Muscle

by Alan Trotter

  I wake into myself. I wake into myself wondering what _____ was shot for, whether Swagger got anything for it, and plenty other things. What do I know about Lowden? I know how his face looks with the air squeezed from it. What do I know about Cansel? I know how his eyes widened as he escaped his burning sheet. As _____ drove his knife into his face, how he screamed. I need to get some control, before I lose it all again, and I go to Holcomb’s apartment to look for it.

  I go to Holcomb’s, where they wrung the life from him and it’s as if time died in here with him: the writer’s not here (not even as a stain on the bed: the mattress is gone) but everything else is like it was when _____ and I went through it, after we’d found him, eye ready to drop from his face, a hole in his cheek.

  There is still no copper ball that can hold the future and the past.

  But I take his handwritten notebooks and his typewritten pages, and all the hundreds of thousands of words he’d sold off one by one to the pulps. I find them in magazines he had in drawers, in magazines under his bed, in a magazine levelling his kitchen table. They are under the name Holcomb, and also some, in older magazines, under a different name, Campbell, though the writing is recognisably Holcomb’s and fragments in the notebooks mark the stories as his.

  *

  It takes me a long time reading Holcomb’s stories and notebooks to learn how to read them. Each time through, more of them is available. I get to know Holcomb’s handwriting writing until the two of us are so familiar that I can follow it even when it’s drunk out of its skull. I begin to see in the different machines and scientists and ways of describing time what will be useful and how to discard the rest.

  In one slurring, drunk-sliding passage of a notebook I find something about a time traveller who discovers that time isn’t a single line—past at one end, future at the other, us pushed along its length—but something multiplying, branching:

  NOT flowing, but RIGID. The past and future are as real and fixed as the present, but they exist in infinite variety. Every branch of time, and they are INFINITE, represents a possible other creation, each one different from the others by one single degree. Across the sum of them all exists everything in every possible variety.

  So everything that didn’t happen here, happened there, or it happened one branch further across, and every sorry act that is committed over here, somewhere it isn’t. Crawl far enough back up the branches, then you could get one to the other. You could move out of your version of things and into any other: your pick.

  The next passage arrives like a hangover. It’s about Holcomb not his scientist—all his writing works back to self-pity. This passage ends: I’m writing this and yesterday I did and didn’t shoot myself.

  *

  Holcomb’s versions of time, his different machines: they talk against each other, Holcomb and Campbell disagree constantly with each other and with themselves. They put together models of the universe and they bury them in scrubland, and make more. I pick through it all to find what’s useful, and I begin to see in the notes and the dropped half-details of some of the stories the outline of the device.

  *

  Drift in thought. Evvie is kind to me and takes my hand, and I fall asleep in her apartment and when she wakes me, it is softly. ‘Hello there, happy bear.’ I spend the night at the New Europe, and I don’t think for days about where _____ is, maybe because I know.

  I go back to Evvie’s. Only she sends me away. As if I didn’t sleep in her apartment, as if she didn’t wake me softly, and tap on my tooth, and kiss me, and bandage my hand. This, she says, was pity or kindness. She says that she was decent to me because I came to her, but it doesn’t give me a right over her, not to keep coming, not to insist she feel some way she doesn’t, and all the pity and kindness is in the past and none of it is to be repeated.

  She should know how easy love is if it’s just freely given, how it multiplies from itself: I’ve seen it in Lydia and the apartment manager and how they are with their son, it will grow and grow if she just lets it. I’m frustrated and I let her feel some of my frustration. She is acting as if she didn’t open the door to me and, seeing me there, with a cut hand, covered in dirt from paying off a debt, her debt, because hadn’t it travelled on to her?—as if I wasn’t entitled to something.

  She talks to me like you’d talk to an unwelcome stranger, like you’d talk to someone you were wary of. She keeps her door between us. As if she could hold me off if I chose to press myself, if I chose to explore into her room, to find with my hands what it is I’m entitled to. She asks me what it is I want, as if she hadn’t shared the ease and contentment of our sitting together, as if she hadn’t put her hand in mine.

