Atom (8 page)

 

 

‘My apologies for having to do this uptown, Count. Hadda bring a barbecue up here t'escape the salivaters - too many people swingin' visits to the pen. Just up the hall - Rex Camp's waitin' to suck up the ashes.'

DeCrow sat opposite in electrolock cuffs homed to a central computer. ‘You mean the young man Fiasco?'

‘Pretty soon,' rumbled Blince, lighting a cigar, ‘they'll be firin' up that bad boy.'

A hoarse scream tore echoing through the uptown den.

‘Was that it?' DeCrow asked.

‘Nah, they're just shavin' his hair. Now, from the top - name.'

‘I've always liked the name Tom Sawyer.'

‘Well, Mr Sawyer, I “saw yer” doin' a hundred and ten in a stickle cab, whattya got to say about that?'

‘Mr Blince, I was in the back of a taxi, at the back of a group of four vehicles. Why arrest me - why not the others?'

‘In a gaggle o' four cars it's a cinch the guy at the rear knows who he's followin'. Why waste energy? Enough crime to supervise right now with the rod puppet's visit and the mob gettin' antsy. Lights on in the crime studio.'

‘Blunder here and the gallows sprout, eh.'

‘I like to think so, Mr Sawyer. What did that bastard Wardial call it - “Beerlight City, jewel of asphalt”. Real poetic aint it? Depravity's lotus land.' Blince paused, drawing on the cigar. The yelling cell was tamped down with unnatural silence during such pauses. ‘But in the realm o' cold, hard, throbbin' fact, the sickness I've seen would shred your ears.'

A small smile further sharpened DeCrow's vulpine features. ‘A man must be acquainted with the rugged incline of infinity before he can shred my ears.'

‘Well howzabout this. A gal comes by, we don't notice her at first but then she gives it all up re Fiasco - says she thinks she's bein' followed by a mob boy. Five minutes after she quits the downtown den, the mob boy's head's nearly off, cut with a blade thin as theory. Terrible, tragic and so on. Shiv was so creepy he'd be furtive in a floodlight.'

‘Tragic, as you say,' DeCrow nodded, his mouth slopping like a mudbubble. ‘But not unusual. The female of the species, as they say. I'm an old man, Mr Blince. I remember when anger was merely a sign of haste. But consider humanity through the ages - my profession is archaeology, you understand. I study worlds bloodless as merry-go-rounds. Bricks sandwiching ancient air, cooked by the Aztec sun. I've seen battery insertion diagrams among Egyptian hieroglyphics. Crystal skulls barking Yiddish punchlines. But such things are flavourless. I've resolved to live life and get the truth fresh out of the shell. Why, only last month I booted a cat off a fire escape. The pleasure it afforded me is hard to believe. Shortly thereafter I made a cool thousand, bowling with some of the larger jellyfish and sea anemones which are freely available in many fish markets. I laughed buckets, I can tell you. Ofcourse, such amusement has an unremovable price tag. I was hounded from city to city, referred to as insane and charmless, and found myself here in Beerlight, a town about which I know practically nothing, and without the faintest idea where to strike next.'

‘The corner exists for men like you, Sawyer. Go on.'

‘Well. I began to hear of a dealer in bottled monsters by the name of Atom. You see, Mr Blince, I ... something I forgot to mention is the matter of my great tragedy. A son, long lost. The tales I heard of Atom led me to consider he might be the bairn I hadn't seen these twenty-five years. Yes, so I paid a cab driver by the hour to sit in wait for this Atom he knew by sight. And yet I don't know why I didn't think of it before - you, as Chief of Police, must know every denizen of this distorted metropolis. What news can you tell me of the boy?'

‘So it's like that eh. Well, Atom's got fan-forward rows of replacement teeth, like a shark. P.I. modality. Brownstone on Saints. Speaks eleven languages simultaneously. Searches the guards. Supplies trouble for them that want it. Purple barcode on his ass. Ask him his past and he'll smile enigmatic and tap the side of someone else's nose. Shot my mother's windchimes. Built a tugboat out of dead elves, because they said it couldn't be done. Only himself to blame. Those are the facts - but that's never the whole story, Mr Sawyer. We all know at a deep level how things should be. For instance it aint natural to have a dog whose skull's bigger than your own. Something's wrong with this picture. Atom's father was a magician who'd make articles of food disappear by simply eating 'em. He never tumbled to why the crowd hated him - when they pelted him with fruit he caught it in his mouth and swallowed it. Then he varied his act, going into the audience - but instead of plucking eggs and pennies from onlookers' ears he tore off the ears and held them up with this look of ... controlled exaltation them faggots always do. Next he started in on this ventriloquist act where he tried to convince the audience that the dummy could speak but just chose not to, because it didn't respect anyone present. Someone in the audience blew its head off with a rifle and Atom's dad was relieved that the charade was over at last. Then - and only then - did he tog up the four-year-old Atom in a dummy suit and a pink mask with a clacker jaw. Atom the toddler, hidden behind the hinge. And sat on his Pa's knee, legs dangling motionless, that kid would chuck back the lines like a smart guy. Atom senior could drink a glass o' water, overlap the dialogue, you name it - got a real hilarious name for himself. But little Taffy became pretty sick o' bein' held by the neck every night, and during the act one evening he kicked off his dad's lap and ran amok in the club, jumping onto tables, biting holes in people's cheeks, setting fire to the curtains and squealing like a stuck pig. Afterwards, everyone described it a little differently. But all agreed on the presence of a demon. Atom senior was busted for possession, and died in the middle of a joke.'

