4
Like the sound of low flying aircraft receding, gunfire surges along Reconstruction Avenue and disappears around the corner into Victory Square where it spatters up against a statue of History’s Last Hero. For Glow Harvey it never entirely fades, he can always hear a distant sound like matches snapping, but it recedes enough for him to turn for the comparative safety of his room.
And he is just about to do that, for the hallway, after drunk Len has vanished, kicking his way through the world, is beginning to harbour a few too many shadows, when out of the perforated darkness shifts a creature Harvey has not encountered for some time. A young woman. She’s dressed in a duffle coat and faded jeans. A pale oval of a face shows up; strong dark eyes and a Roman nose.
“Harvey!” she says in a soft, throaty voice, as if she knows him. Then she checks herself, glances quickly over her shoulder and says in a more formal voice. “You are Glow Harvey?”
This is a leading question; Harvey looks over his shoulder to see who might be standing beside him. Since he lives largely in a male world of his own creation, in which females are elusive gossamer creatures with voices like those of schoolgirls and thighs like the delicate inside of his own armpit, or grim kung-fu types, lean and muscular with pectorals like men, who belong to the Sleeping Beauties and are all too real, he’s hardly ready to confront one in the halfway world of the rathouse.
Her voice is strong and honest, and tinged with the ragged edge of some hidden sorrow. “I’ve got to talk to you. Can I come into your room?” She makes as if to head in that direction.
Only Harvey, his Schrodinger’s Cafe sandwich-board street-work disguise, and fear, inhabit his room, and that makes it a full house. He is quite happy to consider the woman as someone who just slipped in off the street to escape the passing skirmish, but not one who would know his name and follow him right into his room.
But that’s what she does, in a brisk, no nonsense way, a shiny dark ponytail bobbing determinedly behind. In the worn light of his room he sees she has a red scarf in loose wreaths around her neck, and a little chaos of hair behind each ear, where she tucks it in. She has a petite, puckish air to her, a quirky beauty hidden behind nervous movements and quick shifts of mood and focus.
Harvey’s room is an exercise in Rathouse minimalism. With two humans inside it, the room shrinks to a dirty box. It’s not really dirty, Harvey decides; it’s just that there is not that much to clean. The sandwich board stands in one corner. The design on the front depicts a transparent cube in which a cat lies dead. On the back, the cat stands up inside the ghostly cube alive. There is no sign of any food or eating utensils, but there is a tiny gas cooker beside which a cup of coffee smoulders in a tin mug. There’s a roll-up camp-stretcher of fibre-plastic and light aluminium poles. A soldier’s bed. Unwillingly, Harvey sees the room through a stranger’s eye and finds nothing but the most temporary occupation. That’s because Harvey never stops for too long; he has to keep moving; if he doesn’t he will turn to stone.
Then he notices the shards of glass, just where they should be, beneath the window but they are covered in dust, as if the attack took place days, even weeks ago. I’m losing chunks of time, he thinks, or somebody’s fucking with me. The dorsal shards still point at him, but he ignores them; he has seen people go fastidiously crazy, always stirring their tea in one direction or some nonsense, but he can’t remember where he’s seen these things, or when. He has a background in the world but no temporal location for it.
A thin light streams through the window, sharper where the glass is missing because of the accumulated dust on the panes. As if it has neatly cut itself along the edges, it makes a jagged flower on the wall.
Nano-glass, have you forgotten, a voice in his mind says.
“You are Harvey Evensong,” the girl says, “known on the street as Glow Harvey. While your street reputation is as a glowworm, you are, also, a member of a terrorist organization known as The Sleeping Beauties.” She speaks officially, as if reading from cue-cards, not looking at him but at the dust-filled, shattered window behind.
They stand awkwardly for a moment, like two strangers at a party, unintroduced.
Evensong. Harvey rotates the word in his mind to see what it might reveal. “How come you know so much about me?”
The young woman takes a breath; her glance goes back over her shoulder towards the door. She gathers herself for a final, mental hurdle. “Because I used to know you, Evensong. In another lifetime, you might say.”
Something happens inside Harvey that’s like a hail of bullets going through glass. Evensong. The glass shatters into coloured fragments. It had to happen some day. A person like this would walk through the door carrying a name. A woman. Like someone in a nightmare, drawn to watch the same scene over and over without release, Harvey turns his mind back and peers into his past, searching for a clue: a sign, a face still there when forgetting doesn’t work. Maybe if he believed in reincarnation that might help, although he doubts it.
“Are you with the Beauties?” he asks her. Sooner or later they will find him, come to him in one form or another. A girl in a duffle-coat. An old drunk. An out-of-work therapist. A Mickey Mouse or an Elvis Presley, a Donald Duck or a Madonna, an Aladdin or an Osama bin Laden.
They’ll strap a bomb to his chest and send him walking into Cartoonland.
“No.” She faces him now. She is on her own; she’s run out of script, it seems.
