1 The City Under Siege

I cannot remember exactly how it began. Nobody, not even the Minister, could remember. But I know it started well after my abysmal childhood was mercifully over. The nuns who buried my mother fixed me up with a safe berth; I was a minor clerk in a government office. I rented a room with a bed and a table, a chair and a gas ring, a cupboard and a coffee pot. My landlady was still comparatively young and extremely accommodating. I was always a little bored yet perfectly content. But I think I must have been one of the first people in the city to notice how the shadows began to fall subtly awry and a curious sense of strangeness invaded everything. I had, you see, the time to see. And the Doctor started his activities in very small ways. Sugar tasted a little salty, sometimes. A door one had always seen to be blue modulated by scarcely perceptible stages until, suddenly, it was a green door.

But if remarkable fruits, such as pineapples with the colour and texture of strawberries or walnuts which tasted of caramel, appeared among the apples and oranges on the stalls in the market, everyone put it down to our increased imports, for business had boomed since the man who later became the Minister of Determination took over the post of Minister of Trade. He was always the model of efficiency. I used to put away the files in the Board of Trade. After that, I used to help the Minister with his crossword puzzles and this mutual pastime bred a spurious intimacy which made my promotion parallel his own. He admired the indifferent speed with which I led him up and down the tricksy checkerboard of black and white and I do not think he ever realized the speed was bred only of indifference.

How was the city before it changed? It seemed it would never change.

It was a solid, drab, yet not unfriendly city. It throve on business. It was prosperous. It was thickly, obtusely masculine. Some cities are women and must be loved; others are men and can only be admired or bargained with and my city settled serge-clad buttocks at vulgar ease as if in a leather armchair. His pockets were stuffed with money and his belly with rich food. Historically, he had taken a circuitous path to arrive at such smug, impenetrable, bourgeois affluence; he started life a slaver, a pimp, a gun-runner, a murderer and a pirate, a rakish villain, the exiled scum of Europe – and look at him lording it! The city was built on a tidal river and the slums and the area around the docks still pullulated with blacks, browns and Orientals who lived in a picturesque squalor the city fathers in their veranda’d suburbs contrived to ignore. Yet the city, now, was rich, even if it was ugly; but it was just a little nervous, all the same. It hardly ever dared peer over its well-upholstered shoulder in case it glimpsed the yellow mountains louring far towards the north, atavistic reminders of the interior of a continent which inspired a wordless fear in those who had come here so lately. The word ‘indigenous’ was unmentionable. Yet some of the buildings, dating from the colonial period, were impressive – the Cathedral; the Opera House; stone memorials of a past to which few, if any, of us had contributed though, since I was of Indian extraction, I suffered the ironic knowledge that my forefathers had anointed the foundations of the state with a good deal of their blood.

I was of Indian extraction. Yes. My mother came from feckless, middle-European immigrant stock and her business, which was prostitution of the least exalted type, took her to the slums a good deal. I do not know who my father was but I carried his genetic imprint on my face, although my colleagues always contrived politely to ignore it since the white, pious nuns had vouched for me. Yet I was a very disaffected young man for I was not unaware of my disinheritance.

When I had enough money, I would go to the Opera House for the inhuman stylization of opera naturally appealed to me very much. I was especially fond of The Magic Flute. During a certain performance of The Magic Flute one evening in the month of May, as I sat in the gallery enduring the divine illusion of perfection which Mozart imposed on me and which I poisoned for myself since I could not forget it was false, a curious, greenish glitter in the stalls below me caught my eye. I leaned forward. Papageno struck his bells and, at that very moment, as if the bells caused it, I saw the auditorium was full of peacocks in full spread who very soon began to scream in intolerably raucous voices, utterly drowning the music so that I instantly became bored and irritated. Boredom was my first reaction to incipient delirium. Glancing round me, I saw that everyone in the gallery was wearing a peacock-green skull cap and behind each spectator stirred an incandescent, feathered fan. I am still not sure why I did not instantly clap my hand to my own arse to find out whether I, too, had become so bedecked – perhaps I knew the limitations of my sensibility positively forbade such a thing might happen to me, since I admired the formal beauty of peacocks very much. All around me were the beginnings of considerable panic; the peacocks shrieked and fluttered like distracted rainbows and soon they let down the safety curtain, as the performance could not continue under the circumstances. It was Dr Hoffman’s first disruptive coup. So I went home, disgruntled, balked of my Mozart, and, the next morning the barrage began in earnest.

We did not understand the means by which the Doctor modified the nature of reality until very much later. We were taken entirely by surprise and chaos supervened immediately. Hallucinations flowed with magical speed in every brain. A state of emergency was declared. A special meeting of the cabinet took place in a small boat upon so stormy a sea that most of the ministers vomited throughout the proceedings and the Chancellor of the Exchequer was washed overboard. My Minister dared walk on the water and retrieved his senior dryshod since there was, in fact, not one drop of water there; after that, the cabinet gave him full authority to cope with the situation and soon he virtually ruled the city single-handed.

