Take No Prisoners (40 page)

The cruel monarch was suddenly back in the room, her eyes a green blaze of fury. When she spoke her words were clipped into arrows of ice that pinned me to the pillows.

"That is a question you should never have thought to ask, Quinn Hogarth. You have demeaned me, and I do not take kindly to that."

And then she relaxed her shoulders again. "No, darling. There's no one. I love you as much as I ever have – more, if anything. Believe me, this is all because of the love I have for you. If I loved you any the less, I'd ... well, I'd not have wasted the ... the opportunity you presented me." She bit her lip, eyes dancing. "To put it in the politest possible terms."

Despite myself, I smiled too – more in relief that I'd escaped the full force of her regal ire than anything else.

"And now," she said.

Tania didn't complete the sentence, but, her movements crisp, reached for the bottle by the bedside and twisted its cork out. She sniffed the open top, appreciating the fumes, then poured the pale amber liquid into the hotel's tooth glass.

When she'd done and the tumbler was full to the brim, there was still about an inch left in the bottle. She looked at the remaining liquid accusingly, then very deliberately tipped it, too, into the glass.

It all went in, but the glass didn't overflow.

"Wait a moment," she said, and went to burrow through one of the drawers, pulling out the screw-topped plastic drinking cup I'd barely used since our arrival in Glasgow. For a moment I thought she was going to decant the liquor into it, but instead she just pulled out the straw.

"You'll need this, at least at first," she said, popping it into the glass. Still the meniscus held and there was no overflow.

"Kiss me," I said. "You owe me a kiss. Please."

"Before I go," she replied. "I'm not gone yet."

I knew I should be doing something more by way of protesting – I should be leaping from the bed and having a showdown with her, or going on my bended knee to plead with her – but it was as if there was something hypnotic in the air, so that all I could do was follow the flow of events with a sort of unhappy complaisance. She was the one who was in entire control of what would happen. For me to try to redirect things would be not just a challenge to her authority but a disruption of the natural order. I had the sense that all this had been written down before somewhere, and that I – and, for that matter, Tania – had no choice but to follow that unread script. A tiny part of me rebelled against this uncomfortable tranquility, but I ignored it as I would have ignored a butterfly on the field of battle: something irrelevant whose prettiness I might have the time to appreciate later.

So I watched her lethargically as she neatly folded my clothes and piled them on the ottoman that sat in front of the window table. She unravelled my socks and tucked them neatly into the openings of my shoes, then placed the shoes side by side under the ottoman. Lastly she came across to the bed once more and, assuming no disagreement from me, unstrapped the sad pink prosthetic from my arm. She placed the parody of flesh on top of the heap of my clothing.

Then she stood facing me, her hands cupped together like a virgin's in front of her crotch.

"Don't ever, ever forget how much I love you, Quinn. And ... and remember what I said. I'll be around."

She took two quick, determined steps to the bedside, as if concerned her resolve might desert her, and looked down on me where I sat.

"I believe you requested a kiss, sir," she said with mock coyness.

Her lips were fire on mine.

I don't mean what the words would mean in a purple novel. I felt as if I were being kissed by and kissing flame. The pain was nearly as intense as I'd suffered when I'd first come stumbling back out of unconsciousness after the device had exploded in front of me in Falluja, but where that had been hostile agony this was exquisitely pleasurable. Her tonguetip flickered against mine and I almost screamed, but still I forced myself against her.

Then she was on the far side of the room, standing by the door, her hand on its handle, half-shadowed because the weak glow of the bedside lamp barely reached that far.

"Drink, Quinn," she said, gesturing with her head to tell me what I should do.

I leaned to my side, fumbling the bent plastic straw around with the stump of my arm until it pointed toward my lips.

I took it into my mouth, my eyes still on Tania's silently standing figure.

"I've enjoyed beyond words having you as my husband, Quinn," she whispered. "My sweet lover. But you no longer need me."

Before she'd finished speaking she'd turned the handle of the door and was gone into the anonymity of the hotel corridor.

I let out a long breath, and drank.

