chapter eighteen

The Isolation Hospital [2]

 

“Ta failte romhat, please have a seat.” Professor O’Connell leaned back in his maroon leather-bound chair and observed Frank through the lower halves of his reading glasses. “That’s a form of welcome in our native tongue. Do you have any Irish? You are, I understand, something of a polyglot.”

 

Frank made a gesture by opening the fingers of both hands slightly, palms upwards as if to suggest that his personal store of language was unfortunately empty of Irish. In fact his mind was taking in the academic paraphernalia that littered the room: heavy tomes in German mostly concerned with behaviour and the physiology of the nervous system, diagrams of the brain and main sensory organs in dissection and most appealingly, the instruments used for carrying out such dissections held in a large case mounted on the wall beside an ill-hung portrait of the British monarch.

 

“We have been taking a close interest in you, Mr Kørner, for some six weeks now. You are an interesting man, Mr Kørner, an educated man, even a brilliant man; therefore I propose to share my opinions with you. Mr Kørner; this is not something I am in the practice of doing with my patients, and I hope you will soon see why I have chosen to do so.”

 

“You said ‘we’,” Frank interjected, “To what others are you referring?” He sensed the presence of some kind of forbidden society in the room. This had been Browne’s weakness; but it was not the perverted appetites of the flesh that he felt connected the professor to some others, it was something more structured; there was intellect behind it.

 

“The police, of course,” replied O’Connell, a little too hastily. “You know that they were sure you were involved with five deaths, including that of the eccentric Browne. That number has, by the way, increased. Two of their officers were examining the cargo that Browne’s barge was carrying and suffered a similar fate to the landlord himself.” Frank tried not to smile “And are they persevering in trying to link me to these unfortunate deaths?”

 

“Let us just say that they are putting a great deal of time into persuading me to find you dangerously unbalanced. They do not want to see you leaving this institution alive.”

 

Frank felt the tension leave his body. It was now clear that the professor had it in mind to do more than share opinions with him. An offer was about to be made and since his intuition had already detected some clandestine purpose, O’Connell was about to hand Frank the keys to his soul. The professor bent forward over the desk and lowered his voice, seeking eye-contact above the lenses; man to man without any barrier save the gaseous molecules and microscopic debris that comprised the air. “Mr Kørner; I do not think you have a dangerous mental condition aside from genius and an unfortunate form of hysteria which misguides your affections. You know of what I speak?”

 

Frank cast his eyes down in a look of shame which he hoped would convince the professor of the accuracy of his diagnosis. O’Connell relaxed; he felt he had discovered a secret which Frank would strive his utmost to keep from general knowledge. “I see we understand each other,” the psychiatrist continued. “Many in the more intellectual or theological levels of society share your weakness Mr Kørner. We regard it as a developmental aberrance caused by trauma in the early years, but we are scientists. Society at large has a more brutal way of characterising your disgusting sexual practices, and punishes your type accordingly. Discretion is a noble quality, do you not think?”

 

The image of O’Connell being consumed by the bone gas vied in Frank’s mind with that of the former being subjected to a particularly violent anal assault by a memorable performer he had witnessed in Browne’s company in Paris. Again he smiled and again the professor took this as a sign of complicity.

 

“Splendid. You are aware. No doubt, that this country has been repeatedly ravished by the British,” said O’Connell, pausing whilst Frank reached for his handkerchief to disguise his humour as he visualised a team of massive British naval personnel buggering the professor serially and without mercy. “Yes, it is a tragedy; and from time to time your European confreres have attempted to come to our aid. Mr Kørner, I believe that the seven deaths I referred to before were indeed caused by you. I believe that the cargo impounded from Browne’s barge by the police constitutes some kind of deadly weapon. I believe that you know how to use this weapon and I further believe that you have the ability to reproduce this weapon, given the appropriate resources. Am I correct?”

 

The ticking of a pendulum clock filled the hiatus. Frank was impressed by two things: the accuracy of the professor’s grasp of the bone gas, and his stupidity in revealing his knowledge such a naïve manner. If it wasn’t sex that was driving O’Connell it must be politics. The psychiatrist stood and walked to the angled picture of the king. He opened the back of the frame and took out a sheet of paper. “I would like you to read this draft.”

 

THE PROCLAMATION OF

POBLACHT NA H EIREANN

---

 

THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT
OF THE
IRISH REPUBLIC

TO THE PEOPLE OF IRELAND

IRISHMEN AND IRISHWOMEN: In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.

Having organised and trained her manhood through her secret revolutionary organisation, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and through her open military organisations…

 

He held the text in sightless eyes. This was his freedom, this was his passport, this was his blank cheque. Frank’s immortality was again assured. He looked up. O’Connell’s death was now inevitable, his brain already foam.

 

 

 

chapter seventeen

No resemblance to actual post abstract expressionists intended...

Saluting The Flag

New York in 1955 was a long way from how it had been when he arrived in ‘45, and that itself had been light years from the petrified structures of blood and dust that was all then left of Dresden. Making money was easy, as usual. The authorities had shipped him out of Germany because intelligence had identified him as a scientist they could use; in fact he had shared a cabin for a couple of days with Werner Von Braun; but whereas Operation Paperclip gave the latter a major role in the frantic Space Race, Frank’s biological breakthroughs were of little practical interest to America, and he had soon been allowed to find work in the private sector. Americans had money; American women had money and what they wanted to spend it on was themselves. The early days in Cologne opened doors and Frank was soon designing perfumes for the middle classes who could never aspire to the European classics. It was only a couple of months since Von Braun had got American nationality, whatever that meant, and Frank was delighted to think of him in Huntsville Alabama, working twelve hours a day, shooting at the moon, while he spent an hour or two in is penthouse office, scribbled down a few chemical recipes, and spent the rest of his hours doing whatever he pleased.

Frank was not so dull as to miss the fact that self aggrandisement was one of his two vital principles, the other being elegant cruelty. For this reason he was delighted to find himself sitting on an improbably long velvet sofa with the cream of the art and fashion world waiting to be photographed and interviewed for the New Yorker magazine. He recognised many of his so- called contemporaries, although he was in his nineties in some real sense: Warhol, Pollock, Greenberg; about a dozen more. Two of the men, one about twenty five and the other five years or so older, caught his eye, and as the assistant editor finished her introduction to the afternoon’s work and coffee arrived he decided to introduce himself.

“Kørner, Frank,” he said, shaking the hand of the older man, “I’m in perfume. I haven’t met you before”.

“Robert. No I’m from out of town, Texas, as if you couldn’t guess from the accent, and this is Jack, well Jasper really.” Jack smiled and shook Frank’s hand. Frank breathed quietly and held the second; something unfamiliar was happening.

“What are you in?” he enquired.

“God knows,” Robert spoke quickly, as if he were protecting his friend from the difficulties of social intercourse. “We’re artists, we have studios in the same brownstone. Someone told Miss New Yorker over there that we are the new hip thing.”

“I’m in the groove Jackson!” At last Jack spoke and they tried fairly unsuccessfully to stifle their laughter since Pollock was only standing a couple of yards away, manifestly failing to enjoy the coffee. Frank caught what he thought was a triple meaning and smiled with what he hoped might be taken for camaraderie. He dropped his card and scribbled down their studio address, which turned out to be their apartment also. It was agreed that he would visit later in the day to see the work which the New Yorker claimed was the Next Big Thing after abstract expressionism.

Frank had to admit to himself that he was a couple of dry martinis ahead of sober when he arrived at the studio, but Robert had left him at the starting line. He sat on a hinged wooden ladder and swung his arm around, spilling rye over the surrounding canvasses.

“Fuck the gesture, Frank. It’s all about the real images in the real world, not the psyched up shit that makes you throw Prussian Blue here or black fucking housepaint there. Goddamn it, why paint flat? You can’t deny that paintings have three dimensions, four if you count the making time. Photographs, objects, film… This is what the new art is.”

Frank surveyed the evidence of his host’s assertions. He had always been a bit of a Klimt man himself, and he really was a contemporary. This parade of modern debris was ugly, but it was also exciting. “And what is the new art about?” he asked.

“Everything, nothing. America.” Robert took a large swig of rye “Fuck it, I’m steamed Frank. Jack knows. He has beer and paint and the flag.”

