Afterimage

"It isn't the noise so much as the screaming," Richard said, shifting slightly on the grassy knoll.

Jack, lying on his stomach, glanced his way. His pale blue eyes watched him silently for a moment. "Not real screams."

"Well, that's just the thing, one never knows..." Richard contemplated the branches of the willow tree overhead. "Some of them are truly chilling."

Jack started to say something, then stopped when he saw the tension in his friend's face. Instead, he stood and walked over to the creek, calling over his shoulder as he went, "Not nearly as chilling as the look Madame Cast gave you from her opera box last night, I'll wager."

Richard didn't turn, but brightened suddenly and chuckled. "I shouldn't be surprised." He leaned back on the heels of his hands and squinted up at the sun. "Did she say anything to you about it? I saw you chatting at intermission."

Jack was watching the creek, crouched, his hand poised above the surface. "God forbid... " he started, suddenly moving as he snatched a herring, perfect and glistening, and tossed it on the bank. "...God forbid I get involved in your scandals." He struck out again and snatched a carp, similarly perfect. He picked up the other and, double fisted, approached Richard's back with a smile tugging at one corner of his mouth.

Richard called out lightly, "Oh they're right to despise me, I suppose."

Jack, coming from behind, leant over Richard's head and kissed him on the forehead. "Nonsense," he said, and casually dropped the carp into his friend's lap.

"Fucking hell!" Richard blurted, scooping the flopping visitor off of his lap.

Jack smiled impishly and settled down on the grass, leaning against the tree trunk and watching Richard fuss about his trousers. Biting into the silvery fish, he said "It's your duty, after all, to expose the fool and lash the knave and all that rot." The fish blinked, rotating its eyes to watch Jack eat it.

Richard smiled and looked fondly at the other man.

"And her play was dull. I don't know if it was all of the things you wrote it was, but..." Jack shrugged, biting off the head of the fish, masticating thoughtfully. The tail still jerked around a bit.

Richard looked at his fish, which had stopped moving, and picked it up. He held it gingerly, and bit into the side. Inside, it was solid and smooth, the same gold as the skin.

"Thanks," Richard said. Then, with a curious look, "What does yours taste like?"

Jack looked at him, one thin eyebrow arching curiously. "Well -- silvery, naturally. How else would it taste?"

Richard chewed slowly and carefully. "This tastes like water chestnuts, lightly salted," he decreed.

Jack leant over and took a bite of the gold fish, almost nipping Richard's hand. "Goldy," he proclaimed, swallowing.

Richard shook his head, a bit melancholy. "It's simply infamous how the nuances of the palate have degenerated."

"Oh, posh," said Jack, between silver mouthfuls, "You know as well as I that the color spectrum offers an infinite variety of taste."

"'Each more delicious than the next.' Yes, I know. But there was something added to the experience when you knew that this spice had been growing as a mold on a tree, that sweetmeat was taken from an exotic bird of prey --" Richard's eyes focused as a raptor's might as he said this, his hand swooping down in flight.

"Oh yes," Jack drawled, "I deeply resent missing out on the slaughter of thinking beings for foodstuffs."

"Don't you remember Old World food at all? You were a child, I know, but..."

"Mercifully, my memories essentially begin in the playgrounds of the New," Jack said, smoothing down a wayward lock of blond hair. "I remember the faces of my parents, or at least I think I do -- the Family Album they sent me over with was extremely thorough."

Richard looked at his friend, his eyebrows raised.

Jack continued, plucking at a piece of grass, "They intended, at one point, to make the upgrade themselves. My nannies were overlaid with my mother's smell and voice, to ease the transition."

"I know this is perfectly ghastly of me to say, Jack," Richard said, his face drawn, "But that seems to me obscene. To not know if one's memories were real or simulated --"

Jack smiled, stretching his legs out. He focused his attention between his pointy shoes and the grassy earth shifted slightly. "Well, that's where we differ, my dear friend." Jack lifted a fine tapered hand, and a silver cable broke the surface of the earth, slowly twisting skyward. "I thrive on simulation. We live in a world of our own making, a world we can craft." He watched the cable slow and gently splayed his fingers. Delicate green sprouts sprung from the cable and spiraled out into flowers of brilliant red.

Jack stopped, plucked some petals from the flower and sprinkled them liberally around in his friend's dark hair.

"So what you find obscene is, to me, wonderful. But it's hardly a case of more refined sensibilities... I, for instance, find myself baffled and, yes, repulsed, by the idea of living in Gastown." His eyes were apologetic. "So you must forgive me if I have a less than complete sympathy for your sleepless nights. It seems to be par for the course."

