The House of Rumour A Novel

19

the sun





She thought she spotted him standing in a corner, staring absently at a gently oscillating light projection. It was the after party for the première of the Fugitive Alien remake, a nightclub in West Hollywood transformed into a spaceship interior. Supporting pillars of the open space encased in airbrushed fibreglass, dressed with glowing tubes and pulsing hieroglyphs; waiting staff in lycra costumes, extraterrestrial hair and make-up; a bar at one end decked out as a huge control panel.

She weaved through the crowd, still not quite sure if it was him. Stiffened into a rented tuxedo, white hair ponytailed, he held a frosted green highball in one hand. Something about the angle of his head, the goofy half-grin, the curious-child eyes that stared out of the collapsed mask of his face. Recognition. Memory. Loss.

‘Larry,’ she said, trying to catch his gaze.

He frowned and dropped his line of sight. Could he see her properly? she wondered. He seemed to be gaping into the middle distance. Maybe his vision was shot, though he wasn’t wearing glasses. Maybe his hearing was shot.

‘Zagorski!’ she called out.

His face opened up into a smile and slowly she saw the Larry she had known all those years ago. Her perception shifting, making that illusory adjustment whereby all the traces of age fade in one who is familiar and an expression long remembered pulls into focus. He reached out and grabbed her elbow, as if steadying them both from a sudden earth tremor. His hand was gnarled and spattered with liver spots. Blue veins stood out like wiring.

‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Mary-Lou. Look at you.’

Her hair was up in a loose chignon and she was wearing the fuchsia Issey Miyake Pleats Please dress she had bought back in 1993. She had thought it would be just right for this event, a clever choice. Maybe it was just too bold for a seventy-nine-year-old.

‘Well, look at yourself, Zagorski.’ She bristled in his grip. ‘All got up in a monkey suit.’

‘No, I mean . . .’ He let go of her and made a vague gesture with his hand. ‘I mean, you look fantastic.’

A sparkle in his rheumy eyes. She smiled then looked away. A waitress sidled by in pale-blue face-paint offering a tray of tiny dishes. Larry looked over at an arrangement of delicately tentacled canapés.

‘So,’ he asked the waitress. ‘What do we have here?’

‘Seared baby squid with truffle oil on a mango–lime pipette skewer,’ she replied.

‘Mmm, yeah.’ Larry picked one out and popped it into his mouth whole.

‘Well,’ said Mary-Lou. ‘We’ve sure come a long way from Clifton’s Cafeteria.’

‘Uh-uh.’ Larry swallowed and wiped his lips with a napkin. ‘Some of us are still here for the free limeade.’

He held up his glass to her then took a sip.

‘What is that?’

‘Mojito. Thought I’d have a drink for Nemo. You know, it was his idea in the first place.’

‘What was?’

‘The story that became Fugitive Alien. He just had the sense to take his name off the credits of the original.’

‘Sure,’ said Mary-Lou drily.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean . . .’ Larry gestured vaguely at something. ‘I meant the script. Your film, you know, it was a cult classic.’

‘Oh, come on, Larry, let’s not be precious.’

‘It’s true. This remake, I suppose it’s meant to be clever, post-modern or whatever. But it’s not. It’s just dumb.’

‘So why did you come?’

‘Well, I sort of know Danny Osiris, but the real reason I’m here,’ he shrugged, ‘is I thought I might just bump into you.’

‘That’s sweet.’

An alien waiter passed with a tray of champagne flutes. Mary-Lou took one and clinked it against Larry’s glass.

‘It’s really good to see you, Mary-Lou,’ he said.

‘You too, Larry. Here’s to Nemo. Have you heard from him lately?’

‘Aw, Jesus, you don’t know, do you?’

‘What?’

‘He died last year.’

As she let out a groan of exasperated resignation, an eerie wail pierced the air. On a stage at the far end of the club a girl in a silver dress was playing the theremin, furiously sculpting the air with her hands.

‘Let’s find somewhere to sit down,’ Mary-Lou suggested.

