming on to this feeling, a distracted, looming loss, as though his senses had been lifted by a de Quincey pickpocket, or as though (and in this he was mercurially godlike) the several portions of his consciousness, of his brain (quite literally) were making a parliamentary move, if not towards dissolution, then towards certain secession.
In his rapidly expanding omnipotence he was suddenly privy to a ‘Forbidden City Of Secret Thoughts’, capitalized and triggered to this knowledge in much the same way that a film director redundifies his message by displaying an image of the Eiffel Tower as well as the surtitle ‘Paris’.
As delicately as he could Dion began to move across the strange topography which swam in and out of a dense fog. He was, he realized without fear, inside someone else’s mind. The fog began to drift off to the left and he saw that he was standing, beer mug in his hand, outside the gates of a city. Looking up he could see the interior of the city swelling up the side of an extremely steep, unbearably high mountain. In defiance of all possible laws of gravity, he could see the street plan of the city: labyrinthine, dead-ending into sudden wastelands of rubble or feeding into five-sided plazas, circled round with palaces, police stations, brothels, zoos, burning bridges, roman amphitheaters.
-Is anybody home? he cried, vertigo half-nelsoning his bowels.
-Be right with you, the Rudyard’s barmaid said, seizing his empty mug.
Dion studied the capering of orange ash at the end of Aquinas’ cigarette. As he breathed slowly out, a fragment from the Forbidden City clinked discretely into place. Fuck the Madonna and blessed be the meek, Dion thought to himself, it must have been Mary’s mind that he’d stumbled into for a split second there. Turning over the bright bauble in his own mind he considered what he had stolen: Mary’s Feelings About Aquinas – Exhibit 1.
Dion postponed a more leisurely analysis and turned towards him.
-What’s your opinion of Effingham? he asked.
Aquinas smiled, a half-shrug of politesse sending cigarette smoke spiraling across the counter.
-Mary? I think she’s talented and self-destructive. I think the basis of her art, her songs for instance, are a sort of self-pitying obsession with memory, with loss. She’s an anti-romantic, self-centered, bitchy. I think she’d like to be like Joyce. You know, ‘silence and exile and cunning’. So far she’s only perfected the silence part. I’ve given up trying to get inside her head.
-Why?
-Well, maybe it has something to do with the way she thinks. She says that the fundamental difference between the sexes isn’t biological, it’s mental. She says that a woman’s mind is like a terraced, labyrinthine city whereas a man’s mind is like a vast Saharan expanse, with an oasis on each horizon.