TWICE

by Susanna Kleeman

  Silence.

  ‘And why would I do that?’ I said.

  ‘For no reason. For every reason. Because it goes against your programming. To break the spell. Not to waste my knowledge. Not to play his game.’

  Our bound energy, the three of us rapt.

  ‘Come off it,’ the Don said. ‘Don’t fall for it. This isn’t real, is it? The perfect set-up. Me and him, balanced here? You having to choose: one or the other? You know better than that by now. I set this up. Our adventure. Ritual theatre. To clean the slate.’

  They swayed.

  ‘You’re lying,’ I said.

  ‘I’m telling you the truth. I told you the truth, mostly. Help me out and I’ll tell you everything. All that history.’

  ‘Don’t fall for it,’ the Chris said.

  ‘Kill me now,’ Don said to Chris, ‘why don’t you? Make the sacrifice: let go now and I’ll go down with you. Since you’re so noble. Except you won’t, right?’ It turned to me. ‘I planned this. You’re fulfilling my plan. My death wish: maybe it’s…too much, to live forever, without connection. Without her. Without you. And maybe we’ll connect again. Down there, our minerals side by side in some rock for a few billion years. And maybe I want you to be my gun. But. Don’t to listen to him. Stepping into my game,’ nodding at Chris, ‘to usurp me. To kill me in my own theatre when my defences are down. So he can rule in my stead except worse: no culture, synthetic, no knowledge.’

  ‘Nim,’ Chris said, from his side of the pipe. ‘This was planned, by Alan, from way back. This was my mission, like you had your mission. I didn’t say before, I had to protect you.’

  ‘Noble words,’ the Don said. ‘If there was ever a mission from Alan then your Chris twisted it. He’s doing this for himself, twisting my game. You save him, the first thing he’ll do is kill you. At least with me you know where you stand.’

  I laughed

  ‘Be careful, Nim. This isn’t about you, it’s about the world. You’d save him just to spite me? Let us both die. It’s what she would have done.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, squatting on the upturned lamp base to steady it. ‘Maybe next time.’

  I shunted the lamp rod round towards Chris’s side of the pipe as Don began to wiggle his wrist out of the leash loop cutting into his hand. Chris grabbed for the metal rod, I squatted down for dear life as the rod bent under his weight and he started to inch forwards towards me while Don hurtled down into the void.

  52

  ‘So,’ Chris said, when it was done and we were secured and rescued and nourished and wrapped in foil cloaks in the plastic tent they’d set up further down Vengeance Street, behind the cones and tape of the cordoned-off road. ‘There’s so much to tell you, the whole plan from the start, our bit, years in the making: me and Tal and Tibet and the others—Flora too, her whole family, they’re fine, can’t wait to see you. Tal can’t wait to see you, tell you everything.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, so glad. ‘But maybe not now,’ being not in the mood for it.

  ‘Right,’ he said, running that full index finger down his nose. The new world king, dumb old Scritchwood Chris, forever in my debt. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘For everything. And before. When I didn’t know, how I was. They found me, you know, in New York. That’s why I left you like I did. So you’d hate me. To protect you. I’m sorry.’

  I reached out my hand to him and drew him close and hugged him. ‘It’s OK,’ I said.

  ‘Nim,’ he said, ‘I want you to know. It’s going to be different now, the world. It’s going to be better. It went wrong, with Don. We need a deep clean, a whole-world reset, from the ground up, see if we can’t do this. Keep a watch out. A big change is coming soon, for everyone, to set things right, build a new normal. Thanks to you.’

  ‘I’m so glad,’ I said, preferring that version.

  ‘And you: what do you want to do?’ Because he was going to be busy now: worlds to rule, plans and planets to spruce, from the ground up. ‘I could do with…someone like you beside me. Though I don’t feel we could…I don’t think that’s right between us. I’m sure you agree.’

  ‘I do,’ I said. ‘And I think you’ll manage just fine without me. I think I’m…Time for something new.’

  ‘Whatever you want. Wherever you want to go, the freedom of the world—the parts we control at any rate. And soon everywhere, once I make my peace, with Tibet’s help.’

  I nodded. I was sure he’d do me proud.

  ‘We’ll talk,’ he said. ‘But not now, I hear you. We’ll get together soon, with Tal, with Flora, afterwards, when things quieten down. There’s a boat, a small one, a few streets down, by the bridge to Barrow. It’ll take you anywhere. They’ll work out your story with you, what to tell people. You’ll be safe. I give you my word.’

  People were already jostling round him, with their phones and devices, so much pressing business I was sure. He nodded at me, and then at a bald Asian woman in saffron robes who shook my hand. ‘Sister Li will escort you, wherever you want to go. I’ll be in touch. It’s so great, isn’t it?’ clutching my arm, holding me close again. ‘You need anything, I’m here. The world owes you. Love you, Nim.’

  We hugged again and I got up and stepped with the robed woman by my side out of the tent, into the low squat buildings of Vengeance Street, into the sunlit world.

  A mild spring afternoon on Walney Island, a strange gold sky, brushing past dumdums gathered at the edge of the cordon with their phones up taking the pictures. ‘Gas explosion,’ was the whisper, the police keeping guard there, the building itself a caved-in wreck like a rotted tooth surrounded by regular fellows.

  ‘So,’ Sister Li said as we saw the flash of water at the end of the road, the masts of small boats gathered there. ‘Where d’you want to go?’

  She was plump and wore glasses and had the look of a friendly modern monk.

  Everything was out there, stretched before me. I touched the healed scar on my wrist. ‘Home, please, I think,’ I said. Back to Archway, why not. Just be in my flat for a bit. Put my feet up, see if I couldn’t rearrange Glen’s furniture downstairs with my new powers. Write some of this down, if I could, while I still remembered. For the dumdums, not that they’d believe it, stash it in some casket in some lake or desert, just in case. My terma, out there somewhere, in the wonderful one-life world.

  END

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to all at Zero Books / John Hunt Publishing, especially Dominic James, Douglas Lain and John Romans.

  Thanks to Manuela and David Kleeman for everything, and to Alice Feinstein for her friendship and astonishing eye. Thanks to Peadar Mac Eilis, Polly Faber, Jennifer Nadel, Kristin Baumgartner, Anna Minton, Nicole Scollay, Julie Kleeman, Jenny Kleeman, Rene Cori, Martine Tabeaud, Dr Bea Lewkowicz, Chris Scott of Sahara Overland, Simon Ferguson, Stephen Brouwer and all the Hopes, Fergusons and Ellums for invaluable help, advice and support.

  Thanks to Gillian Slovo, Charlotte Sinclair, Debby Turner, Elen Lewis, Genevieve Fox, Mark Huband, Phil Brady and Rosie Rowell for vital input.

  Massive thanks to Tim Hope for showing me Britain and everything else, and to lovely Eddie and Hazie for coming along.

  CULTURE, SOCIETY & POLITICS

  The modern world is at an impasse. Disasters scroll across our smartphone screens and we’re invited to like, follow or upvote, but critical thinking is harder and harder to find. Rather than connecting us in common struggle and debate, the internet has sped up and deepened a long-standing process of alienation and atomization. Zer0 Books wants to work against this trend. With critical theory as our jumping off point, we aim to publish books that make our readers uncomfortable. We want to move beyond received opinions.

  Zer0 Books is on the left and wants to reinvent the left. We are sick of the injustice, the suffering and the stupidity that defines both our political and cultural world, and we aim to find a new foundation for a new struggle.

  If this book has helped you to clarify an idea, solve a problem
or extend your knowledge, you may want to check out our online content as well. Look for Zer0 Books: Advancing Conversations in the iTunes directory and for our Zer0 Books YouTube channel.

  Popular videos include:

  Žižek and the Double Blackmain

  The Intellectual Dark Web is a Bad Sign

  Can there be an Anti-SJW Left?

  Answering Jordan Peterson on Marxism

  Follow us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ZeroBooks and Twitter at https://twitter.com/Zer0Books

  Bestsellers from Zer0 Books include:

  Give Them An Argument

  Logic for the Left

  Ben Burgis

  Many serious leftists have learned to distrust talk of logic. This is a serious mistake.

  Paperback: 978-1-78904-210-8 ebook: 978-1-78904-211-5

  Poor but Sexy

  Culture Clashes in Europe East and West

  Agata Pyzik

  How the East stayed East and the West stayed West.

  Paperback: 978-1-78099-394-2 ebook: 978-1-78099-395-9

  An Anthropology of Nothing in Particular

  Martin Demant Frederiksen

  A journey into the social lives of meaninglessness.

  Paperback: 978-1-78535-699-5 ebook: 978-1-78535-700-8

  In the Dust of This Planet

  Horror of Philosophy vol. 1

  Eugene Thacker

  In the first of a series of three books on the Horror of Philosophy, In the Dust of This Planet offers the genre of horror as a way of thinking about the unthinkable.

  Paperback: 978-1-84694-676-9 ebook: 978-1-78099-010-1

  The End of Oulipo?

  An Attempt to Exhaust a Movement

  Lauren Elkin, Veronica Esposito

  Paperback: 978-1-78099-655-4 ebook: 978-1-78099-656-1

  Capitalist Realism

  Is There No Alternative?

  Mark Fisher

  An analysis of the ways in which capitalism has presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system.

  Paperback: 978-1-84694-317-1 ebook: 978-1-78099-734-6

  Rebel Rebel

  Chris O’Leary

  David Bowie: every single song. Everything you want to know, everything you didn’t know.

  Paperback: 978-1-78099-244-0 ebook: 978-1-78099-713-1

  Kill All Normies

  Angela Nagle

  Online culture wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump.

  Paperback: 978-1-78535-543-1 ebook: 978-1-78535-544-8

  Cartographies of the Absolute

  Alberto Toscano, Jeff Kinkle

  An aesthetics of the economy for the twenty-first century.

  Paperback: 978-1-78099-275-4 ebook: 978-1-78279-973-3

  Malign Velocities

  Accelerationism and Capitalism

  Benjamin Noys

  Long listed for the Bread and Roses Prize 2015, Malign Velocities argues against the need for speed, tracking acceleration as the symptom of the ongoing crises of capitalism.

  Paperback: 978-1-78279-300-7 ebook: 978-1-78279-299-4

  Meat Market

  Female Flesh under Capitalism

  Laurie Penny

  A feminist dissection of women’s bodies as the fleshy fulcrum of capitalist cannibalism, whereby women are both consumers and consumed.

  Paperback: 978-1-84694-521-2 ebook: 978-1-84694-782-7

  Babbling Corpse

  Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts

  Grafton Tanner

  Paperback: 978-1-78279-759-3 ebook: 978-1-78279-760-9

  New Work New Culture

  Work we want and a culture that strengthens us

  Frithjoff Bergmann

  A serious alternative for mankind and the planet.

  Paperback: 978-1-78904-064-7 ebook: 978-1-78904-065-4

  Romeo and Juliet in Palestine

  Teaching Under Occupation

  Tom Sperlinger

  Life in the West Bank, the nature of pedagogy and the role of a university under occupation.

  Paperback: 978-1-78279-637-4 ebook: 978-1-78279-636-7

  Ghosts of My Life

  Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

  Mark Fisher

  Paperback: 978-1-78099-226-6 ebook: 978-1-78279-624-4

  Sweetening the Pill

  or How We Got Hooked on Hormonal Birth Control

  Holly Grigg-Spall

  Has contraception liberated or oppressed women?

  Sweetening the Pill breaks the silence on the dark side of hormonal contraception.

  Paperback: 978-1-78099-607-3 ebook: 978-1-78099-608-0

  Why Are We The Good Guys?

  Reclaiming Your Mind from the Delusions of Propaganda

  David Cromwell

  A provocative challenge to the standard ideology that Western power is a benevolent force in the world.

  Paperback: 978-1-78099-365-2 ebook: 978-1-78099-366-9

  The Writing on the Wall

  On the Decomposition of Capitalism and its Critics

  Anselm Jappe, Alastair Hemmens

  A new approach to the meaning of social emancipation.

  Paperback: 978-1-78535-581-3 ebook: 978-1-78535-582-0

  Enjoying It

  Candy Crush and Capitalism

  Alfie Bown

  A study of enjoyment and of the enjoyment of studying. Bown asks what enjoyment says about us and what we say about enjoyment, and why.

  Paperback: 978-1-78535-155-6 ebook: 978-1-78535-156-3

  Color, Facture, Art and Design

  Iona Singh

  This materialist definition of fine-art develops guidelines for architecture, design, cultural-studies and ultimately social change.

  Paperback: 978-1-78099-629-5 ebook: 978-1-78099-630-1

  Neglected or Misunderstood

  The Radical Feminism of Shulamith Firestone

  Victoria Margree

  An interrogation of issues surrounding gender, biology, sexuality, work and technology, and the ways in which our imaginations continue to be in thrall to ideologies of maternity and the nuclear family.

  Paperback: 978-1-78535-539-4 ebook: 978-1-78535-540-0

  How to Dismantle the NHS in 10 Easy Steps (Second Edition)

  Youssef El-Gingihy

  The story of how your NHS was sold off and why you will have to buy private health insurance soon. A new expanded second edition with chapters on junior doctors’ strikes and government blueprints for US-style healthcare.

  Paperback: 978-1-78904-178-1 ebook: 978-1-78904-179-8

  Digesting Recipes

  The Art of Culinary Notation

  Susannah Worth

  A recipe is an instruction, the imperative tone of the expert, but this constraint can offer its own kind of potential. A recipe need not be a domestic trap but might instead offer escape – something to fantasise about or aspire to.

  Paperback: 978-1-78279-860-6 ebook: 978-1-78279-859-0

  Most titles are published in paperback and as an ebook.

  Paperbacks are available in traditional bookshops. Both print and ebook formats are available online.

  Follow us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ZeroBooks and Twitter at https://twitter.com/Zer0Books