part three

 

the apostates

 

 

 

one

 

 

I have always had gurus, though few of my gurus knew that was what they were. My desire was that they should sense, empower, my boundless ambition – to change, transform, serve, command. And, of course, first to submit, be commanded, be transformed, changed.

Many of my gurus were women.

We believe – and it’s not true – that women are poor judges of crime, of criminal intentions. perhaps that’s why I felt safer with them. Although – my one small criminal pattern: it’s hardly worth the mention. A little strip, an art deco doodle, ornamental brass or onyx, tapped into the continental blue steel rails of my existence. Living through, living parallel with, all the big official massacres, performed, threatened, impending, about to he revealed: really, any behaviour at all is excusable. Many have tried to set up sacred mounds of sensibility to commemorate these massacres; perhaps to get a better look, or keep the blood off their shoes by standing on the top. I hadn’t got that kind of talent. And I thought it was misplaced.

I’d watched the world, the ideal world, imploding. It took one summer, one fall, to have all those housefathers and housewives go back to normalcy, to being what they had always wanted, to what they’d always been. All that European, that communist, world, in which we’d seen our dreams, our nightmares – suddenly disappeared, wiped out, like a long stretch of sleep. All this, of course, took place for us, we good and bad American boys, honorary Martians, as a vision, a pre-vision. Perhaps it happened long before, or hasn’t happened yet. Perhaps I really am a Martian.

The reign of commonsense and horse-trading returned. It was an enthralling vision, this future. Not inspiring, but after all ... Everything went back, to normal. But we were, always had been, normal.

Who’s next? I asked myself. What shall I do? What big idea, big man, is up and waiting for a turn? And is it me?

There is always someone to tell you, ask you, ‘Haha, can it be you, with all your burdens? Perhaps what’s to come has conquered us already. The real world, but with a great, a convulsing power and striving, you could call it Sufism. Sufis do.’

‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘What can it be, this mystic potion, this rending eyeglass?’

‘Why, it’s a way of moving through the world, but with a conquering bias. You’re a tennis star, with an unbeatable service. I even know a dilettante, a certain person taking his novitiate. One Sinclair, traveller, navigator, hero. A Southerner, I think. Probably a poet and inventor too.’

‘That sounds good,’ I say. ‘I sense that good guys in the further parts of this relentless Union are checking up on me. When can I leave?’

My intermediary smiles, and says, ‘Remember, though you are the star, and all your services are aces – you also have to be the ball.’

I say, ‘Well, that’s the rule they taught. That’s the old Berkeley dialectic all right.’

‘What the fuck did you do at Berkeley?’

‘I parked the students’ cars. Sometimes I’d help them with their papers.’

 

 

* * *

 

 

Sinclair was in the hot-box next to mine. We looked out over desert and dried bushes. The trainers patiently threw little lumps of stinking meat for their falcons, went through the motions with their predators, their captives.

I ask, ‘Did I tell you it took a hundred and fourteen movements to load and fire a musket – when my folks were defending and attack­ing the Heights of Abraham?’     

‘Yes, you did,’ says Sinclair.

‘And did I explain to you all about power, music, magic and design?’

‘Layouts? Formal foliage, trampled lozenges, the crushed square? Yes, you did. Exhaustively.’

Sinclair: tycoon, traveller; clairvoyant, insurgent, bore. I have trouble speaking, as before the mudbath treatment we have been drinking. We are encased in zinc boxes, our heads sticking out, purple, like the Mexican prisoners in the film, about to he footballed off by horses. My body is a shrimp of steam in the red mud. Am I being born from the clay, or melting into it?

Sinclair is my master, my boss. Reading my thoughts, changing my shape. Riding me. He laughs:

‘Yes, that’s the question. Is the system growth? Or the manure of growth? The only question. In music, training hawks, hunting. Killing. It all takes a system. But can you ride that system? Or are you part of it?’

We simmer in silence. Suddenly, he says, ‘You must love me. You must love me, you know.’ Then, not changing his tone: ‘My balls feel like roast chestnuts. In paprika sauce.’

I have killed a man. I feel his limbs clasped round me like the old man of the sea, dead. It is my qualification for being Sinclair’s bodyguard. The man I killed I killed with a single shot. A target pistol. He drew on me with an empty gun. A good joke. An intricate one, for both of us.

‘Arabia deserta’, says Sinclair, as we return to the hotel. An unnecessary remark. There is no one but us. He whispers, ‘Last night, when you were playing tric-trac with your spies, one of the women came to me.’

The women are hooded, they walk like walled gardens. I wonder if they put their tongues out at us as we pass.

Sinclair puts his face against mine and whispers again, ‘I put my tongue deep into Islam.’

The hotel room is stifling. The beds have bugs, so we sleep like two grey, spotted haddocks in the Styrofoam packing our electronic kits come in. Our waste shoots straight out through the pipe, and leaves stains twenty metres long, down the hotel’s white outer wall.

‘Well, we’re cooked,’ says Sinclair, satisfied. ‘Jayman,’ he goes on, as we droop on the beds, like two poor boys from Brooklyn, ‘I need love. Remember the Liberator, remember Bolívar, being carried round greater Columbia like a pustule. But he would have love.’

To get my attention, he jabs a knife down between my fingers. ‘An old commando trick.’

I say, ‘The hawks are hooked on rotten meat.’

Their meat lumps are transistorised, a homing device makes hunting easy. And what we sell for classy hunting can be used for missiles. Anything. Keeping flocks of pilgrims together, in the desert, at Jeddah airport. Herds of goats. Anything.

‘True,’ says Sinclair, ‘but you must also see the nobility of it. The nobility.’

Our hotel cranes up tall and thin, ash-white but grubby, like a plaster cast stripped off a shrivelled leg, a stilt. We call it The Stilton. On the mud skyscraper next door, a trumpeter stretches out his neck, like a swan, and hits three octaves simultaneously on his warhorn, screaming like a shaman screams when stuffed with coke, his bones charred out and filleted, up through nose-holes covered with a nose-plectrum. Last whistle of breath on earth stoppered up for him in his tibia. Scream of help from nobody, skin suit flayed like Xipe’s. Eyes popped like when you land on Pluto. Summons to the end of differences between the species, obsidian telescope no charge, look up God’s nostril absolutely free.

‘That fucking noise makes me think of happy hour,’ says Sinclair.

He watches an old man, in the road, a twig gripped in his toes, stirring a pot. Sinclair is obsessed by these people, but won’t talk to them. ‘Only women cook,’ he says, ‘but here, it’s men ... and never a fire beneath the pots.’

Our city is up high, high. It takes four hours for trucks and eight for donkeys, climbing from the plain. Twice a day we check if we’ll have visitors. Sinclair wants to sell his hunting lures to sporty sheiks. They never show. Make friends; then mediate. And having power, make money.

He says, ‘That guy down there is smoking! Isn’t that anomalous?’

‘Yes. A Merit.’

He looks at me intently. ‘Your job is the true humanist’s, you know. Guarding my body. Greater love, and all that.’

‘It depends.’

‘I have to be important to you.’

I say, ‘Hard for me to get another master if they bump you off.’

‘We’re hard as basilisks,’ he kids me, ‘and it’s not just slaves who get to die to save their masters.’

I pretend to agree: ‘I follow in your footsteps. You follow in that Roman’s – Catenna.’

He is obsessed by Catenna, satrap or strategos, who led his legion of the edge, off the periphery. No longer conqueror for Rome, he founded a whole new bandits’ nest. The other day we found a cippus, a milestone he had left. ‘vir hum cos ren,’ Sinclair read out. ‘“That most humble man, who refused the consulship”, the bastard. Outsmarted me again!’ He waved the cippus over his head, and I thought he was going to dash it down. ‘Or maybe it’s “He refurbished the consulship with human virtues.” cos? Cosmos, perhaps. Or Cosa Nostra? And all I leave is streaks of slime down hotel walls. Catenna – no ad bc nonsense. Just straight, straight time. When to be alive was paradise, and changing sides was history. And changing shape, religion. Deep, deep into Islam,’ he muses. ‘My tongue.’

I say, ‘No Islam either.’

‘Don’t you feel him, this Catenna, still around?’ asks Sinclair. ‘Sentenced to eternal life? The Prophet supposed to have extended the sentence.’

I say dismissively, though I’m impressed, ‘It seems a hard throw for a Prophet to risk.’

‘Risk? Only religious people know how to take risks. We’ve forgotten. Like the sheiks. Think, Jayman: hunting. Sport. Conservation. The new, the true international. Everyone likes hunting, all classes and all cultures. Likes to feel good doing it. To feel they’re doing good. And so, our little guidance systems ...’

He wanders round his projects: ‘This desert air promotes immortality. I bet you could do a 99-year sentence here, just toss it off. Eh, Jayman?’

I am not provoked.

He goes on: ‘My main aim, I often think, should he saving people. Not playing Go in real space. Not dodging spies, and goddam street dogs. But then, the rigours of a journey must be turned to good use. Or does that sound pretentious?’

I say, ‘It sounds stupid.’

‘You’re tied to my destiny, Jayman,’ he towers over me, a billowing monster, greyish, covered with red bite-spots, like a flatfish: ‘And that depresses me.’

‘I’m tied to your life, at least,’ I say.

‘Because I have more power.’

‘More money,’ I say.

Sinclair says peevishly, ‘Remark typical of the subaltern, I might say, the servant, class. Money comes and goes. More is always round the corner. Around the corner too there lurks the mugger who may take it all. And that’s where you serve. If the money goes, I don’t want my throat cut too.’

He is pleased with himself. Catenna – a living pawn, taking refuge off the board, starting a new game in new dimensions. Islam casually penetrated. Myself enslaved.

He says, ‘Nature is oppressive here. But not much of it is living.’

When people tire of shooting at the birds, they shoot relentlessly into the desert. I feel I am being worked through the bowels of a history not my own.

He says, ‘After all, it’s hot. Just very hot. Hotter’n when Catenna came, and took off all the trees. It’s heating up, and up. All there’s left, is devotion. Devotion to error: especially that, young Jayman. Remember them, your mistakes. The most precious things, and yours, yours alone. Mistakes.’

Yes, he is a great man. A very great man. One of the last, and I am tied to him as sheep are tied to things, to all other sheep, the next sheep. The sheep looks at its shepherd and says, ‘I know that you will eat my flesh.’

What is Sinclair’s secret? The secret of his secrets, the key to this new world, so closed to reason and to projects, open to faith and conjuring?

He says, ‘I wasn’t born in a country, I was born in a ship.’ But beneath all the tycoonery there lies a piece of scared America, like mine. Believe myself protected by Cajuns, but fear them. And I killed a man, very neatly. Is that enough to account for slavery, for ever, sold to Sinclair? Who now sells to Arabs, knowing still less than I do what they are, if they are ‘they’. ‘Put my tongue ...’

I say, ‘Did I tell you about my Albanian girl, Sinclair?’ and he replies, still looking for bandits in the street, ‘Why so melancholy, Jayman? Why worry about one killing? You don’t lose your innocence for ever, Jayman. Be a man! I’ll get your innocence back for you. Trust me!’ He laughs, and lies back in his fishbox, a fat haddock.

He says, ‘All our contacts here have Oxford degrees. How can you tell they’re genuine? Hunting types. Here, they could hunt the dogs.’

I reduce myself to vanishing point. I am Stan to his Ollie. He looks at me with distaste. ‘That’s what I need – a sensitive bodyguard. My employee, my likeness, my brother. Shackled to you with gold chains. Plated.’

We discuss the testing of our equipment. The royal hunt: the chase, the chase. I flex my boiled legs. We pace, lost, like tall birds.

In the desert, bronze can’t corrode. We find little suits of Roman armour, no one inside. We’ve also found a live platoon, and Sinclair said, ‘What the fuck you legionaries doing here? Take me to your strategos at once,’ and to me, ‘Goddam Catenna, still lurking here.’

The soldiers pointed over the ridge. Its crest dissolved into gas, like the plains of Saturn; mirages streaming like the ants, like sugar fading into water, dissolved.

Sinclair tries all his tricks to find the chief. There is no one. He says, ‘There’s a whole army over there. They’re waiting for the general. Perhaps it’s me.’

‘But Sinclair,’ I say, ‘what’re they for?’

‘For? For, Jayman? Why, for rent, of course. And I’ll find the right occasion.’

I feel my old man of the sea press his knees around my neck. ‘Fuck off,’ I think. Remembering, I wrecked my car, long time ago, a Transam bellying down in sand, and red men running up and saying – but in Sioux – ‘This guy’s a loser.’ And perhaps not a Transam after all, just some old Pontiac.

Desert shrivels out ideas, just leaves curiosity, and curious things. Hell with camels, Sinclair says.

I say, ‘People here are sensitive, and sensitive to us,’ and he replies, ‘What sensitive?’

I say, ‘Sinclair, did I tell you about Brazil and Paraguay? How there you don’t find anything new at all, as though the motor’s gone, and just the noise of roaring pistons drinking oil, but everything is parrots, the slaves are freed with nowhere else to go.’

And he says, ‘Yes, Jayman, exhaustively. You have obsessions, I have goals. Better like that, too. It’s congruent.’

 

 

 

 

two

 

 

 

Later, Sinclair says, ‘We must find a Greek army to take on those Romans. A sporting one, with my lures as the prize. From the satellites, we’ll all show up as an immense archaeological site. Capitalism sucks, I know, Jayman, but we want something that sucks. What do you want, Jayman?’

I say, without conviction, ‘Innocence.’ We don’t look innocent, either of us. The old world has come to an end. The old gods, kings, heroes – everything has died with it. We want the new, but we look terminally ancient. Still, this is a quite intensive course of heresy Sinclair’s imposed on me.

He closes his eyes. He goes to catland; thinking about money, he sets his jaws in a smile, and leaves the body It is slumped beside mine. I remember a woman with teeth like toffee chunks, saying to me, ‘Age doesn’t matter after all, does it, love?’ It makes me think of Sinclair saying, ‘Still need mediators, old boy, the world will always need mediators.’

Perhaps if the Romans beat the Greeks, they’ll take on the Arabs, and then we shall see magic: nets twirling, transforming powders flying, the primitive rules of time and space and falling bodies cut in half, all bent, suspended. Then troop back into Sinclair’s imagination. Training for the conquest of absolutely nothing. The new world endlessly conquered by the old – and who’s to tell the difference, Greeks and Romans pretty much the same, and Cajuns too, up there where satellites and falcons dart.

Here, where old lizards in skull caps sell dust in dusty shops, there must be a sign. In archaic script, looping around the block, to colour code the sheep: orange, red, blue, green.

Sinclair is back from catland, back into his body; it looks like mine, inflated. He mutters, ‘I know that you will eat my flesh,’ then, more alert, ‘Ha, Jayman, some things you can’t do. Not in your script, just mine.’

He is addicted, without urgency: to himself, like all the great, the very great. I watch him. He says irritably, ‘Clean your pistol. Do something. Show some potency, find me an army. Rent a car you can’t smash up. Make a prophecy. Every prophet has his hour. Let’s hope women will become prophets, then we’ll have twice as many. Or just amuse me. Find a new joke.’

He’s right. I’m static. I whistle. One of the tric-trac players, far below, waves back. We are peripheral. It gives us solidarity.

We are as close as we shall get. If we are rats, then we can gnaw, and listen to the big guys, inside the walls and out: our unwrinkled brains are laser-sharp.

Sinclair says, ‘This place is worn out. They shouldn’t have stripped off all the fruit-trees. Poisoned the wells. Miscegenation to boot: if it makes a difference ...’

 

* * *

 

The next day, there are customers, and Sinclair says, ‘I doubt the floor will hold this crew.’ We unpack sights and guidance systems, targets, aiming marks. Gloves for firing, and for hooding falcons. Styrofoam is everywhere.

The sheiks ask if they can trust me. ‘He’s almost one of us,’ says Sinclair, winking. He gives his little speech to four or five, who wear both suits and winding sheets, as if to show that they’re transitional. ‘Gentlemen,’ he says, ‘Sport. And hunting. I propose an international force, an army dedicated to peace; to sensitive culling. To refinement of the body, and communion with our friends, the animals.’

‘These little systems,’ he goes on, as we wonder who the ‘animals’ might include, ‘see in the dark. Can see your prey be he in the darkest tree, the blackest forest.’ He picks one up, it’s like a netsuke, or lump of gristle silver-wired. ‘It takes your hawk right to the song. Checks that a kill would be within your quota – then: whammo! Your falcon zaps the little fellow, and is homed back, satisfied, obedient, and replete.’

The sheiks think this banal. But they are interested in night sights, and one asks Sinclair, ‘Were we at school together? In the States?’

‘A prep school? No, I couldn’t take the smell. The cooking was like armpits.’

The sheik says gloomily, ‘I stuck it through, for what, for what? The world is full of preppies who never went to school at all.’ He looks sharply at me. He says, ‘You look like you live with absent friends. What makes you go? Intelligence? Just ordinary? The mystery of the East? The Arab card. Bit of a screw loose?’

Sinclair smiles, and says, ‘He’s really just like us. Perhaps a touch of shellshock, but hasn’t lost his aim, haha. It seems I’m shackled to him now, my twin. And so, if that doesn’t trouble me, it shouldn’t bother you. Really, young Jayman here is not East Coast at all, comes from a place where people are few, don’t circulate, so lacks that touch of class, which may be crap, but still ...’

The sheiks are fascinated by me, and stare.

Sinclair says hurriedly, ‘The President is very keen that rifle clubs should organise the gentlemen, for sport, for divertissement, on a global scale. And, now that the old ideas, old balances, have gone, he wants collateral links to strengthen. How else will the circle hold together?’ The sheiks are still gazing at me.

He answers himself: ‘The sporting person. Used to decide on life, on death. On horseback, with a dog. No more the citizen, no more the stay-at-homes. The huntsman.’ There is blankness.

He whispers to me frantically – ‘That one over there, the pinstripe – that one! Remember – I told you of my contact, the intimate one.’ He is wheezing with urgency. I ask, ‘Not your tongue? Islam?’

‘Yes, yes, I’m sure. The devil ... She.’

I say, ‘Lucky you,’ but he is off again. The Hunters’ International, a new freemasonry, toughs, playing the great game. The good guys winning worldwide, paying off in pheasants.

Sinclair’s girl smiles at me, waggles his pink friendly tongue. A debonair anteater, scooping up termites and their secrets. He murmurs, ‘Just call me Cass – Cassandra is too cumbersome,’ and I feel the name is not quite right, but Sinclair is hollering on about the turkeys on the Supreme Court, and at ‘turkeys’ everyone relaxes and begins to think of room service, and I am thinking back again, how proud I was, having an Indian in love with me, and how she said, ‘You keep on going out with an Indian, you going to talk like one,’ and suddenly I had thought, ‘Yes, you are, you are an Indian’, and she had been a French Indian, that brings me back to Cajun queens, and how I guess we all need one, or may have had one and not quite made the cut; so, where do we start, again?

And always lurking back, somewhere, the violence with the target pistol, and it had been a damned good shot.

Sinclair is organising battles now. That Indian girl was white, so white – white like you find in paintcans, or on Chinese actresses.

I whisper to Sinclair, ‘Watch out for Cass, he’s sharp, and he’s inveigling you.’

But Sinclair puts his arm round Cass’s shoulders, says, ‘Inveigling – some word! An Irishry, perhaps? I own this guy,’ he points to me, clown­ing with some upstate accent. ‘Now he thinks he owns me, and my friends.’ He leans towards Cass, and I see him winding up his tongue for a strike, like it’s a siege machine. He draws back: ‘Cass, the master of our ceremonies, our little magic, and our mister money-bags.’ There is unamused laughter. It’s clear that Cass is their big cheese, their magic cheese. Sinclair ploughs ahead:

‘In the States, it saddens me to say, you see big piles of capitalism just sitting round and rusting out, and here,’ he waves at the minarets expectant outside, like sets of frilly skittles, ‘I think – “better an agent, a middleman to be, than wait; better be in between than wait for the negative, the entropy, to eat your bones”. The cancer of history, gentlemen. The winding down of all that’s dear and true.’

Cass accepts Sinclair’s arm pressing him, as the talk of peace and war rolls on, and Sinclair thinks, I know, ‘Power in the world means taking assholes as you find them. Traditions are a bonus, a given quantity.’ His embrace is somewhere between constraint and sex, and Cass allows it, polite and shrewd. Perhaps in love.

‘Better the sporting gun than napalm,’ Sinclair roars, ‘although, for little tribal wars napalm would be neater, and can also be arranged.’ I feel excluded, and the sheiks poke at our advanced material on the beds, unmoved and unconvinced: it’s all just stuff.

‘Off to arrange the battle,’ Sinclair says, rousing a storm of suits and robes, bank clerks beneath but above, outside, an envelope of dervish, silent, disciplined.

I stay behind with Cass, we stand like butler and chambermaid, marooned without our orders.

I say, ‘What we need’s some women here.’ He looks at our rubbish.

‘You mean to tidy up?’

‘No, for their sensibility,’ and he replies, ‘Well, won’t I do?’

I say, ‘We’re both quite novices, but Sinclair is more practised at most things,’ and Cass picks up on this and asks, ‘Is Sinclair such a great man? To mediate requires some power, and he has only names and packing cases. Catenna brought an army, even if it did get swallowed up.’

‘Swallowed? How?’

‘He started as a Roman general, and became a Greek strategos. What happened to the first army? Not assimilation, Jayman, not transmogrification. Armies, armies, Jayman. An entourage too. A general, not a murderer. Is that what you two have to offer?’

I say proudly, ‘We have exhausted our own culture. We have come to its margin. And yet we are its leading edge. Where you find the edge, there you find the most danger, the place where you are most decisive. We observe, seek out, sell. We do not kill, we certainly don’t make money.’ We sound like idiots.

Cass flicks me with a webbing strap, and I feel my old man of the sea flinch back. Cass laughs, and I think he mutters, something about mystical salesmen.

He asks, ‘Why should I give you guys our guys’ money?’ and I answer, ‘From love, Cass, what else?’ And he laughs and laughs.

 

 

* * *

 

 

‘Small, these armies,’ says Sinclair, inspecting them, two species of crabs in their different armours. ‘But aggressive. Very aggressive.’

I notice some of the tric-trac players in the ranks, and they stick out their chins fiercely and grin.

‘Romans and Greeks,’ says Sinclair. ‘Just like at school. Dionysius and Apollo. Cybele and the Gorgon. Changing shapes. Like Cass and his unmerry men. And glooming everyone to stone, like Jayman here.’

We are surrounded by mini-generals with togas over unspotted armour. Sinclair says irritably, ‘You should have organised something in this city. Spies, informers. Bearers at least.’

I say, ‘I did. I know these guys. They’re turning a dishonest buck. What more could I do?’

Some are shouting, some lying in the foetal position, as if waiting for Sinclair’s word to be born again. It is a profoundly transgressive situation. Sinclair rears up, massive. He commands two armies.

‘The hunt, the hunt,’ he shouts. ‘We must give them something to hunt, to catch.’

I think, ‘I don’t want any of this. Hell no, I won’t go. It takes no courage to say “no”.’ And yet I’m glued here.

And suddenly we’re running, Sinclair and I. Me, the grasshopper-action, knees pumping up to my chin, he the better-fed, the bomb-shaped one, head dwindling up into worn-out matting, the belly going strong from side to side, thin Wall Street legs, calves like lamb cutlets. I look like the clockwork hare, and he the cartoon police dog.

‘Turn their flanks!’ he roars.

He wants the little armies to chase our lures, not clash ignorantly into each other like two football squads. A great man. A very great man, one of the founders of a proximate world, a future that doesn’t worry about what comes next – and not a bad tactician, though running in this heat sends you straight to hellfire in a tarry net.

Sinclair slips out of his pants, his hairpin legs all cotton-fuzzed.

‘Come on,’ he screams, ‘you fucking white man’s batman,’ and laughing on an uprise of breath, my fine pumping, action is thrown out. If I had studied more, and let my brain do the body’s work, I should be flying now, instead of taxi-ing.

The customers are standing on a knoll, they must be laughing, but all I hear is padding of bare feet, a scrape of bronze, the pounding of the heavy metal groups meshed together on the transistors – and then, the good old roar I know so well, of mercenaries entering into the spirit, and forgetting the body.

I shout, ‘Sinclair! We are the prize, the lures, the proxies – they’re after us! If you go, it’s part of your dream, not mine! We are the beasts, the animals! The armies – they’re hungry!’

We are genetic freaks, ripe for the culling – Sinclair, with his missile system, escaping from some lab, the wires, the little tubes flash. Flash! a roar, he’s done the launch, the gadget farts out in the sand. The armies hanging back – but then the Greeks are off again, the Romans pound along, their armour hot and critical as magnesium primed with sweat, and at the last I shout, ‘Great man!’

And Sinclair turns, back in himself, back in his body. The man of peace and mediation now, and not hare nor otter, skylark nor boar, nor any hunted thing. He turns, holds up his hand. The warriors stop.

‘No, no,’ he says. ‘First, you must wait. Then, when I and the lad here have the thing set up – then, you must chase. The hunt, the royal hunt: then it begins.’

I think, ‘And never stops, being Sinclair’s idea to start up the clockwork here’, but how, and why, it’s far from clear.

The clients reassured, the armies wheel around and take a break. I hear Sinclair explaining, ‘No, not a movie – it’s your history you’re seeing,’ and Cass says, ‘It seems to me the killing is too easy here. The game is made of balances, even the manhunt. If your systems fail, the hunt’s impossible. And if they work – too easy.’

I say, ‘The new game’s populism, Cass. Not catching things, but getting lots of people marshalled up behind the sporting gentlemen. Animals are quite irrelevant, and for the mediator the purpose is to have ideas and groupings fixed.’

