Gears of the City (19 page)

Are you listening?

It began as a perversion. It began as a sick thought, of an imprisoned libertine and lecher, thinking, how might I most terribly outrage against decency? Arrest me, will they, for debauchery? They’ll see what debauchery means!

I dressed up whores as the Gods and I fucked them.

You do not appear shocked. Have you forgotten the Gods, too? What a funny blank little man you are.

It rather discomforts me, not to be shocking. Are you not perhaps a
little
… ?

Yes, well, it quickly became clear that this delightful practice was more than a mere perversion—I should not say that, for it has always been my case that a pure and beautiful perversion’s a finer thing than any dull utilitarian
purpose.
But anyway. In this forbidden union with the divine—in this ecstatic union—I found myself becoming closer and closer to the divinities of the city. Elevated, in the moment of ecstasy, to what lay above the ordinary matter of the city; descending, in submission and degradation, to what lay below it. Piercing the curtain of the real with a thrust. A thrust!

Pardon me.

A dance of submission to the divine, and dominance over it. More—of
unity
with the divine. As your dull old Professor Holbach sought to understand the Gods of the city with his mind and his mathematics and his grey brain—so I mastered them with my prick.

I confess that the ritual has grown baroque, has grown elaborate, over the years; once it was me and a whore and a bird-mask and perhaps a whip or candle; now the cast’s swollen and the props become … operatic.

I once wrote a piece for the opera, in fact.

What do you
think
happened? They banned my opera and burned the sheet music and put me back in the Iron Rose.

I am suddenly very tired. Have I mentioned the drug? It takes its toll. Let us retire. You look quite exhausted, too. Mr. Basso! Show our guest to a room. No, I insist. My Creatures! I sleep alone tonight for the drug leaves me flaccid—but any pretty thing that wishes to curry favor may attend me in the morning. I include you, Mr. Whatever-your-name-is-Ar/^w-is-it, in my offer. No? Shame.

Go, sleep. Do not let me catch you talking to Ivy. Remember there are always a thousand watchful eyes in Brace-Bel’s house. I have been too long in prison and I have become a kind of warden myself.

A
re you awake?

Yes?

Splendid!

I cannot sleep. Is the bed acceptable?

No, no, don’t worry; you need fear no assault from me. I take no one against their will. An unfree choice is useless for my purposes. Mine is a liberatory philosophy, a liberatory art, a science of escape!

Shush, shush. If you would be more comfortable I will sit on the chair, and leave the bed to you.

It is the small hours of the night. I keep no clocks in the house because my devices interfere with their workings, but you can tell time by that horrid yellow moon. The moon in these last days is like the stub of a cigarette, the skull of a rat, the pus in a blinded eye.

Now my story becomes strange; better told at night. I will tell you how I came to this place and this time.

So, then—in and out of gaol. I grew pale. In Mensonge’s custody I grew fat, like a eunuch, for what other pleasures but gluttony did I have? I scribbled by candlelight and discussed my ideas with rats. Though the Rose was my most frequent residence, I saw a great
many other gaols. I recall when Mass How held me in the clay cells beneath their Parliament. They sent pious back-benchers to slobber for precious drops of repentance, which I denied them. I observed that ours was a city of a thousand Gods, and great antiquity: there were places where my practices were sanctified, and those of my interrogators were thought foul and unnatural. I told them of the followers of the Wasting Queen, who dwelled in the east in their narrow towers, and considered increase of persons to be blasphemy, a theft of souls from the storehouses of the Gods, and a practice that crowded the city and invited disease; those excellent people favored only barren pleasures; why should not I? So the Parliament concluded that I was in league with foreign powers; this did not hasten my release, or gentle my confinement. You saw the stripes on my back, did you not? Over the years some were administered with love, but others, so many, were administered in spite, or fear, or the wicked self-denied lusts of torturers and priests, and …

In and out of gaol. Your lover Olympia did much work on my behalf, begrudgingly but …

Do you remember her? You do? You do not? What a cold man you are!

