Chapter 10
Remembrance
He's staring balefully at the pills gently resting in the curve of his palm.
They're pretty pink pills. They stare back silently and eyelessly at him, and he can hear them imploring him huskily, smokily : "eatttt meee!".
He watches himself carefully raise his palm to his mouth, and then the glass of water....
Somewhere in the background, the radio is droning on and on (and on) about the wonders of marital bliss, cooking, and children (although not necessarily in that order). Simon Notsos Lim interviews some depressed twenty-five year old bloke who's whinging that he's old, and single, and how everyone looks at him funny when he's out on the street, and how incredibly lonely he feels. Sob, sniff, wail.
Simon sympathetically hears him out, then gently tells him in his calm, gentle and very gay voice that it's not about love, but marriage :
"Don't marry the woman you love, love the woman you marry!
Although Kit, ahaha, for you it's probably too late now. You're on the shelf, buddy, you know, the top shelf where the woman can't, and don't really want to reach! Go on buddy, hell, take the whole bottle!"
The radio laughs manically at him as he dully tips two more tablets into his palm and slams them home. Simon says, "Simon says, take the pills you fucking coward, have the guts do something, foronceinyourlife!" and to the accompaniement of Hotel California, and Notsos Lim's orgasmic laughter, Kit throws his head back and tips the remainder of the bottle's contents into his mouth...
*****
Kit has his eyes closed. His cheek tingles with the body electric as fingers draw delicately across it. His ricebowl-fringe is lifted suddenly by a hot breath - a breath of air; fingers of wind. Wind, from open air. Open air, bounded by concrete pillars, and metalwork.
He's been standing on the train platform staring morosely at the tracks for ten minutes now.
My life is so boring.
I need to lose weight.
I need to go to the gym.
I want a woman to love me.
Why doesn't anybody love me?
I think it's because,
My life is so boring...
He takes a step towards the edge.
...Why doesn't anybody love me?
Another step.
...What if...
Another step.
There's a dull thump. Somewhere in the background someone starts screaming Ohmigodohmigodjesuschrist.
Kit's too busy doing the body electric breakdance to notice. He smells : the smell of freshly crisped bacon mingled with something else; he hears : someone else howling - a high-pitched, unnatural sound, lonely and forelorn, slightly like a wolfcall, but different. And beneath that, a soft metallic hum, rapidly crescendoing into a thunderous roar as the rails beneath him shudder to life; just before the train hits him, he thinks How strange, I feel no pain.
Nothing much else happens to Kit for a while.
Death is never quite like the movies, is it?
*****
Kit's standing awkwardly next to the most beautiful girl he's ever seen, the poetic playmobil-couple etched in the misty golden glow of a streetlamp. He feels like he should know her, somehow. They're standing so near to each other that he can feel the heat radiating off her body onto his naked arms, and make out the tiny wrinkles at the corner of her eyes as her brow creases imperceptibly, making him wonder what she's thinking.
"Well, I guess this is goodbye." he hears himself choke, and feels his feet shuffling boyishly, one, two.
"I had a good time." She, gently. He wonders briefly if this is womanspeak for goodbye forever. And knows it's really just that dreaded "I'll always see you as my friend" old stinker.
Oh well, what the hell..
"When will I..." They laugh. They've both started together.
"You first." Kit, ever the gentleman.
"Okay, me first. When will I see you again?" She smiles at him with her eyes.
Looking into the dizzyingly infinite twin depths of her soul - Kit feels his reality spinning away. This all feels so surreal. Any minute now, Chee is going to bite my toe and wake me up.
Kit glances down expectantly.
It happens so quickly he barely has time to catch it out of the corner of his eye.
There's a squeal - no, more like a shriek - of tires freewheeling, and the smell of burning rubber. There's a dark flash, on the periphery of his vision, and a dull, wet thump. Sort of like the thump a body makes when it's hit by a solid metal chasis travelling at forty miles an hour. There's a crisp, clean crack almost like a rifle shot, only slightly more crumply - more like the sound of a hundred bubble wrap bubbles exploding almost simultaneously, really - and then the pain sets in a microsecond later as the realisation arrives from his spine to his brain that he has twelve fractured ribs on his right chest wall. His head, turning of its own accord towards the van thumps into the windshield then snaps obscenely backwards on his neck, and then he feels his feet leave the ground. He's dead before he hits the ground, his neck broken cleanly at the level of the atlanto-axial joint through the pedicles of the axis - what doctors like to call a "hangman's fracture".
*****
Kits eyes widen in shock and he inhales sharply.
