Читать книгу Somewhere East of Life - Brian Aldiss - Страница 11

In Ward One on the third floor of Swindon Hospital lay Roy Burnell. Of the four beds in the ward, only his was occupied. He felt no great inclination to get up.

Nevertheless, even the horizontal position could not stem a swirl of events around him. There were, first and foremost, the visits from the police, and in particular from an Inspector Chan, an Asian member of the Wiltshire anti-terrorist squad.

The police had discovered Burnell in a house with a dead woman. He had been armed, and surrounded by boxes of bullets and much literature of an incendiary nature, as the official phrase went. He had been disarmed, handcuffed, and taken none too gently to the police station in Swindon. There he had been interrogated for some hours. It was then that Inspector Chan had been called in. Burnell’s plea that he had somehow lost his memory had been taken as additional reason to suspect his motives.

Only slowly had Burnell, dazed by events, realized that the police had initially been frightened men. The presence of a psychotic killer in Bishops Linctus had been alarming enough; the possibility that there might be two of them, the second armed with an illegal KGB murder weapon, had driven them mad.

Forensic evidence supported Burnell’s statement. The bullets which had killed the dead woman, Mrs Beryl Foot, were fired from the Barrett. 50 calibre semi-automatic now in their possession. Not only did the Makarov PSM use 5.45mm rounds, but examination showed it had not been fired recently.

Released and installed in hospital, suffering from exposure, Burnell discovered that what was now known as the Bishops Linctus Massacre had attracted world-wide attention. The specialist in charge of his ward, a friendly Dr Rosemary Kepepwe, brought him newspapers, where he was able to see what had happened that terrible morning.

After shooting the old man, Stanley Burrows, 58, and his step-grandson, Charles Dilwara, 1½ and his own mother in rapid succession, Lawrence ‘Mad Dog’ Foot had walked armed into the village. There he shot dead the first three people he saw outside the Spar supermarket. Several other people had been wounded and a plate-glass window valued at £2,000 had been broken. ‘BISHOPS BLOODBATH’ screamed the tabloids.

Mrs Renée Ash, blonde, 22, had witnessed the events from the window of her hairdressing establishment. She had her photograph in the paper, sitting coyly on a low wall, legs crossed. ‘It was awful,’ she said. ‘There was blood all over the pavement. And on a Saturday morning, too.’

The shooting aroused more excitement than the war in the Crimea, in which British troops, the Cheshires, were involved. Everyone expected trouble in the Crimea, but in a quiet little spot like Bishops Linctus, in the peaceful British countryside … The Prime Minister himself was driven down to the scene of the crime to shake a few hands.

As for Larry ‘Mad Dog’ Foot – as his friends reportedly called him – armed police from Bishops Magnum and Salisbury had shot him down behind the Shell garage. Some papers carried photographs of his body covered by a blanket being taken away on a stretcher. Burnell thought of Larry saying gently, ‘I like helping people’. Perhaps his help had been refused once too often.

Burnell’s melancholy was deepened by a sense of having fallen off a wall. He felt no power on earth could put him together again. Pieces of the past floated in his mind like fish in a bowl, without destination.

He was sedated and slept for long periods. At one point he woke to find a doctor with a maternal bust encased in a white apron at his bedside. This was the comforting Dr Rosemary Kepepwe. She sat by his side and talked soothingly.

‘I’ve been in a coma, haven’t I?’

‘We think you have fallen victim to memory-thieves. It’s one of the mushroom industries of the modern world … Anything’s stealable nowadays,’ she said, smiling down at him. ‘Don’t worry. Did you hear of e-mnemonicvision?’

‘Was there some kind of crash?’

‘Don’t worry. We’ll do a few tests on you and soon you will feel better.’

He trailed about the hospital from room to room, comparing diagrams, playing with bricks, having blood samples and brain scans taken, helpless in expert hands. A neurosurgeon jokingly offered to lend him a copy of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.

