There’s a joke all Bergeners know: a tourist and a ten-year-old local kid find themselves next to one another at a bus stop/shop counter/cafe table – in whichever version, staring through rain-bleared glass at streets along which rivers of rainwater gush. The tourist asks the kid:
‘What’s it like here when it’s not raining?’
The kid looks back at him as though the question were the stupidest he’d ever heard.
‘How would I know?’ he says. ‘I’m only ten.’
Rain here is post-Newtonian: it can fall down, sideways, even upward. Stepping out, first morning in town, Phocan picked up an umbrella in the hotel lobby, and was puzzled by the receptionist’s enigmatic, slightly condescending glance. The riddle was resolved within two minutes. No one carries the things here; they’re useless. The rainwater swirls in hazy streams, auratic drifts around you, finding out your every port of entry: gaps between coat fastenings or shirt buttons, between sleeve and wrist or trouser-leg and ankle, weft and warp of jumper-knit. By the time he’d reached Sardinen he was saturated: not just clothes but (it felt) skin as well, as though some strange inversion of this country’s vaunted sauna ritual had just taken place, a reverse sweating, and the atmosphere, not he, had shed its moisture, millions of nebulised drops that his body, like a sponge, had thirstily absorbed. His hosts’ first act was to have one of their number, an acrobat named Trine, lead him to a klær buttikk to purchase a full-body anorak that, like a scientist in a film involving mass-contagion or (as with Incarnation, although Ben Briar – oddly – hasn’t flagged this up and called for the characters to wear similarly prophylactic outfits) alien contact, he now dons automatically each time he ventures outside.
MU’s housed in an old canning factory, whence its informal title. MU stands for the Movement Underground, but everyone just calls it (building, company, employees) Sardinen. In the vaulted workshops, hooks from which the daily catch was hoisted by the barrelful before being upended, sloshed down ramps on to conveyors that led millions of fish a merry dance through grading, brining, nobbing, seaming and eventual cartoning now secure ropes and bungees, aerial straps and nets, cordes lisses and volantes to and from which acrobats hang, swing, split, piston and basqule, while up towards and even sometimes on beyond them other bodies rise, shot from the trampolines with which patches of floor have been inlaid. Still others fall, from beams and loading doors, in dives by turns gracious and willed, evocative of Acapulco cliffs, and (conversely) passive and unshaped, as though the faller had been shot or pushed or simply lost their footing, on to blue crash-mats that boom as they implode under each impact, upper surface crumpling before rising once more, yeast-rich dough on speed-play, to assume its previous volume although not topography (the exact distribution through the plastic of folds and creases never, Phocan’s concluded, the same twice) as they await the next free-falling mass. In one corner of the room a human pyramid reaches almost to beam level: a misshapen one that’s crumbling and collapsing even as it forms, discarded body-blocks scrambling to their feet and stumbling on across the floor to form new, smaller mastabas as they clamber over other fallen, stumbling bodies, groping their way forward …
The scenario’s as follows: Tszvetan and Tild have been found out. It was always bound to happen; even at the state reception in Kern’s harbour, as the Sidereal’s doors groaned open and the bride-to-be was led down the long, rose-draped walkway, face emerging from the clouds of dry ice with which the vehicle had been doused (Herzberg’s, not Briar’s, idea) – the way her escort led her by the hand, the way he held her hand, a lack of stiffness to the grip exuding more familiarity than ceremony … Courtiers’ tongues started wagging right then, and haven’t stopped since. One of their number, a weaselly commandant named Marloe who’s long harboured a grudge against Louis Q’s protégé (they’re the same age; Tszvetan was a better racer than him, and outnotched his kills during the War by two-to-one), has been constantly dreaming up ways to blow their cover. He’s activated route tracers and communications spyware, body-signature detectors, crypto-shadows; he’s let slip, Iago-like, insinuations at each opportunity – none of which ruses have achieved their goal, partly because the lovers have been on to him and taken appropriate precautions (trace-erasure software, phoneme-scramblers, shadow-diffractors, etc., etc.), partly due to Louis Q’s unwillingness to see, or to acknowledge having seen, what’s obvious to everyone else.
