by M. Suddain
2. I did not ‘infiltrate’ the party aboard the Butcher’s yacht, as the tabloid sheets have stated. I was ‘invited’ to her yacht by her thugs, at gunpoint, presumably after they read the borderline-illiterate letter sent to the papers in which I supposedly threatened to murder their boss. This letter was written by my interim assistant, Lance, who was filling in for Daniel Woodbine while he attended his father’s wake. Lance is no longer in my service.
3. I did not intentionally shoot Lance in the leg after learning he sent that letter. The gun went off accidentally. I did not leave him to bleed out on the floor of my chalet at Alpine Village. I placed the phone and a first-aid kit within reach before leaving. I had to leave because Nanše was on the Butcher’s yacht, and in danger.
4. She wasn’t on that yacht because of me. I did not drag her from her kitchen to humiliate her in front of a roomful of diners, as the news-sheets have said. Yes, I requested she come out. But it was to praise her sauces. Unfortunately, the people around me decided to add their own thoughts, and so managed to turn my attempt at adulation into a critical free-for-all in which my childhood friend was utterly humiliated, and her career ruined. Again. It’s still too unbearable to recount more than the general details. I will, eventually.
… The day after the banquet I went to the catering company’s temporary HQ to see if I could explain things. The sour girl behind the desk told me Nanše had been demoted from sauce chef to waitress, thanks to me, and was booked for the Butcher’s yacht party that night. Apparently, being female staff at a party where any members of the Kaukassian elite are present is the ultimate punishment. Lots have to be drawn, danger pay offered. I decided that the only way to salvage the situation was to get the entire party cancelled. Then I could see Nanše and straighten everything out. I told Lance to handle it.
‘I need something dramatic, but not too dramatic.’
‘Gotcha.’
‘Call in a bomb threat or something. But be subtle.’
This is the kind of instruction you can give to a Beast. It is not the kind you can give to a Lance. Lance is one of those people whose face you instantly want to hit. And not just because it’s spray-tanned and strangely asymmetrical. But it is also because of that. And when you hear him talk you want to do even worse things to his face. He’s not the good kind of gay man, like Daniel. He’s that annoying kind of gay man. You know? The one who has to turn everything into a drama. Example: imagine my surprise when the afternoon editions of all the major dailies carried the following full-page letter.
To All the People Everywhere,
You have crossed me for the last time, human people. Be prepared to suffer my revenge. I am the Tomahawk, you know. I have plotted to put a bomb on board a yacht belonging to a famous dictator (wink) who is having a decadent celebration this very evening, people! Heed my words, people! Cancel that fancy soiree, etc, and send all the staff home, or I can’t not be held responsible for what I won’t do, which is to BLOW up that yacht and every person ON BOARD OF it! You have been warned, people!
Yours sincerely,
The Tomahawk
… Or am I?
… ‘What the unholy fuck, Lance! You sent an open bomb threat to the press?’
‘You said to do a bomb threat!’
‘I meant an anonymous call to the police! I didn’t mean send a detailed plot to the world with my fucking NAME ON IT!’
‘I didn’t put your name on it, silly! I made up a cool secret name. The Tomahawk!’
‘Are you … is this … are you fucking serious?’
‘You don’t like it?’
‘… That’s my fucking pen-name, Lance.’
‘… … … … Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?’
‘I call myself the fucking Tomahawk! It’s my handle! All my stuff is published under the Tomahawk!’
‘… … … … … … … … … … … … … Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?’
‘Lance, you fucking dick-pipe, you’ve ruined everything!’
‘Wow. That’s actually a really funny coincidence. The Tomahawk. I must have, like, picked it up subconsciously? Must have stuck in the old noggin.’
‘OK, so, you have to go to your room and lock the door so I don’t cave in your noggin with a fucking alpine-style mantel clock. And I have to go out to that boat.’
‘No, John, you’re acting crazy. This is crazy.’
‘I’m not acting crazy, Lance. I’m perfectly calm. Where is my passport?’
‘No, this has gone too far now. Mr Woodbine said if things went all crazy and you got too crazy I shouldn’t let you go anywhere.’
