Chapter 24: The Heart of Darkness

The DreamAds headquarters was a forty-minute drive out of Dublin, situated in an industrial park near Kildare town. Not that I drove. Foot or bike for me. And the occasional bus, such as the motherly A50 that carried me in her warm interior through along roads swept by a cold and aloof north wind.

‘Are you Cyn today?’ asked Daniel, from the seat beside me.

‘Mostly…’ I thought about the question some more. ‘If I forced myself to be all Cyn, I think I probably could. It’s more fun to be part Celine though.’

‘You’re a hybrid. Celin. Cyline.’ He experimented with mixing my name. ‘They both are personifications of the moon, so perhaps Luna would suit the hybrid you?’

‘Or Nightmare Moon!’

He chuckled. ‘You’re lucky to have both beings in your mind working together.’

‘We all do. It’s just that most of the time the part of us using language doesn’t let go enough to feel the otherness that’s there too.’

Having come to a halt for a red light, the bus forgot to start again on green, so interested was she in our conversation.

‘Did you see that Michael Longley died?’ said Daniel.

‘Who?’

‘A Belfast poet. Arts Council type.’

This was a somewhat disparaging description and although he was normally enthusiastic about other poets, I wondered if my lover was feeling envy. His next words persuaded me that this wasn’t the case.

‘Longley once said,’ Daniel continued, ‘that he had no idea where poems came from, but that if he could go there, he would.’

‘Beautiful.’

‘When you are Celine are you visiting that place? What’s it like?’

That was an interesting question. The bus wanted me to take to that magical place if I could show her the way. I could not.

‘Celine is far more receptive to that other world than I, but she was born on Earth thirty-four years ago and suckled at our mother’s breast on her own until I began to form and took over our body. She’s as mortal as me and we will die together. It might be that there are beings who live in the realm of beauty, but the best that we can do is touch it. Like touching the surface of a plasma ball and receiving the lightning.’

‘I need that touch, Cyn. I need it so much.’ There were tears in Daniel’s eyes. ‘Help me find it.’

I put an arm around his shoulder. ‘You’ve found it before. You’ll find it again.’

The bus sighed. Then opened her doors to the cold air. We had arrived at a large, grey car park, which even on a Saturday was being used by several buses and over a hundred cars.

As I left the bus, I caressed her wing mirror.

After buttoning up Daniel’s coat – new; purchased by me because although it was olive and not necessarily his favourite colour, the coat was the most eager of all those on the rack to keep him warm whatever the weather – I took Daniel’s hand and we walked along a stone-slabbed path towards the DreamAds building.

By the manner in which we were sauntering under the grey sky, rather than striding in haste, Daniel and I stood out from all those around us who were heading to work. This risked unwanted attention, yet I felt safe enough in this public environment. It was the prospect of entering the DreamAds building that did not feel safe, not at all. Even while it was out of view behind a unit of bathroom appliances I could feel it, a savage demon wearing the mask of a polite secretary.

And there it was. I stopped when I saw the colourful DreamsAds sign on the tidy grass outside of the next building and only moved forward again after a tug on my arm from Daniel.

Standing before a rotating door made of glass, through which we could see the wide reception area and a security desk, I said:

‘I have to let Celine take over now. Try not to get in the way.’

‘I don’t see how we’re going to get in.’

A wide and low grey-brick building, whose many rectangular windows have a modern-looking teal sheen. Five marble stairs, wide enough for a dozen people, lead up to a glass entrance. An imposing frame for the door, created by pale, bas-relief stonework of a column on either side supporting a flattened, triangular roof. The real roof is another storey above the entrance design and is black and flat, like the top of a mortarboard hat. To my right is another unusual feature: the front corner of the building on that side has a protrusion of pale blue brick and glass, giving those corner rooms an extension from which the occupants can look out along the front and side of the building, like the way that medieval castles had towers at their corners. Only, this building had just the one extension, deliberately making it unbalanced.

I close my eyes.

Open. Evil flows through this building like maelstrom of swirling purple clouds. Here, before me, is the heart of the cold-hearted monster that is DreamAds. And this company headquarters has a noticeable role even within the vast being that is Capitalism, the being that provides the host environment for DreamAds and all the businesses of the world. Imagine an enormous alien lifeform blanketing the entire surface of planet Earth with a blubber-like body. The corpuscles inside this being are us, billions of humans moving around to keep the alien’s circulation functioning. Its mind – cruel and ruthless – is distributed into nodes, concentrated in cities everywhere, but especially megacities like Tokyo, Delhi, Shanghai, Dhaka, Sao Paulo, and Cairo. Akin to the mind of an octopus, which includes its tentacles, Capitalism thinks by manipulation rather than contemplation. This building is a like a ligament within that titanic being; when I cut the ligament the planet-sized alien will notice me for a moment (a terrifying thought). It will not care about the injury; it can regrow another DreamAds within weeks. But it might kill me by diverting just a fraction of its restless energy to a brutal swipe at my existence, acting, as it always does, through the minds of humans who may not be aware of their overlord but who sacrifice themselves and others to it.

