1
Up the hill, they come. Ancient lovers old as sunset, younger than dew. Nothing is weathered about them, everything is new. They walk close-knit, fingers clasped. They know the land as distinctly as they understand their love, and theirs is a love of an unusual kind. Away to the right, past the hills toward an emerald stream below, white cedars sway. Their leaves hum, a lowly grove song much filled with wonderment. The year is 5019.
At the apex of the climb, the lovers stand silent. They listen to the cedars and an otherworldly sound of wind, first a soft chuckle, then something merrier that rolls. Now, slowly, a resonant echo winds up the columns of the trees from the ground up until, by and by, it is tall enough to stir the hillcrest with fresh notes of a brand-new song.
And so, the lovers dance. Their dance is expression, direction, transition. Her foot slides to the left. His steps in to close the space, alternates and glides to the back. She flirts toward it. He grinds his hips to her pelvis and guides her dance. When her foot meets his, she lifts it, flexes her knee, until her leg wraps fully around him. Her back is supple, leaned in a downward bend away from him. She sways from side to side, arms afloat, and then a complete stillness claims her. It is the stillness of a timeless kind. Finally, gently, the flat of his palm at the nip of her waist carries her rise from the ground until she is tall once more, until their lips are near enough to brush.
She tastes of rain and sun and snow.
Her hands are soft and beautiful about him; his are firm and coarse, strong and tender in their claim of her waist. Liam Keen opens his eyes, thinks how striking the world beyond her head, how happy and wild the wind blows, how it draws closer, closer still, until its closeness widens curls from their cozy tightness on her head, until they blow left and away from her face in a single, white sheet.
Dancing with her is easy as one. He kisses her deeply into dawn.
2
Summer of 2013
Sounds of singing cicadas filled the air. A red box chocolate selection (bite-size) lay scattered on the road. Heart-shapes soaked and melted in warm crimson as Liam Keen lifted off the ground. He looked from a distance at mangled remains of him—meat, blood and bone—wedged around tire, glass and metal. He felt no emotion seeing himself like that. But he knew at once that he was dead.
A blonde woman with a bleeding face, driver of the Roaditor Turbo, a four-wheel jumbo, was dead too. Tossed through the windshield, impaled on a stump growing by the wayside. Her powdered cheek gashed to white bone. Crimson-spattered wood protruded through a jagged gap in her back. Torn flesh and blood hung from the stub’s spear. Sticky puddles spread from purple grass and crept along the road, as the malevolent spike of wood faced a lime sky. Streaks of cloud waded toward a golden sun in the horizon.
The world around and beyond Liam moved at normal pace. No crowd gathered, three-people thick to amaze at death. Two streets away, Hoochi Mama was baking fresh cinnamon bread. Cabbies leaned lazily by their yellow cars chewing gum as if it were cud. Forlorn cigarette butts stuck out of green, silver-capped rubbish bins. A curly-haired male carried shopping bags marked “Neutral Planet” in both hands. He gave the accident scene a passing glance and crossed the road.
Cyclists and cars diverted to unaffected streets. A woman with bouncy hair walked her dog as skimpily clad joggers ran this way and that past a revolving fountain sprinkling crystal water. Only naked mannequins stared, some in shocked silence, from the perspective of a shop window, others quietly amused at the magical indifference of the Metropolis.
3
Audrey
Before that summer there was Audrey.
Tonight, dinner was molecular food. It reminded Liam of black caviar and rose champagne. But it was neither. His wife Audrey, a born cook, was a retired actress. What she had placed at the dining table in a sizzling plate on a linen placemat was soft on the tongue. Its texture was like the pulp of a summer fruit. Its chew finished with a hint of zucchini flowers.
Together, they cleared the table.
Audrey handwashed the dishes, Liam dried. They worked in silence, always like this.
And then: “There then.” She pecked him on the cheek.
“Already?”
She smiled in a tolerating way. “It’s been a long day.”
“Alright then.”
She climbed up the stairs to her room whose walls were sprigged with heart-shaped bouquets. His had 3D rendering, cubes, fires and dark.
He tried to read the news, swiped his handheld tablet. He flicked through articles and stories, restless. Same old: celebrity scandal, teen gang arrest, new gadget on the market.
He retired not long after to his own downstairs bedroom.
He dropped his day clothes, insurance guy smart casual. He took to the bathroom. A blast of heat as the shower ran. He polished each tooth one by one inside the hum of an automated toothbrush. The tiles on his floor sparkled around the shower mat. He used a spare towel to wipe the spray. He rubbed his hair as he walked out of the ensuite bathroom, and stopped short.
“Someone’s been sleeping in my bed,” he said lightly. “Someone’s still sleeping in my bed.”
Audrey lay neat inside his doona. He felt a flutter of excitement. This was unbelievable. He threw aside the doona. Inside it, on his bed, she lay posed for him. She was wearing a black, lacy number he had not seen before. It was far different from her nightgown that resembled in shape, color and feel what a medic on call might wear. The lace Audrey wore was nothing like the medic’s cloth: this one showed everything.
Liam blinked. She was still there: Audrey. In his bed. Not in her own aurora bed, four-poster, in her room at the top of the stairs. She was here, laying on her back, posed and ready for him. And it wasn’t his birthday.
That’s right: he got lucky on birthdays and special occasions.
Liam threw off his pajamas and climbed in his jocks beside her. “What’s this?” He touched the straps of her lacy number.
“For the love of—”.
“Have I forgotten something?”
A flitting in her eye. “What do you mean?”
“Special something?”
“Nope.”
He couldn’t remember the last time . . . No, he remembered. Every detail. Her cream ankles.
Who knew what snatched couples apart, why after a starry-eyed start they wound up living, perhaps quibbling, like siblings? But Audrey didn’t fight. How did you pick a fight with someone unruffled?
He slid the straps off her shoulders. His lips tailed his hand as he moved the clothing.
“Please,” she said.
