Someone passes me a fluorescent blue drink, Ottoman Ice, and I down it in one hit.
He continues to tell his stories but his arm is around my neck and I keep thinking to myself: isn’t this what you came for, isn’t time with Dany what you wanted?
The Ottoman Ice has rapture in it, and before long everything has that tinge of silver, those floating motes of light dancing around the room like emblems of joy. I have another and the waves of heat begin to course up and down my body.
“Are you his brother? You look just like him,” one of the skip-girls asks me. They’re not that quick, skip-girls.
“What’s your name?” I say.
“Sandy.”
All the skip-girls have names like that: Sandy, Cherry, Peta, Ruby. Her lips are full and red and suddenly her little cherubic face sets off some reaction in my stomach. Skip-girls, I think, are gorgeous.
The Ottoman Ice no longer burns in my throat. Now it’s just a soft warmth, as if my throat is adjusting itself to the heat emanating from my body. Through a window on my left the mini-desert stretches out and in the distance I can see a little oasis.
“Can you see that?” I say, but there’s no one beside me. Everyone is at a table about ten feet away. When did we arrive at the observation deck? I wonder. I join them at the table. Dany is still entertaining: he’s charismatic, just as I imagined.
“And there, on the asteroid,” he says, “was what looked like a complex machine or engine, too structured to be natural, I swear. But how much fuel did we have? Who knew? Let’s go down, I said. I mean, here we were, how many light years from home, and there, within arm’s reach is evidence of alien civilisation. Let’s go, I said. Take it now, seize our chance. No, said the captain. Yes, said I. No, he said. When else will we get this chance? I said. We can’t risk it, said the captain. So that was that.” He grins his childlike grin.
Breaths of amazement. I look out over the desert again, not believing a word of it and suddenly we’re in the Turkish steam baths and soaking everything up and my body is on fire. All I can do is lie there, head back as the steam invades my body and I feel like I’m somehow dissolving and becoming the water and the water is me and I’m suddenly aware of Dany above me leaning down and he says, “Look, I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry.” He touches my shoulder and then walks off quickly and Sandy is looking at me from the sofa as I look over to the Towers from Dany’s penthouse while Christy and Dany are in the bedroom next door.
“You skip-girls,” I say. “You’re so full of life.” I notice her lips again, and this time the freckles on her little round cheeks. She must be in her early twenties, like most skip-girls employed to advertise the Tower, to give it a sense of glamour and sex. She looks out over the city and yawns.
“Do you and Christy work tandem?”
She ignores me and walks to the window. She looks across at the opposite Tower. “It’s amazing, isn’t it? That over there, there’s a whole ’nother city, and that people don’t ever have to leave if they don’t want to. A whole world.”
I walk up behind her, and there are little muscles outlined just so on her back, perfect, as if sculpted from marble.
“I’ve been to all of them,” I say, “every Tower.”
“Wow.”
From the bedroom, I can hear a high-pitched whining, and then I think I hear Christy say, “Oh, yes, that.”
“Each one has my own little mark,” I say. “Soundscape Design. I’m part of the Soundscape Design Team.”
“Really?” Her eyes flicker with interest for a moment.
“Well, you know, part of the team.”
I’m looking down at her and have an urge to lean forward and touch her hair, metallic green and artificial, a typical mark of a skip-girl.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” she says, and she walks swiftly across to the bedroom and is gone. I wait for five minutes and then let myself out.
The next day I spend at home, occasionally staring at my computers and synths, turning them on, pretending I’m going to compose. But it’s too hard and my head feels like it’s been squeezed like a lemon. Oh no, I think, I’m getting old. Once I would have been fine on a day like today, but now my body has perfected the art of sabotage. I wander around distracted, moving from thing to thing, unable to settle. The synths sit in the corner of the room accusingly.
In the afternoon the phone rings and I shuffle towards it, press the button.
“So, what’s he like?” I can see Leila leaning forward, so she can see my expression more clearly on the screen.
“I don’t know.”
“Oh, come on, what’s he like?”
“He’s a great storyteller, I guess. I mean, he had a fan-club all around. You know, charismatic, I guess, kept everyone mesmerised.” I think of Sandy the skip-girl and her full lips, her cherubic face, her metallic hair. Some feeling washes over me that I’d prefer not to acknowledge.
“Is he immature? I bet he’s immature.”
“I don’t know.”
“Christ, Marek, listen to you. It’s always the same with you. You’re still under his spell.”
“I guess he’s young.”
“He must be. He left when he was young.”
“It’s like looking at me, only fifteen years ago... really, like looking back in time. I am, you know, older than him.”
“Yeah: the bastard.” Leila spits the words with satisfaction.
“He’s okay.”
“You were too young when he left. I was what, eight? You, though, you were too young. That’s your problem. That’s why you can’t see.”
“He used to play with us though, remember? He used to build things with us, little ships that flew through the air, orbited that old planet we had hanging in our room. Remember that?”
Leila grimaces a moment. “He hit mum. Remember that? He hit mum.”
“She loved him. She waited for him all her life.”
“You’re both as bad as each other. Both of you. Look where it got her, Marek.”
