The Red Men (8 page)

‘Do you recognize this?’ said Harry Bravado, waving a manuscript. ‘No? That’s because you haven’t written it yet. It’s your book, Raymond. I took some of your
poetry, some of Florence’s. I had to get some advice from the others here. Literature is not my thing. I do know about branding, though.’

He showed Raymond the title page.

‘We think you should call it ‘The Great Refusal’. It has an authenticity. Authenticity sells to the type of people who buy books. We’re assembling pieces based on some of
your correspondence, some of your drunken riffs. It’s going to be a great book. Powerful revolutionary shit. People are crying out for it. Something that feels real, you know, in the unreal
city. That’s poetic isn’t it? I really admire people who are creative, Raymond. I don’t have an ounce of your talent. But I do make things happen. I think you creative types,
you’re awesome, but you’re lazy, and you’re self-doubting, and you’re self-sabotaging and you need the drive of someone like me, and my colleagues here, to knock you into
shape.’

Raymond snapped, ‘Give it to me.’

Bravado laughed. He made a mockery of trying to pass the manuscript through the screen. Raymond had never written that much, not even close to it. He asked to see a few pages and Bravado leafed
through it, showing the artful juxtaposition of Florence’s calls for unmediated life next to his cuticle-gnawing vignettes of street life. Unpunctuated transcripts of their sex talk ran
together in small print like the diary of a graphomaniac. All the months they had been working at Monad, the red men had been idly monitoring them, condensing the vapour of all their chatter.

‘Send it to me,’ Raymond insisted.

‘When it’s finished. It’s up to you. When I’m in a Dr Easy, the first thing I will do is hand it over in person.’

Bravado chucked the manuscript back on a coffee table.

‘Have a good rest, Raymond. You’ve got work to do.’

The screen dimmed and fell from the television like a sheath of dead skin. Then, it made slow slinking progress past Raymond, down the stairs and out of the flat.

I met Raymond’s father only once before he died, in a pub in Clerkenwell. Adam Chase was a stocky man in a brown sheepskin coat; ‘He’s a tough Jew,’ said
Raymond, before telling me proud tales of how his father intervened in fights on the Underground, always on the side of justice. There was something of the hard nut in Raymond, although he was
short and slight and chose his battles poorly.

When I met Adam Chase, I was still editor of
Drug Porn
and sauntered into the pub in a fake fur coat and obscene T-shirt. He was rightly suspicious of me. His son had got into a bad crowd
in Soho, and so Raymond asked me to show up in the pub as a character witness for his better self, the writer. His father, expecting a respectable figure, saw an oversized popinjay and despaired of
the city’s corrupting influence upon his son. Adam Chase nursed one pint of bitter while I bought a succession of drinks for myself and his son.

He asked me what my magazine was called.

‘
Drug Porn
,’ I said, with an interrogative lift, in expectation of him recognizing the title. He had not heard of it before.

‘It’s very influential,’ said Raymond. His father wasn’t interested. The title
Drug Porn
flaunted both the forces that had brought his son down. I registered a
slight resistance on his father’s part when I suggested that Raymond’s time in Soho was a writer’s apprenticeship; other than that, I was unaware of how badly the meeting was
going.

The family took Raymond out of London for a while and tried to get him a job in the local chippy. He always fought his way back. The manic egotism of his youth would not dissipate. He refused to
knuckle down. When suspicions came to him that he was not the centre of the universe, he would dose himself with drugs. Drugs press the inner world upon the outer, the inscape over the landscape.
It is a violent attack upon the everyday, showing callous disregard for the realities the rest of us are struggling through. The drug hero strides through the evening trying to shake some intensity
into us all, but relies on us to pick up the pieces come the morning.

