by Tim Scott
Two ludicrously dust-clad figures stood marooned on the top of a building someplace in downtown Santa Cruz, looking like they’d just robbed a flour factory.
Badly.
29
The roof was familiar, and I realized we were on top of the Thin Building, just one floor up from The Most Inconvenient Bar in the World.
“I think I’ll just lie here for a bit,” said Mat, gazing up from where he had landed when he’d flopped out of the chopper. “It feels like all the cells in my body are vibrating.” Then after a pause he added, “She’s very cool, isn’t she? Very cool.”
“Caroline?”
“Don’t you think?”
“Yes I do, but she sells encyclopedias. What is all that about? I really just don’t get it. People who sell encyclopedias don’t have guns normally, do they?” I yawned, walking to the edge of the building, looking down to see the familiar graveyard of reclaimed bits and pieces from old houses strewn out across the wasteland.
“She likes you. She likes you a lot, even though she tries to hide it.”
“Mat, don’t go there. How can I go out with a woman who takes an oath about encyclopedia selling?” I turned when he didn’t reply, and saw his hangover had taken a solid grip on him again, so I gazed back over the city.
After a few minutes, we got ourselves together enough to stagger into an elevator, which was preoccupied with trying out different sorts of ping, which could accompany the doors opening.
“I like this one,” it said. “It’s more me. What do you think? Ping!” it went with a high-pitched ringing sound.
“It’s great,” I said. “How about we—”
“But then there’s this one, which is a bit more traditional. Ping!” it went again, with a barely perceptible difference. “Better?”
“Inconvenient,” I said.
“Please,” added Mat diplomatically. “And I prefer the first ping.” Thankfully, this seemed to satisfy the elevator, and it closed the doors and headed down in silence. “Here we go. Ready?” said the elevator.
“Yes,” I said.
“PING!” it went, as the doors slid open. “Oh, that was good. Wasn’t that good?”
“Unbelievable,” I said. “Utterly stupendous,” and we walked out into the delicious buzz of Inconvenient.
It was heaving, and that was good.
I could immediately see the time-honored mix of annoyingly pretty women; men with shirts drizzled with color in such a way that made them look like idiots; people with hair sculpted into a variety of shapes, some of them quite possibly with practical uses such as opening bottles; and Mat and myself, still covered in a quite remarkable amount of dust, despite having spent some time hanging underneath a moving helicopter—which, you would have thought, would have dry-cleaned anything. But then again, maybe that explains why dry cleaning never works. Blowing something about isn’t going to get it clean, no matter what they tell you. Otherwise, parachutists would arrive back down gleaming, wouldn’t they?
“Hey!” said a voice, slapping a heavy hand on my shoulder from behind. I turned and saw the thickset bouncer with OTTER tattooed on his forehead and wearing two large earrings. It had been him and his mate who had got me served quickly by Eli a few days before. “You’re the two donkeys I’ve been waiting for. Come on,” he sniffed, clearing away a gap through the crowd with slightly unnecessary force. “Ever done a liver transplant?” he said, turning back to me after a few steps.
“No,” I said.
“Went on a course, didn’t I?”
“Did you?”
“Did my first one this morning. See, I’ve got a badge!” he said, pointing at a small badge he was wearing, of what I took to be a liver that was dripping with blood. “It’s not that difficult. Long as you follow the facts sheet.” He grinned. “Right, this is your space,” he added more seriously, frightening away a teenager who was wearing a T-shirt that I couldn’t help seeing had written on it: HE WHO LAUGHS LAST DIDN’T GET THE JOKE RIGHT AWAY.
“Drinks coming,” he said. “Give you that number of the liver transplant class. Here!” he said, handing Mat a card.
“Thanks.”
“A course makes a nice present to someone,” he added, and left.
“He gets a cut,” said Mat. “It’s all a big selling thing. I’ve had the spiel in here before. It takes five years before they let you anywhere near a liver.” I was relieved to hear this, because the idea of that man operating on my liver was deeply unsettling.
