Forensic Songs

by Mike McCormack

  ‘That was to safeguard their IDs.’

  ‘There were no IDs; names, yes but no IDs. I cannot make it any clearer.’

  It takes Nealon’s mind a long moment to close around the distinction.

  ‘A list of names?’

  ‘Yes, just a list, nothing more.’

  ‘That’s some fix,’ he breathes.

  ‘It’s a piece of work, alright.’

  ‘I was convicted of stealing the IDs of seven men who have never existed?’

  ‘That’s how I see it.’

  ‘I got played.’

  She cannot hide her disbelief. It takes her about five seconds to lose her hold on a straight face; her features twist down to an expression of savage mirth; she can barely speak for laughing.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Mr Nealon, didn’t you learn anything when you were a foot soldier? Don’t tell me you didn’t come across this before. Don’t tell me you didn’t know that in the beginning is the game.’

  Nealon’s shock is so complete he can hardly lift his head to look up; her alarm at losing him completely brings an anxious, conciliatory tone to her voice.

  ‘There’s a game out there and the stakes are high. And you never know when you may be asked to step up and play. It could be now, like tonight, or you may go the whole of your life and never be asked or never even know you have played.’

  Nealon throws up his arms in rage. ‘Jesus, woman. This is not some grand metaphysical construct – it’s a shitty set-up, a betrayal, that’s what it boils down to.’

  ‘Maybe. But people like you, great transgressors, bring the law into existence.’

  ‘Yes and this is the thanks I get.’

  She shrugs. ‘People are beholden to you; Nealon versus the state, the case that ring-fenced the sovereignty and integrity of the citizen’s identity, people now sleep easier in their beds because of you …’

  She tires of her sarcasm and sits back in a dismissive slump. ‘This is all speculation, Mr Nealon. I’m not saying that this is how it was done, I’m saying that this is one way it might have been done.’

  ‘But you’re still saying I got played.’

  ‘What do you want to hear?’

  ‘The truth.’

  ‘Then yes, in the scenario I’ve outlined, you got played like a penny whistle.’

  ‘Just like I’m being played now?’

  ‘No! This is different; now you know the game is afoot, you know the rules and the rewards; how you play is entirely your own decision. But the game is generous; it will accommodate your answer one way or another.’

  Nealon dearly wants to return to his own cell where he might think over all of this. He is fully aware, however, that any call for a timeout will betray his total confusion. His mind is swamped, adrift in an electric fog. There is also a dryness in his mouth, which is drawing the sap from the rest of his body. He wonders what time it is – dawn is surely breaking beyond the walls of the prison. Just as well the sun is going to come up outside this windowless cell; he has the certain feeling he would ignite in pale flame at the merest touch of sunlight. Olwyn Crayn is sitting in profile, her gaze lost in the depths of the cell wall; when she turns to him, her head comes slowly through a quarter-turn.

  ‘A final thing – you’ve no idea how complex this game is, Mr Nealon. This independent studio …’

  ‘Studio my arse,’ Nealon groans, ‘let’s call it what it is, a front, a fucking money-laundering operation, a conduit through which P. O’Neill can reroute funds from any number of scams and present a clean book of accounts at the end of the year; that’s what it is!’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I do say so!’

  She begins again with a show of weary patience. ‘As I say, you have no idea how complex this game is. Whole departments of philosophy and sociology were placed on retainer as consultants. Cambridge, the LSE, the best brains money can buy. Not to mention all the AI engineers who have worked to perfect a multi-path game that opens out to a series of infinite endings …’

  Nealon’s hand shoots out as if stopping an oncoming vehicle. ‘Woah, infinite what?’

  Olwyn Crayn brightens through her fatigue. ‘I thought that might grab your attention. Yes, a possibility of infinite endings, each responding and shaped by the character of each game player’s mode of playing. This is the Holy Grail of gaming, the first narrative game that is not foreclosed to scripted endings.’

  Nealon’s face clouds in disbelief. She surges on.

