WHEN I’M WOKEN by the wedge of dim light, my head’s in a fog and my body’s gripped in a tangled sleeping bag. Tiny room, more of a walk-in cupboard; silhouetted girl in a man’s rugby shirt, long, loopy hair … Holly: good. Holly, whom I ordered out of a six-year period of mourning for a missing little brother—presumably dead and skillfully buried—come now to turf me out without breakfast into a very uncertain future … pretty bad. But the little window’s black as night still. My eyes are still gouged with tiredness. My dry, cigarette-and-pinot-blanc-caked mouth croaks, “Is it morning already?”
“No,” says Holly.
THE GIRL’S BREATHING deepens as she drifts off. Her futon’s our raft and sleep is the river. I sift through all the scents. “I’m out of practice,” she told me, in a blur of hair, clothing, and skin. I told her I was out of practice too, and she said, “Bullshit, Poshboy.” A long-dead violinist plays a Bach partita on the clock radio. The crappy speaker buzzes on the upper notes, but I wouldn’t trade this hour for a private concert with Sir Yehudi Menuhin playing his Stradivarius. Neither would I want to travel back to my and the Humberites’ very undergrad discourse on the nature of love at Le Croc the other night, but if I did I’d tell Fitzsimmons et al. that love is fusion in the sun’s core. Love is a blurring of pronouns. Love is subject and object. The difference between its presence and its absence is the difference between life and death. Experimentally, silently, I mouth I love you to Holly, who breathes like the sea. This time I whisper it, at about the violin’s volume: “I love you.” No one hears, no one sees, but the tree falls in the forest just the same.
STILL DARK. THE Alpine hush is miles deep. The skylight over Holly’s bed is covered with snow, but now that the blizzard’s stopped I’m guessing the stars are out. I’d like to buy her a telescope. Could I send her one? From where? My body’s aching and floaty but my mind’s flicking through the last night and day, like a record collector flicking through files of LPs. On the clock radio, a ghostly presenter named Antoine Tanguay is working through Nocturne Hour from three till four A.M. Like all the best DJs, Antoine Tanguay says almost nothing. I kiss Holly’s hair, but to my surprise she’s awake: “When did the wind die down?”
“An hour ago. Like someone unplugged it.”
“You’ve been awake a whole hour?”
“My arm’s dead, but I didn’t want to disturb you.”
“Idiot.” She lifts her body to tell me to slide it out.
I loop a long strand of her hair around my thumb and rub it on my lip. “I spoke out of turn last night. About your brother. Sorry.”
“You’re forgiven.” She twangs my boxer shorts’ elastic. “Obviously. Maybe I needed to hear it.”
I kiss her wound-up hair bundle, then uncoil it. “You wouldn’t have any ciggies left, perchance?”
In the velvet dark, I see her smile: A blade of happiness slips between my ribs. “What?”
“Use a word like ‘perchance’ in Gravesend, you’d get crucified on the Ebbsfleet roundabout for being a suspected Conservative voter. No cigarettes left, I’m ’fraid. I went out to buy some yesterday, but found a semiattractive stalker, who’d cleverly made himself homeless forty minutes before a whiteout, so I had to come back without any.”
I trace her cheekbones. “Semiattractive? Cheeky moo.”
She yawns an octave. “Hope we can dig a way out tomorrow.”
“I hope we can’t. I like being snowed in with you.”
“Yeah well, some of us have these job things. Günter’s expecting a full house. Flirty-flirty tourists want to party-party-party.”
I bury my head in the crook of her bare shoulder. “No.”
Her hand explores my shoulder blade. “No what?”
“No, you can’t go to Le Croc tomorrow. Sorry. First, because now I’m your man, I forbid it.”
Her sss-sss is a sort of laugh. “Second?”
“Second, if you went, I’d have to gun down every male between twelve and ninety who dared speak to you, plus any lesbians too. That’s seventy-five percent of Le Croc’s clientele. Tomorrow’s headlines would all be BLOODBATH IN THE ALPS and LAMB THE SLAUGHTERER, and as a vegetarian-pacifist type, I know you wouldn’t want any role in a massacre so you’d better shack up”—I kiss her nose, forehead, and temple—“with me all day.”
