Дэвид Митчелл - Utopia Avenue

The mnemo-parallax reveals a Westerner’s face, a man in his late twenties, freckled and red-haired. He dabs beads of sweat from his brow. That’s Jacob de Zoet , says Marinus. Your great-great-great-grandfather. The scene would be normal enough, except for a small black hole between Jacob’s eyebrows. Jacob is writing in a ledger with a quill. Numbers vanish as the quill scratches the paper. The hole in Jacob’s head dwindles to nothing. There are inchoate shouts from outside.

That was it , says Esther. That was the moment.

I don’t understand , says Jasper. What moment?

The moment Knock Knock entered your ancestor , explains Marinus, and began his journey, all the way to you …

The viewpoint wheels in reverse over Nagasaki. Smoke billows into a cooking fire. Gulls spiral backwards alongside the ‘eye’. The trajectory passes through a paper screen on a balcony and stops, abruptly, in a room. The image is frozen still. This memory is not blurry but needle-sharp. The woven-rush mats smell fresh. Sliding screens are decorated with chrysanthemums. A Go table lies overturned, with a bowl of white pieces spilling across the floor. Four corpses lie slumped. The youngest is a monk. One is an elderly official, with wispy eyebrows. A third appears to be a high-ranking Samurai. The last body is Knock Knock in death. A red gourd has toppled over on its side and four soot-black drinking cups are scattered nearby. What is this place? asks Jasper.

The Room of the Last Chrysanthemum , says Marinus. A room I never expected to see again.

Poison, I presume , says Esther. Something quick and nasty.

That’s what the rumours said , confirms Marinus. Let’s begin with our antagonist. Knock Knock was the abbot of an esoteric Shinto order. His real name was, and is, Enomoto. It’s the year 1800, if memory serves. His order operated a kind of harem at its mother monastery at Mount Shiranui, two days away up in the remote Kirishima Mountains. The harem’s purpose wasn’t the usual one, however. It was a type of livestock farm, to ensure a supply of babies.

Jasper asks, Why did a religious order want babies?

To distil their souls into a liquid they called tamashi-abura – Oil of Souls. By imbibing it, the monks postponed death. Indefinitely.

Jasper looks at dead Abbot Enomoto. His lips were black. Enomoto believed he was a necromancer?

Marinus hesitates. Oil of Souls, to use an anachronism, did what it said on the label. Those who drank it did not age.

If I told any of this to Dr Galavazi , Jasper thinks—

He would call it a schizophrenic episode , Marinus agrees, in a trice. He’s a good psychiatrist, but his frames of reference are limited.

But elixirs of immortality aren’t real , says Jasper .

Two or three in a thousand are , says Esther. Horology exists for those two or three.

The psychosedation at the Ghepardo , says Marinus . The mnemo-parallax. This. Esther and me. Are you imagining all this?

I don’t think so , says Jasper. But how can I be sure?

God give me strength , huffs Esther.

Follow Formaggio’s advice, then , says Marinus. File us under Theory X. Not reality, not delusion, but a phenomenon awaiting proof.

Jasper doesn’t know how to respond. Theory X is the only way forward. He returns to the four dead bodies. Who killed them?

The chain of events would fill a hefty novel , replies Marinus. Governor Shiroyama – the samurai in this frieze – learned about Enomoto’s infanticidal regime. He devised a plot to decapitate the order by poisoning its powerful abbot. Enomoto was wisely paranoid about poison, so the plot required both the governor and his secretary to consume the toxin, too. As you see, the plot worked. Enomoto’s young novice accompanied his master to the wrong tea party.

Jasper looks at the crime scene. It’s sad and real. If the plot worked, how did Knock Knock – Enomoto – survive?

Occult knowledge of the Shaded Way , replies Esther Little . His soul resisted the Sea Wind for long enough to find a host – your ancestor Jacob de Zoet , down in the warehouse. But why him, Marinus? Of all the potential hosts in Nagasaki, what links the abbot of an obscure order to a foreign clerk a quarter-mile away?

There was a woman , says Marinus .

Aha , says Esther.

One Orito Aibagawa. The first female scholar of Dutch Studies in Japan. I taught her midwifery and medicine at my surgery on Dejima. Jacob fell for Miss Aibagawa, as white knights do in these tales, but Enomoto abducted her to Mount Shiranui, two days away. The abbot wanted the best midwife in Japan to care for the women in his breeding farm.

Why is this link strong enough , asks Esther, to draw Enomoto’s soul halfway across the city at the moment of death?

Marinus selects his words. Jacob de Zoet, an interpreter named Ogawa and I each played a part in bringing Enomoto’s crimes to the attention of Governor Shiroyama. From Abbot Enomoto’s point of view – they look at the dead cleric – we were accomplices in his murder.

Esther weighs this up. A karmic thread, then. Enomoto’s soul followed it like a beeline. Or a song-line, my people might say.

Jasper feels left behind. So my ancestor in the warehouse wrongs this ‘real’ necromancer in the year 1800. Upon dying, Enomoto’s soul ‘flies’ into Jacob de Zoet’s head and burrows inside. There he stays, dormant, like a larva. This larva gets passed down from father to son, to son, to Grootvader Wim, to my father, to me. All the while, he’s ‘acquiring’ his hosts’ memories and stitching an ever-longer memory-scarf. Then in the 1960s – sixteen decades later – Enomoto is finally replenished enough to ‘wake up’, shatter my mind and take over my body.

That’s about the size of it, kiddo , says Esther.

Is there a cure? asks Jasper.

We can’t just evict Enomoto , says Esther, like we’re a pair of bailiffs, if that’s what you’re hoping.

That’s exactly what I’m hoping , admits Jasper.

If we use force and Enomoto resists , explains Marinus, the brain damage will kill you. Neurologically and psychosoterically, he’s too deeply anchored.

What can we do, then? asks Jasper.

A deal , says Esther. Though even if he agrees to the procedure, the psychosurgery will be very, very delicate.

We need to speak with him , says Marinus .

Wait. Jasper’s alarmed. How will I know if the ‘ psychosurgery ’ is successful?

If it works , says Marinus, you’ll wake up here, in 119A.

If it doesn’t work? asks Jasper.

The next thing you see will be the High Ridge and the Dusk , says Esther, but this time we won’t be able to bring you back.

I don’t have much choice, do I? asks Jasper.

The Room of the Last Chrysanthemum fades.

The ceiling is plain. The room is spacious. He’s on a futon. Not the slope to the High Ridge. The floor is wooden. Jasper explores the inside of his skull and finds Knock Knock – or Enomoto – gone. Not partitioned off, like after the Mongolian’s operation, but gone, like an extracted wisdom tooth or a paid-off debt. Gone . Pale curtains filter daylight. Jasper sits up. He’s wearing yesterday’s underwear. His clothes are folded and hung on a Queen Anne chair. The room is sparsely, curiously furnished: a wall-scroll of a monkey trying to touch its own moonlit reflection, an art-nouveau bookcase, a carpet of symbols, an antique harpsichord and a writing bureau on which sit a fountain pen, an ink pot and nothing else. Silence.