The Living (11 page)

The final straw, perhaps, was my trip to see Hanna in her boarding house – though there is no point in calling her that. Better to call her Mia 31.

When Ef asked if I wanted anything for Nativity and I
replied
that I would like to see Hanna, I didn’t think that he would say yes, I just gave him an honest answer. But he said, ‘Why not, if it will calm you down?’ The administration only let us go grudgingly. They don’t really like it when correctees go wandering about outside the House. As far as I could tell Ef was very insistent, even put pressure on them somehow. They gave us three hours: two for the trip, there and back, and one hour for the ‘meeting with a former Darling’. They strongly recommended handcuffs (‘This virus… anything’s possible’), but he didn’t make me wear them (‘Personally, I trust the lad’). I was touched by that. I almost started trusting him too.

Why did Ef take me to see her at the boarding house? To calm me down? Ha. Probably he wanted to provoke me from the very beginning. Perhaps he even hoped that I would try to run away. I didn’t try… But, one way or another, I still broke free, but that’s exactly what he had been waiting for. Hey, I even sort of understand him. All that fuss about me, all that spam, those thousands of infected messages and mails which they keep sending each other like crazy, as if they don’t even know what they are doing themselves, as if it’s because of some goddamn virus, which keeps reproducing itself constantly… You should go along and check – maybe someone’s already been doing it
by themselves
for ages, of their own accord, maybe someone likes doing it, maybe
someone
has some sympathy for me, maybe there really have been dissidents all this time. Maybe the Service for Planetary Order already thinks the boundary between
socio
virus and
socio
revolt seemed too fragile. They hoped that they would lock me up in a House of Correction and everyone would forget about me. And that there they would be able to quietly poke about inside me, study me like some newly discovered pet, grab at my wings and tug at my antennae – and that I would stay there for life stuck on inviz mode, an unknown but harmless correctee animal… And that’s how it went. For many years that’s exactly how it’s been – but now I am thirty-one and the whole world has suddenly remembered that I exist. The ‘0 threat’ – that’s what they’ve called the virus that has brought me my fame; there is no anti-virus yet – I hope that there will be one by your time.

By the way, it’s funny that I’m the only one who doesn’t get a chance to see all that spam myself. But certain rumours have still reached me and I’ve put together a short list of ‘chain letters’ that I’ve heard about in case you’re interested:

Sorry, it seems I got a bit distracted. I wanted to tell you about Mia 31.

Mia. Hanna. A fat, listless twelve-year-old girl. My mother’s second inc-successor (the first, a little boy, only lived for eight years; they say he was a dwarf). Mia’s forehead was covered in pustules and her eyes were so dull and cold that it was like some ancient-ancient pet was living in her skull and watching us all dispassionately through the little slits on that spotty dirty-brown globaloid forehead…

For about fifteen minutes Ef and I waited for her in the
director’s
office. She finally appeared, or rather, the director led her in, holding her by the arm: The Eternal Murderer was on at the time and that idiot, as far as I could tell, struggled to keep up two layers and could have easily tripped on the stairs, transfixed by the Butcher’s Son.

She seemed slightly disappointed by the fact that she was being distracted from the film, but she still tried to be polite. When I said hello, she offered to friend me ‘so we can chat normally’, but when I replied that I wasn’t connected to
socio
something flashed in her eyes and burned there like a broken lamp, something like surprise. She said practically nothing throughout our entire meeting, except to say that she liked serials and ‘like, yeah, second layer is so awesome’, and I wasn’t even sure if she understood why I had been brought there.

I imagined Hanna, so beautiful, with her velvety eyes like the wings of a tortoiseshell butterfly. Hanna, with her pure,
pale face. Hanna, who could hold three layers effortlessly. Hanna, whom I had lost forever.

When our silent ‘meeting’ came to an end, Ef asked me:

‘So then, are you happy? Are you convinced that everything’s alright with your little Hanna?’

My ‘little Hanna’ and the director laughed in unison at
something
I couldn’t hear. The planetman in The Eternal Murderer had obviously made a good joke.

