Misanthropological psychology

Felicia liked the Mozart Café on Reichsgasse.  It had high windows that poured the afternoon sunlight across the black-and-white chessboard tiled floor, marble topped tables with a single, pedestal-style brass leg ornately curved and twisted to look like a gnarled tree-trunk, and a long, brass-railed counter where the employees served excellent coffee and not-quite-so-excellent cakes.  The employees wore anachronistic starched white aprons over pristine white shirts and black trousers and all seemed to have been taught to smile in the exact same way.  They stayed behind the counter, with the collection of empty cups and crumb-strewn plates handed to a middle-aged woman with a tied-back bun of greying hair and bright, darting eyes who rattled a tiny steel cart back and forth as she cleaned tables and reset expectations.  A separate cadre of waitstaff took orders and delivered them.

Cordelia, who arrived a mere thirty seconds later than Felicia, made a tiny moue when she saw that Felicia had taken the bench-seat leaving her with the high-backed wooden chair and her back to the counter.

“First come, first served,” said Felicia calmly.  She checked her watch.  “I was actually forty seconds late, myself.”

Cordelia waved a white-gloved hand as though fending off a wasp at a picnic.  “I said nothing,” she said.  “Though it wasn’t my fault.  At the metro there was an—“ she paused, clearly choosing her words, “—inconvenient woman holding up passage through the gates with her two children and her pushchair.  Instead of herding them through a gate ahead of her she’d given them their tickets to make their own way through while she wrestled with the pushchair.  So when the chair got stuck and the children mangled their tickets she held up the entire queue for whole minutes!”

Felicia nodded, waiting.  After a pause just barely long enough to allow Felicia to attempt to interrupt, Cordelia continued, “Obviously, since I was forced to be there and observe, I considered the likely psychological drive.”

“Of course,” said Felicia, who would have done exactly the same thing.

“I think it’s safe to infer that the woman intended this outcome,” said Cordelia.  “I mean, a normal person wouldn’t entrust getting through a metro gate to a four-year-old, let alone make them responsible for their younger sister as well.”

“I concur,” said Felicia, thinking this through and deciding that it sounded reasonable.  In her experience, which was limited as she felt that children were entirely other peoples’ problem, she had found children to be obstruent and obstreperous and largely incapable of holding a sensible conversation.

“So she deliberately acted to block the gates, and then used the pushchair to obstruct another.  This is an act of base misanthropy, which by itself would be unremarkable,” said Cordelia, warming to her thesis.  A waiter hovered at her elbow, order-pad at the ready and a pencil held delicately aloft.

“Coffee, thank-you,” said Felicia. “And… do you have any Dobostorte?  Then perhaps a half-slice, please.”

“Coffee also, no milk,” said Cordelia sparing the waiter a single glance.  “And something autumnal I think… perhaps a Bavarian cream?”

The waiter departed in a white-noise crackle of starched cloth and the sudden movement of air brought a breath of brewing coffee across their table.  Both women sniffed and smiled briefly.

“As I was saying,” said Cordelia.  “That by itself would be unremarkable but when the gate-guard attempted to help her things changed.  When the guard ushered the small child and its sister through she called them back, creating a problem as their tickets were now not only mangled but also expired.  When the gate-guard attempted to take the pushchair so as to extricate the woman from the worst of her predicament she shouted at him so volubly that we all took a step back.  Which, and I’m not sure this is a coincidence, caused an elderly man to stumble and fall down the escalator to the metro lines.  When the gate-guard turned to assist the fallen man the woman fell dramatically herself, barely keeping the pushchair above her head and from hitting the smallest of her children.”

“This is quite extraordinary,” said Felicia, intrigued despite herself.  “This woman seems like she demands attention.  A narcissist, perhaps?”

Cordelia nodded.  “That was my initial assessment too,” she said.  “I mean, it’s obviously only a first-glance and would need proper case-work to substantiate, but you can’t help but feel that the whole situation was largely her own fault and that when someone else was involved, however inadvertently, she immediately tried to bring the attention back to herself.  But….”

