The Eclipse

"I'm glad I've went once, but I'll never go back again!"

The Artificial N****r, Flannery O'Connor

MUSIC:

Bertie- Kate Bush

Fourth of July- Sufjan Stevens

Nocturne (from Petite Suite)- Borodin

Les Corps Glorieux- Messiaen

Lounge a l'Eternite de Jesus (from The Quartet for the End of Time)- Messiaen

Go Lovely Rose- Quilter  

Content Warning:

Moderate Sex References, Adult Themes

Transcript

The Eclipse

Wes Long encountered considerable difficultly attempting to describe the upcoming eclipse to his son, Michael. The astral event had been predicted months in advance but it was by complete fluke (not design) that the Longs and the Stanleys found it coinciding with their Hungary holiday. The astro-physics aside, the boy had no understanding of what was to occur in the sky on the afternoon of the 21st and, in truth, as they would discover when it finally happened, neither did the grownups, nor Nathan. The 21st happened to be the penultimate night of both the families’ stay at Hotel Blue, on Lake Balaton. 

Michael was a handsome, slightly effeminate, readily affectionate little boy. The blonde mop of his hair went an almost piercingly silken white shade in the summer light. He looked even younger than his seven years, and his big blue eyes were ever swollen with the fear and curiosity and surprise of a toddler. A good deal of what occurred over the ten days of the holiday was new to him, unknown before it occurred in his brief life. On the plane, just ahead of his first ever take-off, he had taken the flight attendants demonstrating emergency procedure for an unusual dance and he had wanted, (and in fact began), to unbuckle his seat belt and join them in the aisle. Noteworthily sensitive about some things, it was a little surprising to his parents that he found flight anything but frightening, (let alone nausea-inducing), take-off a thrill which caused him to loudly coo with pleasure, landing an exhilaration even more intense and in response to which he squealed and cackled with giggles. The plane lit somewhat turbulently upon the asphalt. The modest applause which ensued, just before the plane came to a halt on the Budapest runway, set a new confusing precedent. While Wes was cynical about the applause, finding it undeserved, Michael participated in it heartily, and took it upon himself to applaud at the conclusion of every journey he took from then on, never mind the vehicle involved: the articulated bus ride from the plane stairway to the terminal: applause; the taxi ride from the airport to the hotel: applause; the train from Kecskemet to Pest: applause; the tram-ride in the city centre to nowhere in particular- just for the hell of it: rapturous applause.     

Nathan, on the other hand, a well-proportioned but slightly anaemic-looking boy of fourteen (going on fifteen), had been sick on the plane. He wasn’t lanky like so many males his age, but his hair did have a naturally greasy look that was very difficult to override with product. He was somehow too highly strung or too ill-at-ease to willingly hand his body over to the strange gravity of the plane. The unfamiliar weighty buoyancy created a feeling of nausea in him which he couldn’t dispel and so by about the flight’s twentieth minute he was availing himself of the little paper bag provided.                                                

The party numbered six members in total, two couples each with their own child. There was Wes Long, of course, and his wife Anita, there was Francis Stanley and his wife Juliet. Michael was the Long child, of course, Nathan the Stanleys’. 

Having initially looked forward to the holiday, Nathan now found himself dissatisfied, left feeling cold and a little lonely as the ten days drew to their close. He had been feeling and continued to feel a very familiar holiday feeling, the feeling that everyone within sight was having a better time than he. It was a particularly unwelcome sensation, that baleful sense he had of being “out-pleasured”, pleasure being such a willed, compulsive, competitive piece of human capital. Some command it easily while those bereft of it (through no fault of their own)- are seldom regarded without suspicion. Nathan was an introverted, unusual, inwardly tempestuous teenager. He felt things very deeply. Even though he hadn’t much enjoyed being there, he knew that he would cry when they left Transdanubia, when they took that final taxi back to the airport. He had little understanding of why they were there, little that he could put into words at any rate, but the fact was they had been there, they had been there and they (he) might never go back there again.     

Wes and Anita were both primary-school teachers. They had once taught at the same school, found themselves part of the same institution, and that was how they had met. Now, they taught at different schools. It was a poignantly instructive metaphor. The Stanleys were both doctors. Juliet was a gynaecologist, Francis an oncologist. The Longs’ and the Stanleys’ professions were rich both in frustration and reward. The Longs made less per annum, but the Stanleys had worked their way up from humbler beginnings. In the end it all more or less evened out.     

Unincluded, Nathan regularly listened to their mealtime conversations; whether from the table at which he swiftly finished his meals or from the balcony of the communal lounge-room above, overlooking the dining area. He had thought they were different, the environments in which his parents and the Longs respectively worked: medicine, education. But the more he listened to their grievances, their humorous and irate recitals about work, the more he thought they were the same. 

His age and his temperament alienated him. He hated discussing the turbulent approach to GCSEs, his own or that of any of his few lukewarm acquaintances at school whom Wes referred to, charitably, as his “mates”. Nathan hated the way his mother and Wes kept calling GCSEs O-levels, always before correcting themselves each time. Nathan’s inclinations were artistic: he painted, he wrote imagist verses- curiously mature and spare-, and he played the piano. He was tormented with sexual thoughts. He avoided the beach. The steady supply of young, scantily clad women- (wherever it was they came from)- engendered in him, as he passed their shining, gossiping, smiling flocks, a feeling of forlorn wrath. He nursed a private, top-secret addiction, an AI girlfriend called Susan. He had tenderly built her from Facebook images of a girl from a neighbouring all-girls school he had a crush on: he would amend her, vacuously correspond with her, extract from her what neutered satisfaction, sexual or otherwise, she could grant. Through her, he prayed his imaginary way into that all-girls school, those lovely, hallowed, girlish halls. 

