Anticipations

by Christopher Priest

  “Did he want us to keep them for him?” she asked Paul. “He knows there isn’t room, and the last time we had those awful boxes of his for two years. We never could figure out where that smell was coming from—remember?”

  Paul waved the question aside. Michael, standing in the middle of the littered room, had begun to cry, and Paul studied this process with panicky fascination, as though, visiting a zoo, he’d suddenly encountered a beautiful tiger on the gravelled path. Then, as if the tiger were calmly to walk back into its cage, Michael stopped.

  “I think if we were to leave Michael alone for a minute—” Paul was more than willing to be led away. He collapsed into his bed with his all-purpose curse. “Holy fucking moly!”

  “You know what it is?” Veronica said soothingly.

  “Glänzende Götterlufte!”

  “It’s their goddamned vulnerability. They’re always so wide open, and they make us feel the same way.”

  “Oh, I don’t blame him, poor thing. But they do take it out of you somehow. Look at the shape Joseph’s in. One minute he’s going to do this, the next moment it’s something else, going on like a flittermouse. And all for what? For a boy.”

  “Michael is scarcely a boy.”

  Paul was too pleased with “flittermouse” to notice what she’d said. “I’ll admit he’s attractive in a rather unheimlich way. But even so, Joseph is old enough to know better.”

  “By the by, I’ve told Michael he can stay on here a while, so if he should—”

  “It’s not as though he even cared for boys. He doesn’t, as a rule.”

  “Be nice to him.”

  Michael was standing in the doorway in his underwear. He knocked on the open door. “I feel dirty. Can I take a bath?” Paul became Arabian in his courtesies. The apartment belonged to Michael. He could stay on a week or a month. He explained, twice, how the console worked, found a fresh bar of soap, and dug into the wardrobe for a fresh towel. As Michael accepted it Paul squinted at the writing on his bracelet, and laughed. “Oh, I like that! Did you see this, Ronny?”

  “Yes, I saw it.”

  “Your name. That’s precious.”

  Michael released the catch, and the bracelet glissaded down the folds of the towel. Paul tried to catch it, missed.

  “You like it,” Michael said, with a smile of stony insincerity, “it’s yours.”

  “Oh but—”

  Michael stepped round him, entered the bathroom, and locked the door.

  5 p.m.

  Bursting with new kittens and well content, Niobe lay beside Michael on the rumpled bed. From time to time Veronica would reach across his knees to ruffle the fur of her throat and she would purr. People (she thought) should be more like cats.

  Sleep had smoothed the grosser signs of age from his face, but gradually in the half-light of the hall she was able to decipher, in the pebbling of the skin, in the pulse of a vein, in a breath, the tragic implications wound into his genes. Was it worth it? worth the pain of reading, always more clearly, the same portents? Of growing every day a little guiltier until her heart was ripe to betray him? And for what? For love? She would not have called it that, but it was there, inside of her, by whatever name, the reason for it.

  A hollowness. As though some creature, intelligent yet inarticulate, compounded of volatile gases, were pushing and prodding at her inner organs, writhing in the oily machineries of her imperishable flesh. Not a child. (Of those regrets no particle remained.) An anti-child perhaps, which Michael’s sperm, dying within her, might cause to die as well.

  He woke at last, all fuzzy and mild from the sedation.

  “You’re in my bed. You’ll be all right.”

  “Oh.” Slowly his mind added it up; he grimaced at the sum. The worst of it seemed to be not that he’d failed but that it would be supposed he’d meant to fail. “Jesus. I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean to—”

  “You did mean to, I think,” she reassured him. “You have your own good looks to blame. There’s a hole in the wall near the flush mechanism. Paul was watching you every moment. When you blanked out we broke in. Five minutes, he said, would have done the trick. You made it quite deep enough.”

  He touched the bandage round his left wrist. “Who?”

  “Paul. Ages and ages ago, when I was typing in that typing pool, Paul was a chirurgeon in Grenoble.”

  “I might as well have gone straight to the Emergency Ward to kill myself. Christ!”

  “Well, you weren’t to know.”

