Smoke and Mirrors

Elric made no response. He walked away from Richard, into the ruined temple.

Richard ran after him.

Inside the temple Richard found a life waiting for him, all ready to be worn and lived, and inside that life, another. Each life he tried on, he slipped into and it pulled him farther in, farther away from the world he came from; one by one, existence following existence, rivers of dreams and fields of stars, a hawk with a sparrow clutched in its talons flies low above the grass, and here are tiny intricate people waiting for him to fill their heads with life, and thousands of years pass and he is engaged in strange work of great importance and sharp beauty, and he is loved, and he is honored, and then a pull, a sharp tug, and it’s . . .

. . . it was like coming up from the bottom of the deep end of a swimming pool. Stars appeared above him and dropped away and dissolved into blues and greens, and it was with a deep sense of disappointment that he became Richard Grey and came to himself once more, filled with an unfamiliar emotion. The emotion was a specific one, so specific that he was surprised, later, to realize that it did not have its own name: a feeling of disgust and regret at having to return to something he had thought long since done with and abandoned and forgotten and dead.

Richard was lying on the ground, and Lindfield was pulling at the tiny knot of his tie. There were other boys around, faces staring down at him, worried, concerned, scared.

Lindfield pulled the tie loose. Richard struggled to pull air, he gulped it, clawed it into his lungs.

“We thought you were faking. You just went over.” Someone said that.

“Shut up,” said Lindfield. “Are you all right? I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. Christ. I’m sorry.”

For one moment, Richard thought he was apologizing for having called him back from the world beyond the temple.

Lindfield was terrified, solicitous, desperately worried. He had obviously never almost killed anyone before. As he walked Richard up the stone steps to the matron’s office, Lindfield explained that he had returned from the school tuck-shop, found Richard unconscious on the path, surrounded by curious boys, and had realized what was wrong. Richard rested for a little in the matron’s office, where he was given a bitter soluble aspirin, from a huge jar, in a plastic tumbler of water, then was shown in to the headmaster’s study.

“God, but you look scruffy, Grey!” said the headmaster, puffing irritably on his pipe. “I don’t blame young Lindfield at all. Anyway, he saved your life. I don’t want to hear another word about it.”

“I’m sorry,” said Grey.

“That will be all,” said the headmaster in his cloud of scented smoke.

“Have you picked a religion yet?” asked the school chaplain, Mr. Aliquid.

Richard shook his head. “I’ve got quite a few to choose from,” he admitted.

The school chaplain was also Richard’s biology teacher. He had recently taken Richard’s biology class, fifteen thirteen-year-old boys and Richard, just twelve, across the road to his little house opposite the school. In the garden Mr. Aliquid had killed, skinned, and dismembered a rabbit with a small sharp knife. Then he’d taken a foot pump and blown up the rabbit’s bladder like a balloon until it had popped, spattering the boys with blood. Richard threw up, but he was the only one who did.

“Hm,” said the chaplain.

The chaplain’s study was lined with books. It was one of the few masters’ studies that was in any way comfortable.

“What about mast***ation? Are you masturbating excessively?” Mr. Aliquid’s eyes gleamed.

“What’s excessively?”

“Oh. More than three or four times a day, I suppose.”

“No,” said Richard. “Not excessively.”

He was a year younger than anyone else in his class; people forgot about that sometimes.

Every weekend he traveled to North London to stay with his cousins for bar mitzvah lessons taught by a thin ascetic cantor, frummer than frum, a cabalist and keeper of hidden mysteries onto which he could be diverted with a well-placed question. Richard was an expert at well-placed questions.

Frum was orthodox, hard-line Jewish. No milk with meat, and two washing machines for the two sets of plates and cutlery.

Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk.

Richard’s cousins in North London were frum, although the boys would secretly buy cheeseburgers after school and brag about it to each other.

Richard suspected his body was hopelessly polluted already. He drew the line at eating rabbit, though. He had eaten rabbit, and disliked it, for years before he figured out what it was. Every Thursday there was what he believed to be a rather unpleasant chicken stew for school lunch. One Thursday he found a rabbit’s paw floating in his stew, and the penny dropped. After that on Thursdays, he filled up on bread and butter.

On the underground train to North London, he’d scan the faces of the other passengers, wondering if any of them were Michael Moorcock.

If he met Moorcock, he’d ask him how to get back to the ruined temple.

If he met Moorcock, he’d be too embarrassed to speak.

Some nights when his parents were out, he’d try to phone Michael Moorcock.

He’d phone directory enquiries and ask for Moorcock’s number.

“Can’t give it to you, love. It’s ex-directory.”

He’d wheedle and cajole, and always fail, to his relief. He didn’t know what he would say to Moorcock if he succeeded.

He put ticks in the front of his Moorcock novels, on the By the Same Author page, for the books he read.

That year there seemed to be a new Moorcock book every week. He’d pick them up at Victoria station on the way to bar mitzvah lessons.

There were a few he simply couldn’t find—Stealer of Souls, Breakfast in the Ruins—and eventually, nervously, he ordered them from the address in the back of the books. He got his father to write him a check.

When the books arrived, they contained a bill for 25 pence: the prices of the books were higher than originally listed. But still, he now had a copy of Stealer of Souls and a copy of Breakfast in the Ruins.

At the back of Breakfast in the Ruins was a biography of Moorcock that said he’d died of lung cancer the year before.

Richard was upset for weeks. That meant there wouldn’t be any more books, ever.

That f**king biography. Shortly after it came out, I was at a Hawkwind gig, stoned out of my brain, and these people kept coming up to me, and I thought I was dead. They kept saying, “You’re dead, you’re dead.” Later I realized that they were saying, “But we thought you were dead.”