Three Moments of an Explosion

by China Miéville

  It would be a story. Whoever comes and goes to clean up Cane’s grave comes and goes unseen.

  No one knows why we put pebbles on graves. I look at them all higgledy-piggledy on Daniel’s marker.

  There’s a tradition that says they’re there to keep the soul down. Not in a bullying but in a kindly way. Any soul can get restless, can toss and turn, can get up and go wandering, and that’s no fun for anyone, including for the sleepwalking dead.

  Those piled-up stones are a loving ballast, keeping the soul safe in the beit olam, the house of the world.

  Yeah, it would be a story, to find out who comes by, takes the crap away, lays more weight gently on Daniel Cane.

  Some stories, though, it doesn’t help to finish.

  We stay there while the sun gets low. I tell Digger to keep the key. Digger’s disappointed but I never promised anything.

  The camera’s a fake. We come and go unseen too. The light is going down over the boulevard. We can hear the traffic.

  I’ve come prepared, with a stone in my pocket. I put it on the grave.

  FOUR FINAL ORPHEUSES

  1. Orpheus, shambling and drunk on shadows, sees sunlight and emerges into what he thinks is the world; into what, with a blinking look around, he decides with only a shade of uncertainty is not merely a widening in the passage itself, a kind of rough natural vestibule, but must surely count as the actual outside. He starts to turn and honestly he supposes it does occur to him before he’s completed the movement that he’s still roofed by stone, that the fresh air really starts about three meters on. And still fractions of a second before he’s caught Eurydice’s eye, still, he would have to admit, in time to stop and walk a few steps on, he decides two things at almost the same instant. The first: This is ambiguous, neither quite tunnel nor quite outside, and that’s not fair. The second, nervously, half-predicated on the first: Oh, I’m sure it’ll be fine.

  2. Orpheus, at the last, is so afraid of the light that he needs the moral support of a smile to step into it, needs it more than he needs Eurydice back.

  3. Orpheus can’t remember the injunction. He tells himself he can’t, anyway. He tells himself he’s turning to ask Eurydice what it was he was or wasn’t supposed to do. It’s a complicated kind of cowardice with which he looks at her.

  4. Orpheus has never forgiven. Never. He plans all the long way up. He slows as he approaches the threshold, listening to her ghost feet. He stops, still just in shadow. He hisses, spins around, stares in hate and triumph at Eurydice’s shocked and receding face.

  THE RABBET

  Though it was fully spring there had been a light snowfall only two weeks ago. There was a strong smell of cut concrete and you could hear when buses passed at the end of the road. Sim moved into the house as soon as Maggie and Ricardo’s previous flatmate moved out. “Don’t come before three,” Maggie said. “He’ll still be here.”

  Maggie was tall and very thin. Her entire self looked windblown. She designed layouts for a computer magazine. “I know it’s not Notting Hill,” she’d said to Sim about where she lived, “but it’s so quick into town, and anyway we’re keeping it real.” She was from south London and made jokes about Neasden being enemy territory.

  She greeted Sim on the front step, with Mack on her narrow hip. Mack pointed at a dog nosing at something. “Look at that,” Maggie said. “Maybe he’s friendly.”

  “Hello,” Mack said, his face a blotch of pleasure. “Hello hello hello.” He said it to the dog and then he said it to Sim.

  “They’re like sponges,” Maggie said to Sim. She led him upstairs.

  “Oh my God,” Sim said. He stood in the center of the room and turned slowly and took it in. “Thank you so much, it’s fantastic.”

  Maggie joined him by the window and shifted Mack to her other side. Three of the room’s four walls were painted an inoffensive light blue. The fourth, the window-wall, was papered, a fussy Victorian design of flowers and trees.

  “You should have seen the guy who just left,” she said. “He was like a sulky kid. Had to kick him out. Let that be a lesson to you. I’m ruthless.”

  “Oh Lord, don’t I know it,” Sim said.

  Buddleia sprawled over a mess of garden below. They did not have access to it; it was only for those in the basement flat. Sim held up his hands so his thumbs and index fingers made a rectangle. He looked through it at the view.