  Niobe, moved either by suspicion or by appetite, was attempting delicately to take the bandage off his right wrist. He swatted her, and winced with pain.

  “Niobe, no! Bad Niobe. Would you like something to eat? Paul said you should.”

  “Maybe later.”

  “What a flutter you put him in. Once he’d sewn you up, it was all I could do to get him not to call in the University’s health service to cart you off. I said it would be better just to find you a nice pill that will see you through the next week or two. You won’t try again, will you? You said before that forty-one was premature.”

  “I promise not to kill myself. Now would you make some soup or something? Or if you’ve got to stare at me, do it from another peephole. Okay?”

  “Okay. But Michael?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  Was it only what he seemed to think—morbid curiosity? Wasn’t it at least as much the case that she liked Michael? She balked at the word “love”. But Joseph, evidently, had fallen in love with him. Why couldn’t she, eventually?

  She raised one partition and lowered another, turning the bathroom into the kitchen. As she rolled the Volkswagen to the tap, the bloody water sloshed about inside. She turned the faucet: not a drop. Recycling what was in the sac seemed tantamount to vampirism, but it was Michael’s own fault for having taken two days’ worth of water for his bath. Before she switched on the purifier she dipped a cup down into the water.

  The transparent pink of a red balloon blown up almost to bursting. She could taste soap, but of his blood there was not a glimmer.

  7 p.m.

  “And where,” Paul asked, blundering daintily in, “is our young Werther?” He put down a beribboned baggy on the Martian rock. Niobe came up to sniff at it.

  “Gone. For good, I think.”

  “Oh damn. And I just made such an ass of myself with Marilyn insisting on three of these. Niobe, get off that.”

  “We can split the third one between us.”

  “And I meant to thank him for this.” Jingling the bracelet. “Well, let’s hope he hasn’t gone and jumped into the Neckar. I wish, though, he had waited till he’d swallowed something to make him cheerful. Maybe you’d better swallow it.”

  “Me?”

  “Life goes on, Ronny. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. As you just said yourself, it’s for the best. If he’d stayed you’d only have got entangled. You’re well out of it. You know you are. Here, look.” He snapped the ribbon, spread the yellow paper apart like the crinkly petals of some November flower, to reveal three wedges of sacher torte. “You see. Even in the midst of affliction Earth pours forth her blessings. I don’t suppose there are any clean forks?”

  “Use your fingers.”

  He already was.

  “Guess what he—Oh, these are delicious.”

  “Then remember to say so—” he sprayed crumbs across the desk “—to Marilyn.”

  “Guess what he stole.”

  “All my notes.”

  “No, not as bad as that.”

  “All yours.”

  “That picture of Joseph—the one I’ve kept all this time, that his wife painted.”

  “Oh, the little shit. That enamel frame must be worth a year’s rent. I told you to hide all those things away. The minute Joseph called to say they were coming, I said put that where they won’t see it.”

  “I did. He found it. I’d fixed an old holly of me in the frame, but it had come half-way ou
t. He must have noticed. I just wish I knew if it were the picture or the frame that he wanted. If it was the frame I could feel righteous.”

  “I’m glad now I didn’t get to thank him for the bracelet.”

  “Otherwise it’s my just dessert.”

  “Our dessert,” he said primly, breaking the third wedge in half. He compared the pieces carefully and took the larger for himself.

  “Because I stole it when Joseph had just thrown me over. With, as I recall, a perfectly clear conscience.”

  Paul shook his head. “Love.”

  “Joseph does that to people.”

  “Apparently. But I don’t see how. He’s rather thick, he has no discernible gifts, and he’s that homely he’s almost grotesque. An indifferent physique. A complexion like a Matisse.”

  “A nose like a Brancusi,” Veronica added.

  “It’s all he has. A noble nose. That’s it.”

  “He’s irresistible.”

  “Ihr Gewaltigen! Does that mean you let him have it? The whole, overweening amount he asked for?”

  “He always pays me back. With interest.”

  “How much this time, Ronny? How much?”

  “Five thousand. He asked for ten.”

