by Sulivan, Tricia; Nevill, Adam; Tchaikovsky, Adrian; McDougall, Sophia; Tidhar, Lavie
And then I heard him drop like a stone down and into the darkness.
I stood still and listened to the silence for a time that began to feel preposterous. Until, so far below the cliff top, I heard a distant puncture as something struck the rocks, and surely came apart down there too. And then I heard no more from him.
Silence thickened all about me on the cliff top. Far away and below my feet I heard the rush and hissing retreat of the ocean waves. There was no other sound.
I looked at the sky in awe. There was nothing to see besides forever. And what had once been the lightless canopy of the universe was not only closer than ever to the surface of the Earth, it was touching the Earth.
I dipped my head and clutched my hands across my face. And I shouted out into the lightlessness, cried out the inscription upon the memorial for the Commonwealth soldiers: “We, whom William once conquered, have now set free the conqueror’s native land.”
After the incident on the cliff top, I walked inland and eventually found a road that led down to the car. I drove back into the town whose name I will never speak again, and nor will I countenance its name spoken in my presence.
Inside our room, I ransacked his scruffy rucksack and found more than I bargained for. His address book contained details of a vast life that I had no knowledge of. It was a thing filled with names and numbers and email addresses on every single page and I will always treasure it. I now possessed his secret world. His mysteries were mine to explore whenever I wished to, if I wished to.
Inside his toiletry bag, I found his money and his drugs. He had an ounce of weed in a baggy, and some pills. The little waterproof wallet bulged with over five hundred euros. Pin money for Toby, but I could live on less for years. I pocketed the money and drugs, his iPod and his smart little camera. I wondered if there were pictures of his fiancée on there; if so, I intended to masturbate over them.
The rest of his things I stuffed inside his rucksack and then jammed his effects deep inside an overflowing skip at the corner of an abandoned building site on the outskirts of the town. I left the guest house before dawn, leaving ten euros on the front desk with the room keys on top of the money. I drove out of town and headed for Dunkirk to catch a return ferry at midnight. The whole thing was very exciting, I can tell you. With the Wet-Wipe tissues he had in his toiletry bag, I even wiped everything of his I had touched and then abandoned.
I called Toby’s parents three weeks later and inquired after him. His mother answered the phone. She was very posh. “He’s off” – which she pronounced awf – “on one of his escapades. Who can I say called?”
Despite the fact that I had killed her son, I gave her my actual name. In the phone box, I nearly fainted with excitement.
She’d never heard of me.
He’d clearly never mentioned my name to his own mother in all of the twenty-three years we had known each other. Again, he managed to spoil a small moment of triumph. He was a natural.
But the strangest thing of all is that even now, when I ponder the fact that I have killed, I can feel no remorse at all. The sentence, I feel, fitted the crime; and his was a crime that no vestige of a criminal justice system would recognise, and yet the damage of such a crime had blighted a life: my life. His death at my hands made me feel renewed, invigorated, awoken and awake, if that makes sense. I felt that some small act of fairness had finally been invested into an unfair world that had left billions dead. I felt entitled. And the craziest thing is, had he paid for our packed lunch on that final trip, he would still be breathing now.
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Electrify Me
Tricia Sullivan
“Art,” says my maker, “You really must stop this power fucking. You’re going to lose all your teeth.”
I can’t help it. Crossing the cow field, climbing the pylon, embracing the wire like the dude riding the bomb at the end of that movie, Dr. Derangedglove.
You can’t even call it pleasure, it’s more like the ghost trick or illusion of pleasure, the expectation of pleasure. A placebo-gasm.
“My needs are hard-wired,” I tell him. “Like humans being attracted to pairs of round things. Like plants turning toward light.”
He waves his robot arm in the air. “This is hard wired. Get a job.”
My maker’s arm is a hot toy, but it wasn’t a fashion choice for him. Losing the original arm goes back to my conception in an accident that killed my maker’s sister and was his fault. In some attempt at redemption he had me made from her parts and tendencies. We never talk about this. I found out by snooping and deduction.
