by Jeff Noon
“Mean anything to you?”
“Angelcroft. Silhouette… No. Nothing.” He placed the photograph on the desk. “I don’t care for these things, Nyquist. I just want my daughter back.”
“That’s in hand.”
“Is there something you’re not telling me?”
Nyquist looked at him. “That’s funny. I could ask the same question.”
Bale stood up from his desk. “I won’t be made fun of.”
Nyquist picked up the photograph. “I’ll need to speak with her mother.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“Let me judge that.”
“Now listen. Don’t overstep the mark.”
“Sometimes you have to, Mr Bale. If you want results.”
“My wife Catherine… I’m afraid she rarely leaves Nocturna.” He smiled. “And now, I have important matters to attend to.”
Nyquist didn’t move. He said, “You’re not asking the right questions.”
“What?”
“About Eleanor. You’re not asking me how she is.”
A moment went by. Bale stared at Nyquist, his eyes unblinking, his smoothed-out face held still. His lips hardly moved as he spoke.
“I’ve a good mind to have you–”
“Guess what? I’m not the problem.”
Patrick Bale turned away. He moved over towards the office window and looked out at his view of the city. Nyquist followed him. Through the tinted glass they both gazed in silence at the vast network of lamps – all of different shapes, sizes and colours – that stretched outward from some upper floor, forming the neon sky. Four flights below, Nyquist could see the cars moving sluggishly along the street amid the constant sparkle of the city’s lower levels.
Bale spoke firmly. “This city is a dynamo. It never stops turning, never stops working. And because of this, Dayzone constantly needs more glow, more heat, more power. But most of all it needs more time. Different kinds of time. A time for every single occasion, mood and desire. The people demand it. And we here at the Ariadne Centre have to administer that time as we see fit.” It sounded like a well-designed machine was speaking. “We have two hundred and thirty-five new timelines coming up for purchase. Many parties are putting in their applications. Some of them are the usual options, but many are quite startling in their originality.” He turned to face Nyquist, his voice growing more insistent; the machine in overdrive. “This is my chosen work. Until the city slows to a standstill, here I stand.” His eyes glistened with love. “I will lead the people through the web of their own confusion, offering hope. Bringing a few more hours and minutes and seconds into their lives.”
Nyquist smiled. “Nice speech. You’re laying down the rules by which the city lives.”
“We have to have rules.”
“And you’re making a lot of money from this.”
“Where is this going, Nyquist?”
“Some people get messed up by time. Seriously damaged.”
“Are you talking about Eleanor?”
“I’m seeing it more and more, lots of people. Chronostasis, they call it.”
“We all have to make sacrifices.”
Nyquist was taken aback by the statement. “What are you saying?”
“Our city is a very special place, an experiment in living, if you will. We are splitting time into its constituent pieces and rebuilding it from the ground up. That takes courage and skill, and great desire. The people’s desire that the day might last forever.”
“And nevermind who gets hurt?”
Bale blinked. “We take all necessary precautions. But you know, there are many pirates out there, bootleggers with their cheap homemade timelines. That’s where the danger lies. Am I to blame if people misuse the products?”
Nyquist looked around the office. Smiling a little, he said, “People are predicting another time crash.”
“These so-called experts–”
“We only just survived the last one.”
Bale held his breath. “Do you think this job comes easily to me? Do you?”
Nyquist shrugged.
Bale’s voice darkened. “The poet Tennyson described time as a ‘maniac scattering dust’. But what else can I do? What else?” He turned to look directly at Nyquist, his eyes filling with an emotion so icy cold it was hardly comprehensible.
Then his gaze lowered as he noticed a few marks of dark red on Nyquist’s shirtfront. “What is that? Blood? You have blood on your clothes…”
“That’s right. Your daughter’s blood.”
“What? She’s been injured?”
“She did it herself.”
Bale’s expression changed around the eyes; they creased at the corners, revealing a good few lines that the latest medical procedure had somehow missed. The first true emotion. Nyquist felt he was rubbing sandpaper on a wound when he pressed forward, saying, “Your daughter’s suffering. She’s not happy.”
