Barnacle Bill The Spacer and Other Stories

by Barnacle Bill the Spacer

  When we entered my apartment, she stopped in the centre of the living room, transfixed by the walls. I had set them to display the environment of the beginning of The Resolute Lover, an endless sweep of golden grasses, with a sparkling on the horizon that might have been the winking of some bright tower.

  ‘Does this bother you?’ I asked, gesturing at the walls.

  ‘No, they startled me, that’s all.’ She strolled along, peering at the grasses, as if hoping to catch sight of someone. Then she turned, and I spoke again from that deep hidden place; a place that now—responding to the sight of her against those golden fields—was spreading all through me.

  ‘Carolyn, I love you,’ I said…and this time I knew who it was that spoke.

  He had removed his cloak, and his body was shimmering, embedded in that pale glow that once had made a weapon of my right hand. I backed away, terrified. Yet even in the midst of fear, it struck me that I was not as terrified as I should have been, that I was not at the point of screaming, of fleeing.

  ‘It’s me, Carolyn,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I said, backing further away.

  ‘I don’t know why you should believe me.’ He looked at his flickering hand. ‘I didn’t understand it myself until now.’

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked, gauging the distance to the door.

  ‘You know,’ he said. ‘The Spider…he’s all through the station. In the computer, the labs, even in the tanks from which my cells were grown. He’s brought us together again.’

  He tried to touch me, and I darted to the side.

  ‘I won’t hurt you,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve seen what a touch can do.’

  ‘Not my touch, Carolyn.’

  I doubted I could make it to the door, but readied myself for a try.

  ‘Listen to me, Carolyn,’ he said. ‘Everything we wanted in the beginning, all the dreams and fictions of love, they can be ours.’

  ‘I never wanted that,’ I said. ‘You did! I only wanted normality, not some…’

  ‘All lovers want the same thing,’ he said. ‘Disillusionment leads them to pretend they want less.’ He stretched out his hands to me. ‘Everything awaits us, everything is prepared. How this came to be, I can’t explain. Except that it makes a funny kind of sense for the ultimate result of science to be an incomprehensible magic.’

  I was still afraid, but my fear was dwindling, lulled by the rhythms of his words, and though I perceived him to be death, I also saw clearly that he was Reynolds, Reynolds made whole.

  ‘This was inevitable,’ he said. ‘We both knew something miraculous could happen…that’s why we stayed together, despite everything. Don’t be afraid. I could never hurt you more than I have.’

  ‘What’s inevitable?’ I asked. He was too close for me to think of running, and I thought I could delay him, put him off with questions.

  ‘Can’t you feel it?’ He was so close, now, I could feel his heat. ‘I can’t tell you what it is, Carolyn, only that it is, that it’s life…a new life.’

  ‘The Spider,’ I said. ‘I don’t understand, I…’

  ‘No more questions,’ he said, and slipped the robes from my shoulders.

  His touch was warmer than natural, making my eyelids droop, but causing no pain. He pulled me down to the floor, and in a moment he was inside me, we were heart to heart, moving together, enveloped in that pale flickering glow, and amidst the pleasure I felt, there was pain, but so little it did not matter…

  …and I, too, was afraid, afraid I was not who I thought, that flames and nothingness would obliterate us, but in having her once again, in the consummation of my long wish, my doubts lessened…

  …and I could no longer tell whether my eyes were open or closed, because sometimes when I thought them closed, I could see him, his face slack with pleasure, head flung back…

  …and when I thought they were open I would have a glimpse of another place wherein she stood beside me, glimpses at first too brief for me to fix them in mind…

  …and everything was whirling, changing, my body, my spirit, all in flux, and death—if this was death—was a long decline, a sweep of golden radiance, and behind me I could see the past reduced to a plain and hills carpeted with golden grasses…

  …and around me golden towers, shimmering, growing more stable and settling into form moment by moment, and people shrouded in golden mist who were also becoming more real, acquiring scars and rags and fine robes, carrying baskets and sacks…

