Free Fall

The night and all her secret stars came and went. The rain I found a comfort and I ran like mad along the wet pavements. So it was that the brown earth in the waste places of this city took me. Sprawled in the semi-dark beyond the reach of street light, I waited for the dawn.

For me the shape of reason was important. Not that the poisons of the city and the life of it were inconsequential. I lived it out. I drank the drink and here on the wasteland I threw it back, up, away. Out of all the foosty Edinburgh bars, out of all the dives and chaummers, here’s tae me, the wanton willie. Reduced by circumstance to the acerbic mud of some building site.

Whence came the reeling, awful feeling. The ache in the heart, the brain, the spasm that brought me out of the Ostlers Arms, down Chambers Street, into the Grassmarket night. The stars were never nearer except in the dull night of that place. I revelled in it. Rolled in it. Vomited out the toxin of it. Lay still in it: cold and soiled till morning.

When the sun lifted up its face above me, behind these guardian walls, its first rays touched me on mine. Here, where the five-o’clock world would not reach. Here, where soon the Saturday overtime men would come: time and a half to mix and match and roil the concrete, spill the precast, render the foundations of a capital. All before the settled pace of afternoons in darkened bars, safe before the television, laughing gallus at the old firm, at hibs or hearts, playing away for the long-lived day.

I steeled myself, creeping out of the dub and mire and into Brunswick Street, where the cobbles rose up like segments and led me to the dull back waters of Elgin Street. There I lay into the pillowed posture of an early bed, stained by sorrow and reckless living. In short, I lay down to die.

By day it was midsummer. The sun, highest in all the sky of this northern planet, me the daftest wino ever, flaked out on the solstice morning. Why the wino, I would ask the winds of my dream, crying out in the reluctance of sleep? Why me? Night time is an aberration of my soul. I wept for something in the strange and human shape I have. I felt fingers and arms, hugged myself like an earthly lover, caressed the folds of this flesh that I knew so well, from so far away.

The worn-off night left me nauseous by noon. The blank illness of the boozer crept up my spine and blemished the heart. I threw up in the bath. As usual. I looked across the scapes of the city to the mound and to the castle rock and to the craigs. Was it love or something worse that gripped my flesh? I stretched out a paw at all the blue-sky buildings there before me. In the distance the Hibernian ground stood lovely and robust. I could not believe my eyes. I slumped once more to sleep. Happy to forget. Who it is I am. Who it is I think I am.

Then the dream, a caustic loch closes its milk-white polluted waters over my head: the deep swim for oxygen, away from moisture. But it is down I go. I bite against the stems of weed and reed. One crushes in my teeth and I smell the scent of green. Air fills my lungs as if, by a miracle, the roots of this living thing would breathe for me. In the crevasse of rock from which it grows, I see the eyes that follow me. I know them, eyes that wink like tell-tales and pilot lights, like green and orange liquid crystals. I can read them. Their information is inscrutable, but I know that as it informs, it watches. It waits for me to wake.

In sleep even later I rummage in the dream of a cupboard. Where I once hid the instruments of my trade. I am thrusting books and boxes aside. I have not known such anger since I stood on the dark side of the moon and wept for home. I rage against the lightless shelves, the useless bedding that, for all its clever design, still prevents my peaceful sleep. I find a broken wire, deep amongst the shoe trees and the rubber flexes: a broken wire but one of alien design. It flickers, as if alive, with picture-lights. The xenology of its form calms me. And then I weep. And then I weep.

Day’s end brings twilight. It is long and slow, creeping up through the city until crimson touches the zenith. By then I have returned to the streets, reeling and rollicking, awash with pints and nips, crazy and monochromatic by the moon-beam sodies’ lights.

Later again, I sit on a stone on Observatory Hill. The west of the city is a jewelled thing, a rumbling space-warped thing, running with approaching cars’ mercury and their ruby receding lights. The sky has a grey back to it, while the lesser stars, all of whom I know, dim to absence. That is what the ground-hog humans see, but my memory, still juggling all the ethanol that money can buy, still knows the secret lights of heaven.

There is a hipper in my zipper, that I pull out and pull upon with a thirst born of twisted genes. I am a misfit. This I know. This I vow, in words of unpronounceable syllables, to have and to be no better than I should be. How many years on earth has this been so? How many years did I come here and stalk the planet. Research. Search, I catcall to the night, search and rescue. But, oh, the cataclysmic spheres have no music left for me. They sit and twink and silent be!

