8 The Castle

While the co-pilot filmed the scene below with a television camera, the helicopter rose up in a rattle of whirling metal. When I looked down, I saw the wide valley of the centaurs open out like a French, eighteenth-century neo-classical fan painted by a follower of Poussin and then close up again as we flew so low above the forest itself the topmost branches scraped against the cabin walls. So all those months of our selves vanished without trace and I heard the pilot call Albertina, ‘Madam’, and then ‘Generalissimo Hoffman’. When I turned from the window, I saw she had already put on one of their spare combat suits of drab, olive twill and was now combing out her black hair, which had grown halfway down her back during our captivity. The co-pilot put away his camera and dug into a locker to produce clothes for me, too. Now she was dressed, I was embarrassed at my nakedness and hurried to cover myself, though my fingers fumbled over the unfamiliar buttons.

‘Am I the general’s batman?’ I asked her but she only smiled at me remotely and began to pore over a map the co-pilot handed her. He and the pilot were both swarthy, silent young men in black berets who chewed on long, black cigars. They spoke mainly a laconic French and I felt I had seen men like them very often before but only in newsreel films. I was given coffee from a thermos flask and they cleared me a place in the cramped quarters so that I could sit down. I had not been in the twentieth century for so long that I felt quite stunned. A radio began to squawk messages in the standard speech of my country. I had not heard my own language for a long time; when we were among the centaurs, Albertina and I had used it as a private language, such as secretive children invent for themselves, and I was shocked to recall the speech was common property. The coffee was hot and strong; they opened a wax-paper parcel of ham sandwiches. Albertina absently plaited her hair and, as she did so, so she put away all her romanticism. Her face was hard and brown and impersonal. I sipped my coffee. She spoke into the radio transmitter but I could make out nothing whatsoever of what she said because of the noise the engines made.

And then Albertina had finished. She gave the pilot back the microphone, sighed, smiled and came to crouch beside me.

‘Not my batman,’ she said. ‘The Doctor will commission you. He just told me that.’

‘Even though I’m enlisted on the other side?’

‘You will go wherever I go,’ she said with such conviction I was silent for I had just seen her passions set fire to a tree and now I was in the real world again I was not quite sure I wanted to burn with her – or, at least, not yet. I felt an inexplicable indifference towards her. Perhaps because she was now yet another she and this she was the absolute antithesis of my black swan and my bouquet of burning bone; she was a crisp, antiseptic soldier to whom other ranks deferred. I began to feel perfidious, for I had no respect for rank.

‘And what of my city?’ I asked her, drawing on a cigar the pilot gave me.

She frowned into her plastic tumbler of coffee.

‘The course of the war was dramatically altered by the destruction of the set of samples. While my father was modifying the transmitters, the Minister completed his computer bank and then instituted a programme he called the Rectification of Names. In spite of himself, he was forced to use philosophic weapons – or, as he would probably prefer to call them, ideological weapons. He decided he could only keep a strict control of his actualities by adjusting their names to agree with them perfectly. So, you understand, that no shadow would fall between the word and the thing described. For the Minister hypothesized my father worked in that shadowy land between the thinkable and the thing thought of, and, if he destroyed this difference, he would destroy my father. Do you follow me?’

‘More or less.’

‘He set up a new slogan, “If the name is right, you see the light.” He is a man of great intellect but limited imagination. Which is why he can hold out against my father, of course. Once the names were right, he thought perfect order and hence perfect government on his own Confucian terms would follow automatically. So he dismissed all his physicists and brought in a team of logical positivists from the School of Philosophy in the National University and set them to the task of fixing all the phenomena compiled by his computers in the solid concrete of a set of names that absolutely agreed with them. Ironically enough, their task was made all the easier because of the flexibility of identity produced in the state of nebulous time.’

She paused. A yellowish glare flooded the cabin.

‘Look. Now we are crossing the desert, the mother of mirages,’ she said.

There was no more forest, only sand drifting in dry spirals the very colour of sterility and, above us, a sky as lifeless as the earth.

‘This is your Minister’s place,’ she said. ‘He has not got enough imagination to realize that the most monstrous aberrations are bound to flourish in soil once it has been disinfected of the imagination.’

And, though I loved her more than anything in the world, I remembered the music of Mozart and murmured to the Queen of the Night:

‘I do not think so.’

But she did not hear me because of the noise of the engines and the turning propellers.

‘So, when the transmitters were operating again, the images we sent out bounced off the intellectual walls the Minister had built. My poor father – he was almost disconcerted, because I was lost in Nebulous Time just when he needed me most!’

The helicopter followed its own shadow over the realm of spiritual death.

‘But now I have been in contact with him at last and he is only waiting for our return to start the Second Front.’

‘For our return? For you – and for me as well?’

‘Yes,’ she said and turned her ensorcellating eyes on me so that all at once I was breathless with desire and the cabin dissolved in our kiss. Yet there was still that duplicity in my heart’s core. I had been marked out at the beginning as the Minister’s man, for all my apathy, for all my disaffection, for I, too, would have worshipped reason if I could ever have found her shrine. Reason was stamped into me as if it were a chromosome, even if I loved the high priestess of passion. Nevertheless, we kissed; and the crew of the helicopter shielded their eyes as though we were too bright for them to bear.

Then the pilot sighted a walled fort with a landing strip beside it on which stood two spare, lean, military transports. We landed in a helicopter port inside the fort itself, which I believe I had once seen in a film of the Foreign Legion. A complement of troopers manned it. They were as brown and down to earth as the crew of the helicopter and they, too, all called Albertina ‘Generalissimo’. We were given a bath and I got myself a military haircut, for my hair had grown almost as long as Albertina’s. Then we had an austere dinner of army rations – for, although she was a general, she was not given preferential treatment – and lay down on two hard, iron beds with flat pillows and coarse grey blankets in a barracks that smelled of disinfectant where I could not have made love to her even if she had let me because twenty other men were sleeping there. I had forgotten how convenient the real world was; how, for example, hot water came boiling out of taps marked ‘hot’, how good it felt to sleep between sheets, and, though there were no clocks in the fort, all the soldiers had come to an informal agreement on a common standard of time so our breakfast, full of nostalgic flavours of bacon, toast, tea and marmalade, was served at the hour we had all agreed to wake up. Then, when everything was ready, the commandant of the fort kissed Albertina on both cheeks; we climbed into a military transport and flew, far more simply though much more lengthily than in any dream, directly to Hoffman’s castle. And nothing whatever happened to ripple the serene, accommodating surface of events except the constant presence of Albertina’s eyes.

Ocean and jungle and, finally, remembered peaks jutting against the sky of evening. I waited expectantly for a sense of homecoming but I experienced nothing. With a faint sinking of the heart, as the plane dipped and circled, I thought that perhaps now I was a stranger everywhere.

It was a hazardous descent into the mountains for Hoffman’s own landing strip was well concealed from the air and I saw nothing of the castle itself as we came down, only the reeling peaks. A jeep was waiting for us; it took us along a rough track through long, black shadows of approaching night but I saw among the rocks before me four moons were already shining high in the secret crests. They were four huge, concave saucers of very highly polished metal that circled like windmills and were all turned towards the city I knew lay below me to the south. Plainly they were part of the transmission system, even though they were so blatantly technological. I was so busy watching them I did not see the castle, though it lay before us, until the jeep stopped and Albertina, with a rush of joy in her voice, said: ‘We’re nearly home.’

