Intentional Dissonance (2 page)

And while the pilots weep as they fight, neither side’s generals allow themselves to care. This is/was/could be war, after all. Thousands lived. More died. There doesn’t seem to be much enemy left. Or anyone really.

Jon carries on looking out the dirty window and stretches his long fingers out and back in again and again like he’s squeezing an invisible ball. His fingers miss playing with the pocket watch but that habit irritates him. Faint memories of what once happened crash through his mind. Different memories do the same in the street, through the weak, tenuous fabric of now, riddled with holes from billions of people jumping back and forth from place to place, shadows and glimmers, caught in loops forever.

Jon tells his head to shut up and he picks up a tiny rust-red vial off the Venetian-carved antique table. He examines the lime-green writing on it before holding it above his mouth. He can’t read the word properly but he thinks it starts with an “S.” Exactly three drops land on his tongue and he counts them off carefully as they fall.

Lacrymatory: Lat. lacrima - a tear. A bottle used to collect the tears of mourners at funerals, found in ancient Roman and Greek tombs, normally made of glass but occasionally also terra cotta.

The drops taste like peach ice tea. It is sweet, not harsh at all.

“What’s this one called?” asks Jon, swallowing, turning the vial over and over in his hands.

“Saudade,” says Emily, “It’s a Portuguese word for the almost terminal, endless longing for a lost love.”

“Cute.”

She can hear him because she’s spent a good portion of her life practicing hearing him, no matter how quietly he speaks. Her red hair follows her shoulders down her back and her eyes are deep blue, deeper than Jon’s, speckled with flint and green. Jon does not think about the curves behind her Victorian blue dress. They are friends and always have been, nothing more. Jon, instead, thinks that Saudade, the drug he’s just put on his tongue which causes one to be overwhelmed by emotion, is a bit like Limerence (again, another word used to describe an endless longing for love) or Stendhal Syndrome (the term used to describe being bought to tears by a work of art), which is what he’d had the first time he’d tried Sadness with her. But this has slightly more of a body rush because he can feel the tips of his fingers start to tingle and go numb. He walks around Emily’s dirty, cluttered, little apartment, which is filled with antiques and the bric-a-brac of mankind, while his legs can still hold him, hands still opening and closing, breathing like they’re lungs. His eyes glance out the window, sick of the bank robber and his daughter with the blonde hair and the pink dress looping outside, hoping in vain for something more moving to look at.
Please, God, give me something else to look at than an old fire escape and this hopeful, desperate father.
Still, the fire escape with its rust and its textures has its own kind of nobility, a defiance of some kind, because it still stands, which is so much more than can be said of so many things these days.

In the distance, he thinks he sees someone falling from the top spire of the United Government building. But it might just be crows and shadows.

He runs his fingers through his shortly cropped, dyed silver-white hair. He can feel Emily watching him. She does that sometimes, just out the corner of her eye. Jon is glad she let him in. She’d already closed up for the day when he came tapping on her door. After some hesitation and a lot of cajoling and threatening and then whispering on his part, she’d let him in and he’d hugged her and he’d felt the relief flood through him as he stepped inside, as all junkies do when they see their dealer. The rust and the decay on the fire escape reminded him of when he’d worked on one of the army airfields years after The End. He remembers his friend James, Gentle James some had called him because he found a rat and took care of it, making it his pet. He’d have done the same with any animal. Anyway, James or Gentle James or Private James Stapleton or whatever you want to call him, died midflight during an operation they’d both gone on. Something secret. The memories of everyone on board had been erased afterwards, as always, but Jon remembers the burial; they’d let him keep that. Some might have called it beautiful but it’s hard to call a funeral beautiful. Because James died in flight (Jon couldn’t remember how), the crew did a traditional burial at air, covering him in a kind of liquid magnesium. Then Jon, Jon and the other members of the crew that weren’t needed to fly the giant bomber, threw him out of the plane with a giant crucifix chained to him, and Jon remembers so vividly, as the body of the person who used to be his friend, sweet Gentle James, kissed the air, the magnesium burst into white hot flames. He became an angel of bright light and smoke and then nothing. Ashes in the sky. Ashes in the sky. Now Jon’s trying not to think about it but there was a fire escape just like the one outside on a building in that fucking airfield. Every day, he walked through the buildings and when no one was looking, he took out a spanner and stole bolts out of things, from the computers, from the walkways, from the machines, whatever. One at a time. Nothing anyone would notice. But the place was always falling apart and no one could work out why. He once had bottles and bottles of nuts and bolts stored away. They would’ve killed him if they’d found them. He didn’t know why he did it; sometimes people just do things. Maybe he just hated his job and the people he worked for.

After he’d finished his years of service, he decided that since there weren’t any normal jobs left, he wanted to be a conceptual art dealer. Someone who just sells the idea of art to other people. You’d pay him some money and he’d whisper poetry or special secrets in your ear; like, “My art, which fathered heaven.” But apparently that job didn’t really exist for a reason: whispering poetry is not a sustainable way to make a living. Perhaps in a good, benevolent world, poets would be rich and stock brokers would go home to shacks, but there weren’t any more stockbrokers and there were almost as many poets left. So a magician it was. An illusionist. A conjurer.

He didn’t know any magic tricks though, so he cheated.

He didn’t even need the top hat or the white ruffled shirt. Before that, when he was still considering the conceptual art dealer thing, he’d once tried to sell the idea of brushing your hair at the same time as everyone else who bought the idea from him, so that whenever you brushed your hair, you’d know that you weren’t alone and that somewhere out there, somewhere else was brushing their hair too. He thought it’d be beautiful, that because, despite all the anti-depressants these days, people still needed cheering up, people needed company, even if it was a strange kind of company. Even if it was just the knowledge that somewhere else, someone else was feeling the exact same thing as you at the exact same time as you. But no one had wanted to give him money for it, everyone just looked at him strangely and that’s why everyone still brushes their hair at different times. Stupid world. Stupid, dying world.

