C

by Tom McCarthy

  v

  By late September only Serge and Clair, Lucia and Miss Larkham and a gaggle of full-time patients who’ve resigned themselves to the knowledge that they’ll never leave the place alive remain in the Grand Hotel. The poles outside stand flagless; the terrace, cleared of tables, collects leaves. Inside, the dining room is being redecorated: a large sheet hangs over the Greco-Roman judge and athletes of the fresco; the white-coated waiter manning the bar beneath it doubles to serve the four or five tables at which guests still sit. Beside the Mir the orchestra no longer plays; the floor of its bandstand, like a horizontal version of the fresco, is covered in sheets as workmen repaint the trellised ironwork of its rails and columns. Wandering out to the fountain every morning, Serge feels like an interloper, someone who’s found his way, like the rose-strewing cherub in the drawing on the brochure, into a picture to which he doesn’t rightly belong. The townspeople, who earlier were so attentive to the visitors, accommodating to the point that their lives, their daily movements and activities, revolved around them, now seem to orbit their own, obscure suns, ones that Serge can’t quite discern. The concierge and maître d’, as often as not out of uniform, chat to one another across the reception desk even when guests are waiting; men with ladders assume right-of-way in corridors and streets alike, leaving visitors to skirt and squeeze around them: this is their town now…

  The general relaxation of formalities makes itself felt in Serge’s sessions with Tania. There’s nothing tangible that’s changed: she still wears the same coat and presses, slaps and saws in the same places-but her hands move over him more casually now. Each session seems like a weekend one, as though they’d both just popped in to an empty office before slipping off on an excursion. One morning, Serge asks her what she’s doing later; when she answers “I do nothing” he suggests they take a boat-ride on the Jiři together.

  “Pleasure boat finished now,” she answers. “Not tourists enough.”

  “Well then, we’ll hire a paddle boat,” Serge answers. “Want to come?”

  Without pausing her rubbing she replies: “What time?”

  “Six o’clock,” Serge says. “Make that five. It’s getting dark earlier and earlier these days.”

  The boathouse by the lock turns out to be closed. He wonders what to do with Tania while he waits for her in front of it. He waits until five-thirty, then five forty-five, then six. At quarter-past he spots Lucia wandering alone beneath the castle. She hasn’t seen him yet; he nips across the bridge until he’s out of sight but still able to watch for Tania’s arrival. He sits there for another hour or so, looking at bubble-clusters moving from the weir’s sluice-gates to the water’s edge. Free and easily liberated, the brochure said; too many all at once will kill you, Dr. Filip warned. Behind him the generating station’s turbines clank and moan. Beyond it, just before the path gives over to fields, there’s a small substation: an urn-like building from which wires emerge and lead to poles, then wind round rubber spindles fixed to horizontal arms on these and split out into smaller wires, like organzine combining, only backwards, each separated strand then disappearing inside a metal casket that’s half-buried in the ground. Between the substation and the main one, vines emerge from the same ground-three rows of them, attached by strings to nursery posts that they’ve outgrown. Serge walks up to the knitted fence around the substation and, resting his fingers in its weave, looks at the vines more closely. They have fruit on them: dark-red grapes bursting with ripeness. He lets his eye run onwards, to the fields. Beyond these there’s a wood, already darkening in the dusk. Perhaps he could take Tania there, he thinks, if she turns up…

  She doesn’t. The next day, as she massages him, he asks her why.

  “Boathouse closed,” she says. “Other nurse tell me.”

  “Well, we could have gone for a walk,” Serge says.

  “Where?” she asks.

  “In the woods, for example. They look nice. Why don’t we do that this evening?”

  “Six o’clock again?” she asks. “Turn over now.”

  “Five,” he says as her shoulder looms above him. “On the far side of the weir, by the power station.”

  “Power?” she asks, sawing his back.

  “Yes. You know: electricity.” He makes a moaning noise and wheels his arms around beside his waist.

  “I understand,” she says, pushing them down again. “I come.”

