by Indra Sinha
Magnus and I have spent the morning watching the filming of the strange commercial I wrote for British Nuclear Fuels: a multi-jointed metal robotic arm clicking a finger cymbal, leads a circle of half-naked yogis in hathayoga exercises on a Cumbrian felltop. The agency thinks the film demonstrates scientific achievement, but to Magnus and me it’s a cybergypsy paean to the weird realm that hides behind our eyelids. In truth, I am ruined for the nugacities and hebetudes of advertising. A decade of cybergypsying has cast me adrift in a world where things do not exist in their own right, where nothing exists except in relation to everything else.
‘What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain? Such a palimpsest is my brain; such a palimpsest, O reader! is yours. Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light . . .’
Strange to think that de Quincey and Coleridge lived here and knew these mountains. Opium-eating de Quincey had a vision of the architect Piranesi, the Scarpa of his day, climbing an eternal stair. Was that a de(e)scrying of the future, a metaphor for the finite recyclability of uranium? Or of the unending energy of sunshine? I think of Sipple – dreamer, ally, imagineer – who detested nuclear power. Ironically, a technology developed to enrich uranium has spawned a fridge-sized centrifuge that could make his solar dream come true . . . “I know that God told you in a vision to leave Kuwait,” his letter to Saddam had concluded. “I have had similar experiences and know that they are meant to be acted on.”
Spirits from the deep mind used to irrupt in the most unwelcome fashion into de Quincey’s everyday life. In Confessions of an English Opium Eater, he recorded that: ‘One day a Malay knocked at my door. What business a Malay could have to transact amongst English mountains, I cannot conjecture: but possibly he was on his way to a sea-port about forty miles distant.’
Magnus has begun checking his mail. There’s an email from the Detonator.
‘The servant who opened the door,’ writes de Quincey, ‘was a young girl born and bred among the mountains, who had never seen an Asiatic dress of any sort: his turban, therefore, confounded her not a little: and, as it turned out, that his attainments in English were exactly of the same extent as hers in Malay, there seemed to be an impassable gulf fixed between all communication of ideas, if either party had happened to possess any. In this dilemma, the girl, recollecting the reputed learning of her master (and, doubtless, giving me credit for a knowledge of all the languages of the earth, besides, perhaps, a few of the lunar ones), came and gave me to understand that there was a sort of demon below, whom she clearly imagined that my art could exorcise from the house.’
‘The Detonator wants to know if you’ve got hold of the Thorp operating system.’
‘Tell him, yes. He can soon reduce this place to a smoking ruin.’
‘Okay,’ says Magnus, typing.
‘I did not immediately go down,’ (writes de Quincey) ‘but, when I did, the group which presented itself, arranged as it was by accident, though not very elaborate, took hold of my fancy and my eye in a way that none of the statuesque attitudes exhibited in the ballets at the Opera House, though so ostentatiously complex, had ever done. In a cottage kitchen, but panelled on the wall with dark wood that from age and rubbing resembled oak, and looking more like a rustic hall of entrance than a kitchen, stood the Malay – his turban and looser trowsers of dingy white relieved upon the dark panelling: he had placed himself nearer to the girl than she seemed to relish; though her native spirit of mountain intrepidity contended with the feeling of simple awe which her countenance expressed as she gazed upon the tiger-cat before her. And a more striking picture there could not be imagined, than the beautiful English face of the girl, and its exquisite fairness, together with her erect and independent attitude, contrasted with the sallow and billious skin of the Malay, enamelled or veneered with mahogany, by marine air, his small, fierce, restless eyes, thin lips, slavish gestures and adorations . . . My knowledge of the Oriental tongues is not remarkably extensive, being indeed confined to two words – the Arabic for barley, and the Turkish for opium (madjoon), which I have learnt from Anastasius. And, as I had neither a Malay dictionary, nor even Adelung’s Mithridates, which might have helped me to a few words, I addressed him in some lines from the Illiad.’
Ten minutes later, the Detonator has replied.
‘He’s keen,’ says Magnus. ‘Wants to go to work right away.’
