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Infinite particles of the divine sun, now
worshipped in the pitches of the night.
John Wieners, 'Acts of Youth'
Forgotten Isola guidebook, ‘39
Martinaise is the cheapest district of Revachol to stay in, if you can find anywhere that will have you — it’s not big and not exactly overflowing with luxury hotels, which might account for part of why it’s so easy to overlook. Over the past few decades there’s not been much for visitors to do here unless they enjoy tirelessly panning for gold in ungentrified junk shops, or have a keen interest in neglected parts of this bustling city’s revolutionary history… There have been attempts to get the commercial life of this quarter bustling again recently, with a changeable and unpredictable nightlife quite unlike anything you’ll find in Revachol East or even the more prosperous parts of Revachol West. But whether it’s truly “up-and-coming”, as the newspaper weekend supplements would have us believe? We’re diehard skeptics on that front, I’m afraid.
You’ll be hard-pressed to find any guided tours or tourist information centres in Martinaise, so keep hold of this guidebook and we’ll tell you the best places to look out for street art (that’s graffito to you and me), remnants of the district’s turbulent history, and mostly-edible eats...
The guidebook is written like a volume of the Intrepid Companion series of pocket-sized books — slightly annoying, not un-patronising, promising some amount of expert knowledge — but the effect is kind of spoiled by the fact that it’s badly photocopied, with pages frequently the wrong way up and in the wrong order, and it has apparently been stapled together by someone who doesn’t understand how a stapler actually works.
The cover is made of rough blue paper. It’s hard to even read the text on it. Kim has come across these guides before - at this point they’re well more than a decade out of date, promising a handful of long-vanished underground businesses, and a nightlife that doesn’t exist anymore, that never really existed at all. He doesn’t know who produced them, or why. He’s not that surprised to find one that Klaasje has left behind. Surely there is no better place to disappear to. Surely the only thing this guide promises is oblivion. Come to Martinaise, where you will be beneath the notice of those who would otherwise crush you. The best they have to offer is this ancient bundle of papers which say that the Whirling-in-Rags is a fun night out. Poor fuckers.
It’s an illusion, of course. Martinaise can be seen and understood by those with the big money, the big power, whenever they want to. It’s just that usually they don’t care to take notice.
The map-that-never-was is reproduced in miniature on the final page. Kim tucks the booklet inside his jacket and considers if, once this is all over, he should ritually burn it. Or have it framed.
***
For his seventeenth birthday, Kim bought the first jacket as a gift to himself. It was the real thing — twenty years old, with a slash at the neck, and a stain inside that could have been blood, or mud, or even oil. “Did somebody die in that thing?” his aunt asked. She flapped a hand near his shoulder as if she wanted to wipe some dirt from it, or maybe fix his collar. But she didn’t touch it, or him.
“No,” he said. “I don’t know.” It had been sitting in the shop for months and months, and it wasn’t very expensive. What kind of shop selling old clothes and battered books and old communist memorabilia — you know, things left over by the side that lost — could afford to charge very much? In Jamrock? And Kim had a job delivering newspapers and magazines and stupid mimeographed flyers for pawn shops and copper merchants, and what was all that for, if not for this. Neither of his parents had been pilots, but that didn’t matter either. The left lens of his glasses was foggy; he wiped it on his sleeve and then put them back on.
That jacket fell apart over a period of less-than-careful years. With the next one, turned up in some other forsaken corner of Revachol West just in time for his thirtieth birthday, he knew to take better care of it. Nobody had died in this one. It had never been worn before — must have just been locked up tight in a trunk in some basement somewhere, for all of these years. For this jacket, he learned so much precision. He learned the right stitches to fix any snags in the lining, any holes starting to form at the seams. So tiny, his eyes stung. He wasn’t made for this. Sitting up late at night, the ashes from his one allotted daily cigarette smouldering cold on the other side of the room, by a half-open window, not close enough to damage the fabric, the last knucklebone of cigarette dead and sputtering out, a little pool of dry ice.
