‘If you’re very busy, I could come another day,’ I suggested.
He squinted at me and lit another cigar. ‘I am expert in all science, so many people take advantage of me. Even when I am small boy, I must carrying to school my small brother. Three kilometre to the gymnasium … Now is shortage of material, I must do all. This damned war … Many upheaval … Spies and traitor … Everywhere same … Today toilet blockage and how to get repair? You cannot be nervous?’
‘I have an appointment, Dr Maté. If later would be more convenient…’
‘Is no problem. Don’t worry … I treat many English. Get this nurse to move, I explain all.’
Maté sought to reassure me. They had developed a method of inserting memories into the brains of amnesiacs, but first those memories had to be recorded with full sensory data on to microchip, and then projected by laser into the brain. That at least was the gist of what I gathered from a long, complex explanation. While I listened, the nurse gave me an injection in the biceps of my left arm. They would need, Maté said, to append electrodes to my cranium in order to obtain full sensory data matching my answers to his questions.
‘I don’t really know Montagu Clements well,’ I protested. But of course I could not simply refuse to co-operate, could not walk out, could not leave poor Clements without doing my best for him.
Indeed, my eyelids felt heavy. It was luxury to stretch out, to groan, to relax … and to fall into the deepest slumber of my life …
* * *
The cathedral in which we walked was almost lightless. My extended senses told me that it was vast. I asked Dr Maté what we were doing there. His answer was incoherent. I did not press him. He seemed to be smoking a cigar; a little red glow formed occasionally as he inhaled, but I could smell no smoke.
In order to keep my spirits up—I admit I was apprehensive—I talked to him as we progressed step by step. ‘I suppose you read Kafka, you understand the complexities with which he found himself faced at every turn. As a psychologist, you must understand that there are people like Kafka for whom existence is an entanglement, a permanent state of war, while for others—why, at the other extreme they sail through life, seemingly unopposed. These differences are accounted for by minute biochemical changes in the brain. Neither state is more or less truthful than the other. For some truth lies in mystery, for others in clarity. Prayer is a great clarifier—or was. My belief is that old Christian churches served as clarifying machines. They helped you to think straight in “this doleful jeste of Life”.’
I went on in this fashion for some while. Dr Maté laughed quite heartily, his voice echoing in the darkness.
‘You’re such good company,’ he said. ‘Is there anything I can do for you in return?’
‘More oxygen,’ I said. ‘It’s so hot in here. As a church architect, I have visited, I believe, all the cathedrals in Europe—Chartres, Burgos, Canterbury, Cologne, Saragossa, Milano, Ely, Zagreb, Gozo, Rheims—’ I continued to name them for some while as we tramped down the nave. ‘But this is the first time I have ever entered a hot and stuffy cathedral.’
‘There are new ways. Neural pathways. Technology is not solely about ways of conducting war. It brings blessings. Not least the new abilities by which we may see human existence anew—relativistically, that is, each person imprisoned in his own Umwelt, his own conceptual universe.’ He let out a roar of laughter. ‘Your friend Kafka—I’d have lobotomised him, speaking personally—he said that it was not only Budapest but the whole world that was tragic. He said, “All protective walls are smashed by the iron fist of technology.” Complaining, of course—the fucker always complained. But it’s the electronic fist of technology which is smashing the walls between human and human. I exclude the Muslims, of course. Down they go, like the Berlin Wall, if you remember that far back. In the future, we shall all be able to share common memories, understandings. All will be common property. Private thought will be a thing of the past. It’s simply a matter of microtechnology.’
I started laughing. I had not realised what good company Hungarians could be.
‘In that connection, I might mention that Jesus Christ was evidently pretty au fait with micro-technology. All that resurrection-of-the-body stuff. Depends on advanced technology, much of it developed during that lucky little war against Saddam Hussein in the Gulf. Strictly Frankenstein stuff. Robbing body-bags. Dead one day, up and running—back into the conflict—the next.’
