by Tim Scott
“Up,” she said. I scraped the chair back across the floor and stood wearily. Zara nodded in approval, then sniffed and approached the shiny seven-foot metal tubes, and I sighed with despair. She bear hugged one, staggered over to me, climbed uncertainly onto the chair, heaved the thing up, and plonked it over my head so it slid down and hit the floor with a clang. It was wildly dark, and there was barely room to move my arms. I turned my head and, twisting a touch more, found one tiny eyehole. I squinted through it and saw Zara taking up her stoic position by the door again.
“Excuse me,” I shouted, my voice echoing around the cylinder. “Is this really, honestly, necessary?”
“Health and Safety.” I faintly heard her voice filter through.
“Health and Safety? I could die and you’d never know.”
“Well, it’s Health and Safety,” came the shrugged, flat reply.
“This is ridiculous…” I began, but my voice halted of its own accord, as though it had fallen off a cliff; somehow I knew I had already plumbed the depths of her conversation. I sighed, breathing out deeply, and tried to think positively. This will pass, I told myself. Things will get better. I wouldn’t always be standing inside a seven-foot-tall cylindrical tube for pointless reasons of Health and Safety.
Frank Sinatra’s voice crooned around me, sounding like he had been shrunk to only six inches high and was standing in the bottom of a very deep well. “Blue moon, Da di da da da dooo.”
A long time ago, when I had been in first grade, our teacher had told us the story of the Englishman Scott of the Antarctic. He wanted to be the first person to the South Pole but came second to Amundsen, the Norwegian, then froze to death on the way back. In England, they hailed him as a hero. Many years later, when I read about it more closely, I found out that the Englishman, Scott, had been really a bit stubborn and frankly a bit stupid, and that the bald facts suggested he was not really a hero at all but more of an arctic joyrider. Sure he was brave to go to the South Pole rather than sit at home eating cakes; but his death was pointless and unnecessary and owed more to stupidity than to heroism. That’s when I began to understand that people don’t pride the truth above a good story.
Up until then I thought truth was all that mattered. I thought that’s what we were all fighting for, and some people were dying for. Sure, truth can be complicated, can be gray instead of black-and-white.
Or mauve.
But the point is, just because it’s difficult and can’t be boiled down to one sentence, or isn’t amusing, doesn’t make it any less valid.
“Truth corrupts,” I once heard a politician say with an alcohol-fueled smile, and I could see he was serious. “It gets people confused, and we don’t want that.”
But he was wrong.
Sure it can bore people. Sure it can be dull and difficult, but it is worth striving for. A story that’s a lie is convenient and often very funny, but it really is a slippery slope. Accepting a lie about small things primes us to accept bigger lies next time, and it’s the thin end of a very large wedge. Somewhere in this country, we lost the skill of encouraging truth and instead embraced lawyers and marketing men to whom truth is something of an out-of-fashion embarrassment.
The man from Zone Securities was just another person who didn’t care about the truth. He was stuck in the rails of believing whatever was easiest, just like he had been taught. We pride so many things above truth—right down to who can shout the loudest, which may well be a hangover from our Neanderthal past, but we really need to move on from that.
No wonder our society is so fucked.
I heard the door open, squinted through the eyehole, and saw a man I didn’t recognize. He was shorter and wore a smart light suit, had well-groomed hair, and was carrying a folder. “Would you like a cup of coffee?” I heard his muffled voice echo.
“Yes, please,” I cried, my spirits lifting.
“I’m sorry. Can you hear me?” he called louder.
“Yes,” I cried.
“Would you like a coffee?” he enunciated slowly, and held up a steaming plastic cup.
“Yes, I would,” I shouted as slowly and clearly as I could.
He smiled and nodded to Zara, who grudgingly moved toward me and vanished out of my line of vision. I felt a jolt, then light flooded over my feet as she slowly heaved the tube off. I felt my arms free up and ducked my head out of the thing. Zara staggered off the chair and waddled like a penguin over to the corner, where she dumped it with the others.