Mesh covered her velvet skin. He traced the lines of her tiny undergarment, a black silhouette, vivid against her skin.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“I don’t want to rush this.”
“It’s not rushing—we need to sleep.”
He pressed against her. She gave him an uncertain smile, one that said he was too close. He kissed her fully on the lips. Her lips were soft, but she did not kiss him back. Audrey didn’t, couldn’t, kiss anyone back.
“Really, Liam. Stop mucking around. Please.”
She lay immaculate, quiet. Then she pushed his weight, slid from him.
“Night darling.” Her peck on his forehead. Her graceful glide out the door, away from him, away from the disquiet of his room, toward the safety and normality of her own room.
***
Before the dinner, with Audrey, always with Audrey, Liam reminisced about his homeworld: Bathox. No Roaditor Turbos there, four-wheeled jumbos: just gruntless gliders, flexi vessels that shape-shifted into any trajectory. In Bathox, travel was another realm. Everywhere was possible.
Nero was one of the first of this world that Liam saw the day he poured out of an acorn. There was a freshness about the air. Liam sat naked, gliderless, arms wrapped about himself, before he unfurled. People stared as he walked. Someone shrugged off a coat and hugged it around him. It was Nero. Later, Liam understood why people stared. Not so much for his nakedness, but for the magnificence of the body he inhabited.
In those early days, Audrey said he was perfect. And Audrey was not a black mirror. The reflection was true. In those days, the two of them spoke, truly spoke. They communed with easiness, easy words, easy eyes of friends, of lovers. Audrey asked no questions. His past was just that: history. From the moment of his arrival to this world, Liam understood that now was now. Immediate. But not a day went past without hauling his mind to Bathox, to the ones he left behind.
In the early days of Audrey, Liam’s heart was still a wasteland. He was bruised, disheveled, whisked inside out. Reeling at the aftermaths of an intergalactic war that brought him to this world. He was ready to neck himself. But Audrey fixed him. The moment their eyes met, they had a real moment right there. Be choosy, his heart said. Females are moths, they flitter from light to light. But Audrey stayed.
***
Might have been easier if they’d fought. If Audrey were tight-faced and screaming, shrew-like and abusing, spitting out words that not only goaded but stuck. Abuse that returned to haunt in little bursts: in the stillness of the bath, between pages of a novel, in the heart of a dream.
Liam might have understood if there had been a wrestle, if—as he held her by the hair to subdue her and she punched girly fists into his ribs—she had said it. Or if she had flung something at him and it bounced off his cheek, cracked on the floor and, as he touched his flaming skin, she had said it. Or if he’d beat her up so bad and, as cops pressed him to the back of a car, she had said it.
But there was no precedent. Even if she had said it that normal way, fought him, lashed horrible words at him, then spat intentions of leaving, it would have been hard, so very hard, to let her go.
***
It was middle of spring. Audrey sat delicious and serene across the dinner table. She listened with slanted head to the flavor of a buttered parsnip on her tongue. She smiled at Ride of the Valkyries playing in the background. She held her fork with nails faultlessly shaped; chewed delicately and moved lips immaculately painted; dabbed at those lips with a napkin flawlessly white. She sat there clad in cat-walk material: baby-soft, catchy enough to intrigue, toned enough to not encroach.
When the serenity of Bach touched their world, there was no disdain in Audrey’s look at Liam. No wonderment at a fool with the table manners of a possum, as he fingered corn on the cob, greased cutlery with messy hands, and pushed aside parsley with a thumb.
That type of derision was not in those temptation eyes that lifted from her plate, not in those lips that smiled a tender smile, and said, “His name is Flint.”
The music stopped. Perhaps the classical selection had come to a natural end. Audrey’s smile, directed at something between Liam’s nose and his forehead in that long stretch of silence, rendered him useless. He looked at Audrey and said nothing. Not “Why?” or “How?” or “When?” Perhaps she would have understood if he had spoken, would have perfectly understood with that efficient air of hers. But he gave nothing.
Now was no longer now. No longer immediate. Who was this Audrey?
She forked a sliver of beef, placed it in her little mouth, toyed with the flavor as she ate it. She even nibbled and swallowed a second parsnip, began to pierce a capsicum but thought better of it.
He waited, fork and knife poised in space. Stared in silence at the woman who was everything to him, and more: his firework—the sparkler on the wick; his candle—the orange on the flame; his flower—the velvet on the petal. Audrey was his stream, his river, his moon. And now she, she . . . He said nothing.
Liam remembered the bright stars and triple moons by day back home in Bathox, gazebos overlooking natural air-loft gardens that shimmered like ruby and emerald chandeliers, cratered beaches full of water birds . . . He remembered how back home in Bathox mating was for life.
Audrey laid down her fork, dubbed at soft lips, folded the napkin and laid it on the calm table. She sipped a baby nip of burgundy wine, left no stain of lipstick on its rim. She stood up, hedged the table, paused. Even lifted hair from her face with immaculate fingers, smoothed it and pushed it to unruffled waves. Only when she turned away did he grip the edge of the table as if to rise, as if to follow her with those questions: “How?” “Where?” “When?”
He began to rise but his knees gave. So, he sat with a tomb in his heart. A dark, uninvited tomb that deepened, filled emptiness with more empty, blackened darkness with more black. When anxiety began to rise, then confusion, pain, and finally rage so wild it was silent, his mouth tasted of cardboard.
Audrey moved away from the table. When the door shut quietly behind her, Liam watched the wood, as though his wife were embossed on it.
Suddenly, he felt fear. Fear of loneliness real as touch. Beyond that moment, that night, that revelation, what else? He hugged his fork, listened to her heels clip! clip! clip! toward the door, as they had done, even though she was no longer in the room. His name is Flint . . . Flint . . . Flint . . . The ghost clippity clip did nothing to soothe those words said calmly, yard-long words from the weight of them, words that had slipped with ease from such beautiful lips. Refusing to settle, the words filled Liam’s air with resonance: Flint . . . Flint . . . Flint . . .
