Empire Dreams

by Ian McDonald

  “Then I saw this TV news report about a doctor down in Memphis who was up in court because he was giving DPMA to anyone who would pay him three hundred dollars and I knew that I had to have it. Had to. No other way to make the dream spark into life. So I worked in the surgery and after hours in a diner and I saved every penny until I had my dream ticket. Then I took a bus to Memphis, put the cash down on Dr. MacKinley’s table, and he slipped the needle up the back of my skull and when I woke up it was the dream-time again. For always.”

  We were kicking around in a souvenir shop on some anonymous alleyway just off the Petit Socco. Hannah picked up a large enameled plate.

  “You like this? I think I might buy it for you as a present.”

  But the wind blows where it will, as the Berbers say, and with the joyful, carefree times came times of melancholy when a great silence welled out of Hannah like blood and we would sit for hours, not speaking, yet desperate for communication. On one such occasion, over glasses of afternoon coffee in a roadside cafe overlooking the place of legends where the waters of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic break upon each other, I asked, purely for the sake of making noise,

  “So, was there a Marrakech?”

  She smiled within her sorrow.

  “There was. There still is.”

  “And an Arthur?”

  “No. Not really. There was someone, back in Deerfield. He was a skipper, that was what we called them in Deerfield, skipped off the draft and ran to Marrakech. Impossibly romantic. But as for being an Arthur. No. Never.” Presently she said, very quietly, “But you could be him if you like.”

  We never came any closer to saying it than that.

  * * * *

  By trading in on an old favor down on rue Ibrahim Sultan, I was able to secure the indefinite usage of a black-and-white Mercedes taxi. I could have asked for more, much more, in return for smuggling synthetic death-hormone suppressants across to Algeciras on the hydrofoil, but nothing else would have afforded me as much pleasure as taking Hannah away from Tangier and the rag-end years of the twentieth century into the timefree lands of the Rif. I felt she needed space and silence and time away from the comradeship of her Soul Circle. New cities, old faces; the strain was beginning to tell on Hannah. So we drove all morning through olive groves and orchards of oranges and almonds. The sun beat down on us through the open sunroof (“It’s stuck,” said bio-smuggling Bakhti, showing me the sheet of polythene which served as protection in case of rain) and glinted from the last of the Rif snows.

  “Just where are you taking me?” Hannah asked.

  “Chaouen,” I replied. We skirted Tétouan, the old capital of Spanish Morocco in the days of the protectorate, crossed the snow-swollen river, and began the long climb up the south road which threw itself across the foothills of the Rif in swoops of exhilarating switchbacks. “Little town on the side of a mountain. Old Spanish governors used to keep country villas there, lovely quiet timeless atmosphere, the perfect retreat, until the tourists come by the busload.”

  The road wound on, up into the changelessness of rural Morocco. Hannah chattered incessantly; observations, exclamations, short improvisations, sketches for longer performance pieces, private monologues in a secret tongue she told me was Jam, the language of the ultras: English reduced to its fundamental units and fused into a form more compact, more expressive. I threw the venerable Merc around the hairpin bends of the way less gone by, hooting at goats and donkeys and country buses with gleeful vindictiveness.

  In the mad-dogs-and-Englishmen hours we stopped at one of those roadside cafe-cum-markets which spring up seemingly spontaneously in Morocco and lunched on prickly pears while the laboring Merc recuperated. Life was beginning to stir once again in response to the cool of early evening when we reached Chaouen tumbling down its mountainside. I paid an urchin to mind the car, and left the overnight bags in the small Moorish hotel. Then we went haggling for spices in the Tuesday market and wandered where the spirit led through the steep streets of the immaculately tidy medina and for a dirham apiece rested in the cool gardens of the restored casbah with the fountains splashing about us and the bats flitting above us, as silent as night, through the trees.

  That evening Hannah seemed distant even for an ultra. She was distracted, diffracted. She would not respond to any of my gentle attempts at conversation. Blaming myself, I asked her what I had done, but all she would say was that it had nothing to do with me; it was her. The dinner was an exhausting affair and I was glad when she went upstairs and left me to finish my coffee alone.