Before anybody starts thinking that the powerfucking is some kind of result of me being mentally damaged by my Greek-tragedy origins, may I say: no. It’s a result of a confusion of terms.
Powerfucking for the original Art would have involved dating men who keep yachts in Marbella and exude controlfreakery. Or, considering she wasn’t that cute, it might have meant some kerfuffle with the local rugby team. She’d been bright but would have turned down life with a well-balanced geeker type in favour of sexual adventures with mercenaries and crocodile-wrestlers. After all this fun I reckon Art would have been pissed off to know that she’d die due to her brother’s bad judgment in passing an IKEA lorry.
I don’t do Dangerlove like that. My reproductive parts are only Barbie genitalia and unlike the original source of Art I can’t be convinced that a guy with a Rolex in a Ferrari has got something to offer me.
Give me the straight juice.
I find a skydiving company called Electric Blue. The ground-level work is boring, but I can feel the droning tug of the buried cables that power the airport. They’re calling me.
First jump. The new assistant instructor is a Made man. We recognise each other..
“What’s your MO?” I say. “Me, I’m into power. Trying to wean myself off the National Grid.”
He laughs. “Oh?”
So I tell him about the wires. He isn’t shocked. Haha, get it? Anyway:
“Nothing to do with evolutionary psychology,” he says. “Nothing to do with sexuality. Or dopamine or D4DR. Nothing at all.”
I laugh. I stare.
“We all do it,” he tells me. “We try to find our way home, but we don’t belong in the same places they do. We’re made half of ideas. It’s like the thoughts aren’t sunk deeply enough into our flesh. We’re not grounded.”
“I don’t think you get what I’m saying.” I am trying to be polite in the face of the total shite he is talking. “I go for the actual current.”
“Oh, I get it,” he says. And like the image on an old Polaroid, a kind of a mad leer develops on his face.
My maker keeps a Polaroid of his baby sister in a box with some other old junk. He had everything else digitized but this one picture of my maker’s mother and her pink bean of a newborn. It lingers in the dark box. Light will make it fade.
We’re moving through a cloud. The wind’s stronger, and rain starts to fly sideways into the hold. The head instructor has the class in a huddle, but he doesn’t seem to notice me and the Made man. That’s not unusual. People tend to skip over us, like movies they’ve seen before.
“You’re doing the right thing,” he tells me. “It’s just that the power lines you’re using to hack open the face of reality are lacking in mythical resonance. High-voltage lines are too industrial and shallow.”
“They almost killed me twice,” I say. “How weak can they be?”
He gives me a pitying look. “Artemis. The purpose of the exercise is not to go to A&E. It’s to break through.”
“Break through… to where, mate?”
“To the place where you’re whole.”
The wind blows his words across his face. I can see their cartoon bubble. The air is alive with loose ions that clutter and bounce, looking for partners, fulfilment, a place to belong.
“You need an integrating source with mythical resonance. That’s how you’ll find the seam th
at takes you to the world that would have been, if only you were intact. Watch this!”
And he throws himself out of the helicopter and into the crash of clouds. I see the lightning come for him like the fractal root of some cosmic tree.
Fucking shit. He’s just incinerated himself. The smoking ruin of his body twists and he opens the chute.
The head instructor grabs for me too late. Lightning meets me as I leap. In the mythical resonance available to us courtesy of Back to the Future Parts I-IV, the possible and the actual are inseparable.
I can feel her all around me. All 157 years of her, clogged arteries, baggy neck, arthritis in the left knee. Head like a bass drum. Knowledge in her flesh, memory in her bones, DNA beavering away to keep her alive even now.
The arthritic knee screams in pain as the ground rushes up and bodyslams us. Can’t breathe. Rolling in the hay with myself & myself, tangled in the chute lines. She is astonished. The scars on her cervix where there would have been children. The air in her lungs, residuals from the other possible destinies of nitrogen and oxygen in their other lives. The slightly-peeved surprise at not having been warned.
