Love in the Time of Fridges Read online

  “That looks fine. Comfortable?” I made a stab at some words, but they came out garbled.

  “Good. Francine is going to put some gel on your head. It may feel a tiny bit cold. Gel 3-B, please, Francine. With alfalfa extract.”

  I felt the cold slop of gunge over my head.

  “It can discolor the hair,” she said, sweeping it around with her rubber gloves until I could feel it dripping down the sides of my face and onto the bib.

  “This will take only a second or two. Francine has a card of some poetry, which you can read to help keep you calm,” he said. “Prepare the Vault for the images, please, Francine. And I’d like a hard copy as well.”

  They exchanged a few other words behind me, and Francine gave me a card. It had some lines of a poem on it, under the heading Government Approved Poetry. “This poem has been approved by Health and Safety to promote calm. It can be read in an emergency to patients who are in shock. Alternatively, show them the picture of the puppy on reverse and encourage them to imagine they are stroking it.”

  Then the doctor’s voice was much louder. “Head hack in five, four—nice and relaxed for me—read the poetry to yourself, that helps—two—keep reading the poetry—one…

  “Fire!”

  chapter

  SEVEN

  At Porlock, Inc., they had now induced an error code onto the screens. It read: “The system cannot perform that operation due to error 3.87.”

  But when Kahill looked that up in a manual, it said: “Error 3.87. A bad error. Actually, that’s astonishingly bad. What did you do to get that? Please let us know.”

  Kahill knocked over his coffee.

  Mendes shook his head.

  The banks of mutimillion-dollar consoles should have been displaying all the most recent instances of people about to do stupid things, but instead the computer was asking how many bytes there were in a gigabyte. And was it more than forty-seven?

  Mendes went back to his office, feeling unease break through him. No one was supposed to know they were here, and the computer wasn’t linked to any outside system. So how had they picked up a virus? Maybe it was a programming glitch. He looked out at the city below.

  People would be doing stupid things down there.

  If it was only small stupid things, the Pentagon would never hear about it and he could bury the whole episode. As long as no one down there did anything really stupid. As long as no one in this city suddenly decided to do something so utterly stupid that the consequences reverberated all the way to Washington.

  He felt a chill.

  chapter

  EIGHT

  Fire!” the doctor cried.

  My mind tingled and flamed as though it was filled with fireflies.

  Then images ran amok as if disturbed by a soft breeze. Pictures of New Seattle fluttering one after the other. The hood of the drongle. The bird sitting on the city sign. The brown eyes of the girl. A Health and Safety sign. More and more shots getting quicker and quicker. Vibrant and sharp, running through my consciousness too fast to comprehend. And then they echoed away into a tumbling dark void.

  “All done,” said the nurse, and I realized I was breathing hard and my vision was a splintered blur of colors. “Your eyes will adjust in a minute as your brain settles itself.”

  A crash.

  And a scream. I couldn’t make out what was happening. For a second I saw the doctor held under the jaw, his tired, smug expression replaced with a panic that stretched his skin taut and infected his eyes.

  He was flung across the room, and his head smashed a console. Smoke erupted from the thing and the plates holding my head kicked like a mule.

  A firestorm of pain ran through my head. My eyes stung and it felt like I was swimming about in my own mind. Memories from years before were ripped out and splayed open in a riot of semiconsciousness. I struggled to breathe.

  The machine was clawing at my mind with a vicious squeeze, collapsing who I was into a crow-black sea of half-consciousness.

  Images boiled. Memories fused together before burning in a great pyre. A man sang Mozart opera. Then another louder voice was suddenly singing about cookies. “Cookies!” The voice sang happily. “They’re lovely! Cookies!” It rang on, and my whole self was nothing but this voice going on about cookies. From somewhere, a tiny insignificant part of me wondered if I was dying.

  Wondered if this was death—a confusing jumble of memories and voices running around and out of control like they had finally been let off the leash.

  But I didn’t want to die.

  I had done too little of the things that mattered. And too much of those that didn’t.

  The voice sang aggressively one last time before it swam away.

  Then hordes of memories bathed in the spotlight of my mind for tiny fleeting moments. Green fields rolling with wildflowers.

  A swirl of off-blue incandescence.

  Abigail smiling on a beach as we ran with our dog, Rufus.

  Sitting at a desk in school.

  Abigail’s hands, playing the piano.

  The swirling rocks of Bryce Canyon.

  Then I sank into myself. Deeper and deeper until I was in a place where living had stopped. Where something else took place.

  Far away, I heard the distant calling of a voice, singing opera again but this time as calm and clear as a child’s breath on a still winter morning, each note casting a forest of light.

  And then it melted into a furious dark energy that strove to burn away the soul of who I was. I stood my ground as it rose up, screaming with a power that was beyond anything I could understand. I was dying. This was death.

  And then, darkness.

  The noise of the machine snapped away.

  I forced my eyes open. For a moment I could not focus but I sensed someone was there with me.

  “Abigail?” I said.

