Kisi and I were looking at each other.
‘I’ve had enough of this,’ I said to him. ‘Open it.’
‘Pearl! Are you listening to me?’ Alison was using her bad dog voice. It would have been funny in any other situation. Right now I didn’t really hear her.
Kisi Sorle knelt before the briefcase on the dusty floor of the guest room. We eyed one another.
‘Do it,’ I said.
‘Don’t do it!’ cried Alison.
He slid the latches open and then spun the briefcase so that it faced me and I could see inside. I think he keeled over after that, but I wasn’t looking at him anymore. I was looking inside my component.
I would be able to see inside if there were anything to see. But there was nothing to see. Absolutely nothing. The opposite of everything. Etc.
I found myself standing on the edge of the briefcase like a diver on the high platform. Thought I knew my feet: they have high, impossible-to-fit arches and they are broad and strong, with muscular toes that grip well. But not anymore.
My feet are claws. I am balancing with my wings, holding myself on the point of falling in or falling back. I feel the substance of the briefcase slither between the clacking grip of my claws. The substance of the briefcase itself is deep, and its intermolecular spaces are suspect: they look back at me like eyes. But these clever engineered depths are as nothing compared to the skirling void of that frank maw. Eater of dead men, mother of questions, it is before me and presents itself without sound, without smell, without sight. Without touch. My claws hold the edges of its containment, a mystery field that shows me my own blindness without mockery and without pity. I try to breathe. I need something to anchor me to the visceral but claws and breath and blood are not enough.
I need to know what’s in there. Perception is not optional. I need to find a way to see it.
‘Pearl,’ said Alison’s light voice in my ear. ‘This is a terrible idea. Come back.’
I tried to hiss ‘keep away’ to her without arousing the notice of whatever was living inside the briefcase, but my words didn’t come out like that. They came out in long string of complicated basso profundo syllables, as though the caverns of my throat were some tremendous echoing place and meaningless words were breeding furiously there.
Oh, shit, I thought. Whatever lives here is bound to awaken now and drag me in by the neck.
I felt myself turning inside out. Invert the brain; it’s a place of deep fissures and uncrossable chasms. The falling.
It’s a sort of laughter. You’d never guess.
In that powerful acceleration I was gifted with a tremendous awareness of the electrical potential of my muscles, and I clenched the edge of the briefcase with all my strength. Those claws I never knew I had, they bit into casing’s material ’til it screamed. Then I launched, headlong into the superunknown, wings folded, sweetness and light into darkness and fear.
This is for everyone who thinks ships are made of metal and petrochemicals and that they travel through space like sailboats travelled the high seas, propelled by mysterious engines that grant them impossible speed. That space sailors have space battles with space pirates and electrical cables and explosions and space bars with space booze. That you can only get there from here by a linear progression. Like rowing really really fast, through the void.
This is for everyone who thinks trips are chemical-induced hallucinations in the naked brain and bodies are expendable in the face of the singularity. This is for you who believe in distance and think time is just another version of same.
John Wheeler posited that every electron in the universe could be one electron zipping back and forth in time, a reversible positron tied in knots with itself – a Speedy Gonzales universe. Where would you cut that Gordian knot to make it collapse? Where would you cut that umbilical cord, baby?
The briefcase and I are whispering to one another, lovers in the dark. Impossible to say which of us said what to one another:
I missed you. You fit so nicely in my hole. Thank you.
A sample of crude oil and a couple of feathers
The veterinarian is making you walk down the stairs but you just want to sleep. You sway and lean on her, and she bundles you into a smelly four-wheel drive. Then she brings the briefcase.
‘You’ve lost a lot of blood,’ she informs you. ‘I’m sorry to rush you, but I thought it best for us to get out of here. Pearl went in the briefcase. Don’t know if you saw that part.’
