She pressed a key on her computer and a tone sounded. It was a clean, pure note of red. Then the tone changed and it went more… orangey?
I told her what I was hearing, but I was kind of hesitant. I had to think hard about this because I sensed it was enough to put me in the nut house.
“Well, Ronnie, enjoy it. And remember how it feels because it won’t last. Couple of days, max, and the synaesthesia will be gone.”
“Ready,” shouted Ponytail. “Soon as you like, Lisa. Hook him up.”
They wheeled this thing over. It was like a big inverted bowl made of chicken wire, with white donuts stuck in amongst the wires. Coming out of the back was a heavy loom of cables, as thick as my arm.
“You haven’t made your ‘no pain’ promise, yet,” I said.
“No,” she said. “We’ve only used the machine once before. I don’t make promises unless I’m sure about them. But the guy we used it on last didn’t complain.”
“He couldn’t very well, could he,” chipped in Ponytail. “He’s dead.”
The doctor went white. She turned on Ponytail and ripped in to him; gave him a right good arse-kicking.
“I am sorry,” she said, with another sideways glare at Ponytail. “I’m sorry. Really. My moronic colleague’s idea of humour. The other patient is not dead.”
I gave Ponytail a smirk. I wasn’t bothered. I thought it was quite funny. It took the tension out of the situation. You get sick of being patronised when do-gooders come inside. I didn’t stop the doc’ from bollockin’ him, though. I thought that was quite funny, too.
I let them put the contraption on my head. They took a while. They farted about with it, trying to line the thing up so it was inch perfect. There was a coloured display on the screen that I took to be the inside of my head. The doc’ turned it away from me.
“Can’t let you look, Ronnie, sorry. Even though you don’t know what any of it means you could be influenced by seeing the visual results of some of the inputs.”
“What is it?” I asked. “The machine?”
“It’s a DFrTMS,” she said. “Deep focussing repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation.”
“Oh, right, one of those.” I made no attempt at keeping the sarcasm from out of my voice.
“Standard rTMS has been used for a while. It uses magnetic stimulation to wake up dormant parts of the brain. But it’s kind of vague and not very portable. This one’s a special. It doesn’t need the kind of magnetic shielding the other devices need because it can focus to a precise three dimensional point in space. We use sympathetic magnetic resonance – something like the wireless power sources they’ve been dabbling with for home media.”
“Well I suppose I’ll have to take your word for it.”
“Once it’s working we can guide it to the parts of your brain that become activated by specific questioning. That’s why I didn’t want you to think about certain… things, until we were ready.”
“And now we are ready,” said Ponytail. “Looks good from here. Good imaging – nice and tight. Ask away, Lisa.”
“First, we’ll show you a video,” she said. “One you’ve seen before.”
It was the funeral again. Lot of people standing around watching a screen.
“They don’t seem to be at the funeral itself,” I said. “They’re watching it on the telly. What’s all that supposed to be about?”
“He didn’t have life insurance. Traditional funerals are expensive. So they did what a lot of people do, now, when they’re a bit strapped – they used EasyPeace.com.”
“Never heard of it.”
“It’s an online funeral service. You go online and select all the elements you want, or can afford, and they set everything up, the complete package. But they don’t encourage you to attend the actual cremation. And burial isn’t an option.”
“So you get to watch on telly?”
“Yeah, that’s about the size of it. I believe you select a venue, online. You probably key-in your postcode and they tell you what’s available, I don’t know the specifics. You give them some details about the deceased – favourite music, films, hobbies. You upload some family photos and videos. EasyPeace.com do the rest. Watch, the video’s starting. They put together a kind of potted life history, a collage of all the images and audio, and they play it for the guests. Usually they throw in some product placement, too, to keep down the costs even further. Then there’s footage of the coffin gliding off behind the velvet curtains.”
I watched in shock at the tacky performance. The camera zoomed in tight onto the coffin, and there on the side was a space for advertising; a logo for Oberhausen Lager, and another, a government health warning about the dangers of smoking.
Lisa continued. “And with a final fanfare - some off-the-shelf, spiritually uplifting music - it’s all over. The widow doesn’t even get the ashes. They email her an electronic copy of the proceedings that she can download onto her PC.”
“How does she know it’s her husband in the coffin?”
“It probably isn’t. The cremation scene will be stock footage. They probably just re-shoot every now and again with different advertising. The husband, Peter Thorpe, the man you murdered, was probably incinerated hours earlier.”
The man I murdered.
His name was Peter Thorpe. His funeral. I’d forgotten what it was, exactly, that I’d been watching here, I’d been so swept-up in the grim reality of EasyPeace.com.
The video had finished but Lisa – I’d started thinking of her as Lisa rather than Doctor Simmonds now – Lisa had frozen the image. It was a tableau of a woman dressed in black. Her face was a mess. She’d tried to put on makeup but with a clumsy hand. Now it was streaked into black rivers down her cheeks. On either side of her, holding each hand, were two girls, no more than seven or eight years old. Their faces were blank masks of shock. Empty. There was nothing there.
“He had daughters,” I said.
“Isabella and Flora.”