Richard stood up, slowly. He put his hands in his pockets and looked away, out towards the crisp, blue horizon. "You think I've gotten what I've asked for," Richard said sardonically.

Jack glanced over at the other's shadowed figure. "I mean... the strange, illogical elements deliberately released... the chaos and deliberate randomness embedded in that environment... with the pretense of creating something 'real,' something 'truly Old World,'" Jack's normally placid features flickered with confusion. "And the vile story that someone actually was murdered there, their life snuffed out as if so much physical ghostfodder --"

"Only a rumor, my delicate friend," Richard interjected with a slight smile.

"But as you know, a rumor as good as gold for the creators of Gastown," Jack retorted. "Touring a place like that, I can understand -- morbid as it is. But living there -- that's positively ghoulish."

Richard's slight smile remained, his posture perhaps a little stiffer.

"Or at least that's what I would have thought," Jack amended, "Had it not been my positively reasonable and cultured friend Richard Williams moving there. As it was, I was profoundly puzzled. I marked it up to the eccentricies of writers -- to the oddities of the Old Worlders. And certainly, the majority of the residents are Old Worlders --"

"Yes..." Richard nodded. "That surprised me, at first, but later it made sense." He looked over at Jack and his smile broke under a sudden wash of pain. Jack's pronounced lips opened slightly in surprise but he said nothing.

Richard took his hands from his pockets and wiped them on his gray trousers. "I told myself that I needed it, the vitality, for my writings. It reminded me of a flat I had rented in Soho as a student, and I certainly had no lack of inspiration then."

"In fact, it was there I wrote the story that was later to become the play that secured my modest measure of fame. But I've bored you with this before."

"You've never bored me with it," Jack protested.

Richard continued as if he had heard nothing. "When I decided to emigrate, Jack, it was on a bit of a lark. With the understanding that eventually everyone would be here, and the few of us with the money and the vision to upgrade early would be esteemed as pioneers."

Richard looked at Jack, his eyes starting to take on life. "I admit, I was fascinated by the idea. My writings at the time were full of delightful prophesy. Transforming oneself into light and finally transcending the flesh - it was a concept nothing less of sublime. The superstitious cretins frightened by wires and the machinery denounced upgrading as abandoning the physical, of becoming less-than-human..."

Jack smiled, amazed. "That anyone could subscribe to the idolatry of meat... it seems absurd. Patently absurd."

"Bigotry was the only thing that flourished in that dead world." Richard paused, a grim set to his jaw, then pointed at the sun. "That star had become a curse in the Old World, Jack. It was impossible to go outside for any period of time without nearly collapsing. The insane heat -- and the sweat, your body would start to stink like a laboring animal," his face enunciated disgust. "The idea of dignity in the face of that was impossible."

Jack raised a finger and lowered it, the sun following his trace exactly. "No tyrant now," he said, and lowered the sun to a stage in the sunset where the colors pleased him.

"It wasn't just the sun. Everything was soiled, tainted. The human race had consumed the world, and it seemed to be time to shed old skins and emerge anew."

"So, I took leave of my friends, my lovers, my family, and took the plunge. 'It's not good-bye,' I said, 'It's au revoir -- until we meet again.' And I said it without the faintest doubt --" he looked at Jack, anguish flooding his face.

Jack, too, became anguished. "Of course you didn't. No more than my parents, no more than the millions who upgraded. Who could have predicted the Silence?"

"Despite the many theories, I was sure it was a complete ecological collapse," Richard said. "The first week after the Silence hit, I waited for the last bitter Old Worlder to try to destroy the New -- to pull the plug on us, somehow -- and I wasn't sure that it wouldn't have been justice. So the fear took the edge off of the realization that everyone was gone. That, and the hope that the Silence was just a silence, and that everything would soon be back to normal."

"Well, there's always the potential..." Jack started, but trailed off weakly.

The sun had almost disappeared, and Richard's face was shrouded in shadows, "So many years have passed. Those people, if they lived past the Silence, would be dead by now... you know that. I can't shake the image that I somehow left them in a burning building, and as I reached the safety of the ground it collapsed. And the screams I hear at night... I recognize them. I imagine I recognize them all."

Jack watched his friend's face. There was a faint glistening there not quite concealed by the shadows. He stood, and approached the back of the other man, his lips moving ineffectually. Then he held Richard, placing his hand over his friend's heart as if to shelter it from ghosts.

#

This originally appeared in print in Adbusters, Summer 1996.