Дэвид Митчелл - Utopia Avenue

Now. Time slows to its usual speed, albeit in reverse gear. Here is the moment when Jasper’s sixteen-year-old self opens the wardrobe in his and Formaggio’s room at Swaffham House. An Oriental cleric with a shaven head stares out of the mirror. The Memory Train stops. Jasper would prefer to look away, but his incorporeal self has no neck muscles or eyelids to shut, so he must scrutinise Knock Knock’s scrutiny. Hatred? Jealousy? Vengefulness?

Marinus releases a long phrase in a foreign language.

I don’t know that language , says Jasper.

He swore , says a dry Australian growl, in Hindi.

Jasper would look around for the owner of the voice, but can’t.

G’day, kiddo, says the voice. I’m Esther Little. The other spook.

Jasper remembers the Aboriginal-looking woman in the changing room at the club. Is anyone else in here?

Just us two little mice , says Esther. Speak, Marinus.

I’ve forgotten thousands of faces during my meta-life , says Marinus . But this one I can’t. Nor shall I. Ever.

Jasper’s confused. You know Knock Knock?

Our paths crossed years ago. Dramatically.

When? asks Jasper. Where? How?

Back in the early 1790s , says Marinus.

Jasper assumes he misheard. Back in the when?

Right first time , says Esther. The 1790s.

A joke? A metaphor? There’s no face for Jasper to try to read, so he asks directly. Dr Marinus, how old are you?

Later. For now, I want more of your backstory.

The journey through Jasper’s life accelerates towards the beginning. Nights blink shut, days open up, clouds streak across the sky. Seasons turn, anti-clockwise. Summer terms at Bishop’s Ely. Easters. Lent terms. Christmases, spent at Swaffham House with boarders whose families lived overseas. Michaelmas terms. Augusts and Julys in Zeeland. Another summer term. The vantage point loses altitude as Jasper’s growth is reversed. A balsa-wood glider off the summer dunes at Domburg. A cricket victory. Singing ‘To Be A Pilgrim’ in the school choir. Swimming in the Great Ouse. Conkers, marbles, jacks and Stuck-in-the-Mud. Soon Jasper is six, and the black car sent by the de Zoets to transport him to a gentleman’s life reverses up to his aunt’s boarding house in the seaside town of Lyme Regis. Jasper shrinks into his fifth, fourth and third years, surrounded by giants whose moods are as unaccountable as the weather. Here are Jasper’s invalid uncle, scoldings, hide-and-seek, a go-kart, a sparkler writing on the dark, a sunny day, a scary dog as big as a cow, a pram, with a view of a granite sea-wall curving into a dull jade sea. Seagulls attack a dropped bag of chips. Children – Jasper’s cousins – scream. The procession of images pauses on the face of a careworn woman. That’s my aunt Nelly , says Jasper. My mother’s sister .

You’re twelve months old here , says Marinus. Now things get indistinct … The images melt into each other. A dog-eaten golliwog. Baked beans squelched between fingers. Rain at a window. A bottle of baby formula. Aunt Nelly’s sleepless face crying softly, ‘ Milly, why did you have to do this to us? ’ Howling. Incontinence. Contentment. All lines are smudged lines, and perspective has stopped working. Babies can’t focus their eyes for eight weeks, explains Marinus. For Temporals this is the end of the line. Ordinarily. If my hypothesis holds water, however …

The motion continues, turgid and dragging–––

–––until a jolt occurs, a slip, an imperfect join in the tracks. If Jasper had a body, he would have steadied himself.

The sensation of motion continues, but now it arcs away from the horizontal and towards the vertical. As if I’m falling down a well , thinks Jasper . Through windows in the walls of the well he glimpses fireworks and Milly Wallace. Diamond Head, the famous hill at Cape Town. A glimpse of a captain’s cabin. The images are clearer than those of Jasper’s infancy, but not as sharp as those from his own boyhood. Like pictures of pictures, or recordings of recordings. But these aren’t my memories , remarks Jasper.

These are fragments of your father’s life , says Marinus .

Here is Guus’s wife in a wedding veil. Leiden University in, Jasper guesses, the 1930s. Flying a kite. Learning to skim stones …

Another jolt occurs. What is that sensation? asks Jasper.

A generational join , says Marinus. We’ve reached your grandfather, before he fathered your father. European bodies lie under an African sky. This looks like the Boer War, I remember it well … a bloody, stupid mess.

Here’s a church full of people in old-fashioned clothes. I know this church , says Jasper. It’s Domburg, in Zeeland.

You know it sixty years later , points out Marinus.

He only migrates to boys, I see , observes Esther.

Who is not a product of their times? says Marinus.

Visionaries , replies Esther, for starters.

Jasper glimpses Dutch-style canal-side houses under a tropical sky. Horse-drawn carriages. A plantation. Java. A shipwreck. A crocodile attacking a water buffalo. A lamplit Melanesian woman under a mosquito net. A blur of lamplit sex. A volcano. A duel – and incorporeal shock, at a bullet-wound. It feels so real, Marinus.

Much as early films did , to early cinema-goers.

Jasper asks, Do memories flow down a bloodline?

Ordinarily, no , says Esther. A mnemo-parallax dies with the brain it resides in. But Horology doesn’t deal with the ordinary .

Then how can it be , asks Jasper, that we are watching memories from before I existed?

We are no longer inside your mnemo-parallax , says Marinus. These are memories of your ancestors’ experiences: but they were archived by a ‘de Zoet family guest’, who passes from father to son, to son, to you. This is the guest’s mnemo-parallax, made of his hosts’ memories, stitched together.

Like a giant meta-scarf , says Esther, made of single scarves.

A guest like the Mongolian? asks Jasper.

With differences , Marinus tells him . The de Zoet guest didn’t, or couldn’t, migrate from his hosts. Nor was he ever fully conscious until your lifetime.

The smell of mothballs. Open chests of white crystals. Camphor , says Marinus . A valuable cargo from Japan in the nineteenth century. We’re getting close. A sloping city of brownish roofs, with green rice terraces higher up. Fishing junks, moored along a wharf. A sailing ship from the Napoleonic era enters a bay, approaching – backwards – a small fan-shaped island, connected to the mainland by a short bridge. A Dutch flag flies on a tall pole. Peking? Siam? Hong Kong?

Nagasaki , says Marinus. A Dutch East Indies Company trading post called Dejima. The sound of a funeral bell. Incense. A grave inscribed with the name, LUCAS MARINUS.

That’s your name , says Jasper.

So it is , replies Marinus, in a strange tone . The sound of a harpsichord. A big bear of a man in an early operating theatre.

You were fond of the pies , observes Esther Little. Look at the belly on you.

I was stuck on Dejima for ten years . Marinus sounds defensive. The British plundered Dutch shipping . Pies were one of my few pleasures. I died there. Thanks, Britannia. Watch closely, Jasper, you’re going to meet someone …