Incredible Bodies

by Ian McGuire

  ‘Nominally, yes. But as we both know the directorship has now been reduced to a sinecure and all power lies with the assistant director, yourself. I am proposing a certain redistribution.’

  ‘A return to the status quo ante. And in return you have a name?’

  ‘I do.’

  Zoe swallowed. She took out a cigarette. Dirck van Camper saw it, winced and shook his head.

  ‘It would have to be a rather special name wouldn’t it?’ he said. ‘To be worth such a price.’

  ‘It’s the name of the person who put you in that wheelchair.’

  He smiled.

  ‘Let me guess.’

  ‘I don’t think you could.’

  ‘Let me try.’

  Zoe nodded. ‘If you like.’

  Dirck half-closed his eyes, pirouetted a few times and hummed to himself.

  ‘Let’s see,’ he said. ‘How about,’ he stopped spinning and looked straight at Zoe, ‘Morris Gutman.’

  Zoe croaked and dropped her unlit cigarette.

  Dirck guffawed.

  ‘Ha! Is that the best you can do Zoe? Morris Gutman, bloody hell.’

  ‘I heard him confess.’

  ‘Maybe you did, maybe you didn’t. But from what I hear about it, Morris would confess to whatever you told him to. The Underseel incident made the Guardian, you know.’

  ‘Yes I saw that.’

  Dirck offered an avuncular smile.

  ‘Really Zoe, I think you need to reassess, take some time off.’

  Dirck turned back to his smart desk and resumed his typing.

  Zoe looked at him: he was wearing a double-breasted Mao jacket and rimless glasses; below the gleam of his bald pate was a faint horseshoe of head stubble. He was waiting, she imagined, for her to plead, to blink, to cut a deal, to accede in some as yet as unspecified way to this cremation of her own career. Above Dirck’s head there was a framed poster from the Seventh Annual Disability Studies Convention in Geneva. Was it possible, Zoe wondered, that she had been wrong all the time, always? That it would end not with the kidney-shaped pool, not with the mesquite barbecue, but here, amid the teak-walled hyper-accessibility of Dirck van Camper’s office? Was it really likely that instead of enjoying Californian underemployment, she would spend the next two decades teaching? Wiping educational arse in a provincial factory farm? Was it possible that they had really won – Dirck, the Crocodile, Adam d’Hote – that these men had actually, actually beaten her?

  On leaving Dirck van Camper’s office Zoe took a black cab directly to the Kum Bar. She was the only customer there. It was three hours before Happy Hour. The tattooed, metal-bound barstaff, with their cut-marks and coldsores, bruises and wax burns, looked at her as though she was strange. She was strange, she realised, strange and absurd and faintly ludicrous. To have ever imagined that she could win on her own, that her will, even her will, with its dark, blood-fed virulence, would be enough. Oh the vanity of it! What had Donald once told her about power? True power is invisible. Powerful men walk among us everyday, but we do not see them at all. All we see are glasses, suits, male-pattern baldness. After her near-death experience she had come to think of power as dark, brooding, glamorous. Wrong. Power was Dennis Sloze; power was Dirck van fucking Camper. It inhered not in the flows but in the systems, not in the flux but in the form.

  What could she do next? She couldn’t imagine. She didn’t want to. She just wanted to stay where she was, sloshing in the depths of her own stupidity, drowning in the pitch-black barrel of her own benightedness. She was drinking the nastiest cocktails she could think of – gin and Coke, Scotch with grapefruit juice. She was drinking for the hangover, drinking for the retch and burn. A boy with hedgehog hair and a purple trench-coat sat down beside her.

  ‘What’s that smell?’ he asked.

  She told him.

  ‘Cool!’ He peered into the remnants of her drinks and sniffed. ‘Have you been making those up yourself?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Owww kaaay.’ The boy licked his lips. ‘I may have something for you.’

  ‘I really doubt that.’

  ‘Hear me out.’ He reached into his trench coat and removed a transparent plastic folder with zip-up pockets. Each pocket contained a nucleus of brightly-coloured pills.

  Zoe rolled her eyes.

  ‘It’s new,’ he said.

  She laughed. ‘New, right. New so you smoke it instead of snort it? New so you stick it up your arse not in your arm? There is no new. New is old.’