The waiter set the two cups of coffee down with the faintest chink of china against marble and disappeared again to bring the pastries separately.  Felicia tasted her coffee and permitted herself another smile.  “But?”

“The gate-guard returned their attention to the woman and her children,” said Cordelia.  She twisted her cup on its saucer, making a tiny creaking noise, but didn’t drink from it.  “And two other people started down the escalator to help the elderly man.  I stayed where I was, in part out of fascination with this scene, and in part because there were at least three rows of people between me and the escalators.”

“And in part because if you arrived here later than me you would have to take the chair rather than the bench,” said Felicia.  The waiter set her Dobostorte in front of her, accompanied with a starched napkin monogrammed with an M for Mozart, and set the Bavarian Cream in front of Cordelia.  “Don’t glare at me, you know it’s true.”

“You make me sound like a monster,” said Cordelia.  She unwrapped her spoon from her napkin and sampled the cream.  “This is still the best in the city,” she said.  “Anyway, when the woman realised that people were attempting to help the elderly man she started screaming that her leg was trapped and she needed medical aid.  That puzzled the guard, and to be honest myself, as we could both clearly see that it wasn’t, and she didn’t.”

Felicia’s mouth was full of Dobostorte so she widened her eyes a little and nodded at Cordelia.

“That’s when I started thinking,” said Cordelia.  “As the crowd regathered around the woman, probably hoping for some ghoulish spectacle, I realised that this couldn’t be simple narcissism.  This was planned and deliberate, and she had contingency plans if she wasn’t getting the attention she desired.  This was misanthropological psychology.”

“In the wild?”  Felicia was so startled that she forgot she was eating, and tiny crumbs of cake scattered over the table.  “I’m so sorry!”  She dabbed at the crumbs with her napkin, sweeping them up.

“Indeed!”

“But… you can’t confirm it, though,” said Felicia.  “Can you?”

“I lifted my phone,” said Cordelia, “and acted as though I was streaming the scene onto Tiktok, or Tactics, or whatever that app is that’s so popular with my teenage clients.”

“Facebook?” said Felicia who didn’t take clients under the age of thirty.

“I think it’s Chinese,” said Cordelia.  “But anyway, I did that, and all of a sudden the woman was shrieking and screaming and I think she even managed to cut herself on the pushchair a little.  But it confirmed to me that this was misanthropological psychology in the wild.”

“I see.”  Felicia set her fork down and reached for her coffee.  “This means that Dr Fraud’s theories are taking on a life of their own, doesn’t it?”

“It definitely means a lot more work for us,” said Cordelia.

 

The state of the alligator

“We propose starting in Florida,” said Jeronica, gently tapping her pen against her notepad.  Looking only out of the corners of her eyes at her audience she noted that Madame Celeste was observing this action with interest and Dr Enogi was pretending not to watch but any slight change in where she tapped caused him to adjust his head slightly to allow him to see it.  Terrence Pennifrock appeared to be ignoring it, though he was systematically trying his fingers, starting with his thumb, in his ear to see if he could dislodge whatever was irritating him.  “We took the liberty of running a couple of focus groups at the advice of our futures division — no cost accrues to you for this, of course.  This was advance research so that we could position ourselves aspirationally in this market stratum.”

“Excellent,” said Madame Celeste.  “Florida is a… an interesting choice of state, might I opine?”

“One would have thought of perhaps Kentucky, first,” said Dr Enogi.  He watched as Jeronica wrote that down too, and his eyes narrowed.  Jeronica wondered if he was starting to be curious that she was writing things down where they could see her.  “Or even Iowa.”

“They’re all Republican,” muttered Terrence.  “I don’t see what matters much outside of that.”  Jeronica wrote down ‘Republican’ as well to see who responded to that and was intrigued that none of the three seemed interested.

“We considered Louisiana,” said Jeronica, which was an outright lie.  All three of her clients had some background connection to that state though, so it gave her another opportunity to assess reactions.  “However we felt that there were strategic disadvantages inheriting directly from historic continental influences.”

