Light (11 page)

Meanwhile, scattered across the northern hemisphere, the corporate enclaves constructed themselves as Old Earth.

They favoured little towns—with little market squares—called Saulsignon or Brandett Hersham; little clean railway trains running through fields of chocolate-coloured ploughland. The men from EMC chose tall, beautiful women and gave them honey-coloured winter coats of real fur. The women chose men from upper management, whom they loved with a fierce mad true devotion, and gave them beautiful children with honey-coloured hair. There were grey stone churches with witch’s hat steeples, chateaux and shooting boxes. Water meadows lined the tributaries of the New Pearl River—there were wild flowers all summer, long, frozen floods a mile wide to skate on every winter. You went to New Venusport if you were lucky, and a hard worker. The corporation sent you there to do a job, but you went for the blue rainwashed skies and white cumulus clouds. The horses, so beautifully groomed. The country sports. And there was such good food in Saulsignon—all those different
cheeses
!

New Venusport, the recruiting brochures said: Planet of choice.

The warren took up an entire block, bounded by the docks on two sides, the waste lot of some old industrial accident on a third, and on the fourth Straint Street, the western boundary of the garment district.

Inside, it was always lighted, but only by the hologram channels, or with lamps designed for New Men eyes: so that what actually reigned was a kind of grey-blue twilight, like the light of some antique monitor. Inside, it was crowded and hot, a chaos of plywood cubicles with no doors. These cubicles weren’t joined by corridors. You never knew where you were. To get from one to the next, you went through a third. You could go through thirty small rooms to get to an outside door. Sometimes they had been partitioned further.

“Well, this is home,” said Tig Vesicle.

Ed Chianese, shaking with tank withdrawal, looked around.

“Nice,” he said. “It’s nice.”

Inside the rooms, there would always be eight or nine people doing something, you couldn’t quite tell whether it was cooking or laundry. Sometimes there would be more. They had a smell about them that was hard to describe: it was like cinnamon mixed with lard. They slept on mattresses right there on the floor. The men kicked their legs out in that awkward way they had, so it was impossible not to trip over their feet as you picked your way through: they looked up for a second from masturbating, eyes as empty and reflective as the eyes of animals in the odd grey light. The women did their hair in a kind of soft short fluff over their rather beautiful oval skulls. They wore sleeveless cotton frocks in ochre colours, which fell from the shoulders with no style whatsoever. They had a body language which said that if they didn’t keep busy it would be too easy to remember where they were. Kids ran about everywhere, pretending to be K-ships. Popular posters of the Kefahuchi Tract were taped up on every wall. The New Men had some kind of cult, centred round the idea that this was where they had originated. It was as sad as everything else about them. Every child knew where they came from, and it wasn’t there.

Eventually Tig Vesicle stopped uncertainly, in a cubicle that looked like all the others.

“Yes. This is home,” he said.

Staring vaguely into a hologram up in one corner of the cubicle was a woman who looked just like him.

“This is Neena,” Tig Vesicle said. “She’s my wife.”

Ed looked down at her. A big grin came over his face.

“Hey,” he said. “I’m pleased to see you, Neena. You got anything to eat?”

They had a cheap stove in every cubicle. The New Men ate a kind of noodle soup. (Sometimes there were objects in it that resembled ice cubes, only lukewarm and bluish.) Ed was in their warren four weeks. He slept on the mattress on the floor, like everyone else. In the day, when Tig Vesicle was out in the city—moving some AbH here, a little bumped-up speed there, trying to avoid the Cray sisters—Ed watched the holograms and ate the food that Neena cooked. Most of that time passed slowly. He was in withdrawal. It was painful: also, real things were very distant a lot of the time and the simple weirdness of being among New Men made that worse. He kept trying to remember who he really was. He could only remember the fictional Ed, an assembly of diamond-clear events that never happened. The afternoon of the third day he was there, Neena Vesicle knelt down next to him where he sat on the mattress.

“Is there any way I can help?” she said.

Ed looked up at her.

“You know, I think there is.”

