Nemonymous Night (36 page)

S
: All these years I believe you killed me. But life has to go on without recrimination. Since things went strange, I’m sure there’s no possible blame. Even shame’s gone out of the window. Dognahnyi—wasn’t he also known as Captain Nemo?...
the one who travels overland to the centre of the earth
as they put in the ‘Jules Verne Tours’ blurb…

A
: Yes, and I’ve since found out, he’s also known as the Weirdmonger…

S
: The Weirdmonger? Someone of that name has been lurking round here for a while—but I’ve not seen him for ages.

A
: They said you had John Ogdon working for you here in the shop?

S
: Who said? Has someone sent you here to spy on me?

A
: No, no, Suds, it’s just that—I can’t explain it—or I can explain it. You probably know John Ogdon as Crazy Lope… You nod. Well, he’s also known as Blasphemy Fitzworth or Padgett Weggs… A proper spy disguised as a dosser or cat’s meat man or…

S
: Well, I’ve not seen Lope for days, either. They say there’s war afoot. Many have already left Klaxon. Most visitors have gone. You’re probably the only visitor at the moment.

A
: Not a war so much, Suds, as head-on collisions of bird-sickness plague, body to body… blending…

S
: I don’t understand. I don’t think I ever will.

A
: It’s the Drill. Dognahnyi’s Drill. It was originally intended by its designer (DF Lewis) as a plug to prevent the flow of Angevin back to the surface, as he believed it was not so much a recreational drug as a carrier of the bird-sickness in a more virulent form, encouraging people-to-people contamination instead of mere bird-to-people contamination. The latter can be controlled. The former can’t be.

S
: That’s the first time I’ve heard mention of this Lewis bloke.

A
: He’s a rather shadowy figure. Arthur once told me about him. Anyway, getting back to the Drill or Plug—it has worsened the situation because of what happened at the Core when it got there. It just provided more fuel for the Angevin from the pairs of people who visited it—and then the hawling-process took it back with it, so not a plug to prevent carrying but the carrier itself. The sickness has now reached the surface via man-city—Viet Nam, Rumania, Turkey, later London, even Clacton—then New York, the whole globe infected not from the sky but by things that masquerade as birds within the globe itself and then come out as real birds having stowed away on the Drill ‘plug’ or, more likely, flowing like feathered torpedos with the Angevin hawling-flow. It’s still rather confusing. But it can be stopped.

S
: How?

A
: It’s something so oblique, so damn opaque, it needs conversations like this to approach from various brainstorming angles to reach some semblance of its basics. Something to do with the word ‘firedrill’ I believe. And that’s just the beginning of the wild guesses.

S
: Firedrill?

A
: Let’s relax for a moment. Talk about other things. Solutions only come when you don’t try to think of them. How’s the shoe business going?

S
: Not bad. With the war coming, the armies needed shodding for a start.

A
: I don’t know how you put up with all those sirens all the time.

S
: Well, they are only going when there are visitors in Klaxon. Otherwise, the tannoys play Classical Music all day. It’s rather a blessing.

A
: Classical Music! I think I’d prefer the sirens!

S
: It’s quite restful most of the time—Chamber Music by Debussy or Beethoven, Schubert—loads of Bach—but yes, they sometimes play some more modern Classical Music more related to the siren sound so we don’t miss it too much! Ligeti, Bartok, Penderecki’s
Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima
, you know the sort of thing… But if there is at least one visitor in Klaxon, back to the sirens proper!

A
: Rather you than me. I’ll be pleased to get out of this place.

S
: What’s in that flowerpot, Amy, by the way?

A
: Guess.

S
: Can’t guess.

A
: OK, let me guess first what that thing is that is in the corner over there—it looks to be a cross between a shoebox and a proper shoe.

S
: That’s a shoe for a Grandfather Clock.

A
: I wish I hadn’t asked! Anyway guess what’s in my flowerpot. It may help.

S
: Arthur’s ear?

A
: Nope

S
: My shoes that you once stole from me?

A
: Nope. And I didn’t!

S
: A clockwork toy—a model of the Drill—an Angel Megazanthus brooch—a cabbage full of dead flies—a toy log-lorry?

A
: Nope, Nope, Nope, Nope, Nope.

