35
Harvey, followed by Hermes and Reingold, sets out for the Wicked Witch’s Fortress with a righteous energy in his blood and the voice of the Lion King ringing in his ears. In his pocket there is – the device. Masquerading as a patch tin. Here is the opportunity he created to bring Universal Products down – to destroy the fundaments of Travesty, unhinge the Empire. All he needs is to hold to it, hold it in his mind and not forget, not let go of his purpose.
The Lion King was right all along.
Barely a street has gone by before Mickey – Harvey assumes it’s the same Mickey – appears again, jumping this way and that, jabbering and pestering, his rubbery arms yo-yoing down to his knees.
“Well? Well? Did we have touchdown? Docking? Has the Space-man earthed? Seeded?” He leers down at Hermes.
Hermes shakes his hand off her arm.
“No?” The Mickey’s voice is full of delight. “Too zonked to get it up, Mr Harvey? The old Daughter of Bones got you, has she?”
“Come on Mick.” Hermes sounds disgusted. “He’s very raw in the world.”
“Raw! Raw!” Mickey’s arms spring in and out of his body, his shoulders swell and contract. “He looks well cooked to me. Fried, along with the rest of the chips. You’re wasting your time, Hermes.”
Reingold is inclined to agree with him. The advent of command voices inside Harvey’s head, which Reingold has deduced from his behaviour, is not a welcome development.
“Fuck, Mick!” Hermes’s steps are firm and determined, as if she were running away from the Mickey.
Mickey strides after her, shouting and pleading. “What are you going to do, pamper and coddle him? Change his pants for him? Tell him when to close his mouth and open his eyes. Face it, he’s heading for Terminal Beach, nowhere else. And where does that leave us? We’re running this fucking show, you know. We’re answerable to you-know-who.”
“Who?” Harvey asks. “I don’t know.”
They ignore him. Hermes looks determinedly ahead. “We’ve got one more card to do Mick. Then the harmonic of the whole reading will fall into place. This is a critical juncture.”
“Good, because I have reached a critical juncture myself. Some-where near here I peel off into a new life. I reincarnate. I can feel it coming. Shedding one more layer of skin, you know – there are new odds, new bets in the offing I’ll flap my wings and fly away … has he had a visitation from the Wondrous Head yet? It’s only a matter of time before that ol’ Severed Head gonna come bouncing out of the ground at you. When you’ve lost your head, Bran the Blessed will offer you his.”
Hermes face has gone white and scared. Harvey feels her and Mickey veering together. Mickey stoops over at her and apparently whispers something into her ear.
To Hermes he calls, “We lost something.”
Hermes looks at him curiously. “What do you mean?”
“Some marbles perhaps,” Mickey says.
“You and I,” Harvey says, remembering. “We came to grief.” He glances up but cannot find the sky. Only a hazy approximation. “There’s light up there,” he thinks. The sun. Radiant energy. It is the sun, which, since he had never seen it directly, became the object of his study and the beginning of his understanding of microwave energy. That’s what I’ve got in my pocket, he thinks. A tiny sun. I just take it out and point it. The Microwave Maniac, greatest terrorist of them all. See Travesty meltdown. Slagheap City.
That’s right! the Lion King booms.
Hermes nods slowly, not looking at him. “We came to grief,” she says to herself.
“Up the down staircases,” Mickey says, nodding in agreement with himself.
Harvey slows his walk down so he can close his eyes. For a mo-ment a microwave vision of the sun burns on his eyelids. He sees the Flower Maiden ablaze with the colours of summer. Butterflies are coming out of the palms of her hands like a stigmata of nature. They fly through the arid air of his old bolthole in the Rathouse, punching coloured holes in the walls; these creatures are indifferent to reincarnation: transfigured, free from the constraints of memory and the illusion of Travesty. A fastidious detail in colour.
He hasn’t remembered everything he needs to remember, no way.
“Let’s do that last card now,” Mickey says, “so I can get out of this disguise. I hate this fucking mask.”
“You’re going to pull through this, Harvey,” Hermes says. “You have the inner strength. Now, you’d better open your eyes.” She keeps the cards firmly by her side.
“Lift the portcullis, old son,” Mickey says. His voice seems to come from far off.
Reingold wonders if Harvey might not be better off with his eyes wide shut.
As the world reassembles, Harvey finds Travesty intact, but the district has changed once more. They are passing through spacious squares lined with older, more noble buildings: weatherboard mixed with stone, stone mixed with glass – an echo of empire. The empire never ended; Travesty lives on. It seems to him that they are heading, not for the Fortress, but back towards the territory of the rathouse, as if he will, like some truant spirit escaped from the cauldron of the Daughter of Bones, be returned to his old hole again with nothing more than memories of a phantom mission, no further ahead. Resolutely he trusts that thought out of his mind. An hour. An hour is all he needs.