‘Which joke.'

‘His life.'

‘Ah-ha.' DeCrow smiled woodenly.

Blince gave a sour chuckle. ‘You're pleasantly lifelike, Mr Sawyer - I could get to like you.' Blince relit his cigar. ‘But I won't.'

‘How exactly do you operate, Mr Blince?' DeCrow asked, throat crackling.

‘Well now, tell me d'you know the story o' the Walrus and the Carpenter?'

‘Why, no I don't.'

‘Good,' said Blince, and stared at him. The lights buzzed, guttered and blotted out.

 

Harry rode the lightning. The tangy fire that flared through his veins was like the embarrassment he felt when he saw a bad combo in the mirror. He was headed for the heart of the fourth of July.

Then he was with the guy Taffy Atom, on a platform over drooling sulphur. He was still strapped to the hotplate, which still resembled a low DIY table or self-surgery seat. Atom crouched to the same eye-level, his black coat pooling like tar. Fiasco noticed that the platform was chequered like a chess board. ‘I don't play chess.'

‘You do,' whispered Atom. ‘I don't.'

‘How's my hair, Atom? See I'm a modern guy. My problems don't end with me, and I aint about to smile.'

‘Behind ugly data is a human way,' said Atom, his face slowly disappearing, ‘mean and patched up, some doubts, hungry but very human.'

The sea of lava had become a planted field. Sunlight drew treasure glittering from the bulbs.

‘America has the hallucinations it deserves,' Atom said, blue sky in place of his evaporated head.

‘This is bad,' Fiasco muttered, feeling sick at the bioluminescent fields. Stuff like sap was linking up in his brain. ‘Headlong the delivery of my failure,' he thought, and black forgiveness washed over him.

 

‘You had us concerned,' said his attorney, flaring out of a striplight blur. He was in a pen cell.

Fiasco felt like a doll made of stone. ‘I baked or what?'

‘Very nearly, Harry,' chuckled Specter. Rex Camp the Coroner stood behind him, benign but aloof in glasses which made his head look like a jukebox.

Fiasco found the bunk under him, sat up. ‘Wha' happened?'

‘A funny thing, actually. Geryon was on the lever, you were going with the flow, staring into the off, lights were dipping out - central brain at the den went down, in fact - when I got some real news. Someone confessed to your first crime.'

‘So?'

‘So no three strikes - you're down to two, so long as his story stands up. Guy called Flea Lonza.'

‘I know Lonza.'

‘How you see him?'

‘Humble and no good.'

‘Until now. Don't know why he's so keen to be swatched as a crook but I've offered to handle the publicity, which'll be almost as frenzied as yours truly's after the rescue. Shoulda seen it - I swanned into the steering room and whacked the lever like a last-ditch slab-arm, saving your scrawny ass. You took the equivalent of a mild course of ECT - you'll have periods of memory loss, flashbacks, bad concentration, and sometimes you'll just stand there.'

‘I do feel kinda light-headed.'

Rex Camp had turned to leave, but stopped at the door and looked back at Fiasco. ‘Later,' he croaked.

 

 

The office of Mayor suffered many opportunities to serve the people. These could be avoided by the use of a few key words passed to the elected on flagday. Meantime it was good to look busy - today the Mayor was being chauffeur-driven to the McKenna Square Assembly Hall to present some sort of fuzzy-meaning item to the President. The Mayor understood the rigours of electioneering - in the course of his own he had promised to establish a public holiday for the practice of gooey mid-lunge uncertainty, a ploy too cynical even for Beerlighters. His campaign slogan, ‘Give dogs hell', did little to advance him. He finally had to trap the other three candidates in a cellar and smother them with his ass.

The matter of his aura had been concluded with a public statement that the office of Mayor was not dependent upon public displays of spirit. Leon Wardial had responded with a seven-hour televised disintegration of the aura in an airport lounge.

Now the Mayor hit the car TV and took a gander. Harry Fiasco, looking tan, was giving a statement in a sheetstorm of camera flash. ‘How'd you feel?' someone asked.

‘Modern, patched up, hallucinations bad, and I don't deliver. But I guess it's easy to be wise after the event. I ... I promised myself I wouldn't cry. What I have to say is this. One golfer a year is hit by lightning. This may be the only evidence we have of god's existence. When I was in the chair, I saw and felt stuff I don't fully recall. But I know we're all, every one of us here, ghosts in embryo. Pre-demons, I guess it is. And that's a real flowery way of saying, this here world's gonna end in fire and brimstone, ladies and gentlemen. Fire and brimstone for sure.'

