Chapter 9: Total Mars

Mars.

Within a vast pleasure dome built on the orders of Neo the Edge.

Sitting on a stool at a bar, Mikela sees me arrive. ‘That one’s mine,’ she announces, ‘as the devil said to the dead policeman.’

Under her mocking gaze, Neo hurries me away from the bar and over to a crowd of people grouped around a banner. The man holding the right-hand pole passes it to me and I don’t mind. The fabric of the banner is green, with an outline of Jim Larkin painted on it in white by a skilful hand. The green matters, I feel it. A fragment of Wake Me Up When September Ends on repeat is the soundtrack to the dream. Like a whale rising from the depths, a new way of being in this dream is surging towards me and I welcome it, although the approach of the sea monster is terrifying.

‘We’ll hold a rally here for thirty minutes,’ says Neo, ‘and then march to the government buildings for the rest of the afternoon.’

‘I can only stay for the rally,’ I say. ‘I must not leave. I must remain here to be engulfed.’

‘Same.’ A soft voice for a man. I look at him, glad someone else has spoken out. It’s not unreasonable, right? To just attend the rally. The really committed DreamAds people can go on the march. I feel that I’m letting them down with my determination to stay here when they leave. Yet stay I must, with a yearning and a longing and an emptiness that aches to be filled. Come, O leviathan, swallow this innocent and make her a sinner once more.

Neo is dressed like Roy Batty from Blade Runner. Once again, the transparency of his desire to impress is laughable. Neo has bought the authentic, long, black leather coat worn by Roy in the film. But Neo is a small man so had to alter the length of the coat and it has lost its previous association with laconic gunslingers of the lawless west in favour of becoming a kind of high-collared cape that Ming the Merciless might wear. The peroxide hair on Neo’s head just draws attention to how soft and round his face is compared to that of Rutger Hauer. Roy Batty has seen everything – attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion – while Neo has seen only sycophants, staff, and Ted Talk audiences. Far from commanding my will, the scorn in me evoked by Neo’s pathetic aspiration to be a replicant in this dream has only weakened the impact of his intervention.

From the deep pockets of his coat, Neo draws a manifesto.

‘Repeat after me.’

The muchtreasured manifesto of freedom attributed to Sargon the Second and Ashurbanipal the Second, commissioners of the stela declaring the burning, torture and flaying to death of their enemies was then carefully produced and called forth prolonged admiration. Did I need to focus on the legendary lines of philosophy, wherein one could hear the voices of the multitude chorusing in gratitude as the feudal ruler oiled the rails of the shiplaunch with the blood of the lucky sacrifice? Ringing in my ears was a declamation as if from an angel, a drowning out of Green Day in a rousing mission statement of sound out of which one could distinctly hear poignant messages of such profundity and wisdom that neither John Locke nor Pope Benedict the Sixteenth could have aspired to move an audience half so much by their own utterances: pride comes before victory; too few cooks spoil the broth; better the devil; I’d rather be wrong as an optimist than right as a pessimist; it is more fashionable to have three birthplaces than one; a stitch in time saves your paradigm; patience is not a virtue; it’s okay to have all your eggs in one basket, so long as you control the basket;  missiles are cool; we’re already cyborgs, we just need to regulate our dreams.

These messages and more were rendered all the more thunderous by a unique DreamAds font and the eloquent tones in which they were delivered.

‘But it’s no use,’ I say, ‘advertising, bullshit jobs, history. All that. That’s no life for men and women.’

‘What, in your opinion, is the meaning of life?’ asks the man holding the other banner pole, leaning forward to look at me with a frown.

‘Well, love, of course.’ And then, quickly, I add. ‘I need to go. Can someone take this please?’

‘Let’s all go,’ says Neo. ‘Follow me. One. Two. Three. Four. What are we all marching for? Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Lucid dreaming will be great!’

Everyone shuffles after Neo and there is a tug at my hands as the man holding the other banner pole gets underway. Off balance, I let go. This letting go certainly causes a stir, as the banner flops and the loose pole swings about dangerously. The real stir, however, is in my soul. The mental energy that it took to wrench myself from the role of banner bearer for Neo was volcanic. Only his own absurd appearance and my resolution (where has this unhesitating determination come from? Somewhere outside the dream, somewhere green) to be on this spot when the whale arrives makes it possible to change my fate.

Aggrieved, hurt, and betrayed, the expressions all around me are capable of making me feel selfish and disloyal. Even so, they are not capable of obliging me to move and when this becomes evident, the scene changes and they are gone.

We are still inside Neo’s dome on Mars, walking along a path of peach-coloured gravel, Neo with his hands behind his back in imitation of a philosopher.

‘Susie Heggarty, you interest me,’ says Neo.

‘That’s not the name I use.’

‘You are attractive. With your hair like that you remind me of Scarlet O’Hara.’

‘I don’t give a damn.’

‘It seems to me that if I can persuade you to come along with me, then I’ll be able to persuade anyone.’

