Yellow Blue Tibia

by Adam Roberts

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Your face . . .’ he said.

  ‘My face is—’

  ‘It is burned? Those are burn scars on your face?’

  ‘Indeed. The story behind those scars is . . .’

  ‘Radiation burns,’ boomed somebody else. ‘It’s a common side-effect of abduction!’

  The room erupted in noise, and my piping denials were wholly swallowed up. There was a prolonged hubbub. Finally, when the noise had settled a little, somebody else cried out, ‘What was it like inside the craft, comrade?’

  ‘I was never abducted,’ I said.

  ‘Did they undertake a physical examination?’

  ‘What colour were they, comrade?’ somebody else shouted.

  ‘Were you stripped naked, comrade?’

  ‘Child-sized, or were you touched by some of the tall breed?’

  ‘I,’ I said, and my voice collapsed into a rubble of coughs. It was very smoky in that subterranean space, and a lifetime of smoking had left my lungs in a poor way.

  ‘The tall breed can be as high as three metres,’ somebody declared.

  ‘They like to probe the rectum!’ shrilled somebody, with a squeaky but penetrating voice. ‘They like to probe the rectum!’ he repeated.

  ‘Comrades,’ I said, getting my voice back under control. ‘Comrades, please listen to me.’

  ‘Was it a Moscow abduction?’ somebody demanded.

  ‘When Stalin himself ordered . . .’

  ‘Not only advanced technology was discovered in Kiev, but the entire history of humanity . . .’

  ‘Petrazavodsk! I was there!’

  ‘They like to probe the rectum!’

  ‘How long were you away? Time dilation can mean—’

  ‘They like to probe the rectum!’

  ‘The case of Andrei Kert’sz, he was gone for six months, although he thought that only a few hours had passed . . .’

  ‘When,’ boomed somebody above the roar, ‘spaceships travel close to the speed of light . . .’

  ‘Rectum!’

  ‘To map the incidence of abduction across the Soviet Union is to realise . . .’ screeched somebody.’

  ‘Ghost rockets!’

  ‘Radiation burns!’

  ‘They like to probe!’

  ‘The correlation between abductions and sunspot activity . . .’

  ‘Project Stalin!’

  ‘A properly dialectical understanding of the UFO phenomenon . . .’

  ‘Comrades,’ I tried again, but I was immediately drowned out by the high-pitched voice of rectum-man, who seemed, indeed, very insistent that the room hear what he had to say: ‘They like to probe the rectum! They like to probe the rectum! They like to probe the rectum!’

  ‘Friends,’ a voice bellowed, commanding the crowd in a way my raspy throat could not. It was Lunacharsky; standing beside me, with both his arms up. The ceiling was so low that this meant he was touching it. ‘Silence! Comrades, be quiet! Please!’ And the noise gradually sank back down. ‘Comrades,’ said Lunacharsky. ‘I think we’d all like to thank our friend Konrad Skvorecky for his insights . . .’

  Applause filled the little space like expansive aural foam. It was the concrete manifestation of my own impotent annoyance. I nodded my head like an idiot. Feeling oddly powerless in the face of this public approbation, I turned to find the stairs with the thought of getting away and finding the nearest Metro. The taxi driver, Saltykov, was standing between the exit and me. ‘It was a very interesting talk,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I have to go now.’

  ‘I insist that you come and meet my friend.’

  ‘No thank you.’

  ‘I insist, and so does he. He is American.’

  ‘I’d prefer to go.’

  ‘He’s your friend too. That’s what he says.’

  In the noise and dark I wasn’t certain I’d heard this correctly. ‘I’m sorry? I don’t know any Americans.’

  ‘His name,’ said Saltykov, gesturing towards the deepest corner of the basement bar, ‘is James Tilly Coyne. He represents the Church of Scientology.’

  A little disoriented, I found myself threading through the crush of humanity two steps behind Saltykov. There was a table fitted snug into an alcove. ‘Please sit down,’ said Saltykov. He nudged me, and I ducked my head to fit under the alcove. In the furthest corner of the recess, nursing a bottle of beer without a glass, sat Dr James Tilly Coyne, US citizen. He beamed at me. ‘An excellent performance,’ he said. In some sense, a way in which I could not quite understand, the disorientation of finding this individual sitting here, in this bar, was connected with the disorientation of sitting with Frenkel in the restaurant earlier that day. They seemed to be aspects of the same disorientation.

  Let us say that science fiction is a kind of conceptual disorientation of the familiar. Of course if that were true, you’d think I’d be more comfortable with the sensation.

  CHAPTER 6

  I sat down. ‘Mr Coyne,’ I said.

  ‘And how pleasant to meet you again,’ he said.

  ‘Your Russian is very fluent,’ I said.

  ‘Thank you!’ he said. ‘But I am poor with contemporary idiom. I like to come to places such as this. This club for example. In part I mean to acquire contemporary idiom. Such things, one cannot learn out of books.’

  ‘It is almost,’ I said, ‘as if you have no need of an official translator.’

  ‘That business at the ministry?’ he said, pinching a simulacrum of remorse from his squinnying eyes. ‘I am sorry. I am sorry about that. Will you forgive me?’

  ‘Is there something to forgive?’

  ‘We were detained by the authorities,’ he explained. ‘I’ve come to the USSR many times, toing and froing between here and the USA. It is an occupational hazard of such travel that occasionally the authorities become suspicious and detain me. In such circumstances I have learnt it is best to . . . pretend to be less knowledgeable than actually I am.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Wise, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘But if you are asking about wisdom,’ I said, ‘you are asking the wrong man.’

  Saltykov had reappeared, carrying three bottles of beer. ‘Here you are! I am content to drink beer,’ he added, a little mysteriously. ‘I hope you are too?’

  ‘I am not thirsty,’ I said. ‘Forgive me if it appears ungrateful on my part.’

  ‘I drink one beer a day,’ Saltykov explained, seating himself. ‘Always between the hours of six and nine in the evening. Never at any other time, never more than one, and never anything stronger.’

  ‘I prefer not to drink alcohol at any time.’

  ‘Mr Konstantin!’ said the American. ‘Are you [teetotal], my friend?’ Then, to Saltykov he added, ‘That’s the English word. I don’t know the Russian equivalent.’

  ‘There is no Russian equivalent,’ I said in a level voice. ‘It is a concept alien to, and corrosive of, the Russian tongue. But yes, I do not drink. I used to do so. I found myself with a choice: continue drinking; continue breathing. I chose the latter.’

  ‘You do not drink beer?’ said Saltykov in his prissy voice. ‘Or vodka?’

  ‘Sometimes I touch tea.’

  ‘I do not drink vodka either,’ said Saltykov. ‘It is unpleasant stuff. I drink very little, in fact, although I permit myself, as I explained, one bottle of beer between the hours of six and nine.

  ‘I do believe,’ said James Coyne, beaming, ‘that I am sitting at a table with the only two [teetotallers] in Russia.’

  ‘Mr Coyne,’ I said. ‘I think I’d better go. I have had a tiring and, indeed, rather confusing day.’

  ‘Please don’t go just yet,’ said Coyne, sitting forward with a sparkle in his eye. ‘I’m here for one reason only, and that’s to meet with you.’

  This, of course, made no sense at all. ‘You’ve come to Russia to meet me?’

  He laughed again, with pleasant warmth. ‘That’s righ
t, sir. I’ve come to Russia to meet you.’

  ‘And so it is that my day gets odder and odder,’ I said. ‘I am a nobody, Mr Coyne, I assure you. I live in a very small flat. I know nobody of any importance, and actually hardly anybody of any kind at all. As the English say, [I eke out a living] as a translator. There’s no reason for my neighbour to cross the hall to meet me; certainly no reason for an American to cross the world for that purpose.’

  ‘It is a matter of the very greatest importance,’ he said.

  ‘You are a baffling human being,’ I said. ‘And so are you,’ I added, looking at Saltykov.

  ‘Me?’ Saltykov returned, looking hurt. ‘Why say that I am baffling? You ought to be more understanding. I,’ he added, ‘have a syndrome.’

  ‘Syndrome,’ I repeated. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Do you mean, what is a syndrome,’ he asked. ‘Or do you mean, what particular syndrome do I have? It is important to be precise.’

  ‘I am guessing that precision is your syndrome,’ I said.

