Ian Hocking - Flashback

She looked down again. Her unfocused eyes mirrored the glowing circuits of the cityscape. She remembered reaching around Jem’s waist to release the magazine from the gun that might have killed her—flicking the bullets into the sink thumb-stroke by thumb-stroke.

The taser seemed to appear and disappear in the winking navigation lamps. She put the barrel to her chest.

So. If she jumped, no true suicide could follow. Luck upon luck would conspire against her death because an event in 2023 must have an older Saskia as its cause. But the taser was still in her hand. Its charge would blow out the last dust of her mind, leaving her body to a woman whom Saskia knew only in reflections. Saskia’s memories would be erased and, with them, her being. The mountains of her life would flatten. Her love for Jem would zero out.

She squeezed the trigger.

‘You are not going to do this,’ said Jem, breathless in Saskia’s ear. The hands of the English woman passed around Saskia and gripped the gun. Saskia released the trigger and let her head rest against Jem’s cheek. The taser dropped over the gantry. It flashed like a tumbling coin, dinged the observation tower, and was gone. Saskia watched Jem’s hands slip away. She turned.

‘I told you not to come, Jem.’

The gantry was empty.

Jem was not here, or anywhere in Berlin. She was in England, of course, and had been since the day after the dinner.

Ego?

Nothing. It could not hear her this close to the pinnacle. There was too much interference.

Saskia stared at the gantry. Her hair blew across her face. She pushed it away and slipped her stump into her back pocket. Then she stepped through the tower door, alone with her visions.

Some days later

When Saskia and the clerk reached the basement, he passed her paperwork to a colleague. ‘Please remember, Frau Müller,’ he continued, ‘that the box requires two keys to unlock it. I have the master key and you have the box key. Yours has no duplicate.’ He pushed through a set of doors. ‘If you lose it, you will be charged for the services of a locksmith to replace the lock. Your rental agreement covers an initial ten-year period. Should you fail to pay rent after this period, the contents of the box will be given to the government. There can be no exceptions.’

The clerk waited for a uniformed guard to open the door of the outer vault. The clerk was clearly nervous. Perhaps something about Saskia disturbed him.

‘Frau Müller,’ he said, adopting a more friendly tone, ‘would you like me to get you a glass of water? You seem rather…’

She shook her head.

The clerk stared at her for a moment longer.

‘Finally, then, please remember that you are not permitted to store illegal or dangerous material in the box.’

He left her in a room with a low ceiling and a single table. On the table was a safe deposit box. Saskia lay her rucksack alongside it and withdrew a polypropylene biohazard container. She put this in the box. Then she took a cinerary urn and placed it next to the container. On the urn was a letter: ‘For J’.

She eased the daffodil from her buttonhole and laid it on top.

This city, late in the day, felt foreign for the first time. Above her, the clouds were feathers around the setting sun. The buildings made labyrinths. Airborne data were threads that she might have gathered on another idle evening, but not this one. The wind’s edge dried her lips. Snow fell, as ever. Her steps were certain. A hatted green man appeared. Saskia crossed the road. Headlights greyed the tails of her jacket. On a fleeting thought, she looked at a driver, ready to run, but he was nobody.

She arrived at Tempelhoff airport half an hour later.

Saskia did not wish to remove her lensless glasses or touch the stiff peak of her cap, though she was sweating, steaming, tickled by her itch for Jem. The arrivals board told her that Jem’s flight had been delayed. With a targeted thought, Saskia interrogated a server in Luton and waited for the answers to stack, byte by stolen byte, in a lattice before her mind’s eye. There had been a technical problem on board the flight. Take-off and landing slots had been reordered and the crew changed. She turned from the information and used the constant pain of her hunger to refocus on her physical self, to exorcise the empty virtual.

For a few hours, she dreamed across plastic seats.

A man called Beckmann crouches in a cemetery while rain scores the ground. He pats together a female shape from the mud. He does not gift his sculpture with a left hand. When the lying form is complete, he bestrides its shoulders and Saskia thinks, No, don’t piss on her. Instead, he slides a revolver from his jacket and points it dead centre of the muddy head. Saskia knows that the revolver has one bullet. He fires. Saskia gasps.

‘There you are,’ said Jem. She looked exasperated. Her hair was blue once more. Saskia noted this and approved. ‘What happened? I thought you would be looking out for me.’

Saskia made to rise but her muscles, which were tighter and tighter these days, delivered a shocking pain up and down her body. She winced as though kicked.

‘Saskia?’

‘It hurts,’ she whispered, crying.

‘Lean on me. What the hell is happening to you? Your breath is awful. When did you eat?’

Later, in the lakeside house on Scharmützelsee, Saskia looked at Jem and felt too old for the company of her youth. They looked at one another in the molten light of oil lamps; the electricity in the house was off and Saskia wasn’t sure how to fix it. The meal was difficult. Salmon and bread were the only foods in the house. Saskia did not eat. Throughout the silence, she understood that the unspoken words concerned the loss of her beauty, the quiet staircase down which her mood had stepped, the putrefaction she could not clean from her pores, and her refusal to eat. Her eyes, too, were overcast.

At length, Jem said, ‘So Danny told me that they caught Wolfgang in the act.’

‘Wolfgang?’ said Saskia. The jump in context had confused her. ‘Yes, I heard. They found him organising an attack on an online casino. Petty blackmail, I suppose. Karel arrested him personally. It will help him get his career back on track.’

‘What about Cory?’

‘Cory? We met.’

‘Then?’

‘I showed him the reports.’ She took Jem’s hand and placed it, with a look of apology, between her legs. ‘Will you kiss me here? While there’s still time?’

‘What you need,’ said Jem, frowning, ‘is a doctor.’

Saskia put Jem’s hand back on the table. Her reply was bitter. ‘The medicines of 2003 are not good enough, nor the physicians.’

‘What do you mean?’ replied Jem. She tried to smile. ‘You’re indestructible, right? Like Captain Scarlet? Spectrum is Green, und so weiter .’

Saskia coughed. After a moment, during which she realised the odour of wet earth was just the blood in her nose, drying, she looked at Jem.

‘Do you know what would happen if I found myself onboard another plane, about to crash? I’d find a parachute and jump.’ Saskia took the bracelet from her pocket and placed it on the table. She repeated, ‘I’d find a parachute and jump .’

Jem stopped chewing. She looked at the bracelet as though it might explode.

‘Be careful with that.’

‘I thought you said I was indestructible.’

Jem threw down her fork. ‘Didn’t that woman, Jennifer, say that the mass measurements need to be precise? Otherwise it will go wrong? For all we know, the wormhole—or whatever it was—that brought down DFU323 might still be wobbling around somewhere around the centre of the Earth, hoovering shit up.’