by Rohan Wilson
‘That shit won’t come off,’ Rin tells him.
‘I can try,’ Hassan says. ‘I can do something.’
This is not the place to do anything. People are crashing past us, streaming through the exits, but the crashing and streaming is the least of our worries. In the misty distance the drones break formation and wade into the crowd. You can tell the drones have understood the enormity of the problem. Four thousand Unlawful Non-Citizens are breaching the outermost perimeter and escaping—this is a problem of some consequence. The drones lose any urge to caution and give us everything they have.
‘Yammy,’ she says. ‘We’ve got to move.’
And I do, I do move. I follow her into the sun. Hassan is prying at the foamy pink gunk on Nazeem’s legs and he doesn’t see the drone draw up behind him and pause. This machine has a black stain on its chest plating from where someone has lobbed a napalm bomb at it. Plating, police lights, wires, and polymer muscles—it’s a distressing sight. For a second I feel a tremor in my stomach as the drone makes its calculations over Hassan. He tears the last foam off Nazeem’s right leg and is starting on the left when the drone opens with a blast of pepper. The jet force sends Hassan skidding along the concrete. It’s soapy and thick, the pepper, and Hassan slips about in it like a newborn foal. Rin is pulling me by the hand but I stop her. We have to stop.
What happens next fills me with vertiginous awe, as if I’ve looked off the rim of a high building. The drone steps forward, steps over Nazeem, but with its bulk and its big weapon-ready arms it loses sight of Hassan. Its sensor array swivels in a wild quest to understand. It seems not to realise that Hassan is beneath its chassis, slipping about in the fluid and blinded. When its broad, clawed foot comes down, Hassan is crushed. He wears a brief expression of shock, his eyes straining as he feels the pressure, then when the full weight of the platform settles, he vomits forth a quantity of blood. The drone keeps its foot there while it scans about and douses fleeing men in restraining foam. Hassan slowly falls still.
‘Oh no,’ I say and it feels trivial. ‘Oh no. No.’ It’s what my heart wants to say and yet it weighs nothing and sounds foolish. No no no. It’s lost instantly among the shouting and crashing of the escape.
‘Come on. What are you doing?’
Rin pulls me along by the t-shirt. I hardly care to walk. There’s no animating force inside me, there’s no thought in my head. Still, she shoves me towards the fence that is covered with men climbing to freedom. A long section begins to bend and break under the mass of so many men and now there’s a path outward and we are swept up in the surge as the thousands of us cross the perimeter into the vegetation outside the facility.
‘Put on your glasses,’ Rin says.
I free them from my pocket. Bent, battered, but usable.
‘Here,’ she says and sends me a map. ‘We’re going to this place.’
A virtual arrow appears on the ground ahead as a guide.
‘Do you see it?’
It points deeper into the trees.
‘Yammy?’
I don’t answer, I don’t care. All I do is follow the arrow.
Yet I am who I am. As we breach the tree line the desire to look back, driven by the childish hope that perhaps Hassan has appeared, is too powerful to ignore. There are so many men that it’s nothing but a sea of black hair. And then behind them, as large as a freightliner, is the manufactory. A ponderous smoke balloons from the windows on the outer wall and there are flashes of fire within it. The manufactory is burning. Even something as big and sovereign and permanent as the manufactory is burning.
I think about Hassan and his bravery and how it’s reduced to nothing. Hassan—the most courageous of men. I think about my mother reaching up with her paintbrush to dab at the ceiling and my father in his cell hunched over the tablet he’d bought with Rin’s corrupt US dollars and the water so full of debris it has turned black. The water rising and them struggling and then nothing. My mother and my father and my country and then nothing. It’s all reduced to nothing by the great state of loss in which we live. The loss and the failure of lives that are always wasted, because they must be wasted. We’re powerless to live any other way.