It's Pink.
Her eyes harden as they meet his, and recognition dawns in them.
"Look out, she's..." Kit screams. Too late... always too late. Everything seems to slur into bullet - no, treacle - time as Kits mind races hysterically.
Pink moves. Reaching into her pink wonderbra, she flicks something... small... at Kit. Kit watches, horrified as the something small becomes something larger, and then larger still, and then ludicrously large and nastily sharp. He puts out his hands to protect his face even as the dart punctures his eyeball, rupturing the globe and shattering through the vault of the skull beyond it, lodging in his forebrain.
There's something warm and sticky on my face, and for some reason, it's getting harder, and harder to... breathe. My head feels like it's exploding, shooting, searing, stabbing, burning pain. I wish whoever that was would stop making that horrid gagging, rattling noise in his throat... it's so distracting... so difficult to.. think.
******
Jean's eyes swim into focus, dark, languid pools of brown filled with sadness and concern. Her left eyelid's just a little lower than the right; it makes her look pained.
"I'm sorry, Kit."
The gun barrel beneath her eyes doesn't even waver as it flares, and the sharp acid tang of burning gunpowder fills the room, and for just a split second, Kit fancies he sees something bright and shiny flickering towards him.
******
Kit's just ten when the Bad Man happens to him.
He's feeling slightly bewildered in the aftermath of his first major junior chess tournament, in which he thinks he did quite well. He feels a little bit like Charlie Brown as his parents herd him between their legs towards the community centre. They stop before another pair of legs - Waa waa waa, waawaa they drone. Something about hoping his chess abilities could be improved by playing with other children more often. Kit's feeling slightly afraid, he's been a cloistered child most of his life, brought up outside the world under the firm hand of his parents. He hasn't been out on his own much... Go with the Nice Man, Kit, his parents say.
He looks back just once as his parents shrink into his field of view, then become gradually smaller as he pads away towards a small, stuffy fluorescent-lit room.
The door closes, and then clicks as the bolt slides home.
A large, fat, oily face descends into view, and breaks into a sweaty, toothy smile.
"Helllooo, Kit..."
Kit doesn't speak another word after that day, for the rest of his life, preferring instead to sit huddled up with his hands hugging his legs on the window sill of his secure ward, looking out through the bars and glass at the sky.
*****
Kit's eight again, and playing alone in the backyard of his school waiting for mum to come and pick him up. Right now, he's kneeling down watching a little jumping spider wandering determinedly forward along the infinite circumferance of his hand. It decides something's not quite on here after a while, and pauses to glance at the pink island with the strange brown grass twenty body lengths ahead of it, across a massive canyon, then decides in its own spidery way, Fuck It, and leaps towards freedom.
Scrunch. A large, shiny black shoe appears in Kit's field of vision, in the grass just before him, between his two hands. The spider turns around to look at the shoe, too.
Kit follows the blue trouser leg upwards towards the shiny buttons on the blue shirt, and then at the blue peaked hat atop the face staring impassively down at him.
"Hullo, mister puwiceman!" he burbles happily, and then claps his hands in glee (making the spider take a death defying leap twenty thousand body lengths to the ground in a hurry) as a ham-sized fist draws something black and shiny from a large, brown holster.
"Izzat your gun?" he chirps.
*****
Kit's too young to understand what it means the day the men in black suits come for him.
He doesn't know what to do, shivering slightly in his blanket after the pulsating warmth of his dark, gentle world of the last nine months (and several days) so he just lies still and breathes as his parents and the midwives coo gently at him. A large pink thing comes into view and prods his open hand, and, instinctively he grips it and grimaces.
He doesn't understand when the men in black suits flood the room suddenly, and he doesn't understand when people start falling to the floor and other people start screaming as their chests blossom into roses of wet red, stark against the greens of their theatre scrubs. Every now and then there's a muffled thud as a silenced bullet strikes home.
But as he hears his mother's distraught, animal cries of fear and shock rage through the room, he reacts almost instinctively, and begins crying.
Years later, he doesn't remember a thing.
*****
Kit opens his eyes.
A brown, craggy mountain looms before him. He feels a warm gust of wind smear across his face - again - and then again - and dispassionately notes the fine tufts of dead black grass in the distance on the sheer sides of the mountain, it's worn contours sloping bumpily upwards towards a pale cream sky, in which an odd many-globed orange sun burns madly - it is cold here. I am naked. It's so quiet...
