The Music of the 22nd Century

I was in London. At least, once upon a time it was London. Now it was a huge meadow. Nothing really remained of the city. There were a few parking lots all cracked and weeded over. Occasionally you’d stumble on a pile of bricks or a block of masonry. Perhaps an architrave from Westminster Abbey, maybe a quoin from St. Paul’s, or even a sett from Oxford Street! In all likelihood it was nothing more than rubble from Kennington. But who cares? In the centre of the meadow stood a large, one-storey wooden shack, called El Farolito. This was all that remained of London: a Mexican bar. Nothing remotely English about it. The last watering hole on the edge of the island, and from here on civilisation ended.

I saw El Farolito from a few miles off. Not the bar itself, but the huge plume of steam rising from its boiler house. There was no wind that day and the steam ascended sluggishly, bright white like a buttercup, finally gathering in a huge cloud that gleamed in the summer sun ten or twelve thousand feet above the earth. I was on foot, tramping down the dirt road cut between the grasses and flowers of the immense meadow.

I listed the names of the Kings and Queens of Britain to myself. I said their names aloud in time with my steps. To the left: grassy meadows scattered with thickets of oak and hawthorn. To the right: the same. Behind me: the same. Ahead: the same, except for the dark smudge of El Farolito and its indolent column of white steam.

The bar was dark inside. Even there I felt like an outsider. Then again, thinking about it, that’s exactly the sort of place where everybody’s an outsider. Are there any regulars in El Farolito? I hate beer and I thought drinking wine would make me look cowardly, so I ordered the most expensive spirit. It was difficult not to cough as I drank. Hard liquor made my tongue burn and left my throat dry. Come to think of it, I don’t much like alcohol at all. But in El Farolito I thought it wise to drink. I sidled across to a man hunched over the bar. He wore combat overalls caked in mud and dust.

As casually and coolly as I could, I asked, ‘what do you hear from the road?’

The ranger looked at me, ‘what?’

I took another sip of the whiskey, ‘oh no I didn’t say anything.’

‘Go away.’

I respected his suggestion, and politely returned to my table.

It now seemed like a stupid mistake to have left Perla’s letter unopened in Agravaine College. What if I died? She might’ve declared her love for me in the letter. She might’ve said: come to the city! Or something else. Not knowing was a cursed blessing or blessed curse. One or the other, surely.

Unopened it was possible for me to imagine every conceivable scenario. That she’d replied at all meant something, and it took little effort to conceive of a growing correspondence between us. Luke wouldn’t know about it and nor would Violet, not even Ofélie. Nobody would know. A delicate correspondence it would be. I’d become the outlet for her suppressed passion. Of course, she could never step back from her consulting career. She wouldn’t want to! A good life awaited her, and I’d make perfectly clear in my letters that she simply must keep going, whatever strange dreams she had on blank and rainy Bank Holidays. Marriage to Luke, three children, an early retirement – these were the things she had to pursue in the concrete world of debts and decent lives. But I’d offer to be her midnight escapee. Yes, I’d offer her the best of both worlds. I’d be a window onto the life she only cautiously imagined when watching action-thrillers to wind down at the weekend, or when she laid in bed at night alone in silk pyjamas and watched the yellow beams of passing traffic wheel across her bedroom ceiling. What might have been, but what couldn’t ever be… I shuddered with extraordinary delight at the notion of her thinking about me. And if she saw me now, tramping across the lowlands that once had been the heart of darkness, surely a glimmer of passionate, idolatrous fantasy might spark in her crystal mind.

Alternatively, I also imagined that her letter was a rebuke. Why the hell did you say such things? She’d have figured out that beneath my letter of birthday congratulations lay a fierce and unrealistically passionate subtext. She’d castigate me for my cruelty and my stupidity. Why fill my head with such fantasies? Why torture me with things that can never be? That might even be better. I’d go off and do my own ridiculous things in the full knowledge that she shared my love. For her it would become a twisted love mingled with hate. For I’d represent the path not taken.

Some new patrons entered El Farolito. They were passersby more in keeping with my presence there. I recognised them as academics right away. Being nearly middle-aged and in a group of more than three (there were five) they had the breezy confidence of regulars. But I could tell by the expression of the rangers and randomers in the dimly lit corners of the bar that these academics had never before entered its swing-doors.