Almost – but not entirely for we still had to cross a chasm in the earth by a wooden bridge so fragile we must walk and so narrow we could only go one at a time. The driver of the jeep spoke a strange mixture of French and Spanish and wore a battered anti-uniform of green twill; he kissed Albertina on both cheeks and roared away, leaving us alone. We went out on to the bridge. The chasm was some sixty feet wide and, from both its lips, sheer precipices fell to a depth of a thousand feet or more, so deep you could not see what lay at the bottom. Beyond the bridge was a little green grove about four acres in area, surrounded on all sides by the crags in which the transmitters were lodged. It was a sweet, female kernel nestling in the core of the virile, thrusting rock. The trees in the grove were full of fruit and the dappled and variegated chalices of enormous flowers seemed to be breathing out all the perfume they had stored up during the day in these last moments before they closed for the night. Brilliant birds sang on the branches in which chattering squirrels swung and the luxuriant grass rustled with rabbits while beautiful roe deer sauntered among the trees, holding up their heads proudly, like princes, under the weights of their antlered crowns. It did not look as though winter had ever touched it and as we drew nearer, our footsteps ringing with a hollow sound on the wooden bridge, I remembered I had seen a picture of Hoffman’s park, a magically transformed picture in which all the detail had been heightened but still recognizably a dream vision of this very park. I had seen it in the peep-show. It was the park framed by the female orifice in the first machine of all and when I looked beyond the trees, I saw the very same castle I had seen then.

The castle stood with its back up against a cliff. The battlements hinted at Hoffman’s Teutonic heritage; he had built himself a Wagnerian castle like a romantic memory in stone and as the light faded, the castle began to open eyes of many beautiful colours for all the windows were of stained glass. And yet I knew I was not dreaming; my feet left prints on the grass and Albertina picked me an apple from a tree and I brushed away the bloom and bit into it and my teeth went ‘crunch!’ While the transmitters flashed and a roaring in the sky told us the transport had taken off again, or another transport had taken off, for there was a hangar full of the things at the military base at the airstrip.

‘What a year it’s been for apples!’ said Albertina. ‘Look how heavy the crop is. The trees are bending almost to the ground. When I went away to quarantine the Count, it was apple blossom time. You can’t imagine how beautiful the apple blossom is, Desiderio!’

I finished my apple and threw away the core. So the princess was taking it for granted I was interested in her patrimonial apple blossom, was she? What presumption! Perhaps she should not have told me so plainly, in her ownership tone of voice, that all this was hers, the castle, the orchards, the mountains, the earth, the sky, all that lay between them. I don’t know. All I know is, I could not transcend myself sufficiently to inherit the universe. Although it was real, I knew the perfection round me was impossible; and perhaps I was right. But now I am too old to know or care. I can no longer tell the difference between memory and dream. They share the same quality of wishful thinking. I thought at the time perhaps I was a terrorist in the cause of reason; though I probably tried to justify myself with such a notion later. Yet when I close my eyes I see her still, walking through the orchard towards her father’s house, in her soldier’s uniform, her heavy black plaits hanging down her back like a little girl’s.

Nobody came to meet us but the front door was open, a door at the top of a not in the least grandiloquent but cracked and mossy staircase, for it was not really a castle, only a country house built after the style of a castle. We entered, first, a sombre, low-ceilinged hall scented with pot pourri and furnished with carved chairs, Chinese pots and Oriental rugs. I do not know what I had been expecting – but certainly never this tranquillity, this domestic peace, for were we not in the house of the magician himself? However, the transmitters sent out their beams high over its battlements and did not affect the fortress of the enemy itself. Here, everything was safe. Everything was ordered. Everything was secure.

All that puzzled me were certain pictures on the wall. These pictures were heavily varnished oils executed in the size and style of the nineteenth-century academician and they all depicted faces and scenes I recognized from old photographs and from the sepia and olive reproductions of forgotten masterpieces in the old-fashioned books the nuns gave us to look at when I was a child, in the evenings after supper, when we had been good. When I read the titles engraved on metal plaques at the bottom of each frame, I saw they depicted such scenes as ‘Leon Trotsky Composing the Eroica Symphony’; the wire-rimmed spectacles, the Hebraic bush of hair, the burning eyes were all familiar. The light of inspiration was in his eyes and the crotchets and quavers rippled from his nib on to the sheets of manuscript paper which flew about the red plush cover of the mahogany table on which he worked as if blown by the fine frenzy of genius. Van Gogh was shown writing ‘Wuthering Heights’ in the parlour of Haworth Parsonage, with bandaged ear, all complete. I was especially struck by a gigantic canvas of Milton blindly executing divine frescos upon the walls of the Sistine Chapel. Seeing my bewilderment, Albertina said, smiling: ‘When my father rewrites the history books, these are some of the things that everyone will suddenly perceive to have always been true.’

Though the signs of the scrupulous attentions of servants were apparent everywhere, the house seemed quite deserted. We were welcomed only by an ancient, lumbering dog who heaved himself painfully up from a rug in front of a little log fire, burning more for the sake of the scent of applewood and the sight of flame than the need for warmth, who came and thrust his wet nose in Albertina’s palm, whining for joy.

‘When I was little, he used to give me rides on his back,’ she said. ‘How white his muzzle is growing!’

Wheezing and panting, the Great Dane followed us up a staircase and along a gallery but we left him outside a room in which a stained glass window dyed the valley outside purple and crimson and Ravel was playing on a very elaborate hi-fi set. A diminutive, dark-haired woman in a long, black dress lay on a couch with her face turned away from us. There, holding her hand, sat the Doctor himself, on a low, padded stool. I knew him at once though he was far older than the pictures I had seen, of course, even if he still wedged open one eye with a monocle just as his old professor had told me he did. There was a strong smell of incense in the room which did not quite conceal the smell of incipient putrefaction. When he let go the woman’s hand, it fell with a lifeless thud. The one discordant note in all this rich man’s sumptuous country estate was the embalmed corpse of his dead wife he kept on a bergère settee in this white-walled room. He was grey-faced and grey-haired and grey-eyed. He wore a handsomely tailored dark suit and his hands were exquisitely manicured. His quality, whatever it had been once, was now only quiet. There was no resemblance whatsoever between the old man and his daughter.

They used the standard language with one another. His first words were:

‘I go to the city tomorrow and arrive there yesterday.’

‘Yes, of course,’ replied Albertina. ‘Because the shadow of the flying bird never moves.’

They smiled. They appeared to understand one another perfectly.

Then he gave her the kisses due to a generalissimo.

They both laughed gently and I felt the hair rising on my scalp. In that room which hung in the castle like a bubble filled with quietude, faced with that strange family group, I felt the most appalling fear. Perhaps because I was in the presence of the disciplined power of the utterly irrational. He was so quiet, so grey, so calm and he had just said something entirely meaningless in a voice of perfect, restrained reason. All at once I realized how lonely we were here, far away in the mountains with only the wind for company, in the house of the man who made dreams come true.

He stroked the nocturnal hair of the corpse and whispered softly: ‘You see, my dear, she has come home, just as I told you she would. And now you must have a refreshing sleep while we must have our dinner.’

But a bell rang and first, it seemed, we must all dress up. Albertina showed me to a chaste, masculine room at the front of the house with a narrow bed and a black leather armchair, many ash trays and a magazine rack containing current numbers of Playboy, The New Yorker, Time and Newsweek. On the dressing-table were silver-backed brushes. I opened the door of a closet and found a bathroom where I took a steaming shower, assisted by great quantities of lemon soap. When I came out, wrapped in the white, towelling robe they had provided for me, I found a dinner jacket and everything to go with it laid out ready for me on the bed, down to silk socks and white linen handkerchief. When I was dressed, I felt in the pocket and found a gold cigarette lighter and matching case filled with Balkan Sobranie Black Russian cigarettes. I looked at myself in the oval, mahogany mirror. I had been transformed again. Time and travel had changed me almost beyond my own recognition. Now I was entirely Albertina in the male aspect. That is why I know I was beautiful when I was a young man. Because I know I looked like Albertina.

