Three Moments of an Explosion

by China Miéville

  They watched. After many seconds, Dughan felt something pressed to his back. He had long enough before anyone spoke to be surprised that whoever this was had got so close without him hearing. He blamed the reek and weird industry he was watching.

  A voice said: “You move and I’ll fucking kill you.”

  When the lost rigs of the world came back, old hands claimed they had seen in the motion of the drills something reversed. Dughan doubted it: shuddering was shuddering. But most of the places where the rigs went there were no oil fields. It might have been that they were sniffing other things than oil to sustain them, but that was not so.

  “Turn around,” the voice said. The uniformed man who faced them was young and afraid. With a weapon pointed at him, old techniques, muscle memory came back and twitched Dughan’s fingers, but he stayed still.

  The man scanned them. No RPGs, no mortars, not even smaller arms. They were not oleophobe fanatics here to attack the Petrobras, nor Oil Firsters, here to kill him, his colleagues and all those who came to investigate or exploit, in their parlance, the visitations.

  “Who the fuck are you?” The guard glanced over their heads at the shuffling rig. He was whispering, though Dughan knew it would make little difference now.

  “We’re just here to watch,” the girl said gently. She was taking care of him. “My dad brought me here to watch is all. Just to see it.”

  The guard searched them, cack-handedly. Dughan silently counted the times he could have disarmed him. The man found only binoculars, torch, and cameras. He frowned at their pictures of Suffolk, of Punch-and-Judy shows, of roadside oddities. No contraband sights. “Jesus!” he said. “Move, then.”

  Behind them the rig shifted and he cringed at the great squelch. “What are you even doing?” he said when they had retreated to the living trees. “Do you have any idea how dangerous this is?”

  “I’m sorry, it was me,” she said. “I just really wanted to see it up close and I begged him. I’m really sorry.”

  The man wiped his forehead. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “Last time there was one of them here, down by Camber Sands?” The Adriatic IV. Dughan didn’t say it. “There was a couple of young lads got in. Got past us. I shouldn’t tell you. They were larking about. Taking pictures and that. Anyway, you know what happened? They had a dog with them and it got too close, and it spooked the rig and it moved. Midway through.” He waved through the copse. “It trod on the dog.”

  Dughan looked back up at the Petrobras’s subdued high burning.

  “Now come on.” The guard beckoned. “Let’s get back.”

  When their feet hit the beach sand, the girl said to him, “How long’ll it be?” Just close enough to the inlet and troughs gouged by the rig’s passing to afford a sightline into the broads, headlights flashed. The jeeps were visible a moment, and people.

  “It’ll be there half a day at least,” the man said. “And it’s a few months later it’ll all kick off.” He even smiled.

  “You know,” he said, “I don’t know, you might probably be a bit old for it but there’s like a kid’s club they have here. They have activities and that.”

  “You saw some once, didn’t you, Dad?” Dughan was not angry when she said that. He marveled, really, at her.

  All its research notwithstanding, UNPERU expressed as much shock as the rest of the world when, over a year after the Ocean Ranger’s visit, up from the still-recovering Newfoundland ground into which it had pushed its drill, the first clutch of newly-hatched oil rigs had unburied themselves.

  They had emerged into the night, shaking off earth. Stood quivering on stiffening metal or cement legs. Tilted tiny helipads. Tottered finally for the sea.

  “How big are they, Dad?” she said.

  “You’ve seen films,” he said. “As big as me.”

  Dughan had gone back to Nigeria. He had waited for months, on the vagaries of gestation. At last the monitors in the delta picked up evidence of subterranean shifts. Over many hours, long before dawn, he had watched unsteady six-foot riglets burrow up out of the forest dirt. Seven of them, of all different designs: buildings, supports, struts, derricks. They waited, swaying like new calves, still wet from their tarry sacs, swinging umbrella-sized cranes.

  He helped to capture two, and to usher the rest safely to the water, where the baby rigs had been tagged and released to scuttle below the waves, escorted by divers as far down as the divers could go. The two captives were taken to hangars where great tanks of brine waited. But they sickened within days and died, and fell apart into scrap and rubble.