And obvious it is: no one-off, the thanadrine-fuelled episode has tapped, in Tild and Tszvetan, inexhaustible reserves of passion. It’s an addiction; they get actual, i.e. somatic, withdrawal symptoms if the tryst isn’t re-consummated every day or so – high temperature, nausea, the shakes … For venues they’ve been using semi-public spaces: the Botanical Garden, Natural Science Museum, Tentirn Tower – assignations thought up on the hoof and messaged via ad-hoc interfaces immune to deciphering because devised by the lovers themselves, intuitively, idiolects almost. He’ll drop chips into her blu-ray stream at certain frequencies, or project flickering laser-beams on to low-hanging clouds above the palace, or flash over an iconogram showing a caprifolio tree, none of which symbols have been pre-infused with a fixed meaning by them – but each time, she knows exactly what he’s signalling. The others – courtiers, servants, populace-at-large – know merely that they’re signalling, and trysting, but can’t place this knowledge in the forum of decodable enunciation, hence of record …
Marloe, no fool, has thought the situation through, and tweaked his strategy accordingly. He’s come to understand that, as far as his aims are concerned, his goal isn’t the uncovering of the affair, since this was hardly covered in the first place. Nor is it convincing Louis Q that the affair is taking place: if what the ruler’s seen already isn’t evidence enough, then nothing will be – they’re virtually screwing right in front of him. No: what he, Marloe, needs to do is to uncover to the populace Louis Q’s awareness of the state of play; and beyond that, to uncover to him, Louis Q, the populace’s knowledge of his knowledge of their knowledge of the tryst – a loop of knowing feeding back into and energising itself, galvanising the whole situation from its stupor. Once all separating curtains, all snug-walls have been torn down, all blind alleys razed, the partitioning of acknowledgement eradicated, then … Then Louis Q will have to act: his own head, crown, sceptre, his authority, will be on the block. Marloe’s been dreaming up some fitting form of mise-en-scène through which the requisite tripartite viewing – Louis Q of lovers, public of lovers-and-Louis-Q, Louis Q of public-viewing-him-viewing-lovers – might be orchestrated …
Events, or at least the court calendar, conspire with him: on Kern, from the Second Kingdom onward, to mark each new moon cycle a royal hunt’s been undertaken. With much sounding of tambours and waving of draps, the regent and his entourage mount an armada of five-cylinders and kjarabancs and chase down the radjars that proliferate around Kern’s veldt and wetlands. The excursion lasts a whole diurnal – an all-male affair, one in which Tszvetan, in the normal run of things, would not only feature but also star, bagging more of the elegant, antlered beasts than anyone else (though, as protocol demands, tributing to Louis Q the excess of his tally over and above that of his liege). But this time he’s crying off, pleading an old injury, a Saraõnic shoulder-wound that’s playing up – which is (to use the old Kern idiom) kwatsch: he and Tild will take his uncle’s absence as free pass for an uninterrupted nocturnal of couping. This they do, imbibing between bouts a range of cocktails that Tild’s mixed for them – nothing so all-consuming as thanadrine, none of which in any case remains (they knocked it off in one go that night on the ship), but nicely complementary to such drawn-out sessions nonetheless: rhodontrine, porphyridion, mandragal, draughts that double the effects of darkness, swathe them in the intimacy and security of what seems the first, or maybe final, night, inducing a forgetfulness, obliviousness even – to danger, to the risks of discovery and of forgetfulness itself. Eventually, passion and bodies spent, they drift seamlessly off into a deep and peaceful sleep. When Louis Q, led on by Marloe (who is easily, once Tszvetan’s DF software’s been reactivated, capable of tracking them) and with the entire hunting party in tow, arms laden with radjars in a state (it seems) no more limpid or inanimate than that of the two lovers, stumbles into the palazzo’s Sala Rosa just as dawn, once more, peeps round Ardis Minor and creeps over the Kernwinal Hills, projecting Fidelus’s light on to the golden threads of the room’s darkened tapestries, it takes a full minute of shouting, prodding, tugging and, eventually, slapping to wake Tild and Tszvetan up.