  She stands him up again. As he waits by the substation he watches soldiers practising manoeuvres in the fields. They run a few feet forwards and lie down, pointing their dummy-rifles at the wood, then jump up and run a few feet further before throwing themselves at the earth again, advancing in stops and starts towards some imaginary enemy within the trees. Serge thinks of what M. Bulteau said about the Prussian arsenals, of what he called their avarice for land and power. Widsun thought the same. Advance thy empire, Venus said to little round Giles. The deep, male voice on the record said that Jiři’s peace-blueprint was flowering among all nations. He remembers the way Lucia smiled at that, then, longing for Tania’s musty smell, turns back towards the weir to look for her, and sees that a door in the generating station is opening. A man walks out and says something to him. “I’m sorry…” Serge shrugs.

  “Deutsch?”

  “No: English.”

  “Oh! You English!” The man’s face lights up. He’s fifty-ish, well-built, with thick grey hair and bronzed, sinewy arms that look like the vines in the patch he’s just stepped out into. “English good people!”

  “Thank you,” Serge says to him. “Are these vines yours?”

  “Vine? Kystenvine, special of region. You like vine?”

  “They look nice,” Serge answers.

  “I get for you,” the man says, then turns and heads back to the generating station. He emerges a few moments later with a bottle.

  “Here: Geschenk for good English!” he says, pushing it through the mesh with his strong, wood-dark arm. “Electro-vine. You take!”

  The bottle’s made from the same murky glass as everything else around here. Its contents are so dark that at first Serge thinks the man has handed him some bottled local earth; but when he takes it through the fence he realises there’s liquid in it. As he turns it in his hands the liquid runs inside, its silky, deep-red filaments stirring and catching the light until they seem to glow.

  “It’s wine?” he asks the man. “From these vines?”

  “Da-ja-how say? Yes! Kystenvine: we make here, only few bottles, for us. Electro-vine for good electro-men!”

  He lets out a deep, hearty laugh, then disappears into the generating station once more. Serge thinks of taking the wine to the field’s edge and drinking it as he watches the soldiers train, but realises that he doesn’t have a corkscrew. Returning to the hotel, he slips the bottle beneath his shirt so Clair won’t see it.

  In his room, a letter’s waiting for him. It’s from his father.

  Dear Son,

  he reads,

  I trust the water’s to your liking. As you’ll doubtless be aware (or perhaps not, bathed as you are in splendid isolation), the Pontic seas of politics are flowing with compulsive course to the Propontic and the Hellesport. Should a retiring ebb not be felt soon, I fear we’ll have to curtail your stay among the Nix and bring you home, lest Vernichtung lay down a barrier preventing your return. Await instructions.

  On another note: I have been experimenting greatly of late with Crookes Tubes, in the manner of Lenard, and feel-with great excitement and not a little trepidation-that I am close to submitting a patent for approval by the great and austere offices of our-his-majesty’s government. Without going into too great detail, and not unaware that in times such as these the intimacy of one’s communications cannot be assured-a fact which does not make me any less loath to engage in the dark, cryptographic art to which your godfather some time ago sold himself corps et biens as the saying goes-What? Yes, what I have in mind involves not only the projection by means electronic of image
s across a screen-a task which, after all, the kinematograph performs more than adequately-but their transmission across long distances, by wires or, indeed, wirelessly, just as sound is wirelessly dispatched at present. There is no reason this could not be done: indeed, successes have already been claimed by others in the passing of static images via radio-you of all people will be privy to that fact-but my ambition is much higher: to transmit moving pictures over distance, such that life in all its full, vibrant immediacy may be relayed without any delay. Yes, you read that right: what I’m inventing is no less than a remote, instant kinematoscope!

