The Gone-Away World (47 page)

Leah looks at me but she does not explain. Worse, her face is filled with a terrible sympathy. She knows what I am hoping for, but she cannot give it, cannot offer me anything at all. Except pity. And this she does, in a breaking voice, as she steps close to me and kisses me lightly on the cheek.

“I'm so sorry,” Leah whispers. “There's a bed in the den.” And she goes inside and follows Gonzo upstairs.

I sleep in a Zedbed in my own unrecognisable house. I sleep quite well, which is infuriating. The following morning Leah brings me toast. She smells of jasmine and Gonzo. I find reasons to be busy until ten, when Gonzo and I climb into the truck. We are taking it to see Malevolent Pete the mechanic before we rejoin Sally and Jim. All trucks in the company pool must be approved and frequently serviced by Malevolent Pete. It is our law. And I cannot help feeling that Gonzo wants some us-time, which is definitely in order.

Leah waves us off.

I have decided two things: the first, that it is impossible for me to hate two people I love for loving one another (quite untrue); the second, that I am less frightened of talking to Gonzo about this than I am of hearing it from my wife. The conversation I have with Gonzo will be hurtful and there will probably be shouting. The one I have with Leah could twist my ribs apart and burst my heart like a water balloon. And so I wave through the passenger-side window at Leah, and she waves back at both of us, biting her lower lip. Gonzo takes us out of heaven and back into the world. The feeling of relief is the worst good feeling I have ever had.

Pete's garage is in a town called Baggin. It's a frontiersy kind of place, gunslinging and macho but basically okay, and they make their own branded cigars there for added grit. The town smells of tobacco all day and all night, and the western end has a brewery too. Baggin is about a day away along the Pipe, but there's a short cut: a more-or-less stable road through the Border, takes about two hours. Gonzo and I have pretty much waltzed through the worst thing that can happen to you in terms of Stuff exposure, and we're okay, so it's just a question of dangerous men out there, and we're officially dangerous too. The weather forecast is fine, anyway—good winds driving the Stuff away from us. So the fork in the road gives Gonzo no pause, and he takes us into the Border. He doesn't have to glance my way. He knows what I would say. He must also know that I am trying to frame my questions, get away from my (hate, horror, fury, screaming hideous gut-eating devils of pain) emotions so I can ask what's going on in a clear, gentle way, as between men of good character and intent. And so it must come as a surprise to him—as it does to me—when it boils out of me at the fifty-mile marker when I spill my drink.

Slick, sickly goo glugs down over my stomach, and I can feel it soak the material and prickle against my skin. It is loathsome. It feels vile. It feels like yesterday. I hate it.

But instead of yelling about the fizzy sugar stuff on my shirt and trousers, I turn on Gonzo and I yell incoherently at him, and then it all comes out. Everything I love, he has taken, and he is my friend, but there are some sacrifices he should not ask, how long has it been going on? Does Leah love him, or have I been perpetrating some terrible sexual inadequacy I have no notion of? Did I skip a lesson at the Soames School? Doze off during a lecture on erogenousnesses vital to the maintenance of faithful relationships? Or was there a class on post-ethical friendship which I somehow did not attend? What, in short, does Gonzo William Lubitsch think he is doing sharing mattress-whoopee with
my wife
?

And it is only when I say these words, which are after all magic words, that Gonzo seems to pay any attention at all. It is at this point that he half-turns to look at me with a kind of sick curiosity. I say them again in case he has not understood. And Gonzo flinches. This result pleases me, and I say it over and over and watch him shrink like the lying sod he is, until finally I am raw enough that I pause to gulp some air, and he says:

“So. You want a beer?”