  He put his head a little on one side, no more than five degrees. ‘Do you know what? That is quite a good way of putting it! Yes, yes, I like that way of putting it.’

  ‘I’d say,’ said Coyne, after sizing me up and down, and with what at the time I took for extraordinary prescience (though now, of course, I understand how he was able to know so much about me), ‘that you have a syndrome too, [Mr] Skvorecky.’

  ‘Do you think so? Not precision, surely.’

  ‘Not that. I don’t mean to presume.’

  ‘Presume all you like,’ I said.

  ‘You were in the war, I suppose?’

  ‘The Great Patriotic War,’ I said, nodding. ‘But you might guess as much about me from my age.’

  ‘In America we observe that many survivors of war suffer from a condition called [post-traumatic stress disorder]. You understand the English?’

  ‘I’ve heard of this disorder,’ I said. ‘I’m surprised you think I suffer from it.’

  ‘What?’ asked Saltykov, blinking. ‘I didn’t catch the name of the syndrome.’

  ‘After-trauma stress syndrome,’ I translated.

  ‘It is often diagnosed in soldiers who have survived a war,’ said Coyne.

  ‘The war was four decades ago,’ I pointed out.

  ‘But it was an unusually savage war,’ he returned. ‘It laid its imprint upon you when you were very young. One’s [thetan], which is to say, one’s soul, is more impressionable when one is young.’

  ‘That is one English word I don’t know.’

  ‘It is a piece of Scientological terminology.’

  ‘After-trauma stress syndrome,’ mused Saltykov. ‘But I have a question. Why is it that some syndromes are named after individuals - scientists, say - and others not? My syndrome, for example, is named after a notable Austrian doctor, Dr Hans Asp—’

  ‘[Post-traumatic stress disorder,]’ I interrupted, speaking English. ‘[It’s possible I have been touched by this, I suppose. But if so, then surely the whole of Russia has been suffering from that. After the trauma that was the Great Patriotic War.]’

  Coyne nodded, and replied in Russian. ‘Or the trauma we call Stalin.’

  I was made a little uncomfortable by the closeness of his gaze. Saltykov looked left and right. There was a little hole in the conversation, and he filled it. ‘I have another question,’ he asked both of us, or neither perhaps. ‘Why cannot colour shock the sensorium in the same way that electricity or collision can?’

  I looked at him. ‘What?’

  ‘Do you wish me to repeat my statement?’

  ‘No, I heard you. What was short for what on earth are you talking about?’

  Saltykov took my question seriously. ‘I am making an observation about the world: extremities of touch are shocking, as with a blow. Extremities of taste likewise - chili, acid - or of smell, and the same with smell, as with smelling salts.’

  ‘Smelling salts,’ I repeated, trying to keep hold of the wriggling thread of his thought.

  ‘Exactly. And of course, extremities of sound are painful. The earsplitting din, the panic shout. These can, of course, be literally intolerable. As for sight, well the photoreceptive layer of the retina is divided into rods and cones. Rods are easily overstimulated by illumination - the intense glare of light that blinds - but cones, responsible for colour vision, do not seem to work this way. In a normal eye, there is no intensity of colour (as opposed to of brightness) that is actively painful, or intolerable, after the fashion of these other things. Since colour is indeed perceived in terms of varying intensities, it is very strange that the intensity doesn’t seem to have an upper level. I wonder: is this the only portion of the human sensorium that works this way?’

  Things seemed to have reached a moment of pure absurdity. A mosquito had stung me. Saltykov was a mosquito, buzzing in my ear. I started laughing. ‘You are a philosopher!’ I said. ‘A philosopher!’

  ‘In a sense I am,’ said Saltykov, with prim outrage at my reaction. ‘But I do not see why that fact occasions hilarity.’

  ‘I’m sorry, comrade,’ I said, getting to my feet. ‘Comrade, I apologise. I implore you, take no offence. Please blame my reaction on exhaustion and old age. I bid you both good night.’

  ‘Shall I drive you in my taxi?’

  ‘If it does not offend you, I shall take the Metro.’

