Dr. Andromas introduces himself (gestures grandly to a banner bearing his name in self-important letters), and the mimes lean on things all around him and giggle silently. He capers stiffly, loses his hat, finds it and draws from it in quick succession two carrots and a lettuce, slightly gnawed. He ponders these, apparently unsure where they can have come from, and leaves the hat sitting on the table behind him while he goes to confer with a mime on the other side of the stage. A rabbit scuttles out of the hat in pursuit of the carrots. The audience goes wild. Andromas turns around, and the rabbit bolts for the hat. Andromas lunges for it but misses, then jams his arm into the topper, and pulls out three metres of orange silk, a sink plunger and the shapely leg of a young woman. This last is sharply withdrawn, and a slender arm emerges and slaps him across the face. He recoils and jams the hat in a panic onto his head. A moment later he sighs and takes it off again. The rabbit is back.
At this point Dr. Andromas steps up a gear. He passes the rabbit to a very young Rheingolder, who takes it with some misgivings until the rabbit parks itself firmly on her lap and falls asleep. Dr. Andromas silently requests from the gentlemen of Rheingold a simple favour: might he have the loan of a gentleman’s watch? (Asking for the watch involves a great deal of careful gesticulation and the miming of cogs. It gives the clear impression that pompous Dr. Andromas believes he is dealing with imbeciles who don’t speak mime like any proper person.) The townsfolk of Rheingold recognise without difficulty that they are invited to dislike this persona, and they laugh at his popinjay manners and his battered dignity, and Andromas preens and assumes that this is all down to his massive comic talent. It’s a contract, and everyone is behaving quite according to their assigned role. The audience is thus perfectly prepared for The Trick.
The Trick follows a predictable pattern. Dr. Andromas takes the watch, and wraps it for safe keeping in a green pocket handkerchief. Then he gives a genial, reassuring wave and smashes the little green cloth bundle repeatedly with a wooden mallet. Several hundred people giggle and gasp. The owner of the watch winces and chuckles tolerantly and silently wishes himself elsewhere. His wife clutches at his arm with nervous good humour. Everyone knows it will be all right. But a look of dismay passes over the doctor’s greasepainted face. He looks in the handkerchief. He rattles it, and—somewhat alarmingly in the context—it goes tinkle. A single stray cogwheel falls out and rolls across the table. Dr. Andromas freezes. He raises one hand in a conjuring sort of a way, and then drops it again. He rattles the handkerchief. Tinkle. A sickly little grin appears on his face. He trots over to the side of the stage and talks urgently to one of the mimes. The mime shrugs. More mimes are called in, and the discussion grows animated. Ike Thermite is hurriedly brought out and does a creditable double-take when informed of the problem. Wrathful Ike despatches a mime to give Andromas a sound bollocking. The Rheingolders cheer and chuckle. Dr. Andromas makes his way to the front of the stage.
Andromas composes his face—impossible moustache and all—into an expression of the most profound regret. He clasps his hands. He is beseeching Rheingold in general, and the owner of the (currently deceased) watch in particular, to be merciful. He gestures to the table, the rabbit, to all the good things he has done. He gives the audience to understand that, in all his years, he has never made such an error as this. But he has, today, experienced the first pang of senility. He has blanked. Possibly tomorrow, when the pressure has abated, he will recover himself. Right now . . . he has forgotten the second half of the trick.
And he opens the handkerchief, and pours a stream of sand and cogs and glass fragments into his open hands.
