The Blasphemer: A Novel (38 page)

‘You remembered. MIT … I’m here because of the lemur. Have you been reading about it?’

‘The one with the feathers?’

‘We don’t know that’s what they are yet. I’m with a film crew. We’re going to include it in the next series of
The Selfish Planet
. I remember you said you watched it …I was thinking more about how the lemur was a perfect example of random mutation as an explanation of evolution. I’m supposed to be meeting the crew there in an hour so I’d better …’ He stood up. ‘Do you fancy coming along?’

‘I can’t. I’ve got a tutorial at ten … Do you have a card?’

Daniel opened his wallet and handed over his card.

In a fine, rolling hand, Susie wrote her number down on a napkin. ‘Here. Any time … You know I found out I was pregnant after the crash?’

‘No, I.. .’

‘It didn’t go to term.’ Daniel sat down again and placed his hand on top of Susie’s across the table. She held it firmly. ‘It was a boy.’ She looked awkward. The mention of the baby had paralysed her. Daniel, feeling the contagion of her awkwardness, removed his hand and sipped his coffee.

The Wildlife Foundation, a zoo in all but name, was in Dorchester, a forty-minute drive away. The director, a craggy-faced man in his fifties, was waiting to greet him: he wanted to lower Daniel’s expectations before he saw the baby lemur. ‘The tabloids have gotten a little carried away,’ he said as he walked alongside Daniel and passed him the mask and smock he would have to wear.

The baby lemur was in an incubator. Daniel peered in. It was no
more than ten inches long and if it had feathers it was not obvious where they were. Though only a few weeks old, the baby resembled the adult it would grow into. The palms on its forelimbs were padded with soft, leathery skin and its narrow face was pale with black lozenge-shaped patches around its eyes and a vulpine muzzle. It had yet to grow its bushy, black-and-white-ringed tail but its underbelly was grey and white. Its slender fingers had flat, humanlike nails and its eyes were bright orange. The director rolled the lemur on to its front and pointed at two small, feathery clumps of hair on its back. Daniel cocked his head to one side and said, ‘I see what you mean.’

‘We’re calling him Red Sox. The papers got that right.’

As the baby was in intensive care, the cameras were not allowed to film him directly. They had to do it from the next room, through a window. Daniel did the piece to camera he had prepared from there, too. The producer was happy after three takes and said there was no need for him to hang around if he didn’t want to – they were going to interview one of the keepers who had witnessed the birth and then do some general shots of the zoo. Daniel decided to stick around for half an hour in case he was needed again; half an hour in which he could take in the rest of the site. He watched a tiger pacing up and down neurotically in its cage before making his way to the aquarium.

The vivid electric yellows, blues and oranges of the tropical fish he found beautiful but haunting. As he stood contemplating them, time went into reverse and he was back in the Pacific Ocean once more. A memory ripped through his thoughts like tearing metal. It was of the plane bucking: its death throws. He could smell electrical burn, acrid like battery acid, and could see a film of smoke filling the cabin. The seaplane, he remembered, accelerated as it spiralled towards the water, the horizon appearing at an angle of forty-five degrees. Nancy had extracted her hand from his, lowered her head down to her knees and cupped the back of her head with both hands.

Who had sent Nancy those flowers?

As he stared into the tank, Daniel replayed another fragmented
memory: at one point the plane had gone into a nosedive and he had known then that he was about to die, yet part of him had clung to the hope that he wouldn’t, that Nancy and he would escape. Part of him, the small, non-scientific part, still believed he was immune to death. The flight attendant’s pidgin English filled his head: ‘… You also remove high-heel shoe, take off you glasses and pour drink into the seatback pocket. Place you life jacket over head but not to inflate until ready to leave aircraft. When you hear the command “Brace! Brace!” we want you assume brace position, with head on you knees, feet tuck underneath and hands over you heads.’

We get through this together.

Daniel pressed his forehead against the cold glass and closed his eyes. He could see the flight attendant demonstrating the brace position as he moved unsteadily through the cabin, his hands shaking. He had made all the passengers demonstrate it in turn. He pushed Nancy’s head down lower. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now check you seat belts are tight and you seats are in upright position. Thank you.’ He repeated the emergency procedure in Spanish. Daniel remembered thinking:
He must be as scared as we are, but he is showing courage. He is being a man. He is toughing it out
.

Feeling short of breath, Daniel staggered, unbuttoned his jacket and removed his scarf.

‘You OK, honey?’

A doughy, silver-haired woman in a motorized wheelchair was staring up at him. Attached to the arms of the chair were carrier bags bulging with groceries.

‘Just a bit hot.’

‘You’re English?’

‘Yes.’

‘You sure you’re OK, honey? You look like you could do with a glass of water.’

‘I need some fresh air.’

The woman smiled, pressed a lever on the arm of her wheelchair and, with an electric sigh, drove off around the next corner. Daniel walked in the opposite direction and came to an abrupt halt as he found himself looking into the bulging, heavy-lidded eyes of a
giant leatherback turtle. It was as long as a man and was floating directly in front of him, as if suspended in air. Daniel thought it might be dead, until it opened and closed its beak. Hello. Transfixed by the long digits fused through its flippers, he brought his hand slowly up and pressed it against the glass. The turtle did not move. It was reading his mind, an impression prompted by a cold sensation at the back of his skull. Daniel waved the out-held hand slowly from side to side. With a powerful wing-like beat of its flippers the turtle swam off, giving a brief view of the thick, oily skin on its heart-shaped shell before becoming an indistinct shadow in the murky water at the back of the tank.

Daniel groaned. He was feeling feverish and achy. This place, this turtle, these memories – he needed to get away from them. With no recollection of how he got there, he found himself sitting in the back seat of a taxi. A numbness had sluiced over him. He doubletapped his watch face and asked the driver to take him back to his hotel. As they drove along the Massachusetts Turnpike he gazed up at a vast reproduction of a Stanley Spencer painting on Huntingdon Avenue. It was on a hoarding advertising an exhibition of First World War artists at the Museum of Fine Art. He asked the driver to drop him there instead.

With its air-conditioned coolness and its tasteful gloom – small, evenly spaced pools of illumination – the gallery had an atmosphere similar to the cathedral. Another place of worship. The altar of art. Admission seventeen dollars. He jogged up the marble stairs that led to the rotunda, saw a sign for the First World War exhibition and cut across a room dedicated to Ger man Expressionism. When he reached the room where the temporary collections were exhibited, he felt dizzy and so lethargic he could barely pull open the heavy double doors with their rubber sound-proofing seals.

The oil paintings here struck him as being improbably bright and colourful, in contrast to the black and white images normally associated with the trenches. Green swirling gas in thick impasto paint. Golden starbursts in night skies, defying the patina of age. Barbed wire gleaming under Verey lights as humpbacked howitzers
emitted lemon flashes from their great barrels. Some of the paintings were quite abstract and naive, influenced, so Daniel read on the introductory panel, by the Vorticist movement – patterns of duckboards and helmets with cigarette smoke rising from beneath them; ghostly chiaroscuro figures in gas masks walking across ploughed fields carpeted with the dead; huddled groups of greatcoats reduced to solid blocks of colour in dark, cratered landscapes. As Daniel strolled between them he clasped his hands behind his back and nodded to himself. One sketch showed a dog-toothed trench lip disgorging men along its length. Some were being hurled up like foamy waves breaking backwards on to a black ocean. There was a cartoonish quality to the sketches. Something almost childlike. Explosives reduced to fireworks. Under one of the Paul Nash paintings – a black landscape of splintered tree stumps – Daniel read a letter the artist had written to his wife in November 1917. His eyes flitted over it and fixed on one word. It was a word that Hamdi had used only days earlier.

No glimmer of God’s hand is seen. Sunset and sunrise are blasphemous, they are mockeries to man; only the black rain out of the bruised and swollen clouds or through the bitter black of night is fit atmosphere in such a land. The rain drives on, the stinking mud becomes more evilly yellow, the shell holes fill up with green white water, the road and tracks are covered in inches of slime, the black dying trees ooze and sweat and the shells never cease.

He looked at the painting again. It was a good description. Nash was as good with words as with paint. Perhaps only words could do the hellishness justice, Daniel thought. He remembered the Siegfried Sassoon poem his father had quoted: ‘I died in hell – (They called it Passchendaele).’ These words now felt sodden and black with meaning. Daniel could feel their weight. Hell. Passchendaele. Blasphemy. It was as if the trenches were entering his own memory; his own consciousness. They were squatting over him, giving him a terrible sense of foreboding, evoking words that had not held meaning for him since he had abandoned them as a child. There was evil here. This was a godless landscape. A
blasphemous place. His great-grandfather had been here, in this mud. He looked again at the paintings and realized these were visions of hell far more nightmarish than any drawn by Hieronymus Bosch. This was not some imagined hell. This was man-made. A hell on earth. A hell with dark fires. He could see his own features reflected in the glass and it was as if the painting was coming to life. It was also producing a sense memory, as the aquarium had done; a feeling of being back in the plane as it was falling to earth. He had been certain then that he was about to die and the imminent prospect of his death, of the nothingness it represented, the hell of not being, terrified him.

Swaying in the cool shadows of the gallery, Daniel found himself in mortal terror once more. The walls of the gallery were closing in. A ball of panic ripped upwards through his diaphragm and into his chest. All around him there was mud, a roiling sea of glutinous, gas-poisoned black. Feeling nauseous and claustrophobic, he backed away from the paintings, attracting the attention of a man with collar-length white hair and a spotted bowtie. A schoolgirl with a brace stared at him, too, smiling at first, then looking alarmed. He wanted to create distance between himself and them. He ran down the steps and out of the main doors, across the grass and left on to Huntingdon. He was sprinting now, keeping pace with a tram trundling along in parallel to the road. At the Symphony Hall, he turned left again in the direction of the Charles River and the comforting embrace of the MIT buildings on the far bank. Ignoring the red hand sign on the pedestrian crossing, he found himself on the Harvard Bridge. He was sweating and when he reached the middle he stopped, bent double and gulped mouthfuls of air. Though a pewter ceiling of cloud was pressing down on him, he could still make out his shadow in the water. As he looked down with vertiginous disgust at the inky, churning liquid below, he felt off balance and cursed his own weakness in the gallery, his childishness, his cowardice.

The river was a broad scar across the city and, judging by the thick, melting folds on its glassy surface, its current was strong. There were black-feathered coots with red eyes and white bills
bobbing on the surface. They were causing ripples. The water was absorbing the light, swallowing it up in its black dimples and whirlpools. He saw what looked like a sheet of dark metal, a shell perhaps, a leatherback. It was gone. Stupid, stupid, stupid. You don’t get leatherbacks in rivers.

He understood this river. He understood why it was here and how it worked. Though it began inland, it was near to the point at which it joined the sea and was almost tidal, the point at which the water began to turn, lost in indecision, running back on itself. As a student he had watched the rowing teams train here, keeping track of the mileage between the bridges. He looked down now and saw a metal plaque commemorating an escape Houdini performed off the bridge in 1908. Perhaps Daniel could escape death, too. He’d done it once, on the plane. It wasn’t so far down, twenty or thirty feet. He held his hand out in front of him and contemplated it.

A low fog was hugging the river. The wrought iron felt cold against his legs and hands as he climbed over the side of the bridge. He remained staring directly in front of him, gently buffeted by the breeze, postponing the moment when he would look down. When he did, he no longer felt afraid. On the contrary, he had an urge to swim that he had not felt since the crash. He began to strip.

For the fifth time that afternoon, Nancy’s mobile rang. When she saw Tom’s name flashing up on the caller ID, for the fifth time she let it go to voicemail. He had left six messages on her home answerphone the night before, and she had not opened the four new emails from him in her inbox. This had been going on for three days, since she told him she couldn’t see him again, that it had been a mistake. Now she was feeling unnerved. Another text came through. ‘You there? Why won’t you answer my calls? Tom xx.’

She replied to this one: ‘
PLEASE STOP THIS TOM. YOU ARE MAKING ME UNCOMFORTABLE
.’

The text came back almost instantly. ‘Sorry, sorry. Can’t we at least talk?’

Nancy replied: ‘
I DON’T NEED THIS RIGHT NOW
.’

She didn’t need it. She had much on her mind. Daniel was due back from the States the morning after next and was planning to stay the night, possibly several nights, with Bruce. This would take some explaining to Martha, who was in a strange mood anyway. She had been sulking since their lunch at Tom’s, that and giving Nancy knowing looks, as if she had worked out what Tom had been up to.