Kaleidoscope 1

In the I Ching, hexagram 23 is called Po. It represents entropy, decay, the idea that things fall apart. The darkness eventually claims the light.

The Havoc Brigade come to kill William Poe on a wet Wednesday morning. He’s sitting on the top deck of the number 43 bus, heading down the Archway Road in North London.

What is William Poe wearing? He’ll be in his standard uniform; a dark grey wool suit, a blue sea island cotton shirt from Turnbull and Asser, and a dark knitted-silk tie. 

Why is he on a bus? Centre Agents don’t usually use public transport. Never mind, we’ll fix that later.

The student behind Poe is conducting a loud conversation in Serbian, holding her phone like it’s a walkie-talkie. William Poe disapproves, tries to tune out the sound.

The bus lurches as the driver applies the brakes. Poe looks out through the front window, sees that a car has halted in front of them, hazard lights blinking. The car is straddling the road, slowing down two lanes of traffic that were about to pass beneath the bridge overhead, known locally, and for obvious reasons given its height, as “Suicide Bridge”.

Something in Poe’s peripheral vision puts his mind on alert; a subconscious trigger of danger that he now tries to catch up with, to contextualise. He turns his head, sees two workmen on the roof of a house over to his right. One of the men is looking right at him, but looks away as their eyes met; looks away too fast, caught in the act.

Poe flicks his eyes up to the parabolic mirror fixed to the corner of the bus’s interior; two men, dressed in black jeans and bomber jackets, are making their way down the aisle towards the front. The first man’s black jacket is unzipped and his right hand is reaching inside… 

Poe looks back to the two workmen, sees the flash of glass reflecting early morning sunlight and knows instinctively that he is looking at a sniper scope. Not roofers then; a shooter and a spotter, dressed in dark blue coveralls.

Up ahead: the car blocking the traffic is disgorging passengers; two men and a woman, dressed in black, reaching into their jackets…

Poe freezes the snapshot in his mind: the car stopping traffic, halting the bus in the kill-zone beneath the bridge. A team attacking from the front. There would be another team on the near side, out of view from here. The men inside the bus, the sniper and spotter on overwatch from the roof across the road… And there would be people behind too; you don’t leave an exit open. 

And the bridge. The bridge is not irrelevant. Something is coming from above… Poe is in the box, a trap closing all around him. 

Poe looks back to the mirror, to the approaching men on the bus. They are first contact. The Havoc Brigade’s planners were not expecting these guys to be able to just walk up and shoot Poe from behind. If they thought that was likely, this trap wouldn’t need to be so thorough. These two are not their best guys; they are supposed to draw Poe’s attention, get his focus onto the immediate threat so that the ambush can move in from all sides. 

Poe takes a breath. Deep and slow in, deep and slow out. The action slow the heart rate, steadies his hands. 

And then he slides to his left off the seat, pivoting on his heels but staying low to the ground, out of sight of the teams outside. The window beside him shatters with a dull crack. A fraction of a second later, the sound of the sniper’s shot reaches his ears. 

To the other passengers, this is not yet computing. Untrained minds have not connected the crack of the window with the dull report of the shot. They don’t know what is happening yet. There are still several seconds before panic will grip them.

The first man-in-black down the aisle draws his gun free as William Poe springs forward and up, slamming the palm of his hand into the gunman’s nose, driving bone fragments into the brain. Poe kicks the dying man’s body backwards into his comrade and, in one fluid movement, draws his Beretta Px4 Storm from the calfskin holster under his arm. As the second man regains his balance and disentangles himself from his friend’s body, Poe fires; two to the chest, one to the head. The second man is dead before he hits the floor.

And now here comes the panic. The natural human reaction is to get as far away from a man firing a gun as possible. But the dimensions of the top deck of a bus, the arrangement of the seats, limit movement, so people are shrinking back, trying to lower themselves and make themselves as small as possible. The screaming hasn’t started yet, but it’s coming.

