Tom McCarthy - C

“Boathouse closed,” she says. “Other nurse tell me.”

“Well, we could have gone for a walk,” Serge says.

“Where?” she asks.

“In the woods, for example. They look nice. Why don’t we do that this evening?”

“Six o’clock again?” she asks. “Turn over now.”

“Five,” he says as her shoulder looms above him. “On the far side of the weir, by the power station.”

“Power?” she asks, sawing his back.

“Yes. You know: electricity.” He makes a moaning noise and wheels his arms around beside his waist.

“I understand,” she says, pushing them down again. “I come.”

She stands him up again. As he waits by the substation he watches soldiers practising manoeuvres in the fields. They run a few feet forwards and lie down, pointing their dummy-rifles at the wood, then jump up and run a few feet further before throwing themselves at the earth again, advancing in stops and starts towards some imaginary enemy within the trees. Serge thinks of what M. Bulteau said about the Prussian arsenals, of what he called their avarice for land and power. Widsun thought the same. Advance thy empire, Venus said to little round Giles. The deep, male voice on the record said that Jiři’s peace-blueprint was flowering among all nations. He remembers the way Lucia smiled at that, then, longing for Tania’s musty smell, turns back towards the weir to look for her, and sees that a door in the generating station is opening. A man walks out and says something to him. “I’m sorry…” Serge shrugs.

“Deutsch?”

“No: English.”

“Oh! You English!” The man’s face lights up. He’s fifty-ish, well-built, with thick grey hair and bronzed, sinewy arms that look like the vines in the patch he’s just stepped out into. “English good people!”

“Thank you,” Serge says to him. “Are these vines yours?”

“Vine? Kystenvine, special of region. You like vine?”

“They look nice,” Serge answers.

“I get for you,” the man says, then turns and heads back to the generating station. He emerges a few moments later with a bottle.

“Here: Geschenk for good English!” he says, pushing it through the mesh with his strong, wood-dark arm. “Electro-vine. You take!”

The bottle’s made from the same murky glass as everything else around here. Its contents are so dark that at first Serge thinks the man has handed him some bottled local earth; but when he takes it through the fence he realises there’s liquid in it. As he turns it in his hands the liquid runs inside, its silky, deep-red filaments stirring and catching the light until they seem to glow.

“It’s wine?” he asks the man. “From these vines?”

“Da-ja-how say? Yes! Kystenvine: we make here, only few bottles, for us. Electro-vine for good electro-men!”

He lets out a deep, hearty laugh, then disappears into the generating station once more. Serge thinks of taking the wine to the field’s edge and drinking it as he watches the soldiers train, but realises that he doesn’t have a corkscrew. Returning to the hotel, he slips the bottle beneath his shirt so Clair won’t see it.

In his room, a letter’s waiting for him. It’s from his father.

Dear Son,

he reads,

I trust the water’s to your liking. As you’ll doubtless be aware (or perhaps not, bathed as you are in splendid isolation), the Pontic seas of politics are flowing with compulsive course to the Propontic and the Hellesport. Should a retiring ebb not be felt soon, I fear we’ll have to curtail your stay among the Nix and bring you home, lest Vernichtung lay down a barrier preventing your return. Await instructions.

On another note: I have been experimenting greatly of late with Crookes Tubes, in the manner of Lenard, and feel-with great excitement and not a little trepidation-that I am close to submitting a patent for approval by the great and austere offices of our-his-majesty’s government. Without going into too great detail, and not unaware that in times such as these the intimacy of one’s communications cannot be assured-a fact which does not make me any less loath to engage in the dark, cryptographic art to which your godfather some time ago sold himself corps et biens as the saying goes-What? Yes, what I have in mind involves not only the projection by means electronic of images across a screen-a task which, after all, the kinematograph performs more than adequately-but their transmission across long distances, by wires or, indeed, wirelessly, just as sound is wirelessly dispatched at present. There is no reason this could not be done: indeed, successes have already been claimed by others in the passing of static images via radio-you of all people will be privy to that fact-but my ambition is much higher: to transmit moving pictures over distance, such that life in all its full, vibrant immediacy may be relayed without any delay. Yes, you read that right: what I’m inventing is no less than a remote, instant kinematoscope!

