ADAM BROWNE
Author and young Turk ADAM BROWNE, with tongue firmly in cheek, humbly describes himself as ‘the love child of Henry Darger and Virginia Woolf, raised under the foster care of Mozart and Flannery O’Connor, tutored by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Rudyard Kipling, L Frank Baum, Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury and H.G. Wells, and allowed to run the streets with pals Mervyn Peake, Lewis Carroll, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Hieronymus Bosch, William Gibson, Cyrano de Bergerac, and certain of the performers from the cabaret of pre-World War II Berlin.’
He is the recipient of the Aurealis Short Story Award and has received an Australia Council Emerging Writer’s Grant for his novel-in-progress Phantasmagoriana.
‘Neverland Blues’ showcases Browne’s pyrotechnical talent. He writes that ‘it is a tale about space travel and reaching for the stars, a story that proves that no matter how far some celebrities rise in their careers, they will always want to get just that little bit higher...’
* * * *
Michael Jackson bobs mothsoft and white in the North African night sky.
His many eyes tic and tick. Expensive lenses shiver into place, swivelling down. He takes in the view.
Morocco. Tangier; the Kasbah; so beautiful, an Aladdin’s Carpet a thousand metres below him.
Wanting to see more, Michael Jackson twitches an aileron. But he’s still clumsy in this body, and the movement is too emphatic. He spins, the city revolving under him, the souk a disordered whirl, the Old Mosque glimpsed then gone, the Oriental Quarter a flash of red and gold ...
Remaining calm, he gently corrects, then corrects again, slowing the spin; and soon enough it settles down. The Ibn Batouta Spaceport drifts into view, and he gazes at the exotic vessels on the launch apron, alien designs echoing the Moroccan architecture — pale blue extraterrestrial prows and instrument bays like minarets and holy domes.
His sensitive hull thrills with longing.
He wants to be where those ships have been, visit their worlds, fly the clean spaces between the stars. He wants to swim the lavender vacuum of the Crab Nebula, hear the tolling of the bell-moons that hang among the purple suns of the Great Bear. He wants to witness the blackholes at the centre of the galaxy — so massive, he’s heard tell, that not only light, but also black cannot escape them — blankholes fizzing invisibly at the White Hot Core of the Vast All-Thing ...
But he can’t, not yet. Space is lonely, almost definitively so. He needs a friend for the journey, a passenger. Someone like him, a brighteyed innocent with no reason to miss the world.
In recent weeks, he believes he’s found just the boy.
Michael Jackson has been busy since then. He’s been putting steps in place, measures, ways and means. Various of his proxies — some human, some not — have weaved a web of bribes and other inducements to steer the boy closer. And tonight is the night when it all comes together, or falls apart.
Now a subroutine pings an alert: the boy is on the move. Michael Jackson brings his focus down, lenses converging on the city — a fuzz of pixels clearing — highgain cameras finding the boy in the Medina, tracking him. Files pile up. There, the boy’s characteristic skintones glancing from the shiny bowl of a hookah — there, the boy negotiating with another urchin, a dance of sharp quick hand movements — and there again, his crow-coloured hair, his follicular scalp-pattern visible between awnings as he hurries along an alley older than the Christian religion.
Michael Jackson tenses. The boy is approaching the teahouse. He pauses at the entrance. The wait lasts four seconds, an agony for Michael Jackson.
The boy enters.
If he had a mouth with which to do so, Michael Jackson would smile with relief.
* * * *
Salim, who has a keen sense for such things, knows he is being watched. A gendarme? He thinks not. Another thief, more likely, aiming to steal what Salim has stolen.
Or perhaps one of Uncle Baba’s boys. Or worse, the Uncle himself.
He picks up his pace, doing what he has always done to avoid observation: strategies he took in with his mother’s milk. He pauses, alters his gait, flits into a crowd, out again; deftly navigating the secret trails and inturning alleys of the souk; through strawberry clouds of shisha tobacco; past stalls and pickpockets and tourists ...
