Smoke and Mirrors (28 page)

makes no attempt to catch even the slowest bird.

Cold wars produce bad losers.

I go home.

News at Ten. And here is Abel Drugger, reading it:

The corners of my eyes catch hasty, bloodless motion—

a mouse?

Well, certainly a peripheral of some kind.

It’s bedtime. I feed the pigeons,

then undress.

Contemplate downloading a succubus from a board,

maybe just call up a sidekick

(there’s public-domain stuff, bawds and bauds,

shareware, no need to pay a fortune,

even copy-protected stuff can be copied, passed about,

everything has a price, any of us).

Dryware, wetware, hardware, software,

blackware, darkware,

nightware, nightmare . . .

The modem sits inviting beside the phone,

red eyes.

I let it rest—

you can’t trust anybody these days.

You download, hell, you don’t know where what came from anymore,

who had it last.

Well, aren’t you? Aren’t you scared of viruses?

Even the better protected files corrupt,

and the best protected corrupt absolutely.

In the kitchen I hear the pigeons billing and queuing,

dreaming of left-handed knives,

of athanors and mirrors.

Pigeon blood stains the floor of my study.

Alone, I sleep. And all alone I dream

Perhaps I wake in the night, suddenly comprehending something,

reach out,

scribble on the back of an old bill

my revelation, my newfound understanding,

knowing that morning will render it prosaic,

knowing that magic is a night-time thing,

then remembering when it still was . . .

Revelation retreats to cliché, listen:

Things seemed simpler before we kept computers.

Waking or dreaming from outside I hear

wild sabbats, screaming winds, tape hum, metal machine music;

witches astride ghetto blasters crowd the moon,

then land on the heath their naked flanks aglisten.

No one pays anything to attend the meet, each has it taken care of in advance,

baby bones with fat still clinging to them;

these things are direct debit, standing order,

and I see

or think I see

a face I recognize and all of them queue up to kiss his ass,

let’s rim the Devil, boys, cold seed,

and in the dark he turns and looks at me:

One door opens, another one slams,

I trust that everything is satisfactory?

We do what we can, everybody’s got the right to turn an honest penny;

we’re all bankrupt, sir,

we’re all redundant,

but we make the best of it, whistle through the Blitz,

that’s the business. Fair trade is no robbery.

Tuesday morning, then, sir, with the pigeons?

I nod and draw the curtains. Junk mail is everywhere.

They’ll get to you,

one way or another they’ll get to you; someday

I’ll find my tube train underground, I’ll pay no fare,

just “This is Hell, and I want out of it,”

and then things will be simple once again.

It will come for me like a dragon down a dark tunnel.

T HE S WEEPER OF D REAMS

A
fter all the dreaming is over, after you wake, and leave the world of madness and glory for the mundane day-lit daily grind, through the wreckage of your abandoned fancies walks the sweeper of dreams.

Who knows what he was when he was alive? Or if, for that matter, he ever was alive. He certainly will not answer your questions. The sweeper talks little, in his gruff gray voice, and when he does speak it is mostly about the weather and the prospects, victories and defeats of certain sports teams. He despises everyone who is not him.

Just as you wake he comes to you, and he sweeps up kingdoms and castles, and angels and owls, mountains and oceans. He sweeps up the lust and the love and the lovers, the sages who are not butterflies, the flowers of meat, the running of the deer and the sinking of the
Lusitania
. He sweeps up everything you left behind in your dreams, the life you wore, the eyes through which you gazed, the examination paper you were never able to find. One by one he sweeps them away: the sharp-toothed woman who sank her teeth into your face; the nuns in the woods; the dead arm that broke through the tepid water of the bath; the scarlet worms that crawled in your chest when you opened your shirt.

He will sweep it up—everything you left behind when you woke. And then he will burn it, to leave the stage fresh for your dreams tomorrow.

Treat him well, if you see him. Be polite with him. Ask him no questions. Applaud his teams’ victories, commiserate with him over their losses, agree with him about the weather. Give him the respect he feels is his due.

For there are people he no longer visits, the sweeper of dreams, with his hand-rolled cigarettes and his dragon tattoo.

You’ve seen them. They have mouths that twitch, and eyes that stare, and they babble and they mewl and they whimper. Some of them walk the cities in ragged clothes, their belongings under their arms. Others of their number are locked in the dark, in places where they can no longer harm themselves or others. They are not mad, or rather, the loss of their sanity is the lesser of their problems. It is worse than madness. They will tell you, if you let them: they are the ones who live, each day, in the wreckage of their dreams.

