The Nostalgia Differential

Jerry Cornelius and his clan return in a “secret history” of Mars,

by way of Texas. In typical Michael Moorcock fashion,

the non-linear story unfurls across time with wry political commentary,

insightful social observations, and abundant musical references.

2013: Shadow on the Wall

Mars was no less attractive from this side of the mountains. Magnificent, oddly biblical, and disturbing. Jerry relished the smell of frying bacon. “These new season shows look good.”

Catherine nodded as she slipped into her place with her plate. “I’m not sure why I thought you were right to take this job.”

“Space!” Her brother gestured with his toast. “It’s getting interesting again.”

He was sincere. He loved Mars. He had always loved Mars. And here he was, camped out beside a canal, one of the fertile belts on a cloudless planet. He and Catherine had always wanted this kind of solitude. They had talked about it long before their father had turned against them. But sometimes, he yearned. His soul craved rain.

“There’s always a chance.” She looked up. Was that a movement? “Before it becomes real, it has to be imagined.”

And soon, the sound of the great atmosphere plant dropped to a pleasant hum. Jerry wondered if it were time for his run.

1933: Walking the Dog

“Every little movement has a meaning of its own, every little thought and feeling by some posture can be shown…” Major Nye hummed a favourite number. Some darling of the halls had performed it in his youth. Slowly, he ran a fond finger over dusty blue and gold spines. “Every little picture tells a tale…I’m sure it was a MacMillan Illustrated Classic. Here we are. You have a wonderful book department. I’d say it’s quite as good as Knightsbridge.”

Mr. Sissons was gracious. Clearly impressed by the major’s Saville Row tailoring, he moved a pale, modest hand, adjusting his pearl grey suit. “So we’re told, sir. Will Snarleyowl be all?”

“Unless you have a My Strudel, is it?”

“We’re waiting for the next printing, Major. With Herr Hitler and his popular ‘pastry cook’ socialists in power, more people are curious. Do you know much, sir?”

“About Austrian cuisine?” Major Nye couldn’t say. He hadn’t realised the chap had other interests. “Wasn’t he in the Battenburg rising? When’s it due in?”

“We can order it for you, of course. Do you live in Buenos Aires?”

“Not yet, I’m afraid.” He thought of Vanessa; the Hotel Robinson. “I’d move here like a shot, if I were a free man.”

Mr. Sissons’ smile was discreetly tired.

1944: Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree

They found Jerry cutting cane in the backcountry, north of Rio. They cleaned him up and gave him a pair of boots. He was delighted. They might have been hand-made.

“Don’t worry.” Miss Brunner counted out the bills to the thickset Indian who had reported him. “He’ll be his old self in no time. Look, he’s found a copy of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus already. Fish to water, eh?”

“Fish?” The Indian scratched his head. “Nowhere around here that I know. Not any more.”

But Jerry, mumbling cross-legged from the polished planks of the upper deck, quickly discarded the book and picked another from the pile. Coarse, the pornographic memoir thought to have been written as a kind of sequel to Walton’s Compleat Angler. He began looking through the pockets of his new black pea jacket. “Rod?”

“We’d better be leaving, while we can.” Major Nye adjusted the fraying cuffs of his civilian tweed. “Once he finds the Doré Milton, we’ll never get him off the boat.”

“Is it regression?”

“Not typically.”

With her slender arthritic fingers, Miss Brunner tightened her graying perm. “In politics, one word is worth a thousand pictures. Not so?” She flirted a glance at a freshly, and cheaply, uniformed Captain Pardon. He’d receive a fortune for this help. The old vessel wheezed black smoke and coughed a little circumspectly. The little captain seemed surprised, studying a large chronometer he held in his left hand and making notes with a new pencil on his paper cuff.

“If we left now,” said Major Nye, “we might get to Sao Paulo before the next riot.”

“Are they still upset with the Americans?” she asked.

“Not since they found out the reason for the shelling. Embarrassing, of course.” He moved his mouth in mock disapproval. “Poor intelligence, as usual.” The major remained unhappy about his posting. After Casablanca, it had seemed all downhill until now.

The steamboat made a convulsive movement, then whoever was steering let loose with the whistle. Captain Pardon cursed in French and headed for the wheelhouse.

Miss Brunner shrugged. “Does anyone know where he trained?”

