The Red Men

by Abaitua, Matthew De

  I was contractually obliged to give full disclosure of my friend’s activities so I met Eakins in his mezzanine office in the Wave and told him what I knew. Harry Bravado was imitating Raymond’s dead father, and Raymond wanted to retaliate. If he couldn’t reach into the Monad to do so, then he would find his counterpart in the real world, Harold Blasebalk, and punish him instead.

  Through the glass, the customer service team argued with subscribers. It was clear that Raymond was not the only one in the intake to be suffering. Out on the floor all the men looked dishevelled even for poets. A few pints of life had been siphoned out of them. Likewise, the women were washed-out and dead on their feet.

  ‘It turns out that Blasebalk is missing,’ said Morton, pouring himself a fresh glass of milk. ‘Harry Bravado told us. We’re concerned that Bravado’s recent aberrant behaviour has been caused by his subscriber’s breakdown. The red man is angry and upset at Blasebalk’s behaviour.’

  Morton was tetchy. The company was having a difficult day. His screen showed the full extent of the problem: an unidentified rogue program was consuming all the processing power, leaving the simulated environment jerky and unfinished. The red men were reduced to their lizard brains and had taken to crawling around attacking one another. Unfortunately the entire IT department was on a motivational course in the Caribbean.

  ‘The Cantor intelligence is also affected by the crash. It blames the weather,’ said Morton, pointing at the glass wall of his office, which was spattered with rain.

  I sketched out worst-case scenarios if the AI went down. Morton interrupted my anxious hypotheses.

  ‘Being teased by a red man is within the terms of Raymond’s contract. He is employed to take this shit. I’ve spoken to Blasebalk’s wife and she said her husband felt the red man was responsible for ruining his life. Management is not particularly exercised by this issue. There is little legal recourse for anyone here. We know that Harold Blasebalk has a history of substance abuse and abandonment. A half of lager could push him over the edge. And I don’t need to fill you in on Raymond Chase’s charge sheet when it comes to mental dysfunction.’

  ‘We have a responsibility,’ I said.

  ‘We have procedures in place to discharge that responsibility. All the red men are monitored by the Cantor intelligence. It likes to let things run their course, and we have to trust it.’

  ‘What if Cantor crashes?’

  ‘If Cantor crashes, the red men crash with it. You have to understand their interdependence. Cantor is an artificially intelligent artist and the red men are figments of its imagination. If Cantor decides to explore the narrative possibilities of one of those characters, then that is its artistic right. No one has access to any code. I doubt we could understand it even if we did. All our IT department can offer is a kind of literary criticism.’

  Morton took out his little ethnic bag of neuroceuticals and jangled them at me.

  ‘I hope to understand more once I have finished taking all of these.’

  His reassurances were quite disturbing. I asked permission to pursue the matter further.

  ‘On a personal level, I am worried about Raymond. I am responsible for him working here. Could I pull Florence out for a while? I’d like to speak to her.’

  Morton popped another couple of mood softeners and shrugged. It was his way of giving permission; a sub-vocal gesture so subtle that if the consequences of the permission turned out badly, he could deny that it had been given.

  I took Florence to the staff canteen and offered to buy her lunch.

  ‘I’ve already had my rations,’ she said. Florence was wearing a head scarf, and a powder-blue silk and wool crêpe mix suit decorated with a pink fabric rose. The hemline of her skirt fell just below the knee and she was careful to keep it that way. I wondered if she ever took the whole rationing chic so far as to rub a used tea bag over her calves to simulate stockings. I asked her about Raymond.

  ‘He’s very angry,’ she replied. ‘Sometimes his face drifts and you don’t know where he is. Then he is urgently there, you know. He has been giving out a lot of silence. That’s unlike him.’

  Her teeth were translucent from calcium deficiency. She corrected her head scarf.

  ‘We should have gone somewhere I could smoke.’

  ‘Have you seen much of Raymond lately?’

  ‘Less than usual.’

  ‘Is Bravado still giving you trouble?’