  Why do I tell you this? you ask. Because I intend, filius meus, or rather fili mi (I hope, dear boy, that Clair is not letting your Latin rust, nor any other branch of the great tree of learning up whose trunk you are climbing, like the squirrel in the Norwegian-no, the Finnish-is it Kalevalla, or Kavelavela or-anyway)-I intend, once my patent is granted, to incorporate: that is, to set up commercially. What do you think of Carrefax Cathode for a name? More to the point, what would you think of becoming, if not immediately a partner, then at least, and, if required, by legal proxy till you turn eighteen, a signatory to the incorporated body? I have been pondering the question of an identificatory visual motif, or logo if you will, and feel that a photograph of your late sister would complement, nay complete, the family nature of our undertaking. The love of technology shared by the three of us has always been a font of pleasure-of the greatest pleasure-for me; and I see no reason why your sister’s death should interrupt this interfamilial communion, far less call a halt to it. When Bell’s brother, with whom the great man had spent so many hours working towards the telephone’s invention, passed away, this merely spurred Bell on to create a machine sensitive enough to enter into discourse with him should the existence of an afterlife turn out to be not merely a metaphysical presupposition but a physical fact too. No contact was made-but did the brother not still play a part in the invention? Should his contribution be forgotten? So it is with Sophie, I believe. When future generations watch images, borne by fiery electric particles, dancing on their walls, relayed thither from distant lands, should it not…

  Serge sets the letter down. He had a fluoroscopy session one day, quite early in his stay in Kloděbrady, when Dr. Filip wanted to ascertain the extent of the encumbrance in his bowels. In a windowless room buried deep in the entrails of the Maxbrenner building, he stood between a lead-lined X-ray box and an empty wooden frame that Dr. Filip shifted slightly up and down on its supporting post until it was positioned just in front of Serge’s midriff. The doctor then slid a screen into the frame’s groove and, stepping away from Serge, switched the room’s lights off and the contraption on. There was a whirring, then a flash, a smell of calcium tungstate; and then a glowing pool collected in the air just on the far side of the screen, as though Serge’s stomach were seeping light.

  “Please not to move,” the doctor’s voice instructed him from the darkness as Serge tried to crane his head forwards to see the light-source. “I can show you with mirror.”

  A scraping came from beneath the voice, then the sound of something being lifted from the floor-then there it was, reflected back at him: the inside of his belly, etched in blocks and lines of black against the fluoroscope screen’s sickly calcium-white, suspended in a void that detached it from anything and everything. Organs, tubes and bones quivered and oscillated against each other awkwardly, like animals-reptiles, molluscs, nether-dwelling creatures-who, crammed together in a space too small for them, bristle with aggression towards one another yet understand, through some vermicular, primordial instinct, that the survival of each depends on that of its unwanted neighbours. Both Serge and Dr. Filip watched the scene in silence for quite some time. Serge’s stomach, and not the vacuum in which it was held, was the living, moving part of this new film that was being projected and viewed in the instant of its creation-and yet, rendered negative and ghostly by the rays, it seemed to Serge more dead than all the meat inside it. Lying back now on the bed trying to picture his father’s putative invention, he sees skinless bodies moving through empty space: hundreds of them, stretching, bending and gesturing, like the dancing skeletons of folklore and travelling carnival displays. “Carrefax Cathode”: whatever vibrant immediacy this might possess, all Serge can see is death-death broadcast out of Poldhu, Malin, Cleethorpes, flung across the seas, pulsed out on the hour from Paris, relayed from mast to mast and station to station, from Abyssinia to Suez to Crookhaven and on to homes in Europe and across the world. Can death be patented? He reaches for the mineral-water bottle by his bed and, holding it up to his face, rotates it so the seven-digit number on its label ticker-tapes past his eyes…

  “Why didn’t you turn up this time?” he asks as Tania presses her balled palms into his abdomen the next morning.

  “I have thing to do,” she answers.

  “I met a man who gave me wine,” he tells her.

  “Cystenwine?” she asks him.

  “That’s what he called it, more or less.”

  “Is very good.”

  “We could drink it together,” he says, “if you come this evening.”

  “Okay,” she says, “I come.”