From my window, I could see the apple orchards, the crevasse and the road that led over the bare mountain to the military installation. Everything was perfectly calm and filled with the mushroomy, winey scents of autumn. Another bell rang and I went down the thickly carpeted staircase to the picture gallery where Albertina and her father were drinking very dry sherry. Dinner was served off an English eighteenth-century table in another of those chaste, restrained, white-walled rooms with a flower arrangement in the disappearing Japanese transcendental style on the sideboard and china, glass and cutlery so extraordinarily tasteful one was hardly aware of its presence. The meal was very simple and perfectly in tune with the season of the year – some kind of clear soup; a little trout; a saddle of hare, grilled; mushrooms; salad; fruit and cheese. The wines all matched. With the very strong black coffee there was a selection of recherché liqueurs and we all smoked probably priceless cigars. Still no servants appeared. All the courses had been sent up from subterranean kitchens in a small service elevator from which Albertina herself served us. There was no conversation during the meal but another stereo set hidden behind a white-enamelled grille was playing a Schubert song cycle, The Winter Journey.

‘Do you not feel,’ said the Doctor in his very soft but still crisp-edged voice, ‘that invisible presences have more reality than visible ones? They exert more influence upon us. They make us cry more easily.’

This was the only sentiment or expression of feeling he revealed during the time I knew him. As the silent meal went on, I began to sense in his quietness, his almost quiescence, his silence and slow movements, a willed concentration of thought that, if exploited, might indeed rule the world. He bemused me. He was stillness. He seemed to have refined himself almost to nothing. He was a grey ghost sitting in a striped coat at a very elegant table and yet he was also Prospero – though, ironically enough, one could not judge the Prospero effect in his own castle for he could not alter the constituents of the aromatic coffee we sipped by so much as an iota. Here, nothing could possibly be fantastic. That was the source of my bitter disappointment. I had wanted his house to be a palace dedicated only to wonder.

Even at the worldly level I was disappointed, for I could plainly see that, on everyday terms alone, he was very rich and I was very, very poor. As the very poor often do, I felt the rich could only justify their wealth by making a lavish and conspicuous display of it. My grill disgruntled me; I scorned his good taste. If I were as rich as he, why, I would barbecue peacocks nightly. Besides, good taste has always bored me a little and, in the enemy H.Q., I felt a little bored. It was then, to revive my flagging interest in my surroundings, that I consciously reminded myself I was a secret agent for the other side. They were not the enemy. I was.

The white evening dress of a Victorian romantic heroine rustled about Albertina’s feet and clung like frost to her amber breasts yet I wished she had worn the transvestite apparel of her father’s ambassador or had come to the table naked, with poppies in her hair, in the style she had adopted for dinner in the land of the centaurs. My disillusionment was profound. I was not in the domain of the marvellous at all. I had gone far beyond that and at last I had reached the power-house of the marvellous, where all its clanking, dull, stage machinery was kept. Even if it is the dream made flesh, the real, once it becomes real, can be no more than real. While I did not know her, I thought she was sublime; when I knew her, I loved her. But, even as I pared my dessert persimmon with the silver knife provided, I was already wondering whether the fleshly possession of Albertina would not be the greatest disillusionment of all.

The habit of sardonic contemplation is the hardest habit of all to break.

When we finished our coffee, the Doctor excused himself for he said he had some business in his study, which was housed in a tower, but he gave me another of his fine cigars and Albertina said, Would I not like to walk outside for a while and enjoy my cigar in the mild evening? So we went out into the park. I have forgotten what month it was but, by the scents, I guessed it must be October.

‘Here,’ she said. ‘This way.’

The face of the precipice opened before her but I knew it opened only because she had pressed an unmagical switch. Her abundant skirts swirling before us, she led me up a steep cleft in the rock, a secret passage to the rooftree of the mountain, which issued among the tumbled rocks where one of the transmitters turned like a transfigured mill wheel. But she turned her back on it and led me some little distance through the dishevelled boulders, under a faint half lemon slice of moon, both of us so elegant in evening dress we were ourselves like a poignant anachronism projected backwards upon primeval wilderness. And then we came to a kind of circular amphitheatre hollowed out of the yellow rock and peopled with a silent multitude of immobile shapes in rows and columns and ranks, like the guardians of the place.

‘It was a cemetery,’ said Albertina. ‘The Indians made it, before the Europeans came. But they did not come here. Then the Indians died, most of them. So these are all that remains of the Indians.’

In the centre of this amphitheatre was an oblong tumulus containing, presumably, the bones of my dead ancestors and all the mute spectators who surrounded it were meant to scare away grave robbers, mountain lions, or mountain dogs, or any other thing that might disturb the sleepers in the earth. The Indians had shaped unglazed pottery into men on horseback armed with swords and women with bows, into dogs that snarled, and also urns, small houses and cooking implements as if to make a city for the earthen regiments, these crude, brown figures sadly chipped by time and the weather whose eyes were holes through which you could see that all were hollow within. We went down the stepped side of the hollow through these thickets of imitation men and her skirts drifted out behind her and her hair flowed down her bare, richly coloured shoulders as freely as the hair of a Druid priestess. She, formed of the colours of the rocks and the figurines, the darkness and the moonlight.

Love is the synthesis of dream and actuality; love is the only matrix of the unprecedented; love is the tree which buds lovers like roses. In white, vestal majesty, she spoke to me of love among the funerary ornaments on the naked mountain and then I, like an intrepid swimmer, flung myself into the angry breakers of her petticoats and put my mouth against the unshorn seal of love itself. And that was as close as I ever got to consummation. It took place in the graveyard of my forefathers.

Albertina seated herself on a rock that might have been an altar, once, and motioned me to sit beside her. We were the cynosure of the sightless eyes of a countless pottery audience.

‘The state of love is like the South in Hui Shih’s paradox: “The South has at once a limit and no limit.” Lu Teming made the following commentary on this paradox: “He spoke about the South but he was only taking it as an example. There is the mirror and the image but there is also the image of the image; two mirrors reflect each other and images may be multiplied without end.” Ours is a supreme encounter, Desiderio. We are two such disseminating mirrors.’

In the looking glasses of her eyes, I saw reflected my entire being whirl apart and reassemble itself innumerable times.

‘Love is a perpetual journey that does not go through space, an endless oscillating motion that remains unmoved. Love creates for itself a tension that disrupts every tense in time. Love has certain elements in common with eternal regression, since this exchange of reflections can neither be exhausted nor destroyed, but it is not a regression. It is a direct durationless, locationless progression towards an ultimate state of ecstatic annihilation.’

She lectured me and the grave ornaments with the most beautiful gravity and, if I felt my attention wandering, it was only because of the chill in the night air and the teasing presence in my pocket of the cigar the Doctor had given me that I felt would be rude to light up, now. And, besides, my nostrils were full of the musky odour of her skin. Then she put her hand on my wrist; her touch electrified me.

‘My father has discovered that the magnetic field formed by our reciprocal desire – yes, Desiderio, our desire – may be quite unique in its intensity. Such desire must be the strongest force in the world and, if it could be crystallized, would show itself as a deposit which is the definitive residuum of the most powerful inherited associations. And desire is also the source of the greatest source of radiant energy in the entire universe!’

