A thoughtful silence settles. Someone says, “Far out.”
The expression is new to Jasper. He guesses it means “Wow.”
“If you were a sci-fi writer,” Aphra Booth taps her cigarette, “I’d think, Well, it’s clichéd drivel, but his fans’ll go, ‘Far out.’ Or, if you’d fabricated a cult, I’d think, Scientologists, Hare Krishna, and the Vatican peddle their hogwash, you may as well peddle yours. But what sticks in my craw is how you tosh up your drivel in the lexicon of science. You piss in the well of knowledge.”
“We should thank Miss Booth,” says the ufologist, “for revealing how academia thinks. If I don’t believe it, it’s not knowledge.”
Aphra Booth exhales smoke. “Fifty years from now, you’ll look back at this horseshit and cringe with embarrassment.”
“You’ll look back in fifty years, and think, Why was my thinking so shackled and anal?”
“Shackled and anal?” Aphra Booth stubs out her cigarette. “My God, how we give ourselves away…” She walks off, stepping aside for Elf, who is with an exotic-looking young woman in black velvet with silver designs.
“Jasper, there’s someone I’d like you to meet. This is Luisa.”
“Hello, Luisa,” says Jasper.
“I love your music.” Luisa sounds American. “I adore Elf’s songs, I hasten to add”—the women exchange a bright look—“but I played ‘Wedding Presence’ so often, I wore out the track. It’s numinous, if I can use that word.”
Numin, thinks Jasper, from “divine will.” “Thank you. Are those comets embroidered on your jacket?”
“Uh, yeah. Stylized ones.”
“Luisa did them herself,” says Elf. “I got an E for Needlework and the remark, ‘Could try harder.’ Scarred for life.”
“Are you a ufologist?” Jasper asks the American. “Or a fashion designer?”
Luisa finds the questions amusing. “Neither. I’m a journalism student, here on a Fulbright scholarship. Lucky me, right?”
“I doubt luck has anything to do with it,” objects Elf.
“Aw, shucks. I was in Three Kings Yard when Elf had her Martin Luther King moment.”
“God, that all went by in a blur,” says Elf. “I don’t recall what I said, but I sure as heck know it wasn’t ‘I have a dream…’ ”
“Too modest, Elf. I covered the story for Spyglass magazine, and I quoted you, and hey presto—my first byline in an international publication. So. I owe you.”
“Ah, stuff and nonsense.” Elf’s smiling in a way Jasper hasn’t seen since before the death of her nephew.
“Do you guys have any plans to tour in the States?” asks Luisa. “They’d eat you with a spoon in New York, in LA.”
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” asks Jasper.
“Oh, it’s good,” says Luisa. “Definitely good.”
“Our label’s mooting a short U.S. tour,” says Elf, “now Paradise is selling in reasonable numbers. Who knows?”
* * *
—
HALFWAY DOWN THE curving stairwell, Jasper hears a voice. “Hello, Mr. Famous.” Its owner has one blue eye and one black eye. He’s dressed in a black suit with silver buttons and white piping. “We met on the stairs last time, too,” says David Bowie. “I was on my way up, then. Now I’m going down. Is that a metaphor?”
Jasper shrugs. “If you want it to be.”
David Bowie looks behind Jasper. “So…is Mecca here?”
“Her last letter was from San Francisco.”
“Where else? Ninety-nine people, you forget instantly. Mecca’s one in a hundred. Five hundred. She shines.”
“I agree.”
“Jealousy is not a demon that tortures you.”
“Women go with who they want to go with.”
“Precisely! Most men are ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane.’ I’m jealous of your sales, though. If it’s not a cheeky question,” David Bowie leans in, “did Levon cook the whole Italian affair up?”
By chance, Levon is in Jasper’s line of sight, topping up Peter Sellers’s wine glass at the foot of the stairs. “Not unless he’s ten times craftier than we know.”
“Mine’s ten times crappier than I thought. My singles got no airplay. My label didn’t promote the album. It flopped, too.”
“I bought it, David. I found a lot to admire.”
“Ugh. A glass of whisky and a revolver would be kinder.”
“Sorry if I’ve offended you.”