Larry got another drink and they grabbed a booth in a quiet lounge area.

‘I guess you’re used to these things,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Film premières, smart parties, you know. You were a studio executive.’

‘Yeah, in television. And nearly twenty years ago. What happened to Nemo?’

‘Massive stroke.’

‘Oh, Christ.’

‘You know we fell out in the sixties. Then five years ago I got this manuscript from him through a Cuban guy living in Florida. We started working together again, on this post-utopian thing. We kept talking about meeting up. In Mexico. Well, we left it too late.’

Larry took a long swig from his glass.

‘Hey,’ said Mary-Lou. ‘Go easy on the limeade.’

‘Don’t worry. It’s not a problem for me any more. I hardly drink at all these days.’

‘All the more reason to go steady.’

‘Sure.’ He rattled the ice in his mojito and settled it on the table. ‘All those people we knew from the film. Gone. Sharleen, Nemo.’

‘Come on, Larry, let’s not get maudlin.’

‘Jack.’

‘What?’ Mary-Lou frowned.

‘Jack Parsons. Well, he did the special effects, remember?’

‘Oh. Yeah.’ She stared off into the distance.

‘You never got over him, did you?’

She looked back at Larry.

‘Let’s not talk about Jack.’

‘Okay, okay.’

Larry drained his glass and handed it to a passing waiter.

‘Can I have another of these?’ he asked. ‘Mary-Lou?’

‘Sure. A glass of champagne, please. How’s Martin?’

‘He’s good. He’s living up in Seattle. Working as a sound technician. I don’t see so much of him these days.’

‘And you? Still writing?’

‘Yeah. Another novel. Not sure where it’s going. I’m calling it The House of God.’

‘Good title.’

‘Yeah. Could be the best thing about it. But, you know, there is something I want you to see. Something I wrote a while back.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yeah. Something I wrote for you.’

Their drinks arrived and Larry chinked his glass against hers once more.

‘This is like being back at Clifton’s,’ he said. ‘Me trying to impress you. You know, that’s what my writing career was really based on.’

‘Zagorski, the limeade is making you sentimental.’

‘In mojito veritas. You were my inspiration.’

‘Okay, okay. Let’s change the subject.’

‘Okay. Well, you know, this film is really dumb, but Danny’s quite an interesting guy.’

‘Who?’

‘Danny Osiris. Yeah, quite an interesting guy. He believes in all this UFO nonsense, just like Sharleen used to. But he gave me this strange manuscript. Sort of a story but it refers to some crazy stuff that happened in the war.’

Larry was trying to focus but the rum was fuzzing his mind.

‘Mary-Lou, wasn’t there a woman called Astrid at your commune in Pasadena?’

‘Now you’re losing me, Zagorski. You’re talking about Astrid?’

‘Yeah. German woman. Fortune-teller.’

‘Astrid, yeah. What about her?’

At that moment a production assistant from Multiversal Pictures came up to the table and told Mary-Lou that the director would really like to meet her.

‘Sure,’ she replied. ‘I’ll come over. But look, the writer of the original is here too. Why don’t I bring him with me?’

‘Er, yeah,’ the assistant replied with a doubtful shrug. ‘Sure.’

The director of the Fugitive Alien remake was earnest and full of respect for Mary-Lou. He was barely in his thirties yet astonishingly cognisant of 1950s pop culture. And he knew all about her television work on shows like The Scanner. Mary-Lou struggled to include Larry in the conversation, but she knew that people rarely want to talk to the writer.

Larry hovered and continued drinking. At one o’clock Mary-Lou said she wanted to go.

‘Are you staying, Larry?’

‘No, no.’

‘Then, come on. I’ll get them to order us cars.’

They went down to the foyer, arm in arm, for support as much as anything else.

‘So good to see you,’ Larry said once more.

‘Yeah.’

‘Come and have lunch with me.’

‘Sure.’

‘You promise?’

‘Larry, of course I’ll have lunch with you.’

