He was born under a cold star. He was told by his mother that she looked out of the window and saw it burning like polished metal, greater than the others in the constellations around it, and that it was a sign, she said, that someone of great importance had been born. He learned that a cold star waxed in the night sky at moments of monumental significance, and that its appearance was taken by the men of the city as a divine indication of an individual’s power. He heard that as he emerged from his mother’s womb the nurses attending fell to their knees in genuflection, that while the sheets were awash with blood his mother rose from the bed and stood, suckling him, as the starlight poured through the vaulted window. He learned all the myths of his early life from his mother. He listened, sat on her knee as she wove another story about his preternatural powers: how he could stand and walk at the age of six months, how he could talk in sentences at one, how he could string a bow at two, how he witnessed his first hunt and killed his first quarry at three. He had no reason to disbelieve these stories as everyone present was always in assent. He knew that on hearing of his birth, his father, the chief officer, who had been in a meeting with the Duke and his own subordinate officers, had given no sign to those around him of what had taken place, as the Duke, spiteful as he was, had come to believe every piece of news was somehow a threat to his authority. He was brought to his father’s chambers later that night by his mother, and his father announced that his son, his only child, was destined for an office even greater than his own. He had been told that his mother and father had struggled to conceive a child, and that his birth was considered a miraculous event by the attendant physicians, who had repeatedly told his parents that there was no hope of their producing offspring, with this unlikelihood making his arrival into the world, and under a cold star at that, to be a grand flexion of the cosmos, a bending of the fates to the sheer will of his desire to exist.
He spent his infancy cloistered in the family chambers, attended to by nursemaids and his mother, with his father either in the Duke’s company or out of the city on reconnaissance for strategic purposes, with the military of the region to the north of theirs now indulging in regular sabre-rattling under an immature new demagogue. He would watch his father, on the few occasions he was present with the family, pacing the rooms and dictating his plans to an amanuensis, his patience with the Duke, who had become endlessly suspicious in his old age, beginning to fray. He would toddle around the corridors of the basilica holding his mother’s hand, his natural curiosity stopping him at each decorative suit of armour, gate or painting, the guards coming to recognise and make faces at him as he passed them. He would look up to the vast ceilings above, so dimly lit that in places the walls disappeared into darkness, and imagined there was no ceiling but an endless passage to the stars or some other galaxy. He was three years old when, sat awkwardly astride his father’s horse, he hurtled through the woods around the city, the hart weaving continually out of sight between the trees ahead until eventually an arrow found its mark, his mother furious at the lines of blood she found smeared across his cheeks on his return, his father arguing about the importance of his blooding being witnessed by the hunt and therefore becoming the knowledge of the council.
He would play with the other soldiers’ children, and eventually felt a desire to move around the city itself, to walk its streets and see the people and buildings closely, only to be told by his mother this was not becoming of a chief officer’s son, that there was a certain decorum to be observed and any trip into the city itself would be undertaken under heavy supervision, his only excursions taking place in a carriage which did not stop until it reached the city gate, his father knowing that the city itself was given to febrile atmospheres and that there was only so much control that could be exercised over its inhabitants short of closing them up inside the city which, bar some rudimentary reinforcements, had not been substantially refortified since it burned during the invasion when his father himself was only a child. He sat within the carriage, the thin cloth curtains pulled tight against the world outside, his young eye searching for the spaces where, due to a bump or obstacle in the road, the city would reveal itself to him in glimpses. He saw the richer areas containing the houses of the court and the lower military staff, their buildings of white stone and the open meadows where their children played, the stones that were the walls of the city before the invasion acting now as makeshift seats or imaginary castles. He saw the roads that connected these places with the mercantile areas, streets studded with stalls and kiosks and large numbers of people milling around, even some of the lower members of the court and military in person, those people considered by his mother to be of a baser social order because to be seen in these streets, she said, was an acknowledgement of a common nature.
He would push his face to the edge of the curtain as they drew closer to the edge of the city the better to gaze upon the slums and the hovels, his morbid anticipation bolstered by his mother’s attempts to shield him from them as they passed. He noticed, even at such a young age, that the quality of an individual’s clothing and physical bearing changed as they entered these areas, with shirts and coats becoming flimsy and dirty in comparison to the relatively lustrous and lushly coloured fabrics of the previous districts. He saw faces bruised and muddy, those with missing features and limbs, children with rib cages protruding, his mother noting his shock at what he saw and comforting him by explaining that these people were here because this was their allocated place in the cosmos, that one born here had somehow deserved their fate, and that any loss of sight, mobility or speech was only a personalised extension of their particular lot, one bestowed due to poor behaviour in a prior existence or as a result of a parent’s transgression. He saw eventually the broad gates of the city roll into view, thinly guarded in this relatively peaceable time, and the guards pulling at the doors to allow them into the lands outside.
