Utopia Avenue : A Novel

by Mitchell, David

  He swore, says a dry Australian growl, in Hindi.

  Jasper would look around for the owner of the voice, but can’t.

  G’day, kiddo, says the voice. I’m Esther Little. The other spook.

  Jasper remembers the Aboriginal-looking woman in the changing room at the club. Is anyone else in here?

  Just us two little mice, says Esther. Speak, Marinus.

  I’ve forgotten thousands of faces during my meta-life, says Marinus. But this one I can’t. Nor shall I. Ever.

  Jasper’s confused. You know Knock Knock?

  Our paths crossed years ago. Dramatically.

  When? asks Jasper. Where? How?

  Back in the early 1790s, says Marinus.

  Jasper assumes he misheard. Back in the when?

  Right first time, says Esther. The 1790s.

  A joke? A metaphor? There’s no face for Jasper to try to read, so he asks directly. Dr Marinus, how old are you?

  Later. For now, I want more of your backstory.

  The journey through Jasper’s life accelerates towards the beginning. Nights blink shut, days open up, clouds streak across the sky. Seasons turn, anti-clockwise. Summer terms at Bishop’s Ely. Easters. Lent terms. Christmases, spent at Swaffham House with boarders whose families lived overseas. Michaelmas terms. Augusts and Julys in Zeeland. Another summer term. The vantage point loses altitude as Jasper’s growth is reversed. A balsa-wood glider off the summer dunes at Domburg. A cricket victory. Singing ‘To Be A Pilgrim’ in the school choir. Swimming in the Great Ouse. Conkers, marbles, jacks and Stuck-in-the-Mud. Soon Jasper is six, and the black car sent by the de Zoets to transport him to a gentleman’s life reverses up to his aunt’s boarding house in the seaside town of Lyme Regis. Jasper shrinks into his fifth, fourth and third years, surrounded by giants whose moods are as unaccountable as the weather. Here are Jasper’s invalid uncle, scoldings, hide-and-seek, a go-kart, a sparkler writing on the dark, a sunny day, a scary dog as big as a cow, a pram, with a view of a granite sea-wall curving into a dull jade sea. Seagulls attack a dropped bag of chips. Children – Jasper’s cousins – scream. The procession of images pauses on the face of a careworn woman. That’s my aunt Nelly, says Jasper. My mother’s sister.

  You’re twelve months old here, says Marinus. Now things get indistinct … The images melt into each other. A dog-eaten golliwog. Baked beans squelched between fingers. Rain at a window. A bottle of baby formula. Aunt Nelly’s sleepless face crying softly, ‘Milly, why did you have to do this to us?’ Howling. Incontinence. Contentment. All lines are smudged lines, and perspective has stopped working. Babies can’t focus their eyes for eight weeks, explains Marinus. For Temporals this is the end of the line. Ordinarily. If my hypothesis holds water, however …

  The motion continues, turgid and dragging–––

  –––until a jolt occurs, a slip, an imperfect join in the tracks. If Jasper had a body, he would have steadied himself.

  The sensation of motion continues, but now it arcs away from the horizontal and towards the vertical. As if I’m falling down a well, thinks Jasper. Through windows in the walls of the well he glimpses fireworks and Milly Wallace. Diamond Head, the famous hill at Cape Town. A glimpse of a captain’s cabin. The images are clearer than those of Jasper’s infancy, but not as sharp as those from his own boyhood. Like pictures of pictures, or recordings of recordings. But these aren’t my memories, remarks Jasper.

  These are fragments of your father’s life, says Marinus.

  Here is Guus’s wife in a wedding veil. Leiden University in, Jasper guesses, the 1930s. Flying a kite. Learning to skim stones …

  Another jolt occurs. What is that sensation? asks Jasper.

  A generational join, says Marinus. We’ve reached your grandfather, before he fathered your father. European bodies lie under an African sky. This looks like the Boer War, I remember it well … a bloody, stupid mess.

  Here’s a church full of people in old-fashioned clothes. I know this church, says Jasper. It’s Domburg, in Zeeland.

  You know it sixty years later, points out Marinus.

  He only migrates to boys, I see, observes Esther.

  Who is not a product of their times? says Marinus.

  Visionaries, replies Esther, for starters.

  Jasper glimpses Dutch-style canal-side houses under a tropical sky. Horse-drawn carriages. A plantation. Java. A shipwreck. A crocodile attacking a water buffalo. A lamplit Melanesian woman under a mosquito net. A blur of lamplit sex. A volcano. A duel – and incorporeal shock, at a bullet-wound. It feels so real, Marinus.