‘Soon then.’

His car arrived first and she walked out to it with him. He put his arm around her. At first she thought he’d lost his balance as she felt his hand catch hold of her shoulder and pull her closer. Then he kissed her. At first he simply meant to brush his lips against her cheek but instead his mouth found hers. It was clumsy but passionate. She tasted rum and mint and lime juice.

‘Hey.’ She gave a little laugh as she pulled away from him.

‘Oh.’ The shocked look on his face, just like the teenager she had known. ‘Hey, I’m sorry, Mary-Lou.’

‘Get outta here, Zagorski,’ she said and pushed him into his car.



A week later they met at a restaurant by the broadwalk in Venice Beach. Larry chose the spaghetti alle vongole; Mary-Lou ordered a cheese omelette and a salad with no tomatoes.

‘No tomatoes?’ Larry asked. ‘You allergic?’

‘No, well, it’s this diet I’m trying. The blood-type diet.’

‘Blood type?’

‘Sure. It’s based on the theory that blood types evolved at different eras of human development. Type O is the earliest, hunter-gatherers, so if you’re that blood group you get the proteins: meat, nuts. A comes next, which is the type that evolved when humans started cultivating so As should eat vegetables and cereals. I’m a B and us Bs were nomads, pastoral people who lived with their herds. We’re pretty omnivorous and we get to eat dairy.’

‘Nice. But no tomatoes.’

‘No. No shellfish neither, so I won’t be picking at yours.’

‘A diet based on blood type. That’s insane. You believe in it?’

‘I don’t know, Larry. It seems to work for me, that’s all.’

‘It’s just some mad idea.’

‘So?’

She gave him a cold stare. He ducked his head a little.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be so dismissive. What do I know? And look, I’m sorry about the other night. My behaviour. Too much free limeade.’

‘I hope you didn’t kiss me like that just because you were drunk.’

Her mouth widened a little into an arch smile. Larry grinned and shook his head.

‘No. But I shouldn’t have been drunk. I’ve put all that behind me. That time we met in the late seventies, God knows what I must have been like. I was clean for fifteen years. I did the meetings and everything.’

‘AA?’

‘AA, NA, the lot.’

‘And they got you through it, right? The Higher Power stuff?’

‘Yeah. I know what you’re thinking. I didn’t really believe in it.’

‘But it worked for you. For a while.’

‘Yeah. Point taken.’

Their food arrived. Larry looked over at Mary-Lou’s plate as it was set down in front of her.

‘Wow,’ he said. ‘That is a lot of dairy.’

‘The thing is,’ he went on after a few mouthfuls of pasta, ‘what we believe in just seems to get smaller and smaller. Diets, therapy, exercise regimes, support groups. Little superstitions. We worship household gods.’

‘Nothing wrong with that.’

‘But there used to be so much more. You know what really bugs me? People going on about “the planet”.’

‘You’re not saying global warming’s unimportant?’

‘No, no, just that phrase. When did it become the planet? Singular. Definite. Like there aren’t any other planets or something. It’s like an admission of defeat. We used to dream of going to other planets. Now?’

‘Jack used to dream of going to the stars,’ Mary-Lou murmured.

‘Yeah. And you know the last time people went out into space? I mean, going properly out of orbit. Apollo 17, 1972. We’ve got all these satellites whizzing about up there but most of them are just looking back down on us. It isn’t space exploration, it’s a sophisticated surveillance system. The planet. It’s positively pre-Copernican.’

‘Does it really matter any more?’

‘I don’t know, Mary-Lou. Nemo used to have this theory of interstellar socialism.’

‘Now, that is insane.’

‘Official policy of the Posadist Fourth International. At least it was bold. Utopian.’

‘We all had crazy ideas at one time or another, didn’t we?’

‘And that’s what this story I wrote is all about.’

‘What?’

‘The one I told you about. The one I wanted you to see. Can I send it to you?’

‘Yeah,’ she replied with a hint of dread in her voice. ‘Sure.’