Her intellectual grasp impressed me but I could have wished she was a little less earnest. She had inherited in full her father’s lack of humour. The peep-show proprietor had warned me of his lack of humour. Yet I found her most endearing when she was so serious. When I thought she was endearing, suddenly she looked exactly like the angel the nuns put on top of the convent Christmas tree. And yet she was very eloquent. Her eloquence moved me, as the music of Mozart and the wall-paintings of the Ancient Egyptians used to move me.

‘In theory, one can reduce everything to a series of ultimate simples. When my father perfects this theory, which he will do in perhaps three or four years time, he will name it Hoffman’s Principle of Unwrought Simplicity and once he fully understands its laws, he will reduce everything in the world to the non-created bases from which the world is built. And then he will take the world apart and make a new world.’

What? The grey man in the monocle who so hated humanity he could not bear to see a servant and reserved his affection for a wife who was safely dead? Yes. That grey man. Her black mane brushed my cheek and I touched her shoulders. The texture of her skin was like suède.

‘Because, you see, the world is built from these simples. Everything else in the world is only an irrelevant accessory of certain simples. These simples have a kind of reality that does not belong to anything else. The ultimate simplicity, Desiderio, is Love. That is to say, Desire, Desiderio. Which is generated by four legs in bed.’

Roused beyond endurance, I was naïve enough to take this as an invitation and I flung her backwards on the burial mound and dived straight into her beating, foaming skirts. But, though I managed to get high enough to kiss her simplicity, she fought me so skilfully I could do nothing else. Then she began to laugh.

‘Don’t you see it’s quite out of the question, at the moment?’ she said. ‘You have never yet made love to me because, all the time you have known me, I’ve been maintained in my various appearances only by the power of your desire.’

I was disconcerted to find my physicality thwarted by metaphysics. I struck her in the face with the heavy flat of my hand. Her cut lip bled a little but she did not flinch from the blow nor reprimand me afterwards.

‘Oh, Desiderio, soon! soon! When we go to the laboratory together, you will see me as I really am.’

I did not understand her at all. The segment of moon leaked out a thin, ugly, sepia-coloured light that crumbled everything around us to degenerate forms. I was troubled in mind and very uneasy for the magician’s castle was not the home of unreason at all but a school for some kind of to me incomprehensible logic and now she told me we must go back there, for her father was waiting to take me on a tour of the laboratories.

She took me up to his study high in a tower in a smoothly gliding elevator and she left me outside the door. She kissed me on the cheek and said with infinite promise: ‘Tonight. Later.’ She vanished inside the doors of the elevator, like a white bird, engulfed; I watched her go with I do not know what presentiment of ill-fortune. How could I know that, when I saw her next, I would have no option but to kill her?

I knocked. The Doctor greeted me. He had changed into a white coat for he was a scientist, but whatever clothes he wore he could not have been more impersonal than he had been at first. He was cold, grey, still and fathomless – not a man; the sea. I found I was afraid of him.

His study, his private work-room, his inner sanctum, his lair, his observatory, had windows from which he could check the movements of the transmitters, though he must have watched the stars, too, for there was an antique map of the heavens hanging on the wall. And now I think I must have imagined some, at least, of the decor I found in the room for it satisfied my imagination so fully I was half suspicious, even when I remembered how the peep-show proprietor had told me his former pupil had delved deeply into the Arabic and Oriental and medieval pseudo-sciences. It was half Rottwang’s laboratory in Lang’s Metropolis but it was also the cabinet of Dr Caligari and, more than either, as I remember it, very probably fallaciously, it was the laboratory of a dilettante aristocrat of the late seventeenth century who dabbled in natural philosophy and tried his hand at necromancy, for there were even martyrized shapes of pickled mandrake in bottles on the shelves and a mingled odour of amber and sulphur filled the air.

The room was cluttered with curiosities – whales’ teeth, narwhals’ horns and skeletons of extinct creatures left higgledy-piggledy wherever they had happened to be put down, all thick with dust and most satisfactory cobwebs, and on the right of the great, black, locked cupboard that dominated the room were alembics, furnaces, Bunsen burners and various other instruments of chemistry as well as jars of preserved monsters and heaps of fossils in forms I would not have thought possible before I had seen less of the world. The shelves to the left of the cupboard bowed in the middle under the weight of the books they bore. Most of the books were very ancient; some were in Arabic and a great number in Chinese. The bulk of his library seemed to be devoted to rare treatises on various forms of divination, though there was no branch of human knowledge that was not represented. On a workbench lay a curious collection of optical toys, a thaumatrope, a Chinese pacing horse lamp and several others, all of types which worked on the principle of persistence of vision. These were all free from dust and seemed to be the objects of his most recent researches. I remembered he had lately been trying to replace the set of samples.

The Doctor laid his hand on the work-bench.

‘At this very bench, I, personally, assisted only by my daughter and my former professor whose fingers were not blind, collected, selected and graded all the complex phenomena in the universe before I could even begin to submit it to changes.’

I murmured my admiration in the back of my throat. He took a ring of keys from his pocket and unlocked the cupboard. The black door swung open to reveal three long shelves crammed with very thick files.

‘Here are the tabulated records of my researches.’

But I was far more interested to see the six shelves given over to the raw materials for the fabrication of all the images in the peep-show – two shelves of trays of glass slides; two of envelopes labelled ‘negs.’ which must contain the negatives of the photographic sequences; and two of moulds for casting small objects in wax, neatly arranged under inscrutable headings consisting of various combinations of sets of three broken and unbroken lines, like so:; and so; and so; and so on.

Hoffman said: ‘Once the samples are selected, interpreted, painted, cast and articulated, I can exhibit pain as positively as I can exhibit red. I show love in the same way that I show straight. I demonstrate fear just as precisely as I exemplify crooked. And ecstasy and tree and despair and stone, all exhibited in the same fashion. I can make you perceive ideas with your senses because I do not acknowledge any essential difference in the phenomenological bases of the two modes of thought. All things co-exist in pairs but mine is not an either/or world.

‘Mine is an and + and world.

‘I alone have discovered the key to the inexhaustible plus.’

His voice never rose above a drab monotone, never expressed enthusiasm, never invited astonishment. In him, the pedantry he had handed down to his daughter went unmodified by charm or leavened by intellectual passion.

‘What is the nature of that key, Doctor?’

‘Eroto-energy,’ he said tonelessly. ‘Here. I have something that will interest you.’

He took a tape recorder from the bowels of the cupboard and switched it on. After a preliminary crackle, I heard the voice of the Minister. After all that time, all those changes, I heard him speak again. The tape must have been monitored from a propaganda broadcast to the besieged city.

‘– and though real plagues have ravaged us and most of our buildings have tumbled stone from stone, so those of us who are left skulk like rats in the ruins; even if, for a time, our very spirits were tormented without cease by deceitful images springing from that dark part of ourselves humanity must always consent to ignore if we are to live in peace together; although unreason has run rampant through our streets, nevertheless, reason can – will – must! restore order in the end. For light to guide us, we have nothing but our reason. Night and day, day and night, we are tirelessly at work on the immediate problem before us. Our only weapon in the fight is inflexible rationalism and, since we brought reason into the battle, already the clocks have agreed to tell us the same time once more and, already –’

The tape registered a roaring, splintering crash and after that it was perfectly empty. It ran hissing on until the Doctor switched the machine off.

‘Reason cannot produce the poetry disorder does,’ he remarked without enthusiasm. ‘And he thinks I only operate in the gaps between things and definitions! What scant respect he shows for me!’

But I was silent for the resolute yet unhysterical timbre of the Minister’s voice had brought back all kinds of dimly remembered certitudes, certain forgotten harmonies that had once moved me as deeply as I was capable of being moved.

