Authors: Ian R. MacLeod
He took the book over to the thin pool of light cast by the nearest bulb. The names were alphabeticized, with any new recruits for each month added at the end.
NSE
obviously meant nurse. LW would probably be laundry worker.
CLNR
would be cleaning guys like himself.
We decided he’d change his name to Lamotte, which is my name, rather than the other way around. It just sounded so much better than Daniel Hogg
… If she’d been telling the truth, Lamotte would also be her maiden name, but there was no sign of any Lamotte in all 1928… Then, there it was in red copperplate just above the bottom columns of March 1929’s figures.
Lamotte, April, Nse.
His breath quickening, he flicked on through the crackling pages. Add-ons for overtime and extra shifts. Deductions for uniform and laundry. Asterisks for small corrections. Approval stamps for some inspection by the IRS. She really had worked here. Then, in November of the same year, 1929, there were no entries for her. He flicked back. October. He tilted the page more carefully into the grainy light. There was writing at the bottom where the ink had gone spidery with damp. But there was a definite circle, and an arrow, pointing down.
Sec
—something… He struggled with the sense of it for a moment.
Seconded to
The final word was so thickly blacked out as to be impossible to read. He flicked on through the months, years, of the regular pay records, looking for more of April Lamotte. As far as he could tell, she’d never returned to the Met from wherever it was she’d been sent. He flicked back to the relevant few pages, tore them out, and stuffed them into his back pocket.
He spent some time longer picking his way along the dusty aisles, but there was no sign down here of the main patient records. Must be kept elsewhere, maybe up on the wards—but why look through old files when the guy Daniel Lamotte had been obsessing about was still here at the Met?
He wheeled the mop trolley back along the basement corridors to the elevator and set the lever to Up. He let the first floor—it seemed to be mostly offices—slide by. The second, though, presented a linoleumfloored corridor receding beneath rows of bright skylights to a steel door. He stopped the elevator, rolled back the gate. He looked in on empty nurses’ offices and rooms filled with sour heaps of laundry as he pushed his trolley on. The puke-green gloss-painted door at the far end was thickly impressive. So was its lock. He glanced back the other way, still hoping for some nurse or functionary to emerge with a set of keys, or maybe for a reason not to be here at all. But there was no one about. For want of anything better, he tried the heavy brass handle. The door swung in.
The hospital smell which had been slowly creeping up on his subconscious was suddenly as obvious as day. Rankness undercut with disinfectant. Dust and sour flesh and piss and that halfclean odor you got when you first opened a medicine chest—all combined. Then there was the sound as well. He’d forgotten about that. A lingering echo which, even though it currently seemed to shiver along the polished linoleum with nothing more than the wheeze of the trolley and his own footsteps, still seemed to resonate with lost screams. This place was almost empty though, whilst the wheeled gurneys had been lined along the corridors like railcarriages waiting in some ghastly station when he’d last visited his stepmom Jenny, and there had been glimpses everywhere of things better left unseen. Flesh weeping around loosening gray bandages. Tubes entering unknowable orifices. People coughing and moaning as if to drown out that undertow of echoing screams.
“Hi there Billy…” It had been Jenny’s voice, but somehow not her face. Flesh turned into grayed papier mache fallen loose and thin. A gumless smile and teeth red with what he thought for a moment was only poorly applied lipstick. But this wasn’t how Jenny was or could ever be. She was always pristine. Always neat. She smelled of soap and laundry and cooking. There were blood flecks on the sheets also, which were otherwise as gray as her face. He felt his father’s lumbering awkwardness as he stood beside him. Felt the hellbound heat of her fingers when she touched his face.
He forced himself back to the Met. Forced himself to walk on in what so obviously was nothing like the same place. That smell of soup, for instance, which he’d noticed down in the basement, seemed to fill this corridor, was now so strong that it almost cut out the undertow of bleach and unwashed flesh. There were no screams here, either. At least, not outside his own head. Carried instead on this green shining air were the calls of many voices which made him think of that bit in the Odyssey where Odysseus encounters the sirens. It was weird, but the sound really was that sweet. A large woman in a paisley shift breezed by in the hazed, metallic light. She gave a big smile and said
hi handsome
as she hummed her way past. He’d smiled and said
hi beautiful
back and pushed his trolley on before it occurred to him that he should have asked for directions.
Drawn on by the sound of voices singing, he passed through other unlocked doors. The Met was nothing like he’d expected. Where were the barred cells, the screams of tormented souls? Even the smell of this soup wasn’t such a bad thing—fact was, he found that he was actually salivating. Thick pipes ran across the ceiling above him, and he could hear,
feel
them humming. As for the other smells, the sounds—the clanging doors, the muffled grunts of some kind of struggle he caught when he glanced through a half-closed door and saw three big guys in a tiled white space holding another much smaller guy down on a leather bench whilst a forth straightened out a rubber hose—they were as natural in here as birdsong…
The wheels of Clark’s trolley whistled, and he whistled along with them, trying to find the right lilt for whatever song something inside his head was singing. He’d never have thought before that joy had any obvious color, but it hung here in a shimming pink mist above and around everything. It was a bit like seeing two places superimposed. On the one hand, he was pushing his way though a large, long room, with barred widows of wire mesh glass letting in gray light across a sprawl of metal-framed chairs and tables, a few orange boxes stuffed with jigsaws and magazines, and some heaped-up mattresses. On the other, there was a beauty to this scene which he might have associated with those fancy Italian paintings where centaurs and winged babies pranced to pipe music. Only this was better. This was for real.
The Met was all of a piece, and all just as it should be. It was just the way God Himself would have ordered it—if, that was, God had happened to be a doctor of psychiatry in a white coat and with a brown rubber hose draped around his neck instead of the usual stethoscope, and with maybe a couple of large crocodile clips attached to some kind of stand-alone generator dangling from his all-healing hands.
It was the people in here, he guessed, that made the difference. They were so happy they actually glowed like Chinese lanterns—and Clark, looking down at himself, realized that he was glowing as well. Greenish protrusions crackled out of him in flares of joy.
“Say, any of you folks know where I can find a guy called Howard Hughes… ?” Even as he asked the question, he knew that it was ridiculous. Already, he was laughing, and it was as if he’d told the funniest joke in history, for everyone else was cracking up as well.
Beyond the haze, outside the Met, he could see how some of these people might not be your first choice to share a streetcar bench with. Their mouths hung open, their bodies were lopsided, and they were wearing the kind of loose, white, ass-ventilating hospital shifts that didn’t leave much to the imagination. One guy had a pair of galoshes on as if to compensate, whilst another, sporting a striped railworkers’ cap, was holding his not inconsiderable dick out towards Clark as they drew closer to him.
Hands all over him now. Papery and meaty—
soupily
—scented, they swarmed across his face, sidewaysing his glasses and drawing him in and down. As he succumbed to their embrace, he looked up at the dimming ceiling, and saw once again those big pipes, and realized that what pulsed inside them wasn’t soup at all. For surely they contained actual joy—they must make the stuff here in the Met, and then just pump it out like the LAWAP pumped out water. Joy wasn’t soupy brown or any other single color, but a mingling of all the shades of this swarming, tingling glow. Joy was warm and it was prickly and it was smooth and it was cold; joy was all of those things—and so many others he couldn’t even begin to express—as limbs and bright eager mouths joined with him in a single siren song…
“What ya’ll doin’?” a voice rumbled somewhere. “Fella like this, he ain’t like you, he
important
. He got the mop, he got the trolley. He got places to
go
…”
Broad arms took hold, drag-carrying him back out through swing doors into a corridor where the roseate light was so dimmed he could have cried for its loss as he slumped back against a wall.
“Why you gone stole my mop trolley?” The guy was black and bald and big. His smile was all gum, and his left eyebrow was stuck in a raised position which gave him a quizzical look.
“I’m sorry. I was just…” A sad, bitter residue washed over Clark. He straightened his glasses. His stomach looped. Then he tried to scratch at a weird itch in his skull. “… borrowing it to get something done.”
“Covering up for someone?”
“Not exactly. What the hell was going on in there?”
“Don’t know much about the Met, do you, if you ain’t heard of the moodies.”
“Moodies?”
“What you folk from the outside calls the feelies.” The big black guy waved a stubby-fingered hand. “But that word for what goes on in here ain’t anything like strong enough. Ain’t what you
feel
. Puts you in a whole fresh
mood
.”
