by Tim Scott
Then the left-hand bend snapped right, jettisoning me across the Odysseus Hat, and I whacked my nose with a hard, brutal thump. What is it about getting hit on the nose? Why does it hurt out of all proportion? My face streamed with pain, but a pinprick of light in the metal hat hauled my attention back. I tried to keep myself steady enough to look through as we tore along, but my head was thwacking the sides of the tube like a jackhammer. I caught a frenetic glimpse of some kind of canteen, way down below. But the scene snapped away abruptly as I creamed into another searing right-hand bend that was swamped in reams of inky darkness.
What was the point of all this? Whatever happened to elevators and stairs? I could feel the raw bruises aching on every inch of my body, and the sensation took me back to being wiped out by a wave the size of Oregon on Todos Santos Island. I had sat on the beach for a good hour after that just getting my head back together.
More random images crashed through my brain: Habakkuk handing me something; an acacia tree in an atrium.
Suddenly, a thumping drop brought the Hat down again on my head, then I was into another long, sweeping, downward curve before the vibrations eased off and the speed was reined in. A rattle, like we were skating over rollers, and we slid to a halt. I heard a well-oiled humming noise and felt the Hat tip until I dropped like a dead sack onto my feet, with the Odysseus Hat still over my head.
I became suddenly aware of my own breath and realized I was snorting like a cantering horse. I just stood and tried to let the memory of the vibrations drain from my body, but my legs felt mugged of energy.
“Sally H78?” a voice said impatiently, and I realized it might have been speaking before and I’d not been tuned in to it.
“What?” I shouted.
“Are you Sally H78?” came the muffled male voice again.
“No!” I cried.
“Well, where is she?”
“I don’t know.” I answered with irritation, still trying to get my head into gear again, but I couldn’t see where the eyehole had spun around to.
“Oh, Rill. Rill!” called the voice. “We’ve another Wombat in the system. I bet she’s stuck in one of the overheads!” Then aimed at me: “Did you see her at all?”
“No,” I shouted. “I can’t see a fucking thing.”
“Oh, this is all I need. I’m supposed to be off at six, you know. Typical. You sure you didn’t see her in one of the overheads?”
“No,” I said slowly. “I am stuck inside a seven-foot-high metal tube, in case you had missed that bit.”
He snorted, as if this wasn’t much of an excuse. “I know where she is. She’s in the overhead on level two. She’s jumped the points. Anyway, what do you want?”
“Want?” I asked.
“Yes. What do you want?”
“A…a cigarette if you’ve got one. That would be great.”
“Yeah, like I can do that.” He snorted again. “I take it you’re Jonny X? Or am I going to be here all night?”
“Yes. That’s me.”
“Thank Christ. Says here you’re in with the Half-Gones. Have you been decommed?”
“What?”
“Decommissioned.”
“I’ve really no idea. I’m here for speeding and entering a—”
“Right, OK, says you haven’t here. I’ll get you to Section Decom; I’ve got to find this damned Sally woman now.”
“Please, why don’t we just use the stairs?” I cried. “I can walk, you know. Wouldn’t it make everything much simpler and less fucking painful?”
“Yeah, but not as cost-effective, apparently,” he answered, after a pause.
Again I felt the slither of metal under my feet and again the head-cracking jolt as the tube was tilted back. Then, the now-familiar, steady rumble of the wheels vibrating up through the metal sides like the sound of some oversized cat purring. We were moving, only this time I couldn’t see anything and somehow I cared less and just lay there. I’d had the stuffing knocked out of me and my mind had been shaken off its mountings, so I just let the occasional shouts from outside filter in without paying too much attention.
“Oy, Natter! You seen Bishop anyplace? We’ve a Wombat in the system, and I need him to check the overheads in section two! His voice com is dead as a dodo!”
Something shouted back I didn’t hear, then: “In a dress? Well, he shouldn’t be in a fucking dress at work should he? We’ve said he can wear the women’s shoes, but that’s it!”