Frank was surprised. He had hardly expected the symbol of a conservative nation as a subject for these radical artists. Most people, himself included, didn’t get abstract expressionism, so something even more radical was bound to be alien.

“What does he mean; the flag?” He asked Jack.

“It’s in my studio on the other floor,” Jack spoke hesitantly and checked Robert for support. Unfortunately Robert was snoring atop the ladder, a mixture of bourbon and piss staining the leg of his blue dungarees. “Would you care to look at what I have so far?”

“Of course,” replied Frank, leading the way to the door, “I would love to see what you’re working on.”

Jack’s studio was calm where Robert’s was riotous. Frank now felt a coolness of thought which reminded him of himself in Svalbard. He touched the waxy surface of the paintings and then the cheeks of their creator. They kissed, and later that night he woke to find himself fellated before the multiple flags that hovered in the studio’s gloom.

chapter sixteen

some nostalgia

Google Earth

Kay sat on the white chair she had bought for €5 in a charity shop despite the fact that the Blue Gamp Gallery presently held an exhibition of beautifully crafted furniture made from bog-oak; thunderously silent, possessing hundreds of years of solidity and loved by the artist until inexpressibly smooth and justifiably expensive. The creaking white chair was hard, of the kind one found in sour waiting rooms fifty years ago, before plastic, MDF or design were considered appropriate for clients or patients, but to Kay it was a throne. When the memories had returned, inasmuch as they ever had, and her father, Douglas and the dwarf were permanently detained in prison or psychiatric institution, she had decided that she had to remake her world: she was the Queen and recreator; hence the throne and the art.

Christmas was coming but she had nothing important to do. There was an optimistic quantity of Douglas elves, 288 in fact, standing on a table in Trisha’s house ready for sale and there would be no customers until the mothers and grandmothers of Listowel had respectively recovered from the school run or finished an eleven o’clock cappuccino. Kay spun the planet on the laptop until she estimated London to be at the centre of the window. She zoomed in slowly, respecting her anxiety and the microcircuits under her fingertips. The generalised green haze shifted towards urban grey and the blue worm of Thames likewise greened and greyed. Now buildings, vehicles and street furniture could be observed. This was an image built yesterday afternoon; if it were from earlier today the streets would be jammed with red buses and the pavements thronged with commuters. She selected points of interest and little markers indicated galleries and municipal buildings. There was Southwark Cathedral and Tate Modern, casting shadows Eastwards over the sluggish water of the river. She stilled her heart and clicked in again. Here were individuals and newspapers motionless on the pavements that led to The Clink and what had been Frank’s Café.

Although the images could not represent movement she felt herself leave the backdoor of the ancient pile, pushing the heavy plastic bin to the end of the paved area and then dragging it over the earth path that led to the stream. It tipped and she was by now adept at balancing the weight and fixing the wheels as it disgorged the bones and viscera into the black stream. She knew every nettle and twist of barbed wire in that vile cul de sac. Once she had dared to send a bottle loaded with a dismal plea for rescue into the water, imagining it bobbing through the filth to some estuary where a man with a metal detector or a child seeking crabs would find it and alert the authorities.

She zoomed out and felt the gallery close about her. She followed the Thames under bridges and as it slipped by the horizontal vertebrae of the flood barrier, Barking, new estates on reclaimed marsh, fields and mudflats to that wide estuary. Here was the spot where she imagined her bottle still lay under a decade of detritus. The Ford cars and trade vans squatted discretely separate in the semicircular space between the track and the slime. The lower classes of Essex were unknowingly frozen within their vehicles, trading their drugs, making calls they could not make at home or attempting sex while her satellite eye hovered.

She jabbed the mouse pad and the planet fled; momentarily atomised before adopting its waiting position. She thought about time and work and calling Trisha, but only out of a faint sense of duty to her constructed sanity, because what she really needed to do was go see her father. The planet turned about nine degrees to the East and she stabbed the zoom button into the heart of the secure wing of the psychiatric hospital. Frank had ruled here, and had even tried to lock her away here forever once he had sensed his plans beginning the unravelling. She knew her father was here, imprisoned physically and mentally, able to only rock, moan and shit. She could never visit him; it would be far too dangerous, but this way she could get close. This way she could almost stare into his empty eyes and smell his emptying bowels.

Something caught her attention and she tried to get in closer, but Ballinasloe was not London and the satellites were nowhere near as generous with their pixels here. A white dot shimmered on dark green inside the high wall surrounding the secure wing. She touched the screen of the laptop, stroked the dot with immense tenderness. At that moment, some time last evening, a white cat could see her father in his abysmal padded nowhere. Her smile guided the tear between her lips. Frank didn’t matter any more.

chapter fifteen

A pretty clear indication of that which is truely evil in Frank. Thanks to Fionn for most of this...

Los Cardales

Following the rigid infrastructural architecture of Germany and the sophistication of the New York public transport network Frank was taken aback by the extreme casualness whereby the railway line here was defined by a slight decline, as if encouraging drunks or cycling children to roll onto the tracks. He stepped onto the orange earth and summoned a mozo to collect his luggage. He calculated that there was about an hour of sunlight left and the heladería was cut by sharp diagonal shadows; enormously elongated trees, buildings and people. Iglesias sat in a bright parallelogram, his three bodyguards suited and black on black beside him. “Venga, Frank, tomarás un mojito?” The silhouettes shifted stoically, and Iglesias spun a light aluminium chair into the suddenly pink light. The fat man’s cigar smoke dragged against gravity.

“Hombre, no tengo ningun idea por qué este cabrón quiera encontrarnos en esta cochambre, pero el cabrón y yo chingón..” Iglesias slapped a fly onto the table top and incinerated it with the end of his Cohiba. Frank was unfamiliar with the almost infinite richness of South American slang, but nodded in agreement with the general idea. “Qué tal el viaje?”

“Long, but interesting,” replied Frank. “The train had an almost imperial splendour, although faded, and the commission expected from even quite minor employees was… excessive.”

“If they knew it was Alejandro Iglesias paying their sobornos those tíos would keep their hands in their pockets.” He laughed and turned to his bodyguards to make sure that they had properly appreciated his joke, but at that moment all three tensed and slipped their hands inside their jackets. A long black Pontiac Grand Am sedan pulled up in a haze of dry orange dust, two less flamboyant saloons following and a slight man in his thirties, formally dressed, with a tight moustache and even tighter gelled hair emerged. He made a gesture to the vague but immense figures leaving the other cars and stepped almost casually towards Frank and Iglesias. Frank immediately realised that his party was outnumbered and despite the evening heat in this out-post of Buenos Aires he felt the Arctic in his blood and bones. The calming ice stilled his nerves; things were undoubtedly going to become extremely unpleasant but he was utterly confident in his ability to survive. He took his father’s geological case from his luggage as Iglesias stood and attempted a fraternal embrace of the new arrival. The bodyguards on both sides shifted their shoulders uneasily and let their fingers touch the reassurance of gunmetal or balls. Frank palmed two dice charged with the bone gas from his father’s case and then remove a bag of his genetically modified cocaine. At 100% purity as it was here it was almost instant death to ingest the white powder. Frank was confident that it would account for some of these new arrivals; the factor that he could not control was how much damage they would do to his plans before they died.

“Frank, I want you to meet Angel Corrales, he is interested in doing business with us,” said Iglesias, using perfect English due to the focussing nature of the terror he was feeling. For a second Frank considered altering his plans and letting Iglesias die in the inevitable blood-bath, but then his aesthetic sensibilities returned along with his greed. He had decided months ago that Iglesias was going to contribute the cerebral essence that would allow Frank VI to commence later in 1983 and he was not going to let a local gang-land feud get in the way. He conjured up the most offensive aspects of Iglesias’s character in order to convince himself that it was worth the extreme risks he was about to run in order to be the one who turned this fat criminal’s brain into a light grey foam. It was touch and go between his bravura use of castellaño and his lack of respect for Vega Sicilia, but in the end it was the memory of the man sloshing the red wine into the glass and then into himself without the slightest appreciation of the complex biochemistry that made it the pinnacle of Spanish viniculture that saved his life that day. Satisfied with his decision Frank shook Angel Corrales’s hand knowing it would soon be cold, and let himself be led into a back room. Iglesias followed but as they were about to enter the room behind the bar Corrales lifted his eyebrow and a huge bodyguard stepped out of the miasma of coffee and boiling oil. “I need to talk with Professor Kørner a solas.” Frank saw Iglesias slump. He knew what was coming; ever since Corrales had arrived with such a large party of armed thugs he had known that he was going to die, but he had clung to the hope that he could somehow use Frank to survive. That hope ended the second that Frank entered the room alone with Corrales.

The room was small. There were two stools and an antique card table with what was once inlaid baize but was now a brownish green depression, slick from the passage of every coin that had passed over the bar in the last thirty years.

“You are aware of course that Iglesias has already ordered your coffin, Señor Kørner.” It was a pathetic opening gambit and Frank had some difficulty in parading the appropriate emotions across his face. He took the die from his pocket and played with it as if he were contemplating life as a game of chance.

“If you were a gambling man, señor, I’m sure you would bet on Corrales rather than Iglesias at this somewhat difficult juncture.”

Frank breathed deeply, as if coming to terms with a tough decision, but actually to give himself the maximum protection from the gas. “I dislike chance,” he muttered, slamming the die down on the leathery table top, the one up, letting the invisible gas escape. He let his head fall into his hands, defeated and trusted to the latino character that Corrales would reach over with some physical expression of sympathy. There it was; the hand on the shoulder. Frank held his breath for a few seconds, felt the hand slip away, and then he looked up to see the eyes fall out of the gangster’s skull.

The bone gas had dissolved the majority of Corrales’ ribs as well as the skull and upper vertebrae before Frank had managed to leave the room. Outside things were worse than he had expected. Most of the body guards of both gangs were slumped over the tables, but one giant of a man remained standing, and he was at that moment engaged in the last seconds of the garrotting of Alejandro Iglesias. He had one more die loaded with bone gas, but it would not kill the thug before the wire had completely severed the victim’s head from the body. Already the blood was hitting the canvass with arterial force, obscuring the Quilmes Cerveza logo. Frank prized an Uzi from the stiffening fingers of the nearest minder and let approximately thirty rounds transform the assassin’s head into a creamy patina upon the further wall.

Iglesias was beyond saving by the means of conventional medicine. His throat was gaping and the jugular, although not completely sectioned, was emitting blood at a frightening rate. Frank reached over the counter and ripped a length of plastic piping from the Quilmes tap. He thrust it into the fat man’s windpipe, pushing it down into the lungs. The black blood frothed up. Franks sucked out a couple of mouthfuls and then began to pump in his own quickly inhaled air. His fingers pinched the jugular and as soon as the chest expanded, gasping for life, he flipped open his father’s case and extracted a phial of the nutriment. He smeared it around the edges of the wound, reflecting that such liberal use would mean revisiting Edgeøya three months ahead of schedule, and then fashioned a bandage from a ragged length of curtain.

He stood in the cooling air outside the heladeria and thought about paintings; vast abstract paintings with runs of paint the product of the artist’s will and Newton’s gravity. This was the nearest thing to happiness he could imagine: recollecting how in a hurt second he had killed millions just as he had risked his own life and given of the nutriment to save an Ecuadorean gun-runner and drug dealer he despised. Iglesias coughed and Frank let the moment go. They would return to Casa Branco in the Grand Am and they would be newly feared and respected.

chapter fourteen

The Ash Field

Douglas stood, frozen in a slight forward stoop that was at first glance one of supplication, but over time eroded towards a calcified heart of calculated menace. The ranked repetition; twelve in a line, twelve tiers produced the appropriate collective noun. Two gross blue-green eyes surveyed the drizzle, thickening to sleet as it fell on the stuttering development of the semi-designed, fully detached houses which now covered the Ash Field. Beside the trestle table stood an easel supporting a canvass. The painting only half worked in acrylics depicted Kay Macnamara as a troubled dark nymph, emerging from a Celtic knot of eternally damp roots and fungi.

Frank inhaled the studio smells with a deep satisfaction. He remembered blissful days in New York in the 1960s when vengeance was his drug of choice. He had gone too far then of course, and the world was still lacerated by his spite. You save the grandest gestures for love, he reflected, but this time it was his own death that had to be avenged and it would be private but poetic. He placed an antique leather bound box on the window ledge and methodically opened the two buckles. This was his father’s geological kit-box. Frank lifted the steel tube with another within it used for extracting samples. He set it on the ledge where it hungrily reflected the pale grey light after more than a century of blind box-bound lethargy. Now he felt the weight of the hammer, imagined his father cracking open balls of silica in the monochrome Arctic; then using the sharp claws behind the head to scrape rich orange mineral from the million drab whites while he, the infant son, amused himself with probability or the wide vowels of the Sami language.

He dropped the hammer into his pocket and felt the immaculate Italian material drag at his shoulder as it accepted the weight. He moved to his chosen spot behind the door and waited for Kay to return home following her day in the gallery. It had been so easy to find her. He could not let her see him of course, and so had picked his moment to enter the gallery and express admiration of her childish models. The temporary assistant possessed all the enthusiastic naivety of the young and artistic and had readily provided him with her address. Now he was only minutes away from what he had termed his final performance; a swan song of elegant murder with a heady entr’act of torture. She had killed him but she was going to make this margin of his life feel good.

The key scraped against the lock before finding its way in and Frank stopped breathing and felt his penis swell with expectation. He heard her drop her coat in the hall and fill the kettle. She lit a cigarette and opened her mail. The suspense and the erection were painful. He followed the ritual of tea-making, the stubbing out of the cigarette, the opening of the newspaper. His fingers caressed the thin metal tube, letting the inner tube run in and out of the outer sheath. He detested masturbation, but this was different. A hot drop squeezed ecstatically from the urethal opening. At last she, too, was coming.

The hair was darker, longer, wilder than he remembered; but of course she would have changed such aspects of her appearance as she built a new life. She stood sharing the ceramic gaze of the one hundred and forty-four elves. Frank calculated the angles of incidence and reflection, respecting the terrifying memory of her retina. He moved silently, yet she had detected something for there was a brief gasp before the metal tube slipped into the skull where the spinal column began and she slumped, paralysed over the groaning table. Frank allowed the weapon to jut from the back of her head as he pulled her backwards into the bathroom. It was only when he rolled her gently onto the floor that he saw that it was not Kay who stared at him with impotent terror. The sexual tension evaporated leaving a grimy discomfort. He had two choices; let this woman live, albeit with permanent paralysis and some brain damage, or improvise. Ever the showman, Frank decided to improvise.

chapter thirteen

Frank's existential nausea is swept away by a chance encounter with a bit of decorative pottery

The Demi-Monde


The bar was situated at the periphery of the newly fashionable docks area. Property developers had bought up the decayed warehouses and tenements along the quays over the preceding dozen or so years and converted them into loft spaces, third generation offices and coffee shops. The school in which the rotten meat that had been intended as Frank VII was a this moment melting, stood like a slightly bewildered dinosaur amongst the raging gentrification because it belonged to a trust the unravelling of which was already occupying a second century of lawyers. Unfortunately for the developers, but happily for Frank, the disused wharf was at the edge of the area farthest from the city centre and the property boom had crashed magnificently only six months ago. The result was an immaculate bar in a superb industrial concrete finish, housing the finest beers, wines and coffees and boasting comfortingly warm jazzy muzak. The only customers were increasingly desperate real estate agents, temporary office workers and four or five characters who thought of themselves as bohemians during the few hours between eleven and two when they were only partially inebriated.

Frank had no such delusions. He had been many things in his several lifetimes, and drunk was nowhere near the worst. He enjoyed the sordid thirst with its utter lack of discernment in satisfying itself as a more pure version of the lusts he had exploited in his victims over his preceding lives. Today, as had become his habit, breakfast was a glass of tempranillo accompanied by chick peas and chorizo. Old habits die hard, and although it cost him the equivalent of a small bottle of Polish over-proof spirits, he still had some standards.

The German sculptor, working on procuring her third husband, a tired American who believed he was using her for sex, approached the bar. Frank was slightly afraid that she would attempt conversation, but fortunately she had forgotten his terse rudeness of the previous night and could think only of wine. He returned to the excellent tapas and then became dimly aware that the sculptor, having received her glass of chardonnay, was engaging the barmaid in conversation about a small model figurine.