‘Where is my passport, Lance?’
‘I don’t know where it is, Jonathan?’
‘Is that my passport behind your back?’
‘No. That’s my passport. Silly.’
‘I need my passport to get out through security.’
‘It’s my passport. I don’t know where yours is. Have you checked your scallop-pressed lambswool coat.’
‘It isn’t in my lambswool coat. You have it there.’
‘You’re scaring me, Jonathan. Put down that clock.’
‘This clock? You want me to put down this clock?’
‘Yes, that one.’
‘This huntsman’s mantel clock with alpine motifs?’
‘Yes, I want you to put that huntsman’s clock back on the mantel.’
‘Then give me the passport.’
‘I can’t do that. You’re being all crazy!’
‘I’m not being crazy. I’m being perfectly calm. Listen. I’m speaking to you in a calm voice. I’m asking you, calmly, to give me my passport, or I will beat you with this clock until you do.’
‘No! It looks expensive!’
‘I will beat you with it.’
‘No! You’re acting all … crazy … you’re …’
‘I will beat you. I will beat you till you’re blue.’
‘No! Please don’t! Gods, this is amazing.’
‘I will shoot you in the fucking leg.’
‘No, the beating. Do the beating.’
‘No beating. I will shoot you.’
‘Gods, where did you get a gun? So big!’
‘Seriously, Lance, I will fucking shoot you.’
‘No!’
‘Yes.’
And then I did. It was a small-bore weapon. Hardly broke the skin. Lance wasn’t happy, though. But also, in some strange way, was. ‘Oh gods, I can’t believe you … this is so … wow! It’s like a movie!’
‘Shut the fuck up, Lance.’
The Butcher’s goons showed up to find me holding a gun as blood pissed from my assistant’s leg. ‘We hear you want to kill our boss, yes? She wants see you. See if you have courage to kill her to face.’ So I got dressed and went with them, at gunpoint. I was happy to.
‘Don’t leave! I need medical help! I love you!’
And by the next evening I was in custody in the Near East.
… Beast. Some important housekeeping. I need a new Watermargin™. The copies they usually send didn’t arrive this month. I need a Steelhead, too. Also, I need a red bucket, four ounces of malt liquor and a frozen chocolate cake. I need some antiacid capsules. Please don’t ask questions. I do feel like reading again. I think. But strangely I feel like a book about horses. I can’t explain it. It should be something where a horse and a human protagonist, maybe a kid, share a special bond. Or maybe something where the horse is the protagonist. No donkeys, though. It has to be a horse. Something old-fashioned from the knights/maidens/chivalry genre would do. But strictly no dragons. Also, I need sunlight. I’m happy to be out of hospital, don’t get me wrong. I have moved from the Mercator Blue because the light was of a poor quality. The Red Desert Lodge is a comfortable travel inn. They have a strange old Ideamax in-house audio/visual system with an arcane manual tuning knob which works on a duel axis. Child———Adult on the vertical axis, and Female———Male on the horizontal. If you tune around the
middle you get classic documentaries and light infotainment. Tune to the extreme upper right of the Adult/Male quadrant – as I discovered for a fundamentally disturbing few seconds before I could smash my palm against the off button – and you get full-frontal eye-assaulted by a micro-budget adult feature called Sweatbangers IV. The upper regions of Adult/Female are more gentle. They have a mid-core soap called Los Hijos de la Carne. On the children’s end of the spectrum I was surprised to come across a show called Mr Spongey Sponge. These are the kind of synchronistic episodes I have to tolerate since I went to Coma.
… Sleep would help, but I find I can’t, and don’t want to. Doctor Rubin’s nightly ‘dream clinics’ have become annoying and intrusive. He is trying to get me to share my feelings, and to write poetry, both of which represent to me more extreme forms of torture than I received while a prisoner in the East. Also, he won’t stop insisting I read his book, Infinity Remastered. I ask, ‘Does it have horses?’ and he answers, ‘No. Would you like it to?’ I say, ‘Maybe.’ He says, ‘Then the next copy will have horses!’ And then at our next session he’s brought a pony he wants me to confide in. So you can see why I don’t like to sleep.
