by Tim Scott
“Who?” he said cocking his head.
“Caroline E61. One of your representatives. She was on my case.”
“Ah,” he said nodding to himself. “Ahhh,” he added more finally, after a pause, then turned and walked away without giving any indication as to whether he would tell her anything. As he clipped up the stairs again, I realized all the figures in black had melted from the rooftops. The Belgian reached the top step, heading for the solid stone building, pushed open one of the large doors, and slipped inside.
There was an empty pause after the door thunked shut, and Mat let out a breath. I guess he had been holding it in for some time.
“Fucking hell,” he said, as we stood there, marooned in the silence of the empty wide square with the noise of the fountain suddenly lapping louder again. In the distance, a large group of people was singing “Jingle Bells” and the words filtered through to us intermittently between the splashes of the falling slush.
Jingle Bells,
Jingle Bells,
Jingle all the way
Oh, what fun it is to run
Away from men with guns! Oh!
I looked at Mat to see if he shared my surprise, but he was righting the bike. I put what I thought I’d heard down to my head feeling as confused as if it had spent an entire week on a tour of the dullest paper bag factory there was in Kansas.
With an otter as a tour guide.
“Shame about your bike,” I said, knowing how attached Mat was to it.
“Yeah, it’s pretty much had it,” he replied. “Back wheel’s all over the place.”
“Guess we’ll have to leave it for now and start walking unless you have a better idea.” I sighed. At that moment, we heard the faint ring of approaching sleigh bells and I caught Mat’s eye.
“Oh no,” I said. “Oh no, no way. Don’t even think we might do that.” But Mat didn’t break eye contact with me, and a smug, immovable smile spread across his face.
42
I had never been to the Buena Vista Industrial Village before. As we crossed through the first few miles, I saw it wasn’t so much a village as a sprawling, smoke-belching litter of pipes, urban machinery, and chimneys that stained the ground with leaked oil and gagged the sky with gases and vapors that their white-teethed spokesmen always cheerily explained weren’t doing anyone any harm. But the miles of dead, inhumane wasteland around us said otherwise as brutally as if the place had been covered in dying, gasping badgers. Maybe it’s inevitable industry kills everything around it, cleansing all sense of nature and humanity, so the science-y things they do can have center stage.
Maybe, but probably not.
The taxi Rider cruised between the factories and rusting holding tanks, dwarfed by the sheer scale of their awkward bulk, and I realized these were the cathedrals of our generation—not the showy, shiny, make-believe, high-tensile things architects were always trying to impose on us. These things sat ignored and shoved out of sight, but still with a gritty, stubborn character all of their own. They stood in part for greed and a certain sort of carelessness with the world, but there was an element of triumphalism about them too—a sense of sticking a marker down to show we were here. I liked the kick that entering this foreign, grinding land gave me. It’s like smoking, I thought; it’s bad for you, but hell, it’s a really deep, satisfying buzz.
I sighed and wished I hadn’t stumbled across the thought of smoking again, because now it would plague me, and I tried unsuccessfully to lose the idea in a backwater of my mind.
We had left Christmas Single a half hour before. Mat had reveled in the fact I was consumed by a fire of embarrassment and anger at finding myself in the back of a sleigh covered in presents, and was doubled up with laughter for just about the whole journey, which made things seem somehow normal again. The “Ho-ho-ho-ing” Santa had taken us through the snow to the edge of the zone, and from there we had hailed a taxi bike to the Buena Vista Industrial Village.
If I had been given a dollar every time that Santa said, “Ho! Ho! Ho!” on that short journey, I would, at a guess, have something like forty-two dollars. I visibly winced every time he said it, which of course made Mat laugh more, and the Santa saw that as a sign of encouragement. So the whole thing just snowballed.
And snowballed.
