entropy of erro, climbing, acrophilia and on a sunday morning

Let us begin in the middle as there are no beginnings. She put on her dark jacket, took her bag and left. From the house in the outer suburbs she drove down the patchwork of roads, long flat roads, downhill curves, passing through housing estates, towns, villages, that made her wish she was driving something faster. Drifting down the valley road past the fields with sheep and black cows, past advertisements for cars, food shops, politicians, the faces of young women, Televisions and films. Familiar redbrick housing behind service roads. It was late afternoon, not even five o’clock, on the roadsides people were sitting on benches, old men and women sat on the chairs smoking and talking, watching her and the world drifting past. An ambulance, paramedics collecting an injured person from the pavement, police in blue uniforms looking for crime through film and tv filled eyes. They don’t talk much as they drive. Just the occasional phrase, sentence, exchanges on driving. The low level murmur of two streams of consciousness. < My head hurts, she tells the other> <It will stop soon…> She phoned me, i could hear the sound of the car, a window was open. Hi Jean could you do me a favour and feed Henry for me. I’ll be back late, possibly tomorrow and I left early… The entrance code is 19682012. OK, see you later.

The town reminded her of many medium sized towns, a long wide street with a nice square, narrow streets. There were cafes and bars in old corners, cars, bikes and buses negotiating the high sided streets. Like all the towns there was a lack of parks, insufficient greenery, too much concrete. She stopped off at the gallery as arranged. Ben Nicholson and less familiarly Kenzo Murakmi abstract expressionist nylon and ashes, seared and scarred frames of wood and detritus, faint lace painted over the shadows of the body on clothes attached to the images of love…. Painted in beige on a bright red background. Plastic panels distorted with heat reminding her of Carrington’s Bride laid bare. Melancholy, the plastic and metal hung like mutated flesh from the strangely rectangular frame. Like an hallucination. They respond to the works in the same way because there is no difference here. There is a placard on gallery wall printed in a large black font; “the space constituted by and constitutive of the drama of self consciousness and mutual recognition that lay at their hearts…” She joins the courier at the table, drinks tea and eats a peanut cookie before taking the bag from the locker and leaves through the garden exit…. < What’s in the bag?> <Its the new running bag, laundered money, an identity and clothing in case we need to run.> Outside the gallery the noise of crickets, insects, a car, an hallucination, the long curve around the bottom of a hill. Which when it was flowing as well as this always made her think of Lucretius, declination in a fluid mechanism. (In this vignette at least; she is plural, she is always two, and what was important for them was less their working together that the strange fact of working between the two of them, the two who were almost identical, but not quite…)