I replied to Ef’s question:

‘She’s not Hanna, she never has been her and never will be.’

Ef got up and took a step in my direction. Something
predatory
appeared in him – not in his cold mirror face, but rather in his movements, in his posture. The director of the boarding house stared at me, gurgled excitedly and then screwed up his face, as if what I had said had caused an attack of heartburn and he had choked on stomach acid.

‘What did you mean by that?’ Ef asked. ‘What does that mean, “not Hanna”?’

‘Hanna died.’

‘Wow, did he just say that…’ Hanna whispered, looking at me with something like awe. ‘That’s a bad word. You’re not allowed to say that.’

‘Let’s put some handcuffs on for the way back, eh, buddy?’ Ef buzzed. ‘Looks like you don’t respect the Living. Like you don’t agree with Him. You just insulted Him, and it’s all been recorded on this device.’ He pointed at the chatterbox. ‘As a member of the Service for Planetary Order I am obliged to inform the
Administration
at the House of Correction about your behaviour. And recommend that you be moved to the Special Unit.’

Of course he’d been planning on it ending up like this from the very beginning.

…Do I really disagree? Am I really a dissident? I always wanted to be like everyone else. I still want to. Not now, so then, after the Pause.

Hey, you, there, in the future! I hope you really will exist. I hope that you will be me. I hope that I will be. If you are my continuation, if I am you, then sorry about this idiotic incode that you got from me… Personally it’s ruined my life, but I really hope you’ll cope with it. That you won’t get put in the Special Unit. That I won’t get put there… That I will become a part of the Living.

It’s probably cowardice. It’s running away. It’s not fair. But if you will exist, if you do exist, sorry for what I’m about to do. I’m planning on killing myself – yes, yes, sorry about that, sorry one more time, I shouldn’t say that, I should put it
differently
. I am planning on ‘temporarily ceasing to exist’, ‘taking a pause’, but I’m no fool, I know: they all get pauses, but all I get is a ‘stop’. So if you do exist, if you will exist – then we’ve won, you and me, because it means that we’re like everyone else. I’m like everyone else. I am a part of the Living.

I always wanted to be like everyone else. But they have made me a god. They have made me a devil. They have made me a fruit fly for them to do experiments on. They have made me very dangerous. They did not even know what they were doing.

They have forced me into a corner. They have left me
completely
alone. They have taken away my best friend.

Today he will come again. Ef, the man in the mask. They will pronounce judgment on my case. Look for defects, ask nasty little questions, start digging about inside me like I’m a heap of common property.

And then I’m going to set myself on fire. Then they’ll all see how a wonder-sunshine burns!

And here’s another thing. If you exist, then, please, visit Cracker at least every now and again. He’s very lonely there in his chamber. He’s completely stopped moving. They say he fell into a coma and can’t see or hear anything anymore. But I’m sure he’ll be able to tell that you are sitting there with him.

That I am sitting there with him.

Very slowly, trying not to make any sudden movements, Ef moves up to the broken window and carefully raises his hand in greeting.

‘Happy Birthday, Matthew!’ Ef says.

Matthew shudders and gingerly crawls off inside the shop window, crunching on shards of glass. The blood has already clotted on his hands and face – he probably cut himself when he broke the glass.

They had found Matthew in district R 800, on the third floor of the Megalopolis shopping centre. It is one of those hideous abandoned malls which are listed in the ‘to be demolished’ column in the local office of Plan for a More Beautiful World, but still never get demolished because they’re located in uninhabited districts and no one gets round to it. When it comes down to it, Megalopolis is not spoiling anyone’s view, because no one, except crazy Matthew, comes out to R 800. At one time activists from the movement ‘Memorial’ wanted to turn shopping centres like this into museums of antiquity and run tours to them as part of the ‘Let’s Go for a Walk in First Layer’ initiative and show people what commerce looked like before
socio
. However, they didn’t manage to get even a single tour group together, so the project was shut down.