  ‘[I hope you don’t mind if I accompany you up the stairs,]’ said Coyne, in English, also getting to his feet. I wanted to tell him not to bother himself, but instead I found the laughter bubbling up again. Frenkel had been abducted by aliens! The far-fetched story we invented, for the benefit of Stalin himself, was coming true. Every Moscow taxi driver was a secret philosopher who took their passengers to the Pushkin Club rather than to their actual destinations. The world was insane. ‘Come along then, my new American friend,’ I said. And we picked our way through the tables of the Pushkin, crammed with faces now scowling and hostile where before they had been eager and welcoming, and made our way up the stairs and out in the cold.

  CHAPTER 7

  We were on Zholtovskovo Street, and it was very late in the night. ‘Will you walk with me?’ Coyne asked. ‘My hotel is not far from here.’

  ‘Which hotel?’

  ‘The Marco Polo. It’s just off the Tverskaya Ulitsa. Do you know it?’

  ‘That’s a little close to the Militia headquarters for my taste,’ I said.

  ‘Oh but it’s opulent, the Marco Polo. It’s new, you know. It’s a symbol of the coming Russia. Of the coming, opulent Russia.’

  ‘It sounds too expensive for the likes of me,’ I said.

  ‘The hotel?’

  ‘The new Russia.’

  He coughed. ‘[Expense,]’ he said in English, adding a word that I did not recognise, but which might have been a reference to Smolensk. ‘I’m American!’ he beamed. ‘I have a reputation to keep up! Come back to the hotel and I’ll show you. Perhaps a drink of vodka before we turn in for the night?’

  ‘I don’t drink vodka.’

  ‘I forgot. You and Saltykov, the only two adult human beings in the entire Soviet Union who don’t drink vodka. But perhaps you’ll have a coffee? Or a glass of water?’

  ‘People seem strangely eager to press hospitality upon me today.’

  ‘A testament to your sociability! Or perhaps they are trying to win you to their cause?’

  ‘An unlikely supposition. You forget that I’m a nobody.’

  ‘But you are not!’ said the American, earnestly. ‘You are a very important person. You have the opportunity to save the lives of millions.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You and I need to have a conversation, my friend. It may be the most important conversation you ever have in your life.’

  I digested this. ‘I take it, this is the opening gambit by which your Church converts people to its faith.’

  Coyne laughed, easily and fluently. ‘[You’re droll,]’ he said, in English. Th
en, in Russian: ‘Nothing like that. But the truth is almost too alarming to express. The future of - well, millions of lives, certainly. It’s probably not too much to say: the fate of the world.’

  ‘The fate of the world?’

  ‘I’m not [bullshitting],’ he said. ‘You know that term?’

  ‘I’m familiar with many of the varieties of Anglophone shit.’

  ‘Well, believe me that what I’m telling you now is not [bullshit]. It’s a threat to millions of lives. It’s a threat to the whole world. I am not talking metaphorically. It’s real.’

  ‘So: you wish to have a conversation with me about a threat to the whole world, that I am uniquely positioned to avert?’

  He laughed. ‘[Yes, that’s about the up and down of it.]’

  ‘[Both up and down? What a paradoxical man you are.]’

  ‘[Perhaps. But I am truthful.]’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I do. My religion is about uncovering the truth, and speaking the truth is of course a necessary part of that. I am here, in part, to test the waters for a possible Scientological base in Moscow. Just as I have told the authorities. But - the truth is I’m not here primarily to do that. Despite what I said in the ministry earlier. Well, the truth is I work in nuclear power. I have a degree in nuclear physics. I work in the States as a safety consultant for nuclear power stations.’

  ‘Saltykov claimed something similar.’

  ‘Hey! That’s right!’ We walked under the light of a streetlamp, a dunce-hat-shaped cone of brightness sitting on the pavement in the black night. He stopped me, and I looked at his face. The bright overhead illumination worked a strange etcher’s trick upon the lines on his face, scoring them deeper, and shining waxily off the portions in between. ‘I’m about to tell you something top secret. Top top secret. Do you understand?’

  ‘I understand. Understand and believe are two different words.’

  ‘[I couldn’t talk with you about it in that club. And I won’t be able to talk about it in the hotel room, which is probably bugged. Strike probably, insert certainly.]’

  ‘And here outside,’ I said, ‘it’s just you, me and comrade streetlamp here.’