“Four Hangover Whackers,” said a waiter in a white coat, to my shock.
It was impossible to get any sort of drink from the waiters in Inconvenient; they were exclusively there for effect. They were primed just to nod and say things like, “I’ll be with you in a minute,” or just gesticulate and smile in a meaningful way, then never reappear at all. Generally, the drinks they carried weren’t actually for anyone. Sometimes they even took orders and people new to Inconvenient were often under the illusion that this would lead to a drink being served at some stage.
How naive they were.
It was a steep learning curve, getting used to the ways of Inconvenient, but this waiter had actually served us four drinks and I can tell you, that caused quite a stir in the people around us. They moved back slightly as though we possessed some kind of ethereal force field that they wanted to be well clear of.
I tried to ignore them as Mat and I dragged ourselves up onto the stools we had somehow managed to acquire and leaned on the shelf that held our drinks. Hangover Whackers were a concoction that were reputed to cure hangovers faster than any other known substance. What was in them was supposed to be some kind of gigantic secret, because it dealt with the alcohol in a holistic way or something. An even bigger secret seemed to me to be the fact that they did fuck all that a glass of water couldn’t do, but it was liquid of some sort and that was all that mattered. Mat took the first one and drained it right off, then paused. “I’ve been dreaming of that,” he said croakily.
I smiled as he caressed his second Whacker, and I could see speaking was still way down on his list of easily attainable activities. “Chill out, Mat. I’ve got some stuff to check out here,” I said, opening the folder.
The whole Dream Virus Project idea was intriguing, if bonkers, but maybe there was some tangential clue in here that would unlock this whole thing.
“I’m glad the psychopathic Riders made sure you took some paperwork home with you,” Mat commented weakly, then laid his head down on the shelf, having seemingly used up all reserves of energy, and by all appearances went to sleep.
I sipped my drink and began to pore over the contents of the folder. Some of the sheets seemed to be out of order and some of them didn’t have anything to do with the project at all as far as I could see, and some were torn hurriedly from books, so the whole collection was a weird jumble of facts and ideas. There were mathematical fractals, some complicated dream psychology, and quite a bit of stuff about DNA. The DNA pages triggered something one of the Riders had said to me. “This is the list of DNA we need to be susceptible.” They seemed to have believed the Dream Virus could somehow be specifically targeted at an individual’s DNA. That was a very weird idea.
It would mean you could release a virus and only the people you had singled out would catch it; the ones you had specified by attaching their DNA somehow to the virus.
But a Dream Virus? That was another step along the line. A virus that gave people serial dreams night after night that you simply uncorked someplace and let find its targets by spreading out like a disease? It was an idea from so far out in left field that I had to get my head adjusted to the whole concept. It was like being told the earth is actually flat after all, and a mixup with some of the adding and subtracting in the seventeenth century led generations to think it was round.
You have to take several steps back and try and readjust your whole mental landscape, while not allowing yourself to shout, “Stop talking complete and utter bollocks!” at th
e top of your voice.
“A Dream Virus that only infects a person whose DNA has been written into the program and gives them the same dream night after night,” I said to myself, trying to keep an open mind. Suppose such a thing was true. Suppose that’s what these pages actually did show. Where did that get me? I still had no idea what this had to do with me. Or why the file seemed to be in my handwriting. Or really how it would assassinate God. Or come to that, why anyone would want to assassinate God. There were still way too many questions. It was like getting an exam on a different subject from the one you were expecting.
I sat back and took a gulp of my Hangover Whacker. It had a slightly sweet lemony taste, and gently fizzed in my mouth in a pleasingly medicinal kind of way. Actually, it wasn’t bad. Not the sort of thing I would have normally ordered, but surprisingly ideal for when you’ve had a hangover and been lugged alarmingly about underneath a helicopter. It did give the impression it was actively sorting out my insides, which was rather wonderful, and I was beginning to revise my scepticism about the whole subject of Hangover Whackers. I looked at the file again.
