Kopek dreamt that he was standing in Regents Park. It was autumn. A chill wind shook the trees. The sky was overcast. It had been raining. His feet were cold and damp.
Before him was a statue. Large and black. A convoluted figure-of-eight laying on its side.
All around was an open expanse of grass. Yet, he felt that the statue was barring his way.
And Diane was dead…
… Diane was dead…
He awoke in confusion, with a dull pain behind his eyes. There was a vague image in his mind: Something dark and heavy. But he could not recall the details…
This was a cry for help: A message in a bottle, thrown into the sea of eternity.
He was eighteen years old, going on forty. He had been born in 1972 as a fully formed adult, struggling to be free of the womb of his adolescence.
He was stranded on this desert island. A castaway upon the desolate shores of the 1990s.
This was a fiction about his life…
The eastern horizon glared crimson with a false sunrise as Colchester burned. Sinister dawn grey shadows writhed along the ground, like snakes twisting in agony, as Kopek trod upon their illusory bodies. On both sides of the road, the bland faces of suburban homes regarded him vacantly, their dark windows like empty eye sockets in a row of concrete skulls.
As he approached his goal, he slowed his pace and became more stealthy. At the corner of the road, he stepped over a low wall into a garden and took cover behind a tangled confusion of long untended rose bushes. But the metallic fabric of his stolen combat suit glowed a dull orange as if to betray him; reflecting the fiery, unnatural sky. He looked up and cursed it silently. The clouds burned like massive hot coals, even though the true dawn was not due for another two hours yet.
Grimly, he returned his attention to the small block of flats which he hoped would be his shelter during the daylight hours to come. There were no visible signs that it was occupied. He activated the scanners in his suit in order to be sure. While they went through their sensory cycle, he again regarded the play of shadows all around him. A surreal and savage flicker from which he gained a morbid enjoyment. As if witnessing a satanic rite, very much at odds with this quiet estate. Dark bodies cavorting between the abandoned family cars…
He grew suspicious of the recent series of images that had been passing through his mind and decided to make an atmospheric test. Sure enough, there were traces of hallucinogenic gas in the air. Not in sufficient quantity to trigger his suit’s automatic defences; but his perceptions were definitely being affected. And this was not the time to be seeing things…
… they were after him with clutching clawed bloodstained huge hands they were after him forever and ever laughing from crooked fanged pits in their faces and reaching out their hands their eyes their eyes! burning smoking daggers of ice in great pools of liquid hate their hands! their eyes! their teeth their fangs! running forever and ever and the laughter echoed and running the claws tore at his running from the claws forever in tunnels tunnels of despair ending in flames and eyes that froze the glinting claws the shining fangs that reached for his running legs forever and ever running tunnels and tunnels with biting scratching tunnel claws of biting dark…
He awoke from fear but did not escape it. The thunder of his heartbeat, the storm of his breath. His limbs were tensed for flight – but away from what?
His mind could not focus upon the image it sought to contain. There was an impression of blackness. Awesome in both depth and size. Beyond all scope of definition. His inner eyes refused to regard it. The sense of fear was too overwhelming. His only desire was to run. To escape. To free himself from the approach of absolute evil. Of the primal dark. Of the death of all things…
He opened his real eyes to the lesser gloom of early morning. The familiar grey ghosts of bedroom furniture. He became aware of the musky odour of his own sweat.
Death. He was no longer afraid of death.
Death was soft.
Death was soothing.
Death was a clean, non habit forming narcotic.
He would not have minded living the moment of his death forever. But there were several other moments he had to live first.
He sighed as he felt himself drifting inexorably towards the twenty-first century…
He sat near the River, reading one of his own books by the light of the burning City. And Jesus came to him and placed a hand on his shoulder, saying: “Despair not. For God still abides in many Alternatives. And God is love.”
And Kopek was sore amazed and said, “Sod off.”
This wall was his bible. The scriptures written with a spray-can, telling of the concrete god who loved no-one but his sons; the pylons. Arms outstretched, they woke up from their metal slumbers and hummed in praise to the electric messiah.
He believed in the iron madonna whose child, stillborn, ruled every wavelength. He made the sign of the double helix to ward off daemon DNA – the source of all his misery. At this computerised crucifixion, god and man both fell; unplugged.
“In the end,” declared Kopek. “We descend. Deeper than your philosophy and darker than my heart. In the end…”
He returned to the spring of 1972: Newly green trees framed the scene. The ground was soft and the grass wet beneath his cold feet. A cracked concrete path ended nearby.
A statue. He saw it clearly. A reclining figure eight. Stone curves almost voluptuous, but grey lifeless against the green.
He felt old…
… He opened his eyes and gazed in bewilderment at the grey, featureless ceiling. He could remember dreaming, but could not recall a single detail of his dreams. A sensation he had never liked.
He frowned.
The room was poorly lit. Dull and dingy.
It had once been bright and airy. An almost clinical white. But that had been… twenty-three years ago…
Twenty-three years, he thought. It was inconceivable.
Time crashed. The world was a cinder and he was ash.
”Follow me and I will keep your name alive,” he had promised. “Until tomorrow.”
Hot sewage had boiled up from the drains. The people had abandoned their bunkers in order to loot the shops. They had fired their last shots. Bodies burnt black and glowing blue with radiation.
1972: He lived that year, again and again, in a haze of desire. He lived… as fire… and in fear… As he grew older, he attended more and more funerals. All he lived for was the hope of glimpsing something he had seen, once, in Diane’s eyes…
Not light. Somehow. He looked at her face: Tried to read it, like a map, to find his way out. Her eyes concealed a world…
He could not love her. He could only hate her less for what she was: Human; female. In his misanthropic way, an insult showed that she had reached him. And it hurt.
