I say what’s on my mind. The ‘f’ is drawn out. The ‘u’ in the middle stretches a little, in absolute aggravation. Bathos. I’m going to die of bathos. Well, I avoided one death in the depths, and here I am in a cave, looking at another. Of course.
The hard ‘ck’ comes out like breathing. I say the whole again, by way of confirmation: ‘Fuck.’
The Chamber of Isis is a place in a video game. It was made up for the game. It sounds plausible, but it’s not real. There was a lot of press about that, a lot of articles about Baudrillard, because there is nothing the nerd world likes more than to think itself adrift in a sea of French postmodern philosophy. If you can get Keanu Reeves to play the lead, so much the better.
The lead designer – a British woman, I remember – said she had coded it to be possible but vanishingly hard to find the way in, and that sort of challenge issued to the Internet usually stands for about a day. But the Chamber in Witnessed evidently resists intrusion. A group in Denmark actually went through the code, line by line, and still couldn’t do it. Apparently the coding is itself encrypted, a vastly sophisticated thing that uses external verification and all sorts of crap the NSA gets very excited about.
But I got in, drunk and stoned and ithyphallic. Orgasmic, even, if I remember.
Nikolaos Megalos wants me to find a place that exists, in so far as it has ever existed at all, in the conceptual penumbra of a popular toy.
‘You are disappointed,’ Megalos says, and it takes me a moment to realise that I actually am, a bit. He’s my nemesis, my Lord of the Rings. I wanted him to be a sort of cult-leading über-jock, not one of my people: not a nerd in a fascist cassock.
‘You’re being ignorant, Constantine,’ someone else says, and now I wish I hadn’t said ‘fuck’ already because if I say it again it won’t have the same bite.
‘You’re being ignorant and a fool. Oh, I know, you were always Gelasia’s student, not mine. I know that. But I hoped you would have absorbed a little of my discipline, if only by osmosis. Stella did.’ He nods to Stella, and she nods back. Stella not Stella, and her uncle with whom she shares no genetic connection. Or, no more than any human with any other, which is a lot.
‘Think about it, Constantine, and you will see. The god – your shark, mm? – your shark does not see the flesh of this world. That is the shadow. The god sees our true selves, our signs and signifiers. It sees the Hierophant, the Supplicant. It sees Stella, and what she means. It doesn’t care about the mist around her. The game is a world made of signs. It exists as a map of a place that has no physical reality, so we call it unreal, but to the god, it’s no more unreal than we are. It swims in you, and in the game, and the water tastes the same. Cleaner, there, if anything.’ He’s wearing a robe, like the haruspex in the other room but considerably cleaner.
I think – I think – I think I will punch him now. Yes. I think that is what I will do. Professor Cosmatou would cry. I don’t know how he can hurt her so. And look: is she here? No. Why? Because he does not dare. He does not dare that defilement, that lie. Or perhaps he has in mind a rebirth of his own somehow, as a brave young Greek, and a girl to match. He will leave behind Cosmatos and amuse himself with Anthea the net-mender’s daughter, and she will see his wrinkled old prod as a sign and signifier of the mightiest male organ in all of Greece.
Which is fucking mine, by the way.
Yes. Definitely time to punch him in the face – although rage, now: rage is a great clearer-out of the mental attic, I will say that. It’s so sheer and sharp that I’m no longer confused. Stella, yes. I like Stella, and I honestly don’t give a shit if she’s mad or not. When we leave here together, which we will do, we will be of the Fifteen Hundred, and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual applies to other people. If she believes she’s the reincarnation of my dead girlfriend and I say she is, then that is what her passport will say. It is what people will accept. I am Constantine Kyriakos, and I have ascended, in this moment, not to the role of Hierophant in some dead religion, but to the far more comfortable and powerful seat of motherfucking billionaire. Perhaps I should thank him for making things clear to me.
*
I don’t think I’ve broken my hand. I’m pretty sure Cosmatos’s nose has seen better days (bad aim on my part, I’ve got no experience with pugilism). Stella looks … Stella. If she’s surprised, she’s hiding it well. She looks weirdly placid. I’m not sure what the original would have felt about this, to be honest.
I should probably be looking at Megalos, so I do. Behind him, all the monks and monkettes are frozen in place. They’ve never seen anybody deck a soothsayer before, least of all their beloved Hierophant.
