The Book of Lamps and Banners

by Elizabeth Hand

  “Why would Tindra’s father live there?”

  “Why do people live anywhere? Maybe he has family. Maybe he works in the cement factory. I don’t even know for sure that’s where he lives. If they’re there, we’ll find them.”

  “So will Lyla and Tommy.” It was the first time I’d thought of them in hours. “There’s no way they won’t have figured this out, too.”

  “I thought he was MIA. You think his sister would go there without him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Would he go without her?”

  “I told you, I don’t know.” I rubbed my eyes, my thoughts colliding like pinballs.

  “‘Don’t know,’ ‘don’t know.’ What do you know, Cass?”

  He stood and started pacing. I slid over to his laptop and clicked on another photo. It showed a group of protesters with the cement plant in the background. Winter—everyone wore heavy clothing and held handwritten signs with gloved hands.

  I pointed at one of the signs. “What’s this mean?”

  “‘Sweden first.’”

  “What about this one?”

  “Blott Sverige svenska krusbär har. It’s a saying—‘Only Sweden has Swedish gooseberries.’ Meaning keep your dark-skinned fruits to yourself.”

  “What about this?”

  He shook his head. “No clue. I don’t know that much Swedish—‘where’s the bathroom,’ ‘how much is this,’ ‘I think you’re hot.’ Beyond that you’re on your own.”

  I clicked to translate the article. Employees and concerned locals were protesting the fact that the cement factory had recently hired a dozen immigrants. The dateline for the piece was not even two months ago:

  We have a housing shortage on the island and not enough jobs. Why are they going to foreigners and not to genuine Swedes?

  A related article was a year older and more disturbing. Someone had set fire to refugee housing outside Slythamn. No one died, but a thirteen-year-old refugee girl had gone missing in the confusion. There was a blurry accompanying photo of a skinny kid, dark hair, braces, no head scarf. A phone number to call if you had information.

  I lost interest and searched for news about the rally in Victoria Park. The more liberal sites appeared to be downplaying it. They cited fewer than a thousand participants; online tabloids and nationalist sites represented the gathering as having been more heavily attended. HNN called it “a triumph.”

  Today’s event was a rousing show of support on the part of citizens who wish to preserve our way of life. Representatives from the U.S., Sweden, Germany, Denmark, and France underscored that this is an international problem, with repercussions that extend beyond our own shores to those of other nations that share our core values.

  I clicked through news photos, looking for anyone who resembled Tindra or Lyla, Tommy or Gryffin. Or me. Finally I yawned and gave up.

  Quinn had turned on the flat-screen TV and was sprawled on the bed, watching a soccer match. I lay beside him. When a commercial came on he switched channels, clicking through news, weather, another commercial, more soccer, more news…

  “Hey.” I sat up, pointing at the screen. “Go back.”

  “What?”

  “The station you just passed, go back to it.”

  He pointed the remote at the screen. A Sky News newscaster read from a teleprompter while footage of the rally played behind her. The video switched to an enlarged photo image. Cops stood around the body of a dark-skinned man as two hooded figures in white coveralls approached from a police van.

  “Son of a bitch,” I whispered. “That’s Tommy.”

  Chapter 38

  A headline flashed across the screen—SUSPECT DOWNED BY METRO POLICE—then cut to a John Lewis ad. I snatched the remote from Quinn’s hand, ran through scores of stations, but saw no other related news. I grabbed the laptop. In seconds I found the story.

  BREAKING NEWS

  An unidentified man died late this afternoon at a nationalist rally in Victoria Park. Described as dark skinned and wearing military-style clothing, earlier he had been observed near the front of the crowd during Conservative MP Ronald Morton’s address, according to a Metro Police spokesperson. Witnesses later claimed to have seen him arguing with a woman about a mobile phone, immediately before he attacked another man without provocation. When on-site police intervened, the assailant attacked them. An officer responded by using a Taser. The man died shortly afterward at the scene. Human rights activists have denounced the police action as being racially motivated.

