Authors: Jeff Noon
She saw Melissa’s body, her shape.
Melissa Gold. The young woman seen clearer, reaching out from the screen towards Nola with such anguish on her face, it was painful to behold. Nola mirrored her every movement, reaching out herself in dreamlife,
further, closer.
Through the glass of the Dome, through the screen.
Until the hands met, until the fingers intertwined.
Until their eyes clicked on each others,
deep and dark.
(Hands, red...red...)
Melissa’s grip tightened. Something passed between them, Nola could feel it, a light, a fire.
Flicker.
Something nagged. Static charge.
Melissa sliding away. Distant.
Near.
Distant.
Unreachable now../..>
*//..,>
Spark,,,*/
../.(+,,,crackle of
skull..,’/>..fuse..),//>...
../*/ <.+...
Nola turned and turned in her dreaming sleep.
Seeing...glimpsing...
Hands red with blood. What? Why this?
Fingers
flowing. Red.
No...
Melissa’s hands. Smeared.
Red.
Melissa with her little blade of stone and wire, cutting herself.
Slicing herself, her stomach.
Clearly seen in the dream.
Melissa. No. Don’t...please...
So clearly...painful, clear. The knife working with care, with precision held against the pain, shallow cuts in the belly’s flesh.
Design work.
What are you doing? Stop. Please don’t...
Nola’s voice, her dreaming voice unheard.
Stop now...
( sklikc )
A tiny noise. The soft click and hum of a camera.
Nola stirred.
Dreaming...ah yes...good...only dreaming...
Blue flash.
A tiny black lens opening in the darkened room.
!fzzkzzzzztzk!
stealing light and colour from her skin.
Nola moaned and cried out.
She awoke.
...
Hotel room, dark.
Then a flash of yellow light, soft, spreading
Fading.
Her eyes were bleary, half closed, but she could see the young man standing there, Joe Palmer, this temporary lover, someone to cling to in the dark. But now he stood apart, his face half hidden by shadow and by the shining glamacam that he held, his body immobile but for the one finger pressing over and over, activating the shutter, collecting all that Nola had to give, all of her various outpourings, her body aglow with the channels of the night.
He moved in close on the mouth, her lips painted with flecks of colour, tiny pictures, moving figures. Lips that moved, yet barely. Whispers.
Joe. Joe, don’t. Stop now.
‘It’s all right.’ Distant reply. Joe’s voice. ‘I just want to...I want to keep you for later.’ A quiet voice. ‘To look over you, when you’re gone. Your beauty. To watch you again.’
Stop. Stop now.
Camera click.
‘Only for me,’ he whispered. ‘For my use alone, I promise.’
Nola groaned.
Her stomach flamed.
The slow cut and stab of a blade, slowly, carefully—
Nola felt it. The dream still present in some way.
How can that be?
She felt clearly the pain of the blade and when she looked down, moving aside the bed sheet, down to her naked flesh she saw there:
Blood.
Blood on her skin, her belly, her hands
Scratches:
A series of them curving round, making a shape.
Tiny little cuts
The blood dripping from each one,
stark red.
Nola’s heart jumped, her breath
stopped.
She looked down in a slow daze at the wound.
A crude design of a human eye looked back at her from the flesh. Lids, eyeball, widened pupil, a few lashes.
A tear.
Nola’s mind was split in two:
One half seeing the blood for what it was, a mere film of the wounds captured from broadcast waves.
Her hand moving through the wave of signals
her fingers dry
unsliced themselves
unbloodied
but
filmed
with blood.
The other side of her mind feeling the torment
imagining the act;
the knife peeling flesh
again
again.
The knife
Point of contact—
The slow painful determination
Skkrssskttt...
Nola cried, reaching out for Joe.
The camera flashed
soft
yellow.
‘Joe,’ she said, ‘Joseph, turn on the screen.’
‘What?’
Turn it on.
He did so. Putting down the camera, moving to the small set attached to the wall by a swinging metal arm.
He tuned into Pleasure Dome.
And they saw there, as shown already on Nola’s stomach, the wounds of Melissa.
Live and direct. Rolling as we speak.
Melissa had cut into her own stomach with an improvised blade and carved out the symbol of an eye, an eye that stared out of the screen in close-up.
A human eye of blood
and tears.
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Wound pulse.
Nola alone now. She could barely keep her hands on the steering wheel, barely see the road ahead through the blur of early morning rain, the throb of overload.
Too much information.
Too many pictures.
The slow red flow of her stomach and hands, drop by drop.
Her flesh lined with a blood diagram where the image knife had cut.
Still in shock from that, still reeling. Still thinking that somehow she had to reach out, to help in some way, to cleanse the blood, to close and stitch the wound.
Melissa’s stomach.
Nola knew that now.
Melissa’s hands.
Nola picked up further news from the airwaves, from the fiery web sparkle of the ether. Millions of signals flashing back and forth through grey light, through clouds and dust and scattered wind-borne litter. She saw them in her mind’s eye, his vast array of communication. Melissa’s crude weapon examined in details, discussed by experts, this thin stark blade of sharpened stone and wire strung with dirty matted hair. With this she had proceeded to harm herself.
Seven cuts to the stomach.
In reality, the cuts were shallow, a work of art more than damage.
Demonic markings, ritual scars.
The eye. Shape and symbol.
The evil eye. The all-seeing eye.
Horus.
The Pleasure Dome worked its magic, its skin of dreams alive with the same imagery, the eye of poison, the eye of love, the splash of red, fountains, a scarlet moon, a swarm of flies with crimson wings, funeral songs, bloodpetal flowers. Blossom and fade, blossom and fade and blossom again.
The viewing figures rose, drawn upwards by the blade’s tip, the moment when sharpness met flesh. The incident was shown over and over on the vine, as people tuned in to the bloodletting.
The victim pleasing herself, working herself. Making the map of her skin.
The cameras moved in.
The body responded.
Finally, the knife lifted up in Melissa’s hands, her two hands, to be pushed slowly through the pliable surface of the Dome itself, making a tiny slice, an opening.