The Music of Razors (20 page)

A Nabber was standing just behind Suni’s head, its arms draped along the tiled floor behind it. It managed to look impatient.

“ghrug. sumfle. spek.”

It made a
gimme
motion with one rubbery hand. Suni sat up, the joints of his back complaining as he did so. His breath was coming more easily, if painfully. The Nabber tapped the backpack. Slowly Suni slipped it off, handed it over…

“Oh, hang on a second.”

“eeeeee…”

“Just wait…” Suni took his homework out and zipped the bag back up. “There you go.” He handed the bag over, and the fat blue ball snatched it immediately.

“
eeeee. klig oohn somfa la,
” it explained, clutching the bag tightly to itself, muffling its gargling little voice. Then it wandered over to the bench, crawled into the shadow beneath it, and was gone.

Suni wondered what had happened to Walter. He thought about what Walter had said, about having a sister, and wondered if this was where the whole thing ended. Quietly, Suni hoped Walter found someone else to do the job.

He wondered what school would be like come Monday morning.

He got to his feet, straightened his pajamas, and walked out of the restroom.

The first thing Suni saw was a lot of people with a lot of luggage and, by a big glass door that led to a busy carpark, a sign.

It said
WELCOME TO VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA.

He wondered if someone might let him use the phone.

NINE

WAKING

W
ALTER STOOD BY A BROWN RIVER, UP TO HIS ANKLES
in cold mud. It was a gray morning in this part of the world. Far away, on the other bank, bleak factories churned endlessly. The sky was slate-colored and featureless. Years ago, somewhere upstream a nuclear reactor had melted down. Downstream a bird cried out, sounding like a baby.

“Tub,” he said to the river. “It’s Wally.”

The river was a slow mover. Enormous and weighty, it shifted seaward with the alacrity of a beast that would rather be sleeping.

A round head broke the dirt-colored surface of the river, midway out. Water cascaded from the protruding lower jaw, and tiny eyes opened in wide surprise.

“Wally?”

“Hi, Tub.” He smiled.

The head disappeared, and a trail of bubbles made its way toward Walter. Wally noted that his feet were growing colder with each passing moment.

The hairless head broke the surface thirty feet from shore, and Tub waded in, brown water spilling off rounded shoulders and his broad, soft body. He stood there, naked, privates concealed beneath a drooping gut, only slightly taller than Walter’s three and a half feet.

“I’ve been down there a long time,” Tub said in his slow, matter-of-fact voice.

“You didn’t have to be,” Walter said.

“I didn’t?”

“I need the Anxietoscope.”

Tub looked to the river, then back to Walter again. “You gonna take it?”

Walter nodded. “I’ll look after it now.”

“But it’s the last one. He got all the others.”

“It’ll be okay. I’ll give it to Hope when she’s older. It’ll give her something to fight with.”

Tub broke into a big grin. Wide, flat teeth, browning in the cracks. “She’ll know how to use it,” Tub said. “She’s old like you.”

Walter nodded again. “Maybe it’ll save her, get us all out of this mess.”

Tub thought about this. “You’re not her monster anymore.”

“I’ll do what I can. That’s why I need it.”

Tub nodded, gravely. “Yeah.” And then: “He’ll get her.”

Walter shook his head. “I won’t let him.”

“You should be someone else’s monster by now.”

“I know.”

“But…,” Tub said. “But you won’t be able to do anything.”

“I made friends with someone—a boy—I think he can help me help her.” He sighed and shook his head. “It’s the best I can do.”

Tub didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, hopefully: “Have you seen Nimble?”

“No,” Walter lied. “I haven’t.”

Walter couldn’t tell Tub what had happened after that: that the doctor had found her, and changed her, inside. It would have broken the poor guy’s heart.

Tub turned and scanned the river once more. “What happens to me now?” he asked, child-like.

“You don’t have to watch it anymore. You can go wherever you like.”

Tub thought about it. “I might just stay here.” Walter wondered what Dorian, Tub’s maker, must have been like for Tub to be so lost without him. “I’ll get your thing, now.”

When Tub gave Walter the instrument it was inside a small box Tub had fashioned from a discarded forty-four-gallon gasoline drum to pass the time. The Anxietoscope glowed softly like a full moon through clouds.

Before this moment Walter had never touched an instrument. Henry had never allowed it.

Walter reached out and laid a finger upon the Anxietoscope.

Murder, light, despair.

Places opened in Walter’s mind like blooming wounds. Memory pumped out, fresh and hot.

Rage.

In the split second it took the camera of Walter’s mind to zoom out far enough to view the topography of God’s face writ large across the whole of Creation, Walter knew why Henry had chosen him and his sister.

Walter remembered everything.

“Do…do you know what to do with that, then?” Tub said.

Walter nodded, his mouth dry. “I know. The…box…you made for this, Tub. It was a good box.”

Tub squeezed his hands together. “Thanks.”

“But I need to make a different box for it now. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Out of paper, the way you usually do?”

