Empty Space ktt-3

by M. John Harrison

  The assistant thrashed about. Lost in space, trying to place herself equidistant from everything else in the universe, she heard her own faint cry in the dark and moved towards it. Yellowish oily liquid filled her mouth. Later she listened tiredly while the twink-tank patched her up. In her anxiety, it told her, she had choked on the tank fluid or ‘proteome’. She had ripped out the main cable. She was losing cerebro-spinal fluid and later today she might experience a little light bleeding from neurotypical energy sites; it wasn’t so bad.

  ‘Something happened in there,’ she said.

  ‘Once immersed,’ the tank reminded her, in the voice of a real mother, ‘you should never move or try to shout.’

  ‘I don’t expect to feel like that.’

  Over on the other side of town, Epstein and his soldiers were still trying to bring Toni Reno back to earth. Toni’s reaction seemed coy, especially for a dead man. Every time one of them touched him he bounced gently away, making curious swimmy elastic movements in the air, curving his back in a clean arc, circling some invisible central point as the uniforms jumped and waved their arms twelve feet below him. It was puzzling. It was even elegant. The rain had stopped. Morning traffic clogged Tupolev; downtown was solid.

  FOUR

  Givenchy

  Left to herself, Anna Waterman tended to medicate with reasonably-priced red wine, a bottle of which, taken before bed, only made things worse next day, when — full of guilts like a ball of living eels she couldn’t disentangle without each one slipping away quietly into the dark — she would ring the consulting rooms to see if Dr Alpert had a cancellation. This she did at half past eight one morning a week or two after missing her last appointment.

  Her first husband had spent much of the previous night running away from her, until she cornered him in King’s Cross at a cheap hotel. In the dream Michael hadn’t looked much like himself. Neither of them had looked much like themselves, in fact. But Anna had felt exactly as she felt then, when she was young and he was still alive: exhausted and angry. ‘You’re always afraid!’ she tried to convince him. ‘You’re always hiding from me!’ Once in the hotel room together they fucked again and again in a blind panic, as if both of them were trying to avoid thinking about something else. After that, events moved themselves on with the usual kind of dreary predictability. Her husband became agitated and ran away again while she was asleep, leaving a note in which he talked of his ‘great discovery’. In the final lobe of the dream, Anna found herself lying alone on a cold, black, reflective surface — this time she described it to Dr Alpert as resembling a hotel bathroom floor — in an echoing space the nature of which she couldn’t describe at all. It was very tall; it was ‘dark and light at the same time’. She had a sense of dread. She couldn’t see much; she could see everything, but she didn’t know what any of it was. She felt as if she was changing into something.

  ‘And is that what you remember most clearly from the dream?’

  ‘Oh no. I remember the frock I was wearing. Is that absurd?’

  ‘Not entirely,’ said Dr Alpert, although she thought it was.

  ‘It was beautiful.’ Anna frowned intently for a moment, as though, if she focused, she could have the frock in front of her. ‘Givenchy, from the early 1960s. The most marvellous grey, in some shiny fabric like satin. I can’t say more than that.’ She blinked at Dr Alpert. ‘Did Givenchy ever make anything like that? Does that sound like him?’

  ‘Just to pick up on an earlier point,’ the doctor said, ‘I wonder what you mean when you say that your guilt is “like a ball of eels”?’

  ‘You see, I’m not really talking about guilt. Not at the moment.’

  ‘Perhaps not.’

  Recognising this as a difference of opinion, the two women stared at one another thoughtfully. For now there didn’t seem to be a way around it. Anna fiddled with the clasp of her bag. After a minute or two she offered:

  ‘I’m afraid I forgot to bring the test results you asked for.’

  Helen Alpert smiled.

  ‘Please don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Your daughter had the hospital copy them to me. She was worried you might lose them on the train.’

  And she slid the documents, three or four sheets of printout in a plastic sleeve, across her desk. Anna, whose history of lost documents was extensive, pushed them back without looking at them.

  ‘It was wrong of Marnie to do this,’ she said. ‘It was controlling.’ Then, feeling she had been disloyal, tried to explain: ‘I don’t want tests. I don’t want to know these things about myself. I want just to live my life until it’s over. Marnie is the wrong generation to understand that.’

