Tom McCarthy: C

Breakfast consists of blocks of bacon, fried bread, black pudding and mushrooms. They all look the same: dark lumps of matter. They taste the same as well, all giving off the flavour that, in vapour form, pervades the whole ship: a compound of decayed funguses, hot engine oil and onions. The indignant lady’s at it again, complaining to the stewards that she hasn’t been allotted the right table. The stewards try to relocate her, concocting a story about mixed-up or badly copied seating manifests, which they attempt to sell, with profuse apologies, to the family at the table the complainer covets. These people grudgingly move, although not to the complainer’s table, which is too small to accommodate them: they’re re-seated at a third one, which necessitates a new eviction, a new relocation. Pushing his plate away half-eaten, Serge leaves the dining room and skirts a game of deck quoits being played outside. Pausing for a while, he stares at the patterned markings and the poles rising above them; then, feeling fever taking hold of him once more, heads back to his cabin.

Lying on his berth, he sweats. The sweat, mixing with the tar-deposit left on his skin from his bath, turns black. That’s what he thinks is happening, at least: it’s possible that the sweat came out of him black in the first place. Mela chole: he hears, amidst the engine’s rumble and the room’s higher-pitched rattling, Dr. Filip’s thin, electric voice talking about black meat. He hears a lot of things: chants of the Versoie Day School children as they reel off their pronunciation exercises, footsteps marching along country roads, the whirr and clack of film projectors or motorised curtains. It seems that these are welling upwards, from the bottom of the sea-and that the sea itself is black, oily and dense. Closing his eyes, he pictures it as shellac, and the Borromeo’s prow as a gramophone needle, bobbing as it rides the contours of a disc. After a while, the image grows so strong in his mind that he becomes convinced that there’s a Berliner just outside his cabin: one deposited by someone, for some reason, in the corridor beside his door. He can clearly hear it playing, repeating variations of the same phrase:

Inking the centre

Inking the centre of the country

Inking the centre of

These words loop a few times, then give over to a single syllable, repeated:

kod, kod, kod, kod…

– a word, or non-word, that itself eventually mutates, changing its provenance and status until it finally resolves itself as a knocking on the cabin’s door.

“Who is it?” Serge calls out, or thinks he does.

“Thod, thod, thod, thod…” a voice calls back. The door swings open, and a steward enters.

“Bodner?” Serge asks.

The steward says something, but it doesn’t make much sense. His voice trips over itself, stuttering.

“Bring the Berlin inner,” Serge says. “In, I mean.”

“The what’s the what, sir?” the steward enquires, holding some kind of clipboard in his hand.

“The ink set,” Serge replies.

The steward momentarily retreats, returning behind a trolley on whose tray large, black machine parts lie. The parts, while different shapes and sizes, have a uniform look: Serge can tell that they all belong to a single, larger contraption. The steward runs his finger down his clipboard’s columns until he finds the entry that he’s looking for and, tapping his fingertip twice against the spot where the pertinent paragraph commences, tells Serge:

“It’s inset inset.”

“What’s that?” Serge asks him.

“It’s in sections,” the steward repeats, without moving his lips.

Serge tries to ask him what the thing is, but his lips won’t move either. None of him will move-not willingly, at least. It’s by virtue of the gangly, mutinous movement willed from elsewhere he experienced earlier that he finds himself, after the steward’s disappeared again, crawling across the floor and, taking hold of each machine part with his feelers, reassembling the contraption. Segments slot together with an automated ease: he knows right where to put them, and they know right where to go. Pretty soon he has the whole thing up and running, in its full arched, columned, knobbed and needled glory: it’s an even better version of the wireless set he merged with last night-an improved model, Mark II. As he hits the first clear frequency a voice spills from it and announces, in the manner of a call-sign:

“Incest-Radio.”

Lubricating the dial with his sweat, Serge sets to work, first capturing, then moving around, the cabin-stations he was tuned into last night, the station-chambers. It’s a matter of laying hold of each, feeling for its parameters, its walls, then lifting it up intact and relocating it wholesale: the room, and the conversation taking place in it. Parts of each spill in transit, trickling into other ones, distorting and corrupting their own conversations and adding to the general clatter-but Serge knows that, in methodically capturing and relocating one after the other, he’ll eventually unearth the one he’s looking for, the special chamber. He can feel its music growing closer, its melody gaining form; its voices, too, becoming clearer, more precise. At the same time, commensurate with this drawing-near and sharpening, corresponding to it with a perfect technological alignment, a part-to-part reciprocity, he can feel excitement and desire growing in him, driven to a pitch by the knowledge that nothing is, has been or ever will be more important than the successful execution of the task in which he’s now engrossed. Finally, whether after minutes or hours he can’t tell, it happens: the chamber itself looms into view and opens up to him, and he finds himself bathed in its noise and signal-not just the transmitted noise and signal, picked up at a distance, but the source noise, the source signal, at their very point of origin-as he stands right at the ceremony’s heart, its main participant.

The ceremony is either a coronation or a marriage-or, more properly described, a combination of the two. The décor is regal: jewel-encrusted birds set upon boughs of gilded trees while peacocks roam a petal-strewn floor below them, their fanned-out, diamond-studded tails displaying large suns as they brush over amber-coloured blocks of camphor delicately spun around by filigrees of twisted gold. Serge and his bride stand on a raised podium. The couple wear, wrapped around their heads, black ribbons that have smudged their foreheads in the manner called for by the ceremony’s custom. To the side of the podium a steward stands wearing the ibis-mask of Thoth, holding a set of towels or tablets, copy orders or reports. Behind the steward stretches Versoie’s Mosaic Garden, stables dilapidated, path all overgrown, the ruins of the main house visible beyond its collapsed wall. Next to him, transformed into a towel-robed priestess, aerodynamic purple and black triangles running backwards from her eyes, stands the ship’s indignant lady. Behind these two, just off the podium, seated at front-row tables over which they lean excitedly, are journalists: they thrash incessantly at typewriters, hammering out sheets of copy that are torn from their machines’ rollers the moment each page is filled, handed to scurrying messengers and whisked off to Fleet Street to be typeset alongside insurance ads, printed on huge, groaning presses, bundled and dispatched to cities all around the world and scoured in secret rooms for keywords and acrostics. Since Serge and his bride have commandeered the typewriters’ ribbons for their headgear, the pages are all blank-but this doesn’t seem to worry anyone: they’re hammered and handed out, transferred, typeset, printed and pored over nonetheless. Opposite the journalists, on the podium’s far side, musicians play, vibrating as they do so. Behind these, and all around, handmaidens-androgynous children of both sexes-hold black circles aloft as they chant, in unison: