The Thing Itself (5 page)

My life has gone down the toilet since I saw it. My life has gone to shit. My life has quite literally turned to garbage.

I look in the mirror, and some days I see myself, my frostbitten face weirdly distorted; and sometimes I get a vivid hallucination that somebody else’s face is looking out – a younger somebody, their face likewise scarred with burn tissue. He’s not me. I don’t know who he is. There’s something about him I find unpleasantly familiar, though.

The John Carpenter film
The Thing
was on the telly a while back. That wasn’t one of the VHS tapes they gave us, to watch on base I mean. For obvious reasons. That’s not what it was like for me at all. That doesn’t capture it at all. They, or it, or whatever, were not
thing
-y.

They are inhuman. But this is only my dream of them, I think. But it is not a dream of a human. It is not a dream of a thing. Or it is, but of a sick kind of thing. And, actually, no. That’s not it.

He keeps writing to me. I wish he’d stop writing.

2

Baedeker’s Fermi

Plurality

1900. The first year of a new century, and the twelfth day of April: bright sunshine. How could it be anything other than auspicious? A sky so flawless a blue it looked as though enamelled and polished from horizon to horizon by the celestial jeweller Himself. From Cologne to Mayence we were travelling aboard the saloon-steamer
Deutscher Kaiser
. The journey upstream took us twelve hours, although the guidebook assured us the return voyage downstream takes as little as seven and a half. No man may doubt the muscular implacability of the Rhenish flow here, close as it is to the North Sea. Albert and I sat on deck all morning smoking cigars and watching the green landscape slide beautifully past, green as emerald, green the ideal ocean of the fairy tales. Albert particularly admired (he said) the view of distant hills, and behind them the spectral white of faraway mountain tops. I preferred the nearby vineyards. By seven we disembarked into Mayence.

We took adjoining rooms – with, of course, a connecting door – in the Hof Von Holland, located upon the Rheinstrasse. Both rooms had fine views of the river. It was a simple matter to obtain the services of a valet-de-place for 5 marks a day – as one German mark has the monetary worth of a good English shilling, this was not cheap. But he agreed to serve the both of us for the money, and these being the early days of our Rhine odyssey, we preferred not to haggle or pinch our pennies – or pfennigs, I should say.

That evening we dined well, and strolled along the gas-lit Rheinpromenade as far as the Schloss. Later, Albert joined me in my room and together we consulted the Baedeker. Mayence, in German Mainz, is a strongly fortified town with 72,300 inhab. (23,000 Prot., 4,000 Jews), including a garrison of 8,000 soldiers. It is pleasantly situated on the left hand of the Rhine, opposite and below the influx of the Main.

‘It says,’ I observed, ‘that the Romanic-Germanic Central Museum contains the most varied and interesting collection of ante-Christian antiquities in the whole of Germany.’

‘Ante-anti,’ repeated Albie, chuckling. ‘It is too painfully clear these guides are not written by native English speakers.’

‘The Library and the Collection of Coins occupy the second and third floors of the west wing, to which is appended a remarkable assembly of typographical curiosities, manuscripts and incunabula. A complete set of coinage from the court of Charlemagne is the collection’s pride.’

‘I am more interested in the two valuable coins that comprise
this
collection,’ said Albie, slipping his hand into my breeches. There then occurred the event which, naturally, modesty, not to say legal sanction, prevents me from detailing. Afterwards we slept. I wanted us to share the bed in my room, which was certainly ample enough for two; but Albert, wisely I suppose, considered the possibility that a chambermaid, or hotelier, or even young Hans our valet-de-place, might chance upon us together. So he returned to his room.

We rose late and broke our fast in the Weiner Café on Gymnasiumstrasse. The date was 13th April – a Friday. Sharply drawn white clouds, perfect as puffs of white, mobbed the sky. A strong spring breeze had awoken itself, making the big trees lining the Strasse move with an underwater slowness. But as I drank my wine-and-water and picked the last flakes of pasty from my plate, I bethought me how very comely was the pink and white stonework of the buildings of Mayence; how courteous and handsome the natives – even the Jews, of whom there were many in their funereal black. I reminded myself of how fortunate I was to be able to enjoy so much of the world’s beauty with Albert. I was, I told myself, happy. I insisted upon it. If I insisted strongly enough, the feeling of chewing apprehension in my stomach would surely recede.

After breakfast we visited the cathedral: an imposing block-shaped edifice of rose-coloured stone, with one superbly tall slate-clad spire at the northern end. Ingress was achieved via two marvellous and mighty brazen doors that opened on to the north aisle, and in silent admiration we walked the length of the building – 122 yards long, the Baedeker informed us, and supported by 56 hefty pillars. Albert translated some of the funerary inscriptions for my benefit, and I sketched a few of the statues into my notebook. There is a particularly well-rendered head of Saturn on the eighteenth-century monument dedicated to a certain Canon von Breidenbach-Bürresheim. The cloisters are tranquil, built in the Gothic style, and Albert and I sat side by side and smoked for an hour, as the shadows slowly swung about the great axis of the turning world. The Baedeker recommended visiting the crypt, but by now it was lunchtime, and the verger could not be found to unlock the door for us.

