by Tim Scott
So that was it.
That was the connection between their farcical struggle with their new names and this crazy wish to assassinate God. Something made some kind of sense.
“Piece of the jigsaw,” I said softly, then contemplated that I had never actually ever done a jigsaw myself, even as a child, and it would probably be some sort of service to mankind’s credibility if they were outlawed. I had a vision of some aliens having got hold of the ten-piece jigsaw of Mary Poppins my sister had been given one Christmas, putting it together, nodding to each other, and posting a note to the rest of the universe to never bother visiting earth.
Ever.
I shook myself back to the present and realized my mind must be tired as hell to be wandering off among such left-field thoughts, and I took another sip of the excellent, rejuvenating coffee. The Riders were naming themselves after the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and that presumably explained all the writing on the walls. I looked up “apocalypse” in the A’s, found it, and scanned down to the bottom of the page.
“Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” it read. “The end of the world, described in the Bible by the Book of Revelation, is heralded by the appearance of four horsemen who ride the earth bringing death and destruction on four different-colored horses.” I took another sip of coffee.
So what could possibly connect all these things? Four Riders pretending they had come out of the Bible and wanting me to assassinate God. An encyclopedia saleswoman who had saved my life. And a group of thieves who had stolen my house and didn’t know where the vis-media remote was. I clutched my coffee mug. Then I set it down, searched through the pockets of my sodden clothes, and retrieved the card those punks had left among the remains of my house. The number was in my Skin Media phone now anyway, but I thought I might as well hang on to this in case my phone had a nervous breakdown or something.
“‘Don’t you hate it when this happens?’” I read aloud again.
Maybe I should give them another call and try and organize that meeting. They had seemed open to the idea, and my dream library books could be the key to sorting this whole mess out. I touched my Skin Media phone.
“Geesh, have I got some good messages for you!” sparked the phone immediately and part of me wished I hadn’t woken it.
“OK. Cool it,” I said, trying to keep the thing from mouthing off.
“Emma rang and left another really long message,” it cried excitedly. “Boy, is she ever mad!”
“OK,” I said, “I’ll give her a call later and explain.”
“Explain what? Why you are ‘selfish and self-obsessed’?” cried the phone happily. “Or ‘devoid of normal human responsibilities’? Or ‘lacking in the most basic skills and sensitivities necessary for a relationship’? There was also something about resizing the shape of your kidneys. Can I go into that? It was really graphic.”
“She was that mad?”
“Yup. It was terrific.”
“Right,” I said, feeling tiredness and frustration slice through me; this was one mess I could try and sort out now, before it grew any larger. “Call her now, then. Go on. See if I can sort this out.”
The phone hummed happily. It liked nothing better than phoning people, and got stroppy if it was ignored for too long. It was some clever marketing thing that they programmed into its character, which I found had got much worse over time; the idea was it encouraged you to use it more. Only, of course, it wasn’t clever. It was just incredibly annoying, like so many things marketing people do. In fact, like pretty much all the things I could think of that marketing people do.
Emma’s voice clicked on the line. But it was just a message. She wasn’t picking up.
“Hi, this is Emma, I’m having my hair developed all day. If that’s Charlotte, leave me a salacious message. And if that’s Jonny, this is going to cost you so much cake, you bastard!”
I sighed. There was something not quite right with us. Something not quite right with this relationship, as though we were speaking totally different languages and neither of us had realized it. But right now I didn’t want to go delving to see what that feeling meant.
“Emma. It’s Jonny. Hi, I just want to apologize. Cake is definitely on me. I’ve had a crushingly bad time. Someone stole my house, which, as you can imagine, wasn’t good; and all kinds of other stuff have made things even worse. I’m sorry if I’ve been insensitive, you don’t deserve that and I’ll call you really soon when things are not so crazed. I’d like to give this another chance. You’re a really great person and we could get on fine…did we really argue about smoking?” I paused, not even sure whether we had argued about it or not.
