Only Forward

by Michael Marshall Smith

  It’s partly being in Eastedge that does that, too. As we walked slowly along the front, the strong breeze wrapping our clothes round the front of our bodies, I saw that the Neighbourhood had changed not at all since I’d last been there. It looks like a ghost town, which is what it is. Eastedge is big, covering about fifty miles of coastland, yet only about twenty people live there. No one comes here, and they haven’t in over a hundred years. We’ve turned our back on the sea, turned our back on that huge churning storm of uncertainty: we don’t need it any more, have no use for it. The buildings along the front are still in a reasonable state of repair, because nobody has the energy to come this far to vandalise a dead town. What would be the point? The shops and restaurants, genteel crumbling hotels and rotting jetties, they wait out the decades by themselves, watching the tides and the passing years, left well behind in time with nothing but dissolution in front of them, the fading palaces of yesterday’s world.

  See what I mean? I’ll try to snap out of it.

  ‘It’s a bit spooky, actually,’ Alkland said, dragging his eyes away from the sea to take in the peeling storefronts and windswept and deserted street. ‘Doesn’t anybody live here any more?’

  ‘A very few, mild cranks and lunatics for the most part. We’re going to visit one of them now.’

  ‘Are we?’ The Actioneer sounded dubious. ‘Why? And where’s that piano coming from?’

  We were getting closer to the source of the music. It was actually rather beautiful in an eerie way, small fragments of a melody of calm melancholy. As we passed one of the bigger restaurants on the other side of the street I thought I saw a flicker of movement deep within, but didn’t go to check. The people here are easily frightened, and I liked the music.

  ‘We’re going to visit him because he has a plane.’

  ‘Ah. I wondered why we’d come all this way.’ After an untroubled night’s sleep the Actioneer didn’t look any healthier, but he certainly seemed more chipper, in a tired sort of way. ‘Are we leaving the country or something?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And no. We’re not going in the plane. He is.’

  ‘I see,’ he replied, and then frowned. ‘No, I don’t. What are we doing, then?’

  ‘Staying here.’

  ‘What?’

  I knew that sooner or later I was going to have to try to explain the next bit to Alkland, but wanted to hold off for the time being. If he didn’t have much time to think about it, it would be easier for me. Or less unbelievably difficult, anyway.

  ‘Trust me.’

  ‘Hmm,’ he said, but he left it at that.

  Two hours later we were sitting in the Dome. The Dome used to be the big hotel on the strip, the place where you came if you had a tremendous amount of money and wanted to make that fact absolutely clear to everyone else. Short of carrying a large sign, the best way of saying, ‘Hey look: I have more cash than I possibly know what to do with,’ was to check into the Dome for a couple of weeks.

  But rich people have become very serious, it seems, and now those people are hanging out in Brandfield and Cash Neighbourhoods, playing golf. Being rich doesn’t look like as much fun as it used to be. In the old days you got rich, and then stopped working and concentrated very hard on having a very good time in very expensive ways. Now people get rich, and then just work harder to try to become even richer. Sometimes they play golf. That’s it, apparently. Doesn’t sound like a bundle of laughs to me, but there you are.

  We were sitting in the Dome’s dining room, which is a room about a hundred metres square still littered with the occasional chair and table amidst the dust and debris. The room is at the centre of the hotel, and has no windows. That’s important.

  Finding Villig had been easy. He lives in a kind of one-man shanty town on the beach. He started off in the old changing hut there, but over the years has added lean-tos and extensions and bits and pieces until now it covers the beach from road to sea in a strip about twenty yards wide.

  For reasons known only to himself, and probably not even to him, Villig has built his ‘house’ in such a way that the roof is only about four feet off the ground. Inside is a series of chambers and tunnels and dens, and you have to get around by crawling on your hands and knees. Leaving the Actioneer outside, to his relief, I found one of the several entrances and burrowed in towards the centre.

