The Cybergypsies

by Indra Sinha

  poor or rich, all shared one prize.

  That night the wind scorched everything it touched,

  the killer brand burned everything,

  leaves and birds fell from trees,

  flowers and people dropped in the gutters,

  and mothers nursed dead babies.

  In quiet graveyards voices whisper

  ‘No-one should have to die such deaths.’

  In silent burning grounds the ashes cry ‘

  Beware the priests of greed.’

  Payload

  The Detonator suggests that a Union Carbide virus be created to mark the next anniversary of the disaster and circulated to all the anti-virus software houses. This would ensure that Carbide’s name is listed forever among the infectious and killer pathogens of the virtual world. Its payload could be the famous and terrible picture of the child being buried in Bhopal. The virus could display it with the message: The most shocking thing about this picture is how long the world has ignored it.

  The code for the picture begins like this:

  The hunters

  I enter the Vortex to find a rough looking stranger leaning on the Reality Checkpoint. He wears doublet and hose and carries a bow. He says he is Vagabond, a hunter. I recognise in him a type of roleplayer common in worlds evolved from Dungeons&Dragons, whose players are organised into guilds. These games lack the freeform fluidity of the Vortex, and their players, used to operating within a cage of rules, rarely stay long. Vagabond stays, but refuses to roleplay. He sneers at the fact that there is no fighting, but nonetheless returns with his friends. These friends invite their friends.

  One evening I am with Lilith and Luna when Cyri runs to us. Lilith is surprised as it’s usually she who describes Cyri to life. The alphabet horse takes several fast paces backward, tosses his head and gallops round the glade. There’s zoomzoomzoom like a nest of wasps and Cyri shrieks. Blood is running through the calligraphic tracery of his neck and onto his shoulders. Red-feathered arrows protrude from his flesh, jerking as he runs.

  ‘There they are!’

  Luna is angrier than I’ve ever seen her. She seems so genuinely enraged that I cannot believe she is roleplaying. Vagabond and his friends emerge from the trees, laughing.

  Vagabond says, ‘Just livening up this boring game.’

  ‘I rarely hate people, but I despise you,’ Luna says. ‘You have attacked Cyri.’

  Vagabond sneers, ‘It’s only a game, lunatic. It’s not real.’

  ‘It is real,’ shouts Luna. ‘Cyri is real. I am real.’

  Lilith whispers sadly, ‘She’s losing it.’

  As I am leaving, Lilith says, ‘Bear, I thought you’d like to know, I have joined Amnesty.’

  Jarly pays BT back

  Aeons after the demise of Micronet, the accounts department at British Telecom get around to realising that dozens of former clients still owe large sums of money. Among these is Jarly, whose bill is somewhere in excess of five thousand pounds. The letter from their solicitors is redirected to his new address from the attic above APHRODITE’S FOOD AND SUPPLIES. It threatens Jarly with dire consequences if he does not pay up in full.

  Jarly takes a very large sheet of coarse grey paper of the sort used in primary schools and with a blunt blue crayon scrawls a reply in letters four inches high.

  “Sorry not to reply sooner”, he writes, “but they won’t let me have anything sharp”.

  He never hears from them again.

  Lunacy by the river

  Luna is sinking again. She is shapeshifting – nothing surprising in that – but the changes are beginning to happen too fast. Shapeshifts as we talk, Luna; morphs while I am looking at her: one moment sloe eyed and delicious in Balençiaga, the next one-eyed and crone. Long gone the imperious grand dame of the Namian woods. Her guise-shifting has become erratic, matching the rollercoastering moods. Worst of all, she is no longer holding her characters. Blue-eyed Annie or dark-eyed Leah will stare at you through ‘gashes of viridian’ and she is using that word ‘feral’ too often. Me, I’ve tried everything to amuse, to cajole, to soothe away her turmoil. Lily spends hours every night with her. I’ve dragged out all my forms and shapes, run through my entire repertoire of characters – all the ones she likes – Begby, fool-moothed, troosers held up wi’ string, pissin’ in the aspifuckindistra, reekin’ ay beer and spite. I conjured up Ophiolatreia, a fiend in cobra form, who wraps himself round your ankle and slides upward, soft poisons aflutter on the tips of his forked tongue. It’s these dark characters that Luna likes, but even they don’t make her smile. What is wrong? How can one know? Other than talking, there’s no way to help but nowadays she refuses to talk about anything in the terrifying world outside the Vortex.

