Chapter Text
August ’51 was not kind to Jamrock. In a typical summer, the heat and long days brought a sense of freedom to Revachol's beating heart: any square or scrap of grass became a stage or a salon where citizens gathered. Saramirizian carnival parties drew the residents of serviced apartments in Grand Couron and the housing projects of Villalobos alike into the centre, dressed in their brightest outfits to dance to rhythms played on tin cans and empty kegs given a new life by carnival drummers. Jamrock’s elders took full advantage of the extended hours of daylight, gathering outside cafes or around picnic tables to play rapid-fire rounds of poker and dominoes, using their breaks in play to share home-made sandwiches or rush to finish an ice-cream before sticky drops of melted vanilla marked the cards, the rituals of a lifetime of summers. Children and teenagers could write epics with the discoveries, conflict and romance that they packed into the precious weeks out of school, often finding a first tangle with the RCM’s juvenile officers or taste of heartbreak before rebounding the same day for new adventures, full of the insatiable appetite for newness and experience that drives the young. While these small familiar joys did not disappear in ’51, they played out as footnotes to the main story of that summer, written in blood on the pavements of Jamrock.
First: the blood of a teenage boy making his first desperate attempt at robbery was shed by a shop owner with an illegal firearm. The dead boy was reincarnated as mourners and the mourners expanded to embody an entire underclass of the city’s dispossessed and desperate while the shop owner expanded to embody the Revachol petite bourgeoisie who saw far greater amounts of wealth hoarded out of reach by far more nefarious people than themselves and felt therefore perpetually defensive and wrongly pathologised, with each faction finding only the other on the battleground of their doorsteps. Police were sent in not to talk or listen, nor to bandage wounds or rebuild, but to stand in riot gear between the two groups, inevitably beating and wrestling to the ground and arresting anyone from the side they were facing who tried to break the barricades. Windows were broken, garbage bins set alight, more illegal gunshots rang out and more blood was spilled, arrestees were found unresponsive in cells overnight. Field officers from precincts all across Revachol were shipped to the 41st’s territory for the sole purpose of keeping the violence - or at least, more than the usual levels of violence - from spreading beyond the centre of Jamrock, while in the Precinct’s headquarters, their Captain Pryce hoarded his lieutenants, explaining to them that this was only the start in a larger chain of events, that he could not lose more of his best and brightest to stray Molotovs or suicidally angry civilians ahead of the coming storm, that this was a time for strategy, a taste of temporary promotion to a non-field grade.
'Strategy' consisted of a lot of long, sweaty days within the mill, clearing and filing long-overdue paperwork and anxiously waiting for radio transmissions from junior officers on the streets. Lieutenant Jean Vicquemare had long advocated for more strategic work in the Precinct and had jumped at the opportunity to catch the Captain’s ear, to investigate the supply chains by which weapons originally sold under proper licence found their way into the black market. He had first proposed the work at the start of the summer and had it judged ‘non-urgent’, and now that its priority had been made apparent, he was told it was work to pick up when the patrol officers returned from their special duty, that the special consultant Heidelstam would come to him when the time was right. His pet project mothballed once again and the prospect of patrol work off the table for the time being, Jean was left with little alternative to spending more time in the mill with his new partner, Lt. Kitsuragi.
He was not proud of the way that he had greeted his new partner on his transfer to the precinct. His reaction had been born of juvenile jealousy: anticipating that the new detective would not only displace him as Harry’s partner but breathe a new sense of legitimacy into his lunacy, embarking on whatever number of new cases per week and being showered in praise from the Captain, while he would languish, eternal satellite, obviously now no better than a sergeant. Worse, he wouldn’t even have been able to complain; he had made no secret of his desire for a role that did not require him to orbit Harry. Things had of course come to pass a little differently, at least to date, and Jean had tried his best to get along with Kim, who certainly he could not see an obvious reason to dislike. He was polite, resolutely professional and appeared to get on well with his fellow officers, and never came to work stinking of piss or alcohol. He did, however, make it near-impossible to make amends by simple virtue of treating him with the complete and casual indifference that say, a housecat gives to an overly friendly guest. On their first day of formal duty together, a remorseful Jean had greeted him with a cup of coffee in the precinct and a cautious:
“Hey, Detective. I just wanted to say I’m sorry I started us off on the wrong foot.”
