Chapter One : Flowers of Last Summer

•

Friday. 

Derek left work much later than usual.  As he walked he could hear the deep and steady hum of the city, at last unbroken by the insistent ebb and flow of traffic.  A distant pulse, vast and indifferent. 

No-one said goodbye to him as they left the office.  And he was careful not to catch the eyes of those that passed his desk on the way to the lift.  Oblivious to him, groups of women laughed and whispered their way out, glittering by in scented anticipation.

They had nothing to say to him.  And he had nothing left to say.  It was all arranged.   

•

In his final years at college Derek had been given a nickname.  Of course, he was often called nerd, tosser, wierdo, spaz.  Sometimes worse.  But this was different.

Aeronautics and Astronomy was as under-subscribed as usual.  Dr Lev had introduced himself to the handful of students by reading out their names with many eccentric mispronunciations.  Then he had scrawled a jumble of barely legible headings, concepts and obscure technical terms to illustrate the syllabus.  

At one point near the end, Lev had gestured theatrically and said “Ah, what does this all mean?”.  Derek forgot to laugh with the other students, and continued scribbling untidily in his notebook.  His eyes were closed.  There was a moment of silence, and Lev wandered between the desks to where Derek sat, glanced down and ambled away.  Derek blushed and coughed, looked down in surprise and covered the corner of the page with his pale hand.   Beneath his fingers lay a spidery maze through which a red line snaked with implacable efficiency.  

Then the lesson was over, and amidst the transitional murmur Lev had leaned over Derek’s shoulder and spoken quietly, in his thick Russian accent. 

“So, like Maupertius and Le Chatelier, you have risen above all mystery …nothing to learn, no need to listen.  A little Metatron, I shall call you.  Yes, that is good.”

Lev did not look at Derek as he spoke, and as the last of the students trailed out he walked back to the front of the classroom, collected his books and was gone.

•

Derek was a quiet student and lacked the kind of curiosity that inspires good teaching.  His grades, including those given by Dr Lev, were average and sometimes good.  He had occasional intuitions about astronomical conjunctions, but this was a very minor aspect of his studies, and his progress was unspectacular.  Lev rarely spoke to him, and used the name he had conferred only when marking his work, where he would write ‘55% - little Metatron is attending but not observing.’, or ‘little Metatron, you did not check your calculations.  Try again.’, or ‘The laws governing different celestial bodies are not as you assumed, therefore little Metraton receives C- for following incorrect data through to an illogical conclusion”.  As often as not he would simply score Derek’s work without comment.

For a long time Derek had not thought of anything he could say to Dr Lev regarding either his work or this strange-sounding name, but instinctively he kept it secret.  Perhaps Lev used obscure nicknames for all his students.   Derek accepted it as just another arbitrary element of his life.

Despite staring at it for several minutes, he did not understand the pattern he had drawn, although it seemed to have both form and meaning.  The dead ends in the maze were populated by groups of dots that for a moment seemed familiar to Derek.  A red line spiralled asymetrically from the very edge of the page to a point at the centre, and without it the maze would have appeared  balanced and cohesive.  The red rippled and ruined the pattern.  After a few minutes, Derek began to feel uncomfortable and tore the fragment from his book.   It was a mistake, and he had drawn unwanted attention to himself, and Lev had mocked him.  This was a familiar feeling.

He found the classes became no more interesting as time went on, and carefully and consciously avoided the margin of his notebooks.    It seemed to him that the entire canon of astronomical physics was, at best, equivalent to the interminable contemplation of one leaf within a mighty forest.  Hesitant and qualified conclusions might be drawn about the leaf, but a hundred lifetimes of study would barely encompass one small branch or twig of the forest itself. 

So Derek withdrew from speculation.  Hampered by middling grades in his chosen speciality, he dutifully augmented his studies with practical modules in the rapidly expanding field of computers.

•

Derek first saw her shortly after joining Logista as a junior programmer.  She was delivering payslips to the unfortunately named Errors and Variables Team.  On his first day he was repeatedly told how other departments humorously considered this a reference to the staff who worked there. 

“You’re new.”   She said as she walked behind him.  He was aware of a slight and subtle perfume.  He watched her arm as she placed the envelope gently beside him on the desk.  Her skin was a very light brown, the soft golden hairs on her forearm barely visible.  He mumbled something without looking up at her face.

“Okay, don’t spend it all at once.  I’m Claire. It’s crap here, but at least the pay is terrible.”  she said as she walked away.  Her voice was warm.  She had gone before he realised he should have laughed, and he sat alone at his desk absently holding the payslip.  He suppressed the urge to sniff it, and looked around nervously.

The next day he saw Claire coming out of the lift on his floor.  Before he could look away, she smiled at him then turned and disappeared down one of the corridors. 

