‘Madame,’ said Jinx, ‘this is not the time for — ’ Jinx pirouetted to the minimalist fanfare of Kito’s gun, staggered, took a photograph from his jacket, tore it to shreds (it emitted a tiny squeal), and fell noiselessly over the balustrade to the streets below, to resolve, for himself at least, the question of whether or not we were simulations.
‘It was true then,’ I said. ‘Mr Jinx really did love a photo-mechanical.’
‘Not love,’ said Kito, ‘an infatuation.’ The Pikadons brought their particle weapons to bear on their fellow bijouterie, intent on scrambling the symbiotic electronics that riddled her hypothalamus (little doohickeys that had cried sex, sex, sex these five score years).
‘A cruel infatuation.’ The weapons discharged, ejecting joke-shop flags, one Bang! the other Boom! Kito’s lightstick had turned into a steely dan.
‘Seems the goddess of this place doesn’t like guns,’ I said.
‘Guess she didn’t like Jinx either,’ said Morgenstern. He holstered his lightstick.
‘Spalanzani,’ I said, climbing into the golf cart, ‘you think you could get me a scalpel?’ Spalanzani disappeared into the dome and re-emerged with a handful of surgical instruments.
‘You saw what she did just then,’ said Spalanzani. ‘Perhaps we shouldn’t—’
‘Get on with it,’ said Morgenstern. ‘If she can do that in her sleep none of us are safe.’
‘Can no get worse, Uncle Jack,’ said a Pikadon.
I selected a blade and applied it to my arm. Spalanzani tut-tutted. ‘Keep her jaw open,’ I said to him, opening a vein and letting the blood drip into Primavera’s mouth. Her throat contracted in a covetous gulp. I squeezed the vein; no question, really, of force-feeding her; she yawned, blood spattering her face and hair. I was gambling that her haemodipsia was stronger than the bonds of her unconsciousness.
The goons were muttering:
‘Jesus, these English.’
‘De-pravity.’
‘A green and perverted land for sure.’
‘Wait’ll I tell Alice about . .
Primavera knocked away Spalanzani’s hands, clawed at my arm, brought the slit vein to her mouth, and sucked, like a baby on its bottle.Ohh—tombstonesownmoaninight ... In the land of death and desire our coach awaited us. We shook and shivered. The car. The girl. The river...
What—
‘It’s enough,’ said Morgenstern, pulling me off.
Primavera drew a hand across her mouth. ‘Shit, Iggy, what happened to my clothes?’ I took off my jacket and handed it to her. .
‘We’re at the Grace,’ I said. ‘Remember? We were in Kito’s bedroom when—’
‘And what’s this slut doing here?’ said Primavera, glaring at Jack- Morgenstern. She frowned. ‘It’s gone. It’s gone. I can’t see inside his mind.’
‘We’re still here,’ said Morgenstern, looking around. ‘She’s gone lucid, and we’re still here. Tell her to pinch herself, Zwakh.’
I took Primavera’s hand and led her to the edge of the roof. ‘Fuck,’ she said, her eyes distending to accommodate the fused skyline of East and West.
‘You’re dreaming, Primavera,’ I said, ‘and we’re inside your dreams.’
’’Stupid! If I were dreaming I’d be able to—’ The garden vanished and was replaced by our suite at the Grace. ‘Anything.’ Primavera was curled up on the sofa, her green silk kimono spilling onto my lap. ‘You’re right,’ she said, ‘I am dreaming.’ She was eating popcorn; the lights were turned down; and all five of our TVs were tuned in to the Jack Morgenstern show.
‘Very clever,’ I said. ‘As if I haven’t seen enough of your dumb tricks.’
Morgenstern, clad in sacrificial white, was being frogmarched down a long corridor. His captors—masked, but betraying long manes of bleached blonde hair—kicked a wheelchair from his path...
‘I’m going to teach that slut a lesson,’ said Primavera, filling her mouth with junk.
The corridor opened onto a big rotunda, at the centre of which two marble slabs displayed the skewered bodies of the Morgenstern goon squad. The third slab, unoccupied, was evidently reserved for Morgenstern himself.
‘Just stop the melodramatics, Primavera. We don’t have time for this.’
‘Sure. I mean he’s such a nice guy. I want to have his fucking babies.’
Morgenstern, his gown stripped away, hirsute and horrible, was on all fours upon the slab. A pair of rubber-gloved hands took hold of his ankles.
