Barefoot in the Head

by Brian W Aldiss

  A dirty boy there called Robbins, once been acclaimed a saint in Nottingham, ran into the water calling to Charteris ‘You are greater than me! You contain all cross-references! So stop me drowning myself!’

  Charteris stood by the margin of the sea ignoring Robbins as he floundered, reading momentarily the pinched timescapes of her countance. Then he turned towards Ostend and said, ‘Friends, we must defy the great either-orness of the crass life that lived us like automata, howl like dogs if needed! Hunt! Hunt! Among the many futures scattled about like pebbles on his beach are a certain finite number of deaths and lives. Hunt them! I see us speeding into a great prongessional future which every blind moment is an eight-lane highway. Beside our catceleration rides splinternity, because the bone comes where the meat is sweetest. Hunt me, hunt the true me, the true you. Tomorrow, I precog that death will swallow me and throw me back to you again, and you will then see I have achieved the farther shore of either-orness. I will discard the dislocation!’

  ‘A miracle!’ cried the pop group and the hepos and motorcaders and all weirdies adjacent to the night. Angeline hugged him close, aware that he had to say nothing she could understand and still be wonderful. Near him was happening and the general stamnation broached. Behind them, clutching the holy relic of the bean tin, struggling and evacuating, Robbins went down into an unlit road beyond all terrestrial trajectory.

  The promenade like a grey ridge of firn in early dawnlight, life, lootless.

  Beyond the post-glacial shelf, where lights burned between night and day, stood derelict projects of hotels, petrified by the coming of French-built Arab aircraft; some half-made, blueprints in girder form, some half demolished, all blank-eyed, broken-doored, with weeds in the foundations and leprous remains of human habitation. Here from their cattlepsy crawled the crusaders, scratching themselves in the ambiguous morning and blowing acid breath.

  Knee-deep in his groins, thin in his increasing thicket, cult-figure Colin Charteris the Simon Temple of himself makes his own mark in the greylight, emerging like a lion from his lair, his mange of hair all about him. Some of his larger jackals call a greeting, the Burtons, Featherstone-Haugh, little Gloria, thin dark Cass, Rubinstein with an early reefer glowing. The hero half-coughs in answer, scans craftily the stoned reigns of the beach, checks to see no great sweet jail trees sprang up there in the constabulary of the night, impoisoning them among writhing branches and the rough unshaven cyanightmarine light in a cellout.

  The old church in the Šumadija rags sweet hum of rotten fallen flesh and flowers and a buzzing bee where the old fellow on his last stone bed of all. Going with his so respected father and not a word spoken. The very scent of the grass and walls and a fine checker of stone. The prone face of shagged hair and gristle-vaulted nostril and his father lifting up a mottled hand detached from the slab. Words droning like a bee. The same sick false light in the cell. His own fear and comfort like key-in-lock and then the sick man heaving himself onto a spike of greaseflesh to reach — don’t flinch Dusan! — and pat the budding coconut of Colin’s mange of harum —

  Angeline wondered if her period would not come again today and boiled coffee for her lord and master on a fold-up stove; she was uncertain whether or not she felt sick and, if she did feel sick, whether it was because she was pregnant or because she dreaded the prospect of another day’s crazy part-automatic driving. Well, it was a fuzzy set world like her shaman said and she of and with it.

  Some of them were already revving their cars or driving them over the ice-rim onto the sand as being the quickest way to extricate from the muddle of beached beasts crouched like whales with beetle wings. Maintenance was going on to a limited extent, mainly in the sphere of bits of rope tying on bits of machine. The sparky thing currently was to fill blown eggshells with paint and then stick them on to the bonnet with adhesive plaster; when you got moving, the paint peed out in crazy trickles or blew across the windscreen and roof of the automobile or, under sudden acceleration, the egg burst like a duff ventricle. Only Charteris’ Banshee was unadorned by such whims. Like France, it was neutral. And Red.

  ‘Where we going today, Col?’

  ‘You know.’ In the background, flutes and gritars.

  ‘Brussels?’

  ‘Some name like that.’

  ‘Then where? Tomorrow? The day after, where?’

