Song Of Time (34 page)

Glancing into the mirrors which ranged the rococo walls across Harad’s apartment, I found it hard to pick myself out. I was just another sleek dress, another pretty face—the violinist, yes, who played that tune: you know, the one who’s screwing poor, poor Claude Vaudin…The fame, the fabrics, the simply
being here
seemed to matter far more than who you really were. Many of the men were wearing back-buttoned suits with high collars, which, it suddenly struck me, mimicked the smocks that Christos and his followers wore. Everything here had been reduced—or elevated—to gossip and fashion statement.

At eleven, and after a brief and largely inaudible speech from Harad Le Pape, the newly-constructed doors at the apartment’s far end groaned open in a breeze of fresh paint. This, at last, was it—or at least would be until the next big
it
—and everyone agreed as we filed up the wide, new stairs that only dear, darling Harad could have ever persuaded a gathering such as this to queue like common entrants to a fairground ride. What an odd feeling it was, finally to be entering the fabled 6th floor which had long promised a redefinition of art—or perhaps of life itself. Harad had said so many things about this work that it was hard to recollect any of them, but it was immediately apparent as we fanned out along a maze of stark white walls that this project was at least as ambitious as expected, and that it was vigorously multi-sensory. There was much to admire as we wandered the labyrinth of installations and exhibits, and much that was intriguingly new, or interestingly familiar, or just down-right strange.

The journalists and the commentators were happy—you could see them revising their estimation of the Nordinger premiere even further downwards in the light of this—and there was certainly nowhere else to be seen, at least until the post-election parties. But I soon realised that I was fighting back a rising sense of disappointment. Here, for example, was the same mound of dog poo which Harad had once famously reviewed when it had lain outside the Pompidou Centre. Everyone oohed and ahhed, but surely this was ridiculously self-referential? And here were the precious glasses which the myopic Joyce had supposedly used to write
Ulysses
, shattered—but so what? And here were Impressionist street scenes, and wafts of sound and smell, and portentous voices reading stuff backwards. Was this woman vomiting copiously into a Ming vase an exhibit, or merely another guest? Harad would probably have been happy to have it either way, but I suddenly wasn’t. Although cleverly and expensively presented, this was nothing more than just another one man—or woman—exhibition…

A study of the surviving contemporary reviews would probably suggest that Harad’s 6th floor was uniformly received as a masterpiece, but in truth attention soon began to drift on that night of its unveiling. The thing, the problem, the computer or communications glitch which a few people had mentioned earlier in the context of the elections, seemed to be genuine. Bracelets weren’t working. It was most frustrating, especially for the many who liked to read the reviews before passing judgement on anything. It was assumed for a while that Harad had cleverly put up a block on airwave transmissions, or that it was an effect of the endless dry thunderstorm which still rumbled outside. Perhaps it was even a virus attack. But none of those explanations made proper sense.

Claude was still performing. Claude was relentless. His voice was whipcrack loud. Harad, in comparison, seemed almost catatonically subdued. But here we all were in his or her 6th floor, and the odd thing was that, despite the gathering sense of ennui and the pull of the imminent post-election parties, people seemed reluctant to leave. I checked my own bracelet. It, too, was dead. Looking around for Claude, I heard a man moaning in what sounded at first like the throes of sexual ecstasy, but which then turned into a high wailing. There were titters. Looks were exchanged.
Most
strange. Perhaps Harad had another trick up his or her sleeve, after all…

It was getting harder to tell exactly where performance ended and reality began. The next big virtuality projection I encountered looked like nothing more than the lightning-shot Parisian sky above our heads, but the one beyond was far more fiery, and was perhaps an ironic play on the apocalypse which Christos and so many others had predicted. But I realised as I approached another roiling vision of flame and smoke that what I was seeing wasn’t simply art. The display of a near-midnight sky above some great city shot through with a bleary sun fizzed and flickered with the logo of one of the main news channels. Those people who still hadn’t realised that this was a realtime transmission relayed along the surviving landlines were smiling and clapping as they watched, but the rest of us had fallen into shocked silence, or were looking away.

