by Jeff Noon
It could’ve been me, Daddy. When would my turn come around?
Do you wonder about me sometimes? Do you like to look at me on the screen? I’m reaching out now, can you see me, can you see my hand?
Reach out. If you can.
Oh God, what have I done?
I have lost myself completely.
I am the mirror where another woman’s face lives. I’m the picture in the paper, the half-known woman falling out of night clubs, the stick-figure daughter of the world-famous music man. The girl with the haunted eyes, the stark red camera-flash eyes.
I am the closed door.
I am the whisper in the dark, the lost words to the lost song, the one you would never let the public hear.
I am your daughter. Your only child.
Look at me.
Hate me.
Turn away from me.
Love me.
-13-
Rain falling.
Flash of streetlamps. Road signs. Susurration. Whoosh of vehicles passing, yellow blur of light.
Nola was hardly aware of the steering wheel as it turned under her gloved fingers. Slow rhythm of the wipers across the windscreen, each slow wave of droplets melting the world.
Music:
Slow pulse of Bio-Dub music playing
from the skin of Nola,
channelled from a pirate station.
Electric blood running through her, nerves dancing alive with prickles and motion. Palms itching, burning. Movies and broadcasts coming through to her, moving on her, spreading further over her body, she could feel them creeping.
The Pleasure Dome called from her stomach.
Nola tuned in.
Colours swirling in heat patterns across flesh, shapes forming.
She heard Melissa speaking.
...the room at the end of the corridor...hide and seek... the picture in the paper...the stick-figure...
Nola’s skin tingled with each word, each hissssss of static.
The road glistened.
Beep. Beep. Beep Beep Beep.
The pained, plastic song of Nola’s bug.
That would be George calling up, no doubt. George, with his pleas; the voice still ringing in her ears, his voice of greed and wonder and manic desire.
Your problems are over, my Nola.
Let me handle this. Let me nurture this new magic talent and send it out towards the public eye.
Sweetness!
By entering the machine, you have become the machine, you have embraced the machine. To turn against it now is pure hypocrisy.
You’re my special projection.
My favourite creation.
Nola was jumping from mood to mood, from despair at her fate, to exhilaration at the power she might have. One moment she wanted nothing more than to be cured, wiped clean; the next she imagined picking up every broadcast currently etherborne and to feel herself glorified in the flux, the overload, the sheer white heat of NOW.
She was running on pure energy.
Keep driving.
This her only plan.
Night folded itself along the road, pushed away momentarily by the car’s glowlamps. A single light seen in the distance. Nearer. Shining red, then blue, then golden.
Neon sign. Nine letters still alight, two letters dead, one flashing half broken.
T E FALL N MOON.
Nola pulled up outside the place, a roadside bar. She felt herself being urged on by the spirit that held her. She’d taken to calling it the Image Demon, a picture in her mind of the virus as it claimed possession.
Out. Walking. Towards people.
Long coat, glossy and black, wrapped tight around her, buttoned. Dark glasses. Gloves and scarf. Really too warm for such a fashion, but she had no choice.
Doorway. Glass cracked in one panel. Inside, tables and chairs draped half in darkness, the rest far too bright. Smell of hardworking flesh, sweat. A sleazy hole. Lots of customers, a lively bunch. Laughter, shouts. Fists banging down on the bar top. Portapops and telebugs and glamacams and somapods flashed and whirred and sang and glimmered and sparkled in people’s hands, against faces, in handbags and on tabletops: a choir of electronic angels hovering in parallel company to the drinkers. Too much humanity but this was just what she needed, this would do it. Just some good old human noise to drown out the signals from her skin, the pictures, the calling voices.
Pleasure Dome was playing live on a giant visionplex screen at the back of the room. Melissa’s words unrolled across the bottom of the screen as she spoke them. Madness in the lines, the things being said. The craziness building. Most of the clientele present ignored the programme, lost to their own worlds, their own captivities. But a number of spectators were standing frozen where they were, staring in awe at the screen, in cold drunken witness.
Nola counted a dozen of these abject viewers, eyes glued to the image of the Dome. She went up close to one such, and saw his eyelids fluttering in time with the static flow from the screen. His mouth hung open as he answered Melissa with a spell of his own:
Please, do not leave me.
Please my sweet oracle, my visionary, do not treat me this way, not now, not like this.
Stay with me, stay as you are.
Swirl and dance your mind for me, all on view.
Be mine.
Be mine forever...
Alas, it could not be.
Melissa’s face was suddenly veiled in fuzz, smeared like a powder wipe.
Flicker...
Channel breakdown.
The viewer cursed. His eyes widened to gather more light, more image, more signal.
And all around the crowd surged and taunted, they fumbled and cursed and swore and danced.
The viewer ignored them.
He might as well be living in a different room.
