Subvision

by Andrew McEwan

  She found Mike leaning on a rusty mangle. He was shaking violently. She loosened the warmed pistol from his sweating grasp and watched him slide, as if released, down the wall, flaking paint, helpless with relief. He retrieved the blood-stained handkerchief from his right raincoat pocket. Art's handkerchief. Art's blood.

  ‘Mike, what happened? Where's Arthur?’

  Mike, dumb and empty, said, ‘He killed him,’ hoping he would be believed, not have his insane jealousy exposed. His sister loomed over him like a bird. Mike loved her terribly; wanted her; deserved her. Arthur did not, he told himself. Arthur did not.

  ‘Mike.’ Her tone was fatal. ‘Tell me, Mike.’

  The music belonged to another place entirely.

  ‘We followed him, like you said to. He took a bus out of town.’ Stray light glinted off her fangs. Renny, he'd done her a favour; but she wouldn't see it that way. He had to lie. Had to. ‘Morrison,’ he said. ‘Morrison had it. You were right. He took a bus out of town and then walked into some woods. It was easy tracking him, he walked ankle-deep in mud by a stream. Other footprints crossed his, some even joined them. It got harder to tell what was what, and the ground turned marshy, like a swamp. Art lost a shoe. I was in front. I heard a noise, and he was dead, face down in the mud.’

  It was a good story. He almost believed it.

  Renny didn't. Standing over him, fangs aglow, she was hungry for his throat.

  Mike had imagined being Arthur. He'd practiced for years, but to no avail. He couldn't pull it off. She wasn't fooled. It took more than a gun. Arthur had always looked down on him, wanted rid of him. Still, he obeyed Renny's orders, taking Mike along with him to spy on the nurse. They'd argued in the car and Art had threatened him with the pistol. It wasn't the first time, so Mike knew he wouldn't shoot. Art was all mouth - mouth that grazed on Renny every night. Mike hated that mouth. He punched Art in the gut and grabbed the gun, wedged its shiny barrel between Art's frightened gums, forced its machined snout against the roof of Art's drying aperture, squeezed the trigger that would, he believed, silence that aperture forever. The body he folded in the boot of the car parked opposite Morrison's flat. He managed to clean most of the blood off the windscreen using his shirt, but by no means all. He wiped his palms on the seat cover, his fingers on Art's handkerchief, adopted Art's persona and called Renny. Easy, he knew that swagger. But no.

  Renny tossed the dread pistol in his lap and faded as if trapped unawares by morning. Mike was delirious; the party sucked him back. Abandoning himself to the swirl, the top of Arthur's skull blossoming constantly before his eyes, bone and brains impregnating the aptly named headlining, a percussion of atonal fragments through insulation. The windscreen was heavily smeared; the outside, where he couldn't reach, couldn't wipe. Blood dripped from the sky, thick heart-shaped drops he was powerless to dispel. The handkerchief was saturated. The shirt was locked in the boot with the corpse. People stared. They stared through the windows, their heads hideously stretched, as if the bullets fired upward into their deserving craniums had somehow failed to exit. These skulls were elastic. Bullet-proof, from the inside. They stood in the blood hail and stared at Mike. Aliens, sailors, gangsters, nuns; they indicated after their high-brow fashion his absolute guilt. He'd lost everything but the gun. Couched in his hand, its muzzle wavered as he moved about the house, always coming to the same exit, trying to find his way out and coming again and again to the same exit, its neon sign radiant, flashing on and off down the swollen barrel he pushed against his palate. The tall-heads gathered round and laughed. He was okay, they said. Watch, I've seen this done before, he pulls the trigger and all this fake blood and stuff comes streaming out of his nose and mouth along with half a dozen luminous false teeth and a cardboard tongue. Really, it's funny. Such a mess. I saw it on the telly a while back. Washes right out...

  Got dark early?

  Bang.

