Greybeard

by Paul Christensen

  The woman said: ‘It’s a good thing, anyhow. You were starting to rabbit on about that Aquarian crapola again. I keep telling you to stick to the point.’

  ‘My dear Delvene,’ said the guru frostily. ‘I think I know what our audience expects. When are you going to learn to trust my fucking instincts?’

  ‘Okay, then direct the goddamn thing yourself!’ she snapped, tossing an empty coke can on to the ground before stalking away.

  ‘Do you remember the Nazi era, old man?’ one of the crew said to me, raising his voice as if I were a spastic (or whatever they call them nowadays).

  I shook my head and they lost interest.

  ‘Best to call it a day,’ said the cameraman, fiddling with his machine. ‘Something ain’t right here.’

  ‘Whaddaya mean?’

  ‘The focus is shot. Dunno why. Maybe the footage won’t even be usable.’

  ‘Evil powers, here.’ They all laughed.

  I chortled too, but for different reasons.

  ‘Alright,’ the guru raised his voice. ‘Everything is against us today. We’ll re-shoot tomorrow. Let’s go back to the hotel.’ They moved off. I picked up the forgotten coke can and moved it to a bin, deciding that I should go too, as the atmosphere had been stifled somewhat.

  I walked back through the village of Horn to the train station, and there they were again, shuffling around on the platform as they waited for the regional express. The guru was expounding enthusiastically about a girl he had met yesterday at a bar in Paderborn.

  ‘Oh, you and your little goth bitches,’ the director dismissed him.

  ‘No, this one is different. She seemed to understand me. She was British, though I don’t hold that against her. Said she was a computer hacker. I think she’s one of us at heart.’ I realised he was probably talking about the girl from the crypt, and smiled to myself.

  The train arrived, and I sat in a different carriage to them. It began to rain almost as soon as I boarded. I fell asleep, only waking at Paderborn due to the noise of the camera crew alighting to return to their hotel. I felt tired and disheveled, and well-near asleep on my feet.

  * * *

  Before taking the bus back to Wewelsburg, however, I felt the urge to visit another local tourist attraction, one my poor murdered grandson had told me about – the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum, said to be the world’s largest computer museum. A technophobe, such as I tend to be at times, might envision it as something akin to a visit to Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors: a bit of harmless fun, nothing particularly spooky. But I wanted Davey’s spirit to see it through my living eyes.

  And there it all was, dully flashing, the history of computers. A graveyard, a tomb for machines.

  But although the souls of transistors are alien to me, I am hesitant to condemn them – for who knows what their purpose is in the scheme of things. It may be more significant and lasting than my own task, important though that has proven to be.

  Rounding a corner into the Hall of Fame (where pictures of Leibniz and Charles Babbage stare benevolently down at one through the clanking fog of history), I ran smack into someone I recognised, and had recently heard spoken of – the girl from the crypt.

  ‘Hello again,’ she said, seeming pleased to see me.

  ‘Hello there young woman. I think I met your boyfriend today, you know.’ She blushed.

  ‘What boyfriend?’

  ‘A documentary film maker.’

  ‘You mean Bartholomew Cleves? He’s not my boyfriend. Well, I arranged to meet him for a drink tomorrow night. He was very insistent. I guess it’s because I’ve always been starved of male attention that I find it hard to say no. He’s famous in certain circles, too, though that’s neither here nor there. But I do admire his integrity. Anyway, it never rains, it pours, as they say.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, he’s not the only one who’s interested in me. It’s funny…I’m not the kind men usually look at twice. But suddenly I get two at once.’

  ‘Who’s the other?’

  ‘A guy called Nicky Hooden. He’s not rich, like Bartholomew. He’s poor, and very earnest. A bit flaky, perhaps, but he believes in himself, which is important…you know, I can’t decide if I like wealth or poverty more in a man. They both have their merits.’

  ‘Monetary status is a matter of merit?’

