1.: Radio Friendly Unit Shifter
(Dublin, 12/10/2012)
Here’s the scene: Ptolema sits alone in the booth at Bewley’s Oriental, sipping bitter black coffee. The October morning sun makes hard candy of Harry Clarke’s stained-glass windows, and she checks her watch, and she stares into her coffee cup, and she looks at the stained glass, in that order, over and over again. The two agents are late, and late could mean anything. Or it could mean nothing at all. She’s surrounded by the clamor of Trinity students and faculty, locals, tourists, latter-day bohemians. Ptolema hasn’t been in Dublin in almost twenty years now, and it made her angry and sick to her stomach to see the Starbucks that’s opened almost directly across the street from Bewley’s. This thoroughfare is no longer the Dublin of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde, not the Dublin of Mícheál Ó Coileáin and the Easter Rising. Grafton Street, she thinks, might as well be a Disney World reconstruction of the city. It was not so far along, this cancer, the last time she was here. But, again, that was almost twenty years ago. This is Dublin attempting to remake and sanitize itself for the World At Large, for the travelers who want history as exhibit, local color free of anything that would make them uneasy. Plastic Paddy souvenirs. Leprechaun and shamrock tchotchkes. But, Starbucks or no Starbucks, the McDonald’s at the intersection with Wicklow Street or no, Burger fucking King or no, a block or two in almost any direction, and that, that is still Ewan MacColl’s “Dirty Old Town,” sure as Salford ever was.
Heard a siren from the dock.
Saw a train set the night on fire.
Smelled the spring on the smoky wind.
Dirty old town, dirty old town.
And even here on Sráid Grafton, there are still the buskers, the street preachers, the children sent out by their parents to beg for spare change. Stand on Ha’penny Bridge, and the Liffey still brings to her mind Murdoch and how “No man who has faced the Liffey can be appalled by the dirt of another river.” The tourist-friendly cancer is kept hemmed in by the disagreeable, living city that will never have its face scrubbed up presentable for company. So, good for you, Dirty Old Town.
I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.
Ptolema checks her watch again: 10:38 a.m., which puts the X agents almost a half hour tardy. She’s already called her handler in London once, and if she calls again Ptolema knows she’ll be pulled. Because it could be a setup. Because it might be. She turns off her phone, just in case Barbican Estates decides to ring her. There’s too much riding on this meeting, and she’s not about to see three months’ work swirl down the shitter because someone can’t tell time. Or can’t be bothered. This is, of course, to be expected from the X motherfuckers, and she knew that going in. She leans back in the booth, wanting a cigarette, and the air smells like frying eggs and dry little disks of black and white pudding.
Watch face. Coffee. Stained glass.
She bought the watch from a Munich pawnshop in 1963. The steaming coffee reminds her of the mist rising from that bay in Maine that has disgorged Hell’s own derelicts. The windows hint at an unfamiliar world.
Ptolema notices four students at a nearby table staring. Laughing amongst themselves. Sniggering boy-men. Muttering German. One jabs a thumb her way. To those pasty, pale bastards, she must cut a strange sight, sure: bald head smooth enough it glistens in the sun through the windows, her brown skin, the ugly scar over her left ear, and, to them, she probably appears no older than thirty, thirty-five. Ptolema smiles and shows them her middle finger, and they shut the fuck up and mind their breakfasts. Perhaps it was the impatience in her eyes. Maybe they caught sight of all the secrets there, all the necessary evils of her station, all the men and women she’s sent to Charon—by her own hand or the obedient hands of her subordinates.
Ptolema stares at the door, as though she can will the Xers to show up.
The coffee steams, and she tries not to think of Deer Isle, Maine. She hasn’t entered the quarantine zone herself, and she won’t if she can help it. Thank you very much, but there’s plenty enough ugliness this side of the pond without going abroad in search of more and better. Let the CDC handle it, the CIA and the NSA and that Other American Group that has no official or unofficial title, those faceless, hollow men who crouch in the shadows beneath an Albany skyscraper and are ever on standby when this sort of shit goes down—which seems to be happening more and more often, and fuck all if she even wants to know why. It’s not her job to know why. That’s way above and beyond her pay grade. It’s only her job to monitor the comings and goings of the X. To fathom the unfathomable, as it were, because how do you understand the goals of an organization so secretive 99.9 percent of its operatives have only the faintest idea of the big picture and are let loose to make up the dos and don’ts of a mission or experiment as they go along. Anarchy leaves almost as bad a taste in Ptolema’s mouth as would the crap they sell at that McDonald’s across the way.
The four German kids depart, surly and still muttering amongst themselves. She checks her watch again—10:45. And she’s just about two centimeters away from Screw these idiots, and screw Barbican when she catches sight of two faces that match the photos tucked into the dossier in her satchel beneath the table. These expats, supposedly cast out by their own designs. Fallen from their brethren quasi-Buddhist, mongrel Hindu, cyber-Shinto, Gnostic Thelemite worshippers at the shrines of Castaneda, Crowley, Camus, Blavatsky, Robert Anton Wilson, Velikovsky, Berlitz, Charles Fort, ad infinitum, a congregation based, possibly, in Saigon, or Calcutta, or Buenos Aires, or, more likely, nowhere at all. Anyway, this pair of ladies, they look like the rough end of flattened shit. Even more tattered than in their photographs. A wonder someone didn’t turn them away at the door, because they sure as fuck look more like panhandlers than anyone who could afford a meal or a pint. Between them, probably not even the €2.20 for a side of potato farl. Oh, but how looks can be deceiving, and for all she knows, these two might be goddamn stockbrokers or solicitors on the bum. Still, no one’s going to touch an X. Not anyone who isn’t deep in the know. Won’t have the foggiest why, so call it instinct. In their rags both genuine or carefully cultivated, these two weave their way between the tables, untouchable because that’s the way it is. Fucking ghosts, the whole lot of them. Even rogue agents like these two—assuming they actually are rogues, and that’s not just another layer of some other ghost’s one-dimensional logistic map or what have you. Ptolema sits up straighter and straightens the lapels of her leather blazer—force of habit from years when the Y didn’t send her out to do business with sketchy cocksuckers, when the Bureau’s resources were not stretched so bloody thin, and Ptolema was held back for shadow dignitaries and face-to-face sitdowns with those occupying unquestionable power, for whom appearances actually mattered.
They reach her booth, there below Harry Clarke’s windows. One of the women is a tall redhead with a buzz cut and a ring in her nose. The other’s not so tall, and her black hair’s pulled back in two long braids. Right off, it’s obvious neither of them are Irish. Ptolema doesn’t even have to hear them speak to know that much. Americans, the both of them, and she’d bet half her Swiss bank account on that. They slide into the seat across from her.