My memory of her seemed to be torn into shreds that were billowing in the breeze.
“Did we really go to that bar together that night? Sorry, I’m talking nonsense, so…I’ll be in touch really soon. Love you,” I said, clicking off with a tap of my finger and feeling that I had stirred up even more confusion in my head than before I started.
“And there are three messages from Zone Traffic Securities,” the phone hummed on.
“Right; good,” I said, still thinking about Emma. “What?” I suddenly jerked, as this information seeped into the relevant part of my brain.
“You were the lone rider on a machine speeding and crossing three FBZs yesterday and were required to turn yourself in by midnight last night. I guess you’ve missed that one a bit. Important, do you think?”
“Caught speeding yesterday?” My head ached at the news. “In three FBZs? But…I wasn’t…Yesterday afternoon…” I thought back. “I was…unconscious,” I finished, trying to wrench my thoughts into some sort of order. “It wasn’t me. There’s been a huge error.”
“OK. They seemed pretty certain though,” said the phone. The room suddenly felt very quiet. It was a nasty silence, which seemed to gather around me and say “Oooooooooh dear.” Getting on the wrong side of Zone Traffic Securities was a sure way to ruin your life in a very dull, long, drawn-out, bureaucratic kind of way.
“Not Zone Traffic Securities too,” I said with resignation. “They really are a tight-assed bunch of persnickety wankers.”
“Thanks for the big welcome,” said a voice behind me, and I felt a cold shiver arrow down my spine. I paused, then turned very slowly to see a thickset man with a moustache like a flock of toothbrushes. He was wearing a Zone Traffic Securities uniform and pointing a gun directly at my head. “Here’s a tip,” he added. “When you’ve gone to all the trouble to hole yourself up in a hideout and you’ve cloned your C-4 Charlie, don’t use your Skin Media. It kind of gives the game away.”
I made a small, strange, pointless gesture that involved raising my shoulders and turning out my palms and said, “Ahh.” The door rattled open and three slightly overweight Zone Traffic Securities blokes and a woman bundled Caroline E roughly into the room.
“Wildcat!” exclaimed one of the men.
“Derek, bring Buzzy 34 in here. We got a couple of Exosets need booking,” the woman sang out at her voice com.
“Q-ten to that,” came the hissed reply. “Is this an R-forty-one?”
“I don’t have a fucking clue,” said the woman. “Just land the goddamn chopper.”
No doubt I was just another dispatch number to them, another small-time nobody, another zap-file, another face in a line of faces that didn’t mean anything other than it was all part of the day-to-day routine. I tried to meet Caroline’s eyes as we were herded, stumbling, back outside. I wanted to know what she was thinking, wanted to know if she was still on my side and if she had some plan; but her features seemed worryingly cold, dead, and expressionless.
A couple of other Zone Securities personnel were outside, looking bored, and after a second or two Buzzy 34 popped up above the tree line and skated to a landing in front of the cabin. I felt a hand in the small of my back push me roughly toward the GaFFA 8 chopper, then a lot of things happened at once. The face of one of the Zone Securities blokes on the edge of
the clearing crumpled with panic, while a sickening crunch resembling a watermelon being imploded with a baseball bat came from behind me. I spun around to be caught instantly in the giant grip of the thickset Zone Security bloke, but beyond him I saw Caroline E swerve off, trailed by a line of gunfire, leaving four of the Zone Traffic Securities mob scattered on the ground.
“It’s a six-seven,” cried the pilot, and they acted quickly, heaving me into the floor of the Buzzy and piling in as the rotor blades screamed us off with such a crazy yaw over the trees that one of the guys rolled across the chopper floor and clean out the door. The tree branches below must have broken his fall, because we heard his shouts a few seconds later.
“What kind of a fucking takeoff was that, Jackson? Jackson? Jackson, come back here with that thing! Come on. Don’t play games with me!”
