Blind Assassin (101 page)

That’s not Zycronian, they didn’t have newspapers.

Point taken. Scratch that. How about, More powerful than God, more evil than the Devil; the poor have it, the rich lack it, and if you eat it you die?

That’s a new one.

Take a guess.

I give up.

Nothing.

She takes a minute to work it out. Nothing. Yes, she says. That should do it.

As they ride, the blind assassin keeps one arm around the girl. How to protect her? He has an idea, impromptu and born of desperation, but nevertheless it may work. He will affirm that both of them are indeed divine messengers, but of different kinds. He is the one who receives the messages from the Invincible One, but only she can interpret them. This she does with her hands, by making signs with her fingers. The method of reading of these signs has been revealed only to him. He will add, just in case they get any nasty ideas, that no man must be allowed to touch the mute girl in an improper way, or in any way at all. Except himself, of course. Otherwise she will lose the power.

It’s foolproof, for as long as they’ll buy it. He hopes she’s quick on the uptake, and can improvise. He wonders if she knows any signs.

That’s all for today, he says. I need to open the window.

But it’s so cold.

Not for me it isn’t. This place is like a closet. I’m suffocating.

She feels his forehead. I think you’re coming down with something. I could go to the drugstore—

No. I never get sick.

What is it? What’s wrong? You’re worried.

I’m not worried as such. I never worry But I don’t trust what’s happening. I don’t trust my friends. My so-called friends.

Why? What are they up to?

Bugger all, he says That’s the problem.

Mayfair, February 1936

Toronto High Noon Gossip

BY YORK

The Royal York Hotel overflowed with exotically garbed revellers in mid-January at the season’s third charity costume ball, given in aid of the Downtown Foundlings’ Crèche. The theme this year—with a nod to last year’s spectacular “Tamurlane in Samarkand” Beaux Arts Ball—was “Xanadu,” and under the skilled direction of Mr. Wallace Wynant, the three lavish ballrooms were transformed into a “stately pleasure dome” of compelling brilliance, where Kubla Khan and his glittering entourage held court. Foreign potentates from Eastern realms and their retinues—harems, servants, dancing girls and slaves, as well as damsels with dulcimers, merchants, courtesans, fakirs, soldiers of all nations, and beggars galore—whirled gaily around a spectacular “Alph, the Sacred River” fountain, dyed a Bacchanalian purple by an overhead spotlight, beneath shimmering crystal festoons in the central “Cave of Ice.”

Dancing went briskly forward as well in the two adjacent garden-bowers, each loaded with blossom, while a jazz orchestra in each ballroom kept up the “symphony and song” We did not hear any “ancestral voices prophesying war,” as all was sweet accord, thanks to the firmly-guiding hand of Mrs Winifred Griffen Prior, the Ball’s convenor, ravishing in scarlet and gold as a Princess from Rajistan. Also on the reception committee were Mrs Richard Chase Griffen, an Abyssinian maid in green and silver, Mrs. Oliver MacDonnell, in Chinese red, and Mrs Hugh N. Hillert, imposing as a Sultaness in magenta.

The Blind Assassin: Alien on Ice

He’s in another place now, a room he’s rented out near the Junction. It’s above a hardware store. In its window is a sparse display of wrenches and hinges. It isn’t doing too well; nothing around here is doing too well. Grit blows through the air, crumpled paper along the ground; the sidewalks are treacherous with ice, from packed snow nobody’s shovelled.

In the middle distance trains mourn and shunt, their whistles trailing into the distance. Never hello, always goodbye. He could hop one, but it’s a chance: they’re patrolled, though you never know when. Anyway he’s nailed in place right now—let’s face it—because of her; although, like the trains, she’s never on time and always departing.

The room is two flights up, back stairs with rubber treads, the rubber worn patchy, but at least it’s a separate entrance. Unless you count the young couple with a baby on the other side of the wall. They use the same stairs, but he rarely sees them, they get up too early. He can hear them at midnight though, when he’s trying to work; they go at it as if there’s no tomorrow, their bed squeaking like rats. It drives him crazy. You’d think with one yelling brat they’d have called it quits, but no, on they gallop. At least they’re quick about it.

Sometimes he sets his ear against the wall to listen. Any porthole in a storm, he thinks. In the night all cows are cows.

He’s crossed paths with the woman a couple of times, padded and kerchiefed like a Russian granny, labouring with parcels and baby buggy. They stash that thing on the downstairs landing, where it waits like some alien death trap, its black mouth gaping. He helped her with it once and she smiled at him, a stealthy smile, her little teeth bluish around the edges, like skim milk.
Does my typewriter bother you at night?
he’d ventured—hinting that he’s awake then, that he overhears. No,
not at all
Blank stare, dumb as a heifer. Dark circles under her eyes, downward lines etched from nose to mouth corners. He doubts the evening doings are her idea. Too fast, for one thing—the guy’s in and out like a bank robber. She has
drudge
written all over her; she probably stares at the ceiling, thinks about mopping the floor.

