by Ian McDonald
“Oh, hey, here’s yours.”
While he tore off the Hokusai print wrapping paper and walked about in front of the mirror in his wardrobe, admiring himself in the real silk Japanese yukata, her fingers played the buttons.
“Saul, look.” She held it out to him. “Merry Christmas, Saul” marched, Fascist black on grey, across the display. Elsewhere, the radio news reported that the search area for wreckage from the transatlantic jumbo that had crashed four days before Christmas had been widened to cover a fifty-mile-diameter circle across the Southern Uplands of Scotland.
Here is the rundown for the penultimate Christmas of the decade in L’Esperanza Street. Kids get skateboards and jackets with Australian soap stars on the back. Dads get camcorders, or, a lucky few, satellite dishes. Mums get sweet things, smelly things, and underwear they’ll never quite have the courage to wear.
Enjoying her one night of self-company apart from the Cuba Libre limbo of advertising parties, lawyer parties, dojo parties, friends’ parties, friends of friends’ parties leading up to the grand bacchanalia of New Year, Enye was barefoot and cat-curled on the sofa listening, half hypnotised by the soft-focus highlights of her Christmas decorations, to Madam Butterfly.
There was a knock on the door, a small, hard musket ball of intrusion into her treasured privacy.
She let them knock again. She was not expecting anybody; anyone who would be knocking she did not want to see.
And again.
And again.
She surrendered on the fifth knock.
They were the kind of people her mother had told her not to open doors to. Two men, anonymous, forty-wise; something in accounts somewhere, or the marketing of uninteresting but essential components for machine tools. Dressed in matching black suits two sizes too small, over white polo-neck sweaters. All they needed to be apprentice Men from U.N.C.L.E. was to take pens from their pockets and whisper “Open Channel D.” One carried a small briefcase, held high in front of his chest. They seemed uncomfortable, ill-fitted to themselves, like novice door-to-door evangelists.
“Mizz MacColl? We’re from General and Far Eastern Electronics. We believe you recently became the owner of a Sony-Nihon Mark 19 Hakudachi Personal Organiser?” They peered around the door into her apartment. A card was proffered and accepted. Enye studied the smeary black typeface.
“We’ve been receiving a number of complaints from owners of Sony-Nihon Mark 19 Hakudachi Personal Organisers about a number of faults and my company has decided to recall the last batch. If you could, would it be possible for us to see your Sony-Nihon Mark 19 Hakudachi Personal Organiser?”
“What sort of problems?”
“Oh, this and that—small, irritating things.”
“I haven’t had any problems with mine.”
“They tend to take a while to show up. General and Far Eastern Electronics thought it simplest to recall the entire batch.”
The second man, Mr. Accounts-something, was fiddling with the brass catches of his glintingly new briefcase as if he had never seen them before. Mr. Uninteresting but Essential Components continued, “Ah, the Sony-Nihon Mark 19 Hakudachi Personal Organizer?”
“I’ll get it, but I don’t really think…”
“Would it, ah, be possible for us to come inside? Just for a moment? There are a couple of tests we’d like to run.”
“If you must.” Though it was the last thing she wanted to do. Inside, they stood helplessly, apparently confused by the geography of her apartment.
“A seat? Sit down?”
“Oh no, thank you, we’d rather stand.”
Mr. Accounts-Something had managed to open his briefcase. As she went to the bedroom to fetch the personal organiser, Enye observed how keen he was for her not to see what was inside. Mr. Uninteresting but Essential Components took the Sony-Nihon Mark 19 Hakudachi Personal Organiser, passed it without comment to his colleague, who set the briefcase on the carpet by the door and knelt in front of it. Mr. Uninteresting but Essential Components was very careful to keep himself between Enye and his colleague. Washes of coloured light lit the kneeling Mr. Accounts-Something’s face. He closed the briefcase, having had some difficulty with the catches, and stood up.
“Um, my organiser?”
“Oh. Sorry. One of the defective units. Quite unmistakable, once you know what to look for. General and Far Eastern Electronics will supply a suitable replacement as soon as new stocks arrive.”
“I’ve got information and stuff in that. Personal stuff.”