And if the sweeper of dreams leaves you, he will never come back.

F OREIGN P ARTS

The VENEREAL DISEASE is disease contracted as a consequence of impure connexion. The fearful constitutional consequences which may result from this affection,—consequences, the fear of which may haunt the mind for years, which may taint the whole springs of health, and be transmitted to circulate in the young blood of innocent offspring,—are indeed terrible considerations, too terrible not to render the disease one of those which must unhesitatingly be placed under medical care.

— 
SPENCER THOMAS, M.D., L.R.C.S. (EDIN.),

A DICTIONARY OF DOMESTIC MEDICINE AND HOUSEHOLD SURGERY
,
1882

S
imon Powers didn’t like sex. Not really.

He disliked having someone else in the same bed as himself; he suspected that he came too soon; he always felt uncomfortably that his performance was in some way being graded, like a driving test or a practical examination.

He had got laid in college a few times and once, three years ago, after the office New Year’s party. But that had been that, and as far as Simon was concerned, he was well out of it.

It occurred to him once, during a slack time at the office, that he would have liked to have lived in the days of Queen Victoria, where well-brought-up women were no more than resentful sex dolls in the bedroom: they’d unlace their stays, loosen their petticoats (revealing pinkish-white flesh) then lie back and suffer the indignities of the carnal act—an indignity it would never even occur to them that they were meant to enjoy.

He filed it away for later, another masturbatory fantasy.

Simon masturbated a great deal. Every night—sometimes more than that if he was unable to sleep. He could take as long, or as short, a time to climax as he wished. And in his mind he had had them all. Film and television stars; women from the office; schoolgirls; the naked models who pouted from the crumpled pages of
Fiesta;
faceless slaves in chains; tanned boys with bodies like Greek gods . . .

Night after night they paraded in front of him.

It was safer that way.

In his mind.

And afterward he’d fall asleep, comfortable and safe in a world he controlled, and he’d sleep without dreaming. Or at least, he never remembered his dreams in the morning.

The morning it started he was woken by the radio (“Two hundred killed and many others believed to be injured; and now over to Jack for the weather and traffic news . . . ”), dragged himself out of bed, and stumbled, bladder aching, into the bathroom.

He pulled up the toilet seat and urinated. It felt like he was pissing needles.

He needed to urinate again after breakfast—less painfully, since the flow was not as heavy—and three more times before lunch.

Each time it hurt.

He told himself that it couldn’t be a venereal disease. That was something that other people got, and something (he thought of his last sexual encounter, three years in the past) that you got from other people. You couldn’t really catch it from toilet seats, could you? Wasn’t that just a joke?

Simon Powers was twenty-six, and he worked in a large London bank, in the securities division. He had few friends at work. His only real friend, Nick Lawrence, a lonely Canadian, had recently transferred to another branch, and Simon sat by himself in the staff canteen, staring out at the Docklands Lego landscape, picking at a limp green salad.

Someone tapped him on the shoulder.

“Simon, I heard a good one today. Wanna hear?” Jim Jones was the office clown, a dark-haired, intense young man who claimed he had a special pocket on his boxer shorts, for condoms.

“Um. Sure.”

“Here you go. What’s the collective noun for people who work in banks?”

“The what?”

“Collective noun. You know, like a flock of sheep, a pride of lions. Give up?” Simon nodded. “A wunch of bankers.”

Simon must have looked puzzled, because Jim sighed and said,

“Wunch of bankers.
Bunch of wankers.
God, you’re slow . . .” Then, spotting a group of young women at a far table, Jim straightened his tie and carried his tray over to them.

He could hear Jim telling his joke to the women, this time with added hand movements.

They all got it immediately.

Simon left his salad on the table and went back to work.

That night he sat in his chair in his bedsitter flat with the television turned off, and he tried to remember what he knew about venereal diseases.

There was syphilis, which pocked your face and drove the Kings of England mad; gonorrhea—the clap—a green oozing and more madness; crabs, little pubic lice, which nested and itched (he inspected his pubic hairs through a magnifying glass, but nothing moved); AIDS, the eighties plague, a plea for clean needles and safer sexual habits (but what could be safer than a clean wank for one into a fresh handful of white tissues?); herpes, which had something to do with cold sores (he checked his lips in the mirror, they looked fine). That was all he knew.

And he went to bed and fretted himself to sleep, without daring to masturbate.

