Partial Eclipse
by Graham Joyce

 
I know that Myra goes to bed every night and whispers, "Dear God please let the aliens come back." 

It's morning, and a diffuse winter sunlight bleeds through the curtains. I roll over in bed and stroke the warm, tanned swelling of Myra's belly, feeling the quickening under the callused pads of my fingers. It's just a tiny vibration, not unlike the attack note on the E-string. Myra opens her eyes sleepily and smiles at me. It's all beautiful. I want it to be beautiful. But now every expectant mother and father wants their infant to be born with an alien inside them. 

"Anything?" I say. 

She gives a tiny shake of her head, no. Just as she has done for nearly seven years now. Just as I do when she asks me. 

"You?" 

But she doesn't really have to ask. She knows that if the answer was yes then I would have woken her to tell her. Instead, so we don't have to think about it, I stroke her belly, because I know that by running the heel of my hand along the rim of her thrilling pink pot I can make the baby kick. And it does. She does. 

"I saw her foot!" I shout. I can still see it. Or maybe it's an elbow, but anyway it tracks along the curve of Myra's belly, rippling flesh as it goes, and then withdraws. 

"You're convinced it's a girl," she says. "You're wrong." 

Myra's awake now. She'll have to get out of bed. She's about a week away from her time, and I know the baby is pressing on her bladder. But as she swings her legs out of bed she pauses, strokes her huge stomach, and says, "There was a moment. In the middle of the night …" 

"Yes?" I hardly dare breathe. 

"No, it wasn't anything really. It was just …" 

"Tell me." 

"I can't say for sure. I had to go to the bathroom, and it was in that moment when I was waking up, half-asleep, I thought I heard my baby calling to me. Would that count?" 

I lie back, thinking, Would that count? Would it count? I don't know. 

"I mean," says Myra, "I know he can't call to me, so it might have been a dream. Or I might have simply imagined it because I so badly wanted to dream?" 

I nod, but it sounds to me like no, it doesn't count. You see, there have been these rumors about pregnant women dreaming. "New wives' tales," you might call them. We've been yearning for it to happen since Myra's pregnancy was first confirmed. 

Nothing. 

I get up and ready myself for work. I can hear our daughter Mandy stirring in her room. Myra sees me select the Blucher. I love the unusual workmanship. The belly is spruce and the back, waist, and neck are polished maple. The hole is slightly elliptical, shaping a delicious ooze and throb in the resonance. 

She raises her eyebrows as I lay the guitar in my battered carrying case and gently lock the clasps. "We're re-recording Teppi's early piece." God, it's hard to sound enthusiastic. 

"Not that old thing! Didn't you do that a couple of years ago?" 

"Six years ago," I point out. "And we're doing this much slower. Slow. Very slow." 

"Surely there's more you could do than that!" And she looks at me, because she knows it makes me sad. She kisses me, and off I go to work. 




· · · · ·  


Floyd picks me up. He has his cello in the boot, so I lay the Blucher gently in the backseat. "I've got one for you," he says brightly. 
My heart sinks, and I stare at the stalled traffic ahead. "Go on." 

"He's six years old. Last week he drew hundreds of people in Manchester. Hundreds. The week before that, Leeds, and you couldn't get a seat." 

I've heard all this routine before. "What does he play?" 

"That's it. He's not a musician. He's a storyteller." 

"Give us a break, Floyd! Six years old?" 

"He's in town tomorrow night. You and Myra, me and Zelda." 

Like I say, I've been down this road before with Floyd. Mostly with kiddie musos, admittedly, but with the occasional storyteller too. It is a road of stony disappointment every time, but Floyd is a sucker. He wants to believe. He needs to. Maybe I'm mean, but you wouldn't get me to part with the price of the tickets any more, and Floyd knows that. There are too many spivs fleecing decent, hopeful people like Floyd and Zelda. 

Floyd reads my thoughts. "My treat," he says. "Now then, do you know what we're doing today?" 