He sat with his knife and fork. Before he had time to grasp it, bank it, judge it, confront it, scorn the value of it, define it, comprehend it even—so deep was the astonishment, it rendered him powerless—she was gone.
Audrey took with her that wildflower smell associated with home. She also took her tennis racket, a rosy negligee, two suitcases, four yoga video tapes, a bunch of books, her classical collection, and Liam’s heart.
***
That night, he wiped clean the bottle of burgundy wine she had nipped with baby sips. Before long, such was his state, he had summoned moroseness. Together they pulled several cans from the fridge, sat on the floor, killed a pint of lager and then two. Beer raced down Liam’s throat. When it pressed down on his bladder, he sorted it.
Then he took the advice of moroseness and reclined on a cushion on the floor, Audrey’s velvet cushion soft as a cat. There, he sank to acres of drinking solace. When eyelids finally closed, he succumbed to a maudlin sleep where he once more became a little boy with freckles large as pebbles.
But that little boy snored like a swine and an amoeba of drool spread from one side of his lip down his chin.
***
The corn was still on the cob on a dirty plate three days later. So were parsley and sleek cucumber slices, thin enough for a royal garden party, interspersed with cold beef julienne.
All Liam felt was . . . misplaced. He missed Bathox. He missed Audrey.
And somewhere out there Audrey was in bed tucked in the arms of a man named Flint.
On the fourth morning of drinking to a stupefied sleep, he woke with a blooming headache and bloodshot eyes. Soon as his headache waned, soon as he trusted his stomach, Liam ran. Rock-a-tee. Rock-a-tee. Past an abandoned pond lined with trees. Green trees, yellow trees, red trees, brown trees, leafless trees . . . A morning shadow raced with him below pale blue sky interspersed with silver gray clouds. A rising sun glided in and out of the clouds. Liam’s feet pounded footpaths, cyclists swerved around him, some shouted profanities, but he kept moving miles, miles out.
Rock-a-tee. Rock-a-tee. Rock-a-tee-tee-rock-a-tee.
He stopped running.
A warm sheet of sweat poured down his back and his temples. Leaning forward, he caught his breath under the silvered sky, on nutty gravel alongside grass moist with dew. Hands on his knees, he studied mad goose pimples stealing off his skin. His sweatshirt prickled from cling. Wet cotton shorts gripped his thighs.
He jogged back home to an apartment tight with absence. Strewn with dirty socks and plates, empty beer cans and scattered bottles of Claret, Shiraz, even cleanskins. Treasures Audrey overlooked when she left. He phoned the office to call in sick. A tight-arsed receptionist, broomstick up her whatsit, put him through—finally!—to Wolfe, squad boss at the dastardly insurance company.
Wolfe was not having a barrel of it. “You’re fired,” he said.
4
Nero knocked the door down—nearly.
He was a ballistics expert. Married to Vivienne Frontczak, a hybrid of Plutian and terrestrial descent; a model, legs to her chest. It was Vivienne who introduced Liam to Audrey Rivers, a movie actress with ivory-white skin and delicious eyes.
Now Nero looked about Liam’s forlorn house and said: “Place smells like rotten socks. It smells like something burning.”
“My brain,” muttered Liam. He was a dirty, disheveled mess on the bed.
Nero whistled. “Who let you out of the cage?”
“Audrey, she left me.”
“Oh man.”
That was before Liam told him about the phone chat with Wolfe.
“Man!”
And then he said: “Dude up, mate. Run, swim, do what you must. And you need a job. Two choices, matey. Moon over Audrey. Or consider a serious career in the martial force. Inside information—we’re recruiting.”
Serious career in the force, chose maudlin Liam.
Nero ended up filling the application tablet himself. Same day he put it in for initial screening and processing, Liam took his abandoned Streetwagon, wrapped a seatbelt around him and hit the road. He ran a red on Napoleon Street and got booked for drunk driving.
Nero bailed him out. Even drove him home.
“That’s one quick way to get martial attention,” he said to Liam. “Thirty-five kilometers per hour over the speed limit. Blood alcohol over 2.2. Way over. You’re not a P-plater, Liam. Are you mad?”
Liam regarded him with riot eyes. “Go home now,” he slobbered. “I’m good, Nero.”
“I am not leaving you, matey,” he said.
“I’m right as rain. Go home.”
“Not a spotting chance.” Nero dragged Liam to the bathroom. “Look at the mirror. Go on. Look at yourself.”
Liam lifted his head enough to brush a swift glance. Sunken cheeks, a grim pallor and drooping jaws looked back at him. Liam did not know that man in the mirror.
“Go to the gym,” Nero said. “Anything. Mooning doesn’t bring her back. Sober up, matey. Audrey’s gone.”
He tucked Liam in bed, brought him kick-arse coffee from Star Frek, or Star Wars, followed by a whopper burger and a chilled can of soda.
“God bless soda,” garbled Liam. “Lazarus in a can.” He began to sob. Thick, manly sobs, awful and loud.
Nero snapped. “Pull yourself together, grief! An ability to splash your boots does not distinguish you.”
He stormed out, leaving Liam with a hangover face streaked like a badly peeled orange. Next morning, Nero showed at Liam’s door. Refused to come in and stood by the step. Quietly, he stretched out a small tablet with a phone code on it.
Liam took it. “Thanks buddy,” he said. Pale cheeks and a lethargic smile.
“No worries.”
It took nine days. Nine whole days for Liam to summon enough interest at the number. He was sure Nero had given him a hotline to a loony bin or some nut-cracking shrink. All Liam needed was a kick up the arse, and he could get that for free; why when he was job free would he want a shrink who charged a spleen? He fiddled listlessly with the tablet and put it down.
***
For the first time in weeks, Liam took himself to an aqua center. It was deserted, nearly closing. An attendant with russet hair and vexed eyes made the rounds.
