The Body Library

by Jeff Noon

  “What?”

  Her mood changed. “Quickly, Nyquist. Come on.”

  “You woke me up.”

  The man was looking around the office, an expression of distaste on his face. Nyquist took an instant dislike to him.

  “Aren’t you going to introduce your friend?”

  Monroe frowned. “Just move.”

  He did so, walking back into the bedroom. He started to get changed and then turned when he sensed someone behind him. It was Monroe’s colleague, standing there watching Nyquist intently. “How about a little privacy?” There was no response. The man’s eyes never left him. Nyquist turned round and pulled on the first clothes he could find. He walked back into the office, following the man, and he sat at his desk looking at his two visitors in silence.

  “Mr Nyquist…”

  Monroe paused, licked her lips and glanced at the folder she was holding. The file was closed, so he couldn’t imagine what she was looking at.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “I have to ask a question about the narratives in which you’re currently involved.”

  “Go on.”

  “Mr Nyquist, have you been completely truthful to us about the nature of those stories?”

  He tried to stay calm, to not react in any obvious way, but he felt his throat constrict. He held her stare and smiled and nodded and thought about what he should say next. He came up with a blank.

  “I’m afraid… I don’t know what you mean…”

  “I think you do.”

  Monroe’s expression had changed, she looked fierce, irritated. It worried him.

  “As far as I know, I’ve mentioned everything. But of course, it’s not always possible to remember every detail.”

  “Well, remember them now, why don’t you?”

  Nyquist looked from her to the man, who gave no clue as to what he was thinking, or what he wanted. He was a few years younger than Monroe, yet he was obviously her superior. His hair was neat, combed into a very precise parting. His features were as tidy as his hair, the eyes, nose and lips perfectly placed, highly symmetrical. It was an unnerving effect, almost masklike. Nyquist had to turn away from it, lest a sudden crack appear in the dull perfection.

  “Can you give me a clue, Bella?”

  “It’s Officer Monroe.”

  “Right. Of course. Officer. What am I looking for?”

  She didn’t answer him. Instead she looked over to her colleague and waited. Another moment passed, and then this man approached the desk and spoke at last.

  “I see you’ve been typing recently?”

  Nyquist panicked. He couldn’t help it. His eyes darted over to where the typewriter sat on his desk. He’d forgotten about his night-time vision. Yes, there was a piece of paper in the machine, but it had to be blank, a blank page. Surely he had only dreamed the words were there. But he could see the few lines of text, quite clearly.

  The man bent at the waist and tapped at the sheet of typing paper with a single finger. “You’ve been busy.”

  “No.”

  “No. Really?”

  Monroe spoke in a calm but determined voice: “Officer Drake needs to know, John. Help him all you can, I beg you.”

  Her use of his first name was a blessing. “I think… I think I wrote it in the night.”

  “You think?” Officer Drake loomed over him. He was a tall man and up close his eyes had a washed-out, early morning greyness to them. “Well?”

  The headache was even more pronounced by now, close to the forefront of his brain. Nyquist couldn’t answer, but Monroe helped him out:

  “Mr Nyquist has been writing a novel for two months now.”

  He pounced on this. “I have. It’s true. It’s based on a real-life case from my past.”

  “I see.” Drake nodded. He repeated the boy’s name to himself, taken from the sheet of paper. “Calvin… Calvin. Yes, interesting.” He and Monroe shared a look.

  “I have a character called that,” Nyquist explained.

  “And this… this letter, this desperate plea for help… this is a part of that novel?”

  “It is. I was dreaming and I woke up in the middle of the night with those few lines in my head and I thought they’d fit into the next chapter, so I got up and typed them.”

  “So, it was a brainwave? A visit in the night from the muse?”

  The man’s voice was becoming an irritation. Nyquist felt angry. “Sure. One muse or another often comes to visit me, in the night.”

  Monroe covered her eyes with a hand. Officer Drake stood where he was and he tore the sheet of paper from the typewriter. “Do you think this is a humorous event?”

  “I don’t know if the event is humorous, do I?” His voice grew tighter. “Because I don’t actually know what the event is, in any form. So why don’t you sit down and tell me.”

  The two men stared at each other.

  And then Officer Drake moved away from the desk, carrying the sheet of typing paper with him. Taking this as her cue, Monroe came forward and asked in a quiet voice: “John, do you have any knowledge of a man called Patrick Wellborn?”

  “I’ve heard the name somewhere.”

  “He’s a fellow officer, working for the Narrative Council.”

  “And what’s happened to him?”

  “He’s gone missing.”

  Monroe looked devastated by the news, now she’d said it out loud. But once again, Nyquist did his best to not respond, neither to her words, nor to her obvious distress.

  “He hasn’t been in work for weeks, and his apartment is empty. And we think you’re involved, John.”

  “What is this based on?”

  “We know you visited his apartment, for instance, and that you took some items away from there.”

  Officer Drake interrupted, “That’s enough, Monroe. Let’s take him in. Vaughn!” He called to the doorway and another man appeared there, ready to help with the arrest.