“You mean the bloody alligators?” asked Terrence. He had cleaned his ear to his satisfaction and was now inspecting his finger to see what he’d removed.

“I suspect she’s thinking of the capital,” said Dr Enogi.  “We have, naturally, done our own research, Miss Jeronica, and in the area of that particular state we felt that the capital would be slow to accept our ideas and that developing a grass-roots movement in the more rural areas would be too slow.”

“The alligators were a concern,” said Jeronica, deliberately speaking slowly to allow her to hide her surprise that they had come up.  “And my name is simply Jeronica, thank-you, Dr. Enogi.”

“Are they?”  Madame Celeste sounded uninterested.  “Well.  Florida is… well, as I said, an interesting choice, but certainly not one we would shy away from.  Providing sufficient evidence is provided that this is, indeed, the best place to start.”

“There are four states that I think we could recommend launching Guncare in,” said Jeronica.  “Florida is the top of that short-list, but we have a case for each state and we will present that to you.  When you leave there will be a briefing pack for each of you so that you can review our findings ahead of our next meeting.  If you decide that there should be a next meeting.”  Madame Celeste and Dr Enogi looked at each other, clearly considering who should answer that, but Jeronica continued without giving them the chance to speak.  “But in brief, there is an adequately trained workforce, there are significant opportunities to influence the state legislature, and… mishaps?  Let’s call them mishaps; if they were to occur in the early stages of the project it is likely that they would be considered more acceptable than in other parts of the country.”

“You mean like the hospital falling down?” said Terrence.  Jeronica, who was aware that he had been behind the construction of six hospitals that had either collapsed of their own accord or had to be demolished for public safety, carefully didn’t smile as she met his gaze.

“I was thinking more of patients being eaten by alligators,” she said. “After all, residential Guncare patients should have the opportunity to shoot at things, and if they miss there is a chance that some of those things will fight back.”

Dr. Enogi’s eyes gleamed suddenly.  “Ah, so we could have hunting grounds as part of the hospital?” he said.  “I like that, that will sell well. I can picture the brochures now; we can offer a range of elective surgeries with two-day safaris!  Recuperate with a rifle!  Or maybe, Improve your aim and your health with our two-day intensive care offering!”

“I like recuperate with a rifle,” said Madame Celeste.  She sounded thoughtful.  “I wonder… I wonder if we should extend this a little further to clinics, as well as hospitals?  Health-care is such a broad-ranging word; we could increase its gamut just a little further, no?”

“Just tell us how far you’d like to roam,” said Jeronica.

Guncare

 The offices of Data Analytic Marketetic Normalisations were always shadowy and quiet.  The founder and CEO, Jeremy Diseased-Rat, preferred it that way though the rumours about it being because of a near-permanent hangover were quashed whenever they started up.  Reception was currently manned by a short, dark-haired man who was so thin that his suit would have hung better on a coat-hanger.  He was sat behind a curved zebrawood desk with two monitors and six phones in front of him and two photocopiers, an actual fax machine and some sinister black boxes with tiny blinking white lights behind him, and as Jeronica walked into the reception area to greet her clients he was holding forth, to their appalled fascination, on the subject of his keto diet.

“The key is fasting and then purging,” he said, making a gesture with one hand that caused Madame Celeste to raise an eyebrow so severely her eye twitched below it.

“Thank you, Ronald,” said Jeronica, cutting him short.  “I believe that Margoyle and Stephanotte are waiting for correspondance on the futures of Soft Furnishings in Antique Japan.  Perhaps you could check your inbox and see if they’ve arrived yet?”

“Oh no, they defini—“ started Ronald, only to be cut off by the discrete ping of an email arriving.  “Ah, well—“

“Excellent,” said Jeronica.  She turned to her clients: Madame Celeste, Dr Enogi and Terrence Pennifrock.  “Have you been offered refreshment?”  There was no overt censure in her voice but Ronald’s shoulders stiffened instantly anyway.

