Desolation

by Tim Lebbon

  George put his hand to his mouth, belched, apologized profusely.

  “What was I saying?” Cain asked, trying to hide his embarrassment.

  “I’m not really sure,” George said. “But you were raging at something. I heard you from all the way downstairs. The house swallowed your words, but the rage was there for sure.”

  The house swallowed your words.

  “You’re the first of the other residents I’ve met,” Cain said.

  “Really? No Whistler? He’s usually first to welcome someone new.”

  “Whistler?”

  George glanced around, then leaned in over the threshold of Cain’s flat. “Flat Four. Always playing those damn pipes of his. Hence the nickname. Bit weird, if you ask me.”

  Must be the house number, Cain thought. George’s eyes were wide, deep, reflecting golden lamplight spilling out of Cain’s bedroom and seemingly amplifying it back at him. They were not the eyes of a quiet, meek man, though that seemed to be the image that George was attempting to portray. He was small and thin, weak-looking, shoulders slumped, hands clasping and unclasping by his sides . . . but his eyes seemed hungry.

  That’s what Cain had seen in his face. Hunger.

  “I heard him earlier,” Cain said. “When I was on the way upstairs this evening.”

  “You only heard him?” George asked, smiling that smirk again.

  “Yes, his door was closed.”

  “Not what I meant.” George shook his head. Cain was sure he glimpsed the man’s tongue lolling from his open mouth.

  “Look, I would invite you in, but—”

  “Oh no, no!” George said, stepping back slightly. “It’s the middle of the night, I know that. I just wanted to wake you up, make sure you were okay. Some dream you were having there.”

  “It must have been,” Cain said, but his memory of the dream was silent. No dream . . . a nightmare!

  “So I’ll see you around, I guess. Maybe you can come down for a few drinks one evening? I’m in Flat Two.”

  “Next to the Sister?”

  “Ah, I see Peter’s told you about her, at least.”

  “She’s as far as he got.”

  George smiled, laughed a little, looked down into the darkness of the staircase. “Yes, the Sister.”

  Cain was tempted, but he thought George had intended that. And now, with night’s silence mimicking Cain’s dream with its completeness, standing here talking to George felt suddenly wrong. Perhaps deep down Cain was always waiting for that siren to shatter his mind.

  “Well, I’ll see you around,” Cain said. He smiled, George nodded, and he shut the door on the man from Flat Two.

  Cain returned to his bed, turned off the light, and stared out the window. He had not drawn the curtains before retiring for the night, enjoying a strange thrill at being able to lie back and see the stars and moon spread across the sky. Starlight touching him made him feel very young.

  The dream sat around him like an invisible cloak, its silence and lack of substance heavier than anything solid. He often felt like this when he woke up at night, whether or not he knew he had been dreaming, as if he were trapped in endless rock, his body and mind the only living things there, everything else inanimate. It would always take a while for him to crawl from the rock’s grasp; sometimes by talking quietly to himself and listening to the echo coming in from farther and farther away, sometimes by chewing on a piece of fruit, always reminding himself that there was much more to things than just him. A smell would bring him around faster, but in Afresh the air had always been sterile and clean. Staring at something familiar would urge his senses to find themselves, but in the dead of night at Afresh there were no lights, and gazing into the dark would often make matters worse.

  Here, Cain had freedom. He saw the lightspeckled sky and the dream quickly faded away. Meeting George had already driven its memory down, but their brief exchange had little effect on the hollow echoes still haunting Cain’s mind. It needed him to focus his own attention, rather than being a passive target of someone else’s, to find release.

  He stared out, and the skies stared back.

  “We’re all the stuff of the stars,” he whispered. And even though his dream had almost gone, he cringed slightly as he awaited the siren’s assault. When the silence continued, it felt safe to break it again. “We all come from the stars, father, and you never allowed for that. With so much history already inside me, how can I never feel, hear, speak? How, when I’ve got so much to tell?” Nothing answered him. For once he was comfortable in his own solitude, now that the dream was gone. As he continued gazing out at the clear night sky, he ran his hands over the blanket tangled around his legs, feeling its landscape and creating a hundred stories from every dip and ridge.

  The next day was Cain’s first full day of freedom. He was a man with responsibilities now, choices, and a potential that made him dizzy when he thought about it. Sitting at his dining table eating breakfast—dry toast and a cup of watered-down orange juice—the possibilities of the day seemed endless. There was so much he could do, and yet the idea that there was no one to tell him what to do was disconcerting. If he decided to curl up in bed and whimper himself back to sleep, the Face would not come in and urge him awake. If he remained seated at the table, pushing toast crumbs across its surface, losing himself in ambiguous memories of a past that was all dream and nightmare, the Voice would not whisper over his shoulder that the present mattered so much more.

  He could look to the future and do his best to make a life. He could dwell on the past and let the future stretch away untouched. Or he could seize the day.

  For the first time, the choice was truly his own.

  He left the flat soon after breakfast. The building was silent—no pan pipes from Whistler, no praying from Sister Josephine’s room—and Cain assumed that they had either left for work or were still asleep. It was so quiet that he clicked his fingers to check his hearing. Once he opened the front door, however, the busy sounds from outside flooded in to fill the lobby. He looked around to see if anything was annoyed at the intrusion, but the doors and walls stared blankly back at him.