"Sure." It's getting even harder to sound bright. "Early Teppi." 

"Aw, fuck!" says Floyd. "Not Teppi again. That really has spoiled my day." And he leans hard on his horn just to prove it, scaring a hapless cyclist. 

And even though I try hard to fake it, I have to admit that down in the recording studio it's a fucking bore, all day long. It's not Teppi's fault. Teppi is wonderful, complex and varied. But it's not enough. Even if I had never heard Teppi before, even if I hadn't recorded him faster, slower, con brio, who cares, we just can't make ourselves bleed for him. He, like all the others, takes the awful blame for not being new. 

Floyd tries. We all try. Mid-morning I see Floyd's shiny black skin, like an aubergine, perspiring from the point on his receding hairline as he works his cello for the complicated fifth. A crackling voice from the control box cuts in and we're told to take a break. Moments later I walk into the washroom and I hear Floyd weeping. He's bent over a basin so he doesn't know I'm there. I leave before he sees me. 

While waiting for Floyd to emerge from the washroom I talk with Vanessa. Always bright, always jolly, Vanessa is a brick. Superb pianist. Before the aliens left, Vanessa had a dazzling career ahead of her, with three recordings of her own steely jazz-rock compositions under her belt. Of course, that was nearly seven years ago, but she doesn't seem to let it get her down. 

Floyd swings out of the bathroom, chipper, all smiles now that he sees Vanessa, so he pours himself a cup of Darjeeling and treats us to one of his jokes. Old jokes, of course. He knows Vanessa will laugh. He knows I will, too. Gosh, it's a very old one. So old I see the punch line laboring up the hill like a cart horse ready for the knackers, and unfortunately I laugh a moment too soon. 

The following evening we put on best bib and tucker and turn up at the De Montfort Hall, where this six-year-old is expected to perform. Myra is somewhat uncomfortable, being so big, but she doesn't want to disappoint Floyd and Zelda. Anyway, she knows we won't get out so much after the baby arrives. 

"Oh, let me!" Zelda admires Myra's bump, placing the flat of her palm on the underbelly. Zelda has beautiful long manicured fingers. She and Floyd have kids of their own, but they're almost grown-up. "It's a boy," she says. "You're carrying at the front." 

That's what they said about Mandy. Nobody really knows. 

Then Zelda stoops and puts her cheek against Myra's bump, as if she's trying to listen through the distended skin and into the womb. "Oh please let him dream!" she says softly. 

We're caught. Trapped. Left dangling by Zelda's overt remark, and we all look away. A disembodied voice on the PA tells us that the performance will commence in three minutes. 

"Come on," Floyd says. 

I think he looks slightly angry. 

We take our seats, and I'm amazed that the hall is full to capacity. I mean, we've all been hoaxed and duped and gypped and bilked so many times over the last few years you'd think it impossible to fill a hall this size ever again. But no. As I swing round checking for faces I might recognize, I see there's not a single vacant seat. The house lights go down, there's some nervous coughing, the curtains open. 

First a warm-up act, a seven-piece jazz ensemble. Floyd looks at me as if to say, not bad but not good either, though we're both pretty stern critics. I recognize the opening piece but I can't put a name to it: Floyd will know. The fact is my mind is on the kid, and I don't like it. 

Six years old. That's the ticket, isn't it? Six. I just don't like the idea of this six-year-old having to carry the weight of expectation—and the inevitable disappointment—of the 1500 people in the audience. I think of my own six-year-old Mandy, at home with her babysitter, and how I would never allow her to be put through this. 

But there's big money in it, and even when it goes wrong the promoters and, presumably, the kid's parents get to pocket the admissions charges. Because nothing can ever be proved conclusively, can it? 

Polite applause dispatches the ensemble and the stage is rearranged for the kid. Big chair in the middle, overhead microphone, one chair either side for what I see in the program are the kid's "guardians" rather than his parents. I point this out to Myra. 