Another pull of cheap and cheerless drink. Water of life. I know the gregarious nature of stars. I tell you! But resistance is futile. Futility is futile. I slide, as function leaves my robot limbs, into a slump upon a boulder. Now I grep, now I mumble, now I grok and puke, and foam bubbles like nebular pearls upon my lips.

Steep hills in my dreams let me fall rolling to oblivion. I lie again in the five hour morning, dew spewed, mud-dubbed, rip-torn and film-starred-eyed on the caked grass ground. Like all the grim faced country pumpkins, I shit myself for fear and run bum boozled for the dinge I call a flat in Elgin Street.

Another morning breaks decrepit. She finds me in the fireplace, wrecked and anthropomorphic. Sometimes love is like a stranger. She kisses my crusted face, wipes the debris of the night away. I think of angels. I wake into the morning, earlier than otherwise to see her. She might love me for what I am, but she knows so little. And yet I might love her too. When she goes, is gone. Lost in the city at work. I miss her smile. I lay my head against the wall and rock into sleep again. Hung over, passed over, turned over. By the very heaven I look back up upon.

The dream place erupts around me. Black substitutes for white. Sky for earth. Black earth. The fires of hell are in my soul. And my aching temples ache like nobody’s. The dark room corner shines with something. The little lights play on. Here green, here orange, the display is indicating where it is: in the corner of a room, a space somewhere, a place of control. This is the bedroom cupboard once again, the secret place, which thrums with machinery and I deny it. In there threads the mechanics of my destiny. I am fighting to live without it, struggling with it, raking the coals of fire inside my heart to pluck out the worst embers. I want to be free. I want to be.

The cupboard is bare. Except for trinkets, insignificant things, the dark hole is bare. Then down in the darkest drawer, in the secretest shelf, the lights blink as if. Come here and speak, my young space invader, speak in tongues. Speak .Report.

I am huddled in the noon tide like a foetus. New-born, wet with amniotic wet, I utter protests at the world. I rise like Jesus from the nightly dead. In the later hours she comes home to me again. Kisses me as if kisses were an invention. She takes me into love like a fire, consumes me, sucks me in until I am spent in the coming evening. Then I dream again. If the truth be told, and if it were true, it is I who am falsehood. But it is she who holds me. I do not understand it. What she sees in me. She holds me steady for more than these mongrel, stolen passions. Alone, I am unsure, abandoned and I don’t know why.

Then she is gone, but her aura remains and I explore the evening before regret arrives. In the corner cupboard, I crouch on the floor again. Who am I to say what devices hide here under lock and key? Kneeling on the matting, sobbing and writhing, I push away the debris that cover the secret thing. I know that it is there. I always know. Even when I forget, I know. Even when I drown my screaming soul beneath this culture’s mountainous abuse I know. I know that it is there.

The tell-tales are alive: they glow. I stretch out to take hold. There are dials and keypads, sensors and dials. I lift them up. I try to remember. I recognise the signals. I try to remember, but what I know is confused. The flickering lights bemuse, they hypnotise. When I press the reddest light of all, I think I know. Who I am, I cannot admit.

The lights mutate. Symbols creep into shape on its surface. I can read in them what none in this wild city can read. Beside the screen and pads; slender filaments can be brought out to sense and probe; the longer antennae extend to communicate: to uplink, upload, subtend, submit. And if I can bear it, the needle beams will slip into a vein and heal even me.

I have not done this for so long, for years. I was afraid to. I am still afraid. I swallow hard and feel sweat begin, the run-down of apprehension inside my flimsy clothes. I wonder if it was she who tipped the scales. I do not know. I am wasting here. I am ravaged by an unkindness I brought upon myself. I touch the finger point. The terminal burns to life. It lights itself. I feel the light reflecting on my skin. I press for contact, here in the cupboard, my bolt-hole. I press and wait.

Slow, the dream remembers me. Stark on the landscape where a different sun shadows its moons to bed. The Gorajanda trees heavy with dew light. Hot oceanic waves on the caustic beaches. I am overcome even in daylight, exhausted, too long in the teeth of this world to care. I sleep in the stations of the unit. Until she wakes me with gentle lips on mine.