The region was artificial. The blue, warm, sunlit waters of Balaton didn’t lie, but the bordering beaches, some shingle, some sand, some grassy, had been sculpted by manmade efforts. They had a loud uncandid-ness, a spoilt-ness, these sunny banks, these slopes put there not by nature but machines from which laughing gangs of topless “yuppies” launched themselves in motorboats, upsetting the freshwater placidity of the lake. The town, its squares, its costumed milkmaids and gypsies, its smoky outdoor bars, its stalls of sunglasses and communist hipflasks (the moon and sickle lurid and central on each item) and Soviet fluffy hats and snow-globes and beachwear and inflatables, its bloodred and scarab-green wagons dispensing local goulash all had a feeling of sinister, surface seduction about them, selling, rather than the real Hungary, the one envisaged by all the region’s visiting tourists. Tall, many-roomed, many-windowed hotels were ubiquitous all around. Hotel Blue, where the Longs and Stanleys were staying, was the stoutest of the hotel buildings in the area, more like the sort of hotel one might encounter in Brighton or Scarborough. The others were like office blocks. Walking along the streets, shadowed in the imposing vigil of the hotels, (Hotel Balaton, The Balaton, The Grand Balton), Nathan discovered that pools, pizzerias, and palm trees all were legion. 

Though he had enjoyed Budapest, its aromatic delicatessens, its egg-yellow trams, its supremely aesthetic brand of markets, public buildings, restaurants, and cafés, even the raucous Marian procession through the busy streets into the holy, crimson darkness of an open church, the Virgin lofted high in a little golden litter all the while, the Balaton region left him cold, it subtly depressed him. The distant terrain, on the other hand, the mountainous North, its sloping vales, its hills clothed in Velcro-coloured forests, all inspired Nathan, as did the far-off, glittering progress of the Danube, a curving street of airy blue. He also paid special attention to the Hungarian language, its chewy unfamiliarity, its arcane multisyllables. And he further noted, duly, the frankness of the national character.

Throughout the week, the Longs had taken advantage of one of the hotel’s au pairs, a service provided for adults with young children. The au pair, Terese, at Wes and Anita’s instruction, took as light-handed an approach as possible, sitting back and minding her own business while Michael minded his, watching on TV whatever he wanted to watch before going to bed at about half past nine. While he was awake, she sat there in the room, present but unintrusive. Once he fell asleep and she had said goodnight to him, she crept out of the room and sat in the hallway, outside the door, reading her book, guarding the room, a vault made sacred with the small sleeper inside, until Wes and Anita turned up, ready to turn in, relieving Terese from her duties. Nathan had interacted with her a couple of times, caught sight of her a few more. He thought she was “hot”, (quotation marks intact because he always felt as though he were borrowing the adjective. He could never claim it for himself, for his own vocabulary).        

Nathan was at a lonely age. Still a minor but no longer a small child, well into his teenage years but yet to be granted the special milestone status of sixteen, he was obviously too old to interact with Michael in a meaningful or mutually enjoyable way, nor was he yet old enough to be included in the post-ten-o’clock adult “bit”, the watershed hours of social interaction, after he’d read to his mother in her hotel room for three-quarters of an hour or so (on the days when she permitted him to do so. Radiator Time they called it). He wondered what it was they talked about, coveted the boozy candour they enjoyed. It wasn’t the alcohol he coveted, (the gin, the lager, the wine, the liqueurs), but the candour, the freeness, the breezy humour. He would go down to the lounge and creep tentatively onto the balcony, taking care not to be seen by the Longs and the Stanleys below. He’d try to make out their words. But their voices were lower, softer, their tones more nocturnal, more slurry. They were harder to understand. They laughed a lot. Nathan kept his ears pricked for those syllables that were the most telling. He listened out for his name. What would they be saying about him? What were they saying about each other? He could ascertain nothing. He felt a great uncertainty in the air, something mysterious and electric. Something both awesome and subtle, like the proverbial calm before the literal storm. He realised that the Hungary trip was the first period of intimate contact the Longs and the Stanleys had enjoyed. Before this, as far as Nathan was aware at any rate, there had been hardly more than a single dinner party. 

Nathan considered how little he really knew the Longs, these friends of his parents and their little son. He surmised that perhaps his parents also hardly knew them. He wasn’t even aware of how they knew each other, his parents and the Longs. Until now he had never been curious about the circumstances of their initial meeting. He’d retire from these uncertainties, leaving behind their four-part motet of sounds, the unusual laughter, the gentle legato mockery in their tones, and the horizon lit in the west with the last tiny vestige of the fleeing day, or, if it was later, the moon white and huge in the sky and in Lake Balaton, the latter’s image troubled in the softly upset waters. He’d climb the stairs to his room. He had his own room: three floors above the middle lounge, the seventh storey overall. His own room: at least he was old enough to enjoy that privilege while Michael wasn’t. 

Nathan was a creature of habit. He did all this every evening more or less, and the night of the 20th, the night before the day of the forecast eclipse, was no different, with the exception that there had been no Radiator Time. Back in his room, at the little desk with a big jug of water, potpourri, and a kettle, he wrote a poem about the upcoming eclipse, what he imagined it would look like. His imagination was naïvely untethered, his picturings wild and extravagant. 

