vidit

In Chris' social horizon (which was somewhat narrower than the far-off band of his spatial horizon) everyone had started meeting at dinner parties. At any rate, everyone who met everyone that does, does. The musical chairs that takes place there is no more structured or codified than the drunken spinning round each other in a club or basking in the stupid/great noise of a band at a gig. But the language is easier to learn. Pidgin Debrett's, filtered and creoled but still intact: start outwards, work inwards; pay no attention to your food; eat invisibly, and act charmingly. Truths cloaked themselves strangely at the parties Chris forced himself to attend, hidden in this language that he was only just learning. Like a foreigner or an autistic he followed the conversation at a distance, carefully trying one newly-learned trick and then another, retreating when confused or contradicted.

Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture of a man, and he is always looking for his other half.... Chris was an old enough hand at this modern equivalent of courtship that he and she were swapping significant glances across the hostess' laughter at one such gathering; six months later when Debra had recovered her strength enough to throw another do, the significance was entirely other. Chris soared, far above his forty-fourth floor. The clouds he wore, and the sky was his earth. He was happy, presumptuously happy.

Greater height, greater prestige, greater hubris.

"Zeus was angry, and in his anger he cut each man in two, like a sorb apple which is halved for pickling."

The sun was round the other side of the building, yet the day was clearly glorious. Each building sang with brightness, and the air in between buzzed. Now a partner yet partnerless, Chris wanted more than anything to see beyond his dismal horizon. If only this dark vale could be lifted above the levels of his surroundings, then he might gain perspective in the stretching away of green fields and opportunities growing like wild flowers. Falling away from him like the ground, like gently-sloping hills; not steep escarpments or walls of glass. Mirrors and steel hoops surrounded him, showed him only his self alone. They pulled his eyes back to himself, dragged and dragged.

Height brings power and power brings opportunity. Chris had to heal himself; no healer could do it for him, bring together the skin where one had been torn into one and one. Chris was surprised at the ease with which he was able to hire investigation. It was impossible to buy facts and certainty that way, he knew; but every opportunity for facts - hurting but compassionate - was almost as precious as the fact itself.

Photos arrived in Manila envelopes: sporadically at first, then with a daily regularity like clock-punching. Faces that Chris would never have looked twice at were made special by the act of recorded delivery, and suspicion, however briefly, was thrown on everyone. After weeks of leafing through images of his and her acquaintances, some just hers, a message began to form among the random snaps and flashes. Like a repeated Morse code emerging from static - weakly, but then stronger once you notice it - the same face seemed to drop into Chris' in-tray more resoundingly than the rest. The accompanying notes told of increasingly intimate meetings, clinches, then definite assignations. Restaurants. Theatre. Cinema. Overnights. Curtains closed at lunchtime. It had to be him. Jeremy.

Sometimes Chris fancied he could see clues in even the early pictures of the two of them. There was the way they sat, of course, and the proximity: all the usual body bullshit. But as he stared longer at Jeremy's cigarette smoke, hanging infernally around his shoulders in every photo, and like a slipped halo over his balding head ("Christ: what did she see in him?") he began to pick out letters and fragments of words in the fumes. They twirled and twisted with copperplate curlicues in their lower case. Chris took a marker pen and traced out on one picture: "tricked". On another, "cabron". On yet another, "cuckold". When Chris received the last picture - after the closed curtains - then without consideration for the pattern of the smoke he scrawled "YOU'RE FIRED" over Jeremy's face. He slashed black lines through "FIRED" and wrote "DEAD." Then he began to systematically fill the whole of the picture with black, wet ink.