Fremder

  She gave me a quick leer over her shoulder. ‘A change is as good as a rest.’

  *

  Although I still think of huge green breakers when I remember that time it turned out that Caroline wasn’t from California but from Pennsylvania and she’d never done any surfing. She’d played lacrosse at college, though; I’d like to have seen that.

  After the break we went to the Cyberspace Lab for a reality-envelope run in which the Clever Daughter/Sun Ra episode was simulated in real time with a model developed from the Clever Daughter automatic transmission, the Sun Ra disc and log, and Bill Charteris’s recall. The whole thing was then analysed with ten-permutation parameters but none of it helped me to remember anything.

  Then a hypno session with Caroline. Here’s the transcript:

  L: Can you hear me?

  G: Yes.

  L: You’re aboard Clever Daughter and it’s the 4th of November.

  G: Happy Birthday, Frem.

  L: Right, Happy Birthday, Frem. Now it’s 04:06.

  G: OK for flicker on 47.7 Ems. Hit the switch, Plessik. Bye bye Hubble.

  L: Bye bye Hubble. What now?

  G: What?

  L: What’s happening?

  G: Oh no. Hold on.

  L: Hold on to what?

  G: No, no, no.

  L: What are you seeing?

  G: Not seeing.

  L: What then? Hearing?

  G: (VIBRATES TONGUE AGAINST ROOF OF MOUTH WHILE EXPELLING BREATH) Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

  L: What’s that? Did you hear a sound like that?

  G: No.

  L: What then?

  G: Riffling.

  L: What? What riffling?

  G: Like a great big pack of cards.

  L: This is something you heard?

  G: No.

  L: It was in your mind?

  G: Piss off, Dr Lovecraft.

  Caroline gave me that to read after the session. When I finished I put it back on her desk so that it was lying at an angle in front of her. She lined it up parallel to the edge of the desk. ‘Why did you tell me to piss off?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know – I suppose I don’t like having too many people inside my head.’

  ‘OK, I can understand that; I know it’s an intrusion but we need answers. Do you remember telling me about the riffling?’

  ‘No.’

  She put the transcript in the file. ‘Can you tell me anything else at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Straightsies?’

  ‘Straightsies.’

  ‘You’re not bleeping for a Section 10, are you?’ Section 10 is Contract annulled without censure due to job-related illness or injury; full pay and compensation as stipulated in Clause 86.

  ‘All I’m bleeping for is a little peace and quiet.’

  ‘You won’t find it in this world, Frem.’

  That was where the first day of the Level 4 ended. When somebody in a white jacket came to take me to my quarters I found various colours in my head for which there were no words. I wanted to demonstrate these colours to the somebody in the white jacket but he seemed to want me to keep still so I had to knock him down, after which he got up and knocked me down and sat on me while somebody else zapped me with a large shot of Be-a-Good-Chap and I woke up the next morning feeling very well rested.

  9

  Let’s take a kayak to Quincey or Nyack,

  Let’s get away from it all.

  Matt Dennis and Thomas Adair, ‘Let’s Get Away from It All’

  ‘You ever been to Badru?’ said Caroline next morning.

  ‘It’s one of my favourite places.’

  ‘Feel like going there today?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s nothing official – I just want to see what it feels like, the two of us on Badru. We’ll drink Krasnaya Kola and eat Galaktik Miks with Spudnik Fry and spend the night in a Q-BO SLEEP. How’s that grab you?’

  ‘Hard. But is this a you-and-me personal thing or is it a new approach to the Level 4?’

  ‘Look, Frem – the you that’s part of the you-and-me personal thing is the same you that’s nilsponding the Level 4. So I don’t really know how much of it is for me and how much is for Corporation. Is that OK?’

  ‘OK, let’s do Badru.’

  There was a 10:00 jet so we caught it. The other passengers were mostly lingerie salesman from a company called Flauntees Ltd, all of them wearing badges with their first names on them and all of them bound for Yamomoto Pleasure Station 7 for their annual sales conference. Several of them looked at Caroline with eyes that were obviously undressing her and putting her into something more comfortable but they were quiet about it.

  ‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,’ said a husky female voice after we buckled ourselves in. ‘Welcome aboard the Pandora, your Interjet shuttle service to Badr al-Budur. I’m Captain Kurtz and I’ve got a green board in front of me so as soon as we get the word from Traffic Control we’ll be off. Our jump time to Badru is eight minutes, give or take the odd half-hour depending on the El Niños. Today’s forecast is fifteen per cent so it shouldn’t be too bad. A final reminder: if you haven’t already checked all electronic equipment, please buzz a cabin attendant and do it now.’ There was a pause while three or four laptops were collected, then the clear for blastoff sounded. ‘Cabin attendants, please buckle up,’ said the captain, and there was a bone-rattling roar as we blasted off. Once in our flight path we lurched, wobbled, shook, rattled, and rolled as we hit the El Niños and Pandora and all of us grew alternately longer, shorter, and otherwise, bending and twisting with the varying force fields. Strange colours surged around the ship and faded into blackness on the seatback monitors. Some of the Flauntees Ltd first-names began to chant, ‘Tees-Flaun, Tees-Flaun,’ then became quiet as sick bags were brought into play and the cabin staff were kept on the hop with urgent calls for aid of one kind or another. Eventually the spaceport at Badru appeared in the seatback monitors, the captain said, ‘Layzen gemmen, than kyoufer flynnerjet, hopesee yougen. Hava plenstop Badru,’ and we were down after an hour and sixteen minutes of jump.

  Everybody staggered off Pandora into the dim blue noctolux and many-coloured neon of the spaceport. The Flauntees Ltd crowd dispersed into the gift shop, the bar, and MIKHAIL’S QWIKSNAK; Caroline and I wobbled to a bench and sat down as the spaceport filled up with emptiness and that imbricated silence made up of the low roar of the air-cycling system, the hum of the robot sweepers, the sizzle of the noctolux lamps, and the sound of distant footsteps. The smell of the spaceport at Badru, that blend of LavaKleen, floor wax, and frying, is the smell of all-alone and faraway that meets the traveller everywhere in the world of nowheres. The big board showed that it was 19:23 in Tokyo, 11:23 in Paris, 06:23 in New York. Departures on offer were:

  YAM PLEAS STATN 7 INTGAL JMP 14 DEP 12:15 NOT READY

  NEWCOMP CONF CTR TRNSCT JMP 03 DEP 13:40 NOT READY

  Caroline took my hand and laced her fingers into mine. ‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘dawmsfergahn hamuch s’plasis wah’iss.’

  ‘Saygen,’ I said. ‘Berrwaylill.’

  We waited a little and tried again. ‘Jesus,’ said Caroline, ‘I’d almost forgotten how much this place is what it is.’

  ‘I hadn’t.’ I was seeing the figure in the blue coverall tumbling over and over in the icy cold, Badr al-Budur like a pale moon in the distance.

  ‘This is the real thing,’ said Caroline. ‘It’s the deepest, the profoundest. It’s the big bazonga, it’s really existential.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, watching a distant sweeper with a faulty program banging again and again into the Information kiosk, ‘just don’t tell me it’s a metaphor, OK?’

  ‘Sorry! Shall we go for a Galaktik Mik?’

  ‘Right. That’s what I need – that Quasi-Protein fix.’ Followed by our echoing footsteps we made our way to MIKHAIL’S QWIKSNAK where the smell of frying embraced us greasily and the coloured neon hung like exotic nocturnal fruit.
/>
  ‘Have a good hello,’ burbled the charming female robot at the entrance to the cafeteria. ‘Welcome day Qwiksnak to Mikhail’s hello, have a, have a, have a … Come back and see us hello.’

  ‘You too,’ we said. We slid our trays along the rails under red, orange, yellow, purple, and blue neon, loaded up with Galaktik Miks, Spudnik Fry, and Krasnaya Kolas, and found ourselves a table by the windows. In the distance Qamar al-Zaman the rubbish planet hung like a rotting grapefruit while all around us the Flauntees reps chewed and swallowed and called each other Kevin and Tony and Fred in loud voices.

  ‘This is one of your special places, is it?’ ‘I said to Caroline. ‘One of your reference points?’

  She nodded. ‘This is a paradigm of what-it-is,’ she said. ‘It’s a place where you eat non-food and wait for a jump to somewhere else that’s not ready.’