And later: “Tessa 34? I’m supposed to be off at six. You want to deal with a Wombat Retrieval? There’s a bonus in it.” But mostly I just let my thoughts wander—and they didn’t wander very far or with any great intensity.
“Here we are, mate—Decom. Someone’ll pick you up later,” I heard him snort, then it felt like he thumped the side of the tube a couple of times good-naturedly before snapping it upright and sliding out the heel of the hand truck from beneath my feet.
The echo of the thump roused my senses. Where were we? Decom? What was that all about? A massive thunk on the roof of the Odysseus Hat sent a sharp shock through my veins and I tensed as white light streamed in over my feet and the Hat began to slide up and away. As I squinted into the growing brightness, the tube was yanked off and I could see nothing because the intense whiteness of the light bleached away all my vision. My ears buzzed at the disappearance of the constant metal echo, and I stood generally dazed and uncertain, feeling like a cat that has been plonked down in the snow for the first time and can’t make sense of the world. Machines groaned and spat in an erratic symphony of noise, but through it, I heard a bright, perky woman’s voice over a PA:
“It is illegal to cross the yellow line. Please do not cross the yellow line or you may be harpooned.”
I blinked, taking in the new scene in tiny slivers as my pupils fought to shrink down to narrow slits. An old lady in a heavy tweed skirt was standing about twenty feet to my right on a raised platform, with a cluster of grimy, jutting-armed, heavily bolted, overused machines about her, while a gang of people scuffed around down on floor level, twiddling knobs and rapping dials with a detached, mucking-around-with-each-other air. Farther off, there were maybe fifteen or twenty people, each standing on an identically raised platform, and all surrounded by a similar small gang of Zone Securities people and machines. Above all of them hung an Odysseus Hat on long lengths of coiled chain, hovering like some low-budget spacecraft, ready to pounce.
The room was a wide-floored, hollow-noised, oil-smeared, dirty gray shack, littered with broken or discarded machines and stiff with hard, arcing shouts and echoes.
“Please do not cross the yellow line,” suggested the woman on the PA again smoothly, “or you may be harpooned.”
I glanced around and made out a thick yellow line scoured onto the floor at the far end of this enormous space, but there didn’t seem to be anything obvious beyond it, and I couldn’t see why crossing it was considered such a big deal. I felt a firm hand grab my arm and, jerking my head down, saw I was on a platform exactly like all the others. The thickset Zone Securities man who was gripping my arm like an iron vise had an air of resigned boredom about him.
“Feet in the clips. Nice and still,” someone else cried against the backdrop of machine noise, and I felt two metal pincers snap around my ankles before I even had time to think. The man holding my arm clipped it out horizontally with rough firmness, then plugged my Jab-Tab into a machine that sent a vibration scouring down my arm. Meanwhile, someone had seized my other hand and pulled it out, and I felt a clamp close forcefully around my Skin Media phone. That machine let out an unhealthy, high-pitched squeal and ejected a surprising amount of steam that clouded the whole area.
“You’re in the cycle for ten minutes. Can you please sign here?” shouted the first man, whose face was smeared with oil. He pressed a pen into my clamped and vibrating hand, so it was all I could do not to drop it.
“Sign for what?” I shouted.
“To say you’ve agreed to be dec
ommissioned and you waive all rights to your life and everything associated with it. It’s just a formality, to be honest.”
“What?” I shouted above a particularly whiny machine that had just started up someplace.
“It’s just a formality. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“I’m not signing it. I want to speak to a lawyer,” I yelled rather optimistically, I thought, but the word “lawyer” triggered a change in his facial expression.
“OK. OK.” He sighed and swung in a huge bulbous microphone on a counterweighted boom. When it was near me, he said, “All yours,” and left.
“Lawyers’ fees are controlled by the National Council of Lawyers Fee Board, which dictate that the lawyer is allowed to talk to you for sixty seconds free of charge,” a voice howled at me, and I sensed things were moving way too fast. “If you are facing criminal charges, then a further fifteen seconds may be obtainable free of charge. If you wish to insure yourself against saying anything that might incriminate you by employing a man who will speak louder than you at the same time, please indicate to the officer dealing with your case. If you wish to—” but the automated speech was cut off abruptly.
