Ciaran Carson - Exchange Place

So it is written in the book, said Bourne, the book of all our lives. What is your name? Kilpatrick hesitated. The bicycle, man, look at the bicycle, said Bourne. And then Kilpatrick knew who he was. He turned the bicycle round and there, in white paint on the seat tube in a boy’s careful schoolboy script, was written J. Kilfeather. So now you know, said Bourne, as I once got to know. You know what got me? No, not the cricket bat. I played that one well at the time. Top left shelf, seventh object along. Kilfeather found himself staring at pair of navy women’s court shoes, late 1940s style, stacked heel. My mother’s shoes, said Bourne, I wore them one Hallowe’en when I was what? four or five, and I clattered around in the dark in them and a long dress, seeing fireworks go off all around me. Funny the way things move you. You suffer from migraine in your teens? Kilfeather nodded. A lot of us did, said Bourne, with others it’s epilepsy. It’s all in the aura, don’t you see? It changes the world for you, or rather it changes you for the world, because the world is always what it is no matter what. When I realized that I really started to paint. The other thing was just something I did for the Other Side unbeknownst to myself, when they put the fugue on me, just like they did on you. The fugue? said Kilfeather. You know your classic fugue, said Bourne. Yes, said Kilfeather, from fugere , to flee. Yes, said Bourne, variant of temporary global amnesia, person thinks he’s someone else, often found in migraineurs, normally it only lasts a matter of months or weeks, but the Other Side found a way of inducing it to last for years. It was only when I was born again that I remembered the chair, the helmet with the electrodes, like one of those hair salon hairdryers. Not that it was unpleasant. Far from it, something like sinking into black velvet. I heard a voice in my head speaking of green fields. Then I was gone, and John Browne the printer woke up in another city as John Bourne the painter. The Other Side don’t like their alters to be too disjunctive. I kept the name Bourne, a bit more class to it, don’t you think? Though you may call me Browne. So there you are: you’re an alter too. But there’s a twist to the plot. The Other Side have planted another alter in Belfast, a John Kilfeather who is masquerading as you, unbeknownst to himself. Not to mention the fact that he’s introduced a character dangerously close to me, courtesy of the Other Side again, calls him John Harland. We must redress the balance, said John Browne, and Kilfeather knew he was speaking the truth. What must I do? he said.

First we must kit you out, said Browne. The suit is excellent, of course, what an operation though, overkill if you ask me, our people in Belfast had the neighbourhood closed down with a bomb scare for three days just to get into the house. You won’t need the book, we’ve already been through it with a fine-tooth comb. Interesting propositions if fanciful at times, doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know. In any event it’s a copy, we needed the fake Kilfeather to have the original for continuity purposes, and of course you will have access to that when the time comes. The only thing you really need is the gun. The gun? said Kilfeather, and Browne handed him the Luger pistol.

The rain was still pouring down from an apocalyptic sky. I heard the Albert Clock strike the half-hour, the same reverberating note that struck me so many times over the years, giving me that next half-hour of grace before I saw the person whom I was to meet, half an hour in which the words would come to me unbidden as I wrote them down; and I remembered countless other times writing ecstatically in a notebook, whether under an awning in the pouring rain or on the sunlit terrace of a café, scribbling for months, for years, circling round a theme that only gradually discloses itself, pages covered in words, arrows leading back to other words, words crossed out, addenda, corrigenda, pages flickering behind the page I write in now. I flicked through the previous entries.

It seems like a dream, or so it seems now when I look back at it, I had written days ago, a week ago, a month ago. The entry bore no date. Only now am I waking up to it, in a manner of speaking, said the entry. What led to it? It all depends how far back one goes. Did it begin here, in this blink of an eyelid, or elsewhere, in another? So it was written.

Contrapunctus XIV , I had written. Journeys in fractal land are arduous. Mandelbrot: ‘length’ is not something that can be meaningfully specified. Mandelbrot quotes Edmund Whymper on mountaineering: It is worthy of remark that … fragments of rock … often represent the characteristic form of the cliffs from which they have been broken.

I am wearing a pair of Oxford brogues by ‘K’ shoes of Kendal, 1960s vintage, bought on eBay, I had written. I looked down at my feet. I was wearing them now. They had been barely worn yet when I put them on I could feel the imprint of another’s foot upon the insole, and I wondered who had walked in them before me. Kendal in the Lake District, I had written, Wordsworth country, the poet striding for miles up hill down dale as the words came to him unbidden and he cried them aloud with every step he took. There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, the earth, and common sight, to me did seem apparell’d in celestial light, the glory and the freshness of a dream.

I paused from my writing and looked up at the sky. The rain had ceased and a sun pale as the moon drifted through the clouds. I felt that sensation of a migraine aura steal over me once again. The brickwork of the building opposite was charged with pattern, brick and mortar interstices undulating like a piece of music. I closed my book, took up my briefcase and walked out into the street, spellbound by everything I saw, the gutter heaving like a river in spate, the manhole covers under my feet like heraldic shields laid down by a forgotten empire. When I looked up I saw domes and cupolas, battlements and parapets gleaming on the skyline of the city under the leaden clouds, and my route now seemed preordained from some distant epoch. A car-horn sounded ceremonially and my whole being shimmered with the knowledge that the atoms of my brain had been forged aeons ago in the stars, billions of atoms forming dense thickets of neurons and transmission cables endlessly communicating, more active often in sleep than in waking life.

I walked towards my destination along the route that I had taken for many years, and with every footstep I took, I watched the city unfolding herself in all the beauty and the glory of her detail. And I heard the words of John the Divine, And the twelve gates of the city were twelve pearls; every gate was of one pearl; and the street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent glass. I walked among the people invisible to them, the apparition of these faces in a crowd, and I looked upon them, and I knew these nameless ones for all they knew me not. What was my name? Where was I coming from? Where was I going? I was this John, and that John, and the other John, and I was everyone and everything around me. I was yet to write the book in which all would be revealed, these lives of which I was the author, but now my path was clear, I knew the words would come when the time came, and I was filled with exaltation.

Before I knew it I was sitting under an awning outside the Morning Star. I ordered a Pernod with ice, a jug of water on the side. I poured water into the spirit and watched it slowly change from clear to cloud. The little miracle never failed to please me. I rolled a cigarette and took out my notebook. I lit the cigarette and took a sip of Pernod. I checked my watch and then thought to check the Omega I was to show my client. Both were almost exactly in synch, the second hand of the Wittnauer sweeping a little in advance of the Omega as if leading it on into the future. Beautiful watch the Omega, I was loth to part with it, maybe I could fob him off with the promise of something he would think better, a Rolex which if not exactly fake had been compromised by what they call reconditioning, covers a few sins invisible to the untrained eye. I put the Omega back in the briefcase and wrote in the notebook: I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, which is, and which was, and is to come. As I did so there was a flash of lightning followed by an almighty peal of thunder, and it started to pour rain again. It dripped from the awning spattering the words I had just written; but no matter, I moved to a more sheltered spot, taking with me my accoutrements of drink, tobacco and briefcase, and continued to write the first words that came into my mind. I heard them spoken from afar and I was merely setting down that which was dictated by another, my pen struggling to keep pace as word came after word. What thou seest, write in a book, said the voice.