By now, most of the foxes have slunk away, as if they don’t like to hear the end of that story. “How long did you stay in Gandayaw?” says Raf.
“I carried on making glow. I had to pay guys from the Concession to start bringing the flower back for me. They told me a lot of stories about the foxes in the jungle acting like people. I guess I was torn up about Craig, but …‘It feels good to get paid, regardless of how many homeboys get slayed,’ right?” Raf doesn’t find Win’s bravado very convincing here. “Then one night Sam—he’s one of Zaya’s—he comes to me, he tells me who he is, and he says Lacebark looking for me and I need to get the fuck out of Gandayaw.”
“But how would Lacebark have known who you were?”
“Zaya worked out how it must’ve gone down.” Lacebark would have seen that handwritten note on Craig’s desk about something “better than ecstasy,” Win explains, and if they sent a femoral blood sample back to North Carolina—standard procedure for insurance reasons whenever an American employee died on Lacebark business—they would have detected trace quantities of an unfamiliar amphetamine-class substance. So they would have known right away that Craig was into drugs. But their suspicions wouldn’t have stopped there. Craig’s killer, after all, was the cousin of a one-eyed Chinese heroin dealer who had been chased out of town by the Tatmadaw a year earlier for late payment of protection money. Also, in his early draft reports Craig had mentioned a rare flower with promising stimulant properties that was picked by mine workers in the Concession, and later on he’d made a procurement order which had attracted no scrutiny at the time but which now looked a lot like supplies for a drug laboratory. Overall, there would have been enough evidence to imply that their internal management consultant—thirty-seven years old, unmarried, owner of a seven-hundred-dollar programmable espresso machine—had made a preposterous and doomed attempt to set himself up in Gandayaw as some sort of small-time trafficker. As the investigation continued, the hotel staff would have reported that a Burmese boy had often visited Craig in his hotel room, and the local security force would have reported that the Burmese boy was known to be a lackey of the Chinese heroin dealer’s murderous cousin.
In other words, it’s possible that Lacebark started chasing Win for corporate security reasons long before they realised that he was the only person in the world who knew how to synthesise the substance in Craig’s blood. And in fact none of this is enough to explain why Lacebark turned their attention to glow with such urgency. Even if a few young executives were open-minded and entrepreneurial enough to contemplate the possibility that an extraordinary new drug might one day be of more value than an underperforming copper and ruby mine, a handwritten note and a toxicological analysis and a few rumours about a flower in the forest would not have been sufficient to explain diversification. All that stuff is just fruit juice. Which is why Zaya is convinced that Craig, like an idiot, must also have been keeping a diary.
“After Gandayaw, Sam took me to this camp in the forest,” Win continues. “You ever read that Che Guevara Bolivian Diary? I thought it would be pretty gangster, but it’s the most boring book ever. ‘Today it rained and we had to move camp.’ ‘Today it rained and we had to move camp.’ That’s what it was like. And they made me eat roasted bats! Zaya wanted to get me out of Burma, but Lacebark were watching too close. Then Nargis happened. That was our chance. They smuggled me out of the country with a condom full of glo seeds while everything was still fucked up.”
Raf takes a sip of his tea. “So why London?”
“Foxes,” says Win. “Foxes everywhere here. Plus people take a lot of pills. We need both of those to operate. That don’t leave a lot of cities.”
“Does it really have to be foxes? It can’t be another animal?”
“I don’t know. I heard Berlin has wild boar right in the middle of the city. And they take a lot of pills there too. So that might have worked. But we didn’t want to take the risk.”
“So how did you end up in a Lacebark training facility?” Raf says, suppressing a small yawn, because it’s now dandelion on the flower clock, a couple of hours past tonight’s bedtime. Darkness has settled on the fictive transect of south London outside the window, the notional sun beginning another three-hour whirl around this classroom globe, even as the weeks skipping past in Win’s memoir superimposed yet another chronometry on the short span that’s elapsed since Raf came into this kitchen. Isaac once told him about the two competing theories of time: according to the A theory, tenses are real, and the present is a meat-grinder that converts the future irrevocably into the past, but according to the B theory, tenses are a subjective illusion, with all the different instants bound like pages into a book, sequential but static, or maybe not even sequential. Here in the training facility, Lacebark could make the B theory real, swapping one of the three dimensions of space for a dimension of time: a single upright plane would be extended into an infinite smear, like one of those multiple exposures of a golf swing or a tennis serve in a magazine, so that as you walked forward, you’d never travel even an inch farther down the street, but instead you’d slide from dawn to dusk, an army of extras brought in to represent a single individual existing at many different times in the same spot.
