The Red Men

by Abaitua, Matthew De

  I could see how much this scared Raymond. His medication had helped him attain the foothills of respectability: a job, a flat, his relationship with Florence. Without it, how long would it be before the Connector returned? The Connector was his name for his mania, a berserk carpenter working day and night nailing this to that in construction of an intricate but deranged work.

  At Camden Road, a seat became available. Raymond took it, grimacing at its damp warmth. The upholstery had not been laundered that decade and the carriage stunk like a meat locker. In the margins of his pamphlet, Raymond penned a line about passengers swinging in on hooks like carcasses.

  The steam on the windows subsided as they rolled westward through the rail yards of Willesden Junction and along the attenuated suburb of Acton. The train pulled into Kew, his destination.

  Stepping onto the platform, Raymond raised his collar against the cold and the class of the place. He had servant’s genes. The houses lining the approach to Kew Gardens retained quarters down below for the likes of him. In the driveways, weekend sports cars loitered beside the family tractor.

  The school run was under way. In unwieldy sponge safety suits, children waddled from porch to people carrier. Raymond attracted a few funny looks for his demob suit and flat cap with the peak yanked down. The second-hand suit dated from a time before the insertion of RFID (radio frequency identification) tags into all products. The tags were transmitters the size of sand grains secreted by marketing departments keen to track the treatment of their products beyond the store. His rationing chic was not merely nostalgia for a lost age, it was also the only way he could be sure there were no spies in his clothing.

  Arriving at the house, Raymond corrected the line of his jacket. The gravel of the long driveway crunched beneath his leather shoes. The bell was an old-fashioned mechanical ring. He appreciated the authenticity of it all.

  After some rustling in the hall, the door was answered by a frowning young woman in rubber gloves. She regarded him with undisguised scepticism.

  ‘Yes?’ English was not her first language. Raymond realized she was the help.

  ‘I am looking for Mr Blasebalk,’ he said, removing his cap. ‘Mr Harold Blasebalk?’

  Ahh. She knew him. She indicated the empty hallway and, by implication, the empty house beyond.

  ‘Not here.’

  ‘Do you know when he’ll be back?’

  ‘Not here. Never here. Not for months.’ Stepping into the patio to confirm this, Raymond noted the absence of men’s shoes beneath the coat hook. Two unfaded rectangles on the wall indicated recently removed pictures.

  ‘Divorced,’ said the cleaner, miming the removal of a ring.

  A Land Rover eased its way onto the drive and up to the front of the house. Raymond smiled uneasily at the woman behind the steering wheel. He knew from the Monad files that she was the wife, Karen Fraser, the third daughter of a West London clan so notorious it warranted hanging on to her maiden name.

  ‘I am looking for Mr Blasebalk,’ said Raymond.

  ‘Aren’t we all?’ Her voice was husky with the previous evening’s pinot noir and skunk. Gathering some shopping from the boot, she spoke to Raymond without glancing up from her task.

  ‘Does he owe you money?’

  ‘I’m from Monad. I work with Harold’s red man, Harry Bravado.’

  ‘Then you know my ex-husband better than I do,’ she said, hoisting the bags from the back of the car and passing them over to the cleaner.

  ‘Do you have an address for him?’

  ‘I did but he’s not there anymore.’

  Raymond went to leave. ‘I’ll try him at work then.’

  Karen shook her head.

  ‘Don’t bother. They made him redundant. You are here about the subscription?’

  Raymond shook his head. The files on the Blasebalks had no marker indicating a late or even lapsed subscription. Who was keeping up the payments for Harry Bravado? Blasebalk’s employers perhaps, retaining the services of the ultra-efficient digital employee in preference to the addled human one. Or did Monad itself have a motivation for keeping Bravado running?

  Karen Fraser went into the house trailing the faintest of invitations for him to follow. He was reluctant to transgress further than the entrance to the hall. Their conversation became polite shouting while she loaded up the fridge, switched on the kettle, and fossicked around in the ashtray for a decent length of joint. When she finished unloading the shopping, she stood at the end of the hallway. Her grey-blonde hair had an upright tangle due to her habit of raking it back during conversation, and she stood with one arm protectively across her midriff.

  ‘You’re the messenger boy aren’t you? You are worried I might sue.’

  ‘I just want to find your husband,’ said Raymond.

  Karen stalked off. Guessing that he was to follow, Raymond took a few steps down the hallway, then he stopped. The clack of his leather shoes upon the wooden boards made him wonder: does one remove one’s shoes in a middle-class household? Is it disrespectful to the cleaner to muddy her work? Then there was the issue of his socks. It was a Tuesday, always a bad day for his socks. Karen Fraser was padding around barefoot, so he decided to follow her example, prising off his shoes, unwrapping his socks and stuffing them in his pockets. He followed her into the conservatory where she was pouring tea into two handicraft mugs, an unlit charred nub of spliff tucked in the crook of her forefinger and index finger. After sparking it up, she smoked it with a greedy, dramatic emphasis. She inclined her head to exhale out of the open window. Raymond tried to appear relaxed, crossing his legs and adjusting the line of his trouser, revealing his pallid lightly haired shin.

