by Will Self
—Well – oof-oof – if I can’t manage it you’ll stop it garrotting me, won’t you, Terry?
—Sure, Fergus.
—So – oof-oof-oof-oooaaay! – obliging. The Ferret performed the feat, sat up and took the towel Terry held out. Mopping the teensy crannies of his tiny head, he turned to his workout buddy. Um, tell me, Terry, have you always been a muscle dwarf?
—Nope, Fergus, I used to be a leather dwarf back in NYC, but that scene was so crazy and then everyone got sick, so I came out here. People are much more accepting in LA – he smirked – and I get a helluva lot of offers. Where are your friends?
—Oh, them – they’re strolling along the esplanade.
—Fergus, are they, like – an item?
They certainly appeared to be an item, Dorian and Gavin, as they breasted the throngs along the roadway at the top of the beach – both of them in khaki shorts and white T-shirts, both of them in shades, both of them with the smooth, clipped haircuts of gays in the military. Yes, they looked like an item of coupled normality, while all around surged a mêlée of singular mutations: ancient hippies, with bells on their fingers and rings on their toes; snake priestesses entwined with their hissing disciples; tattooed primitives nouveaux, their patterned faces two-dimensional; punks jangling with the metal threaded through their scabrous flesh; soul dudes muffling the world with their Afros.
—I’ve never seen so many freaks in one place, said Gavin; these people are unbelievable! He was enjoying himself hugely. Dorian, whom back in London Gavin found arrogant, distant and hopelessly narcissistic, had been applying his formidable charm.
—Well, Gavin, in my experience it’s often the most outrageous outsides that harbour the most prosaic insides, while those of us who appear fresh-faced and beautiful contain a most rotten and disgusting core.
—What about you, Dorian – what’s your disgusting core?
—It’s just that: a disgusting core. My looks are unnaturally preserved. Eleven years ago, immediately after I left university, Baz Hallward made his video portrait of me, and while I have remained a fresh-faced twenty-two-year-old, the installation has suffered the onslaught of the past decade. All my debauchery is now inscribed on my cathode features, while these ones… he broke step, turned to Gavin, took his hands, looked into his eyes… remain pristine.
Gavin laughed. Nice conceit, Dorian, he said; sounds like some of the conceptual works these young artists at Goldsmiths’ have been working on. Maybe you should do it rather than talk about it.
—What d’you mean?
—Take Baz’s installation and customise it. I know what his stuff is like – incredibly fey, laughable really. Everything’s a lot more hard-edged now. You should meet some of the newer crowd – you’d like them.
—Plenty of time for that, as I’m immortal. Even if this sympathetic magic with Baz’s piece doesn’t carry on working for ever, I’m going to have my body frozen so that when the scientists of the future have discovered the secret of perpetual life they can boot me up again and then upgrade me.
—Are you serious, Dorian? You mean get those cryonics people to freeze you?
—Why not? That’s part of the reason the Ferret is here – I said I’d introduce him to my immortalist friends; he’s very keen on the idea.
In the hospital waiting room Wotton stirred. He grasped the Ferret’s firm shoulder in his febrile fingers. ‘I don’t say hello to inverts any more, Fergus.’
‘Oh no?’
‘No, I say, “Welcome fellow sufferer,” which is how Schopenhauer thought everyone should be greeted. Tell me, Fergus, why don’t you have the virus?’
‘Well, really… Henry, I don’t think… I mean I don’t engage in that sort of thing nowadays.’
‘Perhaps you ought to. After all, if you’re going to be frozen so that the doctors of the future can thaw you out, you’d be doing them a favour by presenting them with a challenge, mm?’
A woman doctor who’d been hovering nearby came forward. ‘Mr Wotton?’
‘That’s me.’ He struggled to rise and she reached down to assist him.
‘I’m very sorry you were kept waiting so long; we have a bed ready for you now. Will your friend be waiting for you? It’s likely you won’t be conscious again until early evening.’
‘Yes, he’s my buddy and he’s going to stay.’
‘Stay? Buddy?’ The Ferret was appalled.
