Utopia Avenue

by David Mitchell

  Levon’s face goes doubly illegible. He puts a gown over his pajamas and leaves the room.

  Jasper hears the Dutch ringtone from the earpiece.

  Knock Knock knock-knocks over the ring-rings…

  The doctor answers. “It’s damned early, whoever you are.”

  Jasper speaks in Dutch. “Dr. Galavazi, I need your help.”

  A pause. “Good morning, Jasper. Where are you?”

  “Levon’s room in the Chelsea Hotel in New York.”

  “New York is a sucked orange, according to Emerson.”

  Jasper thinks about this. “Knock Knock’s come back. Really, really back. Not just on his way.”

  A long pause. “Symptoms?”

  “Knocking. Lots of knocking. It’s not relentless yet, but I feel him. Smirking. Like a cat toying with a bird. And the Queludrin’s losing its potency. Two pills last six or seven hours. I took another one as we landed, but Knock Knock’s knocking again.”

  Knock-knock.

  “Jasper? Are you still there?”

  “He knocked. Just now. There’s no Mongolian to save me this time. If Queludrin stops working, I’m defenseless.”

  “Then we need to find another drug that does.”

  “What if I ask a doctor, ‘Give me a drug to stop these noises in my head?’ and he locks me up in a padded cell? This is America. America’s the world leader for locking people up.”

  A pause. “Getting agitated won’t help.”

  “Then what will help, Dr. Galavazi?”

  “Right now, sleep. Do you have any sleeping pills?”

  “I took one, but Knock Knock woke me up.”

  “Take two. I’ll contact my colleague, Dr. Yu Leon Marinus. The one I told you about when you visited. He’s at Columbia University, so he shouldn’t be far away from…It’s the Chelsea Hotel, you say?”

  “Yes. It’s famous.”

  “I’ll ask him to visit you. Urgently.”

  Jasper hears a knock-knock, knock-knock, knock-knock…Like sarcastic applause. “Thank you.” He hangs up and leaves Levon’s room. His manager tries to block his way. “What’s going on?”

  Jasper goes back to Room 777 to a mock death march of Knock, knock, knock. He takes two benzodiazepines, turns off the lamp, and sinks into a chemical limbo, where…

  * * *

  —

  A CICADA NYMPH, bulbous and blind, is sucking sap from a tree root. It emerges from the soil into a raucous forest. In tiny increments the grub climbs a sapling growing in the shadow of a giant cedar. Under a twig the grub clings until, from a diaphanous carapace, a shiny black cicada hatches. The insect unfolds its gummy wings to dry them in the sun. Then…up, up, up it flies through crisscrossed, sun-streaked, dark-splotched air; over the roof of a cloister where pregnant women sweep the walkway; over the steep roofs of Zeeland; over Chetwynd Mews; over the Brooklyn Bridge, and down, down, through a gap in the sash window of Room 777 in the Chelsea Hotel where Jasper lies unconscious. A black aperture has opened between his eyebrows. The cicada lands on Jasper’s forehead, tucks in its wings, and enters the hole.

  Knock-knock. Jasper wakes up. Knock Knock is awake and present. He may as well be sitting on the chair in the corner, in person. Perhaps he is. Jasper’s watch says 7:12 A.M. He goes to the bathroom and takes three Queludrins. Only nine left.

  Dr. Galavazi always told Jasper that speaking to Knock Knock feeds and fortifies his psychosis, and urged him not to do so. Jasper decides that prohibition is now pointless. Back in the bedroom, he draws a Formaggio-style alphabet grid. “You know how this works. Will you speak to me?”

  The noise of early traffic simmered seven floors below.

  No knocks, but a voice: If I choose to, de Zoet, I shall.

  Jasper gasps. The voice is as clear as the Mongolian’s.

  I hear your words, says Knock Knock. I hear your thoughts.

  Jasper’s mind spins. “This is Knock Knock?”

  I am he whom you call by that name.

  To Jasper’s inner ear, the voice sounds patrician, cold and resolute. “Should I call you by another name?”

  Would you care by what name a dog knows you?

  Jasper works out that, in this metaphor, he is the dog and Knock Knock the master. He glances at the clock: 7:14 A.M. The Queludrin is having no effect. “Why do you want to destroy me?”

  This body is my property. It is time you were gone.

  “This body? This mind? They’re mine. They’re me.”

  My claim is older than yours.

  “What claim? I don’t understand.”

  A pause. The dream of the cicada.

  More metaphors? “Am I the cicada? Are you? What are you going to do to me? Just tell me. Directly.”

  “Directly,” then: the custom of my country allows even the lowliest thief a period of a few hours to prepare his spirit for death. Your period of grace begins now, and ends tonight.