One man has stood up. Maybe he has training, maybe he just has the one-percent hero instinct to put himself in harm’s way. Before Poe can engage with him, all the windows along the front and left-hand side of the bus shatter in quick succession, disintegrated by sustained volleys of automatic gunfire from outside. The big man falls, dead. The Serbian student’s phone clatters to the floor. She will never need it again. Glass rains down; smoke, dust and debris fill the air. And now the screaming starts. People are scrambling over the dead to get out, everyone on the same page now; get the hell off this bus as fast as possible. 

Another bullet from the sniper’s rifle shatters a side window. Poe looks around. Through the back window of the bus, he can see several more gunmen approaching. He crouches, sighting his pistol on the sniper on the roof across the street. He fires. An impossible shot, even if the Beretta was accurate at distance. The bullet crunches into a chimney stack beside the sniper. Poe holds his breath, adjusts his aim to the right and fires again; three shots in quick succession. One of the rounds takes the sniper in the shoulder, spinning him around and dropping him off the roof.

Poe is the target here. The other passengers on the bus are collateral damage. The first order of business is to get away from them, draw fire from the innocents. He turns towards the front of the bus and runs forward, firing through the smashed windows, driving the hit-team approaching from the front into cover.

Poe launches off his right foot and throws himself forward out of the window. The roof of the stationary car in front crumples under his weight, absorbing some of the impact. Off-balance, Poe rolls sideways, slipping off the roof of the car and hitting the road in a crouch.

A gunman clears a car up ahead and Poe pivots at the waist and fires two rounds into him. Immediately, several bullets crunch into the car beside him. Poe rolls clear, letting off two more rounds from a prone position, into an assailant approaching from behind. 

Poe takes a breath, comes up onto one knee, gun raised in front of him, arms locked, sweeping for another target. There is a loud crunch and the roof of the bus shakes as if something heavy has just landed on it. Here is whatever was always coming off of that bridge; death from above. Poe looks up, his eyes squinting to make out the figure who now stands on top of the bus, silhouetted against the bright morning sky.

He can’t see the man’s features, but he would recognise that outline anywhere. Hans Schmidt, captain of the Havoc Brigade and Dieter Morenz’s most trusted lieutenant, is nearly seven feet tall and built like Mister Universe, dressed head-to-toe in black tactical gear. Schmidt looks down at Poe. He turns his head slightly, and now Poe can see the vicious scar running down the left side of his weathered face, bisecting the ragged leather patch that covers the hole where, rumour has it, he lost his left eye fighting his way out of an ambush by the Nine Unknown Men in Mongolia. 

In his hand Schmidt twirls his trademark weapon; the Aztec macuahuitl - a wooden club lined with razor sharp obsidian blades. Poe is dimly aware of the other gunmen stepping back, forming a perimeter, outlining the shape of the arena in which he is to face Schmidt, in what is clearly intended to be a gladiatorial fight to the death. 

Schmidt steps off the edge of the bus and drops, easily, languidly, onto the tarmac. He looks at Poe through his one good eye, his crooked mouth twisting into a grin…

“Can I see your ticket please, Sir?”.

A plain-clothes ticket inspector dangles a plastic ID badge off of a lanyard in front of my face. I fumble in my pocket for my phone, touch it on the machine he offers me. He nods and heads back up the bus.

Behind me, the student winds up her too-loud phone conversation. The bus slows down for my stop.

Up ahead, Centre Point looms. Commuters surge out of Tottenham Court Road tube station; a black-grey mass oozing along the pavement. I stand, unsteady on the top deck, as the bus slows for the stop.

Wednesday morning. 8.37am. Grey. Light rain. Welcome to the Drudge.

The office. A grey block of concrete, built in the Seventies as a container of human despair. A nothing space. Airless. Dead sound. A fat security guard in the drab lobby, presiding over the incoming flow of hunched workers, like a primary school teacher ushering the kids in from the playground for a maths test.

Crammed into the lift. Cheap after-shave, perfume, coffee-breath. No one speaks. No eye contact. A hint of alcohol; someone out late, or starting early?

And then vomited out onto the fifth floor. Open-plan, because management consultants think this promotes the free exchange of ideas, and no one told them that our job is not to have ideas. Ideas are extraneous, distracting, dangerous.