“Tracy 45N. Can I help you?” came another voice from somewhere.
“Are you a lawyer?” I shouted quickly.
“That’s correct. You understand my fees?”
“Yes, yes, look, I’m not signing a form saying that I arrhhhhhhhhhg,” I exclaimed as the machine clamped over my Skin Media phone delivered a sharp, stabbing pain into my elbow.
“I see. This may be a nicety of contract law, which I’m not altogether familiar with. Would you like me to put it before council?” came her clipped, but not at all reassuring, voice.
“No. Listen to me, I’m not signing some form saying that I have agreed to this when I clearly haven’t.”
“Ah, I see, I understand. Well, it is a prerogative of Zone Securities to ask all their clients to sign that particular form, subject to a recent amendment to the Fisheries Act.”
“I really don’t care. I’m not signing it.”
“You have ten seconds remaining,” came the smooth, gravelly voice from somewhere.
“Can you sort this out?” I shouted.
“Yes, no problem. My advice is to sign the form under the proviso I—” But she was cut off by the automated voice.
“Your time is up. Your account will be docked a nominal fee to cover health care and shipping.”
“Shipping?” I exclaimed, but there was no one to hear. The area around me was empty.
I stared out to the ends of the hangar. Standing on this metal platform with my arms clamped out to the sides by these oil-smeared, bolt-shaking machines that felt like they were gnawing away at my past, I realized that everyone else being decommissioned was in the same position.
Together, we looked like some bizarre group crucifixion. Maybe that’s what the person who had designed all this intended. Somehow, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
“Down the Avenues and Alleyways” floated in—another easy-listening track washing around the hangar.
The machines suddenly roared louder, screaming with wild, jabbing pleasure, and the searing pain coursed through my arms, tingling at first, then burning into a hot-metaled, liquid soup that poured through my veins. It felt as though the fabric of my life was being scalded away from the inside out. And then, abruptly, the agony faded like water draining away from a large, calm reservoir, and the machine noise whined down to an empty silence, leaving me utterly exhausted.
“All done,” said a woman with a clipboard, smiling as I came around. “You had a couple of data viruses but nothing too bad. All your documents are signed and in order and they’ll be attached to your Odysseus Hat. Congratulations. You’re a Half-Gone.”
“I didn’t sign anything,” I said, finding my voice—which seemed foreign and didn’t feel wholly connected to my mouth.
“Is OK,” said the man with a heavy Spanish lilt and oil on his cheek. “Is OK. We can have lunch. Is OK.”
“All accounted for,” said the woman in a matronly tone that I guessed was supposed to draw a line under everything.
“I refused to sign.” I tried to shout but it came out as a whisper.
“It’s only a formality, honestly. Nothing to worry your socks over.” This time she made a gesture. In the distance I caught sight of a lone black figure, running frantically before swerving to avoid being felled by a spear. I opened my mouth in surprise, but at that moment the Odysseus Hat was slipped down over me.
“Please do not cross the yellow line,” sang the muffled woman’s voice over the PA again, “or you may be harpooned.”
14
You’re in with the Half-Gones,” chuckled a voice from outside the Odysseus Hat as I was knocked off-balance yet again as the thing was yanked forward.
“They’re the mad ones. The psychos,” he added, as we trundled off. “It’s not the best place, to be honest, not really hotel standard, but Health and Safety turn a blind eye because we fix it for them to have their company baseball game in the A’s stadium. But I didn’t say that. Anyway, the Half-Gones do make me laugh. One time, one of them collected all his ear wax for several years and used it to try and suffocate one of the—”
“Don’t think I want to hear about the Half-Gones,” I said quickly, through the metal.
“Come on, you have to laugh about it!” blathered on the man, unperturbed. “Don’t you? It’s the only way to stay sane in this place. Another time, one of them Half-Gones caught a rat and managed to use its intestines as a stethoscope. He found he could listen to—”
“Thank you!” I shouted from inside the Odysseus Hat, enunciating every word clearly. “Can we talk about something else?”
