‘You should take in a show. All work and no play—’
I glanced at Morgenstern. ‘He’s incurable.’
‘Over there,’ said Primavera. ‘Stop!’
We pulled in to the kerb. ‘Astoria?’ said the driver. ‘They do Shakespeare and all that stuff. You should try a musical...’ Outside the theatre a billboard proclaimed Salomi—A New Play By D Toxicophilous. ‘Anyway, it’s a first-night performance. You’ll never get a seat.’
‘First night? Iggy, he’s bound to be there.’
‘We’re supposed to be going to Soho,’ said Morgenstern.
‘But it’s his first night. We can wait until the end and then shout “Author! Author!” ’
‘That’s crazy,’ I said.
‘It’s crazy,’ said Morgenstern.
‘So who asked you, slut?’ Primavera stepped onto the pavement. A passing car sent a sheet of water across her path, leaving her rat-tailed and bemired. ‘This is a crazy world,’ she said, wiping her eyes. ‘Come on. Let’s go. Let’s go ape shit.’
The amalgamation of West End millennial swank with the cut-and-run fabric of the Weird had resulted in a theatreland of High Art, Hucksterism and Hullabaloo. Primavera shoved through clones in snooty evening dress, flower girls and saffron-robed monkettes: Primavera squared, Primavera to the power of 3, 4, 5, Primavera to the power of 100.
‘Hey you—kid with the enamel eyes—you wanna buy—’ Primavera felled the tout with the kick known as ‘The alligator swings its tail’ and used her own face as a stepping stone. I tracked her through a crush of curious witnesses, and entered the theatre’s foyer.
‘First night, huh?’ said Primavera. The foyer was empty.
‘First-night nerves?’ I said. We proceeded into the stalls.
‘Iggy, the whole place is empty.’ We sat in the back row, Morgenstern placing an aisle between himself and his tormentor. The auditorium was a fleapit. A vast network of cobwebs hung from a surrounding frieze that was a burlesque of Phidian art; bat droppings littered the floor; seats were slashed, the stage curtain ragged; and all was illuminated by a sallow light. The light dimmed; the curtain rose.
SCENE
The Palace of Herod. A boudoir—a doll’s boudoir—high above the streets of New Jerusalem. Salome is discovered at her toilette, attended by her maid.
MAID (aside): ‘Salomé, not Salome,’ says the Princess of Judaea, ‘Salome sounds like salami and I’m French, savez-vous? One more Salome and salami’s what you get, salami and tar-water till the end of your days...’ So call me Electrolux, ma’am, not Electra. I’m English, dooby-doo? I don’t say it, of course. You want Greek slave? I do Greek slave. Do it very well.
SALOMÉ: So who is this Jokanaan?
MAID: A prophet, ma’am. With a vision of Christ as Shiva.
SALOMÉ: I’ve heard he’s pretty. Pretty as the Archangel Gabriel. Pretty as the Angel of Death. And famously cruel. Almost as cruel as me.
MAID (aside): Well, maybe a bad girl like her needs a bad boy like him. Ever since her mother, Herodias, came over from Paris and got hitched to the Big Jew, Herod himself, she’s been scratching at the wound of her boredom like a sex-rat gnawing at its own bowels ... (To Salomé) He’s a rebel, ma’am. Talks revolution. The decline and fall of the empire de luxe. Talks of one who’ll come ‘after him’ and reprogram the race, a bodysnatcher who’ll change us all...
SALOMÉ: Hosannah in the highest. Maybe I’ll go see him. I like guys who’re a little sicko. It’ll make a change from playing mahjong with Mummy’s friends.
MAID: So here’s your raiment, excessively dermatoid; and here’s your shoes, perilously heeled. Now the war paint: lipstick made from marinated foreskins, mascara made from blackened bones...
Primavera threw her legs over the seat in front. ‘Boring,’ she said. I put my arm about her shoulders. It occurred to me that this was something I had never done: take my girlfriend to a show, or to the movies. It seemed it was something only ordinary people did. (Sure, I’d escorted her to the premiere of The Birth Of A Nation. Great SFX, that show. I remember the Gaseu—disembodied heads trailing long tails of intestine—that feasted on the unborn of Siam. They were meant to symbolize the Negroid and Slavic decadence of the West so nobly resisted by the Siamese people. Sure. Great. But that had been work...) Morgenstern’s head fell forward; he began to snore. ‘You want me to vampire-fuck you?’ ‘Kiss me,’ I said. ‘Pretend that—’
‘Get out of it. Snogging in the back row’s for kids.’ ‘Maybe we could—’
‘Yeah, and maybe you could get me a good dentist.’ She shrugged off my arm. ‘Boring. Bormg.’