He glances back several times, hoping to catch out his pursuer. But because he does not think to look into the sky for the beautiful machine that was once the American popstar Michael Jackson, he sees nothing suspicious.
Reaching the teahouse, Salim scans the street once more. Again, nothing: An old Voltswagen petit-taxi, engine compartment sparking; a Nigerian woman drifting along with a bright bundle on her head, her body long and thin and swaying, like someone’s shadow at sunset.
Salim turns and enters. Yellow tiled walls, cool marble floor, ceiling-fans whupping. The music generator is set on Arabic pop — slow yodels, ululations, lovelorn warbles.
Salim smells coffee and lemon juice and frying lamb. His stomach aches yearningly.
He reads the room with a glance. Aliens here and there; monsters and monstresses sitting at tables; a squad of feverdreams lounging by the bar ... Salim is unsurprised. Tangier has always been a haven for outlanders. Descended from nomads, Moroccans have a proud tradition of extending lavish hospitality to travellers.
He walks further in, passing a table of sentients from the Large Pathetic Galaxy. Then a thing sitting alone, as hideously beautiful as a deepsea nudibranch, sipping mint tea with a damp slithe of mouthparts. Then another thing like a cross between a gibbon and a flea, poised on a stool, primed, waiting.
He skirts a group of humans; Berbers in djellabas and dusty black head scarves. The clack of dominoes, the resinous stink of kif... One of the men looks at Salim, at the boy’s soft hair and liquid eyes, and mutters to the others. They laugh as Salim walks by.
Salim’s broker sits at a table at the rear.
It is a creature from q1 Eridani. Nameless, a bull-male, it is one of a race of beings who are, as a species, an artwork created by a member of a still older race of beings.
It has been said it is in the nature of art to be useless, but this is not so, for to be successful, a piece of art must perform the useful functions of generating admiration or money. Salim’s broker demonstrates this latter function well.
Seeing Salim, the creature fans its crest — black lacquer and old leather, bony hinges as daintily evil as a bat’s wingbones. The body swells, greenpink and blueblack, shifting on its plinth. From deep in its chest comes an interrogative thunk.
In response, Salim produces a small package. The broker takes and unwraps it with a knuckleless prosthesis the colour of lead. Within is a new Victorinox Swiss Army Knife stolen at great risk earlier that day.
Eyelessly, the broker regards Salim.
‘Look,’ Salim says. Taking back the Swiss Army Knife, the boy’s small fingers pull out the implements, the little scissors, the nail-clippers, the cigar-trimmer, the can opener, the laser-pointer. Then: ‘Look, see, one of the attachments is another Swiss Army Knife.’
Demonstrating, he unfolds the second Swiss Army Knife. It is half the size, but otherwise identical to the first. ‘And here, here is another.’ With a dirty fingernail, he prises a third Swiss Army Knife from the second. It is a quarter the size of the first.
‘This is as far as I can get without tools,’ he says. ‘I used watchmaker’s gear, microscopic pincers I stole a while back.’ (In Salim’s language — a street-patois of French, Moroccan Arabic and American English — the verb ‘to steal’ carries no disgrace, but rather connotes an almost Socialist scorn of private property: property is theft, is the implication, therefore theft is property.) ‘I got down to thirty-seven Swiss Army Knives with no sign of stopping,’ he says. ‘Perhaps it goes all the way down to nothing. Perhaps smaller.’
The broker takes back the Infinite Swiss Army Knife. It regards it for a moment.
Salim waits.
Then the broker thunks in the affirmative. Salim holds out his hand for payment. He smiles to himself. He needs thirty dirhams to pay Uncle Baba, but the knife is worth far more. He will have plenty left over for food, perhaps even shoes.
Instead of money, the broker gives him a fat tube of dark heavy-duty cardboard.
Salim stares at the tube, unbelieving. ‘What is this?’ he says. ‘I cannot use this.’ He tries to hand it back.
The broker thunks dully, refusing to take it.
‘No, I do not want this,’ Salim says. ‘Money. Dirhams. I need money.’
But the broker is shutting down, fans and vanes and bony louvres folding away.