A shot of Blince. ‘This is the oldest tool in the box. Charmin' offender. Young enough to play victim. Fake epiphany in stir. Real touching. And once again the court authorities are slow as zombies changin' direction.'

Flea Lonza grinned uncertain at the camera as he was hustled through a hallway of yelling reporters.

‘Why'd you steal that apple?'

‘Yes sir, I stole it - stole it good.'

‘Why?'

Flea was shoved through a door. ‘- Hungry.'

The announcer spoke over shots of the President cutting a ribbon at a target range. ‘The President underwent another blow to his banality with the revelation that every night he wraps gaffa tape around the head of a python and deepthroats it to the tune of “America” from West Side Story. We now go to Beerlight's McKenna Square Assembly Hall for the President's state address.'

The mayor leaned forward. ‘Faster, driver - it's starting.'

The chauffer turned around - under the formal cap was a woman of snow and smoke. ‘Relax,' she said.

‘What's the problem?'

She raised a gun at him. ‘Metabolic.'

The blast woke him into a day that tasted of roses. Aimless stains of music in the air. Dwelling under leaves, hermits in the afternoon murmured, nights to reach in their praise. It was a barley-bronze country, revoluting squirrels about oaks, garnet leaves across thirsty embankments, paladins and gaudy populaces beating through the countryside, poets tranced and petalled under clocks. Blue sugarpike dropped a hundred feet through the fall, spiralling at themselves over foam.

At dawn he selected eyeballs, a bagful of clinking trinkets, figurines of frozen blood. A large assemblage was milling its way under the diffused shadow of coppiced trees. The commanding welcome of colleagues, gentlemen slapping dead watches, laughter, quilltopped harlequins stroking strings. White fans under slow clouds. Stone banquets left in scatters. He paraded into the throne room and pierced the inquisition fuss, confronting the monarch. ‘My liege,' he hollered, presenting the king with a tray of violet fungus tusks. ‘Grind these and torch them in a bowl, see the flame colour and choose the morning shirt accordingly. But this, sire, is apparently what you do anyway.'

‘It takes energy to curse someone. Waterlog this one's gullet merely.'

He walked a walk as a lion to the door, and after a swift backward glance, bolted. Holding air open to kick from the surroundings, he went across the gap of slates and lawns, gone behind him, flying over towers and tremendous monuments, tapering distances streaking into veins, places dashing out of sight. Trailing untidiness overwashed the geology, riddling green to the coast. Tropical boats of crowds, blue and red garments, hot drops of deep summer, delusions seeping from nectar as amazon poison. He led voiceless science into the mountains, pointed to land under faded clouds, pushed ...

Then he swallowed the gods and slept, dreaming he was the Mayor of a nightmare city, lying dazed in an oily alleyway.

 

The President took the stage with a floodlight smile and foxhole eyes. His frosted hair was an icepack for an angry boil of a head. A thunder of backhands greeted his arrival.

Campaign bluster slowly narrowed to a finer focus. ‘There are pips in the fruit of liberty,' he stated. ‘They are called elections. Banners make the man. I have spearheaded the important transition from a government unconcerned with the people's endorsement to one which takes their endorsement for granted. I'm determined to complete this transition, however unpopular. I don't intend to establish a beachhead and then squander it on damn pelicans.'

After applause the Mayor was announced and when Atom walked on in an allow cloak, everyone denied their eyes - they'd been told this was the Mayor so it must be at any cost. He needn't have bothered - the turnover in mayors was so fast nobody could keep pace with their names or appearance. ‘Mr President,' Atom said expansively, ‘that was a finely-crafted speech. I'm sure every bastard here will join me in thanking you. And before you go on back to hell I'd like to present you with a modest token of our complicity. Myself and the powers that be have thought long, hard and veined about what might be appropriate. Something symbolic, perhaps? Some kinda dumb trophy? We had a good laugh about that. But it was decided to give you something you really need. So here's a brain, in a kind of ice box. Take pleasure in it.'

Atom handed over the cryo box and the President, beaming, opened it up. Amid applause he and Atom shook hands for the blaze of camera strobe, the box tilted like a presentation plaque. ‘Mr President,' said Atom through the clench of his grin, ‘the day that Memorial statue of Abe Lincoln looks aside with a great wrench and steps down like a Harryhausen giant, your balls are pancakes.'

 

ATOM'S JOURNAL

 

Owl with a face like an intake fan. A filigree of golden ductworks, sweating with rootwater. A giant rabbit in the wheelhouse of a missing container ship, staring ahead, woffling its nose, ignoring the state-of-the-art direction-finding equipment. A mirrorcool sky. Scattering rain. A planted field, just beginning to crack.