“You’re the one calling to find out.”
“Fine. Listen, gotta go. Why don’t you come over for dinner?”
But I’m off the phone and I put Mozart on with the volume up. I close my eyes and lean back in the chair as the chorus comes in: Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.
I meet Dany again the following week up in the Towers. His makeup is gone, he is in the latest fashion – as far as I can tell – all straight sharp lines and black, of course. It’s always black.
“Have you seen this holographic porn?” he asks. “It’s amazing, really, I mean, God.”
I lean from one foot to the other, wondering what to say.
“God,” he says, “some of those girls. Some of those positions.” He shakes his head.
To change the subject I say, “Remember we used to play with little ships that flew around a toy planet?”
He cocks his head. “Do you still have those?”
I nod.
“Christ, I loved those little things,” he says.
“You can come to my place and see them if you want.”
“No, can’t. I’ve got to get ready.”
“What for?”
“We’re going back.”
“Back?”
“The machine. We’re supposed to examine the alien machine.”
“But there is no machine,” I say, calling his bluff.
He shakes his head for a second, then adds, “No, you’re right. There isn’t.” He walks into the bedroom and I am left shifting my balance from foot to foot. Then he’s back again: “Here, I have something for you: I brought it back for her, but now I want you to have it. It’s from Centauri.” He leans over and passes me a piece of strange, black swirling rock, attached to a chain, alien and beautiful.
“She died of cancer, you know. Even now cancer takes people.” I hold the rock in my hand, and now I want to cry again, but in a different way. I want to reach out to him.
; “Wanna go to a strip show?”
“Uh, I don’t know.”
“I know! I know just the place: baths! That’s one thing you miss in space: real water to float in. Come on.”
So I follow him to the elevator, and we rise, past the eighteen hundreds, nineteen hundreds, and then at twenty-two hundred we’re off the elevator and into the cavernous deck of the shuttle-port. Shuttles taxi around like strange beetles threatening to burst into flight at any moment. Others line a far wall at an angle.
“What are we doing?”
“We’re going to Holsen’s Tower, north.”
“By shuttle?”
“Yep.”
There is a line of taxis along the walkway and Dany presses a button, there’s a quick sound as the pressurised door opens – shhht – and we hop in.
The shuttle is a lot smaller on the inside than I imagined, only one long seat facing forward, a series of panels across the back of the seat in front. A glass window so we can see the driver, who has great rolls of fat at the back of his head and neck. The taxi shuttles across the tarmac, turns left, and I can see the runway, which opens out into the clear blue of the sky. We sit for a moment and another shuttle emerges slightly in front of us, lines itself up with the runway, stops for a minute and then suddenly its burners are a deep red, the air behind it shimmers, and it is gone.
Our taxi starts to shudder and I take a gasp of breath: surely we’re not going to be able to fly. We’ll get to the end of the runway and plummet to our deaths. This taxi, I realise, will crash. This is the one, the one out of a million that will break down in mid-flight, lose power, send us to our deaths. The unbelievable shuddering as we power along the runway confirms this, and I close my eyes. Suddenly the shuddering stops and I open them again, afraid of what I might see, and sure enough, beneath us the great metropolis lies like a model of itself. I gasp. Good God, there’s nothing holding us up.
“You can let go of my hand now.” Dany laughs.
“This is the first time I’ve flown.”
“It’s all right. It’ll be all right.” He gives my hand a squeeze and I feel calmer.
“Look,” he says. “Look at the city off there in the distance. Isn’t it beautiful? Like a ruined civilisation.”
The little city does look like an ancient ruin. As if it has been through a storm that left some of the weaker buildings as rubble, or just a few walls surrounding a mess, while others it stripped of their outer layer, leaving their mottled undercoats visible.
“I have a son down there.”
“Really? What’s his name?”
“Max.”
“You didn’t want to give him a Czech name? Keep your mother’s tradition?”
“No. We’re not Czechs anymore. Would you like to meet him?”
He sits for a while in silence, and then says, “You know, I think I would.”
Before long we’re north of the city and then into another Tower and the flight is over. Down in the eleven hundreds is Japantown and I find myself lying in a steaming bath, a sparse garden surrounding me and a pot of green tea just out of arm’s reach so I have to lift myself out of the bath to pour it. The roof is camouflaged and gives the impression of being sky. Thankfully there is no view of the city whatsoever. There are no sounds at all. Just silence – the Japanese really know how to do it.
“The silence is funny,” I say. “The Towers are almost all soundscaped.”
“Really.”
“Yep. That’s what I do. Soundscaping.”
“I see.”
“Yeah, wanted to be a musician, but you know. Soundscaping’s a good job. Keeps me afloat.”
“So you compromised.”
“No. I just, you know, you have to be realistic.”
“Christ, Marek.”
“What’s so fucking bad about that?”
“That sort of realism isn’t for me.”
I pull myself out of the bath to pour more tea and wonder, annoyed: why didn’t I pull the pot closer last time?
We sit in silence for quite a while and I don’t know, perhaps it’s the silence, or the beauty of the garden, or the heat of the bath, but suddenly I begin to cry.
