by Tim Scott
“Jonny? You OK?” Mat’s voice wavered.
“I have to see Eli,” I said, “I’ve just remembered what happened that day on the mountain with Jack.”
Mat’s face softened and he put his arm around me, knowing I had somehow unleashed a plateload of inner demons.
“Oh, Jonny. What a time to be dealing with that too,” he whispered.
“Yeah,” I said. “I must tell it all to Eli. She has to know.”
“OK, that’s cool. Come on.” Then he added, “We’ve only a few minutes of security clearance left in our arms, so let’s get out of here.”
We scurried over to the stone ramp and scampered up toward the gargantuan entrance doors. I tried desperately to put what I had remembered out of the way until a time I could go over it all properly, but my mind was seeping sadness and guilt into my soul. It ran through my body like an upturned bottle of olive oil in a handbag, finding every corner.
Mat sensed my head was all over the place and eased me down the corridors, weaving us through the ever-growing traffic of Odysseus Hats and generally making a path. I wondered about Eli; it was almost a certainty she’d be at Inconvenient. She worked most evenings there, too generous to take the time off she was owed.
“Thank my huge cock!” cried a voice from a room as we passed, and I fell back into the present moment with an aching sigh of annoyance. “Thank my cock!” cried the same man I had seen earlier, hopping out after us as we shimmied onward through the crowds toward the entrance. “Computer’s the game! Frank’s the name! You nailed it, right? And it was a Klimy, wasn’t it?”
He babbled on, not waiting for my response. “I knew you’d nail it. I could tell from your eyes. This man is going to nail that Klimy! I thought. Nice job, soldier.”
That was too much. I halted abruptly with a cocktail of frustration, annoyance, and bottled sadness scouring through me.
“I’m going! I’m going!” said the man, holding his hands up before I could say a word. “Just thank my cock!” he cried back from down the corridor. “Thank my huge great cock!”
Mat had carried on ahead, unaware I had stopped, and now he bobbed in and out of my sight, skipping among the crowds of Zone Securities personnel and Odysseus Hats, probably assuming I was right behind him and I was an idiot not to be. The corridor seemed busier than ever. I struggled to pass three Father Christmases who must have been here from Christmas Single for some reason. They were “ho-ho-ho-ing” to such a degree that sending them on a lifetime tour of especially dull areas of Finland would have not been too harsh a punishment, as far as I was concerned.
I barged forward, trying to get Mat back into sight, but a Hat coming the other way wobbled off its hand truck and fell sideways across the corridor, blocking the passageway entirely. The sadness that coursed through me quelled most of my frustration. There were about three minutes before the hour in my arm ran out, and that was still enough to get me out of here.
I watched the Zone Securities woman take a huge, worn wooden mallet out of a case on the wall and smash at the Hat repeatedly until it scraped free, taking gouges of plaster with it. The cries of the man inside the thing rang on after each blow, and I guessed he wouldn’t be able to hear jack shit for hours. Perhaps he’d still be vibrating too much to notice, anyway. The Securities woman replaced the mallet in the case and I sprang over the Hat while it still lay poleaxed on the floor. Everyone else was hanging back, waiting for the poor man to get up, but I had ditched politeness sometime earlier.
Mat was nowhere in sight now, and I guessed he’d hold up for me outside, realizing that I was caught up in this porridge of madness. The corridor became less crowded, and I pushed on as quickly as I dared without drawing too much attention to myself. I wondered about the guy on the front desk; he was the last line of security in this place, and it would be ideal if he was still engrossed in Chico the Dog. A sensation of something light touched my neck, then a hand yanked me ferociously sideways through a set of doors, like the snap of a mousetrap.
“Let’s have a look at you,” said a man in a suit, holding my neck with the overpowerful grasp of a madman. “Yeah, you’re the guy that I saw yesterday, and now look at you in this fancy costume. You’re no ad virus worker. You were some dream architect. Well, how do you do? You’re my ticket back into a job here.”
