‘Piss off,’ says Davey, reaching for his beer as another awkward silence falls on the table.
‘Jack?’ I hear Jez saying, ‘Jack, it’s you.’
I look around and see everyone looking at me. Oops, nearly missed my turn. ‘Sorry,’ I say, ‘I was miles away.’
‘Who with?’ asks Mark.
‘Jody?’ suggests Jez.
‘In your dreams,’ says Nick.
I let the comments wash over me and ignore them. With hindsight, I’m not sure why I say what I say next. I think I must have recently heard that old Alicia Keys song about New York. You know, the one that has the lines about concrete jungles where dreams are made. ‘Empire State of Mind,’ that’s what it was called.
‘When I was in my second year at Leeds uni,’ I begin, and still not entirely sure what I wanted to do with my life, I had a brief fling with an American girl. Her name was Delta.’ I hear someone snigger at the name.
‘She was on an exchange course to study at Leeds for one semester. Somehow we ended up in bed together, which was fine by me. But then, pretty soon, she started getting a little bit too keen and clingy. Wanted to meet my parents. Wanted me to go back with her to New York. She was probably just lonely, but she was way, way too intense for my liking, so I slowly edged her out of my life. And that was it.
‘But, just occasionally I regret acting the way I did. I was young, why did I turn down such an opportunity? I should have been bolder and visited her in New York. I mean, who knows what would have happened if I had? So that’s my choice. If I could have my life over again, I’d have taken up Delta’s offer and followed her to New York.’
AGENCY-PROJECT-SYBOT#29-SIMULATION-ENTERING-PHASE#2-
‘Eight men and four women crammed together into a tight space like this? Sounds like a recipe for trouble.’
Haven’t you heard? We’ve been warned to expect 50 percent casualties.’
I walk up the staircase and out of the subway, pick up a Starbucks mocha with an additional shot of espresso but strictly no extra cream and make my way over to the North Tower. For the fifth time this morning, I ask myself why I’m doing this? It’s not that I don’t love Delta, it’s just that, well, just that something seems to have died. We’ve grown too comfortable with each other. Maybe take each other for granted too much. I have my work. She has the kids. Our lives have drifted in different directions.
It wasn’t always like this. When I first met her we were both studying at a university in England. She was like nobody else I’d ever met before. She was exciting. She was different. She swept me off my feet and I willingly followed her back to New York. But that was then and this is now. Now, at the age of 47, I feel that everything is ashes and nothing I do holds any interest for me.
Maybe that’s why I’m behaving like a love-sick teenager. Making my way up the elevators in the World Trade Center, at 8:30 in the morning, on my way to the Windows on the World restaurant on the 106th floor. I’m on my way to the Windows on the World for a breakfast meeting with another woman.
Kerri-Alpha. That’s her professional name, she’s a journalist with a lifestyle magazine on the Upper East Side and dropped her real name, Keghourhi Assadourian, for something zappier. What she sees in me, I don’t know. I’m just another displaced Englishman in New York. But I don’t care, and over the past few weeks we’ve been grabbing more and more time together.
Today we’re having breakfast before heading off to borrow a mutual friend’s apartment over towards Chinatown. I’m early for my assignation with Kerri. I left home as soon as I could this morning, to avoid having to tell a lie direct to Delta’s face. She thinks I’ve a day of business meetings on Wall Street. I take a deep breath, to steady my nerves. I know I’m on dangerous ground. And then . . . Then, everything changes. Everything ends.
At 8:46 there is the sound of thunder. A roaring cacophony of mechanical noise. A deafening blast of screaming, twisting metal and crashing, falling masonry. The whole building rocks, shakes and sways and the elevator car I’m riding in shudders to a halt.
I look at my fellow passengers. It must be bad; they’ve all stopped checking or talking into their mobile phones. Nobody says a thing but then someone sniffs the air. I can smell it too.
It’s smoke. Something is burning.
I don’t know who says it first, but we are all thinking the same thing. We all know it: the Tower is on fire.