I was reminiscing about this as I waited for Raymond, many years after that awkward chat with his father. He had called and requested we meet somewhere other than Monad. So I waited at a table
in a pub on Old Compton Street, which afforded me an excellent view of the Soho promenade: the ageing hipsters sticking to their skateboard style of low-slung denim and ironic T-shirts, a work
outfit for industries in which youth had a greater value than experience; the dissolute rodent men moving between drug supply and drug demand; divorced fathers taking their daughters to a musical
in town; unkempt office stooges in ill-fitting suits, with their ties off and tails untucked to let their real selves hang out; a suave older type in yachting linens, red faced with blonde
colouring and drowsy with the effects of his gin and tonic. Then, bobbing through the crowd, in a brown suit and brogues, came Raymond.

He joined me at my table and set about relating the events of the previous evening, of how he and Florence had accompanied Alex Drown’s red man to a restaurant meeting then on to the
awkward encounter with the real Alex Drown and her young baby and finally the visit from Harry Bravado. I found it all very disturbing.

When Adam Chase died, suddenly, a heart attack out of the blue, the question of what to do with his son was still pending. With his father snatched from existence, Raymond’s survival
relied upon him taking on some of his father’s decency and stability. It was a struggle. As the Soho promenade attested, London demands you reinvent yourself in its own image. You must become
weightless, drifting above whoever you once were. The danger is that it takes just one push for you to fly out of view, and be quickly forgotten.

Raymond wanted me to lobby for Harry Bravado to be given access to a robot body. We talked as colleagues, with a shared concern for company business. I agreed to pass Bravado’s request
another step up the hierarchy to Morton Eakins. This satisfied Raymond. He changed the subject. There was something he wanted to know.

‘Why were you never simulated, Nelson?’

I shrugged. ‘I can’t afford it.’

He didn’t accept this. ‘The company would do it for free, surely. If you had a red man they would have two employees for the price of one.’

‘It’s very new technology. We don’t know how it plays out over time. Some of the management have had it done, like Alex, but I’m not really one of them.’

‘Wouldn’t you find it exciting?’

‘I don’t want to take the risk.’

‘Risk?’

‘Have you ever watched the red men argue? It’s hard for outsiders to make any sense of the outpourings of data between two angry red men. They have a faster form of communication
when they are talking between themselves. Although talking is not the right word. It’s beyond the gradual, one-word-after-another unfolding of language and more like the pattern of a
peacock’s tail. A thousand messages flash up instantaneously. So that is unnerving. And then there is the violence. Their culture is very aggressive and competitive. Disputes can turn nasty.
They inflict injuries on one another, which last until we initiate a repair. The subscribers have complained that they have checked in with their red man only to find it bloodied and pummelled to
death, and then we have restart it. It doesn’t happen that often, but when it does, they set upon one another like ravens upon a painted bird.’

‘You’re worried they’ll bully your red man?’

‘I’m not in an experimental frame of mind anymore. I am a family guy. I don’t go looking for trouble. I don’t like the idea of the red men being able to walk around our
world. It should be a closed experiment. But the Monad interacts with our world so that the company can make money. The red men are a bad idea and we should stop it, but we can’t, because
money has its own mass, its own momentum, and we are on board the enormous vessel of a business plan.’

‘And you accuse me of catastrophizing things.’

I shrugged, acknowledging his point. We were both susceptible to apocalyptic visions. A sweeping Blast-It-All reaction to the spirit of the age.

I wanted to know why Raymond was acting as Bravado’s advocate.

He was shamefaced. ‘I didn’t tell you this because it’s ridiculous. I haven’t told Florence either. The red men have ghostwritten our book. Or ghost-edited it. Assembled
it out of all the scraps published and unpublished that Florence and I have lying around, as well material taken from our conversations over the last few months. Harry Bravado showed it to me. Some
of it. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.’

‘It’s not real,’ I said.

Raymond looked at me like I was being naïve.

‘The book will be called ‘The Great Refusal’. It’s our case against the society of screens. I am aware of the hypocrisy of it. That’s why I haven’t told
Florence. A book insisting on authenticity assembled by the very technology we despise: to her, it would be a violation. And I agree with that. We must keep our integrity. Yet, I am very
tempted.’