I found the paraphernalia of the Doctor’s science disgusted me when I saw it face to face. And his cold eyes perturbed me. I knew he could never be my master. I might not want the Minister’s world but I did not want the Doctor’s world either. All at once I was pitched on the horns of a dilemma, for I was presented with two alternatives and it seemed to me that the Doctor must be wrong for neither alternative could possibly co-exist with the other. He might know the nature of the inexhaustible plus but, all the same, he was a totalitarian. And I was in this unhappy position – I, of all men, had been given the casting vote between a barren yet harmonious calm and a fertile yet cacophonous tempest.

Well, you know the choice I made. Nothing in this city quarrels with its name. The clocks all run on time, every one. Time moves forward on the four wheels of the dimensions just as it always did before the Doctor’s time. When I finish this chapter, they will bring me a cup of hot milk and a plate of lightly buttered digestive biscuits; when I finish my life, they will bring me a winding sheet and take me to a vault in the Cathedral. They have reconstructed the Cathedral so well you would not believe it had ever been demolished. I will never see her again. The shadows fall immutably. In the square, the chestnut tree casts leaves of autumn on my statue’s shoulders. The golden bowl is not broken in this city. It is round as a cake and everyone may have a slice of it, according to his need. A need is nothing like a desire.

Old Desiderio asks young Desiderio: ‘And when he offered you a night of perfect ecstasy in exchange for a lifetime’s contentment, how could you possibly choose the latter?’

And young Desiderio answers: ‘I am too young to know regret.’

But it was not as simple as that, of course. It is not even as though I have been contented. Yet others have certainly been contented. Nothing excessive, mind – always only a gentle contentment. Yet, because of what I did, everybody is relatively contented because they do not know how to name their desires so the desires do not exist, in accordance with the Minister’s theory. So I suppose that, all in all, I acted for the common good. That is why they made a hero of me, although I did not know at the time I acted for the common good. Perhaps I acted only on impulse. Perhaps he did not offer me a high enough price; after all, he only offered me my heart’s desire.

Besides, he was a hypocrite.

He penned desire in a cage and said: ‘Look! I have liberated desire!’ He was a hypocrite. So I, a hypocrite on a less dramatic scale, I hypocritically killed him, did I?

But there I go again – running ahead of myself! See, I have ruined all the suspense. I have quite spoiled my climax. But why do you deserve a climax, anyway? I am only trying to tell you exactly, as far as I can remember, what actually happened. And you know very well already that it was I who killed Dr Hoffman; you have read all about it in the history books and know the very date far better than I because I have forgotten it. But it must have been October because the air smelled of mushrooms.

I would have hated him less if he had been less bored with his inventions.

‘The source of eroto-energy is, of course, inexhaustible, as my early colleague and co-researcher, Mendoza, surmised.’

He pointed through the window to the transmitter that turned ceaselessly at the top of the cliff beside the house.

‘For the last five years those transmitters, powered by simple, radiant energy, e.g. eroto-energy, have been beaming upon the city the crude infrastructure of

(a) synthetically authentic phenomena;

(b) mutable combinations of synthetically authentic phenomena; and have also been transmitting

(c) sufficient radiation to intensify a symbol until it becomes an object according to the law of effective evolving, or, if you prefer a rather more explicit term, complex becoming.

‘By the liberation of the unconscious we shall, of course, liberate man. And the naked man will walk in and out of everybody’s senses.’

But he was one of those people it is impossible to imagine without their clothes. He was taken by a fit of coughing which he smothered in a spotless white handkerchief.

‘The positive is an involved correlative of the negative and, once desire is endowed with synthetic form, it follows inevitably that thought and object operate on the same level. This is basic to –’

And this was the man whose daughter had told the Minister to go in fear of abstractions! I interrupted him; I had a question.

‘And whatever really happened to Mendoza?’

‘Mendoza?’

The Doctor took down a jar from a shelf. It contained a human brain floating in formaldehyde.

‘This is all we managed to salvage. He was horribly scarred. Whatever happened in his time-machine, it burned him to the bone and also utterly disordered his mind. He lingered on, raving, for five days before he died in the public ward of a charitable hospital. Mendoza and I had not been on speaking terms for years, of course. But I managed to obtain his brain as I was most curious to see it. However, whatever it had contained died five days before the rest of him and the structure was no different from that of any other brain.’

Somehow I found this recital exceedingly unnerving. He replaced the jar and smiled as well as he was able.

‘Now let me take you down to visit the distilling plant and the reality modifying machines. I’m sure you’ll find the reality modifying machines perfectly fascinating; they actually perform the preliminary stages in the synthesis of phenomena.’

He might have been inviting me on a guided tour round a chocolate factory. I wondered why his daughter loved him. The Count had suited my notion of Prometheus far better than the real Prometheus did; yet, now and then, the half-derisive contempt I felt for this prim thief of fire was touched with a horrid shudder when I remembered he was triple-refined Mind in person and Matter was an optical toy to him. But I could not understand why a man like him should want to liberate man so much. I could not see how he could have got that notion of liberation inside his skull. I was sure he only wanted power.

Perhaps I killed him out of incomprehension.

We descended to the underground levels of the castle in another businesslike electric elevator which took us a great distance below the earth before it stopped. Here, where the dungeons should have been, there were white-tiled corridors soundlessly floored with black rubber and lit by strip lighting far more brightly than day. All was technological whiteness and silence. Presently he pressed a button which released the catch on an impassive-looking metal door. We entered a busy, deserted laboratory filled with the apparatus of a distillery. The glass vats and tubes were bubbling with a faintly luminous, milky, whitish substance.

‘We need not linger here but I thought you would like a glimpse of it. This is merely the distilling plant. Here, the secretions of fulfilled desire are processed to procure an essence which has not yet pullulated into germinal form. Even with an electron microscope it is impossible to detect the slightest speck of root, seed or fundament in this, as it were, biochemical metasoup and it is safe to say we have cooked up for ourselves in our glass casseroles a pure, uncreated essence of being.

‘Now, what do we do with our metasoup? Why, we precipitate it. Come this way.’

The wall of the distilling plant opened to let us through and closed again behind us.

‘Allow me to introduce,’ said Hoffman with a pale smile, ‘my reality modifying machines.’

The machines operated with only an occasional, internal, twanging murmur; they could have been making electronic music. They were six cylindrical drums of stainless steel rotating on invisible axes with the same ceaseless, terrifying serenity of the transmitters turning, now, perhaps a mile above our heads, for we had penetrated very deeply into the earth. The drums were as tall as a man and perhaps three feet in circumference, with a shuttered viewing window in each base. A ridged, plastic pipe emerged from the white-tiled wall to disappear into a sealed aperture in the top of each drum and the wires which led from them appeared to feed into six glowing screens a confusion of endlessly swelling and diminishing ectoplasmic shapes formed around central nuclei of flashing lights. These screens were something like TV screens and formed a bank in the wall above complicated panels of switches on the other side of the laboratory.

Though the room was brightly lit and obviously in use, the only signs of the existence of a staff of technicians were a water cooler, a number of tubular steel chairs and a table containing a number of clipboards. It was a very sterile place.

‘These machines were formulated on the model of objective chance, taking “objective chance” as the definition of the sum total of all the coincidences which control an individual destiny. Just like the transmitters, they are powered by eroto-energy so their action is further modified by the Mendoza effect, that is, the temporal side-effect of eroto-energy.

‘Inside the reality modifying machines, we precipitate essence of being.’

He snapped open one of the viewing windows and I glimpsed a whirling darkness shot through with brilliant sparks, like the sky on a windy night. But he closed the window again immediately.

‘During the precipitation process, the essence of being spontaneously generates the germinal molecule of an uncreated alternative. That is, the germinal molecule of objectified desire.’