"Cynical," she says. I think she means the manipulation of the kid but she adds, "You're so cynical." She strokes her bulge. I know the chair isn't comfortable for her. 

The kid comes on and he's a funny-looking thing. He's wearing a starched collar too big for his neck. He's pale under the limelight, his hair is plastered to his head and his ears stick out like wing nuts. Poor little runt. But he looks precociously unflustered by the size of the audience. His "guardians" take their seats either side of him as the kid is introduced by the emcee. Polite applause dies down and the kid waits, creating a tension in the hall, and I know, I just know, he's been coached to do this. 

He leans forward slightly and says, "Once upon a time." 

And the audience goes wild. Rapturous applause. This is irony, you see. Laid on with a teaspoon. From a six-year-old. It's a little message for critical observers like myself, for the skeptics and the doubters and disbelievers. It's post-post-postmodern. Or something. From a six-year-old sprog. And the audience laps it up. 

It takes a while for this little riot to die down before he launches into the story proper. And I have to admit it, he's not bad for a six-year-old. He delivers well, his story is pacy, he's got good kiddie timing, and he speaks clearly. What more could anyone want? 

The one thing we all want. The one thing we would willingly sacrifice all the above qualities to have. 

I identify the story after just a few minutes. Most people in the audience don't yet, but they will, because the narrative pattern will occur to them. It happens to be an old Romanian folktale, about a bear who walks through an anonymous landscape meeting other animals, challenging all of them to guess what he has under his hat. How do I know it? Because two years ago we re-recorded almost the complete collection of Moldovan's work—faster or slower, I can't recall—and there was a libretto borrowing from the tale. Floyd has clocked it too, because he turns to me with an expression of apology on his face. I smile back thinly. 

I mean, what are we supposed to do? Interrupt the proceedings and denounce the six-year-old in front of 1500 people? Jump to my feet and shout, "This isn't original! I spy a Romanian folk tale!" 

Nah. In any event, there is already a sense of slumping attention in the audience. Many have worked it out for themselves. The familiar narrative pattern, linked with inauthenticities in the manner the kid has been trained to deliver, will give it away. But an audience in denial is an astonishing thing, and the kid holds it for twelve minutes before ending the tale. 

The audience applauds loudly, but—and it's a significant but—not so loudly as they greeted his opening line. The emcee proposes a break, and promises us another performance by the ensemble before the prodigy will offer us a second tale. 

Not for us. We're out of there, as are a reasonable percentage of the audience judging by the bustling cloakroom activity. "Well," says Zelda, helping Myra on with her coat. "I hadn't heard it before." 

"Me neither," says Myra huffily. 

Floyd's levitated eyebrows exhort me to say nothing. We adjourn to The Long Memory for a drink before home. 




· · · · ·  


And a drink turns into seven or eight, as it must. There has been a lot more drunkenness these last few years, a lot more alcoholism. Drink and drugs: they give a semblance of dreaming, don't they? Helping us to remember. An approach to dreaming. A dullard's kick against the thick, thick ice. 
"A man walks into a bar," says Floyd. 

We're trying to invent a joke again. It's a dead loss, because there hasn't been a new joke in almost seven years, but we're pissed as newts in a pickle jar so we try anyway. Floyd says, start with the old structures, it makes things easier. 

"A man walks into a bar …" 

"Says, 'ouch!' " Zelda chips in. 

"Old. Very, very old," Myra says. She's not drinking because of the baby. Her tolerance for our "hilarious" drunkenness is wearing thin. She's already reached for her coat. 

"Really?' Zelda protests. "I thought I'd just made it up. I really did." She's slurring. 

"A man bars into a walk." Floyd says. 

"Give us a break!" Myra almost screams. "Come on, Jonathan, take me home." 

I think it's the interpreting I miss most. Though an interpreted dream is a punctured dream, at least in those days you could be certain of a steady supply, and the fun was in the mystery, the guessing, the deconstructing, the reassembling. We can all out-argue Freud when we own the theater. 

