Ah, well, he was thinking, watching her shocked face. So that’s the way things are, and that nice civilised patrician gent I was talking to was really Pigsty Liver For whom might is right, and now I’ve bust the deal—
She left, saying she’d get back to him.
Ax, crestfallen and exasperated, wondered if his life was actually in danger (she had been so flustered), but decided not. Fred Eiffrich isn’t Caligula, he’s just an emperor whose favour is easily lost. Too bad. And if Ax no longer had a patron in this town, that was okay. He had a contingency plan.
In the morning he took the Metro to Dupont Circle, bought himself coffee and a muffin and went to sit in the park. People walked briskly, a school class of teenagers were doing drill-exercises. Sparrows flirted and chirruped and hunted scraps. The central fountain featured a ronde of undraped forms, male and female: sleek, pallid stone. Two white guys, clad in running shorts and singlets, sat on the rim of the bowl talking quietly. Could one of them be my man? He wondered if he’d been stupid about the gig, but decided he’d been right to say no as an opening gambit; see what Lurch comes back with… On his VIP ticket he’d have flown into Shannon by private jet (no flights to England, but he could have handled the rest of the journey). Getting out of the USA otherwise, when he had little money, wasn’t supposed to be here, had a chip in his head and came from a contaminated country, was not going to be straightforward. But he’d been working on it.
I like to be in charge of my next sandwich.
The sparrows caught his attention. What a strange city it is, where nobody feeds the birds. He wanted to crumble some of his blueberry muffin for them, but respect for Lurch’s feelings restrained him. I’d hate to create an artificial food chain… One of the little birds hopped to within inches of his foot, without the bait. She looked up. He saw in extraordinary clarity the blonde stripe above her shining dark eye, the soft pelt of smoky brown feathers. She reminded him of Fiorinda, and he had a wistful thought that she might come to his hand. He could almost feel the tiny claws, digging into him—
Oh
He recognised the penumbra of something untoward happening in his brain, and the next instant there was Fiorinda, her living ghost: Fiorinda, in her storm-cloud indigo and the orange fluffy cardigan, one arm across her breast, the bi-loc set in a white-knuckled grip against the side of her head. His heart leapt. Oh God, she has remembered. My telecoms-allergic babe finally realised why the fuck I gave her that thing. She looked as if she’d been crying.
‘Ax!’
‘Fiorinda, my baby. What’s the matter? What’s happened, sweetheart?’
‘Ax, you have to come home. Sage has gone. Olwen wouldn’t give him life support any more. You don’t know because he wouldn’t let us tell you, but he was taking far too much snapshot, in the Zen Self experiments. He said he couldn’t stop, it was something he had to do, and now he’s gone to Caer Siddi.’
The moment he saw her, the moment he heard her voice, the world turned upside down and righted itself, and he was there, in the world he thought he’d lost, loving her and Sage, grasping that they were in trouble and he’d have to sort it out—
‘You two haven’t been getting on then, I take it. And the stupid bugger wouldn’t let you tell me. Fiorinda, don’t cry, it’ll be okay. Just explain to me what went wrong—’
She shook her head, her trouble only darker. ‘N-not at this distance, Ax. You don’t understand, he’s gone. He was, I think he was dying when he left Rivermead. No one who goes to Caer Siddi ever comes out again. He’s never coming back. Sage is gone. Things are okay here but not too good. Fergal’s taken command of the London barmies, apparently Sage told him to do that, but I’m not sure, what do you think?’
‘I’m on my way. I’ll be with you soon as I can. Fiorinda, don’t worry. It won’t be as bad as you’re making out. I’ll talk to Sage, I’ll go and haul him out—’
‘Oh.’ She looked around. ‘You’re outside. Can other people see me? Do I look weird?’
‘Yeah, they can see you, like a ghost. They won’t worry. It doesn’t—’
‘Shit. I’d better break the connection, this is contraband. Please, please come home as quickly as you can. I love you.’
She had vanished before he realised that he could have touched her.