The story kept changing. The Chinese, no, the Americans, had exchanged missiles. It was an asteroid or comet. It was 9/11 and 10/12 all over again, but bigger, smaller, better, worse. I caught a glimpse of Harad Le Pape standing amid the increasingly agitated crowds. Tears shone across his or her big cheeks, although whether in grief about what seemed to be happening in the world or at the fate of his great artistic statement, it was impossible to tell. Spillages of bicycles from last year’s Tour de France faded from another of the expensive virtual screens and people screamed as smoke and rubble rolled out towards them in one vast, unending wave.

Bizarrely, the one name which kept re-emerging was Yellowstone, which we then still thought of as merely the home of Old Faithful and Yogi Bear. This wasn’t a nuclear war, the talking heads which began to appear amid the scenes of devastation were beginning to explain, but a natural disaster—a volcanic eruption on a scale beyond any in human history. There was an odd mixture of commiseration and relief as this news swept through Harad’s 6th floor. Yes, it was terrible. But it was only some
volcano
. And it was in America, by which in those days we still meant the USA. It really couldn’t have been much further away…

Harad’s guests finally began to move down onto the street and I found Claude outside as well, amid the milling noise and traffic. Paris had reawoken, and the scene was colourful, chaotic. It was past midnight and the election results had been delayed, but the planned fireworks went off anyway. They ripped overhead in angry volleys. Then, bells began to ring in their crackling wake. There was so much noise. Thunder still rolled. There were shouts, car-horns, the waving of flags and makeshift banners, and people were barging by us as the lit sky played over Claude’s anguished face. It was as if all the contents of Harad’s 6th floor had spilled out across Paris in a vast carnival wave. For who cared about the elections now? At the very least, it could wait. Cataclysmic projections played across buildings as I followed Claude north and west. There was street music. Dogs barked from balconies and the business in the cafes was huge. The water-sellers were in fine voice. Madmen and prophets of every conceivable religion wandered and raved…

To me, much of this was all too much like that day when I’d tried to get across Birmingham to Nan Ashar’s house along the canals beneath the flames and barricades. Even beyond the images of roiling darkness which were playing everywhere, there was the same broken glass, the same smoke and flame. I thought at first as I hurried with him that Claude was hurryingly intent on discovering some proper source of information. Then, that he just wanted to escape all this light and noise. I already guessed that his home country was ruined and his parents were probably dead, but everything was too loud for talk, and had happened too quickly for us to have any proper understanding.

Claude grabbed my hand as we stumbled on through a sea of images. Paris was several cities at once that cataclysmic night. Wild parties of cheering youths went by, leaning from cars with banners and bottles, waving burning American flags. Moaning women clustered around news sources, broadcast images of flame and smoke playing torrents of emotion across their weeping faces. Gunshots or fireworks still crackled. Clustered in a side street—I’m still sure I saw it—was a cackling gaggle of penguins. The thunder still rolled. A van went by, its loudhailer proclaiming victory for one side or the other in the day’s elections, although the words were distorted beyond any possibility of being understood. Claude was still holding my hand, dragging me on, and I submitted easily to the pull of his arms and the tumble of the streets towards Montmartre. I knew that he needed me, and I’d have held onto him even if he’d tried to let me go.

“WELL?” ADAM REGARDS ME FROM THE CHAIR by the window as I lie here on the red divan in the music room which he helped, half-carried, me down to this morning. “You were going to that warehouse—but what happened? Was Christos still there?” Curled amid a soft spill of blankets, I stare up at the beamed ceiling, feeling a dimming sense of noise and smoke. “You don’t understand. It isn’t that simple. Life isn’t just one story. You make choices…Or you think you do. Anyway, you stumble along streets and up steps and duck openings. And somewhere along the line, events happen…But afterwards, when you look back, they’re not always just one thing, but many.”

All last night, all of this morning, I’ve talked, and Adam’s listened. Now, outside, and far away from Paris, the clouds are pushing their stormy arms through the stuttering sunlight, and the wind is rising strongly enough to cause Adam’s many reflections to flare and distort in the panes of the bay windows.

“I checked up on Christos’ name,” he says softly, “when I was looking at all that stuff about Claude. He’s well documented—a totemic figure. Then, at about the time of the elections, he just vanished. Of course, there were all sorts of suggestions, but nothing concrete. He was simply there, and then not there. Of course, his organisation collapsed without him. And he never reappeared again…”

The air that night tasted tipsy and hazy. The looted shops had spilled out onto the streets, and the windmill above the Moulin Rouge was in flames. Everyone was looking for someone to blame.