Why do I tell you this? you ask. Because I intend, filius meus, or rather fili mi (I hope, dear boy, that Clair is not letting your Latin rust, nor any other branch of the great tree of learning up whose trunk you are climbing, like the squirrel in the Norwegian-no, the Finnish-is it Kalevalla, or Kavelavela or-anyway)-I intend, once my patent is granted, to incorporate: that is, to set up commercially. What do you think of Carrefax Cathode for a name? More to the point, what would you think of becoming, if not immediately a partner, then at least, and, if required, by legal proxy till you turn eighteen, a signatory to the incorporated body? I have been pondering the question of an identificatory visual motif, or logo if you will, and feel that a photograph of your late sister would complement, nay complete, the family nature of our undertaking. The love of technology shared by the three of us has always been a font of pleasure-of the greatest pleasure-for me; and I see no reason why your sister’s death should interrupt this interfamilial communion, far less call a halt to it. When Bell’s brother, with whom the great man had spent so many hours working towards the telephone’s invention, passed away, this merely spurred Bell on to create a machine sensitive enough to enter into discourse with him should the existence of an afterlife turn out to be not merely a metaphysical presupposition but a physical fact too. No contact was made-but did the brother not still play a part in the invention? Should his contribution be forgotten? So it is with Sophie, I believe. When future generations watch images, borne by fiery electric particles, dancing on their walls, relayed thither from distant lands, should it not…

Serge sets the letter down. He had a fluoroscopy session one day, quite early in his stay in Kloděbrady, when Dr. Filip wanted to ascertain the extent of the encumbrance in his bowels. In a windowless room buried deep in the entrails of the Maxbrenner building, he stood between a lead-lined X-ray box and an empty wooden frame that Dr. Filip shifted slightly up and down on its supporting post until it was positioned just in front of Serge’s midriff. The doctor then slid a screen into the frame’s groove and, stepping away from Serge, switched the room’s lights off and the contraption on. There was a whirring, then a flash, a smell of calcium tungstate; and then a glowing pool collected in the air just on the far side of the screen, as though Serge’s stomach were seeping light.

“Please not to move,” the doctor’s voice instructed him from the darkness as Serge tried to crane his head forwards to see the light-source. “I can show you with mirror.”

A scraping came from beneath the voice, then the sound of something being lifted from the floor-then there it was, reflected back at him: the inside of his belly, etched in blocks and lines of black against the fluoroscope screen’s sickly calcium-white, suspended in a void that detached it from anything and everything. Organs, tubes and bones quivered and oscillated against each other awkwardly, like animals-reptiles, molluscs, nether-dwelling creatures-who, crammed together in a space too small for them, bristle with aggression towards one another yet understand, through some vermicular, primordial instinct, that the survival of each depends on that of its unwanted neighbours. Both Serge and Dr. Filip watched the scene in silence for quite some time. Serge’s stomach, and not the vacuum in which it was held, was the living, moving part of this new film that was being projected and viewed in the instant of its creation-and yet, rendered negative and ghostly by the rays, it seemed to Serge more dead than all the meat inside it. Lying back now on the bed trying to picture his father’s putative invention, he sees skinless bodies moving through empty space: hundreds of them, stretching, bending and gesturing, like the dancing skeletons of folklore and travelling carnival displays. “Carrefax Cathode”: whatever vibrant immediacy this might possess, all Serge can see is death-death broadcast out of Poldhu, Malin, Cleethorpes, flung across the seas, pulsed out on the hour from Paris, relayed from mast to mast and station to station, from Abyssinia to Suez to Crookhaven and on to homes in Europe and across the world. Can death be patented? He reaches for the mineral-water bottle by his bed and, holding it up to his face, rotates it so the seven-digit number on its label ticker-tapes past his eyes…