He was on his feet. He sat back on the bench and reached for his cooling paper cup of coffee. His eyes were fixed on the Art Deco fountain; his mind was racing. I must go home, I must get back. They’ve had a bust-up over the Zen Self, and Fiorinda’s alone: but there’s something else. Something I ought to know. I can feel it. Ideas started to click together in his mind, hints he’d dismissed, disregarded inferences, a cascade that he couldn’t stop. Straws in the wind, random objects out of place that reveal the direction of a great secret mass of moving air—
‘Oh my God!’ he gasped, starting to his feet again, his whole body thrilling with fight-and-flight. ‘My God, Sage—! What have you done?’
If desperation had been enough he would have dived through the ether, around the world, and snatched her out of danger, as if from a burning building. A youngish, good-looking Hispanic bloke, in worn-down funky leisurewear, was coming towards him. ‘Mr Preston? Hi, I’m João. You waiting for me?’
It was his underground ticket home connection.
The man offered his hand. In the split second before he took it Ax recalled that this was no longer a gesture between negotiating strangers in the USA. Yesterday morning the President clapped Ax around the shoulders and squeezed his arm, getting physical without a qualm; but he didn’t shake hands. They don’t wear gloves, that would be too weird, but they don’t touch skin to sweaty skin on the first date. Bio-terrorism’s a real danger. He remembered, but he took the hand because it was too late, and everything went black.
Where am I? He was lying on his side on a hard, dusty surface. He thought it was wood, floorboards or planks. He was handcuffed, blindfold; he couldn’t hear anything. When he moved, he found the cuffs were locked to a wall. Further inventory: he was wearing teeshirt and underpants, he had some bruising he’d rather not think about, a sore face, the taste of old blood in his mouth, but no serious physical pain. Where am I now? I’ve been moved. I was somewhere different, floating in a sea of drugged daze, they have moved me. A blurred impression of the past few days began to surface. He lay still, deathly afraid, Oh, Fiorinda… Okay, it could be worse. I could be naked, could have been hurt much worse. This isn’t too bad. This is not an absolutely hopeless fix. Objective one, calm yourself. Be open and ready for whatever chance comes.
At last, footsteps. Someone ripped off the blindfold.
It was the bloke from Dupont Circle, with others. Two deeply tanned white guys, one with grey bristle hair, the other much younger. Two stocky, dark-skinned guys, alike as brothers; and a tall, thin man black as tar. They all had handguns. The older white guy was clutching his and looking trigger-happy. The others less so, guns in reserve.
‘What’s going on? What’s happening?’
‘Same as last time, Ax. You’ve been kidnapped. You know the score, you co-operate, be nice, or we’ll hurt you.’
He sat up, cuffed to the wall, and tried to look around without appearing to do so. The bed had no mattress, just dusty planks. No window was in his line of sight, and neither was the door. A sink in a corner. Bare dingy-brown walls. It could be a very cheap, shabby and dirty hotel room. He couldn’t hear traffic.
‘So, what is it you want?’ He gave them a rueful smile. ‘Contrary to the sound of the thing, I don’t have easy access to large sums of money, but—’
‘It’s not for money!’ shouted the old white guy, the gun shaking in his hand. ‘We’re not interested in your fucking money!’
‘Hey, we do want money!’ countered one of the two stocky guys, in a hurry, as if fearing Whitey would wreck the deal.
‘Yeah, but this isn’t about money!’ repeated the older bloke, furiously. He sprang forward and gave Ax a smack in the face wi
th the side of the gun that knocked his head back, ringing, stinging. ‘This is about the blow!’
‘I don’t have any cocaine, either. Not on me.’
‘I mean the MARKET! This is about what you did, you bastard. And you’re going to fucking UNDO, or you will never see the light of day again!’
‘This is not personal,’ said the man from Dupont Circle. He put his arm around Ax’s shoulders and leaned in close, warm breath, a sickening jolt of fear. ‘You know, Ax, I am your biggest fan. I admire very much the Rock and Roll Reich. Fiorinda, the Powerbabes, the Reading Festival, I am there. Be good to each other, I believe that. But you have to help us. You don’t know what you did. I know you’ll help us when you understand.’
