Fremder

  ‘What do I know about photoneurons? Bear in mind that this was my first job; Pythia duty is the top T/7 spot and I beat out a lot of other applicants for the post.’

  ‘I’m thinking about yesterday when Pythia went deep with me and you fainted. Why didn’t you tell me what it was in the after-session room?’

  ‘The first time we made love I didn’t want you thinking of me as someone whose head was bugged. Do you blame me?’

  ‘How can I blame you for anything, Katya? I love you.’

  She kissed me. ‘Are you sure about that?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure.’

  ‘That’s good because there’s no knowing how much time we’ve got and I don’t want you to be sorry later.’

  ‘What do you know that I don’t about how much time we’ve got?’

  ‘Nothing, but it was easy enough to see from that session that Pythia isn’t through with you yet; that means that Top Exec wants something more from you; and that means we should make the most of today which is my day off. Let’s have a picnic on the Red Mountain.’ She opened the fridge. ‘I’ve got a tin of sardines, half a French bread, and a bottle of red.’

  ‘Maybe we could do a little shopping on the way.’

  ‘Let’s just go, let’s give ourselves some memories before something happens.’

  ‘Don’t say that, it’s unlucky.’

  ‘Sorry. I never expect anything good to last.’

  ‘Try not to think that way; expectation is part of the reality envelope – you’re transmitting event configurations that are searching for receptors.’

  ‘Don’t tell me any more, I don’t want to know about the reality envelope; life is hard enough.’

  We wired to the Ziggurat, went up to the flight pad, got a Red Zone day pass on Katya’s ID, and signed out a microhopper. Then we flew out to Red Mountain Park. The mountain stood up before us roseate and golden with rust and green with copper oxides like something in a Max Ernst painting, a scanty matting of grass covering the compacted wreckage of ancient roaders, choppers, hovers, skimmers, tankers, bombers, fighters, freighters, and other vehicles arrested in a state of romantic ruin and kept from further decay by many coatings of permalin. A bronze plaque said:

  THIS MOUNTAIN OF DEAD NOISE IS DEDICATED

  BY THE SHEELA-NA-GIG TO THE USES OF TRANQUILLITY.

  1 April 2010

  The electronic sign below it said:

  TODAY’S AIR IS RED 3 – OZONE IS RED 2

  BREATHERS AND U-V PROTEX MUST BE WORN!

  Our pass got us on to the top level and we had it to ourselves except for a young Exec couple with a small son named Bert. This child had a toy terminator beam that emitted a nasty little whine every time he pulled the trigger. Bert terminated us many times, each time yelling, ‘You’re terminated!’

  ‘Stop that, Bert! Stop bothering those people,’ shouted his smiling parents. Whatever noise there was below us was muffled by the barrier screen and the polariser cut off visibility so that the mountaintop we sat on had no apparent bottom. Beyond the quivering air that marked the limit of the screen London lay sweltering under its grey November sky through which circles of bright emptiness looked out at me. Wirecars and microhoppers buzzed like flies in the heavy air. The Ziggurat stood glowing its dull purple against the grey with circlings of crows marking the plaza where the dead still lay.

  We put some distance between Bert and us and ate our sardines and bread and drank our wine while the dreary shouts of Prongs and Arseholes came up small and quiet through the barrier screen. I hadn’t thought about happiness for a long time but suddenly I recognised it and in the same moment tried not to – I didn’t want to be caught out in the open with it on that junkyard mountain. My wristphone was heavy with silence and the grey sky seemed full of menace. I wanted twilight and shadowy rooms and mazurkas. We were loading a memory into our heads and I wondered how long I’d be around to remember it.

  Katya squeezed my hand. ‘Worrying won’t help,’ she said. ‘All we can do is try to be ready for anything.’

  ‘Are you ready for anything?’

  She rubbed her hair against my face and said nothing for a while, then, ‘Look at this grass we’re sitting on.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Look how it’s growing on this old iron, how it found a way to do it. It started with moss growing on the wreckage, the spores found a way of penetrating the permalin so they could feed on the rust and break down the metal and make moss to catch the dust from the wind until it made earth out of iron for the grass to grow on. Wasn’t that clever of the moss? It didn’t know that it couldn’t do it so it did it.’

