Traven made us some sort of stone stew out of nettles, mushrooms and cigarettes. There was also tea made apparently from eyeshadow. To me he supplied bandages. My hand wound zinged like sweetened lightning. We were invited to stay the night. An obscure room held alot of apparatus but didn’t look to have been used in a long while. Traven rummaged through the equipment. ‘I’ve been cataloguing meaningless changes on the inner surface of this funnel, do you see? I have less and less conviction that the exercise is worth it.’
‘It’s not, obviously.’
‘You’re right. I’m all washed up.’
In an open barn what we’d thought was the fore of a train was a dead turbine. We looked it over for kit, found nothing usable.
This house of used retorts was tragic. When darkness fell I headed out to the car. The street night was a black magnet dragging downwards. Trees hissed like dissolving codeine and dim tumbleweeds blew by in a creepy way. The kid was sat on the kerb, his head bent over Schottner Kier. Maybe it was like I told Betty, books only inoculate against ideas’ real effect. We all compartmentalise so as not to have to freak out. ‘How’s the book?’
The kid looked up, eyes like a cartoon.
I left him to it. I got in the car, locked it, pulled the scale gear and clambered into the back as the stepdown initiated. The back seat of Planckward planks elongated into a staircase etherically canted to form a slant entry into sidespace. I let go and quickly hit a chicane, a fold where reality had been dodged. The world was full of them now, billions to any geographical instant, and the trained sense could feel them out like the ridges in a lenticular print. I teased the crack a little wider and went through, hidden by locating myself amid the matter the world hid from itself. The concomitant drench of truth was both refreshing and ugly, blazing and muted, a very particular quality of bright sourness. I flew through discarded fact, strong and strongly denied; over history, its blurring ranks of petrified reprisal speeding into concurrent strips. You know something is not physical when it has no temperature. The shadow of a flower doesn’t hold its colour.
Then the almost unbearable temporal thickening as I valved into the small anteroom we called ‘the concourse’. After a few minutes curled up like a fist, I stood unsteadily and pushed the door into Madison’s safe house, far from morality’s equator. It was designed like a hotel at the bottom of the sea, all blue domed ceilings, thermal mass walls, pillars of poured white glass, arched doors and round windows that brought in the sun. Beyond the frontage of one-way camouflage glass and past the gleaming white-sand beach was the gently rippled amethyst of the ocean. Why be awed by the immensity of obstacles and not by the immensity of nature? Sometimes we cannot fully respond to a new dimension - the less adjacent ones can feel incongruent and may vibrate quite a bit even when idling. But I’ve found the present works better in territories that don’t mirror the rest of the world.
‘Maddy?’
‘Taff? I’m in the bath.’
I went in, took off my burnt rags and got in opposite her.
‘What the hell happened to your hair?’
I ruffled my own scalp happily. ‘You like it? It caught on fire.’
‘And third-degree burns, missing fingers, flesh-wounds. Are you in pain?’
‘Don’t get me started. They’re all hepped up on ritual and mutual surveillance over there.’
We looked at each other between her legs. It was like driving down the Golden Gate Bridge. Her breasts loved each other.
‘How is it?’ she asked.
‘It’s their last chance not to do anything right and they’re taking full advantage. Some are claiming civilisation is on the mend asymmetrically. There are still millions of contrahuman, contranatural and contradictory laws sloshing around, and barely enough healthy land into which to push a pin. Nobody really knows what day of the week it is and there hasn’t been a decent burial anywhere in years.’
‘How’s the tech?’
I told her about the hardscrabble cannibalism and systematic avoidance at large. Most potential tech had died by humanity’s shortfall, as people found themselves less and less concerned with artificial longevity and neural interfacing, and more concerned with finding something - anything - to eat.
‘But there’s an exception. Remember when guns got smart? Fire-by-wire. Only enhancements really, we still directed them. But by introducing the etheric pulse grid and a set of criteria we gave them philosophy and they really flowered.’
‘The Lotus Gun.’
