by Ian McDonald
She could smell it as she locked the Citroen in the safe parking place among the towering industrial refuse bins. As she approached across the broken bottles and shredded plastic bags, the sensation left the purely subjective to become objective, external, tangible. Not the nausea of mythoconscious contact. Something other. More intimate. The pheromone of dread.
The darkness under the brick arch had a different shape, a different mass, a different timbre. And a new perfume: the smell of burning. Of cardboard and wood. Of the oily black combustion of plastics. Of scorched meat. Flesh.
Reaching from the massed darkness into the light of the shunting yard floods was a pale shape. A hand.
She fled.
Twin headlights challenged her as she drove down the rutted grass laneway behind L’Esperanza Street. She shielded her eyes, stopped, stepped out of the Citroen. The twin beams dipped, extinguished. Through the blur of retinal afterimages she saw a blue Ford station wagon growl forward, softly, slowly, wheels crunching over the cinders and litter of the entry. It stopped, license plate touching Enye’s shins. Moonface stepped out.
“They hit us.”
“I know. I went there.”
“You did what?”
“There was something I had to tell you.”
“I suppose it was inevitable. Only we never expected… We never expected at all. Nothing we could do. Three of us got away—the ones who could move fast enough. I stole a car.” The Ford’s courtesy light clicked on; in the front seat was the Wolfwere, legs pulled up beneath her doggy-fashion, hands resting on the dash, doggy-fashion. In the back was Lami. Even with the backseat folded forward, there was barely enough room for her snake’s body. She looked Enye the look of accusation of a dreadful crime.
“They? More than the one Nimrod?”
“The Nimrod, and two others. And things…” Moonface’s face was scarred by sudden pain. By the yellow glow of the courtesy light Enye saw he was nursing a wound to his left arm. The grubby mandala-print sweat top was stained darkly, wetly.
“Things?”
“Things like you couldn’t even begin to believe,” Lami said.
“What are you going to do?” A heaviness fell upon Enye, the first exploratory testing of a burden of undeserved responsibility, unwarranted guilt that she knew would grow to the crushing mass of an entire world until it was discharged.
“Drive. Vanish.” Moonface raised his eyes to the unseen hills to the south of the city. “There’s a couple of hundred miles in the tank. That gives us a lot of country to lose ourselves in. It’ll be harder in the country, but we’ll work something. I’m sorry that your education should have ended before you were properly prepared.”
“We should never have started. If we’d minded our own business, Paul, Liane and Marcus might still be with us,” Lami hissed, and her voice was the voice of the snake within at last possessing the form of the snake without. Enye felt compelled to apologise.
“You’d rather we stayed this way forever?” Moonface said.
“You’d rather Paul, Liane, and Marcus were still alive?”
“We haven’t the time for this. Look.” Moonface held out his hand. In his palm was the transparent plastic envelope.
“I don’t need it. That’s what I wanted to tell you. I’ve found a weapon.” Enye explained the events of Christmas past. The hand remained extended.
“You still need it. In this bag is the difference between fighting a rear guard action and taking it to the enemy. With this, you can be the hunter, not the hunted. With your swords, you can only destroy. With this, and your mythoconsciousness, you can heal. Take it. Take it!”
All the same, she hesitated. A thousand doubts, a thousand horrors, a thousand possible futures, radiated from the distance between their fingers.
“Take it.”
She snatched the plastic bag, thrust it down down down into a hip pocket. Headlight beams swayed and darted, gear boxes whined as she reversed out of the alleyway to permit the Ford station wagon exit. In the back window was a KRTP-FM Number Wun-4-Fun sticker. The car stopped window to window.
“Will I see you again?”
“Don’t look for us. You’re too dangerous. Lami was right. If we hadn’t involved ourselves with you, things might have been different. Or they might not. All I can promise you is that I hope someday a stranger will come up to you in the street. You’ll not recognise him, but he’ll recognise you. He’ll greet you like an old, old friend, like someone who has done him the greatest favour anyone could do. He may have a pretty woman with him. You’ll not recognise her, either. And they may have a dog.”
The stolen Ford drove off. Its engine echoed and reechoed down the red-brick streets until it was annihilated in the great night-voice of the city.