  ‘Yes, that was clever of the moss.’ We took off our breathers and goggles long enough to kiss sardinefully. ‘You think we can do it?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I think we can.’

  ‘Do what, though? That’s the question.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what the question is – we’re the answer. Look at me.’

  I looked.

  ‘Remember how it was when you first saw me?’

  ‘Yes, I remember it.’

  ‘When I was walking ahead of you I could feel your eyes on my bum. I could feel your eyes lighting up like a neon sign that spelled out THIS IS THE ONE. Tell me I’m wrong.’

  ‘You’re not wrong.’

  ‘And am I the one?’

  ‘Yes, Katya, you are the one.’

  ‘Very good. And I’m very superstitious, so I won’t use the H word…’

  ‘What’s the H word?’

  ‘It’s the opposite of sad. I won’t use that word but right now you’re not utterly miserable, are you?’

  ‘Not utterly, no.’

  ‘And nobody can take that away from us, can they?’

  ‘No, they can’t.’

  ‘Well, there you are then.’

  I was looking over her shoulder when she said that and I saw a tawny owl cruising low over the mountain. I didn’t believe it at first but I turned Katya around and we saw it together. She was going to speak but I put my finger over her breather mesh and we kept the owl in us unspoken then and in the hopper and the wirecar going back.

  We bought a bottle of gin and back at Katya’s place in the violet dusk we sat in the viewbubble drinking it and listening to Ilse Bak playing Chopin nocturnes. Katya had put on a hologram of a relief carving of Perseus killing the Gorgon; DETAIL OF METOPE FROM SELINUS, PALERMO MUSEUM, said the label. Of Perseus, only the left hand gripping Medusa’s hair was visible, and under her chin, held by his right hand, the blade that was decapitating her. The Gorgon’s head was the conventionalised one with the round face, mad grin, vampire-like canine teeth, and loosely hanging tongue, here broken off short. It was a plate that was in my collection as well and it was a face that was often in my thoughts – this was not a human Medusa but rather the mask worn by something not to be named. There’s a second plate of that metope that shows the full figures of both Perseus and Medusa and includes the winged horse Pegasus that was born of Medusa’s blood. Again Katya hadn’t switched on any lamps; in the darkening room the stone rictus of the Gorgon’s head seemed to quiver, seemed urgent with misery and message. ‘That’s an interesting sequence,’ I said: ‘B-Z to Vermeer girl to Gorgon’s head.’

  ‘They’re all looking out of one another’s eyes.’

  I looked into her eyes, dark in the dimness of the room. At that moment we were hearing the Nocturne in B Flat Minor, Op. 9, No. 1. The first time I heard that music it was the same recording, played by one of those philosophising late-night disc jockeys; with that nocturne behind him he’d read something – I don’t remember what but I remember that it had a Proustian flavour – about an orange grove. Ever since then when I hear that nocturne I think of an orange grove by moonlight, the scent of the silvered oranges. ‘Are the B-Z and the Vermeer girl and the Gorgon’s head looking out of your eyes as well?’ I said.

  ‘Mine as well.’

  ‘Are you a mystery?’

  ??
?Yes. Have you been looking for one?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The Outer Executive Circle newsboard riffled its lights as new stories came in, then flashed: FINANCE EXEC: ‘CREDIT DEVALUED, INFLATION BEATEN’ – MAINTENANCE STRIKE CONTINUES; ELECTRICIANS THREATEN STOPPAGE – OPPOSITION: ‘STOP CLEVER DAUGHTER COVER-UP’ …

  ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘if only we knew who’s covering up what.’

  There was nothing more about Clever Daughter; the news-board went on with: PRONG LEADER’S CANNIBAL COOK BOOK DISCOVERED – TOP EXEC: ‘GAY FAKE ROBOT IS FOREIGN AGENT’ – WIRECAR DISASTER ENQUIRY: TRANSPORT EXEC CLEARED – FINANCE EXEC …

  ‘What’s going to happen?’ said Katya.

  ‘I don’t know but I think Pythia knows a lot more than she’s told me.’

  ‘I saw the Thinksec printouts from your session. Pythia had some wild-looking peaks when she saw Izzy on the pixels.’

