LoveStar (19 page)

HELL

Months passed. Ragnar's star was in the ascendant and LoveStar couldn't avoid him. His face was everywhere. The towers rose, the dead were fired up to the Million Star Belt, and Ivanov did little but praise Ragnar. “One hell of a boy, that Ragnar! Damn it, you've got an heir in Ragnar!”

Ragnar summoned LoveStar and Yamaguchi down to LoveDeath. They were greeted by Ivanov. He was unrecognizable, his old suit replaced with a ridiculous mish-mash of garments. Yamaguchi swore when she saw that the offices had been refurbished according to “style-free style.” Wires and pipes protruded with the sole purpose of emphasising the undesigned rawness of the space. On the walls were photographs and drawings of the towers under construction: Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, St. Petersburg, Rome . . .

“Ragnar's going to unveil the new LoveDeath campaign,” said Ivanov. “I warn you, it's cutting-edge stuff, but it's getting tougher out there, so we have to go further. Ragnar, over to you.”

“Good morning,” said Ragnar, bowing deferentially to LoveStar. “The Million Star Festival is ready to launch but, as you know, LoveDeath's customers have not all paid up on time. The department reported a mere seventeen percent profit for the last quarter. That's below the expected $9,980 billion figure, and there are various explanations for this. For example, we have not had widows turned out of their homes, and in my opinion this policy has caused us considerable damage. We've also had problems with smugglers. Vagrants and paupers have been abandoned outside our offices all over the world, and more often than not we've allowed them to tag along. Particularly since we began accumulating bodies for the Million Star Festival. I think it's time LoveDeath put the pressure on again. People take LoveDeath too much for granted.”

LoveStar appeared not to be listening. He was doodling a pattern on a piece of paper.

“You're not going to have them buried, are you?” asked Yamaguchi in disgust.

“No,” said Ragnar. “Here are some shots of the new campaign,” he said, starting the advertisement.

The first film clip showed monstrous yellow trucks driving in a column across the barren wastes and rough tracks of the Odadahraun lava field. It looked autumnal; the surroundings were gray and icy. The picture quality was poor, as if viewed from a plague-fly. The trucks drove past barriers and dirt roads, splashed across a stream feeding a reservoir, and from there up a steep slope. Then for the first time the cargo became visible from the plague-fly. Yamaguchi paled when she saw what was on the back of the trucks.

“This is horrible! Please turn it off!” She closed her eyes and shrieked: “TURN IT OFF!”

“What's the matter?” asked Ragnar. “Dead is dead.”

The plague-fly followed the trucks across the lava field through drizzle and sleet, but now the cargo was constantly in view and when the trucks drove over bumps the load bounced, sending hands and feet flapping limply in the air.

“Hey! Something fell off the back!”

It lay naked and corpse-white on the track, but the trucks carried on regardless, crushing it into the dirt road. Ravens perched on surrounding rocks, waiting to snatch a piece of carrion.

“Stop!” yelled Yamaguchi. “Are these real pictures? Were those real bodies?”

The column of vehicles carried on until it reached the rim of the crater, known as Hell, by Lake Oskjuvatn. There the trucks took turns reversing to the edge and tipping their loads down into the boiling, sulfurous mud.

“Where are the tourists? Where are the swimmers?”

The trucks tipped and tipped in a constant stream, their cargo either floating or lying half-submerged, though here and there legs, arms, and gaping heads stuck up out of the ooze.

Yamaguchi was white in the face.

“That's the vilest thing I've ever seen! Was it a real film, Ragnar? I demand to know. Were the pictures real?”

“I'm really pleased with this one,” said Ragnar with a gleam in his eye.

Now there were trucks driving up a rugged, black mountain. A cutaway showed that it was the volcano, Mt. Hekla. A crater had been blasted in the summit and red lava surged and boiled in the wound. The same scenes were repeated. The trucks tipped lifeless loads down into the boiling morass and a caption appeared:

STOWAWAYS GO TO HELL!