Maté was genuinely puzzled. We halted under a memorial statue to Frederick the Great. Maté had heard of Frankenstein. It was the other great Christian myth which puzzled him. This was the first time I had ever encountered anyone walking into a cathedral who had never heard of Jesus Christ. Explaining about Jesus proved more difficult than I expected. The heat and darkness confused me. I knew Jesus was related to John the Baptist and the Virgin Mary, but could not quite remember how. Was Christ his surname or his Christian name?
My father had been a Christian. All the same, it was difficult to recall the legend exactly. I was better on ‘Frankenstein’. But I ended by clarifying Jesus’ role in the scheme of things by quoting, as far as I could remember, from a hymn, ‘He came down on earth from Heaven, He died to save us all.’
Although I couldn’t actually see Maté’s sneer, I felt it in the darkness. ‘Where was this Jesus when Belsen and Auschwitz and Dresden and Hiroshima happened? Having a smoke out the back?’
Somehow, I felt it was rather sacrilegious to mention Jesus’ name aloud where we were. The cathedral was constructed in the form of a T, the horizontal limb being much longer than the vertical, stretching away into the endless dark. Oh, the weight of masonry! Like fossil vertebrae, great columns reared up on every side, engineered to support vast weight, as if this whole edifice was situated many miles under the earth’s crust, the mass of which must somehow be borne.
So I say. So I understand it. Yet those stone vertebrae, in defiance of the dull facts of physics, writhed like the chordata, climbing lizard-tailed into the deeper darknesses of the vaulting. It was the cathedral to end all cathedrals.
Maté and I now stood at the junction of the cathedral’s great T. The vertical limb of this overpowering architectural masterpiece sloped downwards. We stopped to stare down that slope, more sensed than seen. Kafka could have felt no more trepidation at that time than I, though I covered my nervousness by giggling at Maté’s latest joke. He claimed he had not heard of the Virgin Mary, either.
I stood at the top of the slope. With me was another church architect, Sir Kingsley Amis.
‘The font is somewhere over there,’ he said, gesturing into the darkness. ‘But I’d better warn you it’s not drinking water. Even if it was, you wouldn’t want to drink it, would you?’ He gave a throaty laugh.
Both he and I were greatly diminished by Dr Maté, who now made a proclamation, reading from a box. ‘We’re here now, on the spot you see indicated on your map, adjacent to the pons asinorum. Presently a devil will appear and remove one of you. I am not permitted to say where he will remove you to. We have to keep destinations secret in wartime, but I am authorised to say that it will be somewhere fairly unpleasant. As you know, the war between humanity and the rest is still on. But Geneva rules will apply, except in so far as fire and brimstone will be permitted on a strictly controlled basis. All torture will be attended by an authorised member of the International Red Cross.’
‘How long do we have to wait? Is there the chance of a drink before we go?’ Sir Kingsley Amis asked.
‘Devil should be here shortly. ETA 2001,’ Maté said.
‘Shortly’ was just another of the euphemisms such as surface in wartime. It indicated an eternity, just as bombs are described as deterrents, This’ll spoil his day’ means ‘We’ll kill him’, and ‘God’ means ‘A ton of bricks is about to fall on you’. Myself, I prefer euphemisms.
Phew, I was so tired. Time in the building was lethargic, with every minute stretching, stretching out in companionship with t
he night towards infinity. Reality wore thin, bringing in illusion. At one point I almost imagined I was sitting typing while a dreadful, senseless war was waged in the Gulf. But the gulf of time I was in was much greater. Forget reality; it’s one of the universe’s dead ends …
Interest is hard to sustain, but my feeling was as much of interest as terror. Only those who enjoy life feel terror. I admired all the melancholy grandeur round me, the reptilian sense of claustrophobia. It compared favourably with the slum in which I lived.
At the bottom of the slope before us, a stage became illuminated. You must imagine this as an entirely gradual process, not easily represented in words. A. Pause. Stage. Pause. Became. Pause. Ill. Pause. You. Pause. Min. Pause. Ay. Pause. Ted. Trumpets. It was illuminated predominately in bars of intersecting blue and crimson.