“…in Listowel.”

“What were you doing down in Kerry?” asked the barmaid with little interest.

“I was hoping to get some of my pieces into a gallery down there. It’s run by a collective so I went to meet a committee.”

“And did they take anything?”

“Yes, they are showing some children’s furniture, a couple of chairs in ash. While I was there I bought this elf from the artist. Quaint isn’t it?”

Frank looked at the figure, a rotund elf about 15 centimetres in height. It was made with great attention to detail; even the glasses had silver painted frames and real lenses. The face was enigmatic and somehow familiar. He felt cold sweat run behind his right ear. It was more than familiar; it was an accurate image of someone he knew well, someone who was involved in the disaster that was Frank VI. Douglas Hudson was presently serving a life sentence for his part in the cannibal ring that had also included Kevin McNamara and the dwarf known only as Wibz. Now his image, made more disturbing by the fairytale costume, was smiling coldly at the customers in the bar. Frank only enjoyed abstract art and certainly detested this kind of decorative nonsense, but he attempted as much enthusiasm as possible in addressing the sculptor.

“What a charming piece. I have some friends with children who would love one. Do you know how I can get hold of the artist?”

“Just a moment,” she replied, searching in her handbag. “Yes, here’s her card.” Frank took it and one glance confirmed his suspicions: Kay McNamara, Artist, Blue Gamp Gallery, Chapel Street, Listowel, County Kerry. The door was firmly closed on his short career as an alcoholic. Self preservation and the desire for revenge energised him utterly, sweeter than any wine. He gave the card back to the sculptor with a genuine smile. He knew he would never see her or any of the other sad members of the Demi Monde again. Tomorrow he would leave his disgusting bed-sit, but tonight he must plan. It is rare that a man gets the chance to avenge his own murder, and Frank’s genius demanded that his vengeance be beautiful, elegant and magnificently violent.

chapter twelve

The Fishing Hole

In 1866 Frank, then aged five, watched particles of ice form miniature continents on the kitchen window. He had been monitoring the relief map for some months, had named the landmasses, created inhabitants and forms of government for each one. He had also developed histories, cultures, religions and languages but felt uncomfortably aware that these owed too much to his father’s personal history and Norway’s difficult past century or so. In short Frank was already beginning to tire of Art-for-Art’s sake, and wanted to find a more practical arena in which to exercise his imagination.

Shifting his focus he noted that his mother and father continued to fuck upon the permafrost whilst two huskies sniffed at their discarded clothes. After a few more minutes his father stood, brushed ice and grit from his back and ignoring his clothes, marched towards the house. Frank’s mother meanwhile took handfuls of powdery snow and rubbed it into her face, neck, and then methodically into her entire body. It was a post-coital ritual which Frank believed to be common amongst the females of her tribe. His father, although an enthusiast for most things Sami, preferred a hot bath as a way of restoring the circulation to his extremities after love-making.

To his great surprise, and slight annoyance as he was still engrossed in a developing naval conflict between two southern ice continents, Frank’s father called him into the bathroom. The geographical theme continued as his father’s knees and face rose up, islands above the water and beneath the tropical steam; the beard undulating like a mass of seaweed and the pink tip of his penis some kind of buoy.

“I’m sure you agree with me that it is right that domestic duties should be shared equally amongst the family; at least in the modern, enlightened family,” he began, his booming voice echoed by the pine panelling of the walls and at once muffled by the dense steam. “We, that is your mother and I, have decided that you are ready to help in the gathering of foodstuffs.”

“But I do manage the vegetables,” retorted Frank, proud of his herb garden and unique method of propagating root vegetables in gravel under glass-topped igloos.

“I am referring to something rather more active than that!” his father laughed without derision. “Today you are coming with me to get fish.”

Frank thought about the ochre flaps which hung in the pantry. As far as he was aware fish came on the occasional ship from Russia or Norway that made an unscheduled stop at Edgeøya because the captain had been at college with his father. He knew that they once lived; why else were there bones in amongst the tough salty fabric of which they were made?

“Is there a ship coming?” he asked. Again the laugh; warm, protective.

“No, we will find the fish ourselves. I have made a fishing hole. We shall be patient hunters.” The water cascaded from his huge body as he emerged from the bath and reached for a towel. “And we shall go now. Your mother deserves a rich meal tonight. Together we will catch, prepare and cook for our wild empress.”

Frank was astonished at this sudden door opening into his life. He tasted his ignorance and from that moment on savoured the unexpected as the salted herring which hung in the Edgeøya pantry. He rushed to put on his coat, gloves and boots, and within ten minutes father and son were tramping across the impossibly hard ice towards one of the many bays on this side of the island.

They stood on a ridge and watched the ocean smacking massively black into the rocks fifty metres below. Frank was impressed. In later lives he was to meet people who lived by terror, but he would forever be able to anaesthetise fear by visualising that particular spot in the Arctic Sea. His father turned and seemed to disappear into the ice. Frank hurried to see what had happened and saw that there was a steep path; steps cut into the ice leading down to some mysterious destination, and his father standing just below him, arms outstretched, waiting for him to follow.

Frank considered the peril, tried to balance it with the intellectual excitement of discovering what it was to get fish, and then felt himself short circuited by what he later found other people called love and trust. He leant into space and fell, almost senseless into his father’s arms.

At the foot of the steps there was a shelf of rock beneath which the viscous sea boomed ceaselessly. His father took two balls of cord, gave one to his son, and played the other into a dark crack in the ground, fitting steel hooks to the twine every half metre or so. When it was fully unwound he wrapped it about his left wrist, inside the heavy glove, and attached the hooks as Frank let his own line down into the crevasse. Then they sat, breathing, smiling; sharing a common purpose, incredibly safe from the thumping of the sea which produced irregular falls of ice from above.

Frank caught his breath as he felt the strong tug on the line. His father just raised his right hand and the gesture calmed the boy. He relaxed and the line kicked twice. He noticed his father smiling and every now and then mouthing the Sami word for yes. He copied; mouthing the same word each time a new sudden pull was transmitted along the cord. Time passed, It was summer so there would be no night as such, but the faint twilight deepened the blue of the sky which could be seen above the jagged edge of the crevasse. At last his father spoke.

“This place is only accessible for a couple of weeks if the summer is especially kind. We will come again tomorrow should the weather permit it. Now, let us bring in the catch.” He freed his wrist and began to pull up the line, twisting fish after fish from the hooks as he did so. Frank could not wait, he knew his line was likewise heavy with the silver creatures, and he methodically brought them up and added them to the slippery pile that grew between the father and son.

Finally the lines were both clean and rewound. Frank’s father took a knife from his pocket. “You don’t have to do this,” he said, and he slit the belly with one pass of his hand, and on the return twisted to deposit the innards directly into the sea. Frank watched him empty three more fish and then felt a surge of knowledge and power. He opened his hand and was given his own knife. His father was forgotten in the blinding intensity with which a five year old enjoys the repeated process of evisceration. He had loved his father unconditionally for a few hours; this other pleasure was going to last for several lifetimes.

chapter eleven

Kay's father is in a bad way.

Reinforced Glass

From the point of view of the dimensions of light the crystal lattice is neither dark nor pale; it is a sphere where colour is meaningless. Sucking the focus from the glass the disc is immeasurable but somehow sensed; flat, grey. A swarm of jet coalesce into a vertical path, hardening and intersecting horizontals. Reflections now obliterate the glass according to the deliberate imperfections of manufacture; but at the same time the blue definition of the circle appears, and with it the comfort of perceived space.

Within a white grub burrows ceaselessly into the equally white mattress of a wall. It is the patient, a term so appropriate that it has shed its meaning; the patient who rocks his white jacket against the colourless fabric of the air. His life and crimes are recorded digitally, brought freshly into the ward by each visitor like a daily dose of refreshing venom, carbonising his veins, making ash of his neurons, powdering the desiccated material of his brain.

Twice a day he is inspected and his sanitary needs addressed. There is a tube inserted directly into his bladder, but waterproof padding is taped about him to contain other waste. When removed it is always clean, and yet within seconds he evacuates upon the changing mat. The psychiatrists insist he has no sense of external stimulus, and yet it is only the removal of the diaper that prompts the outflow. The nurses feel nothing by profession; they have experienced much worse, and they know he cannot be doing it consciously, it is automatic, not an intended action. It signifies nothing.

