This short story, by Graham Thomas, is taken from 'Various Sorrows & Joys', a collection of short stories and poetry by Graham and Luke Searle
The dreamless man awoke as the aeroplane banked into its descent, the aching groan of the engines a caressing alarm. Sharp, foreign light cut through the cabin in parallax to the roll of the plane. It was severe and unexpected. He turned his head to look out of the almond window and saw below him a strange city. He was immediately struck with the colour - terracotta. Roof and brick, all terracotta. A dry canal that was once a boiling river scarred through city. The long dead river was a contrasting mirror to that in his own city. The bisecting river in his home had churned dark through the slate metropolis for ten thousand years. It was the lifeblood of his home, all those years and miles behind.
He gazed into the future. He thought of a thousand years hence when he would be older than Methuselah but still with keen senses. He imagined his city to be as that of the dry terracotta city he was now gliding over. Would Gabriella still be with him when his back was bent and his beard tripped his feet? He thought of a future without her. The grinding of the landing gear hatching from their white underwing eggs caused his jaw to clench. He closed his eyes and thought of a future without Gabriella but it did not seem possible. Now that she had appeared to him six months prior and built a city of her own inside him, how could he live until one thousand without having another dream? A city of dream. A city called Gabriella. There would be no future without her. The aeroplane began its final approach and he could already feel the red heat of the foreign land upon him.
Before Gabriella came to him, he was dreamless. When he fell asleep, he was cast adrift into a void. There was an ache to him in waking life, and a nothingness to his dreamscape. He was alone. He did not pray for Gabriella, he did not pray for anything, he just travelled through his time in a vacant way. But Gabriella did come to him. She did find him, somehow, fully formed and perfectly real. This was not how he explained it to his friends and grieving family, but inside it was exactly as it happened. Everyone else needed only to know that Gabriella simply existed. They would meet her perhaps in their own dreams and that was fine. For him, it was his second, secret heartbeat. The aeroplane touched down.
The light enveloped him. It penetrated into his skin and burnt his eyes. It was more than an embrace. He felt as if he was the birth of a star. He stepped out of the aeroplane and descended the steps, the metal hand rail scorching. He shielded his eyes as the shimmering heat disfigured the city before him. Everything appeared to be under dry water. He was at the bottom of a dry pool, or perhaps on the bed of that old dead canal he had seen when he was a God above all. The light and heat were like nothing he had felt before and nothing he could have anticipated. She had never described it. She had never warned him. She had simply appeared to him in a dream one week previously, with a tear and the eyes of the doe. In that dream, she had said “come to me, come to my city, my love, my eternal torture.” And then she faded from perception, as wakefulness had begun to reclaim him. He awoke to the bright, fluorescent light in his little bedroom and he knew then that he had no other choice but to fly to her immediately.
The light in the terminal was quieter - artificial and welcomingly generic, the familiar breathing light of his own city. His senses returned a little and he negotiated the routine of passport control and baggage reclaim. The process was relatively easy, despite the stupefying language being hurled at him from every voice at such speed that his inner ear spun and he began to feel dizzy. At the end of the terminal, the sliding doors opened and once more he stepped in to the birth of the star. A tight grip on his arm spun him around and a large man with graveyard teeth and joke-shop eyeballs dragged him towards a taxi painted in colours that were not the same as in his own city. He handed the bulbous driver a piece of paper upon which his destination was written. The driver snatched the paper and slammed the passenger door. The taxi sped into the city and the giddy young man fell against the beaded back seat and closed his eyes, the light still too much to bear, the city still too foreign and the terracotta still too strange.
The apartment block was taller than the great Crystal Spear in his own city. How high had the aeroplane been flying to avoid it? The taxi drove off as he stood on the wide pavement that had no step to differentiate it from the road. He stared up at the colossus before him. Every window had a green awning fully extended. A thousand eyelids fluttering in the oven air. Or a thousand sails perhaps? He thought once more of the future, when he would be one thousand years old. He understood that all buildings in this city would need to have these sails for when the light became too much and the levees broke, flooding the city in a torrent of new-born starlight. And then, these great buildings would catch the wind and depart. Titan ships sailing off over the light, and to a new home. Perhaps to his city which remained forever strong in its generic light and grey, steel structures.