I don’t want any of this to alarm you. Everything is fine. I said it was OK for you to go away for a day or two to care for your mother at this difficult time, and that I wouldn’t act out, or write letters, or run away again. I have not run away. I have moved to the Red Desert Lodge, and found there a better quality of light, and a comfortable viewing zone in the upper-middle Adult/Female quadrant.
If you can do anything to stabalise my sunlight issues, I’d be grateful. I don’t think the sunlight they supply in these hotels is the real deal. Do you suppose we could get some kind of sunlight capsule I could sleep in? I feel like maybe electricity would do. I feel like maybe since my interrogation I’m suffering from electricity withdrawal, and if I could just get one decent jolt it’d be fine. Only I don’t have the tools I’d need to take this lamp apart. But again, I don’t want you to worry. Everything is under control.
Please lean on Sieven to at least give me a discount on my Watermargins™.
… 14. I did not ‘make brazen threats of physical violence’ after arriving at the party aboard The Huntress.
15. And I did not ‘willingly deploy a canister of nerve toxin in the yacht’s ventilation system after first putting on a gas mask’. Someone put the mask on me while I was sleeping.
16. And I’m sure I don’t need to impress on Esmeralda that I do not have ‘a history of mental illness and well-publicised hate issues’. As she knows, I have the correct amount of misanthropy for any right-thinking person. I hate humanity, yes. But I never had any interest in driving our species towards a war which could bring about the deaths of billions, and end civilisation as we know it. I just wanted to write about food.
16.1. And yes, a cursory glance at my body of work will reveal that I’ve frequently called for the extermination of the human race, but this was hyperbole, an extension of my public persona. It was not, entirely, my heartfelt view. At best I half-heartedly wished for the extinction of humanity.
… You know what, Beast? Fuck Sieven. And fuck his Watermargins™. They’re overpriced, and over-engineered. I found, at a local discount stationer’s, a Blue Mountain Horse and Pony Journal and Calendar. It is a journal for small girls, yes. But it is affordable, uses a reasonable quality paper stock – as good as the newer Watermargins™, anyway – and has a section at the back with stickers. Some are meant to be placed in your calendar as reminders, others have affirming horse-themed messages, and some are just plain fun. I feel like my eyes have been opened.
… Colette. Yes, I’m back from the East and on the mend. I’m improving every day. The stars themselves are jealous of your seemingly inexhaustible investigative energies. No, I didn’t get a chance to read the profile you wrote on me for SquireBurst, and so I couldn’t possibly comment on the points it raises. On the record, of course I’m more than happy to work with journalists in any way I can, and to clarify the issues they exhume regarding my past. Off the record, I’m more than happy for you, and your entire professional body, to die peacefully in your sleep in a nice warm bed of lava from an active volcano.
… 27. I’ve always carried hard currency and several passports, Salmander, because it makes it more difficult for stalkers and tabloid hacks and vengeful chefs to trace me. The documents are all tied to legally certified aliases.
28. This was not a ‘one-way trip’ to the Fair. I had no onward ticket because that idiot Lance forgot to book one.
… 32. I do not have amnesia. Though many of the details of what happened at the Fair are still foggy due to the nerve-gas traces which leaked through my gas mask, my memories of what happened after the Fair are almost unbearably vivid. I was handed over to the Security Services. I was interrogated thoroughly. It was hell. Though the food was surprisingly good. A well-fed prisoner can be interrogated for longer, I think. Eventually, miraculously, they agreed to send me back to the West. I was already in a coma by that point, so I wasn’t any use to them. A combination of the nerve gas, the beatings, the electricity, the general shock of life, had sent me under. They thought I was dead. Fortunately, someone at the morgue decided to give me a proper medical examination. I know this because when they put me on the boat back I still had a docket clipped to me.
DECEASE. TO INCINERATE.
No decease! Alive! Alive! Alive! – Dr Robulmonov.
