We Are Now Beginning Our Descent

by James Meek

  He wandered out of the utility room towards Astrid’s study. He would not try to sleep, but waking was no comfort in the rural small hours. He was shaking inside, almost trembling, like in the aftermath of some angry, meaningless altercation with a stranger in the street. Like the aftermath of the Cunnerys’. He was unsure what day it had been. He could make himself sure, he could work it out, but he would rather it was on no particular day. He’d been in that state, with the jitters, when he came out of there and wrote to Sophie M’Gurgan. He pressed his eyes shut and bared his teeth. He opened his eyes and began to look through old numbers of DC Monthly for Astrid’s articles. He found several and took them to the kitchen. He sat down at the table and read through Astrid’s reports from Afghanistan. There were four; each, except for the last, was some five thousand words long. One was about the women of the Panjshir valley, all they had endured and lost during the wars against the Soviets and the Taliban. Another was from inside an American unit hunting for Osama bin Laden in the southern mountains. The third was about an Afghan soldier, a Dari-speaking Tajik from the north, who had travelled to the Pashtun realm of Kandahar for the first time in his life as the Taliban retreated, and then returned to his home village, where his uncle had taken up opium cultivation.

  Kellas heard Naomi crying. Bastian brought her into the kitchen and made her up some formula and fed her. Neither man spoke. Kellas read Astrid’s fourth story, a short sketch at the beginning of the magazine about the experience of giving birth in an Afghan maternity hospital, where ‘everything was fine, except for the swaddling’ and how hard it had been afterwards to get the documents to prove that Naomi was her own, American, baby. Nothing was said but some kind of companion was implicit in the last, and perhaps the third article. There was reference to ‘a friend’.

  Bastian took Naomi away and returned, alone. He filled a glass from the tap and put it down at the far end of the table from where Kellas was sitting. He sat down, took a drink of water, folded his arms and looked at Kellas.

  ‘I was reading Astrid’s articles from Afghanistan,’ said Kellas.

  Bastian nodded. ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘They’re great. The last one, about getting Naomi home, it was pretty funny. I guess she could have written a lot more.’

  ‘She could have. Taking Naomi out of Afghanistan was nothing compared to getting her into the country. She was launched home by the helpful side of American bureaucracy but when she landed it happened that she got caught by the suspicious side. Then social services got involved. There were calls to Nasa, blood tests, affidavits FedExed from Australia. By the time they believed it was her baby, they’d come across Astrid’s other files. Two DUIs, damaging property, discharging a firearm in public.’

  ‘Did she hurt anyone?’

  ‘It was ten years ago. She emptied a gun into a guy’s car, outside a bar, to stop him following her. There wasn’t anyone in the car when she did it. He’d been hassling her all night. She never went to jail, but social services didn’t like it. The righteous superstitions of the enlightened. They knew her mother. They whispered about bad blood. It was a hard summer, what with bringing back Naomi, and Jack dying. And from the day she came back from Kabul until tonight, she’s stayed on the wagon.’

  ‘You’re trying to make me feel bad.’

  ‘Do you feel bad?’

  ‘Of course I feel bad. I know that if I hadn’t come here, your commune would still be ticking along.’

  ‘I don’t like to call Astrid an alcoholic because it sounds too much like the end of the story.’

  ‘Isn’t it supposed to be the beginning of—’

  ‘I know what AA says,’ interrupted Bastian, his voice raised. ‘I can’t stop you calling her an alcoholic. I’m not going to tell you that I’ve never seen her this way. I’ll tell you some more. She’s never said she drinks too much. The only way she recognises what she does is how she tries to stop herself doing it. She’s never gone to a meeting, stood up and said: “I am an alcoholic.” If you tell her she’s drunk, she’ll tell you to go to hell. Three and a half bottles of wine, now, in December ’02, that’s a drink. Two, three years ago, it would’ve been her mid-morning lemonade.’

  The reptile eyes. ‘When you see her that way, even once…I know how weak it makes me sound,’ said Kellas. ‘But I have seen her now, and the alcoholic, it’s the real her.’

