I come to this understanding slowly, and it is primarily based upon the realisation that there is almost nothing about these ladies to suggest that they are virgins. Christian myth is not top-heavy (unlike nymph number twelve) with wanton heavens. In a good solid Christian story these girls would be covered up and singing hymns. That is emphatically not the case. These are women of blissful sexual emancipation (what the Evangelist would call, publicly, low moral character). If they sing at all, they are singers, not of hymns, but of the throaty, wicked kind of song where the chanteuse concludes her performance wearing nothing but a smile. Sadly they are also, damn the scruples I learned from Old Man Lubitsch and Aline and all the rest, lacking.
Don’t get me wrong: you can’t fault your nymph on deportment or diaphanous robes, and they have erotic intermittence absolutely nailed to the carpet. But get past the natural desire to grab a handful of Elysian backside and perform a bit of strenuous quality testing, and there are significant lacunae in their interpersonal skills, starting with a vocabulary which extends only a few hundred words beyond “Ooh, la la!” And though it is difficult to concentrate here—by reason of the pan pipes, the stretching and what appears to be a rolling Miss Nearly Naked competition—I am peripherally aware that “Ooh, la la” is not an expression often seen in classical Greek. The thought occurs to me, fuzzily, that I am spiritually misplaced. I am dead, but by some error—of a type with which I am extremely familiar—I am in the wrong afterlife, and while it is reasonably picturesque and full of (pretty but ill-educated and also curiously French) nymphs, I should really be getting along. I grasp a passing shepherdess by the least erogenous protruding part and attempt to secure some relevant information.
“Excuse me? Where am I?”
Titter.
“Am I dead? Is this my afterlife?”
Snort, giggle, bounce. The bouncing is interesting. I am distracted by it. She wanders off. I pull myself together, secure another one.
“I really need to go. This is lovely, and you’re all, really, very attractive, but I have things to do and places to be and I’m basically not your epicurean afterlife sort of person, I’m more the wild beauty, the thundering rivers and vast oceans sort of person. This is all a bit agricultural. So if there’s a door . . . ?”
Tee hee.
Grandmother Wu’s voice, in my head, suggests that this is a very special hell for intellectual, caring men. You can get your ashes hauled, get fed grapes and eat pastry all you like, for ever, but the whole thing will eventually drive you into a coma of self-loathing and ennui which will destroy your mind and turn your self-respect into a razor in the soul. If that’s the case, by the way, the Immortal Judge has sorely overestimated my integrity, but for the moment I’m still trying to get out of here.
“Anybody? I really want to get out of here!”
My wish is, in some measure, granted: I catch fire. This is not really what I was hoping for. It’s immediately recognisable: extreme discomfort and intense heat spreading from a point of initial ignition around the ankles upwards to my thighs and belly. I’m being burned at the stake. The invisible, intangible stake. Marvellous. Without the stench of burning and any sign of actual fire about my lower limbs, however, I conclude that this must be the onset of my translation to another inappropriate spiritual world of less pleasing aspect such as the Christian hell (returning to my roots, alas) described so forcefully by James Joyce in Portrait of the Artist, which the Evangelist read to us every year at Christmas time. So: to hell, thrashing in agony, because I have fallen down on my face. The nymphs pay me no attention at all as I writhe on the ground, which causes me to ponder the possibility that they are not true individuals but spiritual automata, and while I am thinking this, someone catheterises me, an intervention guaranteed to attract the attention of the patient. Thus, my journey across the infinite cosmos of the soul takes the form of me wincing and saying “ow,” and by the time I open my eyes, I have missed limbo and pandemonium and possibly the glimpse of heaven I was supposed to get to torment me for eternity, and am in hell.