“Marrakech, I think.” The major chuckled forgivingly.

Miss Brunner frowned.

1956: Just Couldn’t Resist Her With Her Pocket Transistor

At first, he thinks it is a dust storm. Then the dust grows thicker. He covers his mouth with his handkerchief. There are stinging pebbles in it now. He lies down and protects his head. He thinks, Jesus Christ, I’m being buried alive! So he forces himself to his knees and crawls on, until at last the storm stops. In the following stillness, he sees a figure ahead, shadowy against the sun. A smiling, bearded face.

A recurring dream. Jerry wondered if the man were his father. The expression was familiar. In the dream, they were so proud to be on Mars, so pleased it looked just like Barsoom in John Carter.

On his 18th birthday, his father pressed Heidegger’s Being and Time at him. “It’s flawed, of course, but also very coherent. Try him.” Jerry had decided he wasn’t a great thinker. And God knew what the drugs had done to his dad’s brain. He drew a deep, relaxing breath. Sometimes surgery was the only answer.

In the following dream, he was crossing an ice-bridge in a horse-drawn sleigh. His sister Catherine sat in front of him wrapped in white furs. Behind them, in snow reddened by the setting sun, sharp black shadows of birches crossed the deep, bleak ruts the sleigh made. The same old cryptograms, each telling a different tale.

“What’s it all mean, Jerry?” his sister asked.

“People are frightened. They simply won’t tolerate the absurdists any more. Not as an audience.” Una Persson, gloriously stylish in her snug greatcoat, spoke from behind, where she was leading her own grey. “And when they’re frightened, they burn a witch. That’s where we come in.”

Jerry was prepared to work with what he had, but it wouldn’t be easy for anyone. Too many dreams, too much delusion, too many illusions. How could he have kept so many balls in the air at the same time?

He awoke with a guffaw.

“What is it now?” Catherine sat up. “Christ, it’s cold.”

Outside the darkness and silence continued to gather.

1967: Lady D’Arbanville

Zurich trams ran so thoroughly on time Una Persson felt faintly disgusted, especially when she attempted to board in her old Belenciaga frock while going through her bag, looking for her fare. She apologised in her pretty German. “Sometimes I have to unpack everything. Just to find the right change.”

“Sometimes you have to unpack everything anyway.” The driver handed her a ticket of a higher denomination than the one she’d paid for. “Now you can go much further.” He winked. “Perhaps you should have flown.”

“He won’t fly.” She made a grateful, apologetic face.

“Oh, that’s always such a problem. Are you married?” He pulled the lever and the doors hissed shut. “Here on holiday?”

He was flirting with her. Why do the children play? A strange tune to come into her head at that moment. Was he looking for a hardheaded woman?

She had to admit she admired his Turkish looks. What was it about those big Mediterranean noses?

1971: Friend of the Devil

Time and order? What could we do without them? The theatre wasn’t what it was. In the current climate, they could never have a successful revival of The Jew’s Bargain. Which was a stupid thing to say, he thought. Was it true the image always preceded the actuality? I have seen your skull covered in filth, he told Mengele. I have seen you dead. You have no idea what great good will come of our suffering. The State of Israel will rise from our ashes. He had been able to look into Mengele’s face and see the attempt to control the contractions of terror there. Was it unseemly to congratulate himself for bartering his good life to save one young woman from the creature whose bones were now displayed at the Nazi Remains show in Munich? I am not man enough for this, he thought. But it was too late. I had made my bargain with God. It was unbreakable. He would not release me from it. I wish I had known that at the time.

He was reading from his own journal.

But, best of all, I had proved there truly was a God. I need never despair again. Never carry that burden Nietzsche had put on me. Yet, if you had a past and a present, why could you not have a future? Or a number of futures? He had spent so long trying to work out the consequences of radiant time. Too many equations. Too many adventures. Too much of everything. Accretion challenged complexity.

There was a long way to go yet.

Jerry wondered how much hotter things would get, before they started cooling down again. He wetted another towel and stretched it over his sister’s pale forehead. He checked his watch. In a couple of hours, the world would know for certain. How much time had he waited so long ago, as his child bride sweated out her memories?