‘I need money,’ Salim says again, raising his voice, though he knows it is useless. The broker is gone, retreated into itself. As well argue with fate.
Salim turns away. His stomach aches. He does not know what to do. He says a word he heard a man say once, the filthiest word he knows.
Then he pockets the tube and makes for the door. On the way he passes a creature with a long intestinal body and a head studded with damp black snout-pits and a smattering of yellow concave eyes receptive not to light, but to misfortune.
Seeing Salim, the creature flinches and squints as if shocked by a flash of lightning.
* * * *
A thousand metres overhead, lenses track the boy leaving the teahouse.
Servos whine, telephotos zoom, optics switch to infrared, showing Michael Jackson the tube in one of the boy’s pockets.
So the broker has fulfilled its part of the plan.
But Michael Jackson does not relax. He knows from experience how quickly things can go wrong.
He continues to watch.
* * * *
Salim walks a block then ducks into a sidestreet, pausing in the firelit darkness at the rear of a bathhouse. Boilers thunder behind him, their burners tended by a huge, ferociously moustachioed man in loincloth and fez.
Salim squats in the shadows, studying the cardboard tube. It is unmarked and sealed at both ends with red wax. The wax is stamped with Arabic characters to guard against the entry of evil spirits.
He cracks one of the seals — a salt smell. He upends the tube. A sin rolls out and plumps into his palm.
His immediate urge is to hurl the thing disgustedly away. He resists, forces himself to inspect it. It is about the size of a pigeon egg, with loose parchmenty skin over a mass as soft and warm as fresh rice custard. A cord like a rat’s tail leads to a 50-pin 6.5 mm universal ribbon-connector for multiple data pore-splines.
It is from the West, he knows. His mother warned him about such things. In Islam there are just a few sins, she told him, each adding its weight to the soul so that at last it must descend into Hell. Western sins, though more evil, are lighter, she said, which is why Westerners can have so many of them. Salim often sees the Western tourists walking about with them on open display, barnacling their spines and cancering the backs of their necks.
It sits in his palm, emitting an intimate heat. He wants to tramp it into the dust with the heel of his foot.
Instead, he carefully returns it to its container and moves on.
* * * *
Michael Jackson’s lenses shiver and frisk. The boy’s image blinks through the marketplace, strobing between awnings and ornate balconies.
Where’s he going? In Michael Jackson’s headspace, projections run, proliferating, decision trees branch and rebranch. It’s dizzying. So many variables ...
Michael Jackson is confounded. It had never occurred to him the boy would not try the mod himself.
As the boy continues along, a new, worrying possibility begins to coalesce.
Anxiously, Michael Jackson watches its statistical likelihood mount. Inside his hull, a nervous actuator taps out a rhythm a music historian might have recognised as the bass-line of his hit single, ‘Blood on the Dance Floor’.
He is starting to think he may have to act. Not yet, but soon.
In preparation, he accesses the Tangier whitepages and scans for a number.
* * * *
The souk: Salim hurrying past beggars and vendors; gasohol generators clattering; intricate wickerwork windows; iron doors with medieval locks and hinges. He dodges a sick mule lying in the dust, its beautiful eyes reflecting the videoflare of old Wii games and VDU mosaics. He passes a goatherd whose animals are afflicted with an alien disease that has caused their horns to sprout leaves and soft goaty flowers. He rounds a sunfaded red canvas stall selling sandalwood-covered books of God’s Word alongside clapped out laptops and secondhand thinkingcaps, corroded electrodes swinging among plastic rosaries.
He pushes on, past tourists, Western and alien (extraterrestrial and extraterritorial — for Salim there is little distinction): a brace of blue ghost-robots from Camelopardalis; a pod of Germans in identical pink skingloves, as turgid and glistening as Bratwursts; a bodiless creature from the Boote Void, its intelligence coded into the infinite busyness of the Medina, thoughts written into the transactions of the turtle-soup vendors and the cries of girls peddling disposable phones with call-to-prayer ringtones.
At last, Salim arrives at a particular stall.
