In World City

by I. F. Godsland

Then Miranda had them all together in Dion’s Place for the next sampling session and Ferrie decided he was going to push it further. He was going to take the piss out of Mysté in front of Miranda.

  Mysté was on the couch and Miranda had the tissue sampler in place. “Hey, Misty,” Ferrie called out, “With a name like that, how come Miranda can even see you?” Then, with his feelings on a roll, Ferrie pushed it further still. “Anyhow, you’re so fuckin’ black that it’s a fuckin’ wonder anyone can see you.”

  This was the first time Ferrie had made a thing out of Mysté’s colour. Dion thought of Maskel again and readied himself to give Ferrie a slap across the face that would send the boy flying. But Mysté was quicker. He was off the couch and, with Miranda’s sampler in hand, was across the space between himself and Ferrie while Dion’s muscles were still tensing. While Dion was moving across the floor, Mysté had the sampler up in the air and down into Ferrie’s left eye. And before Dion reached them, Mysté had said, in a cool, clipped voice, “Now you tell me who can see and who can’t.”

  He raised the sampler in readiness for the other eye and Dion thrust himself between them, saying, “Leave it there, Mysté. That’s enough.”

  Ferrie had fallen on the ground and was screaming in a high, thin falsetto, like a small animal being tortured. He had his hands to his eye. Dion firmly took both wrists and separated Ferrie’s palms to examine the damage. There was nothing but a bloody, empty socket.

  *

  Miranda held on to herself long enough to drive Ferrie through the wet, dark streets of the Waste into World City and then a long way to a discretely lit avenue lined with private clinics. There, she paid enough money for a qualified surgeon to examine the wound, pronounce the boy irrevocably blind in his left eye and clean up the mess with no questions asked. Ferrie returned with a black patch over his eye. Mysté said within hearing of enough witnesses for word to get around, “You look good, Ferrie. Patch suits you. I like the colour, too.” But word also got around how this had been said with no animosity, no triumph, nothing, just dead straight. Unprompted, a few others said the same, and Ferrie seemed to gain something from the damage. He relaxed.

  As for Miranda, she came back from the surgeon’s white as a sheet and speaking to Dion in monosyllables. He took her to his apartment on the edge of World City, gave her a brandy and wrapped a blanket around her. He could feel the wind and rain outside trying to get past his walls. He just wanted to make sure she was all right. She looked so hopelessly vulnerable. He just couldn’t understand the state of shock she had gone into. Hadn’t she trained as a doctor? In her training, she must have seen bloodier things than Ferrie’s eye socket.

  She stayed one night, then another. “You okay, Miranda?” he would ask, when she obviously wasn’t.

  “Hmm, I’m okay. Thanks for putting me up. I just don’t much feel like being on my own at the moment. It’s so dark outside.”

  He didn’t press her any harder. It seemed best just to let her be and let whatever had been surprised in her settle back down. At least that isolating confidence she had been enveloping herself in had gone. She just seemed to be in some kind of limbo, healing maybe.

  On the third day, the weather cleared and a warm, hazy sun began to shine. Miranda brightened a bit. “Dion, can we go out for dinner again. There’s a place I’d like to go to. It’s a bit of a way from here. I just want to get out into some trees, away from all this.”

  The wave of her hand took in an unbroken swathe of buildings and concrete, steel and glass, that might, for all the gesture conveyed, have stretched from ocean to ocean.

  *

  The restaurant had, in the Middle Ages, been a monastery, built above the Rhine, with a terrace that looked down through trees to the river below. The place was in the centre of a broad green enclave set apart for preservation from the encroachment of World City industry. A rare, warm autumn twilight bathed the old stones. Trees crowded up from the river, their yellowing leaves whispering white noise with every passing breeze. Far below, the river ran much as it had always done – despite periodic attempts to make it more efficient.

