Nova Swing (12 page)

“Is this what will happen to me inside the site? Am I dreaming what it is like? I don’t want to go in but I must.” There being no attempt to explain this combination of need and paralysis, Vic was forced back repeatedly on to the entry which had first caught his eye. “Am I confused when I remember, or try to, the time before I was born?” Then, as if this weren’t enough:

“The vast craneflies,
libellulinae
and locusts which somehow filled my life then were emblematic. They were alien species, icons of difference; as tentative and fearful as they were frightening. They were usually trying to speak, through the woman I knew as The Girl Beneath the Dragonfly. She was translating for them, caught up, electrified, pushed out of herself, taken over, by their need. She had no life of her own. She was a radio, a retro radio. She lay on the sodden black ash. She was myself. They stood over her, trembling. They were trying to explain through her how badly things had gone wrong. How they had been blown here by circumstances they could not control. How they didn’t mean to be here. In a sense they were my parents, but they had never been meant to be here, in the world as we knew it then.

“Insect,” she concluded, “is an anagram of incest.”

Even for a childhood on another planet it seemed extreme.

At least he had learned her name, written repeatedly across the first two or three pages in a hand which, formless at first, soon became practised and fluent. It was Kielar. “Mrs Elizabeth Kielar,” she had written again and again, like a girl trying out future identities from the safety of some expensive New Venusberg school. “Elizabeth Kielar. Mrs
Kielar
.” Vic would never use it, but it was a name. She stood looking at him uncertainly from her doorway. The fur coat Irene had so admired was loosely slung over an oyster satin slip, which encouraged the hallway light to pool up blue shadows behind her thin collarbones.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I—”

“In the end,” Vic said, “sorry’s never enough.”

He pushed past her and into the apartment. It was seven or eight rooms one after the other, the connecting doors open so you could see the length of it. A bank of identical windows ran all the way down on the left, lighting it like a single artfully divided space, a restaurant or a gallery. Vic could feel her standing behind him, pulling the coat closed across her breasts, watching him with that continuous bland puzzlement of hers. She smelled of Anaïs Anaïs, and also some expensive flowered soap.

“You knew that,” he insisted, without looking back, “but until now you’ve never had to acknowledge it.” He held up the diary. “Why give this to me?”

She shut the door quietly behind her.

“You’re angry,” she said. “I don’t know why you’re so angry.”

“I can’t work with uncertainties on this side.”

“Would you like to have a drink?” This idea seemed to restore her. “I was asleep when you knocked,” she said. “Please come in and have a drink.”

“I want to know what you think I can give you,” Vic said.

“It didn’t work because you were so angry. I was more afraid of you than that place.”

“Maybe that’s how it seems to you now,” Vic said.

In the end, though, what could he do but shrug? He followed her down the curious linear apartment, accepted a drink, sat at one end of a sofa with a green chenille cover thrown over it and watched while she arranged herself at the other, in the corner as far away from him as she could get. She drew up her knees. She allowed the fur coat to fall loosely around her, and watched Vic in return. Vic made a pantomime of placing her diary carefully on a small table, which was perhaps his way of saying that was over now, he’d just leave that alone. There was a single narrow glass vase on the same table. In the mornings the light would fall harshly across it, tangle the transparent shadow of the vase in the shadows of the window frame. “Is that the drink you like?” she asked him. “Is that the way you prefer it?”

After a moment he said:

“When you walked into Liv Hula’s bar, I thought you were a tourist. That was a mistake. It put both of us in danger.”

“Mr Serotonin, I—”

“Look at me,” Vic urged. “Listen. I’m telling you this. In there, the most unreliable people are the ones looking for something. Their lives were too difficult to solve. Now they hope something good will happen to them, but they’ve been hoping for too long and that’s what makes them dangerous. You never know what will happen to them in there. They thought they wanted to find something—it would have been easier to stay this side of things.” It was his standard speech to women like that. He usually gave it in a corner of Liv Hula’s bar, or a suite at one of the tourist hotels.

He swallowed his drink. He leaned forward.

“Do you understand?” he said.

She shivered and pulled the coat back round her suddenly. “You’re angry because you’re afraid of everything,” she said.

Vic shrugged and smiled.

