by Tom McCarthy
That in black ink
That in black ink
That in black ink my love
In front of Serge and his betrothed a male priest stands, canvas or papier-mâché wings extending outwards from broad shoulders. He, too, pronounces words, mumbling in liturgical tones long strings of blessing that, through their iteration, bring about the ceremony’s goal. The exact form of each word can’t be made out above the chanting of the hermaphroditic handmaidens and the clickety-clack of the reporters’ Coronas, nor is it meant to be: like all liturgical oratory, it runs from his mouth and slips by in a smooth and constant thread. This turn of phrase, this figure of speech, “a smooth and constant thread” (and Serge can hear it too, this phrase, these very words, running alongside or behind or, perhaps, still further within the chanting and intoning and the rest, issuing as though from a room not separated from this one but lying rather somehow concurrent or convergent with it: words being reeled off like the radio commentary at a boxing match) is far from metaphorical: a silken thread is actually running from the priest’s mouth, streaming over Serge’s and his bride’s shoulders and the shoulders of the handmaidens, the branches of the trees and the fragrant camphor blocks before it falls to the confettied floor and gathers round the gliding peacocks’ feet. Parts of its script ring clear: the part (for example) about the “tick of time” that, at some juncture in the recent past, ceremonially bit him, or the associated, aptly reflexive two-word fragment “ticker-tape.” The handmaidens continue chanting, modifying their refrain’s sequence as their voices, somehow dull and jubilant at the same time, rise in pitch and volume:
That in black ink
That in black ink
My love may still shine bright
Serge can feel this love, too, not in some abstract way but literally: physically feel it-see it as well, materialised in the camphor and the thread, the branches and the feathers, the gold filigree and, most of all, the black typewriter ribbons. It’s in the texture of the air, which has a crinkled feel, like crêpe. It’s in his transformed and transforming body. Two of the handmaidens step forwards and drape a garland on the pylon rising from his waist. Glancing down, he sees that the garland’s made of dead flowers-and the knowledge hits him in this instant that the children are dead too, that the whole kingdom over which he and his new wife are being anointed is negative. It’s negative, again, in the strict photographic sense: a reversed template from which endless correct, right-way-round copies can be printed, but that itself is destined to be held back in abeyance, out of view, withdrawn-a fact that makes this one moment of revelation he’s being granted all the more exceptional, all the more sacred, as though he’d suddenly been given access to the darkroom of all history. Chemical odours waft across the podium as the priest turns to bride and groom and pronounces their names. These are both long, and full of compound parts: Serge’s is “Ra-Osram-Iris-K4-CQD”; his bride’s is “CY-Hep-Sofia-SZGY.” Crowds, thronging around the stage from further back, shuffling and stumbling forwards across squares extending to infinity, whole hordes of them, wave their feelers in the air in celebration. Time flattens as it rushes backwards, ticker-taping too: this is a send-off, a departure-only this time, Serge is on the boat, not the jetty…
A sudden whistle pierces the air: it’s a reveille, a gathering-call. Everything’s coming to a head, converging: the lines, angles and dimensions of the room, the gazes of handmaidens, priests, attendants, journalists and insect-populace alike. All these are now directed towards the veil covering the face of Serge’s bride. The music, chanting, intoning and typing have all been suspended in anticipation of the fabric being lifted. Sophie does this now, peeling the gauze away and gazing straight at him. There’s no need for her to ask him if he recognises her. Her face is blank-a featureless oval of the texture and off-white colour of a fluoroscope screen-which for some reason makes it all the more instantly recognisable. It has folds in it, creases and indentations. Images kink and distend as, accompanied by the familiar sound of whirring, they start playing across its surface: grainy and jumpy, they show siblings passing through an orchard, running down the neatly ordered rows between its trees. The trees themselves-their bark, leaves and fruit-are a corroded colour. The siblings are as well. The whole scene’s flat, like film. Without unflattening, it rotates round until it’s being shown from above, in plan view. Then it flickers out, and gives back over to the map-contours of Sophie’s otherwise blank face. These, in turn, direct Serge’s gaze downwards, to her hands, which rest above a vat of apples that are slowly fermenting. Picking a much-worm-drilled one from near the pile’s top, she proffers it towards him…
It’s not clear whether he’s meant to take the apple or not. The contours of Sophie’s face morph to form a mouth, which opens, in an equally ambiguous way: it seems at first that it’s going to bite the apple; then that it’s him into which the teeth are about to be sunk. But both these impressions turn out to be wrong: it soon becomes apparent that the mouth has opened in order to speak. Sophie’s going to say the word that will complete the ceremony, bring about its climax, sealing his and her anointment, their ascendancy and union-and that will, at the same time, deliver to the crowd the proclamation that they’ve come to hear, transforming, unifying and redeeming them, redeeming everything. The word is welling, not so much in Sophie’s lungs and thorax as in space itself, roaring across it like a giant wave, loudening as it approaches. Then it arrives, rupturing the air as it breaks across the podium: it’s a burst of static-a static that contains all messages ever sent, and all words ever spoken; it combines all times and places too, scrunching these together as it swallows them into its crackling, booming mass, a mass expanding with the strength and speed of an explosion of galactic proportions, a solar flare. The static rushes over the whole crowd, and roars through Serge’s body, making his limbs and chest contract and shiver with convulsions. Sweat, or seed, or sediment, spills from him. Everything is spilling: as the chamber’s walls are blown away, rows of box files spring open on ministry shelves, vomiting their contents; archives gush up from the ground like oil; glass cabinets shatter and erupt; bathtubs slosh and overflow; even graves are opening, the dead being catapulted back out of the earth…
