Monument Maker, page 59
The whole scene was a mess, still cordoned off with police tape and with the great letter A toppled sideways so that it looked like a Soviet spaceship beached on the moon. There is a certain protocol, Token Bob reminded us, and he stopped us in our tracks. We cannot change a single iota; we should not remove a single jot. We nodded to one another, then we descended into the gloom.
In the end it was a disaster, mirroring the original catastrophe like an aftershock or a bellyache. No sooner had we crossed police lines and started lowering ourselves, man by man, through the gaping hole in the floor, than the authorities showed up. Down below you could hear the snap of camera shutters like the report of a machine gun. The officers called, cease and desist, and we threw our hands in the air, half in love with the idea of our own outlawry, as the police moved in and began to politely manhandle us out of the door. I thought about what The Grey Bat had said about staring nothing right in the face and for a moment I felt as if I recognised it. But where had he gone? I had clearly seen him disappear through the hole in the floor, this splintered wound with twisted boards stretching up, leaping feet first into this vat of darkness, this historical question. But he never reappeared. The Flashlight winked at me and pointed to the floor and made a signal like he was taking a photograph with a camera. Okay, I said, okay, we have one of us down there, we have infiltrated the bunker, mission accomplished. I nodded but I was already starting to feel excluded.
Later that night all the talk was focused on The Grey Bat, The Grey Owl, The Grey Fox. He was the real deal, someone said, a commitment above and beyond, someone else added. If anyone can turn this around, he can, The Pink Panzer insisted.
When I got back to our hotel my wife was reading in bed, a book I had recommended to her, Jersey Under the Jackboot by R.C.F. Maugham. She was at the bit about the ban on excessive tobacco cultivation. This book is depressing me, she said. Can’t we just cuddle up? I stripped down to my vest and underwear and climbed into bed. Outside the window we could see the silhouettes of people passing back and forth along the front. In the distance someone was flying a kite. I told her about the events of the day, how The Grey Bat had disappeared beneath the floor on a reconnaissance mission, how we had fooled the police. I will never understand it, she said. What’s wrong with being up here in the light? I was about to tell her how we believed in exploring every possibility, how there was light in darkness, a black sun behind the bright one, but in the end I gave up. How could I explain to her that we find our origins in blood and in darkness on an unimaginable level? I reached over, switched off the lamp, and lay with my arms around her.
The next day the conference continued as usual but there was no sign of The Grey Wolf. In the morning there were various presentations: Scotland’s Secret Runways, a somewhat dry topography of Scotland’s longest and straightest roads; The Corsham Mirror, an interesting attempt to map the secret thirty-five-acre city buried beneath Wiltshire complete with man-made lake, sixty miles of road, a BBC recording studio and a paper messaging system facilitated by tubes filled with compressed air; Flat Earth: Notes Towards a Lexicon of Luftwaffe Targets, a potentially interesting talk that included a slideshow of rare Luftwaffe reconnaissance photographs taken from the air in Fife in the closing years of 1939 but which was marred by a pronounced stammer and a complete failure to get to grips with the technology of overhead projectors; Grim’s Graves, a tedious account of some godforsaken Neolithic flint mine (we do tend to attract them); and—most interesting of all—Here is Bunker of Upon Bunker, an attempt to map what for many of us was the underground site with the most significance, the ultimate prize, the dream of infiltrators worldwide, the place where Hitler made his last stand and his last exit via a pill and a bullet in the head, the Führerbunker.
It was the closest any of us could hope to come to walking in the footsteps of Dante or John Dee. The speaker—a Polish émigré whose name unfortunately translated as The Cold Fish—had drawn up several maps that included the location of Hitler’s study and living room, Eva Braun’s bedroom, Goebbels’s bedroom and the quarters of his wife and family—whose bodies the Bolsheviks discovered—even the quarters of the dog Blondi and its fated litter, alongside lists that were mind-boggling in their detail and scope, lists of the wines cellared in the basement of the Reich Chancellery and indiscriminately consumed during that fateful week in April, the single gramophone record that accompanied the tragic dance parties in the Vorbunker—a sentimental and effeminate recording of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, according to The Cold Fish—the cakes favoured by Hitler, sometimes three servings at a time, the paintings that decorated the walls (everyone knows about the portrait of Frederick the Great, but how about the lesser-known Grey Lady, the painting of an unknown woman with a face like granite and arched eyebrows that seemed to contain all the sorrow and pain of the world?).