Now, what Dr Hoffman had done, in the first instance, was this. Consider the nature of a city. It is a vast repository of time, the discarded times of all the men and women who have lived, worked, dreamed and died in the streets which grow like a wilfully organic thing, unfurl like the petals of a mired rose and yet lack evanescence so entirely that they preserve the past in haphazard layers, so this alley is old while the avenue that runs beside it is newly built but nevertheless has been built over the deep-down, dead-in-the-ground relics of the older, perhaps the original, huddle of alleys which germinated the entire quarter. Dr Hoffman’s gigantic generators sent out a series of seismic vibrations which made great cracks in the hitherto immutable surface of the time and space equation we had informally formulated in order to realize our city and, out of these cracks, well – nobody knew what would come next.

A kind of orgiastic panic seized the city. Those bluff, complaisant avenues and piazzas were suddenly as fertile in metamorphoses as a magic forest. Whether the apparitions were shades of the dead, synthetic reconstructions of the living or in no way replicas of anything we knew, they inhabited the same dimension as the living for Dr Hoffman had enormously extended the limits of this dimension. The very stones were mouths which spoke. I myself decided the revenants were objects – perhaps personified ideas – which could think but did not exist. This seemed the only hypothesis which might explain my own case for I acknowledged them – I saw them; they screamed and whickered at me – and yet I did not believe in them.

This phantasmagoric redefinition of a city was constantly fluctuating for it was now the kingdom of the instantaneous.

Cloud palaces erected themselves then silently toppled to reveal for a moment the familiar warehouse beneath them until they were replaced by some fresh audacity. A group of chanting pillars exploded in the middle of a mantra and lo! they were once again street lamps until, with night, they changed to silent flowers. Giant heads in the helmets of conquistadors sailed up like sad, painted kites over the giggling chimney pots. Hardly anything remained the same for more than one second and the city was no longer the conscious production of humanity; it had become the arbitrary realm of dream.

The boulevards susurrated with mendicants who wore long, loose, patchwork coats, strings of beads and ragged turbans; they carried staffs decorated with bunches of variegated ribbons. They claimed to be refugees from the mountains and now all they could do to make a living was to sell to the credulous charms and talismans against domestic spectres who turned the milk sour or lurked in fireplaces eating up the flames so the fires would not light. But the beggars possessed only the most dubious reality status and at any moment might be caught in the blasts of radar emanating from the Ministry of Determination, when they would vanish with a faint squeak, leaving some citizen with his proffered pennies still clutched in his hand, gazing at empty air. Sometimes the talismans they sold vanished with them even though they had already been stowed away in the household shrines of their purchasers; and sometimes not.

The question of the nature of the talismans was one of both profane and profound surmise, for in some instances the spectral salesmen must have carved their crude icons out of solid wood which did not have the faculty of vanishing but, if so, how could a knife of shadows cut real flesh from a living tree? Clearly the phantoms were capable of inflicting significant form on natural substances. The superstitious fear of the citizens rose to a pitch of feverish delirium and they often raised hue and cries against any unfortunate whose appearance smacked in some way of transparency or else who seemed suspiciously too real. The suspects were often torn to pieces. I remember a riot which began when a man snatched a baby from a perambulator and dashed it to the ground because he complained that its smile was ‘too lifelike’.

By the end of the first year there was no longer any way of guessing what one would see when one opened one’s eyes in the morning for other people’s dreams insidiously invaded the bedroom while one slept and yet it seemed that sleep was our last privacy for, while we slept, at least we knew that we were dreaming although the stuff of our waking hours, so buffeted by phantoms, had grown thin and insubstantial enough to seem itself no more than seeming, or else the fragile marginalia of our dreams. Sheeted teasing memories of the past waited to greet us at the foot of the bed and these were often memories of someone else’s past, even if they still wished us ‘Good morning’ with an unnerving familiarity when we opened our enchanted eyes. Dead children came calling in nightgowns, rubbing the sleep and grave dust from their eyes. Not only the dead returned but also the lost living. Abandoned lovers were often lured into the false embrace of faithless mistresses and this caused the Minister the gravest concern for he feared that one day a man would impregnate an illusion and then a generation of half-breed ghosts would befoul the city even more. But as I often felt I was a half-breed ghost myself, I did not feel much concerned over that! Anyway, the great majority of the things which appeared around us were by no means familiar, though they often teasingly recalled aspects of past experience, as if they were memories of forgotten memories.

