Дэвид Митчелл - Utopia Avenue

‘Roll Away the Stone’; ‘Mona Lisa’; ‘Darkroom’. The Ghepardo show is bizarre and painful. Bizarre, because Jasper’s ex-body is playing songs Jasper knows inside out as he passively observes. Painful, because performance is not only technique: performance is technique and soul, and Knock Knock minus Jasper is merely competent. Utopia Avenue should be playing far better on their American debut. Elf, Dean and Griff must think Jasper’s letting them down. Five or six hundred New Yorkers will believe the same – that Jasper de Zoet couldn’t be bothered. It hurts him that Utopia Avenue die in a whimper of disappointment. Ironic that, as I’m fading away, I’m feeling emotions more clearly than I did when I had a body. The band play ‘The Hook’. It’s as lacklustre a version as the others. Jasper wonders at Knock Knock’s motive for bringing his new body here, to play this show. Not from a sense of duty. He feels Knock Knock’s thrill at the noise and attention. Knock Knock was somebody before Jasper knew him: perhaps that somebody was a performer as well, or somebody who commanded, or was worshipped. Well? Jasper asks his gaoler. Will you tell me who you were? There is no reply. The band play ‘Prove It’. The magical feedback loop between the band and the audience is not happening, and it is Jasper’s fault. Except it’s really your fault, Knock Knock … Look, the ember’s almost out … if you’ll grant me a dying wish, let me spend the last of myself on ‘Sound Mind’. They’ll worship you. Knock Knock heard him. He’s thinking it over. Jasper senses it. His reply arrives with a surge of voltage. Jasper shudders at the shock of possessing his own nervous system once again. Private Ward N9D can only be eighty or ninety minutes ago, but the sensation is giddying and raw. Tinkerbells from the glitterballs dance across Jasper’s vision. ‘Thanks for coming out tonight, everyone.’

Someone calls out, ‘More than you’ve fuckin’ done, pal!’

Last words nobody knows will be last words. Jasper turns to Dean: ‘Thanks.’ To Griff: ‘Nice work.’ To Elf: ‘Goodbye.’ Jasper strums; asks the tech-guy for more volume on his guitar; shuts his eyes … and slams into an amp-blowing, bent-string howl; and fires off a scale of triads, sliding from high E, all the way down. Jasper rewards his first cheer of the night with a new riff that isn’t ‘Sound Mind’: nobody will ever know it’s a rip-off of Cream’s ‘Born Under a Bad Sign’. It gets the audience thunder-clapping in time. Griff, Dean, and Elf join in on drums, bass and Hammond. Jasper steers the jam through three cycles before wrapping it up in a Wah-Wah’d B flat, the opening of ‘Sound Mind’. Dean comes in with the bass riff; Elf comes in on the next bar; and Griff chop-slaps on the next. Jasper leans in for his psycho-whisper …

Tomorrow I heard a knock at a door –

a door that won’t be there before –

couldn’t tell if it was criminal,

didn’t know it was subliminal, so …

Griff gongs the gong. Ghepardo patrons smile. Dean moves in to the mic for his vocal turn as Nobody:

I opened up and Nobody spoke,

‘Son, you’ve become a serious joke;

Old Father Sanity left you behind –

sad truth is, you’re not of sound mind.’

The band have never played a better ‘Sound Mind’. The crowd belt out the third chorus, and Jasper’s eyes are mysteriously wet. I’m glad it happened once before I went. Jasper’s running out of fuel, of road, of himself. He gallops into a rapid-fire outro. Elf spins out a whirlwind on her Hammond. Griff summons an earthquake from a mile down. Dean’s fingers zig-zag faster than the eye. Jasper moves towards the speaker, inch by inch, until it finds Hendrix’s Goldilocks spot – and yoooooooooooowl ! A banshee’s orgasm. Beyond Elf, Jasper sees Knock Knock pass by Luisa Rey and approach him. This must be a dying illusion. Knock Knock’s in my head. The phantom turns to the audience to bask in its roaring heat, then he looks at Jasper the way a moneylender looks at a debtor.

He touches the spot between Jasper’s eyebrows.

The pain is over before he knew it arrived.

Jasper’s body slumps like a discarded puppet.

He sees it on the stage from a few feet above.

So it’s true, you really do float upwards.

‘Sound Mind’ has clattered off the tracks.

The Ghepardo trickles away, like sand.

Levon’s distant voice: ‘ Lower that curtain! ’

An irresistible velocity takes him away …

To a sand dune, steep and high, ending in a ridge, up ahead. The wind and the sand are the only sounds. Behind him, the blankness is blanker the deeper you look. Pale lights stream past Jasper at knee-height or waist-height, towards the ridge. A multitude. The wind pushes Jasper up the slope as, surely, it propels the pale lights, like tumbleweed. He tries to catch one, but it passes through his palm. Souls? Jasper examines his hand. Only my memory of my hand. Perhaps every pale light sees itself as a person. The high ridge is close now, and closer with every step. The sky – if it is sky – is darkening to dusk. Soon – if it is ‘soon’ – Jasper stands on the crest of the high ridge and looks into the dusk. The Dusk. Dunes slope down to a sea of void. It appears to be four or five miles away, but Jasper doubts that distances work the same way here. The pale lights follow the contours of the dunes, at varying speeds and heights, down to the sea. The soul of Jasper de Zoet steps off the high ridge …

Somebody issues an order: ‘ Turn back .’

The soul of Jasper de Zoet stops at the brink.

The seaward wind pushes at the soul, harder.

The soul resists. A tug-of-war breaks out …

Jasper is slung into his body on the sofa backstage at the Ghepardo. He tries to move. He can’t. Not a limb, not a finger. Eyeballs and eyelids, yes. Otherwise, I’m paralysed. The eight people visible to Jasper are motionless. Not just standing still: motionless. Dean is a life-size model of Dean, holding a blood-dappled handkerchief close to Jasper’s face. My nose is bleeding. Griff is standing behind Dean. Luisa, holding Jasper’s wrist, is as still as a photograph. Howie’s girlfriend is discharging a sneeze. Howie Stoker’s fingernail is inside his nostril. Levon and Max appear to be in conversation with a shaggy-haired stranger holding a syringe – a doctor? Jasper thinks of Joseph Wright’s Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump . I can still remember and still access facts. Noise seeps in from the Ghepardo’s ballroom. Time has stopped in here, but not out there. Jasper recalls collapsing onstage at the end of ‘Sound Mind’.

He remembers the dunes. The Dusk. I died.

Why am I back here? Something brought me.

Where is Knock Knock? Still here in my mind.

What causes paralysis in eight people?

A man and a woman enter the room. A copper-skinned, middle-aged woman in a khaki tunic, trousers, desert boots and beads of many colours; and a slim Asian man in a bespoke suit, with silvering hair and gold-rimmed glasses. Neither looks perturbed by the human waxworks.

‘The nick of time, I’d say,’ remarks the woman. She prises the syringe from the doctor’s fingers. ‘God knows what’s in this.’

The Asian man approaches the sofa and squats on his heels. ‘Did you see the high ridge? The Dusk, the souls …’

Jasper is still as voiceless as before.

The man touches Jasper’s throat.

‘Who are you?’

‘Dr Yu Leon Marinus. “Marinus” is fine. Ignaz Galavazi sent me. I was out of the city, but Esther here’ – he glances at his companion – ‘tracked you after our friend Walt reported seeing you in the park.’