The lift deposited us — quite literally: the floor slid forward on arrival — in a sealed vault where rainbows of triangular mirrors crept over each other at the speed of molluscs, slowly overlapping in a shifting kaleidoscope. My chaperone inserted his card into an invisible slot between them and they fell into line smoothly and noiselessly to form a long corridor, which, from the warmest to the coldest, glowed with all the colours of the spectrum.
‘Don’t worry about how to get there. The walls will lead the way. Oh, and by the way, send my regards to Verraco when you see him: Freddy’s the name,’ he added, and before I had time to get my question out, he’d disappeared like a fly on the tongue of a toad.
As I walked down the corridor the walls laced shut behind me; I had no alternative but to go on. I came out into a lobby where the aggression of the mirrors was tempered by thick Renaissance tapestries in which a hart, comic-strip fashion, was by turns startled, pursued, harried and felled by the hunters’ hounds and arrows. When it spoke to me, it did so in the emotionless, electronic voice of a computer.
‘Lie down please.’
I lay back on a couch upholstered in black leather so soft it felt freshly skinned, and a seated figure materialised in the matching armchair at my head. His smell reached me before his shadow did, a smell of dust blown off old books, of ash and dead insects in a spider-web. Then I saw him reflected in the mirror on the wall. He was a man of indefinite age, greying hair and Freudian beard, thick glasses and hands gnarled like the branches of a rose tree. His torso was sturdy, a block of wood, but his arms and legs were as thin as matchsticks, four more and he’d have looked just like a spider. He was wearing coarse woollen trousers and a dull-coloured tweed jacket, unbuttoned to reveal the butt of an automatic weapon peeping out against the stiff, light-blue cotton of his shirt.
‘Turn away please,’ he said, and I realised the electronic voice was his natural one. I did as I was told. Two minutes elapsed in total silence.
‘I’ve come to see Sr Tamerlán,’ I explained finally.
‘Why?’
‘He sent for me.’
‘What for?’
‘I suppose he must be in need of my services,’ I ventured.
‘What services?’
‘Security systems specialist. Networks. Viruses. Um …’
‘In a word.’
‘Hacker,’ I answered without hesitation.
‘The metal detector,’ I saw him glance at a console built into the arm of his chair, ‘has registered a foreign body in your head. Show it to me.’
‘I can’t. It’s inside.’
‘Explain please.’
‘A piece of helmet. A soldier’s helmet. A memory …’
‘We’ll get round to your memories some other time,’ he cut in. He didn’t move his eyes when he wanted to look at something, but turned his entire head the way a mantis does. The staring eyes met mine.
‘Don’t look at me. The appointment was at ten. It’s twelve thirty. Explain yourself.’
‘I have trouble getting up in the morning,’ I told him. ‘So I wait till noon. Mornings give me the fear. Every night I go to bed thinking “Tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll make it,” but the alarm clock goes off (actually, it’s a voice program I designed) and fills me with dread.’
‘What fills you with dread?’
‘The feeling that the worst night-terrors pale into insignificance beside the horror of a routine morning. The burden of the day. Having breakfast. Looking out of the window. Going outside. Taking a bus. Once I get moving, the fear goes and I find it enjoyable, even elating. But when I’m fighting with the sheets, it all looks terribly threatening, and I lie there suffering for hours before I can get up.’
‘Consequences.’
‘The later I get up, the more real my fears become, and I spend the rest of the day in a fog of puffy eyes, with a bad taste in my mouth and a feeling like I’m walking on dirty hospital swabs. Once I cross a certain threshold, I know the day’s a write-off and I reason to myself that the later I get up, the less of that write-off I’ll have to bear, although of course every hour I subtract from the horror intensifies the dull ache of the ones still to go. By night-time I have insomnia from it all and can’t get to sleep before daybreak … when the whole cycle starts again. Umm … can I ask you a question?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re Sr Tamerlán’s bodyg— head of security, I take it?’
‘Yes, I’m his psychoanalyst.’
‘What’s with the weapon then?’
‘What weapon?’
‘Not the word. The other one.’
‘Oh. That’s to protect him from his own fantasies.’
‘It isn’t for killing real people?’
‘You’ll discover that in Sr Tamerlán’s case that distinction is quite beside the point. Follow me,’ he said, and when he stood up, I realised he was barely five feet tall. Swaying unsteadily on two of his legs — probably because he was used to eight — he led me through a mirrored panel, which opened and closed so smoothly and silently it was like stepping through a wall of mercury.
As a boy, one of my favourite bits in the Road Runner was when Wile E. Coyote, in his enthusiasm to catch the mocking bird, would confidently go on running on thin air without realising, until the Road Runner pointed out the void beneath his feet, and only then — as if things only happen when we become aware of them — would he start to fall. I took my first steps into Sr Tamerlán’s office in the same spirit of innocence and immediately had to cling to the nearest column. Through the thick glass on which I stood yawned the other twenty-nine storeys of the tower, growing in chaos and complexity, and diminishing in clarity level by level, just the way, when you peer into a crystal sea, the waters get murkier the deeper you look. This office was apparently the point of maximum visibility: the one place from which the rest of the building became transparent — the one place with no mirrors. It was difficult to decide which was worse: the towering chaos below, or this unbearable order into which it finally resolved itself.
‘Remain standing, please,’ said the bodyguard, whose presence I’d momentarily forgotten about, in the voice of someone inviting me to take a seat, and, gliding fearlessly along the threads of his web spread across the void, he squeezed into a tiny side-room, whose transparent door spun on its axis as he went through, and turned its mirrored face to me.
He hadn’t said anything about not walking, so, as the minutes ticked by and I was getting bored, I sauntered over to the imposing desk: a half-moon of thick, tempered glass driven into three supports of living rock positioned in the centre of the room. At one end was a small city of monitors and video-screens, computer terminals, phone and fax switchboards, printers that, chirruping like cicadas, fed now and then on walls of continuous feed. The other half of this great arc was given over to more personal objects: a riding-crop with an exquisitely fashioned Creole-silverwork handle; a black stone tray full of white sand raked into sinuous and harmonious furrows around three little grey rocks; a well-trained bonsai ombú — save for the leaves, which were almost normal size — set in an astonishingly faithful replica of a fenceless pampas. But what caught my eye was an acrylic prism about the size of a gold ingot, with a long, opaque object inside. This object must have been about a foot long and as thick as my wrist, bluntish with a pebbly relief at one end and tapering slightly to a little tail at the other, all of an even coffee colour. I held it up to the light, rotating it in my fingers the better to appreciate its shifting, iridescent sheen. That’s strange, I thought, looking at it in this light you’d swear it was a …