***
His uncle still lives in the apartment Kim was born in. Back when Kim was born, his parents lived there. They took it in turns to look after him, while the other one went to work for the Revolution.
Kim has no clue what they did, what work looked like. “I didn’t ask questions,” his uncle says. He survived by way of being uninterested in everything but for the radio, and his mail-order magazines about the mysteries of the Pale. He could have been up there, pressed right into it. He could have travelled through it for the revolution. He didn’t want to. The weight of the static on his shoulders. A prickle on his neck where he can feel that mystery stain against his bare skin. He’s nineteen, and trying to get his uncle to answer the door. It’s time for their weekly dinner-and-cards evening. Kim presses the buzzer, and a voice he doesn’t know answers.
“What’s that?” the voice says. It’s sharp, and distracted.
Kim stammers. “It’s. It’s Kim Kitsuragi,” he says. “I was looking for my uncle.”
“Fuck,” the voice at the other end says. “I lost track of time, I thought you were going to be my brother — he got kicked out of his lodgings for setting the oven on fire...”
Kim rubs a hand across his chin. “I’m sorry for disturbing you, sir,” he says. “I must have buzzed the wrong apartment.”
“Is there anyone out there watching you?” the voice continues, as if it doesn’t care who he is. “I know, my darling, I know. But I keep hearing these rumours, I’m starting to think they must already have agents in the city.”
Darling. My. No. “Sir,” Kim says, but the man at the other end doesn’t let him speak.
“Okay, I’ll let you up. Kim’s been calling for you all afternoon.”
“I am Kim,” Kim says, frustrated. He knocks his fist against the latch holding the door in place, and the line goes dead, but the door doesn’t open.
He waits a few moments before hitting the buzzer again. He makes sure he hits the right number. He pauses in the cold, breathing out a clump of formless mist. And before he can speak, there the voice is again. “What’s that?”
It hits him on the breastbone. He presses his hand there. His uncle is always talking about ghosts from the Pale. Voices that rattle around the circuits. He recognises a small curl of his own voice in this voice. He talked about a Kim. Could it be —
His uncle emerges from the door, newspaper in hand, glasses pushed up on top of his head. He finds Kim standing, bowed, by the buzzer. “It didn’t work,” Kim says, finally. His voice feels rough and squeaky, like he’s going through puberty all over again. “It wasn’t connecting right.”
—
Kim’s too young to remember cinema under the commune — that’s the title of a book he stumbles across in the local library one day when he’s looking for a good dirty noir to send him to sleep, and it’s little more than a few academic papers from a number of Occidental institutions collected together. He can’t think of any films he’s seen from that period that were from Revachol.
He flicks through and comes to a chapter about the forgotten and derelict cinemas of Revachol West. He reads it standing up and notes down a number of buildings he knows that have since become social clubs where men play dice at all hours, laundrettes, flop houses, and bazaars where you can find anything beautiful and cheap and nothing useful and affordable. He notices that many have been razed for tenement blocks, or have simply crumbled away to ruins, or were bombed during the suppression of the revolution. A few were in basements, and maybe they’re still down there, cans of celluloid quietly rotting. Maybe some of them have gone down in flames. The book is old, and there are many lacunae in the authors’ knowledge. But there are photographs, and small accounts here and there, from dispatches in newspapers, letters preserved in far-flung archives, and oral histories collected by travelling researchers.
It’s not surprising how few of the contributors to this volume are based in Revachol. Nobody in charge here is going to fund this shit.
He browses the rest of the book. It’s a Sunday afternoon, he’s off-shift, he has nowhere urgent to be. He recognises a few stills, although he couldn’t say where from. A woman wearing the same jacket that Kim’s wearing. A line of young people, all dressed in black, pulling the collars of their t-shirts up to hide their faces. The fabled anarchists. All dead a year later, of course.
Kim’s seen the newsreels filmed in the aftermath of the coalition government seizing control. They’re in here too. But there are a few others written up in here, from the preceding years. Before the commune fell. Smuggled out in shipments of drugs, strapped to birds, taken by volunteer Paledrivers who almost went mad, unprepared for what they would find out there.
