Utopia Avenue : A Novel

by Mitchell, David

  Levon is outside the Ghepardo. A poster says, ‘Take a trip down UTOPIA AVENUE.’ The cab stops and Knock Knock gets out, bringing what’s left of Jasper with him. ‘Hey!’ shouts the driver. ‘HEY! Mister! Two sixty!’ Levon’s already there, handing him three dollars. ‘Keep the change, keep the change. Thanks. Bye.’ The taxi roars off. Levon grips Knock Knock’s shoulders believing them to be Jasper’s. Jasper wants to explain, to apologise, to beg for help, but his tongue, lips and vocal cords won’t work for him. Levon’s frowning. Worry, Jasper guesses, relief and anger. ‘Can you play?’ asks Levon. ‘Have you taken anything?’

  Knock Knock speaks: ‘I am here to play.’

  Jasper hears his own voice convey another’s words.

  ‘Good,’ says Levon. ‘You’ve cut it fine, but that’s great.’

  Around them, people are entering the venue.

  Someone says, ‘That’s him, that’s Jasper de Zoet.’

  But it’s not! It’s not me! It’s my body, hijacked!

  Levon steers Knock Knock down an alley, through a stage door and down a corridor, where Levon tells a stagehand, ‘Tell Max and Brigit the Prodigal Son is home.’ They enter a changing room with dressing-tables and two big red sofas in the centre. Elf is sitting on one, with her friend Luisa. Good, thinks Jasper. I’m glad you found her, or she found you. Howie Stoker is here, dressed like Dracula, with a girlfriend – or his daughter? – whose eyelashes curl and interlace like Venus fly-traps. Elf stands up in her lucky suede jacket from Top of the Pops and says his name. Griff’s in his loose shirt with his chest hair showing. Dean’s shouting at him. Knock Knock asks for water. Dean flings a jugful into Knock Knock’s face. Knock Knock enjoys the sensation. Dean is still shouting. A fleck of spittle lands on Knock Knock’s cheek. ‘You’re not shouting at who you think you’re shouting at’, Jasper wants to tell him – but will never be able to tell anyone anything ever again. Elf’s calmer. There are mirrors. This gets complicated. Through Jasper’s ex-eyeballs, Jasper sees his ex-body, steered by Knock Knock, approach the mirror. Knock Knock is smiling with Jasper’s face. So that’s what my smile looks like. It is strange beyond strange. Knock Knock turns away and tunes Jasper’s Stratocaster, drawing on Jasper’s knowledge. Luisa touches his ex-forehead. ‘No fever,’ says the woman. Max Mulholland arrives, pink and sweaty, followed by a bustling woman, who Jasper guesses is the venue owner. Speech multiplies. What’s left of Jasper can’t keep words in the right order as easily as his old self could. It’s like a roomful of radios. His ex-fingers pluck a G. ‘I am here to play,’ says Knock Knock. ‘I want their energy.’

  ‘Roll Away the Stone’; ‘Mona Lisa’; ‘Darkroom’. The Ghepardo show is bizarre and painful. Bizarre, because Jasper’s ex-body is playing songs Jasper knows inside out as he passively observes. Painful, because performance is not only technique: performance is technique and soul, and Knock Knock minus Jasper is merely competent. Utopia Avenue should be playing far better on their American debut. Elf, Dean and Griff must think Jasper’s letting them down. Five or six hundred New Yorkers will believe the same – that Jasper de Zoet couldn’t be bothered. It hurts him that Utopia Avenue die in a whimper of disappointment. Ironic that, as I’m fading away, I’m feeling emotions more clearly than I did when I had a body. The band play ‘The Hook’. It’s as lacklustre a version as the others. Jasper wonders at Knock Knock’s motive for bringing his new body here, to play this show. Not from a sense of duty. He feels Knock Knock’s thrill at the noise and attention. Knock Knock was somebody before Jasper knew him: perhaps that somebody was a performer as well, or somebody who commanded, or was worshipped. Well? Jasper asks his gaoler. Will you tell me who you were? There is no reply. The band play ‘Prove It’. The magical feedback loop between the band and the audience is not happening, and it is Jasper’s fault. Except it’s really your fault, Knock Knock … Look, the ember’s almost out … if you’ll grant me a dying wish, let me spend the last of myself on ‘Sound Mind’. They’ll worship you. Knock Knock heard him. He’s thinking it over. Jasper senses it. His reply arrives with a surge of voltage. Jasper shudders at the shock of possessing his own nervous system once again. Private Ward N9D can only be eighty or ninety minutes ago, but the sensation is giddying and raw. Tinkerbells from the glitterballs dance across Jasper’s vision. ‘Thanks for coming out tonight, everyone.’

