redRobe

Chapter Twenty-Three Swimming Towards the Light

‘Budvar,’ Axl demanded, but only because he knew Leon couldn’t possibly provide bottled beer. Couldn’t provide a decent shave either, obviously enough, because Cocheforet didn’t run to generators and the Braun disposable Axl had stolen from Dr Jane’s surgery didn’t work on daylight, it needed a feed.

Which was tough, because Cocheforet didn’t run to that either. The better Axl felt inside himself the worse his temper got. Almost as if the constant headache had acted as a filter against the world in which he’d found himself.

No razor, no newsfeed and no new eyes, but worst of all no hope of finding any of them anywhere ... It was like stumbling back two centuries. Except it wasn’t. What it was really like was going below Third World.

Standing at the zinc, Axl stared slowly round at Leon’s filthy bar and the silent, three-man crowd of even filthier customers and wondered for the first time what he was doing, other than saving his own life. Mind you, he knew what they were doing. Waiting for him to leave the room.

As for Samsara itself… Well, the best you could say was that it was economically self-sufficient. Not importing food or technology from Earth meant no commercial ties, and no commercial ties meant no metaNational leverage. Economic blockade might have replaced the gunboat kind nine times out of ten, but even the guys on Capitol Hill weren’t stupid enough to try that one on Tsongkhapa, not when there were no essentials that Samsara needed.

In the end Axl settled for some kind of fermented barley mess called chang that came out of a big copper pot, looked like molasses mixed with water and tasted of rained-out bonfires. It was what the three men sat silently in the corner were drinking too. Only they all used long wooden straws and drank straight from a smaller pot that a dark-haired Tibetan boy had carried over to their table. The boy didn’t seem to have a name. Leon just called him you.

The behaviour of the other customers ran the full gamut from A to B and back again. From staring into the chang to glaring at Axl with undisguised suspicion as he tossed three years of therapy and two twelve-point plans straight down his gullet in choking gulps of thin, yeast-sour ditch water. It was five years since he’d last touched alcohol and, given what the chang tasted like, not a day of it had been wasted.

He was really getting on their wick and the only problem was he had less than no idea why. If he had, he might have been able to work on it a bit more. Make push come to shove, because that’s what it had to do. Axl didn’t have time to blend it, become accepted, put up the usual smokescreen.

Outside in the street a door slammed loudly and everyone in the bar tried not to look at each other, but that was okay because Axl was busy looking at all of them. No one looked back.

‘Rotten night,’ said Axl, nodding towards the noise. There was no reply to that either, but Axl was starting to enjoy filling the sullen silences. His words were slurred far more than four small bowls of chang warranted, especially as one of those was still soaking into the earthen floor at his feet.

On the other side of the inn wall, wind was ripping needles from thin pines while hail thudded into the wet ground like endless shot. In all the newsfeeds he’d seen about Samsara none had mentioned that the weather was buggered. Mind you, he hadn’t seen many and those he had always concentrated on Vajrayana and life in that city.

Samsara was silly season stuff. Every time the Jihad in North Africa declared a brief peace or the Russian Tsar who was holed up at Yekaterinburg summoned Marshal Sukarov to play wargames instead of letting the marshal lead his troops from what could loosely be called the Sino-Russian war front, given it was fought by proxies and much of it was information-based anyway—every time Cy Sat ran out of hard news they sent some photogenic, freelance Ishie off to Samsara to record her impressions.

Mostly these were of the Vajrayana’s quaint, wonderful and why can’t we manage this on Earth variety. But maybe, Axl decided, that was because in reality the wheelworld was freezing, with fucked weather and villages full of traumatised basket cases with killer PTS. Somehow that side of the experiment didn’t make it to the screen.

He couldn’t imagine why.

‘Another beer,’ Axl demanded, banging down his wooden bowl so that what was left slopped across the table before dripping slowly onto the floor. Behind his bar, Leon scowled into his beard but told the boy to take Axl a fresh bowl anyway. The bowl was small, hand-lathed from oak and decorated with five poor-quality cracked turquoises. The boy carried it like it was the most precious thing he’d ever seen.

‘Your room’s ready,’ Leon said pointedly.

‘But I’m not,’ said Axl as he slammed the new bowl back onto the table, spilling some more. ‘I’m going for a walk…’

And you’re welcome to come after me, he told the three men in his head, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Fingers touched the brass hilt of his hunting knife where its bare blade was surgically taped to his side, handle down for ease of use.