At this point he was interrupted with a dismissively raised hand and the flat reply:
“No need. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
The lieutenant had closed all possible discussion of Jean’s sins there, and stubbornly avoided re-opening the conversation. In their four weeks working together he had resisted not only any efforts to apologise, but also any off-the-job socialising and as much small talk as possible. He had learnt that Kitsuragi lived in an apartment in Grand Couron and that while his motor carriage was RCM property, he modified and maintained it as a hobby, and just about nothing else. It was one of many reasons he’d been greatly missing Judit’s presence since her riot duty assignment a week or so ago. Her rapport with the new detective was so easy as to be unfathomable to Jean, and he’d hoped that her natural talent for diplomacy would have prompted him to warm up. Instead, he’d gotten only sporadic ‘work talk’ (granted, it was focused and insightful work talk), in between which Kim would avoid him, busying himself with paperwork, a book of crossword puzzles, or occasionally in conversation with Trant, usually discussing historical trivia so niche that he could not help a creeping sense they were deliberately excluding him despite knowing well enough they were sincere.
Guys like that - he’d never understood how they could just be that way in front of other people, so earnestly nerdy and kind of proudly dull, what they’d done in school to avoid getting the bino beaten out of them. He’d always tried his best to fly under the radar, act normal and unobjectionable, and here he was; well into his mid-thirties and feeling like a sore thumb because he couldn’t keep up with two middle-aged men whose idea of water-cooler chat was comparing personal heroes of the pioneer era of aerostatic engineering. But it wasn’t their problem, really, was it? The problem was that Jean didn’t have any idea what he wanted or who he wanted to be. All that effort to be the average fucking normal human being, all that resentment towards Harry for being a limelight-hogging open freak incapable of listening to him even for a moment all those years, and then when he finally got his moment in the spotlight, he’d wasted no time proving himself just as adept in acting like an insecure bully who didn’t deserve his partner’s respect. The time for strategy couldn’t end soon enough.
***
Though largely absent from the mill, Jean’s former partner had likewise found himself in a state of stasis amidst that summer’s upheaval. Every day in the last month or so, since he had left his shack in search of his memories, had felt equally nonsensical: disconnected, the way that Tuesday night’s dream has no regard for where you left Monday’s. He had found ways to fill the days since the episode, mostly non-destructive ones. He hadn’t been drinking or snorting speed; in fact the thought of speed giving him even more of so much empty time to wade through made him feel ill. Once a week, he would take the streetcar to an anodyne community centre in Central Jamrock where he would sit for an hour on an uncomfortable folding chair too small for his frame, just like the one in the harbour at Martinaise, and talk about alcoholism with a group of fellow alcoholics in between sips of watery sweet cordial or even more watery coffee from flimsy plastic cups. On his first visit he had been encouraged to stand up in front of the group and explain himself.
His name was Harry, he said, but he had drunk so much that he forgotten that fact, forgotten everything. In the same night he had also threatened to shoot himself and driven a motor-carriage into the sea, likely also with the intention of killing himself. He had drunk so much to forget some things that were still forgotten and some things he had remembered, like the failure of a relationship and the awful things he said and did while he was drinking. But he was alive and ready to stop drinking, he supposed. He had rambled a bit, as was typical of him, blurting out things like how he felt dead bodies and Dolores Dei talking to him, and that he had been told that he was like a bang-bang cockatoo, and the faces in the room had given him the same sympathetic serious half-smiles and nods to those parts as they had to the rest of the story. At the subsequent meetings he tried to stick to doing the half-smiling and nodding himself, and not to talk about himself any more.