He reached up and put his hands either side of her ribs, and with a little sideways pressure tried to get her to kneel over him. It took her a moment to understand what he was suggesting. Then, awkward and serious, she tried to comply. “I’m all arms and legs,” she said. She hardly smelled at all until he touched her. Then a kind of thick sweetness rolled out from her. Every time he touched her somewhere new, one of her legs would jerk, or she would catch her breath and exclaim at the same time, or shiver and half curl up. She looked down at Ed’s hands, raising the cotton dress to her waist.

“Oh,” she said. “Look at you.” She laughed. “I mean me.”

Her ribs articulated in a way he couldn’t quite understand.

Later she said, “Is that all right? We go the wrong way for you. A bit the wrong way.” She hissed. She wiped one hand upwards, over her face, across her skull. “Is that all right?” Tank withdrawal was in the bone. It was cellular, organic. But it was also a kind of separation anxiety. It was the sustained scream of wanting to be back in a lost world you had loved. Nothing was a cure, but sex helped. Twinks on withdrawal were desperate for sex. It was like morphine to them.

“That’s good,” Ed said. “Ah, yes. That’s fine.”

The four weeks he was in the warren, everyone imitated him. Had they ever been so close to a human being before? What exactly did that mean to them? They came to the cubicle doorway and looked in at him with a kind of sombre passivity. A typical gesture of his, a manner of speaking, would go round the whole place in an hour. The kids ran from room to room imitating him. Neena Vesicle imitated him even when he was fucking her.

“Open up a little more,” she would suggest, or, “Now me in you,” then laugh. “I mean, you in me. Oh God. Oh fuck.
Fuck.
”

She was perfect for him because she was stranger and even harder to understand than he was. After they finished she lay there awkwardly in his arms, said, “Oh no, it’s nice, it’s quite comfortable.” She said: “Who are you, Ed Chianese?” There was more than one way to answer that, but she had her preferences. If he said, “I’m just some twink,” she actually looked angry. After a few days he felt himself returning from the tank. He was a long way away, and then he was closer and it was the voices of withdrawal which had retreated right to the edge. He began to remember things about the real Ed Chianese.

“I’ve got debts,” he explained. “I probably owe everyone in the universe.” He stared down at her. She stared back for a moment, then looked away suddenly, as if she hadn’t meant to. “Shh, shh,” he said absently. Then: “I guess they all want to collect off me or fuck me over. What happened in the tank farm was over who got first fuck.”

Neena put her hand over his.

“That’s not who you are,” she said.

After a minute he said: “I remember being a kid.”

“What was that like?”

“I don’t know. My mother died, my sister went away. All I wanted to do was ride the rocket ships.”

Neena smiled.

“Small boys want that,” she said.

Kearney and Anna stayed
in New York for a week. Then Kearney saw the Shrander again. It was at Cathedral Parkway Station on 110th Street, during some kind of stalled time or hiatus, some empty part of the day. The platforms lay deserted, though you sensed that recently they had been full; the heavily riveted central girders marched off into the echoing dark in either direction. Kearney thought he heard something like the fluttering of a bird among them. When he looked up, there hung the Shrander, or anyway its head.

“Try and imagine,” he had once said to Anna, “something like a horse’s skull. Not a horse’s
head,
” he had cautioned her, “but its skull.” The skull of a horse looks nothing like the head at all, but like an enormous curved shears, or a bone beak whose two halves meet only at the tip. “Imagine,” he had told her, “a wicked, intelligent, purposeless-looking thing which apparently cannot speak. A few ribbons or strips of flesh dangle and flutter from it. Even the shadow of that is more than you can bear to see.” It was more than he could bear to see, alone on the platform at Cathedral Parkway. He looked up for an instant, then broke and ran. No voice, but it had certainly told him something. Some time later he found himself stumbling about in Central Park. It was raining. Some time after that, he got back to the apartment. He was shivering, and he had thrown up over himself.

“What’s the matter?” Anna asked. “What on earth’s the matter with you?”

“Pack,” he told her.

“At least change your clothes,” she said.