  “Heart of flint,” Maggie said. “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” Beyond the garden was a long stretch of other backyards and beyond them a crane moving over a railway siding. Trains emerged from underground.

  Sim looked at her through the box of his fingers. “Oh, he’ll be alright, Mags. You did him a favor. Anyway, forget doing him a favor, you’re doing me a favor which is way more important.”

  Maggie pulled her hair out of Mack’s grip, leaving him with a few long red strands to crumple.

  “Ow. So, there’s an attic,” Maggie said. “Trapdoor by the bathroom. You can get a few boxes up there. He did.”

  “Thank you, thank you.”

  Sunlight glinted in the colors of old cars. The crane hauled shredded metal.

  Maggie and Ricardo’s room was directly below Sim’s. When she had been at university with Sim, he’d had a reputation and she listened now, with Ricardo, but they heard nothing. “If he’s smuggling them in he’s bloody good at it,” Ricardo said. “Maybe he’s getting his oats elsewhere.”

  “So long as Mack doesn’t bump into too many déshabillées floozies,” Maggie said. “And so long as I don’t have to listen to them at it.”

  “We could retaliate in kind, wink wink,” said Ricardo.

  Sim had paid three months in advance. It was a friendly arrangement, for as long as he needed it.

  For money he did data entry at a polling company, Tuesday through Friday. The other days he did his own work, as yet unpaid, putting together videos and computer animation on an old laptop. He was Simon, Sim for “sim card,” because when his London friends had first met him they had vaguely decided that he was always on his phone. He was the same age as Maggie but people always thought he was younger than her and than all their peers. He was slight and pretty, with spiky black hair and blue eyes.

  “He was putting stuff in the attic earlier,” Ricardo said.

  “Is he up there now?” Maggie said. She cupped her hand to her ear.

  “I think so.”

  Ricardo made supper.

  “Bloody hell,” Sim said. “Is there anything you can’t do?” After every mouthful he ate, he fed Mack a plastic spoonful. He sniffed the boy’s goop.

  “Parsnip,” said Maggie.

  “Here comes the aeroplane,” said Sim. “Here comes the UFO. Here comes the submarine. God he looks like you, Ricardo.”

  The kitchen was decorated with shiny kitsch, with 1950s advertisements for Coca-Cola and commodities that didn’t exist any more.

  “Whoa there, slow down,” Maggie said. “He hasn’t learned to gobble yet.”

  “How do you like it round here?” Ricardo said.

  “Do you know the Portuguese café?” Sim said. “So good.”

  He said he would take them out to supper. He led them a roundabout route, showed them places of which they had not been aware—that café, an Afrocentric bookshop, a tiny triangular park by the overland station.

  “It’s embarrassing,” Ricardo said. “He’s only been here two weeks.”

  “Oh, don’t,” Maggie said. “You know what it’s like. It’s always easier to be an explorer somewhere that isn’t where you really live. It’s because he just moved here.”

  “We’d just moved here once. We never found all this stuff. We suck.”

  You could watch Sim’s animation on his website. Maggie and Ricardo were curious.

  “Hmmm,” Ricardo said. “Bit undergrad.”

  A rabbit-like character walked in a brightly colored forest. From the trees grew presents in Christmas paper, and lightbulbs, and little yapping dogs dangling fro
m their leads.

  “Hmmm indeed,” Maggie said. “It would be a rabbit. Dark Bugs, very Donnie Darko. Jesus, Sim.”

  “Rabbet,” said Mack, smacking his lips. “Rabbet, rabbet.”

  “This looks a bit cheap to me,” Ricardo said. The rabbit’s ears were like long water-filled balloons. They bounced to a glitchy soundtrack.

  “I remember this,” Maggie said. “He started this one years ago.”

  “What’s it doing?” Ricardo said.

  “Going to Grandma’s house, I think?”

  They watched. “How long’s he been working on it?” Ricardo said.

  “Since a bit after we graduated,” Maggie said. Ricardo looked at her. “Turn it off,” she said. “Poor sod.”

  “Can I have a housewarming?” Sim said.

  “Our house is already warm,” said Maggie.

  “Only joint friends,” he said. “A Sim-warming, then.”

  “You and your warming.”