  She laughed, chewing on a fingernail. ‘Like you wouldn’t believe.’

  Then Florence leaned forward, and whispered to me, ‘Is it still on?’

  I didn’t understand what she meant. I let it pass and continued with my questions.

  ‘Do you know where Raymond is now?’

  She flashed me a look that I could not quite read.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m worried that he might be thinking about violence,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah right.’ Florence’s replies were encoded by her facial expressions. I would have to crack them if the true meaning of the conversation was to be apparent.

  ‘We have to persuade him to come in. We need his account of what has been going on. Then management can take action.’

  ‘But you don’t want him to come in alone, do you?’

  ‘Alone is fine.’ I shook my head, showing her that I felt I was missing something in the conversation. Discreetly she took my smartphone from the table and gently removed its battery, laying it beside the handset.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Florence hissed at me.

  ‘I just want to speak to Raymond,’ I hissed back. ‘I haven’t heard from him in a month.’

  Florence looked at me like I was an idiot.

  ‘You spoke to him yesterday. I was there.’

  I reared back.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You called him when he got back from Leytonstone. You were talking about the old days. About Drug Porn, about some article Raymond had written. He was very pleased you remembered it.’

  This was how I learnt that Harry Bravado had been imitating me, taking on my role as Raymond’s confidant, doctor to his patient, patron to his poet, all that.

  The colour drained from her face. I realized something terrible had just occurred to her.

  ‘I’ve got to warn him.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘You and Raymond have been planning this for weeks. Wait! Shit!’

  Florence let out a little scream, stifled it and set about trying to reassemble my mobile phone. She broke a nail on the casing; it pinged off and lay on the table between us.

  ‘He told you where he was going and everything. You’ve set him up. He wouldn’t have taken it this far if it hadn’t have been you.’

  Florence called Raymond. There was no answer. Raymond had already gone back into the dark.

  Raymond drifted along with the commuters. He kept his eyes on the ranks of shoes and boots clomping up the stairs and concentrated upon keeping in step. Stratford station was airy and clean, a futuristic terminal. No time to daydream. Head down, pass in hand, Raymond walked quickly into the dark zone with a paper under his arm and a gun in his inside pocket.

  The traffic burred around the Broadway. The Wave building loomed in the background, its crest and trough of steel an example of the simple order power can impose. Raymond walked through a hotchpotch of market stalls and unsteady shops. His sensation was of being was quite different from usual: sedated, disembodied, separate from the acts he was compelled to perform. He walked up the Grove, toward Leytonstone High Road, through the street economy. Two Somalian men presided over a rug of flotsam and jetsam, their distinctive physiognomies tall and sinuous, beguiling punctuation marks drifting over the usual prose of the street. Huddled low, a Vietnamese woman showed him her bagful of pirate content. The weak daylight played out like grainy film stock, the shop fronts were all washed-out colours and soft contrast. Only the advertising hoardings were vibrant. The thirty-foot tall photograph of a bottle of
Moët & Chandon stuck to the side of a burnt-out house was a grand faux pas.

  He arrived at the courier’s house before he was ready. Unaccustomed to sharpening himself in anticipation of a crucial act, he dawdled outside the house feeling cloudy and diffuse. There was a hard centre to him, the gun. It dragged at the shape of his jacket as he idly circled the house. In the yard, the courier supervised the hoisting and lowering of large porcelain conical acoustic horns, guiding them over pipes that jutted from the shadows below. Raymond considered calling out to him, but lacked even the will for that minor act. Instead he strolled around to the front of the house. The small white van he had seen the previous day was still there, except now there was a man sitting in the driving seat. The heaps of personal effects had been moved. The driver beckoned to Raymond. He walked over to the van; the driver leaned across and popped open the passenger door. It creaked on its hinge and dragged against the road.

  ‘You wanted to speak with me?’ asked the driver.

