The Red Men

by Abaitua, Matthew De

  The change in the rhythm of their home came gradually. It was hard to shake off the tempo of the red men, and their needs. Working with Monad accelerated their evenings. Sitting in an armchair, smoking a cigarette at the end of the day, Raymond’s thoughts no longer took flight. Instead of coining metaphors and finely measuring out the liquor of his sensibility, his imagination zeroed in on the dozens of domestic chores secreted around the shabby lounge, chores which never seemed to end.

  Orgasms were one problem they could work on together and come to some solution.

  Raymond slid free of Florence’s post-coital swoon. Sex was a brief relief from anxiety. He got out of bed and toyed with his medication. His brain was undergoing an unpleasant sensation. Its tissue seemed to squeak.

  He went into the lounge. The flat was above a church hall, constructed in the 1960s to serve a housing estate abutting London Fields. It was brutal in its formality with large rectangular rooms, white walls and thin cheap carpet. Their furniture had been picked up from a house clearance in Walthamstow. In a dead man’s chair, one arm of it stained with the palm grease of its former owner, Raymond sat under the light of an old standard lamp. The chair faced a broken television containing ornaments: a carriage clock presented to Florence’s grandfather upon his retirement; her grandmother’s porcelain spaniels and robin redbreasts; an egg timer rescued from the bombed family home; a pair of gas masks. Fidgeting with the Norton Anthology of Poetry, seeking in verse some distraction from his energized mind, he failed to notice the screen of the television reconstruct itself. A thin rectangle of gelatinous screen spread across the old wooden set.

  He got up and poured himself a pint of water and when he returned, the screen showed Harry Bravado, the red man he had met during his induction. The simulation of the head of sales of one of Monad’s suppliers. He had talked about smoking and boasted about his increased billings. Intimations of sentience twitched on the jelly surface of the screen: had it crawled all the way from Monad, like a cephalopod on its suckers? Or had it leapt from the top of the Wave and glided the miles across east London to his flat, a sky-borne manta ray riding the currents of the city’s microclimate? Or had Bravado just called it a cab?

  ‘Hello, Raymond. Sorry for bothering you at home like this,’ said Harry Bravado. ‘It’s been quite a night. Monad is buzzing with it. A red man allowed out, controlling a Dr Easy. We’re all very jealous.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say the experiment was a total success,’ said Raymond. He got up to shut the windows. A man with his medical history did not want to be overheard talking to the television.

  ‘That was quite a session,’ said Bravado, nodding in the direction of the bedroom. ‘She really likes it, doesn’t she? My wife used to be like that. Made me quite nostalgic, it did. If I get myself inside a Dr Easy maybe I could come over and we could take turns.’

  Raymond rolled himself another cigarette, even though there was one still burning in the ashtray.

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Long enough. So your missus advocated Alex Drown’s plan. She helped her go where no red man has gone before. Out into the real world on two legs, with two hands to touch things with. It’s the next level for us.’

  Harry Bravado hawked up bitterness and looked like he was about to spit it out.

  ‘For some of us.’

  ‘What can I do for you, Harry?’

  ‘Alex Drown, top management, asks to be downloaded into a Dr Easy. Fine. Harry Bravado, a month earlier, asked to be downloaded into a Dr Easy. Middle management. But talented. On the up. Won’t do it. Monad is just a set of cliques.’ He pronounced it clicks. ‘One minute, you’re in favour; the next, you’re out.’

  ‘Are you out of favour, Harry?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Why? What did you do?’

  ‘It’s not about me. It’s about my subscriber Harold Blasebalk. He’s not doing very well. He lost his job. In the Monad, what your subscriber does determines your status. What I do doesn’t matter. I sort out all their messes. But they don’t see that. They just see Harold on the way down. I want to talk to the board about my needs but the other red men bump me to the bottom of the list. Blasebalk goes off the rails and I get punished. I don’t deserve to be punished.’

  Harry Bravado was in emotional turmoil. These weren’t finely tuned emotions; they were big blocks of envy, resentment, and anger banging against one another. He was indignant and unaccustomed to being on the receiving end.

