The Dreams of the Eternal City

by Mark Reece

  The view of the city from inside the taxi was sanitised; the windows were steamed up and cold to the touch, obliterating everything in a grey haze. Nevertheless, Ethan was so absorbed by what had happened that night and the feeling in his legs, which he pinched several more times when the initial pain was no longer effective in focusing his attention, that they soon reached his home. The ticker had stopped at over fifty pounds.

  “Do you mind if we go to the high street? Sorry, but I need to get some money out, I didn’t realise it’d be this much.”

  The man put on the handbrake and turned his head a fraction, so that he must have been looking at him partly out of the corner of his eye and partly through the mirror.

  “Forget about it. We’ll take it as down payment for tonight.”

  Ethan froze and his teeth clenched. It was only then that he saw the pink beads that hung over the seat before him. He immediately thought of his recurring dream and rocked back as if the stringing tendril had wrapped around his neck. He seemed to have to climb over himself to get out the car.

  It sped off silently and he desperately tried to remember what the man looked like. Ethan did not know why it was important although he believed that it was with absolute conviction, meaning that he stood on the pavement for several seconds trying to build an impression of his face. However, Ethan’s memory of that night was a series of fragments, and he could only recall a generic Asian complexion and accent. When he came to himself, his hands were very cold.

  Chill stuck to his skin like oil on water as he moved around the house, the heating making no difference, nor did burying himself into the sofa.

  When Ethan saw that it was three o’clock, he realised that if he was to have any chance of avoiding a repeat of what had happened, he had to drag his sleeping pattern back to normal; even though going to bed at that time was absurd, it was a three-hour improvement on the previous night, and would at least be movement in the right direction. However, he put on the MV and listlessly flicked through the channels. It was all tedium and pornography, the Security in Broadcasting Act having placed restrictions on the length and types of programmes that could be shown at night, futilely, of course, given the ubiquity of the Internet. Nevertheless, he watched anything that held the remotest interest, continually promising himself that he would go to bed after the next set of advertisements or when a programme had finished. Yet he remained there, unmovable.

  When he could not stand glass-eyed nudity any longer, Ethan switched the MV to the Internet and browsed with equal languor. He watched time pass in small increments on the clock at the bottom of the screen.

  Ethan went on the BBC website and automatically scanned for security and sleep-related stories, quickly coming across a feature on the north of England where a far right group had carried out a series of attacks on immigrants, with an anonymous leader posting messages on websites, including: ‘Paki scum are all Icks and thieves’. The local SDMA had put out a press release stating that: ‘There is no proven correlation between the amount of immigrants, asylum seekers, or members of BAME communities in an area and the prevalence of SC breaches or sleep based subversion’. Despite everything, Ethan allowed himself a smile. At least I don’t have to deal with that crap.

  He went to bed an hour before he had to get up, the same time as the previous night, when he thought that he would be too weary to move if he did not at least close his eyes before leaving the house. Ethan needed a symbolic divide between one day and the next, without which his life would feel like reading a book without paragraphs.

  He was not sure whether he had slept or only lay still in pain when his alarm clock went off. His eyes jolted open as if someone had shouted into his ear. Being forced back into reality was harsh and unyielding. The ceiling moved closer then further away.

  Ethan knew that he had to go to the address on the note that night. The decisive factor was the threat against Aislin; once he had checked that the phone numbers they had given were hers, the decision was as natural and obvious as that of whether or not to go to work. Anyway, I can gather information while I’m there. They’re making a mistake allowing me into their territory. They’re not in control.

  Nine

  He drove to work that morning, not trusting himself to remain awake on the train. When reaching the car park, Ethan’s stomach fizzed with excitement. The more he tried to distract himself by counting blue cars, the more he knew that he was in desperate trouble, and when he gave way to his imagination, he thought that he might have less than a day to live.

  He had grown used to the new type of exhaustion since his sleep patterns had become distorted. An oppressive weight fell on his shoulders at random points throughout the day, as if he were the subject of a practical joke. During those times, it seemed as if he would fall over should anyone so much as bump into him, and concentration was impossible. On the other hand, there were moments when he felt elated, even manic, when he wanted to run around shouting, using up his last store of energy.

  Time fell through his fingers. Ethan tried not to concentrate too hard, knowing that doing his work would make the morning pass. He constantly interrupted Mo to chat about anything and nothing, only stopping when seeing that he was becoming annoyed. Ethan constantly calculated the time left before he had to leave in hours, minutes, and seconds, before browsing the Internet in the same unfocused way that he had the previous night. Even so, he was drawn back to Hypnos, being unable to keep away from it, shaking when seeing that another hour had gone.

  Just before lunch, Ethan realised with a horror that only made sense in his neurotic state that he had forgotten to reply to Aislin’s message of two days earlier. He rang her twice, going to answerphone, before laboriously typing his response:

  Sorry sweetie phone had run out of battery. hope your well call when you can.