That night he dreamed of tiny women with blank faces, walking in endless rows between gargantuan office blocks, like an army of soldier ants.

Simon did nothing about the pain for another two days. He hoped it would go away, or get better on its own. It didn’t. It got worse. The pain continued for up to an hour after urination; his penis felt raw and bruised inside.

And on the third day, he phoned his doctor’s surgery to make an appointment. He had dreaded having to tell the woman who answered the phone what the problem was, and so he was relieved, and perhaps just a little disappointed, when she didn’t ask but simply made an appointment for the following day.

He told his senior at the bank that he had a sore throat and would need to see the doctor about it. He could feel his cheeks burn as he told her, but she did not remark on this, merely told him that that would be fine.

When he left her office, he found that he was shaking.

It was a gray wet day when he arrived at the doctor’s surgery.

There was no queue, and he went straight in to the doctor. Not his regular doctor, Simon was comforted to see. This was a young Pakistani, of about Simon’s age, who interrupted Simon’s stammered recitation of symptoms to ask:

“Urinating more than usual, are we?”

Simon nodded.

“Any discharge?”

Simon shook his head.

“Right ho. I’d like you to take down your trousers, if you don’t mind.”

Simon took them down. The doctor peered at his penis. “You do have a discharge, you know,” he said.

Simon did himself up again.

“Now, Mr. Powers, tell me, do you think it possible that you might have picked up from someone, a, uh, venereal disease?”

Simon shook his head vigorously. “I haven’t had sex with anyone—” he had almost said ‘anyone else’ “—in almost three years.”

“No?” The doctor obviously didn’t believe him. He smelled of exotic spices and had the whitest teeth Simon had ever seen. “Well, you have either contracted gonorrhea or NSU. Probably NSU: nonspecific urethritis. Which is less famous and less painful than gonorrhea, but it can be a bit of an old bastard to treat. You can get rid of gonorrhea with one big dose of antibiotics. Kills the bugger off . . .” He clapped his hands twice. Loudly. “Just like that.”

“You don’t know, then?”

“Which one it is? Good Lord, no. I’m not even going to try to find out. I’m sending you to a special clinic, which takes care of all of that kind of thing. I’ll give you a note to take with you.” He pulled a pad of headed notepaper from a drawer. “What is your profession, Mr. Powers?”

“I work in a bank.”

“A teller?”

“No.” He shook his head. “I’m in securities. I clerk for two assistant managers.” A thought occurred to him. “They don’t have to know about this, do they?”

The doctor looked shocked. “Good gracious, no.”

He wrote a note, in a careful, round handwriting, stating that Simon Powers, age twenty-six, had something that was probably NSU. He had a discharge. Said he had had no sex for three years. In discomfort. Please could they let him know the results of the tests. He signed it with a squiggle. Then he handed Simon a card with the address and phone number of the special clinic on it. “Here you are. This is where you go. Not to worry—happens to lots of people. See all the cards I have here? Not to worry—you’ll soon be right as rain. Phone them when you get home and make an appointment.”

Simon took the card and stood up to go.

“Don’t worry,” said the doctor. “It won’t prove difficult to treat.”

Simon nodded and tried to smile.

He opened the door to go out.

“And, at any rate, it’s nothing really nasty, like syphilis,” said the doctor.

The two elderly women sitting outside in the hallway waiting area looked up delightedly at this fortuitous overheard, and stared hungrily at Simon as he walked away.

He wished he were dead.

On the pavement outside, waiting for the bus home, Simon thought:
I’ve
got a venereal disease. I’ve
got
a venereal disease. I’ve got a
venereal disease.
Over and over, like a mantra.

He should toll a bell as he walked.

On the bus he tried not to get too close to his fellow passengers. He was certain they knew (couldn’t they read the plague marks on his face?); and at the same time he was ashamed he was forced to keep it a secret from them.

He got back to the flat and went straight into the bathroom, expecting to see a decayed horror-movie face, a rotting skull fuzzy with blue mold, staring back at him from the mirror. Instead, he saw a pink-cheeked bank clerk in his mid-twenties, fair-haired, perfect-skinned.

He fumbled out his penis and scrutinized it with care. It was neither a gangrenous green nor a leprous white, but looked perfectly normal, except for the slightly swollen tip and the clear discharge that lubricated the hole. He realized that his white underpants had been stained across the crotch by the leak.

Simon felt angry with himself and angrier with God for having given him a (say it) (
dose of the clap
) obviously meant for someone else.