Smoke

by Dan Vyleta

  Here is how I pass the hours. I walk the streets. Stand in the thoroughfares, openmouthed, imbibing every current, belching it back into the air. Smoke flowing through the filter of my body. Irritation turning to anger; drunken joy to mischief; boisterousness to wounded pride: behind me a dark wake, dragging others off their paths. Whirlpools of corruption. I am Smoke’s slave and also its master; drift like flotsam yet command its tides. Dialectics. A Fritz philosopher called Hegel. I am Aufhebung: my own cancellation; a new, a higher version of myself. I am the end of history. I played dice with a gang of child thieves in Hampstead; wrestled a beggar in a ditch by Covent Garden and bit off his nose; danced the polka with a lunatic from Palestine, loused his hair and broke his face. I am a leech, a dog, a sparrow. I am a moraine eel. I am, I am, I am. I’m having trouble with words, with time, with order.

  Order!

  First. First I came to London. Trailing him: Charlie Cooper. Nótt and I, sharing the road: on my knees, half the time, my nose to her snout, palms in the dirt, sniffing for his trace. We lost it, both of us. He smokes too little, that one, and there were too many others, covering up. Siren songs all over the city, calling to me, moth to the flame. A boardinghouse in Clapham. An opium den in Limehouse. A mother clutching her stillborn, all alone under a bridge. Distractions. I am he: a boy in a sweetshop, blindfolded, sniffing for a single ginger nut.

  Then: a trace. No, not of the one I followed. The other one. My cousin, my double. But how different his Smoke smells to me now. Where once I sensed rivalry, I now taste promise; where I saw hatred, I now divine kinship. But how weak it seems, this shred of Smoke, leeched by doubt and temperance; how distant from the moment we stood in the ring and beat paths to one another’s souls. I want to find him, wake him to his nature. Taste him, own him, crawl into his skin. Ingestion, osmosis. Cannibalism. Flesh of my flesh, Smoke of my Smoke. In pain and rage we shall become one.

  Order though, order! The world of man has sequence. Cause and effect. The world of Smoke is different. Noumenon: the thing-in-itself. Kant? Cunt! I am Smoke’s avatar. I am its prophet, its priest, its monk. I am—

  Order!

  First. First I come to London. Then comes the trace. Too faint to follow. Chasing it, losing it. A church, the river, distractions.

  Then—Sebastian. I remember where he lives. It is like floating up from the dark of the ocean: relearning the skills of men. Planning. Remembering. Thinking in sentences, in words. All against my newfound nature: my mouth level with the waterline, heart, lungs, and liver in the waves. Leviathan circling at my feet. The Regency. A hotel for gentlemen; porters by the door. Licenced sweets in their mouths. Uniforms speckled with London’s Soot. Room 14. Sebastian, Ashton, Aschenstedt. Smoke, Soot, and Ash.

  There is no light in his room, no movement behind the window. No matter; I wait. Darkness falls. Sebastian returns. His Smoke has touched him, has seeped into his clothes. The faintest of traces. I could stop him at the entrance, make him talk. But it is better to wait, let him lead me to him. Sebastian goes upstairs and turns on the light. One can see it from the square. That’s when I learn there are other watchers. First two, then more, chins raised to his window. Men in long overcoats, truncheons clipped to their belts. One at each entrance to the square. They spot us soon after I have spotted them. Perhaps they have a description: Renfrew’s killer, wanted by magistrates. A gentleman and his hound. It’s Nótt they capture: they see me too but hesitate; allow me to slip away. Fear. I catch its smell and scuttle off; watch across the shoulder of the throng.

  Nótt makes it easy for them. A sick dog, she is, ever since Renfrew. My smell has changed, she sniffs me with suspicion, no longer sure of her own master. Keeps her distance, always six steps behind. A cast-off shadow, chasing the memory of love. Head down, tail tucked, forlorn. I should have gotten rid of her before. But it is hard to kill old habits.

  It takes four of them, converging on her, arms spread out like wrestlers. A crowd gathers at once, eager to see. It separates me from the action. I watch from afar. There is a flavour to the one with the club. He need not have broken her legs but he does so anyway, Smoke rising from his shaven cheeks like a blush that catches fire. He is fair-haired and slight, but in the cast of his mouth he has something of Mr. Price. A man with potential; sergeant to this platoon of thugs. They drag Nótt into a waiting cab. One of the men goes along, the rest resume their watching. Patient, expectant, eyes glued to his window, two floors up. I remain out of sight, cower in the mouth of an alley.

