A bottle of pepper spray in my camera bag, which the security guard had dismissed as a roll of film (ridiculous; we are in a digital age, go back to school, fool!). I looked around, but Byron wasn’t there, of course she wasn’t. Gauguin knows she’s coming, security is tight (but I got in), she wouldn’t be able to get past the door (yet here I am and where was security?), probably already been caught in fact (hey Macarena!) and
I begin to relax.
A quick inventory of the room.
Amplifiers; changing displays indicating the peak sound being pumped through the system from the string quartet
radio racks, currently muted, for when speeches begin
sloppy — hubs for the security men’s radio system too, should definitely be guarded, peculiar that they’re not
dimmer racks and cables, great fat red ends, fat copper in black tubes, it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s
two photos, pinned to the wall
I’m so eager for everything to be fine, I almost miss them.
A woman, her face turned down and to the side, as if caught in a lie. The sun behind her, filling her curling dark hair with reddish cobwebs. Another, she looks direct to camera, but doesn’t seem to see it, attention focused on something else, and that was San Francisco, I recognise the internet café behind — had Byron followed me, or was the photo from another, more trusting time?
The woman, asleep in a chair. Or at least, probably asleep, hopefully asleep, two electrodes pushed through her skull, a pair of goggles round her neck, ready to be worn. A sensor taped to her tongue, she looks like the dead, all that technology, none that I can remember
Hey Macarena!
none that I choose to remember, perhaps
she is me.
And beneath the photos, messages, written in a familiar hand, stuck up on Post-it notes.
SHE IS REAL
SHE IS _WHY
SHE WILL COME
Movement behind me, and at once I turned, raising the pepper spray, cameras swinging around my neck, bruising my belly as they bounced.
The knife bumped on a camera, but then slipped on by, carried by the momentum of the woman who used it. As it passed between the floating ribs on my right side, it was bigger than all the world. She held me up as I began to fall, one hand across my back, the other still supporting me by the knife stuck through my body.
“Is it you?” she asked. “Is it you?”
Not as much blood as I’d thought — not yet — not with the knife still in me, a plug blocking the flow. I looked up into Byron’s face, and she’d chosen a very different path from mine. She’d shaved her head, glued a skullcap on, then a wig of black hair. She wore a grey dress, high-collared and swathed with a black shawl, pinned with a butterfly brooch. A security pass bounced around her neck, declaring her to be press, and a long Italian name that blurred as I tried to focus on it. She wore a green wristband to give her all-area access and — here I would have laughed, if the blood wasn’t seeping from my body — had glued on an extra piece of latex to the bridge of her nose, changing it into a Roman beak, and now she reached into her mouth and removed two little pieces of sponge, deflating her cheeks to their natural dimensions, and discarding them, held my hand tight again and inspected the place where the knife was stuck in my chest.
“It is you,” she breathed, but I couldn’t answer, and she pulled off her shawl and wrapped it tight around the wound, pressing down hard, though I wasn’t at the point where I could process pain. “I wondered if you would come.”
I tried to speak.
Nothing came out. Just back-of-the-throat noises, like an engine trying to start, no oil in the system, a pipe broken somewhere, nasty stain on the tarmac, someone will have to clean that.
“Stay down,” she said, “stay hidden. This will be over soon.”
Her right hand, red with my blood, brushed the side of my face. Maternal. Caring, perhaps. A kind of love.
But she had business to be doing, and I screamed for Gauguin (no sound came) and I screamed for Luca (who didn’t hear) and I screamed stop it, stop it, for God’s sake stop it and nothing stopped and I made no sound.
She turned her back on me. Walked to a little mixing desk, knobs and faders, buttons and dials, a microphone plugged in for announcements and emergencies. Turned it on. Pulled down the sound of music, though the buzz of conversation in the ballroom below didn’t falter. Cleared her throat.
And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,
And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal.
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord.
So saying, she put the microphone down, and I found that I was shaking to hear her speak, and the silence was busy in the hall below as the killing began.
Chapter 92
For a moment, I’d hoped I was wrong, and that Byron would not come to Venice.
Fat chance of that.
How do you stop a madman in the street?
How do you contain a lone wolf?
Byron speaks, and the world goes mad, and she presses her shawl into my wound and whispers, “I’ll find you,” and is gone.
Bleeding out.
(Dying.)
Facts and figures, to pass the time.
In the USA nearly one in five boys and one in eleven high-school girls were reported to have received an attention deficit disorder diagnosis: 6.5 million children
of those, 3.5 million on medication
(Someone screaming below, shush now)
Said the Scientologists of psychiatrists: “[they commit] extortion, mayhem and murder.”
Quoth the Anderson Report, conducted by the state of Victoria into the Church of Scientology: “Scientology is evil, its techniques evil, its practice a serious threat to the community, medically, morally and socially.”
(Blood heading towards the edge of the balcony — funny that, implies a slope, flowing not pooling; subsidence?)
Oxygen use in the body: liver 20.4 per cent, brain 18.4 per cent, heart 11.6 per cent.
Liver functions: breakdown of insulin, breakdown of toxins, conversion of ammonia to urea, production of coagulation factors, protein metabolism, lipid metabolism, amino acid synthesis, platelet regulation, production of growth factors, storage of vitamins, production of albumin, production of… production of…
(something smashing, the music has stopped and so has the conversation but funny, would have expected more really)
Diabetes: suspected long before its formal identification and discovery by the usual suspects of historical medicine, from Galen through to Avicenna. 1910 Sir Edward Albert Sharpey-Schafer isolates insulin
(crawling. Very slow, pushing a fingertip at a time towards the balcony ignore the pain ignore the knife, don’t touch the knife the knife is what’s keeping you alive, keeping the blood from spilling everywhere crawling)
Elliott Joslin publishes the first texts on treatment
however not before some interesting experiments on dogs
remove the pancreas observe the effects
which dogs live
which dogs die
how
why
(crawling, a smear of blood behind me, my clothes glued to my back, silent below now, too silent, even the sobbing has stopped)
Frederick Banting, Charles Best, J. J. R. Macleod, James Collip, purification of insulin for use in humans, only two of them got the Nobel Prize though must have caused a stir back at the office