  “I throw up my arms,” he said, though this was only a figure of speech, for his arms hung, as ever, lifelessly at his sides, “and ask no more. You are a fool for love.”

  11 p.m.

  As he wound back the tape, Paul’s hand brushed the acoustics control, and when the music began again the whole room resounded with the doctor’s abrasive triumphings: “Oh! meine Theorie! Oh mein Ruhm. Ich werde unsterblich! Unsterblich! Unsterblich!” Immersed and unaware, he didn’t notice that Wozzeck had spilled over into Veronica’s part of the room until, at the start of Act Three, the phone rang. “Oh! Oh, I’m sorry.” He pulled back the sound just as Veronica answered. “If that’s Joseph,” he said warningly.

  The screen was blank, allowing her to hope that Paul had guessed right. A long silence and the screen still dead. Could it be Michael?

  “Ronny? Hello?”

  “Loren? Is that you, Loren?”

  “Ronny, your screen is jammed. Can you hear me?”

  “Loren?”

  “I can’t hear you, and there’s no image.”

  “Loren, I think we have a bad connection. Why don’t you”

  “I’m going to hang up and”

  “hang up dial again?”

  “dial again.”

  She hung up and sat beside the phone waiting for it to ring. It didn’t. This is what comes, she thought, of living in a country run by anarchists.

  She checked to see if the phone was still tied on a line to the library. No. Then she located the problem: RECORD was on, and the tape had come to an end. As she removed it from the slot, half of the holly she’d put in front of Joseph’s picture came out with it. Every face a little dimmer, every edge a little duller, as though Time had just taken a bite of her mind.

  In ballpoint on the back of the holly someone—Michael—had written: “This is just to say ‘Thanks for a lovely time!’ and ‘Till we meet again!’ The tape is for Joseph. Please see that he gets it. Ever, Michael D.”

  She put the tape back in the phone (Loren, evidently, had given up), reversed it, and pushed REPLAY.

  First the time—5:58—and date—2/7/97—flashed red on black as an operator chirruped: “. . . through your call to New York, sir.” The screen was blank while the phone rang: an unlisted number.

  Then, a clown’s face. A most literal and traditional clown it was—with a bright red bulb of a nose, maniac eyes, a broad, foolish frown, and tonsured crimson hair sprouting vividly from chalk-white flesh. “Blessed be the holy name of Jesus,” the clown piped in a piercing falsetto.

  “Hi Lulu,” Michael said. (His own features unrecorded throughout the call.) “Is Cole there?”

  “Michael! Michael Divine?” the clown shrilled. “Where are you?”

  “Germany. Is Cole there?”

  “Just a moment, Michael. Oh, Father Severson! Yoo-hoo, Father Severson! Michael, if you would hold the line just one minute I will see if I can find him. I think he may be hearing confession. Oo La La!” He rolled his eyes and tongue about in a parody of voluptas.

  “I’ll hold the line.”

  “I won’t say who it is. I’ll let you surprise him!” The clown’s face moved out of the camera’s eyes, revealing a few square feet of sandalwood wall and a severe, silver-on-teak crucifix.

  Then—another phone, a smoother voice: “Sassahty of Jesus, Fathuh Severson speakin!” Before black drapes, Cole Severson, blond and blandly Byronic, regarded the screen of his own phone with a smile of cautious satisfaction.

  “Hi Cole.”

  “Wail, wail, wail. As ah live an’ breathe! If it ain’t my old frayend Michael Dee-vahn! Long tom, no see.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What can ah do for yahl? In a word.”

  “I guess you know.”

  Cole dropped his accent. “And I guess you can say.”

  “What you didn’t do the last time.”

  “Through no fault of my own, dear child. You rather disappeared.”

  “I’m willing to come back now. On one condition.”

  “It isn’t for you to be making conditions.”

  “On one condition.”

  “And what is that, Michael?”

  “That you document the whole thing, as it happens, all the gory details. And that you send the instalments to someone who—whose address I’ll—I don’t have it now but—”

  “Oh-ho. It’s like that, is it?”

  “That’s my condition.”

