Ink

by Hal Duncan

  “Double it,” he says.

  “You can't be serious.”

  “Serious?” he says. “I'm fucking solemn. I'm not doing this for the glory.”

  It's not the money either really; in the end it's just survival. He hates these people; he works for them only because it suits him here and now. Joey's a Futurist at heart, utterly committed to a belief in absolutely nothing; he just happened to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time, among merchants and ministers like this who'll never really understand the cold calculus of survival. It's a pity. In another world, another universe, he might have been the man who put the bullet in the back of Stalin's head.

  The Minister can't help glancing down into the briefcase, wiping the sweat from his top lip.

  “You understand that… if you fail…”

  “Jack Flash is just another killer,” he says. “We've already won.”

  And stretching his mind leisurely out of his body, feeling for a signal in the ether, Joey Narcosis wonders where the sad psychotic fuckwit is right now.

  A Raging Bull of Sorrow

  A cyclist tringalings his bell as he veers past the wagon, rattling rickety in front of us and round a corner into a crowd that's streaming through the locked-down gates and turnstiles of a factory compound. The shadow of the castle lours over everything here, cooling air that should be Mediterranean-warm.

  “You old fox,” I whisper, reading through the script. “Even when you're using the most reasonable of terms, you're using them to praise the power of disorder.”

  “My dear boy, the Scaramouche will always give you sound advice. He's just trying to bring us all back down to earth … and trying not to do so in one reckless leap into the great abyss. He's a traditionalist.”

  Joey shakes his head at the insanity of this whole venture. He climbs the ladder up onto the wagon roof and stands there, balanced, looking grimly at the castle that is getting ever nearer. He's never had much time for kings or castles, Joey, and his moods get worse each gig we play.

  “They'll never fucking buy it, Guy,” he says.

  “Joey, my boy, so what if Harlequin is not a god? We simply say he is. It is a splendid fraud. Call him the son of Simile, and her the mother of a god—all these grandiose terms, I'm sure they'll be applauded.”

  “—and be lauded. Come,” says Don as Pantaloon, advancing toward Pierrot across the stage. “Let me crown your head with ivy. Come and join us in devotion to the spirit of delirium and drink.”

  Don bumbles, stumbling on his beard as he attempts to put the crown of leaves on Joey's head and, staggering forward to the edge of the stage, he flaps his arms to get his balance back. The crown flies through the air and lands on the Duke's head instead. He pulls it off and tears it up, but the Princess is laughing so he smiles weakly, gives a shrug to show that he's a sport, slow-claps the slapstick jestery. A quiet ripple of amusement is allowed around the court.

  Pantaloon spins round on one foot, grabbing at Pierrot's black tie for balance. He still holds it, pulling Joey closer as he puffs his chest and huffs:

  “Forget this hubris and remember the great hunter once dismembered by the savage hounds he'd reared himself, ripped into pieces in the fields because he boasted that he was a better hunter than—”

  “Get your hands off! Go to your crazy rites and don't infect me with your madness! I swear, I'll bring a reckoning upon the man who teaches this insanity.”

  Pierrot shoves him away and spins to call on all of his imaginary armies out of sight offstage. He fixes me with piercing eyes, something to focus on and rage at. I stick my tongue out.

  ——

  “You! You!” rages Pierrot. “Go now and find if he has any space that he holds sacred. Go and wrench it from its base with crowbars, turn the whole place upside down, and throw it into utter chaos, throw his garlands to the hurricane's winds. That will show him.”

  Offstage, I start a rat-a-tat-tat upon a drum, with one hand—finger and thumb—while with the other hand I rumble thunder on a sheet of thin aluminum, the quiet threat of a storm arising. Jack tucks his Harlequin wand under his arm, goose-steps across the roof, as Joey stalks the stage, his fist clenched, shaking in a mockery of pomp and rage. A lock of his long hair falls down over his face; his fingers rake it back into its place.

  “The rest of you sweep through the countryside,” says Joey. “Find this mincing stranger who infects our women with desire, setting all marriage vows on fire. And if you catch him, bring him here to me, in chains. I'll see him stoned. I'll bring him down. He'll wish he'd never brought his revels to my town.”