The sense of space was powerfully affected so that sometimes the proportions of buildings and townscapes swelled to enormous, ominous sizes or repeated themselves over and over again in a fretting infinity. But this was much less disturbing than the actual objects which filled these gigantesque perspectives. Often, in the vaulted architraves of railway stations, women in states of pearly, heroic nudity, their hair elaborately coiffed in the stately chignons of the fin de siècle, might be seen parading beneath their parasols as serenely as if they had been in the Bois de Boulogne, pausing now and then to stroke, with the judiciously appraising touch of owners of race-horses, the side of steaming engines which did not run any more. And the very birds of the air seemed possessed by devils. Some grew to the size and acquired the temperament of winged jaguars. Fanged sparrows plucked out the eyes of little children. Snarling flocks of starlings swooped down upon some starving wretch picking over a mess of dreams and refuse in a gutter and tore what remained of his flesh from his bones. The pigeons lolloped from illusory pediment to window-ledge like volatile, feathered madmen, chattering vile rhymes and laughing in hoarse, throaty voices, or perched upon chimney stacks shouting quotations from Hegel. But often, in actual mid-air, the birds would forget the techniques and mechanics of the very act of flight and then they fell down, so that every morning dead birds lay in drifts on the pavements like autumn leaves or brown, wind-blown snow. Sometimes the river ran backwards and crazy fish jumped out to flop upon the sidewalks and wriggle around on their bellies for a while until they died, choking for lack of water. It was, too, the heyday of trompe l’œil for painted forms took advantage of the liveliness they mimicked. Horses from the pictures of Stubbs in the Municipal Art Gallery neighed, tossed their manes and stepped delicately off their canvases to go to crop the grass in public parks. A plump Bacchus wearing only a few grapes strayed from a Titian into a bar and there instituted Dionysiac revelry.

But only a few of the transmutations were lyrical. Frequently, imaginary massacres filled the gutters with blood and, besides, the cumulative psychological effect of all these distortions, combined with the dislocation of everyday life and the hardship and privations we began to suffer, created a deep-seated anxiety and a sense of profound melancholy. It seemed each one of us was trapped in some downward-drooping convoluted spiral of unreality from which we could never escape. Many committed suicide.

Trade was at an end. All the factories closed down and there was wholesale unemployment. There was always the smell of dissolution in the air for the public services were utterly disorganized. Typhoid took a heavy toll and there were grim murmurs of cholera or worse. The only form of transport the Minister permitted in the city was the bicycle, since it can only be ridden by that constant effort of will which precludes the imagination. The Determination Police enforced a strict system of rationing in an attempt to eke out the city’s dwindling supplies of food as long as possible but the citizens lied freely about their needs and those of their dependants, broke into shops to steal and gleefully submitted to the authorities the forged bread tickets with which Dr Hoffman flooded the streets. After the Minister sealed off the city, our only news of the country outside the capital came from the terse, laconic reports of the Determination Police and the gossip of the few peasants who had the necessary credentials to pass the guards at the checkpoints with a basket or two of vegetables or some coops of chickens.

Dr Hoffman had destroyed time and played games with the objects by which we regulated time. I often glanced at my watch only to find its hands had been replaced by a healthy growth of ivy or honey-suckle which, while I looked, writhed impudently all over its face, concealing it. Tricks with watches and clocks were pet devices of his, for so he rubbed home to us how we no longer held a structure of time in common. Inside the twin divisions of light and darkness there was no more segmentation, for what clocks were left all told a different time and nobody trusted them anyway. Past time occupied the city for whole days together, sometimes, so that the streets of a hundred years before were superimposed on nowadays streets and I made my way to the Bureau only by memory, along never-before-trodden lanes that looked as indestructible as earth itself and yet would vanish, presumably, whenever someone in Dr Hoffman’s entourage grew bored and pressed a switch.

Statistics for burglary, arson, robbery with violence and rape rose to astronomical heights and it was not safe, either physically or metaphysically, to leave one’s room at night although one was not particularly safe if one stayed at home either. There had been two cases of suspected plague. By the beginning of the second year we received no news at all from the world outside for Dr Hoffman blocked all the radio waves. Slowly the city acquired a majestic solitude. There grew in it, or it grew into, a desolate beauty, the beauty of the hopeless, a beauty which caught the heart and made the tears come. One would never have believed it possible for this city to be beautiful.

At certain times, especially in the evenings, as the shadows lengthened, the ripe sunlight of the day’s ending fell with a peculiar, suggestive heaviness, trapping the swooning buildings in a sweet, solid calm, as if preserving them in honey. Aurified by the Midas rays of the setting sun, the sky took on the appearance of a thin sheet of beaten gold like the ground of certain ancient paintings so the monolithically misshapen, depthless forms of the city took on the enhanced glamour of the totally artificial. Then, we – that is, those of us who retained some notion of what was real and what was not – felt the vertigo of those teetering on the edge of a magic precipice. We found ourselves holding our breath almost in expectancy, as though we might stand on the threshold of a great event, transfixed in the portentous moment of waiting, although inwardly we were perturbed since this new, awesome, orchestration of time and space which surrounded us might be only the overture to something else, to some most profoundly audacious of all these assaults against the things we had always known. The Minister was the only person I knew who claimed he did not, even once, experience this sense of immanence.

The Minister had never in all his life felt the slightest quiver of empirical uncertainty. He was the hardest thing that ever existed and never the flicker of a mirage distorted for so much as a fleeting second the austere and intransigent objectivity of his face even though, as I saw it, his work consisted essentially in setting a limit to thought, for Dr Hoffman appeared to me to be proliferating his weaponry of images along the obscure and controversial borderline between the thinkable and the unthinkable.

‘Very well,’ said the Minister. ‘The Doctor has invented a virus which causes a cancer of the mind, so that the cells of the imagination run wild. And we must – we will! – discover the antidote.’

