Yellow Blue Tibia (27 page)

But this, I realised at once, was the wrong tack to take. The worry lines disappeared from Trofim’s brow, and a rather vulgarly calculating expression passed across his eyes. ‘But, comrade,’ he said, ‘Didn’t you yourself fight in the Great Patriotic War? How many millions died then, defending Russia? How many is too many? Some thousands may perish in Ukraine, but they will be sacrificing their lives for a greater purpose.’

I felt my temper begin to stretch. Clearly the thing to do at that time, in that place, was to try and talk Trofim round; get him to holster his gun and put the grenade down. To persuade him to leave. Who better to do this than a man who has spent years as a writer honing his powers of expression? But I had had a long day. ‘Oh, don’t be idiotic,’ I snapped. ‘
Purpose?
What plan could possibly justify such sacrifice of life?’

He looked almost gloating. ‘It’s secret.’

‘So? You’re going to kill me anyway!’

‘Yes,’ he agreed, slowly, as if the reality of the situation were only then dawning on him. ‘I suppose I am going to kill you.’ My stomach swirled.

‘So, why not tell me?’

‘Oh no,’ he said, ingenuously. ‘I was ordered to tell nobody.’

‘Comrade, permit me to say, I believe you
will
tell me. What harm can there be in talking to a dead man? Dead men keep secrets better than anybody.’

‘Orders.’

‘You’d send me to my grave without knowing?’

This clearly troubled him. ‘I do apologise, comrade. But there’s really nothing I can say.’

I had to keep him talking. Perhaps, I thought to myself, Saltykov will come back in, creep up behind him and disarm him. I didn’t want to dwell on the details of how he would do this: Saltykov’s weakling-buffoonishness tangling with this slab of honed military flesh. If I had tried to picture the details to myself its impossibility would have impressed itself upon my mind and scorched my hope. But I wanted to hang on to the possibility. ‘I shall try and reason with you, comrade,’ I said, ‘as one old soldier to another. Things have very clearly not gone according to plan for you, here in Chernobyl. You will have to explain to your superiors why you failed to complete your mission. Take me back to Moscow, and I will support your story. Any story you care to concoct. I am a writer after all, and good at concocting stories.’

‘Stories of monstrous octocats from space,’ he said, in an enormously mournful voice.

‘Science fiction is the literature of the future,’ I said, scratching through my brain to recall some of the vatic emptinesses of Frenkel’s pronouncements on the genre. ‘Science fiction
imagines
the future. It seeks not to reproduce the world, as have all hitherto existing literatures, but to
change
it. It is the Communism of literary forms. It is the literature of proletarian possibilities.’

‘I am truly sorry, comrade,’ he said. ‘But I cannot report failure of the mission to Moscow. I must detonate the grenade.’

‘Even though it will kill you.’

‘It will kill you also.’

‘That,’ I said, ‘is also an important consideration.’

‘My father,’ said Trofim, standing straighter as he gave vent to this small confession, ‘was a soldier. He died of cancer. He said, in hospital, that he wished he’d died on the battlefield. He said that dying on the battlefield was better than dying in hospital. If I have to choose, I know which one I prefer.’

‘You omit the third option, which is not to die at all.’

‘To complete the mission,’ he said, holding out the grenade.

‘Think, Trofim! You want to turn this premier nuclear facility into a radioactive crater? Think of the hundreds of thousands you will slaughter! Children - women—’

Then Trofim said the most extraordinary thing I ever heard him utter. In a clear voice, as if reciting sacred text, he said, ‘We are not alone in the universe, comrade.’

It took me a moment to gather enough of my wits even to reply. ‘What?’

‘There are higher intelligences guiding what we do here.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Comrade, they are
radiation
aliens. If I detonate this grenade, and explode this nuclear pile, I will transform my grossly material consciousness into pure radiation.’

‘No you won’t,’ I said.

‘Yes, I will.’

‘Seriously, Trofim, you won’t.’

