FUNNY LITTLE FELLOWS

 

 

 

Foreword

n this job, we learn to kill each other. In this job we learn to torture, no, not each other, that would be gruesome and grotesque, but whoever. To put it wholesomely, whomsoever. But we also get to see interesting places, people. People who don’t kiss with their mouths – when you consider it, that’s rather slimy – but with cheeks or noses, and who knows what comes after. But it’s true, we live in violent times, a violent world, where we may all end up without water, without sun, even.

And yet, we must continue to discuss these things – write poetry, if you like, discuss how we know the world is real without us, whether we learn through things, or feelings, or because we’re taught in a particular way – by who, I wonder – and of course many of the guys we deal with, that we try to educate in our civilisation – not that it always seems so great – anyway, they see the same things quite differently, and though they may drive Toyotas, even sniff some coca, or listen to our bands, nonetheless, their world is full of people to protect, situations to avoid like death, and enemies that are not ours. And may be us.

It takes no genius, in short, to see that though all things are one, and we are the one species – to stop the killing and the gouging and the stabbing, even the insults and the plotting, becomes a difficult and consuming business, where neither poems nor philosophy, nor even good intentions, help you much. Here a quite different set of ploys and escamotages comes into play, and we are talking different languages, although our actions seem identical to the other guys’ – and even not too civil.

And so I find myself here, on the upward slope, a car is waiting, driver stubs again his oft-stubbed fag, we’re almost off, the wires connect, and no one cheers but there’s an air of celebration, a journey where we hope to learn.

Up Mount El’brus

his sweet old Soviet car – at once stiff and bouncy – seems born of donkeys and pack horses. Up the mountain it goes, digging in with its buttocks, rolling with the corners. From up here maybe I shall see Mount Ararat, hovering above its ice like Fuji on the film packets – site of other nostalgias, other massacres. Remember the animals, clearly forced into the Ark – that beached on Ararat – as married couples, yet prevented in some way from procreation, God so angry, he hadn’t realised that births would sink the ship, eat the crew. Then so penitent, but still with that problem of abundance. Chastity left to the animals. Abstinence however procured, a self-control to shame us all.

A mystery you can deal with at home, an adventure means you leave, immersed then in mystery. I’ve seen an ibex. I’m not what it is seeking. It licks a stone. At my feet ants are running like water. All life here is quite indifferent, as I should expect. Paths have crossed here. I have no path.

The tall old car keeps bottoming out. I yelp a little to Yuri Popov, and he laughs. ‘You’ve got your own shock absorbers – you’re sitting on them.’

We pass people waving. ‘A glum life,’ says Yuri.. ‘Nothing to do and nowhere to go.’

To me, it’s all a breath of the old world. I find a newspaper in the car, printed in one of the troubled provinces to the east. I expect Yuri will show them to me later as he takes me to the mountaintop.

The paper says: ‘What’ll we be eating in 2030, now scepticism has taken over from the religious wave? Crocodiles, pigeons and sharks. What matter, as we all know it tastes like chicken. ‘Streetwise pigeon legs on a bun. Croc paws sizzling.’ The one thing that remains from the martyrs’ death, now you can choose a ‘splatter death’. After all, who wants to end up in a bed, a toxic pustule without kidneys, when you can go out like a man, gun blazing (with blanks maybe) against the Special Forces? The Terror is diffused, it’s built in – like credulity. And the rich dissemble – the new puritanism leaves them protected from anything but local crime, yet still protesting ... And the end of nations doesn’t end the universal anger. Anger, yes that’s the mark of 2030. Our 2030 vision.’

I’m up here to find Oesho, god of the winds and high places – this mountain, between the highest in Europe and a modest Asian one, a real confine, uncrossed by nomads but still full of corpses. Lord Curzon said the best frontier was a railway in the desert. No railway here. I turn my florid music up and make this terrifying view a symphony.

‘For God’s sake,’ says Yuri, annoyed. ‘This old style music everywhere – you should accept the modern turn – here, you can go to bed with anyone you like, or anyone you don’t like. The edge is blurred between fact and fantasy, and anyway, what’s wrong with fantasy, as the monkey said as he scored the winning goal in the world cup. Move on, old man, for “post” is always post and past, the merely modern is already dead, and we’ve the power to live the future we’re inventing. We’ve learnt to say, “God save and fuck the planet and us with it, one step forward and one back, enough to see us through.”’

Higher and higher. No bird, no tree. A cloud above – and now below. No sound from those glum folks we passed. And Yuri says, ‘Battalions slid from here.’ I imagine them, the soldiers, they’re riding down the glacier, uniforms as for parade, sometimes a warrior fresh from literary duelling – the Pushkinites fought their battles here and fell right off the edge. Heroes of their time, then ever more dead heroes, poor dumb bastards.

We’ve reached the end of the track. We stand within a huge ice basin, basin full of ice that clinks like silver coins on shale, and sighs. Above is cloud, above and inside cloud – more mountain. Biggest in Europe. El’brus. There, it’s named, and so it’s not just rock, it’s real. As if some Spaniard tired of naming Indialand had sailed and beached up here. Maybe an Arab.

Below, far below, some soldiers are practising in a crevasse. Falling, raising each other up, and falling. A splodge of green that’s not of grass but uniforms. Voices disconnected, scared.

Yuri says, ‘It’s time to eat. The cooks got up at three to boil these eggs – a minute more and they’d be edible.’ They’re soft and mucous. He hurls his into the glacier, and I think poor unacknowledged chicken, and throw mine after. A century, and they’ll slide down with the soldiers, those faces red as apples, dead, the eggs now grey, grey green.

I say, ‘I guess we’re hardboiled eggs’, but Yuri is fixed on death, and now eternity, ‘Where there’s no time and no events, eternity is infinitely long and also infinitely short. In fact it isn’t anything. So don’t expect to meet your granny or your pets. No hope to keep your eye on things – without duration there’s not any thing. And so, your robbing banks, your judgement, penitence, it’s all over and never begun, no trace left on the ether. Which there isn’t anyway.’

We look gloomily up to Moscow, over to Berlin, then there is Georgia and down there Teheran, and Yuri says, ‘These high mountains – there never is a top, a needle point to stand on – just another saucer full of ice. Here, at least, we have the glacier, creaks and chinks with grey and silver planchets, then, as if it has a motor, movement, seeming to promise life – but really – just slides inertly.

‘Fields of force, spirits in trees. You see, the people here,’ he points south and east, ‘and the people there,’ it’s north and west, ‘are just pools, of people, like they were animals in a forest. Only when they’re brought together, like herds, like hordes, – you bring them all together, the hot and cold, believers and not, the animists and the people of the book and word who hate each other, like people together on an ark for maybe a millennium – get pissed off, prefer to drown or throw the others overboard, so much for diversity and stuff like that. Taken one by one, these humans are quite lovely, you’d want to make a set, collect the cleanest ones, but – tough – what you get’s exactly what you haven’t seen. A surprise packet, some want to screw you, others prefer the longer squeeze, to milk you for a lifetime then, in the name of friendship, set you free. Your last years. Anxiety, waiting for the doctor’s nod.’

He asks me, ‘Who you spying for?’

‘And you?’

‘Who do you think?’

He’s got on a pair of dirty trainers and smudgy pants, but a beautiful black jacket – must be made of shaven apeskin or some such, and his face hair’s sculpted round, two scimitars of dark sideburns reaching to the jowl, a line of tough moustache, like Seventies cinema Mexes. A thoroughly modern anomaly, excellently prepared for show and yet it says ‘keep off’, and if you get too close, ‘fuck off, I’ll hurt you’.

He says, ‘I understand the spying urge. The curiosity. But spying is for, about, something, or, rather, it’s for someone.’

I say, ‘We’re all a little spooks, all trained to be a spook, it doesn’t matter if you do it for the truth or to plan a heist or tell a government who to kill.’

He isn’t satisfied. He says, ‘If you could see anything from here’ – a mist’s come down, below, the soldiers practising their falls, down in the crevasse and out again, are deep in trouble – ‘if you could, you’d see right down into Georgia, where they say America begins. And over to the left there’s sea, two Romes, and to the right the troubled lands and then downhill to China and the porcelain, the tea, and take another wiggle and you’re with the magic monkeys, shapeshifters and the valiant deeds of battling lovers, seeking some grail or just a quiet screw ...’

I say, ‘In Georgia, they make you drink a bottle of brandy every time you sit at table – how can you function there?’

     ‘You don’t have to drink it,’ he says, ‘and besides, they are our long-lost, never-found – our brothers by a different father and perhaps a mother too, maybe just all huggermugger in the barn, it really doesn’t matter, who could care after all these years?’

I say, ‘Maybe to you it doesn’t matter—’

‘Then who does it matter to, and so – it’s true that you can buy friends, but they never will be loyal slaves, they’ll always be available for sex but it’s all a little slow and boring, and for anything else it’s just more money, just more cash, though fortunately it all comes back as commissions – and to pay the services of you and me.’

All these little countries, clans cobbled together, myths reinvented, cultures with diasporas immense, faiths swelling and deflating. Steadfast or forever mutated.

I say, ‘And these little criminal entrepots, a myriad of hotspots all competing,’

‘Just civic pride,’ he says, ‘like football fans. Allsorts in a bag.’

And now the soldiers are upon us.

 

*

 

Reality is a crevasse on Mount El’brus. I’m dangling like a paralysed spider – below, a misty cold cauldron of nothing but air, the soldiers say, ‘We need a counter-eight,’ and I think ‘not me’ and they’re on me, wrapping me all round, just enough pressure on the throat and ribs to make me squawk and see it all, near-death, the sea, the dead fish, wallflowers, the dark well, and then I’m dangling down, in the crevasse. Above, the silly grinning heads of soldiers. Gone are any tales of gals and heroes, faith in reason, now it’s all just dangle. I shout, ‘Who will be my counterweight?’ Some faces disappear, I see a larger gap of sky, no light. And there is soldier Anatol, white as a curd and up and past me, and I go down, where ice is green and smells of nothing, filling up my lungs, and down I lurch again and laughter or maybe it’s curses like I’m the dreg in a green bottle and then they pause ... ‘Who you’re spying for,’ maybe I hear, ‘The Muslims, Georgians, tribes?’ No one, and so no protection, we explorers are all a bit of spook – ‘liberal, communist, atheist’, and I hear them say, ‘Suppose we use some of this old military junk and hoist him up,’ and I suspect that Popov’s taken over, one spy can’t lose another spy, that changes all the rules.

What looks like sticks but must be guns comes slowly down, and I go up, revolving. Popov is laughing as I reach the top, still spinning.

Then down we go, in the car, white into green, the people peering from their huts; old Ladas now are chicken mansions, the children stare and pick their nose, we’re back in the human melting pot that never melts, that keeps the clans alive and feisty, and here a church and there a blackened little mosque and vice versa and so on and on through borders and some checkpoints and at times Popov is scared and undesirable, and sometimes it is me, though my fine shoes work better than a visa – better than his jacket – it shows that I’ve the might of wealthy men, somewhere at my back, who can command.

And here I’m in this bar, there’s several clans all spitting at each other, across the tables, but it seems it’s some kind of detox place, maybe for hangovers as there isn’t any drink, just a tall fire, and someone says ‘More rose petals’, something is thrown, the flames leap and the smoke gets in our throats and legs. And there’s this ice-white woman, Petra, and she sits with me, and maybe I’m in love and surely never will forget, and at a point she bites, she bites. It’s like a viral snake, she bites me deeply in the cheek and there is blood and laughter, more rose petals, and she says, ‘You want kids? I can have all you want and more besides,’ and she’s all over me, and there’s my passport done the rounds, and though it’s false it seems Canadian – with one of those no one’s to know where you have been and what you’re after – and she’s my spirit and my sickness and I know this wound is epic and will leave a scar right through. And someone says, right in my ear, ‘His favourite pig followed him right to the slaughterhouse.’

And – peace, yes, peace. Like the icy basin where the glacier starts, the bodies under glass, just starting on their slide, the soft-boiled eggs an offering to no one in particular. And not a bird, the mountain’s dome dissolves in mist, and mist below, the soldiers all gone home, the live ones, and the dead just slowly trucking down. And yes, it’s peace, but not eternal.

Popov has saved my life, I think. I say, ‘Call me Stag.’

‘Not your name.’

‘Not my name.’

All those guys, those kingdoms, wave a paw to Georgia, Ossetia, Caspian, Khwarezm – where the cultured pillagers came from – their different gods, the languages from who knows where, Georgia full up with Armenians, homelands of Iranians and Turks, the Russian clans, a restless wandering from field and steppe and forest, seeking a better creed, more better creeds and yet when all is said, just looking for a crust, a piece of cheese, a bottle without the hangover.

‘And all too human, my young spy!’

I have a debrief with my chief. Skullface by name and looks. He likes to make it seem it’s our first time.

‘Name?’ he asks.

‘Stagg Delfine.’

Skullface asks about the Stagg.

‘Some guy lent money to my father. Mortgage on my name.’

He says, ‘Well, when you work here, lots of things are provisional. Some you can pay off.’ He points to my cheek. ‘Fine set of tooth scars there.’

‘Thanks.’

Assigned to tea. Teapots. Tibetan tea, Indian, Chinese, Sogdian, Turkic even, in bricks, alembics, poems, terracotta friezes, ritual, grave goods, on camels Bactrian or not, on birchbark and on silk. He asks, ‘The trade itself? The routes, prices, flows and politics, and who’s behind. As cover you must write a book – a serious book, remember.’

I say, and it’s not all wrong, ‘The publishers want a picture book.’ He wanders off quite satisfied. I can’t read all the sources anyway, can’t reconstruct the whole mosaic.

Tucked into this observatory, institute, researching everything – the keyholes, bombs, imperatives of faith, the trousers up or down, outrunning any man’s predictions – a network of obscure things, pressures on this guy here, that produces bankrupts over there, some law no law unto ourselves, a massive card game with anonymous players – all connected up with intelligent glue. No director, no researcher, ever letting go or closing – each obscure thing tied to the next, proclaiming history and the unexpected, causes, effects, unreasoning logic. One luminescent string knotting to the next ... length of string.

I like the rituals, but the taste of tea comes to disgust. Maybe in my memory there’s that tea in Paraguay, that maté and the coca, tasting and sniffing, taking up the gun, sucking the silver straw, the memory that spurs the blood. Inventing what we’d like to forget, and perhaps is only story, the monkey says ‘feeling guilty about your past crimes takes the pleasure from the new ones’.

Lady gurus here, beautiful, but just to make the tea.

And Skullface muses, ‘Popov may be hired. If he wants. I must send him some good shoes.’

I ask, ‘What can he offer?’

‘Well, he says he saved your life, and knows the embroidery of the clans that make us up.’

‘Well, he cast me down,’ I say grudgingly, ‘down in the ice cave, then he said to pull me up – if that is saving life, then he’s the greatest.’

‘It’s him, or there’s a lady major that they want to send, and maybe she’s from China, or it may be,’ he pauses, ‘she’s just Chinese, so could be from anywhere at all, believing who knows what or absolutely nothing.’

And I think of Anna, who might be my friend, my lover. She’s already here. She says of Skullface, ‘He’s quite funny sometimes,’ and it’s her I feel for, but she says, ‘I’m still in love with George.’

‘George the Georgian? That’s a safe bet, since he’s dead. He’s your protection now – a real longing for an unreal object. Beyond the stars.’

I say, ‘If China lay beyond that door, I’d go.’    

But will she come, the major? Popov had saved my life, he says, and so he’s coming, now he’s here, and life goes on. And Petra bit me, and has left her mark. Left, too, a little grave figurine, back from the steppe, earth mother, maybe, or Cybele, borrowed from someone else’s myths.

The major writes, and jokes, ‘I’m waiting for my horse’, the aeroplane is like a horse and so I say, ‘A horse would go down well here. Carrying the tea, at least partway,’ it seems she knows us all, the institute with its ghostly crew, and maybe by divine right she’s mine, since Anna still belongs to George.

And Anna says, ‘I’m your best friend, and but for your nerves, we’d be together still.’ ‘My nerves! You got on them, that’s why,’ I say.

Her face is quite Byzantine, each feature taken separately is soft, they melt together and you have a calm tough ensemble, low arches, caramel depths, silks and pink that could be set in stone or any hard metal. She says, ‘I’m a bitch, you know,’ and then, ‘You’re wrong, perversely wrong.’

I ask, ‘Old Skullface, how d’you find him?’ And she says, ‘We’re lovers sometimes,’ and I’m appalled. ‘Why him?’

‘Well, he’s the boss, of course.’

And ‘When?’ I ask.

‘Mostly in motels. At lunchtime.’

 ‘What, pillows and sheets, all that?’

‘Sometimes he’s quite funny,’ she repeats, and goes on, as if it doesn’t matter, copulating with the chief, ‘Who are all these guys you’re dealing with? Regime judges, torturers, slave traders, grannies sold for cash ... Who are they, your chums? If ever I’m to help you, I need to touch them, smell them, look into their eyeballs, cost their dental work, the tic, twitch, beating vein of complicity.’

