Earthly Powers

by Anthony Burgess

  "This is Father Chang speaking." There was nothing Chinese in the voice, which had the slack falling disdainful tune of an Anglican rector's.

  "My name is Toomey. I am a friend, well, more of a relative really, by marriage that is, of--"

  "Your name is? This rain, you know, is very discouraging."

  On the train north I was alone as far as Kampar. My message had gone some way toward purging a lover's apprehension. Wordsworth riding to Lucy. I got out the typescript of the first third of Lion City and made ink corrections and improvements, though the Bakelite barrel slid on sweat. That Penang dinner party, candles flapping sometimes to extinction in the wind of the punkahs. Miss Drury's pale lips reddened with curry sauce. A rill of perspiration starting at Miss Denham's left ear and coursing toward her decolletage. Directoire dresses. I inked in a wart on the cheek of wheezing Major Farquhar and pencilled a few lines under the eyes of old Mrs. Saunderson who knew Sanskrit. Candlelight drowned in the rummers of watered claret. Live, you swine, come to life. "I observe from the recently arrived Times, and stap my vitals what a time, ha, it takes to get here, that Mr. Raffles's friend Tom Moore has published a new volume."--"Some tale of the fabled East? Oh, how I adored Lalla Rookh!" At Kampar a Scotch mining engineer got on, very garrulous. More than twenty years in the country and ye canna get to the bottom of the mentality of the folk. He was beautifully and brownly bald. Soothingly rational for a time with his Calvinistic engines, he ended with the mystery of divine election, the inscrutability of God's will. Aye, I've seen things here I'd not credit were possible. I lost ma faith here in mechanical cause and effect. A Malay mechanic will first pray to the semangat or divine soul of an unfunctioning engine, then threaten it, only at the last bring out the spanner. First things first. Well, here's Ipoh but our true location is the rain, the rain's the reality, the rest but a shadow. Good night, it was pleasant conversing with ye.

  Kuala Kangsar was a lake that swilled into the compartment when I opened the door, but there was a rehabilitation or temporary remission in the heavens, the clouds not oppressive and a full moon underfoot. I splashed to a Malay rowboat and for one Straits dollar was pulled to rising land where the keel ground on a new shore. There were no trishaws about, I had to sweat on soaked feet up Bukit Chandan. Philip's Ford was in the porch, and foolishly I thanked God. Yusof came out, knotting his sarong. Tuan sakit, tuan. Tuan di-rumah sakit. I could not breathe, my heart knocked thrice to be let out. Yusof was grave and this was a sign of hope. Had he been laughing I would have known the worst, for laughter is the wise Eastern response to the inhumanity of death. I changed socks, shoes and trousers and, when I came back to the living room, Yusof had a whisky and water ready for me. I rested and drank and smoked a cigarette. I gave Yusof one and he puffed it with grace. I did not have enough Malay to elicit anything like a story. Anak orang Tamil mati? Yes, mati, the child of the Tamil man was dead. Tahi Adam, Yusof sneered, emboldened by his cigarette, but he looked swiftly behind him as though the obscenity could perhaps just possibly conjure its referent. Adam's shit, the brown man despising the black. And tuan? Tuan, so far as I could make out, was very tired and was sleeping at the hospital. The death of the child had struck him to the hati or liver. Things might not yet after all be so bad. Tuan has been working too hard. Tuan is a good man. True, Yusof. I was ready to walk to the hospital.

  I collapsed in Philip's office onto the rattan armchair. Dr. Lim, dozing on the examination couch, came to startled. I added the main overhead light to the dim desk one and took the brandy out of the medicaments cupboard, being, by extension, at home here, then I swigged from the bottle sitting down again. "Nobody," Dr. Lim said, "could make contact with you. He asked for you until it was not possible to ask. Today a telegram was sent but I do not think it will arrive. But you are here nevertheless."

  "I knew something was wrong. The child died, I take it?"

