C

by Tom McCarthy

  Somehow, they manage to find their way back up to the surface. Laura stays in her chamber; Serge steps out into the daylight. He climbs to the spot he surveyed the landscape from earlier, and looks down on the site again. For some reason, he recalls Pollard’s warning about fake antiquities, and the mad thought flashes through his mind that this whole cemetery might somehow be artificial, phoney as a dud 10-piastre coin. His ankle’s itching. His clothes are smeared with black. Looking out across the wider landscape’s ridges and plateaus again, he takes his notebook out once more and writes in it: Here as good a place as any. Before closing it again, he crosses the word Arenow out and writes, in its place, Am not.

  iii

  The journey back to Cairo takes much less time: they’re travelling with the flow. The river seems more concrete now, a moving belt that carries the Ani instead of shunting it. Now that it’s no longer rushing past him, Serge can see the individual silt clusters floating in the water’s mass; huge clods as well sometimes, being flushed downstream as though the land were voiding itself with a giant, continental enema. He’s alone with the crew now, the sole European. Fragments of his earlier conversations with the others play across his mind as the dahabia passes landmarks he vaguely recognises from the outward voyage-but, since he’s moving in the wrong direction, these fragments play themselves out backwards, words and gestures scrambled through reversal. Serge scratches his continually itching ankle as he tries to reconstruct their phrases from the plash and creak, their positions and movements from angles of the boom and tiller or the sunlight on the water…

  Boulaq, when they arrive there, seems reversed too somehow, not quite right: as though, in approaching it from the wrong side, they’d turned its quayside, warehouses and tugs into negatives of themselves. Pollard, who meets Serge off the boat, also seems wrong.

  “Didn’t your parting go on the other side?” Serge asks, looking at his hair.

  “My what? Not got your land-legs yet?”

  Serge is stumbling, his left arm lowered right down to his ankle, which he’s scratching violently now, digging his nails in, drawing blood. This isn’t the only reason he’s stumbling: he feels dazed and disoriented, as though seasick, although he senses that it’s something deeper than seasickness that’s making him feel this way. Pollard’s talking on and on, assailing him with information that doesn’t make much sense, as though its logic were reversed as well:

  “… might opt for the direct transmission system… still to be decided… general feeling you’ve done excellently though… Macauley asked me to pass on…”

  “How does he know how well I’ve done? I haven’t reported back yet.”

  “… leave brought forwards… back to Blighty and all that… Port Said tomorrow… report can be completed in your own time…”

  “My leave?” asks Serge.

  Pollard nods.

  “But it wasn’t due for…”

  Pollard starts explaining something, but Serge can’t listen properly: the movement of the taxi into which his colleague’s bundled him is disorienting him further. They head straight for his apartment, where he finds his trunk already packed. He spends a fitful, sweaty night there, then is picked up in the morning and put on a train to Port Said.

  “You’ve got a nasty cysthair,” says the man sharing his compartment as Serge scratches at his now much-inflamed ankle.

  “A nasty what?” asks Serge.

  “A nasty cyst, there,” the man repeats, more slowly. “Ought to get it looked at.”

  Serge looks at the man instead.

  “You’re an optician, right?” he asks him.

  “Not at all,” the other answers guardedly. He begins to tell Serge what it is he does, but Serge ignores the content of his speech, trying all the while to place his accent. That he can’t do so isn’t due to any sociological failing on his part, but rather to a growing acoustic strangeness overtaking him: all dialogues and tones have sounded foreign since he left the Ani, as though his aural apparatus had been thrown off-kilter by the land’s vibrations. Port Said assaults his ears when he arrives: porters and lemonade-sellers haggling for custom, ships’ representatives calling out the names of liners as they round up passengers, water-busses sounding their horns as they ply the harbour. Serge is escorted, by somebody or other, to the Island and Far East Line’s Borromeo, on whose deck a gaggle of tourists, businessmen and civil servants argue in cacophony with stewards over hold and cabin baggage, cabin size and cabin allocation. One lady is repeatedly complaining at being given the wrong one. Serge, surrendering both his cases, is led to his own, where he immediately lies down, passing the next few hours in a state between waking and sleep. At some point the Borromeo’s engines start up, and the whole room begins to shake. A little later, the huge ship starts moving. Dragging himself from his berth, Serge steps out on deck to watch the land dwindle away. The city’s lights appear to flicker on and off, as though signalling, Pharos-like, across the water. The ship’s wake runs backwards like an inverted vapour trail, its parallels nearing each other as their distance from the stern increases. He wonders if they converge at some point-at the horizon, wherever that is, or perhaps just beyond it. Conversations are taking place around him: someone, leaning on the railings, is pronouncing the “Said” of the disappearing city’s name “said,” as in “he said, she said…”

