Nova Swing

by M. John Harrison

  "So," he called. "A nice night, Fat Antoyne."

  "It's just Antoyne," Antoyne said.

  He looked doomed and sodden, as if someone had recently pushed him in the sea. The foldaway rainwear ballooning up around him in each gust only partly covered his royal blue suit. The night's weather had pursued him from bar to bar, The World of Today to The Breakaway Station, lacquering his hair across his reddened face: every time he went in somewhere, the rain eased off; every time he decided to move on, it got worse. Now he stopped short of the pier and, eyeing its pitted cast-iron supports, said, "I won't come under there, thanks." And, failing to take heart from the detective's smile: "I been walking up and down for hours in case I missed you."

  "This was the time we agreed."

  "I was never good with time. I got anxieties around it." The rain lashed at him suddenly. To avoid it he stepped without thinking into the shadow of the pier.

  "You see?" murmured Aschemann, as if Antoyne had proved something to him. "It's not so bad." They contemplated the junk that had gathered beneath the pier, too heavy for the sea to move; then the line of rusty barbed wire and barely discernible fluorescence at the eastward extent of the event site itself.

  "Are you afraid of it, Antoyne?"

  "I don't care about it one way or the other."

  Aschemann pretended to give this some consideration. "I thought I saw something move over there," he said. "Just before you arrived." He couldn't quite decide if it was the kind of movement you would expect from, say, a rag, or a bit of wastepaper tumbling briefly across mottled sand; or whether it was more animate than that. "Everyone cares about it," he said. "Otherwise, what would we talk about?" Antoyne shrugged. Aschemann struggled to light his pipe, then gave up and suggested that, since nothing was happening now, they go into the Long Bar. "It would be warmer there, we could get that cocktail drink you introduced everyone to." But Antoyne didn't want to be seen in the Cafe Surf.

  "I came to give up Vic," he said.

  "That will put a different gloss on it," the detective admitted. "Also, I remembered you don't like the music there. Come with me, then, let's stare this thing right in the eye, you can tell me everything you know about it." He took Antoyne's arm and urged him to look across the old fence into the site, marvelling, "A piece of the Kefahuchi Tract! A piece of the heart of things that fell to earth! I'm afraid of it, Antoyne, I don't mind admitting; I'm afraid of what it means to us, and that's why I asked you how you felt." All he got in response was the white of Antoyne's eye. The fence wire was so rusty it fell apart at a touch, into a kind of wet grit. Rubbing a little of it between his fingers, the way you might crush a leaf of mint, Aschemann smelled the strong iron smell. "No one's replaced this since the original event," he guessed. "Antoyne, why would you want to give up Vic Serotonin?"

  "I don't like it here," Antoyne decided suddenly.

  Aschemann kept hold of his arm. "But you're used to it, a man like you. Vic's been in and out by this route all year."

  Antoyne laughed.

  "No one in their right mind would go in from here," he said. "Is that what you thought? Vic would jump off from here? Look at it!" There was no aureole to speak of, there was only the thinnest skin between the different states of things. You would be straight into the worst of it without warning. "Look at the air over there!"

  It was like a heat shimmer, only cold and dark, and its very existence seemed to bring home to Antoyne the falseness of his position. "I'm hanging by a thread here," he complained. After a short struggle, he detached himself from Aschemann's grip and began to walk rapidly away from the wire, out from under the pier and into the wind and rain, his rainslicker flapping and cracking wildly. "I never went in there with Vic or anyone else," he called over his shoulder.

  Aschemann, stumbling after him, heard none of it. Even as they talked, something had been changing on the other side of the fence; halfway to the safety of the Cafe Surf the wavefront bowled them over. Fat Antoyne knelt in the wet sand, opening and closing his mouth, while the detective, temporarily unable to order his legs, stopped and stared out to sea, where he believed he could see, moored in broad daylight, two or three ancient, rusting cargo vessels. An electric current appeared to be arcing between his clenched jaws. "Irene won't like what you've done to your nice suit," he made himself say. At that, Antoyne's face turned up, dead white in the streaming rain.