But I’m obsessed, I say, ‘No, not with Skullface. Not bed. Not absorption, pleasure if you like, or social climbing, or to satisfy, but repetition, no!’

‘Of course.’

‘Bed? Pillows and sheets? Blankets even?’

‘Motels at lunchtime,’ and I think, you could have brought sandwiches, eaten them at your desks.

What sense of humour rustled between the sheets? My warmth was all bled out, high on the glacier, high above the clans that fought, each with a language untranslatable, inherited, a mouthful of melon seeds, parched thistles, spit and spit.

And later Skullface says, ‘We’re here to stop the universal crumble – even fat old Mr Capital, too fat he can’t roll over in his bed, we’re here to do what he can’t do, confront the little bands of sad and evil people in the mountain tops, the cities, if live in them they must – just tough on them.’

I say, ‘Everything always crumbles.’

‘Yes, but we have at least the choice. First we defeat our enemies, then we can choose – a willed extinction. The big chiefs say – enough of holding on, waiting for history to take another turn – world regret, the Germans had a word for it. Enough of this fading foliage, bodies all rusted out, enough of transplants, therapies. Why let the flawed endure?’ He pauses, rests a knee on my desk, he is very tall, and I see his suit is stained with ink, with liquid ink like they used to use. And then he spoils his vision: ‘Now, dear Stag, just follow me in my little wandering – the aliens. Remember, they always followed our technology – saucers that flew when we still had five o’clock tea. Then discs – our backs were bad, and later still the implants, body takeovers, when the whole bony part begins to wilt. And now, just think of viruses – not just the ones the chickens have, but laptops. In our computers, yes, there’s lots of sickness that we humans plant, but there are too,’ he pauses. ‘Funny little fellows. Not just destructive, but masterful. Sussing our secrets. Changing the names, speaking with tongues. Getting even to our monkeys, biblical Koranic – all the wise masters, some of them with beards to scratch. Funny little fellows. Aliens – viruses – in our laptops.’

*

 

Oor institute. Beneath are miles of galleries – first the monkeys, smelly but sociable among themselves, then the departments of bilocation and shapeshifting, the narcotics (locked), smoke sneaking through the keyhole.

I say, ‘Tea is not a strategic good.’

‘Maybe not at first, but widely used, a driver of the bureaucratic effort. Besides, once we found the monkeys reproduced the bible and could write an infinity of others, everything became a precious option. The world became strategic, its past and present, everything at all, auguries for the future, if there is one. Every little thing a passe-partout, only connect – now everything’s connected, one big system, all is filed and latent, and the dead—’

‘The dead?’

‘Nothing to be done with them, except they’re there. Alongside. An earthly paradise, like dinosaurs that end up in the shale, as oil, that drive your old Camaro. Dino juice that’s squirting out the back and up your nose.’

I say, ‘But then again, there’s the intentions. The spying game’s not just into what is, research, intelligence, but where you plant your bomb, spike the drinks, insult the women...’

‘Well,’ says Skullface, ‘I’ve shared some secrets and some remedies. So now I’ll tell you how you fit. You see, to set up things like peace and maybe war – though war’s an altogether easier track – we need a fresh, a charismatic face. In short, we need a celebrity. We, of course, look after the charisma bit. Not to make gravitas, you understand, but a real, a wholesome icon. Someone to stick on the wall, to put it rudely. Someone for dinnertime. The screen is throbbing – suddenly it’s you!’

‘But people don’t want stirring, wishes fulfilled. They want today.’

‘Some space remains. Day on day, some dreams they have. The people twist and turn, they calculate, they go out in the streets, they scream, they battle, stab and chirp. They’re what we always were, and what they are is what we have to fix.’

‘It seems old hat.’

‘And vieux chapeau is what you are, my friend. And that is what we need.’

So each big cheese has clinging to them one little cheese – or more.

He talks about the institute. ‘Just type in word of god and you’ll see how clever the monkeys are in writing software – the whole text, complete with all the begats – a real puzzle for the monkeys at first, who don’t set store by ancestors.

‘I told you how the bosses have decided – plan for the end, quiet Armageddon. Leave it to the aliens, if they want – they’re already here, and so you end the mess, the torture and the slaughter!’ He laughs, goes on, ‘We’re in a criminal war zone. The favourite pig trots affectionately to the slaughterhouse, the old school friend’s shot on someone’s orders, alighting from the train on the way to his new job. And those little pools of evil-doing – Naples, Mexico City, the cities and the regions that live by contraband, enslavement of the best – the better thing is: turn them into microstates. That live by contraband and enslavement of the best. But then, they’ll have an army and police, ambassadors and all that stuff, and so you set the good bads against the bad bads. Our national states are hopeless, no, you need the war of each against all and in the end they’ll all turn out like us, but much too small to do the kind of damage that we’ve done, we do. These nasty little city states, these bands of brothers, in the end will fuse quite easily with the larger world of capital. Money, they say, has neither colour nor a smell, and so they’ll tip their cash back in the pool.’

I insist, ‘Who are these mega-archs, how do they decide we’re for extinction. And all the election stuff ...?’

He laughs, ‘You don’t suppose they let those little guys and gals, those ephemera, rule the roost? They put them up, they cast them down. No one is the wiser. Indeed, wisdom doesn’t enter.’ I persist. ‘How are the top guys chosen, who chooses them?’

‘If you know that, if I were to tell, then you’d know everything.’ And I suspect he doesn’t know. He leans over me. ‘You know, Anna is our link with crime,’ and he adds, ‘You know, you may have heard, my predecessor had a most mysterious wife – in her youth she’d been an acrobat, and worked the best circuses in Europe. She was called the most dangerous woman in the continent.’

‘No, it can’t be so,’ I say, ‘I used to know them both, she kept out of sight. A true homebody, wouldn’t even keep a dog.’

But he is heavy with his news, and says, ‘As far as I’m involved, the Chinese major can be yours, if she shows up. She and your saviour, Mr Popov, both have lived it all, if not in first person, then in history. Here in the Institute, we don’t confuse the ordinary mechanisms of social control, irksome those these are, with visionary repression. Not that we propose, nor oppose, repression, just cast a cold eye. And if you want to change the habits, what they call the culture ...’ and he lays a burning eye on me, and I remember Anna saying, ‘He’s quite ardent.’

‘For you,’ he says, ‘the plan is this – a charismatic celebrity, concocted, to make a day of peace for the whole world. A day without a death. Maybe to give a taste.’

I say at once, though he’s not asked me, ‘I think it’s stupid. On Monday we don’t fight, refresh our wounds and clean our guns, and next day we are at it, fighting for diamonds or justice, as relief.

Better to plan how to live in it, the zoo is better than the jungle – war’s in our nature, however much we dream of second chances.’

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘so, it’s quite stupid. But that’s quite harmless, if we pull it off. Inflating you, and riding with the rhetoric.’

‘Why, then? Just for the risk the system needs? Conflict’s a thing we clansmen do, it suits us, gives us identity. Modesty should be the mode.’

‘No clan would take you, Stag,’ he says. ‘Besides, up on the mountain, it wasn’t cash that drove you.’

‘No, I already had the money.’

‘Pay.’

‘No, curiosity. The money won on horses.’

‘A prize? Scholarship?’

‘No, a horse. And curiosity. And I got bitten. Though not by a horse.’

He is not dismayed. ‘Well, anyway, why else d’you think we’d want you here?’

I think, ‘There in the basement, past narcotics, there’s the eventuality room. There, I believe, they calculate all possible outcomes, occurrences, disasters, alliances – the switchback of the nations, rise, fall, rebirth – and above the clouds of angels, rising, falling, they estimate what this angel, devil, criminal, accomplishes. And best thing is, I hear they sell these possibilities as scripts for TV and the movies – even a division that cloaks it all as sex or epics. I think that there’s my home and destiny.’

‘But no,’ he laughs, ‘that’s just where we make our money, thinking of futures – that’s our nature too. The zebra never thinks his world could be unstriped. And yet, we plan, take the stripes off. And planning’s what we’ve done for you.’

 

*

 

A flaw in the computer, and I’ve new unwanted friends. Clicked into pervasive life.

A Dr Afasian, maybe survivor from my mountain farce, Armenian by name and habitation – who can tell? – from Moscow, Tbilisi, all references mushed together, Armenians like oil in machines long rusted out, even in Egypt, taking on the burdens of others less articulate, adding to all the burdens already taken on ... Proposing a politics parallel to the task they’ve given me, but with discoveries, even deviant.

And a Mr B, a Mr Beest, I think from somewhere in the Americas, usual computer come on, make some money give me your identity, history, who the hell you are, Jew or Arab, maybe a Japanese all with their baggage that they have to have, info equivalent to precisely nothing much, tales for the kids and maybe somewhere there’s a walking skeleton, a granddad survived who makes the story all his own, but now the thing is just to make back the cash the previous trickster lost for you, first thing’s to believe with all your heart, yes in yourself, but also that big frosty mountain, Capital, just waiting like a frozen turkey for your knife.

And Cai, is she Chinese, maybe from Vietnam, or then again it could be jokers from Mumbai or Bangalore who know this script and so can shapeshift into any mode and any story that they please. She promises adventures to the past, an ABC – an ancient book. Tract of philosophy, one of the books a Chinese emperor ordered burnt, its author, along with 13,000 others, executed, and yet the book survived, up there in the rafters.

Maybe Mr B’s an alien, a virus, thing with no beginning and no fate, and yet from somewhere, and Cai is telling me about her struggle to acquire some plumbing and has ended up, she says, with all the glory of a toilet without water – the pipes required all lying in some pile, a scam by warlords or a bureaucrat – and what has this to do with philosophy I ask, and it’s too late, she’s off in Ming or maybe Tang philosophy and metaphor, the poems sound to me like Japanese and improvised. And then she says, ‘You’re crazy, putting a system of values in your politics and economics, bound to end in tears, hypocrisies all round. Better to see it all, freefalls and eye patches together, our common, equal humanity, all in one boat, some captains and some slaves, all in the end condemned to eat each other.’

Afasian says, ‘If you want change, you must act quick, and really want it, otherwise the economy recovers and they’re all back and digging in the fields and shopping, and so – on and on the great ship sails, the captain being drunk or overboard – it really doesn’t matter since what makes it go is wind. Is wind, my friend.’ He sounds infinitely sad, sad as the infinite stupid wind.

And Mr Beest says, ‘If it’s celebrity you’re bound to be, there must exist a process of development. Not just a string of ceremonies and secret lives, you must aspire, from ingenuous victim and spy to win some kind of command.’

Cai says, ‘This sage, this writer, had in mind that aspects of the musical art were dangerous. For that he suffered, and he hid. Or rather, he concealed.’

‘Music? Intervals, melodies, words maybe.’

‘No, really it was mathematics.’

‘Numbers – it’s all intervals, up and down or horizontal.’

‘Not really. More it was mechanics. A building programme that the emperor had wanted would be blocked by inauspicious calculations.’

I say, ‘But surely, then, the advice was good, a little wiggle would have unblocked the destiny.’

She pauses. ‘Not really. The idea was to block the nomads by building them a city. Nomads supplied the horses needed, so a city meant that price and supply were fixed – so too the nomads stuck behind the city walls. Nomads can’t defend a city, and when they do, they’re settled, part of the pack. A city’s good for artists and the like, for show, parades, the beautiful people walking up and down. The tourists.’

‘So this guy’s advice was a political refusal, advice for the nomads to stay as they were.’

‘So it would seem, did seem.’

I’m curious and I ask, ‘What are you, Cai, an avatar like my Afasian and Beest, or real, with sex and wages, insurance – all that stuff?’

There is a pause, maybe offence. She – for let me fancy it is she – replies, ‘My hair is darkish, I’m about one metre seventy. Majored in human studies – I like music, reading, keeping fit.’

I think of Anna, and the giggling in motels. I wonder if they used the same one, or had a rota on the Strip.

And later Cai, mine by divine or Skullface’s right, says, ‘I’m not real Chinese, just one of their minorities,’ and I want to ask if from the steppe or wetlands, mountains or deserts, but she asks, ‘If they want to give you fame, can't you use it to say something a bit significant, or even biting,’ and I tell her, ‘All the celebrities try that.’

Afasian talks of structures, though Beest says that’s all revelations and no good, just need daily grind – but Skullface seems to have a link with Cai, and I’m surprised that Cai the writer, now my colleague, should be one, the writer not just fiction, and the major moderately feisty. And Mr Beest tells me of a Hindu and a Muslim arguing over who should date a highly polished Indian lady, going to insults, ‘Pigeater’, ‘Monotheist’ though both are vegetarians and atheists, the lady has a fine grey cat, a tail held upright like a feather, and she no doubt discreet with other lovers and so haughty ... And I wonder if that lover is Mr, maybe Doctor, Beest, and he goes on, capitalism, war, the rules you must obey, and science being full of rules, all marching along in lockstep, and we just poor anarchic warriors who never fight because our market value lies in being without wounds, there just as a threat.’

‘After the trivia,’ he says, ‘comes the dominating abstract, after the bathos, heaving movements – the transportation of the “tea” – though no one drinks it here’ and I wonder where ‘here’ is, ‘the horse trade, art, the guns, banknotes, and above it all, the cloud above the glacier, the mountain top, if it has a top but must have, logically ... Above them all: Monsieur le Capital.’

I tell him, ‘It’s all in order’, and I turn away and ask, ‘Are you the Cai who writes? The same one that’s arriving?’ And she repeats, ‘in order here’, but I’m not sure, the ghosts that use computers now have quite confused who’s real and who’s on payroll – but Cai is here, she takes me on a ride. As we proceed – a kind of festive shed, long tables clad in copper, and there’s men, men in sheepskins, metal boots, that’s dancing up a storm. And somewhere there’s a band or maybe it’s a tape that’s going wild and screaming high with violins and trumpets and some maniac who’s drumming so’s to lose the rest, and they are deeply in their brains and won’t wake up to anything except their whirling on, and I think ‘Sufis’, but it’s more Tex-Mex, or maybe Bulgars, with a touch of drugs and maybe raki or a slug or two of something made from apricots, that maybe leaves you blind but just the moment when you took it down, you see the future and the past in one unyielding moment – eternal time that is no time at all. And thank you, God, for you were right, a billion years last just one slice of second, and we know all that you know, though true, we can’t create a sound or tree or chicken, any goddam thing, and one god is perhaps better than all the panoply the guys are invoking here, the drumming on the tables, on the tapes ... And now the guys that’s dancing like they’ve redhot boots are joined by little imps with packets of black powder, like powerful squibs – they throw the bags, and splaffs beneath the feet, the air is full of flash and flup and whap. And on they go, nothing will call a stop, unless it’s something arbitrary, and I think, ‘they must be copper miners’ but there’s too much goddam noise to hear my thoughts. And then Cai takes me to a cave, or maybe it’s a tomb, or church, or arsenal and we must prostrate ourselves and hell, it’s some religious theatre with a play, it seems to last for days, but no, it lasts for weeks. And all the pain at last dries up, because we’re numbed by lying there, and I can hear the guys still dancing on the tables in the other zone, and priests galore and smells and pills for everyone, our brains have all leaked out like custard and have joined the one big superbrain or mushroom soup that’s forming in the roof, and I can’t feel, not pain nor love nor anything, my comrades or my enemies just palpitating here, no start, no finish, no subjection, just a little taste of being quite alert, and yet not being anything at all.

When that is done, we all stand up, though who we all are, I’ve no idea, and then I see we’re in another mode, and here is fire, a fire altar and some threatening guys, and various gods rise from the smoke, and then there’s movement.

But these are state religions, all controlled.’

‘Wait and you will see where all that comes from,’ says Cai.

 One thing or the other, they’re either spontaneous or the state, I think.

She is angry. ‘It isn’t that at all,’ she says, ‘there is no chaos, there is no disorder – it’s either present or it’s forming’, and I think, ‘At least it’s not all done with animals,’ and I hear my voice aloud, ‘No, not the animals, at least leave the animals be’, but it’s the start of sacrifices, and I wish they’d get on to the humans who at least believe they’re doing it for good, if not exactly fun, although I guess they’ve had a good time before death, at least the night before, the little kids seem to get off on the idea of pretty clothes and paradise before the knife ... And now the animals have gone, they’ve gone into the fire, and now it’s humans, maybe prisoners or maybe not, the chosen ones, unfortunate for sure and knowing it or not, though after all a good priest can put you down without a squeak, it’s just like surgery, and so you do not wake, there is no pain, and nothing ...

And so, having atoned for what I know not, now we all swarm out. Then we have a little entr’acte given by the maidens – if they are such, and you’ve got to go a long way to find the simpering tuneful virgins in these parts – wherever these parts may be. But there’s an air of kindness, discovery maybe, a quieter time. Thank God the drummer’s had enough, and so have we, we lie here on the earth, the sky is very low. At least each has his own brain again – but no, off we go once more, and now it’s war and maybe social justice, we’re in two teams, we snarl and scream, we’ve all got sticks or maybe clubs –nothing that let’s you finish off your mate with just a single blow, so doing it’s quite serious, smash and smash. Adrenalin, if it is that, helping to support the gravest wounds, you lose a leg or finger and you go on as if you’ve batteries inside.

