WHEN I WOKE UP again Eddie was holding a slab of raw bacon on my face. The left side of my head was throbbing and was swollen taut. My ear was crusted with dried blood. I was curled in a fetal position.
There ya are, Eddie said. Back again amongst the living, yeah? Caught a couple of tough shots from that big bastard.
There was some vague light that looked something like daylight coming in from the window. I glanced around and saw that the room was empty; I was lying on the dusty floor of Alan’s flat, with Eddie kneeling beside me. It was morning. The place was empty; all of Alan’s things had been removed.
Where’d he go? I asked.
Dunno. Eddie shrugged. Left the key under me door this morning. He was paid up thro’ the next two months as well, yeah? Strange, know wha’ I mean?
I took the bacon out of Eddie’s hand and looked at it.
I thought you were supposed to put raw steak on a wound like this, I said.
Eddie snatched the bacon from my hands.
Do I look like a fockin’ butcher to ya?
He stormed out and I was alone in Alan’s little room. I got up and felt for any other injuries but nothing else seemed serious. I searched my pockets: My wallet and keys were still with me, though the Thompson book I’d stolen from the library was gone, and that wasn’t all. Alan Henry had also taken my ear votive, one of the few objects that held some real value to me.
I went back to my flat to wash the layer of bacon grease from my face and see how bad it looked. A swollen purple-and-red welt about the shape of Africa curved from my forehead around my left eye and down across my cheek. I could feel my heart thumping in it like some internal machine, and I stroked it with my fingers like a cushioned creature that had attached itself to my face. My earlobe was split and throbbing, but the blood had clotted and the lower half of my ear was encased in it like a dark, crusty jewel.
Mick was laying down another layer of insecticides in the kitchen. He walked backward through the living room with a can in each hand, spraying with a wide side-to-side motion, like a man parking planes at the airport. Mick goes through about four cans a week, not to mention the rest of the pest-control devices he uses.
West Nile virus, Mick said. They found a crow in Finsbury that tested positive.
Mick, I said, I was wondering if we could talk about something.
Mick’s eyes flitted across me momentarily. The wound on my face was now burning in the arid atmosphere of the kitchen, like someone was holding a blowtorch to it. Mick stopped spraying and set down the cans.
Yeah? What’s that? There’s something wrong with yer face, mate.
It’s about the Song of Amun. I mean I know that you’ve seen it and—
Just a sec, Mick said, bending to the stove, let me get me kidneys out o’ the oven.
He opened the oven door and using a napkin grabbed a small kidney pie off the baking rack. He set it on the counter and began rummaging for a fork. I still had my hands over my mouth and my eyes watered from the cloud formations of chemicals that drifted through the kitchen. Mick began forking the hot pie into his little ferret mouth.
The Song of Amun, I said, from Karnak? Klein told me about it, and that you’d seen it.
Mick was scraping at the pie tin; his face bent to it like a penitent.
I was wondering if you could tell me something about it, seeing as it is concurrent with the Stela and site specific.
Why don’t you just look at it yourself? Mick said.
Well, I said, it’s . . . it’s unavailable right now. You did read it, right?
Mick wrinkled his brow. His skin was nearly translucent and fine blue veins worked their way across his forehead.
Nothing to say about it, mate. Trust me. Lot of sentimental rot, that mess. Nothing to it.
A few moments later Mick chucked his pie pan into the trash and picked up his insecticide cans and started spraying again, covering the kitchen floor in long even strokes. He glanced at me as he sprayed. He wasn’t going to even mention the Song of Amun to me, much less share his translations. I didn’t need this; I didn’t have time to muck about with him when my career was poised to implode.
Somebody thrash ya last night, old man? Your face looks like fockin’ ’ell, yeah?
For a moment or two I debated grabbing his skinny neck with both hands and twisting till his eyes popped out of his little rodent skull. I outweighed him by at least forty pounds and had a few inches on him. I knew that I could pummel him to within an inch of his life, if I wanted to. I’m not the violent sort, never have been, but the mild animosity I normally felt toward Mick was certainly peaking. Maybe I was just looking to wreak some kind of misdirected revenge. I had the urge to seize him and tear his puny body into little pieces and chuck him into the Thames, the way Seth tore Osiris apart and cast him into the Nile. Of course his mother, Isis, put him back together again and it just made Osiris all the more powerful in the end; he became the final judge in the afterworld. Nevertheless, I still wanted to thrash him.