  "I got the information. Where Vic'll start from tomorrow. Who the client is. But it's reasonable I get money for it."

  Aschemann continued to stare out to sea.

  "I could find you something," he conceded vaguely.

  The rain drenched Antoyne. It poured down his face. His hands and knees made large smooth dimples in the sand, spacetime curves in a surface that seemed elastic with water. "More than something," he said. "I supported Vic in his ambitions, like all those Black Cat White Cat people. But I got to admit now he didn't truly reciprocate, and it's time to take back from him the responsibility for my life." He looked up at the detective. "It was a waste of my heart the day I tried to be friends with a man as lonely as Vic Serotonin, and this is the only favour he'll ever do me."

  But Aschemann wasn't listening; his eyes were focused off to the side, in that vague way people have when they are taking a dial-up.

  "Hello, Paulie," he said.

  Only shortly after these events, across the city in Globe Town, Edith Bonaventure woke guiltily from a dream in which she was thirteen years old and nationwide, a dream like the glitter of accordion chrome in smoky light, expanding and contracting as queasily as accordion bellows in that way which seems to the listener to bear only the most cursory relationship to the music produced: a repeating dream which, despite its general noise and dancing and evident nostalgic glamour, she sometimes thought, did not have her best interests at heart. Globe Town, by contrast, presented to itself-or at least to the waking Edith-as quiet and dark, a little triangle of gentrified streets still faintly resonant with some recent displacement of air, some implacable release of energy, some outrage committed on one kind of physics by another. A great tour ship (probably, Edith thought, the Beths/Hirston Skeleton Queen, destination Santa Muerte, brochured as "Planet of the Alphane Moons," fifty lights or more down the Beach) had just left its berth for the parking orbit.

  Edith got her feet over the side of the bed. "If you think I'm believing any of that," she told her dream, "you're wrong." The floor was cold, her nightdress tangled around her waist, as if making music in your sleep was as much of a struggle as making it awake. She knew better than to blame the Skeleton Queen for waking her; more probably it was Emil's kidneys. "Hey," she called up to him, "don't do anything, I'm on my way. It's OK. Leave it to me. It's OK whatever you did."

  No answer.

  "I'm coming," she called.

  Emil had crawled under his bed and become wedged at the hips. She attempted to haul him out. "Hey, are you trying to help?" she said. "Because don't."

  "We're fucked, Billy. Those things out there aren't human. Whatever we do now is the end of us."

  "Come on, Emil, it was only a cruise ship."

  "Look at that fucker! That's better than any floating pile of shoes!"

  The room was dark, though random blue and green lights crawled across the walls: hard ultraviolet, absorbed from the tour ship's exhaust flare by a system of fluorescent butterfly-scale pigments and tailored Bragg reflectors in Emil's smart tattoos, now re-emitted in the visible spectrum. The departure of the Skeleton Queen had also brought on a mild fit, during which his bowels, it seemed, had let go. Edith, exhausted and suddenly depressed, began to wonder what she was doing here-what either of them had ever been doing, wherever they were. She lay on the floor near her father and started crying. "You don't help me," she said, turning angrily away from him like a wife. "I have to do all this myself." And then, turning back, "We came in from the stars, Emil, but the stars were our home. We gave up all that fun so you could go mad."

  Emil returned her star
e dubiously. "This isn't the only bed I've ever been under."

  Edith wiped her hand across her tears and laughed.

  "I know," she said.

  "You know why I think I get this?" he said. "Neuronal soft errors. We're all brain-fried in Globe Town. Seriously, we should move somewhere safer. Those departures are a quantum jockey's nightmare."

  "You get this because you left your mind in the site."

  "That too," he admitted. Then: "If anything, the arrivals are worse."

  "Jesus, Emil, you really smell."

  "If you pull my arm I think I can push with my other leg."