~

I was a mist, a haar, that clung close to the land, creeping into every last one of its crevices, becoming almost absorbed by it yet retaining my own self, my own separateness. I became the inverse of trees, taking their shapes into myself, their convexities being reproduced with perfect fidelity as concavities within me. Flying birds and running animals – human animals among them – were streams of their passage through me. Stones and mountains formed new parts of me, too, as did valleys and the shore.

None of them paid the least bit of attention to my presence. I had been here not forever but for far longer than any of them had. I was simply a part of reality to them, like the air they breathed. As with the air, I was invisible. As with the air, they could not be if I were gone.

Formless, I had all forms. Formless, I was able to make of myself any form I chose, following whatever was the whim of my moment.

In this particular moment of mine I watched myself deciding that a piece of me should be thickened, twisting streamers of intangibility coming together in a swirl and coalescing around each other in countless layers to create physical essence where before there had been none. The creation emerging from the mist, taking shade out of the greyness only I could see, had two legs, two arms, a head, a momentary identity, a name.

That name was Quinn, and the creation talked – I could see it doing so, even though I couldn't be troubled to listen. I did, however, trouble to give it the power to see through my eyes, hear with my ears.

There were others like me. I knew this in the same way the small creatures knew of me. It had always been so. Like me, they toyed with their world, creating and destroying, most of eternity just playing. At our edges we blended with each other, enriching each other, delighting in each other. But not all of us did this, not always. Some chose the route of dying.

Through my eyes the Quinn-creation could see one of these entering its death throes. It was taking physicality around itself, binding itself in an amour of steel to defend itself from all that was not itself, even though it had no attackers. I watched, passive, as it did this. I knew what would happen to it next – we all did. Self-caged, unable to bear the surrounding weight of its idiot armor, it would shrink, growing ever more bitter and miserable as it did so, like an old man seeking impotently to destroy all around him rather than confront the failure he has made of his life. The entity had become engrossed by its own madness, the madness that fed it and fed upon it. There was nothing any of us could do to save it.

The Quinn-creation, however, wished to try.

Had
wished to try.

Seeing it through my eyes, he saw the infeasibility of the task. Feeling its dying through my emotions, he was able to strip himself of his pity. The entity had not been struck by death, but had instead chosen of its own free will to die, and the manner of its dying. Through stupidity it had embraced insanity. Existence does not tolerate stupidity long.

We watched the stupid, shrinking, dying entity, did the Quinn-creation and I. Perhaps there was a chance for it, perhaps it could save itself. It was difficult to care, although I sensed the Quinn-creation retained some vestige of caring.

Certainly the Quinn-creation, the name-taker, as it melted back into me – abandoning its self as it discovered that its selfhood was all that had held it back from being truly free, truly individual, truly something other than just another faceless unit in a millions-strong temporary flock, truly everlasting – possessed enough compassion for the one that was approaching its death to be a name-giver as well as a name-taker. The Quinn-creation gave the self-condemned, self-armored, self-narrowing entity a name.

The Quinn-creation, its shared thoughts fraying with regret, called the dying entity Fortusa.

~

I awoke with what I believed at first was the hangover to end all hangovers. My plastic beaker, empty, had found its way into my naked armpit. I squinted painfully against the grey light streaking in from the station; neither of us had thought to draw the curtains last night. Barely audible, like thunder beyond the mountains, a voice announced that a train for a destination was now boarding at a platform. The tiny noise made the spiritual silence, the utter Tania-less loneliness of the room – of the cold hill side – all the more profound.

I swung my legs over the side of the bed, got to my feet, swayed. No wonder the liquor was called The Hard Stuff: it had a kick like nothing I'd ever drunk before ...

Yet my vision was clear. My mouth was no fouler-tasting than on any other morning. My stomach wasn't unsettled.

The pain in my head didn't come from the liquor – or, at least, it did, but not from the alcohol. The pain was from the still-healing surgery the dream had performed in my mind.

Dream?

That had been no dream. It had been a glimpse, for the first time in my life, of reality. Reality makes us, molds us, nurtures us or rejects us, but it is also made
by
us, by all of us, even though we are unconscious creators.

The incisions in my mind would heal soon. Already the stitches could be pulled out.

Half an hour later I was at the hotel's reception desk. The clerk glanced at my hands, my plastic hands, as I leaned on the counter in front of her. The left one was now accustomed to me; the right was still an intruder, but I wore it this morning anyway. It held my room card-key.

