Caltraps of Time (16 page)

Piitasan read the newspapers over lunch. Their front pages had deployed all last week their most resounding rhetoric over the horrors of the invasion in Blovno; now they carried no less resounding rhetoric on their back pages over the fortunes of the Blovno match. The correspondence columns carried twenty incompatible confident ‘solutions’ to the international situation. Three liberal leaders had been assassinated in Usam. where ten cities and two penitentiaries were in uproar; three psychotics had shot down seventy people between them. Four more airliners had been hijacked. Shemites were still slaughtering Shemites across sand and water.

Coming out, Piit’s eye was caught by an exquisite face, a girl in a million, crossing the road, but as she came over the light changed and he saw that the seemingly sculptured bone structure and the pellucid skin were a cosmetic trick, the hair a wig. The legs were passable. Sidestepping round a youth who was thrusting a jagged glass bottle-end into the face of another, he paused to buy a packet of cigarettes at a kiosk. (The owner, tired after a strainful night on the Good Samaritan Open Line, gave him the wrong brand at first.) He walked on, but was knocked down by a van which, doing forty, had cannoned off a little car without reversing lights that had shot back out of an archway into the main road past a stationary lorry, and whose vision (the car’s) had been further obscured by a skeleton puppet, a toy lion on the backrest, six imitation bullet holes, a few stickers on the side windows and a boastful notice about cheetahs.

Piitasan’s packet of cigarettes spilled and crushed in the road but most of the fragments were picked up later by a newspaper vendor, who thus succeeded in bringing his own suffocation by lung cancer a week nearer at no cost to himself. Piitasan did not survive the ambulance journey but the bottle-scarred youth did, though blinded. A minute later the Good Samaritan kiosk owner was also blinded, but only for fourteen months, by inexpertly flung ammonia from a snatch till-raider, who got away with the price of two packets and a half, but made half as much again out of a poor old woman’s bag down the next street. Vall glanced out at the car accident from her window seat at a restaurant and went on with her conversation with Younis.

Henn ran into Abut, the tithe historian, in a mob that was wrecking an embassy. ‘Hello, fancy meeting you,’ said Abut, pausing with a brick in his hand. ‘Didn’t I see you on the Fifth last night?’

‘That discussion? Yes — what did you think of it?’

‘A bit overweighted on the economic side of the argument, I thought.’

‘Yes, but that chap Filipse wasn’t high-powered enough, so naturally the whole thing tilted over on to our side.’

‘I suppose— ’ and Abut paused a moment to hurl his brick — ’you know Dzhonsan’s analysis?’

‘That thing that came out last February?’ Henn looked round for a missile, and tugged at a half-loose length of paling.

‘Allow me.’ Abut joined in and the two eventually got it loose. Henn fell over backwards and picked himself up, saying:

‘Thanks; well I’ve only skimmed through it. Its arguments struck me as a trifle specious, but plainly it wants digesting.’

‘I don’t agree with you — about speciousness I mean — but perhaps if you were to look at it again?’

‘Maybe you’re right,’ said Henn, grabbing a lump of documents tossed down from a window. Together they ran with them to the bonfire.

‘How’s Maadj?’ said Abut, kicking a stray file into the flames.

‘Fine, thanks. I say, we’d better make ourselves scarce, it’s getting a bit too hot here — metaphorically I mean.’ They slipped off. But when Henn reached his car a quarter of a mile off he found its tyres slashed, its aerial twisted off, and its side windows smashed, though there was nothing inside to rifle. He started to walk, tried the nearest phone box to warn Maadj, but found it disembowelled. Gutting across the square past the children playing hopscotch, he found a group of youths rocking a couple of cars and joined in, feeling sore remembering his own car. Soon they had one on its side, then the other. They smashed open the petrol caps, backed off and threw burning matches onto the gushing fluid. The result made a satisfactory spectacle. Looking at his watch, Henn slipped off to the nearest bus stop. The buses were running again, and he got home only a little late.

Abut, meanwhile, had taken a train. A stone struck his compartment window but he only got a cut face. He had to miss
Tomorrow’s Gimmicks,
an entertaining programme about scientific gadgetry, and wait six hours in hospital while more urgent cases were dealt with, and finally was walking home at two in the morning when he was knifed in the ribs. The history of tithes never got published. (His widow later left their house unoccupied too long, and it was three months before the squatters were expelled, leaving slogans executed in excreta.)