  I know I can make a life around Evvie Heydt, I can keep at her, I can crawl through possibilities until I do.

  *

  Polly is reading her newspaper and one of the men in white smocks interrupts her. He has been spinning a powder round in a container of milk, dissolving it. ‘Would you mind?’ he says and holds the milk out to her. He wants her to do his work for him, to stand by Box, reach into the frame of the device and part the damaged lips, to tip the milk into his mouth. To nurse him.

  ‘No,’ she says, with a voice to crack chinaware, ‘I’m not doing that.’ She feels like she might punch the young man in the nose. He frowns, and begins the job himself. Polly finds herself too full of anger for the young man to go back to the paper. She watches him instead.

  When he is finished he leaves the room. Polly pulls her chair closer to Box and looks through the mesh of the device into his eyes, though she doesn’t find him there.

  ‘I hate you,’ she says, though the tone of her voice is friendly. She pats him on the leg with her rolled up newspaper. ‘I hate you so much it hurts me to be in here with you. Maybe that’s why you wear all of this,’ she says. ‘This treehouse you’ve built yourself into. To stop me coming at you with a knife. Well, I won’t. You’re not the first son of a bitch I’ve known.’

  *

  Polly thinks back to the reporter who visited her here. One of the attendants must have known someone, perhaps they were even paid for the tip.

  She arrived one day and there, already in her chair, was the man—young, scrawny, with a sharp nose and dark, thick, back-combed hair. The chair itself was closer to the window than it would usually be, and the window was open wide. The man had a phoney smile that slid into place when Polly came in the room. He bounced up and offered her the seat with an expansive gesture. He didn’t introduce himself but, as she sat, stood a few paces behind her, hands clasped behind his back, looking thoughtfully at Box and refusing to catch her eye, as if this was a show they had arranged to meet at.

  Irritated, she ignored him, and was deciding if she could do it better by reading the sleek she had in her bag, when, without altering his gaze, he said, ‘This must be a very emotional experience for you.’

  She chewed on her teeth. He stood a while longer and then tried, ‘It’s hard to say how brave you are to come here.’

  Rather than say anything, she chose to be every bit as still and empty as Box. She’d tire this man out by not responding. She wouldn’t reward him for surprising her—trapping her with his presence.

  It didn’t take long: a few minutes, a few more unanswered comments, and he started to fidget where he stood. Then he coughed twice into his hand. At that, a photographer appeared in the open window and popped a bulb at her, and both of them were gone.

  Polly saw the story when it ran. The picture of her in her big church hat, full of anger for the photographer, Box in his machine, full of nothing at all, and both looking as mad as each other on their folding chairs in this bare little room. It called her the Madhouse Mother, and had quotes from her that made her saintly and kind and were generally horseshit. It was from that article and the couple more it bred that some of the attendants took to calling her Mother. She read like a character in a story—this odd version of herself who spoke about how she forgave Box for what he had do
ne.

  She felt almost jealous of this other her.

  ‘Maybe I should have forgiven you by now,’ she says. ‘I hoped I would, after all these months. I know you didn’t pick your brain from a shelf, because none of us do, so I should be able to say: he was made this way, vicious and selfish, and then he was sent out on a path to kill my daughter. He didn’t choose any of it, not his brain, not the path. I know that I’m a piece of meat in this skillet,’ she says tapping her head, ‘or else some God made me some way, and whichever it is I didn’t get a say in what I was given. And if you’re a nasty piece of spoiled meat I guess it wasn’t your doing either.’

  She says, ‘Well, I’m going to keep sitting here in my skillet and thinking how you’re stuck in yours, because I don’t know what to do with hating you.’ She opens her newspaper.

