by Will Self
Virgin Trains toilet you’d dropped it in. In the nineteen sixties the
Iranian economy was growing, and, while left-wing intellectuals
and the religiously orthodox might have resented the Pahlavi
dynasty, for Amir: It was a beautiful childhood, Jonathan – a
beautiful childhood. We had so much freedom in Khorramabad –
we could go where we pleased … Any adult would look out for any
child, so our parents never worried about us. It was, truly, as if we
were one big family. Going to the bakery in the morning for my
own family’s bread, I’d use my pocket money to buy two or three
extra of the flat sangak loaves. Shater Ali was a very imposing figure
and a well-educated man – to be a baker was considered a highstatus
occupation. He’d flip the loaves from the paddle on to the
counter and I’d stand there picking out the pebbles and bits of
gravel. For you see, the sangak was baked in this way so as to – as
we say in Farsi – take the sweat off it. I remember Shater Ali, if we
ever were cheeky enough to say the sangak was too sweaty, would
either quote the anecdote about Rumi and Shams, or else blame the
English – because in Khorramabad, in the Zagora Mountains of
Iran, in the nineteen sixties, the English – and in particular the
English spies – were responsible for everything that was bad or went
wrong. It rains on your birthday? Blame the English. A fox got into
the hen house? Blame the English. You have a pimple on the end of
your nose? The English have somehow managed to interfere with
your skin … And here I am, Jonathan, sitting in a car in a Viennese
back street, telling it all to an English spy … Oh, yes, Amir, telling it
all to an English spy equipped with an air loom in the form of a
short-burst veeaitcheff transceiver, one which – when he’s transmitting
– he often hides inside a stuffed Garfield the Cat, suckered to
the rear window of whichever work car he’s driving. As for little
Amir: Walking back to the family home with the sangak loaves
piled up on a sheet of newspaper, my friends would swoop on me
from all directions – hungry little birds. And they’d peck-peck-chat-chat
away at the warm flatbread with their fingers – that’s why
I’d usually try to buy a couple extra, because otherwise I’d reach
home empty-handed … It’s April, and Milla’s going out to see her
old friend Mona, which makes her happy: You seem happy, Mum …
is the sort of thing I might say to her, as I peck-peck-chat-chat at
her cheek. But I don’t want to blow my cover. I’m not too worried
about her coming into my room when I’m phoning Jonathan – but
she might … there’s some of the leftover chilli-stuff in the back of the
fridge, or I’ve left a fiver on the kitchen table if you want to get a takeaway
… Audio take is what Jonathan’s colleagues used to call
it – but audio takeaway would be better: I can see that you’re serious,
Ben … – You left enough material in the attaché case, Jonathan, for me
to begin building a fairly convincing picture of your activities over the
years – and I’m an imaginative person … – So let me get this perfectly
clear, Ben: you want me to give you access to these secret networks,
so you can effect some sort of … But no – don’t say it yet, Jonathan.
You’re being premature, not the sort of démarche someone as diplomatic
as you should ever attempt. One thing the agent known as
Mandinkulus has never suffered from is being premature: I know
how to bide my time, since time is what I’m in full and vacant
possession of – what does it matter if I spend an hour or five, seeing
if I can pile these seven knock-off wind-up Pikachu figurines up on
top of each other over and over, again annagain … The repetition
can be aggravating – anguishing, too. The important thing is it’s
only the first reiteration that truly matters: the reflection, the double,
the go-round of the frayed, saliva-damp end of one of the toothpicks
Milla buys for me in boxes of five thousand from a catering
supplies wholesaler in Dollis Hill. I thought you should know: after
Colossus, the wartime computer built by the boffins at Bletchley
Park was broken up, its spare parts were cannibalised to build the
new trunk-call phone exchange – also in Dollis Hill, and not far
from my grandfather’s old therapeutic community. I think you
should also know about the Sage system, which went online in the
year that Gramps lost his virginity. Tush, now – he’s had few secrets
from me for years now, whatever he believes. Sage was a great leap
forward for human connectivity: since its inception in the counting
houses of Sumer, the unicameral mind has held sway, with its psychotic
delusions of personhood and autonomy. The hive mind has
been activated only by religious enthusiasm or pathological hysteria.
Or both. But with Sage humankind began its return to the cybernetic
Eden where traditional peoples reside – a dappled, forested
and lush place, where the mind that directs the arm which holds the
axe that strikes the tree that’s rooted in the earth which is nourished
by the rain that’s Mother Earth’s own circulatory system knows full
well they’re all one and the same thinking, feeling thing, world
without end. Oh, poor Milla! Poor Mother Earth has suffered the
torment of those bloody scars – the endometriotic lesions left by
opencast mining, nuclear-testing and all the rest of the slashing
and burning those unmindful and self-harming axes have done.