Having got hold of it was a step forward, and ideally I needed all my research stuff to help me dissect it in detail. But that was in my house. I tried to think of a way to get in touch with the punks who had stolen it, but other than go back to Zone Securities on my hands and knees looking for the lost business card, my mind drew a blank. I took another gulp and let the Hangover Whacker slide down and saw that on the back of the teenager’s T-shirt it said: WHEN YOU CAN’T FIND THE DOOR TO YOUR FUTURE, REMEMBER, EVERY ROOM HAS A DOOR SOMEPLACE. I wondered whether he’d considered the possibility someone could have built the room around him while he was asleep. My thoughts skidded on the idea, but the significance of it eluded me—and the more I thought about it, the less sense it made, until I had to let it go.
“Mat, here’s the deal. We need to break in to Zone Securities and find a card that is as big as a chocolate cookie,” I said, returning to the problem of my house and knowing full well that Mat was unconscious. I took another gulp and began to feel that my head needed to slow down and take time-out properly.
“Yes! It’s time to add the power of the nuclear bomb to your golf swing,” sang out the hologram of the annoying small man, suddenly appearing just in front of me again. “Hi! I’m Tony Shappenhaur IV. You know me better as ‘The Thinking Buckaroo,’ and I’m here to tell you about the amazing power of this driver.”
This was all I needed—the ad I had caught in Zone Securities. I stared wearily at the hologram, unable to face the prospect of waiting for it to run through its whole spiel, and I was about to ask the teenage kid whether he had a zapper when the waiter reappeared from nowhere.
“Can I get that for you, sir?” he said in a smooth, accentless voice, producing a neat white zapper and snuffing out the virus ad instantly. I tried to thank him, but I was way too surprised. Not only had the waiter served us drinks, but now he was being helpful. I suddenly sensed people around us were getting uneasy about this.
“Never seen a waiter be helpful in here before,” said a man in a baggy suit, looking utterly perplexed. “The whole world is going weird.” I nodded and tried to ignore the whispers around us.
“There was a helpful waiter,” and “I’m telling you he was really helpful,” were a couple I picked up from the melee, which seemed to be buzzing in our vicinity all of a sudden. Clearly, Caroline E had friends in high places to make all this happen. I sensed she probably had friends in low places too, come to that, and quite possibly she had friends in places that were as close to sea level as makes no difference if I’m going to be pedantic. But the point is, when waiters start being helpful in Inconvenient, it makes you know you are part of something very big that you really don’t understand.
“I have an idea,” said Mat, still lying with his eyes shut.
“What’s that?” I said, caught slightly off guard by the fact he wasn’t unconscious.
“I have an idea, but my head is too tired to tell you now,” he added without moving.
“Right. Good. Well, you know, don’t forget it,” I said, wondering if he knew he was talking.
“Where to now?” I muttered. “Where to now?” I picked up the file and began to reread bits of it more carefully. While parts of it made some sort of sense, a lot of it was beyond me. And yet I had this feeling in my mind somewhere that it was stuff I would have understood years before, at college, when my dream theory classes were still fresh in my mind. The more I read, the more I seemed to be able to get my head around the idea of a Dream Virus. Maybe it wasn’t such a crazy concept, after all. “Come on, Mat,” I said, poking him. “Time to leave.”
“Oh. What flavor of people have come to kill you this time?” he groaned, without moving.
“Nobody yet, but we’re leaving.” I helped him off the barstool and onto his feet, and he reluctantly began to readjust himself to the complicated scenario of walking. A couple of waiters hovered close by ready to remove our stools into storage the moment we were gone, so no one else could use them. We staggered into the same elevator we had used earlier, which was possibly a mistake.
“I’ve been thinking, maybe it should be more dramatic and not just a ping,” said the elevator.
“Ground floor,” I said, hoping to stem its enthusiasm for inane conversation.