“OK, if that’s what you want,” said the voice with a touch of deflated hurt. “Just thought you might want to know what you’re in for. Look in their eyes if you want to see which are the most bonkers. That’s a good tip. As soon as they take the Hat off, look right into their eyes. Most of them are normal like you probably are, but some of them think nothing of taking a shoe and gnawing at it until it’s as sharp as a knife, then—”
“Really. Enough,” I shouted. “Honestly. Please.”
“OK, OK. As you wish.” He sounded dejected and there was a grumpy, hanging silence as we weaved our way onward, pitted only with a few exchanges he had on his voice com. I didn’t catch any words, just his general sense of surprise.
Finally, the Hat snapped upright and my momentum rapped my forehead against the metal sides for the umpteenth time that day as he left me.
I waited.
The darkness seemed to suffocate time itself, slowing it to a tortuous plod, then stretching out each second like chewing gum, so I felt dislocated from everything and hung, suspended, in a void of meaninglessness. I became aware of something in my left hand, something I had been clinging to for so long I had forgotten it. I tried to work out what it was and where I had picked it up. It was a crunched-up piece of cardboard and I turned it over, wondering whether it was important, but at that second a thumping clang on the roof of the Hat startled me and I dropped it.
The Hat began to slide up and off and I tried to prepare myself for whatever was to come. What was it the man had said again? Look into their eyes to tell which were the maddest? The Hat rose interminably slowly, letting the screaming white light edge up my legs like a rising flood. I squinted at this new brightness, trying to be ready for whatever the Half-Gones had in store. I could see a pair of feet in smart ladies’ shoes marooned in the iridescence. The Hat rose more slowly than ever and was almost off the top of my head when I ducked out of it, blinking into the eyes of a person standing not two feet away. Was this a Half-Gone? I squinted frantically. It seemed like I was in some kind of white light land, where everything shone and gleamed.
“Jonny X—well, look at you. Look at you, my poor love!”
“Sarah?” I said.
“Of course it’s me.
With nothing but a blanket on! Oh, and what have you done to your wrists? That is absolutely disgusting.”
“Yeah. Not pleasant is it?” I said, still barely able to see anything properly.
“You poor, drowned dog. Sit down before you fall down and have a drink.”
“Where is this place?” I shambled, now beginning to make out gleaming white surfaces and silver tables from the brightness as I clasped the back of a chair.
“It’s the canteen. Where did you think it was, the Staten Island Ferry? I’ve brought some of your old clothes, which you never picked up even though you promised—sit down, poor love, come on, and please have my coffee. You look like you really need it.”
“Yeah,” I said, collapsing into the chair. “What am I doing in the canteen? Why are you here exactly?” A torrent of questions lined up in my head, waiting to be asked.
“Zone Securities contacted me as next of kin. Saying you’d been speeding and did I want to pay bail. Which I did. Don’t look so surprised. We are still married, you know.”
“Yes, officially.” It came out whispered.
“What have you been doing, Jonny? And where is your house, for God’s sake? That house was wonderful. I loved that house. I painted the bathroom myself.” I took the cup of coffee and drank. Next to it was some kind of cake thing and I bit into it, staring off into nothing, trying to take in this new development.
“I’m very glad you’re here, Sarah. They were about to dump me somewhere bad,” I said slowly. “I owe you one.”
“Really?” laughed Sarah with a forced sense of jollity. “For the last ten years I’d say you owe me more like four thousand, eight hundred and ninety-four—and that’s just for not returning my calls.”
I smiled—and for the first time in a long while, I saw a glimpse of the old Sarah. The funny Sarah, the confident Sarah who was good to be with, who was stimulating and excitable, who could take things and run with them; whom I had deeply, honestly loved and whom I had missed like hell when we were apart. But the feeling was wrapped in the thick, cotton-wool sadness of all that had happened since.