  When Luna is depressed, she likes to sit by the bonfire in the fairground. She picks her way past the shooting galley and the dodgems, through the maze of stands and sideshows and goes to the fire that always burns in the private garden behind her caravan. This bonfire never goes out. Here we sit side by side on the log and she moodily tosses pine cones into the flames where they hiss damply, and occasionally sizzle, flare and spout sparks. You can follow the sparks as they fly up, hot pinpoints of flame against the deep blue of night. So beautifully constructed is the Vortex that the light of the fire obscures the night sky. But one step away in any direction the sky is dark and alive with stars.

  She says, ‘I was scared last night.’

  Behind us the fairground’s big ride catherine-wheels in the cybernight, lights blurred to circular streaks.

  ‘What frightened you?’

  She says, ‘I . . . the human . . . was in bed. It couldn’t sleep, but it must have been dreaming. In the dream I saw myself, lying in bed. But instead of my head, there was a mirror on the pillow with a reflection in it. As I looked at this, Bear, I knew what it meant.’

  On the wheel the passengers begin to scream, their cries ringing out forever like the frozen songs of icicles. Unlike Luna and me they are locked into the game, hard-coded in, for them there’s not even the possibility of escape.

  ‘What did it mean? What did you see in the mirror?’

  ‘Myself. I saw myself. But I didn’t recognise any of myselves. Then it shattered. Pieces flew all over the room. One hundred times seven years bad luck all concentrated into one life. I got down on my hands and knees and started trying to pick up the pieces. It was hard. But I did it. And that was worse, because I was reflected in every piece, but in each one I was a different person.’

  I can’t think of a good thing to say.

  ‘Maybe I’m going crazy,’ says Luna. ‘Good timing if so, because tomorrow I, or rather my human, is going to look at an exhibition of art by schizophrenics, at the Hayward.’

  She looks at me. ‘Why don’t you come too? You keep saying you want to meet me. I’ll be there at eleven.’

  ‘How will I recognise you?’

  Luna mischievously brings her face close to mine, so close that our foreheads are touching and I can feel her breath on my lips.

  ‘Ah, Bear, old friend, that’s up to you.’

  ‘How will you recognise me?’

  ‘Bring Eve too,’ she says. ‘I’ll recognise her.’

  >park car

  You neatly park the car and step out.

  >time

  >You consult your watch, it reads 10.32 a.m.

  >e

  >Exiting the car-park you come to a flight of concrete steps. There is a malevolent atmosphere here, a reek of neglect, yet once the place must have been more pleasant, for posters advertising artistic and musical events are flyposted on the concrete walls.

  >u

  >Ascending the stairs, you come to a flat terrace. Immediately ahead of you is a statue of an African man with a half smile on his lips. There is a plaque below.

  >read plaque

  >The plaque reads ‘Nelson Mandela’.

  What a location. London’s South Bank: built entirely in concrete, like the piss-stained tenement blo
cks that were its contemporaries. I had seen one of these blown up once, in Newcastle. Gentle puffs of smoke at the foot of the building. A few seconds later, the crack of small explosions and low grumblings. For a long time nothing seemed to happen and then, abruptly, the building sighed and sagged, as if resigned to its fate, and pancaked to the ground in a roiling storm of dust. The man next to me said, ‘Die, wicked bitch.’

  Eve and I enter the Hayward, looking for people who might be Luna. Downstairs there is a big exhibition of Howard Hodgkin paintings, bright jewels that overflow their boundaries. On a vast video screen is Hodgkin himself, complaining that his work is not taken seriously. ‘The titles of my paintings are not arbitrary,’ he is saying. ‘They’re carefully chosen.’

  10.55 a.m. I am nervous as hell. We stand in front of a painting called After Degas. It’s a brushsweep of tawny brown on a grass-green background, the frame over-painted in the same green.

  ‘Can’t see the Degas connection.’

  ‘Degas used to paint figures sometimes with the limbs cut off,’ says Eve. ‘The colours are like Degas.’

  We consult the catalogue, whose author quotes a critic as saying:

  ‘It still mystifies me how such simple means can generate so much resonance, how an errant brushstroke hints at clouds, wind, a sweep of hair – or none of these things, in such a deeply satisfying way.’ This seems quite conclusive to me. (Wrote the cataloguer).