So, is this chaos, or an order rigid, predetermined? And maybe we’ll go ahead for days or years, not doing much and planting maize and then perhaps to build a city, start some trade or carve a rock and paint our faces.

Now I understand why Skullface says celebrity is something that can takes us out of this – real sentiments for unreal objects, not the king, but the meta-king, not the guy that tortures you but some nonentity who keeps you interested and if you’re lucky even a laugh or gesture of disdain. But keeps you in the loop.

 

*

 

From somewhere between Turfan and Lanzhou, Cai once had her home. Unlikely she was on the caravans, few nomads make it to the secret police, the Cold Mountains still all sorts of barrier ... Her history spread out like a map – one or two roads, some details to be pencilled in, though spellings change, moustachioed adventurers had changed their language and technology. And I remember the tattooed Mongolian in Moscow, sitting at my table and laughing as no food arrived, the dishes on the menu last seen in 1916, his life a line of mirth. My history has no map, it’s just a vapour trail, nothing abandoned, all just moving on.

 

*

 

I intercept a message, Skullface to Cai. He says, ‘Stag’s a fine lad, an empty vessel. Has infantile concern with, fascination for, violence not as a by-blow but a thing in itself, not tactic but a strategy of the species. And though he may be right, yet he will do, and with this preoccupation will do perfectly. And tea will bind us all! – as has concentrated England in these last two hundred years, and spreads, and now dear Cai, with comrade Popov, if you can tolerate him, you’ll bind us to Stag’s project. Those land routes turning into concerns quite abstract, we call them geopolitical – but still a vital flux.’

‘But he must have positions,’ she says, ‘not just aversions?’

‘He’s no beliefs – I won’t say has no qualities. Doesn’t know where he stands, not having faiths, religion, ethnic roots – whatever you may think these are. He’s a tower of winds, he stands there and is ventilated by whatever breeze – and only fears a tempest when that means demolition. He’s curious because he’s ignorant. We took him, knowing nothing about anything. To him, life’s just aesthetic – it pleases him, or not.’

 

*

 

Afasian writes, ‘My friend, you must see I’m an extremist, my great temptation – tear it all down and build it up another way. Decoupling, that is still the word. Take Islam, ride it for a while until it’s clear it’s only faith – which I have none – but after it has mobilised and shaken thrones! And capitalism – dies and ends and is reborn, the dragon coming from its cave, but ... Whoa! not father dragon, but the son or daughter, the fire is just the same. And once again, off with its head, but meanwhile from the cave – and call it capitalism or what you will – it’s just our sneaky nature coming forth, to eat our brother – giving him a hand, screwing our sisters, all in the family, and on and on. But what I’ll suggest to you, my friend ...’ But I close him off, banal stuff, prelude to some scam that means just signing things, there being little else to do in ether – except to snuggle into someone else’s bank account.

And Mr Beest, or surely it is Doctor or Professor Beest, he too has some scams to offer, not the apocalyptic political kind, which lead you just to tears or worse, not international bonds, but innovation.

‘Listen, Stag – there’s nothing now for you to make from finance – what you need is something everyone will want. And sell and sell till everyone has got one, like it was another thumb or leg, and based on our humanity. Need a phone call to your granny, watch the tickertape, latest massacre or famine, maybe a flood or cops on heat or any goddam thing? But this is genuine.’ He pauses for days. I wonder if he’s selling to hundreds like me. ‘The new deal’s personalising. Everything – identity. Who you are like, identical to, your twin, your enemy, your avatar. Making it more real for you, beef up your piddling imagination and scarce facts – everything you have that makes a picture, no larger than the inside of your head.’

He raves on. ‘I propose that everyone should carry a sort of autobiographic sheet, all electronic, naturally, that the person next to them can read. They just plug in. It’s a version of your life, who you are, would like to be, your skills and interests. It’s what I call the Personal Card. The great thing being that every day, in every way, you edit all the details. Today your Spanish granddad takes the fore, tomorrow it’s archery your forte, then it’s some epic or a personal creed – maybe Gilgamesh becomes your favourite book. And no one criticises, says you’re an arrogant or a selfish person because we know: tomorrow it can, will, and should all change, and disappear and in new forms – it reappears. Yesterday you were, today you have become – tomorrow, more epiphanies. That way we make our own histories, and so new history is made, but very brief and shifting. And all of us will have the Card. No need to speak. You’re who you are today, newly invented, silent and untouchable.’

He goes on: ‘I’m standing in the bus and just plug in to A or B beside me, and I have their story. Maybe they want to be an acrobat, a suicide, or sleep with nuns – you never need to say a word, or tell them that you’re reading them, or questioning if it’s all made up or deeply felt. You see, we share in each other’s fantasy,’ and I think of the wife of Skullface’s predecessor – certainly a vulgar confusion of names and persons. He goes on, ‘Because, young Stag, feeling deep has nothing at all to do with what you really are, because what you put on your Personal Card is real and what you really are, and feel.’ He is triumphant. ‘Think of the cash we’ll get! The whole world needs one – not some state document, your height, religion, all that crap, that mostly you can’t change – although I have a scheme for changing height that’s only at the start – but something that is you, and made and modified by you, unknown to all authorities ...’

‘But the police?’ I say. ‘Thought crime is here again, and if you put down on your card you stole a fish, for sure they’ll charge you, make you stand a trial, although it didn’t happen.’

‘You have a point. It isn’t proof against the torturer, who’ll make you tell the real from real. But that is easily overcome. If you find the going’s tough, you cancel instantly, without a trace. Deny it all. No one will ever know.’

I insist. ‘But that way you are blank sheets, they can make you confess to anything, and so you miss the option of keeping to a prudent silence – or a modest lie.’

‘That’s true, but what’s your point? If everyone stays silent and anonymous, we are all everything – you’re quite secure, and quite irrelevant. The only thing you mustn’t do – is get caught in the act, the act of cancelling yourself And after all, so many of us never accomplish anything. The Card, well, yes! It’s an accomplishment, and if you’re caught, unlikely, – but then, c’est la vie, me boyo!’

There’s more recruiting, interviews, we nominate acquaintances we think won’t threaten us. I’d known Harry before. He had handed me to Yuri Popov, as he put it, for protection. Now Skullface wanted to appoint him – internal security.

Skullface says, ‘Describe him to me.’

‘Small. Drunk. A fornicator.’

‘He sounds ideal. And you sound biblical. So does he.’

‘Just fact,’ I say.

When we appoint him on that premise, I tell him, ‘No need for hostility between us. Though Petra – who you know – is furious.’

And he replies, ‘You could have gone a long way with Petra. Hell and back.’

She wasn’t Muslim. If there is an opposite, that was she. I say, ‘I love the idea of Islam. Like going home. A home I’ve never been to.’

Harry says, ‘You don’t understand – and that we don’t allow,’ and suddenly he’s talking in the name of our establishment, and sees me as a misfit. I look at his shoes for reasons, but they are middle range, and don’t give much away.

I sit, dreaming of Khiva, where I’ve never been: the market, Tajiks in caftans, melons piled like bombshells, grain is maybe mixed with sand and gravel, but gravel from what sites! – the watchtowers, minarets, the bones of Russian soldiers, pearls abandoned.

Then I remember the old hippie road down to the south, guys good and bad seeking their gurus and settling, maybe, for a quick fumble in the fields and then – a generation of regrets and self-exclusion, American politics biting back, the hippies’ hair now gone completely, the old Afghan coats turned back to camel skins.

And then – epiphany! No, tea is not strategic goods – the tea routes running up from India, along from China, then westward, northward, nice cuppas as the camels tire, a piece chipped off the brick, somehow the water’s boiled, way above the Cold Mountains – then, suddenly, the clouds, my clouds, lift off – it’s drugs! No tea, but poppies, magic this and that. Drugs for sure is strategic goods, and runs through all our continents.

I bring my discovery to Skullface, ‘It was all a trick! My duties weren’t for tea, but all these other substances,’ and so he laughs, ‘Well, Stag, you’ve got there, halfway at least. It doesn’t matter what the stuff is, tea or smack. The routes, the carriage trade – that’s where the interest lies, and who skims what, and who protects and sells, and what they buy and who they kill. But drugs is just hypothesis that serves. When guys get tired of freaking out, they’ll turn to something else – maybe it’s atom bombs, maybe it’s sex – the thing is, are the roads policed, the caravans all mustered?’

‘I feel cheated. And more central. And this means the nomads are again our vital source.’

‘Your nomads, Stag! It could be anyone, a you, a me, we saddle up our mules, or camels, reindeer, and set off, find the pass, boil up our tea, and there you have it. Disaster only if we find some smart guy’s made the stuff from chemicals. But since they haven’t managed to replace tea, we think the drug trade will go on the same, unless they try to make it legal – but that spoils the fun, it stops transgression in its tracks, and all those cops and mafias – it all stops. And we are for free trade, young Stag, forget your humanistic glimmer there, join up! – it’s trade that pays your wage and future hopes.’

Well, it’s an argument.

Drugs! How banal. For a man of destiny. Pushing snot up the nose, a pipe of this, transfusion of that. Little spurts of pleasure, give a boost to the party, even a little fine writing in the skull. And my dream caravans? All quite irrelevant, the real business done with Toyotas, the VW Minibus, trekking the stuff and people over the holy roads, full of the aspiring hopeless.

 My team – Popov and Anna, beautiful losers both – at least that Major Cai’s got officer grade, though little else save hallucinations. And better far my voices, Afasian and Beest, my ministers of speed and intrigue – at least they feel the coolness of the keyboard, moments of pause before they write to me.

Old Skullface says of Popov, ‘It’s always better when you must decide to put on your horns and
pitchfork, to be the pricker, not the pricked – even if that makes you somewhat of a prick!’ and how he laughs, and adds, ‘Well, Stag, so much for social revolution.’

‘There must be something more than getting round the rules,’ I say, but in the end I’m not convinced, and surely Cai and Anna won’t support me, nor will Popov, now the cops have taken over his whole corporation, and his arsenal too.

Skullface is agitated, ‘Stag, maybe your worldly wisdom can find a way to help me out ... I sent a thing for auction, thinking it to be a fake, they sold it but the buyer had it vetted. Now they’ve given him his money back, and I’ll have nothing, and the firm now asks me thousands – costs of a valuation, enormous.’

‘I think you’ll have to pay them,’ I say. ‘You signed up for the game, you were in bad faith, a scam that failed.’

He sniffs, but this damned auction and its thousands, scam upon scam, runs through all our histories, like a golden thread, now until the end. It has become his life, his Personal Card.

 

 

*

 

Upstairs, the institute is fine. The little conference rooms, the magazines all up-to-date, no sound from life below. But then you take the stairs – down, then past the Industrious Apes – it’s what we call the monkeys, just for flattery – the wolves with their mechanical intelligence, opening doors and climbing trees – then poor dogs who can’t do either, waiting for their master’s hand. The pot-heads, singing in the locked room; further down, the mathematicians working out the probabilities, selling them on to television – price of diamonds, revolt in Saudi, melting of the ice and forests, discoveries of butterflies in Montreal – the planet skewing, lurching along, a top that’s starting to run out of twist – the little human figures, their big heads dreaming of dinosaurs as heirs, yet procreating always, hoping for the best, counting their days, and days to come. Peeking at the ending, finding out who done it, and to whom. It’s no surprise that Skullface thinks in terms of days: a day of peace, maybe to fix another auction, cut his loss.

I talk cautiously to Harry. He is the spy of spies, concerned with our security, but really with our every detail. When I count my friends and enemies, I never include him. He can always say whatever he thinks, because we daren’t repeat it – it may be just a hook to fish us in. He says, ‘We must do something with all these peoples, clans, these faiths and syncretisms. Tidy them all up, fit them in categories – monotheists, transcendentals, then the politicals – strongarms and weak, the ones who do and those who supplicate. Otherwise, it’s chaos. All these mini-peoples when the rest of us are making out with women of all stripes, our children living in a broth of cultures, the first-round wives with secondary kids. American mums with Indonesian granddads.’

He turns to me and asks, ‘Well, Stag, what’s your take?’

‘I love all these peoples, people, superficially,’ I reply. ‘I see them on their rounds, picking through old clothes, selling uncertain batteries, fighting for some dignity in the modern soup,’ but Harry’s quite the schoolman, hobnobs with categories and shades of inference. He ought to love himself a little more, just like the rest of us.

When we finish, Skullface is lurking there, OK, that’s his job as well, to overhear, controlling the controllers, and later on, Harry is boasting of his conquests – not as a sliding from one conquest, one dissatisfaction, to another, but mountains climbed or animals bagged and trophied. Women! He tells me, ‘This girl from Isfahan – the best. That false ingenuousness, skin like fresh mushrooms – highest quality,’ and so and so, and on and on.

And later, we are wordless in his office, and I see a tall sad monkey in a corner of the room. He’s urinating peacefully, and I think – he shouldn’t be up here. They’re not quite friends and not quite servants, but we have to treat them right, the work they do’s industrial, though they are fed to make mistakes – a billion mistakes, in which the truth is latent, set like zircons.

‘Hey, you!’ shouts Harry.

The monkey turns in silence, ambles out, and Harry races after him, his boots are waving wildly, and I think, he shouldn’t do it, he should be living, and letting us live our precariousness, a few more grey anonymous days, but he is off, his anger burning like a fire and ever higher, near to the stairs that go down to monkey planet, their property.

There is a ‘frush’, a sound of falling clothes and boots, a shout of ‘Ape perdition’, scutter of derisive paws ...

*

 

Skullface is philosophical. ‘A frontline colleague, he was always close to death – for us, and now his passionate urge that brought to women of all creeds intense – maybe ephemeral – pleasure, and their kids no doubt some presents here and there – pursuing nature at its most suspect and hostile, tangling with the monkeys, has tumbled down the ladder of descent ...’ he has lost the thread.

He wants to say that Harry is martyr to the cause, rather than to his anger, but the words are pallid and he breaks it off, we’re all relieved and yet suspicious. No one has fallen down those stairs before, and maybe Skullface with some silken twine ... or even the girl from Isfahan, who’s maybe trained a monkey to do serious tricks ... And then I know, it must be Skullface, with his fear that Iranians are infiltrating everywhere, and surely Harry stumbled over the lines of duty, and I too must watch my step, a detour from the tea to drugs – the census of the risky traffics – skirting Iran, for now, and I’m for now, relieved.

I look at Popov, Anna and dear Cai, and think how risky is the promenade beneath the clouds, up where the glacier starts, a single step may last a thousand years, refrigerated.

 

*

 

A few days later, I see a monkey coming up the stairs – usually they’re busy with robotic tasks. He holds a sheaf of papers, and I take it from his hand. He looks me in the eye. They’re supposed to salute us, but he doesn’t. I don’t report him. Maybe he reports me for the lapse. It’s hard to say if this is freedom – freedom for him, – if he’s enjoying it. I see my logo on the dossier – a deer, a stag, looking backwards over its shoulder.

The dossier reads like a dialogue between two stand-up hams. ‘He’s either very stupid or well trained. When he was on Mount El’brus, all that mattered was the mountain. And he was wearing sneakers, so he’s scarcely alpine.’

‘Didn’t he do some politics, while he was there? What does Popov say about it?’

‘Well, there was a swarm of greens and Trots, odd commies and some pacifist guys and gals, freaky, and all with skills at entryism.’

‘All Stag was interested in was folk music, drink, and women.’

‘But that’s the region where there’s wars and industries of war.’

‘He didn’t seem to notice that, the factories, workshops where they fix the tanks.’

‘And yet he sought out some old trade unionists, guys on both sides, old sweeties, servants from the Soviet times.’

‘Trying to contact oppositions, then. Clever!’

‘Everything’s been infiltrated, but he found a man who’d had his legs cut off, spent time with him.’

‘But everyone’s got thick dossiers on them, here ...’

‘Well, remember, once he’d been on a march, and signed that letter.’

‘Ah yes, that letter, some liberal squawk, so out of place, though one could understand his beef – but then again, it doesn’t seem to fit the person.’

‘Ingenuous and stubborn. Qualities to make him a public figure.’

Then a note, aside, ‘Could employ as clever asset,’ and another hand puts in, ‘Query protection from a major power, and clearly trained – start him on tea,’ and then ‘mini-promote him into drugs’.

The report goes on, ‘... no political involvement of any kind, indifferent to the signs of conflict and of faith – interest in buying rugs and grave goods. But then – that woman bit him, maybe she had prised open the cover he was wearing – and wow she had wolf eyes.’

And the other comedian says, ‘The Caucasus is full of wolves who’ve turned into women, vice versa too. D’you know why she bit him?’

‘’cos he wouldn’t play.’ 

‘I’m not convinced about his guru’s wife – the one they say was acrobat, they say perhaps she was the most significantly dangerous woman in the Western world.’

‘Naw, just mistaken identity. She didn’t have a double life, forget the acrobat-housewife, they’re two persons, separate from birth.’