  ‘Oh, yes. If he’s rich, then unless he inherited it, it means he worked like a demon for it…and I like that kind of energy. But if he’s poor, then unless he’s bone idle, it means he has dedicated himself to some ideal, something so vital and overriding that he hasn’t time to bother with mere money. And I like that kind of energy too. I guess it’s really only middle-of-the-road men who turn me off…they totally gross me out!’

  ‘Yes, I see your point. But this soldier of poverty, this Nicky Hooden…he wouldn’t be from Liverpool by any chance?’

  ‘How on earth did you know that?’ Her jaw dropped, then she looked suspicious. ‘Have you been spying on me?’

  ‘No, of course not. I have enough to get my own task done without worrying about what others are doing.’

  ‘Then how did you know he was from Liverpool?’

  ‘I encountered him in a bookshop the other day, if you must know. I think of him as the equal-but-opposite of…Bartholomew Cleves, if I got his name right. So it would seem natural that they were both pursuing you, like matter and anti-matter, cancelling each other out, ha ha.’ She looked at me strangely.

  ‘So what’s your task, then?’

  ‘My task?’

  ‘Yes. You said you had one, which took all your energy.’

  ‘My task, unfortunately, is avenging someone’s murder.’

  Her eyes widened. For some reason I trusted her, and decided to explain everything.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ she murmured when I had finished. Whether she was inwardly moved or not, I couldn’t tell. She was quiet; only her brow furrowed. A chaotic burbling of voices announced what appeared to be a party of happy-drunken farmers making their appearance in this strange place, far from blood and soil. From their distinctive accents I guessed they were Bavarian, on some wintery group-tour to the sour north. The girl took it as a sign to leave. I raised my hand in farewell, a Roman salute almost, and she did likewise, unconsciously, perhaps instinctively.

  She was almost a bit boring to me now, revealed as having normal dating interests. For I felt I should only be surrounded by warriors (if it were possible for a female to be such; I supposed it might, in rare measure; see Boudicca). But I had thought of her as a kind of technosophic nun, vastly more interesting to me than someone who would entertain romance with the likes of Hooden or Cleves.

  So I made myself to leave, and weirdly, there was a power outage, making the museum exceptionally gloomy this late afternoon. The farmers took this as an occasion for uproarious mirth, but to me it rendered the place as a weird and misty underworld, a Niflheim of the machines…and so I forgot whether I was coming or going.

  * * *

  Next came the forging of my cubist armour.

  Dazzle.

  Conceptual art always struck me as not art but artifice; but now I was giving it worth by using it for something practical and splendid.

  First I dazzled the tall army boots I had found in a jumble shop, in just the right size. I gave them such stripes they looked like black and white dimensional vortex hooves of some genetically modified beast from the far future.

  And then I dazzled the leather leggings and studded codpiece which I had had to enter some dodgy shop adjoining a ‘Sexy-Kino’ to attain (the assistant hadn’t even looked twice at me).

  Then I dazzled the wicket keeper’s gloves I had found in a shop at Sennelager called ‘Olde England’.

  The fumes from the spray-paint were now making me dizzy, so I wrapped a shirt around my mouth and nose, then proceeded.

  The armour for my torso was a hockey goalie’s get-up with its sturdy chest and arm protectors, wh
ich I dazzled to the point where my innards and outards were indistinguishable, competing strands of a three dimensional maze.

  Then the leather jacket, from the same jumble shop the boots were from.

  Then the balaclava, which I painted with fake eyes, like a killer whale’s. And the round soldier’s helmet, from which war I didn’t know, to protect my aged head from shrapnel.

  And so, my armour was complete.

  I was become death, destroyer of worlds!

  3

  The Field of Mars

  February

  I sat up in my sleeping bag, reading one of the newspapers I had been using as insulation. It appeared that Germany’s national handball team had won the European title, their win immediately mired in ‘controversy’ because all the team members were white.

  Meanwhile, in other news, the federal government were searching for persons of interest connected with the New Years’ gang rapes in Cologne. Not the actual rapists, though – that would be far too easy. Instead, they were searching for the police whistleblowers who had exposed the crimes to the international media!