  Someone calls out, ‘More than you’ve fuckin’ done, pal!’

  Last words nobody knows will be last words. Jasper turns to Dean: ‘Thanks.’ To Griff: ‘Nice work.’ To Elf: ‘Goodbye.’ Jasper strums; asks the tech-guy for more volume on his guitar; shuts his eyes … and slams into an amp-blowing, bent-string howl; and fires off a scale of triads, sliding from high E, all the way down. Jasper rewards his first cheer of the night with a new riff that isn’t ‘Sound Mind’: nobody will ever know it’s a rip-off of Cream’s ‘Born Under a Bad Sign’. It gets the audience thunder-clapping in time. Griff, Dean, and Elf join in on drums, bass and Hammond. Jasper steers the jam through three cycles before wrapping it up in a Wah-Wah’d B flat, the opening of ‘Sound Mind’. Dean comes in with the bass riff; Elf comes in on the next bar; and Griff chop-slaps on the next. Jasper leans in for his psycho-whisper …

  Tomorrow I heard a knock at a door –

  a door that won’t be there before –

  couldn’t tell if it was criminal,

  didn’t know it was subliminal, so …

  Griff gongs the gong. Ghepardo patrons smile. Dean moves in to the mic for his vocal turn as Nobody:

  I opened up and Nobody spoke,

  ‘Son, you’ve become a serious joke;

  Old Father Sanity left you behind –

  sad truth is, you’re not of sound mind.’

  The band have never played a better ‘Sound Mind’. The crowd belt out the third chorus, and Jasper’s eyes are mysteriously wet. I’m glad it happened once before I went. Jasper’s running out of fuel, of road, of himself. He gallops into a rapid-fire outro. Elf spins out a whirlwind on her Hammond. Griff summons an earthquake from a mile down. Dean’s fingers zig-zag faster than the eye. Jasper moves towards the speaker, inch by inch, until it finds Hendrix’s Goldilocks spot – and yoooooooooooowl! A banshee’s orgasm. Beyond Elf, Jasper sees Knock Knock pass by Luisa Rey and approach him. This must be a dying illusion. Knock Knock’s in my head. The phantom turns to the audience to bask in its roaring heat, then he looks at Jasper the way a moneylender looks at a debtor.

  He touches the spot between Jasper’s eyebrows.

  The pain is over before he knew it arrived.

  Jasper’s body slumps like a discarded puppet.

  He sees it on the stage from a few feet above.

  So it’s true, you really do float upwards.

  ‘Sound Mind’ has clattered off the tracks.

  The Ghepardo trickles away, like sand.

  Levon’s distant voice: ‘Lower that curtain!’

  An irresistible velocity takes him away …

  To a sand dune, steep and high, ending in a ridge, up ahead. The wind and the sand are the only sounds. Behind him, the blankness is blanker the deeper you look. Pale lights stream past Jasper at knee-height or waist-height, towards the ridge. A multitude. The wind pushes Jasper up the slope as, surely, it propels the pale lights, like tumbleweed. He tries to catch one, but it passes through his palm. Souls? Jasper examines his hand. Only my memory of my hand. Perhaps every pale light sees itself as a person. The high ridge is close now, and closer with every step. The sky – if it is sky – is darkening to dusk. Soon – if it is ‘soon’ – Jasper stands on the crest of the high ridge and looks into the dusk. The Dusk. Dunes slope down to a sea of void. It appears to be four or five miles away, but Jasper doubts that distances work the same way here. The pale lights follow the contours of the dunes, at varying speeds and heights, down to the sea. The soul of Jasper de Zoet steps off the high ridge …

  Somebody issues an order: ‘Turn back.’

  The soul of Jasper
de Zoet stops at the brink.

  The seaward wind pushes at the soul, harder.

  The soul resists. A tug-of-war breaks out …

  Jasper is slung into his body on the sofa backstage at the Ghepardo. He tries to move. He can’t. Not a limb, not a finger. Eyeballs and eyelids, yes. Otherwise, I’m paralysed. The eight people visible to Jasper are motionless. Not just standing still: motionless. Dean is a life-size model of Dean, holding a blood-dappled handkerchief close to Jasper’s face. My nose is bleeding. Griff is standing behind Dean. Luisa, holding Jasper’s wrist, is as still as a photograph. Howie’s girlfriend is discharging a sneeze. Howie Stoker’s fingernail is inside his nostril. Levon and Max appear to be in conversation with a shaggy-haired stranger holding a syringe – a doctor? Jasper thinks of Joseph Wright’s Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump. I can still remember and still access facts. Noise seeps in from the Ghepardo’s ballroom. Time has stopped in here, but not out there. Jasper recalls collapsing onstage at the end of ‘Sound Mind’.

