by Tom McCarthy
Outside, Audrey is buoyant:
“Did you feel the weight come off you?” she asks, skipping back down Hoxton Street.
“I did, in fact,” Serge answers, honestly.
“I felt mine going straight to Michael,” she says. “I could tell he wasn’t far away when Tilly was talking with Ralph.”
“Can I come with you again next week?” Serge asks.
“Of course you can!” she answers. She kisses him on both cheeks, then buries her face in his neck and sniffs it lovingly.
He spends the week making a remote controller. It’s not difficult: he mounts a small ignition coil on a baseboard, adds an accumulator, two antennae, a switch and a telegraph key. He estimates the amount of power that Fedora’s controller has, and gives himself more. As a result, the mechanism’s too big to fit in his jacket pocket: after a little experimentation, he manages to bind it to the inside lining in such a way that the fingers of his right hand can manipulate the key without him needing to see it. The next Thursday, he and Audrey ride the bus along Clerkenwell Road again. He stands two feet from her, sideways-turned and slightly stiff.
About half of the audience from last week have returned; the rest are new. Paul’s parents are here; Ralph’s aren’t, though.
“You’d think they’d come back, after what happened last time,” Serge says.
“I thought I’d want to after Michael spoke to me,” Audrey tells him. “But you don’t need to communicate with them all the time, any more than when they were alive. Just knowing someone’s fine is enough-that, and the odd ‘hello’ now and then…”
The atom-man is here too; so’s the secretary, poised above her notebook. So, of course, is Fedora. He nods to Audrey like he did last week, including Serge within the gesture this time. Serge sends a big smile back at him, trying not to look too hard at the bulge on his chest but finding his eyes wandering towards it all the same, hoping he’s guessed the level right: accumulator can’t be more than four volts, surely…
The master of ceremonies gives the same spiel as last week. The same hymns are sung. The same sequence of hiccups, sobs and heaving rattles Miss Dobai’s frame, then modulates into the deep and plaintive tones of Morris, who grumbles about codicils and proxy signatures. The Comanche Chief’s on holiday today: his place is taken by a South Pacific fisherman who drowned diving for abalone and now drifts through balmy waters in a place where all seas meet. Tilly’s on fine form, though, giggling as she mediates between another infantryman and his parents, then a submariner and his brother (there’s a nautical theme to the evening). This second spirit accurately describes the contents of a box of his effects received by the brother just a week ago, even naming the sorting office whose stamp the package bore. Serge realises, as the brother gasps his confirmation of the objects and the name, that the network of Miss Dobai’s collaborators extends far beyond this hall: she must have postmen working for her, nurses, undertakers, clerks in the Bureau of Records, domestic servants, painters and photographers or their assistants, people scouring newspapers like Sophie and Widsun used to, tabulating death notices, auction listings, engagement and marriage announcements and who knows what else. His hand keeps slipping beneath his jacket, feeling the circuit-board lurking beneath it, his own secret network-then withdrawing, lest it attract attention: it’s not time, not yet…
When Miss Dobai slumps back in her chair, exhausted by her vocal mediation, her master of ceremonies busies himself setting up the table-tilting phase of the séance. A different gentleman comes forward to help him demonstrate the table’s lack of external attachments and to staff the blackboard, and a different lady volunteers to call the letters out. They’re not part of the sham after all, Serge reasons: why should they be? As long as Fedora does his job, only Miss Dobai and her master of ceremonies need be in on it. Serge wonders if it’s Miss Dobai who calls the shots, or this other man. Perhaps there is no Miss Dobai, Baltimore immigrant, frequenter of trains and boats and courts: perhaps the woman on the stage in front of them’s a Londoner, from no further afield than Hackney or Mile End, picked up in some bar where washed-up cabaret performers drink and trained to do the voices, all the sobs and hiccups. Maybe neither she nor he’s behind it all, but someone else entirely, a “control” not even in the room but sitting back at home counting the proceeds of this remote manipulation of human automata. Serge slips his hand back underneath his jacket as the lady starts calling the letters out. He lets the first few sequences be dictated by Fedora: WEHEARWHENTHEYCRY is scrawled across the blackboard after a while.