Loving was beyond him. She had to be content to agonise and force him to react.
“Leave me,” he said. “I don’t need you. Don’t need you or your subtle, masquerading pain. Just let me cry.”
He could not love her. Could not be so wrong. Then why the tears?
Too late, he said; “Help me. Tell me why we both are sad.”
Sad…
Kissing Diane was like touching his lips to the blade of a knife. The cold steel both thrilled and terrified him.
Alone and lonely in London, accompanied only by a guitar that he was unable to play, Kopek wandered the streets. He felt like a ghost.
Life’s not a game, he thought; unless you’re playing. Life’s not a joke, unless you’re laughing.
“Don’t you see?” he demanded. “The past isn’t dead. It’s here, all around us. If anything, it’s the present that’s dead. Because life’s a continual process of realising what’s just happened.”
“And what about the future?”
“Which one?” Kopek laughed. “All right, I’ll be serious. The future is what happens after we’re dead. And I can’t pretend to know what that is, can I?”
His particulate mind resembled a jigsaw puzzle: A jigsaw puzzle with a number of pieces missing and several more that didn’t quite seem to fit into place.
His grey eyes perceived a grey ceiling. His eyes were the shade of grey that might be associated with the phrase ‘grey depression’. Gradually, the room brightened a little. The ceiling was revealed to be a dirty white, sagging in places and patterned with a network of cracks.
Cracks. His imagination failed to make anything else of them The cracks remained cracks. Kopek remained drowsing, at the hazy edge of wakefulness…
Jesus returned and stood at the foot of his bed. “I’m sorry to keep bothering you,” he mumbled. “It’s just that we’re both in the same line of work, so to speak. I believe it would be a good idea if we co-ordinated our efforts in order to have a better chance of changing the way people think. It’s the only way to eradicate Evil from the human spirit…”
“I’m not so sure I believe in Evil,” interrupted Kopek. “I’ve yet to meet anyone I would describe in those terms. So far as I’m concerned, the majority of the world’s ills are caused by a failure to do Good.”
”That’s easy for you to say,” sneered Jesus.
Failure: The Gene Rebel had failed. The Establishment had firmly re-established itself and was pledged to maintain the status quo at any cost.
Kopek pushed his way through the crowded London streets, brushing people aside like cobwebs.
People: Their faces were inscrutable. Blurred by time. Expressionless. Their eyes were unbearable… So tired. So weary of dull, lacklustre images… They all seemed to heave a single, enormous sigh. A uniform expression of their terrible ennui.
A chill breeze traversed the road. A cloud passed before the sun. A raindrop touched his cheek…
He awoke with tears in his eyes. Diane stirred in the bed beside him. “Did you say something?” she enquired, in a muffled, sleepy voice.
Of course, it wasn’t Diane. He was married to Linda.
“Forget it,” he said. “Dreams…”
Dreams, he thought. Love is lust and dreams are dust.
Later that day, he obtained a travel permit and drove to Barnsbury for what he hoped would be the last time. The old house was unmistakable. Its outside walls had been painted green while all the other buildings in the Square remained predominantly white.
Kopek stepped from his car – a vintage silver Harrington Alpine – and grimaced at the contrast. But, he supposed, it was better than the sixties style neo-psychedelic abstract which had adorned the place before.
With a mental shudder, he wondered what would come next. A montage of sea shells, perhaps? Or a giant portrait of the latest pop star? Or even a return to bare brick?
Not for the first time, he shook his head in complete bewilderment.
Diane waved to him from the kitchen window.
No, she fucking didn’t!
The building wasn’t there any more: It was a multi-storey car park; a derelict arts complex; a bomb damaged towerblock; a building site; a fortress of black stone…
He remembered standing in the musky darkness of his bedroom, looking down in blank incomprehension at the two sleeping figures nestled together beneath the black silk sheets. He knew that one of them was his wife. But the other figure was a man he didn’t recognise. The oppressive shadows effectively concealed his identity.
Kopek was totally nonplussed. This was a situation he had never expected to encounter. He was numb. He felt no emotion whatsoever. He just didn’t know how to react.
It was an unreal tableau. He regarded the scene as if it was merely an interesting abstract sculpture: ‘A Study In Black’. He reduced the two bodies to two interesting sets of curves that flowed together and fused with the rectangular prism of the bed. This central theme was replicated in the way the amorphous shadows merged with the hard, impassive plane of the wall.
It resembled a three dimensional Rorschach design. It also reminded him of the statue in Regents Park.
“What’s it supposed to symbolise?” he asked… Diane… or Sheila… or Linda… or whoever the woman was who was standing there, holding his hand.
“Can’t you see? It’s the mathematical symbol for Infinity. Rather ironic, in the circumstances.”
”How do you mean?”
“Well, once upon a time, we used to share a misguided belief that there was such a thing as a ‘Real’ world. That all the Alternative worlds were no more than echoes. But Martyn proved us wrong. Everything and anything is Real. Including the paradoxical fact that this Alternative is governed by physical rules that don’t allow the existence of any other Alternatives.”
“So, this is his famous ‘Monoverse’.”
“Exactly. There’s no escape. If we die here, we stay dead.”
“Oh, shit.”
This time, when he really wanted to, he didn’t awake from his nightmare. The pang of fear still burned in the pit of his stomach. A cold sweat still caused his flesh to tingle. The darkness of Infinity loomed ever nearer…
He stood holding the telephone receiver. Black and strangely shaped, it spoke to him in her voice. (It was only random electronic noise.) He could see the full moon. He felt very much afraid. He said, “Hello.” She made a ritual response. They danced around each other for a while. But the mad, silent music soon ended. They stood alone and far apart…
He wanted to say he loved her, without actually using those words; for then he would have been lying.
And then…
… Then what?
