Armwrestling the Dead

by Andrew McEwan

furniture mountain shook, the sideboards parting with the tables to leave the armchair suspended, uplifted by nothing more than swirling, glittering dust.

  And then he fell. He fell down an endless corridor into a room whose elongated windows were thrown open to admit the breeze, curtains dancing like summer frocks, beyond the warm womb of space, stars bright jet-plane zippers criss-crossing the pools of his irises. Blue planets, hollow worlds...

  Awash in tears, he sniffled.

  His skull felt swollen, subtly different. His feet were propped on one arm of the two seat sofa, his shoulders wedged into the other.

  Angelo brought him coffee. ‘Got any money?’

  ‘Money?’

  ‘Travelling expenses.’

  ‘I thought this was all worked out?’

  ‘It is - but we need to borrow.’

  ‘We?’

  Angelo shrugged. ‘Us. The agency. Harry, you go where you go uninvited, with no guarantee of success. You’ve adequate funds to cover the outward journey, from your own pocket? Remember, you’re looking to emigrate but you don’t trust the brochures. You’re a journalist, you want to see things for yourself before deciding where to settle. This is your last big adventure.’

  ii

  World 162 was Hecuba. Hucuba had nineteen moons.

  Uri Evangela staked out his farm using five thousand posts and a tape measure. There was plenty of room. The sheep left tufts of wool on the wire. Uri had a wife named Belinda. Together they sheared and made a child. They called him Ivan after Uri’s father. Belinda’s father had been called Peter; but the milk turned sour the night of the birth, proving Uri’s ghost the stronger.

  Peter had been an electrician.

  On his way to school one day Ivan got into a fight with a boy twice his size and three years older. He took a beating. But when the victor turned his back young Ivan stabbed him with a screwdriver.

  ‘Hey, Evangela.’

  It was Stormy with a plastic sheet.

  Ivan leaned on his mop and frowned indulgently. The sheet bore the likeness of a naked woman with spread legs.

  ‘I found it behind a stall,’ Stormy told him, excited.

  ‘I’ve four more passageways,’ Ivan grumbled.

  ‘You haven’t seen one before?’ He held the sheet taut beneath his chin.

  ‘You really are from the backwards, eh? Well, learn something, Evangela. This is all the breakfast you can eat. A wrapper. You fuck it.’

  Ivan saw. He pushed his mop.

  ‘I wonder who it belongs to,’ mused Stormy, sticking his chest out. ‘Got to be worth a few cigarettes.’

  ‘I don’t care. Put it back.’

  He rounded a corner. Stormy though, ignored his advice.

  The deckmaster, Pointsman, let it be known than an unnamed transportee had been found drowned in a toilet. There were, he added, no suspicious circumstances.

  That same work period Ivan received a message, a reminder of home. Curious, he made the rendezvous. The boy was a man now and he remembered the little shepherd. A frost grew on his torso, was shaved from his head, which was heavily pitted. Of the two men with him, honed and edged like ploughshares, one twisted a length of string round his whitened fingers while the other stood with his mouth open.

  ‘Good to see you again, Ivan,’ said David. ‘Small galaxy.’

  The string-twister laughed emptily, was silenced. David wished to broaden a conspiracy.

  Ivan smiled, having listened. ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘Now let’s not argue,’ the man pleaded. ‘I had no idea you were aboard or I would have contacted you sooner. It’s not every day you get to link up with a face from the past.

  Ivan wanted nothing to do with him. ‘You know what will happen? They’ll vent the ship, killing everyone. This is a company vessel; we’re company fodder.’

  The three shook heads. ‘So where’s the problem? We’re dead anyway, or as good as. What do you care about these others? Once we ground, that’s it; no second chance, nothing. You want that? You still think my idea’s stupid?’

  ‘Yes.’

  David blanched. ‘I’ve this scar,’ he said. ‘It itches. It makes me nervous when it does that. And you know what? It’s right. When it itches I know something’s up; so I keep my eyes peeled and I’m ready to act.’ He gazed around theatrically. ‘It’s itching now. It hasn’t stopped; been gnawing me like a rat since we hauled.’

  They walked a short distance, one group among many in the freezone.

  ‘It shouldn’t be too hard to start the fire,’ David argued, shoulder to shoulder with the shepherd he had once accused of poisoning a horse of his father’s. ‘It doesn’t even have to be big, just smoky enough to create a diversion. Marvin here reckons once the sprinklers are going that will cause sufficient turbulence in the main water system for air to be dragged back through the pipes into the storage tanks. All we have to do is find a way of accessing one or more; preferably one each. That would stretch our chances. The tanks are drained routinely before and after a trip, and that’s when we make our move.’