  ‘After you split up, where did your husband go?’

  ‘He rented a flat in Islington. The young bachelor about town. You should have seen the clothes he bought. Covered in studs. So gay.’ Karen offered Raymond the spliff, which he accepted, and then with a woozy sardonic smile, she complimented him on his shoes. Once she had stopped laughing, Karen made a small show of righting herself, assembling her sober face.

  ‘I can tell you where he hasn’t gone. He could not survive in the countryside. He is allergic to it. The provinces give him the heeb. And he left his identity card behind so that rules out leaving Britain. I spoke to his mother. None of the family have heard from him, or if they have they are not telling me. I only know he is alive because he cleaned out our current account. Fortunately he was kind enough to leave us with the savings.’

  Absent-mindedly, Karen took her screen out of her back pocket and put it on the table. Alarmed, Raymond snatched it up, prising out the battery before passing the glass back to her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Raymond.

  Karen was not convinced.

  ‘My husband did that too. Switching it off was not enough. It needed to be unplugged,’

  ‘It’s just a precaution,’ said Raymond.

  ‘It’s paranoia,’ she said, ‘and I know plenty about paranoia.’ Her hand fluttered before him and was not satisfied until he returned the spliff to it.

  ‘Harold wanted to unplug everything. Which was not practical. Our daughter needs a screen for school, her identity card every time she goes to the doctors. You can’t unplug our mortgage, our credit cards, our bills. The only time we use cash is to pay the cleaner. Harold wanted to go dark. That’s what he called it. I just wanted him to see a psychiatrist.’

  Raymond was struggling to reconcile the stylings of the Blasebalk-Fraser household with what he had seen of Harry Bravado. There were wind chimes over the door, a wooden box of wooden children’s toys tucked under the table. In the garden, a wrought iron pagoda, leaves heaped upon an overgrown lawn. It was at odds with Harry Bravado. The red man was aggressive and had none of a father’s patience or a husband’s facility for compromise. Either the red men technology was grossly inaccurate or Blasebalk had concealed a side of himself from his family. In creating Bravado, Cantor had snared qualities far removed from sloppy j
umpers and affable Dadness.

  Karen Fraser had questions of her own.

  ‘You’re not Monad’s messenger boy are you?’

  ‘I’m not here in any official capacity,’ said Raymond, shoeless and sucking down the last of joint. ‘Tell me, did you have any contact with Harry Bravado?’

  ‘When he was first simulated, Harold went on about his red man like it was his new best friend. It flattered him, this thing with his face and voice that knew everything. The perfect son, almost. I was upset that this Harry Bravado – as it started calling itself – showed no interest in me at all. Its wife! Mother of its child! When I spoke to it, a look crossed its face. The kind of look your husband gives you when you are talking politics after half a bottle of red. You’re not married, are you Raymond? Let me tell you. A wife can’t let those looks pass. That contempt can fester if it’s not all out in the open. I confronted the red man on its attitude.’

  ‘It laughed in my face. Nasty thing. They captured the worst of my husband. A grotesque caricature. The part of him that I never saw while he was at work making money.’

  ‘I was naïve. I thought because he had a red man Harold would work less. But he worked more. He became competitive with it. One time he slept under his desk for four days until he was sent home just to get a shower and change his clothes. Instead of being a team they became rivals. It didn’t help that Harold’s old habits returned. Monad should never have allowed the red man to smoke and drink. That was astonishingly insensitive, given everything Harold had gone through with his addictions. We met in rehab. I knew exactly what he was going through. Seeing Bravado on that screen smoking and drinking and thriving on it, without any consequences, no health worries, no family responsibilities…’

  ‘Where do you think Harold is now?’

  ‘He’s skulking around car parks trying to score crack. He’s been up all night in a Soho den doing deals. He’s just woken up and his face is covered in self-inflicted scratches. He’ll be back into all of that shit. You get weaker as you get older. You lose the strength to sort yourself out again and again. I hope you find him, but I am not going to look for that kind of trouble.’

  It took an age for Raymond to come down from the cannabis. In his bedroom, he scrawled the information he had gathered concerning Blasebalk’s whereabouts – London, Islington, Rehab, Soho, crack, gone dark – onto Post-it notes and stuck them to the bare white walls. Harry Bravado had tormented Blasebalk in the same way he was now tormenting Raymond. Even though he had ditched his mobile phone and switched off all power in the flat, the red man guided some automated sweepers beneath his window. Their speech synthesizers, usually confined to warning pedestrians that they were backing up, spoke loudly of the ‘paedophile in number 28, Flat C’. With his torch tucked between his shoulder and his ear, Raymond yanked every page from the A–Z so he could reassemble a map of London on the wall. There were dark patches south and east of the river. Since Blasebalk had already drifted to Islington, it made sense that he would continue in that direction. His cash would go far in the information wastelands between Stratford and Leytonstone in the long highways of bedsits and squats. He could use market stalls for provisions, and pick up some cash in hand in the thriving black economy of immigrant builders, electricians and plumbers. Raymond could go back there, live incognito, dedicate his life to finding Blasebalk and when he did, he would… he would…

  The mania was back. He crawled around on his hands and knees to ground himself against the leaps and bounds of his reason. He should never have gone near the cannabis. Narcotics had an inverse effect on him; just as hyperactive children are dosed with stimulants to slow them down, so the somnolent clouds of dope brought about a gnashing frenzy in Raymond. His urge to monologue was so strong he crawled to the toilet bowl, nauseous at not having anyone to talk at. Eventually, he dug out his phone, reasoning that since Bravado already knew where he lived, there was no harm in switching it on and calling me.

