28
“Have you really come back across time and hope, to save me?”
Hermes has never seemed beautiful to Harvey. From necessity, she’s learned how to hide it; like everybody else on the Day of Delight, she is wearing a disguise.
“I have,” she says sincerely. She laughs. “You’re paranoid, and have good reason to be; you think that I am trying to meddle with your mind. I am not. I am trying to reactivate the heart. Your heart! I want to set you in motion.”
“You have already done that,” he says, indicating his legs, churning away beneath him. “But you mentioned my mission. What is my mission?”
“I was hoping you would remember.”
Harvey clung to the revelation he’d had under the sign of the Hot Pie, in the House of Tip-Top; he thought he would forget but he hasn’t. “I invented something,” he says, catching the wisp of a trail.
“You have to remember what it was!”
“Why?”
She faces him and comes up close. He can feel her trembling with a knowledge she cannot speak. Her eyes are raised up to him in a kiss.
And my heart broke loose on the wind …
“I believe you,” he says.
It is an utterance that gives both of them great relief. Something slips off their shoulders and scuttles off into the changing-room shadows of the streets. Focus blurs.
“It is time to leave behind the Daughter of Bones,” Hermes says. “We move on to a new card. We’re making progress.” She looks resolute, as if she knows where she is going; it’s the way she has of lifting her head high, as if her spine were extended a few rungs.
They are walking past a series of show rooms set up to look like kitchens, lounges and bedrooms, all from one ideal home in some ideal country where appearances are perfectly preserved, even to the point where there is not so much as a smudge on the pure white shirt of the little mannequin boy running towards the gleaming table for a bowl of plastic fruit. Not a speck of dust. All proudly presented by the female mannequin, wife and mother, staring rigidly into the plate glass.
Hermes slows down as they pass these displays, and makes gestures as if she were showing them off to some hidden camera, smiling at Harvey as if she were doing some mime for his amusement. But what is she doing? Harvey is unexpectedly thrown back to the mo-ment in Nisa Michelangelo’s room, watching tiny figures setting up some kind of apparatus on the roof opposite. Nisa’s huge studio is at the very top of the rathouse, an enormous attic spread beneath vast rafters. Beyond the reach of cameras! He thought, in the paranoia of incipient glow withdrawal, that it was a weapon he was seeing – just as likely, he sees now, it was a camera! A lens! A flash from a basement angle, or from above.
Hermes finds a bus shelter in front of the display rooms, and takes out her square of magic silk. I hope I get to where I’m going, Harvey thinks. I hope that all this is part of some larger, more meaningful game plan.
Just as Hermes, with all due ritual, is about to present the next card, a Mickey Mouse comes up. He is unnaturally tall, and dances and stalks as if he were walking on stilts. He does an ungainly dance in front of them both that would embarrass inspiration. I knew it, Harvey thinks. I told the sculptor about him. They have finally caught up with me.
“Hi ya, Hermes,” he says, “Is this the spaceman? You’re a bit behind schedule you know.”
“This is Harvey,” she says coolly. “I was wondering when you’d show up.” There is a cynical edge in her voice Harvey has never heard before. Her heart-shaped mouth turns down; her eyes go hooded.
“Pleased to met ya, Harvey, Mr Spaceman.” The Mickey loosens a rubber hand which he dangles Harvey’s way. Harvey takes it and squeezes it and assures himself that it is boneless. “I’m Mickey but you can call me Mick.”
The Mickey’s tone is friendly, his voice on the verge of a happy laugh, but Hermes does not seem impressed. “What are you doing here, Mick?” There is an odd urgency in her question, a touch of pleading.
“Same as all the other Mickeys; enjoying the Carnival. We’re all off to watch the Beagle Boys, with assistance from El Queada, break into Scrooge’s money bin. Then of course the toy scramble. We mustn’t forget the toy scramble. This is the day to loot and be looted. It is party time! Sweetheart. Those dreaded Beagle Boys with their pit bull terriers, and Al Quieda with their secret Weapons of Mass Destruction, assaulting Scrooge’s ultra fortified money bin, heroically resisted by Huey Dewey and Louie with a troop of stout-hearted Ganders, genial Hulks, and an uninvited group of the Civil Rights for Vampires movement! Who can resist?”
