Archive of Our Own

YOU: You are called once, in official duty, to deal with your mother.

ESPRIT DE CORPS: Early in your career in the RCM, you are called out to a greengrocer’s for reports of a shoplifting. The woman, when you arrive, sits with her head bowed and her knees drawn up. Her once-brown hair is poorly dyed, leaving a thick silvery part like a scar.


EMPATHY: Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no.

THE SCENE OF THE CRIME: The door slaps behind you, making you jump.

THE PERPETRATOR: She raises her head. Her eyes soften on you, then widen.

VOLITION: *Don’t.*

1) “Well, what do we have here?”

2) [Turn to your partner.] “I got this one, Smith.”

3) “Mama?”

YOU: “Mama?”

AUTHORITY: You get rid of the junior officer. You’re good with the younger officers. A natural, Pryce says. Then, all witnesses dispatched elsewhere, you take your mother into the backroom of the shop like a common criminal.

LOGIC: Which she is.

ENCYCLOPEDIA: Stealing, or petty theft, is punishable by…

EMPATHY: Your own *mother.* You heartless bastard.

GLORIA DU BOIS: The shop’s backroom is poorly lit and smells of old, rotten produce. Your mother drops onto a sack of onions and watches you through her hair.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: She’s drunk.

HALF LIGHT: She’s done this before - gotten drunk and shoplifted. At least now she knows better than to steal from Frittte.

PAIN THRESHOLD: Her wrist had not healed right. She blames her dismissal from the chicken-plucking factory on this.

1) “Mama, you can’t be doing this.”

2) “I would’ve given you the money.”

3) “What were you trying to steal, anyway?”

4) “Are you drunk?”

YOU: “Mama, you can’t be doing this.”

GLORIA DU BOIS: “Why not?”

1) “It’s illegal.”

2) “It’s embarrassing.”

YOU: “It’s illegal.”

GLORIA DU BOIS: “So is listening to the radio after eleven at night.”

ENCYCLOPEDIA: Technically true. An old hold-over law from the war that had never been repealed. It’s rarely enforced - except for when the RCM or the Moralintern really wants to *throw the book* at someone.

YOU: “Do a lot of listening to the radio after eleven?”

GLORIA DU BOIS: “I’m not telling you, copper.” She winks at you.

HALF LIGHT: You know she does. Don’t you remember falling asleep as a child to the soft and crackling sound of the radio in the next room…?

1) “It’s illegal.”

2) “It’s embarrassing.”

YOU: “It’s embarrassing. Mama, I’m an officer, I can’t get called out to arrest you.”

GLORIA DU BOIS: Her face narrows, her mouth closing to a thin line.

HALF LIGHT: Careful. The line between cheerful, playful drunk and angry, bitter drunk is thin…

GLORIA DU BOIS: “Now you sound like your father.” She spits on the floor. A wet *splat* on the old concrete, nearly hitting your shoe.

CONCEPTUALIZATION: If you squint your eye, the pattern looks a bit like a dead dog…or a blown-up building.

1) “Mama, you can’t be doing this.”

2) “I would’ve given you the money.”

3) “What were you trying to steal, anyway?”

4) “Are you drunk?”

LOGIC: Of course she is. You can see it in the blotchy red of her cheeks, the years of it in her broken veins, her ragged pores, her dull hair. You remember her as beautiful when you were younger.

EMPATHY: Don’t ask her this. You will make her feel ashamed.

SAVOIR FAIRE: Good. She should. Just look at her. No different from the madwomen who roam the streets now that they’ve been turned out of the Pox, begging for food. Someone might mistake her for one of them if she’s not careful.

PAIN THRESHOLD: She’s been getting bad again. Hard to get ahold of, and distracted when you do. You’re always left feeling as if she doesn’t want you when you’re there - and then when you leave, the phone calls, the little presents at your door. Dora’s getting sick of it. You’ve tried explaining it to her. The long years with only the two of you. The way your mother loves you so much. The way you long, when the world is hard, and miserable, and cold, and so, so lonely, to lay your head in her lap once more.

1) “Mama, you can’t be doing this.”

2) “I would’ve given you the money.”

3) “What were you trying to steal, anyway?”

4) “Are you drunk?”

YOU: “What were you trying to steal, anyway?”

GLORIA DU BOIS: “A roast. Some onions…some celery.”

VISUAL CALCULUS: The celery is where she went wrong. It had stuck out of the top of her pocket and given the whole game away.

HALF LIGHT: Everyone knows celery is a natural snitch. YOU: “Everyone knows celery is a natural snitch.”

GLORIA DU BOIS: “A rotten vegetable,” she agrees. “I should have known better.”

RHETORIC: The arrows of laughter dart between your eyes. You’ve always been able to fall into this - the quick jokes, thrown like a ball, and caught just as easily.

1) “Mama, you can’t be doing this.”

2) “I would’ve given you the money.”

3) “What were you trying to steal, anyway?”

4) “Are you drunk?”

YOU: “I would’ve given you the money.”

GLORIA DU BOIS: “What money? I know you don’t have any more money than I do.”

SAVOIR FAIRE: You do. A little.

1) “I have money. I totally have money.”

2) “I can get it from Dora.”

3) “I get paid on Friday.”

YOU: “I have money. I totally have money.”

GLORIA DU BOIS: “Don’t lie to your mother.”

YOU: You lower your eyes in shame. There is a slit in the onion bag your mother sits on, and several onions bulge precariously, as if making a break for it.

1) “I have money. I totally have money.”

2) “I can get it from Dora.”

3) “I get paid on Friday.”

YOU: “I can get it from Dora.”

GLORIA DU BOIS: “Absolutely not,” she snaps. “That girl’s the best thing that’s happened to you.”

