Caposcripti
A novel about shrunken heads and dropouts, language and voyeurism, set in London and the Amazon basin.
Modern London. The photographer is a man ruled by two obseessions. First, to take photographs that speak for him. Second, to make the subjects of his photographs speak to him alone. 

Rewind to Peru in 1851. An explorer is battling to survive in a claustrophobic and unknown world, in flight from modernity and seeking older truths, which he finds in the customs of the Caposcripti.

How these secrets survive, and how the photographer uses them in his terrifying experiments is only the beginning of the journey with these intriguing characters.


praise for Caposcripti:

“Beautifully constructed” ....“immaculate prose” ... “John Grisham meets Carlos Castaneda”
BOOKMONGERS LONDON

“I loved the way the dialogue builds and builds, but is very subtle...a different way of looking.”
Anna Druka

“It's a great read!”
Rod McLaren

“I was hungry for more, each of my busy days, to induldge myself in this book. Each time I opened the pages I was there, with the characters, my six senses working the pages, sitting on the edge of my seat throughout my Caposcripti experience. This is an incredible book! Zelda Rhiando's first novel reads as if she is already a seasoned writer...a natural talent like hers is undeniable and hats off for a superior first novel. Highly recommend reading!”
Lisa Billson of The Loose Salute

“It's really good. Very accomplished for a first novel.”
Patrick Kelly

“Just finished Caposcripti and what a cracking good read it is too. Genuine sense of menace throughout.”
Ron Meerbeck

“Finished!! Favourite bits: the ending, nina cleaning up after murder, taypi's daguerreotype. I'm spreading the word!”
Emily Foges

“I saw one of your stickers in the toilet and wanted to scrawl 'beware the photographer!' - but I'd lost my pen.”
Julia Roberts

“Can't put down. Betty leaves you on such a nervous edge. Love it.”
Julia Roberts

Author interview on Scott Pack's blog:
meandmybigmouth.blogspot.com/   http://t.co/7NZUpjWd

More about the book:
http://www.caposcripti.com

Caposcripti

Visit Caposcripti.com to buy print or digital copies of this book, or https://www.amazon.com/Caposcripti/dp/B07M5HQFVK for the full audio version.

Caposcripti

A novel about shrunken heads and dropouts, language and voyeurism, set in London and the Amazon basin.
Modern London. The photographer is a man ruled by two obseessions. First, to take photographs that speak for him. Second, to make the subjects of his photographs speak to him alone. 

Rewind to Peru in 1851. An explorer is battling to survive in a claustrophobic and unknown world, in flight from modernity and seeking older truths, which he finds in the customs of the Caposcripti.

How these secrets survive, and how the photographer uses them in his terrifying experiments is only the beginning of the journey with these intriguing characters.


praise for Caposcripti:

“Beautifully constructed” ....“immaculate prose” ... “John Grisham meets Carlos Castaneda”
BOOKMONGERS LONDON

“I loved the way the dialogue builds and builds, but is very subtle...a different way of looking.”
Anna Druka

“It's a great read!”
Rod McLaren

“I was hungry for more, each of my busy days, to induldge myself in this book. Each time I opened the pages I was there, with the characters, my six senses working the pages, sitting on the edge of my seat throughout my Caposcripti experience. This is an incredible book! Zelda Rhiando's first novel reads as if she is already a seasoned writer...a natural talent like hers is undeniable and hats off for a superior first novel. Highly recommend reading!”
Lisa Billson of The Loose Salute

“It's really good. Very accomplished for a first novel.”
Patrick Kelly

“Just finished Caposcripti and what a cracking good read it is too. Genuine sense of menace throughout.”
Ron Meerbeck

“Finished!! Favourite bits: the ending, nina cleaning up after murder, taypi's daguerreotype. I'm spreading the word!”
Emily Foges

“I saw one of your stickers in the toilet and wanted to scrawl 'beware the photographer!' - but I'd lost my pen.”
Julia Roberts

“Can't put down. Betty leaves you on such a nervous edge. Love it.”
Julia Roberts

Author interview on Scott Pack's blog:
meandmybigmouth.blogspot.com/   http://t.co/7NZUpjWd

More about the book:
http://www.caposcripti.com

Chapter 1: Personae

An excerpt from the spoken word version of Caposcripti - visit http://www.caposcripti.com to buy print and digital copies of this book.

2. Scouting
The Photographer is out looking to score with his callipers and cameras. All around, he feels the pulse of the city; the grumble of traffic, the constant near contact with other pedestrians on the pavement. He is edgy, taut. Controlled precision and a certain detachment are evident in his posture. He has chosen that uncertain hour between daylight and dusk when the puddles in the gutter start to reflect darkness and the stark outlines of cornices, aerials, and fire escapes. Today, however, the Photographer is not particularly interested in puddles – although once upon a time he took pictures of them, as well as street scenes, barrow markets, smiling children, obscure buildings.

Back then the urban landscape had inspired him with its complexity – awed him with the continual juxtaposition of the unexpected. He would go to Liverpool Street station to attune himself to the city’s rhythms, wheels within wheels, natives interacting with one another like cogs turning, clockwork and unvarying measures; contrapuntal movement. Nine-to-fivers in from the suburbs every day; the swarms of black suits fleeing the city at five-fifteen; soaring buildings, park-sized atriums, giant tropical plants belying their sterility and dwarfing the scurrying workers below; skyscrapers suspended from great steel arches, glistening pyramids of glass – all invited the Photographer’s lens, demanded interpretation.

But now in the gathering dusk he ignores these and other possibilities. He is conducting a dialogue of one: with himself and his camera, the method and the goal, the Cartesian dichotomy. He believes in dualism.

“In the beginning was the word: and the word was with God. Who can we believe? The priests and the philosophers, these lovers of wisdom? Should have been a camera there. Black and white. Never lies.”

“Seven planets, God and the Devil, and man travelling a known path one way or the other. Someone is up there with their CCTV, filming inside the mind, no lies. Camera never lies.”

The Photographer doesn’t own a television: he had a black- and-white one once, but the dull eye watching him from across the room unnerved him. God and his eye piercing his very soul, pinning him insect-like under the solar microscope, caught in the panopticon. No escape. Sometimes he thinks he is Lucifer – he too carries his hell inside him.

And so he is outside as the dusk falls, while the sun is too engaged in its struggle with the moon to keep an eye on him. Eyes scan the faces of passers-by for the one whose head fits his specifications: he has it down to a fine art now. The callipers are just a prop, part of the mythos. These days the only genre that interests him is portraiture, and he has no time for clouds, solar eclipses, or the bottom of the ocean. Motion photography he flirted with briefly, in his youth, but lately he’s been after the freeze frame, the moment of truth.

Camera and callipers; callipers and camera. The others on
the pavement give him a wide berth: his gaze is discomfiting – measuring them from head to foot as they near him. He has chosen a busy time and the roads are at capacity. The city’s dwellers are displaying a refinement of evolution: the ability to condense population past the point where another species would choose to selectively cull their own kind. Evolution has a part to play in this narrative. The Photographer has more respect for it than for the scurrying pedestrians in his path.

Still they serve their purpose.


An excerpt from the spoken word version of Caposcripti - visit http://www.caposcripti.com to buy print and digital copies of this book.