It was a stunning feat of scholarly exegesis that was somewhat undermined by the revelation that he had personally uncovered a Nazi interrogation and torture chamber in the basement of a property in Greece, where he kept a holiday home, a room filled with bloodied sheets and dentist’s chairs, he insisted, a common fantasy among crackpots of a certain bent.
Still, there was enough material there that we all quite forgot about The Grey Wolf and instead spent the bulk of the morning wandering the bunker in our minds, the noise of constant bombardment up above, the sound of boots on concrete steps, the asthmatic drone of the air conditioning, the smell of wet dogs, the secret files, the wooden pews and the subterranean light, the rusting blast doors opening and closing like the gates of heaven.
The afternoon was set aside for a field trip around the defence architecture of Fife; the Secret Bunker—back then still very much a secret other than to those “in the know”—and the pillboxes that dotted the coast; the fortified islands; the anti-tank cubes; the abandoned airstrips; the sound mirrors; the nightside that had come to lord it over our lives. Truth is: I had seen it all before.
Incredibly, The Sightless Head, the modernist seminary designed by Pierre Melville just along the coast, wasn’t even on the itinerary. Back then it was still a functioning theological school. Its lack of mystery, its lack of a patina of decay, its refusal, back then, to become ruins, made it inexplicably unattractive to my fellow subterraneans, which seems crazy, now that it’s abandoned, and in the past, and haunted.
Let the neophytes have their day, I said to myself, and began to make my way back to the hotel, imagining a spot of lunch with my wife and perhaps even a game of chess and a short nap. I always carried a travel set with me but had yet to convince my wife to join me in a full game. She said she knew me too well, whatever that meant, and besides, she kept forgetting the rules, her rooks would become bishops, her castles like kings, and the next thing you knew she would be in tears over what she described as my “territorial aggression.” It’s not Austria, I would say to her, it’s not Poland!
As I passed along the front—it was another glorious summer’s day with highs in the mid-seventies—I spied a queue developing outside a seafront cafe. Never being one to pass up a spectacle, I immediately attached myself to the throng. The man in front of me, a man with tightly curled black hair and the swollen nose of a perpetual drug addict, turned and grinned up at me. You’re into it too, he said to me.
Let me assure you, I replied, I am most certainly not “into it.” You’re here, he said, you’re into it. I am most assuredly “into” nothing, I informed him. Then why are you here? he said. I merely came to see what all the fuss was about. It’s Mascaroni, he said, Elizabeth Mascaroni, she’s in the ice cream shop. And who might she be? I asked. Elizabeth Mascaroni is a star, he said, a child star. She’s come back to Burntisland to visit her family and meet her fans.
Just then I noticed Jack Frost a few people ahead of us in the queue. I ducked behind my new-found acquaintance. What was he doing here? I could see that he was holding something, a photograph, perhaps, was he queuing in order to obtain a signature? Right then a beggar appeared from out of nowhere, a negro, itself a rarity in Burntisland, never mind a blind one. As he made his way along the queue, an awkward silence descended upon us. What’s the matter? he asked. Hasn’t anyone ever seen a blind person before? Every so often he would poke someone in the leg or rap a child on the head with his stick, but no one had the nerve to say anything. I recommend the Mexican Vanilla, he announced, while facing the wrong way altogether, and with that he disappeared towards the beach.
That was the moment I decided to set a trap. I broke off from the queue and took a seat on a bench across the way, directly facing the door of the cafe. I crossed my legs, loaded a pipe and waited for the confrontation. It took no more than twenty minutes.
