‘I can’t,’ he said. He didn’t look, didn’t want to see the speaker. He took a drag on the cigarette and went and hailed a taxi and got inside.

‘Drive,’ he said, and when the driver looked at him with a quizzical expression Joe said, ‘Just drive.’

artificial day

——

Lights and people and too-tall buildings… it was warm and dark inside the taxi, and smelled inexplicably of aniseed, covering a deeper lingering smell that was familiar. The driver glanced sideways, saw the paperback in Joe’s hands and scowled. ‘My nephew has that book,’ he said. ‘Listen to this. A bomb goes off downtown and the police arrest the Easter bunny, Santa Claus, the tooth fairy and Osama Bin Laden. They put them in an identity parade and have a witness try to point out the perpetrator. Who does she pick?’

Joe said, ‘I don’t know.’

‘Osama Bin Laden,’ the taxi driver said. ‘Because the other three don’t exist.’

He scowled harder. ‘I don’t get it,’ he said. Then: ‘I told my nephew I catch him reading this shit again I’ll smack him.’

Joe just felt tired. ‘Did it work?’ he said. The driver shook his head, slowly and with great deliberation, from side to side. ‘No,’ he said.

Joe was looking, not at the open book but at the single sheet of paper he had smoothed open between the pages. It was the paper he had found in Mike Longshott’s correspondence. Like the taxi driver, he didn’t get it either.

The paper read:

Conspiracies and Crime, Murder and Mayhem, Vengeance and Valor –

For the First. Time. Ever!

Only In New York City –

A Global Gathering of Like Minded Minds:

 

OsamaCon !!!

 

Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden ??

 

The shadowy Vigilante, the arch-criminal mastermind, the enemy of Western Civilization?

 

Come and find out – if you dare!

 

Panels, lectures, family entertainment, dealer tables, art expo and costume competition!

An all-you-can-eat B.B.Q following the parade on Sunday!

 

Only $55 pre-registration, $65 at the door, The Hotel Kandahar, Lower Manhattan (does not include room price. 10% discount available for members registering early. Kids go half-price). To book dealer tables contact the organisers ( Mike Longshott Appreciation Society, Queens, New York ). Price negotiable.

 

Be blown away – only at the First Annual OsamaCon, coming soon –

And then the dates, hotel address and contact numbers, all crowded in at the bottom, as if shying away from the bold, mis-matched writing overhead.

‘What’s that?’ the taxi driver said.

‘That?’ Joe said. He shook his head. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said, folding it closed again. ‘Can you take me to the Hotel Kandahar, please?’

‘Hotel what?’ the driver said.

Joe gave him the address. The driver shrugged. ‘You need a girl?’ he said.

‘No.’

‘Everybody needs a girl,’ the driver said. Joe said, ‘I have one already…’ though he wasn’t sure he did. An image of the girl rose in his mind again, under the plane, just before it took off. I will find you, she had said. And so far she had…

‘Dope?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You need some dope? I got some Burmese stuff, make you see paradise.’

Under the aniseed, the familiar smell of opium. Joe said, ‘Just drive.’

He sat back and closed his eyes against the city they were passing through. The driver drove. Silence like a spider’s web shivered behind Joe’s eyes.

It was coming up to morning, but New York had an artificial day lit up that was all of her own.

towers reaching for the sky

——

‘I’d like a room.’

A burned-out light bulb in the ceiling fixture meant only a single light shone and the bulb was bare and hanging from its wire. A high-class dump. The man behind the high counter had the eyes of a rabbit – they moved so much it was impossible not to imagine him running from something. He looked as if he’d ran for a very long time and didn’t know how to stop. He shrugged, open palms forward, did a small, strange shudder with his shoulders. ‘I’m afraid we’re full.’

Joe put down a wad of cash. The black credit card burned a hole in his pocket. ‘But we might have something. Let me check.’

Joe put down another, thinner wedge of money. Machine-cut, printed in the US of A. Dead presidents stated up at the man in reception. ‘Tenth floor,’ the man said. The money disappeared. Perhaps he was an amateur magician.

There was a cut-out of Osama Bin Laden, life-sized, at the entrance to the hotel. A wooden table and two folding chairs and a sign that said Registration. There was no one sitting there. The man at reception followed Joe’s gaze and his eyes opened just a little wider and he said, ‘Are you here for the convention?’

‘Has it started yet?’

‘Pre-registration was today – yesterday, I should say.’ Outside, night like a giant ape had been defeated by morning’s firepower and was toppled. There was no one else in reception only there was, but Joe wasn’t willing to admit it. Not just yet. Only when he moved the shadows in the dusty corners of the room seemed to move with him, and shapes materialised only to resolve themselves into everyday objects when he focused on them. Maybe he was just tired.

He hoped so.

‘Your key,’ the man behind the reception desk said. Above his head a row of round clocks showed the time in Tokyo, Los Angeles, Kabul and Bombay as well as New York. Only New York time was frozen at 8:46. ‘When do they open?’ Joe said, jerking his thumb at the empty desk by the door.

‘A couple of hours.’

He didn’t feel tired. He said, ‘Do you have a bar?’

‘Through there, but –’

Joe collected his key.

‘When do you come off-shift?’ he said.

The man shrugged and twitched. His pupils were dilated. ‘I don’t,’ he said.

Joe shrugged and headed for the elevator. ‘Go easy on that stuff,’ he said. The shadows followed him with dry whispers.

In the room he prepared a bath. The sound of the running water was soothing. Daylight seeped in through the window-frames. He turned off the water and went and sat down on the bed. He must have fallen asleep, because when he opened his eyes the light was much brighter and when he went to the bath the water was cold and the bubbles had gone, leaving only a film of murky perspiration on the surface of the water. He opened the windows and let in air, and the murmuring voices quieted down. He lit a cigarette and ran a fresh bath.

Outside the window, towers were reaching for the sky like Babylonian minarets. The bed had been made military-fashion, you could bounce a coin off it if that was your idea of amusement. It wasn’t Joe’s. The bed looked undisturbed. It always did, even though he must have fallen asleep on it. Sleep, for Joe, was merely an absence.

A khaki-brown blanket was folded neatly and precisely over the bed with its edges tucked into the underside of the mattress. Joe looked out of the window again. He had the feeling that outside the window there should have been hover-cars, men in trilby hats and jet packs, spider-webs of passageways spreading out of the distant tops of the towers. There should have been women in silver suits taking in a show at the tri-vids before indulging in a spot of lunch, the kind that came in three-course pills, great big subservient robots trailing behind them. Instead there was a brown man in overalls collecting rubbish with a long stick outside an adult cinema, and the cars were halted, bumper-to-bumper, beside a traffic light that seemed to be stuck permanently on red. There was a siren in the distance. There was the sound of car horns, a door slamming, someone cursing loudly in American English. Joe shut the window and put out the cigarette and stripped, taking off tie and moustache and Victor “Ricky” Laszlo.