RHETORIC: She’s right, you know.

1) “I have money. I totally have money.”

2) “I can get it from Dora.”

3) “I get paid on Friday.”

YOU: “I get paid on Friday.”

GLORIA DU BOIS: Her eyes brighten. Then she sighs. “Don’t,” she says. “You need it. I’m just going to drink it anyway, Harry.”

PAIN THRESHOLD: There is a very large, very hard lump in your throat, the approximate size and shape of an onion.

YOU: “I’ll bring some money over when I get off work.”

GLORIA DU BOIS: “Do your mama a favor, yeah? Go talk to the shopkeeper and see if you can keep him from pressing charges. Go on. I’ll be good.” She sits on her hands, wriggling her fingers to show they’re trapped. She grins at you, showing dark, stained teeth, narrow and lovely.

CONCEPTUALIZATION: Your mama’s smile.

SUGGESTION: It turns out that the shopkeeper *does* want to press charges - three times this month, he says - and it takes most of the tools of the RCM to convince him not to.

YOU: You fetch your mother from the back, ignoring the strange bulge in her skirt pockets, and, because it’s the afternoon, taker her to the bar down the street, because you both need a drink.

THE GRAY DOG: The Gray Dog is her regular place, and it’s two blocks from her apartment, so you can trust her to walk home when you have to go back to work after.

ENCYCLOPEDIA: The apartment is not the one you grew up in. That home is four non-renewed leases ago.

INLAND EMPIRE: You can never go home again.

THE GRAY DOG: The two of you order, and she pulls several onions and peppers out of her pocket, placing them on the bar.

YOU: “Mama!”

GLORIA DU BOIS: She winks at you, and puts them back in her pocket. You drink, watching your mama talk and flirt and laugh with the regulars she knows. In between, her eyes go silent, far away. You look at her, the rounded, slumped shoulders, the rough skin of her chest, her hands, swollen with gout and thickened veins.

CONCEPTUALIZATION: She used to be the most beautiful woman in the world.

SAVOIR FAIRE: Now, that place has been usurped by another.

PERCEPTION: Now, she just looks…well, *you,* Harry.

ENDURANCE: Except *old.* How many years does she have left? She’s - what?

ENCYCLOPEDIA: Fifty-seven? Fifty-nine?

HALF LIGHT: *Don’t* say that. *Never* say that.

YOU: “Mama, how old are you?”

GLORIA DU BOIS: “Depends on who’s asking. For you? Forty-nine.”

SAVOIR FAIRE: She looks older. What’s aged her so?

LOGIC: It’s the drinking.

PAIN THRESHOLD: *You* did.

EMPATHY: It was her love for you. Born in the Revolution in a bombed-out building. How *hard* she worked. Rebuilding after the war, working in the pet shop, cleaning buildings, plucking chickens….sliding ever further down the pay scale, all to provide for *you.* To protect *you.* Her darling baby boy.

YOU: Your eyes are burning. There is something painful and hard in your chest. The detritus of bombs.

COMPOSURE: It’s only the alcohol that’s making you maudlin. The Du Bois curse. You get like this about *everything.*

PAIN THRESHOLD: But especially her.

EMPATHY: Your mother hears you crying.

SHIVERS: A small child falls from a tree to the street below. Its voice rising in a wail, its mother drops the laundry she is folding and runs to the street….a mother sits by her sick child’s bed, pressing her cold fingers to its feverish head… “Honey, he was never worth a damn anyway,” another mother says to her weeping adult child…

GLORIA DU BOIS: She turns to you instantly, breaking off mid-conversation with the man next to her. “What is it, baby? What’s wrong?”

1) “I love you.”

2) “It’s not fair.”

3) “Mama.”

YOU: “It’s not fair.” Your voice comes out strangled and hoarse.

GLORIA DU BOIS: Something passes over her face, dark and strange. She takes a drink. “Life is not kind, baby,” she says.

PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: You cannot hold yourself up any longer. You half-slide, half-fall off your barstool onto the sticky ground, and slowly rest your head in her lap.

1) “I love you.”

2) “It’s not fair.”

3) “Mama.”

YOU: “Mama.”

GLORIA DU BOIS: “Harrier,” she says. She puts a hand on your face, then brushes your hair back.

ENDURANCE: They are the hands of an old woman.

1) “I love you.”

2) “It’s not fair.”

3) “Mama.”

YOU: “I love you,” you mumble into her lap, which smells of onions, and stale laundry, and your mother.

GLORIA DU BOIS: “I love you too, baby.”

EMPATHY: And she does. You can feel it like you could as a child - all-encompassing, the light in the darkness, a pair of arms holding you, and keeping you safe. For just a little while longer.

YOU: You crash the car.

REACTION SPEED: You don’t *mean* to - one minute you’re driving, the road heaving and bucking beneath you, far out in the dark - and the next you’re sideways, hanging like an aerostatic or a great broken skua.

PERCEPTION: The engine screams, then sobs, then whimpers.

INTERFACING: You *broke* it, Harry.

PAIN THRESHOLD: Your face and chest throb in time with the engine, winding down.

YOU: Where am I?

LOGIC: Where were you trying to get to?

YOU: Grand Couron.

VISUAL CALCULUS: Well, that’s not here.

LOGIC: Where were you coming from?

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Boogie Street. Face-down on the bar and mumbling into your hands, your mustache wet with beer and tears.

VISUAL CALCULUS: Well, we’re not on Boogie Street anymore, either.

PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: Get out of the car, kid.

YOU: Somehow, you get out of the car. You stumble off to the side -

PAIN THRESHOLD: Pain flaring in your right ankle. A thousand agonies.

LOGIC: Must’ve gotten smashed up when you hit that telephone pole.

INTERFACING: With that car.