‘Well, someone’s got to’ve been the most dangerous.’

‘Confusion of names, forget it.’

I wonder who’s been checking on me, maybe it’s my best friend, but since I don’t have one, who in hell …

I leave the file on Skullface’s desk, and later hear him laughing over it as he must have done with all suchlike, and later Anna joins him and I hear complicit giggling. Ah, beautiful Anna. But all in all I haven’t come out bad, career is forming – just that Cai and all that Chinese thought and such, they say the writing started as if monkeys thought it up (and how that Chinese delegation fumed when I suggested that!) – and oh my passion for the boss’s Anna, servant to his human side, as if I cared, as if he had a human side. But I have my team online, economist, that’s Beest and politologist, Afasian, and if I keep the monkeys sweet and don’t offend, maybe I’ll get the cash to travel further east, maybe the Cold Mountains, even.

And as I muse, I hear old Skullface bellow, ‘The Iranians!’ and of course he spots the missing element, the civilisation in between – between my Yuri Popov and the major Cai, that sweet and bitter bandit queen. Iranians. What are they doing in our ethnic soup, not quite astride our tea routes, certainly not immune from drugs – and yet my dossier does not mention them, and nor do I (remember Harry!) – and are they there, an absent presence, if not why not ... And at least they’ll want to analyse the sheds where tanks are fixed and fitted up.

‘Iranians,’ I hear him whisper, ‘Yon Stag was seeking something, must have been, when he climbed the mountain,’ and Anna pitches in, ‘Or was driven up it in a car,’ and Skullface says, ‘Yes, yes – the wolf that didn’t bark, the bitten biter bit – and Petra now, it’s clear – a loner tries to leave a sign, a message,’ and I feel my scar and wonder what perversity it is that makes me long to be back in that bar, the covert brandy, nearly-dervish music, and Petra with her yellow eyes ...

 

*

 

I overhear Skullface: ‘Yes, our friend’s a little ‘Turkish’, you understand ... yes, yes, sympathies are good, but in that respect – to send him round the world, chatting to presidents, what’s the good? No, first he must do boot camp, somewhere tough to make his name, maybe accomplish what we need.’

For us, overhearing is the most important of the arts, the attested means of communicating. Does he mean to send me to the jungle or the desert, even to the mountains, and I’m torn – the great dilemma, become a public figure or be what I want? I think of all the armed militias, battalions of irregulars everywhere, anonymous fighting, armies of widows training on rope walls, of armed resistance in the Thirties in the forests of Ukraine, of horrible people living ordinary miserable lives, of ordinary people doing horrible things, and not regretting, moving along. Of people living in narrow boundaries, expecting rebirth and so quite smug, or now, uncertainty removed, just knowing it’s just once, this life.

And here is Popov, so I ask, ‘How was it, all of you, moving on to your next history lesson – blood on your hands, perhaps?’

 

*

 

Anna and Cai sneak in, they use my office as a listening post, while Popov says, ‘No blood on my hands! We have a special soap,’ and Cai’s amused and says, ‘Maybe it’s guilt, and you should tell us why,’ and Popov points to me and says, ‘Poor guy, you, Anna rode him like a horse,’ and lightening things up I say, ‘Old Skullface seems to have a deal with our monkey friends.’

I’m always courteous when mentioning them, you never know, and Cai puts in, ‘Well, he’s responsible for them, the pity is, those monkeys never will grow up. Or talk to us,’ and Anna adds, ‘Or know the finite,’ and we all reflect and think the monkeys have it good. I don’t know what to say.

‘I have to do my sums,’ I say. ‘The traffic in those drugs and other things, and even people, seems hotting up. Starting poor just makes you quite insatiable,’ and Cai concludes the thought: ‘for cash’, and we are quiet and contemplate, and think of Anna’s life with George and how he died, and maybe too we think of Harry. And Cai says, ‘We don’t even know if that girl from Isfahan was real or not,’ and I tell them, ‘Anyone can have an imaginary girl with skin that’s like fresh mushrooms – but then, those military men like Harry, they’ve bonded hard in tents with other men. Perhaps our Harry was inclined to other things – he sure as hell reacted to that monkey’ – ‘who someone planted in his room,’ adds Cai.

    She tells us how they made them change their houses, that once they lived in courtyards with the women on one side. The spacious farms were rubbled, then the animals were confiscated, everyone went to hi-rise living, and the old respect made no more sense, but she surely misses the old times with the chickens and the goats and privacy, the gates were shut and they were all inside with all they loved and hated, not like now, where who knows what lies underfoot and dancing in the night above and maybe murder in the next apartment. And we are silent, thinking of times all swept away, how sad that Anna should have only George, a shadow if not quite a ghost, still lingering on, bit of her identity that serves for absolutely nothing, all those hormones gone to waste, and how it makes her such a bore, and bitter with it, never letting go but nothing, really, to cling on to ... But in different ways both she and Cai have something I could suffer for, some sentiment. If I were humanist, or even a philosopher, like Cai’s incinerated one! The man is burnt, the book lives on but no one has a clear idea of what it means and signifies, for after all, if it’s just about a building plan, well, we don’t care, the walls have tumbled down, sown with blood and lime and spit, and so life passes on and by and maybe up. Arriving at banality, I say, ‘I guess we’re all in some human condition’, Cai laughs and says, ‘Well, after all, you are just what you say,’ and Anna says, ‘I hardly speak at all,’ and we all laugh, and Popov tells us, as he leaves, ‘One thing you can accept, that when the boss of bosses speaks, you better jump,’ but that’s the thing the boss is waiting to overhear, an insincere but ingratiating gesture. And so he leaves, Cai grieving for her courtyard home, Anna for George, and me for the confusion of the clans that if you try to taste and touch it, burns you. And I touch my scars.

Old Skullface calls me in. He is excited, even smiles. ‘We’ve the idea,’ he says, ‘To change our name, from  institute of possibilities to institute of probabilities. The TV sales are going well, none of our hypotheses is overturned. And then there’s plans for you.’

Through the window I see a pair of arms, a bottom and a tail, and then another.

‘I thought the monkeys hunkered down at night,’ I  say, ‘right by their desks, but now I see them swarming over us, even to the roof,’ and he replies, ‘The new regime, dear friend. I let them out for exercise, a pity that we don’t have one of those old buildings with the insides out, so they could climb up pipes and wires and such,’ again he smiles. I think of Anna.

‘It gives us time, if needs be, to check their laptops, sort the devils out,’ he means the aliens that lie in wait, the virus in the software.

‘More tasks for them,’ he says. ‘Seeking the life meanings, takes a bit of time, of patience,’ and he sighs, Napoleon waiting for his second or his third coming or going. ‘Of course, we only try to change the surface of things, the rest is genocide or worse, things quite reprehensible, as I agree. Stick to the surface, Stag Delfine.’

‘Avoid the teflon, then,’ I joke, but he is high, and running like a train:

‘My friend, our Popov showed you how the world is interleaved and tall, I might say hierarchical,’ and he pauses as if taking in a mountain yet unclimbed.

‘And you are still, I fear, a zero. But inflatable.’

He leans back. More monkeys rise and fall, and some look in and show their teeth – a grin? Contempt? Or just the strain of clinging on.

‘A crew’, he says: ‘Those primal things that’s hard to discipline,’ and I think of the urinating monkey, of Harry’s fall.

‘Sometimes they forget themselves, but after all, we can’t have these Iranians infiltrating here – besides, a military man should know his days are numbered, that is why he sets his mark upon the document that says, “We may at any time, for any reason, snuff you out.” For that is duty, Stag, and patriotism, although the words sound quite banal, if not archaic.’

And he goes on: ‘I’d so much hoped you’d find a spot of quiet with that young Cai, we try to fit our operatives up, but you are both – it seems to me – prisoners of old thinking: she has to be, she’s nothing else, they’ve nothing much to do but walk about and try forgetting that quite frantic past. And shop. But you, I fear – your mind is solid rock, fixated on that time before the time before, you can’t let go a fantasy of what is gone and never was. Take me, and Anna. Her, I do respect,’ and he goes on about her past, adventures with that guy, and how he’s happy with her now, they even cook some pancakes after making love, he’s quite a skilful chef, and on he goes, and all those words and images, and this and that and stuff, and Anna is the prize. How he has dealt with sponsors – everyone, it seems – the corporations, states, the dissidents, transgressors, anyone who wants a list of sums and goods and possibilities – maybe in the end he makes a little shipment – of this and that. I hope it’s guns not drugs because, though death is all the same with both, indeed with anything at all, at least the guns is action, though the pain involved is sharper and not transitory.

Anna’s the prize, for what, for who, I wonder, what are her gifts? He says, ‘Maybe she can get things fixed, supply escapes, or improvise a cure. She has the gift of being quite indifferent to right, and what’s the other thing,’ he laughs, ‘She’ll get you out of there, wherever, find a boat, a helicopter. Fix that thing.’

And I’m so pleased, my secret is my secret team, the guys that no one knows, advice that I’ve not solicited, but surely they’ll be there, and if I need, they’ll make the situation. Anna will pick me up.

I say to Skullface, ‘There’s more cops outside.’

He peers out, seeming to ignore the monkeys: ‘No, just the usual, cruising for lunatics.’

He describes my project. He is a kingmaker. I am not a king. He is godlike. But he’s not a god. He says, ‘You’ll find yourself, well, with street people.’

‘It’s all the same to me.’

‘No, not the same. You must have love, commitment. Or else it’s not for you.’

We pause. He says, ‘You’ll see them as ordinary, guys that’s even lost. But in the jungle, forest, desert, they must seem saviours, inspirers, our absent Venuses, Apollos.’

Again a pause. ‘Philosophically speaking, that’s the point. Love. And you see, just speaking. But as for your intentions? Accomplishments? All states, all movements – all have dirty hands. So, love, where does that come in? You must love, not see or speak. Then your intentions turn to history, to all kinds of facts. Love not for country, and not right or wrong, but for suffering.’

I object, ‘But why should these guys – some kinds of combatants I guess – want peace, even for a day?’

He says, ‘Once, I was in Moscow. Some show, some speech – in Soviet times. Why was I there? Who knows, maybe like you I won a bet. And maybe you remember, the war in Vietnam?’

‘I’ve seen it mentioned.’

‘Well, it was in full swing. And there came a delegation from the North, in uniform. You remember, everyone pretended the regulars weren’t involved, but there they were. And triumphantly, when they came in we all stood up, to honour them. Who knows what all the others present felt? All I know is that for me, they were the heroes, victors – and I was filled with love for them. We, all big bristly westerners, our faces carcase colour, and they were tiny, out of our world. Fighting our fight. Not left or right, but epic.’

‘A bad war, as I remember.’

‘Unspeakable. But at that point we didn’t think of deaths, reprisals, afterwards – and I say “we” though maybe I was all alone. It was a war that had to be, as natural as growing up.’

‘And this epiphany has stayed with me, this sense of species being, solidarity, indifferent to logic. When you go, to island or to jungle, where the cover is magnificent – the trees that reach the stars, the animals all furred and multicoloured ...’

I interrupt: ‘These street people, then – a new ruling class, alert to their fellows’ needs?’

‘I wouldn’t bet on it. We’re not monkeys, Stag. We own more stuff, for one. But we can’t manage our destiny. That’s what we call our freedom. Your mission, though, is to support these fighters, blindly. Objectively. Because we know there’s always injustice and misery, and that states hide it, cause it, and when they concoct a remedy, they’re like the rich man who brings prosperity maybe to many, but above all, first of all, to himself. You make life in the interstices, but to do so you must hide the great fault of the species. We are cruel and selfish, Stag. I no less than you. Not my discovery, of course.’

He is in full flood. ‘Wealth is a bet on the future, like the bet that took me to Moscow. And all that’s been swept away. And was it all unjust, I ask? And is what comes thereafter, is that all fun and lollypops? We are all historians of the future, Stag. Avant la letter,’ and he laughs, mispronouncing.

I think of my adventure up the mountain. And did I love the clans that lay beneath, that hate each other, though to a tranquil eye they all seem interchangeable?

And Skullface, trying to ingratiate himself, has taken steps to distance everything from logic. Love, or blind faith? Or blind obedience. It all comes to the same.

I ask Skullface, ‘And my duties with the drugs? What’s to become of them?’

Abstractedly he says, ‘Drugs? Drugs, we all take drugs, to live a longer and a happier life – we hope no one gets killed or impoverished assisting us. And Stag, the big thing now is water. And air, naturally. The rest is marking time, it’s physiological. And are your motives always, really, truly humanist? Although you say you aren’t. And what is humanism anyway? Vain hopes, dear friend, that all may live as you when you live well, and when you don’t, a pox on them. Besides, when you are in the forest, on the plain, those warrior guys are like the ancient mercenaries, their value ends if they get killed, and so they live for war, but fight as little as they can. And then fight dirty.’ And he sniggers.

I’m impressed by Skullface’s pragmatic revolutionism. It comes from some younger self, or creature, that flourished before he reached the bosses’ office.

Skullface muses, ‘Of course, clans are much more,’ he stares at me ‘Sticky. Than families or nations – course, there is a downside too. Think of the Georgian,’ and I think of Anna’s George, the dead Georgian, brought out, jangly skeleton, when she wants to dump a suitor.

‘Think of Stalin, all his nonsense – zapping the cousins even unto the third degree, anathema the marriage without the boss’s sayso, all that superfluous blood and guts. Stag, you know about clans, and Cai does too, salt of the earth – but also scum, and when you think of families, those awful sulky kids, and nations, all those flags for burning, silly uniforms, just like operetta, and that stuff about one for all and all for one when all we want is skipping military duty, maybe the taxes too ... ah, my dear friend, and now they spring it on us – a planet in its death-throes, we’ve all to join some super ant colony, each happy with its lot, though maybe also cannibal, and we pull together, pull like a team of goats – against another team ...’

Anna’s come in to hear the ending. We stare at him, then at each other, and Anna says – we don’t quite know what she thinks – ‘In a pig’s eye’, and maybe it’s agreement, or a sign to shut old Skullface up, and yes, it’s all our job, but also not a concern of ours, and so we stare out through the window at that wide sky, though, true, it is a bit discoloured, but who cares, and when it rains it’s still a goddam nuisance, and I think again of shoes and their protection from the weather, and it’s time to go, it’s all a bit obsessive, that won’t do, except that most of what we do’s obsession, call it routine and values, coming home to the correct address, waving the cultural flag, find someone who’ll fight for us, defend our civilisation ... a line of verse comes into mind as we get off the elevator: ‘It’s life ole friend,’ and Skullface says, ‘Look at poor Stag, there – off in the Caucasus again, I’ll bet, and looking for another bite to even that one up,’ and they all laugh, as if my scars have made me real, but all they’ve done is set a question, another, maybe, love, or maybe just the usual tedium with claws.

 

Life in the Forest

eneath, there is a map of green and brown, with maybe monkeys interlaced in trees, perhaps there’s desert, pink stone flowers, a rusty pickup’s bones, extent of squalid nothing, bits of nature lying there, unloved, unloving.

I’m with the fighters. We don’t discuss what they are fighting for, it seems it should be quite self-evident. I josh along with their big chief, he calls himself Apollo. We spend some time on neutral ground, on women. Common folklore. I say, ‘I’d quite like a relation with Cai – might do her good,’ and laugh. Apollo says, ‘Men look for women who will hurt them. So that in turn they can be bad to them.’ And laughs.

At least I hope she isn’t turned, like Daphne, into a bush. He says, ‘Of course, we take your mythic names, though not their powers.’

His view of life is simple – they have to face opponents’ strategy of Provocation followed by Punishment. The big powers, when they’re winning, drive you to the wall, and then pick off the margins. Then get the compromisers to hit their feisty brothers, make the feisty ones turn fratricide. The word is always peace, the policy is war.

I say, ‘Apollo,’ and feel so stupid naming him, that he too smiles, reacts in slow time, and I go on, ‘Is it true there’s a mail service leaving here?’ and he replies, ‘Sure we communicate – that’s our job’ and then I hear from Skullface in two days. He writes:

‘First, your tea assignment. That special brew, fermented, that made them millions in the boom – is bust,’ and since it went the length of China, made me think the room was there for opium wars, and then old Skullface warns, ‘And spare me comments on the food, young Stag, the washing and the animals, fever, music and the rest. What interests me’s the military side, and only that,’ and I think that that’s too bad, for all we have to talk about is what we eat, spaghetti and canned okra, hear the only tape they have – that goddam skunk metal band. They’ve shown me what they read – an anthology of Bakunin, Marx being out of date they say, and an extra is a pamphlet by Cai’s old burnt philosopher – on how the sciences are really music of the spheres, construction done by choral singing.

And it takes me months to realise that Apollo reads what I have sent, replies in my, or anyone’s name. And then I let the fever take me.

 

*

 

It is in a vision that I see my old mate Popov dangling from a tree, with some great beast, chimera or crocodile, that’s climbed the trunk and taken off his foot. And now my guys have bound him up and filled him with more dope, because he seemed quite high when snagged up in the tree, and now the beast has loped off somewhere – usually the animals here, inedible, are big as squirrels, maybe a flying badger, nothing extraordinary. And I ask him what he came to do, ungrateful.