Kevin has forgotten his name, his nationality, his aspirations. He breathes, he rocks and twice a day he excretes. He excretes his crimes and his sense of self. He excretes life. He excretes his memories. He excretes guilt and innocence; this is amoral shit. This is not just shit. This is not unjust shit. He excretes tiny ephemeral molecules of Kay. The victims all passed this way years ago, but she can never leave until he himself dissolves in the flames and his ashes float upon the convection currents from incineration to the same place without dimension that only light inhabits.

Kevin thinks of nothing, and in detail that means he thinks of his place on that convection current. He rocks through the falling of the light and the night and the creeping dawn. He rocks with a regularity which stops the clocks; even age fails here. He has already embraced the rising mote of breathless air. He cannot feel, but he feels only the searing heat which strips the bones as he falls.

chapter ten

The Small Square

The café was getting the beginnings of its winter appearance; trying on the drab apparel for the first time. A couple of precautionary raincoats hung by the door, no umbrellas as yet, the real tell-tale sign was the margin of condensation around every window and the necessity to keep the lights on even at ten thirty in the morning. In sum it was a flat, indeterminate weekday in November and Kay stirred her cappuccino with a slow but relentless determination to put some kind of sympathetic spin on her spirits. She should have been looking forward to the next few weeks for a number of reasons; there was more work to be produced, more people in the gallery and most importantly more income between now and Christmas than in all the other months taken together; but today was a bad one, and she knew damn well why.

“What’s bugging you?”

Trisha filled the table with bustling concern and the deeply comforting smell of oil paint. She slapped her notebook down and propped a packet of cigarettes open upon it, removing one and waving it about as she talked, fully aware that Kay and most of the staff were terrified that she would light it and force one of them to tell her to put it out.

“You’re staring into that coffee as if it were a crystal ball. Is this to do with your latest conquest? He doesn’t look that bad, but you can never tell from appearances.”

“No, he’s okay; well quite pleasant actually,” replied Kay.

“Oh, really; do go on,” in her enthusiasm for romantic detail, Trisha almost, but not quite, sparked her lighter. Kay took a long breath of linseed and frying sausages, seeing nothing but the dissolving chocolate dusted foam.

Trisha’s hand, wrist made strong by the multi-coloured fabric woven around it, clamped down over Kay’s, stilling the nervous turning of the spoon. “You know Frank isn’t real. We checked it out, we checked everything out. Frank never existed, he was never your shrink, he had nothing to do with the pharmaceutical company. He’s just more of that shit that you were left with by your parents…”

“By my dad.”

“Sorry, by your dad; but he’s paying for it for the rest of his life.”

“Is he? I don’t think he even knows he’s locked up. Apparently he’s developed some sort of late onset autism. Anyway, what’s prison for? It’s obviously not making him a better person, or any kind of person, and I’m sure society doesn’t care enough about what he… they… did to me to think his sentence constitutes revenge.”

“So?”

“So he knew Frank.”

Trisha was the only person Kay had ever met whom she could read emotionally. Now she sensed the tussle between exasperation and sorrow.

“Drink up. Forget about it. We’ve too much to be doing in the gallery. Your elves are flying out the doors.”

Kay smiled despite herself. “Not literally I hope.” Well done Trisha. Perhaps she was right. In the end, when everything except your memories tell you that someone never existed, and she had to admit her memories had already been shown to be unreliable, perhaps it was better to go along with the general consensus. She shook Frank’s image out of her head and prepared to make more elves. At least they were real.

chapter nine

The Ringstrasse

The medieval roofline seemed defeated now by the infinite expanse above. Centuries of ramshackle storeys steadily rising from the Westphalian earth, seeking to touch the canopy of heaven, suddenly seemed fragile and child-like in the face of the modern scale of the universe and the peripheral nature of those foundations. Frank’s attentions in his third incarnation had turned to wealth, and Cologne had been selected as an industrial centre producing chemicals and pharmaceuticals. It was a theme to which he would return, disastrously, in Frank VI.

Now it was cold; cold enough to keep all but the beggars and the insane indoors, but not cold enough for Frank to feel the motherly touch of his remote home. He let the long skirts of his raincoat flap in the slight breeze created by his rapid steps, regular, counted more often consciously than not in sixes or dozens. The turning into the club happened on five. He resisted the urge to recount; imagine an extra pace, even reconsider the starting point. He knew where that led; another infinity, and conceded that he would be cheating himself if he failed to admit that the turn had occurred on five, but that maybe the turn itself was not a significant event, in fact it was six, the first footfall on the new route, that was the special one. Order re-established he was able once more to consider his environment.

At this moment an old woman, made enormous by her coats and need offered him a sparse fist of roses. He made his habitual response to these requests; a smile that was at once recognition of the beggar’s situation and at the same time an understanding of the entire issue; life, not life, space, vacuum and chance. In these days God was dead and Europe was the gateway to the New Order. Naturally he despised the trivial aspirations and brutal methods of the National Socialists, but this was change at a new level and he intended to make the most of it. He had come to make a fortune from scents and now he found politics standing up before him like one of the denizens of the club to which he was heading. The possibilities were equally as tasty. He felt he was at a more significant turning point. Recently it had been wealth that had attracted him but now he wanted to change the world.

He paused in a hemisphere of darkness and briefly checked the street for prying eyes. The paranoia of the era chafed but was necessary. Anyone could find themselves denounced by a jealous neighbour or over-zealous supporter of the party and Frank’s plans did not include dealing with the late-night attentions of brown-shirted thugs. Satisfied that he was unobserved he passed into the Brewhouse. There were few drinkers as the party dictated how workers should spend their leisure time; Frank quickly spotted the over-weight man nursing a glass of Früe Kölsch as an unofficial inspector for Kraft durch Freude. He paid for his own modest dry sherry and moved towards the back room. The security men recognised him and one took his coat as the other opened the door just enough to allow his entry. The sudden lull in the conversation continued as he was examined by each man sitting around the centrally placed circular table. Von Schröder broke the silence.

“Gentlemen, allow me to introduce Herr Kørner. He shares many of our views about the new Chancellor, and he will be able to help us with his special talents in the field of biological chemistry.”

His audience suitably relaxed, Frank took the stage.

chapter eight

Casa Branco



The cars screamed dust into the briefly dry air; two fat opalescent Cameros already muted and slowed by distance as their tyres dissolved into the haze hanging over the track that led to the forest. Iglesias dropped a heavy arm onto Frank’s shoulders and guided him into the courtyard.

“Now we are alone, Professor Kørner, I want to congratulate you on your excellent way of doing business. If you can convince those hijos de la gran chingada you can convince anyone. We are going to be doing a great deal more business together…. A great deal.”

Frank wondered what the fat Ecuadorian meant by alone. The presence of five slightly jumpy guards stroking Kalashnikovs was making him feel positively crowded. Iglesias seemed to read his mind.

“Hombre! Son Sordomudos! Ciegos! You can do anything and they see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing, nada. You can shit in front of them, fuck even! You don’t believe me? Try it, I get you a nice muchacha. I think they make it kind of special.”

“Not just now Alejandro. I’m happy they’re around to protect my ass, not watch it bump up and down,” replied Frank, conjuring exactly the right blend of machismo and humour to see off safely the threat of public intimacy with a female minor. He followed Iglesias’s example and sat to a large wooden table. A maid who Frank believed he could otherwise have found himself performing with placed a decanter and two glasses before them.

“Ribera del Duero,” announced the big man. “I only celebrate with the best vinos de España. These Portuguese tíos would drink my piss and get drunk. How long until we can get another cargo out?”

“Patience, amigo,” said Frank, immediately regretting mimicking the habit of dropping Spanish into his sentences. Iglesias obviously did it as a way of affirming the superiority of his Spanish colonial roots over the Portuguese that provided the language of Brazil. He was surely aware that his own nationals were commonly regarded as the most degenerate of the continent, and for this reason he surrounded himself with tokens, such as this Vega Sicilia, emphasising the refinement possible only to one of a pure Spanish descent. Frank recognised the tang of racial supremacy, and as always it hid the truth that those who promoted such views, like the overweight drug baron before him, were themselves genetically infected by that which they despised. Iglesias’s mother was reputed to be a half-caste whore from somewhere in the mountains and his father a chemist from Sao Paolo who had self-medicated himself into a communal grave in the slums a few months before his son’s birth.