“Then what is your interest in me?” He gestures helplessly around the room, as if it explains his inadequacy.
The girl faces another hurdle, and takes the jump. “We used to be … an item.”
“An item.” Harvey thinks of the great UP store with thousands of items all looking exactly the same. Packaged and priced.
“Lovers.”
There is a delicacy in the air, like silence. Harvey fingers the glow in his pocket. It’s in a case, like an antique cigarette tin. There are ridges along the outside.
“Then how come I don’t remember you?”
Her voice softens. “What do you remember, Evensong?”
“I don’t remember my last name. Evensong. It sounds strange when I say it. Like a stage name. But I remember the Lion King. And Uncle Scrooge. And the Sleeping Beauties.” In fact, he thought, I re-member it all; anyone as important as a lover I would surely remember.
“And the Veil?”
As soon as she says it he sees it. Drawn across the path of his vision, is a great dirty grey curtain, swirling and opaque, blocking him from seeing anything further back than the day of his arrival at the
rathouse; he is standing on the steps looking up at the doorway trying to focus on the permanent, dingy notice hanging above it. Vacancies. The dirty grey curtain hangs above the rathouse like a tidal wave of annihilation, and he walks out of it like a man walking out of the sea, up the steps and into the rathouse where he sits and collects the days like pearls, marking them off on a calendar with a dried up felt-tip pen. There I was without a face and it touched me.
Before the rathouse I was nothing.
Behind the veil and before the rathouse there are some memories, yes, dominated by the image of the Lion King, but these mental pictures, now that he comes too look at them carefully, have a fuzzy, grey, ill-defined nature, like cut-out shapes behind a screen, and cannot be brought into focus. Veil stuff. Terror stuff. The bleeding edge, where memory meets the imagination.
Behind it, he is convinced; there is another world with bright sunlight and clear skies innocent of the sound of gunfire and the hoarse screams of atrocity. Where night is innocent of everything but the moon. A place where the heart might break loose on the wind and the body reunite with the soul, but he cannot get through to it, though the barrier offers no more resistance than mist, yet it is filled, not just with the more definite shapes of the Lion King and the Beauties, but with further swirling shapes which half-cohere, not solid enough to be memory, not insubstantial enough to be just random concoctions of Brownian motion. These are the ghosts of mind which hover between terror and reality and which prey on sleep. Dancing equations. The S Matrix spread of probability values.
“Harvey!” her voice is croaky soft and touched with sadness. She stands very still and firm. “You’re going to have to believe me and trust me. Both these things will be hard for you. I mean, as far as you know I’m a complete stranger.” She looks around the room, her eyes resting briefly on the patch of wall where he, like a prisoner, has marked off his days with his dried felt tip. And made other notations.
All around it are craters made from the impact of fifty calibre bullets.
“So am I.” He tries to make a joke of it. He sees dozens of himself walking through different doors on different days into the same anonymous corridor. The rathouse, a place where the shadows are strangers to themselves.
She shifts awkwardly on her feet as if she suddenly needs a lavatory. “I’ve come back across time and hope. Come back to save you, Evensong. To lead you out of this murky place. You don’t know who I am so just think of me as a creature born of hope. I bring you your true name. And other things besides.”
Hope. Harvey seems to be able to remember hope; a time when it looked as if Travesty could be brought down, undermined, transformed from within into something else; a time to re-envisage democracy, freedom, dignity: to steal these buzz words from the PR wing of Universal Products and make them real again; a time to dream of how the spirit of humanity might lift itself from its own schlock, put aside the tyranny of the inane and bust out of Travesty forever.
“I haven’t forgotten everything,” he says defensively.
“And do you remember your mission?” A certain grimness has entered her tone. When he doesn’t answer she goes on, “That’s why you’re here, on the run from the Lion King. You’re a defector.”
Reluctantly, Harvey pushes his mind back before the rathouse, through the veil, and searches for the truth in her words. He had to turn his face away from the rage of Scrooge and the righteous wrath of the Lion King; they were after him all right, no doubt of that.
“All walled in by the terror,” she observes.
Harvey thinks about this, then doesn’t. “What do you want me to do?” All he really knows about people is that they want him to do things – they want things from him. In this respect men and women are identical.
She says, “You don’t remember me, do you?”
“Uh…”
“It’s ok. I knew …” She bites her bottom lip. It is more than nervousness. With everything she says she is testing some kind of ground within herself, some inner fidelity. She appears to have a safe place she can go to test out every utterance, find out where her foot will fall before she takes the next step. Harvey wishes he had a safe place like that; some refuge of the mind.
She speaks very carefully, “Now, how far into the past can you see?”
“I can’t see past the first star,” Harvey says, staring at the wall.
Her eyes spring open. “What?”
It hangs just inside the dirty grey curtain of the veil, weak and re-mote, but he’s not going to tell her that, he decides, realizing that she has not yet told him her name although apparently in full possession of his.