  It took a while to find him, but Villig was in. He’s always in. If I didn’t come and stir up his nest with a stick every now and then he would probably have taken root by now. Once I’d found him I crawled towards what serves as the kitchen and made a pot of Jahavan Stupidly High Strength Coffee. Don’t ever drink that stuff, by the way: it makes foolish and unhelpful thoughts feel like a state of transcendental bliss. Drinking Jahavan Stupidly High Strength makes you realise why alcoholics drink so much. It’s only in Villig’s kitchen because I put it there.

  Fashioning a rough funnel out of cardboard I tipped the stuff down Villig’s throat until he was a functioning human being and then hustled him out of a tunnel into the outside world. Alkland was down at the waterline, staring benignly out at the massive expanse of blue, letting the water lap up close to his shoes, watching the waves, smelling the salt.

  ‘Wow,’ Villig said on re-entry, ‘It’s all still here. The sky, the earth, all that stuff. Cool. And no snakes.’

  Alkland joined us, regarding Villig with some caution. The fact that Villig dresses in rags and has hair down to his waist tends not to inspire confidence, and I don’t think Alkland had ever met a card-carrying loony before. Villig gazed vaguely back at the Actioneer for a while, and then turned and punched me on the shoulder.

  ‘So, Stark, Eh? Hm? Eh?’ He stopped, laboriously backtracked in his mind for what the point of his sentence was supposed to be, found it, and then continued, ‘Back into the fray, eh? Back into the twilight zone, am I right? Eh?’

  He then giggled for quite some time. Alkland raised his eyebrows at me and I shrugged. Villig is a complete disaster of a human being in all but one respect. There’s one thing he’s uniquely qualified to do, and I needed him to do it now.

  ‘Vill,’ I said, waving a hand in front of his face to attract his attention, ‘I need to go soon.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ he grunted, and then whirled round to look at Alkland again, who flinched. ‘This the gentleman? This the plaintiff?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He’ll be going too.’

  ‘Yeah, right on.’ Villig peered closely at the Actioneer’s face for a while. ‘Been having some bad dreams, hey?’

  Alkland stared at him, startled.

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I can see it in your skin, man. It’s written all over.’

  Alkland turned to me, realising, for the first time I suspect, that there might be a little more to his sleeping problems than he’d realised. That was good. That was the reason I’d brought him to meet Villig, rather than leave him to his own devices while I sorted things out.

  ‘Okay,’ said Villig abruptly. He shut his eyes tight for a long moment, and then reopened them. Though still bloodshot, they looked suddenly intelligent, the blue still piercing despite his best efforts to extinguish it. He looked at his wrist, tutted because there was no watch there, and asked me the time.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Right. Give me an hour.’ He nodded at Alkland who, surprised by his new note of authority, nodded back. Then he strode off down the beach. We watched him go for a moment and then Alkland spoke.

  ‘Stark,’ he said, ‘you have some very odd friends.’

  And now, sitting at a table and surrounded by faded grandeur, I tried to explain to him what was going to happen next.

  You see, what it is, is this.

  Things are sometimes the way they appear.

  That’s the bottom line, the concentrate version, but you have to add it to one other fact before you see where I’m going.

  Imagine a road you know well, the one your apartment is on, or the road to the stores or somethi
ng. Now picture yourself walking down it. Think of the buildings, the trees if there are any, the cracks in the pavement, the way the journey looks and feels.

  Done that? Okay, now do the same, but coming up the road.

  Feels different, doesn’t it? I don’t just mean in the obvious way: the road you’re walking up or down feels actually different, seems like a different road. Sure, you know it’s the same, but how does it actually look, how does it feel?

  Does it feel like you’re walking up and down the same road, or does it seem a little bit like you’re walking the same way down different roads?

  You may have noticed this before, noticed that if you go a different way down a road you use all the time you may not recognise it, may have noticed that the journey back from somewhere always seems quicker than the journey out, even if you go the same way.

  Okay, so what, you’re saying: perception, psychology, subjectivity. What difference?