  The boy sighed and shook his head. ‘Normally I would share your cynicism,’ he said. ‘The world of narcotics is indeed a hive of bullshit. But that’s the nature of the consciousness-altering industries. Our customers need constant escalation, and if it isn’t there we have to pretend it is.’

  ‘But now?’ said Zoe.

  ‘But now it is here. May I direct your attention to this beauty in the corner.’ One pocket contained a single triangular pill the colour of tomato ketchup. ‘They call it Snail. It’s locally made – an offshoot of the biological weapons programme over at Wetterton. It’ll rip out your synapses and turn them into a papier-mâché effigy of Mao Tse Tung.’

  ‘Hallucinations?’

  ‘Severe.’

  ‘I want something that will hurt and scare me,’ said Zoe. ‘I want something that’ll teach me a lesson. I don’t want happy-clappy, I don’t even want mildly terrifying; I want apocalyptic, I want to feel my soul sucked out through my fucking nostrils.’

  The boy raised his hooped eyebrows, pursed his studded lips and grinned. ‘Girlfriend,’ he said, ‘I think you’ve just met Mr Right.’

  The Snail did the trick. After twenty minutes Zoe was staring at the lush green surface of her wheatgrass and schnapps cocktail, convinced that it was sending her messages – that the glints and twists of light, the tiny but perfect pricks of shadow were forming words, symbols, runes; that they were speaking to her in long elegiac, riffs about failure and loss and despair, about the abstract universality of error and the terrible specificities of pain. After forty minutes the drink rose out of the glass in a slick green column and wrapped itself around her neck like a chilly boa constrictor. It then wrapped itself around her head and arms, her legs and torso, her feet and hands and face until she was mummified by its ghastly green rope. Then it started to squeeze, to fill her mouth and arse and vagina, to buffet and flay her from inside and out, until at last she felt her soul sucked out through her nostrils and saw it lying on the table in front of her, quivering, vulgar, murky, like a large plate of phlegm.

  After an hour she was back in the Kum Bar. Her cocktail was untouched. The boy with hedgehog hair was chatting to a barman and sipping crème de menthe.

  ‘An hour!’ she said. ‘Sixty quid and it only lasts an hour?’

  ‘They’re working on that,’ he said. ‘This is only mark one.’

  ‘It’s built-in obsolescence,’ she yelled. ‘You’re a fucking disgrace.’

  ‘Wow, watch what you’re saying. These are craftsmen. This is not buying a chemistry set and flogging bad E to teenyboppers. This is good gear. These are gastrodrugs. Now tell me I’m wrong.’

  He looked her straight in the face. The silver studs on his upper lip looked like the residue of a permanent, mythic sneeze.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘How much for three?’

  By the end of the evening, according to the hedgehog boy, Zoe had taken more Snail than anyone else on earth ever. Her body, he claimed, now had the status of a chemical experiment and should be treated accordingly.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Carefully observed.’ He grinned, winked and stuck his tongue in his cheek.

  ‘Forget it,’ she said to the hedgehog boy.

  ‘Call me a cab,’ she said to the barman.

  The thought of being touched by anything human bored her immeasurably. She wondered whether the Snail had ruined sex for her forever. Perhaps it had. If so, she wasn’t sure it was such a bad bargain. Sex, af
ter all, had misled her badly. It had told her it was everything; it had promised that if she clung to its flanks, if she gave herself to its tides, it could raise her up, it could cast her to the very heights. That had been a lie.

  Zoe was in a cab going home. No other living being had ever come down off four consecutive hits of Snail. She wondered what it would be like; she wondered whether it was even survivable. Outside the Casa Urbano she saw beggars, hordes of them – a dwarfish army of beggars waving their polystyrene cups, patting their noisome dogs, chanting in Wagnerian chorus: Spare change please, mate. After a moment the army shrank, steadied, coalesced into the form of only one beggar: Trevor, whom she knew quite well, and his dog Dirty Harry. She found the sight of Trevor and Dirty Harry, however, more terrifying in its straightness, its accuracy, its crude and unbudging sense of realism than any hallucinatory begging army ever could have been. Zoe’s world, she realised, had been horribly disenchanted, not only by the retreating Snail (which was certainly bad enough) but also more basically and brutally by the failure of her vision: by the draining of the kidney-shaped pool; by the recession of the ontic tides; by the sudden flattening of the electric ocean of Is. Never had she felt such a sense of nullity, never had she imagined that the world could present itself to her as so utterly little, so terribly poor. As she stood in the lift watching the carpet’s paisley pattern wind and unroll around her feet, she had no idea what to do next. As she clicked off the digital door lock and stepped into the apartment, it struck her that in some blunt and basic way this was the end.