Which is the most weirdly comforting thing I have ever heard. Of course I want a beer. Clearly, he has an explanation. He is unfussed by what he has heard. This whole business is some ill-conceived prank gone wrong, or yes, that strange undercover operation I could not be warned of in advance. It is a test, and I/we have passed, and George Copsen, who is not dead at all, will now appear from behind the curtain to make sense of everything. Gonzo reaches in the back for the beer, must have stashed some there before we left the house. I am still feverishly seeking Copsen's hiding place, and I conclude that it must be extra-dimensional: Professor Derek has been at his tricks again, in some even more remarkable way. And indeed we have crossed into some kind of weird, inappropriate place, because when Gonzo's hand emerges from behind the seat, he is holding not a beer but a decent-sized gun. It is a handgun in workman-like grey, and he does not offer it to me but compounds his error by pointing it at my head.

In fact, he does not point it
at my head.
He just generally points it at me, but when I look into its one good eye, and catch the glint of the nominally soft-nosed (but actually irretrievably solid and lethal) slug in the chamber, all I can imagine is the thing going off and my brain sluicing backwards onto the expensive upholstery. And hence I think of it as
at my head,
despite its being aimed loosely at my torso.

Twenty hours ago Gonzo was a cartoonish hero-lout, a perpetual boychild with the body of a Hercules. He drank beer from the bottle, liked his steaks and his women raw, and would have stepped without hesitation between a puppy and a speeding truck for no better reason than a fuzzy sense of the way things oughta be. This Gonzo is a new deal: a nervous, glazed bastard with designer shakes and a greasy, halfregretful expression which tells you he doesn't really care a damn. This Gonzo is not your friend, he's just this guy you met a few times; granted, you like one another, but in the final analysis, if there's a shark in the water he hopes you get eaten whole, and that you're fat enough to satisfy the fish or stick in its salty white throat and choke it with your masticated leg. This is a guy who will kill you on the off-chance that sharks cannot vomit.

“Get out of the truck,” Gonzo tells me. He waves the gun, eyes mostly on the road. His peripheral vision will tell him if I move, those old biological hardwirings spotting muscles and hinges moving relative to one another and producing the basic response: he'll fire the gun. And so I stay extremely still. The gun wobbles anyway, and for a moment it is pointed down and a little behind me. Now, instead of imagining my head bursting open, I see what will happen if he discharges the gun in that direction: the slug penetrating the enormous fuel tank, stimulating the stored chemical energy into a bright gasp of heat. For a fraction of a second the whole thing will look like one of those weird little static globes the hippie scions had at Jarndice, and then it will look like the beginning of a model sun. We will not actually witness this, because our eyes will be burned from their sockets and our brains will follow them into oblivion before ever we have a chance to apprehend the mechanism by which we die.

Thinking this, I am willing or even eager to leave the truck. It seems this will resolve what has become a rather twitchy situation. I feel somewhat hard done by; it is I, after all, who has been grievously wronged. Gonzo is guilty (and if I had any doubts on that score, they have rather faded away) and by rights ought to be contrite. Although perhaps that is how it goes: anger is easier, after all. I must have sinned against Gonzo in the past. Everyone distractedly injures their friends from time to time. I wonder briefly which of my unknown transgressions so deeply offended him as to bring us here. It must have been a howler. Or perhaps he is in love with Leah, and she with him, in the tradition of
weak-ass romance
Jim Hepsobah so abhors. I remember Leah's apology last night, her discomfort. “I'm so sorry.” But not sorry enough to repent, to abjure. No. There is more to this. Please, God, it is more than it seems.

In this brief meditation I have lost the opportunity to assail Gonzo in a fast-moving truck while he is driving with one hand and holding a pistol in the other, and this is not entirely a matter for regret. He speaks again:

“Get out.”

All Gonzo needs to do to achieve my departure is stop the truck, or at least bring it to a speed where I won't splinter anything more vital than the grommets on my shoelaces when I hit the ground running. I tell him so. It is possible that I am unclear. For answer, he points the gun at my body and pulls the trigger more times than I would have thought possible.

At long last, I get shot.

I wonder briefly whether it counts if you get shot by a friend instead of by an enemy, and then I realise that those definitions have now become confused.

