Gripless

The CorpSeCorps had never lost sight of Jimmy. During his time at Martha Graham they’d hauled him in regularly, four times a year, for what they called little talks. They’d ask him the same questions they’d already asked a dozen times, just to see if they got the same answers. I don’t know was the safest thing Jimmy could think of to say, which most of the time was accurate enough.

After a while they’d taken to showing him pictures – stills from buttonhole snoop cameras, or black-and-whites that looked as if they’d been pulled off the security videocams at pleebland bank ATMs, or news-channel footage of this or that: demonstrations, riots, executions. The game was to see if he recognized any of the faces. They’d have him wired up, so even if he pretended ignorance they’d catch the spikes of neural electricity he wouldn’t be able to control. He’d kept waiting for the Happicuppa caper in Maryland to turn up, the one with his mother in it – he dreaded that – but it never showed.

He hadn’t received any foreign postcards for a long time.

After he’d gone to work at AnooYoo, the Corpsmen appeared to have forgotten about him. But no, they were just paying out the rope – seeing if he, or else the other side, meaning his mother, would use his new position, his dollop of extra freedom, to try to make contact again. After a year or so, there was the familiar knocking on the door. He always knew it was them because they never used the intercom first, they must have had some kind of bypass, not to mention the door code. Hello, Jimmy, how ya doing, we just need to ask you a few questions, see if you can help us out a little here.

Sure, be glad to.

Attaboy.

And so it went.

In – what? – his fifth year at AnooYoo, they finally hit pay dirt. He’d been looking at their pictures for a couple of hours by then. Shots of a boondocks war in some arid mountain range across the ocean, with close-ups of dead mercenaries, male and female; a bunch of aid workers getting mauled by the starving in one of those dusty famines far away; a row of heads on poles – that was in the ex-Argentine, said the CorpSeCorps, though they didn’t say whose heads they were or how they’d got onto the poles. Several women going through a supermarket checkout, all in sunglasses. A dozen bodies sprawled on the floor after a raid on a God’s Gardeners safe house – that outfit was outlawed now – and one of them sure looked a lot like his old roomie, the incendiary Bernice. He said so, being a good boy, and got a pat on the back, but obviously they’d known that already because they weren’t interested. He felt bad about Bernice: she’d been a nut and a nuisance, but she hadn’t deserved to die like that.

A lineup of mug shots from a Sacramento prison. The driver’s licence photo from a suicide car-bomber. (But if the car had blown up, how had they come by the licence?) Three pantiless waitresses from a pleebland no-touching nookie bar – they threw that in for fun, and it did cause a waver on the neural monitor, unnatural if it hadn’t, and smiles and chuckles all round. A riot scene Jimmy recognized from a movie remake of Frankenstein. They always put in a few tricks like that to keep him on his toes.

Then more mug shots. Nope, said Jimmy. Nope, nope, nothing.

Then came what looked like a routine execution. No horseplay, no prisoners breaking free, no foul language: by this Jimmy knew before he saw her that it was a woman they were erasing. Then came the figure in the loose grey prison clothing shuffling along, hair tied back, wrists handcuffed, the female guard to either side, the blindfold. Shooting by spraygun, it was going to be. No need for a firing squad, one spraygun would have done, but they kept the old custom, five in a row, so no single executioner need lose sleep over whose virtual bullet had killed first.

Shooting was only for treason. Otherwise it was gas, or hanging, or the big brainfrizz.

A man’s voice, words coming from outside the shot: the Corpsmen had the sound turned down because they wanted Jimmy to concentrate on the visuals, but it must have been an order because now the guards were taking off the blindfold. Pan to close-up: the woman was looking right at him, right out of the frame: a blue-eyed look, direct, defiant, patient, wounded. But no tears. Then the sound came suddenly up. Goodbye. Remember Killer. I love you. Don’t let me down.

No question, it was his mother. Jimmy was shocked by how old she’d become: her skin was lined, her mouth withered. Was it the hard living she’d been doing on the run, or was it bad treatment? How long had she been in prison, in their grip? What had they been doing to her?

Wait, he wanted to yell, but that was that, pullback shot, eyes covered again, zap zap zap. Bad aim, red spurts, they almost took her head off. Long shot of her crumpling to the ground.

“Anything there, Jimmy?”

“Nope. Sorry. Nothing.” How could she have foreseen he’d be looking?

They must have picked up the heartbeat, the surge of energy. After a few neutral questions – “Want a coffee? Need a leak?” – one of them said, “So, who was this killer?”

“Killer,” Jimmy said. He began to laugh. “Killer was a skunk.” There, he’d done it. Another betrayal. He couldn’t help himself.

