Largely due to this scruple and perhaps also because I find it interesting and illuminating to discuss or at least attempt to discuss with my colleagues subjects such as those enumerated above, my code name within the department is The Philosopher.
I live in a Switzerland. The indefinite article is germane.
The particular Switzerland I live in is not even called Switzerland, but it is a recognised type, a place whose function and demeanour will be familiar to all those we number amongst the Aware. “Aware” means being au fait with the realities of the realities. “Aware” is a term applied to those who understand that we live not in one world – singular, settled and linear – but within a multitude of worlds, forever exponentially and explosively multiplying through time. More to the point, it applies to those who know how easy it is to travel between these disparate, ever-branching and unfolding and developing realities.
My home is an old lodge in the pines, on a ridge looking out over the small but sophisticated spa town of Flesse. Beyond the town, to the west, is high rolling ground, clothed with trees. To the east, behind my lodge, the hills rise in craggy increments, culminating in a serrated massif of mountains high enough to hold snow all the year. Sufficiently compact for one to take all of it in with a single glance from my terrace, Flesse nevertheless boasts an opera house, a railway station and junction, a medley of fascinating and eccentric shops, two superior hotels and a casino. When I am not on my travels, working for Madame d’Ortolan or some other member of l’Expédience – the Concern – I am here: reading in my library during wet weather, walking in the hills on the finer days and, in the evening, frequenting the hotels and the casino.
When I am, as it were, away, flitting between other worlds and other bodies, I still have a life here; a version of me remains, living on, inhabiting my house and my body and going through all the appropriate motions concomitant with existence, though by all accounts I am, in the shape of this residual self, quite astoundingly boring. According to my housekeeper and a few other people who have encountered me in this state, I never leave the house, I sleep a great deal, I will eat but not cook food for myself, I am reluctant to get dressed properly and I show no interest in music or conversation. Sometimes I try to read a book but sit staring at the same page for hours, either not really reading it or reading it over and over again. Art books, paintings and illustrations appear to pique my interest as much as anything, which is to say not very much at all, as will a television programme, though only if it is visually arresting. My conversation becomes monosyllabic. I seem happiest just sitting in the loggia or staring out of a window at the view.
I’m told that I appear drugged, or sedated, or as though I have had a stroke or been lobotomised. I maintain that I have met several allegedly normal persons and not a few students who exhibit a lesser degree of day-to-day animation – I exaggerate only slightly. However, I have no cause to complain. I don’t get into trouble while I’m away from myself (well, I don’t get into trouble here) and my appetite is not sufficient to cause me to gain weight. Perish the thought that I might go for a walk in the hills and fall off a cliff, or head for the casino and incur vast debts, or start an ill-advised affair while my back is turned on myself.
The rest of the time, though, I am entirely here, living fully, attention undivided, in this world, this reality, on the seemingly singular version of the Earth that calls itself Calbefraques. My name – in what is for me at least this base or root reality – is nothing like the ones I usually end up with when transitioning. Here I am called Temudjin Oh, a name of Eastern Asian origin. The Earth I came from is one of the many where the influence of the Mongolian Empires, especially in Europe, was more profound than the one in which you are reading these words.
I live an orderly, even quiet life, as entirely befits somebody who spends potentially highly disorienting amounts of time flitting between one world and the next, too often for the unfortunate purpose of killing people. Murder is not all that I do, however. Sometimes I will be a positive angel, a good fairy, an imp of the benign, showering some unfortunate who is down on their luck with money or granting them a commission or pointing them in the direction of somebody who might be able to help them. On occasion I do something almost unbearably banal, like trip somebody up in the street, or buy them a drink in a bar or – once – fall down in front of them while apparently suffering a fit.
That was one of the few times when I glimpsed what I might really have been doing. The young doctor – hurrying to an appointment but who nevertheless stopped to tend to me – was thereby prevented from entering a building that promptly collapsed in a great burst of dust and mortar and smashed wooden beams. Lying there in the gutter, seeing this, just a few dozen strides down the street, I feigned a partial recovery, thanked him and insisted that he hurry to treat the many wailing unfortunates injured by the tenement’s collapse. “No, thank you, sir,” he muttered, face grey, not just with dust. “I believe your fit saved my life.” He disappeared into the growing crowd while I sat there, trying not to get fallen over by those rushing to help or gawp.
I have no idea what that young fellow then went on to do or achieve. Something good, I trust.
Sometimes I simply introduce one person to another, or leave a particular book or pamphlet lying around for them to discover. Sometimes I just talk to them, generally encouraging them or mentioning a particular idea. I relish such roles, but they are not the ones I remember. They are certainly not the ones that keep me awake at night. Perhaps this is simply because geniality is conventionally a little insipid. Havoc rocks.
Most of my colleagues and superiors choose to live in cities. It is where we are most at home and where one can most easily make the transition from one reality to another. I do not pretend entirely to understand either the theories or the mechanics – spiritual mechanics, if you will, but still mechanics – behind such profoundly disconnected travellings, but I know a little regarding how these things work, some of it gleaned from others and some of it the result of simply working matters out for myself, practically, rather as I was able to work out what the true purpose of my appearing to faint in front of that young doctor was when the building he had been about to enter fell down.
Flitting from here to there to any-old-where requires a deep sense of place, and some sort of minimum level of societal complexity, it would seem. It is as a result of this that cities are by far the easiest places in which to slip between realities.
Aircraft work too, though, if one has the skill. Something about the concentration of people, I suppose. I sip my gin and tonic and look down at the clouds. The peaks of some of the higher mountains in the Norwegian coastal range protrude like jagged ice cubes floating in milk. I am taking a direct Great Circle route from London to Tokyo, cosseted within a giant aircraft coasting high above the weather where the sky is a deep, dark blue.
I may flit from here, within the plane. I may not. It is not an easy thing to do – many of us have wasted our drug by trying to effect transitions from remote places or – especially – moving start points. The way it appears to work is that if a successful flit cannot be made then nothing at all happens and one remains where one is. There are rumours, however, that people who have tried such manoeuvres have indeed ended up in another reality, but without the benefit of whatever mode of transport they left behind in the source reality being there to greet them in the target one. One pops into existence over open water if one flitted from a liner, splashing into an empty ocean to drown or be eaten by sharks, or – if the attempted transition is from an aircraft like this – one materialises in mid-air twelve thousand metres up with no air to breathe, a temperature of sixty below and a long way to fall. I have had successes flitting from aircraft, and failures; obviously failures where nothing happened.