Liam stripped to his jocks. He stepped into the cool waters. He tucked on the wall, hips away from his feet, threw his arms out and his body arched into the peak of his dive. He aligned his body to the water. He timed the rotation of his trunk to the movement of his arm. He finished the stroke with a deep sweep that completed the cycle.
He swam like it was life. And death.
When he jumped out of the pool and into the shower, revigorated, he knew what he needed to do. He smiled at the attendant with an abundance of charm he had not felt in a while. That night, inside the hum of the automated toothbrush, as he polished each tooth one by one, he gazed at the muddiness of the floor tiles, and observed that they needed a clean.
He picked up the tablet and finally dialed the code. It was no psychiatric hospital.
“I’m no six-figure case,” a woman said after his introductory mutterings. “My fee is easy. I specialize in all conversions.”
5
Sugar Sweetman
Without reason or conviction, Liam accepted an appointment for which he promptly showed. Bunched blocks looked like little fists in Saville Row. Cab drivers idled and gossiped by the sidewalk. Given opportunity for something else, they watched Liam with lazy eyes.
He stepped out of the battered Streetwagon, rifled through his pockets for the address in a fit of panic, and found it:
Level 3, 517 Saville Row.
Hoochi Mama stood at 513, a bakery. Two doors away, Liam stepped through a doubtful, unnumbered doorway. It was tall between alternate numbers, which made it likely to be 517. A ground-floor reception with wall-to-wall carpeting (threadbare) stood unmanned. Hedging bets on the address and still having no clue as to what his appointment was about, he took a dawdling lift to Level Three.
A woman with cherry lips, cotton-white hair and black candy-eyes that went deep, deep, deep, answered the first door he knocked.
“Yes?” She smoothed her baby doll top.
No roots in that snow hair indicated altered color: auburn, blonde, brunette or flame. White-as-white brows matching the white-as-white hair suggested natural color. Honey skin, a bust firmed with youth, she was younger and far prettier than her voice. Fingers rubbing her chin, she cast a glance at Liam’s bowed shoulders. His eyes touched the ground, uncertainty in them.
“No change, darling,” she said. “Come along later. We’ll find something. Maybe food too. Those bones need meat.”
For his haggard, disheveled look, he realized, she had mistaken him for a tramp. He opened his lips to speak, to ask directions to one Sugar Sweetman. But the woman had already turned toward the inner room and was waving him inside.
“You look crook,” she said. “Belushi, can of baked beans. Come in. I’ll feed you, all right. This once. Come.”
He followed.
“I’m no bargain store, chappy,” she tossed over her shoulder. “But something’s going down for you to look that crook.” She nodded at a visitor’s lounge. “We’ll fix us up good.”
“I’m—” He couldn’t bring himself to say it was a case of mistaken identity. He wasn’t a tramp.
“Yes?”
“Sugar. Sweetman. If you could just show me where she—”
“Who are you?”
“My . . . my name . . . Liam—”
“Keen?” Her gaze incredulous.
He brightened. “Are you Sugar Sweetman?”
“None other twenty miles round.”
“On the phone . . .” he said. “We—”
She threw back her head and laughed. “You’re worse than Nero said. Belushi, can of baked beans. Worse.” Loud, rolling laughter spread free as a sneeze.
When Sugar’s laughter subsided, she lifted a menu-like tablet from a chrome shelf unit. Wordlessly, she passed it over to him and left him to it in the visitor’s lounge. He looked at the list spread out before him, the graphics and explanations of each, and flushed.
She returned dressed in a daffodil-yellow kimono of slinky silk. Lemon drops sprigged with crimson baby spade-leaves. They danced on the cloth. A topaz necklace swayed above smooth honey-colored breasts. A heady scent, clover and wild, wrapped around her as she moved.
She pressed a small shot glass into his hand. “Malt Rum,” she said. Her hands were rough as a farmer’s, the nails on them clean and trimmed. But her touch on his fingers was like a spinal tap. It shook him all over.
“Drink,” she said. He hesitated. “You’ll need it.”
He took a gulp.
“You look comfortable,” he managed through a tight throat, wary of what was on offer.
“Comfortable?”
She threw her head back and laughed, that loud-as-a-sneeze laughter, perhaps louder. It spread, it tinkled. One couldn’t ignore it. He couldn’t.
“Comfortable,” she said again. “I’m comfy, darling. More than.” Candy-eyes appraised him. “Now you need to be.”
She led him by hand to an inside chamber, a room that smelled of lavender, primulas and cyclamens. It, in fact, had those very flowers in colorful array in a vase.
Liam noted a leather head on a Rustler king bed of solid timber in the Pharaoh suite.
Sugar sensed his severe mental baggage. She treated him like one on the critical list.
He exclaimed, closed his eyes and faded into a calm sleep.
6
He stirred to her coaxing, fingers and then hands, finally her mouth, rousing him.
He was lying on his back, but she pulled him so that he sat, entwined in her arms. She nurtured him in her caress. “Think of Audrey.”
They soared to a cosmic dimension.
“I’m a body artist,” she whispered, as he wept.
***
The weather was wild when he stepped outside the building. He hunched against a whooshing wind. Cold air touched his nostrils, inside a heady scent of warm cinnamon bread from Hoochi Mama. His jacket flapped about until he clutched the ends.
Hoochi Mama was impossible to resist.
“How you doing?” said a heavy mono-eyed woman with a bust ten melons wide.
“You’re lucky to be inside.”
She followed his eyes out the flapping shutters.
“Does that to people, the bread,” she said with a twinkling eye. “How many bread you want?”
He settled for one loaf.
She peered into the oven. “Ready in a minute.” Her R dragged. “Drink-a coffee? How you take it?” Gave him marks with index and thumb joined in a circle with the word “Good”. It was a compliment. “Too much sugar no good. Look-a me!”
He joined her honest-as-music laughter. The coffee when it came was something else. One sip tightened his nipples.