“Yes, thank-you,” said Dr. Enogi, a tall, dark-skinned man who was standing up.  “Though I doubt I, personally, will feel like eating again any time soon.”

Madame Celeste rose next, holding a glass of iced water.  “Your water is excellent,” she said as though commenting on the weather.  “I assume you import?”

Jeronica inclined her head slightly.  “We have a concession,” she said.  “We did a little work with the Fiji water brand some years back and in turn they provide us with a few bottles when they can spare them.  Mr Pennifrock, would you like anything else?”

Terrence was still sitting down and pressing a stubby, reddened finger down onto crumbs on a small plate with an intricate design painted around the edge.  When he had gathered all of them, he put the finger in his mouth and sucked it clean.

“I’m good,” he said in a broad drawl.  “Your pastries are amazing, darlin’, but if I eat too many I’ll put on more weight and the wifey won’t be happy.”

“My name is Jeronica, Mr Pennifrock,” said Jeronica with more than a little ice in her tone.  “I would become unhappy were I to be referred to in any other way.”

Whatever Terrence might have replied, his words were silenced by Madame Celeste’s gaze.  He met her eyes with his own and there was a moment of tension and then they both backed down together.

“This way, please,” said Jeronica and escorted them at a stately pace down a dimly-lit corridor.  On either side were wood-panelled walls, broken at intervals by doors and smoked-glass windows.  The floor was heavily carpetted and even Terrence, stamping his feet down as he walked, failed to make much more noise than the wind makes when blowing through long grass.  At the third door Jeronica waved a hand and the doors slid back silently admitting them into Meeting Room Gauze.

When they were all seated around a small beechwood table set with notepads, Mont Blanc pens and a carafe of still water Jeronica leaned forward very slightly, rested her hands flat on the table, and said, “Guncare.”

There was hesitation as Terrence and Dr Enogi looked at each other, and then Madame Celeste nodded.

“Yes,” she said.  “I had heard you were good.  The best, even.  I hadn’t expected that you would know our intentions before we even spoke them.”

“We’ve been anticipating this development for a while,” said Jeronica.  “Our future division considers this to be a strong natural development of current trends and had identified certain groups as the most likely to take the initiative.  We are, of course, extremely pleased that you are choosing to.”

“What do you consider ‘Guncare’?” asked Dr Enogi.  He was sitting perfectly upright and watching Jeronica the way a mongoose watches a cobra.  His hands were also on the table, but his fingers were interlaced and his two signet rings, both tourmalines, were resting against the tabletop.

“Healthcare mediated by guns,” said Jeronica.  “Our estimation is that access to reliable healthcare in your country is currently only available for certain strata of your society.  While this has worked for quite some time, and may continue to work for a while longer, it is inefficient and does not provide enough control over who has access to the healthcare and when.  Naturally, universal health coverage is desirable—“

“Sweden,” said Terrence with a sneer.

“— perhaps.  But to reach that, compromises must be made.  And since gun-ownership is a key principle of your society—“

“The right to arm bears,” said Terrence.

“— indeed,” said Jeronica, who was aware that Terrence’s second company had done exactly that, “we perceive that a move to guncare, where gun ownership and licencing provides fast-track access to healthcare, is not only natural, but desirable amongst a good 38% of the population already.  With a number that large, elevating it to a majority is quite straightforward; we have done similar things in the past for, for example, the Sweden problem.  There is an easy lead in for most people simply by noting that people who own guns are more likely to need emergency access to healthcare, and that by being licenced to own a gun they are already registered with the state, thus ensuring that tax-payers are prioritised for medical provision.”

Madame Celeste had been nodding along in each of Jeronica’s pauses.  Now she smiled, though it was the cold smile of an aunt informing unloved nephews and nieces that her will disinherited them all.

“Licencing is not… precisely… the key point,” she said.

“Please go on,” said Jeronica.

“Well,” said Dr Enogi, glancing at Madame Celeste as though to ask permission to interrupt her.  “Licencing might be a way to sell it initially.  We can downgrade it to membership later.”