“You know why all animals got a blind spot, right?” says Win. “Because the gap where the optic nerve attaches to the retina is the only place you can’t fit photoreceptor cells. That’s what this place is. They running surveillance all over London. Except here.”
“But there are cameras all around us.”
“Those cameras on a separate, closed system. The footage don’t get processed by they facial-recognition algorithms.”
“So you’re just hiding here inside the blind spot?”
“Yeah. Been here since they set this place up. Half the extras, they really working for Zaya. They bring in glo. I feed it to the foxes. The foxes shit in my bathtub. I filter out the precursor and do the hard chemistry. What I end up with is, like, one reductive amination away from pure glow. I give that to the extras and they take it back to Zaya. Then his guys finish off the process. If that was happening anywhere but here, Lacebark would’ve traced the supply line to me months back, but they don’t have the imagination to see, right? That the centre of Zaya’s network could be … fuck, what’s the word?”—he snaps his fingers—“could be homotopic with the centre of they own network. The journeys they extras make between they cribs and the facility, the interactions between the extras while they here together—the hilarious thing, Lacebark take care to cut all that stuff from they ImPressure• mapping, because they don’t want any artificial distortions in the data. But we live in those distortions. ‘The calls are coming from inside the house!’ You ever see that movie? Anyway, we couldn’t have done it without help. Right now, most of the money we make from slinging glow goes to paying off the guys in the control room above the ‘pub.’ They make sure everything tilts our way.”
“Lacebark have completely lost control of their own training facility, and they don’t even realise?”
“They starting to. They don’t understand what’s happening yet, but they starting to realise something fucked up here. Nobody wants to admit it, though. Nobody wants to get fired. That’s why they so slow to catch up. You know, they run simulations in here every day? They bust in and put a hood over my head and drag me into a van. They already caught me a hundred times. They just don’t know it. Wish I could see Bezant’s face when he finds out.”
For Lacebark, Raf thinks, it must feel like a locked room mystery, with south London as the locked room. “So what are you going to do? You can’t leave the blind spot or they’ll catch you for real.”
Win smirks. “Of course I leave. I got to get laid like everybody else.”
“What do you mean?”
“I go see my boy Jesnik at the café. It’s easy. I get out like you came in. And I know where the cameras are pointed.” Every time he tunnels through that beach of rubbish in the yard, he admits, it reminds him of Hseng’s body on the dump in Gandayaw.
“Does Cherish know?”
“She knows I have a thing going with Jesnik. But she don’t know I leave this place to see him. She thinks we just jerk each other off when he comes in to deliver coffee and baklava for Belasco and the others.”
“They let him in here?”
“Yeah. He gets paid to keep his mouth shut same as the rest.”
Raf wonders about the photos on the fridge in the flat in Camberwell. He realises that although they looked like disposable camera pictures, they could just as easily have been webcam pictures printed off some cruising site. “Why haven’t you told Cherish there’s a way out of the facility?”
“I have to keep my options open. Here’s the thing: Jesnik’s uncle’s a gangster. Like, a real live one.” And he’s famous in the Serbian mafia, Win explains, partly because in the toilets of a puppet theatre he once took down three big men who’d come to kill him using only a broken fluorescent tube lamp. When Win finally leaves the facility for good, the plan is to smuggle him to a farm outside Majdanpek—the countryside there is full of foxes—where they’ll start a glo plantation and a glow factory big enough to export hundreds of kilograms of the drug a year. Jesnik’s uncle was sceptical at first, since he’d never managed to make any real money from ecstasy, but now he’s starting to negotiate terms. Of course, he doesn’t realise his nephew is gay—as far as he knows, Jesnik is just Win’s business partner.
Matryoshka dolls again, Raf thinks, except this time each doll is kept a secret from the one that contains it: the depot is disloyal to the city and the laboratory is disloyal to the depot and the chemist is disloyal to the laboratory, as if inside the Hopi reservation inside the Navajo reservation inside the state of Arizona there was yet another reservation which had a population of only one.
“You’re going to betray Cherish and Zaya?” he says.
Win shrugs. “I don’t care about that Shining Path shit. I just want to get rich and live in a big house with Jesnik the rest of my life. ‘My laboratory story keep me flowing with glory.’ ”
“The rest of your life? Really?”
“Sure.”
“So, I mean, do you love him?” says Raf, feeling like someone’s dad.
