You Meet Inter-7 A
Five years went by. Five years, but what is that to you? Time doesn't mean much without a body. You experience, sure, but you don't age, at least not the way everything else does. You do not decay, and you don't wind down, so you're not really a part of it are you? Less involved than the smallest microbe and farther away than the farthest star, although of course the reality of the situation is more complicated. The reality of a situation usually is, and in this case it's true that observation is itself an act, and that it changes what's observed. Regardless, free from the grinding processes of life, the age lines and grey hairs, the rot and rust stains, you are also free from time. For you it passes simply, one year giving way to another as easily as one moment to the next, as easily as reading the words "five years later" and turning a page.
Not that it being easy will save you from much, in the end. The important thing is that time and space exist. Naturally, you must be somewhere, and in your case for the past five years you've been here, stuck in the town as if tethered to it. The farthest you've ever managed to get is about a mile off the coast, floating idly over the cold gray waves of the Greater Sea, and once almost to the top of the northern hills, although you never made it to the summit, never climbed high enough to see what was on the other side. Granted, no one can say you didn't try: struggling against whatever invisible cords have bound you to the town, you've set out time and again, but no amount of effort on your part has ever made a difference. No matter what direction you choose to go in, you always reach your limit.
It isn't painful. More a feeling of indifference than captivity, once you reach the edge of town you no longer feel the need to carry on, and forgetting what it was like to want to leave, you turn around. This is only confusing or off-putting once you're back – while you're engaged in it, returning seems like the most natural thing in the world. Of course, the cycle resumes as soon as you do return, and it isn't long before the town again begins to weigh on you. Soon enough you'll decide to start out again, vowing this time to go for good.
It never works. Newt Run is all you know and maybe it's all you'll ever know. Not that it's such a bad thing. Admit it: it's an interesting place, as far as it goes. At least there's a lot to look at, and for someone in your unique position that has to be considered a selling point. And that's what you've been doing for the past five years. You've been looking.
You saw faces flash in the crowded streets, uniform pixels in a flesh-scale monochrome, all of them equally valid and therefore interchangeable. Unnoticed, you watched from the windows of buses, coming to understand the town through its architecture, the quality of the brickwork or the state of its yards. For a long time you dedicated yourself to a study of store-fronts, learning what you could from those elaborate tableaus in the boutiques off Clarion Street, headless mannequins posing in the latest fashions next to designer handbags strung up like butchered hunks of meat. Later you moved to the businesses of Northside, stores with cheap, red-brick facades and barred windows, or else abandoned entirely, the shuttered relics of some other, more prosperous time.
You passed from one street to another and one face to the next, and suddenly one of them would stand out, if for no other reason than because of the set of a man's jaw, or the look in a woman's eyes, of solitude say, or agitation. A town is composed of these things, the faces of people as well as buildings, but you wanted something more than that: you wanted a story, and for a time searching for one was like a drug.
You began to follow people, starting with the tired, middle-aged man you saw crossing 3rd Bridge, caught by the look in his eyes, a look that was at once sad and resigned, as if he'd long ago given up hope but didn't particularly care or miss it. You took in his shabby gray suit, threadbare but spotlessly clean (as if he made sure to have it laundered at rigidly defined intervals), as well as the way he put one foot in front of the other, his scuffed, leather shoes eating the pavement like a metronome does time. It was remarkable to you that he was, after all, still alive, still functioning, obviously still getting up in the morning, dragging himself out of bed and shoveling forkfulls of food into his mouth. Over and above all of this was the fact that you sensed in him, even in this man, more reality and cohesion than you could ever ascribe to yourself.
You went with him to his apartment, watching as he unlocked the door and passed down the length of a hall into an off-white kitchen. Loosening his tie, he sat down at a wooden table and removed his shoes, pulling them off irritably, as if he was angry at himself for forgetting to do so earlier. At last he went to the sink and filled a glass with water. He drank slowly, looking out the window at the brick wall of his neighbour's house, and then he sat the glass down on the counter.
