King of Morning, Queen of Day

by Ian McDonald

  Omry insists people call her Om. Omry will tell you that it has significance for the new decade which will be an age of transcendence and peace and general niceness to all living creatures. Omry’s real name is Anne-Marie. She comes from the north lands, where the accents can make good morning sound like a declaration of war. It is the only place outside China where it is possible to have a conversation entirely in monosyllables. Everyone still calls her Omry.

  Omry is a Purveyor of Organic Holistic Naturopathic Compounds. Omry will tell you all her merchandise is guaranteed One Hundred Percent Natural and Organic No Synthetics No Additives no colourants no preservatives no added sugar sodium-free high in fibre low in cholesterol fully biodegradable. Omry is a pusher. A vendor. A peddler. A dealer. Omry does it for the money. Omry specialises in odd fungi and unusual highs. Some of the wrinkled scrotumlike things in her antique apothecary’s chest are so abstruse the police aren’t even certain if they are bustable.

  Omry is Enye’s supplier. Enye learned about Omry from the Midnight Children. Omry is possibly the only person to have seen them in their light-of-day manifestations. Or then again, maybe not. Omry takes orders on the office fax machine. For a Purveyor of Organic Holistic Natural Compounds, Omry is surprisingly technophilic. Enye expects to hear that she takes all major credit cards. She calls 0800 BIKEBOY and is gratified to hear “A Short Trip in a Fast Machine” as background music, a pleasant change to the usual digi-beat and scratch-sample Omry purports to like.

  “One hundred grams each, okay,” Omry says in her flat, spadelike northern accent. “It’ll be a day or so to get that much together. This stuff is hard to come by. Just what does it do, anyway, huh?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, my little scrap of Lycra.”

  The bathroom-cabinet Shekinah factory is a lot more sophisticated than it was in the early days (early days: she finds it difficult to believe that it has been just over a year since her grandmother’s funeral). Macerate in industrial alcohol, set to dry on silk screens in the airing cupboard, mix to a paste with crushed chalk and a binding medium and roll into nice little pill shapes on the wooden pharmacist’s pill paddles she found in a Saturday antique market along the quays. They pass quite convincingly as Vitamin C in the right bottle.

  Omry will tell you she places a high value on harmonious and mutually fulfilling customer-client relationships. Omry delivers on time, every time, exactly as ordered. In a day or so, Mr. Antrobus comes aknocking at Enye’s door with a small padded envelope which he accepted, in absentia, from a punky but cute bicycle courier. Also, a bouquet of flowers from Enye’s young man. He does hope there is nothing the matter. Would she care to discuss it sometime over tea and pikelets? Which, Enye realises, she would, very much. She would love to pour it all out in slops and spills over Mr. Antrobus’s worn paisley carpet under the watchful eyes of his cats and Greek sunsets; would love to have half the burden of hurt and uncertainty borne by another’s shoulders; but instead she stuffs the flowers into a vase and sets the two hundred gram packets of obscure fungi in a glass beaker of alcohol in the microwave low setting for half an hour or so.

  She will need Shekinah, much much Shekinah, if she is to reach out with her mythoconsciousness to hunt her enemies through the twist and twine of the mythlines.

  It is poor strategy to allow yourself to be led around by the enemy. This is the meaning of the term “to hold down a pillow”—not permitting your enemy to raise his head. To suppress the enemy’s useful actions and permit only his useless actions. This is the way of strategy.

  Is your enemy’s spirit flourishing or waning? Observe his disposition and thus gain the position of advantage. This is what it means to “know the times.” Once you know his metre and motivation, you may attack in an unsuspected manner.

  All things collapse when their rhythm is disrupted.

  Think of the robber trapped in a house. The world sees him as a fortified enemy, but we see with the eye of “becoming the enemy.” He who is shut in is the pheasant. He who enters to arrest is the hawk.

  You must appreciate this.

  Consider this deeply.

  Study this well.

  Research this deeply.

  Train diligently.

  Apply yourself to this discipline.

  When your spirit is unclouded, when the fog of confusion clears away, there is the true void.

  Nihon Me.

  Sanbon Me.

  Yonhon Me.