AUTHORITY: *Her* car.

YOU: Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no.

SUGGESTION: I mean, in your defense, she really should have known better than to leave the car with you, anyway. She already knows you’re not capable of taking care of things. Like motor carriages, or her.

[-1 morale]

EMPATHY: You’re not helping.

YOU: That’s Dora’s car.

ENCYCLOPEDIA: Good job! You didn’t hit your head too hard after all.

YOU: Dora loves that car.

ENDURANCE: *Loved* that car. Past tense. Face it, Harry. You really did a number on it…

THE WELL-LOVED CAR: Dora’s well-loved car - a ’32 Meke Seven-Sun, butter-yellow, with the little luggage rack on the back, and the right headlight that you replaced from the *last* time you backed into something - has been totaled, smashed into a torturous shape resembling a crushed bug.

DRAMA: Somebody crashed your car!

LOGIC: That somebody is *you,* Harry.


YOU: You limp towards it, pain shrieking up your leg as you go.

ENDURANCE: Dora loved that car. She had bought it herself after graduating college and getting her teaching job at Grand Couron High - with you.

RHETORIC: Surely not *herself?* The holiday presents from a wealthy family, tucked away - the graduation gift of money -

COMPOSURE: And the extra hours she spent working at that clothing store she hated, smiling while her mother criticized the shabby state of her clothes -

PAIN THRESHOLD: Face it. This was the first thing that was ever really *hers,* and you ruined it.

SUGGESTION: We can think of a few *other* things you’ve done that to.

YOU: You drop down to the ground and weep, your face in your hands. Snot mixes with blood mixes with tears. You weep for a long, long time, and when you are done, you sit up and look at what you’ve done.

????: The sky above you is heavily clouded. Little light shines down on you. The broken headlight of the Seven-Star glares yellowly. You are on a badly rutted road. There are no trees. There is nothing.


YOU: Where am I?

SHIVERS: WHERE THE VALLEY OF THE DOGS MEETS FAUBOURG - ON THE EDGES BEFORE THE WOODS START, AND ALSO THE WILD DOGS. THERE IS NO COMFORT HERE.

LOGIC: Hang on - if you’re here, where’s Dora?

PAIN THRESHOLD: Did we hurt her??

[-1 morale]

ENCYCLOPEDIA: No. Remember? Right now, she is at her father’s house in Grand Couron. You had fought yesterday - a bad one, the worst you’ve ever had.

PAIN THRESHOLD: You didn’t know you could *have* fights that bad with someone you loved. With someone who loved you. Standing in the kitchen feeling like your lungs were being torn out of your chest, screaming at each other. Thinking, how did we get here? How do I take it back?

INLAND EMPIRE: There is no taking back the words, the broken bottle, the crashed car. The only thing that can wash it away is the sea…

YOU: You limp back to the car. There is a bottle of Commodore smashed and leaking into the driver’s seat. When you check, there is a corresponding gash in your thigh.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Go on - lick the seat.

VOLITION: Harry, don’t do that.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: There has to be at least a quarter-bottle soaked into the upholstery. Go on. The worst fuckup of your life, and you want to face this *sober*?

RHETORIC: Chin up, Harry-boy. The worst fuckup of your life…so far!

VOLITION: Is this supposed to be helping?

HAND-EYE COORDINATION: You press your fingers down into the upholstery. Liquid wells up; you make a futile attempt to capture it, and then lick your fingers.

PERCEPTION: It tastes like blood, and spilled wine, and cigarette ashes.

YOU: You have a vague recollection of calling Dora from a bar payphone. “I can’t do this anymore, Harry! I’m leaving you!” “Harry, don’t call here again!”

SAVOIR FAIRE: Oh, god, don’t think of that.

[-1 morale]

YOU: You are having trouble thinking of anything. Your mind is a great Pale blank and you are driving ever deeper.

PERCEPTION: The radio is still playing, cutting in and out.

INLAND EMPIRE: It’s a bad night for Pale static.

PERCEPTION: A woman’s voice, the accent of the last century. “I really don’t know what I’m going to tell him when he comes home!”

Another: “You shouldn’t have gotten married if you didn’t want children.”

DRAMA: Yes! That’s what happened. You were reaching to tune the radio, and you lost control of the car.

YOU: Really? Is that really what happened?

ENDURANCE: No. You just sort of…blacked out.

YOU: How much did I drink?

PAIN THRESHOLD: Not enough.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: It’s never enough. It’ll *never* be enough.

HALF LIGHT: If it was, you wouldn’t have woken up again.

VOLITION: Harry - you need help.

YOU: Good, I’m going to wait here until someone drives by, and I’m going to tell them I was changing the radio station, and a dog ran out in front of me.

CONCEPTUALIZATION: Yes - a black dog.

DRAMA: Good, good. Details help sell the lie.

INLAND EMPIRE: No one’s coming. You will wait here all night.

YOU: Who will help me?


 EMPATHY: The woman who loves you.

YOU: How can I get to her?

ENCYCLOPEDIA: Grand Couron is 27 km to the east.

YOU: You take a tottering step forward and fall, skinning your hands.

ENDURANCE: We won’t make it.

SHIVERS: THERE IS A PAYPHONE 3 KILOMETERS TO THE NORTH ALONG THIS ROAD, AT AN OLD BURNT-OUT ROADSIDE CAFE. YOU WENT THERE, ONCE, WITH YOUR FATHER, A LONG TIME AGO.

YOU: I don’t remember that.

ENCYCLOPEDIA: Neither does he. Because he’s dead.

LOGIC: That’s six kilometers total.

ENDURANCE: We can make that. Consider it our penance.