Kevn and Younis next day, just back from a half-weekend celebrating the bicentenary of
Shiftem Trendy,
went for a walk in the park. The usual speakers were there, plus two they had never seen before. One, a flushed youth with the bulging forehead of an epileptic, was yelling, ‘We are living in exciting times! A new morality is being worked out! A total revolution in thinking is under way! Bourgeois liberalism and bourgeois ethics are dead! A new dawn is rising!’ His scanty audience ate ice creams and dropped the cartons and papers on the grass. The other, twitching, with tremulous limbs and dully glazed eyeballs bearing witness to the long-range toxic effects of too much continuous indignation, had lost his voice in catarrh, and his audience with it. His gaze fixed on a caravanserai of noble thunderheads sweeping and boiling above the horizon, he was hoarsely murmuring, ‘Nature, unutterable muddle of elegance and horror, of micro-miniaturized precision and mega-waste, indefensible handiwork of Nobodaddy! Man, unspeakable paragon of presumption, who out-elegances Nature, who out-horrors Nature, who are so sure you are right in your casuistries and that others are wrong, who cannot spare a moment to imagine what your neighbour needs! Man, pleased with your most infantile follies and your most cynical manoeuvres, who — heckler, protester, terrorist, oppressor — in the name of freedom will obliterate freedom, in the name of peace plot war, in the name of right do wrong — when will you make an end of yourself and give the illimitable messy universe a chance to start again clean?’

‘Time for lunch,’ said Younis. ‘Something extra special I’ve run up. You’ll never guess.’

<>

~ * ~

Doctor Fausta

Plus ça change et plus c’est la petite différence.

I first met him when I was a year or two younger. Now I’m older and, perhaps, wiser, I know better what to think of that meeting. It was a day just like today. I was walking alone in the Peak District. The weather was fine (for the north of England, anyway) but not too hot; there was a fresh breeze blowing behind me, and I was climbing up a long gentle slope in the limestone-and-grass area when I saw him, a tall figure like myself, standing stock still, a mile ahead at the top. After a bit I saw that he was looking down towards me. He had his hands in his pockets, a rucksack like mine on his back, shorts, no cap. Gave me an uneasy feeling, having him waiting there staring at me. Looked casual enough, though, with those hands in his pockets. Lost, maybe, or just lonely. I slowed down a bit as I got near the top, and the wind seemed to drop. A few bird cries around. No one else in sight. Three hundred yards away now, he sat down by the track, still staring towards me.

As I came up I saw he was smiling tentatively at me, still silent. It was he who looked guarded. Then I saw why. My heart gave a great leap. He was very like a photo of me might be, only a bit more lined, a bit less hair perhaps, mouth tenser at the corners. Must have given him as much of a turn as me to see the resemblance. Then we both grinned at one another, like children who share a secret.

‘Hello!’ was all he said. Thin voice, but I had an idea I’d heard it before, somehow.

‘Waiting for company?’ I said.

‘Thought I might as well wait, seeing you were coming this way.’ His voice trembled oddly. A nervous chap. Kept watching my face. Hands still in pockets.

‘I’m going over to the hostel down there,’ I said. ‘That your way too?’

‘Yes; mind if I come with you?’

‘Okay.’

After that we went along together, but he seemed to dry up. Let me do all the talking, didn’t say much about himself, said his plans were vague, said he’d had a job abroad but it was good to get back. His voice lost its tremble and he seemed to relax, but he had the air of listening all the time, if you know what I mean. As if he expected pearls of wisdom to fall from my lips. None did, of course.

‘Funny we look so alike — you might be my twin brother -only a bit older perhaps,’ I remarked at one point.

He gave a snort of laughter. ‘Doppelgangers, yes; we do.’

I asked if he knew my home town, and various places the family had come from. No, he said, but didn’t go into details.

At the hostel he seemed to look around and get his bearings. We chatted about this and that — religion, sex, the government, students, food, drugs, TV, parties and so on. Except for a sort of reserve and vagueness here and there, his views were very close to my own, only a little more bitter at times in comparison. Next morning he went down the valley, while I went over the next ridge.

