David Mitchell - Slade House

Jonah modifies his face and shows me his profile: “Better?”

“Better. How are our bodies doing?”

“Yours is in a state of serene perfection, as ever; mine is still skewered through the throat with a fox-headed hairpin. The attic walls are safe, but the Operandi is a husk, Sister. I give it fifteen minutes.”

I turn to Marinus. “Then let’s wake the patient and give her her medicine. We’ll recharge the Operandi first, then repair your throat, cell by cell.”

Jonah looks at the unconscious woman with impure thoughts. “Will she offer any resistance, Sister?”

“She rejected the strawberry in the garden — citing Carl Jung and ‘gut instinct,’ if you please — but then it was the hue of raw liver, and when she wakes in here she won’t know if it’s May Day, Marrakesh or Monteverdi. Do you have the Banjax?”

Jonah evokes a red and white tablet on his palm. “Sufficiently generic, would you say?”

“Make it smaller, so she can swallow it without effort. Have a glass of water ready. Deny her any chance to stop and think.”

Jonah shrinks the pill, tips it onto a dish and evokes a glass and a bottle of Evian on the bedside table. “Look, when you telegrammed from the alley, I was, uh, not at my best, and—”

“You’ve been starved of fresh psychovoltage for eighteen years, Jonah. I’d be insane by now, not just a trifle insecure.”

“No, Sister, let me finish: what I, I ‘said’ was a dying huzzah of … what I no longer believe. I’m trying to say that you’re right.”

My projected self looks at my brother’s projected self. “About?”

“About old dogs, new tricks, not-so-splendid isolation from la Voie Ombragée; and about … a higher purpose. Will that do for now?”

Well, this is a U-turn: “Have I wandered into an orison?”

“If you’re going to gloat, Sister, you can bloody well—”

“No. I’m not gloating, Jonah. I’ve been waiting thirty years to hear you say this. We’ll go to Mount Shiranui. The west of Japan is heaven in the autumn. Enomoto Sensei wants to meet you. She suggested a dozen ways to improve our Operandi.”

The projected Jonah contemplates an ending and a beginning. “Good. Okay. That’s decided, then.”

I think of my brother and I as foetuses sharing Nellie Grayer’s womb, one hundred and sixteen years ago; and of our birth-bodies, sharing our Lacuna for eight decades. Strangers are “They,” a lover is first a “You” and then a “We,” but Jonah is a half of “I.” I pull myself back to the matter at hand before I say anything sentimental. “Your throat will hurt like holy hell when I pull the hairpin out, but I’ll cauterize the wound and—”

“Now or never, Sister.” Jonah puts his left forefinger on our guest’s frontal chakra eye. With his right hand, he glyphs her awake …

… and Iris Marinus-Levy’s pupils dilate in the orison’s uncertain light. “Stay still, Iris,” says Jonah, using his own voice. “You’ve been in an accident, but everything’s fine. You’re in hospital. You’re safe.”

She’s as feeble and scared as she sounds: “Accident?”

“Black ice on the M4 side of town. Your VW’s a write-off, but nobody else was involved, and we don’t think your injuries are that serious. You’ve been here all day. You’re in the Royal Berkshire Hospital.”

Marinus swallows and looks dazed. “I … Who …?”

“Yes, I’m Gareth Bell, and this is Doctor Harriet Hayes. All quacks together. Iris, to help with your treatment program, we’d like to ask a few diagnostics — are you up to it, do you think?”

“Oh …” the Woozy Shrink squints, “yeah … sure. Go for it.”

I take over: “Thanks, Iris, that’s great. Firstly, can you tell us if you’re in any pain right now?”

Marinus checks she can move her hands, then her feet. “No, I–I … just numbness, I guess. My joints ache a little.”

“Uh-huh,” I scribble on my clipboard. “The IV’s feeding you anti-inflammatories and painkillers. You sustained some bad bruising up your left side. Secondly … limb mobility, you just did that for us, great — who said that doctors make the worst patients?”

