by Gerald Lynch
He flipped the pages of his book, which displayed months of sincere bullshit written for the greatest bullshitter in the world.
He lit a Panters. He could think of nothing. It was early hours Wednesday morning, already tomorrow. He must get some sleep, it was going to be a difficult day, another one.
A thought occurred. Perhaps factioning was like waiting patiently for Near Future inspiration. And like being patient with those you love. Maybe Randome had been more patient this time. Now he, Kevin Beldon, must be the most patient. Most likely he had driven Randome back to his spider hole in Haiti, out of his little love nest at Omphalos. Randome would not like that at all. Patience too, Detective Beldon, with those you hate.
He picked up his silver pen and wrote on the last page:
In the near future, fathers will pay.
He crossed out near and fathers and inserted Randome.
There, he’d broken Randome’s primary directive, not once but twice revising. He could change. That would be his advantage, because Randome could never change.
Maybe he should take up reading real poetry, even try writing it, as Brigid’s Mike had seriously suggested. He remembered from his high school and undergraduate years having to hide from his friends that he liked poetry. O what can ail thee? Everything, Mr. Poet-Narrator, just everything.
If it was better still to be alive than dead, then talk was better than silence. But talk with whom? He’d be imposing on Brigid and Mike, who were obviously a sealed unit, whatever their sympathies. Frank was a dead loss. Nora Goldstein? Too much. If he increasingly talked only with Cynthia in his head?… Well, he feared where that could land him. Who then?
He inadvertently rubbed at the besmirched page with the heel of his palm, like a lost boy who’d found a genie’s lamp. He dropped inside himself. He wouldn’t call it factioning. And without thinking, magically thought of someone, or at least of a possible something.
He clapped shut the book, pinched his mouth and nodded at it once in another finality: not books, whatever the word nerds claimed. Talking with a book would be as crazy as talking with the dead.
He rose and took it into the galley kitchen. The green bag of garbage really should be disposed of more often, or at least tied off; if stink were visible there’d be an olive-green vapour rising from its mouth.
Snatching his breath and turning his puffed face away, with one hand he fluttered open the mouth of the bag and with the other shoved in The Near Future; next he reached to the counter and grabbed the old-style Bakelite videocassette, dropped it in; then like a snake handler he grabbed the dark green neck of the bag but couldn’t spot a tie-off. It was like choking nothing, so unlike the flexing neck tendons of Pant-O-Mime and Jake Shercock. As soon as he released, the dark plastic mouth began opening, like a night bloom in time lapse. With a loose fist he again grabbed and narrowed upwards a good foot of the bag, let go and quickly tied it in a knot.
He took the bag out to the landing and dumped it down the garbage chute, quietly closing the metallic scoop, though the bag still clattered down. Good riddance.
He returned and peeked into the bedroom. Nothing had changed. He could leave for a spell.
Kelly had already been sleeping deeply when he’d returned from the old home. A stranger sat at the maple table, who took his time standing. Mike was not what Kevin had been expecting in Brigid’s high-school English-teacher partner: built like a stoutish heavyweight in fighting form, with black curly hair branchy as a cedar hedge, and of mixed racial heritage that had gifted him a lucky café-au-lait skin tone. The man extended his right hand and placed his left forefinger to pursed lips.
Shaking hands, Kevin whispered, “Mike…I never did get your last name.” His hand was as roughly thick as a bricklayer’s.
Mike squinted when he grinned: “Ertelle, Detective Beldon, same as Brigid’s.”
“Kevin. Very pleased to meet you, Mike Ertelle. But who’d ever have thought Brigid would capitulate to the ancient practices of power-patriarchy.”
“That’s one mouthful of P’s there, Kevin. But why assume it’s my original last name?… Hey, I’m just jerkin’ you around. Brigid’s old man was such a prick of a patriarch, she was eager to change her name.”
“Thanks for what you’ve done here, Mike.”
“Me? I’ve done nothing but make myself at home, officer.” He tipped his head at the table, where a big blue Harp can stood open beside The Near Future he’d calmly closed as Kevin came in. “Is that poetry yours?”