The experience of repeatedly getting shot in the gut at close range is pretty much as advertised. The only thing is I don't pass out. Having finally gotten shot, I am damn well going to live the experience. I am thrown from the truck, Gonzo's boot striking my chest above the entry wounds, exquisite pain. I catch the wind, billow like a kite. My back bends limply forward until my spine is at maximum arc, my arms are out beyond my shoulders and head, the new orifice in my stomach creased, agony beyond nausea. I am totally and utterly one of those weird images by Warhol:
Silhouette of a Gunshot Victim,
silkscreen print, one in a series intended to mimic the fractional motion of twenty-four frames of cinematic film. I am printed in black on yellow, reproduced as a T-shirt. I am this year's Che Guevara. A single second separates me from the asphalt.

I do not pass out.

I strike like a break-dancer doing one of those impossible belly flips. I bounce. My eyelashes brush the ground, frail antenna sensing so much: dry, dry road, dust and gravel, a kernel of wheat, the slight tackiness of the surface. I smell oil and heat, desert grass and something cloying and rich which I cannot name. Then I am standing upright, flying in that position towards the accelerating truck. The pain rides my shadow, my angel's wings. Bones have broken somewhere, I know it, but I am totally unable to say which ones. My legs touch the road, pass through the surface, fall into the ground. The earth is too soft to support my weight. It is candyfloss. I am a titan. Only if I lie down can it hold me, the greater surface area compensating for my remarkable weight.

I lie down, but I do not pass out. It seems to me that it would be okay to do that now, because the bouncing is over, but I have forgotten how. There ought to be a darkness waiting, a coma, perhaps a merciful death. If these things are present they are on strike or lazy, or I'm a second-class passenger and the unconsciousness car is currently occupied by premium travellers.

I lie with my face pressed to the uncomfortable heat of the asphalt and a small stone pricking my ear. It annoys me more than I can say. And as if this wasn't bad enough, now I am hallucinating. A person in a top hat is screaming at me to wake up, which is ludicrous because I am awake and fully aware of this awful mess. The person shakes his head and actually goes as far as to slap me to get my attention. He slaps like a girl. Hah! I have been shot. Mere slapping cannot harm me! I feel no pain. I tell him so. He has big round eyes like a cow. Perhaps he
is
a cow. Most likely, a friendly cow has come to sit with me while I die. He is not weeping on my face, he is licking it with bovine simplicity. He is desirous of conversation or a biscuit, or maybe he just wants to help a fellow mammal. A comradely cow. I wonder if it will make him sad when I expire. Perhaps I should wait a bit, until he is gone. Shall I wait, Comrade Cow? Yes, the cow says. Wait. Wait.

I wait. It is cold here, in the sun. I shiver. The cow wraps me in slender arms (my hallucination, my rules,
nyahh
) and lays me in her cow lap. All cows are girls, or at least, all cows with laps. Boy cows have no available lap space, owing to their masculine construction. Wait, says Comrade Cow. Just wait.

I lie there in this damned uncomfortable position for seven hours, nine minutes and eight seconds. I know this because I count them. Comrade Cow sits with me all the way through, does not stop talking that entire time, and does not let me fall asleep, which I would love to do. I become a Cow-ist (to rhyme with Mao-ist and Dao-ist). I live for Comrade Cow. And then finally a bulbous, carrot-shaped silver Airstream bus appears in my field of vision like a road-going whale, and from its belly—via the mouth or driver's-side door—out jumps Jonah, and starts shouting and giving orders, although he is very fat and appears to be wearing a sarong, and they roll me over onto a stretcher and do magic things to make me better, but these, alas, I do not get to observe, because when Jonah sees that I am fully conscious he starts swearing and they fill my body with a fearsome, blue-white cold which proceeds from my hand to the rest of my body, and I realise, from the sudden lack, that the pain has been with me all the time.

I pass out.

Chapter Eleven

The wrong afterlife;
the Devil;
all the fun of the fair.

