Global effect was said to be like Pinatubo’s eruption in 1991, or some said a double Pinatubo. The total release was taken to the stratosphere in several thousand individual missions. We had a fleet of only two hundred planes, so we each went up scores and scores of times, spread out over seven months. That was a lot of work. Of course it was a pretty small effort as these things go. And if it helped to prevent another heat wave, it was worth doing.
We knew the Chinese hated the idea, and Pakistan of course, and although we flew only when the jet streams were running toward the east or northeast, there were times when those countries lay in the path of dispersion. And all over the world people pointed out that the ozone layer would get hurt, which would be bad for everyone. Once a heat-seeking missile flew right by our plane, Vikram dodged it at the last minute, the plane squealed like a cat. No one ever found out who shot it at us. But we didn’t care. We did what we were told, we were happy to do it. Everyone had lost someone they knew in the heat wave. Even if they hadn’t, it was India. And it could happen again, anywhere in India and really anywhere in the world. As our officials told people, over and over. Even farther north a heat wave could strike. Europe once suffered one that killed seventy thousand people, even though Europe is so far north. Well more than half the land on Earth is at risk. So we did it.
Day after day for seven months. And round-the-clock, what with maintenance and refueling, and the filling of the tanks. It was a routine that took many thousands of people working together. We got tired, exhausted, but also we got into the rhythm of it. There were enough crews to fly once out of every three missions per plane. For many weeks in the middle of it, it felt like it would go on forever. That it was all we were ever meant to do. We felt like we were saving India, and maybe saving the world. But it was India we were concerned with. No more deadly heat waves. So we hoped. It was a very emotional time.
Now, if I go anywhere in the world, and if someone speaks against what we did, I challenge them. You don’t know anything, I tell them. It wasn’t your people, so you don’t care. But we know and we care. And there hasn’t been a heat wave like that since. One may come again, no doubt of that, but we did what we could. We did the right thing. I must admit, I sometimes shout at people if they deny that. I damn them to hell. Which is a place we in India have already seen. So I have no patience for people who object to what we did. They don’t know what they’re talking about. They haven’t seen it, and we have.
11
Ideology, n. An imaginary relationship to a real situation.
In common usage, what the other person has, especially when systematically distorting the facts.
But it seems to us that an ideology is a necessary feature of cognition, and if anyone were to lack one, which we doubt, they would be badly disabled. There is a real situation, that can’t be denied, but it is too big for any individual to know in full, and so we must create our understanding by way of an act of the imagination. So we all have an ideology, and this is a good thing. So much information pours into the mind, ranging from sensory experience to discursive and mediated inputs of all kinds, that some kind of personal organizing system is necessary to make sense of things in ways that allow one to decide and to act. Worldview, philosophy, religion, these are all synonyms for ideology as defined above; and so is science, although it’s the different one, the special one, by way of its perpetual cross-checking with reality tests of all kinds, and its continuous sharpening of focus. That surely makes science central to a most interesting project, which is to invent, improve, and put to use an ideology that explains in a coherent and useful way as much of the blooming buzzing inrush of the world as possible. What one would hope for in an ideology is clarity and explanatory breadth, and power. We leave the proof of this as an exercise for the reader.
12
Bypassing the imaginary relationship part for a moment, what about the real situation? Unknowable, of course, as per above. But consider this aspect of it:
Recent extinctions include the Saudi gazelle, the Japanese sea lion, the Caribbean monk seal, the Christmas Island pipstrelle, the Bramble Cay melomys, the vaquita porpoise, the Alagoas foliage-gleaner, the cryptic treehunter, Spix’s macaw, the po’ouli, the northern white rhino, the mountain tapir, the Haitian solenodon, the giant otter, Attwater’s prairie chicken, the Spanish lynx, the Persian fallow deer, the Japanese crested ibis, the Arabian oryx, the snub-nosed monkey, the Ceylon elephant, the indris, Zanzibar’s red colobus, the mountain gorilla, the white-throated wallaby, the walia ibex, the aye-aye, the vicuna, the giant panda, the monkey-eating eagle, and an estimated two hundred more species of mammals, seven hundred species of birds, four hundred species of reptiles, six hundred species of amphibians, and four thousand species of plants.
The current rate of extinctions compared to the geological norm is now several thousandfold faster, making this the sixth great mass extinction event in Earth’s history, and thus the start of the Anthropocene in its clearest demarcation, which is to say, we are in a biosphere catastrophe that will be obvious in the fossil record for as long as the Earth lasts. Also the mass extinction is one of the most obvious examples of things done by humans that cannot be undone, despite all the experimental de-extinction efforts, and the general robustness of life on Earth. Ocean acidification and deoxygenation are other examples of things done by humans that we can’t undo, and the relation between this ocean acidification/deoxygenation and the extinction event may soon become profound, in that the former may stupendously accelerate the latter.
Evolution itself will of course eventually refill all these emptied ecological niches with new species. The pre-existing plenitude of speciation will be restored in less than twenty million years.
