by Oisin McGann
“Look at the way we were cut out of the end-of-year gig,” she continued. “Why? Because they don’t like our music. And why don’t they like it? Because when we’re singing our songs, we can say what we damn well please. Sol’s just the latest victim.”
“Maybe it’s not the police at all,” Faisal spoke up.
“Maybe he’s been ‘disappeared’ by the Clockworkers.”
“Oh, shut up, Fai. God, you’re worse than Ube sometimes.”
There was a lull into silence as the class tried to come up with a new subject for conversation.
“Hey, you said Sol’s dad is a daylighter?” somebody piped up.
“Yeah.” Ube sighed.
“Wasn’t there a daylighter murdered the other day? Somebody threw him into a piston well. He got all mashed up!”
Suddenly the subject had been reopened, and a new flurry of theories ricocheted around the room. By the time Ms. Kiroa had returned with Sol, the image of his father had already been re-formed: a player in the twilight underworld who had crossed the city mafia and earned himself a swim with the pistons. And now his son was carrying his debt, his card marked, his days numbered, his life lived by the ticking of a clock.
When he walked in with Ms. Kiroa, the class looked at him with a newfound respect and a profound sympathy.
Sol circled his father in a clear space on the roof of their building. Barely twelve years old, he was already up to his dad’s shoulder, and strong for his age. He had his guard up, chin down, elbows tucked as he darted back and forth, trying to find an opening in Gregor’s guard. Once, this would have been a one-sided game, but his father was having to work now. It was just touch-sparring, and Sol was getting quicker. They weren’t wearing gloves, and Gregor’s big meaty hands were open and loose. Sol tried a jab, and then an uppercut, but Gregor knocked them away.
“You’re too tense,” he told his son. “It’s slowing you down. Loosen up.”
Sol feinted a left hook and nearly got a right hook to Gregor’s temple.
“Better!” said his father, smiling.
They moved around each other, both light on their feet, both relishing the game. Sol pulled his fist in close to his head, and Gregor’s left hand whipped out and slapped his son’s right. Sol’s hand caught his own temple, and he winced.
“Don’t hold your hands too close to your head, especially when you’re not using gloves,” Gregor told him.
“They can hurt you as much as your opponent’s can. It’s all very well if you’re both wearing nice big soft gloves, but with bare knuckles, give yourself space. Got it?”
Sol nodded. He loved this; it was only when they were training that he got to spend time alone with his dad. The apartment was so small, he and Nattie were still sharing a room, even though she was fourteen now and showing far too much interest in boys. Gregor would come home after work, and they would have dinner, and he would sit and browse the web for a while. He might talk to Sol, but it wasn’t the same. It was family talk: “How was school?” or “What did you get up to today?” And he never talked about his day at work. They didn’t ask either; nobody was very interested in what a crane driver did all day.
Sol moved his hands out from his head a little, and they circled for another few moments. Then he aimed a touch at Gregor’s exposed forehead.
Gregor’s head came forward at the same moment, and Sol’s knuckles cracked painfully against the bone of his father’s brow.
“Ow!”
“Oh, sorry, son. Show me your hand….” Gregor examined his knuckles. “You’ll be all right. You have to be careful hitting the forehead—it’s the hardest part of the head. You can break your hand on it. In the prize-fights, some of the guys actually head-butt fists to do just that. Maddest thing you ever saw. Come on, let’s call it a day. Your mother’d have my ass if you came down with a broken hand.”
Putting an arm around his son’s shoulders, Gregor steered him toward the stairs.
“Have you ever been in a prizefight, Dad?” Sol asked.
“Naw, fighting for money’s a mug’s game, son. You’ll always lose more than you gain. Always use your head first; I don’t want to hear about you using this stuff in school, you hear me? You only fight when you have to, but you need to know how, and that’s why I teach you.”
Sol nodded. He’d already been in a few fights in school, and he’d won them all, but now he thought it would be better if Gregor didn’t know about them.
