Pumping Up Napoleon (14 page)

He makes the surprised face, looks down at his name, and laughs. ‘My bad handwriting,' he says. ‘It's really
Marlon
.'

I sit in the big chair beside the bed while he changes the sheets. All the time he is chuckling at my mistake and shaking his head. Then he looks at me sideways as he tucks in a corner, and says, ‘You know, Marion's a girl's name.'

‘Is it?' I say.

‘Sure it is,' says Marlon.

But then it turns out there was once a man called Marion. Dr McKinnon knows about him. He was a film star, she says, and he changed his name to John Wayne.

‘John Wayne?' says Marlon, when I tell him. ‘The cowboy? No way!'

There are more sessions with the black velvet bag, but now the marbles don't remind me of anything. They're just marbles.

‘Sometimes,' I tell Dr McKinnon to cheer us both up, ‘just when I'm about to fall asleep, I see pictures.'

‘Well,' she says. ‘Just close your eyes, let yourself drift, and tell me what you see.'

I close my eyes. ‘I see stars. Coming towards me.'

‘Just let yourself drift; do you hear anything?'

I'm hardly listening to her; I can hear my own voice saying, ‘Are we there yet?'

Planets hurtle past the windows. Stars dash through my brain.

‘Dad, are we
there
yet?'

He puts down his checklist and swivels his seat to face me. ‘Have we stopped?' he says with raised eyebrows.

‘No,' I say.

‘Are we still moving?'

I look out of the window. ‘You know we are.'

‘So, it would be safe to assume we're not there yet, wouldn't it?'

But he gets out the map again. I know that he's shown me before, and that I made him cross by not remembering the details. ‘Most of the smudgy fingerprints are galaxies,' he says, ‘except that one.'

I laugh, because that smudgy fingerprint is mine, and when I put it there he wasn't cross with me.

‘This galaxy with the red cross is home.' Father points but doesn't touch. ‘This one with the blue cross is where we are going. This dotted line shows our trajectory. Here's our ship, in miniature, on its way towards the blue cross.'

The path the ship has covered is red. The path ahead is blue. There are lots of blue dots still to come. I loll back in my seat and groan.

‘You wanna drive?' says dad.

‘Yeah!' I say, leaping up.

He never lets me steer on my own, even though the controls are disengaged in flight. They're for docking and manoeuvring only. I know that. He sits in the driving seat and I sit on his knee. He keeps his arms around me.

‘Don't wrench the wheel so hard,' says dad.

‘But it's not
doing
anything,' I say, forgetting to pretend.

‘Even so.' His voice sounds tight.

I look round and up at his face.

He's staring out of the window. His eyes look as if they're being slowly boiled.

‘Were there any names on the map?' asks Dr McKinnon.

‘No,' I say. ‘Not any I could see.'

I don't know what to call the people who don't have their names on their chests; I want to wear mine so that people will know who I am. Marlon writes it for me on a strip of paper tape but it won't stay stuck to the downy white hospital gown.

‘Don't worry about it, Daniel,' says Marlon. ‘Most people don't go around with their names on a badge.'

I've learned to walk since they put Jesus into my room. He doesn't wear his name on his chest.

On the very first day, when I'm re-telling him my two memories, he grunts and asks me, ‘What planet are you from?'

I tell him I don't know.

‘What's your name?' I ask. ‘Why don't you have it written down?'

‘Jesus,' he says, snorting and turning his back.

‘Hello, Jesus,' I say, turning my back on him too. ‘My name's Daniel.' I look down; my name has fallen off.

When you're out in the hallway you can see that the torsos and heads are carried by legs. They're not floating, after all. Jesus goes out a lot. When he's here he won't look at me. I find him sitting in a different room, in front of a box of moving pictures. Now some of my day is spent sitting here. It is called the TV lounge; that is what is says on the door. No one speaks except the people in the box.

Dr McKinnon tells me I have to think about leaving the hospital. When she speaks she doesn't look at my face, but over my shoulder, as if talking to someone behind me. I turn but no one is there.

Where do they want me to go? A man comes and takes my photograph, and then it is in the papers.

‘Don't worry,' says Marlon. ‘It's nearly Christmas. Someone will have pity on a lost puppy like you.' He says they always like to clear as many beds as they can before the holidays. I wonder how they will get the beds out of the rooms and what they will do with the rooms afterwards. Where will all these people go?

I look at my photograph; my eyes are closed; my mind's eye is disturbed by flickering dreams.

One morning, when I should be waking up, I find myself standing near an open window and see a yellow curtain, blowing in the sun. I put my hand over my mouth and nose, afraid; someone is letting all the air out.

But then I see the curtain is blowing towards me, as if air is coming in from the outside. This is unusual. My legs move; the window comes closer. A hand (mine?) brushes the curtain aside. Outside is a street: the sun beats down on a boardwalk and, beyond that, hard-baked dirt. One long street of wooden houses stretches away towards the mountains, dwindling into an open space of sand and scrub, white in the heat, all the way to the red horizon. A big man on a horse is riding out of the desert towards me.

I step out onto the boardwalk, just as the big man stops outside the house. ‘I like it here,' I say to him, as he's getting down from his horse. ‘You have weather.'

‘Well, for crying out loud, boy, put some clothes on,' says the big man.

I look down at myself and see that I am naked. The sun feels good on my skin. The breeze tickles the hair on my arms. I shake my head.

He shakes his head too. ‘Well, I guess as long as there's no one else around. It's your sunburn.' Then he leads me round to the back of the house.

But where is the back of the house? There's nothing but a beam angled to hold up the one front wall of unpainted wood. Yet here is the window of a few moments ago and the same yellow curtain blowing.