We strolled out into the breezy sunlight, north to Gutenbergplatz where a fine statue commemorates Mayence’s most famous son, John Gutenberg, inventor of the printing press. We heard the first of the commotion here. It was Albert who first saw the changes in the sky. At the far end of Ludwigsstrasse a considerable crowd of people were in motion, and their shrieks and yells of terror carried cleanly to us on the clear spring air. A tram, rolling along its grooves down the street, stopped suddenly. I saw its driver scramble from the cab and abandon it.

‘Clouds!’ Albert yelled, suddenly. Such uncharacteristic behaviour for this reserved, immaculately mannered individual! ‘Clouds!’ He was pointing upwards. For a moment I saw clouds, visible masses of water droplets suspended in the air according to the logic of their relative density. But then the ghastly reality struck me, a modern-day Saul on the road to a ghastly Tarsus – for water must always be heavier than mere air, and no structure of such size and evident solidity could support itself overhead. What we had thought clouds were not. They were something else. They were gigantic amoeboid
beings
, creatures of monstrous otherness. A venus-shell of silver mist, animated by some incomprehensible will or mechanism, swooped low over Mayence’s crenulations and spired roofs. It was a
device
, a machine constructed on principles quite different to steam engines or electrical capacitors; a chariot for cleaving the high sky, a throne set about with rods and lights. Weapons? And seated in its heart, wraithed about by the very device it piloted, was a creature unlike any I have seen – like the meat at the centre of a cockle, but the size of a bullock, orange and quivering with life. I looked about me, my heart galloping, a hideous anticipation of perdition in my whole body. Every cloud was a chariot, and in every one monsters of various sizes were enthroned – from cattle-big to whale-big. They thronged the sky. ‘O strange!’ I howled. ‘Strange strange strange!’ The creature I had first seen had brought its mist-chariot down almost to touch the ground. Now it began advancing towards me over the cobbles of the square. Its tangle of nude-muscle-fibre body jittered, and weird black tentacles, like tadpole tails, sprung up upon its torso. Thorns made of flesh. Beckoning scilla. I am not ashamed to say that I hurled myself down upon the ground, that I pressed my face against the stones, and wrapped my arms about my head, whimpering.

That evening we dined at a restaurant named Hanaczik, at the very top of Jacobsbergergasse. The main course was of middling quality, but dessert – apple torte and fine-whipped cream – was delicious, and the claret belonged in the first class. We strolled side by side along to Gutenbergplatz where the theatre is, half-thinking of seeing a play. But we had not planned ahead and by the time we got there the performance had already started. It was, moreover, a Germanic translation of a Dion Boucicault play, and Albert was of the opinion that we could see Boucicault any day of the week at home. ‘We’re in Rhineland!’ he told me. ‘We ought to immerse ourselves in
Germanic
culture!’

‘Oh that we could walk, arm in arm, through these streets,’ I declared.

He hushed me at once. ‘You wouldn’t enjoy being arrested, Harold.’

‘These people?’ I said, gesturing. The Platz was thronged. ‘Ordinary Germans going about their business – they pay us no mind. It’s as if they don’t see us. We are merely two foreigners, babbling in a barbarian tongue!’

‘They’d see us pretty quick if we started behaving as spoony young lovers,’ Albert retorted, in a quiet, forceful voice. ‘And you’d see
them
too, if you looked properly—’ So I looked again; and saw that the crowd of people possessed a markworthy homogeneity. Black-clad people, moving without timidity and yet with unobtrusive haste across the square. Jews. For the Friday evening commences their sabbath, and I suppose they were returning from their temple to their homes. ‘These Hebrew gentlemen will be even less disposed to notice us,’ I said. ‘Keeping themselves to themselves.’

We returned to the hotel, and sat in the lounge smoking and reading. Albert made his slow way, brow furrowed so deeply it was as though the book was a plough, carving up the soil of his head, through a work of German philosophy – that same Freddie Nietzsche upon whom the clever set in London is so keen. I read for the second time my copy of Herbert Wells’s
War of the Worlds
.

The following day we caught the train to Frankfurt.