  The Oporto authorities pumped poisons into the university grounds where the Interocean II had drilled and left the earth slick and soupy. Whether that was what kept its brood from being born was never clear: those eggs were not recovered. In other coastal cities, neonate oil platforms did emerge, to gallop hectic and nervy through the streets, spreading panic.

  Only the most violent post-return decommissioning could stop all this, only second deaths, from which the rigs did not come back again, kept them from where they wished to go, to drill. Once chosen, a place might be visited by any one of the wild rigs that walked out of the abyss. As if such locations had been decided collectively. UNPERU observed the nesting sites, more all the time, and kept track of the rigs themselves as best they could, of their behemoth grazing or wandering at the bottom of the world.

  “What activities do they do in this club?” the girl said.

  “Oh.” The guard shrugged. “Stuff like, you can see the eggs on a live feed. They’ll be digging down to them and they’ll put cameras and thermometers and whatever. Sometimes you can even see movement through the shells. And there’s coloring books and games and that.” He smiled again. “Like I say, it’s too young for you.”

  They laid eggs, so, many people said, they must have sex. There was no logic there. They were oil rigs. Dughan thought the belief exoneration of the strange prurience that endlessly turned on monoliths rutting miles down. An inhuman pornography of great slams and grinding, horrified whales veering from where one rig mounted another, warmed by hydrothermal vents.

  “And no one knows what happens to the young, do they, Dad?”

  Other guards came to meet them. Half-welcoming, half-peremptory. Dughan recognized none. Behind the security were the few tourists lucky to have been nearby, at accredited hotels, when Petrobras’s heavy steps had registered on the scanners.

  “No one knows yet,” Dughan said to his daughter. “They’re still very young. They’re little and the sea’s very big. They’ve got a lot of growing to do.”

  A guide was in the middle of a spiel. “We’ll come back in the morning, when it’s finished laying,” she said. “You can bring your cameras then—no danger then if you forgot to turn your flash off.” People laughed.

  “What’s wrong?” Dughan whispered.

  “Do you think it’s true what he said?” the girl whispered. “About the dog? That’s horrible.” She made a face. He stared not at the twitching Petrobras P-36 with its concrete in the mere, not at its drill ovipositor injecting slippy black rig eggs into England, but at the sea. “Maybe he was lying to scare us,” the girl said.

  Dughan turned and took in the length of Covehithe Beach. They were out of sight, but he looked in the direction of the graveyard, and of St. Andrew’s stubby hall where services continued within the medieval carapace, remains of a grander church fallen apart to time and the civil war and to economics, fallen ultimately with permission.

  THE JUNKET

  Daniel Cane left his gym at 2:45 p.m. on a Thursday in early August. He stopped at a grocery store on Avalon Street, near the turnoff to Preston Avenue. The clerk remembers him picking up some juice and peanut butter. He left at 2:57 p.m. and started in the direction of the apartment he’d lived in for the past seven months.

  It was a twenty-minute walk. He’d done it many times. But Daniel Cane, hippest, most controversial screenwriter on the West Coast, never made it home.r />
  You know all this. You know every detail of Cane’s disappearance by now. Who doesn’t? And you know what comes next too. That’s why you’re reading this, right? To get to that stuff?

  It’s coming.

  She’s one of the five most photographed women in the world this year, but when she appears, it still takes a few seconds to realize that we’re looking at Abi Hempel.

  It’s only been a few weeks since the release of the film that hurled her onto the A-list. In that time, no matter what she’s rocking—Alexander Wang, Rodarte, Westwood, or vintage—she’s rarely been seen without her dark brown hair styled in the look Vogue called “demure-fierce.” Almost frumpy, but really not. Parted on the left, shoulder-length. A shout-out to the character who’s made her so very famous and whom, despite the nearly ten years she has on her, with her large, deep-set eyes, unruly brows, pale skin, and crooked smile, Hempel bears an astounding resemblance.

  But the young woman who mounts the stage is barely recognizable. Our expectant hush becomes astonishment. What’s this dark gray pantsuit? Is that a tan? What’s with the bob?

  Maybe somebody’s tired of the sell.

  Abi peers at us through severe glasses. She’s studying philosophy at the Sorbonne, and she looks the part, even if she doesn’t sound it.