The white guy started ranting again. The others joined in, saying things that were slightly more coherent, no less lunatic. They were in the drug business, or they had been, until the market crashed. Their careers had been wrecked by the legalisation of recreational drugs in Europe—above all, the synthesis of artificial cocaine. They held Ax Preston responsible. He had ruined their lives. What they expected him to do about it was unclear. He was a hostage—
That seemed to be it.
Deathly afraid, he lived for days in that room, chained to the wall, taken twice a day, handcuffed and blindfold, to a toilet: talking whenever they would let him, trying to romance them, trying to find out where he was, hoping he would get to speak with someone rational. He got nowhere. It dawned on him that there was no one rational, no one in charge. He was dealing with an amputated limb, a flailing poisonous tentacle no longer connected to any organised body. He could not call Fiorinda; the b-loc link was one way. But it was okay. She would realise something had gone wrong and call him again. All he had to do was stay alive, she would send the cavalry. Unless… Unless the the nightmare he’d envisaged, just before this disaster, was real, and it had intervened.
The kidnappers were volatile, but not violent. Not even older Whitey, apart from the tantrums; which grew less. They didn’t hurt him anymore, though he knew it was in them: especially in João. After a few days they let him do without the blindfold except for the toilet trips. They gave him food, rice and beans; and water from the sink. João kept saying he would borrow a guitar so that Ax would feel at home. Ax Preston, he always has his guitar. Like Jimi Hendrix.
One day, maybe the tenth or fifteenth from Dupont Circle, the six of them arrived together, with another man. The newcomer wore a suit of white overalls, like a house-painter. He was carrying a rigid metal briefcase.
Ax’s heart stood still.
‘Hey,’ he said, ‘what do you want me to do? I didn’t cause a global recession, and I can’t disinvent synthetic blow, fuck’s sake, can’t put the genie back in the bottle—’
‘Ax, we have to prove that we’ve got you,’ said João, reasonably. ‘This is a good thing, be calm, don’t worry. When we have proved that we really have Ax Preston, then we can have the ransom paid, and everything will be fine. We are not bad people, Ax.’
‘Take a photograph,’ he whispered, his lips scarcely able to move.
‘That’s fucking stupid,’ said one of the stocky pair (only ‘João’ had a name, so far). ‘Don’t be stupid, Ax. Pictures can be faked. What would a photo prove?’
‘Blood sample. Tissue sample.’
They already had his ring, the ring Fiorinda had given him, along with everything else he’d been carrying. They had plenty of ID.
‘We could cut off your hands,’ said João. ‘But we will only take something that you don’t need, that losing it will not make you less of a man, but more.’
The man in the painter’s overalls set his briefcase on the floor and opened it, with the stoic expression of someone who knows he should be in a better job. Ax couldn’t see into the case, but he could see the man donning a pair of slick medical gloves. He watched, rigid with fear, as older Whitey and João confabulated over a needle and a syringe, works that had been travelling loose in Whitey’s denim jacket pocket. Is this a clean needle, are you sure? It doesn’t look very clean. Oh fuck.
‘Don’t put me out,’ he said, urgently. ‘Don’t put me out. I have to be conscious!’
He struggled furiously, things having reached the point where there was nothing to be gained by staying calm. They got him strapped down, face down, on his bed of boards. Okay, okay, I’ll keep still. Don’t knock me out!
But they did.
When he woke again he was still lying in the dirty room. His wrists were cuffed in front of him, but not fastened to the wall. He put both hands to his head and found a crusted, sticky dressing over the place where they’d shaved a patch of hair and cut open his skull. If that gets infected, I am fucked. He could not remember his own name, but he could feel it, like something he could touch through a veil, through water. All kinds of knowledge were immanent in him. The engine was working just as it had been before, but the syncromesh was gone. If that gets infected I am fucked… The person who could put that thought together knew everything, but like an amputated limb, a lost arm of the sea.
He tried to get up and fell off the bed. Right arm and leg (or maybe left arm and leg, same side, anyway) were not responding. He tried to crawl and found that the limbs that felt paralysed moved, more or less: but he couldn’t think about it or everything went haywire. He remembered effects slightly like this from, whoooh, long time ago, long time ago. When the chip was first put in.