It must have been shortly after your arrival that I was confined again in the Iron Rose. Its vast and dark twisting capillaries were like home to me by then. Arrested for blasphemy under Seal of the Duke of Baltic Street, no thanks to Olympia, no thanks to her—she was, perhaps, too busy with you, and neglecting her duties. Eh? Eh?

They deprived me of human contact.

They had a most ingenious method of driving me mad. They allowed me writing implements, and paper, and so every day—I had no window, but one knew when it was day and when it was night; one sensed it; a fresh sadness sank over the prison every morning, and fresh horror broke every night—every day I wrote. Letters; a novel; a treatise.

Every evening they took my work away. When they returned it in the morning it was subtly changed. My ideas were subtly disordered. Affirmations were made negations; sharp contradictions twisted into spineless agreement; paradoxes unknotted. Characters who had taken part in my fictional debaucheries with openhearted glee now only
pretended
pleasure; one could tell that underneath they suffered. Can you imagine any torment more terrible?

How was it possible? How did my gaolers find the time? I wrote all day, every day, from the first moment the torches were lit to the moment they were snuffed. How was there time in the day’s remainder for even the most skillful forger to produce such subtle parodies? There was not. I concluded that there must be a doppel-ganger in the cell next to mine, writing as I wrote, hour for hour, a constant evil mirror of my own scribbling hand—a creature that was almost but not quite my double. Perhaps, I thought, they gave him
my
work every morning, and he underwent the same torments as I; never knowing which were his thoughts and which were mine, which mine and which his. At last they silenced me. Me! At last I was unable to write, not trusting my own thoughts. My thoughts were taken from me. They were all I ever had. It was never truly about the flesh, never truly, no one understood that …

I sat in silence for I know not how long. I became less than a worm, turning under the earth; a fat pale grub.

O
ne day there was a terrible sound of riot and alarm. No, first there was the distant smell of fire and smoke. The clatter of knives. Distant screams. There were often screams in the Rose, but they were the screams of prisoners, they had a tone of resignation to them, they spoke their lines of agony like practiced players; now I heard the screams of
gaolers
, full of outrage and surprise and offense. There had been an escape, somewhere in the endless corridors above me. The screams of my gaolers were the sweetest sound I had ever heard. In the inviolate privacy of my cell I began to masturbate.

I expected the noise to quieten, to last no longer than my own pleasure in it, to be put down. Instead it grew, and grew. They came closer—those children.

They came down the corridors of my cell like a fresh wild wind. They were laughing and shouting. A flash of bright silk … Then they were gone. They moved faster than any natural human person; I believe they were touched by some God. In those days the city was full of talk of those children, the Thunderers, and Silk their leader, and their gaol-breaking enterprises; but for all my long experience in gaols that was the only time I saw them. For all my long study of the Gods and for all my many rituals I never broke the barrier between
man and God, but those ragged children had been touched by some miraculous effortless grace.

They were gone before I could call out. They were not there for me.

My cell door hung open.

I quickly found that all the doors on my floor were open; Silk and his cohorts must have tripped a switch somewhere, or broken a chain. All the prisoners of the Duke of Baltic Street milled around in their nightshirts or nakedness, in the unguarded hallways. My doppelganger was not among them. I attempted to assert order, to offer leadership or at least advice, but some thuggish criminal— some vulgar burglar or murderer—recognized me as the blasphemer Brace-Bel, and it seemed that the first order of business for these newly free men would be to punish the deviant in their midst, and so, cursing mankind, I fled.

I fled down dark corridors, in the wake of the miraculous Silk. Everywhere was in disarray. I passed free men struggling toward the light, carrying the lame and the sick on their backs; and I passed creatures that could think of no better use for their freedom than to rob and plunder each other in the darkness.

I should have fled upward to freedom but my curiosity drove me down, and down, in Silk’s path. Soon I was lost.

How much do you remember of the workings of this city, Arjun?

I see. To have forgotten so much! It must be agony.

Suffice it to say that the Rose is an unusual place—a place of unusual density—of suffering, of history, of hope and fear
and power
— and in this city, certain things follow from that. Just as the moon may perturb the tides, so the weight of the Rose and places like it perturbs the city’s cartography, distorts its time and its space.