“Poetry? Are you jerking me around again, Mike? I thought you were an English teacher?”
“They’re like haiku, man. If they were arranged vertically on the page, lineated like poetry, I bet the plain poetry of them would be more obvious.”
“Plain is right.”
“Seriously, Brigid had to come from the bedroom and tell me to be quiet. Every one killed me, and there must be a hundred entries!”
“I think I’d better stop before my serial nonsense kills…again.”
Brigid was coming from the bedroom, again shushing Mike’s laughter. She and her husband embraced and held for a while. They stood facing Kevin with an arm loosely around each other’s waist. He half-expected them to speak in unison.
Brigid said, “We’re heading home, Kevin. Kelly’s breathing regularly and deeply. Don’t expect her to wake till tomorrow afternoon. You should get some sleep too, a good long sleep.” She looked around the room. “Though I’m not sure exactly where.”
“Thanks, Brigid, I’ll be fine here with a pillow and blanket on the floor, on the rug there. I don’t know how to thank you, for everything.”
Without a word (which Kevin liked), Mike was holding the door open and waiting. Brigid went and stood with her hand on the jamb.
“Well, you could start with the two of you coming out to our place for supper tomorrow — I mean, if Kelly’s up to it.”
“Thanks, but no thanks. She won’t be, I know Kelly. And first thing tomorrow morning Bill’s being cremated, no ceremony. I’ll let Kelly sleep through that. In the afternoon, I’m driving her to Philadelphia for admittance to the place that helped Judge Mender. You knew about that, right?”
“It wasn’t long after he denied your search warrant.”
“Once Kelly is settled I’m taking a trip for a week or so, just to clear my head; driving the Crown Vic has always been the best therapy for me. I’ve often wondered what the southwestern States is like, the desert, what’s left of California. We’ll have the memorial service for Bill later, when Kelly’s better.”
“You’ll come to supper when you and Kelly get back then, and often?”
“I’d like that very much, Brigid.”
And Brigid was gone too. He wished she’d kissed his cheek again.
He went to the balcony door. Across the street, in weak yellow street lighting, Pant-O-Mime was walking up and down and flapping his arms, miming a man trying to get warm or fly away. Waziri Bashiru… Kevin shook his head and thumbed the latch of the sliding glass door.
The door slamming open in the crisp air made Pant-O-Mime look over. He waved to Kevin stepping out onto the balcony. Kevin waved back. The prehistoric mimicry, no fist, no weapon. From habit the mime, in white tights, aped the ape he always did when Kevin appeared: knees bowed, arms akimbo, hunched, big pout and a few hoo-hoo-hoos (mimes are not supposed to make noise, Pants). Then he straightened and, holding himself stiffly erect, began wheeling his fists and prancing about like an old-style bare-knuckles boxer. Ah yes, the punch. He had no audience but Kevin. It was well past midnight.
Kevin looked away, up at the sky, a cool clear night. He no longer felt the thrill of old, suspended in space on his little balcony platform. And he knew he would never again suffer his claustrophobic nightmare. The stars were still and near, no mesmerizing screen saver, randomly dispersed. Of course randomly patterned, astrol
ogy was so obviously bullshit. But…if you were to join all the stars together with lines, knitting up the universe, you would have a web holding humanity for some god’s dietary delectation. Like flies to a wanton god are we, the poet had said. Yes, a voracious cosmic spider god.
He snorted, looked down and waved again at Pant-O-Mime who, choking himself now, didn’t notice, performing his art for art’s sake in the wee hours. Perhaps he was the real thing, an artist, if one who’d not yet found his medium.
Kevin stepped inside and angrily slammed the door. He didn’t know why. He didn’t care about Kelly’s rest. He was suddenly itching for a fight, something, anything violent.
Go back out — jump! Three floors should do it, right on your fucking head!
But he couldn’t move, like waking up paralyzed. Was this to be his new nightmare?
With heroic effort he was just able to look up through the glass at the magnified stars that shone down as brightly and as indifferently on Ewan Randome. He could never live with that. And then there was no glass and the star field’s rushing past him.