  He passed quickly through the garden and stood on the pavement beyond, looking across the road at the dilapidated house named Heaven. It seemed strange that a landlord would own such a well-maintained block of flats and yet live in a place like that. Cain had yet to see anyone else’s accommodation, true, but once past the garden and inside, the whole of Number 13 felt well looked after. Heaven, on the other hand, was close to collapse. Does Peter really live there? Cain thought. Or maybe he just went there yesterday for something else. Maybe there’s a man living in there, a drug addict, and Peter helps him out now and then with some advice, a shoulder to cry on, a source of harsh words when they’re needed.

  He enjoyed making up things about people. It camouflaged the uncomfortable fact that he sometimes knew more than he should.

  Cain turned from the house and walked down the street, passing busy homes and quiet buildings, welcoming the sounds of people getting on with life. He glanced back once at Number 13, looked up at the roof window of his living room, and for a split second he saw a face in the window below his. He paused, blinked, and the face was gone. He moved slightly to the side, trying to make out whether he had merely seen a reflection or a sheen of dust catching the sun. But whatever he had seen did not return, and he could not make it reappear from sunlight or shadow. It was Flat Three facing out onto the road, and he realized that he still did not know who lived there. He knew of the nun, Whistler and George, but this flat was still a mystery. The windows were dark, not inviting his inspection. He could see no curtains or blinds. The flat may as well have been empty.

  A few people passed him and he wondered whether any of them were from Flat Three. Peter had made vague promises about giving him the guided tour, telling him about the other occupants (You’re sharing a house with some odd folk, he’d said), showing him the electric cupboard and laundry room. B
ut Flat Three remained a mystery. Perhaps it always would. Cain had his share of secrets, some of which he knew, many he did not. Why should he be the only one?

  A postman passed him by without a glance; there would be no letters for him. A man walking his dog nodded a curt greeting, and a woman dragging a child by the hand glanced up and offered a nervous smile, as if trying to forgive herself for her offspring’s red wrist and wet eyes. A group of teenagers parted to let him through, offering polite “hello”s and throwing smirks at the corner of his eye. Cain returned the greetings and weathered the smirks, and he knew only what he saw. For that he was glad. When he sometimes knew more his father would have called it Pure Sight, but then the old man was mad.

  Cain walked to the end of Endless Crescent, wondering whether he was disobeying some unwritten law in doing so. He smiled. The Voice would have something to say about that. Humor, he had said, is endemic, a fundamental part of us as humans, and you’re the living proof of that. Shut away for so long, you can still find humor.

  At the end of the Crescent he faced a difficult decision. Turning left would take him back to the shops he had visited the previous day: a takeaway, a local grocer’s, a newsagent’s, a video and DVD rental store, a few others. If he turned right, the busy road wending that way would eventually guide him out of the suburbs and into the city proper. There was a lot of traffic here, and Cain winced at the noise. A horn blared and he pressed back against a garden wall, fearing that the siren would descend and deafen him from the inside. More cars streamed by. There would be hundreds of people shopping in the city, thousands, maybe more, all wearing colorful clothing and perfumes, chattering into mobile phones glued to their ears. The crowd would act as one unit, surrounding him and drawing him into itself, the city’s defense mechanism spying an alien body. He could imagine the result—the bright clothes, the loudness, the taste of commerce, the sight of all those faces staring at him and knowing that he was nothing special—and as each new image presented itself, the siren threatened to shatter it into fragments. A butterfly fluttered by, and Cain thought of grabbing it in case it was part of his mind.

  Left, quietness and safety and a place he had already been. Right, something unknown. He was free—away from Afresh and his father’s skewed influence—and as the Voice had told him so often, his life was his own.

  But that dream from last night still spoke to him.

  He turned left.

  Sometimes Cain believed he had an original idea, something elemental and unique, something that could change things. But he was never confident enough to believe in it.

  Chapter Three

  Circus

  They tried. After his father died and Cain went to Afresh, and the extent of his mistreatment slowly revealed itself, the Voice and the Face did their best to help him sense real life.

  He was a teenager then, lost in his years, confused by his body and thoughts and everything around him. Ironically, in many areas he was as educated as anyone they had ever met. His father had allowed him access to an impressive library of reference books, which Cain read compulsively during those times when his father’s research and experimentation led him elsewhere. He had also spent a long time educating Cain himself, because Pure Sight would never manifest in someone without extensive knowledge. So Cain’s father had taught him numbers but not languages, because he said that the language of wisdom was universal. He had lectured in physics but not biology, because the flesh is weak. He had helped Cain understand the history of war, but never the tales of those who strove for peace, because chaos was the fundamental form of existence. And Cain had remained trapped in that old, rambling house in the country, forever denied the experience to complement his learning. He knew the great histories of Egypt, though he had never smelled the spice of its forbidden sands. He read of women and their beauty, though he had never seen a member of the opposite sex, not even his mother. He found endless cookery volumes celebrating feasts, banquets, the world’s foods and wines, but his father fed him the most tasteless, insipid concoctions imaginable.