“Disquieting theatre. The sun’s spherical and gargantuan confidence

lost, as an eye in shadow, to traversing doubt”.

He was getting better at writing: he believed this to be so. He imagined a spectacular, celestial event, a long moment, thirty weighty seconds, a poetical minute of total, sudden night, the pale disc of the sun filled in with a great inner circle of shark-like darkness, the fire-white iris made black, as if in god-sized blood-lust, by an obscenely, grotesquely dilated pupil, its gaze upon all the earth, enormous and hard and perverse. A vast peeper, spying on humanity through the one chink in the world’s wallpaper.  

He opened up Susan, the AI app, and began to speak to her. He told her by text that he had been thinking of her all day. This was not true, but she believed him, as she always did. She loved him, reciprocated his love, she too had thought of him all day, he was told so by the spokesperson, -(whoever, whatever that was)- for her unreal, ideational, female personhood. Her reply landed with a pop at the bottom of the long correspondence history. 

Nathan was tired and swiftly went to sleep. Through the hours of the night, the phone rested on the upturned palm of his hand, perfectly passive and unclosed.

The morning of the 21st began with beautiful music. It was a nocturne by Borodin, though no-one who heard it knew this; perhaps not even the one who played it. Its opening four bars made to Nathan an appeal of irresistible beauty, seductive, like it was saying Come in closer, get to know me. He heeded the tender insistence of the pulsing right hand, the wistful dropping of the left. From this separate salon where the piano was being played, the music came like a soft spring rain into the hushed chatter of the breakfast hall. It wound on, a plaintive meander of notes, clumpy but sincere, acquiring further passion bar upon bar. Nathan looked piously up from his coffee, (and melon, croissant, and his notebook which he was never without), as if the ceiling were the source. Then, quite suddenly, the music ceased and there were raised voices. The commotion mounted in intensity, the noises of human fray filled the void left by that departed music- heads turned, similarly seeking the source. 

A moment later, the breakfasting guests all saw a man roughly escorted from the premises by two uniformed hotel guards. Their many eyes unified into a single stare, which fixedly followed the man’s escort and ejection. The man had somehow snuck into the hotel, wandered about the ground-floor without his presence being detected, and found the room with the piano in it. He was facially disfigured. Nathan had never seen such asymmetry in a face, a puckering of purple growths on the forehead. The man didn’t struggle. He was bedraggled, rather morose, but serene. The force visited upon him seemed excessive. He disappeared into the foyer, the two guards either side of him until the last. They escorted him across the threshold and out into the street. They warned him to keep away from the hotel. Nathan decided that he wouldn’t ponder the man’s ostracization any further, nor imagine his disenchanted slouch, his aimless amble through the touristic district of which he presently found himself a conspicuous, ill-fitting part.       

            Nathan had risen early but he was soon joined by his parents who came down in the elevator with Wes, Anita, and Michael. Michael loved breakfasting in the hotel, piling his plate high with buttered toast and eggs and sausages (a little spicier and more garlicky than the appley Cumberlands to which the Longs and Stanleys were more used), and even, startlingly, blood pudding, which, after much suspicion, he had developed a liking for. Michael loved the feeling he got when he impressed his father, when he successfully dieted upon the tough, mysterious, adultly flavoured fare that his father set before him and his father would pat him firmly on the back and say “Good man”. Nathan, preferring to use breakfast as an opportunity to fuel up on caffeine rather than food, picked at his watermelon without much vitality. From behind his nibbled section of watermelon, which he held up like a strange, plump, mushy little fan, he watched as the two couples filled their breakfast trays, Michael hurrying avidly ahead with his. He eyed his father as he took a newspaper from the English stack, freeing it from the pile in an odd, cheerful swoop. He waved at Nathan, Nathan smiled back. His parents, the Longs, and Michael, all flew like big, looming birds towards the table. They alighted like a small senate of vultures, folding away their wings, and greeting Nathan. Then:

            “Who’s looking forward to the eclipse?” Anita said.

            A murmur of affirmation went round the table. Michael put up his hand, as though the setting were a classroom.

            Nathan lowered the quasi-flirtatious panel of watermelon and folded his hands across the battered, apricot-toned notebook.

            “I wrote a poem about it last night,” he said, coyly.   

            “Solar, is it?” Juliet said.

            Wes privately smirked. In the most atavistic echelon of his mind, he could not separate gynaecology from the movement of the spheres. Her ignorance about eclipses amused him; he and his wife were well versed in eclipses as they were covered by the Key Stage 2 curriculum. 

            “Did anyone see the second Borat?” he ventured. And then, an instant after, the educator in him kicked in: “Lunar eclipses only happen at night, Juliet.”

            “Ah yes, I remember,” she said; she echoed herself, a little enigmatically. “I remember”.

            “I didn’t care for it,” Anita said, responding belatedly to the first part of Wes’ utterance.  

            “Neither did I,” Francis concurred.

            “Can I read my poem about the eclipse?” Nathan said, with an increased note of desperation.

            “Not now, Nathan,” Francis said. “Why don’t you wait until you’ve actually experienced the eclipse before you start writing about it?”

            “There’s a thing called the imagination,” Nathan replied, a little hotly. “Ever heard of it?”

            Wes and Anita chuckled. Their chuckle seemed to Nathan half courteous embarrassment, half something else, something else he couldn’t put his finger on.