~ * ~

A couple of weeks later, when I was just rustling up tea after my first day back at work, who should turn up but this type again. There he stood at the door of my flat. He had a small case with him this time, and, a town suit. ‘Thought I’d look you up,’ he said. I must have given him my address, I supposed. I had to ask him in. Gave him tea. The fellow and I got talking. Pretty soon we were finishing each other’s sentences, agreeing with each other like mad. It was late at night when we drew breath and I offered him a doss-down on the settee. We clashed in the bathroom next morning, but he presented me with a tinned ham and said he’d a day or two to kill; might he spend the evenings in my pad till then? This was all right by me. He said he’d browse around the shopping centre nearby, lunch out, and be back that night. Which he was, with some beer.

A couple of days later, early in the morning, we were deep in discussion of old Donne and Priestley and serial time. He was letting me do most of the talking this time. Suddenly he got up and began to pace to and fro.

‘Ever hear a tape recording of yourself?’ he said.

‘No, why?’

‘You’d be surprised at how different you might sound to yourself. So they say. Never heard one myself. Ever noticed your own mannerisms?’

‘Now I come to think of it,
you’ve
got one that’s rather like mine — rubbing your left ear when you’re thinking. That’s the only one I can think of. I suppose you made me notice it by having the same trick.’

‘Ever studied your fingerprints?’ And he came up close, seized my left hand in his right, swung round, and laid his own left hand alongside.

There was a long silence. Those left hands were twins. The lines on them were twins. The whorls and loops on their fingers were twins. Same thing with the right. I stared at his face. It had a mole on the right cheek, the spitting image of mine.

‘We must be unique,’ I said shakily. ‘The only identical non-twins in the world.’

‘You think so?’

‘I’m sure so. Stands to reason. How—’

‘Then what about this chickenpox mark?’

On his left temple was a little pit, in the same place (and with the same shape and size) as mine.

‘Let me tell you a few things about yourself you never told me, and haven’t really told anyone. Your mother used to call you Bop when you were five or six — correct? ... You were called Fits at school — spelt
f, i, t, s.
You pretended to like it, but secretly you hated it... You cried yourself to sleep the first day at boarding school, but no one knew — right? ... A terrier frightened you by jumping at you, at the age of four, but no one saw — right? It was a sandy ginger thing with one black ear. And you never told anyone ... You could never stand the way your father put his hand on your shoulder when he was trying to put something over on you right? But you never said anything about it, you never let on ... Have I said enough?’

I sat down and looked at him. I was rubbing my left shoulder resentfully.

‘Your middle name is Absalom but you never told anyone. You changed your second initial to
I
because of the word that
A
makes, and you told that girl Katy two years ago that the
I
stood for Ian — right? ... Now let me tell you who I am, and how I know.’ (And he sat down.)
‘My
second name was Absalom.
I
told that bird it was Ian.
I
was called Fits.
I
was frightened by that dog.
My
father put his hand on
my
shoulder. And so on. Yes, I am a doppelganger: I’ve been buzzing you all this time, a real doppel. I knew you were going to come up that track up the moor just then. I knew you were back from your first day’s work when I came to your flat. I knew where it was
and
where you work. I knew because I am you ... only a little bit older ... I don’t expect you to believe it, not all at once. Let’s have some coffee.’ And he made the coffee. His hands were shaking a bit. As for me,
my
mind was whirling.

‘Well now, let’s begin at the beginning. You’ve heard of the idea that some of these elementary particles are particles going backwards in time? In fact I know you have. You read it about four months ago, or thereabouts ... It’s Saturday night, we may as well make a night of it and sleep in tomorrow ... Someone said he thought there might be a reverse-time universe, what he called the Faustian universe, in which time went the other way, and all the particles would be anti-particles to ours. A silly name, Faustian — Faust was going the same way as the rest of us, only he got jumped back to a personally younger age at one point, that’s all. The effect of spending time in the reverse universe ages you, it doesn’t make you younger. For there is a reverse universe. The catacosm, the boys call it. This one we’re in is the anacosm. The earth here is called the anageon, the other one is the catageon. Across there, only in the same spot, if you get me; only it can’t really be the same spot, or the two universes would annihilate each other. But no one seems to know where it is, or even if the word where has any meaning in this context. Anyway, it’s a nearly identical universe, with the same galaxies, clusters, novae, solar system, planets, earth, continents, seas, animals, plants, men, national groupings, events, and so on, broadly speaking; as long as you choose the same instant of time ... But you can’t choose, really. That’s it. When you “print off’ — that’s passing from one “cosm” to the other — you print off onto the same point of time as you started in.’