  That’s the point. It isn’t perception, psychology or subjectivity. Roads are different depending which way you go down them. That really is the way it is. Not a lot of people realise that, are equipped to see it and believe it: the fact that Villig does is why he can do what he does, and the fact that I do is one of the reasons I’m so good at what I do. It’s a hell of a difficult thing to come to terms with, but that’s the way it is. And once you realise that, the gates are thrown wide open.

  ‘All right,’ said Alkland eventually. ‘All right. Even if I do accept that intellectually, as a conceptual position, what difference does it make? And what does it have to do with us being here and with that odd man?’

  I lit another cigarette. The last half hour had been very heavy-going. As I expected, the can-do, rational, reality-is-what-it-seems Actioneer had put up a long and rigorous fight against what I’d just tried to explain, and he still wasn’t buying it. I wouldn’t care, but he had to be convinced, or at least ready to believe. Without that, this wasn’t going to work.

  ‘You’ve never been in a plane, have you?’ I asked, by way of preparation. ‘Or flown to a different country?’

  ‘No, of course I haven’t.’

  ‘Right.’ I said, and rubbed my forehead. ‘Well, you’re going to have to take my word for the next bit then.’

  People generally do have to. Nobody goes abroad these days, any more than they wander round seeing different Neighbourhoods.

  ‘Well,’ I started, and then changed my mind abruptly. He wasn’t going to believe what I was going to tell him, simply wasn’t built to intuitively take on board what some guy on a plane had realised a few hundred years back, and what it meant. I was just going to have to hope that my belief, my knowledge, was enough to carry us both. It generally was, but I sensed that Alkland was going to be a heavy load.

  ‘Never mind. The point is this. You and I are going to walk out of this hotel, and walk down to the beach. Then we’re going to keep on walking for a couple of miles.’

  ‘Into the sea?’ laughed Alkland.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. His face changed, and for the first time I saw how he’d got as high up in the Centre as he had.

  ‘Look, Stark, this is not a time for joking. You know I can’t swim, and unless you’re planning that we walk on water…’

  ‘No, you look,’ I said, irritably. I was tired, and I was a little fed up at this point by continually having to wade through layers of rationality to say what I had to say. ‘We’re not going to swim, we are going to walk. I don’t expect you to understand that, but you have to keep an open mind. You have to trust that I know what I’m doing. And do you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  “Let me put it to you in a way I know you’ll understand. Delegation, division of responsibility, yes? You don’t do everything in your Department, don’t do all the jobs. Sometimes you have to let better qualified people do bits of it, yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ he conceded, grudgingly. Actioneers are like that: the fact that they can’t do absolutely everything pisses them off no end.

  ‘When it comes to this, I’m not just the better qualified person. I’m the only qualified person. That’s why Zenda gets me in. That’s why I’m here. I am the only person who can do this. I can probably do it without your trust, but it will make it a hell of a lot more difficult for both of us, especially you.’

  Alkland was silent for a moment, and then his face softened.

  ‘Okay. I’m sorry, Stark. I just don’t know what to think, what to do. I’m not used to this kind of thing. I’m not used to uncertainty.’

  ‘I know. I am. It’s my job. My whole life is one great “What next?” I’m for ever using Plan B, or C or Z. That’s the way these things work, Alkland. Life is not a memo. It’s strange, and it can turn on you, and it does what you least expect it to all the fucking time. There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Alkland, and I’m about to show you one of them.’

  Suddenly he smiled, a what-the-hell grin that took thirty years off him.

  ‘Okay, okay. What do I do?’

  ‘When we walk out of here, things are going to be different outside. Spend the next five minutes thinking about that. Things are going to be different, and strange. But what you see is what there is, okay? And trust me.’

  ‘I do,’ he said. ‘God knows why, but I do.’

  He must have done. Enough, at least.

  Five minutes later I felt a very small tickle at the back of my mind, and knew it was time to go. I stood up, and Alkland rose with me. The Actioneer had spent the last few minutes deep in thought, turned in on himself, obviously trying as best he could to internalise what I’d said to him. He looked at me nervously.

