Intentional Dissonance (7 page)

“You sure you don’t want us to walk you there?” Jon asks. It’s one of the safest neighbourhoods in the city but there’s some kind of safety line that Emily offers and he’s not sure he really wants to cut it.

“No, I’ll be ok, you guys have fun,” says Emily and she turns and she disappears slowly into the night, step by soft step, into the silence.

Jon and Michelle stand in the gravel driveway. He glances over at a spot in the gravel where he cut his foot open as a child, on some green broken glass from a discarded beer bottle. He still has the scar.

“Are you ok with coming?” Jon asks. He feels stupid and nervous and he’s getting sick and tired of the voice in his head screaming: “RELAX! JUST RELAX! JUST! RELAX!”

“Sure,” she replies with a smile and she closes her eyes slightly when she says it. Jon feels less stupid and less nervous. He pats his pockets where he always keeps the key for the front door. It isn’t there. There is only air and nothingness where the key should be. Michelle cannot see Jon’s face in the moonlight, otherwise she would notice how pale he’s suddenly become.

“What’s wrong?” asks Michelle.

“Nothing, just hold on,” says Jon. She rubs her arms. It isn’t cold.

“It has to be here somewhere,” says Jon. Jon pats his pockets again, even though it isn’t going to magically appear on a second search but he hopes against hope that, somehow, it does. It doesn’t.

“Can you wait here? I need to get into the house from the back and then I’ll come and unlock here,” he asks.

“If that’s what you’ve got to do,” says Michelle with a sigh.

“It’ll only take a second,” says Jon. He’s not very convincing. In truth, he has no idea how he’s going to get back into the house but he has to try. By all that is holy, he has to try.

“Ok then, hurry up,” says Michelle.

She rubs her arms again. It still isn’t cold.

Jon runs through the front yard, to the side gate at the edge of the house and scrambles over it, pushing his feet into the gaps between the rails to hoist himself up and over, before making his way through his family’s small backyard to the sliding door. It had locked behind him when he went through it. But there’s a window open near it that, only a few years before, he’d been able to squeeze through, if he got in at just the right angle. He’s stockier now, just after the end of childhood, but only slightly, and he has to try. He moves a paint can under the window and stands on it to reach the burglar bars, which he uses to pull himself up onto the sill.

He manages to squeeze his head through and then the light in the room turns on and he hears a voice.

“Jon?” says Jon’s father.

All of Jon’s hopes have left him. Some part of him is glad that his father is so used to him sneaking out at night that he doesn’t mistake him for a burglar and shoot him. The rest of him is bitterly disappointed.

“It’s me.”

“What are you doing?”

“I just wanted to…to get some air.”

“Ah yes, air. I always climb in through the window when I want air. Speaking of which, why are you climbing through the window?” asks Jon’s father.

“No reason,” says Jon.

Jon’s father doesn’t say anything for a moment before finally speaking, “Just try not to make too much noise.”

“Yes, Dad. Thanks, Dad,” says Jon.

“Get inside,” says Jon’s father.

He unlocks the door and lets him in. He has a funny expression on his face like he knows more than what’s been let on and he ruffles his son’s short hair. Jon shakes his father’s hand off. He can do nothing at this point except retreat to his bedroom. He’s glad at least that his father caught him and not his mother. His mother’s always on edge. She always seems like the world is too much for her; luckily Jon has inherited none of her high strung nature. Jon turns the light off and goes to the window and pulls back the curtains, also covered with comic book characters, to tell Michelle what’s happened and give her the comic he’s promised her:
The Black Kracken
special edition that she seemed so interested in. He’ll explain what happened and they’ll see each other again tomorrow, once his tests are finished. He scans the darkness for her. She’s not there, not hiding in the bushes, nothing. She’s gone. He knows she’s gone.

“Michelle?” Jon whispers into the night.

No response.

Jon will find the key in his box of cigarettes tomorrow morning.

Chapter 7

Now

A man looks down at the red paint on his hands and wonders for a moment if he’s killed his wife and this is her blood or maybe he’s just painted the garden bench red, that’s all. He thinks it is a strange thought and carries on digging the hole he’s digging in the back garden. He whistles. He writes this all down in his moleskin diary, later that evening. His wife should be back from work by now but she isn’t.

Somewhere else, Jon shifts against the handcuffs holding him in the painfully hard wooden chair in the small interrogation room, trying to find some kind of comfortable position. There isn’t one.

Jon decides to call this Peace Ambassador “Deformed,” as that name is as good as any. He’s taken off the smiling, bulletproof face mask and has a scar across his face and Jon wishes he’d given it to him. Deformed seems resigned to the fact, if not happy about it, that he’s going to have to hurt someone and that someone, is Jon.

“I wouldn’t have to use the fucking drugs if you’d stop drugging the water supply. Besides, that briefcase wasn’t mine and you guys know it, my briefcase had sandwiches in it and no amount of bullshit is going to change that.”

For the most part, Deformed ignores him and paces up and down, then he sits down and folds his hands in front of him and says, “Doing what you’re doing, using this Sadness shit, this…garbage, romanticising it, you’re not making friends with us or anyone else in the United Government. Why? Why bring this on?”

“Because ‘fuck you’ is why,” says Jon. The United Government. That must be where he is. He’s in the tall white spires where they take political and emotional prisoners and their families or friends for reconditioning. Michelle. Oh God, Michelle. Where’s Michelle? Is she here?

Bang.
Now’s not the time, Jon
, some far off voice tells him.
Think about yourself for a second, forget about Michelle
. Deformed slams his fist into Jon’s face again and Jon can feel some of his teeth losing their grip. All the stars come out to play in front of his eyes. Blood pours from his mouth in a steady torrent.

