The Bone Clocks

“But I can’t pay it back, Hal …” Here comes the harpoon, eviscerating my bankability, my self-esteem, my sodding pension. “I—I—I spent it. Years ago. Or Zoл spent it. Or Zoл’s lawyers spent it.”

“Yes, but they know you own property in Hampstead.”

“No sodding way! They can’t touch my house!” Disapproving faces look up from the deck—did I shout? “Can they? Hal?”

“Their lawyers are displaying worrying levels of confidence.”

“What if I handed in a new novel in … say, ten weeks?”

“They’re not bluffing, Crispin. They trulyaren’t interested.”

“Then what the sodding hell do we do? Fake my suicide?”

I meant it as gallows humor, but Hal doesn’t dismiss the option: “First they’d sue your estate, via us; then your insurers would track you down, so unless you sought political asylum in Pyongyang, you’d get three years for fraud. No, your best hope lies in selling the Australian lighthouse novel at Frankfurt for a fat enough sum to pacify Erebus and Bleecker Yard. Nobody’ll pay you a bean up front now, alas. Can you send me the first three chapters?”

“Right. Well. The new novel has … evolved.”

Hal, I imagine, mouths a silent profanity. He asks, “Evolved?”

“For one thing, the story’s now set in Shanghai.”

“Shanghai around the 1840s? Opium Wars?”

“More Shanghai in the present day, actually.”

“Right … I didn’t know you were a Sinologist as well.”

“World’s oldest culture. Workshop of the World. The Chinese Century. China’s very …  now.” Listen to me, Crispin Hershey pitching a book like a kid fresh off a creative-writing course.

“Where does the Australian lighthouse fit in?”

I take a deep breath. And another. “It doesn’t.”

Hal, I am fairly sure, is miming shooting himself.

“But this one’s got legs, Hal. A jet-lagged businessman has the mother of all breakdowns in a labyrinthine hotel in Shanghai, encounters a minister, a CEO, a cleaner, a psychic woman who hears voices”—gabbling garbling—“think Solarismeets Noam Chomsky via The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Add a dash of Twin Peaks …”

Hal is pouring himself a whisky and soda: Hear it fizz? His voice is flat and accusative: “Crispin. Are you trying to tell me that you’re writing a fantasy novel?”

“Me? Never! Or it’s only one-third fantasy. Half, at most.”

“A book can’t be a half fantasy any more than a woman can be half pregnant. How many pages have you got?”

“Oh, it’s humming along really well. About a hundred.”

“Crispin. This is me. How many pages have you got?”

How does he alwaysknow? “Thirty—but the rest is all mapped out, I swear.”

Hal the Hyena exhales a sawtoothed groan. “Shitting Nora.”

THE WHALE’S TAIL lifts. Water streams off the striated flukes. “All tail flukes are unique,” the guide is saying, “and researchers can recognize individuals from their patterns. Now we watch the whale dive …” The flukes slice into the water, and the visitor from another realm is gone. The passengers stare as if a friend’s gone for good. I stare as if I squandered my one and only close encounter with a cetacean on a shitty business call. The American family pass round a box of cupcakes, and the caring way they make sure they’ve all had one injects me with fifty milliliters of distilled envy. Why didn’tI invite Juno and Anaпs along on this trip, so mykids would have lifelong memories of being with their dad in Iceland, too? The boat’s engines growl into life, and the vessel turns back towards Hъsavнk. The town’s a mile away beneath a brooding fell. Harbor buildings, a fish-processing plant, a few restaurants and hotels, a wedding-cake church, one department store, steeply gabled houses painted all the shades of the color chart, WiFi masts, and whatever else 2,376 Icelanders need to get from one year to the next. One last time I look north between the muscled walls of the bay, towards the Arctic Ocean, where somewhere the whale is circling in its dark skies.

September 20, 2019

HALFWAY ALONG OUR JOURNEY to life’s end I found myself astray in a dark wood. This fork in the path, these slender birches, that mossy boulder tilted upwards, like a troll’s head. Finding oneself astray in any wood is a feat in Iceland, where even scraggy copses are rare. Zoл never let me navigate in our pre-satnav era; she said it was safer to drive with the road atlas on her lap. My tourist map of Бsbyrgi isn’t any help; the mile-wide, horseshoe-shaped, forested ravine sinks beneath the surrounding land to a hundred-meter rock face, where a river dawdles in pools … But where am I in it? The river’s vowels and the trees’ consonants speak a not-quite-foreign language.