This, then, is the state of play: Louis Q, apoplectic at his bride’s and nephew’s joint betrayal of him; at having himself been found out finding out; at having (consequently) to do something about it; at the tawdry symbolism of the antlers being clasped all around him, proffered like so many mocking mirrors – and Tszvetan and Tild, blinking in the hostile daylight, shamed and naked but at the same time silently defiant. They stare back at the assembled company with eyes so piercing that courtiers avert theirs; to Louis Q, the eyes say: Yes. You willed it, and it happened. What are you going to do? The regent has no choice. He decrees that Tszvetan and Tild be executed in the public square come the diurnal’s zenith. Marloe, though, who truly is a shit, ventures to suggest to him that Tild instead be handed over, straight away, to Kern’s leperosi – poor sub-citizens who, afflicted by a meteor-borne virus that both disfigures and cripples them, causing rank lesions to erupt across their skin before eating its way down into their flesh, which in turn causes toes, fingers, sometimes entire limbs to auto-amputate … These creatures, shunned by employers, landlords and just about everyone else due to the highly infectious character of their disease, find themselves condemned to endless wandering about Kern’s empty precincts, waste grounds, marsh- and border-zones, from which they emerge intermittently, en masse, to shove mendicant, insufficiently digited hands at passers-by who recoil in revulsion from them. Why not, urges Marloe, hand Tild straight over to the group of them that they saw camped out in the disused old port as they rode back from the wetlands, and let them have their way with her?
In this, too, Louis Q is cornered: any temperance of his ire, ebbing to humble love of his revenge’s violent pace, would be viewed as a sign of weakness – from a political, never mind personal, POV, ill-advised messaging. Tszvetan is popular, and the plebeiani seem to be taking Tild to their collective heart as well; a delay or commutation that leaves the two intact could birth a dangerous ambivalence in terms of public loyalties, open an interregnum in which fealty might start swinging, see the younger couple take on the aspect of a parallel royal household, a new court-in-waiting … No: it behoves Louis Q to be swift and brutal, and accept Marloe’s baroque proposal. So it is: Tszvetan to be burned, today, in the piazzo; Tild to be gang-banged to death, gangrenously, by Kern’s leperosi.
‘You’re sure you want them climbing over each other like this?’ Phocan asks Herzberg as the two men watch Sardinen’s akrobater mounting one another’s backs and shoulders, then, formations grown top-heavy, tumbling off again to roll about the floor before once more finding their feet and seeking out newly forming masses to join up with.
‘Absolutely,’ the AD decisively responds. ‘It’s what Lukas wants. The leperosi manifest as a collective body. They represent collectiveness – a counterpoint to the heroic individualism of the main characters; and … there was something else too …’
‘Okay,’ Phocan says. ‘It’s just a little difficult to …’
‘Also,’ Herzberg continues, recalling Dressel’s involved lecture on the matter, delivered to him by the great director back in London on the eve of his departure here, ‘disease, infection and affliction: these are low embodiments of the desire that’s overtaken the two lovers. He mentioned Death in Venice: how the plague, you know, all the collapsing bodies, symbolise the moral downfall of the upright and respectable composer, his “abandonment to longing’s putrefaction” …’
Phocan hasn’t seen Death in Venice. But he knows that markering and mo-capping a ‘collective body’ is going to be a headache – paradoxically, since a gangling, multi-limbed monster is precisely what you often get before you extricate and allocate the portions; that latter task (extricating, allocating) being the very one to which he’s just last week been trying to convince the IACSS crowd that Pantarey’s Physis 6™ is perfectly suited. Here, though, the sequence is reversed. The production to order of an artefact, of tangle and confusion, isn’t as simple as you might presume – unpredictable or indeterminate conglomerations being characterised, after all, by indeterminacy, unpredictability …
‘Let’s,’ he tells Herzberg after thinking for a moment, ‘get them markered up, and have them do their tumbling and re-amalgamating as per your directions, and we’ll just see what we get, take it from there.’
