by Tim Scott
We swept down an alley, and the bike skidded to a halt.
“Close as I can get,” said the driver.
“Yeah, I know.” I took his fire-wire and plugged into the tiny socket on my wrist to validate the money. Some smart news-writer had labeled them “Jab-Tabs,” and the name had stuck.
“Thanks. Have a power day,” said the Rider automatically.
“It’s too late for that, really,” I said.
“OK well, whatever,” he replied. “Sorry I trod on Mr. Grumpy’s toes there,” he added in a rather unexpected children’s character voice, then, with a squeal of tires, was gone.
The alley was a dead end but for a small low door that hung off its hinges. The green paint flaked off in shards and someone had written: “This revolution is for display purposes only!” in white paint above it. I was right on the edge of Compilation, in a kind of no-man’s-land before you got to Trance. There was a noise of someone playing a hand drum echoing around the buildings. Sometimes it felt like it was close enough to grasp, sometimes much farther off. Just a homeless person I guessed, passing the time. I swung through the green door that led into the shell of the old building; the roof was missing now and the place was full of rubble.
I picked my way through and out the other side to the river, crossed the footbridge, and glanced down.
The river was empty. It had been removed for cleaning some months before and the company concerned had gone bust. Now nobody could find it. There had been something about it in the newspapers.
I reached the other side of the bridge just as the sun poked out from behind the clouds, and I began to feel my fingers warming up. They were always freezing up on bikes and turning blue because the circulation had been damaged. A hangover from getting frostbite on a mountaineering trip years before.
In the distance was the Thin Building, and in spite of everything I just stopped and gazed, and desperately fought the urge to light up a cigarette. God, I could do with a drag.
The Thin Building had been abandoned by the buildings around it, which had fallen or been pulled down over the years for one reason or another, so now it stood there undaunted and alone. In the daylight, it was beautiful in a quite different way than I was used to.
Nobody bothered with this part of town. Nobody built stuff here—no new Well-Malls, no Public Access arenas, no twenty-four-hour Ziffer Sniffers Alarm stores—just acres of architectural bits and pieces. There were stacks of old fireplaces and classical doorways and chimneypots and a whole host of stuff that maybe at one time was in some sort of order and now just seemed to be dotted at odd angles. I wound my way past a huge staircase spiraling up into the nothingness of the sky and almost tripped over the edge of an ornamental fountain. The area around the Thin Building was supposed to be a reclamation yard, but it was more like a graveyard for stuff. Driftwood from houses long since gone, each an echo from a different past that no one could remember anymore. Now they sat out the ends of their days here, as though paying homage to the Thin Building.
My mind flicked into alert mode as I heard the noise of bikes echoing dully across the waste ground and looked around. But there was no sign of anyone there at all, though the growl of engines was unmistakable. I looked again. I was beginning to think that maybe it was some trick of the wind, then I clocked them, up on the roof of the old Water Bank over the empty river.
How on earth did they ride up there? There were three or maybe four Riders, silhouetted against the rising sun, and there was something about them that made me uneasy. I looked away as the sun became too bright, and when I looked back they were gone. I quickened my step; I was exposed here, and I didn’t feel comfortable with it.
The Thin Building came about like this. Before planners became outlawed and all fled to South America to live in exile, they had decreed the new building was only allowed to be twenty feet wide, but four hundred feet long and two hundred forty-six stories high. The reason was a secret—because, they said, no one else was qualified enough to understand. That the architect managed to create the beautiful structure before me was astounding—or, maybe, just plain lucky. Seeing the Thin Building made me feel that, despite everything, there was a sense of order buried somewhere within us all—a discernible truth that, if we could only find it, would make things an awful lot clearer. Maybe it was a sense there just might be a God, after all.
Or maybe that was all just a lot of bullshit I kidded myself with.