‘Yes,’ he repeated, articulating a credo too grounded in faith to be challenged, ‘I will. My consciousness will move to a higher dimension.’

‘Trofim, you don’t sound like yourself.’

‘It will not be death. I will be translated into a realm of pure energy. This blast will propel me, and I will face our sponsors face to face.’

I considered this, and tried to formulate the most trenchant criticism. There had to be a way I could make Trofim see its lunacy; some form of words that would persuade him. In the end I opted for, ‘No you won’t.’

‘Yes I will.’

‘Translated into pure radiation? Meeting radiation aliens? This won’t happen.’

‘Yes it will.’

‘No it won’t.’

‘Yes it will.’

‘No it
won’t
.’

‘Yes it will.’

‘It
will not.’

‘Yes it will.’

This argumentative strategy was not having the desired result. I tried a different tack. ‘If you explode the grenade, all that will happen is that you will exterminate your consciousness, and mine.’

‘No I won’t,’ he said.

‘You’ll die.’

‘No I won’t.’

‘Yes you
will.’

‘No I won’t.’

‘Yes
you will
!’

‘I shall meet the radiation aliens,’ he said, firmly.

‘Comrade,’ I said. ‘Listen to me carefully. The radiation aliens - I
made them up
. Me! You’re talking to their creator. Comrade Frenkel and I, and a gaggle of other science fiction writers, back in the 1940s. We
wrote
them.’

He was looking at, but not seeing, me. ‘Comrade Frenkel . . .’

‘Comrade Frenkel has his own reasons for wanting to pretend this absurd narrative is real. But it is
not
real. Please do not
believe in
my ridiculous science fiction! I do not write science fiction for you to
believe in it
! For God’s sake! For the sake of the Mekon himself - don’t! None of us really understood what radiation even
was
, back then! It was all rumour, and conjecture, and wild stories about the American attack on Hiroshima. We didn’t know! If you pull that pin, you won’t be translating yourself into a higher consciousness; you’ll be blasting yourself into sand and ash and scattering yourself in fine grained, radioactive form across the whole east of Europe.’

‘Comrade Frenkel told me,’ said Trofim, with a stubbornness that was not aggressive, since it inhered simply, we might even say
purely
, in the very limitations of his own mind, ‘told me that you were a slippery fish. A slippery fish, he called you.’

‘You
can’t
believe all this UFO mumbo-jumbo?’

‘Of course!’ he said.

‘You’ve been brainwashed,’ I told him. ‘You’ve joined a cult.’

‘Religion,’ he said, as if considering the concept.

‘Marx called religion the opium of the people,’ I said, angrily. ‘But at least opium is a high-class drug. UFO religion? That’s the
methylated spirits
of the people. It’s the home-still
beetroot-alcohol
of the people.’ I was furious, of course, because I knew I had failed. This had been my chance to talk Trofim round - poor, dumbheaded Trofim. This had been my moment to overpower him with my superior wits, just as he would (given the chance) have overpowered me with his superior muscles. But if my supposed skill with words was not sufficient even to persuade an individual like Trofim, then what good was I? In retrospect I wonder if I wasn’t being unfair to myself. It is of course easier to fool an intelligent man than a stupid one, for the intelligent man is in the habit of shifting his thoughts around and around, where the stupid one more often than not has fastened onto a single notion like a swimmer clinging to the raft that will keep him afloat. In retrospect, I suppose I could never have persuaded Trofim of the idiocy of believing that the middle of an atomic blast was the gateway to a higher mode of existence.

I fumbled in my jacket pocket and located a cigarette. It was, I knew, the last cigarette I would ever smoke - and so it proved.

‘What are you doing?’ said Trofim.

‘I’m smoking my last cigarette,’ I said, snapping back the metal lid of lighter and manoeuvring its knob of flame onto the end of the white tube. ‘The last cigarette,’ I added, ‘that I shall ever smoke.’ Sucking the smoke into my chest added a tincture of calm to the rattled choler of my body. My stress unnotched itself one belthole. I breathed out, lengthily.

