A River Called Time

by Courttia Newland

  He released his grip, examining the thin dent, just beneath the curve of alpha-keratin, flooded red where it had been white. Looked up.

  Hanaigh was gone.

  Markriss turned in his seat. A little way from the lift shaft, a small living room. Sofas, one-seater easy chairs, a large slidescreen, bookshelves, all surrounding a low glass coffee table. Hanaigh E’lul stood in the centre of the space, back to him, running a finger along shelves.

  Markriss got up, annoyed, wincing at the pressure of his slightly full stomach. Disoriented by what Hanaigh had just said and his sudden relocation. He walked over to the former CEO.

  ‘Look, I think this is a waste of both our time. Don’t you think?’

  When he turned, Hanaigh held something in his hands. A thin golden strip of collapsed metal, the miniature rendering of a cobra.

  A uraeus.

  ‘Where did you get that?’

  Hanaigh lifted his eyebrows. ‘Mark, I’m rich. I get what I want.’

  ‘Why did you call me here? Really.’

  The older man’s lips pursed. ‘Like it or not, we have a connection. On either ends of the scale, perhaps, from entirely different backgrounds. But we are one. “As above, so below”, you could say.’

  Hanaigh chuckled, as a flash obscured Markriss’s eyes. Dark earth, purple liquid. His vision cleared, leaving him disoriented. Half blind.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘When I read the book your father propagated, whatever the means, it led me to take further spiritual practice. I left behind my use of pods. They began to cloud my judgement, so I meditated on my own terms. Came into acceptance of who I am, the level of growth I’d reached on this plane.’

  Hanaigh stepped closer, uraeus folded in his limp right hand, a sleeping bird. Regarding Markriss with passionless scrutiny.

  ‘Somewhere in your spiritual essence, you encountered Ausares. Osiris, Elegbá, Reynard, Iktomi. Different traditions know him by different names, though his purpose and form is always the same.’

  Markriss’s voice, heard by his own ears, was vague and steady. ‘So I found the god of death? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Death, yes. Most importantly, resurrection. That’s where his trickster nature stems from, the fact he was given the power to circumvent mortality. You’re aware that Kemetian legends tell us Sebek and his followers trapped Ausares in a box fastened with nails, took it to the mouth of the Nile and threw him into the river? And after, when Auset was led to the body by means of dogs which she bred and named Apnu, the dog-headed god, showed gratitude by providing her with the words that caused her dead husband to live again. So you could say this was the first deception, to trick the nature of humanity itself, and in doing so, become a deity. For your purposes, his trick was simpler. Ausares, coming in the guise of one who had recently become zamani, Harman Wallace, encouraged your pursuit of a rogue spirit so he could set you on the path towards your higher self. He, intentionally I believe, led you to me.’

  Markriss felt himself wanting to reach towards the serpent crown, only just managing to stop. Its gleam compelled his touch. He squeezed his nails into the soft flesh of his hands, causing indistinct pain.

  ‘How could you know any of this? Least of all that I met Harman Wallace? He’s been dead for over a hundred years.’

  Hanaigh smiled. Took another step.

  ‘There’s so much to encounter on the higher planes, Mark. I’d urge you to explore, but you don’t need that from me. You have your guide.’

  Another step. Markriss saw himself as he had been during his vision, falling into the depths of earth, pressing the metal floor beneath his palms for balance.

  ‘I travelled the Taut and saw what I had become,’ Hanaigh continued. ‘How we twisted spiritual science for the material gains you mentioned. Used the power of the ethereal bodies to control feral animals, so we might see through their eyes and watch the masses. Flooded the minds of those beneath us with passive dreams, to keep them under our control. Leeched their energy so we might be strong, and rule.’

  Hanaigh stood before him. Clinical. Cold. At his feet, movement, although he could not move, could not breathe, could not raise his voice. A dog. Pupil-dark. Lithe.

  Apnu. She was Apnu.

  Hanaigh raised his arm, uraeus clasped in a fist.

