Against the Day (101 page)

His ruminations were broken in upon
by a violent dispute over in the corner, among an unkempt, indeed seedy, band
of varying ages and nationalities, whose only common language Kit recognized
presently as that of the Quaternions, though he couldn’t recall ever seeing so
many of that embattled persuasion gathered in one place before. Even stranger
than that, he now grew aware that they seemed to
recognize him
—not
that Masonic signs and countersigns were being exchanged, exactly, and
yet—

   
“Here
then, Kellner! a
demi
of Lambic for that bloke over there with the

seaweed on his suit,” called a cheerfully insane party in a
battered skimmer

that looked like he’d found it on the beach.

   
Kit
made what he hoped was the universal sign for short funds by pulling

out an imaginary pair of trouser pockets and shrugging in
apology.

“Not
to worry, this week it’s all on the Trinity maths department, they’re wizards
at solving biquaternion equations, but show them an expense account and lucky
for us their minds go blank.” He introduced himself as Barry Nebulay, from the
University of Dublin, space was made, and Kit joined the polyglot gang.

All
last week and this, Quaternioneers had been converging on Ostend to hold one of
their irregularly spaced World Conventions. In the wake of the transatlantic
unpleasantness of the ’90s known as the Quaternion Wars—in which Kit was
aware that Yale, being the home of Gibbsian Vectors, had figured as a major
belligerent—true Quaternionists, if not defeated outright then at best
having come to feel irrelevant, could be found these days wandering the world,
dispersed, under the yellow skies of Tasmania, out in the American desert, up
in the Alpine wastes of Switzerland, gathering furtively in bordertown hotels,
at luncheons in rented parlors, in hotel lobbies whose surfaces, varying in
splendor from French velvet to aboriginal masonry, raised ensembles of
echoes—they were eyed suspiciously by waiters who brought in and ladled
from oversize alloyedsteel kettles vegetables grown locally whose names did not
readily come to mind, or animal parts concealed by opaque
sauces—particularly, here in Belgium, forms of mayonnaise— whose
color schemes ran to indigoes and aquas, often quite vivid actually
. . .
yes but what choices, if any,
remained? Having been inseparable from the rise of the electromagnetic in human
affairs, the Hamiltonian devotees had now, fallen from grace, come to embody,
for the established scientific religion, a subversive, indeed heretical, faith
for whom proscription and exile were too good.

The
Grand Hôtel de la Nouvelle Digue was tucked well back of the Boulevard van
Iseghem, far from the seawall it was named for, its appeal being chiefly to the
cautious of purse, including the usual assortment of offseason tourists,
fugitives, pensioners, abandoned lovers imagining they had found the anterooms
of death. In fact, little was what it seemed. The rooms at the hotel were
remorselessly appointed with objects of faux bamboo fashioned from pine,
painted in exotic colors such as Chinese red, and featuring tabletops of cheap,
perhaps synthetic, marble. In an attempt to grasp the propensities of Belgian
Art Nouveau in its full modernity, woman/animal hybrid motifs were to be seen
incorporated into basin and tub fittings, bedcoverings, drapes, and lampshades.

   
Kit
looked around. “Pretty fancy.”

   
“By
this point,” said Barry Nebulay, “no one is keeping very close tabs on who is
or is not a registered guest. You would not be the only one dossing here free
of charge.” Kit, having decided to try to win enough at the Casino to get to
Göttingen, presently found himself sleeping in a corner among piles of
Quaternionist debris, along with a shifting population of refugees whose names,
if he heard them at all, he quickly forgot.

