by Ashly Graham
Coming in at a slight angle, so close to the tops of the trees that he brushed them with his raised feet, Dark lowered his undercarriage...and made a perfect landing. Unhitching the harness of the parachute—where it had come from, and how it had glommed onto his frame he did not bother to consider—and shouting with gratitude and joy, he gathered up the silk that straggled behind him on the dewy grass like a punctured balloon and folded it reverently on the ground.
Then he walked unsteadily, as if he were a sailor who has just set foot on dry land after circumnavigating the world, down the path through the churchyard that led to the bunker-like excrescence of the Annexe.
Echoing Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘“Home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill”’, he breathed.
The Annexe exuded an even greater air of desolation and neglect than ever, which Dark found upsetting because he had never noticed it before. Approaching the front door he knocked on it, half-heartedly and half believing that he would answer it himself in the person of a stranger. For the first time in his life he felt lonely.
When nobody came it did not occur to him to try the handle, and he was about to go round to the rear entrance when, without the former palaver of unfastening chains, drawing bolts and unlocking, it was flung open and the two Barts!, pausing only to gape in disbelief, hurled themselves down the steps to embrace him.
Their momentum knocked Dark over harder than the mistimed parachute landing he had anticipated and the three of them collapsed in a heap. Not to left out, they were joined by Dark’s decrepit hound, sway-backed and milky-eyed but doing his best to wag his tail.
Odysseus was home.
‘Hello,’ gasped Dark, getting to his feet and helping up first the Barts! and then the animal. ‘Oh, I am pleased to see you. How are you both? I do hope you’ve been making use of all the rooms. Gosh, I’m absolutely ravenous. Perhaps the three of us could scare up a late supper together and talk, if you’re not too tired. It’s high time we got to know each other better. And to get things off on the right foot, you must promise me that from now on you shall call me Fletcher…as I will you as...’
‘…rrld.’
‘…gnss.’
‘Of course. Agnes and Harold. Wonderful. Come on.’
As their master plunged into the house, the dumbfounded Mr and Mrs Bartholomew stood shuffling their feet; until a minute later Fletcher returned, took each of them by the hand and drew them inside.
*
One who wanders out of existence
Is drawn to a vale that she described
As a much-loved place from history, Where
Foxgloves of imagination bloom by moonlight;
Where stone is soft as butter, trees grow
From our hearts, earth is filigreed with gold,
And churches stand restored within
The sometime cemeteries of our lives.
What is there left to say? Much more.
The place has been absorbed, with many
Accreted years of memory, into a greater land
Of understanding; treasure found; and love.
GLORIA
Chapter One
Within the four grey walls and four grey towers surrounding London’s former Greenwich Hospital, in the tower above the chapel—now the mortuary—Superintendent Laszlo 9013J walked up the stairs to wind the clock. It was almost eleven-fifteen in the morning on a Wednesday in early November, 2032, and the clapper of the cracked bell was about to announce the quarter.
The Greenwich had changed since the days when it had been a famous and much lauded healing institution. Renamed the Exeat Institute, now, instead of being devoted to the saving of lives, it ended them in the name of research. One of the most secretive and protected sites in the world, the people who worked there had to have the highest of clearances from Central, the organization that ruled the Global State.
As Superintendent of the Exeat Institute, 9013J was responsible for every detail of its rigorous seven days a week twenty-four hour schedule, and ensuring the smooth functioning of its infrastructure. DNA microarray robots and sequencers, mass spectrometers, and digital imaging microscopes: although such equipment was not designed to be handled like forklift trucks, far too much of the Superintendent’s day was taken up with ordering repairs and replacement parts, and dealing with incompetent servicemen. There were the cryogenic freezers to be kept at the correct temperature, and the ventilation and air circulation pipes germ-free; there were the climate controls to be maintained, and the sterilizers, and the airborne pathogen filters, the negative pressure ducts, and those that carried purified water and gases.
The machinery, which included many prototypes, was temperamental, and if the generators did not kick in the moment there was a failure in the nuclear electrical power supply, 9013J’s head would be on a platter.
On the human level, the research experts and technicians had to have everything they required in the laboratories, and their every request, however unorthodox or impractical, was to be complied with. Laszlo had a sour opinion of technicians, some of whom were no more than eighteen years old, with their loud voices and pumped-up egos; for all their qualifications and expertise many were clumsy and damaged a lot of hardware. The canteen was a big deal, what with the special diets and constant complaints. Then there was the routine business: corpses and body parts and toxic wastes to be removed; supplies to be ordered, delivered to the proper departments on a timely basis, and distributed within them; elevators and toilets, clean and stocked with paper, to be guaranteed in working order for use by several thousand workers.