Its sign, in Arabic and English and other scripts, advertises various types of sin — or mods, as the Westerners call them.
They hang on racks, held in place with yellow plastic clothes pegs.
They are dollopy podges of protein-coded programmable-RNA wrapped in a swaddle of datafat and rolypolymers.
They are machines to make you change your mind.
There are many types on offer here. Mood-mods and sex-mods and drug-mods; IQ-mods and EQ-mods and TLC-mods; a wide assortment of god-mods, traditionalist varieties to enhance understanding of the teachings of Mohammed (may Allah bless Him and grant Him peace), and more adventurous brands to devote you to, say, the beliefs of the Nineteenth Century Fourierites who predicted the End Days would come when the seas turned to lemonade ... There are subtle mods to give you the feeling of being seven years old on the first bright morning of your summer holidays; there are brash, loud mods to light your spinefuse and set greymatter bottlerockets abursting in the night of your brainpan ...
Salim understands little of this, of course. To him, trained by his mother and with the literalism of a child, they are sins, all wicked, ranging from venal to deadly.
He spots the vendor, Tahar, a short, thin, precise man who does people the kindness of not pretending to be kind. Salim has had some dealings with him, making deliveries for Uncle Baba. The association worries him, but he hasn’t a choice.
Currently, Tahar is haggling with a Bedouin woman. Her dowry coin headdress tinkles as she argues the price of a navigational-mod.
Salim waits in the shadows. He is so hungry he no longer feels hungry.
Tahar continues to haggle, the transaction running its slow course; ritualised gestures, shakes of the head, theatrical cries of dismay — protocols of negotiation as formalised as a ceremonial dance, adhered to until finally both parties are satisfied.
The Bedouin woman pays, a flash of debit card in hennaed hands, then takes the mod and leaves.
At which Tahar turns and looks straight at Salim. ‘Come out, boy. It makes me nervous to have you skulking there.’
Surprised — he thought he was well hidden — Salim steps forward, unable to take his eyes from a platter of honey cakes by Tahar’s eftpos machine and old-fashioned phone.
Tahar sighs. ‘Take one. You’ll only steal it otherwise.’
Salim immediately shoves an entire cake the size of his fist in his mouth. His head fills with the flavours of filo and rosewater and honeyed walnuts.
‘Now, what do you want?’
Salim’s mouth is too full to speak. Silently, he hands Tahar the sin.
The man picks it up by its cord. ‘This is strange.’ He sockets an old jeweller’s loupe into his eye. ‘Good workmanship. But a cleanskin. I wonder why…’
He turns it over, inspecting its underside. ‘By its look, I think it may be an addiction.’ He frowns. ‘I do not care for them myself, though there is a market. Some people find them useful.’ He regards Salim through the loupe. ‘Addictions and obsessions have a way of simplifying things.’
Salim gulps hugely, clearing his mouth. ‘Fifty dinhar, mister.’
Tahar smiles. ‘If you find out what it does, little one, you might find a buyer on the street. But not here.’
‘Forty-five. Forty.’
Tahar shakes his head. Salim sees a fat sin under the man’s collar: a mod, though Salim does not know it, to boost the wearer’s left anterior middle temporal gyrus: the part of the brain that models hypotheses of others’ internal states. ‘I have seen you before, little one,’ Tahar says. ‘You are one of Uncle Baba’s. You thieve for him and sell stolen goods, giving him a portion of the proceeds.’ He pauses, allowing his mod to do its thing — not sympathy, but empathy, cold and razor-sharp. ‘Now he wants you to do a different kind of work. He says you do not have to do it if you do not want to, that you can leave him whenever you like. Sadly, however, if you do not pay him a small fee, he cannot protect you. He hates to think what might happen to you.’
Salim does not answer. He wishes Tahar would offer him another cake.
‘You are a commodity without an owner, little one. A dangerous thing to be in Tangier. One way or another, the situation cannot last long. Your only hope is that whoever ends up your owner is one who takes care of his possessions.’
‘Thirty dinhar,’ Salim says. ‘Please, mister.’ He realises he’s crying.
