by Rohan Wilson
I like that Hassan fought. I like that he carries his wife’s fourth grade report card in his pocket. Hawwa has many opinions, it says. Hawwa finds much humour in other people’s stupidity, it says. I never met Hawwa but I like her. I like Hassan too, but the past and his losses have left him twitchy.
‘You’re recording this?’ he says in Dhivehi.
‘I’m recording.’
‘They’re going to kill them. Make sure you record it.’
He stands close by, gripping my wrist to keep my eyes trained on the riot officers. The viewer count in the stream ticks over to five thousand. A fellow is pinned beneath a shield by two thugs and zip-tied around the feet and five thousand people watch it with me. A can of gas spins on the ground and five thousand people see it fizzle to an end. This is the best I can do. Show them the truth. It’s what my father did. But I am not my father.
‘A machine,’ Howland says. ‘That’s what this place is.’
He’s leaning on the wall beside me. I keep my eyes straight ahead.
‘A machine for making violence. It justifies its own existence. They treat us as criminals and then, when we act as criminals, which is what they want, they attack us.’
I watch the Emergency Response Team douse a man with pepper spray.
‘The natural outcome is always violence,’ Howland says.
‘We want visas,’ I say. ‘We don’t want to hurt anyone.’
‘No,’ Hassan says. ‘I don’t want to hurt anyone.’
‘You’ve had a gutful of this,’ Howland says. ‘I can see it.’
We look at each other.
‘You’ve already lost. They’re not going to let you out. Forget about visas. Forget all that shit.’ The ruts in his forehead deepen as he leans towards us. ‘Muslims. Brown men like you. Believe me, they’re never giving you visas. They never were.’
It’s easy to agree with him. We’ve been lured here with lies, after all.
‘This is about justice now,’ he says. ‘Let me make one call and I can stop them.’
‘Be serious.’
‘One call and I will send those bastards back.’
‘That’s impossible.’
‘Give me the glasses. You’ll see.’
He holds out his hand.
Wrestle with the truth and be brought to ground, or so my father would say. Something ratchets over and clicks in my mind, a heavy knowledge, thick and heavy, and I understand that Howland is probably right. They won’t let us into Australia, not anymore. We’ll be called Islamists and jihadis. Ordinary Australians will see the damage we’ve caused here and that will be the end. Violent, angry Muslims. Who would want us? Perhaps it’s the hunger, or some lingering effect from my chest wounds. I sway. I focus my eyes on Howland. The colours in the dormitory swirl into a whitish whole. And then it subsides. And then I hand him the glasses.
‘Good man,’ he says.
He walks to a corner of the dormitory. I don’t hear the conversation. The call is brief. When he removes the glasses and turns to me there’s a snarling sort of quality in the way his nostrils pump.
‘Right,’ he says. ‘Let’s go.’
‘He’s making it up,’ Hassan says to us in Dhivehi.
‘He brought us cola, didn’t he?’ Rasheed says.
But Howland is already on the march.
‘You can’t take the glasses,’ I say to him. I follow him to the stairwell. ‘No, wait. Hey!’
I see the top of his head descending. I run after him.
The recreation yard is ugly in the cold sun of afternoon. Everywhere the men move in a dull, dazed fashion. None have slept. Some stand around talking and waving banners and others sit hugging their legs. If it wasn’t for the fires and the curling sea break of black smoke it might have been any other day. I step over a boy lying on the gravel. I push through a group of Bangladeshis. Howland is passing the blue gum when I spot him. He’s walking in the manner of a bodybuilder with his arms out wide, towards G and F pods. Beyond G and F lies the western perimeter.
He’s standing hard against the inner fence when I find him. His hands are hooked in the cross weave and he’s peering through the wire. You can hear the hum of the electrified outer fencing some metres away. Between the fences is a no man’s land covered with gravel and the shoes and t-shirts that angry, desperate men have tossed. In that second, I see there’s a woman outside the perimeter. She’s crouching in a patch of scrub and she’s dressed in black with her hood up and a baseball cap low over her eyes. In one powerful movement, she rises from the bushes and flings a rubbish bag in a spin like a hammer thrower.