  Much as early films did, to early cinema-goers.

  Jasper asks, Do memories flow down a bloodline?

  Ordinarily, no, says Esther. A mnemo-parallax dies with the brain it resides in. But Horology doesn’t deal with the ordinary.

  Then how can it be, asks Jasper, that we are watching memories from before I existed?

  We are no longer inside your mnemo-parallax, says Marinus. These are memories of your ancestors’ experiences: but they were archived by a ‘de Zoet family guest’, who passes from father to son, to son, to you. This is the guest’s mnemo-parallax, made of his hosts’ memories, stitched together.

  Like a giant meta-scarf, says Esther, made of single scarves.

  A guest like the Mongolian? asks Jasper.

  With differences, Marinus tells him. The de Zoet guest didn’t, or couldn’t, migrate from his hosts. Nor was he ever fully conscious until your lifetime.

  The smell of mothballs. Open chests of white crystals. Camphor, says Marinus. A valuable cargo from Japan in the nineteenth century. We’re getting close. A sloping city of brownish roofs, with green rice terraces higher up. Fishing junks, moored along a wharf. A sailing ship from the Napoleonic era enters a bay, approaching – backwards – a small fan-shaped island, connected to the mainland by a short bridge. A Dutch flag flies on a tall pole. Peking? Siam? Hong Kong?

  Nagasaki, says Marinus. A Dutch East Indies Company trading post called Dejima. The sound of a funeral bell. Incense. A grave inscribed with the name, LUCAS MARINUS.

  That’s your name, says Jasper.

  So it is, replies Marinus, in a strange tone. The sound of a harpsichord. A big bear of a man in an early operating theatre.

  You were fond of the pies, observes Esther Little. Look at the belly on you.

  I was stuck on Dejima for ten years. Marinus sounds defensive. The British plundered Dutch shipping. Pies were one of my few pleasures. I died there. Thanks, Britannia. Watch closely, Jasper, you’re going to meet someone …

  The mnemo-parallax reveals a Westerner’s face, a man in his late twenties, freckled and red-haired. He dabs beads of sweat from his brow. That’s Jacob de Zoet, says Marinus. Your great-great-great-grandfather. The scene would be normal enough, except for a small black hole between Jacob’s eyebrows. Jacob is writing in a ledger with a quill. Numbers vanish as the quill scratches the paper. The hole in Jacob’s head dwindles to nothing. There are inchoate shouts from outside.

  That was it, says Esther. That was the moment.

  I don’t understand, says Jasper. What moment?

  The moment Knock Knock entered your ancestor, explains Marinus, and began his journey, all the way to you …

  The viewpoint wheels in reverse over Nagasaki. Smoke billows into a cooking fire. Gulls spiral backwards alongside the ‘eye’. The trajectory passes through a paper screen on a balcony and stops, abruptly, in a room. The image is frozen still. This memory is not blurry but needle-sharp. The woven-rush mats smell fresh. Sliding screens are decorated with chrysanthemums. A Go table lies overturned, with a bowl of white pieces spilling across the floor. Four corpses lie slumped. The youngest is a monk. One is an elderly official, with wispy eyebrows. A third appears to be a high-ranking Samurai. The last body is Knock Knock in death. A red gourd has toppled over on its side and four soot-black drinking cups are scattered nearby. What is this place? asks Jasper.

  The Room of the Last Ch
rysanthemum, says Marinus. A room I never expected to see again.

  Poison, I presume, says Esther. Something quick and nasty.

  That’s what the rumours said, confirms Marinus. Let’s begin with our antagonist. Knock Knock was the abbot of an esoteric Shinto order. His real name was, and is, Enomoto. It’s the year 1800, if memory serves. His order operated a kind of harem at its mother monastery at Mount Shiranui, two days away up in the remote Kirishima Mountains. The harem’s purpose wasn’t the usual one, however. It was a type of livestock farm, to ensure a supply of babies.

  Jasper asks, Why did a religious order want babies?

  To distil their souls into a liquid they called tamashi-abura – Oil of Souls. By imbibing it, the monks postponed death. Indefinitely.

  Jasper looks at dead Abbot Enomoto. His lips were black. Enomoto believed he was a necromancer?

  Marinus hesitates. Oil of Souls, to use an anachronism, did what it said on the label. Those who drank it did not age.

  If I told any of this to Dr Galavazi, Jasper thinks—

  He would call it a schizophrenic episode, Marinus agrees, in a trice. He’s a good psychiatrist, but his frames of reference are limited.

  But elixirs of immortality aren’t real, says Jasper.

  Two or three in a thousand are, says Esther. Horology exists for those two or three.