You sure? I said. Nothing?
Mick shook his head. He was crouched under the sink, squeezing thin tubes of poisonous paste along the baseboards.
Where’d that money come from, Mick? I said. All the money you gave Alan?
Uni loans, mate. The checks arrive every four months.
You haven’t been a student for years.
No matter. I register for a class every once in a while, yeah? I’m technically working on a degree.
Really? In what?
Ancient civilizations? Or cultural anthropology? I forget. I just send them some of the work I’m doing here and it seems to satisfy them all right.
How much are you in debt?
What, ah, I’d say at least sixty thousand quid.
I was afraid to ask just what the hell he was spending all this money on, other than insecticides. He dressed like a career rough sleeper, rarely engaged in much hygiene of any kind, owned almost nothing but a few changes of clothes and a moldy toothbrush, and seemed to exist almost purely on sausages, kidney pies, tinned meats, curry, takeaway from the corner chip shop, and occasional forays into the depths of the steamy Asian kitchens of Soho.
Mick busied himself with the traps next. The regular roach stations, as well as cricket and ant baits and specially designed hormone-emitting capsules that emanated a type of radiation that got into insects’ DNA structure. You could tell it was working when you saw roaches crawling out to die with only three legs, or a second head coming out the side of their abdomens. Mick crawled about the kitchen, placing the various traps at intervals of about a foot. The fresh baits made my wounded face throb so I backed into the hallway and shouted to him.
When do you plan on paying all that off? Doesn’t that worry you?
I don’t plan on paying it at all.
Mick rolled on the living-room floor, attaching baits to the underside of the couch and coffee table.
Haven’t got a living relative to speak of, except for me mum. She’s nearly seventy now. If I die with no heirs, it’s no problem, yeah?
You mean you’ll just leave the debt? Just die with it?
He looked at me in utter astonishment.
Of course.
Who’ll pay it?
Who gives a bloody fuck’all about that? I’ll be dead, yeah?
He laughed through his ferret teeth, his eyes filled with something like mirth.
Mick always preferred the Ptolemaic view of Egypt, a world at odds with its own destiny, the tumultuous years. His was a mythology that I couldn’t quite decipher. Despite his apparent disdain for things spiritual, Mick kept lumps of wet clay piled on a box down in the lab and was inscribing sets of tablets with passages in Demotic, Coptic, and some other cuneiform-type scripts I didn’t recognize.
Often in the long hours of the morning or afternoon, while I was poring over the Stela, Mick would murmur things to himself while perched on his stool, mostly fragments of ancient Egyptian and Arabic as far as I could tell, as he pressed the damp clay with his hand-carved reed stylus, inscribing something that applied only to his personal twisted sense of theology and order. There was some kind of internal search occurring under that constructed shell of indifference; Mick had some passion for craft beyond the monetary, whatever it was. But he would never own up to it, and he took that secret with him to the other side. To this day I think of his whispered intonations as a kind of background music to those days in the British Museum.
Aye, Rothschild, Mick said, pie didn’t quite do the trick. What say we get ourselves a bite to eat?
It was true that I hadn’t had anything to eat in the last twenty-four hours other than half a soggy cone of chips.
Okay, I said, it’d be nice to get out and let these chemicals settle. But I get to choose. No Indonesian this time.
Mick grumbled, but assented. Mick’s favorite restaurant, which he frequented at least once a week, was a gritty Indonesian place in the lower end of Soho. I was tired of it; not of the food, which was agreeable enough, but with Mick’s whole ritual. Mick’s favorite dish was some kind of bone-in fish lying prostrate athwart a chipped pale blue plate, swimming in a murky brown sauce that was thick with small insect pod-looking peppers and flakes of powdery red and black leaves. It was his custom to order it hot—the true stuff, mind you, none of this tourist shite, he would say to the bowing waiter, smirking in his rumpled knee-length smock.