He did not see Claire again for a while.  Another girl silently delivered his slip the following month.  He worked slowly and alone on a series of dull and unimportant assignments.  A group of men in his team stood by the lift and called out to him one evening, inviting him for drinks to celebrate a birthday.  He smiled weakly and waved them away.

•

Claire was waiting for him when he returned to the office one afternoon.  She had borrowed a chair and was sitting opposite his workspace, a pen between her teeth.  He fixed his eyes steadily on the desk and coughed as he sat down.

She removed the pen.  “Derek, hi … there’s a little problem, I’m afraid.”

He started to look up and stopped.  He realised he had looked at her breasts and felt himself begin to blush.  He looked down again.

“Yeah.  Basically they’ve messed up your money.  We spotted it but it means your wages will be late this month.  Maybe two or three days.  I thought I’d better let you know as soon as possible.” 

Her voice was professionally sympathetic.   He met her eyes for the briefest moment.  A delicate blue. 

“Oh …okay.”  he said, shuffling the papers in front of him.

“They should give you an advance if you ask for it.  If you got bills to pay or something.  It’s not your fault.  But you’ll have to fill out a form..”

“Well, it’s probably alright, I mean …” Derek looked over her shoulder, wondering if anyone was listening.  She was wearing a thin summer top, and the skin at the base of her neck was very pale.  He sensed her looking at him intently.  “… I can help you fill the form out, if you like.”

“Yes.”  He answered quickly.  Too quickly, maybe.  “I mean, uh, will it take long?”

“Well, you’re probably good at forms and stuff.  Goes with the job, doesn’t it?  Come down tomorrow and we’ll sort it out.  I don’t want you to starve.”  She was smiling at him again.  Her pupils were incredibly small.  He wondered if he was holding eye contact too long.  He looked down. 

Inexplicably there was dirt under his fingernails.  His face felt damp.  She stood up, a little shorter than him.  He forgot to smile as she left.

•

‘So it is Written.  Metatron - at once angel and demon.  By the incontrovertible Will of God Metatron  undertakes a timeless, blistering and revelatory ascent through the levels of Heaven, of which there are Seven, each utterly distinct and apart from one another.  And he is transformed into a winged spirit, a thing of fire, and a being with innumerable eyes. Metatron becomes, and is, the supreme and divine angel of death, and receives from God each day the list of souls to be taken.’

•

He had finally found something in the library a little while before graduating.  Afterwards  he had a vague idea about writing a witty farewell note to Dr Lev, something about how he understood the joke all along, or about finding Lev’s class “divinely inspiring”.  But he could not get the syntax right, and had given up after a few attempts.  Lev had ended the final lesson without ceremony, and Derek had departed without shaking his hand.

It hadn’t sounded religious to him before.  The word looked more like a measurement – a particle quantity of some kind, or a unit of computer memory.  He was not Jewish, but the word did not feel Jewish.  And Derek failed to see a connection.  His moment of adolescent inattentiveness was neither mystical nor transcendent.  Meta itself was something to with philosophy, or perhaps ancient Greek.  The whole business seemed as arbitrary and devoid of significance as the rest of Derek’s world.

Later, he remembered the name occasionally, sometimes wondering if it had been part of a joke among the teachers at his expense.  He threw away or lost his exercise books and assignment papers.  He remembered the other names, the usual epithets aimed at unathletic science students.  Sometimes he heard them on TV.  Since the advent of Bill Gates, ‘geek‘ had become a more ambiguous term, almost a compliment, or at least imbued with a certain potential.  Mostly he had just been called Wilson.  Or not at all.

•

The suburban roads seemed ridiculously deserted.  At any moment crowds of drinkers and clubbers would probably spill out from somewhere, but as Derek walked by the neatly-kept front lawns the streets were silent.  Only the city itself throbbed, or was augmented by the rumbling crescendo of aeroplanes. 

Despite the cool of the evening, Derek was sweating.  He walked briskly, movement without fluidity.   He looked straight ahead.  This was a familiar journey, with few visual highlights.  The district was dull and contented, neither rich nor poor.  The houses lacked character, but there was always space to park.  He turned off the main road and walked along a side street with smaller houses and short, perfunctory gardens.  Through open curtains in upstairs rooms the blue flicker of television danced on walls and ceilings.  

He stopped before crossing the road as a car swept slowly by.  He looked up at the sky, interlaced with telephone wires and framed by the silhouetted rooftops.  Andromeda was visible below the distinctive formation of Cassiopiea.  He mouthed the names of Almach, Mirach and Sirrah as his view panned to the right.  Away from the city centre the sky was almost black, but M15 was obscured by a unlit loft.  He looked directly upwards with a movement of the head that made him slightly dizzy.  It must be Lyra, although Sulaphat seemed brighter than Vega, which was not the case.  His eyes watered slightly, and he looked down again, blinking, and crossed the road.  The road was a cul-de-sac and at the closed end was a larger house that had clearly been converted into apartments.  Cars and motorbikes were parked untidily, and the yellow streetlights gleamed and multiplied on the cool metallic surfaces. 

