The Red Men

by Abaitua, Matthew De

  ‘I first saw this different version of myself standing on the opposite platform at a tube station. He was fit, tidy and expensively dressed. As he made his way up the platform and through the crowds, he had vigour in his stride. I followed him, stumbling over the other passengers. He was definitely me. Except his skin was smooth where mine is pitted and his teeth were marble where mine are sandstone. His hair was combed back, his nose unbroken, and he had a pair of expensive sunglasses. His soul gave off the same hum as mine. Our frequencies met and became one long oscillating wave.

  ‘The train rolled in. But when it pulled away, he was still standing on the platform, grinning at me. The doppelganger nodded toward the exit. We met up outside the station, and stood facing one another against a torrent of commuters. He was taller than me, his spine had not been twisted by sleeping on the streets. Behind the sunglasses, his pupils were two reflective silver disks.

  ‘He said, “I know who you are.”

  ‘I went to touch him, and he backed away repulsed.

  ‘‘‘Never touch me.”

  ‘Cruel circumstance had unlocked my cells so that their energy leaked directly into him. His skin was full of light where mine had acquired shadows and bruises that would not heal. We argued over who was Dr Jekyll and who was Mr Hyde. Was I the shadow walker, the evil twin, or was he?

  ‘My doppelgänger set out his argument with the tedious obviousness of a corporate presentation. The wiles of the boardroom served him well.

  ‘“Let us consider the evidence,” he said, as we sat outside a café in Clerkenwell Green.

  ‘His name was Michael Sawyer, and he was the courtier of a billionaire who operated out of London and his own private island. He earned a quarter of a million pounds a year, and that was before you took into account his bonuses, his stock options, his rent-free apartment.

  ‘I told him that I was called The Elk, and had not gone by the name of Michael Sawyer for some years. Sawyer held up his hands and declared, “You are the doppelgänger. Clearly.”

  ‘I argued that despite my raddled appearance and criminal activities, he was the Mr Hyde, that his life was merely a legitimized evil, that his arrogance came from the permit we give to the rich so that they may commit the hundreds of hard-hearted cruelties required to attain and protect their position with a clear conscience.

  ‘This line of reasoning bored him. His mobile rang and he took the call, limiting himself to yes and no, unwilling to share profitable information even with me, his other self.

  ‘“I am not saying I am good and you are evil,” Michael Sawyer said, sipped at his espresso. “But you exist in the underclass, whereas I am part of the elite. To achieve my position I’ve had to deny certain instincts and urges, and is it not traditional that such repression will eventually spring forth in the form of another self?”

  ‘I did not accept his argument that I was his shadow.

  ‘I said, “My life is a quest that has required greater bravery and sacrifice than your unthinking conformity. Is it not possible that after my explorations of alternate mind states, I have brought something back with me; a grey alien or a chattering elf?”

  ‘Michael Sawyer laughed. “No, I would suggest that was unlikely.”

  ‘We shared the same ideaspace, sometimes it was impossible for me to tell if we were talking to one another, or thinking at one another. Michael Sawyer leant forward, “At which point do you think we diverged? Where did the path fork?”

  ‘“Did you ever take drugs?”

  ‘“That’s not it. Go deeper.”

  ‘“Did you drop out of university?”

  ‘“Yes. I was sectioned.”

  ‘“Amphetamine psychosis?”

  ‘“No. Dad.”

  ‘“Or Mum.”

  ‘“Yes. Or women.”

  ‘“Jane?”

  ‘“Yes, I remember her. Later.”

  ‘“Do you remember Imogen?”

  ‘“No. So sometime between Jane and Imogen.”

  ‘“It could easily have been some minor random event. A missed train, a chance acquaintance.”

  ‘“What about jobs?”

  ‘“I was homeless for a time. Then I fell in with Leto at the Dyad. He’s my boss.”

  ‘“My employer is an eccentric sybarite, no more. I would suggest this Leto may be the reason for the doubling.”

  ‘“I think you are lying.”

  ‘“How could I lie to you?”

  ‘“Evil twins deceive.”

  ‘“The lies we tell ourselves are the most powerful of all.”

  ‘“Exactly.”

  ‘“Then we can never trust each other.”