When the food arrived the kitchen staff would come out and stand along the wall, a motley crew of Asians, crossing their thin, hairless tattooed arms across their splattered white tank tops and sunken chests, ebony cigarettes dangling from their wet lips, watching Mick with obvious amusement and anticipation. They waited as Mick sawed a forkful of the fish, weighing it carefully, allowing the sauce to drip cleanly onto the smeared oilcloth-covered table. Mick placed the tender white flesh into his little ferret mouth and, eyes closed, began to masticate furiously, the translucent skin of his cheeks rippling with the fine striations of muscles that swept like spiderwebs across his face and bulbous cranium. He swallowed and opened his eyes, always looking at me in the same way, a savory expression, as if to say he was sorry that I couldn’t experience such a pleasure, that all of this was so far beyond me and my abilities that he was left feeling nothing for me but true pity.
Which I never quite understood, as I had ordered precisely the same dish and was quickly and unceremoniously working my way through the spicy fish with my own particular set of eating mechanics, wrestling bits of the tender flesh from the splintery plastic of the bones, dabbing it in the sauce, and washing it down with a small glass of lemon pop.
After a few minutes Mick’s face would begin to go white, his self-serving, condescending grimace would begin to falter, and then his face would begin to turn the most alarming shade of yellow, as if his liver had exploded and the bile had run flush to his face. His Adam’s apple began working furiously, eyes tearing, and it was always then, when the first tear began to run down his face, his gaze still locked on mine, that we would hear the stifled laughter from the kitchen lads, a snort and then the sound of lips pressed against the backs of hands to no avail, the halfhearted attempt at suppression, breaking into a keening wail of snorts and wheezes. Then they would all go bounding back into the kitchen, howling with that particular sort of laughter that defies a specific cultural or linguistic subset or structure—shrieks of pleasure brought on by the discomfort and misery of another. So universal that sound, the same all over the world. Mick then would sputter and begin to help himself to my water glass. He had already poured his own down the front of his shirt.
The slab of fish was a bit hot, true, but nothing that I hadn’t seen bettered in the taverns of North Africa or various port towns along the Turkish coast. I tried to finish my meal grimly, with some sort of sympathy for Mick, feigning a struggle with the fish, nodding in agreement as he shook and spat into his napkin, cramming slices of bread into his chapped maw, draining glass after glass of water that the tearful hostess poured for him, by now running a fire line of ice water from the kitchen to our table, passing glasses hand over hand to Mick’s trembling fingers. He wouldn’t speak to me for the rest of the night, spitting in the gutters as we walked home along Charing Cross, muttering into his ear votives, as if it were all my doing, as if I were to blame.
Later at the flat I would be subjected to Mick’s further intestinal anguish as he thrashed about in the bathroom. One particular evening after such a meal I went to use the toilet sometime late in the night. When I flipped on the light I found Mick trembling and naked, his wiry arms outstretched with a hand planted on each wall, hovering over the bowl, suspended in a seated position like some kind of freakish gymnast, his eyes blazing and bubbles of spittle on his white lips. I went back to the bedroom and huddled under the sheets, my need to urinate suddenly absent, and spent the next few hours trying not to listen to Mick’s muffled moaning cries: It burns . . . oh god it burns, it burns!
Instead this time I led Mick to a place just off Endell Street, nestled deep in the circuitous windings of Covent Garden, a small, delightfully strange vegetarian restaurant called Cranky’s, where you can get a bowl of warm organic barley topped with cilantro, carrot shavings and pine nuts, and wash it all down with a cool glass of celery-beet juice, watery green and thick with chunks of murky purple sediment. There were a series of restaurants like this in the Covent Garden area where you could get such organic-type vegetarian fare, many of them run by the powerful English Krishna organization that called London home. I figured I’d gut down something organic and perhaps maybe catch a glimpse of Alan Henry, as he frequented these places, haunting the small inner courtyards and plazas of Covent Garden. I’d often seen him there conversing with Krishnas or other men wearing robed dress.
I didn’t actually care much for the food, but sometimes after a few weeks of fish and chips and Yorkshire pudding a man feels like he needs to detox the system. Flush it out with something that hadn’t been shitting and fornicating on a mossy hill in Cumbria a short time before. Considering his diet I thought this was something Mick might appreciate.