  ‘Thinksec does printouts of Pythia sessions?’

  ‘Sure, that’s why they’re called Thinksec – their little minds are busy all the time. Did you know they’re part of Top Exec?’

  ‘I thought they were under the SNG.’

  ‘The Sheela-Na-Gig is under them although the civilians don’t know it. Top Exec is where the action is.’

  ‘And how come a T/7 gets to see Thinksec printouts?’

  ‘I’ve got my sources. The people on top might run things but the hired help always know what’s going down.’

  ‘She’s a strange one, that 23.7 billion photoneuron Data Evaluator. Who’d have thought she’d crash like that when she went deep with me?’

  ‘Who’d have thought I’d crash? That never happened to me before.’

  ‘I like a woman who knows when to faint,’ I said. Then we moved on to other matters and there was no more shoptalk for some time.

  17

  The colour of regret – who has seen it?

  I have not.

  The colour of regret – what is it?

  I don’t know.

  Yet I have tasted it.

  The colour of regret?

  Yes, I have tasted that colour,

  the colour of regret.

  Rodney Spoor, ‘Colours’

  ‘Music feeds that which it findeth,’ somebody said. As I write this I’m listening to Ilse Bak’s Chopin Nocturnes and in my mouth is the taste of the colour of regret. One of the memory-pictures that haunts me is Caroline crying that night at the Hubble Bubble because she’d given herself and I hadn’t. She was right about the coupler that’s missing in me; sometimes I don’t even seem to be connected to myself. Stranger is my name and there are times when I’m a stranger to myself.

  18

  To be, or not to be: that is the question:

  William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, scene i

  To be and not to be: that is the answer.

  Helen Gorn, 2019 Notebook

  Still the same night, getting on for 03:00. Katya was asleep and I was watching Fractal Bims of Titan and listening with headphones when I heard a very quiet self-effacing knock at the door. I looked through the peephole and recognised the Ziggurat Maintenance man I’d seen in the wirecar.

  ‘I want to talk to Fremder Gorn,’ he said.

  ‘Who are you?’ I whispered without opening.

  ‘Wait a moment,’ he said, and wrote a note which he slid under the door:

  I’M LOWELL SIXE – I HAVE THINGS TO TELL YOU.

  THIS FLAT IS BUGGED. PLEASE COME OUTSIDE

  SO WE CAN TALK. BRING TWO GLASSES.

  TRUST ME.

  The name meant nothing to me. My first thought was: he’s going to tell me who my father was. What if he is my father! ‘Wait a moment,’ I whispered. I hurried on some clothes, got two glasses, programmed the lock for my thumb, opened the door, saw that he was apparently alone, and went out. He opened a small rucksack, took out a bottle, and held it up for my inspection: Glenfiddich, which certainly put him in a class above your ordinary geriatric mugger. So I thought: why not?

  ‘What did you want to tell me?’ I said.

  He put his finger to his lips, then pointed up. We took the lift to the roof and went to a dark corner where the ventilators made a soft roar. The night was like damp flannel. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘What’s this all about?’

  Sixe opened the bottle and poured the glasses nearly full. ‘Absent friends,’ he said. We clinked glasses and he emptied more than half of his.

  There was enough light for me to see him pretty well; for a while he just stood there with his eyes closed while the drink went down. My earlier description of him as a failed-looking sort of man with dirty fingernails was unkind but there’s no escaping the fact that people carry their wins and their losses in their faces and the way they walk; although this man’s face seemed blurred and unreadable his general manner was that of someone who’d had more losses than wins. The dark shape of him against the red glow in the sky seemed to impose an additional reality (or unreality) on the one I was already struggling with. I didn’t want to be a character in his story but it seemed I had no choice.

  ‘Why would that flat be bugged?’ I said.

  ‘Don’t come the innocent with me – you must know why Corporation is interested in you.’

  That seemed a reasonable answer but I felt as if I ought to be careful. ‘Got any ID?’ I said.

  He handed me his Ziggurat card. The photo was of him but the name was Charles Harris. ‘Charles Harris?’

  ‘That isn’t the face I used to have either. If I were walking around as Lowell Sixe I wouldn’t be walking around any more.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s a long story.’ He drank more whisky and seemed disinclined to talk.