  To his surprise, she does. They meet on the weir and stroll over to the far bank, past the generating station. Serge can see figures moving around inside, but can’t tell if his vine-limbed benefactor is among them. He and Tania pass the substation and head into the fields. The soldiers are all gone; the whole landscape seems empty-even the train pulled up beside the earth-mounds a quarter of a mile or so away has been abandoned, its driver probably drinking with the shovellers and soldiers, the bandstand-painters and dining-hall decorators in one of the town’s inns. Serge has the Kystenwein on him; he also has a corkscrew borrowed from the hotel’s kitchen. He looks at Tania, wondering if he should break the bottle out right now. She doesn’t seem impatient for it. Her eyes, dimmer than usual in the dusk, stare vaguely ahead, towards the woods. A path leads into these; they follow it. After a while the woods end temporarily and a strip, too narrow for a field, runs between them and the next block of woods.

  “Against fire,” Tania tells him-the first words she’s spoken since they started walking.

  “What’s one disaster more or less, in this town?” Serge murmurs.

  She doesn’t respond. To their right, in the fire-break’s middle, there’s an indentation: a kind of mini-quarry where the ground’s been hollowed out. Its black-soiled surfaces curve in a way suggestive of soft chairs.

  “Why don’t we sit there?” Serge asks.

  Tania shrugs. They enter the indentation and sit down, leaning back against its edges. Serge pulls the corkscrew from his pocket and opens the bottle.

  “I didn’t bring any glasses, I’m afraid,” he tells her.

  Tania takes the bottle from his hands and drinks from it, throwing her head back. The liquid casts a deep-red glow across her neck. She hands it back to him. He brings it to his lips-and tastes on its rim the warm, bitter residue of Tania’s spit. The wine itself he doesn’t taste till further back, down in his throat: it’s bitter too, in a rich, dirty way.

  “It’s different from the one I had on my first evening here,” he says. “My tutor said that it was good for my digestion, but Dr. Filip’s only letting me drink-”

  “Why you come alone with teacher?” Tania interrupts him. “Why not parents too?”

  “They have things to do, like you.”

  “Take care of brothers and sisters?”

  “No,” Serge replies. “I don’t have those. I had a sister, but no more.”

  “She died?” asks Tania. Serge nods. “How?”

  Serge ponders the question for a while, then answers:

  “She fell from a height and hit the ground.”

  Tania reaches for the bottle and drinks again. When she’s done, he drinks too. The wine’s making him warm; he feels the silky hotness moving outwards from his stomach, to his arms, his legs, his he
ad. Tania takes the bottle again and drinks once more, this time taking long, deep gulps. He does the same. Some of the wine’s escaped from the side of Tania’s mouth; it runs down her chin and dribbles onto her blouse. Serge reaches out his hand and spreads the wet film from her chin around her cheek. She doesn’t stop him, or react in any way. Her eyes, glazed as always, stare through him at the black earth. He brings his mouth up to her face and licks the wine from it. Her neck, beside his ear, emits a low, guttural sound, of the same character and pitch as low-frequency radio waves. He can smell the musty odour rising from her body-from its corners, enclaves, holes. He tugs at her blouse and, meeting no resistance, pulls it off completely, then does the same to her skirt and underclothes.

  “Turn around,” he says. “I want to see your back.”

  She turns. There it is, right under his face: the crook, rising beneath her shoulder like a ridge with valleys running down its side, flesh-rills held up by bones under the skin. He touches it, then runs his fingers up and down the rills. Still kneeling behind her, he pulls his own clothes off and, holding his penis in his right hand, feeds it under and inside her from behind while clasping her back’s crook in his left hand. The guttural sounds in her neck increase in volume; the musty smell grows stronger, sharper. Serge shuts his eyes and, for some reason, sees the ruddy, marble eyes of the stuffed Spitalfield, the corrugated surface of his hairy skin. He opens them again and, looking straight down, sees the earth rising between Tania’s fingers where her hands push into it. He runs his own hand down her back, so hard the nails puncture its surface, and moves inside her violently, like he’s seen animals and insects do it. Her thighs push back at him, pulling him further in. He closes his eyes again and feels a burning growing in his stomach.