She would have liked to talk to you about the sky over Castaliae Fons but instead talks to herself about the bright blue sky and the quick billowing clouds driven away by the winds. <At least its not going to rain, she says.> The deserted churches on the hill as she drives along the road, across the bottom of the heath, and then deeper into the city. She arrived in a mid-summer early evening, parking the car some fifty metres from the doorway in st.nwigtn. She sat in the car and taped and chalked her fingers before putting on her gloves to disguise the climbing preparations. <my favourite type of climbing has always been buildings> < better than trees…> <We have acrophilia, I like to climb things> < for once the I is right, as I don’t think I am as acrophiliac as you are, it’s a pretty mad medical opinion,…> < I like to be up in high places, buildings are best, trees, cliffs and mountains are OK but I like climbing buildings the best…> <It’s odd that this is one of the differences between us…> <I was an acrophile before this happened to us.> <i know we are, one of us has to be more internalist and its me. > All this whilst photons and waves generated by the sun poured into the mews. She wants to say, to tell you: This is what I was like then, when we passed through travelling towards Feramontov. Did she like England in those days? Better than Japan or the south they would say/have said. It was like pushing aside a bead curtain hung over the door of a strange bar and walking straight into a book by an existentially miserable Mexican writer, in a New York bar in which a man was trying to leave his wife, or perhaps in her case something a little more sinister, a woman leaving her mistress. That was the doorway into life, away from the existential moment she was living in and would be returning too sooner or later. It had the scent of literature, perhaps on a website or a slim book of stories, like reading a short story in the cafe over some tapas whilst drinking mineral water and good quality espresso. It was an ordinary day, She wasn’t the person who you might know now. She still had the aura of guilt that afflicts those who cannot quite believe they have survived, still waiting for things to happen to them; who are trying on elements of reaction to see how they feel. She was recovering and beginning to take risks again, occasionally writing them down in her journals, either as stories or system specifications, both of which were describing related things. There and then she travelled further south, slightly squinting in bright sunshine even whilst wearing her green shades, imagining some lazy afternoons, with birdsong, planes and insect noise, small glasses of beer then, it would be impossible now. She was collecting evidence for the people that she worked for, and eventually in a few hours she would report it, and the next day there would be meetings, which she would not attend and decisions made. <How long will this take?> <We should get back around 11 pm , possibly earlier if everything goes well, I’m surprised you don’t know that.> <I don’t seem to be able to estimate how long it could take.> [I monitored our body, evaluating the state of the muscles, removing the fatigue of the day, preparing to heighten our senses…] The day had began with a phone call she monitored between him and Aragaki, his mother. Only her words matter, his are forgotten… (“She should be dead, her body frozen in a cryogenic cell after we have extracted the information… We own her body. It is my responsibility. I accepted this work from the council. ”) <If we’d known about this before we could have vanished.> < I wanted to trust him>…

That early evening we leaned against the bar, sipping mineral water and espresso, listening to a French writer poet reading his dirge to an audience in a small gallery/bar. The poet was full of tenderness talking about these long dead french men. She recognized that the poet really did love these men, the men he was reimagining in this long room, sitting or standing on the slightly raised stage. It was an authentic love, she thought, but she, as a public, was disconcerted by the abuse he was committing. The poet may love what was in these men, perhaps even what is his. What was it about European men and their false universals, universalism, she wondered. And what was the poet thinking making such a confession to the public. What is this thing he is thinking. Is poetry so unaware of the damage it is causing to the parties ? But she ate pieces of chorizo sausage whilst musing about the entropic state the poet represents, she said to herself, too late, to late now […] She heard herself order some more,< Lagrimas de Pollo and some Patas Bravas… we need the extra food.> <Dare we tell him about us ? > <What could we say to make him understand. It’s not as if there is anyone else like us.> <He might simply hand us over to her…> The bar had two walls covered with cracked blackened mirrors, portraits of people and ornamental frames, strips of shelving for pictures and books to be balanced on. The bar was built backing onto a shady courtyard, it was a lightwell, to one side of the bar was a wooden doorway high enough for a horse and cart to enter and a few well watered old trees prospering in the shade of the lightwell. It was a good place. It was early, they had opened doors into the courtyard to create a breezeway through the cafe. There was a group of people of the kind you find in expensive hotels sitting around and expecting to be talking late into the night. She sat on a bench in the courtyard, inspecting the walls and deciding on her climbing route, whilst finishing her drink and eating the last of the Patas Bravas.

