LITMIR.BIZ

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die, Buddy thought.

      The spirit heard the unspoken reply.

      ‘No,’ he said. ‘Don’t imagine death. Please don’t imagine death. I can’t arm myself with that.’

      Arm yourself? Buddy thought.

      ‘Against the Jaff.’

      Who are you?

      ‘Men once. Spirits now. Enemies forever. You have to help me. I need the last squeezings of your mind, or I go to war with him naked.’

      Sorry, I already gave, Buddy thought. You saw him do the taking. And by the way, what was that thing?

      ‘The terata? Your primal fears made solid. He’s riding to the world on it.’ Fletcher looked up the chimney again. ‘But he won’t break surface yet. The day’s too bright for him.’

      Is it still day?

      ‘Yes.’

      How do you know?

      ‘The process of the sun still moves me, even here. I wanted to be sky, Vance. Instead, two decades I’ve lived in darkness, with the Jaff at my throat. Now he’s taking the war overground, and I need arms against him, plucked out of your head.’

      There’s nothing left, Buddy said. I’m finished.

      ‘Quiddity must be preserved,’ Fletcher said.

      Quiddity?

      ‘The dream-sea. You might even see its island, as you die. It’s wonderful; I envy you the freedom to leave this world …’

      Heaven you mean? Buddy thought. Is it Heaven you mean? If so, I haven’t got a chance.

      ‘Heaven’s only one of many stories, told on the shores of Ephemeris. There are hundreds, and you’ll know them all. So don’t be afraid. Only give me a little of your mind, so that Quiddity may be preserved.’

      Who from?

      ‘The Jaff, who else?’

      Buddy had never been much of a dreamer. His sleep, when it wasn’t drugged or drunk, was that of a man who lived himself to exhaustion daily. After a gig, or a fuck, or both, he would give himself to sleep as to a rehearsal for the final oblivion that called him now. With the fear of nullity a rod to his broken back he scrabbled to make sense of Fletcher’s words. A sea; a shore; a place of stories, in which Heaven was just one of many possibilities? How could he have lived his life and never known this place?

      ‘You’ve known it,’ Fletcher told him. ‘You’ve swum Quiddity twice in your life. The night you were born, and the night you first slept beside the one you loved most in your life. Who was that, Buddy? There’ve been so many women, right? Which one of them meant most to you? Oh … but of course. In the end, there was only one. Am I right? Your mother.’

      How the hell did you know that?

      ‘Put it down to a lucky guess …’

      Liar!

      ‘OK, so I’m digging around in your thoughts a little. Forgive me the trespass. I need help, Buddy, or the Jaff has me beaten. You don’t want that.’

      No, I don’t.

      ‘Imagine for me. Give me something more than regret to make an ally of. Who are your heroes?’

      Heroes?

      ‘Picture them for me.’

      Comedians! All of them.

      ‘An army of comedians? Why not?’

      The thought of it made Buddy smile. Why not indeed? Hadn’t there been a time when he’d thought his art could cleanse the world of malice? Perhaps an army of holy fools could succeed with laughter where bombs had failed. A sweet, ridiculous vision. Comedians on the battlefields, baring their asses to the guns, and beating the generals over the head with rubber chickens; grinning cannon-fodder, confounding the politicians with puns and signing the peace-treaties in polka-dotted ink.

      His smile became laughter.

      ‘Hold that thought,’ Fletcher said, reaching into Buddy’s mind.

      The laughter hurt. Even Fletcher’s touch could not mellow the fresh spasms it initiated in Buddy’s system.

      ‘Don’t die!’ he heard Fletcher say. ‘Not yet! For Quiddity’s sake, not yet!’

      But it was no use his hollering. The laughter and the pain had hold of Buddy head to toe. He looked at the hovering spirit with tears pouring down his face.

      Sorry, he thought. Can’t seem to hold on. Don’t want to –

      Laughter racked him.

      – You shouldn’t have asked to remember.

      ‘A moment!’ said Fletcher. ‘That’s all I need.’

      Too late. The life went out of him, leaving Fletcher with vapours in his hands too frail to be set against the Jaff.

      ‘Damn you!’ Fletcher said, yelling at the corpse as he’d once (so long ago) stood and shouted at Jaffe as he lay on the floor of the Misión de Santa Catrina. This time there was no life to be bullied from the corpse. Buddy was gone. On his face sat an expression both tragic and comical, which was only right. He’d lived his life that way. And in dying he’d assured Palomo Grove of a future burgeoning with such contradictions.

      iv

      Time in the Grove would play countless tricks in the next few days, but none surely as frustrating to its victim as the stretch between Howie’s parting from Jo-Beth and the time when he would see her again. The minutes lengthened to the scale of hours; the hours seemed long enough to produce a generation. He distracted himself as best he could by going to look for his mother’s house. That had after all been his ambition here: to learn his nature better by grasping his family tree closer to the root. So far, of course, he’d merely succeeded in adding confusion to confusion. He’d not known himself capable of what he’d felt last night – and felt now even more strongly. This soaring, unreasoning belief that all was well with the world, and could never be made unwell again. The fact of time unravelling the way it was could not best his optimism; it was just a game reality was playing with him, to confirm the absolute authority of what he was feeling.

      And to that trick was added another, more subtle still. When he came to the house where his mother had lived it was almost supernaturally unchanged, exactly as in the photographs he’d seen of the place. He stood in the middle of the street and stared at it. There was no traffic in either direction; nor any pedestrians. This corner of the Grove floated in mid-morning languor, and he felt almost as though his mother might appear at the window, a child again, and gaze out at him. That notion would not have occurred to him but for the events of the previous night. The miraculous recognition in that locking of eyes – the sense he’d had (still had) that his encounter with Jo-Beth had been a joy in waiting somewhere – led his mind to make patterns it had never dared before, and this possibility (a place from which a deeper self had drawn knowledge of Jo-Beth and known her imminence) would have been beyond him twenty-four hours before. Again, a loop. The mysteries of their meeting had taken him into realms of supposition which led from love to physics to philosophy and back to love again in such a way that art and science could no longer be distinguished.

      Nor indeed, could the sense of mystery he felt, standing here in front of his mother’s house, be separated from the mystery of the girl. House, mother, and meeting were one whole extraordinary story. He, the common factor.

      He decided against knocking on the door (after all, how much more could he learn from the place?) and was about to retrace his steps when some instinct checked him and instead he continued up the gentle gradient of the street to its summit. There he was startled to find himself presented with a panoramic view of the Grove, looking east over the

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