I pointed to the name in the paperwork.
‘Your name is familiar.’
‘That’s not my name. You can call me The Elk.’
The Elk ran his tongue urgently around the inside of his upper and lower palate, the tip taking a scouring inquisitive run across the gums. A salesman’s tongue is always restless, probing, oppressive.
The Dyad office was a single-storey warehouse in a light industrial park situated between a carpet factory and a manufacturer of conservatories. As The Elk signed me in at reception, he threw confidences out like dice. The Elk, it seemed, was a nickname he had acquired while homeless on the streets of London.
‘Hackney mainly. Do you know Hackney?’
He shows me the ruin of his mouth, the rotting fence posts of his teeth.
‘I have four front teeth missing. One for every month I lived rough.’
‘Was that a long time ago?’ I asked, not quite able to look him in the eye.
‘It seems like it.’
He rolled his head on his neck muscles and stretched to loosen the tension about his shoulders.
‘It really does your back in. Sitting on the pavement all day, asking for money. Then there are the nights carrying around everything you own in wet bags. It’s terrible for the posture.’
The Elk tore my details out of the register and folded them into a plastic envelope which he then clipped upon my lapel.
‘Security. You know how it is.’
He removed the padlock securing the heavy iron doors. The rusting, industrial entrance opened into a long corridor, decorated at set intervals by placid art and municipal pastels. The smell of cleaning agents indicated the medical nature of the establishment.
‘Doesn’t having a job get you down? Don’t you miss the freedom of the streets?’ I asked. ‘Drinking under the sunshine, abusing workers.’
The Elk walked on, ‘Dyad is not like a normal job. I’m not working for the man, here. I’m working for the anti-man.’
I looked at the corporate literature in my hand. The Dyad logo was seared on the cover of the brochure. At first glance, the Dyad logo resembled a pair of glasses on the bridge of a nose, or a barbell overlain with the letter ‘X’. Turning it ninety degrees, the Dyad brand was also a reflection of the head and arms of a stick figure. Two beings bonded into one, like so:
‘Dyad gave me a chance when no one would even look at me.’ The Elk walked backwards so that he could speak to me face-to-face. His hand gestures were inflected with t’ai chi; he had new age bangles around his wrist, and his fingernails were cracked from scrabbling against paving stones.
‘Dyad took away my addictions and gave me purpose. Dyad is not a company in the conventional sense. It is a shared state of mind, a communal coming together to inhabit an idea.’
‘Whose idea would that be?’ I said.
‘Leto’s, of course.’
I followed The Elk into a side office where he produced more paperwork for me to complete. I signed disclaimers and waivers, and a single declaration that I was sound of mind.
‘All of this,’ he said, picking up the documentation, ‘will be shredded if you decide not to go ahead. Until we finish this process, you are under no obligation to Dyad and can step out at any time. You understand?’
I nodded, and continued signing. The Elk went through his patter.
‘You are a family man. Nothing is as important as your continuing ability to support that family. So many people leave it too late to come to Dyad because they think it is selfish to invest in their own health. Believe me. You are the best investment you could make. If you die, you let everyone down.’
I finished filling in the forms. The Elk took them from me and slipped them into my file.
‘You are doing the right thing.’
‘You never know what’s around the corner,’ I said.
‘I suppose you want to see them now, don’t you? Everyone likes to touch them, if only once.’
I nodded. The Elk bounded out of his seat and went over to a locker in the corner of the office from which he produced two white chemical suits, two pairs of lightly powdered disposable gloves, latex booties and two gas masks. I slipped off my coat. The Elk removed his suit jacket and placed it on a hanger in the locker. Together we helped one another into our protective clothing, ensuring the seams were fastened down, the cuffs at the wrist and ankles tightened. Once the gas masks were on, we could only communicate through hand gestures, the first of which was a simple beckoning wave from The Elk.
Follow me.
