The Resolution Part 1

one : two shaven-headed lurkers, yakking with an invisible giant

Blue, bright and bitter - a spring morning in the city. In her single room apartment a young woman called Sheema Gulab is soundly asleep, dreaming dreams that we will have our privileged scrutiny of in due course. While she dreams, we have a little time to poke around her room, and seeing nothing particularly of interest (a few old medical books in a tidy stack, a Karl Jung bust, a little vase of delphiniums, make of these things what you will), to look out of the window, pausing to note the two young men making strange, gangly circumlocutions down on the street below. Perhaps they are workmen waiting for a pickup to take them to a job; let’s not waste time on them, but instead, throwing open Sheema’s window, launch upwards and outwards, into this city in which we find ourselves, a city of which we know, so far, only that it is spring and that somewhere this young woman is asleep in it. Soaring up, we observe, here amongst the pigeons and the crows, that the city’s own growth is peculiarly fervent: that somehow it has annexed the season of spring as a good time for budding, for reaching another storey higher, for improving on previous designs, even for pulling down outdated schema entirely and starting again from scratch. Everywhere there is the impression of spring-cleaning: the sweepers out in droves, elephantine cruisers with terrific warning sirens blaring and lights blazing, coming like great, lumbering megalosauruses over the brows of the skyways, down into line with the windows of buildings, their great vacuums sucking up the detritus of a million passages to and from work, all the dust and dirt of yesterday’s business. As we swoop closer to ground level we make out, along the pavement, scrubbing with their foaming brushes, smaller beasts, some guided by resigned-looking men and women, others unaccompanied and half-finished excavations, cordoned off by temporary walls with small glassless windows through which members of the public can

satisfy their natural curiosity; where, indeed, in half an hour or so, Sheema will stop on her way to work in order to peer into a wide, deep gash between two buildings, inside of which she will see archaeologists, suited against the possibility of thousand-year-old pockets of plague still active in the foundations they are sifting through – whilst to one side looms a huge pile of bones, sorted: piles of fibulas, femurs, scapulas, tibias, human skulls; where she will pull back her head to read the inscription on the side of the building:

EXCAVATION WORKS– To extend the Citibank Building a further twenty (20) stories below ground. Lateral works: deconsecration and relocation of burial ground c. 1550. Apply to City Council for further information.

Like us, Sheema, as she turns away to continue on her path towards work, will not fail to notice around her the ramps rising up through the buildings on glinting scaffold, up out of sight, the skeletons of new half-finished skyways. She will spot, and indeed be spotted by, a few of the contract workmen who are everywhere in motion, scrambling over the new constructions, eating hot breakfasts on precarious joists and struts, throwing down lewd comments for a lucky few women such as she, or scuttling along the pavements and skyways from old to new jobs. Here and there Sheema will see a bit of green struggling up between buildings, or a park, politely asking her to recall how much this huge burgeoning system around her, this city, owes to the organic nature it now seems to outdo in inorganic steel and concrete - and, perhaps, what the original meaning of spring once was.

But we’re ahead of ourselves. These visions of a thousand, thousand-year-old deaths, beneath a city in the process of fearlessly usurping nature: they’re yet to be seen by Sheema. There she is, still curled in her bunched duvet, oblivious to all the things she will see today (some of which, it should be mentioned, will be rather on the strange side), knees pressed up against her chest, deep in dream. Down by her sides, her fingers jerk convulsively, feeling at something that takes form under the sheets, down where it is still dark. A face. Sheema is touching it, putting her fingers to its mouth, and into its mouth, to each lip in turn; then running them from its dark thick hair, down its forehead and over its aquiline nose and chin. It is a man’s face, a handsome, middle-aged, blue-eyed man’s face. She holds his head in both her hands. As she is about to kiss his mouth, by degrees, everything begins to slow.