Primavera picked up the remote and froze all five pictures. ‘Hey, Morgenstern,’ she called, ‘you can hear me?’
The TVs remained frozen, but Morgenstern’s disembodied voice was panting over the speakers. ‘You murderous little bitch. My boys—’
‘Just do it,’ I said. ‘Get rid qf him and start thinking of a way to get us out of here.’
‘I want to play,’ she said, sulkily.
‘Games. Always games. Don’t you realize what’s happened?’
‘It’s just a dream, Iggy. Why do you always have to be so serious.’
‘Just a dream? We’re inside you. You’ve taken us all into—’
‘There’s no need to shout!’
‘Into your matrix.’
Her mouth, pausing in its task of grinding popcorn to pap, hung open; a long red fingernail picked at her fangs. There was a guy with an Italian accent. I was lying on something cold. Then the American comes in, yeah...’ The pulp mill of her teeth resumed work. ‘Then you’re real?’
‘I feel real, though Spalanzani says that maybe—’ Jack Morgenstern had begun to scream.
‘Shall we do it?’ said Primavera.
‘Get it over with. He knows about Titania. About the Seven Stars.’
‘Naughty, naughty, naughty!’ Primavera took hold of the remote.
‘Wait!’ said Morgenstern. Primavera’s finger hovered above the freezeframe. ‘We were never going to send you back to England. I said that just to scare you. To make you talk!’
‘Yeah, yeah, sure,’ I said. I looked past Morgenstern into the shadows of the execution chamber. ‘It’s so dark,’ I said. ‘Back home it was always so light. So white. So—’
‘Clean?’ said Primavera.
‘All those candles. And masks. And that thing in the centre—like some kind of gibbet.’
‘Medicine-heads,’ said Primavera, ‘have the aesthetic sense of retarded oysters. This is better. More gothic.’
‘Yeah,’ I said.
‘Can’t you hear me?’ screamed Morgenstern.
‘Try to think of yourself as a sim,’ I said. ‘Maybe Spalanzani’s right.’
‘We wanted information on Titania. The girls—they don’t talk. We thought you’d be different.’
‘If I’d known you were listening...’
‘We had to know where she hides, what kind of organization she’s got.’
‘Yeah, so you can zap her from space.’
‘No. You don’t understand.’ He panted and moaned, as if he were about to sell his soul to the moment, and would soon be defrocked, deflowered, disgraced. ‘We’re working with her.’
‘Slut,’ said Primavera.
I walked over to a TV and spread my palm across the close-up. ‘Jack. Be brave. Let’s hear no more. It’s beneath your dignity. Abdominal impalement’s not so bad.’
‘More like messy,’ said Primavera. ‘He hasn’t been trephinated.’
I tapped Morgenstern’s glass forehead. ‘Think of something nice. Green fields. The moon on the seashore. Your favourite cake. Mother.’ I turned to Primavera. ‘Ready?’
‘Don’t you dare get high and mighty about killing people ever again. Do you understand me, Ignatz Zwakh?’
‘But I know the secret,’ said Morgenstern, ‘the secret of the matrix!’
‘Big deal,’ said Primavera. ‘So do I. We all do. Every one of Titania’s dolls.’
‘You’ll never find him,’ he said. ‘Not alone. Not without me.’
‘Find who?�
� I said.
‘He means Dr Toxicophilous. He’s in here too. Sometimes I get a little peep of him just before I go to sleep.’
‘Toxicophilous has the key to the matrix,’ said Morgen-stem. ‘He can wake you up. He can let us out!’
‘So after we kill you we’ll go find him. I’ll dream us to Grosvenor Square.’ Primavera put down her popcorn and, propping chin in hand, adopted Thinker’s pose. ‘But you know, Iggy, he’s sort of got a point. Where do we start looking? I can’t dream us to a place I’ve never seen. I just can’t imagine it.’
‘But out there,’ I said, ‘there’s lots of things you haven’t seen. Half of London.’
‘Picture books. Lessons at school. I don’t know what. But I’ve seen them.’
I slapped my hand on top of the TV. The picture wobbled. ‘How does he know about this matrix business?’
‘It’s obvious, Iggy. He’s wrung it out of some doll. S’pose I’m not the first he’s captured.’
‘Titania told me,’ said Morgenstern. ‘Titania’s people. Voluntarily.’
