Authors: Jeff Noon
‘Three weeks and two days.’
‘You’ve been watching?’
‘Oh, more than that.’
‘What?’
Nola shrugged.
George glanced at her. ‘Melissa is acting weird, don't you think?’
‘It’s always weird. That’s the nature of the Dome.’
‘Yes, but not like this. Not this bad. I mean...she’s practically an animal.’ George shook his head. ‘It’s disgusting. Really.’
‘She’s getting close.’
‘Close?’
‘To the truth.’
George looked at Nola. ‘What is that supposed to mean?’
Nola smiled. ‘The occupant needs to be isolated, stripped of basic human values. Only then is the mind truly alive to the moment by moment flow of images.’
‘Oh. You think?’
‘Truth is not born from beauty. It’s born from dirt.’
George waved his hand at this. ‘What is that? Poetry or something? I don’t know what you mean, Nola. You’re not making sense.’
She nodded and grinned and watched him for a while. Her manager sat there, bathed in blue screen light, his face glowing sad at the sights on view.
Nola spoke with kindness. ‘It’s not her. It’s not really her, you do know that. It’s not Melissa. It’s just her image.’
George shook his head at this. His eyes were lost and clouded. His yellow-stained fingers wavered over the buttons on the remote. ‘There’s a difference?’ he asked.
Nola looked at him. ‘George...you really think you created me, don’t you?’
He stared at her: ‘I did.’
The words lay between them.
‘I was always in denial of that,’ Nola said. ‘I had so many...dreams...that I thought they had to be mine and mine alone. They didn’t belong to you.’
‘I allowed you to dream.’
Nola smiled.
‘No more.’
She felt cold at saying this, almost as though she had betrayed him, abandoned her mentor to loneliness.
George shook his head. ‘I don't know what you’re saying.’
‘Your days are passing.’
‘Why are you being like this?’
She found a magazine article about herself. The photographs had been digitally mutated, excised of every human flaw.
‘Maybe I should try that one time.’
‘What?’
‘Covering myself in mud, in shit. Tearing my hair out, eating barely cooked meat on live scattercast.’
George frowned at her. He took her in, head to foot, saying: ‘You’re not looking too well, pumpkin.’
‘Look at this, George.’ She brandished the magazine, the layout. ‘I look like a doll, a great big grown-up plastic dolly.’
‘Nola?’
‘If I took up a knife, right this moment...if I should cut myself, slice myself open, what would happen? I’d collapse. No blood. Just the air escaping from me. I’d vanish.’
‘You’re not still worried about the single, are you?’
Nola shook her head. She made a noise, a drawn breath. The magazine fell from her hands.
George asked: ‘What have you been doing with yourself?’
‘Driving. Just driving around.’
‘On your own?’
A shrug. Nola pulled her overcoat tighter around her body.
‘And the same last night?’ George continued. ‘Am I right? You know success is fine from a distance, Nola, but up close it breeds jealousy. You have to be careful out there.’
‘So you say.’
‘They can turn nasty.’
‘They?’
‘The punters. They might see you in the wrong light, and come over all Roman Empire on you. It happens, believe me. They might well tear that lovely body of yours to shreds.’
‘That might be welcomed.’
George sighed. ‘It’s not over yet, my dear.’
‘What isn't?’
‘Your career. Not yet. Not quite yet.’
Nola kept silent on this.
‘Oh fuck. There it goes again.’ This from George as he stood up and walked over to the screen. ‘Should I celebrate this, or curse it?’ He jabbed at the remote, but it was no good; the image was flickering, black to white, black to white to black. The sole inhabitant of the Dome was seen only in the moments between darkness. George cursed. ‘Too much god-awful stupid interference. Electric storms in the ionosphere. Too many satellites up there, the signals cross over each other. And not only that, the bloody moon’s slipping out of orbit, now. I read that, online.’
‘You believe these things?’
‘Some such.’
He pressed at the remote, bringing up scenes from other cameras, finding one that remained stable. It patrolled the area around the Dome.
‘Look at them all, Nola. All drawn by some kind of
force-beam or something, some twisted-up desire. It’s the central node, you see, where the Nation’s desires gather. And what are they doing? They’re not chanting anymore, they’re not screaming and clapping and all the usual stuff, no, they’re just standing there in some kind of media trance.’
Nola moved closer to the visionplex.
She felt her own body warming up, the nearer she got,
bursts of electrical energy
travelling her brain and nervous system.
Her fingertips glowed.
She studied the faces of the audience.
The camera chose one young couple for its special attention, two of the more photogenic specimens. Their faces were fixed at one shared angle, their eyes spellbound as they gazed at the Dome. Now the viewpoint shifted to the Pleasure Dome itself. The screen fizzed with lines of snow and pixel dust. And even the moon was faulty; the silver globe that hung above was flickering with cloud cover, atmospherics.
The light was failing.
The crowds at the fence stood with their heads bowed, in reverence before the Church of the Sacred Image.
They might well be praying.
