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Das Traumfänger
That is where my dearest and brightest dreams have ranged - to hear for the duration of a heartbeat the universe and the totality of life in its mysterious, innate harmony.
Albus - you must see, here Hesse speaks of life as a thing which can be completed, finished; total and harmonious. That suggests that life is, for most people and for most times, incomplete. A work in progress; something that will, perhaps, never be completed. (You would say this, yes - that a life cut short is incomplete and can never become completed? I, I in my contrariness, in my faith, would say it is the other: that a life cut short is complete - it has become what it was always intended to be. But that is less pleasing and more depressing, I admit.
Na ja, aber if you take this to its logical conclusion - you and I were fated, pre-destined. Intended. Is that not much more pleasing?)
What would it matter to complete life - to finish it, to fulfil it like a journey or a learning? How do you complete the finished? How do you refine the refined? If you overdo something, you destroy it: over-mine, over-dig, over-eat. Gluttony comes at a cost, and if you want too much of life, why should it not be the same?
You asked me once what it felt like, to exist in infinite futures at once, to Know them all at once - a split second of enlightenment, I think you called it, bright and blinding and painful clarity; an aching truth which sits in the stomach, surrounded by a calmed turmoil.
I cannot answer that - I have tried before - but this, this is what it is.
Thin-spun strings, pulled taut, in a soft, falling kaleidoscope - from the palest gold-flecked yellow through the gentle petal-pinks and richer, deeper reds: cerise and cherry; to the very bottom, brown-white feathers hanging free from navy threads. It drifts through the air, above your head, stirred by the slightest, slimmest breeze slipping through the cracked-open window and the open curtains.
It sways and dances and you watch it, blue eyes bright even in the night.
The beads bump against the wall in a series of gentle tapping sounds, beating out a faint staccato rhythm, full of long pauses and a quiet clattering every now and then. It keeps you awake, the sound and the swaying, but it is soothing in its own way - the nostalgia it provokes a sweet melancholy, to counteract the bitter taste in your mouth.
You had seen it in America, at a conference on what-had-felt-like the other side of the world, down in San Francisco - a twinkling cacophony of a city, full of lights and voices and remarkably quaint for a thriving, growing place, fiercely half-wild - hanging off a stall there. When the woman running it had seen you stop, seen you just, well, stop in the street, she had smiled, bright and beaming, and beckoned you over.
They were hardly the same as the ones your mother had made for you when you were small, with coloured yarn stretched thin and tiny glass beads you threaded on with plump child-like fingers - but they were similar enough, and it was similar enough.
You thought it would help.
It does not, alas. It does less than help, in fact, and you feel a fool all over again.
There is a path in the grass - a trail - and he follows on in a quiet, languid chase. He is in no rush; there is no need - the other is waiting for him, after all.
Through the trees, picking his way down the ambling, wandering path laid out for him, he watches as the grass grows full of flowers and the trees rustle, brushing crumpled leaves to the floor in a thickening pile; all around him, it is a patchwork carpet of white daisies and orange-red leaves and delicate rose-lavender rhododendrons he decides he likes best of all. The scent of them is thick now, dizzying and heady and turning the air almost humid, under-laid by the fresh pine and the wind whisking air up the river, salty and sweet.
The air shimmers, almost, under the weight of it - the perfume sticking in his throat, to his clothes; he imagines he will smell it for days after, wake up with it clinging to his skin - well, that and the crackle, sparkling and soft, of magic, metallic and hot, that he can taste on the back of his throat.
He was wrong before, he realises: this is this is what it would be to fly too close to the sun.
Sitting down, he stretches his legs out in front of him, the grey checks of his trousers - new and sharply cut, he had worn them the other day - almost ostentatious in their tedium, and buries a hand in a head of curls to his right.
It feels like cornsilk, fluffed and mussed from sleep, familiar enough to cut through skin, and it is real enough that he forgets to breathe.
