11
The road to Trance is smooth and flat, and we don’t talk. The road to Trance is well planned: all destinations clearly signed and all lanes clearly delineated. I follow procedure and make the first stop the The Number 4 General Hospital and pull up in the visitors’ car park. Nuchi leaves, promising to try and pick up some consumption tablets for Vera.

The sun is shaded by the swaying leaves of the ladle trees that surround three sides of the car park. Leaves that sway with the breath of wind exactly as they should do: no improvisation, no mucking about, and no stiff inhibition. Below, there’s a uniformed gardener cutting back the new bunches of growth that hem the lower part of the trunk – clip, clip, swish, clip. I have been left to myself. I have been left to my own devices. I stink. My armpits reek. Maybe I am ill. I am old that is for sure. If it wasn’t for things that never change, or never change much – for example, the whiff I get when I bring my bicep just above my nostrils – then you could lose touch with younger self. It is a constant, a proof that I perceive that shows I am still me, though, of course the real reason I know I am still me is that I have never been anyone else; the smell is just reassuring confirmation. For example, I must have have caught this smell when I was lying in bed on a Saturday morning when I was listening to the rumble of the barrels my step dad was rolling out of the cellar into the yard for the dray. I’d have detected a whiff of this common musk when I was flirting with my wife-to-be those 14 summers ago, passing her a bottle of the spirit her husband had just passed me down by the Teka. I’d wanted to hug the both of them: believe it or not. Who am I thinking this for? Who am I recording this thought in words for? Pause. Question unanswered. So, dates, years, me, think, think… the year 1475, I was 17, so what was I doing… last year of school, OK: job at the timber plant in the summer, and the host of characters rise: a hazy chorus - Desmond, Shorty, Sandy – but can I think of a conversation I’d had? Think…the warehouse with the timber from Cravia. Can I remember a scene, a moment in detail? I look out of the window: there is a bee floating towards me. It’s framed against a blue patch of sky between the two ladles in front of the van. A moment … a moment. What was her name? Running off at lunchtime to take the potatoes off the heat. A scene: come on… OK, lying in the bath after work, the steam rising above the nicotine-stained wallpaper, twisting the hot tap with my foot, filling it up with new heat and thinking of the flesh of the secretary’s pert tits, imagining them encroaching like the expanding wall of heat, the body of it drifting up from my legs to enfold my cock. The bee comes closer; my hands shaking, trembling inexplicably in hers, Eve, her eyes grey, questioning, tortured and free, closer closer straight towards me until suddenly right there in front of me it’s whipped out of existence with the swooping brutal speed of instinct and necessity.

“Let’s go. No dice here.” Nuchi announces, as he climbs in.

“Come on! What are we waiting for?”

I am about to start her up, but I turn to look at him, “You know I just saw a bee get taken by a bird.”

“Taken? Where?”

“Swooped up in one beak-full. Right here – this bird just swooped out of nowhere.”

“Nowhere, really? Are you in shock?” enquires Nuhi, entertained.

“It was coming straight towards me. It can’t have been concentrating. Then, whoosh – there’s no arguing with a thing like that.”

“I suppose it has made you think?”

I start her up, thankful for the conversation dispersing the curse.

“Yeah, I was going to say that.”

“Well, that’s the main thing. Something has made you think.”

“To Artis’s, then?”

“You are the one to whom nature has shown an intimate moment: you decide.”

I turn left out to the bypass.

“Actually, seriously, you really saw that? I don’t think I have ever seen such a thing.”

“You’d remember it, I think.”

We head around Trance. The bypass is carved into the scenery, banked with tall steep neat verges. Unless you were especially alert to variation in vegetation or lay-by, you wouldn’t know where you were, were it not for the numbered roads slipping off into the various segments of the capital. This order and domination of chaos has set Nuchi off again, talking about the old country. I say ‘set off‘ because good laws, does he love the chaos – growing up as he did with all that drama.

“You have a good memory, Nuchi.” I say after an extended and detailed anecdote about an episode involving a good-natured drink-riding incident with him on a moped in the town square of his youth, a dying pigeon, and a flirtatious older woman.

“What? Ah, I just miss it – the life.”

I take the 19 and we sweep slowly into the suburbs, a minute or two of quiet and unassuming red bricked two-stories, and then a patch of pedestrian density milling with quiet purpose around the amalgamation of centres for servicing requirements, each of which has a personal story, similarity compromised by character and trammelled by function and existing architecture – all hard work, a little avarice, a little focus, and a shop sign.