  The psychosedation at the Ghepardo, says Marinus. The mnemo-parallax. This. Esther and me. Are you imagining all this?

  I don’t think so, says Jasper. But how can I be sure?

  God give me strength, huffs Esther.

  Follow Formaggio’s advice, then, says Marinus. File us under Theory X. Not reality, not delusion, but a phenomenon awaiting proof.

  Jasper doesn’t know how to respond. Theory X is the only way forward. He returns to the four dead bodies. Who killed them?

  The chain of events would fill a hefty novel, replies Marinus. Governor Shiroyama – the samurai in this frieze – learned about Enomoto’s infanticidal regime. He devised a plot to decapitate the order by poisoning its powerful abbot. Enomoto was wisely paranoid about poison, so the plot required both the governor and his secretary to consume the toxin, too. As you see, the plot worked. Enomoto’s young novice accompanied his master to the wrong tea party.

  Jasper looks at the crime scene. It’s sad and real. If the plot worked, how did Knock Knock – Enomoto – survive?

  Occult knowledge of the Shaded Way, replies Esther Little. His soul resisted the Sea Wind for long enough to find a host – your ancestor Jacob de Zoet, down in the warehouse. But why him, Marinus? Of all the potential hosts in Nagasaki, what links the abbot of an obscure order to a foreign clerk a quarter-mile away?

  There was a woman, says Marinus.

  Aha, says Esther.

  One Orito Aibagawa. The first female scholar of Dutch Studies in Japan. I taught her midwifery and medicine at my surgery on Dejima. Jacob fell for Miss Aibagawa, as white knights do in these tales, but Enomoto abducted her to Mount Shiranui, two days away. The abbot wanted the best midwife in Japan to care for the women in his breeding farm.

  Why is this link strong enough, asks Esther, to draw Enomoto’s soul halfway across the city at the moment of death?

  Marinus selects his words. Jacob de Zoet, an interpreter named Ogawa and I each played a part in bringing Enomoto’s crimes to the attention of Governor Shiroyama. From Abbot Enomoto’s point of view – they look at the dead cleric – we were accomplices in his murder.

  Esther weighs this up. A karmic thread, then. Enomoto’s soul followed it like a beeline. Or a song-line, my people might say.

  Jasper feels left behind. So my ancestor in the warehouse wrongs this ‘real’ necromancer in the year 1800. Upon dying, Enomoto’s soul ‘flies’ into Jacob de Zoet’s head and burrows inside. There he stays, dormant, like a larva. This larva gets passed down from father to son, to son, to Grootvader Wim, to my father, to me. All the while, he’s ‘acquiring’ his hosts’ memories and stitching an ever-longer memory-scarf. Then in the 1960s – sixteen decades later – Enomoto is finally replenished enough to ‘wake up’, shatter my mind and take over my body.

  That’s about the size of it, kiddo, says Esther.

  Is there a cure? asks Jasper.

  We can’t just evict Enomoto, says Esther, like we’re a pair of bailiffs, if that’s what you’re hoping.

  That’s exactly what I’m hoping, admits Jasper.

  If we use force and Enomoto resists, explains Marinus, the brain damage will kill you. Neurologically and psychosoterically, he’s too deeply anchored.

  What can we do, then? asks Jasper.

  A deal, says Esther. Though even if he agrees to the procedure, the psychosurgery will be very, very delicate.

  We need to speak with him, says Marinus.

  Wait. Jasper’s alarmed. How will I know if the ‘psychosurgery’ is successful?

  If it works, says Marinus, you’ll wake up here, in 119A.

  If it doesn’t work? asks Jasper.

  The next thing you see will be the High Ridge and the Dusk, says Esther, but this time we won’t be able to bring you back.

  I don’t have much choice, do I? asks Jasper.

  The Room of the Last Chrysanthemum fades.

  The ceiling is plain. The room is spacious. He’s on a futon. Not the slope to the High Ridge. The floor is wooden. Jasper explores the inside of his skull and finds Knock Knock – or Enomoto – gone. Not partitioned off, like after the Mongolian’s operation, but gone, like an extracted wisdom tooth or a paid-off debt. Gone. Pale curtains filter daylight. Jasper sits up. He’s wearing yesterday’s underwear. His clothes are folded and hung on a Queen Anne chair. The room is sparsely, curiously furnished: a wall-scroll of a monkey trying to touch its own moonlit reflection, an art-nouveau bookcase, a carpet of symbols, an antique harpsichord and a writing bureau on which sit a fountain pen, an ink pot and nothing else. Silence.