The veterinarian – Alison, she says – starts driving. You try to think about Pearl in the briefcase but find your mind is like a mule that’s decided it won’t turn left, and you can’t do it. Alison calls her assistant to check the practice is OK until someone called Gunther arrives. She has arranged to meet Gunther in a desolate part of Leith and swap vehicles. You don’t have the energy to tell her that her phone is surely monitored.
‘How long is it likely to take?’ she asks. ‘For Pearl to do whatever it is she’s trying to do?’
You fix your gaze on the traffic light ahead of you, fighting nausea.
‘Is this car in the national database?’ you ask.
‘What, you mean, can we be tracked? Yes, we can.’
‘That’s bad for us.’
Alison clears her throat. ‘So, ehrm, is it possible for you to let me speak to the doctor? Because I’d like some advice about how to deal with your . . . his . . . your body.’
‘You are speaking to me and I am a doctor,’ you say, letting your head fall back on the headrest and closing your eyes. ‘If you want to deal with my body you could start by avoiding these cobbled back roads. Where are we going?’
Pearl’s phone rings and Alison pulls over outside a strip club in Leith to take the call. She puts it on speaker.
‘This is Jerry Shroeder from Edinburgh University. I have some information on the sample you asked me to look at.’
‘The what?’
‘The sample? I hope I’ve got the right number. Is this Pearl? I have here a sample of crude oil and a couple of feathers that came my way with your contact details attached. Ring any bells?’
Alison glances at you and puts the parking brake on.
‘Of course,’ she tells him. ‘I’m sorry – you caught me right in the middle of something. Go on. I’m listening.’
The voice on the phone says,
‘Well, if you’ve got access to a computer I could application-share and you could see for yourself. There are structures here that . . . that we just don’t see in nature.’
Jerry Shroeder sounds excited
‘I’m in Edinburgh, as it happens,’ Alison says cautiously.
‘Great! Do you want to come in? You can look through the microscope yourself, and I can explain . . . ?’
You shake your head when he says this. It’s surely a trap.
‘I’ll have to get back to you. Can I take your number?’
When she hangs up you say, ‘Feathers and oil. It could be something, but I wouldn’t go in person. Too risky.’
Alison is looking at her rear-view mirror.
‘I’m more concerned with people pursuing us,’ she says.
You sigh. ‘That’s not how it will be done. They’ll use GPS. Do you have any paracetamol?’
‘There’s ibuprofen in the glove box.’
‘I never take that,’ you inform her. ‘It does terrible things to your liver.’
Her voice sails up in a laugh. ‘You’re worried about liver damage? Tell you what, Doctor. Open the glove box and take three ibuprofen and a slug of what’s in the flask. Your wee liver won’t even notice the ibuprofen after the whisky hits it.’
‘My liver,’ you intone, ‘is not wee.’
But you do as she says.
‘It’s going to be OK. Gunther will ring any minute. No one can connect you and me. I have no record whatsoever. We’ll get you out of sight, and we’ll figure out how to get the money back from Bethany and make this thing right. There has to be a way. It will be OK.’
‘Pace will have monitored phones, internet, everything,’ you tell her. ‘One of their agents is gone. There are the people from the bridge who saw Pearl. They can add it up.’
‘They. They. Who are they?’
‘Pace have government links. The reason the police haven’t been round is because MI5 and possibly the international finance community are watching everything we do. Your phone is monitored. Your e-mail is monitored. There’s probably a satellite on us by now. They are all in each other’s pockets, the whole pack of them.’
‘I was afraid it was something like that. Are you sure?’
‘They don’t want you, Alison. They want me. And whatever you see in the headlines, it’s not because of the gunshots on Long Island. They want me because I know where the bodies are buried at Pace. I know everything about how Stevens skimmed the money. This isn’t the first time I’ve worked for him.’
‘What about the briefcase? No offence, but Pearl has entrusted her life to me.’
‘They’ll be aware of it. I’m certain none of them know anything about what it really contains.’
‘Well, if they take it and open it then it will be like that movie when the Nazis open the Ark of the Covenant, won’t it?’
‘I’m not going to let it come to that.’