“I’m sorry, but General and Far Eastern Electronics will supply a suitable replacement as soon as new stocks arrive-”
They backed out of the door, bowing, getting in each other’s way. Mr. Accounts-Something had not spoken a word in the entire exchange. Mr. Uninteresting but Essential Components had sounded—the simile came to Enye and struck her with its appositeness—like a ham actor delivering poorly learned lines.
Of course, the number on the smeary business card returned the data space white keen of Number Unobtainable. Of course, directory inquiries could find no reference for a General and Far Eastern Electronics. Of course, the electronics shop that had sold Saul the Sony-Nihon Mark 19 Hakudachi Personal Organiser did not list General and Far Eastern Electronics as a supplier, had never heard of a General and Far Eastern Electronics.
“Sounds to me as if you’ve been conned out of one Sony-Nihon Mark 19 Hakudachi Personal Organiser,” said Jaypee, more than a little frayed at the edges on his fifth straight night parrrrrtying.
“Sounds to me like a classic M.I.B. phenomenon,” said the Bryghte Younge Thynge in the black net tutu who had been trying most of the evening to chat Jaypee into concupiscent intrigue. Saul was elsewhere, an innocent abroad among the danceables and drinkables, the smokables and sniffables and screwables; Enye discovered an ingrowing talon of mild jealousy to which she had never suspected a vulnerability. She did not know, no one knew, under whose auspices this End of Year Bash had been thrown, but the same old faces that graced every other in-between day function could be found in abundance, liberally salted with Bryghte Younge Thynges making their social debut.
“M.I.B.? A British Secret Service agent stealing a Russian fighter?” inquired Jaypee.
Black net tutu and legs that went all the way to her you know you know had a laugh like cars being crushed.
“No no no no no. Men in Black. M.I.B. Classic Youfoe events. Someone has a Youfoe experience and then these funny men come around, from the air ministry, or something like, and they ask like these really gauche questions. They always go in twos, and they usually either dress in black or drive a black car or carry black briefcases or something like. Never seem to know exactly what they’re doing, sort of like confused, like people who’ve been brought in off the street and asked to play bit parts in a movie. Classic pattern. Your two sound like classic Men in Black events. You had any experiences of Youfoe consciousness lately?”
“Nothing classic.”
“You mean flying saucers and all that?” asked Jaypee, who did not much want to enter into concupiscent intrigue with black net tutu legs, etc. “Atlantis and power crystals and out-of-body experiences and channellers, who take all major credit cards and claim to be in contact with thirty-thousand-year-old entities? One wonders what priceless pearls of wisdom one might get from a thirty-thousand-year-old entity when one crosses its palm with plastic? Watch out for sabre-tooths, and don’t eat the plants with the blue flowers if you don’t want to be shitting yourself for a week?”
“Jeez, like you’re so gauche.”
Bryghte Younge Thynge flurried off in high, rustling dudgeon to spend the remainder of the year being chatted up by a man who claimed to have had carnal knowledge of a Pointer Sister.
“Gauche being the opposite of classic?” Enye asked as the old year passed away and the new arrived.
That Ufology and all its attendant corpus of faith should be a facet of mythoconsciousness did not surprise her. Of greater
concern was that two ostensible phaguses had found her, entered her house, and taken a piece of her property
In the morning, with the statement from the credit card company, was a brown paper parcel laboriously wrapped in string in that way that looks so inviting but no one can be bothered to do anymore. Nestled in tissue paper in a green cardboard carton: a Sony-Nihon Mark 19 Hakudachi Personal Organiser with a compliment slip written in a large, loose, childish hand:
General and Far Eastern Electronics wishes you the compliments of the season and every happiness with your new Sony-Nihon Mark 19 Hakudachi Personal Organiser.
She did not know whether to switch it on or hit it with a hammer.
She fetched the hammer from under the kitchen sink.
And switched it on.
Words and symbols too fleeting for human comprehension flickered across the liquid crystal display. Lines meshed and intermeshed, formed Op Art moiré patterns. The screen cleared, then flashed the words, silver on grey:
DISRUPTOR LOADED.
She was thumbing through the instruction manual when the screen cleared to proclaim a new message.
PRESS 8 TO CONTINUE.
As instructions not contained in any manual scrolled across the screen, she understood. Like seed crystals in supersaturated solution, her subconscious cry for help from beyond comprehension had precipitated into Men in Black. She had created, and as ignorantly dissolved back into the unsubstance of the Mygmus, her first phaguses, bearing a gift of wonder and puissance.
