Had he felt her, even then, beginning to recede . . . called up the control from across the Wall as a way of holding on? She was deepening from his waking, his social eye like light at the edge of the evening when, for perhaps a perilous ten minutes, nothing helps: put on your glasses and light lamps, sit by the west window and still it keeps going away, you keep losing the light and perhaps it is forever this time . . . a good time of day for learning surrender, learning to diminish like the light, or like certain music. This surrender is his only gift. Afterward he can recall nothing. Sometimes, rarely, there may be tantalizing—not words, but halos of meaning around words his mouth evidently spoke, that only stay behind—if they do—for a moment, like dreams, can’t be held or developed, and, presently, go away. He’s been under Rollo Groast’s EEG countless times since first he came to “The White Visitation,” and all’s normal-adult except for, oh once or twice perhaps a stray 50-millivolt spike off a temporal lobe, now left now right, really no pattern to it—indeed a kind of canals-of-Mars controversy has been in progress for these years among the different observers—Aaron Throwster swears he’s seen slow delta-wave shapes out of the left frontal and suspects a tumor, last summer Edwin Treacle noted a “subdued petitmal spike-and-wave alternation, curiously much slower than the usual three per second”—though admittedly Treacle was up in London all the night before debauching with Allen Lamplighter and his gambling crowd. Less than a week later the buzzbomb gave Lamp-lighter his chance: to find Eventyr from the other side and prove him to be what others had said: an interface between the worlds, a sensitive. Lamplighter had offered 5-to-2 odds. But so far he’s been silent: nothing in the soft acetate/metal discs or typed transcripts that mightn’t be any of a dozen other souls. . . .
They’ve come, in their time, from as far away as the institute at Bristol to gape at, to measure and systematically doubt the freaks of Psi Section. Here’s Ronald Cherrycoke, the noted psychometrist, eyes lightly fluttering, hands a steady inch away framing the brown-wrapped box in which are securely hidden certain early-War mementos, a dark-maroon cravat, a broken Schaeffer fountain pen, a tarnished pince-nez of white gold, all belonging to a Group Captain “Basher” St. Blaise, stationed far away north of London . . . as this Cherrycoke, a normal-looking lad, perhaps a bit overweight, begins now to recite in his lathe-humming Midland accents an intimate résumé of the Group Captain, his anxieties about his falling hair, his enthusiasm over the Donald Duck cinema cartoons, an incident during the Lübeck raid which only he and his wingman, now passed on, shared and agreed not to report—nothing that violated security: confirmed later, in fact, by St. Blaise himself smiling a bit openmouthed well the joke’s certainly on me and now tell me how’d you do it? Indeed, how does Cherrycoke do it? How do any of them? How does Margaret Quartertone produce voices on discs and wire recorders miles distant without speaking or physically touching the equipment? And what speakers are now beginning to assemble? Where are the five-digit groups coming from which the Reverend Dr. Paul de la Nuit, chaplain and staff automatist, has been writing for weeks now, and which, it is felt ominously, no one up in London quite knows how to decrypt? What do Edwin Treacle’s recent dreams of flight mean, especially as time-correlated with Nora Dodson-Truck’s dreams of falling? What gathers among them all, that each in his own freak way can testify to but not in language, not even the lingua franca of the offices? Turbulences in the aether, uncertainties out in the winds of karma. Those souls across the interface, those we call the dead, are increasingly anxious and evasive. Even Carroll Eventyr’s own control, the habitually cool and sarcastic Peter Sachsa, the one who found him that day long ago on the Embankment and thereafter—whenever there are messages to be passed across—even Sachsa’s become nervous. . . .