‘Haha,’ says Cass, ‘another big reactionary scam, to sucker everyone in, then do a deal when blood is on the way – then, off to the bank again.’ He does not seem offended. I hear him mutter, ‘My bank’, but he says, ‘Well, for vendetta, your little tricks would work quite well. They’d follow someone anywhere, and then, quite anonymously would jelly them, after a year, a decade even?’

I say, ‘I guess so. Yes, you could.’

He persists, ‘And so, it isn’t on. These are just gadgets that a man might want. Or – just do without, easily, for a thousand years. It’s your ideas, Jayman my dear, they just don’t …’ and he shakes his head sadly, as if he would have enjoyed losing money on us. We are all steps in Sinclair’s ladder, and it goes up and up, beyond the clouds, searching for the biggest, the original snake, escape chute that gets him out of trouble, out of greatness.

I say, ‘Well, there is Catenna. Sinclair’s obsession. Sinclair seeks out the guilty, to forgive them. Subject them. People, he says, follow the guilty, since one guilt calls to another.’

‘I’m not guilty of anything,’ says Cass, and smiles.

He takes over from Sinclair, pays the centurions, makes the warriors knock their armour into shape with rubber hammers.

We shall hunt again tomorrow, and the Greeks and Romans trudge off singing. They have nothing, no dogs follow them. But they have money, and tuck it in their armour.

I say to Cass, ‘Rebellion is a sacred thing, and I’m not worthy. A rebel fights his fears, it’s true, but also his opponents,’ and Cass says, ‘You should run with the herd sometimes, Jayman.’ It’s most puzzling.

 

 

 

three

 

 

Our buyers will stay, we have impressed them with our strangeness and ambition. They say they’ll transform the city, ‘Poverty like this will soon die out, a disgrace,’ and become quite friendly, they call me ‘Killer Jayman’, and without alcohol it’s an amazing perform­ance. Someone brings out a cake, and we find it’s made of icecream.

‘I could take this to my bed,’ says Sinclair, scooping out a slice and stuffing it inside his trousers.

Cass tells me, ‘They’d like you to be the hare,’ and smiles, turns down his mouth to show he doesn’t quite approve, but as a favour, perhaps … At first I think they want me to be Herr, and replace Sinclair, but no – tomorrow they want to see me run. Cass explains, I’m to be coursed, ‘It’s only fun with humans. Sinclair is a demi-god, and besides – those little stick legs!’

‘No, no,’ I say, ‘Sinclair would never permit ... me, one of his creatures, his creations,’ but now he grins, and with a languid paw he hands me over: ‘One of the disadvantages, old boy, the dark side of your trade or calling.’

I say to Cass, ‘I need snow and ice, not just women for their sensibilities. Need other people here, to die for me, fill up the armour suits with fresh bones and head bowls,’ and he smiles, and says, ‘That was always Sinclair’s line. He got it from Catenna,’ and I am overwhelmed with shame, at being sold, to make a sale. Worse than being lost at cards, like a bundle of serfs, or a king’s valuable daughter. Sorcerer’s apprentice become a fox, to be eaten on the trot, from stiff tail and backside up.

Our customers stay in the hotel with us, and Sinclair says, ‘Just like a real hunting party.’ There is nothing we can eat. I envy the ignorance of the fox, the stag, who sleep their usual edge of sleep before the chase. Cass offers to console me, but I say, ‘I’m just raw meat’, and I think of being in some encapsulated condition where there’s no danger, no crime to commit, except masturbation, and no death penalty ever. And my old man of the sea is excited about tomorrow’s trip, and what a view he’ll have.

Cass says just put on a show, but I know, failure always costs more than you reckon.

If I fail, how can Sinclair punish me? Where could I run? For the promise of land in Macedonia, a payoff from the Roman army? Or tendons jabbed apart, that Greek armour doesn’t reach the sensitive spots, and then, those minor gods are always wasting people when it’s not expected. Or I could wait for Islam, but I feel too old already. A way of life, of truth, of discipline – I’ve reached the ho-hum age about all that, besides, somewhere there are sheriffs and the cops who have my dossier. Irrevocably modern, with a document that follows me like the word of God; Achilles and his heels.

Much easier, living with the Cajuns, beaten so often it had lost its force, one of so many beaten peoples, on bony plains and swamps and icefields. Beaten by the champ, and so invented music.

Here, we have the heavy metal, and the frantic trumpet, and the muezzin’s voice, no doubt Catenna’s armies have some slave refrain, some chant to keep the night away. Catenna’s armies: rented out to give Sinclair something to practise with. And who but Cass could pay?

Cass says, ‘We haven’t yet been beaten,’ and I say, ‘Good for you,’ and flex my legs for running.

Theodolyte looking for the vanishing point, in the flat, where I can vanish. Brother rabbit, showing the way. A Cajun queen: pick me up in her convertible, swish off on a green marble road, with rose-pink milestones.

I say to Sinclair, ‘If we become objects of their hospitality, how can you mediate? If you make me run, you’ve become part of their side.’

‘But you have not, Jayman. You define me. Am I prepared to stake you in a contest? Risk losing your services? You are a key.’

I say, ‘But I have no autonomy. If I escape, your lures are no good. If I’m caught, what will they do to me?’

I sound pitiful. I feel worse. Sinclair is triumphant.

‘Exactly. It’s that unknown that proves my point. If they damage you, it means they don’t trust me. If I don’t let you run – it means I don’t trust them. So, Jayman, run. It’s bitter, but it’s noble. Besides, it’s precisely this new politics, this new religion, where our old values don’t count. Once they countered our money with magic: now, they have the money. Their magic didn’t work. Ours must. Am I understood, Jayman? There aren’t any communists any more: and for us, that’s a terrible blow. All those ideas about reason being important, and the economic base the key! Well, we could make a deal with that, or see them as our rivals. But now – I tell you, we have to live on earth with human beings, Jayman. It’s tough and often repellant, but, there it is. And if we can’t exploit the guys, we have to – kind of lever them. And Sufism is an answer. So is killing animals, since it’s all that’s left. You, Jayman, are kind of in between: my world, their world, Brer Rabbit’s world.’

Towards dawn, a Doris Day movie comes on the TV, and they wake Sinclair to watch it. The flickering is like my soul in a cube. Sinclair has never before explained the mission and my part in it so well. A part central, but in all dimensions, dogsbody.

In one of the TV spots I see the start of my favourite mini-tale – a white girl and a black girl driving a Ferrari through downtown Miami. Whores, liberals, car buffs. All of those. But the clip runs out, and I shall never see the full story, of where they’re going, are they meeting the owner of the car?

I flex my legs, and something pops. The dying grasshopper. Sinclair is talking about Pilgrim. He means me. Cass takes this wrong, and whispers to me on his serpent’s breath, ‘That fat tycoon, can’t you get shot of him?’ and shows me a little shooter that would do just that.

But then I hear him say to Sinclair, that I’m a ‘typical semi-cultural, semi-rebellious subperson, confused and self-downtreading’, and I see that Cass is a tempter, though I’ve little time for downmarket Christian epics, and Sinclair looks offended since he likes being surrounded by people with gigantic pretensions.

It would be easier if these Arabs were Americans, easier to deal with them, but, I reflect, I must make my history, make history, and so must play my hand.

The others are taking bets on me, and Sinclair joins in. Do I have fantasies of persecution? This should be the cure.

Cass says, ‘You’re going to do it then? Run? Be hunted?’

Stiffly, I say, ‘You’d better fix those electronics, if you’re going to buy them.’

‘Oh, I shall, Jayman, I shall. I do exactly what I like. What’s right, what is allowed. I’m the Protestant, not you – you must conform, if unenthusiastically.’

I console myself, thinking, ‘Slavery makes the lasting empires,’ try to pop my kneejoints back. Being hunted is a game of submission and false humility, and I prepare for my moment of revelation, or it may be heart attack.

I start running aggressively. I pound the dust, like a runner with the ball. I am the ball. My clothes feel like zinc hangings, my guts bob inside me, my tongue clangs up and down. My blood turns to steam and whistles out my ears. The Romans are moving, and I see the chi-rho signs levelled to pin me. The Greeks whirl like a defence squad and head us all off. We are moving fast, and I dump my set of tracing-wires, in case I find a hole to hide somewhere.

I am an animal, informed about time, death, the end of the world, my species melting down in one last pot. I cross a line: there is flashing. I feel as if I have eaten baloney sandwiches stuffed with Ecstasy. I am in darkness. My heart squelches away. Before me in the dark there is a dark print, a huge 4-F shoe, that glows dull white, and then cools down to red. I am terrified. It is one of mine. I stumble into a deep black hall, for storing things and keeping quiet about its own existence for centuries. I know everything, but inside nature is fighting back. It brands me with death signs from the inside out.

Catenna appears, inside me. I feel him as a wiry lump of gristle, like a hunter’s lure, inside my chest. He is illuminated. He is cool, whiter than a Cajun queen, whiter than drifts of snow with cougar shit on top like currants. I wait for him to speak, my blood is billowing in my arteries, my old man of the sea is whistled out with wind and bloodlust, – heart and lungs flop down exhausted, anywhere.

‘Catenna!’ I cry. I think I hear a mumble about ‘extremes of negativity’. I sit down in my footprint. It is bigger than a savage’s, and I regret the red meat I have eaten, women let cook for me, animals eviscerated and thrown away untasted from my table.

Catenna fades away inside me like a sodium flare. There is smoke on the floor of my mouth. I read the signs on the warehouse walls: in Greek, or Latin, or Karosthi. Before all choice wisdom of India was discovered. A wall of this – cellar? cistern? mausoleum? basilica? – is covered with gigantic lists of everything, cow humps and udders, flowers for dyeing, things that look like billiard cues – Catenna was a great compiler, that at least they cannot steal. Platoons of beetles ready for – my – grave duty stand idly by, or just march up and down.

I have found Catenna. It is no mystery. It is an ever-deepening mystery. And not just god of war, of guilt, revenge: redemption neatly coming after. A god of inventories. A last flicker, wink or whisper. ‘You are free.’ I need a ticket, thank you, to go on or back, not freedom. Not even asked what I wanted, anyway.

I stick my snout carefully from the hole. Our customers are on a ridge, waving their arms; albino vultures. The Greeks have taken to beating shit out of the Romans, pelting them with car parts and old cans. All shining pure because there’s no humidity here, and Sinclair hovers like a demi-god, wringing his hands, and shouting not to kill each other, there’s no fucking insurance. Besides, ‘He’s over here, here’s Jayman.’

But Cass come over, hugs me, says, ‘You’re free now, aren’t you? Got the message in the wine store?’

Our clients only want the guns, it seems. I’d gone to earth, and blocked the radio signals, and besides, hunting with guided bullets is unsporting, so they say.

Sinclair is sure it’s all my fault, and says, ‘There will be hell to pay for these,’ pointing to two corpses. A centurion, and a shrimpy private, struck down by unseen objects. I say, ‘Perhaps the gods ...’ But Sinclair is on me like a stone, with talk of blasphemy, and how we had to hope the dead had no women waiting for them. ‘Though what the hell you do here without women ...’ – and how we must respect whatever jurisdiction makes its claims. Here on the margin, rules count for more. In the metropolis, it’s so efficient and so quick, you get away with murder, though in my own goddam case the corpse drags on behind me like a fetter.

Sinclair says, ‘Catenna loved all soldiers, live or dead, his or the enemy’s.’

The bodies of the rented soldiers are loaded on a cart and displayed to their mates. The little private has been stabbed, and I see some throwing knives away.

Sinclair returns to me: I say, ‘What am I supposed to learn from this? Cass asked me, “Did I learn?” How does one ever learn?’

And Sinclair says, ‘Castration. Some of the clients suggest it might do for you. Smooth off your rough edges. You’re too old for it to leave a gap, too much free time. Catenna started quite a fashion, and I thought, after screwing up with the sale, entering into the wrong spirit of things, failing to mediate ... Just see it as a hunting accident, the kind of thing they used to hurry plot action along.’

My heart starts up again, like a factory of toads, the blood heats up, dissolves, big blotches stand out on my hands. My legs have thrown their pins this time, and lie like broken stilts.

Sinclair is quite serious, and I think of an appeal to Cass. But perhaps he’s had the operation – or, in my case, suggested it.

Sinclair says, ‘It might start a bud of faith in you, a bud of green among those sterile colours of the flesh and blood, the white and red, the purity and the passion.’

I see the little lances of the armies, their bandilleros red and white, the surgeons’ colours; the troops have scrubbed their armour gold. I say, ‘Faith is the last thing I can handle at this moment’, and Sinclair goes on about the castrations when Catenna was immured. ‘Went to live in an altar, for bravado, or for world-weariness, so to preserve the power, the living god. Sniffing the blood, the tribute ...’

I am marbled and crusted with terror. I say, ‘Even a Cajun queen can’t ask that much,’ and they laugh. It has the right effect, and I am one of them again, one of the good guys.

Sinclair laughs, and says, ‘Well, with all the old tricks falling down, we must invent, try out the scenarios for when we are at last one world, and when there are shared values and markets, all that crap, one world religion, all the walls and ideologies gone down,’ and everyone looks solemn, and I fancy Cass is starting up a mantra, but he says, ‘It would make a memorable afternoon in the field. Like the old days. A willing victim, the dogs with tongues ...’ and I think of Sinclair’s, reaching for wisdom, a word snaking up or down in Cass.

I say, ‘I should submit, of course,’ and my old man of the sea is excited and rocks up and down. ‘Oh yes,’ but they think I mean I’m plotting vendettas, and so back off.

The generals are settling for blood money, the clients want to shoot their guns, and form an honour party. The fire a volley, and then many more. A Greek takes his lyre and improvises. The strophes multiply like eels. Soon we are all weeping. I, for the salvation of my testicles, the others for beauty, the fine fit of their polished handmedowns – who knows? Fine dovetailing of romantic and restraint. Sinclair asks, ‘Who were those two bozos anyway?’ And they tell him, ‘Just guys hanging round, waiting for enlistment in the Roman army.’

Sinclair looks proud: ‘Anywhere else, they’d have had a long wait.’

A violinist joins in, the instruments of our more modern world appear – the tar, a big zither mounted on a goat, some tiny finger drums. The radios all turned down provide a sea of interference and atmospheric drumming, like long, dead fingers clacking.

And so we all submit, make up satires at a buck a time, and argue – how many trumpeters there were, who got the highest note. We trail back to the hotel, our cheeks wet with tears, uniforms shredded or cast off, robes like winding sheets; the casualties spotted with pompons like two football queens. Our grief turns them into accidental deaths, without rancour.

Sinclair does the rounds with his wallet, and I say, ‘Watch the racial stereotypes, Sinclair.’

He says, ‘I don’t mind my stereotype, why should they? Besides, they need the cash. We charge this to the foundation.’

It has been a fine spectacle, and Catenna would be – is – mollified, rattling and gurgling in his looted warehouse.

Sinclair is impatient, and proposes that they pay him, then ‘We’ll be off to Europe’, as the muezzin calls.

There is a silence. Cass laughs and says, ‘You’re there already, Sinclair. Catenna forged the link. Our bull, you see, is not the kind with humps, but European. Catenna tacked the two edges together here, the two empires.’ Sinclair looks blank. Cass goes on, ‘Zeus fucked Europa. Catenna on that occasion, right here, standing in for the bull. We have become,’ he smiles lazily, ‘part – a founding part – of your heritage, Sinclair. We are already there, in Europe.’ Cass leads me aside. ‘In any case, Jayman, we have our plans. We are to be in the future, whatever it is, under our own names. Now that the nineteenth century’s back – or should I say, now that the prejudices of the last, or current, century have disappeared, we must attempt to sneak in everywhere.’

‘Sneak in?’ I ask, surprised.

‘A manner of speaking.’ He leads me to a room off the main street. I have never seen so many broken billiard cues and golf clubs. So that’s where they all end up. There is a plate on the door which seems to read ‘Whirling and banking’. Our customers are all there, looking happier but less grand, and much less rich. They are drinking coffee, or maybe it’s a ritual and they’re drinking something in the coffee.

They congratulate me on my running: Cass says, ‘For us, Catenna was a great, a very great, man. And prophet. Before Islam, but nonetheless a prophet in the big time.’

‘Prophet of what?’

‘Of running. Of the future,’ Cass replies.

I ask, ‘Then you are heretics?’

Cass says, ‘We err, if we err, only as regards belief. We conform, in our behaviour, to the rules. We compete, that’s all, with extra, even secret, vigour.’ He eyes the coffee-pot.

‘Magic?’ I ask

‘Syncretism,’ he says.

‘Business as usual, then. But why welcome me here?’

Cass gestures to show my question is a clumsy one: ‘The Greeks and Romans – who were they? Not passport holders. And come to that, who are we? All the peoples here who left a culture, have passed into the magical sphere, the one you both aspire to. Those Greeks and Romans, Jayman, who you saw today, and two fine specimens carried off and in reanimation: – all shamans.’ He pours from the pot: it tastes of apricots, is green. Before, I could swear it was Nescafé.

I ask, ‘You mean, you’re resurrecting them, the soldiers?’

He says, ‘We have every hope. Although it often takes until after blood money is paid and compensation settled.’

‘And Sinclair? And our wheeler-dealing?’

Cass says, ‘We think that Sinclair too is a great, yes, a great man; of peace and trade, and high professionalism. Profoundly chaste, avoids extremes and negativity.’

I say, ‘Yes, if those are virtues here.’

‘Well,’ says Cass, ‘overall, we don’t give a shit about his character – what matters is not being done down, but being able to sucker in.’

I say, ‘Sinclair has no dominions, rules nothing, is neither Hamlet nor Caesar.’

Cass is unimpressed. ‘Ghosts, poison, vendetta. We’re looking for more practical things. A new world stage. No fundamentalism.’

I persist, ‘Sinclair doesn’t have a court, he has me. But I’m not against enthusiasm, I don’t want this reactionary scam of gentlemanly hunters screwing everything up.’

Cass laughs. ‘Then classical empires? Demigods? I guess it might come into a future – imperfect, that’s to say.’

I say, ‘I’m interested in the codes you live by. But my real job is stopping the conspiracy.’

He laughs again, ‘Dear Jayman, my big lame friend! You’re there to stop the dagger, not the plot. What attracts me to Sinclair is the gangster part, the sanctimonious side – selling rifles to the Indians, then going back to tell palefaces why.’

I say, ‘Well, shooting things is alien to me – just a professional accident. I like things rich and strange.’

‘And I like them corrupt, but ready to be straightened out, young Jayman.’ Cass is amused, but not by me. ‘The more curious you are, my friend, the more you’ll find people are inscrutable, make non-negotiable demands. Jayman, as an aide, a learner, you’re a disaster. Clumsy too.’

It’s true. I admire the simple, automatic things: playing a scale, growing a plant.

‘But,’ says Cass, ‘you were brave when they wanted to cut your balls off.’

‘Sinclair says I spoiled the sport,’ I say.

‘Only a great man could say that.’

 

 

* * *

 

 

I tell Sinclair, ‘I didn’t exactly refuse, just ran faster, in my fashion. Besides, your clients seem to be some secret society, Cass the head wizard.’

‘Yes, yes, of course,’ he says, ‘they’re a bank.’

I insist: ‘I thought it was to do with religion,’ and I hear Catenna rumbling away behind the walls, a bagpipe full of bum notes and rancid stew, his pig eyes with blond pig lashes a flat grey in his flat grey skin.

‘Lead poisoning,’ says Sinclair, reading my thoughts. ‘But why should you think Catenna – any god – was likeable?’

I remember, ‘You wanted me to love you, Sinclair,’ though now I see in him too a bit of pig, fermenting his own poisons. ‘And you seem ambiguous about loving Cass.’

Impatiently, he says, ‘Yes, yes. Of course he doesn’t have the real power, here on the margin. But we must be ready – all kinds of markets, empires, federations, superstitions. Everywhere lamenting that it’s all fragmenting, everywhere rushing together at the speed of language. Must get ourselves a piece of the action, though here Catenna still holds sway.’ And he hams, ‘From beyond the tomb. For ever,’ but I see that he believes. He pretends to listen to the dead.

He tells me, ‘You’re a wanderer and a sceptic, while I aspire to centrality. Perhaps we should leave our junk here, get closer to Europe’s core?’

 

 

* * *

 

 

We go to consult Catenna in his cistern, ‘To clear our minds, and open to the other world,’ as Sinclair says. It is still massively empty, walls covered with game scores, infinite computations.

‘Perhaps this was wallpaper,’ Sinclair muses. ‘Once you mess around with history, almost anything becomes something else, usually much less interesting. But can’t you feel Catenna here, young Jayman, feel his great belly – don’t you feel he had a massive gut? And that cold eye! Everything was one to him, the same.’

‘Wallpaper.’

‘Exactly.’

To me, Catenna says to get the hell off out, leave him to manage his own people, take our scams elsewhere, and he’ll look after the dead, if they are dead, and if not, then that’s good too and goes down in the books.

‘Where things still matter,’ Sinclair thinks aloud, ‘ideas and faith and poverty still rule the roost. That’s where I see myself. Still. Not where you guys—’ he includes me, the losers, the off-whites and the poor, the credulous ‘—accept their lot, but where they’re just too proud, or maybe just too ignorant or bigoted to give up asking goddam questions. Great things, young Jayman,’ he stares fascinated as I heave my joints into their shrunken sockets, ‘All the things that scared our fathers, God and Bolshevism, losing out and being impotent – all gone by the board, into a new ball game. Except perhaps here—’ he bangs his hand on the altar and it booms empty.

Perhaps this cistern could have been a place for games, down in the cool black, or for Turkish wrestling, something slippery. Sinclair gallops on: ‘That Islam is precarious, creates a nervousness, is built on one, is clear. Much more concerned with status than with truth. Who’s got the bigger prophet. Behaving cool, pretending not to care about the complexes and insults. Being fucked about by others, but still having to get your slice. But, Jayman, I ask, “How long?” “How long?” I ask. When is the next wave coming? Mounted on what? Not a camel, that’s for sure.’

The authentic voice of Catenna: planter of milestones on no roads: overstriker of his image on the coins of others.

A raucous shouting, ‘Get out of here, get out of my pit.’ It is a sign. Cass is waiting. He says, ‘One of the Romans died. The other we resurrected. But the atmosphere is poor: miracles are not thought well of here, they reek of extremity. You should be off.’

Sinclair is pleased to go, so is my old man of the sea, who claps spurs to my ears. Sinclair says the tourists will flock here, when they get some plumbing in: the balances restored. There is another roar: ‘Out!’ It may have been an echo. With dignity, Sinclair bows to Cass, who kisses him.

We all retain our reputations. Catenna and Sinclair as great, even very great, men.

All are pleased to see us leave, and empty hands are raised in definitive farewell. I dissolve my network of spies and friends. I say, ‘It is enough,’ and Sinclair says; ‘They want us out? That’s good. But we’ll be back.’

After all, he wants peace, not interference, so being thrown out is a success. He asks aloud, ‘But is the seed of faith planted,’ and I answer: ‘In me, Sinclair, yes.’

I hear him say, ‘I have to hire a busted revolutionary to guard my ass. Well, well, my, my.’

Ah yes, the Movement in the States, all dwindling down, slid into decor and a metaphor for loneliness, and I think, ‘I’m cooked, burnt through,’ and Sinclair reads my thought and says, ‘Poor Jayman, thrown out of all the institutions but never giving up on them, still hooked on making it, and being calm and happy, making friends. Some revolutionary, Jayman! Some making it!’

 

 

four

 

 

He is embittered, though we had a fair run here. I see his fair lashes and the eyes as flat as obols, copper with a bluish lustre, as though blanked off with cataract. Eyes musing on the cabbala and wallflowers: goat stew, followed by a nap.

We trundle ourselves off down the hill, Sinclair muttering ‘Vanity, vanity’, as he pushes the publicity junk and empty cases down the hill, down to the plain. In a trolley marked Jeddah airport. Then he surrenders to the decencies, and lets me push him. Stuffed in the steel basket, he’s the fat ant and I’m the grasshopper, joints umbrella-splayed and cranked together with Styrofoam joists.

‘Still as hot as hell,’ he says smugly, as we go down. My body is a brake, a ‘z’, the cart’s wheels wobble with its shakes. Sinclair says, ‘A mystery. A complete mystery, these guys. Though I’m impressed.’

For a moment I am tempted to kill him. But I don’t want another old man of the sea on my back. I whisper, ‘It means obeying. And being taken care of by guys like you.’

We pass a line of mausolea, very small, the tiles coming off, and grass growing on the knobs. They look like souvenirs of Tamurlaine’s. Sinclair says, ‘You see, they should have continued like that. The dead are very important, Jayman.’

‘I know.’

‘They outnumber us, I believe. Although we are relentlessly prolific. Lots of husbands, not much husbandry, haha. Thinking of the dead, if we had buried Catenna, let him die a reasonable death, go down with the rest, we needn’t lay his shade like this.’

Sinclair will not be silent: ‘Look for the origins,’ he says. ‘What unites the Arabs and everyone else is not always having been here,’ and he goes on, ‘Not all dervishes, you know, young Jayman, whirl. Some just sit still and smoke or think.’

Cass is waiting at the bottom of the hill: ‘Are you taking Catenna? We’ll be glad to be rid of him.’

He is no longer the friendly serpent who entertained us on the hill. ‘Arabs change like that,’ says Sinclair noisily.

The plain is full of geese and blue streams, roses and bright green, some of this is binliners, but all in all it is a kind of paradise. Wrestlers are oiling up from cans of vegetable oil, and leaping.

Sinclair says, ‘You came all this way to spit in our eye? That I call real nice,’ and Cass replies, ‘We value our obedience highly. Underneath, is chaos and uncaring: United states. Animal movements.’

I think how Sinclair must watch his tongue next time. Animal movements. And how when we reach Europe proper, he will have to set me free.