Chapter 2: Scouting

Chapter 3: Amazonas 1851

4. Betty
Night-time in London – or rather the electric dusk that passes for night in the city, where the sky develops a perpetual orange glow that conceals all but the brightest stars, and a thin haze softens everything into indistinctness.
Patches of light from the street lamps intensify the areas of shadow under the long landbridge supporting the railway line, and cast doorways and corners into obscurity. Beneath the overhang arches curve along the pavement. The shops and offices are shuttered against the night, rendered uniform by the dark outlines of graffiti etched into them. The street is littered with the debris of daytime and has that peculiar sense of isolation of the shuttered outdoor market.
Save for the dim glimmer of reflection thrown from his lens, the Photographer is near invisible in his hiding place, black coat melting into the dark stone, dark eyes dim hollows in his pale face, camouflaged in stillness, checking for cameras.
His quarry, an old drunk entering the final stages of dipsomania, is about half-way down the street bedded down for the night in the entrance to the station. Like the market and the shops it’s closed now, quiet and deserted, and she
is only just visible through the metal cage that forms the stairwell. A near shapeless bundle in the darkness, even the filth and the stink of piss and stale cider have not been enough to dissuade her from the shelter that the stairwell affords in coldest hour before dawn. Shelter, the Photographer reflects, that will provide his activities with some cover too.
Everywhere these days there are cameras watching; cameras, hidden by them, tricks and feints. Even the concealed ones might be dummies, double bluffs, no escape. Watching me? He marks her and bides his time; there’s no need to rush. Does anybody really see such people? Maybe not, but the camera catches everything.
The Photographer pictures a grand controller, seated in front of a giant switchboard, wired into a chamber studded with monitors in obscene symbiosis: a monstrous eye. Images flash on the screens, zoom shots, wide pans – from the grainy black and white of CCTV to the lurid polychrome of cheap porn.
Suddenly everything vanishes, every screen switches to a single shot, a magnified view of the very street, the very doorway where he is hiding, camera lens glinting in the streetlight, sight and senses straining. But what would
they see? Nothing. For how can they see what they’re not looking for? Blind. Blind leading the blind. Eyes closed to the patterns in the noise, fragments of the lost language. He’s been watching this one for some time now, saving her up like a banquet, waiting for the moment of significance, the confluence of signs.
Even in the dark he can form a perfect mental picture of every contour of her person – from the filthy and crusted layers of petticoats, and blouses, and skirts, and coats, and cardigans, to the bloated feet wrapped in layers of plastic; conjunctival eyes squinting from the lined and bloodshot face. He is impervious to the decay, for this face still
holds a promise of beauty for him, hints given in the high cheekbones, weathered cheeks, sockets spaced wide and eyes of an extraordinary colour.
He’s observed her in all weathers: panhandling for change or drinking Tennent’s Super on a bench by the library with
the other regulars; shouting and spitting at the pigeons, at the government, at the rain, and at the great confusing conspiracy of it all; sleeping it off on the pavement, as oblivious to the passers-by as they are to her.
How many times has he asked himself: does anybody see such people? Really see them or just register their presence
as they pass in the morning as an annoyance or obstacle or object of sudden pity, quickly forgotten? How many hundreds of pairs of eyes glance at this woman on a daily basis without ever seeing her at all? And if challenged to describe even
one small aspect of her appearance, what would they recall? Naturally this last is an important consideration.
It’s different for him, for them; he’s intimate with her, close as no other. Who else could describe, as the Photographer can describe, the colour of her eyes, the moles on her face, the deep lines carved down to the mouth? Who knows the precise number of her teeth, and which are crowns? Who traces the lines on her hands, the varicose veins marbling the back of her calves, measures the tone and tenor of her voice, when she wakes, when she sleeps, where she goes?
Who had last touched her emaciated body – as he would – filled with a kind of awe before the microcosm of humanity; the machinery of natural language latent in her cells, like some complex DNA strand waiting to unfold? She will be more than the sum of her parts, society’s discard, nameless and invisible. She exists for this, fragment of an equation
that embodies that primary relationship between the identity of the individual, and the millions of dim reflections of the original form that people the universe, the fragments of Babel that she carries within her.
And all this contingent on the cameras, the CCTV, his present concealment and his long observation of her habits: Will anybody miss her? Will anyone register her absence, and having registered it, ask questions, instigate a trace, compile footage of her haunts to establish just when and where and how she disappeared? Will they delve into the black economy of the nameless and unrecorded to discover her true identity, that long-forgotten National Insurance number, the place on the Electoral roll surely lapsed?
So much easier to suppose that she has moved on, succumbed quietly to the maw of the streets, been rescued to rot her days away in institutionalised peace....
All potential truths, all possibilities, all made concrete to confuse the pursuer – a paper trail laid for those who might be looking.
“Black and white. Clear-cut. No, there is nothing preventing this: she is nothing. Camera never lies. People do. I must remember as life is art, she is symbolism. Nearly time now: woo her with the camera; always works, black and white: Camera never lies. Fool the eye. Time. Now.”
When he was younger he relished these opportunities. Anticipation and the quick strike, snap, run. But this is only the first step in the process. Each element is deliberate, each a part of the ritual.
Above all there must be no haste in his actions.
As with each of his victims there’s an element of the lover’s nervousness in this first contact. Despite all his observation, even having seen inside them with the eye of his lens, clear
as the cross-section of a cell on a microscope, even then first contact is a shock, recognising in each of them a fragment
of the true language. Whilst others dismiss their drunken ravings, he rejoices in their deafness to the language of Babel, the speakers of tongues – Have they no ears to hear? Here, in
this dark and filthy street, shuttered for the night and watched by the blind lens of a score of CCTV cameras, here, would he hear the voice of God? Her cries could be the only remedy for the lost symmetry of his soul.
Not all of his subjects have been women: although there
have certainly been a few. Outwardly they differ from each other, but linked by a common theme; the shibboleth latent in their musculature, in the juxtaposition of cheekbone and eye socket, the grammar of the sacred language encoded in each like a cipher. Each of these individuals could be prepared and reduced to their essence, the barest equation. Each would become an elegant notation in the vast and complex calculation, the answer to which is the original word, the knowledge the first humans stole from the Garden of Eden, which was lost in the destruction of the Tower of Babel.
It was time now, painfully, to reconstruct that language
to unpick the myths and conspiracy theories of society’s remnants, living on the borders of its conscience, and rework them into his own private mythology.
Time. Strike. Thrill of fear or is it anticipation? He feels himself becoming hard, the street silent enough to hear her gently snoring in the stairwell, his measured tread as he approaches.
Softly he speaks her name, all reassurance – Betty come now dear, come with me, calming her with his mild voice and gentle hands, talking to her all the time as he gathers her up from her den. Somehow it’s easier than expected to convince her that he poses no threat. She comes quietly, holding his hand in hers, grasping his fingers like a child, despite the illusion of bulk created by her many layers. She is so light and frail she seems barely anchored to the ground.
Her hand: cracked and slightly crusted – is it exposure, or some skin complaint worsened by dirt and lack of washing? The contact is uncomfortable but necessary to reassure her; the last thing he needs is a scene in front of the cameras. He glances at her profile in the darkness, walking head-down, one foot in front of the other, and the next gets you where you’re going; how many years of the same round? Deliverer.
The rented car is around the corner, but it feels like miles, like they’re crawling, open targets on the battlefield. Finally they reach it. He opens the passenger door.
“It’s all right Betty, I’m going to help you, can’t have you sleeping on the cold street at night. Got a nice warm bed and a few ciders for you at home, come along now, in you get.”
Slow, slow talking in a gentle monotone, reassuring smile, no sudden movements; in his pocket, the solution – just in case.
Once she’s in he closes the passenger door gently and walks slowly around to the other side of the car, settling his large frame into the seat. Turns the ignition and starts the car; turns to look at Betty, already dozing, head on her chest in the comfortable seat. Good. They can drive for a while.
After half an hour or so, sure that she is deep in slumber, he slowly brings the car to a halt in a residential street beneath a large tree. What infinite patience it requires to wait for a couple more minutes. The street is quiet and dark, and she has not stirred at all. Time. Now.

Chapter 4: Betty

Excerpt from the spoken word version of Caposcripti

5. Wanderings

March 24th
82 degrees on the Thermometer. Another hard march today. I am traversing dense Jungle; huge tree trunks litter the landscape & where once they shaded a sparse Jungle floor, now are grown up every type of vegetation & the whole wrapped around by Lianas & mosses grown over the rotting boles so that it makes for very treacherous footing & much machete work. Birds of a brilliant plumage, in shades of gold, green & ochre occasionally flit across my path & the air is strongly aromatic.

In this region grow many of the douradinha; it has a yellow flower & looks something like our dandelion. The Indians use it as a powerful emetic, the which I have no need for just now.

It is only the thought of all the invisible Jungle, the lure of the empty spaces on my map that keeps me going. It is solely the promise of an Eden, a place of purity & simplicity utterly foreign to the Babel of London, the insensate progress of the Western world that drives me on. It is not my first such journey. Other journals now stored safely in London (where one day this volume too, shall rest, God willing) contain passages describing mandalas built up painstakingly from sand by Tibetan lamas, only to be brushed away on the instant
they are finished with yak’s hair brooms. I have illustrated first- hand locust plagues in Africa & passed on recipes for aphrodisiacs, philtres & near untraceable poisons, learnt from the medicine men of Haiti & the Congo, to my descendants – in the journals that lie safely back in London.

Sometimes I have used guides to take me to those distant & unrecorded tribes, to traverse areas so remote & strange that none of my race has ever ventured there to map their valleys & hills & secret places. Each sentence clawed out of painful ascents into the mountains, to the rocky heights where nothing grows, surviving on a few dried-out grains of corn, goat’s milk, edible lichens, melting snow water in my mouth, staggering through blizzards over high mountain passes, eyes slitted behind wooden goggles.

But none of it has prepared me for the Amazon, for the rich & hungry Jungle, for the river, its life-blood & for the unseen & unrecorded interiors, where life superabounds.

