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Vesicle woke from this dream weeping. He couldn’t help but identify with the dying rickshaw girl: worse, somewhere between waking and sleeping, “rents” had become “tears,” and this, he felt, summed up the life of his whole race. He got up, wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his coat, and went out into the street. He had that oddly jointed look, that shambling look all New Men have. Two blocks down towards the Exotic Diseases Hospital, he bought a Muranese fish curry, which he ate with a wooden throwaway fork, holding the plastic container close under his chin and shovelling the food into his mouth with awkward, ravenous movements. Then he went back to the tank farm and thought about the Crays.

The Crays, Evie and Bella, had started out in digitised art retroporn—specialising in a surface so realistic it seemed to defamiliarise the sex act into something machinelike and interesting—then diversified, after the collapse of the 2397 bull market, into tanking and associated scams. Now they were in money. Vesicle was less afraid of them than awed. He was star-struck every time they came in his shop to pick up the rents or check his take. He would tell you at length the things they did, and was always trying to imitate the way they talked.

After he had slept a little more, Vesicle went round the farm and checked the tanks. Something made him stop by one of them and put his hand against it. It felt warm, as if the activity inside it had increased. It felt like an egg.

Inside the tank, this is what was happening.

Chinese Ed woke up and nothing in his house worked. The bedside alarm didn’t go off, the TV was a greyout, and his refrigerator wouldn’t talk to him. Things got worse after he had his first cup of coffee, when two guys from the DA’s office knocked on his door. They wore double-breasted sharkskin suits with the jackets hanging open so you could see they were heeled. Ed knew them from when he worked the DA office himself. They were morons. Their names were Hanson and Rank. Hanson was a fat guy who took things easy, but Otto Rank was like rust. He never slept. He had ambitions, they said, to be DA himself. These two sat on stools at the breakfast bar in Ed’s kitchen and he made them coffee.

“Hey,” said Hanson. “Chinese Ed.”

“Hanson,” Ed said.

“So what do you know, Ed?” Rank said. “We hear you’re interested in the Brady case.” He smiled. He leaned forward until his face was near Ed’s. “We’re interested in that too.”

Hanson looked nervous. He said:

“We know you were at the scene, Ed.”

“Fuck this,” Rank said immediately. “We don’t need to
discuss
this with him.” He grinned at Ed. “Why’d you waste him, Ed?”

“Waste who?”

Rank shook his head at Hanson, as if to say, What do you make of this shithead? Ed said:

“Kiss it, Rank. You want some more java?”

“Hey,” Rank said. “You kiss it.” He took out a handful of brass cases and threw them across the breakfast bar. “Colt .45,” he said. “Military issue. Dumdum rounds. Two separate guns.” The brass cases danced and rattled. “You want to show me your guns, Ed? Those two fucking Colts you carry like some TV detective? You want to bet we can get a match?”

Ed showed his teeth.

“You have to have the guns for that. You want to take them off me, here and now? Think you can do that, Otto?”

Hanson looked anxious. “No need for that, Ed,” he said.

“We can go away and get the fucking warrant, Ed, and then we can come back and take the guns,” said Rank. He shrugged. “We can take you. We can take your house. We could take your wife, you still had one, and play jump the bones with her ’til Saturday next. You want to do this the hard way, Ed, or the easy way?”

Ed said: “We can do it either way.”

“No we can’t, Ed,” said Otto Rank. “Not this time. I’m surprised you don’t know that.” He shrugged. “Hey,” he said, “I think you do.” He lifted his finger in Ed’s face, pointed it like a gun. “Later,” he said.

“Fuck you, Rank,” Ed said.

He knew something was wrong when Rank only laughed and left.

“Shit, Ed,” Hanson said. He shrugged. Then he left too.

After he was sure they were gone, Ed went out to his car, a four-to-the-floor ’47 Dodge into which someone had shoehorned the 409 from a ’52 Caddy. He fired it up and sat in it for a moment listening to the four-barrel suck air. He looked at his hands.

“We can do it either way you fuckers,” he whispered. Then he dumped the clutch and drove downtown.