From the office, we returned to the corridor and clomped down to a double set of air lock doors. Even though I was hooded and masked, I still closed my eyes against the scouring jets of water. I turned around with my arms hitched up to ensure I was fully decontaminated. When I was bold enough to open my eyes again, I saw that The Elk was giving me an inquisitive thumbs-up. I replied with one of my own.
OK.
We ambled through the air lock into a white-tiled warehouse sparsely populated by figures like ourselves, oversized snowmen, a few of whom looked up from their tasks to wave. The workers were each attending to a heavy golden fruit suspended from the ceiling upon flexible transparent tendrils. As The Elk led me on into the factory floor, I saw that these fruit were in fact pigs. Each pig was clad in a gold suit fashioned out of skintight PVC interwoven with a lattice of filaments. Over their eyes, the pigs had been fitted with large green-tinted goggles. Their trotters pushed hither and thither upon a floating sequence of platforms. It seemed that the pigs were being kept in a simulated environment of their own, which they experienced both through the goggles and through the ripples of their sense suit.
The Dyad brochure had prepared me for this spectacle. The pigs were bred specially for xenotransplantation, so their arrested immune systems required a completely sterilized environment. The simulated environment was put in place merely to reassure them, pigs being notoriously skittish and liable to overheating due to their lack of sweat glands. The Elk led me to one particular sow and encouraged me to lay my hand upon her distended pregnant belly. In there wriggled a foetus already infected with a lentivirus carrying my foreign genes. Its mother, with her natural defences knocked out, would not abort the alien offspring.
Although I was in my early thirties, I was entering cancer country. The lifespan of a xenopig was about a decade, therefore covering me up until my fortieth birthday, when the process would begin again. With this first investment, I could guarantee a perfect match for blood or bone marrow, and would always be able to lay my hands on a replacement heart, liver and lungs to sweep away all the damage my appetites had inflicted upon them. Like Jonathan Stoker Snr, I could replenish my virility with a new brace of testicles. Or like Bruno Bougas, I could restore kidneys devastated by painkillers. My heart, wrung dry between the twisting hands of stress and stimulants, would no longer be a cause for concern.
The Elk risked another thumbs-up and I responded in kind.
Instead of a pension, I would have a pig. Man and animal bonded together as one being. A Dyad.
All that remained was the matter of haggling over the price.
Back in the office, The Elk quickly became exasperated with my belligerent negotiating technique. He shook his head as I waved a page from the brochure at him.
‘How do I know this is really a xenopig?’
The brochure showed the animal floating like a gilded astronaut in the laboratory farm.
‘How do I know you haven’t taken human organs and engineered them to match me, then stuck them in a pig? Wouldn’t that be cheaper than growing them from an embryo? I think you are using the pigs just to cover up what’s really going on here at Dyad.’
‘That’s a very serious allegation,’ said The Elk.
‘It is.’ I said.
‘Sometimes we do transplant people into their pigs. If their body is irrevocably damaged, the pig can house the human brain, once we adjust the skull. That’s one of the reasons why Dyad’s
life-prolonging strategy is superior to those of rival technologies.’
I tried another tack.
‘How have you overcome the risk of viruses dormant in pig DNA crossing over to humans?’
‘You will have to take medication.’
‘Does it have any side-effects?’
‘Some patients have complained of feeling a bit “snouty”.’
‘What did you say?’
‘A bit snouty. A bit porky. The risk of porcine retroviruses crossing over to humans is very serious. We mitigate that risk by making you less human with our medication. You can only infect other xenotransplant patients. Man and beast unified in a new hybrid species.’
I had not forgotten Bruno Bougas sitting with his shirt off in my apartment, manipulating his fleshy features in the mirror and making that very complaint. I had not forgotten Stoker Snr’s maroon jowls and augmented coil of cock, his indiscriminate appetite for meetings, deals, and advantage. Nor could I be said to be wholly remembering them. The memories bobbed up, detached from some larger submerged structure.
How did I get to Dyad? I must have driven but I didn’t remember the driving. I must have chosen to go but I didn’t remember the choice. I would laugh as soon as it all came back to me, I was sure of that. This was a blip of urban amnesia, one day deleting the other. Standing on the platform holding a ticket for no good reason. Happens all the time.