I stared at the frozen image. I’d seen all this before, but I hadn’t seen it. My chest felt like someone had lodged a bowling ball in there. My throat felt swollen. My eyes were swimming and then… tears. I couldn’t remember ever having shed tears before. Not in my entire life. Even as a child. Now they poured, running down my face, soaking my prison shirt.
“When your father… died,” I said. “Did you..? I mean… What kind of funeral?”
“Lisa, careful,” said Ponytail, “I don’t think this is a very constructive line…” She waved him off - but she didn’t answer me, not for a while. She was deep in some distant memory.
“I was twelve,” she said at last. “Mum didn’t understand these things. I certainly didn’t. The prison service phoned her and said they’d be willing to take care of everything. They emphasised how funerals were expensive.”
She wiped away a tear. I felt clashing, gulping emotions inside. I guess it would be difficult enough for anyone to take in this kind of tale without some kind of response. I was taking it both barrels, with the first emotions I’d ever known.
“Mum signed a release paper. From then on my dad belonged to them. They cremated him – we think. We don’t know when. His ashes – or his bones - are somewhere. We don’t know where. We have no access to his prison records, his medical records, anything.”
She was openly crying, now.
We both were.
“Ronnie,” she said, “We’d have given anything for a seedy, low-budget EasyPeace.com funeral back then. I even tried to arrange something a few years back, fifteen years after he died, you know, so we could get some kind of closure. Mum didn’t make it. After we lost Dad she just slid downhill. After Mum died I cancelled the arrangements, there didn’t seem to be much point any more.”
I stared at her.
“Ronnie, you asked me why I do this. You wondered what I have against prisons. Well, I hope you understand just a small part of it, now.”
“Is that real or just some stock fairytale aimed
at pushing the right buttons?” I said.
“It’s not a story. I’m a Behavioural Pharmacologist – I don’t do acting. You’ve probably heard many tales like this before, but you’ve never had the mental equipment to engage with them. Now you have. My gift to you.”
She looked over at Ponytail, who nodded.
“Did it hurt? So we can tell future patients,” she asked.
“It’s done?”
“Oh yes, all the circuits are burned into place forever. You now have a conscience, Ronnie Parkinson. All that remains for us to do is to tag you. Shoulder okay?”
“I nodded.”
“This will hurt. Promise. And I do keep my promises.”
Ponytail held something against my shoulder, and zap! Shit, she wasn’t lying. I rubbed the sore spot on my shoulder and glared at Ponytail.
But I didn’t feel like killing him.
“Sorry,” he said. He didn’t look very sorry.
“You’ll be monitored,” said Lisa.
“So I don’t run off?”
She shook her head. “The tag is for us. You will try to kill yourself. We can’t allow that. You’re going to have to live with what you’ve done, now. There’ll be no easy way out for you.”
“What do you mean, ‘what I’ve done?’”
“You’ll understand, soon enough. But I’ll give you a starter for ten. Think about Flora and Isabella. Think about those two little girls growing up without their Dad. And think about his wife. Think about how it was you that took their husband and father away from them. Because he spoiled your evening out with a girl whose name you can’t remember.”
Martinson came and led me out of the van. He took me to a room where I was given a pair of jeans and a shirt and a pair of shoes. The same clothes I’d been wearing the night I stabbed Peter Thorpe and destroyed his family. They’d been washed. No blood stains.
Prison Officers told me things, gave me papers to sign, took me through gates with bars that slammed behind me; pushed me towards a judas gate set in a heavy steel double door. Pushed me through. To the outside. Where I stood, blinking, and people looked at me, a pale, dazed, sad looking man dressed in twelve-year-old clothes that were already soaked through with tears and snot.
Martinson took me to see Frank Moss. It felt strange to be back, but also a little like being home. No, not home. Just… back.
“Mr Moss, good to see you,” I said.
“Wish I could say the same, Mr Parkinson,” he said. “I didn’t expect to see you back here so soon. And you are not looking so good.”
I was surprised to have been brought to ‘the office’ rather than the visiting room. But, as I’ve said, Frank Moss was different. He was respected. And also, I suppose, technically, not even an inmate.
“I can see it,” said Moss. “It is there in your eyes. My god, yes, I can see remorse. The real thing. You look haunted.”
I hung my head and the tears flowed again, at once.
“Every day, Mr Moss. I see those two little girls holding their mother’s hand. I see the emptiness in their eyes. I can’t take it Mr Moss. I can’t take this bastard thing. This… conscience. I want it out. What do I do? How do I take it away?”
“Clinically you can’t do anything. But you could try and help the family.”
“They won’t see me. I sent money. It came back.”
“I can understand that.”
“What do I do?” Mr Moss.
“Do? You do what I have done for twenty-seven years, Mr Parkinson. You take one day at a time. You suffer. You feel.”
He let me sit a while with my head in my hands, my throat gulping and convulsing.
“Let me tell you something,” he said, after a while. “I get to hear stuff, you know? It might help. It might not. Something about Doctor Simmonds. May I?”
I nodded.
“Lisa Simmonds lost her father while he was in prison.”
“I knew that,” I said.
“Yes, but did you know the circumstances?”