“How do you hear?” the secretary asks, addressing herself to the table as before.
Fedora’s halfway through spelling out RESONANCE, or maybe RESONATIONS, when Serge intervenes. He flips the switch on in his pocket and, tapping the key to join the circuit, cuts in after the A, just as the lady calls out H. It works: the table tilts; the blackboard-staffing gentleman writes down an H. In front of Serge, Fedora’s shoulders lock up. He looks around, confused. Serge makes the table tilt again at I, then S. He manages one more letter, a T; then, as he waits for U to come round, Fedora, elbow twitching, cuts in again and tilts on E. Serge takes the next round with an R.
“I’ve got ‘RESONAHISTER,’ ” the secretary reads. “It’s not a word.”
On a cue from the master of ceremonies, the lady volunteer goes back to A. Fedora’s taken his hand out of his jacket now, and is trying to attract the master of ceremonies’ attention, but to no avail. Serge has a clear run at the next eleven letters, and dictates the sequence DOBAIISFRAU.
“That’s German for ‘Mrs.,’ ” someone near him murmurs.
D, he adds.
Now Fedora has got the master of ceremonies’ attention: the latter stares at him wide-eyed and apoplectic, urging him to get his act together. He, though, is in no state to do this: Serge can see, even from behind, that he’s panicking. His head’s turning from side to side; his hand is nowhere near his jacket.
“I’ve got ‘DOBAI IS FRAUD,’ ” the secretary says, taken aback. “Who’s saying this? Where are you?”
UPMISSDOBAISCUNT, Serge dictates. So intent is the master of ceremonies on communicating with Fedora that he doesn’t pay attention to the letters being called out. By the time he glances at the board again, the last message has been supplemented by the sequence “AUDREYITSMESERGE.”
“I think we should curtail this session,” announces the master of ceremonies. “Miss Dobai is clearly…”
But he’s lost control of the procedure. Defiantly, the lady volunteer raises her voice above him and continues calling out the letters. As Audrey stares at him open-mouthed, Serge moves in for the kill:
TABLECONTROLLEDBYMANINFEDORA.
The room falls silent as the letter-calling stops. All eyes shift to Fedora, who, as though it made a difference, slides from his head the item in question before making swiftly for the door. Two sturdier men than him detain him there; in what passes for an ensuing struggle, his remote controller falls from his jacket to the floor.
“Two-volt,” Serge comments. “I could have gone lower.”
On the stage, Miss Dobai snaps out of her lethargy, rises and strides towards the side-door through which the master of ceremonies has already exited. Two more men try to cut her off but they’re too late: they throw their weight at the door, then, realising it opens into the room, pull it towards them and rush through it after the duo. Others have stormed the stage: they push past the secretary, who sits at her desk dazed, pencil still in hand, and throw themselves upon the table, tearing at it vehemently, as though the piece of furniture had wilfully deceived them. Next to Serge, a woman’s screaming. It could be Paul’s mother, but it’s hard to tell: the whole place is in uproar, women shrieking and men shouting, running around, grabbing hold of other men whom they suspect of being in on the act. Fistfights are breaking out. Steering between them, Serge wanders to the front of the hall; as the stage empties, its occupants rushing after some poor, innocent detainee who
’s managed to pull himself loose and make a dash for the main exit, he climbs the steps and walks up to the table. It’s been snapped in two, its upper surface ripped clean from the stem-or, rather, not quite cleanly: both parts have splintered where they’ve been separated. Nestling among the splinters on the base are the cogs of a small, automatic hinge; beside the hinge, glued to the inside of the hollow leg, a receiver with decoherer and coherer, relay, circuit battery and two antennae more or less identical to the ones lightly scratching Serge’s side. Serge bends down and inspects the shattered contraption from close up. The table’s real enough, at least. Its wood is old, and beginning to rot. A small insect, some kind of wood louse, is crawling out of it, crossing the wires of the receiver’s circuit-board as it heads up towards the opening that’s miraculously appeared, like a new heaven, in the space above it. The insect’s body is dark and wet, like oil or ink. Serge watches it ooze upwards for a while, then turns and walks away.