W
HEREVER
I
AM
, it is the good kind of place. Well, small caveat: it is conceivable that I am dead, but
other
than that, it is the good kind of place. There are fields. You might term them pastures, although there are no actual cattle (poor Comrade Cow is lonely, somewhere), and hence no cattle-related by-products which might make you unwilling to run barefoot through them. These are fields of the sort envisaged as eternal rewards. In the distance there are mountains, but they aren't mountains like my home—my old home—they are bigger, bluer and snowier, and as a consequence of this, looking at them doesn't hurt. Nothing does, actually, which is jolly welcome. And there are shepherdesses. If you visit a museum almost anywhere in the world, you see shepherdesses like this; the fantasy is hard-wired into the lechers of our race. These shepherdesses are on the blowsy, wistful end of the filthy dream spectrum. They are, to be honest, nymphs. They titter, and they move in a way which can be described only as flitting. (Flitting is a form of locomotion which involves running on tiptoe, wiggling and bouncing, and having your clothes very nearly fall off.) They are winsome, albeit in a knowing way which suggests practice. When I look at them, they look back from beneath heavy lashes. When I look away, they pout. If they suspect I am able to see them in the corner of my eye, they stretch languorously, and make little whimpering sounds as of a person with a pleasant itch which needs careful scratching. It appears that I am a pagan.

I come to this understanding slowly, and it is primarily based upon the realisation that there is almost nothing about these ladies to suggest that they are virgins. Christian myth is not top-heavy (unlike nymph number twelve) with wanton heavens. In a good solid Christian story these girls would be covered up and singing hymns. That is emphatically not the case. These are women of blissful sexual emancipation (what the Evangelist would call, publicly,
low moral character
). If they sing at all, they are singers, not of hymns, but of the throaty, wicked kind of song where the chanteuse concludes her performance wearing nothing but a smile. Sadly they are also, damn the scruples I learned from Old Man Lubitsch and Aline and all the rest,
lacking.

Don't get me wrong: you can't fault your nymph on deportment or diaphanous robes, and they have erotic intermittence absolutely nailed to the carpet. But get past the natural desire to grab a handful of Elysian backside and perform a bit of strenuous quality testing, and there are significant lacunae in their interpersonal skills, starting with a vocabulary which extends only a few hundred words beyond “Ooh, la
la
!” And though it is difficult to concentrate here—by reason of the pan pipes, the stretching and what appears to be a rolling Miss Nearly Naked competition—I am peripherally aware that “Ooh, la
la
” is not an expression often seen in classical Greek. The thought occurs to me, fuzzily, that I am spiritually misplaced. I am dead, but by some error—of a type with which I am extremely familiar—I am in the wrong afterlife, and while it is reasonably picturesque and full of (pretty but ill-educated and also curiously
French
) nymphs, I should really be getting along. I grasp a passing shepherdess by the least erogenous protruding part and attempt to secure some relevant information.

“Excuse me? Where am I?”

Titter.

“Am I dead? Is this my afterlife?”

Snort, giggle, bounce. The bouncing is interesting. I am distracted by it. She wanders off. I pull myself together, secure another one.

“I
really
need to go. This is lovely, and you're all, really, very attractive, but I have things to do and places to be and I'm basically not your epicurean afterlife sort of person, I'm more the wild beauty, the thundering rivers and vast oceans sort of person. This is all a bit agricultural. So if there's a door . . . ?”

Tee hee.

Grandmother Wu's voice, in my head, suggests that this is a very special hell for intellectual, caring men. You can get your ashes hauled, get fed grapes and eat pastry all you like, for ever, but the whole thing will eventually drive you into a coma of self-loathing and ennui which will destroy your mind and turn your self-respect into a razor in the soul. If that's the case, by the way, the Immortal Judge has sorely overestimated my integrity, but for the moment I'm still trying to get out of here.

“Anybody? I
really
want to get out of here!”

