It wasn’t the sweaty man she was going to hit with it, realised Milena.
She was going to hit me.
And it seemed to the Milena who remembered that she could see across the river to a park and a little boy in a cowboy hat ran round and round it, singing, ‘Pi-per! Pi-per!’
And the dog cried out, ‘Don’t go! Don’t go!’
I have to. A little while, you shall not see me.
All the Earth seemed to fall away. Milena saw the fields and the village of England in neat patterns, the grain, the pinioned pear trees, and the beehive houses. She wafted up through cloud, into mist, and up into Antarctica, and there, in the light of heaven, in the icy chill, there was life. There, the spiders danced, between crystals of ice. I know where I am, thought Milena, remembering.
Then the window of the Bulge blinked, and suddenly, strung between the clouds were Bees. They had grown great purple wings, veined like leaves, and they hung like bats. There were veins in the sky, clear tubes, full of sluggishly pumping fluids. There were bobbing plants rising up in seaweed tangles, attached to pumpkins full of gas. There were great swirls of Bees, throwing themselves between the plants, rising up on spirals of air like Dore’s Angels, living on light and moisture. They attached themselves to the veins that bridged the clouds.
When was this? Then Milena remembering remembered.
Rolfa threw her head back and howled with joy.
It doesn’t just go back. It goes forward as well, Rolfa said in wonder.
This is the future, thought Milena. I am seeing the future.
Past and future swirled together, in a vision. Milena was swept higher. The sky overhead went dark and the sea far below was like burnished brass. The Earth and the clouds exchanged light. All of it, the Earth, the clouds, the light, the many Milenas, the future and the past, the net of Bees, the net of nerves, all held in a system of reciprocity.
I am. I am outside. I am, outside of time. Outside of time, I have always been weightless.
Afternoon sunlight poured in through the windows. Rolfa’s breasts, shaved, spread almost flat on her chest. Milena was kissing the prickly belly, filling the belly button with her tongue. Then memory took her down further, to where Rolfa had not shaved, to where womanhood lay in folds, and Milena kissed that, slipped her tongue into it, and whipped her own small body around, so that Rolfa could kiss her. It was not harbour or refuge that Milena sought, but the body that was one with the person.
There was a hiss. The two Bulges parted, the seal broken, and the smaller Bulge fell away from the larger. It was returning to Earth. Milena the director saw Christian Soldier, outlined in pure white light falling away from her. It doesn’t matter, don’t regret, she told herself. You’ll be back, you’ll be back here for the Comedy.
Zamavej no rozloucenou, Milena!
Wave goodbye, Milena. It was the last thing she could remember her mother saying.
I’m going home, thought Milena the director.
And then it was the night, in the little room, the Shell. ‘I’m going to sing,’ warned Rolfa, feverish on the bed. Milena fumbled in panic for a pencil to write the music down. Why write it, Milena? No one ever forgets anything. They only try to escape it. You will know this music for the rest of your life, note for note.
Rolfa began to sing the music that ends Purgatory, that will end all that will be performed of the Comedy. She sang it for Milena, looking all the while at her, the music that was like Handel, like Mozart, like Wagner, notes rescued from the core of the soul that belongs to no one, pulled out of the realm of freedom, the realm in which we all ought to live.
‘Give it a rest!’ someone shouted from an upper floor.
Rolfa smiled, and raised her voice. You’ll remember this, too, the smile said.
‘Qu-iet!’ howled someone else.
Milena went to the window to yell at all of them, all of the people who had blocked the music in Rolfa and in themselves and in her.
‘Someone’s dying!’ Milena wailed. For her, it was true.
Rolfa held up her hands and through some miracle of air and spittle reproduced the sound of applause, the sound of justice. And suddenly they were both in Rolfa’s street, at night, by a park, and the trees were applauding too with their leaves. Milena was wearing the indigent gloves. Rolfa, covered in fur again, hugged her and held her. For some reason, it was snowing. Snow fell like stars. When did it snow?
Milena looked at the park in the snow and knew it was the London of the future. This was the crescent outside Rolfa’s house, years after both of them were gone. This was the London in which Milena no longer lived, in which there was no Rolfa to hold her, in which Milena had no flesh to be held.
It was cold this future and she haunted it as a ghost. There were bootmarks in the snow, but no one walking. There were lights floating in the sky.
Did it matter that she no longer existed? Did this eternity stretching after her weigh any more heavily than the moments in the garden? The future was utterly without nostalgia or understanding, as cruel and new as a child.
I’m going to faint, thought Milena. She was cold, shivering. This is ridiculous: real people don’t faint. Neither do ghosts.
But she felt herself slip away anyway. The moon of the future swam in the sky and Milena let herself fall. She felt herself fall, and was lifted up. For a moment, she thought she was in Rolfa’s arms.
Time was a dream. The helicopters came again, roaring over the tops of the trees, tormenting them, tearing leaves from the branches, sending flurries through the snow. It was not Rolfa, but Mike Stone who was carrying her now, running with her as he had with Milton the Minister, as if this were her wedding again. People rushed to help him lower Milena to the floor, and from out of pouches in his trousers Mike took a pulse injector and clips. He put them into Milena’s ears and arms.
This is not the future or the past. This is my Now, she realised, and Now is always timeless.
She thought the Reading Room was the grass of the park in Rolfa’s street. She wished with all her heart it was that crescent of grass and trees and that she would wake up in the morning in her own room to find that Rolfa was going to live with her.
Milena felt the grass of her sixteenth summer press against her cheek. She wanted to put the very tips of her fingers in Rolfa’s hand. She couldn’t find it, any of it.
The grass was gone, and the park, and the infinitude of different Milenas for all her different Nows. The Milena who was remembering felt herself reunited with the Milena who was still alive.
She felt herself lying on the floor of the Consensus. She could feel her thoughts surge and fail. Mike Stone was leaning over her and there was a pulse injector in her ear. She felt herself slip down and away and then return, like the lapping of waves on a little lake. The Reading was over. She was dying.
Had Rolfa kissed the top of her head? Had she run her fingers through Milena’s hair?
The answer was yes.
What, Milena wondered, what happens next’
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
The Third Book
(A Low Comedy)
The Consensus of Central London rose up as a fleshy forest over Marsham Street. It turned sunlight into sugar and elements of the soil into protein. Sap was pumped through its heart, the Crown, which directed all of its unconscious mechanisms of tending — the circulation of oxygen and sugar, the elimination of wastes, the patrolling of its immune system. It was also there, in the Crown, that the synthesis of memory and thought took place. Out of the Crown, attached by roots, grew clumps of tissue, nestled together in the earth like potatoes. Crabs the size of hands protected the tubers, attacking animal or insect invaders. Doctors inspected the flesh, crouching through brick corridors like coal miners.