Oddly disturbed, you left him there, understanding that you would get nothing more from him; whatever spark of recognition or insight it is that's needed to understand a life was not coming: here, if anywhere, was a man living a life devoid of stories. There was no subtext to be found in him, no plot, and nothing further to be learned. Abandoning his house, you felt a deep weight settle on you, as if the blandness of a man drinking water in his kitchen was itself the story and the point, and precisely because of its banality no different from any other moment, for him or any other man.
You told yourself that you'd made a mistake, choosing him. Then again, you might simply have given up too soon. Perhaps if you'd been more patient you'd have witnessed something more, found whatever thread it is that binds the events of a life together, even if that life is made up of "events" as isolated as drinking a cup of water in an empty kitchen. This is an interesting town, or as interesting as any other, and you were sure there were stories to be found here. After all, what is consciousness except the drive to imprint a story on the world? And weren't you conscious? It seemed like a valid question, but you reasoned that if you were thinking about it you must be (thinking equaling being, in some sense anyway, or at least in some traditions.) Besides, the fact remained that time was passing and you were aware of it; you had to find something to fill your days.
Later you passed a circular fountain in the middle of a public square. In the center of the pool was a statue of a dancing girl. The statue's face was nearly featureless, and its long, slim legs were frozen in a pose of perpetual grace. The blue-gray metal it was cast from was worn in places, with small patches of rust spotting its hands and shoulders.
Seated at the edge of the fountain was a young woman dressed in a long, floral-patterned skirt and a white, sleeveless t-shirt. Hanging from a strap around her neck was a small watch, and as you looked at her, she held it up and checked the time. Her nails were painted black.
It struck you that this girl was the polar opposite of the man you'd previously followed; neither sad nor resigned, she sat by the pool as if cut from some other, more perfect world. She was both young and beautiful, and very, very alive. In short, she was exactly the type of girl that a man might fall in love with, and suddenly it seemed so simple: if you were looking to find a consistent narrative in life, wasn't a love story the best place to start? You made the decision in an instant, and were with her as the girl rose from the pool and left the square.
Her name was Caroline Brown. You learned this later, and that her friends called her Carol, or C. She was 23 years old and was a recent graduate from Newt Run University, where she'd majored in politics. She'd been an above average student, and one of her professors had even urged her to continue with her studies in a graduate program, but the thought of more school didn't appeal to her, and she suspected that her professor simply wanted to sleep with her, or at least to fantasize about the possibility. Instead, she asked for more hours at the clothing store where she'd worked part-time as a student; she was in no hurry, and felt like taking things slow for a while before she started worrying too much about her future. Besides, she got along with her manager and the work was easy.
Her boss' name was Angie Majors. She was 32 years old and mostly happy, or at least that was the image of h
erself that she liked to project. Certainly she was happy with Carol, who she respected for her energy and her direct, unpretentious manner of speech. Angie imagined that she saw something of herself in the younger woman, although at 23 Carol was far more self-contained and comfortable than Angie had ever been. For Carol, Angie was a boss and the job was a job. She went to work in the morning and she left in the evening. It was a part of her life and very little more.
During the year you followed her, Carol saw two men, one from February to August and the other from September to November. Their names were Luke Coulter and Terry Dunstan; she slept with one other man over the course of the year, cheating on Terry with a photographer named Richard, and while that encounter had its own particular impact, it was with Luke and Terry that she was most preoccupied.
It should be noted that Carol's life was always more than these relationships. It was more than her job and her friends, more than where she lived, or the places she went and the food she ate; her life was the total of each these things and many others, and the sum of what she thought about them all. There were moments of texture and insight that had nothing to do with men, dialogues with people who touched her existence in only the most peripheral of ways that nevertheless managed to lay bare certain base elements of personality and intention. There were also times when Carol felt herself adrift and alone, when she felt that "life" (that vague and ill-defined notion by which she meant something other than what she was currently living) was passing her by. Like anyone else, she grappled with doubts and insecurities, and there were times when she wondered what the point of it all was, and where she was heading.