“Have-a some apple cinnamon,” she said. Wouldn’t take no for an answer. The bun was crispy and golden outside, perfectly baked inside. It fell apart like snow in his mouth. He closed his eyes to linger the taste.
“You drink-a more coffee?” He couldn’t. But she tossed a puffed bun anyhow into the brown paper bag with his crusty cinnamon bread.
“Don’t insult-a me,” when he tried to pay for the coffee.
In the car on the way back, he wondered about Sugar, how she fit in his picture of healing. Why exactly had Nero directed Liam to her?
When confronted, Nero mounted a very scientific argument. “You needed a score, baby. Been running on reserve, man. Seeping to subzero.”
“But why?” Liam demanded.
“Why were you on reserve? You tell me!”
“Why did you give me Sugar’s number?”
“Your existence was dominated by a woman who tossed you out like a bin. Now you’ve got momentum to find purpose beyond Audrey, you ask me why?”
“I thought the number was for a shrink,” Liam said.
“You wanted a shrink?”
“No-o.”
“Listen, matey,” Nero put a hand on Liam’s shoulder. “I did a bust once. Explosives. I was green, knew jack. And there were explosives. Know what the officer-in-charge did? He said: ‘If you hear a big boom, lurch out the nearest exit, hop into a car and drive.’ That’s what our officer said. ‘Drive like mad. Don’t try and be a hero.’” He removed his hand. “You are in a boom, mate. One hell of a plonker. Drive.”
“Yes. Well. Fine one to say. But—” he had to know. “How did you . . . surely . . . What in heaven will Viv think—?”
“Leave my wife out of this.”
Liam finally squeezed it out of him: “First time I met Sugar, she was a tarot card reader.”
And—yes—Nero did know about the menu in Sugar’s no-red-carpet apartment.
7
Sugar paced him. She ran him through her menu, one that left no boaty burp. Sure, sometimes she cooked. But whatever it was on that menu, it had little to do with food.
Despite all that, Liam was dismayed to find Audrey hung on in his head, refusing to dislodge. He left lengthy messages on her mobile. She never answered, never called back. But he was possessed by the woman. She spread, filling every brain cell of him, growing more and more beautiful each dream. He soon succumbed to the realization he was a well-adjusted slob: Audrey had left an indelible scent of herself in his head; an imprint like a bloodstain that constantly reminded him of death.
Through it all, Sugar was a gun. A bit more each time.
One day, sensing his deep helplessness, his neediness as he sobbed in her arms with no self-preservation, she set him straight. “I give no absolutes,” she said. White-as-white hair flicked. “Falling in love is a no-no.” She squeezed him gently. “That’s one potential danger slot.” Sweet saucer eyes regarded him. Black candy-eyes that went deep and deep.
And though his heart raced tall and fast, he understood her words. They were simple. He could take what she offered. Use it, need it, but he could never, could never ever control it.
He accepted that space: no complications.
And it was just as well. He was home and hosed when it came to no complications. Liam could hold his own now. Love was black-eyed venom.
8
At the aqua center there was another swimmer in the water. She left the wall, arms first. Her head and shoulders came out of the water. Kick, she lunged forward.
On his way home, he saw her again, across the car park. She dropped something—her goggles.
“Thanks,” her voice syrupy. Their fingers touched past the goggles.
He noticed her frumpy look: a jean shirt above a striped frock; a black jacket thrown over the shirt; soiled shoes and the most ridiculous rucksack. He also noticed her hair: sloppily contained with a single clip, but how lustrous! It was chestnut with highlights. It twinkled under a blonde moon, a single moon, unlike the triple moons of Bathox.
Bathox: memories of it ambushed him when he least expected.
He made his way through the dusk, stopped by a traffic light. The night was full of innocence, no angry clouds in the horizon. Down the road, the wink of a garbage van’s lights. A chill in the air blew his way. The wind smelled lightly of smog, or smoke, or a whiff of reeds. Out yonder, a line of birds climbed on a silent migration to someplace.
Liam looked about him in the night. He spotted the odd folk loitering about: a man with a short crop, but half his face covered in a mustache, walking past a pharmacy. A girl with crystal eyes and a boyish figure. She clapped down the street in knee-high boots, past a fleet of shops: a closed fish and chips, a pawn shop, a shoe repair shop. She cut into a corner. A gent with a furrowed brow and receding hair. He walked in Liam’s direction.
Liam wondered about them. Singly, he studied anyone he saw. Were there other visitors to this world like him? Hard to tell—how easily visitors blended. How they cleaved through people. Like him, arrivals didn’t come with a beak on their face or bark in their skin. They looked like everyday folk. They played laidback and they fit. Like Audrey, who belonged to this world. She fit. Yes, he still remembered Audrey. Wisps of her catapulted in chambers of his mind: the kitchenette, the lounge, the bedroom. Memories of her lunged at him with the intensity of a longing that was also a nightmare.
At this moment, he thought, a man named Flint was in bed, dragging Audrey under his breath. Did she wear black lace that showed everything, sprawled on his bed and willing?
He remembered how he and Audrey that final night had sat together yet alone, how she smiled a tender smile, and said words that shot out like grenades. “His name is Flint.” He remembered how the music stopped.
9
It took twelve full lunar cycles of Sugar and of Hoochi Mama’s hot cinnamon bread before Liam’s application to the force was screened and processed. Before he knew it, he was a recruit. Then he was a cop. His life was getting back on track. It had taken a while getting his faculties together, but he was no longer morose and maladjusted. Sure, he still wept at Sugar’s. But the rest of him kicked to a new dimension. Sugar had repaired him to good nick. Keen career prospects were looking his way. The rate he was going, Nero was hinting at ballistics.
***
One day, Sugar upped the ante.
“New item on the menu,” she said. “Obsessavaganza.”
She tossed her white-as-white hair. He ran his fingers through it, and agreed.