The static comes at him again: a second burst, heading the other way, like an enormous echo or the backrush from the first explosion, air propelled out by its breath being sucked in again. This time it carries him along with it: he feels himself rushing backwards, through a black and endless void. He’s merging with the void: seared, shot through, carbonisé, he’s become the sea of ink, the distance between planets, the space across which signals travel. Like time itself, he’s flattening, turning into carbon paper: the black smear between the sheets, the surface through which things repeat, CC themselves, but that will itself always remain black, and blank. Looking backwards as the sound-wave draws away from him, accelerating onwards, he sees things being duplicated in the expanse created by its passage: cats and phone-wires, cars and dancers, rivers. The orchard’s been duplicated too: the siblings have stopped running through it and are sitting at a game-board. All these scenes and objects have been reproduced inwardly, as though injected through some kind of time-syringe into his stomach, in whose blackness they’re suspended like small, lit-up screens, contained by the walls of a new syringe that frames them and injects them further inwards, again and again, the scenes and objects miniaturising more and more as they regress. Eventually, they become so small and distant that they dwindle. From where he is now, he can see the children in the orchard and their game-board shrinking, and the orchard itself shrinking, and the wires around it too: their edges all contracting to form a compound that itself shrinks until it’s so small that it’s no longer perceptible. Then the whole image fades away. The noise has faded too: only fragments of it are left, small residues, vague sonic smudges…
In the middle of the second night away from port, Dr. Martinov, an Island and Far East Line company doctor of some six years’ standing (
previously of the Chakdina and, before that, the Aurora), is summoned from his cabin to attend to a sick passenger. He finds the young man delirious, bathed in sweat and subject to a temperature so high as to be (in his opinion) unsurvivable. Quinine would be of little help: it’s not malaria that’s causing the fever, but rather a cyst on the patient’s ankle that’s become so infected that it’s clearly poisoned his whole bloodstream.
“Tourist?” he asks the steward.
“Civil servant,” the other replies. “He was muttering something about rooms being moved around.”
The sick man, roused by these words, tries to speak.
“What’s that?” asks Martinov.
The man, his eyes half-vacant, makes a great effort that results in no more than the word “dumb” issuing from his lips.
“Who’s dumb?” asks Martinov.
The young man concentrates his face again and manages to say, beneath his breath:
“Dummy chamber.”
“Where?” Martinov asks.
“Everywhere,” replies the man. “What’s not?”
“What’s not what? Do you have a next of kin?”
The young man’s eyes roll upwards and his face wrinkles into what looks like a smile. A kind of growl rises from his throat; he concentrates his facial muscles again, and manages to say:
“It came through.”
“Through what?”
“Through me.”
“What did?”
“The call: I’m being called.”
Dr. Martinov turns to the steward and instructs him:
“Go to the wireless room and ask them if anything’s come in for him.”
The steward leaves the cabin. While he waits for his return, Martinov pulls a chair up by the berth, and sits watching the young man’s face. He’s watched a lot of people die, but it’s a little different each time. This man is struggling with something. Although his eyes are growing more and more empty and listless with every passing minute, the jaw seems rigidly determined, held in firm position; the lips, too, are taut and sculpted, as though trying to shape more words. With each outward breath, they form a small, thin parting, which makes the exhalation sound as a long, drawn-out sssssss; then, at each breath’s end, after the failing lungs have emptied themselves but before they’ve thrown their engines into reverse and started the slow process of replenishing themselves again-in the short hiatus between exhaling and inhaling, the man’s throat contracts three or four times in quick succession, making a repeated clicking sound, a set of quick-fire c-c-c-c’s. It does this every time, with a strange regularity: “sssssss, c-c-c-c; sssssss, c-c-c-c; sssssss, c-c-c-c…”
The wireless room is one deck down. It has two clocks on the wall: one showing Cairo time, one London. Beneath these, thin electric cables trail across the room’s wooden panels, one leading to a lamp, another to a bell. A man sits below the wires with headphones on, facing the wall. To his right is a stack of paper and a stamp; to the right of these, nailed to the wall, a basket; above the basket, widening as it runs up to the ceiling, hangs a speaking tube. The room has no windows. The operator doesn’t turn around as, in response to the steward’s enquiry as to whether any telegrams have arrived for an S. Carrefax, he flicks through the basket and answers in the negative.
The steward leaves. As he passes the kitchen door on his way back to the stairs a Sudanese cook comes out and tips scraps from a bucket over the Borromeo’s stern. The steward pauses and watches the scraps bobbing in the churned-up water for a while. The moon’s gone: only the ship’s electric glow illuminates the wake, two white lines running backwards into darkness. When the stretch in which the scraps are bobbing fades from view, the steward turns away towards the staircase. The wake itself remains, etched out across the water’s surface; then it fades as well, although no one is there to see it go.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to:
Louise Stern, for her animated lectures on deaf education; Jane Lewty, for her insights into radio and modernism; Penny McCarthy, for Spenserian guidance; Cathie Shipton, for chemical advice; Sam Crosfield, for his horticultural expertise; Aleksander Kolkowski, who knows everything there is to know about early recording equipment; Markéta Baéková, for finding me a perfect spa town; Edward Bottoms, for helping to disinter the Architectural Association’s history; Steven Connor, for his reading list on séances; Marko Daniel, for images of Arsenura armida and Marconi operators’ cabins; Charles Burney, for Egyptological wisdom; Alex Bowler, for his sharp line-editing; Dan Franklin, for his confidence; Marty Asher and Sonny Mehta, for their commitment; and Melanie Jackson and Jonny Pegg, for their untiring support.
Tom McCarthy
***
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