  "The child was already far gone. What looked like improvement was rehabilitation, I mean temporary remission. It is what comes at the end of the illness. The nurses should have known. I should have remembered. Mr. Mahalingam was very angry and made threats. Dr. Shawcross blamed Mr. Mahalingam for not bringing in his son much earlier. Mr. Mahalingam had to be thrown out of the hospital."

  "And Philip?" I swallowed and swallowed, then swallowed more brandy.

  "He was depressed. He was already tired. An hour of very painful dyspepsia and also the symptoms of colic. Then much diarrhoea. Then collapse. The diarrhoea goes on during the coma. It cannot go on much longer. There is little left in his intestines although I have set up an oral drip of glucose solution."

  "What are you doing for him?" I could hardly get the words out.

  "Dr. Howes is coming from Ipoh. It is a coma. All we can do is to expect him to emerge from the coma. But I have seen nothing like it before. It is the face that is so strange."

  "The face?"

  "Are you willing to come and see?" He spoke the last three words with the exact intonation of the Chinese lan i lan, look one look. It did not sound like a question.

  "I must." But I did not want to. I wanted Philip to walk in here, tousled and yawning, seem to have slept for days, feeling a hell of a lot better, ah a little note from Mahalingam admitting criminal remissness, how did things go in Malacca, Ken?

  Philip was in a private first-class officer's room with the overhead light full on him. He was in plain grey pyjamas and lying under a single sheet with his hands joined loosely over it at the crotch. A cannula was fixed to his mouth and the cannula fitted to a rubber tube and the rubber tube fitted to an inverted bottle of colorless fluid fixed with clamps to the bedhead.

  "You see?"

  "Oh my God." The face was set in a rictus of amusement, sardonic, meaning either grinning like a dog or sourfaced after the eating of an astringent plant of Sardinia, what art historians call the archaic smile, meaning that the lips were engaged in mirth while the eyes were aloof from it. The eyes were open, the upper lids well up, but they looked at nothing. "Philip," I called. "Phil. It's me, Ken, I'm back." There was no response.

  "Pulse is very slow but very regular," Dr. Lim said. "Temperature much subnormal. Breathing regular also, but faint."

  A Chinese nurse came in, showed sad teeth at me, spoke brief Hokkien to Dr. Lim.

  "What do you really think?" I asked Dr. Lim.

  "He is not near death, if that is what you mean. It is just a very deep sleep, but it is unnerving to see the face. Our Malay nurses will not go near him. If one tries to recompose the face into into--"

  "Something," I said bitterly, "more in keeping with the state of being ill--"

  "You could say that, yes. The face does not change. Ah." He sniffed the air near Philip. "I think the bowels have moved again." And he said something in Hokkien to the nurse, without doubt about changing a nappy, as though Philip were little John or Ann.

  "He is not left?" I asked.

  "No, no, somebody is always near. I sleep in the office. Let us go back to the office. We can do nothing here just standing by his bed."

  "He might hear my voice, might respond."

  "He will do neither. Dr. Howes is a doctor of much experience. He is very old. He will give a name to this. He will know what is to be done."

  "Why don't you go home, John, if I may call you John? You look worn out. Get a decent night's sleep." Though the night was far gone. "I'll stay here, look in every half-hour, summon help when help seems in order. You can trust me. Philip's my friend."

  "My friend also." And then, "Too conscientious, too conscientious." That long word, so un-Chinese, attacked him like the foreign invader it was. "Conscientious." We were back in the office. He sat down on the examination couch and began to sob dryly. The inscrutable Oriental. It is the British who are the inscrutable ones. None could tell my feelings. You, reader, cannot tell them.

  I said, sitting also, "Tell me, John. Do you think Mahalingam has done this?"

  He looked up, a black lock fallen over his eye an
ideogram of his feelings. "I know what you mean. I was born in Penang. I am a British Chinese of the Straits Settlements. I was told many tales as a child and saw some strange things too. Then my education was very Western. I took my medical degree in Scotland, in Edinburgh. Such things were driven out of my mind, especially in Scotland. I was told of cause and effect and sickness as dysfunction to be explained and rectified. I did a brief course in psychiatry and learned of hysterical illness. I try to think that this may be Philip's and that his unconscious mind may be spoken to. I do not want to believe what you think may be possible. But I may have to believe it."