YOU: You do not remember much of the walk, limping and dragging yourself down the dark and unlit road, nor do you remember the phone call under a dark and mocking sky. When you next come to yourself, you are sitting slumped along the side of the road in the glow of the single headlight. Another car - her father’s - screeches to a halt by the Seven-Star.

DORA INGERLUND: Dora tumbles out, running over, then stopping. She slows when she sees you - the Seven-Star - the scatter of glass and twisted metal on the road. “Oh, *Harry,*” she says. “What happened?”

PERCEPTION: This far away, she cannot smell the alcohol, nor see your reddened, bruised eyes. Not yet.

DORA INGERLUND: She steps closer, out of the glow of her father’s car’s headlights, and into the broken, battered glow of her own.

SAVOIR FAIRE: She is wearing a coat, which you recognize as her father’s, thrown over her nightgown. She’s wearing thin slippers.

LOGIC: She was so worried about you she came straight here.

1) “I don’t remember that pole being here!”

2) “It’s a frame job. By someone who hates the RCM.”

3) “Girls love a bad boy.” [Shoot her with your finger guns.]

      -2 PAIN THRESHOLD: Right one out of commission.

4) “I was coming to see you.”

YOU: “I was coming to see you.”

DORA INGERLUND: Something washes over her face, soft and tender and relentless as the waves of the sea.

INLAND EMPIRE: If only you were there right now. Everything dark….and silent…everything all over for good. Finally settled.

1) “I love you.”

2) “I’m sorry.”

3) “I was changing the radio station.”

4) “I don’t know what happened. I think I was drunk.”

YOU: “I love you.”

DORA INGERLUND: “I know.” Her voice is as quiet as the road before the crash.

HALF LIGHT: She’s going to leave you now.

SUGGESTION: No. She won’t. She sees you like this, broken and bleeding, all for love of her -

EMPATHY: And she will *stay.*

SUGGESTION: Oh, yes. Here you go, Harry. This is going to work like a charm. Now she’ll never, *ever* leave you. And if she does, you can *always* get her back. Just like this…

LOGIC: Revachol will eventually run out of cars.

INLAND EMPIRE: And still she will leave…

YOU: You sit, looking up at her, your large hands limp and loose at your sides.

PERCEPTION: In the remaining headlight, Dora’s shadow stretches over you, tall, her nightgown floating a little like a white robe, the headlight shining through it, illuminating her body -

CONCEPTUALIZATION: You can almost see her lungs grow.

CONCEPTUALIZATION: This woman is a saint. You do not deserve her.

DORA INGERLUND: She steps towards you, then again, and again. In her thin slippers, over broken glass and sharp metal.

PAIN THRESHOLD: She loves you. She loves you. She loves you.

DORA INGERLUND: “Oh, Harry,” she says, “What have you done?”

JAMROCK, REVACHOL WEST: The city is waiting for you when you get back.

YOU: The city you return to is at once familiar and strange…the first two weeks before you are allowed to return to work at the RCM, you spend in shambling walks around Jamrock, as far as your leg will carry you. Two blocks, then four, then seven.

AUTHORITY: You find that your feet carry you, sometimes, in directions other than the one you mean to go - turning left when you intend to turn right, ducking down narrow alleyways.

ENCYCLOPEDIA: You find that you can predict buildings….now a low wall, now a high, leaning tenement, now the crumbled remains of a burnt-out warehouse.

ESPRIT DE CORPS: Jean Vicquemare, who stops by your apartment with Judit one day with case files for you to refamiliarze yourself with, says it’s because you’d spent so many days stumbling around the city blind drunk. Your body knows the way like a dog.

Gottlieb, during a checkup, says you had been making an experiment of walking the city with your eyes closed to learn it through smell and the soles of your shoes. He knows this because you had come in one night after walking into a large and rusted collapsed section of fencing.

Kim, when you talk to him on the telephone - because you call each other twice a week, as if you cannot bear not to - says it only makes sense; you’re a police officer, a man of the city.

INLAND EMPIRE: The city herself says nothing directly to you. If she speaks, it is through these little nudges, these half-remembered maps.

HALF LIGHT: If she were a woman, you’d be inclined to say she was sulking.

INLAND EMPIRE: At night, sometimes, you dream of strange places you have not yet seen in this life. A vast empty tangled garden, a deep underground glitter, a warehouse with a dizzying ladder of stairs climbing up into the sun…

YOU: You go back to work, then, and walk farther, more - going into shabby desolate little apartments, into canals, under motorways. At night, you walk the city in the yellow glow of the sodium lights, trying -

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: And failing -

VOLITION: To distract yourself from your unwavering thirst.

YOU: Tonight, you are having a bad night.

ENDURANCE: Aren’t they all? After the work is done, the cases are filed…as the precinct empties out, the green-shaded lamps click on…after Lieutenant Kitsuragi rises, stretching, his shirt riding up his stomach…

VOLITION: We’re not going to think about Kim like that. It’s disrespectful.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: You’re damn right it is, crown-head. Why don’t you put a sock in it, anyway? You’re the reason Harry-baby feels like this.


VOLITION: He drank yesterday. And Harry - *you* were the one who said you didn’t want to drink two days in a row.


AUTHORITY: Arbitrary rules, benefiting no one.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: And we didn’t drink Sunday, even though we really, really wanted to. And come *on.* The boy’s lonely. Listen to all those people walking by his open window…

INLAND EMPIRE: Everyone is having fun without you.

JAMROCK, REVACHOL WEST: It is early spring in Revachol. It has rained recently, and the thick, rich scent of it comes down into your apartment under the street. Bursts of laughter - music - car tires -

VISUAL CALCULUS: All going away from you, leaving you alone in an apartment that does not feel entirely your own.


YOU: This is good. I can do this.

VOLITION: Yes - sit and stare at the crumbling plaster of your bleak apartment, your damp stacks of newspaper.


