Terminal Two - Seventh Episode: In Which A Camel Explodes, Impressing No One

Drake Two and Eliza Seven stood on the ivy-twined veranda, smoking expensive cigarettes in extravagant holders and silently contemplating the Slow Bomb, which hung above the sunset like a big fat bee intent on ruining everything. In the distance, flamehawks rode thermals over Jenkins Airport and rose in daft twists, leaving noxious spiral contrails. Smog cuddled the city like lagging.

Nigh tumid with vexation, Drake tapped the holder's narrow black stem too hard and the cherry dropped from his cigarette, falling a hundred floors to land in the accelerant-coated wig of a weary civil servant leaving the building. Faint shrieks and the odour of crematoria wafted up through the humid air as Drake sighed and patted his pantaloons for a lighter.

A lurid pink laser zinged across his line of sight, snagging the tip of his cigarette and coaxing it alight in a gentle puff of combustion. Blinking, he turned to see Eliza refastening the buttons on her silk blouse.

'Where'd that spring from?'

'Come now, Drake.' Eliza's smile was perfumed with a whiff of ozone. 'A lady must have her secrets.'

'Oh. Oh dear. I do wish you hadn't¦' And Drake buckled into his eleventh crying jag of the day.

Eliza regarded him with calculated, stately detachment, her poise and demeanour constant objects of public scrutiny via an octet of veranda-cams. She blew a smoke loop, crushed the butt of her cigarette against the faux-marble balustrade.

'Was it something I said?'

Drake rose, pawing water from his cheeks. 'Oh my.' He looked down at the damp smears besmirching his velveteen gloves with something like revulsion, quickly threaded his fingers behind his back. 'Eliza?'

'Yes dear.'

'You've a vagina, haven't you?'

'Oh Jenkins. Not again.'

'But I don't understand!' Drake clutched at his hair distractedly, cigarette painting fuzzy wisps. 'What's wrong with me?' He stared into her designer eyes imploringly. 'Am I so repugnant? Does being a Minister make me undeserving of love?'

'Why is it me you always come to with your impossible angst-koans?'

'Because you're a woman!'

'So is Delphine.' Eliza holstered another cigarette, then in an apparent concession to convention whipped out a matchbook. The matchbook's cover read Club Tatami ' We Do It Sans Eyeballs; she thumbed it open to reveal a tiny speaker emitting queer, throttled twitters. Seconds later a novadove nose-dived out of the sky, insane with reciprocal lust ' in a streak of flame it knocked the matchbook from her hands then smashed itself to charred embers against the granite flagging. She batted aside the singed remnants of her fringe, took a curt drag on her lit cigarette. 'So is Monique.'

'Yes, but¦' As Drake tried to wave away the stink of smouldering bird his expression tightened like a plait. 'Neither of them are here. And I need to know now.' He thumped his chest, silver rings clacking mutedly against the bronze moodwatch in his breast pocket. 'There's a hole in my soul. You know how nature abhors a vacuum.'

'Can't you stuff it with shredded newspaper or something?'

'Eliza! Please!' He tugged at his lace ruff. 'A man can't live on politics alone. Can't you see I'm languishing? I need¦ I need¦' Drake motioned with his palm but no words came out, his throat dry-retching silence. 'Look ' parrots mate for life. Did you know that? And they come in beautiful colours. No wonder you never see a parrot doubled over with grief. They have love, Eliza. Genuine, heart-crushing, artery-constricting love.' He looked out over the city and his face twisted with rage. 'Why aren't I a parrot?'

'I'm forcibly reminded of McVey's First Rule of Public Relations: "Born from a position of ignorance, all questions are inherently idiotic ' thus, unless one wishes to give currency to idiocy, one must ignore the question when formulating a response. I don't think you're capable of true sadness, Drake ' none of us are. I've a vague intuition that might be the saddest thing of all. Ironical, n'est pas?'

Drake dealt the balustrade an ersatz blow. 'You don't understand!'

'Voluntarily. My assumptions are freshwater; it'd hardly do to have your brackish worldview sending them all belly-up.'

'I can't go on like this!' Drake rounded on her, beating his breastbone. 'Look at me!'

Eliza sighed and kettled smoke through glossed, full lips. 'I am looking at you. Save for brief, merciful interludes called blinks, my gaze is perpetually upon you. This is the best I can manage without getting transparent eyelids.' Drake cocked his head and gazed at her expectantly. 'I am not getting transparent eyelids!'

'You're so cruel,' said Drake. 'I'm reaching out to you for advice. My heart can't take much more of this. I need to find someone, Eliza. I need a wife.'

'For Jenkins' sake. Marriage is like the Patella Street Sanatorium ' it's an abhorrent, outmoded institution where crazy people die, shitting and pissing and screaming for their mothers.'

'How can you be so cynical?' Drake mewled. 'Marriage is a commitment. It's an amazing public demonstration of mutual sincerity.'

'Call me paranoid, but I'm suspicious of any declaration of love where the couple are getting their lines fed to them by a stranger.'

Drake's face broke open like an egg. 'What would you have me do, then?'

Eliza drew on her cigarette until her eyes watered. 'I have several points to make, and I intend to deliver them wearily, burdened by the knowledge that you'll not merely ignore them, but actively misinterpret their key tenets. I've numbered them for your convenience. Firstly,' she tapped ash over the balcony edge, 'I'd imagine your wooing letters would garner a more favourable response if you decided upon specific recipients and addressed them accordingly, rather than folding them into paper darts and flinging them out across the grime-lashed rooftops.'

Drake was aghast. 'I can't pick women like sweaters!'

'Real women are sweaters, Drake darling. Snorers and excreters also. I fear the protracted ordeal of actually sharing your bedchamber with one might be more than your enfeebled cardio-pulmonary system can take.'