  He showed them pictures on his phone. He had taken to breaking into old buildings. He swiped past shots of himself gurning in bars with people they did not know to offices stripped of furniture, empty stairwells in falling-down blocks. In the backgrounds, through windows, it was night. Sometimes he was with other people in those places; mostly he was alone. He showed them images of his delighted face. In one, behind him, a man was removing a fringe of broken glass from a reinforced window. Maggie frowned.

  “That’s a bloke called Brian,” Sim said. “Brian fucking Something-or-other. Oh God, sorry!”

  Ricardo put his hands over Mack’s ears and gave a tight smile.

  Sim was out at night more and more often but he did not seem tired. He brought back spoils.

  “I don’t want this shit in my kitchen,” Maggie said. Musty books, cheap ornaments. Discarded photographs, worthless paintings and engravings.

  “This stuff is great.” He held up a graying copy of the Inferno. “I’m going to read this finally.”

  “Where’d you get it all?”

  “All over.”

  Closed libraries. The windowsills of squatterless squats. Offices and, of course, deserted hospitals.

  “People just leave stuff, it’s amazing,” Sim said. “When they go.”

  Maggie touched the pictures and they felt clammy. Oil portrait sketches, watercolors of country scenes, buckled with damp.

  “That was from way out by the suburbs,” Sim said. “I don’t know if it used to be a gallery or a dealer’s or what but this place had a whole bunch of art just in stacks. These were the best ones.”

  “They’re fair old crap, Sim.”

  The black-framed engraving was a full-face view of a Victorian manor. Sash windows, a parapet, a portico. The house was surrounded by trees, lit up by moonlight. The image was dotted with thunderbugs under its glass.

  “It was some big old building,” Sim said. “Down in south London.” He held the engraving up to the wall, above the kitchen table. “What do you think? Goes with the yellow?”

  “Ugly,” Maggie said.

  “Unlike the Coke ads?”

  “Ouch,” she said. “Fair play. There’s a hammer under the stairs.”

  “It’s quite sweet,” she said that night to Ricardo. He was staring at the picture. “He wants to make a mark on the place.”

  “Not that it’s his place,” Ricardo said.

  “If we had the money,” she said, “we could live in splendid isolation.”

  “Sorry,” Ricardo said. He took the engraving from the wall and turned it over. The frame was plain and black and simple. It looked handmade, imperfectly. There was nothing on the back but a few stains of age.

  Maggie took it from him and hung it back up and looked at the house. I wouldn’t want to go in there, she thought. “Oh,” she said. “It’s not that bad.”

  Mack loved Sim. Mack raised his arms and made Sim dance with him in the kitchen. Sim showed him the brighter parts of his video, and Mack shouted, “Rabbet!” as the animal jumped and turned. Sim held Mack up in front of the picture he had hung.

  He sang to the tune of “Mack the Knife.” “Oh the house has, open windows dear. And the moon shines, very bright. Look at the grass, and the trees, dear, what is coming, out of sight?”

  Maggie gave him a look.

  Mack twisted in Sim’s arms and stared at the engraving. “Down you go, big boy,” Sim said. “I’m going to do a bit of work.”

  “You sure?” said Maggie. “You seem tired. Night off?”

  “No. Work work sucks, but this work—” He pointed in the direction of his room. “I’ve got to get on.”

  Sim had given Maggie the URL of the secret feed where he stored reference pictures for his videos and animations, shots of his explorations, demanding that she take a look. Selfies, Sim’s face mostly covered, recognizable to her by hair and eyes. Brick, old cement, beams, dusty lining paper, and rubbish.

  There he was in a triangular space, hunched to fit. Maggie looked carefully at the picture on her phone. She climbed the stairs and checked on Mack as he was sleeping. She heard the tapping of Sim’s keyboard from his room. She opened the trapdoor to the attic and ascended into a filthy dark space.

  It was cramped with boxes. She could see things their previous flatmate had left, a few of her own and Ricardo’s bits and pieces. Sim’s.

  Maggie looked at the picture again. It was this attic. Sim had explored here. She covered her mouth with a shaking hand. Sim counted this a place of spoils.

