My granddaughter’s opinions came in visits, emails, and scraps of paper shoved heedlessly into envelopes and sent to me. You have to understand, she wrote after I showed her the first sketch,
that this is a real possible future. It’s not a nightmare, it’s a truth. It already exists in the overlap of our technologies and our fears. It only needs the right flow of events for us to act the dream and make it real. Imagine how safe it would feel to know that no one could ever commit a crime of violence and go unnoticed, ever again. Imagine what it would mean to us to know – know for certain – that the plane or the bus we’re travelling on is properly maintained, that the teacher who looks after our children doesn’t have ugly secrets. All it would cost is our privacy, and to be honest who really cares about that? What secrets would you need to keep from a mathematical construct without a heart? From a card index? Why would it matter? And there couldn’t be any abuse of the system, because the system would be built not to allow it. It’s the pathway we’re taking now, that we’ve been on for a while.
I wrote back saying that I agreed, but as far as I knew, no one was building a machine to read minds just yet. I thought I was amusingly wry, but I was wrong, as she quickly informed me, because there are several projects doing just that at a low level with magnetic resonance imaging, and when something is physically possible in this new age, it gets done sooner rather than later. She forwarded me a quaint editorial piece from a science journal, which begged to reassure me that serious mind-reading wouldn’t be possible without invasive brain implants, and therefore – as no court would conceivably agree to such a thing – we need not fear an intrusion on our liberty from this source. I wondered in what world the author was living. In the wake of New York’s horror, it seemed to me, a person suspected of having advance knowledge of a similar outrage would be on the operating table before the judge had her wig on.
The question, Annie said, wasn’t whether we could have a society like the one she wanted me to imagine, it was whether we would.
The more I spoke to her, the more I began to understand properly what it meant that she was the founder of this company: not merely that she was a good business brain, nor even that she possessed a flair for the smoke and mirrors of financing that must have been from her mother’s side of the family. No: Colson said she had the Blacksmith’s Word for numbers, for making them sit up and dance, and I began to realise that Annie was the creative engine of an atelier that worked in computer code. She would mash ideas together in her head and spit them out almost randomly, and Colson would spin them around in the air and bat them right back to her as narratives and demand to know if she could build something that would do that. They were very happy to have me join the parlay: it was an open conversation, only enriched by additional minds. The first rule was that everyone must be heard and no idea was weak. The triage came later, in hard-nosed edit sessions. I skipped those meetings, pleading age and art.
When I accepted the commission, there was a scrupulous contract we all signed which entitled me to a share of whatever profit the outfit might make – though Annie told me wryly that it would produce only tiny money unless we were very good and very lucky. In the vanishingly unlikely event that we scored a direct hit, though, she was confident that I would be pleased by my percentage. I didn’t really pay much attention. I was an artist again. I had no desire to walk back from where I was. I refused to let Annie take the early sketches. They were trial pieces, I said. Useless now. I saw her face flicker. Concern. Eagerness. Trepidation. Anticipation.
I knew she would not be disappointed. I was once more the relapsing madman of my first career, the world around me transformed by my strange eyes into a strange place.
I had come home.
*
Addis Ababa in the days of my ascendancy was a city built of spies. My home was ruled by an Emperor, the great and some say divine Haile Selassie, who saw himself I would swear not as the god the Rastafari would make him, but the bridge his nation must cross to go from a timeless and superstitious past to an accelerating future. He aspired, though, to at least one divine attribute, which was omniscience. Ethiopia traditionally teemed with plots, and the capital above all, as must any imperial court where the power of life and death is vested in the whim of a potentate, and our practice of intrigue is one which goes back thousands of years, so that we are better practised at it and more in the habit than almost any other nation in the world. This, in the middle of the twentieth century, took the form of resistance to Haile Selassie’s upheavals and modernisations – which were many and discomforting to the service aristocracy that he notionally ruled – or an urgent desire he should hurry up and do more of them, harder, faster, louder. Oh, he was a hero, and had fought his way back, after the accursèd Fascist invasion, at the head of an army. He was beloved of Winston Churchill and later of the citizens of the United States – but at home, just as he had gouged and politicked his way to the crown, so those under him constantly sought promotion, because only in promotion was there any sort of security to be had in Addis Ababa. Security, indeed, was his obsession also, both for his realm, and for himself. In the arena of statecraft he chose to dance between the raindrops of America and Russia, but in his personal power he was less bending. He was the Emperor, and let none doubt that his rule was absolute.