Night falls suddenly, the Jungle becoming a negative of itself, deepening shadows where the palms & saplings & vines & trees grow into & around each other. The dark is almost complete – apart from the spark of fireflies & the occasional star pricked out against the ink of the sky where the Jungle breaks.

March 25th
This morning I stumbled across a clearing that looked as though it may have once been cultivated – perhaps with maize or manioc – but the Jungle grows back so fast that it’s impossible to be sure, or to tell how recently the ground was used. It could be a clue or a chimera. I have come to the conclusion that I will almost certainly be the last to know when I encounter the people of this Jungle.
Despite the rumours of bloodshed & war between tribes, an almost pathological distrust of outsiders, dark hints of cannibalism & the practice of head shrinking, I have made no attempt at concealment as I hack my way through this Jungle. For one, the sheer density of vegetation seems to insulate against all sound, even the crunch of branches beneath my feet are strangely muted, so that I feel the urge to scream bubbling up within me, if only to reassure myself that I
am not forgetting language, losing my voice & the habit of shaping words. Then, too, concealment would be pointless. These people know the Jungle so much better than I.

There have been reports of whole expeditions killed & tortured by Indians, angry & terrified at the strangers invading their territory; people who have learned the hard way to associate the white man with death, with slavery, with the loss of land & children. The Chaman that I hired back at Iquitos has long deserted me. I awoke one morning to find that the rogue had left & taken the canoe & himself & returned to more familiar lands. I had no hint of what had frightened him so & little warning of his intended defection except for mutterings about bad magic & death.

These people are too superstitious; As a humanist I am tainted neither by religion nor fear of unknown spirits. I have no intention of being a missionary; nor am I a tourist. I have looked death in the face; we are old friends now. It is knowledge I am after – a thirst that will never be quenched until I am in my grave.

March 26th
Another hard day’s walking through impenetrable terrain. Only my compass assures me that I am travelling in my intended direction through this matted felted Jungle, knitted together by cabled creepers. The plant life is excessively abundant, characterised by prodigious variety and creates a terrible & wonderful landscape, yet I find myself almost blind to its strangeness & occupy my mind chiefly with imagining the tribes who have had, as yet, no contact with Western man. In this Jungle dwell people who have never heard of steam, glass, Faraday or gunpowder. Their customs could be the strangest I have ever encountered; their religion incomprehensible, pantheistic, sublime. How do they imagine the heavenly bodies, who can only catch glimpses of the firmament between the lowering trees?

According to the rumours that I was able to glean in Iquitos, there is one Tribe in this area that writes & what is more they have reportedly been doing so since ‘the beginning time’. The rumours suggest that they are unlike the other tribes in these lands, the Jivaro & Shuar & Machichuenga, who are one & all bloodthirsty & savage in the extreme. This Tribe is rumoured to be peaceful; a nomadic people who nevertheless have magic powerful enough to protect them from their more warlike neighbours.

It is my dream, put simply, to make First Contact with this people, isolated from the world outside their Jungle home. That world feels as distant as the moon here, with the great walls of green rising on all sides, the tangled vegetation, warring for space & light.

Here the possibility of creating multiple worlds exists, the real far away & half-forgotten.

All my life I have been in flight from society, in search of a greater truth, the answer to a single question. What knowledge did Man lose when God destroyed the tower of Babel? What had so terrified Him that he cast Man back into the chaos before speech? It has been the chief labour of my existence to find an enlightened people who have the answers to these questions that plague me so. I can never rest until I do. When I find them they will take me in, teach me their customs & their language & through me will discover & come to know their fellow man. I will be their sole interpreter; their unique point of contact. Alone in the world I will understand their ways & a grateful humanity will thank me for revealing the secrets that they have discovered. Secrets of medicine, levitation, magic & divination. Who knows what boundaries of the Mind they have conquered, untainted by blundering Science? All of this will be mine to interpret; to add to my chronicles, to augment the pattern I am creating of the world.

But now the light fades & it is time to sleep. I write to drive away the demons of loneliness, but neither pen nor paper is limitless. To sleep, perchance to dream...

March 27th
Over the years I have become less & less convinced of the efficacy of language in recording, correlating & explaining the customs & tongues that I have uncovered & chronicled. Thus have I have developed a system of Mathematical Notation combining that of the Ancient Greeks, Egyptians & Sumerians, as well as those of Mesmer – & including symbols & constructions previously undreamed of in any Western or Eastern lexicon. This system functions as a kind of shorthand, allowing me to cross-reference these elements from so many different cultures. It has the additional advantage of requiring far less space than longhand.
My hands, wrists, forearms are covered in notes that I have made whilst travelling through the Jungle. They overlay themselves & with my fading vision & the guttering of the tallow, it is a struggle to transcribe them all before darkness or sleep claims me. I dare not expose the notebooks to the continual dripping of moisture from the high canopy, so I try to memorise & reproduce – in detail as faithful as is possible – poor sketches of the marvels that surround me.

Decades of squinting at tiny characters have all but destroyed my vision. My greatest fear is not death, so much as the loss of my spectacles! I preserve these against the damp & dirt of the Jungle by keeping them in an inside pocket wrapped in silk. Sadly it is now slowly rotting away like the rest of my equipment. The humidity here is well nigh total.

Night is falling now; at last it is getting a little cooler. The tallow is holding out, so I shall permit myself the leisure of writing a little more than usual in here; sometimes it is the only way to combat the solitude.

In the background always I hear the sounds of the Jungle. No longer do the chorus of calls, whistles, barks & shrieks that start up at dusk terrify me. At first sleeplessness hollowed my cheeks & lent a grey pallor to my skin. I experienced delusions & imagined horrors – waking with a jaguar or a puma snarling on my chest, vampire bats sucking my blood at night, giant snakes crushing me & swallowing me whole.

So far, none of these terrors have come to pass. I have seen monkeys, lizards, tree sloths, giant rodents, capybaras & porcupines, but evidently the fanged predators of the Jungle have sought easier meat for their tea. Still, when the firewood situation permits, I build a fire before I camp & trust that the hammock will protect me from the depredations of ground-dwelling creatures. The merest inch of flesh uncovered is a virtual invitation to the bites of bloodsucking bats & insects alike.

I must remember not to leave anything on the Jungle floor, for it does not stay there for long; a good piece of biscuit was carried away this morning, and my food stocks are very low. There seem to be a limitless number of ants & all determined to purloin every scrap of anything left unsecured, as if the Jungle is intent on gradually assimilating me.

March 29th
The sun is rarely visible & direction further confused by the variety & monotony of the landscape, the murmur & lap & drip of water, millions of leaves brushing against each other, parrots calling to each other, monkeys screaming in protest, packs leaping through the trees, cicadas whirring. At dusk the daytime sounds segue into
those of the night; the Jungle is at its loudest for the brief period of semi-darkness when then sky is a riot of flame & the stars have not yet begun to emerge. At this time the frogs begin to sing & join their voices to the spider monkeys calling for rain.

Thus far have I seen little sign of the people for whom I am searching – only the barest traces of settlements, tools or fires. According to the fragments of information that I have been able to gather, they should be somewhere around this area – always assuming that I have not lost my way or become confused by recurring bouts of Fever. The unwholesomeness of this place may well be the death of me, but I refuse to entertain the possibility.

The journey through this inimical yet beautiful landscape can only create in me the most perfect rapport with the invisible people. Hard fought-for, my experiences become the tools with which to decipher their language. I will find them & when I do I will be the first & only of my race to discover their unique world, to create a bridge between their reality & our own.

From my earliest youth I conceived a fascination for language. Just as we cannot exist save for our thought, so language defines people & ideas. Language is grown from environment as the flower grows on the vine. Thus, one can make no serious study of a language in isolation of both the people & the place that has shaped its lexicon; & it follows that it is only through a minute & careful study of the life around me that I can have any hope of understanding the detail of their existence.

If I am fortunate enough to be able to talk with the Tribe & so stumble through mutual discovery to a sense of language, it will be solely because I have learned in the very lineaments of my body the shape of their experiences. The World is in its essence made of words; for how can we have any concept of that which we cannot describe? Descartes understood this.

I have interpreted & catalogued innumerable languages the world over & although sounds repeat, the meaning is never the same; the words are never repeated. It is as if the shattering of language created a million million tiny echoes of the first word; each corresponding to a facet of the consciousness of the earth, in potentially infinite variety.

visit http://www.caposcripti.com if you'd like to buy a print or digital copy of this book.