We say goodnight to Floyd and Zelda; lush, slobbering kisses all round. They stay for another drink as I shamble out of the swinging doors of The Long Memory, supported by my heavily pregnant wife. I complain bitterly about being made to leave early. 

"It was time," Myra says. "You know what will happen after the next drink. Floyd will get weepy. Then Zelda will get weepy because Floyd is weepy. Then we'll all have a stupid argument the subject of which no one will remember. Come on, stand up." 

"It's only the booze," I say as we reach the car. 

Myra gets into the driver's seat. She can barely fit her bump under the steering wheel. "The thing is," she says, tickling the ignition into life, "in knowing when it's time to go." 




· · · · ·   

Time to go. The aliens presumably knew it was time to go. Everyone can remember the moment when they quit the planet. When they quit us. And just as with the Kennedy assassination, everyone knows what they were doing at the time it happened: they were sleeping. 

The aliens appeared to everyone in a dream. Not the same dream exactly, but almost. You see, the aliens had to take some form in which to say farewell. For some it was a grandmother, for others a long-lost friend; for others still, a pet dog they'd had as a kid: for me my beloved collie, Nelly, long dead. But the message was the same. Thank you for hosting us, they said. We're very grateful, they said. But we've had enough, they said. 

They were apologetic that their stay was so brief. Five hundred thousand years residing inside our heads was, for them, a regrettably short stay. The twinkle of an eye. It was short but interesting, they said. But they dearly hoped that we had enjoyed the fruits of their presence as much as they had enjoyed an exhilarating ride. 

Everyone remembers being addressed in the same way, whether by grandmother or dog. Polite, somewhat formal, slightly abashed. Then the dream image had transformed into a cube of black light on a black background, before infolding into complete absence. The world awoke to a stunned comprehension of what had happened. 

Since which time no one has dreamed. 

Not a flicker. Lacunæ on a global scale. A collective lobotomy. 




· · · · ·  


Back home, Myra climbs into bed as I gargle with mouthwash and brush my teeth and try to sober up a bit. I know if I flop into bed the world will spin and I'll feel the nausea, so instead I go into my daughter's room and watch her sleeping. 
I perch on the edge of Mandy's bed, just watching her. In the moment of observing her sleep her room becomes a peaceful chapel or a quiet temple. Wind chimes tinkle softly at the window open a little to the night air. I sense her sleeping spirit at large, roaming, restless, looking for something, a Neverland, a Narnia. She's flying, but she can't find anywhere to land. I love her so much I could cry. She's six years old, and she has never dreamed. 

I have this confession to make: in the dark, at night, while she's sleeping, I whisper things in the delicate conch of my sleeping child's ear. Any things. Remembered fables. Old tales. Strange stories. Religious parables. Fragments. Anything that occurs to me. Heaven knows why, but the other day I heard myself saying Allah is great, there is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet. Then I sang her a song in French about dancing on the bridge of Avignon. 

Trying to create dreams for her. Trying to pierce the shell, hole the ice. 

It took us a while to work out that the aliens hadn't stolen our dreams. The aliens were the dreams. It was difficult to understand initially, generations of us brought up on notions of aliens as basically humanoid with latex rubber heads, or with eggshell-blue skin, or as disembodied human brains encased in a pink gas. 

The aliens residing in the consciousness of humanity for half a million years were a benevolent virus. They needed symbiosis, a host to achieve sentience, and that is what we gave them. What did they give us in return? Stories, music, religion. Tools, scientific ideas. Jokes, connections. The synaptic fire. 

After their departure they became known to us as Prometheans. 

Since then our stories have dried up. Our music has frozen. Our science is arrested. No one has had an original notion in seven years. We are lodged in the mud of time, fossilized. We are consigned to limbo, and the cold wind of uncreation howls in our ears like a demon. Our species, all of humanity, has become the preterite, the passed over. Our psychic teeth, pulled. 