  Renny shed her tears out of earshot of the prisoner. His machine sat where it had appeared on the carpet in her front room and didn't move a flap or lever. The yonderscope, it reminded her of a supermarket fair ride, some exotic carriage in which to speed through colourless air, never remaining long in one place, never coming completely to a stop. She didn't think it could. Even though outwardly solid the fantastic machine gave the impression of not being all there. Renny, who had read her Verne and Wells, guessed its purpose from the first. And its passenger, Austin Pearce? Not so simple. He'd come over friendly initially, as if he'd manifested in juxtaposition with her TV using all the art and precision of a seagull alighting on a bollard, in fact deliberately, as a result of inter-actuality manoeuvring. They'd stared at each other, both suspecting something amiss in the wider scheme of universal occurrences. And both were right. But were they right to suspect one another? They'd stared harder. Renny imagined there must be a fault with his machine. Pearce gauged her eyes, saw a nascent appreciation therein of subtler designs, a future flower of recognition, a bud presently collating the available evidence before deciding whether or not to open fully. A freak accident during final approach had landed him here, in her front room, abutting her television. He'd lost his bearings. Moreover, he'd lost that vital component without which there was no hope of securing a space/time exit. Renny understood that; she'd been startled by the obese orange cat as it chased a luminous string of green and blue beads from living-room to kitchen to bedroom, cornering them in the toilet bowl, the bowl of the toilet Renny, in a moment of rare panic, had then flushed.

  Austin Pearce, on hearing, groaned the low groan of fatalism, whereupon Renny hit him over the head with the Hoover nozzle, bound him hand and foot and locked him in the cupboard under the sink. He was passive, resigned to his loss when eventually she let him out, pondering, he admitted, the unconnectiveness of connected, singular life.

  A trying business, she concluded.

  Now, tears long past, Renny sat musing, brooding over the disconnectiveness of his escape, on foot.

  Things were mixed up, she was willing to concede that. She wasn't sure if she recognized the world anymore. The fact that there were aliens abroad no longer surprised her. She didn't care what shape they were, if there heads were too big and arms too many, or what they ate, was disinterested in the wild speculation concerning their sexual preferences and the rumoured dimensions of their extraterrestrial dongs. Renny just wanted to explore the space the yonderscope's sudden and very strange arrival had opened up. She had to be out of her mind, she realized. But how else?

  Renny had been content to dream of Scherzo Trepan. There was a certain security, a reassuring quality to his floundering. The cat had been safe with him. And Pearce had supplied a number of grins; tacit agreement, honed and polished wiles. They had played draughts between commercials and made a single game last thirteen hours. Renny travelled back and forth, crushing the grass till she'd worn a path, Scherzo's blacked-out skull hers to visit, to dream in like he never could, his sole resource a memory stacked with images, a leading light in this cabaret his sister Annie, her thousand faces uplifted by daytime imagination, her flesh and scenery, costume and vocabulary, her every role, pose and adventure etched in his mentality, mostly in closed rooms, backstage, out of bounds to Scherzo who simply had not dared to venture this way, happy to view from afar what Renny revelled in. Pieces of everything, jumbled, noisy, the whole she'd chosen to understudy.

  It was difficult, even now, to acknowledge her mistakes and confront the actuality that she was not the only player. Others laid claim to this subvisual territory. Other wholes. But she liked Scherzo; maybe too much to be really good at the toe-to-toe, to make her own sphere the fullest. She thought briefly of Art and brother Mike. Forgot them. The curtain had risen. She had her part. Annie had left the theatre. Renny sojourned in Scherzo's subconscious, always below the waves, the intangible surface. She longed to reach out and touch her unknowing audience; a fear of the consequences stopped her. She could no longer decide whose world was truer. Did she wallo
w in fiction? So be it: a true submariner.

  The fiction was Trepan's. One day they'd meet, up there in the sun, in light or darkness, for between the conscious and the unconscious ran many rivers.

  39

  Then Renny had stood by the cream-coloured phone, which rang, and now as she picked the receiver up, swallowing, she knew it to be Arthur's ghost calling from a box.

  ‘I can't get out,’ he lamented. ‘I'm stuck.’

  She didn't pursue the fact.

  ‘Have you seen Mike? What did he tell you? That Morrison bumped me off? The little shit. If he wasn't dead already I'd kill him myself.’