  “I don’t want to die.”

  That is irrelevant. You die tonight.

  “Is there no other way?”

  None.

  Jasper stares at his hands. The clock ticks.

  This is your fate, de Zoet. No sword, bullet, exorcist, drug, stranger, or stratagem can change it. Accept this.

  “If I kill myself first?”

  Then I will inhabit another. There is no shortage of suitable bodies in this city. If you want anything of yourself to survive, however, surrender this body in good working order.

  Knock Knock withdraws…

  * * *

  —

  TRAFFIC SIMMERS SEVEN floors below Jasper’s balcony. The air is cool and metallic. Autumn’s here. The city rumbles, near and far. Early sunlight reflects off high east-facing windows. Jasper lists his options. One. Jump over the rail. Deny Knock Knock my body. Jasper waits for an intervention. None is forthcoming. If this is my last day, why end it now? Two. Act as if Knock Knock has not just served a death sentence and spend the day with Elf, Dean, and Griff in interviews with the press, answering questions about our first impressions of America and why Elf, a woman, is in Utopia Avenue.

  Three. Go down to breakfast and tell Levon and the band that Knock Knock, a demon in his head, is going to kill him later. Four. Obey Knock Knock. Prepare for death. How do you do that? Jasper’s not sure, but he finds himself cleaning his teeth, dressing in his stage gear, pocketing his wallet, putting his shoes on, walking down the echoey stairwell, out through the lobby, and onto 23rd Street, past unglamorous apartments, repair shops, garages, a bus depot, parking lots, and warehouses, where men in oil-stained overalls eyeball him as if he’s an intruder who has no legitimate business there. Rats ferret through rubbish spilling from an upturned bin. Jasper walks under an elevated highway of angry cars. Beyond is a strip of wasteland. He watches the Hudson River slide past, toward its perpetual ending. I am leaving the world. Not in fifty years. Tonight. Whatever Knock Knock’s plans for his future are, Jasper doubts very much they include Utopia Avenue. The band too, then, has only a few hours left, unless Elf and Dean carry on without him. I’m half ghost already. In a lean-to, a kid Jasper’s age is injecting drugs into his lacerated forearm. He looks up at Jasper and slumps back, the tip of the needle still in his arm. Jasper walks on. He stops and reties an undone bootlace, marveling at the complexity of this everyday operation. Weeds corkscrew up from cracks in the path. Their flowers are sparks…

  * * *

  —

  JASPER IS ENGULFED in a human river, dammed by a DON’T WALK sign; it changes to WALK and the river spills forward. Glass-fronted buildings reflect the sun, its own reflections and re-reflections.

  In a gleaming perfume showroom, women stare at Jasper like sinister dolls. He tries a row of samples from wrist to elbow. Lavender, rose, geranium, sage. Bottled gardens. “Sir,” says a serious
guard. “We have a hair policy.”

  “What’s a hair policy?” asked Jasper.

  The guard’s eyes narrow into slits. “Wise guy.”

  Jasper’s confused. “Only accidentally.”

  “Scram, buddy. Go!”

  Aggression, realizes Jasper. He leaves the showroom, passing a school bus, big and yellow and toylike, disgorging schoolchildren. “Quit whining, Snail!” scolds an older girl. Jasper thinks about his cousins in Lyme Regis—Eileen, Lesley, Norma, John, Robert—for the first time in a long, long time. Their faces are forgotten. One wave of the de Zoet magic wand and they vanished. They’ll probably be married now, with children of their own. Maybe they saw Utopia Avenue on Top of the Pops without recognizing their small cousin from long ago. “Titch,” they used to call him. “Shrimp.” He wonders if they missed him, after the de Zoets’ driver took him off to boarding school.

  Hundreds, thousands of besuited men with briefcases surge along this sunless street. Few speak. None gives way. None makes eye contact. They serve the god who made them. Jasper has to dodge or get shoulder-barged. A busker is playing Big Bill Broonzy’s “Key to the Highway.” George Washington watches from his plinth, framed by Doric columns. Statues’ faces are easier to read than people’s—George Washington is not pleased to be there. Jasper sees a shop: BOWLING GREEN PHARMACY. A rebel thought nudges Jasper inside to ask a pharmacist for an over-the-counter antipsychotic drug, and his skull is pummeled by KNOCK-KNOCK KNOCK-KNOCK KNOCK-KNOCK KNOCK-KNOCK KNOCK-KNOCK KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK KNOCK-KNOCK KNOCK-KNOCK KNOCK-KNOCK KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK KNOCK-KNOCK KNOCK-KNOCK KNOCK-KNOCK KNOCK-KNOCK KNOCK-KNOCK KNOCK-KNOCK KNOCK-KNOCK KNOCK-KNOCK KNOCK-KNOCK until his vision swims.