‘How can a spy work with a limp?’ he says to cheer me up, though he’s sure sad to lose his foot. His state will never pay him off for that, and here it’s hopeless, as they’re all high on Bakunin and self-help (although it seems to me that what they want is State to help them out of state’s embrace) – but now I’m stuck with Popov, who can’t run.

And all we seem to do is listen to the radio – they tell us that patrols are coming, and our guys fire some rounds at backsides in the bush, then it’s our backsides are bolting up the hill, and all our stuff is lost or scattered, and our breath is scarce as water.

So I hope the next time will be Anna, who is skilled at rescuing, if at nothing else. Though why they want to rescue me when planting me was such a task, I cannot think.

 

*

 

Life in the forest is pleasant. If it were not for the terror of instant death, or capture, and being beaten about, it’s almost a healthy life. The food is one of the hardships I’m forbidden to mention and in any case would be the same whatever my complaints. We have reverted to the condition of a warrior band. Since we are the hunted, not the hunting, when we feel safe we laugh and sing, and even when we’re under threat I try to chant beneath my breath.

Although Apollo sees me as a winning card – old Skullface must have promised something – I must not be taken prisoner, or that would blow the whole game, so I’m at a loss what I should do if running doesn’t save us.

At times we shoot, at times we read the book, and someone gives their thoughts but not too much. The others have a history that’s sent them here, like history it makes them what they are, but there’s no point in telling how – the torture, death, the frameup, loss of dignity or something worse.

I say to Rama, who I think of as the Thug, ‘They say revenge is sweet, but also eaten cold, we’re used to that, since here we can’t light fires and try it hot,’ but my come-on doesn’t loosen him. He says, ‘We’ll know what to do with them!’ which is predictable, but adds, ‘Of course, we must select, for after all, it doesn’t help to promise bloodbaths, whatever the moral case may be,’ and warrior Hector says, ‘The killing and a battle’s different things. I’d want no part in retribution, however you can justify it,’ but I think that all this talking, maybe the thinking too, amounts to very little.

And as I think of what old Skullface wants, and how my ‘day of peace’ might seem to warriors running for their lives, a message comes: the girl who’s selling ‘weeks’, it may be months, of peace – a rival plan – is making ground. And so my stay will shortly end.

I try to put Apollo at his ease. His name is larger than his body, certainly than his face. I say, ‘At Rhodes they drove a four-horse chariot into the sea in your name and honour. You, the invincible companion. You who rise and fall, or set,’ and he laughs:

‘With rising and falling, that puts me between the Wild Boys and the Mild. But you are right, yes, I do believe the past is co-determinate with our times, the gods indeed our companions. And where the roses grow without a limit, there I was honoured. Maybe just my name,’ and I’m alarmed, for I see his namesake may take him on a rant, which I’d join in, but I’m scared of putting my feet wrong, joining that chariot in the sea.

I wonder, did they bring the horses back, this habit of expensive sacrifice seems to divide these old guys from us moderns, but then I think of shooting rockets at the moon and making tapes of lice on Venus, and I think maybe we too know how to spend and overspend. We have to spend a buck to show we know a thing or two on how the universe is ordered – gods and sirens, nymphs and all kinds of creeping things that visit us by night, alas it isn’t Anna, nor yet Cai. More likely Beest with patent papers to be signed.

Who knows what interest there is in these shabby assisted warriors, in what they think? It’s all provisional, so long as we are battling in the scrub. I know we must be observable from space, the rusty cans alone must shine like tiny stars, they all know where we are, so do they wait to kill us one by one, or just a-simmering here?

Apollo says, ‘I have to get the questions and the answers sorted out, although these bombs and bullets shake my concentration on the language front. Meanwhile, Delfine, your presence gives us some protection,’ and I see that Skullface, if he doesn’t run the show, at least determines how it all works out, the times and rhythms. Probabilities department stacking up our chances, discovery of some resource that makes us worth more than the Wild Boys – they have nothing but their rhetoric – and the Mild Boys, the sweet smell of their sacrifice.

I say, ‘I often think the people involved are not the ones we – they – thought they were.’

 

*

 

Apollo laughs. ‘We change our shape. But I am still the invincible, the African, sun. And why does violence trouble you, and not, say, poverty, which hurts you all your life?’

I say, ‘It’s a personal, not an analytic thing.’

‘And why a day of peace? Why not find someone who’ll push it for a week? A month? It’s all the same to me, or rather, if it works, then I can wait. We can’t think in terms of days or weeks.’

 I think how Skullface is a modest type. The others – they have just ideas and plans, and need for still more others to play the parts that need a sacrifice of flesh and blood. While he just starts it off and waits.

I must go delicately, I say, ‘Bakunin gives you extreme flexibility. Extreme.’

He is not pleased. ‘That’s the beauty, and the plague. After all, we don’t do this to become theologians.’

I recall, ‘Wasn’t it peasants and revolution? Then trade unions? Reforms? Direct action? Propaganda by the deed, a bomb to hasten it along.’

He dismisses this. ‘These are strategic options, yes, that in time were taken, mostly wanting.’

‘As solutions to whatever problems, I’d say largely zero.’

‘Because they failed, because the people weren’t prepared. Or else were overwhelmed.’

I let this circulate. I hope Rama and Hector don’t start in with their objections, which often end in beatings. I regret starting these limping hares.

Apollo says, ‘These old books lead to old arguments. First you feel the goad, the wind, the flame, they bear you up. Then maybe a book, to give you weight,’ and I add, ‘To drag you down.’

He repeats, ‘Who wants to be a theologian, or who knows what those religious freaks may have in mind. And they’re as flexible as us. Or perhaps there comes some continuity, some figure who gives it all a shape, interpretation. Then into battle, and it all transforms. Or even some success, new guys come in, they’ve new objectives...’

I’m quite surprised. ‘I’ve seen you for a while, quite determined and coherent, braving the worst and doing it, and now you make it all seem relative.’

He turns away and says, ‘We want quite well defined, quite other things. As do the Mild, the Wild. You have to learn the language, Stag.’

And I think of Skullface and his aliens, and who knows what they want, it’s certainly not to sit in forest clearings eating okra with a spoon from cans. Although he has his monkeys, they sure as hell do what he wants and stand there po-faced, well drilled and tails neat curled to left or right, and not a sneer or eyebrow out of place.

I can’t tell Skullface about the hardships, which is most of our life here. And the military part is just the normal time of fearing death. We are only one group, maybe not the toughest, not the most skilful – there are the Wild Boys and the Mild Boys. The Mild Boys want to take over government. The Wild Boys have some religious plan, some interpretation of some book – like we have, but a weightier one – they want redemption, not just liberation, then off down a pleasanter track. Redemption leads you to some pre-existing truth, which quite diminishes what you might accomplish.

But I am sure that none of us is making arms and gunpowder, so someone somewhere trucks it in, and in a way they’re making sure that we go on, and even send up cans of okra – wonder what the other guys are eating, and I hear the religious ones have steak, or maybe it is made from leaves or bark, but goddam okra’s one thing for breakfast that you wouldn’t want. And knowing as I do that I lack all passion and conviction, we’re back to hardship, and there’s no reward, and as for peace and war, I say to Apollo: ‘I guess it’s all just tit for tat, and nothing about causes and effects – the means for peace and all its purposes are really just like those for war,’ and he replies, ‘Your day of peace is just publicity. A day, a month, a year. Developing a taste for peace or reconciliation – well, Stag, that’s always there, or somewhere round.’

And so I think: ‘Then Skullface is a devil, or at least a devil’s advocate.’

Apollo laughs. ‘You can’t think your Skullface is behind us?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘If we must put up with you, we must get something in return, of course. And we may move into towns. It’s horrible here.’

‘Can you so easily change shape?’

‘Yes.’

‘More corruption, more contacts,’ I say. ‘And the peasants?’

‘Peasants want more land, at first to work on, then to sell, to rent, to use as guarantees. When they’ve nothing, then they’re on our side, but afterwards ...’

‘But to restore autonomy, the purity? The whole pre-modern dream?’

‘Are you instructing us?’

‘I wouldn’t dream ...’

‘Besides,’ he says, with force, ‘I don’t exactly see you praying ...’

‘I pray all the time.’

‘For yourself – and anyway, all this military stuff, hardly pre-modern. Glory is what we need. The ancient glories and a stronger hand in bargaining,’ and we both look at the long ridge of scrub beyond the camp, the okra cans, some things that look like ape bones.

‘Well, I’m a sceptic,’ I say. ‘Not too observant – and not political.’

‘Well, Major,’ he says with wasted irony, ‘How’d you escape the politics, when you’re part of it.’

I make a noncommittal sound. And think of Cai – she’s known the politics is everything, the music, houses, goats and chickens, and I think to console myself, that if it’s everything it’s also nothing and invisible like air, we need it only when it’s ceased to be, and maybe old Bakunin saw it right although for when and who I cannot say, nor can Apollo and the rest.

Apollo says, ‘Our power comes from your reaction,’ and I think, ‘He’s not been long in his job, because this idea draws him along. Then Rama grasps the initiative – the action – from it. The idea’s a motor, not realisable even in myth or epic, just a force. Comprehensible – but all that killing ...’

Afasian says, ‘Remember your history,’ but which particular one? And he’s no guide – it’s politics, and so – it’s discourse off the cuff, or serpentine. And Mr Beest communicates, he says, ‘Haha, you’ve got a goldmine there, all you need is miners ...’ and it’s something Apollo seems to recognise.

He says, ‘That Personal Card of his, it just requires a special stone. And here, from all the world, we’re sitting on a load of it. The load of it.’

I think, ‘We are all like these stones.’

We are none of us being sincere.

Apollo is hard as these stones, and so is Rama – but Rama likes cruelty, and though his name means exotic adventures and difficult victories, through inspiration he’s become more or less a thug. And Hector’s just a warrior.

I know, but I don’t care, how they can use these stones, and fit them into little spy shells to carry round and lie, as if all culture was not a lie, like clothes, and all the things that make us more ingratiating, and more dangerous than the monkeys at headquarters.

I don’t care, because we’ve all lived with guerrillas and the state guerrillas, nationalist states and nationalist liberators. Our neighbours and ourselves – we all talk freely of freedom and punishment, of doing down the different and being them. As Skullface says, we know about hardships, they bore us, the people who’re behind the people, we think we know the plotters as we plot, we think that influence is nobler than the deed itself. That’s what thought is, itself and round the back again.

And now Apollo lets me stay, because old Skullface gave him something so he would, but for me it’s just an interlude before I mount old Skullface’s stage, the one with all the presidents and ministers.

Apollo asks, ‘Would you like to read my poetry?’

‘No thanks.’

‘It isn’t just the sun that makes things grow, but poetry too. That takes you to the beginning.’

‘Hmmm.’

He makes me read some. It is esoteric, manichean, even decadent. He is too large in them. He is liberator and also founder, nature wilts as he observes it, the animals stop their eating and their fighting and all their other things, as he observes them. He does not convince, but I have nothing other, nothing more nor less – for while I’m here, he’s everything. Life, death, and more.

 

*

 

I send a note to Cai. ‘These guys say they’re anarchists – but they’re just pros at the subversion game – flexibility for the possible. Somewhere between maximum and minimum, the artwork of the tossed bomb and the pastoral of the commune. Complicated search for simplicity. And your book, Cai, ‘just connect’ – well, so it is. Just look at our new resource, the stones. No laws written on them, just fortunes. We’ll have the prospectors here in no time, our great new bargaining counters, like monster tiddlywinks. Which philosopher will be burnt this time, Cai?’

And Apollo, I notice, looks at me as if he knows he’ll be the one to navigate this load of stones, make the alliances, pretend the bombs are really the careless lovely ones of centuries ago, bring it all down, rise up the free unfettered spirit. All that. Not deals, but purification. Hector could be quite pleased to see I call him ‘warrior’, but, well, Rama’s just a thug, and maybe pleased with that, who cares.

I’m quite affectionate, thinking of our old institute, the monkeys patterning the old brown bricks with a golden interlacing, a mesh of arabesques, of paws and tails. Even old Skullface, surely just a naughty freak, and not the master of the games? And I forget poor Harry and the dreary tasks that wait for me – enthusing the presidents.

Cai says, ‘The boss can put everything at risk. With that power, he could do everything and its contrary, and I’m afraid he will.’

I say, ‘None of that nonsense about good boss, bad boss. He had his plan, but never countenanced transformation, never expected transcendence ...’

‘But what he’s managed with the monkeys is remarkable.’

I remember the scenes with her – the dynamiters’ ball – not exactly an adventure, but impressive all the same.

She says, ‘Me being between two worlds, I think gives me some pervasive strength – belonging to your world which demands nothing of me, except total belief and loyalty, and losing mine – mine, where hatred and betrayal are the givens, given risks, maybe, but currency,’ and I think I see us in a landscape, white as silver and a sky that’s uniform enamelled blue – it’s terribly cold. I think I see a wolf, poisoned perhaps, it climbs painfully into a tree, and on a leafless branch I see its mate is stretched out there – poisoned, both of them, I guess. In the distance there’s a railway line, there’s a toy train, carrying away toy people, maybe it’s just far off, and there’s a little covered station, a kind of shed, people are drinking here, and there’s a man in pebble glasses, quite drunk, prone like a penitent, trying to support himself and move, two bright green gherkins in his hands, supporting him, little stumps, frail tiny crutches. I think, ‘He looks he could be a poet’, and I look for Cai and she’s not there, and I feel angry, a great deafening anger, that she puts these visions in my head and then backs off, an exploitation of the – what? Imagination? Presence? I can do nothing for her, can’t stop the carousing and the carousel, these people who seem very poor and desperate. Where before the drunks were capering, these are somnolent, near sleep or death, the train is tiny but it’s not a toy, it takes a part of them away, the others just can’t make it up its steps.

I say, ‘Cai’ – and surely, somewhere she can hear me, ‘I know some things in motion can’t be modified ... But where are you? Where is the something else we look for, expect to see,’ and there is silence, and I know there’s nothing to be said or done, though we will do and say it all again, and probably the Boss is doing well, to master squads of monkeys ... it must mean something, doing what he wills, or maybe being part of it.

But – hard to call this an adventure, and I’m just her instrument, for the nothing that she needs to say. Her past, her life, is done – beyond repair. So, what does she do now? Nothing I can tell her.

 

Rescue!

nd suddenly, it’s Anna, a little grubby but well kitted-out.

I say, after the greeting, ‘Why are you here?’

‘Rescue. My strong point.’

‘They’ll kill us if they see us. The others too will kill us if they see us.’

     She is not disturbed. ‘After your guys started to massacre, what’s the point in staying?’

I object, ‘Well, it’s their job – or maybe just one aspect of it. And anyway, it was tit for tat.’

‘That’s a consolation, then,’ she says. ‘But follow that with a day of peace, and you’ll be laughed to extinction. And besides, the other celebs came and got away unharmed.’

‘That was before the killing. And they were sold – these guys can’t be bothered with long kidnaps, they’re on the move. They traded hostages for more supplies, and no harm done. But now, the stakes have risen ...’

She asks, ‘Where’s Popov – made the initiative to rescue you, but really to upstage the boss.’

‘They had to trade him for some cans of carrots – diced – they couldn’t stand his lamentations. You need an expert if you rescue someone.’

She repeats, ‘It’s my strong point,’ and we manoeuvre ourselves to an inconspicuous place, more or less what I’d call some bushes.

‘What’s Skullface think about it all?’

She giggles, and I think of motels, with pancakes after. She says, ‘If you didn’t call him Skullface you might respect him more.’

I might. I might even love him, along with the other clans and warriors, my ephemerals – Afasian, the wandering Armenian who turns up everywhere, invoked or not, and Dr Beest, maybe a Hindu or just American, doing his sums to get a cap and gown. And shall I see them all again – though see is not quite the sense, sensation. In the laptop. Shall I log on to them, and maybe find if they have flesh? And surely I may see my friend, the mutilated Popov, see if he’s really lost his foot, and Anna says ‘Let’s snuggle down behind these shrubs.’

Well, it was what I think I’d always wanted, though I prefer a situation where there’s past and future, not just running and sudden death.

She says, ‘It’s time to make love, now. Out of our time, a space. I know that’s what you want.’

And it was good with Anna.

It was not very good with Anna.

Her body’s soft, but that tough mind is not quite pearl in oyster. Rather, you wonder if it’s not the knife beneath the mattress.

In the morning, we slouch off – the sentry always sleeps near dawn. We’re sticky in our sticky clothes. I ask, ‘Where the hell are we going?’ and she says, ‘I’ve got some chums to meet us,’ and I know she’s done a deal, a fix made with the other side. ‘If my guys get caught, they’ll be exterminated,’ I say, and she shrugs on, ‘They should never have done that massacre. It changed the rules.’

And I protest: ‘But you’ve become a player, now responsible for consequences far beyond just rescuing me – which could be done for cash, maybe a bazooka or some such.’