  Gohon Me.

  Roppon Me.

  Nanahon Me.

  Nikon Me. Sanbon Me. Yonhon Me. Gohon Me. Roppon Me. Nanahon Me.

  Nihon Me. Sanbon Me. Yonhon Me. Gohon Me. Roppon Me. Nanahon Me.

  The swords flash and fly. She is dressed for the night. The Shekinah is a hymn inside her. Under the disciplines of the Kamae, body and spirit are approaching unity, the void. She is high like never before, high and vertiginous. She is running on burning soul

  ninonmesanbonme…

  The telephone rings.

  The singing silver blades freeze in their dance.

  Ring ring. Ring ring, Ring ring; Ring ring, Ring ring, Ring ring; Ring ring, Ring ring, Ring ring…

  “Yes.”

  It is him. He wants to know what is happening to her, to him, can he see her again he wants to see her again he must see her again he has to know what he means what she means. Any moment he is going to say it. He says it—where he stands.

  “Not now, Saul.”

  “Enye… Enye…”

  “No.”

  The telephone clicks down.

  She is guided through the dripping, ringing levels of the old abandoned warehouse building by the information that all doors but the right ones are locked against her.

  He is expecting her.

  He has, he says, been waiting for her for a long, long time.

  He is an aged, aged man, sitting, hands on thighs, on a tattered swivel chair. The vinyl upholstery has split; crumbling foam peers out. He is dressed in buckle sandals, gray slacks, and a grubby aran sweater. Face and hands are deeply eroded. He wears round, wire frame glasses like Samuel Beckett. The only light in the room is from the dozens and dozens of television sets. Wall to wall, floor to ceiling, stacked eight, nine, ten high, all designs from old mahogany veneer monochromes with fabric-covered speakers to flat-screen blacque-tech with full Dolby stereo. Televisions, dozens upon dozens; hundreds of images, all, Enye realises, different. Most of empty streets, the nova-glare of streetlights, puddles of neon and halogen, the cometary trail of red taillights. Punks roistering in a deserted rapid-transit station; street-cleaning trucks intimately connected with the city’s gutters by pulsing umbilicals; delay-struck night-flyers bent, exhausted, over their suitcases in airport departure lounges; immigrant women skating vibrating polishing machines over the marble concourses of the capitals of industry; night watchmen, watched; prowl cars; waitresses in all-night coffee shops; the staff of pizza dens and burger stops packing up after another thankless night; drunks in doorways; road repair crews; taxi drivers; buskers. She stops at that one. The boy with the electric guitar and the punky, gymnastic girl in the ripped leotard—lovers; police, thieves.

  The aged aged man on the rotting typist’s chair notices her watching. “I wouldn’t waste your time, if I were you. When you have been watching as long as I have, you’ll come to realise there is nothing new under the sun. Every show is a repeat. We are condemned to play out the same trivial soap operas, the same tired and trite old cliches, the same clunking old plot mechanisms. You have no idea how glad I will be to see the final credits roll and the little white dot vanish in the middle of the screen. Come in, come close, you have absolutely nothing to fear from me. I am not an actor in this drama, I am the spectator in the gallery. Argus of the Hundred Eyes.” He turns back from her to his flickering televisions. “I think it must be twenty years, judging by the seasons, since I came here, since I found myself in this room, with my televisions. Oh, not as many then—the technol
ogy was not so sophisticated. No memories of any place other than this, a life other than this, than watching the televisions. I concluded early that I was not as those I saw on the screens—that these screens were, indeed, no ordinary televisions. To this day I still do not understand what powers them, or where they come from—and come they do, I know the signs now, while my back is turned, and only while my back is turned, I feel a prickling along my hairline and I know that if I look back, there will be another television added to my collection. Models constantly updated, I’ll say that. That one there—” he points, but they are all blue video shine to Enye, “that’s high definition. Technology that’s only just being made available. No off switch, though. On any of them. Another of my early realisations was that the channel I watch is the city, and the programme life. In a sense, I am the memory of the city, old Argus. I am the witness of its continued existence. You must have heard the solipsistic riddle of the tree falling in the forest. Does it make any noise if there is no one there to witness it? The old Berkelian conundrum, when a thing is unperceived, can it be said to exist? I like to think that without my constant observation and witness, the city would have disremembered itself and vanished into nothingness, for there must have been a time, even the briefest moment, the merest fraction of a fraction of a second, when I was the only one awake and aware of the whole teeming population. A conceit, or perhaps, when I am gone back to the state from which I came, one dark night the city will indeed unremember itself and dissolve like a forgotten dream. Oh, I have no illusions about myself—a man who never sleeps, never eats, never excretes, never tires, is never prodded by the goads of sexual longing; a man who has never, in at least twenty years, been able to set foot outside this building in which you find him because of the crippling dread that makes it impossible for him to leave this chair for more than a few minutes at a time. What else could such a man be but someone else’s dream, someone else’s nightmare?