Obsessavaganza.
First, she ran him a warm bath.
Liam soaked in the fat tub, legs wrapped around the faucet as water rushed against his body. He thought about the water, its hydrogen and oxygen molecules combined, reacted together, a chemical equation not dissimilar from person-to-person chemistry. In one combination, it formed water—purging, sustaining. In another: hydrogen peroxide—burning, toxic. Time slipped by. He sat and sat in that bathtub scented with tropical pineapple salt.
He remembered how he arrived in a glider. How it needed something compact and small to shoot into, else the energy scatter arising from velocity and impact would cause a blast. He wondered how many visitors to this world reached safe passage. Acorns made good landing. Or okra. Coconuts were too big.
He remembered Audrey’s profoundly beautiful eyes teeming with something more, her smile genuine and big soon as she set eyes on him. He remembered their first bath together, how she scrubbed the parts of his back he couldn’t reach, how the pleasure was near impossible to take.
What went wrong?
Now Sugar delivered him to the bedroom. She produced a towel, plush in its thickness, ripe in its yellow color. Toweled, dried, he lay on her Rustler king bed. He allowed himself to relax to the hum of ornamented music: it threw up slurs and bends and slides and wails. It rose and fell, jigged and reeled as music notes bent, cut and rolled before they softened to quiet.
Sugar caressed him all over. She explored with her fingers. First, she guided him through eye circles: look at the ceiling. Breathe. Move your eyes only. Look as far left as you can. Now as far right. Now toward your feet. Your eyes only moving, not your head.
Then she massaged his jaw. Breathe. Make a sound. Any sound. What sound? Be silly.
She held his jaw with her hands, wiggled it. She pressed her fingers into his lips, reached into his cheeks, massaged his teeth, his gums. She worked his head, lolled it from side to side. She touched his belly, kneaded gently with her hands and then fists. She squeezed and released until he felt loosened, and then tense as the pressure of her hands shifted to a new dance on his skin.
It was an awakening.
He strained for her touch, willed her hands to reach every part of him. Energy rushed through his body like steam. He felt new and hot all at once, breathed faster and faster unable to contain himself. As more and more energy engulfed him, the intensity pushed tears to his eyes. It felt like any moment he would fly. He took a breath. He thought about the water, its hydrogen and oxygen molecules. Just then, Sugar moved her touch. His breath fell.
The sensation . . . It was ecstasy, a dance drug, a spa. Firepower. Release. Pressure. Release. Heightened senses pulsated in every inch of him. Liam’s life stood still, then he was flying into a bright light. He swallowed his cry—only just. Something snapped and exploded. His body whistled in all parts.
Obsessavaganza.
It stamped Audrey right off his head, a complete whitewash. First, fragments of her sprinkled away like shards of glass, and then blew away like fairy dust. Liam nearly danced outright. He started a victory dance with his hand, but Sugar restrained him.
“You have matriculated with honors,” she said.
“Therapy,” his voice full of wonderment.
To celebrate, Sugar cooked for him. She tossed a live, squirming lobster into an angry frying pan spitting oil. Stirred it with a wooden spoon until the shell snapped. Inside, the meat was white and tender.
They ate from one bowl with their hands, spat shells into another. Liam’s fumbles with the lobster, pinching its legs with thumb and index fingers, snapping clumsily to arrive at moist meat inside, amused Sugar.
Tender, juicy, fresh—that lobster eaten so primitively was far different from Audrey’s thread-thin bream, ribboned bell pepper arranged on a plate in a bouquet of purple, green and orange around baby strips of beef. No classical music, Valkyries and the like. Just Sugar’s fat laughter that tinkled, prickled and spread bigger than a sneeze.
Sugar was vintage. And she was addictive. With a girl-next-door demeanor, candy soft eyes and big white-as-white hair, she was no spread for a magazine cover. But she mastered a fine art few women could boast. After Obsessavaganza, Liam never thought of Audrey. Not once. In fact, she receded to a very thin memory that did not meaningfully upset him.
No sterner measures were necessary for healing at this point.
Yet to oblige Sugar—or perhaps to expand his horizon—Liam tried, in a pivotal moment, Erase. Sugar dropped a gloop of oil on his body, and greased him up. She lunged at him in tackles, one knock and down he went on flexed knee clutching at his ribs.
She swung a hook in an unprecedented back flip that had plenty on it. She swooped him, kneed him, punched him, kicked him. Threw him, choked him, tonged him, cuffed him, chained him, concussed him. Left purple bruises bigger than grapefruit on his skin. He caved, driven half-mad with pain and pleasure.
He knew that when he left Sugar’s to stop at Hoochi Mama’s, she might ask, “You run-a red light? You bang-a into a wall?” He could well have slid under a freight train, the way he looked. Winded, he amazed at Sugar’s strength.
Belushi, can of baked beans! he thought on a whopper flyer. Celestial. Pigs might fly.
10
They lay side by side on a fuchsia carpet, feet touching. A lime sky streaked with smoky cloud out the far window. Tall glasses sizzled with bubbly between them. It was the first time, he realized, she’d got a sparkly for them.
“What did she do to you?” Sugar asked.
“Who?” he asked, tongue lazy with vintage fizz. Distinct apricots, acid and a blend of something biscuity toyed on his lips.
She raised on her elbows. “Audrey.”
“What do you mean?” he hedged.
“Why did her leaving make you like you were? Break you?”
Light from a white, shifting sun caught the mahogany wood of a chiffonier. He was silent for a moment, not sure where this question had come from. Bothered him where it was headed.
“I don’t know,” he said quietly at last. “I really don’t know.”
A distant craft soared across the streaked sky. Liam followed it with his eyes until it vanished beyond the window. Even then, he still thought and wondered about why “His name is Flint” had left him so off the rails. Broken him enough to need fixing.
Sugar rose from the floor and stood there in a Fanta-orange kimono by the chiffonier. Layers of age formed unique contours on the wood. She gazed at him.