Chapter 5: Wanderings

An excerpt from Caposcripti http://www.caposcripti.com

6. Nina

Where is it going a good question and one that she was only just after asking herself as she walked down the road. Just where indeed is it all going, Nina - and are you up there at the front, or only just after catching the tail end of it. Life's running away and one of these days you'll not be holding the reins girl: that's for sure. Coming down off a trip and she's feeling blue, blue and mottled, thoughts scattered and useless.

She is tall and pale from a decade under London’s gunmetal sky, with red hair and faded freckles. A slightly too-sharp nose points upward and (at this moment in time) her mouth points downwards. Her eyes are shadowed; one keeping an eye on the pavement while the other looks inside. She might be enchanting but she tends to the tawdry. Her clothes are garish.

Her one firmly held belief is in chaos. In the beginning was the word? Bullshit. So what was before the beginning? What was outside the universe? What was inside the apple? Chaos. There is no truth. There is no law. There is no reason. We are not even a humorous error: geometry and nature are only by some strange synchronicity connected. What is left, then, when the creed of irrationality rules? Language only hides the fact that there is no truth.

What makes her distrust truth, all truth, to such a degree? Who held her back with custom, with prejudice and with guilt? Who still daily smothers her with silent grief?

People are far more complex than they appear. These are not characters. The only names that have been changed are to protect the guilty.

There are no innocents.

Her room is small, untidy, littered with books, with bright things, things she's found, and things she'll find a use for sometime. mistress of disguise, her collection of wigs, false eyelashes, hats and glasses allows her to express her protean personality and exercise her obsessions; self is after all, only a construct. Books are visible scattered amongst underwear, feather boas, glossy magazines and shoes. Energy without expression, painful vision of a world in shades of grey, lost to the simple dichotomy of black and white, opposite and equal, and one in the middle makes Trinity, Church, Our Father, Hail Mary - and Christ I still know all the words after all these years; cold knees and the chill hand of the devil down the back of her neck.

She drags her past behind her like a trawl net.

Her age? Indeterminately twenties. Stance? Defensive. Voice? Mellifluous. Object of desire? Freedom. For desire.

What do we mean by freedom? All of these threads will at some point conjoin. She will discover, and they will realise, and he will decipher, and yet another will record freedom, under 3, under seven, or infinite criteria. At which point there will be a denouement and it won't matter any more. Sure someone will care, but you and I won't know about it, and sure what's the point when I'm only young and I've no desire for a church wedding or knitting lessons. Because after all St Peter's retired, and the hinges rusted off the pearly gates, and God gave up, and man got stubborn: and now here we are faced with this crap. They always say you can spot a convent girl a mile away. Especially the ones with the veils and black habits.

She has no piercing in her body: her earlobes are unblemished, her tongue in one piece, her nipples and navel framed only with fine hairs. She has no scars, no tattoos; none of life's signifiers. She doesn't dye her hair. In this respect she is entirely as nature intended her and thus eminently suited for this narrative. For someone as precise and devoted to rules as the Photographer she is ideal. Her skin is variegated: he could read volumes from her wrists, the flesh on her cheekbones. She is an obsession waiting to happen.

She doesn’t have a job in any recognised sense. She gets by on the dole, and on a series of get-rich-quick-earn-££££££’s-at-home schemes that haven’t yet made her fortune but consume enough hours to stop her feeling guilty for doing nothing constructive with her time – and keep the DSS off her back. When she’s not scratching a living from London’s unwelcoming streets she spends her time in libraries, watching the other readers: ostensibly there to borrow books, but perhaps like herself lost in contemplation of the library’s patrons, constructing imaginary lives and fantasies around them. The British Library is best. She loves the smell of books long untouched, the dark corridors of shelves and the dim recesses where gems of intellect rest. She has her regulars there, each tenuous connection: students, writers, harmless crackpots engaged in researching their genealogy and serious academics with their air of abstracted genius, gestating theories. Glances across the wide tables, eyes not quite meeting, relationships formed but not consummated.

The reader’s ticket she has had since her college days gives her access to the stacks. Down here direction is confused by the fact that the shelves are on casters and can move in any direction, creating a maze of shifting passages where bearings are soon lost in the dim light. You see few people, but they are often the most interesting; each struggling with their own private obsessions. Practice has helped her to develop techniques of observation so subtle that her victims have no idea that they are under surveillance, and she is able to reconstruct their research with astonishing accuracy – checking the notes that they make for themselves, and then carelessly leave on tables, the queries made of the vast catalogues, monitors detailing the location of volumes buried deep in the library’s bowels; vicarious intellectual. Is she looking for truth amongst those millions of words, a copy of every book mapped out like a blueprint of humanity’s imagination? If so, she hasn’t found it. Yet.

But she senses that they have: and one in particular. The Photographer. He was the first that she had wanted to follow outside the Library; to discover what other secrets he had found.

She lives near Elephant and Castle in a council block that’s been condemned. In this sense she’s technically homeless, but the block has been squatted for long enough that it’s inhabitants feel reasonably secure. The corridors have been trashed beyond all recognition, graffiti scrawled in unreadable palimpsest on the filthy walls. The floors are a mess of rubbish, broken furniture, syringes, old newspapers and other, unrecognisable, detritus. She tries not to examine it too closely, and watches where she puts her feet.

Some of the flats have electricity and water – the utilities companies don’t care if the tenants are legal or not so long as someone is happy to feed coins to the meter. Five or six people share the one she lives in. She doesn’t trust any of them, and padlocks her door when she is at home, and even more securely when she is not.

She has no friends, but innumerable acquaintances. She’s known, on the scene, always at the edge of parties, always caning it. She has her contacts with the e-dealers, speed freaks, acid punters. Base, coke, 2CB, pure MDMA when she can get her hands on it – which isn’t hard, at the right parties. The wasted addicts lying in the corners in the hallways– eyes glazed and cunning, sizing her up for her cash, looking through her at the next fix, are enough to dissuade her from indulging in anything harder. They make her think of a certain genre of film, the ‘gritty hardness’ of the 90’s, smug revelations of society’s decay, drug addiction, violence, crime. – But the comparison is meaningless in the face of their reality. The books she had read, films she had seen always glamorised the addict to some extent. But there was nothing seductive about these wrecks. So she watched her step, was careful and kept her eyes shuttered.

She comes from everywhere and nowhere: one of London’s dispossessed, her accent has mellowed and been adulterated in the city of Babel until she speaks in a flat London drawl, with just a tinge on the R’s to suggest her origin. The honey pot of the city has drawn her in, as with other character in this story – and now holds her fast in a web of seeming coincidence, where all time’s strands conjoin and conspire inexorably to draw her into the centre.

If you asked her where she comes from she would probably name some anonymous small town in middle England – but it’s not home to her anymore. Going back there she’s a stranger. She remembers a couple of bars, but they’re different. She’s unlikely to meet anyone she once knew on the street - and if she does, it only confirms her lack of contact. They will have nothing in common, and will soon drift on, having established their separateness. Her life is a list of outdated contact numbers.

Chapter 6: Nina

Excerpt from Caposcripti by Zelda Rhiando - http://www.caposcripti.com


7. Taypi’s Discovery
Taypi crouched lower in the cover of the giant palm, praying that he’d not been observed. He took long shallow breaths, and closing his eyes concentrated on relaxing every part of his body. Gradually he became aware that the perspiration was cooling and that insects were exploring his motionless skin. He opened his eyes and began to tune his senses to the jungle around him, the myriad of sounds, colours, smells and textures that made up his environment.

The stranger was still in the vicinity, about twenty paces away from where he lay hidden. He couldn’t see him, but he could hear him and smell the acrid odour of his body – a mixture of stale sweat, urine and a damp musty stench. Beneath the odours of sap and sweat and piss he smelt quite unlike any human that the boy had ever encountered. This in itself was frightening – especially when combined with the sounds that the man was making. Low mutterings, their rhythm strangely broken, clicks, dissonant humming; altogether a meaningless jumble of sounds that sounded like the raving of someone in a dream spell. Maybe he was preparing to cast a spell, and was some kind of magician? Maybe this was a test, a vision, and part of his initiation.

Taypi was in the middle of the period of his isolation, part of the ceremony that would make him a man. Only if he could survive in the jungle on his own for a full month, until the moon turned again and showed his jutting cheekbone and cold smile to the world, would he be allowed to return to his people, no more a boy. Until that time he lived in isolation, spending his days foraging for food and chewing the various roots and herbs which the Speaker (who held the knowledge of the Tribe and communicated with spirits) had given him so that he could discover his spirit animal. The Speaker had warned him that demons might try to trick him during this period – so Taypi was not sure if the apparition before him was human, or a spirit who had taken on this disguise to confuse him.