‘Yes; don’t be so squeamish. They might let you watch if you’re good – some buddies do. They use a general anaesthetic; all they have to do is take the line out and instal a new one. Some people I know would be delighted to witness a tube being tunnelled through the membrane below my upper chest wall. Perhaps if you cope with this you’ll shape up – to be frank, Fergus, you’re not much good at buddying.’
‘Buddying?’
‘Befriending someone with AIDS, helping them out. Look,’ Wotton continued as the trio tottered down the corridor between treatment rooms, ‘if you really can’t handle it you can stay on the ward and sleep. The important thing is that until I actually go into theatre I want you to keep performing, keep telling me about Dorian.’
15
Way out to the east of Los Angeles, in a district called Riverside, the dry gulches of the surrounding mesa gouged down into a jumble of used-car lots, warehouses and light-industrial premises. The atmosphere here was even more bilious than in the centre of town – or was it only that the distempered air was more noticeable, having less aural and visual pollution to compete with? On a roughly trapezoid patch of asphalt outside the rolled-up steel door of a breeze-block unit stood another ill-assorted trio. (Some tales are full of well-matched couples, but this, alas, is not one of them.)
Terry, the muscle dwarf, stroked his hairy trowel and prodded at the hard ground with a sneaker. Six months in California had coated Gavin with the sweetness of good living, and this sticky layer had been caramelised by the sun. Dorian was Dorian, never more incontrovertibly himself, never more beautiful, than when placed in ugly prosaic surroundings. The three men stared up into the unit, to where, perched on top of a catwalk that ran across the top of several large, wheeled storage Dewars, stood the Ferret. With him was a scoutmasterish character, kitted out in khaki shorts, knee socks, sandals, sheathed knife, wire-rimmed spectacles, and a walrus moustache like a lip-borne token of masculinity. Wreaths of dry-ice smoke eddied from the gloom out to the sunlight. The Ferret was peering into it with the bemused expression of a genteel lady who’s been told at the age of sixty-three that she is about to become a mother again.
—What are those? he asked the scoutmaster.
—Neurocans, came the reply, the canisters that contain the heads of our members who have opted for partial suspension.
—And that costs fifty thousand, yes?
—That’s correct.
—While to have my whole body, er… suspended is more expensive?
—In the region of a hundred and sixty thousand dollars, sir, so yes, considerably more expensive. But as I said to you while we toured the facility, an investment in cryonic suspension isn’t only financial. All of our members are fully committed to a philosophy; most are prepared to join in assisting at the perfusion and suspension of their fellows after deanimation.
—Oh, I don’t know about that…
—Listen – the scoutmaster squatted down on his haunches and yarned on as if the dry ice were a smoking campfire – I’ve assisted at four suspensions now and I can tell you that in the first seconds after deanimation – when the team sprang into action and I commenced cutting down the femoral artery so we could pump in the glycerol – I felt more sense of achievement than I have in any other area of my life. And I was a marine sergeant in ’Nam – I’m no pussy, no sir.
—Um, yes, absolutely – I don’t like to think of myself as in the least little bit feline either. Tell me, Dorian, he called down from his perch, have you gone for the whole-body suspension or only the, um, neuro?
—Since you
ask, Fergus, whole-body – I shouldn’t want to have another body cloned for me when I’ve been reanimated. It might not be up to scratch; they might confuse my DNA with someone else’s – I could end up with my head stuck on an inferior body… like Terry’s, for instance.
—Back off, Dorian! The muscle dwarf bridled at an invisible leash, his arms flexing invisible bolt-cutters. I don’t have to put up with this crap, I’m nobody’s fucking poodle.
—Boys, boys… the Ferret damped them down from on high… there’s no need for such histrionics. But speaking of poodles – he turned back to the immortalist – is there any facility for, um, suspending one’s favourite companions?
—Why, absolutely. Look down there, sir, can you see the blue linen sacks? They contain members’ pets. Personally I feel certain that being greeted by our four-legged friends when we’re reanimated will be a great comfort and enormously assist our integration into a future society which will be vastly more technically sophisticated than our own.
In the limo thrumming back west along Route 99, Gavin guffawed, Pets! A technology vastly more sophisticated than our own! Who do these jokers think they’re kidding? Did you see their operating theatre? It was like something out of Dr-bloody-Kildare, totally hokey.