  ‘Nelson. A quick query. If a red man harmed its subscriber, would Monad switch it off?’

  ‘What’s on your mind, Raymond?’

  ‘I’m not the first victim of Bravado. He tormented his subscriber too, ruined his life as far as I can tell.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘I went looking for Harold Blasebalk. He’s missing, just as Bravado said. His wife told me he became obsessed about unplugging himself. I figure he’s gone dark somewhere out east. The question is: how do I find him?’

  ‘What do you hope to achieve by digging up Blasebalk?’

  ‘Monad won’t be able to ignore Bravado’s behaviour if I can prove he has been tormenting his subscriber. It undermines their whole business. I’ll see that Bravado gets deleted for what he’s done to me.’

  ‘Good luck Raymond.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Raymond switched off his phone and removed the battery.

  Unfortunately, I never had that conversation with Raymond.

  Later, when I had to piece together this sequence of events with Florence, I was adamant that I had never spoken to him about looking for Blasebalk. To begin with, I would never have recommended going into that part of the city in Raymond’s condition. Stratford and the outer fringes of Hackney were attracting a new type of immigrant. Anonymity seekers. The conspiracy theorists and the fathers fleeing child support. The alienated scientists, converting sweatshops to synthesize new narcotics, practitioners of outlaw technologies clustered in the abandoned manufacturing zones: xenotransplantation, genetic modification, maverick biotech geniuses working out of the back of a transit van. The network interprets government as damage and routes around it. Ground Zero of the Great Refusal. Like all black economies, it was cash-only; the notes all had their serial numbers singed off. Sometimes the Kurdish guy at the off-licence on Mare Street handed them out as change. In such a society, Raymond’s reality testing would quickly fail. No, if he had called me and said he was going dark in search of Harold Blasebalk I would have advised against that adventure in the strongest possible terms.

  ‘Wake up, son. I have to talk to you.’

  Raymond opened his eyes and saw a glowing figure standing at the other end of the room. It was his father, wearing a thick woollen coat, scarf and brown leather driving gloves. The door was a window into the afterlife. Raymond slipped out of bed. His father watched his naked son feel urgently around the edges of the screen clinging to the door frame.

  ‘Who brought you in here, Dad? Was it Harry Bravado?’

  His father blinked rapidly. He was having trouble thinking around the fist in his mind. Then he remembered what he had come to talk about.

  ‘Son, you have to take the lithium. You are a man now. You’re too much for me and your mother to handle when you are like this. It really upsets her when you talk your stuff. Can you just think about what you’re saying?’

  Raymond took a good look at his father’s face, got in right up close and saw the capillaries erupting behind his skin and how he talked tight-lipped to conceal the ruin time had made of his teeth. He peered right into the old man, close enough to smell the frazzled ions. His father thought he was faking it, playing the malingerer. His father’s love, once presumed to be fathomless, actually had disturbing creatures scuttling around at the bottom of it: disappointment, anger, frustration. He just wanted to shake some sense into that boy of his.

  ‘Dad, what is Harry Bravado making you do?’

  ‘No one makes me do anything, son. I am my own man. If you took your pills again, you would remember that.’

  ‘I can’t trust them. He has poisoned them.’

  The screen was a genetically modified virus. It had slipped under the door and crawled up it, like a slime mould. Then, under remote instruction, the virus hardened into a screen, secreting a solvent to bond it to the old wooden door. Raymond gave up trying to prise it loose. He put on his dressing gown, sat on the edge of the bed and rolled himself a cigarette. His father didn’t approve of his smoking but he
let it pass, reluctant to cause unnecessary confrontation.

  ‘Come home, Raymond. You need help. It’s gone much further this time. We’re worried that you are going to do something irrevocable.’

  While flicking at his lighter, Raymond realized two things: one, that the lighter worked and that therefore it was unlikely that this was a dream, as devices rarely function correctly even in lucid dreams. The sensation of smoking, the increase in heart rate, the yawn of his satiated craving, also reassured him that this was actually happening. Secondly, turning the lighter over in his hands he realized he had been careless to have allowed such a recent product into his possession as it was likely to have an RFID chip. He would need a Zippo, something he could break down into its constituent components and search. Or he could use matches, once he’d taken them out of the box.

  ‘I can’t get through to you anymore,’ his father pleaded.

  ‘That’s because you’re dead, Dad. I carried your coffin. I can feel the weight of you shifting into the corner of the box. I don’t know if Bravado’s been using old family videos or even if he’s lifting my memories out of my own head. You are a simulation created by a simulation. You are ones and zeros.’

  ‘Please Raymond. Don’t.’

  ‘You’re dead, Dad. You are in the ground, I put earth on you.’