Albus, Gellert murmurs - sleepy, as he should be, and fond, as he should not.
He does not say anything.
There is so much he should say - I hate you, I love you, I do not love you any more, I cannot forgive you, I cannot forget you, I wish you had never run, I wish I had followed, I wish I wish I wish I hate I love I wish - but none of sticks; it all passes through him in fleeting, vague bursts and then fades, paper-thin things and drifting away like smoke caught in clouds.
So he says nothing.
Albus, Gellert says again: more heat, a little more breath and the air around them stills, trees and bees and flowers vanishing.
Twining strands round his hand, slick and tangled, he tugs them taut in a gentle jerk and pulls a surprised, throaty sound from Gellert; a rough half-caught cry, intimate and laced through with red.
The world flashes in a mirage of cotton-sheets and the hot smell of sweat, panted gasps echoing, and his head is ringing, reeling as though he is drunk.
A second later - a quartet of heartbeats, suddenly loud - and there is skin, warm and curved, pressing against his arm. The weight of Gellert's head is too comfortable, the familiarity of it curdling his stomach (how many times had they sat like this in the field, by the brook, pressed close in Albus' bed as sheets tangled around legs? Too many, he knows, too many). The heat seeps through into his own body, a dull burn, even as the bridge remains cool under his thighs.
This whole venture was foolish - foolish and selfish - and it is that same, bitter-sour selfishness which makes him comb through, loop curls about his fingers and tug, harder this time. He feels Gellert shift (he is resolute in this: he will not look, will not look down, cannot look down - he looks down and he is lost), hears how his sigh shudders out of his mouth, looks down (looks down, oh but he is a fool) to meet Gellert's mismatched gaze, mottled as though they are shaded, a glade of trees sweeping to cover them...
And that is enough for now. It has gone on too long as it is. He has been reckless to come here, cruelly self-indulgent, and if he stays... if he says any longer, he is quite sure he will breach every rule he set himself.
So he rips his hand from Gellert's hair and does not look back as he leaves.
The first note - a scribbled scrap of paper, torn from a book (Hermann Hesse's Gertrude, you later discover), covered in the margins and around the sides in Gellert's inimitable, looped handwriting, arrives two days later.
You lock it in the box under your bed.
With all the other mementoes you should not keep.
And the Stymphalian birds, wont to hide the day with veiling wings, did he not bring down from the very clouds?
- Seneca
(The card is small, portrait and pocket-sized, with neat, smooth edges and the smell of the cherry blossom petals which had fluttered out of the envelope in a shower of gentle, velveteen pink; it sits on his desk, tucked between pages 182 and 183 of A Tale of Two Cities with only a corner poking out, white-rind and blue paint swirls. Most of the time, he can barely see it - and that helps, really it does - but when he pauses, every now and then, glancing outside at the trees and the sweep of the school grounds with their long, curved lines of evergreen firs and the shimmering body of the lake, he thinks and wonders and somehow, someway or another, he finds the card sitting in his hands, face-up, his heart beating double time as he waits, waits, waits to turn it over and read the inscription on the back.
It is undoubtedly pretentious, most assuredly aggrandising, to claim similarity with a demi-god, to claim connection to the divine, however tenuous, but, ah but does it not make something in his chest thump a little off-beat.
He can recite it by now; can see the flicks and troughs in his handwriting - the hooded loops of the capitals and the sharp, jagged lines in the ‘n's and ‘m's - so instead, he studies the miniature painting on the front of it: the washed-out blue-grey of the landscape, the dark outline of the man's coat and legs, his blonde hair seeming to blow and bluster in a stilled wind.
It is only an image and it would be innocent, were it not for the fact that it is from Gellert, and so there is nothing innocent about it at all.
There is nothing much really innocent about either of them.