He walked to the door and located Gabriella’s number. He held his finger over the button, hesitating to touch it. A magnet at a pole. He was not sure if he was yet ready to hear her voice in real life. He had not heard it since she had returned to this bright city of hers those few weeks back. In between that strangely distant goodbye on the train platform in their University Town and this burning moment, he had only heard her voice in his dreams, or behind his eyes whenever he closed them. Perhaps he loved that private approximation more than the real thing? She had moved in to his heart and built a city which was more searing and brighter than the one he was standing in now, perhaps she had done the same with her voice? She might be mute. She might be coarse. Behind his eyes, her private voice kissed his corneas and he smiled. He had arrived, he had ventured far across the sea. Great wings had carried him farther than any lover had dared to travel before - a two hour flight of over one thousand years. He readily awoke to reality and pressed the button to her sanctuary. No voice spoke to him. Instead, a loud, vintage buzz and the front door to the colossal building creaked open. Into the expectant black womb he stepped. The door closed behind him.
The darkness was near complete: a void, save for the trail of bread-crumb lights. Flickering tungsten bulbs older than he was guided him through the hallway and towards the bannister-less stair case. The bulbs were dim, the filaments crackling and twisted like trapped, dying glow worms skewered in a clear display case. He ascended.
The lights bore him to her. The climb was arduous, his legs racked with lactic acid. He felt the air grow heavy as he neared the top of the tower. Feeling his chin, his fingers caught themselves on the fresh stubble. His heart ached for the journey until finally the last ascending glow worm bulb passed by his shoulder and he came to a landing. Only one door presented itself to him. There may have been others lining the hallway, but he saw only one. It’s signature revealed by the warm light from within. He held his hands to his breast, his heart pushing through his ribcage and desiring to leap out and be cradled by his motherly palms. He walked to the door. It opened of its own accord and he entered.
Gabriella had waited so long for him. So long. And then, as if God had forgotten and hastily rectified His mistake, her torture stepped in to the hallway of her small apartment, within her beloved and secure city. He had arrived into her bower.
He turned and saw her standing in the hallway. Gabriella was alive, breathing and completely naked. He froze for a second, staring ahead at the golden statue in front of him. In the dim womb light of the corridor he could already see that she was not who he had fallen in love with back in that grey and steel-rained city of his - that shy girl who didn’t not speak his language, who clutched her books to her breast and looked only at the floor, was not the same as the apparition in this reality. Gabriella was staring at him, fierce eyes angered with a pyre’s love.
“I’m here,” he whispered in disbelief.
“You’re home,” floated her reply. It was Gabriella. The voice behind his eyelids had not replaced her true sound, nor was the voice as he recalled in his memory. He was kissed to remember those dark, dank days when they had no money to walk in to town and so stayed in their shared university accommodation and slowly, more slowly than the rain, began to get to know each other - the language lessons, the innocent gestures, the recipes of preferred tea consigned to memory. Those days when the other occupants had drunk themselves into bed and he and her found themselves alone in the kitchen. The looks. The whispers. That old voice sound-tracked to those images was not true either. Those memories. That voice back then, that voice behind his eyes, that was not Gabriella at all and he knew then what a pale imitation of truth the imagination conjured.
‘You’re home.’ Those were the halcyon words that were whispered to him in that strange city, in the womb of the orange light was the true Gabriella. She beckoned him forward. He rested his case against the wall and took three tentative steps towards her. He felt slow and unsteady, as if learning to walk again or maybe even for the first time. Gabriella appeared so different, and yet so familiar. He stood before her, finally.
“You are wearing too many clothes, my torture,” she said, flatly. “You look like a foreigner.”
“I am,” he replied from the far end of a dream.
Gabriella turned from him and walked into the dark living room, towards a tall set of French windows, her nakedness like the furniture and the scent of the city, the light of the air – all perfectly harmonious. The city’s palette was a melancholic presentation, but a necessary and unshakable one.
Gabriella pushed open the glass doors and stepped out on to the balcony. A great waft of vanilla swept through, as if it had been an eager outsider who had forgotten their keys, locked out for hours and desperate to come home. He was nearly knocked off his feet when the smell rushed passed him and off down the unexplored corridor, pushing open a door and disappearing into the yet-to-be-discovered bedroom before climbing under the sheets.