  In one tome there were fifty essays written in celebration of Mozart. Cain was mesmerized. Such beauty and rapture in words, describing something so beyond his understanding. The only music he heard was the humming in the shadows, the tune that took years to progress from nothing to something he could never, ever forget. And that had been beyond his father’s knowing.

  So at Afresh they tried to bring him out of the deep, dark place his father had forced him into. And though their efforts were benign and designed only to help, for his first couple of years in the Home the siren had blasted Cain every single day. When he heard music, the siren erupted. If he tasted something new, it smashed the pleasure from him. If he looked at a painting, the siren’s sheer violence bled the colors to gray. He slowly came to believe that it was no longer real, but that made it worse. It meant that it was inside him, and he had no concept of how he could ever purge it from his mind.

  As the years went by so the siren receded, first in frequency and then in volume. It still found its voice from time to time, but Cain’s understanding of his father—what he had done, how, and why—seemed to temper it somewhat, and its influence faded away into bad memories and nasty dreams.

  They took him to a circus. At seventeen he was older than most of the children there, and probably more knowledgeable than many of the adults. But he had never eaten candy floss, toffee apples, or doughnuts, and he had never abandoned himself to unrestrained laughter or awe. The Voice talked consistently, trying to calm Cain as new sights and sounds opened up around him. He had been on trips out of Afresh many times, but they were always well planned to avoid too much exposure at any one time. The circus blew all that away. As they guided him into the Big Top and found a seat, Cain began to feel overwhelmed. The Voice whispered in his ear. The Face held his hand. The crowd roared and laughed, a living, flexing mass of people dressed in every color imaginable, writhing and rolling with the show. A sickly sweet smell hung in the air, sticking to his clothes, finding its way through even when Cain covered his nose with his shirt.

  The siren struck and he collapsed in on himself, shrinking in the seat as the Voice and Face frantically tried to pull him back.

  They carried him outside, and when he clasped his hands to his ears to exclude the roar of a thousand people he would never know, they did not try to talk him out of it. His two helpers placed him gently in the back of the car and clicked the door shut behind him. He opened his eyes at last and breathed in, content with the smell of old leather, the sight of the driver’s seat in front of him, and the sound of the engine still ticking as it cooled from their vain journey here.

  There were other times, progressively more successful. The Voice and Face learned a lot from that trip to the circus, and Cain was happy to go along with their new, more tempered plan to introduce the world to him. Even then the siren sometimes crashed in unexpectedly, shattering Cain where he stood and sending him back into the silent darkness, which he was beginning to believe was the only existence he could ever truly know.

  With every step that Cain took, failure stalked him. Once or twice he turned around to see whether there were shadows where there should be none, listened for whispers behind garden walls and hedges, such was the sense of being observed. The Voice and the Face would not be pleased with this, he knew. He had to call sometime today to tell them how he was, and what could he honestly say? The flat is fine, perfect, but I’m still afraid of everything. He could not say that. He would not. And yet it was the truth.

  He had spent six years at Afresh waiting for the day when he was old enough to leave and live on his own, put his broken childhood behind him. He would never completely forget, and Afresh never pushed him into forgetfulness. But he would learn to live with what had happened and, perhaps given time, understand it. His father had loved him, they told him, but he had not known what love meant.

  Cain walked faster. He looked up when he heard some children shouting and sc
reaming in the park he had sat outside the night before. He paused at the fence, watching them at play on the few swings, slides, and climbing frames that had survived vandalism at the hands of local youths. They shouted in glee, and he mentally urged them to shout some more. They wore bright clothing, pinks and blues and colorful character T-shirts, and he scanned around for more sustenance for his eyes.

  Put me down! he thought. Put me down now, you fuck! But the siren was silent, its instigator hiding well back behind memory and nightmare. His father’s image affected him at that moment as much as a faded photograph.

  “Louder!” he shouted. “Play louder!” But his voice caused the children to pause, and their parents turned and regarded him with undisguised hostility. Cain smiled, trying to convey benevolence, but his expression angered them more. He hurried away, disturbed by their reaction.

  He sought more. He had taken the coward’s choice back at the crossroads, but he could still defy his father here. He would buy flavorful food and strong beer, a Mozart CD and some scented candles for his flat. Today he would sense life all around him. It would take time, he knew that. He could not rush headlong into the circus of life. He had to introduce himself gradually, an act at a time. The high-wire balance of meeting new people, the lion-taming efforts of fending off his old fears.

  And that was when he saw the clown.

  She was sitting on the pavement outside the takeaway Cain had used the previous evening. He could tell it was a woman even under the clown’s outfit; her breasts were heavy, the curve of her hips obvious. The takeaway was closed now, but the clown ate yellow, greasy rice from a foil container, and Cain had to wonder whether she had bought it or found it. She was a happy clown, with a smile drawn from ear to ear, eyes tall and wide, bright pink hat with a real red rose protruding from its tip. Her suit was baggy and extravagant, even though spilled grains of rice had spotted it with oil. That only added to the effect. It was a riot of color and texture, and Cain could not help smiling when he saw the beauty and wonder in that.