Of course, life isn't something that can be naturally distilled, but you told yourself that with Carol you were resolved to look at the big picture, having made a conscious decision to ignore the more isolated details of who and what she was in an effort to focus on something more essential. In this way you hoped to unlock the secret, making whatever intuitive leap might be necessary to connect one moment to another, fusing even the smallest details of a life into an essential part of the whole. But first you'd watch Carol Brown fall in love.
It started in a bar, which surprised her, since she'd always thought it was impossible to meet anyone in bars. It was also unusual in that she noticed Luke first; she liked his smooth, caramel-coloured skin, as well as the line of his shoulders as he slouched in his seat, and the look of his slim hands around a beer. She noticed a tattoo just beneath the sleeve of his white t-shirt and she had an urge to see the rest of it.
At that precise moment, he turned around, and their eyes met.
Had he felt her looking at him? You've watched any number of people and none of them have ever been aware of you, but then you don't have eyes the way that Carol does, eyes that exist in the same space as the things they see, so it's possible that Luke really had felt Carol's gaze. Then again, it's possible that he was just uncomfortable in his seat and wanted to shift position. Whatever the reason, he turned, and he smiled.
It was a smile that struck Carol as completely unaffected, and it was enough to carry her across the bar to him; four hours later they wound up in Carol's bed.
You didn't know how you were supposed to feel about it, watching them, whether or not there should have been some sense of excitement in the motion of their young bodies, the passage of hands, legs tangling, their mouths pressed together, or tongues, and the soft moans that escaped their lips. You took it all in, everything, from multiple angles, zooming in for a close-up of Carol's face and her expression, one that was both like and unlike pain, as if she'd gone somewhere else for a moment, somewhere outside.
When it was over you felt almost as drained as they did, lying across the bed like wounded things, breathing heavily, the sheets damp with sweat.
It had been good, but it wasn't conclusive; Carol wasn't sure whether or not she came, and Luke thought she probably hadn't. He resolved to focus more on foreplay the next time (he was sure there would be a next time), and three days later he invited Carol to his apartment for a meal. The food (a vegetarian pasta) was good, and she liked the quiet, confident way Luke had of carrying himself as he served it, and the intensity with which he occasionally looked at her, as if he was afraid she might disappear at any moment.
Eating with him, and talking, Carol realized that she felt good. She allowed herself to think that maybe this was the beginning of a relationship that could go somewhere; Luke was nice, and he seemed to be genuinely interested in her. They each drank a bottle of wine with the meal, and it felt very natural to them both when Carol proposed they spend the night together.
For several months things between them went well (or at least they appeared to go well, which is almost the same thing, and maybe all that can be hoped for.) The two of them met, shared meals, talked and went out, watched movies, slept together; they were dating. They thought about each other and spent the majority of their free time together. Twice they had dinner with Carol's mother (her father had died of a heart attack when she was 17) and once with Luke's parents, who were just as nice as he was, even if they were quiet, especially his father, who didn't say much of anything but looked at Carol kindly, and in his own way made her feel at home.
As with everything else, their relationship wasn't perfect, but it was easy, and it felt positive. There were even signs that it was going somewhere, forward maybe, at least emotionally, and then there came a night when the two of them had an argument about where Carol had been and why she hadn't called (out with friends and because she hadn't thought about it), and the force of it surprised them both, the bitterness and recrimination stirred up by careless words and the seemingly endless back and forth of accusation and counter-accusation that did end, eventually, when they found themselves making up on Luke's couch.
Lying next to her, post-coital and spent, Luke stared at the ceiling and told her that he loved her. A blue, pre-dawn light filled the room, and a silence stretched out before them, tightening, until at last Carol also said the words, breathing them in less than a whisper. She wanted to smile but somehow she was afraid to. Instead she stared at the ceiling until at length Luke turned and kissed her. For a moment she felt her body falling away, light as shed skin.
Both of them thought that was something they'd remember for the rest of their lives, but in fact the memory was already fading, even as it occurred. Time doesn't stop, not even for love; moments continue to pile up, one after another, they don't care if you were happy yesterday, because now is all they offer.
