Intentional Dissonance (4 page)

She is a constant comfort in the mess that is their apartment. Jon cares more about how he feels, how comfortable he is, than what things look like where he lives. Some people can’t function in a mess. He can. He remembered someone asking him once how he found anything. It was easy. Whatever it was, it was somewhere on the floor.

He does his best to slow down his mind and eventually, he falls asleep next to her. After dreaming feverishly, a side effect of all the Sadness, he wakes up again. He vaguely remembers being taken to a camp where they cut the tattoos off people so they have no reminders of who they once were. Nothing left but scars. But he isn’t sure that ever happened. His mind is a timeless wasteland with moments of sanity, burnt by the fire of his reservations about the rest of world and what it’s become. Anyone besides him and Michelle and Emily, everyone else, could go to hell. The world could go deeper into hell. Here, at least, there was peace. They’d only spent a week in the apartment but from the looks of things, it seems longer.

They’d been thrown out of the previous one. It started out well but because of the combination of Jon’s gift and the drugs, the sadness settled in; slowly, like morning fog, it seeped out through the front door into the hallway. He’d smiled when the landlord came over to ask if he knew anything about the sadness, grinned in fact, and insisted that while he didn’t mind the questions, the idea that he should be anything but euphoric was ridiculous. But they always catch you sooner or later, all it takes is a tear in a mirror or a sigh as you pass. The neighbours always noticed. Most didn’t say anything, quietly enjoying the idea of feeling something for the first time in years but someone always spoke up. And then Jon and Michelle got thrown out.

He dreamed of a world where now wasn’t a place in his head, where the past ate up the future one moment at a time like it should, but as his music teacher once said before she’d died in The End, “You take too many flights of fancy. You’re a daydream away from the edge.”

Now. Now. Now. Now.

Jon manages to fall asleep again for a few hours and when he wakes up, he kisses Michelle on the cheek. She rolls over in her sleep, not even acknowledging he’s there. He leaves her in bed. He’s recorded a dozen meals on the MicroPVR over the last 24 hours and he opens and closes the black plastic door, tasting each one to see if he actually wants to eat it or if he’s just curious. He loves classic American dishes like pizza and hamburgers and has scheduled the box to record each and every one of those meals when they get transmitted. He tries not to think about his father. He has to perform his “magic” tonight and the knowledge sits at the back of his head, uncomfortably taking up space. The food becomes little more than a distraction. He can only do what he does, use his gift, if he’s completely convinced he can do it or if he’s in a state of primal fear. But the craftsmanship, the details that make it beautiful, that happens late at night when he’s supposed to sleep, when he worries that maybe, this time, he will fail.

The fear drives him.

A few hours later, he’s on a train and not sure how he got there. No matter, the blackouts happen often enough that he’s used to them. He gets off at the station and walks the rest of the way, carrying his black suitcase, which, if asked, he tells people is filled with props for his magic tricks. The black suitcase often just contains exotic sandwiches he’s downloaded off the MicroPVR. He does his best to ignore the dark shadows that make up the rest of the world. The others. The dark, depressing, damningly smiling remains of humanity, victims of drug-induced happiness and emotional manipulation, with their desperate attempts at a ‘normal existence’ and their disease of apartness. No matter where you go, someone’s always giggling insanely in a corner somewhere, someone’s stopped walking and just sat down in the middle of the road, deep in a dissociative state, a side effect of the ketamine (or at least that’s the theory in terms of what they’re actually using) infused water supply. A man leans out of a window, grabbing his shoulder, trying to sell him a fake pair of Fujisio TruSights™. Jon keeps walking.

Some days, he feels like they deserve the new world. The air shimmers with electricity and the butterflies in his stomach dance as he arrives under a low hanging sign, illuminated by a few candles that crudely spell out the words, “Cabaret du Néant.” He knows it’s a front for Duer, a local drug dealer that supplies Sadness to Emily and pretty much the whole of the city that chooses to take it. But a job is a job, even for a “magician.” Jon has never met Duer nor does he care to, based off rumours of his pastimes, which include killing or hurting people who owe him money or drugs. Jon owes him nothing and he wants to keep it that way. He opens the door. The bar is full tonight. A slight paranoia hangs over the otherwise strangely festive, jarringly coloured leather clad and bowler hatted crowd. Many wear blue bracelets that mark them as needing extra supervision for “Unnecessary Emotion.” The blue bands stop them from getting jobs. After all, who wants to hire someone that isn’t always happy? It shames their families and it stops them from being considered normal. Some are drinking bottled water, with none of the mood enhancing muck in it that the rest of the populace gleefully consumes. Many are drinking beer. Those on the dance floor cry and scream and move and sway backwards and forwards on an unseen tide. Jon feels at least slightly at home and slightly normal here. A barman routinely squirts turpentine across the bar, across the bottles at the back, and at the supporting beams, then sets the whole thing on fire. Every time the flames whoosh out in a mini mushroom cloud, a wave of heat breaks over the crowd and they scream for more before it all burns out. Jon’s seen him occasionally take out a chainsaw and rev it in time to the music. It’s a nice touch.

Through a giant bay window in the side of the bar, the crowd can see a man stuck in an endless loop, chasing after his wife, who thinks he’s dead and who is trying to kill herself by throwing herself off a building with a teleportation halo attached to it—a safety net that just sends you back to the top of the building when you jump. Sometimes one of the late night revelers tries to yell at her, just to see if they can stop her. Sometimes her eyes shift towards them for an instant before she falls and it happens again.

