The Great and Secret Show

At first, having set up the laboratory to Fletcher’s specifications, and offered the man some thoughts on the problem he’d gleaned from the Dead Letters, Jaffe left the maestro alone, despatching supplies (starfish, sea urchins; mescalin; an ape) as and when they were requested, but visiting only once a month. On each occasion he’d spent twenty-four hours with Fletcher, drinking and sharing gossip which Jaffe had plucked from the academic grapevine to feed Fletcher’s curiosity. After eleven such visits, sensing that the researches at the Mission were beginning to move towards some conclusion, he began to make the journey more regularly. He was less welcome each time. On one occasion Fletcher had even attempted to keep Jaffe out of the Mission altogether, and there’d been a short, mismatched struggle. Fletcher was no fighter. His stooping, undernourished body was that of a man who’d been bent at his studies since adolescence. Beaten, he’d been obliged to allow access. Inside, Jaffe had found the ape, transformed by Fletcher’s distillation, the Nuncio, into an ugly but undeniably human child. Even then, in the midst of this triumph, there’d been hints of the breakdown which Jaffe couldn’t doubt Fletcher had finally succumbed to. The man had been uneasy about what they’d achieved. But Jaffe had been too damned pleased to take the warning signs seriously. He’d even suggested he try the Nuncio for himself, there and then. Fletcher had counselled against it; suggested several months of further study to be undertaken before Jaffe risk such a step. The Nuncio was still too volatile, he argued. He wanted to examine the way it worked on the boy’s system before any further tests. Suppose it simply proved fatal to the child in a week? Or a day? That argument was enough to cool Jaffe’s ardour for a while. He left Fletcher to undertake the proposed tests, returning on a weekly basis now, becoming more aware of Fletcher’s disintegration with each visit, but assuming the man’s pride in his own masterwork would prevent him trying to undo it.

Now, as flocks of scorched notes flew across the ground towards him, he cursed his trust. He stepped from the jeep and began to make his way through the scattered fires towards the Mission. There had always been an apocalyptic air about this spot. The earth so dry and sandy it could sustain little more than a few stunted yucca; the Mission, perched so close to the cliff-edge that one winter the Pacific would inevitably claim it, the boobies and tropic birds making din overhead.

Today there were only words on the wing. The Mission’s walls were stained with smoke where fires had been built close to them. The earth was dusted with ash, even less fertile than sand.

Nothing was as it had been.

He called Fletcher’s name as he stepped through the open door, the anxiety he’d felt coming up the hill now close to fear, not for himself but for the Great Work. He was glad he’d come armed. If Fletcher’s grasp on sanity had finally slipped he might be obliged to coerce the formula for the Nuncio from him. It would not be the first time he’d gone seeking knowledge with a weapon in his pocket. It was sometimes necessary.

The interior was all ruin; several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of instrumentation – coaxed, bullied or seduced from academics who’d given him what he asked for just to get Jaffe’s eyes off them – destroyed; table-tops cleared with the sweep of an arm. The windows had all been thrown open and the Pacific wind blew through the place, hot and salty. Jaffe navigated the wreckage and made his way through to Fletcher’s favourite room, the cell he’d once (high on mescalin) called the plug in the hole in his heart.

He was there, alive, sitting in his chair in front of the flung window, staring up at the sun: the very act that had blinded him in his right eye. He was dressed in the same shabby shirt and overlarge trousers he always wore; his face presented the same pinched, unshaven profile; the pony-tail of greying hair (his only concession to vanity), was in place. Even his posture – hands at his lap, the body sagging – was one Jaffe had seen innumerable times. And yet there was something subtly wrong with the scene, enough to hold Jaffe at the door, refusing to step into the cell. It was as if Fletcher was too much himself. This was too perfect an image of him: the contemplative, staring at the sun, his every pore and pucker demanding the attention of Jaffe’s aching retina, as if his portrait had been painted by a thousand miniaturists, all of whom had been granted an inch of their subject and with brushes bearing a single hair rendered their portion in nauseating detail. The rest of the room – the walls, the window, even the chair on which Fletcher sat – swam out of focus, unable to compete with the too-thorough reality of this man.

Jaffe closed his eyes against the portrait. It overloaded his senses. Made him nauseous. In the darkness, he heard Fletcher’s voice, as unmusical as ever.