“I… see,” said Madame Celeste.  “That might work.  But yes, ultimately we would prefer people to purchase membership in, say, a national society that promoted safe gun ownership and responsible behaviour.”

Jeronica drew a marble-white notepad to her and picked up a pen.  In careful, highly legible script she made a note on the pad and then carefully ignored the other three people reading what she’d written.  “For the sake of argument,” she said, “say something like the National Rifle Association?  Privately owned, so that changes to the membership regulations are not subject to governmental scrutiny?”

“For the sake of argument,” repeated Madame Celeste, a faint smile passing across her face and then being replaced by her familiar stony demeanour.  “We understood that might be difficult.”

“Not at all,” said Jeronica.  “In fact, it might ease a couple of other sticking points.”

Sand schooner

 “Ahoy there, the land!” came a cry from somewhere beyond the columns and I started.  I had expected that I would be alone in this place, whether it was Iglé or somewhere pretending to be like it.  Behind me there was nothing, just the red sands of the Sonora desert and the stone columns rising up and marking the edge of the city.

“You!  Yes, you!  Ahoy there!”  The voice sounded slightly hectoring and reminded me of a shopkeeper I had known in Paris who bemoaned her lack of repeat custom while refusing to hear that her attitude was miasmic to an extreme.  I looked around to both sides now and still there was nothing in sight.  Then an odd-shaped sail appeared above a low wall and a sand-schooner hove into view.

The ship was medium length, at least compared with those ships I knew to ply the sands of the desert, and was ivory-coloured all over save for the name which was written in teal along one-side: the Ivy Mariner.  Portholes indicated a single below-deck and the bridge was two-storied in the tradition of the University schooners that gathered seismic data and geological artefacts.  The lower-bridge level would house the instrumentation for study and the upper-level was where the steering and speed of the ship was managed.  A tall woman was standing outside the upper-level of the bridge and leaning on a railing.  When she noticed that I’d seen her she stood upright and waved an arm dramatically as though concerned that I might look away again.

“Ahoy!”

“Hello,” I called back, wondering how well my voice might carry in the dry afternoon air.  “Can I help you?”

“Are you lost?” she shouted back, and uncertain if she could hear me or not, I shook my head carefully and meaningfully.  “I think you are,” she shouted.  “Wait there, I’ll send out a man.”

I shivered despite the heat of the day.  Sending out a man meant this was a private vessel and not a University ship.  The Academics were a well-meaning bunch in my experience, and friendly to a fault, but they would always put you aside in favour of their latest obsession or idea.  The private vessels however were owned by the wealthy of Sonora desert.  They had been granted a number of freedoms and permissions under successive governments, all discretely paid for naturally, until someone had realised that the desert was essentially a self-governing fiefdom that was only a short step away from not having to pay taxes.  The court cases arising from that are still making their way through the Sonora courts, hindered at every step by the fact that all Sonora law enforcement and judiciary are connected, one way or another, to the wealthy who view the desert as their playground.  At the very least, if I were to ‘accidentally’ die out here I could be certain that no-one would investigate my death.

Looking around though my options were limited: I could wait for this man and find out what the lady of the schooner wanted, or I could venture deeper into a city that was trying to fill me with memories that were not my own.  I balked at one, and then the other, feeling as though I had no options at all but to wait for fate to overtake me.

I decided, too late as it turned out, that the city was the lesser evil and turned and walked briskly down what might once have been a street intending to take the first turning that would hide me from the ship and then find a broken house or shop to hide in.  I doubted that anyone would search too assiduously for me: a stranger without water in the desert wouldn’t last long.  They might wait for me to leave and then try and accost me, but once night fell I was sure I could sneak past the ship and try and find my way back.  Though I was as ill-dressed for the cold of the desert at night as I was for the heat of the desert during the day.

I had misjudged the athleticism and interest of the man sent to find me though, and I had barely turned the corner and started looking at rotted brick and crumbling stone, considering which shadows might be deep enough to hide in, when the sounds of light, running footsteps made me tense and a hand landed firmly on my shoulder.