Oh, poor Mother Milla, whose very sensitivity and self-awareness
are themselves the new nerves grown by these lesions. A tool, a
technology – what it’s called hardly matters: the Sage system, with
its network of early-warning radar stations, could render incoming
Soviet ballistic missiles as so many swarming white dots, which
appeared on the screens of bunker-bound technicians. Equipped
with light guns, they’d shoot these white dots to fix the eyeseebeeemms’
positions for the computers calculating their trajectories.
Sound familiar? Sage represented the most ambitious attempt yet
to create a working model of the world manipulable from and by
the seat of my pants – which wear out, believe me, what with the
industrial levels of sitting down I do. It’s May, and the general
election has come and gone. There’s an atmosphere of nothing
much throughout the land and I phone Jonathan again. Milla’s
out shopping and I’ve just showered, so I speak to him while I’m
walking up and down the hall, towelling myself – winding the
towel into a thick cord with which I strop my moobs … You’ve
contacted some of your friends, then ? – You know I have… – But strictly
on the quiet – just as a favour to you? – You know that as well …
– There’s a stilted, Pinteresque quality to these exchanges, I feel… – I
thought you never went out … – I can read … He wants to get it
straight – a ridiculous expression, since what he desires is to understand
the whole compass of my ceaselessly stim
ming delusion. And
I reach out to him in his fastness of beet fields: Yes, it’s true, I believe
a sort of wormhole could be opened up by connecting an ordinary,
internet-enabled phone to the secure secret internet of the five eyes.
The Sage system has burgeoned and extended over the past six
decades to the point where the content of the world wide web, and
the covert intelligence gathering programmes of the major Western
powers, taken in sum, constitute a map of the entire collective
human being, which is itself the same size as that human being. If
Jonathan will only provide me with the codes necessary to open that
wormhole … Why, the entire system can be turned off and turned
on again – resetting human consciousness, so that henceforth we
will always be together. Never alone. Of course, I explain to him, as
I rub the tightly wound towel around my genitals, releasing small
puffs of skin particles from my pubic hair … fine as silica – Bonnie!
Bo-nnie! Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose leaves … This is where
it’s all been leading: the myriad iterations of human mediatisation –
the faces staring at the screens, the fingers pressing the keys,
pushing the buttons and toggling the levers: the boldly going extension
of cyber-space by autists and their avatars, who’ve no need to
look into another’s eyes to know what they’re thinking, because
in this new-old realm space and thought are entirely coextensive.
Yes, I tell Jonathan … Yes, I tell Jonathan … the palilalia is indeed
a spell, summoning through ceaseless stimming repetition this
new-old reality. Yes, I tell Jonathan – if you’re a computer-gamer
as skilled as I, equipped with an internet connection of sufficient
speed to avoid any lag at all, then you can perceive the transition
between individual frames … the transition between individual
frames … And since human visual perception consists in comparing
the twenty-two stills our retinas register each second so
as to extrapolate the trajectories of moving objects – what is the
individual subject, save for a Sage system with ideas above its
workstation? with ideas above its workstation? Okay – I know I
promised there’d be no repetitions, but they do provide … emphasis.
The confirmation of our camera-like status, and our ability
to make our own chronophotographs, comes with the so-called
wagon-wheel illusion, whereby the spokes of a wagon wheel seem to
travel backwards while it travels forward – you’re familiar with that,
Jona-than? Your own house is called Wagon Wheels, while you
were sitting beneath one on the fateful Friday lunchtime when
you lost control of your large data-set. Sufferers from some neurological
conditions also experience what’s called cinematic vision,
whereby they retain one of the twenty-two stills for several seconds
in their visual field, such that subsequent frames show through,
much in the way that successive computer screens show through one
another when the system is … lagging. Encephalitis lethargica is
one of those conditions, and my own grandfather – my dear old
Gramps – who tried awakening survivors of the encephalitis lethargica
epidemic when he was working at Friern Mental Hospital in
the nineteen seventies – managed to capture on film the physical
correlate of cinematic vision, which is, of course, the reordering of
time itself. Yes! I exult to Jonathan, no longer attempting to hide
what’s gripped my unfeeling psyche: Yes! I do indeed believe in a
binary rapture to come, as the entire system is switched on again
and the Meat Blanket bites of all humanity’s minds are uploaded to
the cloud – the cloud born of war, dark and monsoonal, which, as it
absorbs and reconfigures the human being, rises, growing lighter
and more radiant. We will have at last attained our home on high –
and in so doing will realise it was always right to hand, while down
below on the surface, Mother Earth’s endometriotic lesions will
begin to heal. And yes! I exult to my phoney friend, I am indeed the
nerd messiah of this great awakening of human mind, brought on
unwittingly by the high-functioning autist-nabobs of the tech
industry and the military-industrial complex! It is, I think, the
provisional character of this torment that would strike Jonathan
most, sitting in the vestibule, under the print of Caistor Sheep
Market. Spring has sprung in north Lincolnshire as well – but,
while the jingling of Sally and Gawain as they trot along Church
Lane might be as rhythmic as the prose describing it, there’d be no
outdoor activities for Jonathan beyond the meat-run to Lancaster’s
and the daily dog-walk … Bonnie – Bo-nnie! Not that Ben White-house-Busner
would’ve given him an ultimatum, but for now
Jonathan – with the tinny receiver grinding his shell-like, as this
psychic turbulence twangs into him – would probably resolve to …
string him along. After all, he’s very likely already spoken to Stephen
Marshalsea, who of all those on his new-entrant course he’s
remained closest to – quite possibly because Marshalsea decided
fairly early on he wasn’t cut out for the lifelong night shift of
espionage, so left to take up a job with Hilton Hotels, which, with
its world-girdling chain, has often provided the EssEyeEss with
convenient cover for agents and informants alike. June comes
running down the road with dandelion clocks lifting off from its
silky-soft hair into the warm air of suburbia, and the French knitters
follow on behind … will you heel, girl! Come here, I say – Bonnie!