After some time Taypi relaxed his immobility and dared to stretch one of his legs, which had begun to cramp a little. Emboldened by the fact that the man did not seem to have noticed his presence he decided to risk sneaking a look at him. The palm he was hiding in was one of a stand, on the edge of a small clearing formed when one of the giant trees had toppled, crushing the vegetation beneath it. The Stranger was sitting on one end of the massive trunk, examining something that he held in one hand, and writing with the other, and
the boy was able to crawl to a place where he could see him through the leaves. This took some time – he didn’t dare risk disturbing the leaves in case it startled the birds roosting on the upper branches, so his movements were infinitesimal; he almost grew from one spot to the next.

The clearing was bright with sunlight, slanting down into the ragged hole left in the cover by the fallen palm. The Stranger was outlined clearly against the foliage by his light clothes, his head covered by a decrepit hat that had once been a creamy magnolia, but was now somewhat greenish in hue. Every
so often he would remove it, and wipe his face and brow before replacing it on his head. Taypi noticed several things at once: he was covered from head to foot, except for his hands and face, with garments of a kind that he had never seen before. The skin that was visible was yellowed and leathery, and marked with deep grooves. On his beaky nose some kind of adornment was perched which covered his eyes, and hooked over his ears. He was hunched over, making it hard to judge his height – but gave the impression of having been a tall man. He was holding something in his hand which he squinted through, and which kept throwing off lightning in the sun – although it didn’t seem to bother him. 

As the boy watched he put it down and began to write on a tablet with many leaves, sometimes pausing and scribbling on the back of his left hand.
Taypi forgot his crouched position, the branches that were digging into him, and the ants that had begun to make a regimented exploration of one of his feet. He was frozen in place; the sensation of movement a memory. The world narrowed to the bright clearing, and the Stranger, oblivious to his presence, and busy cataloguing a new species of orchid in a sunbeam.

The spell was broken when the Stranger began gathering his things, obviously preparing to continue his onslaught on the jungle. The boy suddenly woke up to his predicament, realising that there was no way he dared make a move until the man was gone. He only allowed himself to breathe again when the Stranger, having gathered up his travelling equipment, departed from the other end of the clearing. Within seconds he was out of sight, machete poised for chopping at any roots or vines, and leaving a swathe of mangled vegetation in his wake.

Taypi was left alone in the clearing to try to make sense of any of the things that he had seen. It still lacked a handful of days to his appointed return to the camp – the moon was not nearly full yet. To come back before that time was unheard of, nothing before this had ever made it necessary as far as he was aware. They came back, or they didn’t; but not before the allotted time. And this? The presence of this man was something that Taypi thought the Speaker and the Chief of the Tribe would want to know about. What would happen if he delayed, and the Stranger stumbled across the pueblo?

Still they were a few days walk from his home, and Taypi didn’t have any proof that the Stranger was even aware of his people’s existence. He could watch him for the next few days, and return to the pueblo after his time was up with the news. That way he would not risk the disgrace, or banishment (or worse), that he imagined waited for one who broke his pact with the moon.

Chapter 7: Taypi’s Discovery

Chapter 8 of Caposcripti by Zelda Rhiando http://www.caposcripti.com

8. Flora; My Attempts at Hunting

April 03–
The deepening shadows remind me that the day is almost over. My little lantern throws friendly light from a bough above my head; my hammock is snugly rigged & now tis time to write up observations of the day.

The going being a little less irksome today, I have been able to be somewhat more leisurely with my pace, & even to collect some samples, & perform a rough dissection on a tree frog which I had first sketched as you see on the facing page. It’s markings were quite extraordinary, & I fancy would occasion much comment at the Zoological Society.

It is somewhat dispiriting that travelling on my own this way,
& thus acting as my own porter somewhat inhibits my ability to catalogue as I go, but still I can aim for some level of accuracy & veracity, as far as is possible given the tools to hand. As well as the frog, I followed the trail of some leafcutter ants, to their cunningly constructed nest, & searched out the funnel spider’s trap-doored lair (though you can be sure I was well apprised of the danger to myself in so doing). Less perilous, but wondrous, the colonies of clay globes built by termites. These minute architects suggest the hand of some creator, yet my humanism makes me distrust such conclusions; nature is passing strange in its manifestations. “There are more things in heaven & earth...”


April 06–
I have spent the day half maddened & dazed, feverish & dreamlike as I hack & cut my way towards my goal, brushing flies from my lips & eyes, feasting on the stinging sweat, the suppurating bites. Bits of leaves & branches, beetles & unidentified seeds add themselves to the tangle of my hair & the folds of my clothes. My route is determined equally by compass & intuition, for it is rarely possible to travel in a straight line for long. Some of the land that I am crossing has evidently been cleared at some point in the past – the Jungle has reclaimed it’s own with extra ferocity, throwing up tangled areas of plants.
This afternoon I encountered a marshy area, and as I could see no clear route around it, I had perforce to go through it, precariously balancing on fallen logs, on stones, on anything solid enough to hold my weight in the valleys of mud between the river’s tributaries. After this I came to an area where the Jungle floor was clear, huge trees soaring over the ground carpeted with their dead leaves & strange species of fungi; mosses, creepers & roots hanging down from the secondary growth, high above the ground. Looking up I could see ferns & orchids & parlour palms, parasites on the trunks of giant sequoias. I wish I were a spider monkey; I envy their graceful passage through the highest reaches of the Jungle.

I have fallen into a pattern of travel now. I walk from daybreak
to dusk with infrequent stops for rest & refreshment, supping
on fruits that I recognise & pools of water collected in Jungle hollows, or tapped from the trunks of trees. Today I got lucky, & caught a small bird, but there’s precious little meat on them, barely worth the trouble of searching out dry firewood. The river has its own dangers; swift moving & silent water snakes, many-teethed amphibians, & the animals & birds usually avoid my somewhat clumsy traps.

This afternoon I tried to shoot a peccary, using the heavy musket
I carry with me, the report deadened against the deep gloom of
the Jungle. But it is difficult to aim & fire the clumsy weapon fast enough to hit anything, & I was certainly no match for such fleet footed game. I do not know enough of the habits of the Jungle creatures to follow the trails of capybaras, or catch possums in their lairs. Now I dare not waste what little powder & ammunition I have left in case I should need it to defend myself.

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Chapter 8: Flora; My Attempts at Hunting

Chapter 9 of Caposcripti (spoken word version) http://www.caposcripti.com

9. Watching the Stranger

Taypi had spent the last few days watching the Stranger, and struggling to fit the things that he observed into any frame of reference that made sense. For a start the Stranger seemed to be ridiculously ignorant of the jungle, like a child who has never left his mother’s hip. Even whilst walking he kept examining and touching everything, even, at one point, standing on a nest of poison ants to sample the bark of a tree, scraping away at it with his machete. This tool, of wonderful sharpness was as different from the palm machetes of the Tribe as was everything else about the Stranger. Who knew, he might have some purpose for the bark that the Tribe were completely unaware of ? It wasn’t much good for anything, as far as Taypi knew. It was too crumbly to use for binding, inedible, no good in tea and with no known medicinal properties. The Stranger seemed to become very excited about it and packed the sample carefully away in one of his many pockets, after wrapping it in some banana leaf, along with a leaf from the tree.

Every so often he would stop, take out something bright from his pocket, cast around for some light between the leaves, and measure it up against the sun. He would scribble symbols on his arms and on the tablet around his neck. This reassured the boy somewhat, as he understood the sun, and the practice of recording knowledge on the body. For the Tribe it is a sacred process, the indelible symbols pricked on the flesh with sharp thorns, whereas for this strange creature it seems as instinctive as breathing. There is no ceremony to the Stranger’s writing – he makes notes as he goes, and the letters are not indelibly pricked on the skin, but scribbled in all on top of each other, new symbols etched over the faded tracery of the old. The implement he uses for the markings could be made of bone, yet it is the wrong colour; the handle intricately worked. There were rumours of tribes that had the secret of metal: it could be that he was one of those... But that he seemed entirely foreign to this place, and Taypi was not even sure if those tribes still existed. There seemed to be far fewer drums rumbling through the jungle each year.

Taypi has not been able to get close enough to see what the Stranger is writing in his book with many leaves, but the writing on his hands and arms stands out clearly. The script seems regular, repeating the same few symbols in a bewildering variety of combinations. Perhaps the man is making prayers on his skin, endlessly repeating the name of his guardian spirits. The idea that the written language could combine the same few symbols to reproduce any word in the language was foreign to Taypi – for the Tribe had thousands of symbols, each reflecting the essential properties of the object, idea or event they described. You could not lie, or describe something incorrectly in their language; each event, each story has its own notation and style, variation but never repetition.