A weapon.
Mr. Mooney of the antiques restoration firm who undertook the servicing and sharpening of Enye’s swords had been horrified at what the small, sallow, black-haired woman had wanted him to do to a Murasama blade. But he had done it. The intensity of the small, sallow, black-haired woman compelled him.
That night she watched the silver disruptor glyphs swarm from the habaki and meld with her blade. She swung the katana through the Five Attitudes. It sang for her, a new song that no ear but hers could hear.
Two samurai stand on the side of a hill, swords drawn. Rain is pouring down. They are soaked through by the pouring rain. Neither makes a move. They have been standing since dawn in the pouring rain, neither moving. They are Masters, the greatest exponents of the Way, and yet they stand there, soaking wet, neither moving, for to move is to reveal your spirit to your enemy and give him advantage over you.
So neither moves. And neither will move.
Unless one possesses a weapon of overwhelming superiority.
Phaedra is too fine a strategist to let anything as unsubtle as a victorious glint shine in her eye, but from the moment she enters the glass office that from its superior level overlooks all the transparent lives of the Glass Menagerie, Enye knows that this is the hour when the irresistible weapon is unholstered.
The irresistible weapon is a sheet of dot-matrix computer flimsy. Columns, rows, tabulations, figures.
“Would you care to explain this to me, Enye?”
First names. So.
The results of the urine analysis. Without understanding a single decimal or percentage point, Enye knows what it says.
“It’s off by several points, Enye.”
Shekinah. The Radiant Presence of God.
“Look. Spare me any pious shit about company commitments to stand valiant and firm in the face of the greatest social menace of the century because, quite frankly, it just doesn’t sound convincing coming from someone who has the Gross National Products of several South American countries stuffed up her corroded nostrils.”
Phaedra smiles a Phaedra smile.
“Would you care to see my analysis? It’s right here on the desk. I can point out the discrepancies.”
I’m sure it’s as pure as the finest Colombian White, Phaedra.”
And if the hillside upon which one of the samurai stands overlooks Hiroshima?
It was a moment that, in any other mood, in any other circumstance, she would have bronzed like her first pair of shoes: Jaypee Kinsella with frostbite of the witticisms. She knew he wanted to say something. Her look dared him to as she gathered up the disseminated fragments of her personality in three cardboard boxes. Two mugs three pencil sharpeners (one Garfield, one regulation aluminum, one in the shape of a Great Northern Diver) pens papers pads executive mercury mazes and roll-the-ball-into-the-hole games, a Rubik cube soft-soaped for speed-solving, a set of pornographic saké cups with marbles in the bottoms that, when filled with saké, magically revealed a couple engaged in an act of oral outrage, a ball of aluminum foil the size of a fist, one Walkperson, three sets of dead batteries leaking toxic orange pus, a tape of the Meistersinger she had thought lost forever, a copy of the collected short stories of D. H. Lawrence, pairs of tights, packets of tampons and sanitary towels, candles, icons, pieces of quirky blue china, an Endangered Bat Species of the World mobile, a water pistol, desk tidy, pencil pots, assorted Schefflera, Hypoestes, and Ficus Pumilla, a solid gold swizzle stick, a half-eaten bar of chocolate (dark), several cardboard folders of diverse papers, an expired car-tax disc, a threatening letter from the Tax Department, a credit card company statement, a communiqué from the Reader’s Digest informing her that she may have already won a totally ludicrous sum of money, a copy of Cosi Fan Tutti she had likewise thought gone forever, a pair of high heel shoes for special occasions, a packet of paracetamol, a packet of sinus decongestants, a packet of antihistamines, a packet of fructose tablets, a plastic dog turd, birthday cards Christmas cards get-well-soon cards congratulations-on-joining-us-in-your-new-job cards.
She extends a hand to Jaypee. She cannot look at him.
“Well, good-bye, Jaypee, it’s been good knowing you, but this is it. Good-bye.”
“Shit, Enye, she didn’t have to fire you…”
“She didn’t. I quit.”
“Fine gesture, Enye, noble gesture, but what the hell are you going to do?”