Sinclair goes on, ‘Peace is important, but if you guys prefer, then I’ll say that mediation is more important.’

He dismounts from his trolley. He has become much fatter on the mountain. I miss the evening games of tric-trac, telling the Greeks and Romans about animal rights and Berkeley. Sinclair says, ‘As for your freedom, Jayman, in Europe they’re all free. Perhaps you’d prefer some closer kind of bonding. If not to me, then to my quest, our quest. Historically ...’ but I am already thinking, well, for a guy like me who makes mistakes, even defining freedom and carrying the results dead on my shoulders, perhaps some kind of leash, a servitude? It doesn’t mean too much to Cass, who already has his own things to obey. And, I suppose, to disobey.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Sinclair has worked out a new diplomacy. He has airline route maps, covered with triangles no company will fly. He wants to create a new region, a thin wedge whose point starts in Germany and ends here, in Dog City. We, marshalling the traffic up and down.

I tell Sinclair, ‘Forget it, there’s nothing here. Green marble roads that vanish in the desert, obsidian you might flake into something sharp, coins worn for millennia – nothing.’

And Sinclair says weakly, for reassurance, ‘Well, there’s us.’ There is living here, which is terrible, frightening, dull. And there is not living here, which may be worse, or change, or death. Dull. Missing things, things as they were, the trumpeter who misses notes but tries.

I never invented anything. I know how Cass feels. Invention is a blasphemy. Change a poke in the eye for order. My legs are shot. Catenna rumbles in me like intestines. We are standing by a milestone, one of his. Catenna, completing or renouncing his fifth consulship, being handed Asia on a plate: or could it be a milestone he’s accepting?

‘It is the sun,’ says Cass. ‘On a field altar. Catenna brought the sun here, and had to dig a pit to hide from it.’

Catenna’s sun presses down on us. Useless to worship it, it never goes away. It rots the melons on the stalk, and Sinclair complains again about his balls. After the hotbox, I felt cool, but it’s made my legs go brittle. The armour suits are full of bones, bones for making the new soldiers, and I’m ready for recycling. Cass says,

‘Well, Jayman, you did well, survived this war, and left us nothing. Not even your spare parts. You can fight again – Catenna needs troops like you. Martyrs we can recycle easily, but leathery old soldiers, they go on and on.’

He seems unsentimental, but as we leave, he gives my hand a squeeze, and whispers, ‘Many, many more campaigns. And there’s no limit to the consulships that anyone can hold, or claim.’

Catenna’s sun pokes at our sweaty scalps, the heavy metal bands boom off the mountainside, and for the first time, though now they’re far away, I see circles of people dancing – young girls in bud, or dervishes.

Sinclair ponders. ‘I wonder what Cass gave us, Jayman. All these goddam miserable people. It’s like performing bears’ – we had seen hundreds on the ferry to Europe – ‘one you can feel indignant about, but not a mass of them.’

‘Politics is over, Sinclair,’ I say, but he comes back, ‘Nonsense. Diplomacy and interests, how can they stop? I want more history, more – I leave you with the rest, the music, magic, fashion. You keep the crusts, I’ll drink the soup.’

I tell him, ‘The seed of faith will uproot the tree of certainty.’ But it’s a two-edged axe. Sinclair says, ‘That’s what Catenna gave me – history. Faith.’ Gave him? He goes on, ‘And Cass gave nothing, but he showed me, why people obey. Because, Jayman, they believe. Still. They have faith. Or history. And that’s why they don’t submit, but Mr Jayman, free, he will submit, because he has no faith, no history. So, no goddam scepticism from you!’

Cass’s apple was the fruit of accord, and even, up to a point, forgiveness. Lucky for Sinclair, who says, ‘We shall arrive at the airport. But the miles we shall have covered in the train.’

 

 

* * *

 

We wait to be met off no flight, from no point of departure. Sinclair changes money, from no source. I say, ‘Disobedience ...’ and Sinclair interrupts to say: ‘Of course, there are no ethics, not even empirical selves to hang our hats on, but there is still space ...’ when we are taken off to meet the first of the three Annas. Everyone is pleased to see us, everyone is quick to pass us on.

Sinclair says, ‘The Annas are top European chiefs, and all from hunting countries. Here, we shall play the card of Islam. Here, at the gates of Vienna. Here they know all about collateral campaigns. They form new regions, ethnic leagues, triangles in real space.’

I say, ‘I think we’ve come too late,’ but Sinclair’s off, he says, ‘Vienna, with its museums of defeat, is on the edge. And if they fear the Turks, think what the desert Arabs do to them! This false sophistication, Jayman, touch of homosex, through being enclosed so long, no doubt,’ and with his gesturing he drives away my Cajun queen, who’s hovering like a fawn. The dead old man of the sea is in the saddle, and my Indian lover loves no more. Irritated, I say, ‘What’s your vice, old boy? What let you down?’ and to my surprise he tells me.

‘I was an agent for women who wanted to run in politics. I got them money from the sponsors. Then, the sponsors wanted to be candidates.’

‘A fine line, but walked by many people,’ I say, ‘and not illegal.’

‘Well,’ says Sinclair, ‘It goes on. People want favours, other people give them. To excess.’

I say, ‘They got you on a prostitution earnings charge?’

He smiles shyly. ‘Only in some States. I was in the middle, got it from both sides. No protection, and of course, no thanks.’

I say, ‘And many careers were closed and those opening up—’

‘Involve being shackled to losers like yourself,’ he says sourly, adding, ‘Jayman. Dear boy, old friend.’

‘But that’s how you get money. You know how to ask.’

He relaxes, ‘Jayman, I don’t boast, but I could raise an army, and the next day they’d all die for me.’

So Sinclair is an unofficial person. I say, ‘You were a commissioned officer of feminism.’

He replies, ‘Silly charges, like silly compliments, can never be refuted.’

Cass was right. It is better to obey God than submit to Sinclair.

 

 

* * *

 

 

We strode into Europe like victorious Turks. Without suitcases, speaking only the German we had learnt from Nazis in the cinema. Sinclair insisted Austria was a great hunting country. The first Anna – Anna Fürst – told us things had moved on – from high culture to abstract things, to other civilisations: physics, engraving, banking, tourism. The other Annas would confirm this: the bourgeois had embalmed their culture. The problem was – its mausolea were decaying.

Anna rejoices in liberty, intelligence, she says. If money is the fashionable thing – so be it. If hunting – yes, that too was good. She judges with her brain, suppresses taste and interests. But hunting, though she wouldn’t criticise, gives a large scope for administering. People in one good season could wipe out the lot. So – you must make the argument for preserving wild pigs and leopards and the like, the rabbit and the swan, of course, and then rare toads, the butterfly immortalised by Klimt.

I ask Sinclair, ‘If she’s the top, what does the top do?’

‘First thing she does, Jayman, is want to see you wear a good suit,’ and that was OK too. I bought one, light as a silver leaf. I had my hair dyed ash, and in my frosted threads I seemed a piece of gossamer, a cobweb martyred by the frost.

It took two days and some Serbian tailors to fit Sinclair up. He says, ‘It’s Voltaire’s Europe again, Jayman,’ and I say:

‘But Sinclair, that’s just terrible. You’re the unwittiest, the least detached,’ and he says, ‘Screw that, Jayman, it’s the clothes that count,’ and he has them make a sky-blue coat and swish of hair behind, that looks like Elvis back to front, and then a scarf spotted with strawberries, ‘Just waiting for the cream’, he says.

When I mention hunting, he shakes his kit at me, and says: ‘Forget the past, forget Dog City, Cass and the banking dervishes; unless they turn up here, we must move fast, a little faster than the earth. A comet with its regular hours, that takes its morning tea in Tokyo, a scotch in London, last coffee in New York, pisses in the dark Pacific, and from the top again.’

It’s Sinclair selling futures and bestraddling planets. And we go to see a ‘wandering of the peoples’ – between tourism and refuge, exile and refuge, the peoples near the edge, the frontier, come to check out the neighbouring states. ‘This beats invasions,’ says Sinclair, enthusiastically.

They come to check the new values, housing coupons, welfare; whether to start over. ‘These must be Slovenes,’ Sinclair says, as they press against the guards. Of course, all can come in – but after assemblies on the grass, their euphoria is exhausted. Most go home, others move to the workers’ empty flats, the Prater’s wheel of life will give them hope.

Sinclair says, ‘I’m afraid I have nothing at all to say,’ and now we’re all Voltaires, I feel the same. When escape lies in all directions, then there’s no escape. My old man of the sea grips me, his knees have got new strength, he starts to choke me.

Anna Fürst suggests, ‘The communists might like to start a new party – a hunting party. A touch of red, a bit of green, and far away from cities.’ For a moment she looks like a confident fawn, dark eyebrows and the long lip you find in Budapest, lining up for tea dances. A creature whose free and abundant nature is riveted with gunshots, the hunters crying ‘fuck’ as guns go pop, and all turns into leaves and mud.

Sinclair says, ‘Hum, well. Those communist guys sure screwed up a noble vision. Do we want them along? But then again – who else do we have, that hasn’t fucked it up? At least they don’t blame it on their nature, or their god. I’d think it out again myself, right from the start – only, young Jayman, you’re quite right. It’s stereotypes that count. Belonging. Having culture. Representing something communal that once, maybe, has worked. On paper.’

I ask, ‘So dressing up will get us to the top? Already you have lost your accent, mine clings on, that pleasant blend of red man and of black, with just a touch of Cajun, and a slice of Portuguese: it’s like the scent of jasmine.’

Sinclair presses on: ‘Jayman, now, we Yanks represent tranquillity, the cosmopolitan experience, solitude in spades. Being continental, we provide these rednecks here with guidance. Remember, Jayman, we are still the cream. Here, you’ll find Nazis – any kind of bad exper­ience. The worst we ever did was try to spread the bucks around.

‘I walked my line. Thousands had walked before. But – I was pushed aside. You too, in your romantic way – your only fault was keeping a steady aim. If you’d not squeezed that goddam trigger, only pulled it wildly. Efficiency your downfall. Coolness. Always tremble a little when you take a life, it shows respect. Maybe it makes the old man upstairs—’ he points at the sky, brown at the rim as if with tannin ‘—a bit forgiving.’ He winks, and I wonder what he knows about forgiveness. Sinclair needs God to give his self-besottedness a centre.

He jokes with Anna Fürst: ‘We could put you in touch with some dervishes, only they don’t whirl.’ And he winks, as he did when talking of God’s jealousy of his creations, of his creatures.

He instructs Anna, that ‘Here, in the centre, there’s more energy. And it’s cool. More efficiency. Where we come from, on the edge, it’s hot as hell. Where it’s hottest, there the life is less. Here, where you all seem near extinction, there are profits. On the periphery, everything is wasted. Burned up.’

Anna Fürst says, ‘Democracy means I take orders, I don’t give them. So big projects don’t interest me. But who do you represent?’

Sinclair tells her, ‘No one. That representation stuff is for the birds. If I said I represent five spaced-out guys in Utah, in a cave, what would that give me, in your eyes? Or if I made it fifty million? And that they all voted for me? It would tell you what a lot of crazy guys there are in Utah. And what a lot of caves.’

Anna Fürst says, ‘Representative power reflects the male, or should I say, the masculine ethic. Are you rejecting that?’ But Sinclair doesn’t look like he’s rejecting anything.

She makes an international call – another Anna. We are meant to overhear. ‘They’re not preachers, and they’re not rich, but they preach and they have money. They join things together, they say. They find things by juxtaposition, tie them together. A kind of random splicing, DNA but not so scientific.’ She pauses, then: ‘They’ve lost me. Everything here is flowing like the tide. They want the top – but here, there isn’t one.’

They whisper, and I hear ‘Arabia deserta’. Anna Fürst repeats, ‘Are they reckless? No.’ And I think, ‘Yes, we are: not to ourselves, but to the normality out there somewhere, normality that passes through our sensors arriving always damascened grotesque. We are terrible, and ambitious.’ I hallucinate, thinking of normality as a seething nest of salamanders, and Sinclair asks, ‘Jayman, you having the same hallucinations as me? I see Cass, tall and green, an axlotl in the Western desert, threatened by the fires that rage out there, asking for help.’

I tell him, yes, the same scenario, but no sense of threat. I’ve great confidence in syncretism.

Sinclair ingratiates himself with Anna: ‘We have no merchandise, we’ve only credit. We need people to practise our leadership skills upon. To demonstrate our talents.’

She says, ‘As neutrals, we don’t have regiments for rent.’

‘For cash, then,’ says Sinclair as tycoon.

‘There are always people in uniform who’ll obey and take your orders. Even with an international, a human, or an ecological slant.’

She looks at us, fawn in a thicket. ‘You can pick a regiment from our toy catalogues.’

Sinclair says, ‘What fascinates me is your big horses, halfway between beasts and people, and the trainers, halfway between gipsies and Magyars. Big white buggers, they are, with big black genitalia, like painted on. All over the world, exported, packed in boxes, naturally. The whole world loves an animal, Jayman, if it’s trained by man to outclass men.’

I say, ‘We’re getting near the border here, Sinclair. We shouldn’t meddle with the lines between the species – genuine threat to order there!’

Sinclair couldn’t care less. He wants some Swabians for himself, is organising campaigns; he wants to win for once. The world with infinite shading here and there is endlessly a satisfaction, but I say:

‘Sinclair, I don’t like Europe. They’re very sensitive, no doubt, but also terrible, vicious people. This is the real jungle, Sinclair. The woods are full of witches, their heads full of grannies’ thoughts.’

He says, ‘Jayman, that’s momma’s talk, and from you, knight of the road, a deadeye, heir to the Wobblies, founder of a generation over in a flash ...’

My old man of the sea seems to have got sharper spurs. Perhaps it is he who drives me to socialise with Anna Fürst.

She tells me, ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t understand people of your class.’

She is preparing Sinclair’s soldiers, she says, and in her office there is a little harp, and to pass the time, I lay it on its back and strum it like a zither. And she says, ‘It’s dead. It’s not for playing. Above all, not like that.’

I remember saying to Sinclair, ‘Sinclair, I’ve never been so lonely in my life,’ and he replied, irritated, ‘Rubbish! You’re surrounded by people. It’s your strumming. Foreign music calms some people, but Anna is deadly calm already.’

I go with Anna to a dancing bar, where there’s a glitter lamp of silver. When it lights me up, I disappear, since I’m all silver. Anna says, ‘I can only see your fingernails – and those black cuffs look like two black zeroes.’

I ask, ‘Can I call you “little Anna”?’

She smiles, and with a great effort draws up her long upper lip, and shows two little teeth, like black pearls. We leave the Big Ben, and go to her place ‘for gentian cordials’. There is a big picture of a bomber flying low over black and silver water. Its aerials are like cobwebs: windows blacked out. I say, ‘Your choice is original,’ it’s the only decoration.

She says, ‘I hope you’re not being sexist.’

I see a case, like a crushed tric-trac set; it holds a zither, battered like a lozenge.

I say, ‘So you’re on good terms with power?’

‘I suppose so. The less you define it, the more you have. At least, the formal kind – which is mostly what there is here.’

She has six books. The first carves out Central Europes. Another is a syncretism of all beliefs. Then, there is a universal language for all peoples. There is a collection of Turkish artillery maps. I say, ‘You don’t do much reading.’

‘Not reading. Selection. It’s the books. The best.’

I say, ‘The best. Wow,’ and this pleases her.

I ask, ‘What do you do with all your money?’ and she says she’d like to keep a cat, but mostly it has gone on these six books, and in the bank. She asks about Sinclair and his projects, Cass and his bank.

I tell her, ‘The higher you go, the thinner the air, the greater the danger of hallucinations.’ I think of Catenna, down in his pit, down in the cool, eternal life.

She has concentrated herself mightily in this room. It’s a command post, and the bomber always zooming on its way, with messages and bombs. In my suit, I feel like a chrysalis.

She says, ‘Don’t give me any crap about Sinclair being a great man.’

I tell her, ‘He studies. He’s not concerned with serious things like massacres, the health of Gaia. That’s my specialty. Or rather, yes, he is concerned, but only as far as it affects him.’

‘He sounds like one of us,’ says Anna the Neutral, ‘just like one of us, rather exceptional, people.’

She brings out the cordials. They cloud when she adds something, and she says ‘arak’. I don’t trust her. She has set out three glasses. I don’t move to drink. She asks me, ‘Would you like to play something?’ offering the crushed zither. ‘No,’ I say.

‘You should just look at the liquids,’ she says.

We stare at them. She goes to catland, and I hallucinate badly. My old man of the sea becomes a crab, and when I fling him off he drops out of his shell, and I am forced to stuff him back. It is horrible. She has been somewhere nice, with pines and horses, their massive genitals blacked in with shoe polish.

I say, ‘Thank you very much.’ I hate her.

She is still high on her drinks, and on whoever the third one might be for. ‘Later,’ she says, ‘Someone will come for them,’ but whether from the kitchen or the occult, she doesn’t say.

I tell Sinclair all about it, and how she is more advanced than we are in the mystical, and he is frantic to take her out. This time, they drink the drinks. There are only two glasses. They taste of gentian. I ask, ‘And did you put your tongue in her ear?’ and he says, ‘There’s much more to that girl than you’d think.’

We go to the place our troops should muster in. It is degradation, worse than Dog City. ‘What’s this dump?’ asks Sinclair. ‘People dossing, burning alive, shooting up, crapping everywhere and calling out like crows. What kind of image is this?’

He says to me: ‘Anna has done nothing.’

I tell him, as if he’s a tourist or an alien, ‘You need committees to do anything, Sinclair. Money. Times, places.’

He goes to see Anna, furious, returns: ‘So, we must start our corps of hunters and guardians of the deep wood all by ourselves. Anna says, ‘You have my placet’, and when I insist that I want more, she says, ‘You have my placet – that’s worth more than the pair of you.’

Sinclair’s fake East Coast wears off when he’s annoyed, and he becomes a Southerner, failure too sickly sweet. When he’s calmer, he says: ‘I’m not using these dossers in my regiment. They are good human beings all, but anything natural would run from them. They smell.’

I have run too, and I smell. And when I run I shoot out pellets that smell of polecat, and I hope that if it gets in people’s eyes it makes them blind. I say, ‘Smell too is a form of offence, if there’s nothing else,’ but Sinclair tells me:

‘Remember, Jayman, here, we’re in the world of walls, asylums, Chinese boxes. Mandarins enclosed by all of these and more; wide margins, and madness, bureaucrats. Goose feathers and gipsies, playing violins on their knees. But – I shall nonetheless raise and train my regiment. The Green Dragoons. It sounds a bit Disneyish, I know, but it holds a bit of Islam in the colour, and a bit of dragon, like in Eden – the snake, before it lost its legs. The first mutilation of nature.’

I say, ‘I think you’ll have the laugh on Anna, anyway.’

That pleases him. He mutters something about ‘Anna’s shabby neutral­ity’, then rouses himself and complains about ‘Amazing attacks on plucky little Austria’. He says, ‘But no dossers.’

I say, ‘Why not? They’re a reserve army. And in uniform, in defence of animals?’

He says gloomily, ‘I could use women, I suppose, but I’d hoped to avoid that cliché. Besides, it’s not just butterflies and stuff my guards, my hunters, need to watch, it’s biochemistry and things that last for years. What makes the crimes against the bee, or persons, pale? Perspective, Jayman. We must have responsibility for collectivities – beside those, we’re just fictions. To us, mere individuals, massacres, atomic wars involve distortions, guilt, laments that last for generations, even after death. But think, old boy, to nature it’s a hiccup, a bonus of sports and hybrids, survivals, multiplications. You must have the vision, boy! The vision.’

The old man round my neck is unimpressed. He takes a tighter hold. I say, ‘So Anna’s OK again, then?’

‘We’re just fictions, Jayman,’ Sinclair says, pleased with the idea. ‘She understands the strategy. Ad hoc. Giving guys like us – like me at any rate – our heads. Swimming. With the tide, but swimming.’

‘Like Catenna, only with water?’

Sinclair says decisively, ‘Yesterday Anna got on my nerves, today it’s Catenna. And you. Go take a walk in some of these big gardens, see how finely bred the pet dogs are. Go choose some pornographic book for Anna. She seems the type. Just get off my back.’

‘A seventh book for Anna? It’s less precarious than the desert chase, which was, sort of, my wedding gift to Cass and you. Homage. But the meaning of it all is still obscure,’ and Sinclair mutters, ‘Giving, Jayman. Giving is all, giving all you’ve got. And not asking for the change.’

 

 

five

 

 

So, our Anna introduces us to another Anna, Anna Biscotta from Italy, from Rome; a gryphon, and Sinclair says, ‘Another neutral’, and I’m surprised how free he is with judgements now, when in Dog City he made none. Anna Biscotta was a communist, but then, she says, and laughs, ‘In three weeks, I not only wasn’t any more, – no one else was that either, at all! Marvellous! I’d aged, but had no past. I’d made a career with one foot in transgression. And suddenly, all the slaves were free, – my slaves, and I myself!

‘I could follow my natural instinct, and be liberal, and not feel bad. Even be green.’

I say, ‘You could even own slaves,’ but Sinclair hushes me, and the Biscotta says of me, ‘Who’s your friend here, in the spring suiting? You should tell him, there’s no margin left. We’re all one family now. Even little Anna here,’ and she hugs Anna Fürst, who pulls away and says, ‘I’m sorry, sheep’s wool makes me allergic.’

Sinclair whispers to me, ‘Don’t despise! They’re survivors too, you know,’ and I suppose that’s how he sees himself, as well as me. And Cass too, but on a longer scale, a longer thread.

And Sinclair and the other spiders are busy spinning webs that will become castles; in this strange empty room that’s full of zithery voices, and so many corners that a spider goes demented looking at all the cornices and pediments where it might sling its net.

Anna Fürst says, ‘A little private regiment is always useful. Not armed, but ready to sleep rough.’

‘Absolutely nothing military,’ Anna Biscotta agrees, ‘but efficient, better motivated, and with girls as well.’

‘Service before everything, ladies, as the Russians say,’ Sinclair adds. ‘The first thing is establishing a habit of disinterested obedience. For which we need not just governors, like yourselves, but sergeants and, if possible, cooks.’

Starting from zero is hard, especially when your head is full of old stuff. They laugh, and agree they are hungry. I hope we can avoid Anna Fürst’s play with the cordials. She says, ‘What having influence does, is make all art and magic seem quite ordinary,’ and she stares at me, like a conjurer at a rabbit that really disappears.

I say to Anna Biscotta, who looks massive sitting down, ‘Losing your past must have been devastating,’ but she says, ‘It was just losing my name. Like a casualty of civilisation – like the peasants, or the horse and cart, or the rococo. Except, my trouble was a different one from theirs.’ She pins me with a brown eye that looks freshly polished that morning. ‘I was swept aside by civilisation because I didn’t believe in freedom enough.’

‘So,’ I say, ‘You were born again, but without a resurrection.’

She looks at me suspiciously. ‘There being no resurrection simply means I go on, go back, to being an ordinary Jew,’ she says. ‘I renounce a mystical unity in favour of a human one. In my own skin.’

I wish I was with the Cajuns, going on for ever, driving pickup trucks and firing into the treetops. And Anna Fürst laughs her silvery laugh, like zithers falling off a table, and tells us about terrorists who become gipsies, who wander over Central Europe. And Sinclair looks at me, as if he thinks she’s aiming close to us, but then the food comes, the usual scrambled eggs and beer, Biscotta manages to have hers covered with lozenges of anchovy and olives like uncut emeralds.

Biscotta says, ‘I got this colour by being put in a bucket. My mother worked in the fields, and so, to keep me cool, while I waited kept me in a pail,’ and Sinclair takes us back to books at this: ‘Too much wandering and whimsy. What we need is family books. Tales with morals.’

A dish of brains is put before him, and he says, ‘Well, that’s a cheap shot now. But, since we’re talking of ourselves, how long do you reckon these guys will stay liberal and tolerant? When they’re success­ful, won’t they drop all that?’

And I know he means, ‘How can I dominate?’ and the Biscotta assures him that power is only in the spirit, as if she’s sure of having one, and Sinclair looks sad and puzzled.

Anna Fürst says we’ll all get so used to being liberal, it’ll take no effort to go on being one, whatever happens. And she too starts to look sad and thoughtful.

The end of the world seems to demand the start of a new one. I say idly, ‘It would be fun if Cass was here,’ and Sinclair snorts. I ask him, ‘What do you expect to get here?’ And he says, ‘One species. Wow. And these Annas see it coming all together, the power, a whole new story, all the characters and motivations to be written in, jobs filled, the money to be handed out.’

‘And me?’ I ask. Nothing. He says nothing.

I persist, ‘Do you want to write your name on history? To do that, you must be immortal, or even more. Just wanting’s not enough,’ and I remember my burden, my dead man, his spurs and iron-shod shoes.

Sinclair mumbles something about ‘a third consulship’, but I say neither of us would get elected sheriff in a highway burgh where all you see is auto-wrecks.

I go back to the parade-ground, which has never seen a hussar. I am followed by a cop. Anna must have stuck him on me, and he forces me to notice him, so I have to run or stay with him. I see a movie I dislike, the cop eats popcorn in the seat behind. How can you compete with that, an Anna with a cop? Or with Biscotta, toughened in a bucket that put a shell on her but would cook me, and had her communist horse shot under her and bought a racing-car instead. And Anna Fürst, who knows these intellectuals and still finds them interest­ing; reads Amerika, still goes there with expenses paid.

 

 

* * *

 

 

We are out of cash, and Sinclair makes me live with the dossers on alternate days. ‘You have the look of them,’ he tells me, ‘But for me, it means an historical defeat.’