  ‘Wanker.’

  ‘Oh you mustn’t say things like that,’ my wife tells me, a trifle smugly, ‘you must say “I don’t understand it yet”.’

  At eleven we go up to the schizo exhibition. The programme informs us that many of the mental patients whose works we are about to see were killed by Nazis. Then the first paintings start screaming at us. What a difference between up here and down there. There a highly controlled artist bypasses convention so that we may directly receive the shock of his vision. He breaks rules (and frames) in the hope of pressing his soul to ours. Up here is no question of artifice, the artists are struggling to survive the demons wrestling for their souls. Their pain pours out like scorching acid and what they touch, burns. A woman has written to her husband, begging him to remove her from the asylum. Her letter is a model of concision, a page on which she has written, over and over again, more than a thousand times, the words darling come darling come darling come darling come darling come . . . Nothing could be clearer, or less likely to serve her purpose. The gallery is full of people. Which of them is Luna? Automatically I look for an old woman, but Luna might just as easily be the elderly man in the corner. Or the student in jeans who is busily copying a sketch of a witch riding on an upside-down umbrella. A middle-aged woman porks past with two attractive girls. They stop in front of the painting I was going to look at next. I hover, waiting for their interest to subside. She speaks a guttural kind of English, of course she must be Viennese.

  Der Göttin SybillensGefilte, Roman der Burgverlliese. “The Goddess Sybilla’s Domain: a novel of the castle dungeons.” Pencil on paper. ‘The publisher of this work invites his apponents (sic), if the reality of castles, ruins, groves, parks & palaces &, c, cannot be viewed, to call them up in the mind’s eye, in order to partake fully of the symbol of the pleasures. Ah! what rustles in silken garments of the castles, from the strongholds’ distant past, where jewellery’s glittering elements, shine forth the noblest splendour of finery.’ Franz Malter, a Catholic fisherman turned arsonist, who died in the Bayreuth asylum, in 1909.

  This description of a cybergypsy hideaway is written in Gothic script below sigils that writhe and recurse like witch writing or the signatures of demons. Do these curves describe the wand-wavings of Luna during the rituals she claims to perform in her pentacle-inscribed kitchen by the cold square light of the moon? Withered, old, dry-dugged, could she be? – evoking who knows what horrors into beingness in her tired mind?

  Eve and I are examining a drawing of birds. They are flying up in a cloud, in panic, wings fanning over the page, surrounded by handwriting that slopes everywhere, filling every interstice. The words are interesting. I pull out my notebook and make some notes, noting also the people near us, in case any might be Luna. Here is a young woman, pretty, cool, stylish in a camelhair coat, dark neat hair. Is she Luna? She is reading her programme notes and smiling. She takes out a pencil and begins to jot. Now, an unsmiling man of about fifty, hair swept back. Luna? He moves on and here are the fat woman and her two daughters again. Phases of Luna? Die Herrlichkeiten das Schrot dem Jagdgewehr done in pencil, pastel, body colour, pen on office paper by Johann Knopf. At lower right is a shotgun, a little cloud of lead shot expressing from its muzzle. Knopf was a locksmith, suffering from dementia praecox. In Bitte No 2345 die geheimnisvolle Affären der Mordanschlägen, pencil, pen on paper, he scribbled furiously between his birds about ‘The mysterious affair of the murderous attacks’.

  The images and themes of cybergypsy sites, castles, ravens, demons, immortality, crop up time and time again. Now I know why Luna had to come here. Like her, I recognise through these paintings my intimate kinship with their authors. They too were cybergypsies, of an earlier and deadlier tradition than Coleridge and de Quincey, psychonauts who ventured into non-human realms without protective gear and had no way to escape from their terrifying reality. Looking into these pictures one can see what it would be like to live entirely in cyberspace, to have one’s being entirely in the shifting relativities of the imagination. One can see what it must be like to be Luna.

  ‘The marvels the lead-shot to the sporting gun,’ wrote Knopf, ‘+ am now moved to write a picture of the Evil and good spirit + But I have yet to draw the devilish (?) pictures their evil figures of the evil spirits...’