I got talking to them. They’d travelled down from Oxford with the intention of going to Moscow. Armando Lorenzo, John Barton, Kublai Kirillov, Arkadiusz Shovkovskiy, and Terrence Flock. Their hope was to recover Lenin’s body from his Mausoleum. Whether they wanted to salvage the mummy or burn it wasn’t clear, for they were peculiar men. The only way I can describe them as a band of neo-Byzantine clerico-fascists. Fashionably dressed, intolerable, and bogglingly well-informed. But they liked me. I explained that I was also an academic, from Agravaine College, and that my project was the recovery of artefacts from the Mediterranean basin, ‘as I’m sure you know, the seabed is full of unretrieved treasures.’

They accepted my story without hesitation and offered to take me as far as the Alps. We drank together. Things seemed half-decent. Rats of the world, unite! An hour later we left El Farolito and boarded their minibus. We drove for thirty hours and they dropped me off in the Alpine highlands. From there I went on foot. But instead of experiencing increasingly warm weather as I travelled south, I was met with long, cold days and icy wind.

I slept in forests, in bushes, between the roots of big trees, and so on and so forth. Generally I looked for heather. It was comfortable, warm, and if you found heather in a hillside hollow, there was no wind, either. Lots of creepy-crawlies in heather, but none of them can hurt you. The whole of Europe was like that. Forests, meadows, river valleys, open plains, and nothing else.

The salt flats of the drained Mediterranean were a little warmer, however, though I couldn’t possibly tell you why. And they were littered with fallen glory. Great big barnacled ships rested on their keels in the crusted seabed. You’d see them from miles away, these blotches of brown on a plain of white nothingness. The horizon was dotted with once-sunken masts. I found Etruscan coins, Minoan goblets, Ottoman scimitars, and Athenian statues. Marble arms stuck out of the sand. Skulls still clad in their rusty helmets gazed eternally across the dry Mediterranean. Here I slept in the ships or in the sparse rock formations. Would I find Atlantis? No. But I found something else, and soon I walked through ice and snow.

It’s hard to be sure where I found the castle, for the Eastern Mediterranean was one big icy plateau. Beyond that, the Levant was endless tundra. Other than smashed pottery, cigarette butts, and bits of discarded scaffolding, there was no sign of human civilisation. And yet there wasn’t much wildlife either. I saw plenty of birds. Flocks of geese overhead; huge congregations of geese in the wetlands. Now I think about it, the only birds I saw were geese! There were no other living creatures at all. So why or how had the geese survived?

I crossed Sinai. Barren mountains all around. White domes of smooth ice and untrodden snow. The plains and valleys were permafrost; hard, chilly soil. Unforgiving. I started noticing footprints when I entered Mesopotamia. (I think it was Mesopotamia, but it might’ve been the Baltic). They looked like the outline of elephant feet. And then I came across big piles of frozen dung. Mammoths?

The days became dark. There was no sunrise and there was no sunset. A dim glow in the north and the dual lanterns of the Moon and Apollo were all that lit the world. Everything was steeped in purple shadows and thick grey fog.

I came to a frozen sea. The Dead Sea? The Black Sea? The Red Sea? The Arabian Gulf? I knew not. It stretched into the fog and disappeared. Beyond the frozen sea, obscured by the fog, I sensed mountains. There was a deeper shadow there, in the distance, a lurking and colossal shadow. Its heavier darkness seemed to clash with the ghastly emptiness of starless sky. I crossed the frozen lake. It took days. Finally, at the far side of the frozen lake, leviathan cliffs loomed through the fog. An icy wind blasted down from the mountains and dispersed, just for a moment, the thick wreaths of mist. I saw a spur of rock, volcanic rock as black as night, jutting out from the sheer cliffs. There was a castle on the pillar of rock.

Then the fog descended and the castle vanished.

I heard the clanking of their armour before I saw them. I thought it was the ice cracking at first. But the regularity and the metallic tone of their march was not the same as the extraterrestrial sonic booms of splitting ice. My heart thumped. Adrenaline flooded my veins. But here, on the frozen lake, there was nowhere to run. So I remained still.

The knights’ entrance was preceded by their silhouettes. At first the shadows were huge, as though giants were coming towards me, but they shrunk and sharpened until men in armour replaced them. The snow crunched loudly beneath their heavy feet and I liked the sound of their slightly hoarse breathing and the puffs of white that came from their visors. Their sabres rattled against their plate armour as their chainmail jingled, and the icy wind ruffled the plumes on their helmets and their crimson sashes.

‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume?’

One of them laughed viciously. The others remained silent. The one who laughed, and who wore a red plume instead of a white plume on his helmet, lifted his visor, ‘you’re coming with us. We won’t hurt you.’

They blindfolded me, took me to the castle, and threw me in jail. Or, should I say, in gaol. I was allowed to keep my bag.

I didn’t want to read poetry or prose. Otherwise, all I’d brought with me were the (few) letters from Violet, my correspondence with Charles, and those postcards from Candelaria. In the meagre light of my cell I examined these papers carefully, reading them over and over again. Eventually I got bored of reading and just looked at the pictures from Candelaria’s villa.

I’d pace around my cell for fifteen or twenty minutes, smoking angrily (they gave me cigarettes), then sit down and look at Candelaria’s postcards for about thirty five seconds. Afterwards back to pacing. Ideas came to me. Brilliant ideas. But my typewriter was still in Agravaine. So how does one write, when one has neither ink nor paper nor word processing software, nor indeed hardware upon which to run the word processing software? You write on the walls, of course.

You’ve got to be kidding me.

These thoughts were particularly unpleasant. I had, only moments ago, very seriously considered writing on the walls. And yet, despite what you might think, I didn’t feel crazy. I’m not crazy, right? Surely crazy people write on walls because they have voices in their heads or something like that. I only wanted to write on the walls due to an administrative oversight. It was practicality, not slipping sanity, that drove me to scratch letters into the stones. To Hell with it! Auf Wiedersehen, Pep! I took out my knife and started writing. Unlike crazy people I was very tidy. I chose a starting point carefully and from there wrote in letters of a uniform size and line spacing. It was slow work, but that gave me time to think very deliberately about my choice of words.

And besides, for the whole world I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else. The city? You’ve got to be kidding me. Not even the Porter’s Lodge in Agravaine College, certainly not Ms. Farringdon’s, and definitely not at home. Here I felt saner and more peaceful than anywhere else. So I wrote prose and poetry and random fragments of screenplays and drama. How many days passed? No clue. But they fed me well and the cell wasn’t too cold. I stretched, jogged on the spot, and held imaginary fistfights. Then I looked at Candelaria’s postcards. I dreamed up situations where I visited Nova Italia and left a blazing trail of legendary, wild glory.

Then, one day, they let me out. I have a sneaking suspicion that once I started to write on the walls they took pity on me. Probably I seemed like a harmless madman. The prison guard wore black leather armour embossed with eagles and trimmed with golden thread. I asked him his name: ‘Bastiano’. I asked him where I was: ‘the castle’. I asked him why they’d brought me here: ‘to save you from the cold’. I thanked him.

Then Bastiano looked me in the eyes. He was handsome and lean. ‘Stay here, in the castle. You’ll find everything you need. The Captain will return soon.’

I thanked the guard profusely, but that was all I could get from him. What the bloody hell were they doing here? In case of… something. What terrible secret could necessitate their presence in the middle of the frozen earth? Or, perhaps, it was some O.S.A. operation. All these guards and soldiers might just be creeps and spooks. But I didn’t believe that for a second.

So I found a random bed chamber and made it my own. I ate in the dining hall with the other men. We had smoked fish, roasted seal, scrambled seagull eggs, calamari, and lots of freshly made pasta. I drank red wine. I read my novels and my poetry and wandered the candlelit corridors of the castle. Sometimes I explored the battlements. They were usually shrouded in fog, though those big sheer mountains always loomed overhead. And it was Winter: night became eternal. Therefore battlements were cold, windy, and terrifyingly high. I never stayed long. Instead I’d return to the candlelit labyrinth of chapels, sleeping quarters, barracks, granaries, galleries, dungeons, libraries (empty, by the way), kitchens, halls, and towers. Life was perfect.

