Harvey has no choice but to stride it out, right into the rotting core of Travesty, where the ubiquitous hand of poverty has, like a King Midas in reverse, sucked the gold out of everything and infected it all with the same drab grey: the grey of the streets, the grey of the sky, the grey of too many windows. And, above all, the grey of damp. It is the era of mould and funguses, growths and carbuncles. Candida skies. But dig down a finger or two and it’s all dry and drought and dust.
Harvey, who’s crashed but still walking, still on his feet, is pas-sing through a landscape of frozen forms, half made up of the city, half the empty field of the Keeper of Secrets; it is a movement that has
abandoned all hope of destinations, all prospect of return, all expectation of healing.
Whatever his mission might have been, it is long since abandoned. The Lion King can eat his heart out and Scrooge McDuck can sue his insurers.
He understands now that Hermes is wrong, that these card readings will not restore his soul but rather hasten the doom already upon him, and which he has delayed by being as still, quiet and invisible as possible – but he does not tell her this. It seems that Hermes has acted in good faith, against even the advice of her friends, like the Mickey Mouse, who, while tending to come and go, has generally taken up position a little way behind them, sometimes skipping up to join them.
His arrival seems to have affected the close bond between Harvey and Hermes, driving Hermes into a brooding silence that even the ebullient Mickey has trouble cracking. Suddenly Hermes pulls Harvey’s hand and leads him down a side street called Half Moon Crescent, and, when the Mickey turns to follow them, she places herself in front of him.
“I’m sorry Mick. You can’t come any further. Thanks for helping me this far. I really do appreciate it. You’ve been a real friend. We’ll meet up later.”
The Mickey sounds scared. “Why can’t I come with you? You might need help with the Spaceman.”
“I won’t need any help.”
“He could be dangerous.”
“I’ll risk it.”
A whine enters the Mickey’s voice. “Why can’t I come? Is some-thing private going to happen?”
“Come on, Mick, you’re making it harder.”
“To dump me you mean. What are odds on that, I wonder?”
“You knew I had to follow this through. For Harvey, for myself. Christ!”
The Mickey’s voice was hard and bitter. “So I get the thanks-you’ve-been-a-real-friend routine. You used me when you needed me.
On those nights of terror when there was nowhere else to go, you came to me, to your friend Mickey, and clung to me like a fly to shit. When there was no one else, Hermes! No one! And no one watching!”
He shrieks this last line, throwing it down like the ace of spades. “Not a fucking soul watching!”
During Mickey’s speech Harvey stands on the corner of Half Moon Crescent and Miracle Mile trying to decode the binary logic of intersections. Somebody bisects his vision at an acute angle, disrupting his calculations. It is Hermes, looking crushed by the Mickey’s eloquence.
“We discussed all this Mick, before we started. We knew what it entailed.”
The Mickey is all gestures, pure stage, “Sure, sure! Cut! Edit! Purge it, you bastards! All bets are off!”
“Maybe it’ll be different when this is over.”
“Maybe! Maybe! Pigs can fly.” The Mickey moves off down the street, stilted, uneasy on his long legs. “I’m not waiting around, you can bet your fucking arse on that. I’m cashing in my chips.”
“You can’t do that.”
“Just watch me.”
Hermes joins Harvey, eyes full of mist. She takes him by the arm and grips him.
“That’s the way with people Harvey, they’ll run out on you just when you need them the most, just when you most need their love and understanding. Come on, there’s somewhere we have to go.”
“What contract?” Harvey asks.
They are standing in front of an old, dilapidated house surrounded by decaying banana trees. The house is small and has a cottage like feel to it. Harvey knows he is expected to remember this place, and would like to say he does, but all he can see in the doorway is the familiar entrance to the Underworld. The same stone steps, the heavy lintel and the dark entrance. Enter the realm of the Dark Lady, who is able to suck destinations into herself through the power of her secrets. In his burned, crashed world, everything adds to the power of the Increaser of Secrets. Whole realms of human knowledge have fallen into her world. How can he hope to escape?
Hermes leads him up the steps and through the entrance and Harvey finds himself in an unexpectedly pleasant lounge, nothing like the one in the display window, and with a worn comfortable feel about it. Homely. “Very nice,” he murmurs politely, as if to an estate agent. She leads him through a couple of equally very nice rooms to a bedroom, sparse but snug.
Hermes takes his hand and changes his body from fire to flesh. Her hand is warm and palpable – a live creature in its own right. It grips him with strong fingers and Harvey can feel that grip all the way up his arm; it seems suddenly astonishing to him that there should be another universe of life, a great constellation of cells, blood and memory, hovering right by him. With a name and a face and a soul. The grip of her palm in his links him into her circulatory system, the close cloudlike action of her feelings, and the sidereal movement of former lifetimes winking like remote stars. This is Hermes. Holding him through the crash.
Harvey shuffles his feet. “Places like this get strange during a crash.”
“I know.” She slips her arm around him. “There might be other ways through the crash, Harvey.”
Harvey considers it. “But I’m not allowed to fall in love with you or project my hopes and fears on you. You said that yourself. You’re working for someone.”
“Only for myself. I had to say that to protect myself from Even-song. To protect myself in advance from this bedroom scene.” There is a tremble in the voice, a shimmer in the ponytail.
“Which you knew was coming up.”
She nods. “And from which Mickey was trying to save me. And himself.”
“This is the one thing you haven’t tried?”
She nods again. “But it’s not that, even.”
“What is it?”
She shrugs. “It’s just the right time. My body knows. When my body speaks, I listen to it.”
The Increaser of Secrets, Harvey thinks.