Lately, as if all tuned in to the same aethereal Xth Programme, new varieties of freak have been showing up at “The White Visitation,” all hours of the day and night, silent, staring, expecting to be taken care of, carrying machines of black metal and glass gingerbread, off on waxy trances, hyperkinetically waiting only the right trigger-question to start blithering 200 words a minute about their special, terrible endowments. An assault. What are we to make of Gavin Trefoil, for whose gift there’s not even a name yet? (Rollo Groast wants to call it autochromatism.) Gavin, the youngest here, only 17, can somehow metabolize at will one of his amino acids, tyrosine. This will produce melanin, which is the brown-black pigment responsible for human skin color. Gavin can also inhibit this metabolizing by—it appears—varying the level of his blood phenylalanine. So he can change his color from most ghastly albino up through a smooth spectrum to very deep, purplish, black. If he concentrates he can keep this up, at any level, for weeks. Usually he is distracted, or forgets, and gradually drifts back to his rest state, a pale freckled redhead’s complexion. But you can imagine how useful he was to Gerhardt von Göll during the shooting of the Schwarzkommando footage: he helped save literally hours of make-up and lighting work, acting as a variable reflector. The best theory of how is Rollo’s, but it’s hopelessly vague—we do know that the dermal cells which produce melanin—the melanocytes—were once, in each of us, at an early stage of embryonic growth, part of the central nervous system. But as the embryo grows, as tissue goes on differentiating, some of these nerve cells move away from what will be the CNS, and migrate out to the skin, to become melanocytes. They keep their original tree-branch shapes, the axon and dendrites of the typical nerve cell. But the dendrites are used now to carry not electric signals but skin pigment. Rollo Groast believes in some link, so far undiscovered—some surviving cell-memory that will, retrocolonial, still respond to messages from the metropolitan brain. Messages that young Trefoil may not consciously know of. “It is part,” Rollo writes home to the elder Dr. Groast in Lancashire, in elaborate revenge for childhood tales of Jenny Greenteeth waiting out in the fens to drown him, “part of an old and clandestine drama for which the human body serves only as a set of very allusive, often cryptic programme-notes—it’s as if the body we can measure is a scrap of this programme found outside in the street, near a magnificent stone theatre we cannot enter. The convolutions of language denied us! the great Stage, even darker than Mr Tyrone Guthrie’s accustomed murk. . . . Gilt and mirroring, red velvet, tier on tier of box seats all in shadows too, as somewhere down in that deep proscenium, deeper than geometries we know of, the voices utter secrets we are never told. . . .”
—Everything that comes out from CNS we have to file here, you see. It gets to be a damned nuisance after a while. Most of it’s utterly useless. But you never know when they’ll want something. Middle of the night, or during the worst part of an ultraviolet bombardment you know, it makes no difference to them back there.
—Do you ever get out much to . . . well, up to the Outer Level?
(A long pause in which the older operative stares quite openly, as several changes flow across her features—amusement, pity, concern— until the younger one speaks again.) I-I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be—
—(Abruptly) I’m supposed to tell you, eventually, as part of the briefing.
—Tell me what?
—Just as I was told once. We hand it on, one generation to the next. (There is no piece of business plausible enough for her to find refuge in. We sense that this has not yet become routine for her. Out of decency now, she tries to speak quietly, if not gently.) We all go up to the Outer Level, young man. Some immediately, others not for a while. But sooner or later everyone out here has to go Epidermal. No exceptions.
—Has to—
—I’m sorry.
—But isn’t it . . . I thought it was only a—well, a level. A place you’d visit. Isn’t it. . . ?
—Outlandish scenery, oh yes so did I—unusual formations, a peep into the Outer Radiance. But it’s all of us, you see. Millions of us, changed to interface, to horn, and no feeling, and silence.
—Oh, God. (A pause in which he
tries to take it in—then, in panic, pushes it back:) No—how can you say that—you can’t feel the memory? the tug . . . we’re in exile, we do have a home! (Silence from the other.) Back there! Not up at the interface. Back in the CNS!
—(Quietly) It’s been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home—only the millions of last moments . . . no more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.
