was stated aloud.
‘Why did he do it?’
‘Well, the term “altruism” springs to mind. You familiar with it? European folk tales are full of this sort of thing, where someone will do something for no visible reason.’
Apparently I wasn’t supposed to know the answer, so when I supplied it I was surprised by the outbreak of evasive fronting-off it provoked. I was still evaluating normalcy here and seeking a baseline in case I decided to comply.
I was worried the Jade had slowed my reflexes, so I popped the pin off a pocket time cap, putting a three-second gain on my existence - I was three seconds into their future. If necessary I would fake a response delay.
‘What’s in the cooking pot?’
‘Know them for what they are: beans. You want?’
‘No, thanks.’ If he’d handed me the ladle it would have gone out of time-phase and given the game away.
‘True. Our short acquaintance ought not to be themed around beans. Never trouble anyone else with what you can hate fully yourself, eh?’
I was starting to think he had a point when a movement at the Gate drew my eye. The Gate slowly opened a crack, allowing through a couple of ragged figures in a puff of dust. A door of those proportions should be approached with a frown of survival. But the kid possessed the sort of face that looked as if it had just that instant run out of ideas. He stood there with no method or disguise, his shapeless kecks flapping up a storm. Next to him an old man with a sharkskin face was wearing a jellycoat flushing from cyan to orange to purple.
I didn’t remark on them, and they were almost out of the plaza when Jose noticed them with a start. Without even standing he pulled a stained-glass grenade from somewhere and pulled the pin, throwing it over-arm at the retreating figures. The air around them scrambled and they blipped out of sight. It was a chronobomb.
Jose explained the situation to the others while betraying no anxiety. They responded likewise, and the three began unhurriedly to check and load their weapons, lumbering to their feet and stretching. They turned their attention to the Gate. The corroded doors were shut. For one who had been so ferociously open about his shortcomings and those of his gang, Alfonso was a confident guy.
Everyone had set to sharpening their spare keys since America went full-scarcity, and the philosopher Merk Duidelijkop had thought it would be alright to create an extensive measurement system of dismay, the Merk Scale, which escalated through 32 million increments. Over the next twenty minutes I watched the three Mexicans climb this scale until they were in a state of savage melancholy. They had sat back down, and were looking angrily at the closed Gate. Their time bomb was mis-firing, maybe. My little delay switch wasn’t strong enough to intersect. Depending on the wiring it could have been a simple expiation misfire. I’d have to ask Maddy later on.
‘This is getting a little creepy now, Alfonso. I like it.’
He seemed not to hear, smoking a shock absorber.
‘You should try nicotine patches.’
He looked at me with indignation. ‘Patches? We don’t need no stinkin’ patches!’
Their gruff malaise continued, with Alfonso throwing me increasingly suspicious looks.
‘Yes, I’ve done everything wrong, as usual,’ I said, playing with the smashed blacktop as if I were on a beach. ‘Yep, that’s the desiccated tarantula in the coconut. Wisdom is something grown, not arranged, buckaroo.’
‘Don’t call me buckaroo, Senor Atom. It would be a simple matter to let a bullet escape in your direction.’
‘Oh I suppose mine is the sort of tap-water truth that’s taken for granted. The pattern of our shifting cowardices has a meaning. I’d like to build you an amazing scale model. And now I begin.’
This unbridled indifference seemed to annoy them. Alfonso gestured at Junco. ‘The Thistle here, his personality basically consists of compressed air. He believes that every talent must unfold itself ultimately in bloody violence. Like this.’ And he snapped his fist at the air, knocking a fly briefly off-course.
At the same moment, Junco thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea to fire the Kingmaker at me. I stepped aside. Junco looked blankly confused. Aiming at my past, he had seen the bullet go through me.
‘Whatever you think you know about being Mexican comes from me,’ I announced. I don’t know why I said it - I blame the drugs - but I was still laughing when Jose sapped me over the head. When I hit the ground my face was positioned to complete the sentence ‘Belting the old noggin eh?’ so it hit the dirt chin-first, digging in like a trowel. They had a lot of trouble moving me, apparently.
4 FIFTY-FIFTY CLOWN
I was dreaming about a grand cathedral of sea cucumbers belching sediment through the windows. I missed my wife.
I awoke leaking into a strange room. I was strapped to an old self-surgery seat. My shirt had already died. The stainless steel throne stood in a garage littered with car batteries, syringes, crumbs of glass and scattered gaskets. There was a pile of tyre-rims like cybernetic haloes.
It sounds more fun than it was. The moment fell into me like painful rain. The Jade and time cap had worn off. I was blood-sick, time-sick. I rolled my head a little - my neck felt granular. It seemed my throat had been doing some wholesale rasping. Three fingers were missing from my left hand, leaving the thumb and index. They weren’t too bright - they’d left me both trigger fingers.
Wearing his hair back to front, Jose stood at the lowered garage door in some sort of apron. And there was Alfonso, sitting sadly on a pile of galvanised steel tubes and looking as if he might cry all over his Astra jacket. They seemed in worse shape than me, as ragged as if they had been keeping up a show of goodwill. Maybe I’d already been annoying them - but I didn’t remember. I supposed I’d been running interference and then wiped that part of my brain before re-emerging. I had no option but to start from the beginning.
‘The sun has risen, senor,’ Alfonso said, perking up a little. ‘The brotherhood have the streets.’
Jose approached me with a cordless hammer drill. ‘Coffin bugs know the geometry of disappearance, Senor Atom. They will explain it to you soon.’
He proceeded to demonstrate what he called ‘the sawmill essentials’ of persuasion with various expert shoves, workshop horrors and other morale-blasting monkeyshines. It was like a sort of electric birthday, and seemed designed to provoke me into a reckless and unguarded outburst. I didn’t think of many remarks, except the unvoiced one that they didn’t go nearly far enough. As it was I seemed to horrify them every time I opened my mouth - even when I asked explicitly after the relevant protocol.
But they were enlivened. The project interested them so much that they frequently stared at me to see if I was starting to like it too. Jose referred to his knife as ‘the key to your throat’. I realised these people would quickly exhaust me with their enthusiasm.
‘Your friend waiting to welcome your guests at the Stina?’
They looked annoyed, which meant the kid and the old man hadn’t re-entered the city yet. Alfonso stood and began punching me almost as if it mattered to him personally. I was surprised - baffled, really - at this