Just
down the corridor happened to be living a cell of Belgian nihilists—
Eugénie, Fatou, Denis, and Policarpe, styling themselves “Young Congo”—
persons of unfailing interest to the Garde Civique as well as to those French
Second Bureau folks who visited Brussels on a regular basis. Whenever Kit ran
into any of these youngsters—which seemed more often than chance would
account for—there was always a moment of intense recognition, almost as
if he’d once, somehow, actually
belonged to
the little
phalange,
until
something had happened, something too terrible to remember, at least as
momentous as the fate of the
Stupendica,
whereupon everything, along
with memory, had gone falling dizzily away, not only downward but out along
other axes of spacetime as well. This had been happening a lot to him lately.
While it was certainly a relief to have nothing weighing him down for the
moment beyond his clothes—and though it was almost possible to convince
himself he had escaped the Vibe curse and was now starting life
afresh—the weightless condition he was going around in was peculiar
enough to turn dangerous at any time. When he got a good look at the Digue,
twentyfive feet high and lined with fancy hotels, and the sea just the other
side of it, pounding away, higher than the town, he couldn’t help imagining a
conscious force, looking for a weak point, destined to overtop the promenade
and sweep Ostend to destruction.

“So
the black hordes of the Congo,” meditated Policarpe. “Whom Belgians in their Low
Country neuropathy imagine also in unremitting swell, silently rising, ever
higher, behind some wall of force and death which no one knows how to make
strong enough to keep them from overwhelming everything—”

   
“Their
unmerited suffering,” Denis suggested, “their moral superiority.”

“Hardly.
They are as savage and degenerate as Europeans. Nor is it a matter of simple
numbers, for here in Belgium is the highest population density in the world,
and no one can much be taken by surprise in that regard. No, we create this, I
think—project it from the coconscious, from out of the ooze of
hallucination being mapped onto continually by the unremitting and unremittable
hell of our dominion down there. Each time a member of the Force Publique
strikes a rubber worker, or even speaks the simplest insult, the tidal forces
intensify, the
digue
of selfcontradiction grows ever weaker.”

It
was like being together back in
khâgne.
Everyone lay around in a sort of

focused inertia, drinking, handing cigarettes back and forth,
forgetting with

whom, or whether, they were supposed to be romantically
obsessed. Denis and Eugénie had studied geography with Reclus at the University
of Brussels, Fatou and Policarpe were fleeing warrants issued in Paris, where
even the intent to advocate Anarchism was a crime. “Like the Russian
nihilists,” Denis explained, “we are metaphysicians at heart. There is a danger
of becoming too logical. At the end of the day one can only consult one’s
heart.”

   
“Don’t
mind Denis, he’s a Stirnerite.”

“
Anarchoindividualiste
,
though you are too much of
an imbecile to appreciate this distinction.”

Though there existed within the
phalange
a
hundred opportunities to
draw such distinctions, Africa remained the unspoken, the unpermitted term that
kept them solid and resolute. That and the moral obligation, though some might
have said obsession, with assassinating Leopold, King of the Belgians.

“Has anyone noticed,” Denis ventured,
“how many assorted figures of power in Europe—Kings, Queens, Grand Dukes,
Ministers—have been going down lately beneath the implacable Juggernaut
of History? corpses of the powerful toppling in every direction, with a
frequency far higher than chance might suggest?”

“Are you authorized to speak for the
gods of Chance?” inquired Eugénie. “Who can say what a ‘normal’ assassination
rate is supposed to be?”

“Yes,” Policarpe put in, “maybe it’s
not high
enough
yet. Considering how scientifically inevitable the act
is.”

The group had taken heart from the
example of the fifteenyearold Anarchist Sipido, who in solidarity with the
Boers of South Africa had tried to assassinate the Prince and Princess of Wales
in Brussels, at the Gare du Nord. Four shots at close range missed, Sipido and
his gang were arrested and later acquitted, and the Prince was now King of
England. “And the Brits,” shrugged Policarpe, the realist in the group, “are
still treating the Boers like dirt. Sipido should have paid more attention to
the tools of our trade. One appreciates the need for concealment, but if one is
out after Crown Prince, one needs caliber, not to mention a larger magazine.”

“Let’s say we placed a bomb, out at
the Hippodrome,” proposed Fatou, rouged, hatless, and wearing a skirt shorter
than a circus girl’s, though everybody but Kit was pretending not to notice this.

“Or in the Royal Bathing Hut,”
Policarpe said. “Anyone can hire that for twenty francs.”

   
“Who’s
got twenty francs?”