She crosses the complex room dense with its supple hides, lemon-rubbed teak, rising snarls of incense, bright optical hardware, faded Central Asian rugs in gold and scarlet, hanging open-ribbed wrought-ironwork, a long, long downstage cross, eating an orange, section by acid section, as she goes, the faille gown flowing beautifully, its elaborate sleeves falling from very broadened shoulders till tightly gathered into long button-strung cuffs all in some nameless earth tone—a hedge-green, a clay-brown, a touch of oxidation, a breath of the autumnal—the light from the street lamps comes in through philodendron stalks and fingered leaves arrested in a grasp at the last straining away of sunset, falls a tranquil yellow across the cut-steel buckles at her insteps and streaks on along the flanks and down the tall heels of her patent shoes, so polished as to seem of no color at all past such mild citrus light where it touches them, and they refuse it, as if it were a masochist’s kiss. Behind her steps the carpet relaxes ceilingward, sole and heel-shapes disappearing visibly slow out of the wool pile. A single rocket explosion comes thudding across the city, from far east of here, east by southeast. The light along her shoes flows and checks like afternoon traffic. She pauses, reminded of something: the military frock trembling, silk filling-yarns shivering by crowded thousands as the chilly light slides over and off and touching again their unprotected backs. The smells of burning musk and sandalwood, of leather and spilled whisky, thicken in the room.
And he—passive as trance, allowing her beauty: to enter him or avoid him, whatever’s to be her pleasure. How shall he be other than mild receiver, filler of silences? All the radii of the room are hers, watery cellophane, crackling tangential as she turns on her heel-axis, lancing as she begins to retrace her path. Can he have loved her for nearly a decade? It’s incredible. This connoisseuse of “splendid weaknesses,” run not by any lust or even velleity but by vacuum: by the absence of human hope. She is frightening. Someone called her an erotic nihilist . . . each of them, Cherrycoke, Paul de la Nuit, even, he would imagine, young Trefoil, even—so he’s heard—Margaret Quartertone, each of them used for the ideology of the Zero . . . to make Nora’s great rejection that much more awesome. For . . . if she does love him: if all her words, this decade of rooms and conversations meant anything . . . if she loves him and still will deny him, on the short end of 5-to-2 deny his gift, deny what’s distributed in his every cell . . . then . . .
If she loves him. He’s too passive, he hasn’t the nerve to reach in, as Cherrycoke has tried to. . . . Of course Cherrycoke is odd. He laughs too often. Not aimlessly either, but directed at something he thinks everyone else can see too. All of us watching some wry newsreel, the beam from the projector falling milky-white, thickening with smoke from briers and cheroots, Abdullas and Woodbines . . . the lit profiles of military personnel and young ladies are the edges of clouds: the manly crepe of an overseas cap knifing forward into the darkened cinema, the shiny rounding of a silk leg tossed lazily toe-in between two seats in the row ahead, the keen-shadowed turbans of velvet and feathering eyelashes beneath. Among these nights’ faint and lusting couples, Ronald Cherrycoke’s laughing and bearing his loneliness, brittle, easily crazed, oozing gum from the cracks, a strange mac of most unstable plastic. . . . Of all her splendid weaklings, it is he who undertakes the most perilous trips into her void, looking for a heart whose rhythms he will call. It must astonish her, Nora-so-heartless, Cherrycoke kneeling, stirring her silks, between his hands old history flowing in eddy-currents—scarves of lime, aqua, lavender passing, pins, brooches, opalescent scorpions (her birth sign) inside gold mountings in triskelion, shoe-buckles, broken nacre fans and theatre programs, suspender-tabs, dark, lank, pre-austerity stockings . . . on his unaccustomed knees, hands swimming, turning, seeking out her past in molecular traces so precarious among the flow of objects, the progress through his hands, she delighted to issue her denials, covering up his hits (close, often dead on) skillfully as if it were drawing-room comedy. . . .
It’s a dangerous game Cherrycoke’s playing here. Often he thinks the sheer volume of information pouring in through his fingers will saturate, burn him out . . . she seems determined to overwhelm him with her history and its pain, and the edge of it, always fresh from the stone, cutting at his hopes, at all their hopes. He does respect her: he knows that very little of this is female theatricals, really. She has turned her face, more than once, to the Outer Radiance and simply seen nothing there. And so each time has taken a little more of the Zero into herself. It comes down to courage, at worst an amount of self-deluding that’s vanishingly small: he has to admire it, even if he can’t accept her glassy wastes, her appeals to a day not of wrath but of final indifference. . . . Any more than she can accept the truth he knows about himself. He does receive emanations, impressions . . . the cry inside the stone . . . excremental kisses stitched unseen across the yoke of an old shirt . . . a betrayal, an informer whose guilt will sicken one day to throat cancer, chiming like daylight through the fourchettes and quirks of a tattered Italian glove . . . Basher St. Blaise’s angel, miles beyond designating, rising over Lübeck that Palm Sunday with the poison-green domes underneath its feet, an obsessive crossflow of red tiles rushing up and down a thousand peaked roofs as the bombers banked and dived, the Baltic already lost in a pall of incendiary smoke behind, here was the Angel: ice crystals swept hissing away from the back edges of wings perilously deep, opening as they were moved into new white abyss. . . . For half a minute radio silence broke apart. The traffic being:
St. Blaise: Freakshow Two, did you see that, over.
