Burning Your Boats 精彩片段：
UNCOLLECTED STORIES-The Scarlet House-1
I remember, Id been watching a hawk. There was an immense sky of the most innocent blue, blue of a bowl from which a child might just have drunk its morning milk and left behind a few whitish traces of cloud around the rim, and, imprinted on this sky, a single point of perfect stillness -- a hawk over the ruins. A hawk so still he seemed the central node of the sky and the source of the heavy silence which fell down on the ruins like invisible rain; an immobile hawk so high above the turning world that I was sure he would see a half rotating hemisphere below him; and, over this hemisphere, scampered the plump vole or delicious bunny that did not know it had been pinioned already by the eyebeam of its feathered, taloned fate imminent in the air. Morning, silence, a hawk, his prey and ruins. If I try very hard, I can also add to this landscape with my little tent, my half-track and, piece by piece, all my naturalists equipment. . . I must have gone out to collect samples of the desolate flora of this empty place. Above the green abandonment of the deserted city, where the little foxes played, a rapt hawk gathered to himself all its haunted stillness.
Hawk plummets. Hes unpremeditated and precise as Zen swordsmen, his fall subsumed to the aerial whizz of the rope that traps me.
I am sure of it -- beat me as much as you like; I remember it perfectly. Dont I?
The Count sits in a hall hung with embroideries depicting all the hierarchy of hell, a place, he claims, not unlike the Scarlet House. Soon, everywhere will be like the Scarlet House. Chaos is coming, says the Count, and giggles; the Count ends all his letters "yours entropically" and signs them with the peacocks quill dipped in the blood of a human sacrifice. Why did you come to these abandoned regions, my dear, surely youd heard rumours that I and my fabulous retinue had already installed ourselves in the ruins, preparing chaos with the aid of a Tarot pack?
But I had no notion who the Count was when his bodyguard captured me. They stood around me as I writhed on the ground and they showed their fangs at me; they all file their canines to a point, it is a sign of machismo among them. They wore jackets of black leather brightly studded with cabbalistic patterns; tall boots; snug leggings of black leather; and slick black helmets that fitted closely over the head and over the mouth, too, leaving only their pale eyes visible. Their eyes glittered like pebbles in a brook. They were armed with hand-guns and their belts bristled with knives. Each carried a coil of rope. A silence so perfect that it might never have been broken resumed itself after the hawk fell.
They hauled me off at the end of the rope they tied to the back of one of their motorcycles and made me run, tumble, bounce behind them on my way to the Scarlet House, though I must admit they drove quite slowly, so I was not much injured. The Scarlet House was built of white concrete and looked to me very much like a hospital, a large terminal ward. A few days in bed there, and the gravel rash, the grazes and bruises healed.
I remember everything perfectly. I know the ruins exist; at nights, I can hear the foxes barking in New Bond Street. That sound confirms the existence of the ruins though, of course, I can see nothing from the windows.
Meanwhile, in this blind place, the Count consults maps of the stars with the aid of his adviser, whose general efficiency is hindered by the epileptic fits with which he is afflicted. Though at the best of times his wits are out of order; he drools, too. His star-spangled robes are dabbled with spittle and spilled food and other randomly spattered bodily effluvia, for hes quite shameless in his odd little lusts and pleasures and the Count lets him indulge them all. Hes the licensed fool and may even pull out his prick and play with it at mealtimes, and woe betide you if you flinch from one of his random displays of slobbering affection, for thats a sure sign you arent in tune with chaos. But Im not sure if hes a fool all the time; sometimes his eyes focus on me with the assessing glint of a used-car dealer. Then I am afraid he may be wondering what I can remember.
When hes been a good fool and made the Count chuckle, the Count tells Madame Schreck to give him access to one of the youngest of the girls. There are girls as young as twelve or thirteen and Fool likes his women just out of the shell. The Fool takes his present down to the dungeons. We wont see her again.
But was she not almost as good as dead the moment she set foot inside the Scarlet House? The moment of capture had sealed her fate.
As for myself, I am sure I was captured by the bikers, in the ruins. I am perfectly confident that is how I came to the Scarlet House. Yet the Count assures me, with equal, if not superior confidence, that I am mistaken, so that I am not sure which of us to believe.
The Count is dedicated to the obliteration of memory.
Memory, says the Count, is the main difference between man and the beasts; the beasts were born to live but man was born to remember. Out of his memory, he made abstract patterns of significant forms. Memory is the grid of meaning we impose on the random and bewildering flux of the world. Memory is the line we pay out behind us as we travel through time -- it is the clue, like Ariadnes, which means we do not lose our way. Memory is the lasso with which we capture the past and haul it from chaos towards us in nicely ordered sequences, like those of baroque keyboard music. The Count grimaces when he says that because he hates music even more that he hates mathematics but he loves to listen to screaming. "The entropic rhetoric of the scream", he calls it. Madame Schreck screeches for him sometimes at night, to augment his pleasure if we girls have screamed ourselves hoarse and cannot make any more noise.
Memory, origin of narrative; memory, barrier against oblivion; memory, repository of my being, those delicate filaments of myself I weave, in time into a spiders web to catch as much world in it as I can. In the midst of my self-spun web, there I can sit, in the serenity of my self-possession. Or so I would, if I could.