Ink (15 page)

hey say he was in Dresden, my brother. They say he was in Dresden when v’ the Allied firebombs fell. They say he was in Dresden and Koln, and Düsseldorf and Hamburg. They say he was in London during the Blitz, jumping from rooftop to rooftop—a latter-day Spring-Heeled Jack—and every time his jackboots touched a house, every time he leapt again out of his crouch, that house was blasted with a crack of thunder and abloom of flame. They say he was in New York when the first of Von Braun's newborns ripped a streak of fire down Wall Street.

In Dresden, London and New York the bombs followed him, as if he was their golden harbinger of death. Or as if, perhaps, it was my brother that they sought to blast and not the families huddled in coal cellars, factory-worker women with their children and grandparents, or businessmen standing at windows twenty stories high, watching in horror as the light came searing through the darkness, closer, closer. They say they saw him walk out of the firestorms inviolate, this spirit of all Blitzes, created in destruction. They say he was in Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Wherever there was fire, in those days, they say they saw my brother, Johann von Strann—Jack Flash as the English called him—übermensch, avatar, moonchild. But then it was in fire that he forged himself, in blood and fire.

He wanted to become a hero of the most ancient sort, a god summoned into the body of a man. Instead he was a man caught in the dreams of God.

In Dresden, Florence on the Elbe as they called it for its architecture of rococo and baroque, the capital of Saxony, a god of fire can only feel at home. That city
of Dresden china, fired in kilns, dark clay transformed in the furnace into fine, white porcelain. A port city of heavy industry, of foundries and forges, iron and carbon melded into steel for manufacturing. My brother often talked of one of his heroes, Michael Bakunin, holding the city after it rebelled, after it rose up and threw the king of Saxony out for rejecting the constitution of the German Empire. He talked of Bakunin and his army of factory workers taking art treasures from the city's museums and placing them on the barricades to discourage Prussian troops from shooting. Bakunin and his rebels fighting on the streets for four days while the shopkeepers, the petty bourgeois shopkeepers, formed community guards supporting the troops against the insurrectionists.

You do have this history in your world, I hope? No, no, I'm sure you do. You still remember a century of swastikas and sickles, the bullet years that shot from Bosnia to Bosnia, years when the Great Game became deadly serious and great powers, great ideas, moved in dark floods across the world, impervious to all boundaries, moral or geographic. The world after this, believe me, is not so very different. We try to change it, but sometimes it seems we only change ourselves.

Prometheus changed the world. So much so that Prometheus, bringer of fire, is bound in a relief sculpture on the wall of Dresden's Katholische Hofkirche. A city such as Dresden, after all, has much to thank that thief of fire for, who gave us the means to build our modern world. Poets and musicians who visited Dresden from all over Europe left and wrote great masterworks extolling that titan figure of enlightenment. Romance and Reason, in the figure of Prometheus, are fused like iron and carbon in the steel with which we make our ships and cars, our tanks and guns; and so the two implacably opposed ideals of Western thought found something they could share in that tragic, heroic figure of Prometheus bound, in chains, in statues cast in bronze, in lyric verse, in symphonies of crystal sound, in stone relief… in Dresden.

One might almost imagine that it was this very idol of Zeus's hated enemy that brought the fire down from the skies. As if he sent his message down in thunderbolts: How dare you reverence that thief? If you're so grateful for his gift of fire, then let us see how grateful you can be; I'll give you fire in abundance.

There are no photographs of my brother, I believe, only stories; but the stories are the sort that never make it into official records. A silhouette walking unscathed from a building that's become a furnace. A figure crouched on a chimney breast, calling down the firestorm. War seems to generate such myths, and
some of them become famous: angels who appear to rout opposing forces; dead comrades who save a soldier's life only to disappear into the smoke they came from. But Jack Flash, that flame-haired angel of death in billowing army overcoat, whose growl was the thunder of approaching bombers, whose howl was the keen of diving V-3 rockets, and whose roar was the blast of buildings blown to kingdom come—I've heard the stories of him only here and there, from those who saw their loved ones die; and, always they have told the stories quietly and reluctantly, as if merely to speak of him might be to summon him again.

They are quite wrong, of course. My brother accepts no summonings, no invitations. He needs no persuasion.

Don comes back on the stage, quick-changed into the costume of a soldier, gleaning armor with a sharp and savage shine, holding a chain.

“M'sire Pierrot, we're back,” he says and, with a heave, hauls Jack onto the stage with him. He slams the Harlequin down on his knees.

“We've got the prey you sent us after. Hunted him like game, we did. But this one's bleedin tame.”

Don sneers, but there's confusion under his contempt.