Hermes doesn’t mince words. “You’re tracking me, Mick. You followed me to the rathouse, you followed us here. Instead of leaving me alone to get on with it.”
“Yeah, well … it becomes a habit.” The Mickey put his hands together in a gesture of mock contrition. “I’m on a rescue mission too. We’re all rescuers here, see. Except Harvey; he’s on the bottom of the rescuing tree. You rescue Mr Spaceman here, I rescue you, he rescues nobody. The show goes on! Everybody gets rescued and happy endings are in sight all around.” He laughs and dances, his long matchstick legs clacking together.
“I don’t need rescuing, Mick. Not yet, anyway.” She puts a peculiar, emphatic emphasis on these last words.
“I bet that’s what Harvey said. Right Harvey?”
“I don’t remember,” Harvey says.
“Of course not,” says Mick. “You remember jack shit. But don’t worry about it. You don’t need to remember much.” He rears to his full height. His head bobs and floats above them.
Hermes’ face goes white and her nostrils pinch. “Fuck off, Mick! You know what I’m trying to do here. By intervening, you’re destroying the, uh, process …”
The Mickey does not lose his good humour. “I’m not in the script yet, right? I’ve blown my cue. Too fucking bad! All will be revealed in the end.” This last remark he addresses to Harvey, as if making him a solemn promise. “There is an answer. I’m not at liberty to tell.” Clumsily, Mickey taps his nose.
“Fuck you,” Hermes says in a low, nasty voice. “We were doing quite nicely thank you …”
Mickey holds a large, pawed claw up to his ears. “Doing quite nicely were we, thank you,” he shouts. Several passers by turn and stare. “In line for a payout, we are!” the passers by flee.
Harvey notices sheaths for retracted razor blades built into Mickey’s paws. They are made of leather, and the blades can shoot out at any moment. “I’m missing something here,” Harvey says.
“You can say that again,” snaps the Mickey.
“Fuck you,” Hermes intones, lower and nastier. So full of venom Harvey hardly recognises her voice.
The Mickey’s dizzy grin jumps from side to side. “Fuck you too,” his voice stays genial. “I happen to think that what you’re doing is dangerous, and a threat to the mission, but of course I don’t count; the scenario and all that goes with it are mysteries to me, of course. I’m only ever told what I have to know. It’s all ad hoc and fait accompli. I do what the directors tell me to do or I’m out of a job. I’m just Mickey. Take the Mickey out of me and there’s nothing left.”
He punches the air few times with his big, blobby Mickey fists and disappears, merging into a passing procession of fellow Mickeys and vanishing up the street, fists still waving.
“He cares about me, Harvey, or at least he says he does.” She gives Harvey a funny, sideways look as if testing his reaction, and, receiving none, continues, “He makes telephone calls at one’ o’clock in the morning, telling me he can’t live without me. Does that mean he cares for me?”
Harvey doesn’t know. He knows nothing about relationships at all. They belong to the greater mysteries of life. They take time to work on. Too much time. What he does know is that he doesn’t particularly care for the Mickey.
Hermes is adamant: “He’s trying to screw my scene, that’s what he wants. He’ll go to extraordinary lengths to fuck me over.”
Some people sound bitter when they’re trying to be matter of fact – Hermes is one of those.
“What did he mean, ‘in line for a payout’?”
“He located you.”
“Located?”
“You went off the map after the Lion King got to you. God knows what he did to your mind. Then Mickey finds you at that stinking rathouse.”
“I’ve been under observation?”
“You bet. We can’t just let the inventor of the diversity equation vanish into the Lion King’s maw.”
“Who’s we?”
“Listen, Harvey, the Biology Bureau are after you. They suspect an adaption. Possibly genetically engineered by the Lion King. They’ve pressured Reingold into spying on you.”
“Jesus! Why are telling me all this now?”
“Because you’re asking. Because we may not have much time. Meeting Mickey was not propitious. He plays his own game.”
“And who do you represent?”
She smiled a Mona Lisa smile. “But you know already. I am the Flower Maiden.”
They’re closing in, Harvey thinks. First they are invisible and known only by their signs. Then they disclose themselves in some form or another whilst keeping their true selves hidden. Finally they take off their Heisenburg masks.
“We have to look at the next card.” There is a tingle of desperation in her voice.