YOU: Sorry, is that supposed to be inspiring?

RHETORIC: Meditate on poverty and drunkenness.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Yeah, maybe you can play a rousing game of solitaire! When did you get so *lame,* Harry?

SAVOIR FAIRE: Got to say, Savvy agrees with Sparky.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Thanks, Savs. Always knew you were in my corner…what do you say we go out dancing?

PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: Come on, champ, up and at em. Go for a walk, a run - anything.


YOU: I’m so *tired.* How long do I have to do this?

AUTHORITY: Until you prove yourself again.


YOU: To who?

AUTHORITY: To everyone who loves you.

YOU: No one loves me.

INLAND EMPIRE: False. There is one who does…

PAIN THRESHOLD: You should call Mirova.

EMPATHY: Not her.

SHIVERS: It is a beautiful night in Revachol, the clear snow-scented warmth of early spring…in a dance club on Boogie Street a girl loses herself completely to the music. Three blocks away, an old woman leans her head back against the doorway she sits in. She is thinking of a song…on Broadway, a man walks rapidly down the street, whistling a song he’d heard earlier on the radio. There is a bottle of wine in one hand, and flowers in the other.

YOU: You cannot bear this anymore, being so far apart from everyone. You get up, and you go out.

PERDITION AND MAIN: The streets are slick with the recent rain. You splash through it, your snakeskins breaking up the reflections of lights, buildings, telephone wires…the air is cool on your skin, like a kiss.

YOU: Where do I go?

1) To the east…

2) To the north…

3) To the west…

4) To the south…

SHIVERS: To the east, the river, thick and dark and cold. The floating drug market, with its splash of oars, and the calls of the vendors. On the shore, the Night Market is getting set up, full of life and light.

1) To the east…

2) To the north…

3) To the west…

4) To the south…

SHIVERS: To the north, the shining copper dome of the precinct, a bastion of justice and morality.

HALF LIGHT: And crying, sniveling drunks, mothers caught stealing to feed their children, old men staring at their bloodied hands…

ESPRIT DE CORPS: The soft huff and stamp of horses, the heat and smell of them. The slow relentless decay of papers in the archives, and Jules Pidieu in his smoke-filled room, calling out on the radio. “Yes, this is Precinct 41…a code 83, you say? Over.”

AUTHORITY: The precinct is in good hands. You can turn your attention away.

1) To the east…

2) To the north…

3) To the west…

4) To the south…

SHIVERS: To the west, a photo-film development store. Inside the doorway are hundreds of forgotten and left-behind photos, developed and never picked up. Many of them have been pasted to the walls. There is a fabric-covered bench to sit on white you wait, and a trailing green plant pressed to the windowpane in desperate search of light, and there is, on the east wall, about a man’s height from the floor, a photo of a brown-haired man with green eyes and a badly crooked smile. He has an arm around a beautiful young blonde girl. They are playing at looking cool, and looking grown-up, but they look young. The man has a lit cigarette in the hand slung around her shoulder. The girl, who is holding onto him like she never wants to let go, is so beautiful it hurts. The light is the perfect yellow light of late summer. Looking at the picture, it seems that it will always be summer, and you will always be in love.

1) To the east…

2) To the north…

3) To the west…

4) To the south…

SHIVERS: To the south, the sprawl of warehouses and dirty skua-shacks and piss-stained bars that tumble, headlong, into Faubourg. The usual parade of drunks; Dead Man’s Alley off Gregoire, where the drunks go when their money is gone…and Broadway, with its large heavy church, the shadows always in the corners, her lungs never illuminating it all. How many hours have you spent there, stumbled from the bar next door, only to wake to the soft steps of the priests, the sound of the bells…?

REACTION SPEED: You pause in the street, one foot lifted. There are so many possibilities. Too many. The city is near-infinite, near-limitless.

YOU: Which way do I go?

SHIVERS: A faint breeze stirs the hair from your forehead. Scent of dog piss and stale trash. Motor exhaust and a woman’s perfume.

YOU: You close your eyes, spin in a circle, and set your foot down. When you open your eyes, you are facing west.

JAMROCK: You go west, stopping by a kiosk to get a bottle of Commodore Red. Today’s copy of the Revachol Times - nearly out of date - sits beside it.


ESPRIT DE CORPS: Lieutenant Kitsuragi had forgotten to purchase one today on his rounds of the city. He will miss both the crossword and the page three article on TipTop. If you buy it for him now, you can leave it on his desk in the morning, startling a smile out of him.

YOU: You purchase the bottle and the paper, tucking them both into your coat.

AUTHORITY: And then you let the city take you away.

SHIVERS: To the west…

JAMROCK, REVACHOL WEST: To the west, the dogs’ warren of neighborhoods, the thick clotheslines of sodden washing caught in the sudden rainstorm of earlier. You enter the maze and get lost, immediately, in a tiny courtyard, where a small girl plays very seriously with a set of marbles…one of them rolls over and is stopped by your snakeskin shoe; you pick it up and inspect it in the streetlight. A green marble with a stylized flaw in it; a yellow-and-red twist.

YOU: Reaching into your pocket, you pull out another, found in your travels this week - a marble meant to look like Elysium, with small dark isolas spotting pale gray glass…you hand them both to the girl. She is examining the new marble closely as you continue on…

JAMROCK, REVACHOL WEST: To the north, you run your hand along the low stone wall in the neighborhood called Suzerain’s Hunt - in polite terminology; in impolite quarters, it is called something else entirely, although it still rhymes -

ENCYCLOPEDIA: This neighborhood - before it was a neighborhood - once housed the favored hunting grounds of Filippe the First. None were allowed to enter, save by special permission, on fear of death.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: It is *also* where he was rumored to keep his mistress, the daughter of the Royal Huntsman…

RHETORIC: Hence its other, more popular name.