His room has been created by dividing a larger room in two, which accounts for the flimsiness of the wall. The space is narrow and cold: there’s a breeze around the window frame, the radiator clanks and drips but gives no heat. A toilet stashed in one chilly corner, old piss and iron staining the bowl a toxic orange, and a shower stall made of zinc, with a rubber curtain grimy with age. The shower is a black hose running up one wall, with a round head of perforated metal. The dribble of water that comes out of it is cold as a witch’s tit. A Murphy bed, inexpertly installed so that he has to bust a gut prying it down; a plywood counter stuck together with furniture nails, painted yellow some time ago. A one-ring burner. Dinginess blankets everything like soot.

Compared to where he might be, it’s a palace.

He’s ditched his pals. Skipped out on them, left no address. It shouldn’t have taken this long to arrange a passport, or the two passports he requires. He felt they were keeping him in the larder as insurance: if someone more valuable to them got caught, they could trade him in. Maybe they were thinking of turning him in anyway. He’d make a cute fall guy: he’s expendable, he’s never really fit their notions. A fellow-traveller who didn’t travel far or fast enough. They disliked his erudition, such as it was; they disliked his skepticism, which they mistook for levity.
Just because Smith is wrong doesn’t mean Jones is right,
he’d said once. They’d probably noted it down for future reference. They have their little lists.

Maybe they wanted their own martyr, their own one-man Sacco and Vanzetti. After he’s been hanged by the neck until Red, villainous face in all the papers, they’ll reveal some proof of his innocence—chalk up a few points of moral outrage.
Look what the system does! Outright murder! No justice!
They think like that, the comrades. Like a chess game. He’d be the pawn sacrifice.

He goes to the window, looks out. Icicles like brownish tusks depend outside the glass, taking their colour from the roofing. He thinks of her name, an electric aura circling it—a sexual buzz like blue neon. Where is she? She won’t take a taxi, not right to the spot, she’s too bright for that. He stares at the streetcar stop, willing her to materialize. Stepping down with a flash of leg, a high-heeled boot, best plush.
Cunt on stilts,
Why does he think like that, when if any other man said that about her he’d hit the bastard?

She’ll be wearing a fur coat. He’ll despise her for it, he’ll ask her to keep it on. Fur all the way through.

Last time he saw her there was a bruise on her thigh. He wished he’d made it himself.
What’s this? I bumped into a door.
He always knows when she’s lying. Or he thinks he knows. Thinking he knows can be a trap. An ex-professor once told him he had a diamond-hard intellect and he’d been flattered at the time. Now he considers the nature of diamonds. Although sharp and glittering and useful for cutting glass, they shine with reflected light only. They’re no use at all in the dark.

Why does she keep arriving? Is he some private game she’s playing, is that it? He won’t let her pay for anything, he won’t be bought. She wants a love story out of him because girls do, or girls of her type who still expect something from life. But there must be another angle. The wish for revenge, or for punishment. Women have curious ways of hurting someone else. They hurt themselves instead; or else they do it so the guy doesn’t even know he’s been hurt until much later. Then he finds out. Then his dick falls off. Despite those eyes, the pure line of her throat, he catches a glimpse in her at times of something complex and smirched.

Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she’s actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along.

He has a bridge table, flea-market vintage, and one folding chair. He sits down at the typewriter, blows on his fingers, rolls in paper.

In a glacier located in the Swiss Alps (or the Rocky Mountains, better, or on Greenland, even better), some explorers have found—embedded in a flow of clear ice—a space vehicle. It’s shaped like a small dirigible, but pointed at the ends like an okra pod. An eerie glow comes from it, shining up through the ice. What colour is this glow? Green is best, with a yellow tinge to it, like absinthe.

The explorers melt the ice, using what? A blowtorch they happen to have with them? A large fire made from nearby trees? If trees, better to move it back to the Rocky Mountains. No trees in Greenland. Perhaps a huge crystal could be employed, which would magnify the rays of the sun. The Boy Scouts—of which he had briefly been one—were taught to use this method to start fires. Out of sight of the Scoutmaster, a jovial, mournful pink-faced man fond of sing-songs and hatchets, they’d held their magnifying glasses trained on their bare arms to see who could stand it longest. They’d set fire to pine needles that way, and scraps of toilet paper.

No, the giant crystal would be too impossible.

The ice is gradually melted. X, who will be a dour Scot, warns them not to meddle with it as no good will come, but Y, who is an English scientist, says they must add to the store of human knowledge, whereas Z, an American, says they stand to make millions. B, who is a girl with blonde hair and a puffy, bludgeoned-looking mouth, says it is all very thrilling. She is a Russian and is thought to believe in Free Love. X, Y, and Z have not put this to the test, though all would like to—Y subconsciously, X guiltily, and Z crudely.