‘Did you ever meet some friends of mine?’ I said to The Elk. ‘They’ve had xenotransplants.’
‘Dyad has numerous offices. We treat a lot of people.’
I told him their names. Bruno Bougas and Jonathan Stoker Snr. ‘They both work for Monad,’ I said. ‘Have you heard of Monad?’
‘Of course. Technically speaking, Monad is a competitor to Dyad.’ He tapped my application for a xenopig. ‘Am I going to make a sale here today, or not?’
The more I thought about Bruno Bougas, the more I had a strange feeling that he should be with me. As if I had left him in the car park with the engine running. How would Bougas handle this transaction? The acquisition of a spare set of organs is a rite of passage to be lined up alongside your first child or your second mortgage. You cannot be considered to be a truly modern adult until you have contemplated the fact of your own mortality and then decided to invest all your wealth into avoiding it. A gold-wrapped xenopig had displaced the glans-red sports car as the mid-life crisis investment of choice. How would the management of Monad handle this crucial transaction? If I was to be taken seriously as one of them, considered equal to the Stokers, Morton Eakins, Bruno Bougas or even Hermes Spence himself, then I would have to demand the privileges and deference they effortlessly assumed.
‘I want to see the manager,’ I said. The Elk shook his head. He wanted to know why. I said I didn’t like his attitude, for want of anything of better.
‘I want to see Leto.’ As soon as I said it, the name tasted familiar.
The Elk stroked the silver rungs sewn into his cheek. He decided to go and see if Leto was free.
Alone in the small office, I found myself doodling the Dyad and the Monad logo. I wondered what The Elk meant about the two companies being competitors. What was the connection between organ transplants and simulated people? What market did they compete over? If Dyad was a rival to Monad, why had I not heard of it before? One of Monad’s biggest problems was its monopoly. To survive in the face of a suspicious government, the company went out of its way to pretend it had the problems and concerns of any other corporations, devising products and brands to fit in with capitalism.
At times like this, I missed Raymond Chase. Since his disappearance, the slow flow of corporate will carried me through long weeks of no thought. Lacking a will of my own, I hosted the urges of the organization. This happens very easily. You start by controlling your desires, then deferring their gratification and before you know it you’ve lost the ability to want altogether. Other people want for you. Friends, employers, wives, children. I was a vessel for other people’s longing.
Where was Raymond? Where was I?
I stood up. Anxiety magnetized my concerns and suddenly they all pointed in one direction: EXIT.
In retrospect, I can say that, at this particular moment, my mind realized at some submerged level that it had been duped. My body was really slumped in the back of a limousine, a discarded puppet draped over a swooning Bruno Bougas. However, the texture of the Dyad was so concrete that I would have gone mad at the revelation that it was in fact illusory. My mind protected me. It kept me ignorant for my own good, content to send covert messages of concern.
Clouds parted to reveal hot shining fear.
I needed to splash cold water on my face to bring my pulse rate down. My heart was uncertain as to what rhythm it should keep and danced incompetently. My search for a bathroom sent me along corridors, through fire doors and past empty side offices. When I found one, I applied water to my cheek, eyes, neck and lips. The water was body temperature and did nothing to calm my anxiety.
I became aware of a low regular breathing close by. Quite distinct from my own shallow quick breaths. The inhalation was prolonged, the lungs filling up for over a minute. I counted the duration of this prodigious intake, much longer than any human breath. I realized that in my panic for water I had completely lost my bearings and arrived at an unfamiliar, deserted wing of the building. The pastel abstracts of medicinal art had been removed from this place, and replaced by biro tattoos, the Dyad logo drawn with such force that it was a striation in the plaster. When the exhalation finally came, a long gradual deflation of enormous lungs, I felt the lukewarm, stained air flow around my ankles. It was coming through the gap at the bottom of a pair of double doors. Small rectangles of glass were set in them, cross-hatched with wire. Not much could be discerned beyond except darkness.
