‘Coward,’ said Caroline.
‘That’s your professional opinion, is it?’
‘Yes, it is: I’ve given you four openings and you’re afraid to get into it with me.’
‘Into what?’
‘You know very well what — you’ve stonewalled the one-on-ones and somehow you’ve managed to jam the RE runs and the hypno sessions. We’re seven days into the Level 4 and I haven’t got diddly-poo to show for it.’
‘I’m sorry if I’m making you look bad with the Sheela-Na-Gig but there are things I just can’t remember.’
‘You’re not sorry. When it’s ooh-ooh time you’re out of your pants like greased lightning but when it’s Level 4 time you zip your mouth shut and you don’t care how it makes me look.’
‘Oh, I see. This is the first time that you’ve made it absolutely clear that this was a sex-for-answers deal. And for a little while I thought it was my desperation pheromones that were lighting your fire.’
‘Goddam it, Frem, give me a break, will you? What I said about you and me was true but I have got a job to do.’
‘And we both know what your priorities are, don’t we.’
‘That’s not fair — I haven’t been trading sex for answers but you’ve been using me while giving nothing.’
‘Giving nothing! I’ve been giving you whatever I am, and what I mostly am is desperation — I thought that’s what you liked.’
We went on like that for a while and the evening came to an end early. The remaining two weeks were strictly business and not very productive from Caroline’s point of view — I wasn’t giving her the answers she wanted and even elephant-sized shots of Epiphanol couldn’t get them out of me.
At the end of the Level 4 there was a DSC Board of Enquiry and the finding of the suits and uniforms was that no action was to be taken pending further investigation and a Pythia session back on Earth. The Level 4 material, such as it was, had been sent to the Ziggurat for processing. When my orders came through, Caroline, who’d been hoping to go Earthside for the next stage of things, didn’t get that assignment.
‘You can see how impressed they were with my work,’ she said. ‘I’m lucky they didn’t bust me to emptying bedpans.’
On my last night at Hubble Straits we went to the Hubble Bubble again. We didn’t talk much, just sat there emptying and refilling our glasses. Wasny Flim’s last song was one of his own, ‘Here and Gone’:
Here and gone,
the picture of you in my eyes,
your voice, your laughter, and your walk …
My eyes were on Flim when I heard sniffling. I turned to look at Caroline and saw that she was crying a little. ‘What?’ I said.
She looked at me as if she were seeing me for the first time, seeing me as someone unknown. ‘First Navigator Fremder Gorn,’ she said, ‘it just occurred to me that there might be something missing in you and that’s why you didn’t disappear with the ship and the others. You’re the most alone person I’ve ever met. You know how wirecars have couplers, what they call male and female couplers — you push one car up against another and there’s a clunk and they connect? Most people have couplers but you seem not to. You weren’t connected to your ship or the others; when they went you stayed alone. And you never connected with me although you stuck your male part into my female one. I wanted you to give me the how-it-is-with-Fremder the same as I gave you the how-it-is-with-Caroline but you wouldn’t do it and now you’re going Earthside with all the how-it-is still locked up in you. OK, that’s the last assessment from Dr Love-but-not-very-crafty.’
The circles of emptiness were very bright, the shadows blurred and dim, the space outside the Bubble bleaker than usual as Flim continued:
Here and gone,
the kisses and the lies,
the small dark hours when we used to talk -
here and gone, all that we were together,
here and gone.
She was sitting there looking like the goddess on her desk, at the same time seductive and full of fear and doubt.
‘Listen, Caroline,…’ I began.
‘Please,’ she said, ‘no bullshit. We had one good week and that’s it. You’ll remember me as Caroline Not-very-crafty who was fun in bed and dead easy to outsmart in the Level 4.’
‘No, I won’t.’
‘Even better — you’ll forget me.’
‘You know I won’t.’
‘Sure, Frem, let’s have lunch sometime. Here comes Mikhail’s Snackdome again. Time to go.’
11
I see a red door and I want it painted black,
No colours any more, I want them to turn black.
I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes -
I have to turn my head until my darkness goes.
Maybe for some people the business of knowing who and what and when and where they are is simple; not for me. The past and the present flicker together in my mind and it isn’t easy to sort through the different strands of story to find one that is only mine. Here’s an extract from one of Helen Gorn’s notebooks of 2022, the year of her suicide and my birth:
18.08.22
‘I know death hath ten thousand several doors for men to take their exits.’ Going out is easy, coming in is a labour. Hold it up by the ankles and smack its bottom. Cry — you’re in the world. Nobody asks to be born. Lots of people ask for the other.
And yet another transcript, this one from one of my mother’s therapy sessions (which I, the as yet unborn Gorn, attended) after her first suicide attempt later that same August:
SNG REST AND REASSESSMENT CENTRE
GORN, HELEN — SESSION 12–15:30 — 22.08.22
THERAPISTD. SCHWARTZ, DIRECTOR, PHYSIO/PSYCHO
(GORN IS WEARING HEADPHONES AND LISTENING TO AN AUDIOBOY)
S: What are you listening to?
G: Bloody cheek!
S: Why do you say that?
G: (MOCKING ME) ‘Why do you say that?’ I never saw you before in my life and here you come with your face and your spectacles and your beard and you want to know what I’m listening to. I don’t ask you what you’re listening to, do I?
S: I’m not listening to anything.
G: That’s your problem — you don’t listen.
S: I meant that I’m not listening to music.
G: Never mind. Those that can’t hear, let them not listen.
S: What can you hear?
G: The black.
S: By?
G: Johann Sebastian Schwarz.
S: Do you mean Bach?
G: I mean Black. That’s your name too — Schwarz. But you don’t listen.
S: Which of Schwarz’s compositions are you listening to?
G: The Art of Frog. I hate it.
S: Why?
G: No hop.
S: What about you? Have you got hop?
G: Don’t be stupid. If I had I wouldn’t be here, would I. Would you like to disappear?
S: I’m interested in why you tried to disappear.
G: ‘If I should take a notion to jump right into the ocean, ain’t nobody’s business if I do.’ Know that song?