M. Harrison: Empty Space

‘Are you there?’ she said encouragingly.

‘Yes,’ whispered the alien on the pallet. It thrashed about briefly, sending up a cloud of feathers. ‘I am. I am here.’

The assistant maintained an office on the fifth floor of the building at Uniment & Poe. She had staff, she had a budget, she had a ’52 mint-blue Cadillac roadster in the parking garage: no one knew how she achieved this kind of success. You saw the Cadillac outside the bar they called the Tango du Chat where she often spent an evening; two or three times a week she would leave it at the kerb on C-Street and enter Cedar Mountain, an upscale tank farm where they kept several personalised immersive art experiences on file for her, based on the life of a fictitious 20th century housewife called Joan. As Joan, the assistant cooked meals, used ‘cleaning products’ and serviced her man 1956-style, which generally meant he grunted a lot and came on her leg (despite its exoticism, she found this aspect of the experience profoundly calming). Today, though, she chose another Cedar Mountain favourite: the five-star Room 121 , based on a tableau of the same name by Sandra Shen, in which she could be a woman — unnamed but still perhaps 20th century — ‘alone’ in a hotel.

It was night. She was lounging in the tropical heat of a single room. She was at the window, a tall woman whose eyes were blue, whose age was hard to tell, whose clothes — a black two-piece with lightly padded shoulders, a striped grey and black blouse of some glazed material — scarcely hid an untidy sexuality. She never did much in the room. She drank rum; she stared out the window, thinking that wherever you are at night in the city you can always see, beyond the roof of the next building, the faint glow of floodlights. The radio played a musing version of a popular tune, `Rhapsody in Blue’. It was all as it should be. It was leading to the moment when her hands went impersonally into her underwear, when it would seem to the assistant that she was not so much having sex with herself as with the room, the song, the hotel: with every object in that instance of the liquid world.

This time, though, Room 121 went dark and dropped sideways. A million silver eels flickered past the windows. Whispers filled each dusty corner. She felt the tank world come apart around her, into dark and streaming pixels: next thing, she was hanging in the parking orbit above a rusty alien artefact the size of a brown dwarf. Things were such an effort. She was swimming with eels, down to the pocked and gouged surface. Somewhere in the fractal labyrinth beneath, a woman like herself lay on the allotropic carbon deck, a white paste oozing from the corner of her mouth. This woman was barely human. She was neither conscious nor unconscious, dead nor alive. There was something wrong with her cheekbones. She was waiting. She came from the past, she came from the future; she was about to speak.

The assistant thrashed about. Lost in space, trying to place herself equidistant from everything else in the universe, she heard her own faint cry in the dark and moved towards it. Yellowish oily liquid filled her mouth. Later she listened tiredly while the twink-tank patched her up. In her anxiety, it told her, she had choked on the tank fluid or ‘proteome’. She had ripped out the main cable. She was losing cerebro-spinal fluid and later today she might experience a little light bleeding from neurotypical energy sites; it wasn’t so bad.

‘Something happened in there,’ she said.

‘Once immersed,’ the tank reminded her, in the voice of a real mother, ‘you should never move or try to shout.’

‘I don’t expect to feel like that.’

Over on the other side of town, Epstein and his soldiers were still trying to bring Toni Reno back to earth. Toni’s reaction seemed coy, especially for a dead man. Every time one of them touched him he bounced gently away, making curious swimmy elastic movements in the air, curving his back in a clean arc, circling some invisible central point as the uniforms jumped and waved their arms twelve feet below him. It was puzzling. It was even elegant. The rain had stopped. Morning traffic clogged Tupolev; downtown was solid.

Left to herself, Anna Waterman tended to medicate with reasonably-priced red wine, a bottle of which, taken before bed, only made things worse next day, when — full of guilts like a ball of living eels she couldn’t disentangle without each one slipping away quietly into the dark — she would ring the consulting rooms to see if Dr Alpert had a cancellation. This she did at half past eight one morning a week or two after missing her last appointment.

Her first husband had spent much of the previous night running away from her, until she cornered him in King’s Cross at a cheap hotel. In the dream Michael hadn’t looked much like himself. Neither of them had looked much like themselves, in fact. But Anna had felt exactly as she felt then, when she was young and he was still alive: exhausted and angry. ‘You’re always afraid!’ she tried to convince him. ‘You’re always hiding from me!’ Once in the hotel room together they fucked again and again in a blind panic, as if both of them were trying to avoid thinking about something else. After that, events moved themselves on with the usual kind of dreary predictability. Her husband became agitated and ran away again while she was asleep, leaving a note in which he talked of his ‘great discovery’. In the final lobe of the dream, Anna found herself lying alone on a cold, black, reflective surface — this time she described it to Dr Alpert as resembling a hotel bathroom floor — in an echoing space the nature of which she couldn’t describe at all. It was very tall; it was ‘dark and light at the same time’. She had a sense of dread. She couldn’t see much; she could see everything, but she didn’t know what any of it was. She felt as if she was changing into something.

‘And is that what you remember most clearly from the dream?’

‘Oh no. I remember the frock I was wearing. Is that absurd?’

‘Not entirely,’ said Dr Alpert, although she thought it was.

‘It was beautiful.’ Anna frowned intently for a moment, as though, if she focused, she could have the frock in front of her. ‘Givenchy, from the early 1960s. The most marvellous grey, in some shiny fabric like satin. I can’t say more than that.’ She blinked at Dr Alpert. ‘Did Givenchy ever make anything like that? Does that sound like him?’

‘Just to pick up on an earlier point,’ the doctor said, ‘I wonder what you mean when you say that your guilt is “like a ball of eels”?’

‘You see, I’m not really talking about guilt. Not at the moment.’

‘Perhaps not.’

Recognising this as a difference of opinion, the two women stared at one another thoughtfully. For now there didn’t seem to be a way around it. Anna fiddled with the clasp of her bag. After a minute or two she offered:

‘I’m afraid I forgot to bring the test results you asked for.’

Helen Alpert smiled.

‘Please don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Your daughter had the hospital copy them to me. She was worried you might lose them on the train.’

And she slid the documents, three or four sheets of printout in a plastic sleeve, across her desk. Anna, whose history of lost documents was extensive, pushed them back without looking at them.

‘It was wrong of Marnie to do this,’ she said. ‘It was controlling.’ Then, feeling she had been disloyal, tried to explain: ‘I don’t want tests. I don’t want to know these things about myself. I want just to live my life until it’s over. Marnie is the wrong generation to understand that.’

‘Neurologically, Anna, you’re very sound. You should be relieved. There are signs of a couple of tiny strokes. Otherwise you’re fine.’