‘She’s dead,’ said Frenkel. ‘Forget about her. Consider instead your own imminent extinction.’
I was pressed up against the glass now. The prospect of my own death did not bother me in the slightest. ‘You could have killed me at the hospital,’ I said.
He was holding the knife against my torso with his right hand and fiddling with the latch for the window with his left. ‘I rebuked Nik thoroughly for his failure, don’t worry.’
‘I don’t mean the red-haired man,’ I said, still trying to see past Frenkel to the body of my fiancée, humped upon the carpet like a small hill of flesh. ‘I mean when you visited me personally.’
‘I never visited you in hospital. What, you think I’m going to bring you a bundle of flowers?’
‘When you injected this thing in my neck.’ I wasn’t really concentrating on what I said. I was straining to look at Dora’s ample body, lying on the carpet. Not moving.
Frenkel had stopped fiddling with the latch. He was looking at me.
‘What did you say?’
‘You stuck me in the neck with this mosquito bite.’
‘I never did that,’ he said. He was speaking, all of a sudden, curiously slowly.
‘I remember it.’
‘You don’t remember,’ he insisted.
‘Again with your hypnotism nonsense? That tone of voice? I remember what I remember.’
He looked at me long and hard. Then he looked at the knife in his hand, turning the blade back and forth. ‘Believe me, I never came to your hospital. It was under Militia guard, you know. Nik failing in his bid to have you killed meant I’d missed my chance.’
‘You came,’ I told him, casting my mind back, ‘in the middle of the night, and you shone a torch in my face, and then you reached round and jabbed me in the neck.’
‘And how did I get past the guards?’
‘You told me you were invisible.’
‘I told you that!’ he said. It looked at though his face was about to crumple into anger, or perhaps even despair, but then, with that odd little knight’s move of the emotions that was characteristic of him, he suddenly burst out laughing. ‘I did tell you that! I told you I was invisible? Fuck, I was invisible!’
‘If you’d simply killed me there,’ I said, trying to access the full range of anguish I knew to be inside me, ‘then I wouldn’t have been able to lead you back to her now. I wish you’d done it then.’
Frenkel was looking at me in a very strange way. ‘It wasn’t the hospital, Konsty.’
‘But I remember you! You came in the middle of the night!’
‘Ah! Now couldn’t that have been a dream? Don’t you have dreams in the middle of the night, like everybody else?’
Of course it could have been a dream. ‘On the other hand,’ I said. ‘This lump is definitely in my neck. The mosquito definitely bit me. Even though the weather is much too cold for mosquitoes.’ Saying this brought the memory of Trofim’s huge bovine face swimming in front of me. I was back, momentarily, in the Moscow restaurant; back in the place where Frenkel had told me his whole peculiar abduction story. I blinked.
I blinked.
I was in a Kiev hotel room, and the woman I loved was lying dead upon the carpet, and the man who killed her was standing right in front of me. ‘You know what?’ he was saying. ‘It’s remarkable.’
‘What is this thing you’ve put in my neck, anyway?’
‘It’s very precious, old man. Miniature and powerful and made by no human hands.’
‘Still with this? Genuine alien technology? Give it up, Jan! You and I know better than that.’
‘I’m very struck that you remembered,’ he mused. ‘I suppose it’s the brain injury. Who knows what effect that would have?’
‘Mashed up,’ I said. ‘But I’m still capable of feeling grief.’ I wished that were true.
‘Konsty, you goat,’ he chortled. ‘I did jab you in the neck. I did it in a seedy little restaurant in Moscow, weeks ago. Weeks and weeks. Then I made you forget that I had done it. I made you forget, and you really had forgotten for good. And now here you are remembering! What I mean to say is: the memory has been jumbled up out of the ooze of your brain. You’ve relocated the experience in your memory. I was invisible to you when I jabbed you. So you’ve relocated the memory to the night-time, when people generally are invisible. And you’ve attached it to the hospital. It didn’t happen in the hospital.’
‘I remember that restaurant.’
‘Of course you do!’
‘Are you saying,’ I asked him, ‘that you hypnotised me? Are you a hypnotist?’ A thought occurred to me. ‘Did you hypnotise Trofim into seeing aliens? Little green men?’
‘No, no. Hypnotism is no good for those sorts of special effects. What hypnotism is good for is encouraging you not to notice things that are there.’
‘There’s no such thing as hypnotism,’ I said.
‘There’s no such thing as hypnotism,’ he agreed. ‘No magical trance state in the brain, no. It is nothing. Shall I tell you what it is? It is wholly a question of suggestibility. I’ll tell you something else. It works best with people who are conditioned to respect authority and who are used to doing what authority figures tell them. The Soviet Union is full of such people. Most of this century has been an experiment in creating an entire population of such people. Ex-army are best of all. When somebody with a suitably authoritative manner tells you something, you tend to believe it. Even if what they are telling you is: I am invisible, you cannot see me, you will not remember this.’
‘Nonsense!’
‘Isn’t it, though? Still, you didn’t see me, and didn’t remember. Until that explosion knocked your brain about.’
‘Mesmerism, though?’
‘It’s a technical discipline — one mastered by the KGB.’
‘KGB mind control?’ I scoffed.
‘It’s not mind control,’ he said. ‘It’s alternate realities. It’s tuning the brain into an alternate timeline. It’s purely technical — there’s a generator, and it superimposes a slightly different quantum reality upon the…’ He put a finger out and rotated an imaginary telephone dial in the air in front of him. ‘Etcetera and etcetera,’ he concluded, airily.
‘How very plausible,’ I observed, craning my neck to see Dora’s body.
‘It’s of especial use for a secret policeman,’ he explained. ‘I say, “You can’t see me,” and you can’t see me. The important thing is in making sure you can’t see certain things. Things,’ he added, slipping the knife into his pocket, and readying his stance, prior to pushing me, ‘like aliens.’
‘You want people not to see the aliens?’
‘People not seeing the aliens is precisely the point!’ This seemed to animate him tremendously. ‘You need to understand. Getting people to see the aliens is everything we have been working towards! People are distressingly good at not seeing things. Have you never had the experience of looking for a pen, and searching your desk, and looking everywhere, and only at the end realising that the pen was right there in front of your face the whole time?’
‘The elephant in the room,’ I said.
‘Exactly — that’s it exactly. We are trying to get people to see the fucking elephant.’
‘Not pen?’
‘The elephant is a better analogy.’
‘It is a bigger analogy, I suppose.’
He ignored this. ‘If things go to plan — and you have been a fucking pain in the arse about that, by the way — but if they go to plan then people will suddenly see the elephant that’s been in front of them all along. Like now: you’re chatting with me, and in doing so you’re entirely failing to see the big thing here, your own death. It’s right outside the window, there — look — huge, and you can’t even see it.’ And the strange thing is that there was something outside the window: vast, metal, oval or spherical; it occupied the sky; it hung in air. It was so huge you couldn’t miss it. You could not not see it. But I looked again, and understood that it was too huge to be seen. I couldn’t see anything: just sky, and the Kiev skyline. As if it might be: hold a coin-sized circle of glass, with its shine and its scratches, at arm’s length and you’ll see it. And hold it in front of your eye and you’ll see it. But your cornea, shining and scratched and closer than anything else, you cannot see. For a moment I saw the machine in the sky, and then I could only see sky.