Zima Blue and Other Stories (66 page)
'Let's get some air in here, shall we,' she said, without actually addressing me. She whisked back the curtain, revealing the rest of the room.
There comes a point, even in the deepest drug-induced para-reality, where sufficient data from the real world can build up and penetrate the fiction.
You're in the deepest shit imaginable
, that voice repeated. And I began, for the first time, to heed my own subconscious. There were no other patients in the 'ward'. The room was small, four, five metres along each damp-stained wall. They were covered with literally hundreds of . . . but no, I'll come to
those
in a moment, after I've set the rest of the scene. High windows on one wall admitted wan shafts of dawn light, falling in patches on the floor. There was a metal door, padlocked on the inside. The room's odour of urine and vomit reminded me of a multi-storey carpark stairwell. There was a couch, two garden seats and a wooden table, an empty wheelchair, a tripod and Anglepoise set-up holding a waiting camcorder. The rest of the room was crammed with expensive-looking electronic equipment ... racks of slim, black synthesisers, embossed with familiar names: Casio, Korg, Roland, Yamaha, Hammond, Prophet. The whole stack wired to a table-load of MIDI monitors and PC keyboards, dove-grey shells, wrapped in a tangle of cables and fibre optics. There were crushed Irn Bru cans, Lucozade and Beck's bottles, tabloids, listings magazines, ring-bound folders, cassette and video cases, floppy disks and what looked like piles of twelve-inch, white-label records. I looked closer: each sleeve had the words
Digital to Analogue
scrawled over it. I remembered that: one of those subsequently sampled club hits from about six months back. You heard parts of it on many new records.
You're in the deepest shit imaginable
, that voice repeated. And I began, for the first time, to heed my own subconscious. There were no other patients in the 'ward'. The room was small, four, five metres along each damp-stained wall. They were covered with literally hundreds of . . . but no, I'll come to
those
in a moment, after I've set the rest of the scene. High windows on one wall admitted wan shafts of dawn light, falling in patches on the floor. There was a metal door, padlocked on the inside. The room's odour of urine and vomit reminded me of a multi-storey carpark stairwell. There was a couch, two garden seats and a wooden table, an empty wheelchair, a tripod and Anglepoise set-up holding a waiting camcorder. The rest of the room was crammed with expensive-looking electronic equipment ... racks of slim, black synthesisers, embossed with familiar names: Casio, Korg, Roland, Yamaha, Hammond, Prophet. The whole stack wired to a table-load of MIDI monitors and PC keyboards, dove-grey shells, wrapped in a tangle of cables and fibre optics. There were crushed Irn Bru cans, Lucozade and Beck's bottles, tabloids, listings magazines, ring-bound folders, cassette and video cases, floppy disks and what looked like piles of twelve-inch, white-label records. I looked closer: each sleeve had the words
Digital to Analogue
scrawled over it. I remembered that: one of those subsequently sampled club hits from about six months back. You heard parts of it on many new records.
The shelving held dozens of display devices with gridded screens, oscilloscopes or cardiogram machines, displaying different blippy patterns, like the contours on her T-shirt. I knew where I'd seen it now: taken from an album cover. And it wasn't some landscape at all, but the radio signal of a pulsar, a clock ticking in space. I couldn't recall who'd told me that, but it seemed bizarre at the time, an icon from the heart of science manifesting itself in a million apartments, wrapped around a piece of hallowed black vinyl. Like those Mandelbrot sets that started infesting album sleeves and vids for a few months. As if science was the ultimate subculture, somehow, the stuff beneath the floorboards you don't want to know too much about . . .
Incidental detail: the table with the MIDI-stack also held something chunky and metallic, with a pistol-grip, shaped like a
Space: 1999
gun. An industrial stapler. This must be what they mean by a bad trip, ha ha.
Space: 1999
gun. An industrial stapler. This must be what they mean by a bad trip, ha ha.
Concerning the walls: I think the operative term here must be
Shrine
, in the sense that she'd pinned up dozens of monochrome photographs of me - taken during the last year of my life - some in the street, my distant figure outlined in red, others close up in some club, my eyes blankly uncomprehending. Just like CIA target-acquisition images. And more: complicated graphs and diagrams, scrawled over in felt-tip, fixed in laminated confusion on top of one another. Sonograms, sound spectra, electrical circuit diagrams, technical pieces about
entrainment
. . . Christ, where had I heard that before, and why did it honestly matter now? And why did she have a map of the UK, webbed with dotted ley-lines?