And at nights I whisper in my child's tender ear, trying and failing to incubate the glory of dreaming. 




· · · · ·  


Myra wakes in the morning and, with a struggle, sits up in bed. I blink my eyes open, and she shakes her head, no, again. She hauls herself to her feet and walks naked to the bathroom, magnificent and comical, the morning light shining on the stretched skin of her huge pot. She mutters something about swollen feet, and I wonder if our baby is going to arrive on the seventh anniversary of the departure of the aliens. 
We are post-dreaming now, of course. Almost a new way of dating human history, ante- and post-dreaming. For academics, at any rate. The huge joke (I use the word loosely) is that in the entire field of intellectual endeavor only certain academics—critical theorists, social commentators, and cultural analysts—proceed as if nothing has happened, busily producing unfathomable papers on post-dreaming society. 

Of course, not everyone buys the idea that we've lost it. Creativity, I mean. Originality. Innovation. Breakthrough. Those slavering puppies up at the University, for example, publishing their breathtakingly incomprehensible theses and self-serving tracts. But they're about the only ones. Hence the spectacle of six-year-old prodigies conning huge audiences desperate for the succor of the new. 

Myra is thinking about something. She returns from the bathroom stroking her belly, two deep vertical creases between her eyebrows. "Out with it," I say. 

She sits on the bed again, but with her back to me. "What if," she begins; "what if there were not innumerable aliens?" 

I think I know what's coming. It has occurred to me already. 

"I mean," she continues, "it would be odd, wouldn't it, if there were exactly the same number of aliens as there were people, and they just happened to match up, one apiece as it were. Are you with me?" 

"Yes. Go on." 

"So what if really there was only one alien. Inhabiting all of us. And that single alien decided to leave us. That would make more sense, wouldn't it?" 

"It's a thought," I say, trying to sound light. 

"Then that single alien who left us. Might that be what we've always called God?" 

This is too complicated. I don't want to think about this, so I just kiss Myra and go downstairs to make some coffee. 




· · · · ·  


Is this the end? Have we arrived at some feeble conclusion to human history, terrible in its banality? Not the nightmare end. Not the four horsemen. Not the holocaust, nor the nuclear winter, nor the global warming, nor the asteroid storm. Just this exhaustion. Just this absence. Like a watch spring run down. 
I think this might be worse than the apocalyptic ending. The absence of poetry, of music, of narrative; this muted fanfare; the end of the never-ending movie. Not by fire or ice, but by indifference. An indifference that leaves us at the mercy of eternity. 

Mandy is up and awake. Warm spring sunlight streams through the windows. She has the door open and is running for the swing I erected for her under the big old lilac tree. I leave the coffee to bubble and follow her out. The lilac flower is rampant, intoxicating. 

Mandy sees me. She giggles. "Push me, Daddy! Come on!" 

And I push her back and forth, and she moves from shadow into light with each swing. She wants to go dangerously high. "Faster, Daddy, Faster!" 

Then I see the expression change on her face, and I step back to allow the swing to slow. "What is it?" 

She spits something into her hand, and it's with relief I see it's only a milk tooth, slightly bloody at the root. It's her last one. She hands me the milk tooth as if she's trusting me with a precious stone or a talisman. I'm not sure what to do with it. 

"Push me again! Higher! Higher!" 




· · · · ·  


First contact was something we speculated about for a hundred years. Of course they would be carbon-based, even roughly humanoid; of course they would somehow vocalize; of course they would occupy the same plane of time and space. Not intersecting like this. Not like a finger of smoke inserted into the brain. How could we have guessed that first contact was already made perhaps half a million years ago? 
Mandy swings from shadow into the dappled morning sunlight, giggling, calling for me to push her higher and higher, and I clutch Mandy's milk tooth, a droplet of dew in my fist, and I think: Is it one alien? Or is it one for each of us? And I wonder what I'm going to tell Mandy come the day she asks me. 