Funebrial music began to play, brass and bass predominating.
The music, so kin to the lighting, was familiar to me, yet only just above audibility, as the lighting hovered just above the visible end of the spectrum.
These low levels of activity were in keeping with the enormous silences of the cathedral structure. They were shattered by the sudden incursion of a resounding bass voice which broke into song. That timbre, that mixture of threat and exultation! Unmistakable even to a layman.
‘The devil!’ Kingsley Amis and I exclaimed together.
‘And in good voice,’ said Dr Maté. ‘So this is where I have to leave you.’
I was stunned by his indifference. ‘What about that sewing machine?’ I asked. But he was not to be deflected.
Even while speaking, he was shrinking, either in real terms or because he was being sucked into the distance; darkness made it hard to differentiate. However, I had little time to waste on Maté. Attention turned naturally to the devil. Though he had yet to appear on the dim-lit stage, I knew he was going to come for Kingsley Amis.
‘I’d better make myself scarce too,’ I said. ‘Don’t want to get in your way.’
‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘You never know. He might be after you. Depends on whether or not he’s a literary critic.’
When the devil arrived on stage, he was out of scale, far too large—ridiculously far too large, I might say, meaning no disrespect. It was hard to discern anything of him in the confused dark. He was black and gleaming, his outline as smooth as a dolphin’s even down to the hint of rubber. He stepped forward and advanced slowly up the ramp, still singing in that voice which shook the rafters.
This struck me as being, all told, unlikely. It was that very feeling that all was unlikely, that anything likely was over and done with like last year’s cricket match, which was most frightening. I trembled. Trembling didn’t help one bit.
I turned to Kingsley Amis. He was no longer there. I was alone. The devil was coming for me.
In terror, I peered along the great wide lateral arms of the cathedral.
‘Anyone there?’ I called. ‘Help! Help! Taxi!’
To the left was only Stygian darkness, too syrupy for me to think of penetrating, the black from which ignorance is made. As I looked towards the right, however, along the other widespread arm of the building, something materialised there like a stain: light towards the dead, dull end of the electromagnetic spectrum.
All this I took in feverishly, for the devil, still singing, was approaching me still. Perhaps I should apologise for my fears. As a rationalist, I had but to snap my rational fingers, it might be argued, and the devil would fade away in a puff of smoke. To which I might say that, rationalist or not, I had spent too many years in my capacity as church architect investigating the fossils of a dead faith not to have imbibed something of the old superstitions. But—this was more germane—I had a belief in the Jungian notion of various traits and twists of the human personality becoming dramatised as persons or personages. This enormous devil could well be an embodiment of the dark side of my character; in which case, I was all the less likely to escape him.
Nor did I.
As I took a pace or two to my right, starting to run towards that faint dull promise of escape, a vision distantly revealed itself. Fading into being came a magnificent palladian façade, lit in a colour like blood, with doric columns and blind doorways. Nothing human was to be seen there—no man to whom I might call. If the burrow to my left represented the squalors of the subconscious, here to my right was the chill of the super-ego.
I ran for it. But was hardly into my stride when the singing devil reached me. I screamed. He snatched me up …
… and bit off my head.
* * *
To any of you with decent sensibilities, I must apologise for these horrific images. You may claim they were subjective, private to me, and should remain private, on the grounds that the world has nightmares enough. Perhaps. But what happened to me was that my head was bitten off almost literally.
My memory was wiped.
It’s a curious thing suddenly to find oneself walking. Imagine yourself in a cinema. The movie begins. Its opening shot is of some character walking, walking across a featureless landscape. Photography: grainy. The shot immediately holds your interest, perhaps because our ancestors right back to the Ice Age were great walkers. Now imagine that you’re not sitting watching in your comfortable stalls seat: you are that character. Only you’re not in a movie. You’re for real, or what we call real, according to our limited sensory equipment.
Your life has just begun and you’re walking across what turns out to be Salisbury Plain. It’s cold, there’s a hint of rain in the breeze. The place looks ugly. But walking is no trouble. It’s everything else that’s trouble.