  “When I read the script I thought, ‘Wow,’ ” she says. We scribble as if this kind of horseshit is epiphany. “It was really smart, really funny and kind of dark. And respectful.”

  There it is. Me and a few buddies—stand down, guys, I’m not going to name names—glance at each other and put little marks on our checklists. Twenty-dollar ante each. We’re playing bingo.

  Did she do her own stunts? She flexes a bicep so we all laugh.

  “God no,” she says. “John wanted to be really sparing with CGI. Like, the scene where my character jumps from the roof of the museum? That’s a brilliant stuntwoman called Gabrielle Bing, and she’s really doing that. I saw her training and I was like, ‘Uh, no.’

  “I did what I could. I have a gymnastics background, and we had an awesome Krav Maga instructor. I wanted to do as much of the fight scenes as I could. I did get to punch Tommy in the face.” We all laugh again, dutifully.

  Did she consider how controversial the subject matter might be?

  “Honestly, no. We were surprised. I totally respect anyone who doesn’t like what we’ve done, but you know, it was never our intention to offend anybody.” Buzzzz: there’s another one. “For us this was really an homage.”

  Can I get double points for that? She’s polite and sincere-sounding and it’s almost plausible.

  How was it working with Daniel Cane?

  We all knew that was coming. She moves in her seat.

  “I didn’t work closely with him,” she says. “He was on-set, he did a few rewrites. We had dinner a couple of times. He was a sweet guy. What happened was an absolute tragedy and all my sympathies are with his family.”

  What would you say to the protestors?

  “I’d say, Don’t come see the movie.”

  At this point I’m going to risk your wrath and my job by telling you that your ever-loving correspondent was one of the lucky few scheduled for a brief one-to-one with Hempel. And that I didn’t take it. Gave the slot to someone else. (You’re welcome, Schlockwaves readers!)

  Stay with me. I had work to do, calls to make. Authorities to badger, people on the phone to charm. I’d got to the “Officially there’s nothing I can do, but let me speak to someone and call you back” stage.

  Daniel’s friends raised the alarm after he failed to turn up to two meetings in two days. The cops weren’t particularly concerned. Young rich dude goes AWOL in a party town? The choppers stayed grounded.

  Three days after that an anonymous and untraceable call was made to Nikki Finke. The woman said she was speaking “for Daniel Cane’s victims,” that “his crimes would not be forgotten,” that “justice had been done.”

  The cops looked harder after that.

  We’re driven across town. Johnny D is giving his interviews in a different hotel. There are rumors of “creative differences.”

  “Come on,” says Johnny. “Abi’s great. You’ve seen it, right? You saw what a great job she did.” He looks like a man who wants a cigarette. “Look, on a project like this, sure there are going to be arguments, but—”

  Can he comment on the claims about the canal scene?

  “Oh right, I’ve heard this one. I forced her to stay in the water the whole night while we did a hundred takes and she got pneumonia, right? I’m not going to dignify that with a response.”

  We’ve been briefed. Daniel Cane is off-limits.

  What’s the collective noun for journalists at a publicity event? A schmooze? A mouthpiece? A funnel?

  But even the most compliant crowd has a certain collective cunning. You could almost believe we’d cooked this up between us, we divvy it up so well. First a few softballs—influences, best moments, funny stories, blah blah. Then come questions about the protestors. The woman from Cinéma asks about the statement Yad Vashem put out.

  Johnny knows how to bad-boy swagger without saying anything overtly offensive. Not that “offensive” is something he’s always anxious to avoid: hey, this is the man who cut his teeth at the notorious NoLuck Studio; whose first film, Rob my Grave, was denounced in the British Parliament. This is the brain behind the Stereotype Man and Dumb Broad.

  Right now, though, he’s cautious. It’s all “great deal of respect for the sensitivities involved” this—we must’ve gotten drunker or bolder because that merits a few laughs—“careful to consider the ramifications” that, and—“sacred texts” the other.

  Boom. Several of us checked our phones at that point: a group text. One word: BINGO!

  I won’t tell you who won. It wasn’t me.