  "I'm not," I said, "committed to science as you are. I'm a mere novelist. I will believe anything. Once I ceased to see the world as very mysterious I would no longer wish to write. Many things came together in my mind when I was traveling back. I read once in a book that there are certain men who must be avoided. You must not entrust them with anything of yours. You must not even allow them into your house. To give them even a glass of water may be dangerous. They will take hairs off your comb or your fingernail clippings if they can get them. They are after power over you. I used to think this was very thrilling and absurd but now I find it not absurd and not thrilling. I feel that I am walking into a boys book and being subjected to the laws of extravagant fiction. This may be a punishment on me for having built my career on fantasy. But my punishment is an indirect one, and I am being selfish in mentioning it. Because I am not innocent, and it is the innocent always who are set upon. This doctor from Ipoh will do no good. He needs a priest."

  Dr. Lim stared at me, black Chinese eyes, pupil and iris one, the slight strabismus of exhaustion, Hortense's, her venerean brand much exaggerated when she was. "Philip is not Catholic. He is not anything. You mean the Last Sacraments?"

  "You and I have been brought up on the same catechism. And even to restore health where God deems it to be expedient. Well, I'd clutch at that too. But that was not what I had in mind."

  "I know," he said, "what you have in mind."

  The road between Ipoh and Kuala Kangsar was mostly flooded. The rain resumed and the medical books in Philip's office were covered with a faint mould. When Dr. Howes arrived he told us irritably of a stalled car five miles out of Ipoh, his sais swimming to a police post and getting a police launch, what you've got me here for had better be good. He was over seventy, his face a map of rivers, thin except for the colonial egg, overworked in Ipoh, why the hell couldn't Kuala Kangsar look after itself, damn it all in Ipoh we have real illnesses. But he was impressed by the sardonic mask of Philip, the coma without excitatory trauma, the continued though scanty action of the bowels. He sniffed at a sample of the stool. "Christ," he said, "what's been going on here?" Lim and I looked at each other and kept to ourselves the inadmissible aetiology. Then Howes said, "Has somebody been getting at him?"

  "You mean," John Lim said cautiously, "one of the local--"

  "Look here, Lim, you were born here. You know what goes on. We don't know it all and we never will. If Manson-Barr can't explain amok or latah or that other thing, the shrinking penis one, he's not likely to be able to explain a thing like this. They're scared of putting it in their bloody tomes, unscientific. Has it ever struck you that some of us expats just daren't go home? I mean, I'll die here, unretired. We start to reminisce and the sweet pink innocents tap their foreheads when we turn our backs. He is crazed by the spell of far Arabia, they have stolen his bloody wits away as the poet puts it. What's been going on here?" he said again.

  I told him. He looked me all over while I spoke and the effect was of a dog sniffing, what the hell was I, what the hell was I doing in this Godforsaken hole back of beyond, East Jesus. "So," I said, "we have it out with him."

  "Are you out of your mind? He won't admit it, they never do. He'll have a damned good laugh and then complain about molestation. Now I'll tell you what's going to happen. Our young friend here is going to wake up tomorrow or the next day screaming for eggs and bacon and a nice iced slice of papaya. Punished enough, see. The long rest won't do him any harm, look at it that way. Keep on with the glucose, watch dehydration. Anything else for me to look at while I'm here?"

  Philip did not wake up the next day or the day after that or even the week after or the week after that. The Chinese nurses set up in the vestibule of the main hospital building a Christmas display of fierce olive-green leaves viciously spiked, bloodily berried, a mockery of holly, surrounded with little wax candles, lilin-lilin as they were prettily called. These blew out whenever the door opened to the monsoon, but, with Eastern patience, the nurses were quick to light them again. To the door of the emaciated grinning Philip odd scrawled hieroglyphs and pictograms were affixed by furtive hobbling patients. The club secretary called on me to say sorry about that stupid misunderstanding, everybody was drunk that was the trouble, welcome back any time, general vote that Mr. Toomey should dress up as Santa Claus for the kiddies, season of good will and mellow fruitfulness. The members, he added, greatly mourned Doe Shawcross. Hoped his successor would be as good. They assumed he was as bad as dead, a dire shadow on the Christmas drinking. Two days before Christmas Monsignor Carlo Campanati arrived.