  “Oh, I have watched you on my televisions. I have seen what you have done, and I knew that in time you would come for me. Because of what I am, because there are questions you have that only I may answer. I am Argus of the Hundred Televisual Eyes. More than that, at my last count, which was some while ago, I must admit. Surely I must have seen who it was murdered Dr. Hannibal Rooke, who it was destroyed the Midnight Children? I would help you if I were able, but even with my slightly over one hundred eyes, changing channels every two seconds, it takes me over a year, a year, to look into the hearts of every soul in this city. There is so much that passes me by. I have no factual evidence to give you, all I can do is advise, and pray you continue with your own search. It is not the place at which you arrive that is important, but the way you come to it.” The aged, aged man turned again to face Enye. The light from the televisions deeply engraved the lines in his face. “Understand realities: your swords, your computer, your drug. Do not think I am ignorant of them. I have been watching your progress through the nightlands of the city. They are no more real, or necessary, than I. Symbols. Your war is a war of symbologies, a battle between ghosts, spirits, mythologies, at once both the most real and the most unreal of entities. Any power they possess is from you, your own power, your own ability to cross the Earth/Mygmus membrane and shape its substance according to your own personal mythologies, your own hopes, and wishes, and fears. That is why the Way you go is more important than the place you arrive, because while you are on the way there is hope for change, and growth; to arrive is to enter changelessness and stasis.

  “I advise you as some of us exist in this world knowing our nature and longing for our return to the Mygmus, so there are those that love the lives they have scraped out, and will hold tightly to them.

  “Just because I am an old man, without defences, without strategy, who can therefore do nothing but welcome you, do not imagine that we will all be equally helpless. We know each other—how can we not?—for we are all of one substance with each other. By now they will know of you, and will be preparing themselves. I tell you this: beware the Lords of the Gateway.

  “There. Now. I have warned you. Now, kindly deliver me from this impotent existence of watching and return me to my true domain.”

  He sits upright in his chair, palms flat on grey flannel trouser legs, sandalled feet flat on the floor. His head is held erect, his expression sublime, like a saint or windswept tree, or some other intensely present object. She has read that in the Middle Ages women were executed like this, seated in a chair.

  “Ya!” The lesser kiai. Chudan No Kame, the middle attitude, culminating in the Men cut, the neck stroke, the perfect stroke, most difficult of all strokes to master.

  For the first time, she understands what it is to treat one’s enemy as an honoured guest.

  The screens of the banked televisions are all swept by a sudden blizzard of video snow.

  Even Jaypee asks, didn’t you wear that outfit yesterday? People in QHPSL notice things like that.

  He regards the transparent plastic bottle on his desk with the suspicion he normally reserves for government letters in brown envelopes.

  “It’s quite simple,” says the Blessèd Phaedra on one of her rare progresses through the Glass Menagerie, bestowing grace and favour and transparent plastic bottles with firmly fitting screw tops. “Just fill it.”

  “What? From here?” Jaypee doubles up in music-hall laughter. Enye, tarnished and groggy and vaguely nauseated, leans back in her chair, rolls her plastic bottle around the desktop with her stocking feet—pedal self-massage.

  “You get that, MacColl?”

  “MacColl got that.”

  “Words is throwing a strunt this morning, Phaedra, darling. It’s either a man or a period.”

  “It’s always either a bloody man or a period to you men.”