Sure she did,’ I said. ‘How come Titania never told me?’
‘Titania,’ said Morgenstern, ‘has told me many things.’
‘Salaud.’
‘Yeah,’ said Primavera, ‘my queen wouldn’t be involved with the likes of you.’
‘I know Grosvenor Square,’ he said. ‘I was posted there years back. I can take you...’
Primavera blew out her cheeks and exhaled noisily. She got up, knocking over a pile of manga, and circulated amongst the debris of our three-year holiday in the Weird: broken chairs, broken fax, ripped, blood-crusted Y-fronts (trophies of the ‘interesting boys’ she had met), all covered in an undisturbed dust, the ash from the little volcanoes of our lives, and all lit by the phosphor-dot luminescence of the TVs, each one of which beamed Jack Morgenstern’s face, surmounted by a tiara of beer cans. A dying ad-sign outside the window filled the room with hiccups of light. Green, black, green, black. Bangkok-London, in all its noir packaging, its cheap glitz flashing across the sky, was ever near. Too near. Primavera snapped her fingers. ‘Guess I’ll have to kill you later,’ she muttered. With slick editing, the hydroponic garden reappeared. Primavera had dressed the three of us in -
‘Combat fatigues?’
‘I’m feeling mean,’ she said. She took Morgenstern by his lapels. ‘Maybe you’re flesh and blood, maybe you’re a bunch of pixels. But you know what I can do, so don’t fuck with me.’ A small audience of three half-humans and one nanoengineer peered about the door of the dome. ‘That goes for you too.’ Primavera took me to one side.
‘Is Toxicophilous really here?’ I said.
‘He’s in every Lilim. That’s what Titania told me. But it’s a secret. The “secret of the matrix”. Only dolls are supposed to know.’
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘Some girl’s blabbed. Morgenstern must really have used the thumbscrews. I’ll get him. You’ll see. He’s going to know what it’s like.’
‘Toxicophilous can help us?’
‘My ROM is all messed up, but Toxicophilous represents the programme that controls my files, my instincts. He’s my operating system. Perhaps he can sort things out.’ She looked out over the unreal city. ‘He’s out there somewhere; somewhere where the universe according to Primavera Bobinski becomes the Lilim ur-universe.’ Morgenstern was summoned to heel. ‘So take me to Gros-venor Square, slut.’
Morgenstern, comprehending, I think, that life and death depended on the morbid fancy of his erstwhile prisoner, composed himself and waved a deprecating hand over the rooftops. ‘This place is a g-goddamn mess. I might be able to spot it from the air. Trouble is, you just spiked my autogyro pilot.’
‘I can be really delinquent if you like,’ said Primavera. To me she added: ‘Seems I can do big-time magic again. In my dreams at least. I’ll fly the three of us over town until slutty here gets a fix on where this Grosvenor place is.’
‘What about me?’ said Kito. ‘What if you no come back?’
‘Don’t worry, Madame,’ said Primavera, ‘if there is an exit you can be sure I’ll flush you out.’
‘Where you go to, Uncle Jack?’ said a Pikadon.
‘You vanish, come back, go again,’ said the other. ‘Take us with you!’
‘Shut up,’ said Primavera, ‘we’re going to see a man who can re-boot me.’
‘Be careful,’ called Spalanzani, ‘be careful when you dream. The city is part of your memory, but we are realtime. So fragile! So soft!’
‘I’m not going to dream,’ said Primavera, ‘I’m going to fly.’ She put an arm about my waist.
‘Please,’ I said, ‘you know I don’t like flying.’
‘Don’t be a pin,’ she said, ‘this isn’t Marseille. We’re not on the run. Nobody’s going to shoot at us.’ She took hold of Morgenstern and flexed her knees. ‘Hold on, boys.’ With a little jump she was airborne; Morgenstern’s bulk immediately tipped her to her left. ‘Weee!’ Morgenstern began windmilling his free arm like an incompetent funambulist. Compensating (Morgenstern was twice my size), Primavera pitched, yawed, then regained her attitude. Where was the sick-bag? I closed my eyes to the dreamscape below.
Morgenstern must have followed my lead. ‘Start looking, slut!’ said Primavera. ‘We haven’t brought you along just so you can wimp out.’ His breath came fast and heavy. Primavera, her lips to my ear, said, ‘This guy got asthma or something?’ She began to shake Morgenstern up and down. ‘A little turbulence ahead, ladies and gentlemen.’ Our fatigues billowed as Primavera initiated a lazy dive; car horns, shouts, the rumpus of the streets, carried over the whistle of our descent.
