H(A)PPY

by Nicola Barker

  Turn away from the narrative!

  Turn away, Mira A!

  Mira A picks up her guitar. She is perspiring uncontrollably. Her hands are bathed in sweat. She tries to play, to hold down a note – any note – and her fingers, quite miraculously, seem to adhere. But the note? Harsh! Metallic! Reverberating! And the vibration enters her whole body through her fingertips – her skin – her pores – it echoes through her ears – it shudders into her teeth.

  This dreadful oscillation.

  This flaw.

  This blip.

  But Mira A continues to strum, to pluck.

  Be brave!

  There is a tune she longs to play –

  Be brave!

  A sweet waltz. It is the only thing that may bring her solace. She is not yet sure of it. She has not yet committed it to memory. There are spaces. There are gaps. And sometimes the gaps are more meaningful than the notes. She peers into them. She marvels at their whiteness. She blinks. She looks for her own shadow in the whiteness but there is no shadow here.

  There is nothing.

  But narrative.

  Must not panic.

  Must not panic.

  As long as she keeps telling the story.

  She is alive.

  She is not obliterated.

  The words.

  Her soul.

  And yet . . .

  But . . .

  For some . . .

  For some strange reason she suddenly can’t . . .

  Can’t . . .

  Uh!

  Speak . . .

  Can’t . . .

  Uh!

  Can’t . . .

  Breathe!

  Then the song returns. The darkness of the notes against the page. The waltz. Her fingers still perspiring. The curious oscillation.

  Metal strings.

  One hundred stones, rattling against the floorboards.

  TERRIBLE DISCIPLINE!

  One hundred stones.

  And feathers.

  And tiny stitches like a line of train track travelling across a broad upper lip.

  She is dreaming, surely?

  She is dreaming –

  Yes! At last!

  She mustn’t wake up!

  Don’t wake up!

  Sleep.

  Sleeeeep.

  Mira A sleeps, at first fitfully, then more deeply.

  As Mira A sleeps, Mira B stares down quietly at Mira A’s inert body, then glances over, faintly scowling, towards her Information Stream.

  Mira B sighs and gently lifts her hand from where it has been firmly placed over Mira A’s mouth. The marks of her fingers are clearly visible – indented, in angry pink, deep into Mira A’s pale skin. After she carefully rearranges the dank locks of hair obscuring Mira A’s damp cheeks she is still for a moment, then smiles darkly and bends forward, placing her lips right up close against Mira A’s ear:

  Hello. Hello. Hello. I am the sister star, she whispers.

  I am staring into the light.

  I have started to tell the story of myself. As if I am distanced from myself – dispassionately watching myself. This narrative is the problem. It is a filth, a cancer, that infiltrates everything, that warps and undermines all that is sure and Known. All Certainty. All that is Present. All that is in This Moment. All confidence. All H(A)PPI . . .

  There should have been a sense of relief at my dreams returning – at least here – there – I can almost be myself. But is it me? Isn’t it a new self, an alien self, a dangerous self that violates rules and abandons codes?

  Who is Mira A?

  My dreams have returned. But instead of relief I feel an icy fear. After the re-stringing of the kora, I can’t be certain what I may do – what horrors I may perpetrate – under the guise of sleep.

  Such strange dreams. And when I awoke the bed was drenched with sweat. I checked my guitar – the strings. I walked around the room, inspecting all surfaces, picking up familiar objects and then placing them down again – studying them – to see if anything had changed. Nothing had changed. But everything felt . . .

  Shifted.

  A centimetre or two to the left.

  I call the dog to me. Tuck is sitting in his bed. He ignores my call. He doesn’t even lift his head.

  I have lost confidence in myself.

  I feel fragile. Shaken. An odd tenderness on the skin around my mouth.

  Who am I?

  Whose story is this?

  And why do I still doggedly persist in telling it?

  I had thought of examining the Streams of Kipp and Tuesday. To find clues. To find answers. But now I am reconsidering. I am re-evaluating.

  Too risky.

  Has Mira A not engendered sufficient levels of chaos already?

  Inadvertently?