The day before this man had sent me to the Half-Gones, and earlier he’d been the one hunched over the retirement ice cream. His suit was more crumpled, and he looked like someone had battered his ego around the block with a heavy spade, but it was the same man all right. There was a terrified nervousness in his eyes that reminded me of a lost puppy that had spent the night wandering the streets on its own, its whole life-support system suddenly gone.
“Surprise retirement! Well, have I got a surprise for them,” he hissed, his eyes bulging.
“Surprise?” I said, trying to generate some kind of relationship with him in the hope it might lead somewhere.
“Yeah,” said the man. “Surprise!” And at that moment, an Odysseus Hat slammed down from the ceiling above and covered him with a wild clang. I stood stunned for a long second, wondering what had happened. No one in the canteen seemed to notice anything. The cop on the far side was trying to put his arm around the Hispanic girl. She was resisting with a worried smile, while the Wombat Retrieval team were all gathered around the hole in the wall with some machine or other making a grinding noise like a steam train sliding slowly off a rusty tin roof. Sparks spluttered out from the hole like sprays of luminous phosphorescence. I guessed all that racket had smothered any noise from the Hat. Otherwise, the place was pretty much deserted.
I put my ear to the Hat but I couldn’t hear groaning of any kind. The guy was out cold.
There was no sign of Mat, and I had an uneasy feeling about this. The only other people who could want me free from Zone Securities were the Belgian encyclopedia salesman or the Riders.
I decided not to hang around to find out which of them it was. I only had about thirty seconds’ security clearance left in my arm anyway, and I unashamedly bolted for the door.
Outside, Mat was waiting at the top of the steps. “OK?” he said, as I crashed out, breathing hard.
“Yeah. You didn’t drop one of those metal Hats on some guy just now, did you?”
“Not me,” he said, shaking his head.
“Well, someone did, thankfully. Come on. Let’s get over to Inconvenient. Eli will be there, and I want to tell her now. I can’t hold on to this anymore,” I said, heading toward the steps.
The warm afternoon sun wrapped over the scattering of buildings and plasi-screens that squatted sadly in this chewed-up part of town as we skipped down the steps toward the bike. Someone was probably following us, but right now I wasn’t looking back. I was thinking about Eli.
And I was thinking about Eli’s brother, Jack.
34
Mat’s bike was parked in a narrow street, tucked in next to a boarded-up bar that hunched over a small side alley. We carefully checked around, but the whole area was deserted, so we squeezed out of the ad virus uniforms before tossing them to a Litter Beagle that was nosing about in a doorway.
It grasped at them gratefully, battling with sudden excitement to suck the sheer weight of material down one of its nozzles. We folded up the ad scanners and shoved the whole bulging toolkit hurriedly onto the bike carrier. Then I slid onto the back. The crash suit hummed as it bustled around me, fitting itself snugly. Mat’s did the same.
The memory I had back seemed to lie cold and detached in my head, making the other images in my mind look faded. It was as though it had a different weight to it that made it stand apart. I guessed I had suppressed it for so long now that suddenly being out in the open allowed it to pulsate in this weird way. Mat fired the bike, and we roared away in a shock of smoke, heading off through Easy Listening toward the outskirts of Jazz, Compilation, then on to The Most Inconvenient Bar in the World.
I didn’t pay too much attent
ion to the journey, and most of the images I saw tended to pass through my head without getting digested. Maybe I should have been on the alert for the Riders, but I had reached saturation point and there was no longer as much room for fear in my head as there had been.
Jazz was its usual self-indulgent mix. I was accosted by a memory of ordering a pizza just around the corner from the street we were on, only for it to arrive topped solely with olives and nothing else—not even cheese—because, I was told, “that’s what the chef is really into at the moment.” That was one of the reasons I avoided Jazz—not because I had any deep dislike of the people there, but merely because I liked normal pizzas and Long Island Iced Teas that didn’t come made with sherry and cloves “as a new experimental form.”