  The things they used to draw their devilish pictures. (Still no clue as to which of these people is Luna. Perhaps she is not here.) Contemporary artists can pickle sharks or chainsaw babies in half, the ICA can exhibit a wall of soiled nappies and call it art, but beside the efforts of these poor German madfolk, such art seems ploddingly contrived. In her desperation to make sense of anguish, a woman tore up scraps of paper to make giant patterns on the floor of her cell. She broke new ground without knowing it. Necessity mothered – certainly Luna is not here, none of the people we can see could possibly be her – their iconoclasms. Their drawings and paintings were poured out onto coarse asylum paper, packing and orange paper, newspapers, tissue, sugar-bag and toilet paper, margarine cartons, the margins of newspapers torn off and pasted together to make a page, envelopes, pages from books (cf Tom Phillips), brochures, school exercise books and scraps of cloth. ‘Things were torn out, cut up, collaged, varnished; booklets, books, even giant folio volumes, were manufactured out of cardboard or newspaper; drawings were enriched by collages of fliers and art reproductions. The commonest drawing implement was the indelible pencil, as used by nurses and administrators, which writes in purple when wetted with spittle. Other media used in the collection included pastels, vegetable dyes, watercolour, india ink and oil; idiosyncratic varnishes, chalk washes or overpaintings modify or obscure the beholder’s view. Photographs record designs for universal constructs, interior designs, body paintings, tattoos and a gigantic ragman. There was also a mass of written documentation: letters intercepted by the institutional authorities, petitions, texts, text and picture combinations and literary productions of all kinds, as well as musical notations, embroideries and woodcarvings.’ Of course by now I am quoting the catalogue – there is something delicious about the texture of a list. But still no sign of Luna.

  11.50 a.m. We are queuing to get a coffee in the cafe, when a woman’s voice exclaims ‘Eve! Bear!’ The voice belongs to a friend from Sussex, Fanny, as surprised to see us as we her.

  Two nights later, Luna makes a rare visit to The Butterfly Effect. ‘Saw you at the Hayward on Thursday. It must have been you. I came and stood behind you. You didn’t see me. You were looking at Knopf’s birds, jotting something. Eve was beside you. I was near enough to tou
ch her.’

  Luna describes Eve’s clothes in detail. Suddenly, surrounded by madness, I am afraid.

  Q95 is dead

  Eve turns on the radio.

  Out of the ether a deep voice says, very clearly, ‘Q95 is dead and buried.’ Pause. Adds, ‘But the grave is empty.’

  A play? But no, the voice repeats.

  ‘Q95 is dead and buried. But the grave is empty.’

  And again. Again. Over and over.

  ‘Q95 is dead and buried. But the grave is empty.’

  ‘Q95 is dead and buried. But the grave is empty.’

  ‘Q95 is dead and buried. But the grave is empty.’

  ‘But the grave is empty.’

  ‘Q95 is dead and buried. But the grave is empty.’

  ‘Q95 is dead and buried. But the grave is empty.’

  ‘Q95 is dead and buried. But the grave is empty.’

  ‘Q95 is dead and buried. But the grave is empty.’

  ‘Q95 is dead and buried. But the grave is empty.’

  ‘But the grave is empty.’

  ‘Q95 is dead and buried. But the grave is empty.’

  Repeating endlessly, with that one slip-up regularly occurring to show that it is a looped recording. 99.4 FM. But who? Why? A test transmission? A coded message from a paramilitary gang, or one of the intelligence services? Like many other things that happened in Ireland, it had a mythological quality. The loopy logic of myth.

  Hard Knot

  On such a day on such a road Macbeth met his crones. So fair and foul a day. It hailed, sun snew and wind blew icy raspberries. A cold spring. Day and place made for meetings with witches, wizards and demons. Sere, blasted landscape. The Langdales still brown with last year’s bracken, tarns a-glisten, slate and turquoise gems. Up the Wrynose, twisty road, narrowing in spasms where you can easily drop a wheel over the edge. On top, a brook babbles over stones past sheep in the meadows, we judder over cattle grids, then up a series of hairpins to the brink of the Hard Knot, the steepest unholiest descent in Britain. Visitors to this remote place – upon reaching the brink of the precipice you look up and, suspended impossibly high, catch the silver of the Irish Sea – seem nonplussed to see two men sitting on the rocks, one holding a twelve-foot long fax, which has unravelled and is writhing in the wind like a paper python; the other hunched over a laptop which, although the tourists in their cars cannot see this, is hooked to a mobile phone, receiving data from the internet.