And there’s a lost revolutionary romance, made by students, perhaps never finished or screened for anyone other than fellow students and communists. It’s unclear, as so few who had any knowledge about it survived the decade. The stills are taken from a smuggled letter sent to comrades in Graad in early ‘08 by an aerostatic pilot, committed to the cause. Somebody might have died for this message. The flag of the commune. A bullet through a statue of the king. The usual stuff. And then there are the strangenesses. Shoes the wrong shape for feet. A feast table with a message spread across it, letters entirely made of bread. Anarchists covering their faces with their hands. Anarchists buttering bread and feeding it to each other, faces still hidden. A young Seolite girl in a pilot’s jacket, draped around her shoulders. Coins with holes drilled through their heart, piercing the old absent living king through his head forever, strung up like beads.
Kim clenches his teeth and puts the book down. The film is lost, he tells himself. He turns away. Unless it’s just in some bunker somewhere. Where would that be. Who knows. Martinaise, maybe. Somewhere else nobody cares to look. It would be terrible, they were kids, and they didn’t know they were about to die, unless maybe they did. The romance of the revolution, indeed. Like his uncle and his magazines. His bathroom compendium of crazy cryptids.
—
Kim hears his mother’s voice, too. Much later on. He’s trying to fix the washing machine, the wires have come loose at the back, and the electrician can’t come until next week, and Kim needs clean shirts and pants and socks and underwear, and he can do this, maybe, maybe he can do this. The power’s off. It’s very important that the power is turned off in every place that it can turn off. And it is. He’s turned it off.
But as he examines the wires and tries to tighten the connections there’s a fizz in the air around the metal. His body is shaped like an aerial pointing up. His parents never set foot in this apartment, as far as he knows. But there she is, like he’s only been tuning a radio. All this work to fix the machine, and this is his reward. “Len,” she says. She is a long way away, and she sounds like the wind, rushing cold into his ears. “I thought you weren’t coming home tonight. We heard such an awful crash coming from the west. The gunfire, Len.”
“I’m not Len,” he says. The hair on his arms is rising, like he’s charged. “It’s Kim. You called me that.”
“The baby has been crying for you all day,” she says.
“I’m not crying,” he says. “I’m right here. No gunfire tonight. Just a broken washer.” His gun is in a locked drawer, separated into its constituent parts. It sounds like the start of one of those detective novels he can’t stop reading. If the gun is broken up and locked away, then what was the weapon? If the door is jammed from the inside, how did the murder happen?
“Len, just come upstairs,” she says. She’s begging. “I’ll go out for the rest of the night. It’s my turn, not yours. Come and rock the baby to sleep. Kim wants you, not me.”
He can’t tell from her voice if she wants Len to come upstairs so he can get some rest, or if she just wants to hand over her baby so she can focus on the real work of living through the end of a revolution. The work which nobody really survived. Except for the baby nestled in a makeshift crib in the bottom drawer of his parents’ dresser. Getting spit on his parents’ old clothes. It doesn’t strike him until he hears his mother’s voice, forty years later. But they’re very young, even if they’re not as young as he was.
“I’m already here,” Kim says. “I’ll stay with you for as long as you want.” He knows she can’t hear him, somehow. Like how he knows whose voice he’s hearing, although she never introduced herself, never said Hi this is Yelena Kitsuragi, are you my grown-up son in the future. It doesn’t really matter.
Or does it. This fucking washer, it was never any good.
—
Kim agreed to help Harry clean out some trash from his apartment, but it’s turned into Kim sipping on flat lemonade at the kitchen table while Harry tries to sort endless stacks of paper into new stacks of paper on the floor beside him. Bills, letters, mislaid paperwork, leaflets, flyers, death threats, a handwritten poem on brown paper that Harry refuses to let him see…
One little booklet drifts loose, shiny dark blue and white and yellow. Kim picks it up - carefully at first, he’s got no idea where it’s been - and examines it. It’s advertising a school. Not so far from here. It’s old, and some of the colours have started to fade. Some of the others have started to bleed.