He paused to allow me to absorb this information. I would have expected any other man to show a certain modest pride as he exhibited devices that could utterly disrupt human consciousness but Dr Hoffman displayed only a faded weariness and a depressing ennui. He paused to take a drink of water from the water-cooler, crumpled up his used cardboard cup dispiritedly and sighed.

‘Inside the reality modifying machines, in the medium of essential undifferentiation, these germinal molecules are agitated until, according to certain innate determinative tendencies, they form themselves into divergent sequences which act as what I call “transformation groups”. Eventually a multi-dimensional body is brought into being which operates only upon an uncertainty principle. These bodies appear on the screen… over there… expressed in a complex notation of blips and bleeps. It requires extreme persistence of vision to make sense of the code at this stage. Nevertheless, those formless blobs are, as it were, the embryos of palpable appearances. Once these undifferentiated yet apprehendable ideas of objectified desire reach a reciprocating object, the appearance is organically restructured by the desires subsisting in latency in the object itself. These desires must, of course, subsist, since to desire is to be.’

So that was the Doctor’s version of the cogito! I DESIRE THEREFORE I EXIST. Yet he seemed to me a man without desires.

‘In this way, a synthetically authentic phenomenon finally takes shape. I used the capital city of this country as the testing ground for my first experiments because the unstable existential structure of its institutions could not suppress the latent consciousness as effectively as a structure with a firmer societal organization. I should have had very little success in, for example, Peking – in spite of the Chinese influence on my researches.

‘My wife,’ he added tangentially, ‘is a very brilliant woman.’

I thought of the corpse upstairs and shuddered.

‘I chose the capital only because it was so well suited to my experiments. I was rather put out when the times produced the Minister and the Minister produced his defences. I had thought there were no defences against the unleashed unconscious. I had certainly not bargained for a military campaign when I began transmission. I had not seen myself as a warlord but I effectively evolved into one.’

From his significant pause, I realized he had made a joke and laughed dutifully.

‘At once I hired mercenaries and, of necessity, an element of attrition entered the deployment of my imagery since, initially, I could to some extent control the evolution of the phantoms by the use of the sets of samples and my blind old professor, who once received a little training in divination from my wife, could also suggest certain possible mutations of events which usually, in fact, transpired. However, I had always intended to phase myself out of operations when I had clear evidence of the autonomous, free-form, self-promulgation of concretized desires. But, once the set of samples was accidentally destroyed, my calculations went awry. Nebulous time arrived instantaneously rather than in the course of a programmed dissolution of time itself and I did not know if the manifestations could, as it were, stand on their own two feet. Or on whatever number of feet they decided to possess.

‘But every day the aerial patrols spot more and more growths of hitherto unimaginable flora and herds of biologically dubious fauna inhabiting hitherto unformulated territory. And, of course, Albertina’s detailed reports of the tribe of a quite illusory African coast and the verifiable, photographable activities of beasts with no reality status whatsoever indicate the manifestations are functioning perfectly adequately. Indeed, all have reified themselves to such an extent that they seem to believe themselves quite firmly rooted in the imaginary sub-stratum of time itself.’

Lecturing seemed to tire him. He took another drink of water and dissolved two tablets into it before he swallowed it. Yet he was the man who wanted to establish a dictatorship of desire.

‘But the Cannibal Chief was real enough!’ I objected.

‘The Cannibal Chief was the triumphant creation of nebulous time. He was brought into being only because of the Count’s desire for self-destruction.’ He hid a yawn with a desiccated hand.

‘But I know he was real enough because I killed him!’

‘What kind of proof is that?’ asked Hoffman with a chill smile and all at once I felt a twinge of doubt for killing the Chief was the only heroic action I performed in all my life and I knew at the time it was out of character.

‘The existence of things is like a galloping horse,’ he went on with that patronizing, Decembral smile of his. ‘There is no movement through which they become modified, no time when they are not changed. What I have achieved has been accomplished only through certain loopholes in metaphysics and I was able, as it were, to base a meta-technology upon metaphysics only by the most scrupulous observance of and adherence to the laws of empirical research. And I have hardly begun, yet. Compared with what is to come, my work so far has only been a period of inactivity, such as the Ancient Chinese called: “the beginning of an anteriority to the beginning”.’

I knew only that he had examined the world by the light of the intellect alone and had seen a totally different construction from that which the senses see by the light of reason. And yet he moved with the feeble effort of a man near death.

‘I think you have seen enough here,’ he said. ‘We will move on to the desire generators.’

We left the ballet of incipient forms and the throbbing drums and once again walked those white, endless corridors that were the unprepossessing viscera of dream. I was almost in possession of the secret now, and it did not seem to me to be worth much. Was I condemned to perpetual disillusionment? Were all the potential masters the world held for me to be revealed as nothing but monsters or charlatans or wraiths? Indeed, I knew from my own experience that, once liberated, those desires it seemed to me he cheapened as he talked of them were far greater than their liberator and could shine more brightly than a thousand suns and yet I did not think he knew what desire was. At the end of the corridor was a pair of sliding doors with Chinese characters painted on them.

‘My wife’s work,’ said Hoffman. ‘She is the poet of the family. In rough translation, our motto reads: “There is intercommunication of seed between male and female and all things are produced.” It is exceedingly apt.’

I was totally unprepared for what I found inside those doors.

The electricity of desire lit everything with chill, bewitching fire and the entire structure was roofed and walled with seamless looking-glass. The first technician I had seen in the laboratories sat at a steel desk, nodding over a pile of comic books. He was a beautiful hermaphrodite in an evening dress of purple gauze with silver sequins round his eyes.

‘I am a harmonious concatenation of male and female and so the Doctor gave me sole charge of the generators,’ he said in a voice like a sexual ’cello. ‘I was the most beautiful transvestite in all Greenwich Village before the Doctor gave me the post of intermediary. I represent the inherent symmetry of divergent asymmetry.’

The Doctor caressed him affectionately on the shoulder. But the intermediary was a cripple and had to roll himself forward on a wheelchair to show us round the love pens.

They were housed in a curving, narrow room some hundreds of yards long, an undulating tentacle extending into the very core of the mountain. All along the mirrored walls were three-tiered wire bunks. In the ceiling, above each tier of bunks, were copper extractors of a funnel type leading into an upper room where a good deal of invisible machinery roared with a sound like rushing water but the noise of the machinery was almost drowned by the moans, grunts, screams, bellowings and choked mutterings that rose from the occupants of those open coffins, for here were a hundred of the best-matched lovers in the world, twined in a hundred of the most fervent embraces passion could devise.

They were all stark naked and very young. They came from every race in the world, brown, black, white and yellow, and were paired, as far as I could see, according to colour differences. They formed a pictorial lexicon of all the things a man and a woman might do together within the confines of a bed of wire six feet long by three feet wide. There was such a multitude of configurations of belly and buttock, thigh and breast, nipple and navel, all in continual motion, that I remembered the anatomy lessons of the acrobats of desire and how the Count had spoken, with uncharacteristic reverence, of the ‘death-defying double somersault of love’.

I was awed and I was revolted.

‘They are paired in these mesh cubicles so that they can all see one another – if they bother to look, of course, and hear one another, if they can hear, that is; and so, if necessary, receive a constant refreshment from visual and audial stimuli,’ commented the irrepressibly efficient Doctor. The rubber wheels of the hermaphrodite’s chair squeaked a little on the mirrored floor as we walked slowly past the hutches. The polished walls and floor reflected and multiplied the visible propagation of eroto-energy as they had done that stormy night in the orchid-coloured caravan, when the Arab tumblers and I together must unwittingly have invoked a landslide. Our footsteps clinked. The Doctor tugged at the brown ringlets of a plump, dimpled, pink and white English rosebud straining beneath a diminutive but immensely tooled Mongolian; she did not even turn her head for she was poised on the verge of a ripping shriek as her apricot-skinned lover plunged down.