As she drove in to QHPSL the next morning, crawling through the city’s choked vascular system, the radio news reported that the Social Services were expressing concern over the increasing numbers of young people living on the streets following the deaths of three in a fire in their shelter. The police were not ruling out the possibility of violence between rival groups of street-dwellers; though the fire appeared to have been started by a camping gas stove, the bodies showed signs of having been gashed and lacerated. The two young men and the young woman in question had not been identified.
Shekinah. The Radiant Presence of God.
It still looked like a year’s supply of toenail clippings and bleached pubic hair. An adhesive label held dog-Latin taxonomies and a list of instructions: one five ml. spoon this, two five ml. spoon that, infuse for so long in so many mls. water… She prepared the brew in her bamboo-handled Japanese teapot, poured a cup, and let cup and pot go cold while she sat staring at it, more afraid than she had ever been in her life. She reboiled the kettle. Emptied the pot. Brewed fresh. Poured a cup. It smelled of concentrated woodland. It tasted of light bulbs. She drank the cup down in one swallow and panicked at the irrevocability of her recklessness. When the cold panic had passed, she went to sit in her most comfortable chair for whatever was to happen. The chair was not comfortable; she was not comfortable. She felt she should be sitting in a special place, in a special posture, listening to special music, wearing special clothes. She contented herself to kneel on the rug in front of her rack of swords.
The Radiant Presence of God did not so much overwhelm her like the trumpet blasts of Apocalypse as steal upon her like a thief in the night. She could not say at what point she became aware that what she had been brought up to believe in as concrete and immutable was unravelling, dissolving to reveal a more intimate reality hidden within like an unborn child. It was always to be so, when she took the Shekinah. There should have been fear as her hands, her arms, her kneeling thighs, her body, the floor upon which she knelt, the walls that surrounded her, the roof that sheltered her, grew insubstantial and translucent. But in the Radiant Presence of God there is no fear, only awe and reverent joy, and she gasped aloud in wonder to see the concealed revealed in the tongues of fire, like the Fractal dragons of Chaos Theory that were her hands, or the young tree half summer green half afire that was her body, or the currents of many-coloured light, like oil on water, that flowed about the contours of her body through the walls and floors of her apartment.
She crossed to the window and looking Out, saw a city transformed. Light. Endless light. Primal light. With a cry, she turned away; too much, too soon. But she understood that what she saw no one else could see for the sight would have scorched their synapses and stamped the shape of that searing sight onto their molten, malleable bodies. She returned to the window, winced, gasped, tried to rub the ache of seeing too much out of her eyes, looked. Heard. Felt.
Out there, in the infinite degrees of complexity of spirals within spirals about spirals of the ur-city, was a malignancy, a darkness, an unfittedness that she felt as a nausea, as a tightness in her heart, a constriction in her breathing. She saw them like a cancer, heard their muttering voices like the voice of cancer if cancer were
to have a voice; the voices of the fallen angels of the Mygmus.
Then she went out into the alleyways and industrial parks to hunt the hunter. The sky signs led her to a laneway that smelled of semen and grease between a convent school and a row of shops. The Nimrod was cramming garbage from ripped open plastic sacks into its maw. It looked up, startled. It had taken the semblance of a pig, some primeval myth memory from the very edge of human consciousness, some denizen of the psychic tundra below the breath of Ice Age glaciers. Curved tusks glinted skull-white in the neons of an all-night video shop. Yellow pig eyes shone with unalloyed hatred. She stood, back to the neon glow, swords held comfortably, easily in the attitude called “Open on All Eight Sides.” LEDs glowed at her waist.
“Hi. I’m back.”
The afterblast blinded her for several seconds. Scuzzballs of oily blue light caromed off the red brick walls and dented garbage bins. Voices from the flats above the shops were every-syllable clear, guttural, puzzled. Should they call the police, the gas board, the electricity board? What happened? Lights were coming on, windows opening.
Enye sheathed her swords and loped away through the web of intersecting alleys and back entries to the row of rusting corrugated iron garaging where she had left the Citroen.
She must be out of condition. She had not thought she could feel so bad after one day on the bike. Her thighs are so stiff and sore they can hardly carry her to the hot, deep, steaming, foaming bath and the glass of whiskey perched on the rim. Her inside leg feels like it measures at least three metres. She should have taken that guy with the long hair, what is he called? Elliot, yes, his advice and bought a proper pair of shorts with chamois gusset. She can kiss adieu to sex for at least the next six months. Even the thought of it makes her wince.