  ‘Michael Sawyer unfurled a twenty-pound note and summoned the waiter. His mac folded over his arm, his briefcase in his other hand, he walked off in the direction of St James Church.’

  I asked the Elk if he ever saw his doppelgänger again.

  ‘Yes. Often. I would sit on a dirty rug outside his local off-licence and he would give me money. He began visiting the off-licence every day. At the same time, I lost all taste for alcohol and woke up to the life around me. The energy flow between us reversed. The magnetic poles flipped. I got off my rug. I was on the up. He was on the way down.’

  ‘I was there when he died,’ I said. Michael Sawyer was the executive who blew himself up in the Hackney bedsit. I remembered Dr Easy going in to counsel him and discovering he had been shot in the mouth and so could not negotiate.

  ‘Yes, that very day, I woke up with this rip in my cheek.’

  The silver pins in his cheek glimmered in the moonlight. I was enraptured by this exchange. As The Elk told the story of his doppelgänger, it dawned on me how our exposure to these strange forces had created doubles of us all. Blasebalk versus Bravado, Sonny versus Nelson, Eakins versus Morty; it was a condition of the age, to be separated from oneself, our desires amputated then remodelled and returned to us as an alien body.

  I asked The Elk if he remembered our encounter in the Dyad. He stood back from the fire, his voice drifted out of the night.

  ‘Some dreams are easier to remember than others.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘That the more you go into the Dyad, the more it all merges into one experience,’ said Florence. ‘The Dyad is a world I have dreamt of since I was a child. Monad is a compromised corporate imagination, the human imagination clapped in irons. Dyad is the fairies at the bottom of the garden. Dyad is the ability to fly, it is witches and wizards, angels and devils, a place where imagination can explode as in a dream.’

  ‘The Land of Do-As-Thou-Wilt,’ added Raymond.

  ‘Tell me more about Leto,’ I said.

  Raymond laughed. ‘Now that is a long story. I think for that tale we will need more firewood.’

  The Elk went to fetch it, padding back toward the beach. The surf was luminescent under the moonlight.

  Raymond began his story.

  ‘I will never forget the night the Elk took me to meet Leto. The sun was not coming up over Hackney. It was four in the morning for hours. We went into the Turkish clubs on Amhurst Road, and played on fruit machines that paid out in sachets of heroin. AK-47s in the pool cue rack. Such a dark scene. A landscape is a state of mind. I was in those places so I became that person. The Elk knew everybody. In a Fucker Fried Chicken he bought some crack off the team leader. “Would you like a side order of heroin with that, sir?” I shared a can of Fanta with a crack zombie, the chalk of moulting epidermis on her black skin. She taught me a lullaby that she sings to her baby: “Crack is coming, crack is coming, we love crack, we love crack.” Eyes of starved desire. She offered to do anything I cared to think of.

  ‘A landscape is a state of mind. The Elk took me to the corner of Amhurst and Pembury Road, where the curve of the Downs Estate loomed with the cold immensity of an iron hull and a tower block gave me the finger. Forces were gathering. Young men with no moral code wearing sweatshirts with the hood up over a baseball cap. They would mug
anyone. Threaten to throw nail varnish all over the pushchair if the mother didn’t hand over her purse. Puncture a twelve-year-old girl’s lung with a stiletto until she hands over her mobile phone. Get you in a headlock and knife you twenty-three times. Crack your skull against the kerb then walk away.

  ‘It was still somewhere between four and five in the morning, death’s hour, when heart attacks steal husbands from their wives, when emaciated androgynes succumb to cancer, when babies suffocate in their cots. Even those fortunate enough to be spared another day feel its shadow run over them, and turn uneasily in their sleep.

  ‘The Elk and I walked further into the dark zone. It was easy to mistake a heap of rubbish for a pile of bodies, a traffic light for a gibbet. At the top of Pembury hill, we skirted the scrub of Hackney Downs. To the north of the Downs, the derelict Nightingale estate was squatted by drug mules, deluded sods who’d sweated on a flight from Jamaica with a colon full of cocaine on the promise of a flat in London only to be delivered by their dealers to derelict tower blocks. The Elk motioned to walk on; it was enough to have brushed against the Nightingale estate, no need to broach its interior. We doubled back on ourselves. From the Downs, we turned south-east onto the Lower Clapton Road. The quietness of the hour was interrupted by a battered Mercedes; the indigestinal rumblings of its bass bins dopplered by.

