She had closed her eyes, remembering.
‘The faint buzz of background conversation. Plates and glasses clinking. The faint hum of the factories far below in the stack. That constant vibration that's there in everything.' She opened her eyes and looked at him pleadingly. ‘It was real, Ben. Tell me it was.'
He looked back at her, shaking his head. ‘No. That was all on the tape.'
‘No!' She shook her head fiercely. ‘I mean, I saw you there. Sitting there across from me. It was you. I know it was. You said...' She strained to remember, then nodded to herself. ‘You said that I shouldn't be afraid of them. You said that it was their instinct to fly.'
‘I said that once, yes. But not to you. And not in the Café Burgundy.'
She sat up, her hands grabbing at his arms, feeling the smooth texture of the cloth, then reaching up to touch his face, feeling the roughness of his cheeks where he had yet to shave. Again he laughed, but softly now.
‘You can't tell, can you? Which is real. This or the other thing. And yet you're here, Catherine. Here, with me. Now.'
She looked at him a moment longer, then tore her gaze away, frightened and confused.
‘That before,' he said, ‘that thing you thought happened. That was a fiction. My fiction. It never happened. I made it.'
He reached out, holding her chin with one hand, gently turning her face until she was looking at him again. ‘But this... this is real. This now.' He moved his face down to hers, brushing her lips with his own.
Her eyes grew large, a vague understanding coming into her face. ‘Then...' But it was as if she had reached out to grasp at something, only to have it vanish before her eyes. The light faded from her face. She looked down, shaking her head.
He straightened up, stepping out from the frame. Taking his blue silk pau from the bed he turned back, offering it to her.
‘Here, put this on.'
She took the robe, handling it strangely, staring at it as if uncertain whether it existed or not; as if, at any moment, she would wake again and find it all a dream.
He stood there, watching her, his eyes searching hers for answers, then turned away.
‘Put it on, Catherine. Put it on and I'll make some coffee.'
She lay there on his bed, his blue silk pau wrapped about her, a mound of pillows propped up behind her, sipping at her coffee.
Ben was pacing the room, pausing from time to time to look across at her, then moving on, gesturing as he talked, his movements extravagant, expansive. He seemed energized, his powerful, athletic form balanced between a natural grace and an unnatural watchfulness, like some strange, magnificent beast, intelligent beyond mere knowing. His eyes flashed as he spoke, while his hands turned in the air as if they fashioned it, moulding it into new forms, new shapes.
She watched him, mesmerized. Before now she'd had only a vague idea of what he was, but now she knew. As her mind cleared she had found herself awed by the immensity of his achievement. It had been so real...
He paused beside the empty frame, one hand resting lightly against the upright.
‘When I say I had a problem, I didn't realize how wrong it was to think of it as such. You see, it wasn't something that could be circumvented with a bit of technical trickery; it was more a question of taking greater pains. A question of harnessing my energies more intensely. Of being more watchful.'
She smiled at that. As if anyone could be more watchful than he.
‘So... I began with a kind of cartoon. Ten frames a second, rough-cast. That gave me the pace, the shape of the thing. Then I developed it a stage further. Put in the detail. Recorded it at twenty-five a second. Finally I polished and honed it, perfecting each separate strand; re-recording at fifty a second. Slowly making it more real.'
His hands made a delicate little movement, as if drawing the finest of wires from within a tight wad of fibres.
‘It occurred to me that there really was no other way of doing it. I simply had to make it as real as I possibly could.'
‘But how? I can't see how you did it. It's...' She shrugged, laughing, amazed by him. ‘No. It's not possible. You couldn't have!'
And yet he had.
‘How?' He grew very still. A faint smile played on his lips, then was gone. For a moment she didn't understand what he was doing with his body, with the expression on his face. Then, suddenly, her mouth fell open, shocked by the accuracy of his imitation; his stance, the very look of him.
And then he spoke.
‘But how? I can't see how you did it. It's...' He shrugged and laughed: a soft, feminine laugh of surprise. ‘No. It's simply not possible. You couldn't have!'
It was perfect. Not her exactly, yet a perfect copy all the sasquof c Athe sasqume – of her gestures, her facial movements, her voice. Every nuance and intonation caught precisely. As if the mirror talked.
