by Claire North
Three more days of staking out the building gave me the names and identities of everyone working in the outfit. A couple of grad students, a pair of researchers who should have known better, a trio of undergrads from Berkeley in it for the credit on their CVs. I approached them all, chatted in the canteen, brushed up against them in the library, and within a few days could have greeted any of them warmly and asked after their pet cat/lizard/spider/fish by name.
At the heart of the group was Meredith Earwood. Two years into a psychology major, with a minor in English literature, she was the lab rat in the treatment chair, her blood on the needles in the biohazard bin. Her hair was dyed, crafted and sprayed, five dollars for every snip of the scissors; her teeth were perfect little moons in her mouth, her home West Virginia, her ambition to be a counsellor to the famous in LA, her CV adorned with pageants won, her stomach a display of stone-carved muscle, her place on the top of the cheerleading team assured, she somersaulted and backflipped her way to popularity and fame but it wasn’t enough, not enough, never enough.
I opened a conversation with her outside the library with an easy route in: do you have Perfection?
Of course she did, she’d got to 543,000 points back home, no one in her town had achieved so much but then, surprising, unexpected, “But I don’t use that bullshit any more.”
I raised my eyebrows, sat down on the edge of a wall beside her, held my student bag close, purchased three hours ago from the campus shop and rubbed down against bricks until it looked suitably used, and said, “What do you mean you don’t use it?”
“Perfection is an elitist tool of social division,” she explained with the absolute confidence of a second-year humanities student destined to rule the universe. “It’s almost impossible for the poor to achieve more than a few hundred thousand points, and the only way you can achieve a million is by accumulating both the material goods, and the material values of the extremely rich and privileged. You know how the company behind Perfection decided what ‘perfect’ was?”
No, no I didn’t, how did they…?
“The internet. They took Google, Amazon, Bing, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook, Weibo – all the algorithms, all the data, and mined it for what ‘perfect’ meant. Figured the cloud mind would know, because people always know best, all the people, data and numbers on the web and you know what they got?”
No, what did they…?
“George Clooney and Angelina Jolie, that’s what. They got movie stars and models. Rich boys and pretty girls. They got fashion and fast cars, Caribbean holidays, blue skies, clean waters, organic socks and vegan diets. They got fairytales – fantasies – a social construct of ‘perfect’ that’s unobtainable, that’s been pumped out by TV and films and magazines to make us buy, buy buy buy more stuff more advertising buy buy buy buy a house buy a car buy new shoes buy perfection – and they programmed it into their algorithm as the definition of what we should all be. I mean shit, that’s nothing new, Hollywood’s been doing it for years, Perfection’s just riding that wave. Perfection is whatever the marketing men say it is, and we bought it.”
“So you stopped?”
“Sure.”
“But—” I caught myself before the words “you are having treatments” could pass my lips, half closed my eyes, put my head on one side, looking for a better way in.
“But I’m beautiful?” she offered, into my silence.
Not quite where I was going, but…
“I choose to look good,” she exclaimed, highlighting every word with a stab of her finger. “The world admires me, and I like being admired. I know it’s bullshit, but it’s easy, it helps me get where I want to be, and I want to be at the top.”
I counted bricks in the pavement, held my bag tighter, the weight of books that weren’t even mine – must have stolen them from somewhere – pulling me down. “Did you hear about treatments?” I murmured.
She looked up, sharp, then smiled, hiding the knives in her eyes. “Sure.”
“The 106, they say…”
“Sure, I heard that.”
“I hear they make you perfect.”
She didn’t reply, and that night, I followed her to the lab, and watched through a hole I’d drilled in the walls three days before, fibre-optic camera pushed through the gap, as she sat in the chair, didn’t flinch when they gave her the injections, smiled when they put the goggles over her eyes. A man in blue plastic overalls – who I’d never seen before – parted the hairs around the crown of her head, pushed a needle, four inches long, a round sort of antennae at the top, into her skull, all the way. Her heart rate didn’t rise, her breathing was steady, O2 99, BP 122/81. They put headphones on her, a metal node on her tongue, a tube up her nose. They waited. Machines ran and someone made coffee, and they waited.