For a moment Frank thought of his own fierce Sami mother, but he had changed himself too much, or not enough, and once more he adopted the role of a lifetime.

“Remember Alejandro, we are not cutting the cocaine. That’s what they expected and they didn’t find it. This is genetic modification of the plant itself. These plants are producing coca at the same rate as normal, but I have increased the narcotic effects by a factor of about sixteen. You don’t cheat anyone, you run no risks apart from those inherent in the business, and yet you make sixteen times the money. Also my adapted plants are even more addictive than the normal. The dealers will listen to their customers and you, my friend, will be the supplier they will all want, so you charge, if you like, a premium rate.”

“You are a beautiful man, Professor Kørner,” said Iglesias, filling his antique glass to the brim. “Chiquita! Venga, taste some churro.” Frank watched the girl bend to her task and counted the days until he could liquidise the fat man’s brain.

chapter seven

The Village

There was no breeze apart from the dry carbon coughs from the yellow cabs, rattling the geometric ribcage of the city. Frank paused for a moment to light a cigarette and felt rather than saw the flood of pedestrians pull curtains of colour, sound and odours around him. Germany before the war had been characterised by long nights of wild decadence, excess of music, drink, style; but counterbalanced by the introspective wintry pessimism of a race chastened by centuries of barbaric internecine conflicts. The Germans never let themselves forget that it was they who had put an end to the Roman circus, so they watched their own decadence with a vague numbed sense of its own doom.

New York, and more particularly Greenwich Village was something else again. It was already, in 1960, populated with a mass of nationalities, pushing against each other and feeding off each other in a creative and cultural melting pot. There was no unifying protestant ethic, and only the flimsiest of moral codes. Frank let the lungful of Lucky Strike shimmer into the neon atmosphere and sought to find in the miasma of sensation the pulse of Jazz from the club behind. It was already a cliché, but he really was standing by a basement café with the smell of fine coffee and strong brandy mingling with the staccato bop phrases played on bass, drums, sax and trumpet. Tonight it was Art Pepper, a white boy but sharing the narcotic tastes of most of his black colleagues, and also their flamboyant sense of melody and rhythm. Frank checked his narrow tie and choreographed his descent to the fanfare that was “Smack Up”.

It was just after ten, so the club’s population was dominated by followers of the music, mostly white students or black or latin youngsters with their own bands learning and dreaming of one day being on stage themselves. The others were tourists, dealers or pimps waiting for their women to come back from work and spit dollars into their hands. Frank hardly knew which music he was really hearing; the percussive bop or the orchestration of social existence. Both were beautiful and, for him, objects of abstract inspection.
At this point in his career, and he regarded life number four as being a bit like the mid to late twenties, Frank was still shaking with the dawning realisation of what he had actually done. He didn’t mean by this his incredible achievements in biological science, he took them for granted along with his inexorable genius; no, he meant what he had done in the way a mother looks aghast at a clumsy child and utters the commonplace phrase. What he had done at the end of life number three had more than confirmed his misanthropy. When a relationship dies you hurt, you feel despair, empty and worthless (although Frank regarded empty and worthless as distinct as pH1 and 14), even a misery bordering on suicide; and then you get even. What had shocked Frank was that when he got even he did it in a way that was to take out millions of lives over the coming century or so.

In Germany the death camps had been a constant impingement on his consciousness, a sawing bowed bass line to acknowledge his present environment or a pervading scent like opium or diesel. He had lived with the knowledge of what was happening to the Jews, Gypsies, mental defectives etc. and could see it as some kind of primitive aesthetic gesture, a kind of action painting with blood. On reflection he supposed it had raised his sights, given him a glimpse of the power he had to make his sensations more real, more lasting; certainly more subtle and infinitely more refined than those of his Austrian model.

He ordered whiskey, Irish; the taste for which he had acquired along with cerebral substance of Professor O’Connell in 1916. Loud and familiar laughter from the lobby caused him to swing around and he was delighted to see three of his acquaintances enter the bar. They were seasoned bohemians, a man and a woman in their thirties and an older man approaching his fifties. The men wore the uniform of the demi-monde that Frank himself favoured, the two piece suit, black trousers and jacket, white shirt and thin plainish tie in a dark shade. The woman wore a long skirt featuring a large floral print and white man’s shirt rather than a blouse. She smoked only French cigarettes through an ancient mother-of-pearl effect filter.

“Ellsworth, Helen,” called Frank, shaking another Lucky strike from his pack, “Good to see you. Let’s grab a table. What can I get you?”

“Frank! There must be fine music here tonight if you’re hitting the spot,” replied the younger man. “I’ll have a vodka in honour of your Norwegian roots.”

“That’s Russia, Ellsworth. Norway is different,” protested Frank.

“Hush! Don’t mention the Reds. There’s an iron curtain across my soul and only your pure non-Commie Norwegian vodka can dissolve it tonight. Anyway, we’re celebrating with Morris here.”

Frank recognised the name. Helen had been deep into Morris for some time now, and although he was a lot older than the other painters, sculptors and writers that congregated in the village, word had it that his new work was going to make a big noise, move things on like Johns had. “A show?” he asked, moving to the bar.

“Sure,” replied Morris, “and most is already sold. Beer?”

Frank didn’t need to ask Helen what she was drinking. By now they had an agreed code of slight eyebrow movement. It was going to be two beers and another Irish whiskey. Helen blamed Frank for introducing her to the stuff, but he didn’t believe her. She went her own way. That’s why she had pursued Morris. Everyone assumed she would start to paint like him, but in fact it had turned out the other way round. Frank liked her. He found the idea extraordinary. He had never liked anyone, and after Jack he would certainly never love anyone again. Helen was unique and he was quietly determined that she would never know what he had done; not to save his own reputation of course, simply to respect her innocence. He looked at her, smiling seriously through the smoke, and imagined how she would laugh if she thought he was ‘respecting her innocence’. The Pepper Quintet blotted out conversational traces and improvised with the smudged skeins of meaning. The whiskey dissolved the rest.

chapter six

Frank's creativity is widely based. Here he is in London in cullinary mode... ellipses for D there.
The Café

South-east London was a long way from the rugged landscapes of south-east Brazil. The café had begun as a joke; his latest contributor had been an enthusiastic chef as well as an invisible but ubiquitous arms dealer and the café existed on paper as a business through which millions of dollars could be channelled. When things had got a little too hot in Belo Horizonte Frank decided to take a breather by indulging his newly acquired hobby and opening up the café for business.

He finished counting the take from the evening and slipped the cash-box into the safe. A warm self congratulatory glow suffused his limbs as he reflected that his arithmetically progressive genius had given him once again the rewards that other people spend their lives toiling to attain, and all without the inconvenience of developing ulcers, anxiety, addiction or coronary disease. In fact he’d rarely felt better.

Wibz shuffled past the door and attempted a sentence in English, thickened to the limits of comprehension by his Balkan accent and most of a bottle of over-proof Polish spirits.

“Need girl to stay this time.”

“I am not in the mood to entertain your pathetic attempts at levity,” replied Frank. “You know the way we operate here: you bring them in warm and I send them out piping. What on earth makes you want to keep this one?”

Wibz reached down into his suede trousers and let a long string of mucus swing from his nose. Frank was delighted that the unexpectedly large dimensions of the dwarf’s member distracted him from the gleaming nasal extrusion. He had already calculated the relative dimensions of the organ and applied it to a man of 185 cm (giving the dwarf a relative penis size of length approximately 35 cm and diameter 11 cm. Big by any standards) before he added “As long as there’s no security issues that’s fine for a few days, but make sure we have enough raw materials for tomorrow, there are reviewers coming and some music group or other.”

The dwarf coughed happily into his hand and moistened the tip of his extended member. For a second Frank imagined what was about to happen to the girl and felt a double shock of disgust and nostalgia. He had, of course, identified with the teenager Wibz had locked in the cage. Frank had enjoyed sexual union for a brief spell in the year 1876, in this very city, less than a kilometre from the spot where he now stood. He recalled his amour, a slaughter-house worker with an amateur interest in chemistry, married to Agnes, exhausted from providing and providing for six children. He could still smell the blood, beer and bromine as he had been deliciously impaled, Friday and Saturday nights in a shed off Borough High Street.