“Not a nice guy, eh? Some sort of biker?”

“No,” said Jimmy, laughing more. “You don’t get it. A skunk. A rakunk. An animal.” He put his head down on his two fists, weeping with laughter. Why did she have to drag Killer into it? So he’d know it was really her, that’s why. So he’d believe her. But what did she mean about letting her down?

“Sorry about that, son,” said the older of the two Corpsmen. “We just had to be sure.”

It didn’t occur to Jimmy to ask when the execution had taken place. Afterwards, he realized it might have been years ago. What if the whole thing was a fake? It could even have been digital, at least the shots, the spurts of blood, the falling down. Maybe his mother was still alive, maybe she was even still at large. If so, what had he given away?

The next few weeks were the worst he could remember. Too many things were coming back to him, too much of what he’d lost, or – sadder – had never had in the first place. All that wasted time, and he didn’t even know who’d wasted it.

He was angry most days. At first he sought out his various lovers, but he was moody with them, he failed to be entertaining, and worse, he’d lost interest in the sex. He stopped answering their e-messages – Is anything wrong, was it something I did, how can I help – and didn’t return their calls: explaining wasn’t worth it. In earlier days he would have made his mother’s death into a psychodrama, harvested some sympathy, but that wasn’t what he wanted now.

What did he want?

He went to the Compound singles bar; no joy there, he already knew most of those women, he didn’t need their neediness. He went back to Internet porn, found it had lost its bloom: it was repetitive, mechanical, devoid of its earlier allure. He searched the Web for the HottTotts site, hoping that something familiar would help him to feel less isolated, but it was defunct.

He was drinking alone now, at night, a bad sign. He shouldn’t be doing that, it only depressed him, but he had to dull the pain. The pain of what? The pain of the raw torn places, the damaged membranes where he’d whanged up against the Great Indifference of the Universe. One big shark’s mouth, the universe. Row after row of razor-sharp teeth.

He knew he was faltering, trying to keep his footing. Everything in his life was temporary, ungrounded. Language itself had lost its solidity; it had become thin, contingent, slippery, a viscid film on which he was sliding around like an eyeball on a plate. An eyeball that could still see, however. That was the trouble.

He remembered himself as carefree, earlier, in his youth. Carefree, thick-skinned, skipping light-footed over the surfaces, whistling in the dark, able to get through anything. Turning a blind eye. Now he found himself wincing away. The smallest setbacks were major – a lost sock, a jammed electric toothbrush. Even the sunrise was blinding. He was being rubbed all over with sandpaper. “Get a grip,” he told himself. “Get a handle on it. Put it behind you. Move forward. Make a new you.”

Such positive slogans. Such bland inspirational promotions vomit. What he really wanted was revenge. But against whom, and for what? Even if he had the energy for it, even if he could focus and aim, such a thing would be less than useless.

On the worst nights he’d call up Alex the parrot, long dead by then but still walking and talking on the Net, and watch him go through his paces. Handler: What colour is the round ball, Alex? The round ball? Alex, head on side, thinking: Blue. Handler: Good boy! Alex: Cork-nut, cork-nut! Handler: There you are! Then Alex would be given a cob of baby corn, which wasn’t what he’d asked for, he’d asked for an almond. Seeing this would bring tears to Jimmy’s eyes.

Then he’d stay up too late, and once in bed he’d stare at the ceiling, telling over his lists of obsolete words for the comfort that was in them. Dibble. Aphasia. Breast plough. Enigma. Gat. If Alex the parrot were his, they’d be friends, they’d be brothers. He’d teach him more words. Knell. Kern. Alack.

But there was no longer any comfort in the words. There was nothing in them. It no longer delighted Jimmy to possess these small collections of letters that other people had forgotten about. It was like having his own baby teeth in a box.

At the edge of sleep a procession would appear behind his eyes, moving out of the shadows to the left, crossing his field of vision. Young slender girls with small hands, ribbons in their hair, bearing garlands of many-coloured flowers. The field would be green, but it wasn’t a pastoral scene: these were girls in danger, in need of rescue. There was something – a threatening presence – behind the trees.

Or perhaps the danger was in him. Perhaps he was the danger, a fanged animal gazing out from the shadowy cave of the space inside his own skull.

Or it might be the girls themselves that were dangerous. There was always that possibility. They could be a bait, a trap. He knew they were much older than they appeared to be, and much more powerful as well. Unlike himself they had a ruthless wisdom.

The girls were calm, they were grave and ceremonious. They’d look at him, they’d look into him, they would recognize and accept him, accept his darknesses. Then they would smile.

Oh honey, I know you. I see you. I know what you want.