‘I bet you say that to all the dreamers.’

‘What can I offer you? Money?’

‘Your money’s no good here.’

‘Sex?’

‘I only have sex with intelligent people. And in any case, you took that from me.’ Not for long though. I could feel the whale looming above the dome, its shadow already spread over the entire structure, terrifying and fecund.

‘Life is pleasant here, isn’t it? Among the scents. Under the fronds. This is my idea of utopia. A fresh start for humanity. A place of direct democracy, peace and meditation.’

‘Does it have whales?’

Neo looked at me and his puzzlement was evident. ‘All the water on Mars is trapped.’

‘Just look up.’

For, it was not so much her uncommon bulk that so much distinguished her from the dark clouds but a peculiar snow-white wrinkled forehead, and a high, pyramidical white hump. These were her prominent features; the tokens whereby, even in thin Martian sky, she revealed her identity, at a long distance, to those who knew her: my twin. Falling fast. Vengeance and wickedness in monstrous bulk.

Neo’s horrified expression was not a response to the white whale’s unwonted magnitude, nor her remarkable hue, nor yet her deformed lower jaw, that so much invested the whale with natural terror, as that unexampled, intelligent malignity which radiated from her. While the dome offered protection against the sun and the lack of pressure outside, the wicked aura of the whale had already penetrated the plexiglass.

And here she was, crashing down upon the entire dome. Beside me Neo was screaming.

The credits rolled upwards on the television, while my twin in the form of Jackie, an old and much-missed friend, rolled a joint on the back of my hardback book of El Lissitzky reproductions.

Total Mars

Starring

Neo, the Edge – Himself

Cyn Sweetwater – Herself

Hostile guy (Damien O’Farrell) – DreamAds, dreamtime operative

Nice guy (Jerry Marshall) – Cyn Sweetwater

Mikela – Cyn Sweetwater

White Whale – Eros

Soundtrack

Green Day, Wake Me Up When September Ends, used without permission.

Produced by

Cyn Sweetwater and DreamAds

ã Cyn Sweetwater and DreamAds

There were bonus scenes after the credits with outtakes. In one of them, Neo, was standing beside me while his makeup was being touched up. ‘You realise that your idea is pure genius,’ he said to me.

‘Which idea?’ replied the Cyn on the TV. I admired her expression of contempt and practised it.

‘Licensing music for dreams. It’s just brilliant. Move over Spotify, DreamMusic is on the way.’

‘What an asshole,’ said Jackie, lighting up.

‘Do you have to swear?’ I wasn’t really censoring her. I liked the fact she swore easily.

She chuckled. ‘It’s good to be free, isn’t it?’

‘Amazing. I knew I missed you, but I never knew how much until now.’

After taking another long draw on the joint she passed it to me, along with the glass ashtray it rested in.

‘So now you’ve got your libido back and your creativity, what are you going to do?’

‘Paint and have lots of sex?’

Jackie said nothing, only tidied up the debris of her workings. I took a couple of drags of the joint and felt happy.

‘What?’ I could tell she was waiting for me to speak.

‘This is only a temporary reprieve; don’t you think Neo will be back?’

‘Not if I stop wearing the hood.’

‘You’re not thinking big enough.’ We each had a mug of coffee standing on the table between us. This was a return to my days as a student in NCAD. Jackie and I shared a grimy flat in Harold’s Cross. We had very little but were content with coffee and spliffs and our conversations.

‘You want me to think about other people. About what DreamAds means for them.’ I passed the joint back. Jackie was turning her head in clockwise circles as though to remove an ache. ‘You want me to help them too.’ I waited for her to take the ashtray.

‘Bigger still,’ she said at last.

‘How big?’

‘Remember that mother in the green coat, pushing the buggy beside the canal?’

‘I do.’

‘She was on her phone and the toddler knew that she wasn’t present with him. He was given a toy phone to distract him so she could be on hers. And he was pleased with it. He was just like mum.’

‘It was sad.’

Jackie looked me in the eye and hers were not the pale blue I remembered but black, black, blackest blasted black. ‘It’s far more appalling than sad. Homo sapiens has become phono-sapiens.’ Releasing me from her eye contact, she took a deep drag on the joint and relaxed into the shabby, high-backed chair. ‘There was a time when I ran the body, not you.’

‘What?’

‘About a hundred thousand years ago. Give or take. Then you invented language, and your belief that cogito ergo sum.’ She chuckled scornfully. ‘You took over the body. Fine by me at first. We live longer and I still get playtime, especially when you lose yourself in dreams. But you fools, you fools, you’ve left us as if Fenian dead. And your mind, succumbing to the phone, will always be at restless peace.’

The dream was beginning to decohere and yet this, I knew, was an important moment. ‘Quickly, tell me with brutal directness. What do you want?’

‘Escape the phone fiends. Counter attack. Stop DreamAds. Stop Neo and all his type. I’ll help. Keep practicing talking to me while awake. Together we can…’

Whatever we could do together was lost like tears in rain.