The Stranger eats and drinks as he travels – but is clumsy in his foraging – ripping fruits from the trees and bushes and leaving scars on the jungle as he passes. Taypi has no need to cut his way through the thick vegetation, instead using almost invisible paths that weave through the clearings, sometimes travelling along the beds of streams, sometimes taking entirely to the river. This is always a last resort as the Tribe are afraid of the open sky. They believe that the spirits of those that have left look down at them at night, glinting like so many fireflies between the clouds, and that they are jealous of the living, stealing their spirits when they can.

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Chapter 9: Watching the Stranger

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10. The Photographer’s Apartment

The Photographer’s apartment is in an old style mansion block, with a central well in the buildings, and barred windows, netted to prevent pigeons nesting. Only a single, small and heavily obscured window lights the rooms giving onto this space. The Photographer has blacked out even this small aperture with soundproofing material, and installed a complicated ventilation system to replace the window, so that once inside the room you could be anywhere or nowhere.

The room itself is not large – a box room, or bathroom perhaps. It would make a perfect darkroom, but the Photographer has long since adapted another of the rooms in the apartment for this purpose.

Inside the room there is no furniture. The walls, floor, and ceiling are padded with soft black rubber. Concealed in black rubber studs are tiny microphones, which pick up and amplify the slightest whisper, connected to a recording system in the Photographer’s study that holds two three-hour tapes. When the room is occupied they are changed every six hours.

The only entrance is through a heavily soundproofed door, with a specially reinforced lock that secures the door to the frame on both the hinged and opening sides. From inside it’s hard to find the door, as the back and the surrounding walls are padded in the same material. The Photographer keeps the key on a chain around his neck at all times, and the lock well oiled, so that it turns smoothly and silently. A hatch is built into the door, allowing food or water to be placed inside the doorway for the occupant of the room, but even this works through an ingenious airlock system, so that no light or sound is allowed to enter. The room could be a womb, or a sensory deprivation tank. 

The Photographer has himself spent some hours enclosed between its padded walls, but the total solitude, the silence, and the whispering of internal voices frightened him; he felt as though his soul was being eaten. Now he uses it solely for observation, sending others on the journeys that he himself is too terrified to make, recording the pleas and entreaties absorbed by the padded walls, the gradual loss of identity and the dissolution of language. Each time he attempts to piece together a deeper meaning from the babble on his tapes. But there is never quite enough to grasp a pattern, and frustration sends him out looking for fresh victims.

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Chapter 10: The Photographer's Apartment

Chapter 11 of the spoken word version of Caposcripti by Zelda Rhiando
http://www.caposcripti.com

11. Fever

April 09–
Today I saw a striking bird & had a strange sensation of deja vue. Although it seemed new & strange, being of a genus I have not encountered before, & at same time it was strangely familiar, as though I had already seen it somewhere. & thus I am combing my Journal for a reference to it, & yes – just days ago I had sketched it & have already forgotten both that & what else?

My senses are much disordered; & I am much plagued by stomach cramps, vomiting, diarrhoea, sweats, & all the other consequences of my experiments in the edible. Each episode a painful lesson in the vocabulary of sustenance, a language I must learn soon if I am not to perish from want of food. Twould be an irony to starve in the midst of such natural plenty.

April 11–
A nasty shock today – I think my reactions slowing. Nearly stepped on a fer-de-lance – a snake of a highly poisonous variety (although I hear that the Indians make an antidote of the plant of the same name, which mashed and applied as a poultice, produces a speedy cure) This threw me off balance, the hand I threw out to catch myself landing almost dead square in a column of biting ants.

My diet is still very poor, though I have found breadfruits to eat. The mosquitoes are very plaguesome. I must keep myself covered from head-to-toe to avoid their bites. That & the bloodsucking of leaches & ticks have left me prey to recurrent fevers, which take me out of myself for days, wavering between unconsciousness & vivid hallucinations, so that I no longer know where, or who, I am. Either of those small mistakes could be fatal to me out here, & who knows if anyone will ever discover my rotted bones, the rusted remains of
a beltbuckle, the gold of my pocket watch perhaps all that remains after all else has decayed?

April 14–
I could not swear that is the correct date I see visions, and hear unexplained sounds. Flashes of coppery faces, strangely ornamented and tattooed, alternated with a speech seemingly composed of clicks and vowels, singing and whistling, the smell of smoke and headgear made of feathers. I feel another fever coming on.

Hard to tell what is dream and what reality; hallucinating caused by fever or hunger? Someone (or something?) is watching me. I feel eyes always upon my back. I hope to God they are friendly eyes, as I have become weak as a kitten.

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Chapter 11: Fever

An excerpt from Caposcripti by Zelda Rhiando - http://www.caposcripti.com/

Chapter 12: Return to the Pueblo

Chapter 13 of Caposcripti by Zelda Rhiando - http://www.caposcripti.com

Chapter 13: A Meeting with Quentin

Chapter 14 from Caposcripti by Zelda Rhiando



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Chapter 14 - Tribal Gathering

Chapter 15 of Caposcripti by Zelda Rhiando - http://www.caposcripti.com


15. Watching the Photographer: 1

Nina cast another oblique look in the direction of the Photographer, with whom she had become more and more preoccupied, to the point where she had begun to neglect the usual subjects of her scrutiny and to frequent the library at all hours in the hope of seeing him. Whilst she had quickly discovered that his visits were regular enough to set a clock by, so far he remained a cipher to her – inscrutable in his dark clothes, his cold glance measuring but not engaging with the other readers, with the librarians, and with her.

Today she is doing her frumpy actress look – moth-eaten black wig, velvet draperies, Dame Edna glasses and many- buttoned black boots. She can barely see him, for he is half concealed behind a tall and meticulously arranged pile of books, bent low over a reporter’s pad in which he is making notes in his tiny handwriting. He is not so absorbed in his work that he is impervious to the interest of those about him, and seems to be making a conscious effort to prevent others from seeing the notes he is taking. Walking quietly past him she can just make out the titles on the spines of the books, creating a signature that she has learnt to interpret. Yet there’s no immediately discernable pattern in his choices: studies by anthropologists long since gone to dust, ancient anatomy books, treatises by Egyptologists, photographs of catacombs filled with the desiccated flesh of my flesh, Victoriana: the fetishism of death. With these are books on linguistics, the bible code, the tower of Babel, language, hermeneutics, Kabbalah, Mesmer, the Philosopher’s stone, numerology – even the Rosicrucians get a look in somewhere, woven into the pattern of this strange man’s researches.

She has never encountered someone who confuses her so much, nor who covers his tracks so well, requiring all her stratagems to watch him. Then too there is that nagging sense of recognition: familiar in the sense of someone that you’ve met, somewhere, sometime, but can’t quite place.

This is a face she’s seen somewhere, frozen in attitude in a black and white photograph. Or is it his black clothes, dark hair, cold eyes and pale, spare frame that makes him seem as though reproduced on celluloid? Then, she has it. From somewhere deep in her memory she dredges up a recollection of where she has seen him before, his face ever before her eyes, teasing. The memory goes back to her college days, and to the fine art degree she had read for, but never completed.

A Photographer, she was sure, but what was his name? She could not explain her growing obsession with him – but this inability to identify him, the disturbing familiarity of his physiognomy, intensified the feeling, and the sense of a connection between them. She began discern in his habits special messages intended only for her.

Today the Photographer turned up at the Library at his usual time: he seems a man of impeccable precision and inflexible habits. This makes Nina’s task much easier – for once she worked out when he would be in the library, she was able to relax the schedule which had kept her there at all hours, and anticipate his arrival to the minute. She prepares for these sessions as though for an assignation – spending hours on her costumes and make-up – for she is invariably in disguise, veiled like a coy bride.

Curiosity cuts like heartburn in her chest – where does he go to when he is not in the Library? Where does he live? What is he working on that drives him to dig up such a strange mixture of volumes from the library, and what is the significance of his obscure choices? Once he has finished with the reference books, he invariably amasses a stack to

take home – although how he can read them all is a mystery to Nina, as he invariably returns each one within the week. She can only suppose he is doing some giant work of cross- referencing, collating different branches of knowledge, and creating some kind of index. Watching him, seeming to absorb light into himself in the dim reading room, bent low over a book, so that the stack before him half conceals his hunched figure, she resolves that she must begin to find the answers to some of these questions, which will never be answered within the Library’s walls.
At precisely 3.30 the Photographer consulted his watch,
and began to gather up his notebook and pen, and to stack the books neatly for the librarians to return them to their appointed shelves. Nina knew this meant he was about to leave, and made her way quickly out of the reading room and towards the exit. She would wait for him on the street.