The kitchen table is darkened with hardware. She sits behind it and I feel sick. The plexi-boxes look so normal, like hi-fi or desktop. But the lights still shine. The knowledge beacons know. I stare and stare. She sits and sits. I feel for once, maybe she loves me. I don’t know. I cannot look her in the eye.

It’s time to talk, she says.

I think so too. A nod is all I muster.

Look at all this, she says, all this. You didn’t buy this on Princes Street.

No, I mumble, still half cut from all my drunken years.

Then her hand, that makes me feel that this is still the dream, touches me on the skin and the heart. Her eyes are like mine: green and deep. It must be love. And I am afraid again.

Do you know what this is? She asks as if I had forgotten. But my voice will not acknowledge.

Comm unit, I say in earth words.

How long has it been? she asks. The flickering light in her eyes is like the green and orange tell-tales.

What I utter is the truth. But I have been too long a human, too long a vagrant. Seven years. I tell her. Continuing… Seven years without word. Seven years abandoned.

She eyes me darkly. You were not abandoned. You came here for a purpose. Do you remember it?

I say nothing. Words are out of the question. I start shaking my head, hanging my head. Memory does not flood back, but more like black, it inundates me with shame, I have no recall, only feelings that fill me with dread,

She goes on, You left us. Your group. More than seven years ago, local time. We searched for you but had to go back. Time ran out. We couldn’t miss translocation. In any case, we thought you were dead.

Not dead, gone native, I say, at last in a hoarse whisper.

I look at the curtains, seedy with earth’s light, the crude walls papered with primitive emotion, so much of it my own. The old wound is reopening. I have an arousing desire for flight. I wanted to be free. Comes my lame excuse.

Free? she says, suddenly animated, Free? How can that be? You were a part of us, a leader. You put us all in danger, not to mention our purpose. You risked contact, contamination - risked yourself and a world. You chose to disappear… to be free.

It filled my head like a different dream: again creeping from the shuttle and its desert base. Against my body the pouch of geological specimens taken as currency. I knew they would seek me out. But I wanted no more rules, no more responsibility, no civilised behaviour. I covered my tracks. I disabled my communicator. I concealed it from their scanners. I knew that they would have to leave, leaving me.

How can I explain this to her, this woman, who had found her way into my affections? Now, she represented what I had chosen to reject. She said ‘we’. Do I remember her? Time comes at me like a funnel. I cannot recall who I was. The feelings are so mixed. ‘We’? And was I free? All this time on earth running away, but never free. Free from what? I feel alien: because I have human form but I am not human, because I cannot reach back to the being I was?

Something weary grows in my heart and I follow it. I don’t remember, I tell her. how do I know you know me?

She sheds a tear. We were matched, a union, a liaison. I don’t know what you say for this here. That is how I know, why I came back. To reach you, to find out.

I feel my mind spin. I discover a thing like anger and a fragment of my living dream that will not let me be. Anger, rage, fear, all rise up. But I do not know why. She takes my hand in a strong grip. I feel the love there and it draws me. Come. She is crying, Come with me, now, before it is too late.

Time and lateness substitute for fear and rage. I run around the room screaming. I remember everything and know nothing. I resist her grip. I shake it off. I push her away. Violent. Not willing to hurt her, only willing resistance. She falls against the table, the communicator to the floor. It whines and flickers. Never mind it, she says, I have my own. And there she holds it, small and compact, taken from some hidden pocket, some bag. We must go now.

And I am screaming at the door. I wrestle her to the floor until in another corner I lie weeping and she, bleeding, presses the stud for healing and for contact. It’s too late, she says to it, and the words are resonant and familiar, unheard for so long. It’s too late for him now, and for me. Take me up, she says and she is gone.

Night descends upon my rebellious nature. I crawl from bar to bar. The high light sky hangs like the bubble-boundary of the earth. Tonight I remember history. I am an alien visitor, cast as human. But I piss it up with the best. Then the sky falls in on me as it always does. The greatness of heaven crushes me to a gutter somewhere. I fall asleep in the runnels of dirt and grime and snore till daylight.

I waken in my flat again. I am alone with the communicator. I have it on the table, its fragments reassembled. I know that she is gone and night is coming and I am here. I have forgotten too much. I press the studs.

The image bank is activating. I see the first recording play, frosted and indistinct like a memory. There is no sky. An ancestral light still shines among the data. This was the home world of my people. But fumble as I may, and press the contact studs, there is no contact. The ether is dead. There is no signal.