I pushed open one of the huge brass doors that always filled me with a sense of my own importance and insignificance in equal measures and stepped into the lobby of the Thin Building with its vast curved ceiling and pale marble floor. The elevators were right at the far end in a semicircle, which was a good two-hundred-foot walk, and the whole lobby was cool and deserted. Except, I realized, for an old man sitting on one of the alabaster benches, soundlessly asleep. My footsteps echoed on the marble like pistol shots across an alpine valley, but they didn’t disturb him. I stopped when I drew near and saw he had a kind, well-worn face. “Look after yourself, old man,” I whispered, and walked on.
“Morning,” said the elevator.
“Inconvenient,” I said automatically, stepping inside. It was on the top two floors.
“Oh yes!” said the elevator. “No problem. No problem-o.” The doors closed with a pleasingly solid swish-cum-clunk.
“Knock, knock,” said the elevator hesitantly.
I yawned.
“Knock! Knock!” it said, more confident this time.
“Oh. No jokes please.” I closed my eyes.
“Oh, come on,” said the elevator. “Knock! Knock!”
“I’ve had a bad day.”
“Come on! It’s a good one. Knock! Knock!”
“Please,” I said, and kept my eyes firmly closed. Then finally the door opened and I breathed a sigh of relief and stepped out. I paused, turned around, and stepped back into the elevator.
“This is only one sixty-seven.”
“It’s as far as I go,” said the elevator.
“What? Oh all right. All right.” I sighed. “Who’s there?”
The doors shut.
“Norma Lee.”
“Norma Lee who?”
“Norma Lee I’d plummet and kill you, but today I feel good. Get it?”
“I get it.”
“It’s a bit of an elevator joke. It’s going the rounds.”
“Wonderful,” I said, without conviction. “Are we there yet?”
“Yes,” said the elevator. “Here we are.”
The doors opened and I stepped out to be greeted by a low hum of voices and warm, distant laughter. I glanced out of the window and saw a Rider picking his way gingerly through the reclamation graveyard. That was unusual. It was an “FBZ”—a Forbidden Bike Zone—and even around here in Compilation the security people would give him a hard time. Then I noticed a second bike and a third, then a fourth, all weaving slowly toward the Thin Building from different sides. I didn’t have a good feeling about any of this.
“Kids must have been mucking around with the circuits of number four elevator,” I said to one of the balding bouncers, absentmindedly. “It’s telling jokes again.”
The bouncer shrugged.
I nodded, realizing he was so uninterested in what I had just said he could have won some sort of award. I put the Riders out of my mind, shouldered my way past a gaggle of girls so pretty it was frankly annoying, and headed for the bar in a small room in the far corner. It was, as I expected even at this time of the morning, packed.
Some people claimed that Inconvenient hired actors to come in and pack the bar if there weren’t enough customers, just to make sure it was always incredibly inconvenient to get a drink. I’m not sure I believed this and I never bothered to find out, because it just didn’t matter. I took a deep breath and bludgeoned my way into the melee, avoiding some haircuts that had been gelled into such a state they had become dangerously sharp. When I was about twenty feet away from the bar the c
rowd—as always—became too solid and I was wedged in. I scanned the bar in the small gaps between the heads in front of me and felt my heart leap. Eli was serving. This was good. This was more than good.
Eli 32N and I went back a long way. So far, in fact, I couldn’t even remember how we’d met—or maybe I didn’t want to exactly, because it had been a bad time for all of us. Eli was the woman I wish I’d married, but for some reason we’d gone down the road of being good friends. Timing, I think, had a lot to do with it. And once that happens, once friendship goes beyond a certain point, some women like Eli see your faults, your humanness, the fact that you’re not that unattainable magic they crave, and there’s no going back.
I twisted my hips and found myself rather closer than I would have liked to a large man with a beard covered in droplets of sweat. Over my shoulder, I clocked the doors on elevator four opening, and out walked a girl with a rabbit-up-the-ass expression and wearing way too much makeup, who marched up to the bouncer, said a few words, paused, then stomped off indignantly. I smiled. I didn’t think people actually stomped like that in real life.