He had to find out what was going on. He knew a broad in the DA’s office called Robinson. He persuaded her to go to Sullivan’s diner with him and get lunch. She was a tall woman with a wide smile, good tits and a way of licking mayonnaise out the corner of her mouth which suggested she might be equally good at licking mayonnaise out the corner of yours. Ed knew that he could find that out if he wanted to. He could find that out, but he was more interested in the Brady case, and what Rank and Hanson knew.

“Hey,” he said. “Rita.”

“Cut the flannel, Chinese Ed,” said Rita. She tapped her fingers and looked out the window at the crowded street. She had come here from Detroit looking for something new. But this was just another sulphur dioxide town, a town without hope full of the black mist of engines. “Don’t put that sugar on me,” she sang.

Chinese Ed shrugged. He was halfway out the door of Sullivan’s when he heard her say:

“Hey, Ed. You still fuck?”

He turned back. Maybe the day was looking better now. Rita Robinson was grinning and he was walking towards her when something weird happened. The light was obscured in Sullivan’s doorway. Rita, who could see why, stared past Ed in a kind of dawning fear; Ed, who couldn’t, began to ask her what was wrong. Rita raised her hand and pointed.

“Jesus, Ed,” she said. “Look.”

He turned and looked. A giant yellow duck was trying to force itself into the diner.

“But you never phone!”
Anna Kearney said.

“I’m phoning now,” he explained, as if to a child.

“You never come and see me.”

Anna Kearney lived in Grove Park, in a tangle of streets between the railway and the river. A thin woman who fell easily into anorexia, she had a constantly puzzled expression; kept his surname because she preferred it to her own. Her flat, originally council housing, was dark and cluttered. It smelled of handmade soap, Earl Grey tea, stale milk. Early on in her tenancy she had painted fish on the bathroom walls, papered the back of every door with letters from her friends, with Polaroid photographs and memos to herself. It was an old habit, but many of the memos were new.

If you don’t want to do something you don’t have to,
Kearney read.
Do only the things you can. Leave the rest.

“You look well,” he told her.

“You mean I look fat. I always know I’m too fat when people say that.”

He shrugged.

“Well, it’s nice to see you anyway,” he said.

“I’m having a bath. I was running it when you called.”

She kept some things for him in a room at the back of the flat: a bed, a chair, a small green-painted chest of drawers on top of which lay two or three dyed feathers, part of a triangular scented candle, and a handful of pebbles which still smelled faintly of the sea, arranged carefully in front of a framed photograph of himself at seven years old.

Though it was his own, the life these objects represented seemed unreadable and impassive. After staring at them for a moment, he rubbed his hands across his face and lit the candle. He shook the Shrander’s dice out of their little leather bag, threw them repeatedly. Larger than you would expect, made from some polished brownish substance which he suspected was human bone, they skittered and rolled between the other objects, throwing up patterns he could make nothing of. Before he stole the dice, he had cast Tarot cards for the same purpose: there were two or three decks in the chest of drawers somewhere, grubby from use but still in their original cartons.

“Do you want something to eat?” Anna called from the bathroom. There was a sound of her moving in the water. “I could make you something if you like.”

Kearney sighed.

“That would be nice,” he said.

He threw the dice again, then replaced them and looked round the room. It was small, with bare untreated floorboards and a window which looked out on the thick black foul-pipes of other flats. On the off-white wall above the chest of drawers, Kearney had years ago drawn two or three diagrams in coloured chalk. He couldn’t make anything of them, either.

After they had eaten, she lit candles and persuaded him to go to bed with her. “I’m really tired,” she said. “Really exhausted.” She sighed and clung to him. Her skin was still damp and flushed from the bath. Kearney ran his fingers down between her buttocks. She breathed in sharply, then rolled away onto her stomach and half-knelt, raising herself so that he could reach her better. Her sex felt like very soft suede. He rubbed it until her entire body went rigid and she came, gasping, making a kind of tiny coughing groan. To his surprise this gave him an erection. He waited for it to subside, which took a few minutes, then said:

“I probably have to go away.”

She stared at him. “But what about me?”

“Anna, I left you long ago,” he reminded her.

“But you’re still here. You’re happy to come and fuck me; you come for this.”

“It’s you who wants this.”

She clutched his hand. “But I see that thing,” she said. “I see it every day now.”

