The White Door by Stephen Chan Page B

world.
    This is how you passed by. Only in the repetition of dreams could you see a single cable in the sky. It grew across with not a pylon ofsupport. Half way between man and angel you sped across the sky, both arms holding fast to the pulley of a flying fox. If you lost your grip…
    And you would, feet held forward, fly over acres and miles of the world of mud, and you flew urgently for the storm of the world’s end was massing out of your sight, far from the horizon to which you sped, but you knew the storm for this was the dream of destiny.
    Even the people of the mud world did not want to die in the storm. You flew, the silent roar of terrible lives seeking to live.
    Suddenly the dream pitches you there. The flying fox has gone. For the brief moment of futility you fly unaided. Against a grey tidal wave the size of a mountain you are the dreamt silhouette that flies sword in hand against the last wave of time and you are, forever, that man who came too late to save a single crab in his hopeless hole.

WHITE BROTHER
1: Anton’s dream
    A month after the death of his father he sat in his Finnish room in Tampere, a distinguished visiting professor, and a full moon rose over the autumn mists, and the trees, becoming gold and red, dropped no more leaves, and he had mapped out the tattoo of the Red Emperor for his back, and the Finnish girl lay in his bed and almost a quarter century ago, as she was being born, and as the second moon girl in the throes of war in Bangladesh was being born, he was lamenting the loss of the first of their line, howling like the long-haired pelt-coated wolves of the Northern wastes, and he was – just as he was now one block away from the Lenin Museum – waving a flag and felt through the seams and stitching of his heart that all the East was red, so that in Tampere all those years later he resolved to write the chronicle of how he sought to lay the first girl of the moon on a flag of red by the green trees of Parnell and, as he made love to her there, was unknowing that amidst shell fire in one country and by the melancholy lakes of another the heartaches of his future were also being sired.
     
    The first dream Anton had was to assassinate William Rogers. So, while the others nailed together their placards, filled their flour bombs, Anton spent first one week in the Hotel Intercontinental,learning the mind and the view of a victim, calculating reverse trajectories from the bedroom below the one Rogers would occupy. Then he bought a telescopic sight for the .303 rifle he had resurrected from his late father’s wardrobe, having first cleaned the barrel and furniture-polished the stock. Fastidious, Anton; a new silk bandana, tea from a silver pot, the long-haired sniper who thought he might end a century of war, Sarajevo to Auckland, by a single bullet, start out with an archduke, clean up with a secretary of state. Even the New Zealand students knew Rogers was a dove in the US cabinet, but Anton wanted a symbol as much as he wanted a trophy, and he wanted a message that would retort around the world, bring comfort to his beloved Vietnamese, and harry the hawks who were already seeking a safe route out. No safe route, unless fast, was Anton’s simple message. In the Intercontinental, Anton viewed where the student protesters would gather. Flour bombs, he smiled to himself, they’ll bring flour bombs, maybe hit some policemen with their placards, and the police would form up flying wedges to dive amidst the crowd, like a kingfisher blue, to pluck from the shoals those ringleaders whose faces they had rehearsed from their briefing notes. Charge them with disorderly behaviour. The same ringleaders would plan to melt away into the university grounds around the Old Government House, confident the campus was sacrosanct and the police would stop at the gates as if a Geneva Convention ordered them. Olympian, Anton; smiled, said: no, this will be settled by a bullet to shock my little very little