Nola’s skull buzzed with noise. She could imagine the global audience in their millions, in their true goggle-eyed multitude, watching this poor young woman, Melissa.
Three weeks and more. Twenty-three days of the body under constant surveillance, loved and prodded by lenses and microphones, followed and scanned, examined. Days and nights of the mind being sucked, hollowed out, scoured and framed, images pulled loose and projected wide onto the Dome that lay above her, around her on all sides, enclosing.
Viewers worldwide lay bets on the extent and future chronology of Melissa’s breakdown. They
wanted
the breakdown. It would be sustenance to them, fuel for the desperate party of their own lives, and compensation for all the cold nights they had stared at their own faces in like manner, the mirror’s need drawing them forth. The viewers yearned to see themselves up there on the screen, not as superstars, but as broken people, survivors damaged by love and by hate and work and departing children and illness and grief and frustration and betrayal and laziness and distrust and all the games they had played and lost in the past: well now let somebody else fail, they were saying, let them suffer instead of me.
Be my mirror...
Crack me open.
Show me the mind’s dark contents. Fuck me up. Pity me. Throw me crumbs, I do not care. Nail yourself to the cross of entertainment for me. Let me see that, let me worship at the shrine of glass.
Nola felt weak. Her body swayed.
On screen, the miniature cameras moved in, their gentle lenses searching the Dome’s interior space, finding Melissa once again. Finding flesh.
Her forearm filled the screen.
She had fashioned a tiny blade from a stone, and with this she was writing in perfect, precious, delicate letters of blood and dirt her message from before, her constant refrain:
DADDY I H
George Gold couldn't take his eyes off the picture, off the message as it appeared in letters, one by one.
DADDY I HATE Y
Nola touched his arm gently. ‘Don’t do it, George. Don't look at her.’
‘But she’s crying out, isn't she? Look now, please. She’s crying out for love.’
‘For your love?’
Melissa was carefully slicing the difficult shape of the letter O. This was intercut with shots of the Dome from the outside, the same letters in crimson also forming on the exterior surface, large size, a flow and flux of pain.
The Dome screamed in silence.
George’s face set tight. ‘Of course for my love, what else? Look! I’m the subject matter of her essay. Nobody else. Me.’
Nola felt faint. She said, ‘Nobody’s survived in there for more than five weeks, you know that. Most of them go crazy. That’s why the crowd gathers, it’s why we watch. We want the madness.’
He nodded. ‘Melissa will do it, she’ll beat the record. Melissa will win.’
‘That’s what you hope?’
‘She’s my girl. My true brave little girl.’ George took a drink. ‘You should’ve seen her, Nola, in the weeks previous to this. Melissa would turn up unexpected at my door, drunk to the limits, screaming at me. Other times, I would come home and find her in the house already, just sitting there in silence, in shadows. Staring at me. Just...just staring. Hours would pass by. Once she was found wandering half naked in the street, demanding that people be her friend.’ He wiped his eyes. ‘So this...her entering the Dome, it’s a way forward, don’t you think. Tell me you think that?’
Nola moved back a little.
‘Why don’t you go and see her, George? Speak to her. I’m sure they’d let you in.’
No response. He could not take his eyes off the screen, where the ritual continued.
A final letter. The message was now complete, as one on skin and screen and Dome:
DADDY I HATE YOU
George’s eyes closed. His face held itself tight. Nola could see his age, peeking out from beneath all the lift and stretch work he’d had done in the last few years.
He smiled to himself and then looked up at her.
‘All I want,’ he murmured, ‘all I want is to reach down there through the screen, to take my daughter into my arms, to touch my palms against her head, one hand on each side, like this, you see?’
Hands held in front of him, just far enough apart.
‘To press my fingers lightly against the implants where they glow, to feel the heat of those electrical stigmata, and to...and to send my own thoughts into her mind, to converse with her in this way, this gentle way.’
He gazed at Nola, his eyes wet, aglow.
‘That’s all.’
Nola spoke softly: ‘The people are waiting for Melissa to kill herself.’ She moved in close to him, tender now. ‘They want her to explode, to blow her mind open with one last cascade of thoughts and dreams. It’s what they really and most truly desire. You do know that?’
Flicker...
George hesitated. One hand dropped to the remote. His head shook, barely discernible.
‘Why? Why are you saying this?’
‘It’s the truth.’
George turned to the screen. The broadcast image of his child blurred in his sight.
Nola held her breath. Now she had to speak. To speak of herself
Sweat on her body, feverskin.
‘I’m in trouble, George.’
Silence. Then he coughed. ‘Trouble?’
‘It’s serious.’
Looking now. Looking at Nola. Considering her face, its various aspects; her body shape, the language of her stance; her hands, the way they were held in front of her, folded across her stomach. It was a pose he had never seen her do before. Certainly, it was not one of her prescribed moves, not part of the official choreography. He would have to have words with someone. Another word to be added to the long list of words to be had with so many people; it was growing daily. It was threatening to pull him under, it was smothering him.