The Photographer came down the steps with an abstracted air, hands clenched in his pockets, and eyes scanning the stairs before him without seeing them, as if totally absorbed in mulling over the facts and myths that he had been collating in the Library. From across the road she could make out his tall figure, and watched him turn and flag a taxi, which soon joined the traffic on the Marylebone road, and meant that for the moment she had lost him.

Slowly she turned and made her way down into the tube station, and the Northern Line, for the Elephant, and home. Once upon a time she would have stayed in the Library until closing time – but now she needed to be alone to think over their silent dialogue.
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Chapter 15: Watching the Photographer 1

An excerpt from Caposcripti, by Zelda Rhiando - http://www.caposcripti.com

16. Cab Rage: a Moment of Angst

The Photographer settled himself in the back of the black cab, and gave his address to the driver. The traffic was heavy, as always on the Marylebone Road, but the Photographer registered little of the passing cityscape, his mind on the work that awaited him at home, the tantalising fragments of information that he had been able to unearth at the library, and the system that he was evolving based on this research.

You must not assume that just because he had taken a cab today, he always travelled this way – it depended on his mood. Sometimes he would take the bus home from the library, the old-fashioned kind, with an open platform. He would
sit at the back and watch the other passengers, and the city going past the steamy windows. He felt both connected and disconnected at these times – both a part of the scurrying London populace and above, outside of it. But today he
felt like paying for the solitude and discretion of a black cab driver. Should the cabbie be in a talkative mood, one glance in the rear-view mirror usually stopped attempts at conversation dead.

Crossing London Bridge, with it’s black suited city professionals he felt a sudden rush of anger at their antlike existence – which only confirmed for him the value of his work. He resisted the temptation to pull across the glass that separated him from the cab driver and ask “Do you believe in free will, I mean do you? Really? Look at them with their pensions and peps, policies and endowment schemes, insurance against anything which could possibly happen except, of course, the death of the soul: what price”,
he felt like asking, “do you put upon the soul?” 

The driver wouldn’t listen of course, inured already to the men with sandwich boards; Jehovah’s Witnesses daily knocking “Do you believe? Do you believe in an inalienable right to dictate your own actions, reactions to the world about you? Do you believe in the consequent FULL RESPONSIBILITY for all possible results of your actions? Does it make you scream, and shudder, paralysed with indecision, crushed beneath the weight of that awful knowledge?” He wanted to scream “do you believe do you understand?”

He realised that he was sweating, breathing hard, knuckles white and strained. But the taxi driver had not noticed anything, or if he had had ignored it with the sanguinity of his kind, and the Photographer spent the rest of the journey in silence, mulling over the next stage in the process.

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Chapter 16: Cab Rage: a Moment of Angst

Chapter 17 of the spoken word version of Caposcripti by Zelda Rhiando http://www.caposcripti.com for print and digital copies


17. Recordings and Methods

The Photographer returned to his work with relief once the taxi had dropped him off, removing the tapes and the player from the drawer where he had concealed them.
The DAT tapes were neatly labelled, and represented 3 days of continuous recording, the cartridges changed every six hours. Transcribing them was a time-consuming process, but the Photographer had invested in the most expensive equipment – allowing him to scan through hours of material automatically, taking his verbal snapshots. The machine would stop at the slightest utterance, the smallest piece of the jigsaw that constituted the original language, as they gradually forgot the speech they had learnt to communicate in this society and returned to a more primal language encoded in their flesh.
The Photographer cross-referenced another sound on his card system, and made a copy of the portion of the recording that contained the original sample. Checking his watch he realised that it was feeding time for the latest guest. He went into his small kitchen, and prepared a tray: a plastic beaker filled with water, a bowl of soup, and two pieces of toast. They often refused food at first, but even the strongest would crumble after a couple of days in the room, and the dishes would be returned to the dumbwaiter licked clean.
This took five minutes, no more. He crossed the hallway to the door of the room, its all-but invisible frame set flush in the wall. The outline of the hatch was equally indiscernible, and was heavily insulated. Silent enough for the room’s occupants who had heard their last human voice. The
only sound that escaped its padded walls was through the reassuringly mechanical medium of the tape recorder, divorced from the messy physicality of it all. That, and the complete darkness of the room created a sense of isolation that divorced one completely from any awareness of the physical world. The Photographer had tried it himself on a couple of occasions, and had not liked the sensation. Luckily he could leave at any point.
Only when the recordings began to lose any semblance of coherent language did he stop bringing the food each day.
All that escaped the room when he opened the hatch was
the smell of shit and urine, unwashed body and fear – and the Photographer would stop opening the hatch until his recorders picked up nothing but silence. Then he would open up the room and remove the body.
He is gradually building up a library of these tapes,
strange moans and broken words. The positioning of
the microphones makes them sound as though they are coming from the bottom of a deep well, an oubliette whose occupants are not so much as forgotten, as never known in the first place.

http://www.caposcripti.com for print and digital copies

Chapter 17: Recordings and Methods

An excerpt from Caposcripti by Zelda Rhiando - http://www.caposcripti.com

Chapter 18. A Decision is Made

The Speaker awoke at dusk with a raging headache, cramps in his stomach, and a taste of dust in his mouth. A whole night and a day had passed in this world, as he slept. He had spirit-journeyed again, and this time, the connection had not been broken. It took him a moment to connect these sensations with the events of the afternoon, and then the realisation of what he had discovered hit him like a blow in the chest. Everything would change with the stranger who was arriving – but the Speaker could not see how, and he struggled to hold onto the connections he had made before they dissipated.

He became aware that there were several people watching him. He got up and followed them to the central hut, where he found many members of the Tribe. They had been waiting patiently for him to emerge from the fugue state, confident that he would have all the answers, as he always did. This only increased his sense of dread, as he stared at the chief of the Tribe, at the heads of the families, and tried to gather words to describe what he had understood. 

Nevertheless, he could not lie – he had not been given the language with which to do that. His grave face told his watchers that the news would not be good.

“Brothers. I have looked in the memories of our people, and questioned the spirits of the jungle. I have gazed through
the eyes of animals, and studied the patterns of probability.
I could not understand much of what I saw, but I know that this man is far outside our experience, and that his people speak a language that has never been heard by our people. His
mind is like black water – I could not see into it.”

“I have found no answers to our questions, nor could I see our future clearly, or the future of the stranger. I do not even know if he will live or die. Yet one thing came through clearly: everything that we have known will change.”

The news caused a rumble of disquiet. In living memory, there had never been a situation or problem for the Tribe that the sacred scripts had not provided a solution for. The Tribe were so used to being able to consult the Speaker, who held in his head the Tribe’s memories, and could consult the shrunken heads preserved against the jungle for generations for any information that they required, that the very thought that there might be no answers caused some panic. The Speaker continued imperturbably.

“I do not know if he will survive, but I think we should keep him away from the rest of the Tribe for the moment. I will nurse him with Taypi and his mother until he is strong enough to be taught some of the ways of our people."

“If he lives, we will have to learn to speak with him. If he dies, we have no guide, no words with which to free his spirit, nor any way of understanding the knowledge that we would gain from him. Nevertheless, it may be that we will find some connection with him. For the boy said he is inscribed in our manner, if not in our script, and his spirit was not invisible to me. We will leave immediately.”

Print and digital copies of Caposcripti are available at http://www.caposcripti.com


Chapter 18: A Decision is Made

An excerpt from the spoken word version of Caposcripti. Print and digital copies of this novel are available from http://www.caposcripti.com


19. Gerard

It was a greyly humid day – smog low on the pavements and the West End traffic snarling its contorted loops through Soho. The streets teemed with young and beautiful affluence, coy glances darting round the pavement cafés.
The Photographer noted careless caresses, faces and bodies strewn about with metal, fashionable clothes and coked-out eyes. He observed men in business suits, expensive cars, exclusive restaurants. He watched with interest the derelicts, the homeless and the uncared-for populating doorways and lingering on street corners.

“Got any spare change mate?”

The dull voice instantly commanded his attention. From the pavement, frayed cuffs wrapped around grimy knees, a hopeful face looked up at him. His eyes are pleading but also aloof: he’s probably asked that question a hundred times today, and his faith in human nature survived a bare week of the West End treatment.

The Photographer decides to become involved – up until this point he could have walked away, and risked nothing. But he feels a need for human contact, for games; for gambling. It has become too easy, too safe, the temptation to break some of the rules he has made for himself too strong. Or maybe it’s just that he no longer needs them. He feels attuned to them all, the lost people that he saves, the heads he steals from corpses in the morgue, from the scenes of accidents when he can get away with it. There is a poetry to events that he thinks he has the measure of – the grand controller, the
prestidigitator of reality, shaping lives like a clever illusion for motivations both obscure and subtle.