Shrine
, in the sense that she'd pinned up dozens of monochrome photographs of me - taken during the last year of my life - some in the street, my distant figure outlined in red, others close up in some club, my eyes blankly uncomprehending. Just like CIA target-acquisition images. And more: complicated graphs and diagrams, scrawled over in felt-tip, fixed in laminated confusion on top of one another. Sonograms, sound spectra, electrical circuit diagrams, technical pieces about
entrainment
. . . Christ, where had I heard that before, and why did it honestly matter now? And why did she have a map of the UK, webbed with dotted ley-lines?
I was beginning to sweat. Thinking maybe my subconscious had a point; maybe this
was
a little unusual for a hospital.
was
a little unusual for a hospital.
She was fiddling with my head. I realised that I was wired up to something, little electrodes around my temples. She was fixing them down after they'd worked loose. She'd fixed things to my chest as well, white discs trailing wires to a mound of humming machines. All I was wearing was a pair of white, grass-stained jeans.
Click
, with the Dictaphone. 'Log entry, 05:45. Summary to date.' She coughed before continuing in her soft, educated Tyneside accent. 'My orders were to terminate the subject on sight, in view of the danger to the community at large. At 2:45 a.m. I attempted to zero the subject in the Drome. Termination was impossible without risk of substantial collateral damage to the uninfected. I followed the subject from the Drome, hoping to get a clear shot. At around 3:30, however, I decided to break protocol and bring in the subject for captive examination. If all goes well, I'll be finished in a matter of hours.' A studied pause. 'Our operational integrity will not have been compromised, I promise. While my methods may be my own, I'm fully aware of the consequences for urban panic should our cover be exposed.' She clicked off the recorder, fumbled in her pockets and lit a cigarette from a black carton inscribed with a skull and crossbones, dragging on it thoughtfully before restarting the tape. 'I took a series of EEG readings while the subject was under,' she said, fixing a fresh marker in the little gripper of a pen-trace machine. There was a basket full of output, etched in wavering ink. The machine hummed into life, the pen gliding to and fro. 'Now I'm observing the subject's waking responses to a variety of stimuli.'
, with the Dictaphone. 'Log entry, 05:45. Summary to date.' She coughed before continuing in her soft, educated Tyneside accent. 'My orders were to terminate the subject on sight, in view of the danger to the community at large. At 2:45 a.m. I attempted to zero the subject in the Drome. Termination was impossible without risk of substantial collateral damage to the uninfected. I followed the subject from the Drome, hoping to get a clear shot. At around 3:30, however, I decided to break protocol and bring in the subject for captive examination. If all goes well, I'll be finished in a matter of hours.' A studied pause. 'Our operational integrity will not have been compromised, I promise. While my methods may be my own, I'm fully aware of the consequences for urban panic should our cover be exposed.' She clicked off the recorder, fumbled in her pockets and lit a cigarette from a black carton inscribed with a skull and crossbones, dragging on it thoughtfully before restarting the tape. 'I took a series of EEG readings while the subject was under,' she said, fixing a fresh marker in the little gripper of a pen-trace machine. There was a basket full of output, etched in wavering ink. The machine hummed into life, the pen gliding to and fro. 'Now I'm observing the subject's waking responses to a variety of stimuli.'
'Please don't hurt me . . . I promise I won't tell anyone if you let me go...'