  They took their seats on the edge of the terrace and sat in silence some moments, relaxing into the sounds and scents and feel of the place. Dion experienced an odd pull inside himself. This wasn’t the kind of business place he was familiar with, and it wasn’t the kind of high, glittering, isolating place Miranda had taken him to before. This place didn’t seem to require anything of him. It just let him be and, letting him be, it enabled a kind of current to start flowing in him that made him feel some way he couldn’t put words to. It was okay, though. There was an easiness being allowed between the two of them. All the circumstances of their lives were for the moment suspended. He looked at Miranda and she looked back and smiled. A waiter came and they ordered a bottle of wine and something light to eat they could share. The wine came, was sampled and full glasses poured.

  Miranda lifted her glass, took a sip, carefully placed the glass back down and looked at Dion, holding his gaze. She asked carefully, as if afraid she might damage something of extreme fragility, “Why did Mysté do that? Why did he dig out Ferrie’s eye?”

  Dion felt at ease with himself, sure of his opinions. He said, “Ferrie pushed it too far. Mysté takes his name very seriously. He takes himself very seriously. That got to Ferrie, but he didn’t know how to stop. There was a guy once who didn’t know how to stop with me. Only he was much older and I couldn’t get away from him. I killed him.”

  It was as well Miranda had sought out this place of safety so instinctively. Instincts are generally accurate and this place had insulated her sufficiently from the horrible immediacy of Mysté’s violence to allow her to ask about the boy and openly acknowledge what had happened. Now it allowed her to hear with understanding rather than shock or judgement what Dion had once done.

  “The guy you killed must have been pretty bad,” she said.

  “He was. Ferrie might have turned into someone like him, if he hadn’t had his eye put out.”

  “I don’t know, something happened to me when Mysté did that. I don’t know what happened. I just sort of went into shock.”

  “That’s what I thought. That’s why I let you be. I thought you’d come round. You’re okay now?”

  “Sort of. I don’t know.” She looked around uncertainly then said, “But you didn’t go into shock, did you. Maybe you’re more used to violence than I am. But none of the kids went into shock either. Is there something wrong with me, Dion? Have I just had things too soft all my life?”

  “I don’t think you’ve had things soft. You wouldn’t have got to where you are if it had all been soft for you. I think maybe there’s things you don’t see, though. You maybe don’t see how dirty people can get. Generally they hide it from people as powerful as you. People who’ve come up along your kind of track can use the law and their education and contacts in ways that don’t spill too much blood. It probably comes down to the same thing in the end, but the viciousness gets hidden. Your kinds of people don’t go around putting other people’s eyes out – least, not anymore. My kind still does.”

  Miranda listened but Dion’s words seemed far away, like shouts from a distant shore. She was beginning to feel as if she was swimming, as if the space they were in was somehow liquid and she was being borne on deep, powerful currents. It should have been frightening but she felt strangely reassured. If she hung onto anything fixed and rigid, the currents would thrash her around and she would be damaged. Casting herself adrift, she felt buoyed up, safely supported, carried. Where they were was just right for cutting loose, a no-man’s land that was neither Waste nor World City, a place that referred far back to a time before such distinctions had been made. The building was of old stone, not steel and glass, and the trees and the river had been there forever.

  And there was a man being carried into this otherness with her. The world this man was describing was obscene and dangerous. It was dirty and hot and far aw
ay from anything secure and familiar. It was a world one was utterly alone in, prey to whatever predators might fix their attention on you, to do with you what they chose, to do things that were filthy and agonizing and were utterly negating of all you might ever become. Yet all the time they had been together, Dion had kept her safe in this world, safe enough to begin dealing with that awful moment in Dion’s Place when she had seen a violence unleashed that had shaken her to a depth she had not known she possessed, safe enough even to begin dealing with whatever else crawled about in those depths.

  *

  No critical memory swept over Miranda Whitlam, no image of violence, dirty concrete walls, empty, sightless eyes and stilled life. But the feeling was there. The knowledge of the nothingness that had once been revealed to her was entirely present. In sympathy with the place inside herself she had arrived at, the sunlight dimmed and a truly cold wind rolled up from the river. She hardly noticed. The wind was merely part of what she knew, what she was.