  “You fool,” says Scaramouche, but quietly, aside. “You don't know what you're doing here today. You always have been something of a dick. Now you are, sad to say, a raving lunatic.”

  He takes Don by the arm.

  “Come, Pantaloon. Let's get out of his way. All we can do now here is pray pray for this man with his tempestuous temper, and pray for the city that it doesn't suffer in his tragedy. Come, take your ivy staff and follow me. Steady, old boy—don't want the two of us old fools to fall. Come, we must give our god his dues, this Harlequin, the son of Sooth.”

  He shakes his head and slips an arm around Don's shoulder.

  “My old friend, I fear that your King Pierrot will bring a raging bull of sorrow to your house. A premonition? No, I judge him by his acts and his intentions. Words so foolish show him for a fool.”

  RAT RACE OR RAT TRAP

  The Minister loosens his tie, wiping his sweating palms on it, mouth dry, heart pounding in his chest, looking across the hotel room at the young hustler handcuffed to the bed, and—

  Joey unlatches his mind, brings it back to the here and now of the bridge and the Rookery louring close beside him. He files the Minister's grubby little secret away for future reference; it's leverage that might come in useful, but right now he has a Jack to track.

  He takes a little pillbox from his pocket, opens it and downs a Smiley. The buzz is already fading from the last one—popped just before the Minister's visit— and he'll need to stay in the zone for this job, keep the volume of his own emotions turned down nice and low so he can pick up the signals in the ether. In the crime scene.

  The sentry has been propped against a tree, legs crossed, arms folded, hat down over his eyes like the sombrero of a sleeping Mexican. Just as a finishing touch, Joey assumes, a thin cigarette dangles from his mouth. He pulls it out and sniffs it—cannabis, tobacco, and a scent something like aniseed or licorice. Ouzo. Smells like Jack, all right. He goes through the man's pockets, looking for other anomalies, things that don't belong there. A wallet, a set of keys, some change, a matchbook.

  He rubs the matchbook between thumb and finger, feeling for the psychic taint, the touch of a familiar identity, and there's a tiny … flash of something.

  The spy who came in from the chaos.

  Standing up, he casts his mind a little wider, looking for a trace of memories, sensations.

  The bridge remembers.

  A shallow river, winding its tree-lined banks all through the bourgeois West End suburbs where the merchants and the middle classes live, through parks as groomed as the Victorian gentry promenading within them, passing picturesque ruined mills, glass houses of botanical gardens. A shallow river winding down to join the Clyde, where the great steel wireliners were built, warehouses filled with shabtis and tobacco, filled with the fortunes of the overseers and entrepreneurs come home to gift their native city with the wealth of their gratitude, with parks and statues, a broken-nosed grim bust of Carlyle, a Boer War monument with a pith-helmeted soldier, a bronze lioness with a broken-necked bird hanging from her jaws, red paint sprayed round its mouth by Jack and Joey, passing a bottle of Ouzo back and forth between them, moving on to paint gold eye shadow, red lipstick and nail varnish on the two Teutonic-looking knights built into the plinth of the mounted general who looks down over the park toward this bridge over a shallow river, winding as a swollen scar across the land
scape, open sewer for the inhabitants of the West End ghettos of the literati, for the shit of academians and bohemians, tenements and town houses now squalid squats and hovels, bombed and rebuilt with sheet metal and scaffolding into warrens, prisons for the dissidents and deviants, as defined in the Sedition Act of ‘59 and the Nights of Fire when the library was emptied and its books brought down to be thrown, burning, into this shallow river, winding, here at the bridge where the bratspawn of the Rookery come down to play in the dumping ground no-man's-land at the edge of freedom, as he came down here when he was their age, as we came down here and played among the broken fridges, with pocket knives and air guns, and we shot at rats for target practice, till we were old enough to shoot at each other, to kill on a bridge to nowhere over a shallow river winding.

  Joey Narcosis drops the cigarette.

  The bridge remembers him.

  He looks up at the Gothic tower, sole visible vestige of the old university, rising over the rooftops of the Rookery.

