A thousand years ago, I was born to test the immunity of innocence. My name is…ah, but what does that matter? No one is left to fear it. My occupations included the Baltic states, Poland, and Germany. When I found them, they were complacent democracies tied in a loose federation. Now they lie devastated, their once-glorious rivers are sewers, contaminating a black and lifeless sea.
A government department recorded my name on a birth certificate. But the buildings and archives have all been razed. Only my beloved fortress remains. From here, I survey the barren world and wonder if, amidst its cancerous growths, fetid swamps and lifeless plains, a charred bank statement or page torn from a passport still bears that name.
I remember the bearer as if he were a character in a novel. He knew happiness, of that I am certain. In the silence that can descend on the Volga, in an autumn sunset when the leaves litter the banks in yellowing mounds, I thought I had found it: in storms, on seas calm or turbulent, savouring a beer in a bar in Saint Petersburg. But it was a fleeting guest, difficult to keep or entertain. During my rule, I sought to crush joy. The compilers of dictionaries were ordered to expunge the word and all its dubious synonyms.
After I abandoned my pursuit of happiness, things went more smoothly. I travelled widely and met the rich and celebrated, the powerful and the great, and found them all beset by qualms and follies. My name loitered in hotel receptions, graced travellers’ cheques and invoices, confused tax inspectors investigating complicated frauds, baffled insurers investigating air crashes and shipwrecks. It filled headlines. But despite the poison-tipped umbrellas and mysterious falls from windows, the staged car crashes and inexplicable deaths in custody, innocence clung to me like a miracle.
By my fortieth year, I was incredibly powerful. The millions who obeyed me knew that by conquering happiness, I had also conquered pain. This absolved them of guilt. I left to them the manifestos and rallies, the assassinations and invasions. I reviewed their parades, denounced enemies from the podium, and had the final say on uniform and strategy. The less visible I became, the more I was feared. I read Mein Kampf and considered it boastful juvenilia full of vitriol and invective. Without setting pen to paper, I knew I would write a better book. I read Sun Tzu and Nietzsche and found applause but little guidance.
If I gaze out of the reinforced window, I can see the book I made. Its syntax is the steel girders, twisted into bizarre configurations, which rise beside the blast holes; its grammar a broken road that stretches to the outskirts of the city, where the ruined skyscrapers glint like fillings in a broken mouth. The skeletons of abandoned cars line the route. Beside one, there is a skull. By taking the remaining lift, I could go and fetch it. If I stopped the eye sockets with rubies, it would make an admirable drinking cup. But I cannot leave this lead-lined room. To do so would be instant death.
Then I tire of the arid view, a haze comes before my eyes, and I see fresh pages. That’s when the faces come. Of course, they can’t be there. There’s no one there, but they are so insistent. Formerly, they frightened me, but they make for company of sorts. I am grateful they never mention happiness. They are perpetually dour and self-absorbed. Nevertheless, I would be bored without them.
It saddens me that they are not real. But the high command was certain: there could be no survivors. Many were astounded at the end. They had lived so long under the threat of destruction that they thought the weapons would never be used. They considered them trinkets rolled out to adorn May Day parades. What did they expect? That no one would press the button in an age where the arms race, like life itself, had become increasingly frenetic and error-prone. Is it any surprise that the crisis detonated on the scale it did? They clustered in their tens of thousands in streets and squares: the New Agers, the orthodox, the reborn. The sky lit up with the glare of distant explosions. Satellites fired missiles that streamed across the firmament. Then, the moon turned red. The crowds wailed and fell to their knees. Many prayed to the messiah they believed would come. Instead, the rockets rained down, thick as locusts.
The faces do not appear to be aware of this. Tentatively, I asked a few of them about the war. They looked blankly at me. Surprisingly, they live in a city much like the one I grew up in, except there are machines, modes of transport, and tools I do not recognise. I wondered about this, but then I realised I had sourced them from the sci-fi stories of my youth. I like to travel in the hub of vast machines that connect their world. The faces ignore me. They stare into space, absorbed by their own affairs. I enjoy the anonymity that creation affords.
Nevertheless, once I was accosted by a grubby man whose eyes were dewy and mournful like an old dog’s. He called me by a name I dimly remembered, an alias abandoned in a Kaliningrad hotel. I shook my head and pushed past him, shocked by the tenacity of the unreal. But he persisted and, dogging my steps, declared that he had worked for many years at my right hand. I looked at him pityingly, stunned by his lack of invention. He grew desperate and cited the secret orders I had given that obliterated a city. He could not understand how I had forgotten. I prepared to dismiss him. He was too preposterous. Then, a strange thing happened. He reached out and tried to grab my arm.