They sit on the edge of the bed and Hermes puts her arms around his neck. They are warm and living and odorous with the secrets of her body. Gently she breathes through the fabric of his shirt warming the flesh below. “Harvey I want you to understand that nothing is expected of you. Just relax and fall right through the crash. All I want to do is give you a little warmth, love and security, some good old fashioned tender loving care – and to try and stimulate a different chemical mix in your body.”
“A different chemical mix,” Harvey repeats. Anything you say is likely to become a mantra – or noted and used as evidence against you. Everything you think twists into a vortex.
“Warmth, love and security,” she says, rubbing her cheek against his. Her cheek is soft and full of its own gentle breath. As she repeats these words a pit of loneliness and loss opens up in Harvey. This pit grows huge and swallows everything. The probability front of his psyche collapses and he is a nothing but a smear of loneliness grafted upon the smudge of a body – the ache of loss on the ache of tendon and sinew. Nothing animates the blackness of this pit: no sound, but a thin wail that might be the crying of an abandoned child, or the distant, fractal cry of a bird. Tears roll down his cheeks. It is too painful, he wants to tell her, too painful to go to this place.
The pit becomes a pip.
Seed and kernel. The nutshell of him.
Don’t crack me open, he pleads with her. Don’t split me down the middle for I will spill out obscenely, all pulsing guts and blood.
Hermes removes his shirt and rubs his upper body. This touch, gentle, tender and intricate, turns his body to glass, and then, in turn, to something skinned and quivering. At the same time, as if every touch were a trigger, the territory of sad things grows into him through the back door of his blood, and he knows with a certainty that skips the membrane of memory, that whatever he has been in a previous lifetime he must have known the love of woman like this, for it is there in the fine print of his cellular make up. Seed and kernel. On the inside of the nutshell.
More tears come out onto his cheeks as if they were born there, or were secreted through his skin. They are warm and living, but very frail. Hermes makes gentle cooing sounds and continues her rubbing, interspersing her hands with the touch of her lips, as if reclaiming, piece by piece, a long lost province of tenderness. His tears cool on his face, and move down, making small inroads into the curve around his mouth. In a moment he can taste them and there’s a tartness in them, like blood.
Her mouth passes across his, wetting him softly with her tongue. Her mouth is plump and moist and shaped like a heart. He immediately feels the dryness of his lips. The dryness invades his mouth, which becomes like a cave of limestone, bleached and moistureless. Her tongue runs across the gateway of his teeth, but does not seek to penetrate, laps at the tear tracks around his mouth and a moment later her teeth make small indentations on his shoulder, which he feels as short, sharp commands.
Hermes says, “let’s sigh, and mingle our breaths.” So they sigh and their breaths mingle. When he breathes in, he draws something of her in with him; when he breathes out, his rib-cage aches with emptiness.
Her hands trailing across his body, she stands up and faces him and with a few, quick movements she takes off her clothes. He can hear them sigh on the floor like so many fallen leaves.
“Can you look at me Harvey?” she asks. “You don’t have to.”
Harvey cannot look at her. First his hands cover his eyes, then his eyes cover the other side of the room; since he is not ready for anything at all, he cannot be ready for the revelation of her nakedness.
But he does look, and he remembers. Her nakedness, petite with youth yet rounded and deep breasted, is a warm palatable thing, full of soft places for memories in exile. Every line and pathway is known to him, every fold and curve, hair and smooth; the very way her flesh fits the air fits the eye. The conjoining of the parts, too; the fitting of thighbone to hipbone fits, in turn, to the flexible socket of memory, which may hinge on the tracery of a body or the smell of hair.
She turns around and he is graced by the fluid line of her back, the stubborn rotundity of her buttocks. These aspects too, he recognises, and his eye fits around them like a familiar hand.
Reaching up with both hands she takes out her ponytail and shakes her hair loose.
Sweet saliva fills his mouth.
She turns and steps closer and Harvey reaches out to touch her hip, and, as soon as his fingers connect his hand fills up with images. These he plays back into her skin with another touch and hears her give a little quick breath of recognition, as if she too were remembering with her body.
This trickle of body memory turns into a flood, they close their eyes and let their eager hands do their remembering for them. Here! This way! There! Warmth! Flame! A swift, urgent joy. They are all hands and bodies. He doesn’t think it can happen but it happens; not even the crash can stop it. It is like a home coming; it is all over them.
“That’s right,” she shouts in triumph. “That’s just right.
Afterwards they lie across the bed.
“We weren’t just casual lovers,” he says.
“Longer than most.”
“Who are you and Mickey working for?”
“It’s not quite like that but I can’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
“Because you would run for cover. Lapse into your old forgetfulness.”
“That’s handy.”
“It’s true. It’s already happened. Mickey should never have appeared. He’s a loose cannon. He’s trying to screw things up for his own purposes.”
“What purposes?”
“You have to trust me. And you have to do something else.”
‘What?”
“Let me see your glow container. I’m not interested in the glow, just the container.”
Harvey takes a chance. His first instinct is to bolt, to run for cover just like she said, but the odds are shifting in his favour, he can feel them, new probability fronts in the making, new wormholes linking time and thought and memory.
He hands her the case. Not much left in it anyway. One miserable patch put aside for a rainy day. Which is probably now.
Hermes inspects the cylinder, turning it over, measuring it with her eye. “It’s heavy,” she says, running her finger down the v-shaped grove. “What’s this part? See only half the case is for storing patches.”
She is right.
“It’s a weapon,” he says.
“Do you remember?”
“It came out of the Diversity Equation.” He would get it, eventually. He would know the truth.
“I should like to live in a very much simpler world,” Harvey says.