Subvision

by Andrew McEwan

  Of course it was Taylor's legacy that freed him, Taylor's genius that served to unwind the knot of his brain, the potential his creator had installed and kept secret from Tony. Moses vanished, becoming what shape he pleased, shifting over grass and tarmac as his co-ordination blossomed inside the boneless frame of this being.

  ‘Where are you headed?’ the red girl asked from her island, sat with legs crossed.

  She'd risen from the dead.

  He didn't answer.

  ‘I was murdered,’ she told him. ‘My mother killed me. We were driving for ages, me heaped in the back seat, my mother behind the wheel. I was dying slowly, bleeding inside where she'd kicked me. But that wasn't the worst. Once she stabbed me with a kitchen knife and I needed ninety-three stitches. That really hurt. This pain isn't bad. I don't mind being a ghost. It's just too quiet; you're unable to scream like you could and your hands pass through objects if you don't give a great deal of thought to picking them up. It can be a lot of fun though. Haunting, I mean. I stayed in this house once and the old couple who lived there got a priest in to do an exorcism. I was evicted, right? I used to have a great time turning the bath water cold moments after someone got in, warm and relaxed. Then there was the trick with the soap, filling it with blood or shit - or giving the old man a blow-job when he was half asleep, that was good. The old lady always seemed to have her legs closed, but I did manage to fuck her with a pound of sausage meat one night after she'd had too much sherry to drink. They had separate rooms, only I can see through walls, so I always knew when one or the other was awake; that was the best time to screw with the sleeping partner, when their better half was listening - sucking his wrinkled cock or plucking the coarse grey hairs from her nipples.’ The red girl sighed. ‘The best thing was television,’ she continued. ‘If I concentrated really hard I could get them in there. Or maybe I drew the picture out. I'm not sure how it works. Anyway I'd get them involved in comedies and dramatic productions, whatever was available. Adverts. They'd panic trying to sell toothpaste or soap. I'd even join them. We were the Three Musketeers, countless eternal triangles. Larry, Mo and Curly, that was us. And I forget how many episodes of Dallas we did.’

  24

  Scherzo was captivated by the glowing-on-pavement sun. A flightless bird, a gosling not long hatched, learning to fend for itself, he watched stoically as his shadow crept past like an amoeba.

  ‘Let's get a coffee.’

  ‘Yeah, okay.’

  ‘We can tell each other our life stories,’ Rosemary said. Standing, she brushed dust from her clothing.

  Scherzo got up, picked his teeth. ‘I already told mine.’ He spat, stuffed his hands in his pocket and slouched off, hunching his shoulders.

  Rosemary caught him in brisk, exaggerated strides. Grabbing his elbow she turned him to face her.

  ‘What?’ demanded Scherzo, inexplicably angry. ‘Can't we just part, leave each other alone?’

  She was puzzled. A bus moved noisily down the street, dragging litter in its wake, trampling asphalt.

  It was time to wake up, Scherzo thought. This girl wished only to drift and dream. He'd had it with romance, been struck by a colder lightning. A silent moment of reflection had altered his mind. Light bounced on water and off cement. Buildings were nothing more than complex arrangements of branches. He was lost in a forest, and that forest was close and warm. The street was restless, some fantastic painting, a haunted cinema.

  ‘Let go of my arm,’ he whispered.

  ‘Roy?’ Her fingers trembled on his flesh.

  ‘I said: let go of my arm.’

  ‘Roy, what's got into you?’ She held on. ‘You've barely slept for days. What is it? Tell me, please.’ Rebecca disengaged her eyes from his sallow, unhealthy features. ‘Let's go home,’ she said in false bright tones that were desperate. ‘We've been away from people too long. It would do us both good...’

  ‘No!’ He pulled away and headed for the boat, its tilted oars and cracked paint.