Slowly, his words began to form. He let them spill out in bits and fits as they came. “She was the works.” There was no texture in his voice. “Audrey was. A prime cut.”
Sugar nodded lightly. “A fine, fine lady she must have been.”
“She wasn’t.”
“Then life insurance. Was she? Life insurance to you, Liam?”
“Hell no.” Texture came back to his voice. “Never.”
Sugar laughed. A tickling, prickling whooper laugh that spread enough to make him smile.
“Then she was a fine cigar,” she said when she stopped laughing. “Or beautiful music you couldn’t dance to.”
“Or a cab,” he said. “I thought she would drive me someplace in this world. Didn’t know where. Didn’t care how. I just wanted her there with me.”
“How about that heartfelt! Never spoke more candid.”
Tinkling laughter again, merry as a clarinet.
“Come here,” he said. He reached to pull her down to the floor, but she dodged his fingers, until they were both helpless with mirth. He smiled into her eyes.
And then it was too cozy. The simplicity of it brought with it a complication that first surprised him and then confounded him. He felt under pressure. Pressure rising from his toes. What the . . . He lost his heartbeat. Something hauled him to his feet. Suddenly the carpet on the floor with its salmon color sprigged with magentas didn’t look right. The moment . . . He didn’t like it. He wanted to be forty-light-years away, traveling faster than light.
In the silence that followed, he reached for words to fill the awkwardness. Tiny talk, thoughts, distractions . . . They eluded him in the bracket of that moment, perhaps because the candy-eyes were serious. They sucked him in with something finer, something that frightened him. Warm stars in her eyes told him something. They were eyes saturated with fondness. He realized with dismay she had broken her rule. The agreement was simple: no absolutes. But she had fallen in love. Sugar was in love with him. He couldn’t herald it, allow her to express it. Had he guessed of this turn at the start of their liaison, there would have been more trepidation in his bite. He didn’t know how to improvise. Or be adventurous. Was Sugar for life? He simply couldn’t love.
He wondered how something this perfect could go so wrong. He pondered the rot that had fouled him and Audrey—how by the time he noticed, it was all too putrid to salvage. Putrid as the war of ages that nearly destroyed Bathox, but didn’t. Enemies that fanned out with flashers and gliders from all over the galaxy. But now gliders were no more machines of war. They were vessels of peace, of interspace travel that landed into acorns.
He blinked once. Twice. Huge silence. A raging headache drummed a beat in his head. A flutter in his heart, and Sugar dropped her gaze. A great deal of hesitancy and sadness lingered in her smile.
“Get up,” she said. “You look like a medically induced coma. Get out of here before the night lets out.”
She understood. Though her candy-eyes now looked like tired woman eyes, flat eyes like Saturday after Good Friday, she understood. Liam’s headache dissolved. And for the first time since he started seeing her, he took her in his arms and made love to her with the intensity of a man about to go away on a journey to Waggu Waggu, Woy Woy or Woop Woop—the end of the world.
Nestled in his arms, Sugar wept.
“If you start at a hundred,” she said, “then you’ve got no more place to go.” Her eyes were no longer flat. They were deep, almost calm. Her voice was sad as an oboe.
“Don’t be a stranger, hey champ,” she said at the door, clinging to his chest.
***
Inside the nearly deserted aqua center with its vexed attendant, Liam stripped to his jocks. He climbed on the block. He bent down and forward from the hips, knees bent, head low. He raised his head quickly, pushed away hands stretched and threw himself forward. He speared clean into the cool waters and glided back and forth, breathing every fifth stroke, until the peering of the attendant into his line of vision nudged him out of the crystal blue pool.
11
Meredith
He found her in the mauve pages of the services directory under “G”: Gentleman’s escort.
“It’s called displacement,” said Nero.
Meredith lived in a beachcomber in Affleck Boulevard. She took only pre-bookings. She accepted bite-size chocolates and vintage bubbly. She asked no questions and demanded that none be asked of her. All was well if Liam did not succumb to a terrible impulse to reminisce, to talk about or prompt personal history. When he took her, she lay unruffled and wore a cool face of iridescent beauty.
He never guided Meredith into the positions he desired. He never angled her into poses he had achieved with Sugar: the rider—him on his back as she straddled and rode him. The spooner—both on their sides, rocking to orgasm. The chainer—reverse missionary, legs entwined. The cowgirl—her atop him, facing his feet. Oh, the visual stimulation of watching her buttocks. The tactile stimulation of stroking Sugar’s neck, back, breasts . . . The erotic stoking of her hands on his body, her easy access to all important parts of him . . . The acute artistry of her hands. Fully aroused in this position, his holdback—the one he had practiced and practiced so many times with Sugar—dissolved. Liam barely lasted minutes before the whorl. A prolonged epiphany that left his entire body singing. The flair of his orgasms, it came complete with a rain of crisp white octagonal starlets floating in his vision.
Being with Sugar was nothing like the fumbled bum lifter—the one he tried with Audrey the last time they had sex. This recollection of Audrey was not an effort. It was flitting, a distant thought. A comparison: with Sugar he was etched with magic, and she delivered him to a sweet, impossible place. It was a place that was fantasy compared to moments with Audrey, or Meredith.
Unlike Sugar to whom it was nurture, to Meredith sex was . . . a burden? She held her hand delicately to the small of his back, as though they were dancing to a waltz at a Queen’s ball. Once or twice a fair-feathered bird perched on the ledge, cocked its head and stared at them through the window.
Meredith glanced at her watch when time was up or nearly up. She calmly said, “Three more minutes.”
Sometimes, when she said it, Liam was too close to the edge to be distracted. Sometimes his desire ebbed, and he coiled.
Later, if Liam floated naked in her marble bathtub or laid hands at the back of his head on a braided mattress, brooding into space, she let him. She only glanced at her watch when extra time was up or nearly up. Liam soon learned to pre-empt the clock: There goes the hootie, he would think, moments before her eyes sought the dial.