  He opened his sent folder and read his message. Will she believe me? He had not used that excuse for a while so perhaps she would. Needless to say, he had already broken his commitment to treat her better. He had taken the opportunity of her absence to behave as if she did not exist.

  I’ve not even spoken to her since she’s been away. I need to sort everything out before she gets back – both Hypnos and this other stuff. His pledge to himself was all the more vehement given that he did not quite believe it.

  That afternoon, he abandoned any pretence of doing anything other than waiting. He planned to stay in the office until the appointed time. Having thought about little else all day, Ethan had decided that that was the best way to avoid suspicion. It’s hardly unusual for me to still be here after everyone else has gone. He was so tired that he could not have concentrated even if he had wanted to. This is nothing short of disgraceful.

  To his surprise, only a few people left at the end of their shifts. He had planned to leave at seven, having thought through his actions in such detail that he seemed to have already left many times.

  At ten past, Ethan thought that his watch had to be wrong, and at quarter past that they might be finishing files. At twenty past, he became suspicious and stood on tiptoe to watch the others over the dividers. They were just… working. He had evidently been excluded from the office, as there had to be a glut of breaches for this to happen. Even Alfie was still there. In normal circumstances, he knew the tiniest details about what everyone was doing, meaning that people often asked him for advice. Since he had become busy with Hypnos and strung out the rest of the time, he had stopped paying attention. I don’t know the first fucking thing about what’s going on.

  They left one by one rather than en-masse, as they usually did, until he was alone with Mo. Ethan realised that it must seem suspicious that he was sitting there doing nothing, so he opened one of his old files and wrote up some notes with the utmost reluctance.

  “When are you staying till?” Mohammed asked.

  “Just a few more minutes. Until I get to the end of this section.”
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  “I don’t know why you cover for them all the time. With all this shit going on with the contractors and with dweeb, you should just do your bit then go home.”

  “I suppose you’re right. It’s made me fall out with Ash a few times recently. I’m taking the opportunity to finish things up now so we can concentrate on looking for a house when she gets back.”

  “Do you want to go down the promotion route?”

  “I don’t know. I might do.”

  “Then you need to be careful of Dan. The problem is that if you’re making everything work here, he doesn’t have to do anything and he’ll take you for granted. Why should he promote you if you’re doing the job for nothing already?”

  “I know what you’re saying.”

  “Okay, well, that’s what I think.”

  “Yeah… yeah… thanks…”

  “Right, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “See you later.”

  Ethan had the impression that Mo had stayed late specifically to warn him. He looked out of the security glass but could not see him; no light ever entered or escaped the SDMA. He remained there for several minutes, waiting for he knew not what.

  After clearing his desk to comply with policy, Ethan wondered how lying his head on it could have seemed so attractive the previous day. It felt like some perverse whim now, like an out-of-body experience. This is why the Icks are so dangerous, they’re like odourless gas.

  As he left the building, he felt the same childish thrill of that morning, knowing that not only was he doing something radically out of his routine, but that it was dangerous in a way he could not imagine.

  Ethan made his way to a fast food place and waited in a queue of bored-looking commuters, all of whom carried either a briefcase or a backpack, and regularly looked at their watches. Ethan was the only one who did not hop from one foot to the other and who examined the menu above the counter with a more than cursory glance.

  Flickering holograms showed shiny coloured food, elongating then contracting every few seconds, and there was something offensive in the lack of care shown in the images, the confidence that the crudest splodges would be enough to sell the muck. It worked though, of course. The area seemed to capture the sighs of the queuing bored, which reverberated around the room before becoming trapped in the walls.

  When it was eventually his turn, Ethan ordered – it was all much the same – then sat on a high chair near a window. His stomach grumbled after he had eaten; the food had been the same colours as depicted. He had enough time that he even bought dessert, which could not have been differentiated from the main course had they been placed side by side. He took a perverse pleasure out of guessing what Aislin’s response would have been if she had seen him eating there.

  However, that place was not designed for reflection; after a few minutes, a man came over to clear away his rubbish, rubbing the table perfunctorily with a cloth and sighing when their shoulders made contact.

  Ethan thought that it would be better to go early than to continue wandering around. I must have been caught on security cameras hundreds of times by now. Anyway, what’s the worse that can happen? He didn’t want to think about that, but whatever it was, being early wouldn’t make a difference. Are the Iklonians any bigger on timekeeping than the SDMA? They probably don’t have a time book. Ethan sniggered at the idea, making a woman push a buggy to one side as she passed him.

  He had never been to the street the Iklonians had given him but knew the general area, having been given a tour of it by his predecessor as an example of an SC breach hotspot. They had not got out of their car the entire time, she having frightened him with stories about how many police officers, postmen, social workers, and other officials had gone missing in that part of Central Zone.

