The Red Men (32 page)

‘It was The Elk who saved me. He knew what to do. I couldn’t call my mother, I couldn’t speak to Florence. We got her out later. I hoped that if we told our story to the press
then Monad would be exposed. The Elk was distributing anti-Monad pamphlets and I got my story in those.

‘Blasebalk’s murder galvanized the Great Refusal. Before his death, the Great Refusal was a disparate feuding movement. I holed up in The Elk’s haunted house and together we
slowly pulled it together. My story brought some sanity to bear. People stopped conflating Monad with the Illuminati, or seeing the Monad as an end-point of history into which the elite of the New
World Order would retreat, abandoning the rest of humanity to a devastated polluted planet. You know how they think. Connecting everything together until nothing makes any sense.

Blasebalk’s murder sobered the movement. He was the first martyr of the unreal wars. Part-time dissidence was no longer an option. We are the new resistance.’

The Elk stepped out of the dark. He threw an armful of wood onto the fire, which explored it lustily.

‘You know the world is evil but you turn your face from it and hope you will endure. You know that what you do contributes to that evil but you hope that you will never be held to account
for those actions. Do you know why they call me The Elk? Because I used to bang my head against the wall. Bang. Bang. Bang. Nothing ever changed, and then one day, I met my doppelgänger, and
it was like I had finally broken through the screen dividing me from the world as it truly is.

‘I first saw this different version of myself standing on the opposite platform at a tube station. He was fit, tidy and expensively dressed. As he made his way up the platform and through
the crowds, he had vigour in his stride. I followed him, stumbling over the other passengers. He was definitely me. Except his skin was smooth where mine is pitted and his teeth were marble where
mine are sandstone. His hair was combed back, his nose unbroken, and he had a pair of expensive sunglasses. His soul gave off the same hum as mine. Our frequencies met and became one long
oscillating wave.

‘The train rolled in. But when it pulled away, he was still standing on the platform, grinning at me. The doppelganger nodded toward the exit. We met up outside the station, and stood
facing one another against a torrent of commuters. He was taller than me, his spine had not been twisted by sleeping on the streets. Behind the sunglasses, his pupils were two reflective silver
disks.

‘He said, “I know who you are.”

‘I went to touch him, and he backed away repulsed.

‘‘‘Never touch me.”

‘Cruel circumstance had unlocked my cells so that their energy leaked directly into him. His skin was full of light where mine had acquired shadows and bruises that would not heal. We
argued over who was Dr Jekyll and who was Mr Hyde. Was I the shadow walker, the evil twin, or was he?

‘My doppelgänger set out his argument with the tedious obviousness of a corporate presentation. The wiles of the boardroom served him well.

‘“Let us consider the evidence,” he said, as we sat outside a café in Clerkenwell Green.

‘His name was Michael Sawyer, and he was the courtier of a billionaire who operated out of London and his own private island. He earned a quarter of a million pounds a year, and that was
before you took into account his bonuses, his stock options, his rent-free apartment.

‘I told him that I was called The Elk, and had not gone by the name of Michael Sawyer for some years. Sawyer held up his hands and declared, “You are the doppelgänger.
Clearly.”

‘I argued that despite my raddled appearance and criminal activities, he was the Mr Hyde, that his life was merely a legitimized evil, that his arrogance came from the permit we give to
the rich so that they may commit the hundreds of hard-hearted cruelties required to attain and protect their position with a clear conscience.

‘This line of reasoning bored him. His mobile rang and he took the call, limiting himself to yes and no, unwilling to share profitable information even with me, his other self.

‘“I am not saying I am good and you are evil,” Michael Sawyer said, sipped at his espresso. “But you exist in the underclass, whereas I am part of the elite. To achieve
my position I’ve had to deny certain instincts and urges, and is it not traditional that such repression will eventually spring forth in the form of another self?”

‘I did not accept his argument that I was his shadow.

‘I said, “My life is a quest that has required greater bravery and sacrifice than your unthinking conformity. Is it not possible that after my explorations of alternate mind states,
I have brought something back with me; a grey alien or a chattering elf?”

‘Michael Sawyer laughed. “No, I would suggest that was unlikely.”