  …and this was no heaven, no peaceful heaven, for as we moved beneath those crumbling towers of yellow stone, I saw soldiers with oddly shaped spears on the battlements, and the crowds around us were made up of hard-bitten men and women wearing belted daggers, and old crones bent double under the weight of sacks of produce, and younger women with the look of ill-usage about them, who leaned from the doors and windows of smoke-darkened houses and cried out their price…

  …and the sun overhead seemed to shift, putting forth prominences that rippled and undulated as in a dance, and shone down a ray of light to illuminate the tallest tower, the one we had sought for all these years, the one whose mystery we must unravel…

  …and the opaque image of an old man in a yellow robe was floating above the crowd, his pupils appearing to shift, to put forth fiery threads as did the sun, and he was haranguing us, daring us all to penetrate his tower, to negotiate his webs and steal the secrets of time…

  …and after wandering all day, we found a room in an inn not half a mile from the wizard’s tower, a mean place with grimy walls and scuttlings in the corners and a straw mattress that crackled when we lay on it. But it was so much more than we’d had in a long, long time, we were delighted, and when night had fallen, with moonlight streaming in and the wizard’s tower visible through a window against the deep blue of the sky, the room seemed palatial. We made love until well past midnight, love as we had never practised it: trusting, unfettered by inhibition. And afterward, still joined, listening to the cries and music of the city, I suddenly remembered my life in that other world, the Spider, Helios Station, everything, and from the tense look on Carolyn’s face, from her next words, I knew that she, too, had remembered.

  ‘Back at Helios,’ she said, ‘we were making love, lying exactly like this, and…’ She broke off, a worry line creasing her brow. ‘What if this is all a dream, a moment between dying and death?’

  ‘Why should you think that?’

  ‘The Spider…I don’t know. I just felt it was true.’

  ‘It’s more reasonable to assume that everything is a form of transition between the apartment and this room. Besides, why would the Spider want you to die?’

  ‘Why has he done any of this? We don’t even know what he is…a demon, a god.’

  ‘Or something of mine,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, that…or death.’

  I stroked her hair, and her eyelids fluttered down.

  ‘I’m afraid to go to sleep,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I think there’s more to this than death.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because of how we are.’

  That’s why I think it is death,’ she said. ‘Because it’s too good to last.’

  ‘Even if it is death,’ I told her, ‘in this place death might last longer than our old lives.’

  Of course I was certain of very little myself, but I managed to soothe her, and soon she was asleep. Out the window, the wizard’s tower—if, indeed, that’s what it was—glowed and rippled, alive with power, menacing in its brilliance. But I was past being afraid. Even in the face of something as unfathomable as a creature who has appropriated the dream of a man who may have dreamed it into existence and fashioned thereof either a life or a death, even in a world of unanswerable questions, when love is certain—love, the only question that is its own answer—everything becomes quite simple, and, in the end, a matter of acceptance.

  We live in an old chaos of the sun

 
; Wallace Stevens

  ALL THE PERFUMES OF ARABY

  For nearly two years after my arrival in Egypt, I put off visiting the Pyramids. I had seen them once, briefly at sunset, while en route by car from Alexandria to Cairo. Looming up from the lion-coloured sands, their sunstruck sides ignited to a shimmering orange, as if the original limestone veneer had been magically restored, and the shadows in their lee showed a deep mysterious blue, almost purple, like the blood of Caesar’s Rome. They diminished me, those ancient tombs. Too much beauty for my deracinated spirit, too much grandeur and immensity. They made me think of history, death, and folly. I had no wish to endure the bout of self-examination a longer visit might provoke. It would be best, I thought, to live a hard, modern life in that city of monuments, free of ponderous considerations and intellectual witness. But eventually curiosity got the best of me, and one afternoon I travelled out to Giza. This time, swarmed by tourists, displayed beneath an oppressive grey sky, it was the Pyramids that looked diminished: dull brown heaps like the spoor of a huge, strangely regular beast.