We have to fight a colony of cats, menacing and organised. They eat our food, knock over booze. Their hierarchy mocks ours. Our boss, Andreas, swollen like a pustule, has charred his legs. Thrashes about with crutches. He was some big Party chief out East, he sings the old songs when he finds the words, and so we sleep at last near dawn; our minds blasted with having no gods, no tsars, no heroes. Solidarity, though. And Mr Big, the head cat, is now a tattered yellow doormat; one eye black as a railroad tunnel.

I ask Sinclair, ‘Don’t you feel the pickings here too slim, the competition hot? Everything is flattened out, professional. The Annas get their power through being modest, unsentimental. Catenna seems a little local god, his shrines all underground ...’

But Sinclair says, ‘Crap, old boy. Look at the space here, the ingenuousness. Look at their need for faith; yesterday fascism, last night communism. We’re in the interlude, but something else will come. In expanding circles. The one species movement, Jayman, think of that.’

But I think of Mr Big, who lost his ears in bossing thirty tabbies.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The third Anna is Anna Flake, Sinclair calls her ‘The Big Cheese that rules most of England’, and that’s what she says she does. The other Annas still have scales from prehistory on them, but Anna Flake has never made an election speech or done exams. She has commanded. Sinclair is envious:

‘When that girl falls, she’ll have no regrets. To get up there, she had to know everything – how to drop acid, business sense, all that.’

It’s true. She is at home with image. She’s white, white as a Cajun queen, but with a pinky base that shows it’s fake. I tell her she’s sixteen, has been a tax collector, sharecropper, Jane-in-the­-forest – and a cop. Anna Fürst admires her as an impostor, but the Biscotta finds her petty bourgeois, weak on women.

Sinclair says, ‘Perhaps the biggest part of being powerful is to be envied. Not desirable, so that has ruled out Cass. Not vulnerable, like Anna Fürst, nor thornproof like Biscotta – though all those things are part of it. The Flake has got it right: what you need is cheek, not face. Presence, not qualities.’

He is lyrical. ‘She sings,’ he says. ‘She is a singer. Opens her mouth and hits you. Men don’t do it. They’re embarrassed, and besides, croak, croak – who cares? But Flake knows everything and doesn’t care. She is the singer, not the song.’

This was one of the things Flake knew, and I remember her telling Sinclair about the poems they did at school.

It was a dossers’ night, and I joined the ritual of the Internation­ale, down among planners and the regional secretaries. Slipping down from vodka to Mr Big’s best moonshine.

Anna Flake says, ‘Sinclair’s got it wrong. Immortality’s out. You must run and run – not like a film, run like a blown leaf. That’s why I like you, Jayman. You’re like a dead pop star. You should come to England, go partying, be unemployed. Your investment will be nil, like your regrets.’

Unemployment is not her game, she says. She moves the margin about – tells them what fits the age, and what’s old boots. A culture planner, doing the spectacular part of what moves, and, she says, ‘The other big cheeses trust me, because I’m ordinary.’

She looks like a busted punk general. She tells me that Sinclair and I are locked in the museum – performing horses, regiments; all folklore to the other Annas. Flake says ‘You guys have got no style,’ and indeed, my beautiful suit is tarnishing through sleeping with the cats, and I wish Sinclair could choose sensible hotels.

One night there is a battle between the Slav and German communists, down in the dossers’ yard. Mr Big loses his vantage pile of earth and unburnable crap, all kicked away in fragments of struggle and escape. And Andreas rears up like a polypheme, waving a four-by-four around his head, and promises to get us. The anthems clash, the languages spill out, and all who can, unite against us. Mr Big and I screech through the periphery like two cats about to be scalded, the others scream for our heads and wave their brands. Their empties tinkle at our heels like spurs, and Mr Big finds a hole two inches high, and wriggles in.

My cop runs wheezing up. A single shot fired in the air, and off the pirates slope – their black flag of anarchy retreats, the red one is stowed away for better times.

Next day, Sinclair tells me that Anna Fürst wants to be rid of me. She says, ‘I can’t stand the sound of marching feet he brings. Endlessly marching, stupidly to and fro, to desert wars and roundups, the empty shouts and disobedience, the popeyed heads, the smell of shit and cordite,’ and on she goes.

I say, ‘She – or her cop – saved me. It’s you she’s after. It’s you that set the tone.’

But Sinclair insists, ‘The boss is always tolerated. In the desert, Cass and I, like the two heads on a coin. It’s the subordinate – always a pain, worse than the master. He can’t change. And if he does – more subordination. You’re just a tougher looking nut than me. Yet, you obey, I order.’ But I hear Biscotta too has said of us, ‘Two heroes from the old West, but slowing down, so their bony fingers never get to shoot.’

Sinclair shakes his head. ‘What will it be, this world run by Annas? A small regiment, not like Catenna’s armies. Just write my name, in history, in sand no feet can kick away. A monument, but not quite death. The trouble, Jayman, is that here we’re Martians.’

I think of the three Annas in their Louisiana toyhouse, pontificating about evil. I say, ‘But we’ve Anglo-Saxon sensibilities. And besides, our troubles are of our own making.’

‘Yes,’ he says, comforted, ‘At least there’s that.’

I could walk out. The Annas court Sinclair, who, says the Biscotta, ‘makes the frontier safe to ride’. For Anna Fürst, he’d be a hitman. People have come, and gone, and left her this half-empty city. Perhaps she communed with them in cordials. Now, though, there’s no one left. No Freud, no sex-killers at the opera, nothing to secede from. She says, ‘I must get something started.’

 

 

* * *

 

 

They suggest another evening together. Sinclair tells me, ‘I’d rather spend the time with Cass, than all these whisps of talk and feeling guilty,’ and it seems that the Biscotta wants a salesman, to sell the red cooperatives’ products to the Arabs. ‘She’s keen on making bucks for others,’ and I say:

‘It’s in Catenna’s line. The Romans were hot on bathroom products,’ and Sinclair makes a dismissive gesture. ‘Balls! Got it from the Etruscans. Those Romans – good for nothing but crapping in the sand.’

It’s Anna Flake who wants the gunrunner – ‘It’s in her blood,’ says Sinclair, ‘she can’t pass up the chance to spoil the others’ game.’

She says to me I should come away, and ditch Sinclair. ‘You could live with me, live in my garage. I don’t want involvements, and besides, I don’t have a car.’

I tell her, ‘I couldn’t drop our grand design. I’ve been called here, all the way from Cajun country,’ and she giggles, says we sentimentalists make her want to collect us.

What we need is money, Sinclair’s suppliers want to make us hungry for it. Anna Fürst says, ‘Now, it’s capitalism, or you’re nothing. But, in a garden, there are many flowers, and each will have its message.’

Biscotta says, ‘Afraid so,’ and Flake, with vigour, ‘Go deep, go fast,’ and Anna Fürst weaves her pudding with her spoon, and says, ‘It’s in the mixture; some is becoming cream and other is explosive’, and Sinclair leaps back from the table, recovers, and says, ‘You can’t scare me with metaphors.’

 

 

 

 

six

 

 

Anna Flake gets me alone. She half embraces me, half is embraced. She says, ‘I’m hairy but I’m clean.’

I say, ‘I like that introduction. I’m still sore from running and from being beaten,’ and I think that no faithful slave could do more than me, presenting Sinclair first with Cass, and then with Anna Fürst; and so, behind the pile where Mr Big’s successor sings arias and holds court, we spend an hour of interlude. ‘Passion on your part, curiosity on mine,’ says Anna Flake, not realising I live here part time. And we hear behind my grunting and her shocks of recognition the Party secretaries hum: ‘This is the final, the decisive struggle, with the Internationale, the human race will arise.’

Anna Flake says, ‘It could be the banks of the Mississippi,’ and I remember she doesn’t know this little stockade is sometimes my home.

She says, ‘America so fascinates me. So full, now, of different things, like the sea once was: the musics and the cargo, taken on voyages, the strange people; and crazy politicians, rich bright ones interested in the most intimate things – the pizza fad. Wow! It must be like living in vaudeville.’

‘Sometimes. I’ve been in Dog City and the desert recently,’ I say. ‘We had to get out of the States to cool down.’

‘I bet. I imagine,’ she says, then, ‘Jayman, I’ve a favour that I need from you. And now we know each other, you can’t refuse – not without an excuse, at least.’ The world grinds round some more. She says, ‘Jayman, I want you to kill someone for me.’

‘Why, you helpless or something?’ I say quickly.

‘It’s not my thing,’ she says.

‘Nor mine. I’ve no room on my shoulders for your dead friends’, I say, though I am curious. I add, ‘It’s not a thing that needs a special expertise, just that you experience it in the first person.’

I think of Biscotta, shocked: her rigid meerschaum face. Of Cass, a smile between distaste and leer. And Anna Fürst, sad, excited. I say, ‘Surely you English guys have an army, spies to do all that for you?’

‘This is a kind of spy.’

I wonder if this is a joke; a test. Or just the species-love of talk of death and prisons.

We are lying like two grave-figures in the fenced enclosure where the gipsies used to pluck their geese and park their donkeys and the little carts.

Anna Flake says weakly, ‘He was spying on me.’

I say, ‘The death penalty sound drastic.’

‘No one would connect you. Besides, if my career is ruined, think of the thousands who will die, in all my causes: forests, animals. Jayman, this guy is foul. He’s rich. Offensive to the species.’

‘What’s he got on you?’ I ask.

‘He knows about me – things like you and me. My bank balances. And he gets people killed. In jail, in Africa, a special friend of mine.’

I say, ‘It seems a lot to ask me, after a quick jump in the donkey park.’

‘Jayman, you should start looking at things from the woman’s viewpoint.’

‘I know guys who’d kill for less,’ I agree, ‘but the stain still clings.’ Not just the stain, I think, the goddam weight. I say, ‘Well, you can ask, you have the power.’

‘But not of life or death.’

‘Nor Sinclair’s plans. Assassinations like this would sidetrack them, and our mission.’

‘Fuck Sinclair. The pustule.’

She backs off. Of course, it was a metaphor, her stress, the passing intimacy tossed off to one another. And I wonder if I know the guy, and think maybe I’ll do it some time after: ‘After your disgrace. Anonymous vendetta, with long-distance zappers.’

When we’ve both gone down, quiet, in the cistern, in the desert.

She has not finished. ‘It happens – death – much more often than you think. With all the new diseases, and the life expectancy dropping by decades. No one bothers if some young guy drops out a window, or stands behind a friend’s car, and goes. It’s the new lightness, Jayman.’

I feel the weight of my old man of the sea, the weight of all those gipsies and their dumpy animals, their carts extensions of a single tree-trunk. My mouth fills with mud, and I’m afraid Andreas will hear us.

‘More passion?’ asks Anna Flake, as I writhe about.

‘No, it’s just I live here sometimes,’ and she tells me I’d be happier in her garage.

She calls me her hooded falcon, as a compliment, though I remember what they eat, out in the desert. But too much sensibility is crippling, so I wonder if I should talk to Sinclair, though everything tells me to keep quiet.

Sinclair says, ‘You weasel. Let you sleep rough, you come back with your beak full of mouse and diamonds. Now I know – any anonymous deaths, it’s you responsible. A rogue batman, flapping about, offing the foes of bureaucrats.’

‘I thought I should tell you. That is, I thought I shouldn’t.’

‘Quite right,’ says Sinclair. ‘But remember, Jayman, power in Europe is much stickier than it was out there—’ he waves towards the desert, a few last camels, disagreeable before extinction. ‘Here, we’ve nothing to offer, we’re the Greeks not bearing gifts – so, we’re not feared. We’re Western strangers here: we offer justice – in your case, a one-shot execution. But we’re strictly hired hands, Jayman.’

I agree. ‘Catenna got the Greeks and Romans playing games together, all mixed up. Cass got our missile system by promising to light your fire. Surely you can rub the Annas together, get something smouldering?’

He rubs his paws together. ‘This place is a black hole. Power flows towards it, but somehow, you can’t grasp it. What I need’s my personal mint.’

I laugh. ‘Come on, Sinclair, in every bar where good guys meet to snort or chew or smoke I hear that line. You must do better, if you want me to drill your regiment, or have a grapple with Biscotta.’

He is offended. ‘You should try seeing things from the woman’s standpoint, Jayman. Catenna could teach you lots. You play the victim all the time, young Jayman. I need a gopher, not a buffoon.’

He looks like General Lee, drunk in his tent. He says, ‘Jayman, since we have been here, how many governments have fallen? The answer’s ‘lots’. Democr­ats and others, crushed by tanks? Power blocs crumbled, been reassembled? The answer – ‘several’. Doesn’t it all seem like a century ago? A generation? The refugees, the wandering of the peoples, their extinction? The answer – ‘yes’. And what have we been asked to do, and done? Nothing. Lots of things have happened. We have seen the horses gallop past, not taking their hoofbeats for our own hearts. But we have neither grabbed their heads, nor ridden them.’ A long, malign pause.

‘And what fucks me up, Jayman,’ he concludes, ‘Is that the Annas are in the middle of it all. And see you as a hitman, my old friend. Myself, some kind of growth, excrescence.’

I do not try to comfort him. Again, we are sitting on our beds, wait­ing for the call to rule the new world, or a part of it. Then, there is a call from Anna Fürst.

‘I desperately need your help,’ she says. ‘My country is about to be abolished.’

Sinclair is not impressed. ‘Someone’s country had to be first to go,’ he says. ‘You can’t have all these new identities, and popes, beliefs, and moving people round without something falling into a black hole. Austria drew the low card.’

But Anna Fürst is furious. ‘It was Biscotta. Jealousy. Living on a peninsula no one wants. All she thinks of is length. And our unique identity? How can that be sliced up or watered down?’

Sinclair pays no attention. He says, ‘I am putting the last touches to an invention that I was most generously left with, in the desert, by associates of mine.’

He takes a leathery machine from a leather box, and puts it on the floor. It looks like a soft gyroscope. It has many wheels, circuits, or worlds, hacked out one inside another.

Sinclair explains. ‘It’s a history machine: a future watch, a history globe. Based on the revolutionary principle. It lets you tell the cosmic, or historical, time. Let’s see if it works for Austria too.’

With heavy pantomime he squints through it, oppressively humming and hawing all the while. Then, ‘Yes, yes, yes. After the great partitions and the age of splendour, there comes a cycle of effervescence, not all sweet, and I see that then there is a little wheel of populism – or it may be death – and – yes, after that a stretch of corporate dealing. Then, after, there is nothing. Rather, there’s a patch of donkey skin – it might be dog – and then it passes into something else, a wheel that could be made of shagreen, or it might be plastic imitating jade.’

Anna Fürst says desperately, ‘Sinclair, I need armies of dragoons, green if they must be, to defend us,’ but he whispers to me:

‘No, Jayman, no. It’s too small, too crowded round.’ And to Anna: ‘Well, if I were you, I’d settle for being made a theme park. Even more fun, and less expensive, a safari: hunters, guards, the lot.’

Again, he whispers, ‘Jayman, if I were to save the country, meagre as it is, where could I fit in Cass? A consortium, perhaps, his bank...’ ‘You mean, he could buy Austria?’

Sinclair says, ‘Certainly, to stop it disappearing, and he’d get it cheap. I see it as a kind of traveller’s halt, along the way. Like the clock in Grand Central, with little booths and tasteful shops, live music even.’

I remind him, ‘The money, Sinclair.’

‘Jayman,’ he says, ‘we’ll win it.’

‘How?’

‘Games of chance, my dear old friend. With our leather globes. But, alas, my dear young Jayman, they offer confirmation, not predictions. They’re scientifically accurate of course, but at the expense they only tell you what has happened, is observable. No age of magic and belief, poor Jayman, but one of certainty. After the facts; that’s what they’re for. On those you build the theories ...’ He is set to run on, and I say to Anna Fürst, ‘If this is Biscotta’s idea, and you’re her friend, all you need is make her change her mind, retract,’ but Anna says, ‘I’ll never do what she suggests. It’s more distasteful than anything Anna Flake’s done in the flesh.’

‘In that case, then,’ says Sinclair wrenching at the history globe. ‘You must expect to see your country, and your job, join the greater unity; like bubbles in champagne or soda water, to quote the expert in the matter, Fichte. After all, it doesn’t mean the end of everything. Just think how hard it’s been to get rid of Poland, how that keeps coming back.’

I interrupt him, ‘With the history clock we’re ready to march into the new world. Again.’

‘Well, Jayman, it’s not entirely true, what I said about it. Just because it comes from Dog City doesn’t mean it’s perfect. It has a fault. It runs a little fast. It tells you what has happened, that’s for sure. But just a little in anticipation. It must be shrinkage. Per­haps thin air dries out the precious skins and leathers it’s been cobbled out of.’

I am distressed to see our chances of money, sex, international leverage thrown away so lightly, so technically. I say to Anna Fürst: ‘Perhaps the things that Anna Biscotta has suggested aren’t too bad,’ and mention how I survived being hunted, beaten, possibly castrated, without a trauma, but she says,

‘Some things a man can take, take in his stride if needs be. But for me, alliances take place on paper and are signed. Not between sheets, or even worse, without them, and quite against nature, not to mention law.’

I think, ‘Marie Antoinette,’ but I’m anxious to help the good Austrians and their nightmare creativity, and even Anna Fürst, though she shows no compassion for myself, ‘that fox, that scissor-legs’, I’ve heard her call me. Sinclair is holding out for cash, though it does him credit that he’ll cut Cass in. Though – to be satrap of Austria, riding round the Ring, even emperor, always in uniform – it’s no future for a gambler like Sinclair, expert at beating raps, looking inside sealed packs of cards, mystic, visionary ...

He rolls the history clock along the carpet. What look like nutshells and perhaps some beetle eggs fall out. It is an astrolabe for zodiacs. Inside, I see a pale, pale light. Perhaps a little moon, a dying sliver of a little sun.

‘Where did you get it?’ I ask.

Simply, he says, ‘I stole it.’

Stole it from Cass, while Cass was stealing from us. This is high level exchange. While I was struggling in the mud with other fugitives, Sinclair was squinting at what was just about to happen. Pale light through the dust. I remember how my Indian lover said, ‘I can see further in the moonlight than you,’ though I could count larger quantities of boxcars, look longer at the sun and further up its radials, and knew the names of plants in French, but not what they were for. And that is what she said she knew, even if she said, ‘Or maybe that is just a thing that Indians say.’ And I think maybe it is.

‘Save Austria?’ says Sinclair grandly. ‘I’ll think about it,’ and walks off swinging the history clock by its thong.

I feel quite like helping Anna Fürst, though saving states goes against my grain, but Sinclair says savagely, hearing all my thoughts, especially generous ones, ‘Jayman, you feel better because you’ve stopped killing people, and now they’re trying to get you. And now you want to help a state! Bravo! But Jayman, you’re made to run away. A fine, tall person you may be, but a dabbler. Runner.’

Later, when I see Anna Fürst, she looks so sad. She’s in the bear’s embrace: a big brown bear, with a pink tongue, Biscotta, hugging her and saying after all, she’d no designs to partition Austria. Just show little Anna what it was like being swallowed up. But I think if Anna was not quite so little, there would be war between these two. And if Anna Fürst is looking for a killer too, my picture of three Annas as power in community and sisterhood is swallowed up in Sinclair’s knowing sneer. My old man of the sea tightens his knees around me once again, and Sinclair takes control, his cold eye burning bright above his massive, waxing gut, as if he dines on populations, gulping regions down.

He tells me, ‘Remember Jayman, if you can’t see it as a cartoon, people won’t understand it,’ and he says people are quite happy to let the Annas have their fun, they’re bogged down in their own technologies, trying to make things work, and not the slightest bothered – as we are – with the future and its present.

I think, if this is life, it’s quite unorderly; depriving me, without a motive, for ever of my Cajun queens. Then, I remember that the history clock resolves a lot of questions about the great design, the forecasts, choices. Even the massacres. This clock’s a sketch, a reject prototype, perhaps by Vulcan, or some artisan god. It reflects. Decides nothing. But because it’s always fast, it’s always wrong. So what it – most accurately – reflects, is: nothing. In relativity, relative to something else, everything has always happened and not happened. Happening itself is no great shakes. And so the clock’s not even magic, just a glob of universe. There is no revelation. Everything is revelation.

‘The perfect gift for mediators,’ I say, ‘But not for men of power.’

Sinclair turns his flat blue eye on me – but now I see it’s streaked with red and purple like the sea past sunset, sun gone down beneath the first blanket of cold water, a beefsteak malign and pounded. The sun. All night the smiths will work on it, to bash it into shape, then burnish, hone it, putting back the fire. And then ‘voilà, gentlemen, the sun.’ In Sinclair’s eye.

I say to Sinclair, ‘You can be Vulcan’, and he says, ‘Fuck it all, Jayman, I know the history clock works for the mediator, not for the man of power. I know the sun will rise tomorrow – but with that knowledge I can’t do a fucking thing. Try betting with someone it will rise. Or that it won’t. Result is zero.’

I remind him, ‘But Sinclair, the aim was power through mediation, with some help from the neglected divinities, and profiting from our bounding energy,’ but he turns furious and snared:

‘Crap, Jayman. You mediate after power, because you’ve got it. First, you must take it. Making people work or die, or worship at your shrine, croak with your picture held before their longing eyes. And I, what have I got? One slave, who’d like to run away. One disciple, who can’t penetrate my mysteries.’

He looks tragic and bewildered, like Byron burning his friends’ bodies. Biscotta says she’d like to introduce that as a summer rite, but I’m afraid of her, and see her leaping on the shore, a deep-fried earth-mother, throwing the little white and writhing sacrifices on the flames; they might be me, or Sinclair.

I am inspired, and say to Sinclair, ‘Why not enlist Biscotta? She’s a tough warrior, not like the other two,’ but Sinclair says, ‘Jayman, you must keep your hallucinations down. Biscotta is a mercenary who likes a noisy tent.’ He mutters ‘horseplay’, and I remember how in Dog City he did nothing. Stood at the window watching, and didn’t pray or hunt, or tremble, or any goddam thing. Just once, put out his tongue, at everyone.

He has his gadget, though, the clock. I ask, ‘Did you really commune with Catenna?’

He is silent, and I wonder if he’s remembering a patrician past. Then, he says, quite kindly, ‘Jayman, you must learn, that among my other things, I lie a lot.’

I say, quite kindly, ‘Lying and stealing are all right, Sinclair. It’s cheating you’re not forgiven for.’

He muses: ‘Look at all these people, Jayman. Coming from a vast underclass, forcing their way up from modest security to fashionable precariousness, a great no man’s land of no one in particular, a fair, a circus. In all this flux and scamper, Jayman, can you doubt I’m the man of the future?’ He kicks the history globe, and it groans and scuffs along the floor. I think, but do not say, The Great Dictator, but he’s there before me, and he says, ‘Yes, Jayman, but I’ve no charisma,’ and to myself I say, ‘no sense of humour either’, and his eye is on me like a poultice.

We talk about Biscotta; Sinclair says her draughts of freedom have gone down the wrong way, and blown her up. ‘She’s discovering that after all she is a bourgeois, so can bugger up the lives of everyone without remorse. Communists like that, Jayman, are the worst, because they’ve kept their ticket to the kingdom of God.’

I say, ‘That’s not a mediator’s judgement, Sinclair,’ and he tells me we are in a new Augustan age. Himself a candidate for Augustus.

He says, ‘The Flake, free spirit, on the other hand – I see her accumulating piles of misery. The Fürst, I fear will snap. Both brittle people in their way. The Fürst most elegantly trained, the Flake, instead, inhabitant of many spheres. Little Anna Fürst, going to school, speaking in many languages, the Flake never having time for things, and speaking in many tongues.’

Sinclair makes his pronouncements twiddling the history clock.

I wonder if what he says is preaching, or just idle chat, and if we’re really at the top of something here.

He says, ‘Yes, Jayman. It is here. The earth has plates, and where they meet is earthquake land. Here we’re in a zone of slide and buckle. Black holes await the incautious step, I fear, young friend.’

I wonder if his family were preacher folk, or if that was another circle that he’d merely envied. I ask to look at the history clock; going backwards, naturally, since only Sinclair gets to hunt ... the future.

Let me see, let me see. Turning it back, my Indian, my Cajun queen, and all those proud automobiles, adjuncts of courtly loves. Those were the days, when sentiment and sudden death went hand in hand, before I got this goddam maniac dead soul around my neck, left paradise. I squint down the time hole. Colours faded, fading, long stretch of nothing much. Everyone is goddam young. I push and grind the mechanism, and it breaks.

Sinclair shouts, ‘You shit. And my childhood? Irretrievable. Cass wore his out by staring at it. Now, mine is locked in there. Where it always was and will be. Inaccessible.’

To placate him, I say: ‘It’s no great experience, Sinclair. You see the paths you didn’t take, and you don’t take them,’ and he calls me sentimentalist, because I contemplate, whereas he learns.

He takes the broken globe and tucks it away from me beneath his coat. I’m not interested in the future, only in the past, tinkering and making it come out better. And la Biscotta must have had the same idea, saying she’s given up on wiping out this country, but instead there’ll be a congress, to discuss the future of the peoples.

She says, ‘More than redrawing maps, more than just metterniching about with bits and pieces. A stocktaking, of all our resources, plans, ideas.’

Sinclair bulges where he hides the history clock, but he’s impassive. He says, ‘I hear you’ve had congresses like this before. Well, if you need a hand, I can supply the advice of the more stable continents, a mix of yankee wryness and some Cajun tabasco. Then again, if you want entertainment, or commitment, I can lay on huntsmen, even soldiers in suitable classical dress. Camels. Datsuns – I’ll soon have the franchise …’ and he and la Biscotta whisper together about prices on Roman honour guards, contracts for exotics and for vehicles that ride on sand and autobahn – meaning that both will take an honest cut.

