Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [92]
Once they banned collapsing code, The Gap didn’t get any bigger, so maybe there was something in that. But some of us believed that if any of the above was true it had only been a facilitator, a gateway that let us find something people had been looking for all along without realizing what they might find.
We’ll probably never know for sure because, now that it’s over, no one wants to even think about it. Trying to conquer it was a mistake, and nobody brags about mistakes. The war was kept quiet at the time, and the silence since has been ear-shattering. There haven’t been any movies about what happened in there, and there never will be. It was one defeat too many. It wasn’t even classified as a war, but as a training exercise, and you’d be surprised how many Bright Eyes have died in suspicious circumstances since it ended. Especially those who started talking about it.
You won’t find it in the history books, but it happened. I know. I was there.
We discovered how to get into the world’s subconscious, but instead of respecting it, and letting its good influence seep out into the conscious world as it always had, we tried to charge in and take it over, as if it was a new territory which could be owned. We found Eden, and napalmed it; found Oz’s wells, and pissed in them; found the mainspring of power which kept the real world sane and spread the virus of insanity throughout it. Maybe we even found the truth my father believed the real world hid; if so, we should have left it alone.
It was never officially called The Gap. It had several names, their length increasing with the seniority of the person who spoke them. But the only name ever used by anyone who was actually there was The Gap. And when they took us in, units of teenagers with nothing better to do except be the guinea pigs in someone else’s war, why did they make us stand in such a way that no one could see—or be seen by—anyone else? Because, I believe, that’s what The Gap was all about. Falling between cracks, being cut out of the loop, consigned to dead code, which has lost its place in the program and which nobody remembers anymore.
I believe The Gap is made up of all of the places where no one is, of all the sights no one sees. It comes from silence, and lack, and the deleted and unread; it is the gap between what you want and what you have, between love and affection, between hope and truth. It’s the place where crooked cues come from, and it’s the answer to a question: Does a tree exist when there’s no one there to perceive it?
It exists all right, but it’s in The Gap. And there will be many more of them, and they will not shade you from anything and they will not be your friends. A flash of images: hydraulic stumps; bloody necks; weapon jam; fear. None of it real, just a spasm of remembrance.
Then Ghuaji in front of us, but not completely there; only his clothes running off between the trees, banking and dodging as if under heavy fire. The truck roaring in the silence. And the trees. All the trees were there.
Flash again, but real: a sharp crack as the truck ran into a bank of trunks, Vinaldi and I flung forward to collide with the windshield. It cracked, but not enough; we spent the first seconds back in The Gap barely conscious.
Then it cleared and I swirled my head up and saw the clothes still floating into the distance, like a runaway laundry basket. I felt a moment of dismay—as if entering once more a recurrent nightmare, barely remembered during the day, but like an old soiled glove at night. An incommunicable dread; of half-turns and stares, of screams in the shelves and shoes poking out from beneath curtains in the middle of the night. “Come and see me,” the shoes say, but you know the person they belong to is dead and the shoes shouldn’t be there at all.
When I could still see the clothes half a mile away, I knew it was really so. It is so dark there, silky dark, and yet that doesn’t stop you seeing. You can’t imagine it unless you’ve been there, and