In these last days, when there are no Gods, people have forgotten that the city is a living thing.

Pressing further into the Rose I found myself lost in alien places. There were signs on the walls in alien languages, and I am a learned man and yet there were soon languages and letters I did not recognize, some of which frankly made me uneasy. I lost myself among people who spoke strange languages; people who had strange eyes; people who seemed unaware that they were in prison at all, who
made pale and ragged societies for themselves in the hallways, with their savage kings marked out by the keys hung around their necks; people who had strange anatomies, as if someone yet more daringly perverse than I ever was had fathered by-blows on cats, or dogs, or birds, or snakes, or animals I could not name, or even flowers; people who were scarcely people. I developed a familiarity with
electric light;
at first it made me wonder if I had a fever. There were places where the corridors contracted, smaller and smaller, to house prisoners scarcely larger than dolls. There were places where the ceiling was so high it was lost in darkness, and vast imprisoned men shambled in the torchlight—and I thought
I
had grown fat on prison food and no exercise! This took many days, yes? Many weeks. Some days I drank water from cracks in the ceiling, and fed on moss and mushrooms; some days I starved. I traveled many miles beyond the walls of the Iron Rose as it stood in my city, our city.

I wish I could see your eyes. Do you remember the Rose? Damn this feeble moon! In the old days the moon was bone-white and cast a wild light. Poets worshipped it. The moon in these years is only fit for pity.

Sometimes, during my, my
rituals
, in the moment of ecstasy, I saw what I saw when I lost myself under the Rose. I saw the world falling away. I saw the
real
breaking like a mirror. I could never hold on to it; a few brief shimmering gasps and there I was, back in the world again.

Let’s go for a walk in the garden. The traps will not touch us. I am master here. I need to be in the open air.

Only you can understand me. We are lonely ghosts, out of our time. It is a great pleasure to talk. The flesh is a fine thing but words are my greatest pleasure.

L
ost under the Rose, I wondered if I had gone mad. I had often been
called
mad. Once the priests of Tiber tried to exorcise mad spirits from me, a process that involved fire, for Tiber—do you recall it? — was a God of avenging fire. These burns, here and here, remember it for me. The pain did not make me
less
mad. The electrical therapy was the latest thing, in those days; one of our colleagues on the Atlas, Dr. Hermann, invented it. May he be damned for it. Never mind. I was
not
mad.

You’re curious about my devices, my traps? That one, in the branch above your head, places a sickness in the lungs. Hold your torch a little closer: you’ll see the coal in its heart. Go on, it will not harm you while I am here.

What? Shay gave it to me.

You start as if you know the name. I am not surprised.

Shay, then. Bear with me a little longer.

I was thoroughly lost, and despairing. I’d seen enough of miracles. I desired nothing more than to return to my little flat in Foyle. To dally with my favorite girls and boys. To dispute philosophical abstractions with my friends of the Atlas, about whom I had grown sentimental. Even to return to my comfortable little cell, and my writing paper, and the company of my doppelganger. Perhaps he, I thought, my doppelganger, had been released in my place— Olympia would surely have procured my release by then, I thought, at Sessions or Assizes or Common Pleas or Oyer and Terminer; the rattling rusty wheels of Law would have turned. And my doppel-ganger would have gone out into the city in my skin, to enjoy the simple pleasures of my life, while I had taken his place among the unreal creatures of the uncanny prison that spawned him.

Yet where was the way back? Where was the way forward? I pressed on, hopelessly lost.

I was fleeing when Shay found me. There was a place where white-coated men and women moved slowly, silently,
dutifully
through the corridors, making notes, communicating in curt nods that all was to their satisfaction. Slope-browed and red-eyed! So long as you passed among them slowly, head down, in silence, and gave no cause for alarm, they seemed not to notice you as an intruder. If your nerve or your patience broke and you stepped too quickly, they turned on you in sudden savagery; beneath their white coats they carried sharp instruments of surgery. Do not disturb the silence of those doctors!