  “Whoa whoa whoa, pulcherina.”

  “Piss off, Kinsella.”

  “What a good idea.”

  The Blessèd Phaedra passes on her way. When Jaypee returns, he holds the bottle up to the light.

  “Chateau Mouton Kinsella; an insouciant little number, but I think you’ll be titillated by its braggadocio. If I’d known this was scheduled for this morning, I’d never have had the cream of asparagus soup.” Judi-Angel from Traffic cruises past, little plastic bottle in hand. “Oh, Judi-Angel,” Jaypee sings, “do you know if you drink a glass of your own piss—no one else’s, mind—you’ll have a complexion like a baby’s bottom?”

  She mouths F.U.s at him. He swivels in his chair, sings out the open office door in fifties doo-wop style,

  Judi-Angel, I love you, don’t you see?

  Judi-Angel, though you smell somewhat of pee.

  For your skin, soft and lovely, I so much want to kiss.

  Is so smooth, ’cause each morning, you drink a glass of piss.

  Judi-Angel, doobie doo-wah, Judi Angel, dum dum dum dum…”

  A thing like a hostess trolley with telescopic steel whiskers comes whining through the Glass Menagerie.

  “Cup of chamomile, perchance?” Jaypee asks.

  “What happened to Mrs. O’Verall?”

  “The Blessèd Phaedra happened to Mrs. O’Verall. Advances in office automation, and all that.”

  “God help Mrs. O’Verall.”

  “God help us all, and you especially, Enye MacColl.”

  “Why?” asks Enye, dexterously turning the bottle upright with her toes.

  “You been backpacking in Munchkinland, pulcherina? The Blessèd Phaedra’s attempt to come clean with her conscience, or, I rather suspect, acting on the express instruction of Oscar the Bastard. QHPSL puts its hand to its heart to stand with Nancy Reagan and Babs Bush and Superman and Wonder Woman and Mandrake the Magician to declare itself drug-free. We’re being dope-tested.”

  It’s Christmastime. Cuttin’ down trees. Puttin’ up reindeer, singin’ songs about feedin’ the world, and Wishin’ It Could Be Christmas Every Day (can you imagine, all those pairs of slippers and holly-leaf boxer shorts and perfume you don’t
like, spending the rest of your life watching reruns of The Wizard of Oz in a rising pall of silent hot fermented turkey fart) and dreamin’ of a “White Christmas” and “Dashin’ through the Snow on a One-Horse Open Sleigh” and “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire, Jack Frost Nippin’ at Your Toes” (Stays pretty green around here, didn’t snow last year, probably won’t this. Warmest winter since records began. Something to do with global warming). Fattenin’ up credit cards. Stunnin’ turkeys with five hundred volt shock probes before guillotinin’ them with automated shears; pullin’ technically drunk corpses from wrecked hot hatchbacks; January sales startin’ on Christmas Eve; Christmas trees up since the end of November; Christmas Muzak in the hypermart since the end of October; Santa Claus arrivin’ at his Enchanted Ice Grotto in the suburban malls since the end of September; and someone sent a letter to the paper claimin’ to have seen the first Christmas card in the shops the end of August.

  Saul gave Enye a present. He leaned, head cupped in his hands against his pillow, and watched her, kneeling on the end of his bed in a “Save the Rain Forests” T-shirt and panties that were nothing more than a postage stamp stuck to a piece of elastic, turn it over and over and feel its bumps and listen to its rattles and rumbles and harmonics with her ear and rub it against her cheek and taste it with her tongue, lick its wrappings, its bitter adhesive tape, with oohs and aahs and a childlike glee he found deeply erotic, tearing off the wrapping and tearing open the box and tearing away the transparent bubble wrap.

  “It’s an electronic personal organiser. Like a portable computer. Address, telephone numbers, calendar, diary, planner, appointments, memos, personal information, watch, alarm, thesaurus, pocket calculator, currency exchanger. It’s got add-on ROM packs, and there’s a twenty-pin adapter to connect it to a micro or a mainframe, and an interfacer so you can squirt numbers out of the memory straight into the telephone. There’s even an add-on printer…” She was already lying on her back with it held over her face, pressing buttons.