Steve Tem - Ubo

THE INSECT VOICES at the back of his brain might have taken him anywhere. Often there was a time just before the dream was over and a new scenario began that he thought they may have taken him to some prehistoric place and left him there, some lost landscape of hard shell and claw and bodies torn and leaking. They’d sent him to where they wanted him, to where he needed to be. They’d left him with barbed, narrow legs in his thoughts, hard exoskeletons at the periphery of his vision.

Daniel came to again while staring up at the sky. The smell here was worse than Ubo, worse than anywhere he’d ever been. He could see blackened, crumbling brick buildings in his peripheral vision, moist and dripping, a thick red sky. And all he could smell was that stench of raw sewage. He wanted to look down and make sure he wasn’t standing in it, but the character he had entered was singularly focused on that sky and wouldn’t allow it.

Daniel was surrounded by a wall of noise, beating against him from all sides, and yet his character had somehow turned it off, refusing to hear it. It was as if his new persona had eaten him.

A black plume of smoke thrust itself across the red sky, stalled, then began to dissipate into air already heavy with particles. This left some patches of sky looking oilier than others; he could see the small green and purple and blue rainbows that oil makes in a puddle.

Then the head snapped down and around and the sound came rushing back in: an incredible clatter, layer upon layer of thousands of rattling carts and buggies pouring down the kennetseeno streets, metal shod wheels on cobblestone, and their vibrating shells all sounding as if they were shaking themselves to pieces, punctuated by the more pleasing rhythm of the horses’ iron-cladhooves. Then there were the sellers, the street criers, their shouted words overlapping until he had no idea what they were saying, except the periodic exclamation of “Buy! Buy! Buy!” And then lording over them all the melodic notes of the bell tower at Christ Church, pealing out the hour.

Christ Church? And all this smoke and sewage, buggy rattling. London in the Victorian era, certainly. Early industrial London, incredibly filthy city. He never would have believed the amount of pollution that could be generated by coal, tons and tons of it burning all the time, if he hadn’t been seeing it himself.

Spitalfields , his character thought, as if in answer. And the chapel. Whitechapel . And Daniel felt his own thoughts falling away into tatters as an old rage tore up out of the deep shadows and consumed him.

A ballad monger stood on the corner, his broad sheets tied around his hat, his head dropping back ( slice , slice !) as he began to bellow,

And all around him the folks was laughing and jostling, speaking of Jack the Ripper. Well, that weren’t his name, now was it? But he didn’t like the name his bastard of a pa give him, so Jack would do, all jolly the way they said it now, or all full of fear the way they said it at night. Happy Jack—though he’d never been happy as far as he membered—or Sad Jack or Rippin Jack it was all him. Never mind wot they said in the papers. He didn’t read them, just heard about them, and their lies, because he’d never writ any of them letters, or called hisself Jack. But Jack, Happy Jack would do.

Oh, he knew how to read and write well enough—one of his pa’s old customers was a proper gent, some kind of professor fell into drink and become a lushington. He stank of hair oil, his bloody whiskers all curled up in bacca-pipes. Before he died—a do down one night with a holy water sprinkler bashing his noggin—he taught Jack plenty, including things Happy Jack wouldn’t think about. But Jack never liked the way the read and the writ words felt in his head, all bumping around and hurtful like a tin cup full of stones. Each word like a new voice in his head, and him with too many in there already. The “mad multitudes,” to quote Milton, the way the professor always done.

But the words kept coming none the less, with all their temptations and colorful suggestions. There was that other bloke the professor was always quoting, now wasn’t there? Something Blake? “Sooner murder an infant in the cradle (a terrible thing!) than nurse unacted desire.”

Jack never set out to be no trassewno. He never wanted to hold a candle to the devil. He weren’t born evil, no matter wot the papers or the ballad criers said. Oh, he knew life. He’d done his share o’ area diving round the Chapel, some beak hunting (he dearly loved them chickens!), bug hunting, a bit of blag. But he weren’t a bludger at first. All that bloody business come after living too many years in Hell, hearing the church bells every day and thinking about wot they promised, and then getting none of it. The Chapel were a long ways from Heaven.

Then a film come over Jack’s lamps, like it done most days ahead of sunset, betwixt three and four. Soon enough you’d hardly see your hand in front of your face, even with the gas lamps on, with all the black bits in the air. But Jack got dark afore the rest. Jack got dark with the sun still blazin high. He could see all them other blokes walking about in the afternoon of their day when for him it was nigh midnight. Not like he favored the dark, or being alone and such. The dark left him with a sick feeling in his belly and salt on his tongue, with all the times he membered living there, no matter the time of day.

So he started moving, running in his big gallies into folk, knocking em down, not cause he was of a mind to hurt nobody but cause he wanted to run out of there, run out of London if he could. Folks shouted at him, cause they knew him, though they didn’t know him as Jack.

The ripper distracted, Daniel floated up through the swirl of madness, past the thoughts of bloody hole, filth and scum and a rotting taste going down as deep as the lungs , as if seeking a gulp of clean air. He’d never experienced such chaos in a character before, not even in a murdering thug like Jesse James or a monster like Caligula, both clearly reasoning people compared to this one.

He was playing a character and the character was part him and part what the roaches had been able to find out or recreate. But the experience of being inside a character was always different, and sometimes even varied widely over the span of a single visitation.

Sometimes, like this time with Jack the Ripper, you were swallowed completely, so there seemed no difference between Jack’s thoughts and your thoughts, and looking out Jack’s eyes was the same as looking out of your own, and you smelled the stench with Jack’s nose, and when Jack raged that was you raging as well.

These were the hardest characters to shake later, when you woke up back in the barracks. You’d feel the most guilt over what Jack had done, and you’d have flashbacks into the character at the most inopportune times, like when you were eating dinner, or thinking of the family you’d left behind, and you’d curl up into a ball on the floor, knowing that a hundred showers wouldn’t wash all that filth away.