  Sim had his party. The kitchen was full of people, most of whom Maggie knew. A few of those she didn’t she thought she recognized from the pictures of Sim’s explorations. “Oy,” she said, and pushed the fridge door closed. She stood in front of the silverware.

  “Heirloom, Mags?” someone said, and pointed at the engraving.

  “Why couldn’t it be one of my heirlooms?” said Ricardo.

  “You’re too common. Mags is a fallen aristo.”

  “I wish,” said Maggie.

  “Present from Sim,” said Ricardo.

  “He got it at a junk shop,” a man called Tom said. He saw Maggie’s expression. “What? He told me he bought it at a junk shop. He said was thinking about drawing something on it. Doing a Chapmans.” He ran his fingers over the frame.

  What Sim had sung to Mack was true: one of the windows in the picture was open. The water-spotting in the lower right corner was worse than Maggie remembered.

  She took the picture from the wall.

  “Nobody’s going full Chapman in my kitchen,” she said.

  Sim was sitting on the stairs drinking a beer. “I’m sorry,” Maggie said. “I’ve decided I sort of hate this picture. I’m going to put it in your room.”

  She recoiled at his expression.

  “Give.” He held out his hand.

  “It’s fine, I’ll just—”

  “Give.” He stood and climbed to his room, the picture in his hand.

  Maggie thought, Fuck you.

  Church bells sounded beyond the tire emporium. When Maggie woke, Ricardo was already up. Mack was in his high chair. He shook his cup at her.

  “He’s a grumpy little sod this morning,” Ricardo said. He stroked Mack’s head and Mack rocked back and screwed up his face. He stared at the wall and Maggie realized with a feeling as if she had drunk very cold water that he was staring at a black-framed picture, that it was back on the wall.

  She stood so quickly that she spilled her coffee. Mack bawled and Ricardo looked at her in alarm.

  But the frame did not contain the engraving. In its place was another reproduction of a vintage advertisement, brought from elsewhere in the house. A long-gone toothpaste. Girls sitting in a diner, beaming with shining teeth. Sim had written Sorry on a piece of paper and tucked it into the frame.

  “Yeah,” said Ricardo. “I was going to say. I don’t know what that’s about.”

  “We had an argument,” she said.

  She took Sim a coffee. When he didn’t answer she o
pened the door. He was not in the room. The engraving was on his desk. He had started to add to it: a pencil outline of the rabbit figure from his animations stood on the lawn, looking quizzically at the house. Sim had lightly shaded in its body, against the moonlight and the glimmer of the house.

  Light slanted in through clouds and washed the image out. She did not think it was a very good piece of work. The original, or Sim’s altered version.

  Sim made supper, silently.

  “What’s up?” Maggie said.

  “Shitty day,” he said.

  “Sugary day, eh?” said Ricardo. He held Mack.

  “Oh. Sorry.” He looked at Ricardo with dislike. “I can’t get this stuff I’m working on right.” The fish fell apart on his fork and he tutted and glanced at the new picture. “I will, though,” Sim said.

  “Doubt it,” Ricardo said when Sim had gone. He showed Maggie the animation.

  The rabbit had been fiddled with. “Look,” said Maggie. Sim had scanned in the country house from the engraving, turned it into a fussy digital version. The rabbit crept smoothly across the lawn toward it on all fours, wearing a cross on its back. “I guess it’s supposed to be scary,” she said.

  At its edges, where it crossed the original image, the rabbit brought out the darkness beyond it.

  Mack began to cry.

  “Well, it’s scaring someone,” Maggie said.

  But Mack was not looking at the computer. He was looking at the picture on the wall.

  Maggie did too. The green and red of the girls’ skirts, the crisp blue of the server’s uniform, with its trim. The chocolate. The whites of the girls’ teeth.

  Mack kept crying. There was water-staining at the bottom right of the picture.

  Maggie took it down and removed the ad from the thin plain frame. Its varnish was chipped, showing dark old wood beneath. She could see chisel marks where it had been shaped.

  She put it on the top of the stairs. “Where’s the clip-frame?” she said to Ricardo. “The one this was in before?”

  When she followed Ricardo to bed, the frame was gone from the stairs.