LOVEDEATH!

“Do you mean to show this to people?” asked Yamaguchi.

Ivanov laughed.

“I told you it was hard-hitting! You should have seen your face.” Ragnar looked at Yamaguchi as if she was a fool. “This is not aimed at a general audience. It's to show the illiterate, poor, and stupid target groups that there's no point sneaking bodies here in the hope that they'll go to heaven. There's no point being dumped here without a dime and thinking that if people die in this country they'll automatically get launched. This is what happens to stowaways! They go straight to Hell! The fires of hell await them!”

“LoveStar! Aren't you going to do anything?” yelled Yamaguchi.

LoveStar said nothing. He just looked from Ivanov to Ragnar and knew that nothing could be done.

“What sentimental nonsense is this?” asked Ragnar. “LoveStar himself had the idea for the ‘Rotting Mother' campaign. This is no cruder than that was in its time! I saw it when I was little. It had quite an impact. My grandmother had just been buried. We kids went sobbing to Mom and Dad, begging them to have the old woman fired up. Of course it didn't work. LoveDeath was so expensive then; it cost as much as a new Ferrari.”

“Who made this advertisement?” asked LoveStar.

“As I said, the bodies were just abandoned outside and a plague-fly . . .”

“WERE THE PICTURES REAL?” asked LoveStar.

“It was just rubbish that had been left lying around, just a few days' worth of raw material. We didn't kill anyone. It would all have rotted anyway,” said Ragnar with a shrug.

LoveStar got to his feet.

“Everybody out except Ragnar!” he growled.

Yamaguchi and Ivanov made themselves scarce.

Unflinching, Ragnar walked up to LoveStar with determined steps.

“You'd better get used to this!” he whispered. “It was prophesied: the dead shall rise again! You could perfect the world if only you wanted to. We could get a better grip on things; you need me. You're getting old and soft; you can't do it alone. What's love without death? What's heaven without hell? EH? What's God without the Devil, LoveStar? You can't have God without hell. You'll never get a proper grip on the people. If you don't create hell, the people will do it themselves. You have no choice. We're going to use this advertisement!”

“You're mad!”

LoveStar grabbed Ragnar's collar, but the other man reacted fast, seizing LoveStar's wrist so hard that his knuckles whitened. Ragnar was younger and stronger. He looked LoveStar straight in the eye.

“We've already got death fully under our control,” he said, tightening his grip. “The old method is no longer on offer. We've got love too, but that's a problem; love is undermining us. We'll use LoveGod to calculate people a little less accurately, thereby preventing the decline of consumption. Those who divorce will be forever excluded from LoveDeath and sent to hell. The same applies to those who do not subscribe to LoveGod. Those who do not pray, those who do not confess to LoveGod and do not reveal their innermost desires will be excluded and cast into the pit of Hell or fires of Mt. Hekla. That way it'll all work out. People want answers; we can provide them. Get used to it. You've found the final solution. Love, Death, and God. You're God already.”

Releasing his grip, Ragnar marched out and LoveStar collapsed into a chair, closed his eyes and sent up a prayer to goodness knows where. “You who are in the place, save yourself if you can. You who are in the place, take my life from me . . .”

CRY-TRAP

LoveGod was hurtling ahead like an express train and there was no way of stopping it. Nothing stops an idea, and LoveStar felt as if he himself was standing on the tracks. If he called off the search, someone else would find the place; that was quite certain. The technology existed. The ring was closing. The leader of the search party seemed to think he could sense God himself:

“He seems to live at a different pace. He must be able to see light traveling. For him every day is like a thousand years. In his eyes we move slower than the grass that grows before our eyes. He seems to move like a wave. For him every second is like 4.2 days. He could be here now, in Africa now and back here now. Three seconds for us. Twelve days for him. He could be everywhere at once, according to our perception.”

