Castles Made of Sand (33 page)

A pause that lasted, longer and longer.

‘Can you tell Fiorinda about this?’ Rox asked gently.

‘If I could tell Fiorinda, do you think I would be here?’

‘So you’re going to tell me?’

‘No. Okay, now here’s the issue where I need advice. I want to achieve the Zen Self for myself. I don’t know if this makes sense to you, but once you’ve seen that you could be complete, once you’ve seen it’s
possible
to be complete, it’s a goal that’s irresistible.’

Roxane nodded. ‘Yes. You came to the right place. I understand.’

‘Huh? Oh, you mean your surgery? I never thought of that. Well, good, maybe you do understand. So there’s two reasons for me to achieve the Zen Self. One is that it’s something I must do, or things will turn out very badly. For my Fiorinda, and my Ax, and, fuck,
generally
. The other is my own salvation. So why do I do it? This is the problem. This is very fucking important, Ax, sorry, I mean Rox. If I choose the wrong motive then I won’t achieve the Zen Self, it’s as simple as that. I know I won’t, because I will falter, I will fall, unless I’m absolutely certain.’ The skull laughed silently, in breathtaking detail: the naked minutiae of a human expression.‘Please tell me. Should I be thinking selfish, or stupid?’

‘I don’t know what to say.’

There was another long silence.

‘The details are useless. Like a memory that you cling to, and it was never really like that, you know what I mean… But not the significance. That’s real. When your firing pattern is in phase with information-space you’re
there
, wherever you landed, and it’s
from the brain state
of there that your mind constructs the visions. Emotional truth. So I can’t be wrong. I can be wrong in every detail, but I can’t be wrong in what I know. I’m not trying to change the future. You can’t change the future, and it’s changing all the time anyway: that’s simultaneity. It’s a paradox. Eleven-dimensional kaleidescope, like Ver said. But if I don’t choose right, it will be disastrous. Yeah, it’s confusing. Tell me.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t see how I can help.’

The skull grinned at hir, not very pleasantly this time.

‘You know, you saved my life once. You remember the Africa Tour? “Mba Kyere”, I am passed over? Mary had told me she was getting married, and her bloke would adopt Marlon and I would never see him again. Bullshit, but I believed it. I was trying to kill myself. Not smack, alcohol, much more efficient. George said to me, you know, if you die now, Roxane Smith’s gonna to write your obituary. Kept me alive.’

Who’d be a critic.

‘I am glad to have been of service. There are few rockstars I’d rather keep alive.’

‘Hahaha. All I want is an answer. Just say what you think.’

I genuinely didn’t understand the question, s/he thought. But s/he was moved to pity, and by the memory of what Sage had been to them, through this long dangerous journey. S/he remembered Massacre Night, blood seeping from the mask. Pigsty’s goons had to rough him up: it didn’t bother him at all, he was thinking only of how to protect us. Sage dead calm and rock-steady, from the moment the shit hit the fan. Our tower of strength.

‘Do what seems right to you, Sage. We’ve trusted you all this time. Trust yourself.’

The skull looked amused, and then cast down. ‘Is that it?’ he said. ‘Oh fuck. That’s a challenge. Okay. Thanks.’

Silence again. S/he realised Sage was not aware of these silences, which were curiously
infectious
. The two of them might have gone on sitting for hours, in this anonymous room laden with mementoes.

At last he shifted in the chair and said anxiously, ‘I hope… It wasn’t because you fell out with Chip and Ver over the Zen Self that you left Notting Hill—?’

Roxane set hir wine glass on the small Afghan table at hir elbow and folded hir elegant, aged hands around one knee. ‘No, Sage,’ s/he said with dignity, chin up. ‘I found myself
de trop
. The boys would not have banished me; I withdrew.’

‘Oh. Right.’ A little crooked smile of fellow-feeling.

‘It doesn’t matter. My relationship with Kevin was always based more on love than on sex, and the love is still there.’

‘Well, I think I’ll go now.’

S/he went with him to the door of the room. ‘Sage. When I feel the need to call on supernatural power, I get on my knees—which is not so easy as it used to be—and I perform an arcane invocation that begins,
Our father in heaven…
As you say, every detail may be fucked up; the significance is not. I have been young, I am now old, and I have never found, or heard of, any tech fix or psychoactive drug that bettered my results.’

