Jeff Noon - Pixel Juice

Towards the other side…

Always, traversing this bridge in happier times, I had sensed the meaning of those words, and welcomed it. Now I was dreading the passage. Again I pressed the cop woman for details. 'At least tell me when he escaped,' I asked.

'Is the time important?' Kinsey replied. 'Did you feel something?'

I nodded.

Then she told me the time of his escape, and of course it was 6.35, right when I was greasing the hair, and the feel had sizzled me.

It's strange, but you always know when the darkness is feeling lonely. I might be down in London on business for instance, no matter, I can feel it. In boardrooms and offices, on trains or in taxis, wherever I am; when Dugg wants to fuck, somehow it gets through to me. It's not like I get a sudden erection or anything crude like that, because that's impossible without Dugg being there; more a feeling of being needed, deep down, like I said, in the skull. The shiver, the tingle, whatever.

'But how?' I asked. 'I mean, it's not possible, is it?'

Kinsey turned away as the car swung into the dockyard, where a frazzled guard checked our IDs. On the wall beside him someone had sprayed the words gnomes go home. Around the gateway a bunch of applicants were waiting, desolate and soaked through. The prison must've called off all hand-overs, because this sorry crowd was shouting at the guards to let them inside.

No deal.

But we went through easy, and as the car pulled to a halt, already I was feeling the guilt come over me; if only I'd let Dugg out. If only. He was allowed out five days a year and I'd only used up four of them. He was due another, and with the year coming to a halt, he must've been terribly desperate.

But escape? How could he do that? He'd been well behaved on all previous leave-days, following the rules, well except for the last one, but that was a blip perversion, nothing serious. A few more months, he was due out for good, and I know how much he's been looking forward to his freedom. Believe me, I know.

What could have made him so crazy?

In 1999 I was classified as a Class E sexual pervert, which is the weakest kind, no trouble if properly controlled. Well there you go, because one day I let the thing inside get out of hand. It wasn't a serious incident, and nobody got hurt, at least no-one except myself, and that's what I'd paid for anyway. But the act got reported by some professional voyeur, and the next thing I was dragged before a judge, who ordered the pain inside me removed.

Digital castration. Either that, or go to prison myself, which I doubt I would've survived. Not with my desires.

It was a four-year separation.

You think, straight after the operation, that you'll never get over the loneliness, because the shadow of your desire haunts you like a ghost-itch. Then, slowly, you come to terms with it, actually start to enjoy the freedom, in a way. Life turns easier, without the other person raising their snake inside you.

Stuff like that, because you start to see your lost sexuality as a separate being eventually; another, darker reason to live.

And then, sometimes, usually when the night is darkest, you get the tingle again. Being a Class E, I got the five days of freedom, and that's a way to scratch the need. But you have to ration it carefully, make sure it's a good need, not just a whisper. And of course you have to control it, once it's out, just use it for the normal stuff, the boring stuff, which they say is better than nothing. Yeah, sure it is.

But you live with it, you know. You live with it. And Dugg was good, I really thought he'd been changed by the life in exile.

Made clean.

But now…

Maybe it's true, what they say about prison just making you worse.

We sailed out to the Monastery aboard a rickety launch, and I was drenched to the hollow, still in my party clothes. On previous visits the ship had seemed a quite civilized place, more like a laboratory than a prison, with the guards wearing nice suits, and perfumed breath, with a gentle calming music being constantly played. All that had now been stripped away, like a flimsy skin. I was led down a long corridor past the old cell doors. From behind which came a fearsome noise, as of so many trapped animals. What I had taken earlier to be emergency sirens was mostly this caged and hungry growling.

What does the human sex look like, the nastier kind anyway, once released from the body's containment? Artists' impressions, based on 'genuine eyewitness reports', showed either a lump of misshapen flesh, as though ripped from the guts, or else a paler, more spectral version of the original sinner, a sort of waking dream or ghost figure.

One famous photograph showed a hideous, malformed monster, small and hunched, with a fixed evil grin. The image was dark and badly processed, the kind of thing you can find a thousand shapes within, whatever your mind desires to see, fitfully. From this photograph came the popular name for the sexual miscreants. The twisting of pheromones: Pheronomes.

I suppose there was a gnome-like figure vaguely squatting there, but for myself I have always seen the interior as the fleeting, following shadow. The authorities, for their part, maintain that the sexual knowledge is merely that: knowledge. Pure information; a batch of digital biology imprisoned on a computer's hard disk. If this be so, then what strange creatures made the hideous noise coming from all the cells?

Kinsey and her partner more or less shoved me into the transfer room. There was another man in there, an older guy. I remembered his face from my day of separation. The prison governor. 'Well,' he began, 'this is a sorry way…'

Somewhere or other, I was wondering what this 'way' was, and where it was leading.

'… to celebrate the New Year.'

Right. I made an effort to keep myself glued together. There was a chair. I sat down. Put my hands on the table. To steady them. Asked for a cigarette. Got ignored. People talking over me. Around me. The table was wedged up against the wall. In front of me, set into the wall, the apparatus of transfer…

How many times had I sat at this same table, waiting patiently, excitedly, for Dugg to be transferred back into my body. Hardly thinking of it, my hands were now caressing the various switches and buttons that glinted there, almost willing the computer's screen to come to nascent life. To wake from this dream and find Dugg still living, in the lines of numbers and symbols that constituted his collected presence.

It was not to be. Usually, upon coming aboard I would feel his desire growing; the closer we were, the stronger the bond. But now the ship felt quite empty, devoid of that exquisite tension. My shadow had drifted.

Somebody was talking. The name Breakheart was mentioned, which stirred a dark memory, and then another voice: 'That poor, poor child…'

'A child…" I whispered, turning.

Now, for the first time it seemed, the three of them, the two cops and the governor, paid me serious attention. Kinsey laughed, and then did a strange thing, or not so strange: she hit me. It was a powerful blow with the flat of her hand, with enough force to shock me back to reality. The strangest thing of all, however; the terrible, laughable thought that went through my head: that in different circumstances, earlier in my life and with Dugg back inside me, nothing in the world would have thrilled me more than to be treated in such a way by a figure of authority. A cop, a female cop! Hitting me! From such practices have I made a sorry life, and paid for it.

'You like messing with children, eh?' Kinsey asked. 'You want to mess with me?'

'But… but Dugg… that is… I… I've never…'

Struggling for the feeling.

'I've never been like that!'

'You may calm down, Mr Carter,' said the governor. 'And you too, Detective Sergeant. Mr Carter is innocent. The prison, that is, myself, will accept full responsibility. There will be an inquiry.' The governor's eyes were filled with a shadow of his own making, one of imminent loss, as he turned to me.