8

she who regenerates us from dualities

Harvey and Hermes sit side-by-side on the only seating available in his room, his camp stretcher. Hermes is fiddling with something in her duffle-coat pocket and it’s making Harvey nervous. As the glow wears out of his system everything makes him nervous, and if he doesn’t get a glow-patch on his skin soon he will face the Crash.
The unthinkable crash.

“Do you really think you’re a reincarnation of Hermes?” he asks, by way of making conversation. He’s heard of those who remember waking from their lives, where they must have died, into their Travesty bodies. He has no memory of dying – or does he? Perhaps it lies buried behind the veil, along with everything else; perhaps that lay at the heart of the confusion of being he feels all the time. But if it was true, how did one awake from being a Greek god? How can a Greek God die?

She turns away from him, maybe embarrassed by the question, he thinks. Actually she is gathering her thoughts for what she has to say next.

“I have to get you out of here and we have to go on a journey. As we go, I will feed you a few images that I hope will trigger your memory, and help you to recover yourself.”

She pulls from her duffle coat something wrapped in silk; a fair silk, intense and pure in the dingy room. Her fingers rap on it as if she were knocking or sending code. Her fingers are small and plump, like a child’s.

Harvey stares at the glowing bundle. “You want to tell my fortune?”

“Listen Harvey, the cards speak directly to your secret, undisclosed self.” She speaks emphatically, as if to a slow witted child.

Harvey tries to think of what his secret, undisclosed self might consist. A fruitless task if ever there was one. Like trying to remember dying.

“The figures and symbols on the cards are very ancient, with deep roots in your mind,” she says, reverently unfolding the silk and smoothing it down with the palm of her hand. “There’s a chance we can awaken these energies in you, reactivate your mind.” The slender pack lies face down on the rich silk, the back patterned in green. Her eyes fix on him expectantly. “Awake the Evensong within.”

“It’s your deal.”

“It’s your shuffle.”

He shuffles and cuts the cards.

Ceremonially, she flashes the top card at him. “This is the Starting Point,” she half-shouts. “The Flower Maiden!” Tears threaten her eyes.

Harvey looks. He sees a smiling woman dressed in green, holding flowers. Her hair is green, and forest brown. She is standing in a field of wild flowers and herbs while behind her lies a forest. In the field there is a maypole.

“It’s a pretty card,” he says for the sake of something to say. The prettiness of the card is no more than the concession of his blood to the final infusions of glow. The card is a window on a world where the sun shines and wild grasses and tiny flowers cover bare feet.

“Is that all you can say? A pretty card?”

“She looks like you.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“Does anything happen when you look at this card?”

“Is anything supposed to happen?”

Unhappily, she says, “Well it is just the Starting Point, I suppose.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that we’ve tried just about everything we can try.”

“To do what?”

“Lift the Veil.”

Harvey studies the pack of cards in her hand. Like Schrodinger’s cat, a card can be anything – until it’s turned over. Behind the veil the world is either alive or dead. Until the veil is lifted, no one can know. The probability front collapses just around the corner. “Why?”

“To find out what the bastards have done to your mind, that’s why. And don’t ask why I care or I might start to wonder myself.”

Harvey makes an effort. After all this is a rescue mission, and he is the one being rescued. More than likely the rescue mission is a front for some deeper purpose; more than likely she is an agent of the Sleeping Beauties here to destroy him. Or a Lion King spy. Somewhere he’s heard of Truth and Dare players doing this sort of thing, researching a person and doing a number on them. Or doing weird online scams.

“What does the card signify?”

“The Flower Maiden is the Mother of Spring and Flowers, she who regenerates us from dualities and who unites us in life.”