  I scrolled to another brief article, and another. All the information was the same. “Jesus Christ,” I said, and ran a hand through my hair.

  “You sure it’s him?” asked Quinn.

  “I think so, but…”

  He leaned over my shoulder and clicked the top of the screen. Rows of photographs appeared. Most were the same shot I’d seen on TV, but Quinn jabbed his finger at one originally posted on Twitter. “Let’s see that one.”

  He enlarged the digital image till it filled the screen, so underlit it resembled a sepia photograph from the early twentieth century. I still recognized Tommy immediately.

  “That’s him,” I said. I felt sick.

  “You sure?”

  I nodded. I remembered that massive head bent over a Parcheesi board. Want to play? Might help pass the time. “Tommy. I don’t even know his last name.”

  “He’s a pretty big guy to die from being tased. Maybe he had a bad heart.”

  I stared at the photo and let my eyes adjust to the distorted play of light and shadow, as though adjusting to a darkroom. Tommy lay on his back, his arms thrown out, mouth and eyes wide as though staring at something wondrous.

  I enlarged the image. “Does getting tased hurt?”

  “Fuck yeah. It’s like being electrocuted. You seize up—”

  Quinn demonstrated, drawing his arms to his chest. “If you get hit in the arm, I mean. Your legs spasm if you get it in the thigh. It’s pretty bad.”

  Again I peered at the photo, that rapt expression. Tommy didn’t look like he’d been in pain. “But people die from it?”

  “Sometimes, sure. But a guy that big? Like I said, that would be tough, unless he had a bad heart or was fucked up on drugs. Was this guy an addict?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  I reread the account of the attack, then flipped back to Tommy’s photo. Who had he attacked? Erik? The man who’d met with Tindra, or kidnapped her?

  I was still scrolling for news when an update popped up. Tommy hadn’t yet been ID’d, but his victim had—a sixty-three-year-old black man from South London who’d been part of a church group protesting the white nationalists.

  “He came out of nowhere,” the pensioner stated, obviously still shaken. “Never seen him before, I have no idea why he singled me out…”

  I turned to Quinn. “This doesn’t make any sense. Why would he attack some old guy protesting the Nazis?”

  I enlarged the photo to get a better look at Tommy’s face. His upper lip had curled back slightly from his teeth, as though he was starting to smile. Both eyes were wide open. One shone glassy white, its pupil shrunken to a nearly invisible pinpoint. Darkness occluded the other eye. I thought of Harold and the crimson bloom in his eye; of the dead bird and the dart I’d seen near his house, the dead bird the boys had been toying with in the park.

  I peered at the photo of Tommy more closely. Was that darkness caused by a shadow? Or some flaw or damage to the eye itself? I looked at Quinn. “Have you ever seen someone get electrocuted?”

  “Yeah, once. Guy wasn’t cooperative, I had to give him a nudge.”

  “Do you remember what his eyes looked like? Like, were they dilated?”

  “‘Dilated’?” Quinn rubbed his chin. “I dunno. Maybe. It wasn’t a lot of voltage—too much and you go into cardiac arrest, and I wasn’t being paid for that. I remember he looked like shit afterward, more like he’d OD’d. Except for the burns.”

  “Bu
t you think maybe his eyes were dilated?”

  Quinn raised his hands. “I told you, I don’t know. They could have been. I’m not an EMT.”

  I zoomed in and out on the photo, until I was certain that there was no object or figure that might have cast a shadow across Tommy’s right eye. Whatever darkness was there came from the eye itself.

  The pupil of the other eye was definitely constricted, not dilated. I enlarged the image until it fragmented into gray ash and snow. Even digital images decay if you distort them enough.

  After a minute I stood and took a step back, still staring at the computer screen. I let my eyes go in and out of focus. When the image blurred, I slowly moved my head back and forth, until the image grew clear again, like a photograph emerging from the toner bath in a darkroom. My thoughts snapped into focus along with my vision. I knew what I was looking at.