Thirty-six minutes later, they disconnected her, a little bit at a time, and nothing had changed, but when she opened her eyes the man in blue overalls said, “A simple child that draws its breath, and feels life in every limb, what should it know of death?”
And she smiled, in no apparent pain, and answered, “I met a little cottage girl, she was eight years old, she said; her hair was thick with many a curl that clustered round her head.”
They gave her a lift home, after the procedure, and she waved at them from the door of her house, and the next day got a 78 in her paper on cognition and culture, which was a ridiculously high mark, and went to English beaming, until her lecturer said,
“The little maid would have her will, and said, ‘Nay we are seven!’”
At which point Meredith turned, still smiling serenely, and, with the corner of her expensive grey laptop, smashed the brains out of the student sitting by her side.
Chapter 73
An ambulance on the left, the police car on the right.
Meredith screamed for a very, very long time when they dragged her off the boy she was trying to kill. She screamed until they sedated her, and lay, handcuffed, in the seat of the ambulance, its gurney already occupied with the man whose brains now showed visible and pink between the broken bones of his cranium. I stood in the crowd of onlookers, some silent, some crying, more attempting to take photos, until a furious anthropology professor roared, “If I see a single photograph of that poor boy anywhere, anywhere at all, I will bounce you! I will bounce you so hard you’ll wish you were a fucking tennis ball!!”
The professor was fifty-five at a pinch, diminutive, bespectacled and an expert in the meaning of meaning, whatever that meant. She had the lungs of an opera singer and the fury of a pitbull, and the crowd dispersed before her wrath, and so did I.
At night, I returned to the labs where Meredith had been treated, and found them empty, gone; just the smell of bleach.
I went back to the house of Agustin Carrazza, and he too was vanished, departed in a hurry, lights off, no one home.
I locked myself in a motel room, piled cushions around the doors and walls, and listened once again to the sound of Byron’s voice, turned up full, as she proclaimed, “For the sword outwears its sheath, and the soul wears out the breast, and the heart must pause to breathe, and love itself have a rest…”
Hey Macarena!
This time, the urge to vomit came entirely from me, from the experiences I, myself, had found, and not from any implant in my mind.
Then I put on recordings of every Wordsworth and Lord Byron poem I could find, and lay back on the bed to listen to them all, and had no adverse response to either, and kept the clock in my line of sight to ensure I lost no time.
After six hours of poetical digestion, I put my running shoes on, and went to visit Meredith in the hospital.
They had her in a private room, handcuffed to the bed. A sleepy man in a blue cap sat watch outside, empty paper coffee cups crushed on the chair beside him, a packet of tortilla chips nearly finished, a nicotine stain around his fingers. I stole a nurse’s badge from a woman in oncology, scrubs from a surgical ante-theatre, and a clipboard off the end of a bed. I tied my
hair back, smiled at the policeman by the door, who didn’t bother to check my badge as he let me in.
Meredith was dozing the fitful sleep of a woman unlikely to sleep well again. I sat down beside her, woke her gently, my hand on hers, and at her start said, soft, East-Coast American, “It’s all right. I wanted to check on how you were doing.”
“Is he dead?” she asked. “Did I kill him?”
“No.”
“Christ! Christ oh God Christ…”
Relief, I thought, in her face, but there was too much anxiety to let the relief last long. “Meredith,” I said, “the doctor needs to know if you’re on any other medical protocols. Have you been having any sort of treatment for other conditions?”
“Treatments? No.”
“There are needle marks in your arm.”
“Oh… yeah, sure… I gave blood, or something.”
“There’s more needle marks than that.”
“I… I’m not having any treatments.”
Either a damn good liar, or she can’t remember. “Do you remember an industrial estate out towards Walnut Creek? People in overalls, a reclining chair?”