  ‘Neurologically, Anna, you’re very sound. You should be relieved. There are signs of a couple of tiny strokes. Otherwise you’re fine.’

  But Anna — who had feared all along things would go in this direction once Marnie lost her patience — remembered Michael Kearney, trembling in her arms in his paralysis of anxiety, and could only repeat, ‘I don’t want to know things like that about myself.’ Helen Alpert identified this, perhaps correctly, as a defensive stubbornness; baffled, they stared at one another in silence again until Anna shrugged, looked at her watch, and said: ‘I think my time’s up.’

  ‘Is there anything else?’ the doctor said.

  ‘My cat is bringing home the internal organs of exotic animals.’

  ‘I meant, really, if there was anything else you remembered about the dream.’

  After Anna had gone, the doctor leaned back in her chair and rubbed her eyes tiredly.

  Helen Alpert was a tall woman, given to skinny jeans and soft leather coats, whose career had begun in the psychology of chronic pain; veered during her troubled second marriage into PTSD and trauma management; and finally come to rest in private consulting rooms by the Thames in Chiswick, where she facilitated the inner lives of mid-range production executives from the surrounding BBC enclaves. Perhaps ten years younger than Anna, she had made her home on the opposite side of the river in one of the quiet streets around Kew Green. Mornings, she jogged by the river. At weekends she wandered the Gardens or drove her temperamental first-generation Citroen XM to a cottage in East Anglia, where she trudged up and down the shingle beaches in the rain and ate pea mousse with Parma ham & shallot dressing, followed by roast breast & confit leg of squab on puy lentils with parmentier potatoes and jus, at the local Michelin-starred pub conversion. Despite or perhaps because of this regime, she remained single. She had been treating Anna Waterman for three years. It was slow going. They had layered up this peculiar dream of Anna’s until it was a rich and satisfying fiction, but not one that offered an easy reading of itself; and they had never seemed quite suited to one another.

  Now, knowing Anna to be too young to have worn 1960s Givenchy, the doctor assumed the garment to be a symbol of the parent, entering the words, ‘The unthought known?’ into Anna’s case file and emphasising them heavily.

  Then she leafed back through the file, parts of which were easier to understand than others.

  Born Anne-Marie Selve in 1976, to a provincial couple already in middle age, Anna had formed herself early. Academically focused at eight, she had been obsessive by fourteen. It was a familar story. Arriving at Girton a year ahead of her cohort she allowed a further year to pass before succumbing to anorexia. Self-harm and her first suicide attempt followed. By then, the parents — never much more than pleasantly surprised to find themselves parents in the first place — were too old to offer emotional help; in addition there remained, according to psychiatric reports, some unidentified tension between father and daughter. Girton patched Anna together. For a time she was, as she put it, everyone’s favourite suicide. ‘They knocked on my door if they thought things were too quiet.’ But soon the Selves’ place in her life was taken by a visiting professor of mathematical physics. This man, Michael Kearney, uncommunicative, narcissistic and easily depressed, turned out to have his own problems. They were married fast and divorced even faster
; yet, sustained perhaps by its fiercely mutual structures of manipulation, the relationship proved more durable than either of them believed, lurching along in its disordered way until Kearney ended it on the eve of the Millennium by walking into the Atlantic just north of Scituate, Massachusetts.

  At this remove, the mathematician became unidentifiable. He had no family Helen Alpert could trace; while Anna claimed to have ‘forgotten everything’, and wouldn’t be certain about his age or even the colour of his eyes. When she could be persuaded to speak about Kearney, he was transformed into careful fiction. Vague one day, meaninglessly particular the next, Anna’s revision of Kearney presented him as a gap in her life even as he had filled it.

  Publicly there was a little more. He had written, probably as a joke, a pamphlet on randomness and the Tarot. Some topological speculations — stimulated by exchanges with the reclusive mathematician Grigori Perelman — had been published a year or two before his death, to cautious peer approval. Otherwise Michael Kearney’s contribution to science lay in an unfinished quantum computing project, most of the work on which had been done by an unassuming experimental physicist called Brian Tate. Tate — newly divorced, unequal even to the brief publicity surrounding Kearney’s suicide, and wrong-footed by a minor funding scandal involving the venture capital firm MVC-Kaplan — went down with the ship. His results proved unrepeatable. With his collaborator dead, and his claim to have coaxed massive parallel processing from a train of cheaply modified desktop PCs dismissed as junk science, he faded from view in a month. All this was a matter of record.

