Smoke and Mirrors

“I’m not Christian.”

“So? You still come top of the class in Divinity, Jewboy.”

“No thanks. Hey, I got a new Moorcock. One you haven’t read. It’s an Elric book.”

“You haven’t. There isn’t a new one.”

“Is. It’s called The Jade Man’s Eyes. It’s printed in green ink. I found it in a bookshop in Brighton.”

“Can I borrow it after you?”

“Course.”

It was getting chilly, and they walked back, arm in arm. Like Elric and Moonglum, thought Richard to himself, and it made as much sense as MacBride’s angels.

Richard had daydreams in which he would kidnap Michael Moorcock and make him tell Richard the secret.

If pushed, Richard would be unable to tell you what kind of thing the secret was. It was something to do with writing; something to do with gods.

Richard wondered where Moorcock got his ideas from.

Probably from the ruined temple, he decided, in the end, although he could no longer remember what the temple looked like. He remembered a shadow, and stars, and the feeling of pain at returning to something he thought long finished.

He wondered if that was where all authors got their ideas from or just Michael Moorcock.

If you had told him that they just made it all up, out of their heads, he would never have believed you. There had to be a place the magic came from.

Didn’t there?

This bloke phoned me up from America the other night, he said, “Listen, man, I have to talk to you about your religion.” I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t got any f**king religion.”

—Michael Moorcock, in conversation, Notting Hill, 1976

It was six months later. Richard had been bar mitzvahed and would be changing schools soon. He and J.B.C. MacBride were sitting on the grass outside the school in the early evening, reading books. Richard’s parents were late picking him up from school.

Richard was reading The English Assassin. MacBride was engrossed in The Devil Rides Out.

Richard found himself squinting at the page. It wasn’t properly dark yet, but he couldn’t read anymore. Everything was turning into grays.

“Mac? What do you want to be when you grow up?”

The evening was warm, and the grass was dry and comfortable.

“I don’t know. A writer, maybe. Like Michael Moorcock. Or T.H. White. How about you?”

Richard sat and thought. The sky was a violet-gray, and a ghost moon hung high in it, like a sliver of a dream. He pulled up a blade of grass and slowly shredded it between his fingers, bit by bit. He couldn’t say “A writer” as well now. It would seem like he was copying. And he didn’t want to be a writer. Not really. There were other things to be.

“When I grow up,” he said, pensively, eventually, “I want to be a wolf.”

“It’ll never happen,” said MacBride.

“Maybe not,” said Richard. “We’ll see.”

The lights went on in the school windows, one by one, making the violet sky seem darker than it was before, and the summer evening was gentle and quiet. At that time of year, the day lasts forever, and the night never really comes.

“I’d like to be a wolf. Not all the time. Just sometimes. In the dark. I would run through the forests as a wolf at night,” said Richard, mostly to himself. “I’d never hurt anyone. Not that kind of wolf. I’d just run and run forever in the moonlight, through the trees, and never get tired or out of breath, and never have to stop. That’s what I want to be when I grow up . . . ” He pulled up another long stalk of grass, expertly stripped the blades from it, and slowly began to chew the stem.

And the two children sat alone in the gray twilight, side by side, and waited for the future to start.

COLD COLORS

I.

Woken at nine o’clock by the postman,

who turns out not to be the postman but an itinerant seller of pigeons,

crying,

“Fat pigeons, pure pigeons, dove white, slate gray,

living, breathing pigeons,

none of your reanimated muck here, sir.”

I have pigeons and to spare and I tell him so.

He tells me he’s new in this business,

used to be part of a moderately successful

financial securities analysis company

but was laid off, replaced by a computer RS232’d to a quartz sphere.

“Still, mustn’t grumble, one door opens, another one slams,

got to keep up with the times, sir, got to keep up with the times.”

He thrusts me a free pigeon

(To attract new custom, sir,

once you’ve tried one of our pigeons, you’ll never look at another)

and struts down the stairs, singing,

“Pigeons alive-oh, alive alive-oh.”

Ten o’clock after I’ve bathed and shaved

(unguents of eternal youth and of certain sexual attraction applied from plastic vessels)

I take the pigeon into my study;

I refresh the chalk circle around my old Dell 310,

hang wards at each corner of the monitor,

and do what is needful with the pigeon.

Then I turn the computer to on: It chugs and hums,

inside it fans blow like storm winds on old oceans

ready to drown poor merchantmen.

Autoexec complete it bleeps:

I’ll do, I’ll do, I’ll do . . .

II.

Two o’clock and walking through familiar London

—or what was familiar London before the cursor deleted certain certainties—

I watch a suit and tie man giving suck

to the Psion Organizer lodged in his breast pocket,

its serial interface like a cool mouth hunting his chest for sustenance,

familiar feeling, and I’m watching my breath steam in the air.

Cold as a witch’s tit these days is London,

you’d never think it was November,

and from underground the sounds of trains rumble.

Mysterious: tube trains are almost legendary in these times,

stopping only for virgins and the pure of heart,

first stop Avalon, Lyonesse, or the Isles of the Blessed. Maybe

you get a postcard and maybe you don’t.

Anyway, looking down any chasm demonstrates conclusively

there is no room under London for subways;

I warm my hands at a pit.

Flames lick upward.

Far below a smiling demon spots me, waves, mouths carefully,

as one does to the deaf, or distant, or to foreigners.

Its sales performance is spotless: It mines a Dwarrow Clone,

mimes software beyond my wildest,

Albertus Magnus ARChived on three floppies,