Harvey suddenly remembers Wheeler’s answer to Schrodinger’s cat conundrum. The cat, said Wheeler, is both alive and dead, but in different universes. Opening the box opens the observer to one of the universes. None of this, of course, being of much interest to the patrons of Schrodinger’s Cafe, on the corner of City Road and the Alley of Neglect, up and down which Harvey once paraded in his sandwich-board a few hours each day for a meal or credits. But why remember this now, and how come he knows anything about Shrodinger’s paradoxical cat at all? A cat whose life, like Harvey’s, is in a state of quantum uncertainty, and would stay that way until some mysterious observer appeared to collapse the probability wave and resolve the fluctuations of virtual energy into flesh and blood. Harvey’s life is like a book that has no words until opened and the pages turned.

“It sounds wonderful,” he says lamely.

Hermes gives him a sly look. “She also represents magical sex. Erotic potential.” She doesn’t have to try to smile this time. A tomboy peeks out.

“Sounds like a bad joke to me.”

“Come on Harvey, you glow worm, where’s the glow? Are you on downers or something?” Hermes is certainly glowing; the Flower Maiden has brought an artful flush to her cheeks.

Harvey is immediately on the defensive again. “It’s just hard for me to take that seriously right now. It’s not spring and I don’t know any Flower Maidens.”

“Don’t be silly Evensong. She’s a Goddess. Maybe she has some message for you.” Hermes closes her eyes and clasps her hands together on her lap. Her eyelids flutter fervently against her cheek. Nothing much happens and Harvey starts to fiddle. He rolls a piece of fluff from the floor into a tight ball. The hard edge of the container in his pocket cuts into his skin. At last Hermes says, “This card represents your potential. That’s your starting point, your potential. Remember that, Harvey. There is hope for you, hope for all mankind.”

Harvey promises to remember.

“We have to go now.”

“You mean leave the rathouse?”

“Exactly. Get yourself out of this stinking hole. You said you liked to keep moving. This fucking place is half the problem. You’ve holed up here and now it’s growing over you like a mould, sealing you up, cutting off your escape, stalling your rebirth. Soon it will absorb you, digest you and you’ll be nothing more than a smear on a dirty wall. It’s carnival time, Evensong! You always loved carnival. You used to say it was people’s way of undressing their lives.”

“I used to work in mathematics or something.”

“Can you remember?” she says swiftly.

He can’t. But once, not long after he stepped from the veil into the rathouse, he sat for three days covering sheets of paper with numbers, a vast interlocking series that must have been sitting, whole and complete, in his mind.

“Do you still have those sheets of paper?”

He does but he doesn’t tell her that. Instead he says, “I don’t want to leave. Not yet.” He glances fearfully at the jagged edges of the window. Just wait till you fucking crash, he tells himself.

“Nisa said you’d say that.”

“Nisa?”

“Your neighbour, upstairs, the artist or whatever he is. Nisa Michelangelo. He said this place is like a womb for you. You’re too scared to take your place in the big outside world of your memories. Except walking behind a sandwich board between a live cat and a dead cat. He said you are terrified of your previous incarnations.”

“The bastard.”

“Nisa says you’re like a big baby.”

“He’s got me in a nutshell.”

“Don’t worry about it. He’s no different. But you’ll come with me, won’t you? You’ll come eventually.”

“No.”

She leans back against the wall and closes her eyes. Harvey can see the lines of tiredness on her face. She’s lonely, he thinks. You can see people’s loneliness when they close their eyes. For a moment she fights off some kind of weight, some terrible weariness, before opening her eyes and coming to life again. God knows what she has been through for his sake.

“Use your imagination! It’s triggers we’re searching for. Triggers! A passage through. Fuck it Evensong, we’ve tried everything else.” She looks away, embarrassed.

Everything?

“Who’s we?”

She doesn’t answer.