The school was sponsored by an international financial firm, well known for its many Occidental offices, and its one tower in Revachol West. There’s a pathetic little logo in the upper right corner, right where any booklet first starts to go ratty from being opened and browse through too many times.
“Huh,” he says, half to himself. “Look at that.” He flicks through it, searching for a piece of Harry’s prehistory. The long-distance running club has half a page all to themselves. Harry is there in the middle - Kim would recognise that posture anywhere, even if it’s a lot more broken down now. But the paper is too cheap and the photo too low-quality for him to really be able to make out Harry’s face. The smoothness of it. Nothing to hold onto. The paper slips against his fingers. He holds it out to Harry. “Found a piece of your puzzle,” he says. Maybe Harry should hang onto it. But that’s not Kim’s choice. He’s just here for some semblance of moral support. And the lemonade.
—
Kim learned to dance in underground gay clubs, learned to let loose around people who don’t know him, don’t know his real name, don’t care to know it, it doesn’t matter, who puts trust in names down here, it’s what you choose that matters.
So there are his tight plain-colour t-shirts, a flower inked into his inner arm, and the way he chooses to move next to other people. The eye contact, the connection, the attention. A lack of doubt in how he uses his eyelashes, his eyebrows, his firm, impassive mouth.
Sometimes this life, snatched in his free time, seems to break into the rest of the world. Not fully, but there are small sparks of it. A few grains in the palm of his hand.
Inside a dilapidated church, of all places. Some rooms are so old he can feel oblivion trying to take them. Some places are so charged he can feel other moments and other spaces layered on top. Not this music, not these kids. He wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere like this in that other life.
But somewhere, something rhymes. Somewhere, he puts out a hand, and his other hand knocks back.
He sits down with his notebook trying to make sense of this moment, later. The few specks of pale that hang there, suspended in mid-air. This is how the breaks start to happen; this is how all that furious consciousness and anxiety break through.
He’s seen how it can take and change other people. It feels personal, his connection. To it. A difficult acquaintance. He is trying to understand at a distance.
He taps a hand on the table and then tries to drink the last of his coffee. It’s gone cold, and it’s almost down to the dregs. He pulls a face and puts the mug back. It’s the fifth time he’s done that in the past twenty minutes. Next time he does it there are coffee grounds on his face, a couple sticking to his moustache.
He wipes himself clean and tries to keep writing.
When Kim gets distracted while taking notes, sometimes he comes back to look them over and finds that details have made their way in that he has no memory of; not of noting them in the first place, nor of committing them to paper.
He will be told by a sobbing witness that their missing friend was last seen in a long brown coat, and will find that he has added information about styling; details about the lapels, or a badly mended tear up the left sleeve.
He wonders if it is like this elsewhere. In Revachol East. On the other side of the pale. Or if it is just him; if this would follow him anywhere and everywhere. Whatever it is.
Sometimes the details are wrong; often they turn out right.
Maybe it’s the jacket. Maybe there is something about the jacket, after all. Maybe it flew, once. Much too far.
Or maybe. Sometimes he wonders if he is dreaming other people’s dreams. If the street he is walking is real, but somewhere very far away. He pinches himself and it fucking hurts, but that’s not his arm. Yes it is. Yes, it has to be.
He pays close attention when he takes notes, these days. And on his nights off... so what if he doesn’t pay too much attention to how his feet move. To the words they spell out as he shuffles across the floor. To the glyphs his arms make. To what words are being intoned under the bass. To the language of glances, and eyebrows, and hands.
In the morning he flips through his notebook again. Wondering if someone else, somewhere, is writing him messages. A street over? Ten years ago? A tiniest idea might set him on the right path. The wrong word could send him over the edge. No. He’s not that person anymore.
He scribbles a message for Harry, and waits a few days to send it. Just to be sure. Just to make sure he knows what he’s saying. What’s being said.