‘The first really sentient one supposedly, yeah. And people thought the issue of gun rights had come too late because most guns still piggy-backed humanity and humanity was finished. But there’s been some sort of leap beyond the days of non-aspirational firearms. Apparently this Calvarius construct has developed way beyond single precept guns. It’s worshipped, even by Parker.’
‘The man who holds god’s bullet in his mouth.’
‘Who’d always been vanilla, mainly.’
Maddy was smiling lazily. I wanted to eat the top of her head like a chocolate egg; live in the palm of her hand; dive into her blue swimming pool heart. ‘Ah, Maddy. I met you in a sniper’s nest and you never let up.’
‘I should think not, you dumb goose.’
‘That reminds me, Strobe’s gone AWOL. His signal’s disappeared.’
‘Probably off breaking someone’s arm with his wing. We all need some downtime. I don’t understand why you’re still using the Atom personality.’
‘It still blends a little. They’re cocooned in noir over there, even now. Though they seem to get more elaborately curt every day. I still haven’t completely aligned to the indigenous fanatical traditions. I’m not that smart Maddy but surrounded by them it’s like running in one-quarter gravity. I’ve taken so much Jade my head feels like a medicine ball.’
‘You’re talking as if you’re going back.’
‘I am.’
After a silence, Maddy stood up and stepped out of the bath. I’d need a siege ladder to reach her ass. Towelling off, she resumed in tirade mode. ‘I gave you permission for your final fling or whatever it is. To get it out of your system and get back.’
‘Permission?’
She stared candidly at me.
‘Okay, permission. But I’m completely gay for you Maddy, you know that.’
‘Come on Taff, we so busted our asses getting this place set up during the slow apocalypse and all. We’re safe here. History doesn’t have the momentum to climb our stairs.’
When we’d left Beerlight way back, the President of China had just broken up the Great Wall so that when viewed from space it said I’M WITH STUPID and pointed across the Pacific. America was no longer viewed as a forgivable adolescent but as an embarrassingly challenged adult.
‘You’ve already done sansara, baby. Stick a fork in their ass and turn them over. Forgive them and don’t let them stand in your way. ‘
‘That’s what I’m going to do now.’
‘It’ll be like one of those nightmares, Taff - where you can’t find your way back to the beer garden.’
‘I feel like I got unfinished business there. Closure.’
‘Closure already happened. There’s only other people’s business in Beerlight.’
‘I’m not in Beerlight, I’m in the Terminal burbs. Deep masks and chainlink families. It’s becoming Fadland, with everything else.’
‘Is Beerlight a hold-out?’
‘Only just. It’s thin. Right now I could fashion a better city out of snot.’
She pulled on her pants. ‘Is it suicide by cop, Taff, like Jesus?’
‘I’m coming back. It’s a final fling, like you said.’
‘Morbid curiosity’s what it is. It can’t be pretty.’
‘I saw a nice bird over there, a white one.’
‘A dove?’
‘It was made of pipe cleaners and had a beer cap for an eye. In the Delayed Reaction Bar. But it was pretty.’
‘The Reaction, that old place?’
She put a watch on each wrist, set to two different times.
‘Toto was right, bars burn last. I need a gun. Can’t find the Glory.’
‘I’m not your armourer anymore, Taff.’
She walked out. I got out of the bath and followed her into the workshop. ‘Toolmaker then.’
‘Inventor. Researcher. You’re dragging us backward into the ball pit with those children.’
‘What do you know about cortexial payloads?’
She sighed. ‘Fissionaries. A myth, basically. The holy grail of the MK-Ultra crowd for a while - Medulla Ballistica. But it’s an urban legend as far as I know.’
I thought about that a while. ‘I need a sidearm and a sidespace holster.’
‘I can make a pouch but subcached ordnance won’t make it through the valve. It’ll fuse inside you.’
She was looking through tools, and turfed out a blowtorch.
‘Just the joeypouch then.’