I prodded myself back to the present, and my eyes took in more gangling hulks of factories that were slipping by with welters of chimneys and oddly shaped outbuildings circling around them. I wondered why on earth they had brought my house to this godforsaken industrial wasteland when they could be on an isolated beach in Baja, or tucked away in the outreaches of Yosemite, or down in a forest clearing in Oregon somewhere. I guessed they thought this was the last place anyone would come looking for them, and maybe they were right. We were also not that far from downtown Santa Cruz, and all its services would be easy to tap into here, so I s’pose it wasn’t so stupid.
My house was about two hundred yards away and to our left when I finally saw it, looking like a lost, crying child abandoned in a city of giants and surrounded by an air of shock. It was exactly where the punks had said it would be, and I realized I had been reining in my expectation, paying heed to a sense of something inside my head that this was all going to turn out to be some hugely dull and frustrating joke. But there it was, tiny and improbable, elegant and stupidly out of place, like someone who had gone to a party making a real effort with the fancy dress chicken costume, then found out when they walked in that it was black tie. The taxi Rider throttled back as we approached, pulling the bike lazily over a little way short as we had asked and hopped off, unconcerned at the bulging strangeness of this whole situation.
I guess taxi Riders see so many disparate pieces of people’s lives that they cease to have any grounding in what is strange and what isn’t. Or perhaps they just stop caring and let things skid by like signs on a freeway. Either way, this woman might have been dropping us off at the theater for all the interest she showed in where we were. “My son’s birthday is today; know what I’m getting him?” she was saying with a rise in her voice and a shake of her long auburn hair.
“You tell me,” I said, eyeing my house, and suddenly full of doubt—feeling this was a gigantic trap we were walking straight into and wondering how stupid we must be to approach so brazenly in the open.
“A chair. A good solid chair. The sort of chair you can take with you through life. My dad once gave me a chair when I was nineteen, and that chair has gone everywhere with me. I can come back to that wonderful chair at the end of the day and sit down and feel I’m home. I’m really, actually home. And, on top of all that, I’m getting great lumbar support at the same time. You know what I’m saying?”
“Yes,” I said distractedly, still keeping an eye on my house and pulling myself up when I finally registered what it was she had actually said. “Well, actually no. I don’t really have any idea at all.” I saw her hesitate and added, “But then, I don’t have kids.” And I realized I had made an attempt to be vaguely polite when normally I would probably have been incredibly irritated. Maybe my temper had been blunted by the relief of having escaped the Riders.
“Oh, well, you should,” she went on, connecting up the Jab-Tab to Mat’s arm. “They’re great. I love all my kids, except when they sit on my chair; then I see black. Very black. Anyway, have a power day, d’you hear?”
“Yes,” I said, “our day has certainly been brimming with power already, thank you.”
She nodded, not sensing my irony, mounted the bike, then squealed off, curving away into the gray, smoking landscape, down the wide, savaged road we had come in.
And there we were, utterly alone, dwarfed by these massive industrial carcasses, and I wondered why, when stumbling upon them like this, their scale made me feel far more acutely alive. It was as though they focused some great, unseen laser beam of self-awareness right down on me.
I watched my house for a few seconds, but there was no sign of movement. I turned to Mat. “If we’r
e walking into a trap of some sort, it’s already too late, because they’ll have seen us an age ago. So we might as well just stroll up as though we’re going for Thanksgiving dinner.”
Mat smiled ruefully, and it reminded me of the sort of expression he normally reserved for when he had just spent the morning in a dull meeting, while all the time the surf at Steamers had been eight-foot and clean. We began walking, leaving dim footprints in the skim of black dust that had settled on everything, crunching over the brittle, irregular black nodules that were scattered liberally about. They looked like something made at school by a teenager in chemistry that seemed to consist partly of chemicals, but mostly of melted lab equipment.