‘We shared the same ideaspace, sometimes it was impossible for me to tell if we were talking to one another, or thinking at one another. Michael Sawyer leant forward, “At which point
do you think we diverged? Where did the path fork?”

‘“Did you ever take drugs?”

‘“That’s not it. Go deeper.”

‘“Did you drop out of university?”

‘“Yes. I was sectioned.”

‘“Amphetamine psychosis?”

‘“No. Dad.”

‘“Or Mum.”

‘“Yes. Or women.”

‘“Jane?”

‘“Yes, I remember her. Later.”

‘“Do you remember Imogen?”

‘“No. So sometime between Jane and Imogen.”

‘“It could easily have been some minor random event. A missed train, a chance acquaintance.”

‘“What about jobs?”

‘“I was homeless for a time. Then I fell in with Leto at the Dyad. He’s my boss.”

‘“My employer is an eccentric sybarite, no more. I would suggest this Leto may be the reason for the doubling.”

‘“I think you are lying.”

‘“How could I lie to you?”

‘“Evil twins deceive.”

‘“The lies we tell ourselves are the most powerful of all.”

‘“Exactly.”

‘“Then we can never trust each other.”

‘Michael Sawyer unfurled a twenty-pound note and summoned the waiter. His mac folded over his arm, his briefcase in his other hand, he walked off in the direction of St James
Church.’

I asked the Elk if he ever saw his doppelgänger again.

‘Yes. Often. I would sit on a dirty rug outside his local off-licence and he would give me money. He began visiting the off-licence every day. At the same time, I lost all taste for
alcohol and woke up to the life around me. The energy flow between us reversed. The magnetic poles flipped. I got off my rug. I was on the up. He was on the way down.’

‘I was there when he died,’ I said. Michael Sawyer was the executive who blew himself up in the Hackney bedsit. I remembered Dr Easy going in to counsel him and discovering he had
been shot in the mouth and so could not negotiate.

‘Yes, that very day, I woke up with this rip in my cheek.’

The silver pins in his cheek glimmered in the moonlight. I was enraptured by this exchange. As The Elk told the story of his doppelgänger, it dawned on me how our exposure to these strange
forces had created doubles of us all. Blasebalk versus Bravado, Sonny versus Nelson, Eakins versus Morty; it was a condition of the age, to be separated from oneself, our desires amputated then
remodelled and returned to us as an alien body.

I asked The Elk if he remembered our encounter in the Dyad. He stood back from the fire, his voice drifted out of the night.

‘Some dreams are easier to remember than others.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘That the more you go into the Dyad, the more it all merges into one experience,’ said Florence. ‘The Dyad is a world I have dreamt of since I was a child. Monad is a
compromised corporate imagination, the human imagination clapped in irons. Dyad is the fairies at the bottom of the garden. Dyad is the ability to fly, it is witches and wizards, angels and devils,
a place where imagination can explode as in a dream.’

‘The Land of Do-As-Thou-Wilt,’ added Raymond.

‘Tell me more about Leto,’ I said.

Raymond laughed. ‘Now that is a long story. I think for that tale we will need more firewood.’

The Elk went to fetch it, padding back toward the beach. The surf was luminescent under the moonlight.

Raymond began his story.

‘I will never forget the night the Elk took me to meet Leto. The sun was not coming up over Hackney. It was four in the morning for hours. We went into the Turkish clubs on Amhurst Road,
and played on fruit machines that paid out in sachets of heroin. AK-47s in the pool cue rack. Such a dark scene. A landscape is a state of mind. I was in those places so I became that person. The
Elk knew everybody. In a Fucker Fried Chicken he bought some crack off the team leader. “Would you like a side order of heroin with that, sir?” I shared a can of Fanta with a crack
zombie, the chalk of moulting epidermis on her black skin. She taught me a lullaby that she sings to her baby: “Crack is coming, crack is coming, we love crack, we love crack.” Eyes of
starved desire. She offered to do anything I cared to think of.

‘A landscape is a state of mind. The Elk took me to the corner of Amhurst and Pembury Road, where the curve of the Downs Estate loomed with the cold immensity of an iron hull and a tower
block gave me the finger. Forces were gathering. Young men with no moral code wearing sweatshirts with the hood up over a baseball cap. They would mug anyone. Threaten to throw nail varnish all
over the pushchair if the mother didn’t hand over her purse. Puncture a twelve-year-old girl’s lung with a stiletto until she hands over her mobile phone. Get you in a headlock and
knife you twenty-three times. Crack your skull against the kerb then walk away.

