Alchemisland

Agent Cobalt Byron watched his glass sweating. Meandering rivulets formed bosomish half circles. His thumb breasted the glass’s neck to meet his forefinger’s tip. His movements were liquid. A studied portrait of poured grace. He brought his drink to his open carp mouth. Like an assassin silently unleashing his impatiently-brandished onzil into the head of his mark, knocking it back took a single wrist flick and he didn’t lose a drop of what he called miraculous admix. When the amber concoction ignited his breast, he winced as one does when scourged or climaxing. He gulped before slamming the empty glass against his flimsy beach table with a heavy dictionary-against-head sound. Under force its twiggy tripod legs snapped like short tempers. When it landed its paraphernalia-cluttered tabletop scattered sand. Without reaction, perhaps without recognition, Byron watched the last of his coke disappear into the sand, where a needier man might spend a millennium nostril-hoovering without erasing a single dune.

He knew not what witches in past lives his soul had scorned to deserve this sun. He loathed this time of day. Dyes of evening eking in occidentally, the sun teases setting only to grow hotter. In the heat, line-ridden shadows of beachgoers shimmered like tape static. It doesn’t bother them, he thought to himself in a do-gooder’s nagging voice, why let it bother you? The lowing sun caught his brow’s sweat whose salty beads were as coruscating gems set along a diadem. Gilded from weeks of fine weather, his thrice-burnt skin yet wore thrown egg blotches of his natural pallor. On the colour scale, Byron landed between ghost geisha and flux-ridden tenement denizen. The sunsplattered lenses of his aviators like bronze shields before burning Iphigenia. Sidelight lanced his peripheral. It seemed a wince had taken his face for a permanent perch. Little wonder the island’s elderly, who at dawn lined the beachfront with noisy newspapers, were cragged and weatherworn; they had fluted skin like raked sand sick of the sun, with legs of oakwrinkle bronze which when crossed resembled gnarled staves that savages fixed into the ground to mark mounds to nameless stellar progenitors. 

Behind his shades, Cobalt Byron’s tired eyes ringed black from lack of sleep were fixed on the sun like a solar sniper. He blinked away exhaustion and his creasing brow sent sweat cascading down his closely-shaven cheeks. He reached into his chino pocket, produced a white handkerchief pocked with lizard green splotches, took the cleanest corner and wiped his face dry. He abhorred this humbling heat which dried him out like a parchment. Weather fit for lizards, lepers and lazarines. He sat patiently in the growing shade awaiting the sun’s brief demise, safe in that knowledge; for a moment the tall shaggy-haired youth with cowry riviere and underarm surfboard walking back from the water became a gold-capped Aztec priest holding a dagger aloft to draw down the day.

Cobalt sighed relief when Sol’s blazing limbs sank beneath midway waves. His tensed shoulders released. His body sagged. His hand brushed cool sand hot only a moment ago. He leant to stand. His splayed hand left an antique-seeming impression which the growing wind reinterred. He surveyed debris around the collapsed table, poked and moved sand around using his shoe like a shovel, casting away dust which immediately rolled back to fill the hole whence it came. The glass he sought stuck up out of the sand; its upturned base like a crystal tabletop fit for the sidhe king. He stooped, scooped, shook, wiped it clean of sand with his handkerchief then filled it with golden liquid from a flask he kept on him at all times like a Golem’s parchment.

Dim impressions marking his passage were undone by the wind before his now-deglassed eyes as he walked the short distance to his beach cabin, the sort of twig-built, palm-shaded structure one imagined to be inhabited by intrepid cartographers in search of mythical river sources, replete with pith helmets and satchels full of vague Spanish treasure maps. When he went inside he allowed a smile, glad of the shade. From the pocket of a blue blazer slung over an armchair shoulder he retrieved his neglected phone. He traced a light-producing glyph on the ebon mirror of its face, stirring the device to life. He zoomed through the names, taking care to keep his eyes toward the top of his eye case, because if he read even a little bit of one email he would get an anxiety which would gnaw at him until he’d opened and read it, which would start a chain reaction of email and text opening that would inevitably result in his capture and subsequent execution in some dismal quarry prefab.

He swiped them away off the screen, to where the ignored things go. He imagined his querents’ words spilling onto the floor of a vast, sunless place, between mountains of unread poems. Cobalt’s eyes, accustomed to shallow speed reading, zoomed like pong squares made of melted aquamarines whilst his restless index finger unsuccessfully repelled his feed.

One supposed that humanity’s creation of a ‘timeline’ by which we become aware of pertinent and sometimes personalised information is presaged in the manner by which history is chronicled, as moulded by our unique long view of time. We see our past as a succession of right-headed changes tending toward the fixed goal that our present time has become; from entropy to entropy through all wonder and strife. Further, we can imagine that with supply and time the construction of the Bayeux Tapestry might have continued on uninterrupted forever, the pale  oriflamme growing in length and complexity as its blemishless flank was emblazoned with the stirring contents of the book of recent days. Further, through blood-tinged icicles, catch glimpses of timelines to come in the serpentine unfolding of our prehistoric undertakings. How the figures are made comely by the imperfect canvas which peaks and craters and undulates. How images band canvases, lending them boundlessness. How the image sequences stretch with the room’s dimensions, and with the artists’ skills, and how the impressions we made of things developed and became sophisticated with time, advancing beginnings where none were known. 

