Would you read this novel?

Amongst my many writing projects is a novel that I finished recently after working on it, in spare moments, for the past two years or so.
It's strange, to say the least - a sort of metaphysical thriller, I guess.
And, I am not sure where it came from, nor what to do with it. But, before I make any decision about trying to get it published, I thought it might be a good idea to try it out here in serialised form.

I will post subsequent sections of it fairly regularly - unless too many of you say "enough already!". Meanwhile, here goes:



Being Crane

Blue Crane Anthropoides paradiseus: Very large; all bluegrey shading to blackish on drooping wind streamers; crown whitish, Open grassland, karoo, cultivated fields. SW Cape to highveld; also in Namibia. Common resident and local migrant.
Field Companion to Roberts' Birds of Southern Africa (Revised second edition, Cape Town, 2001)

If one has truly understood a Crane, one has understood everything.
Peter Mattiessen

I don't believe in the word "being". The idea of being is a human invention.
Marcel Duchamp



Chapter 1 Into Fields of Locusts

What is left of Chicago has been suffering, yet again, from chronic deprivation of natural light. And this time, for well over a week.

Obscure debilitating deseases have spread almost everywhere with unnerving speed and stealth. In the enveloping darkness, only the most resilient go about what remains of their daily business. But even amongst them, cognitive disorientation is rife.

The residual animal population has lost all sense of natural rhythm. Many species have forgotten how to sleep soundly, eat properly, or do anything indicative of some underlying order. Domestic pets seem to have suffered most in this respect. And, their variegated, round-the-clock exploits reflect as much.

Certain exceptionally intelligent dogs, whose comprehensively scaled-up skulls and diminuitive bodily proportions betray that they have been bred for a preponderance of brains over bulk, appear to have bucked the dismal trend. Well, almost. They turn up tail-waggingly on time for meals whenever these are provided, and they make the usual fulsome bowel movements in the usual inappropriate places. Nevertheless, many of them are still so strung out that they bark themselves awake for hours on end throughout the night anyhow.

A select few (though, of course, nobody has selected them) have developed mysterious nocturnal musical predilections. Without even the merest hint of effort on their part, they can cause immense auditory distress to all those within the far reaches of earshot. Such pain appears to be an unplanned price of their otherwise surprisingly gifted operatic misadventures. Somehow, they also seem to have retained the presence of mind to enjoy doing just this kind of damage. Sometimes they celebrate in unison - as if the prospect and execution of torture by cannine renderings, juxtaposing soaring snippets of La Boeheme with interminable ground-hugging chunks of The Ring, have a special value in their own universe of experience.

Birds fall out of the sky after getting locked into mesmerising, ever-spiralling patterns of flight. Bats crash into all manner of things upright. The food chains of burrowing insects have broken down in chaos. All cats have reportedly left town. Vermin in the know are too nervously challenged to take advantage of this. Only very stubborn, scrawny, surface vegetation survives in the vast areas of vermillion, scorched and scarred soil that dominate the landscape encircling the cavernous craters. Yet, in a scattering of places, humble household plants blossom in full colour.

Disparate groups of lizard-looking people with sunken eyes and long black, flickering tongues wander the streets while wailing together in the same key of doom. They are said to be living deep down in the craters. Some say this is because they simply want to die soonest. Other rumours, not yet coalesced into anything approaching the reliability of folk lore, spin out more fantastical tales: the lush purple carpets of unknown phosphorescent, lavender-spotted butterflies that drift meanderingly in and out of the craters from time to time are vehicles of transmogrification for the Shadows who are keeping watch, as always, on everything and everyone. But, the very existence of these supposedly omnisicent observers has always been disputed. Street philosophy has risen way above its normal levels of intellectual endeavour in claiming them to be figments of an urban myth that, in their naivety, the powers that be tried to foist on the people at large. Whatever the truth, nobody pays a visit to the craters to find out what is going on.

Prominent buildings sit reduced to a collage of splintered glass and piebald rubble, criss-crossed Jackson Pollock style by splashes of molten plastic and acrobatically bent steel. The psychological impact of all this is worsened, even for the architecturally unawakened, by the sight of large numbers of more mundane buildings somehow left standing amidst the carnage.
It goes without saying that much of the city's once famously thriving high culture has collapsed in correlative fragments of ruins. The same holds for the major institutions of business and commerce. Most are now buried far below ground, alongside well-dispersed remains of the Commodities Exchange and other, once awesome, centres of economic power. The Wall Street Journal struggles to find readers, even online. Investment analysts still working have less credibility than scrutineers of tarot cards, star charts, and human palms. Clowns, magicians, and street performers are in much more urgent and respectful demand than East European string quartets or quietly spoken, apologetically diffident, award-winning poets.

On the first wednesday, in early August, at 15.00, Selwyn, an elderly, extremely slow-moving, habitually sleepy guard who works part time, usually no more than three days a week, for Mauberly-H, one of the world's largest and most profitable security companies. glimpses a large, shadowy, bird-shaped object as it plunges suddenly from out of the solemn, charcoal draped sky plum into the centre of the long stay patients' relaxation pool. This being the small, slime-layered, tepidly heated one on the north-east side of what is now the city's main official psychiatric establishment.

Selwyn is watching everything on a tiny monitor run, almost all the time, from the hospital's own makeshift generators situated within the southern depths of what is left of the underground car park.

In the mix extracted from the night vision-activated lenses smothered by particles of pollutant-lime smog, things look as if they have been roughly sculptured from marizpan by drug-frenzied street urchins. Resolution control adds what look like scatterered outcrops of wild grass to the chaotically indeteminate edges of the images. The sound-track is also infested by what sounds like a chorus of protest from studiously insistent locusts. A large, disgruntled frog pitches in enthusiastically at random intervals, as if to announce it is the real thing.