  I found her on the rusting balcony. At her feet, the lights of Chaouen; above her, the African night, and bright Arcturus, guide-star of the ancient Moorish navigators.

  “If it meant just slipping back into flatlife consciousness, I could cope with that. But to have all this: to see you as you truly are, Morrison, in the glory of your humanity, a phoenix draped in rainbow energies ringing to the inner symphony of your race-song, to see the pregnant land as full in its emptiness as an egg is of wisdom, thirty thousand years of being superimposed upon itself layer upon layer upon layer of mille-feuille sedimentary sandstone, to hear the barking of ancestral ghosts, to have God omnipresent and omnivisible in everything I see—it’s an agony. An agony.”

  She would not look at me. I reached out to touch her, to draw her away from herself. She recoiled from my fingertips with a yelping cry.

  “You burned me! Burned me!”

  Five perfect ovals of blistered flesh marred the skin. She glanced wildly about herself as if threatened by approaching shadows, clapped her hands to her ears as if shutting out the tintinnabula of God.

  “Too high, too much, too far, too soon. God, the colors of your energy!”

  She spun to face me. She opened her clenched right hand. In it she held three gray hairs.

  “It’s beginning, Morrison. Oh God, I’m so afraid.”

  “I’m sorry. There is nothing I can do for her. Or you.”

  Masrurian the Dream Doctor plied his trade from an alchemist’s den excavated deep under the walls of the medina, an uneasy amalgam of modern and medieval; typically Tangier, typically Masrurian, self-proclaimed Armenian exile in cool white linen suit.

  Claims, like suits, are cheaply made in Tangier.

  “There’s got to be something.”

  “Has there?” Masrurian the Dream Doctor repaired to his desk, a florid anachronism in schlock Moorish. “Tell me, Mr. Morrison, you have been educated? Past primary level? You understand the English language?” A lisping Peter Lorre of a man, his lizard head jutted forward as he spoke, his tongue flickered in and out as he spoke, as if tasting the air. “Then you will know what ‘irreversible’ means. Irreversible, Mr. Morrison.” He measured and weighed his syllables like drams of tincture, as fragile and nervous as his colored-glass alembics. A stuffed basilisk regarded me with contemptuous eyes. “Good day, Mr. Morrison.”

  He stabbed at the keys of his computer terminal; pointless Arabic chased across the screen. His glasses constantly slipped down his greasy nose and were pushed back into position. When he saw that I was not going to leave, he sat up with a theatrical sigh of exasperation.

  “Very well, Mr. Morrison. A short biochemistry lesson. As you are doubtless as ignorant of the neurobiology of the Tessier/Rhodes process as you are of your own language, I shall make things simple for you to understand.” Bottled brains, proudly labeled like pickles in a fruit cellar, lined the shelves behind his desk. “Put simplistically, the Tessier/Rhodes process accelerates the flow of sodium ions across the synaptic gap, thus increasing the action potential of the individual neuron severalfold. Further, DPMA encourages the process of myelination in the cerebral axons.” His glasses slipped and he restored them with an unconscious gesture. “Synaptic impulses travel faster in myelinated fibers than nonmyelinated; the potential jumps from node to node, do you see? And there is evidence that DPMA stimulates the topology of the cortex.” Masrurian looked at me as I were a brain in a bot
tle. “Brainfolding, Mr. Morrison. Surely you must be aware that it is the convolutions of our brains that make us the sentient, intelligent creatures we would all claim to be?

  “As this woman’s … ah … lover, you of course know what the benefits of the Tessier/Rhodes process are; what it is that makes them do this thing. Amplified neural responses, new modes of perception, the purported ability to smell colors, taste sounds, hear the touch of a finger; I believe their name for it is ‘cosmic awareness.’ They liken themselves to gods; you would know better than I if this is deserved; certainly, they perceive and respond emotionally to a universe infinitely more rich and varied than that revealed to the senses of those they arrogantly term ‘flatlifers.”’