  I wandered about for more than an hour. I regarded the faceless mystery of the Sphinx and managed to avoid having a video taken atop a camel by a ragged teenager with an old camcorder and the raw scar of an AIDS inoculation on his bicep. At length I leaned up against my Land Rover and smoked a hand-rolled cigarette salted with hashish and opium flakes. I thought in pictures, my eyes closed, imagining ibis gods and golden sun boats. When a woman’s voice with more than a touch of Southern accent spoke from nearby, saying, ‘You can smell that shit fifty feet away,’ I was so distanced I felt only mild resentment for this interference in the plotlessness of my life, and said, because it required little energy, ‘Thanks.’

  She was tall and slender and brown, with a slightly horsey face and generous features and a pronounced overbite, the sort of tomboyish look I’d always found attractive, though overall she was a bit sinewy for my tastes. Late twenties, I’d say. About my age. Her skin, roughened by the sun, was just starting to crack into crow’s-feet, her cheekbones were sharply whittled, and her honey-brown hair, tied back with a bandanna, was streaked blonde and brittle at the ends. She had on chino shorts and a white T-shirt and was carrying a net bag that held a canteen, a passport wallet, and some oranges.

  ‘Aren’t you goin’ to put it out?’ She gestured at my cigarette.

  ‘Guess I better,’ I said, and grinned at her as I ground out the butt, expecting her to leave now that her prim mission had been accomplished; but she remained standing there, squinting at me.

  ‘You’re that smuggler guy, right?’ she said. ‘Shears.’

  ‘Shields. Danny Shields.’ I was not alarmed that she knew my business—many did—but I was annoyed at not being able to recall her. She had nice eyes, dark brown, almost oriental-shaped. Her legs were long, lean and well defined, but very feminine. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t remember your name.’

  ‘Kate Corsaro,’ she said after a moment’s hesitation. ‘We’ve never met. Just somebody pointed you out to me in a night club. They told me you were a smuggler.’ She left a pause. ‘I thought you looked interestin’.’

  ‘First impressions,’ I said. ‘You can never trust ’em.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know ’bout that.’ She gazed off toward the Great Pyramid; then, after a second or two: ‘So what do you smuggle? Drugs?’

  ‘Too dangerous. You run drugs, you’re looking at the death penalty. I have something of a moral problem with it, too.’

  ‘Is that right?’ She glanced down at the remains of my cigarette.

  ‘Just because I use doesn’t mean I approve of the business.’

  ‘Seems to me that’s tacit approval.’

  ‘Maybe so, but I see a distinction. Whatever else pays, I’ll deal with it. Diamonds, exotic software, hacksaw blades…whatever. But no drugs.’

  ‘Hacksaw blades?’ She laughed. ‘Can’t be much profit in that.’

  ‘You might be surprised.’

  ‘Been a while since anything’s surprised me,’ she said.

  A silence stretched between us, vibrant as a plucked wire. I wanted to touch the soft packs of muscle that bunched at the corners of her mouth. ‘You’ve come to the right place,’ I said. ‘I’m surprised all the time here.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘Like now,’ I said. ‘Like this very minute, I’m surprised.’

  ‘This here?’ she said. ‘This is just doin’ what comes naturally.’

  Despite her flirtatious tone, I had an idea she was getting bored. To hold her interest I told stories about my Arab partner in the old bazaar, about moving robotic elements and tractor parts. It’s odd, how when you come on to someone, even with the sort of half-assed move I was making, you invest the proceedings with unwarranted emotion, you imbue every action and thought with luminous possibility, until suddenly all the playful motives you had for making the move begin to grow legitimate and powerful. It is as if a little engine has been switched on in your heart due to some critical level of heat having been reached. It seems that random and impersonal, that careless. Not that I was falling in love with her. It was just that everything was becoming urgent, edgy. But soon I began to bore myself with my own glibness, and I asked Kate how she had ended up in Egypt.

  ‘I was in the Middle East nine years ago. I had an itch to see it again.’

  ‘In Egypt?’

  ‘Naw, I was in Saudi. But I didn’t want to go back. I couldn’t walk around free like here.’