‘I believe that smoking is not permitted in here, comrade.’

‘By all means,’ I said, ‘fetch a supervisor and report me.’

He stared at me. ‘Smoking is very bad for your health,’ he said.

‘So is being caught at the exact heart of a nuclear conflagration.’

‘Comrade,’ he said mournfully, ‘please do not be sarcastic.’ There was a popping noise: Trofim was tutting. That would be like him - to tut me like a disappointed schoolmaster.

‘I’ll make you a deal,’ I replied. ‘I will abjure sarcasm for the remainder of my earthly existence, if
you
agree not to pull the pin on your grenade.’

‘It’s too late.’

I breathed in another long draw on my cigarette. Despite the absurd situation in which I found myself, relaxation was starting to spread through my muscles. ‘This alien realm to which you will be transported. Will I get there too? Or will I be blasted to material atoms, even as you translate into radiation consciousness?’

‘You don’t understand, comrade,’ he said.

‘I’m trying to understand.’

‘You don’t
believe
.’

‘Comrade Trofim,’ I said, turning away from him to face the pool, ‘if you pull that pin, then I shall lose all respect for you.’

‘I have already pulled the pin, comrade,’ he said, in a wavery voice.

That was what the popping sound had been. The fuse had been ticking down all those long seconds of chatter. I had, perhaps, a single second remaining of earthly life.

It seems very strange to me, looking back at that mortal portion of my existence, to think that I could, standing as I was on the very lip of eternity, give myself over to petty annoyance. But mortal humanity cannot ever
prepare
itself for death, for the very good reason that we can only prepare for events with which we are familiar, or which we can comprehend, and our own death is neither of these things. Until we are dead we will stubbornly believe, in some corner of our consciousness, that we will continue living; and once we are dead it is, naturally, too late to believe anything at all. As the mechanical fuse marked off the last remaining second of my life I was aware, of course, that I had failed. I found it was possible to bring all my consciousness into the focal point of the cigarette at my mouth. I drew a very last lungful of smoke. Of all the cigarettes I had smoked before, this may have been the most simply pleasurable. Previously I had either
been aware
that I was smoking, an awareness tinged necessarily with guilt at the harmful effects the foul stuff was having upon me, or else I had smoked from automatic, unconscious habit, as I concentrated upon something else, in which case I was hardly aware that I was smoking at all. But for that one perfect moment, on the edge of death, I could suck the tobacco into my lungs knowing that, since I was dying anyway,
it
could do me no harm. I began to breathe out a tentacle of smoke, and with the smoke blew away all my anger. It felt like a lifetime’s anger. And, in that perfect moment, two thoughts occurred to me. One was the purest optimism, and it was this:
The grenade may be a dud
. The other, which seemed to spool naturally from that first, was:
I shall ask him simply to replace the pin, and he will do this
. As to why I believed I would be able to persuade Trofim to do this, I’m not sure. It came into my head as clearly, and purely, as a revelation. It was all I needed to do. I started to turn my head, saying, ‘Com—’

I heard just the start of a roar; no more than a split second before it vanished entirely from my sensorium, or else before my sensorium vanished entirely. The material solidity of the space we were in was deconstructed and reconstructed as light, clear and bright and warm, alive and bright and warm. It was
pure
light. I did not have time to think,
the grenade has detonated, Chernobyl has exploded -
I did not, then, have time to think anything at all because there
was
no time at all. Time had evaporated. Instead of time there was the experience, filtered as if through memory, of white light and white heat, the rushing and beating upon me of great waves, monumental tides, of white light and white heat. A process of replacing every single one of the carbon atoms in my body with photons; and a reverberating pulse that swarmed upon the net of my nerves.

When I was a child, I had believed that death was a red-haired man.

Out of perfect whiteness and the perfection of the light a single point of sensual connection began to coalesce; one unsullied, soprano musical note, a musical note as pure as mathematics, like an angel singing, a spirit-entity heralding my arrival in a new place.