‘I will find you,’ she had said. ‘I will always find you.’

But here there was no motion of light in water. The girl was as barred from the prisoner’s cell as the future is inexorably barred from the past. There was only the one door, and it led nowhere. He would study the stains on the walls, searching for patterns in the way they stretched and shrivelled like pulsating, living things. He could see faces in them, clouds, typewriters, mountains. He thought about doors in film.

They were like the fabriques in Parc Monceau. Films were constructed landscapes, a fakery made up of the torn pieces of differing locations. A door opened on the outside of a building, in a movie, and it led — more often than not — not into the inside of the building, but somewhere else. There were transitions in film, smoothed over, made seamless, but they were transitions nevertheless, a shortcut through both space and time. Opening a door in film was like prying open a transdimensional gate: it could lead anywhere, everywhere. It was a realisation the prisoner shied from.

More and more the voices crystallized, like a signal strengthening on a wireless radio set. They whispered, shouted, cried, laughed. They jabbered and muttered and mumbled and yelled, their constant babble invading the darkness. He couldn’t shut them out.

And more questions. He couldn’t shut those out either. ‘Describe a stealth bomber. Describe smart bombs. How does a wireless network operate? What do Scud missiles look like? What is Nintendo? What is a Shenzhou-5?’

‘Where is Mike Longshott?’ the prisoner said. More and more that became his focus, the lode-star to which he could pin the shreds of himself.

‘There is no Mike Longshott.’

But he knew they were lying.

Finding Mike Longshott gave him his purpose back. He began to rebuild the detective out of the floating fragments loose in the darkness. He began to map a landscape, a vista of fabriques.

‘What is your name?’ they kept asking him in interrogation. ‘What was your name?’

‘Joe,’ the prisoner whispered. ‘Joe.’

‘There is no Joe.’

But he knew they were lying.

Then came a time when no one came, and he was left alone in the cell. Though the darkness abated a little, the voices were still there. They sounded louder in the confines of the cell. Mike Longshott, the prisoner thought. And the thought brought with it clarity. He was a detective, and this was his case. He was a detective. In the top drawer of the desk in his office there was an illegal knockoff Smith & Wesson .38, and a bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label: half-empty or half-full, depending.

The voices whispered advice. They were not ready to move on. He thought he recognised familiar voices in the babble but couldn’t be sure. He thought about doors in films. If you opened a door in a fabricated landscape, it could lead you anywhere you wanted to go. But he was afraid of opening the door.

yellow-sun brightness

——

In his cell, the prisoner prepared. He was accompanied now by the voices of the dead, whispering to him, urging him on. He wished he could shut them within the pages of a book. In the stains on the walls he now saw faces, nothing but faces staring back at him. ‘Longshott,’ he said out loud, tasting the name. The shadows murmured assent. The prisoner knew what he was, but didn’t know who. He stared at the door, and the door stared back. He put his hand against its metal surface and it was warm. There was a long jagged scratch in the grey paint at the prisoner’s waist level. The door had no handle. ‘Osama,’ he said, tasting this word, too, like a strange wine, with hints of acidity and some rust. ‘Osama Bin Laden.’

The shadows hissed, like puppets in a theatre. I’m ready, the prisoner thought. He thought of the girl. He pictured mountains. He undressed slowly: at some point his clothes had gone, and he was given a prisoner’s uniform, blood-orange, beltless, and he shelled it off with relief and stood there naked, and with both his hands flat against the surface of the door, he pushed.

The voices grew in pitch and agitation. Yellow light sipped under the door, in the process whitening. He thought he could feel a wind, cold and clean: a mountain wind, flowing and then surging through the edges of the door. He pushed, and the white light turned brighter, a yellow-sun brightness, and its warmth was on his naked skin. He pushed and the door opened, or perhaps disappeared, and the voices rose into an unbearable crescendo. For a long moment the prisoner just stood there, looking out. He thought about freedom. It was what you had when you had nothing left to lose. He stared at the rectangle of bright light and for a moment it was quiet. The voices had fled ahead of him, waited for him on the other side.

The prisoner put his hands against the rectangle of light, testing it. There was no resistance. He could sense the waiting voices. The prisoner shivered, once, and was still.

Joe stepped through the door.

IN TRANSIT

ghost stories

——

There was a bluejay outside my window that morning. Its crest was fully raised, suggesting it was excited, or it was being aggressive. They’re aggressive birds, the bluejays. They’re tough, adaptable, and they’ve been colonizing new habitats for decades. They like bright shiny objects, like coins, and have a reputation, not entirely deserved, for raiding other birds’ nests, and stealing eggs and hatchlings, even the nests themselves. They are very pretty birds, the bluejays. I think this one was a male. I peered at it through the glass and it looked back at me, and the sun streamed in through the window and it looked like it was going to be a beautiful day. I was up early because I had to go to the airport. The colour of a bluejay comes not from pigmentation but from the special structure of its feathers. If you crush the feather, the blue will slowly fade as the structure of the feather is destroyed. I left bed without waking my wife and went downstairs to the kitchen. I put on the coffee and while I waited I looked through my vinyl records and finally put on Duke Ellington’s Mood Indigo, Duke on piano, Joe Nanton on trombone, Whetsol on the trumpet, Bigard on clarinet, Fred Guy on banjo, Braud on bass and Sonny Greer on drums. I’d bought that album when I was a kid, when they still had vinyl in every shop, and I knew every groove and every scratch on that old record. I poured myself some coffee and listened to Duke Ellington and saw that the bluejay had followed me down to the kitchen and was chattering at me through the window. When I had finished the coffee I went back upstairs, the notes of the piano following me as I climbed, and I got dressed and brushed my teeth and picked up my suitcase, which was already packed. My wife turned over on her back and opened her eyes and gave me a sleepy smile and I bent down and kissed her, and she turned around and went back to sleep. I wish, now, I’d told her I loved her. I went downstairs and put away the record, slipping it into its sleeve carefully and placing it with the others. Before I left I trailed my hand over the records, absent-mindedly. When I went outside I could no longer see the bluejay. I drove to the airport with my window half-open. I could smell pancakes from a diner further down the street. When I got to the airport I left the car in the car-park and went into the terminal building. I had to go to Los Angeles for a meeting, and as I sat on the plane waiting for it to leave I made notes on a notepad, things I was going to say, but mostly just doodling.

***

The reason I was on the bus that day is, there was a lot of confusion around King’s Cross, they said there was a power failure, to be honest no one knew what was going on. We were evacuated out from the tube to Euston Bus Station and it was like a sea of nervous, irritable people, too many bodies all together in a crowd, trying to get to work, pushing, and the buses crawling into station like red-shelled snails sick with a summer cold. I was already late and I had a presentation to give that day and so I pushed my way to the bus and somehow managed to get a seat – I was sitting on the upper deck, by the window, looking out on the station. I noticed one boy detach himself from the crowd, moving away into a relatively quiet area, where he stood and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. He had wavy brown hair and wore earphones and as he smoked he nodded his head in time with the music – I remember wondering what album he was listening too, and also trying to see his eyes. For just a moment, as the bus was pulling out of the station, he looked up, and I think he saw me, we were looking at each other, and he smiled. He had a nice smile. For just a moment I had this crazy notion of getting off the bus, pushing out and through all the waiting people, go up to this guy, say something, I don’t know what. Maybe just smile, and bum a cigarette. Maybe ask him what the time was, or if he wanted to go get a coffee. Something. But I never do things like that, and anyway the bus was pulling out of the station, and the guy was looking elsewhere and I sat back and when I looked through the window again he was gone.