  ‘Look out of the window,’ said Bastian. ‘Do you think the darkness is day, pretending to be night? Is the day just darkness with light hiding it? How can you tell? Astrid was a drunk tonight, but she wasn’t this morning, and she won’t be tomorrow. They’ll start out calling her an alcoholic, and they’ll try to cure her of that. It doesn’t stop there. They’ll diagnose all her weaknesses, they’ll put a medical term on everything that makes her human, and they won’t be happy till they’ve cured her of the disease of being Astrid Walsh.’

  Kellas nodded and looked down at the table. He bit his lip.

  ‘I’m disappointed in you,’ said Bastian. ‘You have to make your own lover before you can know her. Everybody does that. What else are you going to do? But you’ve got to leave space for the real woman to grow inside. Otherwise you’ll end up alone.’

  ‘Like you.’

  ‘Three people share this house.’

  Kellas stood up, rinsed off his plate and glass and put them on the drying rack next to the sink. He asked Bastian for his glass and Bastian passed it to him and Kellas rinsed it.

  ‘You’re not bad-looking,’ said Bastian. ‘But you’re not so perfect that a woman would want you just to play with.’

  ‘What’s your point?’

  ‘It turns out Astrid’s not what you wanted. What about what she wanted?’

  ‘I’m no use to her.’

  ‘This has happened to you before,’ said Bastian. ‘You’re some kind of -aholic. They’d give it a name, too, and try to cure you, if they could.’

  Kellas turned round and stood with his hands behind his back, leaning against the counter. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I gave it plenty of space and time with my ex-wife, and with my Czech girlfriend, and with a woman I was – with an English girlfriend.’

  ‘I thought there’d be more.’

  Kellas laughed, sat down and ran his fingers through his hair. He sighed and held his hands out open towards Bastian. ‘What do you want?’ he said. ‘Details of my schoolboy crush?’

  ‘Was it a schoolboy crush?’

  ‘No,’ said Kellas, licking his lips and frowning. ‘I’ve always thought of it as love. Something total, a real sickness, which left me changed. I never felt that way again until. Yes. But that was twenty years ago.’

  ‘OK. You dated while you were at school, and that was the end of it.’

  ‘No, we never went out. I was too shy to speak to her. I moped after her from a distance for a year, I worshipped her, I wrote her poems. I was amazed at the power she had over me.’ She had taken hold of the world when he was there and shaken it till all its folds snapped and shone like a flag in the wind. ‘But after a year I went to university and she stayed behind.’

  ‘You never saw her again.’

  Kellas found himself blinking rapidly as he faced Bastian down. ‘I didn’t say that. She contacted me out of the blue twelve years ago, after she saw my name over an article. We went for a drink and she came home with me. We didn’t sleep together. She looked the same, and the talking was good, but she no longer had those powers to shake the world. She looked exactly the same, yet she’d become ordinary. She took a cab home. That was the end of the story.’ He shrugged. ‘When I say the end of the story, I mean the end of that story, the love story. I still see her, often, but I don’t have those feelings for her now. She married a friend of mine, Pat M’Gurgan, the writer I talked about yesterday.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘I don’t see why it matters to you.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Sophie.’

  ‘You’re jealous of your friend beca
use he married your old sweetheart.’

  ‘I’m jealous of my friend for finding a way to stay with a woman he doesn’t love any more.’

  13

  Kellas got up at dawn and found clothes and shoes where Bastian had told him to forage. The shoes were Bastian’s, an old pair of sneakers, a size too large, but with a pair of thick socks and the laces pulled tight, he could walk in them. He took everything out of his wallet and spread the bills out on top of the chest of drawers to dry. He wrapped himself in an oil-stained grey-and-black checked overcoat, put the mobile in his pocket, still switched off, and left the house before anyone else was up. He walked to the main road and crossed the causeway to Assateague as the clear sky gained light. The wind touching his cheek was almost warm. Kellas followed the road into the pines of the outer island, passed a set of empty tollbooths marking the edge of the wildlife refuge, and took the way signed to the beach.