  ‘That’s it. You hit the mood exactly. The question marks the antidope for auto-motion. More coffee there?’

  ‘Drink the first lot, darling, then you get some more; didn’t you learn any such thing when you were a boy? Didn’t your father tell you? You know, this isn’t a crusade — it’s a migration! Animals not spirits, revolt of youth you make me laugh!’

  The coffee ran down his chin, he was only half-drinking, as he nodded his head and said, ‘Sheer inspiration, yes! Crusade has only one object. What you thinks deported but the oldtime? Migratory is more instinctive, more options open.’

  He expanded the theme as they climbed into the car, talking not only to her but to big mottled machine-face Banjo and other people who impinged, Burton now nagging for favours. The Serb had ceased to think what he was saying. It was the migratory converse; the result was that he astonished himself and this elation fed back into his system, rephotographed a thousand times, each time enlarged in a conflagration of spongation in idation or inundation of conflation, so that he could pursue more than one thought simultaneously down into its deep loughburrows snooper-trooper fashion.

  Burton was bellowing something at the top of his voice, but the engines drowned out what he said as they began to roll along the grey deserted front, away from littoral meanings, between echoing shutters and sea. The new autorace, born and bred on motorways; on these great one-dimensional roads rolling they mobius-stripped themselves naked to all sensation, beaded, bearded, belted, busted, bepileptic, tearing across the synthetic twen-cen landskip, seaming all the way across Urp, Aish, Chine, leaving them under their reefer-smoke, to the Archangels, godding it across the skidways in creasingack selleration bitch you’m in us all in catagusts of living.

  Great flood of tatterdemalion vehicles in multicolour flooded out onto the Hotpants Highway, rushing swerving, grinding, bumping, bucking, rupting, south towards Aalter and the infinite, travelling up to one-fifty photographs per minute, creasing axle aeration.

  He lumbered up from the vast brown inaccessible otherworld of sleep and went hurriedly to shave. In the second bed, the wilting leaf of his wife still silent among her own shades.

  As he looked at his motionless face, Koninkrijk thought of the good North Dutch girl back in the little hotel in Maastricht. Baby you won’t get no sex Off of me in low point X. The last crash, driving with the cop fast to the scene of the accident maybe the same today my form of gratification just a vampire. It was a little Renault nose deep in a cliff of lorry, as if snuggling there. The terrible anticipation as he jumped out of the still-moving car and ran towards it; in a year of life, maybe one moment of truth; in a hundred miles of speedtrack, this one node. The crossover roads like ganglia of an aborted space-time. A tractor-driver hurrying forward, explaining in thick Flemish accident. I saw un I saw un, he swerve out to overtake me, this lorry pull up to let him by, see, this other chap don’t pull up in time the first chap get clear away, ought to be a bloody Law against it.

  There is a law against it, out my way.

  Voilà! All the luggage in the back of the car a jerry-built shrine tumbled forward over the shoulders of the driver. He wears no safety belt of harness, is utterly smashed, yet he lives and groans, seems to be begging for something in — German?

  The ambulance arriving almost at once, hostile pedestrians also staring in through the now-public car windows. The uniformed men ease the crushed driver out bit by bit; the lorry-driver and the tractor-driver stand by, masking their helplessness with explanations and repeated phrases. He swerve out to overtake me. Koninkrijk with this dirty curiosity, recalling it again now obsessively with self-hate, maul
s over the bloodgobbed contents of the car after the ambulance men have teased most of the victim clear.

  His cold little distorted image of the man-run world held only this driving and crashing, nothing else; everything else led to climatic moments of driving and crashing, the sparky technological fulfilment offered by the first flint arrowhead, the schizophrenic clash of man’s divided nature since he conjured good and bad out of meshing phenomena — to all that, crashung and drivung were the climax, a geared aggression beyond sexuality or indeed any moment’s action.

  The chemicals could merely mask basics.

  Eating and defecating and the rest were just preparatory processes, getting the body tuned for the next cyborg down the roads. His wife-defective. Things other people did were just substitutes for speed death. Chinese peasants, grovelling up to their kneecaps in paddy longing for the day when they too could enjoy speed death. Congenitally deaf, hearing only engines.