Hell is smaller than I expected. Indeed, it appears to be a long, narrow motel room. The infernal prison of Lucifer Morningstar is upholstered in a cheap hessian wallpaper. There is also a bed, which does not seem to be a surgical table or other torturer’s tool, although there is a drip in my arm and another in a place more intimate about which you already know. If there is a part of me which does not hurt, it’s being very quiet about it. The only properly hell-ish things about it are a strange, nauseating sense of motion and the dim awareness of hissing and gasping voices, or possibly a large river or ill-tuned radio set, nearby: whoossh-shweeddogga-dogga-dogga-shweee, and so on.
The Devil—for surely no one else would think to catheterise a ghost—appears to have let himself go a bit. His stomach is proudly rounded, and protrudes like a single vast breast implant over the belt line of a green-and-purple sarong. His face is demonically out of focus.
“Hi,” the Devil says. “I thought you were a gonner.” And he smiles, revealing imperfect but cheerful teeth. My spiritual certainty recedes. Nowhere have I ever heard of Satan taking the form of an avuncular hippie. No doubt he could. It just seems inefficient. This is not a form ideal for offering blandishments or inciting fear. It isn’t even particularly reassuring. It’s just a guy who could use several years on a crosstrainer and a diet of lettuce so that he can view his ankles without the aid of a mirror.
“My name’s K,” he says. “Pleased to meet you. Don’t talk just yet. You’ve still got plenty of resting up left in you. Tomorrow we’ll see about getting some whole food for you.” But this last is already from a great distance, because now that I am awake again, conscious and possibly alive, I feel a great urge to sleep.
I sleep. I dream good dreams about being a kid, about Cricklewood Cove and Ma Lubitsch’s goulash and Old Man Lubitsch’s bees. I dream about Elisabeth and Jarndice, and Aline. I do not dream about sex, which means that the bit about Aline is quite short. I dream of educated nymphs playing poker and talking politics, and investigating crimes in a city covered in greenery and bioluminescent lights, where domesticated bison pull the trains (I am the mayor, but for all my power I can’t stop people from wearing red hats, which of course makes the bison belligerent and causes accidents every day). I dream about being a crab, which is less tedious than it sounds. I dream I am a playing card, but no one will tell me which one, and I cannot crane my neck to see.
I dream someone is burning bacon, and when I wake up, I find the Devil—K—swearing amid a cloud of giddy baconsmoke, working at a portable stove at the far end of the room. Mercifully, I am no longer attached to a bag by a thin piece of tubing protruding from my genitals, or I would probably be embarrassed. Indeed, even my drip seems to have gone. K looks back over his shoulder and waves. It’s not immediately obvious whether he does this because he knows I am awake, or because he can’t see me through the incinerated pig. I feel a moment’s guilt at being present for the death rites of a pig, because Flynn the Barman’s pigs did such sterling service not so long ago when we needed them.
K waves again, and this one is definitely for me. At his side stands a girl in batik, wearing the expression of one who told him the pan was too hot. She has short dark hair cut aggressively flat around one side. She marches through the fog of pig and stands in front of me.
“Hi,” she says. “I’m K.”
I must look confused. I thought K was the fat geezer. Some bloke with a dry mouth says this out loud.
“No,” she says. “I mean, he is. But I’m K.” As if that makes it all clear. My K—the original and still the most enormous—sheds his apron with a slightly despairing gesture and chucks the bacon remnant into a bin. He opens a narrow window near the stove, and instantly the smoke whisks out and the unmistakable sound of the road bores in. Yes. The silver whale. I am aboard Jonah’s bus. Jonah’s bus is my hospital, which is Satan’s hell. Satan’s hell is a camper van. K, somewhat troublingly, is not
the same as K. I gurgle a bit. Frege is not the ideal companion for a man recently ventilated. K the corpulent shuts the window and shoots his companion a cross look.
“Don’t do that to him, love. He’s been shot. He’s addled enough as it is,” and to me, “I’m K. She’s also K. We both—many of us here, actually—have the same name. Not that we’re all the same person, you understand. We just use one signifier to encourage random reassessment of the nature of our relationships. We don’t like to make assumptions, yeah?”
