We Are Now Beginning Our Descent

by James Meek

  ‘A few months later, I signed up,’ Bastian said to Kellas. ‘It sounds odd, but I wasn’t thinking about spies and the Cold War. I was thinking about a great hermetic bureaucracy, a secret city of servants in white shirts tending something eternal and arcane. It seemed I was to be a visitor in the cloisters of a silent order. When I went in I saw water coolers and ugly carpet tiles and heard squabbles about who’d booked which conference room, but by that time I was curious to see who was going to benefit from my two hundred and fifty dollars a week. I was surprised to get through the security clearance so easily. It turned out I could be cleared at a very low level. Same as the cleaners who vacuumed the low-security offices at night. I didn’t have a record. I hadn’t dodged the draft because I’d never been called up. I was surprised to see the word “Program” on the contract. It seemed over-pompous. But there I was one morning, driving to Virginia, past the gatehouses, and sitting down with the students of the CIA’s first Creative Writing Program.’

  There were only eight students, all men. Like Crowpucker, they were young, with soft hands and pale, office-bound complexions. Their faces beamed with optimism.

  ‘And I don’t mean hope,’ Bastian said to Kellas. ‘“Hope” implies that you reckon there’s a chance things might work out, and a chance they might not. These guys had an expectation of triumph. It was a sure thing. I could never figure out whether the triumph was to be theirs, or the agency’s, or America’s, or humanity’s. I’m not sure they saw a difference.’ They introduced themselves and Bastian outlined the way his classes usually worked.

  ‘Sir,’ said one of them, ‘do you think it’s always true that history is written by the victors? Couldn’t losers write history instead, if they wrote it really, really well?’

  Before Bastian could speak, the students began arguing among themselves.

  ‘They went on for a long time,’ Bastian told Kellas. ‘I sat there and listened. By the time they quietened down, I knew I was the wrong man in the wrong place, and I wouldn’t be coming back. What they were arguing about was events that hadn’t yet happened, as if they were certain to happen, as if they already had happened. I kept hearing phrases like “When the Soviet Union invades Iran”, “When the communists take over Italy”, “When Moscow makes its move for Iceland”, “When we start getting arms to the Muslims of Central Asia.” If I’d been more paranoid, if these men had been older, I might have thought they knew what they were talking about. That they knew these events were coming, might even, who knows, trigger them. It was the CIA. But not these guys. They laughed too much. It was the strangest thing: they were serious and not serious at the same time. They were sincere when they talked about what would happen in the future; they honestly believed these real countries and peoples would experience these events. But there were no people among these peoples. The countries they spoke about were shapes on a map, with certain numerical qualities. It was a simple world of deviants, conformists and masses.’

  When he could get a word in, Bastian said that perhaps there’d been a misunderstanding. Crowpucker apologised and recalled the meeting in the Chinese restaurant. What this was about, he said, was learning how to harness a writer’s imagination in the service of intelligence.

  Bastian said it was true that imagination could be applied to guess what individuals might be thinking, what they might be like, and how they might act. But it worked best when the individual was a fictional composite character, based on experience of other, real people. It couldn’t be applied to nations or peoples, except in fantasy literature, or pulp fiction.

  The students looked disappointed. They took notes. Bastian felt that he would not have to quit after all; they’d sack him and keep auditioning teachers until they found one who would teach them exactly what they had already decided they were going to learn.

  Crowpucker wanted a debate. Surely, he said, there were three kinds of imagination. There was making something or somebody up that didn’t exist at all. There was imagining how real people were going to act in the future. And then there was the third kind, where you imagined what you or your organisation, or your country, might be capable of, and then you went and did it. Wasn’t the ideal when you were able to combine them all, imagination and action? Like the founding fathers. They had imagined a non-existent country, a democratic America, they had imagined how the British and the American settlers would treat the idea, and they had imagined a course of action they could take that would make the fantasy real.

  Bastian told Crowpucker that he was confusing philosophy and practical planning with literature. Novels and plays weren’t there to show people what to be, or predict what they would do. They showed what human beings are.