But he still had no idea how the Doctor had done it although it was clear that day by day he was growing better at it. So the Minister, who had not one shred of superstition in him, was forced to become an exorcist for all he could do was to try to scare the spooks off the bedevilled streets and although he had a battery of technological devices to help him, in the last resort he was reduced to the methods of the medieval witch-hunter. I rarely had the stomach to pass Reality Testing Laboratory C for the smell of roast pork nauseated me and I wondered if the Minister, out of desperation, intended to rewrite the Cartesian cogito thus: ‘I am in pain, therefore I exist,’ and base his tests upon it for, in cases of stubborn and extreme confusion, they operated a trial by fire. If it emerged alive from the incineration room, it was obviously unreal and, if he had been reduced to a handful of ash, he had been authentic. By the end of the second year, most other expedients – the radar and so on – were proving fallible, anyway. The Determination Police claimed the Incineration Room had carbonized a number of Hoffman’s agents but, as for myself, I was suspicious of the Determination Police for their ankle-length, truculently belted coats of black leather, their low-crowned, wide-brimmed fedoras and their altogether too highly polished boots woke in me an uncomfortable progression of associations. They looked as if they had been recruited wholesale from a Jewish nightmare.

In the early days of the war the first counter-weapon we devised was the Determining Radar Apparatus, which was both offensive and defensive as it incorporated a laser effect in its beam. The Determining Radar Apparatus worked on the theory that non-solid substance which could, however, be recognized by the senses had a molecular structure which bristled with projections. The model of the unreality atom in the Minister’s office consisted of a tetrahydron improvised out of a number of hairbrushes. The radar beams were supposed to bruise themselves on this bed of thorns and certainly let out an inaudible shriek instantly visible on the screens at H.Q. This shriek automatically triggered the laser and at once annihilated the offending non-substance. For a time, during the last half of the first year, the Minister wore a faint smile for daily we disintegrated whole battalions of eldritch guerrillas but the Doctor’s research laboratories must have swiftly restructured their own prototype molecule for, by Christmas time, the screens at H.Q. were gradually falling silent, letting out only a few very occasional squeaks when a beam accidentally brushed the teeth of what was now patently an obsolete illusion probably only used as a decoy – such things, for example, as a man whose hat had become his head; while more and more outrageous spectacles danced and shouted in a city only intermittently recognizable. The Minister’s smile died. Our physicists, all of whom had a three-star reality rating and the patience of Job, finally turned out a new hypothetical model for this modification of the unreality atom. It was a sphere of looking glass, like a reflective tear, and the leader of the team, Dr Drosselmeier, explained to the Minister and myself how the molecules must fit together like a coalescence of raindrops.

At this point, Dr Drosselmeier went mad. He did so without warning but most melodramatically. He blew up the physics laboratory, the records which contained the sum total of his researches, four of his assistants and himself. I do not think his breakdown was caused by some obscure machination of the Doctor, even though I was beginning to feel the Doctor was probably omnipotent; I suspect Drosselmeier had unwittingly exposed himself to an overdose of reality and it had destroyed his reason. However, this disaster left us utterly defenceless and the Minister was forced to rely more and more on the primitive and increasingly brutal methods of the Determination Police while he himself supervised work on a project he believed would finally save us from the Doctor. When he spoke of this project, a guarded but Messianic gleam crept into his usually cool and sceptical eyes.

He was in the process of constructing an immense computer centre which would formulate a systematic procedure for calculating the verifiable self-consistency of any given object. He believed the criterion of reality was that a thing was determinate and the identity of a thing lay only in the extent to which it resembled itself. He was the most ascetic of logicians but, if he had a fatal flaw, it was his touch of scholasticism. He believed that the city – which he took as a microcosm of the universe – contained a finite set of objects and a finite set of their combinations and therefore a list could be made of all possible distinct forms which were logically viable. These could be counted, organized into a conceptual framework and so form a kind of check list for the verification of all phenomena, instantly available by means of an information retrieval system. So he was engaged in the almost superhuman task of programming computers with factual data concerning every single thing which, as far as it was humanly possible to judge, had ever – even if only once and that momentarily – existed. Thus the existence of any object at all, however bizarre it might at first appear, could first be checked against the entire history of the world and then be given a possibility rating. Once a thing was registered as ‘possible’, however, there followed the infinitely more complex procedure designed to discover if it were probable.

Sometimes he talked to me about politics. His political philosophy had the non-dynamic magnificence of contrapuntal, pre-classical music; he described to me a grooved, interlocking set of institutions governed by the notion of a great propriety. He called it his theory of ‘names and functions’. Each man was secure in possession of a certain name which also ensured him a certain position in a society seen as a series of interlinking rings which, although continually in movement, were never subjected to change for there were never any disturbances and no usurpation of names or ranks or roles whatsoever. And the city circled in this utterly harmonious fashion with the radiant serenity of a place in which everything was inevitable for, as soon as the death of a ruler completed one movement in this celestial concerto, the inauguration of another ruler signalled the start of another movement precisely similar in form. The Minister had a singular passion for Bach. He thought that Mozart was frivolous. He was as sombre and sedate as a mandarin.