“You have to learn to look after yourself, because nobody’s going to do you any favors in this life,” Gregor went on. “You’ve got your family, but apart from that, you’re on your own. You can’t rely on anybody. You should never give your trust freely, Sol. You’ve got to make people earn it. You hear me?”
“Sure, Dad.”
Four years later, in Ana Kiroa’s apartment, Sol lay awake, his mind racing. Mixed in with older recollections were tumbling images of the events of the last few days: the crane accident, the attack in his apartment, the interrogation at the police station, and, most of all, his father’s “alleged” crime.
Part of him believed it. Gregor got into fights sometimes; he knew that. He took arguments seriously, and he hung around with men who got physical when things didn’t go their way. Maybe this one had gone too far; Gregor wouldn’t murder somebody, but if that guy Hyung had pulled a knife or something, then Gregor might have had no choice.
Sol could imagine his father killing under those circumstances, and despite himself, he felt a little thrill of excitement at the thought. His father could be a killer. Part of Sol had always wanted that kind of reputation: the reluctant killer. “I didn’t want to kill that man, but it was him or me.” That was what it meant to be hard. And he had always known Gregor was a hard man.
Sol was always a little uneasy sleeping in somebody else’s place. It wasn’t insecurity; it was the idea of being indebted to somebody. Accepting hospitality meant you weren’t going it alone. And going it alone was important to Sol. He thought of Ana asleep in her room and tried not to let his imagination run away with him. It had been awkward earlier in the evening, with her roommates. An evening with three teachers. One of them, Candice, was quite cute. Dark, and with a mass of black hair around a lively face. But not as beautiful as Ana.
They were funny, the three women. At first they’d tried to act like teachers, all strict and proper. But being at home was obviously too much for them, and they’d relaxed and changed completely, chatting and making one another giggle. Maybe living with Gregor meant Sol was only used to a man’s world, but really, they were so…girlie.
He thought back to the time when he’d first seen Ana like that. He’d been out running late one night, and as he passed the entrance, he’d seen her coming out of a nightclub. She was dressed in a tight short skirt and a white blouse that showed her full figure. She was laughing with friends, all of them sweating from dancing in the hot atmosphere of the club. He had watched them walk away as he stood in the shadows with his hood up.
Memories continued to weave through his mind as he slowly drifted off to sleep. It was Sunday tomorrow. He would go up to the West Dome Depot and talk to some of the people his father worked with. Maybe they would be able to tell him what had happened to Gregor—perhaps one of them was a witness to the fight. Sleep came in an unsettled churning of wrecked machinery and claustrophobic, gray walls. Dark figures silhouetted against the living room window faded to nothing, but the sense of their presence continued to hang there, long after they were gone.
Section 6/24: MUSIC
SITTING ON THE EDGE of her bed in her T-shirt, cradling her guitar, Cleo was plucking out a tune that had come to her in her sleep. She struggled to remember it, trying different notes as she sought out the melody. She still had not learned musical notation, so she used a digicorder to record the tune once she had worked it out on the guitar. The lyrics would get written down later, with the chords scrawled above the words. Her sister, Victoria, who shared the room with h
er, eventually woke at the sound of the experimental notes, turned to look over at her, and scowled. She put her face in her arms, covering her ears.
“It’s Sunday morning!” she protested. “Do that somewhere else!”
“Bite me,” Cleo retorted.
“Stick it up your ass!” Vicky snapped back, with a grin on her face.
“When I’m famous, you’re going to have to show me some respect.”
“When you’re famous, I’m going to have to wake you up and show you you’re dreamin’.”
“I’m going to make some breakfast,” Cleo announced, prodding her sister’s huddled figure. “You want some?”
“No, thanks. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m trying to sleep!”
Cleo giggled and took her guitar with her, through to the kitchen. Her mother was reading some old book while her father watched the sports on the web.
“Cleopatra, darling, put on something warm. You’ll catch your death,” her mother told her.
“I’m fine, Mom. Is there any water?”