‘Okay,’ shouted Morgenstern, ‘I’m looking, I’m looking! There’s Selfridges, so this must be Oxford Street. No. It’s a klong. But over there—that’s Nelson’s column. Piccadilly Circus. That monorail shouldn’t be there, and those temples... Wait. To your right. No. Straight on...’
‘This is hopeless,’ said Primavera, after Morgenstern had treated us to half an hour of manic directions. She brought us down in a thoroughfare that was half road, half klong, opposite an electronic cafe. ‘Let’s try the Net,’ she said, and swung through the cafe doors; the doors swung back, returning Primavera to the street.
‘No good?’ I said.
‘Best hamburger in town,’ she said, and walked away licking ketchup from her fingers.
Primavera put her head through the doors. ‘What’s keeping you two?’ Inside the cafe her face was everywhere: customers, cashiers, bag-ladies, mechanical beggar kids ... A seated row of Primaveras looked at us askance, then, with a synchronized flick of hair, returned their attention to their milk shakes.
‘Seems I’m the only person who lives in this city,’ said their original. ‘Except for the good doctor, that is.’
We walked up to a bank of transcoms. A Primavera clone in a two-piece business suit asked, ‘Person to person, station to station, or machine to machine?’ ‘Poison to poison,’ said Primavera.
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘Dr—’ Well, surrender my loins to... I didn’t know the guy’s real name. Nobody did. Over the years we’d grown superstitious about pronouncing it, regarding it as some kind of Tetragrammaton. ‘Toxicophilous,’ I said.
‘And if you can’t raise him,’ said Primavera, ‘try one of his household appliances.’
‘Just a moment please.’
The computer listed no such name.
Primavera gave Morgenstern a tired but sanguinary stare. ‘Listen, slut, you’re going to have to do better or—’ ‘Darling!’ A clone ran across the cafe and kissed Primavera on the cheek. ‘I haven’t seen you since school!’ ‘S’pose not.’
‘Toxicophilous,’ said Morgenstern (eager, I think, to escape another dose of Primavera’s in-flight antics), ‘you heard of him?’
‘Oh, him,’ said the clone.
‘We need to talk,’ I said.
’You newspaper people? I thought you knew all about—’
‘No,’ I said.
‘We’re oneironauts,’ said Primavera. ‘Aliens. Take us to your leader. Take us to Dr Toxicophilous.’
‘It’s a strange world,’ said the clone.
Slap! said Primavera’s hand. ‘Wake up!’
Impassive (though blood beaded her razored face), the clone said, ‘Try Soho. Try Frenchie’s.’
Morgenstern was through the doors.
‘Sure,’ I said to the clone, ‘thanks.’
‘Look out for the rippers!’
Outside, a tuk-tuk awaited us, a photocopy Primavera ready to take our fare. ‘Rippers?’ I said.
Primavera jumped aboard. ‘My brain cells say the craziest things.’
The three-wheeler buzzed through the crossbred streets, the intersection of a ‘cities of the world’ theme park where images of London half remembered from school books interwove with the symbols of our exile in Siam. From cabs, buses, water taxis and temples, from pubs, massage parlours, food stalls and theatres, night owls returned our stares, a thousand green eyes that held ours but a moment before refocusing on business, pleasure or the void.
Water was lapping at our feet. ‘Where we’re going,’ I asked the driver, ‘are there canals?’
‘Scared about getting your feet wet?’ she said. The water began to rise; black spray jetted through the tuk-tuk’s open body; we were penetrating the city’s aquapoli-tan heart. Upstairs, where the money lived, high above the smog in air-filtered splendour, the lights of penthouse condos shone like the gold bar of heaven. How many rich bitch Primaveras leaned out? We had come to save them. Where were the streamers, the fireworks, the cheers?
Stench of klongs; small-hour exhaustion; decay. This was dollspace. Machine consciousness. Impure, like all thought, but more massive than the consciousness of mankind, its constituents were psychons of iron, glass and steel, a neon-bright vortex of complex simplicity from which rose the aleatory music that so bewitched the world. Music that was solid, dimensional; music that was sinew, muscle, physique.
‘New to town?’ said the driver.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Business trip.’
Dead Girls, Dead Boys, Dead Things Page 13
