I did not sleep, or perhaps I did not wake. I worked and worked and felt myself dissolve into the brush, the paint, the stone. Even my splinted fingers were nimble as I folded the dreamworld around the rivets in the door, as I cheated perspective to yield a high dome of blue stars on my ceiling and derive the benign face of the mother goddess of space exploration from the sinister surveillant I had drawn in my first flush.
They told me the days were passing and asked if I wanted a priest, then left when I laughed at them. Could they imagine a priest having anything to say in such a room? The guards now would not enter. They said that sometimes, when they did, they could not find me for a few minutes inside, even though the place was barely ten feet deep. They said that sometimes they got lost departing, as if the patterns of the walls were depthless and extrusive. It was understood that when the time came I would not be marched out, but that they should shoot me from outside the room, and then hose the whole place down until the colours ran.
On the evening before my execution they brought me wine, and I mixed it with rose madder and drew the final lines upon the east wall, then drank the rest and lay down upon the floor. I reached outward to the painted sky of rocketships and the benign angels of the other walls, to a dream of age and fulfilment, and begged.
I lay on the floor of Alem Bekagn, the place that is called ‘Farewell to the World’ because it is the gate of death, and felt, between the instants, the edges of a better door.
*
I am reaching for that door now, that door into somewhere else, not the one we came in by – although of course they are occupying the same space. I am an old man, addled by the heat and the smoke. I am a young artist in fear of his life. I am a magician, and this is my only trick. I can feel the texture of the door in the middle of the air in my boiling cell. I can feel the coolness of it, the safe place beyond.
I can hear my own breathing. No one else can do this. If I am right, I will save us all. If I am not, we will die now rather than dying in ten minutes.
I can hear the screams and wails of the others in Alem Bekagn. I can hear them yesterday and tomorrow and all through the wretched history of this place, all sick and bloody and needless. No one else can do this, and that is my shame. I should go from room to room and release them all, but what if there is a limit to my soul’s capacity? What if I can carry only so many? Only myself?
What if I can carry only so many?
Then Annie goes first. Then Colson. Then me.
Do I have the right to gamble on the madness of an old refugee?
Do I have any chance at all, if I do not? My hands were so much stronger then, my body so very beautiful. I would paint myself gladly now, if I could remember what I was. I would erect a mirror in my studio and paint my own body on the canvas just to wonder at the miracle that it was.
I can feel those muscles, ghost flesh on strong young bones. Those are the hands that grip the door.
There’s not even anyone waiting for me, in death. Or, how do I know? Perhaps there is. Perhaps one among the many lovely, loving women of the seventies remembers me fondly on the other side. Perhaps she never forgot me and has been waiting ever since. Or perhaps the afterlife embraces the aspects of ourselves that love in all their facets, and that part of Michael’s mother that did love me is grown into a whole self, and taps her feet impatiently on the step of the wondrous heavenly city.
Perhaps there was another life, not so sad, that I missed somehow this time, and will have in another world. Although look at this fine girl who is my granddaughter, and tell me you would trade her for any other.
No. I would not.
I would not trade her for anything, least of all my own life, here at its far, far end.
I stand up and open the door, and hear her call out in horror.
We step through, into a room full of ghosts.
this acceleration
MIELIKKI NEITH OPENS her eyes. The ambassador smiles an apology. ‘Inspector? We need the room.’
The blanket is warm.
‘How long was I asleep?’
‘A few moments only. Please: there is space. At this hour, Dr Wachsmann takes a bath and we use his room for a general staff meeting. There is a mattress in the consular office for late nights.’
‘Thank you.’ She should go. She should get on. But her head is foggy and heavy, and that is all she wants: a place to lay it down, and a soft cushion to support her neck. Tubman was right: this acceleration of the Hunter playback is tiring. She has things to do – but it wouldn’t be good to fall asleep, unwillingly, while doing them.
Later, she will work out what the story means. Annie Bekele against the world, government reaching out for the game engine. Is that what happened? How close is Hunter’s allegory?
‘A few more minutes. Maybe an hour. Thank you.’
‘Of course,’ the ambassador says. ‘Do you – do you need a doctor?’
‘No. No, no. I’m fine. Just sleep. It’s the memories.’
‘I see.’
No, you don’t. But I think I begin to.
down into the honey
FROM THE FALSE Chamber I fall, although falling implies a purpose or direction to my trajectory which is absent. I enter a world of painful colours and twisted shapes to whose extensions my eyes or perhaps my mind are incapable. I fall, drift or spiral through a nacreous place. Maybe it is literally a vast and convoluted shell, and I am tumbling toward the mouthparts of whatever crab lives within. Maybe I am grit, being expelled into an ocean as strange as this tiny curve, or maybe the curve is infinite and I will live like this for ever. I shall not grow old or die, but I shall grow mad until the distinction between what I am and what is out there is moot. Maybe. But it seems not: in the end I come into a library, and I smell burning books.