If this experience was to end, then it must end beyond these doors.
They opened onto a windowless corridor of grey-white walls descending into blackness. My eyes slowly adjusted to the silver light. The walls were slick with condensation and covered in more biro scrawls. The loops, peaks and troughs of ink became more intense as I moved down the corridor. They reminded me of doodles on the inside of an exercise book in which a boy has summoned all the excitement of a big fight merely by drawing it. The anthropomorphic logos of Monad and Dyad battled against a crude rendering of Liverpool’s cityscape, bystanders on fire fleeing screaming. The artist alternated dynamic scouring strokes with graphomaniac detail. The narrative of their fight continued all the way down the corridor. Underfoot, the floor tiles were loose, their adhesive gum solvent in the pervasive damp. Another deep breath began, louder now, coming from somewhere up ahead. As the lungs reached their capacity, the pipes constricted, sounding a resonant note like a nail file drawn up the length of a bass string. The corridor turned and descended into a chamber, from where I could hear the hubbub of numerous voices. Here the biro scrawl climaxed with the Dyad strangling the Monad, each of its four hands clutching the throat.
Keeping close to the wall, I inched down a ramp.
The municipal offices of Dyad gave way to a limestone gorge. Here the walls were slick unworked rock. The air was chill and saturated. A crimson light drifted like a Scotch mist beneath bands of thickening darkness. A fog clung to the centrepiece of the room. Through it, I could just make out the giant outline of a reclining leviathan.
Leto.
Leto’s rib cage relaxed as he slowly let out another breath. His exhalations were so fetid I had to turn my face aside from them. I kept to the back of the chamber, my footsteps deliberate and silent. The giant was wearing a stained ill-fitting shirt, its hairy lower gut visible where the last button had come away. He was wearing shorts, and his enormous ankles and feet were swollen, the skin taut and bruised as a rotting aubergine. One flip-flop dangled from its foot, and the other, the size of saloon car, lay on the floor. Leto had a raw drinker’s face with dirty greasy hair pasted to a flaking scalp, while his lips were cha
pped with sores the size of frying pans.
It was then that I noticed the giant was sleeping on a colossal park bench.
As he slept, Leto was attended to by numerous men and women, all dressed in the make-do-and-mend uniforms of the Great Refusal, their faces gas-masked against the noxious fumes of their dosser god. While some applied unguents and balms to the crusty yellow eruptions of his impetigo, others worked to heave cardboard skips of fried chicken and aluminium tankers of psychofuel across the chamber, leaving them within easy reach of the giant for when he awoke. It was clearly a dangerous job; the bearers froze when the giant lifted a lazy hand to scratch at his flanks, then scurried as quickly as their load would allow them to put the colossal can of drink within swatting reach. One of the bearers saw me. By now I was helpless with awe, all thoughts of secrecy forgotten in the face of this terrifying spectacle. The bearer approached me. I fixated upon the proboscis of his old gas mask. The distance between us shortened in stroboscopic leaps until we eyed one another at arms reach.
Who would scream first?
The bearer removed his gas mask, exposing the sweating gasping face of Bruno Bougas.
‘Is that you?’ he whispered.
‘Yes.’ I nodded.
‘Leto,’ he said, and pointed at the unconscious titan. ‘He’ll wake soon. He’ll need a drink.’
‘They wanted me to buy a xenopig,’ I said. Both of us were operating on the last erg of our faculties. Having become accustomed to the reality of the Dyad, the appearance of Bougas confused me, for it suggested a further level of existence than merely this office, this chamber, this dosser god.
‘They welcome me as one of them,’ said Bougas. ‘I will become one of them.’
We stood together as the last preparations for Leto’s waking were completed. The leviathan sniffed and snuffled on his way back to life. I expected a long ascent into consciousness. But it was as abrupt as a switch; suddenly, every cell in Leto’s being craved more alcohol.
The giant’s eyes flicked open. My own eyes closed.
The Red Men Page 19