“Except K likes to assume he can cook,” the girl says savagely. “And he can’t cook.”
“I haven’t demonstrated the ability to cook,” K murmurs placidly, “but it’s inaccurate to say that I can’t. Perhaps I’m just waiting for the right moment.”
“The right moment.”
“Yes,” says K, airily, “possibly I am waiting for a moment which is tactically advantageous. I will suddenly leap upon the raw food and render it cordon bleu in a fit of remarkable efficacy, and in doing so, I will change the world for the better.” He smiles.
The girl arches a sceptical eyebrow and does not speak. It is the more sceptical because of the way her hair is cut, which is most probably why it’s cut that way.
K (the fat one, not the sceptic) demands a moment of communion with his patient. He fusses over me. He consults something which looks a bit like a medical chart, except that it is clipped to a piece of orange Perspex which used to be a drinks tray in a bar called Viva Humperdink!
“How do you feel?” he says.
“I don’t know.”
“Okay,” K says, and apparently ticks a box on the chart which says “Don’t know.” “Basically,” K says, “you’re doing amazingly well. You had a lot of cracked and broken ribs and so on, and they’re . . . well, they’re broken, but they’re not dangerous. Both of your ankles are sprained, but not badly, which is frankly a bit miraculous. And you have bruising all over you, and of course you’ve been, you know . . .”
This one, I do know.
“Shot.”
K nods.
“But you’re going to live.”
Oh.
“How did you find me?”
K looks uncomfortable.
“Thank Dr. Andromas,” he says, and ducks behind the chart. Apparently Dr. Andromas isn’t a topic he wants to dwell on. “Is there anything else you want to know?”
There are several questions I do not ask. I do not ask them because I have studied the gong fu of Isaac Newton. Assumption Soames, insurrectionist and secret heretic, required that her students grasp Newton’s Laws at an early age, so I was familiar with them even before Master Wu appointed Newton a sifu and a person of consequence. On the ostensible basis that every righteous soldier must know his enemy, the Evangelist stalked and purred from the back of the classroom to the front—a teacher you cannot see but know is there is infinitely more imposing than one you can measure with your eyes—and pounced on dissenters and doodlers and demanded they recite the blasphemous catechism of the alchemist and sorcerer.
So: A body continues in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line unless acted upon by a net external force. And here I am, continuing in my state of rest. This is the Law of Inertia, something of which I have a great deal at the moment. Although I may also, pace Albert Einstein, be in motion—the jag of the wheels and the hiss of air around the bus strongly suggests it must be so.
Next, the awkward one, which is frankly slippery as a fish and wriggles away from your comprehension as you reach for it: The alteration of motion is ever proportional to the motive force impressed, and is made in the direction of the right line in which that force is impressed. It comes out windy because it is naturally expressed neither in Latin nor in English, but in the murky cant of mathematics known as algebra. To the uninitiated, this law is so much noise, like the whistling around the bus. I am a master mason of both these temples. I speak not only algebra but also the language of the many-wheeled heavy transport. I know from the sound of the tyres that we are on an A-class road in medium repair, but that we are nowhere urban, because I can hear the dust and random gravel of the desert. I know that the bus needs a service, and that we are travelling at around sixty miles per hour, and that there is at least one vehicle of similar disposition close to us on the right. I know also that our front right tyre is somewhat bald and that its opposite number needs some air.
These things I know because I have kneeled at the feet of mechanical wizards and seen their secret texts. From my other initiation, the backhanded educational magic of the Evangelist, I know that Newton’s Second Law is rendered as F = ma, Force is equal to mass times acceleration. Force is measured in Newtons, and the everyday utility of this law can be assessed from the fact that almost no one knows that. On the other hand, almost nothing with cogs or an engine would work without it.