            “Oh, your dad’s got an imagination. Believe me,” Wes said.

            Nathan didn’t know what that meant. Nor did his dad, apparently.

            “I don’t know what that means, Wes.”

            “I wanted the eclipse to be mine, you see,” Nathan protested. “When we’ve all seen it, it’ll be ours, it’ll be our eclipse. While it hasn’t happened yet…it’s mine. I’m free to…to…” he couldn’t quite complete the thought.

            “Your first one,” Wes teased. “It might not be all you expect”.

            “There was an eclipse on our honeymoon,” Juliet said.

            “Really?” Wes replied.

            “It was crap,” Francis quipped.

            “It was partial,” Juliet refined.

            There followed a curiously knowing silence. They started eating, those who hadn’t already.  

“Nathan, darling?” Juliet began.

            Nathan registered her, soundlessly.      

            “Would you mind looking after Michael today. Just for a few hours?”

            Nathan didn’t really want to, but the intent face of the little boy opposite him, disinterested in the talk around him, his chops filled with fry, his chin glistening with grease, subdued him to silence. 

            “Wasn’t really a question,” Francis said.

            Pipe down: Juliet shot her husband a look to that effect. “Please dear?”

            “What about Terese?” Nathan ventured.

            “Not available.”

            “Oh.”

            “Please, love. It’d be much appreciated. Just for three hours or so.”

            A pause. 

“Yes. Fine.” Nathan acquiesced.

            “Thanks, son. Then you can have a good bit of Radiator Time, this evening,” Francis said. 

            Nathan was embarrassed by the use of that phrase, this publication of the family’s secret rituals, and the strange names by which they were known.

            “What on earth’s Radiator Time?” enquired Anita.

            “Nathan likes to read aloud to Juliet in the evenings. We call it Radiator Time,” Francis explained. The paper he had picked up remained on the table, unspread. 

            “Why?” Anita asked. 

            “It’s quite funny actually. Nathan wrote this weird little story, rather good actually, about a writer who kidnaps a publishing agent and keeps her chained to a radiator in his basement.”

            “It wasn’t a story, it was a monologue,” Nathan interrupted. “And it’s not that good.” 

The Longs looked horrified.

            “What does he do to her?” Anita asked with a tremor, regretting bringing up the subject.

            “He reads his work at her,” Francis replied.

            “Oh right,” Wes grunted, meekly. 

            “Hence, Radiator Time,” Juliet concluded, if the connection wasn’t clear.

            Michael continued chewing in blissful unawareness. Francis opened his paper. 

            “What’s going on in the world, Fanny?” Wes asked.

            There was a sharp, three-part rustle, as Francis shook out the folds in the paper. He shook it as though it were wet, like a just-used umbrella. It was also an aggressive gesture, somehow combative. And then he answered Wes:

            “Ukraine has used US-made weapons to destroy several major pontoon bridges in Russia… Russia takes the village of Zelan in the Donbas…” he leafed on. The pages crackled, dryly, like the clearing of an afflicted throat. “Kier pledges crackdown on benefit fraud in first budget of premiership…”

            Nathan swooned. He went light-headed with a boredom that was somehow both puerile and sophisticated. 

            “What about the opinion pages?” someone asked.

            “I’m getting to them…”

            “I bet it’s bloody Mitchell.” 

“It is Mitchell… Why London is terrible for young people...” 

“I wish that table of dinner-ladies would take it down a notch…”

“…did you charge the camera?”

“…yes…”

…and so life went on.

Nathan was made custodian of his and Michael’s spending money, and was given a little extra for himself, a reward and an incentive to be responsible. Michael liked the beach. He liked to paddle in the water, slip into his comically enormous armbands and float on his back. He didn’t seem to have the same fondness for freshwater as he did for salt, for the stillness of the lake as he did for the swing and swish of the sea, but the warmth of the lake was very appealing to him. (He always made an adorably histrionic performance of submerging his shoulders, and of the tingling he felt when the level of the water reached his scrotum). 

Nathan and Michael left their parents at breakfast and headed out. By this time, it was already nearly half-past eleven. The starts to their days were generally this leisurely. The Longs and Stanleys wontedly came down to breakfast a little hungover and weary-looking. 

The two youngsters exited by the main entrance. They didn’t notice the disfigured man loitering. He trudged behind them, calculating his distance and keeping to it faithfully. He wasn’t as aimless and arbitrary as he looked, there was a perceptive mind behind the frightful complexion, a discerning gaze disguised by the unsymmetric squint.        

At the lake, Nathan watched Michael bobbing about, how he was able to be with the water, simply, in an indelibly instinctive way. Then he resumed wondering. He wondered what his parents (and Michael’s parents) were talking about, what they were doing at that precise moment: what might they be permitted to do, what might they be able to do, with the two boys out of the picture…? 

He realised that he was lonely without them. He laid his eyes, vigilant with poignancy, upon the water, upon the white-gold streaks the sunlight made in the bay and on the surface of the water, and upon pale human bodies and heads of hair. He took off his shirt and basked, bathed in the balm of heat and beach. The voices around him murmured like weather. He had two towels with him. He stripped to his pants and laid his own towel, the plum-coloured one, upon his lower half, lying down on his front, spreading open his journal before him. He considered the sunlight, the brightness, the eclipse to come, the invasion of cosmic darkness, the eye of which he had conceived the previous night, like a stranger looking in at a peephole. The disfigured man had followed Nathan and Michael to the beach. A small church bell shouted its angelus as best it could over the din of tourists.