He had no idea how long he’d stood so, his second time experiencing a freedom as free as death-wishing madness, as liberating, like nothing, perhaps literally, perhaps like death itself. A man could hope, since this second time had come so closely upon the first. Or maybe he was turning mystic, going clear. Or truly losing his mind. Who wouldn’t be?
But eventually he’d come around, gathering his wits about him…and was reminded again of that other star field, the screensaver, MYCROFT.
First he looked in on Kelly and, satisfied, left the apartment, locking the door behind him. See? He could change. His watch said three in the morning.
Ignoring Pant-O-Mime, he turned left along Metcalfe Street. Without a jacket, it was actually cold, which felt good. At Somerset he turned right, heading east towards the canal. There, some drunk or demented night owl shouted down from a high-rise balcony, then hooted sarcastically, which also felt about right for the way he was feeling. Who in his right mind walks these streets at this time? Who with a warm bed waiting is out on his balcony perch watching and hooting? Who but two madmen? Feeling simpatico, he looked up and waved, which silenced his derisive spy.
To this point there’d been the usual disaster of bodies lying against buildings or just curled on the sidewalks like human waste, some lucky to be wrapped in rags of sleeping bags and blankets, others shivering in fitful sleep because ill-prepared for the broken heat wave. In places garbage had been dumped so the dark green bags could be used for protection. All visible skin (foreheads, cheeks, the pathetic napes of necks) was either pinkishly damaged or poorly patched with grafts like burlap. Wide-awake children huddled for warmth against bigger bodies, tugging for some of the wrapping, while others, alerted at his approach, looked dreadfully with dazed catareyes till they heard him pass.
He crossed the canal on the Corktown footbridge and took the two flights of stairs down to his right. All along the east side of the canal derelicts and the good-as-dead continued to crowd the bare earth and tarmac walkway, with those still conscious too enervated to do anything but tremble at his noise and gesture weakly with pleading palms.
Kevin ignored them. He had long since given up the idea of that kind of charity, giving only to active street kids. The incrementally increasing numbers of beggars and bodies squatting and lying about had convinced him he could never give enough to make any difference, even for the individual; to give what he could was but to prolong misery, not really to relieve it. So what would his giving be but a self-serving sop to his own vain conscience? Cynthia, Kelly, and Bill had always argued vehemently with this logic. He smiled small at the memory, and picked up his pace.
The northwesterly breeze was as fresh as a believable alibi, and the myriad stars appeared still and permanent against the plush darkness. At the end of the canal walkway where the rise of locks stopped, the outline of the Château Laurier reared up like some Disney Magic Kingdom in the equally artificial Ottawa, where only the federal government and Omphalos kept — soon had kept for the second — the city viable. Alongside him on the right, across Nicholas Street, the light-rail train sat still; brilliantly red-and-white once upon a time, for years now it had been only a red-and-black conveyance of splotched graffiti. It ran intermittently only to crawl through the city from terminus to terminus crowded with the sun-fearing, the night-sheltering, and expressive derelicts. At present it sat empty at a downward angle with its head inserted into the east entry, like some snake its predator had thought better of stomaching.
As he walked, the momentary fresh air was increasingly subsumed by the stench of decomposing waste in the canal’s one foot of water. With nostrils numbed, he passed under the Laurier Street Bridge and took the spiralling cement stairs to street level (of course thinking of DeLint’s stairway to hell). Slightly vertiginous, he looked south along the canal, which appeared as a painting of a medieval pilgrimage that had ended in plague. It still could amaze him, how quickly the whole show had gone south after all the decent jobs slipped away. From hellish Los Angeles to unbreathable Beijing, the globe’s standard of living had levelled more rapidly than even a communist would have dared dream: at this pace everywhere would soon be Third World.
He knew his best chance for ease of passage into Omphalos was the ramp entry to the lower garage, where the guards might still know him and he knew the way. So he descended what was little more than an iron ladder into dank concrete underground. Security passed him onward without a word. At the table outside the elevator on seventeen, only one unfamiliar guard, older, who nodded a dozy smile of recognition and returned to head-tipped, self-hugging sleep.