Amy puts her hand in the flowerpot and brings out her own childhood doll strapped into a doll-sized deck-chair and clasping a doll-sized flowerpot. And Sudra is alone again with her shoeboxes and bespoke shoes. Even the tannoys are silent for once. Just barely perceptible jingling from some of the shoeboxes.

*

Klaxon City was the name of an amusement arcade in London’s Soho—sufficiently sophisticated to be considered a casino, or certainly abiding by the same rules and providing comparable opportunities for the punters. It was simply more open-fronted with looser membership conditions and lower grade jackpots, but otherwise it had all the trimmings: just on the corner from Leicester Square underground station.

A husband and wife team by the name of Greg and Beth were managers and the owner was Sudra Incorporated, the whereabouts of whose shadowy head office was even unknown to the managers, other than as a Registered Address which could not easily be checked out, short of a long journey to the ends of the earth, it seemed, or at least beyond Zone Six on London Transport. Greg and Beth were recruited via an agent by the name of Mr Dognahnyi who had a flat in Mayfair, but even he had indirect contact with Sudra Inc. Emails and cash transfers by PayPal. Only the odd visit from Authorities, most of which prying was kept at bay by mysterious paperwork behind the scenes in bent accountants’ and solicitors’ offices. There being no food involved, only the broadest Health & Safety Regulators were given the slightest excuse to pay heed to Klaxon City’s methods, without any recourse to Cleansing Agents or Culinary Inspections. And even these turned blind eyes as well as deaf ears to some of the outlandish noises and migraine-inducing strobes.

Mr D’s flat had original oils sporting walls to hang on that were so thickly chintzed one did not need to wonder how the thrum of London outside was sound-proofed for the benefit of the subtle Chamber Music playing from the tiniest speakers, but ones with the greatest dynamic range that Greg and Beth had ever heard. The walls of Klaxon City itself likewise did indeed have oils to set off the hi-tech walls of digitalised games and spinning mantras that constituted some of the ‘amusements’ and insidious temptations to gamble. Oil portraits of fantasy vistas which—when one became accustomed to the types of game on offer—were seen to accompany the risk-and-ride boxes-of-tricks as a pianist would accompany a singer.

Only a few were privy to Klaxon City’s ‘amusement’ services because—from the outside—it looked quite seedy with a threat of muggings by scarred street-sleepers rather than promise of coddlings by bosomy croupiers. This was a way to keep the place select—a topsy-turvy method of restricting the clientele by aversion therapy with regard to the unwanted narrow-minded types of punter who only judged things by surface appearances. The games needed far-sighted specialisms of humanity to make them work at their optimum—and these prize customers were encouraged by winning large sums of money rather against the odds of most other casinos. It was creative payola for turning imagination into actuality—a method in a madness of which even Greg and Beth had hardly scratched the surface. The punters simply needed to get past the obvious signs of criminal danger that associated itself with most arcades and then they would find beyond such frontage the most benevolent form of creative gambling imaginable—and once imagined, the world was their oyster.

Greg and Beth used to run an arcade in Clacton. That was useful experience. In Clacton, one can be trained for all manner of deeper occupations which seaside resorts alone know how to harbour. A Dry Dock for the re-fitting of genius prior to its re-launch. And even for Greg and Beth, it was simply a short journey by train to Liverpool Street, then underground to Leicester Square followed by a warm welcome by Mr Dognahnyi on behalf of Sudra Inc. At first, rather troubled by the frontage of Klaxon City, they were—once inside, once through that initial burst of dismay at the grim-faced bouncers—soon glistened upon by every conceivable spinning-table of landlocked luck teetering towards the benefit of all who played them—and even the toilets boasted original oils.

The underground trains made the place shake with low-throated rumbles from time to time. Luckily, imagination drew short of imagining them to be bombs or quakes or even life going on elsewhere beyond surface after surface of surface appearance towards a recognition of the madness intrinsic to an existence still not fully in the know.

One wall-game was to shoot the birds. A spinning-vista of a lake sanctuary where you needed to aim at any feathers once glimpsed. And the more you shot off, the more you won. It was called ‘The Tenacity of Feathers’. And a siren sounded out at every direct hit.