“Not happy?”
“I don’t know what it is, Mr Bale, that’s made her run away. But my god, that girl is running.”
The chief executive shook his head a few times before locking his gaze onto Nyquist. The ever-changing colours of the city painted his face with flickering patterns. Seconds passed, one by one by one. Patrick Bale closed his eyes tight. When he opened them again a moment later, his face had gained full control of itself.
“I want my daughter found.” The words came out in a steady rhythm, the machine back in charge. “Do this for me, if you will. Nothing else matters.”
Clocks and Shadows
Nyquist’s office was situated in the area of Dayzone designated as Precinct Nine, otherwise known as Body Heat. Long ago it had been a thriving tourist spot for visitors from the outside world. From such heights it had drifted down-market to become the sex trade district. Later still, some of the artists had migrated over from their usual quarter to create this strange hybrid zone. Nyquist liked the feel of it, when he was out of the office anyway; the way the streets were flooded with various shades of red lighting effects, and the intense feeling of life such places can give off, human existence at the raw edges of the flesh. There were always rumours of the council wanting to clean the area up, but for now the artistic and the sexually bizarre mingled and prevailed.
After parking the car in his regular place Nyquist walked back along the high street. All the usual suspects were out and about: the street corner skin poets, alongside models and actresses specialising in the patterns of heat and light across the semi-naked human form. The avant-garde tanning merchants had set up shop on the paved boulevard, their mirrors, glass jars and pasting blades radiant with flashes of scarlet light. A little further along a troupe of actors showed off their illuminated scenes featuring the god Helios and his golden chariot. There was a scraping noise from above and Nyquist looked up to see a gang of bulb monkeys hard at work. In general, the poorer the district, the closer to the street the neon sky was; so here it was easy to make out the operatives. They were dressed in tight, heat-resistant outfits, with goggles to protect their eyes, and they carried their tools and a supply of new bulbs and other electrical parts in canvas bags strapped around their bodies. Their agility was always a pleasure to watch as they clung to the walls and the metalwork with their hooks, safety ropes and suckers, and then scrambled upside down across the canopy of lamps like restless spiders at their work.
Nyquist turned down an alleyway and entered a shop called Diverse Pleasures. Crystal chandeliers hung down from the ceiling and many objects of interest and curiosity were arranged on shelves: voodoo dolls, snake and bird skulls, old maps of the city showing the ever increasing spread of lights, crucifixes, antique gramophones, weird surgical instruments and the like. The sexual accessories for which the shop was most famous were hardly distinguishable from some of the other more innocent devices on display. A slatted blind covered the window and the beams of light that found their way inside patterned the dusty air into grey and white stripes. From every part
of the store there came the sound of ticking, from wall clocks, from clockwork dolls and mechanical devices, from the many fob watches dangling by their gold and silver chains. Nyquist always felt that he was walking inside a machine designed only to tick and to chime.
The shop was run by the Lindseys, a married couple in their sixties.
“Johnny, my dear!” cried Alana Lindsey. “Where have you been hiding yourself for so long a time?”
Nyquist placed the green tartan bag on the counter. “Nocturna,” he answered.
“Oh, you stay too long nightside and it eats into your soul. We hardly go there at all these days.”
Nyquist rubbed at his eyes in response.
“Have you been sleeping properly?”
“A few hours here and there.” This was the truth.
She pursed her lips. “You should take more care of your days and your nights, Johnny. Make sure you know which is which, and where one ends and the other begins. And then make a choice!”
Nyquist nodded. “That’s good advice.” He reached into the bag to pull out the yellow cloth with its hidden contents. “Any idea what this is?”
Alana looked on as the strange figurine was revealed. She called for her husband from the back room and Jude Lindsey appeared instantly, dressed in his usual bright array of clothing. “Now let us see,” he muttered, “what have we got here?” Carefully, he picked up the sculpted leather figure, turning it this way and that in the beam of an angled lamp.