She wore sleek black skirts and fluffed windswept hair around a powdered face; always looked like she was going to the Oscars. The villa had a fire crackling hearth, natural light, a granite kitchen, marble bench tops . . . An ivory carpet, dovetail drawers, Holland blinds, English brass handles, jade ornaments, Dutch masters wall replicas in seamless spacing, swathed drapery. Class and finery.
One day, it dawned upon him: he had thumbed the mauve pages and found a whore who looked like Audrey. Who dressed like Audrey. Who moved like Audrey. Who had genetically harvested timber Venetians. Who spoke in a china-cup fragile way. Who fucked like a Queen’s waltz.
Meredith was so like Audrey, and that made her safe—unlike Sugar who had dared love him. Liam paused with that thought, holding a red box chocolate selection (bite-size) in his hands. Turmoil and yearning filled every space of him, right there, in the middle of Meredith’s open living room that spilled into a deep terrace with a curling swimming pool. A kind of realization opened in him. He was in love with Sugar. Madly, madly in love. And though it frightened him no longer, he tried distracting himself from it. Glanced at a famous portrait (Meredith said) of a medieval sprite named Aquila, Degilla or Godilla. He couldn’t tell, from the way she said it in her china-cup fragile way, what was correct.
“That you, darling?” she said from somewhere upstairs.
He heard her climbing delicately down the spiraling staircase, pictured her autumn eyes and velvet skin, replayed her engineered ten-carat smile. Before hint of her wildflower scent reached him, before her trophy smile—poised for effect, bestowed as reward, held perfectly on a five-star face with movie caliber immortality—before all that could infect him, he was gone.
12
The water at the aqua center felt crisp to his skin. He built speed on his approach to the wall, faster and faster and tucked his nose to the knees, heels to the hips. He kicked off the wall and, with swift dolphin kicks, he fluttered away, away.
The attendant was waiting for him when he climbed out.
“Clear the head?” she said.
“Full of dunes,” he said. “But they are singing.”
13
The Dying
He died five minutes from Automat Station on the way to Sugar. The blonde woman in a jumbo Roaditor yapped on her mobile as he crossed the road with the ribboned chocolate box selection. Last thing he remembered before lifting off the ground a bit dazed was a splash of rainbow, his blood leaving a flowering pattern that closely resembled a Persian carpet filled with red.
Past noon now, fat blue-black flies soaked, almost drowned, in dead body fluids in the purple grass by the roadside. Heat lazed. It charred foreheads and split callused hands. Those who napped in their houses, Liam thought, would feel sickened waking up two hours later in that heat. Those without a nap in their eyelids would slog, trying to find middle ground in and out of the heat. Perhaps fans or small leafed trees offered a little solace. Even butterflies dropped. Given the absence of cool winds to calm their feelers, they struggled anxiously, flickering one second or two, and then they simply collapsed. Drowsy bees fluttered around the heady scent of sun, wind, blood, and a little pollen caught between spring and summer.
A siren rose from the distance. It drew nearer.
Liam looked ahead, at the blocks bunched like little fists two streets away. A sign on one wall said: We Have Moved. Gray smoke curled skyward from Hoochi Mama’s chimney where waves of oven fire made crisp cinnamon bread. He blinked. The sun’s weight in his eyes was becoming unbearable. A bird cried in the sky, a glassy, wilderness sound.
“Loof!” said a cheerful dog struggling on his leash. The owner pulled him away, distracting him from the rusty smell of clotting blood on the road.
Something drew Liam’s gaze past a yellow and black billboard announcing a fledgling singer with knockout booty. His eye settled on Level Three, Block 517, where he and Sugar had lain side by side with touching toes on a fuchsia carpet.
White-as-white hair flew wild in warm winds at the window. Charcoal candy-eyes beckoned him, gazing at him with such wonder. She was waving at someone behind him. As he turned and saw no one there, Nero’s words flashed in his head: “She was a tarot card reader.”
Tarot . . . tarot card reader . . .
Sudden elation gripped him. Sugar could see him. Not his body—meat, bone, blood—splattered under glass and metal. She could see him. Liam smiled. He waved. Sugar waved back. He started running toward her. Rock-a-tee. Rock-a-tee.
He crossed the road to busy Satsuma Road. Wheels of a tram groaned like a grinder’s stone. They squealed. A door gleaming like a sword in the sun burst open. Liam didn’t look back. He steered clear of the road, away from ticking traffic lights, away from rolling cars, grunting cars, purring cars, buses, bicycles, trams. His feet silently moved past Hoochi Mama’s toward soft beckoning eyes filled with wonderment, toward a love older than sunset, younger than dew.
Rock-a-tee. Rock-a-tee-tee-rock-a-tee.
***
A twilight cloud forms in the topaz sky, a wispy cloud which, if you look closely, you could begin to make out the ghost of its face: two eyes, the space of a nose, a set of smiling lips and sometimes, if your eye is kind and steady, you just might see some hands and feet. As the moonlit sky glimmers with morning stars that have eaten a lot of silver, pearls or diamonds, Sugar Sweetman speaks.
“You are together now,” she says to Liam, perfectly reading his silence.
“Now, more than ever,” he agrees. “I was some bit of a hazard back then.”
“The heart is a complex thing, sometimes improbable to comprehend.”
“But you are a maverick, the juror of my heart.”
“Guilty,” she whispers happily, “guilty as charged.”
“And Nero?”
“In time you will connect. I will help you.”
They savor the wind-kissed crest where they stand arm in arm, where they can see all, share all, be all one more time, before they would take their great happy feet down the hill to poinsettias and azaleas and huckleberry petals in full bloom; to baby breath, fairy tickle and a home sweet home aroma of Hoochi Mama’s cinnamon cookies as they turn golden; to a wide-open place full of grace.
A place called home.
It no longer matters it is not Bathox.