  “It’s cold,” Dion said uneasily. “Let’s go inside.”

  “Don’t worry. It’ll pass,” Miranda said dreamily. “The wind will pass. It’ll all pass. It’s okay.”

  Dion, too, was feeling himself cast adrift, only he viewed the receding shoreline with less equanimity. He had a life he valued, with a future and plans. He looked at Miranda, searching for some way of pulling her back. But she was moving too fast and she was already out too far and she was taking him with her. He thought of the car he had come in, the roads he had taken, the wine glass he now held in his hand. The images made him anxious and instinctively he thrust them away. Only the image of the person in front of him offered any kind of certainty. For the first time, Miranda Whitlam seemed to be truly opening herself up to him. He held onto the image before him, beautiful beyond belief, and let the rest go where it would.

  And the darkness passed, just as Miranda had prophesied. The shadow that had come with the wind lifted and they were once more bathed in warm autumn sunlight. To Dion Miranda appeared as beautiful as when he had first come upon her, deep in the midst of his island, back when he had been looking for the place where he could live forever. But there was a difference now. She knew he was there and she was inviting him to join her.

  As for Miranda, the familiar net of structures and connections that all believe to be their defining appearance was finally beginning to break apart. Its strands were separating, opening up a view onto somewhere unknown, and unknowable in any familiar terms. The image that came to her was of the wildwood, covering Europe forever. She was in the depths of that great forest now and the twilight was a receding boundary, the deep indigo over the river dissolving the forms of the visible, making them transparent and insubstantial.

  With her increasing distance from the objective world, the trees became presences, like memories of someone she herself had been, once upon a time, deep in the past. The river was a sky she looked down into, or an ocean current, a track into limitlessness; and the stonework of the terrace was a craft adrift in the midst of it all, something conceivably solid but cut loose in a boundless sea of awareness. The experience she was dissolving into was familiar as a ghost, something so deeply known it was awful. She felt she knew the world she was falling into better than she knew herself.

  Memories moved in Dion, reluctantly, stiffly, like an old door opening after centuries of disuse. But the door opened enough for him to say, “I had a grandmother. I haven’t thought about her in years. She was a sorceress.”

  Adrift as Miranda was, Dion’s sudden memory seemed the most sensible thing he could have said to her. “Tell me about her,” she asked. “What did she teach you?”

  A breeze, tenuous as thought, passed between them. Dion took in the twilight, the yellowing leaves, the river, the old stones of the terrace, still warm from the afternoon sun. He would not have been surprised to see his grandmother walk up the path that led through the trees from the river. He held the image in his mind and, letting it intensify, said, “My grandmother lived in this world every minute. I’m remembering something she once said to me. She said – do you know what she said?” Dion laughed, suddenly embarrassed by his memory but determined to keep going. “She said, ‘This world, young Dion, this world made of dream stuff’.”

  Dion laughed again, trying to ease the immediacy of the challenging old voice, but trying all the same for his grandmother’s tone: grating, harsh and warm, like the coals being stirred in the metal drums the Waste inhabitants stood by in winter. “She said, ‘I know you think this world made of all those bits and pieces they teach you the names of in school – all that solid stuff. You think that, eh? Most peoples think that. No reason why not – no one drowns in the ground – ‘less it’s been raining hard. But not so, Dion. Not bits and pieces. Not solid stuff, this world. This world made of dream stuff’.” Dion gestured with the same peremptory impatience his grandmother would have used then, settling more into the role, “‘But this dream stuff different from what you get in your bed at night. This is the dream stuff you tell what to do, stuff you manage, like you was the plantation manager telling the casuals up from Soufrière what to do next. It useful enough, same as them. And everyone agree pretty much what need doing. But all this dream stuff is only what you can pick and choose, like in the plantation. Now, young Dion, you try pickin’ and choosin’ the hate that Matthew Lasalle feel for that plantation man who bought him out for piss. There’s no ruler you’ll ever put beside that hate, but hate is killing the crop sure as any damn beetle. That how well Matthew Lasalle can hate’,” and Dion stopped dead, shocked by the immediacy of his memory, emptying his glass of wine in a single swallow, trying to close the door.