  Supper is called, but Serge skips it. Lying on his berth, sweating, he becomes aware of his own body in a way in which he hasn’t been since adolescence. His limbs are heavy, gangly; they don’t seem like part of him-at least not parts that fall beneath his mind’s control, but ones jolted and twitched instead by some manipulating hand located elsewhere. The engine noise sounds in his chest. It seems to carry conversations from other parts of the vessel: the deck, perhaps, or possibly the dining room, or maybe even those of its past passengers, still humming through its metal girders, resonating in the enclosed air of its corridors and cabins, shafts and vents. Their cadences rise and fall with the ship’s motion, with such synchronicity that it seems to Serge that he’s rising and falling not so much above the ocean per se as on and into them: the cadences themselves, their peaks and troughs…

  When he falls properly asleep, he dreams of insects moving around a chessboard that may or may not be the sea. At times it seems more like a gridded carpet than a chessboard. The insects stagger about ponderously, stupidly, reacting with aggression towards other insects when these cross their paths: rearing up, waving their tentacles threateningly as antennae quiver and contract, and so on. Despite the unintelligent, blind nature of the creatures’ movement, there’s a will at work behind them, calculating and announcing moves, dictating their trajectories across the board. The presence of this will gives the whole scene an air of ritual. Above the board a voice intones, with a rhythm as steady as a galley drummer’s beat, “K4, K4, K4…” After a while the woven mesh of sea turns into desert: an enormous stretch of it, all parched and cracked, across which figures stumble-multitudes of them, whole armies, linked up hand-in-hand, wave after wave, heading towards a demarcated compound. Falkiner’s inside the compound, fiddling with an urn, his station-marked geometries forming the supporting struts and girders of some kind of sandbox…

  Serge wakes up briefly. His berth’s drenched in sweat. Looking around the cabin, he sees nothing special: just a cupboard and a chair, his untouched trunk. The single porthole gives onto a night that’s lit up by a full, bright moon. The sky’s a kind of silvery-black-an odd combination that, again, gives him the sense of having pitched up in a photographic negative. Turning away from the reversed image, he falls straight back into a lucid dream, once more of insects-only this time, all the insects have combined into a single, giant one from whose perspective, and from within whose body, he surveys this new dream’s landscape. In effect, he is the insect. His gangly, mutinous limbs have grown into long feelers that jab and scrape at the air. What’s more, the air presents back to these feelers surfaces with which contact is to be made,
ones that solicit contact: plates, sockets, holes. As parts of him alight on and plug into these, space itself starts to jolt and crackle into action, and Serge finds himself connected to everywhere, to all imaginable places. Signals hurtle through the sky, through time, like particles or flecks of matter, visible and solid. Each of his feelers has now found its corresponding touch-point, and the overall shape formed by this coupling, its architecture, has become apparent: it’s a giant, tentacular wireless set, an insect-radio mounted on a plinth or altar. Serge is the votary kneeling down before it, arms stretched out to touch it; he’s also the set itself-he’s both. Twitching and shifting in his sleep, he fiddles with himself, nudging his way through the dial-and picks up, through the background thrum and general clutter of the conversations taking place all over, particular voices coming from some station that’s located in a cabin close at hand: one neighbouring his own, or two away, or possibly lying one deck above or below his and then one cabin along. They’re special voices, saying important things. There’s music coming from this nearby cabin-station too, but Serge can’t quite hear its melody: it, like the special voices’ words, is just beyond the range of hearing. He can tell, though, from the rhythm, the solemnity and grandeur of both words and music, that they form part of a ceremony of such splendour and magnificence that, to it, the ritualised game of chess he witnessed earlier bore the same relation as a canapé does to a banquet, a prelude to a symphony or a quick sketch to a fully executed masterpiece in oil: the ceremony is the climax of the process he’s embarked upon, the main event.

