Island

by Johanna Skibsrud

  Was that why the island had suffered so much? Lota had asked. Everyone turned to stare, but Lota pretended not to notice. She was standing on tiptoe, toward the back of the crowd, her arms folded protectively across her small chest. Was that why? she asked again. A muddle-headed god who couldn’t keep the difference straight in his mind, who couldn’t tell water from earth or good from bad?

  The artist had taken off his hat and shielded his eyes against the glare of the sun. Sweat had collected in a ring around his head and now he rubbed it away. Yes, he responded uneasily. As far as he understood the story, at least, that was the reason for the suffering that now existed among all people on earth.

  But Lota had continued to puzzle over the question. She’d hardly listened while the artist spoke—in more confident tones now—about the history and process of his work, and remained distracted even after the talk had ended and everyone had begun to mill about, drinking lemonade from plastic cups and helping themselves to finger sandwiches and chocolate macaroons. What the artist had said didn’t make sense, she realized, and even her own question was somehow off. Because the muddle-headed god was a god from the before-time—a time when everything had existed in balance and human beings and animals had lived in peace. Lota half wanted to interrupt the little party to warn the artist of his mistake. It was not the Birdman, she wanted to say, but whoever it was who’d first torn the bodies of men from the bodies of birds, whoever had first drawn back the water from the earth and the earth from the sky. It was he and not the mixed-up dreaming god who’d been the cause of the people’s suffering.

  Nobody else seemed concerned. They chatted mildly and munched on macaroons, and slowly drifted away. Lota stayed, however, for some time after, hovering beside the refreshment table and watching the artist as he continued to work—still wondering to herself whether the figure he carved represented the cause of, or their deliverance from, suffering.

  And ever since, whenever Lota saw the Birdman in the centre of town, she was reminded of the resigned and meticulous patience of the artist—as well as of his mistake. It came to seem as though, in a way, it was he who was her distant ancestor, rather than the bird.

  But now it was, very certainly, the bird and not the artist that Nick Fromm resembled as he stood beside the foreign guard and technicians outside the main station. He stared at them as they drove away, bewildered. He shook his head—not in opposition or resistance, but in wonder and disbelief.

  In no time at all after that they were bumping along the rough gravel drive, crowded at the edges with pigweed and creeper; in no time they were clearing the gates of the outer station and Lota was feeling the same way she did whenever she jumped off the end of the wharf into the sea.

  The cameras, suspended and glinting, winked at them from their high poles. Leaning partway out the passenger window, Kurtz raised her gun at one of them and fired. The bulb spat and shattered; fine splinters of glass rained down like a sudden sun shower. She fired again. Then Mad Max, leaning out a rear window, fired. Then Baby Jane opposite. Bang. Pop. Buzz. Bang. Pop. Buzz. The cameras burst and scattered along the drive. Tiny shards of glass twinkled like fallen stars.

  And still nothing happened. No alarm sounded; nothing, or nobody, appeared. Lota watched the low building and tightened her grip on her gun. Her heart pounded. She began to doubt that anything, or anyone, was actually inside the building. But the more she doubted, the more terrified she became.

  Then a shot echoed loudly; they were within fifty yards of the building. Another shot followed. Then another.

  Lota couldn’t tell where the shots were coming from, and for a terrifying moment it seemed as though they were being fired from the earth itself, surrounding them from every side. But then Kurtz fired back and a figure stumbled, then fell, from the station’s low roof. To Lota, it was as though it happened backwards. The figure was already falling before she noticed that Kurtz had raised her gun.

  After that there was a deafening silence. The van screeched to a halt and Baby Jane hauled open the back door. They poured out, one after another. More guns fired. But Lota’s heart no longer pounded in her chest. It seemed as if it hardly beat at all. The feeling had gone in her legs and hands, but she continued to move—as if automatically now. She was aware of her feet crunching gravel, of the steady progress she made toward the low building, of Kurtz’s voice—though she couldn’t make out a single word.

  It didn’t matter. She knew well enough what the orders were. She was to guard the entrance (she drew up abruptly in front of the door); to make sure no one either entered or exited the building; to “shoot first, ask questions later”—fire at anything and anyone that crossed her path.

  “Violence,” Kurtz had told them once, “is humanity recreating itself. We do not, of course, invite violence,” she’d added very carefully, “but we do not foreclose on its possibility—or, for that matter, on any other. For the future to take place, for it to take the place of both the present and the past, there must be a clean break—a genuine, necessarily violent rupture.”

  Lota held her gun tightly and tried to swallow. Well, she considered, she was alive anyway.

  The idea troubled her. She turned in circles, listened as shouts, curses, and the odd gunshot echoed from inside.

  She peered into the building—saw, directly across the hall, that a set of double doors had been propped open, emptying onto a windowless room. The only light came from a door at the back. Having been left slightly ajar, it permitted a dull glow to fall in an elongated triangle along the cracked concrete floor.

  Lota looked left, then right. A narrow corridor extended in both directions, tapering at the ends and glowing like an empty shell.

  Doors continued to bang. Then Hal appeared. He looked different. There was something swollen about him, Lota thought. His neck looked thicker.

  Behind him—shoulders thrust, mouth gagged, head wagging—was the man who, six months before, had been “honoured and proud” to welcome Nick and the two other new hires to “the Ø Com family.” Norm and Hal had picked him up outside his home just as Kurtz was entering the embassy; he never went to work before ten.