“Sorry about the Odysseus Hat,” this man said.
“Health and Safety,” I added.
“Ah! You know. Ridiculous isn’t it?” He smiled and handed me a plastic cup of coffee.
“Thank you,” I said, and decided to try and make some positive effort with this man. “I’m here for driving in some FBZs, which really wasn’t—”
“Yes, yes, I know.” He held up a hand good-naturedly. “My colleague was called away on some sort of…business.”
He ended vaguely.
“This is your wonderful card, is it?” he said, handing me back the printed card I had found at my house, just as the door flapped open and another burly woman in a Zone Securities boiler suit backed her way into the room, pulling a hand truck with another seven-foot-high cylindrical metal tube on it.
“I think you’ve the wrong room,” the man in the suit announced.
“Oh, sorry; whoops!” the burly woman replied, looking around and nodding at the door. “Thought this was twenty-four. Oh yeah, twenty-four is the other one, with the blood on the floor,” she said, and started back out.
“I wasn’t there!” came a muffled cry of a woman from the tube, whose words shunted out of her at the speed of a wild lawn mower. “How could I? I’ve never been to Idaho, why would anyone in their right mind want to go to Idaho? I hate Idaho, almost more than Cincinnati. OK, I hate Cincinnati more than Idaho I admit, but it’s a close thing, really close…” Then the door of the room shut, cutting off her voice.
“Sorry,” said the man, regaining the sheen of his composure. “Yes. We’ve checked your story out, and it makes a surprising amount of sense.”
“Really?” I said, knocked back by this sudden change of fortune.
“Yes. To let you into a little secret, the Surveillance Vis link has been hacked into,” he said conspiratorially, “and it’s someone’s idea of a joke to play Chico the Dog twenty-four hours a day onto all our surveillance screens. Very funny, eh? As a consequence we have no visual data at all at the moment. But the really annoying thing is, there’s no episode thirteen.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, Chico goes from being stuck on an island in this swollen river which is rising a foot every few minutes at the end of episode twelve to jumping from a balloon and landing on a trampoline at the start of episode fourteen, and we don’t know what went on in between. It’s kind of bugging everyone. But it’s a silly thing and we have someone working on it, so really, don’t worry. The point is we have solid eyewitness reports confirming these Riders as you describe them. How about that?” I nodded and took a sip of coffee, trying to absorb the news and trying not to let my relief run away with me. The coffee was excellent. Really, extraordinarily excellent and just how I like it.
“So, clearly, there’s no case against you and you are, as of this moment, a free man.”
“Free?” I repeated, still treading carefully.
“That’s it. Free,” he chirped. “Get yourself out of here. Have a good lunch. Go and kiss a beautiful girl for me.”
I hesitated; there was something not quite right here.
“All definitely sorted?” I found myself saying, setting the cup back down on the table. “Free?”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s it. Good-bye.” There was a pause and I started toward the door in what felt like a peculiarly weird, hanging silence.
“No, not really,” he cried, clapping his hands and laughing. “You’re not free. Good God, no! And you believed
me! You believed me just like that! Your face was such a picture. I wish you could have seen it. Oh, you bought that all the way to Alaska! I can’t believe it was that easy! I don’t know how I kept a straight face!” He laughed in the direction of the large woman, who remained totally expressionless. “That makes me feel so good! No, no, no, no, my colleague checked the column marked CLB. I’ve no idea what that really stands for exactly. Nobody does. We call it the ‘complete load of bullshit’ column. It means you’re in with the Half-Gones. I really wish you could have seen the look on your face! So, I’m required to inform you we’ll contact your next of kin et cetera, et cetera.” I looked into his beaming face. “You have to admit, you fell for that like a poo from a seagull didn’t you? Never mind,” he added with a wink, then turned briskly and left.
Zara was standing over me with the Odysseus Hat and the next thing I knew it dropped down, snuffing out the light with a muffled clang.