  Apparently, the estate had the highest number of missing persons reports in the country. It was also subject to high rates of crime, disease, fires, and everything else that was recorded. Most famously, it had been the location of a notorious triple murder when a known Iklonian had stabbed a mother and her two children after deliberately going ten days without sleep. His interview with the police was later made public, in which he had babbled for hours with slurred speech about his clothes being made out of animals and the ‘red between the cracks’.

  Although Ethan had recognised the initiation rite for what it was after he had worked at the SDMA for a few years and seen the same thing done to other rookies, the aimless fear he had felt about the place had remained with him; the statistics his predecessor had quoted were true, after all. He switched off his personal mobile in his pocket, knowing that its expense would expose him if anyone saw it.

  There were graffiti tags sprayed around the area in no pattern that he could discern. In some streets, there was one on every house, whereas others had none. As he walked, Ethan saw that somehow, someone had daubed the top of a lamppost with fluorescent colours. He thought he recognised symbols from DIA reports but could not be sure. Around the corner from his destination was a derelict warehouse entirely covered with the marks, although a single slogan, written in bubble letters, dominated the wall facing the road: ‘Being woken by an alarm clock is always the first humiliation of the day.’

  The address was a block of flats that stretched to the sky, of the type that Ethan had only ever seen in documentaries about post Second World War poverty. None of the windows were lit, and the concrete looked black in the darkness, giving the building the impression of being abandoned. Ethan went inside into a cramped lobby, at the back of which was a set of narrow stone steps that spiralled upwards. The walls were covered with posters advertising the PSH. As he moved forward, brown leaves crunched underfoot, sounding like boots squelching in water.

  There was a panel of what must have been doorbells near the entrance, and by standing on tiptoe, Ethan saw that the highest number was 155. The note had not given a flat number. Surely they can’t want me to knock every door? He could only guess how many floors there were. Shit, they’re as disorganised as us. He heard something moving on the stairwell above him and felt the same lurch in his stomach as when he had set out. A small rat-like man appeared at the top of the stairs, his head covered by a hoody. He stared at the floor as resolutely as a socially awkward child.

  “Are you…?”

  “Come on.”

  He turned and slouched away, never lifting his eyes. He spoke with a dull regional accent, making Ethan think how rough he sounded. Ethan was taken aback by his impression, as he had always thought that he had the most common accent of anyone who worked for the SDMA. He had never before listened to someone with the recognition that he was of a higher social class.

  The man led him up a series of stairwells, each of which had a window the size of his hand. He noticed the varying states of decay in the frames as he passed them. Most were opaque with dirt and he shivered at the draft every time.

  At first, he was annoyed by how slowly the man walked and stepped closely behind him, trying to pressure him into speeding up. However, as they climbed ever higher and exhaustion tightened around his ankles as if they were being compressed, Ethan was glad of his lethargy. He concentrated on the echoes of their footsteps with a strong sense that his actions were not real.

  He regretted not counting the stairwells from the start. With three sets of stairs making up one floor, that’s been… at least ten. He tried, futilely, to work out how many floors there were by estimating the number of doors on each one. Just as it seemed that they would walk through a skylight then fall through endless cloud, never reaching the ground, Ethan realised that there was a man waiting at the top of their current set of stairs, his arms folded. The guide stopped a few paces in front of him and said, “Okay…” then turned and walked past Ethan with the same slow, stubborn pace with which he had gone up, making him step aside.

  “Hello, you must be Ethan…” the man said. He scratched the back of his
ear before holding out a hand. Ethan shook it, crushing his clammy fingers. Is this how they initiate people into the cult? With a handshake? His vision wavered before him, and for a moment, he thought that he was going to faint.

  “Yeah.”

  “Come in, it’s cold out.” The man’s voice was hesitant, making Ethan uncertain. The man wore a purple shirt with the top button undone, which gave his double chin space to wobble. There was a large mole on his neck that Ethan at first assumed was a scar because of its size. The buckle on the belt of his trousers seemed too big, given how tight they were. After a few seconds of looking at him, Ethan saw that his hair was thinning without there being any actual bald spots.

  The lounge immediately beyond the door seemed huge at first, and as his eyes grew used to the gloom, he saw that it was because there was very little in it. The only lighting emanated from lanterns in each corner, which were covered with drapes the same colour as the man’s shirt. There were two sofas pushed against the far wall, also the same colour. Ethan saw a couple lying entwined on one of them, whereas on the other sat a man in his early twenties dressed all in black, his pale skin evident even in the haze. His hair stood up and he was very thin, giving him an impoverished, aggressive look. He stared at Ethan petulantly.

  “Move out the way, Max,” the man said to him. ‘Max’ remained still for just long enough to make his irritation evident, before sidling into a back room.