On the train I completed my reread of the Wellsian story. There was something about it that snagged meaningfully upon my imagination, though I couldn’t decide for myself what this
something
was. As storytelling it made no absurd pretence to great art; Wells himself, a man I knew distantly – the acquaintance of an acquaintance – was no Goethe, or Shakespeare, or Homer. He was, in point of fact, a servant’s son, bred in the honest humbleness of the Kent countryside. To meet him in the flesh was to be struck by his ingenious cleverness and his bouncy earnestness, both characteristics as clear markers as you could hope to see of his
lack
of gentility. True breeding cannot be counterfeited. This same fellow was now making a name for himself in the literary world with nothing more than a penny dreadful sensibility and a few handfuls of journalistic glitter cast upon the page. Nonetheless, his was the book that refused to leave my mind! Having read it twice, I was now certain I would read it a third time. What
was
it that so fascinated me? I asked Albert’s opinion on the matter, but he was dismissive. ‘That trash,’ he said. ‘To call it a penny dreadful overvalues it. Farthing dreadful, let us say. Lights on Mars? Strange creatures descending from the sky to wreak havoc in …’

He stopped speaking. For a moment we looked at one another. Indigestion clawed at my guts. ‘Sausage is supposed to be,’ I said, looking out of the window. ‘I mean, the people of Germany are
alleged
to be masters in the making of sausages! And yet my poor guts are rumbling lamentably upon that breakfast meal.’

‘Mine too,’ said Albert, returning to his philosophical treatise. ‘Intestines having a fearful job chewing over this stuff. It’s unaccountable, I must say.’

‘You usually have the most enviable digestive constitution,’ I observed.

‘Indeed!’

In a moment the sensation passed out of my midriff, and I felt more at ease. For a while I attempted to peruse a local newspaper, by way of improving my German. But Albert grew cross-tempered with my continual interruptions to
his
reading, and my asking after the meaning of this word, or that word. So I threw that project over, and instead stared out of the window of our compartment. The train line passed for many miles through woodland; but then it broke free of the trees and ran alongside the Rhine. I stared at the waterway, which returned a muddy-silver version of the wide sky back to the heavens. The trees on the distant far bank were as small as grass blades. The motion of the train, and the pacifying fullness and inexhaustible flow of the river, soothed me. Then, but then, oh
but then
fleetingly I saw something reflected in the body of the water – a mile-long snake in the sky, with fanning blue feather-like protruberances on its tail, and lights gleaming as portholes along its length. I cried out, and looked up, and there were tears in my eyes: I was weeping with a kind of terror of recognition, a strange throat-closing emotion combining horror and delight. Why delight?

The central railway station of Frankfurt is the largest and handsomest structure of its type I have encountered upon my travels in Germany (I hear the Berlin Bahnhof is larger, but I have yet to go to Berlin). The station overlooks its own spacious Bahnhofsplatz, from which wide and tree-lined streets radiate – Kronprinzestrasse, Kaiserstrasse, Taunusstrasse. Inconveniently, however, the station is located a distance west of the centre of the city, and the hotels of Frankfurt do not send omnibuses to meet the trains. We were obliged therefore to hire a private cab, and some foolish delay in loading our luggage was the occasion for Albert losing his temper. It is not like his normal character to rage so, but
something
had agitated his balance of mind, and he railed at the blank-faced driver in fluent German for five full minutes. Eventually we clambered aboard and rode bumpily to the hotel Schwan, on the Goetheplatz. According to my Baedeker, it was at this luxurious establishment that the peace of 10th May 1871 was concluded, the defeated remnants of once-mighty martial France forced to capitulate to the resurgence of German might. And what opulence there was inside! A large gilded reception hallway, blood-red carpets soft as silk up the two arching stairways. The Schwan also operates a mechanical elevator in which, with some small apprehension at its prison-like sliding grille and confined space, the two of us ascended to our room.

I’m sorry to say we quarrelled like children as soon as the porter left us to ourselves. I rebuked Albert for his ill-tempered words to the cabriolet-driver, and he retaliated hotly, accusing me of
sticking my nose in
when I ‘couldn’t even get my mouth around the simplest Deutscher terms’. We parted badly, and I tried to cool my fury by wandering through the streets of this strange city with only my guidebook to direct me. I stood beneath Schwanthaler’s Monument of Goethe, erected in 1844, twelve years after the poet’s death. The reliefs on the front of the pedestal are allegorical, and the ones on the sides are figures from Goethe’s poems. I strolled to the Römer, the town hall of the former free imperial city, and the most interesting edifice in Frankfurt from a historical point of view. The façade presented three lofty gables to the Römerberg, or market-place, opposite. I passed the cathedral without going inside, and instead wasted an idle hour in the Städel Art Institute, a handsome building of grey sandstone which contains collections of pictures, engravings and drawings by all the great European masters, as well as numerous casts and busts. The main picture gallery is especially rich in specimens of the early Flemish and German schools of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as well as many pretty Dutch interiors from the seventeenth century and even a few from Italy. The names of the artists appear on the picture frames.