So long. So long at the border. Could they sweat this out too? Now he understood why Benjamin had given himself up to despair. The world could no longer be manipulated or persuaded. At last, he began to understand the codes. It really shouldn’t have taken this long. Too many pictures. Far too many words. And ghosts! Those ghosts.

What the fuck had happened to the action? The mystery?

“Wake up, old chap.” Major Nye’s voice was distant and encouraging. “Our truck’s arrived at last! We’re on our way! Another four decades and we’ll be in Syria. Or Lebanon, at any rate. What do you think of that?”

“Saladin’s still in charge, isn’t he?”

“The Kurds seem to think so.”

Jerry got up slowly adjusting his cap. “Has anyone seen my launcher?”

1984: Momma Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys

When in Galveston, Jerry habitually took his breakfast at the Waffle House on 25th and Broadway. It was the least infected of the joints. Here, it was impossible to catch even a glimpse of the ocean. He was beginning to regret buying the Bishop’s Palace. When had he last eaten so much bacon? Really, it was time to stop. He was growing weak again. He reached into the darkness and found her long, soft hand. Now he could only love.

She reassured him with her grasp. He was grateful for this small, deliberate kindness. When he first came to the island, he had so much wanted to find some kind of purpose. He felt certain he would come across a sign of Leadbelly or maybe one of the other Texas bluesmen here. But, leaving not so much as a playbill behind, they had gone north and east. They had no interest in time. From the brochures, quantum physics and m-theory seemed to fit well with the Moorish Gothic of the Bishops Palace. As a result, he had bought the great pile with its pointed roofs, minarets, and Persianate beaux-arts. There had even been a touch of early Tiffany art nouveaux. It once provided the most accurate understanding of the style, why so many modernists rejected it, confusing complexity for fussy pre-modernity. Sometimes he hated to see the look of disappointment disturb the firmness of some poor mod’s features. Twenty years earlier, all that had mattered was that you had a pocket full of purple hearts and a willingness to stay up all night at the Flamingo.

“Is there something wrong with the music?” She looked out at the driving rain. “Why isn’t working any more?”

“Rock and roll died the day Hair opened in New York,” he murmured, glancing around to see if he was overheard. Reactionary debased versions of Viennese Light classical with extra bass. Queen sang the dirge at the funeral of American black music. Then country wasn’t country any more. Looking up from his Big Triple, Shaky Mo Collier pushed at greasy hair with greasier fingers and gave Jerry a thumb’s up. His attention wandered.

Catherine glared in his direction. Beside him, Miss Brunner watched Mo vaguely checking the action of his slick little Colt. “She was getting ready to settle down. I felt sorry for her.” He kissed the air and said something under his breath. He looked around for his grits.

“Perfect.” Miss Brunner prepared herself for prayer. By increasing the population so successfully, religion again showed its relevance to modern times.

This had turned into fun. A neat little running backwards race. He panted. “Religion has done a great job keeping pace with the times. Or was it always an arm of consumerism?”

Mo looked up from his Colt. “Is that like water over there? What’s it? Tidal wave?”

“Oh, bugger!” Jerry had left his guitars in his hotel.

1985: The Dream Police

Portobello Road was not the road it had been. It led north into the shabby limbo of the Harrow Road and Kilburn, where everything became grey and indistinct. To the south, the colours grew brighter and eventually less garish, the closer you got to Notting Hill tube station.

Didi Dee, doctor to the stars, stood at the intersection of Blenheim Crescent and the market, looking up and down in the hope she would see the original Body Shop or Rough Trade records. She was disgusted by her own nostalgia for a past her customers had wiped out. She had very little choice, as she saw it, of maintaining so much sentimental romanticism balanced by so much actuality. “Too many pictures,” she murmured. “Too many voices. Too many voices.”

The pleasure of the suburbs was that they presented a simplified narrative. The city had far too many narratives.

She repeated this complaint, gathering the white cotton dress around her like a disappointed bride.

“What could I have done about it?” Jerry was surly. After all, he had grown up on this very street. “Some of us enjoy complexity. Some of us can’t live without it. It’s meat and drink to me.”

“Well, it drives me crazy.”

“This was never designed for upper class, black professionals. You can’t blame me for that.”

“I just said it drives me crazy, that’s all. Is this a good place to find a taxi?”

Until the music studios, like Island, started establishing themselves in the area, Jerry couldn’t remember seeing a taxi anywhere in the neighbourhood. Even the whores had to get out at Westbourne Road and walk.

