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When my friends must interrupt me, they send Victor. No light, form or texture perturbs him. A man of even mouth and shapely, pristine fingernails. He says into the vicinity of my body’s hearing, “I am so sorry to trouble you, friend, but it seems Slee was taken by the Bureau.”
So then I am back in the body. It is like a massive coat slung over my shoulders. Inside, my spirit is composed of another substance, which rubs my skin’s inner lining and creates a perpetual static.
My Slee?
“It’s Victor,” he says. At this time I am aware, but at other times I would not be. I sometimes hear other voices with other hearings. “They took him off Sovereign Square. A hatmaker told Renira.”
In the dismal winter, as our Detective Wakefield collected his petty suspicions, my friends knew that our nascent explorations had to proceed delicately. And that, if it was necessary, they might be called to submit their parts to indignity for the sake of our whole. But I am like an eye and Slee is like another eye.
“The hatmaker said it was all in a rush. Only noticed because of the clang as they hauled him into the Black Maria. Like his head had caught, she said. He dropped a sheaf of papers in the process. But the rain must have ruined them, and Renira didn’t see anything.”
These days, I create speech like I create paintings. Sometimes frenzied, in a haze, unremembered moments after the tongue hits the teeth. At other times: lengthily, uncertainly, mechanically. It is one of the latter times.
Victor waits for me. He does not have the old useless habit of searching my face for any kind of expression.
I am sitting cross-legged on the end of my bed. It has become a blue evening all of a sudden, and in the city outside my open window, distant lights float. Soft rain spatters my pillow.
“Will you close the shutter?” I say to Victor, as my hands are still tingling. Victor picks over the chalked diagrams on my floor, props a knee on the edge of my bed to lean across me, and pulls the shutter in with a soft click. Victor performs many actions with soft clicks.
“Slee’s star-maps,” I say.
“Most likely,” Victor said. “He must have dropped them to keep them out of the Bureau’s hands.”
He was noble to leave them. The Bureau would have salivated over those papers. But it is horrible to think of them like that on the street, prone, dripping.
“What was he doing outside?” Of late, Slee rarely leaves his attic-observatory. I hear his footsteps on the floorboards in the middle of the night. Then I imagine him up there, although I could just as easily go up and see him with my body’s eyes. My friends find it harder to look at him now; I have only enjoyed looking at him more and more. He contorts his tall form under the eaves like a figure in a funhouse mirror, handles telescopes with a genital tenderness. He mutters syllables that are not yet words. He is always writing, on star-maps, or his forearms and thighs and feet, or his walls and floor. It is either nonsense or a traumatically incisive mathematics.
“His lens cutter is in Sovereign Square. Maybe he made some breakthrough.” Slee has sensitive eyes. Sensitive eyelids, pink in his translucent face.
They could be doing anything to those eyelids. We don’t know the Suppression Bureau’s methods. Slee would not respond well to torture, I expect. These days his reasoning is so advanced that he wouldn’t understand how to make it stop.
They might sit him down at a table, give him a glass of water and leave him alone to worry himself open. They might coddle him, feign concern. Do you want coffee? Sugar? No, he drinks it black. Do you need medical care? Have they done anything to you? Do you have a friend we could call—a different one? Idiots. They might humiliate him. Strip him, shower him, perform cavity searches, shine torches, shout, spit on him, grip, pulp.
Well. Victor waiting.
“We will have to go and visit him,” I say.
“If you like, friend,” Victor said. “I am at your leisure.” Of course, I think, we will kill them all.
I have riled myself up. Foolish of me. That isn’t our way. The Colonel would welcome it but I have even higher Hours to please.
“Let’s begin with a light touch,” I say. “I will dress. Tell the others, and have Enid meet me in the front hall.”
Victor smiles, because he knows no matter what touch we begin with it will end with the touch of his razor if it must.
My friends may not know that I can hear everything that goes on in the dust-colored rooms of our council house. I had no intention of keeping it from them. I became aware so slowly. After a certain point it would have been more awkward to tell them.
Thus I hear Enid whispering to herself in the empty front hall as she does up her boots. She is most talkative when alone. She replays her part in remembered or imagined conversations; she says her own name as if she might forget it. She never sounds sure she has it right.
