Fremder Read online

  Once we had a country and we thought it fair,

  Look in the atlas and you’ll find it there:

  We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.

  W.H. Auden

  Songs and Other Musical Pieces

  who do you have to fuck to get into this picture?

  Dory Previn

  starlet starlet on the screen, who will follow norma jean?

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  Acknowledgments

  By the Same Author

  1

  Out of the tomb, we bring Badroulbadour,

  Within our bellies, we her chariot.

  Here is an eye. And here are, one by one,

  The lashes of that eye and its white lid.

  Here is the cheek on which that lid declined,

  And, finger after finger, here, the hand,

  The genius of that cheek. Here are the lips,

  The bundle of the body and the feet.

  … … .

  Out of the tomb we bring Badroulbadour.

  Wallace Stevens, ‘The Worms at Heaven’s Gate’

  In the deep chill and the darkness of the Fourth Galaxy, in the black sparkle of deep space, oh so lonely, see a figure in a blue coverall tumbling over and over as it comes towards you: no space suit, no helmet, no oxygen. Is he dead? He can’t be alive, can he? What’s in his mind now? Are there pictures frozen in his mind?

  Pictures in the mind! Words also. Again last night I had the dream, the one in which it was made known to me, perhaps by a written message, perhaps by the sound of distant weeping, that the rats were lamenting the removal of their sacred objects. I have never dreamed this dream on the planet Badr al-Budur but perhaps one night I shall.

  Badr al-Budur (everybody calls it Badru) in the Fourth Galaxy is a little off the beaten track: because of El-Niño variables in that sector you can’t flicker to it, you have to go to Hubble Straits and jet from there. Badru is a place you stop at on the way to somewhere else, an in-between place, a middle-of-the-night scene change where you breathe bottled air that smells like LavaKleen and wait for the next jet to Erehwon or Xanadu or wherever.

  There’s nothing on Badru but the spaceport which is mostly empty except for robot sweepers humming through the echoing silence under dim blue noctolux lamps. Clocks, too, that tell you what day and time it is in London, Tokyo, New York, and so on. There’s MIKHAIL’S QWIKSNAK, a multilingual cafeteria in pink, purple, red, blue, green, and yellow neon (with missing letters) where you can get GALAKT K MIKS, SPUDNIK FRY, KRASNAYA K LA, and indigestion or worse. Nearby is Mikhail’s Bistro where you can get a better class of indigestion. Next to it is a gift shop where robots fluent in twenty currencies will sell you clockwork orreries made in New Taiwan, models of the Stephen Hawking, pornoscopes featuring the Arabian Nights Princess Badr al-Budur with her lover Qamar al-Zaman, key rings with bits of polished budurite, and tea towels that say, ‘I’VE BEEN THRU BADRU. HAVE YOU?’ Not surprisingly, Badru orbits the planet Qamar al-Zaman which is the rubbish tip for that sector.

  There are a mini-cine and a cybercade in the spaceport but my favourite night spot on Badru is the Q-BO SLEEP that beckons in purple neon, SLEEP & SHOWER IO CR. PER HOUR: each cube with its high-mileage futon, shower, sink, and toilet. The blankets have a grey prison look and the towels are only a little thicker than the toilet paper. To check in you insert your card and punch in your hours, then you get your Hi-REM or Dropout tab from the dispenser and you’re bye-bye until your jump to Erehwon or Xanadu or wherever.

  Nobody lives on Badru except cockroaches; the staff are all robots and the supplies are delivered weekly by Mikhail’s Intergalaktik. Mikhail loses money on it but he had to take it on to get the Fourth-Galaxy franchise. What I like about Badru is that it’s so much what it is, so much the appearance of itself printed on the very thin membrane that we call reality. On the other side of that membrane is the endless becoming that swallows up years and worlds, Badr al-Budur, Mikhail’s Intergalaktik, even the dream rats and their sacred objects, in the dark of no remembrance.

  I was only a few megaklicks off Badru when they found me drifting in space on the morning of 4 November 2052. No space suit, no helmet, no oxygen, and the pictures in my mind all frozen.

  2

  From the hagg and hungrie goblin

  That into raggs would rend ye,

  And the spirit that stands by the naked man

  In the Book of Moones defend yee!

  That of your five sounde sences

  You never be forsaken,

  Nor wander from your selves with Tom

  Abroad to begg your bacon.

  Anonymous, ‘Tom O’ Bedlam’s Song’

  The fourth of November 2052 was my thirtieth birthday. What happened that morning in the Fourth Galaxy came to be known as the Clever Daughter incident, and after it they kept me at Hubble Straits Space Station for three weeks for a Level 4 Study at Newton Centre. They wanted to know how I’d been able to hold on to the world. When I say ‘the world’ I don’t mean Planet Earth, I mean everything this side of the reality membrane.

  My head is full of music: all kinds of songs and fragments of songs, most of them written, sung, and played by dead people. Some of my best friends are dead people.