“There weren't no flight, no fight, no face all white with fear. He didn't even go a little pale, just gives a grin, he does, holds up his hands for us to bind. He just gave in, says,
tie me up and run me in.
He waited for us, made it easy.”

Don looks away, unsettled, almost queasy, then speaks quietly.

“I was ashamed. I says to him I didn't wish him any ill. I only follow orders.”

He looks back at Pierrot.

“I says, this is my master's will.”

“But m'sire, those followers caught by your majesty and bound in manacles and leg irons—all of those locked in the cells—they've all got free. The chains just fell off their feet by themselves, and doors unlocked, flew open, with no outside help. They've just slipped out of their shackles and gone off to play like children in the fields, calling for Harlequin. This stranger's brought a bloomin host of miracles, m'sire. Whatever happens next, I'd keep an eye on him.”

I slip back to the sidelines of the action, watching Don and Joey, watching Jack, and watching Guy hidden behind the curtainry across from me, stroking
his beard and studying the Duke, the Princess Anaesthesia. The hall is dark and quiet now, the audience absorbed into the action. The Princess hushes the distraction of her consul's learned explication of the theme, the Harlequin as human spirit—

“Is that gin,” she says, “or whisky?”

The Duke laughs.

It's not the first time we've performed this sort of play hidden inside a play. It's not the first time that Monsieur Reynard's set out to sneak some secret message into our spectaculars, to use my song, Jack's dance, Don's pyrotechnics as the smoke and mirrors to disguise something a tad more strong; but it is the first time he's set out so blatantly subversive as to show a prince of hell his own defeat. I think we're lucky that the man sees little more than Jack prancing across the stage, the pantomime of Pantaloon and Scaramouche, the melodrama of Pierrot as he rants and raves. There was one gig we played one time in what, to all intents and purposes, was the Castile of a self-styled El Cid. We got through one Cervantes sketch, using the text performed by Lorca's La Barraca company, before we had to ride out hell for leather, Jack and Joey firing tommy guns from the wagon's running boards into the horde riding in hot pursuit. The London mob were just as bad in George's day, Guy said. They'd tear the theater down and have the owner on his knees apologizing, if they didn't like the play.

I guess we're all a little nervous then, but luckily, for now, the Duke looks mildly amused. The rest of them—the sleeping souls who think he built their whole eternity—just look confused.

“Unchain his hands. Now that we have him in the cage, he's not so quick he can escape my rage.”

Pierrot prowls.

“Well, stranger, I can see you're not unsuited to your goal of bedding every woman in this land. You're not an … unattractive man. From your wild hair”—he says, running his hand through Jack's blond shock to clench a fistful, snap his head back—“I should say you've never been a fighter. But it does set off your cheeks.”

He runs his fingers over skin, under the chin.

“So soft and pale, not weathered by the sun, but rather kept under the shade to help you in your aims. You hunt love as your game and use the beauty of your face as bait. Come, tell me all about your race.”

“I'm a lionskin hustler with a hand full of orgone.”

The Lizard Lounge is lush with a rogues’ gallery of regulars, and noisy with the chatter of the charming and the clink of cocktail glasses, a hustle that mutes as I walk in the door, a harlequin of death in motley longcoat.

“I'm the prodigal son of a nanotech kill zone.”

I check my chi-lance with the bouncer and step down into the parting crowd. A singer onstage is swinging through a loungecore retro medley, all crooning moodiness, and sultry, sullen style.

“I am the world's forbidden boy, the son you're searching to destroy.”

Quiffed-up and louche in crushed red velvet tux and frilly shirt, he snaps his fingers in a gunshot click at me and winks—hey.

“—
Forbidden boy… forbidden boy
…”

I flick a slack salute right back at him, and the moment of celebrity passes as people turn back to their friends, only a few furtive glances and nods in my direction breaking the discreet and diplomatic privacy offered by a den of such iniquity as this.

“And that was ‘Search and Destroy’ from our favorite Popster dedicated to the one and only Twentieth Century Boi. Oh yeah. If music be the food of love, there might well be some golden copulations on the streets tonight, mis amigos, because I can tell you that we have a veritable feast for your ears only, here on Radio Free Kentigern. So spark up another joint and crack open another beer, you high wasters of the city of dead dreams. Open your ears and listen to the crack of doom. Is that the coffee you can smell, or the shit hitting the fan? Yes sir, the rhythm of life is a hell of a beat, that beat is on the street and in the air, all round us, here and there and everywhere, because we
—
that's right
—
we are the one free station that they never stopped. This is the Voice of Reason calling out across the wilderness of the city, just a lone Coyote howling in the desert night up at a moon that's burning bright. And if you just tuned in, a little recap for you; we're talking about Jack Flash
—
not so much ‘Where are they now?’ as ‘How the hell did he come back from that?’ “