There was no way the river knew what the trees on its banks concealed.  The language of the trunks, however, had a straightforward story of horizontal as well as vertical things to tell.

            Thomas Linz sat back—remembering his father—and watched the wide waters fast slide beneath the ship; an inland sea stretched out into the narrow course his life had become.  The captain had, of course, called it a ship, but, really, it was a glorified canal boat of the second water with Danubian pretensions of voyage, albeit fulfilled ones.

            Linz had a companion but, for the moment at least, he had forgotten who or where he or she was.  The banks’ natural furniture—leaves of green gold and shadowy makeshift easy-chairs—preoccupied him with increasing intensity.

            There was a little besuited man among the passengers, one with braces and hearing-aids, who scuttled around the upper deck, looking as if he yearned to latch upon Linz.  Instead of which, a creature upon one of the banks suddenly poked its head through the green gold.  Most passengers, however, failed to notice this.  Only Linz and the besuited scuttler were aware of it—and one of them (Linz or the scuttler I forgot to remember) did not make a conscious note of such a sighting.  The passengers yawned, their holiday gear belying the starched souls within—only slightly softening.

            Linz seemed stiffer; his soul had already melted, albeit alongside a still hard heart.

            The creature, meanwhile, had withdrawn its trunk.  Not exactly a trunk; more a vestigial, almost shameful, part.  The eyes were green, therefore barely blending with the beautiful gold thrones.  Green jewels almost in their own setting.  The odd castle or two passing by the boat—oops! Ship—belied the fact that each monster—oops! Creature, Dream, Vision &c.—was the same one each time...

            “What you staring at?”

            “Nothing.”

            Linz’ lifelong companion had at last declared its identity.

            “Yet another Christian church spire topped by an Islamic bulb?”

            “Not worth mentioning, as when we first kept seeing them.”

            “Well, what the?”

            “Things ... and things.”

            Meanwhile, the scuttler hovered close-by in aid of his aids, as it were.  Perhaps he knew more about ‘things’ than anyone could ever be expected to know.  Or at least heard them.

            The willowy banks of the river were quiet.  The noise needed to be inferred.  A riparian angst caught Linz unawares, as the scuttler left their territory—Linz’ own and Linz’ companion’s combined.

            “How can we spend a?”

            “Holiday, without talking?”

            “Yes.”

            At that moment, Linz found himself transmitted to the bank by means of some super-mental motive force.  His real human body remained upon the forgotten boat’s sundeck’s sunbed—as a result of a bargain, one perhaps struck between the Devil and the soul of Linz.

            So, having been transmitted to the bank like a telegraphic transfer, Linz found himself sitting behind two huge green windows that wobbled as he wobbled, nodded as he nodded, blinked as he blinked.  He held his head in amazement. Where was his companion?  Forgotten yet again, I vouch; forgotten now, not only vis à vis identity but existence itself.  But the holding of his head—what was that, was it a?

            There was a proboscis he felt, instead of a smooth brow.  Below, he fumbled with jagged teeth.  And he fumbled, too, with thoughts.  Fast and loose, like the river itself—heading towards a heart of darkness.  He grappled with images and conceits that were beyond normal human ken.  Beyond as well as beneath.

            Under Western Eyes.  The title of a novel kept flowing through what used to be the mind of Linz.  The cruise ship—upon which his erstwhile companion, the other holiday-makers, the hair-banded ear-aid scuttler, the Dutch captain, the Slovakian servant-girls, the arch-janitrix purser, the bobbing courier, all of them, indeed, remained ignorant of his absence—slipped by against the speeding currents.  The willowy foliage formed coarse net curtains hanging across the green-tinted lens of his twin scopes—scopes that merged into one as he manually squeezed the muscles below the mysterious proboscis he had felt earlier.

            “What hell is the?”
            “I’m your voice which.”

            “Reflects the mind that speaks it?”

            “Yes. Sort of.”

            “Of what?”

            “A ship, not a boat.”

            He shook his mane, thinking it was his own head, which it probably was, but possibly not.  Certainties were only beliefs, at best.

            He’d felt lonely, most of his life.  As all cruisers chugged beyond even his own tolerant sweep of vision (or dream), he suddenly felt alone as well as lonely. 

            But, now, he needed to forage for fodder.  To be lonely possessed an emptiness of its own nature.  To be hungry, yet another brand of emptiness.  Emptinesses, though, that felt themselves to be cousins.  Be it God who was Father to the great family Existence or be it some pantheistic force which cannot be thus focused, Linz knew that the future held too many emptinesses to count.  All of which needed filling.  With Anton Bruckner and contrition.

            Meantime, as these and other trite considerations floated through the concealed tributaries of his mind...

            Like a river, it was ever the river but never the same river.

 

“Thoughts are strange; thoughts are stranger still when they scuttle, smooth as Mozartian water, between huge locks that only the Universal Mind can turn.”  Rachel Mildeyes (from THEOSOPHY’S  KEY Vol viii: Anita Brookner’s use of the word “sorry’ in her novels of spinsterly manners)

 

First draft of SORRY, STRANGER was written whilst cruising along the Danube - 8/97