by Jeff Kamen
Old lady in the cave. Anya sitting at the lamp and reading those long nights. Taking notes from her, the old voice cracked and hoarse.
And something else in there: a note of strong and silent purpose.
Anger? Some nameless deep desire?
Flicker of a wish being made …
A staring youth within a frame ...
~O~
Later, sitting on her bed, she reorders the pages and bundles them up with string. Careful not to tear the edges, where the dark flakes break off so easily.
She goes to her old tin trunk and places the bundle safely beneath her folded clothing. As she does, she feels something round and hard that she hasn’t looked at in months, and takes it out. The size of a large pear, and about the same weight. She studies its stippled surface, the colour of charcoal; parts of it polished-looking, as though lightly glazed. Formed as a peculiar result of the body’s mineralization process, she imagines, a waste by-product that at times she has considered throwing away. Yet she never can: to do so would be to deny who she is; would be to break the link, the thread that binds the voices together. Holding it determinedly, she catches an image of Mona placing her own stony deposit in a box; sees her hiding it beneath the cellar stairs. Others of that strange sorority she sees acting similarly, women turning in a black spiral of silhouettes before a large carnelian sun. Women with the same swarthy face as her own, moving in a series of overlapping gestures as they placed their own strange inheritance upon a shelf, or locked it up, or buried it in shame — in some cases from fear of adding to the questions they’d have to face should the truth be discovered, the truth of their solitary parentage.
Always the same, it seems, a tyranny of repetition. Vadraskar smearing hers with blood, then baking it; placing it in pride of place in her sceptre, then one day smashing it to dust. Grethà keeping hers among her books and pens, her dark little paperweight for many years until she’d given it away.
And her own sitting in her hand, still intact, plucked as she had been herself, from that old and twisted body. She studies it further, puzzled, trying to seek order within her crowded head. Why? she wonders, pulling at the flickerings, trying to draw out a clue. Why? What was the point of it?
And then, as the minutes pass, she stares in deeper. The pictures multiplying. Recalling her second day of life. Grethà pale and meatless, an upright figure in a chair. Herself as yet unnamed, so very new to the world … and yet so weary of it, all of it known from times before. At least that was how it had felt; memories surging through her mind in a ceaseless war of echoes ...
Grethà being carried to the woodpile … more like her aged and crippled twin than someone who’d birthed her … wrapped in a gown of stars and the kind-eyed stranger sobbing among the bearers ...
Him.
Searching Grethà’s thoughts, she finds him appearing in that earlier past like a figure long hoped-for, yet still unexpected. Arriving one day in a cloud of smoke and sunshine, the rays surrounding him like an aura as he came forward with his outstretched arms and carried her to safety…
She pulls internally, casting a faint dust of light across the darkness. A few whispered words over a candle. Grethà’s dry brown finger tracing a map.
She pulls again.
That hot afternoon … the door on its worn leather hinges hanging slightly ajar. A thump, something striking the wood; surely children throwing stones. Then smoke from somewhere … smoke rolling up the door and the flames like leaves of dried gold and her thin old voice screaming in terror. Then a shout, a commotion outside. The door scuffing open and those kind grave eyes upon her. A bearded face with a white mask clamped over it like a shell.
Klaus …
He then turning with that slumped body in his arms towards the light. As though to deliver Grethà to the day, as might a holy man …
As might a healer, one to end the pain ... the kind of man she needs herself, and so dearly.
‘Help me,’ she whispers, ‘help me now,’ but the kind-eyed man says nothing in reply, as if words are forbidden to him. As if he can only look at her. Can only disappear.
Chapter 10 — Return To The City
He is found slumped and babbling in a corridor that early summer and is carried down to the sickroom to be placed under observation. He wakes in a row of well-ordered beds. Antiseptic smells mingle in the filtered air.
The foamboard-muffled hush calms him down and the sight of other people assures him that the world is ordinary and good. That the faceless one cannot reach him. Yet at night he screams so desperately that the staff come to him running, the shadow of their upraised needles like stalactites upon the pale green walls.
After a few days some of the obs bay crew come to visit. They enter as a jostling rabble, making enough noise to get them cautioned by the duty nurse. As they crowd around his bed, Stoeckl cracking jokes, others offering him things to eat, he feels like standing up in his bedclothes and crying aloud. He wants to tell someone what is disturbing him, wants to confide in somebody — about his plans, his need to escape, his horror of the creature that only he can see. But so ingrained in him is the need for secrecy that when asked what is wrong he says nothing and does nothing, meets the ring of faces with an awkward shrug.
As the group continue talking, he coughs, smiles, stammers, then manages to get Lütt-Ebbins’ attention. The tall figure turns his way, raising a quizzical eyebrow.
‘Ah, Lütt,’ he whispers, ‘ah … have you noticed anything?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Ah ... well. Recently. Anything.’
Lütt-Ebbins moves back as a nurse slides a tray onto the bedtable. ‘Anything where?’
‘Well ... ah, anywhere.’
‘Have I noticed anything anywhere? Like what?’