Dr Kepepwe came back to see him shortly after an orderly had delivered Burnell’s tea. ‘Now, don’t worry about anything. The Neurology Department is piecing together a map of your brain with indications of lesions there. They know that a section of your memory has been stolen from you.’

He grappled feebly with the idea. Visions of scalpels and silver handsaws rose to his mind.

The doctor said firmly, ‘Memory has no one location in the brain. It’s not a department. The thieves in your case have covered the hippocampus and regions of the cortex. We’ll know more precisely soon. It’s a delicate operation.’

He groaned. ‘You mean they’ve cut me up, destroyed my brain?’

She wagged a finger, smiling. ‘It’s an electronic method, well established these last five years. I don’t want to hear too many complaints from you, sir! You’re lucky that your period of memory was evidently stolen by an expert, not just some cowboy. First look at your brain suggests that you are pretty OK otherwise. You might easily be in PVS.’

For some reason he could not make out, he longed to hold her hand. Gazing up at her, he said, ‘I’d be less inclined to complain if I knew what PVS was.’

‘When they started doing e-mnemonicvision operations on the human brain, accidents occurred. That’s where EMV has got its bad name, why it’s still limited. Some volunteers became cases of PVS – which stands for Persistent Vegetative State. PVS. Of course you are experiencing a terrible loss, but you seem otherwise fully functional. You talk OK, for instance.’

‘Hope so,’ he muttered.

‘What about sexual functions, then? Do you still have erections?’

‘Hadn’t you better research that area yourself, Doctor?’

When she laughed, most of her body shook. ‘You’re a naughty boy, that I can see. We shall return to that subject later. Drink your tea and don’t worry about things.’

‘Do you want a raspberry jam sandwich, Doctor? I’ve lost my appetite as well as my memory. Will my memory return? You’re sure I wasn’t in an accident – a car crash or something?’

She shook her head. ‘Everything’s as I tell you. We’ll soon find out more about you. That will help. You’re going to counselling every morning, starting tomorrow, and that will help too. We can find out how many years of memory you’ve lost.’

‘Years? Shit!’ He said he could recall that there was an opera he had seen in which a man had his reflection stolen. This was worse, like a kind of evil magic.

‘You see, you remember some things, like the opera. Now don’t worry. Rest today. You’re still in shock. Eat up that sandwich.’

He obliged the doctor by taking a bite before asking her what EMV was.

‘You don’t even recall that? It’s a scourge of modern life, like video shockers only a few years back. You know that tumours can be removed from the brain without old-fashioned surgery, and now it’s possible to remove selected memories. Those memories can be stored electronically and so reproduced any number of times.

‘Oh, it’s a huge industry.’ While he munched at the limp sandwich, she explained how EMV was a sport for amateurs, just as television had been invaded by amateur videos. Anyone with a striking memory or experience could sell it to the EMV companies, ‘the way poor people used to sell a kidney for a bit of money’. Of course they would lose that memory for ever but, if it was valuable to them, it could be reinserted once it was recorded.

‘So I could get my memory back if I could find the thieves?’

‘You can’t catch these people.’ She went on to say that for EMV-viewers, the memories projected into their heads were as transient as dreams although, projected at greater power, they could become as permanent and ‘real’ as genuine memories. A vogue for the permanent insertion of seemingly life-enhancing memory implants was yielding up a new generation of mental cases whose assumed memories did not fit their own personality patterns.

Burnell was sunk in introspection. His gaze fixed itself on a malevolent square of cherry fruit cake lying on the white plate before him. He became convinced that he could read its mind: and somewhere in the warped mental processes of the fruit was an ambition to eat him, rather than vice versa. Only with an effort did he manage to look away and stare into the friendly black face by the bedside.

‘I can’t remember where I was before I found myself running on Salisbury Plain.’

This time, she put her hand reassuringly over his. ‘We shall find out all about you. Don’t worry. Tomorrow, our psychotherapist, Rebecca Rosebottom, will see you. And she is an absolute guru.’

Smiling, she rose to go.

‘Would you take this piece of fruit cake away with you?’ he bleated.