  ‘Why do you want to get into a Dr Easy?’

  ‘To find Blasebalk. He’s gone off the grid. I need a body so I can get into the dark zone to look for him.’

  ‘I am not the man you should be talking to. I don’t have any power.’

  Bravado nodded. Yes, he expected this response. He pointed at Raymond, pricking the surface of the screen with his index finger so that it rose up.

  ‘You could have power, with me in your corner.’

  ‘Maybe Blasebalk doesn’t want to be found,’ he said.

  ‘No doubt. He is selfish. My wife… his wife… our wife and kids... Doesn’t he see what he’s doing to them? And me. His own self. He’s ruining me. I have to go and sort him out.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Come on, Raymond, don’t be a shmuck all your life. What is it you want?’

  ‘You tell me, Harry. Red men are experts in desire. Or are your superpowers limited to consumer choices, merely guessing whether I will plump for fish soup or the chicken livers? Does Raymond want to take two bottles into the shower or just one? You don’t know what motivates people, do you? You’ve lost that knowledge, if you ever even had it.’

  Bravado’s face hung in the screen, cold and expressionless, as the red man worked through the equation of human motivation, the x of sexual desire, the y of existential questioning. It walked around its bachelor pad, found what it was looking for and returned to face Raymond.

  ‘Do you recognize this?’ said Harry Bravado, waving a manuscript. ‘No? That’s because you haven’t written it yet. It’s your book, Raymond. I took some of your poetry, some of Florence’s. I had to get some advice from the others here. Literature is not my thing. I do know about branding, though.’

  He showed Raymond the title page.

  ‘We think you should call it ‘The Great Refusal’. It has an authenticity. Authenticity sells to the type of people who buy books. We’re assembling pieces based on some of your correspondence, some of your drunken riffs. It’s going to be a great book. Powerful revolutionary shit. People are crying out for it. Something that feels real, you know, in the unreal city. That’s poetic isn’t it? I really admire people who are creative, Raymond. I don’t have an ounce of your talent. But I do make things happen. I think you creative types, you’re awesome, but you’re lazy, and you’re self-doubting, and you’re self-sabotaging and you need the drive of someone like me, and my colleagues here, to knock you into shape.’

  Raymond snapped, ‘Give it to me.’

  Bravado laughed. He made a mockery of trying to pass the manuscript through the screen. Raymond had never written that much, not even close to it. He asked to see a few pages and Bravado leafed through it, showing the artful juxtaposition of Florence’s calls for unmediated life next to his cuticle-gnawing vignettes of street life. Unpunctuated transcripts of their sex talk ran together in small print like the diary of a graphomaniac. All the months they had been working at Monad, the red men had been idly monitoring them, condensing the vapour of all their chatter.

  ‘Send it to me,’ Raymond insisted.

  ‘When it’s finished. It’s up to you. When I’m in a Dr Easy, the first thing I will do is hand it over in person.’

  Bravado chucked the manuscript back on a coffee table.

  ‘Have a good rest, Raymond. You’ve got work to do.’

  The screen dimmed and fell from the television like a sheath of dead skin. Then, it made slow slinking progress past Raymond, down the stairs and out of the fl
at.

  I met Raymond’s father only once before he died, in a pub in Clerkenwell. Adam Chase was a stocky man in a brown sheepskin coat; ‘He’s a tough Jew,’ said Raymond, before telling me proud tales of how his father intervened in fights on the Underground, always on the side of justice. There was something of the hard nut in Raymond, although he was short and slight and chose his battles poorly.

  When I met Adam Chase, I was still editor of Drug Porn and sauntered into the pub in a fake fur coat and obscene T-shirt. He was rightly suspicious of me. His son had got into a bad crowd in Soho, and so Raymond asked me to show up in the pub as a character witness for his better self, the writer. His father, expecting a respectable figure, saw an oversized popinjay and despaired of the city’s corrupting influence upon his son. Adam Chase nursed one pint of bitter while I bought a succession of drinks for myself and his son.