Moth, he lost again. He licks his lips, struggling to find the words without incriminating himself, without giving it all away. ‘I, ah ... well, that’s just it. I-I don’t know.’
‘No. No, I haven’t seen anything. Nothing interesting.’
After a run of such nights, medics convene around his bed and whisper together, making notes. A period of rest is ordered for him, a well-earned break in the City. Before the week is out he finds himself entering the cavernous and white-roofed shuttle station. With his pass checked, he crosses the tiled concourse, wondering how he made it down the stairs. He heads over to the passenger platform, his small wurmhaut bag containing little more than toiletries. He stares blankly as people drift his way and move on.
The next service will leave at sixteen hundred hours ...
Eventually, lights flare within the tunnel. An announcement buzzes from the raised control tower at the back of the station, and all those gathered along the platform turn from the electronic hoardings to watch the shuttle as it glides out of the darkness, tubular carriages gleaming. A truck hoots dimly in the cargo area of the station, and he looks across the tracks to where a goods train has pulled in some time before, the freight beds loaded with large metal containers. Hefty units, these, at least fifteen by thirty feet in dimension, huge riveted vaults bearing supplies from the City and the other colonies to the south. Vaguely, disconnectedly, he wonders what they hold, what equipment has been ordered, and for what purpose; then the incoming train blocks his view. As it slows, engines groaning in decline, he stands back from the people aligning themselves with the doors.
... report any suspicious packages to the security desk …
Hoping for a seat away from the guards, away from everyone.
~O~
The shuttle hums south, leaning on the rails. The drugs they have given him make him feel sleepy, yet his mind will not rest.
Staring at the black walls riding by, he thinks back to the time when his father must have first encountered the mountain. Back when Van Hagens was little more than an idea, a rumour, and his father had been that rare thing in Nassgrube: an adventurer, a lead figure among the surface-bound research teams. At least that was how it had seemed t
o him, an unquestioning boy studying for a place at the Academy. At the time he’d been caught up in the excitement of it all, unable to gauge the significance of his father’s reflections as his position had altered. As he recalled it, his father had gone from being a champion of the northern base to one of a small group querying the purpose of its construction. There’d been something about the plans his father had been unsure of, uneasy about, the more so when the points he was trying to raise went unanswered.
But what those objections had been, as with so many things from that time, he finds himself unable to fathom.
Black walls riding by. He observes his face in the glass, the tufted brown hair. The eyes he meets are hollow like his life and there is little else he thinks of along that route which does not eat at him. He curses himself for his weakness and sits in an agony of shame, striving to draw in that precious nourishment of sleep which does not swill dreams in it.
At City station he heads for the gates amidst large crowds rushing to make their connections. Most of the population are clad in overalls or fatigues or labcoats, some in pressed wurmhaut suits. As he walks through a din of tannoy announcements, a piercing whistle blows. He stands in the exit queue, watching guards in dark uniforms march by, boots crunching in time. He watches a woman struggling with a suitcase, a station clerk going across to help. Watches a young couple talking shyly together. As ever there is no one here for him and there will be no one to meet with later on. It occurs to him that he is back at his life’s painful starting point, the hub of it, where the steel rails run like the wires of some brutal evacuation to those other friendless backwaters, Gabelstad and Ostgrenze. The only other choices Nassgrube has to offer, and yet what can they offer other than brutality and factories, whistles and barracks and floodlights? What other than cruelly clinging memories of the past?
At the gates he is taken aside for questioning and roughly patted down. The officers punch the chit handed to him at the sickhouse and send him on his way. With his mind cold and aching, he goes outside and takes the steps down to Bergmanstrasse.
Early afternoon and the cans are burning brightly, mirrored off the chrome-plated buildings like a laser field, a clash of brilliant suns that spike his vision and leave him blinking until he shields himself with his goggles. To look around again as a pale young man with a face of mourning. Damaged-looking, like some wretched creature chosen for experiment, prodded and pricked beyond endurance. For what has he done since bidding the City goodbye? Nothing, and only nothing.
He goes on listlessly. Little has changed in his absence, the same grid of streets conveying the same grey buggies; the same anonymous pedestrians hurrying on their way like bloodcells in arterial circulation. The same strange fishlens perspective formed by that scooped-out eggshell of a sky, the concrete buildings crowding in closely like the funnels of large ships moored in a shrunken harbour. His eyes rove unwillingly, taking in the rooftop profiles of filterheads rearing mouthlike in the glare. The dustvents and cameras swivelling like armies of hooded skulls. Everywhere that endless wrapping-round of pipework that seems to strangle every upright fixture and weave through every underpass and walkway. He nods bitterly. Yes, little has changed. Coughing figures going by, their eyes snapping and cutting away and their steps a dance of routines long plotted like points along a map that some machine has designed, cold stylus ajitter. A few drones pass him, shuffling along in a chemical miasma, staring vacantly, focussed solely on their tasks. No one to go to and all that time before him to spend so uselessly, and all the while the terror growing in him that he will make the same trip back year on desperate year until that final chilling train ride out to the food processing farms. He looks about bleakly. No one here older than sixty five; not one soul.
