Smoke and Mirrors (27 page)

The evening was warm, and the grass was dry and comfortable.

“I don’t know. A writer, maybe. Like Michael Moorcock. Or T.H. White. How about you?”

Richard sat and thought. The sky was a violet-gray, and a ghost moon hung high in it, like a sliver of a dream. He pulled up a blade of grass and slowly shredded it between his fingers, bit by bit. He couldn’t say “A writer” as well now. It would seem like he was copying. And he didn’t want to be a writer. Not really. There were other things to be.

“When I grow up,” he said, pensively, eventually, “I want to be a wolf.”

“It’ll never happen,” said MacBride.

“Maybe not,” said Richard. “We’ll see.”

The lights went on in the school windows, one by one, making the violet sky seem darker than it was before, and the summer evening was gentle and quiet. At that time of year, the day lasts forever, and the night never really comes.

“I’d like to be a wolf. Not all the time. Just sometimes. In the dark. I would run through the forests as a wolf at night,” said Richard, mostly to himself. “I’d never hurt anyone. Not that kind of wolf. I’d just run and run forever in the moonlight, through the trees, and never get tired or out of breath, and never have to stop. That’s what I want to be when I grow up . . . ” He pulled up another long stalk of grass, expertly stripped the blades from it, and slowly began to chew the stem.

And the two children sat alone in the gray twilight, side by side, and waited for the future to start.

C OLD C OLORS

Woken at nine o’clock by the postman,

who turns out not to be the postman but an itinerant seller of pigeons,

crying,

“Fat pigeons, pure pigeons, dove white, slate gray,

living, breathing pigeons,

none of your reanimated muck here, sir.”

I have pigeons and to spare and I tell him so.

He tells me he’s new in this business,

used to be part of a moderately successful

financial securities analysis company

but was laid off, replaced by a computer RS232’d to a quartz sphere.

“Still, mustn’t grumble, one door opens, another one slams,

got to keep up with the times, sir, got to keep up with the times.”

He thrusts me a free pigeon

(To attract new custom, sir,

once you’ve tried one of our pigeons, you’ll never look at another)

and struts down the stairs, singing,

“Pigeons alive-oh, alive alive-oh.”

Ten o’clock after I’ve bathed and shaved

(unguents of eternal youth and of certain sexual attraction applied from plastic vessels)

I take the pigeon into my study;

I refresh the chalk circle around my old Dell 310,

hang wards at each corner of the monitor,

and do what is needful with the pigeon.

Then I turn the computer to on: It chugs and hums,

inside it fans blow like storm winds on old oceans

ready to drown poor merchantmen.

Autoexec complete it bleeps:

I’ll do, I’ll do, I’ll do . . .

Two o’clock and walking through familiar London

—or what was familiar London before the cursor deleted certain certainties—

I watch a suit and tie man giving suck

to the Psion Organizer lodged in his breast pocket,

its serial interface like a cool mouth hunting his chest for sustenance,

familiar feeling, and I’m watching my breath steam in the air.

Cold as a witch’s tit these days is London,

you’d never think it was November,

and from underground the sounds of trains rumble.

Mysterious: tube trains are almost legendary in these times,

stopping only for virgins and the pure of heart,

first stop Avalon, Lyonesse, or the Isles of the Blessed. Maybe

you get a postcard and maybe you don’t.

Anyway, looking down any chasm demonstrates conclusively

there is no room under London for subways;

I warm my hands at a pit.

Flames lick upward.

Far below a smiling demon spots me, waves, mouths carefully,

as one does to the deaf, or distant, or to foreigners.

Its sales performance is spotless: It mines a Dwarrow Clone,

mimes software beyond my wildest,

Albertus Magnus ARChived on three floppies,

Claviculae Solomon
for VGA, CGA, four-color or monochrome,

mimes

and mimes

and mimes.

The tourists lean over the riftways to Hell,

staring at the damned

(perhaps the worst part of damnation;

eternal torture is bearable in noble silence, alone,

but an audience, eating crisps and chips and chestnuts,

an audience who aren’t even really that interested . . .

They must feel like something at the zoo,

the damned).

Pigeons flutter around Hell, dancing on the updrafts,

race memory perhaps telling them

that somewhere around here there should be four lions,

unfrozen water, one stone man above;

the tourists cluster around.

One does a deal with the demon: a ten-pack of blank floppies for his soul.

One has recognized a relative in the flames and is waving:

Coooee! Coooeee! Uncle Joseph!
Look, Nerissa, it’s your Great-Uncle Joe

that died before you was born,

that’s him down there, in the Slough, up to his eyes in boiling scum

with the worms crawling in and out of his face.

Such a lovely man.

We all cried at his funeral.