  ‘Those wiser than ourselves tell us, “To enter the realm of eternity, a new birth is necessary.” I need you to take this power, use it as the old man instructed, so we’re both enabled to rise. I’ve seen it. We’ll exist on the spiritual plane, as Ra intended.’

  Anu barked, over and over. Hanaigh’s curious eyes never left him. Markriss had lost control of his body. He was drained of thought, or perspective. He felt mechanical, devoid of intention. There was only instinct, pure nature. His fingers reached for the crown, touching metal warmed by Hanaigh’s grip, and at once it all surged through him. Everything. He remembered his bike ride through Watkiss Town, alone. Taking a Y-tram into work, rocking with motion. Conversing with Wallace on the Taut, Chileshe and Ayizan in his old friend’s Poor Quarter allocation. The scything flow of the River Thames, the calm of Holland Park. A temple statue of Sebek. He saw it all, the splendour and tragedy.

  A snap, a switch of location. Somewhere he knew. Vision unimpeded, Markriss saw his podroom from a position suspended up high, just below the ceiling. A pinch of faint light streamed from the window overlooking Prospect Road, creating shadow and bulky silhouettes. The alarm clock, beaming 4 a.m. His physical body in the pod, prone and sleeping. The familiar warmth of Prospect Towers, his allocation.

  He looked closer at himself. The physical body at rest beneath his ethereal form was skewed at a very strange angle. Open-eyed, staring at nothing. He lowered his ka to see. Blood leaked beneath him. A damp patch located just beneath his ribcage, the wide oval of blood taking on the shape of an eye, saturating cotton, growing larger as he watched.

  Then there was sound. Wailing, screaming anguish. He tracked the noise to its source and saw Chile and Keshni holding each other in the stark, white, empty living area, the room bearing few possessions that might constitute life. A wall was spray-painted green with a six-pointed star, the capital O at its centre. The women’s red faces, sheened with tears. Arms tight around each other. Impassive, Markriss understood.

  His physical body was dying. He had been attacked.

  He listened, straining to hear more. There, not far. He tracked again, finding himself in the sterile grey of the emergency staircase, two running people, panting, throwing themselves down steps, holding the plastic banister for better purchase, arms flailing, feet stumbling, tripping, nearly sending them over. A man, a woman. Dirt, a second skin. Patchwork jackets ripped and shredded to gossamer threads, barely enough clothing to hold the bodies they contained. Skin tight on skulls, cheekbones prominent. Weals and ruby sores on bare patches of skin, expansive, reddened eyes. Markriss experienced fear as if it belonged to him, every inhaled breath fire, their very existence pain. Falling to the concrete on the final landing, hardly able to push through emergency doors. He knew both so well.

  Mannesh Kappaur, feet up on the desk before a dormant slidescreen, clattered awake at the slam of the stairway doors, swinging to his feet. They sprinted through the vacant lobby for the exit, Nesta and Iris, fumbling escape, crying distressed yells. The Outsiders crashed through the glass doors of the entrance and onto the street without looking back. Dogs scattered in panic, then, not knowing what else to do, they took off at their heels, awkward and injured with them.

  Markriss ignored the young security guard’s steadily mounting terror, instead watching the Outsiders head towards blackened low-rise Poor Quarter blocks. Harsh breaths receding, becoming faint memory.

  He blinked himself back into the podroom. Mouth open. Coughing lungs. Blood spat between teeth and lips onto fresh white duvet cover. He could feel Chile’s absence, hear her running down the stairs while Keshni leant over the podside stroking his hair. Coul
d even feel the relaxing tug of strands at his scalp, comfort the body had craved.

  It was too late. It was over.

  The final rattling gasp was release, his ethereal form brightening as the ka rose from his physical body as if it were condensation. Spiralling upwards, it surged to him. They merged, ecstatic, freed.

  In that swift moment, he returned to his own physical body, Hanaigh waiting, sole witness to his flood of understanding, causing similar brilliance to light the older man’s face.

