The Vorrh

twenty minutes. Then the surgeon moved across the room to one of his glass-fronted cabinets and selected an instrument from within. He carefully wound its clockwork mechanisms and strapped it onto his patient’s head. It was made of brass and glass, with a delicate set of folding blinkers and mirrors, some darkened by plating. The surgeon pulled up a chair to face his patient, and adjusted the metal discs, close to the sides of Muybridge’s worried eyes. Both his hands worked the device, bringing his face so close to Muybridge’s that each could smell the other’s breath. Tiny ratchet clicks announced the adjustments.
    ‘It’s a peripherscope,’ the surgeon explained. ‘It should interest you, being a scholar of the optic world.’ He then moved his chair and physically turned the patient’s head towards the oriel window, setting a clamp on his neck and chin. ‘Just like one of your photographic portraits,’ he said mildly. ‘Now, look through the central panel of the window and focus on the dome.’
    The patient wanted to correct him about the old-fashioned portraits, in which the sitter was secured in a metal frame, held still while the slow camera collected their deathlike image. He had long since dispensed with such artificial contrivance. He would explain his experiments in chemical preparation of film, he would…
    ‘The dome, please!’ the surgeon demanded. The middle pane of glass was different to the rest, clearer, with a greenish hue. The distant dome was framed in its bright confines. The patient stared. ‘Now, please, do not move, just stare at the dome.’
    These were the surgeon’s last words, as he paced from one side to the other, behind the patient. He touched the headset, activating spinning discs and minute reflections of light, almost out of vision, like the suns and moons of distant planets, contained in an unstable darkness inside the corners of the patient’s eyes. A night which shimmered with endless space, drawing light particles from inside his vision, from his surroundings, even from the glowing dome. Outside, time was changing and the tide of the seething river had turned back towards the sea. Something in the space between the double dome fluttered and shifted in unison.
    When the motors were stopped and all movement ceased, the day had vanished. He sat in a twilit room, growing chilled as the stars rose outside in the frosting air. Gull lit a lamp and put a shawl about the patient’s shoulders, gently removing the device from his head. He sat, unclamped and stiff in the wooden chair, his attention still fixed on the oriel window.
    ‘Please, make yourself more comfortable, Mr. Muybridge.’
    The surgeon’s voice seemed far off and above him. The continual, dull pain in his head had gone and he felt exhausted. A growing sense of euphoria was making him feel curiously weightless.
    ‘It’s the angels,’ Gull said. ‘The angels of silence that hide between the whispering gallery and outer dome of the Cathedral. They have crossed the Thames and are fluttering in your head, it’s quite normal to feel a little dazed.’
    He smiled broadly at Muybridge, who was gripping the surgeon’s words like the same vertiginous handrail in the gallery of St. Paul’s.
    ‘Your eyes are, miraculously, undamaged. The zygomorphic bones of your face conducted the impact of the accident backwards and upwards, into your brain. I surmise that the force of the shock was considerable, but caused no long-term structural damage.’ Gull leant back in his leather chair and looked dramatically into the photographer’s gaze. ‘There may be side effects,’ he said, ‘but I think I might have alleviated or at least diluted those this afternoon. The peripheral vision and its territories of sight and sense are virtually unexplored. My device measures and takes litmus of their emotional potential, their mental humours, do you understand? I have also made some inward adjustments, without the need of the scalpel or the saw.’
    He got up and made the necessary movements to conclude the meeting. As he conducted Muybridge towards the door, he said, ‘Are you planning to return to America?’
    The photographer nodded. ‘Eventually.’
    ‘I would do it soon, if I were you. Better to be in a landscape away from people for the next few years. Make pictures of that wilderness, force your sight and your imagination outward. It’s better for you.’
    They stood either side of the door, their handshake