For a few brief moments but in reality perhaps only a second or two, we try to pretend there is nothing wrong, nothing to worry about. But this facade of composure doesn’t last long as the smoke begins to grow denser, to become a visible, malevolent presence in the car. It is also starting to get hotter and the smell of burning is getting ever more pungent. The crackling, snickering sound of a fire is all around us. We can feel the heat beneath our feet. The flames have climbed the lift shaft and are now snapping at the underside of our elevator car.
All pretence of calm and control collapses. We start to shout. We yell. We bang on the walls of the elevator car with our briefcases and with our bare hands. Someone is sobbing. Somebody else is praying.
‘Help!’
‘Get us out of here!’
‘Don’t let us die!’
‘Help, help!’
‘Jack, Jack! What the hell’s the matter with you? What are you screaming about? Why are you banging on the walls?
‘Help! Get me out of here! Don’t let me die! Help, help!’
‘Steady on, mate, you’re only in the loo. The others sent me in because you’d been gone so long. We thought you’d been struck down with Delhi-belly or fallen asleep. You know you can’t take your ale these days.’
‘I’m dying in here!’
‘Jack, what are you on about? Get off the floor man. Jack? Jack? Oh, shit. Quick, somebody call an ambulance, I think Jack’s having a heart attack.’
‘Now let’s see you get out of that, you bastard,’ says the woman, as she presses the
As she looks at the screen, she shakes her head. Has she been too hard on Jack? Leaving him there squirming. Unsure whether he is dying of a heart attack on the floor of a lavatory in an Indian restaurant or about to be obliterated in a holocaust of flames, buckling metal and crumbling walls, as the North Tower of the World Trade Center collapses.
‘More to the point,’ she asks herself, ‘where does the story go from here?’
It’s not that she hates Jack, it’s just that there’s nothing going on between them anymore. All he seems to care about is that bloody job at the Agency. Like this evening, he’ll come home late smelling of beer and biryani after another curry night with that sad bunch of losers from his office.
Diane realises her feelings are more than a little motivated by her disappointment with the way her own life and her relationship with Jack turned out. When she’d met him at Bradford University, all those years ago, she’d only planned to stay in the UK for the one semester before returning to New York.
Instead, she’d been swept off her feet by this charming and exciting Brit. The early years had been good but her own career never took off in the way she had hoped. Then there were the children. And then, when they left home . . . there was nothing. She was an alien national, alone in an alien town.
Now she was reading for a PhD in creative writing at the local university - one of the few good things (if not the only good thing) this grim Northern city had going for it. She once told Kat, her best friend on the course, ‘I felt that at the age of 47, everything was ashes and nothing I did held any interest for me. Just long grey days of nothingness, stretching out over the years.’
Kat, who had a rather more earthy outlook on life, suggested Diane should cultivate her inner cougar and start picking up toy-boys for some down and dirty
gratuitous, meaningless sex. Instead, Diane immersed herself in her studies and started to write-out her anger.
She checked the clock on her desk. Time to print off the story and head over to the faculty building for the one-to-one tutorial she had scheduled for later that afternoon.
AGENCY-PROTECT~SYBOT#29-SIMULATION-REACTIVATION-PHASE-
‘Deploying defibrillator paddles. Charging. Charged. Standby. Shock discharged. Candidate responding. Vital life signs increasing. Deploying defibrillator paddles again. Charging. Charged. Standby. Shock discharged. Life signs satisfactory. Reactivation successfully commenced. Retracting defibrillator paddles.’
Diane sat in the office while her tutor, the man they called the Count, read through her story. He wasn’t a real count - that was just the nickname Kat had given him. Kat reckoned he was a vampire or at least modelled himself on Count Dracula, what with his pale complexion, slicked-back, unnaturally jet-black hair, old fashioned clothes (the Count was probably the only man on campus still wearing velvet jackets in a non-ironic way) and pointy, little teeth. He even had an apartment in The Towers, a big, soot-blackened, neo-Gothic pile some long-dead Victorian factory owner had built for himself up on the edge of the moors, overlooking the town.