JAMROCK, REVACHOL WEST: The wall is low, and layered with jagged stones and small offerings. Much of the original wall, which was said to mark off the Suzerain’s hunting grounds, is now gone, pilfered for other purposes…in some places it remains, bordering the very small cemetery. Only twelve graves remain, most of them mere depressions in the earth. No grave markers tell you who lies here.

INLAND EMPIRE: The dead are forgotten.

ENCYCLOPEDIA: As are your dead.

YOU: You linger, kneeling at each one, pressing your hand to the ground.

INLAND EMPIRE: The suzerain’s mistress…her father…a very small boy… a traitor…

YOU: You pour a small amount of the Commodore on each of the twelve graves.

INLAND EMPIRE: This is a lonely place, often overlooked.

ENCYCLOPEDIA: The city is showing you all her secrets tonight.

SUGGESTION: Like a lover who wants to impress.

JAMROCK, REVACHOL WEST: To the south, the shopping district, with its darkened storefronts, dirty plate-glass and pawn shops and two Radio Revachols. Tucked in between every store a bar, with glittering, seductive neons…muffled music from the jukeboxes and cigarette smoke, and you passing by, all alone.

YOU: You slow before a fortune-teller’s shop. There is a lit display in the window of four cards laid out on a faded velvet cloth.

CONCEPTUALIZATION: The cloth used to be a deep, rich ochre. Now it is the faded color of old skin.

SHIVERS: The fortune teller lays four cards out every night. On a whim, maybe, a private freak, or perhaps to catch the eye of a particular passer-by…

PERCEPTION: Tonight, the cards are as follows:

1) THE FIVE OF CUPS

2) THE MOON

3) THE PALE

4) THE WORLD

THE FIVE OF CUPS: There is a table full of five cups. Four of them are upside-down, indicating nothing remains. The fifth rolls across the table, full, spilling red wine to the floor below like blood…

1) THE FIVE OF CUPS

2) THE MOON

3) THE PALE

4) THE WORLD

THE MOON: A lost dog - shaggy and dark - bays at a shining white moon. The moon does not care about the dog. The moon has to go to the aerodome. And the dog has to stay here, in hell, all alone.

1) THE FIVE OF CUPS

2) THE MOON

3) THE PALE

4) THE WORLD

THE PALE: This card is in every deck, and for some reason, comes up in every reading that is ever done…most spreads incorporate it, adding an extra card in the knowledge that it will come up unbidden each time. The card is a vast, Pale gray that sucks you in…you sway, staring at it. Other than the unnumbered words THE PALE at the bottom of the card, there is no other speck of color or information, no matter how long you look. Just the ending grayness. It makes you feel a little sick.

1) THE FIVE OF CUPS

2) THE MOON

3) THE PALE

4) THE WORLD

THE WORLD: The world, according to the card, is a city. It looks suspiciously like the streets of Revachol, tight and narrow and empty. You press your face and hands to the glass, fogging it with your breath. In the background of THE WORLD is a shining copper dome….and the glitter of the river…and perhaps, somewhere, a man with his face pressed to plate-glass, all alone.


PAIN THRESHOLD: You are so sad. You want to get on all fours and howl like a dog.

SHIVERS: Upstairs, the woman turns, and sighs in her sleep. Down below, a man is looking at his cards…

JAMROCK, REVACHOL WEST: To the east, the river, its dark fishy lure, the smell of its waters, the roaring rush around the bridge pylons…you try not to look at the detritus piled up around them. Sometimes, there are limbs, or limp, bobbing bodies. Often there are crates of interesting things, and sometimes large turtles with quick jaws.

PAIN THRESHOLD: How do you think you got that scar on your leg?

JAMROCK, REVACHOL WEST: The Night Market is wrapping up, and you walk through the emptying streets like it has been foretold. It is late. You have been out all night. You go on to the wharf, sitting down at the edge of the water. You can see the slow barge of the Paradisio, the floating whorehouse that journeys between river and sea, and back again, offering love to sailors, Wild Pines workers, Vacholeires…

PAIN THRESHOLD: You take your shoes off and put your hot, aching feet in the cold water.

ENDURANCE: You have danced the length and breadth of the city tonight.

ENCYCLOPEDIA: Not even close. Like a woman, you will never know all her secrets.

LOGIC: And this is only Jamrock. There is so much more to the city.

EMPATHY: Your heart is under these streets. You will never get enough.

YOU: You have missed this city like a giant, gaping hole.

SHIVERS: YOU USED TO DO THIS ALL THE TIME. WALKING MY STREETS, KNOWING ME.

HALF LIGHT: Just another thing you’ve abandoned.

YOU: I’m sorry.

SHIVERS: I HAVE NO USE FOR APOLOGIES. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE WORDS. I MISS YOU. COME BACK.

YOU: I’m here. I love you.

SHIVERS: AS AM I. IF YOU CAN SAVE ME, I WILL NOT LEAVE YOU BEFORE YOU LEAVE ME. THIS I PROMISE YOU. MY SOUL IS VAST, AND I WILL ALWAYS BE WITH YOU.

YOU: You pour a little bit of the Commodore out on the cracked wharf, and watch the sunrise with La Revacholiere, and you feel the city with you, and her vast soul.

YOU: You are in love with Kim Kitsuragi.

ENCYCLOPEDIA: You don’t *remember* love. Not exactly. You remember the burning, and the pain, and the icy cool black relief of the water…

SAVOIR FAIRE: And the dancing. Love *has* to have dancing.

ENCYCLOPEDIA: Yes, and the dancing, too.

LOGIC: It’s no wonder you’re in love with Kim. Kim’s -

SAVOIR FAIRE: So *cool.*

EMPATHY: He’s nice to you.