Biscotta says, ‘Of course, I hate corruption, and in no way is this deal a commercial one. Besides, the imagination has no price,’ but Sinclair says to save her breath convincing him, he thinks to make a profit from a congress that’s promoting peace would be a sin. Though not, of course, as profitable as making it from other things, ha ha, and so they laugh, and salvation too must move on with the times. And I reflect I may get a bed to sleep in. Even find Mr Big and take him in.

So, Anna Fürst sees she is not the victim but the host. But Anna Flake is troubled, and she says to me, ‘Let’s break it up.’

‘Why, Flake?’

‘Maybe I’m a Tory. Maybe I don’t follow what’s going on.’

‘But why break it up, and how?’

‘Perhaps I don’t like hypocrites. And organise your dossers, the Party secretaries.’

      I say, ‘I still don’t see it. It’s not me.’

She says, ‘Do this, and I’ll let you off killing that person for me,’ and she looks appealing, so I’m tempted, till I see I’m being suckered in.

I tell her, ‘The dossers don’t feel marginal, just resentful history turned out like that. But they’re still part of your system, Flake, they don’t like challenging the bosses, or the cops.’

She tries to flatter me, ‘Jayman, you’re not on the outs. You too are one of us, you’re different because you have more freedom, that’s all. That’s your treasure. Besides, it’s all Biscotta’s plan. She lives on a peninsula that no one wants, and so she feels that she can play the others’ hands. Austria – a big park. Italy for short holidays. So, what does that leave us? Hard work.’

I shrug politely. ‘Sinclair and I are respectable again, benevolent and mysterious, not zealots. Maybe you could supply security guards.’

Flake says, ‘It’s this gigantism. It takes so much to put empires together – but the result! It’s so banal. It should be about people and individuals – these big expanses without frontiers. But there are fences everywhere, it all goes back to gothic; mysterious rulers, torturing of strangers, animals eviscerated everywhere. It should be different, Jayman, get to breathe, not just go shopping.’

I say, ‘I’m people too,’ thinking of the long lines of fallen men and sinful souls I come from, but she doesn’t see the point. 

My old man of the sea does, though, and is in fine form with his spurs.

Flake says, ‘You Americans are innocents, you don’t have to fight to be yourselves,’ and I ask, ‘Because I’m nothing?’ and she says, ‘Well, you must decide on that. But won’t your dossers help?’

I say, ‘They were modest men, raised up and then cast down. Now, angry. They want revenge, but on screech, your liver burns out quick. They must act fast. Besides, they’re not ragged communists, they’re suited ones. Everyone has a uniform now, even the Indians round the stockade.’

Flake says, ‘The dossers look pretty ragged to me. A platoon of them would make a good display. Honking and hollering. Ragged-trousered crusaders!’

Suddenly I’m tired of playing. I shout, ‘Fuck off! Leave me to my madness. Howl. I shall howl!’ And I do, rousing some servants and bringing big uniforms fluttering after me from the cop-closet.

I bring them light, a saviour of sorts in Sinclair, and now I’m on the outs, they want to steal my matches. Hunting me like a desert animal, and now, after one quick practice jump, Flake wants to recruit me. Ecstasy in the parlour, offing the rebels.

‘You’re nothing, you’ve got nothing,’ I scream, and see Biscotta running up and preparing some kind of immobilising judo hold, and Anna Fürst is on the phone for more fast uniforms. And so I laugh, and wish for a few minutes of Cass the realist and his disguises, not these bits of broken pediment.

 

 

 

seven

 

 

Sinclair again says less and less, and holds the globe up to his eye, so that the whole mechanics of his head looks like a pustule of drying blood, and then he says, ‘Jayman, cool it. Now is not the time, the time is not yet come, and when it does, you’ll have a warning, but not much. So when I tell you, get out there goddam quick – or you’ll get given to the Greeks. And then the Romans.’ He looks more and more like Catenna, and I’d like to ask about his world, the campaigns and the civilisations that he’d like to break up or construct. But no questions come, except about hotel bills and salvation. And I lack the context, and do nothing, so he too is quiet, and twiddles with his globe, and bits of crap and stuff fall out, like twists of prayer and flags of nowhere that they set flapping in the desert.

And he sets his eye on me, the one that isn’t streaked and bloodied with looking at the draughty future, and he says, ‘Jayman, if you’ll spare the crap about the common man – I think I have it. Have the way of life, the eyrie on the world. In short, I’m free of all the up-and-down-the-mountain, salvation-fall, uncle-duck-to-pauper – all the routines we got off the TV.’ He adds savagely, ‘When you broke the past, young Jayman, you made it easier for a patient man, like me, to empty all the junk that’s in his head. To go back, before the synthetic prophets, back to the original, the minor league. Then, before all the universal stuff, you see they really knew how to lay bat on ball, and mind on matter. The age of Catenna—’ he says, and stops.

To help, I say, ‘The minor leagues?’ and my old man of the sea thinks this a huge joke, and jiggles up and down. ‘Yes, yes,’ says Sinclair. ‘Back to the minor leagues, because,’ quietly triumphant now, ‘you know what the major league was? The epics, big prophets, wall to wall empires, the international massacring?’

‘Tell me, boss.’

‘It was all the minors joined together and playing under a bigger name!’ He pauses. ‘This one’s an empire where the slaves are happy, Jayman. And so, one of the biggest there has been. Does that make sense, Jayman? Is that what you want?’ He looks quizzical.

I say, ‘What? The best? All there is? Should we join with Flake, get the dossers to break it up?’

He says, ‘Jayman,’ sadly, ‘I thought I had an outfit working here. And, Jayman, I thought that you were part of it. Do you think this jailbait, those tough guys out there, can bust up this, this ....’ he pauses eloqu­ently. Outside I can hear Andreas clearing a circle of cats with his stick and cursing his colleagues for indiscipline.

Sinclair says, ‘I’m heavily into Marx these days, but what makes me weep, is his lightness: of being, of his pen, at the dinner table. Charades, Jayman. So goddam English, with his parlour and his kitchen, and worrying about his pustules and his arse. He should have signed with Darwin, gone and found the fireproof penguins, been swallowed by a whale, eaten the bosun, been keelhauled and lost his nose to a savage queen with clap; a leg, an arm to Moby Dick. Escaped from Devil’s Island. Then told us what was what to surviving this fucking system, and introduce us to political economy. Instead, what? Trotting to the library, and all for nothing. A thousand years of altruism. Lightness, Jayman. Lightness.’

He snorts. ‘Wouldn’t get to bat on my team. Not a patriarch. Not even a secretary, just an amateur like you, Jayman. One of the outs, no passport, and, worse than you, without a master.’

I think, ‘If not truth, then money’, but as Andreas says, ‘It’s by approximities we live.’

Sinclair complains, ‘I thought this congress was on ‘Venice Waterlogged’, but it seems it’s on something called ‘Division and Distinction’. Who’s in, who’s out. Who has style, and who has not. Who’s to pump the gas, and who to work the massage parlours. As for Venice, with your wetsuits, boats with glass bottoms – let it sink,’ and I suggest it’s neither being sunk nor afloat that makes their world uncertain, but he’s off, proposing that New York be sunk. ‘Just think, no winter snow and no more humid summers, blacks and whites will all be green, bejewelled with barnacles like amphoras.’

I fiddle with my face. The beating that I got from Andreas has snapped one of my jaw-struts, and it pokes through my stubble like a chop bone. Only the foothills of the wound are sore, but it’s the face of badly butchered pig. Sinclair says, though not unkindly,

‘You look as if you’ve got the plague. How can I take you around with me? Does that turn Flake on?’

But I say, ‘It’s nothing, Sinclair, just how a bodyguard’s supposed to look,’

But Sinclair says, ‘Well, to me you’ve got a pig’s head. That can offend some people.’

He says I should round up the dossers, not to disrupt things, but instead to give an ecumenical blessing to the new empire.

He insists, ‘Jayman, I want them to be in. These old communists are like the blacks, the Indians we have back home. What they stand for – differences of culture, colour, even poverty – that’s what we stand for too. Bring ’em in. Keeping them out is dead, dead as the Puritans. Colour, now: I’d give a fortune for a decent-coloured skin – and so should you, old friend, that wouldn’t show the marks. Indeed, and better still, a whole rainbow of them …’

I suggest, ‘A classy black one for funerals,’ but he runs on.

‘And culture. What does multiculture mean, but being master of them all? Like the old Romans. No one would have heard of the Sabines if the Romans hadn’t raped them, or Etruscans if the Romans hadn’t needed them as kings and plumbers. Darwin, Jayman. I’m very heavily into Darwin now. Incorporate the best bits, let the worst just painlessly fly out the window: like the flying lizard, for fuck’s sake.’

‘But Sinclair, I’ve heard you say the opposite, “Come unto me, you flying lizards, you dropouts, you Marx-fakers; you reds in tooth, in skin, in flag ...”I though it was your credo.’

‘Not here, Jayman. Here, it’s everyone in first, then wear whatever goddam costume you want. If you’re not in you don’t pay the fare, don’t get to sit with the driver. You run along behind.’

He pauses. Then, ‘Jayman, the things I said about skins and culture, odd touch of prejudice about the lizard, homosadism – all that will come out right, when I do my memoirs. This is just the friendly, the raw stuff, just you and me. The real hard work of rendering down this crap is done at the word-processor, after the events. And Jayman, I promise you, there’ll be events. And not just petty ones.’

‘I know, Sinclair.’

‘Jayman, you sound muffled. Like someone planning a stab in the back.’

‘Just easing my pig jaws, Sinclair.’

‘My dear old friend! Don’t take it to heart – I don’t mean you’re a mutant, something from the movies. Of course the sign will pass away. And of course, you’ve your rights too, Jayman. No one can take those away. That’s what inalienable means, old boy. And if you want more of them, just write them down.’ He’s amused at his wit, and hands me a pencil. I say, ‘This is from the police offices, Sincl­air.’

He stares at me. ‘I told you I stole things, on occasion. The history globe, and now this pencil.’

Very great men like Catenna can linger on as rumblings, trapped, stoppered farts. Living with Sinclair is precarious. Sitting in on a game where all the aces have gone, but more are expected to show up.

I say, ‘But Sinclair, all the Romans and Greeks have left us is Catenna. Is that all – the margins taking on their own life, the only life that’s inextinguishable?’

‘Stop creeping and cringing, Jayman,’ Sinclair says. ‘Remember, you were once American. All this sentiment about peripheries! If you’d lived where I did, you’d know all about peripheries! They’d have eaten you like a hot dog there.’

I think, ‘You eat me like a hot dog too, Sinclair.’ But I have my star map, that the Indians and the Cajuns showed me. Shows they are all in place. Indifferent and meaningless. Universal salvation, guy with a problem to straighten out – equally a guide. What does Sinclair have to match this? I wonder, then remember: the future.

Sinclair says, ‘We must be careful with the Annas. Ours is a heavy style, and we’ve not tried it on the angels at the top, the ones who get elected, and so must fall. The Annas are just people who can’t trust themselves to win, be voted in. They lack the common touch. And yet – as far as Annas go – we are the common touch. So, we must bring them all together – aristos, democrats, Annas. That was what hunting was supposed to do. The common touch, the common touch. Something that anyone can win, in his or her own way, of course. Dangle everything up high, let the media get a shot – and not these everlasting congresses. A spectacle, dear Jayman. Arranged by you, most kindly.’

‘Shit no, Sinclair. That’s the dregs.’ I remember the police papers, following me from somewhere, every feast requiring living sacri­fice. ‘You’re trying to set me up, Sinclair.’

‘Defend yourself, then, Jayman,’ he says. He has become longer, more tubular, since we got here. Fruits of incredible mental exercise.

We watch bits of a civil war on TV. He says, ‘Jayman, a few years ago that would have set you going. Me too, I expect! Here, the word is “no extremes”. The respectable ones up front, we disreputables rowing the galley along somewhere underneath, out of sight.’

‘No change, then, Sinclair,’ I ask.

He laughs: ‘No change, and no receipt, no bill. Just go-betweens, between the undergrowth and the fragrant upper air.’

I say, ‘But the Annas – they have values. It’s just they respect democracy too much to press their views.’

Sinclair says firmly, ‘The Annas are the dregs.’

‘Andreas, then?’

‘Quite a different, a higher, class of dregs.’

He goes on, ‘Boredom is a great mover, Jayman. Why did the Romans jack it in? It got too dull, defending, never enjoying. Always the wreckers there, outside the fence. In the end, it got easier to say, “what the fuck”. And get your throat cut.’

‘But we hope to avoid that?’

He says, ‘Avoid it very much, young Jayman, cackling away like Mr Straightman. But Catenna – he didn’t give in. Of course, in other ways, he’d given in before.’ He broods, but he’s not in catland.

Finally, he says, ‘Make your own mind up.’

‘I can’t, Sinclair. I’ve too much round my neck.’

 

 

* * *

 

 

He says that Cass is coming, ‘Cass, now, is not the dregs. Always on the subversive side, within the limits of professionalism.’ I rub my pigsnout, hoping it’s a badge of competence.

Sinclair says, ‘Cass has been fighting since the day he was born. Five hundred years ago. What does he have to show? A little respect, a little dignity, a little – and I mean really little – bank. More of an office, really, not the sort you could knock off.’ Cass and his delegation are awarded places in a seminar, on the outskirts of the conference. Sinclair says, ‘You’re on your own. But you can talk about it.’

In the restaurant, Cass and his disciples eat like surgeons sewing wounds. Andreas has a spot up front, and is to ask forgiveness of all those who’ll listen. ‘What, again?’ he asks, but doesn’t seem to mind. Sinclair is almost clean, arranging for Arabs, and the rehabilitation of the bosses. But I feel there’s something shaky here, and my old man of the sea holds on as if he fears the worst. When photographs are taken, Sinclair is jostled off the platform, though he insists, ‘It’s protocol, not hierarchy.’

The Annas are on show, each with a special handbag: Biscotta’s like a little ottoman, and Anna Fürst’s an imitation roll with poppy seeds. Anna Flake has one with chains. She wears a suit, and on her head a modest black punk crest. Then, she screams, and levitates.

She’s being lifted by her crest. Some large metal bird has seized her, making me think of Sinbad and my own afflictions. The bird can’t get lift off, but it can’t let go, the Flake is hovering at head height. With her purse, she swats her crest, but Sinclair mutters, ‘Mohican queen crashes on summit’, and the bird can’t disgorge her.

Sinclair says, ‘That’s my fucking apparatus,’ and I see Cass fiddling at a radio, and I hear him say, ‘It’s set for sheep, but she must weigh a ton.’

And Sinclair groans, ‘Oh why, Cass, why?’ – though ‘why not’ would do as well.

Cass screams at him, ‘Not for you, not for your body, Sinclair. Not from jealousy, but passion.’

Anna Flake tears off the mechanical mandibles, and shouts at Cass, ‘You sod.’ And then she runs to me, and points at Cass: ‘That’s him, the one I made the contract for. It’s him, and here’s your chance.’

But up the police come; and Cass is lucky, because the police fear Arabs, and a kidnapping is a ludicrous charge. Cass says, ‘I just flew in from Dog City, and my bird went critical on me.’

He blames the malfunctioning on Sinclair, who says, ‘But why, Cass? I got you to give a paper in the seminar.’

Cass mutters, ‘Not because of your body, Sinclair,’ and Sinclair’s body looks like a long tube of basalt, wrapped in a sack. Cass says, ‘And I’d always admired you for your transcendence of America.’

Sinclair whispers to me, ‘He’s mad because I snitched his future,’ but Cass insists it’s because ‘That Flake’s a mocker – of all outside, all those who struggle, who have faith. She’s a shopper,’ and I see Biscotta nodding vigorously, but Anna Fürst is hunting in her poppy roll, where I see a tiny pair of gilded handcuffs, and she says, ‘A bird in the hair, two birds in the air – I’m sure it refers to a number in the lottery.’ But Anna Flake thinks Fürst is armed, and shouts to her, ‘Do it, waste them all.’

We move away, and Sinclair says, ‘Well, if they don’t kill him, Cass should get more exposure in the congress, for the hurt he’s suffered, the breakage I fear of that fine falcon, and ...’ he breaks off, for we see Andreas, magnificent in his body hair and leather pants, carrying a metal eagle on his wrist. Its eyes flash, its feathers are covered with opalescent lights that ripple through an acid sequence; and it sings – with a low and quite melodious voice. It sounds like Siegfried’s funeral journey, but it might even be the Internationale. For a time it looks like Andreas plans to put Flake over his shoulder, but she resists, and as the eagle’s power runs low, the baritone sinks down, until it’s at the bottom of the sea, singing of eels.

Sinclair says, ‘And are we reduced to this, all become terrorists, and against what – a terrorist’s groupie?’ but after all it is his moment. An arm round Flake and one round Cass, he separates them while appearing to conciliate. They make a fine sextet – Sinclair and Cass, three Annas and Andreas, and Sinclair now rounds off the act. His hunting birds are tamed, the continent is recomposed, a decent space for marginals is improvised. Sinclair, with arms that are each two metres long, can hold Cass and Biscotta in one hand, the Flake and Fürst a whole stage-width away. Each with their own drama, their own plot, and Andreas magnificent with the discharged birds, the talons lifeless, clamped shut on his shoulders.

Images of Indian queens, though not of Cajuns, of magic birds that eat the livers of good dossers everywhere, even of Arabs, coming late, finding the best consumed, picked over ... My time in Vienna has been mostly spent in museums and the donkey park. I see the history globe under Sinclair’s coat – now more a mantle – and at full stretch I make a lunge to take it. But the image and the icon overload, short out, and in a flash I see a truckload of gendarmes wheeling down on me.

It is the hunt, and I am off again, cursing myself and Sinclair as I run, although I feel that if I escape from Sinclair and his power, I’d escape the whole network, running from nature, science, through to Fürst and Flake.

I vanish through a door: the sign says ‘Chance Parlour’, whether it’s sex or horse-racing I don’t know. I’m deafened by the noise – a Paraguayan group is on the stand, squawking like parakeets, banging out heavy metal like in Dog City. A voice – ‘Welcome back. But not yet welcome home’ – a shove. I’m panting on a platform, and step smoothly on a train just leaving – as the sound of dogs and horns draws near, and behind, the legions.

 

 

 

eight

 

 

I had failed to find, or shake, a faith. Perhaps I’d flown too high. I’d found Central Europe just as it was streaming out into an infinity of Central Europes.

I now found myself in two or three of them. I had failed to keep my job. I had failed Sinclair, to see how he would step into Catenna’s puma skins.

On the other hand – I had not killed again. I had not killed my brother, Cass. I had not understood, that was all. And now my natural self, the pink pig underneath pink man, had been laid bare. But all the same, my quick look at the history globe had shown I was all set to live. On what, I didn’t know.

Here, Austria is piled on bits of Italy. Here the train stopped, here I found the first new sproutings of the middle ages. Prosperity – but – did they want a pope, an emperor? It seemed an insult, just the thought. I should have called them communes, but these little groups of scholars, artisans, even a sober bunch that said it was the ‘workers’ brotherhood’ – were all, juridically, cooperatives.

I made three calls, one to each Anna. ‘I’m calling from the future. We shall all live closed up, in perfect balance, doing what we know,’ I said.

Biscotta enthused about the Romans, Anna Fürst about the Greeks. Flake said the future lay in deserts, preferably without the Arabs, though she loved them dearly. And I wondered if the famous friend in jail had been herself, or Cass: and if it was herself – or Cass – who’d done some deal, betrayal, sexual perhaps, that had gone bad, because she said, ‘The desert’s getting bigger, and we’re used to homosex at school.’

My suit begins to change colour, browning at the edges, paper at the critical temperature; my ashblond hair is growing out, my face is pig beneath, badger above.

Perhaps I can find a cooperative that will take me – there must be one for residues, for strangers. But they’re radical in the old-fashioned way. To be accepted, you must be a nice guy: it’s not that acceptance makes you nice. For me, no hope. And then – no, I won’t defer, won’t be a liberal from necessity, or because they demand it. I shall not start off again the politeness that ends with rich old uncle jackal getting all the power, myself politely shown the door.

At least, there’s still a door. Biscotta talks about the ‘ferment of the provinces’, lectures about it in New York; and Anna Fürst’s Greeks stretch further and last longer than the others. Anna Flake complains her neck has been giraffed in being lifted.

I can’t get accepted by the middle ages. I’m invited to their feast, but there’s a speech from the regional accountant, and I’m caught with my bag of scraps, accused of thieving. It’s harder to get entry to the working class than to the intellectuals, but both complain, I’ve nothing to offer but my appetite. I ask the intellectuals to sculpt me in my suit; to the workers, that I write a song for them to sing. And both groups tell me to get lost. I’m desperate. I’ve fallen through a crack in their fine oaken floor, their tight-weave pavement.

I fall. I’m falling, my fall is unbroken. I call Sinclair.

‘I’m a broken man,’ I say, and to my surprise, he comes.

‘You seem kind of suspended in space,’ he says. ‘What are you all about?’

‘Free me, Sinclair,’ I say.

‘Love me, Jayman,’ he says.

‘In the flesh, Sinclair?’

‘In the spirit, Jayman, and you know it, know your limitations.’

I try to convince him the future really is here – the middle ages, the attempts to stone me, the funny food they eat, the long pointed shoes. Sinclair says, ‘Elves’ hats is just fashion. And it shows respect for nature.’

I say, ‘No more, Sinclair. I have no choice, but to follow to the death. This was the great adventure. First a revolutionary in the States; then trouble – we all had it – with the bikers and the cops. Then this dead man—’ I wiggle my shoulders, and he flops about ‘—who doesn’t go away,’ but Sinclair’s sliding off, mumbling,

‘What the hell, what the hell. What the hell you on about? What a loser’s hand! The States, cops, innocence regained – what crap! It’s dead, all dead – communism, your funny little dead old man, you, and liberation in Utah, and popping pills – it’s gone a thousand times, it’s over.’

‘I know, I know, Sinclair, I’m telling you!’ I scream. ‘I know. I’m here now, standing on the join that Italy and Austria make before the iron comes down one last time and presses them together. I’m alive and real here, and when the music stops, all those without an elves’ hat on and in a corporation’s going to get fucked, to have no money, no six kinds of fish on Friday, no knitted woodfolks’ ale. I’m living through it all, Sinclair. It’s history – try biting off a bit some time, see it turn your teeth and insides black. Sinclair, I followed you, I served you, you made me, and I thought in the end all would compensate, all balance out.’

He says, ‘Jayman, yours is a fine but idle spirit. You tell me that you’re free: that’s good. Even freer than the rest – that’s better. But you have to think too – all those communist guys parked there in Vienna: they were in it too, the big adventure, the big hayride. There’s heaps of people want to be slaves again, old boy, and have to get used to being free instead.’

I’m nearly crying with frustration. ‘I took it all for real, Sinclair, for more than petty thieving, lying, cheating, in Catenna’s name.’

He says, ‘Then that was your mistake, young Jayman. Learn to adapt; demand less, graft more. Earn your suits. Imitate the Annas. And don’t go off and talk about cartoons in Pernambuco, or the colour of air. Just be thankful, you were party to a shoot-out, not a massacre.’

‘So, Sinclair, it ends up like the fourth crusade? Constantinople rubbed out instead of Jerusalem?’

He says sympathetically, ‘Goddam Venetians. A cash deal, though, Jayman, not a conspiracy. Still, they shouldn’t have broken into the emperor’s zoo and killed his pets, that’s for sure. Quite right to get criticised over that.’

‘Help me, Sinclair.’

‘That’s more like it, Jayman, that’s a cry I can respect. Wipe away your tears, and stop dreaming. Think hard about those objects on the table, concentrate on them, and forget about Cass.’

‘I couldn’t care less about your women, Sinclair, or about mine. I just want to eat.’

Sinclair points to a tiny mouth organ on the table, like the kind on keyrings. Some scuffings from the history globe. A grape formed from mother of pearl. They are material, unmistakably real things. I had expected a picture; of wall churches, bandits, an airspeed indic­ator – something that would speak of travel, values, or transgression. I know following a god is a frustrating, if not a lost cause. I know it will all look better in the gospels. Nothing. Morosely, I pick up the mouth organ, to show willing. It makes two notes.

Delighted, Sinclair says, ‘That’s the way, Jayman. Slowly does it. Back into the human species, but not too fast – you’ll get the bends.’

‘What the fuck, Sinclair. Can’t I be freed, at least sent on my way, with a modest letter of credit?’ The old man of the sea twists my neck between his thighs, as if he’s cracking lobsters.

‘Now, Jayman,’ says Sinclair, ‘You’ll begin to see what’s real. And what is just convention. You think, because you follow things, they’re leading somewhere. Leading you somewhere you might want to go. It’s convention, Jayman. The pathetic fallacy.’

‘Catenna led people, and is alive and rumbling.’

Sinclair reproves me, and picks up the grape: I see it is an eye, an agate iris, a statue’s eye. Idly, he looks through it at the sun. He turns to me, I see his eye gone blind, opaque. ‘Forgot about these gewgaws, Jayman, my old friend,’ he says. ‘It takes a while for sight to be restored, after looking at the sun – speaking of Catenna.’

‘Some secret, then? To show I needed you, to show you’re needed. People look because they need to find – even if it’s only in a book. Some seer’s reward.’

He scoffs. ‘Some Sears and Roebuck, Jayman. Don’t be cynical, be realistic. Live hopelessly, modestly, with reason. You’re not a slave, nor will you live to ride beside Catenna in purple, into Persepolis.’

His words, foolish and inconsequential though they sound, throw me into depression. I can say, do, anything I like. No one will take notice. Why should I want them to? Why did Sonny Boy Williamson – if it was he – play so assiduously for King Biscuit Flour? Because it was his nature, I suppose. I squeak at the mouth organ, and Sinclair looks encouraging.