“I was just trying to remember stuff, you know” I say, “the past ten or fifteen years, and further back into my childhood – but I couldn’t get anything much in any detail.”

“Well” says Nuchi, gesturing for me to change lanes, “you have to think of your memory as being independent of you.”

“That helps?”

“I have no idea, but one of my intelligent friends suggested it. Look you can’t control or decide what to remember, right? So, imagine what you cannot control as not being ‘you‘ – your consciously thinking, deciding you.”

“Right, so…”

“So, ‘you’ ” he points at me, “for the love of Plotniks, you have to entertain it! Your memory is probably so fucking bored it has been sleeping half the time. Then you are like ‘what happened last Friday?’ and the poor thing is scrambling around, probably making something up that you will like – because that’s what you really want, right?”

“Well…” I say, pulling the van up by the verge next to the branch of Miega Chemists, “Well OK.”

The Truth from Art

“Art please, love.”

“Art!” his assistant shouts from behind the counter, craning her head back and to the right towards the staircase whilst trying not to take her eyes off us.

“I come, I come, I coming” wheezes old Art from the floor above. Artis is my wife’s cousin, and this little boxy place is Artis’s domain. He’s been over here for twenty years or so. Shot off practically as soon as it was possible, met a local, hitched his cock, and set up shop. It was Artis who gave us the idea after the tip– a little moist niche to crouch in as the economy desiccated and the Funds were stuffing their hands in our pockets, turning out the dust they found there and scattering it over our madly panicking and soon-to-be-scattered heads.

“Boys, boys!” he smiles and opens the latch from behind the counter to come out and shake us warmly by the hand – a rock hard, old-time grip with full eye contact: too strong for a chemist, but then he hasn’t always been a man of medicine. He whips the strands of long oily grey hair that are forever falling over his forehead and his stoney grey eyes. “Good to see you! How are you both holding up? Will you take a tea?”

“Sure”

“Good, good, come through, come through to the back, and let’s see what is what.”

We pull up some chairs and Art lights the gas stove. While the water is coming to the boil, he ask after our wives and kids and we both say they are all managing just fine: everything is order with his daughter, too, apparently – at university studying Law.

After he sits the mugs in front of us, he sits for a moment, looking at us, gently nodding his head – but not at us, it seems: nodding at a suggestion or imperative only he hears.

“Boys” he says, and leans over to pick up a newspaper from a chair beside him, “Boys, I have been reading this, and I wanted to ask you what you have heard.”

“What is it?” asks Nuchi gazing at the front cover of the Norland Crier.

“OK, well it says here that we, OK, I mean you, sorry, you are going to have to use this digital Rialto. It says that this will happen in the next few days.”

“No way, not in the next few days! Come on! Impossible!“ exclaims Nuchi, adding “isn’t it?”

“I will translate,” answers Art, takes out his glasses, and begins to focus on the front page, “OK, crash etcetera etcetera… umm. Ah… Following the near collapse of NordFund due to the run on cash deposits, the head of the International Order Undertaking declared that they would be looking to bring the timescale up, umm, shorten it… OK, so that the Rialto will be implemented as soon as possible. Sir George deGuard, head of the IOU, stated that the citizens of Letzonia, and indeed the rest of the community, could not take on more debt to bail out another fund which falls into difficulty due to the ill-informed panicking of deposit holders. Furthermore, he stated that this would instill order and transparency into the Letzonian economy, an economy well known for the tribute evasion of a section of its people. This will, umm this will, therefore be a great step forward in the Commission’s mission to ensure a prosperous, safe and stable community of states… and so on and so on. The Rialto will be this planet’s first solely digital currency – all transactions will be recorded by the sweepers and the relevant tribute taken at source… Private exchanges between natural people will take place via patch or computer… OK what else? Special patches … for those yet to have them will be distributed in the cities and the countryside… Finance Minister Didzis Dombrovskis declared that although it may take a little time for people to get used to the new system, it was imperative that it was introduced as soon as possible. We are Hah! Sorry boys, ‘we are an intelligent and responsible people, and understand that this is a thoroughly reasonable condition for the IOU to insist on before the next tranche of low interest credit is transferred to the state’s coffers’ ”.

Artis takes off his glasses and pulls his cheeks down with the thumb and fingers of his left hand, “It goes on to say they will be introducing it in a few zones down south, too, but… hah! We are the laboratory rabbits.”