  And then I saw the gun.

  chapter

  NINE

  I stared, frozen, as my eyes fought to contend with the white light. Silence scuttled about the room. I slumped forward, the jack plug ripping from the back of my neck as my head released from the boards. It was the girl from the drongle.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I said. “You nearly killed me. That machine was searching my long-term memory.” She held the gun at my head. On the floor, the doctor and nurse were out cold. The silence settled amid the raw glare of the lights.

  “We’re getting out of here,” she said.

  “You’re out of your mind.”

  “You’re Huckleberry Lindbergh, an ex-cop, so you know this place. Get up.”

  Her eyes shone with the passion I had seen before in the drongle, but now it was mixed through with adrenaline.

  “I can’t help you,” I said.

  “Yes, you can.”

  She kicked away the boards that had clasped my head and pulled me up. I felt remnants of pain snake through my spine and go to ground through my legs, leaving a numb trail in my lungs. The world was still there, but it all seemed slightly farther away, as though all the fittings had inched back slightly and were eyeing me with suspicion.

  “You’re struggling to keep your own past in check, aren’t you? It’s in your eyes. I’ve seen that look before,” she said.

  “You’re making a mistake.”

  “I don’t think so.” And then she shot the wall near me and the sound reverberated. “Move.”

  I stumbled toward the door. She grabbed the images that had been printed from my head and stuffed them in my pocket. I locked eyes with two cops who appeared behind the glass partition with stony faces, each displaying a dish-scourer of a mustache. Their sense of humor looked as though it had been drained away by a machine, leaving their faces empty of a whole range of basic emotions. They stared at the two bodies on the floor.

  Then the woman lugged me out of the room, and I stumbled along behind as she gripped my arm, like a favorite toy being dragged by a child.

  chapter

  TEN
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  Maddox couldn’t see his face.

  But he knew unmistakeably that it was the man in black.

  He had an emptiness about him, an absence. He didn’t fit in here, but he didn’t entirely fit in anywhere. There would always be a slight gap between him and the rest of the world. Maddox scooted down the bench seat, making his stomach fold around the table edge, and sat opposite. Cathy had been insistent that he lose weight, but doughnuts were too easy to come by in the force.

  “You’re late and I can’t stay long here. Do you have it?” The man spoke from behind black sunglasses. Maddox tensed, and the man seemed almost to fade away before his eyes.

  “My eyes are going,” Maddox said. “There was a complication. I got the fridge out with the whole batch, but it escaped.”

  “Escaped?”

  “Yeah. I’ve put out feelers, but I have to be careful. I don’t know where it is.”

  “Find it, and before they do,” said the man in black. “I have to go. I have been here too long.”

  chapter

  ELEVEN

  The head hack gel stung my eyes.

  “Grab those smoke canisters. Grab them,” cried the woman as we passed a stack of boxes. I managed to get hold of one and crammed it under my arm. “Which way to the roof?” she cried.

  “The roof?”

  “Yeah. The roof.” She looked at me and I felt the energy in her deep brown eyes slip from her and resonate through me.

  “Left,” I said. “Stairwell ahead. But you’ll be trapped.”

  She pushed me forward, and I felt the muscles in my legs react like they were strung as tightly as piano wire. An alarm screamed and I tried to wipe the gel from my face as she pulled me along. Even if we got out of here, the cops would hunt us down with their zealous brand of dull efficiency for as long as it took.

  Even if it took until after we were dead.

  They would probably come along to our graves just to heckle us.

  She dragged me toward the stairwell and forced me upward. The echoes of our steps came back in empty snaps.

  I was breathing hard, my chest virtually exploding with the effort. Too many mojitos over too many years. Christ, I needed to cut back, or maybe I just needed to have more. Maybe that would nullify the pain.

  She hauled me up five flights and then we stumbled out through the fire escape door and onto the rain-drenched roof. She let go of my arm and headed to the parapet, jinking easily through the air-con units and aerials. The gel had stung away my vision and I stopped to wipe it away with my sleeve as the rain teemed down in the darkness. The situation was hopeless.

  She was up shit creek without a paddle.

  Or a boat.

  Or a hotel where she could call the travel agent and complain about the whole way the creek had been misrepresented generally.

  chapter

  TWELVE

  I stumbled toward where she had stopped, still retching for breath, but I caught my arm on an air-conditioning unit so that the smoke canisters spilled from the box and scattered across the roof. One exploded in a scream of smoke. I left them lying there. When I reached her, she was standing by the parapet looking at the fire escape.

  Or more precisely, where it should have been.

  There were the rusted remains of fixings and a sign that had been posted. It read: “In case of emergency, break the glass and pull out the picture of the puppy. Then stare at it until calm.”

  The other buildings on the block were too far away to access. “We have very little time,” she said. “Can you think of a plan?”

  “No. And I don’t make plans.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t make plans.” I leaned against one of the large stone birds that adorned the parapet, still trying to get my heart rate down to something less than several hundred. The bird toppled from the roof. I watched it loop end-over-end until it blew apart into shards on the steps below, amid hordes of people.

  “But it looks like jumping is out,” I said.