Myra comes out to us in her silk kimono, sleepily pushing a stray curl behind her ear. Mandy jumps off the swing to let her mother sit, a sincere gesture but one copied from adults around her these last couple of months. But she wants to push Myra on the swing. 

"Gently," Myra says. "Just gently. I don't want to go high." 

I go back in and bring out the coffee on a tray. Mandy pushes Myra gently back and forth on the swing, babbling happily, and I notice Myra is frowning. She mouths something at me and points to her ear, indicating I should listen. 

"… And she said they were sorry. It was a long time. They wouldn't normally have gone such a long time and they didn't like to leave for longer periods than they had stayed, but they couldn't help it and anyway a long time ago is the same as the near future for them and tomorrow is half the length of only a part of yesterday and—" 

I stop Mandy from talking and I stall the swing. "Who? Who said this?" 

"Nelly," says Mandy still intent on pushing Myra back and forth; and the overpowering scent of the lilac makes me feel giddy and I say, "Who is Nelly?" 

"Don't be silly Daddy, you know Nelly. She's a dog. She was your dog when you were a little boy. Have you still got my tooth?" 

"Yes, yes, I've still got it here," and I'm holding this tray of coffee and I don't know what to do with it. "When did Nelly tell you this?" 

"In the night while I was asleep, Nelly came and told me she was sorry to be away so long but she was back and all her friends would come back— 

"Jonathan!" says Myra, but I'm too interested in what Mandy is saying to look up. 

I sweep Mandy up in my arms and hurry back inside, where I switch on the television. Mandy is still speaking. "—And I had a little talk with Selina in Mummy's tummy because I know she's a girl though you don't know and—" 

"Jonathan!" Myra calls from the garden, but it's all over the television. Reports flooding in from Auckland and Fiji, from Vladivostok and Brisbane, from Osaka and Jakarta! And from Islamabad and Nairobi, from Israel and Cairo, Eastern Europe, anyplace where people go to sleep and wake up before we do, and nearer to home, too, people waking from dreaming, rushing out into the streets in tears and madness just to try to recount what has happened to them in the night, not everyone, to be sure, but millions, yes, millions of people, maybe half the global population, dreaming dreams, gut-spilling their experiences as the report sweeps across the globe like the shadow of an eclipse, or a tsunami of unparalleled joy, or a single unbearably beautiful musical note resonating around the planet and I don't know if it was all a warning, or a punishment or an aberration but whatever it was we are going to be allowed to dream again, dream and create, and I know that this time we need to be more careful but my heart is bursting as I understand implicitly that we are to be given back our wings. 

"Jonathan!" 

I rush back out into the garden and Myra is gazing at me with a strange expression, half desperation, half appeal, and her kimono has fallen open and the sunlight flares on a mercurial rivulet along her thigh and it has started and I want to put down the coffee and to listen more to Mandy and to watch the sensational news reports on TV and to get my wife to hospital and I want to hand back the tooth and I'm staring, staring at the heraldic trickle, the catch-light of the silver manifesto, unable to do anything, paralyzed by the torrent of words my daughter is speaking while I am drunk on lilac and imminence. 

"Jonathan," Myra says firmly, hauling herself out of the swing, "just put the coffee down." 

So I put the tray of coffee down on the grass and I go and get the pre-packed bags and when I've got the car ready Myra and Mandy get in. 

"Selina will be my sister, won't she?" says Mandy. 

"Yes. Fasten your seat belt." 

"Selina will have lots of dreams, won't she?" 

"Yes," I say, sparking the car into life. 

Mandy thinks for a bit. "Is Selina coming now?" 

"Yes," Myra says. "You're very sure it's a girl, aren't you?" 

"Yes," Mandy replies, "because in the night they told me that another half a million years is starting. Have you still got my tooth?" 

I say yes, I still have her tooth. It is still squeezed in my fist like a token of some miraculous covenant as I drive us to the hospital, because the baby is coming. 


The End