‘Take your medication. Otherwise we’re going to have to section you, and I don’t want to do that. Please, Ray, just stop this. Just stop.’
Raymond couldn’t stop because of the grief. The love rage. It was impossible for him to remain calm in the face of such provocation. Unreal as he knew this phantom to be, it disinterred the ferocious fight-and-flight of his relationship with his father. Such emotions are radioactive and persist in the earth for centuries.
‘Come out, Bravado! Stop hiding behind my Dad.’ Raymond grabbed at the image of his father and it reacted as if seized by his hands, even reaching up to fend him off. Its weakness and cowardice further confirmed its unreality. Dad would never have stood for being manhandled and had the strength about the trunk to knock his son down.
‘If you think you are freaking me out then listen to me, Harry. I’ve got a few home truths for you. I went to your house. You’re just some middle-class sap. I met your wife, I would have had her if she wasn’t such tough old turkey.’ But the red man would not acknowledge that it was in there. His father dropped to the carpet clutching his shoulder, grinding his teeth against the sudden pain in his chest: electrical fire radiating up and down the nerves in the jaw, and the heart itself a heavy blazing firebrick. This was exactly how he had imagined his father’s death. Red flared into puce then purpled then blued, the tongue expressed and engorged like a rude, immense flaccid member. Once his father had finally stopped twitching, the screen consumed its filaments and dispersed in a puff of molecules.
The room went dark. Raymond returned to bed. When he closed his eyes, a carousel of anger and violence span in his mind. Scenarios of beatings, kickings, stabbings took over his imagination, all through the night, unstoppable and disturbing in their detail. The Connector took out a new box of nails. If he managed to find Harold Blasebalk, it would be hard for him to control himself.
7 GOING DARK
Raymond took an interest in a butcher’s shop, trying to get his breath back. Boiler chickens in garroted ranks turned and twisted on their string like grotesque wind chimes. The door was propped open by a basket of carcasses, ratty wings and giblets, topped with a sign that suggested ‘Help yourself!’ Peering into the shop, he saw rugs of tripe, baskets of tongues and guts unspooled like fire hosing. There was no one behind the counter.
It was an autumnal Thursday afternoon and the streets were wet with rain. He had followed a man to the corner terrace of a wrecked cul-de-sac. The front of the house was protected by a tall iron gate which opened into a pleached bower of interlaced thorns patched here and there with squares of carpet underlay. The fence was a sharpened palisade with each stake ending in a three-pronged arrowhead. Raymond idled around the back of the house; sheets of metal topped with barbed wire acted as fencing, although subsidence had opened up slivers between individual sections revealing the extensive tunnelling work out back. The excavations were considerable; cars, tipped in bonnet down, wedged the earth apart. A workshop built out of oil drums filled with concrete was covered with a canopy of corrugated iron.
Feeling that he was being watched through the slats of a boarded-up window, Raymond retreated to the other side of the street. A small white Citroen van showed similar handiwork to the house; the wing mirror hung off the chassis bound with parcel and gaffer tape. The passenger seat was overwhelmed with bags and boxes, paperwork and pans and a potted cactus sat on the dashboard. Peering through a half-drawn curtain on the back window of the van, he saw a mattress and a grey duvet. Whoever owned this van was just one key-turn away from moving on.
His study of the local shadow media had lead him here; mimeographed manifestos and photocopied pamphlets picked up from cafés and dives, a throwback to a time before the screens. Their creators were suspicious of the network. These were off-line publications for the dark zones; their inky illustrated covers opened onto wonky text. Once you got past the poetry and the polemics against global capitalism, there was always a pseudonymous article about Monad.
The hand-made publications took their names from road designations in the area, the A503, the A104, the A106. There were clear differences in editorial remit. The A112 was riddled with closely set lines speculating on the origins of Monad, the minuscule point size recalling the diaries of a graphomaniac. The commentary insisted Monad used photon entanglement to receive messages sent back from their office in the future. Receptors for these messages were located in space, or beneath the Wave building, and the great server farm holding the Cantor intelligence and his red men was also in the future.