She presses her ear to my ribs. “Have you heard your heart? It’s like Keith Moon in there. Seriously. Have I got off with a mutant?”
The blanket’s slipped off her shoulder: I pull it back. We say nothing for a while. Antoine whispers in his radio studio, wherever it is, and plays John Cage’s In a Landscape. It unscrolls, meanderingly. “If time had a pause button,” I tell Holly Sykes, “I’d press it. Right”—I press a spot between her eyebrows and up a bit—“there. Now.”
“But if you did that, the whole universe’d be frozen, even you, so you couldn’t press play to start time again. We’d be stuck forever.”
I kiss her on the mouth and blood’s rushing everywhere.
She murmurs, “You only value something if you know it’ll end.”
NEXT TIME I wake, Holly’s room is gray, like underneath a hole in pack ice. Whispering Antoine is long gone; the radio’s buzzing with French-Algerian rap and the clock says 08:15. She’s showering. Today’s the day I either change my life or I don’t. I locate my clothes, straighten the twisted duvet, and deposit the tissues in a small wicker bin. Then I notice a big round silver pendant, looped over a postcard Blu-Tacked to the wall above the box that serves as a bedside table. The pendant is a labyrinth of grooves and ridges. It’s hand-made, with great care, though it’d be too heavy to wear for long and it’s too big not to attract constant attention. I try to solve it by eye, but get lost once, twice, a third time. Only by holding it in my palm and using my little fingernail to trace a path do I get to the middle. If the maze was real and you were stuck in it, you’d need time and luck. When the moment’s right, I’ll ask Holly about it.
And the postcard? It could be one of a hundred suspension bridges anywhere in the world. Holly’s still in her shower, so I pull the postcard off the wall and turn it over …
Hugo Lamb, meet Sexual Jealousy. Wow. “Ed.” How dare he send Holly a postcard? Or—worse—was it a string of postcards? Was there a follow-up from Athens? Is he a boyfriend? So this is why Normals commit crimes of passion. I want to get Ed’s head fastened into stocks and hurl two-kilo plaster statues of Jesus of Rio at his face until he doesn’t have one. This is what Olly Quinn would want to do to me if he ever found out that I’d poked Ness. Then I notice the 1985 date—deliverance! Hallejulah. But hang on: Why has Holly been carting his postcard around for six years? The cretin doesn’t even know “spinarets” are “minarets.” Unless it’s a private joke. That’d be worse. How dare he share private jokes with Holly? Did Ed give her the maze pendant, too? Makes sense. When she had me inside her, was she imagining I was him? Yes yes yes, I know these snarly thoughts are ridiculous and hypocritical, but they still sting. I want to feed Ed’s postcard to my lighter and watch the Bosphorus Bridge and its sunny day and its sub-sixth-form reportage burn, baby, burn. Then I’d flush its ashes down the sewers, like the Russians did to what was left of Adolf Hitler. No. Deep breath, calm down, keep Hitler out of it, and consider the breezy “Cheers, Ed.” A real boyfriend would write “Love, Ed.” There is the “x,” though. Consider also that if Holly in 1985 was in Gravesend receiving postcards, she wasn’t being gobbled by an Ed on a squeaky European mattress. Ed must’ve been a not-quite-lover-not-quite-friend.
Probably.
“HELP YOURSELF TO the shower,” she says round the door, and I call back, “Thanks,” in a neutral tone to match. Normally I admire uncommitted matter-of-factness the morning after, but with this wooden stake called “Love” whacked through my heart, I want proof of intimacy and have to ignore a strong urge to go and kiss Holly. What if it’s a no? Don’t force it. I have a skin-scalding shower, change into fresh clothes—what do fugitives do for clean laundry?—and go to the kitchenette, where I find a note:
Hugo—I’m a coward about goodbyes, so I’ve gone to Le Croc to start the cleaning. If you want to stay over tonight, bring me breakfast and I’ll find you a feather duster and a frilly apron. If you don’t show up, then such is life, and good luck with your metamorphisis (is that how you spell it?). H.