‘That's the way it is, boy,' says the big man. ‘Better get used to it.'

‘Good news,' says Marlon. ‘Someone has recognised you.' He has brought me a pile of clothes. I sniff them. They smell of perfume, different from the smell on the hospital gown.

‘These are
your
clothes,' says Marlon. ‘Don't you recognise them? You go along the corridor and have a shower now and take these with you,' – he piles them into my arms – ‘and come back with them on.'

I set off.

‘Hey,' says Marlon, calling after me.

I turn.

He comes up and spins me around again, tugging the strings at the back of my garment.

‘You forget there's no back to this thing,' he says. ‘You're walking around showing your ass to the world.'

‘Thanks,' I say.

In the bathroom I work the hot tap and the cold and make the right mix. I look into the mirror. In it I see a man with a growth of dark beard and lank hair shot with grey. There are pouches under the eyes, broken veins on the cheeks, red patches around the nose. I look at him sideways and he, suspicious, does the same.

I take a long time to wash, or rather, I spend a long time playing with the water, losing myself in the sounds of lapping and splashing, the feel of the silky flow of it over my wrists, the spattering drops jumping up at my face when I hit it with a flat hand.

My face is wet and now I think I remember… I am crying, as I push the wall with the yellow-curtained window. The big man leaps out of the way as the wall totters. ‘Look out!' he shouts, as the beam falls down, and the wall changes direction. As it falls towards me I put my arms over my head.

Marlon opens the door. ‘Come on,' he says. ‘She's here.'

I nod and show my teeth and Marlon goes away.

Slowly, I get dressed in the clothes they want me to wear. The trousers, when I hold them up, seem impossibly long, something that would fit my father. And yet they fit me. I button up the shirt, starting from the bottom so I do it right. My fingers are trembling.

Slowly, I walk back down the corridor to my room. Waiting inside is a woman, sitting in my bedside chair, talking to Marlon who's stripping the bed and Jesus who is looking at her with big eyes.

I peer at them through the crack in the door.

‘It's hard to know what happened exactly, or why,' the woman is saying, in a gun-metal voice, ‘he just went off to work that day, like any other, and next thing, he's here. You know,' she leans forward and taps a finger on the stripped bed, ‘they found him wandering in the desert,
naked
, not a stitch on him?'

Marlon touches the metal bed-frame and a blue spark cracks. ‘Damn,' says Marlon, snatching his hand away. ‘Sorry,' he says, ‘that static'll get you every time.' He finds the edge of the clean sheet and shakes the cloth free.

I turn away from the door. At the end of the corridor I see Dr McKinnon with a clipboard under her arm, passing on her way to somewhere else.

I stand in the hallway and try to breathe while people move around me, not looking at me, not telling me that I am in the way. Turning, I begin to walk, not looking back. I keep one hand on the wall as I walk, and push, steadily, against it.

Somewhere there must be a way out; somewhere there must be a way to go.

The Disappearance of Baby Joe

Big Joe has a helicopter, large houses and more than one island. He also has a bad heart; his arteries are glue. Never mind; Big Joe has no intention of dying.

Firstly, he has his own clinic, staffed with the best doctors, surgeons, nurses and technicians money can buy. It takes care of him and all his ‘people' and does important research besides. There is a Reproduction Unit, where the latest advances in genetic modification and cloning are practised, but it has been something of a disappointment: in thirty years it has only delivered one viable living product.

‘How is the little guy?' Big Joe asks, maybe once or twice a week. He never forgets entirely, no matter where he is at the time: his office in Manhattan, his yacht in Sydney harbour, or the small country he owns in South America. Usually, his assistant glances at the last page of a leather-bound report and says, ‘He's good'.

The little guy is precious, the first and last of his kind. If Big Joe ever worries about him he consoles himself with the thought that Baby Joe is treated like a little Prince. A very short, perpetually incarcerated and ultimately doomed Prince – but then, Baby Joe doesn't know much about that. He only knows what it is like to be fussed over by his attendants, whose job it is to keep him happy and ignorant and free from disease.

He's never even seen his dad.

Baby Joe lives on an artificial island poking out into Amsterdam harbour. His palace is a rubber igloo inside a warehouse aromatic from years of storing cocoa beans. Baby Joe wouldn't know about that either: the air in the igloo is filtered and conditioned; there is just the right amount of illumination from daylight bulbs to keep him healthy; soothing music regulates his moods.

There are no windows and he has never been outside. They tell him it is dangerous and disease-ridden. This is true (they show him newspapers) but no more than it has ever been.

‘You're too special to risk losing,' is what his doctor tells him. Baby Joe believes it. After all, he is the centre of the universe: a boy, nearly a man, with many servants and no responsibilities.

Every day Baby Joe has a visit from a doctor, a dietician, an exercise coach, a masseur and a nurse (who makes sure he washes properly). He also regularly sees an igloo-cleaner and a psychoanalyst. They all talk to him as if he really is a slice of minor royalty. None of these people are bigger than four feet tall because that is the height that Baby Joe has been programmed to attain. Big Joe decreed the clone should not be able to look him in the eye. At fifteen, he's full-grown.

Last of all there is Mort, his personal servant, his companion; the nearest thing Baby Joe has to a friend.

Mort crawls inside the igloo with a cup of green tea for Baby Joe and stands up.

Baby Joe is lying on a bank of cushions, wearing his favourite purple plush all-in-one. He has a big torso and little arms and legs. He could lose weight, but so what, if he's happy?

Right now he is frowning. ‘Are you getting taller?' says Baby Joe.