And I hear my strategists, my many hands: Victor, Ysabet, Renira and Leo. In the daytime Leo shuffles around papers and rumors for the Press Secretary. The others have known even shiftier livelihoods. They plot: who can be intimidated? Who can be bribed? Who can be tricked?
I never suggested such tactics. These unpleasantries are necessary with the Suppression Bureau putting its fingers everywhere. I am lucky to have such resourceful friends.
And at night, I hear Slee’s limbs shifting together and apart in his sleep. A papery sound.
Onto my body, I put suspenders, a vest, a sports jacket with a patched elbow. I wear all gray now because it is one less thing to think through. Except for a cravat the color of mustard. And gloves, chamois, black.
I hear my friends in the front hall. Enid, now biting her nails so close that the vulnerable skin of her nail-beds tingles. Renira twisting her copper pendant, with the bird-skull on the end, among her slender fingers. Renira’s continental accent: “Our Friend will be reckless.”
I don’t know when they all started to pronounce our friend so pointedly when they talk about me. It makes me shiver. The emotion is not familiar, but adjacent to pleasure at least. I am not offended; I have been known to be reckless.
“That’s cruel of you.” Enid, dreamy.
“I’m only saying, darling, that you must be prepared to make a quick exit. One of your quick exits.”
She didn’t mean to, but she has invoked Enid’s last ill-fated excursion. The hole going all the way through her foot, an empty circle for a doorway, and the empty circle of her arms, in which she could not bring back Neville’s body. People assume a corpse will be light for some reason, as though most of a person’s weight was the soul. Enid is quiet.
Renira senses her mistake. She tries to make casual conversation but guesses wrong at it again. “Have you ever supposed that Slee and Our Friend…?”
“That’s cruel and nosy.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You thought it.”
You can’t hear my thoughts, Renira might once have said, but now she isn’t so sure. Enid is one of my stranger friends. Though we are all a little peculiar. It is not my doing. I only invited my friends to lay down the burden of normalcy. In this house we see each other for what we are.
“Maybe, a long time ago,” Enid says after a while. “Before we met them. When it was just the two of them, at the university.” Enid doesn’t take Renira’s pleasure in love-gossip, but the thought does make her vaguely happy. All her emotions are vague.
“Why not now?”
“Our Friend’s body…”
“Darling, you're so unimaginative. I don’t see any reason why that should hold them back.”
I listen idly. Their speculation doesn’t offend me. I share everything with my friends. My mortal privacies and shames have been superceded by the true secrets, infinitely more sensitive, which I learned in the Mansus.
If they asked to my face, I would tell them. Sometimes, in the dark, when Slee and I stepped out of some soiree or late-flown lecture, he would put up his umbrella to shelter me against those feathery rains of early morning hours. We would linger with our faces close. He would always say I’ll be off then—and pause—and I always felt an impulse. This impulse lived not in my mind but my body.
A muscle memory for which there was no memory. A muscle premonition.
It was an open secret that some in our circles had sybaritic tendencies. Even Victor, whom we knew then distantly, boarded at a parish school where members of the House of Lords sent their most musical sons. Once at a philosophy club, Slee and I both saw a drunk colleague press his hand around the back of another's neck and rub with too much fondness. The receiver shook him and shot an undecipherable look. The laugh that went around the room was hilarious and terrified. A reprimand and a pardon. Slee and I, on the loveseat, went still at the same moment. Our knees drifted a little further apart.
I have the privilege of knowing, now that I am what I am, that Slee would not have refused me.
But when I was what I was, I couldn’t have been sure. Cozy, stupid years. By now, the things Slee and I have shaped ourselves into don’t fit together. Cosmically, I mean, not in the sense Renira is getting at.
Sometimes I have the urge to ask him for his thoughts on the matter. Except Slee’s memory of those days is ragged, his understanding moreso.
My footsteps take the path that they always have, but somehow my friends are often surprised when I arrive in a room. Renira smiles, nervous, with her purple-red mouth. Enid hardly reacts.
“Good afternoon,” Renira says. “Are you ready?”
I give Renira la bise and smile at Enid. I say, “Shall we?"
Enid and I cross the dark city under the gray rain. I find it lovely that every city calls its secret hallways by a different name. Alleys, or laneways, chares, vennels, closes or shuts or cuttings or ginnels. Who knows what they really are? We travel by any of these. Enid puts up her prim black umbrella for us. We stand close together. We do not eat much anymore, so we must have the appearance of two charcoal tallies on the world.