  ‘The screens were up. Television screens, black windscreens, hoods, blinds. The East End has lost its public squalor. You think of those black-and-white photographs of slums, women and their children balefully posed on their doorsteps for an anthropological snap. All that’s gone. Now the sickness is private. Silent unweeping private despair. Like the man in the junk shop in Lower Clapton; he works and sleeps in his shop. Sometimes I see him crying at his desk. He knows he’s going to die there. As we walked by the Nightingale estate, I thought of that time the neighbours turned their TV up because the man next door was being skinned alive. Or when Fat Angie force-fed that woman bullets, then held a gun to her head, then made her suck Angie’s brother’s cock, then pushed the wire of a coat hanger into her bicep. All for what? Mistaken identity? Identity is a mistake! We were out there flanked by these rising blocks of private horror with no hope of dawn to relieve us from an elongated dark hour of the soul. I realized it was a dreadful night, an unending night. As if the sun took one look at what was going on, and decided to come back later.

  ‘The Elk made me take the drug for the first time. He had a hip flask of Leto’s spice. He said, “It’s just a mild psychoactive tincture with very specific effects,” and I’m like, “What will it do to me?”

  ‘“This is not a drug,” he said. “It’s a key.”

  ‘After taking a swig, I felt a little flush around the gills, a numb exaggerated quality to my lips. Nothing more. The Elk steered me down Linscott Road, and toward the forlorn portico of the Orphan’s Asylum, the neoclassical pillars a declaration of the out-of-place, as if one could step through it and into a netherworld. Sure enough, we went through the portico and into a knee-high pampas that stretched out into the old grounds of the girl’s school, which likewise had long since run to ruin. Beyond this marshy stretch lay three tower blocks positioned like the pins of a plug, merging with the heavy sky.

  ‘“Our destination,” said the Elk, picking up the pace. “Stick close to me.”

  ‘A number of the flats were burnt out, while others were sealed up with steel grates. A thick black tongue of rotting carpet lolled from one window. At another, the silhouettes of children appeared. The concourse was littered with items flung from the building, impacted washing machines, WCs torn from their fittings, the cisterns smashed and the pans stained. The burnt-out cars were all parked neatly on an adjoining side street. I thought I heard a wolf howl although it was probably a child. If the Pembury and Nightingale estates had made me shiver with fear, then this unknown territory was the epitome of urban desolation, an anti-Jerusalem, an evil wizard’s lair. Worse than evil. If a landscape was truly a state of mind, then this craggy concrete land had been fashioned out of the affectless way in which a madman can stab a child and care nothing of the pain he inflicts.

  ‘We walked up one of the shorter towers, The Elk taking the stairs with the rangy confidence of a man who had trekked the Himalayas. I hankered after taking the lift but there was someone living in it.

  ‘I stepped over some pitiful cases on that walk up. On one floor, cow throats were pinned out to mark territory. An entire herd of them. Glass pipes crunching under foot, the stench of meat hanging everywhere. The Elk explained that as Leto is a god they offered meat and stolen mobile phones as tribute to him.

  ‘As you can imagine, Nelson, by this point, I agreed with everything The Elk told me. In the cold light of day, you can doubt all you want. But in that endless twilight, there seemed no reason for him to lie, and everything I saw on that walk confirmed there was an uncanny spirit abroad.

  ‘We reached the tenth floor. The Elk took a bunch of keys from his pocket and unlocked the door of a flat.

  ‘It was a bare breeze-block apartment with busted plumbing. At its centre, there was a quartet of filthy mattresses on which an enormous man faded in and out of consciousness. Around the bed, there were piles of festering meat. The ceiling was a foot-thick layer of flies, a million compound eyes monitoring. The Elk ministered to the giant man. His skin was attenuated and translucent, stretched to fit the stranger within. At that point, Leto was twelve feet tall and grotesquely fat, stuffed with animal organs.

