Tom McCarthy - C

“… might opt for the direct transmission system… still to be decided… general feeling you’ve done excellently though… Macauley asked me to pass on…”

“How does he know how well I’ve done? I haven’t reported back yet.”

“… leave brought forwards… back to Blighty and all that… Port Said tomorrow… report can be completed in your own time…”

“My leave?” asks Serge.

Pollard nods.

“But it wasn’t due for…”

Pollard starts explaining something, but Serge can’t listen properly: the movement of the taxi into which his colleague’s bundled him is disorienting him further. They head straight for his apartment, where he finds his trunk already packed. He spends a fitful, sweaty night there, then is picked up in the morning and put on a train to Port Said.

“You’ve got a nasty cysthair,” says the man sharing his compartment as Serge scratches at his now much-inflamed ankle.

“A nasty what?” asks Serge.

“A nasty cyst, there,” the man repeats, more slowly. “Ought to get it looked at.”

Serge looks at the man instead.

“You’re an optician, right?” he asks him.

“Not at all,” the other answers guardedly. He begins to tell Serge what it is he does, but Serge ignores the content of his speech, trying all the while to place his accent. That he can’t do so isn’t due to any sociological failing on his part, but rather to a growing acoustic strangeness overtaking him: all dialogues and tones have sounded foreign since he left the Ani, as though his aural apparatus had been thrown off-kilter by the land’s vibrations. Port Said assaults his ears when he arrives: porters and lemonade-sellers haggling for custom, ships’ representatives calling out the names of liners as they round up passengers, water-busses sounding their horns as they ply the harbour. Serge is escorted, by somebody or other, to the Island and Far East Line’s Borromeo, on whose deck a gaggle of tourists, businessmen and civil servants argue in cacophony with stewards over hold and cabin baggage, cabin size and cabin allocation. One lady is repeatedly complaining at being given the wrong one. Serge, surrendering both his cases, is led to his own, where he immediately lies down, passing the next few hours in a state between waking and sleep. At some point the Borromeo’s engines start up, and the whole room begins to shake. A little later, the huge ship starts moving. Dragging himself from his berth, Serge steps out on deck to watch the land dwindle away. The city’s lights appear to flicker on and off, as though signalling, Pharos-like, across the water. The ship’s wake runs backwards like an inverted vapour trail, its parallels nearing each other as their distance from the stern increases. He wonders if they converge at some point-at the horizon, wherever that is, or perhaps just beyond it. Conversations are taking place around him: someone, leaning on the railings, is pronouncing the “Said” of the disappearing city’s name “said,” as in “he said, she said…”

Supper is called, but Serge skips it. Lying on his berth, sweating, he becomes aware of his own body in a way in which he hasn’t been since adolescence. His limbs are heavy, gangly; they don’t seem like part of him-at least not parts that fall beneath his mind’s control, but ones jolted and twitched instead by some manipulating hand located elsewhere. The engine noise sounds in his chest. It seems to carry conversations from other parts of the vessel: the deck, perhaps, or possibly the dining room, or maybe even those of its past passengers, still humming through its metal girders, resonating in the enclosed air of its corridors and cabins, shafts and vents. Their cadences rise and fall with the ship’s motion, with such synchronicity that it seems to Serge that he’s rising and falling not so much above the ocean per se as on and into them: the cadences themselves, their peaks and troughs…

When he falls properly asleep, he dreams of insects moving around a chessboard that may or may not be the sea. At times it seems more like a gridded carpet than a chessboard. The insects stagger about ponderously, stupidly, reacting with aggression towards other insects when these cross their paths: rearing up, waving their tentacles threateningly as antennae quiver and contract, and so on. Despite the unintelligent, blind nature of the creatures’ movement, there’s a will at work behind them, calculating and announcing moves, dictating their trajectories across the board. The presence of this will gives the whole scene an air of ritual. Above the board a voice intones, with a rhythm as steady as a galley drummer’s beat, “K4, K4, K4…” After a while the woven mesh of sea turns into desert: an enormous stretch of it, all parched and cracked, across which figures stumble-multitudes of them, whole armies, linked up hand-in-hand, wave after wave, heading towards a demarcated compound. Falkiner’s inside the compound, fiddling with an urn, his station-marked geometries forming the supporting struts and girders of some kind of sandbox…