We trudge along rows and rows of identi-desks; computer terminal, phone, notepad. No knick-knacks; this is a work environment, leave personal items at home. Grimy windows filter brown light, permanently shaded by the taller, nicer building across the street, through the windows of which we sometimes see brightly-clothed, energetic people doing jobs they seem to care about. Sometimes we see them laugh.

There is no laughter here on the fifth floor. Sound is a drone of low telephone conversation, computer fans, photocopiers, pitched at a frequency that induces a feeling of vague discomfort and inadequacy.

How did I end up here? The past is a blur, a fuzz of mistakes and missed opportunities, roads not taken. I can’t untangle it, I can’t see it clearly. I am aware of arriving from somewhere, but I cannot clearly picture the departure point. It’s as if I slept through the journey. Back there, I sense there may have been promise. Whatever it was, it bled out along the way and now here I am, trudging with the gait of a man wearily retreating from the field of conflict, towards another day of soul-flailing abuse.

My name is James McGill. I am thirty-seven years old. I was going to be a celebrated novelist, a comic book artist, a film-maker, a marine biologist, a secret agent. I am none of those things. I am a grey nobody. I am struggling. I am anxious. I lie awake at night doing rudimentary maths in my head; how many meals do I need to skip to make sure that my wife and son have enough to eat? How long can I dodge the calls from the power company before I really have to pay them something? If I apply for a new credit card tomorrow, will it arrive in time to cover the rent at the end of the month?

And when it’s over, when I have done my time, what floats in my eventual wake? “Here lies James McGill…” And then what? “Husband and father”? Evoking images of a pipe and slippers, of putting my feet up with the newspaper at the end of a hard day’s work. “Who could not provide.” There’s the kicker. A man who loves his wife and son with all his heart but cannot reliably keep a roof over their heads or food on the table, who cannot afford holidays or decent Christmas presents or to run a car. A man who cannot enjoy the unconditional love of a nine-year-old boy because he worries that the kid has been gipped by life, that he has inherited bad luck as part of a poundshop genetic package. A man who knows that it is only a matter of time before his many failings coalesce and snap into focus in his son’s mind, and that unconditional love turns to resentment or pity or hate.

I am trying. I am failing you. My best is not good enough.

“This is fucking shit.” Spence, the guy who sits next to me. He’s about my age but he still has some fight in him. He’s single, so this paltry wage goes a little further for him. He has enough left over at the end of the month to allow him to believe he is building something, that he’s going somewhere. This place might just be a brief stop on the way to something better. The trap is closing, but Spence doesn’t quite see it yet. He is aware of the hollow souls all around him but he imagines that they didn’t fight as hard as he is fighting, that they didn’t see the way out that he is sure to find.

“This is fucking shit,” says Spence. He’s looking at an internal e-mail that is probably about time-keeping, because they’re almost always about time-keeping. Spence looks up as I take off my anorak and hang it over the back of the chair. “Did you see this?”

I look over at his screen; a wall of text beneath the corporate logo.

“They’re saying our call rates are down. They’re introducing penalties.”

I shrug. I don’t kick against this bullshit any more. It’s too relentless, a constant tsunami of criticism designed to make us work harder and harder. It’s all stick because the only carrot the people upstairs could possibly offer would be more money, and they aren’t about to do that. We are not saving whales, or helping hungry kids or curing disease. There is nothing about the job itself that can be spun in a motivational way. And so they go with “Work harder or we’ll give some other poor sod your shitty job”.

As I scan this latest invective, Spence’s screen fritzes. Just for a moment; the crisp text going fuzzy, the whole image warping. In my peripheral vision, I notice it happening simultaneously on all the screens around me.

The world swims, the horizon shifts, a wave of nausea crashes on the beach of my consciousness and I grab the back of my chair to stay upright.

“Jesus, and now the whole system is on the blink.” says Spence. “It’s been doing this for the past few minutes.”

I look around. No one else seems to have been affected. I drop into my chair, suddenly hot; a sheen of sweat, skin tingling, light-headed.

