Dispatch from a Colored Room



  Dispatch from a Colored Room

  by Matt Weber

  Copyright 2014 Matt Weber

  Cover assembled from photos courtesy of Aleksandra P., Guido Muermann, and Lindsay Wright via freeimages.com. The cover was created using the GIMP, also free. The book was assembled and compiled in Scrivener, not free but well worth the money.

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  Table of Contents

  Dispatch from a Colored Room

  Connect with Matt

  About Matt

  Dispatch from a Colored Room

  Thank you, Daniel. With your indulgence, my friends, I'll take a slightly more discursive approach in my rebuttal.

  So I'm out in this absolute boondock of the sinistral sixth, the kind of distance from anything civilized that you don't even realize existed until you go out to a place like that. You take the rail to its ass-end and that's only the beginning, there's a huge bus on a highway and then a little bus on back roads and finally some kind of all-terrain vehicle whose shocks are made of some magical material that transmits unaltered—nay, amplified—every last irregularity of the highly irregular dirt road that you have to take to get to the Imen-fucked-off depot that serves as city center to this boondock, which is still a mile away on a dirt path worn through the grass by foot traffic—which is the worst part, flinching at the sky the whole way. Then seven blocks of getting looked at by a bunch of land-proud autochthons who stare at my business suit as though it were a uniform for Dog-Kickers LLC, and up five flights to the shabby little apartment on whose door I knock hoping, at this point praying, that I haven't made some terrible misstep and come to the wrong place. I say the name with the knock, of course, "Aimée Leblanc?" and a woman opens the door and says "Yeah, I'm Aimée Leblanc," and the relief is so gigantic that I actually forget for several seconds what I'm going to say next.

  I can hear a kid banging around in the background, not that there's much ground in back; for all that the sinistral sixth is every bit as wide open as they say it is, the apartments look just like home. Aimée is impatient, apprehensive, lank-haired and sinewy with eyes that are dull but not deep dull, the kind of dull where there seems to be a film on them so you don't know what's under. Too young to use to be pretty, but there you go. I've been thinking about how to do this all morning, of course, and into the afternoon, and the reality of Aimée Leblanc wrong-foots me in the most blindingly predictable way you could imagine: I know the bones of her history, her situation, but seeing the eye-bags, the melanoma scars, the stain of betel on her teeth and acullico on her fingertips, all the flaws and erosions of not much of a life—is she even capable of the happiness I imagined? Is she even capable of believing this is anything but a trick?

  Well, she's really annoyed by now, so I do the minimum: I hand her a very nice sleather portfolio embossed with the logo of my institution, which fluoresces tastefully with just enough bioluminescence so you'd notice, and I say, "Mlle Leblanc, I know you'll want to go over the details, but I hope you'll believe me when I say you've become a rich woman."

  I've set this up very nicely, I hope you'll agree, so you're now itching to know how she'll react, and if all goes well I won't violate the covenant of not keeping you in suspense without delivering something of value during the period of let's call it suspension. I mentioned my institution, which is a name I really have to fake in this context; let's call it Dawnroad Bank, let's say the logo is the sun rising over a hill with a road stretching toward it. I think that would bioluminesce nicely. This is a few years ago now, so I look more or less like this, only quite formal—full three-piece business suit, bespoke but made of crap jute, sleather shoes that were probably not as nice as the portfolio that I'd just handed Aimée, and a scarf and gloves that I'd shoved in my briefcase because they looked like shit, much like my coat, which I hadn't worn because it looked like shit. They do not teach you, in the offices of Dawnroad Bank, how much it strains your credibility with clients when you're standing on their doorstep shivering hard enough that you're actually a little out of breath from it. Dawnroad Bank does not often pay personal visits to clients in the boondocks of the sinistral sixth. But Dawnroad Bank never leaves money on the table.

  Think about where that's gotten them now, when the skies are split like the bellies of week-drowned rats and you can't take a bite of bread without gritting your teeth on black bone-ash.

  Some of you are going to want me to get to the point. You know that's not how it works. Who's here tonight? I see Aurea Laclois, the only woman in this room brave enough to admit she's whored to live so she could walk this stage; I see Ambrose Chrysaor, who still can't talk after a Champion nearly strangled him backstage for the crime of playing his part too well. Everyone here has suffered something like, and not for any "point," because any geometer will tell you that a point is defined as nothing. A thousand points adds up to empty space. And you're here, listening to me, because you know it.

  I'm going to read you something. You'll understand why in a bit. Trust me when I tell you that it won't work if I wait to lay all the foundations first. I can't make you let me keep the stage; but you know you should, if this life you gave your life for is worth anything at all.

  Imen is even-handed with his children; all experience in their own time the cuff and the caress, the kiss and the rod. You are just born, Aimée, and my flesh has sentenced itself to die.

  A physician friend has diagnosed me with a chancre that presses on the older precincts of the brain, those that govern basic impulses and operations. I had suspected the ailment for some time, due to certain alterations in my perception, and now they are confirmed. The question now turns to what to do—though you will of course know, as you read, what has been done. If you are reading this letter, and those that will follow, at the funeral of an old man, who lived a happy life and left a satisfactory inheritance, then I will have unhorsed my brain's black rider (which I have named for the structure in which it resides, the "black substance" in the very base of the brain, about which you will have learned in school—paying better attention, naturally, than your father did) and gone on to a happier existence. Perhaps you will read them long after I am dead, but on a bed or divan in a comfortable apartment on the middle terraces, a poorer bequest than a life with a healthy father but one in which I will, nonetheless, take some small pride before my last breath departs.

  But, my darling, there is the greater possibility that I will doubly fail you—fail to defeat the black rider, to be sure, but fail also to provide for my own treatment. In that case, I shall leave a yet more meager bequest. I will do all I can, and that will be to disencumber you of my failing flesh.

  You are seven days old, and the most light my life has ever known. If ever I write one true thing, it is this: I will not rationalize my failures. I know my love, and my disease, and what I must do.

  The first thing Aimée Leblanc does is lean out the door and look right, then left, then behind me. "No one's recording," I tell her. This is the first time I've done a job like this, but it has happened a couple of times in Dawnroad's history and they like to handle it well because, let's be honest, there is no more profitable client than one who has a lot of money and no idea how to manage it—if you can manage to keep their hands off the bulk of it, which I swiftly judge may be difficult for Aimée Leblanc, who clearly uses
a lot of betel and acullico—but it's not my problem. "I'm happy to come in," I say, "if you'd like to get the full story in privacy." I try not to show how desperate I am to get out of the cold.

  She gives the scene one final glance, then looks back at me. "I don't own anything except my boy," she said, "and a couple of knives and guns."

  "Well, Mlle Leblanc, I'm here to tell you that you do in fact possess a few assets," I said. "And I'm here in my capacity as a representative of Dawnroad Bank to part you from a small fraction of those assets, in exchange for which we think we can offer you more than enough growth to cover our fee."

  She looks at me and I imagine a sparrow looking at a hawk with a bag of seed in its beak. Come closer, little bird, I'm here to help. "Well, I've said what I have to say," she says at last, "so I guess you'd better come in and say your bit."

  I enter the apartment, which is spare but still messy: A lot of little plass toys on the floor, a couple of kids' books with the flexible pages that don't tear, two shabby wooden chairs around a round