  ‘Where do I come into it?’

  ‘You’re the son of Helen Gorn. I knew her and there are things I think you should know.’

  ‘Why choose this particular time to tell me?’

  ‘Might be useful, I don’t know.’ He took another drink and coughed for about ten minutes; then he reached into the rucksack again and brought out three books: two hardbacks and a paperback. ‘These were Helen’s,’ he said. ‘I’m giving them to you.’ He handed them over as if he didn’t really want to let go of them.

  The books smelled as if they’d been lying in the dark in an old trunk for a long time. One of the hardbacks was the 1955 Jewish Publication Society Holy Scriptures, stuck full of strips of yellow paper with her notations in faded black ink: ‘NOT IN THE WIND, NOT IN THE EARTHQUAKE’, ‘WHAT I WILL DO TO MY VINEYARD’, and so on in her cursive block-lettering. The paperback was Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance, and the other hardback, art-book sized, was a falling-apart and clearly loved-to-death Die Bibel in Bildern, the wood-engravings of Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld and the text of Martin Luther. On the cover was Elijah going up to heaven with the chariot and horses of fire: Elias Himmelfahrt.

  As I took that book in my hands it fell open to Elijah being fed by ravens at the brook Cherith: Elijah had what looked like a slice of gammon in his hand while a raven delivered either a potato or a bun and a second raven offered another non-kosher slice. In the background was a deer drinking at the brook. The ravens were tidy little things and so was the deer; everything was small and neat, even the trees limited their spread as if Carolsfeld, like a photographer at a wedding, had said, ‘Everybody a little closer together, please.’ I held the book to my face and fancied that some faint fragrance was mingled with the musty-paper and dark-trunk smell.

  I once saw some real live ravens, it was during a DSC short-jump exercise in the Grampians. A VMET blew and a crew of six were instantly translated from M-waves to raven snacks. I was in the search party, and when we found what was left of them on Rannoch Moor the ravens were tucking in heartily and chuckling about all the Elijahs that had dropped in to feed them. Those ravens were not little tidy birds, they were very big and black and wild, no table manners at all but they croaked a big loutish ‘Thank you, it’s been nice having you’ as they took off h
eavily and flapped away.

  All three books bore on their flyleaves the date 16.2.84 and S.P.C.K London written in a German-looking hand. Elias always entered the date and the name of the shop in the secondhand books he bought; these were from the long-gone bookshop of the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge that used to be in the Marylebone Road. As a child Helen Gorn must have loved the neat 1860 wood-engravings in the Carolsfeld book; in them the universe was a graspable proposition and on the Sabbath God snoozed in a cloud-swing between the sun and the moon and stars, his hands folded across his stomach and his bare feet on the ball of the earth while fourteen angels sang whatever angels sing on Sundays. But even when she was a child I think the god she spoke to was the old savage one who could never be pictured and whose name was an unpronounceable tetragrammaton. When I look at that book now, as when I first saw it that night on the roof with Lowell Sixe, the ravens of Rannoch Moor come between me and the visual marzipan of those engravings.

  ‘You ever heard of the Elijah Project?’ said Sixe.

  ‘The Elijah Project – was that to do with flicker drive?’

  He shook his head, looked out over the lights of Oldtown and had another drink. He was a sad man but I could see that he felt good having someone to tell his story to. ‘In 2016 Helen Gorn was eighteen and her brother Izzy was thirteen. They were living in that big house in Oldtown West 71 with their housekeeper. That summer Helen sat her Professionals in Neurophysiology, Physics, Fractals, and Speculative Mathematics at the Corporation School of Science and Technology. She got As in everything but she wasn’t having much fun. She’d never had a boyfriend – she’d been hoping to go to the May Ball with a boy she liked but it didn’t happen. She said she’d begun to feel invisible – she half expected people to try to walk through her in the walkways or sit on her in the wirecar.

  ‘Her parents had killed themselves in August seven years before and August was always a hard month for her to get through. That summer of 2016, years before I ever met her, she began to think a lot about being and not-being. She kept notebooks, wrote down her thoughts and quotations from things she read. Here’s a notebook page from that time.’ He gave me a folded photocopy and a pocket torch and I read in my mother’s handwriting: