“Like a cat’s leg,” he says.
“What is? Which bit?”
“The whole thing.”
Pietersen steps back and tilts his head at the elongated spit of land formed by the collated images. After a while he nods and murmurs:
“I suppose it does have that shape, a little.”
The next day, Serge taps a small mound of cocaine onto his shaving mirror, pushes it into a line, rolls up a twenty-franc note and breathes the powder up towards his cranium. It stings behind his eyes, then numbs the upper part of his face. As Gibbs takes off, Serge feels a lump of phlegm grow in his throat. He swallows; it tastes bitter, chemical. The tracer-lines this time are vibrant and electric: it’s as though the air were laced with wires. Higher up, the vapour trails of SE5s form straight white lines against the blue, as though the sky’s surface were a mirror too. Scorch-marks and crater contours on the ground look powdery; it seems that if he swooped above them low enough, then he could breathe them up as well, snort the whole landscape into his head. The three hours pass in minutes. As they dip low to strafe the trenches on the way back, he feels the blood rush to his groin. He whips his belt off, leaps bolt upright and has barely got his trousers down before the seed shoots from him, arcs over the machine’s tail and falls in a fine thread towards the slit earth down below.
“From all the Cs!” he shouts. “The bird of Heaven!”
From this day onwards, he develops a keen interest in the contents of the medicine box in the RE8’s cabin, tucked between the aerial’s copper reel and the second set of controls. He experiments with benzoic acid, amyl nitrate, ether and bromide before discovering diacetylmorphine. Held in injectable phials, the liquid floods him with euphoria each time he pushes it into his flesh: a murky, earthy warmth that spreads out from his abdomen in waves. Then everything slows down and seems to float: the tracers rise towards him languidly, like bubbles in a glass; Archie puff-clouds hang about his head like party bunting. He likes it when the bullets come close-really close, so that they’re almost grazing the machine’s side: when this happens he feels like he’s a matador being passed by the bull’s horn, the two previously antagonistic objects brought together in an arrangement of force and balance so perfectly proportioned that it’s been removed from time, gathered up by a pantheon of immortals to adorn their walls. The sky takes on a timeless aspect too: the intersecting lines of ordnance residue and exhaust fumes form a grid in which all past manoeuvres have become recorded and in which, by extension, history itself seems to hang suspended. Flashes tincture the lines green, lace them with yellow, spatter them with incandescent reds. The colours look synthetic, as though they’d been daubed and splashed on from bottles, like Carlisle ’s oils, aquarelles and acrylics; it seems to Serge that if he had a jar of turpentine or camphor and a sponge then he could wipe the whole sky clear…
In states such as this, he finds his attention captivated by the German kite balloons. He’ll gaze at them for endless stretches, measuring his position not from the grid squares on his map but from these strange, distended objects as they rotate to his view. Unlike the English ones, they’re coloured the dark, putrid tone of rotting flesh. They may have the shape of intestines, but their rising, falling and eventual deflation makes him think of lungs-diseased ones, like the catarrh-ridden lungs of the burrow dwellers whose flashes they pinpoint. When he sees one being inflated on the ground, it calls to his mind the image of ticks swelling as they gorge themselves on blood. He fires on airborne ones that come into his range not out of hatred or a sense of duty, but to see what happens when the bullets touch their surface, in the way a child might poke an insect. When flame-tendrils push outwards from inside the balloons and climb up their surface before bursting into bloom, he watches the men in their baskets throw their parachutes over the side and jump. Often they get stuck halfway down, tangled in the ropes and netting. Seeing them wriggling as the flame crawls down the twine towards them, he thinks of flies caught in spiders’ webs; when they roast, they look like dead flies, round and blackened.
He starts picturing the batteries he’s targeting as insects too, ticks that have burrowed into the ground’s skin and embedded themselves there: his task’s unpicking them. Pinned to the slaughterhouse’s wall, the photographs take on the air of dermatological slides.
“I don’t think that one’ll be troubling our boys much more,” Pietersen declares triumphantly, tapping a deeply pockmarked patch on his mosaic. “The whole sector’s dead now.”
“Dead?” asks Serge.
“Yes,” Pietersen replies. “You’ve killed it.”
“I don’t see it that way,” Serge murmurs back.
“You think there’s still an emplacement there?”
“That’s not what I mean… It’s just that…”
He can’t explain it. What he means is that he doesn’t think of what he’s doing as a deadening. Quite the opposite: it’s a quickening, a bringing to life. He feels this viscerally, not just intellectually, every time his tapping finger draws shells up into their arcs, or sends instructions buzzing through the woods to kick-start piano wires for whirring cameras, or causes the ground’s scars and wrinkles to shift and contort from one photo to another: it’s an awakening, a setting into motion. In these moments Serge is like the Eiffel Tower, a pylon animating the whole world, calling the zero hour of a new age of metal and explosive, geometry and connectedness-and calling it over and over again, so that its birth can be played out in votive repetition through these elaborate and ecstatic acts of sacrifice…
And in the background of these iterations, like a relic of an old order, the sun: intoxicated, spewing gas and sulphur, black with cordite smoke and tar. As the summer months draw on, it seems to sicken. Rising beneath him on early-morning flights, its light’s infected by the ghostly pallor of the salient’s mists, driven a nauseous hue by green and yellow flashes. It darkens, not lightens, as each day progresses and the puffballs, vapour clouds and tracer-lines build up. Its transit through the air seems laboured, as though the whirring mechanism that dragged it along its tracks were damaged and worn out. As afternoons run into evenings, it becomes so saturated with the toxins all around it that it can no longer hold itself up and, grown heavy and feeble, sinks. Serge watches it die time and time again, watches its derelict disc slip into silvery, metallic marshland, where it drowns and dissolves. When this happens, a chemical transformation spreads across land and sky, turning both acidic. In these moments, he feels better than he’s ever felt before-as though his rising were commensurate with the sun’s sinking. As space runs out backwards like a strip of film from his tail, the world seems to anoint him, through its very presence, as the gate, bulb, aperture and general projection point that’s brought it about: a new, tar-coated orb around which all things turn.
9
i
By September, more than two-thirds of the pilots and observers who made up the 104th when Serge arrived have been killed. The ones who remain undergo a similar set of transformations to the landscapes in Pietersen’s photographs. Their faces turn to leather-thick, nickwax-smeared leather each of whose pores stands out like a pothole in a rock surface-and grow deep furrows. Eyelids twitch; lips tremble and convulse in nervous spasms. Arriving back from flights, they stumble from their machines with the effects of acceleration and deceleration, of ungradated transit through modes of gravity alternately positive and negative, sculpted in the open mouths, sucked-in cheeks and swollen tongues that they present to the airfield’s personnel for the next few hours. Clown Bodners, Serge tells himself. Sometimes they laugh uncontrollably, as though a passing shell had whispered to them the funniest joke imaginable, although often it’s hard to tell if they’re laughing or crying. The engines’ pulses have bored through their flesh and bones and set up small vibrating motors in their very core: their hands struggle to hold teacups still, light cigarettes, unbutton jackets…