  “And there is a negative.”

  Hands spread wide, an Armenian exile’s expression of accommodation.

  “Why else would you be here? The synaptic hyperactivity inevitably throws the autonomic and endocrinal systems into overstimulation. Hormone levels, including those of the cyclic nucleotides, cyclic adenosine monophosphate, and cyclic guanosine monophosphate, the so-called ‘death hormones’ which govern aging, all run wild. After approximately thirty months of normal biological function, the subject—or, shall we say, sufferer—begins to age with astounding rapidity; within a few weeks of the onset they have descended through decrepitude and senescence into death. Once the DPMA is injected into the thalamus the process is, Mr. Morrison, quite inescapable. Believe me, there is no going back for her, whoever she is.”

  A small cry, like a bird. I found my thumbs pressing hard against Masrurian’s glasses, eager to shatter the lenses and drive the fragments into his eyes.

  “Is there not some counter hormone you can inject?” This, asked of the man who spliced together synthetic anti-death hormones in his den and sent them across the Strait of Gibraltar in the pockets of American draft-dodgers. Fascinating how the weary tone of contempt had left his voice.

  “Experiments were made with specifically keyed endorphins to block the neural DPMA receptors; the endorphins also fatally blocked transmission to the somatic nervous system, which controls organ function.”

  “Some kind of enzyme that might cut the DPMA molecule?” My thumbs pressed harder on the lenses. The plastic frames creaked. Dwarf Masrurian gave another small shriek.

  “Mr. Morrison! No no no …” He struggled for scientific thought. “Ah, ah, the only enzyme which would cut the DPMA molecule reduced it to two components, one a beneficial growth hormone, the other an acetylcholine-blocking neurotoxin related to those used in military nerve gases. Mr. Morrison, please, there is no way out.”

  “No,” I said. “No no no no …” I bore down with the gathering strength of my fury. Masrurian the Dream Doctor’s hands fluttered blindly at my face like little creatures. The plastic legs of the glasses snapped. He gave a cry as the frames gouged into his eyesockets … and my hands fell away from his face.

  Dropped and forgotten, it lay thoughtlessly kicked under a desk, a crescent of silver filigree glinting in the corners of my eyes, a Moorish moon. I saw it flash and spin, dangling from Ruthie’s fingers. I saw the delight in her eyes and I heard my voice, again: “For you, Ruthie. Happy nineteenth birthday.”

  She had found it. At last. Something had made her take her courage in both hands and lay it down with the five hundred dollars on Masrurian’s desk.

  Or was what she had found only a different kind of cowardice?

  I was numb.

  As I left, the glass eyes of the stuffed cockatrice regarded me with accusation, and complicity in an awful crime.

  * * * *

  The hotel was of that kind to which Moroccan businessmen take their whores; dark intent behind a decorous veil of green neon Arabic. The third and fourth floors were permanently reserved for ultra Soul Circles visiting the city. The teenage concierge barely wasted a glance on me: I was not an ultra, therefore either the kif traffickers in the back bar or the whores in the downstairs disco would accommodate me. I could smell her patchouli clear across the lobby. She turned up her Sony and sang, tunelessly as only headphone wearers can, to the latest Rock-the-Casbah beat beaming in from Big Fortress America moored just outside Libyan territorial waters.

  She was waiting for me. She stood with her back turned, but her voice, the voice of the poet, filled the lobby like birds.

  “All alonio, Morrisey. They’re all gone, down to the medina. Claytime, Morrisey. Friend of yours, I believe. Finally found enough courage to eat the peach. That’s what we call it. You know Eliot? So, they’ve gone and I’m all alonio, because we’re ultras, and we’re family, and we all love each other so so much.”

  I had never heard such bitterness in a voice.

  “Hannah, I’ve been to Masrurian.”

  “Then you know, don’t you?”