As she watched him now, Diane involuntarily shuddered as she saw his unusually long, for a man at least, fingernails tracing her words across the pages of her manuscript. ‘Yuk,’ she thinks to herself, ‘those aren’t nails, they’re claws.’ Diane will never know the accuracy of her opinion.
Finally he spoke. ‘I can see your dilemma. You’ve built up the story nicely. Is the 9/11 scenario the fevered imaginings of a heart attack victim? Or, is the curry night a final escapist fantasy of someone about to die in a terrorist attack? But how do you round off this story without resorting to a cop-out cliched ending?’
‘Such as,’ suggested Diane, ‘having Jack wake up to discover it was all a dream?’
Precisely. Or else throw in some preposterous trick, twist-in-the-tale, ending that will annoy your readers and leave them feeling cheated? Like suddenly revealing a minor character, hmm, I don’t know.’ The Count paused. ‘Like suddenly revealing that Jody, the office PA, had all along been a Russian spy and was poisoning Jack with small doses of a rare chemical that was only activated when it came into contact with curry spices.’
Diane laughed. Her tutor might be creepy, but he knew his stuff. There again, he was the author of ‘The Underlying Homosexual Imagery in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ - an academic paper Diane suspected only one person on the course, its author, had ever read from start to finish.
‘What might be a good idea is if we introduce another character into the story, perhaps a narrator, to give it an element of context? For example, what if you - I mean the Delta character in New York - is made the narrator, so this becomes her story focusing on her unsatisfactory relationship with Jack?’
Diane shifted uneasily in her seat. Was her tutor reading her mind? How did he know this had been one of her motivations for writing the story?
‘Diane.’ The Count was talking to her. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not reading your mind. I’m not telepathic or some kind of monster, I’m only a creative writing tutor, but I have encountered this situation before. Leaving aside the fact the Delta character seems to be your poorly disguised alter-ego, there is something about this town - I mean this city - that alienates people.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Diane.
‘Look at the place. Originally made its money out of mills and heavy industry. Bursting with Northern, Victorian civic pride, which is also the only reason why there’s a university here. But now the mills have closed, the factories have all gone and the biggest employer is a newcomer, the Agency, a government computing and research establishment.
‘Here’s the thing: apart from the location, there’s no real connection between the old mill-town community that made this place and the people at the Agency who now bring in most of the money. Not least as most of the people at the Agency are also newcomers who’ve been recruited from outside and will often move away again later in their careers.
‘It’s even worse for people like you. You are merely married into the Agency. You’ve got nothing in common with the old town, yet at the same time, thanks to official secrets rules and all that, you’re also at arm’s length to the Agency. You are alienated, in limbo, so it’s hardly surprising you’re dissatisfied with your lot.’
‘What you say,’ said Diane, ‘may not be entirely off the mark. But how does that fit in with my story?’
‘At the moment you are in danger of a conventional trick ending, with a character in grave peril thinking he’s somewhere else - but is he? It’s an interesting and contemporary take, but why bother? Ambrose Bierce did it first and better back in the 1890s in his short story ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’. ‘Instead,’ continued the tutor, ‘why not subvert the trope. Bring the Delta character into this piece and make it her story. Make her the deus ex machina. Give her the ultimate sanction: the power of life and death over the Jack character.’
‘I’m liking where this is going,’ said Diane, adding, with perhaps more enthusiasm than she should, ‘We could have Jack not die of a heart attack, but be left severely disabled. Perhaps with a stroke, or in a coma and on a ventilator. I’ll research the medical details later. Then, for a final scene, Delta is asked by the hospital whether they should switch off the life support.’