For all her street smarts, Omry had proved remarkably easy to blackmail. The very mention of the Narcotics Division had her call-you-back-in-five-minutes-yes-there’s-a-vacancy-for-a-rider-if-you-think-you’re-up-to-it.
Nothing better, Omry? Nothing with a little frisson of executive glitz?
This is a bicycle courier company, sister, not Saatchi & Saatchi. Do-me-no-favours.
At least it keeps her in credit (a checque every Friday. She’s surprised to learn that she isn’t making that much less than she did at QHPSL) and close to her source of supply. It will give her time and space to resupply and regroup and devise a strategy for her hunt for these Lords of the Gateway, whatever they are. Once she gets the chamois padded shorts and ditches her old saddle for a customised formfitter (£39.95 from MacConvey’s Cycle Boutique but worth every centavo), once the legs get into rhythm and remember their old student day stamina when she thought nothing of cycling two hundred miles in a weekend, once she learns the ground rules of life in the bus lane, like which truck companies don’t mind you hanging onto their under-rider bars for a free ride and which ones do, and which cops will give you a ticket if you leave your Peugeot eighteen-gear ATB in a no-parking zone, which companies tip, and which companies want you out of their black rubber and endangered wood lobbies before you’ve even entered (hardly surprising: QHPSL belongs to this latter flock), she finds she loves her job. She loves its immediacy, its presentness. She loves its lack of abstraction—just Enye MacColl and the traffic, a Day-Glo corpuscle weaving its course through the city’s vascular system. A thousand challenges, a thousand threats; she faces death and serious injury a thousand times a day. She loves the art of living by her wits. True strategy, total immersion in the present, the happening moment.
The couriers are an affable, piratical mob, bound together by an us-and-themness, an esprit de corps common with Mujahaddin guerrillas and space shuttle crews. They know it is a jungle out there. They are an eclectic outfit: see the guy with the hand-customised flames on his frame, he’s a trainee clergyman; see the girl with the Mandelbrot set pattern on her solid rear wheel, she’s a resting actress; see that guy with the neat chevron tights, he’s done time on an Alabama chain gang. Yes, sir, of course it was drugs, what else do you get put on a chain gang for these days, except being black. There’s at least one doctor of atomic physics, a disaffected housewife who walked out on husband kiddies and Hi-Fibre Malt-Enriched Weetie-Bangs one morning; a psychopath; someone who may or may not be the next James Joyce; actors, patricides, fools, priests, pretenders. And Elliot.
Elliot thinks he may be the only Elliot in a country of males named after pale-faced plaster statuettes. Elliot may be right. Elliot has long hair he never wears gelled back or tied into a pigtail; just long, and blond, and smelling of frequent-wash herbal shampoo. Elliot gets There first, wherever There is a first to be, or to have; First to get the new Shinamo eighteen-speed gear-reduction system for his ATB, first to hit the streets in the hot-off-the-plane-from-Milan shirts, first with the belt pouch and the oversized rubber driver’s chronometer on elasticated sweat band, first to introduce himself to the virgin recruits Hi I’m Elliot, the only Elliot in the country, probably; greetings.
Elliot has Noticed Enye.
Enye knows Elliot has Noticed her. Enye is not certain she wants to be noticed by Elliot. It is all the good things and all the bad things about Saul freshly laundered and ironed and laid out; his needs, her secrets, his hunger, her inability to satisfy that hunger. She wants and does not want to walk that valley again.
Elliot asks Enye, by means of conversation, what she is into.
“Music,” she says.
“Like jazz? Folk? Four aran sweaters singing the ‘Wild Rover,’ God forfend? Rock? Heavy metal?”
“No,” she says, “Music.”
Elliot is into designer dance. Street music. Musique. Maximal rhythm, minimal melody. Found sources, cut-ups, samples, ethno-beat: Ikombé drummers and wailing muezzins. He lives it with an intensity, an immediacy that draws Enye. She knows what it is to burn the flames of private obsession. She knows it is this that Elliot has noticed about her. When he talks about what he wants to do—make music, cut disks, session at clubs and warehouse parties, the energy crackles between them like summer lightning. Enye plays him Ives’s Symphony Number Three on her Walkperson. She sees the intensity of his concentration, his keenness to comprehend something beyond his experience. She likes that. He asks can he borrow the tape. Next morning, as they gather the dispatches from Omry, it is as if he has had a religious experience.