She says sternly, ‘No more toys, Stag. They broke the pact, their cover’s compromised, their friends at court have had enough. No more cash for tricky exploits. The game is over, Stag – though yours has just begun.’

We run away. I wonder, ‘Whatever happened to Bakunin?’ – and yet the pretext for my guys’ slaughtering was quite in line – the villagers were setting up a kind of state, they’d deviated. And all because their chief drank so much beer he couldn’t judge the cases brought before him – so, instead of custom or rotation, the idea was to set up a committee, elections, ambassadors, all that stuff. And worst of all, no longer to act as intermediaries. So, no more messages and no more supplies, and even worse, a pact made with the capital. No more needful traffic.

And as we run, I see the other soldiers, cleaner than mine, and more afraid. I hear them mortaring my friends.

Anna asks, ‘What induced them to kill those villagers?’

Absurd to say, ‘Bakunin made them do it.’ I don’t say, I don’t think, ‘frustration.’ I say instead, ‘Change in the balance of forces.’

I’m back. I pick up a paper. I’ve not yet been launched, I’m still anonymous speculation.

Here’s something about me, sneakering up russia – must have been Cai that spread the news I mountaineered in sneakers. Popov wore his, but I – I, my fine Italian shoes. And here is one for Skullface, probe harry snadder’s fall. This will be with us all our lives. It’s true that I wore sneakers in the forest, not on the mountain, in the car – so how to set the story right?

Old Skullface beams, ‘Well, all your tribulations over, now’s the time to enjoy your prize,’ and I think, ‘I already had it,’ and smile at Anna – though of course, old Skullface has his three-deck experiences with her, and he is still the boss, and what am I, who knows, and I don’t care.

Celebrity

eing a celebrity is just what I expected. Most celebrities were something, had some talent, previously. All I had was the mountain. A view. Some hardships, now forgotten. Maybe, as they say, ‘a take on life’, a view from very high, the clans and dialects of the world. And now, try to reach conclusions, like peering in an engine, that’s turning, spitting, turning.

I remember one of the presidents. He is quite distant. He cannot ask me what I am, and so he asks a spook he has to take around with him. ‘The guy that parlayed with the terrorists,’ I hear. And I don’t even have a fresh toothmark to show for it.

The President brings himself back from somewhere. He’s like a man who’s juggling with six eggs – we know he’ll drop some and so spoil his act, but he knows too to throw them high and higher, so the trick will last, they’re in the air, and those of us who still have faith can wish him well and wait for all those eggs to change their colours, silver, purple, green, as they pass up and down before the lights.

He has a special wife, I wonder how he met her, standing there beneath the eggs, but maybe they get used to meeting people while they’re juggling, or maybe some chief spook has joined them up to make a pair, a project. She’s a celebrity too and no one now remembers what her talent was before she took to posing, perhaps she was a stripper or a medium, skier or princess, hard to tell, her clothes are never bought in stores, her body has been set in some particular boneshop, so you see a lot of spine and ribs, the rest is all stuck on abundantly, but she talks too, she doesn’t stop, and gradually her body matters less, and you can watch her lips, out come the words, an engine turning, spitting, turning.

I interrupt. I say, ‘I’m the guy that’s bringing peace. That is, not bringing anything at all, but just the plan ...To stop them, us, doing what we’re doing, so that there is nothing going on at all,’ and she scents something, but he says, ‘Ok, the terrorists, yes, so what’s the good of peace with them?’

And I confess, there doesn’t seem to be much there, but he goes on, ‘Had some woman here the other day – now, she was for a month, or year, of peace – I can’t remember which – a length of time you can do something with, stock up with guns, or buy the guys, or have them argue, who knows what. A day! It isn’t worth a spit,’ and to myself I must admit, he’s quite a sharp old dear, he wears some medals, which the others don’t. A stag retired from rutting but with many scars, and when he’s dead I wonder what the wife will do, I guess she’ll start the circle over, when the eggs have all come down she’ll maybe make a soufflé, and I laugh, which isn’t in the plan at all. And so he sees me as a lightweight, or more likely, a contemptuous type who sniggers – he turns again to his spook minder, and I hear, ‘Iranians’ and I wonder why this jealousy of someone else’s culture, surely they should start to have one of their own, and I feel Petra’s teethmarks, and I wonder if I’ll ever see her, and so thinking, it is clear I won’t. And better so.

The relation with the President’s wife was like stepping into another, maybe a previous, century, more polite and expert. And discovering, through her, a different race of men. ‘What’s that smell’, I wonder, ‘Can it be patchouli, whatever that might be,’ but she says it’s the usual stuff that very expensive women wear. Her small talk too’s minute, but in a fruity voice – what fruit, I wonder, maybe Chinese gooseberry – it seems immense.

‘The chandeliers are held in place by screws through beams. They’re washed with soap, though that is not my job,’ she says. I see why caravans of drugs are needed as therapies for her. She clearly fancies me, or else I am part of her job, she stands so close, maybe in receptions there is such a crush you stand like this so you can hear, it means that her dress, so loose the label flaps, is just a curtain for her underwear, with every move it flaps, reveals. I want to say, ‘You were a pro before the marriage, then,’ but don’t. I mean ‘professional’, but in this circle, woe if you’re misunderstood. She takes my hand and here’s a breast, somewhere beneath my shoulders, nestling in – it bears it’s own uncoded message. Later, it seems, she leaves these parties more easily than all the rest of us who stand around, wanting to go, unknowing the procedure.

She is quite small, undressed, but her perfume, detached from her, is huge, it fills but does not rock the room, and as the phrases come to mind I giggle and that seems to spur her on.

‘Well, Mr Peace,’ she says, ‘I hope you’re not so peaceful now that we’re alone,’ and I think that this should be my line, but she has set her sails for love, or at least quick stripping off and clouds of dust and smell of cash rise up.

She seems to have a special contraceptive set, a kind of toolkit I have never seen before, I say, ‘I don’t think you’ll need all that stuff,’ but she is silent, and I suppose that in affairs of state a small mistake can fill the tabloids and TV for months and maybe more, and so she fits it up, and then we’re in the next part of the test, and here it seems she’s used to some performing men from cultures strange, unknown to me, I don’t know how they manage, but it seems that it’s the only way she knows, or rather it is clear I’ve no idea of how the rich and powerful avoid the propagation of their kind and yet appear to get enjoyment, as if the whole thing’s like a glass of wine you’re told is pricey though it seems the usual thin and acid stuff you drink until you’re sick. And when she’s gone through tactics that bemuse me, a kind of exercise that’s carried out with skill and extended practice but is, after all, just training, though for what I’m quite unsure.

She says, ‘Well, Mr Peace, I see the name is not misplaced. At least I’ve done my bit for your most worthy enterprise,’ and I think, ‘well, yes, I suppose so, she didn’t spare herself, but no impression has been left.’

I say, ‘Thank you very much,’ at least to be polite is easy, and I don’t add ‘your majesty’ or ‘madame’, although it seems to me the kind of service that madames might give, if some girl didn’t show, or didn’t want.

 

Welcome Home

hy, after all, should Popov like me? If he’d left me to dangle in the crevasse, starve, perhaps, or fill with blood head down, like a fruit, it wouldn’t mean that he disliked me. One kind of indifference is much like another. But he does sneer, when he says, ‘While you’re suspending war, why not abolish money and power – they also play a part. And history, and dignity, territory and greed, self-defence and justice, lies, sex, and beauty – that should end the Trojan war.’

I say, ‘The Trojan war was resolved in a speakeasy, probably called The Horse. The Greeks went in their downtime, drank a little with the Trojan pacifists, and dreamed up the idea of a wooden horse. Full of soldiers. Yeah, of course! Trundling in the main gate. Who could doubt it. Look, a present!’ But he’s not intrigued.

‘Go with it Stag, instead. The glory. The sacrality. What made us Russians sprawl across those goddam steppes, and down where we embraced the people who don’t like us, believing, speaking, all kinds of wayward things that neither we nor you could understand. Look at your cheek! Who’d fight a battle to get one of those?’ He laughs. ‘And so we found another set of obstacles, of destinies to combat – don’t like empire? Right, try socialism instead. Who’d you prefer, us or our enemies? And so on. And now – see what liberation means? War, Stag. Money, arms. No, Stag, stop climbing that wall of mirrors, hold your nose, accept, the only thing that’s fine that comes from walking on this earth is magnificence, the dream, the word of God, driving destiny, the licence of the chief – who breaks the rules, who lets you break them too, become a bit like him, to hell with all the others, to hell with you as well.’

Maybe if Skullface heard him he’d object, ‘The Institute must take all sides, we seek the truth, not transcendental victories.’

And Popov laughs again, a nasty laugh. ‘It doesn’t matter what the Boss’s motives are. Instead, you must ride forth, in front. On your horse there’s only one way you can face.’

He lightens up. ‘At least the shoe problem is resolved for now.’

I comfort him: ‘You’ve still got a stub left.’

‘It should get me a promotion. My mother always wanted me to make colonel.’

I say, ‘The rest of us is stuck at major. And we should’ve had combat boots.’

‘Not with our rank. We get observer sneakers, but no boots.’

 

*

 

Skullface thinks the mission quite a triumph.

‘The chiefs will love it that we’ve got a casualty, and only lost a foot. But your guys are getting slack – you shouldn’t let them play that tape – maybe I’ll send in the complete Varèse – that’ll show them all! And not a word, young Stag, about your sufferings. Everyone around you is suffering much worse, at least you’ve had your spot, met a few presidents, their wives – the dumpy ones from east, and in the west, you see they’ve got the class – nude models, starlets, actresses, and a few with boyfriends. Century of the uncommon man, end of the dull, the privileged few.’

I wonder where he stands, old Skullface, not a minority representative, but yet – his squadrons of monkeys, aliens – and alas, my Anna – he’s not the chief you might expect.

And I think that some of the guys here have doctorates in economics, although they can’t be keeping up with news and views, and maybe Skullface should discriminate a little more, make some distinction between us autonomists and the Mild Boys, Wild Boys.

‘We’re all behind you, Stag,’ he says. ‘We don’t want these guys to have their way, but compromise – that may mean precious nought – is what we try to sell. As well, of course, as guns and okra, and keeping sweet our friends over the ridge, the ones that’s following your music. Have them keep it down, Stag, you don’t know who’ll come and see, and then there’ll be the bombs, and some more hundreds, maybe thousands, prospectors with their rifles – most deplorable, on all sides, upsetting families, clans, and then, my God, you’ll have the preachers and the editorialists in! Historians and their brooms, to stack you and your detritus into heaps – heaps of “I told you so”, if only you’d been listening.’

And I think, ‘What does he want of us, this old devil?’ and I dream of Anna.

 

*

 

I say to my successor, ‘Must we go on calling you John Doe?’ though that is really what distinguishes him, and that alone.

‘Till we get a task that needs another name,’ he says, ‘And incidentally, who are these funny little fellows the boss talks about? Not Iranians?’

‘No,’ I say, ‘It’s the stuff in the computers that criticises him, or else screws up the system.’

John Doe says, ‘Hah, Iranians. They hanged people from tall cranes. Takes a real civilisation to do that.’

I almost envy him the calculations he’ll have to make – maybe the parts of atom bombs, carried cautiously along the ancient roads. Or maybe their day too is done.

He says, ‘Of course you can have faith and not pray. And pray a lot because you don’t believe in anything,’ and I agree: ‘Tiles falling from the roof.’

And he adds, ‘Yes, or rogue monkeys,’ and I sense that beneath his well-tuned flab there beats a dissident heart. We think of Harry Snadders and his fall.

 

*

 

Afasian writes in a storm of reproof, ‘Hey, you guys! Think strategy! Think politics! Think specifics! Culture days are over – you said ideology was finished, then you reinvent it, call it peace, stability, what you will – those days are gone. Back to the beginning! And you can forget the rumour that I wanted votes for animals. Yes, it’s true it’s one way of seeing that you’ve rights – but the logistics, guys! Arks all over – and the goats won’t vote for sheep, and you can imagine foxes getting chicken votes...’

Old Skullface is amused, for after all, his scams are only that, and one campaign’s as good as any other when it’s failed, though even better when it wins.

And Beest joins in, it seems to me that they communicate. Maybe I’m stupid, like friends when one leads the other on for years and at one blow the game is up, account is settled, tears and bankruptcy, all that stuff and recriminations and hurt pride. So better then, on with the next, and Mr Beest insists, ‘My rocks will see you through – stones into bread, my personal cards will make a fortune,’ but I fear that now the wind has changed, we’re clinging to what little secret selves we have, and even telling lies about us isn’t funny any more, but he’s alert, he knows the stones are in Apollo’s fief, and we’re the link.

Old Skullface says, ‘To break those rocks you need another macho guy like our Stag here to do the deal, and at the moment I’m right out,’ and of course, poor Popov’s lame and Anna’s wanted for her duties down in the motel, and Cai’s too full of acid to take on running through the forest like a bambi – and I fear that as celebrity, ex, my price is high, and anyway, I’m through, the exercise is over, and I think, ‘I don’t give a shit for peace or war, it isn’t in my province,’ and I’d like to stay with Petra, maybe sharing a kebab, give her something good to have her bite instead of me, to hell with all these guys in uniform and protocol and monkeys up to trickiness – and back to maniacs and ordinary human hatreds ... But all this I don’t say aloud, and now there’s other operatives all clustered round, to be fresh volunteers, or try to hide, and Skullface says he’s got to think, I hear him calling the motel, and here comes Anna, eyes all sharpened though the face is glum, or maybe that’s my mind.

 

*

 

I hear Skullface, describing my job to my successor. ‘Yes, Stag was very good at sums. This is the trick: you have the number of horses, yaks and pickup trucks: the bills of lading, insurances, the visas used and not: the bank accounts of the police, records of house buying, gambling, children: tires and string: people found and missing, arrests and bribes. A mass of things. And so you make a total, then another total – of all the missing things. The difference is all the illegal stuff that’s moving. You can add arms and documents, capital and gas – it’s what we call traffic analysis.’

Doe looks bemused, and says, ‘I always thought spying was a dirty game – but now it sounds like banking.’

Skullface beams. ‘It’s just like prostitution – once a thing you struggled to avoid, the dregs and dirt of poverty, it was. But now, you talk of choice, not destiny or luck – all jobs are dodgy and precarious, you choose to have a life fragmented, one bit won’t tell about another. So, spying in the morning, robbing in the afternoon, and in the evening – relaxing with some other pimps.’

 

*

 

I see Popov stick a garish picture on his desk. It is Saint Antony. I say, ‘You like birds, then?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘For my foot. St Antony stuck one on again.’

I say, ‘Sure you’ve got the right St A., there were at least a couple?’ and he winces.

 

*

 

Ah yes! The hardships: starting with flatulence and blisters, allergy to okra, gunshot and knife wounds, chemicals, losing at cards, joshing with the general, carrying heavy and explosive stuff, insomnia and sleeping sickness, bugs in the ear, politics and nothing alcoholic. Lots of running, fear of death and sadness of living, anger and silence, aggressiveness and obedience – you must experience everything in life and death, but with a will – nothing fantastic or too extrovert.

I ask my successor, ‘What should I call you?’

‘I’ll tell you when we decide. Great work with the tea there, Stag.’

I laugh. ‘But then there’s the violence.’

‘Not the worst thing,’ he says.

‘What is?’

‘Who knows? Invisibility, perhaps.’

I say, ‘That’s true, since everyone goes ape to be seen. Remember, though, ‘to thine own self be true’ – and that’s a mountain of things, no talk of visibility. A funny kind of truth, for sure.’

He laughs. ‘You’re a romantic, Stag. Surely you don’t believe a day of peace resolves anything – it’s just a stunt.’

‘I just go along. Maybe I’m stunted too.’

He says, ‘And the boss has this thing about aliens ...’

‘Just a hypothesis,’ I say, not convinced.

‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘Funny guy. Great vision,’ and my vision is of him and Anna.

 

*

 

A monkey appears at the window, loses its grip. We watch as it saves itself, hooks on to a wire far below, drops into the street and skitters off.

I say, ‘I hope they don’t think this ship’s sinking,’ and my successor replies, ‘The boss puts everything on automatic. Maybe they’re bored, the monkeys.’

A pause. He says, ‘Maybe for the time being you could keep on calling me John Doe.’

I think of my name and say, ‘That’s a joke that’s not a fraction funny, and besides you’re not the first ...’

And as John Doe does his sums, he comes to see, as I did in my time, the caravans, the thoughtless yaks, bearing the makings of atom bombs, over the passes, skirting the glaciers, over the icy water, down to the plains where there are goats and geese, the rotting bodies of Toyotas, the infinite song of drivers on the caravans – seeking a sheltered place, circle of bushes or of stones, to make a little fire and pass the night.

Cai says, ‘“One day”, they’ll call you “one day man”,’ and laughs. ‘That Anna’s really quite banal, sure you must think so, Stag,’ and I don’t tell her that I find her too quite banal, but nicely so, or rather like us all, simplistic.

