Rupert Thomson - The Insult

In the Kosminsky Arnold was flicking through a magazine, a cigarette burning in the ashtray beside him. The smoke spiralled past his shoulder, thick and rope-like, something he could almost have climbed. Arnold slid my key across the desk. The lift was working for once; I didn’t have to think of any jokes.

I punched 8 and waited. Up I went. When the doors opened, I stepped out. Then stopped, rooted to the floor in shock. There, standing in front of me, was Visser. He was wearing a brown tweed suit and black shoes. I saw him first, and he was smiling. But when he saw me, his smile stiffened, and he started to back away, down the corridor.

‘What are you doing here?’ I said.

He didn’t answer me. He just kept backing away, almost on tiptoe, his eyes fastened on mine, and I knew then that it must’ve been him behind the wheel of that mysterious car. I thought I knew what he was doing, too. He was pretending he wasn’t there. He was trying to hypnotise me into thinking I was imagining it all.

I walked towards him. ‘What are you doing here, Visser? What do you want?’

Suddenly he turned away, began to run. I ran after him.

‘Visser?’ I shouted. ‘Visser?’

Keeping up with him was hard. Like pistons, those black heels of his. It surprised me that he was fit, that he could run so fast.

There was one moment when I almost grasped one of the flapping tails of his jacket, but I overbalanced in the attempt and lost valuable ground. I didn’t know where he was making for. The fire exit, maybe. Or the service lift.

I was shouting at him, telling him to stop. Doors were opening up and down the corridor. People stood around in their pyjamas, complaining. I ignored them.

Then I was on my back on the carpet. I could see explosions to my left. And there was something sliding down my face. I tasted it. It was blood. I must’ve tripped and hit my head.

I looked round. The corridor was deserted. Visser had got away.

Lights pulsed in front of my left eye.

‘Are you all right?’

It was Gregory’s voice. His sweat a subtle distillation of cod, his hair floating above his head like mist.

‘Did you see him?’ I said.

‘Who?’

Sometimes I couldn’t believe Gregory. I just could not believe him. The man was fucking blind. He had to be. He couldn’t even see things when they were going on right under his nose.

‘No wonder Harold got off with your wife,’ I said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Nothing.’ I took a tissue out of my pocket, held it against the left side of my face. ‘Smoke, listen,’ I said. ‘There was a man —’

‘I didn’t see anyone.’

No, of course not. Jesus Christ.

‘You shouldn’t be running like that,’ Gregory was saying. ‘Not someone in your condition. You could really hurt yourself.’

I left him standing in the corridor and took the lift back down to the lobby. Arnold was still flicking through the same magazine, as if nothing had happened. There was a cigarette in the ashtray, and it was resting at the same angle, but it was longer than before. A different cigarette, then. He’d kill himself at this rate.

I asked him if anyone had left the hotel in the last five minutes. Not that he’d noticed, he replied. I leaned on reception, thinking. Visser was wily. He must have used the back door.

I tried another approach. ‘Did you notice anyone come in?’

‘Lots of people’ve come in.’

‘I mean, someone you haven’t seen before …’

Arnold fell silent.

‘Someone with a brown moustache …’

‘Nobody like that.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Quite sure.’ Arnold seemed to hesitate. ‘You’re bleeding.’

‘I know. It was an accident.’

I took the lift back to the eighth floor. Gregory was nowhere to be seen. I double-locked my door and lay down on the bed. The lights were still pulsing. They reminded me of Leon’s Christmas decorations. Then the room began to spin.

I thought I might be sick, but I wasn’t. I made my way to the bathroom and took two codeine with a glass of water. When I returned to my bed, it was painted white. A glossy, creamy white.

I lay down again.

All the hookers on the second floor were blind. Visser patrolled the corridors in his black shoes.

If I looked out of my window I knew what I would see.

Three beautiful trees.

I must have slept, because suddenly it was afternoon. I couldn’t open my left eye at all. I touched it gently with the fingers of one hand. There was a flaky substance that I couldn’t explain. Then I remembered my fall in the corridor and how I’d hit my head. It had to be blood.

I hauled myself from my bed. As I stood in the bathroom, gripping the edge of the basin, my stomach convulsed. I leaned over, retching. All that came up was bile. It was the colour of pearl light bulbs and thick as old-fashioned paper-glue. I spat and spat, but couldn’t seem to rid my mouth of it.

I’d seen myself in the mirror. My left eye had closed completely; the skin above and below it was tight and fat. My nose and left cheek were swollen, too. Blood had spread across the left side of my face, then it had dried into a brittle crust and cracked, like glaze.

I sank down on to the ice-cold tiles next to the toilet and put my head between my knees. I heard a clock somewhere strike five. It would be dark by now.

Eventually the nausea passed.

I saw Visser on that piece of waste-ground, an image I’d returned to in perplexity a hundred times. I saw him closer, on the eighth floor of my hotel. The knowing way he’d looked at me both times. His interest in my case — obsessive, almost pathological: he’d actually been following me. My secret power, I thought. What if it wasn’t a secret at all? Or rather, what if it was a secret everybody knew about except me? What if it was actually a secret I’d been excluded from? And what if it was being monitored? What if it had been monitored all along? The questions broke over me, one after another, remorselessly, like waves; I felt I was being flattened on some barren shore.

At last it came to me, as I sat on the cold tiles, weak, and wet with sweat, and shivering. It came to me. He knows I can see. He’d known all along. That was why he’d been following me, with that smile on his face. He knows.

The thought was chillingly magnetic. It attracted instant evidence. The endless consultations. That visit to my parents (two hundred kilometres from the clinic!). The file marked HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL. Those things he’d said. Extraordinary case. Unique. Well, of course. I would be, wouldn’t I?

I leaned over the toilet-bowl again, my whole body arching, straining to yield something, my hair spiked with sweat — but there was nothing there. The convulsions were so violent, it felt as if I was about to tear a muscle in my stomach. When the nausea subsided, I sat back against the wall and moaned out loud in sheer relief.

I tried to think as clearly as I could. The titanium plate. It had to be an implanted device. Some kind of receiver or decoder that was capable of interpreting the signals being sent back by my eyes. All my theories about a chance connection, some freak hook-up, my own fragile miracle, they all crumbled in the face of something so logical, so scientific.

Obviously it was a prototype, though. That night in the gardens, objects had appeared through a kind of green gloom. There’d been little or no sense of colour at that point, just shape and movement — a night-camera effect. Then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, it began to change. The scarlet of those capital letters slanting across the cover of my file. The pale-yellow of the tiles in Leon’s restaurant. The glittering blue of Loots’ circus pullover. And yet it was far from being infallible. Which explained my lapses of judgement, my miscalculations. They weren’t clumsiness, as I’d sometimes thought, or panic. They weren’t my fault at all, in fact. They were simple malfunctions. A temporary loss of picture. Do not adjust your set. No wonder Visser spent night after night working late in his office. No wonder there were cranial X-rays everywhere, and confidential files. The system was still in development. He was still perfecting it.