No one ever is.
We stagger off the field together, hair smoking. This is the best day of her life.
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Alternate Currents
Rod Rees
So the question I pose to you is this: what is a genius?
I’ll wager that, like me, you will proclaim a genius to be the man who can understand things that ordinary mortals can’t, who has a sharpness of intellect that separates him from the common weal. Those Yankees amongst you might cite the late, and much unlamented, Abraham Lincoln’s belief that genius disdains a beaten path and seeks regions unexplored, but being of good Confederate stock I shy away from the musings of that son-of-a-bitch. Besides, I can beat any definition dreamt up by Abe-nigger-lover-Lincoln with both hands tied behind my back and a rooster crowing on my head and I can do it in two words.
Nikola Tesla.
Trump that, Abe.
By any measure and by any definition, Nikola Tesla was a sure-fire, copper-bottomed, genius.
And I knew that he was of that persuasion the moment I first clapped eyes on him as he strode across a snow-decked Central Park back in March 1895, but now, when I think on it, it’s difficult to quite figure why I deemed him to be special. Sure, he was tall – over six foot, easy – but not peculiarly tall. Sure, he was slender as a reed but not so thin as to be in any way out of the ordinary. And sure he was dandified, with his sharp cut broadcloth coat, his fancy waistcoat, his silk top hat and the silver-knobbed cane he delighted in twirling, but nothing that would make him stand out from the other New York swells striding up and down Wall Street like they owned the world… which, of course, they did.
No, I guess the thing that signalled Tesla as being an oddity was his eyes. Soft, light-grey and set deep they might have been, but they were eyes that didn’t so much look at you as into you. I knew from the get-go that Tesla saw things a mite differently from the rest of us.
It was Teddy Roosevelt, bumptious blowhard that he was and bursting with pride after being made Police Commissioner, who attempted the introductions. “My dear Tesla, thank you for attending us so promptly and at such an ungodly hour…”
Tesla raised a hand to interrupt and then took a step beyond where Roosevelt and I were standing and breathed, “Nine-hundred and thirty-nine.”
As best I could judge, Tesla had been numbering his steps across the Park. It was, as you might reckon, a touch unsettling, this not being an activity I’d recommend for a full-grown man, but I comforted myself with the thought that genius is often sauced with madness.
Counting completed, Tesla turned and nodded an acknowledgement. “Good morning, Commissioner, and think nothing of requesting my attendance. I am always intrigued by occurrences of a singular nature and ever eager to utilise my talent in the service of the city of New York. So where is this meteor of yours?”
Got to tell you it takes a lot to nonplus Teddy Roosevelt, but Tesla did it easy. He spoke softly, so that you had to listen hard to grab hold of what he was saying, pronouncing his words in that over-exact way foreign types are apt to do, with just the slightest sibilance betraying his antecedents. But though he spoke quietly there was steel in his words that warned you to take heed of them, which is just what Roosevelt did.
He blinked back his surprise and then smiled. “Want to get straight to the meat of the problem, eh, Tesla? But you must allow me a moment to introduce my colleague.” He took me by the arm and urged me forward. “This is Major Henry Arnaud, of the Military Intelligence Division, who is here… well, I ain’t quite sure why he’s here, but he is. Major Arnaud, this is Mr Nikola Tesla, the world famous electrician.”
To describe Tesla as an ‘electrician’ was to do him a disservice, but then Roosevelt was always uncomfortable around those more able than himself. I held out my hand and Tesla took it a mite reluctantly, as though he wasn’t fond of touching his fellow man. He didn’t remove his gloves. Closer to, he was younger than I had first figured – shy of forty, for sure – but looked prematurely aged; his skin had a grey cast to it and there were deep shadows under his unblinking eyes suggesting that he rarely slept.
No matter: that is how I now found myself shaking hands with the man who had revolutionised the production of electricity, had tamed the waters of the Niagara Falls and was being proclaimed as ‘the new Edison’.