The play continued, empurpled, street-precious, very ‘nineties’. Salomé meets Jokanaan (Primavera in a beard); Jokanaan rants. Seems he wants to turn Salomé into a little Watteau goddess. Seems Christ the great programmer, the black Christ, the Christ of guilt and pain, is coming with sword in hand to harry the world of fashion. And Salomé smiles. Pleased.
‘Cut his head off,’ said Primavera, ‘get on with it. Can’t you see that’s what he wants?’
But first there has to be the soft-shoe shuffle. Herod (Primavera in another beard) watches from behind half-lidded eyes bruised with sleeplessness. And Salomé, in a derma-riot of second skin, trips across the boards, neck between thighs, or ankle about neck, an invertebrate contortionist with angry, Medusa-like hair. Then the salver, bloodily replete. And the last line, the line the world has been waiting for:
HEROD: Kill the woman!
Primavera sprang up. ‘Author! Author!’ she screamed, clapping wildly. I added to the applause. Morgenstern blinked, stood, and offered his own hands. The curtain fell; the auditorium again revealed its jaundiced visage. Morgenstern was the first to fall quiet; then I too let my hands hang from my side. ‘Author! Author!’ Primavera cried, until, forlorn, her applause became the sound of one hand clapping: a realization that the doctor would not appear.-
‘We’ve lost valuable time,’ Morgenstern sighed. ‘We should have—’ Primavera treated him to one of those stares to which he always reacted as if he’d had lime juice thrown in his eyes.
‘Soho,’ I said.
‘Bozo,’ said Primavera, and leaped over the rows of seats as if competing for a one-hundred-metre hurdle.
Our tuk-tuk had waited, and soon we were again speeding through canyons of concrete and steel. The night sky was veined like marble, like a membrane split open, ruined, useless. It began to rain: it was a fizz-pop kind of rain, mock-atomic. On either side of the waterway wealth gave way to squalor. Inhuman flotsam sat huddled about scrapheap fires in the shells of gutted buildings; figures slunk in tenement doorways, apache skirts revealing stilettos tucked between stocking tops and thighs; lines of washing, like the bunting of a carnival of sordidness, were strewn between sois; child facsimiles of the screaming Miss P dive-bombed us, jumping from the upper stories of slums into the chemical stew of the klong the rain eased into drizzle.
’Frenchie’s,’ said our driver. On iron stilts that possessed the undulating elegance of a Paris Metro entrance, Frenchie’s rose from its island of silt, its garish vitality contrasting with the boarded tenements, empty restaurants and gloomy merchandisers of Anglo-Saxon smut that lay on either side.
‘Stay here,’ I told the driver. We crossed a gangplank, and a doorgirl ushered us up the stairs into Big Weird a-go-go shadows.
Morgenstern walked to the bar. ‘Screwdriver.’ His hands were shaking.
‘Must still be getting over the flight,’ I said to Primavera.
‘Where you come from, handsome man?’ Wrong Primavera. This one wore a G-string and spoke Big Weird barspeak.
‘Primavera?’ I looked around. She was talking to one of her doubles.
Glass exploded against the wall beside me. ‘It’s blood,’ said Morgenstern.
‘Probably mine,’ I said. ‘This town must be well-stocked.’ I went to sit down. There was something on my stool. A mechanical mammary gland. I tried to brush it
away. Stupid. The breast was insubstantial, and my hand passed from guillotined ligament to teat. The place was filled with holoshit.
‘Drink?’
‘You got anything that’s not red?’ The bar girl pointed to a bottle of some off-white creme. ‘I’ll pass,’ I said, and turned my eyes upon the handful of dancers (programmed to look bored for human similitude) that were shimmying to... The music stopped; restarted. doctor, doctor, I wish you wouldn’t do that. Talk of the streets, the town, the world. Beat of the galactic arm. Damn them. The Imps had a number one.