She flicked ash on the floor then took another dismissive draw. 'Subject is now entering the plea phase, as you'll have observed. The initial euphoric state induced by the drug is fading; terror is replacing confusion and ambivalence about his situation. Soon his pleas will lose coherence; we'll observe the onset of hysterical shock, infantile withdrawal, regressive Oedipal complexes. These facades exactly mirror the usual psychoses observed in situations of extreme trauma, but are little more than mimetic survival ploys.' Then she leaned closer, so that I could see my expression in her black shades. Not looking too good, actually; I'd developed a spontaneous tic on one eyelid. She placed a set of plastic earplugs over my head, then returned to her MIDI hook-up. Touching keys, a multicoloured graphic of waveform profiles sprang onto one of the screens. Another lit up showing an annotated musical score, a third showing a plan view of a piano keyboard, overlaid with numbers and symbols. 'Don't know if you recognise this,' she said, tapping the waveform with a black fingernail, 'but we've been acquainted with it for some time now. And we've been following you for over a year.' Followed by an aside: 'Mental note: must refrain from
any
communication with the subject outside of programme parameters. Difficult, though: they look and smell human, and I'm only human myself. Can't help establishing weak emotional ties. Had the same problem with rhesus monkeys at the institute--'
any
communication with the subject outside of programme parameters. Difficult, though: they look and smell human, and I'm only human myself. Can't help establishing weak emotional ties. Had the same problem with rhesus monkeys at the institute--'
'I promise,' I said. 'Let me go . . . I won't even recognise you, will I . . . we could pass in the street and I wouldn't notice . . . please don't hurt me, I'm begging you . . .'
She stubbed out the cigarette on the back of my hand. 'Uh, uh, uh,' she said. 'No talking till I say so, not until I expressly request a verbal response.' She ripped off a strip of paper from one of the machines; when I'd opened my mouth, the pen-trace had zigged dramatically. 'Hmm,' she said to herself. 'This is very poor indeed, much worse than we assumed.' Then she reached over to the table for the industrial stapler, flicking open its steel jaw, like a soldier checking the clip on his rifle. Gripped the trigger and pumped it twice, to free the action, sending tiny projectiles across the room. Then leaned over my couch and stapled the strip of paper onto the plaster of the wall behind me,
ker-thunk
.
ker-thunk
.
While she did this I'd begun screaming, not merely because of the pain in my hand.
She cuffed me. 'I said quiet, you rascal! No screaming or I'll have to cut your vocal cords . . .' Then she laughed. 'Not that anyone's going to hear us, mind you.' And as she spoke, I heard the throttling up of a plane preparing to take off. We were in the vicinity of an airport, I guessed. I thought of the many bunkers and sheds you'd find within the perimeter of any small airfield. No one was going to wander in on us by accident, that was clear.
Trying to stay sane, I wondered about the synths and the medical gear. The music stuff I could handle; it could have been obtained easily enough. Some of it looked second-hand, edges chipped, keys dusted in a talcum of plaster and dirt, smudged with fingerprints - sorry -
latents
. (That's what they always say, when they're investigating a homicide, in those books by McBain and Harris and Kellerman, those guys who always go on about multiple murders, serial killers, that shit . . .
Check the body for latents - Gee, sorry, Inspector, the state of putrefaction's too advanced . . . we'll have to rely on dental records if we're gonna find out who the hell that poor sucker ever was
. . .)
latents
. (That's what they always say, when they're investigating a homicide, in those books by McBain and Harris and Kellerman, those guys who always go on about multiple murders, serial killers, that shit . . .
Check the body for latents - Gee, sorry, Inspector, the state of putrefaction's too advanced . . . we'll have to rely on dental records if we're gonna find out who the hell that poor sucker ever was
. . .)
But the EEG machine, those oscilloscopes - where'd she lifted them from? God knew it was easy enough to stroll into a hospital these days, easy enough to wander in and casually stab or rape someone - but even now, was the country so shitty that you could stroll out with a van-load of - what was it Python said . . . ha ha? Machines that go
ping
. . . Oh God, I didn't find it all that hysterical, right then.
ping
. . . Oh God, I didn't find it all that hysterical, right then.
'Log entry,' she said. '06:10. I am studying the encephalogram of the subject's so-called conscious mind. Brain music. A jumbled confusion of overlaid electrical signals signifying the neural activity of the subject's brain from second to second. First impression: although the trace might look normal enough to the layperson, no neurologist would accept that this was the EEG trace of a walking, talking human being. It's more evocative of certain types of akinetic or psychomotor seizure. A kind of prolonged grand mal convulsion.' She nodded, as if certifying her own theory. Then she put down the paper. 'Now the most critical part of the study commences. In order to probe the extent of the takeover, I must force conditioned responses from the subject. Taken as an ensemble, they hold the key to the nature of the takeover. Although we've now identified the likely progenitor of the infection, the mechanisms of transmission are far from certain. By regressing the subject back to the point of infection, I hope to gain fresh insights. To gain full compliance I am about to administer scopolamine intravenously. Entry ends.'