The men (I could call them guards, soldiers, sentinels, sentries, dragoons, officers, wardens, shepherds, deputies, centurions, or sheriffs, but I’ll stick with men) had a rigorous, ritualistic routine. Notwithstanding those on sentry duty (whose shifts therefore varied from standard protocol) they all rose early. The chaplain rung the four o’clock bell and fifteen minutes later the bugler sounded the morning call. I can’t explain or even understand all the details, but the whole day went on in this manner, dictated and directed by bugles and bells and cannon fire. They performed drills, paraded and marched, polished their buttons and boots, cleaned their rifles, took thirty minutes for lunch, did various tasks in the afternoon (such as grouting, weeding, sweeping, and other rigorous maintenance of the fortress), ate a formal evening meal preceded by grace, prayers, and silence, all according to specific and indecipherable rules of etiquette and drinking, then took three hours’ leave in the evening to do as they pleased, which usually meant playing dominoes, cards, mah-jong, chess, go, and backgammon while drinking and smoking in the great hall. They were expected in the chapel three times a day, they tended the courtyard gardens, they were sent to break holes in the frozen lake and fish, and they did all sorts of other mysterious things.

Let me tell you now: I loved it.

Some of them had specific titles (beyond the ranks of Deputy, Sergeant-at-Arms, and Lieutenant) such as the Chaplain, the Bugler, the Drummer, the Librarian, the Astronomer, the Chef, the Master of the Revels, the Distiller, and so on and so forth. Strikingly, however, there was no doctor. Not even an apothecary or surgeon of any kind. Once a man was injured. He fell from the scaffolding (it had been erected for the purposes of replacing eroded masonry on the astronomy tower) and snapped his ankle. The men who witnessed this accident were the ones who took care of him. They cleaned his wounds, set his bones, and made a cast. Were they all medically trained? That’s how it seemed.

I found an old CRT in one of the towers. It was right at the top, in a timber-framed loft full of old mattresses and quilts and other assorted crap. There was a generator, too, and a carboard box of VHS tapes. I watched Casablanca several times over. I swear it was me and Perla dancing in Paris! Two hearts of an unimaginably different material brought together by circumstance. Yes, that would be us. United by war and fate, cast on the same rock in the middle of a mighty storm, searching for love in the aftermath of catastrophe and shipwreck… and finding it there! We’d lead a glamorous lifestyle. I’d wear double-breasted jackets and paisley pocket squares. I’d smoke all day long. She’d wear floor-length silk gowns and pearl necklaces and her milk-white skin would glow like muslin in the fine gauze-light of the Golden Age. We’d go ballroom dancing! Our cheeks pressed softly together, our eyes downcast, we’d be dancing in heaven.

I asked Lieutenant Bastiano if I could help. He offered me sentry duty. That granted me the non-commissioned rank of Sentinel, which was the lowest rung on the ladder of this bleakly isolated Order. Even as a comrade, I couldn’t get much from the guards. They all said different things. I mean, they were extraordinary men. It wasn’t confusion that I saw in their faces, not disinterest either, but something else.

One of them said they were waiting for a play. That a company of players were destined to turn up and give a performance, and that these soldiers would provide an audience. Another spoke about some future war. And that when the fighting started, these men would protect the villagers. ‘One day there’ll be a battle on the ice. Maybe in one thousand years. Maybe one thousand years ago. There will be a battle on the ice.’ They were zealous, all of them, and ready to die. In that way, I think, their souls had entered a state of sublimity. Now I had joined their ranks as soldiers of the fortress on the edge of a frozen wasteland on an earth soon to be left behind.

The Captain of the Guard returned. He caught my eye immediately. A big Italian called Giambattista Lizzardi. He must’ve been two metres tall, though he didn’t have the strange proportions of a big man. His body was that of someone five foot ten, just blown up to a larger height. Therefore he seemed especially enormous. It wasn’t that he was tall; he was simply a giant man. His eyes were big, narrow, and lugubrious. His brow was broad and deep and furious. He had a close-trimmed beard and everybody (except Lieutenant Bastiano) called him the Generalissimo.

Our first conversation was on the battlements. Lieutenant Bastiano found me in the CRT Tower, ‘the Captain wants to see you.’ I went up there in my simple, undecorated, black Sentinel uniform. There, caught between the plummeting darkness of the eternal winter’s night and the violent, brick-red firelight of the battlement braziers, Captain Giambattista Lizzardi looked like Godfrey of Bouillon. The Captain’s armour was inlaid with spirals of gold and silver trefoils. Rubies glittered ominously on his gauntlets and his chest plate was emblazoned with blue and white mountains.

‘I like your castle,’ I said to the Captain.

He inhaled the last of his cigarette and threw it over the castle walls, ‘there are no flowers here.’