  “I wanted to hurt him. I almost hurt him, badly.”

  “You should have. He deserves it. So, you know, and I suppose he was awfully sorry, Mr. Morrison, but there was nothing he could do. And he’s right.”

  She turned to face me.

  “Look at me, Morrisey. Look at me!”

  I felt as if the curved sword of the basiji had been driven through my stomach.

  One day—less, a handful of hours—had passed for me.

  In that time Hannah had aged ten years.

  My eyes burned her and she tried to hide her face from me. And I would have, I should have, should have looked away. But I could not. To look was unbearable, but I could not look away.

  “You too?” Hannah shouted. “You want to be like them? You want to watch, see what it’s like? Well, take a good look then, a good long look. Yes, it’s ugly, yes, I’m aging, growing old, yes, I’m dying. You want to say that, see how it sounds? You want to be like the rest of those … ravens and fly off far away because you can’t bear to see how it’ll be for you someday, flatlifer? Well, see the show. Get something out of it, enrich your life, because, quite frankly, Morrisey, it scares the piss out of me. Do you know how old I am? Do you? I was twenty-seven last month. Twenty-seven; we were drinking wine under the orange blossoms of Seville and we laughed and drank to life because we thought we were going to live forever.”

  The teenage concierge buried her nose in an improving Islamic comic and poised her finger over the panic button to the police station. Hannah turned and fled up the fire stairs. I did not follow. I could not tell if she was crying.

  I took indefinite leave of absence from the cocaine-eyed sons of the diplomatic corps to be with Hannah. She needed me. The ultras had deserted her. They were life, she was death. There was no place for her in their tinsel-bright, butterfly world. So they left Hannah alone in her room, alone with the death.

  She feared that death. She feared annihilation. She feared becoming nothing. She would have loved to embrace some formula of belief upon which to ride through the death. She spent long warm spring afternoons in theological argument with ministers, holy men, and sidi. They were unable to satisfy her.

  “I can see more in all my uncertainty than they can guess even in their deepest faith,” she said. Her voice was a ravaged whisper. “God, Morrisey, I don’t want to be nothing.”

  She loved the veranda. The teeming life of the street refuted, for a minute, for an hour, her mortality. We would sit, and merely be. Not a word would pass between us. We communicated at a level more intimate by far than noise. Of all the things which filled those last days, I treasure the memory of this fruitful, present silence most. One night I woke with a start in my chair; a draft, I think, from an open window. I could not recall having fallen asleep. I glanced at my watch: three A.M. Hannah was on the balcony, face intense in the prophet-green light from the hotel neons. Her arthritis-knotted hands lay still in her lap. She was gazing into the three o’clock empty street with the same rapt intensity I had witnessed in the hotel in Chaouen.

  “Where will all the words go?” she whispered. “All the words inside of me? Will they break free from me and soar like birds, or wi
ll they crumble to dust and ashes? I worry about the words, Morrisey. They’re so much more than I am.”

  “I could steal a vox-writer from school,” I suggested.

  “No,” Hannah said. “They can’t be trapped on paper. The words have to be free or they die. I’ll miss the words. So much unspoken, so little said.”

  “Try and get some sleep,” I whispered. Hollywood adage, B-movie cliché. Hannah laughed.

  “Morrisey, you should know me better than that. I don’t sleep. None of us sleep. Ever. Why sleep when life itself is a dream?”

  * * * *

  The wind was out of Africa the day Hannah died; the ancient crazy wind. And in the end Hannah was not reluctant to be away with it. In the end she was willing for that crazy wind to carry her on, over the edge of the world where the men and cities that perch there are afraid to go. Downstairs, under the kohl-dark eyes of the teenage concierge, the ultras waited like roosting birds of ill-omen.

  The wind from Africa whirled the dust through the streets of Tangier, rattled the blind, swirled the notes of an Islamic chant through the open window of Room 317. It made Hannah smile. Dreadful, a twenty-seven-year-old smile on an eighty-eight-year-old face. I see it yet.