“Well, hey, maybe psychiatrists make better ones.”

I smile. “Great, I’ll tick my ‘tribal affiliation’ box.”

“Do I have any breakages?” asks Marinus, trying to sit up.

“Woah, woah,” says Jonah-as-Doctor Bell, “Iris, take it easy . The neck-brace is just a precaution, don’t worry. We haven’t X-rayed you on the off-chance that you’re pregnant. Might you be?”

“No, my period was last week. Definitely not pregnant.”

“Great,” I say, “we’ll take you up to X-ray in an hour or so. Vision: how many fingers?” I hold up four.

“Four,” says Marinus.

“And now?” I ask.

“None,” says Marinus.

“No problem there,” says Jonah, “though we’re a tad anxious about concussion — there’s a doozy of a contusion round the back of your noggin. We’ll CAT-scan you after your trip to X-ray, but what recollections do you have of the accident?”

“Uh …” Marinus looks haggard and worried. “Uh …”

We sit down on her bed. “You recall being in your car?”

“Yes, but … I remember arriving at my destination.”

“O- kay, ” Jonah says. “Where was this destination?”

“A passageway, an alley, off Westwood Road, on the edge of town. Slade Alley. I’d gone to meet Bombadil.”

“ ‘Bombadil’?” says Jonah. “Not the Green Man leprechaun-y one from The Lord of the Rings ? What a bizarre alias.”

“Uh … I–I—I never read it, but my Bombadil’s a conspiracy theorist. I don’t know if that’s his real name or not. He’s a research subject. I’m writing a paper on abduction fantasies. He was … in an alley, and … there was a door in a wall that wasn’t normally there …”

“Fascinating,” I say, looking a little alarmed. “But I promise you, Iris, the only place you’ve been today is the Royal Berkshire Hospital.”

“You know better than us,” Jonah says cheerfully, “the tricks a mind’ll play on itself after a trauma or accident. But look, Iris, you’ve told us what we need. If you’d just take this paracetamol to staunch any minor internal bleeding you may have sustained—” Jonah flips up the bed’s swivel table and places the pill on a little white dish “—I’ll text Viv Singh at Dawkins to say you’re conscious and verbal. They’ve been on tenterhooks all day.”

“Yes, thanks, I, uh …” Marinus gazes at the easy-to-swallow pill.

My evoked heart in my evoked body beats a little faster.

I look back. Jonah puts a glass of Evian water by the dish.

“Thank you.” Still bleary, Marinus picks up the pill.

I look away. Swallow it, I think. Swallow it whole .

“No worries,” says Jonah, unworriedly, as if our metalives aren’t dependent on this fickle woman doing as he bids her. Jonah scrolls down his contacts, mumbling, “Viv Singh …”

“Uh … could I just ask a question?” asks Marinus.

“Fire away,” says Jonah, not taking his eyes off his iPhone.

“Why in the eleven thousand and eleven names of God would I oblige two parasitic soul-slayers by imbibing their poison?”

The wall-clock stops; the LEDs on the monitors die; a far-off telephone falls silent; and Jonah freezes, with his back to both me and Marinus. I stand and back away, stumbling and sick. My brain insists that Marinus, a guest, cannot know more about us than Jonah and I know about her; that a quotidian psychiatrist cannot be lying in an evoked bed in our inner orison, watching us like a committee member at a dull meeting: and yet she does, she is, she is. “Of all the shortcomings in your Operandi,” our guest is saying, “your ‘Banjax’ is the most antiquated. Truly! An anima-abortifacient so fragile that unless the patient imbibes it of his or her own conscious volition, it fails to work — we haven’t seen the Shaded Way use such a primitive formula for fifty or sixty years. What were you thinking, Grayers? If you’d only updated it you could have injected it into my body just now. Or tried to.”