  He had to be the first man out. As the road curved he saw a deer up ahead, a dappled animal not three feet high. It turned its head towards him, tensed its thigh muscles, and dived off the road, its hooves clicking on the blacktop, then splashing through the pools on either side. The sun caught the white plumage of a trio of egrets loitering in the crook of a pine branch and herons had spaced themselves out along the margins of the waterland, like the weathered piles of a vanished causeway. The trees ended and the road ran straight east towards the dunes. In the open water to the south were the camouflaged cubes of hunters’ hides. There was a sound in the distance like a commuter train approaching. Kellas looked to the north and saw a white cloud rising, shifting, curling and sharpening. It was thousands of white birds, flying and braying at once: snow geese. The lightening of the air was not only from the sun rising but from the flattening of the land as he approached the ocean. Here at the continent’s eastern edge the light was cold and pearly, promising great wonders, in its own time, for the patient among the species. In the lee of the dunes was a visitors’ centre with a tall flagpole. There was wind enough to make the Stars and Stripes twitch, rise, sag and twitch again. Kellas reached the dunes and tramped over them and down onto the beach.

  It was a plain, clean beach of fine pale sand. The breakers rose waist-high, smashed and hissed, and a flock of birds with walnutsized bodies raced in and out, as fast as spiders, to scour the rakedup sand for protein as each wave advanced and retreated. The sea roared with the same great raw throat, always drinking and never swallowing, that Kellas had grown up with. He had spent evenings on the beach closest to his home in Duncairn in the year before he left, at the time when the last light was going down yellow over the city and the first star rose over the forest further down the coast. He’d sat on the sand, digging his hands into it and feeling that he was becoming a poet and a lover, when he was neither. Like Pat M’Gurgan, Kellas believed that the light belonged to him, but Kellas had wanted to be loved for understanding it, not for sharing it.

  Talking to Bastian the night before, he had still made the sixteen-year-old Sophie ‘the girl’, and the married Sophie, Sophie. It was easier to think of them as two people, the one he had imagined, adored and kept his distance from, and the one he knew, his clever hard-working friend, who’d never been supposed to hear him blurt that she was one of those ordinary women who got things done. It was an odd thing to have said. She was not ordinary. She was the fixed place that the ever-drowning staff of her radio station clung to amid their solipsistic woes and squabbles, she’d raised a son, made two stepdaughters think of her as their mother, and moored M’Gurgan in the semblance of a haven for the last twelve years. The word ‘ordinary’ was an after-echo of the word that had jumped into Kellas’s head in 1990, when Sophie had sought him out and they had met for a single evening.

  He’d been surprised at her courage and recklessness in contacting him after so much time had passed, when she knew nothing about him except his bad poems to her, his loitering near her house in the hope of seeing her outside school, his obscure novel and a few articles she’d read. Her claim was that it was curiosity. In the night and day before they met, at a bar in Clerkenwell, a conveyor of possibilities revolved around Kellas. That a great mercy had been shown to him, a second chance. That she would have changed out of recognition, become fat or drug-raddled. That they would make love that night. That she’d lose her nerve and not come. That he might call her and cancel. That, whether he was seventeen or twenty-six, he still desired a sixteen-year-old.

  He was late. As he approached the bar, he saw her coming towards him in the distance. Nothing obvious about her had changed that he could see, her features, her expression, the way she moved. Yet when they were close, he saw that something in her, an obscure quality he had once yearned to have by him, was no longer there. They talked all evening and nothing harsh was said on either side and Kellas managed not to pronounce the word ‘ordinary’, but she could tell that he was disappointed, and she was hurt, and the more hurt and disappointed she was, the more affectionate she tried to be. Towards the end Kellas was trying to keep talking while he thought wild, enraged thoughts about how the Sophie who should have been there had been murdered by this Sophie. They stood at Kellas’s door, and when Sophie realised that Kellas did not even want to kiss her, she said: ‘Well. This hasn’t worked out, has it?’ And she left him there. He watched her walking away and told himself he should run after her, as if to see whether his body would act on its own; as if his legs might find the will his heart lacked. But he didn’t move until she was out of sight.