  “No drugs,” Jasper tells Knock Knock. “I understand.”

  Knock Knock does not reply, but stops pounding.

  A pharmacist is staring. “Can I help you, son?”

  “It’s okay. I was talking to a voice in my head.”

  * * *

  —

  DOWN IN A subway station, booms and screeches echo all the way from the underworld to Jasper’s eardrums. An ogre’s borborygmi. An approaching train howls out of the tunnel and stops to disgorge and load up with more carcasses-in-waiting. The carriage contains all the racial variations Jasper knows of, with mixes he can only guess at. Rivers of blood, he thinks, flow not in the street but through our species. Passengers sway, snooze, and read. The genetic deck is reshuffled at every stop. I wish I could live here. He wonders if Knock Knock intends to erase his memories once he’s moved in, or if he’ll keep some, like the photograph albums of a man you murder. If Knock Knock hears, he offers no comment. Jasper gets off at the 86th Street stop. It looks close to Central Park on the map of the subway stops. A thin sheet of cloud is pulled tight across the sky. The sun shines through, like a torch. This neighborhood is home to old money and privilege, like Mayfair or the Prinsengracht. The park draws Jasper a few blocks along 86th Street and into its well-thumbed pages. Maples are pyrotechnic. Conkers spill from catjackets, like brains, under the spreading chestnut tree. Squirrels flit in and out of sight. A spiral path brings Jasper into a mossy omphalos. He sits on a bench and rests his aching feet. We are porous. “Old haunts fill me with melancholy.” The elderly man has the beard of God and the hat and pipe of a gentleman farmer. “Old haunts gladden my heart.”

  “It’s a new haunt, for me,” says Jasper.

  “Time is the only difference.”

  “I don’t have much of that left.”

  “To die is different from what anyone supposes.” The old man touches Jasper’s wrist. “Don’t be afraid.”

  “Easy for you to say. You had a whole lifetime.”

  “As do we all. Not a moment more, nor a moment less.”

  Jasper wakes up. Nobody’s there. He walks out of the spiral and onto a lawn where a military band is playing “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” The Stars and Stripes flutters from a flagpole by an army tent. A banner reads, WANTED: AMERICAN HEROES—ENLIST TODAY! A couple of recruitment officers are surrounded by a dozen long-haired youths. “Heroes? You’re burning children over there! Children! Wake the fuck up already! It’s genocide!”

  A recruitment officer shouts back: “You’re a disgrace! Hiding behind that peace sign while REAL MEN do your fighting for you! Peace doesn’t just happen! Peace has to be fought for!”

  A crowd is gathering, but Jasper doesn’t stay to watch. His death sentence has made most things that once mattered newly irrelevant. He leaves Central Park and finds a statue on a tall pillar on a traffic island. Christopher Columbus has lost his way and it’s later than he thought. Jasper buys a bottle of something called Dr Pepper from a street vendor, but it doesn’t taste of pepper. Jasper didn’t bring his watch. He asks Knock Knock, “How much time do I have left?”

  If Knock Knock hears, he does not answer.

  Jasper enters a record shop. Cream’s “Born Under a Bad Sign” is playing. He flicks through the racks of LPs, enjoying the updraft of air on his face with every sleeve flicked. He takes his leave of Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper’s, A Love Supreme; of Etta James’s At Last!, Aretha Franklin’s I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You and Love’s Forever Changes; of Otis Blue, The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators, and The Who Sell Out. Jasper arrives at Paradise Is the Road to Paradise and Stuff of Life. The tarot card cover turned out well. Jasper wishes he could live long enough to hear Elf’s and Dean’s American songs. He’ll miss his life. Except, of course, he won’t. Only the living miss things.

  “They’re playing in town this week.” The shopkeeper has a big belly, milky eyes, and stains on his polyester shirt. “The Ghepardo. Broadway at 53rd. That’s the second album. Stuff of Life. The first one was good, but that’s a step up.”

  “Is it selling well?”

  “Sold five today. You sound English.”

  “My mother was. I went to school there.”

  “Yeah? Ever see the Beatles?”

  “Only John. It was at a party.”

  “Woah. You met him? You’re shitting me.”

  Is “shitting” lying? “We didn’t really chat. It was under a table. He’d lost his mind and wanted it back.”

  The shopkeeper frowns. “Is that, like, British humor?”

  “Not as far as I know.”

  “Born Under a Bad Sign” ends. “Try this,” says the shopkeeper, and puts on “Look Who It Isn’t.” “Total motherfucker.”