We both look up. It streaks high above the coils of razor wire. It crashes in the dust and rolls to a stop. Howland turns. He’s too far away. I reach for the bag and take it.
‘Careful,’ he says.
It’s heavy. It smells of chemicals. I unknot the neck and open it.
‘A little present,’ he says.
Bottles of detergent. A tin of petrol. Something else too. I reach inside. An aerosol can with a blowtorch attachment.
He takes a few steps towards me but I drag the bag further away.
‘Don’t go to water on me now,’ he says. ‘You’re better than that.’
‘What is it for?’
‘We have every right to destroy a system that seeks to destroy us.’
‘Destroy it? What are you talking about?’
‘Our weakness provokes them. Our existence provokes them. They’ll never leave us alone, Yammy.’
‘This isn’t the right way.’
‘Your father thought it was the right way.’
The air goes out of me. I’d told him about Moosa and the prison on Maafushi during our long vigil for the first night of the strike. He wanted to know more and more about what happened. The political climate. The actions of the police. How many killed. What charges they brought against my father. Even though it made me uncomfortable, I kept answering his questions and trying to explain why my father failed. And he did fail—that’s plain to me now. Not because he sought the truth, not because he challenged the powerful, not even because he left my mother and me alone. No, these choices I can understand. My father despised what the president did to our country. We all did. No, he failed because he believed in the possibility of violent overthrow.
‘You reckon your old man would resign himself to this?’
I look down at the bag and the fuel tin inside. Enough petrol to destroy a building. I don’t think Howland wants to burn buildings.
‘It’s founded on force, Yammy. All of it. The system. The social order. That’s the game. That’s the trap. We’re all prisoners.’
‘I know that.’
‘Your father knew it.’
He’s right about my father. My father would rile up the people with a narrative. He’d reveal how the monolith of Western capitalism had come to crush them. He’d organise hunger strikes and sit-ins. And when it turned violent, as it inevitably would, because he’d given them no hope, he’d let the young lead in his place. People like Hassan. Hawwa. Rasheed. The gassed and beaten, the dead in the street before the People’s Majlis. That’s what my father would do.
‘We want visas,’ I say. ‘Not violence.’
‘That’s why you need to give me the petrol.’
I can see the glasses sticking out of his pocket. Our hope and my safety lay with those glasses.
‘If they are going to keep us here,’ he says, ‘we need to charge them a price. Let them know they deal with men, not slaves.’
‘Give me the glasses,’ I say.
‘Give me the bag.’
We stand staring at each other.
‘Who goes first?’ I say.
‘You.’
‘Me? No. You.’
I look at him for a long time. I drop the bag and take a few steps away. He plucks the glasses from his pocket and tosses them onto the gravel. ‘Where’d you get those fucking things anyway?’ he says.
I snatch them bef
ore he can change his mind. He slings the bag over his shoulder and starts tramping around the pods and it takes me a few moments to understand what he’s doing. Dozens of empty water bottles cover the ground, thrown everywhere during the protest, and he collects them into the bag.
While I’m watching this, I experience a queer prickly sickness in the belly. He fills a few of the bottles from the fuel container through a funnel he makes from half a bottle and lines them up beside the wall. Ten, twelve, fifteen of them. There’s a jug of dishwashing liquid. He shakes it and pours some into his palm. He sniffs. He spreads it about with his thumb. Then he moves along the line of bottles dosing a good amount into each that he’d filled with fuel. He makes twenty of these concoctions. He screws on the lids and shakes them and puts them in the bag.
‘Today is a day for pure men,’ he says.
He turns towards the recreation yard.
If I’m being honest, I never believed in revolution the way my father did. We lower classes are not a horde of starving, suffering Mongols kept in check by the police apparatus. That’s the fantasy of the wealthy. We don’t seek their overthrow. We’re too busy working to bother with the logic of class conflict and the end of history. We’re too busy trying to feed ourselves. I sometimes think the wealthy owe their lives to this distraction. I doubt this truth is lost on them either.