Carol and Luke went on dating, and even if the sex continued to be better than average, it never really lived up to the expectations they'd both had for it, that first time.
They kept on laughing together, enjoying each other's company, but Carol laughed more often than Luke did, who was slightly too serious, and self-involved.
They enjoyed sharing a bed, but whereas Luke could fall asleep easily, Carol had trouble, especially at his place, where she was often forced to lie awake for hours, listening to his soft, unconscious breathing. At first she found this soothing, but after a while it lost its appeal, and eventually she came to hate it. It seemed to her to be a perfect metaphor for the man, this soft, easy breathing, and the effortless way in which he fell asleep, especially after sex. It was as if he never worried, happy with everything that came his way, no matter what happened.
Carol resented this lack of worry in him, but she shouldn't have, because the fact was that Luke worried as much as anyone else. He felt anxiety about his work, and was deeply concerned about whether or not he'd ever be able to make anything of his life; he'd dropped out of college a few years before he met Carol, hating the institution for its inflexibility, and the textbooks for their bland, colourless writing. He hated the cold, uncomfortable lecture halls, and the dry voices of his professors. Most of all he'd hated the way his peers latched onto any new idea, falling over themselves to agree with one another, voicing near identical opinions and mouthing the same stock
phrases. It wasn't even that he necessarily disagreed with them, but Luke had a tendency to slow discussions down, focusing on known facts at the expense of rhetoric, and because he was nice, to play the role of mediator in any conflict, of which there were many. All of this left him exhausted, and he felt there could be no more useless way to become exhausted, expending energy on conversations that went nowhere, his words disappearing into the air like steam hissing from a broken valve.
At the end of his first year he dropped out of school and took the first job he could get, which in Newt Run meant working in the mines. He didn't like this any better than he had liked school, but it was a change, and at least in the deep pits no one had time to waste on useless conversations. Later, after he'd grown sick of the dark and the dirt and the physical exhaustion, it was too late; he had bills to pay, rent on his apartment and car payments, and what with food and alcohol, at the end of each month he found himself right back where he'd started, saving nothing, and barely getting by. Still, he could sleep easily – lifting heavy minerals all day tends to have that effect – and maybe if Carol had ever expressed her frustration about any of this or told him what she was feeling it's possible they could have worked things out. As it was, she felt childish even thinking some of the things she did, resenting her boyfriend because he slept well, not that that stopped her from feeling it, or her resentment from growing.
Luke wasn't stupid. He sensed that something was wrong, and that there was a distance between them (a distance that might have been there all along, he wasn't sure, but which in any case was more obvious now, and widening), and he was prepared when Carol told him they needed to talk. He agreed with everything she had to say, too readily maybe, nodding his head at each of her conclusions: yes, things weren't working out the way they'd hoped; yes, he felt like they were standing still; yes, it might be a good idea for them to stop seeing each other for a while; yes; that's what they did.
They were both upset about it, for a while, Luke more so than Carol, but then the feeling of loss diminished, until eventually it was gone altogether.
Had they really loved each other? You wondered, and so did they, briefly, before they stopped thinking about it. It wasn't long after this that Carol met Terry.
Her boss Angie introduced the two of them at a house party. Terry was ten years older, and a manager at a small, vegan restaurant. He was tall and rather thin, but Carol liked the set of his eyes, the way they curved slightly at the corners, and the soft brown of his iris. She knew that something was going to happen between them as soon as she saw him, or that's how she put it to herself afterwards, and Terry was more than willing.
Over the next few weeks Carol spent most of her time at Terry's apartment. It was a nicer place than her own, in a renovated building on Forest Street, and while it wasn't on the water, "it was within spitting distance", as he put it, an expression Carol didn't like but which she forgot about after their second date. She enjoyed the view from his small balcony, looking out over the lights of the town, the stuttered line of houses reaching halfway up the side of the eastern hills, and the glow of car headlights on the road below.
