Smoke and Mirrors (26 page)

Lindfield pulled the tie loose. Richard struggled to pull air, he gulped it, clawed it into his lungs.

“We thought you were faking. You just went over.” Someone said that.

“Shut up,” said Lindfield. “Are you all right? I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. Christ. I’m sorry.”

For one moment, Richard thought he was apologizing for having called him back from the world beyond the temple.

Lindfield was terrified, solicitous, desperately worried. He had obviously never almost killed anyone before. As he walked Richard up the stone steps to the matron’s office, Lindfield explained that he had returned from the school tuck-shop, found Richard unconscious on the path, surrounded by curious boys, and had realized what was wrong. Richard rested for a little in the matron’s office, where he was given a bitter soluble aspirin, from a huge jar, in a plastic tumbler of water, then was shown in to the headmaster’s study.

“God, but you look scruffy, Grey!” said the headmaster, puffing irritably on his pipe. “I don’t blame young Lindfield at all. Anyway, he saved your life. I don’t want to hear another word about it.”

“I’m sorry,” said Grey.

“That will be all,” said the headmaster in his cloud of scented smoke.

“Have you picked a religion yet?” asked the school chaplain, Mr. Aliquid.

Richard shook his head. “I’ve got quite a few to choose from,” he admitted.

The school chaplain was also Richard’s biology teacher. He had recently taken Richard’s biology class, fifteen thirteen-year-old boys and Richard, just twelve, across the road to his little house opposite the school. In the garden Mr. Aliquid had killed, skinned, and dismembered a rabbit with a small sharp knife. Then he’d taken a foot pump and blown up the rabbit’s bladder like a balloon until it had popped, spattering the boys with blood. Richard threw up, but he was the only one who did.

“Hm,” said the chaplain.

The chaplain’s study was lined with books. It was one of the few masters’ studies that was in any way comfortable.

“What about masturbation? Are you masturbating excessively?” Mr. Aliquid’s eyes gleamed.

“What’s excessively?”

“Oh. More than three or four times a day, I suppose.”

“No,” said Richard. “Not excessively.”

He was a year younger than anyone else in his class; people forgot about that sometimes.

Every weekend he traveled to North London to stay with his cousins for bar mitzvah lessons taught by a thin ascetic cantor,
frummer
than
frum,
a cabalist and keeper of hidden mysteries onto which he could be diverted with a well-placed question. Richard was an expert at well-placed questions.

Frum
was orthodox, hard-line Jewish. No milk with meat, and two washing machines for the two sets of plates and cutlery.

Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk.

Richard’s cousins in North London were
frum,
although the boys would secretly buy cheeseburgers after school and brag about it to each other.

Richard suspected his body was hopelessly polluted already. He drew the line at eating rabbit, though. He had eaten rabbit, and disliked it, for years before he figured out what it was. Every Thursday there was what he believed to be a rather unpleasant chicken stew for school lunch. One Thursday he found a rabbit’s paw floating in his stew, and the penny dropped. After that on Thursdays, he filled up on bread and butter.

On the underground train to North London, he’d scan the faces of the other passengers, wondering if any of them were Michael Moorcock.

If he met Moorcock, he’d ask him how to get back to the ruined temple.

If he met Moorcock, he’d be too embarrassed to speak.

Some nights when his parents were out, he’d try to phone Michael Moorcock.

He’d phone directory enquiries and ask for Moorcock’s number.

“Can’t give it to you, love. It’s ex-directory.”

He’d wheedle and cajole, and always fail, to his relief. He didn’t know what he would say to Moorcock if he succeeded.

He put ticks in the front of his Moorcock novels, on the By the Same Author page, for the books he read.

That year there seemed to be a new Moorcock book every week. He’d pick them up at Victoria station on the way to bar mitzvah lessons.

There were a few he simply couldn’t find—
Stealer of Souls, Breakfast in the Ruins
—and eventually, nervously, he ordered them from the address in the back of the books. He got his father to write him a check.

When the books arrived, they contained a bill for 25 pence: the prices of the books were higher than originally listed. But still, he now had a copy of
Stealer of Souls
and a copy of
Breakfast in the Ruins.