There was still no movement from my house, but above the hiss and flutter of the factories, the grumpy, dull thuds of distant machinery and chirping whines, I became aware of another noise—a human voice that was singing, straining away, trying to reach the top notes of a song I couldn’t begin to recognize. Mat had heard it too, and was looking at me, but I just shrugged and pressed on. Maybe these punks who had stolen my house were just straightforward, happy-go-lucky punks whom I might have shared a wave and a laugh with at some time in my life at East Cliff or Steamers.
Nevertheless, I thought, the fuckers had stolen my house and I shouldn’t forget that. But boy, whoever it was singing, was really having trouble hitting those top notes. We reached the door and could hear the beat of the music clearly now. It was an old David Bowie track called “Changes.” I thought about trying the door, but I didn’t want to surprise whoever was inside, so I just knocked loudly. And then we waited. The singer belted on, and the music was probably loud enough to mask out pretty much any other noise. After a minute, Mat was about to try the handle, but I stopped him. I waited for the track to come to an end, and knocked again in the relative silence.
There was a heavy pause and some audible scrambling. It opened very slowly and carefully, and a Caribbean Rasta with short, tight dreadlocks poked his head extremely gingerly around before exploding into a broad, white-teethed smile.
“Moose!” he cried. “Hey, it’s the Moose!” he shouted to someone inside and, as he threw open the front door, I saw the other man, who was overweight, pale-skinned, about thirty, and looking sceptically in our direction.
“Kill him,” this other guy said nonchalantly.
“No,” boomed the Rasta. “It’s the Moose! See?”
“We should kill him,” said the man, totally unconcerned that I could clearly hear every word he was saying.
“Sorry, please ignore John,” said the Rasta, turning back to us. “He wants to kill everyone.”
“We did kill the last one,” said John, still ignoring us.
“Will you please just drop it?” cried the Rasta. “Ignore him, Moose. Come in. Make yourself at home! We didn’t kill anyone,” he added.
“We should have killed him, though, just like we should kill this one,” said John. “I want it on the record that I wanted to kill him.”
“This is so great that you are here,” went on the Rasta, shrugging off the last comment. John now hung back, deliberately keeping his distance. “Did you try the singing thing like I said?”
“The stuff I need from my house for the information you need about it. Right?” I said, wondering what we had walked into here.
“Chill out, Moose! Chill out. Come on, let’s have a drink. We’ve been stuck in here together for days, and it’s just great to see someone else.”
I nodded. A drink seemed quite a good idea; it was going to take me a while to sort through my dream library, and I needed to calm down and think straight before I started. We walked through into the living room, and everything was pretty much where I had left it, except I had the weird feeling all the objects were vibrating slightly as though in shock at being wrenched here, and I couldn’t quite seem to focus on the sharp edges of anything. Looking around, I felt a rising tide of materialism and a desire to hang on to all my stuff, but I reined in those thoughts; staying alive was better.
“Long Island Iced Tea, right, Moose?”
I nodded.
“Same for me, please,” Mat said.
“Fine,” said the Rasta, smiling. “And, as it’s the only thing in your drinks cabinet, why don’t we all have one?”
“Tch,” said the other guy, John, shaking his head and turning away.
“He’ll be OK once Sarah the Space Chicken comes on later; he loves that program. I am so glad you are here, Moose!” the Rasta went on more loudly, fixing the drinks.
“How did you know it was me?” I asked, not greatly caring about the answer.
“Your pictures, Moose, all the pictures of you and your wife about the house.”
“My wife?” I said, knowing I was pretty certain there was no picture of me and Sarah anywhere.
“Yes, and doesn’t she half-look pretty with those blue eyes?”
“Sarah has brown eyes,” I said, staring at him.
“Well, then, someone’s been messing around with your photos, Moose, because your wife has the bluest eyes I have ever seen.”
My mind began to thump. Something was not right here. There was a yawning gap, like a crevasse in reality, and I didn’t know whether I dared to go any farther and look over the edge.
“What’s the name of the person you stole my house for?” I said quickly.
“I can’t say, Moose. You must see that.”