I have noticed, in the time since, that the Emperor and the country he ruled – the country he made – look different depending where you stand. Everyone who was present in Addis Ababa at that time has a story of Haile Selassie, and their story is the only one they believe truly reflects the man. Many of these stories are said to be first hand and yet each of them is quite like the others, and if the Emperor had spent even a fraction of the time required to perform all these similar actions, he would have done nothing else for a year. Old Ethiopia hands – and old Ethiopians – will tell you that the Polish journalist, Kapuściński, was quite wrong. Many will say, indeed, that he was a fabricator. But then they will turn around and tell you by way of proof some tall tale of Imperial legerdemain or mercy or love, or tyranny or excess, that could be straight from the odd pages of his book, and then they will say: ‘You see? That was the Emperor, as I knew him!’ as if they have refuted some calumny against their own house. Between then and now, Haile Selassie has become impossible to describe. He is perhaps what mathematicians call fractal: surprisingly for so small a fellow, he is infinite, and the more you explore him the more of him there is, so the best anyone can offer of him – or of my birthplace and its history in those days – is a single slice.
This, then, we shall call the shape of the Imperial day. If it is a lie as to the truth of how things were, it is one which expresses the truth of how things felt.
So: every morning, the Emperor awoke and was dressed, and his first public action was to feed a ferocious menagerie of predatory cats in the sequential and nervous company of his three chief intelligencers. Each of these ministers lived in terror of the day when his collected information should be so incomplete as to cast suspicion upon himself, which would in the instant result in a fall that might terminate in a cell – or indeed might not terminate at all, but continue to the gullet of one of the lions. They therefore cultivated agents not only in one another’s camps and in the countless cliques and parties that teemed in Addis Ababa, but also in every household and family, however innocent. Fathers were constrained to keep watch upon their children’s opinions, mothers reported on their husbands, teenagers upon their friends and students upon their teachers. Teachers, often trained overseas and recruited by the agencies of other nations, were doubled by the Emperor’s espiocrats and then tripled by Langley’s, Moscow’s or London’s, and betrayed all of the above for whatever local plot had captured their hearts. There was no place in the city where someone was not watching, and that someone was watched in turn, and all this watching flowed upwards from the streets to the grand houses to the Imperial Person himself.
It must have been a profoundly nervous exis
tence, to be Solomon Kedir or one of those other ministers, but I think that what it did to us who had no such prominence, was more terrible, if more diffuse. We lived in the Panopticon, and Bentham was entirely wrong about how it works. The watchers, watching one another, became increasingly desperate and paranoid lest they miss something, while we, constantly observed, became almost exhibitionistic of our sins. We flaunted them and dared our master to take offence at our juvenile conspiracies and excesses of the flesh. One way and another, we were frantic with designs. The Emperor should have taken counsel from those founding fathers of America, who knew that the sacrifice of freedom for security is a devil’s compact. He was, after all, the creator of our newspapers, because he deemed them modern and necessary. He founded our banks so that we would have somewhere safe to put our money, and somewhere reputable where we might borrow capital to make the business that would build the future Aksum, that would be the first African nation to build its own cars, its own planes, to join that ultimate grasp of mankind: the space race. In the one arena of spying, however, he drew on the ancient heritage of the land rather than the new thinking, and contrived an aura of total surveillance. A myriad plans were hatched each month in Addis Ababa when I was a boy, that were never put into action because some slight utterance or glance of the Emperor implied to the guilty that he knew all and was offering one last chance at the appearance of loyal compliance – but some survived, and caused him great sorrow and setback, in the end. Him, and many others, and me.