  We wait.

  Sebastian leaves before dawn. They all fall in line with him, strung out across the length of a street. I make up the rear. Already I know he has spotted them: a thread of Smoke following him, of fear and defiance, too weak to be visible, a beacon to my nose. How simply he gives us all the slip. He walks to work, a satchel in one fist. The sewers. I paid for them, studied the plans. A guard hutch outside a hole in the wall. It swallows him. The watchman turns the pursuers away.

  There are other ways in. It takes me a while to find one that is free of guards, my mind tracing the memory of neatly drawn lines. Down below, I find what he’s been building. Iron bars stop me, I give them the slip. Mother lied to me. An investment opportunity, she said, a vineyard of sorts, ripe for the harvest. A mine, an oil well. A pit of dirt. Another lie. Another betrayal.

  How many have there been?

  Rage takes hold of me, breeds madness. I step beyond words. Daniel and Stephen from Donegal are walking with me, Renfrew in their midst. Mr. Price holds a lamp. Green tiling, Caracalla. A room beyond the laws of physics. Light holds no flame here; past turns to present. I bathe, I feed. My stomach bulges but my limbs are weak.

  Order!

  He pulls me back. I catch his scent, it carries on a ventilation draught, recalls me to the world of thought. He is here. Not close, not in this chamber, but in some tunnel far away, where the sewer meets the city above. It lures me back; a long ascent. My cousin, my mirror, my bride. Blood wedding; together we’ll be twice myself.

  I leave the sewers on all fours. Dark outside, the sun long set, beggars jeering at me, then covering their faces when I pass. The trail is fresh; is sweet with courage, with desire, with doubt. His destination: a house half burned. Soot mixing with soot. I look up the stairs. He is inside.

  But so is Mother.

  Her Smoke has a scent all its own, sweet and treacly like a sick man’s piss. The baron’s doing. He cut her deep, Mother showed me the scar. My fingers down her bodice. Seduction: a way of reminding me that I came from her womb. She has betrayed me, used me, given me life. I hate her, I love her. Commonplaces: every mother’s son. I am reborn, remade, a thing of her dark dreams. I am my own becoming. I am the alpha and the omega. I am…I am not ready for her yet.

  I wait. The house draws me, repels me in turn. I squat in the gateway down below. They are all inside. He. Charlie. Livia. Half sister, empress for a day. He wants her. She wants—

  Mother.

  I’m afraid of her.

  But I shot Mr. Price. Father figure; hole for a heart. I could kill her at a hundred yards. A twitch of the finger, no need to look her in the eye. One hundred yards. But the Irish kept the gun.

  I squat in the gateway, watch a tart serve clients in the mouth of the alley across. The men smoke. She does not. Only with the last one does she finally catch, converting his lust to her anger, pale silvery green. Alchemy. Like a goose eating grass and shitting gold. She pulls down her skirts and bolts. The moon rises then is lost in cloud. It rains. I stick my tongue out, each drop seeded with Soot. Sand corns in oysters. Pearls for a swine.

  Time.

  I am no good with time. Half the night gone in the blink of an eye. Then the door opens above and I hide. Mother crosses the yard. Behind her a man, an abomination, carrying a boy, a cripple, a blank. Two rents in the fabric of Smoke. My blood puckers. Puckers, I say: not the skin, the blood, a scrotum dunked in ice. They are in a hurry, Mother and man, walk quickly into the rain. I know
where they are heading. Mother. I shot Mr. Price. If only I had kept the gun.

  But first: inside. To him. Smoke wells up, consumes me. Rage. Yearning. Time. I am no good with time. A minute, an hour, just to take the first step. Put a leash on my Smoke. A game, let’s make a game of it. Savour it. Sommelier. Wine is bitter under the tongue.

  At the top of the stairs: a seam of his Smoke. Old, caked in, stuck to the brick. I put my lips to it. Feeding or kissing? A bloom of mould growing up the wall underneath. Mould and Soot. London’s flowers. They should put them on its crest. Ahead, the door is locked. I stand there sniffing. Time? I am no good with time.