“God knows, Jaypee. God knows. Not advertising. Phaedra’ll have word out all over town. Hear these words, Kinsella: if you have ever entertained one creative thought in your head, if you have ever even for a minute considered originality, freshness, creativity, and genius to matter, if you have one iota of artistic integrity in your soul, you will quit, too, because this place is death to creativity. Death, Jaypee. Death.”
Then she stalks out of the Glass Menagerie with the three piled cardboard boxes in her arms, and every head in every glass cubicle turns to follow her, and she does not acknowledge a single one of them.
The machine on the barrier of the QHPSL car park swallows her card and rewards her with the message CARD INVALIDATED.
She is too angry to settle in her home, too angry for any of the things that usually calm her—music, a bath with a whiskey, calisthenics, sword practice at the dojo, a walk in the garden, a talk with Mr. Antrobus. She wants to take her anger out into the city, pace it about in the streets like a panther on a leash. She wants people to see her anger, hear the air crackle as she passes by, feel its heat on their faces and hands.
She has not been to the city centre coffeehouse since her student days. Then it had been a place of dreams and plans and notions, of attempts at beginnings. That is why she is drawn again to its mahogany-panelled walls and whistling brass biggins and sooty stained-glass windows. A church for agnostics. The coffeehouse is busy; fragments of other lifelines carrying trays entangle briefly with her own. A small, birdlike lady with an English accent asks if she minds if she and her friends share her table. They’re down from the north for the day, where the friends she is visiting live. She likes Enye’s city very much. She thinks it is a magical place. Is she waiting for a friend? Enye says no, she hasn’t any friends. The bright, birdlike lady cannot believe that she does not have any friends. Enye says friends are fragile things—illusions of atmosphere, environment and lighting; like that! (click of the fingers) she has just lost the person she thought of as her best friend.
There is more than one star in heaven, says the
birdlike lady and she smiles and it is as if she and Enye have been caught up together in a dazzling, audacious conspiracy.
She almost calls him that afternoon. Almost. But then the thought of his voice brings back to her all the things her life is easier without: his needs, his weaknesses, his clinging, his irritations and obscurities. Instead she goes to get her hair cut. One inch, all over. She roots through her apartment, collects any item of clothing that might possibly be suspect of Power Dressing, stuffs them into plastic garbage sacks, and drives the lot of them down to the nearest charity shop. The break has to be total. Total. Only one thing stops it from totality.
Such confusion of emotions on Saul’s face as he opens the door to her. Such confusion of emotions in her spirit as the door is opened to her; that, despite all those things her life is easier without, she is standing here in his tastefully decorated neo-Georgian hall with the early morning rain dripping onto his majolica floor tiles.
“My God,” he says, staring at where the hair in which he had so loved to bury his face used to be. “What have you done?”
She answers all the questions he asks her; he blusters and blows threats of litigations against the people who would do this to his Enye.
“Saul,” she says. “Do not be stupid. Understand that: I did it.”
Pressed close to the great, vital heat of his body beside hers in the bed, she slips out of the Thunderbirds T-shirt Saul has lent her, presses her tense, taut self against his slumbering mass, calls him with her tense, taut desperation to love with her. Afterward, she lies watching the motes of darkness coming and going across the plasterwork of his ceiling, as she has so many times before, listening on headphones to nighthawk radio playing Album-Oriented Rock. The break is made. Now she can walk on. They are playing an old song she used to like from her student days. She whispers the words in time to the music: Slip-slidin’ away.
She had a weapon now, but no enemy. Ostensibly in defence of Mr. Antrobus’s cats, she patrolled, swords in sheaths, computer hooked to her belt, the laneway at the rear of the gardens, much to the surprise of other residents. (Who, of course, said nothing. What went on in that house was nobody’s business.) The Nimrod, whatever its form, or stage of metamorphosis, was gone from the immediate environment. After a local radio reported the destruction of a number of hen coops and pigeon lofts by an unidentified but large animal, she expanded the perimeter of her search to include that neighbourhood also. Her breath steaming in the January air; she willed her mythoconsciousness out into the night. Nothing. Rien. Nada. Not even the migrainous neural drumbeat she had learned to recognise as the touch of the Mygmus. She returned to the car, wrapped the swords in an old copy of the Irish Times, drove away through streets broad and narrow.