I have often wondered what would happen if one of them were to touch me. Will my powers of invention simulate substance? I consciously refrain from such contact. I do not want the faces to realise they are ghosts. I am apprehensive lest touch dissolve their world, and I will be left with only ruins. I recoiled. His hand did not even brush me. I ran down the subway steps. At the foot of the stairs, I stumbled and looked back. He had not followed me. I held tightly to the rail to steady myself. Such a structure, of course, is solid. It is the desk I have been sitting at for many years.
There is someone else I see regularly. Always punctual, I arrive at four o’clock every Thursday afternoon. Sometimes, I wonder what would happen if I came earlier. Will I catch the illusion hastily assembling as I go through the door, the book-lined walls, the couch, the swivelling leather chair, swimming like a film into focus? I have granted him more autonomy than the rest. Though the streets teem with bystanders who gather at bus stops and queue outside food shops, I know my senses are the pond they skim on, as fragile and fleeting as midges.
I hesitated to make him so free, but it has proven profitable. He informs me that I was a writer who dreamt up terrifying scenarios of nuclear oblivion. But the public preferred the more conventional terrors of vampires and bug-eyed monsters, and my books went out of print. Since then, I have lived in obscurity, eking out an existence on a pitiful state pension. Because the world did not gratify my grandiose expectations, I convinced myself I had destroyed it. I marvel not so much at his ingenuity but at the predictability of the diagnosis. It smacks of capitulation. Did not the stages of my life prove in smooth succession that the will could find its object, the dream endure? Yet still, I cultivate an illusion I expunged in others. How ludicrous our victories can be!
I remember waiting on a platform in their world. I had got off at the wrong station. When the next train came, I found an empty compartment. At the next station, which was identical to the last one, I tried to get off. The handle moved, but the door remained wedged tight. At the next station, I tried the next door in the corridor, and the same thing happened. The window was also shut fast. The train waited a little longer this time, as though playing cat and mouse. Frantically, I tried the next door and window. Both remained firmly shut. By the time the train moved off from the third station, I had tried every door and window in the corridor. At the fourth station, I tested every door and window on the other side. Frustrated, I determined to sit it out until we got to the terminus. I glanced disdainfully at the passing landscape, the blur of houses and fields. After ten stops, it struck me that all the stations were the same — grey platforms, the tracks overrun with weeds. Only their names were different. There was no destination. Even the door that had admitted me was not there when I tried to get out.
The most insidious of the faces are those I recognise. Quite by accident, I recently ran across an old girlfriend. ‘Irina,’ I called, thinking that through her I might discover the name of the dream city that surrounds us. She stopped and stared in a manner so startled that I was at a loss. Looking at her, memory became a cosmetic surgeon, erasing the lines on her forehead and the wrinkles at the corners of her mouth. I was plunged into a welter of tender feelings I had long considered lost.
We strolled beside a river. Two swans glided on its sun-dappled surface. In a glade shaded by the overhanging branches, she stopped and gathered flowers. I looked from her to the swans, who are a byword for fidelity. I remembered a hope that we would mirror them. But one mounted the bank. I flinched from its black-webbed feet and beady eyes. Irina came up beside me, her arms full of flowers. I turned and grasped her shoulders. “It’s all a lie,” I screamed as I shook her. The flowers fell to the ground. The swan fluttered its wings and emitted indignant squawks that filled the riverside.
I apologised and suggested coffee. Surprisingly, she consented. We found a café and sat by the window. The faces passed, their haste like the current of time itself. “I thought you were dead,” she said. “The war...” I replied. She looked at me strangely. There were many questions I could ask. The man she had met after me: had they married? Did she have grown-up children, a house, pursuits? In the intervening years… what had she learnt? I tried to invest myself in the associations that clung to her as tightly as her dress, but suddenly, all such bridges to the past seemed futile. We sat in silence. Sipped our coffees. If it had not been for the lesson of the swan, I might have reached out and brushed her hand. I smiled as the acclaim of millions resounded in my ears. She got up sharply. “You were selfish,” she said and walked away.
Believe me, I was but an instrument. Like all vessels of history, my destiny and that of the age coincided. Do not ask for what purpose! Now that history has ended, I can only say its secret wheels exist, for I brushed against them like metal in a shower of sparks. I sit within my fortress surrounded by Rembrandts, jewels and gold bullion that my death will render worthless. Soon, I will go to the clinic and select a new body. But I am lonely like the Greenland shark, endlessly circling the Arctic depths.
In the distance, a violent electrical storm flashes above the ruined city. I wonder if it is the same place where the faces live. If so, the mirage cannot persist. Their expressions grow increasingly bleak and aimless; they walk without purpose. I am sure that some of them suspect they are not real.