‘We must all make it to reality on our own,’ he says, ‘Just slough off your illusions like a year’s supply of snakeskins.’

My gut is so empty, I hallucinated, and there is Cass poking his snake tongue in my ear. ‘Money, Sinclair,’ I say with conviction. ‘Give me my money, and I’ll go. Not suits, money.’

Sinclair says, ‘I’ll overlook your pathos for the while. Now, you’re at the centre. Everything is striving to be like you. And they’ll get there. And they’ll do it better. But, Jayman, you are our Faust, the wonder of the age.’

‘Sinclair, I’m hungry.’

‘Jayman, that’s your own fault, your stupid choice.’

My old man of the sea is delighted at this, he pounds my ears and pulls my black and white hair.

‘Sinclair,’ I say, ‘I killed. I killed some stupid fucker.’

He ponders. ‘Yes, Jayman. You screwed up.’

Humbly I say, ‘I didn’t know, Sinclair, I didn’t know how right those nineteenth-century things were going to be.’

A long line of monks passes, smoothly as if they’re on a frieze, at a last supper. They tilt their profiles as if they’re made of porcelain.

Sinclair asks, ‘Do they know how beautiful they are?’

‘I think so. They are terrified. This is a safe house.’

He says, ‘This is the part of the middle ages that appeals to me. The big monasteries for homosex and art, the healthy diet, and of course the gardening and the prayers.’ He is enthusiastic, and I imagine him putting Cass’s name down for a novitiate.

I say, ‘They’re scared, Sinclair. They’re tax evaders, and if the taxmen find them, they’ll lose their families and their houses.’

‘But magic. They know magic?’

‘Yes, Sinclair. They must all take an oath. Some of them are in the mafia, and have done horrible things: made their nephews into sausages, dissolved their mates in acid. Others are just guys who didn’t fill the forms in right.’

Sinclair stares for a while, then says, ‘Yes, I forgot, young Jayman. Here the state allows you lots of space, but if they catch you – back you go, it’s slavery for several generations, galleys, building superways. Still, my young friend, it’s all a bit of history, and no doubt in the end, amid the sand and little bushes there will rise another Rome, the fourth or fifth. And for all this crap – empires, papacies, big industry, big crime, the big ideas – it all takes manpower, Jayman. Manpower, not women, just remember that. And tell your Flake, next time she tries to off my mates, that I have played her number on the wheel of fate. She is still spinning; when she comes to rest, I’ll have her lifted, fixed and bronzed. An avenged angel hanging over Rome.’

‘And hunting, Sinclair? What we came about?’ My stomach gives a roar, and he jumps back: ‘Jayman, your hunger is self-made: go catch yourself a pig.’

My head is mostly pig, and Sinclair is embarrassed: ‘Hunting? Here in Italy, old Jayman, where the old jostles aside the unborn new? Where old Romans never die, but everywhere’s a cemetery? I had great hopes for hunting. Hunting’s done only in real time, and is, of course, completely without an object. If you never kill, or see, a creature, it’s the same. With modern methods, we can cull a species with a sprinkling of acid on the leaves. I remember, in Wisconsin, we had the skylarks so wired up on some pill or other, they just kept flying up and up – fell back deep-frozen into special packages. So exalted, they didn’t even think to breed, or nest, or even eat. To get those birds, you’d need a missile going up, oh, maybe ten miles or so. Here, with the colours, the materials, brocades, leathers – it would leave room for everyone. Even the women come in somewhere, holding the horses. Or preparing lunch.’

I have never felt so bad. ‘Food, Sinclair. After, perhaps, hunting.’

‘But Jayman! The rest of us have solved the problem of the food. We’re stuck as regards the politics,’ and he pauses, as the line of .monks, dead white in the face, begins to chant.

‘It’s beautiful,’ he whispers. ‘What can it be?’

I tell him, ‘They’re pleading the Fifth.’

‘But politics,’ Sinclair continues, ‘well, it’s all liberal now. You can do it, or not; just don’t get caught, settle things with your own conscience, and mind that no one takes offence, or tries to rub you out.’

Some of the monks overhear, look nervous. Sinclair is a menacing, basalt figure.

‘Power, Sinclair,’ I implore. It might be like food.

‘Power is off the menu, Jayman. If it’s slavery you want, no one will oblige you now. It costs too much. The regulations, the fact of having someone all your life. Fuck, Jayman, it’s not just worse than parenthood or marriage. It’s worse than life itself. Slavery is for ever, beyond suicide, beyond the grave. That kind of eternity’s quite out. Why, if I make it to the big time, I’ll have my gospels written up in instalments: no goddam dogmatism.’

He is catching the monks’ nervousness, is anxious to be away. He knows he still has me, that I’m too dull and faithful to make my own way, explain what it’s all about; where the monks, moving teamwise in their frieze, think they are going, who they fear is after them.

‘I want projects, values, plans,’ I say, ‘and if you can’t give me that, then lead me, give me your meaning, make some history round me.’ I shout, ‘For pity’s sake, Sinclair! Finish the picture that I’m in. Give me choruses to sing. A sword to chop with, fetters I can clank. Give me my meaning. Make me mean!’

He is sidling away, his nervous smile hovers on the cloisters like a moth. He says, ‘Mean, Jayman? You are mean, a person fine, idle, mean. Not to say—’ he is almost gone ‘—abject. Chased out the garden once again, for stealing apples. Killing people. Not understanding, not obeying, the word. All the religious crap – but don’t get in my way, young Jayman, for I’m off; into hunting, reading the six books of Anna Fürst, altering my shape, completing the teaching, tailoring the future ...’ He is leaving.

I say, ‘Sinclair, I’m hungry.’

‘Get a job. Go into a factory.’

‘They don’t want me.’

‘Write. Be a monk.’

‘The future, destiny, struggle?’

‘Finished, Jayman, all settled. Get that old time religion.’

‘But, Sinclair, all I know is bondage, chattel slavery, obedience. I don’t believe all that other stuff.’

He is gone. I hear a mumble, ‘force him to be free’, but it is just the monks praying for people somewhere else.

I am hallucinating with hunger. I am useless to everyone. I am in hell. There is no more injustice, there are no more massacres. If there are, the monks have things in hand. I occupy no space, so no one will beat me. I have no money, so no one will rob me. I have no skills, so no one will exploit me. I have a pig’s head, I am not beautiful even to pigs, so no one will screw me.

I sit down. I do not weep, because my face is too swollen. Like a snake, my begging arm creeps from the shade of my brackeny suit. I am a slave reduced to begging. A crowd gathers: burghers, elves, witches.

Someone says: ‘We can’t recognise you.’

It seems you have to be a stereotype, with documents, before you get your crusts. If this were the West, I guess I’d come out shooting. But even that’s incongruous. So, Sinclair’s right. The only time you get to hold a gun is in defence of mother nature. Can I be more abject, dirtier, more repulsive? No. Begging days are done. I get up. I have reached the bottom. There is no one with me, no comrades, faith – no book to read. The only thing I can’t lose is my dead double; stupid weight on my neck, stoops me. Freedom has its advantages, though. I walk away from my pantomime public. They troop back to bench and workshop, to print their guidebook, make their souvenir.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Rita will find me something. She is the mamma of a clan. I say, ‘Mamma, can you find me some clean and easy work?’

She is watching a soap, and rocking on her throne. Clean-looking guys in jerseys and leather jackets look in at us, and grunt. The room is tranquil, but she does have lots of tormented figures on the cross, or variously tomb-bound or exhumed. There is a Christ elongated on a cross that’s been fitted up as a rack.

Rita is solid and floppy, like a seal. She says, ‘You’re not a gipsy, are you? I draw the line at slavs.’

‘I get on well with Indians,’ I say, forgetting I’m not supposed to get on well with anyone except the boss. She says, ‘Well, here we must provide a service. Everybody does. Bodyguarding is a growing line; then there’s informing, naturally, and there’s a lot of frightening to do.’

I say, ‘I saw myself as a kind of spy’, and she laughs, and says, ‘I see you brought your lookout.’ I realise she can see my old man of the sea, my dead brother from the ocean.

I say, ‘I’m trying to get away from masculinity, that bullying, bodyguarding stuff. I want to be a bit more spiritual, though terrorising does seem what the species takes to best.’ I go on to say that if we had hunted and lied less, and gathered more, our cosmic life would be extended, Gaia purring like a cat; and ramble on until she says, ‘You into beating up on faggots, then? Because gratuitous stuff is not my line.’

She’s losing patience, and she says, ‘To give a proof that you are in good faith, we need you to take care of someone. Or his cousin, if you want. But – you must take him on your own. Since you’re into masculinity so deep, you can bring me back a little souvenir, to show me your regard.’ And she brings out a jar of opaque glass; it looks like an immense tear bottle, a deep deep purpling blue. I say, ‘It’s a lousy job, but a beautiful bottle.’

I think, fuck me, that isn’t what I want at all, so uncompromising an assignment on my first day, we haven’t even discussed the benefits and profits yet, and she goes on: ‘We like to have people from outside like you: strangers. People want order, and they are prepared to cause suffering to get it. What do you expect?’ she asks, threaten­ingly. ‘They don’t want war, they don’t want extremism, and they don’t want to pay their taxes. Especially betting taxes. And that’s where you come in. Just cut off a memento when you’ve done it, and put it in the bottle.’

‘How will you recognise it’s his?’

‘He did me wrong once, and I’d recognise that prick anywhere. Besid­es, the bottle sings to me, it sings of love, and death, and motherhood, and gratitude. Stuff like that.’

I ask, ‘Hunting and gathering?’ I think, fuck, she’s worse than Flake and Sinclair put together, and she doesn’t even want a slave, just a pigbutcher, hitman.

And she says, ‘Set a pigman to catch a pig. Forget the gathering, Jayman, just hunt for a while. Or else.’ I hear the bottle singing quietly to itself, of deep blue, purplish fires, of tears, of flesh hacked. I say, ‘Perhaps I’ll be merciful. Try for his cousin.’

She says, ‘Well, that’s my offer. It’s an uncomplicated mission. And if it goes wrong we shall, of course, avenge you. Or your cousin, if you have one.’

My stomach now is full of fear, and good intentions. The world is beginning again, and, though all the structures seem in place, I have to survive a few temptations. I leave, mumbling plans, and as I go I see a big face on TV, its mouth working, ingratiating. It is Sinclair, and he says, ‘You must all be aware how difficult it is to make your way in a disarmed, peaceful society, that takes no ideological shit.’

The translator papers over his language, and he comes out sounding good, even benevolent. The aim in life, he says, is to impose yourself by stealth, not violence.

He makes an elegant movement, reveals a two-metre bow-and-arrows – the kind Odysseus used for his slaughter. ‘Practise with one of these,’ he says, ‘and next day in the office, you will gain respect for your life aims, ruthlessness in settling accounts and paying debts.’ He holds it out, horizontal, a pair of smiling lips, determined ones. He says, ‘It’s only make-believe, of course, but arrows can go right through someone without them knowing. Till afterwards,’ he laughs, and Rita laughs as I scuttle down the stairs. And I think she enjoys finding heroes ready to wipe out the rivals, herself as Penelope, woven deep into the plots of TV soaps.

In my relief at not being hungry, and not being constrained once more to kill, I throw my legs out like a cat’s. Bursting out, on to the street, I see a tall motorbike, its handlebars uptwisted like the horn of the ram at Ur. The dismounted rider is wearing an elves’ cap, and a ski mask. His hands are copper-coloured, like those of the painted wooden oarsmen in the funerary toys they shipped from Egypt. Shipped along with my blue tear bottle. As he raises the target pistol to shoulder level, aims it at me, I turn; quicker than my own eyes, I scutter back. Rita hasn’t seen I’d left.

She is muttering something about intentions not always meaning what they seem, as if that is a good defence in law, and Sinclair on the box is saying, ‘... aim, of course, to cause death. But as humanely as possible, which means quickly. Though I wonder if quick always means humane, and whether it’s quickness or efficiency that we want. Perhaps it is a primitive idea, that what is over quickly cannot be so very important,’ and he goes on about extremely long and painless tortures, done in motels and places, similar that end in death, but are no more than irritants.

I say to Mamma Rita, ‘Please take no offence, but if it’s kill or be killed, perhaps I’m slipping to the second category. Destiny, perhaps,’ and at the word, my old man of the sea whaps me with delight. I hallu­cinate, Cass and a Cajun queen are flashed before me, both drowning in the same sea.

‘Not up to the big one, eh?’ asks Mamma Rita, not unkindly. ‘Well, there is something else, that takes a little longer.’

But I say, ‘It was the starting in that way, starting again – myself this time the victim, as if I hadn’t been the last—’

But she cuts me short, ‘Carry me.’

‘I already have a passenger,’ I say, thinking of adding her for ever to my old man, tiresome beneath a lady boss, who’s heavy as a blackjack.

I ask, ‘For ever?’

She says, ‘You crazy. In a box, out the door. Some centaur’s waiting for me in the street. Breakdown in security.’

I’d rather serve than kill: I thank her. I stuff some bread sticks in my mouth to give me strength, tomato paste, perhaps a cat’s head, roasted, halved and decked out with some green: crunch it all up and then, half done, regret it – pig’s jaws grinding up – perhaps pig?

I bundle Rita up in Styrofoam, and slide her down the stairs. I feel I’m leaving a hotel without paying. I think of our time in the desert, the guns wrapped coolly in reeds and plastic: hotel paid. Slogans on the walls to Catenna, written in Afar – ‘The language that lives up to its name,’ Sinclair said.

It is easy getting past the assassins. The centaur asks, ‘Hey man, gonna mail your old lady?’ He’s suspicious, but with a target pistol it’s unprofessional to shoot at parcels. ‘Another time,’ I say.

Rita says, ‘That was too quick,’ as I unpack her: ‘You bruised me.’ I tell her, ‘The being over quickly is the worst part, the whole species burning out like candle juice’ – thinking of Sinclair’s teaching about death, and my Indian lover’s house, the oil lamps, and oil that penetrates her cookery, the meat pies, flesh burned up twice.

Mamma Rita says grudgingly, ‘I must owe you a favour now. Ask for something quick and small.’

I say, ‘Just my freedom,’ and regret it, as a superior kind of servitude would suit me better, but majestically she says,

‘Jayman, free as the air. Now, though, you’ve offended me,’ as though the right thing to have asked for is to be emperor of Brazil, and probably she has it in her power.

But as I roll around her meanings and intentions, it becomes quite clear: she tried to set me up. I was to get hit, out in the street, then she would sidle off, away in the confusion. So much for earth-mothers. Fuckers, I thought. But hers and Sinclair’s commentaries, though strong on rules, were really just to say: the rules are those you make. Or don’t. Better the quick eye than the rule to turn aside old Mr Death, waiting at the door, on his dark horse, or motorbike.

 

 

 

nine

 

 

I try again – this time to join the gipsies. Although – that’s to belong in one long massacre. That’s why there’s vacancies. The gipsy boss looks like Mamma Rita, but the food is better.

‘Beset by massacres?’ he says. ‘Yes, but we don’t read about it, and so it’s less oppressive than you think. The trouble is, the niggle, the everyday – all the constraint, the circling round. The wandering. You don’t read about it, but you live it, like the Indians.’

He has a hairless moonface. He makes it clear, for him, gipsies is not a thing you join, to get some cash, a meal, or get to buy a good used car. He mumbles something about being ‘programmed to extinction’, but he swears he’s talking about ‘a land of no distinction’. He has no time for guys in elves’ caps, and he agrees that Mamma Rita has a vicious streak.

He says, ‘The violence doesn’t matter. We run away from it, but it follows after. We seem to trigger it off.’

I say, ‘So Italy is no good?’

‘Being nomadic is hell, but being where you can’t move is worse. We move on because we enjoy it – or we used to: but it’s good not having to make yourself liked either.’

‘I understand it’s hard to answer questions about this or that country,’ I say. ‘My own troubles come from being such a fantastic good shot. If I’d been Lenin, I’d have started a revolution in that parking lot. Lenin and I – both quick on the draw.’

‘Well,’ says the gipsy king, ‘I’ve had to run from Lenin too. But you’re not like him, and I hope you don’t think you are. One doubt too many about yourself, and you’re nobody at all.’

I say, ‘If Lenin and I were both Lenin, then there’s still a difference. He got off his shot in Petrograd, afterwards called Leningrad, and my parking lot was in Santa Monica, afterwards called Santa Monica.’

‘You don’t need to confess to me,’ says the gipsy king. ‘And if it isn’t written down, they won’t .believe you anyway. That’s our problem. No one knows a people who doesn’t boast in print: that’s where the Indians went wrong – original reds of America.’

I add eagerly, ‘And the Cajuns.’

‘Naw,’ he says, ‘I heard of them. Good fiddlers, so they must be regular, OK.’

I say, ‘In other words, to be a gipsy, you need a gipsy king,’ and he says, ‘If that was not the case, I’d not be here. Besides, Jayman, do you want to do what gipsies do? We don’t ingratiate ourselves, you know. But rules – yes, wow: bags of rules.’

I tell him of the strange pilgrimages to Catenna’s lair. The strange inscriptions, stranger still desire for truth and revelation, or at least some new sensation; of the caverns still and seductive as winejars. Now the world has ended once, some detonator to start it off again.

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘some of us will end up there to check it out.’

‘And then? Suppose it’s war, or capitalism all over again and unopposed?’

‘Then run like rabbits.’

‘Hunted, not hunting?’

He laughs without enjoyment. ‘Hunting? Perhaps. It’s a thing we do. He’s too clever to have moved off his throne, ever. Is this the margin, beyond which there is nothing? If so, what is Flake, and what is Sinclair? Or are they all tiny, beckoning centres – even like Anna Fürst? But in her case, why do we never drink the drinks, why, what do we contemplate?

The gipsy king’s impatient. ‘It’s rude to think while I’m talking to you. Life without politics is tough, Jayman. No one’s busting themselves to give us rights, that’s for sure. Responsibilities – that’s another question.’ His accent becomes more Brooklyn, and I think of the Biscotta, free in the streets of New York at last, shopping for kilims, no longer tied to communism, the weight of being straight, ascetic.

The king brings out a leather bag, and in the leather bag I see a leather globe. A copy, perhaps, of Sinclair’s. More up to date. Maybe this one runs slow, and you can see in intricate detail what you should have done to end up somewhere else.

He raises it to his eye, more like a bottle than a telescope.

I ask, ‘What’s in there?’

‘A great confusion, Jayman. Lots of running to be done. Peoples are on the move. They’re looking for a Rome to sack, for prisoners to free. The servitude of a thousand years starts with a day of liberty.’

‘Movement? The wandering of the peoples?’

‘The mixing of the peoples. Who won’t be mixed. People cast like biscuits. They will never change.’

‘You mean they’re pure? Original?’

‘Don’t fuck me about, Jayman. You know as well as I, they’re bastards every last one. We all are. You, Jayman, fail the test of courage and democracy. Perhaps you missed the firing of the crucible, that light that lit the dark ages, gave us popes and kings, the 70 millimetre cannon. The peoples were formed and differentiated then.

‘They spoke all the tongues, and goddam it, Jayman, how they hated each other! All naked as snakes, not a hair among them, squalling in Slav and German. All little bastards out the oven. The same oven, Jayman. But they are made for war, I fear. That is their destiny, and they know, each step they take through history groans with blood, their eyes have the soft glow of ovens. And they repent. How they repent! Make bigger, better empires to repent in: ah, Jayman, the lightness of constraint! How willingly they pull the little cart, and call for bigger ones. Ovens. I call them children of the oven. Where they put us. And they will cook again, cook with a bright, a stony flame.’

I am drawn to this. It fits the racial paranoia that I know so well. Imagine my ancestors, fleeing from the plague in Europe, landing as free and godly men, hunting around on that first afternoon, to find a black man or a red man, rape and kill. Yes, it fits, Mr Gipsy, in a way; I say, ‘What do you see in the globe, my friend?’

‘Meadows, geese. People looking after geese, beside blue streams. It is Romania. Romany land, land of the Romans. And there are scarecrows.’ He stares at me. Am I a believer?

Then, briskly, he says, ‘Shit. What good’s all that pastoral? We’d better get on our running shoes.’

I try again: ‘Look, I want—’

‘Too much, Jayman.’

The interview is over, and I haven’t got the job. He says, ‘Here, Jayman, you could know real slavery. In the family. Tradition kept alive...’

He must know something that I don’t, like all the other big cheeses, not especially better than me, or more clever. I think of Candide in the hell of Paraguay and shudder. No, not Paraguay! My innocence isn’t worth that much! What is it that they know? Not sex, to judge from Flake, nor money, looking close at Fürst: and thinking of Biscotta, not ideas, as she unthinking couples under water, little toad-shaped gaia.

I ask myself: ‘What is this big thing, Jayman? What do they look for in Sinclair, what portent do they see in him?’

I hear my old man of the sea, he’s chuckling, and he rides me like a rocking horse. My hunger returns. And suddenly it’s clear. It’s clear that what they see, what they foresee – is war.

 

* * *

 

War. Catenna. Sinclair, the messiah coming as a mediator, but coming from the god of war, certainly not bringing peace, but ... My legs are more shit-scared than the rest of me. They must lie down, once more they win out, and my stomach must accept defeat, and wait.

I beg Sinclair to take me back. He says, ‘Yours is a good, but limited, slogan. Neither mafia nor gipsies! But what then, my young friend?’

I have no answer. He says, ‘Jayman, of course I need you, I’ve got big plans. Show you round to some people, as someone who’s been taking in the enlightenment.’

I say, ‘No, for fuck’s sake, Sinclair. The people here are horrible, and what’s more—’

He interrupts, ‘I see you’ve drunk in the old Weltschmerz. That’s Austrian for tired of life,’ and I shout, ‘It’s not me, it’s them’, but he is off and talking about gipsies and settling them down’s the only way, an ungrateful people, behind so much of the movement of the peoples, and black guys coming from the goddam Sahara and who knows where. And my old man of the sea jumps up and down and joins in all the choruses, and I am forced to say, ‘Sinclair, shit – go easy on the stereotypes, my little guy is beating hell out of my skull.’

‘Jayman,’ he says, all calmed, down and smooth. ‘I have made it big. I’m,’ he whispers, ‘at the top. The big Ps. They go ape for me.’

‘Who might they be?’

‘The Presidents, head Yank, head Russ. Notice how they’ve both given themselves the same title now? The Soviet once was secret­ary. As if you did it all by writing letters. But now it’s president. I call them big corp. and little corp. Because, young Jayman,’ he whispers again, although the only witness is a waiter behind smell-proof doors who waits till my jaws slide into neutral before fuelling me up again, ‘Because,’ Sinclair chuckles, ‘the presidents of the corps. are afraid of becoming corpses!’

He sits back, and my normality goes critical, and I am crunching tiny skulls.

‘War.’ I say.

‘Good man, Jayman,’ says Sinclair, ‘and you can come in very useful.’

‘My new enlightenment values?’ I ask.

‘I hadn’t noticed any. Just clean yourself up, young man – your old man of the sea, the train of Indians, those Cajuns – now the gipsies: how can I introduce you?’

I say, ‘Your monkey. But Sinclair, this war the big guys think they’re starting. Do you want it? Are you opposed to it?’

He winks, and says, ‘I haven’t quite decided yet, young Jayman. And what is more, and should be clear to all, is that what I want,’ and he repeats, slowly, ‘What I want, and what will happen, doesn’t just depend on me.’

I think of the gipsy king and his history globe. I say, ‘Better to look very closely at Romania and forget the rest,’ and I am thinking pastoral, but Sinclair says, ‘A very shrewd remark, old boy.’

I make another one, and say, ‘Then all this crap about the hunting, when we went and woke Catenna and the forces ...’ and he grabs my coat: ‘No, silly boy! Not god of war. An underlabourer. A bootboy of the big cheeses,’ and I say, ‘Sinclair, if cheeses had legs, they’d feel like mine. So. You’ve done it. Hit the big time. Like a rocket.’ He is proud.

When I was young, the Indian girl gave me so much; so little now the gipsy king – it seems that everyone can have a history globe. Then, in the snow, we would count the boxcars, me and my Indian lover: hung with snow, they were, brown and grey snow, chemical extrusions, like mottled and tabby Moby Dicks, coming, she’d say, ‘from a rigid cold’, enjoying the words and saying them over and again. And by God she was right, and when they reached us they must have been bung full with acid icicles. And one day, an Indian came for her, and drove her off in his Camaro: ‘My brother, my lookalike,’  she said. Like hell he was her brother and they went off into the snow, and he shouted as they left, ‘Geronimo’, heading where the boxcars came from; where what’s alive and made by man stands out because it isn’t clean. It’s dirty, and I made a joke of it, and won a Finnish guy’s girl by beating him at shuffleboard, and he got mad and drove his car at me. But she was Finnish too, and she got mad at me because I called her Huck. ‘Don’t say that,’ she said, ‘That bad word is for doing, not for saying’ – and I would get a laugh from the guys by saying, ‘I lost my innocence in a Camaro’, because they knew the story, and now Sinclair screams at me,

‘For fuck’s sake, Jayman. Stop playing with your godawful maudlin adolescence. Can’t you hear the civilisations jangling and getting ready? It’s the great game, Jayman, people are staking high, the cathedrals, yachts and train stations – all up for grabs again. Not like your animal species, all they do is eat and fuck, and when they die, they’ve got no clue where they might finish up. Civilisation, Jayman! Is being staked on the table: the new deck is being dealt.’

So, that’s it, round and round the hands go. Like a clock, like a traffic cop, like a game of poker. Sinclair is getting frantic: ‘Rise to the greatness of the situation, Jayman.’

