The Book of Strange New Things(153)

The room fell silent. After a while, Tartaglione’s breathing grew louder and more rhythmic, until Peter realised he was saying ‘Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh,’ over and over. Then, in a voice thick with disdain, he added, ‘Beautiful. I see.’

Peter was too tired to argue. He knew there were no rainforests here, no mountains, no waterfalls, no exquisitely sculpted gardens, no breathtaking cityscapes, Gothic cathedrals, medieval castles, flocks of geese, giraffes, snow leopards, whatever, all those animals whose names he couldn’t recall, all those tourist destinations he’d seen other people so hungry to visit, all the attractions of the earthly life that he had, quite frankly, never lived. The glory of Prague to him was nothing more than a dim memory of a photograph; flamingos were just film footage; he’d been nowhere; he’d seen nothing; Oasis was the first place he’d ever allowed himself to bond with. The first place he’d ever loved.

‘Yes, beautiful,’ he sighed.

‘You are out of your mind, padre,’ said Tartaglione. ‘Deee-ranged. Loco-loco-loco. This place is beautiful like the grave, beautiful like maggots. The air is full of voices, have you noticed that? Worms in your ears, they burrow right in, they pretend to be just oxygen and moisture but they’re more than that, they’re more than that. Switch off the car engine, switch off your conversation, switch off Bing f*cking Crosby, and what do you hear, instead of silence? The voices, man. They never let up, they’re a liquid, a liquid language, going whisper-whisper-whisper, in your ear canals, down your throat, up your ass. Hey! Are you falling asleep? Don’t die on me, amigo, it’s a long night and I could use the company.’

The pungent odour of Tartaglione’s loneliness dispelled some of the fog in Peter’s brain. He thought of a question he should have asked before, a question that would no doubt have occurred to Bea immediately. ‘Is Kurtzberg here?’

‘What?’ The linguist was jolted off course, yanked from the slipstream of his ranting.

‘Kurtzberg. Is he living here too? With you?’

There was a full minute of silence. ‘We had a falling out,’ said the linguist at last. ‘You might say it was . . . a philosophical disagreement.’

Peter couldn’t speak anymore, but uttered a noise of incomprehension.

‘It was about the ?????,’ Tartaglione explained. ‘Those creepy, insipid, dickless, ass-licking little pastel-coloured vermin.’ A slurp of the beaker, a glug of the gullet. ‘He loved them.’

More time passed. The air whispered softly, making its endless reconnaissance of the boundaries and emptinesses in the room, testing the ceiling, prodding the joins of the walls, brushing the floor, measuring bodies, combing hair, licking skin. Two men breathed, one of them strenuously, one of them barely at all. It seemed that the linguist had said all he was going to say, and was now lost in his own stoic despair.

‘Plus,’ he added, in the final moments before Peter lost consciousness, ‘I cannot stand a guy who won’t have a drink with you.’





24


The Technique of Jesus



The night was supposed to last longer. Much, much longer. Darkness should have kept him captive for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years until the Resurrection came and God pulled all the dead from the ground.

That’s what confused him, when he opened his eyes. He was supposed to be underneath the earth, or hidden under a blanket in an unlit house in an abandoned city, not even decomposed yet, just a lump of inert material that couldn’t feel or see. There wasn’t supposed to be light. Especially not such dazzling white light, brighter than the sky.

It was not the light of Afterlife; it was the light of a hospital. Yes, he remembered now. He had broken his ankles, running from the law, and he’d been taken to hospital and pumped full of anaesthetic so that mysterious figures in masks could mend his splintered bones. There would be no more running; he would have to take what was coming to him. A woman’s face floated down over his own. The face of a beautiful woman. Bending over him as if he was a baby in a crib. On her bosom, a name tag that said Beatrice. She was a nurse. He liked her instinctively, as though he’d been waiting for her to turn up all his life. He might even marry her one day, if she said yes.

‘Bea,’ he croaked.

‘Try again,’ said the woman. Her face grew rounder, her eyes changed colour, her neck shortened, her hair rearranged itself into a boyish cut.

‘Grainger,’ he said.

‘You got it,’ she said wearily.

‘Where am I?’ The light hurt his eyes. He turned his head aside, into a pale green cotton pillow.

‘In the infirmary,’ said Grainger. ‘Whoah – keep that arm still, it’s got an IV drip in it.’

He did as he was told. A thin tube dangled against his cheek. ‘How did I get here?’

‘I told you I’d always look out for you, didn’t I?’ said Grainger. Then, after a pause: ‘Which is more than you can say for God.’

He let his tethered arm fall back onto the coverlet and smiled. ‘Maybe God is working through you.’

‘Yeah? Well, as a matter of fact there’s medications for thoughts like that. Lurasidone. Asenapine. I can prescribe you some anytime you’re ready.’

Still squinting against the light, he craned his head round to look at the bag that fed his intravenous line. The liquid in it was transparent. Glucose or saline, not blood.