“You’re obviously doing well.”
“I am…” She nodded, as if the idea surprised her. “I mean, I didn’t expect—”
“—And you look—”
“—And you, Gus, what I said about you being—”
“—That project of mine—”
“—I know, I—”
They stopped and gazed at each other. Then they both smiled and the moment seemed to hold, warm and frozen, as if from a scene within a painting. It was almost…
“Well…” Elanore broke the illusion first as she began to fumble in the small sequined purse she had on her lap. Eventually, she produced a handkerchief and blew delicately on her nose. Gustav tried not to grind his teeth—although this was exactly the kind of affectation he detested about ghosts. He guessed, anyway, from the changed look on her face, that she knew what he was thinking. “I suppose that’s it, then, isn’t it, Gus? We’ve met—we’ve spent the evening together without arguing. Almost like old times.”
“Nothing will ever be like old times.”
“No…” Her eyes glinted, and he thought for a moment that she was going to become angry—goaded at last into something like the Elanore of old. But she just smiled. “Nothing ever will be like old times. That’s the problem, isn’t it? Nothing ever was, or ever will be…”
Elanore clipped her purse shut again. Elanore stood up. Gustav saw her hesitate as she considered bending down to kiss him farewell, then decide that he would just regard that as another affront, another slap in the face.
Elanore turned and walked away from Gustav, fading into the chiaroscuro swirls of lamplight and grey.
Elanore, as if Gustav needed reminding, had been alive when he’d first met her. In fact, he’d never known anyone who was more so. Of course, the age difference between them was always huge—she’d already been past a hundred by then and he was barely forty—but they’d agreed on that first day that they met and on many days after that there was a corner in time around which the old eventually turned to rejoin the young.
In another age, and although she always laughingly denied it, Gustav always suspected that Elanore would have had her sagging breasts implanted with silicone, the wrinkles stretched back from her face, her heart replaced by a throbbing steel simulacrum. But she was lucky enough to exist at a time when effective anti-aging treatments were finally available. As a post-centenarian, wise and rich and moderately, pleasantly, famous, Elanore was probably more fresh and beautiful than she’d been at any other era in her life. Gustav had met her at a party beside a Russian lake—guests wandering amid dunes of snow. Foreal had been a fashionable option then; although for Gustav the grounds of this pillared ice-crystalled palace that Catherine the Great’s Scottish favourite Charles Cameron had built seemed far too gorgeous to be entirely true. But it was true—foreal, actual, concrete, genuine, unvirtual—and such knowledge was what had driven him then. That, and the huge impossibility of ever really managing to convey any of it as a painter. That, and the absolute certainty that he would try.
Elanore had wandered up to him from the forest dusk dressed in seal furs. The shock of her beauty had been like all the rubbish he’d heard other artists talk about and thus so detested. And he’d been a stammering wreck, but somehow that hadn’t mattered. There had been—and here again the words became stupid, meaningless—a dazed physicality between them from that first moment that was so intense it was spiritual.
Elanore told Gustav that she’d seen and admired the series of triptychs he’d just finished working on. They were painted directly onto slabs of wood, and depicted totemistic figures in dense blocks of colour. The critics had generally dammed them with faint praise—had talked of Cubism and Mondrian—were somehow unable to recognise Gustav’s obvious and grateful debt to Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings. But Elanore had seen and understood those bright muddy colours. And, yes, she’d dabbled a little in painting herself—just enough to know that truly creative acts were probably beyond her…
Elanore wore her red hair short in those days. And there were freckles, then as always, scattered across the bridge of her nose. She showed the tips of her teeth when she smiled, and he was conscious of her lips and her tongue. He could smell, faint within the clouds of breath that entwined them, her womanly scent.
A small black cat threaded its way between them as they talked, then, barely breaking the crust of the snow, leapt up onto a bough of the nearest pine and crouched there, watching them with emerald eyes.
“That’s Metzengerstein,” Elanore said, her own even greener eyes flickering across Gustav face, but never ceasing to regard him. “He’s my librarian.”