He looked at Gabriella’s back as she stood at midnight, overlooking her city. His eyelids grew heavy but there was no sleep massaging his neck and kissing his ear. Instead was an urge to admit that he was home. He began to undress.
They had stood in silence at the balcony until the midnight hour had passed. Then, without warning, came an explosive movement from Gabriella. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. A wry smile on her lips, a crook of her head. He had seen that expression before. He had not remembered it until that very moment. It came to her when she heard certain movements in music. A great phrase designed to make love to Gabriella only. He remembered only listening to music and thinking at that time ‘this moment will never be forgotten.’ But the canvas of that picture was muddy. He had kept hold of the feeling, and not the image. But now, seeing that half-smile and that tiny crook of her neck, he reconciled the subtle ecstasy that was given to Gabriella whenever artists throughout time had been touched by her and deemed themselves worthy to create echoes in their creation and as such would find their way across centuries, charts, continents and genres to once again make love to her. It was an adagio to his desire. But there was no music in the still, balmy air. Nothing. And yet that tiny, grandiose gesture was performed. Gabriella crooked her head.
“They are coming,” she whispered as she pointed to the distance, across the moonlight dusted rooftops. He tore his gaze from her and looked to the horizon. The air then turned acrid, thick with gunpowder. The stench of cordite caused him to heave and Gabriella to tilt her head back and let her mane of brown hair to fall into the valley of her shoulder blades.
“What is this?” he whispered.
“It’s our Festival of Ancestors.”
He looked again to the horizon, the fog of powder smoke billowing across the city. A smile across his face then came. The grey, billowing clouds reminded him of the endless slate-grey city clouds that were his home – a stab then of nostalgia for the city he now felt he would never see again. At the base of the cloud-storm, the iron grey began to glow orange and red.
“Here they are. Can you see?”
He saw only a distant, great fire engulfing the city. His mouth opened in wonderment and awe.
“The city is burning!” he whispered in amazement.
“No, just our ancestors.”
And then he saw them. The great ancestors of old returned - mighty effigies, perhaps one hundred feet high of wood, paper, fabric; huge titans walking slowly through the city streets, each ablaze.
“We spend the year remembering our ancestors. And we build their effigies. We set them on fire and push them through the city. Bringing them together into a great square. All the memory of the city in one place. We burn them and we say goodbye forever.”
“That is sad.”
“No, my torture, for tomorrow we will remember them again for another year. The ancestors do not die, only the goodbyes.”
He clenched his jaw and gripped the wrought-iron railing of the tiny balcony. Gabriella did not look at her sad love. She gently put her hand on his. He had never felt the specific touch she gave him in that moment, but he knew it was her skin.
“Would you like one?”
He tried not to cry, feeling that his new home should not be blessed with his tears until first it was blessed with his love. He nodded and pointed to a great titan, the farthest away, and the furthest from the great epicentre of memory.
“That one.”
“Your father?”
“My father.” And he thought then of the old man who had passed away just a month before his youngest boy had taken the journey to university - that stubborn, old man who had left the grey city and taken with him his young boy’s ability to dream.
“I wish he could have met you.”
“Maybe we did, in a past life,” offered Gabriella in a tone that mixed confusion with certainty. “Maybe we will meet again in one thousand years from now when we finally leave?”
They both watched the great effigy moving longingly through the city until the memory had joined all its other ancestors.
Silently, he said goodbye.
“You will remember him tomorrow,” touched Gabriella, “Until dawn, you are free.” And with that, Gabriella turned from the window.
He felt no sadness. No melancholia. The hole in his heart that had appeared the day he received that phone call had closed up. He knew that tomorrow it would no doubt re-open perhaps bigger, perhaps smaller. But that was tomorrow and until dawn he was free.
He turned from the small balcony and followed Gabriella as she led the way in to the bedroom.