‘Good. Tell him not to worry about radioactivity circling the globe, children getting leukemia, contaminated grass, milk, farm animals . . . The thing is to get his point across good and hard.’
‘Hang on, hang on,’ says Magnus, taking this down.
The madness of de Quincey addressing to a Malay sailor in Homeric Greek such words of welcome as, say, Calypso spoke to Odysseus when he was washed up on her magic island, or Achilles to the luckless Hector; just such coups de foudre, such stunningly crass victories, are also ours. We are terrified that nuclear power may be unsafe, so fuck, let’s prove we’re right by trying to cause a major international incident.
Magnus and I sit side by side, arsed to granite, laughing like crazies. Around us, the mountain domes are wrinkled as the snouts of dinosaurs.
Gotcha
Geno has vanished. No sign of him for weeks. The bulletin board line appears to be down. The last time I talked to him, he told me that a lightning storm had taken out his hard drive. I wonder if someone, possibly Cleton, has wreaked cynical revenge by slipping him a trojan, one of those that instructs the victim’s computer to perform the simple sequence
c:
format c: | y
which reformats, ie, wipes clean, your hard drive. I try for some days, but The Oklahoma Institute of Virus Research does not reply. One night, I get a recorded message which says, ‘The number you have dialled has been disconnected.’ I try Geno’s voice line, but it’s the same story. No trace on NuKENet, nor in several other obvious hacker haunts. No spoor on Cleton’s reclaimed virus echo. Then one day I am on a board in Miami called Brokedown Palace. This is run by Newbomb Turk, NuKE sympathiser, friend of Geno’s and ARiSToTLE’s.
‘Geno got his ass busted by the FBI,’ Turk tells me. ‘He’s in jail.’
It appears that Geno had dialled up the FBI’s National Crime Information Center computer and gingered it up with a virus. This seemed such a jolly idea that next day he decided to do it all over again. This time, words began appearing on his screen, an FBI system operator doing a sort of ‘halt-who-goes-there?’ routine. Geno immediately broke the connection and because he’d taken the usual hacker precaution of routing the call via two or three hard-to-trace nodes, breathed a sigh of relief. But a minute later his phone rang and a deep voice said with a chuckle, ‘Gotcha!’
‘Hit ’em with the Backtime virus,’ says Turk gloomily. ‘Yep, Geno’s inside. Looks like he’s gonna be away a loooong time.’
MacGillicuddy’s Reeks
We’ve been in Ireland two weeks and Gliomach’s clues are leading us nowhere. But in truth neither of us either minds or notices, because we are in a world of our own, neither of us quite certain what the future holds for us, or whether it will hold.
The storm catches us in MacGillicuddy’s Reeks, huge, towering shoulders of moorland where golden eagles still fly. There is a crash of thunder overhead, a flash that turns the sky pond-green. It is summer, warm, the car is filled with green-yellow storm light. Fat drops of rain begin to fall, smearing the windscreen, making it hard to see. The road ahead is narrowing as we get higher, passing in and out of patches of cloud. Without warning a car as big as ours, in fact it’s another Land Rover, comes at us round a corner. I stand on the brakes and somehow we fishtail past.
‘That driver was Indian,’ says Eve. ‘How strange.’
The rain is rushing down outside. The surface of the road is a white haze of detonating water bombs.
‘Even when the hurricane came, you played Shades,’ says Eve.
All week, driving
home from London there’d been lightning in the south; flickering, restless gusts. There were warnings that a big wind was on the way. Eve went to bed around eleven, as usual leaving me lost in the glow of the screen. There were lions in the wind. Line noise. Interference. We used to call it ‘lions’. It looked something like . . . as if I were typing this sentence when wi{tho{{ut {{wa{{{rni{n{{g there{ {{w{ould {{{{begi{{{{n {{{{{{{{a{{{{se{{{r{{{ies of in{{ter{{{{{{{{{u{{p{{{t {{io{{{{{n{s, {{{{{ {g{{ro{{{ wi{{{{{{ng worse. And the lions did roar, more and more loudly, and the brambles flung themselves at the windows as the wind picked up, wheewing, shrieking, whistling. A tall cypress bent forward, began rapping at the panes, which bulged inwards with each buffet of wind. When the ‘lions’ made play impossible, I went to bed.