‘Look! They are so engrossed in their vital work they do not even notice us!’

The hermaphrodite tittered sycophantically but she need not have worked so hard at her disguise. I suspected her already. I had seen her disguised far too often not to recognize her disguises.

‘We feed them hormones intravenously,’ the Doctor informed me.

‘Their plentiful secretions fall through the wire meshes into the trays underneath each tier, or dynamic set, of lovers and are gathered up three times a day by means of large sponges, so that nothing whatsoever is lost. And the energy they release – eroto-energy, the simplest yet most powerful form of radiant energy in the entire universe – rises up through these funnels into the generating chambers overhead.’

And these were all the true acrobats of desire, whom the Moroccans had only exemplified.

He sighed again and swallowed two aspirin, though there was no water-cooler in this laboratory so he had to chew them dry. The eyes of the hermaphrodite were the shape of tears laid on their sides and had the very colour of the tremendous clamour that rose from all those lovers caught perpetually in the trap of one another’s arms, for there were no locks or bars anywhere; they could have come and gone as they pleased. Yet, petrified pilgrims, locked parallels, icons of perpetual motion, they knew nothing but the progress of their static journey towards willed, mutual annihilation.

‘These lovers do not die,’ said Albertina. ‘They have transcended mortality.’

‘After an indefinite period of dimensionless time,’ amplified the Doctor wearily, ‘they resolve into two basic constituents – pure sex and pure energy. That is, fire and air. It is a grand explosion. And,’ he added with, I think, a faint wonder, ‘every single one of them volunteered.’

Beneath the purple bosom of her ball gown, I saw an interior corsage of flame, her heart. We moved down the lines of pens, we and our reflections, he, and she, and I, until we came to the end of the line. It had taken us a quarter of an hour, walking at a good pace. And here, at the top of a tier, was an empty cubicle.

As soon as I saw it, I knew it was my marriage bed.

The time was ripe. My bride was waiting. We had her father’s blessing.

‘I shall go to the city tomorrow,’ said the Doctor, ‘and, since time will be altogether negated –’

‘– you will arrive yesterday,’ concluded Albertina. They both laughed gently. And now I understood this gnomic exchange perfectly. Our long-delayed but so greatly longed-for conjunction would spurt such a charge of energy our infinity would fill the world and, in this experiential void, the Doctor would descend on the city and his liberation would begin.

She wiped the silver from her eyes and the purple dress dropped away from the goddess of the cornfields, more savagely and triumphantly beautiful than any imagining, my Platonic other, my necessary extinction, my dream made flesh.

‘No!’ I cried. ‘No, Generalissimo! No!’

And I cried out so loudly I pierced even the willed oblivion of the love slaves for, as I ran past towards the door, they bucked and thrust less violently and one or two of them even moved their eyes as far as they could without moving their heads to watch me, such vacant eyes that slowly, painfully cleared as the sweat on their limbs dried. The light began to flicker a little, as though heralding a power failure.

An alarum bell shrilled. The Doctor had a gun and sent a volley of bullets after me but my many reflections misled him and the bullets bounced back off the walls and caused great bloodshed among the woefully exposed practitioners of desire. I rattled the steel doors but they must have locked automatically when the alarum went off. So, weaponless, desperate, half-blinded by tears, I turned to face my adversaries.

The Doctor had leapt into the wheelchair to propel himself more quickly down the long room, for he was slow on his feet. He was showing some emotion at last. His face was working and he gibbered with rage as he shook his useless, empty revolver. But she – she was like an avenging angel, because she truly loved me, and in her hand she held a knife that flashed in the white, trembling, artificial light. And all the naked lovers had abandoned their communion to lament their dead and the dying on whose beautiful flesh the bright blood blossomed.

I had seen nothing in the peep-show to warn me of the grotesque dénouement of my great passion.

He came straight at me in his wheelchair, intending to run me down, but I grasped the arms of the chair and overturned it. He was as weightless as a doll. He went limply sprawling and the revolver flew from his hand to spin over the glass and crash against the wall while his head cracked down at such an awkward angle I think his neck broke instantly. A little blood trickled down his nose to meet the flow that trickled upwards from the nose in the mirror and then I was wrestling on top of his body with Albertina for the knife.

We wrestled on her father’s flaccid corpse for possession of the knife as passionately as if for the possession of each other.

And then we slithered like wet fish over the mirrors but still she would not let go of the knife though I clutched her wrist too tightly for her to be able to kill me with it. She bit me and tore my clothes and I bit her and pummelled her with my fists. I pummelled her breasts until they were as blue as her eyelids but she never let go and I savaged her throat with my teeth as if I were a tiger and she were the trophy I seized in the forests of the night. But she did not let go for a long, long time, not until all her strength was gone. At that, I killed her.

It is very hard for me to write this down. And I have already told you how I killed the Doctor – that is, unintentionally. Do you not already know I do not deserve to be a hero? Why should I tell you how I killed Albertina? I think I killed her to stop her killing me. I think that was the case. I am almost sure it was the case. Almost certain.

When her fingers slackened on the handle, I seized the knife immediately and stabbed her below the left nipple. Or perhaps it was in the belly. No, it was below the left nipple for the fire vanished as the steel entered the flames but she spoke to me before she died. She said: ‘I always knew one only died of love.’ Then she fell back from the blade of the knife. She must have hidden the knife in her purple dress though I will never know why, of course. It was a common kitchen knife, such as is used to chop meat fine enough for hamburger and so on. Her flesh parted to let the knife out and her eyes, though still the shape of horizontal tears, were silent forever.

If the Doctor had been a real magician, the underground laboratory, the castle, the whole edifice of stone and stained glass and cloud and mist should have vanished. There should have been a crash of thunder and a strong wind would have blown away the levers and the machinery and the books and the alembics and the pickled mandrakes and the alligator skeletons; and I should have found myself alone on the mountain side, under a waning moon, with only the rags of dream in my hands. But no. The alarum bells continued to ring and some of the surviving lovers, rudely shaken from their embrace by the sound of gunfire, began to clamber from their sleepless dormitory on shaky legs, though they moved without sense or purpose, as if obeying some obscure compulsion to come closer to the spectacle of death, though none of them seemed to observe this spectacle for they still seemed half-blinded. And the one door remained remorselessly closed, while I was a mile beneath the crust of the earth, locked in a white-tiled hall of mirrors. Nevertheless, as I wiped the reeking blade on the handkerchief they had provided for my breast pocket, I felt, how can I put it? Yes; I felt the uneasy sense of perfect freedom. Freedom, yes. I thought I was free of her, you see.

But there was no way out of the laboratory except the sealed door and how could I be free of her as long as I myself remained alive?

I knew the alarum bell must rouse something and my first thought was, escape; my second, that escape was impossible. Those of the milling lovers who were not lamenting their dead or grieving over one another’s wounds were as witless and uncertain on their feet as new born colts. They knew only that they had been interrupted in the middle of the most important work in the world but neither how nor why and even those whose shattered faces streamed with blood clasped their partners’ arms or legs and begged them to lie down again while others, risen, tottering, befogged by mirrors, kissed the glass cases that seemed to hold such inviting lips. Yet few, if any, took any notice of me with my knife or had even seen how cruelly I had betrayed love itself. I hid myself among the wire hutches until the metal doors slid open. The alarum ceased.