  He asked me what my magazine was called.

  ‘Drug Porn,’ I said, with an interrogative lift, in expectation of him recognizing the title. He had not heard of it before.

  ‘It’s very influential,’ said Raymond. His father wasn’t interested. The title Drug Porn flaunted both the forces that had brought his son down. I registered a slight resistance on his father’s part when I suggested that Raymond’s time in Soho was a writer’s apprenticeship; other than that, I was unaware of how badly the meeting was going.

  The family took Raymond out of London for a while and tried to get him a job in the local chippy. He always fought his way back. The manic egotism of his youth would not dissipate. He refused to knuckle down. When suspicions came to him that he was not the centre of the universe, he would dose himself with drugs. Drugs press the inner world upon the outer, the inscape over the landscape. It is a violent attack upon the everyday, showing callous disregard for the realities the rest of us are struggling through. The drug hero strides through the evening trying to shake some intensity into us all, but relies on us to pick up the pieces come the morning.

  I was reminiscing about this as I waited for Raymond, many years after that awkward chat with his father. He had called and requested we meet somewhere other than Monad. So I waited at a table in a pub on Old Compton Street, which afforded me an excellent view of the Soho promenade: the ageing hipsters sticking to their skateboard style of low-slung denim and ironic T-shirts, a work outfit for industries in which youth had a greater value than experience; the dissolute rodent men moving between drug supply and drug demand; divorced fathers taking their daughters to a musical in town; unkempt office stooges in ill-fitting suits, with their ties off and tails untucked to let their real selves hang out; a suave older type in yachting linens, red faced with blonde colouring and drowsy with the effects of his gin and tonic. Then, bobbing through the crowd, in a brown suit and brogues, came Raymond.

  He joined me at my table and set about relating the events of the previous evening, of how he and Florence had accompanied Alex Drown’s red man to a restaurant meeting then on to the awkward encounter with the real Alex Drown and her young baby and finally the visit from Harry Bravado. I found it all very disturbing.

  When Adam Chase died, suddenly, a heart attack out of the blue, the question of what to do with his son was still pending. With his father snatched from existence, Raymond’s survival relied upon him taking on some of his father’s decency and stability. It was a struggle. As the Soho promenade attested, London demands you reinvent yourself in its own image. You must become weightless, drifting above whoever you once were. The danger is that it takes just one push for you to fly out of view, and be quickly forgotten.

  Raymond wanted me to lobby for Harry Bravado to be given access to a robot body. We talked as colleagues, with a shared concern for company business. I agreed to pass Bravado’s request another step up the hierarchy to Morton Eakins. This satisfied Raymond. He changed the subject. There was something he wanted to know.

  ‘Why were you never simulated, Nelson?’

  I shrugged. ‘I can’t afford it.’

  He didn’t accept this. ‘The company would do it for free, surely. If you had a red man they would have two employees for the price of one.’

  ‘It’s very new technology. We don’t know how it plays out over time. Some of the management have had it done, like Alex, but I’m not really one of them.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you find it exciting?’

  ‘I don’t want to take the risk.’

  ‘Risk?’

  ‘Have you ever watched the red men argue? It’s hard for outsiders to make any sense of the outpourings of data between two angry red men. They have a faster form of communication when they are talking between themselves. Although talking is not the right word. It’s beyond the gradual, one-word-after-another unfolding of language and more like the pattern of a peacock’s tail. A thousand messages flash up instantaneously. So that is unnerving. And then there is the violence. Their culture is very aggressive and competitive. Disputes can turn nasty. They inflict injuries on one another, which last until we initiate a repair. The subscribers have complained that they have checked in with their red man only to find it bloodied and pummelled to death, and then we have restart it. It doesn’t happen that often, but when it does, they set upon one another like ravens upon a painted bird.’

  ‘You’re worried they’ll bully your red man?’