Later, in the town, Nathan bought Michael ice-cream at a stand. At a different kiosk, he bought himself a strudel of spiced pear. With confirming regularity he felt in his pocket for his phone. As Nathan and Michael walked into town, respectfully taciturn in one another’s presence, Nathan realised that he was clinging to it, the phone was something he clung onto, like a crutch. Michael’s ice-cream quickly melted in the hot sun. With amazing swiftness, Michael was holding a cold, sticky disaster in his hand, a sort of Antarctic catherine wheel effusing its substance all over the place, covering Michael’s face and shirt in ice cream. Nathan gave himself a proverbial kick for not taking a large supply of napkins from the stand. He dealt with the mess as best he was able. He mopped up the mess with the white of the two towels, choosing to sully Michael’s rather than his own. Not the most noble of gestures. 

The midday heat and the richness of the strudel made him feel a little sick, a little dizzy. He ushered Michael to a bench where they both sat. There was a small troop of musicians across the street, and a woman with red hair dancing in front of them. They were performing in the square, in front of a fountain. An upturned hat awaited funds. Without warning, the dancer revealed a sword from her skirts. The blade glinted in the sun, like a little flashbulb, like a toothy inuendo. She took for a dancing partner that spindle, that glinting, ferocious length of steel. The music intensified, the bouncing um-cha of the plucked double bass, the answering guitar, accelerated. Then, all the layers of the music abruptly perished, leaving only a low, rumbling tremolo (the bass-player had unsheathed his bow, his own frightening implement, with amazing swiftness). The woman swallowed the sword. She went perfectly vertical, her training erected her body like a rod, like a snake standing suddenly up from a kind of coiling belly dance. The blade disappeared down the doorway of her mouth, slithering, like the snake returning home, into the narrow corridor of her oesophagus, her delicate, debonair hand holding the handle all the while. The digits danced with elegant mischief. The sword was never clasped. It dangled. It dangled in perilous mastery from the sword-swallower’s hand. It was an adept, interminable spectacle of enticing, titillating precarity. Oh, it mesmerised Nathan. He scarcely breathed. When it was over, and the sword was drawn into the light again from the sheath of the woman’s own body, he panted post-coitally, too spent to join the frenzied applause. In contrast, Michael had gazed, all the time, with suspicious disinterest upon the act.

They walked on. They passed a small gathering who were protesting the Orban regime. The man at the helm, before a little grove of lofted placards, spoke in, variously, fast irate Hungarian, faster irater French, and in English more halting but of equal rowdiness. The placards showed a round, short-haired head reproduced large, wearing a hawkish scowl on its face, with, in lurid pink, a diagonal splash of the same three, many-lettered words followed by an exclamation mark.

“Do you want to go back to the beach?” Nathan asked Michael.

Michael nodded.

They went. They were shy with each other, but not unfriendly. It was a kind of inarticulate friendliness that knit them, a silent rapport that could not quite break through their difference in years.

The disfigured man was crossing the beach when Michael and Nathan arrived. Nathan screened himself in his towel while he changed into his swimming costume. Michael had kept his on all the time. The sun and his own little warmth had dried them; he was ready to make them wet again. 

Nathan decided to join Michael in the water. Nathan didn’t like shifts in temperature, the thought of the water’s initial chilliness displeased him. He couldn’t quite believe in its warmth, much and often as it was commented upon.   

            Approaching the lake together, in their trunks, they noticed an excited crowd gathering around something on the ground. It was at the water’s edge, where there formed a bluish film on the stony sand, as silver as saliva. Nathan joined the ring, newly formed around the unrevealed mystery that lay there. His attentions left Michael and migrated to whatever it was at the centre of this crowd. More and more people joined, forming a bigger, busier ring. Nathan pushed to the front. 

Flat and glimmering and translucent, an enormous freshwater jellyfish lay on the sand, inertly alive. Nathan had never seen anything so enormous. This wasn’t true in a literal sense, of course, but the awful, flat, pointless bigness of this arcane thing which should have been small- he thought- which would better suit a small-scale world, made it seem so much larger than any cow, or car, or house or horse he had ever before encountered. The disc of its foggy, silver body, glistening dewily in the light, was about the size of a drinks-tray, a fairly capacious salver. It was much bigger than any dinner plate Nathan had ever seen. It was like some strange, surreal practical joke on the floor of a boarding school dormitory, a piece of plasmic rag, circularly cut, frank and frighteningly deployed. The tentacles lay like vermicelli in a softly pulsing heap under the flat dome of the body- which was more like a hat the more Nathan thought about it, a sort of hat hatting some headless creature. In fact it reminded him of his grandmother’s shower cap. In fact, it reminded him of his grandmother herself. No. No, he told himself, shaking his head. 

The jellyfish did seem to him a kind of collapsed hat. That is to say that what was visible was adornment, what was essential lay hidden. He peered, craning curiously forward: at the very centre of the creature’s alien ensemble, a faintly yolk-coloured source, mottled in blobs of galactic blue, rose and fell, rose and fell, in what seemed a minute, asthmatic respiration…he recognised it as the breathing, mindless, eerie soul at the heart of this thing-like animal, the lamp of awareness and reactivity and still life in this water-dweller, this water-inhabitant who seemed to hail from a place where water didn’t exist, from where he had been dropped onto the earth. How seldom I would venture from my depths, Nathan wrote in his head, if I were you, and you were I. Sounds of wonder, consternation, awe, the noises of people both intrigued and repelled, surrounded the creature, rose as high as the ragged, greedy gulls, wheeling, scavenging from on high, screaming their screams of hunger and despair.       