Serge wakes up briefly. His berth’s drenched in sweat. Looking around the cabin, he sees nothing special: just a cupboard and a chair, his untouched trunk. The single porthole gives onto a night that’s lit up by a full, bright moon. The sky’s a kind of silvery-black-an odd combination that, again, gives him the sense of having pitched up in a photographic negative. Turning away from the reversed image, he falls straight back into a lucid dream, once more of insects-only this time, all the insects have combined into a single, giant one from whose perspective, and from within whose body, he surveys this new dream’s landscape. In effect, he is the insect. His gangly, mutinous limbs have grown into long feelers that jab and scrape at the air. What’s more, the air presents back to these feelers surfaces with which contact is to be made, ones that solicit contact: plates, sockets, holes. As parts of him alight on and plug into these, space itself starts to jolt and crackle into action, and Serge finds himself connected to everywhere, to all imaginable places. Signals hurtle through the sky, through time, like particles or flecks of matter, visible and solid. Each of his feelers has now found its corresponding touch-point, and the overall shape formed by this coupling, its architecture, has become apparent: it’s a giant, tentacular wireless set, an insect-radio mounted on a plinth or altar. Serge is the votary kneeling down before it, arms stretched out to touch it; he’s also the set itself-he’s both. Twitching and shifting in his sleep, he fiddles with himself, nudging his way through the dial-and picks up, through the background thrum and general clutter of the conversations taking place all over, particular voices coming from some station that’s located in a cabin close at hand: one neighbouring his own, or two away, or possibly lying one deck above or below his and then one cabin along. They’re special voices, saying important things. There’s music coming from this nearby cabin-station too, but Serge can’t quite hear its melody: it, like the special voices’ words, is just beyond the range of hearing. He can tell, though, from the rhythm, the solemnity and grandeur of both words and music, that they form part of a ceremony of such splendour and magnificence that, to it, the ritualised game of chess he witnessed earlier bore the same relation as a canapé does to a banquet, a prelude to a symphony or a quick sketch to a fully executed masterpiece in oil: the ceremony is the climax of the process he’s embarked upon, the main event.

“That’s the place to be,” he says aloud-and, in doing so, wakes himself up. It’s morning. The engine noise is still going. The ship’s rising and falling as before. He feels slightly better; climbing from his berth, he digs a dressing gown out of his trunk and, slipping it on, makes his way to the Borromeo’s baths. These are located near the ship’s stern: two rows of wooden shacks each of which opens straight onto the deck. There’s a queue to use them. Men read papers and nod at one another gruffly as they wait. Women queue on the far side. A young, honeymooning couple wave to one another from their segregated spots; the lady who was complaining earlier looks out to sea indignantly, clasping her towelling robe tightly around her shoulders. Crewmen change the water between bathers, sloshing from buckets as they swing these across the deck. The bath itself is filled with hot sea-water, cooked in the ship’s bowels and piped in through a tap; what the staff are replacing is the bowl of fresh water that rests above this on a shelf. Both have traces of engine oil in them. Stretched out in the tub when it’s his turn, Serge watches the petroleum and coal-tar swirl and coalesce across the water’s surface; then he shifts his gaze down to his ankle, which is suppurating. Flesh-eating, Laura told him: lying on his back quite still, ignoring the impatient tapping on the door, he pictures himself as a dead man in a sarcophagus, swathed in spells and imprecations, heart replaced with secret writing and censorious seals. The soap has a logo embossed on its surface; it has tar on it as well. Serge feels more dirty after he’s washed than before, as though his labours, like those of a dung-beetle, had soiled rather than purified him.