Imbroglio

by Andrew McEwan

Sylvester closed the refrigerator door, blocking out any screams for help. That there were screams he was in no doubt. Laughter, too…more than the rattling of milk bottles and the crackling static of ice chill.

  He let out his breath, having held it from the great sucking void.

  There was a rapping on the window like that of long fingernails.

  Erratic and increasingly loud; he turned to see hail. Pea size. Marble size. Golf ball size chunks of frozen water.

  Must be winter, he supposed.

  Didn’t seem right, somehow: too warm, his recent, uncorrupted memory informed.

  Too green.

  But cold…

  The phone rang and he rushed to answer.

  ‘Mr Jones?’

  Placing the receiver on the adjacent Yellow Pages he headed for the door. He took a big fleecy grey coat from its hangar and stepped outside. Beyond the hedge confused traffic coughed and crawled. The coat had a hood and he tipped this forward, narrowing his vision to a tube.

  Huge compacted snowballs exploded round him, all of them missing, none as yet with his name on. They smashed windows and dented car bonnets, ripped through umbrellas and toppled metropolitan pavement walkers, pummelling individuals as if targeted, bludgeoning to death ordinary-looking men and women. Speeding, opaque incendiary devices, they fell in their thousands, spat from thick black clouds squatting over the world like battleships seeding the ocean floor with mines.

  Sirens resounded, but it was too late for the fallen. Even those indoors failed to escape the cull, brains splattered via the intuitive breakage of roof tiles and ceiling roses, candelabras unhooked and vases rocked from shelves by air compressed into pulses, condensation and rarefaction accounting for victims tripped by draught excluders in the shape of dachshunds and squashed under pianos, impaled on brass fireplace ornaments or poisoned by fractured gas appliances. Homes imploded, the weight of ice suffocating. Fires raged, bringing flooding. And the dead filled the gutters.

  The devastation lasted roughly an hour. Sylvester was unscathed, having walked only a short distance, finding himself at a house numbered 78, the card from TNT in his hand and his thumb on the bell, which clanged.

  The house seemed familiar, he thought.

  There was no-one home. He walked around back, crunching through foliage and snow, both now floating to ground in a mixed salad of white and green leaves, fruits and…skis, his skis, poking from a drift in an array of tines, a sculpture sprouting from a large steel bucket, consisting of sports equipment and artificial limbs, a spare parts bin for the athletic amputee.

  Sylvester remembered learning to ski when he was nine. Somewhere in the Alps, a nursery slope with more languages than trees. He’d broken his arm, feeling a twinge there as if to confirm, spending his holiday playing ping-pong and learning how to mix cocktails, the barman disadvantaged by a leg cast yet gaining revenge through the alcohol-free blending of juices.

  And the occasional beer.

  Probably in jail now, he thought, the Portuguese who’d asked his advice on girls.

  Sylvester dragged his hood down. The back garden he found himself in was his own. There was his apple tree, his apples, his trellis. Here was his back door, open a crack and painted a lurid green. He stepped into his kitchen, strangely under-whelmed by each subsequent realization, more surprised by those things he did not recognize, like the glass-handled steak knives sticking in the wall.

  The kitchen was a disaster. The image of it blurred. There was not one kitchen but two; before and after superimposed. His eyes watered. He blinked. The room was tidy, yet strange. He blinked. The room was frosty and chaotic, everything in it either dislodged or upended.

  Like someone had swung a cat. A big one.

  He blew steam through his teeth, then noticed the fridge door. Shut, but with claw marks.

  Sylvester explored.

  He wondered how long it had been since this was his home. Weeks? Months? His memory was intermittent, teasing him with images of where he might have been. Had he moved? He didn’t think so. There were too many things here that obviously belonged to him. Books. CDs. But his life had been overlaid, reconfigured by another and forever changed. He wasn’t who he’d been. He scratched his head. Recalling the delivery card, that which had facilitated his return, he searched for the package addressed to number 59, to the Mr Unger-Farmer whose clothes he wore, giving up eventually and finding his way back to the kitchen, fixed now in its chaotic aspect, to see if the kettle still worked.

  It had stopped snowing. There was no more hail. The bombardment had spared him and his once abode. The windows were intact and all but the kitchen entire. The only other damage was to the world as a whole…

  Out there, bleeding, a revolution had come. He listened to it on the radio, a broadcast crackling with interference, like something from decades before, an old recording of an older diatribe, the guttural spiel of a general whose inspiration was murder.

  There was no electricity. He drank his coffee at room temperature. No milk. Powder scooped from the floor.

  He switched the radio off. Not to save the batteries, but to distance himself from a reality inherently cold.

  You could cut a thing in half forever, he knew. Unless it was a number. Unless you dealt in fractions. It was semantics. Life and death were just words. Man or machine?

