by Will Self
Friern … my enkies! performing a wildly intricate ballet in one of
the old airing courts – There they are! in their twenties togs, tripping
and dipping to some seventies jig … I’m an ape-man, I’m an ape-ape
man … Apish they are – as nimble-footed as chimpanzees,
what with their compulsive ticcing, their wildly unpredictable
movements and their jazzy fulgurations, which fling their brittle
bodies up into the air, only for them to fall back to the desolate
ground. This much Busner readily recalls: That brilliant summer,
during the era of the moon landings, when he’d awakened the post-encephalitics
from their marmoreal half-century-long slumbers –
and begun to see symptoms of their malady everywhere … In the
festination of football players flocking round goal mouths – in the
echolalia of politicians interviewed on the radio … now the problem
is happening now, problematically, and in the city itself, taken in
toto, which even forty-odd years ago seemed to be on the point
of either catatonic dissolution or speeding up and up until it all
flew apart … But what’d been her name, the old and eloquent
enkie who he’d awakened with some of his precious ounce of
L-dihydroxyphenylalanine? This much he definitely does remember:
It cost a thousand pounds! While … for the life of me, I can’t …
it’s on the tip of my … Anyway, one minute she’d been wholly
trapped – a sparrow-like woman enmeshed by the bizarre neural net
of her malady – the next she’d spread her wings … Compos mentis,
she’d regarded the craven new world with a certain Edwardian
pomp and detachment. She’d been, he thinks, really rather remarkably
trenchant – a scientific socialist in her distant youth, she’d been
delighted by humankind’s apparent progress. She wasn’t in the least
discomfited by the wholesale transformation which had taken place
while she Rip-Van-Winkled. The voices of her youth – whether
meek and mild or admonitory and hectoring – torn from pulpit,
lectern and platform while she slept, had been transformed into this
great scritch-itch-itch … He peers down at the mobile phone lying
in his hand: Milla will try again soon enough – and next time
he knows he’ll feel compelled to answer … something might be
wrong … with Ben … If only she could be more like the old enkie:
stoical, and quite unable to … get any reception. I’m a coward,
Busner thinks, and I ought to confront her but it’s awfully ticklish!
He snorts – merriment provoked by this anachronism, accessed
from his memory banks by another: All change, please! Muswell
Hill – the Broadway! All change, please! The driver-operator has
acquired, he realises, a third role, that of the master-of-ceremonies
in the Good Old Days, whose announcements, Busner recalls, had
a stagy, cockneyfied feel: Leddies an’ gennlemen, I gives you …
Muzzerwell ‘ill! So strong is this impression that, descending the
stairs and stepping off the bus, he half expects to see arrayed
before him the top hats and ostrich-feathered toques of a music-hall
audience … When the vision fades, he’s standing on the two
thousand and ten pavement in front of an internet café. Plastic
decals stuck inside its windows advertise LEBARA with African
faces wreathed in smiles – joy occasioned, Busner assumes, by the
coming of modern electronic communications systems, for this is,
he gathers, a service which allows far-flung Swazis, Rwandans and
Gabonese to call home for … mere pennies a minute. He sees their
uncles in jungle clearings, lifting the receivers of coin phones bolted
to baobab trees. He hears the shhhk-shhk as they fumble in their
pockets, then come up with cowrie shells, which they feed into a
specially adapted slot: Poosh de Button A! Poosh de Button, man …
Poosh it! What, he wonders, can these happy exiles be saying as they
yak away for hour upon hour, their wordstream coursing around the
world? The old world … the old cold world … the grey sunken cunt
of the world, full up with cold-old women, their flea-bitten terriers
and their cold-old calcium-whitened turds … give-a dog-a … Full
up, most especially, with Africans – one of whom exits the café at
this point. He’s wearing a spiffy, maroon-leather jacket, and, as
he reaches into its unzippered side pocket, Busner’s groin throbs
sympathetically – goes on throbbing, as the African answers his
phone and without any formalities launches straight into vous n’avez
pas l’autorisation pour gagner … a blatant soliloquy he si vous
souhaitez poursuivre, while old women keep trundling by with
their wheeled wicker … tumbrels. And still Busner’s crotch throbs –
and still the African francophones: un projet de loi pro-forma
connaissement peut être téléchargé notre site of special schizophrenic
interest – because it’s next to impossible nowadays, Busner thinks,
to distinguish between neglected psychotics who hurl their voices to
the carping winds – and those, such as this import-export merchant,
who only wish de vous informer, cher monsieur, que nos conditions
sont tout-à-fait standard et entièrement concurrentielles –. The
African turns away abruptly – and, bereft, Busner reaches into
his tracksuit bottoms to release his own diddle-oooh-doo-doo!