There is absolute silence. It isn’t, of course, the silence of horror, although it’s sort of bleeding in that direction. It is the silence of demand: Make it okay, Ike’s audience is saying. This was funny and now it’s scary and you have to make it be okay. Ike Thermite steps forward and whispers sharply in the doctor’s ear. An ultimatum, apparently—Dr. Andromas looks around for salvation. The mimes desert him. Alone in the middle of the stage, Andromas fretfully wraps the pieces up and makes a few passes over them, but nothing happens. The mimes silently dismantle the scenery. They take the Alps away, and Loch Ness, and everything else, and the lights all go out except for the one which picks out Dr. Andromas like the accused on the witness stand. And finally he cries, on his knees, and this has turned out to be a very other kind of show from the one everyone was expecting. It is, on the one hand, quite clear that Dr. Andromas doesn’t know how to put it all back together, and it is, on the other, very unclear whether this means the watch or the world, or whether there is a difference. An awed, awful quiet settles on the people of Rheingold. There is a sniffle from one of the sturdier matrons and a murmur of mourning from the men. Dr. Andromas is the bearer of an awkward truth. Andromas himself rubs desperately at his moustache until it droops. His huge girlish eyes open very wide, and he allows a single tear to make its way down his face.
And just as Dr. Andromas falls down onto his face and his hat drops off to reveal not the balding pate I had somehow expected but a lush crop of messy hair cut sensibly short, the rabbit abandons its cosy perch and hops back onto the stage. And of course it is wearing a watch around its neck. Yes, that watch. The lights come back, and the mimes are sitting among the audience, and behind the stripy fabric of the circus tent, which is drawn aside, the scenery is all set up: the old world, in a single panorama, mixed with the new: the waterfall at Alicetown, the Westery Mountains, where what must at one time have been a great lake or an inland sea falls over a cliff into something which may have been the Indian Ocean. The first wonders of the age. The crowd erupts with relief and delight. Noise like thunder. Bright light. Joy.
At which point a thing happens to me. The chain of mental dominoes is very simple; the results are not. Complexity arising from simple properties: this is called chaos. The name is very apt. I am drowned in chaos. The woman in front of me claps, vigorously. She whoops. She moves her head. She has a lace band tied round a smart ponytail, and from it a sweet wash of jasmine rolls up and over me. Jasmine. And lace. Leah, in the church in Cricklewood Cove. And immediately thereafter, Leah with Gonzo. Cordite, pain and asphalt.
All the walls come down inside my head. I am betrayed, murdered, rescued, healed and bereft. I have saved the world and been rewarded with five shots in the chest, booted out to die in mid-air on a dusty road. I am toxic waste. I have known heaven, and now I am in hell, and there are mimes. And if there is one thing I will do, before I die in truth, it is this: I will find Gonzo Lubitsch, and I will know why. I will know when, and whether they felt guilty, or whether they laughed at me. I will make him tell me everything. I will make them tell me. Gonzo and her. Her, and Gonzo. I will ride the wind and arrive like a storm, and I will compel answers. I am almost screaming, and my eyes are filled with power and heat. I must be wrapped in boiling shadows. The world must surely be responding to this, making physical my fury, dripping acid from my skin. Although, if so, the man in the seat next to me is taking it remarkably well.
I will avenge. I will have recompense, oh yes. I will.
I am about to surge to my feet. I am about to run out and steal a truck or a bus, and charge off, chase them down. I will travel across the world, if I have to. I will go on for ever. I am inexorable. I am wronged. I am Nemesis, meting out just deserts. Any second now, I will begin. Any second now.
Except that I can see only one conclusion to that course. The road has a logic of its own, a violent, inexorable pressure towards some kind of fearful reckoning. If I chase Gonzo, I must catch him. If I catch him, I must confront him. We will fight. It will end when one of us is dead. Perhaps I will have to kill Leah too. And these are not my footsteps; Gonzo is the man of action. It is Gonzo who rushes in head first, who leads with the chin, gets back on the horse, takes no prisoners.
I am not Gonzo Lubitsch.
And so, when movement comes back to my limbs and I flee the circus tent into the dark, I do
not steal K’s bus and charge off in hot pursuit to who knows what bad end. I walk out into the night with a fire in my gut, and I do what Gonzo Lubitsch, in his whole life that I know of, has never really done.
I think.
Chapter Twelve
Wise man’s counsel; Jim and Sally at play;
Crazy Joe Spork and the Sandpit of Truth.
