Take No Prisoners

by John Grant

  None of them paid the least bit of attention to my presence. I had been here not forever but for far longer than any of them had. I was simply a part of reality to them, like the air they breathed. As with the air, I was invisible. As with the air, they could not be if I were gone.

  Formless, I had all forms. Formless, I was able to make of myself any form I chose, following whatever was the whim of my moment.

  In this particular moment of mine I watched myself deciding that a piece of me should be thickened, twisting streamers of intangibility coming together in a swirl and coalescing around each other in countless layers to create physical essence where before there had been none. The creation emerging from the mist, taking shade out of the greyness only I could see, had two legs, two arms, a head, a momentary identity, a name.

  That name was Quinn, and the creation talked – I could see it doing so, even though I couldn't be troubled to listen. I did, however, trouble to give it the power to see through my eyes, hear with my ears.

  There were others like me. I knew this in the same way the small creatures knew of me. It had always been so. Like me, they toyed with their world, creating and destroying, most of eternity just playing. At our edges we blended with each other, enriching each other, delighting in each other. But not all of us did this, not always. Some chose the route of dying.

  Through my eyes the Quinn-creation could see one of these entering its death throes. It was taking physicality around itself, binding itself in an amour of steel to defend itself from all that was not itself, even though it had no attackers. I watched, passive, as it did this. I knew what would happen to it next – we all did. Self-caged, unable to bear the surrounding weight of its idiot armor, it would shrink, growing ever more bitter and miserable as it did so, like an old man seeking impotently to destroy all around him rather than confront the failure he has made of his life. The entity had become engrossed by its own madness, the madness that fed it and fed upon it. There was nothing any of us could do to save it.

  The Quinn-creation, however, wished to try.

  Had wished to try.

  Seeing it through my eyes, he saw the infeasibility of the task. Feeling its dying through my emotions, he was able to strip himself of his pity. The entity had not been struck by death, but had instead chosen of its own free will to die, and the manner of its dying. Through stupidity it had embraced insanity. Existence does not tolerate stupidity long.

  We watched the stupid, shrinking, dying entity, did the Quinn-creation and I. Perhaps there was a chance for it, perhaps it could save itself. It was difficult to care, although I sensed the Quinn-creation retained some vestige of caring.

  Certainly the Quinn-creation, the name-taker, as it melted back into me – abandoning its self as it discovered that its selfhood was all that had held it back from being truly free, truly individual, truly something other than just another faceless unit in a millions-strong temporary flock, truly everlasting – possessed enough compassion for the one that was approaching its death to be a name-giver as well as a name-taker. The Quinn-creation gave the self-condemned, self-armored, self-narrowing entity a name.

  The Quinn-creation, its shared thoughts fraying with regret, called the dying entity Fortusa.

  ~

  I awoke with what I believed at first was the hangover to end all hangovers. My plastic beaker, empty, had found its way into my naked armpit. I squinted painfully against the grey light streaking in from the station; neither of us had thought to draw the curtains last night. Barely audible, like thunder beyond the mountains, a voice announced that a train for a destination was now boarding at a platform. The tiny noise made the spiritual silence, the utter Tania-less loneliness of the room – of the cold hill side – all the more profound.

  I swung my legs over the side of the bed, got to my feet, swayed. No wonder the liquor was called The Hard Stuff: it had a kick like nothing I'd ever drunk before ...

  Yet my vision was clear. My mouth was no fouler-tasting than on any other morning. My stomach wasn't unsettled.

  The pain in my head didn't come from the liquor – or, at least, it did, but not from the alcohol. The pain was from the still-healing surgery the dream had performed in my mind.

  Dream?

  That had been no dream. It had been a glimpse, for the first time in my life, of reality. Reality makes us, molds us, nurtures us or rejects us, but it is also made by us, by all of us, even though we are unconscious creators.

  The incisions in my mind would heal soon. Already the stitches could be pulled out.

  Half an hour later I was at the hotel's reception desk. The clerk glanced at my hands, my plastic hands, as I leaned on the counter in front of her. The left one was now accustomed to me; the right was still an intruder, but I wore it this morning anyway. It held my room card-key.

  "My wife – she seems to have gone missing."

  The receptionist raised an eyebrow, smiling. "Perhaps she'll still be at breakfast, sir, or in the ..."

  I shook my head impatiently.

  "She's gone. I know that. Did she check out, or did she just ... go?"

  Frowning now, the receptionist checked my card-key, then turned to her keyboard, tapping a few times as she called a new display up on the screen.

  "We have you registered as a single occupancy, sir. Perhaps, ah ..."

  "It's all right. Forget it."

  I walked away.

  Part of me knew the futility of what I was doing, but there was still enough of a part of me stuck in the old ruts that I felt compelled to go through the formalities.

  I made towards a pay phone, then realized I'd never be able to get the coins into the slot. Back upstairs in my room, I picked up the ballpoint pen in my mouth, ready to tackle the phone with it, then let it fall again. If I really tried, I had enough control over my artificial hands to ...

  That was when I realized I'd dressed myself. Not just dressed myself but strapped on the hated plastic prosthetics. Which had I done first? How the hell had I strapped on the prosthetics before I'd strapped on the prosthetics ...?