The skull looked at hir, almost as blank as a Hallowe’en mask. S/he was suddenly very disconcerted. Has Aoxomoxoa really visited eternity? Does he know the truth about what lies there?
Know
it, beyond argument, beyond faith? Don’t tell me, s/he thought. Please, let me cling to my illusions. But Sage was on another tack.

‘Did the punters drown?’

S/he shook hir head. ‘They didn’t. They survived. But I’m afraid it didn’t do Lord Jim a lot of good.’

‘Figures.’

S/he offered hir hand. He took it and bowed over it, the mask vanishing so that it was his natural hand s/he held; his natural face that smiled at hir, as he went out the door. Roxane was left wondering if the whole strange, unconversation s/he’d just had with the Few’s mad scientist might possibly be under the seal of the confessional.

Perhaps so.

As soon as they knew what had happened to Ax, Fiorinda went north for a meeting with DARK. She had to resign from the band: she was unavailable, from now until don’t know when. It was hard. She hadn’t known it would be hard, she’d thought this was the least of her worries: but she was giving up her life. This is how Ax felt, she thought. At least she wasn’t taking their lead guitarist away. Drums, bass, keyboards, two guitars, and everyone could sing if pushed. Charm said, yeah, and we’ll change our knickers frequently, bossyboots. Fuck off, this is
my
band: but what’s this in the tiny polecat eyes of the dike-rock empress? Could it be sympathy? They did a last gig, live at the lambtonworm headquarters in Middlesborough-on-Tees, and she left for London.

Ax had disappeared off the face of the earth. There was no mention of his ‘undercover meeting’ on the Internet Commissioners’ quarantined satellite link, and they couldn’t ask, because they had no way of knowing who was in on the secret. They might not hear from him for weeks; or months.

Sage might be dead by then.

The weird science cabal couldn’t help her. The Heads,
Sage’s band
, had given up on him. Dilip and Chip and Ver were as bad as the punteres, still in thrall to the fucking quest: they knew what Sage was doing was insane, and incredibly dangerous, but they admired him madly and they wouldn’t stop him if they could. At Reading Mayday concert the Heads did an
Unmasked
set, and the mosh roared
Zen Self Zen Self Go For It Sage!
as if he’d invented a new way of juggling with chainsaws. Fiorinda, watching from the side, because she had not been able to stay away, saw how the dancing had been reduced to what he could manage (muscle weakness), and her world darkened. She had already seen Aoxomoxoa on stage for the last time. Gone. Never no more.

She went to Olwen, feeling scared because she was afraid of Olwen Devi. The meeting turned out to be tough in a different way from what she’d expected. Fiorinda had friends she loved that she had also fucked, but she had never fucked anyone
for love
except Ax and Sage. She’d thought other people were the same, and she hadn’t realised how Olwen felt. It was awful. Olwen didn’t say a word of reproach, but they both knew it was all Fiorinda’s fault for not being content with one boyfriend.

But Olwen was helpless too, and that was Fiorinda’s last card.

It was hateful, pathetic.

The position she was in made her blood boil in impotent fury.

They had stopped seeing each other because it was such hell, but she stayed at Rivermead where she could at least be near him, and hear about him. She managed what work she could, and David and Allie were very good about it. When she heard Sage had gone to visit Mary, and to see Marlon at his boarding school, she knew it was over. He wouldn’t be doing that except to say goodbye. But he came back, and she found out that the Zen Selfers were still talking weeks or months. Sage was weaker, they had to space the sessions out, and he couldn’t take so much of the drug. So there was still hope.

Months! June, July, August? Ax could be home.

A few days after she started hoping again, it was all over the campground that Sage had been ‘out’—that is, brain-dead—for nearly six minutes. His brain hadn’t suffered because they’d been supercooling him and pumping him with oxygen, but his heart had started bleeding and given them a big scare. It had been touch and go. Now Olwen Devi was refusing to give him any more life support, so he was leaving. He would go to the Zen Self parent company in North Wales. They regarded Olwen as a renegade, but they knew about Sage and they were willing to help him, as long as he understood the terms. With them, there was no way back. Win or lose, once you pass through the gates of Caer Siddi you don’t come out again.

One night in the last week of May, Fiorinda sat at her piano; in the great upper room with the windows facing west. There was a fire buring in the enamelled metal fireplace, but the room felt cold. She’d been sitting there for a long while, not playing, just looking at nothing. Occasionally she’d rub her bare arms. She was wearing the red and blue printed chiffon that she’d worn when they went to Tyller Pystri, the night they asked her if they could both be her lovers. Elsie the cat was curled up asleep in front of the fire. Someone knocked at the door. She went to open it and there was Sage. She had known he would come to her. She’d been afraid, but he didn’t look as if he was dying. He was leaning against the door frame with the collapsible look he got when very drunk, and Sage-very-drunk was someone she had known and loved, God knows, since the very beginning. She stood back and let him walk in.

‘Remind me,’ she said. ‘Where are we in the rules? Am I allowed to touch you?’

‘You’re a vicious brat.’

He crossed to the hearth, moving with the stringless-puppet uncoordinated grace of Sage-very-drunk, and sat in one of the cross-framed chairs. ‘Come and sit on my knee.’

It was only then that she noticed he wasn’t wearing the mask. She hadn’t seen his natural face since the time he came round to Brixton, after the mediaeval banquet. Oh yes, the night we cried. His hair was shorn again, and she was glad of that. He looked like himself, only very thin and very tired.

She sat on his knee. His arms closed warmly around her. She pulled open his shirt and burrowed her face against him, inhaling the scent of his skin.

He kissed her hair. ‘Oh, Fiorinda… I’m leaving.’

‘I spotted that.’ She sat up. ‘Nothing would get you into a room alone with me except
oh, Fiorinda I’m leaving
. I know all about it. Olwen Devi won’t give you life support any more, so you’re going to Caer Siddi, to achieve the Zen Self or die in the attempt. Oh
God
,’ she wailed, hammering at his chest with her fists, ‘do you ever listen to yourself? What’s
Zen
about it? Where is the
don’t cling! don’t strive!
in what you are doing to yourself? How can you reach something called “the Zen Self” by force, by hustling?’

‘It’s not like that.’

‘What is it like then,
bastard
?’

‘Fee, please don’t talk to me like that tonight.
Please
.’

‘What, you think I ought to be nice to you because after tonight we’ll never see each other again? You’re off to kill yourself, and I ought not to waste our last precious moments yelling? For fuck’s sake!’

‘I am not going to kill myself.’

‘Like hell.’

‘This is something I have to do, Fiorinda.’

She freed herself, though it was terrible to leave his arms, and stood in front of him, shivering hard, but
still fighting
. ‘You’re doing this to punish yourself, because we cheated on Ax and we can’t ever be lovers any more. Is that fair, Sage? Do you really think that’s fair to me, or fair to Ax? Or, or, fuck, to England? I still love you, you know. Are you telling me that without sex there’s nothing left between us?’

‘I shall love you till I die.’

‘Great. So when’s that? Next Wednesday?’ Her knees were giving way, she knelt, shivering, and stared into the flames. ‘No, I’m wrong. This is because of my magic. You think you’ll have magic powers like me. Shit, how can you want the filthy stuff?’

‘It might be different, coming to it the Zen Self way.’

She turned and stared at him in contempt and disbelief.

Sage got down beside her, moving carefully into one of his giant pixie poses. He was so calm. ‘I want to be complete,’ he said. ‘I don’t think this is anything like your power, Fiorinda. Though I think, I suspect, that you may have made your power like it. Zen Self is like when you are for a moment very happy, and you truly forgive and understand the whole terrible world, including yourself and everything you’ve ever done. It’s like getting back to that state where everything is right, via the tech, and making it physical reality. Everything in your whole life fits, it’s coherent, and you are
there
in all of it. There’s nothing you’re afraid of. There’s nothing you have to forget, or cut out, or hide, or deny. That’s what I want. I have seen it, and I cannot turn back.’

‘So join a fucking monastery.’

‘Too slow.’

She remembered being with him by the river, in another Maytime, and he had told her that he wanted to go into the desert, to find himself. We never listen when the people we love are saying the most vital things. ‘You could wait till Ax comes home. I love you, Sage. I’m not totally surprised you’re doing this. It’s always been in you, you’ve always wanted
everything
. But please wait. Just wait.’

‘I can’t. It’s now or never.’

‘What did Mary say?’

‘Oh, I didn’t tell her. I meant to, but it wouldn’t work. But it was okay. I’ll never know how to behave to someone I injured so shamefully, but it was better. Almost like two normal divorced parents, discussing the kid with decent forbearance.’