I am a scholar: it is an odour that excites in me an almost unmentionable panic – the worse because I do not know this library and it is vast. Orange flames curl around the white stone stacks scorching the rough marble black. Stone burns, if you get it hot enough. I am an alchemist: I have cause to know. Marble explodes, tiny shards slashing and blinding. Soon this room will be a storm of razors. A person could not survive here. Even if one were not struck, or broiled, or gashed, one would breathe in shards of glass and bleed into the lungs. I wonder if Scipio died of great blades of flying glass: if he came to a place like this, and was dismembered by some quite uncaring cataclysm.
The scroll cases are catching on the shelves, the sharp tang of their leathers adding flavour to the smoke. It is mouthwatering, like cooking pig steaks over coal. It is a horror, because these books are wonderful. The stacks are too perfect and plain to be human, the edges obedient to geometry, not masonry. That first book on the left is the lost Anatomy of Anaximander, in which he describes the function of organs and the physical location of the soul. That over there is the Song of the Magdalen, not the Christian one but her more terrible predecessor who was the hidden sister of the Karites, and in whom was vested the twinned grace of amnesis and regenesis. Over there are the lost designs of Theano for an engine deriving power from the expansion of heated water, that she said would reshape the practice of war and trade and compel the world to fit in the compass of her arms. That is the vision diary of ‘Arkyn of D‘mt, in which she foretells the history yet to come of the nation of Aksum for two thousand years. Works I have heard of, but never seen anywhere. Works beyond price, because their wisdom is matched only by their scarcity: more than likely these are the only copies in the world. Perhaps they are the only copies in any world.
Somewhere on the helical upper shelves, an inlaid tube containing Socrates’ true analysis of transmigration ignites, releasing precious stones in a shower like hail. If the damn fool archivist had spent his money on a metal tube instead of fripperies, the document within might be safe – for a while at least.
I realise I should take something, take as much as I can. It hardly matters what. The only theme of the collection is excellence. Even a catalog
ue would be priceless, confirming the authenticity of works and their dates, the existence and timelines of knowledge.
I run through the shelves, picking up whatever is cool enough to touch, filling my pockets, my waistband, my sleeves.
In the midst of the library there is a clear space like a glade in a forest, and in the space there is a long reading table made of stone. A demon sits there – the demon, my demon from my dream of this morning – in a peacock-feather cloak, long bird legs crossed at the ankle. As I approach, it lifts its head, and in the shadows of the cowl I see my son’s face.
*
Adeodatus was a model child. He was our joy and our terror as a boy, for his mind was as boundlessly curious as his body was energetic, and the combination of the two was a recipe for all manner of mishaps and calamities. It was I who found him attempting with a will to uncover the explosive secret of the Greek mystics, three months shy of his seventh birthday, and intending to deploy it in his game of model armies. He’d come close, and likely in the next hour would have blown up not only the little wooden carvings but himself and a goodly portion of the house as well.
As the boy aged, he became a fair disputant in his own right, until at fifteen he realised – with an acuteness of emotional wisdom his father still does not possess – that his course was set for a shipwreck. He had sought, until then, to find favour with Augustine by following in his footsteps, and thereby to laud the achievements of the sire and magnify the family name. Latterly he realised that Augustine hardly wished for another to take on the task of such magnification and indeed desired it to himself in his chosen sphere. Adeodatus, adroitly, changed directions and fixed on medicine not for the soul but for the body, seeking there a greatness to lay at the feet of his sire, and the choice was good. Augustine considered it, of course, a lesser profession – he had already concluded by then that all knowledge not contending with the direct contemplation of God was vanity – but not an ignoble one, and the caring nature of it and the son who espoused it was manna to him, which in turn was manna to the boy.
The meal was poisoned for them both, as you already know, and for me. The boy – who was my son, not just his father’s – carried his profession, or it carried him, into some pustule of a hut in an unlanced boil town along his road, and there he contracted a fever that would not release him short of the gates of death. They say his skin burned to the touch, and that he cried out for a cold bath – which they would not give, believing that he would be better served by bleeding.
The patient he went for was already dead by the time he arrived in the hut: a girl, about his own age. I try to tell myself that they are together and in love in some other realm, but I do not believe it. If I have made the true Alkahest, this shall be my great work: I shall raise him back to me. If I have not, then he is dead and likely so am I.
*
My life went wrong at Milan, or perhaps I should say that it turned from the path into which I had gratefully settled. Augustine was teaching rhetoric to students hardly less ungrateful than those in the south. Roman boys of good family were, it had transpired, bad debtors. The end of the term would roll around, and all those faithful faces in the front row would miss the last lecture and vanish into revelry, and my lover’s purse was full of moths and little more. His mother wanted him to marry an heiress. I can’t remember her name, the poor trout. She was a little creature with fine airs and graces, but all the intellect of a baby’s rattle. Monica was adamant: her son must wed a woman of class – and not me, though we’d never made any suggestion we might tie the knot, and I honestly wasn’t sure I wanted to. I had my lover, my son and my studies. I didn’t need to fret over which god should bind me to a man – or how, if he fattened in body and withered in heart as he grew older, I might release myself from the company of a boor. In response to Monica’s chattering, I wondered aloud whether I should find my own gentleman of class to wed. I had my son young, and my body bore hardly a mark; if Augustine married the trout – she had a piscine face, alas, and was forever gaping – I should say fair play and exchange rings with Longinus or Sextius and be glad. The chastity of Roman wives being legendary more as a noble ideal than a practice on the ground – or, as it might be, in the bathhouse, or on an ornamental lawn. I am forever confounded by those who would establish a way of doing things that all others must follow or be deemed unhappy. Sometimes the best things are found in unlikely places.