After the groups he would walk with one of his fellow alcoholics to Judit’s apartment, about fifteen minutes away, and they would sit and eat dinner with her and her children who were also the fellow alcoholic’s children before he took the streetcar back to Martinaise. The fellow alcoholic was a younger man named Ferdinand, dark-skinned with a tall strong build, who dressed plainly but smartly in mostly-black clothes and largely did not speak at the group unless spoken to directly. Harry did not like the group, but his going provided reassurance to Judit, who he liked dearly, that both he and her husband were sober, and he liked the dinner because the group was not to be acknowledged in front of the children. He liked the walk because his companion sometimes offered him a cigarette on the walk there and while he was trying not to smoke so much, on these walks it felt like the right thing to do, to help another person not feel so alone. They were alike not only in their alcoholism and their cigarettes but also as companions in the limbo of ‘unfit to work’. Ferdinand, he had gathered from his reluctant contributions to the group discussions, had worked in construction until an injury on site had left him unable to work, walk, do much other than drink to excess. It had been over a year, and he had learned how to stop drinking and start walking, but work remained out of reach. The children - the boy older but still small, twelve years old with his mother’s wide anxious eyes and quiet manner; the girl eight, precocious and curly-haired - would study him intently while he ate in the way that children, natural anthropologists, do. The boy kept his questions to himself; Harry sometimes felt desperate to answer them but knew that doing so would upset his mother. The younger had recently asked why, if Harry was maman’s friend, he was always out with daddy and not with her, and Judit replied plainly that he and daddy had free time at the same time at the moment and in any case she’d been out with Harry more than you could imagine, just when you were at school.
Most of the week he stayed in Martinaise: he would visit the church to talk about his disdain for the recovery group with Tiago who smirked and told him that most people don’t understand the Mother’s ways but that Harry was no different from those fools in that regard, or walk with Lilienne, sometimes playing catch with or teaching letters to her children while she was on the water. The church soothed him: both the total silence of the Swallow and the thudding, all-encompassing sound of the anodic music offered him a sensation so complete that while in their embrace he could forget the parts of him that he was missing, although too long in the radius of the former reminded him of things that made him queasy and afraid to sleep at night. He appreciated Lilienne too, for the pleasant breezy indifference she displayed around him, sometimes dropping a conversation mid-sentence to bend down and pocket an interesting seashell or feather with the same bright-eyed enthusiasm that her children would have, though he knew that her willingness to leave them with him was a real and intentional display of trust.
The night after the streetcar and the recovery group he would head in the opposite direction: into the heart of Martinaise to see the communists. They were growing in number in an encouraging but modest fashion: Eugene of the Hardies and Elizabeth, their fixer, and occasionally Cindy although she never read the texts and instead hovered around the margins of the room, laughing and cheering when Elizabeth would lose her patience with an overly theoretical strand of the conversation and challenge the boys on the purpose of the group. She was compelling, dragging the last-century theorists into the uprising that seemed to be taking shape in the heart of Jamrock.
“What does any of it mean, sitting here arguing if the ten-thousandth essay on how to bring about a revolution offers synthesis or revisionism when downtown our brothers and sisters are beaten and bleeding in the streets? Sure, you can see they’re not going to bring down the Coalition, but what are you doing for them? To build their class consciousness, to build anything?” she had snapped, at their most recent meeting. She had the immediate agreement of her fellow newcomers and soon a cautious interest from the students in what they could offer to the streets had developed into a meaningful plan. She was a trained legal observer; Eugene had dealt with his fair share of brutality: between them they could turn the group into a small crew of observers and medics to try and prevent arrests and casualties.
“Except,” she had added, whipping her gaze to Harry's direction with a sudden frown, “not you. You couldn’t. I mean, are you going to ask your friends to kindly stop beating the grieving friends of a murdered kid? I don’t know if there’s something you can do ‘from the inside’, if you wanted to release all the detainees or something, but out there with us? No way.”