He always calls his characters by letters at first, then fills the names in afterwards. Sometimes he consults the telephone book, sometimes the inscriptions on tombstones. The woman is always B, which stands for Beyond Belief, Bird Brain, or Big Boobs, depending on his mood. Or Beautiful Blonde, of course.

B sleeps in a separate tent and is in the habit of forgetting her mittens, and wandering around at night contrary to orders. She comments on the beauty of the moon, and on the harmonic qualities of wolf howls; she’s on first-name terms with the sled dogs, talks to them in Russian baby talk, and claims (despite her official scientific materialism) that they have souls. This will be a nuisance if they run out of food and have to eat one, X has concluded in his pessimistic Scottish way.

The glowing pod-like structure is freed from the ice, but the explorers have only a few minutes to examine the material from which it is made—a thin metal alloy unknown to man—before it vaporizes, leaving a smell of almonds, or patchouli, or burnt sugar, or sulphur, or cyanide.

Revealed to view is a form, humanoid in shape, obviously male, dressed in a skin-tight suit the greenish-blue of peacock feathers, with a sheen like beetles’ wings. No. Too much like fairies. Dressed in a skin-tight suit the greenish-blue of a gas flame, with a sheen like gasoline spilled on water. He is still embedded in ice, which must have formed inside the pod. He has light-green skin, slightly pointed ears, thin chiselled lips, and large eyes, which are open. They are mostly pupil, as in owls. His hair is a darker green, and lies in thick coils over his skull, which comes to a noticeable point on top.

Unbelievable. A being from Outer Space. Who knows how long he has lain there? Decades? Centuries? Millennia?

Surely he is dead.

What are they to do? They hoist up the block of ice that encases him, and engage in a conference. (X says they should leave now, and call the authorities; Y wants to dissect him on the spot, but is reminded that he might vaporize, like the spaceship; Z is all for getting him out to civilization on a sled, then packing him in dry ice and selling him to the highest bidder; B points out that their sled dogs are taking an unhealthy interest and have begun to whine, but she is disregarded due to her excessive, Russian, female way of putting things.) Finally—by now it’s dark, and the Northern Lights are behaving in a peculiar fashion—it is decided to put him into B’s tent. B will have to sleep in the other tent, along with the three men, which will provide some opportunities for voyeurism by candlelight, as B certainly knows how to fill an alpine climbing outfit and a sleeping bag as well. During the night they will take four-hour watches, turn and turn about. In the morning they will cast lots in order to reach a final decision.

All goes well through the watches of X, Y and Z. Then it is the turn of B. She says she has an uncanny feeling, a hunch that all will not go well, but she is in the habit of saying this and is ignored. Newly wakened by Z, who has watched with libidinous urges while she has stretched and clambered out of her sleeping bag and then wiggled into her padded outdoor suit, she takes her place in the tent with the frozen being. The flickering of the candle puts her into a drowsy state; she finds herself wondering what the green man would be like in a romantic situation—he has attractive eyebrows, although he is so thin. She nods off to sleep.

The creature encased in ice begins to glow, softly at first, then more strongly. Water runs silently onto the floor of the tent. Now the ice is gone. He sits up, then stands. Without a sound he approaches the sleeping girl. The dark-green hair on his head stirs, coil by coil, then lengthens, tentacle—it now appears—by tentacle. One tentacle twines itself around the girl’s throat, another around her ample charms, a third tightens itself across her mouth. She awakens as if from a nightmare, but it is no nightmare: the space being’s face is close to hers, his cold tentacles hold her in an implacable grip; he is gazing at her with unprecedented longing and desire, with sheer naked need. No mortal man has ever looked at her with such intensity. She struggles briefly, then surrenders to his embrace.

Not that she has much of a choice.

The green mouth opens, revealing fangs. They approach her neck. He loves her so much he’ll assimilate her—make her part of himself, forever. He and she will become one. She understands this wordlessly, because among other things this gent has the gift of telepathic communication.
Yes,
she sighs.

He rolls himself another cigarette. Will he let B be eaten and drunk in this fashion? Or will the sled dogs heed her plight, break loose from their tethers, tear in through the canvas, rip this guy to pieces, tentacle by tentacle? Will one of the others—he favours Y, the cool English scientist—come to her rescue? Will a fight ensue? That might be good.
Fool! I could have taught you everything!
the alien will beam at Y telepathically, just before he dies. His blood will be a non-human colour. Orange would be good.

Or perhaps the green fellow will exchange intravenous fluids with B, and she will become like him—a perfected, greenish version of herself. Then there will be two of them, and they will crush the others to jelly, decapitate the dogs, and set out to conquer the world. The rich, tyrannical cities must be destroyed, the virtuous poor set free.
We are the Flail of the Lord,
the pair of them will announce. They will now be in possession of the Death Ray, put together from the spaceman’s knowledge and some wrenches and hinges looted from a nearby hardware store, so who will argue?