Watching the sequences three hours later, rain playing against Sardinen’s corrugated roof the only background noise now akrobater have been stood down and decamped, collectively, to a bar round the corner named Sardinkan (with effusive hospitality as buoyant as their leaps and bounces, they urged Phocan and Herzberg to come join them once they’d finished what they ‘had to do’), Phocan is pleasantly surprised at the results. The mass of future leperosi, as yet featureless and unadorned with poxed and lacerated skin, limb-stumps, lecherous grins, and so on – they’ll acquire those in London, at DZ – do indeed seem to function as one single, if unusually configured, organism, whose decentralised intelligence flows around it in a current as it, too, wends simultaneously one way and another, coalescing like continuous rainfall round the body of the girl – as it happens, Phocan’s raincoat-selecting assistant Trine – who’s standing in for Tild, or rather for Rosanna Wilmington.
‘I like it.’ Herzberg nods approval over Phocan’s shoulder. ‘I think Lukas will too. Let’s go join our friends in the Sardine Can.’
Herzberg’s satisfaction with his little pun deflates as soon as they arrive to find that Sardinkan does indeed mean ‘sardine can’: a graphic of one, hanging over the bar’s entrance, leaves no room for doubt on this front. Inside, it’s as packed as one, acrobats crammed around tables, perched on barrels, windowsills and ledges, straddling the wooden beams that run beneath the hostelry’s low ceiling. They seem to have quite a heat on already; there’s a jovial air about them; some of them are singing; others laugh as they pass phones around. Drinks are ordered for their guests, along with a new round for the Sardinen. When Phocan asks Trine, who’s made space for him beside her, what they’re looking at on the phones, she hands the one she’s holding to him, and he scrolls through scores of snaps of acrobats in various states and shapes: crumpled, starred, falling, swallow-diving, flailing, rising, soaring, catapulting …
‘How do you know who’s who?’ he asks. Most of the jpegs show them in bodysuits, or with head tucked under legs, or stretched back upwards so the face is turned away.
‘We don’t,’ she shrugs. ‘It doesn’t really matter. What’s important is to find new figures and new permutations.’
‘But …’ he starts – then finds he can’t find the words for his quibble.
‘Yes …?’ Trine prompts, wiping a giant beer-head tidemark from around her mouth.
‘I mean … Aren’t you proud when it’s you who’s found one?’
‘That’s not how we think,’ she tells him. ‘It’s never about us finding something, or us owning a particular action … We’re trained to see our bodies as the place where the action occurs.’
‘And your face?’ he asks.
‘What about it?’ Trine asks back.
‘When Rosanna Wilmington’s is plastered over it … Won’t you feel, you know, kind of cancelled out?’
‘I was never “in” in the first place,’ Trine replies.
Phocan’s about to ask her what she means, but just then another round arrives, ordered this time by Herzberg.
‘Half the film’s budget gone right there!’ he shouts as he passes out the tankards. ‘Pantarey can get the next one.’
This Pantarey does – after which Phocan’s at least half-cut, as are the company in general: their bodies seem to glide from beam to ledge to chair to bar counter more fluidly, without definite outlines; bar counter and beam seem to be gliding too, their borders shifting, realigning. Then it’s out again into the acrobatic rain, surging and turning, hovering and bouncing. Trine’s beside him, holding his arm, and the cobblestones are running till they’re back at his hotel; then somehow he, like Bergen’s rain, has managed to fall up two flights of stairs to his second-floor bedroom, sadly without Trine it seems, although someone is holding forth to him on the subject of anonymity – or is it just him, talking to himself, lying face down, forehead intersected by the raised wooden threshold between lounge and bathroom …?