After lunch they took a stroll along the broadwalk and looked out at the ocean.

‘I must have walked this path a million times,’ said Larry.

‘It’s a beautiful day.’

‘Do you have any regrets, Mary-Lou?’

She laughed.

‘Very few. I don’t even regret marrying Walter.’

Walter Nugent was an advertising executive she had wed in 1961. The marriage had lasted three years.

‘I often wonder how things might have been different,’ said Larry. ‘A change in direction here or there. Those little jonbar points of life.’

‘Yeah, but regrets?’

‘I guess not. I wish I could have saved Sharleen somehow.’

‘Yeah.’

‘And I wish I could have explained quantum mechanics to you that night.’

‘What?’

‘Remember? That night we got drunk on slivovitz.’

‘Oh yeah.’

‘Hell, I really wanted to impress you. But listen, here’s this great new theory. Danny Osiris told me about it, you know, the English guy in the remake. Guess what? Turns out the universe is a hologram.’

‘A hologram?’

‘A complete memory system encoded onto a flat plain. All of reality is projected from a distant event horizon.’

Mary-Lou stopped and turned to him.

‘Larry, do me a favour.’

‘What?’

‘Just shut up and walk for a while.’



Three days after that a large envelope came in the post for Mary-Lou. Inside was a brief note from Larry and a manuscript. She made herself a cup of coffee and sat down to read it.



THE CITY OF THE SUN

by Larry Zagorski



None of us in Heliopolis knew quite when it was that the nightmares began. A sense of unease and disquiet had descended over every district of the city. Perhaps we had all nursed dreadful visions in secret for some time, unwilling to admit to the terrors that haunted our sleep. For months, maybe longer, we suffered a double burden: the horror of these unconscious phantasma; the guilt at their concealment. For here everything is held in common.

The knowledge of these dreadful spectres of the mind finally became public at the fourth Council of the New Moon when a woman called out to the whole assembly that she could bear it no longer. She spoke of an incessant dream of confinement, of being shackled and lying on a damp and befouled mattress. The walls of a dungeon that ran with slime, with an evil, all-pervading stench. Worst was the consuming darkness, a sense of years spent seeing neither light nor sky. A mere tremor of fear ran through the Council Hall at first, that instinct of revulsion in the face of madness, a condition that can seem as contagious as any other disease. But it was not long before we were in doubt as to the soundness of our own minds.

At night I dwell in the depths of a ruined world! cried one, a living death, damned between perdition and oblivion. Another accused our unnamed creator of being oblivious to our pleas. Then at last came a shocking outcry against the sun itself. I address my prayers to you, it began, to see you risen in glory, but if I honour you, great sun, more than any other thing, why should I be condemned to cold and darkness? You give life and movement to the meanest worms; the pale snakes turn to life at the touch of your rays. I, in my misery, envy their wanton play.

Though nothing is considered blasphemy in Heliopolis, this final statement had the ring of it. For ours is the City of the Sun, and the sun forms the centre and very meaning of our existence. As it provides all energy in nature, so we harness it as our chief source of power. We worship it through reason rather than superstition, as the bright countenance of our unnameable creator. It has never forsaken us and yet now in the few hours when our world turns from its face we are plunged into hopeless fright. In days given to freedom and enlightenment, thoughts of darkness and imprisonment made no sense and curses against our beloved sun seemed plainly absurd. Yet all the peculiar words and utterances used in these lamentations were dismally familiar.

At once our Council resolved to pursue the meaning and, indeed, the very cause of these nightmares. The authority of our great city is divided equally between Power, Wisdom, and Love. Power sees to the security and defence of Heliopolis, Love to its care and nurture. So it was left to those of us in Wisdom, which concerns itself with the liberal arts, sciences, mechanics and our education, to institute an investigation.

In the beginning we tried to define the substance of these dreams. In Heliopolis we consider the knowledge of the senses to be above the knowledge of reason, so we looked within ourselves. We called witnesses and analysed the description and the strange choice of language used in recollection. It all sounded utterly alien yet disturbingly memorable and we feared some terrible prophecy. Something existed beyond yet we could not apprehend it.

In the City of the Sun we have lived in a state of permanent happiness, health and virtue, and we had considered ourselves resolved to a calm understanding of life. We count the world to be a living thing. As is said in the old song of childhood:

The world’s a book where the eternal Sense

Wrote his own thoughts; the living temple where,

Painting his very self, with figures fair

He filled the whole immense circumference.



And in this way we have built our city: divided into seven circles, each arrondissement named for the planets as they orbit the great central temple of the sun. Everywhere there are walkways and galleries adorned with mathematical figures, definitions, propositions, equations. There are botanical gardens and illustrations of every known creature. Samples of common and precious stones, minerals and metals are displayed. There are projections on every wall. The temple of the sun is domed; above the altar hangs a globe of earthly representation; in the vaulted ceiling stars are depicted in their different magnitude, with the powers and motions of each expressed separately in three little verses. Heliopolis is a wondrous machine dedicated to the art of memory and simply by walking through it all the arts and sciences may be learnt. Indeed, this is how we educate our people and sustain our culture. Now for the first time we felt lost as we promenaded its pavements and avenues, finding no answer there to our maddening dilemma.

We had hoped that by openly expressing our nightly derangements we might banish them, or at least that the sharing of discomfort might bring its moderation. Instead there came a despairing magnification of our collective woe. The nightmares became ever more brutal and intense. Our imaginations now conjured tortures of the body, torments hitherto unspeakable with curious names: corda, coccodrillo, polledro. The agonising suspension by rope, the hideous spectacle of being stretched to breaking over a wooden horse. The worst of all was called by some cruel muse la veglia or ‘awakener’. Here we are tied above a bed of wooden spikes in such a manner that only the strength of our arms prevents our lower parts coming to rest on them. The harrowing memory of forty hours of this grim punishment was imprinted on our minds.

And as we continued to investigate these torments we were possessed with a feeling that it was we who were being questioned. But if some entity had become our inquisitor, we could not comprehend the nature of this vile interrogation. A few of us demanded that a confession might be offered so that the agony might end. Elsewhere a rumour spread of a man among us who had endured the forty hours of la veglia without ever having revealed his secret. When challenged no one actually knew this person by name, only at some second or third remove as is common in the reporting of gossip. It made no sense in any case as it would not be possible to endure such hideous treatment at the hands of anyone in the City of the Sun.

Indeed, it was decided that the source of the nightmares was another realm entirely since their barbarity was inconceivable to our dominion. They must be a communication from another world, a distant star or planet. We do not doubt that there are worlds beyond our own and account it foolish to believe otherwise. So while our astrologers scanned the heavens for any new disturbance in the cosmos, others of us in Wisdom proceeded to our Great Library.

This treasure house often appears neglected amid all the palaces in Heliopolis and it is true that so much of our experience is read through life that we have scant need of it. The world is our book and our city a sublime school whose very walls form pages of knowledge (as children we learnt the alphabet from its walls as we walked around it). There may be endless volumes, copied with countless errors, but we can read from the one true original. The guardians of the Library have been working for many years on the Great Encyclopedia, and even they confine their individual study to a mere handful of books in a whole lifetime. It is said that it is not the reading that matters so much as the rereading. Nevertheless we cherish all books, especially the unread ones, for who knows what secrets they might yield one day? And as we count the world our book, might not other worlds be other books, strange and unprecedented?

So it was in the unfamiliar sections of the Great Library that we decided to search for evidence of life beyond our own reality. Guided by its guardians, we began an examination of works of speculation. The countless books consulted on this matter included: Lucian of Samosata’s True History, which describes journeys to the moon, the sun and the morning star; Of the Wonderful Things Beyond Thule by Antonius Diogenes, which contains similar references; Al-Farabi’s Al-Madina, al-Fadila featuring an ideal state; the Arabic grimoire the Picatrix, which contains an account of the miraculous City of Adocentyn with a central sun temple that projects planetary colours from its lighthouse; the Letter of Prester John, which reports an Earthly Paradise and various mirabilia: endless possibilities of other worlds and also the disturbing prospect of non-existence. We were particularly perplexed by Thomas More’s Utopia whose very title means ‘no such place’.

But while we in Wisdom seemed lost in futile scholarship, a vernacular narrative was emerging outside the confines of the Library. The whispered story of the man who had endured the worst of all tortures and kept silent had continued to circulate. Though we are loath to give credit to any rumour or heresy, in desperation we picked at any meagre fruits of the grapevine. And though no one had yet named or given any description of this supposed man, the nomenclature of his persecutors had been sporadically voiced as the ‘Congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition’.

It did not take us long to establish the nature of this body. Though we found many references to various holy inquisitions, this one was said to have been founded by the great hierophant of a city called Rome, a place distant in time and space. Many great philosophers were punished by this organisation. One who claimed rightly that the earth goes around the sun was shown their instruments of torture and forced to recant; another who wrote of a plurality of worlds in an infinite universe, of every star being a sun with its own planets, was burnt alive.

In time our attention was drawn to the life of the rebellious monk Tommaso Campanella who as a novice had been briefly imprisoned and tortured by the Inquisition for offences ranging from composing a blasphemous sonnet to harbouring a familiar demon under the nail of his little finger. He went on to engage in practices forbidden in that land: natural magic, astrology and the belief in heliocentrism. He led a revolt in the South that was both a revolution against worldly authority and an evocation of a great cosmological shift in the heavens, a mutazione in the local dialect of the rebels, that would bring about a paradise on earth. Guided more by the inspiration of portents and prophecies than practical strategy, the uprising was quickly suppressed.

Campanella was imprisoned once more and tortured more severely. His one defence against the penalty of death was to assert that he was insane, but in order to prove this he would have to face a dreadful ordeal. The test that the Inquisition used on one claiming madness was forty hours of la veglia. His torturers would watch all the while for signs that he was feigning his lunacy and wait for him to call out in confession. Tommaso Campanella survived. It seemed we had found our rumoured man.

If we felt something of a respite in locating the cause of our mental anguish, this relief did not last long. Soon came a foreboding of a deeper disquiet. Campanella was imprisoned for twenty-six years or more in appalling conditions of deprivation, yet his literary output during this time is remarkable. In the darkness of his cell he wrote or dictated in secret, risking further punishment by smuggling manuscripts out into the world. Many of his works were confiscated and destroyed; we examined what remained in the Great Library with awe and astonishment.

We know not whether the world was made from nothing or from the ruins of other worlds, but we certainly think that it was made and did not exist from eternity. We worship the sun and our unnamed creator and we do not question our origins. So it seemed a superstitious conjecture that many of Campanella’s sonnets appeared to be reworkings of our ancient folk-songs and that his philosophy of a sentient world was identical to ours. In his book on metaphysics he writes that man lives in a double world: according to his body, he exists in only so much space as is least required, held fast in prison and in chains; according to the mind, he is contained by no physical space and no walls; he is in heaven or earth, in Italy, in France, in America, wherever the mind’s thrust penetrates and extends by understanding, seeking, mastering. We found a description of hermetic magic that he practised to ward off the ill effects of the sun’s eclipse: in a sealed room two lamps and five torches were lit and hung to represent the planets and the signs of the zodiac – just as they are in our own solar temple.

A seditious memory threatened our right of permanence. Our provenance at once became momentary, fleeting, obscure. When we finally unearthed Campanella’s greatest work, The City of the Sun, it was with recognition rather than enlightenment that we discovered its pages to be blank. We knew at once what we had always known: that we are his book, his great vision of an ideal world.

The nightmares come no longer; the reality that conjured us has passed, as will all things. Tommaso Campanella composed our happy city from the depths of his suffering; our bright existence was conceived from hellish darkness. We cannot exist but as shadows of an imagined sun, letters that crawl like insects across this page. But we console ourselves that for our creator, words are not merely cyphers for the thoughts they represent; they have a power of their own; they are analogues of a divinised cosmos, evocative, charmed, incantational.



Larry came to visit in the afternoon. Mary-Lou didn’t know what to say when he asked her what she thought of the story. He had been so keen for her to read it that she had imagined it might reveal something urgent and emotional, some deep truth about himself. Instead it was some sort of conceptual parable. Clever and well crafted, maybe, but dry as dust. She couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed.

‘It’s wonderful,’ she told him, hoping that he would not detect the hesitancy in her voice. ‘It’s a great conceit.’

‘Well, Campanella’s notion of the world as a book, it’s something like the hologram theory.’

Mary-Lou recognised a nervous crease of a smile. Larry had always looked like this when he thought he had come up with a good idea.

‘But I don’t understand,’ she went on, annoyed at him now. ‘You said you wrote it for me.’

‘Don’t you remember? That series you did for Superlative Stories. You never finished it.’

‘Christ. “Zodiac Empire”. I’d forgotten all about that.’

‘And remember Nemo was obsessed with Campanella? I suppose they both had this idea of cosmic heretical socialism.’

‘Maybe you should have dedicated it to him.’

‘I wanted you to have it.’

‘Thanks, but—’

‘It’s about all those ideals we used to have.’

‘So you finish a series I wrote for a pulp magazine that paid a cent a word.’

‘Yeah, it’s dumb, I know.’

‘What is it, some sort of closure?’

‘Oh, please, Mary-Lou. Don’t you hate that word? No, I just wanted to revisit the sort of stories we used to believe in. As I get older I think about those times a lot.’

‘When we were young and had all those dreams.’

‘Yeah, and, like I said, ideals. And, you know, you were my ideal, Mary-Lou.’

‘Oh Christ, Larry. I really wish I wasn’t.’

‘Well, it’s the truth.’

‘Right.’

‘And we still need ideals, don’t we?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, do we?’

Larry felt frustrated by the way the conversation was going. Couldn’t they just talk about the story he had given her? He had thought there was some point to it. What he had learnt from their strange century: that utopia can come from suffering; that suffering can come from utopia.

‘You used to believe in so much, Mary-Lou,’ he said.

‘Yes, and then I became a cynic. A hard-nosed television producer.’

‘I don’t believe that.’

‘Good, because, like I said, I don’t regret my life.’

‘Not even Jack?’

‘Oh, please, Larry.’

She glared at him with a sudden feeling of resentment. Why had he brought this up again? That far-off world of the past. It was a distant planet yet it still held an influence, a faint gravity of sadness.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s just—’

‘Do we really have to go through all of this?’

‘You still find it hard to even talk about him.’

‘Maybe I just don’t want to. All this stuff about ideals.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘Yeah, okay.’ Mary-Lou got angry. ‘Okay, let’s talk about all the dreams that never came true.’

‘Yeah,’ he retorted. ‘Why not?’

‘All the idealistic communes that never worked, the revolutions that failed. Let’s talk about how you still feel guilty because Sharleen went and drank the f*cking Kool-Aid.’

‘Hey!’ Larry called out and held up a hand.

He glared back at her. Mary-Lou closed her eyes and shook her head slowly.

‘Jesus, Larry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Really, it’s—’

‘I don’t know where that came from.’

‘It’s okay.’

‘No.’ She opened her eyes. ‘That was a horrible thing to say.’

‘Maybe it needed to be said.’

‘No, it didn’t.’

‘Well.’ He shrugged.

‘Look, maybe you are right about Jack. Maybe I never did get over it.’

‘I shouldn’t have brought it up.’

‘But I got through it. That’s what I did. That’s what we all did. Those of us left.’

‘Yeah.’