  I was just putting those two facts together, 1990 and Saudi Arabia, when the sun came out full, and something glinted on the back of her right hand: three triangular diamond chips embedded in the flesh. I noticed a slight difference in colouration between the wrist and forearm, and realized it was a prosthesis. I had seen similar ones, the same pattern of diamond chips, all embedded in artificial limbs belonging to veterans of Desert Storm. Kate caught me staring at the hand, shifted it behind her hip; but a second later she moved it back into plain view.

  ‘Somethin’ botherin’ you?’ she asked flatly.

  ‘Not at all,’ I said.

  She held my eyes for a few beats. The tension in her face dissolved. ‘It bothers some,’ she said, flexing the fingers of the hand, watching them work. She glanced up at me again. ‘I flew a chopper, case you’re wonderin’.’

  I made a noncommittal noise. ‘Must have been tough.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe, I don’t know. Basically what happened was just plain stupid.’ She lapsed into another silence, and I grew concerned again that I might be losing her interest.

  ‘Would you like to go somewhere?’ I asked. ‘Maybe have a drink?’

  She worried her lower lip. ‘A drink’s not all we’re talkin’ about here, is it?’

  I was pleased by her frankness, her desire to move things along. Like her ungilded exterior, I took this to indicate inner strength. ‘I suppose not.’

  She let out a breath slowly. ‘Know why I came back to this part of the world? I want somethin’ from this place. I don’t even know what exactly. Sometimes I think it’s just to feel somethin’ strong again, ’cause I’ve been so insulated against feelin’ the past nine years. But whatever, I don’t wanna be hangin’ around anybody who’s goin’ to hold me back.’ Another sigh. ‘It’s probably weird, me sayin’ all this, but I don’t want any misunderstandin’s.’

  ‘No, it’s not weird. I can relate.’ Sad for her, I was careful not to let the words sound too facile, because though I did understand her, I no longer believed in what she thought was out there. I felt I should make a stab at honesty. ‘Me, I’m not looking for anything,’ I told her. ‘I just try to accept what comes.’

  ‘That’s more than most,’ she said glumly.

  Overhead the contrail of a fighter became visible, arrowing east toward Syria and the latest headlines. Seeing it appeared to brighten Kate.

  ‘Well,’ she said, shouldering her bag. ‘I reckon I’ll take you up on that drink.’

 
; Around midnight I got up from my bed and went into the living room, to a telephone table by French doors that stood open onto a balcony, where I dialled the Belgian girl whom I had been fucking for the past year. When she answered I said, ‘Hey, Claire.’

  ‘Danny? Where are you?’

  ‘Out and about.’ I tried to think of something else to say. She was helping to install an advanced computer in one of the mosques, one of those projects cloaked in secrecy. I found the whole thing immensely boring, but now I thought talking about it might be distracting. ‘How’s work?’ I asked.

  ‘The usual. The mullahs are upset, the technicians are incompetent.’

  I imagined I could hear her displeasure in the bursts of static on the line. It was a cool night, and I shivered in the breeze. Sweat was drying on my chest, my thighs. Faint wailing music and a chaos of traffic noises from the street below. A slant of moonlight fell over the tile floor, a thin tide that sliced across my ankles and bleached my feet bone white. Beyond the light, two chairs and a sofa made shadowy puzzles in a blue darkness.

  ‘You’re with somebody, aren’t you?’ Claire said.

  ‘You know me,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps I should come over. Make it a threesome.’

  ‘Not this time.’ But I could not help picturing them together. Claire, soft and white, black hair and large, startling indigo eyes, the submissive voluptuary, the intellectual with a doctorate in artificial intelligence. Kate, all brown and lithe, passionate and violently alive.

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘An American. She just got a divorce, she’s doing some travelling.’

  A prickly silence. ‘Why did you call?’

  ‘I wanted to hear your voice.’

  ‘That’s bullshit,’ she said. ‘You’re worried about something. I always get these calls when something’s not going the way you planned.’

  I hung my head, listening to the little fizzing storms on the line.

  ‘Is she getting to you, Danny? Is that it?’