  Markriss heard a bubble of river water and felt longing for immersion, the hair all over his body erect, aching for contact.

  He unfolded the crown to form a secure circle. Joints and hinges fell into place, clicked. He raised the golden uraeus to his head. It fitted well. Hanaigh smiled, eyes tearing, and the cobra threw off the blue glow of a star.

  Light overpowered his ability to see. He lifted from the inside, even as Hanaigh’s ka began to elevate from the polished surface of expansive tiling with him. Apnu’s barks became a fading echo. There was no more, other than his memories of everyone, and everything Markriss had ever been.

  Epilogue

  Śākta-Samāveśa

  ‘There is not one single time; there is a vast multitude of them.’

  — Carlo Rovelli

  27 November 1991

  0

  In a small council house on the far edge of the city, Willow stepped from the open back door into the garden. The six-metre shed at the foot of her space had been stripped bare of glass window-panes and most of the wood constituting the roof. The creeping ivy that proved so troublesome to the previous owner had been prised from the earth by its roots and placed on the heaped pyre of an unlit bonfire, to be ignited sometime in the next few days. This freed the iron railings that marked the boundary of her territory, providing Willow with an undiminished view of the tracks beyond her home where trains had run for over a century and a half. To her right, a fledgling rectangular patch of dirt carved into the surrounding grass where she intended to grow whatever she wished; she hadn’t decided what. On her left, an identical patch headed by a freshly planted dwarf apple tree, fragile as a newborn, barely able to withstand the oncoming elements.

  Willow made her way along the speckled grey path, slowly, taking her time. There was no hurry now they had arrived.

  She bent to examine the thin branches of her apple tree, set with tiny buds, knots of potential. She was hoping for a scent, even though it was still too early for anything of that nature. Untroubled, she rose with a smile of recognition for the promise of coming months.

  It had been long, hard-fought. A house of their own, a space to raise a family. Love was blissful, marriage an adjustment she believed would suit her even more once it had become normalised. The previous owner, a kind, elderly woman, had grown aware of the need to downsize now that isolation was her closest friend. Willow nodded agreement as they spoke of cruel logic and the inevitable demise of the body, Vendriss’s rough palm against hers, picturing herself weaving a similar tale of loss when all the years had fallen behind her, like human hair, or teeth. She’d braced herself against the eventuality, and the elder asked if she felt faint, or whether she needed a cup of woman’s tea.

  Willow ambled further down the path, listening for the train, hoping she might see it for the first time.

  An odd feeling had come to her of late. She had begun to wonder what it might feel like to live inside the Ark, that final destination for the tracks that ran 200 metres down the incline from where she stood. Without good reason, she pictured herself within the ancient grandeur of an Ark Station, even dreaming of what it might feel like to ride the train. There, she imagined slow rocking, the clatter of lullaby wheels, and felt so peaceful that in the very dream itself she had fallen asleep, forehead rested on the thrumming window, and when she’d woken in her pod many hours later she clutched Vendriss’s body to hers, heavy-eyed, shrouded in a mental fog that lasted until afternoon.

  It seemed unreasonable to suggest her interest came from her own preoccupations. Willow had never shown any opinion about the Ark or E-Lul Corp one way or the other. It drove her husband mad, particularly since the company obsessed him. They existed, Willow bought their products and used them, after which she gave them no further attention. They were part of the natural order, like plants, or air, or old age.

  And yet, as she lowered herself to sit cross-legged on cool grass beneath her, moving the A4 notepad she carried from under her arm onto her lap, she frowned, thinking how strange a compulsion it was. How strange.

  Head bent once more, a pen retrieved from her jeans pocket, she pressed the barrel against her mouth, considering a final time, before she wrote in bold capitals: THE BOOK OF THE ARK.

  She muttered the title to herself, liking the sound of each word against the wind. Simple, plain. Right. She jerked herself straight, a flutter occurring inside her like the feathered sensation of human touch, only within her womb. Gasping, her mind searching for the correct term. The quickening. That was it. Willow rested her hand where it had taken place, waiting for the tremble to return against her palm, as she had been told it would.