“You think I could love a bitch who hates rap music?” says Win, but he says it in a way that means “Yes.”
Raf thinks of those old men playing cards in the café. Win’s deluding himself, surely, if he thinks the Serbian mafia, of all people, are going to give him a fair deal. And although there’s real tenderness in the chemist’s voice when he talks about his boyfriend, Raf is certainly glad that none of his own inevitable break-ups took place when both parties were stranded on a rainy Balkan crime farm.
“Win, you wouldn’t be alive right now if it weren’t for Zaya,” he says. “Lacebark would’ve caught you back in Gandayaw and tortured you until you told them how to make glow. Cherish and Zaya need you so they can keep fighting. And you owe them.” Raf can see from Win’s expression that he’s not getting anywhere. And ever since he heard Win’s story about Gandayaw, there’s been a question he’s been longing to ask, even though he knows he should save it for another time. “So if Lacebark were planning to use glo to regulate polyphasic sleep schedules in the Concession, that means it must do something to your circadian rhythms, right? Make them easier to change?”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Does that mean … Do you think there could ever be a derivative that …” Raf realises he’s going to have to explain from the beginning. “Listen, I have this condition—”
Then he hears footsteps in the corridor behind him. He turns to look.
A Lacebark soldier stands in the doorway.
He’s wearing full black ops gear, like a golem built out of the darkness inside a sensory-deprivation hood. There’s a pistol in his thigh holster and he looks as if he could pop kneecaps like bubble wrap between finger and thumb. Raf’s first instinct is to try to escape through the fridge, but he knows that will expose Win’s route out of the freight depot, and they’ll probably both end up dead. In any case, a feedback squeal of terror is drowning out any orders Raf could possibly send to his limbs.
The soldier stares at him. “What the fuck are you doing here?” he says. “The call sheet just says one ethnic high-value target, as usual. No Caucasians.”
The soldier thinks Raf is just another extra. But Raf has no idea how to reply. His heart is stamping out each beat like a factory die.
The soldier strides forward, picks up Raf’s mug of tea, and pours the lukewarm dregs out into his lap. “Do you speak English? Or are you another of the Polacks? When the simulation starts, you’d better be gone, you mompie cunt, or I promise you Bezant will stick his Taser right down your fucking throat. All right?”
Raf nods, feeling the surrogate piss soak into his underwear. The soldier gives him a final long look. And then he turns and marches back down the corridor.
From the front, there’s no evidence that a coup has taken place here. The warehouse looks just as it did when Isaac showed it to him last week. But with Lacebark gone, those two million litres of empty space sing a new anthem. Patting people down for weapons around the back is a squat bouncer with pouches under his eyes that bulge like hospital blood bags, and Raf recognises him from several of Isaac’s previous raves, so they have a little chat. The soundproofing, apparently, has been more trouble than Isaac could have anticipated: almost everyone who turns up asks if the rave’s been cancelled, because they weren’t able to navigate down the street by the bass, and then they’re even more restless than usual in the queue, because usually it’s the heartbeat of the music inside that keeps you interested while you’re waiting. The steel door here reminds Raf of a particular gag in old cartoons: from total silence to loud noise as soon as it’s ajar and then back to total silence as soon as it’s shut. And when he pays his nine quid and gets inside, tears rush to his eyes just like they did when he was watching the fake rain in the freight depot, except this time there’s a grin on his face too.
Isaac’s done it. This is a genuine full-scale early nineties illegal warehouse rave of the type Raf thought he might never get a chance to experience, except that the music they’re playing is the same music you hear on Myth FM every day. As far as anyone knew, there were almost no gaps left in the surface of London, just an impermeable glossy sheath, but Lacebark bored some holes and now hundreds of people are crawling in after them. The bouncer told him that before long they’re probably going to reach “capacity,” which is Isaac’s semi-arbitrary estimate for the maximum number of people that can fit in here before it’s no fun to dance any more. As he feels the subwoofers licking his ribs with their rough Staffie tongues, Raf knows that after tonight he can never go back to that laundrette. All that’s nagging at him is the thought that the last time loud bass tones were played in this room, they were to tenderise someone for interrogation. But he decides this is just the most thorough possible reconsecration of this ground, chasing away the poison from every frequency.
On his way to the trestle-table bar for a beer, he brushes past a sweaty couple holding hands, and he realises delightedly that it’s the boy and the girl from the dryer the weekend before last—they’re rosy, seraphic, with pupils the size of howitzer barrels, and he wants to tell them that if they feel as if this is the best night of their lives, they might actually be right. Then he feels a touch on his arm. And he knows this. He’s been here before.