  Eventually, in the weird fading light his tattoos had stored up out of the physics bounty of the Skeleton Queen, she extricated him and cleaned him up. She spread fresh twill sheets on the bed and got him back into it. She propped him against the pillows and sat beside him. He looked nice. "You look nice," she told him, "like a proper old man. You even have that thin white hair the best old men have." When she was sure he was asleep again, she went downstairs and sat in a chair leafing through a volume of his site journal dated fifteen years before. The room cooled. It stayed night. Looking up occasionally at the rows of teen costumes on the walls, like afterimages of herself in some scientifically inexplicable medium, Edith found she had forgotten where she was, or what part of her life she was in. "Go to sleep in here, you dream entirely in tiny mad paintings," Emil had written. "This is what I got last night: a man spews up a snake, someone else is helping him. They entwine, bent in the shapes of alien body language." She was dozing over this when Vic Serotonin dialled up.

  "Hey, Edith," he said.

  "Funny you should say that, Vic," she replied, and closed the pipe.

  When Vic came on again and asked how Emil was, which she had known he would, she answered, "He's fine. He's happy. You can always see what Emil's thinking, through the holes in his head." There was an ominous rhythmic croaking sound in the pipe, along with a common type of visual interference which made things spin out sideways from under her gaze. She felt fine with her eyes closed; but when she tried to look at things, they slipped away from her. It was the story of her life. "Why'd you call me, I wonder?" she said. And before Vic could reply, "Well, you just want to say you're sorry. You're going into the site tomorrow. Maybe I would change my mind about the book."

  "Edith-"

  "But who's there with you, Vic? You see, you don't answer that one."

  This time it was him who broke the connection.

  "So no diary for you, then, my boy," Edith whispered. She waited a little, as much to give him the benefit of the doubt as to clear her head. Inshore winds drove the rain down the street towards the corporate port. A smaller ship left the ground on a line of light like a crack across things. The world stopped spinning. When he didn't get back to her she opened a new pipe and said to the voice at the other end:

  "I want to report a site crime."

  Upstairs, Emil Bonaventure was propped upright against the pillows like a corpse, his skin yellow in the streetlight from the window, his old ribs slatted with shadows. The energy had drained out of his smart tattoos and he was breathing ever so lightly. Edith watched the pulse in his neck. She could almost see the life through the skin, the thoughts in his head, and what were they but the dreams he couldn't any longer have? Shallow water over cracked chequerboard tiles and cast-off domestic objects, books, plates, magazines, empty tunnels smelling of chemicals, a black dog trotting aimlessly round him in his sleep on some dirty waterlogged ground neither in nor out of anything you could think of as the world, while a woman's voice mourned open-throat from a house not far enough in the distance.

  "Emil," she whispered. She meant: I'm here. She meant: It's OK. She meant: Don't go. After a moment he opened his eyes and smiled.

  "Where's Vic?" he asked.

  "Vic won't be coming to see us any more," Edith said.

  Later that night, down by the seafront, the wind dropped. The rain turned to drizzle and then stopped; in its place, fog stole in across the Corniche, muffling the sounds of merriment from the Cafe Surf. A man who looked like the older Albert Einstein sat on the cold seawall for a while, content, it seemed, to watch the rickshaws come and go in the oystershell lot, or exchange scraps of talk with the Monas in their lime-green tube skirts and orange fake-fur boleros. He liked them to flirt with him, and in return showed them pictures of someone they took to be his granddaughter. The limits of visibility fell, give or take, at a pleasant twenty or thirty yards, describing a comfortable, colourful space lit from within by flocks of smart ads. Everyone, really, was having fun, when into the lot wheeled a pink 1952 Cadillac custom roadster, blessed or cursed, according to where you stood on the subject, with the low skirts and frenched tail lights of a later, impure aesthetic, a giant vehicle which blunt-nosed its way between the rickshaws, scattered the ads and see-sawed to a halt on its real mechanical suspension, while from an unimpeachable white leather interior the sounds of WDIA, Radio Retro, Station to the Stars, thugged their way in solid blocks across the voice of some hysterical commentator at Preter Coeur.

  "Very impressive," Lens Aschemann congratulated his assistant. "I'll just fold my wet raincoat before I get in, if you don't mind, and put it in the back here."

  "Those Monas seem to know you well," the assistant said.

