M. Harrison - LIGHT

'Yes. This is home,' he said.

Staring vaguely into a hologram up in one corner of the cubicle was a woman who looked just like him.

'This is Neena,' Tig Vesicle said. 'She's my wife.'

Ed looked down at her. A big grin came over his face.

'Hey,' he said. 'I'm pleased to see you, Neena. You got anything to eat?'

They had a cheap stove in every cubicle. The New Men ate a kind of noodle soup. (Sometimes there were objects in it that resembled ice cubes, only lukewarm and bluish.) Ed was in their warren four weeks. He slept on the mattress on the floor, like everyone else. In the day, when Tig Vesicle was out in the city-moving some AbH here, a little bumped-up speed there, trying to avoid the Cray sisters-Ed watched the holograms and ate the food that Neena cooked. Most of that time passed slowly. He was in withdrawal. It was painful: also, real things were very distant a lot of the time and the simple weirdness of being among New Men made that worse. He kept trying to remember who he really was. He could only remember the fictional Ed, an assembly of diamond-clear events that never happened. The afternoon of the third day he was there, Neena Vesicle knelt down next to him where he sat on the mattress.

'Is there any way I can help?' she: said.

Ed looked up at her.

'You know, I think there is.'

He reached up and put his hands either side of her ribs, and with a little sideways pressure tried to get her to kneel over him. It took her a moment to understand what he was suggesting. Then, awkward and serious, she tried to comply. 'I'm all arms and legs,' she said. She hardly smelled at all until he touched her. Then a kind of thick sweetness rolled out from her. Every time he touched her somewhere new, one of her legs would jerk, or she would catch her breath and exclaim at the same time, or shiver and half curl up. She looked down at Ed's hands, raising the cotton dress to her waist.

'Oh,' she said. 'Look at you.' She laughed. 'I mean me.'

Her ribs articulated in a way he couldn't quite understand.

Later she said, 'Is that all right? We go the wrong way for you. A bit the wrong way.' She hissed. She wiped one hand upwards, over her face, across her skull. Is that all right?'

Tank withdrawal was in the bone. It was cellular, organic. But it was also a kind of separation anxiety. It was the sustained scream of wanting to be back in a lost world you had loved. Nothing was a cure, but sex helped. Twinks on withdrawal were desperate for sex. It was like morphine to them.

'That's good,' Ed said. 'Ah, yes. That's fine.'

The four weeks he was in the warren, everyone imitated him. Had they ever been so close to a human being before? What exactly did that mean to them? They came to the cubicle doorway and looked in at him with a kind of sombre passivity. A topical gesture of his, a manner of speaking, would go round the whole place in an hour. The kids ran from room to room imitating him. Neena Vesicle imitated him even when he was fucking her.

'Open up a little more,' she would suggest, or, 'Now me in you,' then laugh. 'I mean, you in me. Oh God. Oh fuck. Fuck. '

She was perfect for him because she was stranger and even harder to understand than he was. After they finished she lay there awkwardly in his arms, said, 'Oh no, it's nice, it's quite comfortable.' She said: 'Who are you, Ed Chianese?' There was more than one way to answer that, but she had her preferences. If he said, 'I'm just some twink,' she actually looked angry. After a few days he felt himself returning from the tank. He was a long way away, and then he was closer and it was the voices of withdrawal which had retreated right to the edge. He began to remember things about the real Ed Chianese.

'I've got debts,' he explained. 'I probably owe everyone in the universe.' He stared down at her. She stared back for a moment, then looked away suddenly, as if she hadn't meant to. 'Shh, shh,' he said absently. Then: 'I guess they all want to collect off me or fuck me over. What happened in the tank farm was over who got first fuck.'

Neena put her hand over his.

'That's not who you are,' she said.

After a minute he said: 'I remember being a kid.'

'What was that like?'

'I don't know. My mother died, my sister went away. All I wanted to do was ride the rocket ships.'

Neena smiled.

'Small boys want that,' she said.

Kearney and Anna stayed in New York for a week. Then Kearney saw the Shrander again. It was at Cathedral Parkway Station on 110th Street, during some kind of stalled time or hiatus, some empty part of the day. The platforms lay deserted, though you sensed that recently they had been full; the heavily riveted central girders marched off into the echoing dark in either direction. Kearney thought he heard something like the fluttering of a bird among them. When he looked up, there hung the Shrander, or anyway its head.

'Try and imagine,' he had once said to Anna, 'something like a horse's skull. Not a horse's head ,'he had cautioned her, 'but its skull.' The skull of a horse looks nothing like the head at all, but like an enormous curved shears, or a bone beak whose two halves meet only at the tip. 'Imagine,' he had told her, 'a wicked, intelligent, purposeless-looking thing which apparently cannot speak. A few ribbons or strips of flesh dangle and flutter from it. Even the shadow of that is more than you can bear to see.' It was more than he could bear to see, alone on the platform at Cathedral Parkway. He looked up for an instant, then broke and ran. No voice, but it had certainly told him something. Some time later he found himself stumbling about in Central Park. It was raining. Some time after that, he got back to the apartment. He was shivering, and he had thrown up over himself.

'What's the matter?' Anna asked. 'What on earth's the matter with you?'

'Pack,' he told her.

'At least change your clothes,' she said.

He changed his clothes; and she packed; and they rented a car from Avis; and Kearney drove as fast as he dared on to Henry Hudson Parkway and thence out of the city north. The traffic was aggressive, the expressways dark and dirty, knotted up into intersection after intersection like Kearney's nerves, and after less than an hour Anna had to take over because though Kearney wouldn't stop, he couldn't see any more through his headache or the glare of oncoming lights. Even the inside of the car seemed full of night and weather. The radio stations out there weren't identifying themselves, just secreting gangsta rap like a new form of life. 'Where are we?' Kearney and Anna called to one another over the music. 'Go left! Go left ''I'm stopping.' 'No, no, carry on!' They were like sailors in a fog. Kearney stared helplessly out of the windscreen, then scrambled over into the back seat and fell asleep suddenly.

Hours later he woke in a pulloff on Interstate 93. He had heard a Gothic, animal, keening noise. It was Anna, kneeling in the front passenger seat, facing away from the windscreen and tearing pages randomly out of the AAA mapbook they had got with the car. As she crumpled each one up and threw it into the footwell, she whispered to herself, 'I don't know where I am, I don't know where I am.' There was such a sense of rage and misery filling the cheap blue Pontiac-because Anna had been lost all her life and was never going to find herself now-that he fell back to sleep. The last thing he saw was an Interstate sign four hundred yards ahead, shifting and luminous in the lights of passing trucks. Then it was daylight, and they were in Massachusetts.

Anna found them a motel room at Mann Hill Beach, not far south of Boston. She seemed to have got over the night's depressions. She stood in the parking lot in the pale sunshine, blinking at the dazzle on the sea and shaking the room keys in Kearney's face until he yawned and stirred himself from the back of the car.