a Rapture.’ He believed it had those qualities even now.
Ruby’s commitment to body-art and collectible tambourines couldn’t let this go unchallenged. Prior to the age of irony, she thought, kitsch was already established. ‘It was low art’s idea of high art,’ she said — the aesthetic of people with no taste. Its keynote was sentimentality, not simply in conception but in use. Trash, for her, was another thing altogether, and it was with trash she found herself at home. A true low art, trash was the aesthetic of people who had no aesthetic, and in use it could almost be described as utilitarian. ‘In all its forms,’ she insisted to MP Renoko, ‘and across every media platform, trash is the art of demonstrating, celebrating — and above all getting — sex. It is a Saturday night art.’
Antoyne scratched his head. ‘What happened when you said that?’
‘What happened then was that a fist fight followed, which it soon drew in the entire lunchtime clientele of the Faint Dime, becoming a legend in its own time.’
‘It doesn’t seem enough,’ he said.
‘That, Fat Antoyne, is the big difference between us.’
Because of the weird grimness of the work they do, Ruby believed, quarantine dogs live their opinions hard and proud: so it was predictable Antoyne wouldn’t see such things as intensely as she did. Perhaps because of that it was good that their liaison retained its temporary nature.
They were standing outside the Faint Dime, 9:15 am. There was a smell of cinnamon coffee — a Dime speciality — and eggs. Morning light came down between buildings onto cracked tarmac. On Gravuley Street, everything else lay in grainy shade. It was like a black and white photograph, except for the triumphant pressed- steel values of the diner itself, caught in a ray of light and shining, as Ruby put it, ‘like this real future we are in, rendered with such impossible 3D fidelity as it is, in the language of algorithmic texture and image map!’ A few weeks later, the job was over. Antoyne never saw Vera Rubin’s World or The West Ural Nature Reserve or Ruby Dip again.
He never saw the huge baby either, though the memory of it gave rise to dreams in which he became certain it had found its way through the walls of Gravuley Street to him at last. And in the end, he wished he hadn’t given his business card to MP Renoko. That gesture returned to haunt him too, because Renoko kept the card and later got in touch through Toni Reno, that well-known cunt; and that was how Fat Antoyne came by the mortsafe.
5am, Saudade: not late enough to be morning, too late to be night. Fat Antoyne stood out on the loading platform and stared across the noncorporate port at the dawn, just then arriving in streaks of pale green and salmon over the distinctive silhouette of the Rock Church. He wiped his hands. The rag, which had originally been a white cotton singlet of Irene’s, cropped short and bearing the slogan HIGGS, made him feel both horny and full of an almost nostalgic guilt. A little later, as if to further demonstrate his condition, Irene herself appeared, walking brassily across the windswept cement arm in arm with Liv Hula. They leaned into one another for balance — also a little forward as if compensating for a strong headwind — and sang. Irene was wearing a Vinci Nintendino bolero jacket featuring foot-long alien pinfeathers dyed pink. In one hand she clutched her signature see-thru cosmetics bag; in the other a pair of five-inch heels, red patent leather and with an otherworld glow all their own.
‘Hey,’ called Fat Antoyne.
They waved and called, ‘Hey! Fat Antoyne! Fat Antoyne!’ as if it were a big surprise to see him there, 5 am, on the rocketship they all three owned. Back on board the women tuned to Radio Retro and filled the air with old time hits, including
‘Fat Antoyne, it’s big,’ was Irene’s conclusion.
‘Do you think?’ said Liv Hula. ‘It’s not as big as I expected.’
Fat Antoyne stared at them. ‘I could make you eggs,’ he said. It was a puzzle, the women often thought, how Antoyne maintained his new thin looks, when all he ever did was eat. ‘We could get eggs in the control room. Coffee and raisin bread too.’
Irene hung from her arms around his neck.
She said, ‘Or — Fat Antoyne, listen! Listen, Liv! — we could take a rickshaw to Retiro Street and dance! Eat cake!’
Liv, meanwhile, bent down and peered into the porthole.
‘Don’t encourage him,’ she said.
‘My turn,’ said Irene, pushing her away. ‘What’s a mortsafe anyway?’
‘I don’t see anything much in there,’ Liv Hula said. ‘Can we have the lights on?’ She sought out the bills of lading. ‘“MP Renoko”,’ she read. ‘“Hard goods. D.i.f. Documents on site.” Where are we taking this?’
‘Da Luz Field,’ Antoyne said. ‘Somewhere called World X. It’s fifty lights down.’
‘Everywhere’s fifty lights down, Fat Antoyne.’
SIX
Skull Radio
The assistant rented her room from someone she knew, a woman called Bonaventure who ran a bar on Straint Street near the event site. At night the rocket launches lit the room’s warm air like a bad tank experience, psychic blowback from the engines reinscribing the thoughts and feelings of the people who had lived there before her. They sweated out on to the walls in layers of swirled colours like graffiti written on top of one another. Maps, artefacts, butterflies from another world, all of that kind of thing. For some reason, the assistant didn’t mind. She was used to it. She enjoyed it — although ‘enjoyment’ was a word she had never used much about her own experiences. Sometimes she wondered whose dreams she was having.
The evening after she first heard the word ‘Pearlant’, a man called Gaines walked in through the wall of the room. She understood instantly he was not one of the past’s stories. His appearance made her afraid. In response, her tailoring switched itself on; but something he could do — or didn’t even need to do — switched it off again, so that she came up off the bed hard and fast, then had to stand there in the middle of her own room, feeling naked and displaced, like a child who has made a bad judgement and sees it too late, while he walked around her to the window as if she was a fixed object, something almost interesting in a shop, something that wasn’t in his way.
‘This is a quaint place to live,’ he said, looking down into the street, which had once been gentrified but which was going downhill again. It was late. The bars and nuevo tango joints were opening slowly, their neon-cluttered facades pulsing and sucking. Ads patrolled the pavement with the soft voices of children. Rocket dub basslines thumped in the walls. The street was opening like a glass anemone against the steepening food gradient of the night. ‘But all this cultural babble out here, don’t you sometimes want a rest from it?’
‘It’s only what people want,’ the assistant said. She wasn’t sure what people wanted.
‘They mistake it for substance.’
‘I don’t know what that means.’
It meant that there was something down underneath all this, Gaines informed her. ‘It means that the world isn’t all signs and surfaces.’
She indicated the walls of the room, still imbricated and flickering with hallucinations, hard sweats, failed or partial communications from other planets. ‘How could there be?’ she said. ‘Anything fixed? In this physics universe?’
He came away from the window then and stood close in to her, calculating and looking her up and down with a new interest. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘I know there is because I’ve seen it.’
He laughed. ‘And now it wants to see you,’ he said.
He was one of those men you don’t know if they’re older than they look or younger than they look. He had good skin and a smile which seemed satisfied with all the deficiencies of the world as they had revealed themselves to him. He possessed a deep, withering bitterness he thought he was hiding. Longish grey hair curling into the nape of his neck, maybe a little gelled to stay in place. Chinos and a polo shirt, light canvas shoes whitened with pipeclay — an outfit that meant something, she could see; an outfit that made references the assistant couldn’t follow. He