  Distracted by the realization, I froze for a full minute, perhaps longer. Then I sat down on the bed and shuffled my way out of my shoes. Standing up again, I went to the closet and tussled with the door until I had it open. From the row of my shoes there I selected a pair of slip-ons, and slid my feet into them.

  Back on the bed, I clumsily pressed the 0 for an outside line, waited for the dialling tone, then with care hit the 9 and the 1 and the 1 again.

  I put the phone back on the receiver before the ringing had time to start.

  What the hell had I been doing? It wasn't 911 for the cops in this country: it was 999. Tania had told me that on the plane, and repeated it once we'd arrived in Glasgow until she was sure I had the information firmly imprinted on my brain. In my distraction I'd succumbed to an old habit.

  But wasn't everything I'd been doing for the past few minutes just exactly that – succumbing to old habits? I knew that Tania had gone, and I had a slowly clearing understanding of why she had. I wasn't going to be able to find her unless she wanted to be found, which she didn't. What was the point of all this rigmarole I was putting myself through? Why was I still reciting the lines of the play when the curtain had long ago come down on the final act?

  Sitting on the bed, I let my shoulders sag. Packing the suitcases would be a bit of a nightmare, but I guessed I could always heftily tip one of the hotel's maids to undertake the chore for me. Half the stuff I could leave behind anyway, although I found I was irrationally reluctant just to dump Tania's shoes and clothing and general clutter – if they were still there – into the room's wastebins. Even if I took everything home with me – yes, that was what I would do – the journey would be manageable. The hotel's valets or the taxi driver would get the baggage into the taxi, and at the airport I could use one of their trolleys or find a handler to cope. At the other end, in Newark, things might get a bit more difficult, but not if I explained my plight
at the Glasgow check-in desk and asked them to signal the details through to their counterparts in the States. And from Newark International I could get a taxi all the way home, screw the cost. My wallet was fat with notes in both currencies, and my credit cards were – thanks to Dad's allowance – in reasonably healthy shape. The trip was going to be a challenge, all right, but it was all perfectly feasible ...

  My thoughts ran down like a clockwork toy.

  Old habits again. My first impulse had been to try to trace Tania somehow. Once I'd accepted that this was a fruitless endeavor, my next urge had been the primitive one of scuttling for home as fast as I could go. But home is more than a place, more than a geographical location, more than a set of names and empty symbols. There was a place where I'd lived my whole life, but it had been usurped by name-shifters – by people who seized the names of things, changed their meaning, and pretended they still meant the same. Freedom, on their lips, had become synonymous with slaughter and repression, democracy with the law of the concentration camp. The house in which I'd dwelt, whose every corner I'd thought myself intimately familiar with, had been invaded by thieves, and now I was on the outside gazing in through the window, watching them smash up my property. Whump – there went the microwave. Zip – and a razor sliced through one of the pictures on the wall. Crash – there went the valueless but infinitely valued glass vase Aunt Millie had given me before she died. And all the while the fire the usurpers had lit was blazing merrily in the middle of the living-room carpet, fueled by the chairs and the coffee table ...

  The place I thought of as home wasn't home any longer – not my home.

  I lay down on top of the bed, its coverlet still in disarray from where I'd slept on it last night. The pillows were slightly damp from when I'd been sweating into them, but they were comfortable enough. I put my plastic pseudo-hands behind my head and stared up at the ceiling. There was no need to go scurrying back to the States just yet. The cash and credit cards I'd been planning to use to finance my dash for the solace of familiarity might just as well fund a few extra nights here in this station-side hotel – that's what they'd been intended for in the first place. We'd sampled only a couple of the Indian restaurants, and there must be hundreds more in Glasgow for me to pick among. Was it not the case that Dalí's painting of the crucifixion hung in one of the art museums here?

  If I ran away, my flight would be a mourning. To mourn Tania would be fully to lose her, forever. If I stayed here a while longer she'd always be ...

  ... around.

  I wondered where that train had been departing for.

  ~

  Every day as I arrive at my office, having climbed the last flight of stairs, I pause in front of the glass case that stands just inside the main door. I touch the top of the case, and perhaps it's true that I feel what I think I can feel: the cool smoothness of the glass against my artificial fingertips.

  No. Of course that can't be right. The prosthetics I wear these days are much better than those dreadful pink plastic ones I once so loathed, but even they can't perform miracles.

  The office is in one of these big old residential houses in Grampian Way, in one of the posher parts of Glasgow. Before that it was, briefly, the room over a garage. I've moved up in the world, and nowadays no one seems to notice I'm not Scottish. For four years I've been spearheading a charity devoted to organizing the endeavors of lawyers internationally to get the inmates out of the concentration camp at Guantánamo Bay. We win a few, we lose a whole lot more ... but at least we do win those few.

  I pay myself enough of a salary that every Saturday there's enough left over for lunch at an Indian restaurant. Oh, and for me no longer to need the allowance checks that Dad's anyway stopped sending.

  Inside the glass case is a life-souvenir that is one of the reasons I'm here.