Nola walked on. She bought herself a lager from the bar, and then found a small space in the crowd to call her own. But almost immediately, a woman came over to her, looking her over, sizing her up. She introduced herself as Evelyn. ‘Eva! Call me Eva. Everybody does. I’m completely...mad! Cuckoo. Gone bye-bye. Premises vacated.’ A curl of laugh rising from deep inside, expressed finally as a raucous shriek. Eva was more than three-quarters drunk. She was trying to tell Nola how much she really loved her ex, if only the handsome no-good bastard would understand that simple fact and let her back into his life, then everything would be fine once more, everything. So fine.
Here was a woman alive in her own soap opera, her words borrowed and remixed from dialogue and scenes witnessed on the visionplex and the cinema screen through the years.
‘What shall I call you?’
‘Nola.’
Eva’s faraway gaze suddenly locked in place, and her face was fired by a smile to spark diamonds and light a bulb or two in a dead man’s heart. ‘I like you, Nola. That’s your name right, Nola, I got that right?’ Nola said yes, correct, well remembered from ten seconds ago. ‘I like you Nola, because I can see you’re hanging onto a good thing, I know you are. I can just feel it. I’m special like that, see. I can FEEL things. And there’s something about you, something interesting.’ Eva could sense it, a radiance. Her instincts were triggering. She picked up on the warmth, the glow, the hidden dance of energy from Nola’s skin.
Evelyn was dressed as a New Model Robot Romantic type. It was a fashion, the ersatz automated look, something she had read about in a Lifestyle magazine. She had started the evening in expert character, but by now, with this many drinks running her veins, her robotic traits were slipping. The human kept peeping through in words and gestures. She asked, ‘What’s your personal image status? Like, officially?’ Nola shook her head. Evelyn made little chirruping noises with her tongue on her teeth, against her lips. ‘Oh baby, baby! You gotta have image status. Apply today! I was like a nine, going on ten. Honestly. But then disaster struck. I was docked three points! Can you believe it? Oh well, life is cruel sometimes, I suppose.’ Her fingers played imaginary violin strings, the other
arm miming the bow, caressing a sad despairing tune.
Nola looked around for comfort.
On the bar’s screen, Melissa’s hands were pounding against the curved wall of the Dome. Her fingers stretched out, seen through the surface patterns: a father’s eyes, a broken doll, a snail covered in salt, melting.
The twelve frozen viewers raised their hands as though to help her escape. Or to keep her there. Clearly, they could not decide which. Half in love, half in fear.
The image skipped, settled. Fizzed with interference.
Evelyn pulled out a glamacam. ‘I love these little things so much, don’t you, Nola? I mean, they give everything such a gorgeous sheen!’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Wait. Keep still. I have to take a picture of you.’
Nola felt a sudden anger.
Her own mind in mirror mode to the wall screen: jump-cut thought patterns, random images, crackle, spark and fuzz.
She told Evelyn to back away.
‘I will. I will. But just let me do this. What is that glow you have? Where can I buy it. Does it come in a bottle?’
The wall screen crackled and went black, sputtered with light, died again, came back on. Dome flutter, snowed under with fluff and haze, Melissa’s voice caught in a fog of noise. Data readouts jumped and shivered.
Sound of a fuse shorting, magnified loud.
Fzzzztk!
The Dome reappeared, cloaked in static.
Sfzztztsztxztztztsfssstsztttt...
Some of the younger drinkers were cheering by now, enjoying the damage on view. More people turned to the screen. Others checked the programme for themselves on their portapops, the little devices each crackling in time as they found the correct frequency. The screen danced with broken pictures, spluttered with noise. Some viewers booed and jeered. A beer glass glittered through the darklamp air, smashing against a wall. The landlord fiddled desperately with the screen remote. He remembered the riot that happened when the cup final had gone down in the power cut. Bad days. Bad nasty fucked up days all over.
And within this chaos stood the spellbound ones, bodies at rest, their eyes still locked on course, still fixated. Silent now, each one of them.
Evelyn rubbed a hand along Nola’s shoulder, her neck. She said, ‘I’ve seen you before, somewhere. Aren’t you one of them singer types?’ Fingers on flesh. Hot wet skin. ‘Yeah that’s it. My sister’s got your first tune. Played nothing else for a week or two.’
Nola scratched at her palms. Skrit, skrit. Taste of blue burn metal in her mouth. The whole room blurry in her sight. Ears abuzz with noise: croaks, harsh drawn breaths, ribald chanting. Crunch of glass underfoot. Mouths pressed against telebugs, portapops flickering with vids. Nola could feel a shift inside, a spark set loose in the body’s red-dark chambers, deep down, and the wall-screen followed suit, clicking to a new programme. Natural History. Undersea World. An octopus wafting through deep water, legs curling and uncurling, skin illuminated.
She’d done that herself, Nola felt certain; she made the channel change.
Click, click, click. No hands necessary.
Screen commentary: The octopus has millions of pigmented and reflective cells in its skin, known as chromatophores.
Nola’s black coat slipped from her shoulders.
By an act of will, the different colours of these skin pixels can be activated, intensified, creating a rippling, animated display.
She felt connected to the screen. Television and radio waves filled the room around her, glowing in silvery webs visible only to herself.
The creature uses this for the purpose of camouflage, to send out threatening signals, or for courtship display.
Click.
