by M. Suddain
‘You didn’t?’
Beast snorted as he cast away a used de-hairing pad. ‘Where do I begin? A hotel with a multi-billion-pound security system which can allegedly spot a foreign pube on a man’s coat, but is powerless to pick out the Cloud’s most unconvincing drag act? And if you need the right attire to stay invisible, why was he wearing an evening dress in the day? Oh, and a shortage of menswear? Please. He’s loving it. You see him toss his hair and dab his lips. He’s acting out a classic male fantasy. You all want to be in drag in public. “Oh! My outfit has to look perfect or they’ll kill me!” Pah-lease!’ He tore a pink rectangle from his shoulder and tossed the used strip, now hairy as a small dog, into the sink where it hung limp over the gold-plated swan tap. He was right, of course. There is something ridiculous about a man who wants to remain invisible, yet cross-dresses for dinner before lunch is served. ‘Cross-dressing, Jonathan. It’s not from the need to blend in, to be “who I really am”. It’s to stand out, to be noticed, to assert your presence in a world that dedicates most of its resources to completely ignoring you. Why do you think … she … dresses like that?’
‘Why are you asking me about transvesticism, Jonathan?’ Doctor Difflaydermaus would ask me later that night after drugging me again. ‘At this of all times. When she’s run off somewhere and we can’t find her. When we’re all in immortal danger.’ His voice, a strange music on any occasion, was still hoarse from me trying to strangle him, and panicked from the way our situation had so rapidly deteriorated – thanks to me and my people. I could feel the heat from his body in the confined space of the darkened elevator. His odour was making me gag.
‘Just curious. Are they honourable types, generally?’
‘You’re asking me if transgender individuals are honourable?’
‘Well, in the sense that they’re not really being truthful.’
‘You’re asking me now? At this moment? When your friend is about to be hunted down and butchered.’
‘You’re my doctor.’
‘I have no idea, Jonathan! It’s not my area? Perhaps they have an authentic underlying persona which only finds expression through this habit? Maybe it’s a private indulgence which makes life bearable?’
‘But why rely on garments to express your true self?’
‘I’m … I must be dreaming. How could one man be so …’ It was dark, his glowing eyes had closed. I could hear him deep-breathing through his mouth. His eyes opened. ‘Jonathan, my Master wants her liquidated. He’s had enough. She’s been stirring up certain factions in the staff. She’s been stealing our fire extinguishers, Jonathan. Why would she do that? The Master doesn’t care what’s in your Water Bear’s head any more. He just wants her eliminated.’
This conversation is obviously happening much later in the evening, Colette, after our AV tour, our trip to the Winter Gardens, the episode we’ve come to call ‘The Finger Incident’, our illicit escape to the Rainbow Danger Club, and G’s escape from our company. As you can see, things deteriorated very rapidly after our drink in the Mirror Lounge.
‘So your answer is to fucking drug me again. You drug me with a phantom handkerchief –’
‘In the pocket of your phantom trousers, yes, I heard you, and your shoes aren’t really your shoes.’
‘Precisely. I’m being replaced, piece by piece, Doctor. It’s a systematic assault on who I am.’
‘And one day soon you’ll wake up in a dress, I get it. These are common complexes.’
‘I’m not talking about me.’
‘Oh, I realise that. I’m not stupid? I wear these robes for comfort?’
‘Fucking hell. Can we –’
‘And I can’t discuss other people’s issues. So unless you’d like to talk about your personal relationship to dressing up in –’
‘Fine. I believe a man wears women’s clothing as an act of male conquest.’
‘… women’s clothing. Or –’
‘It’s a classic male power play, like slaying a dragon. Why should that fire-breathing whore get all the attention? I’m a man, the attention should be mine. The feminine dimension confounds this man. He can’t understand it, so he must absorb its magic. Divide and segment the universe. Slice the chthonic monster of creation into chunks we can fathom.’
‘… We’ve discovered 147 dimensions, Jonathan? Hey? We even have one to describe dimensions of zero dimension, but there is, so far as I know, no feminine dimension.’
‘Whatever. You’re just making my point.’
‘I assure you, I’m not. Tell me where she is, Jonathan.’
‘I don’t know where she is.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘I’m not.’
‘My sources tell me she was with you at your birthday dinner. Now she’s gone? I want to know where so I can help her.’
‘No idea. She’s an independent woman.’