  “A pleasure to fulfil it, Michael. Tears? Are you crying real tears? Bless your soul. But you still haven’t said, have you, just what it is you want me—the Society, rather—to do?”

  “I want you to kill me.”

  “Gently, lad, gently. Even on telstar, you know, there are monitors. We don’t live, like you Europeans, in a state of anarchy. We have a government, for which I daily give thanks to God.”

  “I want to join the Society of Jesus. Is that better?”

  “You’ll take the three vows?”

  “However many you like.”

  Cole raised his voice: “Lulu!”

  And the falsetto: “Father?”

  “You may join us on the other line.”

  The screen divided: Cole on the right, Lulu on the left. His costume now included a little straw hat with a big floppy fuchsia daisy sticking up from it.

  “Lulu, Michael will be coming to live with us at the rectory. He wishes to return to a religious life.”

  “Oh!” Lulu squealed. “How simply divine!”

  “Why don’t you sing a song for Michael—to welcome him home.”

  Lulu bowed his head submissively. Then, looking earnestly into the telephone he broke into a florid, forlorn rendition of Schubert’s Ave Maria. Tears rolled down from both his eyes, and, triggered by tweaks of his bulbous nose, his little straw hat lifted off his head each time he reached a particularly high note. The daisy wobbled on its wire stem.

  Veronica turned it off.

  Paul was standing beside her. “God,” he said, “don’t they break your heart?”

  J.G. BALLARD

  One Afternoon at Utah Beach

  “Do you realize that we’re looking down at Utah Beach?”

  As he took off his boots and weather cape, David Ogden pointed through the window at the sea wall. Fifty yards from the villa the flat sand ran along the Normandy coast like an abandoned highway, its right shoulder washed by the sea. Every half-mile a blockhouse of black concrete presented its shell-pocked profile to the calm Channel.

  Small waves flicked at the empty beach, as if waiting for something to happen.

  “I walked down to the war memorial,” Ogden explained. “There’s a Sherman there—an American tank—some field guns and a commemorative plaque. This is where the US First Army came asho
re on D-Day.

  Angela . . . Ogden turned from the window, expecting his wife to comment on his discovery. She and Richard Foster, the pilot who had flown them over to Cherbourg for a week at this rented villa, sat at either end of the velvet settee, watching Ogden with a curious absence of expression. Dressed in their immaculate holiday wear, brandy glasses motionless in their hands as they listened politely, they reminded him of two mannequins in a department store tableau.

  “Utah Beach . . .” Angela gazed in a critical way at the deserted sand, as if expecting a military exercise to materialize for her and fill it with landing craft and assault troops. “I’d forgotten about the war. Dick, do you remember D-Day?”

  “I was two.” Foster stood up and strolled to the window, partly blocking Ogden’s view. “My military career began a little later than yours, David.” Glancing down at Ogden, who was now staring at a blockhouse six hundred yards away, he said, “Utah Beach—well, you wanted some good shooting. Are you sure this isn’t Omaha, or one of the others Juno, Gold, what were they called?”

  Without any intended rudeness, Ogden ignored the younger man. His face was still numb from the sea air, and he was intent on his communion with the empty sand and the blockhouses. Walking along the beach, he had been surprised by the size of these concrete monsters. He had expected a chain of subterranean pill-boxes hiding within the sea wall, but many of them were massive fortresses three storeys high, larger than the parish churches in the nearby towns. The presence of the blockhouses, like the shells of the steel pontoons embedded in the wet sand, had pulled an unsuspected trigger in his mind. Like all examples of cryptic architecture, in which form no longer revealed function—Mayan palaces, catacombs, Viet Cong sanctuaries, the bauxite mines at Les Baux where Cocteau had filmed Le Testament d’Orphée—these World War II blockhouses seemed to transcend time, complex ciphers with a powerful latent identity.

  “Omaha is further east along the coast,” he told Foster matter-of-factly. “Utah Beach was the closest of the landing grounds to Sainte-Mère-Église, where the 82nd Airborne came down. The marshes we shoot across held them up for a while.”