Suddenly, among the autism-inducing blur of bleak Malthusian headlines, puzzling memes, and pictures of people he would only call acquaintances to their faces, he recognized a name and was seized by instant fear. Recognition stayed him. His swiping finger froze above the screen like a scorpion’s stinger, blocking out the first letters of the name. No slow dawning, as when a man unmasks betrayals and sees that the many linked correspondences and hidden sympathies between things, which he had chosen to ignore, were signs hinting infidelity; his mind projecting what it knew out into the world, the mind reading the world as a thing born without; be out with things or be haunted by them, the symbols and haunting signs you summon up seem to say to you, because there can be no secrets, nothing new under the sun, and everything comes to light. 

Cobalt was seized by fear but, like a battle-blinded corsair shook sane by deckmates, soon recaptured his right perspective. To his inner ear, his quickening heart sounded like a salvo of depth charges fulfilling distant Vernean destinies. He felt if he did not concentrate properly that his eyes and heart might leap macabrely from their proper sconces, like those of a cartoon cat as he realises the train due to smite him is the second train (the other ‘of consequences’). 

He offed the phone screen with an imperceptibly slight push and reclined in his chair, rolling his upper back so that his shoulder blades jutted like hidden plates. His raised chin provoked a spinal crack. His right hand forked his unruly mane, commanding it back. Before the same fingertips could enjoy his chin’s stubble his fringe flopped back down, falling irksomely across his eyes. He loved his hair despite how often it sat clumsily. If a wife had been so disobedient, he would have located a biblical passage condoning execution for that act, sharpish. But he loved his locks, admired them then and all the time; considered it his prime external asset. His arms raised above his head like someone doing Y in YMCA. He stretched his wingspan then slapped his chest, turned his bicep and hid his self appreciation of it with a neck stretch.

Cat-satisfied, Cobalt released his limbs and allowed a certain weightlessness. He scanned a second, nodded to himself when he found it. He anchored his focus to a spot on the wall. First, he strove to inhale three seconds, break three seconds, exhale three seconds, break three seconds and repeat. When he attained that rhythm he increased his efforts; first five then seven before finishing with nine second gaps. At the chest-deflating conclusion of his calming system, with routine humour restored, he felt sufficiently refreshed to reattempt his translation of the offending hieroglyphs. His gaze returned to the offed screen. He grinned at his void-eyed facesake in the black mirror before expelling it. He traced the locking glyph’s antidote to free the screen and read the message. Shoulders met earlobes.

His eyes still light blotched from dalliance with Lady Sun blinked before the name, hoping it would disappear. He remembered Daniel when, having failed to decode the characters which had mysteriously apparated onto his great hall’s wall, the perplexed Chaldean seers were being scolded by Nebuchednuzzar. Staring confusedly at the writing on his phone that he wanted so hard to reject having seen, he understood the mind of those poor seers, and like them had no fucking clue what to say next. Cobalt knew three or four different guys named Daniel and got along with all of them. Also, he liked lions for several reasons. First, for their fierce demeanour. Second, for their lightness in play and, third, for their antient resonances, as reminders of wildness, true and righteous force, and times where our dominion was not so total as it has been these last aeons. For him, this image was resonant, potent, charged with will enhancing moxy, vril-like and boisterising. 

His eyes scaled syllables and his tongue sounded the bells of each peak. He read aloud, scanning and rescanning the words. In spycraft as in the occult, a missive’s true content resides in its unwrittens; in the gulfs between words; secreted in narrow voids that keep letters apart. He weighed each word in his oft-lifting eyes, he looked as if he were doing sums in his head, before testing them against his tongue and lips. Had they the touch of a script? Had they the rigid formality agents adhered to, even in casual conversation? (he found that they had) Were the charms of a chrysostomos plied? How much did the message desire his belief therein? 

In the hubbub, his heart rate had risen again, requickening his tamed breath, and he lowered his sweat-sticky forehead into his cradling palm. He traced the tips of two fingers along his brow’s raked way, over and over so that he looked like a member of a secret society subtly tipping someone off. 

Before departing his demesne, Cobalt fetched from the mirror cabinet a tub of sweet-smelling pomade. He ran resin-capped fingers through his unruly hair, waxing it back. The thickness and general health of his hair delighted him into newfound self-confidence. He fluffed the hair at the back of his head which had become stuck to his wax-greyed collar and felt a rousing spirit arising within his lesser-plunged depths. The furtive pagan in him that was his hesitation was sent into temporary exile by the arrival of this effulgent Samson; the blowdart-then-sprint pygmy of his guerilla’s courage was replaced by the steel of the pikeman as he waits down the destrier, hoping to slit its leaping belly and worship Mithras in the rainfall of its steaming innards; the self-critical instinct which had always tempered his impulsive instincts, the virgo sun which gaoled his scorpio rising, fell away from him like friends from the selfish, and he stood before the mirror a man ready. 

He bailed his fists and pushed the gentled hillocks of his close-cropped nails into his palm, which struggled for purchase with the sweat. He shook his arms out like a boxer ridding himself of lactic acid. He sought in various ways to scatter the energy coursing through his arms like a ghost lover. He jogged on the spot, as Nixon was rumoured often to do (wondering, upon stopping, why he was no further away from his problems). He performed star jumps and other combo-exercises, short mudras designed by his employer and taught to every agent, distillations down to exercise’s core constituent parts repackaged into easy-to-perform rudiments. They were designed to afford agents the ability to maintain physical health under any (their word) circumstances; a man so inclined might perform these ablutions unseen whilst under observation; a man so inclined might perform them whilst handcuffed, whilst half-submerged in water, whilst confined to a box whose meagre dimensions could not sustain a ladybird’s lifestyle, let alone a grown man.

So it was that Cobalt Byron set off from his cabin, down the winding coast road toward Stanislaus’ coffee shop.