So, slipping on the glasses, I call Rin. The line rings and rings. She doesn’t answer. The best I can do right now is dictate a message.
warn them. howland has firebombs. tell men to withdraw.
I send it. Van Hooj and the other DEOs are in danger. What I hope is that lives are spared. These men, they’ve tormented us for months and made our lives hard. They laugh at us, hit us and treat us like slaves. But they also help when we need help. They bend rules, they lie for us, and sometimes they even seem to care. My father lost sight of the humanity of his enemies and I’m not going to make the same mistake.
There’s the distant sound of shouting, the distant clatter of batons on shields as I head for the recreation yard to record what’s about to happen. Howland is walking among the men in front of Red Gate, handing out bottles, shouting and pointing and shoving people. I restart the live stream. I pan left and right so that everyone will see. Off in the distance, the Emergency Response Team still holds position. They’ve lowered their helmet visors and their shields wink like panes of glass. I pause. The camera settles on Howland.
I call Rin again. No answer.
So, I forward the stream to her, with a message attached: do you see this?
Some of the men are shaking the bottles and holding them to the light and some unscrew the lids and sniff and some, the shrewd, toss the bottles away or pass them to someone else, to anyone who’ll take it. I wonder if the camera system is still functional. Surely the camera system will see what’s going on? Surely it will alert someone? Looking around now, I realise many of the black domes have been covered—with mud or cloth or paper. I also realise the crowd is moving. Howland is waving his arms, exhorting them forward.
‘Them out there,’ he calls. ‘Them out there with their government arms. Their kevlar. They are the problem.’
A can of gas comes flying from behind the line of shields and bounces and rolls hissing among the group. Howland puts a rag to his face. He kicks the can away.
‘Move away,’ Van Hooj says through his bullhorn. A screech of feedback follows. ‘Back to your pods. Move.’
‘You’re nothing to them,’ Howland calls to the CERTs. ‘You’re figures on a balance sheet. Why die for that?’
‘Final warning, Daniel. Move back.’
‘It’s a changing order. Change with us.’
‘Stop there. Stop. Stop.’
Howland does not stop. He flings the bottle. Gobs of greenish liquid sparkle in the air. It hits the wall of shields and splashes and the bottle rolling at their feet chugs out the last of it. As the smell rises, there’s a shift among the officers. They backstep. They turn to each other. You can see the awareness spread from one to the next, with the smell, with the reactions. The line breaks apart. In their haste to fall back, they collide and one fellow drops his shield and another falls on his backside.
Now it really starts.
Bottles fly. The napalm sprays over their helmets and armour. They’re wiping at themselves and some remove the parts of the armour that are contaminated and some fling aside their shields and tear off their helmets. You can tell they’re not trained for this. No one knows what to do. I circle left for a better angle and zoom in tight and I understand that Van Hooj has lost them. They’re spreading, they’re panicking. He calls through his bullhorn and no one listens. I send another message.
rin, do you see what’s happening? please. call them away.
I pan across to Howland and let the camera focus and it’s so mundane, an everyday sight, to see the long blue tongue of the blowtorch. He lights a stick, waits for it to flare, then lobs it. I find it hard to comprehend the weight of that act. It is simply a series of images. The smoke as it traces upwards and dips into a slow descent. The sparks as it strikes an officer on the forearm. The flame rippling to life as a sheet of pure sunlight.
It’s not until they scream that I feel anything.
The light leaps in a wave, a rush of colour, wrapping the officers in a bright blanket. They slap their arms and legs. One rolls on the ground. I think he’s the one screaming, but it’s hard to tell behind the visor. It’s hard to tell as my ears are full of the running of my heart. Another is tearing at his armour while still holding tight to a bullhorn. Van Hooj. The others catch him and beat him with their hands and shields. They throw him to the ground. I try to hold the glasses steady. His arm is aflame and he’s tearing at the armour to remove it when his other arm also flares up. Now he drops the bullhorn. He must be covered in fuel. The flames leap to his chest and his back. He crawls away like a toddler—towards what? I don’t know. I watch it happen. I’m thinking to myself: the man who tried to lift our spirits with a game of cricket, who bowled his medium pace to us for hours when no one else would, this man is dying. The flames are coming off him in sheets. The heat ripples in the air. He crawls until his arms give out and he plants his face in the gravel.
I am watching with a sort of astonishment. My heart bucks like a skipjack.
The Emergency Response Team breaks up. They back away. I centre the camera on them and zoom in. One of the Maldivians picks up a can of pepper spray dropped in the chaos. It takes him a second to figure it out, a second of pushing and squeezing but when he sprays the line of officers, the effect is immediate. They drop their shields and grab their faces. They slip and stumble. He sprays another man, this one still alight, and the long jet catches fire. The sudden light it gives off illuminates Red Gate and glints off the row of visors. He sprays fire across the front rank.
This proves to be the end of them.
The DEOs take flight through the yard, all in a pack, knocking people from their path. I film them approaching and I turn, panning as they pass, tracking up the hill towards the admin block. They reek of petrol. Many are blackened and smoking. These ones move in a hobbling stagger. At the sallyport to the admin building they form up before the gate. When I pan down the slope I see how, in their haste, in their fear, they’ve left Van Hooj behind.
He lies face down. Flames snap back and forth. Some Maldivians try to reach for him but the heat drives them back. Another man throws a sheet to smother the fire, a sheet scrawled with slogans. Visa. Freedom. Van Hooj is perfectly still. He must be dead. For his sake, I hope he’s dead. A man burning that way does not want to live. I pan across the crowd and catalogue the different states of distress. Many of the protesters are showing true despair and they put their hands on their heads and look to the sky. I see one man shouting. Another openly weeps. We know, every one of us, that our strike has turned to catastrophe. For the first time in weeks, I find myself talking to God. I tell him to wake up. I tell him to open his eyes. B
ut, after all, who am I talking to? It’s the babble of the mind—no one hears it.
I remove the glasses and sit in the dirt.
Sometimes the proper answer is silence.
I sit for a long time. In my hand, the glasses are tapping. They tap again. It takes all my effort to replace them on my nose. A message bubble appears.
we have a problem. wipe the glasses. destroy them.
It’s from Rin. I read the words again and again. It takes me a while to process. I reply:
what is wrong? where are you?
I stare at the bubble, waiting.
admin building. detained. police coming to arrest me.
My insides seem to resonate. I read the message again and again, trying to figure out if I’ve misunderstood. She’s detained, she will be arrested. I look across at the burning body and I look down at my hands. She’s detained, she will be arrested. Over the next seconds my body loses its inner war. My head slumps and I rest my forehead on the gravel. I breathe in the dust and dirt and dampness and try to forestall that awful moment, that final wreck, when I allow myself the truth.
Perhaps it’s minutes. Time spins and stretches. Perhaps it’s merely seconds. But the next thing I understand is the feeling of footsteps coming past, ranks of them. I lift my head and little rocks rain down my face. It takes me some moments to recognise Howland. He’s walking up the slope surrounded by men, some masked, some half naked, one man carrying a shield and baton and another in a helmet and visor. They hold banners that say We Are Human. Some are carrying the plasers and cans of pepper spray dropped by the officers. They walk in a pack past dormitory pods, past the heaps of smouldering mattresses and chairs. The sun is high overhead and pools a shadow at their feet. Howland doesn’t even look at me.
He and his men stop outside the admin block. Along a wire enclosed sallyport of a dozen metres is a door that leads into the admin building. Here, inside this steel cage, stand the last remnant of the Centre Emergency Response Team. There’s an exchange of pepper sprays. In their cage, the officers scurry like startled crabs. They’re outnumbered fifteen or twenty to one. Howland comes forward, crouching behind a shield and fending off the yellow jets of pepper. At the gate he lights the blowtorch and holds it to the locks. Seeing this, understanding what it means, the officers retreat through the security exit. The facility is lost.