“When do you see it? It doesn’t want you anyway. It never did.”

“I’m so exhausted today. I really don’t know what’s the matter with me.”

“If you ate more—”

She turned her back on him abruptly.

“I don’t know why you come here,” she whispered. Then, vehemently: “I have seen it. I’ve seen it in that room. It stands in there, staring out of the window.”

“Christ,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“Why should I tell you anything?”

She fell asleep soon after that. Kearney moved away from her and lay staring at the ceiling, listening to the traffic cross Chiswick Bridge. It was a long time before he could sleep. When he did, he experienced, in the form of a dream, a memory of his childhood.

It was very clear. He was three years old, perhaps less, and he was collecting pebbles on a beach. All the visual values of the beach were pushed, as in some advertising image, so that things seemed a little too sharp, a little too bright, a little too distinct. Sunlight glittered on a receding tide. The sand curved gently away, the colour of linen blinds. Gulls stood in a line on the groyne nearby. Michael Kearney sat among the pebbles. Still wet, and sorted by the undertow into drifts and bands of different sizes, they lay around him like jewels, dried fruit, nubs of bone. He ran them through his fingers, choosing, discarding, choosing and discarding. He saw cream, white, grey; he saw tiger colours. He saw ruby red. He wanted them all! He glanced up to make sure his mother was paying attention, and when he looked down again, some shift of vision had altered his perspective: he saw clearly that the gaps between the larger stones made the same sorts of shapes as the gaps between the smaller ones. The more he looked, the more the arrangement repeated itself. Suddenly he understood this as a condition of things—if you could see the patterns the waves made, or remember the shapes of a million small white clouds, there it would be, a boiling, inexplicable, vertiginous similarity in all the processes of the world, roaring silently away from you in ever-shifting repetitions, always the same, never the same thing twice.

In that moment he was lost. Out of the sand, the sky, the pebbles—out of what he would later think of as the willed fractality of things—emerged the Shrander. He had no name for it then. It had no shape for him. But it was in his dreams thereafter, as a hollow, an absence, a shadow on a door. He woke from this latest dream, forty years later, and it was a pale wet morning with fog in the trees on the other side of the road. Anna Kearney clung to him, saying his name.

“Was I awful last night? I feel much better now.”

He fucked her again, and then left. At the door of the flat she said: “People think it’s a failure to live alone, but it isn’t. The failure is to live with someone because you can’t face anything else.” Pinned to the back of the door was another note:
Someone loves you.
All his life Kearney had preferred women to men. It was a visceral or genetic choice, made early. Women calmed him as much as he excited them. As a result, perhaps, his dealings with men had quickly become awkward, unproductive, chafing.

What had the dice advised? He was no more certain than he had ever been. He decided he would try to find Valentine Sprake. Sprake, who had helped him on and off over the years, lived somewhere in North London. But though Kearney had a telephone number for him, he wasn’t sure it was reliable. He tried it anyway, from Victoria Station. There was a silence at the other end of the line then a woman’s voice said:

“You have reached the BT Cellnet answering service.”

“Hello?” said Kearney. He checked the number he had dialled. “You aren’t on a cellphone,” he said. “This isn’t a cellphone number. Hello?” The silence at the other end spun itself out. In the very distance, he thought, he could hear something like breath. “Sprake?” Nothing. He hung up and found his way down to the Victoria Line platforms. He changed trains at Green Park, and again at Baker Street, working his way obliquely to the centre of town, where he would interrogate the afternoon drinkers at the Lymph Club on Greek Street, one place he might expect to get news of Sprake.

Soho Square was full of schizophrenics. Adrift in the care of the community with their small dirty dogs and bags of clothes, they were brought together at sites like this by an attraction to movement, crowds, commerce. A middle-aged woman with an accent he couldn’t quite place had annexed a bench near the mock-Tudor shack at the centre of the square and was staring around with a lively but undirected interest. Every so often her upper lip folded back and a fey, unpremeditated sound escaped her mouth, more than an exclamation, less than a word. When Kearney appeared, walking fast from the Oxford Street end, an educated look sprang from nowhere into her eyes and she began talking loudly to herself. Her topics were disconnected and various. Kearney hurried past, then on an impulse turned back.