Scuffles continue outside the hall. People are running up and down Hoxton Street, chasing or being chased or, in some cases, both. Locals who weren’t at the meeting in the first place have been caught up in the mêlée. Audrey is standing in the middle of the road, looking as catatonic as Miss Dobai did before her sudden exit. Serge takes her by the arm and leads her down to Old Street, where he hails a taxi.
She doesn’t speak during the ride. When they get back to Rugby Street, she stares straight ahead as he leads her up the staircase to his flat. Once inside, she throws herself onto his bed and starts to sob. He sits down beside her and places his hand on her back, but she shrugs it away. The sobs continue for a while, then ease off; her face stays turned away from him, though, buried in a pillow as she quietly weeps. Serge sits beside her for a long time, watching her back rise and fall. It seems bulkier, as though the weight lent by her body to the world of spirits, loaned out through the twin agencies of love and conviction, had been returned unclaimed. Her hair, too, looks heavier, greased by sadness. Her shirt and dress are crumpled. All of her is downward-sagging, solid, heavy. If mass and gravity have been added to her, something’s been stripped away as well: despite her layers of clothes, she somehow looks more naked than she does even when undressed, as though a belief in which she’s clothed herself till now, a faith in her connectedness to a larger current, to a whole light and vibrant field of radiant transformation through which Michael might have resonated his way back to her, had been peeled off, returning her, denuded, to the world-this world, the only world, in which a table is just a table, paintings and photographs just images made of matter, kites on walls of playrooms unremembered and the dead dead.
Eventually, she falls asleep. Serge leaves the flat and walks the streets, still angry. He’s angry at Miss Dobai and her gang, at people for being credulous, at himself for his cruelty to Audrey. He gravitates, naturally, to the Triangle, spends some time in Mrs. Fox’s, then stops off at Wooldridge’s, then at the taxidermist’s. Needing a place to ingest his by-now-considerable haul, and not wanting to return home or retreat to some dingy toilet, he heads for the Holborn basement where his father’s car is garaged (he’s had the loan of it again for the last two weeks). Retrieving the key from an attendant whose uniform, it strikes him in passing, is very similar to that of the Empire ushers, he sits in the front seat and, in the dark and columned vault, injects and sniffs and sniffs and injects, more and more, to try to make the anger go away. It doesn’t: it bears down on him from all sides. He decides he’s got to make things move.
He starts the car up, leaves the garage and drives southwest, past Chelsea, Wandsworth, Wimbledon. Soon he’s not in London anymore. He doesn’t know where he is, or where he’s going, and he doesn’t care: what matters is to get things moving-get them moving so that he can get them still again, re-find the stasis in the motion. Green, blue and black run by; sometimes an angry shout weaves its way into the air’s tapestry, a klaxon whose tone dips and falls off as it passes. The colours run closer and closer to him; the tapestry becomes a screen, a fixed frame through which sky and landscape race, nearer and nearer all the time: soon it’s as though he were no longer merely watching the projected image but pressing right up against the surface of the screen itself. Into it even: somehow the space around him has become material. It’s not just wind whipping his face: the colours, having merged to brown, are on him, scraping right against his skin and pressing down into his mouth. There’s some kind of inversion going on too: the screen’s surface has rotated and is now above him. From it comes the sound of crashing metal. The noise travels down to meet him, as though from a more elevated world: it sounds like a big iron lid being closed on him. Then it goes quiet. He’s in some kind of nether region now: a mole, being stuffed like drawers and cupboards with an old, familiar substance.
“Earth again,” he murmurs, tasting it inside his mouth. Flakes of it jump out from between his lips as he begins to laugh. His laughter ricochets off the car’s floor, which, overturned and bent now, arches and folds about him like a metal tent or hangar. It’s a pleasant noise; reminds him of liturgical chants and whispers echoing around St. Alfege’s interior. Pinpricks of light pepper the structure’s roof.