She laughs again, and says, ‘That Lady business – you were mounting her as if she were a camel,’ and I exclaim,

‘The security tape! But that’s just part of being a celebrity,’ and she proceeds as if it’s something that has weighed on her, ‘Part, it’s all part of something much more intricate – not just a plan, a stop to what you call “war” and start to something else you think that you desire. Even religion isn’t all heaven or all hell.’ I say:

‘When we, when Skullface, had the plan of changing everything just for a day, it wasn’t anything so intricate,’ but I know even that, the day, was not so simple, and I think of Afasian, when he said, ‘Apollo in the story was a vindictive animal – now, the one you deal with, Stag, do you think he’s waiting for a day of rest? Is that the scheme – or something else?’

And Cai is always wrestling with that ‘something else’, the step behind the step that Skullface takes, and being king is not just ordering executions, and Mr Beest insists,

‘Resources you can’t eat or drink you can at least make money with, and who knows what those stones can do, or if there’s something under them, or what the hell, there’s corporations and an asphalt company waiting near the ridge that hides your guys when they’re challenging the powers that kill, the powers that negotiate – and send them food and bullets.’

 

*

 

A message comes from Apollo: ‘I’m getting offers for the stones – tell me if Beest’s reliable.’

‘Apollo, they’re only stones.’ I say. ‘Take what you can get.’

‘Disasters everywhere,’ he goes on. ‘Rama is captured and will suffer terribly, they want to know his secrets and he hasn’t any. And Hector was wounded, probably another animal, but we had to leave him, and he’ll go to rehab and renounce us. Start up a bicycle shop, I shouldn’t wonder,’ and I think, ‘Where next, the shapeshifting and the poetry, the sun, always more or less on time, usually managing to shine, light of our lives, that African sun invincible – although it’s better to say “unconquered”, since we don’t know how things turn out,’ and Apollo writes,

‘I think I have to make a gesture, show that we mean business, since that’s what we’re going into,’ and I show this to old Skullface and he pockets the note, and says,

‘Mustn’t be complicitous, and show we know ...’ and I think of some great bang or whoosh and all the experts and the ambulances, pics in papers, the TV all marching in – and oh dear, it seems as sad as lying down and getting up. How it has changed, there in the forest, once where Bakunin’s tongue gave inspiration and a challenge, now is just scuffling in the scrub and shooting at tin cans!

 

*

 

Cai says, ‘Stag, if the boss is clumsy, makes too many errors, you could take over, need a celebrity to run the show.’

‘Cai,’ I say, ‘too many projects that are finishing – the sacred texts, the junkies in the basement, who needs them, and probabilities are in a way our certainties, we’ve gone from monkeys hypothesising to “everything is up for trial”,’ but really I mean I have no project, neither deal nor vision – and Anna being neither, all there seems to wait for’s Popov rising to command, and then we’re finished as he has a Power behind him, which old Skullface never had, being himself both power and weakness, kicking our history along, in front, seeing where it led us.

I say to Skullface, ‘There seem too many deaths around us,’ but he seems distracted. He says, ‘Acrobats, rather – that woman, in a sense my predecessor, swinging from the stars, all that symbolist stuff – I feel it myself, in my bones. Gotta get outa here!’ he jazzes, and again I see the attraction he has for Anna.

‘Lovely girl,’ he says, ‘But a bit dull when she’s not into escaping,’ and I think how we’ve been upstaged by that other woman with the scheme of weeks, or even months, of peace, and the whole thing seems quite tawdry.

‘We found too many who say yes and then do no,’ I say, but he’s not bothered.

‘Way of the world, dear Stag,’ he says. ‘You must pick up the small change if the notes pass elsewhere,’ and I think of his profits from the stones, the deals with Apollo.

I tell him, and I shouldn’t, about my hopes for Cai.

‘You may see her as the Other, exotic and distant,’ he  says, ‘but we don’t need guys like that – and besides, she’s really quite an ordinary, furious subject,’ and I know that Skullface has a common touch, a talent too for training, both of us and all those monkeys, maybe the toxics and the mathematicians too – a viewing of the outlands as provinces of his own, his unexotic, life.

 

*

 

I hear Popov conspiring with my successor, Doe. He says, ‘You see, with my foot, or rather the foot that you don’t see, I’ve got to be a counsellor, not an agent. So, my idea is this, after the nonsense with young Stag, day upstaged by week and all that stuff, the videotaping of his fumble with the Lady – all for security, of course, – and then the massacre, Apollo – and the bushes, you’ll have seen all that – well, I’ve some ideas to send us forward. All the battles will go on, whether we put our feet in or we don’t. And I know all about feet put in or not. My interest is Islam. All the big brains say – to separate religion and politics, then we’ll deal with them, one way or another. But think, John Doe – the old communist parties, like in France, said go and vote, reform or revolution: maybe you’ll get one, maybe the other, or perhaps both. And in a generation they were dead. So, that’s the strategy to follow ...’

And my successor says, ‘It’s not the strategy they want in Islam.’

Popov thinks a bit. ‘Well, separation’s what they get – imagine! politics and faith together, make us live the good life, all like kittens in a basket!’ and he snorts. ‘I know all about the faithful, lived with them. If you believe your faith’s the truth, then more fool you, but keep it in a box away from politics, or you’ll lose – even your illusions. I’ve been there, young Doe.’

 

*

 

Popov is frustrated, and he asks Doe about the job. Doe says, ‘Stag used to count, I don’t know how. It’s something that for me is senseless,’ and Popov says,

‘As far as I saw, he called his tea dealers on the phone and asked them what the traffic was – in tea, in drugs, in arms, in people.’

‘Then somewhere there’s a list? Maybe the boss has made one too, for his successor, when this Harry Snadders stuff has seen him forced to go.’

Offhandedly, Popov says, ‘Well, maybe Cai has got the list. Cai, or Chai.’

Doe says, ‘I don’t think the boss will go because he’s guilty. Got fed up, more like,’ and I think, ‘if he goes, maybe there’s Anna taking over, then maybe Cai will disappear. And the scheme for Islam is absurd, creating enemies and fighting for a generation – it’s nothing that concerns me. My caravans move on and through, as they did when they could only ride the little horses, not use them for pulling weights, the people were of all clans, all faiths, and now old Skullface’s fixated on Iranians, and Popov doesn’t know the way to marshal monkeys – and I feel my Petra’s teethmarks. She bit deep, and goes on biting, and I don’t know why, is it a cure, prevention, or just a mark, a pictogram, to show that she possesses – what? Me? It seems too small a thing.’

I think of how I couldn’t tell the ministers from the drug dealers, and found myself offering a price, a quantity and quality. Arms dealers, on the other hand, were quite unmistakeable – cheery in between, loved by all sides. With jokes and catalogues.

 

*

 

Cai says, ‘First, the problem was barbarism – people came from aggressive cultures, shattered the rest. It was on the marches, the borderlands, that the powerful, the outsiders, exercised all their savagery. Then it was socialism, was it the values, or the practices? And now it’s Islam, but you’ll see, it’s passing, if it hasn’t passed. What’s surpassed is gone, is dying, faded. It incorporates itself. And then the wave returns. Maybe this time, more savage.’

 

*

 

Anna sidles up to me. How beautiful, how desirable, she is. Soft to look at, hard when she rescues you, soft of feature, but a man’s best friend.

She says, ‘Stag, my moments of intimacy with you have no equal, you know?’

I say, ‘Intimacy has been quite rare, and hurried,’ and she says, ‘Not physical, idiot, I mean to chat, to pass the time.’

I ponder this. She says, ‘I need to get cut in on those terrorists’ stones. Guerrillas, terrorists, what you want to call them – they’re moving out of fashion – but stones are always useful’ and I tell her, ‘I know all about them, where they are,’ and she says, ‘So does Skullface – not to be underrated, Stag.’

I think I speak of love, or at least affection, some sort of partnership, when in the evenings I finish with the phone calls – most of my guys work nights, and those with yaks or reindeer are in another time zone, but she interrupts,

‘Stag! You’re a former celebrity – what is there left for you to do? You’ve done it, done your life, all your potential mined, promoted. Forget the phone calls, John Doe will find the atom bombs, not you.’

I mention some kind of teaming up, although I know that her time out with Skullface is a problem, but Skullface too will pass, but she is clear, she says, ‘Stag, drop that old love and cling-together stuff – that’s what people do who have no future, no ambition – it’s for failures, not adrenalin, but some kind of valium, turns into slack euphoria – not for me. If you feel it, Stag, just go and do it, don’t romanticise. And it will pass.’

I say, ‘So I’m no use to you? That may be mutual, you know,’ and she says, ‘I hope it is. Take a step back, you’ll see it’s all ridiculous. Think of the President and Lady – they’re still aiming high, they have the instinct, Stag. Don’t sit and mope and give things up.’

She’s right, it shows indeed we can be intimate, though other states are quite as satisfying, like Petra’s bite that comes to mind at various moments, and did not result from intimacy, nor anything like.

‘Intimacy,’ she says, ‘Is the best, Stag. It lasts a minute, or a day. It shows us we’re not monkeys,’ and I think, ‘I’m not so sure about the monkeys. Some of them are quite attached.’

 

*

 

Anna discusses the succession. ‘You, Stag, the trouble is you’re famous, not a pro. And Popov, he’s a Russian,’ and I joke, ‘Footloose, but not fancy free,’ and she plods grimly on: ‘You climbed a mountain, had adventures – but you’ve got this problem, mountains, clans, adventures – and terrorism, fame – above all, your peering through some modest person, seeing a whole historical scene – that’s all imagination, all you, your head,’ and I agree,      ‘I’ve nothing but my fame, it’s true. Fame and my shoes. But why should Skullface leave us?’ and she says, ‘Take the two f’s, the funny fellows – and those apes.’

‘That’s what makes him charming,’ I say, ‘those are his miracles, charisma,’ and I think, ‘What’s happened in those lunch breaks, how can she so easily unseat her lover?’ and I remember that love is an also-ran for her.

I say, ‘Well then – not me, not Popov – why not Cai? All sweetness, a minority rep,’ and Anna continues, ‘And full of hate and ignorant of what the institute can do,’ and I react, ‘This piddling institute – what do you think it can?’

Anna’s impatient, ‘Don’t you understand, if Skullface loses credibility, what’s to become of us? We’re in the loop, the network of diplomacy – we’re the high priests of peace, no one can spit in our clear and optimistic eyes. We have to be attended to. We’ve loved the high, we stumbled steplocked with the lowly – and yet our paws–’ she stops and retreats, ‘Our hands are clean. Our eyes are clear.’

And then I think, so Anna has her plan, not for what to do, but how to reach the top. And that too’s fine for me, because I have my fame, the less I do, the less it can be taken from me, it’s like a jewel that slowly fades, safe in its box.

And so we bicker on, we’re quite reactionary, I maybe most of all. I think of how the Ramayana tells us, when the pair of lovers reach their destination, the monkeys wave to them and female monkeys look out of the windows of the golden upper storey of the palace – how different from my Rama, and our monkeys in the brownstone!

 

*

 

For once, Skullface seems bothered.

‘This one day peace rap,’ he says, ‘you know, it’s a nonsense that makes sense. What sense it has, it shows that Popov’s call to history, riding a white horse, follow my leader, grannie’s footsteps and the glory of old Muscovy – is all a tawdry makeshift. It’s just a pretty blanket. And now we’ve got to handle the girl that wants peace for a week, and then there’ll be the sportsman bidding up – a month! And someone, maybe some tall poppy, president of what, will up us to a year. Stag, imagine the anticlimax of a week! How difficult to sidle round a month of pause in all those shipments, exercises, raids – the training alone, and think of all the infiltrations, the spooks will run like spiders, everyone will sneak in here and buy up that. A year – my dear boy – just think, what a bagarre!

‘A day, now, that’s the not-too-long that makes you think of wanting something more, but not exactly what, you understand. That is the trick – you see it coming, then it’s gone, nothing has changed, but maybe, maybe ... and you, dear Stag, retain your status. He who made it happen! What? you will ask – and so, it’s no one’s job to give the answer. No one asks the guys who promised to end poverty – “After your failure, what comes next?” For we all know, the answer’s “Just another campaign to make whatever it may be – happen.” We must be macho about it.

‘Maybe you could fuck the opposition, the “week-peace” girl, cut a deal, who knows, a marriage somewhere, or a birth?’

I say, ‘I think her backers have all that worked out – her future’s planned, and anyway – the peace guys rutting in some luxury suite – it moves attention from what is, or is not, the point,’ and sadly he agrees.

 

*

 

Cai says, ‘I don’t romanticise you, you know,’ and I reply, ‘Maybe I romanticise – I see you as the weak subject, weak in history.’ If her bosses want her back, she’s precarious, like the institute. I fear for her. I try to shut out cement and skyscrapers, railroads, oil wells, all the trash that overlays my yaks and caravans and camels.

‘Perhaps you’ll find stones, like Apollo, make a killing ...’ I say, and pause, remembering the warning Skullface pocketed, and how the threads must never be neglected lest the pattern’s lost, and Cai explains, ‘We’re full of valuable stones and stuff, we even wish we didn’t have so much, return to live in song and legend, as they say, the tourists say,’ and quickly I tell her, ‘You still hunt with royal eagles, and yet, your real life’s full of despots, poverty, all that ... I tell you, I’ve no vision. I see all sides and yet am blind. I don’t even believe in Skullface and his funny little fellows, and God knows, it should be easy to believe in what’s invisible.’

And I know my time with Cai is up, for she’s off somewhere, clattering of invisible hooves.

 

*

 

Skullface expresses concern about Apollo and the massacres. ‘In and out,’ he says, ‘Our operation without moral responsibilities. Nor, we proposed, political ones.’

We have a bioethics committee, part of our life insurance. Bioethics: ‘There’s a laugh’, says Anna.

We have a session about the monkeys. Now I’m a celebrity, and whatever happens if that status dies or lingers, the monkeys have taken to carrying little cameras, snapping us all, through the windows. I guess they sell the prints. But we mostly talk about the ficus each office has – it’s standard issue, it’s a rebarbative plant, ungiving and delicate, and some would like them dead – no problem with their propagation, as we’re told their roots are boiled, but they cling to being moribund, quite tenacious.

Old Skullface has converted the monkeys’ typing to simple secular texts; he says the basement’s stuffed with too much divinity, there’s no one gets to make a choice, the old tongues and alphabets are generating experts but no faith.

He says down there the monkeys have a thing about the ficus, maybe some latent memory, there is a vast dark hall, they’ve collected all they can, and there the ficus die and rot, the monkeys not seeing that they must give light and water.

This new, transitional, regime has meant Cai’s ancient book is nearly ready, a New Age edition, due to become a selling miracle, now it’s ‘only connect’, so everything is part of everything else, and Cai says that it may be true but rather dull, and where does she fit into this? And Skullface tells her she must be a sport and team is all, and planning projects better fun than realising them, and I think of Anna, wonder what his project can be there, but anyway, I see that Anna’s depths, if such there are, are depths for her and not for me.

Cai says, ‘You’re very delicate with us minorities, Stag, but we fought hard to keep our space, when ‘they’ came riding through. All of them.’

‘Well,’ I say, ‘At least you gave them – some of them – an alphabet. Something they’d never had.’

‘So what?’ she says.

‘With alphabets you can cut deals, write contracts, unless you’re too busy riding your horse, driving your Toyota,’ and she looks at me like I’m a piece of rock.

Skullface organises a memorial ceremony, for the villagers killed. We stand out in the courtyard. He’s hired three trumpeters. They are very tall. They strike some screaming heights, their silver instruments are making icicles, it’s cold as hell, and they go screeching up and down, the bored and friendly faces take a glaze of ice, the leaves fall off the trees. The tallest trumpeter goes higher, goes highest up the mountain, only he above the clouds, to seek out that last soldier, clump of comrades, freezes, casts them down. Into the glacier. This is death. And memory preserved.

 

*

 

And I think, old Skullface, what a bastard, but a clever bastard too. Anna says, ‘We should have our little telephones sound off together, as if the dead are calling us,’ and someone tells her hush, for once she does. Poor Popov is having trouble with his standing, and I see he has a shoe on his good foot that’s far above his status, but of course he only need buy one shoe – I wonder what he does with the unneeded one, maybe he’s got a friend that’s lost the other foot, they met in hospital, go to the store together. And Anna’s wearing little slippers, silver sequins all over, Cai has knitted boots, and I must wear these goddam sneakers, for as I’m still celebrity, the sneakers are the way I’m recognised.

The monkeys swarm up from their room, correcting the bibles having been suspended. They form fours, I think no one has formed fours for decades – they’ve five fingers, so in fives is natural, but fours needs training and I guess that Skullface has been down drilling them, something he couldn’t do with toxics, who don’t show, it being bad taste to have them celebrate the dead, them in communion with death and every non-living thing and state.