‘And maybe you want to live in the past. I don’t blame you. We had better dreams back then. Some grand cosmic vision of the City of the Sun, or whatever. You want to go back to those times when we used to sit in Clifton’s and talk about that future. Well, here we are in the year 2000 and we’re old and worn out. And all we talk about is the past. Even all that space stuff, it’s in the past, Larry. I want to talk about the real future, not some hypothetical idea of it.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean me and you.’

‘What?’

‘Yeah. We’ve got precious little time left, Larry. And I’m tired of that boy from the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society, still desperate for my approval.’

‘Christ.’ Larry winced. ‘I’m sorry, Mary-Lou.’

‘Look, don’t act all hurt. I mean it about me and you.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘We know each other so well. Too well, maybe. But we still get on in our own particular way. And I’ve really liked spending time with you.’

‘That’s good.’

‘But I want to keep going, not look back at things too much. And I really don’t want to be the person you want to impress with your writing. I was never meant to be your muse, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Yeah, but you were.’

‘Not any more, okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘And I don’t want any closure either. Maybe we could try something new.’

‘What?’

‘Well.’ She smiled at him. ‘You know what really impresses me?’

‘What?’

‘That you still might find me attractive after all these years.’

‘Huh?’

‘Yeah. Well, you do, don’t you?’

‘Yes. Yes, I do.’

‘Good. So, what are you going to do about it?’

Larry stared at her.

‘Don’t look so scared, Zagorski.’

‘I’m not, well, I guess I am, but—’

‘Come here.’

She got up slowly and beckoned to him. He went and stood before her. They reached out and held each other in a tentative embrace.

‘Well, I’m nobody’s ideal any more, Larry. Maybe you don’t fancy the reality.’

‘Hey,’ he whispered, moving in closer, sliding his arms around her. ‘You’re in pretty good shape.’

‘Yoga.’ She shrugged. ‘A bit of power-walking.’

‘The blood-type diet.’

‘The blood-type diet. Hell, Larry, I’ll try anything.’

‘Well, you’re looking better than I am. I don’t see how you could find me attractive.’

‘Don’t worry. I don’t have any illusions. I just want a bit of companionship. Some comfort, maybe.’

‘That’s probably all I’m good for.’

‘Listen.’ She stroked his face. ‘You’ve still got a bit of passion left in you, that’s the main thing. That night at the party, when you kissed me—’

‘Like this?’

He pressed his mouth against hers and they held on to each other. For dear life. Against decrepitude and mortality. Closing their eyes and travelling in the time machine of the imagination. Pressing their old bodies together, seeking sanctuary from the shadow, feeling for remnants of desire. Mary-Lou drew her hands up to his chest and pushed him away from her.

‘Wait,’ she said. ‘If this is going to work we’re going to have to take it slowly.’



A low sun strafed the city as they drove east on Santa Monica Boulevard.

‘A date,’ he said, repeating what she had requested. ‘What kind of date were you thinking of?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. A movie and then dinner?’

‘Okay. You know Battlefield Earth has just opened.’

‘Christ, that Hubbard thing?’

‘Yeah. We could go see Travolta as a giant humanoid alien.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘No, me neither. What then? A romantic comedy?’

‘Yeah. Something like that,’ she said and shielded her eyes from a sudden blast of pale light.

Larry glanced across at Mary-Lou, her profile mottled, reptilian. Ancient beauty mutated with age. Yes, he thought, time makes strange aliens of us all. Rare creatures facing extinction. She was right: not much future left. Precious little, she had said. And the thought of that made him happy. So close to the end, there still seemed some absurd sense of hope. All the years lost in a flicker of expectation.

Beyond, Los Angeles was drowning in fire, a gilded sprawl burning with memories. A lifetime flashed on steel and glass, on the hot asphalt of the freeways. The sun itself seemed exhausted, a weary god descending. But this was all his. Matter, energy, information, it all belonged to him in that moment. The past was getting closer with time. Home, a humming chant, an incantation. LA, that dystopian utopia: heaven in the hills, hell in the valley. A simple illusion, fleeting and terminal, but he had found it after all. This, yes this. This was his City of the Sun.