“I’m not allowed in the precinct unescorted at the moment,” he replied, “because I’m off duty. But I’ll try.”
She shook her head, trying to mask her disbelief at the seriousness with which he had responded to the suggestion of a jailbreak. The ambivalence with which she still treated him was obvious, not that he could resent her for it.
The third appointment that marked his progress through the week drew him back to the Precinct. Thursday afternoon meant convalescent appointment; convalescent appointments meant it was Thursday afternoon. He hadn’t been counting, but had started to suspect that he was shaping up for more of his time in the precinct to be for convalescence than actual work this year, first the post-Martinaise physio and head-shrinking and now the post-disappearance-from-Martinaise head-shrinking. He’d gotten pretty good at it by this point: he would measure out portions of his psyche just substantial enough for Gottlieb to poke at without arousing suspicions of ‘obstruction’ or ‘deception’ whilst keeping a sizeable chunk of it untouched, for him alone to work with. Alcohol, ageing, amnesia: fair game. Dora, pain, suicidality and Dora-related pain and suicidality also seemed reasonable topics to therapise. Communism, the ever-encroaching high tide of the Pale, the obvious presence of an enormous quantity of ghosts in the Precinct owing to the building’s prior history as a sweatshop where women and children inhaled microscopic fibres and were crushed and burnt and worked to death in the service of supplying Revachol’s upper classes with luxury textiles (this point itself arguably a sub-strain of communism), and most of all, bisexuality and its synecdoche-or-metonym Lt. Kim Kitsuragi were all strictly off-limits. The Kim section of his brain had been largely walled off even to himself until he could figure out what to do with it, aside from its difficult tendency to breach containment in dreams or when tuning the radio or reflected in a stranger’s glasses. He was beginning to understand the process by which he had managed to jettison so much of himself.
***
It was on Harry’s fourth appointment of this particular round of return-to-work convalescence that he entered Dr Gottlieb’s office to find the Captain there. The lazareth sessions never had much levity in any case, but Pryce’s presence cast a cold, prickly urgency over the little white room. Gottlieb said nothing, as though they were both expecting him to join them. Harry seated himself nervously on the sticky vinyl bench-cum-bed where he always did, sensing the doctor’s evasiveness before choosing to look his Captain directly in the eyes; light, flinty, not too different from his own. Pryce’s face broadened into a smile, creasing all the way up to those grey eyes without his aura lightening a bit.
“Du Bois. I wanted to check in on you myself, son. Hope you’re recovering well.”
Harry did not feel well, about any of it. Still, the Captain commanded reverence and respect in spite of his reservations. He owed a lot to this man.
“Thank you, sir. I hope so too. Um, are you staying for our session?” he added, feeling a voice in his head muttering the words ‘doctor-patient confidentiality’.
The captain’s grin didn’t waver.
“Of course, I’d not want to intrude. But the thing is, du Bois, I was just talking to the good doctor before you arrived. Your convalescent plan thus far has been designed to prepare you to return to active duty, no?”
Harry nodded, wondering what the point in him saying this even was with Gottlieb right there, but the lazareth remained passive.
“Well, we were talking, and I wanted to make a suggestion to you. You’ve been with us a long time. One of the finest officers not just in this precinct but that the RCM has ever seen. But you’ve been through a lot.”
At this cue Gottlieb kicked into action, glancing over the top of his spectacles towards Harry while intoning:
“In the course of duty you’ve developed severe and recurrent trauma-and-stressor symptoms, not to mention taking a number of injuries that are likely to impede your mobility in the long term. We’ve discussed this already, of course.”
He shrugged in vague acknowledgement. Pryce continued:
“The sacrifices you’ve made for us are dear, Lieutenant Double-yfreitor. Some people might be happy to say, well, a bright star burns faster. But I don’t want to lose you, and neither do I want to lose sight of all you’ve done for us - for Revachol West. I don’t believe it’d be the right thing for us to do, to put you back on duty knowing you’ll just end up here again - a more and more difficult recovery each time.”