  “That’s the place to be,” he says aloud-and, in doing so, wakes himself up. It’s morning. The engine noise is still going. The ship’s rising and falling as before. He feels slightly better; climbing from his berth, he digs a dressing gown out of his trunk and, slipping it on, makes his way to the Borromeo’s baths. These are located near the ship’s stern: two rows of wooden shacks each of which opens straight onto the deck. There’s a queue to use them. Men read papers and nod at one another gruffly as they wait. Women queue on the far side. A young, honeymooning couple wave to one another from their segregated spots; the lady who was complaining earlier looks out to sea indignantly, clasping her towelling robe tightly around her shoulders. Crewmen change the water between bathers, sloshing from buckets as they swing these across the deck. The bath itself is filled with hot sea-water, cooked in the ship’s bowels and piped in through a tap; what the staff are replacing is the bowl of fresh water that rests above this on a shelf. Both have traces of engine oil in them. Stretched out in the tub when it’s his turn, Serge watches the petroleum and coal-tar swirl and coalesce across the water’s surface; then he shifts his gaze down to his ankle, which is suppurating. Flesh-eating, Laura told him: lying on his back quite still, ignoring the impatient tapping on the door, he pictures himself as a dead man in a sarcophagus, swathed in spells and imprecations, heart replaced with secret writing and censorious seals. The soap has a logo embossed on its surface; it has tar on it as well. Serge feels more dirty after he’s washed than before, as though his labours, like those of a dung-beetle, had soiled rather than purified him.

  Breakfast consists of blocks of bacon, fried bread, black pudding and mushrooms. They all look the same: dark lumps of matter. They taste the same as well, all giving off the flavour that, in vapour form, pervades the whole ship: a compound of decayed funguses, hot engine oil and onions. The indignant lady’s at it again, complaining to the stewards that she hasn’t been allotted the right table. The stewards try to relocate her, concocting a story about mixed-up or badly copied seating manifests, which they attempt to sell, with profuse apologies, to the family at the table the complainer covets. These people grudgingly move, although not to the complainer’s table, which is too small to accommodate them: they’re re-seated at a third one, which necessitates a new eviction, a new relocation. Pushing his plate away half-eaten, Serge leaves the dining room and skirts a game of deck quoits being played outside. Pausing for a while, he stares at the patterned markings and the poles rising above them; then, feeling fever taking hold of him once more, heads back to his cabin.

  Lying on his berth, he sweats. The sweat, mixing with the tar-deposit left on his skin from his bath, turns black. That’s what he thinks is happening, at least: it’s possible that the sweat came out of him black in the first place. Mela chole: he hears, amidst the engine’s rumble and the room’s higher-pitched rattling, Dr. Filip’s thin, electric voice talking about black meat. He hears a lot of things: chants of the Versoie Day School children as they reel off their pronunciation exercises, footsteps marching along country roads, the whirr and clack of film projectors or motorised curtains. It seems that these are welling upwards, from the bottom of the sea-and that the sea itself is black, oily and dense. Closing his eyes, he pictures it as shellac, and the Borromeo’s prow as a gramophone needle, bobbing as it rides the contours of a disc. After a while, the image grows so strong in his mind that he becomes convinced that there’s a Berliner just outside his cabin: one deposited by someone, for some reason, in the corridor beside his door. He can clearly hear it playing, repeating variations of the same phrase:

  Inking the centre

  Inking the centre of the country

  Inking the centre of

  These words loop a few times, then give over to a single syllable, repeated:

  kod, kod, kod, kod…

  – a word, or non-word, that itself eventually mutates, changing its provenance and status until it finally resolves itself as a knocking on the cabin’s door.

  “Who is it?” Serge calls out, or thinks he does.

  “Thod, thod, thod, thod…” a voice calls back. The door swings open, and a steward enters.

  “Bodner?” Serge asks.

  The steward says something, but it doesn’t make much sense. His voice trips over itself, stuttering.

  “Bring the Berlin inner,” Serge says. “In, I mean.”