‘It was still somewhere between four and five in the morning, death’s hour, when heart attacks steal husbands from their wives, when emaciated androgynes succumb to cancer, when
babies suffocate in their cots. Even those fortunate enough to be spared another day feel its shadow run over them, and turn uneasily in their sleep.

‘The Elk and I walked further into the dark zone. It was easy to mistake a heap of rubbish for a pile of bodies, a traffic light for a gibbet. At the top of Pembury hill, we skirted the
scrub of Hackney Downs. To the north of the Downs, the derelict Nightingale estate was squatted by drug mules, deluded sods who’d sweated on a flight from Jamaica with a colon full of cocaine
on the promise of a flat in London only to be delivered by their dealers to derelict tower blocks. The Elk motioned to walk on; it was enough to have brushed against the Nightingale estate, no need
to broach its interior. We doubled back on ourselves. From the Downs, we turned south-east onto the Lower Clapton Road. The quietness of the hour was interrupted by a battered Mercedes; the
indigestinal rumblings of its bass bins dopplered by.

‘The screens were up. Television screens, black windscreens, hoods, blinds. The East End has lost its public squalor. You think of those black-and-white photographs of slums, women and
their children balefully posed on their doorsteps for an anthropological snap. All that’s gone. Now the sickness is private. Silent unweeping private despair. Like the man in the junk shop in
Lower Clapton; he works and sleeps in his shop. Sometimes I see him crying at his desk. He knows he’s going to die there. As we walked by the Nightingale estate, I thought of that time the
neighbours turned their TV up because the man next door was being skinned alive. Or when Fat Angie force-fed that woman bullets, then held a gun to her head, then made her suck Angie’s
brother’s cock, then pushed the wire of a coat hanger into her bicep. All for what? Mistaken identity? Identity is a mistake! We were out there flanked by these rising blocks of private
horror with no hope of dawn to relieve us from an elongated dark hour of the soul. I realized it was a dreadful night, an unending night. As if the sun took one look at what was going on, and
decided to come back later.

‘The Elk made me take the drug for the first time. He had a hip flask of Leto’s spice. He said, “It’s just a mild psychoactive tincture with very specific effects,”
and I’m like, “What will it do to me?”

‘“This is not a drug,” he said. “It’s a key.”

‘After taking a swig, I felt a little flush around the gills, a numb exaggerated quality to my lips. Nothing more. The Elk steered me down Linscott Road, and toward the forlorn portico of
the Orphan’s Asylum, the neoclassical pillars a declaration of the out-of-place, as if one could step through it and into a netherworld. Sure enough, we went through the portico and into a
knee-high pampas that stretched out into the old grounds of the girl’s school, which likewise had long since run to ruin. Beyond this marshy stretch lay three tower blocks positioned like the
pins of a plug, merging with the heavy sky.

‘“Our destination,” said the Elk, picking up the pace. “Stick close to me.”

‘A number of the flats were burnt out, while others were sealed up with steel grates. A thick black tongue of rotting carpet lolled from one window. At another, the silhouettes of children
appeared. The concourse was littered with items flung from the building, impacted washing machines, WCs torn from their fittings, the cisterns smashed and the pans stained. The burnt-out cars were
all parked neatly on an adjoining side street. I thought I heard a wolf howl although it was probably a child. If the Pembury and Nightingale estates had made me shiver with fear, then this unknown
territory was the epitome of urban desolation, an anti-Jerusalem, an evil wizard’s lair. Worse than evil. If a landscape was truly a state of mind, then this craggy concrete land had been
fashioned out of the affectless way in which a madman can stab a child and care nothing of the pain he inflicts.

‘We walked up one of the shorter towers, The Elk taking the stairs with the rangy confidence of a man who had trekked the Himalayas. I hankered after taking the lift but there was someone
living in it.

‘I stepped over some pitiful cases on that walk up. On one floor, cow throats were pinned out to mark territory. An entire herd of them. Glass pipes crunching under foot, the stench of
meat hanging everywhere. The Elk explained that as Leto is a god they offered meat and stolen mobile phones as tribute to him.