But although he was the most rational man in the world, he was only a witch-doctor in the present state of things, even if the spooks he was pledged to eradicate were not real spooks but phenomena perpetrated by a man who was probably the greatest physicist of all time. Yet, essentially, it was a battle between an encyclopedist and a poet for Hoffman, scientist as he was, utilized his formidable knowledge only to render the invisible visible, even though it certainly seemed to us that his ultimate plan was to rule the world.

The Minister spent night after night among his computers. His face grew grey and drawn with overwork and his fine hands shook with fatigue and yet he remained indefatigable. But it seemed to me that he sought to cast the arbitrarily fine mesh of his predetermined net over nothing but a sea of mirages for he refused to acknowledge how palpable the phantoms were, how they could be seen and touched, kissed and eaten, penetrated and picked in bunches, to be arranged in a vase. The variegated raree-show which now surrounded us was as complicated as a real man himself, walking, but the Minister saw the entire spectacle as a corrugated surface of various greys, the colourless corpse of itself. Yet this limitation of his imagination gave him the capacity to see the city as an existential crossword puzzle which might one day be solved. I passed the days beside him, making innumerable pots of the tea he drank black, with neither lemon nor sugar, emptying his brimming ashtrays and changing the records of Bach and the pre-classicals he played softly all the time to aid his concentration. I was at the hub of things but still I was indifferent. My mother came to see me; my name fluctuated on my nameplate; my dreams were so amazing that, in spite of myself, I had become awe-struck at the approach of sleep. And yet I could summon up no interest in all this.

I felt as if I was watching a film in which the Minister was the hero and the unseen Doctor certainly the villain; but it was an endless film and I found it boring for none of the characters engaged my sympathy, even if I admired them, and all the situations appeared the false engineering of an inefficient phantasist. But I had one curious, persistent hallucination which obscurely troubled me because nothing about it was familiar and, each time I saw her, she never changed. Every night as I lay on the borders of a sleep which had now become as aesthetically exhausting as Wagner, I would be visited by a young woman in a négligé made of a fabric the colour and texture of the petals of poppies which clung about her but did not conceal her quite transparent flesh, so that the exquisite filigree of her skeleton was revealed quite clearly. Where her heart should have been there flickered a knot of flames like ribbons and she shimmered a little, like the air on a very hot summer’s day. She did not speak; she did not smile. Except for those faint quiverings of her unimaginable substance, she did not move. But she never failed to visit me. Now I know that the manifestations of those days were – as perhaps I then suspected but refused to admit to myself – a language of signs which utterly bemused me because I could not read them. Each phantom was a symbol palpitating with appalling significance yet she alone, my visitor with flesh of glass, hinted to me a little of the nature of the mysteries which encompassed us and filled so many of us with terror.

She stayed beside me until I slept, waveringly, brilliantly, hooded in diaphanous scarlet, and occasionally she left an imperative written in lipstick on my dusty windowpane. BE AMOROUS! she exhorted one night and, another night, BE MYSTERIOUS! Some nights later, she scribbled: DON’T THINK, LOOK; and, shortly after that, she warned me: WHEN YOU BEGIN TO THINK, YOU LOSE THE POINT. These messages irritated yet haunted me. They itched away all day inside my head like a speck of dust trapped beneath my eyelids. She was qualitatively different from the comic apparition purporting to be my mother who perched on the mantel-piece in the guise of a fat, white owl begging my forgiveness and hooting her orisons. This visible skeleton, this miraculous bouquet of bone, the formal elements of physicality, was one of the third order of forms who might presently invade us, the order of angels, speaking lions and winged horses, the miraculous revenants for whom the city sometimes seemed hushed in expectation and who themselves would only be the amazing heralds of the arrival of the Emperor of the Marvellous, whose creatures we would by that time have all become.

We knew the name of our adversary. We knew the date at which he graduated in physics with honours from the national university. We knew his father had been a gentleman banker who dabbled a little in the occult and his mother a lady who liked to organize soup kitchens in the slums and sewing schools for repentant prostitutes. We even discovered, to the Minister’s tactful embarrassment, that my own mother, during one of her atoning fits, had stitched for me at one of Mrs Hoffman’s schools a pathetically disintegrating flannel under-garment which I wore for a day before the seams unravelled altogether, an appropriate symbol for my mother’s repentance. I suppose this coincidence gave me a certain tenuous sense of involvement with the Hoffman family – as if, one rainy afternoon, I had talked with an aunt of his briefly about the weather, on a stopping, country train. We knew the very date, 18 September 1867, on which Dr Hoffman’s great-grandfather arrived in this country, a minor aristocrat of slender means fleeing from unmentionable troubles in a certain wolf-haunted mountainous Slavonic principality which was subsequently rendered into legislative non-being during the Franco–Prussian war or some such war. We knew that, when his son was born, the father cast his horoscope and then gave the midwife who had delivered him a tip of several thousand dollars. We knew the boy Hoffman had been involved in a homosexual scandal at his preparatory school and we even knew how much it had cost to hush the scandal up. The Minister devoted an entire bank of computers to data on Dr Hoffman. We even tabulated his childhood illnesses and the Minister found especially significant an attack of brain fever in his seventh year and a crise de nerfs in his sixteenth.