“My own crypt,” he announces to whoever might be listening. There are people around: he can hear voices, muffled beyond the metal. They can hear him too: they’re saying so, saying he must be hurt, that the car should be lifted from above him.
“It won’t come off,” he tries to call back to them. “It’s my carapace.”
The words, instead of travelling cleanly and intelligibly to the bystanders, reverberate and distort inside his bunker. Outside it, there’s general arguing. A voice suggests a way to lift the chassis off him; another proposes a different way; more join in. There’s more arguing, then heaving, then creaking. The misshapen dome is prised away from him; as it comes loose, it affords him a glimpse of the crowd that has gathered round the ditch in which he’s lying; then, as a parting gesture, its edge catches his clothes and flips him from his back onto his front. A new argument starts up, about whether or not to turn him over again.
“Don’t,” Serge tries to tell them. “I’m conversing with an old friend.”
But his mouth’s too earth-filled for the words to come out. The turners win the argument; flipped onto his back once more, he lies incapacitated, staring at the sky.
“Doctor,” someone’s saying; then he’s somewhere else. It could be his flat, or Audrey’s, or Versoie, or the prison back at Hammelburg or Berchtesgaden. There are several doctors round him; then there’s just one, Learmont, and it turns out to be Versoie where he finds himself after all.
“You back with us?” Learmont says.
“Did I leave?” Serge asks.
“The way you’ve been mistreating yourself,” Learmont responds, “you’re lucky not to be in ten separate specimen jars. I’ve never seen…” Then his words trail off, and it’s dark and earthy again.
When Serge wakes up properly, Maureen is sitting at his bedside, watching over him. They’re chatting. It’s like that: they’re already chatting; he seems to have woken up in the middle of a conversation that’s been going on for quite some time. She’s telling him who’s doing what: marrying, leaving the area, being born or dying. The conversation lasts, has lasted, and continues to last for a long stretch, perhaps several weeks, during which time he becomes strong enough to leave his bed and walk around a little. Sometimes Maureen’s replaced at his bedside by his father, who’s telling him about his latest research, patents pending, business schemes. And sometimes it’s his mother, who’s sitting in silence, smiling. It doesn’t really make much difference. Serge consumes it all quite passively, as though watching a film-one in which he’s partly a minor character whose role requires little of him in the way of action, but mainly a viewer, located just beyond the frame. He likes this film, likes his immersion in it, its drawn-out timelessness that has no borders, no beginning and no end…
It doesn’t last forever, though: eve
ntually he’s yanked back into time by the arrival, with his father, of a surprise visitor. Serge senses his presence in the room before he sees or hears him: it’s a familiar, regal presence, one that brings with it, or at least implies, lurking somewhere behind it, all the protocols and codes of an official world, a world of influence and power.
“Serge, my boy!” Widsun beams from an odd angle: tall and vertical.
“My own Dr. Arbus,” Serge replies. “How are the Whitehall Gods?”
“Recruiting,” Widsun says. “I’m working in Communications now, with special responsibilities for North Africa. Thought you might appreciate a short stint on our team in Egypt.”
“ Egypt?” Serge asks. “What have they got there?”
Part Four – Call
11
i
There’s broken masonry along the Rue des Soeurs: window recesses and door frames with chunks missing where bars and hinges have been ripped out, façades chipped and crumbled under battery.
“Last year’s riots,” Petrou tells Serge.
“That too?” Serge asks as they wander past a row of damaged balusters outside the Bourse.
“No, that’s the ’19 revolt. Bourse took a hammering, so to speak.”
“And this?” Serge asks a little later as they come across a pile of giant slabs toppled over one another in a vacant lot on the Rue Stamboul.
“ ’Eighty-two bombardment-although these,” Petrou continues, pointing at the oldest-looking ones, “were probably torn down from some other edifice when the Persians sacked the place in the seventh century; and from another one before that too, when Octavian routed Antony. That’s the thing about Alexandria: these periods just kind of merge together…”