I decided that a few words were necessary to commemorate such an occasion. “I have read much about you, Sir, and deem it an honour to have you consulting on this matter.”
“One of the New Orleans Arnauds, perhaps?”
“How …”
“Your accent is your betrayal.”
“You have a good ear, Sir.”
“Indeed, but all polyglots are thus blessed. And the meteor, Major?” asked Tesla again, obviously impatient to get down to business now that the common courtesies were over.
“This way, Sir.”
The three of us crunched our way over the pristine snow – the sun was just coming up and the overnight snow hadn’t yet been desecrated by promenaders – in the direction of the crater formed by the meteor when it had landed. It was a bitingly cold morning and I hunched deeper into my great coat better to avoid the wind. Tesla noticed, but then, as I was to discover, Tesla noticed everything.
“You must find the cold of a New York winter somewhat bracing after your service in Cuba, Major.”
Now that was a straightener. My mission on behalf of the US government to survey the Spanish defences in Cuba was of the utmost confidentiality, so it was a fine how d’ya do to have a man I had never met in my life so blithely unmasking this most secret of undertakings. I decided to prevaricate. “I am sorry, Sir, but I have never been to Cuba.”
Tesla chuckled quietly. “Oh, come now, Major. You are in ‘Intelligence’ so please do not deny that faculty’s possession by civilians. It is obvious to me that you have recently returned from Cuba where the US military made much use of your fluency in Spanish and your familiarity with Havana. You spent a great deal of time there when you were a child, did you not?”
Tesla’s perspicacity was becoming decidedly unnerving. “No, you are mistaken, Sir. As I say I have never been to Cuba.”
“Remarkable,” observed Tesla.
I made to change the subject. “We have had Arthur Ruskin, Professor of Astronomy at Columbia College, make a preliminary assessment of the meteor, Mr Tesla, and he has opined that, though somewhat more regular in appearance than those normally seen, it is nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Nothing out of the ordinary except for the electrical phenomena associated with its manifestation,” Tesla corrected.
“Indeed,” noted Roosevelt as he pulled a notebook from his pocket. “The meteor’s arrival at five o’clock this morning was observed by a musician returning home from participating in a co
ncert. He stated that the meteor ‘glowed with a brightness that exceeded even the arc lamps illuminating Broadway’, that it was ‘circled by ribbons of fire’ and that it ‘gave off a strange keening sound, akin to that emitted by a howling dog’.”
“Did your witness happen to describe the key this keening sound was rendered in?”
Roosevelt’s left eyebrow arched upwards signalling his amazement regarding Tesla’s insight. “You are something of a mind reader, Tesla. He noted that it was in ‘F sharp in the sixth octave’.” Roosevelt stopped and pointed down to the hole drilled in the snow. “Here we are. This is the latest of New York’s immigrants.”
Tesla ignored Roosevelt’s attempted levity. He stooped down to take a closer look at the meteor embedded in the frost-hard ground, prodding at it with the toe of his galosh. In truth the meteor was quite nondescript, spherical in shape, perhaps six inches in diameter, and coloured a flat black. It looked like a second-cousin to a weather-worn cannonball.
“Professor Ruskin was of the opinion that this was of natural provenance?” enquired Tesla.
“He was. He believed it to be formed from carbonaceous chondrite,” replied Roosevelt.
“Remarkable,” muttered Tesla as he made a number of measurements the purpose of which was quite beyond me. Finally he turned back to Roosevelt. “I would like this object taken to my laboratory on South Fifth Avenue where I have the facilities to examine it more thoroughly.”
“I must be present when these tests are conducted,” I interjected hurriedly: my orders were that I should take the greatest of care regarding the safe-keeping of the meteor.
Tesla nodded as though he had anticipated my stipulation. He then used his cane to point to the lines in the snow running straight as a rule away from the crater in the direction of Columbus Circle. The lines, two inches in breadth, resembled the wake a toy boat might make on the surface of a pond, rippling and snaking as they did over the snow.