My right hand was now free and I stuck my index fingerprint on the screen on my left wrist and woke up my Skin Media phone. Skin Media was still relatively new and felt itchy some days, as though you had a tiny patch of sunburn on your wrist. There were also stories of some people who had the Skin Media picking up aircraft frequencies, or being woken up at night by the taxi chatter from Buenos Aires. I wasn’t one to go too big on new technology, but I signed up with everyone else when it was clear Skin Media was working out. I edged my left wrist up near my mouth.
“Phone, get Eli for me, will you?”
“You have four messages,” said the phone.
“OK, never mind that now. Just get Eli.”
“Sure, sure. Just thought you might like to know about the messages.”
“Come on phone!”
“I am an answaphone. What’s the point of me taking all these messages if you never listen to them?”
“Phone, just get Eli will you?”
“OK. They’re all from Emma, in case you were wondering.”
“Phone…”
“I’m doing it! I’m getting Eli now. Emma rang last night when you were drunk; man is she pissed with you! I’m ringing Eli. I’m ringing.”
Eli picked up. “Jonny X67, you old retrograde, how’s it going? I can’t talk too long, I’m working.”
“I know,” I said. “I just need a favor.”
“I’m not dating you, Jonny X. We’re friends…remember?”
“No, it’s not that, Eli. I’m seeing Emma now anyway—we’re getting on really well—though I still don’t understand what is with you. Why does becoming good friends mean you can’t become lovers later? Anyway, doesn’t matter at the moment. Listen, I’m about twenty feet from the front of the bar. Can you serve me, please?”
“Jesus, Jonny, I’ll get sacked. You know the rules here.”
“Please, Eli, I’m having a bad day.”
“Thought you said you and Emma were getting on really well,” she said playfully.
“Yeah, I kind of lied, and anyway it’s more complicated than that; I’ll explain later. Please, Eli, I know you can do this.”
She heard the desperation in my voice and relented. “OK. OK, Jonny, just this once. Long Island Iced Tea?”
“Yeah. Eli, I owe you.”
“Yeah, so what’s new?” She hung up. I craned my neck past a man with bulging afro hair and caught a glimpse of her. She was talking to someone else on her Skin Media phone and was scanning the crowd. When she clocked me, she smiled, shook her head, then scowled in a way that made her beautiful.
I smiled too, and suddenly felt immensely insulated from everything around me, enveloped in the warm pleasure of simply knowing I had a really good friend. And I would have happily stayed in that wonderfully warm state of mind if two heavy hands hadn’t thumped down on my shoulders and dragged me backwards.
“Trying to get served before your turn?” growled one of the bouncers, who looked as if age and probably too many cheese-burgers had eroded his figure to the extent he was now bordering on paunchy and unfit. Even so, I didn’t doubt he could still hit me tremendously hard. Another bouncer with a thickset shaven head, a neck like a tire, dangling earrings—and also, I couldn’t help noticing the word OTTER mysteriously tattooed on his forehead—stared at me in a way that stripped away any courage I might have been harboring. I tried to keep from looking at the earrings.
“Well,” I began, “no, I…There’s a misunderstanding. You see, I phoned Eli. The noise was…” They stood me upright against a wall in a quiet corner away from the crowd. “I was only asking her if…nice earrings,” I said suddenly, unable to contain myself any longer. The bouncer wearing them smiled and there was a pause big enough to drive a train into.
“Well, it’s your lucky day, isn’t it?” said the other one. “We owe Eli. You’re coming with us.”
I felt myself relax and smiled with the sudden joy of someone who has just put down more bricks than they really had the strength to carry.
The bouncers led me down a small, cramped set of back stairs that ended in a dark, low-ceilinged room, with a floor of uneven stone. We all crouched to avoid cracking our heads on the beams.
The overweight one motioned me to one end of the room and I glanced about, catching sight of what appeared to be an old DJ setup in the dim recesses, with the words IF YOU DON’T DANCE WITH DAN, YOUR MONEY BACK! blazoned across it. Looking at the general appearance of the thing, I was reasonably confident Dan went bankrupt pretty quickly.