  ‘Yes, the first game sensitive to the smallest nuances of each player’s moves and open to infinite story paths.’

  ‘And this is it?’

  ‘Yes. History can be rewritten here and this is just the beginning, there are plans for other games, other genres: Bloody Friday, the mass escape from the Maze, the Brighton bombing, Hume, Adams …’

  ‘The greatest hits?’

  ‘And all the spectaculars.’

  ‘And the ten men wasted away in flesh and bone …’

  ‘These are the times, Mr Nealon. There is no principle or sacrifice that cannot be commoditized. All you have to do is map out the co-ordinates of the event and paint it onto a digital chassis. All that remains is to put a price tag on it.’

  The depth and breadth of Nealon’s confusion is now total; he has lost sight completely of what is at stake here and how this meeting ever began. The whole encounter feels like some intricate construct dropped in from a higher, more abstract realm.

  ‘If your story is true, then the people who put me here are the same people I’m going to work for.’

  ‘I’m not saying the story is true; it’s all speculative, it’s full of holes. All I’m saying is that it’s one version that accounts for the facts. There may be other versions.’

  ‘Suppose we take it as true, why would I help in any way? Why should I help P. O’Neill go legit?’

  ‘That’s a stupid question.’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s stupid about it?’

  ‘I’ve already given you the answer.’

  ‘Give it again, it’s way past my bedtime.’

  ‘The prize, Mr Nealon, think of the prize.’

  Nealon balls his fists on the table and pushes down on them. He does not trust himself any more. The words come through his teeth like ground glass. ‘You bait me with my son and ask is it worth it!’

  ‘You begged the question, feeling sorry for yourself doesn’t work here.’

  ‘Is there any version of all this in which I don’t get fucked?’

  ‘Maybe, I don’t know. As I said, it’s all speculation.’

  ‘Bullshit!’

  ‘The prize, Mr Nealon, keep your eye on the prize.’

  ‘Fuck you!’

  ‘Goodnight.’

  ‘Fuck you!’

  With that she rises from her chair and in one continuous movement is gone from the cell. And he is not sure how she’s done it but everything remains undisturbed by her going.

  Sometime during the last hour or so the guard must have risen from the bunk and left the cell. How could he not have seen him leave, Nealon wonders. But it doesn’t surprise him; it’s just another detail on the margins of his greater confusion. He leans back and runs his hands through his hair. There is a vicious buzzing in his head, some insect with bladed wings banging around inside his skull. The bottle and stack of cups beside the television catch his eye; he goes over and pours himself a drink of the tepid water. While he’s standing, he takes the opportunity to do some stretching exercises. He touches his toes, flexes his arms and rotates his neck. The joints throughout his limbs and back creak with the effort. He sits down and tries to gather his thoughts.

  He cannot think but that there is something inevitable here. All of this feels like some fate writ large and undeniable into the very moment and circumstances of his birth. Right now he sees his life as a stumbling ascent through a series of nested, hierarchical games, each with their own traps and hazard
s, each with their own forfeits, each dangerous to one degree or another. Everything that has led him to this cell now appears as rigid and schematic as a succession of block and lever puzzles, a sequence of pressure locks or hidden keys to be found and turned in the appropriate doors. But vivid as the idea is, Nealon knows that nothing as grandiose as fate or destiny is likely to unfold here tonight. Despite its reach, the immediate scale of all this is intimate, carefully focused. But that does not stop his utter cluelessness bearing down upon him with blunt pressure. Sitting there, he is acutely aware of himself trapped at the vacant core of the prison’s cellular bulk, the pale nexus of himself at the heart of its concrete mesh.

  He is not as tired as he thought. Something in that woman’s going seems to have drawn with it the leaden warmth that so flummoxed him during their stand-off. He has passed beyond fatigue, into that twitchy mode of hyperawareness. There is a rawness also about him, all his senses are alive to the slightest touch; there will be no sleep tonight.