  By that time, Anna’s parents were plaques on a chapel wall somewhere in East Cheshire. She had no friends. The Millennium was over, the fireworks had gone out. Everyone else seemed to know what they wanted. Back in London, she bought a self-help manual and taught herself to eat again. She entrapped Tim Waterman and, still confused but with a growing sense of self-preservation, set about reducing the chaos in her life. Waterman was a kind and successful man whose work often took him abroad. The first time he went away, Anna found she could cook. She put on weight, toyed with the Women’s Institute and, discovering a gift for flowers, the Prettiest Village competition. Tim, who had known her briefly during the Michael Kearney era, seemed calmly amused by it all. She brought up their daughter with care, the best humour she could manage, and a real sense of the worth of that.

  But everything, Helen Alpert reminded herself as she put away the file and locked the consulting room door behind her for the day, is language.

  Pushing her old car west along the Thames through heavy evening traffic, she recalled Anna’s description of ‘fucking in a blind panic’ with her first husband. ‘In fact I always quite liked sex to be that way,’ Anna had added. ‘It made it seem more central somehow, a means of saying something urgent about yourself. The problem was always what could happen next.’ Then, when Helen Alpert raised her eyebrows at this, Anna laughed suddenly and advised: ‘Never do anything unless you’re lost or on fire, Doctor. Otherwise how will you remember it?’ Balked by the Mortlake roundabout, gazing vaguely at a thick red sunset behind layered fringes of trees, Dr Alpert wondered how she could make sense of this except as bravado. Anna Waterman had reinvented herself with the century: now she was discovering that Anna Selve remained the disordered substrate beneath it all. Whatever had drawn her to Michael Kearney underlay everything else she had made.

  In her repeating dream, in her fear of neurological disease, in her increasing sense of the instability of her life — in her denial of all of that — her original disorder had found its voice again.

  Anna, unaware of these judgements, took home two bottles of Fleurie and a tub of pistachio ice cream then telephoned Marnie and conducted a short but satisfying row; after which they agreed to more broadly respect one another’s feelings and Anna listened to news of Marnie’s ex-boyfriend’s new job. Her plan for the rest of the evening had been to turn on her fifty-inch Sony and eat all the ice cream while watching an ageing wildlife presenter gambol in the brackish waters of the North Sea with the half-dozen mouldy-looking grey seals left in the Shetland Islands; but, four of the animals having the previous week contracted human norovirus, the spectacle was cancelled. Anna wandered about. After her exchange with Marnie the house seemed hot and airless. She took a shower. She stood looking out of the kitchen doorway with a glass of Fleurie in her hand. Called the cat. He didn’t come.

  ‘James, you depressing animal,’ she said.

  At nine, the telephone rang. She picked it up expecting Marnie again, but there was no one at the other end. Just as she put the receiver down, she heard an electronic scraping noise, like starlings in a gutter; a distant voice which shouted, as if to a third person even further away than Anna:

  ‘Don’t go in there!’

  When the cat hadn’t come in by ten o’clock, she went out to look for it.

  The air outside seemed even warmer. There was no moon. Instead the summer constellations wheeled above the water meadow. Anna made her way slowly down the lawn, and imagined she saw the cat’s eyes glittering ironically at her from the base of the hedge. ‘James?’ Nothing, only the grey earth still disturbed and scattered about. A strip of orchard ran down one side of the garden, old apple varieties left to themselves to split and fall apart from the centre outward so that their moss-covered boughs curved back down to the ground. The cat would often crouch among them at night; listen for bank voles; chase a moth. He wasn’t there now. Anna balanced her wine glass in the crook of a branch, let herself out through the side gate. ‘James? James!’ she called, all the way across the pasture to where the river, glimmering in the starlight, wound between crack-willow and beds of nettle in soft black earth. Anna, ambushed and thoughtful, stood gazing into the water. Where in daylight it would be solid and brown, with a glassy turbulence at the surface, now it seemed fine-grained, weightless. She trailed her hand. She forgot the cat. She laughed. Suddenly she sat down on the bank and and took off her shoes, and was about to take off her clothes, when something — she wasn’t sure what, it might have been the slightest shift of light on the willow leaves — caused her to turn and look back the way she had come.