“Yes, it came back on this morning…eventually.”
After a breakfast of papery waffles and egg sauce, Cleo sat down on the couch beside her father, humming to herself and searching for the elusive tune on her guitar. Ever since losing the end-of-year gig, she had been playing with some new lyrics. She sang them haltingly as she put the riffs together.
“You can stitch my mouth,
Nail my tongue to the table,
I’ll keep shouting out,
For as long as I’m able,
You won’t shut me up—
“Damn it!”
The A string broke with a twang, and she sighed in exasperation. It was her last one.
“Should get a synth one,” her father murmured, referring to the electronic guitar synthesizers, his attention still focused on the basketball.
“It’s not the same, Dad,” she told him for the hundredth time.
“No strings, though,” he replied.
“Well, who’d pay for it if I did?” she said, and then immediately regretted it.
He had lost his job in Plumbing Maintenance three months previously, in a “streamlining drive,” and had not been able to find more work. Now they lived on her mother’s wages from the part-time library job and his welfare payments. They never had enough money now, and his pride had been hard hit.
“Sorry,” she muttered.
Cleo undid the broken string and wound the two pieces around her fingers, tying them into a coil. She would need to get some more—and there was only one place to do that.
The trams did not descend into the guts of the city. To reach the lowest levels, you had to take a tram to a point above your desired destination and take steps or an elevator down. Cleo preferred the stairs—the elevators were becoming unreliable. From her tram stop, she descended one hundred and fifty-eight steps to Sub-Level Three of the Fourth Quadrant, one of the several levels occupied by the Filipino District.
On the way down, Cleo passed the exposed workings of the city. Driveshafts carrying the city’s power whirred, causing the steps to tremble beneath her feet; pneumatic shock absorbers caught much of the vibration from the engineering, and the heated air was drawn out and along radiators that kept the air temperature at the required level. Pipes wove through the infrastructure, carrying hot water, near-freezing water, steam, or sewage; contaminated air and carbon monoxide, as well as methane from the sewers. Heavily insulated electricity cables followed the catwalks and stairs for ease of maintenance. In more concealed areas, Cleo knew, enterprising individuals tapped the lines, drawing illegal power from the city for personal use.
It got dark as she descended. There was little light from the dome down here. Dust grew thicker, with no winds or rain to clear it, and cockroaches thrived. The walls were thick in the sub-levels: load-bearing reinforced concrete and denceramic architecture. Ash Harbor’s most abundant mammal, rats, had made homes in the countless nooks and crannies. Cleo had learned once in history that the rat had conquered the world right alongside humans. If the elements won out, rats, not humans, would be the last mammal to die. And the cockroaches would be around a long time after that.
Ash Harbor was in what had once been the South Pacific, before most of the ocean had become a vast plain of pack ice. The Philippines had been one of the last refuges of the Old World as the city was built, and the Filipinos had wielded a huge amount of influence in the last years before people moved in. As the richer countries slowly became frozen wastelands, Southeast Asia had found itself host to its more affluent neighbors, and when the rich and the influential booked their places in Ash Harbor’s safe confines, the workers who had built it begged, bribed, bargained, and cheated their way in. Many, many more were turned away by force.
In the years that followed, many of those who had been rich on the outside used up what they had to trade, and affluence took on a new shape in those who could affect the running of the city’s machinery. But there were still many thousands who had come in on the bottom rung and were forced to stay there. The majority were Filipino, and their culture dominated the sub-levels of the Fourth Quadrant. Of all the cultures that had taken refuge in Ash Harbor, only the Pinoy, as they called themselves, had managed to keep a semblance of their original culture. They had also established a new one; the bulk of the black market in Ash Harbor was run by Filipino gangs, and that was what had drawn Cleo to this area on a Sunday morning.
The Filipino District was her favorite place in the whole city. The same smells always hit her as she drew near: dust, grilled fish, spices, and closely packed people. An eclectic mix of stalls and arcades filled the collection of alleys and streets before her, all under the roof of the heavy machinery above.
