Chapter 53, Station to Station

Station to Station

The year was 1897 and Frank was 36. The rotting tooth had been the first imperfection delivered to his body by age, but it had told him that the time was approaching when he would seek recourse to the cave, the nutriment and what it contained. Travel to Edgeøya was easy enough to arrange but took several days from Paris; requiring a train journey from Gare du Nord to Brussels and then to Copenhagen. From here the train ferry, the Helsingør – Helsingborg route aboard the latest ship, the paddle steamer Thyra would get him over the short 2.5 nautical miles crossing to Sweden. Frank still felt it necessary to leave for Svalbard on mining industry supply ships from Norway. Once in his native country he could go where he wanted with no questions asked, and he knew which skippers would drop him off in Edgeøya with appropriate discretion. There was also the small detail that the owners of the French train company operating out of Gare du Nord were both regular customers for his most potent narcotic gas and enthusiastic participants in the bestial orgies he helped orchestrate; thus assuring him of a free private compartment at least as far as the Belgian capital.

Katt had changed everything: his identical copy of the marmalade queen had inherited learnt behaviour from the original after he had mixed cerebral matter from the fore brain with the cat’s life blood in the nutriment. He had transferred memory from original to copy. This was enough for Frank. His next transfer of memory would be performed upon himself, the target being his other pale body floating in an Arctic cave pool. The Princess could help his personal project along by one more crucial step however: it had occurred to Frank that he might increase his already impressive intellectual capacity by adding a contributor to the transfer process. Frank was currently engaged in the onanistic process, long and delicate as he preferred, of selecting the correct intellectual and practical experience that would allow him to grow and expand his ability to both survive and enrich himself. He was fully aware that living for a very long time also required an updating of the interests. An immortal dinosaur remained a big lizard. His early introduction to Wallace and Darwin had not been forgotten. Just as his geographical return to Edgeøya was a matter of moving from station to station, so would be his individual evolution. He thought of mad Nietzsche and smiled. He detested the German’s moustache and his notions of what the Superman should do. Frank was to be the Superman, and he should do nothing, he would do whatever he wished. He also detested pubic hair, and he imagined that of Nietzsche to be particularly appalling. Frank regarded shaving as a whole-body experience, and an essential aspect of intellectual clarity. His contempt for Nietzsche would have an important role to play in his life 40 years later, but by then he would be three times the man he was now, and soon to incorporate a fourth personality into the Greater Frank.

He lifted a glass of iced tea to his lips and the stabbing pain in his tooth took him instantly from Gare du Nord to Gare Austerlitz: he needed to get his dental work finished by Dr Jean-Louis Meaursault. He depressed the button which would alert the staff to his request and carefully placed his papers into the desk before locking. His ideas were already protected by their complexity and the fact that they were written in Norwegian, but Frank trusted no-one. Although he had full confidence in his gas to remove all pain from the dental carnage to come, he swallowed a large glass of Absinthe before following the maid to the waiting Phaeton carriage. The twin grey mares propelled him rapidly from the expanse of the estate to the dark grove which Browne had called Cleis’ quim. Within the hour he stood before the pre-revolution block in which was situated the office of his dentist. Meaursault appeared promptly at his knock and ushered him to the Wilkerson chair. Perhaps under the socially liberating influence of the absinthe Frank entered into conversation with the dentist.

“M. Meaursault, what interests do you have beyond your profession, I know you refrain from the hedonism of many of my other customers, but you must be an intelligent fellow to work as you do,” Frank tried to think of the most absurd hobby to put the man at ease; “Pottery possibly?”

Of course, Frank’s psychological ploy worked, and the dentist laughed. “No M. Kørner, but in the arts. I am an afficionado of new music, and Paris is the place to hear it. Only last night I was present at a sublime performance of pieces by Saint-Saëns and Ravel. Do you know their works?”

“I fear I know nothing of music apart from that sung in my native Norway.” Frank was keen to know more of this world, wishing to delay the application of the ether for a few minutes until his curiosity had been satisfied.

“You are missing a musical evolution in Paris at this moment, M. Kørner, every type of music is being transformed by composers of the finest degree. All forms from different cultures are being explored, adapted and refined. It is both beautiful for its own sake and yet presages great promise for the happy union of all peoples of all nations in the century to come. Art, and particularly music will liberate mankind from war to a glorious equality and fraternity in creative expression.”

With these heartfelt words Meaursault placed the leather bag of gas over Frank’s nose and mouth and counted down: “dix, neuf, huit…”

An ostrich composed of diamonds in primary colours marched across Frank’s field of perception, and it did so over and over again, jumping a box in time to an imagined melody that came from Spain, Russia and Norway. This gave Frank his first taste of the visceral pleasure of music and his first contributor, the only contributor he would take, kill and immortalise for reasons other than pique.

On regaining consciousness Frank sought two things: a tool to enter the dentist’s skull and a means of liquifying and extracting the content required.  He had them identified before he could speak. As the numbness left his lips, he received the offered cup of wine. As Meaursault busied himself with cleaning his instruments Frank picked up the long pliers and with a savage upthrust, inserted them into the space behind the left ear. He then let the suction tube take their place and pushed it in far enough to be inside the frontal lobe. Now maximum suction was applied and at first reluctantly, but then more rapidly, clots of cerebral matter entered the collecting cylinder. He would macerate them next and enclose in ice for the long journey ahead.

As he locked the door, the precious substance secreted in a pocket, Frank had one more altruistic thought, possibly his last: he would deliver on his promise to Cleis, although she wouldn’t like it, a deal was a deal.

