Authors: Jeff Noon
Here she was.
Here she was on the screen.
The exact same person.
Nola Blue. Music Star.
But it wasn’t her. It just wasn’t her.
Who the hell was it?
Nola reached out her hand and touched the screen.
Tingle fuzz. Heat.
The glass lay between them, separating the two beings from each other.
Nola studied her created persona. The mouth, especially. This painted maw as it worked to keep the song alive, the lips moving in time to the beat she kept inside herself.
Sparkle mouth, sparkle eyes.
Lovely sheen of lovely skin.
And yet which was more authentic, her real-life human body, or the image of her body? One bound by flesh and blood and blemish and breath; the other glorified, elevated, set ablaze with computerised passion.
Both of them constructed, both paid for.
Nola watched herself dancing.
Now slow...
Slooooooow.
Moving it down easily as the song reaches toward its climax and the handsome young man succumbs at last
whispering, suddenly loving,
suddenly realising, falling into the singer’s waiting and willing arms.
The kiss.
Ah, the sweet lingering touch of lips on lips.
Final words of the song, final drumbeat.
Video fade-out to black.
Gone.
...fizsxts...
Moment of silence.
Blank screen.
And when was the last time she had kissed or been kissed, really kissed, tongue to tongue, hot breath mingling in the dark of the mouth, when? When?
Nola vaguely recalled her last true boyfriend, from the village where she grew up through her teenage years.
What was his name now?
No, she couldn’t remember.
Where was he, these days? What was he doing?
His face. His skin. Like her own back then, marked only by young time. His mouth. Whispers of loving you forever.
Ages ago, or so it seemed. Another life. And herself a different person.
Fame kills normality, it burns up closeness.
Nola felt tears pricking behind her eyes.
She’d finished the beer without really thinking about it, and that, on top of the two cocktails at the bar, and the drink earlier, when George had come round...
Well, she wasn’t used to it. Too much regime. Do this, do that. Stay fit, healthy, focussed.
Nola stared at the screen.
Two pundits now occupied the space, fair to middling guys with seriously abundant attitude.
One smirked, the other frowned. Both nodded.
The first widened her eyes. ‘It’s the third single from the album.’
The other replied: ‘That’s the trouble. Overexposure.’
‘Correct. Nola’s charm is draining away. What little charm there was, to begin with.’
‘Oh, she had enough, to begin with. More than enough.’
‘But now? Somewhat pallid, think I.’
‘Certainly, she is wasted on this material. Have you heard the demo tracks?’
‘You’re one up on me there, Andy.’
‘Early days material, before Gold Enterprises got hold of her.’
‘Good, is it?’
‘More than averagely good, I would say. Her own songs. Now that’s what she needs to be doing.’
‘Well she needs something.’
‘It’s the George Gold attitude, isn’t it. Mister King Pop himself, in charge of the system.’
‘Gold is
old
.’
‘The system no longer works.’
‘Check the status figures, kiddo. Thirty-six? Next step: accelerated decline.’
‘All I’m saying, Marty, is wait and see. Maybe Nola will break loose.’
‘Too late! I hear a bubble bursting.’
Click.
Nola jumped to another programme.
One more. Another.
Click, click.
Anything but that. Anything but her own self being dissected, poked and prodded like a cute media specimen: broken down, licked at, wrapped up, halfway discarded.
Nola went back to the couch.
Click, click, click.
Her finger pressed idly now at the buttons, moving further out, beyond the legal channels. Her set decoded encryptions on the sly, calling up temporary signal jumps.
Click, clikk, clikck
. Out to the telesphere’s edge, where the spectrum blurred into mist and static. Here buzzed the fractalcasts, quarter-tuned pirate stations stealing frequencies for an hour or two. Cable dreams and nightmares. Political rants, home sex videos, karaoke soaps, real-life domestic arguments, porno-dramas, hyper-specialist dating agencies, bidding wars, medical fibre optics, ghost broadcasts, security surveillance footage, glamacam exposures, old-time ballroom dancers, blurry car crashes, flower arranging, real-time feeds from the street where little kids with pixel faces were singing the new urban folk ballads of guns and blood.