My wish is, in some measure, granted: I catch fire. This is not really what I was hoping for. It's immediately recognisable: extreme discomfort and intense heat spreading from a point of initial ignition around the ankles upwards to my thighs and belly. I'm being burned at the stake. The invisible, intangible stake. Marvellous. Without the stench of burning and any sign of actual fire about my lower limbs, however, I conclude that this must be the onset of my translation to another inappropriate spiritual world of less pleasing aspect such as the Christian hell (returning to my roots, alas) described so forcefully by James Joyce in
Portrait of the Artist,
which the Evangelist read to us every year at Christmas time. So: to hell, thrashing in agony, because I have fallen down on my face. The nymphs pay me no attention at all as I writhe on the ground, which causes me to ponder the possibility that they are not true individuals but spiritual automata, and while I am thinking this, someone catheterises me, an intervention guaranteed to attract the attention of the patient. Thus, my journey across the infinite cosmos of the soul takes the form of me wincing and saying “ow,” and by the time I open my eyes, I have missed limbo and pandemonium and possibly the glimpse of heaven I was supposed to get to torment me for eternity, and am in hell.

Hell is smaller than I expected. Indeed, it appears to be a long, narrow motel room. The infernal prison of Lucifer Morningstar is upholstered in a cheap hessian wallpaper. There is also a bed, which does not seem to be a surgical table or other torturer's tool, although there is a drip in my arm and another in a place more intimate about which you already know. If there is a part of me which does not hurt, it's being very quiet about it. The only properly hell-ish things about it are a strange, nauseating sense of motion and the dim awareness of hissing and gasping voices, or possibly a large river or ill-tuned radio set, nearby:
whoossh-shweeddogga-dogga-dogga-shweee,
and so on.

The Devil—for surely no one else would think to catheterise a ghost—appears to have let himself go a bit. His stomach is proudly rounded, and protrudes like a single vast breast implant over the belt line of a green-and-purple sarong. His face is demonically out of focus.

“Hi,” the Devil says. “I thought you were a gonner.” And he smiles, revealing imperfect but cheerful teeth. My spiritual certainty recedes. Nowhere have I ever heard of Satan taking the form of an avuncular hippie. No doubt he could. It just seems inefficient. This is not a form ideal for offering blandishments or inciting fear. It isn't even particularly reassuring. It's just a guy who could use several years on a crosstrainer and a diet of lettuce so that he can view his ankles without the aid of a mirror.

“My name's K,” he says. “Pleased to meet you. Don't talk just yet. You've still got plenty of resting up left in you. Tomorrow we'll see about getting some whole food for you.” But this last is already from a great distance, because now that I am awake again, conscious and possibly alive, I feel a great urge to sleep.

I sleep. I dream good dreams about being a kid, about Cricklewood Cove and Ma Lubitsch's goulash and Old Man Lubitsch's bees. I dream about Elisabeth and Jarndice, and Aline. I do not dream about sex, which means that the bit about Aline is quite short. I dream of educated nymphs playing poker and talking politics, and investigating crimes in a city covered in greenery and bioluminescent lights, where domesticated bison pull the trains (I am the mayor, but for all my power I can't stop people from wearing red hats, which of course makes the bison belligerent and causes accidents every day). I dream about being a crab, which is less tedious than it sounds. I dream I am a playing card, but no one will tell me which one, and I cannot crane my neck to see.

I dream someone is burning bacon, and when I wake up, I find the Devil—K—swearing amid a cloud of giddy baconsmoke, working at a portable stove at the far end of the room. Mercifully, I am no longer attached to a bag by a thin piece of tubing protruding from my genitals, or I would probably be embarrassed. Indeed, even my drip seems to have gone. K looks back over his shoulder and waves. It's not immediately obvious whether he does this because he knows I am awake, or because he can't see me through the incinerated pig. I feel a moment's guilt at being present for the death rites of a pig, because Flynn the Barman's pigs did such sterling service not so long ago when we needed them.

K waves again, and this one is definitely for me. At his side stands a girl in batik, wearing the expression of one who told him the pan was too hot. She has short dark hair cut aggressively flat around one side. She marches through the fog of pig and stands in front of me.

“Hi,” she says. “I'm K.”

I must look confused. I thought K was the fat geezer. Some bloke with a dry mouth says this out loud.