Searching about in his head proved to be a strange process. He could recall his early life easily. The death of his mother was vivid. It was possible to trace the chain of events until he was in his mid-twenties, when he had grown a small moustache to impress a girlfriend. That would mean the memory was probably ten years old. After that, nothing.

The last thing he could remember clearly was standing in a building in a foreign city waiting for a lift. He was in the foyer of an ornate hotel, all white and gilt and potted cheese plants. The lift cage descended from an upper floor. He walked into it and pressed a button to go up. After that – nothing. The dreaded white-out, the feared abyss. The thieves had got the rest.

The following morning, Dr Kepepwe entered Ward One with a broad smile on her face and her hands behind her broad back.

Burnell was propped up in bed, having just finished breakfast. She came and contemplated him for a moment before speaking.

‘You are Dr Roy Edward Burnell, AIBA. Those are letters after your name. You have been a university lecturer. You are a specialist in the architecture of religious structures such as cathedrals. You are currently an Area Supervisor for the World Antiquities and Cultural Heritage organization in Frankfurt in Germany. You have responsibility for threatened buildings of architectural and religious merit over a wide area.

‘And how do I know all this? Because you have also published a learned book, in which you contrast human aspirations with human-designed structures. The book is called Architrave and Archetype and –’ she brought her hands from behind her – ‘here’s a copy, just tracked down!’

He took the book from her. It carried his photograph on the inner flap of the dust-jacket. He stared at it as if the title were written in letters of fire. In the photograph he had no moustache, praise be.

‘We’re getting somewhere,’ Dr Kepepwe said proudly. ‘We hope to contact your wife next.’

He smote his forehead. ‘My God, don’t say I’m married.’

She laughed. ‘Well, you certainly were. Current marital status unknown.’

He closed his eyes, trying to think. No memory came through, only the tears under the eyelids. Whoever his wife might be, she constituted a vital part of the vault the memory-thieves had robbed. It was lonely, knowing nothing about her. Leafing through the copy of the book Dr Kepepwe had brought, he found her name. There it stood, alone on the printed page, the dedication page:

For

STEPHANIE

‘Nothing is superlative that has its like’

Michel de Montaigne

Tears came again. He had a wife. Stephanie Burnell. The line from Montaigne, if it was more than mere courtesy, suggested love and admiration. How was it he was unable, with his memory of her gone, to feel no love and admiration?

‘We can’t have you moping,’ said Dr Kepepwe, bustling in, to find him staring into space. ‘Are you well enough for a game of tennis? There’s a good indoor court on the top floor. I’m a demon. I’ll play you when I’m off duty at five-thirty.’

To kill the afternoon, he wandered about the great white memorial to human sickness. The few staff he encountered were Asiatics. He found his way into what the hospital called its library, where ping pong was played. The room was deserted; but the whole hospital was strangely deserted, as if the world’s sick had miraculously healed themselves. The library shelves, like the shelves of a derelict pantry, held nothing by way of sustenance. Almost no non-fiction, books on dieting excluded, no travel worth a second look. Fiction of the poorest quality, all formula stuff – romances chiefly, thrillers, also fantasy: The Dragon at Rainbow Bridge and similar titles, featuring pictures of brave men, women, and gnomes in funny armour.

In a neglected corner where ping pong balls could not reach lay a clutch of Penguin Classics. Zola, Carpentier, Balzac, Ibsen, Dostoevsky. He remembered the names. Also the Essays of Montaigne.

Burnell picked up the volume almost with a sense of destiny, having so recently come across Montaigne’s name in his own book. Carrying it over to a bench, he read undisturbed while the best part of an hour stole away, drowsy and silent. He believed he had heard the cadences of Montaigne’s prose before. Nostalgia rose in him, to think he might once have read it in the company of the unknown Stephanie. They must have enjoyed the way the sixteenth-century Frenchman spoke directly to his reader:

I admire the assurance and confidence that everyone has in himself, while there is hardly anything that I am sure of knowing, or that I dare answer to myself that I can do. I never have my means marshalled and at my service, and am aware of them only after the event … For in my studies, the subject of which is man, I find an extreme variety of opinions, an intricate labyrinth of difficulties, one on top of another, and a very great uncertainty and diversity in the school of wisdom itself …

Perhaps that is how I was, Burnell thought. Uncertain. Perhaps it was my nature – and not despicable in Montaigne’s eyes. In which case, my dilemma at present is but a special instance of a more general one. He turned the word ‘certain’ over in his mind, as if it were a curious stone found on a seashore. The great conquerors of history had all been certain. Alexander, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Shi Huang Di, the First Emperor of China. He wasn’t sure but he thought he had never been built in that mould. His father’s tyranny had been enough.

One sign of his lack of the tyrannical gene was that he could not beat Dr Kepepwe at tennis.

After they had played in the echoing court, they drank lemonade together in a deserted canteen. She said she must get along home, but seemed in no hurry to go. On the contrary, she tried to discover how much he knew of recent history, exclaiming with a mixture of delight and dismay when he did not know who was Britain’s Prime Minister, or what had happened recently to the royal family.

Her view of England was that it had now become like Ireland, a country with so much unemployment and such a lack of manufacturing base that many people were forced to go abroad for a living. Blacks and Asiatics, in consequence, claimed a greater role in running the country; it was they, by and large, who were fighting a Muslim insurrection in the Midlands. Dr Kepepwe portrayed the Midlands as an alien land; she was, she explained, a Southerner.

When she asked Burnell what he could remember, he told her of a boyhood trekking holiday in Iceland on which his father had taken him and his brother. It remained as a landmark in misery and humiliation.

She asked him how he enjoyed working in Germany. She had a fear of Germany. Did he not think continually of Hitler’s Final Solution and the terrible crime of murdering six million Jews, gipsies, blacks, and other harmless people?

‘I used to think about it, I suppose,’ Burnell told her. ‘But your question is part of a wider question. Watch the TV news. Terrible slaughter is taking place today in the Crimea, the Caucasus, Bosnia, and elsewhere. The wider question is why humanity is so appallingly cruel – man against man, man against woman, individually and en masse. If there were a God, he would have thrown up his hands in despair by now.’

‘No, no,’ said Dr Kepepwe, shaking her head and much of her body. ‘God never gives up.’

As she was leaving, the doctor said, ‘I’m alone at present while my husband David is away. How I miss him.’ She represented him as the best husband a woman could have, saying proudly that he had won the Isle of Wight Sea-Fishing Trophy two years in succession. He was a brain surgeon and everyone respected him.

David Kepepwe had volunteered to serve under General Stalinbrass in Russia, where surgeons and doctors were badly needed; he was in the Crimea at present. She hoped he was still alive.

‘Well, maybe I’ve talked too much to my prize patient. Tell me honestly how you feel in yourself.’

Without thinking, he said, ‘An ocean, Doctor. A wide ocean with only a small island here and there. No continents. The continents have sunk into the depths …’

That quizzical regard again. ‘FOAM, that’s what they call it. “Free Of All Memory”. You were lucky the villains didn’t steal everything. And there are advantages. I have bad things I’d like to forget. Think of the foam on that private ocean of yours. Remember, “oceanic” has good connotations, so don’t worry. I’ll see you in the morning.’

In her office, Dr Kepepwe kept a well-behaved dog which waited patiently for her throughout her spells of duty. It was at least in part a long-haired terrier. Burnell learnt later its name was Barker. He saw the doctor collect Barker as she picked up her things to go home. The dog needed no lead. It was a dignified little animal, and gave Burnell a hard sidelong look to indicate that any patting would be regarded as condescending: also somewhat animalist.

As Dr Kepepwe left with a wave of the hand, Barker followed at unhurried pace, walking stiffly, looking terribly English. Burnell could imagine it with a copy of The Times tucked under one arm. It and its mistress vanished into the dark to her car and a little unknown nook somewhere.