Hello … Hello … Gramps? Issat you … ? Standing in the beeswax-smelling
hall of his own mind, with Milla calling to him,
Busner feels no anxiety: there’re no buttons for his daughter-in-law
to push … besides le mien. So, he identifies himself – and, as he
begins walking towards the Quadrant, it all comes squeaking out.
Much of it the same as he’d heard the previous Sunday, but with
new and improved anxiety: I’m worried, Gramps … you’ve always
been worried. Ben’s been behaving pretty strangely … he’s always
behaved pretty strangely … I didn’t want to say anything last
Sunday … you couldn’t stop talking last Sunday … but he’s barely
been out of his room in weeks, now … he’s barely been out of his room
in twenty-one years, now … I can cope with that, Gramps, but what
I can’t cope with is the stress of not knowing what he’s getting up
to … none of us know what he’s getting up to … I think he may
be mixed up with that computer-hacking collective, Anonymous.
He’s got hold of one of their masks – the one with the moustache
and goatee … he’s got scores of masks – his own face is a … mask …
I’m worried to death, Gramps – what if he’s hacking into government
computer systems and stuff like that – what if he’s doing stuff
like that other autistic man – Gary McKinnon – I’ve read all about
him in doctors’ waiting rooms. On she talks, onanon, the pulsion of
her plosives pushing him onanon, until he finds himself in the
Quadrant, blankly observing the buses butt and bore, and only semiaware
Milla has shuffled between the objects of her affection, and
it’s now the orfer whom she wishes him to talk to: He’s heard of
you, Gramps, he admires your work – he’s giving a reading next
Thursday in Camden Town. If you went along you might be able to
grab a few seconds with him, explain to him that I’m not some sort
of cyber-stalker … but you are! and then things would … les choses
seraient quoi, exactement? Proceeding up Duke’s Avenue towards the
brown pile slumped atop the hill, Busner, only paying the slightest
of attention to this museum audio-guide, marvels at the contemporary
world: cloudy castles rise up above Alexandra Palace, the
same impossibilist battlements and vaporous curtain walls he
remembers from earliest childhood – yet at ground level he observes
this: an old man clutching the side of his head, passing a young
woman clutching hers. In the near-distance there are two or
three others, all, so far as he can tell, similarly afflicted by the toothache
of conversation … it’s good to talk. But listening to Camilla is
tooth-grinding as well as tooth-aching: He writes a lot about
psychiatry, and stuff – that’s how I got involved, I read this story he
wrote about an autistic kid, and I think he really sorta gets it …
Maybe he does, Busner thinks, maybe the orfer does get it, which is
why he’s so very determined keep the poor soul at arm’s length:
That’s what I’m trying to do with my emails, Gramps, tell him all
about me … and Ben, every last detail of our lives – ‘cause he
gets it, he really does, and one day … he’ll realise I’m sincere, and
we’ll be together – not that I’ve any thought of it happening in this
lifetime! she yelps – the self-deprecatory bark of an old sheepdog,
too doddery now to round ’em up, and he says: Don’t say that,
Milla – you mustn’t talk like that … which is the soured milk of
human kindness – although she laps it up … I mean it, Gramps –
I know you don’t believe in kismet, but I do – I really believe we’ll
be together eventually … not in our human bodies – and not in
heaven, that’s just silliness, but somewhere … On she goes –
onanon. She must realise, surely, that he isn’t listening? Busner has
reached Ally-Pally, and stands looking up at its gaunt superstructure,
barnacled with satellite dishes and weedy with antennae.