“No. I don’t. Why, is there… did I do something? I mean… did I… is there…”
Words trail off. She has no idea.
The girl has no idea at all.
“No,” I breathed, pushing the dishevelled hair back from her blotched face. “It wasn’t you – not you at all.”
I let myself out, and didn’t smile at the cop on my way to the exit.
Chapter 74
A question, the only one that matters: where is Byron?
Perhaps also another: why do I need to know? She said “you will come to me” and I am looking for her, is this just a compulsion? Has she embedded something in my brain, needles and antennae and…
… but no. First things first, I get a full medical, all in one day, fast so the doctors can’t forget mid-test. Nothing embedded, no chips, no wires, no nothing, today is not the day I start wearing a tin-foil hat.
Discipline: if you cannot trust in yourself, trust in others. If you cannot trust in others, trust in the scientific method. Everything else is conjecture and doubt, dogma, fantasy and fear. I will not be afraid. I will not be mad.
I looked for Byron, and Byron was gone.
Vanished from America, vanished from the darknet, simply… vanished.
I searched the 106, I searched laboratories and lecture halls, scoured the airports and the border posts, rummaged through the internet, digging for her, luring her out, and nothing.
She had vanished more effectively than I’d ever imagined, and people could remember her, and she was still gone. Maybe she was right; maybe that was a kind of freedom.
Finding nothing, on a whim, I rode the Greyhound bus to Salt Lake City. The bus wasn’t like the old movies; it was air conditioned, comfortable, a coach with a toilet at the back. “Hi there!” exclaimed the driver over the intercom, as we headed north. “There’s Wi-Fi for your entertainment, magazines for your pleasure, lights above your chairs for reading and a toilet for an experience you won’t ever forget!”
Salt Lake City: founded by Mormons, sustained by skiing and industrial banks. A puddle of straight lines beneath snow-capped peaks. I had a very good hot dog while choosing my next destination – so good I went back for seconds and the woman serving exclaimed, “Honey, you oughtta eat more and fatten up, else you won’t never survive the winter!”
I squirted more ketchup into the bun, tipped an extra two dollars, and caught the bus at 3 a.m. down Interstate 80, heading east, towards nowhere much.
Chapter 75
Names on the road. Evanston, Rock Springs, Rawlins, Laramie, Cheyenne, Ft Collins. Places where founding fathers planted a flag, where the railwaymen came with spades and dynamite, where old tribes fought and died, driven ever further west towards the mountains and the seas. Why am I here? Why am I travelling?
Travelling from, travelling to. It seems like the thing a pilgrim does. It feels like a kind of prayer.
A slow shift in the landscape, the beginning of names tied up with a different kind of history. Lexington, Kearney, Grand Island, Lincoln, Omaha. A decaying industrial heartland. Denver. Ft Morgan. Sterling. Ogallala. The chimneys are dry and dusty, the gates are locked, move with the times or be crushed. Insurance salesmen, dealers in second-hand cars, TV crews, pundits and merchants of opinion and vanity, come east, come east; there’s a ten-minute rest stop in Des Moines, thirty minutes in Walcott if you need to pee, toilet stinks but what of it, someone else will clean up the mess, litter in the road, tomorrow’s problem, today is today is today, what next?
Chicago. I sat by Lake Michigan, still as settled silk, and wondered if the first Europeans to come here had thought they were seas, oceans, and that Japan lay beyond.
I rode the L, marvelled that it could be so slow, crawl so close to the towers in the Loop, craned my neck to see a little piece of sky. I ate pizza by Wrigley Park and cheered for the Cubs, though they were destined to lose. I found a man who liked to rumba, thought, why not, why the hell not, and rumbaed with him all the way to his flat, which smelt of habanero and kidney beans, and it was only fucking, nothing else, and he didn’t ask if he’d see me again and I wasn’t interested in anything more, and I caught the bus the next morning towards South Bend, Toledo, Cleveland and New York.