It is Newton’s Third Law—the one which Assumption Soames used to manipulate the world—which concerns me now: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Push an object and you will go backwards unless you brace yourself to offset the reaction. No force flows in one direction only. Now, a normal person, waking in an unknown bed, decatheterised and enveloped in the smoke of burned and carcinogenic breakfast biomass, would naturally ask a string of questions beginning with “Where am I?” or “How long have I been out?” or other questions more personal and vastly more dangerous. But I have been in this place before. The gong fu of waking from serious injury is also known to me. Questions like that lead in a given direction, or rather in two. They lead from the sickroom to the corridor and thence to the real world beyond, with all its demands and calculations and income tax returns and moral obligations; to weddings and women you love and to attendant catastrophes; and they lead backwards in time to the moment of injury and any matters bearing upon it, such as being blown up or sudden revelations of horrible conspiracies. Newton’s Third Law is to be approached with caution.
Newton’s work on gravity led to the discovery of the Lagrange point, a place where opposing forces cancel one another out, and a body may remain at relative rest. This is where I am right now; the forces in my life confound one another. Better, for the moment, to be here and now, without history or future. A man in need of breakfast. So that is what I am. I accept everything they say, and I wait while K (the batik-wearing sceptic, not the corpulent Lucifer) seeks out nutritious stuff which has not been immolated. And I set my eyes and my feet solidly on a path of painless emptiness for as long as it may last, because for all that I am on the mend in body, there is a dark place in my mind and in my heart which needs a little time before it may be stretched and probed and exercised, and before it is allowed to have an equal and opposite reaction. Because I sense something in it and around it which is alien to me, something boiling and hard, and it occurs to me, as I carefully turn my back upon it, and leave it in its ring-fenced, oxygentented, shadowed place, that this unfamiliar thing inside me may be rage.
I EAT BREAKFAST. I hobble around. Days go by during which I ask no questions and make a point of not answering any either. I do this not aggressively but vaguely, leaving anyone who tries to draw me out with the feeling they learned something, and that next time I will surely open up and let them know it all.
I do not let anyone know it all, least of all myself.
And so I eat and fugue and wander and listen to the chat, and sleep in K’s Airstream and listen to his deep, basso breathing when my chest twinges and I wake for a while. And through the days I sit with him, riding shotgun, even driving, watching the road go under the wheels and listening to the tyres. K does not ask any questions. Sometimes K turns up and she wants to know everything, which is almost as restful, because I can barely begin one prevarication before she runs off at a tangent and supplies me with another. There is a maze in my head, and I grow it out and up, and the monster in the middle fades away. This is a good thing. It works well. Until we come to Rheingold, and all the fences come crashing down. r />
WE GO TO Rheingold to meet up with a few more folks who are part of K’s loose-knit caravan, some guys K says I will totally love. Rheingold will get a circus, and we’ll all hook up and then travel on and around and just live, which I gather is what K and his friends do.
Rheingold is not in the Border, exactly—but on a bad day, when the wind blows strongly from the north-west, and the pressure dips over Lake Barbarella, the Border can just about embrace it, swallow it whole, and everyone goes down into the cellars and waits to see what will be there when they come back up. Rheingold is like Hurricane Alley, with monsters.
In the manner of people who live on the edge of disaster, the lady townsfolk are very correct and proper, and not in the least fond of surprises or loose behaviour. Their job (self-appointed but no less legitimate) is to make sure that Rheingold persists, remains itself, and imparts to the next generation a sense of belonging. They are the walls of Rheingold. Like Ma Lubitsch, another bulwark against the capricious world, they set great store by trifles and commonplaces, and they hew to a church of Regular Meals.
The men here, by contrast, are crusty, loud and bombastic. Their job (self-appointed but no less real) is to carve out a space in which their mothers, daughters, wives and sisters can make the town. They do this by the energy of their actions, the strength of their backs and their convictions and a great deal of shouting. They construct and maintain and occasionally knock down and rebuild the town. They do manly tasks and they hunt or farm, till the soil and maintain livestock, and they fortify and watch over Rheingold in case it is attacked by something ludicrous or dangerous or insane.