King of Morning, Queen of Day (45 page)

For all her street smarts, Omry had proved remarkably easy to blackmail. The very mention of the Narcotics Division had her call-you-back-in-five-minutes-yes-there’s-a-vacancy-for-a-rider-if-you-think-you’re-up-to-it.

Nothing better, Omry? Nothing with a little frisson of executive glitz?

This is a bicycle courier company, sister, not Saatchi & Saatchi. Do-me-no-favours.

At least it keeps her in credit (a checque every Friday. She’s surprised to learn that she isn’t making that much less than she did at QHPSL) and close to her source of supply. It will give her time and space to resupply and regroup and devise a strategy for her hunt for these Lords of the Gateway, whatever they are. Once she gets the chamois padded shorts and ditches her old saddle for a customised formfitter (£39.95 from MacConvey’s Cycle Boutique but worth every centavo), once the legs get into rhythm and remember their old student day stamina when she thought nothing of cycling two hundred miles in a weekend, once she learns the ground rules of life in the bus lane, like which truck companies don’t mind you hanging onto their under-rider bars for a free ride and which ones do, and which cops will give you a ticket if you leave your Peugeot eighteen-gear ATB in a no-parking zone, which companies tip, and which companies want you out of their black rubber and endangered wood lobbies before you’ve even entered (hardly surprising: QHPSL belongs to this latter flock), she finds she loves her job. She loves its immediacy, its presentness. She loves its lack of abstraction—just Enye MacColl and the traffic, a Day-Glo corpuscle weaving its course through the city’s vascular system. A thousand challenges, a thousand threats; she faces death and serious injury a thousand times a day. She loves the art of living by her wits. True strategy, total immersion in the present, the happening moment.

The couriers are an affable, piratical mob, bound together by an us-and-themness, an
esprit de corps
common with Mujahaddin guerrillas and space shuttle crews. They know it is a jungle out there. They are an eclectic outfit: see the guy with the hand-customised flames on his frame, he’s a trainee clergyman; see the girl with the Mandelbrot set pattern on her solid rear wheel, she’s a resting actress; see that guy with the neat chevron tights, he’s done time on an Alabama chain gang. Yes, sir, of course it was drugs, what else do you get put on a chain gang for these days, except being black. There’s at least one doctor of atomic physics, a disaffected housewife who walked out on husband kiddies and Hi-Fibre Malt-Enriched Weetie-Bangs one morning; a psychopath; someone who may or may not be the next James Joyce; actors, patricides, fools, priests, pretenders. And Elliot.

Elliot thinks he may be the only Elliot in a country of males named after pale-faced plaster statuettes. Elliot may be right. Elliot has long hair he never wears gelled back or tied into a pigtail; just long, and blond, and smelling of frequent-wash herbal shampoo. Elliot gets There first, wherever There is a first to be, or to have; First to get the new Shinamo eighteen-speed gear-reduction system for his ATB, first to hit the streets in the hot-off-the-plane-from-Milan shirts, first with the belt pouch and the oversized rubber driver’s chronometer on elasticated sweat band, first to introduce himself to the virgin recruits Hi I’m Elliot, the only Elliot in the country, probably; greetings.

Elliot has Noticed Enye.

Enye knows Elliot has Noticed her. Enye is not certain she wants to be noticed by Elliot. It is all the good things and all the bad things about Saul freshly laundered and ironed and laid out; his needs, her secrets, his hunger, her inability to satisfy that hunger. She wants and does not want to walk that valley again.

Elliot asks Enye, by means of conversation, what she is into.

“Music,” she says.

“Like jazz? Folk? Four aran sweaters singing the ‘Wild Rover,’ God forfend? Rock? Heavy metal?”

“No,” she says,
“Music.”

Elliot is into designer dance. Street music.
Musique.
Maximal rhythm, minimal melody. Found sources, cut-ups, samples, ethno-beat: Ikombé drummers and wailing muezzins. He lives it with an intensity, an immediacy that draws Enye. She knows what it is to burn the flames of private obsession. She knows it is this that Elliot has noticed about her. When he talks about what he wants to do—make music, cut disks, session at clubs and warehouse parties, the energy crackles between them like summer lightning. Enye plays him Ives’s Symphony Number Three on her Walkperson. She sees the intensity of his concentration, his keenness to comprehend something beyond his experience. She likes that. He asks can he borrow the tape. Next morning, as they gather the dispatches from Omry, it is as if he has had a religious experience.

