The Destructives Read Free Page A

top floor of the townhouse to himself, with a personal library where he would read literature with a capital “L”, exploring the intangibles in the works of Levi-Strauss, Freud, Marx. Any thinker who could show him the structure beneath the surface. To compensate for the privilege of his days, he spent his nights with drugs, and the people who belonged to the drugs. A weirdcore habit permanently damaged emotional response. He lost some feeling. That seemed right, a way of minimising the pleasure he could draw from his unearned luxury.
    Beth Green’s dingy flat. Her ethnic cabinet with tiny wooden drawers containing various chemical concoctions. Her heavy-lidded confession that she was in the sweet spot of holding coils of weirdcore and a chunk of money. The slow realisation that she had been indiscrete, wandering off mid-sentence. He turned from her, gripped by the tension between them. Trying to control – trying to conceal – the onset of his need. Then he was on her, with a carved wooden statue of Buddha in his hand, threatening her. And what he did he know about threats? Nothing. But her terror schooled him in the making of threats. Effect seemed to precede cause, such was the intensity of his need: he was threatening her before he had decided to threaten her. He wanted the money but having exercised power, and terrified her, the other possibilities stunned him. With his grandmother’s power and wealth, he could kill Beth Green and get away with it. He was not the kind of man to threaten a woman. He was not the kind of man to hold a woman down against her will. He was not the kind of man to steal. Yet there he was, being all those kinds of man. This was a crucial moment. If he had continued with the drugs for one more hour, then these holidays from reality would have become a permanent vacation.
    A simple knock at the door brought him back – if not to himself then to his conscience, at least. Dr Easy had tracked him down and was waiting in the corridor throughout the crisis: witnessing, relaying, studying, feeling . Theodore dropped the carved wooden Buddha, mumbled apologies to Beth Green, opened the door to leave. Dr Easy stood in the doorway, showing him the passageway beyond, a route out of the squat and into three years of sobriety.
    To measure the extent of his emotional damage, Dr Easy reminded Theodore of the tragedy of his parents. How his mother had died of an accidental overdose when he was a baby. How his father had appeared at various points in his childhood to explain that he had tried not to be an addict but had decided that it was not worth the effort. By it , he meant fatherhood. He meant Theodore. He listened unmoved to his own sad story, numbly exploring the spiral scars on his face.
    He didn’t tell the story of Beth Green to anyone. Young men like to consider themselves handy in a fight. Some experience of violence is expected. But the one time in his life when he had come close to a violent act, it had been against a woman. A drugged woman, at that. The memory stayed in the black box. He felt its edges under his shirt. Asynchronous exosomatic memory; the black box was a book written by him that he could never read.
    He had cleaned up his drug life. Dr Easy bought him a new jacket and worked his grandmother’s contacts to get him a job as a junior accelerator at an agency. That was his profession before he became a lecturer. Theodore’s knowledge of the intangibles and his druggie nous made for a powerful skill-set. The agency assigned him to an array in orbit over Novio Magus twenty-four seven; for a junior staff member, it was a live-in position.
    Novio Magus was a megastructure on the Sussex coastline. Eight square kilometres of glass and steel built on the ruins of the towns of Lewes, Seaford, Newhaven. The foundations of the mall were laid at the end of the Seizure, six years before Theodore was born. Novio Magus was one of the arks built by the emergences for people displaced by