‘Maybe we should get Mr Blades in here. Get him to ask the questions. Hey?’
‘Let’s not do that.’
‘Get him to slice these issues into chunks we understand? No?’
‘Too cramped in here for three.’
‘Not really. Plenty of room. I think we should get Mr Blades in here.’
‘Please.’
‘Why not? See what he thinks about men in dresses, hey? See what he thinks about ungrateful people who don’t cooperate.’
‘Look, Rubin, I want to help. Honestly. But I’ve told you all I know. I don’t even know her middle name. I know she likes cacti and ice skating, and books about spaceships and robots, and –’
‘I know she likes books about spaceships, and robots, Jonathan. I’ve built robots? Real ones? How can a woman who likes reading about robots be hostile to someone who actually builds them? Gods. How do you talk to them, Jonathan? How the “F” …’ He paused for me to register that he almost swore, ‘… do you be yourself around them?’
‘Who? Robots?’
‘Women.’
‘Oh. Well, it’s not complicated. They’re a little like robots. They respond to the right input. You have to be interested, but not over-interested. Be kind, but not simpering. Be present, but not too present. In fact, a little distance is powerful. And showing no interest at all often works. A little arrogance, but not too much. A hint of unkindness makes them interested. And don’t overthink it. Too much knowledge is a bad thing.’
‘Oh gods!’ I felt anguished clouds of cake-infused breath hit my face. ‘You just said some things, then said the exact opposite! This is a nightmare!’
‘I know, Rubin, I know. Try to relax. Breathe. Let calmness in.’
‘Am I keeping you up, Tamberlain?’
‘Hmmm? Are you still here, Hunter? I thought you were rushing off.’
‘This affects your future, you know, and the future of your associates.’
‘Does it, Hunter? I don’t think so. We are at the mercy of an all-powerful machine which can anticipate our every move, but which loves us. We’re safe so long as we obey the rules. We have a contract. Our future is set. Yours, on the other hand, seems uncertain. That’s life. To life!’ I took a sip of my already diminishing drink which had been warming badly under the dazzling lights of the mirror lounge.
‘Please don’t do that.’
‘Hmmmm? Oh, my drink, yes.’
‘Yes. I must ask you to leave your glass more than half full –’
‘Or these “Next Humans” will come to clear it and potentially discover you and murder you horribly. I remember.’
‘Yes. As I explained.’
‘Mmph, it just tastes so fucking good, though.’
‘Mr Tamberlain.’
‘But you don’t want Roxy to come over, do you?’
‘No. No I don’t want Roxy to come over.’
‘Because she’ll kill you, or report you to what’s-his-name … Tüngblatter.’
‘Hey!’ He took a panicked look over my shoulder towards the door, his blue eyes smashing to crystals in the light. He thre
w quick glances towards G, who was offering him no help. Just looking at him with reptilian disinterest. The girl is attracted to strength, but will draw back at the faintest sign of fear or weakness. She’s fiercely loyal, yes; but only to the one who’s paying her salary. And that’s me.
Potentially.
Hunter left his pint of ale unfinished, a raw slash of lipstick on the rim. ‘It’s been a pleasure.’ He said it to Gladys. ‘Here, something for you. He slipped the diamond bracelet from his wrist and dropped it in her palm. ‘Just a Feast Day keepsake. Don’t worry, it’s not from a corpse.’
‘I don’t think she’d mind if it was.’
He turned to me. ‘I wouldn’t get too comfortable, Mr Tamberlain. Contract or not, you’re never safe in this place. And just when you think you are, that’s when they’ll strike.’
He sashayed away and vanished.
26 ‘… confusion about identity, place, time and gender; discouragement, false or unusual sense of well-being, family budgeting errors, fast, irregular, pounding or racing heartbeat, or pulse which makes you feel as if death is imminent; feeling sad or empty when staring at a view.’
27 ‘… Don’t speak to me, don’t look me in the eyes … Gravitas.’
28 Command Division: Insertions and Precision Operations.
29 Internal Security: responsible for intelligence activities related to government revenues and duties.
SOME BRIEF NOTES ON MR BLADES
Before I conclude my notes on our meeting with the stranger in the white dress, and move on to our next misadventure, I need to clarify my thoughts on another horror with a painted face. I would not like to leave you with the impression that I am ‘afraid’ of clowns, or of child entertainers generally; I’m scared of one child entertainer in particular, and with good reason.