Terry was better than Luke in bed, and with him Carol was even able to come from time to time. That was a nice change, although he liked to do it in the dark whereas Luke had preferred to keep the lights on, which Carol had found exciting.
Terry wasn't as nice as Luke, but he dressed better and as he was older there was an air of maturity about him (real or imagined) that Carol found attractive. He knew people at restaurants and at the galleries he took her to; they often went together to the openings of photography and painting exhibitions, usually by young, local artists, but sometimes by those from the capital, where it seemed like everything was being done in monotones, grey abstracts or close-ups of odd, featureless objects. One exhibition, by a photographer who came to the opening dressed in a shroud and who spoke through an interpreter, was comprised solely of portraits of people sleeping. When Carol asked the artist if his models slept in the studio, he explained that all of them were dead. Immediately Carol's thoughts flew to the trouble, which had to be much worse than she'd imagined to account for so many bodies, but when she questioned him further, the photographer only laughed, telling her that it had all been very simple. His brother worked at a funeral parlour, and the families of the deceased had agreed to participate in the project, most of them having been compensated with prints, which they seemed to find comforting, seeing their loved-ones looking so peaceful in death, almost as if they were sleeping, and might wake up at any moment.
That night, positioned on all fours with Terry behind her, Carol found herself staring at a spot on the far wall, where a small shadow had been created by a single, glancing shaft of light. From Carol's angle the shadow looked like a profile, the face of a dead girl, serene and untroubled. She stared at it, panting, pushing her hips back to meet Terry's thrusts, and thought of nothing, only how strange it all was, and sad.
Their relationship wound down slowly, like a spring coming loose. It was what it was, Terry said, and he was right, although something about those words bothered Carol; they rang out in her mind, far more resonant than shallow words had any right to be, and leaving Terry's apartment for the last time, she watched as a couple of boys, no more than 11 or 12 years old, poked at a dead bird with a pair of sticks, and it struck her suddenly that she hated Terry, and whatever it was that it had been, she was glad that it was over.
Soon afterwards you gave up following her.
You were tired, and no closer to understanding anything than you'd ever been; it was true that you knew Carol better than anyone else, better than the man you once saw walking to work with his left shoe undone, or the young mother buying apples from a street vendor with her small daughter tugging incessantly at her hand, but how much better? You had more information but no stronger a connection. In the end, you hadn't found what you were looking for. It's possible that you would have gone on like that, slipping from one random encounter to the next, moving in and out of the lives of strangers, searching for a meaning you'd never find. Or maybe you would have found it, who knows? Once you saw the ring you never had the chance.
It lay on the road, lurid and somehow obscene, a perfect circle painted in blood. You couldn't move, and you stared at it throughout the day and on into the night, its careful symmetry affirmed by the uneven ground and the cracks in the pavement, the dust stains. No one came to wash it away. It was as if everyone had struck some silent, tacit agreement to ignore the ring until the natural processes of snow and wind erased it, but that was only wishful thinking; something like that never truly goes away, you knew that much, the memory of the thing lingering long after the physical reality is gone.
A week later you came across another ring, painted on the side of a building in an alley off Felt Street. Far less blood had been used here, and the ring tapered to a fine point at one end before the circle was completed. Not far away, partially hidden by a few plastic garbage bags and half-eaten scraps of food, you discovered the body of a dead bird, a pigeon with its head torn off. The bird's left wing was broken, bent back at an impossible angle, and many of its feathers had been snapped in half. Its body was strangely flattened, as if it had been rung out, or squeezed, and you realized this is what had been used to paint the ring.
A revulsion rose in you that was more than a simple reaction to the blood-spattered pavement or the pathetic state of the bird: the ring should not exist. It was never meant to be, not in this town, nor anywhere else in this world. The sight of it on the wall was something beyond nature, like a baby born deformed, or the two-headed calf that prophesizes drought.
You left the alley without really being aware of it. Eventually you wound up next to the river, where you stopped to watch moths darting around the street lamps, swooping and dying, their armoured bodies producing monotonous, flicking sounds, strangely inorganic, as if they were wind-up toys.