Oops. I hope I haven’t just moved to have Cosmatos executed. That might be going a bit far. Although I can. I can. Remember Bill, from Madrid.
Megalos looks rather approving. ‘He displeased you,’ he says. ‘And you struck him down. That is appropriate. Do you wish to challenge him in the circle?’
The town circle, for tests of blood. Christ. ‘No.’
‘And he will not challenge you, of course. You carry the god. So, then. All is well. Cosmas, shake his hand.’
We shake hands. Cosmatos stares at me over a bloody handkerchief, a little wild. One of the monkettes leads him away to matron for clean-up and an aspirin.
I feel like a heel. I hit an old man.
But something else has happened here. Megalos is smug as a cat. What have I just done? Something dangerous. I have shed blood here, in this place. Blood is always a payment, or a price.
I need to get to a phone.
Megalos points at the computers again. ‘It is one way to find the Chamber. Does it bother you, that it is a game? The product of a degenerate Anglo-African mind?’
Oh, yes, of course. I’m upset because the designer’s black. Never mind the whole thing is a literal madness.
‘You are still thinking of the world you knew, before the returning of the gods,’ he says, and he actually puts an arm around me. I can feel the fat and muscle of him, smell the predator sweat. ‘The Chamber exists wherever it is made – wherever the signs are sanctified and assembled. In a Catholic creation, that which is touched by God is incorruptible, but in the true Greece, incorruptibility is stasis and eternity is a curse of toothless age. Better to be renewed. Gods are born and fight and die, and they return stranger and stronger. So, too, the Chamber. Each iteration is different – but from within, they are all one. In 1657, the Chamber was created in Oxford by Elias Ashmole, who engraved and printed it as a collection of Tarot cards – but he mimicked the work, two thousand years earlier, of Ostanes the Persian, who came to know the Chamber through traffic with angels, and sculpted it in the clay of Kirman in 431 BC. The Knights of Malta wove it as a tapestry and paid the price for their heresy: the last of them was hanged beneath a bridge in Paris, where a plaque still bears his name. In imitation of that, you know, they hanged the banker Calvi from the Blackfriars Bridge in London!’ He nudges me: ritual murder trivia, ho ho. ‘The Chamber was drawn in blood on the interior surfaces of the Trojan Horse, and through it marched an army of thousands, one by one. It is the door into any castle, the gateway to the best and worst of worlds. It is no less real for being hidden in the folly of a game manufactured by a decadent cultural machine for the frittering away of lives made unbearable in the real world by political wickedness and social discohesion – and in it, we shall restore the world, you and I, if you can first but find it!’
For some reason, even after everything he’s already said, it’s weird hearing him say all this, because it’s obviously mad. I look at Stella for a long time, then back at him. I put my arm around her and draw her close.
Sacrifice accepted.
‘I’ll do it,’ I say, and I feel her relax. A prosaic sort of Hierophanting, but that’s hardly what interests me. No: Witnessed is a live game. It is networked. If I can play for a few minutes unsupervised, I won’t need a phone.
‘One more room,’ Stella says, but
Nikolaos Megalos demurs. I have seen enough of what he wears under his petticoats for today, apparently. Whatever secret is more weird than monk gamers or more vile than the blood room, I’m not going to be allowed in today. I look at Stella. She wants to object, to argue, but Megalos briefly scowls, and she averts her eyes.
Ape reaction: I want to hurt him for making her afraid.
Well, it’s fucking going to hurt when I kick his ontologies up into his armpits.
Stella walks me through our leave-taking, and back down the slope to the village – and then on, to her home.
*
‘This is where I live,’ Stella says, and I remember her saying it the first time we went to her room. We stood on the landing together and we knew that inside there was a future for us: a dense and desperate physical thing that was both desirable and terrifying in its strength – but also a togetherness for which we were both desperate, after years of causing bewilderment in our peers. It’s not so bad if you are a moderately gifted student – if you can get the answer a little faster. You will eventually be forgiven.