Number one. That was the name of the lookalike who had chosen to dismount the stage, kneel down on the bar, and perform, a few centimetres from my face, a routine that would have left a human girl dislocated and raw. Raw as salami. Or Salome. I looked through her legs, to where the other dancers paraded about a glass vat centre stage. In the vat’s bubbling, aerated liquid, a half-formed gynoid stared back at me with the mindless eyes of mindless creation. No superscience attended her nativity. Above her, a neural network programmed with pirated software instructed the vat’s microrobots to duplicate a doll, Cartier, Seiko, Rolex, whatever, not by engineering base elements, but by reorganizing the atomic structure of a human foetus, aborted (so ran the rumours) by force. Illegal, of course. Like synthetic gasoline was illegal. Like prostitution, dermaplastic and psychotropic scent. But this dream bar belonged to the Weird, and the Weird was moneytown, its forbidden technologies commanding huge amounts of foreign exchange. A gynoid was cheap; it turned a quick profit; and a profit made you a patriot.
Primavera joined me. ‘Number thirteen says Dr T’s been and gone. We’ve missed him, Iggy. And nobody knows where this Grosvenor place is.’ My dancer was rejoicing in a display of abdominal contractions, the violence of which seemed ready to disembowel her. ‘Little tart,’ said Primavera. ‘Never thought I’d end up looking like that. Look at her: the Bobinski’s trashed. Nothing belle ipoque there. All that’s left is gynoid.’ Primavera leaned across the bar, took the dancer by the hair, and struck her. Hard. ‘Am I the only one around here who’s awake?’ She struck again. Harder. But the mirror image didn’t crack.
‘Hey,’ said Morgenstern. He was standing by the door, filling his lungs. ‘There’s something happening out here.’
From the door it was possible to see into a nearby alley where a dark cloaked figure was struggling with a whimpering girl.
‘Doll ripper,’ said a bar girl.
Primavera swept back her hair. ‘Nanobot?’ The bar girl nodded. Pushing us aside, Primavera jumped to the half-flooded streets.
It’s always the same: the fire escapes and mullioned windows, the girl in the party dress you push against the alley wall, the snicker-snack! snicker-snack! of steel against cuspids, the gasp and cliched expression of ‘ and
pain’...
‘Come on,’ I said to Morgenstern.
‘Wait a minute. That thing out there—’
I pulled him after me. We clambered into the tuk-tuk. ‘Follow her,’ I said to the driver as Primavera splashed through the shallows and attained the alley’s shore. Ahead of us—cloak spread behind like a comic-book villain—the anthropomorphic virus sprinted into the anonymity of the night. Primavera took to the air.
‘We should be giving this thing a wide berth,’ said Morgenstern.
‘Tell that to Primavera,’ I said.
Morgenstern swung his head about. ‘Jesus.’ I looked behind. Draped over a dustbin was the clone we had seen from our vantage point at Frenchie’s. The hilt of a knife protruded lewdly from between her thighs; teeth ground on metal, with the sound of fingernails clawing at slate. It’s always the same: the expression of innocence betrayed and of crime discovered... ‘Martina, Martina,’ I said. ‘Martina von Kleinkunst.’
The tuk-tuk pulled up; caught in its headlights, the blood-stained nanobot was pinning Primavera against a doorway. ‘Iggy! My magic doesn’t work on him . . She gurgled as the nanobot’s fingers tightened about her throat. The figure, throwing back its cloak, turned its face to us, a face as black and featureless as polished onyx. I scrambled out.
‘I’m Euclidean!’ The thing’s laughter was emotionless, canned. ‘You can’t hurt me! You’re algorithmic, you’re recursive, you’re—’
I rushed it; caught it with a flying tackle; it sank beneath me, yielding like dough. ‘Yeah, well, I’m Euclidean too. From out there. And to me you’re just another tin microbe.’
Warily, Morgenstern approached us. ‘Think this thing can help?’ He gave the nanobot an idle kick.
I stared into the opaque face, and into my own black reflection (felt, for a moment, a girl’s body struggling against my own, fluttering like a bird clenched in a fist). ‘Dr Toxicophilous,’ I said. ‘We want to find Dr Toxicophilous.’
‘So,’ said the nanobot (in the preppy voice of an Ivy League closet queen), ‘who do you think us guys have been looking for the last couple of days? Killing a few biomorphs here and there is all well and fine, but we want to get this job over with. It’s a matter of professional pride. But the old man—he’s not here. Sure, he makes visits. He can go where he likes. But as to where he lives... The rest of the guys have gone off to try and find him.’
‘He has to be here,’ said Morgenstern. ‘He’s supposed to be inside all Lilim.’
‘So he is. But the matrix models an infinite number of universes. We think he lives at the crossroads.’
‘And where’s that?’ I said.