  It used to be just the two of them, Jack and Joey, latter-day urchins playing in the ruins of bohemia. Neither one of them knew his parents; neither one of them really gave a fuck. The only life they knew was the Rookery and the river. What Kentigern was, or could be, didn't matter to them at all. The militia was just another mundane threat like the razor gangs and the scheme clans who were always trying to move in on each other's territories. You avoided them where you could, paid protection money when you had to, played the game by the rules that had been set up from day one. Dog eat dog. Do unto others before they do you. You only had to watch the public executions on the radio-vision, and the Iron Lady sending riot police against the miners, and yuppies in red braces gripping wads of cold, hard cash in their greasy fists, to learn the rules of the game. The Jack he used to know understood that. Or so he thought.

  And then came Guy Fox and King Finn and all the Robin Hood bullshit that Jack swallowed hook, line and sinker, the anti-fascist rebellion, redistribution of wealth, freedom and all that shit. He wonders if Jack even got it at the end, when they were standing on this very bridge and he turned, saw Joey there with the gun trained on him.

  Joey feels around for any other traces of the copycat, or of the Jack who died here twenty years ago, however unlikely that might be. He pushes his mind out of his body and still he finds nothing.

  No. Wait. Somewhere under the drift-dams of rotting debris, amid the oozing sludge, he can sense some sort of life, down there in the filth, rats big as cats, warped by the mix of methane from decaying landfill and orgone seeping from the abandoned mines that lace the whole of Kelvinhill, breeding and feasting, and feasting and breeding, buried in their own shit and trapped under the bulldozed earth, and slowly running out of shit to feed on.

  “It's a fucking rat race, mate,” says Joey to the dead sentry.

  “It's a fucking rat trap,” he hears Jack saying, a long time ago.

  “Rat race or rat trap, it's still all about survival. You trap a bunch of rats in a cage without food, they don't work together for freedom. They just eat each other.”

  Joey picks up the matchbook. This place reminds him of his childhood, all right. But under all the memories of infant thieves and thugs, there's no glorious, heroic Jack Flash, only the vicious monotonal compulsions of rodent hunger and lust, the visceral music of sex and death.

  The Ways of Lunatics and Fools

  I enter, singing.

  “O holiness, queen of eternity, sweeping on golden wings over the earth! Hear the words of Pierrot in his conceit, cursing the son of Simile, spirit of festivals and feasts of flowing wine, the one who lets the drowsy rest, glass in their hand, in ivy shade, or rouses revelers at the masquerade, who drags them up to dance, to shake off their dull care and wake the flute.”

  And Harlequin up on the roof gives out a regal wave, a royal salute.

  “The life of leisure, ruled by reason, rests unshaken and sustains the home, a pleasure dome, for in ethereal estates the powers divine, though they live in the distant far-ago, know every individual's state.”

  I sing out to the Duke, flatter his vanity, flutter my eyes and bow, as if to say: Oh, yes, I see just how magnificent m'sire is in his munificence and magnanimity.

  “This mystery ends all rhetoric lacking law and sense: Life is too short to squander it in abstract logic, unwise sophistry; and those who fail to understand, aim at the skies instead, they miss the joy at hand. These ways, I say, these are the ways of lunatics and fools.”

  “The ways of lunatics and fools,” Don interrupts, and Guy looks over his shoulder as he flicks the reins, the wagon rolling on across the rolling plains under the rolling clouds. I look up from this new script Guy has given us, stop reading, blink from one to the other. It's so seldom that gruff, grizzled Don says anything at all that when he does, the rest of us tend to shut up.

  “You don't like the line?” asks Guy.

  “The line is fine,” says Don. “Just thinking”—and he points far down the road ahead, at spires of splendor lit with golden fires that rise up like a mountain, our far-distant destination. “Ways of lunatics and fools,” he says.

  “Quite so,” says Guy. “Quite so.”

  “Oh let us fly” sing I, “sail through the sky, and enter ciphers, enter isles of a free doubt, where spirits of love laugh, live and soothe man's sylph. To pathos, never fed by river rain, but rich with centuries’ mouths!”

  I stand upon the roof of rumbling roughwood, skipping side to side to balance as the wagon trundles over broken flagstones, arms thrown out with pages flapping in my hand, proclaiming to the wilds, to the dust devils and the slumbering, half-buried masonry in the sands. Jack lounges in the sun beside me, flicking through his script and looking up every so often with a lazy yawn.

  “Do I have any lines in this at all?”

  I drop to my knees to ham it up right in his face.

  “Oh lead me, Harlequin, guiding star of drunken pilgrims, to the holy slopes of oil lamps, haunt of muses. There is the grace. There is the soft desire. There is the revelry of your devotees free of the Empyre.”

  “Will you shut up, up there,” shouts Joey from below.

  “Fuck you,” I say, “I'm practicing.” And sing out, louder still.

  “The joy of our spirit is in banquets. Son of Sooth, savior of wayward boys, he hates all those who will not deign to live the life of bliss, in days and nights of joy. To ease our pains, he gives us riches as his gift. He savors peace and so, to rich and poor alike, he gives delicious wine, glorious booze, to lift the heart and soul above the wisdom of the scholar, endlessly refined. This, then, I choose: that which the poor and ragged man approves.”

  And over grooves and potholes worn by cars and trucks and carts and hooves, the wagon trundles on along a broken road with signs for nonexistent towns, abandoned rest stops, heading for another city where another king or lord or godfather or—in his own mind—god holds court among lost souls who've strayed across this wide land of the dead to end up in his maze, captivated by the order of his streets and roads, becoming slaves. The ways of lunatics and fools, indeed. The palaces of Pantaloons.

  Jack huffs a butterfly away from his nose, swipes at it lazily. I lean my chin over the edge of the wagon's roof, looking down at Guy and Don.

  “So what happens in Act Two?”

  “Oh, Act Two,” says Guy, “that's where things really start to heat up.”

  Errata

  —

  The Universal City

  omewhere in the city below, a muezzin sings the call to evening prayers, and he stands at the window, cigarette in hand, looking down over the slope of roofs and gardens, listening to the waver of that distant clarion voice. Slim twin minarets prick the sky here and there, domes nestled between them. It's largely a modern city though, all roads and apartment blocks, sprawling over the valley floor and crawling up the slopes of Mount Uludag behind, where the Dilmun Otel sits perched among the cafes and restaurants of the hotel quarter.


  He stubs the cigarette out in the ashtray, slings his jacket over his shoulder and grabs his room key—proper old-fashioned room key with a fistful of metal attached to discourage you from taking it outside with you—and pulls the door closed quietly behind him as he leaves. Everything is hotel rooms these days.

  He takes the lift down to reception. Floor six… five… four… three. Ground. There's no two or one for some reason, maybe because there's two subground floors housing the restaurant and health club. It seems a little odd, but different strokes for different folks. Like the way they make the beds, with the covers folded under themselves instead of tucked under the mattress. Or the little sachets of Nescafe with sugar and powdered milk already added that sit beside the electric kettle on the table in the room. As if there's just Turkiye kafe and that weird Western shit which, as far as they're concerned, always has milk and sugar in it, doesn't it?

  “Iyi akşamhr,” he says to the receptionist and she smiles.

  Good evening.

  “Iyi ak§amhr,” she says as he heads out the front door.

  ——

  “Arap§ukru, lutfien”

  The Heykel taksi takes him the five-minute, five-million-lira drive to the Arap§ukru—the Street of Fish Restaurants—and he fumbles through his wallet for the right note. No, that's five hundred thousand. Here's the one. We still can't get over how much the founder of the modern Turkish nation, Emil Attaturk, looks like the mad, camp villain-hero from this fifties sci-fi serial, Lost in Space. Dr. Zachary Smith, his name was. Swear to God, it's the spitting image of him. Needless to say, he hasn't pointed this out to any of the Turks; it would be bad form.

  “Te§ekkur.”

  Thanks.

  “Te§ekkur. Iyi ak§amlar.”

  “Iyi ak§amlar.”