“Do you feel your life has been wasted?” she asked.

Jerry snorted.

June 1959: The Pretenders, Live in London

The riffs were familiar now.

“Not dead yet?” His father’s tone was one of amusement, mixed with what Jerry could only take for resentment. Old Professor Cornelius was baffled by, what he called, the chaotic mathematics of the new popular music. For him, Mozart remained the great unifier.

Jerry lowered the volume and sat down in the single pew provided for petitioners.

“Is this the first time you’ve visited me here?” His father reached for a box at his side and picked out a long, brown Sherman’s. “You were all supposed to convene at my deathbed.”

“It would have helped to have had an address.” Jerry had rather liked his father in life, but in death, he had become unstable and petty. Not to mention, in his choice of vestments, vulgar.

“I’d imagine it’s a pretty well known location.”

“Well, it didn’t occur to me. Didn’t they throw you out?”

“They wanted to.” The old man drew for several seconds on his Sherman’s. “They wanted to. I didn’t leave you very much. I’m sorry about it, of course.”

“That’s the spirit.” Jerry took a swift glance at the plump woman who entered through the curtain. Her long, bright white hair framed her ancient face so that in that light, it had the appearance of redeemed youth. She gave him the creeps.

“You still don’t have to call me mother,” she said firmly.

Jerry held his breath.

“You can’t imagine how disappointed I am in this.” Professor Cornelius made a weak gesture. “You know.”

Jerry pushed his hair back from his forehead. Then he grinned, holstering the needle gun, a present for his 19th birthday. “Grow up, you foolish old bastard. I’m not killing anyone for you. Not today.”

He turned to point at the old woman. “And I don’t care how much you care. Stay in your crypt.”

She was still trying to smile when he left. Sometimes she wished she’d never heard of Mars.

1975: Rolling in the Ruins

“Pulp leads innovation, not only in language and subject, but in social vision, too. The first multi-racial democracy I ever saw was in Dan Dare, in THE EAGLE.” Professor Hira spread bland hands, but made his point no less obscure. “You don’t remember the U.N. cavalry force landing on Venus in gliders, do you? That would have been about 1953.”

“If it has wheels, it can roll backward, as well as forward.” Bishop Beesley used his most reassuring tone. “We have little to fear over the course of the centuries, Mr. Cornelius.”

“You thought history only went one way, didn’t you?” Miss Brunner’s normally sharp tones were mellowed by a mild triumphalism. “Your way. Well, you knew all about radiant time, dark matter, string theory, all the latest crackpot stuff, didn’t you? Refraction, distraction, attraction, reflection, repulsion. Always desire with you, wasn’t it? The weaving, and the wearing. The weaving in, and the weaving out. Back and forth, those shuttles of the Norns, Mr. Cornelius. We knew that, didn’t we? Nothing stops. That’s not part of God’s grand design, old chum.”

“I fear the Man Upstairs has different plans for us,” Bishop Beesley winked heavenward.

“What?” Mo Collier looked up from his Remington. “The Lodger, was he? Even I’ve seen that.”

“Let’s keep it clean, shall we?” Miss Brunner reached behind her neck, obsessively tightening her bun. Her lips were pursed, seemingly drawn back by the same force. She brought a faint smell of disinfectant, which reminded Jerry how ill he had been. Visions of Mary and memories of Pine. He was at the point of throwing up.

Outside Island Studios, he found Major Nye smoking a Sullivan’s. Jerry ran down a silent Basing Street. The sound of his vomiting echoed around the abandoned houses. Ladbroke Grove had gone from middle-class suburb to shabby genteel to slum, and back to middle class enclave. Once, Notting Hill had meant race riots and whores. Now, it meant TV presenters and politicians, making Bishop Beesley’s point. Religions rose and fell on economic tides.

“The bees have all deserted their hives.” Didi Dee lowered herself to the opposite curb and put on her high heels. Without them, she had to be under four feet. Jerry looked carefully at the dark thigh she showed him. Was this some sort of mating ritual? Since he felt no response in his penis, he had to assume he was wrong or it wasn’t working. Would they send someone to marry him? They’d have to wake him first. Dream or delusion? Did it ever really matter?