‘Do you have a choice? Can you . . .’ She resorts to actual handwaving at that point as if she can’t bring herself to say the words change into a prehistoric bat-winged lizard.
‘No,’ you say, and you feel him listening there in your shoulder blades and in your hips. ‘Not under my control. It happens. Or it doesn’t happen. And it’s connected to that.’
You indicate the briefcase, sitting so quietly in the back seat. Alison’s phone lights up.
‘Thank god for Gunther,’ she says, and puts the car in gear. ‘Let’s go.’
She drives to a warehouse covered with graffiti but devoid of airborne advertisements. You hear gulls and you smell garbage. Gunther is there, a slight man with faded wispy hair who drives an ancient mud-cloaked van that looks held together with baling twine. He is using the cigarette lighter to pump up a tyre as Alison parks behind him. She hands him the keys to her late-model four-wheel-drive.
‘Isabel has the number for the supply company in case you need anything. It’s really straightforward stuff, and just ping me if you need anything.’
Gunther has a look on his face like he can’t believe his luck. He glances at you a few times with a flash of small smile, but seems afraid to speak to you. You get the impression he thinks you are Alison’s toy boy. You feel so faint that you must lean on his rickety vehicle.
‘Are you sure about this, Ali?’ Gunther says. ‘I’ve put Madge’s boiler suit in the back for you. I hope it fits.’
‘It’ll be fine. Well, my friend and I had best be off. Thanks so much for doing this, Gunther, and I hope you enjoy Edinburgh.’
Gunther waves as Alison drives off in the squeaky old van. She blows out a huge sigh and punches on the stereo.
‘I hope he’s not suspicious,’ she confides. ‘We’re not really friends. Years ago I taught him on a course and he was always making jokes about sticking his arm up a cow’s backside and then waggling his eyebrows at me as if he thought this was a turn-on. I had to ask my mate Kevin to have a quiet word.’
‘A quiet word?’ You laugh. ‘What exactly would that entail?’
‘Never mind. So, Gunther’s practice is in the middle of fuckall, up north beyond even Inverness. Kevin goes up to do holiday cover when Gunther goes back to Austria every winter to ski, and he told me how on the property there’s an old airplane hangar. I think it used to be part of this estate that got broken up. It’s a huge place, totally empty.’
‘I think I understand,’ you say, plucking a length of baling twine from the gear shift and tossing it in the back of the van. ‘So it is a large animal practice.’
‘Very large.’ Alison laughs. Then she says, ‘Don’t know why I’m laughing. What’s so fucking funny?’
You turn round in your seat and produce what looks like a giant pair of pliers with curved pincers. You snap them together.
‘My daughter has a game called Dinosaur Dentist,’ you say, waving them around.
She swats the pliers away. ‘They’re for taking off horse shoes. Are you going to call your wife and tell her where you are?’
‘Indeed,’ you say. ‘I shall tell her that until further notice I will be living in an airplane hangar and fraternising with the Loch Ness monster while you engage in a little dubious financial hacking to try to recover some of the funds that were lost when Bethany Collins ruined the future of humanity because her boyfriend doesn’t satisfy her sexually. My wife will then file for divorce and report my location to the police.’
‘Can’t say I blame her,’ Alison sighs. ‘Maybe you should say you’re playing golf.’
Remembers the future
My face was in the muck. I lifted my head and sneezed. I was in a shallow ditch, not deep enough to be a grave – more like a really modest impact crater caused by me. It was rapidly filling with water from the surrounding swamp. The shadow of my wings fell over my body, so that I felt intense sunlight on my feathers but not on my skin. The air in my nostrils was sultry and moist, loaded with oxygen. I felt my blood vessels make adjustments as my body reorganised itself to my new environment.
All around me grew horsetail ferns, great big ones. The geometry of their growth ratio played little games with my visual cortex; I liked the pretty patterns. They lay at funny angles where I crushed them, some crisscrossing, some bent like drinking straws. A disturbed insect the size of a hockey stick hovered nearby, its wings thrumming. I found the thing unnerving, but only until I heard the rumble of something much bigger. Towering over the swamp where I lay was a forest of giant angiosperms. I felt tiny.