She pulls Harvey into a closed shop doorway, squats down and spreads her scarf.
“Why is it so important to look at these cards?”
“The Uncertainty Principle in action. Got to be part of your recovery. Quantum factors to trigger your mind. Synchronicity is the Wild Card.”
Breathless, she puts the Flower Maiden and the Daughter of Bones at the bottom right and left respectively, and places a new card in the centre of the silk. As she turns it over she closes her eyes and Harvey leans forward to look. He sees another winter scene more pitiless still than the realm of the Daughter of Bones, since the sky in the background is absolutely blank. In the distance, drawing the eye, is a pile of huge stones clustered around some kind of entrance, maybe to a tomb or cave. The look of it makes him feel queasy. Three massive rocks make up the two pillars and lintel of the entrance. Steps lead from it to a dark, snowy scene; the scribbled twist of black thorn branches, what might be a frozen pond, and, in the foreground a slinking wolf stalks a black bird. In the very foreground a frog squats on a scroll announcing: The Increaser of Secrets.
“What’s all this about?” Harvey has seen the wolf before. While leaving the rathouse. Its reappearance doesn’t help him very much.
Hermes talks very slowly, as if the syllables of the language were unfamiliar to her. Her ponytail holds very still. “This is the home of the Increaser of Secrets, the Dark Goddess of the underworld, and the card represents slumber and death. Hers are the destructive energies and she is a harsh agent of strife and punishment. Do you see that dark entrance? That is the door to her home. There she hoards her secrets, which are bitter to men.”
As she speaks, her voice itself becomes frosty, angular and pitiless, her pronouncements coming from lips as white as clay. Her eyes are still closed but Harvey knows that’s only a trick; the old Increaser of Secrets is staring out at him through those transparent eyelids. To avoid looking at her he looks back at the card and is drawn immediately to the dark entrance. He can feel a thin, life sucking wind as he approaches, his boots crunching in the snow. He looks up and comprehends the utter opacity of the sky. He knows this place; by the mineral circulation of his blood he knows it; by its smell, the chill cloy of it on his skin, the way it fits his body. Here is the very home of the veil.
As he passes between the pillars, and enters the realm of the Increaser of Secrets, Harvey crashes, completely without warning, as if every trace of glow has instantaneously been leeched from his system.
All around him, the gates of the air are closing.
This can’t happen, he thinks. I can’t crash with four patches feeding into my bloodstream. But he knows it can happen, does hap-pen; there are glow freaks who covered themselves in patches, grew them like leeches on their arse, and still hit the Big Crash.
And the Big Crash can come any time. Just when you’re looking the other way. He tries to return through the pillars to the everyday world of Travesty, but the entrance has vanished. He is trapped in Crashland. The place of strife and punishment.
He has entered the eye of a huge lens. Whichever way he moves, it impales him.
He gets up and starts walking. “If I don’t move I’ll turn to glass,” he says. If he keeps on his feet he might just be able to walk his way through the crash; he’s done it before; the trick is to keep those legs churning, the blood pumping. Travesty is still there, he just has to pretend he can see it. The trick is to find some more glow. Reingold, the tight-arse traitor spy, always holding out on him. Where’s my therapist when I need him?
Hermes slips the cards away and follows him. “The Increaser of Secrets,” she murmurs. “It would have to be. The Dark Goddess below who visits upon us our most avid dreams.”
Harvey is beyond any comfort. He knows where Hermes is leading him, and no matter what the location it will always look the same. The snowy field edged with black; the dark entrance, formed by stone: the steps, granite, rough hewn. The slinking wolf, slipping between probabilities. Again and again he will walk up the steps, again and again, having passed through, he will be returned to his life, nothing revealed (despite all the Mickey-Mouse promises), nothing disclosed – just Harvey, trip-switched once more by the deceit of time.
He’s just hit full stride, walking his way through the Big Crash, when Mickey joins them again, skipping from one side of the pavement to the other before them like a stork on speed.
“Hey hey! Harvey. Where are we off to in such a hurry? Got a boat to catch?”
Hermes says, “Let’s sort this out later.” She is looking worriedly at Harvey’s rigid face.
But the gangly Mickey, half bent at the waist, is too busy peering at Harvey, “He’s already missed the boat,” he says to her. “In fact, he’s walking right off the end of the gangplank. Look at him!”