Spares (35 page)

He crept across the opening and onto the other section of the path, warily looking all around him. I headed off at an angle into the clusters of huts, peering through windows and round corners, seeing nothing except tendrils of orange light. The huts themselves were antiseptically empty, sterile as if stamped from molds. In one, I saw a small collection of leaves in the corner, looking as if they were having a meeting, but nothing more interesting than that. The leaf meetings never seemed to
amount to very much. I think it was just a kind of play for them.

When I’d finished the first quarter I crossed the path we came in on and went over to the opposite side. I caught a glimpse of Vinaldi, now at the far end of the village and heading back toward the center.

I was checking yet another hut when I heard a sudden sound from behind me. I whirled around, trigger all but pulled, and saw a small flock of the orange birds fountaining up out of nothing into flight. They chittered and guffawed happily before disappearing with a shudder of air. Then everything was quiet again.

Well, not everything. When the last of the flapping noises died away I heard something the other side of the village. A human utterance of some kind. My first thought was that Vinaldi might have found something and was calling out to me, so I abandoned the current hut and ran in a crouch back toward the central path.

By the time I stepped onto it the sound had faded, and Vinaldi was nowhere to be seen. I debated calling out to him, then realized that if it hadn’t been Vinaldi, and there was anyone else here, I should probably keep my mouth shut. I retreated slowly back to the center of the village, eyes smarting at being open so wide for so long, my ears feeling as if they were swiveling on stalks.

Then I heard something that was definitely a shout, and stopped dead. The noise came from the far corner of the village, and any words contained in it were indistinguishable.

It was very bad timing for me to have to make a decision. My fingers were beginning to feel very long, my mind extremely vague. At any moment I could be Gone Away and suddenly I had to think.

There were two options. The first, go forward, threading my way through the huts until I saw what was going on. Downside: if Vinaldi wasn’t calling for me because he’d found something, I’d walk straight into the trap which Yhandim had undoubtedly set. With sudden clarity, the idea of going into a village struck me as irredeemably
stupid. Why else would we be here unless we’d followed the clothes? Yes, we had to find out where Yhandim’s camp was—but not at the expense of walking straight into it.

So I took a second option, and quickly retreated out of the village. When I was at the perimeter I turned right, keeping my back to the forest, and ran round the edge of the houses, checking the spaces between buildings and trees. It was colder outside the village, much colder. Another night was coming. Night isn’t really night in The Gap. It is simply a period of indeterminate length when it will be darker and even less fun to be there.

Then I saw a figure, on the other side of the village—standing before one of the huts. It looked like Vinaldi, but he wasn’t moving. I was relieved, but only momentarily. There was something strange about his posture, as if he was holding his hands up in the air. As I tried to work out what he was doing, and wondered whether to shout, the second Rapt rush really hit home and suddenly things became difficult and strange. I teetered on the edge of being Gone Away for a moment but managed to hold it off.

I moved very close to the wall of the nearest hut and slid around it, blinking in the way which sometimes helps. Something was very wrong. Vinaldi’s hands were in the air because they had been tied to the hut, and though I couldn’t see any blood, his head was drooping.

Run
, my mind said.
Just turn around and run
.

I crept forward another couple of yards, blinking my eyes rapidly against the coming darkness. Vinaldi was still alive; his head was jerking slightly. Either he was trying to clear it, or he was reeling from Rapt rush. Almost certainly both—my mind was already about as clear as sewage and getting more tangled all the time. I couldn’t see anyone nearby, and I briefly considered simply running toward him and trying to get him free. Then something made me turn my head and look down the path toward the center of the village.

There was nothing there. But the clearing looked
ruffled as though seen through a heat haze. Whichever way I turned my head, the haze stayed in the same place. It was flickering very slightly too, like a bad quality film print, but the flecks weren’t white, they were dark. I rubbed my eyes hard and blinked, but after I stopped seeing stars the effect was still there. The flecks seemed to organize into broken and shifting vertical lines as I watched, as if something was hidden behind a curtain of rain, rain so colored as to make up an image of that patch of the path.

I realized what I was seeing just an instant before the image settled enough for my eyes to tell me. It was Yhandim and Ghuaji, and they were running along the path straight at me. They’d been taken up by The Gap enough to slip into it almost like natives. Ghuaji’s injuries weren’t holding him up any, and Yhandim looked like he’d never been injured in his life. He probably hadn’t. People like Yhandim didn’t get injured: The traffic’s all the other way.

Both looked like a condensed pack of wild animals, bludgeoned into a human state and howling with happy lust.

I did what I’d been trained to do. I ran like hell.