LoveStar locked himself away in the tower and whispered out of an open window:

“This wasn't my idea. I didn't want to be God.” He watched the ravens soaring on an updraft by the floodlit rock.

He tried to doze but started up in a panic and looked around.

“WHO'S THERE?” He paced the floor. Looked under the bed. Turned on the bathroom light. There were mirrored walls on both sides, so he saw himself form two endless rows, receding into infinity. “I'm the first in the row and the last,” he thought, getting gooseflesh. “I'm he who is and was and is to come.” He peered harder to see where the reflection ended, but as far as the eye could see, in the deepest depths of the mirror, he felt someone was standing watching him. He ran into the bedroom and fetched a pair of bird-watching binoculars that he kept under the bed, raised them, and saw EYES STARING straight at him! He let out a shriek, flung away the binoculars, and saw himself again in thousandfold rows. He felt a cold draft behind him, turned to the other mirror, and yelled into the depths:

“HELLO! WHO IS IT? Who are you? What do you want of me? Why did I have to find you? Why did I have to find out your ways?”

No one answered his prayer. Announcements arrived daily:

“The ring is closing in!”

“The ring is a snare,” thought LoveStar.

The leader of the search party called in the middle of the night. The line crackled and the sound was poor. As if the conversation was the photocopy of a photocopied photocopy.

“I THINK WE'VE FOUND THE PLACE!”

“Where does it end?” he whispered.

“YOU'LL NEVER BELIEVE IT, BUT IT'S HERE UNDER TABLE FOUR AT A BURGER JOINT IN TEXAS!!!”

Silence on the line, followed by a roar of laughter from the leader of the search party. He was losing his marbles, too.

“Are you drunk?”

“Just celebrating. We've ruled out Antarctica, North and South America, the Pacific, the North Atlantic, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, the Himalayas, and the bulk of Asia. We're closing the ring. Get ready; it could happen any moment.”

The search was a snare that was tightening around LoveStar's neck. Every time he received reports of success a chill passed through him. He ran into the bathroom and vomited bile. He had no appetite. He took refuge in honey, had the sun brought to him on a white plate. He chewed slowly, watching himself dreaming in the mirror, but he never slept.

In the middle of one night the author appeared in his room.

LoveStar regarded him with contempt. “What are you doing here?”

“The secretary gave me this appointment.”

“In the middle of the night, without asking me?”

“She said she was taking the initiative.”

The author was holding something behind his back. LoveStar paled and recoiled into a corner.

“What have you got there?”

“I talked to your daughter,” said the author coldly. LoveStar got gooseflesh.

“What did you do to her, you bastard?”

The author looked pityingly at LoveStar. “I interviewed her before you fired me. I thought you might like to have the recording.”

The author laid a small box on the table and left.

LoveStar opened the lid and a familiar woman's voice sounded in his head, with an accent acquired from years spent abroad: “. . . I think my brothers hated him. They blamed him for what happened to Mom. I don't remember her at all; I know she was beautiful, especially when she was young, but I was only a few months old when she died. I grew up mostly with my grandparents. They never spoke to him or about him much. I didn't see him often. I don't really know what life was like before she died. I'm sure he loved Mom in his own way; he talked about her as if he did, though he's never mentioned her in public. She was sick and I think it's unfair to blame him for her death; he probably wasn't perceptive enough to help her. I don't know whether he tried very hard to see me; my grandparents said he didn't, but I went to stay with him once a year, anyway. He lived in his office, which was kind of strange. He put me to bed in the evenings and sometimes told me stories. I don't know where they came from; I expect he made them up himself. There was one I must have listened to a thousand times. I recorded it secretly when I was six. I've looked after it carefully. You can have a copy if you want.”

There was a rustling, the theme tune to a kids' TV show, then another rustling in the middle of the song, a short silence, then even poorer sound quality as LoveStar heard the echo and fragments of a distant conversation. He recognized his daughter's voice, twenty-three years younger, a clear child's voice.