Not a love letter, but this note of Holly’s is more precious than any piece of correspondence I’ve ever owned, bar none. That Zorro-like three-stroke H is both intimate and runic. Her handwriting’s not girly, it’s a bit of train wreck, really, calligraphically speaking, but it’s legible if you squint and it’s hers. Discoveries. I fold the note into my wallet, grab my coat, clatter down the stairs, and I’m out, treading in Holly’s ten-minutes-old footsteps through knee-deep snow in the courtyard, where the morning cold is a plunging cold; but the blue sky’s blue as Earth from space, and the warmth from the sun’s a lover’s breath; and icicles drip drops of bright in steep-sloped streets from storybooks whose passersby have mountain souls; the kids are glad to be alive and snowballs fly from curb to curb; I raise my hands and say, “Je me rends!” but a snowball scores a direct hit; I turn to find the little shit and clutch my heart—pretend to die—“Il est mort! Il est mort!” the snipers cry, but when I resurrect myself they fly away like fallen leaves; around the corner here’s the square, my favorite square in Switzerland, if not the world; H?tel Le Sud, the gabled eaves, with Legolandish civic pride, the church clock chimes nine golden times; an Alp rears up on every side; the crêpeman’s setting up his stall across from the patisserie where yesterday this all began; “I’m Not in Love,” claim 10cc but, au contraire, I know I am; the crêpeman looks as if he knows that Holly’s face is all I see on every surface, there transposed; plus nape, lips, jaw, hair, and clothes; I hear her “Sort of,” “Bullshit,” “This is true”; recall her slightly elfish ears; her softnesses; her flattish nose; her guarded eyes of strato-blue; Body Shop tea tree oil shampoo; she’s nearer now with every step; I wonder what she’s thinking … Wondering if I’ll really show? The traffic’s moving pretty slowly, but I’ll wait until the man turns green …
A slush-spattered cream-colored Land Cruiser draws level with where I stand. Before I can feel miffed at having to walk around it, the mirrored window of the driver’s door slides down, and I assume it’ll be a tourist after directions. But, no, I’m wrong. I know this stocky, swarthy driver in a fisherman’s sweater. “G’day, Hugo. You look like a man with a song in his heart.”
His New Zealand accent gives it away. “Elijah D’Arnoq, king of the Cambridge Sharpshooters.” There’s somebody else in the back of the car, but I’m not introduced.
“Your lack of surprise,” I tell D’Arnoq, “suggests this isn’t a chance encounter.”
“Bang on. Miss Constantin sends you her regards.”
I understand. I get to choose between two metamorphoses. One is labeled “Holly Sykes” while the other is … What, exactly?
Elijah D’Arnoq slaps the side of the Land Cruiser. “Hop aboard. Find out what this is all about, or die wondering. Now or never.”
Past the patisserie, down the alley, I can see the crocodile pub sign hanging over Günter’s bar. Fifty paces away? “Get the girl!” counsels the love-drunk, reformed-Scrooge Me. “Imagine her face as you walk in!” The soberer Me folds his arms and looks at D’Arnoq and wonders, “What then?” Well, we’ll eat breakfast; I’ll help Holly clean up the bar; lie low in her place until my fellow Humberites have flown home; we’ll hump like rabbits until we can hardly walk; and while our breaths are coming hard and fast, I’ll blurt out “I love you” and mean it and she’ll blurt out “I love you too, Hugo” and mean it just as much, right then, right there. Then what? I’ll phone the registrar at Humber College to say I’ve suffered a minor breakdown and would like to put my final year on hold. I’ll tell my family—something, no idea what, but I’ll think of something—and buy Holly a telescope. Then what? I find I’m no longer thinking about her every waking moment. Her way of saying “Sort of” or “This is true” begins to grate, and the day comes when we understand that “All You Need Is Love” is rather less than the whole truth. Then what? By now Detective Sheila Young has tracked me down, and her colleagues in Switzerland interview me at the station and only allow me back to Holly’s flat if I surrender my passport. “What’s this about, Poshboy?” Then I’ll have to confess either to stealing an Alzheimer victim’s valuable stamp collection, or luring a fellow student at Humber so deeply into debt that he drove himself off a cliff. Or possibly both, it hardly matters, because Holly will give me back the telescope and get the locks changed. Then what? Agree to go back to London to be interviewed but pick up Marcus Anyder’s passport and book a cheap flight to the Far East or Central America? Such narrative arcs make good movies but shitty existences. Then what? Eke out Anyder’s money until I succumb to the inevitable, open a bar for gap-year kids and turn into Günter. I notice a silver parka on the passenger seat next to D’Arnoq. “Can I just ask for an outline—”
“Doesn’t work like that. You need a leap of faith to leave your old life behind. True metamorphosis doesn’t come with flowcharts.”