“This is pretty awesome,” Cherish says into his ear.
He never sees her arrive or leave anywhere, he thinks. She’s just there. Like Batman. One day he’d like to watch her untangling her headphones from her scarf from the strap of her bag as she comes into a pub. He kisses her straight away, just as if she was his girlfriend. “Yeah, it is,” he says. Then he remembers the reason he’s not supposed to enjoy himself. “Hey, I really have to talk to you about Fourpetal.”
She puts a hand on his arm. “It’s fine. We’re watching him.”
“You know where he is?”
She nods.
“So he can’t do anything stupid and get himself interrogated?”
“Raf, relax. It’s fine. I promise.”
There’s something a little bit slippery about Cherish’s casualness here. Just watching Fourpetal isn’t going to be enough, surely. That won’t stop Lacebark from getting him. Cherish should have snatched him up herself and locked him in a room somewhere. Coming to a rave with Raf should not be the priority tonight. Unless she already has a reason to be certain that Fourpetal isn’t a threat any more.
Is it possible, Raf thinks, that Fourpetal is already dead, and Cherish doesn’t want him to know? Zaya is a soldier, after all, and he probably wouldn’t think twice about killing someone who was about to wreck the whole operation. Of course, Zaya couldn’t have physically accomplished it himself. But Ko could have. Or Cherish. Raf looks at her, wondering if she would have been capable of a pragmatic murder. It doesn’t feel plausible. But maybe that’s just because she’s so pretty and he doesn’t have any imagination. After all, she’s a soldier too. Raf doesn’t know how he’d feel about the right and wrong of it all if he learned that Fourpetal really had been stubbed out. For the hundredth time, he runs through all the people Fourpetal could doom. Cherish and Zaya and Ko and Win and Jesnik and Raf himself.
But Cherish is right. He should relax. Even if Lacebark had conquered the whole of the rest of London and driven every other cuckoo out of every other nest, for the next few hours it wouldn’t matter. Tonight this warehouse is a demilitarised zone. “I need to say hello to Isaac.”
They swim through the crowd towards the low platform where the decks are set up. Isaac is sharing a spliff with the MC. When he sees Raf, he waves and hops down off the platform. “Mate!” he shouts. “You made it!”
“Of course I made it.”
Isaac looks at Cherish. “Is this her?”
“This is her,” says Cherish.
Isaac turns to Raf and makes such a diverse and protracted series of gestures and facial expressions signifying “Good work!” that even Cherish giggles.
“When’s your set?” says Raf.
“At three. Assuming the next DJ turns up. Otherwise it’s in twenty minutes.”
“Make sure you play that track with the harp sample.”
“Listen, Barky finally managed to get hold of some real glow,” says Isaac. “Do you two want any? I know this is sort of the wrong way round, given where it … You know.” He looks at Cherish. “Comes from.”
Raf panics. Isaac might as well be wielding a syringe full of sodium thiopental. If Raf gets high with Cherish, the oxytocin will make him feel like nothing in the world could be more pleasurable than spurting out all his secrets. She doesn’t know that he visited the real Win in the training facility, nor does she know about Win and the Serbian mafia. Even if Win is ready to betray Cherish, it doesn’t seem to Raf that he has any right to betray Win after Win confided in him like that.
“I don’t want to take any tonight,” he says.
“Why not?” says Cherish.
This is especially frustrating because for obvious reasons he is desperate to find out for himself what glow is like. Also, he knows Cherish would look more gorgeous than ever as the drug took its effect on them both—objectively gorgeous because of the bloom of elation it would put in her face and subjectively gorgeous because of the lens of elation it would put in his eyes—the love they’d find in each other until it wore off would be silvery and fathomless like the small universe between two mirrors. A rave like this deserves glow. But he just can’t.
Improvising, he says to her so Isaac won’t hear, “When we fuck later, I want to be able to come.”
He’s almost sure he can see a flicker of relief behind her smile, and he realises she probably had just the same worry as him. She has plenty of secrets to keep too. That much he knows for sure.
“OK,” she says. “I guess if you’re not taking any, I’m not taking any.”
“So it’s ‘love is the drug’ with you two now?” says Isaac. “All right. More for me.”
“Let’s get some shots and then I want to dance,” says Cherish.
Raf gives Isaac a hug. “See you in a bit.”