All the best heroes do a deal with monkeys, they make good troops, and keep their word, but how they suffer, and I think on freely, leaping from banal thought to the sublime and back again, and Skullface takes the monkeys down to tea and biscuits and we’d go too, but trumpet music goes on until the climax, when we’re all at last all frozen in our tombs, surrounded by our useless jewels and bits of food and sacrifices. I wish I’d never gone with the guerrillas, seems you can’t have mourning without complicity.

And then the snappers come, of course I’m still the celebrity, they take me from all sides, although the world’s forgotten if we had our day of peace or not, I’m still the peg they hang existence on.

Expressionless, I give them all my image, so they can remember and work through some emotion, though I’m sure they don’t remember if I’m a hero or a baseball star, and in the end who cares, it’s all in history now, and so I set my face in silent sorrow. And at last it’s done, and we are all alive, and go to have our drinks.

 

*

 

One last throw of the dice, is what Skullface proposes. I fly to see Apollo. He’s now minister for Rec and Tech – reconciliation and sun services – also, the hunt for aliens in computer systems.

‘You’re quite the statesman now,’ I say.

‘I always was, it’s just I don’t do shapeshifting now.’

We chat about Hector, Rama, both physically mashed up but mentally in rehab. ‘And Bakunin?’ I ask. He seems abstracted: ‘Stag, you never even wanted the clock turned back or forward, just wanted the end of clocks. You should learn when to turn the other cheek, haha,’ and tries to embarrass me, a gesture at my cheek.

‘We’ll see your mountain, El’brus, version green!’ he laughs. ‘The caravans disarmed, just migrants seeking work and honest toil – with benefits, and all that stuff, of course.’

Old Skullface wants a bargaining, perhaps he’d settle for a month of what he still calls peace, Apollo says they’re waiting for a ship, and till it docks I can have what Skullface wants, but talk of arms and ships and months is not my interest, so I say,

‘If all else fails, young Anna’ll take the boss’s place,’ and so Apollo laughs,

‘A feisty gal, I heard you two attaining your paradise – a way off, in the bushes,’ and I can object, but don’t, and then he says, ‘You may be worth a final whirl, young Stag, just for old times,’ and I think that maybe I’m to lose a foot, or just another bite, or maybe meet with Petra, and I sense Afasian throwing up his hands – he’s living with his Hindu lady now, gives up his politics, been converted to a pragmatism that mostly leaves him speechless, while Mr Beest, if it is he and not a partnership and bank, has settled down here, mining stones. I don’t want to see them, either of them, willowy voices on the air, and so Apollo says again, ‘One last adventure, Stag, you must be game,’ but game or not, play or the hunt, I don’t have a choice, and off we go.

‘I cut out all this nonsense,’ says Apollo, pointing to the motorcycle escorts as our motorcade moves off, ‘Except for security, of course,’ and he hands me a bag of Beest Corp sweets, throwing from his own bag to the children running alongside. In the distance we see a hump rising from the scrubby ground. I see some of the older kids have tattoos like my cheekmarks, and Apollo says, ‘We tried to do you proud, you being a celebrity, role model too, for all that climbing, rescuing, deep philosophising too,’ and I see the hump is a Mount El’brus, green indeed, reduced in size and snow- and ice-less. On the lower slopes some scavenging is going on, and up above, where the glacier might have started, kids throw each other down, and then scale up again.

‘We thought of calling it Mount Stag,’ he says, ‘but since there’s lots of countries’ cash went to it, we felt a flexible name, changing when each delegation comes, would be in order.’ Then he apologises, ‘I couldn’t forewarn the snappers, but they caught you at the airport,’ and in any case I’m used to them, and if they’re not around I think I must be in the wrong town, so what the hell, and poor Mount Stag is rather feeble.

‘This isn’t much of an adventure,’ I say.

He laughs, ‘Just wait and see.’

And I think ‘Oh no, not Petra,’ as it’s clear he knows my story and my history, and so I wait, and dread.

We pass the Pax Eterna cemetery, where the dogs seek bones, the little stalls that sell Stag shoes – we reach the lower slopes, I think of it as Mount Reform, and Apollo’s pleased:

‘My motto is “every day anew” – the more you announce the changes, greater is the change,’ and we climb round the hummock’s side and see a hall, tin roof, with thugs outside, and no doubt inside too. Apollo says, ‘I’ll leave you here, my story takes another twist – and so does yours.’

And here is Petra, but she can’t be here, can’t be the Petra that bit me. I have all the pieces, but not the message.

Cai’s book, had a fine, comprehensive message, or at least a story, but it no longer holds. Those nomads are long dead, and before they died they mixed in with the rest of us, made us ascetics and hedonists, believers and agnostics, made us Skullface’s Iranians. The message holds its shape, but doesn’t tell. Or else it’s just a story.

Beest makes money, Afasian has found a rich woman and renounced politics, Anna runs the show. Beest is making money from the stones. He can make his money when we’ve all lost ours and have to search for something in us that is entertaining, can be sold.

And entertainment’s here! In this loud hall, the tin roof booms, we’re all dancing, screaming, singing, and my bitten cheek burns with its signs, as if they’re the first strokes and points of what will be an alphabet. It seems – it is – the President without his Lady! He’s trying to get up, he tries to make it out, but there is such a press, a press of bodyguards and spooks and snappers, that he falls, is thrust down, doesn’t rise. I’m dancing and I’m screaming along with Petra, like the rest, and we are all good mates, although the languages are not the same or even similar, and the songs may have a rhythm, but all overlayed, and each one beats whatever he can find, a fist, a foot, a head, a chair, trying to assert, and with a happy face. We are enjoying ourselves! And I see Apollo peeping through the doors, he’ll break this up, he’ll show himself, and we’ll be going, leaving to go on about our normal day, shop or beg or hammer tin.

But no, it doesn’t end, there’s jostling, but I’m still inside. Petra, or her twin, looks critically at me, I say, ‘No more biting,’ and she says, ‘No, it’s quite distinctive as it is, another one would give it symmetry, too much.’

And all the guys are doing what their customs let them do, to enjoy themselves – too much perhaps – the drinkers drink, and I see Georgian brandy, the sniffers sniff, some others do religion, others abstain but sing and stare like hawks – everyone is singing, trying to dance. And women are around, pouring out booze, or picking up the fallen men, or showing off or getting drunk or being hit or who knows what, and we are all a load of monkeys, living on our wits, but maybe not so clever as the apes, though each group has its culture and I think, ‘Stopping those drugs is like stopping snow melting in the spring’ and where I once saw caravans, now I see Toyotas, migrants, and tourists, the whole world singeing itself a little, just the edges, and here the guys are having so much fun, and Security is getting loud, and they’ve got guns, and so a space is made around them.

And Petra sees me drift away, and says, ‘You’ve always done your best,’ and I think, ‘Worse than that you cannot say,’ and do I dream, or is that another president, from the Americas this time, brought in to see us having fun, and there’s Apollo, ushering in, and making his excuse to leave us simmering here. And Petra says, ‘You’d better try your pitch – this guy looks smart, at least as these things go,’ and here he is and asks me what I’ve got, peace or drugs.

     ‘Nothing but my fame,’ I say.

He’s puzzled and I guess fame is what he breathes, and I don’t feel he’s open for a few days’ peace, him steering by the stars and casual omens, no doubt large sacrifices, done by a pontifex, animals burnt and maybe people too, and so I’m quiet, and maybe that’s a novelty, I turn away, and he must think he’s gone invisible.

But fantastic is the noise, the dancing, now the shooting off – maybe it’s fireworks, but it isn’t likely – and I’m with Petra on the floor, and how I wish that I am back with the monkeys inventing bibles and the Word of God, and even Skullface off to the motel, and surely I have won my day, or even two, of peace, but no. No.

Petra is here.

I know we shall all suffer for the trampling of the President.

Still, I shall live on with my fame till it expires. And as for Cai, I think she lives not by the book, but by the fire that burnt its author – an anger I can’t match, but maybe should. And the scars that Petra leaves will heal, not disappear – the first strokes of an alphabet, perhaps.

If that’s what they call hope, it’s rather slight, but if you hope for stupid things, then you’ll be lost – the real point is to leave this room, the guys are singing till they burst, it’s marvellous, it’s horrible – and here’s Apollo, sliding down the hill, he presses in my hand – a book of poems, ministerial stamp. It’s fame for him, a fame on fame, he lives it day to splendid day, I don’t begrudge him, how in any case to judge a person who’s acquired charisma and a motorcade? The little boys – I notice that the girls are still indoors – run up to beg and steal a little of his light. Blessed are they all, I think, as I walk to my aeroplane, and leave my Petra far behind, her mystery, I am pleased to say, has not yet been revealed.

Conclusion

ai almost tenderly looks at my teethmarks, she says, ‘It could be the pictogram for two flutes. If it had been me, I’d leave something more definite behind for you – a watchtower, perhaps,’ and I think, ah, dear Cai, resentments so well buried, no room for me. She’s off again, while masses start their big adventure – making a new America in the east – she’s just an egg in someone else’s omelette. Yet she’s a spy, has made it to the viewing platform, price is compromise, but then, she’s feet in both the stirrups, more than you can say of Popov! His Revolution cancelled out, not just transformed! So farewell Cai – dragging the others, being dragged, into our world, our Institute. And still there’s Anna ...

Suddenly we hear what seems a trumpet call. A shriek, defiant, summoning. We look outside, see nothing, then the word spreads – monkeys on the roof! We run outside – there’s like a rampart high above, crammed with defiant creatures, their teeth shine out like cabuchons, they scream, they wave. Although in all the stories and the pictures they’re excellent with bows, here we don’t keep bows and arrows for the animals, so these weapons, lances, must be our aerials and satellite junk and all the stuff that’s kept up there, even the poles for laundry, how should I know.

And then there’s Skullface – his great skull makes him look like Doctor Death, he shouts to me, ‘You must assert – that I had absolutely nothing to do with planting you with that Apollo, vindictive brute he is, and capable of anything, as maybe we all are, and covering up and justifying. Nothing to do with planting you, and so I had to have you rescued, and that cost poor Popov’s foot, but then our Anna brought it off, it had to be authentic, or we’d have lost the peace!’

So lost it anyway, I thought, and Cai says, ‘War – real spies, real revolutionaries must accept it as part of their business,’ and Anna says with pleasure, ‘War is part of everyone’s business.’ I think of Apollo’s mission, Bakunin’s revolution through the unions, that dusty syndicalism, was heresy to everyone, to Marx and all the governments, the army of disorganised, and not to speak of union bosses, and indeed, it is, has always been, of all lost causes the most lost. Then there’s Popov, with John Doe, who knows no better – but he has to think of future prospects even if they kill him – so they make a pair and stand for honest peace, against old Skullface and manipulation. I know that Popov’s not like that at all, but he plays destiny, combined with planning and the well-schemed stab – and certainly old Skullface is losing parts, since he’s had to call out the monkeys.

Anna says, ‘Monkeys are simply loyal, so in that way they’re independent, they depend only on one person, they’re pledged to him, the one and supreme boss.’ And I think, the monkeys were around in ancient times, that’s how they write the books of God and gods because they write their memoirs, garden of Eden. Monkey Adam. Monkey Eve. Quite innocent. In time, shapeshifting into human form. Animal clan especially favoured, taking part in battles when the humans were too few to risk, I see them driving chariots, mounds of sacrificed bananas, no doubt the typewriter their special instrument, keeping up the link with creator and creation – now, for the moment, slowed right down, confined to machines and messages ... no monkey prophecies, the battles lost, the armour twisted, holed and junked. And as I muse, I hear old Skullface shout, ‘Don’t let the toxics up,’ but they are safe behind their door, so too the families of Probability – they won’t come up to join the battle, on this or other side. I picture them smoking their meerschaums, though I only ever saw their printouts. Then there is a clamour – a handsome monkey loses grip, or else is pushed.

Moment of fear and dread. He lies there, broken on the ground, and Anna says, ‘Poor little bugger,’ a soldier’s lament indeed. And Cai says, ‘Fear and dread. Poor innocent’ and I think, ‘Or maybe not, what anyway can innocence mean, what help is that, if we’re popped off, being innocent’s just euphemistic for “unarmed”.’

Now I see that Popov, followed by John Doe, is climbing up the building. I notice the whole facade has little ladders, branches, even with small painted faces, like a snakes-and-ladders board, pointing the way, and though Popov’s foot is surely missed, he makes good time, and Doe is puffing on behind, his trousers following, for I see he has an old-time military gut, that isn’t made for western clothes, maybe the Greeks wore tunics when they scaled the walls, as with all that lamb and lobster they were putting on the beef, and I imagine – my – Hector, lean as a strip of ape, spearing a hundred as they try to waddle up – although the picture is more Rama’s, with its air of massacre and intervention, maybe divine or mostly not.

Popov and Doe are nearly there, the monkeys on the ramparts scream, though who has an idea of what to do, I cannot think – old Skullface leads the monkeys, but they’ve never shown desire to kill us unless they’re ordered to, and Skullface now must mind his back and also not appear to rule the show but now they’re nearly at the top, our mountaineers – and no! Popov mistakes a painted ladder for a wooden one, he loses hold, he teeters there, a monkey holds a pole, maybe to help him, though it is no help, maybe to push him off, maybe another possibility – he falls, so slowly, as if he’s brought a personal glacier to preserve him, his monstrous sideburns and his apple cheeks, he falls and falling, in the sky outlined, the leg, the absent foot, is fixed against the blue, the victim, traitor, loyal to himself alone. Or maybe some government will mourn him, who knows, their motives are never ours, and as he falls, John Doe puts out a hand. I think, ‘Oh no, you mustn’t spoil the picture, spoil the destiny,’ but he is  follower, bit player, obedient to some vague project that’s not ours, looks only forward; not to our life’s puzzles and our schemes, the books of god, the drugs so lavishly left round, the weapons, from the rocks to all the other killing tools, until we see the long distance ones, the chemicals, the bombs – and maybe worst of all, the books. Doe falls. In silence, selfless gesture unacknowledged. For a moment both are caught – a three-footed hieroglyph against the sky. I imagine in the foyer of some building a picture of the two, maybe a mosaic, sculpture even, a double Icarus, a fall of men, and then they’re down, we see their faces, last few seconds, try to sum it up, the whole of life’s experience, so much to tell, the images and mountains – that’s for Popov – and for Doe, maybe assault courses and a questionnaire or two, equipped him for the spying trade, but not too well. For he is loyal, like the monkeys, and it doesn’t do him good.

But Skullface is now desperate – that’s three operatives gone, counting poor Harry Snadders in, and complicity is strong in every case. The plan for peace is shreds, career for him requires a really fine press conference to shrug off blame, reveal the plan beneath that makes the errors seem good sense or fate – or how maybe someone else was sabotaging the fine plan to save mankind, or at least to make the waiting more attractive.

 The monkeys cheer and wave their spears, and Anna goes to Skullface and she says, ‘We got them, chief.’ There on the ground, the shattered monkey, now with two warriors on top, he didn’t break their fall. Their eyes are open, but their brains have leaked, as if the beauty and the wonder are too great for single minds to apprehend, and Cai calls up the stretcher party, and we’re fewer, but more noble too.

 

Finale

e are standing, Anna, Cai and myself, looking through our window, and we are thankful it is bulletproof. There is a great confusion, a pattering, a wafting. I think of magnificent, fleshed-out white flowers, growing like magic beanstalks, as from below there is a frush, a nearing, a scrambling out.

We see Skullface, smiling tranquilly. He is being borne aloft by all his monkey clan – they do not seem to cling but fly. Without a sound they came down from the roof and mustered. I think I hear the cries – ‘Peace’, ‘Equality’, ‘in freedom’, and he is higher, higher. I think I hear the trumpets, but it may be sirens. Now the traffic stops, down below there is a roaring, maybe it is crowds, what can they make of this, event without a death or wound or cop?

And Anna says, ‘OK – but equality in monkeyland is no great deal’, and I think, ‘“Peace” – we’ll see how far they carry him, what deals he has in mind, what resources to be dug,’ and Cai says quietly, ‘Freedom it may be, for he is free from us, the messes he has made – and in a sense he’s also king, albeit of a tribe in nature. See how they love him, Stag.’

     ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘but they just take orders, and independence is not the greatest gift for apes, they shake their paws with powerful guys – who they may love, and even worship,’ and she says:

‘I don’t think that they appraised his orders, maybe the monkeys are mechanical, not pondering the consequences or the motivations. It’s just wired in, not to take too serious,’ and I must say I’m not convinced: there seems an awful distance between the flying wedge of monkeys, their discipline, and our jumbled standoffs in the forest or the jungle. I wonder who will write the sacred texts, now that the monkey clan has flown away. It all seems rather sad, as we disciples watch in safety from our office, as the mangod who has brought us here and given us our worthless tasks flies far away, jewel clasped in a cluster of monkey hands.

 

Apotheosis

nd the noise below is louder, fiercer, and I hear some chants, or maybe it’s for football clubs or executions, but it’s clear the whole event has entered in the social, the guys with sound equipment and the satellite stuff are doing interviews – it’s taking off, maybe the Boss had wished it so, it has become event, and us – celebrities! The bearers of his truth, expounder of his problems, unresolved, enduring.