I take several more walks around the western end of Cannaregio and the nearer parts of Santa Croce and sit in several more cafés, none too far from the Palazzo Chirezzia, keeping the vague hubbub in internal view at all times. I sit quietly, seemingly watching people, actually probing further into my own pasts.
I am sitting in a little tourist café on the Fondamenta Venier near the Ponte Guglie when I am recognised. I prepare for the worst, but it is just somebody who knows this body, this face, enquiring why I’m not at work this afternoon. I look furtive and embarrassed and stick to vague generalities, mostly keeping my head down. The man nods, winks and taps me on the shoulder before he walks off. He thinks I am waiting for my lover. I drain my lemon tea and leave. I’ve had enough coffee.
I walk to another café, on the Rio Tera De La Madalena. A spritz this time, and some pasta. Staring at the spaghetti in my bowl, I drift into a strange trancelike state, at first wondering how many individual strands of the pasta lengths there might be in the bowl, then how many metres they would all add up to if laid end to end, then realising – as I toy with the pale, soft strands, draping them languorously, voluptuously over the tines of my fork – that their aggregated complexity is like the various entangled themes and episodes of my life: a swirling, hideously complicated, topologically tortuous, possibly knotted exposition of my very own reality lying dumped and glistening here in the moist coils lying on the plate before me, the sliced, abbreviated strands like the lives I have cut short, the glistening red of passata adding an appropriately gory sheathing.
How many lives, I reflect. How many elisions and abbreviations, how many slack abandonments. And how many lives and deaths of my own self-elisions, lives lived briefly in the head and body of another then skipped away from, blithely flicked like dust from a sleeve. Every mission a suicide mission, every transition a transition from life to death (and back again, but still; a death).
I drift, almost without meaning to, into my private viewing theatre of the past. Here I am toddling, saddled on my mother’s hip, dandled on my father’s knee, going to school, leaving home, arriving at UPT, making friends, going to classes, seeing Mrs M for the first time, studying, drinking, dancing, fucking, sitting exams, vacationing at home, fucking Mrs M for the first time, fucking Mrs M for the last time, standing drunk on a parapet in Aspherje looking out over the drop to the Great Park on the far side and wondering where she had gone, why she had abandoned me and whether I should just jump, and then falling backwards, too wasted to stand or balance or even cry. Here I am training to be a fucking multiversal ninja instead.
I can even see how I got where I am metaphysically, too, if you know what I mean; how and why I have changed and my abilities have developed over the last few months and weeks and days and even hours. I was always a natural, always a good learner, I always saw things clearly and I was just genetically predisposed to take transitioning and its associate skills to places they had never been before, with the right sort of push. It doesn’t even make me that special; untold trillions of similarly potentially gifted minds have lived and died on untold worlds all unknowing, their existences just never divined, never sniffed out by l’Expédience. And I can see how all those fraught, dangerous extra missions that Madame d’O sent me on were what made the difference, what proved me and tempered me and forced me to find and cultivate skills within that I did not know I had. I can see these traits, these attributes quite clearly in myself now and I suppose it is just possible that the right, properly attuned sort of person – a Mulverhill, a d’Ortolan – might have seen them or at least their potential in me years ago, if they were able to glance in at just the right angle.
I snap out of my reverie when the waiter nudges my seat – deliberately, probably – waking me from my dream.
The light has changed, the remnants of pasta are quite cold. I glance at my watch. It is fifteen past four o’clock. If I stick with this body then even if I try to run through the crowds, by the time I get to San Marco I’ll be half an hour late. Maybe I should take the next right and get to the Grand Canal, call a water taxi. Or maybe I should do the smart thing and just swap bodies with somebody already in San Marco. I close my eyes, prepare to do whatever it was that let me flit across to this body.
And can’t do it.
What? What’s going on?
I try again, but still nothing. It’s like I’m back to being blocked again. I’m stuck with this body.
I rise, throw down a handful of notes to cover the bill, start walking quickly in the direction of the San Marco and pull out the phone to call Adrian, wondering if I can still sense Concern people remotely like I could before, or if that’s gone too, then stop in mid-button press and mid-stride, stumbling to a halt as I realise, yes, I can still sense stuff and what I sense now is that a profound change has taken place within the Palazzo Chirezzia.
Something very strange and unpleasant has appeared in the small crowd of Concern people in and around the building, something bizarrely different, and not benign.
Who or what is that?
Whatever or whoever it is, I have the disturbing feeling that it’s what is blocking me, and also that as I look at it, it’s looking straight back at me, with a kind of predatory fascination.
“Hello. Who’s this?”
“Ade, it’s Fred, who you are coming to meet.”
“Yeah, Fred, right. Look, mate, I’m en route, amn’t I? Bit optimistic getting through the formalities and then from the old aeroporto to the city in forty-odd minutes. Sorry about that, but you know what it’s like. In a water taxi wotsit now, though, making maximum speed. Driver says we should be there in about ten, fifteen minutes. That be all right?”
“Yes. Adrian, please tell your driver to take you to the Rialto. I’ll meet you there. Not San Marco, I’m running late too and we should get to the Rialto at about the same time.”
“ Rialto, not San Marco. Gotcha. That’s the bridge, innit?”
“That’s right.”
“Okey-doke. See you there, mate.”
“Don’t display the box, though.”
“Eh? Oh. Okay.”
“Stand as close as you can to the very middle of the bridge, right at the top of the walking surface.”
“Got that. Middle, top.”
“What outer clothes are you wearing?”
“Blue jeans, white shirt, sort of, umm, orangey, beigey leather jacket.”
“I’ll find you.”
“Okay, then. See you there.”
The voice was sing-song. “Here-here, hyah-hyah!”
In the main study of the Palazzo Chirezzia, Bisquitine sat sprawled, unladylike, on a rather grand couch whose white covering had only recently been removed. She picked her nose, then inspected the finger involved, cross-eyed. Mrs Siankung sat to one side of her, one of her handlers to the other. Madame d’Ortolan sat on an ornate chair a couple of metres away across a Persian rug and a still sheet-covered occasional table. The other handlers stood behind the couch.
“Now, my dear,” Madame d’Ortolan said quietly, “be very sure about this. He’s still here, still in the city? Still in Venice. Are you certain?”
Bisquitine sucked in her lips, looked meaningfully up at the painted ceiling of the study and said, “These are my lawyers, called Gumsip and Slurridge, they’ll send you the bill and then talk of demurrage.” She smiled broadly, displaying white teeth with little bits of seaweed stuck between them. The body she’d found herself within when they had transitioned had been that of a smartly dressed young woman carrying a briefcase. She’d been standing on a pontoon waiting for a vaporetto when her own consciousness had been displaced by that of Bisquitine, who had immediately decided the weed growing on the side of the floating jetty looked edible; in fact, delicious.