  ‘That’s a problem literature has to deal with,’ said Crowpucker. ‘The lack of a moral framework. The lack of templates for heroic and patriotic action. I could give you examples of what there should be. Tolstoy, for one. And you. Your work.’ Crowpucker urged Bastian to admit that his novel about the Buddhist Jesus was more than an entertainment, a lyric, or a narrative of characters. It was a sermon of sorts, wasn’t it? A lesson? A pattern for how humans should behave? Not one that he, Crowpucker, cared for, but he admired the intention.

  ‘He was clever,’ Bastian told Kellas. ‘They were all clever, well-read wiseasses. He had me. No writer likes to be accused of having written a sermon—’

  ‘No,’ said Kellas.

  ‘—but I couldn’t deny that there was truth in what he said. I’d been working on that book for so long, and still I hadn’t buried the thought that kicked it off, when I was sulking in the mountains, that I really wanted it to be that Jesus was a Buddhist Jew. That even if he hadn’t been, he should have been, and I could make it so and tweak the believers my way.’ Bastian struggled for an answer. He had noticed already that Crowpucker was holding a sheaf of double-spaced typed pages, and asked whether he’d brought the work he couldn’t read to the class in McLean, and whether he’d care to read it now, to give Bastian and the others a better idea of what he meant.

  Crowpucker was glad to read his work out loud. He explained first that the subject of his report was an actual country, and everything in it was based on actual, raw intelligence, but that, for Bastian’s sake, he would refer to the country as country A. The story, or report, as Crowpucker called it, described the life of a boy, Abdullah, living in town K in country A, whose father was a successful exporter of carpets, a devout Muslim, and a member of a group of businessmen trying to persuade the king to step down in favour of an elected parliament. The young boy loved his father and was full of hope for the future of his country. Then, one day, with the help of money and arms from Moscow, the riff-raff of the bazaar and a bunch of misguided liberal intellectuals, the communists staged a coup and took power. The boy’s parents were arrested, his carpet business was collectivised and the mosque placed under strict supervision by atheists. Instead of Koranic classes, the boy was forced to endure Marxist indoctrination. Years went past; repression increased, the boy’s parents were executed, any stirrings of democracy and entrepreneurship were crushed. Islam was treated as a vulgar superstition. At sixteen, the boy fled town K and joined a band of rebel fighters in the mountains. Out-numbered and out-gunned, they fought for freedom. Their struggle hung in the balance. Moscow was helping the communists – but who was helping them? In their caves in the mountains, they dreamed of a powerful land on the other side of the world. Why did America not help them? They fought with their stolen rifles for freedom, democracy, capitalism and God. Where was the USA? The story ended with young Abdullah surrounded by communists, running out of ammunition, and dying with the word ‘Freedom’ on his lips.

  With the applause came the end of the class. They were to reconvene in a week’s time and Bastian was working out the best way to bail when, a couple of days later, he was visited at home by three serious-looking men in suits and ties. They said they worked for the government, and said they’d like to have a talk. They sat down in Bastian’s l
iving room, declining coffee. They were cold and angry. Later it occurred to Bastian that they wanted to frighten him.

  They introduced themselves as Jim, Steve and Don.

  ‘Do you know what Congressional oversight is, Bastian?’ asked Jim. He took a copy of Bastian’s CIA contract out of his pocket and held it up in Bastian’s face. ‘This is your name here, and your signature, right? Have you any idea what kind of a shitstorm goes down now when it comes out that the CIA has been running a covert program without Congressional authorisation?’

  ‘A creative writing program,’ said Bastian.

  ‘Shut up, will you?’ said Jim. The conversation went on for several hours, and recurred for many hours more over the months that followed. The classes were terminated. From hints and asides Bastian deduced that Crowpucker and the other seven writers had been acting beyond their authority, competence or duties; that they were all junior intelligence analysts. They were suspended. Over time Bastian learned that he wasn’t in trouble, and that the severe demeanour of his interrogators was not to render him a pliable witness but to intimidate him into signing various waivers and confidentiality clauses.