“No. Excuse my thin skin.” David Bowie runs his hand through his ginger hair. “I’ve been the Next Big Thing since I left school, but I’m still broke. Hobnobbing with stars at Anthony Hershey’s Midsummer Ball is nice, but tomorrow I’ll be Xeroxing reports in a shitty office. What if my only talent is kidding people I have talent?”
Two women in thigh-length boots pad by.
“Overnight success,” says Jasper, “takes a few years.”
David Bowie swirls the ice in his glass. “Even yours?”
“Three years of busking in Dam Square. After”—can I trust him?—“a long spell in psychiatric care.”
David Bowie meets Jasper’s gaze. “I didn’t know.”
“A discreet clinic in Holland. I don’t advertise it.”
David Bowie hesitates. “My half-brother Terry’s in and out of Cane Hill Hospital, near my parents’ house.”
Jasper shakes his head, like a Normal might. Or should I nod?
“I was with him, actually, when his first episode happened. We were walking down Shaftesbury Avenue, and he started screaming about the tarmac cracking and magma oozing up. For a few seconds I thought he was joking. I was like, ‘Okay, Terry, it’s gone far enough.’ But he meant it. These two coppers thought he was high so they wrestled him to the ground—into the magma that was now burning Terry’s flesh. Fucking terrifying stuff, psychosis.”
Jasper remembers Knock Knock in mirrors. “It is.”
David Bowie crunches an ice cube. “I worry it’s ticking away in me, too. Like a time bomb. These things run in the family.”
I know it’s ticking in me. “I’ve got two half-brothers. So far, they’re fine. The de Zoet side of the family blame it on my mother.”
“How did you get it under control?”
“Psychiatry. Music helps. A…” What to call the Mongolian? “…a kind of mentor.” Jasper drinks his punch and lays out his theory. “A brain constructs a model of reality. If that model isn’t too different from most people’s model, you’re labeled sane. If the model is different, you’re labeled a genius, a misfit, a visionary, or a nutcase. In extreme cases, you’re labeled a schizophrenic and locked up. I’d be dead without Rijksdorp sanatorium.”
“Madness is a label you can’t peel off, though.”
“You write about it, David. Or atypical states of mind. Perhaps your phobia will make you famous.”
David Bowie’s nervy smile comes and goes. “Got a ciggie? Lennon cadged my last one. Like the Scouse millionaire he is.”
Jasper gets out his packet of Camels. “Is he still here?”
“Yes, I think so. He was in the cinema.”
“What cinema?”
“Anthony Hershey has a cinema in the basement. How the other half live, eh? Down that corridor, past that big Ming vase thing”—he points—“there’s a door. You can’t miss it.”
* * *
—
THE STEEP STAIRS descend at right angles. Posters of films line the glossed walls. Les Yeux sans visage. Rashōmon. Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse. The stairs continue for longer than is likely. They end in a small lobby that smells of bitter almonds. A woman, absorbed in her needlepoint, occupies an armchair. Her head is hairless. “Excuse me, is this the cinema?”
The woman looks up. Her eyes are voids. “Popcorn?”
Jasper sees no
sign of popcorn. “No, thank you.”
“Why do you play these games with me?”
“I don’t understand.”
“That’s what you always say.” She pulls a cord. Curtains part to reveal a slab of darkness. “Enter, then.”
Jasper obeys. He cannot see his own hand. Another curtain touches his face. He steps into a tiny auditorium of six rows of six seats. Each one is occupied except for an aisle seat on the front row. Through the cigarette smoke, a title is projected onto a screen: PanOpticon. Jasper’s shadow hunches low as he makes his way to the free seat. If John Lennon is here, Jasper fails to recognize him. The film begins.
* * *
—
IN A BLACK-AND-WHITE city of winter, an omnibus shoulders its way through a crowd. A careworn middle-aged passenger looks out at busy snow, newspaper vendors, policemen beating a black-marketeer, hollow faces in empty shops, and a burned skeletal bridge. Jasper guesses the film was shot behind the Iron Curtain. Getting off the bus, the man asks the driver for directions. By dint of reply, the driver nods at the enormous wall obscuring the sky. The protagonist walks along its foot, looking for the door. Craters, broken things, wild dogs. Circular ruins where a hairy lunatic talks to a fire. Finally the man finds a wooden door. He stoops and knocks. Knock-knock. No reply. Knock-knock. A tin can is hanging from a piece of string vanishing into the masonry and the man speaks into it. “Is anybody there?” The subtitles are English, the language is all hisses, slushes, and cracks. Hungarian? Serbian? Polish? “I’m Dr. Polonski. Warden Bentham is expecting me.” He puts the can to his ear and hears what sounds to Jasper like drowning sailors. Knock-knock-knock. The prison door opens. A hood of tiredness gathers around Jasper’s head. He submits…
* * *
—
…AND WAKES IN a tiny cinema, lit by the mercury sheen of the vacant screen. Jasper looks around. Everybody’s gone. The film’s over. “Sorry for your loss,” says a cultured voice next to him.