He turns away. He needs a little more of that Saudade before the show begins. He goes into the back room and past the bouncer, a burly half-man half-tree called a half-ent by society and Steve by regulars of the club. They nod at each other. Half-ents appeared shortly after The End. People began to change and with so many crazy things happening, half-human-half-trees were just one more crazy thing to add to the list. Jon often thinks that his father would have loved them, the half-ents, because he loved trees. So much that his father had worked with or dreamed of had come to pass but perhaps not in the way he would’ve wished. The world was a dark dream of his father. Some of the half-ents were political extremists, demanding their own separate, new rights in the new world because they were a new species. The protested. They rioted. And they did both quite violently. Fighting a tree is not as easy as it sounds. Steve, however, is not political at all. Steve, as far as Jon knows, just wants to do his job.

The back room is filled with green smoke from melancholy pipes and two children lie in the corner wearing stolen, illegally modded TruSights™, their feet bare and swollen from being on the street in the cold. Their mouths hang open and they’re obviously in awe of whatever they’re looking at on the screens behind their glasses. Whatever place they’re in is better than here.

Awe.

It’s a feeling he misses. He made lists of things he wanted to feel when he was younger, big things, small things, ice, snow, the sand at the beach, someone else’s hands holding his, feeling him feeling them, a feedback loop of feelings, which is what happens when two people make love. He wanted to feel things that made him feel safe and scared and things that ripped his heart out of his chest, things that made him want to go home and things that made him want to travel, things that made him proud and things that made him regret his choices and he, like all people, slowly ticked these things off the list in his head as he lived, as the world turned until soon, there were very few things left to feel.

He believed the last thing he would feel, would be nothing, as that was nearly impossible to feel unless you were dead or hadn’t been born yet. He wondered what it’d be like to not be able to wonder.

He’d once wanted to know what it felt like to be able to talk to people properly, to be normal but he’d given up on finding that feeling, figuring no one ever really found it.

He takes a table in the corner and puts two drops on his tongue from the small vial he’s kept in his pocket since he saw Emily.

He smiles as a single tear rolls down his cheek. He’s ready to go on. A man in a top hat, Barnston, the ring leader of the Cabaret, yells Jon’s name into the back room Jon’s in and he’s up and walking and feeling and ready and a million different things all at once. Barnston steps onto the stage, raising his top hat to the audience and he begins to yell in a way that wouldn’t be out of place at a circus: “Ladies and gentlemen of the Cabaret du Néant! Welcome to our first show of the evening. Many of you have no doubt seen magic shows before but this, this my friends is different. You will not see a woman sawn in half. You will not see a fucking rabbit pulled out of a hat. You will see things you’ve never seen before. You will be immersed in magic and you will witness pure, unadulterated beauty from our grandest illusionist, The Mockingbird!”

Jon hates the performing name they gave him. “The Mockingbird” just sounds stupid to him but he supposes that “Jon the Amazing” is worse. Jon steps on stage and the room hushes except for one or two people drinking and laughing in the corner. Steve, the half-ent bouncer, comes to stand in front of them and asks them to shut up without saying a word, just by folding his arms across his chest and looking at them dead on.

“A fucking magician? You want us to shut up for a magician?” says one, some strung-out freak with a head covered in braids. Steve, without missing a beat, reaches over, grabs the customer’s hand and bends it back until he begs for mercy. Those who have seen him work before continue to keep those who haven’t, quiet. Even if they’ve seen Jon’s abilities a thousand times, they don’t want to miss a thing.

Jon starts slowly; the crowd hardly notices at first. Then a woman gasps as she looks at the wine in her hand. Tiny mermaids begin to appear in their drinks, laughing and giggling, swimming through the bubbles. A soft glow falls over everyone and everything. Jon opens his mouth and begins to sing over the melody that fills the room, the mechanics of the club’s music box billowing steam, auto-tuning his words slightly while his gift turns his words into whatever everyone wants to hear, with just a hint of influence on his part. Strange sound waves drift in and out of each other.

If you weren’t human, if you were a machine and incapable of seeing or hearing things as they could be, only as they are, it would sound like noise to you.

Spinning, shooting, shattered star,

Is it lonely where you are?

Is there a comet, in your heart?

Have you turned your absence into art?

The image of a woman with silver hair yet young and beautiful fills the room, like she’s always been there. That’s how it works. All the illusions have always just been there and you know they’re there like you know you have a heart, a hand or two. It is an undeniable, simple and sudden fact.

Sighing, shining, splintered star,

Once so near and now so far,

Is there moonlight in your hair?

Do you close your eyes to stare?

“Just like rain.” Emily had once said that to describe the nature of his ability. One minute it isn’t and the next minute it is. And what’s wrong with that? It just is. Just like the woman hovering in front of everyone with the silver hair. It seems to grow longer the more you look at it, until it becomes a grid of silver lines that form a background for the rest of her.

Fading, fading, faded star,

You are still my favourite scar,

Screaming out into the night

Reflecting back the darkest light

Her body is pale, naked and slightly translucent and somehow impossible to focus on.

Precious, precious, precious star

I keep your light inside a jar

Are you a stranger here on Earth?

Are you the measure of your worth?

Her face. There, every man sees the woman that hurt him the most, whom he’ll love forever. Every woman sees herself.

Twinkle, twinkle, fallen star

What if love is all we are?

Chapter 4

Then

The flag given to the son of a soldier.