She turned to smile. 'Now, we can either do this quietly, and efficiently, with minimum fuss for all concerned. Or we can do it messily, and unpleasantly. What's it going to be?' As if she were berating a dog that had shat on the floor, not actually bawling it out, but playing on its instinct for mood, its capacity for terror and confusion. She reached for a syringe, held it up to the light and squeezed a few drips from the needle, then injected me. 'Just to get you into the swing, you understand.'
'I'll do whatever you want,' I said, tears streaming down my face. 'But please please please . . .' Then I just trailed off into simpering dejection.
'Now then,' she said, oblivious. 'What say we have a nice little chat, eh?'
I nodded, drooling, hoping I could stall her if she'd let me talk. If I had one hope it was being found, and that meant buying time for myself, spinning out her rituals.
'Well, all right,' she said. 'But I'm going to have to ask you some very
hard
questions. And I'll have the tape running all the while. Plus, there's a little precaution I'd like to take, if we're going to be talking face to face. For my own safety, you understand.'
hard
questions. And I'll have the tape running all the while. Plus, there's a little precaution I'd like to take, if we're going to be talking face to face. For my own safety, you understand.'
'Please, anything,' I said meekly.
She reached for the stapler.
She only did the one eye, the one with the nervous tic. Pulled up the lid and stapled it inside out under my brow. It hurt, but not the way I'd been expecting. Then the eye's itching began to take precedence: not strictly pain, but the kind of gently insistent discomfort that the Chinese know volumes about . . . the kind that can drive you literally mad. Then she got the camcorder, the tiny Anglepoise job, lens only centimetres from the surface of my eye, whirring as it taped. Looking into my brain . . .
And hit me with her conspiracy theory.
She unravelled my past, knotted it, curdled it, stretched it like Brighton rock on the rollers, wefted it with her own imagery, wove it between her fingers, turned it into a cat's cradle of fact and half-remembered experience, some of her recollections so chilling that I swore she'd stolen from my dreams. She took me back, into the past, so that my pain was just a blip in the future. I don't know what she did. Maybe she just used my anxiety as a fulcrum to lever me into the past, or maybe it was hypnosis.
We dream-haunted cities at night, facilitated by spotlit flashes of those CIA cards on the wall, jolting memories, projecting me back into the ambience of specific locations, half a year before BT moved me north. The Manchester and Sheffield scenes flooded back as she played music into my head at skull-attacking volume, lights strobing. Taped voices reverberated, voices I nearly matched with faces. My hand brushed the floor, grabbed at a rusty nail, trying to use the pain of it cutting into my palm to anchor me to the present (as if the pain in the eye wasn't quite real enough to focus on). But it failed, and I sank into the hypnagogic vortex of sound.
Things began to get a little disjointed about then.
She asked me questions, her voice an umbilical to reality. About a virus, nurtured in the club scene. I don't know quite how I responded; I couldn't hear my own voice, and suspected I'd lost coherence long ago. But she kept on questioning, about what she called the 'progenitor':
Digital to Analogue
, a five-hundred-pressing, white-label release on Deflection Records. Asked me if I'd known the distributor, asked me intense, repetitive questions about independent music traders operating in the north-west, asked me about their employees, strange questions that evoked cells in the Lubianka. I remembered the record . . . no one who'd been near the club scene could have forgotten it. But there was something desperately amiss. I couldn't focus the tune, not at all clearly. There was something about it that was difficult to lock on to . . . the essence was there, but I couldn't quite bring it to mind, too deep to retrieve, too basal . . . it was like the perception diagrams where you have to make the cubes flip themselves. My head began to split open with the strain . . .
Digital to Analogue
, a five-hundred-pressing, white-label release on Deflection Records. Asked me if I'd known the distributor, asked me intense, repetitive questions about independent music traders operating in the north-west, asked me about their employees, strange questions that evoked cells in the Lubianka. I remembered the record . . . no one who'd been near the club scene could have forgotten it. But there was something desperately amiss. I couldn't focus the tune, not at all clearly. There was something about it that was difficult to lock on to . . . the essence was there, but I couldn't quite bring it to mind, too deep to retrieve, too basal . . . it was like the perception diagrams where you have to make the cubes flip themselves. My head began to split open with the strain . . .
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