  He remembers the dunes. The Dusk. I died.

  Why am I back here? Something brought me.

  Where is Knock Knock? Still here in my mind.

  What causes paralysis in eight people?

  A man and a woman enter the room. A copper-skinned, middle-aged woman in a khaki tunic, trousers, desert boots and beads of many colours; and a slim Asian man in a bespoke suit, with silvering hair and gold-rimmed glasses. Neither looks perturbed by the human waxworks.

  ‘The nick of time, I’d say,’ remarks the woman. She prises the syringe from the doctor’s fingers. ‘God knows what’s in this.’

  The Asian man approaches the sofa and squats on his heels. ‘Did you see the high ridge? The Dusk, the souls …’

  Jasper is still as voiceless as before.

  The man touches Jasper’s throat.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Dr Yu Leon Marinus. “Marinus” is fine. Ignaz Galavazi sent me. I was out of the city, but Esther here’ – he glances at his companion – ‘tracked you after our friend Walt reported seeing you in the park.’

  The man’s speech is precise. His accent is difficult to locate. Jasper’s mind scrambles to gain traction. He gestures at the others. ‘Did you freeze my friends like that? Will they be okay?’

  ‘It’s called “psychosedation”.’ Esther Little speaks with a buzzing Australian twang. ‘They’ll be fine. Unlike you –’ she frowns at a spot on Jasper’s brow ‘– unless you undergo surgery. Soon.’

  A young woman enters with a wheelchair. ‘Xi Lo’s suasioning like a flame-thrower out there. If you don’t want reports of a mass delusion in the New York Times tomorrow, we have to go.’

  ‘Pardon the bluntness, Jasper,’ says Marinus, ‘but your choices are clear and stark. Stay and die when “Knock Knock” gets free of his temporary straitjacket or come with us and, if you’re lucky, live.’

  A continuum of Jasper’s recent past flies by, viewed from an impossible train, hurtling through sharp images and blurry tunnels. Here’s the band boarding the aeroplane at Heathrow Airport to fly to New York; here’s Dean confronting Guus de Zoet and Maarten; here’s the band at Fungus Hut, discussing vocals for ‘Absent Friend’. Most scenes Jasper forgot ever forgetting. Here’s the jumble and smell of Berwick Street market near Elf’s flat; here’s a cherry-red Triumph sports car overtaking the Beast on a downhill stretch lined with orchards; here’s Jasper’s audition for Archie Kinnock’s Blues Cadillac, two Christmases ago. Memories glimpsed from this backwards-flying Memory Train are imbued with smell, taste, touch, sound and moods: here is the dining room at Rijksdorp sanatorium, infused with the aroma of soup and herring. Jasper himself appears in none of them. A camera can’t photograph itself … except in mirrors, which I avoid. Upon reaching Rijksdorp, the memories decelerate; day and night pulse light and dark like a slowing strobe light. Here’s Jasper’s room, up at the top of the house. An owl hoots. Blustery sunlight shivers on the ceiling. Benign on the outside, malign on the inside. The Mongolian is describing his containment of Knock Knock. It’s a void I’ve cut around your guest. His padded cell, if you like. Slow blur. The early morning regresses into darkness and nothing … until it’s the night before, when the Mongolian explained how he could isolate Knock Knock and buy Jasper a few years’ peace. Now it’s the day before the night. Now it’s the episode at the shore, where the Mongolian announced himself to Jasper, waist high in the North Sea with a rucksack full of pebbles … Then the Memory Train picks up speed again and travels back through Jasper’s months as a psychiatric patient; his guitar classes, lots of Dr Galavazi …

  … and it dawns on Jasper that if he isn’t controlling this train, someone else must be, and that someone else must be here.

  Jasper mind-speaks, Who are you?

  Only Marinus, replies a familiar voice, here in Jasper’s mind. I didn’t want to startle you.

  I don’t remember leaving the Ghepardo.

  Esther put you under psychosedation, the doctor mind-answers. There was, and is, no time to waste.

  Where are we? Why am I seeing these memories?

  Marinus’s pause may contain a sigh. Imagine trying to explain satellite technology to a mule-driver in fifth-century Italy. You – your body – are at 119A, our redoubt in Manhattan. You’re in a secure upstairs room, on a futon, in an induced coma. You’re safe. For now.