Like how you got where you are. Like what happened. Like what your name is. Like who you are. Even like—where are you going?
Night is closing in. That much you understand.
What do you do? You go on walking.
Over to your right in the distance, half-hidden by a fold of land, is a broken circle of stone monoliths. You kind of recognise it, although no name comes to you. It’s the ruin of a Stone Age cathedral, taken out in the war with the Neanderthals, cobalt against the overpraised English countryside.
You continue as dark continues to fall. Your legs keep working, your pace is unvarying. You become slightly afraid of this remorseless body, asking yourself, Is it mine?
Dusk gathers about you like a coat when you climb a fence and reach a road. There is almost no traffic on the road. You try to thumb a lift from the cars as they approach from either direction, sweeping you with their headlights. Past they go, never pausing. Bastards.
The fourteenth car stops. A woman is driving. A man sits beside her. They ask where you want to go, and you say Anywhere. They laugh and say that is where they are going. You climb in. You huddle on the back seat, unable to answer any of their well-meant questions.
They think you are a loony, and drop you in the nearest village. You are inclined to agree with their judgement. You wander hopelessly along the road, then, frightened, back into the village. The village is called Bishops Linctus. By now its streets are deserted. Lights glow inside the pub, The Gun Dog, but, with no money in your pocket, you are afraid to enter. There are countries where you might enter and be looked after in a hospitable way; you do not feel that could happen in England.
A young man in gumboots saunters along the road with a shotgun under his arm. He stares at you hard as he passes. He returns and addresses you. He is guarded but friendly. He seems not to believe you have lost your memory. Nevertheless, he takes you along to his house, which is one of a line of council houses on the edge of the village, just before the plain recommences its reign.
His old mother greets you. She is surprised, saying that Larry never speaks to anyone. He tells her to shut up. You stand there, back to the kitchen wall, while she fries up Larry’s favourite meal, which is sausages and mashed fish fingers. You and Larry sit and eat at the table. It is good.
He has a room he calls His Room. It is locked. The old woman interrupts to s
ay it is full of guns. He says to shut up. He tells you he is a farm labourer or sometimes a brickie. At present he is out of work. He lets you doss on the floor of his bedroom. The place is full of gun magazines, and there is a Kalashnikov in Larry’s bed. He sleeps with it.
You express your gratitude.
‘I like helping people,’ Larry replies. He puts out the light.
You lie there on the floor. Despite all your worries, you feel pleasure and comfort in those words of his, ‘I like helping people. Words of Jesus.’ And so you sleep.
Only you’re not in this movie. This is my movie. I’m for real—or what I call real, according to my limited sensory equipment.
* * *
Morning. When I woke, Larry was already up and about. I could hear his mother shouting at him. For a few seconds, I was living with this present situation. Then the edge of the abyss reappeared. I could remember nothing further back than the time I was walking over that miserable plain.
When I got up, the old woman gave me a cup of thin instant coffee. I stood with her against the sink. She had a canary in a cage.
‘It’s Kevin. We call it Kevin. I think it’s a girl. One of the family, aren’t you? Keeps me company. Say hello to Kevin. I wash it every Saturday, under the hot tap. It likes that. Don’t you, Kevin? You like a nice wash under the hot tap. It’s one of the family. Sing for your mummy, then. Who’s a good Kevin?’
I was watching through the window, as Larry loaded boxes of ammunition into the back of an old battered Land-Rover.
His mother caught my glance. ‘He’s going into Swindon to try and get a job. You stay here with me. He’s a dangerous driver, is Larry. We’ll go down and see Dr Roberts. She’s a sympathetic woman—trained in London, she was—and she’ll help you.’
Larry was looking preoccupied. His movements were slow, his gaze abstracted, as if he were composing a poem in his head. Without glancing back at the house, he climbed into the cab of the Land-Rover. Nothing happened. I went to the window to watch, obscurely thinking something was wrong. The back of his head could be seen. Motionless. Not trying to start the vehicle. Just sitting there in the driver’s seat.
The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991 Page 73