RONNIE CHEUNG might seem like an odd sort of mentor. You might reasonably expect, as I stand there, hallucinating in the dark outside the Rheingold circus tent, that I would be visited by Master Wu, or by Old Man Lubitsch. If I were in the business of choosing my spiritual guide, I probably wouldn’t choose Ronnie. On the other hand, it seems that I, some part of me at least, would choose Ronnie, because that is who I end up talking to. Not the real one of course—rumour has it he survived the war but I’ve no idea where he is. This is a sort of ghost.
We all carry a multitude of ghosts around with us: impressions of other people, strong or weak, deep from long acquaintance or shallow with brevity. Those ghosts are maps, updated with each encounter, made detailed, judged, liked or disliked. They are, if you ask a philosopher, all we can ever really know of the other people in the world. It’s usually best not to ask philosophers anything, precisely because they have the habit of what in the Persian language is called sanud: the profitless consideration of unsettling yet inconsequential things. Be that as it may, Master Wu and Old Man Lubitsch—even in portable form—are both too wise for this moment. There is a level of enlightenment to which it is painful to confess your failings. To admit to either of those elders that I have failed in my life, been so incompetent as to be cuckolded and shot within hours of saving the world (partially), is too much. To be forgiven by them would be to suffer another wound.
Ronnie Cheung, on the other hand, is familiar with screw-up. His advice is of the harsher sort, and it is spoken with the gentleness of a man replete with his own failings and conversant with shame and victim’s guilt and all the rest. Ronnie Cheung is the kind of Buddha you can imagine meeting in a bar, the kind who will save your soul and then rob you blind at the pool table. He is the sort of saint who will smack you repeatedly about the head and neck with a codfish if that’s what you need to get back on track. My subconscious chooses him, so it is Ronnie’s ghost-in-the-head which marches up to me to hear the whole sad story and give advice.
The night is cool. An indecisive moon is hanging above the circus tent while a murmur of approbation filters out through the canvas backdrops. I sit on a stump and stand up again, then sit. Then I stand up. We like to believe we are complex creatures, but sometimes we just get perfectly balanced between conflicting drives, and we dither. Up, down. Up, down. I’m a dog caught between a piece of steak and a comfortable chair. It’s tearing me apart. Up, down. Down. Hmm, no. Up.
“Bumhole. You are giving me a pain. I will not say where. The location of the pain you are giving me is so vile and intimate it would turn your man-parts to water even to contemplate it. I am not in the least bit joking.”
Ronnie’s voice. It’s not that I’m hallucinating. I know perfectly well he isn’t there. And yet I know also what he is saying and where he is standing, and how his big ugly fingers make a casually obscene gesture.
“Come on then. Out with it.”
And out it comes, all of it, in a great awful blurt, delivered without mercy or self-concealment to the empty air, and Ronnie—who isn’t there—paces impatiently.
“Oi,” he says, when I am finished and hanging my head. “You want to know what I think?”
“No.”
“Bollocks. And I’m telling you anyway.”
“Go away.”
Ronnie, who is intangible, hits me extremely hard in the nose. It doesn’t hurt exactly, but a cold rush washes over my face where his fist makes landfall. It makes me shiver, and little fizzy things happen in my brain. It sort of clears out the fluff.
“Bumhole, I am not here to amuse myself. I can do that with my own two hands and a jar of Swarfega. I am here because you, in your tiny wisdom, are seeking me, in mine. All right? So stop being a tosspot and pay attention.”
I pay attention, but in a surly way which conveys that I am only doing so to please him. I do not want his advice. I do not want anyone’s advice.
“The question is whether you were listening to your Uncle Ron all those years ago when he whispered salient truths in your ear, or whether you were in fact jerking off. Do you recall my tactical driving course?”
“Yes.”
“Do you recall every last detail of it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Almost certainly not, because I am a fountain of wisdom and you are a twerp. However. What I am about to impart to you was not in the basic course. I do believe that you took the advanced. Did you?”
“Yes.”
“In the advanced we consider longer-range missions with better opportunities for planning. In other words, strategic and logisticsbased driving missions. And in that context we talk about the value of local knowledge, understanding your enemy’s objectives and theatrewide intelligence. We talk about the minimum threshold for planning. Without a decent picture of what is happening around you, any decision you make is for shit. Still with me? Making sense?”