“This is, wow, this is… cosmic. There’s something going on in here I don’t quite understand, but it’s pretty cool.” It must be a sign of Something, Enye thinks, that she refrains from sarcasm at his
wow
and
cosmic
and
cool.

“You just watch yourself,” Omry says to her as he launches himself on his eighteen-gear Shinamo system ATB into the great soul river. “That ass has my fingerprints on it.”

That evening he invites her to his
place.
He is the kind of person, Enye thinks, who would have a
place.
She has shared her music with him; he wants to share his with her. Somewhere beneath the movie posters and racks of cassettes, the spools of reel tape and tangles of leads, the tape recorders and the microphones, the radio, tape, and CD decks, the graphic equalizers and mini-mixers, the QWERTY boards and green-screen monitors and synthesizers and touch-pad rhythm generators, must be the fundaments and furnishings of a quite nice little attic apartment. She calculates the number of pedal miles per metre of coax.

“When you got a passion, you got a passion,” he says. “Try this.”
This
being a mini-mike headset connected to a tape deck.

“I could get to like this!” she shouts, embedded in interlocking rhythms and driving bass lines. Then she realises, a little foolish, there is no need to shout. The loudness is all internal.

He cuts the play back, flips a switch on a mixing board.

“Say that again?”

“I could get to like this?”

And he runs it through his processors and it comes back at her transmuted into a gospel-singer’s soul-moan.

“I like to work with found sources. I’m puritanical that way. The remix is the dominant cultural form of the last two decades of the twentieth century—do you know that? It’s a cultural form that has only been possible for the last twenty years—William Burroughs and Dada excepted—it’s the only cultural form that is entirely in harmony with the technological ethos of the age. Remix is possible only because of technology.

“You think about it. You listen to the radio, you go to a club, you buy a disk, you see an advert on the tube, what do you hear? Remix music. You buy a book, see a movie, watch TV, what do you see? Old familiar plot lines, old familiar characters, old familiar motivations and relationships, endlessly remixed. You go to buy something to decorate your house, something to make it look pretty, look nice, yes? What do you get? Remix Victorian. Remix Edwardian. Remix Art Deco. You tried to buy any clothes recently? What’s this year’s fashion? Five, ten, fifteen years ago’s fashion, remixed.”

“I always knew I should have held onto those flares,” Enye says but Elliot is being ridden hard by his muse and people do not laugh when they are being ridden by their muse. They do not think of anything but the thing that is riding them, hard. It is a sight at once disturbing and deeply beautiful. As the sight of people being ridden tends to be.

“Even our nation, our history, our past, are subject to remix culture: see how we’re transforming ourselves into a national theme park, see how we’re changing our national identity into other nations’ expectations of what that culture should be? Even in our schools our kids are being taught history remixed in accordance with our particular late twentieth century fixations. Green history, anyone? It happens in Russia every time they have a change of political climate. Remix. Everything is remix. Taken apart, analysed, sampled, put together again. That’s what I want to do. Dub reality: the ultimate remix. I want to go out into the street and make music from what I find there. I’ve got buskers, Salvation Army bands, car backfires, police sirens, children being spanked; all kinds of street sounds digitalised in here. Ultimately, I’d like to create a complete sound map of the whole city. Can you imagine it mixed down onto one master tape? You would be able to experience the entire city at once. You seen the sound system on my bike?” Enye has and has decided she wants one for herself; she likes the idea of bombarding pedestrians and traffic with
La Traviata
or Bach’s St. Matthew Passion from her handlebar-mounted microspeakers, even if it means fitting a quick-release collar so she can take speakers, Walkperson, and all in with her when she makes deliveries. Street music, street crime. “Folks are always asking me, ‘Hey, Elliot, why is there no beat coming out of your sound system?’ and I say, that is because my system is for collecting sound, not throwing sound around. I map the city with my cassette recorder, define each street by its sounds and voices. I’ve caught some of my most valuable material purely as overheards. You like to hear the sound of your own city?”

Found Sources.