There he was, clutching his prize in one hand and with an expression that said, look at me, God Herself just kissed me on the forehead. I stood up as he approached. What’s that you’ve got there? I asked him. He was cool as a cucumber. It’s a signed photograph of your mother, he said to me. That was below the belt. I would have thought you would have been on the tour this afternoon, I said to him. After all, there’s a lot to learn. There’s only one person that could possibly have anything to teach me, he said, and right now he’s six foot under. That stung. So, in the meantime we line up for autographs from pop stars? I asked him. I’m surprised you even know who she is, he said. I don’t, I said, someone informed me of the level of mass idiocy that was taking place here. You obviously don’t get out much, he said. A bachelor, I’m guessing? On the contrary, I informed him, my wife is waiting for me right this minute in a hotel along the front. So how come you’re hanging around outside here? he countered. It was a good question.
I spied you, I said, and I wanted to get to the bottom of it. I’m flattered, he said, I had no idea that I had made such an impression. My feeling is that you are shocked, he continued, that you are shocked by my interest in things that aren’t over with already. You mistake my interest in graveyards for nostalgia or for some kind of refusal of the present. In this you are wrong. I heard your memorialising of the dead the other night (in truth I had no idea what he was talking about), your conviction that the past had somehow been buried and the present was just a pale ghost. Well, the poorer for you. For me, the ruins, the abandoned bunkers, the secret plans, are precisely the things that I have moved beyond. When I look in the mirror, I see everything that I have cast off. I come here, to this meeting, this pathetic AGM, and all that I see are dead men, skeletons preparing their own resting place and already nostalgic about it, nostalgic about death itself. You remind me of alcoholic novelists or the kind of pill-popping nut jobs that work the nightshift in bakeries or that have miserable paper rounds and save their pathetic manuscripts in chests or in shoeboxes under the bed in the hope that the future will deign to throw them some scraps, preferably, conveniently, once they have long vacated the scene.
I took a nervous step backwards. At first I feared he would assault me. But I kept my cool. You, sir, are an ignoramus, I informed him. And a rat to boot. You’re the rat, he spat back. I know the game you’re playing. I was shaken. I was most assuredly not playing any games but somehow the accusation hit home. Is that how I was coming across? Aside from a self-confessed badly fluffed intro, I had thought my entrance to the conference a masterclass in subterranean disdain.
I dismissed him with a shake of the head and walked off. However, I had been disturbed by the vehemence of his attack and I may have stumbled once or twice on my way back to the hotel. The temperature was rising, and the afternoon had become doubly uncomfortable. In a side street I caught sight of the same blind beggar as before, this time walking down the middle of the road and into the path of oncoming vehicles. I watched as a concerned middle-aged woman took him by the arm and led him back to the pavement. It’s a con, I said to myself. It’s all a rotten con.
The next day I was booked to headline afternoon proceedings with my presentation—I should really say unveiling—of The AntiMatterist Manifesto. I prayed that The Grey Owl would return by then.
That night I sat up until dawn, revising the manifesto, reading it softly to myself, tuning it, as it were.
I wrote by the light of a candle while the hearth crackled and my wife occasionally changed sides beneath the soft sheets the hotel had provided us with. I watched figures pass by in the night, silhouettes. The blind beggar, perhaps, who knows? Then the sky moved from grey to blue and finished on a burst of silver that felt magnetic, like it was the colour of the future itself, dawning on me.
The talk was a triumph. What if you were to say yes to no? I asked them. I threw out points like a machine gun.
Afterwards I asked about The Grey Owl. He’s back in town, Token Bob said. The word is, he intends to make a headlining speech. It felt like someone had dropped my heart down an elevator shaft. Had he attended my talk? I asked him. He had. In fact, he had been seen taking notes. I envisioned a great collaboration, him quoting me at length, Jack Frost curled over in his seat in the front row like a rotten question mark. We’re onto something, I said to myself.
