Empty Space (29 page)

Gaines, still seeing Johnnie Izzet’s blackened faceplate and hearing the music of non-Abelian states at room temperature, made himself say:

‘Where does the cat fit in?’

For a moment, Case looked puzzled.

‘Oh, that,’ he said. ‘Our best guess is that it isn’t really a cat. Any more than she’s really a woman. You know?’

‘I didn’t think physics did metaphors.’

‘Here’s the problem. This thing, whatever it is, has all the hallmarks of an emergent property. It isn’t complete, but it’s already self-determining. It’s already
loose. It’s in the labyrinth again, operating the VF14/2b anomalies as a machine. It’s off on some downward causation adventure, separating itself from what you or I would think of as
time.’

‘Why?’ Gaines said.

‘Because there’s something it doesn’t like about its own past.’

‘Reinvention never looked so hard,’ was Gaines’ opinion. He suspected you would have to have fairly low esteem to put yourself through this. ‘What if we brought the
policewoman here,’ he suggested.

Case shook his head to indicate disbelief.

‘Keep me out of it if you do,’ he said. Then he laughed.

‘You know, the game has changed to such a degree I doubt anything would happen? It hasn’t asked for her since before you were last here. It’s interested in something else
now.’

After they had come to an agreement, the assistant left Epstein to it and drove around the city all day in her Cadillac car. Strange forces were at work. She remembered
everyone she killed, but she didn’t remember killing Toni Reno. Eventually, midnight or gone, she turned up at the Tango du Chat with George the tailor on her arm. George looked under the
weather, but he allowed her to buy him several drinks and paid real attention to everything she said. It was quiet at the Tango du Chat. The music was over for the night. Edith Bonaventure, who
owned the place, sat behind the bar reading one of her father’s diaries. People came in for a late drink, then when they saw the assistant – who was mixing Black Heart rum and
bishopsweed, giving everyone those louche amused stares of hers – went out again without having one.

At around two thirty am she asked George:

‘Do you think a person like me can forget killing someone?’

She began to tell him all the other things she couldn’t remember about herself. For her, she said, talking to George was like talking to a doctor. It was a release. ‘Someone like
you knows everything about someone like me.’

George knew nothing, except that in her present form she had come out of a chopshop tank in Preter Coeur. What he didn’t get was who else had been involved. SportCrime? EMC? Whatever she
had been originally, he thought, the dice were loaded against her from that point in the story. Some bunch of charlatans had reinscribed her as a cruel joke. Fourteen-year-old coders and
cut-boys, ripped on growth hormone from a native lemur species. He could imagine the smell of their fried food and
café électrique
. Radio Retro, your Station to the Stars,
blaring reconstructed Oort Country tunes across the workshop while they tuned her, laying in a second nervous system on self-organising nanofibres, throttling up her reflexes, deciding whether to
put in radar, already placing bets on her in fights she was too illegal to be entered for. She would never remember who she had been.

‘At birth,’ he told her, ‘this is my guess, you were already thirty, thirty-two years old?’

‘Hey,’ she said. ‘This is why I like you, George.’

Two years later, she said, after a cooling down period to see if she could still be described as human, they had allowed her on stage with all the other walking psychodramas. ‘In my
case, the investigated and the investigators.’ She struck an attitude. ‘All those, George, who walk in the shadow. All those who carry a gun. First SportCrime then SiteCrime. I had a
hard time adjusting, but I was soon restoring order. I was expected to do well.’ She drank some more rum. ‘George, what’s my reward?’ She grinned at him. ‘It is a
wank in the twink tank. A once a week wank,’ she said. ‘It’s very upmarket.’

‘Come out of a tank, you spend your life trying to get back in one.’

She didn’t know about that, she said. ‘But you quickly see that every context has another context wrapped around it, and another one round that.’