'Good gravy! Must you always be so base?'

Eliza turned and strolled to the far end of the veranda, charred novadove bones snapping like firecrackers beneath her white stiletto heels. Smoke trailed behind her like leaked whimsy.

'Secondly,' she lilted, 'your pain smells faddish. A fortnight ago love scarcely ghosted your vocabulary ' now you're monomanic as a flipped beetle. You bleat about injustice as if it were a new thing, yet we've been its grateful recipients and administrators for years. Check out the vista.' She thrust an arm towards the mess of grim conurbations clustering like frogspawn below. 'Take a whiff, if you like. The torrid, smog-choked gap that separates us up here from those down there is measured inch by inch with inequity. City Hall isn't just a testament to the universe's unfairness ' unfairness is what it's made from. Without blind partiality acting as reality's chief modus operandi neither you nor I would exist. Nothing would. Sentient life is a colossal waste of time.'

Drake propped his elbows on the balustrade. 'Well¦ I don't know. Perhaps I've developed a conscience.'

'Oh shut up. You've misdiagnosed, that's all. The yawning void in your chest isn't lovesickness, it's boredom. Ever since the Deadlock kicked off you've been understimulated.'

'Well of course. Politics is my life.'

'No Drake. Terrorising civil servants with apoplectic tirades over the minutiae of policy redrafts is your life. Politics is your excuse.'

Drake's eyes narrowed. 'Nuance is everything.'

'Then it won't have escaped your attention that whilst the Council of Thirteen remains a Minister light, debates'll go on being six of one and half a dozen of the other. That means we'll be unable to pass decisions, ergo no statute revisions, ergo no opportunities for you to yell at underlings until they take their own lives.'

Eliza blew a javelin of smoke, then swatted it with her cigarette holder. Wrinkling his nose, at last Drake nodded.

'I suppose you're right. This tedium's driving me out of my mind. I've had so much time to think on things¦' He grimaced so hard his face seemed to collapse in on itself. 'It's horrible.'

'There, there, darling. This is a difficult transition for all of us.'

Drake produced a mother-of-pearl cigarette case, opening it with a flourish. An intricate collaboration of miniature gears plinked out the Maranaloka anthem as he unsheathed a cigarette and plugged it into the holder like someone loading a musket.

'I've been so distracted I've quite fallen out of the loop,' he confessed. Placing the tip of his cigarette holder between heavily-lacquered clenched teeth, he resumed his search for a lighter. 'How goes it with the succession?'

Eliza's lips curled back, exposing her gums. 'Grindingly slow, as per. Divining Squad still locked in meditation. Populace a stir-fry of brittle ecstasies, natch. Amateur Sociomancers are having a field day, doling out scattergun predictions through a fug of incense. Chap in the Plague District's already claiming victory. Face like a spoiled omelette, apparently. I do hope he's mistaken.'

'Fucking pretenders,' Drake spat. 'They don't have the first idea what it's like trying to steer this shoaling dreadnought round the submerged reefs of political expediency. People think being a Minister is all vat-loads of grape juice and three day orgasms. Largesse? The last money I saw was that coin a hang-glider pilot chucked at me.' He rubbed the elliptical scar on his forehead, scowling. 'A dime, if I remember rightly.'

'You'll find a way to muddle through,' cooed Eliza. 'For my part, I've been dipping all my cigarettes in embalming fluid. An acquired taste, granted, but once you grow accustomed to the rather-' And she turned to vomit copiously off the side of the balcony.

'Another one for the scrapbook.'

Fingers clutching the balustrade's bunched cusp, Eliza allowed a yellow stalactite of puke to dangle over the wretched city from her open mouth. Twenty-five floors below, desperate hands were wrenching open sash windows as flannel-suited Stockpriests jostled to fling themselves to mulchy oblivion on Judge Street below.
'Oh, would you look at that,' she exclaimed, and the puke-strand snapped and fell. A full fifteen seconds passed before it burst against the corpse-pollocked pavement. 'The Index must have crashed again.'

* * *

While wailing corporate suicides dopplered past the playroom's mullioned windows, fledgling children's entertainer Brish Centaur looked down at his two glove puppets and experienced a sudden blast of clarity. I was wrong to stake my future on these, he found himself thinking, a miniature green baize card table puppet on his left hand, and some kind of crusted mollusc on his right. Back at his apartment he had stayed up until four in the morning, pacing back and forth in a flurry of happy creation, laughing as he imagined the mollusc delivering oblique, ruminating monologues in a cod-gaucho drawl while the card table sat mutely in exquisite counterpoint. Knocking back coffee he had revelled in what he had taken to be visions of the future, where he performed to a vast, booming amphitheatre of delighted children, their joy so intense that it transmogrified into beautiful multicoloured streamers and showers of glittering confetti. Cheeks clammy with tears, he had lain spreadeagled upon the plastic cork-effect tiles of his ill-plumbed kitchenette and run through a retrospective digest of his life's most bitter disappointments, reflecting how each apparent failure had, in fact, taken him a step closer to this: his destiny, his magnum opus, his absolution.

The baby was not entertained.

'Gambling? Ai ai ai! I tell you senor, eet's merely mankind's doomed attempt to force the cosmos to be eenteresting.' Brish tried to soldier on with the skit but all at once his critical judgement was perfect. He cast around for support, meeting only his panicked reflection in the mirrored walls.

The baby's latched jaw clacked open. A mechanism whirred and from somewhere deep inside came a trebly, metrical refrain: Wah¦ Wah¦ Wah¦

Brish Centaur wondered why stupidity so often fled when you needed it most. The playroom strobed with laser fire.