  In the distance, a train horn, the breath of wind. Her future.

  Afterword

  Though the beginning urges for this novel came from the idea of mapping an uncharted fictional territory of astral projection and its corresponding spirituality, years would follow before I knew just what I would do. It was a soup-like mist of unformed ideas that swirled in my head, around the time when I’d finished the publishing run for The Scholar, and the glare of being a first time novelist had begun to fade, normality settling around me. I was renting a run-down room in North Pole road at the time, just across the road from the chip shop. It was late autumn or mid-winter, and whenever I left the building the street was dark, the air filled with condensation that blurred the streetlights, and I didn’t stay out long because it felt almost as cold as the road’s namesake. I didn’t have enough money to cover next month’s rent and I had absolutely no idea what to do about that either. Luckily, I’d applied for a hostel place, which came through just before I would have been evicted. I packed up what little of my possessions I’d had with me, and moved onto Bevington Road, Ladbroke Grove.

  It was there, at some stage, in a room not much wider than a single bed, that I had my second idea. A group of people that live forever inside an indoor building, until the end of their days. It was a one-page outline, and I thought it was pretty good until I looked it over and realised what I’d written was pretty much The Truman Show. I was devastated. Such a good idea, or so I’d thought. At that point I pretty much gave up, though it’s funny to look back and think I hadn’t yet considered fusing the first idea with the one that followed.

  By the time I began to revisit my original urge, a novel focused on astral projection, I’d forgotten that the idea of a huge indoor city was ever separate from one of spiritualty. Feverishly I began world-building, the history, how my characters came to be, who they were. I’m not sure when it came to me, but the third story premise was a game-changer. I would write a novel set in a parallel world in which the Transatlantic Slave Trade, colonisation and the genocide known as Maafa (great tragedy, awful event), hadn’t ever taken place, one in which Europeans treated Africa as the ancient Greeks once treated Kemit, coming not to pillage, rape, murder, but to learn. Because of this, African cosmology had become the dominant global religion. Meditation, astral projection, ancestor veneration and a respect for the natural forces was normalised, something the majority of the global population adhered to, much like capitalism in our world now. I would write a decolonised novel, freed of any adherence to the race-fixated, identity-based reality we live every day. I would mentally and creatively extract myself from the White Gaze.

  I was dizzy with possibility. This was it. Over the course of many years, I began to research, scratch a novel outline, tentatively write prose. At that point I’d published two further novels, and while I w
as daunted about the prospect of taking on such a colossal task, I was liberated by the writing itself, which allowed me to expand my imagination in ways I never had. Armed with a very decent amount of Arts Council funding, I bought books on Kemitan and African cosmology, quantum physics and concepts of time, the philosophies of indigenous world belief systems. I travelled the world as a writer and studied the architecture I found, trying to imagine what a used future might look like. What’s most odd, looking back at that time, was that while I was obviously ploughing forward and writing well, I’d begun to feel overwhelmed. This was a huge task. Not just the writing itself, which already proved this would be my biggest book yet, also the thinking of it. It hurt my brain. And still pages poured from me; I couldn’t stop writing. Though I enjoyed myself, it was painful as hell.

  I got as far as the end of Part One, plus an extra chapter after. I was fatigued, my funding all spent, and broke once again. During that time, and for many years after, I tried to find a literary agent and publisher for this novel, only to face the usual story. No one wanted it. The details are long and boring, but I went around a carousal of agents and editors, presenting the book, finding vague interest, yet never enough to take it on. I was told I should stick to writing urban stories; that ‘mysticism’ was the antithesis of speculative fiction; and best of all, that Black people didn’t eat spaghetti Bolognese, so I really should rethink my verisimilitude. Given the many fantastic feats I believe I have conjured in this story, the fact this gave someone cause for rejection would always crack me up. Things went on the same until about 2008, about a six-year run. I had to give up and try to write a new novel. Reluctantly, I put ARCT into my filing cabinet and decided to wait.