China Miéville - The Last Days of New Paris

Sam says, “I can help you get out.”

Thibaut asks himself why he isn’t just expending the last charge of these insurrectionary nightclothes to smash through the siege and run, to leave the ruins of Paris for the ruins of France beyond. Are these really the city’s last days?

“It’ll be a beautiful book,” he says at last.

“You can help,” she says. “I can show you how to get out. But first, I need more pictures.”

He wants the book. He realizes it with slow wonder. He wants to help with it. Thibaut has learned to obey such intuitions.

Too, he wants to know what Sam’s real mission is.

He grips the exquisite corpse’s cord. He does not know what it is he does, nor how, to have it follow him, but his heart accelerates. If you’d been with us, he thinks at it. In that forest.

“That SOE woman,” Sam says. “You said she could make the Vélo do things.”

“Well, she was trying.”

“The rumors outside are there’s all kinds of experiments. Not just art stuff: occult, too.” She looks into the sky. “Allies working on manifs. Nazis on manifs. Allies trying to crack demons. I heard that some manif version of Baudelaire was sacrificed by Nazis.”

Thibaut says nothing. He suspects that she’s speaking of the Baudelaire of the Marseille deck, Genius of Desire. The sibling of which he carries.

“When I was coming in,” Sam says, “I kept hearing that more Teufel Unterhandleren are on their way in.”

These are the military specialists that cajole the pained demon refugees, with knick-knacks and incantations, according to the terms of contested treaties. They work in close conjunction with Paris’s fascist church, poring over relics and books of banishment, under plaster crucified Christs wearing swastikas, with devils painted at their feet staring up in resentful thrall. “For the glory of God,” Alesch has declared, “we crook his cross, and in his name we command not only his still-risen angels but those angels fallen.”

His order barters with devils. Alesch’s priests are not exorcists: they are anti-exorcists.

“I kept hearing all these stories,” Sam says. “About new factors. About something called Fall Rot.”

1941

“I can’t believe it.” Mary Jayne Gold’s voice shook. “After the trouble he gave me ? He brings someone here we’ve never even met? Has he lost his mind?”

“I don’t know,” said Miriam Davenport. “You saw him—he’s in a queer way.”

Mary Jayne put her finger to her lips as Fry stomped back. He glowered at the two women. Davenport was dark and short, Gold tall and fair. An absurdly perfect juxtaposition, standing to either side of the dark wood table by bundled herbs and half-drunk bottles of wine.

“I’m sorry but it is not the same,” he said at last. “I heard you. Mary Jayne, I’m sorry but Raymond is a criminal. He broke in here.” Mary Jayne stood with her hands on her hips. “Whereas this Jack, this Jack Parsons… he’s just a lost young man—”

“You have no idea who he is,” said Miriam.

“He was so excited about that Colquhoun woman,” Fry said.

“Whom you also don’t know,” said Miriam.

“No. But André told me about her. And Parsons is interested in the movement… I’ve only asked him to join us for supper.” Now he beseeched. “I think he’ll amuse André and Jacqueline.”

“Wasn’t it you who told me we can’t be inviting every lost soul?” Davenport said.

“Something’s coming to an end,” Fry said. “Don’t you feel like that?” He was startled by his own words.

He was the man who had chosen to vacate the villa himself rather than compromise it, being as he was an object of attention. The man who, in agonies, forbade his good friend Victor Serge from lodging there, deeming the communist dissenter too great a danger. Now it was Fry bringing home foundlings.

“Parsons said he was a rocket scientist, ” Miriam said.

“So he’s a fantasist,” said Fry helplessly. “He’s harmless.” He barely knew what he was saying. “I think it’ll be all right. It’s only supper.”

The room in the old house was beautiful and fading. Jack Parsons looked out to the sprawling grounds, where a woman and a man chatted by the pond. Another man had climbed into a tree, was removing pictures from its branches, where they had been hung in strange exhibition.

Parsons had come to France by trains and planes, planes and boats, the pulling in of favors, the paying of bribes. And at moments, when everything had militated against him, when the timing was quite wrong, the official obstruction too implacable, when his urgent, incompetent wanderings had seemed doomed, he had asserted his will.

As many times before, in the U.S., he had flexed the muscles of the mind. As Aleister Crowley had taught him. As he whispered spells when the rockets he made went up. He was used to carefully, intensely interpreting after all such actions, to see if or how the world had responded, in if any subtle ways.

Now in Europe, no such assiduous parsing of aftermaths was necessary. Here the effects were astonishing.

He would speak commands to the universe. He would say to the train guard, “You’ve already seen my ticket,” would strain to make himself slightly invisible to police, to make time drag enough for him to make his connections. He would have been delighted with an instant’s uncertainty, a stuttering of wheels on the track. Instead the officials would usher him to a fine seat. The police would release their grip, and stand back to let him run. The train might lurch right back to where it had been three or four seconds before.

Do what thou wilt. Magic was welling up here from below. It made him feel exhilarated but sick. Its deployment made him queasy. Maybe I can even read minds here, he thought.

When he crossed the border, a few miles out to sea, when he came into French waters lugging his cobbled and home-tooled equipment, Jack had felt the presence intensify. Something in France was quite wrong or quite right.

He had, of course, nudged Varian Fry’s mind, tweaked him to let Parsons visit.

“Let’s give this one more try.” Jack spoke, in his absence, to Von Karman, his boss and friend.

Theodore Von Karman took Jack to work in the Aeronautical Laboratory. Von Karman indulged and liked him, forgave him what he thought eccentricities with respectful good humor. Mostly they talked rockets and math, at first. Politics was to come. A disciple in the Ordo Templi Orientis, Jack was not accustomed to admiring the mass of humanity: Von Karman he could not fail to.

Von Karman had looked sick as news had started to emerge from Europe. “It is trouble,” he said.

It was Von Karman who told Jack, without knowing that he was doing so, that there were words in Prague that might alter the storm of Europe. A presence he might invoke. Von Karman thought it only folklore. Jack, though, knew the truth, because of his other teacher. Von Karman nurtured his mathematics, the rigor of his rockets; Crowley nurtured his spirit, taught him of the other laws. One told Jack of the power in Prague; the other gave him the insight to know that it was, indeed, power.

Now Jack could not get to Prague. But now, too, there was this not-coincidence, this house of Surrealists. They, too, were faithful to revolt and objective chance. Perhaps in their presence he might find, speak words close in transmogrifying power to those he had originally sought and planned to articulate.

“They want to set free the unconscious,” Fry had told him. “Desire.” He shrugged. “You’d have to ask them,” he added, but Parsons did not think he would. With that gloss he understood why Colquhoun would be in both this group and in Crowley’s order. Their aims were the same.