I wonder myself if there was a deeper symbolism in that phrase—‘The Tenacity of Feathers’. And whether it was just another misleading frontage within the first misleading frontage. A meaning that we were all feathers in an eternal lifetime of identities, each identity a single feather that we wore throughout this time-line of crossed-feathers or ruffled ones, being indeed a single feather that we fought to preserve tenaciously, only to fail when one became the next feather (or identity) ripe for plucking. It takes more than one feather to make the bird. And somewhere a creature stretches its still sparsely feathered wings—but with gradually more tufts just starting to sprout on its huge balloon of a belly.

One day, I fear sound-fire will be drilled real deep by a dead-eyed punter towards my own feather’s root. Crazy Lope—dead Red Indian. Null Immortalis.

*

“It’s a need for immortality—whilst before in pre mass-communication eras very few people went down in history books and therefore religion provided the ‘immortality’ because there was no feasible ambition of ‘immortality’ in any other way—today, one can imagine one is in the public eye, and the public eye immortalises in a very insidious but also a believably crystalline fashion. Notoriety or self-crucifixion are two possible paths towards this crystallisation within the ‘public eye’ as well as more straightforward forms of fame—all as provided by the mutual reflections from the unreality/reality syndrome of mass communication-mirrors (and I would include the internet as well as TV as examples of these).”

The speaker in Earth Towers Hall paused. The audience could only wonder if they had correctly placed the quote-marks around words or phrases within his speech. How could they do otherwise? Speeches—like any other sounds or items of music—are interpreted and filtered by the listeners, sometimes quite differently from each other but all ‘correct’ for themselves. They are often dependent not only on mental capacities (prejudices, proclivities etc.) but also on physical ones actually to receive the sounds and translate them into ‘meaning’ via, for example, both Inner Ears. Likewise: visions, dreams, lies, ghosts, fictions, performances, poems-on-the-page, morality fables—all ‘seen’ (mentally and physically) as ‘correct’ by each and every one, but in a slant or shade that is peculiar to each of them one by one... often affecting (or not) the ‘reality’ within which the sounds or visions are placed or contextualised. And this contemplation of mine—words that you have just read as commentary on the speaker’s speech and his audience’s potentiality to ‘listen’—was effectively another speech within my own mind as I waited for the audible speaker (compared to my silent ‘speech’ to myself) to resume his own speech, as he did:

“Here in Earth Towers Hall, it seems appropriate to digress upon the meaning of fiction in the context of what I’ve just said.”

Earth Towers Hall was a new purpose-built building on the banks of the Thames quite close to the City of London. The tip of St Paul’s dome could just be seen through the window that backed on to the hi-tech podium. Mock-architecture mixed with real paintings of Thamesian scenes. This was the inaugural event. An important slant on things real and unreal by a purpose-born Professor of Philosophy who was downgrading his thoughts by posing as a famous author of fiction.

“And one can believe that fiction and non-fiction share the same jigsaw, the same rattle-bag of broken shards of ancient pottery of thought all leading—potentially—to a pattern that we can examine, then use to solve problems (or to create them). An example would be useful. ‘
Nemonymous Night’
ostensibly deals with many current matters (as they happen) and today bird sickness has fallen lower in the sky—and we can only hope that the fiction itself is helping to lower influenza’s temperature and eventually eradicate it. Fiction is that powerful. A happy ending (yes, skip to the end of the book, go on)—it’s bound to be a happy ending or the author would never have finished it. He needs to be thanked for all his good work in harnessing the power of fiction to solve this single pressing problem by setting himself the goal of a happy ending, despite all the horror images he necessarily conjures up
in order to
reach that happy ending…”

I smiled. This speech made no logical sense to me. I did have some sympathy with the speaker’s views on the blurring of reality/unreality, as exemplified by TV Reality Shows like Big Brother and the fact that audiences, these days, actually ‘create’ the event with their reactions (such as pop concerts)—but to extrapolate, i.e. to manufacture an audit trail between fiction (art) and the malleability of reality itself to the same fiction (art), was certainly something very difficult for me to swallow. I held the very book in question within my hands as I sat in the audience—skipped to the end and everything vanished, including myself. Earth Towers Hall echoed with the silence of bird droppings.