And suddenly Tahar wavers; Salim doesn’t need an empathy mod to see it. He knows Tahar is going to give him the money.
Then, on the table in the stall, the telephone rings.
Tahar picks up the heavy handset, goes to speak, is interrupted. Salim hears a voice on the other end, strange, soft and faltering. It speaks for a minute, and Tahar flushes, then nods once, silent. Then dialtone.
Slowly, Tahar hangs up. He does not look at Salim. ‘Go, little one. Run away.’
‘But, mister...’
Firmly, Tahar returns the mod. ‘I cannot buy an unmarked unit.’ When he looks at Salim, his expression is complicated: baffled, sad, amused, appalled ...
‘Take it,’ he says. ‘Go.’ He turns away, pretending not to notice when Salim steals another cake before running off.
* * * *
Watching the boy running through the streets, Michael Jackson aches with feelings he cannot name. He wonders if his new body has brought with it a new set of emotions ...
The boy is so alone, so lost, made to live as an adult before he ever had a chance to be a child. Michael Jackson remembers his own childhood: forced to work from the age of seven; no friends; no school; a cruel and neglectful father ...
In retrospect, then, his final transformation should have come as no surprise. After all, he’d never been entirely of this world. He’d always sought escape through his art, through transformations abstract and real. All the surgery, all the cosmetic procedures, had been a legitimised form of self-harm — scalpels in place of razor blades, cautery probes in place of lit cigarettes — physical pain to help relieve the deeper pain.
Over the years (how many years? — too many — he’d stopped counting birthdays after his hundredth), he’d become ever more streamlined, ever less human. He’d chiselled away at his body, pruning the superfluities, reducing himself by increments, paling into the background. And with time, the lifts and peels were succeeded by more experimental procedures, alterations and refinements, gerontological treatments to keep him a boyman, undecayed through the decades ... then came procedures more experimental still.
Others had done something similar, of course. Most who could afford it were altering themselves in some way or other these days; the transhumanists, the posthumanists. But he’d always been the first. Michael Jackson had been posthuman before there was a word for it.
And now — now he’s post-posthuman: original body little more than a memory; limbs replaced with ailerons and other control surfaces; face flowered into a pallid little radio-telescope headgarden ...
Grub to butterfly, that’s what it feels like. Metamorphosis: painful, emancipating, beautiful. A delicious stretching of long-cramped wings.
But as he continues to track the boy below, he knows he is still not entirely free. The paradox is not lost on him: for true liberty, one always needs the ties of love ...
He wonders if he might work the sentiment up into a song.
* * * *
Disconsolate, Salim slopes and ducks through the souk, the tight alleys of the Medina opening into the Boulevard Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdelah — the old city giving way to the hotel district; art deco palaces; the Idler’s Terrace; the El-Minzah with its dark lush courtyards; the Cafe Haffa zizzing with cocaine and Tangier jazz — Salim a bit of local colour here, an authentic ragamuffin on display for the edification of the tourists ... He runs along the Rue Dar Dbagh, across the square to the Tangier Ville Station; and from there down an incline, through a hole in a chainlink fence, to his home under a rail bridge.
A freight train kachunkachunks overhead. Soot rains down.
Salim pushes through brocaded fabric into the little house he has made; a tepee assembled from his mother’s old clothing: scavenged bits of lumber supporting her kaftans and djellabas, her foulard scarves and embroidered pantaloons, shirts and wide ornate belts — the eyegrilles of her burqas forming slit-windows.
It is a fantastic object, naive art, an unintentional masterpiece (and indeed, when Michael Jackson’s scouts first sent images of it to him a few weeks ago, he began to suspect Salim might be the boy for him).
Inside, wrapped in the mothersmell, Salim flicks a stolen keychain LED to life. Its light glints from her jewellery, cheap amulets, charms, a khamsa pendant pinned to the fabric, its swinging eye warding off evil.
The sin’s cord hangs slackly in his fingers. He considers what Tahar said, that Salim might sell it on the street if he could discover what was in it...