  The pair of shoes that long ago I pushed off my feet in a hotel bedroom, and have never worn since.

  Their laces tied with perfect bows.

  As I pause by the case this morning, I hear, rippling down the corridor, a sound that is one of the other major reasons why my home is in Glasgow, why I'm doing what I'm doing. A cascade of dearly loved laughter. As is almost always the case, she left our somewhat seedy flat before I did this morning, to get to work as early as she could. She's on the phone to a potential donor, perhaps, chatting him up for a few hundred or a few thousand euros extra, or perhaps it's a moral rather than a financial squeeze she's putting on someone: from time to time we gain the ear of a significant legal or political figure here in my chosen homeland, and then there can be a spurt in our achievements.

  I thought I'd lost Tania forever, back on that first morning after she'd told me I no longer needed her and I'd accepted her gift of The Hard Stuff. She said she'd always be near wherever I was, but I didn't believe her – I assumed she was talking purely figuratively. What neither of us recognized then was that the day might come when she'd realize that, though I might no longer need her, she might find herself needing me.

  She found me again – easy enough to do, because I was hardly likely to hide from her. And, of course, I was waiting for her return.

  Her name is Alysson now, and she has wavy copper hair rather than fine, straight and pale. She's a couple of inches shorter and a few years younger than she was before, and her accent is broader, but I knew her for Tania the moment I set eyes on her, that day in The Record Exchange on Jamaica Street when we were both trying to browse through the Savourna Stevenson CDs at the same time. Should I have had any uncertainty, I needed only to look into her eyes, which are brown sometimes and green sometimes but always with behind them the sense of an infinite past. We have a baby on the way – my younger sibling, Alysson often teases me, gazing fondly at her sometimes puerile lover. I eagerly anticipate the day when she'll announce that it's maybe time for her to take me to meet her folks.

  I pat the top of the case one last time, smiling at the sound of her laughter, before I head down the passage to whatever Fairyland the new day brings.

  "The Hard Stuff" was first published in 2005 in Nova Scotia, edited by Neil Williamson and Andrew J. Wilson, was reprinted in Best New Paranormal Romance (2007) ed Paula Guran, and forms Chapter 1 of my novel Leaving Fortusa (2008). Copyright © 2005, 2008 John Grant.

  Bonus Story #2

  Q

  The security guard recognized my face but he knew his job. He laboriously checked my ID, then asked me to step out of the limo so he could frisk me and make me give his machines my thumb-print and a retinal scan. Only then would he allow me through the gate. He politely told me that my driver and my bodyguards were not permitted admission – which, of course, we'd already known – and directed them to a low building about a hundred yards outside the compound where, he assured them, they could enjoy refreshments, entertainment and restrooms.

  He walked with me up to the main entrance, his hand never very far from the gun at his waist.

  "Good to see you're vigilant," I said, in the same way I might have commented on the weather.

  He smiled formally but said nothing.

  At the doorway I had to submit to a second retinal scan before he finally ushered me into a coolly lit reception area. Soft music played in the background, and I stiffened when I recognized what it was. They must have smuggled in the CD.

  Paying no attention to my reaction, the guard dumped onto the receptionist's desk the few items of mine he'd confiscated while frisking me: nail clippers, a blank tape cassette, a tube of lipstick someone had given me as a hint and which I'd never used but still carried around anyway, a comb. Mostly I wasn't sure why he'd decided they were threats to security.

  "Dr Prestrantra," said the young receptionist. "It's good to meet you, ma'am. Dr Heatherton will be with you in a moment."

  "I'm a few minutes early," I said to him.

  I'd hardly had time to wonder why the hell I was apologizing to a receptionist when a door at the back of the room opened and an unshaven man came walking across the shiny
stone floor towards me, a hand outstretched. Blue jeans, a Bon Jovi T-shirt, long dreadlocked hair.

  "Dr Prestrantra?"

  "Cello." My dad had liked the instrument. A good thing, I've always thought, that he didn't like the sousaphone instead.

  "Cello, hi. Tim Heatherton. Good to meet you."

  We shook hands.

  "Coffee? Tea?"

  "I'm awash. A restroom would be welcome."

  "Of course. Charles, could you?"

  The receptionist escorted me down a corridor to a ladies' room, waited outside the door, then led me back again. Dr Heatherton – Tim – was still waiting where we'd left him.

  He grinned. "Social niceties, or should I just get straight on with it?"

  "Up to you. I have the rest of the afternoon free. I need to be back in DC by eight, though."

  "Flying from La Guardia?"

  "Yes."

  "We have three, four hours then. Should be long enough if we start now. Come on back into my lair."

  He led me back through the door he'd come in by and then along a corridor that was largely featureless except for the doors that regularly studded its length. Its walls were painted in one of those colours so tastefully muted you can never afterwards remember what it was.

  We made small talk.

  "I had a very great admiration for your predecessor," he said mildly.

  "So did I."

  "Alex did his best under difficult circumstances."

  "These are difficult times."

  The informal code phrases had been exchanged. We were people of like mind.

  Tim gave a relaxed sigh.

  "And you plan to carry on in the same way that he did?"

  "I do."

  "Good. So I can speak freely?"