Something pulls across me like a hawser, side to side, plucking me like some thick and fleshy string set vibrating, forcing my back bowing up off the bed, jangling every nerve and fibre of my being before releasing me, letting me fall back with relief.
Something resumes, some regularity returns to matters, like a stopped engine at last coughing hesitantly back into life. I think. I don’t know. I’m still sort of drifting, like a boat at a quayside, half disconnected, just one painter securing it, letting it move and wheel and jerk according to the vagaries of tides, currents and winds. It would not take much of a tug to separate me altogether from this mooring, but I am lucky and it does not happen.
Feeling myself drift into a sort of warm fog-bank, a pocket of peace, I bump against the pier again and am secured once more.
And so here I lie, back in my own bed in my own room, brought back to life and grateful for that, but lying here in dread, for I think I have seen what happens next, I believe that I know what is coming.
I cannot get away. I am too exhausted, too weak, too sedated, too disabled by all that has passed to be able to get up and go or even sit up and beg. I try to speak, to tell the staff what I fear, what I have seen happening, but I seem to have lost the words. I can formulate the sentences in my head and I think I am speaking them in my own language inside my head well enough and perfectly coherently when I speak my own language out loud, even though I know nobody will understand, but the translation into the language spoken here, by these nurses and doctors and cleaners and other patients… that seems to have gone from me. I speak gibberish no matter what I try to say, and anyway talk so softly that I think they’d struggle to hear even if I was enunciating with exemplary clarity.
So here I lie, seeing through the day and the hazy sweep of the sun’s slow track across the sky outside and the sheltering blinds between us, waiting for darkness, waiting for night, wondering if it will be this night and knowing that it will be, and the dark-dressed man will come for me before the morning.
I feel tears well in my eyes and trickle gently down my cheeks, intercepted and guttered only when they meet one of the various tubes and pipes and wires that join me to the various pieces of medical equipment clustered quietly around me like mourners around somebody already dead.
No wonder I’ve been losing track of myself. I’m sitting at a little café a short way from the railway station, back to the wall, nursing an Americano and watching the boats stream up and down the Grand Canal. Just along the broad quayside, a line of tourists stand with their luggage waiting to pick up water taxis. At the next table two Australian guys are arguing about whether it’s espresso or expresso.
“Look, for Christ’s sake, it’s there in black and white.”
“That could be a misprint, man, like Chinese instructions. You don’t know.”
I am still toying with my new-found senses. Sensibilities, even. I have done no more leaping into other people’s brains, whether Concern or civilian. I seem to have a sort of vague spotter sense, which is quite useful. I can sense that the baffled, disordered, demoralised intervention teams are still milling about the Palazzo Chirezzia, their members collecting themselves, tending to their wounded, making their excuses to each other and themselves, still not entirely able to understand what really happened, and waiting for back-up and assistance to arrive.
This is all happening just a few hundred metres away from where I’m sitting. I am ready to move quickly away if I need to, but for now I’m happy that I can see them without them seeing me. Another sense: they give the impression of deaf people talking loudly amongst themselves and not realising that they are doing so, while I am sitting here perfectly silent. I would be nervous about putting it to the test – however, I’m oddly but completely confident that a spotter could pass me by right here, a metre or two away, and have no idea that somebody capable of transitioning was sitting watching them. And of course they have no idea what I look like now.
I have been able to take more control of this glass-walls, future-paths sense. At the moment it is telling me that nothing especially threatening is imminent. Looking backwards is possible too, though. It’s like I can see down corridors in my head, in my memory, and as though there is a near-infinite series of doors angled partially to face me as I look down from one end of any particular corridor, so that by looking closely and then zooming in on each one I can see what happened during different transitions I once made. There is an uncanny impression that this is at once one corridor and many, that it leads off in an explosion of different directions scattered vertically and horizontally and in dimensions that I would struggle to put a name to, but, despite this, my mind seems able to cope with the experience.
Here is the time just passed when I bamboozled the whole of not just one conventionally configured but high-skill-and-experience- level Concern intervention team, but two (and more like three, if you count the people watching the perimeter), all at the Palazzo Chirezzia, barely an hour ago.
Here is the time I sat in a room with somebody I thought I loved and watched transfixed as her hand moved through a candle flame like silk.
This is me chasing two fucked-up kids though a Parisian sink estate and watching them die… and again, except differently.
Here is the time I blew that musician’s brains out while he sat in his preposterously blinged half-track.
Look, observe how I save a young man from certain death.
Here, see how I stare at Madame d’Ortolan’s tits, zitted with diamonds.
And this is me with my pals walking down a street and stopping by a fat old geezer sunbathing in his postage-stamp-size front garden, one sunny day, long ago.
I sit, indulging myself in my own internal slide show, amused as all hell.
I’ve let my Americano grow cold. The Grand Canal still froths with boats passing to and fro. The arguing Aussies are gone. Confusion tempered by affronted professional pride still reigns at the Palazzo Chirezzia. And there is a little fear there, too, because their back-up has started to arrive at last and they’ve heard that Madame d’Ortolan is also on her way, with questions.
A warm wind scented with tobacco smoke and diesel exhaust stirs me from my reverie, back to the present and the insistent reality of the here and now.
Indeed; all this historical stuff is highly intriguing, but there is the small matter of my being hunted with pretty much every resource the Concern is able to bring to bear. That needs attending to. Beyond that, the coup that Madame d’Ortolan would appear to be trying to mount is either proceeding or not. I have already done what I can in that regard. I can only hope that my attempts to alert Mrs M to the targets I’d been sent after worked, and they have been warned and put themselves safe.
My present embodiment came complete with a mobile phone. I try calling my new friend Ade, on his way here with a cunningly worked container full of septus, but his mobile telephone is switched off and his office tells me that he is away, expected back tomorrow sometime. I look at the timepiece wrapped round my wrist. The smaller but more important hand points to the two parallel lines just off the vertical, to the left. Eleven. Adrian said that he should be here by four in the afternoon.
We are to meet at the Quadri on the Piazza San Marco, safely surrounded by the tourist throng.
It seems I have to wait.
I pay, then go for a walk, crossing the Grand Canal by the Scalzi bridge and coming back the same way half an hour later – an elegantly curved new one further up is only a week or two from being opened. I wander into the station, sit down in the café and order another Americano, the better to sip slowly. I have a faint desire to count how many platforms there are in the station, but it is residual, easily ignored. The phone rings a few times and its screen shows me the faces of the people calling: Annata, Claudio, Ehno. I don’t answer.