His lips tighten, he looks up the street. Somewhere uptown is a grotto where long ago the founders hunkered down unwashed and skeletal in the weak light of strung electric cells. Their one haven from the oxides, from the dust. Anaemic figures breathing thinly through their valves. Most of them native Österreicher, some of them Slovenes from across the border. Children of fire and war rendered tribeless, nameless, the old Alpine ways gone to death beneath a choking sky.
A newfound people waiting for the day, primitive architects all. Setting down in ink and stone that one golden dream of rebuilding.
~O~
At the reception booth of MT7 he collects the key to the usual room. He takes the lift up and unlocks the door and goes through and sits on the bed.
Behind a wall he hears a quiet drone of voices. Overhead the fluoros buzz restlessly. He snaps a yawn. The day grows emptier; unfocussed. He lifts his hands and looks at them, turning them slowly round and back again, wondering if he is already ageing.
Later, a hot red sky framed darkly by a window. At sunset the cans are tiny studs upon the rooftops. He looks down at the swooping armature of the monorail to watch the carriages skating recklessly along its spine. Rickety-rack, I’m back … I’m back … Down below, between the upraised stanchions, he follows small figures bustling along the roads. He watches a group of workers in cleansing suits out vacuuming roaches and dust, their truck hissing and whirring. The lights falter shade on shade and as evening falls so his eyes move to the dominant profile of the MeisterCell building, black and tomblike on that underworld skyline. Then, hot and resentful, his eyes alight upon the block the family had once called home. The flat on the sixteenth floor. Memories swarm and burn.
The late night call from the infirmary.
Arriving at the lobby. The walk of dread down the empty corridor.
The wait. The hand dressed in a surgical glove, beckoning him. The notepad.
Words like metastases, osteolytic, hypercalcemia; inhuman words.
The agony.
His mother’s face, pale as clay. Its own burial mask. The trolley conveying her shrouded form towards the lifts, a wheel catching as it tried to turn; going out to the collecting truck. The truck leaving for the station, where later she’d be loaded aboard for recycling.
The long and hopeless walk home.
Sitting alone in the family quarters: his father still being held at Gabelstad. His father returning a month later, haggard and broken. A mumbling figure, his mind elsewhere.
You see, Marty, we were never saying, Do Not Alter. No, we were saying, Do Not Abuse ...
He stares at the myriad windows blinking to life, watching the figures moving around their rooms. Nameless, unknowable. People like shadows.
... but in the end all they had to say to us was, Do Not Ask ...
‘I’m here,’ he whispers to the darkness.
~O~
Later, as the ritual decreed, he pulled the bed away from the wall and knelt at the vent, working with a screwdriver.
The disk, as well as the tape it had once lain inside, had long been stashed in there, hidden in a small box. He reached inside. When the box was out, he set it on the table and scrutinised the tape for signs of tampering. No precaution wasted with this, no tiring of his care.
He slotted it inside the same old battered machine.
‘Everyone, look at little Marty... see? See that?’ his pretty mother would forever laugh, lifting him proudly up to the camera while he squinted and kicked his tiny legs about.
He hit pause, went off to fetch a carton, to pull down the blinds. On returning he watched the tape through to its end, and then, as always, he picked up the disk.
Unmistakeable, his father’s writing. For M. I hope you understand.
And he did understand, and he slid it inside the console.
~O~
In the morning he goes downstairs to an empty lounge where he takes his meal, reading the letter the nursing staff have given him.
Later he presents it at the clinic he must attend, a quiet adjunct to the infirmary. He has his eyes tested by staff in training and they run checks on his blood and urine but he knows they will find nothing and they tell him to visit every three days for injections and he does so, and upo
n each visit they find nothing once more. They ask him what he thinks is wrong and he has no answer for them and he asks the same question and they answer likewise and he thinks that nothing will ever happen but the next time he attends he is presented with a tin of pills, bright orange in colour. The pills come with a warning: ‘Half to one a day, at most,’ the consultant says. ‘They’re still being trialled. You’ll need to return for a check up in six months.’
The doctor appears to be right. The pills are strong. Still, they help him sleep, and soon he feels less desperate, is less prone to nightmares.
The days pass by and he wanders the glaring streets and is searched by police patrols every few hours and sent on his way without incident. He retraces old footsteps, old pavements, old memories. On a whim he visits the Academy, hoping to catch up with one of his old tutors, but bad news awaits: the kind old man has been recycled some months before. Shaken, he walks the streets with the sense that his tutor has taken a vital last part of his youth with him, that there is no one left to share those times with, and that his past is almost lost. Inevitably, his thoughts go to the other kind old man he’d known, and at nightfall he stands looking up at the block where he’d lived, the exterior now manacled in scaffolding. Dr Goldschmidt. Goldie. More like an uncle to him, the figure he’d loved more than any of his parents’ friends; the one he’d trusted most and the one he’d gone running to when his father had disappeared, only to find …
He studies the unlit windows, his eyes already moistening. Why? Why had they taken everything? Why was he all that was left?