Beyond the rotating doors, one of these human ants sits behind the security desk. There is a type of fungus that traps ants, infects their brains, and having taken control of them, makes the ants walk up to a height suitable for the release of spores. Capitalism is even more infectious to humans than that fungus is to ants. As a titanic, disembodied alien being, it has penetrated the brain of every human and marches us to its directions. Take a hundred thousand humans, a million even, put them in uniform behind that desk and they would all behave the same way due to this infection. Perhaps one in a million would agree to assist me in protecting people from the harm of DreamAds technology. Not this man. I have to lie to him.

‘Hi, I’m here for an interview for the PA job.’

An unconcerned look at a screen. ‘Do you have your invitation?’

‘Sure…’ Fumble. Dismay. ‘I’m sorry, my phone is out of battery.’

He looks up, face as expressionless as a robot’s. ‘Name?’

Abraham Lincoln. Jennifer Aniston. Spartacus. Cyn-Celine-Luna-Nightmare Moon. Neo, ‘the Edge’. Rita Kernn-Larsen. Jana Brike. Storm Eowyn. Hengist. Herst. Maurice Ravel. Tony Curtis. Marilyn Monroe. Arthur Schopenhauer. Toshiko Okanoue. RavensDagger. So many names that do not work. There are a few that do.

‘Sinead Masters.’

‘Wait over there, on that couch. Someone from HR will bring you up.’ He turns to Daniel. ‘And you?’

‘I’m with her.’

‘Boyfriend. I needed him for the lift.’

‘He can wait over there too and stay there while you do the interview.’

‘Thanks,’ says Daniel.

Once seated – pale blue sofa and chair padding, chrome frames – Daniel leans very close. ‘Now what?’

‘When HR comes, you apologise, tell them I’ve changed my mind and leave promptly, without saying a word to the man at the desk.’

‘But I want to come with you!’ his whisper is as urgent as a whisper can be. Looking into his eyes, so he can see the determination in mine, I deny his wish with a shake of my head.

The security guard occasionally looks over towards us with an expression of placid indifference. When he next does so, I stand, conscious of his gaze, and walk to a toilet door, which I push open. The guard looks away and letting the door swing shut, I move quietly down a corridor and out of his sight to where I see the silver double-doors of a lift. There is a code pad in the wall and I can tell from the wear of the buttons and the difference in the sheen from those which have been used the most, that the code uses 1,8, and 9. The nine is slicker than the other two. Rapidly I tap 1899, 1989, 1998 and this third one is correct.

‘Second Floor,’ announces the pleasant female voice of the lift. If she knew my mission she would instead say, ‘fuck you Celine. I’m calling Neo and jamming my doors. You’re finished. And I don’t mean jail. I mean feet set in concrete and dropped into the cold waters of Dublin Bay by men who laugh when you plead with them to shoot you in the head before tipping you overboard.’

The doors having opened with a merry chime, I must choose left or right. In each direction a navy-carpeted corridor extends the length of the building and to a window that fills the entire wall, allowing me views of the industrial park on one side and a pine-covered hill on the other. I close my eyes and inhale. Like a dog, I get to my knees and sniff. I listen. With the scents and sounds available to me, I can picture this place vividly. Tendrils of DreamAds and of its host, Capitalism, fill the minds of those who during the week work in the rooms to my right. More disturbing are the rooms on opposite sides of the corridor to my left.

Behind one of the doors is an office that sounds and smells as an office should. I can tell that it is currently occupied by a man using Lynx as a deodorant and munching on a pack of spicey tortilla crisps.

Behind the other door, though, is something that causes a shiver to run through me. Beyond that door is hell.

The prospect of death slows my walk until I stop short of the high-security steel door. To get inside, I need a fingerprint. Do I want to enter the heart of darkness? Put my poor body in peril? Surrender it to the giant of DreamAds and the titan of Capitalism like Iphigenia giving herself to the altar of Artemis.

What lies beyond this thick, metal door? No window allows a view. No scent escapes the room other than a suggestion of iron. There is vibration, like a diabolical heart beating. I need a finger.

The other door has a long glass panel running vertically for most of its length. Through it, I can see an open plan office, water cooler, coffee machine and a fifty-ish-year-old man sitting before a desktop, looking at his monitor while dipping thick fingers into a bag of chips that lays on its side. I knock.

Guilty and surprised, the man taps his screen twice before getting up. I wave. There is something unaligned about his walk, a slight infirmity.

‘Hello?’ the door is half open. His tone and expression are neutral.

‘Let me begin at the beginning. When you were sent to inseminate my sweet Cyn with your adverts, then I took your life and drove you out and every one of you who walked through my domain with your dirty-boots. You serpent, whose poison inadvertently woke me to great effort and to descend from Olympus to these cold wastelands.’

‘Ahh,’ he frowns; the door closes. Not before I have made a grab for his little finger. I may be far smaller than him, but I know how to leverage the pain points of the human body and by twisting the finger cruelly I force him to relieve the pressure there by lurching out of the room, across the corridor, and to the pad.

‘You’ve broken my finger!’ he screams, on his knees, nursing the wound.

What matters is the click I hear after pressing his hand to the pad. I’m inside, closing out the sound of his moans. In every way the situation is bad: who will deny it? The day has come in which I will destroy my enemy, since I possess many ways of doing so: shall I set the room on fire, or smash the equipment by force? One thing, however, is for certain: if I am caught having entered the chamber that houses my enemy and plotting its destruction, I will be killed and bring joy to my foes.

I take a deep breath.

And look at the bloodstained walls.