A street preacher proclaiming hate in the name of love:
You’re all going to hell, every one of you. The wages of sin is death! The wages of sin is death! Ye must be born again! Ye must be born again!

A lovers’ argument: she accusing him, he defending himself, he moving from defence to offence, she thrown momentarily back, she rallying with a strong counterattack, he gaining strength for a countercounteroffensive.

A conversation between two thirteen-year-old girls, a complex, utterly banal exchange of agreed allusions, themes, and references quite opaque to anyone outside their social orbit.

A drunk’s monologue, projected on the inside of his skull in full Technicolor by the
Cinema Nostalgique,
of an encounter with a ghostly policeman.

A business man’s oaths and imprecations as he waits for a long overdue wife to return from shopping, gathering in vehemence; then, when she finally appears, the stunning hypocrisy of his glad-to-see-you-have-you-had-a-nice-time-darling greeting.

A madwoman from a mad land reciting memorised pages from the telephone directory in a voice of prophetic hysteria.

“This is just a start,” Elliot says. “I have this grand dream of remixing reality: you have this computer program, see, that’s constantly scanning worldwide television, radio, and telecommunications, stealing samples and then mixing them down to rhythm tracks generated by a subroutine. I use a lot of computer-generated rhythm tracks; most dance music is seventy, eighty percent computer-generated. What I want to do is to take the human element out entirely to make it more human, you understand what I mean? I want the abilities of a computer to contain and express the diversity of what it means to be human. Reality, the twelve-inch version. The Happening World, Club Mix. I get invited to a sound-system party and I just plug in the computer and give them this happening world at five hundred watts per speaker. The people who go to these parties, they just want dance music as a means of escape, something to stuff their heads full of Ecstasy to, or whatever, and let the dope and the music toast their neurons. Me, I want to use dance music to
explore.
I want it to be dangerous, radical. I want dancing to be political.”

“The politics of dancing?” Enye asks.

Elliot looks at her as his muse rolls, sated, from him and withdraws into her divine cloud of unknowing.

“You what?”

She breaks into the dead amusement arcade through a skylight. The rotted, paint-blistered wood yields with only the faintest cry to her crowbar. It is not as great a drop as she has feared. Her red Reeboks hardly make any sound. She drags a retired one-armed-bandit across the pitted linoleum floor and stations it beneath the skylight. She may have to leave the way she entered. She cannot resist one pull, for the sake of all those fat copper pennies she slid down all those chromium gullets in all those childhood amusement arcades. The mechanism has jammed solid. Three lemons, the final payout.

It is a strange contact, the pulse of mythoconsciousness in this seaside town huddled behind its breakwaters and shingle beach against winter; a variable star in her neural constellation, at times so dim and wan as to be virtually imaginary, again, an actinic flare of nova light burning out from among the closed-down arcades and hot dog stalls and rain-washed promenades. Its variable nature and its distance from the mass of phagus activity ranked it low on the list of priorities. Now it had worked its way to the top by dint of Enye having removed all contacts more interesting than it.

She had not been surprised to find this closed-season arcade where she had rolled her pennies as a child the focus of the mythoconscious contact. As she sat in the Citroen listening to Nielsen symphonies and dripping gobbets of Thousand Island dressing onto the upholstery from the burger she bought from the sole late-night eatery on the storm-lashed seafront, she had found herself submerging into cotton-candy reverie. Days when the sun seemed brighter, hotter, cleaner than the sun that shines upon this dog-end decade; days when mothers wore slacks and fathers wore sandals and rolled up their trouser legs, and kiddies wore shorts and white knee socks and babies wore sun bonnets. Days when the souvenir shops unself-consciously gloried in their curious hybrid of naive vulgarity and patriotism. Dirty postcards cheek-to-cheek with pictures of Padre Pio bleeding all over the revolving display rack. Flags of all nations on little wooden sticks to deck the ramparts of your sand Versailles.

Rain had speckled the windshield, washing away the sand castles of other decades. Dead neon, peeling paint, swags of faery lights rattling in the wind driving the cold black breakers onto the shingle shore, graffiti felt-markered on green-painted seats and shelters. The entropy of the heart. When the teenage crew of the solitary late-night burger bar rolled down the shutters, leaving the memory of dirty grease in the morning air, she had made her move.