This made her laugh restlessly. A few minutes later, she abandoned the gene tailor to his drink and went out to where the camber of the street tilted her Cadillac into the kerb, its white
faux-leather ragtop slicked with fine rain. She got in, moving with the care of all those who are bagged. Started its big, reliable V8 engine and sat looking along Straint. Radio on, she thought.
The night was yellow. The narrow perspective of the street phosphoresced away in front of her beneath neon signs – Strait Cuts, New Nueva Cuts, Ambiente Hotel – all the way to the
Event site. She would end this night like many others, at the Event site under Kefahuchi stars, staring out across the waste lots and the lonely lovers struggling in the backs of cars just like
hers, to where physics outdid even her for strangeness: enabling, for an hour, rest. Liminal zones were her forte, she had boasted to George the tailor. She was a liminal zone herself.

‘The moment I understood that, I knew I had to look for a name.’

A name, in the Halo, is everything. You are no one without a name. She had tried Fortunata, Ceres, Mad Cyril and Berenice. She’d been Queenie Key, Ms Smith, The Business, Vice, Mildew,
Miranda, Calder & Arp and Washburn Guitar. She had tried Mani Pedi, Wellness Lux, Lost Lisa, Fedy Pantera, REX-ISOLDE, Ogou Feray, Restylane and Anicet. She’d been Jet Tone, Justine,
Pantopon Rose, The Kleptopastic Fantastic, Lauren Bacall, Avtomat and the little girl who could crack anything. She had tried ‘Frankie Machine’ and Murder Incorporated, The Markov
Property, Elise, Ellis and Elissa. She’d been Elissa Mae, Ruby Mae, Lula Mae, Ruby Tuesday, Mae West and May Day. She’d been The One, The Only, The Two Dollar Radio and Flamingo
Layne. For a day she had been A Member of the Wedding. Then Spanky. Then Misty. Hanna Reitsch, Jaqueline Auriol, Zhang Yumei, Helen Keller, Christine Keeler, Olga Tovyevski. KM, LM, M3 in Orion.
She liked ‘Sabiha Gokce’ but wasn’t sure how to pronounce it. A name is no good if people don’t know how to pronounce it. She’d been Pauline Gower, James Newell
Osterberg and Celia Renfrew-Marx. Emmeline Pankhurst. Irma X. Colette. Mama Doc. Dot Doc. Did she dare call herself, ‘The Blister Sisters’? The Best Engine in the World?

Shortly after she drove off thinking these thoughts, George exited the Tango du Chat and, leaning against a wall, threw up. He wiped his mouth, watched the Cadillac’s tail-lights grow
small. He wondered if she would ever leave him alone.

TWENTY TWO

The See-Not Gate

Waking out of a foul dream to gently hectoring telephone calls from her daughter, Anna Waterman allowed herself to be persuaded into one last session with Helen Alpert.

The doctor had spent much of the morning arguing with a Citroën parts supplier in Richmond and was pleasantly surprised when her client arrived carrying take-out lattes and almond
croissants for them both. Had Anna lost weight since her previous visit? Perhaps not, Helen Alpert decided; perhaps it was in fact a postural change. ‘That’s very thoughtful of you,
Anna,’ she said, though she never drank coffee after eight in the morning.

On her part, Anna felt ashamed of herself. It was like being the one to break up a relationship. Prior to buying the coffee she had spent half an hour on Hammersmith Bridge, gazing down at the
brown water at some people learning to scull, miserably trying to bring herself to face the doctor. After that, the consulting room, with its cut flowers and tranquil light, seemed such a zone of
peace, and Helen Alpert so welcoming, that she didn’t know where to begin. For years, she explained, she had lived in a kind of suspended animation. That seemed to be over now. During the
last few months, life had been waking her out of a sleep she didn’t want to relinquish, forcing her to take part again.

‘That’s what I haven’t liked about it.’

‘No one likes that,’ the doctor agreed.

‘No. But they want it anyway.’

‘Anna, I’m interested in the way you put it, life “forcing” you to take part again. What sort of thing do you mean?’

‘For example, Marnie’s not well.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘I found that I welcomed it. I know that sounds odd.’ Having admitted Marnie to the negotiation, Anna became unsure how much space to allow her. ‘Anyway, it’s time
someone looked after her for a change.’

‘You feel she’s been the parent for too long?’

‘And something else has happened,’ Anna said, ‘which I’d rather not talk about.’

The doctor smiled. ‘Your business is your business.’