  Jasper remembers Dean teaching him the riff at Fungus Hut, and Elf playing organ descents from Bach’s Toccata, and Griff deciding, “This one needs the full Moon. Stand back…”

  It hurts that he’ll never see the band again.

  They’ll think I lost my nerve and vanished.

  Jasper exits the shop. Evening submerges the streets and avenues. The traffic thickens and gets angrier. Jasper overtakes a Ferrari on foot. Horns honk. Ya-honk, ya-hoooooonk, ya-hooooooooonk, filling the geometry of Manhattan. Like most rage, it is perfectly futile. WASHINGTON SQUARE PARK, says a sign. Trees are turning. Somewhere a busker is playing Big Bill Broonzy’s “Key to the Highway.” Profound aural schizophrenia. Men are playing chess on benches, picnic chairs, and tables. The oldest of them is lean as a turkey neck, with cracked spectacles, a grimy tweed cap, and a sackcloth bag. His opponent knocks over his king and pays a cigarette. “I’ll keep your bunk safe, Diz,” he says, and goes.

  Diz looks up at Jasper. “Want a game, Shotgun?”

  “Is your name really ‘Diz’?”

  “That’s what I go by. You in or not?”

  “How does it work?”

  “Easy.” Diz’s voice is a rasp. “I stake a dollar. You stake a dollar to play black, or a dollar-fifty for white. Winner takes the pot.”

  “I’ll play as black.”

  Diz puts two fifty-cent coins into a chipped cup. Jasper puts in a do
llar bill. His opponent opens with a variant on the Modern Benoni Attack. Jasper opts for the King’s Indian Defense. A few spectators gather, and Jasper becomes aware of bets being placed on their game. At the tenth move, Diz sets up a pincer with his bishop. By sidestepping it, Jasper blunders into a two-way fork. He goes a knight down, and a slow war of attrition begins. Jasper manages to castle, but cannot avoid a queen exchange. Piece by traded piece, Jasper’s chances of clawing back a knight or a bishop diminish. At the endgame, Jasper is a move away from promoting a pawn to queen, but Diz has it covered. “Check.”

  “The inevitable.” Jasper knocks over his king. He sees the moon has risen. “That was a strong opening.”

  “They taught me good at my academy.”

  “You went to a chess academy?”

  “Attica Prison Academy. Gimme a half-dollar, I’ll teach you the Benoni.”

  “You already have.” Under the table Jasper slips a five-dollar bill into his box of Dunhills, then gives it to the old man. “Tuition.”

  He pockets it. “ ’Ppreciate that, Shotgun.”

  Signs around him tell Jasper this is Greenwich Village. He smells food but isn’t hungry. He buys an iced tea at a café. Baseball is on the radio. A wall in Jasper’s mind shudders under a powerful blow. It’s a message. Soon now…

  * * *

  —

  JASPER WANTS DARKNESS, privacy, and warmth for this death, but he doesn’t want the others to find him dead in his room. The sight will upset Elf. An empty church, or…He enters a hospital of uncertain dimensions. The emergency room is a turbulent exhibition of human suffering, of fractures, breakages, a knife wound, a gunshot wound, burns. Some patients sit stoically and others don’t. Who can measure the pain of another? Jasper passes a security guard unchallenged and climbs stairs, turns corners, and crosses corridors. The air smells of bleach, old masonry, and something earthy. “Clear the way! Clear the way!” A medical team rushes by with a trolley. Someone is sobbing in a stairwell, above or below, it’s hard to be sure. Jasper reaches a door labeled PRIVATE WARD N9D. There is a window at head-height set into the door. It is curtained behind for privacy and reflects like a black mirror. Knock Knock examines Jasper with the eyes of time. In here, he says. Jasper opens the door a crack. By dim light the color of treacle, he sees a small ward containing two beds. One bed is occupied by a man. There is not much of him left but hollow folds and wrinkles wrapped in a hospital gown. The Hollow Man. The other bed is vacant. Quietly, Jasper shuts the door behind him, removes his shoes, and lies on the spare bed. If the Hollow Man notices his visitor, he gives no indication. Jasper’s feet are throbbing after a day of walking. Sounds reach him, as if piped from a sinking ship. A band is playing on. A telephone is ringing. A woman answers: “Hello?” Pause. “Who shall I say is calling?” Six feet away, a rattle rattles in the Hollow Man’s throat. Split dried peas in a cardboard shaker. Drool pools from a toothless mouth and falls in a filament from withered lips. It soaks into his pillow. The Hollow Man opens his eyes. He has none. Jasper wonders who he once was, and announces, “Goodbye.” Jasper tells Knock Knock, “I’m ready.”