Under haphazardly intense questioning by two languidly sceptical policemen, the guard's professed recall of events will generally be as fuzzy and malleable as this feathery evidence on the screen: "There has been so much radioactivity that it is not unusual for those damn screens to play up. I didn't think anything of it at first."

When Selwyn ventures out on his own to investigate, a little later, just moments after the power shuts down completely, swamping the generators with overload in the process, his ice-blue torch beam picks out the bruised, hairless chest of a naked man, probably in his early forties, half-consciously flailing around on his back by the side of the pool like an overturned turtle abandoned by the feckless cosmos. He is squawking quietly, emitting a mordant soliloquy of reedy, inchoate sounds from the bottom of this throat. It is not clear whether he is unable to speak or just resolutely uninterested in engaging the attention of other human beings because he feels they will be unable to grasp the tragedy of his fate. Blood runs freely from a gaping wound in his left shoulder and splays decoratively across the gently sloping, sand-yellow tiles before liasing to provide the tremulous pool with a drip feed. The water glows emerald green for a few seconds as the blood enters.

Selwyn calls the medics in some haste but then gingerly keeps his silence along with his sense of distance until they arrive. He will never tell a soul about the ominous threats hissed by a raven, answering to the name 'Mickey Finn', that swoops swiftly through the vacant fallout shelter of his mind as he stands alone, tentatively waiting.

All reports of unusual happenings have to be given a preliminary screening at local level. Institutional fear of further attacks remain fever high. So sure enough, the grass-rimmed images are soon enhanced by some tricksy electronic scanning gear hastily filtched from the nearest FBI office. This is a boring smudge of a building situated very conveniently, and still largely unscathed, a few blocks away on the corner of Bartholamew and Seventh. The doctored images yield nothing new.

Victoria West, a well-known ornithologist, who happens to be a trustee of the hospital, is quickly brought in. She confidently asserts that the bird-like shape depicted both on the screen and in Selwyn's halting, vulture censored testimony signifies a Crane, a "vagrant Blue Crane, to be precise." Then, more cautious about playing the expert, she turns to the subject of the man's squawking, carefully deliniated by Selwyn's own rusty vocal chords in a momentary lapse into eloquently accurate detail. After some thought, she surmises "they are consistent with the sounds made by such Cranes". No bird, or material trace of one, is found.

That night she wakes in terror to find a vulture dragging its already blood-soaked claws across the silk-smooth, deep-blushing aureole of her right breast, creating a crevice in the flesh before cleanly slicing the aroused nipple through its puckered centre.

" Dreams like that can take some getting over", says one of her colleagues the next day while stroking her arm in a routinely helpful gesture. "Yes, but dreams do not leave scars" muses Victoria as she changes the subject to something more in tune with that gesture.

As the slashed crevice and surgically sliced nipple heal unusually quickly, they congeal into a delicately intricate ridge of pinkish-brown flesh so richly populated by exquisitely sensitive nerves that even at the merest hint of an air current, say from the beating of a nearby insect's wings, they generate their own overwhelming orgasm of the purest bliss.

On some nights, for many months afterwards, she awakens suddenly to find herself sprawling naked on top of the black silk sheets, her deeply aroused pelvis arching to the ceiling, full-flooded with yearning, legs achingly splayed wide open, and clitoris visibly distended, waiting for another visit and another surgical strike - but this time at the assailably swollen centre of her sensual being. When her partner is present, he watches in amazement, not knowing how to deal with it, and ashamed at his voyeuristic complicity. Sometimes there is blood on the sheets the next morning. It does not wash off. She has taken to always wearing a black leather g-string fringed with imitation vultures' claws made from ivory.

A small plaster, strategically placed over her orginal wound makes living in permanent proximity to sensual bliss a more practical proposition in her professional life. But, her views on birds have changed in ways that will take her many, many years to figure out.

The identity of the man discovered by the pool remains a mystery. Fingerprint and DNA tests draw blanks. He does not have, and apparently never had, a Mind-reader implant. Furthermore, there is no corresponding rip in the web of any social web known to the relevant authorities.

The wound in his shoulder heals remarkably swiftly, as if it has some overarching purpose in doing so. His mind, however, seems to find the task of mending more arduous, if not impossible. There is little evident progress in the first few weeks, during which he says virtually nothing coherent. One of the nurses remarks from time to time that he "sounds like Shakespeare's fool".
But, nobody seems to understand what she is referring to, if they even bother to listen in the first place. However, the subject himself celebrates the comparison by dubbing her his 'Abyssinian maid'.

One unusually bright morning, he captures her hand and intones:

I am not the shadow of the waxwing slain,
For I am the waxwing, wracked in pain
And my soul relects only the world's disdain

She spends most of her spare time over the next few days searching for the source of these lines. And when, by chance, she finds it, she keeps it to herself, as if it were her most precious piece of personal treasure.

After a moderately enthusiastic start, the overburdened, disorganised city police lose all interest in a person who, on his best days, either stares enigmatically in to the distance in vacant silence or mutters quasi-enigmatic, poetic statements, seemingly addressed to the universe itself. A few of the latter, such as 'Time and grief, and self so called, Oh all to end', he repeats ad infinitum, like a human distress signal.

Before long, the cops abandon even the rudimentary task of finding out who he is. The Spooks, however, find this desultory attitude highly convenient. By some gentle bureaucratic sleight of hand, they ensure that he is transferred into their all-enveloping, duplicitous care. Then they open a case file entitled 'Crane'.


Three months later ...