  CHAPTER 38

  He entered the house carrying a little bag, dressed in dirty tropical white with a black armband. Oh my God, no, devilish precognition, he has just come from there having that thing ready in his bag putting it on in the trishaw. He saw me staring at it aghast. "My father," he said. "At last. A time for rejoicing. He is freed from that ridiculous contraption called a human brain and his soul has begun its pilgrimage toward the All High." Yusof came in to gape at him, fat man in white skirt. "Ni hau ma?" Carlo greeted.

  "Ah no, he is Malay. Seiwnat pagi. Minta stengah." Openmouthed, Yusof went to the bottles like a sleepwalker.

  "How did you? How did... I mean, thank God you're here--"

  "You in trouble, is it? You look very very ill."

  "It's not me, not. I mean, the roads are flooded and the trains have stopped running. I gave up hope."

  "Despair and presumption," Carlo said, sitting. "The two sins against the Holy Ghost. It is hard to steer between them, but that is what life is all about. Scylla and Charybdis. I have come from Kuala Lumpur," he said with pride, and this is the first time I touch land. I took a coastal steamer at Kapar and sailed north to Terong and then was brought by police launch down your river, or rather two conjoined, since you are an estuary. Great winds and devastating waves. But I think the rain will ease oft," he said, in the manner of one who has organized a parish fte. He took the stengah from Yusof with an Italianate terima kaseh. Yusof stared in disbelief: it was the first time, I could tell, he had ever heard a white man trill the r. "Siapa nama?" Carlo asked. Yusof told him. "Nama yang chantek sakali," Carlo said, a pretty name. "Nama bapa nabi Isa." Name of father of prophet Jesus, not quite accurate but it would do said Carlo's smile and shrug. He was uglier than ever and seemed to have lost no weight. He was clearly as much at home in the British Orient as in Gorgonzola. He drank oft his drink and said, "Tell me what you want me for here, not of course that it is not delightful to see you again under any circumstances." I told him. "I see," he said. "Let us go."

  Philip's car was still outside. I did not, as the reader will have divined already, drive, but Carlo got Yusof to crank the engine and, when it sparked and throbbed, he drove oft with the assurance you will always find in priests, me pointing the way. I sat next to him nursing the book he had handed me: Rituale Romanum Pauli V Pontificis Maximi Jussu Editum et a Benedicto XIV aucturn et castigatum. Published Ratisbonae, Neo Eboraci et Cincinnatii, MDCCCLXXXI. Cincinnati? Those years ago when Domenico had drawn blood in a nightclub. Everything ties up ultimately. Signatures of reality. Strange to see New York drawn into the net of a dead, no of course living, empire. It had never before quite struck me that the Roman Empire was still there, organized and ruled from the exorcised and sanctified site of Roman martyrs. An officer of the Empire was here, ready to smite th
e jujus of the heathen. And now I broke down for the first time, saying ghastly terrible evil, such a good man, my dear friend, what the swine has done to him, you must save him, you must. And Carlo, eyes on the colonial road, said courage courage courage.

  John Lim was there, not sure of Carlo's rank, taking his hand and looking for a ring to kiss but finding none. The Chinese nurses sketched charming genuflections, the Malay nurses crossed their fingers covertly. "Where is he?" Carlo asked. Then he saw him, and I hid my eyes in my palms while John Lim gave me courage courage pats on the shoulder. It had taken no more than the thin arms of one Chinese nurse to lift Philip onto a water bed: he was raw on the back and rump, I knew, with suppurating bedsores. Carlo saw the sardonic rictus and nodded at it as to an old acquaintance. He sniffed the air fiercely. He did a conjurer's pass over the staring eyes. He noted a minute escape of breath from the grey lips. "Baptised?" he asked me.