The Bhagavad-Gita has little to say on such matters – but from
a magazine he’s read recently in a dental surgery Busner gleaned
this much: a sightline to a communications mast enormously improves
mobile phone reception … which must aid the penetration of those
carcinogenic waves into the delicate tissue of the brain, such that if
the two of them keep on like this, soon enough tumour will speak
unto tumour … Nevertheless, there may be a more providential
way of regarding his tethered predicament – walking round the
other side of the building, Busner gains a peak perspective, and
can descry the entire north-east quadrant of the city, from the Parnassus
of Totteridge right round to the Elysian Fields of Epping
Forest. Meanwhile the surrealistic commentary continues: If only I
could know what he really thinks, Gramps – what he really thinks
about … me … Which is indeed the very nub of it, Busner
concedes, making his way towards a bench. Is it, he wonders, the
mobile phone that’s brought him here by some occult means? Busner
reflects with some irritation on his first attempt at the aimless
wandering of a Hindu holy man: he’d left Kentish Town with no
preconceived plan or route, yet wherever the way had divided he’d
received a techno-nudge … He thinks of Ben’s thumbs, nudging at
the controller – thinks of Ben’s avatar, its burly, burnished torso and
brassiere of bandoliers. For Ben’s still gaming – still toggling his
way along the virtual road to nowhere. Sitting behind him, in the
frigid light of his serried monitors, Zack had watched as this buffo
figure explored the cavernous interior of a ruined building not unlike
Ally-Pally … Bounding over acres of rotten flooring, kinking to
avoid the fire-resistant tiles crumbling from its lofty ceilings. It’s
like there was a nuclear war sometime in the mid nineteen fifties
and this is what the world’s like years later … and this is what the
world’s like years later. True enough, Busner ruminates, but if the
entire wandering world had received such a techno-nudge, it wasn’t
then but a few years later, during the Missile Crisis. What’d
been the name of the Soviet submarine commander? Ah, yes! Arkhipov
– he refused Khrushchev’s order to fire his nuclear missiles, so
preventing almost certain Armageddon. Well … the world’s still
here, and Milla’s still here, and my swollen feet are still here … He
collapses on to the bench and begins unlacing his training shoes,
ruminating the while: Preventing an apocalypse, why … that’s
tantamount to creating a world – this world. Yes, this Arkhipov was
a god – or, more likely, a demiurge, and yes, this is indeed what the
world was like after his act of special creation … AyAy Forty-Eight
to be precise: a dystopia of discontinuous technologies populated by
mutants created in a selective breeding programme presided over
by the blind-bloody watchmaker! Y’know about Wikileaks, don’t you,
Gramps? Ben had asked and asked again: Y’know about Wikileaks,
don’t you, Gramps? the words chucked over his shoulder had fallen
heavily in his grandfather’s lap. Then he’d hit a key, and the
computer’s alternative world had been replaced by a jerky view of
flat-roofed concrete buildings and mud-brick hutments. Tiny figures
were dish-dashing about … running scared from the eye-in-the-sky.
Then the whole scene shivered, shook and disappeared into buff
puffs … Gunsight footage from a YouEssEmm Apache, Gramps,
Ben had said, and said again: from a YouEssEmm Apache, Gramps
– it was an airstrike in Baghdad three years ago … three years
ago … Whole load’ve civilians – including some journalists – were
killed … were killed … The Pentagon’ve consistently denied it – but
here’s the evidence … here’s the evidence … There indeed had been
the evidence – and apparently there was a lot more: These Wikileaks
people, Gramps, they’ve hacked into some secret sites – but
that isn’t how they get most of their stuff, they get most of their
stuff from leaks … they get most of their stuff from leaks … Hence,
Zack had drily observed, their name – but Ben, as ever, had failed
to register any irony, and simply kept on scrolling down … and
down. Zack may’ve been a little disconcerted by the political turn
his grandson’s enthusiasms were taking – but he’d thought nothing
of it until … now: I can’t explain what it is about him, Gramps –
I s’pose with someone you meet socially, you get to see them in
all sorts of … social situations when they’re … socialising … The
fingers leeched … lifeless … bone-white catkins on the unfunny bone …
Busner thinks of Pierson Minor, a fellow pupil at Marples’
Indepen
dent Academy, who’d been struck down by polio and disappeared
glamorously into an iron lung. When he returned his arm
was strapped to his head – which worked well to straighten out the
rigours of the disease. Agony for the kid, though – unable day or
night to lower his arm. Zack thought he’d been sympathetic at the
time – I’m far more so now: I can sorta socialise with him, though,
Gramps – I check his Facebook account and stuff … look at clips of
him on YouTube … then there’s his writing – you can tell an awful
lot about someone from their writing, can’t you, Gramps? Innaway
it’s even more revealing than the stuff they reveal in real life …
Busner thinks the two phenomena are undoubtedly related: Milla’s
new love and her newborn anxieties for her … big baby and his
virtual activities eyearrdoubleyou … Because that’s Ben’s version
of Milla’s real life: the real world he enters only to eat or take a
shit, before returning to his alternative realities. You ought to ask
yourself, Gramps, why it is they want so much data, Ben had said,
and then he’d shown his grandfather the stark outlines of this
ulterior realm. Flow charts, block and Venn diagrams, standard
deviations, and all sorts of other graphical-statistical representations
came flying back towards them from the prow of Ben’s inner-spaceship.
Being of an age, Zack’d thought of nine-out-of-ten, and
ninety-nine, and nine per cent compounded on gilts – but this data
wasn’t selling anything. Ben had said: I’m not going anywhere near
any government systems, Gramps, I’m not a total mong … I’m not
a total mong … Zack had sensed then – and Busner feels certain
now – that his grandson hadn’t meant to imply he was a partial
mong, but that he isn’t a mong at all – it’s us who’re the mongs … An
entire society of amiable Downs folk, wandering about hugging
each other and responding beautifully to music, while the others –
the cooler, more calculating others, such as Ben – got on with
reaping these digital whirlwinds: You ‘n’ Mum, Gramps – you think
all the gaming I do is a waste of time … a waste of time … But it’s
taught me loads … taught me loads … taught me that one person –
a person others call disabled – can not only beat the system …