Bonnie! Oh, confound the animal … I stand behind Milla, who’s
typing her weekly email to the orfer – a different blend of psychic
turbulence, one stirred not shaken: Y’know, Benny, Gramps is
really beginning to lose it, I think Dan and Pat are going to put him in a
home… – That’s a shame, Mum – I thought he wanted to become a sorta
Hindu holy man … – Obviously that’s out of the question, Ben – he can
scarcely remember his name … – Maybe if there were a place he could
go, just for a few days, somewhere he could do a bit of meditation and
stuff. It’d calm him down – maybe convince him the whole thing’s a
bad idea … – Yes, but where? – What about Holy Island, Mum – you
enjoyed that retreat you went on up there … – Funny you should
mention it – I was just writing to the orfer about Holy Island. About
how being there really helped me to dump a lot of negative thinking …
It’s a measure, I feel, of my ascendancy in such relationships I do
have that both Milla and Gramps refer to the orfer as the orfer –
and it’s a further indication of my status as a sort of parhelion, or
sun dog, lighting up their glassy heavens, that neither of them seems
to notice the oddity of what follows. It’s late June, and Gramps
comes over to Kilburn to pick up the smartphone I’ve obtained for
him. I coax him into learning to use it with a simple stratagem –
one of the most useful human motivators th
ere is: narcissism.
Look here, Gramps – if we feed your name into this search bar, see
what comes up … see what comes up … Who would’ve thought
the old man to have had so much digital presence in him? Me for
one – there they all are: videos of him giving keynotes at conferences,
academic papers he’s written which others have uploaded,
third-party accounts of his career and notable figures in his field
with whom he’s been associated: People who search for Doctor Zack
Busner also search for R D Laing, B F Skinner, Thomas Szasz, Gregory
Bateson, etcetera … etcetera … It galvanises the sorry old duffer,
such that soon enough he’s tapping, wiping and tweezering with the
best of them. Shortly before he arrived I replaced the phone’s sim
card with the one from the phone I’ve been using to call Jonathan.
In our last conversation I was a little terse: I don’t think you’re taking
this business seriously enough – I think you think I’m simply delusional,
and that the whole problem is going to go away … – I can’t do what you
ask of me, Ben – if it’s money you need I’m happy to provide it. Can’t we
just meet up and do the handover? I’ve found what you have to say
absolutely fascinating, but I’m pretty much at the end of my tether
now… – I’m going to take you on tour, Jonathan – I’m going to take you
back to where it all began … I wave Gramps off and watch him weave
between the French knitters as he makes his way, staff and begging
bowl in hand, along the road. Begging bowl and staff in hand,
weaving between the French knitters, my avatar makes his way
along the road while I wave him off. His schedule is in the phone –
and I’ve made all the arrangements: he’ll stay tomorrow night at the
Hilton Deansgate in Manchester. I know Jonathan’s put an illegal
trace on me through a private detective – now he’ll be carried along
with my avatar: a grinning helium balloon with a clown’s face on it,
which will bob-bob-bob-along behind Gramps as he zeroes in on
the Castlefield Canal. That Jonathan’s old colleague Marshalsea is
in post as Head of Security at the Hilton brings the whole delicate
matrix of this circuit tantalisingly close to completion: it’ll only
take Marshalsea to realise that what’s bothering Jonathan is indeed