  ‘I'm not the one who's ill!’ Rebecca shouted, words floating, heard by flies, insects to which she had become immune. They'd pestered Roy more than herself from the outset. Her fears had waned concerning their swarming proliferation. But she enacted the ritual spraying of interior and exterior. For his sake, although he would never admit it. The flies belonged to her husband. They glued themselves in their hundreds to his every canvas, bathed in pigment and ink. They existed in a world beneath the coloured oils, housed in air pockets and feeding on brush hairs and cultivated bacteria. Their days were spent in conflict and exploration, the sub-surface as the surface, prone to violent change when wet, becoming treacherous underfoot. The flies laced their boots tight and fitted crampons in an effort to cope with the ever shifting conditions, forcing themselves along routes of adaptation and mutation, behaving as true survivors should. One day they'd exceed the escape velocity of this landscape and colonize an adjoining sphere, a string of silvery eggs in tow.

  25

  Doctor Mood stroked the hair on his chest, the hair on his arms and legs, the hair on his face. He lay in a mound of damp leaves, speckled with pollen and shade, the forest moving about him like a giant lung, breathing deep two-strokes the mixed gases of which circulated the woodland glade of his slumber, plucking the wiry nerves of his new-fashioned skin, strumming his heart and liver.

  There were footfalls. Next, silence. He was watched. A man's voice, bodiless, rang out. ‘Hey, line-follower!’

  And a second, female. ‘Gatherer, are you asleep?’

  They were close but he failed to see them, to pick them out from amid the overlapping trunks. He dragged his knees under him and stood. The leather pouches slung round his neck bobbed like pods of seaweed on the brown tide of his flesh.

  ‘Do you have medicine?’ the first voice inquired, its tone serious, concerned.

  The silence repeated itself. The forest held its breath as if anticipating fire. A stirring in his belly proved the only motion. The smell of herbs and leaf-mould quietened his head.

  But where was he? Was he there still? Trapped is too strong a word. He struggled to take it all in: the forest and its woven hues, its columns of imposing trees, the voices from invisible hosts that floated across the glade, out of nowhere, finding their way over grass and through sunbeams to his ears and skull.

  26

  Nothing happened; until that moment. Time dozed in the long summer, as the sun reluctant to move beyond the horizon. The occasional polar bear came to wrestle or gamble, folding stolen Eskimo dollars out of some ancient rucksack having the appearance of a frozen, mummified corpse, one wedged for decades in a glacial wrinkle or overturned kayak, booty dating from an age preceding snow-cats and heavy duty plastics, when the sweat on a man's brow built up in layers of silver-blue ice like a portable igloo. But still bold adventurers fished for their supper through holes sawn in the fleecy mantle. A weighted line was most effective, although the more skilful preferred - for heroic reasons and photographs hand tinted by penguins imported under the banner of scientific research - to spear their catch, eating it raw and wriggling, as instructed by the penguins who were doing research of their own, spitting out mouthfuls of clean bone. One such was Felix. He stretched like a icy salamander on the crystallized water and flexed his corrugated stomach. The penguins pulled their pom-pom hats down over their eyes and chewed their pens in confusion. Poorman's eyes flashed open. A gunshot.

  Onto the loose station flooring rattled Shin's useless body, spilling blood thinned by paraffin and turpentine, steaming fluid that drained as if sucked to the prevailing whiteness below.

  Dreep had murdered him. The fresh cadaver had a cheroot in its mouth, quietly smoking in grim mime of the pistol parka'd Theodore had employed to silence his tormentor. All was quickly peaceful. Poorman's eyes slid closed once more and his head shook imperceptibly. The marine biologist in her shower unit turned the water off, shivered into a towel newly softened by chemicals, sweetened in the spin,
and lay across her teddy-sprinkled mattress.

  Woodtoe (‘...you can call me Blinder.’) cut the head off a chicken and set it free.

  The penguins booked plane tickets. The bird made a getaway through an opened vent, flapped clumsily to the packed snow, and following a circuit of the base set an erratic course for World's End.

  The light was gently pulsating, it and the chicken exhibiting no fears of their own.