Woke to a clear, bright sky. The bedroom seemed lighter. To the south, great gaps had opened up; we could see clear to the horizon, a field we had never seen before, a slope a mile or two away. Trees, big trees, were down, lying all around our boundary. I went out and stood in silent awe. No sound. No birds, what had become of them? Everywhere huge trees were down. Overhead electric wires writhed like a snake’s honeymoon in our gateway. Grolius’s apple trees were all gone, lying on their sides, roots in the air, oddly undignified, as though they had been pushed over by a child in a temper. Round the front of the house I found Eve standing silently, hugging her arms around herself, looking at her car. A tall pine had crashed down across it, bending it into a U, like a cartoon. She stood there very quietly. Then walked inside. She bore the blow like an animal, with trusting, helpless eyes.
‘But I was wrong to trust you, wasn’t I, Bear? I thought that if I stayed there for you, kept the house, brought up the children, that one day you would come back to me. But you never did. Nothing could stop you, could it? You nearly died of heart failure, but went straight back to Shades. Our rotten house was all we had in the world, but when the hurricane was trying to tear it apart, you went right on playing Shades.’
Actually I had stopped. I’d had to, the phone lines were dead and we had no electricity for weeks. It was a strange experience, driving back to Sussex from London those evenings after the storm. Central London was lit up, back to normal. On the outskirts, the damage was still there. In Kent, trees were lying by the roads, the lane where I’d rescued the two women was impassable, with big trunks lying across it. Even here there were still a few lights, but by the time you reached Sussex, the darkness was total. Here and there in the lanes, as in the days of the smugglers, were windows outlined in flickering candle-glow. The countryside had reverted to its past, but it was a joyful return. People were helping each other with axes and saws and pots of tea. The farmer from down the lane came with a tractor and lifted the tree off Eve’s car. I bought a chainsaw and began logging our windfalls. We soon had a huge stack of firewood. Two of the pine trunks we dragged across the corner of a pond, to make a bridge. It was fun. With no electricity, people began to make their own music again. Guitars came out of attics; flutes and violins. From open windows came the tinkle of pianos. We got out the old wind-up gramophone and listened to Molly’s collection of scratched 78s, records that in some cases had last been played in Ireland fifty years earlier. We cooked on wood and every meal tasted wonderful. Eve is right, I should have given up Shades and the modem at that point. Nothing I experienced in cyberspace ever came close to the beauty of those electricity-free weeks.
It is virtually impossible to drive. I cannot see the road even a few yards ahead. The mountain slopes around us are running with water. Brown torrents are careering off slopes which disappear almost vertically into the clouds. I stop the car.
‘Eve, do you know when I realised what a bloody fool I’ve been? Not during our rows, but during one of our happiest times, when we’d been to the gallery where we were to meet Luna. Afterwards I felt sick with fear. I did not know who or what Luna was, yet I’d allowed it – she even called herself ‘it’ – to come within a yard of you. ‘It’ was standing right behind you. It could have reached out and touched you. My stupidity terrifies me. I can’t believe what I did. Eve, bringing Luna so close to you was like evoking some unknown spirit to appearance. I had the strongest sense that she was jealous of you and now I understand why. I’ve been running that scene in my mind over and over, trying to see it through Luna’s eyes. We are in the gallery looking at the picture of Knopf’s birds. I am scribbling notes. What do I see when I look at you?’
‘What?’ Eve’s face is wet, perhaps splashed by rain, although her window is closed.
‘I see a flesh and blood woman. A woman you can reach out and touch. And that’s what Luna’s jealous of. She can only be who she wants to be in cyberspace, where she is a wraith, a voice, letters on a screen. You, Eve, are who you want to be, and you’ve got it all in real life. Imagine how galling for Luna. You have real hair to stroke, real lips to kiss. And then I had this utterly staggering thought. I thought, “Eve is warm. She breathes. She smiles and can talk to me. She is intelligent and amusing. We have done so many things together. We have shared so much. I held her hand when she gave birth to our children. Eve is far more wonderful, infinitely more compex and interesting than any character that has ever been or ever will be created in cyberspace.” ’
She is laughing and simultaneously half crying. ‘You bloody fool, Bear, I suppose you think that’s a compliment.’