  Seated at the head of her bed in a cross-legged position was the angel of death. He was superhumanly large, with vast, rather camp, black wings, but was otherwise dressed quite normally. He also possessed, quite surprisingly, the face of Morris Gutman.

  ‘Death,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Death,’ she said again.

  ‘Are you OK?’ said the angel of death. ‘Look, I’m sorry, I let myself in. I realise that was probably a bit much. Are you really OK? You look …’

  Zoe stared at the angel of death. She was not frightened of him, whatever he portended. Since that day, eighteen years ago, when she had felt him scurrying inside her – the black hamster death – he had been the source of all her power. Had he come to claim her at last?

  ‘Why are you here?’ she asked.

  ‘I have the dirt on van Camper.’

  Zoe wobbled – the cocktails, the Snail and now this!

  ‘There is no dirt on van Camper,’ she quibbled. ‘I’ve checked.’

  In answer the angel of death produced an envelope. It was long and white. He got off the bed and walked towards her. As he walked, his wings disappeared, he shrank to a more human size, but his face remained that of Morris Gutman. Another layer of Snail exited Zoe’s brain.

  ‘Morris,’ she realised. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I just tried to explain,’ he shouted back. ‘I let myself in. I have something.’

  She looked at the envelope. It was still there. It seemed solid, actual. She reached out to touch it. It was.

  Morris told her the story.

  ‘It’s just too fantastic,’ she said. ‘It can’t be true.’

  He showed her the affidavits, the medical report. As Zoe read them she began to weep. It was so beautiful, so shapely. Dirck van Camper was a fraud, a fraud! As an idea it went far beyond revenge: it had the pure, unearthly elegance of a spiral galaxy or a single snowflake. It was proof, if she still needed it, if she really had forgotten, of the great, dark forces beyond her control, proof that despite all her fears (how foolish they now seemed) the flux was still alive, still throbbing. Big, fat tears sprouted from Zoe’s eyes and splotted against Sister Unke’s laser-printed words. Morris gently eased the documents from her shaking hands and put them safely to one side. With a long, post-Snail sigh, she sank into his fleece-clad arms, into the still-identifiable scent of Bernard’s coq au vin. From far away she could hear the merry sounds of jacuzzal bubbling, the booming slosh and hiss of tidal waters rising once again. She could already smell the mesquite.

  ‘Dennis Sloze,’ she mumbled triumphantly, ‘can kiss my bloody arse.’

  Chapter 35

  Morris Gutman sat in Dirck van Camper’s grandiloquent antechamber and waited. He had been waiting there for two hours already with nothing to read but back issues of Disability Today, and nothing to look at except the humming back and forth of Dirck’s new secretary, Marge. Marge, Morris had concluded after only a few minutes, was probably the most thoroughly disabled person he had ever seen. She had motor neuron disease, cerebral palsy and, for some other reason Morris couldn’t guess at, had tiny, child-sized arms and legs. She spoke through a computer and typed with her mouth. Marge, Morris thought, was obviously Dirck’s beard. After the pre-emptive horrors of Marge the idea of quibbling over someone’s disabled status struck even Morris, with the envelope in his pocket and with his will screwed to the sticking place, as in horribly bad taste.

  ‘Professor van Camper will see you now.’ Marge’s voice came disconcertingly from a speaker high on the wall behind her.

  Morris stood up. He took a deep breath and recalled Zoe’s pep talk from the night before: Your purpose in going in there, Morris, is to maim, destroy and terrorise. What you possess, from Dirck’s point of view, is a catastrophe in a business envelope, it’s five A4 sheets of mayhem. You need to let him know that his empire is in your hands now, that he is dangling over the flames of personal and professional humiliation and that you, Morris, are a vengeful fucking god.

