David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks

THE HOLY SPIRIT entered Oscar Gomez during last Sunday’s service at his Pentecostal church in Vancouver as the congregation recited Psalm 139. He described it to my friend Adnan Buyoya a few hours later as “knowing what lay in the hearts of his brothers and sisters in Christ, what sins they had yet to repent or to atone for.” Gomez’s conviction that God had bestowed this gift upon him was unshakable, and he was setting about God’s work without delay. He took the SkyTrain to Metropolis, a large suburban shopping mall in the city, and started preaching at the main entrance. Christian street preachers in secular cities are more ignored or mocked than they are listened to, but soon a crowd clotted around the short, earnest Mexican Canadian. Total strangers at Metropolis were baited, often to their astonishment, by Gomez’s startling specificity. One man, for example, was exhorted by Gomez to confess to fathering his sister-in-law Bethany’s baby. A hairdresser was begged to return the four thousand dollars she had stolen from her employer at the Curl Up and Dye hair salon. Gomez told a college dropout called Jed that the cannabis he was growing in his frail grandmother’s garden shed was disfiguring his life and could only end in a custodial sentence. Some blanched, their jaws dropping, and fled. Some angrily accused Gomez of hacking into their slates or working for the NSA, to which he replied, “The Lord has all our lives under surveillance.” Some began to weep, and ask for forgiveness. By the time the mall security guys arrived to escort Gomez from the premises, several dozen slates were filming the proceedings and a protective cordon of onlookers was surrounding the “Seer of Washington Street.” The city cops were summoned. YouTube uploads caught Gomez asking one of his arresters to confess to stamping on the head of an Eritrean immigrant — named — three nights before, while beseeching the other officer to seek counseling for his child pornography addiction, naming both the officer’s log-in and the Russian website. We can only guess at the conversation in the squad car, but en route to the precinct HQ, the destination was changed to Coupland Heights Psychiatric Hospital.

“Swear to God, Iris,” Adnan emailed me that evening, “I walked into the interview room and my first thought was, A seer? This guy looks straighter than my accountant . Straightaway — as if I’d spoken out loud — Oscar Gomez told me, “My father was an accountant, Dr. Buyoya, so maybe I get my straightness from him.” How do you conduct an assessment after that? I thought (or hoped?) I had spoken my initial thought aloud, but soon Gomez was referring to those events from my boyhood in Rwanda that I’d only ever told you and my own analyst about during training.” In Adnan’s second email, sent two hours later, patients at Coupland Heights were worshiping the new inmate as a god. “It’s like ‘The Voorman Problem,’ ” Adnan said, referring to a Crispin Hershey novella we both admired. “I know what my grandparents would call Gomez in Yoruba, but there’s no way to talk about witchcraft in English and keep my job. Please, Iris. Can you help?”

VENI, VIDI, NON vici. By the time I’d located my car in the vast, rainy parking lot, I was drenched, and I got a run in my tights as I clambered in. I was also hammered by anger, despair, and a sense of impotence. I’d failed. My device warbled as a message arrived:

2late marinus 2late. will mrs gomez believe the truth?

Answers and implications slid into place, like a self-solving Rubik’s Cube. Topmost was the most obvious, that my device had been hacked by a Carnivore, a gloating Anchorite, who might be incautious and inexperienced enough to let his identity slip. I messaged a half-bluff:

hugo lamb buried his conscience but it never quite died

There was a chance that the “Saint Mark” who had promised to accompany Oscar Gomez up Jacob’s Ladder was “Marcus Anyder,” the Anchorite name of Hugo Lamb. My device sat in my clammy hand for one minute, two, three. Just as I gave up, a message arrived.

consciences r 4 bone clocks marinus, u r 1 beaten woman

My bluff had worked, unless I was being double-bluffed back. But, no, a carnivorous psychodecanter acting alone wouldn’t pass up the chance to rub my nose in my wrong guess, and the “beaten woman” phrase matched L’Ohkna’s profile of Hugo Lamb’s misogyny. As I considered how best to make use of this contact, surely unsanctioned by Constantin or Pfenninger, a third message arrived:

c yr future marinus c yr rearview mirror

Instinctively, I ducked and tilted the rearview mirror until I could see through the rear window. The glass was beaded with rain. I switched on the car’s battery, and clicked on the rear wiper, to remove the—

The passenger-side window exploded into a thousand tiny hailstones, and the mirror above my head was a brittle supernova of plastic and glass. One shard of plastic shrapnel, the size and shape of a fingernail clipping, lodged itself in my cheek.

I crouched, afraid. A logical portion of my mind was arguing that if the marksman had intended to kill me I would now be staring across the Dusk. But I stayed down for several minutes longer. Atemporality neutralizes death’s poison, but it doesn’t defang death, and old habits of survival linger on, even in us.

THAT IS WHY we prosecute the War, I remind myself in 119A, four days later. The window in my room turns under-ice gray. We bother because of Oscar Gomez, Oscar Gomez’s wife, and his three children. Because nobody else would believe in the animacides committed by a syndicate of soul thieves like the Anchorites or by “freelancers” hunting alone. Because if we spent our metalives amassing the wealth of empires and getting stoned on the opiates of wealth and power, knowing what we know yet doing nothing about it, we would be complicit in the psychoslaughter of the innocents.

My device buzzes. It’s Ōshima’s tone. I fumble the thing like a panicky contestant, drop it, retrieve it, and read:

Done. No incidents.

Arkady returning now.

Will shadow Slim Hope.

I fill my lungs with oxygen and blessed relief. The Second Mission is one step closer. Daylight now leaks in around the window. 119A’s ancient plumbing shudders and clanks. I hear feet, a toilet cistern, and cupboard doors. Two or three rooms away, Sadaqat is up.

“SAGE, ROSEMARY, THYME …” Sadaqat, our warden, minder, and would-be traitor, plucks a weed from the raised beds. “I planted parsley too, so we could dine on ‘Scarborough Fair’ but late frost killed it. Some herbs are feebler than others. I’ll try again. Parsley’s rich in iron. Here I planted the onions and leeks, tough customers, and I have high hopes for the rhubarb. Do you remember, Doctor, we grew rhubarb at Dawkins Hospital?”

“I remember the pies,” I tell him.

We’re speaking quietly. Despite the fine-sieved rain and his busy night, Arkady, my fellow Horologist, is practicing Tai Chi among the myrtle and witch hazel across the rooftop courtyard. “This will be a strawberry patch,” Sadaqat points, “and the three fruiting cherry trees I’ll fertilize with the tip of a paintbrush, due to a scarcity of bees here in the East Side. Look! A red cardinal, on the momiji maple. I bought a book about birds, so I know. Those birds on the cloister roof, those are mourning doves. We have starlings nesting under the eaves, up there. They keep me busy with the scrubbing brush, but their droppings make a nutritious fertilizer, so I don’t complain. Here we have the fragrant quarter. Wintersweet, waxflower, and these thorny sticks will become scented roses. The trellis is for honeysuckle and jasmine.”

I notice that Sadaqat’s up-and-down British-Pakistani accent is flattening out. “You’ve worked magic up here, truly.”