  The news alarms Jasper. Will I be alright?

  That depends on what we find. We’re currently inside your brain, in your mnemo-parallax. It connects your cerebellum with your hippocampus and functions as a lifelong memory archive.

  Did you just say, checks Jasper: you are inside my brain?

  Incorporeally, yes. My body is on a futon three feet from yours. Esther can transverse standing. I have to lie down.

  This is a lot to take in, mind-replies Jasper.

  Try, Mule-driver. Try. Meanwhile, look at the pictures.

  The mnemo-parallax shows autumn at Rijksdorp giving way to summer. Fallen leaves fly up to twigs, attach themselves and blush from brown to red to orange to green.

  Everything’s happening backwards.

  You’re re-experiencing your memories in reverse. We’re rewinding.

  Why is everything sharper than my usual memories?

  Marinus extends the analogy. The mnemo-parallax is a master-tape. Full, 4D, multi-sensory, stereo-surround Technicolor. Regular memories are court-room sketches, elaborated and eroded at every viewing.

  Summer at Rijksdorp turns to spring. A fox darts backwards through the dappled shadows.

  You could get lost in here for ever and never come out, thinks Jasper. Speech and thought appear to be equal. Where’s Knock Knock?

  In a jury-rigged brig that won’t hold for long. He is furious and dangerous.

  Can you make a secure cell for him? mind-asks Jasper.

  Alas, the Mongolian’s procedure was a one-time only solution. There’s not enough spare mass in the brain to do it twice.

  How long do I have before Knock Knock’s free again?

  Hours, replies Marinus. Hence the urgency.

  In the mnemo-parallax, puddles launch droplets of rain up to twigs and clouds. Tulips shrink into their bulbs.

  Jasper asks, What are we looking for?

  We’re sifting the proximate circadian cycles for data on Knock Knock. I’ve read Dr Galavazi’s reports on ‘Patient JZ’, but that information passed through filters. Your mnemo-parallax is the primary source. When did you first see his face?

  My last day at Ely. Seven years earlier. Knock Knock was in the mirror in the wardrobe in my room.

  Then let’s take a look. The Memory Train picks up speed. Jasper glimpses patients at Rijksdorp unrolling a snowman out of existence. He asks, How did you ‘psycho-sedate’ everyone back at the Ghepardo? How are you doing all this?

  A branch of applied metaphysics called psychosoterica.

  Jasper considers the word. It sounds like quack science.

  Our fifth-c
entury mule-driver would not know the words ‘orbital velocity’. Does his ignorance mean that aeronautics is quack science?

  No, admits Jasper. Psychosoterica. What is it?

  The devil’s box of tricks, to some. To others, it’s an arsenal. To us, it’s an evolving discipline.

  You keep saying ‘us’. Jasper sees his first year at Rijksdorp passing by at a backwards canter. Who are ‘us’?

  We are Horology, replies Marinus.

  Jasper’s heard of the word. Clockmaking?

  In recent decades, yes. Words evolve. In the past a horologist studied time itself. Look, here’s you arriving at Rijksdorp …

  Jasper sees a six-years-younger Dr Galavazi. Rijksdorp recedes through its gates, viewed at night from Grootvader Wim’s Jaguar. Formaggio is in the car, too. The car appears to drives backwards to Hook of Holland port in thirty seconds, as night gives way to evening. I feel like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, says Jasper.

  I’m not as jolly as the Ghost of Christmas Past, believe me.

  The SS Arnhem crosses the North Sea towards the morning. A stomachful of vomit flies up from the waves into Formaggio’s mouth, and Formaggio rushes backwards to the lounge.

  The day before this, says Jasper. The morning before.

  Fast as flight, the ferry arrives at Harwich, a car travels across Norfolk to Ely, night swallows the day and sixteen-year-old Jasper is back in the bedroom he shares with Formaggio. The knock-knock-knock-knock-knocking speeds into a rapid-fire buzz. Go slow here, Jasper tells Marinus. It happened any second …

  Now. Time slows to its usual speed, albeit in reverse gear. Here is the moment when Jasper’s sixteen-year-old self opens the wardrobe in his and Formaggio’s room at Swaffham House. An Oriental cleric with a shaven head stares out of the mirror. The Memory Train stops. Jasper would prefer to look away, but his incorporeal self has no neck muscles or eyelids to shut, so he must scrutinise Knock Knock’s scrutiny. Hatred? Jealousy? Vengefulness?

  Marinus releases a long phrase in a foreign language.

  I don’t know that language, says Jasper.