Tom McCarthy - C

“Mais c’est Debussy, n’est-ce pas?”

“Non, non: c’est Brahms…”

Serge doesn’t have a glass. He cups his hands and holds them out into the fountain. The water’s not particularly cold and, bizarrely, doesn’t feel particularly wet either. It’s got a kind of sooty feel to it. He draws his hands up to his face and looks at it: it’s cloudy, slightly dark, with bubbles in it. He takes a sip: it’s cloudy-tasting too, and a little bitter. A nurse wanders up and says something he doesn’t understand. He raises his shoulders and looks blankly back at her; she makes a drinking-from-glass gesture with her hand, and points towards a kiosk selling glasses of the same slightly opaque quality as the wildlife cases in the hotel’s lounge. Beside it, a signpost’s arrows bear four names, each painted in large capitals: MIR, MAXBRENNER, ZAMACEK, LETNA. None of them say GRAND HOTEL, but Serge manages to find his way back there by following the same drag he walked up with the porters yesterday, past the trinket-selling kiosks and the chemists’ with their scales and snakes.

He finds Clair waiting agitated for him on the terrace.

“Your appointment’s in five minutes. Hurry up!”

“I’m ready,” Serge shrugs back.

They head in the opposite direction from the fountains, past a statue of a crowned horseman and a large building up and down whose steps columns of nurses move, until they arrive at a smaller building. Here, beside the front door, is a plaque with the name FILIP and a string of letters on it. Inside, a receptionist directs them to a waiting room. Several other patients are sitting in this, most of them holding jars half-full of some sort of dark, silky material: they’re the same size as the ones Bodner stores the honey in at Versoie, with the same bronze screw-on lids. After a few minutes Serge’s name is called.

“Do you want me to come in with you?” Clair asks.

“No,” answers Serge.

Dr. Filip is a small man with unkempt white hair and a stringy beard and whiskers. From behind thin, steel-rimmed spectacles, his eyes fix Serge with a disapproving look. Around him, tables, trays and treadmills are arrayed like the musical instruments of some outlandish orchestra. There are tubes and pumps and cylinders, and scales attached to handles that in turn trail wires towards black sub-boxes. Strangest of all is a large machine that takes up a whole bench. Its cogs and filaments conjoin parts that look like they belong to printing presses, breweries or miniature railways. In its central segment, a dome the same shape as the fountain-pavilions rises up, a spiral staircase carrying a copper cable from its apex down its side and on towards a fuse to which it’s soldered.

“Carrefax, with C, not K,” says Dr. Filip. “Sit down.”

Instinctively, Serge looks around the room for his father before realising that “Carrefax” means him and complying with Dr. Filip’s order.

“Notes from English doctor indicate chronic intestinal problems,” Dr. Filip continues. His voice is sharp, and seems to issue from the tiniest of apertures nestled among the whiskers. “Please to describe them.”

Serge sticks his hands beneath his thighs and shuffles in his chair. “It’s like a big ball in my stomach,” he says. “A big ball of dirt.”

“Why you say ‘dirt’?” asks Dr. Filip.

“Well, because it’s dark. It seems that way.”

“You having constipation?”

Serge nods, reddening.

“And lethargy?”

“Yes,” Serge says. “Very much.”

“Headache?”

“Also.”

“Please to lie on table.” Dr. Filip rises brusquely as he indicates a kind of folding slab that’s held up by a complex frame of interlocking metal legs. It looks a little like an ironing board divided into segments that, hinge-mounted, rise and fall abruptly. “First remove shoes and shirt.”

Serge slides his shirt and shoes off and climbs up onto the table. Dr. Filip pushes Serge’s shoulders down into its flannel-covered surface with cold hands which then move down to Serge’s stomach, which they tap, as though sounding a box or wall. Serge begins to speak but Dr. Filip cuts him off:

“Shh…”

He holds his hand over Serge’s midriff and, tapping it a few more times-gently, as though nudging a dial-lowers his head and listens.

“Not good,” he says after a while. “A blockage. Stagnant. You are having autointoxication. Skin is dark, eyes too. You seeing well, or not?”

“Not,” Serge says. “I mean no. It’s kind of…”

“How is?” Dr. Filip asks, impatient.

“Furry.”

“What is meant?”

“Furry, like fur. The hair of animals. Small hairs. It’s like…”

His voice trails off. It’s hard to describe. Fur’s not quite right. It’s more like tiny filaments. The closest thing he could liken it to is one of his mother’s silks-the really fine, dark ones-held right up to his eyeballs and stretched out in front of them, making the world gauzed: dark-gauzed, covered in fleck-film. It’s been like this for months. When it started, he’d try to blink a hole in it, or wipe it away, peel the veil back; but that only ingrained it further, lodging it beneath the surface of the eyes themselves. He tried washing them, but this just made the filament-mesh run and stain, gauzing everything he saw before he’d even looked at it.

Dr. Filip says: “Please to provide a sample.”

“Sample of what?” Serge asks.

“Stool,” Dr. Filip answers. His cold hands pull Serge’s shoulders upright and turn them towards a low chair with a hole in its seat and a kidney-shaped tray beneath it.

“I can’t,” Serge says.

“Not to be embarrassed,” Dr. Filip sneers disdainfully.

“It’s not that,” Serge explains, reddening again. “I mean I can’t. It doesn’t want to…”

“You speak of what it wants?” Dr. Filip’s stringy eyebrows climb up towards his hairline, and his glasses ride up with them. “So: I am arranging enema for you this afternoon. Also,” he continues, turning to his desk and picking up a pen, “I am giving you diet from which not to digress. Lactose: soured milk and cereal. And fruit. No meat. You give this to hotel kitchen; they will administer.” He hands Serge two cards. “And you will follow hydrotherapy course. Here is schedule.” He slides from a drawer a sheet of paper and, reaching behind him, pulls from a shelf a honey jar, then passes both these to Serge. “Please to go now. Return tomorrow afternoon at four. Also drink constantly the water: from the fountains, with your eating, at all times. Every opportunity, you drink.”

Serge walks back to the hotel holding the jar, wondering what he’s meant to do with it. He tries to hand it in with his menu card, but the maître d’ returns it to him, instructing him to take it to his next appointment, which turns out to be in the building that he saw the nurses entering and leaving. The nurse Serge sees, in a room sharp from disinfectant, makes him lower his trousers and pants and bend across another segmented table whose lower end is ramped down to the ground; then she inserts a rubber tube in him and turns a tap on. As the warmish water enters and then leaves him, carrying no more than a small fragment of whatever’s in him out with it, the fabric of the veil that’s darkening his vision seems to expand and open slightly, making the objects in the room stand out more sharply: the taps and tubes, the tiled gutter running by the walls, the door’s handle and the nurse’s shoulders as she bends towards the gutter to retrieve the sample.

“You have bottle?” she asks.

“Bottle?” Serge says. “No. Should I?”

“Doctor has give you one, I think…”

The honey jar. “I didn’t realise that was meant for…”