All around us life goes on, oblivious to my quandary.
“But I’ll tell you this,” says the New Zealander. “We’ve all been headhunted, except for our founder.” D’Arnoq jerks with his head to the unseen man in the compartment behind. “So I know what you’re feeling right now, Hugo. That space there, between the curb and this car, it’s a chasm. But you’ve been vetted and profiled, and if you cross that chasm, you’ll thrive here. You’ll matter. Whatever you want, now and always, you’ll get.”
I ask him, “Would you make the same choice again?”
“Knowing what I now know, I’d kill to get into this car, if I had to. I’d kill. What you’ve seen Miss Constantin do—that pause button of time at King’s College, or the puppeteering of the homeless guy—that’s just the prelude to lesson one. There’s so much more, Hugo.”
I remember holding Holly in my arms, earlier.
But it’s the feeling of love that we love, not the person.
It’s that giddy exhilaration I just experienced, just now.
The feeling of being chosen and desired and cared about.
It’s pretty pathetic when you examine it clearheadedly.
So. This is a real, live Faustian pact I’m being offered.
I almost smile. Faust tends not to have happy endings.
But a happy ending like whose? Like Brigadier Philby’s?
He passed away peacefully, surrounded by family.
If that’s a happy ending, they’re fucking welcome to it.
When push comes to shove, what’s Faust without his pact?
Nothing. No one. We’d never have heard of him. Quinn.
Dominic Fitzsimmons. Yet another clever postgrad.
Another gray commuter, swaying on the District Line.
The Land Cruiser’s rear door clunks open an inch.
THE MAN—THE FOUNDER—IN the rear of the car acts as if I’m not there, and D’Arnoq says nothing as he drives us away from the town square, so I sit quietly examining my fellow passenger via his reflection in the glass: midforties, frameless glasses, thick if frosted hair; chin cleft, clean-shaven, and a scar over his jawbone, which surely has a story to tell. He has a lean, tough physique. Mittel Europe ex-military? His clothes offer no clues: sturdy ankle-length boots, black moleskin trousers, a leather jacket, once black but battered grayish. If you noticed him in a crowd you might think “architect” or “philosophy lecturer”; but you probably wouldn’t notice him.
There are only two roads out of La Fontaine Sainte-Agnès. One climbs up to the hamlet of La Gouille, but D’Arnoq takes the other, heading down the valley towards Euseigne. We pass a turning for Chetwynd-Pitt’s chalet, and I wonder if the boys are worried about my safety or just pissed off that I abandoned them to their hookers’ pimp. I wonder, but I don’t care. A minute later we’ve passed the town boundary. The road is banked by rising, falling walls of snow, and D’Arnoq drives with caution—the car has snow tires and the road’s been salted, but this is still Switzerland in January. I unzip my coat and think of Holly looking at the clock above the bar, but regret is for the Normals.
“We lost you last night,” states my fellow passenger, in a cultured European accent. “The blizzard hid you from us.”
Now I study him directly. “Yes, I had a disagreement with my host. I’m sorry if it caused you any trouble … sir.”