I shook my head.
“Patrick Simmonds was stabbed by another inmate. A killer. A psychopath with no conscience. Now do you understand?”
“No. No I don’t. Why would she be so eager, then, to free a person such as me?”
“Mr Parkinson. Ronnie. I have a conscience. I made a mistake and I have lived with the memories of that mistake for twenty-seven years. I know how conscience feels. Do you doubt there has been a single day in those twenty-seven years when I have not wished for that memory to be erased?”
I shook my head and looked down at my hands, clasped and wringing in my lap.
“You have the advantage over me. You haven’t always known guilt. You wish you could be restored to that former, blissful state of indifference? Of course you do. But that will never happen. Ever. Since you left us, Lisa Simmonds has secured the release of hundreds of murderers just like you. She is the quintessential abolitionist and yet she has exacted vengeance, the most exquisite vengeance. She has given you a conscience, Ronnie Parkinson. A gift? Or a curse? Embrace it. Accept it. You must. Know that you must carry it with you every day, down the long road to your grave.
“One day at a time, Ronnie Parkinson. One day at a time.”
THE ANGEL IN THE HOURGLASS
by Douglas Sterling
I swirl in my daughter’s closet spectral and thin. I peer through the door’s slats with discarnate eyes. Standing outside is the woman I used to be before the collapse. She is confident with youth. She leans over Christiana and damps her tears with the hem of her apron, promising her that what she saw was only a trick of the light.
“Only lightning, baby. There’s no such thing as ghosts.”
Christiana pulls the down comforter to her nose. A battalion of stuffed animals keeps watch behind her: moth-eaten teddy bears with dangling eyes, crocheted clowns hemorrhaging stuffing.
“But mommy,” says Christiana, “This lightning had a face.”
I’ve gone to a time in our lives when we had no idea the event was looming, waiting for us over the horizon. But I wasn’t careful enough. I wandered a little too close and my daughter caught a glimpse of my diminished manifestation.
My former self sits on the bed and taps the tip of Christiana’s nose. She says, “Sometimes the things we see aren’t really there. It’s just our minds playing games, calling up things from our imaginations.”
It’s torment watching this perfect replay of a life I’ve already lived - it fills me with self-loathing and jealousy all at the same time. I want so badly to touch Christiana, to be near her again - but more than that, I want to give her the life she deserves, a life unspoiled by the collapse.
“But what if it comes back?” asks Christiana.
“The secret to making sure it doesn’t,” says my former self, “is to think about something else.”
I used to read to my daughter from books full of poetry, hoping to soothe her with patterns. I told her that words beautify life, infusing the meaningless avalanche with music. I said that words left unattended on pages are asleep, that they need to be called to life. To set them loose you need lips and teeth, you need sibilant slicing and consonant crashing, all working in accord. And then the symbols lift into the air, and they become music. And life becomes bearable.
My daughter’s eyelids dip. My former self stands, brushing her hand over the light switch as she heads for the door.
“Now go back to sleep, my brave little fighter,” she whispers. “You know I’ll never let anything happen. I’ll always be here to protect you.”
But she is an unwitting liar. She doesn’t know that she’s the one that ruins everything, the one that lets everything happen - after all, she’s yet to commit the crime.
I cannot bring myself to interfere. I would only bring chaos and terror in my ghostly state. I need to leave before Christiana’s eyes readjust and she notices the glow coming from inside her closet.
So I let go. I fall out of time.
The stream opens beneath me like a chute, sending my spirit whisking across the years, crossing centuries of civilization in a single second, gliding over the gray precipitous stretch, through the cobalt flash, and into the ochre wasteland beyond.
This is where my daughter lives now, in a junk strewn slumscape hundreds of thousands of hours away, inside a scrap metal shack heaped full of trash. She lives in a world that is dead. Flowers that used to burn in the sunlight are dull, dampened, lifeless, and grey. All life has been robbed of its luster. This is a world overcome with shadows. But these shadows are unlike the familiar blankets we used to drag around behind us - these are shadows loosed from their owners, set free to drift like lobotomized patients, shambling this way and that.
Christiana is the last of her kind, the last flesh and blood person, and living in this dead world is killing her. Humanity requires fellow humans, mirror neurons need something to reflect, they need words and company and music, which is why I need to make a way out for her. I need to set her free from this endless living death.
The blighting of the collapse has burned my beautiful girl into a cadaverous emaciate. It’s given her rifts for eyes. It’s made her a ventifact version of herself. She’s been worn by the firestorm of time. My glow deepens the furrows lining her face, lighting her nettled hair with streaks of amber.
She looks up at me. Cracked lips part, rheumy eyes flicker to life.
“You’re back,” says Christiana.
I steady myself and speak slowly, careful to avoid the sudden movements that smear my features, changing my face into a formless, phantasmagoric mask, stretching my countenance across a rack of seconds.
“I’m sorry,” I say, my words ringing out, twisting and phasing. “Maybe it was another Tantalus branch. I can’t tell. Either way, it wasn’t useful. And you almost saw me this time. I probably gave you years worth of nightmares.”
Kzine Issue 8 Page 8