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The Quiet Man > Systems Of Romance No.3
A room in an Elizabethan period house. Diamond pane leaded windows. Snow falling outside. Log fire blazing in the stone fireplace. The old gentleman in a dark green tweed suit coughs nervously as he opens the door into a lead lined aquarium room. The first time this door has been opened since he placed an object in the tank in 1948. He was a young man then.

The object was a radioactive isotope wrapped in human skin. And it was submerged in an aquarium full of organic fluids with a small electrical current running constantly through it. This arrangement was left undisturbed in the dark sealed room until now.

An incredible stink meets him as he goes into the blackness. He covers his nose and mouth with a handkerchief while he gropes for the rusted light switch. The room is illuminated under rust speckled fluorescent lights.

He sees that a delicate pale fungus has developed and spread over the ceiling and walls. The big aquarium is now only partly full of a black highly concentrated liquid. There is a half submerged shape inside.

The doctor snaps on a pair of shiny rubber gloves and throws an earth wire into the tank. There is a blue crackle of released energy. He reaches down into the tank, brushing off the accumulated sediment from the shape. He rolls the thing over to inspect it and there is a flash of broken gold among the glistening slime. The thing looks like a small ancient Egyptian mummy, thin and dark with fluid. Its limbs hang loosely as the doctor carries it gingerly from the tank into a shower.

The stink of many stagnant years spreads as the warm needle spray cuts through layers of organic soup. Pieces of a filmy material, tarnished gold on one side and black on the other, break off and slide like wet gelatin down the drain, as the old man eagerly washes off all traces of the foul sediment.

The creature beneath resembles a thin, ten year old boy with wet golden hair, and water wrinkled skin like a foetus. The doctor dries him off in heavy towels and places him on a sterile trolley after massaging his skin with lanolin to smooth it out.

There appears to be something wrong with the left side of the boy's face and shoulder. In the dimness of the room his face resembles an antique painting from a damaged religious Icon, one side of it is corroded by a faint iridescent bluish glow.

The doctor is deeply disturbed by this unexpected imperfection, but nevertheless still excited by the result of his long experiment.

With a small catheter tube he expertly clears the boy's nose, mouth and ears of mucous, then slides him into the body of a complex life-support and monitoring system.

The machine hums and pumps, and after a while the boy begins to breathe. His pale face flushes delicately as his heart suffuses his skin with blood.

After some hours, when he is at last certain that the boy can function independently, the doctor lifts him out of the machine and carries him into a warm, darkened bedroom.

In the rustling dimness, Winter birds singing outside the curtained windows, the doctor is quite moved to tears by the boy's sleeping religious aspect. The eroded edges of that delicate face and shoulder seem unbearably poignant.

"My own flesh and blood, all this time, all this time and still not perfect, so damaged, so damaged."

The doctor whispers softly, realising with surprise that this is the first time he has felt any strong emotion for many, many years.

The boy's eyes open briefly the next day, a few days later he takes some liquid food, and over the ensuing weeks he begins to eat and sleep regularly. As the year turns to Spring the old doctor patiently teaches him to stand, then to walk unaided. The boy develops into a strange silent child, who likes to stand for hours under the trees in the big gardens surrounding the house. The doctor notices that the gardener and housekeeper will not look directly into his face and always cross themselves when they pass him.

His face is always completely smooth and expressionless, though the eyes are sometimes quick to follow any movement, he regards everything in an impassive animal way. It is as though he has not yet learnt to connect his facial movements to his mental processes. The doctor cannot induce him to speak or make any vocal sound, and he becomes terribly saddened by the boy's lack of progress.

One night in Summer the old doctor is lying awake in his bed. The windows are open onto the garden. It is dark outside and raining. A smell of rain and moist roses on the night breeze.

He hears the bedroom door open softly and turns to see the boy come in quietly. The doctor notices a faint phosphorescence around the boy, and the iridescent edges of his damaged face and shoulder glow with a soft fire in the dimness.

The boy stands by the doctor's bed looking down at him.

"It is time now, to be leaving."

His voice is faintly musical, distant. He makes a gesture with his hand as he speaks, a gesture the doctor remembers from the boy who died over forty years ago.

He feels a sudden terror as he is confronted by the boy's unquestionable calm certainty, realising that he is totally vulnerable before him. The boy brings his glowing damaged face closer to the doctor's, looking directly into his eyes. An arc of buzzing blackness goes down between them. They remain fixed in this position for hours as the doctor's body very slowly begins to empty and shrivel. When dawn comes into the room the boy is asleep on the bed and the doctor is gone.

Early sunlight glows through the white climbing roses that grow around the ornamental iron balcony. The garden is still wet from the rainy night. The boy stirs and opens his eyes. For a while he lies motionless, watching the illuminated movements of some small flies flitting between him and the rising sun. Then he yawns and stretches luxuriantly, revelling in the feel of the sheets around him. He throws back the covers. Beneath them the boy and the bed are stained and smeared with a heavy dark yellow grease of some kind.

The boy showers in the pale green bathroom. As he dries himself he rubs his genitals, examining them with curiosity, noticing how they seem wrinkled and much older than the rest of his body.

He puts on a distant suit from the old wardrobe, checks himself in the mirror, smiles and walks from the room.

On the dressing table by the mirror is an old photograph of someone in the same suit, caught in a characteristic gesture as he stands among some other children in a Summer garden. Someone has placed some small white flowers around the picture frame.

The room is deserted seen through the mirror. Some rose petals spill across the bed. Scent of rain and roses and sleep.

The boy steps out into the city. He has money now. He isn't quite sure if this is 1948 or 1982... looking for traces of those times and my face is outside here, somewhere lost in the reflections as I pass the shops.

Coloured litter in the side alley. Cracked grey tarmac with dried pink ice cream smears. The silent gesture from so long ago. "I knew you would come back someday." Circle line. A faint Summer afternoon. Now it is I who am old. Wait a few more years. Close my eyes. Just for a moment. The Mambo. Can click in closer if you want to. The edge of his sleeve on a glass counter top. There was someone else there all the time. Moving through the city with someone else's sex.

"Take this thread from under my skin here and pull it. See, it goes down under the carpet and floorboards, right down the street, miles in many directions." The hope I feel in my heart. A girl's English voice in Summer, her mouth forming the words, lips almost translucent against the sun. The dog sleeping on warm flagstones in the back yard. Drawn to this point from years ago. The old man is the donor. Absorb the doctor. This is mine. The ruined feeling under his shirt. Spinning away. Dark curtains with pinholes of sunlight coming through onto the floorboards. Warm wind rustling through a blaze of Autumn leaves above. Standing on that Avenue wearing the distant suit. Sound of someone whistling as they pass at night. "I am only his gesture after all. He had my photograph from forty years ago. I have his memories now I have the suit, speak his languages. That part is missing." The lead room and a small package of skin. Rhododendrons and a gravel driveway. The Pines Hotel.

There is music and the elaborate stone streets of Prague, then in Berlin the pale green metal windows overlooking the Kudamm. Approaching the monument. A great dark rumble. Thousands of feet walking over years of layered time. Her shape in the twilight room. Empty doorway with sunlight flooding in. Blue hills and swaying trees outside. Someone coming home. Pinholes of light shining through the brown painted shop windows. You said a war would come soon. Silver teeth glinting in saliva. See him through the smile. Growing fainter.

The boy in the distant suit goes into a cinema. Brass swing doors and an usherette wearing a maroon uniform decorated with gold braid. Blinded by the sudden dark, he follows. Her circle of light recedes. The screen seems very small and far away. A tiny illuminated square in the darkness at the end of many rows of seats.

As he focuses on the screen he seems to move towards it in a slow sweep of changing perspective until the screen comes very close then surrounds him until he is inside. It is a medical documentary. An American operating theatre about 1958. Early technicolour, warm American voice-over blurs and merges back into the pale green walls.

He stands in a corner of the room wearing the distant suit. The perspective of that corner stretches away until he is a figure down the long corridor growing more and more distant like someone on a moving escalator, finally winking out like a star. The corner flicks back into the normal perspective of the room.

There is someone on the operating table. A boy with a face resembling an old religious Icon. One side of his delicate face and shoulder is damaged. The highly efficient operating team quickly and expertly strip away skin, genitals and hair from the body, then the muscles and internal organs.

Taking a pair of insulated tongs the doctor extracts a small dark pellet of soft metal from the warm meat of the heart and drops it into a thick polyethylene container. Then a nurse discards the stripped bones and the damaged parts of the face and shoulder, placing them in a metal incinerator box.

The surgeon carefully lays out the skin, placing the other dismembered parts on top of it, then inserts the soft metal pellet into the centre of this arrangement before folding up the skin to make a compact parcel, wrapping in such a way as to leave the genitals neatly placed on top.

Then they paint this parcel of skin and genitals with an adhesive agent before coating its entire surface with pure gold leaf.

The surgeon carries the parcel carefully in his rubber gloved hands into a lead lined room lit by fluorescent tubes. The room smells of metal and electricity. Green oxidised copper wires are set into corroded terminals on the walls. The golden parcel glints richly in the hard fluorescence.

At the centre on the lead room is a solid four foot square slab of dull soft metal with silver unoxidised scratches in its surface, as if the big glass aquarium resting there had been dragged across it recently.

The surgeon places the parcel in the aquarium. We see its golden gleam diffused though the thick greenish glass walls. An electrode is attached to it by copper clips, and a small constant current passed through. Then a big black rubber hose fills the tank with a heavy pearly fluid that has an odour reminiscent of skin that is newly exposed after a long time under medical wrappings.

The surgeon sighs and switches off the lights. Then he carefully seals the heavy doors.

Outside, snow is falling against the leaded windows. The doctor is very tired. He takes off his surgeon's mask and gown, and after washing carefully he goes into the living room. In the light from the windows we see that his face has the smooth, unwrinkled quality of an old eunuch.

He pours himself a small whisky from the crystal decanter, and as he sips it he gazes into the flames of the log fire, a look of resignation in his eyes.

On the sideboard behind him is a photograph of a boy in a distant suit. Faint English Summer afternoon. Someone has placed fresh white flowers around the frame.
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