The scrub of ferns and shrubs and eucalypts stretches on for some distance. The glasses are giving me the names of species—tussock grass, wattle, banksia, blue gum. It has an alien feeling, this forest. It makes me queasy. Rin cuts ahead and I fight through the understorey to keep up but she is smaller, she is faster, and she feels the police at her heels. Elsewhere in the bush we hear the cries and calls of the escapees. Where will they go? What a terrible, grim joke Howland has played on us. After a long while Rin crouches on a fallen log and looks back along our trail.
‘Holy fuck,’ she says. ‘Holy fuck.’
I have no words.
‘Who was that guy anyway?’
I put my head in my hands.
‘Hey,’ she says. She clutches me to her chest. ‘This is good. We got you out. We got you out.’
I hug her waist and feel the softness of her belly on my forehead.
‘It was Hassan,’ I say.
‘Was he, like, your friend?’
‘Yes, very much like that.’
She’s breathing hard. She’s worried. Well, she ought to be worried. She freed four thousand men from an immigration training facility. Yes, she ought to be worried.
Some way further into the forest we hear the humming of airborne drones and Rin says they’ll be tracking us. Heat signatures. Advanced acoustics. With a handful of these, they can track everyone in the forest. There’s a futility to our breakout that she is not yet ready to admit and she forges ahead in her stubbornness with a glance over her shoulder every so often to make sure I’m still following. And I am, I am still following, although somewhere in the cracks of my soul I know how it will end. It will end in police stations, it will end in courtrooms, it will end in the hardest of defeats. What future now for any of us?
The brush thins and we find the terrain easier for a time and then, without warning, we’re standing on the edge of a bay of black water and it’s the strangest sight you can imagine. This bay, this cove, is ringed about by forested hills that are pitted here and there with old-style English homes in a sandy sort of brick. Homes? In fact, I’m not sure. There’s a roofless, broken church; there’s a road that terminates dumbly at the water; there’s a mighty triple-height ruin that may have been a warehouse or a factory emerging from the water. As my gaze lingers, the glasses feed me details about the place. Port Arthur. A penitentiary. The last address for prisoners transported from England in the nineteenth century. But as the sea leisurely rises with the Arctic meltwater the site is being swallowed. I experience a strange dissonance as I realise we Maldivians are not the first prisoners on this island.
‘It’s here,’ Rin says. ‘Thank God. Thank God.’
There’s a ferry. We watch a line of tourists board across a gangway.
‘It’ll take us to Hobart,’ she says.
Now I catch on. She thinks there’s a way out of this.
‘Come on. We’ve got to go.’
My whole body aches. An after-effect of the electricity, yes, but more than that. It aches in a way I can’t stand. Deep in the bones, deep in the heart. This brave, loyal, soft-hearted girl. I ache with tenderness for her. I ache with loss for Hassan. She pulls me by the hand but I remain rooted in place. She’s looking at me with irritation, that furrow between the eyes that I know so well.
‘Come on,’ she says.
She pulls and I resist.
‘Yammy. It’s right there. We just have to get on.’
She must see something in my bearing. She squares up to me.
‘What?’
I shake my head.
‘No,’ she says. ‘No fucking way. Don’t you do this to me.’
‘Be calm. Please be calm.’
‘We’re getting on that boat. You and me. Right now.’
‘It’s impossible. Yo
u know that.’
‘Impossible? What did you just say to me before? We passed impossible a long while ago. We are not stopped by such a small thing as impossible. You said that to me.’
I wince. ‘That was, well, to be honest that was a line from a movie.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘Rin, I don’t have a passport. I don’t have a visa. There’s no chance for me.’
‘Stop talking and get on that boat.’
‘You need to leave me here.’
‘No fucking way.’
‘Without me, you can take a plane. You can fly away.’
She growls in frustration.
‘They don’t know where you are. Think about what that means. Four thousand escaped men and the police have to find them. They don’t even know you’re missing. But in a few hours, they will. In a few hours, they’ll come searching for you.’
She holds my gaze for a long time. There’s a fight inside her that plays across her face. The pressing of the lips, the darting of the eyes. It’s a fight her Heart cannot win though and as that knowledge sinks in there is a softening of her features. A softening, I like to think, of the hard shell of her anger. We look long into each other’s eyes.
‘This doesn’t mean I’m leaving you here,’ she says. ‘I’m not leaving you here.’
‘I know that.’
‘This is temporary.’
‘Temporary,’ I say. ‘Let’s hope so.’
‘You better mean that. You better not be leaving me alone again.’
‘Believe me, I’d rather be coming with you.’
She kisses me then and it hurts. The old pain, the rooted pain that only Rin Braden can give me. But there’s something about this kiss that communicates a larger story. Our bodies draw together. I cup the back of her head. We entwine so tightly that for a few moments I have the illusion that her limbs are my limbs and her warmth is my warmth. It’s the story of us. A fiction, but a beautiful fiction. For a second only and then it passes. Then I open my eyes and there she is, as profoundly unknowable as ever. Unknowable and yet she presses her head to my chest in a way that I recognise. It means, don’t leave me. It means, please stay.
Pulling out of the trees on the bank of the hill is a Tasmania Police SUV. It halts by the church and fires its big bracket of floodlights into the settling dusk. Two officers in uniform exit and take a walk out to where they can lift their binoculars to glass the fringe of the trees. Those trees are teeming with escaped men. I can hear these men calling in fear. Rin hears it too. I feel her tense up. I want to hide her somewhere safe, in a cupboard, under a bed, somewhere, anywhere. But I can’t protect her. In fact, and at the end of everything, it’s she who protects me. She pushes me away and turns. As she crosses the lawn to the pier the pulse thuds so hard behind my eyes that she seems to grow and shrink. Even though she’s dusty, and her pants are torn, and there’s a CYC plaser tucked into her belt, when she reaches the tourists grouping for the ferry she blends in.
I stand there until the ferry has ploughed a long sleek channel through the bay and disappeared. Only when it has disappeared do I walk to the police and tell them who I am.
From: Shinji Hoshino, Ministry of Justice
To: Rin Braden
Subject: RE: I need your help …
Date: Sunday, 18 February 2074
What strange times we live in, when an old man like me can find himself in the middle of a diplomatic incident! I have to say, it’s a little exciting, even if your message gave me a lot of trouble. And it did give me a lot of trouble, let me just make that clear. There’s a press conference this morning and I’m going to feel the heat over this. The Americans and the Australians want to arrest you. Since last night, I’ve been shifting from one meeting to another and from one call to another, trying to find a position for the minister to take. Nevertheless … it’s exciting!
Of course, Rin, you know that under this rough exterior beats a heart of gold. We share a special connection, you and I. Like I always tell you, you’re the daughter I never had (well, the rough and sometimes bad-tempered daughter). You thought throwing me to the floor was great sport and my arm was sore for days but I’m not holding it against you. No. You can trust me to take care of your situation.
Still, this is a matter of national sovereignty. The minister won’t be pushed around by imperialists, that much I promise you, and to that end we’ve had the lawyers going through your koseki. From what they can tell, your birth was recorded correctly in the Akashi registration office, with the mother given as Misaki Sakurai and no name recorded for the father. Rin Sakurai, eh? What a pretty name. How fitting that it uses the kanji for cherry blossom. You truly are a flower …
Anyway, that makes you Japanese under the law. And because there’s no record of anyone renouncing your citizenship, as far as the minister is concerned you never ceased being a citizen. You’re now a Japanese on Japanese soil. The Americans and the Australians are spitting into the wind. They can’t take you anywhere.
No one likes seeing a woman in handcuffs. Certainly, the minister doesn’t and neither does the Japanese public at large. But if you want this to blow over, I’d say you should talk to the FBI and the AFP. Just talk to them. That way, we can show we’re playing along. It would also take some of the heat off the minister. Would you do me that favour?
There’s another matter, too. Your mother made a huge donation to the minister’s re-election fund this morning. Your mother—that gets confusing, doesn’t it? I mean Braden-san. Braden-san made a huge (huge!) donation today which helped us to sort this out more quickly. She’s extremely generous. It must be tough for her, watching you become trapped in the country. You realise, I suppose, that you can never leave after this. The second you do, the Americans will arrest you. So here’s some fatherly advice from me: don’t take Braden-san for granted. Anyone who loves you that much deserves some time and attention. I know there’s trouble between you. I don’t know what it is. It doesn’t matter. You owe her a duty. Consider that advice from your father.
So. Once this dies down a little, I’ve found a new club in Ginza. BlastRoom. You’re going to love it. Promise me we’ll have a drink together?
The Hon. Sophia Rose Kwong MP
Prime Minister
Minister for Truth and Justice
MEDIA RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE DISTRIBUTION
18 SEPTEMBER 2075
The policies of the previous government created a tragedy.
I promised to change those policies and that’s what I’m doing.
Earlier this year, we called a royal commission to investigate the systemic failures that led to rioting in the Eaglehawk Migrant Training Centre.
Today, we welcome the findings of the Ambrose Royal Commission.
In his report, the commissioner outlined sixty-seven recommendations and we will take action on each and every one of them.
We’ll end our partnership with Cabey-Yasuda Corrections and redirect that $5.9 billion investment towards building a new network of migrant training centres with our corporate partner, GeoCivic.
We’ll strengthen the screening process for new immigrants to weed out anyone who isn’t prepared to work hard.
We’ll establish integration programs that teach Australian values to recent arrivals.
We’ll improve the way both detention enforcement officers and police respond to emergencies inside migrant centres.
And in order to put a stop to detainee violence, we’ll extend the use of intelligent security systems that can track dangerous behaviour.
The commissioner also recommended the creation of a joint task force comprising the Australian Federal Police, Tasmania Police, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to pursue the extradition of Rin Sakurai back to Australia.
We’ve provided $50 million for the task force to do its job.
We support the fight to bring Rin Sakurai to justice.
My sweet girl,
I try to write this
and keep second-guessing myself. Should I come across as upbeat? Should I act motherly and calm? Or should I let my feelings out and speak honestly? I don’t know if this is the right way, but I’m just going to say what I’m thinking. You can ignore me—I expect you’ll ignore me. I deserve that. You’ve ignored me for months and another message probably won’t change anything. But understand that what I’m saying is the plainest way I can speak. It’s so plain that I feel freed and unburdened as I write it. What do I have to hide? What do I have to lose?
They say my condition is ‘life limiting’.
Whole days pass where I give up. I’ve had enough. Find me some morphine and put me out. Please, just put me out for good. Then other moments come that are only a few breaths long where the pain lessens and my thoughts clear and I remember holding you as a little girl. In those moments, my profoundest wish is to live to see you again. You can’t understand how much I miss you. You probably don’t care and I deserve that too. But the fact is I miss you so much it chokes the air in my throat.
I don’t ask the doctors how limiting my condition is because it would start me off on negotiation. Give me another month, another week, another day. I’m trying my best to stop pleading with doctors. It takes everything I have to keep my composure when they’re here. Of all the things I’ve overcome in my life to get to where I am, it’s my brain that finally brings me down. Not the board, not a politician, or a protest group, but my own damn brain. I’d be laughing if I wasn’t so terrified.
I had three seizures yesterday. The first one shook me so hard I fell out of bed and knocked over a machine. I don’t even remember the other two but my nurse, Miguel, said they were bad. No, I’m not fucking Miguel. Yes, he is beautiful. I told him that he’s the last man who’ll ever see me naked and he said then let the men of the world weep with envy. The Latinos always know how to make me feel like a woman.
I’ve been a cold and closed person most of my life and you know that better than anyone. The only visitors now are blood drinkers. Lawyers. Bankers. Board members. I’ve signed everything over to you and they want to talk me out of it.