I had no identification, so someone decided to put me, still coma’d, in a boatload of refugees heading west. Was sent to a hospital for refugees. The people there thought I was dead, too, for a while. I know this because when I woke I had ‘NOT DEAD!’ scrawled on my forehead in marker pen. It took a week to sponge off.
… I feel like you might think I’ve slipped into comedy here, Salmander. This could somehow come off as amusing to you, or her. But there was nothing amusing about St Direghul Hospital. For a while I was convinced I had returned to the Black Districts. This ‘hospital’ was set up to handle refugees from conflicts and famines in the Near East. The ‘nurses’ there are shady men with greasy moustaches who only work to palm drugs from patients to sell on the black market. I would wake in that electrically lit cube to find a ‘nurse’, looking dreamily at my face while he languidly sponged me. That isn’t funny. One morning when I woke he said, ‘What’s matter? Look sad. Lady?’ I didn’t even want to talk to him, especially not at that moment, so I nodded.
‘I fix. No problems.’
Later that evening I woke to find a murderous-looking girl with oily hair who said, ‘We fuck-fuck?’ Can’t tell you how long it took to convince her I didn’t want to ‘fuck-fuck’. She threatened to stab me in both eyes. Two men who I assumed were her pimps – but who could easily have been nurses – but were actually MiniSec thugs, showed up. Don’t know how they found me. They were amused to discover me with a prostitute. They asked me all the usual questions: Why was I at the Fair? Why did I go to that party on the Butcher’s yacht? If I didn’t set off the gas and kill everyone on board, why was I found alive and wearing a haz-mask? They wanted to know everything, from the very beginning. Well, the very beginning is a stretch, but I did my best. I told them all I could.
How the Big Start created elemental particles which formed hydrogen and helium nuclei which captured electrons to form stable atoms which coalesced in great numbers to form unfeasibly massive nuclear furnaces, in which were forged some of our more exotic elements – gold, titanium, carbon, oxygen – how some of these furnaces grew large enough that they collapsed inward and exploded with enough energy to outshine their galaxies, and to send their exotic material – gold, titanium, carbon, oxygen – flying out across time and space at 10 per cent of the speed of light. How these elements made new stars around which smaller amounts of elemental material clumped, and how one of these clumps, around one of these stars, spawned life, and how that life made me, a rough creature moulded from these same elemental mater
ials, first a star, then a kind of puddle, then a toddler running through a tiny garret while my parents – themselves formerly stars and puddles – sighed and forgot where they came from. How my father accidentally connected my skull with his elbow during a routine sparring match in a local gym, and I went to sleep, and when I woke up I could see with my nose. How I went off around the floating cities we made from iron and steel and titanium and silicon and made some poor decisions, and went to the Fair, and then to a party, and was arrested, and interrogated, and shot through with charged electrons from a cable connected to a nickel–cadmium ship’s battery, and went to sleep, and when I finally woke and came up through the primordial ooze, among the dizzy mobs of spiny creatures who spun and jerked among the milky jelly, and found my old familiar form – the weather-beaten skeleton – and used my primitive hands to claw my way onto the muddy banks of the shores of the land of the living, I found that my eyes had been glued shut with an epoxy of grief and shame, and that I’d lost my luggage.
They listened far more patiently than I would have expected.
… Everything. My suits. My silk shirts. My Varviana travel loafers. My Highliners. My Nimrod DB99 Chronotek with custom strap. My JetSet Atlantic 9 Compact. Even my trusty old mock wedding band. That luggage was my life. Every item in that case was selected for its beauty, its engineering, each thing was an extension of myself. All I had left when I got back from the East was the evening suit I was wearing when I was arrested, the silver tiepin Nanše gave me for my eighteenth birthday, which I managed to hide under the insole of my right shoe, and the laundry ticket left for me between the pages of a book on my bedside table some time after I went to sleep, which I managed to hide under the insole of my left shoe. Oh, and my shoes. Heavily soiled.
My case was presumably recovered from my chalet at Alpine Village by the cleaners who came to sponge up Lance’s blood, kept in Lost and Found for the mandatory period, then sold or given to charity. At that point beyond any it seemed like the end. I tried to go back to Coma, but I couldn’t find the way.