We walked the half dozen blocks in a mild downpour, Mick spitting and smoking furiously along the way. And then in the recess of Cranky’s, a dank, cold place despite the walls being painted brilliant saffron, we took a table and Mick sat grumbling over mixed organic greens, warily eyeing the olive foccacia bread with sun-dried tomato spread, fingering the bowl of rough hummus with his spidery digits, keeping an eye on the doorway.
Is something the matter? I asked him.
Let me ask you something, Mick said, fixing his eyes squarely on me, something he rarely did.
Sure.
Have you ever noticed the most common form that the figures of, oh, let’s say, aliens, take in western culture? How about the devil?
I shrugged.
Insect. Easily the most popular. Why? Insects are by far the most alien-looking and -acting things we have on this planet, yeah? Do I need to remind you that they have an exoskeleton? A hard outer shell that contains a mix of fluids? I’m sure you’ve noticed that you can drop a spider or a roach off a ten-story building and the fucking thing will scuttle off to its den, like it just stepped off a fucking bus?
So?
I’m sure you’ve heard about the theory of collective consciousness? The massed collective working for a single goal, yeah? Absent of any individual thought or aspiration? We know that different sorts of bees are born into a caste system which designates their particular function in the hive. They are genetically predisposed to carry out these functions. We also know that the workers can somehow communicate complex sets of instructions to the rest of the hive, including navigational elements, that allow the other bees to then seek out the food source.
They communicate with movement, I said. A little dance.
Forget the dance, Mick said. Not complex enough. That’s like saying you could write Old Kingdom funerary instructions in Coptic.
So?
The metaphor of the hive is literal. Each is merely an appendage of the larger body. Do you know how each bee is given its designated position at birth? Besides the queen they are all genetically identical. It depends on the amount of food, essentially sugar water, that each pupa is given by the worker bees. That determines their function. The more sugar, the larger, more powerful their position. All this decided without any thought. Pure instinct. Every action determined by some kind of hardwired instinct.
You’ve got some serious problems, Mick. Some kind of phobia.
Fuck that. Some minute impulse that travels down the threadlike spinal cord from that small lump that serves as a brain. Reactions. Light, temperature, movement, pure reaction to the external world, yeah? Flying blind in a sense. Know how a moth, or a butterfly, will sometimes fly blindly into you? Because they do not recognize you as a living being? You are just a fucking object, another set of intake parameters that is filtered through their microscopic nervous system and engendering a predetermined set of actions! Now, I ask you . . .
He jabbed a finger into my chest, his ferretlike teeth gnashing. I tried to draw away from his ray-gun halitosis as best I could in the narrow booth.
. . . what is more terrifying than that? What? Than action without thought, no rationalization, no intellect, no emotion, no process of any kind? Ruled by instinct metered by a collective consciousness, an actual fucking physical memory! There is no feeling of loss, of sorrow, of pain even. All secondary to survival. You would think that it would make them ultimately predictable, but on the contrary it makes them the most unpredictable living creatures in the world, at least in our interactions with them. Why? Because there is no reason! Their consciousness is so completely unlike our own, that they might as well be fucking aliens.
It was the longest conversation we ever had.
Right after that Mick determined that he couldn’t possibly consume any of this shite, and proceeded to light up a fag even though there were no-smoking signs everywhere. We were promptly ushered back up the stairs and out into the rainy street by a pair of tall, reedy dreadlocked youths, apparently working security for the Krishnas. I was still chewing my garlic tabouli with tomatoes as we hit the street.
Krishna wankers! Mick said. Christ! Fucking poncey shite.
Any idea where I might find Alan? I said.
Nah, mate.
Hanif?
No fucking clue.
Heading up St. Martin’s back toward Bloomsbury we passed a dark little pub called the Four Bells. The windows were glazed with condensation and grease.
Couple a Scotch eggs, Mick mumbled, and wheeled off into the pub, leaving me there in the street.
I don’t know why I even bothered. I walked home alone in the rain, holding my broken face up to catch the cool drops. Wincing in the rain, I cursed Mick’s very soul, his dark, twisted little soul.