  ‘They were afraid,’ Bastian told Kellas. ‘They despised Crowpucker and his friends, I think, but they were less interested in punishing them than – you know the routine. The cover-up. It was that interlude of administrative contrition, after Vietnam and Watergate but before Reagan. The eye of Scrutiny briefly opened. They wanted to take everything that had been talked about in the two hours of that class and bury it as if it had never happened. Including the novel.’

  ‘They wanted to buy your book?’

  ‘They wanted to take it. I had to make them pay for it. In the end, they did pay. They paid me a lot and I signed everything they wanted me to sign. I don’t imagine they could have forced me if I’d refused. I took legal advice. I could have brushed them aside. But I took their money because I’d already lost interest in the book. I didn’t believe in it. I wanted it to disappear. I wanted it to be unwritten. I wanted to take the words and turn them back into whatever they were before they were words. In that one way, Crowpucker was right. I wasn’t writing to entertain. I was trying to write something to live by. I thought: should I write words to live by if I do not live that life?’

  ‘What happened to Crowpucker and the rest?’ asked Kellas.

  Bastian nodded slowly. ‘That was twenty-five years ago,’ he said. ‘They started too early and the CIA was the wrong environment for them. There was too much reality there. They’re in their fifties now, in their prime. They’re still around and from what I can see they’re in demand. They get a lot of patronage. In the last few months I’ve seen their names on the Op-Ed pages all the time. Writing their stories.’

  Bastian took Kellas upstairs to a bedroom in the eaves, with a shower room off it. He gave him a towel and left him. The room was warm and full of light from the risen sun. The floor and slanted ceiling were of unpainted, thickly varnished wood that creaked when Kellas walked across it. Kellas took off his shoes and clothes and removed the bandage. A thin, fragile scab had formed over the cut. He showered and dried himself. The scab held. He took a small package out of the pocket of his jacket, lay down on the sheet, pulled the quilt over his body and closed his eyes. He started to count the hours of sleep he’d had since leaving the Cunnerys’ house. As soon as he began to count, he fell asleep.

  11

  Kellas woke up and opened his eyes. Astrid was sitting on the bed, looking at him.

  ‘Hi,’ she said.

  ‘Hi,’ said Kellas. She had more blood and rawness in her than he remembered. ‘It’s strange to see you again.’

  ‘It’s more strange for me,’ said Astrid. ‘What are you doing here?’ Her voice was not as warm as Kellas wanted. She was sitting on the very edge of the bed, with her legs in jeans crossed away from him, her hands clasped on her lap, her shoulders turned slightly so that she could see his head on the pillow.

  ‘You sent me an email,’ said Kellas.

  ‘Come. On!’ said Astrid, gritting her teeth and marking each word with a hard poke of her middle finger onto Kellas’s thigh under the quilt. ‘You knew it was a fake. That virus sent the same email out to everyone in my address book, and they’re not here. Didn’t you get the message I sent telling everybody, as if it wasn’t obvious?’

  ‘I haven’t checked since I got the first message,’ said Kellas. He sat up and reached out his hand towards Astrid. She looked at it and kept her hands clasped together. She shook her head and bowed her shoulders. ‘What did you think was going to happen?’ she said. ‘I didn’t return your calls, your letters, your emails. Did you think “She’s crazy about me, that’s why she doesn’t ever reply”? Was that your logic?’

  Kellas began to talk about thinking things are going to happen, and how foolish it was, when Astrid interrupted. ‘You can’t stay. You mustn’t stay and you shouldn’t be here. You were out of your mind to think I’d want you to come, whatever it says in a dumb email. Don’t look at me like that. It’s not fair.’

  ‘I was out of my mind. But now I’m here.’

  ‘Bastian said he found you in the snow in just a suit and shirt, without even a bag?’ Astrid laughed. She stopped quickly, and became serious and worried, yet in the two seconds of her laughter Kellas’s spirit stretched. He realised he had gone to sleep with something clenched in his fist, and he remembered what it was. He handed it to Astrid.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘I never gave you back those batteries.’