  With digital photography, there are no chemicals or recombinations of physical elements—no alchemy—unlike traditional print photography, where light interacts with the emulsion to alter its chemistry. Ionization occurs, charging and changing crystal silver to metallic silver, and this creates a latent image in the film’s emulsion.

  But you need an impurity for the process to work. That’s where the chemical developing agent comes in. The random agent acts like the grain of sand in an oyster, only instead of growing a pearl, the presence of the chemical allows the metallic silver within the film’s emulsion to expand. The photograph develops, and the latent image becomes visible. Tindra had called me an immutable object, something that doesn’t change. Maybe I was also the random agent.

  “That.” My finger stabbed at the laptop screen, the eye like a dark planet striated with branching lines that might have been rivers and tributaries. Capillaries. I gestured excitedly at Quinn. “They shot him in the eye, like Harold.”

  Quinn stood behind me. “I don’t see it.”

  “You don’t have to. I see it. And I bet by now the police have, too.”

  Quinn pushed me aside, scrutinizing the image like it was a racing form.

  “I don’t buy it,” he said at last. “There’s no bullet small enough. Nobody could get in a shot that clean.”

  “Someone already has—it’s how Harold died.”

  “The body wouldn’t look like this. This guy’s face, you’d see where the bullet entered. And exited. Look at his eyeball—there’s no bullet hole! And there’s no mention anywhere of him getting shot.”

  “I didn’t see an exit wound with Harold, either. Or the dog.”

  “You wouldn’t know what to look for.” Quinn sounded irritated. “And the frigging dog was poisoned.”

  “What if it wasn’t?”

  “Listen to me. There’s no way someone could drill that guy’s eye in broad daylight, not without someone seeing him. He was in a public park. There was a demonstration going on.”

  “Uh-uh.” I perched on a corner of the bed. “I found a spot. I needed to lay low, I hid under this gigantic tree. No one could see me, but I could see them.”

  Now Quinn just looked pissed off. “You’re being stupid. There wasn’t a shooter hiding under your tree.”

  “There are other trees! Somebody found a perch or a place in the bushes and nailed him. Just like Harold. And maybe the dog, too.”

  “Shot him with what? You need to sober up, Cass. And sleep.”

  “I’m right,” I said. “I know I’m right.”

  I stormed into the bathroom, stood over the sink, and ran the cold water, splashing it into my face. I was right; I was certain of it. But I knew there was a piece missing, something out of focus or just beyond my range of vision; something a camera’s unblinking eye would have captured, but that I’d missed.

  Quinn was right about one thing: I needed to sleep. I turned the water off and dug out the three Percocets, swallowed them with some water, and squeezed my eyes shut. I recalled Harold’s astonishment as he gazed upon The Book of Lamps and Banners, his delight morphing into a corpse’s gaze, and Tommy’s swollen eye, its pupil lost in a web of burst capillaries. Freya’s tattoo. Children poking at the carcass of a tiny bird. A dead dog. Lamps and banners and a language with no words. Skull magic.

  I drank another mouthful of water, returned to the other room, and sat on the bed. I picked up Dead Girls and opened it: not to the illuminated page but a black-and-white photo. Me at nineteen, naked, my fingers clasping the bony hand of a life-size model of a human skeleton draped with a white sheet, as though it were a bride. Beneath the photo was Odilon Redon’s caption for his Temptation of Saint Anthony, the drawing that had inspired my self-portrait:

  Death: I am the one who will make a serious woman of you; come, let us embrace.

  Minutes passed. Quinn slumped in the chair, watching me. I closed the book, stood, and walked to the window.

  “You okay?” Quinn asked.

  I gazed down at the freight company’s loading dock. Two fourteen-wheelers with the same bright orange logo sat side by side, their engines idle. Black turbines spun atop the freight garage, blades flickering like the shadows thrown by an old-fashioned film projector. A blue-and-white Learjet descended toward rows of green lights on the runway, a red wind sock billowing in its wake.

  The mundane scene was a metaphor for something I couldn’t understand. Yet the meaning was there, if only I could stare at it long enough; if only I could break the code.