  Words…

  He tampered with his fire prevention systems.

  So that was why he sweated so much. Threatened by internal combustion, with the risk his major organs might explode.

  Cool it.

  He yawned, another mechanism, useful perhaps for stretching jaw muscles, should he wish to swallow wildfowl whole. Like a python. A dragon whose metallic content was high.

  If he cut himself he bled. But what was his blood’s chemical composition? How deep was his skin? Were these his own teeth?

  Tom didn’t know the answers. He didn’t know much, come to think of it, which was what he was now doing, kicking his feet on a child’s swing. The play area was a rink. Icicles hung from the climbing frame and the slide was a toboggan run. The kids were all sledging, unquestioning of such freak weather conditions – while the parents laid siege to supermarkets and forced sheep into car boots, their primal instincts activated by the unprecedented turn of events.

  The politics didn’t interest Tom.

  The violence did, its random proliferation like an influenza bug, spreading through social contact the disease of blunt instruments, symptoms ranging from fist-fights to gunshots. There were shearing forces at work, opening heads and parting flesh. And it was worse at night.

  The world was lit by fires…

  Leaving the swing to its echo, he took his knife and held it against the throat of a tree, the bark there smooth and taut.

  But the tree was alive. He stood back to admire its sagging branches, leaves wilted beneath an overcoat of grey.

  Tom took hold of its throat and shook.

  The children stopped their sledging to watch.

  Among them, only the blonde girl smiled.

  The others pointed and laughed.

  Dissimilar.

  Not altogether alike.

  Naked corpses through a thin shower, misty and silvered, pink and brown, shaved, gyrating to no music she could hear, wetted, polished, holed, dented, hundreds of them, a zombie chorus line in some bizarre rendition of Oklahoma, each grinning, lips folded under, teeth bared in a grimace of…not surprise…

  Surrender.

  And she danced through them, with them, her cold hands in theirs, her cold skin pressed, her gums receded and her feet numb. Only she wasn’t dead. She was convinced of that. Were they? Undead, perhaps, cursed. Stripped of body hair and given to perform this sham against a backdrop of white, a whiteness evinced by nothing, meaning nothing, composed of nothing. No colour. Just the opposite of black.

  The only colours were pale, empty, sucked to opacity by the all consuming whole, the v
oid outside her skin which orchestrated the show, conducting the silent music with an invisible baton.

  It required a different approach.

  She had to escape this throng.

  But it was so comfortable, the bodies around her offering protection, the safety of a womb. Why would she want to break out? Wasn’t everything here?

  Death, she kept telling herself, unable to remember her own name. Death had taken her. She could not allow that. The dance was a mockery. The choreographer was…

  Vanessa fixed her toes, curling them into a continuum unknown. Gripped. Others crashed into her, tripped and fell. She rubbed her hands over her scalp, bare and chill, the action energizing roots and challenging follicles to grow. Her palms sucked the dead cells from her body and drew them into hairs. Her nails grew. The zombies bayed, screamed into the void. She might take them with her. But their cries, their anguish went unheard.

  The white shattered and she…tumbled. Was that it?

  ‘Bitch! Hey, bitch! Want to play, bitch! Sit on my face, huh…’

  Not a question she entertained, unfolding her wings, still damp, and leaving in search of solid ground.

  They’d follow her. She understood that. There would come a time when there was no place left to run, or fly, a time when the walls had corners and the air grew turgid with dimensions, layers of fact and truth, lies and fiction from which she had to pick.

  Choose…

  Trust.

  It made her laugh.

  She was hard and cold and would not be mistaken. She was indifferent, disdainful of hope and love. She had no time for it. Her work here was more important. She had to cleanse the gut.

  He looked up to see a huge ginger cat leaning in the doorway. Calmly, it lit a cigarette.

  Sylvester held the cat’s gaze for a few seconds; then it dropped to all fours and padded away, high-stepping through the drifts.

  It had brought his memory back.

  There, before him, detailing his transformation.

  He rushed upstairs to change.

 

  Whoever had equipped him had equipped him for combat. Or, more accurately, urban survival. The jacket he wore, outwardly normal, had more secret pockets than a shoplifting nun’s habit. In each was a weapon, an arsenal complex and deadly, tools of the trade for a cross-dimensional assassin. He was a one man invasion force. About his person had been flame throwers and rocket launchers, automatic pistols and a quaint variety pack of grenades, stun through fragmentation. There were garrottes and poisons, smoke canisters and viral agents. A destructive battery was at his disposal, hardware sophisticated and crude. But Tom had selected the knife for its whittling potential, ditching the remainder in a phone box rigged to self-destruct in a given number of seconds, leaving a crater the size of an two Olympic swimming-pools that gave pause to the authorities, who wondered who, other than themselves, had the wherewithal to create such a disturbance.