Derek fumbled in his pocket for the key.  The city would sink into the sea, the cars would rust and crumble.  The flickering light in the window would be still, but Caph and Schedar would wheel upon the apex of Errai, far away in the fathomless sky.  The calculations had all been checked, he understood the different laws that governed the movement of apposite bodies, and the correct data had been followed to a logical conclusion.

The conjuctions were inviolate.  All the faces would be dust.   

•

He realised he did not know her last name, and felt uncomfortable as he just asked for ‘Claire’ at the first desk in Payroll.  The girl, with dark skin and intricately braided hair, had pointed ambiguously down a brightly lit corridor before turning back to her computer. 

His new shirt was a little too big.  As he walked he felt it crumpling and creasing under his belt.  That morning he had splashed cologne all over his freshly shaven face until his skin stung.  He had stood for a moment, looking in the mirror, and then washed and rinsed his face and neck, but the smell seemed to linger.  He had slept badly and his eyes felt heavy, his face tight.

He had woken up aroused.  As he passed the open doorways and threaded his way around copiers and coffee machines, he had the feeling that his desire was transparent and visible to everyone.  He stopped.  He had forgotten to bring a pen.

“Hi Derek!  Come in.  You found me.”

He turned right into a generic office where she sat.  Another girl,  sitting with her back to Claire, glanced up as he entered.  Claire stood up and wheeled a chair away from an empty desk to the side of her own, and motioned to it.  He sat down.

“Okay, now where is that thing … here we are.”  She handed across a sheet covered with hieroglyphics and boxes on both sides.

“You’d better fill it in, but if you get stuck I can tell you what to put.”  He nodded, then put the sheet down and looked around. 

“Uh … can I borrow …  I must have left mine upstairs.”   She smiled and offered him a blue biro.  As he took it from her the tips of their fingers touched. 

“Like being back at school, isn’t it?”  She laughed, and as she sat back Derek saw the material of her skirt catch the light with a shimmer, like velvet.  He coughed, and began filling out the form.  The sound of telephones ringing and conversations drifted in from the corridor.  He could hear the other girl tapping at her keyboard.  He turned the page over, and continued mechanically.  She was breathing through her nose, almost imperceptibly. 

If he blew hard enough, his breath would stir the fine hairs on her arm.  She had picked  up a pen and was writing something.  The form was bureaucratic, detailed but easy.  He signed at the bottom. 

“I thought you’d be good at forms.  We’re all good in this building, except for the CEO, who can’t read or write.”  When she smiled, like now, there were tiny, soft lines at the corner of her mouth.  She leaned over to look at the form upside-down.  The neck of her shirt was loose and open, and the pale skin below her neck was in shadow.  He remembered to laugh. 

“That should do it.  Sorry about all this, we’re normally quite efficient.”

The other girl’s voice was high and hard “Yeah, that’s because none of us have boyfriends.  Company policy.”.  Claire laughed.  Derek shifted uncomfortably, and felt her look.  Slowly he lifted his gaze and smiled as professionally as he could.  Her eyes were large, and her face was still.

She stood up and moved around the desk to his side.  He rose, and offered her the pen.  “This is yours, I … thanks“.

He must have stood up in the wrong direction, or she was standing too close to him.  He could feel the warmth of her leg, only centimetres from his own.  He could not turn his face towards her.  Sweat was forming in the small of his back.  He could smell her, not her perfume, but the smell of skin, or hair.  He focused on a wall clock to his right.  Three seconds passed and a new minute began.

“Don’t worry.  If there’s any more problems I will personally kick some butt.”  She was smiling, he could tell from her voice.  She always smiled at him, and reassured his silences with kind words.  He felt himself reaching for her hand, and stopped, and shuffled away from her.  Her wrists were small, her skin would be soft.   There was an unexpected pang at the base of his stomach.  Then he looked at her face.  He did not know what his own expression looked like.  Perhaps a few more seconds ticked past, but the lights and walls around her hair and face were blurred and he could not see the clock.

“Thank you.  I mean … thanks.”  His voice felt slightly distant.  He smiled, but she did not, and he moved past her, edging around her, brushing the air that surrounded her.  A little too quickly through the door, then he heard her, quietly.  “Okay, Derek.  Okay.”

After a few steps down the corridor he heard the other girl in Claire’s office laughing loudly.  He reddened.  He walked more briskly away.  The corridor was claustrophic, hot and the fluorescent lights harsher and brighter than sunlight.  As though this part of the building was miles underground, that beyond and beneath the cardboard walls and fibre-thin carpet the molten earth fissured and seethed with fire.