  *

  When they first bring me here, another man is sitting in the room with me. My sight is blurred, it often is, and I think maybe the other man is Bernard, but when I ask him he laughs and it isn’t, though he is large like Bernard. He sits and talks with me for a while. He is saying how violence has momentum, once it arrives it leads on into itself, and that is the beautiful thing about it. How long do we spend just looking for the next thing to do, he asks, but violence can fill space, any space it is given, like sunlight filling a room, can surround you every inch like bathwater. And here we’ve been led into it, and maybe there are worse places to be, and I feel quite afraid of him, even though I understand exactly what he means.

  *

  I build the device so quickly it is as if I’m already guided, as if unseen practice has already taken me to it. I know that I don’t have to make a great machine the size of a car that can be climbed into. It is going to be a device that sits around my head, with two straps that I make from a belt to hold it in place: one running from the crown under the chin, the other from the forehead to the back of the neck.

  The device is simple because it has to do something simple. This is one of the clearest things I take from Holcomb’s writing, that manipulation of time is a cinch, however much we struggle to think it. Even crossing a room is hard until you learn to walk. To step back through time is no harder. I pull the mirror from the wall in the bathroom of the dead apartment, and I go to Lydia’s and I take two large mirrors from her, and I sit the mirrors around the table as if the four of us are going to play a friendly game of cards. I take apart the headboard of the bed and use the wood to build a brace that sits across my shoulders, which holds the pieces of device in place as I build it around my head, using the mirrors to watch myself work. All the device requires is a frame of pipes that are braced against important points of the head, close to the leaking thoughts that power and guide its use, and the pipes find their home easy and quick. The device has a sharp edge across the top of my skull and I bleed into my hair without noticing, then I pad the edge and adjust the pressure of the nails that top the pipes to give the device claws to hold itself against me as it needs to, and I unbuild the brace from my shoulders and it perches there, complete and perfect. And I sit in drifting contemplation, slow leaking thought, and the feeling is as if the grip of the machine is taking each quarter of my head and turning it out from the rest, and machine and head ladder out into the apartment and in every direction at once. I climb through the cracked space.

  I drift in contemplation and find myself outside Holcomb’s. It’s night time, the rain is coming down, and the street is empty, but the phone booth is dark and by it lies a heap, a dark mass. I step towards it as I appear in the doorway of the building alongside _____, and I see Swagger lying there, half in, half out of the booth, his gun steadying on us, and in the doorway I have reached down and I throw a rock, and Swagger’s gun fires twice but he’s missed his shot, and I see myself dive backwards into the building onto _____. I take to my heels as Swagger takes to his heels.

  I drift further and I am in the apartment, and _____ is here, and Swagger too and Childs, and I interrupt their preparations. I interrupt their preparations. It is still _____’s apartment and not yet mine. They are sitting at _____’s table with their sleeves rolled up high, their fingers tipped oil-black: Swagger, Childs and _____. I am off at Evvie’s apartment, but I am here too, and I have a chance to keep _____ from being shot in the street. My hand is cut from the fall from Cansel’s window. Lying before the three of them on the table and reflected in their eyes are barrels, chambers, firing rods, ammunition—the guts and grease of guns, maybe half a dozen guns, maybe more.

  Swagger is holding a chamber, a black glistening beetle that he has run through with a long brush, piercing one of its five eyes. Childs’ hand is turning and polishing a trigger guard with a cloth. Between them _____ is holding a shotgun stock. He is looking at the spread laid out before him on a sheet like a picnic, looking greedily, like he can’t wait to take these guts in his guts, like he’ll eat them up until he is lead-bodied, until he can spit bullets wherever Swagger points him.

  ‘Take a seat, Box,’ says Swagger. ‘We’re getting ready. Things are about to break.’

  I don’t take a seat but I don’t find any words for him, or for _____.

  Childs stands. He takes a Colt Super Match from the table and walks over to me. His hoofed leg is a corked gun barrel. He is holding the Colt backwards, shaking hands with the barrel, and he knocks its handle against the back of my cut hand. I keep my arms by my side. Childs’ breath steams upward into my face. ‘Take the gun,’ he says, and raps my hand with it again. He strikes downwards, the inside of the butt against my knuckles, scraping them. My fist clenches and I feel the palm open with blood. The stub of Childs’ missing arm rises up, aroused, like it wants to grip me by the neck. The gun’s handle swipes my hand again.