The threshold mark will stay with him, forehead-imprinted, for most of the following day; in his scrambled state he’ll associate it, every time he glimpses it in rain-blurred glass, not simply with Trine – that is, with Trine’s absence – but also with vaguer, modulating sequences, chains of imperfectly reflected episodes that regress backward, passing through Rafaella Farinati, telescoping off into some dark recess that memory, at least his right now, isn’t up to the task of illuminating. Now, waking up still splayed across the doorway, the rain still crackling out a constant background static on the walls and windowpanes, its aquacity crowing at his dehydration, he drinks all the bottled water in his minibar, then refills the container from his bathroom tap. Flipping his laptop open, he finds awaiting him amidst the inbox clutter two emails of note. One has a .lv address: Latvia. It’s from Raivis Vanins’ office, and it bears, prefaced by a re:, the header (Possibility of Jumelans visit?) of his own email from four days previously. It reads:
Dear Dr Phocan,
Professor Vanins thanks you for your interest in his work. His research into states of equilibrium was principally conducted several decades ago, and has not until quite recently elicited the type of curiosity you communicate. The Professor draws your attention to the holdings of Rīgas Tehniskā Univerisitāte’s Solid-State Physics Department, where the bulk of his archive is kept, and suggests you begin by consulting these. He asks me to add that, should you still wish to meet with him in person, he will, in deference to his old acquaintance your patron Dr Garnett, be prepared to make time for you. Should such an interview be desired, he suggests a date after 13 September.
Yours,
Lazda Krūmin.a
pp Professor Vanins
Patron? Nice word: paternal. No mention of black boxes: why would there be? They weren’t alluded to in the overtures to Vanins made by first Garnett and then, once the channel of communication had been opened, him. Reading this Lazda Krūmin.a’s response, Phocan feels fraudulent, borderline criminal – an impostor, even if he’s not, his sense of alienation from the straight path of his calling amplified by this appalling hangover. Maybe he played up his strategic fascination with the states-of-equilibrium stuff too much: is there an edge of suspicion to the surprise expressed by her, or perhaps through her by the Professor, about his Trojan horse, his violon d’ingres? He’s not able, this morning, to gauge innuendo levels. What does until quite recently mean …? The second message comes from a generic account, no national suffix – but the address grabs his attention straight away: it’s a.pirotti@gmail.com. The header: 808. It opens with the same salutation as the other:
Dear Dr Phocan,
It was edifying and encouraging to meet you in Rome. I wonder how your enquiries into the subject we discussed up on the hillside are proceeding. Do keep me up to date. Perhaps we could connect in Riga, should you find yourself in that neck of the woods at any point in the near future.
I remain your friend and well-wisher,
A.P.
Now, just as when he met Pirotti in the flesh a week ago, Phocan feels disoriented, vertiginous. It’s more than just the toxins and potassium depletion: it’s the sudden groundlessness induced by overlap of territories that should find themselves far apart, unconnected – as though, in their fibre-optic relay to him, or perhaps within the very silver casing of his laptop, two separate fields had intersected, read each other, breached whatever barriers had been put in place, by geography, technology and just plain reality, to keep them separate and unrelated. Riga: how on earth …? In London, as soon as he’d returned from Rome, he looked up Cassius First Motion, and found nothing; he scoured online directories of mo-cap companies, not that this was necessary: the industry is small, he knows them all, but there are always fledglings, start-ups … nothing; then of general tech, CGI outfits à la Degree Zero, sports-science labs, data-security firms – still nothing. Cassius didn’t exist. There was, of course, the number on the card – but to phone that would have entailed a step beyond another threshold, the betrayal one. Industrial espionage. Why didn’t he report the tapping-up to Garnett or Hossain immediately on his return? He doesn’t know the answer to that; but for some reason, he didn’t. It seemed too intimate, a peccadillo almost. And then Farinati’s role, if she was part of it … Should he have read her over-the-shoulder smile? Her pointed marking of his lapel? Or seen through her proffered not-quite-assignation on the Palatino, the most obvious place in all of Rome? Now this … He throws on his anorak and heads out into the rain.