—I don’t imagine you’ll be laughing quite so much, the Ferret sniffed, when you’re dead and Terry and Dorian and I are frolicking in a very real Elysium. Mmm, I can just picture it… crystal lakes and infinitely tall towers of translucent sapphire, the whole place populated by the most divine boys –
—Are you on acid? Gavin leaned over from the front seat and poked at the Ferret. You certainly seem off your trolley.
Terry, who was driving, a bulky cushion beneath his tush, a chauffeur’s cap perched like a yarmulka on his pointy crown, rounded on Gavin, grabbed his arm and snarled, Don’t touch the boss!
—The boss, is it now? Fergus, I never thought you’d stoop to such sycophancy. As for this suspension business, when they pump the glycerol into your corpse’s arteries, there will be a little bit of moisture left in each and every one, and when the temperature drops to minus seventy-five they’ll pop like fucking Ricicles. No matter how vast the technological advancement of the future – and frankly, the way things are going I doubt it’ll get much further at all – they’ll never be able to repair bodies cell by cell.
—‘Course they will, the Ferret yawned; Dorian says they’ll do it with nannywhatsit, little robot thingies – isn’t that it, Dorian?
—Nanotechnology, Fergus – you’re quite right; they’ll have tiny hyperintelligent robots working in concert to repair our damaged bodies. They’ll recreate you, Ferret my love, exactly the same in every detail, right down to your slumberousness. The Ferret was slumbering now, his little head lolling over at an unnatural angle on the leather upholstery, as if he were a nodding human in lieu of a nodding dog. Tut-tut, Dorian admonished Gavin, why deny Fergus his late bid for immortality, if that’s what he wants?
—It’s just so stupid, that’s what I can’t stand. Why are you doing it, Dorian? You aren’t a fool.
—I suppose it’s a spread bet, Gavin. I don’t just belong to this bunch; I belong to a couple of other cryonics outfits too, and a life-extension group. I’m partial to the odd cult as well – there’s one here called Heaven’s Gate, a Japanese lot called Aum Shinrikyo who’re totally gnarly. In Switzerland I belong to some dudes who dress up in delightful robes, called the Order of the Solar Temple, and when I’m in Texas I like to drop by Waco and visit a bunch dubbed the Branch Davidians. Like I say, if you put a chip on every number you’re bound to win at least one spin of fortune’s wheel.
—I can’t believe in any of this except as an affectation, Dorian; I think you’re treating your life as an artwork – of sorts. You should come back to London with me, get Hirst to preserve your corpse in formaldehyde. Put it on show in a fucking big vitrine. It’d be a kind of immortality, if that’s what you want.
—No, if you want, Gavin. If you want.
—Yeah, well, I do want – more than this sad scene. It seems like Terry here is the new Californian catamite; I think I’ll light out for the territory. I can’t imagine I’ll miss the old bastard that much.
‘But I missed him, Henry, truly I did. I felt quite bereft.’
‘And what about Terry?’ Wotton put in, while investing heavily in a Turkish State Monopoly. ‘Didn’t he do the business?’
‘You make it sound so crude. It wasn’t like that at all; I think Terry almost loved me – he was awfully loyal. If he were with me in London I shouldn’t have to come with you to such dreadful places.’ The Ferret peered around at the dank multi-storey car-park, which, with its pissed-upon pillars and rubber-wiped ramps, resembled the interior of a pyramid constructed by an automotive despotism. The two men – one diminutive and nut-brown, the other lank and fish-belly-pale – sat in their darkened saloon as if it were a four-door sarcophagus. But all they had in the way of funerary goods was Wotton’s usual Jag-load of rubbish.
‘Ssh!’ he admonished the Ferret. ‘Here comes London now.’
A silver Honda Aerodeck – such a preposterous little vehicle, with its pretensions to a futurity that had already slid past by the time it rolled off the production line in Marysville, Ohio – came jolting up the ramp, then screeched to a halt. A lithe black guy in his late twenties, sporting a baggy maroon windcheater and baggy black jeans, shot up and out of the little car like a fighter beating a count. He had a flat-top in the current Tyson mode. He swaggered over to the Jag. The Ferret quailed while Wotton wound down his window. ‘Oyez!’ London exclaimed. ‘S’it fuckin’ ’ot yev’ ‘Enry.’