The office is in a burgundy building with covered windows. Getting in is easy. Getting out will be more difficult if they choose to stop us. Renira has already prepared Enid for the possibility. Nevertheless, her silence is tenser than normal. She has brought the implements in a large snap-top purse under her coat, over her shoulder. A knife falters; it must be the hammer and nail.
Wakefield must know we are coming. There are things he could have done to prevent our entry if he were willing to find the right texts. But we arrive with all of our usual limbs and orifices. So we know he was not willing.
In the interrogation room, tucked into an afterthought basement wing, we find Slee. We reach it through the police station’s own secret hallways. On the other side of the viewing window, Slee sits alone with his forehead on the table. His bent neck shows the divots of his vertebrae. How I thank the Hours, when I see those vertebrae. This specific detail is what provokes me, as if I were worried the Bureau would take them. I press my hand to the door and Enid opens it for me.
Slee doesn’t look up. I feel my cheeks tensing with some emotion. Not a centre of expression, the cheeks, for most people, but recently other parts of my face have become more porous.
“Slee,” I say. He shivers. What have they done to him, said to him? All possibilities make me tremble.
I am moved to allow a hand to rest at the nape of his neck. I murmur his first name. Enid flinches, as if I told her gossip she wishes she hadn’t heard.
Slee turns his head. His filmy pink eyelids do not open. A smile drifts onto his face; he rests his head boyishly on his elbow. “It is you,” he says. Then, “Is it you?”
I would respond, but his face slackens in such a way that I figure he has gone unconscious. I feel the top mound of his spine with the side of my thumb.
At this time the young ruddy boy with the ring of keys, who stood obliviously out in the hallway, reappears, inconveniently, in the doorway. He jerks, waking from a dream. He has no baton holstered; his hand goes to his ring of keys.
I look at him.
He screams. Then he screams, “Detective Wakefield!”
“Not yet,” I say to Enid. Like the young ruddy boy, her hand has gone to her hip, to the purse where the hammer and nail sit heavy.
The ruddy boy staggers from the door, shouting, “Your man! Wakefield!”
I haul Slee out of the chair, with his arm slung over my shoulders. Even I, somehow, had Enid’s old misconception that a human body ought to be lighter than it is. Slee is alarmingly bony. I will feed him rice pudding and blackberries and icing-sugar, when he is back in his attic. His ribcage presses into mine and I could imagine the bones interlock like gears.
Slee murmurs my first name. Somehow I thought he didn’t know it. I haven’t gone by it in…
A gun clicks. Wakefield is holding it by his hip, not yet pointing. Enid's breath narrows.
“Nineveh,” says Wakefield.
In many years. Not since I started going by the name Wakefield knows. Which, still, I am startled to hear. Perhaps I should not be called by any name. Except out of the mouth of Slee.
Wakefield is a bulwark, hirsute, monumental; a man of indelicate appearance. But the surprise and revulsion in his expression is slight. He either has great control over his reactions or he is not all that surprised. “What did you do to yourself?”
Have I changed so much since winter, when we saw each other last? I can still walk in the streets unhindered. But it occurs to me I may not be visible all the time.
“I did what I had to," I say.
Wakefield tests the weight of his revolver at his thigh. The same gun he might have shot in the war, with the dirt of the trenches in the crevices of his mouth. Our best route of extraction, other than through Enid's palm, will be his hesitation. When I last knew Wakefield he was too conventional to shoot an unarmed guest in the house of the law. Let alone an unarmed woman. Enid and I are both aware of the strategic benefit of her presence.
Then again, it could be that Wakefield has changed as I have.
"How the fuck did you get in here?" he says, with the resigned tone of a man who knows he is wasting his own time.
I say, “I hope for your sake I find no bruises on my friend."
Wakefield's very teeth are tense in his mouth. I can feel them in mine. “We handled him like a bloody apricot."
There would be no benefit to hurting Wakefield. Anyhow, I am pinned under Slee’s lovely weight.
Enid's voice wavers up impassive and distant as a mirage. "Detective, what crime do you suspect our friend of?"