  My court summons date had gone by and I hadn’t shown up. To avoid arrest I was now sleeping rough in the Teutoburg Forest, wrapped in a sleeping bag and blanket I had bought at a charity shop, with a layer of Lügenpresse to keep in the heat. Even so it was bitterly cold.

  At first I had slept in a picnic hut in the forest, but this had felt too exposed, and so I retreated to a secluded thicket ringed by dark evergreen spruces. Now, ensconced in my thicket, I heard the sound of ghostly armies sweeping the forest at night – the shades of Varus’ legions who perished here two millenia ago. But they didn’t scare me at all…there was no cause for fear.

  And despite the cold, the hard ground was good for my back. I don’t know why I hadn’t tried it years ago.

  * * *

  I had been pondering what to do – whether to martyr myself on the field of Mars – when I suddenly gained a lieutenant, and it came about in the following logical yet unexpected way.

  Taking a stroll around the Externsteine one afternoon I noticed two familiar people walking hand in hand upon the path. It was the technosophic ex-nun and her current beau, the Liverpudlian warlock. At the same moment I noticed another familiar group from the corner of my eye – the American conspiracy crew and their cameraman. Bartholomew Cleves was glaring at the promenading couple, as well he might. For the warlock was twirling his belle around in a strange kind of dance.

  Now we would see what happened when an unstoppable force met an immovable object.

  ‘Stop pawing her, you Satanic monkey,’ boomed Cleves, as if in effort to wake Varus’ legions. I hurried forward to watch the trouble, hoping my young acquaintance wouldn’t be hurt in the fight, if such was to be.

  ‘Ah,’ smirked Nicky Hooden. ‘It’s the Illuminati Man. What are you doing here, then? You’d be more at home in the monks’ cell at the base of the rock over there.’ He pointed towards the cell in question, with its carving of the pre-Christian Irminsul being toppled by Charlemagne’s forces. ‘You don’t understand the powers you’re dealing with here, Cleves. Stick to your Judeo-Christian gibberish, little man.’

  Cleves looked like he was going to explode. He was a head taller than Hooden, and far broader-shouldered…but Hooden had a sense of self-possession that made up for any dearth in physical stature.

  ‘Moon-faced little rat man,’ Cleves shrieked. ‘And you, you silly girl. Getting around with a devil worshipper…I thought you had more brains.’

  ‘Devil worshipper my pale arse,’ sneered Hooden. ‘What would you understand about occult power, snake oil salesman? Stick to peddling erection pills on your tabloid website. You probably need them yourself, ha ha.’

  The inevitable occurred: a flurry of fists and flailing limbs. A line from a song by The Doors inexplicably entered my head, about a minister’s daughter who was in love with a snake.

  I thought I had better escort my acquaintance away from the melee, and did so. She allowed me to take her by the arm and chaperone her like an old-fashioned grandfather from some ancient fairy story.

  ‘I seem to run into you quite a lot,’ she said, unsurprised to see me, craning her neck back to see who was winning the fight. The crew were cheering Cleves on, but Hooden was giving as good as he got. I sang a snatch from an Irish folk song, ‘all the boys are fighting for her,’ and she blushed slightly.

  ‘This is a new experience for me, like I said,’ she murmured, ‘and I’m not really sure what to think about it all.’

  We walked towards the road, and I found myself further explaining my task of vengeance to her. Not my strategy, but who the vengeance must be directed against, and why. To my surprise, I found her eagerly agreeing with me.

  ‘I used to be very liberal,’ she said. ‘In some ways, perhaps, still am. But these sex attacks really opened my eyes. And I’ve seen where the censorship and repression is emanating from. It’s not the _____.’ (She mentioned the name of a populist party in German).

  ‘How many others have their eyes opened, I wonder?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve tried talking over this with both Nicky and Bartholomew, and neither of them were particularly interested. It annoyed me, actually. This shit is real, and it’s going on right now. Of course, I don’t have to tell you that, with your terrible loss. But people are being attacked all over Europe. All thanks to this idiot Merkel.’