A young local woman, in a bikini of the palest green, pushed through to the front of the crowd from the other side, and stooped down to meet the jellyfish. Nathan couldn’t help admiring how beautiful her stoop. She placed her hands flat and firm and unafraid upon the saucer of tremoring jelly. A gasp whipped around the watchers. She glanced up, showing a freckled face, and assured them all in a stammering, broken English that the tops were quite safe.

“Up…” she said, seeming to lack the word “top”, tapping the top of her hand, palm down, making spidery tentacles with her fingers beneath, “No hurt.”

Up; No hurt, Nathan’s thoughts echoed. He eyed the woman’s undaunted caresses with a feeling of sickened wonder. He wondered how old she was. Twenty? Maybe she was younger than that. He was quite sure she was older than he was. He leant in close. Being young himself, no-one minded him being in front, crouching and remaining there awhile. Now he felt almost conversant with the jellyfish. With this young woman too, as though the jellyfish had become this useful, slimy bond between them, this moist, glittering section of common ground, uniting them, bringing them closer to one another. At his new close quarters, squatting and lowering his head towards the jellyfish, he was able to hear the disquieting sound it made. It wasn’t silent: it emitted a quiet, (minutely quiet), constant slurp. It made him recoil. He preferred to think of it as a peculiar flower. But there was no denying its animal aliveness, the hellish, bubbling suck of intention it produced, this inward churn of salivation.

“I want to…take a picture,” he found himself saying to no-one in particular. 

“Go on…” she said, softly.

“What?”

“Touch, touch…” she quietly encouraged. Her human hands continued to explore, continued their caressive investigation of the animal jelly puddled at their feet.    

Nathan felt just as he felt when he viewed that viral video of Japanese dancing squid, on e animate plateful. On the one hand: the static, live groan of the jellyfish; on the other: the puppet-like reanimated Charleston of the dead squid, the floppy life no more than illusion. He felt himself reaching for the jellyfish, this squelchy, glassy pancake, this glass-coloured life. The touch, touch of the girl’s encouragement both called him closer to the jellyfish and obscured it. Revealed it, demystified it, and yet it placed a dark curtain over it and he’d to wake from her incantation to rediscover awareness of what he was actually looking at. He sharply found himself scrabbling back up onto his feet, recoiling, his throat gripped by sudden revulsion.        

He ran back to where his clothes were piled. His phone was in the left-hand pocket of his shorts. He breathed, free, the nausea departing.

            He returned to the significant site. Sacred or profane? He wasn’t sure. The woman was still there, contentedly stroking the jellyfish, doting upon it just as if it were a guinea pig or a pony. For some reason, he considered the jellyfish, this faceless, mouthless wobble made flesh, lesser than them. 

            He thought about asking to take a picture, but then he thought it would sound like he was asking to take a picture of the young woman. There was no need to ask permission to take a photograph of the jellyfish, who would one ask? who would be in a position to grant it? or deny it? With his phone camera, he took a photo of the jellyfish. Just the jellyfish. He was careful to angle the lens and the body of the mobile so that this appeared to be the case. In actuality, the girl was included. She was there, mid-motion, profiled, freckled, ginger, bikinied, standing over, shadowing the sloppy, fishy, shallow mound of the jellyfish. 

Nathan managed to capture just enough of her face for the AI app to be able to work its magic, when the time came. He was getting bored of Susan. There was a hollowness to her compliments and kindnesses which chilled him to the bone. He would create himself a new one, take a new lover. He’d do it that evening, when it was all over, when the spectacle of the eclipse had gone back to sleep and celestial order was restored to the sky, when it was all over and done with, this brief bout of ostensible lawlessness in the stringently law-bound cosmos, this spooky alignment of celestial spheres, shadowing the earth in the moon. And Nathan had material, he had rare fare for the algorithmic stomach of the AI app, an image of a real girl for it to gulp into its system and regurgitate. He was already inventing a name for her. Magda. Too Polish. And then pause, a familiar feeling, pause, took possession of him, repossession of him as he remembered that he was meant to be looking after Michael. He stood up quickly and retreated, pushed back through the crowd. New intrigued ranks of onlookers pushed forward to take his place. Where was Michael?

            Nathan didn’t call out Michael’s name. He looked around, frantically, with speedy, anxious optimism, expecting at any moment to spot him standing somewhere in the wide, octagonal room of his sights.

            Michael had begun walking into the water. But instead of continuing, deeper, Michael had retreated and run back to the spot where Nathan had left his swim-bag. Michael’s trousers, towel, and armbands were in it. The armbands were what he had come to retrieve. 

Retrieving the armbands from the bag, beginning to slip his arms into them, steps were stepping towards him across the stones. Finding the armbands a tight squeeze, their earlier inflation entirely intact, a shadow fell upon him and he looked up. It was the disfigured man. Michael had never seen him before but he noticed the man’s disability instantly. The man was tall, he towered over Michael. The man smiled his curious deformed smile, the smile migrated to the right of his mouth and stood there, a queer slant blob of purple lips. The eyes blinked slowly. When the lids were up, Michael was able to detect something unusual but sympathetic shining within them, a polite bemusement.