  Order!

  Who am I? Lord Spencer? Julius? Caesar. Et tu. Before (before Nótt, after London; before) I entered a church. He had been there: a trace of him on the steps by the gate. The man inside crossed himself. High Anglican: a confession box like a coffin, the priest slumping on its stool. The haste of drunk fingers. Forehead, belly, both sides of the chest. It made me chuckle. The devil, then? The devil is a schoolboy. I stare at my hands. My skin has turned grey, like ash.

  A fist of ash.

  It knocks gently on the door.

  Imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy…, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature…and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears—would you agree to be the architect on such conditions? Tell me the truth.

  FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV (1880), TRANSLATED BY RICHARD PEVEAR AND LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY

  No man is a hero to his valet…Not because the hero is no hero, but because the valet is a valet.

  GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL, LECTURES ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY (1837)

  DEMONS

  “Please, Mrs. Grendel! You must let us out at once. You have no right. And it is very important that we catch up with them. The little boy is in danger. Please. We insist.”

  Livia listens to her own words and frowns.

  We are speaking to Mrs. Grendel as though she is stupid.

  Mrs. Grendel is not stupid. In fact her account of the situation is remarkably lucid. She tells them that the previous evening, as he returned to his hotel, Sebastian noticed a man in the foyer who, while pretending to read, studied Sebastian’s ascent up the stairs with uncommon interest. When Sebastian returned to the front desk some hours later, under the pretext of asking for his mail, the man was still there, reading the same paper. Sebastian concluded that he had been discovered and placed under surveillance. Indeed he was followed when he left his lodgings early that morning, but, using the sewer as a shortcut, he managed to lose his pursuers. He came, informed Lady Naylor, considered “going into hiding,” but resolved to return to his rooms instead. As long as he was under surveillance, he argued, the authorities’ energies were tied up and they would not dare to make too obvious a search of the sewer system. Lady Naylor was left in charge of what he (playfully, in Mrs. Grendel’s opinion childishly) called “the operation.” The lady, in turn, decided not to delay any further and had left an hour previously, taking Grendel along. All this her husband told Mrs. Grendel that very evening just as she is now relaying it to them. Mr. Grendel did not, it appears, invite Mrs. Grendel’s own thoughts on the matter.

  “But where did she take Mowgli?” Charlie mutters. “It’s too early. Lady Naylor said seventy-two hours. It hasn’t been much more than fifty.”

  The voice beyond the door is unmoved by his reasoning.

  “I don’t know about that. Perhaps she lied. People do.”

  Throughout the exchange, Livia is conscious that Thomas is only half listening. Unlike Charlie and her, he has no faith in words. Instead he is busy searching the room. He finds a candle first of all, high up on a shelf; a box of matches. Next, working by candlelight now, he examines the window, finds it expertly barred. An engineer, Sebastian Aschenstedt: thorough. On the floor, not far from the bed, lies his doctor’s bag. Livia remembers his handing it over to her mother when he visited last. The bag has been ransacked, its few remaining contents spilled across the floor. Syringes and little glass vials sealed with tinfoil. The small round tin Sebastian used to infect the child, looking for all the world like a tin of shoe polish, a needle hole at its centre. Thomas unscrews it and finds it encrusted with oily crumbs of brownish Soot. Not far from him, head-high, Mowgli’s mask hangs off a nail like a forgotten face. That’s all, Thomas’s inventory complete. There is nothing in the room that would help them escape.

  Livia returns her attention to the door.

  “You are doing it for money,” she shouts, spite tinting her breath. “You are a greedy dried-up woman who cares only about herself.”

  A silence follows the words. But Mrs. Grendel is still there. Livia can see the shadow of her feet through the crack at the foot of the door.

  “You’ve never been poor, duck,” she says, reasonably. “And Tobias asked me. He never asked a thing of me, not once, in all these years. Until tonight. ‘Keep ’em here,’ he said. ‘The lady wishes it. Lock them in if you must. They are still only children,’ he said. ‘Keep them safe.’ ”

  “It was Grendel’s idea?” There is no masking the hurt in Livia’s voice. “I don’t believe you! Grendel acted under duress. Mother forced him to come.”