However, one day some twenty years previously, Dr Hoffman, the already enormously distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of P., dismissed with a few kind words and a handsome present the valet who looked after him; made a bonfire of his notebooks; packed in a valise a toothbrush, a change of shirts and underwear and the choicest of his father’s library of cabbalistic books; took a taxi to the central railway station; bought a single ticket to the mountain resort of L.; went to the correct platform, where he purchased a pack of imported cigarettes and a net of tangerines from the kiosk; was observed by a porter to peel and consume a fruit; was seen by another porter to enter the gentlemen’s lavatory; and then vanished. He vanished so expeditiously there were even obituaries in the press.

In the years preceding the Reality War, an itinerant showman who gave his name as Mendoza made a small living touring country fairs and carnivals with a small theatre. This theatre did not have any actors; it was a peep-show cum cinematograph but it offered moving views in three dimensions and those who visited it were impressed by the lifelikeness of what they saw. Mendoza prospered. In time he came to the Whitsun Fair in the capital with his theatre, but by this time his art had progressed and now he offered a trip in a time machine. Customers were invited to take off their clothes and don all manner of period costumes provided for them by the impresario. When they were suitably garbed, the lights dimmed and Mendoza projected upon a screen various old newsreels and an occasional early silent comedy. These films had, as it were, slots in them in which the members of the audience could insert themselves and so become part of the shadow show they witnessed. I spoke with a man who, as a child, had been in this fashion an eye-witness of the assassination at Sarajevo. He said it had been raining heavily at the time and everybody moved with the spasmodic jerkiness of clockwork figures. This showman, Mendoza, must have been one of Dr Hoffman’s first disciples or even perhaps an early missionary. Hoffman’s undergraduate class list included a fellow student named Mendoza, said to be psychologically unstable, who did not complete his course of study. But one day a drunken crowd burned down his booth and Mendoza was burned with it, so badly that he died a few days later in some anonymous charity ward, attended by Sisters of Mercy. What linked him unambiguously to Hoffman had been his repeated mutterings: ‘Beware the Hoffman effect!’ On his board-hard death bed, under a casque of lint, he muttered away, an elderly nun remembered. But now Mendoza was irretrievably dead and the Minister wondered if he were not a red herring.

The Minister had built up a hypothetical model of the invisible Dr Hoffman much as Dr Drosselmeier had built up a model of the unreality atom. From the scientist’s academic record, we could see there was scarcely a branch of human knowledge with which he had not familiarized himself. We knew of his taste for the occult. We knew his height, his size in hats, shoes and gloves; his favourite brands of cigars, eau de cologne and tea. The Minister’s model was that of a crazed genius, a megalomaniac who wanted absolute power and would go to extreme lengths to grasp it. He thought Hoffman was satanic and yet I knew my master too well not to realize he was tainted with a little envy for the very power the Doctor abused with such insouciance, the power to subvert the world. This did not lessen my admiration for the Minister. On the contrary, I was so lacking in ambition myself that the spectacle of his, which ravaged him, impressed me enormously. He was like a Faust who cannot find a friendly devil. Or, if he had done so, he would not have been able to believe in him.

The Minister had all the Faustian desires but, since he had rejected the transcendental, he had clipped his own wings. In my meditative days, I used to think that the Faust legend was a warped version of the myth of Prometheus, who defied the wrath of god to gain the prize of fire and was punished for it. I could not see what there might be wrong with knowledge in itself, no matter what the price. In spite of my post, I had taken no sides in the struggle between Dr Hoffman and the Minister. At times I even speculated that Hoffman was altogether Prometheus and no Faust at all, for Faust had been content with conjuring tricks while the manifestations around us sometimes looked as though they were formed of authentic flame. But I kept these thoughts to myself. Nevertheless, you must realize the adversaries were of equal stature. The Minister possessed supernatural strength of mind to have stood out so long and it was his phenomenal intransigence alone which upheld the city.

Indeed, he had become the city. He had become the invisible walls of the city; in himself, he represented the grand totality of the city’s resistance. His movements began to take on a megalithic grandeur. He said continually: ‘No surrender!’ and I could not deny his dignity. I even revered it. But, for myself, I had no axe to grind.

The siege went into its third year. Supplies of food were almost at an end. An epidemic of cholera decimated the eastern suburbs and thirty cases of typhus had been reported that week. Even the discipline of the Determination Police was fraying and now and then one of them would slip into the Minister’s office to tell tales on a colleague. My landlady vanished. Somehow, without anybody knowing, she was dead somewhere, so now I was alone in my house. Every day, the police suppressed riots with tear gas and machine gun fire. And it was blinding, humid, foetid summer, a summer that smelled of shit, blood and roses, for there had never been such roses as those that bloomed that summer. They clambered everywhere and dripped as if perspiring the heaviest, most intoxicating perfume, which seemed to make the very masonry drunk. The senses fused; sometimes these roses emitted low but intolerably piercing pentatonic melodies which were the sound of their deep crimson colour and yet we heard them inside our nostrils. The citronade of the pale morning sun shimmered like a multitude of violins and I tasted unripe apples in the rare, green, midnight rain.