My parents were fine parents, in their way. Their aim wasn’t to make me a moral or even a well-educated person, their only goal was to make me an interesting one. ‘You have no other duty in life than to be interesting, Jonathan,’ said my mother. ‘You should pull attention like a collapsing star when you walk into a room; then dry down into something rich and complex.’ I understood and forgave her mangled metaphor. She taught me to have a studied ‘coolness’ towards life. ‘Do only what you can do well, and show no sign of care or exertion when you do it.’ She called it ‘suarve’, which on Solidad means – well, it’s difficult to translate. It can mean ‘the temperature at which the world settles but doesn’t freeze’, or ‘a great force used gently’, such as when a flower somehow forces its way through a slab of concrete, or ‘an agent which, when added to a mixture, slows its evaporation.’ Mother used their friend James to define ‘suarve’. He was a musician. He had chocolate-dark skin and intense black eyes. He always wore a plain, well-fitted black two-button suit, and a thin black tie. Whenever he came to parties at our house he wouldn’t say much. He didn’t get loud like the other grown-ups. He’d just find some corner to sit in. He’d listen to people like my father talk for hours, occasionally saying ‘Sure’, or, ‘I hear you’. I was hypnotised by him. And my mother was, too. Sometimes I’d catch her staring at him for minutes on end. I learned that if she was ever mad at me – and my mother’s temper was electrifying – I could mention James, and she would exhibit a kind of melting. She caught on to my game eventually.
My parents taught me everything I needed to know about life. They took me to restaurants, they took me to galleries and shows. This was Solidad City at the start of the great Cultural Revolution, when everything was strange and exciting. My father would go down to Monsterat’s to write during the day. Mother would work at home. They couldn’t work in the same place, they said, because her ‘working odours’ drove my father insane. Sometimes they’d go out in the evening, just for a ‘quick drink’, and be away for weeks or months. I’d have to take care of the house, and pay the bills. And when they came back I’d learn that they’d spontaneously jumped on a ship to Zoraster, or the Hebrides, or the Silver Isles. They always brought gifts: a rosewood case for keeping scented insects; a pop-up handbook of interpersonal relations; a beaker which had allegedly once been used in the production of a powerful nerve gas, and which my father presented, unwrapped, saying, ‘You could use it for flowers I suppose.’ And I did. They died. Tod o rebaixares, we say on Solidad. All things fade. He boxed and collected guns. He punched fellow writers he considered too effete. And yet he drank sparkling wine for breakfast and loved high-board diving. He wrote a ‘poem’ which consisted of him diving repeatedly from a high-board for seven hours. Esmeralda called it ‘nebulously asexual’. They fought for three straight days.
But I was going to tell you about my eighth birthday party. I’d never had a party. Mother had been very clear that celebrating birthdays was an arbitrary contrivance with little social value. And yet she was eager to find a way to mark the passing of my genital obsessions. It was Harvest, she said, and they’d planned to throw a party anyway. So she put together a small celebration.
She designed the event meticulously. It was to have traditional refreshments, kinetic poolside ice sculptures, the setting on fire of a large cake made from alcohol-soaked sponge and flammable icing, and a traditional clowner. There happened to be few clowners still alive who practised the old foolish arts: tossing, falling, death-faking and oralism (the art of putting large things, or a large number of smaller things, into your mouth, or down your throat. It is an art, Esmeralda explained, which dates back to traditional rituals for casting out demons, and beyond that to our infantile fixations). Oralism was Mr Blades’ speciality. I heard the slap of his feet coming down the catwalk to our house. And before the great hulk in his black leather clothes and white grease-painted face had even made it all the way through our front door he’d coughed up a large package of sweets. The brown paper was sticky with saliva when it dropped into my trembling hands. Blades had a leather doctor’s bag filled with instruments: knives, clubs, billiard balls, a broad machete, a twin-headed hatchet, its handle wrapped in black leather. We watched him sharpen his instruments with a steel rod. The sound was deafening. Then we watched him put the hatchet under his lips, the machete all the way down his throat, and all nine of the billiard balls in his mouth. The adults applauded politely, their children watched breathless, and I felt a cool nausea throughout my body. This walking mouth with its painted face and black lips observed me throughout the performance, even though I pretended to read my book beside the fire with a glass of wine. My mother came over to me at one point, kissed me lightly on the head (which was the only time she’d ever done this) and said, ‘Don’t think about what he’s doing; think about what the things he’s doing mean.’ I took her affection – and this party – to be her way of making up with me. I’d recently been sent home from school for breaking the nose of a boy who’d called my mother a cave-whore. My father had tried to ostensibly discipline me, while secretly congratulating me behind her back. She’d caught him, they’d fought, and I’d run off, spending several weeks on the streets. (And when I say ‘on the streets’ I mean I sold the watch I’d got for my seventh birthday, used the money to find a few undervalued first editions in a local book market, sold them to a dealer for a modest profit, and checked myself into a reasonably priced pension run by a woman who collected giant crickets. I stayed there until the private detective hired by my mother tracked me down. He told me a few tricks to avoid being tracked next time – like don’t sign into a place under an anagram of your name – then he escorted Tim Johnberlaan home to his mother.)