“Any ideas?” Nyquist asked.
Jude nodded. “Of course. It’s a wayang kulit.”
“A what?”
“A shadow puppet. As used in the Javanese theatre.”
Nyquist knew only a little about the subject. “This is from Java?”
“No, no,” Jude answered. “This is not one of the traditional characters, not that I have ever seen. But well done, mind. Oh yes, nicely crafted. Usually they will have sticks attached here, and here, on the arms and neck, see, so the puppeteer can make them walk and run and leap and pray, as needed.”
Alana pulled a small hardback book from a shelf, an old traveller’s diary, which she opened out on the counter. She tapped one of her long red fingernails against a sepia photograph. Nyquist studied the image: a large sheet of white cloth strung on poles, with some kind of lighting source behind, and the mysterious puppets seen in action against the cloth, where they appeared as shadows. Two dark figures faced each other, either about to fight or to dance. It was a startling image but he couldn’t work out why the missing girl should have such a puppet in her bag.
Jude offered to lend him the book. Nyquist thanked them both.
“Anything else, Johnny?” Alana asked.
“Yes.” He took off his wristwatch and handed it to her. “Have a quick look at this, would you?”
“You really should have a new timepiece by now.” She placed a watchmaker’s eyeglass to her right eye, holding it in place with a practised squeeze of her brow and cheek muscles. “Well, it looks all right. It’s ticking!”
“I’m having trouble with it.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“It’s losing time. Maybe the hands are loose.”
“Yes, maybe. I can tighten them easily enough, but let me see…”
Alana prized off the back of the watch and peered inside. But as she did so a strange thing happened: a tiny, tiny grey cloud rose from the brass workings. It scattered in the air.
“What the hell was that?” Nyquist asked.
“Dust, perhaps.”
“It looked more like smoke,” her husband said. “Or mist, even.”
“But I keep it clean. Sparkling.”
“We know you do, Johnny.”
“It was my father’s.”
“We know, we know. But still…” She held the wristwatch up in disgust. “Look at it! Tarnished, the strap almost broken, the face cracked, the minute hand slightly bent. And there are some very nice chronometers on sale, new ones just in.”
It was suddenly too hot in the shop. “This is fine.” Nyquist picked up the wristwatch, clicking the back in place himself.
Alana made one last sales pitch. “Fully adjustable, Johnny! Up to fifty different timelines.”
“I’m fine. Really.”
Again Nyquist thanked the Lindseys for their help and for the loan of the book, then made his way to the door. He paused outside to get his breath back, and to wipe the sweat away from his eyes. Thankfully, it was only a short distance to his office on Lower Flare Street. He walked up the steps of the crumbling apartment block. The manager, a little man called Queeps, was sitting in his booth on the ground floor. He was always there, nested in the glass chamber, watching a small rickety television set. He couldn’t be avoided.
“Ah. Mr Nyquist! Yes? Come here, please. Thank you.”
Nyquist moved to the cubicle. Animated clocks danced on the television’s screen as a lovely voice soothed the viewer: Where would we be without lovely Old Mother’s Time? The family’s favourite since way back when. The clocks skipped across sunlit monochrome fields. Queeps cursed at the advert. “Such rubbish! Now this…” He pointed to a carriage clock on a shelf. “This is my only time. Every morning I set it, precisely, from the beeps on the radio. You see? Tick, tick, tick! And then I never change my time, not ever, not until I go home to Nocturna.”
“I didn’t know you had a home,” Nyquist said. “I thought you lived here, in the booth.”
Queeps waved the remark aside. “How it goes, one time for daylight, and one time for night. You should try the same, Mr Nyquist. Instead of all this hopping about from one line to another. And maybe you wouldn’t look so tired then, no? Because you know what they say…”
“I don’t, actually.”
“…One of these days you’re going to fall right off the edge of the clock. And then what, eh? Then what?”
Nyquist sighed. “What do you want?”
“Rent. Very much overdue.”