The madness of my life in art began one evening when I was twenty-two years old. I had courted the canvas if not assiduously at least as best I knew how, and I understood inwardly that it had given me the bird. I was beginning to wonder what else I would do with my time on Earth, and then all of a sudden it was happening and I had very little say in it. My talent was a sudden thing, queer and perpendicular to all I knew.
In an interview with an English-speaking newspaper – thank God, a small one that subsequently failed and faded into erasure – I explained quite seriously that I had, through an excitative celebration of higher brain functions and the intervention of illuminatory biochemical processes, attained awareness of an interstitial universe: the post-mortally persisting obtrusions of the collective human mind. Pick the bones out of that, if you can. I, certainly, cannot. I was a middle-class boy, which is to say that my father had served the Emperor in the war, with honour and some effect, and been therefore preferred to high but not heritable position. I had travelled as part of my nation’s eclectic student diaspora, with a scholarship that was meant to make me a lawyer but had somehow ended with my becoming a painter. I had shed along the way the belief in God which had been a defining aspect of my forebears’ education, and replaced Him briefly with Eduard Bernstein before concluding that the fury of politics was not the passion that lived in me.
What actually happened that night, I still do not honestly know. I should call it hallucination – except that, later, I had cause to believe it had a large component either of truth or of something else whose untruthfulness did not hinder its power to work upon the world.
It was very much that sort of party, and a rarity in those days because it was truly international. Even the high Amhara of the Imperial Court did not readily casually exchange formal invitations with foreigners, on the one hand because it might appear they were plotting, and on the other because the wealthy immigrant population in Addis Ababa was still very white and very proud, and it was their pleasure to make fun of us locals for serving the wrong wine with smoked salmon or wearing inappropriate shoes to a dance. They might be here to make money and to assist in the raising up of our country, but to them we were still new at this game of civilisation, and never mind that this place was a power in the world when London was a herd of pigs defecating in a muddy stream, and the island of Manhattan was home not to WASP financial magnates but to those matrilineal ur-Lenape whose stories are lost to smallpox and colonial steel.
This evening was an exception because the host was a large American record label that was hoping to find new sounds here. If they were going to do that they had to know what was truly cool in Addis Ababa, and such was not to be discovered from the lilywhite crowd who only occasionally dared the nightclubs in that part of town called ‘the Desert’, Addis Ababa’s busy and notably wild red-light district. Hence, this party was in a new building strategically constructed to link that place with the more salubrious palace district and facilitate the creation of a cosmopolitan scene. Two American woman from PETA, here to tell us why we should be nice to our little furry friends, were dancing in their underwear on an expensive Swedish carpet. A German photographer was taking pictures of their clothes where they lay discarded and saying that here at last was the critique she had been looking for when she travelled to Addis Ababa. Three members of the Trinidadian cricket team were drinking absinthe with the Emperor’s advisor on Sino-European relations, and the music was provided by one of those local bands everyone said would be bigger than the Rolling Stones. On their first and only album cover, the name of the group was given as a stylised hatchet, enamelled with a lipsticked and enticing female mouth caught somehow in the act of appreciative smirking, so that the symbols together made, in English, the sounds ‘axe’ and ‘mmm’ – or ‘Aksum’, which was the old name for Ethiopia. My friend Tamirat had designed this sideroglyph and was the toast of our little circle for his wit – and, to be fair, for his execution, because it isn’t easy to convey ‘mmm’ so clearly with just a single impression of a mouth, but he had.