‘Whatever crimes and errors I committed over the past ten years, they’ve been wiped cleaner than if I’d been in a confessional. The Catholics should rig up EMV in all their confessionals. The forgiveness of sins could then be followed by the forgetfulness of sins … Which might make human life easier …’

Once the doctor and her dog had left, loneliness overcame him. He knew no one, not even himself.

Switching on his TV set, he found the movie channel was about to show a fantasy film of ancient vintage. Obispo Artists presented Brute of Kerinth, which he began indolently to watch. The film had immediate appeal in his anomic condition since the action was set on a planet and its moon far from Earth. The special effects pleased him, but the happenings, centring on a lost heir and a throne, were those of an historic costume drama. He lost interest, switched off, and gazed at the ceiling instead.

When a half-hour had dragged by, he got himself on the move.

Walking about the echoing hospital in his white gown, calm, savouring his own ghostliness, he imagined himself in an empty fishtank. Active steps were being taken to trace anyone who had known him during those ten lost years. Colleagues, parents. The confusions of war, the tight security now covering Britain, made ordinary communication difficult. But all would be well. He would be reunited with Stephanie in due course.

In the long antiseptic corridors, green LCDs winked, often accompanied by hums and growls. The entrails of a glacier received him.

Under cover of his ghostliness, he invaded Rosemary Kepepwe’s office. All there was neat and anonymous, conventional down to the stained coffee mug on the filing cabinet. On the desk beside a monitor screen stood a framed photograph of husband David. Shining black, he smiled into the camera, standing beside a large fish on a weighing-scale. Burnell recognized an Isle of Wight Sea-Fishing Trophy when he saw one. Another photograph showed two smiling boys in their early teens, with Barker standing meditatively beside them. He wondered about their lives. There was small ground on which to speculate. Dr Kepepwe was little more than an embodiment of kindness and a fast backhand.

Burnell’s steps were solitary on the antiseptic tiled stairs. No use to question who had lived, survived, faded away under pain-killers, within these walls. The quota of patients had been cleared out. He was almost alone.

The news was bad. The hospital awaited a new intake: dying and wounded from a fatal engagement in the Crimea. Military men from all the armies involved were being flown here for treatment. Together with the soldiers heading for the Radioactivity Unit would be sick scientists – scientists, Burnell had been told, who had flown out to Bulgaria to deal with a nuclear plant going critical, and had suffered high doses of radiation. The emergency militarization of the hospital was being carried out under a cloak of secrecy, as all Swindon knew.

Taking a service lift up to the roof, he reflected that at any day now the wards would be filled with men harpooned by their wounds, poised on the brink of final white-out. What of the dead Larry? Had something in his cannonball head been moved to imitate the wider carnage taking place across the Crimea, Georgia and elsewhere? Had poor Larry mistaken Bishops Linctus for Stavropol, and died believing in his own gallantry?

On the roof of the hospital stood air-conditioning plants, breathing out their stale breath. The grimy air of Swindon had painted them black. Burnell went to the parapet and looked over. In the darkness, evidence for the town was mainly electric; lines of street lights, glows from houses, beams of car headlights. By such tokens, the presence of humanity could be hypothesized.

A cat approached him, daintily balancing along the parapet. It came without fear, to manoeuvre under one of his arms. As soon as he stroked it, the cat began to purr. Burnell put a cheek against the neat little head and addressed it affectionately.

Overhead the stars shone, remotely promising something better than the brief rush of biological existence. Engines sounded somewhere below them. Three heavy transport planes passed over Swindon, heading from the West towards the eastern stars. Burnell kept an arm protectively round the cat in case it was scared.

When he returned to his ward, to his nest in the glacier, the cat followed. In clear light, the animal was seen to be a bundle of long black fur. From its forward extremity, like glowworms in a thicket, the odd eye or two winked out now and again. Burnell stroked its more accessible parts, and it spent that night on his bed. He slept badly, harassed by thoughts of Larry and his mother.

In a fit of loneliness in the small hours, he held the warm body of the cat to his chest, comforted by it. He consoled himself by telling himself that the days would pass.

And so they did. And they brought Stephanie to him.