  I stand up and walk around the room again, studying things.

  Everything feels . . .

  Shifted.

  Is it the clamps?

  Maybe I should . . . ?

  Perhaps I might . . . ?

  I step on to the Power Spot and start to walk, then to jog, then to run. My clothing, my footwear, rapidly transform under the pressure of modified use. A bad night. But I do feel stronger now, physically, in myself. The clamps are embedded. As I run I instruct my Sensor to give me access to my own Stream. The Sensor requests a particular moment. I ask for the moment I fell asleep the previous night. Play in real time, I say. In real time.

  Then I run. And I watch myself. Uh . . . Okay. Yes. There she is. Mira A. At rest. I see Mira A, sleeping. Mira A looks . . . looks different from how I . . .

  I . . . me . . . I look . . . Mira A looks strangely thin and drawn. Almost corpse-like. And there is a mark – a curious, grey mark – a bruise, I suppose, on one of her temples. Or perhaps this is the clamp, the new clamp, showing through the delicate gauze of her skin?

  Mira A’s eyelids start to flicker. On the Stream.

  Ah. She is gradually entering her REM. She is slowly acclimatising to her new environment . . .

  Then suddenly – out of the blue – Mira A starts to move a hand. It is a pale hand. A bony hand. It nudges up into the air gracefully, organically, like a tentative, green shoot sprouting from the quiet, nourishing soil of her prone torso. The hand is closed, like a bud, and then, when the arm is fully extended, it opens. But it doesn’t tense, it doesn’t stiffen, it remains soft, almost floppy. Mira A begins to . . . to paint – or to draw – as if creating a work of Japanese calligraphy in pure space, her fingers touching each other at the tips, forming a loose teardrop, like the brush. She works gracefully. Precisely. With intent.

  She is almost conducting. In calligraphy.

  But who is she conducting?

  Where are the orchestra?

  And what is she telling them to play?

  Tuck, the canine, is sitting by the side of her bed, watching. His tail, initially quite still, slowly starts to wag. My run on the Power Spot slows down to a jog, then to a walk. I am already out of breath. I have not exercised in quite some time now. Not since the intervention. Not since the clamps were fitted.

  But what are these odd movements I . . . she . . . we are making?

  What do they represent?

  The first is a wave-like gesture – a rolling motion from right to left. Like a capital letter N but devoid of all sharp edges.

  My eye turns, perplexed, to The Sensor. Dare I ask? But it is already too late. CLAIMING it exclaims, the word jumping and flashing and running wildly up and down the screen. Oscillating.

  There is no pinkening, as yet.

  Claiming?

  Claiming?

  Claiming who?

  Claiming what?

  The gesture suddenly transforms into something else. Mira A’s arm is drawing – or painting – two arrow-heads, or chevrons, pointing to the right. She is very precise. She repeats the movement six, seven . . . Eight times.

  I turn to The Sensor anxiously.

  OTHERS’ HEARTS it shouts, but the wo
rds skip and bounce like the reels on a slot machine.

  Next, hard upon it, something entirely different . . . a small triangle but perched at the tip of a long, straight, upward-slanting line. Like a flag in a golf hole, but upended. It reminds me, for a brief moment, of the ribbons on . . . on you-know-who’s tail.

  I turn to The Sensor, holding my breath.

  UNKNOWN it bounces, then is full of static, then UNKNOWN it repeats, before the letters rapidly turn inside out, bubble and then melt.

  My eyes are drawn back to Mira A. I focus in on her face. Her eyelids are flickering crazily and she seems stressed. Her lips are moving.

  ‘I must turn away from these thoughts. Just turn away from them. I must. I must,’ she mutters.

  And again she repeats it, the phrase running up and down The Information Stream, like liquid, like a waterfall, so loose, so free, virtually gushing out of it:

  ‘Just turn away . . . ’ she gasps. ‘Just turn away from these thoughts. Just turn away . . . Just turn away from them . . . ’

  Without warning the movement – the drawing – the gesture – the painting – transmogrifies again. A large, capital letter T.

  I home in on Mira A’s lips . . .