“I’m sorry, citizen, I didn’t quite catch that, could you repeat yourself?” says Deformed.

“My apologies, officer, your fist was in my face,” says Jon under his breath. Jon is somewhere else right now. Please leave a message after the bang. Bang. Jon is pretty sure that this is what it feels like to go completely insane. Not just partially. Completely.

“Because your mother is a whore,” says Jon.

Now Jon does something he’s promised himself he’ll never do: he uses his gift in front of a Peace Ambassador, the gift his father never got the chance to explain to him, the one he had to discover himself. The air thins and the light around both of them seems to shiver and it slowly pulls together into a humanoid shape.

Jon thinks of his friend James. Sweet, gentle James. He was like a brother to him. And now he imagines, no, he remembers what it was like to see James burning on that cross, what it was like to see him reduced to cinders when they threw him from that plane, covered in liquid magnesium. He imagines the sky burial of his almost-brother, James.

It hurts so much to see him but he doesn’t care. Deformed, because he doesn’t have a brother, sees his sister. He sees his sister burning alive.

“Whoa, what are you doing?” asks Deformed.

Jon forces himself to imagine James burning in unforgiving detail and the smell of burning flesh fills the room. The Peace Ambassador sees his sister burning, burning, burning. After opening and closing his mouth a few times like a goldfish, he looks from Jon, to his sister, then back again. He starts to scream, a low, steadily rising noise. Then his fist finds Jon’s face again. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. The illusion flickers with each blow, like someone hitting a TV set too hard. Jon spits out what’s left of his teeth.

And with his last moments of consciousness, he says quietly, “Because you’ve made sadness a disease, you fucking loser. Happiness without sadness is emptiness, nothingness. The world once taught us to say, ‘I’m sorry,’ when we still cried, as if what we were doing was something to be ashamed of. What you’ve done is worse.”

Deformed, sweating from the sheer effort of the beating, manages to smile through his teeth even though his sister is still in the room, burning alive. Now she’s looking at him. She mouths the words, “I miss you.”

Deformed leans on Jon’s neck and says, “I want you to be happy. The world wants you to be happy.” He flexes one of his arms and cracks his already bloody knuckles.

“…Then why does it have to get so goddamn angry at me, when I’m not?”

“Stop it. Stop it. STOP IT.” Deformed screams.

Bang.

Jon passes out and things stop making sense. At no point in his entire life has he ever considered his life normal. Occasionally stable perhaps, but never normal. And if you accept the fact that everyone gets what they want in the end, one way or another, then you also have to accept the fact that right now, whatever you’re doing, however you’re feeling, you’re getting what you want. Jon’s father told him that. Dad?

Emily’s voice carries on behind him, then seems to leave her mouth and follow him through the house, his parents’ house. It sticks to him like a living thing, crawling over his arms and up his shoulders, seeping into his ears, “Don’t wind up like him Jon. Don’t wind up like your father.”

Everything is a mist.

When he comes to, there’s a gnarled figure standing over him, pouring water over his face. His natural reaction to lash out at him is tempered by the fact that he is in no way guaranteed, by the looks of his host, that he will get a second punch.

Host is the wrong word; they’re both guests of the state. After blinking some of the water out of his eyes and getting a glimpse of his surroundings, he finds himself in pain in a small, grey, concrete room with a low ceiling. The room is empty, save for his fellow guest, a bucket of water, the ladle inside it, and a second, thankfully emptier bucket.

“Who are you and what do you want?” says his fellow occupant.

“I’m Jon,” says Jon.

“I’m Edward. Semi-professional human hater…and eater,” says Edward.

“Your name is Edward Eta?” asks Jon, forgetting the pain and confusion for a moment.

“No you stupid…eater…I eat humans,” says Edward.

That’s what he hasn’t been able to put his finger on: he’s sharing his cell with a half-ent. His fellow guest taps his whirled chin as if he’s thinking. It sounds like a great break on a snooker table. Leaves flow like dreadlocks from his head.

“No offense but you can’t be too good at your job if your job is eating people, and you helped me,” says Jon.

“Helped you?” asks Edward.

“You threw water in my face,” says Jon.

“I like to make sure whatever I’m going to eat isn’t alive when I do it. And if you were dead, the water would wash some of those heal bots off of your face. It’s a courtesy I may start forgetting one of these days,” says Edward.

Jon knows he’s lying. The rumours of half-ents eating humans are nothing but urban legends, started by panicky housewives soon after The End when the half-ents showed up. That on its own isn’t reason enough to test his luck. He shivers slightly as he realises that everything hasn’t been a bad dream. They put the heal bots, tiny particle-sized electromechanical medic machines, on him as soon as he passed out. He can feel his teeth back in his mouth, shiny and new.

“Still, thank you,” says Jon.

Edward sighs and says, “Don’t worry about it. You’ll have bigger problems soon enough, same’s me.”

“What’s your deal?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean why are you in this cell?”

“I’m in this cell because the current government doesn’t seem to take kindly to people campaigning for recognition and the right to vote, even if you happen to be a tree.”

“You’re an activist?”

“No, worse. A sentient creature, something with consciousness that wants to have the same rights as people who don’t look like trees.”

“So you started a riot or something?”

“Worse. I handed out pamphlets.”

“How is a pamphlet worse than a riot?”

“Because words are forever. Even if you kill the person who writes them, words are forever. Even if you disagree with them and spend the rest of your days arguing against what was said, what was said, was still said. A riot only lasts as long as it takes for a fire to burn itself out.”

Jon nodded. Great. A political tree with a penchant for rabble rousing.

“And you?” asks Edward.

“I was framed.”

“That’s original.”

“I was only half arrested for the right reason.”