  ‘“This is the man I told you about,” The Elk whispered to the semiconscious behemoth. “The man who worked for Monad.”

  ‘From under a thin blanket, a raw hand emerged, beckoning me to him. I will never forget Leto’s face. Upon a medicine ball of exploded features, there was the most pitiful expression. His size was agony to him. His eyes were bewildered by it. It took me a few minutes to realize he was naked, as at first I mistook the black peeling patches upon his chest for filthy cloth. He stank like rotting shellfish. Yet I was drawn to him. Under the influence of the spice, disgust was disengaged. Rationally, almost forensically, I could inspect the corruption visited upon his flesh without my gorge rising. The hand that beckoned me close rummaged back under the blanket, the beast moaned, then the hand emerged with spice dripping from its fingers. The sacrament in undiluted form. The Elk went first, licking it off the hand. Immediately he started going under. On his hands and knees he crawled into the corner and passed out. I looked again at Leto’s eyes and it was like there was a vestigial man trapped in there. All of this was happening against his will. That’s how it works. The body is just a host, swollen and distended by the immensity of Leto toiling within it.

  ‘The squat fell away and I found myself slumped outside Camden Tube station, holding a can of psychofuel like it was a flotation device, the only thing stopping me from going under. Then . . . zzzzip. Walking backwards under Kingsland Road, I am enormously fat and talking to Jesus on a baby’s plastic phone. Zzzippp, I wake up under a railway platform, rats inspecting what’s left of one of my legs. Zzzippp, I am queuing outside the Hare Krishna van as they slop daal into a bowl for me. Zzzippp. I wake up in the back of a camper van surrounded by empty bottles of wine. A policeman is knocking at the window. Zzzippp. Unable to think, head full of other people’s thoughts, I am talking to somebody on a bench. Leto. Enormous Leto. Here he is strong and untainted. I am so drunk, and he smiles at my failure to steady myself.

  ‘Leto says to me, “Would you like a drink?”

  ‘“I’m just waiting,” I say.

  ‘“Have a drink with me,” he says. “I’ll get you one. I’m here if you need me. Like the Great Redeemer, if you know what I mean. You are a manta ray with leather wings coming out of the ocean. Manta Raymond. You see? You’ll see. The sun flicks between the branches and winks at me, sharing our secret of immortality. You’ll see. Here.”

  ‘Leto handed me a piece of paper.

  ‘“This is our plan, Manta Ray. Names. Th
ree names for you. The Great Redeemer undoes the Great Wrong. There.”

  ‘He pointed to the names. Horace Buckwell. Morton Eakins. Nelson Millar. On the back of the paper was written a long string of bizarre language. Our Enochian spell. Our implant.

  ‘“We are done,” he said.

  ‘I wanted to ask him where he was going.

  ‘“Think of the corpse of a hare, ladybirds turning this way and that in the empty sockets like eyeballs. I am the ladybirds and there are hundreds of thousands of hares waiting for me.”

  ‘Zzzziipppp . . . I am back in the flat, flat on my back. Now the smell hits me. The Elk is bent over me, holding a gas mask.

  ‘“Here,” he says, “breathe into this. It will protect you.”

  ‘Only the pole star penetrated the ambient aura of the city. There was still no sign of sunrise. Perhaps it was the spice distorting my sense of space but there seemed to be miles of concrete and weeds between the tower block and beyond. Like the dark patch on a brain scan, this expanse of shadowed concourse spoke of malignity, an inscrutable alien canker in an otherwise healthy organism. Ink spilled onto the map.

  ‘I bolted. The stairwell echoed with footsteps and moans. It was completely dark apart from the grey gleam off the metal security doors. The fear rushed upon me.

  ‘I was too scared to continue. My body shook at the thought of revisiting my earlier hallucinations, the wall of animal throats, the creeping children. I risked the lift. There was a woman asleep in it, like she was dead and this was a stainless steel sarcophagus forever transporting her up and down within limbo.

  ‘When I came out of the tower block, I realized I was nowhere near where I thought I was. There were no signs, no one around. Tumbleweeds of junk food packaging, the smouldering burnt bones of cars – that kind of thing. I became distinctly agitated. The first crack zombies were rising. Hood over baseball cap. You know how it is.