Jasper swivels and sees a face from an album cover: Syd Barrett. Pink Floyd’s ex-singer is printed in black and white on the glowing dark. “How was the film? I nodded off.”
Syd Barrett runs a Rizla along his tongue. “People who never set foot beyond the Land of the Sane just don’t understand.”
“Understand?”
Syd Barrett taps the long joint on its filter. “How indescribably sad it is, here on the outside. Got a light?” Jasper finds Grootvader Wim’s lighter and holds up the flame. The big spliff in his lips, Syd leans in. He fills himself with smoke and offers the spliff to Jasper. The hit is instant. It is not just cannabis. Syd’s words arrive late and fragmented, as if bounced off the moon. “We think we are a One, but you and I know an ‘I’ is a ‘Many.’ There’s Nice Guy Me. Psychopath Me. Wife-beater Me. Narcissist Me. Saint Me. I’m-all-right-Jack Me. Suicidal Me. The Me Who Dares Not Speak My Name. Dark Globe Me. I is an Empire of ‘I’s.”
Jasper thinks of Knock Knock. He wonders if a whole minute ever passes when he hasn’t thought of Knock Knock. Only inside music. He asks, “Who is the emperor, Syd?”
Syd Barrett stares back through black holes, opens his mouth, and puts out the joint on his tongue. It hisses.
* * *
—
ANOTHER FILM BEGINS. The screen glows blue. Stippled sea, glazed sky, a bandage-colored coastline. Onscreen, a White Star liner fills the shot. Its horn blasts three times. A caption reads OFF THE COAST OF EGYPT, NOVEMBER 1945.
Cut to—deck of the SS Salisbury. The captain squints at the prayer book: “Lord God, by the power of your Word you stilled the chaos of the primeval seas…” The man is a northerner not given to theatrics. He recites the prayer as if reading nautical protocol: “You made the raging waters of the Flood subside, and you calmed the storm on the Sea of Galilee.”
Cut to reveal—the deck. Passengers and crew stand around the coffin. A haggard nurse holds a three-day-old baby. The baby is crying. The captain pushes on. “O Lord, as we commit the earthly remains of Milly Wallace to the deep, grant her peace…”
Cut to—Two English ladies look down on the service from the railing of the first-class deck. “A tragedy,” remarks the first lady.
“My maid heard from Mrs. Davington’s girl that she”—the woman points a gloved finger at the coffin—“was no ‘Mrs.’ Wallace at all, but an unmarried ‘Miss.’ ”
“Servants are such incorrigible gossips.”
“As if they’ve nothing better to do. Apparently, Miss Wallace was originally a nurse who went out to Bombay on ‘the fishing fleet,’ if I may use the vulgar term. One of those young women who go to India with the purpose of netting themselves a better catch than they might at home. Miss Wallace, it seems, overestimated her talent as an angler. She got ‘hooked’ by a Dutchman, who,” she whispers, “already has a wife and family in Johannesburg…”
The first lady’s eyes open wide. “Is that so? Was he brought to any kind of justice? Couldn’t the governor intervene?”
“Once the U-boat menace was over, the scoundrel hightailed it to South Africa. Miss Wallace was left alone, in that state, in Bombay, with nothing but a third-class passage. What with the delays at Bombay and Aden, however, and nature taking its course earlier than expected…”
“While it takes two to tango,” the first lady fans herself, “one would need a heart of stone not to feel for the poor woman.”
Zoom in on…the coffin, and Jasper at three days old.
Second lady voiceover: “Look at the sorry mite. Motherless, illegitimate. Hardly the best start in life, is it?”
Four sailors in uniform carry the coffin to the edge of the railing. A fifth plays “The Last Post.”