  ‘Only we’re not waiting for a jump to somewhere else.’

  ‘No, we’re not going to somewhere else, you and I.’

  ‘We could, though, if we wanted to.’

  ‘Pleasure Station Seven? Would you like to see me in Flauntees with suspenders and net stockings?’

  ‘I like to see you any way at all, Caroline.’

  ‘Let’s walk – I’ve had as much Quasi as I can handle.’

  ‘Have a good hello,’ said the robot hostess as we left. We went to the observation bubble, not a very big one. From there we had a good view of the Anunnaki, Ereshkigal, and Inanna’s Girdle as well as Qamar al-Zaman. ‘Everything has a name put to it,’ said Caroline, ‘but the name has nothing to do with the reality. The name Caroline is derived from Charles which means manly. Do you think I’m manly?’

  ‘In a very womanly way. What’s the matter, Caroline? What’s bothering you?’

  ‘Nothing in particular; I just wanted to come here because sometimes I like to be in a place where what’s outside me isn’t too different from what’s inside me.’

  ‘I guess that’s why I like it. But you don’t look as if desolation is your thing.’

  ‘Maybe that’s my problem – I look like a lot of laughs but I’m not. Let’s go to the mini-cine and watch something old in black-and-white – Brief Encounter maybe.’

  We went to the mini-cine near the Q-BO SLEEP, found an empty two-seater that reeked of beer and semen, and punched up Brief Encounter.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Caroline as the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto came in over the credits, ‘look! The very first thing you see is a train hurtling away from you in great clouds of steam, then a train coming towards you, then Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson sitting at a table in the refreshment room at Milford Junction and that awful woman chattering so they can’t even have a proper goodbye. Their story begins with the ending of it. That’s so true, it’s so much the way life is.’ She began to sniffle, brought a box of tissues out of her shoulder bag, and settled back to enjoy the film. When Celia Johnson, trapped in a compartment with the dreadful Dolly, said to herself, ‘Nothing lasts, really – neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long,’ Caroline wept openly. ‘Oh shit,’ she said, ‘that gets me every time.’

  I hugged her and kissed her and she made little comfortable noises and told me more about the film which I too had seen several times. ‘Their story begins when he takes a bit of grit out of her eye, he opens her eyes to something she hadn’t seen before. She knew what was happening by the time they’d spent their first afternoon together at the pictures; and it was obviously one of those things that just couldn’t be but it’s so sad and I cry every time.’

  After the film we had dinner at Mikhail’s Bistro where the prices are higher than those at the Qwiksnak but the Quasi-Protein is pretty much the same except for the sauces. Afterwards we walked around the spaceport not talking, just being with each other in the echoing silence. At Hubble Straits when I wasn’t with Caroline and I thought about her, the picture that came first was always her walk: it was a walk that pleasured the eye, a noble way of moving. As we slowly strolled with her arm linked in mine and our bodies touching I felt proud to be the one she walked with.

  ‘What do you want out of life, Frem?’ she said.

  Again I saw the figure in the blue coverall tumbling over and over, drifting in deep space, pictures frozen in its mind. ‘I want to be the whole me, whatever that is.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to remember all that you’ve forgotten, won’t you?’

  ‘It’ll come back when it’s ready, I guess.’ We didn’t say any more about it then. It was after midnight when we got to the Q-BO SLEEP. We found a double, punched in our IDs and our wake-up time, cleaned our teeth, washed our faces, undressed, and crept naked under the thin grey blankets – two bare forked creatures holding each other tight with a great blackness all around.

  10

  They call it stormy Monday,

  But Tuesday’s just as bad.

  T-Bone Walker, ‘They Call It Stormy Monday’

  Back at Hubble Straits next morning the Level 4 continued and Caroline again produced the hypno session transcript. ‘Maybe if we go over it once more something will come back to you,’ she said. Her manner seemed to suggest that now I was ready to be good and perform as required.

  ‘Why should anything more come back to me?’

  ‘Maybe you haven’t such a tight grip on yourself as you did the day of the hypno session.’

  ‘Do you mean that our trip to Badru was meant to loosen me up?’

  ‘Not really. But I did think that maybe some of the walls were down.’