  Her summerhouse was on fire.

  Huge red and gold flames rose at an angle from its conical roof. There was no smoke; and though they cast a great light, and threw long oblique shadows across the pasture, the flames looked stiff, idealised, as though painted for a Tarot card. For a moment she saw herself on the card too, in the foreground but well to one side so that the focus remained firmly on the burning building (which could now be seen to be isolated in the field, with a suggestion of a hedge, or perhaps some kind of earthwork, at its base): a woman hard to age, wearing a 1930s-looking floral print dress, running with her mouth open and a paradoxical expression, a mask of dissociated consternation, on her face. No shoes. Her hair, flying back in the wind, painted as a single mass. Her lips were moving. ‘Go away. Go away from here!’ The flames roared silently up, amid showers of gold sparks. Anna could feel the heat of them, stretching the skin across her cheekbones. Yet by the time she reached the garden gate everything was dark again; and, despite the heat, nothing had been burned. There wasn’t even a smell of smoke — although through the summerhouse windows she glimpsed what looked like embers, still whirling about inside, just above the floor.

  The door had dropped on its hinges a decade before. Anna dragged it open. Two or three houses’ worth of garden furniture and tools met her gaze. Tim had liked to garden. From an early age, Marnie had liked to help. They had liked to be in the garden together, around the flowerbeds or the kidney-shaped pond, while Anna watched with a drink. Deckchairs, sunshades, long-handled pruners. Marnie’s quite expensive ping-pong table. Then, in the shadows, shelves full of half-used garden chemicals. The chemical smells of dusts and powders, spilled across the floor or gone solid in their tins and packets. Then the smell of cardboard boxes, lax with damp, bulging with everything from photograph albums to ornaments. Somet
hing was spilling off the shelves, in a shower of fantastic sparks! They were just like the sparks from a firework! They paled slowly but didn’t fade. Anna approached. She let them fall through her upturned hands. She sat on the floor and sifted through them like a child. Light dripped off her fingers, soft-feeling embers like cool sachets of gel, the neon colours of the organs the cat brought in. After a time these colours leached away, just exactly like heat from embers, to leave a drift of small objects she could barely make out in the dark. Anna sorted through them. She turned them over uncomprehendingly. She found a shoebox, green, a trusted brand, and shovelled them into it. Opening the summerhouse door she had thought she heard sounds: laughter, music, the smells of fried food, alcohol and human excitement in a seaside at night. She rubbed the palm of her left hand with the thumb of her right. Presently, she went outside and looked across the river pasture, where her own running footprints made an erratic track through the thick dew.

  ‘Michael?’ she called softly. ‘Michael?’ She called, ‘Is this you? Are you doing this? Michael this is you, isn’t it?’

  She slept heavily and did not dream. The next morning, she drank a cup of weak green tea; ate a dessert spoon of honey stirred into Greek yoghurt; upended the shoebox across the kitchen counter and watched its contents bounce and roll. They were just small things — ordinarily tawdry but in resonant colours — which she thought must once have belonged to Marnie. She stared at them, strewn across the counter like coloured buttons. Some of them were buttons, in different shapes and sizes. Some of them were more like old-fashioned enamel badges — emblems of someone’s miltary career, or a life in nursing or conducting buses, brought up short by pancreatitis or stroke in the early 1970s. There were things that resembled Lego bricks, made of a translucent material too substantial to be plastic; two or three pinchbeck rings with interesting symbols; a cluster of tiny porcelain rosebuds you could pin to a frock; beads, charms, iron-on tattoos, yellowing dice and a pair of moulded plastic lips at the very beginnings of a kiss. Miniature playing cards slipped from a pasteboard box. There was a plastic mug with a mirrored bottom, so that when you drank from it your own face was revealed. A little red Valentine’s heart with diodes inside that even now lit up when Anna pressed the tiny button on the back — although God knew how old it must be. They were the kinds of things that turn up in trays at flea markets. Costume jewellery fallen out of a Christmas cracker thirty years before. Anna was compelled. She phoned Marnie and they had another disagreement.