  Where we all should go, mused the surgeon, bored by months of quietus. Were they forgotten? He smiled. Civilization, ensconced to the south, no longer cared for its peripheries, eh? Was that it? Out here, up here near the edge and the fabled monsters, he and the others, how many he'd never counted, slowly drained, like Shin, of significance. Like punctured fruit, he thought, turning bad. Aliens were yesterday's news. Old bananas. Watching the chicken shrink gave him an idea. Blinder was tired of sitting on his arse waiting for something. What, he didn't know. He'd walk the blood-spattered path himself, voluntarily. And the gunshot meant he would have company. So, free of past encumbrances, released from his head, he bound an unconscious college boy to a sled, selected his finest boots and axe, wished the penguins luck and set sail by foot to wherever it was the chicken had gone.

  Felix too, Poorman, wearing jeans rolled up, bare chested, no shoes, did not look back. He was overdue relief as commandant. More soldiers, more scientists had failed to arrive. The pictures from outside grew dimmer on the ranks of screens. They'd fade totally soon. But he kept his distance from Blinder and the sled, naked feet slicing neat prints over those of the skids which in turn followed the delicate, wandering traces of the leader bird whose blood, together with Shin's, pooled now in hope of sunset.

  The light thickened as the air was imbued with a gelatinous fog, a rich culture wherein reality might take root, a new world from an old world cutting, a preternatural mist that blossomed from the hard unyielding ice like steam off a hot pavement after brief summer rain. Spectres, tall, lithe and animate, flourished in this growth medium, grinning daytime wraiths striking up from the nadir to a union meeting in the sky, a vote of clouds, a show of perspiration, a count of heat. If invited, such normally transient guests of atmosphere (God's prepuce) would always linger; but they were shy creatures, of course, and required coaxing.

  Blinder paused. He dropped the reins of the sled. Further progress required less baggage if he was to make it over the crevasse. Gripping Dreep's shoulder he rocked him, loosening the rime from the collegiate man's tongue.

  ‘Urrgh,’ Dreep said.

  The sun, ever present, sat like a swollen tomato on the ample lap of a pregnant storm, one as yet to break water, awaiting its moment as must we all, gambling on the outcome of a game of charades, promising more than we can deliver; poised, forever taut, primed like a grenade, forever charged, an unflagging battery. The sun was an electric fire, its proper functioning necessitating an earth.

  Theodore's eyes flickered open, exposing the vacuity of his brain, the skull there-around empty of much save whiteness and cold. Toes and fingers were moved in their respective housings, felt as surprises, almost drawing a smile across his disabled countenance. He had unfamiliar sensations of rational thought and control, felt in command for the first time in ages, a period both long and exhausting, both in and out of his father's powerful rectum, sweating crudely or in lost contempt, wondering, wondering, wondering...how?

  He seldom asked why, our Theodore. He shivered insanely and then was still. Quiet.

  27

  He moved slowly left, fingered wood. The compelling dark moved with him. He moved slowly right, touched steel. The compelling dark moved with him. He broke into a gasping headlong run. The compelling dark smothered his senses. He crashed through branches, each with a voice of its own, rasping and snapping to every side, his vision negated, his hearing confused. It twisted about him, formed shapes all round; no matter where he looked, in which unknown direction, everything he descried was black. Death had surely claimed him. Death or the absolute, that halfway world of irregular dreams, the void which hung between oblivion and consciousness, fishing for non-committed souls, desperate as its victims in their joined plight: the room with no windows or doors, the room whose invisible parameters could be heard to decrease, breathing nails. For there was sound; no vacuum displaced. There was noise of trampled vegetation, dry and warm, cold and wet, of snatched breaths not your own, caught in your throat like a lover's semen, gargled messages of forgotten pain that crackled through the impenetrable night like flames across fields of stubble.

 

  28

  Doctor Mood leaned over the sick child and placed the broad palms of his hands either side of a small locked face. There arose a dull hue of life. The doctor stood, raising his stocky frame to the sky.

  ‘Can he be saved, gatherer?’

  ‘I must take him from you,’ Mood replied, turning his gaze, finding little of human substance to fix on. ‘There is a river to the north that may provide a cure.’ He grimaced, words like thorns in his throat.

  ‘Do as you must, healer. Take our son into your care.’

  Doctor Mood indicated that he would.

  ‘Should we prepare him for the journey?’

  Doctor Mood shook his head.