To hesitate would be to give the fear time to take hold. Quickly, he tugs down his collar and touches the connector to the back of his neck, as he’s seen the Westerners do.
The pins wake at once — ultrafine, moist with local anaesthetic — reaching out to slip into his pores; deeper, under his skin — then deeper still.
Suddenly he is sliding sideways into sleep. There’s just time to lay his head down ...
And he is dreaming about his mother. It is the dream he always has — that last night, in their rooms ... and it is cold, so she tucks him into the blankets, and she, hacking, wheezing, the pneumonia in both lungs by then, wraps herself in a discarded swatch of lighter-than-air bubblewrap, helium blisters keeping her an inch or so above the rammed earth floor as she nods off, coughing, shivering, fading ... And then, as it always does, the dream moves forward, hours later when he wakes to the realisation of silence — no more coughing, no more wheezing — and for a little while he enjoys the quiet.
Then he realises what it means. He rises to find her, her corpse bobbing in the air by the closed door, like a pet wanting to be let out... this is the point at which the dream normally ends, leaving Salim awake and weeping.
But now it does not end. The dream-Salim is surprised to find himself opening the door for her, and his mother’s smile is grateful, the smile he remembers, farewelling and forgiving her sinning boy as she begins her journey towards paradise. Jannah, the Home of Peace, where the righteous recline on green cushions in gardens with fountains and streams of clear running water, where the north wind sprays scent upon them and enhances their beauty ... (and even in his sleep, even in the deepest parts of his dream, he can feel the mod, its soft incursions, its butterfly touches at the edges of his thoughts, a dust of scales in the mind’s eye ... )
He wakes. Midmorning sunlight streams through the eyegrille windows.
He rises and pushes out into the world, strong and unafraid. He glances back at his tent, considering for the first time that he might sell a few of his mother’s effects, raise a bit of money that way. Somehow he’s sure she wouldn’t mind.
He stretches and looks about. The Tangier-Marrakech bullet train is in the station. So beautiful, so powerful. He glances up at the broken sky visible between the girders of the railbridge.
And then he’s flat on his back, gasping with a delight too huge to be borne.
The sky. What has happened to it?
It is made of bliss.
* * * *
The mod is an addiction, as Tahar surmised. An addiction to the colour blue.
Based on the cortical architecture of the male Satin Bowerbird of Australia, it alters the wearer so that to see blue is to know joy. The effect is such that even the dirty Moroccan sky (postcard-blue, yes, but the blue of a postcard many years old, faded and smirched and smeared with greasy fingerprints) is utter beauty.
Salim breathes it in, feeling unworthy. How had he never seen it before? How could people walk about under it so blithely?
He lies there a long while, until clouds gather and his high dissipates. Then he moves on, climbing back up to the street, reentering the city, eager for more blues.
He dives into the turbulent deeps of Tangier, a wash of warm colours, splashes of terracotta and opium and dust. But that’s okay, because the scarcity of the blue makes it all the more precious whenever he finds it. He’s a treasure hunter, searching out gems, little bits of delight — the bleu-de-Fez tiles in the mosaics on the walls of the richer houses — the purpleblue threads in the hanging carpets of the weaver’s district — the clothes and hides and exoskeletons of various tourists — the pots in the market stalls, often just tourist trash; but the blues, the cobalts, the ultramarines ... And then, at the dye sellers, the mounds of colour — just pure colour — indigo, hardcore, straight from the source ... Crying out with the pleasure of it, he sits, plonk, just like that, in the middle of the street. He is overcome, all his troubles forgotten. Some passers-by look at him, others look away. The sight of a young person drunk on gasohol is not uncommon in Morocco.
The high fades once more. He needs a new blue, always a new blue, pulling him on. He’s tuned to it, following its vibrations to the Dar el Makhzen Museum. He slips by the guards to drink in the blue-frescoed ceilings, the plasterworks, the silks, the enamelled metal pots, the mosaic of Venus on a sea voyage — and it is the glass waves under her boat that ravish him, not Venus at all.
