The Bone Clocks

by David Mitchell

“What if … what if heaven is real, but only in moments? Like a glass of water on a hot day when you’re dying of thirst, or when someone’s nice to you for no reason, or …” Mam’s pancakes with Mars Bar sauce; Dad dashing up from the bar just to tell me, “Sleep tight don’t let the bedbugs bite”; or Jacko and Sharon singing “For She’s a Squishy Marshmallow” instead of “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow” every single birthday and wetting themselves even though it’s not at all funny; and Brendan giving his old record player to me instead of one of his mates. “S’pose heaven’s not like a painting that’s just hanging there forever, but more like … like the best song anyone ever wrote, but a song you only catch in snatches, while you’re alive, from passing cars, or … upstairs windows when you’re lost …”

Love’s pure free joy when it works, but when it goes bad you pay for the good hours at loan-shark prices.

“So do you, like … agree with Russia?” “Not at all,” says Ian. “Stalin butchered Russian communism in its cradle, Khrushchev was a shameless revisionist, and Brezhnev built luxury stores for Party sycophants while the workers queued for stale bread. Soviet imperialism’s as bad as American capitalism.”

“The lie that happiness is about borrowing money you haven’t got to buy crap you don’t need,” says Ian. “The lie that we live in a democratic state. And the most weaselly lie of all, that there is no class war. That’s why the Establishment keeps such an iron grip on what’s taught in schools, specially in history. Once the workers wise up, the revolution will kick off. And, as Gil Scott-Heron tells us, it will not be televised.”

“When workers see the unions being gunned down—first with laws, then bullets—it’ll be clear that a class-based revolution isn’t some pie-in-the-sky lefty dream, but a matter of survival.”

“Even if Thatcher doesn’t trigger the revolution this year,” Heidi turns to say, strands of her raspberry-red hair blowing in the wind, “it’s coming. In our lifetimes. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. By the time we’re old, society’ll be run like this: ‘From each according to his or her abilities, to each according to his or her needs.’ Sure, the bosses, the liberals, the Fascists, they’ll all squeal, but you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.

Being born’s a hell of a lottery.

Power is a visitor to, not a possession of, those it empowers. The mad tend to crave it, many of the sane crave it, but the wise worry about its long-term side effects. Power is crack cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul.

Power’s comings and goings, from host to host, via war, marriage, ballot box, diktat, and accident of birth, are the plot of history. The empowered may serve justice, remodel the Earth, transform lush nations into smoking battlefields, and bring down skyscrapers, but power itself is amoral.”

I consider airing my theory that our culture’s coping strategy towards death is to bury it under consumerism and Samsara, that the Riverside Villas of the world are screens that enable this self-deception, and that the elderly are guilty: guilty of proving to us that our willful myopia about death is exactly that.

“Men have imagined republics and principalities that never really existed at all. Yet the way men live is so far removed from the way they ought to live that anyone who abandons what ‘is’ for what ‘should be’ pursues his downfall rather than his preservation; for a man who strives after goodness in all his acts is sure to come to ruin, since there are so many men who are not good.”

Commuters sway like sides of beef and slump like corpses: red-eyed office slaves plugged into Discmans; their podgier selves in their forties buried in the Evening Standard; and nearly retired versions gazing over West London wondering where their lives went.

“outside the system” means poverty. Ask the Yeti how free he feels.

God made the whole Earth in six days, and I’m in Switzerland for nine or ten.

Empires die, like all of us dancers in the strobe-lit dark. See how the light needs shadows. Look: Wrinkles spread like mildew over our peachy sheen; beat-by-beat-by-beat-by-beat-by-beat-by-beat, varicose veins worm through plucked calves; torsos and breasts fatten and sag; behold Brigadier Philby, French kissing with Mrs. Bolitho; as last year’s song hurtles into next year’s song and the year after that, and the dancers’ hairstyles frost, wither, and fall in irradiated tufts; cancer spatters inside this tarry lung, in that aging pancreas, in this aching bollock; DNA frays like wool, and down we tumble; a fall on the stairs, a heart attack, a stroke; not dancing but twitching. This is Club Walpurgis. They knew it in the Middle Ages. Life is a terminal illness.

my and the Humberites’ very undergrad discourse on the nature of love at Le Croc the other night, but if I did I’d tell Fitzsimmons et al. that love is fusion in the sun’s core. Love is a blurring of pronouns. Love is subject and object. The difference between its presence and its absence is the difference between life and death. Experimentally, silently, I mouth I love you to Holly, who breathes like the sea. This time I whisper it, at about the violin’s volume: “I love you.” No one hears, no one sees, but the tree falls in the forest just the same.

“Look at that! Life’s more science-fictiony by the day. It’s not just that you get old and your kids leave; it’s that the world zooms away and leaves you hankering for whatever decade you felt most comfy in.”

Damon MacNish and many of his contemporaries have turned into their own tribute bands, which must be a peculiar and postmodern fate.

“Rootlessness,” I opine, “is the twenty-first-century norm.” “You’re not wrong and that’s why we’re in the shit we’re in, mate. If you belong nowhere, why give a tinker’s toss about anywhere?”

Men marry women hoping they’ll never change. Women marry men hoping they will. Both parties are disappointed,

“Art feasts upon its maker,”

“Nothing lasts, and yet nothing passes, either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.”

Are we mutants? Have we evolved this way? Or are we designed? Designed by whom? Why did the designer go to such elaborate lengths, only to vacate the stage and leave us wondering why we exist? For entertainment? For perversity? For a joke? To judge us? “To what end?” I

His work is urban and his wit’s urbane, but his soul is pastoral.