“No,” she says. “I mean, he is. But I'm
K.
” As if that makes it all clear. My K—the original and still the most enormous—sheds his apron with a slightly despairing gesture and chucks the bacon remnant into a bin. He opens a narrow window near the stove, and instantly the smoke whisks out and the unmistakable sound of the road bores in. Yes. The silver whale. I am aboard Jonah's bus. Jonah's bus is my hospital, which is Satan's hell. Satan's hell is a camper van. K, somewhat troublingly, is not the same as K. I gurgle a bit. Frege is not the ideal companion for a man recently ventilated. K the corpulent shuts the window and shoots his companion a cross look.

“Don't do that to him, love. He's been shot. He's addled enough as it is,” and to me, “I'm K. She's also K. We both—many of us here, actually—have the same name. Not that we're all the same person, you understand. We just use one signifier to encourage random reassessment of the nature of our relationships. We don't like to make assumptions, yeah?”

“Except K likes to assume he can cook,” the girl says savagely. “And he can't cook.”

“I haven't demonstrated the ability to cook,” K murmurs placidly, “but it's inaccurate to say that I can't. Perhaps I'm just waiting for the right moment.”

“The right moment.”

“Yes,” says K, airily, “possibly I am waiting for a moment which is tactically advantageous. I will suddenly leap upon the raw food and render it cordon bleu in a fit of remarkable efficacy, and in doing so, I will change the world for the better.” He smiles.

The girl arches a sceptical eyebrow and does not speak. It is the more sceptical because of the way her hair is cut, which is most probably why it's cut that way.

K (the fat one, not the sceptic) demands a moment of communion with his patient. He fusses over me. He consults something which looks a bit like a medical chart, except that it is clipped to a piece of orange Perspex which used to be a drinks tray in a bar called
Viva Humperdink!

“How do you feel?” he says.

“I don't know.”

“Okay,” K says, and apparently ticks a box on the chart which says “Don't know.” “Basically,” K says, “you're doing amazingly well. You had a lot of cracked and broken ribs and so on, and they're . . . well, they're broken, but they're not dangerous. Both of your ankles are sprained, but not badly, which is frankly a bit miraculous. And you have bruising all over you, and of course you've been, you know . . .”

This one, I do know.

“Shot.”

K nods.

“But you're going to live.”

Oh.

“How did you find me?”

K looks uncomfortable.

“Thank Dr. Andromas,” he says, and ducks behind the chart. Apparently Dr. Andromas isn't a topic he wants to dwell on. “Is there anything else you want to know?”

There are several questions I do not ask. I do not ask them because I have studied the
gong fu
of Isaac Newton. Assumption Soames, insurrectionist and secret heretic, required that her students grasp Newton's Laws at an early age, so I was familiar with them even before Master Wu appointed Newton a
sifu
and a person of consequence. On the ostensible basis that every righteous soldier must know his enemy, the Evangelist stalked and purred from the back of the classroom to the front—a teacher you cannot see but know is there is infinitely more imposing than one you can measure with your eyes—and pounced on dissenters and doodlers and demanded they recite the blasphemous catechism of the alchemist and sorcerer.

So:
A body continues in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line unless acted upon by a net external force.
And here I am, continuing in my state of rest. This is the Law of Inertia, something of which I have a great deal at the moment. Although I may also,
pace
Albert Einstein, be in motion—the jag of the wheels and the hiss of air around the bus strongly suggests it must be so.

Next, the awkward one, which is frankly slippery as a fish and wriggles away from your comprehension as you reach for it:
The alteration of motion is ever proportional to the motive force impressed, and is made in the direction of the right line in which that force is impressed.
It comes out windy because it is naturally expressed neither in Latin nor in English, but in the murky cant of mathematics known as algebra. To the uninitiated, this law is so much noise, like the whistling around the bus. I am a master mason of both these temples. I speak not only algebra but also the language of the many-wheeled heavy transport. I know from the sound of the tyres that we are on an A-class road in medium repair, but that we are nowhere urban, because I can hear the dust and random gravel of the desert. I know that the bus needs a service, and that we are travelling at around sixty miles per hour, and that there is at least one vehicle of similar disposition close to us on the right. I know also that our front right tyre is somewhat bald and that its opposite number needs some air.