He changed his clothes; and she packed; and they rented a car from Avis; and Kearney drove as fast as he dared onto the Henry Hudson Parkway and thence out of the city north. The traffic was aggressive, the expressways dark and dirty, knotted up into intersection after intersection like Kearney’s nerves, and after less than an hour Anna had to take over because though Kearney wouldn’t stop, he couldn’t see any more through his headache or the glare of oncoming lights. Even the inside of the car seemed full of night and weather. The radio stations out there weren’t identifying themselves, just secreting gangsta rap like a new form of life. “Where are we?” Kearney and Anna called to one another over the music. “Go left! Go
left
!” “I’m stopping.” “No, no, carry on!” They were like sailors in a fog. Kearney stared helplessly out of the windscreen, then scrambled over into the back seat and fell asleep suddenly.

Hours later he woke in a pulloff on Interstate 93. He had heard a Gothic, animal, keening noise. It was Anna, kneeling in the front passenger seat, facing away from the windscreen and tearing pages randomly out of the AAA mapbook they had got with the car. As she crumpled each one up and threw it into the footwell, she whispered to herself, “I don’t know where I am, I don’t know where I am.” There was such a sense of rage and misery filling the cheap blue Pontiac—because Anna had been lost all her life and was never going to find herself now—that he fell back to sleep. The last thing he saw was an Interstate sign four hundred yards ahead, shifting and luminous in the lights of passing trucks. Then it was daylight, and they were in Massachusetts.

Anna found them a motel room at Mann Hill Beach, not far south of Boston. She seemed to have got over the night’s depressions. She stood in the parking lot in the pale sunshine, blinking at the dazzle on the sea and shaking the room keys in Kearney’s face until he yawned and stirred himself from the back of the car.

“Come and look!” she urged him. “Isn’t it nice?”

“It’s a motel room,” Kearney acknowledged, eyeing with distrust the ruched faux-gingham curtains.

“It’s a
Boston
motel room.”

They were in Mann Hill Beach longer than New York. There was a coast fog each morning, but it burnt off early and for the rest of the day everything was bleached out in clear winter sunshine. At night, they could see the lights of Provincetown across the bay. No one came near them. At first Kearney searched the room every couple of hours and would sleep only with the headboard lamp on. Eventually he relaxed. Anna, meanwhile, wandered up and down the beach, collecting with a kind of aimless enthusiasm the items the sea washed up; or drove the Pontiac carefully into Boston, where she ate little meals in Italian restaurants. “You should come with me,” she said. “It’s like a holiday. It would do you good.” Then, examining herself in the mirror: “I’ve got fat, haven’t I? Am I too fat?”

Kearney stayed in the room with the TV on and the sound turned down—a habit he had picked up from Brian Tate—or listened to a local radio station which specialised in music from the 1980s. He quite liked this, because it made him feel convalescent, half asleep. Then one night they played the old Tom Waits song “Downtown Train.”

He had never even liked it; but with the first chord, he was flung so completely back into an earlier version of himself that a terrible puzzlement came over him. He couldn’t understand how he had aged so savagely, or how he came to be in a motel room with someone he didn’t know, someone he had yet to meet, a woman older than himself who, when he touched her thin shoulder, looked sideways at him and smiled. Tears sprang into his eyes. It was only a moment of confusion, but it was carnivorous, and he sensed that by acknowledging it he had allowed it in. Thereafter it would follow him as relentlessly as the Shrander. It would always be waiting to spring out on him. Perhaps in a way it
was
the Shrander, and it would eat him moment to moment if he didn’t do something. So the next morning he got up before Anna was awake and drove the Pontiac into Boston.

There, he bought a Sony handicam. He spent some time searching for the kind of soft plastic-covered wire gardeners use; but found a carbon-steel chef’s knife quite easily. On an impulse he went to Beacon Hill, where he picked up two bottles of Montrachet. On his way back to the car he stood for a moment on the south side of the Charles River Basin looking across at MIT, then on an impulse tried to phone Brian Tate. No answer. Back at the motel, Anna was sitting on the bed naked with her feet tucked up, crying. Ten o’clock in the morning and she had already pinned notes to the doors and walls.
Why are you anxious?
they said, and:
Never do more than you can.
They were like beacons for a bad sailor, someone lost even in familiar straits. There was a faint smell of vomit in the bathroom, which she had tried to disguise by spraying perfume about. She looked thinner already. He put his arm round her shoulders.