When they made love later on in the agate pavilion’s frozen glow and as the smoke of their breath and their sweat clouded the winter twilight, all the disparate elements of Gustav’s world finally seemed to join. He carved Elanore’s breasts with his fingers and tongue and painted her with her juices and plunged into her sweet depths and came, finally, finally, and quite deliciously, as her fingers slid around and he in turn was parted and entered by her.
Swimming back up from that, soaked with Elanore, exhausted, but his cock amazingly still half-stiff and rising, Gustav became conscious of the black cat that all this time had been threading its way between them. Its tail now curled against his thigh, corrugating his scrotum. Its claws gently kneaded his belly.
Elanore had laughed and picked Metzengerstein up, purring herself as she laid the creature between her breasts.
Gustav understood. Then or later, there was never any need for her to say more. After all, even Elanore couldn’t live forever—and she needed a librarian with her to record her thoughts and actions if she was ever to pass on. For all its myriad complexities, the human brain had evolved to last a single lifetime; after that, the memories and impressions eventually began to overflow, the data became corrupted. Yes, Gustav understood. He even came to like the way Metzengerstein followed Elanore around like a witch’s familiar, and, yes, its soft sharp cajolings as they made love.
Did they call them ghosts then? Gustav couldn’t remember. It was a word, anyway—like spic, or nigger—that you never used in front of them. When he and Elanore were married, when Gustav loved and painted and loved and painted her, when she gave him her life and her spirit and his own career somehow began to take off as he finally mastered the trick of getting some of the passion he felt down onto the lovely, awkward canvas, he always knew that part of the intensity between them came from the age gap, the difference, the inescapable fact that Elanore would soon have to die.
It finally happened, he remembered, when he was leaving Gauguin’s tropic dreams and nightmares behind and toying with a more straightforwardly Impressionist phase. Elanore was modelling for him nude as Manet’s Olympia. As a concession to practicalities and to the urgency that then always possessed him when he was painting, the black maid-servant bearing the flowers in his lavish new studio on the Boulevard des Capucines was a projection, but the divan and all the hangings, the flowers, and the cat, of course—although by its programmed natured Metzengerstein was incapable of looking quite as scared and scrawny as Manet’s original—were all foreal.
“You know,” Elanore said, not breaking pose, one hand toying with the hem of the shawl on which she was lying, the other laid negligently, possessively, without modesty, across her pubic triangle, “we really should re-invite Marcel over after all he’s done for us lately.”
“Marcel?” In honesty, Gustav was paying little attention to anything at that moment other than which shade to swirl into the boudoir darkness. He dabbed again onto his testing scrap. “Marcel’s in San Francisco. We haven’t seen him in months.”
“Of course…Silly me.”
He finally glanced up again what could have been moments or minutes later, suddenly aware that a cold silence that had set in. Elanore, being Elanore, never forgot anything. Elanore was light and life. Now, all her Olympia-like poise was gone.
This wasn’t like the dec
ay and loss of function that affected the elderly in the days before recombinant drugs. Just like her heart and her limbs, Elanore’s physical brain still functioned perfectly. But the effect was the same. Confusions and mistakes happened frequently after that, as if consciousness drained rapidly once the initial rent was made. For Elanore, with her exquisite dignity, her continued beauty, her companies and her investments and the contacts that she needed to maintain, the process of senility was particularly terrible. No one, least of all Gustav, argued against her decision to pass on.
Back where reality ended, it was past midnight and the moon was blazing down over the Left Bank’s broken rooftops through the greyish brown nanosmog. And exactly where, Gustav wondered, glaring up at it through the still humming gantries of the reality engine that had enclosed him and Elanore, is Francine across the sky? How much do you have to pay to get the right decoders in your optic nerves and see the stars entwined in some vast projection of her? How much of your life do you have to give away?