  ‘Do you remember, Dr Lovecraft, in Hamlet, where Hamlet shows Guildenstern a recorder and asks him if he can play it?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Guildenstern says no, he can’t. And Hamlet says something like, “If you can’t play a simple instrument like this, how do you think you can play me?”’

  ‘I’m not trying to play you.’

  ‘You say you’re not but you are.’

  ‘What’s the big secret here, Fremder? What is it you don’t want to look at?’

  I could feel it growing huge in me but I didn’t know what it was. ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘I believe that you don’t remember but I think you don’t want to remember and I think you could if you wanted to.’

  ‘You’re welcome to your opinion, Dr Lovecraft.’

  Things became distinctly cooler between us after that. We didn’t sleep together again after Badru but Caroline didn’t give up on the Level 4. Sometimes she attacked the physical symptoms of my problems: the best neuro specialists in Physio/Psycho did many EEGs and VC scans but they couldn’t find anything organically wrong with my vision so I had to go on looking at things past bright circles of emptiness.

  The Caroline-and-me thing didn’t grind to a complete halt; sometimes we had drinks and dinner together at the Hubble Bubble. The light there was dim and retentive and the pianist in the lounge was Wasny Flim whose ‘Planetary Fade’ had been Top of the Charts when Judith and I saw the owl. He was a small dark man, all slants and angles like his music. Under the spotlight his eyes were closed and his head thrown back as he wove his wistful intervals through the shadows and the circumambient murmur. And always beyond him receded the black sparkle of space in which the flicker docks and Mikhail’s Snackdome regularly came and went together with the Hawking Threshold light, Ereshkigal, the seven Anunnaki, and Inanna’s Girdle. When Caroline and I came to the lounge at the end of the first week he was playing ‘Where or When’ and talking a throwaway vocal in the Sun Ra manner:

  Some things that happen for the first time,

  Seem to be happening again.

  ‘Maybe there’s no such thing as a first time for anything,’ said Caroline. ‘Maybe the same things keep happening over and over.’ Her voice was lower than usual and she wasn’t looking at me. Flim and his piano continued to suggest that we had met before and laughed before and loved before but who knew where or when? 24 HRS – FREIGHTERS YES, said Mikhail’s Snackdome sile
ntly.

  I’ve mentioned before this the little tribunal of the dusk. There’s no dusk at Hubble Straits but the little tribunal were sitting anyhow, this time as twelve eagle owls, each on a child’s coffin. Please, I said to the mind that had spoken to me of the everything-fear and the all-terror, tell me how to be.

  To my inner eye came white mist on the ancient waters of time’s beginning but there were no words as the Snackdome came round again.

  ‘Freighters yes,’ said Caroline. ‘Everybody’s carrying some kind of a load.’ I let that lie there. She held up her empty glass and I signalled the waiter to bring two more of the same.

  ‘One more river to cross,’ said Caroline as she looked into her fresh gin-and-tonic.

  I didn’t ask her what she meant. We had several more of the same; the bright circles of emptiness in my vision spangled into soft focus and the effect was not unpleasant.

  ‘Maybe this will get us to Level 5,’ she said. ‘Level 4 certainly hasn’t amounted to much.’

  My head was singing:

  PACK UP ALL MY CARE AND WOE,

  HERE I GO, SINGING LOW,

  BYE BYE BLACKBIRD.

  ‘Coward,’ said Caroline.

  ‘That’s your professional opinion, is it?’

  ‘Yes, it is: I’ve given you four openings and you’re afraid to get into it with me.’

  ‘Into what?’

  ‘You know very well what – you’ve stonewalled the one-on-ones and somehow you’ve managed to jam the RE runs and the hypno sessions. We’re seven days into the Level 4 and I haven’t got diddly-poo to show for it.’

  ‘I’m sorry if I’m making you look bad with the Sheela-Na-Gig but there are things I just can’t remember.’

  ‘You’re not sorry. When it’s ooh-ooh time you’re out of your pants like greased lightning but when it’s Level 4 time you zip your mouth shut and you don’t care how it makes me look.’

  ‘Oh, I see. This is the first time that you’ve made it absolutely clear that this was a sex-for-answers deal. And for a little while I thought it was my desperation pheromones that were lighting your fire.’