Walter shook his head. “No. No more paper for me.” And he went to work.

Tub gasped, tiny eyes wide, as he sat in his river, up to his waist, and watched.

TEN

ANXIETOSCOPE

O
NE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THINGS HOPE HAD EVER
seen was a claustrophobic, trash-choked alley wedged between an old glass factory and a garage. She’d pass it every now and then on the way home from a movie. She had looked into it, the first night she passed, and fancied she could see huddled ghosts curled in the refuse, memories of memories looking back at her out of the corners of old eyes.

Thick grime layered the brickwork. The stuff was like a dried, crumbly paste of talcum and mucus, with the occasional cancerous fleck of faded red here and there, the markings of some forgotten vandal. The stuff on the walls had made her think of growth rings in trees, or layers of earth. Made her think that if a sociologist were to slice a layer, she could point to the juicy bits and tell you what had happened there at any given year: of homeless schizophrenics driven by an emotional intensity most people never reach, of a lost and battered rape victim—all bruises and torn underwear—hobbling for the street with one bloodied palm trailing against the wall for support, of a hundred souls who had searched for someplace warm.

To Hope that little alleyway was a cathedral to what happened when life tossed you into what lies outside.

She remembered looking into it, caught by it, conscious of the fact that anybody in there would see her, if anybody was there at all. But she kept looking anyway.

She saw wet brick and puddles, sure; and crates and broken glass that probably came from the factory next door. She saw an old blazer, sodden with filthy water, and a dull-looking plastic tiara perched atop a Dumpster under a flickering fluorescent. There was a broken old walking stick, and some brown flowers lying headfirst in an oily puddle. She saw somebody’s report card.

She wondered if they’d find a piece of her in there one morning. A single eyebrow ring fallen between the cracks of the old bluestone cobbles; maybe a tube of Urban Decay Uzi-colored lipstick for good measure.

She saw streetlight reflected dimly off damp brick, and the faded, spectral stencil of a
NO PARKING
sign that had been sprayed on the wall decades before, now covered in the accreted grime that caked every surface of the alley. She saw more patches of color there, faded red, and she wondered if maybe it was blood, but knew that it wasn’t. She saw shreds of an old band flyer that had been pasted there God knew how long ago, low-resolution black-rimmed eyes looking at her from slow rot, streaked with more ever-present and faded crimson. Then she noticed that streak intersect with another, almost invisible, line of faded red.

Hope saw a letter.

In that moment it all coalesced: patterns formed from the patches and streaks under the grime, gathering, surfacing, revealing themselves to her.

She saw red words a yard high.

I CAN’T BREATHE

It was like a screaming face, frozen in ice.

Not every girl is interested in digging a hole to the center of the Earth, but Hope was different. Which was the reason for most of the trouble she’d had so far in life. She was seventeen years old, pink-haired and pierced, about ready to plunge face-first into a world of freedom and adulthood, yet she was not sure who she was. Her mother kept trying to find and burn her journals in exchange for driving lessons, while teachers kept sending her to the counselor to be asked guarded questions like, “Do you ever feel as if you can’t go on?” and “Is there anyone at school you feel…angry…toward?” More people had asked her pop-psych things like that since Dad was gone than they ever had before. Like she was some potentially explosive pet project.

Everyone’s always so insightful once the disaster’s over.

So she started digging a hole. Just found a vacant lot near her house, took her father’s shovel from the shed, and went digging. Maybe, she thought, it’s a metaphor for the deep-seated self-destructive urge that the counselor’s convinced I have. Maybe I want to bury myself. Maybe it helps me think.

Or maybe it just keeps me from thinking. About anything.

Plunge-heave-hoist-ho.

When she was a kid, maybe seven or eight, she used to dig holes all the time. Pissed her parents off no end. Guests would come over, look at the backyard, and ask if they owned a dog.

Her parents had owned a dog once, but that was before she’d been born. Spud, that was its name. It had been Walter’s dog, before he went into that coma. She’d seen photos. Walter had been like, maybe, one year old and there was this massive ugly wolfhound-thing slobbering all over him. Her mother insisted Walter loved that dog, but the kid looked terrified. Walter was almost twenty-two years old now, or at least his body was. Hope couldn’t even think of that body as a person. If anything it was a guest that had overstayed its welcome in her home and her life. It might have been a person once, but not in Hope’s lifetime. All Walter had ever been was that dead thing in the room next to hers, waiting for enough prayers and tears to resurrect him; a flesh intersection for all the rubber and metal that pointlessly kept his systems pumping. It wasn’t life support for Walter so much as faith support for Hope’s parents. Faith that one day Walter might wake up as suddenly as he had fallen asleep, almost eighteen years ago, and life would pick up where it had left off.

The money for an actual life-support machine had run out when Hope was a kid. When the time came to shut it off and move it out Mum had worked herself into a fit and Dad had just looked on, blankly. Walter still hung on. It wasn’t uncommon. But hanging on for over a decade unassisted, that was something doctors would comment on. Patients could often breathe unassisted, but to go for so long without something going wrong was quite exceptional. Hope had thought unplugging him would mean an end to it all. But it never ended.

Walter was just the name for Hope’s personal nightmare.

Other kids grew up fearing abandonment by parents or something unknown and terrible stepping out of their closet and carrying them off, but Hope had spent her childhood living in fear of the sleeping zombie in the next room. Afraid of what might happen if it opened its eyes and said something. A lot of Walter’s daily upkeep had fallen on her shoulders. She didn’t mind washing him, or even feeding him (though stuffing mashed food down that tube still clenched her gut, no matter how she tried to get over it), so long as she could get out of having to touch the catheter or change the colostomy bag. Hope would do it to save an argument, but she’d always avoid it if she could.

But what she hated most about going into Walter’s room were the paper cranes. Her father had made them for Walter when he was a kid, before Hope had been born, and now her mother insisted on keeping them—all of them—on the bedside table. Flocks of them. A worn-around-the-edges faded rainbow crowd scene. Her father’s birds. She hated even looking at them. She hated having something physical of that man left in the house. It was bad enough her mother still had some of his clothes in her wardrobe. The smell that wafted out was Daddy all over; nothing but the smell of his body. But she hated those cranes more; more than artifacts of her father, they were a tangible reminder of how her parents had sacrificed any life any of them could have had just to keep her brother’s shell in the house.

As a kid Hope knew that if Walter ever woke up she would no longer be needed; that she was just holding Walter’s place until he decided to open his eyes. Now, older and wiser, she knew he was never going to open his eyes; the whole thing was a pantomime.

She had let that explode out of her once, during a particularly expressive argument with her folks, and had been slapped for it. It didn’t come up again. She had gotten over that fiasco by getting her eyebrow pierced. Which led to yet another argument—a big one. Which in turn led her to finally getting that tattoo she’d always wanted: a white tiger with clear blue eyes on her left shoulder blade. She liked the idea of it watching her back. She’d had a thing for cats, tigers especially, ever since she was a kid. Tigers and circus music.

She supposed a fear of replacement went some way to explaining her relationship with Kristian. He had never been the kind of boyfriend she had imagined herself having: a straight-down-the-line, zero-complexity, no-frills, knew-what-he-liked boyfriend. He sweated a little, but she could live with that. She knew what he was thinking, what he wanted, and because of that there’d be no surprises. She didn’t think about the whole thing too much. She only wished Suni and Kristian got along. They’d been friends once, so they said, but Hope being Suni’s ex had just widened the gulf between them.

In the steady rhythm of plunge-heave-hoist-ho she lost the world that owned her and ran amid the fields of her mind, certain that just below her feet was another world waiting to be found. Besides, it was cheaper than smoking.

By the time she was thirteen she had abandoned the shovel for a newfound interest in boys, glamour magazines, and the opinions of others her age—and had consequently never been more miserable.

So she’d gone back to the shovel. Plunge-heave-hoist-ho.

Boys. Men. She couldn’t believe the way they’d warped her life into something she’d never, ever expected. Yet they were like a gravity well, a comforting voice, a masochistic self-trial she found herself trustingly wandering back to in one way or another, again and again. Walter, Suni, her father…

She was up to her armpits when the shovel went
clank.

Great, she thought. Another water main.

She scraped the soft brown soil aside and found a flat surface, gleaming like quicksilver and elaborately crafted. She clapped a hand over her mouth and screamed. No one heard. Good.

Dig dig dig.

It was a box.

A big. Stonking. Box.

It was practically weightless, long and wide and thin as a briefcase. She looked around in the dimming daylight, saw no one on the street or in the lit windows of surrounding houses, and rested the box on the green, green grass.

The box was engraved with intricate, craftful designs and curlicues. She ran her hands across the cool flat top and down the sides, the skin of her palms sliding easily across the glossy surface. It hummed faintly beneath her touch, tickling her hands, sending minuscule vibrations up her radius and ulna. It infused her, sympathetic vibrations sounding across her rib cage and up her neck like a tickle of faint electricity. Vibrations that reached her skull, touched her inner ear, and formed a word…

Anxietoscope…

Hope snatched her hands away. She could still feel the residual tingle in her fingers and bones. A word she’d never heard before still tingled in her ear.

With great care she reached out with one finger and flipped open the lid.

The box practically opened itself.

Inside, on a bed of muslin, lay a small steel cup—a thimble—that would have fit perfectly over one fingertip; a thimble made from the same pure quicksilver metal as the case—with a single barb adorning its tip.

Slowly it rose, resting on nothing, rotating lazily in the air.

She slammed the lid down.

Anxietoscope.
The vibrations died in her ear.
To be used in the…

She quickly stuffed the box into her pack and slung it over one shoulder. Then she was out of the hole and headed for home, her father’s shovel in one hand, soil beneath her nails.