“This is, wow, this is… cosmic. There’s something going on in here I don’t quite understand, but it’s pretty cool.” It must be a sign of Something, Enye thinks, that she refrains from sarcasm at his wow and cosmic and cool.
“You just watch yourself,” Omry says to her as he launches himself on his eighteen-gear Shinamo system ATB into the great soul river. “That ass has my fingerprints on it.”
That evening he invites her to his place. He is the kind of person, Enye thinks, who would have a place. She has shared her music with him; he wants to share his with her. Somewhere beneath the movie posters and racks of cassettes, the spools of reel tape and tangles of leads, the tape recorders and the microphones, the radio, tape, and CD decks, the graphic equalizers and mini-mixers, the QWERTY boards and green-screen monitors and synthesizers and touch-pad rhythm generators, must be the fundaments and furnishings of a quite nice little attic apartment. She calculates the number of pedal miles per metre of coax.
“When you got a passion, you got a passion,” he says. “Try this.” This being a mini-mike headset connected to a tape deck.
“I could get to like this!” she shouts, embedded in interlocking rhythms and driving bass lines. Then she realises, a little foolish, there is no need to shout. The loudness is all internal.
He cuts the play back, flips a switch on a mixing board.
“Say that again?”
“I could get to like this?”
And he runs it through his processors and it comes back at her transmuted into a gospel-singer’s soul-moan.
“I like to work with found sources. I’m puritanical that way. The remix is the domina
nt cultural form of the last two decades of the twentieth century—do you know that? It’s a cultural form that has only been possible for the last twenty years—William Burroughs and Dada excepted—it’s the only cultural form that is entirely in harmony with the technological ethos of the age. Remix is possible only because of technology.
“You think about it. You listen to the radio, you go to a club, you buy a disk, you see an advert on the tube, what do you hear? Remix music. You buy a book, see a movie, watch TV, what do you see? Old familiar plot lines, old familiar characters, old familiar motivations and relationships, endlessly remixed. You go to buy something to decorate your house, something to make it look pretty, look nice, yes? What do you get? Remix Victorian. Remix Edwardian. Remix Art Deco. You tried to buy any clothes recently? What’s this year’s fashion? Five, ten, fifteen years ago’s fashion, remixed.”
“I always knew I should have held onto those flares,” Enye says but Elliot is being ridden hard by his muse and people do not laugh when they are being ridden by their muse. They do not think of anything but the thing that is riding them, hard. It is a sight at once disturbing and deeply beautiful. As the sight of people being ridden tends to be.
“Even our nation, our history, our past, are subject to remix culture: see how we’re transforming ourselves into a national theme park, see how we’re changing our national identity into other nations’ expectations of what that culture should be? Even in our schools our kids are being taught history remixed in accordance with our particular late twentieth century fixations. Green history, anyone? It happens in Russia every time they have a change of political climate. Remix. Everything is remix. Taken apart, analysed, sampled, put together again. That’s what I want to do. Dub reality: the ultimate remix. I want to go out into the street and make music from what I find there. I’ve got buskers, Salvation Army bands, car backfires, police sirens, children being spanked; all kinds of street sounds digitalised in here. Ultimately, I’d like to create a complete sound map of the whole city. Can you imagine it mixed down onto one master tape? You would be able to experience the entire city at once. You seen the sound system on my bike?” Enye has and has decided she wants one for herself; she likes the idea of bombarding pedestrians and traffic with La Traviata or Bach’s St. Matthew Passion from her handlebar-mounted microspeakers, even if it means fitting a quick-release collar so she can take speakers, Walkperson, and all in with her when she makes deliveries. Street music, street crime. “Folks are always asking me, ‘Hey, Elliot, why is there no beat coming out of your sound system?’ and I say, that is because my system is for collecting sound, not throwing sound around. I map the city with my cassette recorder, define each street by its sounds and voices. I’ve caught some of my most valuable material purely as overheards. You like to hear the sound of your own city?”