The mazy streets behind St-Michael were rotten and weed-grown in the bilious fog, the dulled moonlight. No one but Gustav seemed to live in the half-supported ruins of the Left Bank nowadays. It was just a place for posing in and being seen—although in that respect, Gustav reflected, things really hadn’t changed. To get back to his tenement, he had to cross the Boulevard St-Germain through a stream of buzzing robot cars that, no matter how he dodged them, still managed to avoid him. In the busier streets beyond, the big reality engines were still glowing. In fact, it was said that you could now go from one side of Paris to the other without having to step out into foreal. Gustav, as ever, did his best to do the opposite although he knew that, even without any credit, he would still be freely admitted to the many realities on offer in these generous, carefree days. He scowled at the shining planes of the powerfields that stretched between the gantries like bubbles. Faintly from inside, coming at him from beyond the humming of the transformers that tamed and organised the droplets of nanosmog into shapes you could feel, odours you could smell, chairs you could sit on, he could hear words and laughter, music, the clink of glasses. He could even just make out the shapes of the living as they postured and chatted. It was obvious from the way that they were grouped that the living were outnumbered by the dead these days. Outside, in the dim streets, he passed figures like tumbling decahedrons who bore their own fields with them as moved between realities. They were probably unaware of him as they drifted by, or perhaps saw him as some extra enhancement of whatever dream it was they were living. Flick, flick. Scheherazade’s Baghdad. John Carter’s Mars. It really didn’t matter that you were still in Paris, although Elanore, of course, had showed sensitivity in the place she had selected for their meeting.
Beyond the last of the reality engines, Gustav’s own cheap unvirtual tenement loomed into view. He picked his way across the tarmac towards the faint neon of the foreal Spar store beside it. Inside, there were the usual grey slabs of packaging with tiny windows promising every possible delight. He wandered up the aisles and activated the homely presence of the woman who served the dozen or so anachronistic places that were still scattered around Paris. She smiled at him—a living ghost, really; but then people seemed to prefer the illusion of the personal touch. Behind her, he noticed, was an antiquated cigarette machine. He ordered a packet of Disque Bleu, and palmed what were probably the last of his credits—which amounted to half a stick of charcoal or two squeezes-worth of Red Lake. It was a surprise to him, in fact, that he even had enough for these cigarettes.
Outside, ignoring the health warning that flashed briefly before his eyes, he lighted a Disque Bleu, put it to his lips and deeply inhaled. A few moments later, he was in a nauseous sweat, doubled up and gasping.
Another bleak morning, timeless and grey. This ceiling, these walls. And Elanore…Elanore was dead. Gone.
Gustav belched on the wine he was sure that he’d drunk, and smelled the sickness and the smoke of that foreal Disque Bleu still clinging to him. But there was no trace of Elanore. Not a copper strand of hair on his shoulder or curled around his cock, not her scent riming his hands.
He closed his eyes and tried to picture a woman in a white chemise bathing in a river’s shallows, two bearded men talking animatedly in a grassy space beneath the trees and Elanore sitting naked close by, although she watches rather that joins in their conversation…
No. That wasn’t it.
Somehow getting up, pissing cloudily into the appropriate receptacle, Gustav finally grunted in unsurprise when he noticed a virtual light flickering through the heaped and broken frames of his easels. Unlike the telephone, he was sure that the company had disconnected his terminal long ago. His head fizzing, his groin vaguely tumescent, some lost bit of the night nagging like a stray scrap of meat between his teeth, he gazed down into the spinning options that the screen offered.
It was Elanore’s work, of course—or the ghost of entangled electrons that Elanore had become. Hey presto—Gustav was back on line; granted this shimmering link into the lands of the dead and the living. He saw that he even had positive credit, which explained why he’d been able to buy that packet of Disque Bleu. He’d have slammed his fist down into the thing if it would have done any good.
Instead, he scowled at his room, the huddled backs of the canvases, the drifts of discarded food and clothing, the heap of his bed, wondering if Elanore was watching him now, thrusting a spare few gigabytes into the sensors of some nano-insect that was hovering close beside him. Indeed, he half-expected the thin partitions and dangling wires, all the mocking rubbish of his life, to shudder and change into snowy Russian parkland, a wooded glade, even Paris again, 1890. But none of that happened.