Outside was bitter, which wasn’t a surprise: nor was the wind that drove along the valley into Axl’s face, though the night air was so cold it took him a few seconds to catch his breath, and longer still for his eye to adjust to the darkness. What would have surprised Axl, if he hadn’t just been sitting in the inn listening carefully to the noises outside, was the figure frozen animal-still between the stables and an open-ended shed beyond. If in doubt freeze, but not when you’re alone on open ground. Someone should have told the person that. Mind you, someone should have told him that all those years ago, not left him to find out for himself.

Axl didn’t hurry after the ghost figure. Mainly because hurrying wasn’t something he’d been taught. When he ran it was hard and fast, accelerating like an animal and preferably wired up on cooking sulphate. The rest of the time he walked slowly, head up and shoulders loose. As stances went, it didn’t say look at me, but it didn’t say walk through me either. It said, here’s a man going about his business, let’s leave it that way…

Axl could do hard eye without thinking about it and he could tap into psychotic on whim just by taking the filter off his memories, but like his old sergeant used to stress, the main sign of success was not needing to. Getting left alone was a primary skill, one Axl had long since picked up on the street, and beside it all that other shit about slowing down heartbeat, dropping brain rhythms from beta to alpha and hitting a neurological low of ten cycles per second was just that, so much shit.

You couldn’t turn on a teen newsfeed without seeing some bug-eyed drone making a living recycling memes from StreetSemantics 101, but what Axl knew he’d learned direct on the streets of Alphabet by watching who survived and who got razzed.

And he learned fast from his mistakes.

Axl laughed as he wiped rain out of his hollow eye socket. At least he had learned fast back then. Back at the start when the Cardinal did occasional pro bono out of a small basement office in a block at the back of St Patrick’s and Axl was the street kid stood in front of some fancy desk that once belonged to a guy called Frick, or so Axl got told while he was protesting that he didn’t do all that Hail Mary shit.

God was that enamel baby the Spic gangs glued to their Uzi's. He didn’t know what the Nation called their god, only that he wasn’t allowed in pictures so they wore his name on gold pinkie lings or etched into the barrels of those tiny matt-black H&Ks they wore clipped to their belts like Sony Walkwears. Axl didn’t buy into any of that shit, like he didn’t punk for protection.

Mind you, he didn’t need to. Axl had learnt to get out of the way of the kids he couldn’t go through and to do it so no one noticed. He didn’t need protection and he didn’t need God.

Atheist wasn’t a word Axl learnt until later. At the time he got pulled in, he had a vocabulary of maybe 150 words and he didn’t use ninety percent of those. But then he was ten and si, no and chinga tu madre covered most situations. Still, the tall priest promised Axl that he didn’t have to believe in God to take his money so finally the boy did what he was paid to do, follow a fat man out cruising in Central Park.

Besides it was cold and he was hungry. He’d thought the marshmallow heat of his first summer on the streets was bad enough. That was before he reached the winters.

Mostly the man cruised a large courtyard of old paving stones used by the skate gangs. The courtyard was sunk into the ground like a small mall with no ceiling. Around the mall’s edge were blank-eyed statues and at one end stood an empty fountain. In the middle of that fountain—her wings spread wide—stood the Angel of the Waters erected in 1842 to celebrate the arrival of clean water to New York. Not that Axl knew any of that. He just followed the fat man, keeping hidden as the man stopped and talked to skateboys who mostly laughed or kept walking like he wasn’t there.

On the third night, while a shivering Axl was edging round the spread-winged angel, his target vanished. And, scared that he was about to blow it, Axl raced into an underpass that headed back towards Central Park South in search of his target. Which was how Axl found himself frozen in the dark with a blade to his neck.

Not a big junkie knife like the skatez carried but a tiny silver thing that grew its own blade. Axl knew it was sharp because one gentle brush of the blade had beaded his throat with little pearls of blood.

‘You’re not hurt,’ said the fat man as Axl examined the smudges of blood on his own fingers. ‘But you will be if you don’t tell the truth ...'

Axl held his breath. Even at ten he didn’t wriggle, whimper or panic; just looked slowly left and right for his escape route.

‘There isn’t one,’ said the man, ‘is there?’

Axl slowly shook his head.

‘I suggest you remember that ...'