“… for the new cure.” I add.

“Yes.” Art smiles. He folds the paper up gently and places it on the table behind him. Then he clears the table immediately before him in his calm measured way; clears his cup and his patch so that he can place his elbows down and rest his chin on his hands; locked in the semblance of prayer.

“So, what will you do?”

“We are thinking about it,” I say, exchanging glances with Nuchi.

“Hmm, okay” and Art smiles and lifts the palms of his upwards, “okay.”

That’s it with Art and his kind I think I realise: those whose parents lived through the revolution; those like Art who were adults at the end of the Prole era – the hard, quiet ones. The ones who think, and would have you do it, too: slowly, carefully, and with responsibility leavened with amused fatality. They were the ones who got around things when they had to with the people they trusted. We, the younger ones, don’t see it like some of his generation do: we don’t see it as partisans in a slow, grinding conflict do.

“We know it might prove to be difficult selling the stuff over there.”

Art nods, but Nuchi scoffs.

“Oh come on. Look seriously, so they pay us off the record in this Rialto. What’s the difference?”

Art looks at me in what I take to be a question.

“Can they? Will anything be off record anymore?”

“No,” says Art – “not really, not anymore.”

Nuchi rises suddenly with a scrape of his chair, moves to the window, and stands there staring out at the car park at a pair of seagulls circling above the recycling bins.

“Look, what are you saying? How then are we supposed to pay each other? Let’s say I want to lend you a tenner, or …” He turns to face us, “or pay Aivar to patch the piping up – fucking ridiculous.”

“You can pay,” says Art.

“But it will be recorded,” I add.

“So?”

“So, let’s say we go to that old girl in Witches with some of our stuff. She will have to pay us through her patch. She might not want to do that. Folding Kaposta was more anonymous, wasn’t it? And also, think about it, she won’t be able to sell anything that we bring her from here through the pan because technically it’s expired, and she won’t be able to process it officially.”

“So, come on, what did you say? We can use the patch to transfer funds, right? So, come on… she takes it from us privately by her patch, and sells it with… with… well the same way.”

Art shrugs.

“Maybe, Vannuchi, maybe. But the tribute agency will see all the Fund transactions including those made digitally through the patch. The sweepers are all up – they will record everything. It’s possible she will have to explain these movements at some point. She will not want to make too many tribute-free transactions with customers. It might look suspicious.”

“Oh come on!” Nuchi widens his right eye and leans back to fully take in the absurdity, “Are you seriously saying they are going to give a shit about such low-level stuff as this? They are after others, the big ones, not us… I mean, for the saints, please, who do you think we are? Good laws, we are nothing, no one… doing nothing, come on - it’s a joke!“

Art swills the last of his tea around in his cup, and smiles to himself.
“Yes, it is true. We are. But for them, maybe there are too many ‘no ones’. ‘No ones’ out there in the woods, like your father, Jani – eh?”

“Again?” says Vannuchi taking his seat again. “Really? It is … no, …”

“No what?” I ask.

“Well, you know, please don’t, you know… look, it is your, not my family’s fight, OK? Was your father, your…well look, they were armed: that was a war and they were caught up in it - it’s not the same as this. We are not partisans in wartime, are we? I’m sorry, but you are being too dramatic about this - too serious again. Sorry.” And he shrugs his shoulders and motions at the space between us.

Lifting his head up and unfolding his clasped hands, Art slowly responds:

“This, boys, is the start of something new. A new movement, if you like. You have been getting by these last few years by hiding: not physically hiding in the woods, but hiding your transactions, hiding your business. This new system will detect you and those who you do your business with. Maybe, really, they will do nothing about it because you are, sorry, so insignificant. But that will be for them to decide, not you. And I am afraid that no one in your circle will be able to help you. Nowadays, it seems to me, these kinds of decisions are made automatically, programmed if you like. They will soon, very soon, have full knowledge of all our soon-to-be, frankly helpless circles. So, I recommend you think now before your heels are bitten.”

Nuchi puts his head in hands and starts groaning. He doesn’t say anything, just groans slowly enough so we hear the revs of it rolling off the back of the arch of his mouth. I imagine he is contemplating this, his cul de sac of destiny: caught here in this moment with Art and I, the two of us remorselessly drawing the gloomiest of conclusions.

It cheers me up for some reason.