“Call me Mr. Pfenninger, Mr. Anyder. ‘Anyder.’ A well-chosen name. The principal river on the island of Utopia.” The man watches the monochrome world of valley walls, snow-buried fields, and farm buildings. A river rushes alongside the road, black and very fast.
The interview begins. “May I ask how you know about Anyder?”
“We’ve investigated you. We need to know about everything.”
“Do you work for the security services?”
Pfenninger shakes his head. “Only rarely do our circles overlap.”
“So you have no political agenda?”
“As long as we are left alone, none.”
D’Arnoq slows and drops a gear to take a perilous bend.
Time to be direct: “Who are you, Mr. Pfenninger?”
“We are the Anchorites of the Dusk Chapel of the Blind Cathar of the Thomasite Monastery of Sidelhorn Pass. It’s quite a mouthful, you’ll agree, so we refer to ourselves as the Anchorites.”
“I’d agree it sounds freemasonic. Are you?”
His eyes show a gleam of amusement. “No.”
“Then, Mr. Pfenninger, why does your group exist?”
“To ensure the indefinite survival of the group by inducting its members into the Psychosoterica of the Shaded Way.”
“And you’re the … the founder of this … group?”
Pfenninger looks ahead. Power lines dip and rise from pole to pole. “I am the First Anchorite, yes. Mr. D’Arnoq is now the Fifth Anchorite. Ms. Constantin, whom you met, is the Second.”
Cautiously, D’Arnoq overtakes a salt-spitting truck.
“ ‘Psychosoterica,’ ” I say. “I don’t know the word.”
Pfenninger quotes: “A slumber did my spirit seal, I had no human fears.” He looks like he’s just delivered a subtle punch line, and I realize he just spoke without speaking. His lips were pressed together. Which is not possible. So I must be mistaken. “She seemed a thing that could not feel the touch of earthly years.” Again. His voice sounded in my head, a lush and crisp sound, as if through top-of-the-range earphones. His face defies me to suggest it’s a trick. “No motion has she now, no force; she neither hears nor sees.” No muffled voice, no wobbling throat, no tell-tale gap at the corner of his mouth. A recording? Experimentally, I put my hands over my ears but Pfenninger’s voice is just as clear: “Rolled round in Earth’s diurnal course, with rocks, and stones, and trees.”
I’m gaping. I close my mouth. I ask, “How?”
“There is a word,” Pfenninger says aloud. “Utter it.”
So I manage to mumble, “Telepathy.”
Pfenninger addresses our driver: “Did you hear, Mr. D’Arnoq?”
Elijah D’Arnoq’s peering at us in the rearview mirror. “Yes, Mr. Pfenninger, I heard.”
“Mr. D’Arnoq accused me of ventriloquism, when I inducted him. As if I were a performer on the music-hall circuit.”
D’Arnoq protests: “I didn’t have Mr. Anyder’s education, and if the word ‘telepathy’ was coined back then, it hadn’t reached the Chatham Islands. And I was fried by shell shock. It was 1922.”
“We forgave you decades ago, Mr. D’Arnoq, I and my little wooden puppet with the movable jaw.” Pfenninger glances my way, humor in his eyes, but their banter just makes everything weirder. 1922? Why did D’Arnoq say “1922”? Or did he mean to say 1982? But that doesn’t matter: Telepathy’s real. Telepathy exists. Unless I hallucinated the last sixty seconds. We pass a garage where a mechanic shovels snow. We pass a field where a pale fox stands on a stump, sniffing the air.
“So,” my mouth’s dry, “psychosoterica is telepathy?”
“Telepathy is one of its lesser disciplines,” replies Pfenninger.
“Its lesser disciplines? What else can psychosoterica do?”
A cloud shifts and the fast river’s strafed with light.
Pfenninger asks, “What is today’s date, Mr. Anyder?”
“Uh …” I have to grope for the answer. “January the second.”
“Correct. January the second. Remember.” Mr. Pfenninger looks at me; his pupils shrink and I feel a pinprick in my forehead. I—
? ? ?