  On the beach, Kellas walked along the edge of the tideline, the hard-packed wet sand. There were shells, fine scallop half-lids, black ones and white ones. After walking for a mile he saw that a soldier’s helmet had been washed up and partly buried in the sand.

  He went closer. If it had been painted once, the paint had worn off to reveal the material underneath. It did not seem to be made of the usual synthetic composite. It was metal, like bronze, with a light reddish sheen in the brown of it. How had it floated and not sunk? It was slightly oval in shape, dented on top, as if whoever wore it had been struck a violent blow over the head. The form was a flattened hemisphere, with a raised line around the rim. It resembled the helmets Soviet troops had once worn, and which Kellas had seen Russians and Chechens wearing in Grozny. Perhaps some cohort of new American foederati had been on exercise here, Azerbaijani marines, or Ethiopian sailors.

  He put the toe of Bastian’s sneaker against the helmet. With the first touch he apprehended that it was not metal after all. He pressed a little harder and pushed to flip the helmet over. His guts were pinched by a spasm of fear and he took a brisk step back, baring his teeth. Occupying the helmet, and fused to it, was the remains of an arthropod, a jointed beast eight inches long, like a headless scorpion, with ten or twelve jointed legs and a demon’s tail. The vision that came to Kellas’s mind in the instant was of a wounded soldier’s head becoming stuck to the material of his helmet with his own blood, and some battlefield scavenger creeping out and feeding off it from the inside, till the head was entirely consumed. The vision only lasted a second, but it was long enough to shake Kellas, and even after he saw what the helmet and its owner really were, the vision stayed with him.

  This creature had been coming to these shores for longer than humans, and would be here when the humans were gone. Unless, that is, the evolutionary tendencies of human beings merged towards that of the horseshoe crab, and the two creatures became one. Why not? Humankind had been provided with an excellent protection for its mind in the form of a skull, yet had found the protection inadequate, and had designed extra, thicker, larger outer skulls, helmets of steel and Kevlar. In time, humanity might learn the advantage of larger helmets, covering more and more of the body and being worn continuously, until they realised in full the lesson of the horseshoe crab, that to survive for hundreds of millions of years it was better to live permanently inside a thick, all-encompassing helmet, seeing but not being seen, feeling safe.

  Good
for the species, if not, evidently, for all its individual members. Kellas could see now that this part of the beach had dead horseshoe crabs scattered across it, some buried in the sand, others overturned or broken into pieces. It looked like the Kuwaiti desert in 1991 after the mass surrenders of the Iraqi army, when they had dumped their helmets after their weapons were collected and they were led away. Under the gathering darkness of the day, as the oil wells burned, Kellas had picked one up as a souvenir, thinking he might drill holes in it and use it as a flower basket, knowing that this was something he would never do and that he wanted to leave it out in his flat to impress girls. He was twenty-seven. When he took it home he did leave it out, hanging it from a nail in his living room, and found that visitors treated it with revulsion, assuming he had taken it from the corpse of a dead soldier. He told them the truth, but they didn’t believe him, and eventually he took it down and threw it away.

  When they had driven through Saudi and Egyptian lines and through the US Marine positions and were heading towards Kuwait City, Kellas and his companions passed groups of Iraqi soldiers in green fatigues who had surrendered and whose wrists had been tightly bound behind their backs with plastic handcuffs. The Americans had ordered them to march south and they had done so, without water, not sure where they were going. Kellas and the reporter he was driving with had stopped to speak to one man who was walking by himself, handcuffed, exhausted, thin and unshaven, his head lolling at an angle as if somebody had accidentally broken it off and put it back, hoping nobody would notice. He didn’t speak English. They had given him water and driven on and only afterwards did it occur to them: why had they not cut through the plastic of the cuffs and freed his hands? He was unarmed and alone and they could have given him a bottle of water to carry with him. Kellas realised that this was what the soldier had been saying, the Arabic phrase he kept repeating and which Kellas could not understand, when even the possibility of using sign language was denied: ‘Free my hands.’