  Again the answer is devastatingly reasonable.

  “Lady Naylor needs him to keep the child quiet. The boy trusts him, you see. No Smoke, the little mite, but a cheeky bugger all the same.”

  A note of hope swings in this last phrase. What did Grendel say to Livia? We were not blessed ourselves.

  “He struck a bargain.” Livia realises at last. “For Mowgli. But it’s impossible. Grendel promised he would help me. And Grendel can’t lie.”

  “Can’t he?” Mrs. Grendel snorts. “Lies are but words, and he can speak just fine. It’s hate he can’t. That, and there are limits to his love.”

  A moment after she says it, Thomas tries to run down the door. He tries it with a kick first, near the lock. Then an angry charge, a fine mist of Smoke growing darker when it fails. Next Thomas and Charlie try it together. The door does not budge. On the far side, they hear Mrs. Grendel walk away with fast, disgusted steps.

  ф

  They sit defeated, both boys rubbing their shoulders. Livia looks from one to the other, Charlie’s lean, honest runner’s face; Thomas bolder, more intense, ugly in his anger. She pictures herself walking over to them, wedging herself there, in the half-foot gap between their hips. A step from them the respirator leers from its nail on the wall, its saucer eyes reflecting a twinned her.

  Then: a knock on the front door. Five little raps, so soft Livia barely hears them. A friend calling. Steps answer, coming from the kitchen.

  “See! Here they are back already.”

  Mrs. Grendel’s voice sounds pleased with the development. It is their first hint that she is not comfortable with the situation.

  They hear her open the door. The next instant there is the opening syllable of surprise, or perhaps it is a question, cut short before it shapes itself into words. It is followed by the sound of two pairs of footsteps, very close together, as of two people dancing, eerie in their tidiness. The steps stop outside the door and a new sound finds them, an animal sniffing, head-high. Through the gap underneath the door a haze invades the room, dark and tentacular, leaving tracks on the floorboards. It’s Charlie who reacts first, scrambling to his feet, drawing Thomas and Livia away from the door.

  “It’s Julius.”

  The steps resume, still locked in dance. As they retreat into the kitchen, there sounds a scream, the pure notes of panic, a voice so divorced from its normal usage that it takes Livia a heartbeat to ascribe it to Mrs. Grendel. The next moment, Thomas has once again thrown himself against the door. He hammers on it. It does not drown out the second scream. Neither does his shouting.

  “Julius!” he shouts. “Juliu
s Spencer. What are you doing to her?”

  Beside him Charlie stands, face drained of colour.

  “Julius is not what he used to be,” he says.

  He has used these words before, precisely these words, talking about the events at Renfrew’s. It is only now that Livia begins to understand what he means.

  Then the presence returns to the door. A voice: Julius’s, not Julius’s. Speaking not to them as a group but only to Thomas. As though Julius knows he is there, inches away, right behind the door.

  “Are you listening, cousin? How weak you smell. Naked, are you? Come now, don your rage. Here, I’ll help: bait the badger. First the old lady. Livia next. It’ll bring out your plumage. Then we wed.”

  “Don’t,” Thomas pleads.

  Julius does not appear to hear.

  “Locked you in. Thick door! Good of her. A helping hand. Or is it luck? Fortuna is a woman. I am her husband, I am her child. I am the darkness behind her eyelids. I am…”

  He trails off. Then his steps move away again, back to the kitchen. The silence that follows is worse than the earlier screaming. Thomas kicks at the door. The door will not break.

  ф

  Livia is not sure what gives him the idea. He acts as though he has rehearsed it, quickly, efficiently, without hesitation. Dips a hand into her jacket pocket; pulls out their mustard jar of purest black; unscrews the tin of Soot from Sebastian’s bag and replenishes its contents. Then Thomas takes the mask off the nail and stretches its rubber over his head and face until his dark eyes are ringed by its glass goggles. The limp tube dangles from his mouth like a length of fireman’s hose. The tin screws smoothly on its copper spout. Sebastian again. Precision work. Only when Thomas tries to insert the needle of one of the spare syringes into one of the glass vials does he slow down. Wearing the goggles, his sense of depth appears to be compromised. He misses twice, breaking off the needle on the floor; labours to attach another. Then Charlie is there, trying to stop him.