He whistled the memory away tonelessly between his pursed lips and made his way down to the ice house. Here hung the cadavers he plundered to create his delicious and increasingly popular dishes. The gate was of late medieval design and the ice house itself a hidden gem in the ramshackle dereliction of South-East London. Political tension between central and local governments had led to patchy development and an almost total disregard of aesthetic or archaeological values. Frank had been laughed at by the planners when he had expressed his interest in developing the old jail as a theme restaurant, and even health and safety checks had been less than minimal. In discovering the ice house he had removed the junk of the centuries by hand because something cold had been tugging at his tired blood.

Beyond the gate he had found then, as he did now, a calm well of sub-zero temperature that spoke to him of his origins inside the Arctic Circle. Here he could still be Norwegian, here he felt comforted by his infancy in the Nineteenth Century. Here hanging the bodies and eviscerating them seemed as pure an act as the experiments on flora he had carried out in Edgeøya. It was under the thrall of these comforting thoughts that he spun the body on the hook and found the meat on the left buttock and thigh. He needed thin but fatless slices for his signature dish; a millefeuille for carnivores; leaves of human carpaccio gleaming beneath a rich aspic. He expertly shaved the subcutaneous layers before turning the body again and swiftly removing and opening the penis and testicles longitudinally. These would provide the stock.

He returned to the kitchen and fed his saucepan. He viewed the crates of vegetables and considered preparing them himself, but then decided that this was in truth the dwarf’s job and that he could not entertain paying any respect whatsoever to his diminutive colleagues carnal appetites. Wibz could forget about fucking the girl and get down to peeling potatoes.

chapter five

Here are some details of Frank's life in the Nineteenth Century. You can see that he certainly gets around.

The Isolation Hospital

It took hardly a week for Frank to convince himself that he was incarcerated in the isolation hospital as part of an elegant plan of his own devising. He had, in this relatively early part of his career, the habit of writing down his thoughts; observations, strategies, even random musings. His notes made on the first Sunday of his imprisonment read as follows:

Megalomaniacs will inevitably render all to me because they are obsessed with attaining an objective goal, whereas I care nothing for their goal, only for supremacy over their minds.

I flatter them by even bothering to make use of them.

There is no amount of power as there is no amount of money that is ever enough. Power and money are irrelevant in themselves. Genius is the ability to have them both in unlimited quantities by right.

Physical appetite is starvation of the intellect.

Above all else Browne’s flatulence condemned him to his appalling death.

I can see an application for considering roots of negative numbers as themselves being infinite yet countable, leading me to conceive of operations in them as taking place in dimensional spaces which must in number extend beyond four and which may be likewise infinite.

Dirrane’s cheeks have an elegant line and hue. I found it necessary to discharge after observing him in the communal latrines.

He realised that such documents could be used against him soon after his time in the hospital, and later Franks were much more taciturn, although he could never silence the press and he continued to keep almost childish scrap books of clippings whenever he was mentioned or photographed throughout the coming century.

In a sense it was true that Frank had chosen to make use of the isolation hospital, although not using it would have led him to the gallows in double-quick time. This temporary embarrassment was due to the fallout from the Browne affair.

He had been contacted by Browne whilst still living in Paris, making a good living by supplying ether and other intoxicating gasses to the decayed aristocracy of the Belle Epoque. Browne had heard a rumour concerning a particular effect that Frank had created for a very exclusive club in the 13th arrondissement. This club epitomised the decadence of the time and place and so was frequented by the cream of society and the criminally insane. Frank considered himself to encompass both extremes and was therefore amenable to a request from someone not very far removed from the highest political office to produce a gas that would have an unforgettable effect on all who would witness its demonstration. Mummification was a topic which the five year old Frank had found fascinating; he would go so far as to credit it as a major influence upon his later work, so therefore the idea of aiding in the production of a tableau vivant in which a subject would be rapidly but effectively mummified was irresistible. The fact that it would all happen during a pageant of the most disgusting pornography was utterly irrelevant to him.

Of course it was the pornography that had led to Browne. He lived in Ireland in the Victorian era. The authorities found Catholicism and Irish-speaking far more offensive than the acts carried out by Frank and his colleagues in the backstreets of Paris, so Browne, who publicly denounced the native Irish as degenerate and demonstrated his beliefs by treating his tenants in a similar fashion to his pigs, was regarded as a model citizen. Someone in Browne’s circle had been present at that spectacle in Paris, and in the withdrawing room had mentioned it as being the highpoint of his trip to France.

Browne seized upon this new information. His sense of utter superiority to the local population and his ritualised cruelty had led him to regard the Empress herself as foreign, weak and far too liberal. The government in England were throwing loans at Irish tenant farmers to allow them to buy their land. It was obvious to Browne that these ‘people’ had only one use for money, and that was to drink it. He resolved to carry out a coup that would purge the Empire of the corruption at its head, but he needed a weapon that would dismay any opposition. Frank’s gas was to be that weapon.

chapter 4

Frank makes that nasty discovery and has some feelings which disturb his normally icy intellectual equilibrium. Bad news for someone...

The Black Pool

Some time in the 1980s Frank had dragged the tank into this forgotten room. He had set up a basic laboratory and, following a half-term trip to Edgeøya, had filled it with water rich in the nutriment. Frank VII had then been initiated, inception coming from a cell he had removed from...

He had no idea where. He shivered with mental fatigue and the horror of the new reality of his decay. More than the new body which was vital, he needed a new brain which was essential. He reached into his jacket and found the phial. He remembered the getting of the contents and smiled. As usual he would enjoy this particular victory over the one who had thought to use him; who had the arrogance to imagine that he was superior to Frank. Every second of each of his campaigns had given him the warm satisfaction of knowing in just whose farmyard the chickens were going to shit, as Professor O’Connell, the contributor to Frank III had often said.

This particular contributor to the Greater Frank had been a brilliant bio-chemist in the traditional Western mode and a ruthless businessman. His enormous wealth had allowed his interests to wander along the more obscure by-ways of science and so, like most of the others he had found Frank and come to him with his ambitious requests. It had taken Frank less than five minutes to decide that Michael Driscoll’s cerebral vigour would one day be his, although if he had realised then how risky and futile the operation was going to be he may well have opted for a more immediate harvest. He’d had his fingers burnt, he didn’t mind admitting it, but it was only a blip. The big plan, as personified by the Greater Frank was unaffected. He knew that Frank VII would by now be full formed, a perfect clone of himself suspended in the nutriment, waiting only for the cognitive serum that would enable the transfer.

He loved the sub-basement for a number of reasons. The academic nostalgia was important of course, but also the convenience of the school’s neglected boiler, easily reached by the platform, and into which Frank VII would place his current body sometime tomorrow for a rapid and discrete incineration. He filled his trusty Victorian syringe with Driscoll’s mental essence and turned to the tank. Back in the Nineteenth Century he had used opiates to crush the ache of bleeding himself out into the nutriment, but these days that drowsiness was the twenty year kick for which he waited with an edgy passion. To die, to spill the life-blood and experience everything dissolving in the dark liquid, to cease in every sense. He sighed and sought himself in the tank. He felt the cold slippery flesh of his chest, moved his hands up to grip his body under the arms and lifted it into the yellow light.

His breath stopped suddenly, prematurely, painfully. His perfect clone’s skull was grotesquely malformed, a huge crack had been opened in the back of the skull and the brain was a slushy mass of stinking grey mud. His mind reeled at the recognition of his own abortion. An immense unmoveable gate had slammed shut over the future. It was to be weeks before the shock would recede enough for him to be able to focus not on the end of the Greater Frank; his failure and consequently fairly imminent death, but on who had been the agent of this disaster and yes, why not? On revenge.

chapter 3

This chapter is set in Dublin in the not too recent past. Frank makes a difficult journey in even more difficult personal circumstances...
Temple Bar

Frank was tired and still bleeding internally when he turned into the narrow lane in the so-called Bohemian centre of Dublin. What it had in common with the magnificent slums of the Belle Epoque which Frank had been lucky enough to experience first-hand was vomit, urine and faeces. Sludgy puddles of semi-digested food and alcohol, snaking trails of dark piss and the occasional turd too large to have been produced by a dog decorated the paving slabs. The hypodermic syringes, condoms and fast-food wrappings were of course jetsam of the new century, still devoid of nostalgic qualities, although he felt the narcotic elements had a certain style.