  Later, as dusk closed, he lifted the child by his heels and dropped him into a sack, which he next slung over one hairy shoulder. Then began the unpredictable trek north following the lines set by nature into soil and air, those some would describe as being like individual strands of an increasingly complex fate, woven by such trials into carpets of history, legend, magic, loss. But at this time no grand enigmas occupied the traveller. His mind was set upon the task to hand. He disliked, for reasons other than pride, performing autopsies. They spoke of failure, shouted their anger from wounds, gesticulated with limbs whose circulation had ended, brought to a premature close by disease or deliberate killing action. The path was sufficiently difficult without pressing for an explanation. This way there were no signs to misread. The road stretched before him, shifting like water over sand; a road for him to unravel. A thought rebounded: this a pharmacopoeia of apparent illogic and tormenting obtuseness, something to spend a lifetime searching and searching again, in a small space to come to understand and know. Not all of it. Not everything. Only a fool would dream of that. But enough to spare this child from the grave.

  29

  KNOCK! KNOCK!

  ‘Who's there?’

  ‘Livid.’

  ‘Livid who?’

  ‘Who livid here?’

  ‘Bollocks,’ said Scherzo Trepan, two years older, a few rainy days wiser. He thought it either the gas man or Wilson Hives as private detective, decked out in overcoat and beaten hat, stinking of cigarettes and bourbon whiskey. The gas man had called six months earlier, read the meter and left with a big smile on his face; so he definitely knew something. Something more than Trepan did, for Scherzo neither cooked or heated with gas, being an entirely electric individual. He had remained successfully aloof on that occasion, sat out on the unsuitable balcony with a can of beer in one hand and a stretched length of orange nylon string in the other, which he used to open the door. But not this time. He wouldn't be caught out again. He pulled on his trousers.

  30

  He lay on his side by the river. The trees around threw leaf shapes across the slow brown water. If he were to move as they, he might stop breathing. The light was the first he had known, truly experienced, since early childhood. He'd spent the intervening years (how many will always be unknown) in a rough hessian womb, tossed from shoulder to burly shoulder, passing wonder after wonder, witnessing each from inside, melding with animate and inanimate souls, barely escaping with his life. His head was full of imagery he had only the barest grasp of, dreams from outside, perhaps memories caught in lives as yet to be. His own among them? One thing he understood: he was hunted. As he opened his eyes to the liquid present, his realized he enemies were near. But what were
their names?

  What was his own?

 

  31

  Tom lay his gun down on the table, adding another invisible scratch to the matrix of years. His career. There was a phone call and he lifted the receiver.

  ‘Hey,’ the caller prompted.

  ‘Hey what?’

  ‘We need you upstairs; guard duty.’

  ‘You're kidding - tonight?’

  ‘Right away.’ And hung up.

  Tom picked his gun from the table, the metal barely cooled, adding another invisible scratch to the matrix of years; the vital one, a vector whose significance would remain unknown. He left his crowded apartment, his wife and her belongings, his son and daughter and theirs. Tom owned nothing. Even his gun was hired. He took the elevator up to the roof and waited.

  Vacine emerged from the shadows, beard coiled like pubic hair, fingers busy with each other, fascinated by interior bones, knuckle joints and flesh-elastic. He wore a black suit and a skull cap a deep metallic grey. Tom saw his mouth work in silent deliberation. There arose a sympathetic itching in his own taut skin.

  Tom had a dozen fingers.

  A bird hovered overhead.

  ‘Sorry to drag you out at this hour,’ Vacine said, now rubbing his bristled jowls. He glanced skyward at the waiting craft. ‘We've an important guest we need you to chaperon. You know, tag along. The usual.’

  ‘The usual?’

  ‘Just perform in your normal capacity. There's a bonus in this. Trust me.’ He stuffed nervous hands in hidden pockets. The bird lowered, its hum stirring the fine hairs on Tom's ears. Vacine wasn't being honest with him, but he didn't mind, he was used to the run-around. They only told you things to confuse you.

  ‘How much?’ he asked.

  ‘Enough for a new pair of shoes,’ Vacine answered. ‘You've a daughter near school age, right? You could use the extra.’