My city was making its way in the world, becoming for the first time in hundreds of years a de rigueur stop on the travels of the powerful and the scholarly. This was the nation that had fought off the Scramble for Africa; that had its roots in the line of Solomon and now saw its modernity rushing outwards to a time of space ships and orbital colonies: the upwelling, rising, dawning Ethiopia of Haile Selassie. Our very existence, obtruding upon the consciousness of the US of A, was changing the vexed discussion of race in that country, and if our footballers had not delivered in the Cup of Nations for a decade, well, we had promising youngsters, and their coach was the sublime Mengistu Worku. The future was bright, and it was ours for the taking.
I meant to be one of the hands that took it, to reshape the world of art by my dedication and my perception. It was unclear whether I actually possessed either of these things, but of course I thought I did. For now, though, I had put aside all such considerations and was rapt in wonder as I touched a creature so far beyond me as I was beyond a stone, a thing that could not properly be contained or even observed from within our reality, but which might pass through it at an angle as it traversed the tiny wrinkle of space and time that we called ‘everything’. I congratulated myself that for ten thousand generations men and women encountering such consciousnesses had labelled them jinn or angels and cowered before them, while I, a modern man, knew that I was experiencing transient unification with a Jungian collective psyche that might span the stars. I felt entirely sophisticated and à la mode.
An instant before, I had been sitting alone on a fiendishly comfortable sofa and slowly sliding into a reverie that might lead to sleep or to that placid joy that sometimes comes out of nowhere in a crowded room. Now I smelled anise, as if someone were toasting it in a pan beneath my nose, and the two glasses at my feet hurled their contents into the air, as if the room were abruptly dropping into a bottomless chasm. The streaming Jugendstil lines of Chateau Musar framed two entwined figures by the buffet table in such a way as to sketch an open door in the air. My vantage point had rotated around a single point and I was looking through an opening that had always been present but was only now accessible, into what smelled all at the same time like a musty cellar, a furnace, a fishmonger’s and something else that my nose had no name for. From the doorway a voice spoke to me. The words were unclear, as if from a radio tuned improperly to the station, and the greater part of what was said escaped me in a river of noise: F
A LA JI RO JI JA. All the same, it came to me perfectly that my correspondent was the extranoematic masque of the great Anaximander of Miletos, now part of a galactic consciousness and here imparting to me the knowledge that the true reality is a series of five concentric branes or skeins, arranged as spheres, the inner kernel of which is wrapped tightly around the uttermost crystalline circumference in such a manner as to defy Newtonian physics.
I said that was very cool.
Furthermore, Anaximander said, I was already set upon a path to the singular conjunction which would bind all these together, the birth of the burning ocean which flows through all things and makes of all places one place, and I should open myself to the experience so that I might live. Beware jealous Hephaestus and the bearer of the burning torch, Anaximander said, and remember what I have told you: five concentric spheres which must align.
I said I would remember – and evidently I have – and a moment later the wine was back in the glass and the doorway into eternity was gone.
This sort of visitation was then happening constantly: John Lennon had been given an egg by visitors from another planet, and passed it on to Uri Geller because it was, he said, too much of a drag on his mind. All across the United States, Australia and Europe, even the Middle East and Russia, people – including no less a man than Jimmy Carter – were seeing lights in the sky and making contact with entities that were either from other worlds or part of an eternal mind that dreamed the human race. Perhaps there was in the end no difference between the two. The naive perception of what an alien might be was yielding to stranger and more numinous conceptions of panspermic space gods, energy beings and sentient ideas. It would have been more startling if, over time, I had had no such moment of transcendence.
After all, everyone else did.
*
When I awoke the next day – or it may have been the next night – I was very, very hung-over, and painfully aware that I had talked the most appalling rubbish to those around me and most particularly to a broad-hipped and attractive arts stringer from the Sydney Morning Herald. I staggered out of bed and called my mirror an idiot, and he smirked at me and called me the same. It seemed unfair that I should have a hangover, while he looked indecently chipper, but that is the nature of reflections. Mind you, I suppose I had no way of knowing he wasn’t as unhappy as I was. I ate what I could without gagging, and set to my canvas – but when I began to paint, I knew that everything had changed.