“Well, you hardly need me to tell you, Adam, do you?”

“Tell me what?”

“That Christos vanished.”

“That’s it?”

“What else do you want me to say? Claude and I, we got to the tobacco warehouse and we climbed the stairs. But Tiger-Stripe Jill and her situationist crowd were all already out on the streets—on this of all nights, it was where they belonged. Christos was gone as well. All that was left of him were the chains and that virtual helmet. What would you expect? After all, Jill and her mates were hardly the most diligent of warders. They’d probably have let him go just as soon as they realised what was going on outside. So Christos went out into that dangerous night and, just as you say, he vanished. You, Adam, should understand better than most how people can disappear—how they can change identities, transform themselves, or simply get irredeemably lost. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I really have no idea what happened to Christos. He could have been deliberately killed in the riots—believe me, enough people wanted him gone. Or he might have died anonymously like so many others. Or perhaps, after Yellowstone, he thought his work was finished. Perhaps he simply gave up. Or perhaps he really was what he said to me, and the warring bits of his body simply fell apart…”

“And nothing else?”

“Nothing.”

Adam stands up. Looking far more disgruntled than he should—after all, it’s
my
life I’m telling him about—he leaves the music room. As the sounds of dinner waft in from the kitchen, I get myself up and move over to the desk. Something loud clatters across the floor—it’s the empty plastic bottle of Christos water which Adam has been toying with. Too weary to bother to pick it up, I lean close to the windows. A frozen mask, withered beyond recognition, blurs as I struggle to re-focus outside. I can feel the wind as it forces its way through the gaps in the glass. The sea is turning jagged. It’s going to be another savage night, on this savage earth.

How did we ever manage to care so much about politics back in Paris? None of it really mattered. We’re just puny humans, and Mother Earth is Mother Earth. Cities can be put to the flood or capriciously saved in the blink of a cyclone. Comets can approach enough to give us the apocalyptic willies. Whole continents can be laid waste. All these things might happen, and it doesn’t matter to anyone but us humans: that was what Yellowstone taught us.

A few scientists, doom-sayers, those in the know, had understood that one of periodic eruptions of the vast reservoir of magma which lay beneath much of Colorado was imminent, at least in geological terms. For the rest of us, it was just part of the background fuzz of sundry other threats of mass extinction. But the supervolcano erupted, and its after-math soured the skies across the whole planet, withered crops and brought five of the longest, coldest and hungriest winters in human history. The Seine froze—so did the Danube and parts of the Amazon. The snows returned to Kilimanjaro. There were rains across the Gobi and the Sahara. America and Canada were destroyed as functioning nations. The glaciers stopped retreating. The world economy, which had been relentlessly pumping carbon into the atmosphere, suffered an enormous recession. Before, there seemed to be no doubt that the seas would continue to rise and the deserts would spread, that many of the great cities, both the riches and the poorest—as if such distinctions mattered—would be consumed, but in those long winters and short summers, people began to speak of a new ice age instead. Of course, many have said that Yellowstone was the earth’s way of restoring her equilibrium, but they haven’t looked far enough back across her long record of catastrophes, inundations and extinctions. The earth doesn’t care whether she’s hot or cold, fecund or arid. She’s just the tumbling ball of rock to which we, at least those still living, have to cling.

Adam goes to the kitchen and returns a seeming blink afterwards with lunch on a tray—that luxury which soon becomes a curse—which, after helping me to sit up, he lays on my knees. The food passes me by, although I don’t doubt that it’s predictably excellent, whilst he talks of Yellowstone, which of course he already knows all about. He tells me how my parents’ generation must have feared the things we humans could do to each other—terrorism, viruses, the bomb—far more than what nature could do. I don’t bother to contradict him. I can tell he wants me to continue with the story of my life all this afternoon, but I’d rather rest. Why this desperate need to push on today when by tomorrow, this coming storm—which I can feel and hear in the gath-ering crash of waves—will have blown itself away? Who knows, summer might make a return and we could go back to Bezant Bay. And I could re-visit my childhood. I could tell him more about living in Moseley—or Mum and Dad’s parents, or our holidays in France. I could even walk down to Fowey again to stock up, if I’m feeling fit enough. Then, and just as I did last night, I’ll play him some music before we both go to bed…