“Am I different? Have I changed?” she asked, her face morphing back to how he had first seen her, on that rainy afternoon in the Halls. They were now lying together clothed only by the vanilla scent, the blankets a clamshell over two pearls. Their glow illuminated the space, as if two small reading lamps had been smuggled under the covers. He trundle-wheeled his thumb over her check, down her neck, over her nipples, stomach and hips. He marked and recalled every inch of her. She had changed in many ways, it was true. But in the way she conducted herself when smothering him she had remained as the firmament.
“In nearly every way,” he whispered. “The sky is different, but the landscape is the same.”
“That will change too. Over time. Maybe a year, maybe a thousand.”
“But I will not see it.”
One of the reading lamps dimmed as the milk in her eyes became diffused with black coffee.
“You will leave me?”
He laughed. “Never. We are eternal. But we will age at the same time. Face to face.”
Gabriella smiled in relief and gently cupped his exhausted genitals.
“I want to wear these around my neck. A little necklace.”
He thought the prospect gruesome, but she did not. Gabriella pulled him close, and clamped her vice-thighs around his body so that he might comprehend. She exposed her teeth.
“Understand, if you leave me for another, be warned. I will eat you both,” and she smiled broadly, running her tongue over the ridge of her tobacco teeth, stopping at her canines and rolling the tip of her tongue over their fleshy point. Like a charmer’s flute to a snake in a basket, she drew out her canines and pulled them into three-inch longs fangs. “I will cry and cry, while I eat you both.”
“It will never happen. This is home,” he replied.
The fangs retracted, cautiously. “We are home,” Gabriella confirmed as she rested a silken smooth, oak-strong thigh over his waist.
There was no angst in his dreamless sleep because they had been reunited. His sleep was womb-warm. He sat up in bed. Gabriella was not there. A strong aroma of coffee led him, naked from the bed and into the living room. The morning light was as bright and burning as it had been when he had awoken on the aeroplane. But now it was welcome, now he could almost conjure a name for the bewildering light in this ancient city.
Gabriella sat at little wooden table in the corner of the room, by the open window, the wind softly blowing the lace curtain over her face so that it appeared to be a veil.
“Good morning,” he said, stretching broadly and groaning as his muscles and bones pulled him in to shape.
“You’ve changed,” she said as she poured a coffee in to a thimble-sized cup.
He looked down at his form. He had indeed changed. His belly appeared flatter, veins on the backs of his hands like cables leading his gaze to a new musculature that did not belong to him. He was how as he had always dreamt of being, but had in life never the fortitude to becoming.
“I don’t understand.”
“In this city, we are as we want to be for as long as we want to be. An hour, a day. Nine hundred and ninety-nine years.”
And at that, as quickly as the miracle came to him, it went. He looked down at his body and felt as if it was always thus. He took his coffee. “What do we do today?”
Gabriella flecked her eyes over her cup and saw what she needed to see: a lover not old, or young, not wide, or thin and neither happy nor sad.
“We will finish our coffee and smoke,” she stated, “then we will bathe each other, and I will then take you in to our city and you can name all that you see.”
“Is this a dream?”
“Only if you want it to be.”
“Was it for you when you came to my city?”
A zephyr of melancholia waved over Gabriella. “Parts of it were, but I was alone. The solitude of your city will be the deaths of all of you. There is a grey and steel sickness over that place.”
“Over all of it?”
“No, not all of it,” she reached over and brushed her fingers over his, “but it’s not for me. This is where I belong. The light here is my mother. In your city, the light is something sinister. But that is over for us now. You are here with me. I brought you here and you will be my torture for all eternity.”
Gabriella stood up and took his hand, leading him in to the bathroom where they bathed until they forgot to wash each other. It was eleven forty-five when the marble floor became too cold, and the tendrils of her jellyfish hair too stinging as it flayed his chest. Drained, they left the room and to the front door, naked, to dry in the city heat. Gabriella opened the door and turned back to him.
“Love me for more than one thousand years?” she asked, with terrified eyes.
“Forever Gabriella, forever,” he said.
The clock struck noon and Gabriella took his hand and led him out to be born in the city of her starlight. And indeed, he remained in that city forever until that grand soothsayer ‘O Poetinha’ came to him in a dream, haggard and stooped, older than Methuselah and in that dream and with eyes of one thousand years O Poetinha imparted his old and delirious maxim; ‘Love is eternal, until it ends.’