Rules are made to be broken.

“I’m sorry, I never carry change – but I’ll buy you a coffee if you want – how about it?”

“Milky, three sugars please – nice one mate”

“Oh it’s all right – come and drink it with me – there’s a very good place just around the corner.”

“I’d rather stay here if you don’t mind... I... I’m waiting for a friend; he’ll lose it if I’m not here when he gets back.”

“How long is he likely to be? Surely you’ve time for a coffee? I’m a Photographer – I’m doing research for a book on street life. I’d like to talk with you.”

“Where’s your camera then?”

The Photographer reached into one of his pockets and pulled out a pen and a small notebook.

“Let’s just say I’m taking verbal snapshots at the moment – now, how about that coffee?”

The young man is still suspicious, his manner aggressive. “Do you take pictures for magazines and stuff then? Any I might have heard of ?”

Deciding at this point not to reveal that magazines in fact ran features on his work (anonymity being crucial to his plan), the Photographer just smiled, nodded, and replied, “You might say that... I’m freelance – what’s your name anyway?”

“Gerard”

“OK Gerard – so – are you going to help me out with my research? Talking to people, first hand, best material... only it’s hard to write standing up in the street!”

Gerard considered this for a moment, whilst several things warred in his mind. Abandoning such a lucrative pitch was risky – but the guy might pay him; a hot coffee in a dry cafe was an enticing prospect... the guy was a bit creepy... could even be plainclothes, or on the cruise... Soho a natural stamping ground for nonces.... Still – couldn’t do any harm if he kept his wits about him and his eye open for any possibilities.

“All right then.” Gerard stood up, shook out his blanket and rolling it up, shoved it in his bag, pocketing the few coins that he kept there to give passers-by the right idea. He shrugged his shoulders, smoothed down his pants and said, “Where’s this café then?”

“Oh, not very far.” replied the Photographer “it’s this way”

The Photographer led the way, walking rapidly and with purpose, his arms swinging, and his black coat billowing around him. Gerard shuffled his feet and followed him with a loose stride, shoulders slightly hunched and hands in pockets. The Photographer turned his head to ensure that Gerard was in fact following him and slowed down a little, continuing his questioning as they walked.

“Where are you from Gerard? You’re not from London?”

“No – I’m from Bristol, originally. I’ve been down here a few months. My mate said he’d get me a sound engineer gig – I’ve had some training. You know, tape op and that. But he blew his contact with the studio. Some of the kit went missing
– so that’s out. Still I thought I’d stick around. See what’s happening.”

“You don’t like Bristol then?”

“No man, I’ve done that you know? There’s too much hardcore drugs down there, too many angry people. Anyway – the West Country isn’t going anywhere. There’s opportunities down here for someone like me – someone with a bit of smarts, knows the score – mind?”

“But what about your family, your friends – you must miss them?”

Gerard pulled up and looked at him so sharply that for a moment the Photographer thought he had blown it – that Gerard had seen through his gently probing questions, designed to elicit the maximum amount of information whilst giving away nothing about himself. He felt his stomach churn and a tight feeling in his chest, where a fist seemed to clutch and roil. But, unwittingly, he had hit upon a nerve. The fact that Gerard had not even asked the Photographer’s name suggested that he was too self-absorbed to notice the slightly clinical manner in which the Photographer was stripping him of information about his home, his background. That was fine with the Photographer. He wasn’t intending on giving much away anyway.

“I don’t have any family man. Me mam died when I were small – I grew up in a home. I never knew who me da was – not sure me mam did either. I got by. Are we nearly there yet? You said it wern far. I have to get back soon. I’ve got shit to sort out, mind.”

Gerard’s jerky voice gave away a tinge of nervousness, and suggested just the hint of a habit. Nothing too serious, but some dependency was conveyed by the way that he spoke.

“No – it isn’t – in fact here we are. Don’t worry – you’ll be recompensed for your time.” The Photographer kept his voice steady and smooth, giving no hint of the turbulent anticipation beneath. The important thing now was to gain the young man’s trust.

They had arrived at a typical Soho café – the tables in the front facing the street for maximum posing value, those at the back tucked away, to allow intimate little téte a téte’s, secretive assignations. The Photographer had been concerned that the staff might not allow Gerard – whose hands and
face were grimy, whose shoes were crusted with dirt, and who smelled none too clean – inside, but either they didn’t notice or didn’t care. At any rate no one tried to stop them. The Photographer chose a table at the back that couldn’t be seen from the street, and which was slightly cut off from the rest of the café. He seated himself with his back to the other customers, whilst Gerard took a seat against the wall, facing outwards. He told Gerard to order anything he liked. Maybe he was hungry?

Almost immediately an insouciant waiter came to take their order: an espresso for the Photographer; a hot chocolate, a large Coke, several sandwiches and a cake for Gerard, who was bent on taking full advantage of this free lunch ticket. As the waiter walked away with the order, Gerard asked sharply: “Got any fags?” The Photographer didn’t smoke – had not anticipated this eventuality. Spotting a cigarette-vending machine at the far side of the café, he dug some pound coins out of his pocket and handed them to Gerard, telling him to buy himself some cigarettes. Gerard manoeuvred himself out from around the table – nearly colliding with the waiter who had returned with their order. As he fumbled the coins into the machine and squinted at the various brands on offer, the Photographer watched him and thought about the ritual to come – not a ritual in this case, but a departure – for Gerard
was different from the others, more aware, sharper. A change from the drifting human wrecks for whom, the Photographer believed, death was a release, and the means to free the potential in their souls. Gerard had something in common with them – living as he did on the borders of society; and as such might not be missed for a while if he were to disappear, nor looked for too long. His youth made the Photographer a little uneasy, but he seemed to suspect nothing.

As Gerard came back to the table, the Photographer carefully rearranged his features so nothing of his thoughts would show. Gerard sat down and laid into his sandwiches with the gusto of someone who hasn’t eaten properly for several weeks, washing it all down with huge slugs of Coke alternating with hot chocolate. The Photographer let him eat in peace for a few minutes and then carefully, casually asked him:

“Gerard, you’ve got good bones, you could be quite photogenic. I’d like to take some pictures of you, for the series that I mentioned, on street people. I’d like you to come over to my studio. Naturally I’ll pay you for your time – what do you think?”

Gerard looked at him for a moment, considering, hand grasping the chocolate glass, his jaws still working on the sandwich. Their eyes met. The Photographer saw nothing but an interminable boredom there.

“Sure man, just say the word.”


An excerpt from the spoken word version of Caposcripti. Print and digital copies of this novel are available from http://www.caposcripti.com

Chapter 19: Gerard

An excerpt from the spoken word version of Caposcripti. Print and digital copues are available from http://www.caposcripti.com/


20. Watching the Photographer: 2

From across the street, Nina sees him stop and turn to look at a young homeless guy panhandling on the kerb. She can’t hear what they’re talking about, but after a couple of minutes the beggar gets up and follows the Photographer down Dean Street.

She’s been following him for a couple of hours now. A morning’s patient waiting outside his flat rewarded by his decision to use the bus to go up West; and now they’re in Soho.

Nina is surprised to see them go into a café together; the Photographer seeming very tall and spare next to the young guy who she can see now is skinny, and slightly hunched. She follows them in and takes a table near the middle with her back to them. She can’t see them, but can just hear some of what they are saying to each other.

She hears chair legs scrape, and then the homeless guy is walking past her to the cigarette machine. He passes so close she gets a noseful of the stink of him, fumbles money into the machine, and then heads back to the table. Meanwhile, a waiter comes up and takes Nina’s order of a hot chocolate, Milan style. She bends over the book she has taken from her bag and strains to hear what is going on at their table.

She can’t hear much except the clattering of cutlery and glasses; agony. She risks a quick glance. The still and upright back of the Photographer is as though graven in stone, and the homeless guy is tucking into sandwiches and an array of drinks. She looks down again, and then catches a few words
from the Photographer. He is inviting the guy back to his apartment. She hunches down further over the book as they pass her table and leave the café. Nina knows where they are headed, and makes no move to follow now.

Since Nina had started following the Photographer outside the library her dress sense has changed. She still adopts a succession of disguises from her bottomless costume trunk, but she has toned down their flamboyancy; she doesn’t want to be noticed. Her aim is to blend in; to become part of the surroundings.
A hat, of course, is required. Today: a cloche in a conservative colour; a long dark coat that conceals anything beneath; flat shoes to hide her height. Ah Nina, God love you. No one would look at you twice.

An excerpt from the spoken word version of Caposcripti. Print and digital copues are available from http://www.caposcripti.com/


Chapter 20. Watching the Photographer: 2

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Caposcripti

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