We sit listening with disinterest to the people around her. We look at the shut door of the fire escape on the far side of the lightwell and decide to climb up the shady side of the fire escape to the roof and turns off the phone. She puts on her climbing boots, leaves her other shoes under the chair, leaves the scarf with the shoes. Stretches and makes sure her muscles are warm and loose. And starts climbing up the side of the building. Of all the things she had climbed; trees, rocks, mountains, buildings remained her favorite. <Am I OK to climb? She asks.> <Yes, its fine. Let’s go.> She climbs up the edge of the black painted fire escape, avoiding touching the stair supports that are coated with anti-climb paint until around twenty feet above the ground. She rests fifty feet off the ground, thinking about how nice it was that she can climb up the side of buildings these days, looking at the security cameras on the fire escape wall. Nobody sees her ascent. < why are you climbing so slowly?> < I am climbing at the speed of a skilled climber, anything faster and people might notice> As she hangs there four floors up the side of the buildings lightwell. She thinks that she can see the Earth which has been carrying us for tens of thousands of years reaching its limits. Climbing carefully, unhurriedly, slowly. Using pipes, windowsills, cracked bricks, the right-angle metal supports of the fire escape. Halfway up the side of building, the sound of the people in the gallery below, the differences between the city’s silences are no less marked because we are ascending the side of the building, caught in a quiet moment between the noise of traffic and the frenetic office life, our lives are inextricably linked to the noise and derives its significance from it. But here, and so we climb another three metres. Thinking of the bowl on the side-table in Japan which contained an array of pink and red flowers, she remembers a now faceless teacher who used to say: look, this is how the world is, these irreconcilable differences are are like these flowers, made like this flower hundreds of petals, stamens, stalks, molecules, atoms, particles, parsing from this universe to another, in an identical bowl. Not so much differences but a divide, an unavoidable division. She can feel and hear the smile in her head. She stretches across and climbs across and up. She over stretches her left arm and can feel the muscles about to go. Whilst part of her climbs, the other part of her allows images to emerge from the mass of her discontinuous memories, and as she pulls herself tight into the corner to avoid a window, a foot supporting her on the window sill, she looked on the petal of the rock rose and thought of the long roads passing Castaliae Fons, thinking of driving the car fast, northwards on the E1, southwards on the E9, thinking she might return and descend into everyday life through the curtain of the tavern into a scene about Eve by Cixous, and, but instead it was just flowers, cherry blossom, some of whom are dying, entropy, petals falling off onto the white table surface and into the shoes she had abandoned as she ran. Fingers in cracks where the mortar has crumbled/ <How am I remembering this?> She asks herself ninety feet up the side of the building. <Sorry, its the Adrenalin and the need to protect our body.> She laughs and says, <I’m glad your talking again.> <It seems slipperier than before.> <It is,> she said. She reached the top of the wall which was about 30 to 40 Metres above the ground (she couldn’t accurately judge the height) and climbed over the low balustrade and lay down on the flat roof on her back to rest and looked up at the sky. <vertical drifting… Give it a few minutes, perhaps five to recover.> She watched a peregrine pass overhead looking for an evening kill. <It’s OK,> the voice continued, <one of the muscles in our left arm is overstretched, otherwise we are fine. The left arm will feel warm as we repair the muscle. We can strap it later.> <I loved the memory of the flowers, I had forgotten about that,> she thought. <It’s nice up here, very quiet. Can I move?> <Yes, it’s good.> <I wonder how many memories we don’t share.> <I think its no more than 5% perhaps 8% of the total, but it might be more or less.> <Then there are the memories that we have both lost.> <It’s probably why we have never become a single subject, I’m glad though.> She said out loud. <and why you are more acrophiliac than I am> The sky is clear, not even a single plane, a few scattered clouds. <We are pregnant, do you think we should let it grow?> <Is it a girl?> <It can be. We can choose.> <Will it be like me, us, two of us sharing a body and mind?> <I think so because it exists now without the virus, without me, until we decide to let it grow.> <Do you think you would have become sentient if I hadn’t died?> <Don’t know, we don’t know because I am you after all, would you like that?> <And the baby/virus would not be us?> <No, it would be two of itself. Would you like that? > <Yes, good, i like that we are like this.> They laugh, only a solitary seagull passing overhead sees this woman lying on her back laughing to herself. She thinks, they both think it would be nice to have a child. To not be alone. From such desires everything changes.

