The White Door by Stephen Chan Read Free Book Online

antiquities of Europe and what I want to see before I die.
     
    Images of Notre Dame, the Vatican and Canterbury Cathedral filled his head. He asked them to leave – too much stained glass, too much mediated light, too many constrained pathways to heaven. He switched to art. He wanted to see Michaelangelo’s David, Picasso’s Guernica, Leonardo’s… then he remembered son’s disquisition about the two versions Leonardo painted of the Madonna on the rocks, one in London’s National Gallery, one in the Louvre, one full of light and painted in youth, one with the colours of life’s evening. I am not yet in the evening, he thought. I see things only in summer colours. I am dying before evening. He decided against Leonardo and thought of Holland. Not windmills or wooden clogs, but red-light districts and how one finger in a dyke could hold back the cascade of destruction. What could be inserted where and who could be saved by what filled his imagination. But he needed not a finger, but a fist filled with sword to combat, or at least slow down, the mouth-like cancer whose moment to gorge all other tissue had come. It would eat the meals he never ate, and its tongue would wave like the hand transplanted from his stomach, and there would be an army of rapacious cells, allshaped like blind mouths, but equipped with limbs and, with the most exquisite manipulation of knives and forks, would chew noisily at his only liver. Ah, he said, even my cancer cells appear in primary colours. Their lips are Revlon red. And he took himself out of Amsterdam and thought of Oxford, son’s favourite city, but that seemed too much like the cathedrals he had already rejected. Like a pilot slung beneath a hang-glider’s wing, he came to Athens. Ah, yes, there, he thought. This is Europe. Where men spoke well and speech was free and every arm could draw a sword to protect that speech. He came to the Olympic stadium, where son had fought and been badly mauled. Did he go walkabout then? he asked. He came to Marathon and glided over the breathless route to the old city gates. He went to Piræus and flew out over blue seas and dry-lit islands and wheeled free in a light that blazed like Auckland’s. He knew he was in danger of emulating Icarus, Icarus or Dædalus, he could never remember the names of which was father and which was son, but he restrained his blue glide and the scarlet wing bore him well in the Ægean of his dreams and he laughed outside the hospital windows, the laugh of the carpark escapee, you’ll not trap me behind your walls! and he drove away, as whole wards wished they could drive away, and he chanted a new mantra – Black Hand, Black Hand, I piss on you Black Hand, Black Hand, Black Hand, I piss on you Black Hand – and his wheels were like wings in the earliest of seasons and he was telling death to wait its turn and the Revlon lips of his cancer to suck his miles of dust.
6: The white warrior
    You must not close your eyes immediately. Focus on this point, the tip of the beak of the crystal ibis. Remember the comic heroes of your young manhood in New Zealand. There was a turbanned and cloaked hero, otherwise in a Western suit, he was accompanied by a beautiful woman, and he wielded the ibis stick – a bit smaller than the laissez passer plaques carried by Chinese messengers of the king. Inmoments of crisis, the hero would hold up his ibis stick and shout (of course): ‘The ibis stick! The ibis stick!’ From the picture of the ibis on the stick, waves of energy would reach out to destroy his enemies. I had a favourite drawing, as if the hero were seen from a point on the ground some feet in front of him, foreshortened, silhouetted against the energy-radiant sky. That is how your crystal ibis sees you now. We are going to take this energy inside you to fight the army of the cancer king. Inside, you have three avenues of help. But you must reach them to bring them instructions and encouragement. You cannot defeat the cancer