“It’s good we can agree,” he said politely.

At this, she pursed her lips and turned her head away from him so that the long tendons of her neck stood out. Vic could see the tension in them. Her skin was a little darker than he remembered. “This morning,” she said quietly, “I sat here for an hour without moving. I ache. I’m waiting for something to happen, and I don’t even know what part of my life it will approach from.” She turned back to him suddenly and asked, “Have you ever lost your way?” Her eyes, a curious colour between green and brown, were so wide and direct he couldn’t look into them for fear of disappointing her in some obscure fashion.

“Would I know?” he said.

“People lose their way as an act of defence. Then they panic and decide they have to find it again.”

She got up from the sofa and stood in front of him smiling. “Come and look,” she said. “Come over here with me and look out of the window.” When he didn’t respond, she walked over to stare out anyway. “I won’t wait for you,” she said. Then:

“Look!”

Outside it was Saudade, rooftops and streets stretching away in the soft rain and dark. Lines of lights. Cabs and pedestrians flickering under the neon, adstreams like migrations of pastel moths. Distant cries came up; laughter. Past all that, past the tourist port and the military pits, out at the limits of vision, you could see something—a whitish, roiling strip like surf, the boundary of the event site, a stationary vapour of uncertain physics. Beautiful but very strange. Above it, the Kefahuchi Tract had stretched itself across the yielding black sky like the generative principle of some old cosmology. Vic Serotonin stood next to Mrs Kielar. He frowned briefly as if he had seen something out there he wanted to be certain of. Finally, he looked down at her.

“It’s quiet tonight,” he said.

She smiled to herself. “Is it?” she said. “Why did you come here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Tell yourself that if you like. It won’t help.”

The fur coat had fallen open again. City light splashed behind the narrow collarbones, and where the edge of the satin slip lay across it, her skin was the colour of balsamic cream. An unexpected warmth came up from her. The moment he became aware of that, she knew. She gave a low laugh and moved a step or two away from him. “You never had to see me again. What do you care about some tourist? It wasn’t the diary. It was me.” By then Vic had her by the shoulders, which were small and rounded.

“What’s this?” he said, “what’s happening?” and began kissing her.

His mouth safely on hers, she backed towards the sofa and pulled him down. Vic worked the coat off and tugged the slip up round her waist, felt the heat of her on his face; caught broken glimpses, through his own excitement, of the light on her skin. She was one of those women who writhe and push a lot. Some internal struggle with themselves—as urgent as their own narrow bones, skin over muscle—causes them to sweat immediately they touch your clothes. Everything is in their way. You don’t know if they want you or not, but something won’t stop in them. She bit Vic’s arm. One foot pushed and kicked impatiently at the coat as she placed herself, then she had him in her.

“Christ,” Vic said.

“You like this,” she said. “You like it.” She made a small agitated noise, as if she liked it too. She smiled at the ceiling for a moment, then drew up her legs and began to say yes, in a determined yet meditative voice, in time to Vic’s thrusts: “Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes,” until he came.

“How you wanted to do that!” she said.

Vic, as puzzled as he’d ever been in his life, tried to roll away from her and sit up. She only wrapped her legs round him and held him by the shoulders until he couldn’t avoid her eyes.

“Will you take me into the site, Mr Serotonin?”

He stared at her, shook his head. Pulled himself away. “It’s Vic,” he said thickly—then, sitting on the edge of the sofa staring at the window and talking to himself as much as her, “I’m Vic.” He felt used. He didn’t know what he felt. He sat there for half an hour with his back to her in a defensive curve. Neither of them said anything, then he turned round and had her again. Facing away to present herself, she whispered, “You have no idea who you are.”

When Vic woke it was still night, and he was alone.

He toured the long apartment looking for her. White wainscoting and layers of ethnic rugs gave way to shoulder-height marble tiling over large black and white linoleum squares; then green silk wallpaper and dark wooden floorboards worn unevenly but polished to a high shine. Objects were everywhere—feathers from a dead alien, musical instruments casting angular shadows, three sketches of someone else’s ancestors in thin, black-japanned frames. Ceramics from some culture no one knew the name of, a thousand lights down the Beach, a million years down the drain. Everything changed, room to room, except the row of windows, and through these the city light fell cleanly, downshifting colours, accentuating the museum values of the space, emptying everything out. He felt glad of the slight chill on his skin. It reminded him he was alive.