  Raymond climbed into the van and shut the door. The suspension was shot and the vehicle listed to one side, tipping him toward the driver. He got a good look at Harold Blasebalk. His face was a ‘before’ to Bravado’s ‘after’. Where Bravado had tight black curls, Blasebalk had grey tufts sparse as dune grass. Bravado had a fat-pored, freshly shaven surface, Blasebalk had a Formica pallor enlivened by livid capillaries. Harold wore a torn and rumpled work suit over the kind of jumper small children pick for their father for Christmas. Harry Bravado wore a starched white shirt and gold cuff links, if he felt like wearing clothes at all.

  The van smelt strongly of a man and his toxins.

  ‘I recognize you,’ said Raymond.

  ‘Because I look like him?’ Blasebalk slumped back in his seat. The courier was perched on the fence, checking how everything was going down. Blasebalk gave him a nod.

  ‘The Elk told me you were looking for me.’

  ‘He never told me his name.’

  ‘I don’t know yours.’

  Raymond introduced himself.

  ‘I want you to meet someone,’ said Raymond, ‘and then we’ll go into Monad together.’

  Blasebalk shook his head.

  ‘I’ve tried that. I called Monad. Bravado shunted me into voicemail. I went down to the Wave. Bravado called security and they took me away.’

  Raymond offered a shrug instead of sympathy. Blasebalk started the engine.

  ‘I want to keep moving while we talk,’ he said.

  Raymond glanced at the rear view mirror as the van pulled out into the street. Good. It was all going to plan. Blasebalk would drive him to the meeting with Nelson and if he resisted he could persuade him with the gun.

  Blasebalk drove the van alongside Wanstead Flats, level hectares of grassland with thickets of gorse and broom. Were its fishing ponds deep enough to stow a body? Would you even need to hide the corpse around here?

  ‘Is it true my other self has been tormenting you?’ asked Blasebalk.

  ‘He has,’ said Raymond. ‘You have.’

  Blasebalk nodded, accepting the accusation. He concentrated on the road ahead.

  ‘I went to your house,’ continued Raymond. ‘I met your wife.’

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘She’s resigned. She thinks you’ve caved in and gone on a bender.’

  ‘She should have come with me. Women are so pragmatic. So pointlessly pragmatic.’

  Raymond looked out of the window. A pack of mongrels in luminous visibility jackets ran across the scrub. When he didn’t look at Blasebalk, and just sat in the presence of his familiar voice, then he could feel angry again. He needed to be angry.

  ‘You are responsible for all this. You created this thing, you took advantage of it, and then you abandoned it.’

  Blasebalk felt this was unfair.

  ‘I am not responsible for this.’

  They drove up Centre Road, flanked by the unremarkable scrub. Four crows unfurled and suspended upon the wind. Raymond was equally adrift, his temple resting against the cold glass of the window.

  ‘Please,’ he whispered.

  The car inched around the burnt-out congress of two cars, their skeletons interlocked to comfort one another.

  ‘I asked them to delete him,’ said Blasebalk, ‘after he showed me videos of my own death. He thought that by confronting me with my own mortality I could be shocked into following his project, which was complete self-interest, self-actualization, self-gratification. I got the impression that there was intense status competition between the red men. The social standing of the subscriber determined their place in their hierarchy. That was why he was so keen to see me succeed.

  ‘I was stupid. I asked Monad to get rid of him and obviously he found out. His self-interest and mine diverged. I became my own worst enemy. That has always been my problem.’

  After pottering around a roundabout, Blasebalk turned the car back toward the city. To their left, the tall railings girdling the City of London cemetery. Through their shuttering motion, Raymond glimpsed the heads of mournful stone angels and ranks of headstones. So soon and they were here already.

  ‘Take the turning into the graveyard,’ said Raymond. ‘My friend is waiting for us there.’

  The car did not slow.

  ‘I’m not sure I want to meet any friend of yours.’

  ‘He works for Monad too. He’s a consultant and can speak directly to the board. You should hear what he has to say.’