  No way to bring him back.

  ‘If you didn't watch, Renny, he blew his brains out like he did mine. I saw him pass on a bus; should be passing again in a while. Come and see. You could wave to him. I'm not going anywhere. Can't. I wouldn't mind some company. Renny, I'll be honest with you, a phone box isn't such a great place to haunt.’

  ‘Art?’

  ‘Mike shot me in my own car; with my own gun. What a mess! Ruined the upholstery. Then he dumped me in the boot. I'd still be there, only, not realizing I was dead, I floated out. Still, things could be worse; at least here I have use of the phone and people drop by from time to time. But it's lonely. They're strangers. I could almost envy Mike. The bus moves from place to place.’

  ‘Art,’ inquired a puzzled Renny, ‘what do ghosts use for money?’

  ‘Money? No need. Ghosts are electric. I plug straight in. I think after a little practice I'll be able to disseminate entirely and travel down the line. That'd be fun, listening in on people's conversations, bouncing round the globe. And who knows, in a year or two, if I get bored, I could head out into space, explore whole new galaxies...’

  ‘Oh, Art.’

  ‘Renny, I'm serious. So why not come down and let me inside you one last time?’

  ‘I can't,’ she replied.

  ‘Why not? We did it in a phone box once before, remember? You cut your arse.’

  ‘How could I forget. But that isn't it. I can't leave home.’

  ‘You can't get out,’ he lamented. ‘You're stuck.’

  ‘Pearce escaped last night.’

  ‘With his machine? In it? What?’

  ‘No, the machine's still here.’

  ‘In that case he'll be back.’

  She could imagine him nodding - sardonically? ‘Exactly, so I have to stay put.’ It sounded like an excuse. Renny caught the yonderscope's perplexing glimmer out of the corner of her eye, a flower-head of metal and glass, cloud and plastic.

  Somewhere, someone hung up.

  40

  I'm drinking Rose's lime juice cordial. My granny always used to have a bottle in her larder. Probably the same bottle lasted years; self-filling, granny magic. It came wrapped in a glass bottle then, with moulded rose motifs; in a plain square plastic one now. If it were yellow, this splendid cordial, you might easily mistake it for cooking oil. Such is progress. My granny progressed via slow bone shrinkage into a wooden box which in turn advanced six feet (did anyone count them?) below ground. Grandfather later moved in alongside. They were married years. He had one arm. That's one less wing in this palace of worms.

  41

  There was war. Gunfire thundered about the room. Morrison bled over the crackling upturned television having switched channels with his nose. He was feeling vacant, but it took him a moment to remember why. He closed his eyes and sank into utter dark.

  ‘Okay, Tom,’ the TV was saying. ‘Now it's your turn. Don't let us down.’

  Morrison pressed the extinguishing button.

  Morrison showered while the toast burned and then walked the two miles to work. Easy, he was early. His face hurt. It was eleven o'clock, however, before he dared admit the past twenty-four hours amounted to anything more than a mushroom lark. Sitting in the hospital canteen for caffeine dependants, dragging spoon through coffee, he let the whiplash of his mind appraise him of the pertinent facts. The orange globe, its wondrous access. Gone. He wanted it back.

  His lips ached when he drank. His mouth tasted sticky. Nobody sat at his table. They never did.

  42

  Then Renny had been dozing and assembling glimpses of alien worlds from the schisms of light in her front room, now she was asleep.

  Then Renny had been lying on her worn settee with the curtains drawn and the room aglow, now she was seated on a mountainside as dawn broke, spilling sunbeams, sluicing rainbows, spangling dew, a million birds in the sky and ten times that number in her head.

  She was stuffed with feathers. Not just her skull but her whole body. She got to her feet, spongy limbs fickle in the early morning breeze, wobbling. She pressed soft fingers into soft flesh and giggled as both yielded a touch. At the sound of her surprise a figure bearing a large sack appeared to her left. He opened it, the sack, and reached inside. She couldn't see his face, but knew it had to be solid, cut from rock, for he was the only solid object in this place. Everything else - sunbeams, rainbows, dew - was stuffed.