  Eventually someone asks. It was inevitable, off-limits or not. And this wasn’t me, either, but it would’ve been if no one else had stepped up.

  What about Daniel Cane?

  Johnny waves away the PR guy who’s mounting the stage.

  “Daniel was my brother,” Johnny says. There’ll be some good pictures of this moment: he seems genuinely furious.

  “He was like my brother. He came to me with this idea almost eight years ago and I told him if you ever do this with anyone else, I will never forgive you. So tell me, friend, what’s your question? Are you asking me whether I regret doing this movie? Fuck no. This is Daniel’s movie. Would Daniel regret doing it? Fuck no. Do I regret that he died? Fuck yes. Did he ask for it? Is that what you’re saying, my friend? Because fuck you. You got that? You need me to spell it? No he did not.

  “Who do you represent, man? I-net? OK, out of Tel Aviv, right? Well, let me tell you this: Daniel was a proud Jew. He wrote this out of love. He wrote this out of passion, and sincerity, and no sick crazy bastard can take away from that one bit.”

  The way he says it, you could almost forget that he’s selling an action flick. You could be forgiven for forgetting the merchandise, action figures, video game.

  The journalist mutters something.

  “Excuse me?” Johnny shouts.

  “Half,” the guy says.

  The fight that follows looks pretty real to most of us.

  I don’t know who pulled in what favor but the cops who turn up go away again. This little contretemps has screwed the schedule, which, see above, is no skin off my shin: I spend the afternoon watching Cane-iana on YouTube. The FangQuarterly interview where he moons the photographer; the time he threw a slushie at a pap on a bike (the guy wasn’t there for him—Cane had been out with the winner of All-Real American Starlet); the interview with the Goth kid in the graveyard.

  “It used to be just us, man,” the white-faced boy says, looking down. “Now every asshole wants a piece of him. Assholes coming here at like midnight so no one can see and taking everything and shit. They shouldn’t do that. Now they got like drones and cameras and shit watching us.”


  The I-net guy’s a douche. It’s Daniel Cane’s mom who’s Jewish, so he’s Jewish too. This unedifying ping-pong was already in play when he was killed. His family were totally secular vs. he was bar-mitzvahed. He had no interest in Judaica vs. he used Yiddish all the time. His mom’s Jewish vs. only his mom’s Jewish. Stay classy, haters.

  There’s viral video of a drunk, playful Daniel denouncing his younger brother Jacob in a colorful stream, a few years back: “You’re a fucking tshonde, bro,” he shouts, as waiters try to calm him and his brother folds over in laughter. “I’m, I’m plotzing here. You’re meshuggeneh!”

  Almost as well known is the op-ed response in the New York Opinion, published a week before Cane’s death. Its title: “The Smirking Gun.”

  “Will you look at this guy?” it reads. “Sure he knows the words. But watch and listen. See how he wracks his brain to think of more. He’s not using this out of yiddishkeit (ask your bubbe). You know who else loves rolling these words round their mouths? Mocking? Sneering?

  “Bigots. That’s who. Homeboy’s an anti-Semite. Whatever his ma says.”

  A junket is a machine. Distributor ships in hungry journos. We get put up schmancy (ooh!); we get victuals way out of our usual range (aah!); we get to touch stardust (eeh!). The better to make us grateful. We’re supposed to shake hands, press record, get the quotes, dutifully receive a nugget of bullshit “inside” information or two, repeat the odd, thoroughly vetted “secret” rumor.

  Hey, it’s not dignified, but it’s not arms trading. And as a guy who normally kicks off the day with bad coffee and Pop-Tarts, I’m grateful for the buffet and mimosas. Really. Please don’t rip me out of the Rolodexes just because I went a little rogue.

  But if the choice was between grooming my Deep Throat in municipal works (bear with me), or hearing another hot young thing tell us how supercool it was to work with blah and blah, it was an easy call.

  Although to be honest I’d started hitting walls. Maybe I should have gone to the cocktail party.

  Two-thirds of the way through the movie there’s a scene in which gunmen are closing in while Sam Denham’s character, the scholar Mr. Henk, denounces his assistant. “You’re a tshonde,” he says. “You’re meshuggeneh.”