  I like old standards, American mostly, all the way back to the nineteen-twenties. They don’t write songs like that any more, that world isn’t there any more. Once I saw an old documentary with grainy black-and-white footage from 1936, the Spanish Civil War: men running up a hill with bolt-action rifles thinking they were going to do some good.

  I took a trip on the train and I thought about you,

  I passed a shadowy lane and I thought about you,…

  A little strange, a little bringing tears to the eyes, to hear that in your head out beyond the Sixth Galaxy. I’m amazed at how many songs and bits of songs live in my head. And the times when it sings them. Why did it give me ‘The Shadow of Your Smile’ when the jets packed up on a local from Escherville to the Hand of Glory in Schrödinger’s Cat? Or ‘Begin the Beguine’ when the AG slipped its channel and Constanze De Groot took the top off the New Tokyo Sonydome? That morning last November when Clever Daughter and I parted company, however, the music in my head was a much older standard than those.

  You know how it is when you’re sitting in a bar somewhere dark and quiet just breathing in and out and maintaining neutral buoyancy and a stranger starts talking to you and after a while he brings out of his pocket a letter coming apart at the creases; he brings out this letter to show you that at one time he mattered more than he does now and he tells you the story of his life. At first you wish he’d go away but perhaps you say to yourself, Maybe one day I’ll want somebody to listen to my story. Never mind. My name is Fremder Gorn. Fremder means stranger in German.

  3

  i have flown

  to star-stained heights

  on bent and battered wings

  in search of

  mythical kings

  mythical kings

  sure that everything of worth

  is in the sky and not the earth …

  Dory Previn, ‘mythical kings and iguanas’

  Sometimes I think about the age of steam and those great locomotives that thundered into oblivion like the Spirit of Progress. Sometimes I think about the motorcars that poisoned the air
and swallowed up the green and pleasant land and finally sputtered to a halt in gridlock. And sometimes I think about flicker drive.

  My mind goes back to a few minutes before three o’clock in the morning of 4 November 2052, just over a year ago. Nova Central Cargo Spaceport outside London – the flicker docks under the purple stutter of the rhodolux lamps in the rain. Diesel and electrical smells of forklifts and cranes and juicers. Another smell, whispering and beckoning like the Erl King’s daughters: the smell of Out There. People move a little differently at three in the morning. Purple light and deep shadows. Figures in infraglo macs shouting. High-legged gantry cranes loading and unloading freighters and tankers. Lights and colour and motion reflected in the shine of the wet tarmac. Lots of noise but behind the hiss of the purple rain the silence is cruising like a shark.

  Looking down the line of buffers I see Uguisu, Miyazaki, Nippon Enterprises Universal; Aral II, Minsk, Sony Pan-Galactic (ISR) Ltd; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Bremen, BASF Ausserirdisch GmbH; Candide, Marseilles, Corporation Française d’Exploitation Minière Interstellaire. Big names, billions of credits, millions of megaklicks. Beyond the dock lights the ruins of old Nova Central are ghostly, dim. Blackened grasses growing out of cracks in the tarmac; gulls wheeling out of the dark rain into the bright, circling over heaps of rotting refuse, rusting junk; empty buildings put up by somebody’s nephew with their roofs fallen in on floors laid by somebody’s brother-in-law; huge empty fuel-storage tanks with the Corporation logo fading on them; the control tower standing empty with broken windows. The sky is dark and heavy, no moon.

  In Dock 14 (there’s no 13): Clever Daughter, a deep-space Corporation tanker, a huge battered thing like a discarded oil refinery all pocked and pitted from the dust and flying debris of seven galaxies, dull metal shining in the rain. Nothing sleek, nothing aerodynamic – it doesn’t need to be smooth and sleek like those old ships that went up on a pillar of fire and five million pounds a minute. Clever Daughter’s bound for the Morrigan in the Fourth Galaxy with 500,000 hectolitres of protomorphic acid for De Groot Draconium.

  The juicers have disconnected and pulled away. The transmission window’s cleared. ‘OK for flicker on 72.3 Ems,’ says the voice in the headphones. There’s a loud hum and a strong smell like burnt-out writing; the air shimmers in the purple rain under the lights. Clever Daughter and its reflection aren’t there any more. Nothing to see. Only the silence cruising like a shark. That’s flicker drive.

  4

  Flicker freako, here and gone,

  flicker freako, be my baby,

  flicker quicker, off and on,

  love me sometime, love me maybe,

  flicker with me till we peak O!

  be my baby, flicker freako.

  Sol Krummer and Harry Stein, ‘Flicker Freako’

  Some children inherit money and property. What I’ve got is an oscillator in my brain: it’s about the size of a pellet of birdshot. If you want to be a flickerhead you’ve got to have one of those.