  Blasebalk turned the car into the cemetery gates. Armed security guards idled at the entrance. This place had not been allowed to go dark. The fires of the crematorium were still burning.

  They parked by a florist’s cart. Raymond took a hand-drawn map from his jacket while Harold Blasebalk took out an anorak from his bedroom in the boot.

  ‘You can’t hold me responsible for Bravado,’ Harold said, scrambling around in search of a hat and gloves. ‘He is nothing like me. He is immortal, invulnerable, almost omnipotent. He’s not human. Monad are responsible. Cantor is responsible. He was the artist, I was merely his subject.’

  Raymond turned the map clockwise on its axis to establish his bearings.

  ‘Why then, is it only your red man that is tormenting people?’ he said, not looking up.

  The cemetery was a valley of the dead set low in the lee of the North Circular road and a busy train line. Many graves were marked with yellow stickers, indicating they were soon to be reclaimed. Business was good. A patch of the freshly dead was decorated with endearments spelled out in flowers: ‘Dad’, ‘Son’, ‘Bruv’. Recent headstones were inset with screens showing film clips of the deceased. After watching a couple of these recordings, one made by a woman in full knowledge of her terminal condition, the other a man prancing unawares at a Christmas party with his daughter in her arms, they took the long way around. Only graveside wind chimes and distant sirens interrupted the peace. Blasebalk stopped Raymond with a firm hand on his bicep, and pointed out the lumbering form of a Dr Easy comforting a widow. She was in one of those grief-rages where you try to turn back time with kicks and punches, and the benign suede robot accepted each blow, inclining its oval head at a sympathetic angle and turning up the mournful blue in its eyes.

  ‘This is not a dark place,’ said Harold Blasebalk.

  Raymond pressed on.

  ‘It’s a graveyard, Harry.’

  He took a few paces before he realized his mistake. Harold, not Harry.

  Blasebalk stood by a plot decorated with soft toys. The grave of a child. It struck Raymond that this location was ideal for murder in so many respects. Few witnesses, plenty of space. Every headstone insisted on the insignificance of death. These people did not die, they fell asleep. Childish sentiments, a universe where all wounds will be healed, and every loss meets its consolation. The crematorium let out another meagre exhalation. Here was death in all its municipal banality. It would mean nothing to add another entry into its daily itinerary.

  ‘Look at this poor fellow.
’ Blasebalk squatted down next to the child’s grave and righted a teddy bear that had fallen over.

  ‘You don’t have any children, do you, Raymond? You don’t have those feelings. You are still emotionally naive.’

  Raymond laughed.

  ‘While you’re a saint! I’ve lived with your shit. Your concentrated shit!’

  Blasebalk stood up, dusted the soil from his knees.

  ‘I should have fought back. I was so used to behaving. Look where it got me.’

  Raymond took the gun out and pointed it hip-height at Blasebalk, who was not surprised to see it.

  Harold sighed. ‘I’ll come with you then, but it is hopeless.’

  Raymond motioned to Blasebalk to walk ahead across the graves and then followed him, both men steadying themselves upon the headstones.

  ‘Now I know why Harry Bravado hates you so much,’ Blasebalk called back. Many of the graves had collapsed into the ground. The footing was treacherous and Raymond had to muster all his being-in-the-moment to cope with the situation. They came upon the brook, the golf course beyond and the long sentences of graffiti-marked trains barrelling by overhead. Here a gunshot would go unheard. The two men stood at the exact position of the X on Raymond’s map.

  ‘Can I ask you a favour? If this doesn’t work out for me, can you speak to my wife. To my boys.’ The older man considered sobbing, then turned his attention to Raymond’s grip upon the gun.

  Raymond was having doubts. ‘It’s just occurred to me. Your name. Blasebalk. I had no idea Bravado was Jewish. My father was Jewish.’

  Blasebalk shouted back over the noise of the trains. ‘The algorithms smooth out ethnicity over time. It’s the opposite of real life. Your friend is late.’ Blasebalk was definitely considering rushing him.

  ‘He’ll be here.’