‘Eve, I have seen the fucking light. For years I have been living among shadows and reflections of reality. I’ve applauded people for making pathetic facsimiles of reality. I was amazed and thrilled by the woods in the Vortex. But now, Eve, I look at real woods, and I see that every single leaf is complex and mysterious. I came out while you were gardening the other day. I picked up the soil from the kitchen garden, it was rich, dark with compost. I thought, “Cyri the horse is marvellous, but this stuff is a miracle. It is full of living things too tiny to see. It’s home to millions of nematodes, it has a smell, when rain falls it gives off a rich, deep aroma.” I thought, “This is the world I want to live in. This lovely garden is infinitely more subtle, more enchanting, than anything we will ever see in cyberspace.” Eve, I want to be with you in that garden.’
Eve has stopped crying. She says, ‘Bear, you are ridiculous. You sound like an American.’
Then she takes a deep breath and says, ‘I didn’t want to tell you, I hoped I’d never have to hurt you. But I’ve fallen in love with someone else.’
Tralee
Well, there’s nothing left now but Gliomach. Irish roads are funny, they tell jokes. A stretch of loose chippings has three signs within a hundred yards of each other bidding us travel at, respectively, 20, 15, and 30 m.p.h. The verges are alive with scarlet crocosmia, purple loosestrife. A burst of cornflowers and scattered poppies brings us to Tralee.
We follow Gliomach’s instructions to Harty’s Bar, desperate for its facilities. On the door of the gents a notice proclaims ‘Drop 2p in slot and slide knob’. From inside comes the steady plop-plop-plop of a man at work. Eventually we reconvene at the bar.
‘Will you be wanting cream at all in your coffee?’ asks the barman. ‘Tell you what, I’ll give you a nice Irish coffee with cream, why don’t I? That’ll put you in the mood for celebration.’
On the walls are pictures of the barman with all sorts of people, local celebrities. People are constantly coming up and asking him questions. ‘The Roses are coming tonight, aren’t they Charlie?’ ‘There’ll be fireworks, won’t there Charlie?’
The atmosphere reminds me of Todd’s barber of Fakenham.
Charlie the barman gives us a Roses of Tralee brochure and then, bizarrely, signs it himself.
We do not stay for the Roses festival, but carry on to Dingle where we find ourselves in a newsagent. Lounging in the doorway is a man who looks so much like Don McCullin that I want to go up and ask if he is related. Outside a fellow with matted hair is playing a didgeridoo, his small dog tied up nearby. A small girl tells her mother, ‘Ah, I’m afraid some boys
will come and kick it.’
‘You mustn’t always think the worst,’ chides the mother.
There’s a buzz in the supermarket, a tide of people drifting towards the door. Above the crowd of heads bob several large, floppy, beribboned hats. Beneath their wide, elegantly tilted brims are pretty young ladies. The Roses have followed us to Dingle. They sign autographs as a harassed-looking tour manager stands by the door consulting his watch.
‘Block your ears during my BAD singing on the TV, Caroline, Perth’
‘Eve, Greetings from Ulster Rose, Rosalie Howden’
‘Eve, Greetings from South African Rose, Samantha Byre’
‘I just don’t know what came over me,’ says Eve, holding out Charlie’s makeshift autograph album.
When Eve says those words, we sit for a long time in silence. Silence, I say, but thought is locked in the brain by the deafening percussion of rain. It’s an astonishing thing, the Coconet. It’s at moments like that you really feel how complex and multi-layered are its processes. One part of my mind has gone blank, but at other levels, things are continuing as ever. Somewhere deep in my mind, sunlight is falling on a green trout stream, in another part a bus chugs up a hill, the raindrops are jumping off the bonnet of the car and a third part of my mind mimicks them, drumming imaginary fingers and saying ‘pirrirrirrrimpirrirrimpirrimpirrrirrirrim’.