   
“Something
in the picric family might do nicely,” Fatou went on, deploying maps and
diagrams about the tiny room. “Brugère’s powder, say.”

   
“Always
been a Designolle’s man myself,” murmured Denis.

“Or we
might
hire an American
gunslinger,” Eugénie gazing meaningfully at Kit.

“Heck, mademoiselle, you don’t want
to be lettin me near a gun, I’d need steel shoes just to protect, my feet.”

“Come, Kit, you can tell us. How many
desperados have you
. . .
drilled
daylight through?”

   
“Hard
to say, we don’t start countin till it’s over a dozen.”

At the cusp of the twilight, lamps
were lit up and down the streets, against a hovering shadow of beleaguerment by
forces semivisible
. . . .
Beyond the
Digue, waves thudded on the invisible strand. Policarpe had fetched absinthe,
sugar, and paraphernalia. He was the phalanx dandy, sporting, after the style
of Monsieur SantosDumont, a Panama hat to the precise dishevelment of whose
brim he devoted the kind of time other young men might to grooming their
mustaches. He and his friends were
absintheurs
and
absintheuses,
and
spent a lot of time sitting around enacting elaborate drinking rituals. The
Green Hour often stretched on till midnight.

   
“Or,
as we like to say,
l’heure vertigineuse.
”

Around midnight a pair of voices
arguing in Italian were heard outside the door, and the exchange continued for
a while. Recently Young Congo had joined forces with a pair of Italian naval
renegades, Rocco and Pino, who had stolen from the Whitehcad works in Fiume the
highly secret plans for a lowspeed manned torpedo, which they intended to
assemble here in Belgium and go after King Leopold’s royal yacht, the
Alberta,
with. Rocco, never less than earnest, might only have lacked
imagination—while Pino, seeming to express all that is immoderate in the
southern Italian temperament, found himself driven regularly to distraction by
the mental stolidity of his partner. In theory they made a perfect team for
mannedtorpedo work, Rocco’s inability to imagine the nonregulation in any form
promising—even now and then able—to deflect the exuberant though
unprofitable fantasies of Pino.

The
Siluro Dirigibile a Lenta Corsa represented a brief yet romantic chapter in
torpedo history. With its targets limited to stationary objects such as ships
at anchor, the mathematics of trajectory and aiming were enormously simplified,
though the element of personal
virtù
came to assume signal importance,
as the team must first bring their deadly craft undetected past
toooftenunfamiliar harbor defenses until it actually
touched the hull
of
its intended victim—whereupon, having initiated a timed fuzing sequence,
they

must then exfiltrate as fast and far as they could before the
charge went off.

Working uniform was usually a diver’s suit of Vulcanized
rubber for keeping

warm during what might prove to be hours in frigid waters,
the torpedo traveling mostly just below the surface, as perforce must Rocco and
Pino.

   
“What
a night!” exclaimed Pino. “Garde Civique all over the place.”

   
“Top
hats and green uniforms every time you turn around,” added Rocco.

“Still, if you’re not allergic to
green quite yet,” Policarpe offering the absinthe bottle.

“How many ships have you actually
. . .
blown up, Pino?” Fatou was presently
cooing, while Rocco, throwing her fearful glances, was muttering in his
partner’s ear.

   
“. .
.just the kind of question an
Austrian spy
might ask—think, Pino,
think.”

“Pino, what’s he saying?” Fatou tapping
at one ear whose lobe had been left intriguingly naked of ornament. “Does Rocco
think I’m a spy, really?”

“We have had dealings, you see, with
one or two lady spies,” purred Pino, attempting a look of chaste appreciation
that fooled nobody, his efforts today toward the suave being further undone by
a slepton thicket of curls, a distressed Royal Italian Navy fatigue uniform
stained with wine and motor lubricants, and an unfocused gaze that never came
to rest anywhere, least of all upon anybody’s face. “While I am able to take
these episodes as part of life and move on, poor Rocco cannot forget. He has
put into deep narcosis any number of gatherings, even Gypsies in a mood for
allnight festivity, with his obsessions of
danger from lady spies.
”