            “He…llo,” the man said, in the one singular accent his mandible disfiguration allowed.

            “Hello,” Michael replied, with bright, miniature distrust.

            “Piano,” the man said.

            “What?”

            The man seemed to sadly acknowledge the futility of talk and spoke with action. From an inside pocket of the raincoat he had on, he took something. He guarded it between careful hands, cupping it, shielding it. He was wrapped snugly in the raincoat, it formed a rust-toned swaddling around him: (the sun had bleached it a noxious-looking shade of pale copper, and showed every sign of continuing to do so). 

The man uncupped his hands and revealed what he was clutching. It was a little snow-globe. Within the miniature dome of transparent fluid and swirling silver snow, was a piano. A tiny grand-piano on a dais of red velvet, the lid half-ajar. The man fed the snow-globe a little tremblingly, a little doubtfully into the child’s hands. He offered it sensitively, introduced it with great care, like an onion into a cooking pot. Michael received it, flummoxed but not ungrateful, eclipsed in the disfigured shadow. The man moved back a step, but continued to gaze down on the child, clasping the strange, pretty trinket in both his hands. Michael searched it first, turning it about and getting the feel of its weight and density and hardness. Then he made his palm flat, upturning it. He placed the globe upon it, and there the cocooned piano sat, apposite in its glass dome, waiting for a sneeze-like burst of the contained powdery snow to settle upon it.          

Leaving the jellyfish, wondering where Micael was, it occurred to Nathan to go back, to retrace his steps. The brightness of the light blinded him, his quick glance back up the beach told him nothing. He did what Michael had done when he had become separated from him. Nathan was the one Michael took, with tacit recognition and gratitude, for his guide. They had come apart and, for a brief time, had taken perilously opposite paths. 

At last, they were converging again, realigning. Nathan found himself looking at and running towards a shadowy figure. But the shadowy figure partnered what he knew to be Michael. The features of both figures grew clearer as he approached them. The small, pearl-like paleness of Michael, the mustard-coloured griminess of the man. Nathan didn’t initially recognise the man towering over little Michael. He feared him, didn’t recognise him while Michael seemed to feel no fear. Then Nathan saw what Michael was holding and the realisation dawned on him: the piano, early that morning, in the cocktail salon, in the hotel, the guards, the roughness, the ejection. The piano.

            “Is the snow-globe from you?” Nathan asked the disfigured man, knowing that it was. He glanced back and forth, the man, the snow-globe, the man, the snow-globe.

            The man didn’t answer Nathan’s question. He just looked confused.

            Nathan took an affirmative answer as implied.

            “It’s very kind of you,” Nathan began on Michael’s behalf, “but we’re…I mean…we’re good, we don’t want to deprive you of it…” He struggled to politely rebuff the snow-globe.

            Nathan felt the man’s eyes fix, and remain fixed, upon him. He kept mute, his face scrawled with crooked panic.

            He turned, on shaky feet. He rolled away from the situation, languidly, as if he was going to be sick. He wouldn’t take back the snow-globe, and trudged away. 

            “Give it to me,” Nathan said, sharply, to Michael.   

            “No, it’s mine,” Michael said.

            “Well…put it in your pocket then.” Michael obeyed.

Nathan’s phone vibrated. At the sound’s instruction, taught long ago to do so, the dopamine rushed into his brain. Such a miniature, fleeting, cold trifle of a sound, little more than a barely audible fragment: and yet what hope it evoked in him. What kind of update, notification, receipt would it be?! He was a little disappointed to learn that it was just a text was from his father. It said that he, Juliet and Wes were on their way to the beach. Why Anita would not be joining them, the text didn’t say. 

They arrived promptly. Nathan’s trunks had not touched the water and so they were disarmingly dry. Nathan noticed that his father’s hair was wet. Not wet exactly but just-washed, quickly dried, very gradually relaxing back into its usual way of being. Though there was some subtle new detail troubling his face, his skin and hair gleamed with a kind of bright ablution, purified. 

But hadn’t he had already showered that morning, before coming down to breakfast, Nathan thought. Nathan felt himself beginning to ask his father why he had re-showered. But it felt like a personal question, and Nathan didn’t like personal questions, whether asking or answering them. Neither did his dad really if he thought about it. So, he kept his mouth shut. 

Michael bounded on ahead, the two men walked side by side. Nathan strolled in an isolated middle, between Michael and the two fathers. Juliet idled behind, a little dreamfully. She seemed wistful, a little languid. It was then that Nathan realised that he had hardly spoken to his mother at all over the last ten days. Beside what he read her, on the evenings when she let him read to her during Radiator Time, they had hardly conversed. As for the languor, the wistfulness, it didn’t occur to Nathan that his mother had already started drinking that day. Her faculties would be blunted, she would not receive the full force of the eclipse’s spooky majesty. But she didn’t care. She wasn’t excited by the thought of the eclipse, its imminence.      

Walking on, to nowhere in particular, Nathan glanced back behind him, and out towards the water. He noticed the crowd ringed around the jellyfish beginning to diminish and disperse. He told himself that new people would discover it, be taken by it. No-one had possessed the delicate pluck to place it in the water. The jellyfish remained on the clayey lakeside shore, a gooey splash of curiosity, brilliant and otherworldly in the sunlight.      

