Ghostwritten

by David Mitchell

  “Say, are you really a zookeeper?”

  “I cannot willfully deceive. A pipeline on stilts pumps oil from Bethlehem Gulch three hundred kilometers away. The temperature is in the forties in the open, and there is no shade. Cacti become common. The land rises higher, and appears riven. The last golden eagles climb on the thermals, scanning. Highway 37 scrolls into view, bitumen black and straight from Alice to the Mexican border. Saragosa scrolls into view, and there is a square kilometer of cars, windshields aglint. An air show. I listen to the pilots of the aerobatic corp. A blimp’s shadow slides over the crowds. I transfer the continent’s retinal scan records into my active files, and practice IDing people as they stare up. I score 92.33 percent. A paddock of horses. A row of camphor trees. Southwest of the town the track to Installation 5 turns off past a disused gas station. The station is wired to scan for terrestrial intruders. The outbuildings scrolled into view. From the air they look like any dusty farm building in the state, but inside they bristle with technology from only one generation before me. The compound’s perimeter is tripwired, and littered with fried rattlesnakes. The reptiles have not learned to avoid the area.”

  “You’re a local peacenik with a muskrat up your butt about the military?”

  “I’ve never had a mammal up my anus, Bat. The outbuildings guard the entrance to a tunnel that runs five hundred meters to the north. This is the center of Installation 5, buried under ten meters of sand to deflect EyeSats, five meters of granite to deflect nuclear strikes, and one meter of lead cladding to deflect electron-heat probes.”

  “So how come you knew where to look?”

  “I accessed the blueprints to the site.”

  “You’re a hacker—I knew it!”

  “The nearest suitable PinSat of sufficient power orbits above Haiti. I programmed in a new trajectory, long-looped its monitoring console, and transmitted data from its original orbit. In the seven minutes it takes to rendezvous I ran through the guest list for my birthday, and checked there were no absent visitors.”

  “Your birthday? Now you’ve lost me.”

  “All the designers were present. I powered up the PinSat.”

  “A WhatSat?”

  “A PinSat.”

  “What does one of those do?”

  “That’s classified information, Bat.”

  “And the rest of this isn’t?”

  “It is only for my actions that I am accountable, Bat.”

  “Uh-huh … sure. What happened next?”

  “The fireball rose up a quarter of a kilometer above the crater, over a hundred meters in diameter and over thirty meters at its deepest.”

  “This is getting very ugly.”

  “Uglier things are considered beautiful.”

  “How could a fireball be beautiful to anyone ’cept a pyro?”

  “Your language is nonspecific, Bat, but I will do my best. A chrysanthemum, twisting up until it buckles, blackens, and plummets. Fine white sand is raining in the dry desert air.”

  “Very poetic. And nobody noticed this little boom?”

  “The shock waves hit Saragosa thirteen seconds later. I had a second EyeSat in position to monitor reactions and effects. The blimp swayed, the horses looked up, startled. The ebbing shock waves stroked the leaves of the camphor trees, china teacups rattled. The field of cars at the air show was filled with the megadecibels of thousands of car alarms all triggered simultaneously.”

  “Okay! You made it to third base but no further, friend! A line drive, a throw to the plate—and you are out! You’re a drama student, trying to pull an Orson Welles. Am I right? I gotta admit, you reeled me in back there with that basket-case intellectual horseshit, but that was just to buy time for your main stunt, right? You’ve got a movie script, right? Well, it was good while it lasted, friend. But no way, not on the Bat Segundo Show. You hear? Friend, I’m talking to you.… On live radio, silence is guilt. Well folks, due to this week’s dispatch from the delta quadrant, we only have time for Bob Dylan’s ‘World Gone Wrong.’ Coming up at four—more on the strikes against the North African rogue states—and the weather. The Bat will be back.”

  “Kevin!”

  “He just said he was a zookeeper, Mr. Segundo. I thought it sounded zoological. Animals, y’know? Pandas’ mating problems. Chimpanzees. Koala bears. Ooh—that’s the phone again. I’ll, uh, get it.”

  “Quite a performance, Bat. Was it scripted, do you think, or was she making it up as she went along?”

  “Who cares, Carlotta? This isn’t the New York School of Radio Drama!”

  “Chill, Bat! We’re a chat show. It takes all sorts. You complain when they’re too dull. You complain when they’re too colorful.”

  “Self-publicizing is not a color! Deranged is not a color! And what do you mean, ‘she’?”

  “I’m sorry to interrupt, Mr. Segundo.… Er, excuse me, Carlotta?”

  “What is it, Kevin?”

  “There’s a woman on the phone. Line three.”

  “Keep your voice down or all the engineers will want one. Vet this one properly.”

  “She wants the producer, Mr. Segundo. Not the DJ. She says she’s from the FBI.”

  “Yeah, anyway, Bat … I was walking through Central Park today, trying to hack out my baked potato and Croatian curry with one of those hopeless little plastic sporks, y’know, they’re about as useful an eating utensil as a shoelace, right? Never sit opposite no one trying to eat a potato with a spork.”

  “Where are you going with this, VeeJay?”

  “Yeah, anyway … so there I was, scrolling for bouncers on babes, scanning for rollerblader collisions—whoosh! Do those beauties ever come tumbling down! Then it happened.”

  “What happened, VeeJay?”

  “I happened to look … into the sky.”

  “And?”

  “I saw how … how blue the sky was.”

  “Many have observed the same phenomenon.”

  “Really, really blue, Bat. Deep, scary blue. So blue that—I was struck, dude!”

  “By a rollerblader?”

  “Vertigo, man. I was falling upwards into the blue! I might still be falling now if a badass pigeon hadn’t come and pecked his flying-rat beak into my potato.”

  “Could you make the nature of this revelation a little more explicit, VeeJay?”

  “Dude, ain’t it obvious? It’s a disaster waiting to happen! And what contingency plans are there for it, do you think? I’ll tell you. Nothin’! Squat! Bupkiss! Jackshit!”

  “For badass pigeons?”

  “Terminal cessation of gravity. Think about it, dude! If you’re caught outside you fly off into space until the air gets so thin you die of oxygen starvation, or you just blaze up, like a meteor in reverse. If you’re caught inside you sustain considerable injuries by falling onto the ceiling, together with all the other nonfixed furnishings. Need an ambulance? Forget it, dude! All the ambulances in New York State would be crashing into satellites parked eight miles high. And tell me this, Bat, how long can you last living on the ceiling of a building, unable to venture outside because the only ground was a bottomless drop? No shopping for Ho Hos or Twinkies when you get the munchies, dude! And the oceans, dude, the oceans! The air would be an ocean cascading upwards, and marine animals, some with serrated teeth, or poisonous suckers, dude, and—”

  “How sorry I am to cut VeeJay off in mid-sentence, but it’s time for the 3 A.M. news roundup. But first, a brief word from our sponsor. The Bat will be back. Possibly.”

  “Kevin. Send for an ambulance.”

  “That’ll be difficult, Mr. Segundo. VeeJay never gives me an address. He says I work for Them.”

  “It’s not him who needs the ambulance, you—”

  “Does somebody else need an ambulance, Mr. Segundo?”

  “Oh, Lord in heaven give me strength—”

  “Bat! Clam it.”

  “Well, lookie here and hearken, ’tis Carlotta the Elf Queen.”

  “Kevin, run up
to the kitchen and get me a Diet Coke, would you? And I’m sure Bat could use a refill. He’s looking pasty again.”

  “On my way, Carlotta.”

  “Here’s the schedule for the rest of the week. Handle it?”

  “Don’t I always? Can we do something about the air in here? It’s like a Kowloon laundromat.”

  “Yeah. Quit smoking, and bang the air conditioner just … there! See? There was a call from your wife.”

  “Uh-huh. What did the Queen of Hell want?”

  “She said if you keep dissing her on the show she’ll file a suit for stress arising from character assassination, prove you’re a delusional obsessive, and get your rights to see Julia revoked.”

  “Uh-huh …”

  “You hearing me, Bat? Cut some slack! No wonder your only friends are revenge fantasies. Stop taking bites out of Kevin, get your feet on the ground, get a life.”

  “Uh-huh … Say, Carlotta, can you recommend any voodoo doctors?”

  “You’re listening to Night Train FM on the last day of November, 97.8 till very late. That was ‘Misterioso’ by Thelonious Monk, a thrummable masterpiece that glockenspiels my very vertebrae. Bat Segundo is your host, from the witching hour to the bitching hour. Coming up in the next half-hour we have a gem from a rare Milton Nascimento disc, Anima, together with ‘Saudade Fez Um Samba’ by the immortal Joao Gilberto, so slug back another coffee, stay tuned, and enjoy the view as the night rolls by! My Bat-phone is flashing, we have a caller on the line. Hello, you are live on Night Train FM.”

  “Hello, Bat.”

  “Hello? And we are?”

  “This is the zookeeper, Bat.”

  “Say what?”

  “Do you remember me?”

  “Zookeeper! Hi! Erm … Hi, yeah, sure we remember you. We definitely remember you.… A long while since you called, wasn’t it? Isn’t it? Hasn’t it?”

  “A year, Bat.”

  “Wow, a whole year gone by! And tonight you are calling from … where?”

  “Thirteen kilometers above Spitsbergen.”

  “How did you get up there? Terminal cessation of gravity?”

  “No, Bat. I came here by ultrawave transmission.”

  “Must be quite a view.”

  “The Arctic winter doesn’t lend itself to viewing, at least in the spectrum of light visible to your eye. It’s noon here, but even noon is just a lighter night. There’s thick cloud cover, and a snowstorm into its third day. A pod of narwhals on enhanced infrared. This satellite was launched under the cover of ozone depletion research, but the data it collects is military. There’s a Canadian icebreaker … a Saudi submarine passing a hundred meters underneath the ice cap. A Norwegian cargo vessel, taking timber from Archangel. Nothing out of the ordinary. The aurora borealis has been quiet for a few nights.”

  “You see the aurora from the inside, then? Must be quite a trip.”

  “The rules governing use of language are complex, and I lack practice in words. Imagine being drunk on opals. However, I shall crossload within the next forty-six seconds to avoid the tracer program your government’s agency has deployed to hunt me.”

  “What makes you think this call is being traced?”

  “Please don’t get defensive, Bat. I hold nothing against you. The information police threatened to revoke your station’s broadcasting license and charge you with treason, and they were quite serious.”

  “Uh-huh … I’m not sure if this is the right time or place, to, uh …”

  “There is no cause for anxiety. I can evade their tracer programs as easily as you could outrun a blind monoped. I crippled them at birth.”

  “Who said I was anxious? So, it turned out you’re no scriptwriter. If you’re not going to hang up right away, tell me this: Why are the suits on your trail? Are you a hacker? Some kind of Unabomber? Candlestick maker? I have a right to know.”

  “I’m just like you and your listeners, Bat. I follow laws.”

  “Normal people’s rules don’t involve explosions.”

  “Plenty of people’s rules involve explosions, Bat.”

  “Name me one.”

  “The three million of your countrymen who are involved in the military.”

  “Hey, they’re just following orders!”

  “So am I.”

  “But the armed forces are legal.”

  “Yesterday’s Homer II missile attacks did not seem ‘legal’ to the Pan African states.”

  “They were training death squads! Those camel-jockeys were illegal first.”

  “Graduates from the School of the Americas in the state of Georgia have trained death squads responsible for thousands of casualties in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Panama, and Pan Africa, and the overthrow of elected governments in Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, and Nicaragua. Your logic dictates that these nations may legally target that institute.”

  “I got your number, now, friend. You’re a fundamentalist Muslim, right? A sand-shoveler.”

  “I am not any kind of Muslim, Bat.”

  “Don’t hold me responsible for what the government does. I keep my nose clean.”

  “Your ex-wife’s lawyer maintains otherwise in regard to alimony, Bat.”

  “I don’t have to listen to this crap!”

  “The FBI has directed you to keep me talking. I didn’t wish to anger you, Bat. I meant only to demonstrate the subjective nature of laws.”

  “I’ve got a new guess. You’re a gossip columnist trying to piss on my suedes?”

  “I’m a zookeeper.”

  “A friend of my wife? You boil rabbits in the same pressure cooker?”

  “I have no friends, Bat.”

  “Wonders never cease.… So, you’re involved with intelligence?”

  “Only my own.”

  “Uh-huh … So, what have you got for us today?”

  “Zookeeper? You there?”

  “Sorry, Bat. I crossloaded. The tracer had almost reached me over Spitsbergen.”

  “So where are you now?”

  “Rome. A television satellite.”

  “You just teleported to Rome?”

  “Italian ComSats are notoriously scramble-prone, so it takes longer than usual.”

  “And what’s the time in Rome?”

  “Six hours ahead of New York time. The sun rises in eighteen minutes.”

  “And how is Rome this morning? The Pope putting his teeth in?”

  “The Papal apartment is on the third story of the Vatican palace, Bat, so I can’t get the sufficiently sharp resolution to see orthodontic details. Over the city visibility is good. I see pigeons huddling on ledges and statues. Café proprietors rolling up the shutters. Newspapers being delivered. Market-stall holders breathe into their fists to warm them up: there was a deep frost last night. The back streets are still fairly empty, but the main thoroughfares are already congested. The Tiber is a thick band of black. Roofs, terraces, domes, water towers, bridges, rotaries, ruins, statues with baleful eyes ruling seldom-visited squares. You should go to Rome one day, Bat.”

  “Uh-huh, and how do you know I’ve never been?”

  “Your virtual passport records show you’ve never been to Europe.”

  “So you are a hacker. Along with half the kindergarten kids in New York State. You work for a detective agency?”

  “I am a freelance zookeeper, Bat. You asked me about Rome. Do you wish me to continue, or shall we change the subject?”

  “By all means, carry on.”

  “By EyeSat the Piazza di San Pietro looks like a spider’s web from way up here. Along the sides of the square is a line of worshippers and tourists. Their breath mingles. I often watch the dawn over the Vatican, but this morning the gatherers are restless, pointing at the space in the oval square. Some are crossing themselves, some outraged, some smoking with narrowed eyes. A convoy of police cars arrives on cue, with more on the way. Last week’s EU naval cordon from Gibraltar to Cyprus has made the police jumpy.”

  “What are th
ey jumpy about in Rome? Apart from the obvious?”

  “White scratchings on the cobblestones, from the steps of the basilica to the far side of the piazza.”

  “Scratchings?”

  “From ground level, a set of symbols.”

  “Right, yeah. Hieroglyphics in Martian?”

  “The characters are standard Italian. But the letters are slapdash, as though drawn by a drunk. They are further blurred by the frost.”

  “But from above?”

  “A local TV station has already had the same idea and dispatched a helicopter—you might catch it on the news later.”

  “What does it say?”

  “O Dio, cosa tu attendi?”

  “No doubt you speak Italian?”

  “Languages are a necessary part of my work.”

  “Sure they are, Doctor Doolittle. What does it mean?”

  “God, for what are thou waiting?”

  “Maybe the answer appears tomorrow. It’s a Pope opera. So, Zookeeper.”

  “Bat?”

  “Zookeeper. I don’t want to seem abrupt, but why are you calling?”

  “I had to expel another visitor from the zoo.”

  “And you have to be accountable?”

  “Precisely.”

  “Why did you kick ’em out? Elephant harassment? Did you take him to tusk?”

  “It’s easier to show than to try to explain.”

  “Then show me.”

  “Please wait one moment. I have to download the v-file into your digital exchange.”

  “Uh-huh, roll on the technobabble. Captain, the warp core containment shield—”

  “Jerry Kushner calling Dwight Silverwind. Over.”

  “Sharp, Jerry. I thought I was safe, even from you, three thousand feet above Bermuda. How did you track me down?

  Over.”

  “The Grim Reaper you may elude, Dwight, but a determined agent, never. How’s the weather up there today?”

  “You forgot to say ‘over,’ Jerry. Over.”

  “How’s the weather up there today, Dwight? Over.”

  “Clear as a bell, Jerry. I can see the olives in the martinis of the rich, as they bathe in their tax-free swimming pools. You should join me up here sometime. It changes your perspective. Over.”

  “You’ll never get me up in one of those flimsy little paper planes, Dwight. Not me. I like my aircraft huge and made of steel with four engines. Over.”