So many thousands of microgenres.
Everybody was on camera these days, everybody.
Click, click
.
Nola chanced upon an old movie, black and white, one she had not seen before. The story was trite, overly romantic, but certain images seemed to have a fix of their own, to be more like memories:
A black cat walking through a garden where a fountain sprayed arcs of water in sunlight.
A teenage girl flying a kite.
A broken-down car resting at the edge of a lake, its back seat occupied by the corpse of a businessman.
The images glowed with a light of their own.
Images. Moments. Slowing down.
Molten flow.
Nola managed one more click of the remote, one more sleepy finger press,
suddenly tired,
lulled by the sound and the vision
spellbound.
Image: a man’s face, mist-painted. He smiled.
Soft glow of the screen
like a charm cast over the room,
over the viewer as she lay there,
over Nola as she lay there quietly, eyes staring, and then drooping, softly closing; two lovely lashed portals to let one last glimmer of light in, and then no more.
Darkness.
The remote control fell to the carpet.
And by half past one
Nola Blue lay fast
asleep.
~~~
The gentle blue-bronze light of the screen shimmered across her face.
Characters spoke to each other,
gently, covered in soft static,
unheard.
A clock ticked.
Outside Nola’s apartment block, the warm air stirred. The tangle of aerials and satellite dishes on the building’s roof reached for the moon that hung full but half hidden in clouds. Invisible waves of information moved through the air. Now and again, vehicles passed quietly along the avenue below, briefly disturbing this spectral glade of the capital.
A solitary nightbird flew across,
heading for the river.
Night gathered itself into the darkest hour, tilted over, and then began the long
measured
fade
towards dawn.
Nola barely stirred. She moaned once or twice, dreaming perhaps.
Dreaming that something moved just beneath her skin, some strange small creature of light and sound.
Sszzzztzs
Infection took place.
And still the screen flickered
with image.
The struggle towards waking.
Lights flickering...on and off...
A voice...
Breathing...
A woman’s voice...
But not hers...not her own...
Ahhh...must try to...find the way now...
Finally, the voice stopped.
Nola’s eyes came open.
Head throbbing, painful.
She pressed hard at her face to re-engage with herself, with her own body, but all she could truly summon up was a feeling of being hollow inside.
Nola was lying there in the semi-gloom.
Her tongue moved around her mouth; again, the taste of burnt metal. And that buzzing noise inside her head, a steady drone.
Her left forearm ached, the skin tinged red.
She felt strangely unattached, as though she might slowly float away from the couch and hover above it without any means of support.
Dreams. Half remembered.
Catch them...
The lights stuttering. A woman talking:
What the hell was that?
Then darkness. And then?
No. They drifted away.
Traces. Pictures.
Smoke.
Vanished.
Her eyes opened and closed.
The screen made a noise, a crackling sound. Nola looked towards the visionplex.
It was still on, still playing.
The voices she had heard in her sleep were coming from there, from the set. The woman still talking, a man answering now. Two characters. Two angry, loving characters in a drama, that was all, heard from dreamland.
But which channel? Which programme? She could not make it out properly. The figures blurred.
Too much drink last night. Too much.
She wasn’t used to it.
Yes, she must’ve stumbled in drunk and fallen asleep right here in front of the wall screen, like this, fully clothed, leaving the visionplex on all night. It was not the way she did things, not usually.
Nola focussed.
The people faded on the screen.
Silence now.
No pictures. No words.
What was wrong?
And yet, bending closer...
The faint hum of electrostatic.
Fizzle, fizszle...
The noise in Nola’s head sounded like two wires, like two hot stripped-bare wires reaching out towards connection.
Fzzttztzstz...
Nola stared at the blank grey screen, transfixed.