From the back of his billboard, the dead cat grins. Alive or dead, it is all the same to the rathouse. As he considers the fate of Schrodinger’s cat, the probability wave dissolves and Harvey Crashes. He steps through a black hole into his room, which gets shabbier and shabbier until the shabbiness becomes savage. The semblance of animation deserts everything. Hermes turns into a wizened crone hunched over her cards as if over some holy fire, her face composed of badly fitted pieces of skull. When she looks at him a black, tomb- like entrance opens up in her pale, oval face, as if she were about to scream. He looks around the room once more, as if it might contain a clue. Twenty seconds of packing would see him out of this peeling pustulence. There is nothing of him here; he has made no impact at all.

With only transient tenants, the room has become impervious to human occupation; nothing can dent its worn anonymity or persuade it to accumulate a past where pasts go begging. There is something empty and scoured about it – a loneliness that four shabby walls might know. The faint luminous halo that touches everything with its talismanic light, signalling the pulse of life, is dimming; piece-by-piece the world is being restored to banality, and banality wears the face of the threadbare and the stark. All the warmth and guts drains out of things, leaving them with nothing but their surfaces, and their surfaces have nothing to recommend them. Nothing will adhere; no life, no meaning, no memory. A sticky, corrupting grey is seeping through the fabric of existence. The Veil. If he doesn’t get a glow on it will swallow him up entirely, stretch him out until there is nothing left of him. He will be smeared across the face of things like runny butter on toast.
A smattering of particles across the S Matrix. Ballistic probabilistic.

“Excuse me,” he says, stumbling to his feet, heading for the sweating dimness of the hallways; get a patch on arm, or leg, or anywhere, as soon as he can. Get a patch on. He’s not a patch on. She’s not a patch on. Patch up, patch in, Patchpants the sailor.

“You’ve Crashed,” she says with sudden authority. “You don’t have to leave, you know. I’ve seen it before. Get the patches on quick. How many do you have left?”

Harvey sways. Soon the room around him will begin to dissolve. The floor. After the floor, the endless slide. Yet something, even in this extremity, holds him back from producing the glow case in his pocket. She is too eager. His paranoid sensibilities are alerted. Clumsily he turns his back on her and pulls it out anyway. He hunches down for now his back is to the window, which still echoes with holes. Wrapped in a dirty rag is a shining piece of metal, long, like a fat cigar case.
A hidden spring catch pops open one end. A small chamber reveals a few patches rolled up tightly. A pathetic few.

Now to get one on his skin.

Hermes has slithered around the room until she is in front of him again. “Let me have a look at that?” she says, holding out her hand.

Harvey turns his back on her and she slithers again. She is a slidey lizard thing. Her body is like a tongue that flickers around the room. He slaps a patch on his wrist, just above the cuff of his shirt. Patch time!

She says, “It started off as a disguise. Now it has become your face.”

And slaps a patch on the other wrist. What the hell! he loves that double feed. That twin loop through the heart. “The mind has cliffs of fall,” he murmurs as politely as possible, waiting for the glow, the animation of life, to seep back into the world. He doesn’t want to get too close to those cliffs.

“You’re quoting something; maybe it is starting to work. Just a little bit, in funny ways.”

“Pretty funny.”

“That’s a fancy box you have there.” She reaches for it again and he shoves it back into his pocket, wondering why she’s so interested in it.

In front of him is the card. The Spring Maiden all dressed in green, as when the world was young and feverish, stands framed by the maypole. Her garments flow about her as if in a wind. Her green frock is laced with lightning streaks of yellow. It occurs to him, finally, that these cards have no familiar Universal Products stamp on them, making them illegal intellectual property. Whoever these people were, those standing behind her, they were digging deep and risky to get into his mind by going beyond the use of authorized images. The authorities might turn a blind eye to a glow worm, so long as there was no trouble, but they would be very interested in the use of unauthorized images. This girl, Hermes or whomever she calls herself, is bringing more danger with her than he cares to contemplate.

“Where do you want to take me?”

She looks him in the face, bright-eyed. “The Fortress,” she says.

The patches have kicked in. Time speeds up, and all around him the rathouse is busy falling in on itself.