“Hey buddy, what’s wrong?”
I don’t say anything for a while, and then manage to get out between the sobs: “I’ve made some terrible mistakes, in my life, Dad. I’ve made some bad mistakes.”
Leila lives at the crest of a hill, and her husband, George, is a fitness fanatic with a shaven head. George invested in the Towers, or his parents did, and now they live in a mansion overlooking the aqua sea. They have two boats and three cars and a swimming pool in a basement underneath their house. “The sea,” George always says, “is for looking at, not swimming in.” At those times I want to break his teeth, but I always nod and smile and say, “Hey, who would swim in the sea nowadays? I mean, with all that pollution.” George works out and has huge muscles. He and Leila have one child, about three years old, whose name I can’t remember. George and Leila have everything.
The dinner is tiny and served on gigantic white plates: a piece of unidentified meat with two red slivers of what I take to be capsicum on one side.
“A work of art,” I say.
“Don’t be rude,” says Leila.
“He’s not,” says George, “He said it was a work of art.”
“A pure work of art,” I say to annoy Leila.
The kid starts crying at the end of the table.
“Here sweetie,” says Leila, and she reaches over to give him a drink. He keeps crying.
“Listen to ’im,” says George.
“I am,” I say.
“All day,” says George.
“Oh, shut up,” says Leila.
“What’s his name?” I say.
But Leila continues at George, “Like you’d know. I’m the one here all bloody day.”
“What’s his name?”
Leila turns to me. “Families,” she says, “take a lot of energy. You’ll know—”
But I cut her off, “That’s because you had him when you were too old.”
She looks as if she’s been slapped and I turn to my meal with satisfaction.
A moment later she says to me, “So did you. You had Max too old.”
Now it’s my turn to look shocked. No matter how hard I try, I know I look crestfallen. I look back to Leila and she meets my eye. The side of her mouth twitches and suddenly we’re both laughing at ourselves.
“You really should meet up with Dany, you know,” I say.
“I can’t. I just can’t.”
I reach over and place my hand over hers. “You should face him. You know. Say what should be said.”
“Is that what you’re going to do?”
“Yes. I think so. Yes.”
Before Mum died she looked an impossible colour, a kind of composite grey-orange. She was swollen, but in her inimitable way acted as if it was all some kind of joke.
“Look at me,” she said, “I’m a fish from the deep sea,” and she opened and closed her mouth and we all laughed.
I want to tell Dany something about Mum now, as we head to the city, but some part of me holds back. I know, somehow, that he’s not equipped to cope with it. He is, after all, in his early twenties. He’s young, I tell myself.
A minute later and we’re off the monorail together and Dany turns to me and says, “Jesus, look at this place. What have they done to the city?” I keep my eyes focused on the refuse: empty packages, indeterminate plastic things, toilet paper, but Dany, of course, doesn’t know about the street-sellers and suddenly there are three kids around us.
“Bliss, bliss?”
“It’s not really bliss though, is it?” Dany says.
“It is, swear brother, purest I eva had meself. Look mister, look at me eyes.”
“You can get your eyes wide like that with all sorts of poisons,” says Dany, enjoying the debate.
When we arrive at the building I turn to the kid and say, “Okay
, you can fuck off now.”
“Aw mister, it’s good stuff,” one of the little kids says but they leave us alone as we scale the stairs. Three sets of stairs, four doors along the walkway. I knock. Again there is shuffling behind the door and then it opens quicker than I expected. Genie stands there, disappointment written on her face.
“Oh, it’s you, hi.” She says, then notices Dany and quietly adds, as if he’s not there, “My God, Marek, he looks just like you when we met. My god, he’s so beautiful.”
“Can we come in?”
She opens the door.
“Where’s Rick?”
“That bastard.”
Dany sweeps Max up from the corner and says, “Hello grubby-chubby.” Max grins, revealing a little tooth and letting out another big dribble to join the one connecting his chin and chest.
“I’m moving out of this place soon,” says Genie, sweeping back her limp mousy hair, only to have it fall back across her forehead, another symbol of the world’s resistance to her desires.
“I’m amazed you stayed so long,” I say, looking over to Dany and Max, who are playing with a toy that hovers in the air but avoids being caught when you reach out to it. Both have child-like expressions on their faces.
Genie looks over and says again, quietly, “amazing.”
“I’m thinking of going back and being a musician,” I say.
“Oh yeah.”
“No, really.”
Genie looks away from Dany and Max to me. “God, Marek. It would have been alright if you had really wanted to play music, but you always sat in that grey zone your whole life. You didn’t really try music, you always held onto it so you wouldn’t try anything else.”
“The openings were never there; you have to be lucky.”
“You were never ready, never good enough. You never wanted to work at it.”
“Jesus, Genie, you don’t understand how hard it is.”
She reaches over and takes my hand, and just looks at me.
After a moment I say, “I’ll try to come more often.”
“You won’t though, you know you won’t.”
There’s nothing else for me to say, standing there looking back and forth at the one real love of my life and the thin blond hair of my son, as he sits comfortably on Dany’s lap. Her hand feels soft in mine.
The Time Traveller's Almanac Page 139