  "It's charity work. Let's drive a little before you take me in." He fastened his seatbelt. "Go anywhere you like since we'll only be killing time. By the way," he said, "are you back at Sport Crime? If not, you needn't listen to this indifferent music the fighters like." He leaned across and switched off the radio. "Later we can have a proper breakfast, maybe you'd like to go to Pellici's, which I know you enjoyed before. Then I'll let you do what you always wanted: arrest Vic Serotonin."

  He chuckled. "That Vic," he said, "Betrayed three times in the same night. It's hard not to laugh."

  They took the coast road. At first, when the assistant looked up into the driving mirror all she could see was the nacre reflection of her own headlights diffused around the car; further along, though, the fog, stirred up by temperature differentials out at sea, broke into patches. As soon as Aschemann saw where she was taking him, his mood changed. He folded his arms and stared ahead. "You drive too fast," he complained. "How can anyone enjoy themselves?" About fifteen miles out, they got perfect visibility. Shortly afterwards, the assistant pulled into a headland viewpoint and stopped the car facing out to sea.

  "It's a long time since I sat here," Aschemann said.

  Cold air filled the Cadillac, but he wouldn't allow her to close the roof. Instead, he stood up with his hands on the top edge of the windscreen and watched the big ocean waves shovelling the remains of themselves into the bay. Far out, the assistant could see the single, desolate fluttering blue light of some lost rickshaw advertisement: otherwise, the headland was black, the sky and the sea different shades of grey. "Was this place on the record?" he said eventually. "I'm surprised. It was never part of the investigation."

  "You're thorough," she said. "Everyone says that. You came here the day they found her, so you had it recorded."

  "It looks nicer in daylight."

  There he stuck, staring out over the sea.

  ***

  Alerted by neighbours, the uniform branch had found the body of his wife, six o'clock on a hot summer evening, sprawled among the broken furniture, boxes of clothes, the piles of local dope-sheets, fashion magazines and old record albums which had divided the floor of the bungalow into narrow waist-high alleys, filled at that time of day with the rich yellow light filtering between the mille-feuille slats of the wooden blinds.

  "They called me immediately," Aschemann said. "It was hot in there." Up from all the yellowed pages, stronger than the smell of the corpse, came a stifling odour of dust and salt. "It got in your mouth as well as your nose." She had fallen awkwardly, wedged sideways with one arm trapped beneath her and the other draped across a copy of Harpers amp; Queen, her left hand clutching an
empty tumbler, her cheap sun-faded print dress disarranged to show a yellow thigh: but not one of those piles of repro-shop junk, the uniformed men remarked, had been disturbed by her fall. There were no signs of a struggle. It was as if her murderer had been as constrained in here as anyone else. Tattooed in her armpit were the lines: Send me a neon heart/Send it with love/Seek me inside.

  When they turned her over, she proved to be holding in her other hand a letter Aschemann had sent her when they were still young. Invited reluctantly to the scene by an investigator several years his junior, Aschemann examined this for a moment-giving less attention, it seemed, to what he had written than to the thin blue paper he had written it on all that time ago-then went and stood puzzledly in the centre of the maze. The assembled uniforms spoke in low voices and avoided his eyes. He understood all this but it was as if he was seeing it for the first time. If he peered between the slats of the blind, he knew, he would be able to see Carmody, Moneytown, the Harbour Mole, the whole city tattooed stark and clear in strong violet light into the armpit of the bay.

  "What could I do?" he now asked his assistant.

  "They were right not to allow you to investigate."

  "Were they?" He shrugged, as if at this distance it didn't matter. "I told them, 'Do a good job.' I said, 'Bring me the details to my office later.' Then I had someone drive me up here, someone as bright and ambitious as you, who could speak just as many languages. I was a suspect, though I never worked Carmody or knew tattooing."

  He looked around.

  "It's nicer in the day. Nice light."

  Nice light, a warm wind at the edge of the cliff, the whisper of the tide far below. A few eroded bristle-cone pines, a patch of red earth bared and compacted by tourists' feet. An extraordinary sense of freedom, which he had regretted every day since.