Another channel now. A boxing match.
Her own doing.
Nola: the human remote. She peeled off her gloves, one then two.
Click, click.
More channels, the screen stuttering, fizzing.
Punters raised their voices in protest. All seemed of one voice and one vision now, one need. Bring back the live feed. Bring back the Dome! A fight was breaking out. The landlord called for order.
Nola Controller shifted, feeling her stomach clench. Her mind pulsed.
Here she was.
Click, click, click.
Here she was, working the waves.
The programme changed to an Arts show: ballerinas twirling in dresses of silver dazzle, the moon a man in a mask, weeping. And every device in the place, every handheld screen showed the same image, the same stream, the same download.
Shouts. Flare up. Drink spillage. Fuck! Piss off! Lousy fucking machine! The landlord banged his own remote against the counter, managed to get the picture back.
Pleasure Dome.
Nola flesh-clicked it away, bringing back the dancers, then the octopus once more, now a midnight pool in a forest clearing.
Evelyn turned from the screen.
Nola took off her dark glasses. But her eyes were not on Eva, not on anybody in that room. Nola’s eyes shifted focus, soft, watery.
Evelyn could see the glow of warm light seeping through Nola’s clothing, the play of colours around this woman’s neck. She could hear the voices from the skin, quiet as yet; they drew her nearer.
Eva was breathing on Nola, smelling her.
Perspiration, human flesh.
Something else?
Burnt out wiring, maybe? Electrics.
What was that?
Something wet dripping on hot glass. Pure NOISE.
Zzztsiztzle...
Nola’s skin pulled down the broadcasts. She sucked the life out of the screen, peeling images, replacing them. Drawing forth data, making a transfer pass.
Voodoo electrics.
Zxcxttxxtxkzktztttt!
Sudden bursts of colour and noise.
Handheld devices clicked and fizzled and blurred in chaos flow.
The pictures mutated in sync on every single screen in the place. They kissed and bred and gave birth to other images, other sounds, stranger images, stranger sounds. Now the bar’s wall-screen pulsed with life, with flashes of extreme violence, hardcore porn, rapid-fire gunshots. Spurts of blood, fake semen, spit. Car crashes. Burning buildings. Two towers falling in clouds of dust. Tongues in close-up, extreme, wet and pink. Cries for help. A severed head. Hands, fingernails long and sharp, tearing at flesh. Stomach wounds opening like slow-motion flowers. Blade-slice edits of rape, murder, torture. Broken glass. Crunch of bone.
The skull’s dark output.
All called up by Nola from the ether. All conjured by her, dragged down to earth from one hundred different programmes and films, all recast by skincast.
The audience fell silent.
All eyes present were bathed in vision light, all drawn to the wall-screen. And then they turned, this crowd, one by one by one, as one, aware of some odd creature in their midst, somebody making this happen.
The woman.
The music star revealed now.
Nola Blue.
They stared at her as they would at a pirate broadcast, a message brought in from another world.
Slowly Nola pulled her shirt open to let them see her stomach, the pictures, the faces, the dancers, the creatures of the deep, the ballerinas circling each other, all the night’s haze of message and noise and image.
All shown.
Hush. The place in shock.
Nola stretched out her arms towards the clientele, her viewers, the palms face out and opened up wide to show the image that glowed there on the skin: on each palm a filmed eye, two human eyes gazing at the audience from the warm wet skin of the hands.
Every person there staring at the two eyes that stared back at them.
Staring. Staring back.
Mirrored.
Eye
to
Eye...
Stillness.
Only one breath was drawn in the place.
Evelyn’s breath, quiet, contained, her fingers working at the
buttons of her glamacam.
Whirrrrr.
Moments passing.
Clikck whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Nola moved through the crowd. No one stopped her, none touched her, none dared to. They parted to let her go. And even the guardians at the gateway, those of the black suits and the brick-wall shoulders, they let her pass freely.
The wall-screen flickered as she left the bar.
Zxxt, zscki, sssnmmmmm, sxxt!
Fuse blown. Vision cut.
Blackout.
Evelyn came out of the Fallen Moon, to watch Nola’s car moving away from the curb. She rubbed at her eyes where they stung, and shed tears.
She had seen too much this evening.
Still halfway disbelieving, still in awe.
The glamacam warm in her hands.
Fingers atingle, the tips smeared with colour.
Memory glow.
-14-
Nola drove on, pushing the car to its limits.
No destination.
The only lights around coming from nocturnal tattoo shacks and all-night pharmacies, each neon pulse and strobe hitting like a crackle show, shining from a borderline.
Sun Plague remedies on sale here. Guaranteed results! No prescriptions needed.
Dead shine in Nola’s eyes.
Feeling cut off from herself, not quite contained by her own skin. She was a living ghost moving through a series of separate countries, seeking peace, but each country along the way governed by weird laws and weirder people, and herself the weirdest of them all.
Tired. So tired. Need to rest. Need to...
The car was drifting along by its own instruction.
It was time to find a place to crawl to, to crawl into. Somewhere unknown.
Rethink, recharge.