And while the boy stood watching the man, all thought locked out of his face, the fat man who smelled of cologne brushed one thumb along the knife to send the metal blade flowing back into its handle.

Hard fingers gripped a wrist weak from calcium deficiency. ‘Why?’ The man said fiercely, his face pushed so close that Axl could see he had lines round his eyes and a saggy mouth. ‘And how long have you been following me?’

Now was the time to run if he was going to, Axl knew that. The man might have his fancy knife but Axl still knew tricks the fat man would never know. Like how to twist free from a grip without getting your own wrist broken for a start. All it took was pivoting hard against your enemy’s thumb and forefinger.

Worked everytime, at least it had so far.

Only that wasn’t what he was going to do. There was all that cash to collect from the tall priest if he played this right and did what he was told.

‘Saw you come into the Park,’ said Axl, his accent rougher than ever. ‘Thought you might help me…’

‘Why would I do that?’

The boy shrugged. ‘Cos I’m hungry, me. Haven’t eaten for days.’ There was a new whine in his voice, a softness that, had it been real, would have seen him dead long since. Kittens didn’t get cuddled in the Alphabets, they got stamped.

‘You know,’ said the man, his smile mocking, ‘you should force yourself.’

Axl’s rat-like face went ever more blank as he gazed up into the man’s watery eyes. He knew he was being mocked, he just didn’t know how.

‘You’ve got money,’ Axl said and before the fat man could deny it, he gently brushed a finger against the man’s open coat. It was soft and black, shimmering to itself. Silk was something else Axl didn’t know back then, not just smart silk, any silk at all. And if that man had told him little worms spun coats that machines unwound into sticky threads which were then dusted with colours smaller than the eye could see Axl wouldn’t have known what he was talking about anyway, or believed him if he had.

Just as Axl didn’t really believe the fat man was taking him to get a Big Mac as he was nudged back towards the terrace and then down wide stone steps towards dark water.

They walked a path that sucked glue-like at their shoes, the black lake always on their right as the fat man kept promising Axl there was a McDonald's round each corner, but there wasn’t. What there was finally was a wooden house with boarded-up windows and a kicked-in door. Around it winter-stripped trees were strung with broken bulbs. The doorway stank of piss, and inside Axl could hear rats scurrying across broken glass.

They kept scurrying.

What happened where the rats lived wasn’t something Axl thought about. In fact, he thought about it so little that a month or two later he forgot it entirely for five years, only remembering at fifteen, coming to in a jungle camp outside Baranquilla and vomiting up memories with the dregs of his previous night’s vodka. And even now, whenever he thought about that wooden shack—which he didn’t—Axl’s primary driving emotion was gratitude. That he was still alive when it was finally over. Standing more miles away across the cold black vacuum of space than, he could readily imagine, Axl pulled up his collar and shivered.

Later on, when the fat man was gone and the rats had come out of their corner to crawl over Axl’s small white body and chew occasionally to see if it was edible or not, Axl had driven himself to his feet and stumbled out into Central Park, heading for the obsidian water.

Frigid as melt and black like night, the lake had closed over him and crept into the crevices of his body, washing them clean. And for a moment as the cold rushed into him, Axl was filled with ice but then his muscles closed out the lake and Axl found himself swimming slowly towards a dish moon lodged in the skeletal branches of a winter tree on the other side of the lake.

He wouldn’t make it—couldn’t, even—no matter how near it looked. And yet Axl kept swimming towards the light until he felt his body disappear. There were no edges to it at all, no skin, no sense of fingers ending or water beginning. Only an unbelievable cold that was calling to him.

Frost filled Axl’s soul and he believed… no, he knew that when he looked through the sodium haze that arced above Central Park he saw not the heat but the coldness of the sharp white stars beyond.

Dancing flashes of light they were, that blazed and then went out, one after another, like neurones shutting down.

Being brought back to life was the second worst thing that ever happened to Axl. Though no one told Axl that resurrection was what they did and Father Declan Begley did a televised meeting with the NYPD specifically to deny it.

A small Latino officer from the NYPD took Axl’s statement at the hospital, recording everything on vid and in her notebook. There was also a little vidSat set to permanent hover near the ceiling of Axl’s room at Mount Olive but no one told him who owned that, though Axl figured it had to be the priest, because he glanced in that direction more than once as he sat beside Axl’s bed and held the boy’s hand.