“Wrong way,” said a voice that wasn’t quite friendly.  It was deep, slightly growly, and I wondered for a moment if the man were artificially deepening his voice, perhaps to disguise it.  The fingers on my shoulders gripped tightly, but not enough to hurt.  I doubted I could pull free without prising his fingers loose though.

“I wasn’t intending to wait for you,” I said.  “I have business here in the city.”

“In Iglé?  You need permission to visit.”

“I have permission,” I said without thinking.

“Then you just need to show Madam Friest.  Come on.”

The voice still wasn’t quite friendly and I found myself trapped in my lie: clearly I couldn’t claim she’d already seen my permission, and now when we returned this fellow would tell her about it and I would have to admit that I didn’t have any.  I controlled my anger and regret and turned to face my captor.

In ve Iglé

 I walked towards the sound of the water noticing that the sand beneath my feet seemed firmer in this direction; after maybe only twenty seconds the sand became sparser and I could see red rock beneath.  The water turned out to be a small spring, leaping from a crack in the rock  and puddling in a shallow pool before running along a channel the width of two fingers and disappearing into the ground some distance away.  The water was cold and refreshing and once again I found myself regretting that I’d set out so ill-prepared; this would have been an excellent place to refill a water bottle from.

As I looked around, splashing a palmful of water onto my face I saw stones piled up here and there in what might have been roughly rectangular shapes, and wider paths past them that might have been streets.  I rubbed my eyes with more water, and then splashed some onto my shirt, figuring that it being damp might help with the heat, and looked around again.

The buildings seemed intact all of a sudden; I could see a squat red block with an empty doorway and a mustard-yellow awning shading it.  Two windows loomed blackly above, the shadows inside impossible to penetrate from where I was standing.  A wooden frame held trays of what looked like watermelons, though I had no idea where you’d grow watermelons in a desert.  Alongside the building ran a street, paved for the most part but with gaps in the surface where I could imagine someone slipping and twisting an ankle.  Some kind of wiry yellow-green grass grew up against the side of the building, little tufts of it sprouting here and there.  It looked like it was probably torn up when it was noticed.  Overhead the sun shone but it seemed weaker, or least less hot, and I noticed that I wasn’t sweating any more.

I rubbed my head and looked down at the spring, which wasn’t there.  Without thinking I knelt and patted the ground, unable to conceive that the water could just vanish, and instead, as I touched the cool liquid, the water reappeared and the building and the street faded away instead.

A mirage?  It seemed too unlike anything out here for that; too much detail, and the sun’s strength changing wasn’t something a mirage could do.  I pondered, letting the water run over my hand, and then, gradually, the memory of my one-time mentor and no-longer friend Isabella Bonfontaine, came to me.

Iglay is a strange place, she was saying.  I could remember her standing in the courtyard of a bar in Covent Garden, a drink in one hand and a pipe in the other.  It tries to fill you with its memories.  You can’t stand there for any length of time without being made to remember something that never happened to you.  Someone in the chairs, hunched over and trying not to listen turned to face her at that point, and shouted, ‘Will you shut up!’  That’s my point, Isabella had said, sloshing her drink out of its glass as she waved it around.  It just keeps on, pressuring you, trying to force you to leave by never shutting up about its past.

Why was I remembering her?  Was this place like Iglay, a city overfull with memories, looking to pass some off to vistors and passers-by, to take the pressure off itself.  I considered it odd that there should be two cities with the same problem though.

And then my mind started working; I’m going to blame the heat and the sun for me not seeing it sooner, and thank the water for its cooling.  What I had transliterated as Inveigle wasn’t… it was, in fact, in ve Iglé.  In, despite the impossibility of seeing it as anything other than the English word for me, wasn’t even a preposition; it was… a number, I thought after nearly thirty seconds struggling to recall it.  I couldn’t remember which one though.  Ve, however, was a preposition, but it also escaped me.  And Iglé was also spelled Iglay and Iggely if you believed some of the medieval manuscripts.  Number, preposition, Iglay.  I had no idea what that could mean.