He’d gotten a job for a while as a paparazzi for hire. People would ask him to take pictures of them in the company of potential lovers, to create the idea that the person those potential lovers were talking to, was a big deal, such a big deal that a photographer wanted to follow him or her around and take pictures of them. It didn’t last long. Jon was too quiet. He didn’t yell enough, according to most of his previous clients and when he did yell, it was sometimes rude.

Now, back here in this apartment, Emily puts three drops on her own tongue and smiles before slipping her shoes off and taking a few paces over the rich Persian carpet Jon’s standing on, standing a little nearer to him.

Emily undoes the band in her hair and her red hair falls.

“Do you want music? I can put on some Ambient Music For Airports maybe? Or some of Maynard James Keenan’s last works if you’d like?” asks Emily.

“No, the sound of you yammering on is music enough to my ears.”

“You’re a bit of a bastard, Jon. You know that right?” Emily smiles.

Jon just nods, lost somewhere in things that have already happened and smiles back at Emily, despite all the random things bumping around in his head.

She shrugs and makes her own choices for the music they’ll need. Even though she knows he almost never answers or if he does, it’s with sarcasm, she feels it’d be impolite to stop asking.

Brian Eno’s opening notes of 1/1 fill the room, washing everything with an almost-tangible pink haze. The vinyl worked. The technology ration Emily had spent getting it was worth it and it returned that soft texture modern technology had once missed. Digital bits have no colour and less texture. But this piano, this piano being played in this song keeps the sound and colour coming at him, breaking over him like a wave, before it reaches Jon’s throat. The drug, the Sadness, is working, breaking the horrible, dull, boring, mind-numbing happiness imposed on him and everyone else in NewLand by the antidepressants in the city’s water supply. Jon almost never drank water and if he did, it was an emergency and he was dying. He hated that feeling when he had to, the numbness, the death smile, the lying of the soul. Nothing felt real. The world felt at bay. So he drank crudely bottled water, collected from the rain that still fell and then was filtered. It was either that or beer. Some of the Sadness junkies lived on beer but that seemed like a hollow existence. Hundreds of years ago, it was almost always safer to drink clean beer than dirty water. Now, history has repeated itself; you either drank the water or dealt with the overwhelming depression that had existed since the day of The End. It was so bad, if you were out on a hot day and didn’t have enough water to drink, some were just as likely to die from suicide as heat stroke.

“Can you feel it?” asks Emily. A single, hot tear runs down her cheek, ruining her make up.

Jon remembers a word.

Frisson: The word used to describe the moment the hair on the back of your neck stands up when you are struck by a climax of beauty in art.

“Yes,” whispers Jon, “Fuck, yes…” He bursts into hot, shuddering sobs, “…yes.”

Jon’s feelings completely overwhelm him, rolling over him like an unstoppable black wave. The light inside goes dark. This is a kind of chemically induced sadness but it’s so fucking beautiful. He digs his fingernails into his palm, trying desperately to create some kind of physical manifestation of what he’s feeling, trying to bring it out and make it all real. To make him real again, to feel something one more time.

The world quickens and he falls backwards in his mind and here, out of it. If Jon is capable of real, objective thought at this point, it might strike him that beyond the obvious, there’s little to be sad about in this moment. No acid rain fell on his way home to Michelle, the girl, then woman he has loved without question for ten long years. No songs reminded him of his father dying on the day the world ended or his mother who lasted only a little bit longer. No phone not ringing. No reminder of his past or present or future.

And so Jon descends into warmer places, a rich and fertile crystal garden of feeling and emotion. Really though, he’s on the dusty carpet, slowly surrounded by light. It’s soft, white and you can almost touch it.

A voice from nowhere, from the air itself, whispers, “It’s all going to be ok.”

It reminds him of the last time he saw his father: his father held him, then gave him a pill and Jon fell asleep in his arms. Then, in his mind, he sees the image of a fascist bastard Peace Ambassador, one of those entrusted to uphold the peace in NewLand, holding the limp body of a child that had been hit by a passing carriage, and the cop, he’s crying, the soulless scum is crying. Jon saw that walking home once. Each feeling hits Jon full force in the chest and then appears in front of his mind’s eye, represented by different vivid visions, the black wave washing over him, again and again like a relentless tide.

It feels like he’s falling forever. He clutches his knees, turning himself into a ball. The world is brought into terrible, beautiful focus. Everything is tragic and wonderful at the same time.

Nerves flare, synapses snap and shivers run up and down his body, like someone’s running their hand over him, just a hair’s breadth above his skin but never actually touching.

He remembers the first time he’d felt pain and had a name for it; stepping on a green piece of glass, a broken bottle in the gravel driveway of his parents’ small, white suburban house. He remembers being in a row boat once with his father and mother and noticing the way swans move without moving and it’s so beautiful, it’s all so beautiful. Abstract phenomena, memories, stories, symbols, and metaphors crash through his mind, one after the other.

He opens his eyes and manages to blink away some of the hot tears. Emily has fallen on her back, on some pillows, on the Persian rug, on the parquet floor; the same thing consuming him is consuming her, eating her whole, burning her up. She moves at a thousand frames a second, her eyes open and a steady stream of tears falls down past her ear, into her falling hair. Her make-up leaves dark trails across her face.

Everything falls.

She falls.

He falls with her.

She’s slowly beautiful and even in all its current sadness, even in so much chaos, so is the world. Even though it’s all fucked up. Even now. It’s years since it all happened and so much has changed.

Her chest falls as his rises.

Chapter 2

Then