Given their circumstances, Anna considered this the cheapest of jibes. ‘Actually I just want to live my life,’ she heard herself say, with somewhat more emphasis than she had
intended.

‘Everyone wants that. What exactly is wrong with Marnie?’

‘She’s having tests.’

There followed a silence, during which Dr Alpert played with one of her gel pens and made it clear that she was expecting more. Anna considered describing the visit to St Narcissus – the
women shackled to their symptoms by the system and to their lives by mobile phone; the fatuous receptionist; the cancer-shaped stain on the ceiling – but preferring to avoid the
interpretive bout that would inevitably follow, in which she would feel compelled to take part out of simple courtesy, said instead, ‘I never wanted to examine my life, I just wanted to be
inside it.’ This had the nature of a bid or gambit, she realised. ‘Not,’ she qualified, before Helen Alpert could take it up, ‘that I never had a point of view on myself.
Of course I did. Look,’ she said. ‘The fact is, Helen – you’ll understand me, I know you will – I’ve met someone. A man.’ She laughed. ‘Well, more
of a boy, really. Is that awful? Michael is dead, but I feel alive again, and that’s what I want to be. Alive.’

This much denial filled the doctor’s heart with rueful admiration. ‘I’m delighted,’ she said, though it must have been clear that she was not. She wondered why she
bothered. She reached across the desk and put her hands over Anna’s. ‘Tell me what you dreamed last night,’ she said, ‘and I’ll tell you why you mustn’t stop
coming here. Not yet.’

‘Do you know, I didn’t dream at all last night,’ Anna said. ‘Isn’t that odd?’

Half an hour later Helen Alpert accompanied her client to the door, where, both eager to admit how they would miss one another, they said goodbye. While Anna walked swiftly
up Chiswick Mall towards Hammersmith without looking back, Helen crossed the road and leaned on the river wall. It was a sunny morning, but the air had an edge: September, accepting that the game
was up. The Thames ran low, with a sullenness that suggested the tide was on the turn. Two or three mallards, who had looked as if they were going to make a morning of it, honking and squabbling
in the mud, suddenly took off and swept west, gaining height until they vanished behind the trees on the far bank.

Back inside, she put the Waterman file away; then changed her mind and, leafing through it angrily, began to make a fresh set of notes. The client, her personality frozen in adolescence, had
disguised herself as an adult for the duration of her marriage to Tim Waterman. To what end? She had effectively erased the abjection of her life with her first husband, yet remained bound to it,
and through it to the unthought known. Why allow the disguise to fall away now? As to the significance of the repeating dream: other dreams seemed as diagnostically valuable, and moreover came
with all the necessary tools for their own decoding. The central problem, of course, was Michael Kearney. Helen Alpert couldn’t imagine being unable to forget a man whilst at the same time
being unable to remember him. Anna’s self-deception seemed to have spread itself, deft and obdurate, into the real world: the very sparseness of Kearney’s biography –
mathematician, suicide, patch of fog in every life he touched – gave him an unfocused quality.

Today, however, the doctor found herself more interested in Brian Tate, who – casting himself as the assistant, the unassuming experimentalist, workhorse to his friend’s conceptual
genius – had committed career suicide so as not be left out of the grand finale of Kearney’s psychodrama. The great difference between the two men was this: Dr Alpert knew enough
about Tate’s subsequent life to find him. She even had an address, somewhere deep in gentle Walthamstow, cocoon of the North London academic mafia. The file remained on her desk all
morning. She took it with her to her favourite restaurant, Le Vacherin at Acton Green, where she read it again while lunch ran through its rewarding, quietly inevitable cycle – duck egg
cocotte to assiette of hare to prune and Armagnac tart – and the tables emptied around her. ‘Do you know,’ she told her waitress, looking up in surprise to find it was already
two in the afternoon, ‘I think I’d like the bill.’

She was soon on the way to Walthamstow. If he could be found, Brian Tate might perhaps be persuaded to speak – about Kearney, about the events of that time, about the original Anna. It
would be unethical to contact him, certainly. She would have to admit, too, that she was uncovering some unsuspected feature of her own personality. Until now she’d made sure to buffer her
life from the client’s, proud of the fact that in the face of failure she had always been able to find closure without entanglement.