The school was surrounded by a half-hearted fence of corrugated iron, rusting despite the galvanising process due to its weekly anointments of urine, bearing faded fly-posters and site safety notices. The door and windows were boarded up, and although potential squatters had forced open a couple of entrances, Frank was confident that the malevolent atmosphere of the institution would drive out anyone attempting to make shelter no matter how temporary. He stepped over the nettles growing in the rubbish that filled the narrow space between fence and school, one flicking up inside his trouser leg, brushing pain into his lower left calf. He coughed a worm of blood onto his lips and used it to massage the rash. He was uncomfortable, frustrated and very tired. His elegant plans had come to nothing and for the first time in over a century he found himself having to take emergency measures. He was not even preparing a rear-guard action. This was full-fledged retreat; he was cashing in his insurance, after which he would lick his wounds before finding another suitable victim and commence upon a further modest plan to enrich himself.

The rubbish on the heavy iron manhole cover required some work to be cleared, and the huge rectangle of cast iron was almost impossible for him to move in his weakened state. Sweat ran grime into his eyes and his face was smeared with black blood and cat-shit flavoured earth by the time the door was lifted past the point of equilibrium and it crashed over, opening the damp vacuum of the basement to the Dublin sky for the first time in fifteen years or so. Of course he knew the exact day, in fact the very second, when he had last used this redundant doorway, but he was hardly in the mood to recall it now. His kidneys ached, his entrails were knotted with pain and his lungs were refusing to play their full part in respiration. In short he was dying and to make matters worse he looked a mess and stank of his own various excretions.

School basements were magnificent repositories of personal and educational histories. He remembered his father’s maps of the world with all the purple countries being once under the influence of Norway and the pink forming the British Empire. He had resented the scale of the British influence, but had reasoned that most of it was intolerably hot and peopled by Negroes or Orientals, therefore hopelessly unmanageable and intellectually insignificant. Low temperatures suppressed the basic appetites and encouraged abstract thought. As a child he had imagined that it was only a matter of time before the scientific and industrial superiority of the Scandanavians would colour the world, by which he meant Europe, most of Russia and the North Americas a satisfying purple. That was all before he had left his nation behind as his contemporaries fell into sloth, old age and the grave. He was, by virtue of his genius, a self-made man in a quite literal sense.

He made his way past the large sagging boxes in the gloom which rapidly deepened into total void. He supposed that somewhere in those boxes was the school record of his nemesis, the one who had brought him to this embarrassing u-turn in his long and successful career. Fuck her, he thought, recoiling at the taste of the thought. Still, it was acceptable to express annoyance in these special circumstances. He would put it all behind him once he had carried out the transfer. He struck a match and located the lift, and with it the emergency lighting. The heavy lever’s thud announced the weak 25 watt illumination and the grinding of the gears. Frank stood on the iron grill and felt the platform jerk downwards. The musty smell of old earth came up to meet him and for a moment he was in the intersection of centuries. Then he had left the twentieth century behind and was in the circular sub-basement with its medieval walls and air.

frank chapter 2

Prologue

Frank had been born in the year 1861 on the tiny island of Edgeøya, part of Svalbard, an archipelago that lies inside the Arctic Circle at the point where the Barents Sea becomes the Norwegian Sea. His father, Oscar Kørner, was a soil scientist and radical non-conformist who was convinced that the rich mineral deposits on the Islands could be exploited to create a Norwegian technological revolution that would see his country rapidly outstrip the creaking steam engines and bureaucracy of the British Empire. Frank’s mother Sylvia was a member of the Sámi people, a nomadic tribe that lived without respect of national borders between Norway, Finland and Russia. His father’s enormous intelligence, Old Norwegian aristocratic blood, outspoken desire to end the union with Sweden, and penchant for outdoor copulation with his savagely beautiful wife had led to his forced exile from Oslo in 1859. At the age of three Frank’s unnaturally thin fingers were already able to slip tiny samples of plant or insect into a microscope’s slide, and without aid of written language he had produced a small catalogue of the few animals and plants that lived in his immediate environment. His elegant and precise drawing style, an example of which was said to have much impressed John Ruskin, led to his parents considering a future in Fine Arts, but Frank’s true passion was for science. By the age of ten he had, together with his father, produced microscopes of incomparable quality and was able to observe single cells with a level of detail which would only become available to mainstream European scientists in the next century.

Commercial miners began to arrive on the archipelago in the 1880s, but they rarely troubled Oscar Kørner and his small family, confining most of their activities to the larger areas of Spitsbergen and Barents Island which were b y now more generally known to be rich in coal and metals. At seventeen Frank’s mind had turned to the improbability of life arising and surviving in the intense cold of the Arctic Circle. He began to study the effects of freezing on plants and animals. Because he had the microscopy he was able to witness and notate the finest details of changes to both plant and animal cells. Protective strategies within the cells relating to what are now called chromosomes, but which Frank called threads of life led him to attempt to freeze and then re-animate some of his own cells. The rest, as they say, is history, but of course it is a history unknown to other scientists. The isolation of his environment and his inherited distrust of the state led Frank to take a singular and self-centred path. His father’s earlier attempts at mining had opened up a spectacular underground cavern which contained a lake of stagnant water, rich with minerals and organic molecules, and maintained at a perfect 1.742o Celsius for millennia. Frank placed his own frozen cells in that liquid; his papers refer to it as the nutriment, and watched with amazement as mitosis took place.

Now began the phase of his life which Frank called the Promethean Years in his interviews with Professor O’Connell in St. Patrick’s Hospital Dublin during the Irish Civil War.

frank

I am posting Frank weekly, one chapter at a time. at the moment my view is that the chapters should follow the sequence of posting, but time, and particularly fictional time is fluid, so I am considering ways of making the time line of Frank more accessible in the context of electronic media. Suggestions from any Fran readers welcome.

Here's chapter 1
Forest Hill

Frank contemplated the black rectangle of infinity embedded like a Rothko in a frame that stretched the limits of stilled perception. The amber grey beneath contained a thin silence that belied the frantic and frankly disgusting activities of the millions of inhabitants of this city. A slip in the focus of his recently rheumy eyes brought up another picture, this time of his own angular self, arms crossed at the elbows on the cheap desk, the white shirt creased and stained by street-lighting. He felt that the fields of colour were real and this travesty of a portrait abstract and impenetrable. He pulled a cheap untipped cigarette from the pack on the table. Lighting it a comet flared against the sky and then the acrid smell of tobacco tinted the distant stars and hidden planets. He tried to focus on his own image again, an act that generally offended him; or rather that had offended him for the last few years, but now he felt that the night was pooled between the far side of the window and his reflection, that he had to reach out to himself through the viscous black feeding liquid, and horrifically he saw himself smashed in that liquid like a fragile shell. Crisp shards of himself splintering into the ink, turning in it, and due to their improbable thinness, becoming invisible. He was pixillated and dissolved not into the eternal night but the machined glass.

Rapid physical movement was anathema to him, but now his hands clawed at his real face, fingers hooked into hollows at temple and jaw; steadying, recovering, assembling. He gasped and ground the cigarette into an aluminium ashtray he had stolen from a cab-office. You’re getting shaky Frank, he thought; is this what it’s like for everyone? Getting old, facing the end? He stood and turned his back on the window, receiving the room, resonant with the smell of fried bacon and talc. The bed-sitter creaked as he moved to the sink and splashed water into his face. He looked up at the cerise walls, small regular blobs of white showing where some past tenant; he liked to think the last tenant but suspected a much more extensive history, had removed posters and the blue tacked bits of emulsion. The bed of course was the nadir of his fallen state. If the walls carried their history of popular aspiration through posters the bed’s history was far more noxious. It was impossible to think of any kind of sex except the individual taking place on that poor palette. He despised procreation for all the obvious reasons and regarded masturbation as the absolute proof of man’s partial evolution from apes.

Life without immortality was truly appalling.