“He knows the rules,” nodded the chopper pilot like a teacher at a primary school, turning to everyone in the back. “Second time in two months he’s done that. It’s six-seven for Christ sake! A six-seven! Not just some three-eight.” The Buzzy groaned higher into the sky, and it was clear he wasn’t turning back.
“I am not walking again!” cried the man’s voice, more distantly, from below. “I’m not fucking walking back again! Please? Come on! Please? It’s miles to anywhere! Come on! Baaaaaaaassstaaards!”
The rotors clobbered and cracked the air overhead as the pilot threaded us down a series of frenetic, controlled airways, via several airspace holding “lounges.” I lay in my blanket on the chopper floor where I had been dumped, while the Zone Securities Unit lolled in their jump seats. They didn’t bother to slide the door shut, or take much notice of me. They figured I wasn’t going to leap, and they were right. I looked out as we skimmed through the sky and realized we were way out of town, perhaps up toward Nevada, but I couldn’t tell for sure. Another time, I might have enjoyed the flight, but now things had closed so far in around me I felt suffocated and strangely resigned. My past life was hemorrhaging and bleeding away and I didn’t understand why; I didn’t have a fucking clue.
After fifteen minutes we reached the sea, and as I looked out I saw Half Moon Bay and below us, Elmar Beach. A break I had often surfed with Mat and Eli’s brother, Jack, and it was a steady three feet today I guessed. And as I looked, someone took off and ripped a shortboard along the face, and it felt like staring down at my past life.
“It’s like he thinks I could break a six-seven,” the pilot was saying over his shoulder. “Next he’ll want me not to use standard voice com procedures, or reverse a J-fifty-four.”
“You’re a pain in the ass,” said someone to the pilot.
“I know,” replied the pilot with a huge smile. “It’s great, isn’t it?”
I let his voice slide into the background and stared back out at the sea. Maybe I could find someone at Zone Traffic Securities who would realize the Riders were for real, however unlikely that seemed. Maybe I could find someone who would understand that I couldn’t have been speeding and that none of this was my fault. Maybe, if I could just find someone at Zone Securities who would act independently and fight the system.
Surely there had to be someone there like that.
9
When I first met her, Sarah had a young roommate called Tanya. I remember her because she went about the house theatrically banging doors and constantly striking poses when anyone was about, like a second-rate catalogue model who had forgotten she was not at work.
I got the feeling that unless she reminded you she was there, she was scared she might actually cease to mean anything.
Later, I wondered whether she had been using this show to drown out the alarm bells ringing in her head, trying to tell her she was living a cold, obvious lie. It was as clear to everyone else as if she’d given them a pamphlet on the subject, but she patently refused to admit it to herself. She thought she was exuding this persona of cosmopolitan confidence and soulful artistic wit; but it was just an awfully thin, cracked sheen, covering a rather sad, lost girl who copied things other people did to invent some sort of personality for herself. She was like a weird amalgam of people she respected, or had seen on the EtherMat, or read about in trashy magazines; and she found it a constant battle to keep all these disparate bits together.
And then I began to understand that we can have an image in our head of how we think the world sees us, and it’s easy for that image to be way off, just as it was with Tanya. Pointless pretenses don’t fool anyone for very long, however deeply we try and live them. And someday, somewhere, and sometime, we have to face up to ourselves; the selves that other people see.
We really do.
I was beginning to feel I was going to have to face up to a lot of things. I was beginning to see that my old life was losing its ability to support me. I was beginning to feel that I would have to find some kernel, some nugget at the heart of my soul, that was actually me—and somehow I felt if I could find it I wouldn’t drown, no matter how much grief came my way.
10
Right, forgive me, but I want to make sure I’ve got all this straight,” said the Zone Traffic Securities captain, with sharp, severe features, as I sat still wrapped in my blanket in a grimy room somewhere in the bowels of Zone Securities that felt like it had been shunted up to make space for other, more important rooms. The atmosphere seemed to suck the personality from me.