  He looked at his eyes in horror. His mind was sucked to the constant subject. Profession had become obsession. There would be another call today; he must get down to the station, fearing and hoping. The Charteris crusade was invented for his particular philosophy Charteris is rallying take place in absolute darkness. He heard Marta switch the omnivision on as he unplugged his razor. Tremors still churned at his core.

  The immense cliff of earth loomed even higher above his neat red tiles this morning: chugging things like match boxes laboured up there, black against sky. New clay tumbling among daffodils. It was better in the station of the Speed Police — more like being in a liner, less like drowning in a sea.

  ‘Good morning, Jan.’

  ‘Morning, Erik.’

  Koninkrijk went up to the tower, where two uniformed men lounged, chatting, smoking cheroots. He could look down through the glass roof of the duty room just below, see the current shift relaxed with their feet up, snuggled in wicker chairs, reading paperbacks and magazines. When the warning sirened, the room would be suddenly untidily empty, the paperbacks curly with open pages rubbed in the floor.

  Most of these guys had the acid but kept on. Down in Brussels it was worse. As for Germany, Frankfurt and Munchen were burning, they said.

  Scanning the information panel, he took a reading of traffic states from other stations along the Highway. Building up from Ostend.

  Already, the first throes of the crusade were bursting through the arteries of the Aalter stretch. From the station tower, a fine view; nobody saw it but Koninkrijk, as he read his own keynotes from the vast maimed spread; the remainder of the dutyites grazed their minds among tales of big-breasted whores, affrays with Nazis in occupied Scandinavia, shoot-ups in Fort Knox, double-crossings in Macro, or the litter of the previous night’s activities; two officers going off-duty exchange dirty stories over a concession-price Stella Artois in the canteen; reality had a poor attendance, and I’m really the only one but even my eye’s half ahead to the time when the English messiah Banshee jets past here in the saddle of the speed death king and halfback to the thought of that Maastricht girl maybe with her I would at last find that certain thing O Lord God I know I don’t often but what am I to do about Marta is schizophrenia catching her paralysis my fever meshing causes.

  Do you think the emergency government can carry on eh they say it’s the food shortage but the Walloons are at the bottom of this you can bet Yeah food shortage they call it a world famine but we know who’s at the bottom yeah we know who’s at the bottom of it yeah Walloons.

  What does she do in there all day long and I’ll have to move her at the weekend or they bury the house tombs doleful voices but how will I persuade her Christ O Lord Jesus get out there move man move leave it all behind since her confounded father interfering old.

  The warning sounded and he was down into the front park as the men milled. He climbed into N-Car Five; the slam of his door was echoed by others. News coming over the car-radio of a multi-vehicle pile-up on the south lane of the Highway two kilometres north of Aalter. Low Point X. All predicted. Let’s go and they roared under the underpass and bucketted out on the feed and from the feed on to the Highway proper, yellow barrier barrels and red warning lights slicing by the hubs. Saliva dying like a tide. Yacketter yacketter speedbeaches of the freeworld man-madman intersurface.

  The speedometer his thermometer, creeping up and familiar dirty excitement creaming in him. For someone the moment of truth had come big grind the necessary whiteout the shuttling metal death 3-Ding fast before the windscreen and still many marvellous microseconds safety before impact and the rictus of smiling fracture as the latent forces of acceleration actualised. Koninkrijk hated himself for this greedimaginative vampact of his highflown. Already the cathartos were barking beyond the ditched town, the pile wonder sign, the pasty dungheap at the Voeynants house shuttered, and beyond the road-widening the crashfences started on either side, cambered outwards and curved at the top to catch escaping metal. Fast shallow breathing. The acute angle subtended by impacted heart-bleats on mobility.

  The accident heralded itself ahead. Bloodstream flowing south faltered, slowed, dribbled. Koninkrijk’s vagus nerve fluttered with empathy. Somewhere ahead was the actual thrombus, all but entirely blocking the artery. The police car swung into the nearest emergency lane. Koninkrijk was out before it stopped and unlocking the barrier between lanes, hoiking a walkie-talkie with him. Sun warm on his shoulders grass too long against the chain link got to keep nature out of this the weedicides this bloody war that Arabian spray.

