378: Gothic rebels, led by Fritigern, rout Roman legions in the second Battle of Adrianople, killing the Emperor Valens in the process and hastening the decline of the Western Empire…

1916: Aleister Crowley engages in a public chess exhibition in London, playing over seventy games simultaneously while blindfolded. His opponents include amateur chess enthusiasts, dockworkers, bootblackers, William Butler Yeats, and, it is claimed, several gods from pagan mythology. Over the next seventy-two hours, his opponents gradually concede defeat, with the glaring exception of Isis who, it is said, he battles to an amicable draw…

1986: Peter Murphy stands before a baggage carousel at Heathrow, only now feeling the full effects of the barbiturates he had taken to calm his nerves on the fourteen-hour flight from Jakarta. His hips sway side to side, his feet shuffle back and forth as though he is dodging bricks being hurled at him at incredibly low speeds. John Lydon stands a few feet away with headphones on, listening to and practicing along with a Berlitz Japanese language cassette. He is brushing up, apparently, for a TV commercial he is filming in Kyoto later that month. “An advert for hemorrhoid cream,” he remarks smugly, “because I’m such a magnificent pain in the arse.”

This explanation seems pleasing enough to Peter, as a slight smile crosses his lips. He grows increasingly dizzy and leans up against a support beam to keep from falling, his eyes closed, his face raised to the sky. Konichiwa. Domo ari-gato. Peter has a strange feeling that the support he’s leaning against is not nearly as sturdy as it first appeared; he feels it undulating beneath him, neither solid nor liquid nor gas, and if he concentrates hard enough, he can feel something like a pulse in the support beam, a pulse strangely attuned to his own pulse, beating away, in stereo.

He turns to find the beam mystically transformed: what was once an austere concrete beam is now a portly, red-faced Scandinavian man about fifty years old or so, with glasses and a bushy mustache. The support beam mutters something profane under its breath, then turns and walks away. Peter is floored, and not in a figurative sense. He crosses his legs in the Lotus Sutra fashion, his palms pressed against the floor for balance. Moshi moshi. Hai. Hai. Domo ari-gato. At that moment he realizes that the floor, too is not as stable as he’d previously believed. He stares at the baggage carousel to find that it has stopped moving entirely, and that everything around it is now spinning, spinning furiously, hurtling through space at 456,000 miles an hour, 93 million miles from the sun.

Lydon suggests they split a cab, and Peter nods in agreement (or he simply nods—it isn’t clear). Then he suggests that, if Peter isn’t too busy, they might stop over at Lydon’s maternal grandmother’s house off King’s Road for tea. Peter’s limp body slumps into the back seat of the taxicab, swaying like a reed in the wind, completely at the mercy of physics—each movement of the cab creates an equal and opposite reaction in Peter. Lydon chats away—it is unclear whether he is talking to the cabdriver or to Peter, to both of them or neither.

“You know they weren’t here before,” he says. “The Asians—Pakis… Me nan hates em, but me, I think it’s bloody brilliant.” He makes a sweeping hand gesture at the neighborhood out the window. “Imagine—the Ayatollah right here in the heart of London—it’s fucking beautiful, man… That’s the most punk rock thing you can do these days, it’s the next logical step, it’s all we’ve got left. If you want to be a rebel nowadays, you’ve got to grow a beard and pray five times a day. It’s great—oim finkin o convertin meself,” he continues in that musical theater Cockney accent he slips into from time to time. “If Sid were alive today, he’d be hijacking planes, trading hostages for guns and such,” Lydon continues, his eyes now subtly moistened with tears. “It’d be great laughs it would… great, great laughs…”
Peter Murphy sits in a chair in the living room of John Lydon’s maternal grandmother, completely unconscious, a full cup of Earl Grey in front of him now cold, a volume of poetry on his lap opened to Coleridge’s “Kublai Khan” sits unread. “Your friend,” Lydon’s nan remarks, “he’s rather a quiet one, isn’t he?”