‘Everywhere,’ said the nanobot, ‘and nowhere.’ Morg-enstern kicked the thing in the head. Its immaculate physiognomy fractured. ‘Ow! Rough stuff, eh? If this town isn’t the pits. All these girls. Like ants, I tell you. Little reflex machines. A billion ganglia. Ugh! And now you start to—’ Morgenstern kicked the thing again. ‘Listen: we’re talking about a singularity of information. A black hole of consciousness.’ His head lolled to one side. ‘Your consciousness, Primavera Bobinski.’
‘Let’s kill this doll-ripping bastard and get moving,’ said Primavera, massaging her throat. ‘He’s given me an idea.’ I twisted the nanobot’s head, hoping to break its neck; the top of the brain box came off in my hands. Oily globules dripped from the meninges, rolled mercurially across the alley with autonomous life.
‘Mirrors,’ said Primavera, ‘within mirrors. That’s no way in. Got to see the back of my own head. Confront the I.’ She opened her combat jacket. ‘Send the tuk-tuk away, Iggy. We don’t want her sucked in.’ Our driver didn’t linger.
‘Primavera, don’t go screwy on me.’
She sat down, crossed her legs guru-fashion, and stared into the black abyss of her navel. At the first glimmer of green I took a step backwards; Morgenstern copied. ‘Time to Ouroboros,’ she said. As through the smashed porthole of a depressurizing plane, her hair, and then her head, were sucked into her abdomen. Plop! Shoulders, arms, legs followed, until, self-consumed, she remained only a black disk, small and impenetrably dark, surrounded by a luminous green halo. I regurgitated fried grasshopper. ‘Come on,’ she called, voice faint but edged with exasperation.
‘One thing’s for sure,’ said Morgenstern, ‘I’m not staying alone in this place.’
We walked into Primavera’s event horizon.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Psychic Surgery
The necropolis seemed (as it always did) limitless, extending out of eyeshot, beyond hope, beyond the world; a singularity of death where the curvature of space-time was infinite. Eternal. Where was our coach? Our horses? It was cold; colder than at any time I could recall; a ground mist slunk at our heels, crept beneath our fatigues. No pleasure trip, this.
‘Primavera?’ I called. I helped Morgenstern to his feet. Superimposed upon the familiar desolation, like a surreal photomontage, marooned amongst the stone termini of life, a slice of London real estate rose broodingly from the plain. Primavera headed towards it.
‘Grosvenor Square,’ said Morgenstern, as we picked our way through the tombstones, struggling to
match Primavera’s fleetfootedness. As we caught up with her, and passed that boundary between necropolis and square marked by chopped outcroppings of macadam, the mist lifted, and we found ourselves wading through a sea of grass, about us pseudo-Georgian terraces and the ruins of the American Embassy. Encircled by night, the square’s one lit window shone like a beacon in a lonely tower. The sexton of this world of death was at home.
The door was open.
‘Doctor?’ called Primavera. All was in shadows, the furniture shrouded in white sheets; piano music percolated through the ceiling. After climbing two flights of stairs we noticed a splinter of light beneath a door. Primavera rapped her knuckles against the wood. ‘Doctor? Dr Toxicophilous? It’s me, Primavera.’ The music stopped.
‘Enter.’ It was the voice of an old man breathless with disease and second childhood. We found him sitting before an open fire. Wrapped in a paisley dressing gown, and leaning against a four-poster bed, he held, in his lap, a clockwork toy which, undistracted by our presence, he had set to winding, quietly and methodically. He set the toy before him—a model of a young woman seated at a piano—and the music recommenced. ‘Greensleeves. My Lady Greensleeves. I always thought it should be our national anthem. Gentle. Verdant. English. God Save the Queen? Ah, there’ll be a new queen soon. And it will be us that needs saving, God damn /1
Automata carpeted the floor. Primavera cleared a space and sat down beside Dr Toxicophilous, surrounded by her nineteenth- and eighteenth-century predecessors. I breathed through my mouth; the smell of camphor was overpowering.
‘Phalibois made her,’ said Toxicophilous, stroking the horse-hair locks of the little musician. ‘Made her during that golden age before the First World War. The golden age of automata. And all these’—he passed his hand over the half-a-dozen toys at his feet—‘from the Marais district of Paris. I worked in Paris once...’
‘Doctor,’ said Primavera, ‘I need your help.’ Toxicophilous rubbed his chest and wheezed.
Dead Girls, Dead Boys, Dead Things Page 14