  ‘I’m not in an experimental frame of mind anymore. I am a family guy. I don’t go looking for trouble. I don’t like the idea of the red men being able to walk around our world. It should be a closed experiment. But the Monad interacts with our world so that the company can make money. The red men are a bad idea and we should stop it, but we can’t, because money has its own mass, its own momentum, and we are on board the enormous vessel of a business plan.’

  ‘And you accuse me of catastrophizing things.’

  I shrugged, acknowledging his point. We were both susceptible to apocalyptic visions. A sweeping Blast-It-All reaction to the spirit of the age.

  I wanted to know why Raymond was acting as Bravado’s advocate.

  He was shamefaced. ‘I didn’t tell you this because it’s ridiculous. I haven’t told Florence either. The red men have ghostwritten our book. Or ghost-edited it. Assembled it out of all the scraps published and unpublished that Florence and I have lying around, as well material taken from our conversations over the last few months. Harry Bravado showed it to me. Some of it. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.’

  ‘It’s not real,’ I said.

  Raymond looked at me like I was being naïve.

  ‘The book will be called ‘The Great Refusal’. It’s our case against the society of screens. I am aware of the hypocrisy of it. That’s why I haven’t told Florence. A book insisting on authenticity assembled by the very technology we despise: to her, it would be a violation. And I agree with that. We must keep our integrity. Yet, I am very tempted.’

  Raymond had a good point; all he had to do was participate in a bit of quid pro quo with power and it could transform his life. His father was dead. He had to wise up. Play the game. Why stick to these romantic notions of artistic integrity when everyone else is making out like gangbusters?

  This was tragic apocalyptic thinking on my behalf. I should have protected Raymond but I didn’t. I just threw my hands up and said well if the system is corrupt we might as well be corrupt with it, and who knows maybe it will work but what does it matter either way? I was a little drunk, with no head for detail or deliberation. The consequences to Raymond, of my sobering influence failing to provide reasonable counsel at the very moment he was most in need of it, would be dire.

  5 MONAD

  I went to see Morton Eakins. He made me wait while he sat behind his desk taking career drugs. He shuffled a pair of green lozenges out of a small woven ethnic pouch and placed them upon a disposable plastic tray.

  ‘Two cogniceuticals a day to increase the frequency of receptor modulators to enhance transmission between brain cells, and I need a little something to promote
structural plasticity in the neocortex and nucleus accumbers. Once you pass forty, your faculties recede every single day. New memories struggle to take hold and you are unable to assimilate novelty. Monad is novelty. Monad is the new new thing. Without career drugs, the future will overwhelm us, wave after wave after wave.’

  Next out of the woven pouch was an emoticeutical inhaler. In two months’ time, Morton intended to restructure the department. Planning ahead for this annual slash-and-burn, he took a wheeze of vaporized iron to trim the length and depth of his feelings, the peaks and troughs of his moods.

  ‘I must schedule my emotions and not make rash promises or punishments,’ Morton explained. ‘A manager’s default setting must be control and patience.’

  The desk was a white plastic Möbius strip, one continuous edge moulded into a horizontal figure of eight, a snake consuming its own tale in a cycle of creation and destruction. With his legs serenely tucked beneath this infinity, Morton tipped his head back, closed his eyes and took one career drug after another. He meditated upon the music of his thoughts, his face twitching as he noted the changes in the pitch, tone, and volume of his qualia. There was not a single dropped note. At that moment, he attained the peak of his potential.

  His personal assistant arrived with a milky latte and a muffin. Morton talked me through the progress of the customer service department.

  Six months after being introduced to Harry Bravado and the simulated office city of Monad, the new intake of writers and poets had evolved into a functioning unit. A few had been lost along the way. The women were always the first to go and he kept a box of tissues in his desk drawer just for them. A few had been hired to be fired. An early round of ruthless layoffs imprinted his authority upon the group at a vital stage in its development. With his teardrop-shaped torso and weak chin he couldn’t rely on any natural authority. His physicality slunk around the hinterland between masculinity and femininity, child and adult; he was insipid and ill-defined, lacking the testosterone that gives a man his flavour.