Wingman: This is Freakshow Two—affirmative.
St. Blaise: Good.
No one else on the mission seemed to’ve had radio communication. After the raid, St. Blaise checked over the equipment of those who got back to base and found nothing wrong: all the crystals on frequency, the power supplies rippleless as could be expected—but others remembered how, for the few moments the visitation lasted, even static vanished from the earphones. Some may have heard a high singing, like wind among masts, shrouds, bedspring or dish antennas of winter fleets down in the dockyards . . . but only Basher and his wingman saw it, droning across in front of the fiery leagues of face, the eyes, which went towering for miles, shifting to follow their flight, the irises red as embers fairing through yellow to white, as they jettisoned all their bombs in no particular pattern, the fussy Norden device, sweat drops in the air all around its rolling eyepiece, bewildered at their unannounced need to climb, to give up a strike at earth for a strike at heaven. . . .
Group Captain St. Blaise did not include an account of this angel in his official debriefing, the W.A.A.F. officer who interrogated him being known around the base as the worst sort of literal-minded dragon (she had reported Blowitt to psychiatric for his rainbowed Valkyrie over Peenemünde, and Creepham for the bright blue gremlins scattering like spiders off of his Typhoon’s wings and falling gently to the woods of The Hague in little parachutes of the same color). But damn it, this was not a cloud. Unofficially, in the fortnight between the fire-raising at Lübeck and Hitler’s order for “terror attacks of a retaliatory nature”—meaning the V-weapons—word of the Angel got around. Although the Group Captain seemed reluctant, Ronald Cherrycoke was allowed to probe certain objects along on the flight. Thus the Angel was revealed.
Carroll Eventyr attempted then to reach across to Ter
ence Overbaby, St. Blaise’s wingman. Jumped by a skyful of MEs and no way out. The inputs were confusing. Peter Sachsa intimated that there were in fact many versions of the Angel which might apply. Overbaby’s was not as available as certain others. There are problems with levels, and with Judgment, in the Tarot sense. . . . This is part of the storm that sweeps now among them all, both sides of Death. It is unpleasant. On his side, Eventyr tends to feel wholly victimized, even a bit resentful. Peter Sachsa, on his, falls amazingly out of character and into nostalgia for life, the old peace, the Weimar decadence that kept him fed and moving. Taken forcibly over in 1930 by a blow from a police truncheon during a street action in Neukölln, he recalls now, sentimentally, evenings of rubbed darkwood, cigar smoke, ladies in chiseled jade, panne, attar of damask roses, the latest angular pastel paintings on the walls, the latest drugs inside the many little table drawers. More than any mere “Kreis,” on most nights full mandalas came to bloom: all degrees of society, all quarters of the capital, palms down on that famous blood veneer, touching only at little fingers. Sachsa’s table was like a deep pool in the forest. Beneath the surface things were rolling, slipping, beginning to rise. . . . Walter Asch (“Taurus”) was visited one night by something so unusual it took three “Hieropons” (250 mg.) to bring him back, and even so he seemed reluctant to sleep. They all stood watching him, in ragged rows resembling athletic formations, Wimpe the IG-man who happened to be holding the Hieropon keying on Sargner, a civilian attached to General Staff, flanked by Lieutent Weissmann, recently back from South-West Africa, and the Herero aide he’d brought with him, staring, staring at them all, at everything . . . while behind them ladies moved in a sibilant weave, sequins and high-albedo stockings aflash, black-and-white make-up in daintily nasal alarm, eyes wide going oh. . . . Each face that watched Walter Asch was a puppet stage: each a separate routine.
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