‘Not so sure about that,’ said the tutor. ‘Makes Delta come across a little too much of a cold-blooded bitch. Letting Jack die is excessive pay-back for a man whose basic failing is he’s boring. Remember, you don’t want to risk losing the sympathy of your readers. To suddenly turn Delta into a homicidal sociopath is a step too far.’
‘You’re suggesting,’ replied Diane, ‘that there needs to be another factor. One that is credible, so we also can’t make Delta the Russian spy.’
‘Precisely,’ said The Count, with a look that, in Diane’s opinion, was a little too smug and self-satisfied. But there again, he was a creative writing tutor.
‘What about. . . Got it!’ Diane almost jumped off her chair in excitement. ‘What about we entangle Delta with another character? We’ve already hinted at Jody’s rich and varied sex life. What if she is Delta’s friend, but secretly wants that relationship to be closer, a lot closer.
‘Delta is telling her all her troubles. Has turned to Jody for a shoulder to cry on. And she’s saying how she doesn’t know how she’ll be able to cope with Jack being in a coma. Then Jody gently reminds her that if she were to become the widow of an employee of the Agency, Delta would be entitled to a substantial pension. Money that would allow her to break free from this dirty old town and start her life all over again. Oh, yes, I think we’re on to something here.’
‘Good,’ said the tutor, looking at his watch. ‘There are still a few loose ends to tie up there and I think you might want to introduce the Jody-Delta relationship a little earlier, but I look forward to reading your revised draft of this story at our next tutorial.’
Diane said her thank-yous, collected her papers and headed for the door.
Had she paused to look behind her, she would have noticed her tutor was looking at his watch again, but this time with an unsettling smirk on his face. Ironically, given Diane, Kat and the other students’ jokes about him, The Count was indeed a monster.
Not a vampire of course, that would be silly; they exist only in fiction. Nevertheless, a monster with a depraved appetite who preyed on human flesh and tonight he was going hunting. Fortunately for Diane, her tutor’s taste in victims did not run to middle-aged women.
‘GARRGHHH!’ What the hell was that? Something - something painful - has just violently jerked me awake. I’m sweating profusely and there is a smell of burned human flesh in the atmosphere.
In my mind there are the remnants of a vivid nightmare. I was trapped in a burning elevator car in the World Trade Center North Tower. Wait a minu
te, burning flesh? That’s not my imagination, I really am trapped in a burning building! I open my eyes but I can hardly focus and I try to look around me. I’m not in an elevator. No, I’m in some kind of cylinder or domed pod. Like one of those adjustable beds you get when you fly first-class but with an opaque perspex roof.
I glance down to my naked chest. There are two fresh burn marks there. I hear a mechanical whirring noise and, out of the corner of my eye, catch sight of two defibrillator paddles retracting into their housings.
Oh, shit. I really did have a heart attack at the end of that curry and beer night. This, not the 9/11 nightmare, is my reality.
With my vision starting to clear, I look a little more carefully at my surroundings. As I do, the dome above my head splits open and begins to peel back, while the bed I’m lying on starts to reconfigure from horizontal to a more upright chair position.
I’m in the white-painted, sterile surroundings of what I can only assume is a hospital ward. But it’s not like any hospital ward I’ve ever been in before. There again, the Agency has a reputation for offering its staff a high level of health care cover and I did hear they sometimes provide treatment in their own medical research facilities. Perhaps that’s where I am now?
Strange. There seem to be no nursing staff in attendance. I crane my neck to get a better view of my surroundings. I’m not alone. There must be a dozen of these pod-like beds in the ward, ranked in three rows of four. Although as far as I can see, nine of them are vacant and only two others are occupied. Or at least I assume they are occupied, as their domes are still in the closed position.
I hear another noise to my side and turn my head to see a door opening although it’s more like a bulkhead door on a ship. It’s not the style of the doorway that surprises me but what comes floating through it. It’s silver metallic-coloured, about three feet in height from its base to what I guess, from the camera-like lens mounted there, is its head. Midway up the body is some lettering. It reads sybot#29.
The Hot Chick & Other Weird Tales Page 10