  The CD lies on the table. For a long moment he resists touching it; the slightest contact with it might be something from which there is no going back. But Nealon knows that he is playing for time, he knows he is in this to the bitter end. Finally he picks up the disc and places it in the console. He puts on the headset and settles the mic in around his chin as the TV screen comes up with the two-word title, Homo Ludens. Drawing a deep breath, he guides the cursor over the title and strikes.

  The white screen posts a request to submit a reading for the voice-recognition program. The sample text scrolls up the screen … Recognizing the potential of the current situation and in order to enhance the … He speaks the full ceasefire text through to the end and watches as a field at the bottom of the screen fills up and flashes a line that tells him the voice sample is complete and recognized; evidently the programme is sophisticated enough to extrapolate from these few words. Now the screen lights to a stills montage and immediately any doubts about the game’s origins are cleared up. The images morph to life and the whole history of the conflict is collapsed into a two-minute video collage that begins with a clip of the civil rights marches of the late sixties, which fade into running street battles wreathed in tear gas, bodies face down on the city street, the bombed-out buildings and overturned cars, the seething crowds addressed by various demagogues … all of this finally giving way to the ranks of black flags and pale crucifixes on walls and gables across a desolate cityscape before the sequence ends on the totemic image of a gaunt Christ figure, wrapped in blankets, behind bars. The whole sequence is underscored by a grating industrial soundtrack, which chimes with the acidic greens and blues that tint the sequence.

  After thirty seconds the montage begins to loop through itself once more.

  Nealon sits in the gathering stillness, locked in position. A top-down view shows him turned into the television with his legs stretched out in front of him, the wireless control held on his right thigh. He throws his head back and opens his mouth to the heavens – not a howl but a huge yawn, a last surge of fatigue. He pushes himself forward in the chair to rest his elbows on both thighs and to stare at the screen … Everything about this scene, the time and place, the lone figure beneath the naked light, the hard geometry of the cell – all these separate elements lend it the most desolate mood of human isolation.

  But Nealon’s own awareness of himself is on a different scale and in a different register. These are the hours between night and day, that pale interval in which a man’s soul might come unmoored. He has a clear sense of this game unfolding all around him, spreading through the dawn outside the prison walls and into the universe beyond. And he sees how every moment of his life is a part of it, every wilful thing he has ever done, every vacant omission, everything he has ever been subject to. And he knows now that no matter what he does, whatever move he makes, he will always be the centre of this game, the soft locus of its infinite attentiveness, the sway of its move and countermove, its eternal sleeplessness. With a sense of the odds stacking against him, he sees how his wife and child are a part of it also, drawn into its spiralling complexity.

  And down here, at his level, where player and played are one and the same, he is armed with nothing but his wits; the thought does not reassure him. It is a sudden, intense realization and the force of it makes him acutely sensitive of himself, the gradual morph of his body through each successive moment, the rhythmic rot and renewal of his whole organism right down to the molecular level, the proteins and enzymes of his flesh and bone. An image of himself surging to his feet and bawling out his name and his innocence flits across his vision. But to whom this protest is directed or what he hopes to achieve by it, he cannot say. He draws in his feet and braces them hard on the floor. The moment passes in an electric lurch. He takes the control in both hands. The screen presents two options – Play and Quit.

  Nealon moves the cursor and strikes.

  Ever since the death of my father I’ve slept badly, and my father died twenty years ago … that means I’ve slept badly almost half my life. No matter how deep or peaceful I may be, any untoward sound and I’m bolt upright in a shot, prepared for the worst sort of bad news. So when the knock came to the window that night I was already on the floor and into my jeans with my heart hammering in my chest before the sound had died in my ears. I ran through the hall in my feet and pulled the front door open.

  With his shoulder towards me and his face in profile it took me a moment to recognize him. When he turned around and saw my face he took a small step back under the porch light and held up his hands.

  ‘Calm down,’ he said, ‘there’s no one dead, no one hurt or anything.’

  It was cousin Davey, a man I hadn’t seen in twelve months and yet here he was, on my doorstep at three in the morning telling me everything was OK.