We banked a corner and cruised into Compilation, which was a silly zone and tended to attract people who tried to avoid making decisions about anything. There was a bland mix of all the zones here, which they always earnestly argued gave the place the very best of everything. But in reality, it was nothing but a stodgy characterless mess, which—sadly—summed up many of the people who lived here too.
It was the sort of place dull people gravitated toward. The sort who had got to be forty before they were thirty—men who were going bald before their time and running around in over-neat clothes as though they had been dressed by their mums that morning, who also combed their hair and packed their terrifyingly ordered bags.
Mat throttled down and turned into an alley that contained an unexpectedly chic bar called Flame Rouge. It bristled with shiny metal and wires that zigzagged around it like some sort of homage to the wings of a Wright brothers’ plane. Flame Rouge filled all its bars with “edible smoke,” whatever that was, but the result was you couldn’t see a foot in front of your hand. It was popular with students who liked things that make no sense—perhaps because it reminded them of their essays.
Mat throttled to a stop and we both snapped off our crash suits and hopped from the bike. We were as close as we could comfortably get to the FBZ around Inconvenient. A frantic noise of someone slamming pans about, together with raised Chinese voices, wafted in from one of the tenement flats somewhere above and suggested the preparation of one meal was not going as smoothly as it might have.
For some reason, it triggered a craving in me for a beefsteak tomato and mozzarella salad, strewn with olive oil and fresh basil and served with another plate containing a neatly sliced ripe peach. The image was tantalizing. Down on the street, a few young boys milled about with some girls, laughing and trying to impress them with their macho style and showy, gym-honed muscles. Behind them, blue smoke funneled orgasmically out from an open window at the side of Flame Rouge. As I watched, it drifted carelessly about, staining the sky in dark random patches.
We started down toward the tight, dark path that was snuck in between two crumbling brick warehouses and beyond was the footbridge, which crossed where the river had been. The alley was cold and I shivered, feeling we could get trapped here and there would be no escape, so it was a relief to reach the small rusting bridge that flaked red paint. The river was still missing and I guessed the cleaning firm who’d removed it had probably sold it on the black market somewhere, then slipped away to set up another shady company somewhere else.
We walked into the old reclamation yard and wound our way through three vast French-style staircases, swaggering up to floors that didn’t exist anymore, their treads worn down by groups of kids who came to play here now. When I was younger, I could have sat on the top step myself, legs dangling into the air, smoking a cigarette with friends and watching the sun draw long shadows across the glory of the Thin Building on the horizon.
We headed on in silence, past some graffiti proclaiming “Rock and roll is our epiphany” in spidery letters, scrawled on a discarded, peeling old door, and I realized Mat was probably wrapped up in thoughts of that day we were all on the mountain together too. The three of us had been inseparable then, but I knew he’d understand why Eli had to be there when I told the story. I owed her that, and so much more.
We weaved our way past strewn piles of rotting sash windows, a whole clump of collapsed greenhouses that shed glass like tears, and a pair of outsized ornamental stone ostriches, which stared unblinkingly as the acid in each passing rainstorm gently stroked away their feathers.
The brass doors of the Thin Building shimmered warmly in the late-afternoon sun, burning like a wall of golden flame. But as we got closer, the mirage died away and the brass turned an ethereal white. We snaked past some pitted enamel baths and I noticed, with a start, a piece of motorbike lying inside one. It must have ended up there the day the Riders rode me out of the window in Inconvenient. We reached the doors and I gripped the small, twisted box section of brass that swooped out as a handle, and it swung forward with a stiff swoosh.
The long, thin hallway with its vast, cathedral-like ceiling hummed with a deep resonating silence—the sort of silence you would somehow expect to only find in the emptiness of outer space or when a dull lecturer has asked a particularly pointless question. Then three sets of elevator doors broke open almost together and people spilled out in unexpected numbers, fanning out across the hall from the far end, and I felt like I detected a collective slouch of annoyance from them as we threaded our way through. We scooted into one of the elevators before it could leave.