When she stops laughing she walks across the flat roof and jumps down onto the roof of the adjoining warehouse building. A few moments later sitting on the edge of the building roof looking down into the warehouse buildings light-well at the car she has come to find. Feet dangling over the abyss. There were still people in the offices, or at least the lights were still on. Across the other side of the light-well she could see that the entrance to the stairs was open. She thinks she’ll walk down the stairs. She restarted her phone. “hello Ley, it’s me, the car we are looking for is hidden in the light-well at Dunbas and Brittain…” She paused and let her ask questions. “I’m on the roof,” she paused. “Thanks ley, it’s not safe for me to stay here, to speak, hence… thankyou. Speak to you tomorrow. “ <We should call him for the last time> <Yes, sadly we should> She sighs and phones him. [He is in a meeting with her other boss, I should take this he says showing the screen to her. She looks amused, he doesn’t know what it is about his relationship with Erro that amuses her. Perhaps he never will. “Hello” He says. “We are going to have to have a serious talk about Us and more seriously about your mother, Aragaki.” She says to him, looking at lights going on in windows in the lightwell. Pauses, pauses. “Because, just because. Poor human man.” She, who understands that she isn’t really human at all. Smiles, still sitting on the roof. The woman sitting opposite the suddenly shocked man, who still occasionally thinks she may have to kill him, finds herself smiling. “Ï’ll be back home at midnight or so, or we can talk in the morning… oh and I’ve told Ley already but tell her that the car we are looking for is hidden in the lightwell at Dunbas and Brittain…” He tells her he’ll go to her house when he can. He looks across the room and says his voice shocked. “Ërro is on the roof of Dunbas and Brittain…” ]

She left through the stair shaft, the top three floors of the building were being refurbished, there were still people working and leaving the offices. Feramontov was in his room. “You,” he said. “Yes,” she replied. Taking what she’d come for and leaving him and his partner on the floor behind the desk. She adjusted her clothing and joined a few of them in the lift of the fourth floor and left the building… <Did you always intend to do that?> <We had to, for us, not anyone else, we cannot speak to Aragaki, this may be a sufficient message. I don’t understand why that was so easy.> She smiled, for both of them. <Feromontov was very good. He killed me in Tokyo.> <But not us.> <No not us.> The front doors were open. Driving home and in the early morning looking at the photos she had taken from the office, they were surveillance photos of her. Inspecting the photos image by image. Investigating each square centimetre of the enlargements, an imprecise deconstruction of the images piece by piece, then putting the images into an envelope. A long set of tasks that really required impatience and patience by turn, cups of espresso and cappuccino drank into the night.<I enjoyed climbing the building.> < What will we do about this?> They already both knew they would have to follow the line of flight and vanish, but how and where to? Henry the cat is sitting on the table looking at her or at the images and demanding strokes. “Henry are you like us or are you more unified?” The cat seems to be smiling at her. She knows the sense is different from when she was standing over Ferumontov’s body, the sense now is that she is faraway from the dead body on the floor of the building. Indifferent to his death. Now it’s the prints of the south, the novels of Duras, the music of Oslo, these are the things of the person she becomes, the mutant mother of the child called Eve that probably means the end of the uniqueness of the human species; nothing but the actuality. But who is the woman who loved Castaliae Fons that she was thinking of ?

When she returns home she meets her neighbor, two bodies meeting in the lift, both looking tired. Work, he says, we had a patch release to install. I fed Henry earlier. Thank you, she said. I was climbing up the side of a building. Did you climb down ? No, once I get to the top, my acrophilia fades and almost vanishes. so I walked down the stairs. People who don’t climb cathedrals, people like me that is, he said, miss some fine sights. I’ll take you up one later. It’s a date. He imagines. The surface of the images is like old skin, full of fractalized wrinkles and scar tissue, it makes you feel sad. Once it was alive you think but now it is simply in front of you, like dead things scarcely worthy of mass consumption. Spacetime has passed and it is lost, all that remains is a representation which is not in the original sense sense and sense. Here though, looking at this picture of us and our neighbor in the supermarket, a few days before before this meeting and our leaving its still like the fast drive through the tunnel beneath the alps northwards, the day after a poet abused language and his loves. There is music playing through the wall from his loft.