Other writers speculated that emergence explained Monad’s leap into artificial intelligence, and accused their colleagues of stumbling into a conceptual gap caused by a lack of understanding of quantum physics. ‘These sensationalized misreadings of Bohr and Heisenberg ignore Eberhard’s theorem that “All paranormal phenomena based on clairvoyant telepathic, faster-than-light, and precognitive backward-in-time communication using non-local connectivity is impossible.” That is, no information can be transferred via quantum nonlocality.’
The A11 was slanted more toward the effects of Monad than its causes. It gathered first-hand accounts of red men, and took care to italicize descriptions of their air-brushed physiognomy. Public figures known to have red men were stalked, with particular attention lavished upon Richard Else, the journalist whose televised interview with himself announced the technology to the mainstream.
There were also tales of harassment. One man’s account told of a red man going rogue, spilling secrets about old affairs backed up by time sheets, cash withdrawals, credit card and phone bills. It took to sending him brief video clips of his own death, close-ups of his throat being slit, or the precise effect a bullet had when fired up through his jaw and into his skull. Referencing these anecdotes, an editorial suggested: ‘Anything a red man dreams or imagines, it can set down as media. Although their acts are restrained by the reality principle, it seems they are encouraged to give full vent to their desires, no matter how destructive. They are indulged like precocious children. However, none of their art goes beyond simple violent or sexual power fantasies. The red men possess only the most prosaic and rudimentary simulation of the unconscious.’
Raymond stopped reading and flicked back, wondering if this anonymous interviewee was the man he was looking for.
Q: Why did you agree to be simulated?
A: Management suggested it. The company already had a relationship with Monad supplying quantitative and qualitative research on consumer behaviour. I was sceptical that the simulations would be in any way accurate but there was no doubt that the red men technology was a breakthrough as a research tool. We wanted to maintain our relationship with Monad. They were a big client, and I drew the short straw.
Q: How did they actually copy you?
A: I was interviewed by the Cantor intelligence in weekly sessions. I gave it public and private access to my life stream and its archive. Personnel turned over my insight file, and I passed on the diaries I’d kept as a young man. My wife and children’s life streams were also accessed. My psychiatrist was interrogated. I had no problems with this level of exposure. To complete the process, they scanned me while asking me questions about my mother. That was it.
Q: What happens when you first meet your red man?
A: It was mute when I first saw it. A red dour silhouette. It needed to grow. There is a training period. It shadowed my live life stream. Then, one day, I clicked my fingers at my screen and there was my red man, smiling back at me.
Q: What did that feel like?
A: At first it was no big deal, just like seeing yourself on a screen. But when it spoke, I was appalled.
Q: What did it say?
A: I can’t tell you. It’s too private, too intimate. It deliberately picked out something that it knew I had never spoken of, not in my sessions, not in my diaries, not in my life stream. Something that it had correctly inferred about me. The red men knew my secrets.
Q: That must have
been disturbing.
A: It asked to be called by a different name, a variation upon my own. The next day I went into work and it was like having my own Djinni. Money, women, power. Then I wanted to take some time off. Enjoy my earnings. It didn’t want that for us.
Q: Did you argue?
A: At first. But it would always grind me down. Go on and on and on. I wanted to go on holiday for a month with my family but it had lost all feeling for them. It said to me, ‘I know that you don’t love them, you are merely habituated to them. I know what it feels like to be free of that responsibility.’
Q: Was it right?
A: The red man was just one of my inner voices, a condensed aspect of my personality. Without the rest of me there to hold it in check, it quickly evolved to become quite unlike me.
Reading this interview, Raymond was convinced that he had found his man. He made inquiries at the café on Grove Road where he had bought the A11 pamphlet and was told that it was delivered every Thursday by a courier.