Harry felt his eyes widen at these words. He squeezed his fingers hard into the metal frame of the bench, trying to concentrate on the pain instead of the rising panic inside him.
“Now, don’t worry - of course I’d not just ‘let you go’, as it were,” he added hastily, waving his fingers in dismissive quotation marks. He continued, the faux-jollity falling away from his voice suddenly: “I would never consider doing that to somebody like you. What Dr Gottlieb and I have agreed is that a change of role would be more beneficial to your long-term wellbeing, du Bois. We believe your expertise and your unique way of thinking are exactly what the 41st needs in an independent consultant. You’d only need to work say three days a week here, receiving a salary -“
“- the Contractor’s rate would in fact be a modest uplift on what you currently receive,” Gottlieb added.
“- but you would technically no longer be part of the RCM. Paid by us, working with us, but a civilian. Your own man. And you would be based here, in the Precinct. Out of the fray, as it were.”
He had no idea what to make of any of this. It felt as if a bad thing was happening, yet he couldn’t help the sense that everything they said was correct. In the memories that he did have, from the last few months, he remembered feeling confused, upset, scared about having to be a cop. The only times that he’d enjoyed it had been when Kim was telling him what a good job he was doing, and god knows he knew he needed to stop chasing that feeling. Since the most recent episode he had been desperately trying to identify things he could feasibly change about his life that could make being alive feel less bad. And he’d told Gottlieb all of that, except for the Kim part. Perhaps the type of animal he didn’t want to be any more was at least partly a pig.
But still - questions, he had questions:
“But don’t you already have Trant?”
The captain’s eyes laid on the lazareth’s for an uneasy moment before he responded.
“Heidelstam’s contract with us is coming to an end. He’s been a great help to us, of course, but where the precinct is heading - well, we need a new kind of expertise.”
“But I’m not an expert in anything! I don’t even remember my own life properly anymore. Sir.”
“Du Bois, believe me when I tell you that you are an expert in police work. And in this city. The way you handled Martinaise with your memory loss speaks to it. You’ve got knowledge that goes deeper than memory. The kind of thing we really need.”
He felt flattered and threatened all at once. He couldn’t remember ever having argued with Pryce, not even the feeling of having argued with Pryce. He spoke with an authority but also a gravity, an unspoken warning of what would happen if his words were disregarded. There had to be something in that; if Gottlieb had made the suggestion Harry felt fairly sure he would’ve argued about it. Still, he had to know:
“What if I’m not sure I want to?”
He sounded timid but felt brave. Pryce let out a small sigh, leaving Gottlieb to take his turn to speak.
“Harry, the captain and I have assessed that you are not in a fit state to return to police work in the long term. Your medical history, the disclosures you’ve made to me in convalescence, your colleagues’ feedback -“
Of course, your ‘colleagues’. It must be bad, they must have wanted him gone. But whose feedback? Did Jean still hate him that much? Had Kim’s regrets started to outweigh his loyalty?
“In any case,” Pryce chimed in, “We understand the decision is a big one. We’re happy to extend your medical leave with the RCM for as long as you need to make your mind up. But we will need you to make a decision eventually, and unfortunately I believe that your options are to take a consultant’s contract with us or to terminate your current one. The RCM doesn’t have a lot to give, Lieutenant, but we want to keep giving what we can in return for all you’ve given us. And this is the only way that we can.”
Ah. You’re being pitied. He furrowed his brow, wondering if he deserved to be pitied, squeezing harder into the bench. He looked slowly to the two bald men in turn: Pryce as impassive and unreadable as a bronze statue, Gottlieb still shrunken and still hiding something, from him or Pryce or both of them.
“I think I need some time to think about it, if that’s okay, sir?”