But no detachment of militia appeared, only a single, white-clad representative of the hitherto invisible technical staff, armed only with a syringe. And he did not even bother to close the door behind him. Clearly the alarum had always before only indicated some slight indisposition among the lovers that could easily be righted with a shot or two of extra hormones; perhaps they interpreted the flickering of the lights as the sign of a hormonal deficiency. How could anyone know the real nature of the disturbance? What riot might the lovers make? Why should they call out the guard to deal with a lowered vitality among the love slaves? Yet I had been prepared for fifty hired rifles to level against me. I wanted a heroic struggle. I wanted a heroic struggle to justify my murder to myself. And all I did in the end was to stab the harmless technician in the back of the neck as easily as you please while he gaped open-mouthed at the splintered wheelchair, the contorted savant and the dead girl. Leaving my bag of three stiffening behind me, I walked out into the corridor and pressed the button that closed the door behind me.

If you feel a certain sense of anti-climax, how do you think I felt?

I still carried my knife. I noticed I had unconsciously tucked that handkerchief stained with Albertina’s blood into my breast pocket, where it looked just like a red rose.

But the lights were all going out and I knew the rest of the castle, whoever that comprised, would soon all be roused. First, I knew I must destroy the reality modifying machines; this was clearly fixed in my mind as though to wreck them would completely vindicate me – as, indeed, in the eyes of history, it has. I ran down that ice warren of white, glittering corridors, found the laboratory, went in, smashed the dancing screens with the desk, dragged pipes and wires from the walls and set fire to the papers with my gold cigarette lighter. It was the work of moments. To complete the job, I went into the distilling plant and smashed everything I found there, though first I surprised another technician and so I had to stab him, too. These depredations set off no alarums for, by the structure of the Doctor’s system, disturbances were impossible; but the lights were flickering so badly now, I knew I had not much longer at liberty in the castle and so would have to leave the workroom in the tower unharmed. But I guessed the Doctor only allowed his daughter to handle the most arcane secrets and so it proved, for everything stopped immediately as soon as he was dead, of course, and the love slaves disbanded, for concretized desires could not survive without their eroto-energy and… But I knew nothing of that. Those are the dreary ends of the plot. Shall I tie them up or shall I leave them unravelled? The history books tie them up far better than I can for I was deep in the bowels of the earth, was I not, with four notches on my knife. Oh, but I got out easily enough even though the elevator was no longer running. I found the emergency exit; it was beside the elevator. It spiralled me dizzily up to the hall of the castle, where the old dog still drowsed before the grey ashes of the applewood fire.

When he smelled Albertina’s blood, he leapt at me with the last reserves of his senile strength and I left the kitchen knife in his throat. And so he was my last victim in the Doctor’s castle.

In the beatific park, the birds now slept with peaceful heads tucked beneath their wings and the deer slept like statues of deer. One by one, the castle closed its coloured eyes behind me, like a peacock slowly furling in its spread, and its four attendant moons revolved more and more slowly and were already perceptibly fading round the edges, like the real moon towards the end of the night. And I, I was still in my dinner jacket with a black tie round my neck and a bloody buttonhole still stuck in my lapel as I fled across the dew-moistened grass as if I were an uninvited guest turned away from the door of a magnificent dinner party.

I started to run. The wooden bridge sounded off like machine-gun fire under my running feet. I pulled up a dry bush from the edge of the cliff and lit a bonfire on the bridge with my gold cigarette lighter and I burned the bridge behind me, so I could not have gone back to the castle even if I wanted to. I only burned the bridge so that I would not be able to return to her. It broke and fell blazing into the abyss; the earth swallowed it.

But now the sky filled with a locust swarm of helicopters all descending on to the roof of the dying castle and I thought the military were roused at last but then I realized they must have arrived according to a pre-scheduled plan and had come to take the Doctor into the city.

I was the only man alive under the stars who knew the Doctor was dead.

I was the only man alive who knew time had begun again.

The only road led to the air-strip and base so I did not follow any path. Once again I took to the mountains. I wandered among them for perhaps three days, hiding among the rocks when I sighted a roving helicopter overhead for they were buzzing all over the terrain like angry flies and I wondered if the militia might inherit the kingdom the Doctor had prepared for himself. On the third day, quite by accident, I found an Indian farmstead. When I spoke to them in the language of the river people, they took me in, gave me thin barley porridge and let me sleep on the common pallet. In return for my gold cigarette lighter they allowed me to ride away on a scrawny, white, starveling mare and the smallest son, in his baggy white drawers, with the open sores on his legs, came with me until I was safely on the track that took me winding down to the foothills through those cruel, yellow clefts that seared my weary brain with their infinite monotony. The helicopters monitored the white, abandoned skies less and less often; after all, the Doctor’s swarthy soldiers had only been mercenaries and when their pay was not forthcoming, after they tried but failed to make sense of the books, the instrument panels and the generators, they would gut the castle and go off in search of another war, for was there not always another war to be had? And the technicians were only technicians… but I knew nothing of this last phase of the war, its dying fall; I only knew the helicopters came less frequently and then did not come at all.

And there were no more transformations because Albertina’s eyes were extinguished.

On I went, through the lifeless vegetation of winter, and I thought myself free from all the clouds of attachment because I was a traveller who had denied his proper destination. I saw no colours anywhere around me. The food I begged from cottagers had no savour of either sweetness or rankness. I knew I was condemned to disillusionment in perpetuity. My punishment had been my crime.

I returned slowly to the capital. I had neither reason nor desire to do so. Only my inertia, dormant for so long, now reasserted itself and carried me there by its own passive, miserable, apathetic force. In this city I am, or have been, as you know, a hero. I became one of the founders of the new constitution – largely from the negative propulsion of my own inertia for, once I was placed and honoured on my plinth, I was not the man to climb down again, saying: ‘But I am the wrong man!’ for I felt that, if what I had done had turned out for the common good, I might as well reap what benefits I could from it. The shrug is my gesture. The sneer is my expression. If she was air and fire, I was earth and water, that residue of motionless, inert matter that cannot, by its very nature, become irradiated and may not aspire, even if it tries. I am the check, the impulse of restraint. So I effectively evolved into a politician, did I not? I, an old hero, a crumbling statue in an abandoned square.

I returned slowly through the mists of winter. Time lay more thickly about me than the mists. I was so unused to moving through time that I felt like a man walking under water. Time exerted great pressure on my blood vessels and my eardrums, so that I suffered from terrible headaches, weakness and nausea. Time clogged the hooves of my mare until she lay down beneath me and died. Nebulous Time was now time past; I crawled like a worm on its belly through the clinging mud of common time and the bare trees showed only the dreary shapes of an eternal November of the heart, for now all changes would henceforth be, as they had been before, absolutely predictable. And so I identified at last the flavour of my daily bread; it was and would be that of regret. Not, you understand, of remorse; only of regret, that insatiable regret with which we acknowledge that the impossible is, per se, impossible.

Well, I walked the heels out of my silk socks and the soles off my patent leather pumps and I fell down to sleep and rose to walk again until this filthy scarecrow in ragged evening dress, his matted hair falling over his shoulders and his gaunt jaw sprouting unkempt beard, his lapel still stuck through with a blackened rose of stiffened blood – until I saw before me, one moonlit dawn, the smoking ruins of a familiar city.

But as I drew nearer, I saw the ruins were inhabited.

Old Desiderio lays down his pen. In a little while, they will bring me my hot drink before they put me to bed and I am glad of these small attentions for they are the comforts of the old, although they are quite meaningless.

My head aches with writing. What a thick book my memoirs make! What a fat book to coffin young Desiderio, who was so thin and supple. My head aches. I close my eyes.

Unbidden, she comes.