Somewhere East of Life. Brian Aldiss
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of condolence. Monty looked slightly annoyed.
‘Perhaps you don’t understand. The last thing I can really remember is, I was thirty. Ten and a bit years have passed since then and I’ve absolutely no notion what I was doing all that time. No notion at all.’
‘How terrible.’ Burnell suspected a catch was coming, and was loath to commit himself.
‘FOAM. That’s Antonescu’s term. FOAM – Free Of All Memory. He sees it as a kind of, well, liberty. There I beg to differ. You know what it feels like to lose your memory?’
Despite himself, Burnell was interested.
‘It’s like an ocean, old chum. A wide wide ocean with a small island here and there. No continents. The continents have disappeared, sunk without trace. I suppose I couldn’t have a top-up of vodka, could I?’ He held out his glass.
As he poured, Burnell admitted he had seen Monty once or twice during the previous ten years, before his sacking; perhaps he could help to fill the gaps in his memory. Monty Broadwell-Smith made moderately grateful noises. There was no one else he could turn to in Budapest.
When asked if his memory-loss was caused by a virus, Monty professed ignorance. ‘No one knows – as yet at least. Could have been a car crash, causing amnesia. No bones broken if so. Lucky to be alive, I suppose you might say. But what’s going to happen to me, I’ve no idea.’
‘Your wife isn’t with you?’
Monty slapped his forehead with his free hand. A look of amazement crossed his face. ‘Oh my sainted aunt! Don’t say I was married!’
He drank the vodka, he kept the sweater, he shook Burnell’s hand. The next morning, Burnell went round to the Antonescu Clinic as he had promised. Monty wanted one of the specialists at the clinic to question Burnell, in order to construct a few points of identification. Monty suggested that this would help towards a restoration of his memory.
Burnell had agreed. He felt ashamed that he had so grudgingly given his old sweater to a friend in distress.
2
Murder in a Cathedral
‘Nothing to worry about, old chum,’ Monty Broadwell-Smith had said. ‘They’re masters of the healing art.’
The Antonescu Clinic was not as Burnell had imagined it. Cumbersome nineteenth-century apartment blocks, built of stone expressly quarried to grind the faces of the poor, lined a section of Fo Street. Secretive Hungarian lives were lived among heavy furniture in these blocks. They parted at one point to permit entrance to a small nameless square.
The buildings in the square huddled against each other, like teeth in a too-crowded mouth. Instead of dentistry, they had suffered the exhalations from lignite still burnt in the city. A nicotiney taint gave the façades an ancient aspect, as if they had been retrieved from a period long before the Dual Monarchy.
The exception to this antiquity was a leprous concrete structure, a contribution from the Communist era which announced itself as the Ministry of Light Industry. Next to it was wedged a small shop hoping to sell used computers. Above the shop, when Burnell ascended a narrow stair, he found a huddle of rooms partitioned out of a loft. A dated modernity had been achieved with track-lighting and interior glass. Tinkling Muzak proved the Age of the Foxtrot was not entirely dead.
Burnell sat in a windowless waiting-room, looking at a post-Rothko poster which displayed a large black cross with wavery edges on a dark grey background.
A man with a thin cigar in his mouth looked round the door, sketched a salute in greeting and said, ‘Antonescu not here. Business elsewhere. Meet Dr Maté. Maté Joszef, Joszef Maté.’
He then entered the cubicle and proffered a long wiry hand.
In jerky English, Dr Maté explained that he was Mircea Antonescu’s second-in-command. They could get to work immediately. The best procedure would be for Burnell to ascend to a room where a series of questions concerning the forgotten years of Monty Broadwell-Smith could be put to him and the answers recorded electronically.
‘You understand me, Dr Burnell? Here using most modern proprietary methods. Dealing extensively with brain-injury cases. Exclusive. Special to our clinic. To produce best results in Europe, satisfied customers …’ Maté’s thick furry voice was as chewed as his cigar. As he bustled Burnell from the room, his haste almost precluded the use of finite verbs.
Burnell was shown up a spiral stair to a room with a skylight and technical equipment. Here stood a uniformed nurse with grey hair and eyes. She came forward, shaking Burnell’s hand in a friendly manner, requesting him in good German to remove his anorak.
As he did so, and handed the garment to the woman, he caught her expression. She was still smiling, but the smile had become fixed; he read something between pity and contempt in her cold eye.
At once, he felt premonitions of danger. They came on him like a stab of sorrow. He saw, seating himself as directed in an enveloping black chair, what clear-sighted men sometimes see. His life, until now modestly successful, was about to dip into a darkness beyond his control. In that moment there came to him a fear not for but of his own existence. He knew little about medical practice, but the operating table and anaesthetïc apparatus were familiar enough, with black tubes of gas waiting like torpedoes for launch. On the other side of the crowded room, e-mnemonicvision equipment stood like glum secretary birds, their crenellated helmets ready to be swung down and fixed to the cranium. These birds were tethered to computerized controls, already humming, showing their pimples of red light.
Maté bustled about, muttering to the nurse, stubbing out his cigar in an overflowing ashtray.
‘If you’re busy, I will come back tomorrow,’ Burnell said. The nurse pushed him gently into the depths of the chair, telling him soothingly to relax.
‘Like wartime,’ said Maté. ‘Still too many difficulties. Too many problems. Is not good, nicht gut. Many problems unknown.’ Switching on a VDU, he biffed it with the heel of his left hand.
‘Large inflation rate problems, too high taxes … Too many gipsy in town. All time … The Germans of course … The Poles … Vietnamese minority … How we get all work done …’
He swung abruptly into another mode, suddenly looming over Burnell. ‘Just some questions, Dr Burnell. You are nervous, no?’
As his long stained fingers chased themselves through Burnell’s hair, he attempted reassurance. The clinic had developed a method of inserting memories into regions of the brain, to restore amnesiacs to health. The method was a development of e-mnemonicvision. First, those memories had to be recorded with full sensory data on microchip, and then projected into the brain. While he gave a somewhat technical explanation, the nurse gave Burnell an injection in his arm. He felt it as little more than a bee sting.
‘But I don’t know Monty Broadwell-Smith well …’
‘Good, good, Dr Burnell. Now we must append electrodes to the head … Obtain full data in response to my questioning … No dancer will rival you, but every step you take will be as if you were treading on sharp nights …’
Burnell tried to struggle, as the words became confused with the heat.
He could still hear Dr Maté, but the man’s words had become mixed with a colourful ball, which bounced erratically away into the distance. Burnell tried to get out the word ‘discomfort’, but it was too mountainous.
He was walking with Maté in a cathedral, huge and unlit. Their steps were ponderous, as if they waded up to their thighs in water. To confuse the issue further, Maté was smoking a cigar he referred to as ‘The Trial’.
Offended, Burnell attempted a defence of Franz Kafka, distinguished Czech author of a novel of the same name.
‘As a psychologist, you must understand that there are men like Kafka for whom existence is an entanglement, while for others – why, they sail through life like