Right then I had my first premonition, my first flash of the future, like a camera that takes a shot of a pitch-black room and for a second illuminates a body, slumped awkwardly in a chair, and all around it nothing, no explanation, no context, just the future plain and simple. There had been a discovery, I was sure of that, and it had coincided with my AntiMatterist declaration.
I rushed back to my wife, who was in bed reading, this time Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler. This one is better, she said, this one is real literature. I felt impossibly moved. I fell to my knees and clasped my hands to my chest before presenting her with a bunch of carnations that I had pilfered from a field behind a petrol station. My love, I said to her. My angel.
Then I told of her of the reception of my speech, my feeling of impending deliverance to the future. We’ll be there any minute, she laughed, and put her arms around my neck. I lifted her from the bed and the blankets slid from her like the skin of a snake that lives beneath rocks in the desert and that rarely feels the contact of another living being except through a skin that has been left behind and trampled under feet. I fixed her in her chair and wheeled her onto the balcony. We looked out over the beach as the silhouettes of the ice cream ladies made their last rounds and families in swimwear walked home. I asked her if she remembered how we were when we first met. Barely, she said. But I miss them, those two. Then she said it again, those two, like a simple repeat was all that it would take.
I arrived back at the conference at 6.15 P.M. The evening programme wasn’t scheduled to start until seven, but I intended to waylay The Grey Wolf before then and quiz him over the reception of The AntiMatterist Manifesto. He was nowhere to be seen. He’s on stage at 10 P.M., The Lightning Rod confirmed. But he was acting like he had been sniffing cocaine, so I disregarded his information completely. It was only when Token Bob turned up that I gleaned the real story. That The Grey Owl had driven to Edinburgh in order to have a reel of film express-processed in time for that evening’s talk. We’re all hanging by our balls, Token Bob said. He was uncouth. But I got the message.
I could barely contain a feeling of exultation, even as I sat through a series of interminable lectures with titles like If This Be a Plan: The Enigma of the Dunglass Frigidaire—the report of a ruin situated on an outcropping of water near the mouth of the Clyde that had a sealed room deep in its basement that was filled by an impossibly modern fridge that opened like a trapdoor—The Minotaur: A Genealogy; Provocation: The Ground Beneath Our Feet; and, finally, Jack Frost’s London Flatlands: A Refutation. Evidently, they had saved the colons for last.
Frost’s speech began in his usual manner, with much coughing and the forming of white foam in the corners of his mouth, much subconscious genuflecting, at one point even kneeling on the stairs as he made his way on stage, although some people maintained that he briefly collapsed or perhaps suffered a breakdown, which makes sense, knowing what comes next.
He started off on a familiar line, expanding on the idea that there weren’t any true depths at all, that everything lay on the surface. At first he came across like a witchfinder. Then he changed tack, arguing that the idea of the below—which was always a concept, he insisted, as it’s impossible to be below where you are, which means below is permanently inaccessible, which means you are nowhere, not even at a crossroads—was a practical creation, a bin-hole, the exit and entrance for so much rubbish in people’s brains. Poor soul, I thought to myself. Poor suffering soul.
Then he began to talk about reconnaissance missions he had undertaken around London, the tunnels he had discovered that led in and out of the moment at certain points in the city, distinct collusions between time and space. He moved on to his investigations of potentiality. His talk took a magical turn. Magic is the activation of potentialities, he said. Then he came down on us all. He spat foam from the sides of his mouth. You have let yourselves down, he proclaimed. You mistake the catacombs for a different place. He took out a cigarette paper and began to roll it in his fingers. This went on for about ten minutes. An awkward silence crept over the audience. Every so often he would purse his lips and stare at the paper like it had eluded him and then he would start all over again, rerolling this one endlessly delayed cigarette. At one point someone coughed. Token Bob nudged me on the shoulder. He’s not mental, he said, he makes origami animals, at which point Frost perched the model of a small paper deer on the edge of his lectern and walked—some say staggered—off the side of the stage and straight out the door of the auditorium.