It didn’t take long for Axl to work out the code. No squeeze meant it was okay to answer, while fingers tightening on his wrist meant don’t remember—and that was fine, most of the time Axl didn’t.

No one got charged with any crime. The sergeant, a good Catholic from Queens, lost her notebook and somehow managed to park her Sony vid next to a magnet by accident. BodyCount on NY access led next morning with a Glasgow couple molywired outside MOMA, three Hispanics mangled by a renegade garbage crusher and a chef on Mott Street who went postie and slaughtered five First Virtual databrokers on a night out.

None of those made Sunday’s download of the New York Times and no site even mentioned a street kid pulled out of the lake in Central Park, probably because such occurrences were just too common.

Three days later, the second lead on CySat’s New York Tonite was the tragic heart attack of Cardinal Bambinetti. A day after that the local godslot led with a pithy but pious soundbite from his successor, a sleek-suited Vampyre in Armani glasses.

The girl ahead of him was good, Axl gave her that. She moved like a cat, though had there been katGirls on Samsara Axl felt sure he’d have heard about it.

All the same, this one was a natural, blending into the drizzle as she skimmed a darkened house trying the door and pushing against windows, all the while carefully avoiding spades, hoes and other rubbish left out to rot.

Whatever the kid wanted wasn’t falling into place. The door was locked and all the windows bolted. Having checked the place, she went round it again to make doubly sure. Professionalism or desperation? Axl wasn’t sure until the wind brought him his answer in a long low litany of swearing.

‘Fuck.

‘Fuck.

‘Fuck.’

Her words weren’t harsh or even that angry, more resigned like bolted windows was all she expected to find in Cocheforet. And then a door clanged in the distance and simultaneously they both froze. When Axl looked again the girl was pressed flat to a wall, well hidden in the shadows.

‘Thought you might want this,’ said a woman’s voice from behind Axl.

Ketzia had a cloak of sorts folded across her forearms. It was badly-made from greased wool and stank worse than a wet ram.

‘Thanks,’ said Axl.

‘No problem.’ The woman stared off into the darkness, head cocked to one side as if listening to the rain. ‘Figured you’d be cold. Not like Colombia, Samsara isn’t. . .’

Not like… Colombia?

Ketzia nodded, something close to doubt in her eyes. ‘Colombia, San Salvador, Whatever. . . It’s good what you speak, but it’s not real Spanish. Not like I speak. I knew you weren’t really one of us the first time you opened your mouth.’ She lent forward and touched the scars on his face. ‘But these are real. And Joan had followers elsewhere…’

‘You tell your husband?’ Axl wasn’t sure what relevance that had to anything but asked it anyway.

‘Did I tell… ?’ She looked into his face as her fingers caressed the edge of the empty pit where his other eye should be. Slowly Ketzia shook her head. ‘What would he know?’ She said dryly. ‘Leon still thinks he can go home someday.’

‘And you don’t?’

‘I don’t know who lives in my house now but it isn’t me. Besides I’m getting to like Samsara strange as that might seem. The valley’s safe. We don’t need guns or armies ... Or killers,’ her glance was suddenly fierce and she rocked on the balls of her feet, as if ready to go.

‘You were a reformista too?’

It was the wrong question. But what stopped Ketzia from swinging on her heels and leaving was a noise nearby, soft as the passing of a cat.

‘Maybe,’ she said loudly. ‘What’s it to you?’

‘Nothing.’ Axl smiled, really smiled. He could do friendly when necessary and sometimes even when it wasn’t. Without making it obvious, he took a step sideways to stare over Ketzia’s shoulder into the darkness behind.

‘Well then,’ said the woman as she lent in to lift the cloak out of his hands and drape it round him, so that her fingers rested lightly on his shoulders. ‘You should learn not to ask those questions in Cocheforet’. And then she stepped in closer still.

That was the last talking either of them did for a while. The woman’s mouth tasted of buttered tea, inevitable really. Her lips opening hungrily as her hands locked behind Axl’s head, pulling him to her.

Axl wrapped the edges of his borrowed cloak around Ketzia, swallowing them both inside its warmth. She had her eyes shut. Habit maybe, Axl decided: somehow he doubted if it was real passion. And then he realised that the woman probably couldn’t stand to stare too closely into his battered face. But all the same, Ketzia’s tongue snaked against his and she bit at his bottom lip, suddenly pushing herself against him.