What else has changed since 1984?” “Oil’s running out,” I say, checking Holly’s pulse and the second hand of the clock. “Earth’s population is eight billion, mass extinctions of flora and fauna are commonplace, climate change is foreclosing the Holocene Era. Apartheid’s dead, as are the Castros in Cuba, as is privacy. The USSR went bankrupt; the Eastern Bloc collapsed; Germany reunified; the EU has gone federal; China’s a powerhouse—though their air is industrial effluence in a gaseous state—and North Korea is still a gulag run by a coiffured cannibal. The Kurds have a de facto state; it’s Sunni versus Shi‘a throughout the Middle East; the Sri Lankan Tamils got butchered; the Palestinians still have to eke out a living off Israel’s garbage dumps. People outsourced their memories to data centers and basic skills to tabs. On the eleventh of September 2001, Saudi Arabian hijackers flew two airliners into the Twin Towers. As a result Afghanistan and Iraq got invaded and occupied for years by lots of American and a few British troops. Inequality is truly Pharaonic. The world’s twenty-seven richest people own more wealth than the poorest five billion, and people accept that as normal. On the bright side, there’s more computing power in Arkady’s slate than existed in the world when you last walked it; an African American president occupied the White House for two terms; and you can now buy strawberries at Christmas.”

“Books’ll be back,” Esther-in-Unalaq predicts. “Wait till the power grids start failing in the late 2030s and the datavats get erased. It’s not far away. The future looks a lot like the past.” Holly asks, “Is that, like … an official prophecy?” “It’s the inevitable result,” I say, “of population growth and lies about oil reserves.

it really true,” Rafiq shows no sign of shifting from Lorelei’s bed, “that when you were my age you used to get as much electricity as you wanted all the time, like?”

Ten years ago I could have streetviewed the cities, but the Net’s so torn and ragged now that even when we have reception it runs at prebroadband speed. My tab’s getting old, too, and I only have one more in storage. If any arrive via Ringaskiddy Concession, they never make it out of Cork City. I remember the pictures of seawater flooding Fremantle during the deluge of ’33. Or was it the deluge of ’37? Or am I confusing it with pictures of the sea sluicing into the New York subway, when five thousand people drowned underground? Or was that Athens? Or Mumbai? Footage of catastrophes flowed so thick and fast through the thirties that it was hard to keep track of which coastal region had been devastated this week, or which city had been decimated by Ebola or Ratflu. The news turned into a plotless never-ending disaster movie I could hardly bring myself to watch. But since Netcrash One we’ve had hardly any news at all and, if anything, this is worse.

“Sleep tight, Gran, don’t let the bedbugs bite.” Dad used to say that to me, I used to say it to Aoife, Aoife passed it on to Lorelei, and now Lorelei says it back to me. We live on, as long as there are people to live on in.

One of the last books Sharon sent me before post from Australia stopped getting through was about the twelve Apollo astronauts who walked on the moon, and I sort of felt my time in the Dusk was a bit like that. And now that I was back on earth, I could either go slowly crazy by trying to get back to that other realm, to psychosoterica and 119A and Horology, or not, and just say, “It happened, but it’s over,” and get on with the ordinary stuff of family and life.

my feckless generation trusted our memories to the Net, so the ’39 Crash was like a collective stroke.

How easily, how instantly we used to message anyone, anywhere on earth.

it’s everything: It’s grief for the regions we deadlanded, the ice caps we melted, the Gulf Stream we redirected, the rivers we drained, the coasts we flooded, the lakes we choked with crap, the seas we killed, the species we drove to extinction, the pollinators we wiped out, the oil we squandered, the drugs we rendered impotent, the comforting liars we voted into office—all so we didn’t have to change our cozy lifestyles.

People talk about the Endarkenment like our ancestors talked about the Black Death, as if it’s an act of God. But we summoned it, with every tank of oil we burned our way through. My generation were diners stuffing ourselves senseless at the Restaurant of the Earth’s Riches knowing—while denying—that we’d be doing a runner and leaving our grandchildren a tab that can never be paid.

More’s the pity I didn’t lay in better, deeper, bigger stores, too, but we never knew that every temporary shortage would turn out to be a permanent one until it was too late.

“Why will a loving God only help us if we vote for him?” asks Molly.

There is no God but the one we dream up, I could assure my fellow parishioners: Humanity is on its own and always was … … but my truth sounds no crazier than their faith, no saner either; and who has the right to kill Santa? Specially a Santa who promises to reunite the Coogans with their dead son, Pat Joe with his dead brother, me with Aoife, Jacko, Mum, and Dad; and even put the Endarkenment into reverse, and bring back central heating, online ordering, Ryanair, and chocolate. Our hunger for our loved ones and our lost world is as sharp as grief; it howls to be fed. If only that same hunger didn’t make us so meekly vulnerable to men like Father Brady.

John Cullin was blind and his life wasn’t always an easy one, but he lived at a civilized time in a civilized place where people had full bellies. John wrote fine poetry. Admirers wrote to him from America. That world wasn’t made of stone, but sand. I’m afraid. One bad storm is all it will take.

Years ago I’d laugh about these flashes of forgetfulness, but at my age, it’s like the beginning of a slow-motion death sentence. If you can’t trust your mind anymore, you’re mentally homeless.

what’s real changes. If life didn’t change, it wouldn’t be life, it’d be a photograph.” I snip the hairs up his neck. “Even photos change, mind. They fade.”

For most of my life, the world shrank and technology progressed; this was the natural order of things. Few of us clocked on that “the natural order of things” is entirely man-made, and that a world that kept expanding as technology regressed was not only possible but waiting in the wings.