The positive credit light still glowed enticingly within the terminal. In the almost certain knowledge that he would regret it, but quite unable to stop himself, Gustav scrolled through the pathways that led him to the little-frequented section dealing with artist’s foreal requisites. Keeping it simple—down to fresh brushes, and Lefranc and Bourgeois’s extra fine Flake White, Cadmium Yellow, Vermilion, Deep Madder, Cobalt Blue and Emerald Green—and still waiting as the cost all of that clocked up for the familiar credit-expired sign to arrive, he closed the screen.
The materials arrived far quicker than he’d expected, disgorging themselves into a service alcove in the far corner with a whoosh like the wind. The supplier had even remembered to include the fresh bottles of turpentine he’d forgotten to order—he still had plenty of clean stretched canvases anyway. So here (the feel of the fat new tubes, the beautiful, haunting names of the colours, the faint stirring sounds that the brushes made when he tried to lift them) was everything he might possibly need.
Gustav was an artist.
The hours did funny things when Gustav was painting—or even thinking about painting. They ran fast or slow, passed by on a fairy breeze, or thickened and grew huge as megaliths, then joined up and began to dance lumberingly around him, stamping on every sensibility and hope.
Taking fierce drags of his last Disque Bleu, clouding his tenement’s already filmy air, Gustav finally gave up scribbling on his pad and casting side-long glances at the canvas as the blazing moon began to flood Paris with its own sickly version of evening. As he’d always known he’d probably end up doing, he then began to wander the dim edges of his room, tilting back and examining his old, unsold, and generally unfinished canvases. Especially in this light, and seen from upside down, the scenes of foreal Paris looked suitably wan. There was so little to them, in fact, such a thinness and lack of colour, that they could easily be re-used. But here in the tangled shadows of the furthest corner, filled with colours that seemed to pour into the air like a perfume, lay his early attempts at Symbolism and Impressionism…Amid those, he noticed something paler again. In fact, unfinished—but from an era when, as far as he could recall, he’d finished everything. He risked lifting the canvas out, and gazed at the outlines, the dabs of paint, the layers of wash. He recognised it
now. It had been his attempt at Manet’s Olympia.
After Elanore had said her goodbyes to all her friends, she retreated into the white virtual corridors of a building near the Cimetière du Père Lachaise that might once have been called a hospital. There, as a final fail-safe, her mind was scanned and stored, the lineaments of her body were recorded. Gustav was the only person Elanore allowed to visit her during those last weeks; she was perhaps already too confused to understand what seeing her like this was doing to him. He’d sit amid the webs of sliver monitoring wires as she absently stroked Metzengerstein and the cat’s eyes, now far greener and brighter than hers, regarded him. She didn’t seem to want to fight this loss of self. That was probably the thing that hurt him most. Elanore, the proper foreal Elanore, had always been searching for the next river to cross, the next challenge; it was probably the one characteristic that they had shared. But now she accepted death, this loss of Elanore, with nothing but resignation. This is the way it is for all us, Gustav remembered her saying in one the last cogent periods before she forgot his name. So many of our friends have passed on already. It’s just a matter of joining them…
Elanore never quite lost her beauty, but she became like a doll, a model of herself, and her eyes grew vacant as she sat silent or talked ramblingly. The freckles faded from her skin. Her mouth grew slack. She began to smell sour. There was no great fuss made when they finally turned her off, although Gustav still insisted that he be there. It was a relief, in fact, when Elanore’s eyes finally closed and her heart stopped beating, when the hand he’d placed in his turned even more flaccid and cold. Metzengerstein gave Gustav one final glace before it twisted its ways between the wires, leapt off the bed and padded from the room, its tail raised. For a moment, Gustav considered grabbing the thing, slamming it down into a pulp of memory circuits and flesh and metal. But it had already been de-programmed. Metzengerstein was just a shell; a comforter for Elanore in her last dim days. He never saw the creature again.
Snodgrass and Other Illusions: The Best Short Stories of Ian R. MacLeod Page 8