Cortez’s store was a small, incredibly cluttered stall on Sub-Level Three. It was filled with all manner of merchandise, from handmade toys to fertility cures. A webscreen sat on the counter, with a pornographic animated screen saver cycling through a lewd liaison. Behind the counter, a mountainous Pinoy man with a scarred face sat, dozing fitfully. Cleo knew there would be other, more watchful sentries nearby.
Cortez himself was a chubby man in his sixties who wore old-fashioned half-moon glasses and dressed as if he was always cold. This morning he had a woman’s shawl draped over his shoulders and a thick cotton hat on his balding head. His flat, wide face split into a smile when he saw Cleo, and he stood up from his little stool.
“Ahhh! Little Cleo, come to warm an old man’s heart! Mabúhay! Come in, come in!” He turned to a little girl with a small mouth and big eyes who was hugging the frame of the door that led to the back room. “Gátas! Bring some tea for our guest. Be quick now!”
Cleo knew better than to refuse the tea, although she did not want to stay long. “Morning, Cortez,” she said confidently. “I’m looking for some strings.”
“Of course, of course.” He waved at her to slow down, as if she were in danger of hurting herself if she spoke any faster. “All in good time. First, you have to tell me how you’ve been. I haven’t seen you in an age. You’ve grown since you were last here!”
Given that it had only been about a month since her last visit, Cleo thought that unlikely, but she smiled gratefully. She reluctantly took a stool beside him and asked how business was. He always had her make some conversation when she came, and she suspected that he harbored some romantic ideas about her.
“Life is always the same down here, in the depths,” Cortez told her. “We wait for visitors to brighten our day. Tell me, how is young Estella? Such a sweet girl.”
Estella was a Filipino hippy-chick Cleo had gone out with for a while, just to see what it was like. She had needled Cleo constantly to give up the gulp and the stem and, for the love of God, to please stay away from Cortez. Cleo had broken it off, deciding that she only needed one mother and she was more attracted to boys. But they had stayed friends.
“She’s fine,” she replied. “Feisty as ever.”
Co
rtez nodded.
“And your family? How are they?”
“Very well, thank you.” Cleo was wary of telling him too much about her family. She certainly didn’t want him to know that her father was out of a job.
The little girl, Gátas, came in with two mugs of fragrant jasmine tea. Cortez could provide the best of everything, for a price. But he took hospitality seriously. Cleo took a mug and breathed in the fine aroma. Gátas handed the other cup to Cortez and then returned to her position, hugging the door frame and watching the new arrival. Cleo smiled at her, but the girl did not return the gesture, merely looking the other way, into the storeroom.
“I’m looking for some guitar strings,” Cleo urged Cortez gently. “I’m completely out of As, and I’m running low on Ds too. Do you have any?”
“Not here, at the moment,” he replied, taking a sip of his tea. “But one of my boys can fetch some. Quiroz, down the way, looks after my musical supplies. Just a moment.”
Without moving from his chair, he shouted into the storeroom, rattling off some Tagalog at some unseen person inside. A tired, overworked voice replied, and there was the sound of a door opening and closing.
“It’ll just be a few minutes,” Cortez assured her. “How is the music coming along?”
“Great,” she responded, warming to her favorite subject. “I’m working on a new song now. The band’s really coming together…. We were lined up for the end-of-year ball, but the principal pulled us.”
“That’s terrible! How could he turn down such an excellent band?”
To the best of her knowledge, Cortez had never heard her play, but it was nice of him to say it.
“The sponsor, Internal Climate, said our lyrics were inflammatory.”
“Aren’t young people’s lyrics supposed to be inflammatory?”
Cleo beamed, despite herself.
“Is there anything else you’d like while you’re here?” he asked. “Some stem perhaps?”
Cleo shook her head, thanking him with a smile. She didn’t have enough money for both the strings and the drugs. Sipping the hot tea, she tried not to think of her dwindling supply of stem at home, hidden up on the roof of the apartment block.
