‘You can’t sleep yet,’ he said. ‘You know that. There is something wrong. There’s something coming. It’s very close.’
‘Ah. You felt that?’
When the giant left him, Lom went outside to sit by himself some distance from the isba, on a stump of wood. The stiffness of his bruises was scarcely noticeable. He touched his forehead tentatively. In the centre of it, just above the eyebrows, he found a small and roughly round hole in the bone of his skull, like a third eye socket. It had a fine, smooth covering of new skin, slightly puckered at the edge. With his fingertip he felt the fluttering of a pulse.
The world he had seen in all its oceanic myth-ridden fullness was already diminishing, but still he smelled the dampness in the air, the woodsmoke, and heard the flow of water in the creek, and he knew what they meant. It was all traces and memories now, a faint trembling of presences: possibilities almost out of reach. But still real. Still there. The plug in his head was gone, and he was alive.
The world and everything in it, everything that is and was and will be, was the unfolding story of itself, and every separate thing in the world – every particle of rock and air and light, every life, every thought and every event – was also a story, its own story, the story of everything becoming more like itself and less like anything else. The might-be becoming the is. The winter moths on their pheromone trails, intent on love and flight, were heroes. Himself, Maroussia, Vishnik, Aino-Suvantamoinen, they were all like that, or could be: living out the bright significant stories of their own lives, mythic, important.
But Vishnik was dead. Vishnik, what was left of him, mutilated and killed, his ruined body laid out naked on the couch; Chazia had done that.
Lom remembered Chazia and Kantor bending over him in the interrogation room – Chazia’s knife, Kantor’s indifferent finger poking at his opened brain. It was all coming back, riding a hot rushing tide of anger. He could not stay here, in this timeless watery place. He had to do something. He had to go back.
And then – only then – the question occurred to him. The last thing he remembered, vaguely, a blur, was throwing himself from the bridge into the flooding Mir. What had happened to him after he fell? How had he come to be here? He didn’t know.
71
Elsewhere – far away, but not so far – in an empty side room in the Lodka, Lakoba Petrov was preparing himself for his one great moment. He had obtained all he needed – all the materials for his new, wonderful art – from Josef Kantor, impresario of destruction. And now the time was almost come for the performance.
From a canvas holdall Petrov extracted three belts of dynamite and nails, enwrapped his person with them, buckled the straps. Also from the canvas holdall he drew forth a capacious overcoat of dark wool, threaded the detonator cords through the sleeves so he could grip their terminations in his palms, and put on the coat to drape and obscure his death-belted torso.
Petrov did what he did with care. Fully. With absolute clarity and certainty of purpose. Every movement a sacrament. Every breath numbered. Rendered aesthetic. Invested with ritual luminance.
When he tugged the detonators, nails would fly outwards from him explosively. Omnidirectional. Flying in the expulsive, expanding, centrifugal cloud of his own torn and vaporised flesh. He would be the heart of the iron sunburst. Going nova.
And so I am become the unimaginable zero of form. The artist becomes the art. Total creation. Without compromise. Without hesitation. Without meaning, being only and completely what it is. The gap between artist and work obliterated.
His own unneeded coat he closed up in precise folds and set in the middle of the empty floor. Adjacent to this he placed the now-empty canvas holdall.
They would be found so. The only extant work of the Petrovist Destructive School: members, one.
A thought struck him. Awkwardly, on account of the bulk of the explosive girdles, he bent to withdraw items from his former coat. A tube of paint. A piece of polished reflective tin to use as a mirror. One final time, with the facility that came with practice, he inscribed his forehead. And then, with an unexpected flourish, one last tweak of originality, he unbuttoned his shirt and wrote on his bare, white, fleshless, hairless (because shaven)