Their journey takes them through the Alley of the Beggars, and Harvey turns his face away from these wretches, regretting that he left the camouflage of his sandwich board behind. He is nearly through the gauntlet of starved, pitiful faces when a filthy, gnarled hand clutches at his shoulder. An old man, his eyes stark wide, stares unseeing into his face. His eyes are pale blue and as cloudless as the empty heavens. His face is very lined and tortured with years.
“Do not come this way again,” he croaks deliberately. “You can only pass through once.”
“That’s funny,” says Mickey, “I come through here quite regularly.”
“That doesn’t make any difference,” the old man says.
Harvey shakes free. “I don’t have any money,” he says. It is not a circle at all, he thinks, because I cannot pass this way again. There is no return. You never arrive at the same point twice. What a blessing!
“Money won’t make any difference,” the old man says loudly, as if offended. “You can’t offer money. You can’t even offer poverty. Nor your immortal soul. Do not pass this way again. Do not – pass this way – again.”
“Let’s move on, Spaceman,” the Mickey murmurs. “This guy’s on his own asteroid, you know, and you have a rendezvous with your next card. This is not your orbit.” He nods madly at Reingold, as if the good doctor was a party to all this.
But Harvey stops and stares into the old man’s eyes, which are not blind but simply unseeing. He is amazed at their purity and innocence, apparently long washed clean of any polluting images from the external world. They are eyes that have gazed naked on the sun.
“You have very little time, and of the poorest quality,” the old man declares to the whole alley. “Time is deteriorating. This man here, who has the mark of doom upon him, did not take that into account in his clever equations.” He turns his back to Harvey. His voice breaks in his throat and dies away, “So I don’t know why you’re standing here blathering to me.”
“I’m not blathering. In fact I’ve hardly said a word. I just want to know how you knew about my work.”
“Oh, you’re quite famous, you know. I thought you had dis-appeared. That happens you know, people just disappear.”
“You’re talking trash, grandad,” Mickey says harshly. “Come on Spaceman.”
The old man looks bitter and spits as if he’s tasted something sour, “I don’t have anything else to say to you,” then turns into the greasy shadows as if he’d never existed.
“I don’t like this,” Harvey says as they emerge from the Alley of Beggars into the light of the Plaza of Tears, beseeching shadows behind, finally escaped from the starving, shadow creatures with their upturned palms, their hard luck stories and their pamphlets. Harvey remembered the story Nisa Michelangelo told him of the old man revisiting his youthful self, and shivered.
“Beggars are a dime a dozen,” Mickey says carelessly. “Just stay focused for another ten minutes and I’ll treat you a trip to paradise, I promise, cross-my-heart-and-swear-to-die.”
It is a solemn, uncertain light into which they walk. Grey clouds swirl darkly over the tops of the highest buildings; some swirls descend, like naked dancers, towards the ground, blotting out segments of people and buildings like floating patches of blindness.
The Plaza of Tears is milling with people, mostly masked, and behind them, falling clear of the mist, rises the twisted black spires of the Fortress, bathed in the baleful light thrown from below by blue, purple, and sapphire arc lights. It seems to swell and contract as the revolving lights catch it, making it look suddenly huge or at the reverse end of a telescope.
As soon as he sees it, rearing above the carnival chaos, Harvey’s body chemistry undergoes a dramatic change. Everything around him freezes and crystallizes, as if animation and the flush of time are draining out. This is not like any crash. Crash-smash. This is something else, something he never counted on. Harvey stops where he is and turns to stone.
“Man overboard,” Mickey says.
The glow was spiked! Harvey tries to turn to Reingold with questions in his mind, but every movement he makes shatters the world. Reingold is dissolving, morphing into one bending eye, bugged out behind his glasses.
An hour! How much of the hour was left?
“Find somewhere to sit,” The Lion King’s calm voice says.
Reingold is watching Harvey intently. “He’s overdosing.”
“That’s terrific,” Mickey says, pulling off his Mickey mask. “That’s just what we need.” He flings the Mickey mask to the ground and stomps on it. “Fuck! Fuck!”
He is a gaunt faced young man with short, spiky hair, dressed in a trendy jacket, the kind that gives off rainbow chunks of light depending on how he moves. He looks as if he’s been up for many hours. On top of that gangly body, and following his large Mickey bonnet, his head looks as small as scarecrow’s. Yet his manic face swims into Harvey’s field of vision like a bloated pink pig. “Is there anybody in there?” he booms.
Harvey looks beyond him to the spires of the Fortress. They are there, at the far end of the vortex.
“You’re within range,” The Lion King says quietly.
Ahead of him is a concrete bench. If I can make it to the bench, he thinks.
“This is it!” the gaunt faced Mickey says to Hermes. “The show must go on. Lunchtime over.” He gives Reingold a dirty look. “Who are you working for,” he hisses.