He experienced the world beyond the city as a series of indulgences and games, sitting with his father through lengthy and regimented dinners, his presence a guarantee of the vitality of the city’s military line and thus its strength, operating as an indication of power to those they visited and signifying the foolishness of any attempt on the city itself. He was aware when they travelled to other towns and cities that his own home looked different, its buildings made of older materials and its architecture castle-like rather than the clean lines and wide avenues of these new places, and this struck him to such an extent that when they returned home he had the sensation of travelling backwards through time to a more primitive form of living and culture, one that gave the sophisticated architecture of the places they visited the character of a new and developed form of living, and on one occasion even brought this up tactfully in his father’s presence only to be told sharply that he had it all backwards, that these other places were feeble and insubstantial, that they were refuges of craven aesthetes, and that in any conflict they would be flattened in an instant, while this city was built on principles of the past, principles that rooted it to the spot and made it hard to penetrate. He sensed, lying in his bed and listening to the sound of the city through an open window, as if he and everyone else around him were somehow out of time, that the city existed in a different temporal zone to the others, and he wondered what those other people thought of his home, having noticed, for he was a perceptive child, the odd looks and sneers that would sometimes greet his father’s speeches, expressions calculated to avoid the eyes of the person in question but which do not escape a child’s gaze.
He was eight when he disobeyed his mother and with four of the boys from the soldier’s barracks found a way into the streets of the city. He wanted to see the slums and those people he had glimpsed only fitfully from behind the curtain, eventually finding himself separated from his friends after they were chased from a kiosk by an irate proprietor, the chaos splitting them up, as he later discovered, into two groups of two and himself alone. He knew if he was discovered the punishment from his father would be volcanic: he had received enough beatings for minor transgressions to know how bad the violence would be, but this knowledge paradoxically spurred him on to explore further, his reasoning being that one might as well be hung for a crown as for a coin. He knew his clothes would attract attention, being better tailored and fitted than those the city folk wore, and in a decision he would later come to regret he rubbed some mud over himself to blend in, his sense of panic rising as he realised how much he was doing that could not now be undone.
He wandered into the slum districts, astonished at the level of noise and lack of privacy, at people napping out on the street outside their houses, babies being bathed in the open air, women holding conversations at the top of their voices across yards as they carried out domestic tasks. He only knew the family’s quarters and the basilica, which were so wide and high and furnished as to muffle most noises, and he gaped at the sheer level of disrepair in the streets, with dogs running around unclaimed and barking aimlessly, and unattached children playing in ragged groups and screaming with excitement. He saw a band of children of his age approach him, and a girl with impeccably neat but faded clothes, the apparent leader, asked him where he was from because they had not seen him before. He panicked and gestured across towards what he thought was a district sufficiently far away to dispel suspicion, but in error he pointed towards one of the better-off areas of the city and there was much excitement as the children quizzed him. He soon realised that they had never left this area, and so was able to spin a few stories without arousing suspicion about their veracity, though the girl, who announced herself as Fleur, seemed to have an endless battery of questions about every aspect of his life, and eventually he gave up the extensive fabrication and told them truths, concealing only the identity of his family and that he lived in the basilica, as he reasoned that everything he was saying sounded opulent to them relative to their own circumstances, and soon Fleur asked him if he wanted to play with them, and with a shrug he blocked the fear of his father from his mind and chased around with them. He seemed to attract Fleur’s attention more than any other, and she viewed him as one might some strange object one had pulled from the ground, an item of some clear provenance that was nevertheless inscrutable in its purpose, and he would find her staring at him as they crouched behind a wall in an endless, amorphous game of hiding and running. He returned to the basilica, shaking with fear, via the way he had escaped, and to his amazement found that his absence had gone unnoticed, his father being in counsel with the Duke and his mother experiencing a dizzy episode of the kind that had become more frequent in recent months. He lay in his bed and created in his mind a three-dimensional model of his journey, the better to remember the shape of the city and how he might do it again.