“Do you ever see figures? I mean forms, people, symbols? Mathematical symbols?”
“Um.” He fingers the glow in his pocket and thinks of the vague, virtual shapes that weave through the curtain. “I saw a head once.”
“Yes. What sort of head.” She’s watching every restless dis-simulating movement he is making.
He shrugs. “Just an ordinary human head, with lots of hair. It rose from the ground.” He saw the head bouncing out of the curtain for just a moment before it dissolved. The way it bounced it looked as though it was connecting up with its body each time it hit the earth, as if the body were moving underground to meet it. Just before it vanished it opened its mouth, as if it were about to say something.
It’s easier not to remember.
“Look, uh … I’ve got to move. As long as I keep moving …”
“It won’t make any difference. Bran The Blessed will find you.”
“Who?”
“Bran the Blessed, who was buried in the ground to the neck. He sings.”
But it does make a difference who Bran the Blessed is. Stay in one place too long and all the shards of glass falling from the sky turn in your direction. He’s only been awake a few minutes (the echo of gunfire is still fading) and already the walls of the rathouse are pulling in tight around him. With his acute ears he can hear the scrabble of rats in the walls. Squabbling rats.
“You’ve talked to Reingold. Did he help you?”
Of course not! “What do you want?” He hates to be churlish, especially as she becomes more uncertain with every step, pulling ever deeper for inner guidance.
“I want to try something new.” She tries to take the words back.
“You’ve tried before.”
She looks very uneasy and won’t meet his eye; her gaze flicks around the room again like a daylight candle that makes little impression, but it’s hard to find something plausible to focus on. Shrodinger’s Cat. An army camp-stretcher. A scratched calendar on the wall; the graffiti of time. A cup of coffee vaporising beside a dead primus. Plaster crumbing into bullet holes.
She gestures to the sandwich board. “What do the cats mean?”
“It’s a sort of joke thought up by the quantum theorist Schrodinger. Imagine a box with a cat in it. In a corner of the box there is some kind of poison set to be released by a random trigger. Particle decay providing the random trigger.”
She looks confused already. Harvey hastens on, remembering it all as he speaks. Once he knew all this stuff. Not only did he know it but it meant something.
“You close the box and wait for a period. Before you open the box the cat is neither alive nor dead. It exists in a fuzzy quantum land until the box is opened and the probability front collapses into a live or dead cat. That cat is called Schrodinger’s cat.”
She thinks about it. “That’s an awesome responsibility for those opening the box.”
“Why?”
“It’s a moral question. By opening the box they might kill the cat. Or give it life.”
“You’re right,” Harvey says. “No one has ever given the ethical dimension of the cat paradox any attention. How can they, when the trigger lies in the random decay of particles? Where’s the morality in that?”
“It’s just silly,” she says, suddenly impatient. “Of course the cat is either alive or dead. Either the bomb has gone off or it hasn’t. Opening the box won’t make any difference.” She makes a dismissive gesture.
“Not in quantum land. Not until you, the observer intervenes.”
But she has already moved on and is standing in front of the calendar, reading some entries he has made. She reads aloud: “August 10th, end of Merchant’s Way. September 8th, Beginning of Reconstruction Ave. October 15, End of Street … Harvey what is this?”
“The progress of the Veil. When it gets here, I move out.”
“The Veil thickens up as it goes. That’s why you want to keep moving, to stay one step ahead of it. You’ve forgotten the time before when I tried to retrieve you; I’m one step forward and two steps back.”
It thickens as it goes. Of course. The breeding ground of every terror. The echo of the roar of the Lion King. Heads rising up out of the ground dripping blood from the neck. She has tried before and failed.
Harvey senses a dangerous shift in stabilities here. His room, the centre of his makeshift existence, is tipping at a new, unsettling angle. Her Puckishness has come back across time, a random factor from and unknown past. Too palpably human. He thinks, irrelevantly, of the phoney therapist who lives downstairs, and who has a pretentious little awning over his window striped like a retro-barbers shop. Feingold or Steingold or whatever his name is.
“My name is Hermes,” she says softly.
“I need help.”
He clutches the glow case so hard his knuckles crack on the unexpectedly solid steel. His fingers tear at the peculiar v-shaped gutter running along one side of it. This is hardly the time for trust. There are powerful disintegrative forces at work. Travesty itself is held together by the most tenuous of forces. Creatures within the dirty grey curtain sever him from his history; beasts that patrol the borderline between Harvey and his past never sleep. Sometimes he can hear their voices as if there is somebody in the next room, but he can never make out what they are saying. In his most devoutly fearful moments, he sees them emerge into the world of the present, for short periods, to hunt down and exterminate those such as himself. He can hear them in the corridor at night, searching for him with mechanical blindness. Once, he decided to confront them, flung open the door to find a hallway full of luminous butterflies jiggalinging in and out of the walls as if the walls were air.
Maybe this Hermes is a creature like that: a flash of beauty through the Veil.