  ‘Things are about to break,’ says Swagger. I look at _____. ‘We’re going to go calling on a friend of Lowden’s, a friend of Lowden and Cansel—Dickie’s his name. We’re going to be ready. Things are about to break. Take a seat, Box.’

  ‘_____,’ I manage to say, ‘let’s go.’

  Already he is up, standing beside Childs. No one moves like _____. He takes the gun from the cripple, who backs off.

  _____ cradles the gun in his hands and when he speaks he speaks to the gun.

  When _____ spoke—when he wasn’t screaming or threatening death or cursing and spitting teeth, when he was just talking—he always sounded like a boy.

  ‘Box,’ he says, ‘there’s Dickie, and we’re going to go pay him a visit. Things are about to break.’

  I don’t know what to say. We’ve been pulling at the same yoke for so long I don’t know how to move without him moving too. ‘They j u st want—They’ll cop you.’ Isn’t this enough to say?

  Swagger is always his own fanfare. He is in a vest but still has on his hat. I can’t look at him. ‘Because of the fire? Is that what this is?’ he asks. ‘That you burned Cansel?’ He runs his thumbs the height of his suspenders and lets them snap against his chest, then rubs and slaps at his belly like it’s the family dog. ‘Don’t worry about that. That was just some quick thinking, on your part. Cansel’s dead,’ he says. ‘The rest is just colour.’

  He walks so close to me we are both sharing his hat’s brim.

  ‘There’s one more job for you boys. One more job to get this whole thing tied up, so take a seat, Box.’

  I take myself out from under Swagger’s hat, but I can’t manage any more words. I look at _____ and hold out my cut hand to him. I think maybe he’ll take the hand—maybe just to hurt the cut he’ll take the hand, to punish me for the gesture.

  He looks greedily into his gun. I make for the door.

  When they leave I follow them all the way to the fence, Dickie, who takes them into his office building which is as threadbare and old as he is, with his long, thin hair and elbow patches. I wait around the back of the building, where I can see the fire escape. I hear one shot and see the flash, two storeys up. Then I see _____ at the window. He has a gun in his hand, and raises i
t at Swagger, or Childs, and pulls on the trigger. But of course his gun, the gun they’ve given him, does nothing. _____ comes through the window, and shots come with him. He must have taken one in the arm because he clutches it as he passes me, blood in his fingers. I’ve put myself in the dark where he can’t see me, I follow in the shadows, behind Swagger, who’s after him. At the corner, _____ stops. He drops the gelded gun and stands in the street with his head raised as if he’s sniffing. He’s listening. From all the way at the fairground there’s sound carried by the wind. He hears the band organ, and the screams from the double chutes and the Human Roulette Wheel, and he turns as if he thinks that the best way to run, and Swagger takes his shot.

  I leave: I’ll leave _____ and go to Evvie. But I’ll come back. This is just a rehearsal. First I’ll make things right with Evvie, I’ll take Evvie, and I can get it so _____ doesn’t end up on a street corner with a gelded gun sniffing at air.

  There’s some neck pain, from holding the device. But then there’s some back pain from sitting too, and there’s probably some pain that comes from having shoulders and wrist pain from having wrists. Everything a person has comes to pain them. It’s another thing to carry, this pain, like the device, but it’s not more to carry than I can bear. Why would it be easy, why should it be quick? I sit in the device and think with my attention diffused, just like Holcomb calls it: a state of drifting contemplation.

  *

  The first time Polly came here, after four or five men in white smocks had passed her around and each one of them had tried to talk her out of seeing the man she’d come to see, and then the final two had warned her about how strange he would look when she saw him, she still found herself shocked. She stood in the doorway a full minute, while the attendant who had brought her checked his watch and rocked on his heels.

  The instant she put a foot into the room, when Box, who had been so still he could have been taxidermy, turned to look at her, it could have scared her blood out from under her skin. Then he just turned back to his window and his stillness.