He was afraid of his father, of his height, of his bearing, of his sudden change in temperament, such that he preferred his father to be, if not angry, then at least in a visibly bad mood, as this meant he could judge his temperament more clearly than when his disposition was sunnier, and in fact he found his father to be much more frightening when he was cheerful, as he knew the inversion of his mood would result only in a more severe beating. He only ever saw his father in uniform, as he would dress in his own chamber upon rising, his outfit always impeccably neat and clean, his face freshly shaven, with his hair combed severely across his head. He had never experienced what he would call affection from his father, only a general display of public approval which he felt was nonetheless primarily for the attention of his father’s own peers, that displaying one’s son was to display one’s virility and legacy, and always he carried with him that fearful sense that he would be expected one day to replace his father, if not in his particular office then in some equivalent or higher position, and that this matter was entirely unnegotiable. He loved his mother, but she had an emotional distance that grew as he aged, one exacerbated under the will of his father who would frequently chastise his mother for being soft on the boy, and as he grew so did her withdrawals from the world and her occupancy of her bedroom, lying behind the curtains tending one of her increasingly severe headaches.
He was at home when his mother died, playing some imagined game in his room, hearing his father cry out in a tone he had never heard before, his own door being swiftly closed from outside and the sound of many muffled voices filling the quarters, among them the family doctor whose accent he recognised immediately, understanding that whatever incident had occurred must be medical in nature and that, since his father had cried out in horror, that it was likely something to do with his mother. He walked alongside his father in the funeral procession through the corridors of the basilica, twelve years old, dressed formally in the outfit of a young cadet, the coffin borne by soldiers in front of them, his eyes stinging with the tears he had been forbidden to shed, his mother’s burial in the private gardens of the basilica attended by a small group of other employees. He took his mother’s death badly, becoming increasingly transgressive and continuing his secret excursions into the city which had previously been limited to once or twice a month but which he now undertook almost every week, creeping out and making his way down the roads with which he was intimately familiar until he reached the edge of the slums, and along with Fleur, who had grown increasingly beautiful to him, leading a group of local peers around. He was aware that their play had become flirtatious but did not know how to address this, having few friends with whom to discuss his developing attraction, and he desired to kiss Fleur and imagined she would not have minded and in fact encouraged this, but the moment was never appropriate, and in those moments where it was he lost his nerve, preferring to make some joke or indulge in a distraction rather than take proper account of his feelings. He sat with her one afternoon on the edge of the district, the other children off playing some physical game, and in a moment of what he realised later was both bravery and cowardice, he kissed Fleur on the cheek as she turned away, her initially shocked reaction giving way to a broad smile, and whatever was inside him leapt up as if it was going to explode from the top of his skull, and his chest was full of air and light.
He made a terrible error on an excursion some weeks after that. He had become so fixated on seeing Fleur, with their games becoming increasingly romantic in nature and their fleeting kisses more passionate, that he forgot some of the processes he used to cover his tracks upon leaving the basilica, and when he was with Fleur some days later, as they walked casually down the street together he became aware that someone was following them, a man whose face he did not recognise from the local area, an area with which he was now very familiar, and this man’s relentless appearance on every corner that they passed made a high cold feeling flood his chest and neck, and without wishing to worry Fleur he suggested that they walk back towards her family home, reasoning with himself that by leaving her there he could at least draw the man away from Fleur and, if this was indeed an emissary of his father’s he would claim sole responsibility and take whatever grievous punishment was to be doled out. He directed Fleur around the corner to her own street and as he did so he felt a hush descend on the area, and looking up saw the man walking towards them at speed, accompanied this time by two soldiers in full uniform. He was grabbed by the man and pulled roughly away from Fleur, who ran into her house, and as he was marched away in the direction of the basilica he saw the two soldiers enter Fleur’s house and heard the sound of screaming within as he raged and kicked out at the man, his face streaked with tears and his throat hoarse from shouting, the locals standing gaping, some retreating into their houses as they walked by, the basilica moving steadily into view and obliterating the light.
This is an extract from an as-yet-unpublished novel.
David will be reading at the minor incident Berlin weekender on the 16th-17th of October. Details here.
David Hering David Hering is a writer, critic and academic based in Liverpool, England. His fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Point, Guernica, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The London Magazine, 3:AM, and others. He is the author of David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form (Bloomsbury, 2016), The End of the Reel (Ortac Press, 2027) and Holding The Ghost: A Theory of the Contemporary (forthcoming).