‘Bad news,’ he said, very quietly.

‘Why?’ Jaffe said, not opening his eyes. Even with them closed he knew damn well the prodigy was speaking to him without use of tongue or lips.

‘Just leave,’ Fletcher said. ‘And yes.’

‘Yes what?’

‘You’re right. I don’t need my throat any longer.’

‘I didn’t say –’

‘You don’t need to, Jaffe. I’m in your head. It’s in there, Jaffe. Worse than I thought. You must leave …’

The volume faded, though the words still came. Jaffe tried to catch them, but most slipped by. Something about do we become sky?, was it? Yes, that’s what he said:

‘… do we become sky?’

‘What are you talking about?’ Jaffe said.

‘Open your eyes,’ Fletcher replied.

‘It makes me sick to look at you.’

‘The feeling’s mutual. But still … you should open your eyes. See the miracle at work.’

‘What miracle?’

‘Just look.’

He did as Fletcher urged. The scene was exactly as it had been when he’d closed them. The wide window; the man sitting before it. The same exactly.

‘The Nuncio’s in me,’ Fletcher announced in Jaffe’s head. His face didn’t move at all. Not a twitch of the lips. Not a flicker of an eyelash. Just the same terrible finishedness.

‘You mean you tested it on yourself?’ Jaffe said. ‘After all you told me?’

‘It changes everything, Jaffe. It’s the whip to the back of the world.’

‘You took it! It was supposed to be me!’

‘I didn’t take it. It took me. It’s got a life of its own, Jaffe. I wanted to destroy it, but it wouldn’t let me.’

‘Why destroy it in the first place? It’s the Great Work.’

‘Because it doesn’t operate the way I thought it would. It’s not interested in the flesh, Jaffe, except as an afterthought. It’s the mind it plays with. It takes thought for its inspiration, and runs with that. Makes us what we’d hope to be, or fear we are. Or both. Maybe both.’

‘You haven’t changed,’ Jaffe observed. ‘Still sound the same.’

‘But I’m talking in your head,’ Fletcher reminded him. ‘Did I ever do that before?’

‘So, telepathy’s in the future of the species,’ Jaffe replied. ‘No surprise there. You’ve just accelerated the process. Leap-frogged a few thousand years.’

‘Will I be sky?’ Fletcher said again. ‘That’s what I want to be.’

‘Then be it,’ Jaffe said. ‘I’ve got more ambition than that.’

‘Yes. Yes, you have, more’s the pity. That was why I tried to keep it out of your hands. Stop it using you. But it distracted me. I saw the window open and I couldn’t keep away. The Nuncio made me so dreamy. Made me sit, and wonder: will I … will I be sky?’

‘It stopped you cheating me,’ Jaffe said. ‘It wants to be used, that’s all.’

‘Mmmm.’

‘So where’s the rest? You didn’t take it all.’

‘No,’ Fletcher said. The power to deceive had been sluiced from him. ‘But please, don’t …’

‘Where?’ Jaffe said, advancing into the room now. ‘You’ve got it on you?’

He felt myriad tiny brushes against his skin as he stepped forward, as though he’d walked into a dense cloud of invisible gnats. The sensation should have warned him off tackling Fletcher, but he was too eager for the Nuncio to take notice. He put his fingers on the man’s shoulder. Upon contact the figure seemed to fly apart, a cloud of motes – grey, white and red – breaking against him like a pollen storm.

In his head he heard the genius begin to laugh, not, Jaffe knew, at his expense but at the sheer liberation of shrugging off this skin of dulling dust, which had begun to gather upon him at birth, accruing steadily until all but the brightest hints of brightness were stopped. Now, when the dust blew away, Fletcher was still sitting in the chair as he had been. But now he was incandescent.

‘I am too bright?’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

He turned down his flame.

‘I want this too!’ Jaffe said. ‘I want it now.’

‘I know,’ Fletcher replied. ‘I can taste your need. Messy, Jaffe, messy. You’re dangerous. I don’t think I ever really knew ’til now how dangerous you are. I can see you inside out. Read your past.’ He stopped for a moment, then let out a long, pained moan. ‘You killed a man,’ he said.

‘He deserved it.’

‘Stood in your way. And this other I’m seeing … Kissoon is it? Did he die too?’