  “Set off all the smoke canisters, then find me. I’m not shooting cops, no matter how annoying their mustaches are.”

  I nodded and headed back through the night rain to where I had dropped the canisters. I fumbled with the wet tags and let them off one after the other so they formed a massive, impenetrable red cloud. I thought about giving myself up to the cops. There was no sense staying here, but I felt some misguided loyalty to this woman. She understood what was behind my eyes, and that seemed incredibly important.

  I ran across the roof to where she was hitting something.

  When I got to within a few feet, the smoke cleared and I saw she was trying to break a chain that held down a huge advertising balloon that loomed above.

  “You’ll kill yourself,” I said.

  “You came back to New Seattle to find something that would make you feel human, right?”

  “I don’t know why I came back.”

  “I do; it’s in your eyes. You’re about to feel a jolt of adrenaline that should make even a corpse feel human. Hold the chain.”

  “You always live life like this?”

  “With purpose, you mean? You forgotten what that’s like?”

  I looked at her. And through the dingy half-light and pouring rain, I saw she had the kind of inner confidence I had once felt. And I tried to recall when that sense of being me had slipped away.

  “I didn’t have you down for kidnapping and social care in one package,” I said.

  She fired five or six rounds from the gun, and the chain snapped in a shower of sparks. I was dragged ruthlessly across the roof as the glum bulk of the advertising balloon began to wander off in the evening breeze.

  We’re in The Last Chance Saloon now, I thought as my legs caught on one of the air-con units, although it has probably been turned into something with individual table lamps, and renamed The Last Chance Bistro, if an architect has gotten hold of it.

  I felt her hands grab me. Then she began winding the free end of the chain firmly around my chest.

  “If we get split up, I’ve a room at the Halcyon motel, okay? It’ll be safe for the night.”

  “Who the hell are you?” I said.

  “Nena,” she said and then pushed me off the roof and I hung, swinging, chained below the massive balloon. The thing began to drift, and a moment later she jumped, catching me around the waist, and her added weight sent us spiraling down through the cloud of red smoke until we broke clear into the evening lights. She was staring straight at me, and for a moment I smelled her perfume. Then she looked down into the cold rush and her face blanched.

  I followed her gaze and the blurring images coalesced into something with hazy edges that made the scene below look like a Raoul Dufy painting. Maybe this was how Raoul Dufy got the idea for his painting style. Maybe he jumped off a lot of tall buildings and then remembered the hazy, undefined edges of the scene so he could paint it later when he had got out of the hospital…

  We smashed into a man with a sandwich board.

  Then we were spun and dragged into the crowd of hawkers and sellers. Their goods were sent flying around us as we skidded across the sidewalk. I tried desperately to get untangled from the chain, but I was snagged somehow, and snapshot images of people flashed before me, their faces made Technicolor by the adrenaline coursing through my veins.

  Finally I was knocked free, brutally smashing apart a stall of fresh-cut flowers. The balloon dragged Nena on.

  I fought my way to my feet, and suddenly saw it ascending again. She was still attached.

  “The end of the world is so nigh there’s hardly any time to do anything!” cried the man with the sandwich board, knocking me out of the way so he could stagger back to his box. “It’s much more nigh than it was last Tuesday, and it was pretty nigh then. The end of the world is nigh! Who wants a sticker?”

  I looked up again to see Nena float up to roof level.

  Cops who must have spilled into the area fired through the dispersing red sm
oke. I heard the sickening crack and the crowd froze as one. Or maybe I just stopped hearing them. Nena dropped, looking inhumane and entirely wrong and landed half on the sidewalk, a little way away. I fought my way over to her.

  “Nena,” I called. “Nena!”

  “That your girlfriend, is it?” said someone, laughing. I pushed him out of the way and knelt down by her. “Nena,” I said, and turned her over.

  It was a mannequin.

  I stared at the inane smiling face. For a moment I froze, and then realized she must have grabbed it from one of the stalls and made a switch.

  I scrambled back into the crowd as the cops began to inveigle their way through, but there was no sign of her. A fleet of drongles had been slowed to a halt as the confused crowd spilled onto the road.

  I clattered into one and the door sprang open, revealing a group of nuns.

  They stared out.

  I shouted the name of the Halcyon motel into the horn and threw myself in.

  The drongle moved off and nearly ran down a couple of cops who had run into the street. And then we gathered speed and were soon swamped by the traffic. Behind us, the partially collapsed balloon landed on the sidewalk again, causing chaos. I took a long breath and made eye contact with one of the nuns.

  “What makes you so sure there is a God?” she said.

  “What do you mean?” I replied.

  “I mean, why on earth do you think there could be a God?”

  “Sister Rachel is not well,” said another nun. “It came on overnight.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “She has a fever. You see how pale the poor girl is?”

  “I mean, how could there be a God?” continued Sister Rachel. “Why would he allow smug names for different shades of paint? And why would any God not want us to swear? And would he really have invented knees? Or allowed the French to be so off-hand and do that shrugging thing with their shoulders? And why would he think women having mustaches was quite such a clever thing? And why would he decide that the natterjack toad should have sex—”