13
Anytime he broke a sweat his heart would start racing, and soon enough he would be in the throes of a full-on panic attack. Pulse at 150 beats a minute or more. It didn’t matter that he knew he was safe, and that this panic reaction was to something that had happened long before. It didn’t matter that he lived outside Glasgow now, and had a job in a meat-processing plant that gave him access to refrigerated rooms where the temperature was kept just a few degrees above freezing. By the time an attack started it was too late; his body and mind would be plunged instantly into another terrible tornado of biochemicals, pounding through his arteries like crystal meth at its paranoid worst.
This was what people called post-traumatic stress disorder. He knew that, he had been told it many times. PTSD, the great affect of our time. As one of his therapists had once explained to him, one of the identifying characteristics of the disorder was that even when you knew it was happening to you, that didn’t stop it from happening. In that sense, the therapist admitted, the naming of it was useless. Diagnosis was necessary but not sufficient; and what might be sufficient wasn’t at all clear. There were differing opinions, differing outcomes. No treatment had been shown to be fully effective, and most were still largely experimental procedures.
Exposure to events like the event: no.
He had tried this on a visit to Kenya, out every day in temperatures that crept closer and closer to the unlivable. That had resulted in daily panic attacks, and he had curtailed the trip and gone back to Glasgow.
Virtual environments in which to explore aspects of the event: no. He had played video games that made him relive parts of the experience in ways he could control, but these games were as ugly as any M-rated travesty. Panic attacks were frequent, during the games or not.
Rehearsal therapy: he had written accounts of the event while on beta-blockers, repeating this exercise over and over. Sleepy all the time because of the beta-blockers, memoir as automatic writing: I tried to get people inside. I had a water tank in the closet. I hid what I had. The pistol barrel was a little black circle. Everybody was dead.
No good. Just more blurry sick gasping panic attacks, more nightmares.
About half the time he fell asleep, he had nightmares that woke him in a cold sweat
. Sometimes the images were sadistically cruel. After waking from one of these dreams he had to try to warm back up, so he would wiggle his cold toes, toss and turn, try to forget the dream, try to get back to sleep; but it took hours, and sometimes it didn’t work. The next day he would operate like a slow zombie, get through the day by working mindlessly, or by playing video games, mostly games in which he bounced from point to point in a low-g environment. Asteroid hopping.
His therapists talked about trigger events. About avoiding triggers. What they were glossing over with this too-convenient metaphor was that life itself was just a long series of trigger events. That consciousness was the trigger. He woke up, he remembered who he was, he had a panic attack. He got over it and got on with his day as best he could. The command not to think about certain things was precisely a mode of thinking about that thing. Repression, forgetting; he had to learn to forget. Perpetual distraction was impossible. He wanted to get better but he couldn’t.
Cognitive behavioral therapy was accepted by many as the best way to deal with PTSD. But CBT was hard. He pursued it like a religious calling, like a sidewalk over the abyss. One therapist said to him, when he used that phrase, everyone walks that sidewalk over the abyss, that’s life. Mine’s a tightrope, he replied. Focusing on balance was necessary at all times. In that sense, distractions were actually contra-indicated. If you were distracted enough, then a single misstep could send you plunging into the abyss. Constant vigilance— but this too was bad, as just another way of thinking about it, of paying attention to it. No. Hypervigilance was part of the disorder. So there was no way out. No way out but dreamless sleep. Or death.
Or certain drugs. Anti-anxiety drugs were not the same as anti-depressants. They were meant to foil the brain’s uptake of fight-or-flight stimulants. To give consciousness a bit of time to calm the system down by realizing there was no real danger. These drugs had unwanted side effects, sure. Flatness of affect, yes. It was even part of what you wanted. If you killed all feelings, the bad feelings would necessarily be among them and therefore less likely to appear, even if they were the first ones in line, ready to pop. But if you did accomplish that flattening of all feeling, then what? March through life like an automaton, that’s what. Eat like fueling an old car. Exercise hoping to get so tired you could fall asleep and make it through the night. Try not to think. Try not to feel.
So, after many months of that, after years of that, he went back to India.
He needed to try it to see if it would help. Until he tried it, he wouldn’t know. It would be something like aversion therapy, or rather immersion therapy. Go right back to the scene of the crime. Plus he had an idea that had begun to obsess him. He had a plan.
He landed at Delhi, took the train to Lucknow, got off at the station and got on a crowded bus out to his town. The sights and smells, the heat and humidity— they were all triggers, yes. But since consciousness was the real trigger, he steeled himself and looked out the bus’s dusty window and felt the sweat pouring out of his skin, felt the air pulsing in and out of his lungs, felt his heart pound inside him like a child trying to escape. Take it! Live on!
He got off at the bus stop in the town’s central square. He stood there looking around. People were everywhere, all ages, Hindu and Muslim as before, the differences subtle and sometimes not there at all, but his eye had been trained to note the signs— a tikka, a particular rounded cap. The usual mix that this town had always had, back to Akbar and before. All appeared to him as it had been four years earlier. There was no sign that what had happened had ever happened.
Surely there must be a memorial at least. He walked toward the lake, feeling his heart hammer, his skin burn. His clothes were soaked with his sweat, he drank from the water bottle he had in his daypack, just a sip each time, and yet soon it was empty. Everything pulsed, his eyes stung with sweat, behind his wrap-around sunglasses he was weeping furiously. The polarization of the glasses was not enough to keep bursts of light from shattering in his retinas. Sights incoming like needles in the eyeball, everywhere he looked.
The lake was the same. How could it be the same, how could they not have drained it, built over the site with some mausoleum or temple or just an apartment block or a bazaar?
Then again, who was there to remember what had happened here, or what it had been like that week? There were no survivors to be haunted by this place. As for those who had come in and cleaned it up, disposed of the bodies, well, it had been just one town of many, all of them the same. There was no reason to fixate on this one. No— he was the sole survivor. No one else had seen what he had seen and survived to remember it. For all the people walking on this crowded narrow sidewalk, this sad little pastiche of a corniche, it was only what it was today. No sign of a plaque, much less a memorial in the old martial style.
He walked back to the bus station. After some thought, and a trip to an open-walled store to buy more bottled water, he walked to his old offices. The building was still there. The offices were occupied by lawyers and accountants, and a dentist. Next door was a Nepali restaurant that hadn’t been there before. It was just a building. What had happened up there in those rooms—
He sat on the curb, suddenly too weak to stand. He was quivering, he put his head in his hands. It was all there in his head— every hour of it, every minute of it. The water tank in that closet.
He got up and walked back to the bus station and took the next bus back to Lucknow. There he called a number he had been given. A man answered in Hindi. In his bad Hindi he asked if he could speak in English, then switched over when the man said, “Yes, what?”
“I was there,” Frank said. “I was here, during the heat wave. I’m an American, I was with an aid group, here doing development work. I saw what happened. Now I’m back.”
“Why?”
“I have a friend who told me about your group.”
“What group?”
“I was told it’s called Never Again. Devoted to various kinds of direct action?”
Silence from the other end.
“I want to help,” Frank said. “I need to do something.”
More silence. Finally the man said, “Tell me where you are.”
He sat outside the train station for an hour, miserably hot. When it seemed he would wilt and fall, a car drove up to the curb and two young men jumped out and stood before him. “You are the firangi who called?”
“Yes.”
One of them waved a wand over him while the one who had spoken patted him down.
“All right, get in.”
When he was in the front seat passenger side, the driver took off with a squeal. The men behind him blindfolded him. “We don’t want you to know where we are taking you. We won’t harm you, not if you are what you say you are.”
“I am,” Frank said, accepting the blindfold. “I wish I weren’t, but I am.”
No replies. The car made several turns, fast enough to throw Frank against the door or the restraint of his seatbelt. A little electric car, quietly humming, and quick to speed up or slow down.
Then the car stopped and he was led out and up some steps. Into a building. His blindfold was removed; he was standing in a room filled with young men. There was a woman there too, he saw, alone among a dozen men. All of them regarded him curiously.
He told them his story. They nodded grimly from time to time, their gleaming eyes fixed on him. Never had he been looked at so intently.
When he was done they glanced at each other. Finally the woman spoke:
“What do you want now?”
“I want to join you. I want to do something.”
They spoke in Hindi among themselves, more quickly than he could follow. Possibly it was another language, like Bengali or Marathi. He didn’t recognize a single word.
“You can’t join us,” the woman told him after they were done conferring. “We don’t want you. And if you knew about everything that we did, you might not want us. We are the Children of Kali, and you can’t
be one of us, even if you were here during the catastrophe. But you can do something. You can carry a message from us to the world. Maybe that can even help, we don’t know. But you can try. You can tell them that they must change their ways. If they don’t, we will kill them. That’s what they need to know. You can figure out ways to tell them that.”
“I’ll do that,” Frank said. “But I want to do more.”
“Do more then. Just not with us.”
Frank nodded, looked at the floor. He would never be able to explain. Not to these people, not to anyone.
“All right then. I’ll do what I can.”
14
We had to leave. It was too dangerous to stay.
I was a doctor, I ran a small clinic with an assistant and three nurses and a couple who ran the office. My wife taught piano and my children went to school. Then rebels from our area began fighting the government and troops moved into town, and people were being killed right on the street. Even some kids from the school my children went to. And one day our clinic was blown up. When I went to it and saw the wreckage, looked from the street right into my examination room, I knew we had to leave. Somehow we were on the wrong side.
I went to a friend who had been a journalist before the war and asked him if he could put me in touch with a smuggler who would get us on the way to someplace safe. I did not have any particular idea about where that might be. Anyplace was going to be safer than where we were. When my friend understood what I was asking him, he rounded the table and gave me a hug. I’m sorry it’s come to this, he said. I will miss you. This stuck me like a knife in the heart. He knew what it meant, this move. I didn’t know, but he did. And when I saw this, saw what he knew in his face, I sat down on my chair as if shot. My knees buckled. People say this as a figure of speech, but really it is a very accurate account of what happens when you get a big shock. It’s something in the body, a physiological thing, although I can’t explain the mechanism.
The Ministry for the Future Page 5