"Brought the solicitor, did you," Wakefield says. "We aren't detaining him, Nineveh. Your man needs medical attention. He could barely speak, he doesn't seem to know the year. We've called in a doctor."
Enid takes my sleeve in one of her small, unpierced hands. "They're not detaining him. We can walk out," she says quietly into my shoulder.
I say, "What is it you expected to learn from him, Zachary? You ought to have learned by now that my friends don't betray me."
Wakefield's reddened knuckles shift on the stock of his revolver. He is envisioning how I would look falling over the table into the mess of my own skull. It occurs to me that I don't know if I can be shot. Then a pained kind of laugh breaks out of him. "I'm asking you man to man to give your friend fifteen bloody minutes so a trained physician can shine the little light in his eyes."
"Detective, we simply have our own ways," Enid says with some compassion.
"You're breaking him, Nineveh," Wakefield says.
We leave the way we came. Wakefield's gaze remains like a dart in my spine long after we have turned the corner with Slee between us half-dragged. Enid does not have our path by heart — the heart being, after all, a handful of muscle in a casing of bone —but yet she needs no reference.
Victor puts himself under Slee’s other arm. We haul him to my room and lay him on the bed. "Do you need anything from me?" Victor says lowly. "Is he injured?"
I shake my head. "He's worn out," I say.
Victor helps me remove my coat and when I sit down on the bed he takes a knee to unlace my shoes. Enid haunts the stairs. When Victor stands and folds the coat over his arm she beckons him. Their footsteps go down to the kitchen where they meet Renira. They begin to murmur and quarrel about how the whole endeavor went, about what they'll tell the others.
I breathe.
Slee breathes.
It went all right, I think.
I open the window again, so the air will come in and soothe Slee’s poor throat. The rain whispers. Night’s come down on the city. The sky closing its eyelid, hiding its terrible pupil. Trembling, I touch my thumb to Slee’s own pink eyelid, which I have thought so much about in the last—century? and which barely seems real. He is tangible, and his dark lashes twitch. “Sorry, sorry,” I whisper. I feel that my veins run full. Like meltwater coming down the mountain: clear, singing off the cliffs.
A spot of froth on his lower lip. I wipe the fine face clean. I have to peer at it carefully. For many weeks, I haven’t looked into Slee’s face. It seemed only polite. Now here he is.
Something tethers me to looking at him. The old impulse.
Would he wake? He wouldn’t.
Would it be enough? Never.
I want to crawl inside him. I want to consume him. I want to have him. My face hovers above his.
I could kiss him. It would be very easy. Frankly, I could do whatever I like. Not just because he is still unconscious, or in his trance—whatever. He would allow it either way. For old times’ sake. Or because I am his friend, and he would like to make me happy. I could undress, touch and taste him. His taste would be surprising. He smells of the corners of his attic-observatory, but he couldn’t taste of that; there would have to be some human salt in it.
It wouldn’t help.
My hunger is not a physical drive any more that can be satiated by some action of the body. I want other things from Slee. I don’t know what they are.
What did you do to yourself? Wakefield said.
I barely know. I can’t help but think—if I go further, higher—I will find out. I will take Slee with me. Whatever the thing is I want from Slee, it must be possible, if I go far enough. Otherwise I wouldn’t hunger for it. This keeps me sane.
I press my lips to Slee’s forehead. I am trembling. If I put our mouths together I would eat his tongue.
He stirs in his sleep and his hand comes up to brush my chest. I clasp it in mine and gently lay it down by his side, where it rests. There—the spell broken. As if he was casting it with his quaking fingers and now it dissipates. I step away from the bedside and go back down to the foyer.
They turn to look at me, surprised again. I haven’t heard what they were talking about this time.
“My friends,” I say. “You’ve done so well.”
Enid, Victor—they seem not to notice. But as soon as Renira puts her eyes on me she tastes it with her skin.
We open a bottle of wine, and my friends drink it. I watch them. I watch Renira.
Renira—drinking glass after glass, ravenous, as she thinks, what have I done, what am I becoming, how do I know these things. Her face becomes flushed and damp and her thoughts loosen to me. When she looks at me she sees without intending to what I might like to do to Slee. Her horror and her astonishment and eagerness commingle. She senses the red movement in me as though it is light and she is just developing a crude parietal eye, a bump at the top of her sternum, pulsing.