COMPOSURE: He pats your back when you throw up on the really gross ones.

SAVOIR FAIRE: *He* doesn’t throw up on the really gross ones.

DRAMA: He laughs at your jokes. *All* of them. Even the ones you didn’t mean, entirely, to be jokes…

INTERFACING: He’s a real Speedfreak. Remember last week when he *almost* caught Jacob Irw red-handed doing his illegal canal jumps?

ENDURANCE: Ugh. Don’t remind us.

VOLITION: The one cigarette a day.


REACTION SPEED: The quick, sharp remarks that you half-catch - or sometimes, you think, don’t catch at all.

COMPOSURE: The fact that he’s a sore loser, vainglorious and gloating in success, sulking and revisionist in defeat.


SUGGESTION: The fact that he will often play games with little persuasion - card games in the Kineema on stakeouts, Suzerainty on weekends, strange board games you fish out of trash containers and dead mens’ apartments, missing their rule books, and half their pieces - and even once - although he is not very good at coming up with a character, or a backstory - Wirrâl.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: The way he *looks* working on the Kineema, grease on his knuckles, bare shoulders, his shirt pulling up from his waistband…

LOGIC: It’s no wonder you’re in love with him. He’s perfect.

HALF LIGHT: Careful, Harry. This is how it always starts…

YOU: You try to push it down. You go for runs, except you find yourself running to the GRIH, and stopping in to see Kim, because you “had a thought on a case.”

PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: Is it our fault we do our best thinking on the run? Your legs lighter, lifting higher, taking you farther as your brain runs out in front of you?

SUGGESTION: It doesn’t help that Kim always seems pleased to see you, even when you show up, heaving and sweaty, on his doorstep.


ELECTROCHEMISTRY: If you don’t mind my noticing, *especially* when you show up heaving and sweaty on his doorstep.

VISUAL CALCULUS: He *does* get awfully close to you at these times.

PERCEPTION: Inhales deeply, too.

SUGGESTION: Putting the *freak* in *speedfreak.*

YOU: You spend a few weeks, after your realization, avoiding Kim as much as you can. You go on runs, keeping yourself resolutely away from the GRIH. You spend a few - okay, more than a few - nights drinking alone in your apartment, tuning your radio up and down the dial, trying for the pirate radio stations all along the coast. You even try to call *her,* but she doesn’t answer, and you find you don’t regret it as much as you’d thought.

ENDURANCE: And then…you give in. You love Kim from afar, admiring him in all his perfection, and you absolutely, positively, keep it to yourself, so that you don’t ruin everything. You keep it to yourself all throughout the summer, and then into the fall, and through the long, awful, cold winter, and through the following spring, when you come back to life again, and the city is still there, and the city still loves you.

YOU: But your hold on yourself is weakening.


RHETORIC: You almost tell Kim three times you love him.

ESPRIT DE CORPS: The first time is at work, your second spring alive. You are inside a bloodied apartment, kneeling on the floor. You are wrist-deep in a dead woman’s ribcage, searching for something that you know should not be there - evidence of a sequence killer, you’re telling Kim. The autumn sun, mid-morning, is streaming in through the windows, and you glance up to say something to Kim, and stop, speechless.

CONCEPTUALIZATION: There’s that halo again, full of golden light and dust-motes. Kim stands above you with his notebook, looking down.

PAIN THRESHOLD: Your chest clenches hard enough to drop you. You grunt, placing a viscera-streaked hand to your chest.

KIM KITSURAGI: “What? What is it?”

EMPATHY: He must know.

COMPOSURE: His voice goes soft.

YOU: You open your mouth.

SAVOIR FAIRE: Covered in blood and gore? Harry-baby, now is *not* the time. Romance him. Wine and dine him. Take him up on the 8/81 over the city and let him fly. But do *not* tell him at work.

YOU: “Hiccup,” you say, and go back to your work.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: The second time you almost tell Kim you love him, you are out dancing.

ESPRIT DE CORPS: This is *also* for work.

DRAMA: Tis a clever undercover ploy, sire, to enter into the good graces of the fine and suspicious bartender!

YOU: You had bribed the DJ a great deal of money to put on Guillaume le Million, and had boogied Kim out to the dance floor.

SUGGESTION: Kim dances with you slightly more easily than before - no authority needed on this one. His movements are quick and nearly in time with the music, and he occasionally pushes his glasses back up his nose.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Look at his body moving - see him lose himself.

REACTION SPEED: That - there. Did the bartender just slip something into that man’s drink?

YOU: You put a hand on his back, take one hand in yours - he startles, looking at you - and execute a discofied mini-tango three steps to the right, clearing a path.

PERCEPTION: The bartender *definitely* just slipped something into that man’s drink.

AUTHORITY: Kim just…went with it.

ESPRIT DE CORPS: Kim trusts you blindly.

YOU: You spin the two of you, so Kim is now facing the bartender. “Kim, what do you see?”

KIM KITSURAGI: “I-” he says, and pauses. His eyes are very dark.

VOLITION: He is having trouble concentrating.

SUGGESTION: Because of *you.*

LOGIC: Is Kim…attracted to us?

SAVIOR FAIRE: How could he *not* be? Look at us, in these disco duds…we’re the best-looking guy here/

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Except for Kim. And speaking of Kim, do you see how big his pupils are? It’s a *clear* sign of sexual attraction.

LOGIC: It’s just dark in here. His vision is notoriously poor.

VISUAL CALCULUS: Is that why he keeps looking at your mouth?

LOGIC: We probably just have beer stuck between our teeth.

SUGGESTION: Tell him you love him. See what happens.