“I could murder a cheeseburger, suddenly," says Spence. "Still on for tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow?” I try to shake it off, start to log in to the system.

“We’re going to start into the Temple of Elemental Evil,” Spence says. He’s talking about our Dungeons and Dragons game, which used to be a physical gathering; me and a bunch of people Spence met when he worked in a games shop that has since shut down. Pre-pandemic, the game constituted pretty much the entirety of my social life. Then Covid hit and we moved to Zoom. The group got used to that, and the high-instance of co-morbitities amongst people who like to pretend to be elves and druids for a few hours a week meant that once play had gone online, it stayed online. But now the meet-ups had gone from regular to sporadic; it’s much easier to bail on a virtual appointment than a real one.

“Tomorrow… I need to check,” I say. As if I have competing social events. I don’t think I have the energy for people right now.

“I’m going to level it up, obviously.” says Spence. “You can bring Jupitus Morningstar to the party, cause some serious carnage with the fearsome Doomhammer.”

“Is everyone going?” If the answer is no, I might have an exit.

“Rob might be late, but he wants to roll up a new character, so the party can hook up with him along the way. Fucking Monica wants to play a Drow.”

That gets my attention. “A drow? No. She can’t.”

“I know, Fucking Monica again. She’s arguing that the Drow are a playable race in Fifth Edition.”

“They are, but this is a Greyhawk module. If any of our party saw a Drow in the context of Greyhawk, we’d chop them into little pieces.”

Spence shrugs. “She says she’ll take her chances with a charisma roll to persuade you all to let her join.”

“Good luck with that. Jupitus Morningstar hates the Drow.”

“So she can roll with penalties. But that actually might be a fun dynamic. Like a buddy cop movie.”

I have reservations. Fucking Monica is always throwing these curveballs because she likes to be the centre of attention, she’s the one who holds up entire sessions debating some obscure piece of game mechanics. Even within a group of middle-aged D&D players, Fucking Monica is considered a nerd.

A buzzer sounds. Nine ayem. The phone lines light up. Along the rows, people reach for their headsets, like a choreographed dance of the doomed. I hit the button to open my line.

“Tech support, this is James, how can I help you?”

And so it begins. Another day, like all the other days in this grey sludge of a life.

“Jim, you in here?” Spence’s voice, from outside the toilet cubicle.

I must have blanked out again. How long have I been here? When did I come in? My phone is in my hand, the screen blank. What was I doing? What is happening to me?

“Jim?”

“Here.”

I look down. The toilet lid is closed, I must have been hiding out. I stand, flush, exit. Spence is checking his hair in the mirror.

“Are they looking for me?” I ask.

Spence’s reflection stares back at me. “What? No. Why would they? I don’t think “they” even know who we are. You coming for lunch? I’m thinking cheeseburger.”

“I can’t, I’m meeting my mum.”

“Man, seriously? How come?”

How come? I don’t know. She does this, my mother; randomly announces her presence nearby and demands to take me to lunch. It happens two or three times a month. I’m never entirely sure what she’s doing in town. She refers to it as “meandering”. Non-specific. A swirl in the fog of small-talk and low-level criticism that has defined our relationship for my entire adult life. We meet up, we talk about nothing, we go our separate ways, neither of us any the wiser as to the other’s thoughts, opinions, or concerns.

I imagine Jonah, all grown up, sitting here in this cubicle. “I have to meet my Dad for lunch.” His tone weary, resigned. My loser Dad. My boring Dad. My nothing Dad.

Spence looks at me in the mirror as I wash my hands. “Your Mum? Seriously?”

He mimes a dice roll. “Twenty! You have scored a critical hit against fun.”

“I’ll see you after.” I head for the door.

Spence calls after me, “You decapitate joy with your +4 Broadsword of Lameness.”

“Is that raw?” asks my mother, as she watches me lift a small plate of sashimi from the conveyor belt.

“It’s sashimi.”

“It can’t be safe.”

“It’s just like smoked salmon.”

My mother’s mouth purses like a cat’s bum. “That turns my stomach.”