Inveigle

 I left the Hotel Borealis around noon; the receptionist was the same on who’d checked me in the previous day and she looked tired, as though she’d been on shift continuously since I’d arrived.  She lifted her eyes from whatever she was looking at behind the long, steel counter just long enough to identify me and sneer, and then her attention returned to whatever it was that was more interesting.  I considered wishing her a pleasant day and decided against it.  I do not like raising my voice unless there is no other choice and she was far enough away from me that I would have needed to shout.

The heat from the desert hit me like a wall.  I hadn’t noticed the air-conditioning in the hotel once I’d adjusted to its internal temperature, but now outside again the difference was apparent.  The heat was dry but breathing felt difficult at first: I found myself gasping as though the air were somehow thinner instead of just drier, and it only gradually subsided.  I kept walking while I adjusted though and soon stepped out of the shade of the hotel’s colonnade and into the full midday blast of heat and light.  It was less of a shock than leaving the hotel had been, but it was still another shock; enough that I reconsidered leaving the hotel at all.  But the city in the pillars that I had seen last night under the borealis would be treacherous at any time, and at night I’d be hard pressed to see what was coming.

I should, I realised belatedly, have taken water with me.  Instead I strode manfully across red sand that crunched underfoot like cinders and headed north-west with the bravado of an idiot.  After half an hour the city was still nowhere in sight and I was sweating copiously; sweat ran down either side of my nose, behind my ears and down the back of my neck, wicked from my scalp by my hair.  My clothes were soaked through; small patches of sweat had grown and merged and now my shirt clung unpleasantly to my skin and my shorts felt heavy and clammy.  Thirst was increasing; my throat was dry despite my sweat and I found myself licking my upper lip frequently, trying to pick up the salty sweat before it evaporate.  The sun beat down overhead, a constant reminder that what I was doing was foolish, and each footstep trudged a little further away from coolness, water, and civilisation.

Two hours and some handful of minutes had passed by the time I struggled into the shadow of a tall stone column and while the temperature difference wasn’t that great it was enough to afford me temporary relief.  The stone was wind- and weather-worn but still towered above me.  Shading my eyes from the afternoon sun and staring up until my neck hurt I estimated that the column was eight, perhaps nine metres tall, and if the city was three thousand years old then it must have been over ten metres when it was constructed.  The stone was rough to the touch and warm and if anything had ever been carved into it it had eroded away long since.  Beyond it were hints of stone paving beneath shifting red sand and, a little further along still, were two stone lumps that might have been animals once.

There was no sign of any water, though I was probably still outside the old city limits.  Now, for the first time, it occurred to me that whatever water had once flowed here might have dried up as the millenia passed and I estimated that I might make it back to the hotel without collapsing but only if I stayed here less than an hour.  And probably less if I couldn’t find shade to stay in.

A sensible man would have turned back at that point and remade his plans to come back another day.  I, however, wiped my forehead and licked my fingers to try and conserve some water, however futile the gesture, and stepped back out into the furnace of the desert afternoon and continued into the city.

Even up close I couldn’t make out what animals or objects the next two stone lumps might once have been, but carved beneath the left-most one, in letters now only shallowly incised, were runes that I slowly translated to read Inveigle.  A name, or an instruction?  As I pondered my ears registered a regular tapping sound, something both familiar and confusing.  It took nearly thirty seconds before I finally identified as the sound of water dripping.

Breakfast before dawn

“We stop serving breakfast at dawn,” said the receptionist primly.  She looked like my sister, if my sister braided her hair and had glasses; the same shaped face, the same snub nose; even the same slightly-whiny voice.  Her outfit: an entirely respectable two-piece suit over a white blouse with a little brass (or bronze, I couldn’t quite make it out) brooch pinned to the lapel on the left was the kind of thing my sister would have put on.

