Marcel Theroux - Strange Bodies

‘I was approached in 1998 to do work for Sinan Malevin. During that time, he began dealing with Hunter. In the very early 1990s, maybe 1990, before the break-up, Hunter had invested in a radio station in Moscow.

‘From 2001, my work changed. I was present at a meeting with Sinan and his father, Hunter, and both US and Russian officials. Following that meeting, I worked closely with Yurii Olegovich, studying his classified work from the 1940s.’

‘But who was paying for all this?’

‘What we understood at the time was that Hunter had raised funding from private US sources to see if this work of Malevin’s had commercial potential. Now I think it’s not the case. Above Hunter, there are others.’ She looked meaningfully at me.

The scenario she was describing would have seemed beyond absurd if it had been suggested to me a month earlier. But after my experience with Jack, after talking to Malevin, I wasn’t so sure.

‘Why isn’t Sinan’s father involved any more?’

‘Yurii Olegovich resigned when the source of our funding became clear. He is an old Soviet idealist. He couldn’t bear the thought of his work helping our former enemies. The research is being conducted by a clandestine US and Russian joint venture. You understand that the next technological frontier is the human body itself? I’m speaking of human enhancement. The possibilities are enormous, but so are the costs. Each enhancement is tied to a human subject. Every operation is a risk. There is the danger of accident and injury, and the certainty of ageing. Using the Malevin Procedure, each enhanced subject can be in principle duplicated at relatively low cost. It’s the military application of Fedorov’s old dream, using science to transcend the limits of the human. In this case, to create the transhuman — the post-human.’

‘The Übermensch, ’ I said.

‘Of course,’ she agreed. ‘The fascist overtones are unmistakable. Another of my objections. I have no sympathy with those who idealise human perfection. What place would I have in a world like that?’

There was something very touching about the question, and about Vera’s open consciousness of her strangeness and asymmetry. It made me feel protective towards her. And as I stopped fighting the possibility that she might be telling the truth, I began to glimpse her courage. Perhaps she saw some of this in my face, because she reached across the table and took my hand.

‘We must not allow it, Nikolasha. We must not allow it.’

The waitress chose that moment to refill our tea-cups and we both fell silent until she was out of earshot.

‘There is another thing. I know for a fact that Hunter has an additional personal interest. He was diagnosed with a recurrence of prostate cancer last year. He wants us to speed up the testing of prototypes in the hope of prolonging his own life.’

On the giant iPod screen, an old black-and-white newsreel showed a sturdy Russian woman changing a tractor tyre. The lights in the cafe seemed strangely bright. I closed my eyes for a second and the floor gave a lurch under my feet.

‘You don’t look very well at all, Nikolasha,’ Vera said. She touched my forehead. Her hand felt as cold as marble. ‘You have a temperature.’

‘I couldn’t sleep on the train,’ I said.

*

We walked back to the river bank together and found Vera a taxi. She offered me a lift, but I felt like I could use the fresh air. It was a clear, balmy evening. The absurd, Disneyland sculpture of Peter the Great in a Pirates of the Caribbean galleon was framed by yellow and black clouds. Under this lonely, unfamiliar sky, I was struggling against a life-changing realisation and its consequences.

That night I went down to the fitness centre in the basement of the hotel where there was a sauna.

I remember closing my eyes and hearing the tick of the elements inside the heater. I felt ghastly. I was homesick and I wanted the certainties of my old life, but I knew there was no going back to it. I couldn’t seem to calculate how much time had passed since Jack’s disappearance. Was it weeks or days? I missed Lucius and Sarah with a terrible, physical yearning. The light in the sauna seemed unnaturally harsh.

I remember getting into the lift and going back up to my room. I remember dialling Vera’s number.

For a moment, I see my reflection in the window. Beyond it is the tower of Kazan Station. The hands of its clock advance rapidly before my eyes. The locus of my recollection shifts. I seem to be watching myself. I am watching Nicky Slopen as he answers the door; I cannot see to whom.

The continuous thread of my recollection unravels into an assortment of orphaned memories: a mouthful of gold teeth, an imperial eagle embroidered on a length of cloth, tortellini in the chiller of a supermarket, walking past the statue of Edward VII at Tooting Broadway in darkness; climbing up the creaking ladder to my loft, where under the naked bulb, accompanied by the clinks and hisses of the cold-water tank, I am sorting through the boxes of old papers in which I have saved everything: the English composition books full of murders perpetrated with implements made of ice; morose adolescent diaries (‘Frederick came over. We played D and D. I wish my penis was bigger.’); self-conscious teenage ones; and my first long essays for Ron.

My mind begins to unravel. Images of my children strobe and flicker: as they were, as they are, as I’ve never seen them. I tip headfirst into a pool of coloured mud. This is the red clay from which the biblical God made Adam. Chains of homunculi crawl along cables in an unceasing flow, fighting, laughing, dying. Beneath it all palpates a divine certainty that this is a vision of my place in creation. Life is a profound blessing. My true nature transcends a single unitary ego. Light and tenderness and compassion flood through me. I am all men and women at all times. I am all my mothers and fathers. I am Nicholas Patrick Slopen. Humour and kindness and intelligence will survive death, and God on high is full of generous laughter.

So the pain, when it comes, is a shock.

All my next memories are red: that was the colour of my pain; its sound was like an ambulance siren. I felt like an écorché, one of those flayed anatomical cadavers, posed in awful shapes, with bulging eyes and flesh the colour of salt beef. Every fibre of me seemed to have been exposed — a ray of light or a speck of dust could turn me inside out with agony. The contortions of my physical suffering overwhelmed my capacity to think. A few disordered impressions are all that I have of that time: a bucket containing what looked like offal in the corner of the room; a stopped clock with its hands at ten to three; someone wiping my body with a cloth so rough it seemed to be made of shagreen.

One characteristic of pain is that it roots you to the now. It’s the flipside of ecstasy — something both saints and deviants are aware of. It says something about human nature, I suppose, that more religions have chosen the flagellant’s than the voluptuary’s route to the infinite. Or maybe, as my experience suggests, pain just does it more efficiently. It takes you out of the flow of time and pins you in a transcendent present. You forget everything, you become inseparable from your agony, until you emerge from it transformed.

The pain has never entirely left me. It’s constant still, like tinnitus; but after a while — months, weeks, days? — it diminished enough for my sense of self to return and for the world around me to swim into focus.

I assumed that I’d been abducted, but if I’d disturbed the workings of a conspiracy that was important enough for my involvement to merit this, why had Hunter and Sinan left me alive at all? How had they moved me? Where was I? And, as I’ve indicated, there were more troubling inconsistencies between what I seemed to remember of my physical appearance and the body I was confronted with beneath my green hospital gown.