As Kit's disorientated mind gradually completes its reset cycle and regains some measure of its former self-assurance, the previously mountainous features resolve into a brown, leathery face set in an expressionless, beetle-browed frown overlying pale whites of dual eyeballs pierced in their centres by tiny, mad pinpoint black pupils peering over the rims of shiny rayband dark-glasses. The whole contraption... rig... face thing hangs motionless in silence right above him, literally in his face. A wizened brown hand suddenly enters in his field of vision, wielding a very sharp knife. Someone begins to giggle then, hyuck hyuck hyuck, high pitched and terrified, the sound a pig makes stepping into an abattoir, and that someone sounds a lot like Kit.
As the knife looms larger, and larger still, he turns to flee, the rising horror within his gut spilling out through his mouth as he vomits, mouth twitching like a bag of worms as he gibbers incomprehensibly in fear - but he finds his shoulders, arms, hips and legs pinned down to a hard, cold floor by harshly unyielding restraining-straps. He feels a sudden warm wetness at his crotch, then a cold rush up his arm.
Fade to black.
*****
"I think he's coming around." a soft, feminine voice with just an edge of steel to it. He knows it from somewhere. There's a nasty, dead taste in the back of his throat and his arms and legs ache like hell. On the flip side he's lying on a soft, downy bedding in lieu of a hard metal slab, and on twitching his shoulders experimentally, he's not restrained anymore. Dettol - the air smells of dettol. I must be in a hospital.
Kit opens his eyes and a man and woman swim into focus.
"Gnaah?" he says, experimentally.
"Kit, say something." Beautiful eyes, beautiful long hair, this person's name is
"Jean. I've been having the... strangest dreams. Wait. You killed me."
"Uh, yes Kit, but I had to do it, you see..."
"You shot me between the eyes! You bitch! I... hey. Wait a minute. How come I'm alive?"
The "blind" ah pek pops into view and smiles gravely. He's wearing a white coat over surgical scrubs, and that strange silver shiny thing on his forehead that only doctors on telly ever have. Real life doctors tend to pawn them to movie studios for money to buy alcohol.
"Ah, he come round again."
"You again! What the fuck is he doing here?"
"Kit, this is Doctor Chee Cheong-fun, an illegal immigrant and formerly an unemployed neurosurgeon from the People's Republic of China. He saved your life, after I... shot you."
"..."
"Kit, as part of the Empire's scheme for utter domination of it's populace, and to ensure a perpetual landslide victory at the pseudo-democratic Vote, every citizen has a microchip implanted into his brain at birth. When the chip is placed under extreme stress by excessive deviant or subversive thought, it activates and assumes control of the bearer to make him report immediately to the authorities."
"You killed me because I was going to the police?? You could just have restrained me!"
"If the situation is not resolved within ten minutes and the deviant thoughts continue, the chip explodes."
"...oh."
pause.
"I don't see how shooting me in the head would have saved my life."
"The chip explodes with the force of a ten megaton bomb. And the only way to deactivate the chip is for the bearer to die, Kit. You were lucky the good doctor here revealed his identity to us."
Doctor Chee looks up from a bag of fried peanuts and smiles nuttilly.
"I take chip out, sell maybe to taiwan for couplethousanddollar."
Kit raises an eyebrow quizzically.
"Make more money pretend to be blind performer, get to ogle girls too, look up skirt when they go up stair."
"Uh. I didn't need to know that. No prizes for guessing why you were unemployed." Kit's shoulders sag. "Well. I suppose that's that then. I'm alive because of an implausible chain of coincidences and half-thought-out plot devices strung weakly together to perpetuate a miserable excuse for a storyline. I guess that's that then. Now you're probably going to tell me now that I have to work for you because I know where your base is, and if I leave you'll either have to kill me or wipe my memory with a silver dildo with inbuilt red strobe light."
"Um, Kit, the death of Pierre opened up a power vacuum in the resistance..." (somewhere in the background on one of the patient TV screens, a Dyson ad starts playing)
"And having recognised my courage, intelligence and innate rebellious talent you're going to ask me to lead you out of the darkness of the empire into a new age?" Kit asks hopefully.
Jean and Coat stare at him.
"Actually Gawain here volunteered for the job. We need someone to drive the getaway car, carry heavy stuff around, and clean the windows."
"Oh."
"And if you try to leave us we'll have to kill you again. Permanently."
"Ah."
"Sorry."
The silence is punctuated only by the gritty sound of Doctor Chee biting down on the occasional hapless fried peanut, and thus it is that our intrepid young hero's pact with the courageous Resistance in its tireless struggle against the tyrannical forces of the Evil Empire is sealed.
