Solid Gone was a town-shaped case of myalgic encephalopathy.
There were people here. They sat on their wooden verandahs, dressed in drab, turd-like colours. They were of a variety of ages, but all seemed old. Their bodies had no bearing, they slumped and sagged, slack sack-folk. They half-listened to wirelesses set up on beer crates; or semi-attended to the ornate bong-pipes carved from desert gypsum which had been Solid Gone’s name and fame, once; or spent moments studying crossword puzzles and Star-prize Wordsearch magazines before deciding it was too much effort and lolling back in their deckchairs. Even more than a flick of attention to the passing colourful stranger was too much effort. A tip of the chin, a slight declination of the head, were all the welcomes Sweetness received to Solid Gone.
The intricately terraced and irrigated weedfields had turned to dust and blown away years before. The wirelesses were all tuned off station, playing a sinister, whispering amalgam of livestock prices, rural politicians, failed comedians, phone-ins about infidelity. Talk talk talk. A chatter of spectres. Not a minim of music. The heat and drone sat on Sweetness’s shoulders like grey luggage. Drear. Heat. Weight. With every step she imagined the colour draining from her clothes; a thread here, a button there, a seam, a panel, whoops! a whole sleeve, gone dirt.
“Hey!”
She felt she must make some sound, test her voice on the thick air to be sure it was still working. A barefoot kid lolling on a slatted wooden recliner lifted the brim of his hat.
“How do I get to the town centre?”
The kid lifted a thumb, jerked it left.
In the days of civic pride, before this communal affliction of the spirit, Solid Gone had built a small but elegant bourse around a cobbled central plaza. Here the weekly weed markets and meerschaum exchange had met in the colonnaded arcades, sheltered from the dehydrating sun and blow-in, vagrant sand. Sellers in smocks and veils had uncovered their piles of sweet-scented leaf, dealers in cartwheel hats and duster coats bent over the fragrant carpets, sniffing, crumbling fronds between their fingers, heating the powder up in small solar-lens censers, wafting the fumes to their faces. Hands had been struck, oil-paper packets of dollars slapped down into palms; vests of pockets stuffed with bales of pressed leaf. Once. Now plaza and bourse had been reserved for a single, new tenant.
Numb, almost dumb, Sweetness Asiim Engineer stopped in her tracks to stare. The camperbus was suspended ten metres above the cambered cobbles. A thick metal chain fastened each corner to massive staples on the cornices of the adjacent exchange buildings. The bus’s wheels sagged on their leaf springs. There were little gritty oil-pools on the cobbles. Amazed by this wonder in the heart of lethargy, Sweetness circled round for a better view. There was a device on the truck’s roof; some kind of satellite-dish/projector/death-ray/telescope/panopticon thing, aimed at the churning grey centre of the stationary cloud. On the back was a complex transformer unit, clumsily mounted on the luggage rack. The power-pack crackled and dripped fat sparks to the cobbles, where they skittered back and forth before running inevitably down to earth. Ninety degrees more, and the far side of the bus was a swirl of spray-paint graphics that challenged the creeping drab of Solid Gone. Sweetness studied the clouds of angels and jazz musicians and puce and lilac curving things that looked like visual representations of the result of Solid Gone’s former trade for several minutes before she untangled the words: Sanyap Bedassie, Cloud-Cineaste. In the middle of this gaudiness was the black rectangle of an open door. In the middle of the open door sat a young man, dark hair, ratty goatee of the type grown from necessity not fashion. He wore black pants that tapered at the cuffs. Foreshortening made his feet look the size of grain trucks. They were shod in loafers—Preeds of (scuff) read the labels on the soles: no socks. His ankles were painfully big-boned, and skinny. His feet swung in counterpoint.
He looked down and noticed Sweetness.
“Hey! You! Get out of here!”
Sweetness gaminely cocked her head to one side to study him.
“Didn’t you hear me?” The young man waved a weak-looking fist. “Get out, go on! You still got some colour about you.”
“You Sanyap Bedassie?” Sweetness squinted up in a way she knew made her look cute whether she liked it or not.
“Who the hell else do you think I’d be?”
“Don’t know. Seen a lotta weird stuff recently, so now I ask everyone. I’m Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th.”
The man Bedassie looked thoughtful.
“That’s a good mouth-filling name. That ought to keep you safe.”
“What? My name?”
“It’s got strength in it. The weak things go first.”
“What’re you talking about? What you doing up there anyway? You the town paedophile or something?”
“It’s the plague.”
“Plague? I’m out of here if there’s plague.”
“Yes. You should. Go on. Go now.”
“That’s why you’re up there. You’re the plague…If you’ve given me something…”
“I’m not the cause. I’m the cure.”
Sweetness looked up at the face looking down at her between the Preeds guttees, at the bondage-bus hanging in its chains, at the hovering cloud like a cup of sour ash soup, at the pillared plaza for something that would offer an explanation of what she was seeing.
“This is all mad,” she challenged the visible world. An acid grumble in Sweetness’s stomach reminded her of physiological reality. Place your bets: plague, or starvation in the desert. “You got anything to eat? Can’t rightly say how long since I last ate.”
“Not much,” the man in the bus said. “They only feed me twice a day.”
“Anything’ll do.”
“Hang on a wee moment, then.” He rolled over into the dark on the van, reappeared a moment later lying on his belly, right arm aiming a torpedo-shaped bread-roll down at Sweetness.
“I don’t eat the bread, I’ve got gluten allergy. Don’t know why I held on to this, usually I chuck them out for the hawks. Must’ve had a premonition.”
He speared it down, Sweetness took it in cupped hands, tore it apart, crammed it into her mouth. It was stale; each mouthful was like soil, but it was food, it filled bellies. When she had finished, she looked around the elegant arcades.
“How do they get it up to you?”
“Pulley and a basket.”
Sweetness pondered this a moment, then jumped to the inevitable next question.
“So what about, you know?”
“Let’s say, I wouldn’t go round the other side of the van.”
“Fair enough,” Sweetness said. “So just what did you do, then?”
“Nothing. My job. Entertained the people. Showed them humours and horrors, gods and monsters, all human life. And for that, they pay me with industrial grade chains and bread-rolls in a bucket.”
“Have you some problem with straight answers?”
The man laughed. He looked as if the laugh had surprised him, like an ex-smoker hacking in the morning. Stuff still down there.
“No. No, Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th. I have absolutely no problem with straight answers. This is as straight as they can come in this place.”
Sweetness huffed in frustration and instead tried to scry some truth from the fluorescent curvery on the side of the truck.
“So, what does a cloud-cineaste do, anyroad?”
At which a bell began to clang, leaden and mean as a miser’s funeral.
“You’re about to find out,” Sanyap Bedassie said, glancing up. Sweetness looked where he looked. Down each of the avenues that radiated out from the zocalo’s cardinal points, Solid Gone’s citizenry was advancing. Young and old, male and female, sick and halt, a slow, spreading wave of brown and drab, like a terminus honey-wagon unburdening itself of a cargo of nightsoil. They lurched in time with the tolling of the iron bell. Hup! hayfoot, hup, strawfoot. Another metaphor came to Sweetness’s mind: the nasties that Sle and Rother’am liked to watch in Sle’s cubby when they thought no one else was about, munching nimki, faces bathed blue in the zombie-light, snickering at the dismemberments. No: these trans-dead had a purpose, a lust, a blood-hunger. These people just came, and came, and came, closing their doors neatly behind them, safely pocketing their keys, falling into step, spreading sludgily across the cobbles, filling all available space. They nudged against Sweetness as if she was not there. Soft jostles. They did not even smell of anything. Ghosts have no scent.