It was the day before my twenty-fourth birthday. In the afternoon, the Cathedral expired in a blaze of melodious fireworks.

It was our greatest national monument. It had been of immense size and architecturally sublimely chaste. Until then, its severe, classical revival façade had grandly ignored all the Doctor’s whimsical attempts to transform it into a funfair or a mausoleum for ships’ figureheads or a slaughterhouse so he finally detonated it with pyrotechnics. The Minister and I watched the illuminations from our window. The dome rose up and dissolved against the clear blue sky of the middle of the afternoon like a fiery parasol but, while I was faintly regretting that the spectacle had not taken place at night when I should have enjoyed it better, I saw that the Minister was weeping. Berlioz crashed about us; we stood in the heart of a fantastic symphony, awaiting the climacteric, death, which would come in the form of a fatal circus.

For my supper, I ate a salad of dandelions I picked from the wall of my house, which had begun to sprout flowers. I brewed myself a pot from my four-weekly ounce ration of coffee substitute and, I remember, read a little. I read a few pages of The Rape of the Lock. When it was time to sleep, she came to me. For the first time, I smiled at her; she made no response. I slept; and early the next morning, I awoke and yet I knew I was still sleeping for my bed was now, in fact, an island in the middle of an immense lake.

Night was approaching although I knew it was nearly dawn for outside – outside, that is, of the dream – a cock continued to crow. However, within my dream, the shadows of evening took the colours from the shifting waters round me and a small wind rustled the quills of the pine trees, for my island was covered with pines. Nothing moved except this little, lonely wind. I waited, for the dream imperiously demanded that I wait and I seemed to wait endlessly. I do not think I have ever felt so alone, as if I were the last living thing left in the world and this island and this lake were all that was left of the world.

Presently I saw the object of my vigil. A creature was approaching over the water but it did not assuage my loneliness for though I could see it was alive, it did not seem to be alive in the same sense that I was alive and I shuddered with dread. I know I must have stood in an attitude of awed listening, as if to hear the scratching of the claws of the unknown on the outside rind of the world. The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown; I was afraid. I had been afraid when I was a child, when I would lie awake at night and hear my mother panting and grunting like a tiger in the darkness beyond the curtain and I thought she had changed into a beast. Now I was even more afraid than I had been then.

As it drew near, I saw it was a swan. It was a black swan. I cannot tell you how ugly it was; nor yet how marvellous it was. Its vapid eyes were set too close together on its head and expressed a kind of mindless evil that was quite without glamour, though evil is usually attractive, because evil is defiant. Its elongated neck had none of the grace traditionally ascribed to the necks of swans but lolled foolishly, now this way, now that, like a length of hose. And the beak, which was the clear, pinkish scarlet of scentless roses, striped with a single band of white, was flat, broad and spatulate, fit only for grubbing worms from mud. It swam remorselessly and terribly towards me but, when only a few yards of shifting water lay between us, it paused to unfurl its enormous wings as if it were opening a heraldic umbrella.

Never have I seen such blackness, such a soft, feathered, absolute black, a black as intense as the negation of light, black the colour of the extinction of consciousness. The swan flexed its neck like a snake about to strike, opened its beak and began to sing so that I knew it was about to die and I knew, too, she was a swan and also a woman for there issued from her throat a thrilling, erotic contralto. Her song was a savage, wordless lament with the dramatic cadences of flamenco in a scale the notes of which were unfamiliar to me yet seemed those of an ultimate Platonic mode, an elemental music. The shadows deepened yet one last ray of the invisible sun drew a gleam from a golden collar around her throbbing throat and on the collar was engraved the single word: ALBERTINA. The dream broke like a storm and I woke.

The room was full of muffled sunlight. The cock had ceased to crow. But I did not wake properly even though my eyes were open; the dream left my mind full of cobwebs and I scarcely saw the morning though I went, as usual, to the office and found the Minister going through his mail. He was studying a letter which had arrived in an envelope bearing the postmark of one of the solid suburbs in the north of the city. He began to laugh softly.

‘Dr Hoffman’s special agent would like me to take him to lunch today,’ he said and handed me the letter. ‘Test this immediately.’

It went through innumerable computers. It went through Reality Testing Laboratories A and B and we photocopied it before it went through Laboratory C. This was fortunate for it was authentic.

I was to go with the Minister to the rendezvous. My task was simple. I was to record every word that passed between the Minister and the agent on a very small tape recorder concealed in my pocket. He sent me home to change my suit and put on a tie. I must say, most of all, I was looking forward to a good meal for such things were hard to come by nowadays – yet I could see what the Minister could not, that Dr Hoffman would not have sent him the invitation had he not believed we were on our knees.

