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Iniquity

by Chris Bell

~For Michael F~

It happened around the time hats came back into style. People on the streets started to look like extras in a classic film noir and Auckland turned into the Berlin of the South-Pacific: a conflation of poverty, crime and hedonism.

I’d been in the den, listening to Steve Reich’s Music For 18 Musicians from my archived iTunes library when, briefly, I made a mental connection, clicked on a hyperlink, you might say; like stumbling upon a new website.

I remembered a man’s name. It was like finding the key to a locked door.

I should explain. There are three or four illicit dens around the city, their location known only to the few. I frequent the one near the top of what used to be Symonds Street in an alleyway next to a karaoke bar. You’ll see a shop that sells dragon kites, Chinese New Year firecrackers and oriental knick-knacks. That’s just a front. Enter and, as long you use the password I’ve provided, you can pass through it to a tearoom and the ‘reception’ for the upstairs booths, where you can smoke and take advantage of other services. It’s rumoured that most of the attendants are Manchurians — whatever Manchurians are; look it up on Wikipedia. Something connected with China before the internet age.

The man with the strangely familiar face appeared at the den on a winter’s night, mild apart from its leaflessness and a thin wind chasing plastic bags around the vacant lots. Most Aucklanders are too afraid of the Hoodies to venture out in darkness but a reckless disregard for personal safety always accompanies me like an invisible bodyguard. As usual, the sky was pixellated with public information, but little of its fairground brightness reflected on the ground; leaving only glimmers to navigate by as, on foot, I made my way to the den. No traffic except sporadic buses and not a Hoodie in sight; just the odd pedestrian trying to disguise himself under his hat brim, head down, collar up.

The young woman on reception had always struck me as a likely consort of Hoodie top brass — tattooed and comprehensively pierced — but, almost imperceptibly over time, like water dripping onto stone, I appeared to leave an impression on her. I nicknamed her Clepsydra and she didn’t seem to object.

“Evening, John,” she said. Clepsydra always called me John; I don’t know why. “Tea?”

“Please.” Guests were offered tea, but the beverage would be the forbidden pleasure of your choice. Mine was coffee — black, sweet and fragrant — the beans smuggled intact across borders and roasted somewhere in the bush near Karekare. In the shadows beneath the bar she secreted a thermos flask. Without bringing it into view she decanted some coffee into a small Chinese teacup while I sat down in front of her on the other side of the bar.

It was a brew strong enough to spark nostalgia. In my wallet was a creased photo of me. I usually produce it once I’ve taken my first sip, trying to kick-start a few more memories of life in the internet age. In a feminine script on the back of this snapshot someone had written Rangikapiti Pa, Mangonui, Northland. I looked impatient, standing on top of that grassy mound on an overcast day with ragged sea and a wooded headland in the background; my pained expression silently imploring the unknown photographer to take the picture so I could be somewhere else.

Stuck to the back of the wallet containing this photo, and little else, was a tattered Flintstones sticker. I found it a quarter of a century ago, attached to the frame of a bunk I inherited from my late mother; the bed I slept in as a child. The sticker came free with a long obsolete ice-block. I peeled off a torn fragment of it and kept it because it brings back the taste of that confection so vividly that a ghost of its sour, chemical fruitiness still coats my tongue whenever I look at it.

But there was also that much larger part of my past that wasn’t photographed and from which I had no mementos; days that had slipped into Time’s greasy plughole. Afternoons frittered away, soused in wine, gossip and male banter in bars that had been demolished soon after the violence of the first protest marches against big business.

“How’s your day?” Clepsydra asked, pulling me back from this ragged reverie.

“Hard to say,” I replied, almost choking on the coffee because it was so hot. It scoured my mouth like caustic soda. “Mysterious,” I continued as soon as I’d composed myself, “although I don’t know why that should come as a surprise.”

“Mysterious?” Clepsydra sounded interested but it may only have been professional courtesy.

“I just saw a man — homeless, by the look of him — on the Grafton over-bridge. There was no one else around, just him and me, and he was standing at the halfway point, leaning against the railings, looking down at State Highway One as I passed on the other side. He had a jug of some brown liquid — looked like Coca-Cola except of course it can’t have been — balanced on top of the railings next to him. He was standing there as though he was waiting to drop it onto a passing car.”

“There haven’t been cars since before I was born,” Clepsydra said, as though admonishing a senior citizen.

“No,” I said. “But I’ve been seeing people doing odd things for a while now. I’ve started writing them down because I know I’ll never remember them otherwise.”

When I motioned towards the notebook in my pocket she gave me a playful look to suggest I was mad, but it was true. There had been the two-steps-forward-one-step-back man I’d seen getting off the bus near Mount Eden with a crazy look on his face; the weeping woman perched on top of a flock of suitcases on the pavement near the junction of Khyber Pass Road; a punk Maori teenager with moko begging a Subway sandwich off a student in the downtown daylight; a Hoodie crossing the road carrying a gift in Christmas wrapping paper, fumbling then dropping it onto the weeds and cracked asphalt of Upper Queen Street then scrabbling to retrieve it…

I left the notebook in my pocket and scanned the room. In the shadows at the other end of the bar was a silhouetted man. I could tell it was a man because he had a hat and was wearing it, which was unheard of in the dens. Patrons always put their hats on the bar as they sat down. This indiscretion alone flagged him as a possible government agent. What’s more, the den had so many retreats and recesses that other patrons were usually glimpsed only at a distance, disappearing into a room or sleeping in an armchair in front of the satellite feed from Singapore or Tokyo. Other than Clepsydra, I rarely saw anyone at the bar.

This man had pallid skin and an expression like a bad debt. As soon as my eyes tried to lock on to his, he looked back at his glass and twiddled his thumbs. Double-breasted suit, brogues, a tidemark of perspiration around the crown of the trilby.

His voice came weakly from the receding gloom. “You don’t know who I am, do you.” It wasn’t even a question; he wasn’t soliciting an answer so I didn’t say anything for a while.

Eventually I managed the standard, “No. Should I?” There was something curiously familiar about him. Perhaps a hanger-on of that small group of my past acquaintances, one who’d taken a dislike to me or my tobacco smoking and coffee drinking? A former colleague who didn’t approve of my work?

I tried to link his shaded face with a memory but all that came to me were the bars I once drank in. In the internet age I might have whiled away hours with this man; in the shadows of Deschlers before it closed for “renovations”; long lunches at Mink, Squid Row or Galbraith’s; tapas with Rioja on the chilly balcony at Vivace; isolated evenings with whisky-damp elbows from leaning against the bar at Tabac; or long, long ago, cruising like sharks among the fish tanks in… had it been called Coast?

Nothing connected. My mind gave me only Cannot find server, Page not available, Error 404 — File or Directory not found.

*

I once had what would be considered a good memory but that’s all changed. My mind is now a muddle of broken links, jigsaw fragments that don’t connect and chasms left by missing material. The bullet point party’s electro-shock therapy hadn’t cured my “internet addiction”, which is what it claimed countless citizens were suffering from in the days when the propaganda told us the net was killing print, the banks and big business, presaging government bailouts and the more drastic measures we came to call the Almighty Crunch.

I completed the treatment programme around the time they began prosecuting bloggers and citizen journalists for “media crimes”. They had a job waiting for me: what was known as a make-good man in the newsrooms. Making good was in many ways less taxing than being a journalist. It was, to pun unashamedly, clear cut. You followed the style guide, razoring out any reference that might “harm the interests of the state”, “cause panic” or “disturb social peace”, as well as anything else of value that good journalists strive to provide their readers.

I wouldn’t be any good for breaking news now.

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