Sheema Gulab wakes, before her alarm clock, to the unshakeable feeling that someone is watching her. There being no evidence to support this sensation in the immediately visible parts of her bedroom (she has grown used, of course, to the stoic scrutinies of Dr. Jung), she hops off her bed and shuffles, sheathed in her duvet, over to the window. Here, peering sleepily out, she perceives the forms of the two shaven-headed young men, in enthusiastic congress with what, to all appearances, is an entirely invisible interlocutor – an interlocutor given an odd semblance of reality, she notes, by the way in which both shaven heads are oriented to the same precise angle - looking up from either side to the place where a third face might be (though, admittedly, at such an elevation that it could only a giant, ten feet tall at the very least, with whom they speak), their eyes fixed intently and a very attentive look on their faces – just the kind of look one might wear on one’s face, Sheema points out to herself, were one taking orders from an invisible giant.

She has only one moment to ponder this strange scene before her fears of observation are horribly confirmed: one of the men stops the bizarre conversation and looks, briefly but directly, up into her window.

Suitably terrified, Sheema steps quickly back and, casting off the duvet, bolts through to the shower, where she proceeds to indulge herself in a spot of unadulterated terror – not an unjustified response, you will agree, to the discovery of such men, lurking, somehow eerily anticipated, outside one’s door, and holding, to boot, a conversation with an imaginary, giant. Yet as she lingers, compelled by sheer fear, over the image of the two men in the street, the very same young men whom we passed over without a second thought just a few moments ago, Sheema begins to notice – as it were, in retrospect - something in the their animalistic movements, in the way their arms dangled limply at their sides, in their curious aura of absolute, unflinching purpose - something which rings bells. ‘You’re the same,’ she realizes out loud. ‘The same as them. You’re Olaf’s, both of you.’

The meaning of that watery utterance will have to remain oblique for the moment: everything has its proper place of exposition, and that of ‘Olaf’s’ is, for better or worse, the next chapter. Suffice it to say for now that Sheema’s fear, looking only moments ago as though it might spiral totally out of control, is now on the wane. These men: in all likelihood they have indeed been watching her and waiting for her; but now she suspects that, being perhaps of the same odd breed as the patients she looks after every day, they are here not for her per se, but for something connected with these patients - of whom we will have cause to speak much more of as time goes on. This bizarre proclivity to hold conversations with no-one in the middle of the street: this is strange and new, but the rest of it has been seen before and, as such is not the suitable object of full blown, pant-wetting terror.

On the contrary, Sheema’s fear has now receded to an almost purely professional concern, and her encounter with these two shaven headed lurkers has been filed, first and foremost, as preliminary evidence that are other cases of the curious, debilitating disease shared by her patients, that such cases are at large in the city, untreated and unchecked, and possibly spreading – and that, judging from these worrying new hallucinatory symptoms , these cases may be critically advanced. And as if these conjectures were not worrying enough, Sheema now begins to entertain a new thought: are the sufferers somehow attempting to convene, to find each other? Is that the purpose of their vigil outside her apartment?

By the time she reaches up to turn the water off, she has decided on her course of action: call estate security, have them accompany her out of the area and, if necessary, deploying a little feminine charm, all the way to work. Thus protected, let the lurkers tail her to the hospital, and, if possible, have them interned there, and submitted to Dr. Mulvery for a second opinion.

Thus resolved, Sheema Gulab completes her ablutions, dresses and, shouting at her PA to call the security firm for help, breakfasts without fuss. Finally, she steps out onto the pavement fully expecting to see, across the street, the two young men looking over at her, or perhaps up at their giant’s invisible head. Surprised to find that they are gone (perhaps, who knows, she says to herself, having been scared off by the arrival of security, in the form of a rather burly looking, thickly moustached and visibly armed ex-copper), she looks quickly about for their lanky figures and, spotting no-one, smiles apologetically at the uniformed man. ‘Sorry to drag you out like this. Only there was someone…’ ‘Don’t mention it, Miss Gulab. It’s my job. We’ve been having a quiet morning anyway. I’ll walk you to work if you like.’

It is only as the odd pair make off up the street that Sheema remembers her dream, the dream of the man’s face, and, somewhat guiltily, of how she had been holding it in her hands, wanting very much to kiss his mouth. Guiltily, because the face was in the fact the face of a patient of hers: a very peculiar patient indeed, by the name of Emmett Grogan. As if in embarrassment, and telling herself that she is safe now at any rate, she dismisses the security man, and makes off at a clip into the city - hiding her guilty dreams, from herself, in the complexities of the day.

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