  But Miranda was sinking still faster. Fleeting images of her life came to her like fragments seen from a departing train, eyeblinks as the speed gathered. They had all the rigidity of a snapshot – which was indeed their essence – and both fragments and snapshot were constructed specifically to be proof against this immaterialisation she and Dion were now drowning each other in. Miranda was aware of a fleeting coldness as each image passed, a fixity that she shook off as each picture came to her. Then, just before she let go completely, she caught sight of herself injecting the boys with her cocktail of molecular machines that would ensure they would outlive even the oldest. Her eyes opened wide and she forced Dion to hold her gaze. She wanted to scream and laugh, both at once. Really, it was the only kind of release that would do, the only outlet for the insane mix of horror and humour that was sweeping through her.

  Then, recovering herself, she said levelly, “Dion, it’s true what you once said. World City is where you can keep it all forever. But it’s a system of dying. World City is the death where you can keep it all. It’s like midwinter when the wind starts to blow down on the North Europe plain. Everything becomes still. Everything finds its place. That’s a system of dying that makes way for new life. World City is another system, only it doesn’t work to make way for new life. The way World City works is to set up structures that look like life but aren’t. Within those structures life starves to death. After a bit, everything finds its place. Only there’s no new life.”

  “Why are you saying this, Miranda?” Dion asked faintly. He was hanging on to her image with all he had. In the great incoming tide of what she was saying, it was the only surety he could find.

  “Perfection – that’s what World City is working towards,” Miranda came back. “World City is working towards a perfect appearance, a perfect simulation of all that we are. Everything we value will have its equivalent, its counterpart, its simulation. And it will be a simulation that can live forever. So anything you or I might actually be will be valued at nothing. Each one of us will be no more than a fleeting moment in the great fixity of perfection that will be World City. We will construct World City out of the appearances we most value, and those appearances will last forever, and we will be left as nothing.”

  Handelmann’s Hotel...

  Dion’s twin st
ares at him in the dimness of the perfectly appointed hotel room.

  “What’s your name,” Dion asks, hoping for more time.

  “What do you think?” comes the withering reply.

  The chill in Dion deepens. He takes a breath and asks, “Why did she send you?”

  His twin regards him quizzically. “So let’s suppose you scared, man. Let’s suppose you believe in me, because if you do then you gotta be scared.” The boy sits lightly on the bed opposite and says, “You know her, don’t you Mister. She says she owe you a favour.”

  “She owes me no favours,” Dion says. It is the surest thing he knows.

  The boy nods his head from side to side, neither affirming nor denying. “She’s dropped her name since you knew her. Calls herself all kinds of stuff: Fer de Moniac, Miranda Mashkit, Miss Montserrat. She crazy. She say you get this offer because you dealt straight with her, and with the kids she worked on. She say you came out badly from the deal. So you get first benefit of what she got to offer all you World Citizens.”

  With some effort Dion raises himself up on his elbows, looks at the boy and says, “So what’s she got to offer?”

  “What she’s got to offer is the real thing,” his twin says with unnerving finality.

  “What real thing?”

  The boy stands up in front of him and says, “Immortality, life eternal – what you fuckers have been wantin’ ever since you knew you was going to die and all those locks and keys and things was not gonna to make one damn bit of difference. That’s what she got to offer. Forget the injections, the targeted insertions, the repair promoters – all that shit, that’ll only get you a hundred years more at the outside. No, I’m talkin’ about the real thing – immortality, life forever, cheatin’ Death.”

  The boy is like an angel in judgement and Dion looks up at him with bleak foreboding. He does not doubt that something real is on offer.