So I did think about the meaning of what Mr Blades was doing, as I felt fear moving through my body like a tropical infection. James came sauntering in, slipped me a folded twenty, said, ‘For something fun,’ then strolled into the next room. He did it – and this is what makes him the very incarnation of suarve – without seeming to even register that a seven-foot-tall clown was letting a giant pet rat sit inside his open mouth and eat treats off his tongue. I could see what Blades was doing; I c
ould not imagine what it meant.
I went out by the pool to ease my nausea. I watched the spinning sculptures make exquisite shadows on the surface of the pool. My parents had vanished somewhere. Esmeralda’s money had moved us to a fancy modernist pile with a swimming pool which she converted to a diving pool for Earnest. ‘To keep you occupied.’ He was miserable. He hadn’t sold a poem in almost a year. The pool was rarely used.
I took off my shoes and let my legs fall into the water; I saw the water chop them at the knee. There was a faint steam coming off the surface of the pool. Our sun was eclipsed by the Mass of Orpheon, so it was twilight on Solidad for today. I was told that this was a good omen for your birthday. I could hear the sounds of the city being channelled up the canyon, music from a Harvest party somewhere in the distance, and I could hear the show concluding in the drawing room, the snowy rustle of applause. I turned to look over my shoulder. And there he stood, on the steps to the kitchen, sweating profusely from his performance, his huge lungs filling and emptying with a machine-like wheeze, causing ripples on the pool. He fixed me with a glassy stare. What a thing he was. He took a cigarette from his pocket, lit it, inhaled so deeply that the end sizzled and sparked like a carnival-stick, then let out through the vast O of his mouth a ring of smoke so big it could have swallowed me. Then he began to grin. I say ‘began’ because the grin, which appeared as a faint creasing of the left corner of his mouth, emerged as slowly as a sunset, unfolding shadows across the contours of his face, slowly revealing the massive granite slabs of his teeth, until, after what seemed like minutes, he was fully grinning, while all the time keeping me frozen with those unsmiling eyes. The cigarette, spent in one draw, he tossed over my head and into our pool. And then Mr Blades trod heavy down the path to our guest house. What could he possibly want in there? I wondered.
Well, I will tell the end quickly, and simply. I waited some time for him to come back. Then I went down the path. Past the lightly bobbing balloons and pink paper lanterns. Past the ice sculptures, which in the heat had become dripping, amorphous monsters reeling about in the tranquil sunset. I could feel something uncertain in the air. I could hear noises. The sliding door was open a crack. The lights were off. The only light came from the cat-eye slits between the curtains. There was a pall around my mother’s head. My mother’s head? How did that get there? It was a head I’d loved – at least till that moment – more than any other. She was sitting up on one of the benches in the kitchen, surrounded by dirty catering equipment. She had her head back, and a burning cigarette in her right hand which, along with her other hand, she was using to hold her knees up near her chest. Between her legs was a kind of vortex. An unwholesome, oily abyss. Locks of black, greasy hair swirled around the edges of the vortex. There were white grease-paint smears across her sweat-glossed thighs. The look on Esmeralda’s face could only have meant agony to me then. She looked as if she was receiving a series of intense electric shocks. And there was a sound. It’s the sound which haunts me. What I heard below strangled gasps and heavy breaths was a wet, tearing, sucking sound. Like an octopoid wrenched from a concrete slab. I couldn’t watch, but I did. Briefly. But no. But a peek. No. I ran back up the path to the house. I heard my own feet slapping on the path. It was a mysterious scene, and only time and experience would teach me what that clown was doing to my mother with his face.