  Tom doubted he needed all that stuff anyway. He had to take out the men in bright shirts. That was his mission. If it put him on the side of good, all very well; but he had no illusions. This wasn’t his battle. He was a base servant, a myrmidon in thrall to thrill seekers.

  Hell had spilled over. It had happened before and would again. Hereon in was about management.

  He felt incredibly lonely now that his life had been peeled away. Would he ever go back? To what hadn’t been his in the first place, he admitted, an existence modelled on an individual unknown, who had presumably been disappeared. There was a guilt attached to that. He must look like him, he thought, enough to fool the neighbours anyway; the man couldn't have too much in the way of family, or friends either. He had to have been a loner, somebody no-one would come looking for or really miss, a person anonymous, one who others readily left. A confused man, like himself, given to foolishness and desirous of change. The pseudonym was his: Michael Tomatoes. O-levels in metalwork and art. Tom wondered what memories they had in common. Or were his more a composite? Did one complement the other? Whose anima was the driving force? Were either of them real at all?

  Where was that individual now?

  Pulling on trousers, falling flat on his face, engaged in a comedy of dressing of Harold Lloyd proportions, wrestling with the wardrobe and tripping over his socks, only half on his feet at any one time…

  Breathless but breathing. Himself once more. Staring madly at a ceiling he recognized from under a girl.

  What was her name?

  A big girl, a pink girl, a talented girl who swallowed.

  And?

  Then the gap. Then the missing parts. Until now. Until his garden, his kitchen; his cat grown large.

  No need now to put the cat-flap in he’d bought. Malcolm could use the door.

  He laughed uncontrollably for fifteen minutes, unable to stop despite the pain, even falling down the stairs.

  It grew dark.

  The moon rose, full and copper hued, reflecting the sorry state of tides.

  The moon reprised…

  The moon took a snapshot of the Earth and saw…

  Boxes, each with an idea. Containers for liquid and solids, packaging to disguise contents, actualities buried in polystyrene and given new shape by shredded paper, via bubble wrapping.

  People, each with a desire. Containers for liquids and solids, packaging to disguise contents, actualities buried in preconceptions and given new shape by past experience, via ignorance and fear.

  Earths.

  What the bad men exploited, corrupting the soil.

  She thought of it as sculpture.

  She could sense the shame.

  The ice walls pulsed almost unseen, pumping odium into veins, feeding muscles with sadness, the lethargy of contempt that none the less energized limbs to a brutality they themselves had never known, experienced here for the first time, on a subliminal level justified. There was art in it, deep down somewhere – not necessarily good art, but an arranging of sorts, a conscious effort to demonstrate ideas and delineate opinion, so long as it conformed.

  There was only room for sheep. The men in bright shirts dictated a style and the sheep agreed.

  They danced and died. And were reborn as storm-troopers, then to invade a neighbouring land.

  More sheep to the fold.

  Sheep who only knew they were in a field by the four walls.

  History repeating, she thought, not proud of it, but inside it, seeing its workings, the pulsing of its frozen heart.

  And hers an insignificant warmth…

  To be directed carefully, pinpointed, not wasted on grand gestures, not spent within these cathedral chambers. Targeted elsewhere, the buffeting of her wings to be exaggerated in a different hemisphere.

  ‘I told you once, didn’t I, about my dream?’

  ‘Which dream? Not the one with the ice hockey players I hope.’

  ‘No! I gave that up; I told you.’

  ‘What – the dream or the ice hockey…oomph!’

  ‘SHUT UP AND LISTEN FOR ONCE YOU MORON!’

  ‘Eh, okay.’

  ‘I went to this other place…’

  A cold place of shadows and bright lights, the sky reflecting the earth and the people like ghosts. Everyone had a door in their backs. They hinged open and you could step inside, live within, eventually become that person. Not that I did. Too scared, perhaps; or too cautious. I couldn’t help but think how many other people might already be on the inside, one person stepping inside the next and so on, an endless sequence of overlapping personalities with the foremost subsumed. What became of them? I wanted to know, to understand. Who was this person or that person originally? Who was I? Had someone, a number of others stepped inside me? How many? The very idea chilled. Who was I if not myself? But if I’d stepped inside another body…Only I had no memory of that. Did I have a body at all to start with or were these people, male and female, young and old, merely forms of transport to a wandering soul? War
mer on the inside, I realized. To be without a body was to be exposed. Then I simply had to do it, open a person’s door and enter their world. But which? And on doing so would I forget who I was before? Had I occupied countless lives down the years? Wearing each body till it wore out or was irredeemably damaged? Was death left out of the equation?

  ‘Like buying a new car.’

  ‘Or hiring one for the weekend…’

  Twenty Six: Slice