Wave to your uncle, Nerissa, wave to your uncle.

The pigeon man lays limed twigs on the cracked paving stones,

then sprinkles breadcrumbs and waits.

He raises his cap to me.

“This morning’s pigeon, sir, I trust it was satisfactory?”

I allow that it was and toss him a golden shilling

(which he touches surreptitiously to the iron of his gauntlet,

checking for fairy gold, then palms).

Tuesdays, I tell him. Come on Tuesdays.

Bird-legged cottages and huts crowd the London streets,

stepping spindly over the taxis, shitting embers over cyclists,

queuing in the streets behind the buses,

chuckchuckchuckchuckchuurck,
they murmur.

Old women with iron teeth gaze out of the windows,

then return to their magic mirrors,

or to their housework,

Hoovering through fog and filthy air.

Four o’clock in Old Soho,

rapidly becoming a backwater of lost technology.

The ratcheting grate of charms being wound up

with clockwork silver keys

grinds out from every backstreet Watchmaker’s,

Abortionist’s, Philtre & Tobacconist’s.

It’s raining.

Bulletin board kids drive pimpmobiles in floppy hats,

modem panders

anoracked kid-kings of signal to noise;

and all their neon-lit stippled stable flirting and turning under the lights,

succubi and incubi with sell-by dates and Smart Card eyes,

all yours, if you’ve got your number,

know your expiry date, all that.

One of them winks at me

(flashes on, on-off, off-off-on),

noise swallows signal in fumbled fellatio.

(I cross two fingers,

a binary precaution against hex,

effective as superconductor or simple superstition.)

Two poltergeists share a take-away. Old Soho always makes me nervous.

Brewer Street. A hiss from an alley: Mephistopheles opens his brown coat,

flashes me the lining (databased old invocations,

Magians lay ghosts—with diagrams), curses, and begins:

Blight an enemy?

Wither a harvest?

Barren a consort?

Debase an innocent?

Ruin a party . . . ?

For you, sir? No, sir? Reconsider, I beg you.

Just a little of your blood smudged on this printout

and you can be the proud possessor of a new voice synthesizer, listen—

He stands a Zenith portable on a table he makes from a modest suitcase,

attracting a small audience in the process, plugs in the voicebox, types at the

C
> prompt:
GO

and it recites in voice exact and fine:

Orientis princeps Bëelzebub, inferni irredentista menarche et demigorgon, propitiamus vows
. . .

I hurry onward, hurry down the street

while paper ghosts, old printouts, dog my heels,

and hear him patter like a market man:

Not twenty

not eighteen

not fifteen

Cost me twelve lady so help me Satan but to you?

Because I like your pretty face

because I want to raise your spirits.

Five.

That’s right.

Five.

Sold
to the lady with the lovely eyes . . .

The archbishop hunches glaucous blind in the darkness on the edge of St. Paul’s,

small, birdlike, luminous, Humming
I/O, I/O, I/O.

It’s almost six and the rush-hour traffic in stolen dreams

and expanded memory hustles the pavement below us.

I hand the man my jug.

He takes it, carefully, and shuffles back into the waiting cathedral shadows.

When he returns the jug is full once more.

I josh, “Guaranteed holy?”

He traces one word in the frozen dirt:
WYSIWYG

and does not smile back.

(Wheezy wig. Whisky whig.)

He coughs gray, milk phlegm,

spits onto the steps.

What I see in the jug: it looks holy enough, but you can’t know for sure,

not unless you are yourself a siren or a fetch,

coagulating out of a telecom mouthpiece, riding the bleep,

an invocation, some really Wrong Number; then you can tell

from holy.

I’ve dumped telephones in buckets of the stuff before now,

watched things begin to form

then bubble and hiss as the water gets to them:

lustrated and asperged, the Final Sanction.

One afternoon

there was a queue of them, trapped on the tape of my ansaphone:

I copied it to floppy and filed it away.

You want it?

Listen, everything’s for sale.

The priest needs shaving, and he’s got the shakes.

His wine-stained vestments do little to keep him warm.

I give him money.

(Not much. After all,

it’s just water, some creatures are so stupid

They’ll do you a Savini gunk-dissolve

if you sprinkle them with Perrier

for chrissakes, whining the whole time,

All my evil, my beautiful evil.)

The old priest pockets the coin, gives me

a bag of crumbs as a bonus,

sits on his steps, hugging himself.

I feel the need to say something before I leave.

Look, I tell him, it’s not your fault.

It’s just a multi-user system.

You weren’t to know.

If prayers could be networked,

if saintware were up and running,

if you could make your side as reliable as they’ve made theirs . . .

“What You See,” he mutters desolately,

“What You See Is What You Get.” He crumbles a communion wafer

throws it down for the pigeons,