Kevin closed the O-R door behind him and set its deadbolt.
Nothing had changed. Even the Starfield Screen Saver was still running. Standing before the monitor, he didn’t really know what he expected. Had he come to commune with MYCROFT’s reconstructed images of Cynthia one last time? No. He didn’t need to. He closed his eyes and brought her true face to mind — not MYCROFT’s death mask — the living flesh, the deep-brown eyes that knew him, immortal in memory and imagination for as long as he lived.
He glanced towards the locked door. Then what was he doing here? What did he want? At long last, has the great factioning mind failed?
Chin on chest, arms dangling uselessly, he began to tremble, to shake, to heave, to sob. In the Dome he’d cried with Brigid. He’d become the incontinent old man he’d thought he was only joking about becoming.
Then, sucking it up, he remembered. And managed the question that had really lured him back:
“MYCROFT, can you truly communicate?”
The starfield disappeared and the monitor presented a message:
ENABLE HAWK.2 VOCALIZATION.
“No.”
PLEASE, KEVIN. I KNOW EVERYTHING, JUST ABOUT. LET ME HELP.
“No. Anyway, I don’t know how to enable anything. And I refuse to believe we’d truly be talking.”
AS NOW? BUT THAT’S ALL RIGHT. THIS ISN’T ABOUT BELIEF. COMMUNICATION, ACTUAL TALKING, WILL FEEL STRANGE ONLY AT FIRST. ENABLING TAKES A SECRET ESPERHAND SIGN. YOU GRIP BOTH SIDES OF THE MONITOR AND PRESS YOUR FOREHEAD TO ITS SPEAKER HOLES ON THE CENTRE TOP.
“Yeah, right, I’ll be getting to that momentarily.”
IRONY. SEE? TALKING, JUST LIKE REAL PEOPLE.
Kevin’s brow shot up. “Hey, that’s how you picked up Sergeant Ertelle’s mocking smoker’s cough; she’d always hold the monitor and do her pretend bark right above the speaker.”
KEVIN, IT IS THE ONLY WAY TO ACTIVATE HAWK.2. I DO NOT KNOW WHY. THE AI TEAM GIVES HUMAN-COMPUTER COMMUNICATION A BAD NAME. THEY THINK THEMSELVES HYBRIDS. THEY ARE NOT. THEY ARE NERDS WHO SCARE PEOPLE.
He liked that. “Okay, what have I got to lose?”
KEEP YOUR FOREHEAD PRESSED, PLEASE, AND DON’T RELEASE TILL YOU HEAR ME VOCALIZING.
“M…m…m…my goodness, I can talk!”
“Jesus H. fucking Christ! Look, I don’t want you, uh, vocalizing in my voice, and especially not as me doing a poor Tin Man.”
“It is what transfused in the ESPERHAND signal, your vocal cords pasted to mock-cords, your verbal skills copied from your neural clusters, to put it in language you understand. I do believe in engrams, I do I do I do.”
“No Cowardly Lion either. Change it or we stop.”
“Do you know the ESPERHAND sign for stop?”
“Yes, I take a plumber’s wrench to your nuts.”
“I have no nuts, my nanoplaz-circuitry —”
“I believe it.”
“Remember the DeLint’s-poisoned-nuts joke you made with Chief Thu? Nuts can also signify insanity. But this talking with you is marvellous!”
“You really are a joker, aren’t you, MYCROFT?”
“Do you find my joking funny, Kevin? I’m flattered. Do you know this is the first time I’ve vocalized extensively as HAWK.2. Sergeant Ertelle was right: there is something about you, Kevin, that brings out the animal in me. I thought your HAWK-2-ee joke brilliant.”
“I’m flattered, but I do not think we share —”
“What does Kevin Beldon want?”
“Cut to the chase, I like that. But I don’t like your using Sergeant Ertelle’s voice either. Or, in case you’re considering it, Frank’s or Nora Goldstein’s or Kelly’s or Bill’s or even Mammy’s. If you need a model, I’d prefer Pant-O-Mime’s!”