And in New York, I looked across at the statue of Liberty, and I cried.
Seven-day-old clothes, the smell of pepper and sex on my skin, I hadn’t run for days, my legs were dead from the bus, my mind saw only the passing of the world outside, not me, not me at all, discipline, gone, breath, gone, counting, gone, knowledge, truth, thief, all…
Nothing.
Where had I come from? Where was I going?
From nowhere, to nowhere.
The past was just a present that had been, the future was a present yet to come, and only now remained, and I stood by the sea, recovering my land-legs from the road, and wept.
Chapter 76
The strangest thing.
A funny feeling.
I bought a French passport off a guy in the Bronx, a proper professional, his ID on the darknet an alpha-numerical tangle that expired the instant he had cash in hand. He’d done a good job too, right down to stamping it with an entry visa from the Canadian border, a couple from Turkey and one from India. I complimented him on his efforts, and he shrugged, great rippling basketball shoulders, and said when he was working it was like nothing bothered him, yeah.
I went to Fifth Avenue to find something fashionable to steal, but nothing leapt to mind, and that night I went to a casino off Eighth and West 36th and counted cards and lost a little but won more, and at one point a security guard stood behind me, and counted cards with me, but someone dropped a cocktail and started screaming at the man who’d bumped into her, and that briefly diverted the guard’s attention, and when he turned back, he’d forgotten what he was doing there.
Standing at JFK waiting for the plane, I saw a woman with a beautiful silver bracelet set with amber, and I went to steal it, and then stopped myself, and didn’t, and sat back down, and when a few minutes later she saw me, and I smiled, she smiled back, and her day was fine.
The cashier phoned her manager when I paid for my flight to London entirely in cash, but I showed her the paperwork from the casino and explained that I’d got lucky, but never had a bank account in the USA.
“You know you can’t take all that currency across customs, don’t you?” said her manager, and that was okay, I replied, I had a friend in the British embassy who was going to handle it for me. Then I sat in the toilet and counted out $9,990 from my stash, put the rest ($2,681.55) in a brown envelope and dropped it into the donations box for “Bioliving New York – for a greener city for all our children”. They stopped me at customs, and counted out my cash.
“Sweet,” said the lady who helped me re-pack my bag. “Ten bucks short of all the paperwork.”
“I had luck in the casino,” I explained with my best comedy-French accent. “Going to start again, a new life. You can only take what you carry.”
“Swell,” she exclaimed. “I always wanted a clean break, but you know, who doesn’t?”
I flew economy class, half watched a couple of films. A man in a grey suit fidgeted all the way to London, flinching at every bump of turbulence. Sometimes he looked at me and saw someone new, but he didn’t care. His fear would have wiped away all details of this journey, even if I weren’t his companion for the long journey home.
Home.
London.
Hotels, B&Bs, places I know, the river, the winter sun setting behind the London Eye, dog walking on Hampstead Heath, kites flying, is this home?
I took the train to Manchester. Straight streets between stiff, industrial architecture. Short cathedral tucked in between a shopping mall and roaring traffic. Museum dedicated to football, galleries from warehouses, town hall snaked round with trams, stone columns, red brick, not enough trees, crossing the canals at the lock gates, clinging to the black iron handles as you edge, one foot at a time to the other side. The screech of the railway line, the cyclists ready to pedal through the Pennines, is this home?
I ate chips in Albert Square while a steel-drum band played, went to the pub for a quiet pint, put a quid into the fruit machine, lost, and caught the train from Piccadilly to Derby as the sun went down.
Derby.
Is this my home, is this a thing that matters, a place that has some meaning? More than flagstones and concrete, bricks and tar?
I took a hotel room near the station, an ExpressPremierExclusiveSomething, room the size of a cupboard, sheets superglued to the surface of the bed, everything too hot, curtains too thick, night too dark, pipes creaking, slept like a stone.