“Mrs Kielar?” he called. There she was, crouched on a window seat naked, legs drawn up, twisted from the waist so she could look out. Her sharp, vulnerable elbows on the windowsill supported her upper body; her hands were clasped in front of her face. She rocked a little, to and fro. Vic touched her.

“Mrs Kielar?” No response. It was the body language of someone waiting for the worst to happen. “I ache,” she had said to him, “I ache.”

“I’ll take you in there,” he offered. “Soon.”

Across the city, the man who looked like Einstein sucked with satisfaction on his empty pipe and nodded to himself. “For once this technology worked,” he told his assistant. “We have him now.”

He nodded to himself again. “We have Vic now,” he said.

“I don’t see why,” his assistant said.

It was nearly dawn, and she was hungry. They had been sitting in Aschemann’s office for ten hours while a pick-up detail from surveillance mothered the obsolete nanocams Vic Serotonin had brought unwittingly into Mrs Kielar’s apartment to join the house dust, the aerosols of perspiration and warm breath, the tiny drifting flakes of Elizabeth Kielar’s delicate cream-coloured skin which already floated there. In the end the usual series of transmission faults had corrupted the image stream, freezing it on Mrs Kielar in her strained attitude by the window while the travel agent, naked, bent over her solicitously, his mouth open to repeat something, a curiously inappropriate point of reflected light in one eye making him look like an untrustworthy dog.

“Drive me home,” Aschemann said, “and perhaps I’ll tell you.”

Once they were in the car, though, he changed his mind and started to talk about his wife instead. Why, the assistant couldn’t tell. He insisted they have the top down while they drove. He looked tired, cheerful, a little frailer than usual, his white hair disarranged by the rush of cold morning air into the Cadillac. When she suggested they find a place to eat breakfast, he made an irritable gesture.

“My wife,” he said, “was an agoraphobe. You didn’t know that.”

When the assistant failed to respond, instead running through her repertoire of calm practical actions—glancing into the driving mirror, changing gear, slowing to allow a group of cultivars to stagger across the road in front of the Cadillac, drunk, bagged, bleeding out happily from their injuries in the ring—he said, “This will be useful for you to know. You should listen to this if you want to understand the meaning of the Neon Heart murders.”

“I can listen and drive,” she pointed out.

“So you say.”

There was a silence. Then he went on:

“There are kinds of agoraphobes to whom even a knock on the door is too much of the outside world. Someone else must answer it for them. Yet as soon as you step into their houses they become monsters.”

In his wife’s rooms, he said, every inch of floor and furniture space had been filled up with objects, so that you didn’t quite know how to get from the door to the sofa. “Once you had got there you couldn’t move about, except with extreme caution. All quick movement was damped by this labyrinth—” here, he laughed “—where there was even a code, three or four quick pulls on the cord, to get the lavatory light to go on. It’s less, you see, that they are uncomfortable in public than that they only feel in control on their own ground.”

He seemed to expect a response to this, but she couldn’t think of one. Eventually, she said, “Poor woman. Where would you like to eat?”

Aschemann folded his arms and stared ahead.

“Is that all you can say? ‘Poor woman’? Problems like hers are so easy to cure, no one should have them. Is that what you believe?”

“I thought you might want to eat.”

“Agoraphobia is an aggressively territorial strategy: refusal to go out forces the outside to come in, to where it’s manageable. On the agoraphobe’s ground you walk through the agoraphobe’s maze.”

“I don’t see,” she said, “what this has to do with the murders.”

“Well, you have no patience.”

Other crimes had come and gone for him, Aschemann said, but the murders continued. “They continue to this day.” He said this with a kind of bitter satisfaction. Each one published new lines of the verse, with nothing to connect the victims but their shaven armpit and Carmody-style tattoo. “And, of course,” as Aschemann reminded her, “the investigation itself.” He had long ago forbidden the detective branch to work the case. Track record as well as seniority had allowed him to do that, sheer weight of cases solved, paperwork successfully filed. Word went out that it was Aschemann’s crime. He can keep it, was most people’s opinion.