I barely heard her, because I’d finally realized the Farms’ second purpose. They hadn’t been created just for spare parts. The group of men who came to them at night hadn’t been sneaking in. One of them owned the whole deal, and the payments made to the caretakers were simply to ensure their silence. I wondered why they’d never come to my Farm. I was hired under a false name. They couldn’t have known it was me.
It didn’t matter. The answer to Nearly’s question still came easily. “I’m going to kill Maxen,” I said.
“Is that going to solve anything?” she said sadly. “Is that going to bring anyone back?”
“I’m not doing it in the hope of solving something,” I replied. “I’m going to do it because I want to.”
We abandoned the car out in the Portal, and returned to New Richmond; Vinaldi and Nearly through the front entrance, me round the back, as usual. Vinaldi returned to his empire to check that nothing untoward had happened while we’d been gone, sort through his mail, that kind of thing. I asked him to subtly spread a rumor that I’d disappeared, and he said he’d put the word out. Nearly went home to shower, and realized that she’d in effect been on an unpaid holiday for the last couple of days, so maybe she was going back to work, too. I didn’t ask her.
I went back to Howie’s, and spent a while concocting likely deaths for myself. The most convincing story I could come up with was a drug overdose, which gave me pause. That’s not a great comment on a life. I slotted Mal’s disk in and got it to hack the name Jack Randall into the pending file on the list of city dead. The death couldn’t be absolutely official because that required a confirmatory code from the coroner’s office, but I made it appear that my body had been found in the Portal. The coroners could rarely be bothered to go out there, and I knew from experience they’d just rubber-stamp it. The notification would automatically be relayed to the Police subnet, and from there the word would spread to the few people to whom it would be interesting. It also gave me pause to realize that all of them would regard it as good news. All in all, it was a bit of a gloomy experience. I was officially a ghost.
Then I turned the computer off, ate a cheeseburger at last, and started drinking heavily. The burger was excellent, and cheered me up no end.
Say what you like, but history is shit. It’s dirty, and it smells—with good reason, because it has provided the visceral energy which brought the present moment to where it is. This present is like our bodies: They look so clean, because they’re washed every day, but they leave little piles everywhere behind them. Past presents digested, excreted, and left for posterity—and our later selves—to smell.
As I sat in Howie’s office, in the hours before dawn and alone, I felt as if I were sitting in the midst of a hundred piles of shit, the stink of each subtly different from the others. When I tried to trace where each had come from I got lost. I couldn’t remember the steps clearly enough. It was all too complicated. Time to wipe the hard disk and start again.
Howie had left me by myself for the time being, at my request. I was trying to remember when my life had stopped making sense, when the loops got nested so deep I couldn’t see beyond them. You never value simplicity as a child because you’re always leaning into the turns, wanting to become older and get your hands on all those older things. As a child, your options are limited, and as such, so simple and free. Each day is a simple progression of activities, not fractured with the demands of the future.
There are countless things you can do when you’ve grown up, so many calls upon your time. You can smoke. You can drink. You can take drugs. You can work—in fact, you have to, because you have to pay bills. Then there are the things you can’t do. You have to not goof off, not sleep with other people even if they’re available. You have to be happy with where you are and what you’ve got, when the essence of childhood was the belief that there would always be something new.
The addictions and the mandates of being an adult take up so much of your time that you can never simply be. Every thought and every action is shaped and undermined by all the other actions or thoughts you have to forgo. You can find yourself haunted by people and events that never even existed, so surrounded by spirits that the real world shades away. You still search for Narnia, even though you’re too old to believe in it and now it doesn’t want you there.
Innocence is the freedom from having to have a cigarette every half hour, freedom from loving someone, freedom from the endless fallout of bad things which you have endured or done. Freedom from time, and ail time’s passing leaves behind it. The countless smells of shit
The melancholies of youth are to do with not being taken seriously, and the opposite sex. The desperate, biological exposure of that need; the feeling of being left behind when other boys seem to know about smoking and beer and girls—or when other girls had better clothes, a boyfriend of sorts, and tits. Not so much a feeling of being left behind, in fact, so much as a dreadful fear that you were on a subtly different and less vital curve, one which would never bring you into contact with these exciting, contraband substances.
And yet, when I got those things, I realized the truth in the only movie that really scared me as a child. I thought of the time when I saw Pinocchio on television, and I remembered the way the film spoke to me even though the animation was archaic and two-dimensional. I wonder whether my reaction then was a forerunner of what I feel now, if it was an intuitive preunderstanding that these forbidden things really would turn you into a donkey, forever tilling someone else’s field. But you run for them with open arms anyway, because that’s what growing up is about, and only when you stand tired and wet in the rain and mud, the yoke grown so close that it is a part of your shoulders right down to the bone, do you realize what you have done.
I tried to bend the world, and didn’t bend enough myself. I wasted so much time looking for someone who would light up the forest that I didn’t see what I had. Henna was a beacon who would pull me out of the woods, with a strength in her arms which had been put there by my lack of love. I’d stand in front of her, bedraggled and sad in the discovery that what I’d chased was not worth the catching, and believing that Henna never knew what I was really like because I lied. And of course she understood all along, and loved me anyway.
She’s not here anymore, so there’s no one to pull me back. Pinocchio was rescued, and in time turned into a real little boy. The rest of us stand shivering in the rain, and bray.
Howie believed most of what I told him had happened in The Gap, though he did inquire exactly how much Rapt I’d taken. Then he asked me what I was going to do, and I told him.
“How, precisely, are you intending to do that?” he asked, handing me a beer. The bar outside was crowded and noisy, but the office felt like it was miles away from all that.
“There’s a memorial service for Louella Richardson tomorrow,” I said cheerfully. “Maxen’s going to be there, salving his conscience. He’s going to have an uninvited guest.”
“How are you going to get in?”
“I have a plan,” I said.
Howie nodded. “You want some help with the details? Like where exactly you’d like to be buried?”
I smiled at him, thinking how weird life is. I met Howie when I was asking after a murder once, and leaned on him hard for information. He’d refused to play ball for so long, and so imaginatively, that I found myself kind of admiring him. Then I found myself ending up in his bar when I wanted a drink, and even brought Henna and Angela a few times. Now he was the only person in the world prepared to help me, however ridiculous my ambition. Vinaldi had made it clear before leaving that he was having no part of it. His argument was with Yhandim and the others, not Maxen.