She was kissing all the while, softly now as if unaware that her hips were grinding hard against his. And then Axl bit into her neck and Ketzia shook free, pulling her face away from him. But it wasn’t to stop, only to set the rules.

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘No blood.’ Very slowly she began to undo buttons to reveal a silk ASui blouse beneath her top’s rough felt.

The blouse had been smart once, self cleaning, but whoever donated it to the ‘fugee clothes fund for Samsara had burnt out its power or done something stupid like wash it in water, because now the silk was stained with dirt and rotted beneath the arms. While the delicate skeins of optic that threaded through the lace were completely lifeless and unlit.

The fastenings worked, though, being minimalist and mother-of-pearl. Not allowed to bite her neck, Axl knelt in the mud and fastened his mouth beneath one full breast instead, biting softly on the underside where it joined her ribcage. And then, while Ketzia was still shivering, Axl’s mouth slid up to close on a dark nipple. The circle around it was puckered with cold and passion, and Axl swallowed the whole circle into his mouth until she was pulling him tight against her.

Her thighs were hard with muscle and her breasts were full, but her body was already losing its fight with gravity. She was, what? Thirty, thirty-five, maybe only late twenties? Axl had no way of knowing except ask. Maybe later… Resting his head against one breast and letting the other overflow his fingers, Axl shut his eye. He couldn’t remember the last woman he’d fucked who hadn’t been a street whore, but there were a lot of things in everybody’s lives they couldn’t be bothered to remember.

So instead Axl stood back up and concentrated on brushing his fingers softly around the puckered aureole of her left breast, never quite touching the taut nipple until her still-clothed hips were grinding into him hard enough to bruise. And then, with her arms locked tight around his neck and her mouth hungry against his, Axl dropped both his hands to her bare breasts and gripped hard, squeezing the swollen flesh.

Ketzia moaned. There was no sublety after that as Axl slid his hands to her hips and yanked up her skirt. She stank of salt and blood, like an animal in rut, but then so did Axl when her fingers finally freed him.

He let her tug roughly at him, dropping his own hand between her open legs, smoothing his fingers down her soft abdomen until he reached damp body hair that was fine like silk.

Axl groaned. The tiny hood of her clitoris peeled back as he dragged his index finger up the sodden line of her vulva, trapping the swollen outer lips between his other fingers.

Then she was biting at Axl’s mouth again as he hooked one hand under her left thigh and scooped that leg off the ground, opening her wide. Ketzia was tight and slippery and swollen and Axl eased back out of her just to get the feeling of sliding in again between her thighs.

But before he could withdraw a second time, she’d hoisted up her other knee and locked both ankles behind his legs, moving down onto him as Axl supported her weight. Anyone who wanted to could have walked up behind him and taken off his head with a rusty length of molywire, but somehow Axl found it hard to care.

‘Deeper. . .’

Faint moan segued into words as her knees locked tighter and her hips swivelled frantically against him. Axl could smell the grease in her long hair, rank like an animal, and it just made him want to fuck her more. Sliding hands down Ketzia’s spine, Axl hooked his fingers into the base of her back, just above her broad buttocks and yanked.

It was enough.

She came against him, hips rocking, her mouth buried in the crook of his neck. A low stream of raw Valenciana was growled out into his ear. He didn’t know some of the words she was using but they still sounded obscene.

Later, after Axl had loosed his grip on her back and Ketzia had lowered her legs, he’d turned the still-panting woman around to position her against the outside wall of a house, waiting while she braced her hands against damp polycrete.

Then he pulled up the back of her skirt, positioned himself carefully and slid into her, his fingers gripping the side of her hips so her buttocks pulled apart enough to let Axl watch himself as he rode her.

She stank. And mixed in with the basic pheromones of sex and body fluid were darker traces of shit and sweat. But as the Cardinal had once told a teenage Axl before buying him his first whore, if there wasn’t shit and sweat, blood and semen at the end of it then you weren’t doing it right.

Ketzia groaned with each thrust, as his thighs slapped hard against her exposed arse and little shock waves ran up her back. And then Axl came, his fingers roughly gripping her waist as he ploughed deep inside her, spasming.

As he slumped over her back and wrapped his arms round her soft gut, Axl knew one thing only. That the figure he’d started out following was long since gone. Vanished cat-like into the night.