…Matthew had taken a shine to one of the women’s clothes shops. Actually there had not been any clothes there for a long time, but naked mannequins pranced elegantly in the window.
When Cerberus and Ef came across him, Matthew had adorned the brown plastic girls with swathes of costume jewellery evidently plundered from the neighbouring boutique. When he saw the planetmen he got nervous and tried to hide behind the mannequins, then started building something like a barricade, throwing the women’s bodies into a heap, but after a minute he had already calmed down and seemed to have entirely forgotten that anyone else was there.

Now, as Ef gets closer, Matthew looks more perplexed than frightened.

‘Happy Birthday,’ Ef repeats. ‘We’ve come to congratulate you, Matthew.’

‘It’s my birthday?’ A dreamy expression appears on the old man’s face. ‘Have you brought me a present?’

‘Oh, of course we have a present for you, Matthew. You turned sixty today. It’s an important day.’

‘Sixty…’ Matthew repeats and then winks, first with one eye, then with the other. ‘Sixty. Sixty. Sixty. We strongly recommend.’

‘There you go. You even remember that you got a message… We’ve come to give you something very valuable. A new life.’

‘Men with mirrored faces,’ Matthew starts mumbling, ‘men without faces, men without voices… tremble for he is coming… thine twine swine…’ Suddenly, with unexpected deftness, he dashes off to one side towards a jagged hole in the window and quite nimbly jumps out of the shop into the atrium of the shopping centre.

‘…Ye shall all be cast down! For you shall be cast out!’ Matthew breaks into an uneven old man’s trot and his bare feet leave brown bobbles of blood on the dusty floor. ‘For the Saviour died for our sins! His name is Zero! Zero! Died!’

They catch up with him in three bounds, throw him face down on the floor and inject a tranquilliser into his neck. Matthew clicks out almost immediately. Cerberus pulls the handcuffs out of his inside pocket and then immediately chucks them down on the floor next to Matthew in
irritation
.

He gawps at his hand. A hole has opened up in his right glove. Cerberus nods towards the handcuffs.

Ef leans over Matthew, fusses about with the handcuffs and clicks them onto the old man’s wrists. Matthew’s hands are hot. Which is unpleasant. It somehow doesn’t tally with his immobility and the fringe of black under his nails.

‘It’s not working!’ Cerberus jabs at the lift button. ‘We’re going to have to drag him ourselves.’

They haul the limp body down the stairs. The old man is sticky with sweat and he gives off an overpowering, fermented smell of gone-off perfume.

They load Matthew into the truck; he quietly belches up a flowery stench.

Musical interlude:

‘…Golden, Golden, Go-o-o-lden Mean Square!’ Cerberus sings along cheerily.

‘I’m sick of these adverts. I get bombarded morning, noon and night,’ Ef grumbles, looking out the window of the van at the street.

They are, as it happens, going across the utterly deserted Golden Mean Square, carving channels in the golden sand. The concretion of a fist rises up in the middle of the square. It’s like he is in the ring waiting for a rival the right size for him.

‘Ef!’ Cerberus’s chatterbox glugs excitedly.

The Festival for Assisting Nature greets them from afar with sonorous salvoes of fireworks and as soon as they drive onto the premises a song comes on in second layer, ‘Listen to my pulse!’, the latest musical hit from Festival Passions.

They unload Matthew; Cerberus sings along out of tune. He loves the festival and the sense of celebration. Matthew shakes his head, as if he is trying to force the loud noises out of it, and groans weakly. He has already come to, but he’s groggy, like a fly in summer, and he barely resists as they unload him.

In the foyer of the Pause Zone the song comes across worse than outside, in snatches, and it sounds muffled. Matthew calms down. He even smiles when he sees a clown holding a bunch of balloons.

‘It’s my birthday,’ Matthew tells the clown. ‘Is that a present?’ He nods at the balloons.