Cut to—underwater. The hull of the Salisbury floats above. The sun is an orb of dazzle. A coffin plunges through the roof of the surface. Fish dart away. Milly Wallace’s coffin sinks…sinks…sinks and settles on the ruckled seabed. The Salisbury’s propellers churn and rumble. The vessel moves off, leaving strains of Saint-Saëns’s “Aquarium” in its wake. Fish inspect this latest offering.
For the first time he can remember, Jasper’s eyes swell with tears. It is an alien, astonishing sensation. So this is how it feels.
Might Milly Wallace have a message? The coffin grows until its lid fills the screen. Jasper presses his ear against the wood…
Knock —
Knock knock knock —
KNOCK! KNOCK! KNOCK!
KNOCK! KNOCK! KNOCK!
Jasper’s up and running for the exit…
* * *
—
PEOPLE FILL THE corridor, talking, flirting, drinking, smoking, arguing. Jasper’s gasping for breath. His heart’s thumping. The knocking didn’t follow Jasper up the steep Escher-like stairs, but the sense of a death sentence did. Knock Knock’s excavating himself and there’s nothing I can do about it. Brian Jones appears in a cape, beads, and gold. “I’ve a bone to pick with you.” His breath is yeasty and ill. “The lyrics in ‘The Prize.’ I recognize a few lines. From that night in the Scotch.”
Jasper hauls his thoughts from Knock Knock to the ailing Stone. “It’s true. Some of them are yours. Thank you.”
“The magic word.” Brian Jones makes the sign of the cross. “I absolve you. See? I come up with tons of ideas for Mick and Keith but all I get from them is sarcasm. I ought to write songs, you know. Even Wyman’s got one on Satanic Travesties. That settles it. I begin. Tomorrow. Got any drugs?”
“Lord de Zoet of Mayfair and King Brian of Cotchford Farm.” Rod Dempsey, Dean’s drug dealer, sidles up. “Did I hear my favorite three words in the English language, or did my ears deceive me? ‘Got any drugs,’ was it?”
“Rescue me, Sir Rodney of Gravesend,” says Brian Jones. “I daren’t leave the house with so much as an aspirin nowadays.”
“For you, my friend,” Rod Dempsey slips a packe
t into Brian Jones’s waistcoat pocket, “the doctor is always in.” He turns to Jasper. “Prellies, Mandy, Miss Mary J. Acid as pure as driven snow.”
“Another time, maybe.”
“Easy come easy go, that’s me. Brian, I’ll drop by yer crib next week to settle yer tab. It’s mounting up. Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” Rod Dempsey winks and exits between bodies.
Dean arrives through the same gap. “Jasper. Mr. Jones.”
“Fellow jailbird.” Brian Jones grips Dean’s shoulders. “I’ve had the most mind-blowing wheeze. Let’s you and me make a prison film! Mick’s doing one. Some gangster bollocks. Him and Anita get naked in a bath and Keith’s as jealous as hell. That’s what I call justice…Anyway, we’ll get Hershey to direct ours. We’ll call it The Unbreakables. What do you say?”
“ ‘How much dough?’ and ‘Where do I sign?’ ”
“ ‘A ton of’ and ‘In blood on the dotted line.’ ”
“Then I’m in, Brian. One o’ them Oscar statues’d look just the ticket on my nan’s piano.”
“Perfect. I’ll speak with…with my people. I’m off to the little boys’ room to open my present from Dempsey. See you later.”
They watch him go. “As if he could put together a cheese sandwich,” says Dean. “Let alone a film. Where’ve yer been hiding for the last three hours, flatmate? I thought you’d buggered off early.”
“I fell asleep in the cinema.”
Dean gives him an odd look. “Yer’ve been to the cinema?”
“There’s one in the cellar. Syd Barrett was there. I think.”
“Syd’s here? There’s too many famous people at this party. It’s bloody ridiculous. Just bumped into Hendrix coming out o’ the bog.”
“Is John Lennon still around?”
“Thataway.” Dean points down a crowded passageway of bookshelves. “With his Oriental lady, talking to someone who looks very like Judy Garland. Haven’t seen hide nor hair of Elf for a while. Levon’s mingling. Colm’s around somewhere. See yer at the flat if I don’t see yer later, or see yer at Fungus Hut tomorrow if I don’t see yer at the flat…”
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