Spares (32 page)

“A cat’s always on the wrong side of a door,” I said. “You don’t let it out of the house, then outside’s exactly where it wants to be—until you
do
let it out, when it suddenly needs to be back inside again. You keep it indoors, it always wants to be inside the cupboards—until you shut it in one, when it suddenly wants to come out again. You put a cat down anywhere on the earth, and it’s going to go looking for somewhere else to be.”

I glanced outside to see that Ghuaji was still motionless, and that the cat had worked its way round to the far end of the compound, still sniffing, still looking around. Then I lifted the bottle of Jack’s from the floor and poured a little into the cap of the bottle. I put the tip of my finger into the whiskey and carefully carried the drop of liquid over to one of the foils. I repeated this with the other foil and then watched as the two small piles of Rapt deliquesced. Within seconds there were two pools of concentrated liquid, sitting like mercury on the foil.

“This guy thinks about this for a while, and wonders what the fuck the cat is looking for. He gets the idea in his head that there’s some final door somewhere, and all cats are searching for it. So one day, when he’s stoned and has nothing better to do, he lets the cat out and decides to follow it. First thing the cat does, of course, is come straight back in again. Naturally. It’s a cat. Then after a while it goes back outside, and wanders out into the yard. And this yard, okay, backs out onto a forest, and the cat is used to trailing around out there. So the guy follows it, at a distance, and watches while it does what it normally does.”

“I think Ghuaji’s dead,” Vinaldi said.

“No, he isn’t,” I said. “Now listen. There isn’t much more. This guy follows the cat all day as it tromps round the forest.”

“Must have been good dope he was on.”

“He watches the way it goes behind trees, goes into hollows, comes back out again, generally cats around. And then—”

“Something’s happening,” Vinaldi interrupted.

“What?”

“I don’t know. But I saw something.”

“What?”

“I don’t know
. That’s why I say something’s happening.”

I hurriedly reached for the hypo, cracked a new needle on, and sucked the drugs up into the barrel.
When it was flicked I looked back out the windshield and saw that Vinaldi was probably right. Ghuaji’s head had come back up, though his eyes were still closed. The cat was working its way farther into the trees, still pulling the rope behind it. It was so far away that you couldn’t see it, only the line leading out into the darkness. I’d always believed the story had been true. It made sense, to me at least. Cats have been worshiped, used as familiars, for an awfully long time. There had to be a reason.

Then I heard something. Bark working against itself, branches laughing, moonlight scraping the sky. I looked down out of the window and saw a single leaf running past the truck, over the surface of the snow. It had two stalks and was using them as legs, running from what or to where I would never know.

“Yeah, it’s happening,” I said. I looked across at Vinaldi and saw that he was shaking, his hands trembling violently.

“Why didn’t I listen to you, Jack?” he muttered. “Why didn’t I just stay the fuck in New Richmond?” I held the needle out to him, but he shook his head violently. “I’m not having any of that shit. It took me two years to kick it back then.”

“You’re taking it,” I said firmly. “You’re going to have to share the needle with me, but you’re taking it. We barely got out the first time, Johnny. We’re older now. You go in without this and your mind’s going to shatter right away.”

Vinaldi just kept shaking his head. I rolled my own sleeve up and jabbed the needle in. In front of us, Ghuaji was now standing bolt upright, and the rope in his hand was being tugged more insistently. The cat was evidently reaching the limits of its tether, but I didn’t think that was going to matter.

Then the Flip happened, and Vinaldi cried out. The spaces between the trees took on solidity, and it became apparent that the trees themselves were merely gaps. I turned my head slowly to look at the old Farm building,
and saw that it was the same there. The building was nothing, a lack of something, and the space between it and us was now a thing which I could barely see round.

“Oh Jesus fucking Christ,” moaned Vinaldi, and abruptly held his arm out toward me. I rolled his sleeve, flicked the needle again and sank it in, injecting him with the second half of an extremely strong double dose. The noise outside was getting louder, all of the gaps between sounds becoming sounds themselves as the real sounds faded away—and only when that happens do you realize just how much silence there really is. Silences between lovers, when something really needs to be said; silence from a parent when a child needs some word more than anything else in the world; silences and in-betweens and everything that isn’t an answer. All of these quietnesses and more gathered together around us, funneled into the times and places where things didn’t happen and no one was saved.

One thing has always summed up The Gap more than anything else to me. It’s a warning sign I saw, as a child, in front of a dirty lake. The sign was a perfunctory painting of a little boy who had fallen in the water. In the picture there was no one else around, just this child slipping deeper. His arm reached up, his mouth was wide with entreaty, but you knew he was going to die. “BE CAREFUL WHERE YOU PLAY,” the warning at the bottom said: “HELP MAY NEVER COME.”

Ghuaji’s arm jerked out suddenly, as the rope was pulled taut. His eyes opened, and we knew they had because they threw a beam across the trees. Not of light exactly: a different view, a sideways glance. What we saw across his vision was something not really there at all, but which might have been. The rope jerked again and Ghuaji half-stepped, half-toppled, in the direction of the cat, which had now presumably found that door for which its kind had always been searching.

“Start the truck,” I said.

“Won’t he hear?”

“All we’ll be is a patch of silence.”

Vinaldi turned the key and the engine chugged into life; sluggishly—if we’d sat much longer it might not have restarted at all. We watched as Ghuaji staggered off toward the trees. I motioned for Vinaldi to follow him.

“We can’t go down there in this,” he said.

“Just do it,” I said. “And make sure you’re exactly behind him.”

Ghuaji started to pick up speed, partly because he was reaching a steeper slope, mainly as the pull gathered momentum. As Vinaldi steered the truck off the road and down after him I felt the first twinge of Rapt, the forerunner of forerunners, insinuate itself into my system. “Christ, not
again,”
my brain said, but it knew it was the right thing to do, and perfect timing. The truck bumped down the slope and the Flip was stronger there, the space between things seeming to resist until Vinaldi had to push his foot down on the accelerator even though we were traveling downhill. Ghuaji didn’t turn, though we were only five yards behind. He couldn’t hear us. The line to the cat stretched out in front of him like a steel cable and it was pulling him so fast he was almost running.

A thrumming sound started to come up out of the ground, melding with the noise of the truck to cancel out and add to the silence. It felt as if the truck were slipping into some slippery channel carved in air, the bumps from the rocky ground only turbulence. The trees were getting ever closer, Vinaldi’s rictus of concentration tighter, when Ghuaji dropped the rope and started running, just as I saw the cat come hurtling back up the other way. It had seen what it had found, and wanted no part of it.

But Ghuaji kept running, and I screamed at Vinaldi to go faster, and the truck now hurtled down the slope toward trees only ten yards away. For an instant the interior of the truck looked like the inside of a tree trunk, all the surfaces mottled and lined, and I knew it was really about to happen.

“Oh, Jesus,” Vinaldi said. He knew it too.

“Look away,” I said urgently. “Took away from me and away from him. Head for the biggest tree then
look away.”

In that last instant before I turned my head I saw a huge tree trunk in front of us, Ghuaji now sprinting toward it, injuries forgotten. The tree was three feet across, a pillar of blackness, but now it was not a thing at all. In the darkness of its body I could see shadows of beyond, the tree now merely a gap in the impermeable space around it. Through the gap I could see the shape of other trees, trees which stood in a different forest in a different place.

Then I yanked my head to the side so I couldn’t see either Vinaldi or Ghuaji, and watched the other gaps running past, jumbled and swirled as the truck crunched over boulders and fell after Ghuaji toward somewhere else.

Vinaldi shouted at the last moment, as if trying to make the truck change course through words alone. By then it was too late.

The truck hit the tree head-on and went through.

At first they said it was the Internet, as it was called back then. They said the traffic on the network had gotten too dense, that this virtual world had grown too heavy and that all the man with the cat did was discover it had begun. They said all this, but it wasn’t true.

Yes, the Internet snow crashed two weeks before The Gap was discovered, and they never worked out why. True, they had to switch to the alternative Matrix which was already in place, and the old net never worked again.

But The Gap was always there, waiting.

Then they said computer code was at fault, the little lines of syntax we’d thought were perfect and inviolate, simple instructions to simple beings, the chips in the wild inside, flowering up through meaning into function. We’d believed the languages we’d created were protected from ambiguity, but there was seepage from day one. The same sentence in English said with two different inflections creates slightly different meanings: turned out we hadn’t appreciated the difference situation
made to code, because we didn’t really understand the way computers think. All the unspoken half-meanings we missed, the sly words, hidden implications; all of these, it was said, added up to something and went somewhere else and created another place.

They thought they’d finally gotten to the bottom of it when they stopped the writing of collapsing code, a language based on the way the human mind itself was shaped. When written with perfect syntax it would collapse in on itself, creating software with just one line, a line whose meaning was opaque even to the person who had written the original. The writing process became like a childhood, lost and unreachable. The software would work, and work marvelously, but there was always the fear that something else, something unintended, had been sealed in with the instructions. Especially after computers themselves were given the job of writing the code. They were better at it, much better than us, but their motivations were sometimes uncertain, and after the code was sealed it was impossible to tell what was in there. Perhaps things were being said that we couldn’t hear; perhaps this was a conversation humans weren’t invited to eavesdrop on anymore.

Once they banned collapsing code, The Gap didn’t get any bigger, so maybe there was something in that. But some of us believed that if any of the above was true it had only been a facilitator, a gateway that let us find something people had been looking for all along without realizing what they might find.

We’ll probably never know for sure because, now that it’s over, no one wants to even think about it. Trying to conquer it was a mistake, and nobody brags about mistakes. The war was kept quiet at the time, and the silence since has been ear-shattering. There haven’t been any movies about what happened in there, and there never will be. It was one defeat too many. It wasn’t even classified as a war, but as a training exercise, and you’d be surprised how many Bright Eyes have died in suspicious
circumstances since it ended. Especially those who started talking about it.

You won’t find it in the history books, but it happened. I know. I was there.

We discovered how to get into the world’s subconscious, but instead of respecting it, and letting its good influence seep out into the conscious world as it always had, we tried to charge in and take it over, as if it was a new territory which could be owned. We found Eden, and napalmed it; found Oz’s wells, and pissed in them; found the mainspring of power which kept the real world sane and spread the virus of insanity throughout it. Maybe we even found the truth my father believed the real world hid; if so, we should have left it alone.

It was never officially called The Gap. It had several names, their length increasing with the seniority of the person who spoke them. But the only name ever used by anyone who was actually there was The Gap. And when they took us in, units of teenagers with nothing better to do except be the guinea pigs in someone else’s war, why did they make us stand in such a way that no one could see—or be seen by—anyone else? Because, I believe, that’s what The Gap was all about. Falling between cracks, being cut out of the loop, consigned to dead code, which has lost its place in the program and which nobody remembers anymore.