It was as though too many lost souls had been here before and soaked the walls with a particular kind of hopelessness.
“You were unconscious at the time of the bike offenses, but were on the back of a bike ridden by someone who’d had his C-4 Charlie removed, so it looked like you were the one speeding. That’s what you’re saying?” he said, the collar of his shirt so crisp I suddenly thought it looked like it must be made of icing sugar.
“It really happened like that. Do you think you might have some camera footage taken in Jazz yesterday?” I said, trying to work a relationship with this guy, but I sensed he had an almost impenetrable barrier made of businesslike directness around him that was going to be difficult to puncture. It seemed like Frank Sinatra’s voice coming in from somewhere—or one of those Brat-Pack singers anyway—and I recalled from somewhere that the Zone Securities HQ had been relocated to Easy Listening.
There was an irony in there, and lots of jokes were made in the newspapers about how easy it was for the police, spending all their time listening to ridiculous stories made up by their suspects; but I think the reason the new HQ ended up here was because the zone wasn’t popular and land was cheap.
“Honestly, why would I make something up as stupid as that?” I said, trying to get him to bite.
“Because you’re a desperate, rather lowlife criminal?” the man answered eventually, with a rise in his voice.
“Yeah.” I smiled, trying to take this as a joke. “I was being rhetorical, I guess.”
“And I was being a sarcastic wanker?” said the man, pushing his gaze into me like a magician slipping knives into an assistant. He accompanied this with a weird sort of nonsmile.
“No, no. ’Course not, didn’t mean that,” I said, realizing that telling the truth had definitely not been the right decision at all. Now there was no going back; I was like an arctic seal pup who had never been in the sea, but had now strayed onto a slope of ice that was rather steeper than expected. There was only one way I was going, and that was down. “I was just trying to explain and get things straight,” I said, scrabbling furiously.
“Exactly. Well, let’s leave that for now. So these invisible men kidnapped you, but then miraculously you were rescued by a woman who eluded my colleagues and she was…who again?”
“An encyclopedia saleswoman, sir. I know that sounds crazy—I know it does—but you can look them up.”
“Right, well, so was she the one to steal your house, or was that a rabbit from the planet Zinklon?”
“That was some punks.” I sighed, reeling inwardly. They had made the connection with my missing ho
use. I didn’t think they’d be organized enough to know it was gone.
That was the annoying irony with big establishments—they could be ruthlessly efficient when they chose to, and hopelessly incompetent the rest of the time, when you actually needed them to do something.
“You have your house stolen and you don’t report it? Isn’t that strange? Normally when houses vanish like that, people are trying to cover up something. Lose their pasts somehow. Are you trying to cover up something in your past, Mr. X?”
“No, I’ve nothing to hide,” I floundered. “I’ve even got the number of the punks who stole it. Here, please. Call them and sort it out. I’m not being obstructive about this.” I handed him the card. The man took it neatly between finger and thumb and examined it like it had been picked out of a sewer.
“‘Don’t you hate it when this happens?’ “he read. “They left you a card with a phone number? Now that is handy. If only more criminals could be this obliging. Police work would be so much more straightforward. Thank you for leaving your number. When would be a convenient time to arrest you for the armed robbery?”
A burly woman stood by the door, but otherwise the small room was empty except for several bizarre, tall, shiny, metallic cylindrical tubes in the corner. They must have all been about seven feet high. He got up to leave, unable to keep a sneer from his face.
“Have you seen a psychiatrist recently, Mr. X?”
“No.”
“No. Well, we’ll see. Zara, our Health and Safety Executive, will have to put an Odysseus Hat on you while I’m out of the room. I’m required to inform you it’s a routine restriction, after the Hesketh Case, and does not affect your liberty status.” The man strutted to the door, opened it, and left us in silence as the noise of his feet clipped down the corridor and faded. I stared at Zara with a sinking feeling of bored dread. Surely she wasn’t going to do what I was thinking.