They looked up at a sound from Portobello Road. Of late, the phantom Fifteen bus had changed its route. Where was it carrying the damned these days? Once, it had turned at Elgin Crescent, frequently clipping his old Nash and leaving a smear of faintly glowing red paint behind. His old mum’s disembodied voice sounded from the phantom stop. “Full up? How can you be full up at five o’clock, on a Friday, when you don’t even fuckin’ exist?”

With some pleasure, Jerry remembered his mum’s skepticism when confronted by the supernatural. Were they all dead at last? He had been dreaming of oblivion again. Something which could only be enjoyed while not experienced.

“Good old Heidegger.” Miss Brunner left the Mangrove Cafe and headed up the street towards what, in those shoes, could only be Holland Park.

“I think we’re losing her.” Major Nye enjoyed another drag on his gasper. “She’s breaking up.” He frowned, dropping the butt onto a cracking flagstone. “Or is it me?”

2020: Late Morning Lullaby

The great hydraulic towers of Storyville rose in the pink gold morning, sweet water streaming from their glorious steel curves and planes. The wheel chairs were lined in a precise row along the North Placomine Causeway, so their occupants could enjoy and applaud this daily ritual. This was only the fifth time the towers had risen. Soon, the whole city would be surrounded and protected.

“From our ruins, came all this promise.” Monsieur Pardon bent to straighten Jerry’s plaid over his healing legs. “We have dodged the missile again, wouldn’t you say, Mr. Cornelius?”

In the next chair, Miss Brunner yawned ostentatiously. “My dear bishop! My dear bishop!”

Shaky Mo frowned. He had his feet tangled in the chair’s rests. “Is it me or has the quality of Colombian gone off since Valparaiso?” He had Skyped Karen von Krupp, the New Age dentist, who waved back at him from her favourite Starbucks table, looking out at the streets of Laredo.

“I think you’ll find it’s Java, these days,” she said.

2013: Pierrot on the Moon

“Multitudes of universes bring us closer to an understanding of God’s complexity.”

Catherine patted her poor brother’s hand. How bad could things have been, for them to go this far?

“’Will you not do me the courtesy to let me die alone?’ That was what he said to me. As I left, I thought I saw him smile. ‘I have lived for this,’ he said. No more narratives! No more! I would never know now, if all the stories were true. How can you tell, Cathy?”

“All stories are true, Jerry. Mum told us that…”

“More stories? More pain? Who knew? Why would they be so desperate for escape? They don’t want narratives. They want lies. Lullabies. Fantasies. Fucking fantasies.”

“This isn’t the Balkans, my love. The tears are already cold.”

“Did you ever read Wheldrake’s The Willing Boy?”

“No,” she said, “but I can play it.” She slipped a warm hand into his comfort zone.

1981: Hit Me

“I did my best to calm him down.” Didi Dee eased off her scarlet heels. They had rubbed a hole in her left stocking. She had been reluctant to visit Anuradhapura at this time in the evening. The shadows were making it all too grotesque. “Beast. I don’t think he was ever human and certainly not an archangel.” Of late, she had made a number of vague references to Milton.

Jerry mourned. Was the age of the great puritan to come again? He loathed what would follow. Was the 18th century really making a come back? The reactionaries now called themselves conservatives. The conservatives were liberals, and the liberals were what? Libertarians? What did that make easier? Not another sodding revolution, surely?

Professor Hira, sweating, came to sit down on his favourite fallen god. He got nostalgic on these occasions. “I don’t see how we’ve got all the way from Big Bang to M-theory without wondering, for a moment, if all our standard theories are delusional. The 20th century consisted of a series of escapist notions, transformed into gloriously impressive math. The fact is all the evidence has shown that--”

Significantly, Mo Collier checked and rechecked the action of his massive Banning. “Bloody hell! With that triple clip, you can hardly lift the bugger!”

“To be honest, it’s doing my head in.” Jerry looked for friendlier skies. He wanted the familiar sights of his childhood, but most of them were gone, replaced by chains and concessions. “I was thinking of getting a haircut.”

Mo hadn’t really been listening. “Sorry I’m late. Was there another storm? I had to work an extra dodgem shift at the Scrubs fair.” He shivered and held up his hand to see if it was raining. “What’s new?”

“Don’t ask me.” Jerry giggled into the sodden wind. “I just got up.”