  Astrid looked down at her hand as it closed around the batteries and she said: ‘Why are you doing this?’

  ‘There are things I need to talk to you about,’ said Kellas.

  ‘There’s no need here,’ said Astrid, getting up. ‘There’s no need between us. We did what we did and we went our separate ways. Don’t try to make some phoney bond because we slept together once, because you have whatever feelings you think you have for me, or because of anything else.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about what happened at Bagram.’

  ‘You’re too conceited. You want to make somebody else’s tragedy your own because your own mistakes aren’t grand enough to be tragedies.’ She shrugged. ‘Did you think we were going to have a hug and a cry about it and release our suppressed emotions? I don’t do that. I don’t suppress and I don’t release. I do remember. If you think you helped get those men killed, well, you probably did. I probably did. I’m not going to let you use that as a reason to hang out in my house when you shouldn’t be here.’

  ‘Is it your house? Or Bastian’s?’

  ‘It’s not any of your business. Those were Taliban drivers, you know.’ She opened the door. ‘I have to clean a deer.’ She left and he heard her going downstairs.

  Kellas got out of bed. One of the occupants of the house had put clean clothes on a rush-seated chair in the corner; a pair of jeans, a yellow T-shirt and a thick, roll-necked oatmeal sweater. On top of them was a clear plastic bag containing a toothbrush, toothpaste, a disposable razor and a tube of shaving cream. Kellas’s own clothes lay where he’d left them, on an old chest of drawers made from slabs of pine an inch thick. Next to his clothes there was a wooden decoy, carved and painted to imitate a swimming teal. By the bed was a table with a lamp and two books. There was a picture on the wall above the bed. Kellas guessed it had been taken in the late 1960s. It was an over-exposed colour photograph in a plain black metal frame. Standing in the background, on a lawn close to a fruit tree, was a handsome woman in loose summer trousers and a short-sleeved white blouse, holding her head to one side and squinting a little into the light, smiling and sticking the end of her right hand into her pocket self-consciously, while her left hand hung awkwardly loose. She looked like Astrid; her jaw was wider. Halfway between the woman and the camera was a young girl with a ponytail, in a mauve polyester T-shirt with a flower motif, dark slacks and bare feet. Kellas recognised the girl as Astrid. Her image was slightly blurred because she
was moving. She seemed to be running towards the camera, while her arm was stretched out behind her, her hand trailing towards the woman who must be her mother. There was an ambiguity to the motion implicit in the picture. It appeared that, just before the photographer pressed the shutter, Astrid had let go her mother’s hand and run towards the photographer, leaving all three of them isolated. Yet even though Astrid had run away from her mother, she had left her hand stretched out towards her, a gesture of empathy and invitation. It was as if she had been reluctant to be together with her mother at rest, yet would run with her. I shall not stand with you but I shall move with you, if you will move with me.

  Kellas went to the window, which projected out from the roof. It looked down into the back garden. He could see the pale belly of a headless deer hanging from a metal frame by its two front legs. Next to the frame Astrid had set up a folding table. On it was a saw, a cleaver, a butcher’s knife, a roll of kitchen paper, a small, steaming basin of water, and the deer’s head on a plate. It was not a large animal. There was a larger tub on the ground underneath the carcass. Astrid, wearing a stained white apron and holding a small knife between her teeth, was fiddling with a tube in a bloodstained opening she had cut around the deer’s anus. She was tying a knot in it.

  Kellas quickly showered, shaved, cleaned his teeth and put on the borrowed clothes. He wore his own old socks and, after hesitating, put on the jeans over his bare skin, rinsed his underpants in the basin, wrung them out and hung them over the shower curtain rail. He went downstairs. There was a smell of frying meat and the sounds of Bastian talking to Naomi while he opened and closed doors and deployed utensils. In the hallway, between Bastian in the kitchen and Astrid in the garden, Kellas was superfluous. His only reason to be there was to disrupt something that was working beautifully. He put his head round the kitchen door. Bastian looked up from the stove and Kellas asked if he could help. Bastian said no, he was in good time for a late lunch or an early dinner.