At the back of
Breakfast in the Ruins
was a biography of Moorcock that said he’d died of lung cancer the year before.

Richard was upset for weeks. That meant there wouldn’t be any more books, ever.

That fucking biography. Shortly after it came out, I was at a Hawkwind gig, stoned out of my brain, and these people kept coming up to me, and I thought I was dead. They kept saying, “You’re dead, you’re dead.” Later I realized that they were saying, “But we thought you were dead.”

—Michael Moorcock, in conversation, Notting Hill, 1976

There was the Eternal Champion, and then there was the Companion to Champions. Moonglum was Elric’s companion, always cheerful, the perfect foil to the pale prince, who was prey to moods and depressions.

There was a multiverse out there, glittering and magic. There were the agents of balance, the Gods of Chaos, and the Lords of Order. There were the older races, tall, pale, and elfin, and the young kingdoms, filled with people like him. Stupid, boring, normal people.

Sometimes he hoped that Elric could find peace away from the black sword. But it didn’t work that way. There had to be the both of them—the white prince and the black sword.

Once the sword was unsheathed, it lusted for blood, needed to be plunged into quivering flesh. Then it would drain the soul from the victim, feed his or her energy into Elric’s feeble frame.

Richard was becoming obsessed with sex; he had even had a dream in which he was having sex with a girl. Just before waking, he dreamed what it must be like to have an orgasm—it was an intense and magical feeling of love, centered on your heart; that was what it was, in his dream.

A feeling of deep, transcendent, spiritual bliss.

Nothing he experienced ever matched up to that dream.

Nothing even came close.

The Karl Glogauer in
Behold the Man
was not the Karl Glogauer of
Breakfast in the Ruins,
Richard decided; still, it gave him an odd, blasphemous pride to read
Breakfast in the Ruins
in the school chapel in the choir stalls. As long as he was discreet no one seemed to care.

He was the boy with the book. Always and forever.

His head swam with religions: the weekend was now given to the intricate patterns and language of Judaism; each weekday morning to the wood-scented, stained-glass solemnities of the Church of England; and the nights belonged to his own religion, the one he made up for himself, a strange, multicolored pantheon in which the Lords of Chaos (Arioch, Xiombarg, and the rest) rubbed shoulders with the Phantom Stranger from the DC Comics and Sam the trickster-Buddha from Zelazny’s
Lord of Light,
and vampires and talking cats and ogres, and all the things from the Lang colored Fairy books: in which all mythologies existed simultaneously in a magnificent anarchy of belief.

Richard had, however, finally given up (with, it must be admitted, a little regret) his belief in Narnia. From the age of six—for half his life—he had believed devoutly in all things Narnian; until, last year, rereading
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
for perhaps the hundredth time, it had occurred to him that the transformation of the unpleasant Eustace Scrub into a dragon and his subsequent conversion to belief in Aslan the lion was terribly similar to the conversion of St. Paul on the road to Damascus; if his blindness were a dragon . . .

This having occurred to him, Richard found correspondences everywhere, too many to be simple coincidence.

Richard put away the Narnia books, convinced, sadly, that they were allegory; that an author (whom he had trusted) had been attempting to slip something past him. He had had the same disgust with the Professor Challenger stories, when the bull-necked old professor became a convert to Spiritualism; it was not that Richard had any problems with believing in ghosts—Richard believed, with no problems or contradictions, in
everything
—but Conan Doyle was preaching, and it showed through the words. Richard was young, and innocent in his fashion, and believed that authors should be trusted, and that there should be nothing hidden beneath the surface of a story.

At least the Elric stories were honest. There was nothing going on beneath the surface there: Elric was the etiolated prince of a dead race, burning with self-pity, clutching Stormbringer, his dark-bladed broadsword—a blade which sang for lives, which ate human souls, and which gave their strength to the doomed and weakened albino.

Richard read and reread the Elric stories, and he felt pleasure each time Stormbringer plunged into an enemy’s chest, somehow felt a sympathetic satisfaction as Elric drew his strength from the soul-sword, like a heroin addict in a paperback thriller with a fresh supply of smack.