  Most civilians don’t get to see the Corporation Yearbook. Here’s the beginning of ‘A Note on Flicker Drive’ from the 2053 edition:

  Victor Lossiter’s investigations into biological scaling began after he read Richard Voss’s early 1970s papers on 1/f noise and Benoit Mandelbrot’s theory of fractals published in 1977. He credited film director Gösta Kraken, however, with the idea that started him on the research that resulted in his formulation of the Intermittency Principle in ‘Being: Not Steady State but Flicker’, Scientific American, April 2017. Thirty years earlier Kraken had written:

  Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillnesses blurring into motion on the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we find the heart of the mystery in which we are never allowed to rest. The flickering of a film interrupts the intolerable continuity of apparent world; subliminally it gives us those in-between spaces of black that we crave. The eye is hungry for this; eagerly it collaborates with the unwinding strip of celluloid that shows it twenty-four stillnesses per second, making real by an act of retinal retention the here-and-gone, the continual disappearing in which the lovers kiss, the shots are fired, the horses gallop; but below the threshold of conscious thought the eye sees and the mind savours the flickering of the black.

  Gösta Kraken, Perception Perceived:

  an Unfinished Memoir (Jonathan Cape, 1987)

  Years before Kraken’s thoughts on ‘the occulting state of being’ Elias Gorn had begun his investigation of what he termed ‘zoetic oscillation’. As early as 1969 he had written to Boris Pavlovich Belousov:

  After reading of your quite remarkable demonstration of chemical oscillation I have produced this reaction in my own laboratory using a malonic acid reagent. Since then I have been seeing the characteristic spirals and rings in everything from coins of Knossos and Troy Town mazes to the movement of smoke in wind-tunnel experiments. It seems to me that what you have shown us might well be the universal communication pattern of which your chemical reaction is one of an infinite number of manifestations. Communication of what? Perhaps the primal impulse that drives all systems both microcosmic and macrocosmic? A very unscientific leap of the imagination indeed!

  I’ve been considering the possibility of zoetic oscillation and I believe that this can be demonstrated by the simplest of experiments but I haven’t had the technology available that would enable me to build the necessary equipment.

  Elias Gorn never did acquire the technology; he and his wife committed suicide in 2009 when he was dying of cancer, leaving the notes that his daughter Helen would study and make use of. Victor Lossiter had the technology, and in his elegant 2019 experiment that made Lossiter’s rat as famous as Schrödinger’s cat he isolated not only the zoetic current of a rat but the substantive emissions of its cage. He wired both rat and cage to a camera with a nanosecond quartz flash, the circuit that activated the camera being completed only in the intervals in zoetic and inanimate currents; Lossiter’s film showed frame after frame of empty laboratory table, thereby demonstrating that life and matter are not continuous but intermittent, a nonlinear alternation of being and non-being at varying frequencies in the ultraband. Lossiter died in 2021 at thirty-seven with his work unfinished but his discoveries and the researches of Elias and Sarah Gorn started Helen Gorn and her brother Isodor on the ontological investigation that resulted in flicker drive.

  Flicker drive was not Helen Gorn’s first objective: she had been in correspondence with Lossiter since 2018 and she believed that the phonomenon of intermittency could be applied to psychotherapy. Herself given to frequent depressions, she was hoping to find a mode of controlled access to states of non-being as a means of relieving stress. In May 2021 she and her brother Isodor, financed by a Corporation grant, began a series of experiments with the limbic system and within a year they demonstrated conclusively that the ‘carrier wave’ in the human brain is generated in the amygdala…

  Fremder here. At Corporation Library you can see 318 transcripts of Helen Gorn’s recordings of the experiments from 2 May 2021 until 16 February 2022. There are no transcripts between that date and Isodor’s death on 13 April 2022. Helen was twenty-three when they began the experiments, a Fellow of Corporation Neurobiology and Corporation Elite. Eighteen-year-old Isodor was a mathematician and an FCE as well. Reading their notebooks now I find the two of them more like one composite being than two distinct individuals.

  The family name used to be Gorenstein. Elias Gorenstein’s parents ended up in Auschwitz and when he came to England he thought Gorn might be a better name to have if somebody came knocking on the door in the middle of the night. ‘Gorn today; here tomorrow,’ he’s quoted as saying.

  The beginning of my life was not quite the usual thing. My mother killed herself when she was seven months pregnant with me. She knew from the scan that she was carrying a boy and she left a note for the sanatorium staff saying that she wanted me to be circumcised
and named Fremder Elijah Gorn. There was also a note for me; when it was put into my hands four years later I looked at those marks made by my mother’s hand and her words came to me in silence from the voiceless paper:

  Dear Fremder Elijah,

  I’m sorry that I’m not going to be around to be your mother but each of us can only go so far: I’ve gone my distance and now you’ll have to go yours. Learn the speech of ravens and they will feed you.

  Good luck,

  your mother,

  Helen Gorn

  There was a chair for Elijah at the circumcision. Perhaps he attended, perhaps not. As quickly as possible I learned the speech of ravens and they fed me.

  5

  It was just one of those things,

  Just one of those crazy flings.

  One of those bells that now and then rings,

  Just one of those things.

  Cole Porter, ‘Just One of Those Things’

  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.