Says the amputated limb, the lost arm of the sea.
He crawled in the direction of the daylight, the place where he’d always known the window must be. He pushed himself up the wall, with great difficulty, and touched glass. He was looking out of a window after all this time (not a fuck of a clue how long, at this moment). Aha. Beard. Touch his chin. The beard is grown way past where it was, it is soft and sparse. I don’t grow much beard, but what there is is strong enough for a daily shave, annoyingly. I will not grow a beard. He remembered promising Fiorinda that.
Says the amputated limb, the lost arm of the sea.
He could not make sense of what he saw. He noticed for the first time that he couldn’t make sense of anything he saw. Not his own hand in front of his face. Light and shadow, greyscale; other than that, scrambled pixels. I cannot do this. He turned and let himself slide down again with his eyes closed, tears burning his eyelids. Oh fuck, oh Fiorinda, I can’t get there, what’s happening to you?
He stayed for a long time in the same position, in the sweltering damp heat of the dirty room. Nobody came. Every few hours, or maybe every few minutes, he had no way of telling, he opened his eyes and tried again. The need to shit will come. Where will I shit, where will I piss if they don’t take me to the toilet? I’ll choose a corner. I can handle getting the pants down and up, cuffed. I think can do that. There’s water in the sink. Live on water, for a long time. Someone will come. I’ll think of a way to beat this. I will. He opened his eyes and tried again.
He opened his eyes and tried again, and had the strangest sensation of the whole input being there, but unavailable. The animal can see perfectly. Ax can’t.
Now this is what Sage warned me about. The brain becomes parasitical on the chip, routing everything through there, so if the chip goes you are fucked: and I wouldn’t listen, because I couldn’t consider giving up my special stuff. Poor Sage, he must have been scared to death. What an arrogant stupid wanker I am.
He opened his eyes and tried again, he opened his eyes and tried again, not knowing whether he would lose everything that had been left to him, but giving thanks to God for what he had. I have Sage, I have Fiorinda, I can think of them. God is merciful.
He thought of them. The faces were not clear, but he could feel them, filling his heart.
It could have been days later: he opened his eyes and tried again, and the dirty room took shape. God is good. God is great. It looked different. Could be a different room, for all he knew. He listened, am I deaf? There was not a sound. He pushed himself up the wall and looked
out of the window. The dirty room was on the first floor of a breeze-block building in a row of similar buildings. It seemed to be on the edge of a town. The street below was broken up, and trailed away into red stones and earth. He could see derelict industrial things beside a broad, nearly-dry river-bed. On the other side of the nearly-dry river, the green rafted towers of the trees began. They go up forever. They go on and on.
Where the fuck am I?
It took him many weeks to come back from losing his chip. The neurological effects were terrifying, but most of them passed quite quickly. Psychological withdrawal was in ways much worse. The shakes. Disorientation, inability to concentrate, inability to eat, or even to swallow—and a fathomless, engulfing despair that wouldn’t give up. He had lost England, he had lost the Qur’an. He had lost his mind, become an animal like these animals his captors. It was like being in Hell, because there was no escape. The cartel took care of him; they wouldn’t let him die. He would wake to find one or other of them spooning sugar-water into his mouth.
They brought him fresh clothes, they brought a slab of foam and a sheet for the boards of his bed. They cleaned the dirty room a little; they fetched in some furniture. João brought the promised guitar, and an amplifier so they could have a real concert. There was no power in this building but apparently there were others nearby that were still hooked up. The kidnappers ran a cable to Ax’s room: João told Ax he must try to play the guitar. He must try to get better.
He discovered they still had the chip. João carried it around in a dog-eared Jiffy bag. The cartel would sit looking at this Jiffy bag, in Ax’s room: arguing about where to send it and getting nowhere, bewildered by the task. They were afraid they would be traced by their DNA on the package. It had them (especially Martín, old Whitey with the hair-trigger emotions) crying in frustration. How could they send something to England? An unreal place. Buckingham Palace Road, London. Beyond imagining.
Ax had fallen into the hands of the unculture. They were grown-up toddlers. They had no idea how to follow through, how to make a project work.
Castles Made of Sand Page 29