By the time he arrives at the loft, we are asleep in the bedroom, the cat sleeping beside our body. The lights are on, he locks all the outside doors. Brings glasses of water and gets into bed with her. We open our eyes and say “hello”. Beside the bed a pile of unnoticed photographs… We don’t tell him about the dead men who Aragaki had sent for us, or that it’s over, one of you can be happy for a day or so. It is the last time…

I woke up when it was still dark, the other was asleep dreaming of Feramontov’s brown eyes, holding his hand, feeling his weak pulse. <”Don’t.” ” What?” “Hold my hand, it’s nice to talk with a fellow professional… I wish we had met someplace else, “ he said in his dream. She, we holding his hand as he died. She watched him for a moment or two before leaving.> The dream repeating. repeating with variations. One of the stranger things about us is that our sleeping patterns are asynchronous. Sometimes we can be awake and listen to the others dreams, I think we suffer from insomnia because their are two of us. I sat up, and being careful not to wake her got out of bed and looked at his perfect face asleep in the light of the LEDs. I would be saying goodbye later. We would be saying goodbye later… When one of us is asleep is the only time when the noise of the other in our head fades. I went to the kitchen and drank water, listened to the silence and had a couple of shots of the damson vodka Jean had given me… As I drank the second shot she said < your awake> <yes> <let’s go to bed…> Writing this in the first person singular is for us a unique experience, even trying to present this moment when one of us was asleep is nearly impossible, when we are always multiple. Though you are a split subject, you can still say I, as in “would you like a bottle of the Damson Vodka I’ve made?” But we are are always multiple, both of us split. I turned off the lights and went back to bed <nice vodka Jean gave us…> she said and we slept…

11 in the morning… . London Sundays, dreary like some London Sundays can be when beneath a blanket of low cloud, the drizzle falls and makes the city almost uninhabitable. In the morning what do you do ? He left early for his meeting. In our case we travel across the city in the car, I drove whilst the other listened to Angela Hewitt playing the Goldberg variations, and park it in the late morning outside the office on the yellow restricted parking line. Reluctantly we would enter the building and change everything again. So we sat in the drivers seat and looked at the front of the building, reluctant to step out of the car, pausing, hesitating. On this side of the building sheets of glass in a style that suits immaterial factories like this. Blinds hanging down on the inside of the glass to shade the office areas. After a few minutes, a few intense sighs, We got out of the car, took our bag and locking it behind me walked across King Canute place to the building entrance. I (the one writing this) stopped and looked through the glass wall, looking at the security guards, above them the video screens were showing pictures of the desert. <We’ll never see the desert.> <Unless it comes here> I replied. It was Sunday, at this time the city was more less deserted. The trees looked lonely. All we needed to do was pull ourselves together, hold our nerves and go inside. We breathed deeply, <let’s go.> The receptionist and security man waved me through… On the floor, mostly empty on the weekend, operations staff, on the phone, monitoring, watching, writing notes. It’s nearly midday they have been on shift for three or four hours. We had last worked a weekend shift a month or so ago before his mother had found us.

My about to be ex and Nomiko were in her office, talking about D and B. I walked into her office and said as I was sitting down. Good Morning, Nomiko, Franz. They looked at me, studied me, what is it? A friend is always a friend, Nomiko said philosophically. There were papers, some of which I’d written for her on the low table. What do you want? she asked me. They weren’t sure what I was doing there. You might not know me after this, you can both choose as I have to decide what to do… it doesn’t matter in the scheme of things, that’s how life will go now. You will have to decide now or over the rest pf the weekend. Nomiko had inconceivable resources as for that matter did Franz. <He also, I thought, loved me. People like them must be able to recognize the types of people they have to deal with… > Between them was a bowl of mixed nuts, i took a few and happily started eating them. <Before, when I lived in Japan and Korea, I was allergic to nuts. Since I’ve been here I’m allergic to nothing. > <we were borderline celiac before…> I looked at him, I’m sorry you know, I said. And leaned back into the chair stretching my legs beneath the table. I looked at my left arm, holding it up between us. When I climbed up the building I overstretched my muscle, hence the support. It’s almost repaired, still warmer than usual hence the support. Have you finished discussing D & B ? Yes Nomiko said, the police went in, some bodies was found. We were wondering if there was anything we needed to do. If we might be exposed… You won’t be, Franz might be. I said. Do you remember people well Franz? The memory of an Elephant, he replied, a requirement for anyone in our business. And you, what is it you want to remember? Nothing at all, I said. I’ll never know what I have forgotten from before, better we don’t know. In a while I have to decide whether to leave you and run to Timor or Lisbon, to drink creme de menthe in a bar on the hill overlooking the sea. Either that or somebody might send me to the hospital… I marveled at my incoherence.