‘I get it, Sinclair. We can have campaigns, new ones, and another run at the old: world war, colonial, liberation war, urban guerrillas, ecoflop, class war, state terror. And the end of civilised life, insults to religion, god’s head cut off and sent to Mecca in a biscuit tin. A day of liberty leads to a thousand years of servitude, old friend.’

‘No, no, Jayman. You’re what la Biscotta would call a qualunquista, someone who’s too scared to call himself a bloody fascist. What you must do, to break the circle, is think of something new, to rise above ... Not just repeat the crap, what we all know, that people die in wars. We must have one where no one dies! Think, Jayman. Invent. Don’t repeat your sentimental crapola.’

He is, yes, he is a great man. Perhaps the greatest. A war where no one dies. A religion no one believes in. A disease that doesn’t hurt. Hunting with a camera, stealing the image. But too clever, and I feel banality will get him too, the big Ps will do for him, the P that’s really a series of guys with rubber masks, and one of them who really is a rubber mask, as Sinclair says so often, ‘haha’. And once every hundred years, you should try going down to the shore, and find a smooth, smooth shell.

No one has slithered into it, nor out. It has no life, and no idea what life might be. But it may spend its time telling – yes, you – the stories and the jokes you’d take a thousand years to think up for yourself. In fact, getting wisdom in this way, peeking here and there in shells and shawls and rusty bonnets, and never, never risking .... In the end, you’ll sound unbelievably wise. And perhaps they’ll ask, ‘How does one get so wise?’ and you’ll reply, ‘Listening to this shell, which knew no life, no thing had slithered in or out ...’ And imagine how you credible you are! People will climb on each others’ heads to get away from you. Better to take your chances, be the sole survivor in a train smash. That’s an authentic piece of statistical bric-a-brac that anyone, with luck, could be.

‘Jayman, no time for probability: hustle along. The hierarchies click back into place. That Anna Flake – a dirty fighter, swift at flankers; and Anna Fürst can spend her cash, but doesn’t get much fun from it – perhaps that’s how she likes it. Biscotta now, a finger here, a finger there, she ends up doing what she thinks she wants, but with the person that she didn’t want to do it with.’ And I warn, ‘Stereotypes, Sinclair,’ but he is in his saddle, and he says, ‘When people start to wonder if a war is what they need, the stereotypes come galloping back. The forty-four pale horsemen, Jayman. But what I need to do is get fixed up again with Cass; the meeting with that eye, that labyrinthine ear, that led us to Catenna: that wasn’t chance, hey, Jayman, hey, my good old boy?’

His face is bulging, and I stare, remembering my own, my disqualifying, pigface. ‘I’m sorry, Sinclair, it came on again. I saw my brother, in an elf hat, with a target pistol, trundling old Mamma Rita out the door trussed up she was, in rushes. And our good old Styrofoam, still and stuffed as a mummy. My brother, Sinclair: my lookalike, my double, member of my species. The hitman, and the evader. Like Martians say they can’t tell us all apart. Target pistol, Sinclair.’

Wiry heels about my ears.

‘OK, OK, Jayman. You’re here to fight, to hunt – be hunted – another day.’ He sees me as an example for the great ones. ‘The image of suffering humanity, Jayman. That’s what your great pig face brings to mind. These big buggers, when they feel they’ve started off another war – it’s you, your guilts, your frailties, your potential and your actual cowardice – that’s what I want to bring springing to their minds.’

I say: ‘You let them hunt me in the desert, Sinclair.’

‘You had no choice. Besides, we didn’t make a sale. They pilfered all our goods, and we stole theirs.’

He becomes ingratiating: ‘You see, Jayman, these buggers are interested in us only if we’re gods of peace and war. They get off on that, and on having conferences, where they look like paladins. They think, “Which do we want” and, considering us, the many mouthed, the public cough and rustle, “What do they want?” War or peace. “What shall we give them?” Peace or war. Politics is very simple at that level, Jayman. I was speaking to the US President the other day. He said to me, “Sinclair, old boy, I want you to tell me this, and be sincere. What was the Third World War about? How did it end? Defeats, and deaths off stage. But really – it is all a mystery! No one was interested in the philosophy at all.” Then he turns to the Russian – what’s his name? Vlad the Impaler, something like – he says to him, ‘What are you, some kind of anarchist? My lot are more sophisticated. They want to see stuff piled in the shops, oranges and all that crap.”’

I say, ‘Sinclair, you’re just dropping names. Those guys can’t pay for your advice. They don’t carry ready cash, and by the time you get the committee’s cheque, the big guy’s out of office or decapitated.’

But Sinclair insists, we shall confront them at the meeting in Vienna. It seems that Anna Fürst has dusted off her books, the battle plans of all the old historic nations – Bohemians, Moravians – and she’s designing uniforms, translating commands. Biscotta is running for alliances, and complaining, ‘I’m always in bed with someone when this happens, wishing I was there with someone else, or doing something different,’ and the Flake is specialising in assassinations, would like our help with electronics.

‘If they go this time,’ Sinclair says, ‘it’ll be for their identities and their communities,’ and I think of the gipsy and his globe, and hope he’s started running. Sinclair says, ‘If these mongrels fight again, they have to think of something different – it can’t be for duty, family, God and blood again ...’

I say, ‘I think we should speak out: tell them that it’s war,’ but Sinclair shakes his head, and says, ‘For us, there’s no dilemma, Jayman. Mine is not a problem, since the big responsibility is rarely personal. What you know, and what you get to do – the link is pretty loose. And as for you – you have no dilemma either: no one would believe a word you said.’

I am hurt. I say, ‘Well, Sinclair, I shall ask the god of war,’ but Sinclair says, ‘I shall consult with Cass. I believe in him more.’

And I think that Catenna’s motto was not, after all, about being humble and refusing consulships but a swifter comment – vires humanae cosmon reneunt: Human Violence Unravels the Cosmos. Sinclair brushes it aside, and says, ‘That’s polyglot, besides, everyone I ask says it could mean anything.’

But I have worked it out from dictionaries. We argue quietly, Sinclair at times consults his history globe. I massage my bristles, and the old man on my shoulders sniffs and sniffs the air for blood.

 

 

 

ten

 

 

Sinclair and I are chatting to the presidents. Sinclair says, ‘I’ve always wanted to be able to tell you clearly this and that, but now it slips my mind,’ and turning to me, he says loudly, ‘My, this is dull! And all in all, they’re not so smart. After all, everyone knows about Lithuanians, and the cost of arms, and oranges in the shops.      Besides, it doesn’t take a genius to find out what’s wrong with a country.’

The three of them draw away from me, but I hear Sinclair urging them not to sell their souls for common sense. Sinclair buzzes on, and I see that Vlad is sleeping, and his mask is rucked up.at the neck, and the American has his face set, and at one point he slaps at Sinclair as though he is a killer bee.

They take a break, and Sinclair says to me, ‘I’ve been discussing Catenna and his coin types,’ and I say, ‘Oh no, not that, Sinclair, and not that trick with your tongue, I hope.’

But Sinclair takes offence. ‘At least they’re live! Some of your friends are dead. We have to get to talk to these grand guys – they don’t meet normal people,’ but I feel my old man of the sea is taking over, that he has me at the gallop now. I know that Sinclair is failing, failing to stop the war, but also at getting money, shifting their minds to hunting or to other things. And my old man of the sea has the kind of grumbling, acid-filled excitement that Catenna had, like a pot that decides, after a hundred years’ indifference to the heat, that it will boil at last.

Or else – Sinclair wants to mediate between two futures, so he needs suspense, uncertainty. War or peace – and nudging both to keep them well in balance.

I ask, ‘Sinclair, tell me at least, now we have hit the top and agents are checking out our records: why does Flake want me to hit Cass?’

He says, ‘Cass fixed me up this interview. Of course, the Flake is jealous. Think of all the guys out there. All that money in the desert: what do you do without a bank?’

‘You dig a hole, or wear it, like we did.’

Sinclair is impatient: ‘You put it in Cass’s bank, and that’s why he can buy these guys out, twice over. They’re embarrassed, and there isn’t any way a speechwriter gets round that. They have our problem, Jayman. Broke. No cash.’

I say, ‘You promised them a loan from Cass, so as to get your interview?’

He looks shifty. ‘Not exactly, Jayman. Not just that. I admit, I did something I’d only do to someone that I loved. Loved as much, let’s say, as my own family.’

‘Family? What family? What did you buy their time with, Sinclair?’

‘Jayman,’ he says, ‘the bad, deplorable news is – I had to sell you. But there’s good news too. You’re like Trieste. Neither can decide who wants you.’

I look sternly down my snout: ‘I should expect as much, offering myself as a disciple, in exchange for what? I’ve forgotten now. But mine is biblical love, like human sacrifice. If this is really all the scam, then I’d be honoured.’

What is the scam? I say, ‘If you tell them that there will be war, Sinclair, then that’s the scam. For obviously, you’re right, sooner or later and somewhere. It’s a scam bet, not a prediction.’ He looks shifty:

‘Maybe they don’t keep your company, old boy. Besides, I can tell which war it’s going to be!’ He flashes out the history globe, and taps it, shakes it, twirls it freely, a pearl between the dragons. So this must be the scam – somewhere at the map’s end, oiled along with Cass’s bank, there’ll be a god of war and peace who’s kitting up his troops in gold and silver. No surprise, then, that Sinclair’s tongue is free to wander where it will.

‘Anyway,’ says Sinclair, ‘those two, the presidents, they must be odd, to choose that kind of life, and read those speeches other people write, and strut about like pop-up history books. You can’t tell me they understand scam bets. Besides – I know a war is coming up. I feel it in my tubes. We’re cooked and fried, young Jayman.’

I don’t question that our situation is identical. ‘What can they do about it, then?’

‘Run, I guess,’ he says. ‘But there’s a strange thing about the globe. It gives the picture, then starts shaking. One minute, hearts and flowers. The next – what could be soup.’

I say, ‘If you look at anything too long, it comes out soup. I think the pleasure’s just in looking,’ and Sinclair says eagerly, ‘You mean, like voyeurs? But surely that’s the best, old boy. Just think, if before the Russian corp. went clunk we’d taken sides with them – think how we’d feel now! What fools! All that ideology, when all it takes is a few good guys to save the world, and string the bad guys up. But,’ and his gaze is no longer fired or wired, but thoughtful, ‘My globe doesn’t like what it foretells. Not at all the empirical attitude.’

I explain, ‘Not looking so as to find; just looking to look,’ and my old man of the sea gives out a hoot, as if to say, ‘You sure found me.’

Sinclair says, ‘The more that I love Cass, the more I find hate the Annas,’ and he repeats it like an epitaph. Sinclair is steaming up, becoming critical: excitement, isolation – the things that fire up gurus, not to speak of gods. The American president, I saw, had leaned to the Russian one, and said of Sinclair, ‘That guy tongued me!’ And the Russian said, ‘Perhaps he was bugging you,’ and the American: ‘Sure he bugged me, you don’t think I go for homosex as well?’ And Vlad said, ‘Well, if we at least swapped wives, they’d know we’re really serious about this cash you’re going to give us,’ and the Yank said, ‘Lend, not give.’

I say to Sinclair, ‘The States. I’m not going back.’

He laughs. ‘Jayman, you were never there. You had your own reservation. You can’t be refused entry anywhere, if you’re hung up by your heels in space.’

Well, I think, I shall collect suits. Sorting out the meaning of all human things only requires a little act of will. The species lives as one, goes to its church, prays to its god, salutes its flag, hunts its rabbits, picks its nose. And I’ll have suits, the birthday of the human race I’ll celebrate in the all-Russian, all-American way: I’ll buy a fine new synthetic birthday suit. The colour of all human flesh, hermaphroditic, with a pouch where I can raise my young, mammals or reptiles, fish or birds – and also keep the history globe.

‘Come on, Jayman,’ says Sinclair, ‘stop primping and prepare to meet the Annas. If you had a suit like that, you’d need a platform for your little squeaky stiff.’ And the old man of the sea snortles his approval.

Sinclair is growing still, a good quintal’s weight of blotchy mortadella, and my legs are sprouting out my pantlegs, part Uncle Sam, part Jiminy Cricket. We go to Anna Fürst, and find she’s taken on Andreas as a butler. He pretends to take our coats, which we don’t have, and Sinclair clips him on the ear, Andreas armlocks him, and they fall and sprawl on Andreas’s back. Slide into Anna’s warroom, as if we are a vigorous four-legged, four-armed beetle with two thrusting abdomens.

‘For fuck’s sake, Sinclair,’ I tell him. ‘Forget the beetle stuff, remember we’ve got messages and signs from demigods,’ but he is giggling and he says, ‘Four-armed is forewarned, Jayman,’ and Andreas pops Sinclair’s arm joints in and out to make his point, but he is laughing too; and so, we have put on a little boyish military show, and only Anna Flake thinks it’s out of line.

Anna Flake says, ‘You two look like you’ve been shot from cannons. I thought you’d been sold, Jayman.’

Sinclair says hurriedly, ‘Only his soul. And the little guy on top, for curiosity.’

Flake is intrigued: ‘So his legs can still be mine? You don’t plan to break him up?’ and Sinclair smiles nervously, but the others are delighted at the splitting of souls and body, and how you could make the bodies clean the house and not spend a cent on souls.

I try to restore the dignity of my good self: ‘Have you thought – suppose the species starts to cool off here? Gets really calm, unaggressive, integrates – and wafts along on Sachertort and Mozart? If peace really hit, became a way of life?’

‘We’ll almost all be out of a job,’ Biscotta says, and Sinclair says, ‘Those guys in elves’ caps will take over, Jayman. I have seen the future, though, and it’s Bohemian.’ He laughs hugely, but there is a prim silence, and Anna Fürst says, ‘If there is a future, you’ll have to keep quiet in it, Sinclair. You too, young Jayman.’

I think that doing the contract on Cass would not be too bad, if I could see him only as banker, hypocrite, even adopted son of Sinclair. But then, there were those eyes, that tongue too, beneath the chador, a certain humour: when he sprayed me with some musk to hide my scent when they were hunting me, and said, ‘The dogs of war are fired when they smell fear.’

But then it all goes cold again: my Indian lover. With her Indian lover. And then, Sinclair screeching, ‘Pathos, for fuck’s sake, someone, he’s falling into a pathetic state again,’ and my old man of the sea digs in his spurs. And things are going straight on now, and I find a Turkish wrestler’s hold on Andreas’s crotch, and by himself he rises up and off; we five are alone to talk of diplomatic things.

‘Well, now,’ says Sinclair unpleasantly, ‘now we’ve established who’s dead and who’s alive, who’s bought, who’s sold, and who’s just along for a ride – let me drop one more name into your sweet laps. And remember where we’ve come from, remember Dog City.’

They are not impressed. They are already making all the history they have time for.

Sinclair stands. He says, ‘Ghengis Khan.’

There is a dull silence.

Flake says, ‘The Aga Khan’, and the silence thickens.

Sinclair says, ‘Cass has the power. In ready cash. Has the power to transform himself. Transform Catenna too, into love of the body, sex, if you want – the peaceful things, they call them. Instead of Genghis Khan, you can have Cass the great charmer. And you satraps here can keep what you’ve got, and get interest on it.’

I remember, apart from all the racial crap and fear that goes down well with bureaucrats, that Sinclair likes to talk of Cass as though he were the brother of some epic Satan, author and judge of evil. Or, perhaps, first judge, then author of it.

Anna Fürst says, ‘What did the presidents make of this farrago? Is the danger inside, or does it come from outside?’

Sinclair looks wise: ‘Aha. Hunting would be safer, and more middle-brow. The questions, after all, are peripheral and settled. Sensibility tells us that to hunt’s off-limits. Tradition tells you that it can be fun. Like mayhem in the slaughterhouse. And so, good old sensibility, not wanting to offend anyone, says, well, OK, maybe. Anyway, it’s only fucking animals. Look, I’m no prophet – but you European guys should try to think, if you want the others in – or if it’s all a ploy to keep them out. The Genghis? Is it the horizon in your heads, or is it outside? At all events, a great, a very great man.’

Anna Fürst looks prim, and says in Vienna they are used to prophets of doom, they had a famous one who lived in a big house near here, and was a star, absolutely right about everything, and now they have a lot of them, just for insurance: but no one pays a lot of heed.

 

 

 

eleven

 

 

We leave them in a great turmoil, with atlases, and Andreas tells us he was always for reform, but somehow missed the boat: managed, at any rate to catch the train, ha ha. Sinclair gives his business card, that says, ‘I hereby enrol you as a common soldier of fortune, price one redeemable soul, payable at destination.’ Andreas thanks him, and I pinch Sinclair, having nothing more irritable in my armoury, and he says, ‘Wow, Jayman! I was inventing in there like hell, but what I said wasn’t all crazy, was it, about the coldwater ports, the search for manganese, and demographic time bombs in the desert?’

‘You didn’t get to that. You hit them with the Mongol hordes,’ and Sinclair says, ‘They fall for it, these Europeans fall for it each time. They want to join together, lose their tribal identity in some vast melting pot. The problem is, that everyone else is Mongols,’ and he swings the history globe so fast it all becomes a blur, and if the thong breaks it would reach the Prater, and perhaps become a wheel within a wheel.

Anna Flake has seen the joke, sort of, and says to Sinclair, ‘You should get your slave new clothes,’ and then, ‘Biscotta thinks you’re racist kooks, and Fürst’s convinced you’re Turkish spies. But to me, you’re just two sweet guys who want to make a buck. So which of us is right?’

‘Stupidity is an unbreachable defence,’ says Sinclair, ‘And can lead to punishment that only the punisher understands, alas. But if you touch Cass, then between us there will be no peace.’ He towers over her. He is oppressive.

Later she asks me, ‘Why do you stay with him? From fear?’

I say, ‘Sinclair’s infinitely various. In his way, he’s epic, like the Arabian Nights, the slough of despond. The things that come out of him,’ I turn solemn, ‘are like Hollywood. Only, there’s less cash around.’

‘There’s still my garage,’ she says, and I rest my snout on her shoulder, like tomcats do when they expect a female to rake them across the nose.

‘Later,’ she says, not displeased.

‘How later?’ I ask – but Sinclair takes up all my time, like a political party or a week-long poker game. With Sinclair, you’re in or out, you’re saved or damned – one of the big lies you need to keep civilisation together. Not like Flake, who pretends that everyone’s a big cheese. With Sinclair, it’s hope, despair, courage and cowardice. But not as rules of life.

Flake says, ‘Tell me about America. It could be nowhere, if you two come from there.’

I tell her about the swamps, the snakes, the runs with bush turkeys, the isolated wolves who know true love and die together; high towers the beavers build – and she says, ‘But Jayman, there’s no people,’ and I tell her yes, in my experience there are, there are good people that start with Cajuns, Indians, and then there’s Finns and Portuguese maybe, ‘And then, of course, a lot have moved in since I left, but if you drive a lot, like I did, I do, you don’t bother about the people much,’ but my old man of the sea sucks in his breath, as if to say ‘you sure as fuck bothered about me when you thought I had my piece out,’ so I say:

‘It’s not the people, it’s the dumb jobs you get to do. Then there’s the justice. I’d prefer Mexico, where it’s much the same, but less chance of getting caught. And then Brazil is even better, where everyone is kind of Cajun, but they all wear this kind of silver suit,’ and I show her my cuff, but it’s black as if I’ve been burnt at the stake somewhere.

Anna Flake tells me she enjoys seeing people fighting against tyranny and being sacrificed, and dying for a better life, and hope, ecology, but how she always ends up employing people like Andreas, or having them as boss. ‘If we could be born again, into a higher species! This one that we’re in is a kind of crummy lower version. I want to be in one where your voice can sing all the parts in a song at once; or where love lasts for ever, like ecstasy but licit,’ and I say, ‘or where love doesn’t’, and she says I’m sentimental.

I say, ‘It isn’t that. It’s the goddam repetition of everything. Seeing the sun rise every morning, as though if we didn’t we’d forget it. Doing the same thing every day, making the tiny touches that show we’re lichens after all. Same house, same clothes, like lichens. Then we get the hang of it, then whammo, you’re dead.’

She says, ‘You get put down in the history book.’

‘Lichens can’t read, Flake. They can only creep and reproduce.’

She says, ‘Some people can draw a perfect circle freehand, or play the fiddle.’

‘Exactly. Indians and Cajuns. The only thing that stops us looking like lichens on a millenary creep is cars,’ or, I think, in the case of Genghis Khan, horses.

‘But Jayman, do you care? If it’s creep or gallop or zoom?’

‘It seems the critical difference,’ and I think, especially if it’s in a Camaro. With another Indian.

‘Well, anyway, Jayman, even if you’re rather odd, with those scarecrow legs and pigface, and that dirty princeling suit, I’ll let you call me the woman in your life,’ she says, and I think that taking this crap from her makes me want to try for promotion to the eunuchs.

I ask, ‘And Cass? Your friend is tucked back in the archive? Or will you carry him, like my old man of the sea?’

She says, ‘Cass is a snake, like all the other snakes. The vendetta never stops.’

I tell her, ‘The presidents will make it all a smaller world, and we’ll be crouched in front of the TV, the animals all locked in and out, according to their usefulness – but still the savages are everywhere, we see their footprints in our shoes and in our socks and in our shower. I’m a savage, Sinclair is one, but much more powerful, and perhaps you have a special antagonism to Cass because he’s a savage with a bank ...’

She mumbles that we are not interesting or uplifting despite that, but I’m brought back to the question of my servitude when Sinclair says, ‘One more last throw, stout Jayman, then I’ll let you go. It’s all quite clear to me. We can’t be Martians from outside, we must be fixers from within. On the rim, my dear old boy, there’s only gipsy kings, and the usual mass of elves and gnomes. The key is here, the centre. If things are to be shaken, we must bring the outside,’ he pauses and lamely adds, ‘Inside.’

I tell him, ‘I should be sorry to go my own way, Sinclair. I didn’t come to love you, but you’re like a father to me.’ He makes a mock bow, made difficult by his jointless, tubular frame. I continue, ‘I fear that now the Sixties are far away; the Seventies, I was convalescent, and the Eighties didn’t leave a mark. People drove away; they grew older, their cars were newer,’ and I remember the Transam that I crashed, and could still weep. ‘I’d hoped you could get rid of my old man of the sea, but now I kind of like him, like a medal. Gunning him down was, after all, an act of duty ...’

Sinclair adds, almost kindly, ‘And in another country, and besides, the guy was a klutz and probably stoned.’

We stand awkwardly, as if beyond what we’ve said there lies some further intimacy; and awkwardly we turn away, seeing there is not.

Sinclair, with relief, gets down to it. ‘You appreciate, Jayman, doing my tricks, inventing messianic stunts, is not so easy now. But I see clearly, that here you have the small peoples of a continent, these Europeans with a mass of flags, most bloodstained, all with moth-holes. And so, you say, my modest Jayman, “Sell them some new ones.”’

‘Not a fucking flag salesman, Sinclair, surely not that,’ but he pushes forward, twirls the history globe, sparking like a Catherine wheel, and says:

‘But as you know, Indians and Cajuns have no flags. Even in the desert, I never saw—’ and I interrupt,

‘Yes, Sinclair. Everyone has a flag, every animal has a pelt,’ but he goes on, ‘The little khanates, that’s my scheme.’

‘But the little peoples here are moving into the big time, Sinclair.’

‘Exactly. And on the outside? Why, Cass, of course. Think of the desert belt, that covers all of Genghis’s old trampling ground; all the awkward peoples, people on the move, the heretics, the faithful, inspired by need, by faith, by bloody-mindedness. Or else again because they have the new idea.’

‘What’s that, Sinclair?’

‘How the fuck should I know? The people who come after work that one out, Jayman, like your good self writing what you see.’ He leans towards me confidentially, a god comparing notes with the creator of another galaxy, a pope hobnobbing with a prophet: ‘This species moves too goddam quick. It goes up, like a rocket, smoke over everywhere, and then it drops – bits of bomb-casing, big splatter of dinosaur shit. These European guys may stomp each other – they’ve done it before. But it’s with Cass I can do real business. And other things. And so, the plan is this: arrange a show of strength between the European guys and all the forces of the desert – from Mongolia to the Atlantic, then, with a hop, over to Brazil and Paraguay. The desert as metaphor, Jayman, also as real: enthusiasm, Jayman, vocation. The new puritans.’

I shudder when I hear the name of Paraguay. Sinclair says, ‘You see! Everyone’s afraid of Genghis,’ but I say no, it’s Paraguayan Customs I’m afraid of.

He goes on, ‘Then, they can decide: to do a deal with Cass, or screw each other. I think that’s the correct liberal phrasing.’

‘Sinclair, you mean you’re concocting a new Genghis Khan. You’re his fight manager, his second, and then, tucking him up in bed for when he’s won or lost the fight, his consolation?’

He looks pained and thrilled. ‘Jayman, what you haven’t grasped is this. It’s in the name of sport. The great game, as the Brits have put it. Everyone is left to fight another day. The imponderable values, the metaphysics – we steer well clear of all that stuff. We have history on our side,’ he waves the future clock, ‘but we don’t build on it. We violate it. So, we avoid all the disappointing crap about peace being so great and death so horrible, when really, every day, we need a crumb of war, a slice of death pie. But we also need the same next day, and the next, and so go on, go on. Like the rocket, till its fuel runs out, and then – good morning, gravity. Then, my good Jayman, when physics will have run its course, we enter metaphysics – but by then, my position as a prophet will be well confirmed. Or not.’

It’s true. He is the last great humanist. He has known temptation. Every kind: financial, sexual ... And each time, he has fallen, fallen with a greedy, an accepting, eagerness. More human than I could ever be. A great man. Experiencing all the passions, hanging on crosses, wrestling bears, pushing back the frontier: inventing, welding. And all this Sinclair does alone: he moves, he flies, from continent to continent, from desert all-American to Araby.