“Do you know any stories?”

Then he heard his own voice:

“Once there was a king called Medias. He went on regular visits around his kingdom in all his finery with his horse and his hound, but it was the same wherever he went; no one recognized him. Medias went to the butcher, the baker, and the shopkeeper, but he always had to wait in line like everyone else, and no one ever bowed to him. He often had the greatest difficulty getting back into his palace because the guards would stop him and demand identification. One day Medias was sitting sadly in his palace when a dwarf appeared to him.

“‘What troubles you, good sir?' asked the dwarf.

“‘No one recognizes me,' said Medias.

“‘I'll grant you one wish,' said the dwarf.

“‘I wish everything I touch would become famous,' said Medias, ‘I wish everything I touch would appear on the front pages of newspapers all over the world and that everyone would recognize me and bow and scrape before me and worship me and long to meet me. I want people to remember all their lives that they once saw or heard King Medias!'

“‘You shall have your wish fulfilled,' said the dwarf and vanished.

“The next day Medias went to the butcher's to buy a sausage and two chickens, and before he knew it somebody had photographed him, an interview was taken with a woman who had touched Medias's hand in the shop, and the sausage he bought became world famous and was known as Medias Sausage. The farmer who raised the chickens became renowned all over the world as the farmer who raised the chickens that the king bought. Medias mounted his horse, and it became the most famous horse in the world. Medias touched the castle, and people came from all over the world to see it. He went to the barber and the shopkeeper and the baker and always the same story; they all became world famous and sought-after royal bakers, shopkeepers, and barbers. If he patted a dog, people at once wanted to name their children after it.

“One day he met in his palace the most beautiful maidservant in the world. She had blue eyes and thick blonde hair, infectious laughter, and snow-white teeth, and they had a secret tryst in the summerhouse. Medias touched her lightly and tentatively and she touched him, so that in the end they had touched so much that there wasn't a patch the size of a hand anywhere on their bodies that hadn't been touched, caressed, or kissed, and in due course they had two beautiful sons. The maidservant immediately appeared on the front pages of every newspaper in the world. Photographers snapped and snapped away at her until she was red-eyed and white-faced from all the flashes. She tried to flee in Medias's world-famous sports car, driving frantically away from the flashes, but the photographers had lined the road and they snapped and snapped until she was blinded, drove into a lamppost, and was killed.

“Medias grieved and wept, and this was reported in all the newspapers in the world. Their boys wept day and night, but this wasn't mentioned in the papers because the king had never touched them. Kings don't need to touch their children because they're so well cared for by their nurses. But now they were inconsolable. They wept when the day nurse came and sobbed when the night nurse came and quavered: ‘I want Daddy! Daddy, comfort me. Daddy, cuddle me. I feel so bad, Daddy.' But Medias just stood at a distance, looking at them sadly. He couldn't face touching anyone ever again.”

Silence on the tape.

“That's a sad story,” said the child's voice forlornly.

“Yes,” said LoveStar, “it's a sad story.”

“Good night, Daddy.”

The recording ended. LoveStar sat in his chair, but then something happened inside him. “The author has sent me a cry-trap,” he thought, and even though he clamped his eyes shut, he couldn't stem the flood, and the tears poured and he shook and was filled with a strange fear. He sent up more prayers to the place, in the feeble hope that if there was someone listening to the messages, that someone would be able to get away in time: “You who are in the place, save yourself before it is too late!”

Yamaguchi entered the room. She took LoveStar's clasped hands and looked into his eyes. She had deep, dark, beautiful eyes.

“The waiting is over,” she said gently. “We've had a final confirmation from the leader of the search party. We've found the place. We know where the prayers go.”

“Where?”

“They end in the desert. Where we suspected.”

“Is there anyone there? Is HE there?”

“We haven't seen anyone.”