I’m sorry, Nomiko said, so sorry. Understanding what was happening at last. Only Franz, lovely Franz didn’t understand. Or perhaps he was simply avoiding the existential crisis I was delivering. I’m practicing translating poetry I said to him, perhaps it will come to that. Delivering new things to small presses, that will be all that is left for us. “<I am so tired, I will miss you, as the morning passes, we wake up in the same bed, the picture of Marx on the wall smiles at us, we’ve composed songs and children, it’s raining, we will never make it to the promised land…”> I looked at his uncomprehending face. I took the surveillance photographs out of bag and laid them out on the table. All taken over the past ten days. Who took them? He asked. Looking at the pictures of me alone, with him, with Jean walking back from the market, me holding Jeans arm <he looks happy> <we didn’t notice at the time>, with ley and park, entering the office… This man, putting the photo of the dead man on the table, worked for your mother. I cannot ask you to betray your mother, sister, niece, brother. I don’t think you can. The council. He said. He was sent by your mother. <There is no need to say why his mother wants to kidnap me to carry out medical experiments on my inhuman body, nor do I need to say that Nomiko’s friend, was shot simply to obscure the kidnapping attempt. Nomiko already knows this.> I am sorry love, I said to him. I wanted to stay by your side, but I cannot because I might hesitate if it was you who came through the door. We need to break up. I’m sure she’ll send another set of people. When they fail, she will ask you. If I am here. We stopped. I wonder if my sadness showed on my face? Which is why you are here, nomiko said. Yes, I am here, breaking up is easier with you here, so that if it comes to that, if I survive that, then if you are alive Franz. Your mother has ruined everything. She really does hate you Nomiko, it could have been Sam, having Jess shot to obscure that I am the target … My mother, she decided to kill you. He was looking at the picture. Feramontov, Ferumontov Ferumuntov. I never quite knew what his name was. Because my mother sent him, there will be others. We smiled at him, wanly I think, I remember him as being better than this, I don’t want to kill anyone over my body, so we have to break up. Now today. Whilst its raining. Whilst the sun is shining. Whilst the rainforest still exists, before the desert arrives in southern France. Tell your mother not to send anyone else. Forget who I was before. I climbed up the side of a building, dealt with this man and his partner, held his hand as he died. He didn’t die alone, we talked about Tokyo. He loved Tokyo. I don’t want to go the Japan to kill your mother, so i will vanish.

Nomiko looked at me/us a little sadly. Erro, you should go. Take a guitar, some books, what clothes you have to hand, a bottle of Johnnie Walker and go to Zanzibar. Come back next year when the dust has settled. Did you think of doing that when you arrived? We asked. I couldn’t, and then I didn’t need to when I had a baby, I became protected. Suki’s aunts, a few uncles, institutions of the repressive state apparatus, the scary state apparatus. Zanzibar would be good, you two will (probably) never be able to have a relationship, your mother and your family. You can’t give them up Franz, don’t pretend. As for you Erro, you are a schizophrenic madwoman and Franz can’t deal with that when things are this broken. She smiles and continues. I will try sort out his mother and ensure she never comes here again. Put measures in place. My family are terrible, he said, I am terrible for not being able to give them up, but they are all I’ve got… Thankyou Nomiko, we said. O.K then Zanzibar it is. I touched and stroked his face. I’ll see you next year Nomiko, I’ll bring snaps, goodbye I said touching his beautiful face. We probably shouldn’t meet love, ex-love. True, he said.

There is a glory to goodbyes made in an office you may never see again, they are best not drawn out. Brevity is best. All too quickly they would degenerate into little more than self-conscious standing around