  ‘Is there still an oscillation?’ she mutters, tossing her head from side to side (as if plagued by some dreadful attack of fever). ‘But if the flaw has been corrected,’ she gurgles, ‘if the flaw . . . the flaw . . . if . . . if . . . then . . . then why . . . ?’

  Strands of hair lie in lank strips across her perspiring face.

  I glance over towards The Sensor:

  EARTHBOUND SPIRITS! it yells, then explodes, like a firework. The light is so sharp that I instinctively cover my eyes.

  When I uncover them again, another movement . . . a new shape. An arrow – the tip of a spearhead. And the arm is lifting her torso into the air, now. Its movements are so violent. As if the arrow itself – its considerable energy, its flight – is drawing her slight, physical self up and off into the space above the bed. Her chin points to the ceiling and her head tips back, helplessly, on to the coverlet.

  ‘This awful feeling of shame when I . . . This awful . . . This awful . . . ’ she gurgles, head now rolling from side to side.

  I glance over at The Sensor, and immediately The Stream screams: PURIFICATION! PURIFICATION! PURIFICATION! A tiny, perfectly round digital fireball bounces across the tops of the letter i’s, then reaches the concluding exclamation mark and ignites it. The fuse is lit and the words turn to ashes. I steady myself for something dramatic, but nothing happens. Just an ominous flatness, a quiet.

  I grow fearful for Mira A – for myself.

  These symbols seem violent – vicious – malign.

  Mira A’s hand is now swiping a line, and then, just underneath it, the other arm, the other hand (which had previously lain dormant), intersects the line with a triangle. It’s as if the two limbs are warring against each other – wired up to competing hard-drives; the swiping, the wild scything of the right hand battling against the sharp, pointed angles of the left.

  ‘I must turn away from these thoughts. I must! I must! I must!’ Mira A sobs.

  She is crying. She is wailing. Her arms are slicing and chopping into the air with a phenomenal speed and savagery. Each limb seems quite independent – utterly disconnected – from its counterpart, often clashing, slapping, crashing into it.

  I turn to The Sensor, wide-eyed:

  EXORCISM

  it whispers. And with this single, chilling word the violence ends. Mira A grows quiet. But her arms remain hanging – suspended – her head and her shoulders held aloft by an inexplicable magnetism. After a brief duration the first arm slowly inscribes a large U. The other arm draws a diagonal line intersected at its mid-point by another line. An upside-down Y, or two-thirds of an X.

  ‘Can there be no end?’ she murmurs, utterly exhausted now. ‘Can there be no end to these . . . these . . . these . . . ?’

  Words? I whisper, half remembering.

  Then a second time, slightly louder, ‘Words?’

  But Mira A seems temporarily incapable of speech. It’s as if she’s been gagged – or worse – her mouth, perhaps her throat, obstructed in some way. She tries to talk, nonetheless. But she is muffled – blocked – choking. She cannot.

  I turn to The Sensor, traumatised.

  DREAMS it sighs, and then the word slowly begins to bloat, to expand – like a balloon being pumped full of air – until it is plump and round and glistening, at which point it is released – leaves its moorings – and zigzags, screaming – bleating – around the room. I duck. I duck again. It hits the wall and drops, spent, to the floor. It vanishes.

  Am I asleep?

  Am I asleep?

  Might this be a dream and I have simply imagined that I have woken up and everything has been shifted and there is a bruised feeling around my mouth, as if I have been . . . been gagged, and my stomach muscles, now I come to think of it, are aching dreadfully, as if they’ve been . . . as if I’ve been . . .

  No. No! I am awake. I am awake. This is life. This is Truth. These are my hands. These are my feet. I feel certain of it. I turn to The Sensor.

  Am I . . . ?

  Awake, yes, The Sensor nods.

  But could I simply be dreaming that The Sensor is . . . ?

  YOU ARE AWAKE, The Sensor reiterates, more firmly. It shows a record of my current existence in time and space then a graph of my vital signs.

  I am awake. Yes. I am awake. But just to make sure.

  ‘Stop dreaming! ’ I yell and attempt to pinch myself, violently, on the wrist.