  It was a typical nose-to-tail job, ten cars involved, some pig-aback on others like rough parody of animal or coleoptera copulating, sheaths split. Some still filtering through, all passenger heads craned to see desperately want to know if man still stuffed with red blood, ichor, water, what.

  ‘Koch, Schachter, Deslormes, proceed to the rear, get the barriers up and blinker signals ten kilometres back so that there’s no further escalation.’

  Moving forward as he spoke. Discipline the cover for lyric lymph-thug.

  ‘Mittels and Arameche, keep a northward lane free for ambulances.’

  But they knew. They all needed shouting and excitement and the roar of engines. Everything was just a pattern, culled may be from the raped paperbacks on the station floor.

  So like last time and maybe next time. Verisimilitude eroded. A lumbering Swiss truck with Berne numberplates slewed half-off the verge. Into it rear, nose crumpled, a red Banshee. Man wrapped round the steering wheel, head against shattered screen, piled luggage in back spewed forwards over body and shoulders, some broken open, passenger door broken open, oparted ancient Wolseley piled into rear of Banshee, then terrible cluster of vehicles, British registration mostly, patterned crazily. One shot free, burning steadily against outside barrier, lying on its side. People running limping crawling still in trampled grass shouting and crowding and curiosity reality loose among the psychos. The police helicopter clattering up overhead, photographing it all, fanning smoke flat across the wreckage.

  Climax of many dreams. Spilt seed of blood.

  Loudspeakers barking farther along the road as Koch got to work.

  Ambulances arriving, men at the double with float-stretchers, doing their instant archaeology, digging down through the thin metallic strata to where life had pulsed a few tiny eons ago, surfacing with primitive and unformed artifacts of flesh. Someone saying, ‘The Banshee was Charteris’ car.’ Time converting entirely into activity as matter converted into energy. Lost races dredged here bit by bit from their cumbrous armour.

  Two hours’ work later, Koninkrijk sitting exhausted jacket off on the muddled verge, listening in a daze to Charteris speaking to the elect.

  ‘You know I half-foretold this would happen as we multicaded south. You heard the word. Here’s a sort of semi-miracle as more-or-less predicted yesterday or whenever it was when we were at that place. The only places we really need are the in-between places that aren’t places for they are trajectories of maximum possibility — you see
how forced stoppage in this place here created maximum non-possibility for many of us which we call death, the low point where all avenues end.

  ‘All our avenues take a discard but we must play to our most multiplicity in the pack-up. Banjo my agent his avenue is right at a dead breakage. All his phantoms nailed down under a shutter. He Burton who hailed from the Midland carmaker city of Coventry stopped me as we churned out of that place begging to be allowed to ride my Banshee. He had no sounds as to why but the whim so for that reason my thrush Angelina and I took to his heap while he in triumph rode the Banshee. Impulses are there for usage. So it can be all explained away that he had some suicidal wish or that he as a good agent stage-managed it to look like a miracle that I was spared from death as predicted or that if I had instead driven no pile-up would have occurred or that either this accident was already pre-performed in any of its guises or that it was in some way willed by me or us all photoed corporately from some messianic drive in our hidden minds like the serpent of our bosoms. If you all seek dutifully for the certainty of this occasion in its eternal recurrence, each of you will find a different solution more satisfying than others to you, which clips a speciality into the ego-bracket, and so that will be regarded by you as the most “probable” solution alongside all possibles: so like renegade compasses you will each point to a different pole of truth, where on this ribbon all will indicate a personal mean. That’s what we side for isn’t it, the difference? Don’t get automatic! That I beg you to treasure, relish the uncertainty, shun certainty: search the fuzzy set, for when you find accepted probability, it must surely be a conspiracy not to be free between two or more of you, like the old pre-psychedelic ideologies of non-permissive non-multi-society. All this I shall say less certainly in my book Man the Driver, but never more inspiredly than now in this sparked-out moment by the org-up of buddies where this loss so belts us in.’