Richard was convinced that one day the people from Mayflower Books would come after him for their 25 pence. He never dared buy any more books through the mail.

J.B.C. MacBride had a secret.

“You mustn’t tell anyone.”

“Okay.”

Richard had no problem with the idea of keeping secrets. In later years he realized that he was a walking repository of old secrets, secrets that his original confidants had probably long forgotten.

They were walking, with their arms over each other’s shoulders, up to the woods at the back of the school.

Richard had, unasked, been gifted with another secret in these woods: it is here that three of Richard’s school friends have meetings with girls from the village and where, he has been told, they display to each other their genitalia.

“I can’t tell you who told me any of this.”

“Okay,” said Richard.

“I mean, it’s true. And it’s a deadly secret.”

“Fine.”

MacBride had been spending a lot of time recently with Mr. Aliquid, the school chaplain.

“Well, everybody has two angels. God gives them one and Satan gives them one. So when you get hypnotized, Satan’s angel takes control. And that’s how Ouija boards work. It’s Satan’s angel. And you can implore your God’s angel to talk through you. But real enlightenment only occurs when you can talk to your angel. He tells you secrets.”

This was the first time that it had occurred to Grey that the Church of England might have its own esoterica, its own hidden cabala.

The other boy blinked owlishly. “You mustn’t tell anyone that. I’d get into trouble if they knew I’d told you.”

“Fine.”

There was a pause.

“Have you ever wanked off a grown-up?” asked MacBride.

“No.” Richard’s own secret was that he had not yet begun to masturbate. All of his friends masturbated, continually, alone and in pairs or groups. He was a year younger than them and couldn’t understand what the fuss was about; the whole idea made him uncomfortable.

“Spunk everywhere. It’s thick and oozy. They try to get you to put their cocks in your mouth when they shoot off.”

“Eugh.”

“It’s not that bad.” There was a pause. “You know, Mr. Aliquid thinks you’re very clever. If you wanted to join his private religious discussion group, he might say yes.”

The private discussion group met at Mr. Aliquid’s small bachelor house across the road from the school in the evenings, twice a week after prep.

“I’m not Christian.”

“So? You still come top of the class in Divinity, Jewboy.”

“No thanks. Hey, I got a new Moorcock. One you haven’t read. It’s an Elric book.”

“You haven’t. There isn’t a new one.”

“Is. It’s called
The Jade Man’s Eyes.
It’s printed in green ink. I found it in a bookshop in Brighton.”

“Can I borrow it after you?”

“Course.”

It was getting chilly, and they walked back, arm in arm. Like Elric and Moonglum, thought Richard to himself, and it made as much sense as MacBride’s angels.

Richard had daydreams in which he would kidnap Michael Moorcock and make him tell Richard the secret.

If pushed, Richard would be unable to tell you what kind of thing the secret was. It was something to do with writing; something to do with gods.

Richard wondered where Moorcock got his ideas from.

Probably from the ruined temple, he decided, in the end, although he could no longer remember what the temple looked like. He remembered a shadow, and stars, and the feeling of pain at returning to something he thought long finished.

He wondered if that was where all authors got their ideas from or just Michael Moorcock.

If you had told him that they just made it all up, out of their heads, he would never have believed you. There had to be a place the magic came from.

Didn’t there?

This bloke phoned me up from America the other night, he said, “Listen, man, I have to talk to you about your religion.” I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t got any fucking religion.”

—Michael Moorcock, in conversation, Notting Hill, 1976

It was six months later. Richard had been bar mitzvahed and would be changing schools soon. He and J.B.C. MacBride were sitting on the grass outside the school in the early evening, reading books. Richard’s parents were late picking him up from school.

Richard was reading
The English Assassin.
MacBride was engrossed in
The Devil Rides Out.

Richard found himself squinting at the page. It wasn’t properly dark yet, but he couldn’t read anymore. Everything was turning into grays.

“Mac? What do you want to be when you grow up?”