  Dirck van Camper was typing. He didn’t turn to acknowledge Morris, indeed the only sign that he was aware that Morris had entered the room was a slightly increased expression of sourness around his bloodless lips.

  ‘So they let you out already?’ he said.

  Morris glanced around the room: the glass-topped conference table, the yak-suede sofa, the wall-mounted plasma screen, the cut calla lilies, the framed posters from the Seventh Annual Disability Studies Convention (keynote speakers: Firenze Beach, Dirck van Camper), the filigree bowl of paw-paw fruit. He remembered his rotting room in Bernard’s house, he remembered Cirencester, he remembered Rumpswick; he remembered, above all, Flat Hill Open Prison. He felt rather happy with what he was about to do.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, seating himself without permission on the yak-suede sofa, ‘and here I am again.’

  ‘Again, yes.’ Dirck swivelled. ‘Isn’t the wish to return to the scene of one’s crime a little cliché, Morris? I would have thought so.’ He looked at his watch. ‘But anyway, I have only five minutes before my next meeting, so perhaps we could expedite this. What on earth do you imagine I can do for you?’

  ‘I’d like a job, Dirck,’ Morris said. ‘In fact, I’d like your job, which is what Zoe promised me before the … incidents.’

  Dirck looked back at him in silence for several seconds. He then shook his head slightly, took a business card from the holder on the desk in front of him and wrote something on the back of it.

  ‘Please call this number, Morris. She is a friend of mine; her name is Dr Bland. She is not cheap, I realise, but I believe there is a sliding scale and the first consultation is free.’

  He wheeled himself the six feet across to the sofa and held out the card. It was, Morris realised, in Dirck’s mind a magnanimous gesture. He ignored the card.

  ‘Perhaps you think it would be inappropriate, Dirck,’ he said, ‘for someone like me,’ he twiddled his hands and feet, ‘someone with moveable parts, to take over the Hub as it is currently constituted?’

  Dirck’s face clenched.

  ‘You are not taking over the Hub, Morris. That is a fantasy. And I warn you, if you become offensive I will call security.’

  ‘I see what you’re saying, Dirck,’ Morris continued. ‘I mean, it might look a bit off for someone like me – fully functioning and all – to take over this big Disability Studies operation. But I thought if it was a problem, i
f it looked really bad, maybe I could just fake it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fake it. You know, I’d get myself a wheelchair like yours, say I’d had a nasty accident a while back, couldn’t walk but otherwise OK. It wouldn’t have to be too extreme, just enough to be part of the team, to be included. That way I could keep the grants rolling, keep the invitations coming in. Plus, if you think about it, it’s theoretically superb – I’d be stepping beyond the binaries, wouldn’t I? Dirck?’

  Dirck hadn’t moved.

  ‘You,’ he said, ‘are a sick individual. I would like you to leave.’

  ‘Sorry Dirck, but I thought that was the point. This whole enabled/disabled thing is a fiction, right? We’re all disabled in some sense, aren’t we? Isn’t that what you said in your book? That once you set aside the Platonic paradigm of bodily completion (which is fascistic after all), you realise that we are all missing something, we’re all flawed in some way – tonsils, appendix, asthma, arthritis, you name it. It’s just that for people like you and me, Dirck, this universal disability thing is a little more metaphorical than for someone like, say, Marge.’

  Dirck tossed the business card in the direction of the sofa and turned back towards the smart desk.

  ‘I think I will call security now,’ he said.

  ‘I know what happened, Dirck,’ Morris called out. ‘I know about Sister Unke.’

  ‘Sister Unke?’

  ‘You must remember Sister Unke. Utrecht University Hospital? She prayed for you ceaselessly, I’m told.’

  Dirck had his back to Morris, his hand was halfway to the phone.

  ‘Sister Unke is dead by now, I think.’

  ‘Surprisingly not, Dirck. She has moved to a convent in Porksby, which, I admit, is quite close to being dead, but literally, she’s still breathing, still talking, talking quite a lot actually. They’re upset about what you did, Dirck. They think it’s blasphemous.’

  A small spot of redness blinked open at the apex of Dirck’s shaved skull. As Morris watched, it spread down and across like the flesh of a cracked egg until the whole of his head shone hard and half-purple. Morris felt a sudden thrill of vindication and certainty.