11
I felt a great swathe of resentment hammer through me as the darkness inside the Odysseus Hat drained away my senses. Perhaps it should have been a conciliation that at least the Riders weren’t shooting at me, but somehow it wasn’t. Whichever way I turned, my previous life seemed to be dimming quickly into a foreign past, like watching an idyllic tropical island receding from the deck of a clanking, grimy, steaming ship.
Maybe this happened to other people too. Maybe they’d had their lives swallowed up by events they didn’t have a fucking clue about and had entered this same bonkers, twilight world where different rules applied, where they no longer had control over anything they could shake a stick at.
I banged my forehead gently against the wall of the Odysseus Hat, trying to get a grip. There was no point trying to get out of the tube now because I didn’t doubt that would cause enough paperwork to precipitate some sort of forestry crisis.
All I could do was wait.
And then, without explanation, something came to me, like a stone falling in the waters of a still pond. One of the Riders had called the other Jeff, and I had known someone called Jeff.
Somewhere.
The name was well used in my mouth, yet I couldn’t put a face—or anything else—to it, which was odd. And then I had the weird sensation that this thought had been there all the time, sitting there in my mind as big as a boulder, but I hadn’t been able to see it. Jeff. Why was that familiar?
A jolt. Inexplicably something began nibbling at my feet, and I tilted my head down to see a slice of light cutting in at the base of the tube, and felt something being slid in under my shoes. A thin metal plate edged its way between me and the floor, then there was a pause, followed by a stomach-churning whip as the Odysseus Hat tipped back, cracking my head with a sickening jolt on the metal. Then the whole Hat vibrated and I scrabbled and twisted to find the eyehole, and saw flashes of the wall and the doorframe slide past.
We were moving on some sort of hand truck, probably like the one I had seen the Idaho woman being pushed about on. And now that I thought about it, I couldn’t remember where it was they said I was going.
I kept my eye on the peephole as best I could as we edged into the corridor. Another Odysseus Hat flashed past with a metal gleam, then I saw open office doors. In one I caught a glimpse of a man with his feet up on the desk and a pencil in his mouth, holding a sheet of paper. Another two Odysseus Hats shimmered past, followed by the thick wedge of blue from the uniforms of the Zone Traffic Securities women pushing them. Another office. Then another office with a blank day planner on the far wall, hanging at a rakish angle, and in the foreground I caught a fleeting glimpse of the man who had first interviewed me. He was smiling broadly and presenting a birthday cake to a young, flushed girl, amid a group of people who were all singing. Clearly, my case hadn’t lingered on his conscience for too long.
More doors.
Then left down another corridor and I smacked my forehead on the metal tube as we snapped to a jarring, bone-aching halt. Squinting out, I saw a uniformed woman gesticulating theatrically amid a commotion of raised voices, and an Odysseus Hat rolling across the floor with a pair of legs sticking out, as helpless as a tortoise on its back.
We moved on, leaving the scene in chaos, and I saw the walls of the corridor skate past, interspersed with more Odysseus Hats being wheeled in various directions, and I sighed. What had happened to the world? Had it always had a soft underbelly of confusion and chaos, only I had not known it was there, or perhaps just chosen not to go looking for it?
On the face of it, the universe was such an ordered place, all the planets doing their thing, exactly as Einstein said they would. But then someone discovered quantum mechanics, which seemed to show that very small things, like atoms, just did exactly as they wished and were unruly as a drunk teenager with a shopping cart. Maybe on some level we all strove to echo that inconsolable balance between confusion and order; perhaps we were all programmed to try and put things into some sort of system, but there was another part of us that knew deep down there was no point.