‘Now,’ he says, ‘All we need to decide is – where? I am thinking of the plain outside Vienna.’

‘Schwechat?’

He looks at me, knowing me insane. ‘The plain, my dear Jayman, that lies between Vienna and the Iron Gates and Vilnius and Mozhaisk, and Stavropol. This is the big one, Jayman.’

It’s a big block. A thousand by a thousand miles.

I ask, ‘And here, Cass’s new world will meet the old? If it’s interested.’

And Sinclair says, ‘If it can, Jayman, if it can. The new intelligence – the old skills, new heresies, marginal men on the march. Not that I’d tell Cass that. After all, you don’t look too sophisticated yourself at the moment. Can’t you wear a mask?’

I am hurt. In the desert personal appearance is duly private, and I think that after all, some of our American deserts, with gas stations and rangers, aren’t too bad. One soul always pleased to see another, if suspicious too.

He is high on geopolitics, and he goes to tell the Annas. ‘Your presidents and the rest can test their system. See if it works on global scales. The land you’ll rent from little corp.,’ he says, and Anna Biscotta thinks it’s all a great idea.

She says, ‘We Italians – we’re the ancients and the moderns, the high style and the Prince. This One World dream’s just fine with us.’

I say, ‘Well, if the new Genghis’s khanates run from Sakhalin to Recife, then Italy is on the rim, the Northern edge,’ but she says, balls – if they could manage the fourth crusade then they can handle Genghis Khan, so long as he’s not nuclear.

Anna Flake’s amused, and says, ‘While you guys are hot, and working on a whole new system, why don’t you try to do the trick with good and evil?’

I look up at the nothing, visible on my shoulder blades, feel him flapping his black cockerel’s wings. I say, ‘If all it took you capitalists to do for little corp. and all its customers was just one little shove – surely you could do the same for all the bother about gods and devils, good and bad?’

Anna Flake squints at me. ‘I thought so. I had you down as a pinko. It wasn’t just us capitalists did for the reds – we had the pope behind us. A smokescreen about the Greens in nature and in Islam – and – biff! – another crusade is launched, the best of all! The horses didn’t stop until they got to Siberia.’

But all the same, the idea of imploding the old man of the sea, sloughing off death and guilt, which cast a gloom, even on my half hour with the Flake, down in the mud – is that a dream? I say aloud, ‘Yes, first the all-night pizzas, the free dope. Then, down went old Satan, like the song said. And when we’ve bust the lords of poppy and of coca, we’ll go on to bust the other chains. And then we’ll be like the people in the nineteenth century, or like the Indians or the Cajuns: all carefree,’ and silently I add, ‘In their fucking Camaros.’ I feel I am betraying Sinclair, but I go on, ‘But then again, you ask a Cajun if he’s free, he’ll say yes or no or hum and ha, depending as the fancy takes him; whereas your Cajun queen, goddam, will cost you plenty, even if like me you don’t end up with one. And if the devil creates evil, he does it so that he can judge it, and lock you up in God’s big jail – so there’s no way out of that, except ignore it, start from somewhere else.’

Anna Flake explains to Sinclair – ‘It’s what he’s got between his shoulder blades.’

And Sinclair hisses angrily, ‘What you got between your shoulder blades, boy? A hump? A knife?’

And I hiss back, ‘I thought the bugger that I nailed was one of them Cajuns after me.’

‘And the others?’ asks Sinclair. ‘Did you have to do the others?’

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘you have to do them all, the whole family, for that’s what family loyalty means, or they will haunt you. And if they’re innocent now, they won’t be in a day or so; and if they’re really innocent, they’ll go wherever Cajuns go in death. A swamp. A diner. How should I know?’

‘Well, anyway, you’re stuck,’ says Sinclair. ‘One of them’s on your back. So destroying evil, religion, ethics, it won’t do anything at all for you. You’re stuck with what you killed, wanted, loved.’

I say, bewildered, ‘Getting rid of evil might disorient him, throw him off, while he was working his new self out.’

‘Jayman,’ says Flake, ‘you’re a pig,’ and I know I am, but she goes on, ‘but a confused pig, so you’re not all bad.’

Sinclair explains: ‘Jayman here has got it slightly wrong. It’s true, some ideological coins have lost their value, but the other ones inflate to fit the political economy of the soul, or should I say, the brain. You can’t liquidate right and wrong, young Jayman, it’s not like the welfare state or Che or folk songs, all that stuff. What I am proposing here is spectacle, an auction of the future. I don’t intervene, and you can buy or not. Just as you wish.’

Anna Flake says, ‘But you know what will happen? And as principals, surely we must organise our side?’

Sinclair says, effusively, ‘But, my dear Annas, you have so much, and so much of it lies idle, is never even meant to work. Just wheel it out, and I’m sure you and my banking friends can do a deal...’ but Anna Fürst says, ‘Deal? We don’t want anything.’

‘No,’ says Sinclair, ‘but you don’t want your throat cut either, do you?’

And I think he’s going to get us killed or jailed. The only hope is that Sinclair is a match for Andreas, and then we have a zone to get away in that’s a thousand by a thousand miles. And then it strikes me, that on our champion’s side, in our new Ghengis’s tent or camper, there’s the perfect weapon for a universal contest. The history globe. Cass – banker, warrior, victim; robbed; restored.

‘I’ll rent it to him by the hour,’ Sinclair tells me. ‘No. By the revolution.’

I hear Biscotta whispering something about ‘These fucking secular Marxists, never give up, the tubular one has a future to ransom and the scarecrow’s a mass killer of the crudest kind. One has history, the other has the gun,’ and Fürst is nodding wisely, taking notes –I expect she’s writing: ‘Ask porter to kill our guests.’

We leave to organise Cass. As I go, Andreas offers me a suit: ‘I may have shrunk yours in our struggles,’ he says. It’s a fantastic suit, a film of oil, fresh diamonds floating in the fabric, and he says, ‘Recycled petrodollars, newly synthesised,’ and he cracks up, ‘Into suits.’

I say to Sinclair, ‘The Annas are plotting up, Andreas is hanging his old suits on me, part of his secret stash,’ and he says: ‘Bloody people. Those Annas have no style. Permanent furniture movers. And Andreas – lots like him around. A sign of primitivism, to put your treasure into jewels. They learnt a lot, but took good care to forget it quick.’

Hopefully, I say, ‘Nothing to worry about then, Sinclair?’

‘Of course there is, you fool. Meddling with the world turns people against you. Yet it’s a free world, isn’t it? Its history and its future don’t belong to anyone. If we keep our paws off the present, no one should have a beef.’

I’ve started my target shooting once again. I would prefer the job of twirling Sinclair’s globe, but when I use my gun, I find my snout improves; and in my black oiled suit, I look quite sleek.

To me, it’s all one desperate last throw. And Cass flies in, and two more planes behind, one full of cash, the other full of bodyguards. Sinclair says the Annas think power comes from a pork barrel, and tells us all the things the presidents have told him, how they’d like to run for election in each others’ countries, where winning would be much more fun and get them more chapters in the history book – but Sinclair taps the globe and looks knowing.

I say to Sinclair, ‘Is Cass a threat to us? And if not, then to who?’ And Sinclair says, ‘That’s exactly right, the kind of question to be asked in confrontations. Flake thinks he’s whipping up a massacre, the Fürst says he’s overrunning Russia with his Arabs, and la Biscotta says “Let them all come”, and is rarely seen.’

I say, ‘Let’s cut our losses, Sinclair. Millions of people will arrive – only the Romanians have said that yes for sure they’ll help the Annas, but Cass’s lot will have to come by bus, their rustless armour will get scraped—’

‘To the Marne, they went by taxi,’ Sinclair interrupts but I go on, ‘Let’s fuck off out, Sinclair, while we can.’

Sinclair is angry, but mostly he is stupefied and hurt.

‘But, Jayman – and with the future in our hands, the history globe? And Cass? The only woman that I’ve ever loved, the only man I’ve ever respected. Even you, Jayman, though in many ways a base kind of fellow, especially where a backbone’s needed, I – I’d hoped to have you as a son. I should adopt you, Jayman, and when my empires are being sliced away, or simply get too large – I thought you’d be my satrap, or my faithful caesar. You could hive off the agnostics, maybe, and I the moderns. And now – to run away? You can’t just run from destiny.’

Sinclair looks noble and through him I have the vision of the underground of slaves, no longer taking refuge, but surging, pouring through the tunnels, making history from below, and breaking, ululating, through the cement crust, and through the cinders. A vast, unwarlike army of free spirits.

‘But – to do what, Sinclair?’

‘Show themselves they can do it. Show you can do it too – make history. Stop the Flake using you to kill Cass.’

‘Sinclair, I want to get this little old dead man off my back. The rest is just a sack of potatoes. One more, one less, they’re still knobbly to carry around.’

‘The old man is your destiny, Jayman. Surely you want to have that recognised? Even acquire a bigger destiny?’

I say, ‘I want a lighter one,’ then I’m ashamed, because it seems mean-spirited to meet the god of war and have nothing in the world better to do than swan around in suits.

Sinclair is sympathetic, and he says, ‘It’s a pity good sense has taken over for the moment, and the presidents of the corporations have done a deal. But, Jayman, think of the millions, millions – people whose expectations fall, and eyes get brighter. Fever, Jayman. Hunger, Jayman.’

‘Then Sinclair – you’re feeding the Annas a line about the khanates, community wars, all that?’

He looks heavily at me. ‘So?’

‘It’s a line.’

‘It is one line, Jayman. One of many. One of many possible. And I’m not European, Jayman, and I’m not white, and I’m not Christian, and I’m not humanist.’ He waits for me.

‘I never thought to ask you what you were, Sinclair,’ and he says, ‘And you were right, young Jayman.’ He is immense, his muscles waver beneath his clothes, the wings of fallen angels struggle to flap free. ‘At least, my humanity should impress you.’ But he doesn’t look human or humane.

He says, ‘Come on Jayman, you fake, work out what side you’re on. Endure something for a change. Fear, solitude. Don’t get used to people all over you always. Go to a cave and think. Other people’s culture has eaten you out, like woodworms.’

Sinclair is the satan; the only angel who would take the risk, who thinks of people who put power and labour above religion, the fire before the smoke.

 

 

 

twelve

 

 

We watch Cass’s soldiers get off their buses. Some too have come by car, and Sinclair thrills to see the De Sotos and brave old Dodges, the flagships of Olds and Studebaker, rustless like the armour the men are wearing.

‘The horses, Sinclair, the horses,’ I ask eagerly.

‘We have some gipsies working on that,’ says Sinclair, but he looks unconvinced. I recognise armour from all provenances, bits that saw the rise and extinction of the Khwarezm shahs, the Ghaznavids, men with leather horse armour from the Ilkhanid Mongols, the Urtukids, and Sinclair says, sweeping his arms wide, ‘As far South as Prijepolje, East to Kaluga and to Kuznetsk … there hasn’t been a deployment like this since – since the last time in Vienna. And all on tourist visas, Jayman. Think of the packed lunches, think of the poor sheep roasting.’

He is a great, a very great man. But Cass is grumbling about ‘What the fuck they going to find to look at in Kuznetsk?’

And Sinclair tells him no true Khan of Khahns would ask that, and Cass just nuzzles at him.

Anna Fürst has marshalled Andreas and his band, and on her desk there is a kind of field altar, with some gentian cordials waiting.

She says distractedly, ‘No room, no room! We can’t take any more complexity! I’ve grasped Sinclair’s point. I see them all here, staying, in uniforms they never quite wore out, for journeys never quite achieved. But it’s all over, Jayman. Surely Sinclair realises that. It’s all too late.’

I say, ‘Sinclair’s not interested in the past, only in the future. These warriors have come to see the sights, as you might go to Philadelphia; hunt a bit, then back home, in time for prayers for those that pray, and free time for the others.’

‘But, my dear Jayman, all the game’s protected here. And then? What comes next? Us?’

I shrug. ‘You must try to be more accepting. Other people, other cultures, other claims.’

‘But it’s the apocalypse, with forty million horsemen.’

‘Oh, I should think it’s more than that, covering a million square miles.’ I can see some of them lining up for cans of coke and sweet corn rolls at a shiny van outside.

I say, ‘Now’s the time to live out these primitive fears, of horses and horsemen, and the like. Men on horseback is a powerful image,’ and she seems relieved to think there is a therapeutic point behind all this.

La Biscotta is now less tranquil, and says a hundred million Mongol horsemen is incompatible with her idea of civilisation, and I tell her that’s too bad, and probably they too will feel disillusioned after a few years. She screams at me, their consciousness is in the stone ages. I tell her to think of Cossacks’ horses drinking in the Trevi fountain, but she says she’d looked forward to all that, but now the delicate balance had been upset. The Flake too looks shaken, though she likes the idea of people roaming about the continents. But I notice she doesn’t speak to me, and fancy some assassins have been hired to have a go at Cass, avenging her still-mysterious friend – singer of humanist songs? runner of forbidden things?

Then Andreas comes to bustle me out of the warroom, and I see them start their conference, with Anna Fürst, who picks up the first of her six little books and say, ‘It seems they’re not all Arabs,’ and it is a little Baedeker with all the frontiers scribbled out, and massive areas ceded here and there.

I shall never see so many armoured men again, unless one day I go back and they are getting on the Spanish conquest in Miami. I watch with Sinclair and Cass, as guys lean their spears and standards against their buses, play pitch and toss into their helmets; and Cass’s eyes are bright as if he’s brought the whole lot back from some rough Arabian night. And Sinclair too finds a great amusement, and a greater satisfaction underneath it all. Even my old man of the sea’s impressed, and sits up there, cocky as Napoleon, and forgets to pull my hair.

The plain is dusty with them, and the cops in cars just circle round and round them, like noisy Indians round the US army. When the sun comes out and clinks on all that metal, it’s as if it’s raining zircons, and I wonder if the Fürst puts acid in her cocktails. So, I laugh and snortle, and Sinclair says,

‘That’s better, Jayman, my old son, enjoy it, enjoy it while it’s still solid,’ as if it will start to break up and all be molecules again.

Cass says, ‘What magnificent machines those were,’ and he points to some bright and blunted Hudsons, with diced racing tape along their flanks.

The army waits. Army, or hunting party; day outing or forced march; it’s getting bored. Sinclair says,

‘They’re getting restive. We must give some orders, or they’ll start slashing the bus seats,’ and Cass tells him:

‘No, no Sinclair. I didn’t make that part of the deal. There’s no orders, no one to give orders.’

Sinclair is furious. ‘What kind of fucking army won’t take orders?’

‘There’s no command structure,’ Cass explains, ‘no common language, and anyway, there’s nothing that we want them all to do.’

Sinclair hugs him. ‘Thank you, my dear friend Cass, for your transparent honesty. This verbal aspect is what the history globe falls down on. But – you bring out the classic dilemma of all the greatest generals. Having reached the edge, the limit – do they all go forward? Do they all go back?’

We silently repeat the question to ourselves.

Sinclair starts saying, ‘We, the non-elected and the non-elect, the ultra-rational ...’ when the three Annas come up to us. Sinclair looks more like Corinthian column than field marshal in his cloak.

Anna Fürst says, ‘Sinclair, we shall call your bluff.’

He unmoved. He has studied the history globe. He says, ‘But Anna, dear, not even the Romanians have showed up. The toilers of elfland still toil faithfully, your Moravians in their green rig are all at home. What do you have to counter this?’ – he waves towards the mass of anxious tourists. ‘Or this?’ and he gestures at Cass and myself.

It is an epic victory and defeat. The Flake grins at the three of us, then says, ‘We accept the challenge, and we claim the victory. Even if the Biscotta feels it goes too far, we’ve reached our decision. We’ll blast you all with nuclear cannons.’

‘With nuclear cannons?’

Sinclair says with bravado, ‘Shall we make a stand?’

And Flake repeats, ‘Blasted with nuclear cannons,’ while Cass tells her that nuclear blasting is obsolete. ‘You should talk,’ says Flake, sounding chippy, and telling us she has cleared it all with the presidents, who are already preparing their speeches of global condolence.

‘Though, of course, as civilised men, they would prefer it if we worked it out like civilised women,’ says la Biscotta, hugging the other two Annas, and going on, ‘Well, Annas, I’d say we’ve done it; and how about that holiday, just all of us, on the Amalfitana coast, where those sprites I told you about drive lovers to distraction, just to distraction, my dears!’

The others don’t look keen, but I hear them say, ‘Yes, Anna, Ja Anna,’ as the news of nuclear cannons spreads through the ranks.

There is a roar, a clanking, and it sounds like the army of the dead and damned; as those that can, scramble aboard their transport, and the others take to the underground, like Harry Lime – ‘that goddam limey’, Sinclair calls him. Those who believe in martyrdom explain that after nuclear blasting there is nothing to be identified, and the other historic peoples to whom martyrdom means nothing explain that he who runs away lives to be called another time.

 

* * *

 

The Annas unleash Sinclair’s lures on us, and one plucks my old man of the sea off my shoulders as I run, my legs at one with my silk-oiled pants, running as smooth as a 1945 Studebaker; another year of victory, I reflect. But the loss of the old man makes me cry out with regret, as if I’d lost an arm.

Sinclair is pounding along in front, the history globe is almost invisible as it spins, the cogs of astrolabes and spurts of crank-juice pouring out. Sinclair is explaining as he runs, that where the nuclear’s concerned, the globe can’t register, because the fallout screws up the time sequence, no one in the works believes the data, that a simple blasting lasts for millions of years.

A lure snags Sinclair, carried him high but not wriggling – over a stretch of water, could be Lake Balaton, who knows, while Cass and I stop for breath.

Cass says, ‘Jayman, I love that man. Every Genghis needs his banker these days, but I was more than a banker to him,’ and I assure him he probably is, whereas I, adopted son with no empire at all, regard him as more than a father.

Cass agrees. ‘Yes, he could be an evil bastard too – but the vision, and the scale! Today, a quarter of Asia. Tomorrow, all the Indios. Who will give them life, make them known, if not such as he? And, in my modest way,’ he adds, ‘I help.’

I tell him, ‘Fuck yes. Getting those buses round the Black Sea,’ and he interrupts, that he has to deal with assassination squads,

‘That goddam Flake is always at it. Always the same excuse – her friends must be avenged! Jails the world over must be full of them.’ He whispers to me, and at first I draw away, remembering the business of the tongues, but he draws my head towards his mouth, and whispers, ‘State terrorists,’ and then, releasing me, ‘You’ve almost lost your piggy look.’

 

* * *

 

The lures are round our ears again, and I hear Anna Flake shout, ‘Get that goddam Cajun with the hop-pole legs,’ and Cass shouts, ‘Have faith in me,’ and we let the lures seize us and carry us over the water.

Perhaps they are answering Sinclair’s commands. Perhaps they were just programmed like that, transport home from a day’s hunting.

We pass high over Andreas’s group. They are still singing the Internationale, but I don’t know who’s side they’re on, or whether they are fighting, or just breaking out the vodka. Anna Fürst would surely have supplied them.

The cities of the West, each with a brown fur muff of fumes around them, are replaced by more ascetic, pointed ones, but it is hard to tell if their brown rings are air or dust, or horses that the gipsy king contracted to us as mounts. I thought I saw him peddling cans of coke and sandwiches in the Prater.

Then we see the desert rim, and both of us are pleased, dangling in air, that here it’s all done and over with, ‘Or else perhaps a place where it can all start up again,’ as Cass says, though he sounds unenthusiastic.

I tell Cass I have learnt to worship Sinclair, but also to do without him, as he’s often quite intolerable; and that I envy the Annas their holiday in Amalfi, and Cass laughs and says I’ll never lose my deep humanity, but that is not all a fault. Perhaps one day I’ll get a Cajun queen, perhaps instead the Camaro will come back. ‘Don’t bother, Cass. That old Camaro was already rusted through when they took off in it.’

Rusted out like the history globe, but we hear Sinclair’s voice from leagues away, exhorting us to run some more, although he’s safe.

He shouts, ‘You must keep up the struggle, the race is for the hall of fame.’

But he is tiring now, and we see him coming close to Catenna’s cistern. He turns, and makes a sign: Indian signal, Roman salute? The gesture is the same. Catenna’s motto is untranslated. Sinclair’s place in the hierarchy is unclear. The cippus by my foot says to arrive at the centre of Catenna’s empire will take an infinity of days on the march.

Sinclair stops, and we see the bright-barbed lures veer off. They hover over him, their wings still churning. The cistern begins to work and roar and snort, a vat where air ferments, and water turns to smog.

‘He looks like he’s going down to Catenna,’ I say, in foolish wonder.

‘Rest and recreation,’ says Cass. ‘We’ll know where to find him another time, whenever we feel like tasting victory or defeat. And God! – how I shall miss him!’

A very great man. ‘He is gone down now, with the other demigods and superhumans,’ says Cass. ‘With Marx and Nietzsche and Bolívar, Diana, Hector and the rest. Will he feel at home there, I wonder? How will they put up with him?’

I say, ‘I never asked about his background. Or else he told me fantastic lies about it. I think he’d hopes for communism, but now that’s off, he hoped to make a name in dealing – never in banking, the last thing.’

Cass says, ‘Banking is useful. Catenna is demanding, and he and Sinclair like nice things. But as for Europe – let them screw each other how they want. Or do you think we should have faced the cannons?’

‘By no means. I speak as bodyguard and assassin: both of us say “no”. My pig’s head has deflated now,’ I continue, ‘and I’m ready to rejoin the human race. I hear the starting pistols, firing a few volleys. I never atoned for my own small massacre, but more are brewing somewhere. A little personal guilt is what you need to make the history globe run smooth. Indifference helps too.’

Cass asks, ‘And Anna. Flake? Has she still got that contract out on me?’

‘If there’s trouble, ask Mamma Rita. She’s good at cancelling things, and she owes a little favour. Flake is determined. Biscotta is indeterminate. And Fürst I fear is overdetermined.’

‘Ha ha, Jayman. Your little joke says you’re on your way, and leaving faith behind.’

I reflect that I am almost Cass’s son, as well as Sinclair’s. Cass gives me familial advice – ‘Don’t worry about falling off the edge, the end of time. Finding the galaxy is quite uninterested in you.’

Indifferent, like my Cajun queen, my lover in that old Camaro.

‘We mustn’t burn ourselves out, Jayman,’ he says. ‘Though we may serve the gods of war, avoiding massacres is a must.’

And I say, ‘We should avoid pretentiousness about surviving,’ but he has on his banker’s solemnity, silently caresses my last little button of a snout, my golden bristles.

 

* * *

 

The desert is filling up again, as guys come back off the demonstrat­ion; or perhaps they’re the ones who said they’d go, and didn’t. It reminds me of Berkeley, and I say, ‘Well, Cass, here we are at the end, and no one has a scratch. Though I got my beating with railroad ties, or so it felt,’ and Cass says, ‘Yes, but you also got a poke at that Anna Flake.’

And I think, well now, East and West seem inhospitable, so shall I set out, shoulders unencumbered now, my psyche’s motivations crystal clear – to North? to South?

Cass says, ‘Well, I live here,’ but it’s not an invitation, not even like Anna Flake’s to use her garage.

I hover, undecided. The cistern digests what’s left of Sinclair, dissolves my contract with him, but the ground is sick with its own juices, and I look for an escape. Cass is receding now, and I think, after all, perhaps a tired Camaro, coming round the bend from nowhere … But, no, here there are no bends. There are no buildings, no sun, two colours only.

The trucks look musty inside, and there are no Cajun queens, no Indian lovers. I check my legs, the joints. I have not had to survive a massacre. I don’t represent anything, not lovers lost or found, or markets penetrated, nor jokes nor ironies, nor electronic gewgaws traded, gospels apocryphal or not.

I’m already running smoothly, the long legs up and down like pistons, the oil is scarcely boiling, those heat treatments opened up the cylinders.

And I take off, running like a camel, a fuzz of speed, a hunt, the chase, the great game is starting up. I must appear a blur of sound and speed, a history globe, map of the future, spurting sparks, welding the desert crust into a seamless skin.

Without a soul, I think I travel faster still.

As I run, I felt the spell, the jokes, the potions, all the panoply of Sufism lift off. My old man of the sea’s dissolved and gone wherever deeds forgiven go. Myself, again a clean giant; the pig’s head melted, the extending stilt legs back to their normal, if enormous, size. Sinclair re-ingested in the earth. Our dreams of conquering Europe, or at least of making it shit-scared, fought off by three bold and armoured lady bureaucrats. Cass back to his bank, counting the bright notes, as bright and high as magic, poisonous mushrooms.

I seem to gather height. The suits of armour in the desert wink as small as points of mica, sequins on a leopard skin. I have shed my burdens. Louisiana might never have existed. I can remember nothing. I had been enchanted. I had wished for change, a terrible transformation – and glimpsing it, I’d scrabbled back. The history globe had functioned. Seeing the future I had been able to evade it, think my way to safety. A word of thanks here to our sponsor, the history globe, the futures map. ‘Feeling good, feeling good,’ I think, motoring smoothly along, on my own green power.

Only the desert to leave now, place of no massacres, refuge of the gods of war, but sleeping now with Genghis, a fairy tale, a topos of the frightened mind, a page to be turned over.

I think ‘Goddam dervishes,’ and laugh at their ingenuity, at Cass’s club of deadbeats. Legs like ball-bearings bear me up, and up the hill. The milestones crowd together, I must be travelling at the speed of light, or sound at least.

There goes the evening call, that evening call I recognise, the demented trumpet screaming up three octaves, finale for a pyramid of jazz acrobats. I know there are no massacres, have never been, and not in Europe; and in any case, all done by others, who besides are now all dead, gone down.

Up round the last corner, and there before me, is the hotel, and there is Sinclair in a shagreen suit, sliding through a door too small for him; and I run up, and past, and keep on running.