You went into the mountains a
nd followed the course of the sun over the surface of a moss-covered rock, the light changing by degrees, its texture and palette warping from one moment to the next.
You went back to observing humanity, and it no longer mattered if you understood what you saw, only that you had something to look at, something that moved. You chose people at random, such as the young woman you followed to work one day and watched as she sat at her desk and ticked off the hours until she could leave. You were with her as she left for home, and there as she ate a sparse meal in front of the television, and later, as she quietly masturbated in her bed, her thick body curled foetally beneath the blankets.
You watched waves hit the shore, clouds drift, ice melt, each moment so clear and defined that the motion of change was nearly forgotten and all you were left with was a succession of still images lasting for days. Or, alternatively you watched for the change alone, allowing the scenes to speed by in perfect, time-lapsed panoramas, but no matter where you looked, no matter what you chose to focus on, you couldn't escape the rings; their memory was seared in you as indelibly as circles burned into the retina of a man who's stared too long at the sun.
You came across them in alleys and driveways, on the underside of bridges, house walls, the hallways of abandoned tenements, and you began to feel as if you were spinning, unable to decide whether you were the one who found them, or if the rings were finding you.
In this way five years went by, five years that now seem to you as meaningless as a faded scrap of newsprint. Tonight you find yourself on the roof of an office tower, its surface covered with tar and concrete, a number of heating pipes linked together at precise, 90 degree angles. Steam from a faulty vent hisses softly in the cold air.
A ring is painted directly in the center of the roof. Inside it are two headless pigeons, one gray, the other white. The gray bird's stomach is ruptured, its pink guts spilling out like stuffing from an uncooked sausage. The blood is fresh, the bodies barely frozen. Not far away, a man is sitting on the roof ledge. He is facing you, his features shadowy and indistinct. His arms hang limply at his sides, and his long, slender legs are drawn in against the ledge. As he stands up and walks toward you, his face gradually takes on definition, and you notice an odd tilt, or inflection in his eyes, something you've never seen before and that takes you a moment to comprehend.
He is looking at you – he knows that you're there, in front of him; he can see you, and in an instant everything has changed. For the first time you are forced to confront yourself as something that exists, that has a physical reality. As something that can be seen.
You study the man in front of you, trying to understand what's happened.
He is wearing a gray business suit and a thin, black tie of a type that was in vogue more than 10 years ago, and which on this man, with his bland, expressionless face, is likely a conscious statement, some personalized or ironic comment on the current state of fashion. In any case, the tie suits him, as do his brown leather shoes, the classic design of which is off-set by the modern cut of his suit. The overall impression is of a stylish, slightly affected man with money, but looking closer you notice that his slacks are worn at the knees, his shoes scuffed and dirty, and his shirt is stained with blood.
"Well you made it," he says flatly. "I thought I'd have to go on scrawling the things forever. It gets tiresome killing the birds."
In his right hand is another dead pigeon. He drops it onto the roof, where it lands with a barely audible thud. He takes a step toward you, his eyes brown and calm, with a faint tracing of wrinkles at the edges. You guess that he's about 35, or 36. There is a small mole on his forehead, on the right side, about an inch away from the line of his black, unkempt hair. Dark circles mark the underside of his eyes. He looks as if he hasn't slept in days.
"It's hard to know where to start," he says. "The anticipation of the thing takes on more reality than the actual event. Have you ever found that? Maybe it's just me, although it's hard to know what I mean by that, 'me', who 'I' am. I mean it's hard to explain with, what would you call it? Any certainty. There are good days and bad days, but basically it's hard to recognize my own face in the mirror. A problem that must be difficult for you to grasp."
He speaks calmly, enunciating every word, and his eyes never waver. Listening to him, you begin to move outside of yourself, looking at the scene from the vantage point of a third person: the roof is empty except for a man talking to a point in space.