The founder and Director of the Exeat Institute, the young and aggressive Hugo Bonvilian 4285D, was the Exeat’s presiding deity, a man whom one was not allowed to express or even have an opinion of. 4285D’s imperatives, either bellowed or whispered in his unvarying rude and peremptory manner, commanded instant attention, however unreasonable they might be and difficult to accomplish, simultaneously with whatever else might be on hand. The slightest hesitation in complying with Bonvilian’s instructions was taken very seriously, both by himself and his enforcers, and mistakes often had painful, even terminal, consequences. 4285D never discussed anything, he never asked for advice, all he did was order and question and criticize.
Hugo Bonvilian was a member of the D Class created by the Global State’s ruling oligarchy, Central. Ds were the most senior category of official to mix with the lower alphabetical categories of individual, and interact with them in the course of fulfilling their roles. The A, B, and C Class-ranked citizens, those who constituted the hierarchy that ruled the Global State, lived in splendid isolation at Central’s vast complex, which was a hundred times the size of the old American Pentagon building, and a thousand times more efficient. A, B, and C Class personnel never set foot outside Central, except for holidays at one of its Rest-and-Relaxation resorts: as little time for frivolity as they had, what these escapes lacked in duration they made up for in intensity. Only the Ds who reported directly to them, such as Bonvilian, had seen an A, B or C; or been spoken to by one of them, because Ds had to have personal contact with their immediately lower echelons to explicate how their strategies were to be implemented.
Everyone from E Class down to the level where literacy and numeracy and comprehension were an issue received his or her instructions impersonally and electronically.
At the bottom end of the scale were the Zs, who were the most menial of menials: at the Exeat, it was the Zs who incinerated the bodies of those who had been dismembered and eviscerated in the cause of science—Hugo Bonvilian 4285D’s science, the details of which were as hidden from the public as the inner workings of Central; and even if they were not, nobody would have understood them.
Although operational matters within the Exeat Institute were what occupied Laszlo 9013J’s professional life, they most certainly did not include looking after the clock. No one was supposed to wind it or service it.
While Central had as
yet stopped short of declaring that Time was dead, as a medium it had ruled it unnecessary, retrograde, redundant, discredited, subversive, and not just illegitimate but illegal. There was no longer world enough and time for Time in a world where such a concept was, not just passé in the archaic sense of past its prime, archaic, superannuated, but in itself anachronistic. It was against regulations to refer to it or use it as a context for defining the When and Where in the modern Now and Here society. Everyone was to stop believing in the Tinker Bell fairy of Time: for on the same principle as in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, not only could fairies not exist unless one believed in them, but if one comes to doubt them later, they will die.
In which case instead of marching on, Time, shunned and ignored, would not only cease to exist but in so doing constitute grounds for Central to pronounce that it had been deemed never to have existed. What used to be said to go around, no longer came around and therefore, syllogistically, it had never gone around.
All of which meant that, for a public official like Laszlo to commit the symbolic but treasonous act of maintaining the clock, it was essential that he keep his weekly destination and purpose secret, and never delegate the task to a staff member who would have no choice to report it to one of the departmentally ubiquitous monitors of protocol.
Whether or not conscious recollection of the State-mandated conceit regarding the disregarding of Time was why those hurrying through the main quadrangle of the Exeat Institute never glanced at the tower clock, even surreptitiously for old time’s sake, Laszlo 9013J did not know. The workers’ routines were prescribed from the moment of discharging the first duty of the day to the first wink of State-authorized sleep, and any deviance or deviation was sure to be detected and rated.
Only 9013J’s loyal and discreet secretary and personal assistant, Pancake 4465Q, was aware that once a week her boss left his desk on some mysterious errand, and that he looked content and relaxed when he returned. A sympathetic soul, Pancake was pleased, for although like everyone else her boss had no life outside service to the State, he was kind to her.
Administration was Laszlo 9013J’s life. That he had no partner or significant other, or children, and that he was allowed the luxury of a small freshwater fish-tank in his office, were facts for the Records bureau only, and a consequence of his status rather a mark of personal recognition for diligence. In the event of 9013J’s death or disability before the date set for his retirement, a new Superintendent of equal or greater efficiency would be appointed, and no one would have any memory of him.
Central took no interest in one’s private affairs unless they had subversive potential, or affected the quality or quantity of one’s work. Workplace relationships were forbidden. Closed circuit television monitors with zoom lenses, and indoor and outdoor recording devices equipped with long-range shotgun condenser microphones and noise filters, detected and picked up, and forwarded to analytical personnel any infraction or irregularity by those on the premises.
The belfry, and its four clock-faces atop the old hospital’s chapel built of rough-cast stone, overlooked the campus of the Exeat Institute like a watch tower. A narrow but deep balcony ran around the tower where one could stand without being observed from below. The vantage was high enough that on a clear day one could see, if not forever, beyond the ugly agglomeration of modern buildings to a far horizon in all directions. Many years ago, the hospital’s original mid-nineteenth century architecture had appealed to the nobler senses; but with the exception of the outer walls, and the chapel and tower, and the wing containing Ward One, it had been gradually demolished and replaced with utilitarian structures.