Except that it didn’t go that way. With a strange and terrible certainty, sudden and unheralded, Augustine came into my rooms and told me to pack. I must go, he said, back to Thagaste and away from him. It was over.
I thought at first he was saying the school was over, that he had a new job. No, he said. Us, he said. No more us, not now nor ever. He was forsaking the flesh, and seeking the life of the soul. I laughed out loud at that – there was never a fleshier man to love God – and that made him furious. Well, it would, but I was so far from ready for this diktat and hardly accustomed to being instructed by him or anyone else.
I did not let them see me weep. I packed, and nodded, and was gone, and Adeodatus promised he would shortly come to me and live for a time, before he set out into the world again. It was years, and then he came wrongly, and my world was night.
*
I was feeling just a little smug the day my son came home. I was a new woman, years from Augustine and the Alps, and I had, after some considerable time and effort, perfected a healing balsam that actually healed. I had the recipe from a cattle doctor in the market who took a shine to me – he said loudly that it was my tits, but I think he truly liked me for who I was and felt abashed. Drover men are not supposed to suffer from tender emotions, especially not the old, wise ones. He’d have been laughed out of the camp circle if he admitted to being anything other than an erection on legs.
The balsam was prepared from spoiled food, of all things, and was an effective agent against the spread of infection in an open wound. It was one of the most undemanding medicines I have ever known, though the drover insisted that it be used sparingly, lest its working be reduced. He said that certain ticks among his herds now spread a rash that no longer yielded to it, and he had no intention of further teaching the imps and demons of sickness about his magic.
Well, I had determined to use it on persons and not on cattle, and that was surely a better field to expend its power, as long as one was not frivolous.
So I was feeling fine when the girl arrived at my door and said there were men coming, with a great chest, and all for me. A gift from a lover, surely, she said, from some great prince. But I knew only one great prince and surely he sent gifts to no woman, and me least of all. I thought it more likely to be some curious delivery. It would not be the first time: a year before, a man sent me the jaw of a huge sea monster and asked if it was genuine. I told him it was, though honestly I did not know. If so, I shall never swim in the ocean again – the thing was vast enough that I might stand inside its mouth.
The cart came around the bend in the road, and I began to dread. The air seemed suddenly heavy with disaster. There was no lightness in the fellows in the train, no whistling ran ahead to announce their coming. They rode in silence, and beside them walked a single soldier with his spear, a broad-shouldered and sensible tesserarius. On the other side came a priest. Was it plague? Did they bring me a plague corpse, to name the sickness and pronounce the remedy?
They arrived at my door, and the priest said formally that he was very sorry. I could see that he was. His office forbad displays of physical affection, but his hand twitched at his side. He wanted to embrace me, to bear me up. He had lived this moment, he said. He had received the mirror of this news, and survived it, though he thought he would not, and I must come to him whenever I wished, he would do anything he could. It was not even an invitation to bed. He was begging me to know that I was not alone, and it was his agony that unleashed my own horror, that set it creeping from my spine into my heart, and then my skin, so that all the hairs stood u
p and I was sweating in the bright sun. I shouted at him to do the deed. Tell me.
He told me my son was dead.
I did not believe it, but I knew the motion of this play. Where should I go to see him? I must gather him up and lay him out. Where was he?
One by one, each of them turned to look at the pretty box. I will see it for the rest of my life as I saw it then, as if for the first time: the dark wood inlaid with tangled squares and mazes within mazes, so that you might believe the complexity of it went down forever into the grain: a box of puzzles and mysteries; a box for treasures.
They lifted it into my house, amid the braziers and burners and clutter, and they laid it on the floor like a fine new table. One by one, they took their leave.
*
My greatest treasure in the world floated in the box, midway between the surface and the copper bottom. In the cold of the north, the honey had become solid and borne him up, but now in Africa it was liquid again, though he had not settled to the bottom. He must be full of gas. I reached down into the honey and I put my hands behind his armpits, as I had when he was young and barked his shin or took fright at an angry bee. I touched his skin and began to weep, and he was so heavy that I could not bring him up. I hauled on him and felt the muscles in my back turn from strength to agony to exhaustion, and still he would not come. He was always stubborn. I simply kept reaching for him, because I was his mother. It took an hour, in that last embrace, before his head and shoulders slipped free, and then he sighed, as if I had said something particularly foolish.
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