  With a shock, Nyquist recognized this new officer.

  He’d seen him at Melville Towers.

  No Other Outcome

  HIS HANDS were cuffed and his head forced down into his chest. In this manner Nyquist was led out to a black sedan parked directly in front of his residence. The building’s supervisor stared at Nyquist, frowning, and complaining bitterly to his wife about the riffraff they had to put up with these days. Other residents and neighbors watched him go, all peering through their windows at the sight, or standing on the pavement, and they whispered to each other of the shame they felt, and the fear that they themselves might be called up next. It was the most terrible of crimes, to be caught up in the wrong story, a bad story, a story that reached out and stopped other stories from reaching their proper endings: a dreadfully selfish undertaking. One woman spat at Nyquist as he passed by, before Officer Vaughn pushed him into the back seat of the sedan.

  They moved away from the curb. Bella Monroe drove, with Drake sitting next to her in the passenger seat. Vaughn sat in the back with Nyquist, but the subordinate officer made no eye contact with him, said not a word, gave no recognition at all that they had previously met. Nyquist thought about saying something to him, but realized that their previous meeting might become useful, depending on how the day’s events played out. He had to be careful, to say exactly the right thing at the right time, to tell the right tale. He looked out through the window and watched the city pass by. Another warm day; the sun heated the pavements and sparkled on the awnings of the shops, and the women wore their prettiest dresses and smiled at the men they chatted to. The complex array of the city’s grand narrative was evident to Nyquist’s senses – in the details as they intertwined, in the moments, in a single gesture or a sudden explosion of sound. It gave him a bittersweet feeling, that such beauty could exist in the city and yet to be denied its pleasures. And every so often one or more of the citizens would turn and look at the black sedan with its tinted windows, and they would know that inside sat a sinner, an abuser of the narrative;
they would know that a very different kind of story was heading towards its sorry conclusion.

  The car drove on, leaving behind the central areas. He knew they were heading for the Grand Hall of Narrative Content. He had never visited it before, he’d never seen it except in photographs in the Storyville Reporter, but he knew that people feared the place, that children were told cautionary tales of what happened to people who strayed off the proper story paths. People referred to the council as the “word police” or the “story cops”, and they were seen as being far worse than the real police. It set Nyquist’s mind reeling. If only he’d confessed straight away about Wellborn’s attack, and his death. But it was too late now, he had made his decision and would have to live with it.

  He looked across at Officer Vaughn, but the officer was still turned away.

  At last they reached Kafka Court, the large square to the south of the city which housed the governmental buildings. Nyquist looked at the edifices on each side of the square and the hundreds of people who hurried to and fro between them, carrying papers, notebooks, or parchments rolled into tubes and tied with red ribbon. The sedan entered a passageway between two of the buildings and headed down a ramp into an underground car park where the vehicle came to a halt. The side door was opened and Officer Drake pulled him out. He was pushed ahead, and momentarily he lost contact with the officers. He set off running. It was crazy, his mind was reeling. He knew he didn’t stand a chance of getting away, but the act of defiance itself was important.

  All the roads he’d never taken, all those brilliant stories he should’ve been a part of, they all wavered in front of him like a mirage, a haze of possibilities. He ran towards it, his head down, his feet almost stumbling on the concrete floor of the car park. He heard footsteps behind him, the sound echoing loudly in the underground chamber, but he ran on and on until he could no longer hear any noise at all, no footsteps, no shouts, no alarms or sirens, and he realized that he was alone. But he didn’t slow down, believing in this moment that he was once more in charge of his life. On and on and on. And then he slipped. He slipped on a patch of oil and fell heavily to the ground, the air thrust from his lungs, his cuffed hands landing awkwardly. The pain was barely noticed. He rolled over and saw only a bright light over him, a sunburst he couldn’t see beyond, and this was his despair, this light, he was trapped within, incapable of moving one more inch. And he waited there, slowly getting his breath back, until the sound of footsteps made him alert. They stopped close by. He got to his feet once more and stared at the three officers. Vaughn stepped forward but Drake said, “No, let him go. Let his story play out.” The statement was followed by a laugh. Nyquist set off once more, at a much slower pace now, little more than a walk. He reached the far wall of the car park and headed for a green metal door. It opened at his touch, with no effort needed, no struggle, and he walked through into a covered alleyway. He staggered down it, gradually picking up speed, running just for the sake of it, in love with the idea of running, of escaping. He turned a corner and hit another brick wall. It was a dead end. A fire escape was his only way out of there, wherever it might lead. He clambered up it and kicked open the first door he came to.

  It opened onto the main hall of the building.

  The noise was deafening: the sound of cogs and ratchets clattering, wires and springs spinning and leaping, engines stuttering and purring, wooden boards clapping against each other, and people shouting orders.

  He was standing high up on a narrow walkway that ran along the edges of the vast hall, and from this height he could see the many workers at their tasks, scurrying here and there along pathways and in between machines. A complex array of wires crisscrossed the open space of the hall, stretching from machine to machine, from portal to portal, and each shining wire carried along its length hundreds of index cards that travelled at speed before being deposited onto workbenches and counting desks. Workers examined these and clipped new cards to the wires and sent them on their journey. All the time, brass cylinders rattled along clear plastic tubes that clung to the hall’s ceiling: a monstrous intestinal tract.