LoveStar looked around and whispered, “But where do the prayers end up?”

“In a hollow tree stump.” Yamaguchi produced a picture of the stump.

“So? Have you examined the place?”

She hesitated a moment, then said, “No one dares go anywhere near it.”

“What do you mean? No one dares go near a hollow tree stump?”

“The first people to reach the spot were going to peep into the stump, but the villagers warned them against it. They said if anyone went near the tree stump the world would end. Someone went near and . . .”

“What?” whispered LoveStar.

“He was struck by a bolt of lightning,” she whispered back.

“Couldn't you send other people?”

“We did send someone else.”

“And?”

“Another bolt of lightning.”

LoveStar shuddered and felt as if a deathly cold draft was blowing on him. As if there was no rock wall behind him any longer, only a window open to the icy night.

Yamaguchi continued. “We couldn't find anyone else to go. Everyone said it was your idea, so you should go.”

“That I should go?”

“It's your company.”

“So? Do you think the world will end?” asked LoveStar.

Yamaguchi didn't answer.

LoveStar considered the choices. Two people had been struck by lightning. The villagers said the world would end. He had no other choice. He wasn't a free man. He was slave to an idea and came to the only possible conclusion that a starving, insomniac, and idea-infected mind can reach:

“If I don't go, someone else will.”

Yamaguchi was waiting for LoveStar in the doorway.

“The plane's waiting,” she said. “Are you ready?”

“How can one be ready?” muttered LoveStar, putting on his jacket. He looked over the Oxnadalur valley. Smoke curled from a turf farm; a mountain was reflected in the lake.

“It's beautiful, the valley, isn't it?” said LoveStar.

“Yes, it's beautiful.”

“It wasn't as beautiful when I bought it.”

“No,” said Yamaguchi. “The plane's waiting. We'll meet there in five minutes.”

LoveStar walked uneasily around his office, then took the elevator down and proceeded toward the launchpad, where he was ambushed by Ivanov. He was ashen-faced and shook his fist at LoveStar.

“YOU'VE BETRAYED ME! WHY DIDN'T YOU LET ME KNOW?” Ivanov was trembling with fury.

“I don't know what you're talking about. We'll discuss it later,” said LoveStar curtly and hurried toward the plane.

“I'VE FOUND OUT WHAT THE TOWERS ARE SUPPOSED TO HOUSE!” Ivanov called after him. “THEY'RE HOLLOW INSIDE! THEY'RE YAWNING ABYSSES! THEY'RE VAULTS!! ON THE NORTH WALL OF EACH THERE'S A STAR!!!!!”

LoveStar shut his ears and hastened his stride. Ivanov was quickly left behind and yelled louder:

“ON THE NORTH WALL OF EACH TOWER THERE'S A STAR! IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FLOOR THERE'S A STAR! THERE'S A STAR HANGING FROM THE CEILING! THEY'RE A THOUSAND GIANT CHURCHES! RAISED TO WORSHIP LOVESTAR!!! THEY'RE RAISED IN YOUR HONOR, LOVESTAR! DID YOU KNOW ABOUT THIS? WORD HAS STARTED TO SPREAD. WHERE ARE YOU GOING? WHERE'S RAGNAR? WHAT'S THE MILLION STAR FESTIVAL FOR?!”

LoveStar boarded the plane. Yamaguchi was sitting at the back, waiting for him. She rose, came up to him, seized his hands, and kissed him on the brow.

“Good-bye,” she said. “Take care.”

“Aren't you coming?” asked LoveStar.

“The leader of the search party will meet you,” said Yamaguchi. She looked into his eyes, handed him a folded note, and glanced once more over her shoulder before vanishing out of the door.

The plane soared into the air. LoveStar read the note:

You've never asked me about love.

I've calculated the world,

but you've never asked me about love.

I calculated you long before inLOVE

and long before LoveDeath.

your other half is