As it is, the card stays in the book - he replaces it every time, with the reminder that he should find it a better home or burn it; box or burn, box or burn - and he dreams of mountaintops, wind-tossed hair, static electricity trailing along the backs of his hands, and the blurred figure of a man half-hidden in cloud.)
Blurring, running, like water-spilled paint blending and merging, matting into a dark, green-tipped landscape, the world around him tips and changed, lines sketching themselves into place, giving definition to needles on trees, the hidden feathers underneath a bird's wing, the delicate shading on a rhododendron bush. They are heavy in some place, light and a soft dove-grey, leaden and silvery like scars, in others - and in seconds, he is standing on the same path as before.
It is odd - dreams are always odd things, malleable and changeable as mood - but it has grown to feel more comfortable now, that he can never remember them being different, just as he can never remember them being anything but what they are in that moment.
This time, it is different: the sky is grey and full, hanging low with fat, puffed clouds promising rain and the dim rumble of thunder on the horizon. The smell of lightning, smoke-like and thinly fiery, cuts through it all - the flowers and the leaves - carried on a breeze which sways down over the river, flicking at the swift waters underneath, rippling and rocking as they go.
Gellert is not there this time (he is coming, though, that Albus can tell, can feel it - after all, he would not have ended up here if Gellert would not also be here, was not dreaming of this place), and he sits to wait, one foot up on the bridge and the other dangling tentatively over the waters below.
He thinks of it fleetingly, and then there is a newspaper in his hands: German, he presumes - though which he is not sure exactly - from the title in big, gothic lettering over the top and the spread-winged black-and-yellow eagle painted bright in the middle of the words. Across most of the page, there is a black-and-white photo of Gellert, arms raised in his characteristic manner, declaiming like a Roman orator, all pomp and ceremony and silver-tongued honey.
It is startling and sinister and magnificent. It stirs something, deep in his soul.
Gellert's arrival is heralded by a thin line of fire, hair-slim and barbed, which flashes across the top of his newspaper like a whip, red-orange and gold-flecked. The heat from it is sudden, sucking the oxygen out of the air in front of him with a gasp; he drops the paper and watches as it floats down to dip just below the top of the river, sliding under the crested tips of little curving waves.
There is a quiet pause and then Gellert is there, next to him, sitting too close - far too close, as it always was with him, as he always had done - close enough to touch, if he just moved his hands a little.
Even a twitch of his little finger. Even that.
He doesn't, and so they sit there, side-by-side, as the storm grows closer, thicker, massing overhead like a tea blooms in water, ink-grey and blackish, the wind carrying the first spatters of rain down, throwing them over their heads, red and blonde, like confetti.
Albus, Gellert murmurs - and this time, it is almost a prayer, a plea, a bargain. There is nothing of silver left in Gellert then, nothing of honey or allure or easy grace, but a desperation and a hurt which is almost ugly.
He does not say anything.
Instead, he slides a hand around Gellert's thigh, fingers pressing warm on the inside of his leg, and stares out down the landscape, tracing the long line of the river, flashing like fish scales, dulled and rusted, in the gathering dark. Without waiting, even as he hears Gellert's breath quickening, feels the uncertainty, he drags his hand higher and higher and higher.
All his rules are broken, even if they only ever existed and died inside his head, and the glint in Gellert's hair reminds him vaguely, tremulously, of the beads in the dreamcatcher over his bed.
Solitude produces originality, bold & astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd, and the forbidden.
My Albus, dear Albus, you cannot pick and choose which you will have: beauty and perversity go hand-in-hand or have you learned nothing from the days we spent together, the things we experienced together? What is beautiful can be forbidden, is called perverse, but oh, but that beauty still exists, despite all absurdity and courage.
Magic blooms in rare souls, but love beyond love - that is rarer. Do not squander it.
Albus, oh Albus, come see me again. You must. You must. You must.
Do not make me wait too long.
(This time, this one, you crumple it in a fist and lock it in the box, half-wrapped around a purple-sunset dreamcatcher.)