•

‘In the female form Metatron is embodied as Shekinah.  This can be seen through the interpretation through language and application of repeated but ambiguous mystical passages.  The words of Ezekiel, in his prophecy, are of Shekinah as a fire enfolding itself borne by cherubic creatures whose appearance pulsates with undulating light, themselves borne by gyroscopic double wheels.  Lightning emanates from the midst of the fire, around which is clear sapphire where a figure on a throne sat within an electric eye, from the Hebrew "chashmal", and not “amber” as in the typical English translation.’

•

Derek’s parents had been vague, uncommitted.  His family, his neighbours, and all the people he knew as a child were undemonstrative, conventional, empirical by habit rather than doctrine. 

In the winter of 1975 they bought him a small telescope for his eleventh birthday, through which he perceived the constellations as glistening nodes upon an infinitely unattended spiders web, part of an incomparable and alert stillness in which he and the earth were suspended, raging among countless other embalmed prey, while the moon lay dry and cold, a husk from which life had already been consumed.  And the black space between the stars was not vast enough to contain the echoes of all the souls that had already lived and died. 

When Derek and his parents moved house the following year, the telescope had been lost.

•

She would barely feel his brittle weight upon her, except within her where he would burn.  She would feel his ribs, shrink-wrapped by his pale skin,  and trace her fingers around the knot of his hip, and he would quiver.   The open window was bare, and she would see the stars and the lights of passing planes as they carried the loveless and the loved across the sky. 

She would kiss him with her lips only, with just her lips, and his mouth would open for her.  The sheets, crumpled and resting across her knees and thighs, were cool.  She would not say his name, she would only kiss.  From the window the night breeze breathed in.  She would place his hand over her, and feel his hesitation.  But he would know, and close his fingers around her, and she would hold the breath behind her teeth until it became a cry.

His body would be cold against hers, always, and bony against her softness.  She would wake with finger-shaped bruises on her thighs and hips, pull back the sheet that covered them and in the sunlight kiss his forehead.  And he would stir, with his eyes still closed, but would not wake until she had melted away.

And he would remember nothing, except that the tiny windows glowed with light as they crossed the asterism within Ursa Major, for a moment obscuring Merak or perhaps Alioth, and that he was alone and the sheets were cold.   

•

Derek hated cars.  While most people strapped themselves in a claustrophobic exo-skeletal cell and joined the wheeled river that flowed incessantly, slowly through the arteries of towns and cities, their eyes fixed on the surface of the road or the back of car in front,  Derek preferred to walk.  At night he looked up into the starlit emptiness, and perceived the cacophony of light that rose and illuminated the earth’s atmosphere, cloaking the infinite blackness with a muddy purple glow. 

Derek considered himself unexceptional.  All the evidence pointed to this.  He had read somewhere that all religious personifications were simply wish-fulfilment, an expression of the psyche.  And he had wondered for a moment whether Metatron was one of Lev’s psychological metaphors.  But there were many devout Jewish scientists, men with hard and empirical minds, far greater than Lev, or himself.  He had thought little more about it.  Alone, his mind was often quiet.

•

After graduating he had gone for a walk in the area where he and his family used to live.  The familiar buildings seemed smaller and less impressive, and he knew that this was because he was older, and taller.  There were more cars, and the toyshops and bookstores had been replaced by a variety of coffee houses and restaurants.  People moved in more of a hurry than he remembered.  But the ambience was as cosy and unthreatening as it had always been.  He walked near to his childhood home, passing a newer building that appeared to be a small two-storey office, with a driveway in which several cars were parked. 

A flash of remembrance came to him.  As a thirteen-year-old, he had regularly walked by here, and it had been a warehouse of some kind.  Once, the large doors had been open to the street, and he had seen a messy jumble of furniture and stacked pieces of wood.  From inside, a woman with short hair and paint-spattered clothes had seen him and smiled.  He remembered halting, standing there, but could not recall if she spoke to him.  Perhaps she gestured, or waved, but he only remembered her smile.  He had seen her more than once, and she had smiled again, as if in recognition.  Maybe he had stopped and looked around inside.  He could visualise her short hair and rosy cheeks.  As he stood there the memory seemed important somehow, but so very slight and incomplete.

And now the warehouse had gone.  All the people he remembered had gone.  Perhaps a child would see him there in his stiff suit and in later years have a vague, inconsequential recollection - a man standing in a street framed by summer.  He would join the woman who smiled among all the faces of memory, like the flowers of last summer,  flashes of colour in a green field that had felt the wind and sunlight roll across for a season, shimmering for a time and then lost forever. 

End of Chapter One