The restaurant was luxuriously discreet. All its staff had unimpeachable reality ratings, even the plongeurs. We waited for our contact in a dim, confidential bar too comfortably redolent of money to be affected by the tempest of fantasy we could not glimpse outside because the windows were so heavily curtained. Sipping his gin and tonic, the Minister alternately consulted his watch and tapped his foot; I was interested to see he was unable to perform these actions simultaneously, perhaps because he was so single-minded. He emanated tension. A muscle twitched in his cheek. He lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the one he had just put out. We knew who it was the instant our contact came in because the lights immediately fused.

A dozen tiny fireflies clicked into life at the nozzle of a dozen cigarette lighters but I could make out only the vaguest outlines of Dr Hoffman’s emissary until the waiters brought in a number of branched candlesticks so that he was illuminated like the icon he resembled. A breeze seemed to play about him, tossing the small flames hither and thither, keeping constantly aflutter the innumerable ruffles on his lace shirt and casting a multitude of shadows over his face. Presumably he was either of Mongolian extraction or else he numbered among his ancestors, as I did, certain of the forgotten Indians who still linger miserably in the more impenetrable mountains or skulk along the waterways, for his skin was like polished brass, at once greenish and yellowish, his eyelids were vestigial and his cheekbones unusually high. Luxuriantly glossy hair so black it was purplish in colour made of his head almost too heavy a helmet to be supported by the slender column of his neck and his blunt-lipped, sensual mouth was also purplish in colour, as if he had been eating berries. Around his eyes, which were as hieratically brown and uncommunicative as those the Ancient Egyptians painted on their sarcophagi, were thick bands of solid gold cosmetic and the nails on his long hands were enamelled dark crimson, to match the nails on his similarly elegant feet, which were fully exposed by sandals consisting of mere gold thongs. He wore flared trousers of purple suede and used several ropes of pearls for a belt around his waist. All his gestures were instinct with a self-conscious but extraordinary reptilian liquidity; when we rose to go to eat, I saw that he seemed to move in soft coils. I think he was the most beautiful human being I have ever seen – considered, that is, solely as an object, a construction of flesh, skin, bone and fabric, and yet, for all his ambiguous sophistication, indeed, perhaps in its very nature, he hinted at a savagery which had been cunningly tailored to suit the drawing room, though it had been in no way diminished. He was a manicured leopard patently in complicity with chaos. Secure in the armour of his ambivalence, he patronized us. His manner was one of wry, supercilious reserve. He was no common agent. He behaved like an ambassador of an exceedingly powerful principality visiting a small but diplomatically by no means insignificant state. He treated us with the regal condescension of a first lady and the Minister and I found ourselves behaving like boorish provincials who dropped our forks, slopped our soup, knocked over our wine glasses and spilled mayonnaise on our ties while he watched us with faint amusement and barely discernible contempt.

In a gracious attempt to put us at our ease, he chatted desultorily about baroque music in a low, dark voice which had a singular, furry quality. But the Minister refused to talk small talk. He spooned his consommé distastefully, grunting now and then, his cold eyes fixed suspiciously on the luring siren before us who ate with an unfamiliar but graceful series of gestures of the hands, like those of Javanese dancers. I drank my soup and watched them. It was like the dialogue between a tentacular flower and a stone. A waiter took away the plates and brought us sole véronique. You would not have believed we were at war. The young man speared a grape with his fork. He folded up Vivaldi and his lesser-known contemporaries and put them away. As we dismembered our fish, the following conversation took place. I found the tape in a lead coffin in the ruins of the Bureau of Determination many years later, and so am able to transcribe it verbatim.

It was an artifice –

I myself ordered coffee and the Minister took his habitual black tea, though this afternoon he tipped into his cup the contents of a balloon of brandy. He had me play over the recording of their conversation and then stayed sunk in thought for a while, lost inside a cloud of cigarette smoke.

‘If I were a religious man, Desiderio,’ he said at last, ‘I would say we had just survived an encounter with Mephistopheles.’

The Minister had always struck me as a deeply religious man.

‘Let me tell you a parable,’ he went on. ‘A man made a pact with the Devil. The condition was this: the man delivered up his soul as soon as Satan had assassinated God. “Nothing simpler,” said Satan and put a revolver to his own temple.’

‘Do you cast Dr Hoffman as God or Satan?’

The Minister smiled.

‘As my parable suggests, the roles are interchangeable,’ he replied. ‘Come. Let us go.’

But, for myself, I was bewildered, for certain timbres in the young man’s voice had reawakened all my last night’s dream and, as if his voice had struck those mysterious notes which are supposed to shatter glass, a fine tracery of cracks had all at once appeared in the surface of my indifference. The young man fascinated me. As the Minister signed the check, I saw the curious ambassador had left behind him on the chair he had occupied a handkerchief of the same exquisite lace as the fabric of his shirt. I picked it up. Along the hem, stitched in a flourish of silk so white it was virtually invisible, was the name I had only seen before in my dream, the name: ALBERTINA. The hieratic chant of the black swan rang again in my ears; I swayed as if I were about to faint.

The Minister slipped the head waiter a fat tip and lit a fresh cigarette as he led me by the arm into the equivocal afternoon, where the sunlight was already thickening.

‘Desiderio,’ he said. ‘How would you like to go on a little trip?’