She sat forward, spilling her coffee. ‘That's...'
But she could not say. It was frightening. She felt her nerves tingle. For a moment everything slowed about her. She had the sensation of falling, then checked herself.
He was watching her, seeing how she looked: all the time watching her, like a camera eye, noting and storing every last nuance of her behaviour.
‘You have to look, Catherine. Really look at things. You have to try to see them from the other side. To get right inside of them and see how they feel. There's no other way.'
He paused, looking at her differently now, as if gauging whether she was still following him. She nodded, her fingers wiping absently at the spilled coffee on his robe, but her eyes were half-lidded now, uncertain.
‘An artist – any artist – is an actor. His function is mimetic, even at its most expressive. And, like an actor, he must learn to play his audience.' He smiled, opening out his arms as if to encompass the world, his eyes shining darkly with the enormity of his vision. ‘You've seen a tiny piece of it. You've glimpsed what it can be. But it's bigger than that, Catherine. Much, much bigger. What you experienced today was but the merest suggestion of its final form.'
He laughed: a short, sharp explosion of laughter that was like a shout of joy.
‘The art – that's what I'm talking about! The thing all true artists dream of!'
Slowly he brought down his arms. The smile faded on his lips and his eyes grew suddenly fierce. Clenching his fists, he curled them in towards his chest, hunching his body into itself like a dancer's. For a moment he held himself there, tensed, the whole of him gathered there at the centre.
‘Not art like you know it now. No...' He shook his head, as if in great pain. ‘No. This would be something almost unendurable. Something terrible and yet beautiful. Too beautiful for words.'
He laughed coldly, his eyes burning now with an intensity that frightened her.
‘It would be an art to fear, Catherine. An art so cold it would pierce the heart with its iciness, and yet, at the selfsame time so hot that it would blaze like a tiny sun, burning in the darkness of the skull.
‘Can you imagine that? Can you imagine what such an art would be like?' His laughter rang out again, a pitiless, hideous sound. ‘That would be no art for the weak. No. Such an art would destroy the little men!'
She shuddered, unable to take her eyes from him. He was like a demon now, his eyes like dark, smouldering coals. His body seemed transfigured; horrible, almost alien.
She sat forward sharply, the cup falling from her hands.
Across from her Ben saw it fall and noted how it lay; saw how its contents spread across the carpet. Saw, and stored the memory.
He looked up at her, surprised, seeing how her breasts had slipped from within the robe and lay between the rich blue folds of cloth, exposed, strangely different.
And as he looked, desire beat up in him fiercely, like a raging fire.
He sat beside her, reaching within the robe to gently touch the soft warmth of her flesh, his hands moving slowly upward until they cupped her breasts. Then, lowering his face to hers, he let his lips brush softly against her lips.
She tensed, trembling in his arms, then, suddenly, she was pressing up against him, her mouth pushing urgently against his, her arms pulling him down. He shivered, amazed by the sudden change in her, the hungerd nss, Ahungerd n in her eyes.
For a moment he held back, looking down into her face, surprised by the strength of what he suddenly felt. Then, gently, tenderly, he pushed her down, accepting what she offered, casting off the bright, fierce light that had held him in its grasp only moments before, letting himself slip down into the darkness of her, like a stone falling into the heart of a deep, dark well.
Chapter 56
THE LOST BRIDE
‘Well, Minister Heng, what was it you wished to see me about?'
Heng Yu had been kneeling, his head touched to the cold, stone floor. Now he rose, looking up at his T'ang for the first time. Li Shai Tung was sitting in the throne of state, his tall, angular body clothed in imperial yellow. The Council of Ministers had ended an hour past, but Heng Yu had stayed on, requesting a private audience with his T'ang. Three broad steps led up to the presence dais. At the bottom of those steps stood the T'ang's Chancellor, Chung Hu-yan. In the past few months, as the old man had grown visibly weaker, more power had devolved on to the shoulders of the capable and honest Chung, and it was to Chung that Heng had gone, immediately the Council had finished. Now Chung gave the slightest smile as he looked at Heng.