“Dawn seems kind of early,” I said.  I was checking-in to the Hotel Borealis for seven nights and had been looking forward to a week of rest; lazy days sitting on the terraces that overlooked the red sands of the Sonora Desert, quiet evenings in the bars of the hotel, and maybe a night or two at the casino.  Having to wake up before dawn just for breakfast didn’t fit with my agenda.

“Ok boomer,” she said.  “This is your room key — it’s electronic.  Place it against the plate on the door and wait for the beep.  There’s a light that will flash green…” I stopped listening.  I knew how hotel keys worked and my booking was for a suite with the mini-bar prepaid so there really wasn’t much she could say that interested me.  I wondered if I’d be able to make a decent Old Fashioned from the mini-bar or if I’d have to call down to room service.  “…in the event of a fire.” She finished and half-smiled at me.

“Thanks,” I said.  She looked slightly surprised and I wondered if she’d slipped some more ‘ok boomer’ like comments into her little spiel.  “What was the room number again?”

“413,” she said, pointing at the little white card containing my room keycard and a slip of paper bearing the wifi password.  Where the number should have been written was empty space, which she realised at the same time as I did.  “Let me write that down for you, in case of memory loss,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said again, with less sincerity.

The suite was three rooms: a bathroom with an actual bidet — something I assumed had gone the way of the dinosaurs by now — and a Japanese toilet with more functions than my smartphone; a bedroom with the expected kingsize bed that could sleep at least three people plus their dogs; and a sitting room that was slightly overcrowded with overstuffed furniture.  The armchairs bulged and the couch positively lounged and sitting on any of them was like sitting down on a cloud; after a moment you’d forgotten you were sitting at all and felt like you were just being somehow supported in the air by fluffiness.  Getting up proved trickier and I resorted to just rolling off the couch onto the floor and navigating my way up from a solid surface.  All of these faced the huge, plate-glass picture window that looked out on to the Sonora Desert.

Behind the couch, facing away from the window, was a desk and stiff-backed chair.  I considered moving the chair around to the other side of the desk so that I could see out of the window from there too, but it seemed like too much effort.  I wasn’t intending to spend all that much time at a desk anyway.

The borealis woke me at 2am.  I had drawn the curtains across the window before going to bed, and they were floor-length, heavy, weighted curtains of a thick brown material that drank in the light and suffocated it until the room was pitch black.  The noise — the strobing hum that seemed to sweep across the room, bounce off the walls and arc back again, throbbing against the bed, was the culprit.  I sat up, unable to see anything and feeling disoriented, wondering where on earth I was.  Slowly I remembered that I was in the hotel, though that didn’t explain the noise, and I fumbled for the bed-side light-switch.

Instead of the lights I found the switch for opening and closing the curtains and, with a stately whoosh, they drew apart letting greenish-yellow light flicker in from the sitting room.  Thoroughly confused now, I got out of bed and went to the door, convinced that the room lighting had come on anyway but was somehow faulty, and was greeted in the doorway by the borealis in full, glorious performance through the plate-glass window.

It’s not June, I murmured to myself.  The hotel’s brochures were quite definite on the borealis only being visible in June.  I expected that the hotel staff had any number of disgruntled idiot customers at other times of the year who did little more than reveal their illiteracy to the receptionist (and probably escalated it to the manager; what else would an idiot do when proven wrong?) regarding the borealis.  And yet… here I was, being inconvenienced by something I’d deliberately intended to avoid.

The shimmer of the light across the sky was mesmerising though, and the Sonora Desert below it responded; glittering and shining, reflecting back the light from the electromagnetic interactions above and creating odd illusions: a monstrous creature here seemed to stalk westwards towards the columns of an ancient city; then it collapsed into the ripples of a vast ocean on which sailed boats with strange-shaped sails.  Despite myself I moved towards the couch and sat down, transfixed by the display.

At 5:30 the borealis ended and darkness settled back over the cold sands.  The stars twinkled slowly back into view as my night-vision restored, and my stomach rumbled.  With a sigh I reached for the phone.

“Room service?  Yes, I’d like to order breakfast please….”