David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks

In most other subject areas, however, Esther was the teacher. Her metaage became apparent one night when she recited the names of all her previous hosts, and I lined up one pebble per name. There were 207 pebbles. Moombaki sojourned into new hosts when they were about ten and stayed until death, which implied a metalife stretching back approximately seven millennia. This was twice as old as Xi Lo, the oldest Atemporal known to Horology, who at twenty-five centuries was a stripling compared to Esther, whose soul predated Rome, Troy, Egypt, Peking, Nineveh, and Ur. She taught me some of her invocations, and I identified within them various tributaries to the Deep Stream from long before the Schism. On some nights we transversed together, and Esther enfolded my soul in hers so I could spirit-walk much further and faster than I was otherwise able. When she scansioned me I felt like a third-rate poet showing his doggerel to a Shakespeare. When I scansioned her, I felt like a minnow tipped from a jar into a deep inland sea.

TWENTY DAYS AFTER my arrival, I said my goodbyes and set out with Esther toward the Swan River valley accompanied by the four warriors who had escorted us from Jervoise Bay. We headed north from Five Fingers, climbing into the Perth Hills. My guides knew the wooded, trackless slopes as unerringly as Pablo Antay knew the thoroughfares and alleys of Buenos Aires. We camped in a dry creek near a water hole, and after a supper of yam, berries, and duck meat, Pablo Antay fell into steep-sided, slippery sleep. I slept until Esther subwoke me, which is a disorienting reveille. It was still dark, but a predawn wind was stirring the slanting trees into near speech. Esther was outlined against a banksia bush. Blearily, I subasked, All well?

Esther subreplied, Follow . We walked through a stretch of nighttime forest of rustling she-oaks, up a sandstone ridge that cleared the treeline before trifurcating into three “prongs.” Each of these ridges was only a few feet wide, but a hundred paces long, and with steep drops on either side I proceeded with great caution. Esther told me this place was called, descriptively, Emu’s Claw, and led me along the central “toe.” It ended at a lookout point over the Swan River. The looping watercourse was burnished pewter by starlight, and the land was a crumpled patchwork of light and dark blacks. A day’s walk to the west, streaks of surf delineated the ocean, and I guessed that a rough clutter on the north bank of the river was Perth.

Esther sat, so I sat too. A currawong sang throaty gargle phrases in a peppermint tree. I’m gunna teach y’m’true name .

You told me , I subreplied, it would take a day to learn.

Aye, it’s true, but I’m gunna speak it inside y’head, Marinus .

I hesitated. This is a gift I’ll struggle to repay. My true name is only one word long, and you already know that .

“Ain’t y’fault yurra savage,” she said. “Shurrup now. Open up.”

Esther’s soul ingressed and inscribed her long, long, true name onto my memory. Moombaki’s name had grown with the tens, hundreds, and thousands of years since Moombaki’s mother-birth at the Five Fingers, back when it was known as Two Hands. While much of her true name lay beyond my knowledge of the Noongar language, as the minutes passed I understood that her name was also a history of her people, a sort of Bayeux Tapestry that bound myth with loves, births, deaths; hunts, battles, journeys; droughts, fires, storms; and the names of every host within whose body Moombaki had sojourned. With the word Esther her name ended. My visitor egressed and I opened my eyes to find slanted sunlight flaming the canopy below us sharp green, torching the scrub dark gold and reddening the whale-rib clouds, and countless thousands of birds, singing, shrieking, yammering. “Not a bad name,” I said, already feeling the ache of loss.

A marri tree bled gum and starry blooms. Corymbia calophylla .

“Come back anytime,” she said, “or y’kin y’spoke of.”

“I will,” I promised, “but my face will have changed.”

“World’s changin’,” she said. “Even here. Can’t stop it.”

“How’ll we find you, Esther? Me, or Xi Lo, or Holokai?”

Camp here. This place. Emu’s Claw. I’ll know. The Land’ll tell .

I wasn’t surprised to find that she’d gone back. So I set off for Perth, where a dishonorable man called Caleb Warren would soon suffer the fright of his life.

I FINISH FILLING in twenty-seven across — VERTIGO — before looking up to find Iris Marinus-Fenby mirrored in Holly Sykes’s sunglasses. Today’s head-wrap is lilac. I guess her hair only partly recovered from the chemo five years ago. Holly’s indigo dress extends from the buttoned throat to her ankles. “I’m a world-class ignorer of attention-seekers,” Holly slaps the envelope on the table, “but this is so crass, so intrusive, so bizarre, it’s off the scale. So you win. I’m here. I walked down Broadway, and at every crossing I thought, Why give even one minute to this head-meddling nutso? I don’t know how often I almost turned back.”

I ask, “Why didn’t you?”

“ ’Cause I need to know: If Hugo Lamb wishes to contact me, why not do it like everyone else and send an email via my agent? Why send you and this”—she knocks on the envelope—“this tampered-with photo? Does he think it’ll impress me? Reignite old flames? ’Cause if he does he’s in for a heck of a disappointment.”

“Why not sit down and order lunch while I explain?”

“I don’t think so. I only eat lunch with friends.”

“Coffee, then? One drinks coffee with anyone.”

With ill grace, Holly accedes. I mime a cup and mouth “Coffee” at Nestor, who makes a coming-right-up face. “First,” I tell Holly, “Hugo Lamb knows nothing about this. We hope. He’s gone by the name of Marcus Anyder for many years, incidentally.”

“So if Hugo Lamb hasn’t sent you, how can you possibly know that we met years ago in an obscure Swiss ski resort?”

“One of us resides in the Dark Internet. Overhearing things is what he does for a living, as it were.”

“And you. Are you still a Chinese doctor who died in 1984? Or are you alive and female today?”

“I am all those four.” I put a business card on the table. “Dr. Iris Marinus-Fenby. A clinical psychiatrist based in Toronto, though I consult further afield. And, yes, until 1984 I was Yu Leon Marinus.”

Holly removes her sunglasses, scrutinizes the card, and me, with distaste. “I see I have to spell this out, so here goes: I haven’t seen Hugo Lamb since New Year’s Day 1992, when he was in his early twenties, yeah? He’ll be in his midfifties by now. Like me. Now, the manipulator of this image shows Hugo Lamb still looking twenty-five years old, give or take, with the Helix Towers — built in 2018—and iShades hooked over his Qatar 2022 World Cup T-shirt. And the car. Cars didn’t look like that in the nineties. I was there. This photo has been buggered about with. Two questions for you: ‘Why bother?’ and ‘Who bothered?’ ”

A kid at the next table’s playing a 3D app: A kangaroo’s bouncing up a scrolling series of platforms. It’s off-putting. “The photo was taken last July,” I tell Holly. “It has not been altered.”

“So … Hugo Lamb found the fountain of eternal youth?”

A young waiter with Nestor’s heavyweight nose walks by with a T-bone steak sizzling on a hot plate. “Not a fountain, no. A place and a process. Hugo Lamb became an Anchorite of the Chapel of the Blind Cathar in 1992. Since his induction, he hasn’t aged.”

Holly takes this in and puffs out her cheeks. “Well, great. That’s that cleared up. My one-night fling is now … let’s say it, ‘immortal.’ ”