Superstitiously Reingold touches his chest, beneath which his heart, still beating thank god, lies, and which harbours some ancient, irredeemable grudge. A muscle pain that never goes away.
Hermes helps Harvey to the bench – the crystalline world will bend, crackle and twist around him. “It doesn’t matter. Just hold onto yourself.” Her whisper is fierce in his ear.
Every step becomes an epic of movement, spun through cosmic time as the sustaining moment collapses and turns to nothing. Entropy is better dealt with in a sitting position, better still, a lying position. Horizontal, he might slow down his metabolic rate, hold back the collapse of crystal suns with the mightiness of will, and arc across the radius of that final singularity, arms outstretched.
Gratefully, he reaches for the concrete bench. Gratefully he sits.
“He’s warping out,” the Mickey says sharply to Hermes. “Show him the last card! Let’s get on with it! Christ!”
The concrete bench, cool on his flesh, seems like an ideal medium for Harvey’s consciousness at this juncture, since it is a material utterly enclosed upon itself, knowing no extension and having no fear. The comfort of concrete. Had he chosen to become, say, the stump of a tree, he might have been possessed of its fossil memories – the joy of spreading its leaves, the epiphany of sunlight, the nakedness of an open sky, the rootedness of rock, the avidity of decay. But concrete knows nothing of these things, since it has no memories: or at least the memories of its constituent parts have been so homogenised all such traces have been long since smoothed out. It is a viewless, featureless place, without any strength or cohesion yet which, in its very persistence, shelters him.
Perhaps I could be reborn as concrete. It looks like my best option.
I’m only overdosing, he thinks. I can out wait that. He grips the rough edges of the bench with both hands. Reingold, Reingold has given him something else …
“He’s heading for deep space,” the Mickey says. “We’ve lost radio contact, I think, folks. Can you hear me, Mr Spaceman? Say hello to the suckers.”
As if he still had his mask on, Mickey nods, grinning vacuously to Hermes who sits beside Harvey and hastily pulls out her magic silk. Harvey has an image of Mickey grinning behind another mask, as if he could make his face grin harder.
Hermes spreads the silk on her lap and lays down the cards with irreverent speed. The Spring Maiden, the Daughter of Bones, the Wondrous Head. Flap! Flap! Down they go.
This is the simplest of all the cards, depicting a grassy knoll on the top of which is erected a smooth, rounded pillar of stone. Hovering above it is a golden crown with a coronet of candle flames. The stone reminds him of the obelisk featured in an old Science Fiction movie, and which always turns up when man undergoes an evolutionary leap. In the card, it is giving out a vibration, banding the sky behind with colour: beginning with red, moving through yellow and green to the blue and black sky behind, lit by seven stars.
“The Stone of Destiny,” Hermes breathes, greatly relieved. “What a wonderful, affirming card to finish on, Evensong! It represents divine intervention in human affairs. This is the card of spiritual fulfilment. You pass from the garden of the Spring Maiden through, through the winter of the Daughter of Bones, through the dark, hidden world of the Increaser of Secrets, through the wisdom of the Wondrous Head, to emerge triumphant. This is a card of success. It represents divine truth and order; here harmonies rule and the power of the truth is at work.” She lowers her voice and speaks directly into Harvey’s ear. “Here dreams become real; innate worth emerges.”
“I didn’t get any wisdom from the Wondrous Head,” Harvey whispers to her. “And I haven’t emerged triumphant. Not yet.”
“There’s hope for you,” Hermes says out of the side of her mouth. “The Stone of Destiny won’t fail you. Things don’t always take place in the expected order. You should know that.”
Mickey claps. “And here,” he announces, as to some vast audience of his own construction. “on this very spot, Mr Harvey will fulfill his destiny, won’t you Mr Harvey. Carry on, the Stone of Destiny is yours! The odds are running your way! Whole worlds will be won and lost by the end of the day!” He throws his arms out wide, his rubbery grip takes in the whole of Travesty. His smile is pure screen.
“Who is this clown?” Harvey asks.
“We are the light bringers,” she says simply. “Even Mickey, though he is mad. We try and salvage what we can from the mess of Travesty. It is our work – we pay a price for it. Even here, there are miracles.” She looks tired. The grey darkness of Travesty settling over her shoulders like a cloak. “Mickey is very talented. He found you in the darkest of all places. I couldn’t have found you there. That cost him a lot, and he nearly didn’t come through it.”
“I’ve had cameras following me.”
“That’s Mickey. He likes to document everything.”
“So you’re an angel?”
“That’s right. As near to one as you’ll ever see. Mickey and I are here on a soul retrieval mission. Your soul.”
A light bringer? Harvey doesn't need light, he needs a flame, a fierce internal flame, powerful enough to destroy this mockery of a world. This is the last thing he has to do. Destroy Travesty!