  ‘Merkel doesn’t take the blame alone,’ I growled. ‘The media are in unspoken collusion with her. High level civil servants, too.’

  ‘A conspiracy?’

  ‘They don’t have to conspire. They all think alike. Rotten little snake brains. If the word ‘evil’ has any meaning, then they are certainly evil.’

  She nodded, looking at me with thoughtful eyes.

  ‘I sense it too. But what can be done?’

  ‘How good are you at this computer hacking lark?’

  ‘Well, I’m not exactly the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.’

  ‘I should hope not.’ I had once starting reading that ridiculous book in a café where someone had left it behind, and had dropped it in the rubbish bin halfway through.

  ‘I know a few tricks, though…and I’m in contact with others.’

  ‘Well, do you think you can tear yourself away from your pugilistic wooers a little while, long enough to engage in a bit of electronic monkey-wrenching?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said with glee, rubbing her mittened hands together. ‘That is, if you have something definite in mind.’

  ‘Yes, I have a few notions.’

  We trudged through the slush and she talked about Tweedledum and Tweedledee (she didn’t call them that, of course, but I couldn’t help thinking of them as such). Her attraction to Hooden was mainly physical, she said, whereas the admiration she felt for the older and portlier Cleves was more in the intellectual sphere.

  ‘He’s a self-made man. I admire that. And they’re both autodidacts. I also admire that.’ She was somewhat fed up with them both at the moment, however.

  ‘Why aren’t you an autodidact, then? Presumably you have tutors or lecturers at that institution you’re enrolled at.’

  ‘Yes, but I hardly attend class. The requirements are astonishingly low for exchange students here in Germany. And they give you guaranteed paid work while you’re studying…the pay isn’t too bad, actually. My work is proofing an English translation of a German book about coding…which has helped with the hacking, a bit. I aim to pursue further studies when I finish here, though…as an autodidact, of course. I’m done with tutorials, actually.’

  ‘Surely interaction with a teacher can have its advantages over self-directed learning,’ I said, purely for the sake of debate, as I enjoyed talking with her.

  ‘It depends what kind of material you engage with,’ she countered, and we discussed the respective merits of autodidacticism and directed education as we tramped through the village of Horn to the train station.


  On reaching Paderborn we went to her flat, just a few blocks from the Hauptbahnhof. Here she introduced me to her flatmate, Gleb, who was an exchange student from Russia. He, too, was a budding hacker, she had informed me on the ride here, and one she considered trustworthy. So much the better.

  Gleb shook my hand.

  He had strange, pale lunar eyes, but his grip was firm and he looked essentially honest. The girl, whose name I now learnt for the first time was Perdita, explained to him who I was, my quest for vengeance. He took it in his stride, in a calm, Russian sort of way. Good…he wasn’t the kind to sympathise with the invaders, in any case.

  We entered her room (there was no living room, just a hallway with two bedrooms, a kitchenette and bathroom coming off of it). It smelled of sandalwood, immediately taking me back to a commune in the East Midlands where I had lived in the autumn of ’71. The décor here couldn’t be more different, however. There were no records (presumably she had mp3s on her computer) and few books. Those there were mainly concerned computer programming, but I did notice a thick dog-eared paperback that purported to be a ‘psychedelic horror’ novel. I flicked through it idly, but felt no mystery, no aura, no mind-expanding qualities emanating from it. In the old days I could tell if a book was worth reading before even perusing a word of it, merely by the aura it gave off. Perhaps I was more out of touch with the Zeitgeist than I thought. For me, there was no horror in psychedelia, only in the works of man.

  ‘What kind of books you like?’ asked Gleb casually.

  ‘Well, back in the days when I read, one of my favourite writers was called Miguel Serrano.’

  His eyes widened. ‘The Nazi UFO guy?’

  ‘No. He wrote books about India, spiritual questing, the undiscovered Self…that sort of thing.’