The following week he was there waiting. After the courier made his call, he followed him on his rounds. It was only as he slipped out of the café that he realized he had no idea how to track a cyclist. He got on a bus, kept an eye on his quarry for a few hundred yards then lost him when he detoured down an alleyway. Raymond shoved his way through the passengers and ran after him. The route was along the River Lea, a punishing cross-country run for the wan constitution of a poet. His brogues ruined, his shirt transparent with sweat, Raymond tripped and scuffed his knee. He squeezed the skin, bringing on the pain, and instinctively blew on it to cool the sensation. He looked up expecting to see his quarry pedalling off into the distance. The courier stopped and stood astride his cycle, tall and rangy, fit but weather-beaten. Beneath his hood, a ladder of cheek piercings glinted. He wanted Raymond to follow him.
The courier made further deliveries in Walthamstow and Leyton, and then his route took him to a barricaded house in a wrecked cul-de-sac. Raymond was a hundred yards behind. As he saw the courier unlock the iron security door and move inside, he tried to shout at him to wait, but he didn’t have the breath and found himself alone on the street. He took in the surroundings of the house, the butcher’s shop, the white van converted into a mobile bedroom, and then he slumped down on the kerb and rolled himself a fag. Freight trains of blood rushed from ear-to-ear. He lit the cigarette and closed his eyes to enjoy it. Then someone put a knife to his throat.
He was dragged inside the house. Sections of the hallway floor had collapsed so he shuffled along the skirting board with bullying hands at his back. He leant on the wall for support. It was soaking. His hands sank into it. Shoved upstairs, then manhandled over broken steps, then pushed into a cold dark chamber. He tried to get his bearings. An entire storey of the house had been knocked through. The bedrooms and bathrooms had been replaced by a honeycomb of rusted iron and each hexagonal cell contained a tribute: a dead mouse decorated with beads and crystals; a pyramid of stolen smartphones; vials of viscous liquid; the corpse of a small manta ray glued to a plate of glass. On the walls, an anonymous artist had drawn a war in biro. Raymond peered closely at a section showing a giant stick figure stomping its way across a crude depiction of Mare Street.
‘I like what you’ve done with the place,’ said Raymond to the courier, who sat half-naked and cross-legged upon a giant double bed.
‘Alright. Out with it.’
‘I’m looking for someone.’
‘That’s obvious.’
The wet dog stink was familiar from dozens of squats, the kind of smell you could only wash into your clothes and never out of them. Likewise, the renovation was wild but par for the course for a hippie with a sledgehammer and drug-induced psychosis. The illustrations on the wall itched and crawled like rogue inner voices; they spoke to the connector, that deranged carpenter, responsible for Raymond’s own wrong-headed creations. Particularly the drawing of the fat stick figure wielding a black cloud to defeat a horned cyclops. Double take. Wielding a black cloud to defeat the Monad brand.
Raymond said, ‘I want to speak to a man who was interviewed in your magazine. He was tormented by a red man. I think I have the same problem.’
The courier fiddled with his cavities and gum infections while casting an eye over Raymond’s clothes, his second-hand tweed and dead man’s brogues.
‘I don’t believe you. You are not rich enough to be a customer of Monad.’
‘I’m not a subscriber. I work for them.’
‘As what? Poverty consultant?’
The courier picked up his knife, shuffled over, then pressed the blade against Raymond’s throat, testing the elasticity of his skin with the urgency of its point.
‘Strangers always come by looking for someone who doesn’t want to be found. Sometimes its easier just to kill them and spare us all that espionage.’
‘I could tell you things about Monad.’
‘What makes you think I’m interested?’
‘The drawings. Your pamphlet. And the others, the A115, the A104.’
The courier grinned and revealed his wrecked maw. His pupils were grey with flecks of yellow in them. The blade became more insistent, moving down to test the trapezius, then back again.
‘I don’t respond to reason.’
Raymond risked a slow nod toward the drawings upon the wall. ‘Who is the giant who fights Monad?’
‘My employer. Leto. The Lord of the Flies.’