“Inconvenient,” I said.
“Yup,” said the elevator simply, and the doors slotted shut with a thwump. I was half-waiting for some sort of hassle from the elevator, but it seemed remarkably subdued and kept a stoic silence until we were almost there.
“What’s it like in Europe?” it said eventually, as though it had been pondering this.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“What’s it like in Europe? I was thinking of going. Or perhaps even to Panama.”
“You’re an elevator! You can’t go anywhere except up or down,” I said with more vehemence than was probably a good thing.
“Well, I…haven’t tried,” said the elevator.
“It’s dark in Europe,” said Mat—sensing, perhaps, that I was just going to pointlessly antagonize the thing. “And in Panama they have some great waves.”
“Cool,” said the elevator. “What about Baja?”
“Baja. The wide beaches crawl down to an ocean that is peeling with right-handers. We’ve had some good times down in Baja and Isla Todos Santos. We went there one time with Eli’s brother and Jeff, and surfed with the dolphins.”
“Who’s Jeff?” I said, almost involuntarily, as though motivated by a part of my brain that I didn’t know existed. “Who’s Jeff?” I repeated, more insistently, staring at Mat. He looked at me in confusion.
“He’s…he’s…Jeff. Um…fucked if I know. What am I talking about?”
The doors slid open. “See you guys around,” said the elevator. “Either here or in Baja.”
“Yeah,” I said and we stepped out into The Most Inconvenient Bar in the World.
It was completely and utterly deserted.
35
The lights were dim and there was no one about, although after a moment, I made out a couple of voices talking earnestly somewhere. The jukebox was jubilantly playing steam train sound effects for reasons known only to itself, and there were tables and chairs stacked carelessly in riotous piles. I was frankly impressed that Inconvenient even had that many chairs, and glanced at Mat hoping he had some theory that would explain all this, but he just shrugged.
“Closed! Closed! Closed!” said the huge bouncer with OTTER tattooed on his forehead, striding over. “Elevators have orders not to bring anyone else up here. What the fuck was it thinking about?” he shouted as the thing shut its doors quickly. He began to usher us back impatiently. “Come on! Out of ’ere!”
“Where’s Eli?” I said, ignoring him, but he didn’t appear to hear.
“Caroline E61 sent us,” Mat added, and it was the mention of her name that broke the bouncer’s s
tride.
“Oh. You two,” he said stepping back and suddenly placing our faces. “OK, well…” He paused reassessing. “I can do you one drink, but that’s it. And you’ll have to wait for forty-five minutes.”
Mat scanned the place. “Dark. But there’s no one else here, is there?”
“Standards to keep, don’t we?” cried the bouncer, with an impatient gesture, as though this was one thing he would gladly kill a man over. “This is Inconvenient. Just ’cos there’s no one here doesn’t mean you don’t have to wait in line! You stand at the bar for forty-five minutes and you might just get served. I don’t care what asses you’ve been licking. Take it or fuck off.”
“That’s cool,” I replied. “It’s cool. Is Eli here?” The bouncer dropped his shoulders and nodded, then motioned us with his eyebrows to go through to the bar as though he had used up his quota of words for the day. Bouncers are, of course, the masters of understatement and can talk to each other in a secret language called “laconic.” This consists entirely of raising their eyebrows, shrugging their shoulders, and occasionally sniffing. You watch them next time you have a chance. You might think they’re just standing there outside a club staring into space, but actually they’re having a deep conversation about quantum physics or something.
We wandered into the bar area and found it had been turned virtually inside out, so we picked our way over the assorted debris, righted a couple of stools, and hunkered down on them. The bouncer had gone off somewhere—possibly to give the elevator a hard time for bringing us up here—and the jukebox now began to play the noise of old-fashioned racing cars, followed up with some jungle noises.
“Weird,” I said, gesturing at the room. “Definitely weird.”