I was yanked upright with a clang as the Hat snapped vertical and rolled on its lip slightly, before settling again. I felt a slither under my feet and the metal plate was gone. I strained at the eyehole and could just make out several other Odysseus Hats in a haphazard line, leading to what looked like a cupboard door. A woman in a Zone Securities uniform was ushering one of the Hats into the cupboard. She closed the door, heaved down a worn, stiff, oversized handle, and there was a distinct and quickly receding cry. When she opened the door again, the Hat was gone. Then she ushered the next one into the cupboard. As I watched the next Hat vanish, I really didn’t have a good feeling about this, because wherever they were going, I sensed it wasn’t going to be ideal.
The queue of Hats in front of me melted away quickly, until I could distinctly hear the gentle singsong voice of the woman through the metal.
“Forward we go, darling,” she said, and I felt the Hat scrape across the floor and had no choice but to go with it. “There, well done—a little bit more, my darling. That wasn’t so bad, was it?” she cooed, as the peephole went black and I realized I must be inside the cupboard.
I heard a clunk.
Then the stale air seemed to open up and embrace me in one of the longest pauses I have ever known.
12
The record companies had scrambled for power when the cities fractured under their own weight, and politics crumbled in on itself. There had been a massive leadership vacuum and the music companies were at the height of their influence. It seemed natural they should step in.
Everyone knew who they were and they already had a huge, hierarchical structure in place to deal with the dull stuff. They shaped the cities into music zones, which hurt at first, but once it had all settled down it seemed to work out. Music was our elemental-defining characteristic—or at least, that’s what everyone was told at the time.
There still was a government that pouted and argued and generally went about the place stirring up apathy, but it hadn’t had any power for years—mainly, I think, because people had just got bored with it all. It had become so ridiculously petty and savagely inward-looking that if you wanted power, you bought your way into one of the big music companies, such as B. Gets F.B.T., Empty Vessels, or Bacca!Bacca!Woof!Woof!, which had all been top of the pile at one time or another, as the power had ebbed and flowed.
The Zones themselves became run by small elected groups from the people who lived there, but the Music Boards had found a zillion ways to bend and fold decisions as they wanted.
True, they had more influence in some zones than in others; they still were strong in Urban Dance and Blues, but their power was waning in Klick Track, Wah-Wah, Techno, and White Noise, where they didn’t have much of a say anymore. But most often, I guess, it was somewhere in between.
Zone Traffic Police was a strange anomaly that no one could quite explain, and if you brought the question of their power up at a dinner party, people shrugged their shoulders in a �
��that’ show-it’s-happened” kind of a way. Somehow Zone Traffic Police had quietly edged its way into a niche of power across all the zones.
And I mean all of them.
They had maneuvered themselves into a position where no one could tell them what to do. Not without giving them a ridiculously large bribe, anyway.
How was it that a bunch of traffic wardens wielded more power than all the politicians put together?
Maybe it was because everyone realized that traffic was a big deal. Everyone wanted the traffic system to work, and the only way was to let someone run it and turn a blind eye as to how they went about things. After all, people thought, it was a dull job and thank God someone wanted to take it on. That’s the best way I can explain it; but why the traffic police had grown to take over other areas of the law, I don’t exactly know. I really don’t. Why the traffic police dealt with homicides and music copy infringement was just one of those bizarre things, and might have had something to do with budgets and streamlining, but more likely someone deep inside the system was wielding power for the hell of it.
Either way the Zone Traffic Police enjoyed their elevated position. The people there flexed their arms, they strutted about and treated people like they were in first grade.
Every dog has its day, and this dog was having such a good day it was barking with so much excitement, you thought it might explode.
13
The floor abruptly vanished and my head smashed the top of the Odysseus Hat as I sank with it like a stone.
The empty, never-ending fall crunched my stomach into a tiny hard thing until I was eased into a long, sweeping, downward slide.
Then a slingshot of a left-hand curve.
I was flattened achingly against the inside wall of the Hat in the thick vibration-roar of a body-rattling, furious blackness.
Bizarrely random snapshot images of memory flashed through my brain as though shaken free from inside my head by the frenetic pummeling: on a longboard at Steamers Lane; an emotional male opera singer I had seen somewhere; waiting at the altar. But not an altar I recognized.