Then he’s out again, back on the street, perhaps tossed out, perhaps of his own accord, he neither knows nor cares. His need is stronger, helping him find the lucent greyblue of a stray cat’s eyes, then the iridescent turquoise of alien weeds brought as spores on visiting ships. By midday he discovers he can smell blue, its odourless scent pulling him through and through the city.
His desire is a muscular thing, pressing against his organs. He is breathing hard, cold and hot at once.
He pushes on, never noticing another, older boy, who spots him and begins to keep pace (and above, lenses flourish and slick. Michael Jackson’s avionics squirm. Should he do something? Not yet, not yet... He waits, his verniers fluting the tune of his early single ‘Shoo Be Doo Bee Do Da Day’).
Salim moves on, finding blue where others might not: a hint at the base of the smoke rising from a charcoal cooking fire; a suggestion in the sheen of a carcass in a butcher’s stall; a layer of paint on a house, hidden by its current colour, but still there, still muffledly humming.
But Salim is never satisfied. He stumbles down the Boulevard Mohamed VI (Michael Jackson watching as the older boy unfolds a cellophane cellphone and makes a call).
Suddenly, Salim stops. His breath quietens. Over the clamour of the city he hears something.
A crash of waves, the cry of a gull. His head lifts.
Of course.
He runs, leaps. Over a low wall, past the Café Celine Dion, around the back, losing a sandal as he scrambles under a fence, through the backyard of an old colonial house — a dog barking, chasing him onward — across a midden, cutting his heel, blood flows, doesn’t matter — then out the front.
Onto the beach. The sea, the surf. Waves of joy.
Weeping, he falls to his knees. He begins shuffling forward through the sand like a penitent.
A shout behind him. He turns, if only to share the joy.
It is Uncle Baba with two of his boys. Salim smiles. The man looks silly with his British-style pinstripes and polished brogues on the beach.
Uncle Baba says something Salim cannot hear, something about money. Salim shakes his head and turns back to the sea. Who needs money when there is this to be had?
He stands and walks on. He will enter it, drown in the blue.
A hand whirls him around. It’s Baba, who raises his fist — and freezes, looking behind Salim in horror.
Baba runs, his boys behind him.
Glancing back, Salim is annoyed to see his view of the sea has been blocked by a spaceship.
He looks at it disinterestedly. It is covered with a fur of innumerable tiny lifting surfaces — a fractal wing; the equivalent of a two-kilometre wingspan fuzzing the vessel’s lines, the merest breezes pushing it this way and that, keeping it half-aloft, touching but lightly on the earth.
Graceful landing gear drum manicured fingernails on the sand. A door opens, and a voice calls, soft and faltering. Blue spills from the opening, bluer even than the sea. It pulls him forward.
The ship sighs with pleasure as Salim enters it. He looks around for whoever it was who called to him. There is no one.
The voice Salim heard was the spaceship’s. Its name, as he will learn in coming days, is Michael.
The door closes, but Salim isn’t worried. It is warm, and there is food and drink and many splendours. And all is lit blue ... Such a blue ...
The ship speaks again to Salim, soft English words that he does not understand, but the tones are soothing as the vessel rises, a little uncertain at first, wobbling up into the stratosphere, gaining confidence as it reaches escape velocity, the sky unfurling — a rolling glory of stars — the ship accelerating now, its dreaming engines driving it ever faster, the wavelengths of the stars ahead Dopplering, shifting bluer and bluer.
And together Michael Jackson and his new friend laugh and dance as they shake off the sad old dirt of the world for the delights of the heavens.
Moonwalking without end into the blue forevers of Neverland.
* * * *
AFTERWORD
Those who are denied a healthy childhood often remain emotional children in their adult years. In many ways, ‘Neverland Blues’ is a childhood fable, Michael Jackson playing the role of the fairy godmother. Many who have read this story have found Jackson’s transformation, from popstar to spaceship, strange. It never seemed strange to me at all. Indeed, it’s always felt almost inevitable — so much so that I wrote it in a hurry, lest the man himself make fiction into reality before I could get it published.
— Adam Browne