You struggle with that, because obviously he can see you, but what is it he's seeing? More importantly, is he alone in this ability, or has something larger happened? Maybe everyone can see you now, maybe they always could; the thought is like being doused with cold water. Is it possible that you've been floating through the town these past five years, assuming you were invisible, when in reality everyone has just been ignoring you, out of some misguided sense of politeness perhaps, or a mutually agreed upon code of conduct?
"My name is Inter-7 A," the man continues. "But once it was Malcom Collins. I'm fairly sure of that, but that's where it gets hazy. I used to be an art dealer. I think so anyway, but it's like a dream. It fades. There was a gallery, and I probably sold art there. I had a wife. I'm pretty sure I had a wife, but all I can remember is the shape of her body sleeping. Only that. Nothing else is left, just this lump of flesh lying under a white blanket, and the light from a window. Not much of a legacy. I don't even know if that's a memory from one day or many, not that it matters.
"I think I might have a son. Or I'll put it another way: if I had a wife I had a son. One goes with the other. So let's say I did have a wife and a son. But if so there's nothing left of him, just that word, just this noun called 'son.' That's all. So there's not much to go into there. Needless to say I have no idea how to find either of these people again. I only mention them to give you some indication that I was once what could be called a person.
"I remember the first thing I said to me."
The man shakes his head, frowning, and then he laughs sharply.
"That doesn't make any sense!" he barks, and rakes a hand through his hair. "But how else can I put it? It's difficult to know. Let's say that I remember what it said to Malcom Collins before we became Inter-7 A. Because there were two once, something other, and Malcom Collins. Now there is only Inter-7 A, but at that time there were two and it said it needed him. That's all it said. All I can remember it saying. It said it needed him and Malcom Collins responded to that, something deep inside him responded to that. That need, wanting to help something in need. That was all it took."
The man pauses, his face hardening. He sits down, crossing his legs, and holds his head in his hands. He mutters something, and then he laughs again, pressing his index finger to his temple. He looks at you and smiles.
"It's the headache," he says. "It gets bad sometimes and I just..."
He shakes his head again and rises to his feet, surprisingly quickly, his body as agile as a dancer's. He walks to the roof edge and looks over. You watch him leaning forward, six storeys up, flush with a desire you've never known before: you find yourself wishing you had hands, and that you have an urge to push.
The man looks down at the street below, and then he turns around. He walks back and looks at you directly. He seems calm again, his face impassive.
"The first thing I should have said is that it was not from this universe. Neither am I, now. Inter-7 A is not from this universe, because it came from outside, and it's a part of Inter-7 A. That's somehow not as unusual as it should be, coming from outside. Not here. There has to be something wrong here, flawed. Something broken in the plane, but then I'm no one to judge. Anyway it didn't leave its own universe on purpose. It was an accident. It sort of, fell here. And now it's trapped, and with things the way they are, with the way they're going, it's getting scared. I'm getting scared… But then we're all trapped, aren't we? Malcom Collins as surely as Inter-7 A. As surely as anyone else. None of us can escape the future. It's on its way rig
ht now. None of us can escape. Except we're going to. I'm going to. And you're going to help me."
He snaps the thumb and middle finger of his right hand, and then touches his left hand to the side of his neck. His eyes widen.
"I don't know if you can understand it, how much farther out you come from. Much, much farther than it did. You shouldn't be here. Something like that. Or it could be that you have to be here, and that by being here you make all the rest of us possible. I don't know. The important thing is that you can help me. I'm very sensitive to these things. I hope you understand. Call it a benefit of being Inter-7 A. I was aware of you almost as soon as I arrived and once it was obvious that I was stuck here, well, then I had to find you. So I started painting the rings. And you see, they brought you to me."
His words are heavy, solid things, remaining in the air long after the sound has died away; you can no more be rid of them than the man can unspeak them. You feel them all around you, as real and binding as knotted cords; they were, and so they are, and you understand that any freedom you might have had is gone, cut off as surely and as finally as a severed limb.
"I trust that you see now?" continues the man calling himself Inter-7 A. "You're going to help me get out. I'm sorry but you no longer have a choice."