  The faceless man handed her a map.

  43

  No dreams in Scherzo's head. Who can say if Scherzo ever slept? His quest was as much for Annie's brother as Annie herself. Poor Scherzo, the focus of so much heat. He had to learn to swim in the world sweat, tread sticky water with his nostrils squeezed tight, wary of scented fumes. A white cloud one day and the next a black, he understood well the dangers of getting high on body odour. It was difficult enough finding a place to park, the ether was so busy. Few among the airy throng had any real purpose, which served to aggravate him further. He peered in windows, gazed at shop signs, looking for life's smallest mysteries in the curves of reflections and lettering. Immune as they were to time, the shops never shut. The traffic was equally interminable. A cool morning in the future, everything neat and green, he thought to catch sight of Rosemary in a department store. Scherzo called her name as he stepped off the escalator and she turned. It was her, rekindled, made to glow amid the kitchen appliances and associate utensils that occupied this basement. Their eyes met for perhaps a second and what was written in Rosemary's left stark impressions on Scherzo's mind. The lights flickered. Robots whose functions were manifold, sparked, placed extraneous parts, numerous extensions on the gleaming tiled floor and set about the business of buffing and polishing and wiping and shining and tidying each other and the bewildered customers while whistling in a variety of distinguishing notes a variety (depending on their country of origin) of patriotic songs from days of old, of historic mechanical sobriety, when, Sherzo recalled, having been there, countries and patriotism still found their way up onto the dusty blackboard. Two hundred years ago, years as measured by the old calendar, as the future had seen fit to slow itself down and set a new standard of 500 days per annum.

  44

  Austin Pearce, late of Formalhaut, removed the stub of pencil from behind his ear and drew its blunt grey point across the paper braced in his diminutive lap. He was thinking of the orange and constructing a graph, one of possibilities, probabilities, uncooked spaghetti straight lines and future conflagrations. He was sitting by a potted fern in a street closed to traffic, crowded with people, most of whom were lousy drivers, a chaotic steering of biological craft between shops, most of which openly flaunted goods. It was a Tuesday. The sun was bright, and between strokes of pencil Austin contemplated the axial tilt of heads. Shopping bags were another distraction. They bulged, strained, hinted at secrets, shapes disguised, metamorphosed into containers of fabulous produce, frozen fish and fruit juice, milk, cigarettes. This was Pulchritude, he reminded himself; maybe he'd been away too long. The potted fern never took its needle eyes off him. Austin smiled and its brown fronds turned green.

  A child of perhaps five or six (Gregorian) pulled its mother up short as they were passing.

  ‘Look, mummy, an elf.’

  How the people had grown so.

  ‘Don't be cheeky,’ the child wa
s admonished.

  Grown so.

  ‘But he's got pointy ears!’

  How the people had grown so.

  ‘I told you - now come on.’

  Grown so deaf.

  Pearce, benevolent old fart that he was, fired a gleam into the child's eyes and whispered a blessing as its mouth fell open. The five or six year old caught the gist of the message, sufficient to make its nose shine, but the child's impatient mother hauled the wonder-struck listener off to have its feet measured and thence encased in shiny plastic masquerading as something else.

  Austin licked his pencil and concentrated once more on his graph. But what was the use of mapping the universe if that universe was missing a piece? It had to be here; only here, right now (potentially - a morbid curve) was everywhere else.

  His graph swallowed its tail. Chased it, rather, never quite catching up. But on the verge, he was reminded, on the terrible verge, just moments, inches, layers, chances from the edge. And after the edge came the fall. And after the fall? He coughed and shrugged. The fall was terrible enough.

  Fat cat

  sittin' on the windowsill,

  doesn't know the time of day

  pays no bills;

 

  He calibrated distance by a variety of means, employing an array of mathematical and ontological devices.

  maybe chase a mouse later

  maybe a butterfly -

  fat cat

  watchin' the world go by.

  Austin Pearce was back home on blue-green Pulchritude in time for the roses. He was breathing people again. But they'd grown so big he thought he might choke.