  But my intelligent cuffs – those kindly cuffs – expand, just in the nick of time, to prevent me from wounding myself.

  I gaze over at my Graph.

  No pinkening? Still no pinkening? Even after I yelled like that?

  Have I been cut loose?

  Have I been set adrift?

  The Sensor calmly continues to play the Stream of Mira A as she sleeps.

  Who is this girl?

  Am I this girl?

  Is she me?

  I watch her, blankly.

  Mira A’s arms remain hanging, in suspended animation, for several seconds longer and then they fall – they drop. Her torso collapses back down on to the bed. She inhales deeply, she exhales, she rolls over on to her side. She sleeps.

  I can hear panting. Who? I am panting. Because I am afraid. And I feel drained. I realise that I am standing still, just standing, on the Power Spot, and The Spot is now draining me of essential energy. I step off it, startled. Why didn’t The Sensor warn me? I turn back to The Sensor and ask it –

  Why didn’t you . . . ?

  No response.

  I tell it to stop playing the Stream of Mira A, sleeping.

  Stop it!

  I inspect my Graph.

  Nothing. No pinkening.

  Back to The Sensor again . . . Why . . . ?

  The Stream has jammed. There are two, small, vertical lines flashing on the screen. I’m not sure how I know, but the word pause pops, fully formed, into my mind. ‘Start playing!’ I instruct The Sensor, almost angrily. The Sensor does not react. ‘Start playing!’ I tell it again, and then, for a third time, out loud. ‘Start! Start!’ I shout, lifting my hands, theatrically, the way I saw you-know-who do it that time. But The Sensor, The Stream, The Graph, do not respond. I gaze at them blankly. How might this be possible? The clamps? Another flaw? And as I ponder The Stream is jolted in some way and the freeze (the jam, the pause) is released –

  At last!

  – and Mira A, still sleeping, begins to move. But she – like The Stream – is not moving (is not responding) naturally. It’s as if she is a dead weight being manipulated by an invisible force. She is being . . . she is being lifted. She is being sat, upright, on the edge of her bed. But her head hangs forward. She is a dead weight. She is being clumsily rearranged. She is being gathered together. She is being dragged. She is being shifted, from
behind, supported, under her arms, like a giant doll, and humped around the room. There are knees behind her knees (surely?), there are arms behind her arms (surely?), there are feet under her feet. Her progress is gradual, halting, as if the force that moves her is not strong enough to do so with ease. And Tuck. He is running around after her, darting about her, barking. He is snarling. He is snapping at her clothing. But the clothing resists him. She knocks into surfaces. They try to avoid her. Still, I see things shifting – just a centimetre or two. Then finally, she collapses into a comfortable armchair. Her hands are lifted to rest upon the arms. Her head is propped up. Her eyes are opened. Her lips are moved. And The Sensor ticks and ticks and ticks, then slowly, almost nervously, it responds.

  Someone else is telling this story. They are opening and closing my mouth. And the story is expanding – like a piece of hose that is gradually being filled with water. It is lengthening, unfurling, unkinking. But the free end is blocked. It is stoppered. It is sealed. Soon the pressure will build up. The water will mass. The hose will groan and writhe and bloat and creak. And then what?

  A giant effusion?

  A flood?

  I am alone.

  Disconnected.

  From The System.

  From myself.

  I am lost.

  And these words . . . they are not mine, surely? Because I am resisting them, I am fighting them, even as they curl out of my mind, my mouth, even as they slip from my tongue, even as they hang in the air around me like a heavy pall of cigar smoke.

  *“Until the 1960s Paraguayan women were famed for their cigar smoking . . . ”*

  Stop! Stop!

  This is not my fault!

  “Health minister Antonio Barrios said that, even in this case, an abortion would be a violation of Paraguayan law”

  Para . . . ?

  “Police arrested the girl’s stepfather, 42-year-old Gilberto Benitez Zárate . . . he denied the charges and demanded a DNA test to back up his claim . . . authorities immediately arrested the girl’s mother who is 32 years old, and charged her with complicity”