“You wanted to come here.”

“I’m just trying to fit in with the whole…” she waves her hands in the general direction of everything. “Metropolitan lifestyle you have here.”

Her eyes view the passing plates with a mixture of fear and distaste.

“Do they do anything normal here?” The word “normal” doing a lot of heavy-lifting, shaded with provincial English undertones that signal a suspicion of the foreign, the alien, the once-colonised.

She has been talking about the character flaws of people in her village whom I’ve either not met or don’t remember, I have responded to every question about my life with “fine”. She has asked after Jonah, playing the doting grandmother, even though she rarely sees him. And she has peppered in questions about Samantha; each an apparently innocent enquiry that is actually a Trojan horse concealing a phalanx of disapproval.

“Try the chicken,” I suggest.

“Is it raw?”

“It’s chicken, of course it’s not raw.”

“If it’s spicy I shouldn’t have it. I left my Gaviscon at home.”

I take a plate of teriyaki chicken from the belt and slide it in front of her. She pokes at it with a single chopstick, then, catching my eye, “I’m making sure it’s dead.”

I check my watch. I still have twenty-five minutes of this before I can escape back to work. It’s a peculiar achievement that she can make the office seem attractive.

“Does Samantha eat this stuff?” She’s still performing a wooden autopsy on the chicken.

“She does. So does Jonah.”

She affects alarm, “Oh you can’t be giving an eight-year-old raw food.”

“The Japanese do.”

“We’re not Japanese.” She lands “Japanese” like that would just be the worst.

One of the TV screens above the bar fritzes to static for a few seconds. My mother spots it, eyes the screen with suspicion. My balance sways. I cling to the stool. My vision swims. I fight hard not to be sick.

“They’ve got something wrong with their electrics,” says mother.

I blink, breathe, recover. “That’s happening at work too. Probably workmen somewhere drilling near a power cable.”

“How is work?”

How did I walk so easily into that one? I shrug, grunt something neutral.

“You should count yourself lucky.”

Oh, here we go…

“You’re lucky you’ve got a job in this day and age, state of this country. You can support your wife and child, there’s plenty that can’t. Take poor Douglas whatsisname who you used to catch tadpoles with down at the brook, you remember? He had a good job, in a bank, prospects and everything, a whole career and then one day…”

The door to the restaurant opens and Galina Blink glides in. She is wearing a long black felt coat over a perfectly tailored pin-striped trouser suit, her close-cropped flame-red hair standing out against the muted colours like a beacon.

Everything goes into slow-motion as Blink turns to survey the room, the door swinging lazily shut behind her. Her eyes alight on William Poe, sitting at the counter next to a frumpy older woman who seemed to be babbling away to herself.

Blink’s left hand sweeps one side of the long coat open, revealing a set of gleaming throwing knives incorporated into the lining. Her right hand moves to the shiny black hilt of one of the knives. Poe looks down at the conveyor belt of food moving slowly in front of him.

A few metres away, on the approach, his trusty Beretta lies on a small colour-coded plate. Can he get to the gun before Blink’s knife leaves her hand?

William Poe inhales, using a Tibetan breathing technique to lower his heart rate and harness the effects of the adrenaline that is starting to course through his sys–

“Are you daydreaming again?”

I’m back in the room, realising I have mercifully missed most of what she was saying.

“I was saying that you should count yourself lucky that–”

“Just because I have a job doesn’t mean I have to enjoy it. Shouldn’t there be more than this? Are we just drones who go to school and get a job and have a family and follow the rules and get cancer and die? What’s the point of that?”

“Well, I wouldn’t have come if I’d known this was going to turn into a philosophy lecture.”

“No, of course you wouldn’t. Because who wants to actually think about anything any more? Thinking breaks the spell, doesn’t it?”

“There are plenty of people in the world who would jump at the chance to have the kind of life—“

“Fuck those people.”

I feel every muscle in the woman who gave birth to me tense up and then slowly release.

“Your father always got like this around his birthday.”

I look at her, nod slowly. “And then he got cancer and died.”