The day at Sardinen is spent, once more, capturing tumbling, dis- and reassembling bodies. Once his nausea’s been quashed by sugar-intake, Phocan settles into a quiet rhythm, watching leprous forms advance with an irregular regularity, a faceless multitude that seems to sense and think and measure time through its collective body: Lukas’s formulation, planted in his mind by Herzberg, repeats itself for him as he sits editing sequences after the live-capture session’s finished, playing the same short stretches over and over … liberating dynamism of the great machine … in the rain’s crackle and his laptop’s hum, Gastev’s lines take shape too. Or was it erupting? The more Phocan watches, the more abstract the sequences grow: pixels, shearing from the mass’s body to form new blocks, take on the aspect of cells, plasmatic units in search of new clusters and new designations. Non aberranti ma esemplari … Farinati’s words to him also seem to ricochet around the cannery’s airspace. In his addled state, reason all but capsized by great waves of glucose-level fluctuation, Phocan, for some reason, finds his mind drifting back to the extensive disquisitions that Diamond, when she was still wet behind the ears, Pantarey intern, drew from him on artefacts, subject that seemed to fascinate her. No matter how much he tried to impress on her that these were nothing more than the result of glitches, bugs, shortcomings in the code, she kept pushing her homespun thesis that they might in fact be caches for ‘a type of information that we haven’t yet learnt to interpret’.
‘How do you mean?’ he asked, bemused.
‘You know, like in the old days, when rheumatics’ knee-joints foretold thunder-storms. Or with PTSD’d veterans like my friend Aidan’ – this man’s name, ever since Phocan’s knightly rescue of her from his clutches, had become a kind of bonding joke between them – ‘how some weird, neurotic quirk they keep repeating, that makes no sense, is really a symptom that encodes a trauma-scene too awful to be captured as “official” memory but, thanks to the, you know, encoding, manages to sit right in the open, hidden in plain sight …’
He mock-swatted at her head with the data wand he was holding.
‘Doesn’t work like that. They’re glitches. Software failure. End of story.’
Today, though, he’s suddenly not so sure, finds himself prey to an inversion as total as that of yesterday’s Acapulcan plungers. What if … what if artefacts, rather than marking a limitation, an inadequacy, were … What if, contrary to all evidence, to logic itself … if they were the very thing most true in all configurations – tokens, splinters of a stratum of reality so deep, so sedimented, that it hasn’t yet been charted, let alone assigned grid-coordinates, a vessel or a form, but …? And if … then …
No, the thought won’t take shape, probably because it’s kwatsch as well. Fuckin’ kids: Eldridge was right. Phocan closes the leperosi file and pops open another, falling.vp. There are those plungers: a body, male or female, tightly clad in a black, marker-studded bodysuit, is dropping from one of the loading doors towards a mat. Phocan’s got seven versions of the plunge: some clumsy, others more streamlined and aerodynamic, some neither-nor; same body, or different ones, performing each – impossible to tell, and doesn’t matter. It will eventually become a fleeing Tild, plummeting flailing from a cliff edge to be caught in mid-air by a pirogue-riding Tszvetan; also leperosi One, Two and Three, and perhaps Four and Five, too, hurtling to their deaths as they lunge and grope after her. Phocan runs the flailingest dive-sequence through several times; then a more placid one; then, for no reason besides whimsy, he freezes this second dive in mid-fall, runs it backwards, then forwards, then backwards again, so that the figure yo-yos up and down, before eventually freezing it once more in mid-air. Thus arrested, its kinetic panic is transformed, communicating now a kind of serene unconcern that Phocan finds soothing. Spreading outwards from his screen, it seems to overtake not just the space here in Sardinen but beyond too – Rome, London, Riga; to usher in a general state in which things, all things, find themselves caught up in the same general, if unnameable, contraption, and the world, its stakes, its struggles, all hang in the balance.