“Of course, son. It’s a big question. Worth thinking over properly. But do let me know as soon as you’ve made your mind up - and if you have any questions, you know where to find Gottlieb and I. We just want to make sure you’re fully prepared for every step of your, ah, retour au travail.” Each of the last three words pronounced with a specific, leading weight.
Pryce smiled back at both of them, giving a half-wave, half-salute and excusing himself with a: “Be on my way!”
The door slammed unexpectedly loudly as he left the room no bigger or more comfortable in his absence.
“I think we can call off today’s convalescence, all things considered,” Gottlieb murmured.
“Sure. Why not.”
“Call me if you feel unwell, or if you need anything.”
“Sure.”
He took a convoluted route around the lesser-used passages of the mill as he stalked off, so as to avoid running into any ‘friendly’ faces, any further conversation. Part of him was calling out to consult Kim, citing his proven trustworthiness in Martinaise, his unparalleled patience, his superior, cross-precinct knowledge of the RCM’s internal workings, but a stronger voice, the one that fiercely guarded the closed-off section of his psyche, said: No, what if he’s compromised, what if he’s the one who told Gottlieb you were no longer fit to work the streets? What if they all did? Call Pryce tomorrow and tell him you’ll take it just to see their faces when you come back after they thought they had rid of you. It seemed as reasonable a plan as anything at the moment. Maybe it’d gain him some respect from Lizzie, although what would she make of him trying to explain he was no longer a cop but still worked with them? He supposed that had to be part of the point of it - for the Captain to offer him an out, without letting him out of his sight. Still, he had no better ideas for how to fill the unbearable desert of time that he wandered between appointments. Better to know he was being manipulated than to believe he was being looked after.
A DREAM OF REVACHOL
Jean Vicquemare rides with a saddle but no bridle. The rope that links the steed’s neck to his hands is like a main artery; they move as one. The horse is chestnut-coloured, a blaze of colour so bright it brings red into his eyes and pale skin. They ride south, south, deep into Old South where the city starts to fray away, the houses becoming smaller and sparser and the fields becoming all-encompassing, scrubland and playing fields giving way to agricultural land. It takes a long time to get out here; someone who didn’t know what they were doing would get lost. Jean knows and so does the horse. This is the land that grew him and he grew it. As they ride out cornfields spring up, six, seven, eight feet high as if the hoofbeats on the ground are calling them up, to welcome him home. Hooves on the ground and the rustling and whistling of the leaves as they passes through form the rhythm and melody to their ride, a song you can only hear out here.
The corn stalks aren’t native to le Caillou; they’re used to gentler, drier soils. A cold snap in late spring or heavy floods in the summer can lay a whole field to waste, the kind of sudden, cruel loss that he knows well. To grow tall and strong they need the hand of someone willing to fight, and the stalks rising up thick and green around him are the dues he’s earnt from thirty-four years and counting spent fighting. Spitting and yelling and refusing to stand down and trying desperately to spark life out of broken pieces all around him, pouring into the earth what the crop needs to survive. Still, though, sweet corn can’t grow from so much bitterness. It’s the same every year; there’s no wealth in this land. The city would’ve fully encroached if there was anything to take from it, but this salted earth is Jean’s Revachol. He knows what the land has to offer him - now.
A small jerk of the rope, simultaneous squeeze of his legs into the horse’s sides takes them on a sharp right turn and accelerating, crashing into thick, heavy stalks, whispering reassurances to the animal to keep him steady as the broken stems tangle around them, hooves kicking up the smell of earth and sap. They twist and thrash through the fields, greens and soil filling his field of vision, dizzying him. This is his land and his to destroy. Each snap and each jerk from the horse is a moment of catharsis; he feels the tension releasing from his body. He relaxes, eases, completely at one even as the horse kicks back. This is not a horse rejecting its rider: it is setting him free. His body has become lighter than air, drawing upward and away from the ground as the scent and greenery of the fields become distant and indistinct below him, rising higher and further until he and the city are as gone as one another.