  ‘Is it working, whatever it is?’

  ‘Yes.’ I knew it was, because I could feel it. It’s difficult to describe, but everything looks and feels more intense. Colours stand out the way they do before a storm and you seem to see everything very clearly, in a rather peculiar way. It’s a bit like being drunk but staying absolutely stone-cold sober at the same time. Maybe Alkland had actually begun to believe what I’d told him. Maybe seeing Villig had given him a sense that something genuinely weird was in the offing. Whatever, it was working. So far. I led the Actioneer out of the dining room and through into the foyer, and we paused for a moment in front of the huge wooden doors.

  ‘Are you ready for this?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ he said, dubiously. ‘What should I expect?’

  ‘What you see. Nothing else.’

  He nodded, I swung the front door open and we stepped out.

  The bright early morning sun was gone. In its place was a ceiling of low, unbroken grey cloud that made the world seem like a limitless room on a winter afternoon. Occasional pockets of wind rocketed down the street as we crossed to the promenade, whipping leaves and old newspapers around us and howling through doorways, and then disappearing. A dustbin lid blew off and wheeled across the road, clanking, though where we were was still. The piano was silent, because the pianist wasn’t here any more. No one was here except us.

  When we reached the promenade I stopped, and let Alkland take it in. The beach was different, as it always is. Instead of being yellow, it was now mid-grey and wet-looking, as if packed down by decades of rain. It wasn’t sand at all any more, but a kind of heavy mud. And there was something else.

  ‘Where’s the sea gone?’ Alkland wailed, clinging onto the rail. ‘Where’s the bloody sea?’

  The ocean had disappeared, and in its place the dark beach stretched out as far as the horizon. The first fifty yards were featureless, but then it reared and undulated in small ridges and hillocks, stretching out to the horizon, stretching out for hundreds, thousands of miles.

  The way was open.

  A long, long time ago, back when people still travelled between countries fairly regularly, there was this guy, on a plane. The man, whose name was Krats, was bored, whiling away the hours, and for want of anything better to do he leant over and looked out of the window. The plane was over the ocean at
the time, way, high up, and he looked out and was struck by what he saw.

  It looked as though they were flying over some weird limitless mud flat, a featureless expanse of grey mottled by dips and low ridges. He knew they weren’t, of course, knew that it was just the ocean, but the longer he stared down, the harder that became to believe. He knew that the ridges and dips were actually waves frozen into apparent motionlessness by the height, and that their colour was dark metallic blue, but from up there it didn’t look like that. It looked like a plain.

  Then he fell asleep, which is kind of unromantic, but there you are, and forgot about the whole thing until he was flying home again. When he remembered, he looked out of the window and there it was again, the ocean, but looking like this strange featureless expanse.

  He stared out at it for hours, unable to tear his eyes away, and when he got home he told a friend about it, tried to explain how weird the sensation was, how it felt that if it were possible to drop a rope ladder down from the plane and clamber down the thirty thousand feet to the bottom, you wouldn’t drop into water but would step out onto that strange dark plain.

  By chance this friend had an imagination as strong as his, and, as she was in love with him at the time, was ready to take such an odd observation more seriously than it deserved. Krats lived by the sea, and they walked up and down the beach the evening he got back, speculating wildly and increasingly drunkenly about it, in the way that lovers do.

  Then they went to bed and forgot all about it, as lovers will also do. That’s actually a strange feature of this whole thing: it’s very easy to forget about. For a while you have a clear and urgent sensation of understanding, and then suddenly it will be gone, and you’ll be groping around in your mind, trying to remember what it was you thought you’d known. I remember it always, but that’s very unusual. There are only five people who know about this in the world.

  Anyway. A couple of months later Krats’ friend had to take the same flight herself. About four hours into the flight she glanced out of the window and remembered the conversation immediately, because Krats had been right. It really did look like a plain.