I wasn’t in Edinburgh anymore.
There was no sign of the briefcase.
I got to my feet. Sweat was already running down the middle of my back, beading on my feathers. My bare feet sank into the marsh and I felt vulnerable because it was hard to see any distance ahead. I waded and plodded and thrashed aside ferns, all the while taking in the background noise of insect calls, which were low-pitched and hooting.
As I gained higher ground and caught a better view of my environment, I noticed a bald spire of rock that jutted well above the tops of the giant angiosperms that presided over the swamp. If I could get up there, I would get a good view of my surroundings.
Walking on soft loam now, I headed for the cover of the trees. I kept my eye out for tracks of predators, but the ground up here was dry and what markings there were, I couldn’t begin to identify. I could see scarring on the trees, places where the lower branches had been ripped off. Competing pheromones laced the air, and at times there were markings on the bark that looked biological. Something big was in the habit of coming through here; from the look of it, more than one something.
The forest was full of music, some it insect in origin and some reptilian. I heard deeper calls, too, away in the horsetails. Looking out over the flatland from above I could see the stems stirring in places, but whatever was making them stir was effectively invisible.
This really didn’t give me a nice feeling.
I didn’t know what I was going to do with the quetzlcoatlus when I found it, but I had to find it. I didn’t think I could outfly it, and I didn’t like my chances of beating it in a fight, either. Yet so far it had shown no intention of wanting to destroy me; it had had ample opportunity.
I had to find a way to communicate with it.
I began to climb up the hill. It was bigger than it looked; my eyes weren’t used to the scale here. I paused many times for breath, often putting my hand on the bark of a tree to steady myself.
The coiled sunlight of rough sienna bark surged beneath my fingers when I did this. Light made solid. I leaned against one tree for just a moment, for a place to lay my head. Maybe it could give me some scr
ap of comfort. A gouge had been taken out of the side of the tree, as though some large body had collided with it. Its bole was perhaps eight feet in diameter, and a swatch the size of a motorbike had been scraped away at my eye level when I came to stand among the root system. The wound was fresh; there were traces of animal material and the black marks of mud where some living thing had rubbed itself on the edges of the broken wood. Resin sparkled in the light.
I felt the urge to repair it, just like I always feel the urge to repair everything. I put my fingers on the wood and tried to sense its construction. I stilled my gaze. I was listening, as if for a heartbeat. There are faint pulses and vibrations in plants all the time, and they can tell you a lot.
The tiny feathers on the back of my neck had stood up. There was a cold feeling in my solar plexus.
I peeled back the edge of the bark. Flaking moist scaffolds of cellulose lay in my hand, innocent and seemingly aimless plant cells. They didn’t fool me. I could smell the intention that girded their molecules, how it aligned carbon bonds through higher-dimensional ciphers. There was information here, more than I could conceive. I looked up and the great trunks gently converged overhead so that I could see only a scrap of lacy sky. This forest was a library, all right. But the books here weren’t made of dead trees. They were written in living ones.
Something was whispering to me. Not a plant, but Marquita’s voice. Right close in my ear. I knew she wasn’t here. She couldn’t be here. But I could hear her. I heard her breath and the clacking of her spit and the sliding of her tongue, the echoing of breath in throat and against teeth. I knew where the words began and ended because I speak the language, every language, but if you didn’t know language then all the images and histories and truths and fictions in her words would just be a stream of tones bounded by different types of clacking and changes in volume. She was invisible, and when her mouth was against my ear I felt her breath on my skin and the soft ticks and slipperings of consonants go into my soul like sea foam and I was sailing on the low pitch of her voice, for it was like so many other voices and it was like the sun: it was everything I knew. I hear her swallow in between utterances, and I heard her breathe, and we miss so much when the assumptions we attach to words are all we snatch.
Occupy Me Page 17