“So why is the biology bureau and all the rest of the rat pack after me?”
“Because they suspect that you’re an adapt, a mutation. Evolutionary pressures are heavy here. Your freakish maths ability alerted them.”
“It’s too late for them. I’m about to destroy them.”
It takes him eons of time to get the microwave device out of his pocket, and when he succeeds he merely stares at it, all desire and will vanished. What is it anyway but a hectic Babel of circuits.
“You can do it,” the Lion King says.
And he can. With the hypnotic blocks withdrawn, his fingers know just where to go to release the catch to the secret trigger, and his eyes know how to aim down the groove on one side to the Fortress, Travesty’s black beating heart.
“Payoff time,” Mickey whispers.
“Do it,” The Lion King says.
Harvey does it. Depresses the button and holds it down.
Nothing happens. The Fortress is still there, unwavering. The revelers continue to revel. Soon the great toy scramble will begin. Scrooges money bin will disgorge chocolate sovereigns.
“It’s a fake,” Harvey says. “Just a lump of fused metal.”
“Then I’ve lost the shirt off my back,” Mickey says. “There was a lot of money riding on the end of the world.”
“No it’s not, Harvey,” Hermes says. It just didn’t do what you thought it was going to do. What it has done is disable the murderous toys the Biology Bureau were going to let loose and turn the Day of Delight into the Massacre of the innocents in their frenzy to eliminate this new adaption.”
“How do you know this?”
“There’s more. Universal Products knew that the BB was in a Devil’s pact with the Lion King to destroy Travesty. So UP got their scientists to work and adapted your device, Prof Evensong, to save the world rather than destroy it. So they double crossed the BB and switched devices. You’re a hero, Harvey.”
“Hero and dupe.” He laces his fingers together and crackles his long joints.
“Here they come,” Hermes says. “The Gandies.”
An embittered Mickey faces his audience. “Fuck it, folks, we’ve been busted again. This whole thing was a losing bet right from the beginning, if you ask me, but there you go, suckers, and up you too – go suck eggs if you can find them. See ya next time around the roundabout.”
Sure enough, Reingold ascertains, here are the Ganders, masked in riot gear and shields, striding vigorously out of the shifting mist before him, intent on the terrorist threat. He begins a discreet retreat; he certainly doesn’t want his own part in these events to come under scrutiny. It would be too easy for hell-bent authority to misunderstand.
“Let’s go,” Mick says to Hermes, ripping microphones and cameras out of his clothing and stamping them underfoot. “I’m too tall to fall.”
“We can’t just leave him like this.”
“I can. He’ll survive. He’s a creature of this place. A native. Don’t you trust your own reading? He just got the Stone of Destiny didn’t he?”
Her voice is very small. “Yes.”
‘Well that stone sure has its work cut out for it. My time has come. I’ve played my part. I’ve done my Mickey Mouse act, I’ve done Travesty – thank you very much – and now I exit stage left. Rapidly. The Fellowship of the Cards has now broken up. New episode. New deck. Fresh dice. Let’s try a three dimensional world next time, angel. This place gives me the creeps. But I’m glad you cleaned up; somebody has to bet on saving the world.”
Mickey is already pulling back into the street. He’s walking on stilts again. Hermes is saying something but her voice is lost in the procession of passing Carnival revellers. Mickey joins them, mask in place. He waves his arms and grins and grins. His ostrich body dances. Hermes gives a little yellow shiver and swiftly hides her cards. “I have to go too.”
“But you succeeded this time, right. I remembered.”
“That’s right, you remembered.”
“What did Mickey mean when he said you cleaned up.”
“I hope you never find out. It’s much better left this way. It all turned out for the best.”
She steps up, holds him for moment and quickly kisses him. Then she steps back and as she does so her shining individuality hazes over. She becomes colourless and nondescript, hardly worth noticing. With the next backward step she merges more deeply into the colour and movement of the street. She’s so well hidden it takes an effort to see her properly. Another step back and her camouflage is almost complete. The eye flicks across the space she occupies, unable to settle there. Only out of the corner of your eye might you catch a flickering glimpse of a human figure, the swish of a ponytail. Then she is gone. Dissolved into the street. No camera would notice her.
The visceral correlative of her vanishing is the territory of sad things: an old drunk clutching some sleazy evangelist’s tract; someone without a memory sitting in his room holding a wooden gun; an overweight sculptor born in the wrong time; the great hoax Travesty in whose arms they are all gathered like plucked chicken. Christ! The Ganders rush past, mandibles clacking.
It was a set up job, Harvey thinks. Nothing more.
The Ganders find no one. Even Reingold has gone.
They have no interest in Harvey of the Bloodline, sitting on a concrete bench with a lump of useless metal in his hand.
He is nothing.