If you are brilliant, it’s different – not because there is envy or rejection from the other kids, so much, but because the things that interest you are alien. If you are what Stella was – what I touched upon and let go when she died – then you see an added layer in the world and under it. A waterwheel is a waterwheel, but it is also a variable, a standin for the mathematics of rotation and therefore for the planet, and that in turn leads you to wonder if there is a relationship between the behaviour of galaxies and millstreams, and then you find yourself considering cavitation and then you’re wondering whether space and time themselves might be susceptible to a form of super-cavitation, and then when that seems still too irritatingly approximate you express the whole thing in numbers and you’re reaching for the as yet undefined. How do you share that urge over chocolate milk? How do you, as a child, begin to communicate the glimpse you’ve had of the substrate?
Standing outside Stella’s room, and in each other, we saw how we might make a community of two.
This, now, is not a room. It is not on a landing, and there is no red sliding door covered in warning signs and totemic magazine portraits of Patrick Stewart. It’s a small white house in a white street, and there are daffodils growing in the window boxes. In fact, they’re everywhere, too rich and pungent, filling the mouth with over-ripe scent.
Stella takes my hand, a little tighter than I expected. ‘Come in,’ she says.
*
The little cottage is perfect: humble and white-walled, just enough space for one or for two. The floor is pale stone covered in a layer of raffia matting which I’ll wager was woven not a hundred metres from here, if that. The furniture is crude and wooden and looks endlessly comfortable. There’s a sofa covered in cushions, a fireplace, and a beanbag chair close to the wood stacked up along the wall. Away in the corner is the only concession to modernity: a small desktop computer. Even from here, I can see Witnessed running on the screen, Stella’s avatar waiting patiently for her to return. It’s not the default, the detective, but the other one – the revolutionary. There are four or five other options, and I can see that all of them are open to her. You have to reach the level cap with one character to unlock the next, so Stella has played a lot.
‘I always play her now,’ she says. ‘Megalos says I have a knack for the game.’
Yes, no doubt she does, just as she has a knack for being whoever it is he wants her to be. She can become, this Stella: can become whatever is required. And yet my Stella was not malleable, was not ductile in that way, so by definition that part of her must be fading, or the transformation cannot complete. She must be developing solidity, even a measure of stiffness.
She shows me the galley kitchen, the fridge and the fruit bowl, where the knives and forks are, the cups in case I want to make tea. We are delaying, both of us. As long as we are downstairs, we don’t have to answer any of the other questions, the ones about where we sleep and whether we touch again. The downstairs rooms are public and neutral, to a point.
She takes my hand and leads me up the stairs. Wooden risers, wooden treads. Cool black wood hand rail, very old, going up. The turn of the stair is narrow and steep, bringing us physically very close, my face level with her sacrum as she climbs. From one inhalation to the next, I realise I can smell her skin. On the landing she faces me, and again we are inside that circle of arms which presages intimacy, pressed by the walls and the bookshelf.
‘This is your room,’ she says.
I look. It is a lovely room, with a view overlooking the bluest, greenest waves on earth, and not a dorsal fin in sight. Two chairs and a little table for conversations and wine or lemon tea. I realise after a moment that it is laid out in the same pattern as my room in Glyfada, and I wonder if this is coincidental. No. Not here. Remember: everything is a sign.
‘That is the bed,’ Stella observes.
Not quite a double. Not a single either. Big enough. If she steps across the threshold, we will end up in it. I can feel our gravity again, the spiral of decaying mutual orbits. It’s not if, it’s when. Her touch, her hips, smoothing an imaginary wrinkle from her dress, then twitch away before the motion can become a caress.
I don’t know what to do. The etiquette of propositioning a woman not quite my dead girlfriend – and not quite a sympathetic kidnapper part of a vile organisation – is unclear. Then I catch the flavour of her mouth in the air. I look at her eyes, her mouth, her neck. The wider world goes away.
She pushes me across inside the room and strips off my shirt. I want to move towards her but she doesn’t permit it. She touches the newish muscle on my chest, fingers curious and exploratory. I suppose I was that much thinner when she knew me. I was younger. Her hand traces lower: butterfly fingers on my hip, my stomach. She moves closer, lets her hair touch my shoulders, runs her mouth along the skin. It is not a kiss, but the thing that comes before a kiss in the evolution of sex, the way a dinosaur comes before a bird.
She observes the results of her caress and makes a noise of approval. She does not let me close the distance between us. I want to put my hands on her, but I know I am not supposed to. She has a plan.