Above us I could hear the shuffle of feet and guessed we were under the bar. The murmur of muffled music started up and I caught the raw-edged smell of cigarette smoke in the back of my throat. I breathed it in. Suddenly I really, really knew I had to have a cigarette. Just one. I felt for the packet I’d bought the previous night but managed not to open.
“Now,” said the bouncer knocking the roof above his head, “you know what this is?”
“No,” I said, without thinking too much.
“This is what people dream of. This is a trapdoor, which comes up right at the front of the bar at Inconvenient.”
The other bouncer—the one with OTTER tattooed on his forehead—started sniggering.
“Right,” I said, slightly distracted by this and still struggling to locate the packet of cigarettes.
“Here’s the plan,” said the overweight one, unfolding a large thick piece of paper. It was a blueprint of the floor plan of Inconvenient. I marveled at just how thin the building really was.
“We kill the lights here,” he said, looking up at me to see if I was following, and I let my hands drop from their cigarette search and nodded sagely. Otter suddenly sniggered again. I glanced at him and did a double take; he already had his hand on a rusting, old, and frankly dangerous-looking electrical power switch.
“I open the trapdoor here,” continued the overweight one, jabbing the plan. “I go up, clear a small space in the confusion of the darkness, then you follow me up. OK?”
I nodded again and backed it up with a strange shrugging gesture, which was supposed to indicate how impressed I was.
“Eli serves you, I flap the trapdoor shut, and we make our escape here, where the crowd is thinnest. Sweet as a moose. Any questions?” he said, neatly refolding the plan and tapping it on his hand before slipping it carefully back into his jacket pocket.
“No,” I said, trying to contain my bemusement. I have to say I was warming to them though. I mean…
“OK. Synchronize watches,” added the overweight one.
“Why?” I asked, without thinking, and wished I hadn’t.
His shoulders sagged in disappointment at the question. “Why? Because”—he sighed—“it’s good practice, yeah? Always do things properly. Then it becomes automatic. OK?” He shook his head. “Christ,” he said under his breath.
“OK,” I said. �
��OK,” I repeated, more upbeat, trying to retrieve the situation.
“On my mark,” he cried. “Mark! We go in one minute,” and he crouched ready, looking at his watch with utter concentration. Insanely distracted by my new urge for a cigarette, getting a backache from the constant stooping in this small space, we waited pointlessly. I looked about, smiled at Otter when I caught his eye, then found I was making a tocking noise with my tongue.
“Sorry,” I said, aware of the overweight bouncer staring at me with bulging eyes.
“Three, two, one, mark,” he hissed. And I have to hand it to him; the plan worked beautifully. The lights went out, I heaved myself up through the trapdoor after the bouncer, stood up feeling for the edge of the bar, and there was Eli. Enough light spilled from some machine somewhere so that I could just make her out. She handed me a huge Long Island Iced Tea.
“Jonny X, what are we going to do with you?” She smiled. “Do you know why I do these things for you?”
“Because you love me?”
“Because you remind me of my brother.”
“Yeah,” I said.
She plugged a fire-wire in and out of my Jab-Tab with such force it almost took my arm off.
“Now get out of here!” She smiled and without warning the bouncer dragged me off through the crowd and sat me unceremoniously in a chair at a corner table that, moments earlier, would surely have been occupied. There are no spare tables in Inconvenient. There just never are. If there is an empty table, it gets removed by the management and put in storage. The lights blinked on again, and I looked about.
“Not bad,” said Overweight. “Twenty-six seconds. Next time we do it in twenty.” And he pointed at me, raised his eyebrows, and was gone.
“Thanks,” I said as he left. “Thanks,” I said again, more to myself. I took a deep breath and stared at my Long Island Iced Tea.
For the first time in a bit, things were looking up. I was in Inconvenient, I had a huge Long Island Iced Tea, and somewhere to sit. People would kill for the position I was in. Now I felt comfortable enough to think properly about everything—to run over the events of the last few hours, to try and put some sense of order back into who I was, and to make an attempt to take charge of my life again.