"My wife – she seems to have gone missing."

The receptionist raised an eyebrow, smiling. "Perhaps she'll still be at breakfast, sir, or in the ..."

I shook my head impatiently.

"She's gone. I know that. Did she check out, or did she just ... go?"

Frowning now, the receptionist checked my card-key, then turned to her keyboard, tapping a few times as she called a new display up on the screen.

"We have you registered as a single occupancy, sir. Perhaps, ah ..."

"It's all right. Forget it."

I walked away.

Part of me knew the futility of what I was doing, but there was still enough of a part of me stuck in the old ruts that I felt compelled to go through the formalities.

I made towards a pay phone, then realized I'd never be able to get the coins into the slot. Back upstairs in my room, I picked up the ballpoint pen in my mouth, ready to tackle the phone with it, then let it fall again. If I really tried, I had enough control over my artificial hands to ...

That was when I realized I'd dressed myself. Not just dressed myself but strapped on the hated plastic prosthetics. Which had I done first? How the hell had I strapped on the prosthetics before I'd strapped on the prosthetics ...?

Distracted by the realization, I froze for a full minute, perhaps longer. Then I sat down on the bed and shuffled my way out of my shoes. Standing up again, I went to the closet and tussled with the door until I had it open. From the row of my shoes there I selected a pair of slip-ons, and slid my feet into them.

Back on the bed, I clumsily pressed the 0 for an outside line, waited for the dialling tone, then with care hit the 9 and the 1 and the 1 again.

I put the phone back on the receiver before the ringing had time to start.

What the hell had I been doing? It wasn't 911 for the cops in this country: it was 999. Tania had told me that on the plane, and repeated it once we'd arrived in Glasgow until she was sure I had the information firmly imprinted on my brain. In my distraction I'd succumbed to an old habit.

But wasn't everything I'd been doing for the past few minutes just exactly that – succumbing to old habits? I knew that Tania had gone, and I had a slowly clearing understanding of why she had. I wasn't going to be able to find her unless she wanted to be found, which she didn't. What was the point of all this rigmarole I was putting myself through? Why was I still reciting the lines of the play when the curtain had long ago come down on the final act?

Sitting on the bed, I let my shoulders sag. Packing the suitcases would be a bit of a nightmare, but I guessed I could always heftily tip one of the hotel's maids to undertake the chore for me. Half the stuff I could leave behind anyway, although I found I was irrationally reluctant just to dump Tania's shoes and clothing and general clutter – if they were still there – into the room's wastebins. Even if I took everything home with me – yes, that was what I would do – the journey would be manageable. The hotel's valets or the taxi driver would get the baggage into the taxi, and at the airport I could use one of their trolleys or find a handler to cope. At the other end, in Newark, things might get a bit more difficult, but not if I explained my plight at the Glasgow check-in desk and asked them to signal the details through to their counterparts in the States. And from Newark International I could get a taxi all the way home, screw the cost. My wallet was fat with notes in both currencies, and my credit cards were – thanks to Dad's allowance – in reasonably healthy shape. The trip was going to be a challenge, all right, but it was all perfectly feasible ...

My thoughts ran down like a clockwork toy.

Old habits again. My first impulse had been to try to trace Tania somehow. Once I'd accepted that this was a fruitless endeavor, my next urge had been the primitive one of scuttling for home as fast as I could go. But home is more than a place, more than a geographical location, more than a set of names and empty symbols. There was a place where I'd lived my whole life, but it had been usurped by name-shifters – by people who seized the names of things, changed their meaning, and pretended they still meant the same. Freedom, on their lips, had become synonymous with slaughter and repression, democracy with the law of the concentration camp. The house in which I'd dwelt, whose every corner I'd thought myself intimately familiar with, had been invaded by thieves, and now I was on the outside gazing in through the window, watching them smash up my property. Whump – there went the microwave. Zip – and a razor sliced through one of the pictures on the wall. Crash – there went the valueless but infinitely valued glass vase Aunt Millie had given me before she died. And all the while the fire the usurpers had lit was blazing merrily in the middle of the living-room carpet, fueled by the chairs and the coffee table ...