“I don’t know.”
“‘Yes, Ronnie, you are!’ ”
“Yes, Ronnie, you are.”
“All right then. So, you are fucked. Am I right?” Ronnie Cheung waves to indicate that I should respond.
“Yes, Ronnie, you are.”
“Yes, I am. You are fucked. You are desirous of getting unfucked. Unfucking is considerably more difficult than fucking. The Second Law of ther-mo-dynamics—because if you were thinking even for a minute that you are better educated than I am and therefore superior, Bumhole, you were mistaken—does not look with kindness upon unfucking. The level of fuckedness in a system always increases unless something acts on it from the outside. Worse yet, Bumhole, you do not own your own fuckedness. You do not appreciate the fullness of the fucking which has happened to you. You cannot hope to amend your situation without knowing what it is.”
“I do know.”
“I do not think that you do.”
“I do!”
“Then by all means, Bumhole, explain to me why you are not dead—indeed, why you are positively chipper—when you were recently shot in the digestive tract; why your best friend of many years seems to have been conducting an affair with your wife so secret that you never had an inkling, yet so astoundingly absolute that he has moved into your house, exchanged your furniture for his own and bought a bloody dog; and how he was able to do all these things for years when you have been living with your missus all that time.”
“I don’t know.”
“Ah. Well, then perhaps you might want to find out. And while you’re at it, you might want to ask who in all the world might want to damage the Jorgmund Pipe and why; and what name we give a man who wears black, appears from nowhere and cuts his way through a moderately competent fighting force as if they were made of yak butter. You might probe the origin of the mysterious phone call which advised you—presciently, I think we can now say—to avoid this job as if it were a dose of Mongolian Sausage Rot. And since you are a loyal student and friend of dear old Wu Shenyang, you might also give some thought to whether this black-clad sanguinary fucker, who pushed you and your former chum under a shower of the most awful and corrosive muck since the Goss brothers stopped singing, and who tried to cut your head off, is related by some chance to the other black-clad, sanguinary fuckers who may or may not have murdered your teacher and set his house on fire. All of which begs the question of how it is, Bumhole, that you were not warped, twisted and buggered in the eyeholes like anyone else would have been when you were drenched in a shedload of ontologically toxic goop, and whether your current problems derive in some measure from this close encounter with the poisoned lifeblood of the world. Am I right?”
I nod.
&nbs
p; “ ‘Yes, Ronnie, you are!’ How will you do these things?”
“I don’t know!”
“Fuck me, Bumhole—which now I come to think of it is a very strange invitation and you should ignore it—but you don’t know much, do you?” And this is so transparently accurate that I lose the surly and just want a hug.
“No, Ronnie. I really don’t.” And at this Ronnie Cheung peers at me a bit more closely.
“Balls,” he says at last. He slumps next to me on the stump and lights a dog-end from behind his ear.
“Your situation, Bumhole, is a mess. You know nothing. You cannot go over the top in that condition or you will die. You may have noticed that you have escaped death not once but three times in the last little while. Everyone around you is playing for keeps. You are playing with your sister’s doll’s house or—God help us—your own tiny winky. They are on home ground. You are in enemy territory. Pay close attention, Bumhole, because this is the burden of my song: you were set up. Is that clear? If someone knew enough to warn you—by phone, personally—then what has happened has in some measure happened according to a plan. We may assume that this plan does not especially favour you. We shall therefore regard it as an enemy plan. That being the case, you need to know about it. You need the cui bono?, which is to say who benefits? You need maps and charts; you need weather reports and field intelligence. You need these things because everybody else already has them. You haven’t got a prayer until you know what’s going on.”
“How much of it?”
Ronnie Cheung shrugs.
“All of it, for preference.”
“I don’t care about all of it. I just want to know my bit.”
“Bumhole,” says Ronnie Cheung, taking a deep drag on his gasper and tilting his head back to examine the sky, “what in all this ever gave you the impression that anyone was paying attention to what you want?”