  Ivan rubbed his jaw. ‘So we hijack the ship,’ he said. ‘What about fuel? Supposing we live that long, supposing we overcome what remains of the crew - and there might not be any, which means zero life-support - what then?’

  David Zeb, whose mother had broken both her legs in a fall shortly before his birth, whose father disliked sheep and fences, who’d cut Uri’s wire, rocked his smooth head from side to side.

  ‘We die,’ replied Marvin, ‘or we live,’ mouth closing and opening to accommodate the words.

  Ivan thought of Stormy, drowned in a toilet.

  He’d stopped for a charge on the road halfway between Flagstaff and Winslow, the garage with a cafeteria, shade and only two other customers. Having ordered coffee, he picked a table and flipped open his map. The window framed a view of the mesa. The cafe doors breezed open a few minutes later and a girl wearing shorts entered. Removing heavy sunglasses she requested a beaker of milk from the counter, surveyed the empty chairs, and sat opposite Ivan.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hello.’ The response was automatic. She was attractive, about his age, chewing on the glasses’ stems.

  Swapping them for a red and blue striped straw, her foot brushed his knee as she crossed her legs.

  ‘Where are you from?’ the girl inquired, elbows on the table, her teeth small and even.

  Ivan felt himself blush.

  ‘Which planet,’ she quizzed, ‘did you bring?’

  ‘Bring?’ he echoed, closing the map.

  She took another drink, the beaker running from white to opaque to clear.

  ‘You must come from somewhere,’ she stated, ‘and that somewhere is in your head; you brought it with you.’

  He glanced at the exit, feeling Arizona, Earth, was an uncomfortable place to visit.

  ‘Okay, you don’t have to tell me.’ She slotted the chewed stems behind her ears.

  Standing, Ivan made to leave.

  ‘Where are you headed?’

  He paused. ‘Albuquerque.’

  ‘That’s a long drive. You going to enlist?’

  ‘Yes. I mean, I already did.’

  ‘I’m going to Albuquerque, too. You can give me a lift.’

  ‘Don’t you have a car?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well how did you get here?’

  ‘I hitched.’

  ‘Isn’t that dangerous?’

  She finished her milk. ‘Only if you ride with the wrong people. But you seem okay.’

  Ivan turned and walked between the tables to the doors, expecting her to follow. She obviously knew what she was doing. He looked like a safe bet.

  But she didn’t move from her seat.

  ‘Is it okay?’ she asked, suddenly less intimidating, her voice higher.

  The two other customers, a man and a woman, cast hollow glances in her direction.

  He no
dded and held the door open.

  She said her name was Beth. ‘I had a floor job in Vegas, but I quit when my mother got sick.’

  ‘And she lives in Albuquerque?’ Ivan’s confidence was growing; he was getting the hang of this. He hadn’t realized it was such a long journey inland, had wanted to escape the crush of the coast. But he’d time and money to travel and the desert air felt good.

  ‘Right,’ said Beth. Then, ‘Why’d you do it?’

  ‘Enlist?’

  She nodded yes, the wind taking her hair as the car glided over asphalt.

  ‘There was a census, a company ship.’

  ‘And they were recruiting? Where? You didn’t tell me.’

  ‘Hecuba.’

  ‘Never heard of it.’

  Ivan gritted his teeth. Beth’s was the expected response, four words that somehow undermined his past. He swallowed. ‘It was either that or sheep,' he told her, hoping not to sound bitter. In fact Uri’s farm had never been a success, the wool proving about as durable as the grass. It had killed his father, driving in all those posts.

  Evening loomed, so too the New Mexico border. Ivan was tired. Beth offered to take over and let him rest. Dozing in the passenger seat, the wind cooling, he dreamed of a plateau on which stood a tall building entirely faced in glass. Its sides were square and vertical. There were no visible doors or discernible windows. It dominated the tableland. In the glass was reflected the world to the horizon, red-orange and breakfast yellow, distorted peaks and troughs, blades of shadow, the clouds and their images indistinguishable as the building appeared to meld with the silver-blue sky, like a sword penetrating armour of equal brilliance. The dream Ivan walked its perimeter. On the building’s far side, which was as equally lit, the edifice casting no shadow, dangling from the glazed heights on ropes