  A new language…lights and bright colors and symbols—it’s all lamps and banners. It’s all code.

  I turned from the window, returned to the bed, and stared at my book of photographs. I thought about how a lost world hid inside it, conjured from sunlight and salted paper. What had changed in all those years?

  Not me. Not enough, anyway.

  The storm in my brain began to subside, lulled by Percocet. I tugged my shirt off over my head.

  “Hey,” I called to Quinn. “Come here.”

  He looked at me, then stood, reaching to close the window blind.

  “Leave it open,” I said.

  I lifted my face to his as he sank onto the bed and touched my cheek.

  “You smell clean,” he said. “You smell like you.”

  “I am me,” I said, and pulled him to me.

  PART TWO

  KALKÖ

  Chapter 39

  It was still dark when we woke to the sound of Quinn’s phone alarm. He stumbled around, cursing as he made his way to the bathroom. I sat up groggily, hoping I wouldn’t be sick, switched on the light, and confronted my reflection in the mirror across the room. Four a.m. hangover: never a good look. I drank some water from a glass on the nightstand, found the compact in my bag, dug out two tiny scoops with my pinkie nail, and snorted them. It was so caustic, I felt like I’d shot the stuff directly into my eyes.

  By the time Quinn returned from showering, I’d dressed and done my best to clean up. He stared at my eyes and tossed his towel onto the bed.

  “What the hell, you don’t even want coffee first? That shit’s gonna ruin your pretty teeth.”

  “Now there’s that much less if they search my bag.”

  “Not funny, Cass.”

  “It’s mostly B12 and Epsom salts. No one’s going to search my carry-on. I’m more worried that I have a Swedish passport and don’t speak Swedish.”

  “No one’s going to care on this end. Over there, just speak English. Anyone asks, tell them you’ve been living in the U.S. for a long time. Tack means ‘thank you,’ snälla means ‘please.’ Hej means ‘hi.’ You ready? I need a smoke.”

  Outside, Quinn wandered in circles, chain-smoking until the airport shuttle arrived. There hadn’t been time to go online and check for more news about Tommy or Harold. When the shuttle van arrived, I collapsed into a plastic seat and stared out at the wasteland of loading docks and service ramps, lines of cabs and black hire cars already choking the access roads. Quinn elbowed me. “Stop grinding your teeth.”

  I chewed my thumbnail instead.

  At sec
urity, my stomach clenched as I watched two guards pull an elderly woman in a hijab from the line, ignoring the protests of her daughter, a young woman carrying a Vuitton bag, her dark hair pulled into a neat chignon. The old woman said nothing, only walked with the guards down a long corridor.

  We got through security with no trouble.

  “You hungry?” Quinn asked.

  I shook my head, staring at that long, now-empty corridor. Quinn pulled me after him.

  “Come on,” he said. “Nothing you can do.”

  We found a Boots so Quinn could stock up on nicotine gum for the flight, then a place for me to buy a coffee, hoping it would dissolve the bitter film that coated my tongue. It didn’t.

  In the crowded terminal, we sat and watched the infinite news cycle on TV. The sound was turned off, so I read the news crawl. Mass shootings in a Wisconsin Walmart and a Reno parking lot, another UK politician faking his own death. A machete attack in Finland. In Chile, an eight-year-old girl had survived an avalanche that buried her village. In Greenland, a melting glacier had revealed the intact skeleton of an immense pliosaur. There was more info about the new virus that had emerged in China.

  Then up popped footage of yesterday’s demonstration. Quick montage of Morton delivering his speech to rapt onlookers, token shot of a skinhead with a swastika tattooed on his neck, a few seconds of the melee that brought the rally to its end. A scene of uniformed figures moving around an area marked off with police tape, which quickly segued to a police news conference. I followed the news crawl:

  VICTIM IDENTIFIED AS AFGHAN SPECIAL FORCES VETERAN THOMAS LEWIS OF BRIXTON.

  WE HAVE NO SUSPECTS IN CUSTODY AT THIS TIME.