I ran, and eventually I was Gone Away. I cannot tell you where I went. I can only say this:

Henna used to tell me the names of flowers; their names, what they liked in terms of water and sunlight, and where they were originally from. Whether we walked the corridors of 72, or made an excursion out into Virginia, there would be a constant background hum of information, a datastream from Henna’s internal world. At first I feigned interest, and then I ignored her, and now I’ll never know. She would also tell me things which had happened in her day, because she loved me. But because I couldn’t fit them into my life I let these too slide past me and fade away.

All those parts which I could have saved have slipped between my fingers and disappeared.

I don’t know how many people I slept with while I was married to Henna. I don’t mean there were that many, simply that I didn’t keep track, which in some ways seems worse. I didn’t start for three years, but once I began
I just couldn’t seem to stop. Sometimes I was drunk, sometimes I was Rapt, sometimes I was stone-cold sober. I can’t really blame any mitigating substance, unless it’s one I produce in my own mind. Unfaithfulness was coded in.

I’m not trying to excuse it. It’s inexcusable. That’s the whole point of vices, of alcoholism, addictions, and eating disorders. They
have
to be inexcusable. The soul wages war on the self, making it do things it can’t respect—as a punishment for crimes it doesn’t even remember. What’s the point, unless it’s something bad? And what do you do about yourself when you know you can’t stop doing something you despise? You carry on doing it, that’s what. The merry-go-round never stops. The worst of it is that people will respect those addictions, legitimating your own private civil war. They’ll think you can’t help it, that your childhood’s to blame, or some cultural malaise. Anything but you. Sometimes that’s true, but often it just comes down to being an asshole.

It’s an easy thing to do, for a cop, finding someone new to fuck. There’d always be some lonely woman who needed comforting after finding her apartment trashed, or a girl in a bar who thought it was a turn-on to sleep with someone who should have been out catching criminals—or better still, at home with his wife and daughter. Each would last a few weeks, or months, and then I’d purge myself and leave it be. For a little while I’d be good, and pretend to be happy, and then it would simply happen again.

I met Henna through Mal, when I was twenty-two and had just joined the cops. Mal had been in the Life for a year, and seemed to be liking it. We’d been Bright Eyes together—the only two survivors from our unit. We came to New Richmond after being sideslipped out, full of secrets and in search of some kind of life. Mal was originally from Roanoke but didn’t want to go back. I didn’t have anywhere to go back to anymore. My mother was dead of cancer by then, my father soon afterward
in a petty suicide. None of the towns we’d lived in meant any more than the others, and I went to New Richmond to look for a place to call home.

Neither of us had much of an education, or a family to help us up the ladder and over the TOO line, but we didn’t care. For a few years we tried different things, hoping that something would reach out and grab us. We were entranced with the city, with its possibilities, even when it didn’t seem to harbor much more than apathy toward us. New Richmond was a house with many rooms, and I wanted to visit every one of them, make them open to me. When I should have been looking for work I walked its streets, delving through its hidden passages until I knew I could live there-forever.

In the end Mal decided that there was nothing much he could do so he might as well join the police. I watched him for the first year, saw him get wrapped into his work, and concluded that the kind of things he was doing would probably suit me, too. Suit me better than they did him, in some ways; the trawling through debris and junk, the psychos and streetwalkers, the blood and violence seemed to speak directly to some part of my mind. It looked like fun. The Gap had affected Bright Eyes in different ways, and in my case it was as if I’d blossomed there. Leaving it was like having some essential nutrient removed—not one whose absence kills you, but one that simply changes the color of your leaves. I’d learned to live inside fear. The idea of being a cop appealed to that side of me, as did the notion of remaining outside society. I wanted to stand looking in. So I went to the office, proved I could spell at least one of my names, and they gave me a badge and a gun.

I met Henna a few months later, in the depths of a riotous party on 110. Mal had wangled us invites, having met a group of above-the-liners somewhere along the line of duty, and we spruced ourselves up, hopped on an xPress and went in search of fun. I didn’t have much in the early parts of the evening, as I remember, and felt conscious of the fact that I was currently bunked
down in a nasty apartment on one of 38’s more alarming streets. It’s possibly my imagination, but I rather got the impression that Mal and I had been invited as performing bears. I responded in the most constructive way I could: by getting profoundly drunk.

By ten I was so wasted I had been officially downgraded to a lower rung on the evolutionary ladder. Some guy in a suit came up, listened to my attempts to string words together, revoked my rights as Homo sapiens on the spot, and reclassified me as some kind of plant life. I had to fill in all kinds of forms and shit. It was very embarrassing.