YOU: You lean closer, very close to Kim. His mouth parts, eyes widen. You are still dancing. “Kim, I-”

PERCEPTION: A loud thump behind you at the bar. As if of a body slithering off a bar stool and onto the floor.

KIM KITSURAGI: His eyes flit behind you. “Shit,” he says, and drops your hand, and begins to run towards the bar.

YOU: And you follow, mumbling the rest of it under your breath.


PERCEPTION: It is lost in the music. Perhaps it is better that way.

PAIN THRESHOLD: The third time you almost tell Kim you love him, you’re delirious in the lazareth with some nasty lacerations and bruises. You wake to Kim at your bedside, whole and largely unharmed, and it swells up in you so strongly you choke on it.

KIM KITSURAGI: He wakes, then. “Harry,” he says, and the relief in his voice is as soft and dark as oblivion.

YOU: Kim, I love you.

VOLITION: You’re *pretty* sure you don’t say it out loud.

RHETORIC: I didn’t feel our lips move.


PERCEPTION: We didn’t feel *anything.* We’re on some pretty strong painkillers.

COMPOSURE: If you *do* say it, he doesn’t bring it up again, although he *is* suspiciously pink in the ears the next few times he sees you.

ENDURANCE: And then your time is up.

YOU: It is a cold autumn night. After several long days on the case, you find yourself back at Kim’s apartment in the GRIH, smoking on his balcony. You can feel the heavy weariness of a job well-done. You smoke in silence, not speaking, Kim’s presence beside you as comforting and familiar as the Commodore, or your snakeskin shoes, or, on a good day, your own skin.

PERCEPTION: You can feel every shift he makes in your own body. You are as perfectly attuned to him as you are to the city, or to yourself.

KIM’S BALCONY: It is dark on his balcony, very late. Most of the people in the city are asleep by now. It is only you, and Kim, and the aerostatics.

SHIVERS: AND ME.

HALF LIGHT: In the silence, you look out at the city for courage.

PERCEPTION: You can smell the sea, several blocks off, although you cannot hear it. Down in the courtyard is a single solitary light that casts its glow reassuringly.

VOLITION: Go on. Say it.

LOGIC: Sooner or later, you’re going to say it anyway.

RHETORIC: You’re bad at keeping these sorts of things to yourself.

1) “Kim, I’m in love with you.”

2) “Kim, I think I’m in love with you.”

3) “Hey Kim, does the RCM handbook say anything about relationships between officers?”

4) “Hey Kim, truth or dare.”

SAVOIR FAIRE: You clear your throat, loud and rough in the silence.

YOU: “Kim, I’m in love with you.”

KIM KITSURAGI: A long pause. Then, a quick inhale through Kim’s nose. He leans forward to stub out his cigarette and misses, clumsily. A rattle of glass and cast iron.

KIM KITSURAGI: “I know,” he says. His voice is low.

COMPOSURE: Just the barest hint of a tremble.

ENCYCLOPEDIA: He *knows*?

SAVOIR FAIRE: Fuck. We thought we were subtle.

EMPATHY: He *knows?* What kind of an answer is that?

1) “What kind of an answer is that?”

2) “Do you love me too?”

3) “Okay, cool, cool. Just wanted you to know.”

YOU: “Okay, cool, cool. Just wanted you to know.” You shoot your finger guns at him in the dark, guided by the reflection of light on his glasses.

VISUAL CALCULUS: He is looking at you.

KIM KITSURAGI: “Harry.”

SAVOIR FAIRE: He sounds - strangled.

YOU: “Yeah?”

KIM KITSURAGI: He leans forward and puts his cigarette out for good.

COMPOSURE: His hand is definitely trembling a little.

EMPATHY: Do *not* mention it.

KIM KITSURAGI: He rises, then, coming between you and the light.

CONCEPTUALIZATION: The streetlamp halo behind his head -


VOLITION: Rise.

YOU: You rise, gripping the edges of your chair. Kim grabs your lapels and you nearly stumble forward.

KIM KITSURAGI: “I know,” he says again, nearly against your mouth.

YOU: And you kiss him.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: It is like nothing you have ever felt before.

ENCYCLOPEDIA: Of course, you don’t *remember* anything before. Not really.

LOGIC: And the city cannot kiss you back.

SHIVERS: A soft breeze brushes your skin.

YOU: Kim shudders in your hands, and you very, very carefully, cup the back of his head in your hand. KIM KITSURAGI: He makes a noise into your mouth.

HALF LIGHT: It has teeth.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: And tongue, and the taste of cigarettes, and little noises, and all of the good things in life.

ENDURANCE: You are having trouble breathing, gasping brokenly into Kim’s mouth.

KIM KITSURAGI: It does not stop him.

LOGIC: It’s probably because you haven’t broken for air.

AUTHORITY: Kim’s not really letting you, is he?

INLAND EMPIRE: No. That’s not it at all. It’s your lungs, glowing with love. You can see them even with your eyes closed, bright enough to make them prickle and burn and leak.

PERCEPTION: Yours are not the only ones that are glowing. Unless it’s just a trick of the streetlamp.

HALF LIGHT: But Kim hasn’t said it back.

EMPATHY: Does he really need to?

KIM KITSURAGI: He pulls away from you, then, leaning his forehead against yours. His glasses dig, very slightly, into your face. His eyes are dark and fever-bright. “Inside,” he says. “Now.”

KIM’S BALCONY: And then he goes, and it is only you and the city. You are very small on the balcony under the dark sky, and above the earth and the sea. La Revacholiere holds you carefully against the Pale, keeping you safe. Keeping you both safe.

PERCEPTION: A lamp flicks on in the bedroom, yellow and glowing. It is the very same color as your lungs, a beacon in the night to guide you.

YOU: You let yourself be led the few steps inside and into the arms of your love.