The clown leaps up and spins round on one leg, tweaks his own squeaky red nose, nods happily and holds out the balloons. Matthew tries to take the string in his hand; the handcuffs clink quietly. He freezes, staring at the clown in surprise, as if he is trying to tell by the sound what is stopping him accepting the present.

The clown winks a painted eye at the planetmen.

‘Compulsory,’ Ef whispers with his mirrored lips. Cerberus nods irritatedly. The clown hunches over and pulls his head down into his shoulders, miming horror. Behind this
exaggerated
, jokey fear, there is, it seems, real fear hiding in the corner of his multi-coloured eyes. He had not spotted the compulsory. He had not noticed the handcuffs. A good professional should always notice things like that.

Meanwhile Matthew is starting to get seriously nervous. It would seem that he has finally remembered how he got here and why. He is about to dart off towards the exit, but Cerberus and Ef take him by the arms and grip from both sides.

‘Hounds of hell!’ Matthew screeches. ‘Men with mirror faces! Men without faces…!’

The pre-pausers, clustering excitedly around Souvenir Photos and Everything’s Going to Be Alright, start to look around. Quickly scratching the mirrored masks of the planetmen with his gaze and clarifying something for himself, the clown screws his painted face into a grimace of pain. He starts to weep loudly and squirts out two little fountains of artificial tears. Matthew breaks off in the middle of his sentence and looks pityingly at
the clown. He stops crying, flashes his white teeth in a smile, gives his hooter nose another squeeze, hands the balloons to Ef and takes a sweet out of his pocket. He takes off the rustling wrapper. Matthew holds his breath as he watches him.

‘Let’s have a little vitamin!’ the clown announces solemnly. Matthew obediently opens his mouth wide and the clown puts an opalescent black sweet on his tongue. Then he bows and, as if showing Matthew what to do, marches cheerfully off to the far end of the foyer, towards the entrance to the Zone. Once there he waves to Matthew.

‘Don’t go in there, multi-coloured man,’ Matthew whispers, looking at the clown in fascination. ‘Don’t go in there, your paint will get washed off in there…’

There’s something strange going on with the sound – it suddenly comes blaring on at full power. An invisible orchestra strikes up with a subtle electronic tremble, the
anonymous
singer pushes her screechy mantra from her throat in multiple spasms. Cerberus snarls and nods along obediently, Ef rummages through ‘services’ on the festival settings, hoping to switch off the soundtrack (an error has occurred: you are probably trying to do something slightly incorrect), Matthew writhes about, going limp in their hands. The
prepausers
who have crowded together in the foyer look around – some resentfully, some happily – and automatically drum out the rhythm with their feet. The ones that were talking out loud
break into shouts, trying hard to yell over the noise of the deep layers.

At last the music is turned off. The conversations die down. Only a young-looking pre-pauser, who has got all dressed up especially for the occasion, done up head to toe in ‘feeling lucky’ glad rags, is blaring away to the whole Pause Zone like a deaf-mute and flashing his greasy little eyes.

‘…I never needed any accompaniment, it always worked like clockwork for me, I tell you I’ve sired a fair few Darlings here in my time…!’

The person he is talking to makes ‘scary’ eyes, the
young-looking
pre-pauser looks around and shuts up embarrassed. Total silence reigns – both in second layer and in first, as if something thick and sticky has been poured into his ears from inside and out. Matthew concentrates on sucking his sweet, he’s not shouting and jerking about anymore, and Cerberus and Ef sit him down on the colourful sofa. The old man immerses himself in studying the design.

Ef turns round. The clown is standing at the opposite end of the foyer in the company of another four men with faces painted like him and is waving both hands at him joyously. The rest are studying him with strange, playful smiles; one, in a jester’s hat with little bells on it, is giggling. Only now does Ef realise that he is still holding the clown’s present. A planetman in a mirror mask with balloons… That’s a laugh.

Like in ancient times. No one could laugh at the king’s guards except the king’s jesters.

The jesters keep the Living jolly, so He doesn’t get bored. They cheer Him up in all sorts of ways – even laughing at His own power.