“It’s been a bad month.”
“A bad month. A bad week, bad hour, bad minute, a bad second. Exactly the same for everybody. But you pay, soon please.”
The clocks started to sing on the screen. Nyquist blinked and yawned.
“You know,” Queeps continued, “you should leave this city, if it troubles you so very much.”
“I can’t. I can’t do that.”
“Well then. Yes. We will see what happens to you.”
Nyquist made his usual promises and then took the creaking elevator up to the third floor. The wording on his office door read, John Henry Nyquist, Discreet Investigations. He’d debated over the extra cost of the word Henry, but decided it made him sound more reliable. Little good it did him. He clicked the room lights on as he entered the cramped space: a small couch bed, a desk, a typewriter, a couple of chairs, a rusty filing cabinet. The curtains were drawn across the one window, the heavy cloth coloured by slowly moving shapes. Over the years Nyquist had started to feel indifferent towards this place. Somewhere to rest, somewhere to change, to sleep if need be, a telephone line for any stray business. That was it. He picked up the collected mail of the last week or so. The usual bills and offers of “amazing timelines unlike any others ever experienced!” No cheques, no cash. He switched on the ceiling fan, for all the good the slowly moving blades did. Then he poured himself a shot of whisky, gazing at the map of the city as he took his first drink. The map was large scale, pinned to the wall opposite the window. He had bought it when he had first moved into the office. Such hopes. His mother had died when he was very young, and his father, beset by grief at his wife’s death, had struggled to bring his son up alone. Nyquist wanted only to escape from such feelings, to find his own way in life. He had envisioned himself travelling around the city, this strange and beautiful metropolis, the whole vast array of it. He had spent too many years of his younger life drifting from job to lousy job, too long on the run. This new endeavour would give his life purpose, that was the plan: taking pic
tures of errant spouses, recovering stolen goods, digging the dirt, finding runaways, protecting the weak. Helping people out when the police had pulled up short or refused to even start looking. Nothing much, but he was out there on the streets anyway; he had the wherewithal and the muscle and the smarts, and over the years the city had entered his bloodstream, building a map inside his psyche. He might as well do some good by it. Sure, call it that: some good.
Life passes. Time passes. How long ago was it now, when he had first started out? Six years, seven years? More? No, he could not remember. Increasingly, the past was a nebulous substance, flowing and ebbing in his mind.
Such dreams, such desires…
He sat at the desk and slotted a sheet of paper into the typewriter and, one finger at a time, hit the keys:
* * *
THE ELEANOR BALE CASE
* * *
He stared at the blank space below the title, thinking he would make a list of everything he knew, all the pertinent facts. Instead, his mind wandered. His ex-wife had bought him this typewriter when he’d first started the business. He’d written his final letter to her on it: a long, rambling farewell.
He groaned in frustration and took another sip of whisky as he looked at the wall clock above the map. He looked from there to his wristwatch; thankfully, the hands were clearly seen now. But of course the two timepieces were out of sync. He picked up the telephone, dialling a three-letter code. The young woman’s soothing voice spoke to him: “…it will be twelve minutes past nine, and twenty seconds. This week’s time is brought to you courtesy of…” Nyquist replaced the receiver. He turned the winder of his watch, adjusting it to this new time. He couldn’t tell if he was jumping forward or back, but that mattered little. It was good to get yourself fixed every so often to one of the official timelines. He walked over to the window, drawing back the curtain. The colours flooded his room.
Nyquist’s office was situated above the skyline for this particular part of the city. This was the fate of the cheaper rents. Consequently, the view from the window was filled from frame to frame, top to bottom, with a complex jumble of lights. The bulbs pressed up against the glass. There were many colours on display, some of the expected red of the streets of Body Heat, others revealing the hues of a previous history: bright green, sizzling orange, pure white, sky blue, dazzling yellow. Some of the bulbs, a few, had burnt out already. He stared at the patches of darkness. He couldn’t help thinking about what Queeps had said, about the dangers of adjusting his watch too many times.
