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 your torpedoes.’
‘These differences are accounted for by minute biochemical changes in the brain. Neither state is more truthful than the other. For some people like the author to whom you refer, truth lies in mystery, for others in clarity. We have the science of medicine now, but prayer used to be the great clarifier. The old Christian churches used to serve as clarifying machines.’
‘You mean they helped you to think straight in what you might call “this doleful jeste of life”.’
‘I’ve just got to get a millimetre further in.’
They continued to walk in a darkness the extent of which Burnell could hardly comprehend.
‘Anyhow, you’re good company,’ Maté said, affectionately. ‘Is there anything I can do for you in return?’
‘More oxygen,’ Burnell said. ‘It’s hot in this …’ Uncertain between the words ‘chair’ and ‘cathedral’, he came out with ‘chairch’. ‘As a chairch architect, I’ve visited most of the cathedrals in Europe – Chartres, Burgos, Canterbury, Cologne, Saragossa, Milano, Ely, Zagreb, Gozo, Rheims …’
He listened to his voice going on and on. When it too had faded into the distance, he added, ‘But this is the first time I’ve ever been in a hot and stuffy cathedral or chairch.’
‘I’ll put this match out. There are new ways. What we medicos call neural pathwise. Your friend Kafka – personally I’d have lobotomized him – he said that “all protective walls are smashed by the iron fist of technology”. Whingeing, of course, the fucker was always whingeing. But it’s the tiny little fist of nanotechnology which is smashing the walls between human and human. In the future, we shall all be able to share memories and understandings. Everything will be common property. Private thought will be a thing of the past.’
Burnell laughed. He had not realized that Maté was such good company. To continue the joke, he said, ‘In that connection, Jesus Christ was pretty au fait with nanotechnology. You remember? That resurrection of the body stuff? Strictly Frankenstein stuff. Dead one day, up and running the next.’
Maté professed himself puzzled. They halted under a statue of Averroës. He had heard of Frankenstein. It was the other great Christian myth which puzzled him. This was almost the first time Burnell had ever encountered anyone walking in a cathedral who had never heard of Jesus Christ.
Since the man was interested, Burnell tried to deliver a brief résumé of the Saviour’s life. The heat and darkness confused him. He could not recall how exactly Jesus was related to John the Baptist and the Virgin Mary. Nor could he remember whether Christ was his surname or Christian name.
‘I see, so they hanged him in the end, did they?’ said Maté. ‘You’d be better not to remember such depressing things.’
It seemed sacrilegious to mention the name of Jesus in such a place.
The cathedral was constructed in the form of a T, the horizontal limb being much longer than the vertical, stretching away into the dark. The weight of masonry pressed down on Burnell’s head and shoulders. Great columns