Raymond had a good point; all he had to do was participate in a bit of quid pro quo with power and it could transform his life. His father was dead. He had to wise up. Play the game. Why stick
to these romantic notions of artistic integrity when everyone else is making out like gangbusters?

This was tragic apocalyptic thinking on my behalf. I should have protected Raymond but I didn’t. I just threw my hands up and said well if the system is corrupt we might as well be corrupt
with it, and who knows maybe it will work but what does it matter either way? I was a little drunk, with no head for detail or deliberation. The consequences to Raymond, of my sobering influence
failing to provide reasonable counsel at the very moment he was most in need of it, would be dire.

I went to see Morton Eakins. He made me wait while he sat behind his desk taking career drugs. He shuffled a pair of green lozenges out of a small woven ethnic pouch and placed
them upon a disposable plastic tray.

‘Two cogniceuticals a day to increase the frequency of receptor modulators to enhance transmission between brain cells, and I need a little something to promote structural plasticity in
the neocortex and nucleus accumbers. Once you pass forty, your faculties recede every single day. New memories struggle to take hold and you are unable to assimilate novelty. Monad is novelty.
Monad is the new new thing. Without career drugs, the future will overwhelm us, wave after wave after wave.’

Next out of the woven pouch was an emoticeutical inhaler. In two months’ time, Morton intended to restructure the department. Planning ahead for this annual slash-and-burn, he took a
wheeze of vaporized iron to trim the length and depth of his feelings, the peaks and troughs of his moods.

‘I must schedule my emotions and not make rash promises or punishments,’ Morton explained. ‘A manager’s default setting must be control and patience.’

The desk was a white plastic Möbius strip, one continuous edge moulded into a horizontal figure of eight, a snake consuming its own tale in a cycle of creation and destruction. With his
legs serenely tucked beneath this infinity, Morton tipped his head back, closed his eyes and took one career drug after another. He meditated upon the music of his thoughts, his face twitching as
he noted the changes in the pitch, tone, and volume of his qualia. There was not a single dropped note. At that moment, he attained the peak of his potential.

His personal assistant arrived with a milky latte and a muffin. Morton talked me through the progress of the customer service department.

Six months after being introduced to Harry Bravado and the simulated office city of Monad, the new intake of writers and poets had evolved into a functioning unit. A few had been lost along the
way. The women were always the first to go and he kept a box of tissues in his desk drawer just for them. A few had been hired to be fired. An early round of ruthless layoffs imprinted his
authority upon the group at a vital stage in its development. With his teardrop-shaped torso and weak chin he couldn’t rely on any natural authority. His physicality slunk around the
hinterland between masculinity and femininity, child and adult; he was insipid and ill-defined, lacking the testosterone that gives a man his flavour.

I asked Morton how Raymond was getting on.

‘My little Ray of sunshine?’ he replied. ‘Raymondo? Despite his appalling personality, he has shown aptitude for the work. The red men like him because he’s a maniac. We
try to limit his contact with real people. I hear Raymondo and you are friends. I should ask him about you to see if he has got any embarrassing stories to tell.’

The emoticeuticals only increased Morton’s delight in needling me.

We took the elevator up to reception then walked on into the undistinguished open-plan offices of Monad. The fire-retardant charcoal carpets had been cleaned overnight. By midday they would give
off a fug of microwaved lunches and recycled stink, men and women eating at their desks and shitting around the corner. The lighting was ruthless; you could smell everyone baking under it. From
this employee came the waft of a stockinged foot briefly freed from a high heel, from that employee the sickly odour of a warm seat. White-collar bovines in their paddock; if you worked on the
ground floor of the Wave building, you were going nowhere. Paradoxically, the further one descended the Wave, the higher one ascended through Monad’s corporate structure. The mysteries of the
boardroom were conducted down in the bedrock of the Thames. On the ground floor personnel calculated how to trim costs from the cleaning budget. On the upper floors, poets and writers acted as
go-betweens for the red men and their clients.

Morton dropped in on his friends in personnel, making an appointment for the next round of the table football cup. Then we caught the external elevator, a glass pod which followed the outer
oscillation of the Wave.