The outer perimeter, topped by parallel lines of razor wire, was patrolled by armed guards. Cameras, antennae, satellite dishes, and transmission and listening devices, were mounted on steel scaffolds. Only the clock tower remained untenanted, unfortified, unguarded, and festooned with none of the instruments of surveillance that sprouted everywhere else. No supervision was necessary for the human carcasses stockpiled in its base, in the Hades through which Laszlo had to pass on his way upstairs. They were not going anywhere, unless they were called up to assist in laboratory research, like books from the stacks of a library.
The Superintendent considered himself extremely fortunate to have this ancient and forgotten zone to himself. He appreciated the tower’s mournful isolation, within its time-less setting, more every time he visited it. Occasionally his beeper or pocket phone commanded his presence to resolve some crisis, as he was on his way to the top; occasionally he had slipped or fallen, and a few times sprained or twisted an ankle, in his haste to descend the helter-skelter stairs. But 9013J ran his organization efficiently, and so long as he kept his absences to no more than half an hour, by impermissible reckoning, it did not happen often.
Reflecting its retro status, the tower’s stonework was crumbling with age. The dial of the clock was pitted and weathered, and the hands rusted. The beams were rotted from the rain that leaked through the roof, and the infiltrating damp; and the dryer parts were infested with beetle and woodworm. Nonetheless, by some miracle and using a lot of oil Laszlo had been able to maintain the clock’s accuracy and synchronization with the goose steps of modern life.
In return, instead of sulking at the lack of attention that was paid to it, except by its keeper, it continued to honour its sworn allegiance to the evolutionary force that had introduced it to the world, with such gentle authority that even the representatives of the power that most deplored it did not register its passive resistance.
In his non-biological heart the Superintendent was a traditionalist, who believed that regular winding was not just a courtesy owed to any timepiece, but that any theory that Time was dead ran contrary to the laws of nature. He would remain a closet dissenter. For was it not still the case that if the earth stopped revolving, everything on it would spin off into the void?
And what about “In the beginning was the Word”? If there was a Beginning, there had also to be an End, and a Middle and notches in between, like the minutes on a clock on which the hands rotated from noon to noon and midnight to midnight. En ma fin git mon commencement, “In my end is my beginning”: Mary Queen of Scots had been sufficiently impressed by the motto to embroider it on a sampler or screen; and the poet, dramatist and literary critic T.S. Eliot was similarly intrigued by the idea it embodied.
Now, however, Central had pronounced the cosmic law to be an elliptical fallacy based upon a spurious concept…that Time had “disappeared up its own fundament”, was the unembroidered way State had expressed it. And Eliot’s “heretical statements disguised as poeticisms regarding chronical circularity”, though nothing he had written on the subject was original, had resulted in the poet’s writings being banned.
To make a fiction of Time! To deconstruct the documented and the historical, and assert the supremacy of State-sponsored fabrication and denial over truth and fact, was a most egregious international crime. It was also dangerous, like putting a stick in the spokes of a moving bicycle’s wheel. As propaganda it had the potential to return to visit destruction upon the government that disseminated it along with those it was intended to mislead.
Rote and ritual: they were the least-respected components of life, and that was wrong, for Time was greater than any individual, greater than the sum of all peoples. It was all-encompassing. The forces set in motion by Creation were not to be opposed, as George Meredith had recapitulated in his poem Lucifer in Starlight:
On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose.
Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend
Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened,
Where sinners hugged their spectre of repose.
…
He reached a middle height, and at the stars,
Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank.
Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,
The army of unalterable law.
For so long as there was
a sun, who was to deny the accuracy of the gnomon’s shadow on the garden dial? How else were to be immortalized those savoured moments when the clouds rolled away to allow warmth to sink into the hillside, and light to preen a bird’s feather; when a puff of wind shook the leaves on a tree like ringlets on the head of a pretty girl? Such things could not be erased from universal memory, after Time had recorded them and moved on.
Laszlo had an unshakeable belief in the romance of the brief and prematurely ended. In the house where he was born, his family had a mahogany long-case clock that had been made by a Somerset clockmaker in the early nineteenth century. It stood just inside the entrance like the lares and penates of the Ancient Romans, the household gods that guarded the home and warded off danger.
The clock had a break-arch hood topped with three brass wyvern finials, and there were free-standing barley-twist columns at the front on either side of the glazed door. The arch, spandrels, and base of the metal dial were painted, in restful oils, with scenes of solitary figures outside country cottages; a person leaning over a double-arched bridge across a river; and a woman holding a child’s hand as they crossed a meadow surrounded by oak trees. Within the Roman numerals of the hours was a small dial for the seconds, which rocked slightly at every forward click as if they were aware of their subsidiary status, and did not dare to get ahead of themselves.