‘Ask Parker’s gun god where the Glory’s gone. From what you’ve been saying it’s probably taken the opportunity to evolve. Now put your left hand on the worktop and count to three.’
‘One.’
I woke in the bedroom staring at the jungle-painted ceiling and hearing the waves. I held my left hand in front of my face. It was black and pink and sealed over.
Maddy walked in. The gravity used from the soles of her feet to the top of her head was a holy sacrament, in my opinion. But still I began evasive manoeuvres. Why?
‘So,’ I said, ‘I started to blather about them who settle for the golden mean between propaganda and actuality, clueless and painless. You’re right, it’s deader than charcoal. So I’ll ride a coffin as it’s lowered into the grave, whooping like a cowboy.’
‘How much Jade are you on Taff?’
‘I dreamt you’d come and make my excuses for me.’
‘I asked a question. What are you on?’
‘Today?’
I thought about it.
‘Jade, Edenblood. Er, Piracetam. Jade. Inverse agonized Suritozole. Rolipram. Soup made of cigarettes and a Jade chaser. Then a little Jade. And I took some Jade.’
‘You said Jade before. How much are you taking?’
‘Mushrooms?’
‘Jade.’
As with a billion other matters, I didn’t have a clue. Flying shrapnel had allowed me scant opportunity to think about it or anything. ‘It’s not that easy.’
‘It’s not that hard.’
‘Time for me to go,’ I told her, sitting up. I found and pulled on some unburned clothes. At a sudden thought, I felt around the area of my appendix, where my hand slipped ghostly inside me as if into empty air. ‘Thanks.’
‘And meanwhile I’ll just be looking good by the window.’
I kissed her, and started toward the door.
‘A pipe-cleaner bird, Taff? Really?’
I turned and looked at her. I didn’t know what to say.
‘They’re done, Taff. It’s all just about done.’
‘I have to see it through,’ I told her. I looked at my left half-hand and held it up. ‘Thanks for mending me, baby.’
I returned to the anteroom, approaching the far wall and its window to nowhere like the collar of a well. I emerged from the etheric crawlspace into the Mantarosa, parked in the suburban night.
Everyone was asleep but Traven. I found him in the smashed conservatory, smoking a nylon cigarette. Desperation was stretched over his life like skullskin. Broken glass crunched under my boots. ‘You disturb my ongoing adaptation to defeat,’ he said. ‘They said it would pass. But ofcourse it doesn’t, as you probably know. People forgive themselves too readily.’
‘You can’t run while you’re kicking yourself.’
Forgotten people get complicated in different ways. Some become compassionate and amoral. Others evince the vegetable rectitude of statues. Traven’s soul seemed clearcut by exhaustion. He had cooled off enough to reflect upon his circumstances but this had not readied him for the sudden reality of the kid’s return.
‘Who’s the old man?’
‘Edna. He’s been out in the wilderness living off Skittles and wild honey. Takes care of little Johnny Warhead.’
Traven frowned. Then he resumed smoking.
‘We’re heading back to Beerlight tomorrow,’ I told him.
‘Maybe he’ll be as safe amid that mummified mobsterism as in the Fadlands. I was interested to see the shard of apparently non-predatory propulsion you’re using for a car. How’s it work?’
‘It’s basically a rolling evasion amplifier. Operates by deceiving the road, refusing to admit to a geographical position. If you’re precise in your aversions you’re precise in your navigation.’
‘Yes, though at the beck of every circumstance.’
‘Unlimited context obliterates any argument. The dimensions are all of a flowing piece, but we partition it up, number these partitions and limit ourselves to three or four.’
‘I know. But I’m increasingly convinced that this space-time axis is entirely ornamental. What happens here is not meant to be taken seriously. My life has been a daily halloween of patience and postponement. Academia’s attempts to prove otherwise have wasted their time and yours.’
‘You put it much better than I could,’ I said in appeasement.
Traven raised his eyebrows. ‘That’s big of you.’
I left him in the lonely lighthouse of his head. It was only later that I felt the respect due him. He had seen the car.