  “The what’s the what, sir?” the steward enquires, holding some kind of clipboard in his hand.

  “The ink set,” Serge replies.

  The steward momentarily retreats, returning behind a trolley on whose tray large, black machine parts lie. The parts, while different shapes and sizes, have a uniform look: Serge can tell that they all belong to a single, larger contraption. The steward runs his finger down his clipboard’s columns until he finds the entry that he’s looking for and, tapping his fingertip twice against the spot where the pertinent paragraph commences, tells Serge:

  “It’s inset inset.”

  “What’s that?” Serge asks him.

  “It’s in sections,” the steward repeats, without moving his lips.

  Serge tries to ask him what the thing is, but his lips won’t move either. None of him will move-not willingly, at least. It’s by virtue of the gangly, mutinous movement willed from elsewhere he experienced earlier that he finds himself, after the steward’s disappeared again, crawling across the floor and, taking hold of each machine part with his feelers, reassembling the contraption. Segments slot together with an automated ease: he knows right where to put them, and they know right where to go. Pretty soon he has the whole thing up and running, in its full arched, columned, knobbed and needled glory: it’s an even better version of the wireless set he merged with last night-an improved model, Mark II. As he hits the first clear frequency a voice spills from it and announces, in the manner of a call-sign:

  “Incest-Radio.”

  Lubricating the dial with his sweat, Serge sets to work, first capturing, then moving around, the cabin-stations he was tuned into last night, the station-chambers. It’s a matter of laying hold of each, feeling for its parameters, its walls, then lifting it up intact and relocating it wholesale: the room, and the conversation taking place in it. Parts of each spill in transit, trickling into other ones, distorting and corrupting their own conversations and adding to the general clatter-but Serge knows that, in methodically capturing and relocating one after the othe
r, he’ll eventually unearth the one he’s looking for, the special chamber. He can feel its music growing closer, its melody gaining form; its voices, too, becoming clearer, more precise. At the same time, commensurate with this drawing-near and sharpening, corresponding to it with a perfect technological alignment, a part-to-part reciprocity, he can feel excitement and desire growing in him, driven to a pitch by the knowledge that nothing is, has been or ever will be more important than the successful execution of the task in which he’s now engrossed. Finally, whether after minutes or hours he can’t tell, it happens: the chamber itself looms into view and opens up to him, and he finds himself bathed in its noise and signal-not just the transmitted noise and signal, picked up at a distance, but the source noise, the source signal, at their very point of origin-as he stands right at the ceremony’s heart, its main participant.

  The ceremony is either a coronation or a marriage-or, more properly described, a combination of the two. The décor is regal: jewel-encrusted birds set upon boughs of gilded trees while peacocks roam a petal-strewn floor below them, their fanned-out, diamond-studded tails displaying large suns as they brush over amber-coloured blocks of camphor delicately spun around by filigrees of twisted gold. Serge and his bride stand on a raised podium. The couple wear, wrapped around their heads, black ribbons that have smudged their foreheads in the manner called for by the ceremony’s custom. To the side of the podium a steward stands wearing the ibis-mask of Thoth, holding a set of towels or tablets, copy orders or reports. Behind the steward stretches Versoie’s Mosaic Garden, stables dilapidated, path all overgrown, the ruins of the main house visible beyond its collapsed wall. Next to him, transformed into a towel-robed priestess, aerodynamic purple and black triangles running backwards from her eyes, stands the ship’s indignant lady. Behind these two, just off the podium, seated at front-row tables over which they lean excitedly, are journalists: they thrash incessantly at typewriters, hammering out sheets of copy that are torn from their machines’ rollers the moment each page is filled, handed to scurrying messengers and whisked off to Fleet Street to be typeset alongside insurance ads, printed on huge, groaning presses, bundled and dispatched to cities all around the world and scoured in secret rooms for keywords and acrostics. Since Serge and his bride have commandeered the typewriters’ ribbons for their headgear, the pages are all blank-but this doesn’t seem to worry anyone: they’re hammered and handed out, transferred, typeset, printed and pored over nonetheless. Opposite the journalists, on the podium’s far side, musicians play, vibrating as they do so. Behind these, and all around, handmaidens-androgynous children of both sexes-hold black circles aloft as they chant, in unison: