The Ghosts of Altona (12 page)

‘Why do you call your glioma your “Explorer”?’ Lorentz asked.

‘Because that’s what he is. Multiform glioblastomas have these tentacle-like projections that stretch into your brain. Probe it. Every time he finds a new area, moves along a virgin axon and stimulates a fresh dendrite, I discover a new element of my mind, a new part of me. I’ve found myself singing in the most inappropriate of contexts, suddenly understanding questions I never thought to ask myself, smelling or hearing things that no one else can. For a while I even became an accomplished artist, something I could never do before. My Explorer lights up hidden treasures in my brain and, of course, he took me to see Death and showed me how I shouldn’t be afraid of it. People feel sorry for me because I’m going to die soon – but the truth is we’re all going to die. In the meantime, most people live afraid. I’m going to die unafraid. I know the rest of you understand.’

Fabel watched Ansgar for the rest of the session. He listened attentively but detachedly as others spoke, the constant, gentle smile never leaving the pale, intelligent face. He was, Fabel realized, fading out of life and was doing so in absolute contentment.

That, and Fabel’s own recollection of the wonder of a near-death experience, didn’t stop him feeling sad and having a sense of a young life wasted.

20

With most drugs, not that Zombie would have known much about any other drug, there was always a moment of contact, a sense of it hitting your system. Dimethyltryptamine wasn’t like that at all.
You
didn’t change. There was no sense of your body altering or responding to chemical changes; there was no sudden euphoria or opiate rush.

With DMT, it was the world, the universe that changed. Reality, such as it was, wasn’t replaced with hallucination, it simply became transparent, overlaid, enhanced. DMT didn’t offer an altered state of consciousness, it offered a
true
state of consciousness. Zombie had long ago realized that the drug opened up every level of reality. All of the contradictions and complications of the universe that everyone from philosophers to quantum physicists had sought to resolve suddenly became simple and visible. When he took DMT, spacetime was no longer an abstract theoretical concept, Zombie could
see
it, feel it, experience it.

It had been a challenging time for Zombie. So much planning, so many things to set in place. But vengeance was taking a form he had not expected and those who had remained unpunished for so long were now being brought to account.

He was in a place he needed to be. DMT responded to your state of mind. It gave you eyes to see all types of reality, to restore all types of memory, to fold time in on itself. But it also amplified whatever state of mind you were in. DMT brought wonders but, Zombie knew only too well, it could also bring horrors.

For Zombie, it opened the gates to exactly the same kind of experience he had had when he died.

He had, of course, read up on the literature. The theory was that the human pineal gland produced dimethyltryptamine naturally, and that it was responsible for the creation of dreams and the regulation of states of consciousness. The psychiatrist who had been giving him therapy had told him that many endocrinologists believed that, at the point of death, the pineal gland pumped an overdose of dimethyltryptamine into the body, offering a hallucinatory release from the reality of death, the rest of the endocrine system flooding the dying person’s body with endorphins, creating euphoria and eliminating fear. According to this theory, near-death experiences of hyper-senses, out-of-body perspectives, brilliant light and complete joy were all simply a form of super-dream created by pineal gland secretions and a storm of neuro-electrical activity.

But Zombie didn’t believe that. He didn’t believe that at all. It was one of the reasons he had stopped his sessions with the psychiatrist. That and the fact he had been pressuring Zombie to take part in his stupid study.

And anyway, the theory didn’t hold true with Zombie. For a start, he was dead. He had already crossed the threshold and bodily functions played no role in his consciousness any more. He was a ghost: a mind independent of a body but trapped in one. How it was that the physical taking of a drug caused such dramatic changes in that ghostly consciousness was something that Zombie chose not to question.

It was time for him to enter his vault.

His apartment had roll-down metal shutters on the windows, the type more common in southern Germany for shutting out the brightest of the midday sun. With the shutters closed, the apartment was in total darkness except for the single candle he had lit and which now sat on the floor. For Zombie, this was his vault, his mausoleum: a place he could pretend he had found the final rest so far denied him.

*

Zombie lay on his back, his head propped on the cushion and turned to the side so he could focus on the candle flame. There were noises from outside – the living going about empty daily rituals – and Zombie shut them out, focusing on the flame and nothing else.

But the sounds came back to him, except this time he was not annoyed. Instead of background noise, he suddenly found he could hear every level with absolute clarity. He heard a woman complaining to a friend about her job, about her boss. He heard a child whiningly beseeching its mother for another sweet. He heard two adolescents talk crudely about a girl they knew. He heard a thousand different conversations and listened to them all. But it wasn’t a sequence of discussions, they were all happening at the same moment and Zombie could attend to them all. It was a symphony of voices from across the city.

He listened and at the same time heard other layers of voices. The past and the present were overlapping and the long-dead of Hamburg told their story. It was an experience with DMT that Zombie was well acquainted with. For millennia, this had been exactly the reason tribes in the Amazon had taken ayahuasca: to connect with the dead and commune with their ancestors.

The universe was changing, opening up.

Zombie watched the candle flame. The blue, yellow and white in the flame became blues, yellows and whites. The simple form of the flame became a geometry of vast complexity and dimension. He could see the patterns of heat and light normally beyond the visible spectrum; he could also see the origin and the future of the flame, every moment of its existence overlaid in one.

The room broke into patterns of light and colour, kaleidoscope-like. He felt the presence of his father and his grandfather, and others beyond them. They were not there as distinguishable identities but as essences – elements of Zombie’s own being.

He was floating. He was now above the floor, and in an instant above his own body, above Hamburg, above the world. The universe erupted into colour and light.

The angels came for him. They had no form, or no fixed form, but were constantly vibrating, scintillating geometric shapes that continuously folded in on themselves, then folded out, like endless Möbius loops of energy. The angels, as always, had no faces, no features, no eyes, yet Zombie always knew their intentions. He knew without them having to speak that they were his guides. He also knew that, as with every experience like this, he must go where they led.

He moved through time and space without moving. He knew he was still in his apartment, but he was also, in the exact same moment, somewhere else, sometime else.

No
. He tried to tell the angels with his mind.
I don’t want to go there. I don’t want to be here
.

It was the Place of Broken Stones. The place he had died. The place he had been murdered. He begged speechlessly for the angels to take him away, not to put him through it all again, but they told him it was he who decided where they should be; he who had brought them to this place.

He saw the others.

Suddenly, he was back in his body, but not his body that lay on the floor of his apartment, not his fifteen-year-dead body. The body he now occupied was painfully, horribly alive. He was being held down on a stone in the Place of Broken Stones. It was happening again. The others were playing their parts again.

I don’t want to be here
, he screamed silently. He looked up into the night and saw deep, deep into the universe. The same folding, unfolding, eternal geometry filled the sky. He could still see that, but was in a mortal body.

This was where, when and how he had died.

The angels were gone.

Some presence, vast and dark and all-consuming had entered the Place of Broken Stones and the shockwave of its arrival had driven out the angels and any other being of light and energy. He felt it grow near, like a movement of chilled air.

She was above him now. The Silent Goddess. Death. She looked down on him with ice eyes and he was overwhelmed by her beauty and her fearsomeness. The Silent Goddess who takes all lives, from the smallest to the greatest. The Silent Goddess who had been part of the universe since its beginning: the destroyer of worlds and stars, the feeder on energy and life. She was naked and he felt desire mingle with his terror. She had come for him.

He felt the world beneath him shudder and crack asunder. Fire surged up through the spaces between the stones, burned his body.

She raised her sword above him and he could see every layer of the blade’s making, the folding of steel in on itself over and over, the metal furnace hot then plunged cold.

Please no!
He begged for the life he now felt once again, the sensations in his limbs, even the sweet pain.
I don’t want to be dead again
.

The sword arced diamond brilliant in the light of the flames, down and into his chest. He felt it all in unimaginable detail: he felt the blade shear through skin, bone and cartilage; sever artery, vein, capillary; slice through muscle fibre, nerve and organ. His agony was complete, filling every dimension of his being.

He tried to scream but it drowned in a gargle of frothing blood. The Silent Goddess smiled at him, malevolently, beautifully. She leaned down towards him and assumed normal human size. She pulled the blade from his chest and a new wave of pain surged through him. He felt her cold flesh against his cooling flesh as she lay on top of him. She kissed him, her lips and tongue crimsoned with his coughed-up blood.

Zombie died again. He died in the same way he had before. The angels came back and he thanked them, said he understood why he’d had to go through it once more.

Just like the first time he died, Zombie became bathed in a warm, golden light. He was free of his body, free from the pain of flesh. He had become a being of no substance, just like the angels, and could see he was made up of endless, scintillating strands and spirals of pure energy. He was high above his body, looking down on it, and felt no confusion that he was looking down at it both in the Place of Broken Stones and in his own apartment.

All of his family waited for him, the dead generations of it. The light grew in intensity and with it Zombie’s joy. He was finally going to be free. He was going to be amongst the dead, where he belonged, and free of his imprisonment amongst the living.

Zombie, now beyond time, spent only a few seconds but also an eternity in this shining place. He had no sense of leaving it, but, as the drug wore off, he drifted into a deep, dreamless sleep.

When he woke back in his apartment, back in his unburied, still-moving corpse, Zombie rolled over, turned his face into the cushion he’d rested his head on, and stifled the sobs that racked his body.

21

Georg Schmidt knew he had something very important to do but, just at that moment, couldn’t remember what it was. Whatever it was, it was something huge and frightening and unpleasant, because he felt an inexplicable fluttering in his chest and a knot in his gut. That was what his life had become, recently: a left-luggage locker for feelings detached from their source.

Some instinct also told him that what he had to do had something to do with the past. That in itself wasn’t strange, because the past now seemed to dominate his present, ‘then’ frequently disguising itself as ‘now’.

Georg’s history seemed jumbled and confused and he found himself relying more and more on his notebook journal: in his mind the memories were dim, distant, vague ghosts, yet the notebook returned them sharp and clear into focus.

But his recollections were full of contradictions and paradoxes: things he thought he remembered experiencing were, when he thought them through, really just things he must have read or heard about. Third-person memories became first person; first-person experiences were recalled as third-person accounts. Sometimes, instead of a single memory recalling an event, multiple memories conflated so that the perspective changed. For example, he remembered marching on a sunny day, the crowds around him hostile and jeering, then he remembered being in the crowd, shouting and jeering at the marchers.

Georg Schmidt had something important to do, but couldn’t remember what it was.

His father.

The sudden thought of his father focused him for a moment; drew in the scattered fragments. He remembered seeing Franz Schmidt clutching at his chest and falling to the ground. More shots ringing out. People screaming. Blood bubbling on his father’s lips as he tried to say something, his dying voice inaudible above the tumult.

Helmut Wohlmann, who had once been his father’s apprentice, who had been like a brother to Georg, his face drained of colour beneath a brown SA kepi.

Now Georg remembered. That’s why he had a key on a chain around his neck.

Unlocking the drawer, he fished out his diary, where he kept his memories stored, and read through it again. Georg Schmidt had something important to do and now he remembered what it was.

He took the tie from his wardrobe, rolled it up into a coil, and was about to stuff it into his pocket when he checked himself. He went across to the chest of drawers and rummaged around in first one then another until he found what he was looking for. The tie, he had remembered, might need too much strength.