  ‘I thought that was Anthony’s room,’ he added. ‘I thought that was his room there to the front.’

  By way of gaining a moment, my heart still hammering in my chest, I put out my hand. He took mine in his and shook it with slow deliberation. However, as genuine and solid as the handshake was, I now felt inexplicably angry. ‘Davey,’ I blurted hoarsely, ‘what’s up?’

  Davey opened his mouth to speak and seemed to lose the run of himself for a few moments. He uttered a couple of garbled sentences about someone in the car out on the road and then something about someone’s gasúr … and then suddenly he stopped, in a fluster of confusion that was clear now, even to himself. Starting again with a resolute air he began. ‘Mark, I won’t mince words, I’m looking for drink: beer, a bottle of wine, anything.’ And with that he took another step back under the light.

  This was the second week of December, less than fourteen days before Christmas and I knew there was drink in the house. I knew that not two feet away from me in the hall cupboard there were four bottles of wine; I knew also that in the kitchen to my back there was an unopened bottle of Powers. Nevertheless, I shook my head.

  ‘Davey, there isn’t a drop here. You know herself, she doesn’t like having it in the house.’

  ‘Wine, beer, anything,’ he persisted.

  I shook my head, desperately wishing him gone and ashamed of my pathetic lies. ‘Davey, I’m telling you there isn’t a drop in the house, no bottles or cans, nothing.’

  And there we stood, the two of us locked into this moment of knowing lies and embarrassment. Finally Davey nodded his head and raised his hand. ‘Sound, Mark, that’s fair enough, I’ll let you back to bed.’ He turned and moved off over the gravel and I was relieved to close the door and put out the light.

  ‘Who the hell was that?’

  Anthony, my youngest brother, stood in socks and T-shirt at the end of the hall, his face swollen with sleep.

  ‘Cousin Davey.’

  ‘Cousin Davey at this hour, what did he want?’

  ‘What do you think he wants? What does he always want at this hour of the night?’

  Anthony sighed, I didn’t have to spell it out for hi
m. ‘Was he loaded?’

  ‘Of course he was loaded.’

  Anthony looked sorrowful and ran his hand through his hair. ‘He’s back on it again, the poor bastard. No one gets this as bad as Davey does; he’ll go through the village now tonight looking for drink. I’ll bet he’ll go over and knock up the uncle.’

  I remembered the fragile grace with which Davey had moved away from the door, how he had seen through my lies and yet squared with me. I went into my bedroom.

  ‘Don’t forget you’re giving me a lift into town tomorrow,’ Anthony called.

  ‘Why am I giving you a lift into town tomorrow?’

  ‘The results of that test, they should be back.’

  ‘What’s wrong with your own car?’

  ‘I’m leaving her in for the NCT, I told you all this.’

  ‘Shite,’ I breathed, ‘OK, give me a shout after nine.’

  ‘Make it ten, I have to drive it to the garage at nine. I’ll call you when I get back.’

  ‘Fine, whatever, Jesus …’

  I switched off the light and lay on the bed with my hands clasped to my chest, my heart still pounding away like a bastard.

  I turned forty over a month ago and that makes me seven years younger than my father was when he died suddenly of a heart attack. For some years now I’ve been meaning to have a full physical check-up as soon as I struck the big four-oh. I’ve always had some notion that this marker signalled the end of my youth and now that I was entering the foothills of middle age I needed this check-up to see how I was holding up. And any idea that I might postpone it for a while was done for by a series of heart attacks that had ripped through the family this last year. First up was my uncle, a strong, fit man in his mid-fifties who drove a truck for a builder’s yard, a man who never abused himself and whose only vices were a fondness once in a while for twelve-year-old Jameson and a fry. Pushing a lawnmower brought it on. One moment the sun is shining, his family is reared and he’s looking forward to spending a week with the grandkids; the next he’s under the knife having a stent fitted and his whole life is turned upside down. Two months later his brother in America is walking up the hill to his holiday home in the Catskills when that unmistakeable, clamping pain hits him in the chest.