Fremder

5

As I write this I sometimes get the pictures in my head mixed up: thinking of my first birthday I see the figure in the blue coverall tumbling over and over in deep space and when I recall that 4 November in the Fourth Galaxy I see myself being cut out of the belly of my dead mother.

I did my last two months in an artificial womb with, I was told, the sound of her recorded heartbeat in my unborn ears. I’ve often thought I’d like to sit and listen to that tape for a while, some rainy evening maybe; I tried to track it down once at Class A Prenatal but had no luck.

Class A orphans live at The Cauldron until the age of twelve; it isn’t a bad place to do your child time: batteries of wet-nurses to start you off right and dedicated minders to continue the process. I had a minder named Miranda — she was beautiful, with fair hair in a long plait that hung down her back and swung when she walked. The streets then were just as bad as they are now: roving bands of Prongs, Arseholes, Funboys, the Adoption Agency, and worst of all the Shorties and their Clowns, so our rare excursions into the outside world were always made with armed heavies. In the compound there was an ecodome that was meant to keep us happy: it had fields and trees and a murmuring stream; there were rabbits and hedgehogs and a tortoise named Achilles; there was a sky with real weather coming down in accordance with the seasons; November has always been a haunted month for me and the dark and glistening dangers of the bonfire-flickering streets seemed more a part of my reality than the sanitised November of the ecodome.

At The Cauldron there was nothing unusual in not knowing who your father was. If you were Class A you were definitely somebody and not nobody and there was a good chance that both of your parents were somebody too. All of us were snobs; the unoffical roster of probable fathers at The Cauldron was heavy with scientists but also included painters, composers, writers, and of course deep-spacers, every one of them famous. Mostly we pretended that being one parent short was a sort of advanced thing that put us somewhere beyond those simple two-parent children who knew nothing of the world but inside me the questions howled on my track like wolves: why had my mother killed herself? Why hadn’t I got a father? Why had he abandoned my mother and me? Where had he gone? Was it another woman? Was he dead? At night when I thought of my mother disappearing from around me before I was born I sat up and leaned forward in the dark and felt the world move away from me while ravens in their thousands fluttered their wings and whispered the blackness.

When I was twelve I accessed the Hall of Records database but it came up NILFOUND. Later I put a professional tracer on it with the same result. As far back as I can remember birthdays have been bad days for me. I got used to it; I grew up with an emptiness where a mother and father ought to have been and with time the emptiness became my mother and my father. On Earth I like grey skies, rain, bleak landscapes, places of transience and neon tubing, sleazy hotels, dismal downtimes, Q-BO SLEEPS, and so on. In deep space I like places like Badr al-Budur.

Early on in my childhood I sensed the thinness of reality and I became terrified of what might be on the other side of the membrane: I imagined a ceaseless becoming that swallowed up everything. I used to lie awake in the night and grind my teeth. But after a while anything becomes home, even terror.

I think about the dead a lot, their wants and their needs and their unfinished business; I suppose it’s because of the way I came into the world. The dead prodigiously outnumber the living, and although their lives have stopped their action hasn’t; they are with us always, sometimes whispering, sometimes shouting. As a child I used to think about my mother and about her grandparents who died in Auschwitz. And my unknown father, I mostly thought of him as dead too. The dead are with me in the ordinary moments of every day — sometimes I see my hand lift a cup of coffee or sign my name and I feel ghost hands moving with mine, lifting their no-coffee, signing their no-names. And when I flicker they’re always with me. Other deep-spacers have told me they never dream in flicker — how can M-waves dream? — but I know that I do. I always come out of it with a deep sadness, half-remembering blurred faces. Each of us is the forward point of a procession stretching back into the darkness. And even within oneself, every moment is a self that dies: the road to each day’s midnight is littered with corpses and all of them whispering. As I write this I’m listening to Beethoven’s F Major Quartet, Opus 59, No. 1, the first Razumovsky, while thousands of my dead selves hum along with it, sometimes weeping for times that are gone.

Bible studies at The Cauldron began when I was eight but I’d been reading the Bible since I was six and naturally First Kings, Chapter 17, was of considerable interest to me: ‘And Elijah the Tishbite, who was of the inhabitants of Gilead, said unto Ahab: “As the Lord God of Israel liveth, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.”‘ Just like that; no mention of Elijah leading up to it. This man who was my namesake was someone I wanted to know more about. Where had he come from? I asked Mr Clarkson, our teacher. ‘God knows,’ he said. ‘We don’t need to. “Cometh the hour; cometh the man.”’ When we read about the Lord dispatching Elijah to the brook Cherith to be fed by ravens I looked around the room at all those who had no such note as I had from my mother.

Reading of Elijah at the top of Carmel, bowed down upon the earth with his face between his knees as he waited for rain, I had known long since that this was my condition: humbled and waiting. For what? What was Elijah waiting for on Carmel? Rain, yes, but more than that he was waiting for the big hookup that would make him the full Elijah, that would let him be himself. And I, Fremder Elijah Gorn, was waiting for the same thing.

Being a stranger I was always a little strange and I kept to myself much of the time. In the area where the dustbins were there was a little shed of gardening tools; by standing on a dustbin I could climb on to the shed roof, and after a while it became one of my special places. I was sitting up there one afternoon being fed by the ravens when a boy named Albert Stiggs came by and saw me. He used to bully me whenever he found the time and he almost always found it. If you happen to be one who is not good at confronting threats and menaces there will come, sooner or later, like the second planet in a binary system, that other one whose function is to threaten and menace you. The two members of such a system immediately recognise each other as predestined partners in the cosmic pattern. Albert Stiggs had an unbroken record of successes with me and his face was bright with anticipation. ‘What are you doing up there, clipcock?’ he said. ‘Waiting for a fiery chariot?’

I closed my eyes and saw a vibrant purple-blue and that was when my mind spoke to me for the first time. I knew even then that it wasn’t my mind in the same way that my brain was my brain: this was a mind that had been here long before I arrived on the scene and it would be here long after I was gone, ALWAYS THE NOISE, it said. When it spoke there flared up in me a craziness of many colours and a disregard of consequences. What a wonderful feeling.

‘I’m talking to you, clipcock,’ said Albert.

Without thinking I said, ‘Quiet!’

‘What did you say?’

‘Piss off.’

‘Make me.’

The colours of my craziness roared and bellowed in my ears. I jumped off the roof on to Albert and when Miranda came running and pulled me off him he had a concussion and a broken nose. It was a one-off kind of thing — the mind didn’t speak to me again and the craziness didn’t come again but for the rest of my time at The Cauldron there was no more bother from Albert or anyone else.

Things come to an end, though, and when I was twelve they shipped me out of The Cauldron to the Pre-Poly where a boy named Josef Czerny immediately recognised me as his opposite number in the traditional binary. I kept hoping that the mind would speak to me again and show me those many colours of craziness that had enabled me to deal with Albert Stiggs but it didn’t happen and I had no more successes of the Stiggs sort for the rest of my school days.

Twelve isn’t too early to have an aim in life. I felt a craving in me for deep space but most of all I wanted to make friends with that mind that had spoken to me. Not just so I could beat up people who bothered me. No, I wanted to be with it because it was the best feeling I’d ever had and I wanted to have that feeling again, however long it took to get there.