“Yes, you can. Give me the name. Just the name.” And he was taken slightly aback by the new, steely tone of insistence in my voice.
“Don’t tell him. It’s classified,” called the fat white man smugly, sensing his indecision, then spitting on the floor to prove some point about his status. The Rasta looked at me straight in the eyes, holding out my drink.
“Some guy calling himself Exodus,” he said. “What does it matter?”
“Oh! Now we will have to kill him,” said the sweating guy, outraged and still keeping his distance, but no one was really listening to him.
“Exodus?” My throat went dry and I could hardly speak. “Exodus is my alias, my work alias.”
“Well lucky for you,” said the Rasta, sorting out Mat’s drink.
“So what happens when Exodus arrives here?” I pressed on, feeling something inexorably building here.
“This Exodus guy is going to give us the password, and we’ll take the house to a desired location,” said the Rasta.
I swallowed heavily.
Events and images from the past few days suddenly melted and ran like hot lava through my mind. Things were merging and forming, and for a sliver of a second I had no idea what I would end up with. Perhaps nothing much, like those cold, hard black nodules that lay everywhere outside. But I could feel everything that I had taken for granted was suddenly molten, then abruptly, all kinds of ideas cooled quickly into more solid form that would take hours to explore in detail. But already I had a big sense of something that ripped through me.
“Cheers,” said the Rasta, and we clinked glasses.
“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well,” I said, and the Rasta choked on his Long Island Iced Tea, spitting it everywhere.
“Fucking Hell, Moose! Moose?”
“Is it right?” I said, feeling a burning in my eyes.
“What’s going on here?”
“Is it the right password?”
“Yes. It’s the right one, man. How did you know?”
“How did I know?” I said, asking myself the same question.
“What the fuck is going on?”
“We should definitely kill him now,” said the big sweating guy. “No question. You kill him first, then I’ll make sure afterward,” but he made no move to do anything.
“Listen to me,” I said ignoring him, “I am Exodus; I arranged for you to steal my house,” I said, not really believing it myself but just letting my mind run with it, because I had nothing to lose. I saw Mat look at me with the sort of expre
ssion of surprise he normally reserved for when he was told he would not be allowed in the VIP section of the 49ers’ lounge because they only allowed VIPs in there, and not just people who asked nicely.
There was a pause, and the Rasta stared at me. “You understand it was me?” I said. “That password about ‘All shall be well’ is the one I use at work.”
“OK, OK. Just chill out, Moose. This is very weird.”
“Exodus asked you to leave this card, didn’t he?” I said, pulling out the “Don’t you hate it when that happens?” card. “Why would he do that?”
“Pah!” spat the white guy, as though this didn’t prove anything.
“You must believe me. I’m Exodus. I am him,” and I realized I was suddenly sounding too desperate and everyone knew it. The delicate spell I had been weaving was broken.
“Come on, Moose. I’m not buying it. You haven’t even got the tattoo.”
“Which tattoo?”
“The tattoo he told us about.”
I could feel panic spreading more forcefully through my chest, now. I didn’t have a tattoo. What was he talking about? Maybe I had been completely wrong after all; maybe the desperation I felt was because I knew I was grasping at straws, grasping at anything, hoping that somehow I could make everything all right just by convincing these guys some crazy idea I had was true.
“The tiny tattoo on your left butt,” he added.
I had come this far, and now I had driven into a roadblock of sand, but some part of me put faith in a feeling that made no sense, that had no ground in reality.
I didn’t have a tattoo. I hated tattoos. As far as I was concerned, they were badges of stupidity that had to be worn like a sentence through life, long past the time when they ceased to mean anything to you. Like an outrageous haircut that refused to grow out, like a pair of silver boots that got stuck to your feet. Nevertheless, I unbuckled my belt and dropped my pants. The Rasta looked on, appalled.
“Come on, Moose. Don’t do this. We both know you haven’t got the tattoo. I’m not buying the bluff, but it’s a nice try.”