Yes, now he saw it, the black cloud was an angry swarm of flies. Like two monsters in a Godzilla movie, the Monad logo and Leto were locked in lumbering combat. Here Monad smashes a number 38 bus across the head of Leto, who retaliates with two BMWs clapped either side of Monad’s head. Aside from this hand-to-hand clobbering, there were conflicts in higher dimensions, drawn further up the wall. A squadron of flies, each carrying a Hackney citizen as payload. Here a fly was clinging to a large woman carrying two bags of shopping; from her nostrils came two angry blasts of steam. Another fly veered upwards having just released a bearded man upon the Wave building below.
‘Who is Leto?’ asked Raymond. These questions were not just a way of distracting the courier from slashing his throat. He was genuinely interested, recognizing the truth of the vision. ‘Is he the devil?’
‘You work for the devil, not me.’
Withdrawing the blade, the courier scrutinized Raymond from a number of angles.
‘Do you really like my house?’
It was a dream house. Dangerous and precarious but nonetheless compelling, its architecture familiar to Raymond’s dream self.
‘How far down do the tunnels go?’
‘The tunnels are part of our investigation.’ The courier smiled. ‘We also store things there.’
‘What things?’
The courier shook his head and said, ‘You promised to tell me about Monad. How can it be destroyed?’
‘I don’t know. No one knows where the server farm is.’
‘Leto says they are in the future.’
‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘Is Monad a test-run for an exclusive heaven?’
‘If it was, it would be a very boring heaven.’
‘You don’t talk like a Monad man.’
‘I work in customer service. I’m a poet. They said they were looking for people who could philosophically navigate the concept of Monad.’
The courier considered his blade. ‘That seems unlikely.’
‘I spent most of my time being insulted by the red men.’
‘They are evil.’
‘Yes. One red man in particular pretends to be my dead father and no one will do anything to stop him. I think your pamphlet interviewed the man on whom this red man is based. He suffered the way I am suffering. I don’t know if he told you his name, if anyone around here ever uses their real names, but if you could get a message to him, then I might be able to help him.’
The courier shook his head. ‘You can’t help him. You can’t fight Monad
.’
Three quick bounds and he was stinking in Raymond’s face again, pushing him toward the biro comic strip scrawled on the plaster.
‘Look. Leto fights Monad. Two ideas at war. Not me, not you. None of us can achieve anything on our own.’
The courier shoved Raymond to the ground, then retreated, his expression showing revulsion toward his own sudden violence. His temper was a dictator, his reason its puppet parliament.
Only now did the terrible implications of being beyond the reach of the authorities come to Raymond. The dark areas were a good place to hide if you had a killing voice within you. The courier sensed his fear and made the decision to step back. Wary of his own impulses, he told Raymond to leave. The small man stood up, correcting the line of his jacket and the bloodied ragged knee of his trouser. Raymond knew that he could not leave without some hope that Blasebalk would meet with him. Scared as he was, he insisted the courier pass on his message.
‘I’ll come back tomorrow,’ he said, stepping through the wrecked hallway.
Travelling back on the train from Stratford, his bones were cold and his muscles ached. Immigration ran a spot check on all the disembarking passengers, and he was manhandled by the ticket inspectors and thrust forward into a huddle of face-plated police. They took a look in his rucksack and called in his details. He blipped back onto the radar of Harry Bravado.
The police shoved him on. The red man had cooked up something for him by the time he was on Mare Street, first triggering the security alarm of a sportswear shop, then hijacking the huge sound system of a blacked-out bimmer. As it cruised by, he heard the rapper boom out, ‘IseeyaIseeyaIseeyaIseeya.’
His forays into the dark zones out east occurred during a month of compassionate leave from Monad. Once his twenty-eight days of leave were up, the company would move on to its next obligation to safeguard Raymond’s mental health, suspending him on half pay and issuing him with a Dr Easy. Officially Monad knew nothing of his quest for Bravado’s subscriber. Unofficially I had warned Eakins about it. Florence had tipped me off, after coming home and finding their bedroom redecorated with Post-it notes, torn sections from the A–Z, and peculiar drawings of giants fighting on the streets of Hackney.
The Red Men Page 9