‘Indeed,’ Wotton replied, seemingly comprehending this bizarre idiolect, ‘but you aren’t making it any cooler with your mode of arrival.’
‘Sinit ’kin ’urry up gofer over Bushmun,’ London glottaled, ‘an’ summuv.’ His head, as sharp as a sabre, slashed at the stinky air, his shoulders rolled, his knees flexed, paranoia emanated from him with such intensity that it distorted the air like petrol fumes.
‘Ah well, I quite understand, London. In that case you had better furnish me with an eightball of your soi-disant crack. Incidentally…’ he squirmed round to indicate the Ferret, who was now not only quailing, but so agitated – his little liver-spotted hands fluttering around his fluffy toupee – that he even closely resembled a quail… ‘I’d like you to meet a friend of mine –’
‘Issit sound an’ that norv?! Issit?’ If at all possible London was becoming even more agitated.
‘Oh, he’s entirely trustworthy, I assure you – look how old he is. London – Fergus Rokeby; Fergus – London. I hope you don’t tire of each other.’
London had spat a dumpling of cling film into his hand, dried the spit off on his jacket and slapped it into Wotton’s palm while this introduction was being effected. He took the eight twenty-pound notes rolled into a fat stogie and poked at his stomach. ‘Seen you fuckiddim man I mess you good. Mess you fuckin’ straightway.’ And in one agitated movement he shoved the money away and flipped up a pouch of maroon nylon to expose the nacreous butt of an automatic, glistening against the taut brown skin of his belly.
The Ferret fainted dead away.
In sleep – painful to relate – the Ferret dreamed. Painful because to those tormented by a lack of sleep, who had sweated through a ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ of dawn choruses, the idea that the rich little bugger was experiencing a fulsome and refreshing repose as a result of his malady induced an envy of such green intensity that it threatened physically to poison.
But it was true; in sleep the Ferret dreamed, and as he slept so much his dream life was far more coherent and enduring than the content of his waking mind. In sleep the Ferret shook up the particular events of the wider world and peered at them through his own perceptual prism, to create a hypnagogic kaleidoscope of deranging hyperreality. In the Ferret’s vast subconscious (as big as five thousand open-cast Brazilian gold mines, or one hundred Ca
pris), there was ample room for Serbian concentration camps staffed by busboys, naked save for dear little breech-clouts of chammy leather; and there was plenty of Lebensraum for alfresco discos where all the painted peacocks of 1950s Soho could peck and flutter among the loved-up crowds of 1990s ravers. In the Ferret’s cerebral cockpit, penis-nosed premiers – Rabin and Arafat, Mandela and de Klerk, Major and Reynolds – were for ever jousting. They warily circled the rose garden of the White House under the simple gaze of Bouffant Bill, their cheeks spattered with the jism of peace. While alongside this, separated from it all only by a zebra-striped fake-fur divan over a kilometre in length, marched an unending column of young guardsmen, their scarlet chests ribbed with gold braiding, their pillbox hats jigging, their waxed mustachios waving. Over all this arched the empyrean, cold bright blue, curved like the ceiling of a Byzantine church. Through the oculus at its very apex could be seen the entrance to Heaven, guarded by a slip of a St Peter, the down on his cheek burnished by eternity, the handkerchief in his belt dripping with ambrosial nitrate. Above this ascended cloud upon cloud, all gilded by sunlight. Plunging through, swarming about and hovering on these celestial cushions were swarms of well-oiled putti (bronzer, moisturiser, exfoliant, all manner of lubricants), all laughing and gossiping – ‘Well, she said…’ And finally, surmounting everything, inconceivably high, reclining across the very zenith of the firmament, was God Himself, who, during the latter – and more pious – portion of Fergus Rokeby’s life, had assumed the form of Dorian Gray.
Henry Wotton had been, to some extent, correct about the Ferret all those years before, when they ate beluga caviar together under the stone-cold eyes of Jon the Dilly boy.