She moves around me, a possessive circle. I feel her forehead rest briefly on my back. She stands on tiptoe and inhales the nape of my neck. Her dress presses into my skin, that same absolute contact we had on the balconnade, and then, as before, she steps back. As before her withdrawal is a promise, and this time her hips linger, press harder. Fingers rest briefly on my shoulders in clear instruction: don’t move.
I don’t.
When the pressure comes back it has a completely different quality: the sudden and overwhelming awareness of nakedness. She has stepped out of her clothes, and now I can feel her in that absolute sense that comes with the first touch of skin on skin. Very slowly she draws me to the bed, her tongue on my lips and in my mouth with each step, my hands at last discovering the curve of her back, buttock, the side of each breast. She turns again, presses back into me, draws my fingers on a full, emphatic tour. Touch here. Hold. Explore. Good, now here … and here … Harder. Here. All yours. We’re shaking as if we’re cold, but we’re not. This is a desperation I have not known in years.
Touch.
I do. She hisses, drops her head back on to my shoulder, then grabs my hands away again and pushes me down on to the bed. I am a bridge, head and feet on the mattress as I reach for her. Swift fingers brush from my tailbone to my stomach, missing nothing. Her mouth brushes my skin. She lingers out of reach, then comes down on my thighs. Still not where I want to be. Where she wants me. She grabs my wrists and drops on to my chest, then bites my ear, and breathes into my mouth. The most important exhalation in the world. I want it in my lungs. In, out, in, out. I suck in oxygen through my nose, taste her breath again. She disengages, and something tickles. Oddly rhythmical, familiar, the first unerotic thing she has done since we came up the stairs, and still woven through
with strain and sex as she moves, nipples pressing and brushing.
And then I realise she is talking.
‘Constantine?’
I puff lightly back into her mouth, the lightest of movements shaping words. ‘Yes.’
Her lips tickle mine. ‘I do not believe in love. It is a figment of the mind created by biology for the propagation of the species, nothing more. But I love you.’
I laugh. She has not changed. We had this exact conversation nearly twenty years gone. ‘I love you.’ Confirmation. Love, desire, need. Hunger. Want. All true. All equally present in this moment. She shuts her eyes, shudders, slides along my skin. Back. Teasing herself. Teasing me. For … for what? Not just effect, not just to raise the pitch. I can feel it in the way she clings. I am not entirely unravelled. Cosmatos may be the expert on signs, but in this one area of his discipline I will bet my own head I am his master. I can read the subtext in her touch. This is more than lust. More than love, even.
As she moves, clenches, reaches, strokes, she is seeking something, not in me but in herself. But what is it? Not clarity, God knows. You don’t find that here, in the white heat of hormonal overdrive. Healing? Damnation? No. This has the flavour of neither. It is a new thing, a thing I’ve never seen anyone seek in sex.
I think I know what it is.
I do.
Yes, I do.
Courage.
And as she grips one of my legs between hers and presses one hand down on my chest, she has found it. My hands travel, my body moves. For a long time, I am touch. Then I hear her draw breath, and she whispers.
‘Listen to me, Constantine. Please listen. (Oh, God, yes.) No, listen. There is something you must know. (Hnn.) Megalos has changed his plan. Do you understand? He means to have the god out of you, take it. He thinks it was misdelivered, that you are to carry it to him and no further. Or that you are a mistake.’ Her fingers grip, grasp, slip away. ‘(Yes. Oh. Yes.) He believes he can draw it out, in the old way, with blood and sacrifice. Your sacrifice, your blood. He will take you to the zagre, and there you will fight. Everyone will see him ascend. Apotheosis. Then he will open the doors of mystery himself, blessed by his god, anointed in your death. He will come for you, maybe even tonight. It will happen. (Yyyah. Ah. Yes.) He will fight you and he will kill you and I cannot let it be. (Touch me. Don’t stop. Touch me.) I am not Stella. I am not, was never, will never be Stella. I like you, I want you (God, I do) but I am not Stella. My name is Diana Hunter and I am not mad. I am not! There is so much I must tell you. I can save you. We need to leave here, now, tonight, before we die. You must get me out of here. Get us both out of here.’
Gnomon Page 58