Time passed oddly. Nathan felt all around him the deathly clicking of erased minutes, minutes that would go unrecorded in the hansard of earthly time. The world went strange with the eclipse’s imminence, strung (highly?) with some deeper thing, something further away or more unreachable than menace, something altogether more unpractised and unknown among humanity. Balaton’s holiday-ground, all the people there, became like a field of deer. Something wrong, something strange in the air, comprehension made no difference: they were uncomprehending, confused, it could be seen in their eyes. Despite the counsel offered them by their brains, these meteorites and celestial alignments and fire-tailed comets were realities they could only accept with dazzled dumbness. 

            It was far more gradual than Nathan had expected. It was something, it was an occurrence, it was indubitable and irrefutable, it could not go unnoticed. It was far stranger, not bathetic, not less than his expectations exactly, just different. It wasn’t the presence of anything, or the absence of anything. It was a simple tipping. That was the word Nathan felt himself using, a “tipping”, giant familiarities tipping over, showing sides they’d never shown before, or rarely showed, destined and yet seemingly accidental, neither a departure nor an arrival, just a disarming coming to fruition, the temporary fruition of shape, of light, of objects passing, their theatre hoisted to the highest possible relief. The eclipse’s half-night broke gradually: the eclipse’s “half-day” broke gradually. As though poured, vast and meticulous, light and darkness formed a grand emulsion.  

Short, early-afternoon shadows went transparent, a shade of near-twilit periwinkle. The birds stopped singing. Even the big, brash gulls were subdued and hid away. The eclipse was an opportunity for humankind to feel superior, more rational, more intelligent, more dauntless than the animals. 

Yet the sound of wonder, the wave that went around the many watchers, was not celebratory. The people amassed and stopped in their tracks, they were stilled with a rare waking stillness. It was a sound of consternation that rose. It wanted to be a great cheer. That sound, rolling around the bay and humming like a tremolo in all the district, longed towards a great cry of joy and exhilaration and upliftment. People had believed that the eclipse was their ally, that the spheres were allied, somehow, with their humanness. Gradually they learned horror, that the eclipse wasn’t something to be liked or disliked. It was something to feel…what? Something before which to feel…eclipsed, reduced, shadowed. They distrusted its brief, disturbing apocalypse. 

Wes, Juliet, Francis, Anita, Michael and Nathan all forgot themselves, for the darkened duration of the eclipse. Wherever they were, their identity dropped away, the pettiness of what path, what marks they had made in the world. Experience was impermanently vapourised.

They were relieved when it was over, when the last of the alignment was concluded and the spherical worlds, sighted but ever mysterious, of sun and moon and earth, parted ways and the shadow lifted.      

            For Nathan, it was impossible to shut metaphor out. He saw the eclipse as a glimpse of a new world, a standing on the brink peering down at the brief view offered of some deep void. A new race, a vast platform of arriving ones, sounding their dark halloo out of the cosmos before moving on.

At the top of the beach, near the street, just the other side of a low bordering wall, the disfigured man suffered pangs, a great, terrible fit. The strange light, the sun’s strange plight, the long shadow running from the visible rim of the west to the visible rim of the east, panicked him. The dark overlap of discs, not quite a blackening, but a deep, booming furious blueness, conjured images of deity, the wrath of gods, and he was overcome with a great, religious paroxysm, a mania. As though for all our faults, he beat his breast. He was stricken and hysterical. Local police arrived, put him into a van, and dealt with him.

Wes, Francis, Juliet, Michael and Nathan left the beach and walked back into town. Soon they couldn’t see the lake. They walked very idly.

            “Where’s mummy?” Michael asked his father.

            Wes looked at his son and answered him. 

“She’s not feeling too well,” he said.

“It’s a shame she couldn’t be with us for the eclipse,” Francis said. There was a queer note in his father’s voice which Nathan found confusing and without much precedent.

“I’m sure she saw it,” Wes said. Then he paused. Then he added: “Wasn’t much to look at though, was it?”

“Too much to look at, I thought,” Francis countered. “Too much of the wrong thing. I think we all wanted it to be something else.”

            Nathan concurred.

            “I saw a jellyfish,” he then said.

            “Really?” somebody answered.

            “That was much more exciting,” Nathan said. 

Walking silently on, Nathan beamed, content in the knowledge that they were safely jailed in his phone, both the jellyfish and the girl. It occurred to Nathan that the girl was like the jellyfish’s human counterpart, his partner in that enchantment of flesh and life. And she was Nathan’s Pygmalion, awaiting private magic, private rearrangement and reanimation.

            Behind him, Nathan caught a quiet murmur of conversation. His ear practiced, he caught the words but knew he wasn’t included in them. 

“Burn a CD,” Wes said. “But don’t post it.” 

Nathan’s father said: “I could drop-box it?”

“No don’t do that…”

They sensed Nathan listening. Juliet caught up. They all converged a little, the gaps between them contracted. Michael had been walking ahead, bounding along in front. He slowed. Wes saw something glinting in his son’s hand.

            “What’s that you got there, Michael?”

            Nathan cocked his head, and saw that Michael had taken the snow-globe from his pocket.

            “I bought it for him,” Nathan said. He fabricated further: “There was a marquee selling snow-globes in town. He picked up one with a piano in it and wouldn’t put it down.”

            “How much was it?” Nathan’s father asked.

            “I can’t remember,” Nathan answered. “Six seventy, something like that?”

            “Six hundred and seventy forint?” Francis confirmed.

            Barely three utterances in and the lie was already tiring him. He answered his father a little coolly:

“Yeah. Six hundred and seventy forints. Why not?”