  Jasper stands up and draws the curtains. The window is about five storeys up. Manhattan roofs rise, fall and slant. Not far off, the bevelled edges of the Chrysler building rise into low clouds. It’s raining, gently. The bookshelves house books in alphabets varied and unknown to Jasper: The Perpetuum by Jamini Marinus Choudary (ed.); Een beknopte geschiedenis van de Onderstroom in de Lage Landen by H. Damsma and N. Miedema; The Great Unveiling by L. Cantillon; On Lacunae by Xi Lo; and, propped up face outwards, Récit d’un témoin de visu de la Bataille de Paris, de la Commune et du bain de sang subséquent, par le citoyen François Arkady, fier Communard converti à l’Horlogerie by M. Berri. Sheet music of a Scarlatti sonata is on the harpsichord. Jasper lifts the lid. It’s old. Jasper’s sight-reading isn’t as good as Elf’s, so he plays the opening bars of ‘A Raft And A River’. The timbre of the notes is spindly and vitreous. There’s a small en-suite bathroom he uses. He dresses, but can’t see his shoes, so he shuffles to the door in his socks. It slides open into a panelled elevator. Jasper steps inside. The door slides shut. Five unmarked buttons sit in a row; a sixth is marked ‘*’. Jasper presses the asterisk. He waits for the elevator to move, but there are no clunking gears, no slow grinding, like its counterpart at the Chelsea Hotel. Nothing happens.

  Jasper slides the elevator door open and finds an elegant ballroom with a high ceiling and chandeliers. At the end of the long table sits Yu Leon Marinus. ‘You might want to step out of there,’ says the doctor. The elevator has a mind of its own.’

  Jasper enters into the ballroom. Three large windows are semi-opaque. A vast mirror doubles the space and light. Jasper averts his gaze, then averts it back. One less phobia. Pictures from many eras adorn the walls, including Agnolo Bronzino’s Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time. Jasper thought the painting was in London’s National Gallery. ‘Knock Knock’s gone,’ he tells Marinus. ‘So I guess last night was real.’

  ‘He is gone. It was real.’ Marinus indicates a seat near his and lifts a silver dome of the type used to keep food warm. There are poached eggs, mushrooms, brow
n toast, grapefruit juice and a pot of tea.

  ‘That’s what I like to eat at home.’

  ‘Fancy that. Tuck in, if you’re hungry.’

  Jasper finds that he is, sits down – and realises they’ve been speaking Dutch. ‘A psychiatrist, a Horologist and a linguist.’

  ‘My Dutch is rusty, so’ – Marinus reverts to English – ‘I’ll spare you further earache. I was reborn in Haarlem six lifetimes ago, but Dutch evolves so rapidly. Really, I should go and live there for a few months to brush up. Perhaps Galavazi can organise a residency.’

  Jasper grinds black pepper onto his egg. ‘You really do come back? Lifetime after lifetime after lifetime?’

  ‘Same soul, old mind, new body. Now, let’s not insult the chef by letting our breakfast cool. Bon appetit.

  Under Marinus’s dome is a bowl of rice and miso soup. They eat in silence for a minute. Normals feel awkward in the absence of conversation, but Marinus is no Normal. Jasper notices Marinus’s newspaper is the Russian edition of Pravda. ‘Were you Russian in a previous life?’

  ‘Twice.’ Marinus dabs his mouth. ‘Any newspaper named “Truth” is bound to be stuffed with lies. Yet lies may illuminate.’

  Jasper’s yolk bleeds yellow-orange. ‘So Knock Knock agreed to leave without a fight, and the psychosurgery was successful.’

  Marinus tips a small dish of pickles onto his rice. ‘We made a proposal. Esther is persuasive.’

  Jasper pours some tea into a Wedgwood cup. ‘A proposal?’

  ‘If he granted you your lifetime,’ Marinus lifts his bowl and chopsticks, ‘we would grant him one, in return.’

  ‘How? He doesn’t have a body.’

  ‘I found him a spare.’

  Jasper is flummoxed.

  ‘Last June, a teenage male in a city on the eastern seaboard took a drug overdose. His soul left his body that night, but his body saved itself by entering a coma. The police couldn’t identify him and nobody came looking for him. In August John Doe’s coma was downgraded to a persistent vegetative state. American hospitals are businesses, and care is costly. Life support was to be withdrawn on Friday. Approximately …’ Marinus pulls out a time-piece on a chain ‘… ninety minutes ago, John Doe regained consciousness. His team are calling it a miracle. The word “miracle” is a disservice to Esther’s psychosurgery, but no matter. John Doe’s body is Enomoto’s new, and last, host body. Barring accidents, he should live to eighty.’