Clark peered back into the room through a porthole. He could still sense a ringing backwash of the joy which had possessed him, but now it was it was like the cold echo of some ghastly bell. The feeling which had joined him to these sad extremes of humanity who wandered that big room with its vague, wan light was entirely lost to him now. One woman seemed to be thinking about eating another piece of jigsaw. Another was adding some extra knots to the ball of hair she was chewing. A third was hunched back in a corner and rocking back and forth. The guy with the railworkers’ cap still had his dick in his hand. But they were all so
happy
. They were all still smiling, laughing, singing. He could clearly see the haze of plasm now hanging and drifting like colored sea mist, but somehow the last thing of all he noticed about the room were the two dusty-wired enclosures at opposite corners of the room, although he could hear their fizzing electric hum even from here.
“How the hell d’you manage to stay…” he trailed off.
“Sane?
That
what you gonna say? I’m Little Joe by the way. Hate to be impolite, but you still haven’t told me who you are. Or whys you took off with my trolley.”
Clark was still dazed. He scratched again at his head. “My name’s Daniel Lamotte. I’m a screenwriter and I’m doing some research. You know, the way that writers do?”
Little Joe’s permanently raised right eyebrow and absence of any teeth made his expressions hard to interpret, but, if he didn’t smile, he didn’t exactly frown.
“I’m working on a new script about the life of Lars Bechmeir, and there’s an inmate here I’d like to talk to that the authorities won’t let me see. So I thought if I borrowed a cleaning department uniform and wandered around a bit I’d be able to find him on my own. Very obviously, I was wrong.”
“This is some big place. An’ we don’t bother overmuch with directions and signs.”
“So I’ve discovered.”
“Then there’s the moodies.”
“I’ve discovered about them as well.”
“What’s the name of this fella you interested in seeing?” “Howard Hughes.”
“How—” For a moment, the right eyebrow went up to rejoin the left. “Oh, you mean
Howie
, right? Howie’s where Howie always is. Whole Met wouldn’t work without him.”
L
ITTLE JOE LED CLARK
down ways he would never have discovered through the maze of the Met. He glimpsed and felt different communal areas; glee-filled havens of laughing and leaping, other places whose occupants lay drowsed by hissing purple waves in supine repose. The corridor they eventually reached was knotted and fronded with an even thicker mass of the same pipes and cables which ran everywhere in the Met. It became apparent as the humming and thrumming grew louder that they were heading towards its source.
Through impressive gothic doors lay a cathedral of an engine house. There were huge, kettle-like boilers of polished brass. Endless pipes and gantries threaded high above.
“You’d better go on,” Little Joe shouted over the sudden roar. “Howie, he don’t like crowd scenes.”
High up amid the gantries, a single figure in oil-stained dungarees, an equally oil-stained shirt, brown flat cap and engineer’s boots was at work. Clark climbed a ladder. Then another.
“Hey!”
The figure carried on working. Dials and regulators ticked and jumped.
“Excuse me… ?”
Howard Hughes continued to ignore his visitor as Clark crossed the last high walkway. He was still tall and regular-looking; still handsome enough to have starred in some of his own movies, even if the cap did sit slightly oddly on his head.
“Mr. Hughes? Howie… ?”
Only when he’d finished tightening the bolt he’d been working on and pocketed his torque wrench did Hughes straighten and turn.
“You want to speak to me?” He asked in that same slow Texan drawl Clark remembered from the newscasts. Remembered, as well, from that time he’d rejected him at an audition with a remark about how his ears made him look like a taxi cab with both doors open. But there was no trace of recognition in the soft brown gaze. Howard Hughes seemed incurious—more bored than surprised. And mildly impatient; you could tell that he’d like nothing better than to get back to tending his machines.
Ten years ago, every paper you opened had been filled with this guy. Howard Hughes at the premiere of one of his movies with a big-titted broad on his arms, or performing some new stunt in one of his planes. And the films, and the stunts, and the tits, had just gone on getting bigger and bigger until the feelies—which most people had taken as Hughes’ crowning folly—arrived. With that first feelie-movie, a mess of a thing called
Broken Looking Glass
, Hughes had broken the mold. And the mold had stayed broken, for all that Hughes hadn’t been the one to profit from it.