“I think you need another route to time displacement, that’s all. This ain’t healthy. In fact, this is dangerous, cutting into the feeds like that. And Jesus, I’m tired of telling you this. How many times have I told you now?”
“She was a genius,” Ahmed says, almost whispering. “But that does not mean someone could not have interceded before she reached middle game.”
“Your book says someone did. A whole several someones, if I recall.”
Ahmed has two books, actually. Two genuine analog books from the back before: A Field Guide to Eastern Butterflies and The White Queen.
“I mean to say . . .” But then it’s as if he forgets what he’s saying, loses his train of thought before the sentence is hardly begun.
“I know what you mean to say, Ahmed. Don’t let it eat at you. I know what you mean, so don’t worry.”
“Here is the day,” says Ahmed, and this time he actually is whispering, and Johnson almost doesn’t catch the words. Also, just as he says it, the Argyle Shoestring takes a rogue wave across her bow and rocks to port, so there’s another distraction. But Here is the day, that’s a folk hand-me-down, a scribble in the margin of paranoia, what some believe were the last words from the twin before the sky went black and the night came crashing down so, so long ago. Read that bit as you will, literally or figuratively.
“Right, well,” Johnson tells his cabinmate. “This is what I’ve heard.”
And then Johnson turns back to the porthole glass and watches the sun sinking over the Massachusetts horizon while Ahmed goes to his trunk to get the plastic chess set.
4.: Black Ships Seen Last Year South of Heaven
(Dublin, 13/10/2012)
As an American colleague of Ptolema’s has said to her on several occasions, There is late, and then there is not fucking coming, so give it up and go home. She’s sitting alone picking over the sad remnants of her €7.50 plate of smoked cod and chips. Her mouth tastes of beer, malt vinegar, and fried fish. She pokes at the rind of a lemon slice with her fork, then her eyes wander once more to the tall windows facing out onto Upper O’Connell Street. No sign of either the anonymous redhead or black braids. She knows their names, of course, all of it right there in the dossier, and, sure, they know that she knows, but this is how the game is played. She stops stabbing at the lemon slice and pushes the plate away. Late was an hour ago.
Maybe, maybe, she thinks, I should ditch them both. They’re playing me, or they think they are. It’s all a goddamn puppet show for the X. It’s never much of anything else from X, now is it?
She finishes the dregs of her second pint of the evening and briefly considers ordering a third Guinness. But her head’s already a hint of cloudy, and it’s not completely beyond reason to suppose that the pair, or one or the other of them, might yet turn up. So, no more alcohol. When she gets back to the hotel, she’ll turn to the bottle of Connemara and let the whiskey do its job good and proper.
Enough is goddamn enough, she thinks. No one can blame me for canceling on a tête-à-tête that’s never coming. I’ll call Barrymore and lay it all out, start to finish, and, if I’m lucky, he’ll tell me to take the next plane the fuck out of Ireland. She leaves a generous tip, then abandons the warm sanctuary of the restaurant and steps out into the raw and windy night. Ptolema buttons her coat and turns up the collar against the cold. She follows O’Connell Street south and crosses the bridge, then stands at the edge of Aston Quay, watching the dark waters of the peaty Liffey sliding past on their way to the sea. She folds up the collar of her coat and winds her scarf more tightly about her face. This wind’ll strip the skin right off your bones, and here it is not even November yet. The freezing air smells like the river. It smells like the algae clinging to the constricting stone channel through which the river flows. On the opposite shore, back the way she’s come, Eden Quay is a garish spray of neon signs.
Ptolema isn’t aware the redhead is standing only a couple of feet away until the woman speaks. “I’d say I’m sorry about being late,” she says. “Only I’m not, and I’m not in the mood for lies, if you catch my drift.”
“You might have let me know.” Ptolema unwinds the scarf from her face, so her voice won’t be muffled by wool. The redhead has dropped the phony accent, so at least there’s that.
“Might have, but I did not. Bury the past. Move on. Keep on truckin’. Here we are now, and now we can conduct our business beyond the attentions of any we desire not to know our business.”
“You think I don’t have other problems besides you?” Ptolema asks her. “You think you’re at the very fucking top of my list of priorities?”
“I do,” the woman says, and she lights a cigarette. She exhales smoke and the fog of her breath. “At the very tippy top, or near enough. I thought you wanted me to drop all the deceits, Miss P.”
“So, we’re going to stand out here in the cold and have this conversation? I’m going to placate you and freeze my ass off because you’re afraid someone might overhear us in a fish-and-chips shop?”
“If you actually want to hear whatever it is I have to say. I know you Y sorts. I know if there’s one of you, then there’s two, and I know if there’s two, there’s four. I’m keen to your exponential support protocol.”
“Our what? You just fucking made that up.”
The redhead takes another drag on her cigarette and shrugs.
“Are you here to listen, Miss P, or are you here to talk?”
Ptolema takes a punt Éireannach from a pocket and tosses it into the Liffey, a shiny red deer cast in nickel and copper for goddesses forgotten or goddesses who never were.
That there, that’s not me—I go where I please—I walk through walls, I float down the Liffey . . . In a little while, I’ll be gone. I’ll be gone. I’ll be gone. Must then my fortune be . . . wake by the trumpet’s sound . . . and see the flaming skies. I’ll be gone.
Her random thoughts, that come and go, talking of Michelangelo.
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag.
“Fine,” Ptolema tells the redhead. “Twisby and the twin, the twin named Bête.”
“You don’t like what I got to say, if you think I’m bullshittin’ you, you got orders, don’t you? Terminate. Terminate, with extreme prejudice, just like Jerry Ziesmer tells Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now. That’s how it is, I know.”
Ptolema chews at her chapped lower lip, smothering impatience.
“And we shall play a game of chess?” the redhead asks her and laughs.
“No more games. No more stalling.”
“But what about your recording, Miss P? Your creepy child’s voice from out the ether. Is it not commanding that we do just that?”
Ptolema wonders how many years or centuries the coin will lie lost among the rocks and silt on the riverbed. After even she’s dead. Long after this crisis has come and gone and is only an ugly shred of occult history. The X would build an entire equation around the consequences of her having tossed a punt into the river.
“Twisby and the twin,” she says and leaves no room in her voice for any more nonsense from the redhead.