Chapter 52, The Calculus.

The Calculus

At nine years of age Frank knew little of Utilitarianism apart from the phrase his father had painted above the hearth: “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure”. He knew little of pain and much of pleasure, since to Frank at this age the greatest pleasure was the freedom to think, experiment and learn. It never occurred to him until much later that his parents had obeyed Bentham and deliberately sought a home in which pain was, as far as possible, excluded. Oskar Kørner was an existentialist ahead of his time, already realising that Hell was other people, and so he moved his tiny family to Edgeøya, population officially recorded as zero, in order to pursue his  interests in minerals and give his son freedom to develop without social conventions. Conveniently this also enabled Oskar and his Sami wife to forgo clothes when the temperature allowed and fuck in the open air, which was normal for communal families in animal hide tents, but probably rather outré for members of the Norwegian Science Academy.

It was during one prolonged coition just after his ninth birthday that Frank learned the power of counting. His mother, concentrating on keeping Oskar’s cock between her breasts, simultaneously massaging his testicles and licking the glans, failed to notice Frank slip away to the cave. It was here that Frank learned to count exponentially, and shortly after discover logarithms.

Frank had placed a small sample of flesh from his heel in the pool three days earlier, now he saw a foot floating in the black liquid, and from it ran long spindles of fibre, already suggesting the form of an entire leg. Frank looked up to the roof of the cavern and began to count in multiples of two. At first, he used his fingers to arrive at 1024, but then went on to imagine how many cells would be created by binary fission even at the rate of one split per hour. At this moment he had no idea that there would be about thirty trillion cells in an adult body, but by observing the formation of the leg he realised that the growth of a complete individual would take less than a year. The foot floating before him would eventually become a copy of himself: so now the issue was how to give it consciousness. It was at this point that Frank conceived of consciousness as an infectious disease, and that idea was to afford him immortality, at least until he met Kay.

chapter 51 Geni

Geni

Three thirty in the morning was no time to be found upon the streets of Berlin unless you had a reason to be there, sanctioned by the Reich. Frank had no such reason and needed to become invisible and not in Berlin very quickly. He slipped into the shadows as a door opened, a quadrilateral of yellow light cutting the muddy oppressive heat that still clung to the buildings, a quadrilateral that proceeded to hold the silhouette of a more than corpulent male figure.

“That’s enough for you for the night! Werner; you are a great comedian, but an even greater piss-head. I hope you survive Munich to entertain us again before Christmas. Now, as the Fuhrer himself would put it, fuck off back to Cologne”. The silhouette slumped, turned and was surprised to feel a light arm around its shoulders.

“Cologne, well, we are fellow travellers, thrown together by fortune!” Frank was disgusted by the stench of sweat, cheap spirits and rancid bratwurst, but he needed cover and a way out of Berlin, and so he gave his new friend a slap on the back and flashed a handful of banknotes. “Werner, I am delighted to meet you. I believe we can help each other out here. You see I can’t get to my car due to an argument with my wife, and my other home is in Cologne, where I need to be until she cools off. I assume this,” and Frank flicked about a million Marks under Werner’s nose, “could help you in some way.”

“I am a comedian….but are you having a joke?” Werner held Frank’s fistful of money and tried to focus on it.

“I am Norwegian; I don’t even know what a joke is.”

The silhouette pulled a hip-flask from his jacket and registered a dumb disbelief, finding it empty. He rubbed his eyes and turned his attention to Frank.

“You look very clever to me, Mr. Norwegian; so tell me this, what do you call a genius in Norway?”

“Well, geni is the normal term.”

“No, a tourist is the correct term, Mr Dumbfuck Norway.”

Frank let his hand hover for a fraction over Werner’s back before giving him a friendly hug. His way out of Berlin had just promoted itself to his way into Frank IV. This evening was life-changing in the most profound sense, and Frank did not do comedy. Werner was going to die as soon as he had got Frank back to Cologne. Die, and yet live forever. The comedian would be amused by the fact that he had just met his companion for eternity: if he could get past the fact that Frank would stick a knife into his brain, liquify the matter and pour it into the nutriment before sealing the deal. Oh well, Frank knew which of them was the real genius, and Werner was no Buster Keaton.

“This could be a fine mess you’ve got me out of, Werner.”

“Decadent American Communist reference my friend. But funny, and about comedy. I like you.” Werner put his arm around Frank’s shoulder. “What’s your name? I know a place where we can get some fine Irish Whisky. Buy a bottle and I am sure we can get to Cologne together if you can face a night on a small couch with two cats, one of which is incontinent.”

“I can handle that.”

“The other cat is dead, has been for some weeks…. Very smelly….and there are maggots, but that’s life!”

“To life, to death, and to Cologne!” said Frank, slipping a couple of notes into Werner’s hand. “Frank Korner. I feel we have a great future before us Werner.”

“Werner Hesse, I don’t give a fuck about the future unless it has the name Jameson printed on the label. Jameson, bed and Cologne. But first, Jameson.”

“Thank God the Irish Republic continues to trade with Germany; and Norway of course.” Frank found himself almost blinded by the image of Prionsias O’Connell, the contributor to Frank III, as he raised a glass of Jameson before feeling the hard steel enter his skull from below and behind the left ear. The affections as well as the intelligences of his contributors seemed to cling. Nature and nurture? Frank didn’t give a damn as long as he could get out of Berlin and get into a new body. He felt semen snake from his ass. It was time for a new start.