“Please,” added Mat weakly. The doors swooshed shut and we began to descend in silence. But just when I thought we’d demoralized it, it started babbling on again. “It’s like the big moment, isn’t it? The crescendo of the whole journey. You arrive! The doors open! And all you get is a ‘ping.’ It’s not enough, is it?”
“It’s quite enough for me.”
“But what about something bigger?”
“No. Really,” I said.
“Just see what you think.”
“Oh, God,” I sighed, as we reached the ground floor with a smooth bump.
“Uhhhh,” went the elevator, sounding like a woman about to reach orgasm. “Uhhhhhh!” It carried on more forcefully, and the elevator doors began shaking. “Uuuuuuuuuuughghgh” it cried. Then “Yessss!” as the doors flew open accompanied by the dramatic final chord of Also Sprach Zarathustra.
Mat and I exchanged glances.
“I preferred the ‘ping,’” said Mat, and we both stepped out into the long, cool entrance lobby of the Thin Building.
It was empty, as it nearly always seemed to be, and our footsteps echoed up into the vast ceiling, reminding me of the sound of ice cracking in a crevasse. We’d crossed about halfway toward the giant, heavy metal doors when we came to a bench on our left strewn with bunches of flowers.
I stopped, curious, and saw there was a small card. I carefully picked it up. It read, “Rest in peace. Or do whatever it is dead people like to do most.” I hesitated for a moment, and the image of the old man who had been lying here asleep a few days earlier came to me and I wondered if this was all for him. I recalled his face with unexpected clarity, then seeing Mat ahead of me, trotted after him, catching up as he struggled with one of the vast doors. I wanted to say something about it, but didn’t know what it was exactly I wanted to say, so I said nothing.
We heaved open the door and stepped out into the fresh afternoon sun, but the image of the man stayed, cloaking me in a feeling of unexplainable peace. We weaved our way through the reclamation yard, past a variety of classical stone entrance porches that hadn’t seen a door in years, and through an intricate wrought-iron rose pagoda that was folding up onto its knees with rust.
“We’ve somewhere to go,” I said to Mat.
“Giving Habakkuk a visit at last, are we? Excellent. I might actually be sick over him right now rather than just really wanting to be,” said Mat, who had taken a surprising dislike to him considering he had only met him twice.
“Not quite yet,” I said, “but we will soon.”
30
Waddell Creek was deserted. Mat cut the engine and the gentle noise
of the sea lapped inquisitively up to us in the thumping silence.
I had seen too many confusing and, frankly, bizarre people recently, and needed some time-out in a place where there was explicitly no chance of an elevator giving me any sort of grief. I could smell the salt in the spray and felt like a kid skipping class. I shouldn’t be here. I should be someplace being shot at.
I hauled myself stiffly off the bike and felt the sand crumble under my boots like stale sugar. The surf wasn’t that big, perhaps about four to five feet, but the waves were clean, breaking effortlessly in long lines, like someone gently unzipping the water. I watched the glassy, unbroken peaks roll lazily over into bluff explosions of white foam, and it felt like seeing a circus trick over and over, never understanding how it was done. I heard a cough and glanced back. Mat’s hangover seemed to be more under control now. He was unclipping the boards from the carrier hooked onto the Crossfield, and chucked me a wet suit with a smile.
Hitting the surf had always been his answer to problems, and it wasn’t such a bad call; it was finding something real to believe in again. Call me a dork, but the world seems a different place when you’ve just been surfing with a friend. It all feels more chilled by a factor of about ten zillion.
A rip was sucking out a little to the left of us, and to the right I could see the beach run away north toward Half Moon Bay in a frazzle of dunes that poked up like unshaven stubble. I peeled off my clothes and tried not to think about anything and just tune in to the stuff around me, like the gentle breeze sliding across my chest and the noise of the sea; but the image of Caroline staring at me with those blue eyes kept surfacing in my mind.
I wondered whether that stuff about my Jab-Tab and The Voices was really true. Maybe she just said that so she had a reason to get me out of trouble, because she didn’t like to see people floundering in stuff they couldn’t deal with.