  Nyquist couldn’t move. He was hypnotized by the sight that lay before him. For this was the Grand Hall of Narrative Content, where the millions of stories that currently threaded their way through the city were represented and accounted for. He’d heard about it in late-night whispers in bars and storytelling cellars. Fear, shame, despair: tales of horror.

  The hall was so expansive and sprawling it seemed to his eyes like a megalomaniac’s palace, or a giant’s playroom. More workers dashed around the floor, picking up files and papers, consulting documents, reading new cards and injecting cylinders into tubes. The workers talked incessantly to each other, their voices raised to be heard over the rumble and din of the machines in their operation. The hall sounded like a stock exchange at the height of the trading hour, and it wasn’t very different in intent; here stories were swapped and shared, bought and sold, examined, read aloud, edited, added to, re-examined, taken down, removed as waste, rewritten, with new stories arriving every minute through doors and portals in the walls that clattered open and shut like so many mouths. Everything that made Storyville great and wondrous and perilous was contained here. It was a giant shout hurled in the face of an uncaring god. Here was story itself in full flood. Nyquist searched through his vocabulary down to the bottom layers, but there was no single metaphor that could contain or describe the hall and its operation, and he felt dizzy from the effort. A fog appeared before his eyes and he almost fell forward, over the rail, into the building’s monstrous embrace.

  He caught himself at the last moment and he moved along the walkway until he reached a flight of steps leading down to the factory floor. Surely here, amid the confusion, he could slip away, become lost, one more person in the vast crowd. If only his hands were free. But he had no time to think of that, all he could do was move forward, find another way out and from there to the street.

  The chaos engulfed him. The noise, the constant movement, the smoke, the smell of oil, the roaring and pummeling of engines, the chatter and cries of the workers, the whizzing of the story cards along the web of wires: all combined to take charge of his body, his five senses. Workers nearby had turned away from their bench to stare at him. He kept on with the last of his strength, running along an aisle between two of the machines, pushing past the startled operatives. A whistle blew, loud and piercing.

  A warning: Intruder in the midst!

  They closed ranks against his progress. Nyquist’s hands were bound together so he used them as a ram, a club, to force a way through, making it a little way, taking off down another aisle, searching for a way out. He tumbled forward and reached out blindly to keep himself upright, and his cuffed hands grabbed at a cluster of wires, pulling them down, snapping them in two. He landed on the floor. Index cards started to slide off the broken wires. Papers scattered. He was surrounded by stories, so many of them, falling, cascading, tumbling over and over like a fall of leaves. And he lay where he was, his eyes taking in episodes described on the cards nearest to him.

  Patterson, H.J. Moved in with mother. Both hate each other.

  Coleman, Leo. Lost his job due to misconduct. (Connect to Ives, John, Card 347-BCP)

  Jeffries, Susan. Extramarital affair with Naylor, Andrew. (Keep watch)

  Evans, William. Still missing from family home. (Seek other strands)

  Odette, Ronald. Dead. His own hand. Tablets. (Infected)

  And suddenly he was thinking of Zelda again. How their own separate stories had connected for a short period of time.

  Why? Why did she have to die?

  The words on the cards blurred, and he felt that he was losing consciousness, as all around the hall continued with its elaborate, neverending task. Nyquist was hardly aware of its operation anymore. The machines and the workers were silent, even as they sounded, even as they shouted, even as they clamored and cried out. He was cut off from them, from any hope of recognitio
n. Just another scattered man in a scattered land.

  There was a scattered man, who took a scattered path…

  He clambered back to his feet, using his cuffed hands as support. He felt weak, tired beyond any normal measure as though he’d been on a five mile run. He swayed from side to side, but managed through sheer willpower to stay upright. He was trapped at the center of a mirage. A group of workers surrounded him, keeping him penned in. And yet just a few yards away he saw a face that he knew, and his heart broke at the sight.

  It was Bella Monroe.

  His friend, his officer, his trusted story collector.

  She waited there with the two other officers.

  Nyquist waited for her. For what was the use of progress? There was nowhere to go. And he knew then that this building was designed only with capture in mind: the labyrinth of stories always led back to its own beginning, its own end. Only the words carried on. This was why the three officers remained where they were, staring at him, waiting patiently. And knowing this, Nyquist walked towards them. Monroe smiled at him and held out her hands, and he walked towards her, his own hands outstretched and still connected by the cuffs, and the two sets of hands joined as one, hers and his.

  He was here, in this building.

  There was no other place and no other time.

  Only one story was possible from now on.

  John Henry Nyquist willingly gave himself to it.

  Between W and Y

  NYQUIST FELT his hands tighten on the arms of the chair as the overseer asked him for a second time, “When did you first meet Patrick Wellborn?” But every possible answer he could give seemed wrong, except for the truth. A sharp pain needled away at the back of his skull.