  Hal had him by the shoulder and led him slowly, almost tenderly, down the hall. Lota watched them approach. She swung back and forth between the corridor and the drive, and every time she swung back to the corridor they were closer than they had been before. She tried to catch Hal’s eye, but there was something about them that refused to fix, or settle. It made her think of Miles. Yes, she thought—a sick feeling stirring somewhere in her gut—there was something quite definitely narcotic about the way Hal looked now.

  She swung back toward the drive and scanned the horizon without really seeing anything. By the time she’d completed a full turn and stood facing the building again, Kurtz had entered the room from the back. Lota watched her through the double doors, her face plunged into shadow, her hair blazing—lit up from behind by the sliver of light.

  Hal tugged the prisoner through the double doors, then stopped—quickly enough that the prisoner lurched forward, then fell. The noise that resulted—a strange scuffling—startled Lota. She was not sure at first if it was coming from inside or outside. She turned in three complete circles, gun raised—ready.

  But there was nothing but gravel outside, and Mexican creeper. Still, Lota could not be convinced. She stared at the gravel, at the weeds—swaying a little in the slight breeze. Then she whipped around again. She watched, through the open double doors, as Hal yanked the prisoner up from the floor.

  Kurtz was gone now—slipped back the way she’d come. Lota was straining to peer after her when a screeching sound, like a cat being stepped on, caused her to whip around again.

  Nothing. Even the weeds stood stock still.

  Quickly, Lota turned back to the hall. She could still see Hal and the Ø Com man, framed by the double doors. But now, in front of them—in the exact spot where Kurtz had stood only a moment before—there swung a large metal hook. Hal to
ok a step toward the hook, then half turned toward the Ø Com man. Lota could see his face now, the way his eyes glowed; from a distance, they appeared nearly phosphorescent.

  It was possible, Lota considered hopefully, that what was happening to Hal was not, as it had first appeared to her, a sort of narcotic distraction, but its opposite—some of the old wisdom, returning. An apprehension of chaos as power rather than as indifference or dispersal. Yes, it was possible that, at this very moment, he was seeing right down to the particle level—past what was immediately apparent to the eye. Seeing the way that everything was both everything and nothing; identifying the buzz of chaos at the heart of all things.

  But whatever it was that Hal saw at that moment, or failed to see, Lota found it difficult to look away. She forced herself to turn, to look back to the drive, but her eyes refused to focus on anything. She only stood there, blinking painfully, until the scuffling sound from inside the building distracted her again.

  Hal had fastened the prisoner’s handcuffs to the hook in the middle of the room and now the hook was raised; the prisoner’s feet began to dance a little. He had to stand on tiptoe in order to even touch the floor.

  Lota stared as the man danced—turning in little pirouetting circles. Once—briefly, and by sheer accident—she managed to catch his eye. Then his eyes flanked. He seemed to look left and right at the same time, toward both opposing walls.

  Kurtz re-entered carrying a folding chair. She walked around the hanging man and set up the chair so that it faced away from Lota, toward the back of the room. Then Norma emerged; she carried a clipboard in one hand and something else in the other—perhaps a recording device.

  Hal gave the prisoner a shove and he spun like a ballerina. When he stopped spinning, he faced Kurtz directly and Lota could see his eyes again. But now they weren’t looking at her, or at anything, and they still seemed somehow separate, rather than a set. He had not yet made a single sound. Even when, a moment later, Hal removed the gag, the prisoner only coughed; spat a little.

  Lota glanced back at the drive.

  “Name, please?” (It was Kurtz who’d spoken.)

  “You know me well enough.”

  Lota kept her eyes trained, determinedly, on the rolled-back metal gate.

  “Name, please?” There was no alteration in Kurtz’s tone.

  A cough. An indiscernible stutter.

  “Speak up, please, so the recorder can hear you.”

  “Philip. Philip J. Mercer.”

  The pull was irresistible; Lota turned back. She could see Kurtz’s shoulders, rising against the back of the folding chair. The shape of her head—encircled by a fringe of hair that had been lit up by the room’s single shaft of light. Beyond her, the prisoner—suspended—danced awkwardly from foot to foot.

  “Do you know who I am?” Kurtz said.

  The prisoner said nothing.

  Kurtz extended both arms and gestured broadly, toward Hal on her left and Norma on her right. “Do you know who we are?”

  The prisoner continued to dance. “Yes,” he said. “I’ve been informed.”

  “You know our demands, then. I’m sure you’ll agree. They’re simple enough. And yet, I’ve been told you refuse to co-operate.”

  “Wrong!” The prisoner lurched forward, spinning on his toes. “I’ve told you…told your people that…quite the contrary. I’m very happy to co-operate! It’s just I don’t have…have never had, you see…the precise information you’re looking for.” The prisoner completed another full circle on his toes and gasped for breath. “I’ve got a lot of other information—more important information—if you’re willing to listen…” He was losing momentum, couldn’t complete another turn, and swung back, instead, the other way. “Information that can help us both! This situation…really,” he sputtered; he seemed to be losing the thread. “What I want to say is. It puts us all at an advantage. If we could only work together.”

  “Let’s calm down,” Kurtz interrupted. “Please. Can we calm down a moment?”

  The prisoner snorted. An arc of snot flew through the air and disappeared into the shadows.

  “We’re interested,” Kurtz continued coolly, “we’re very interested in working together. Of course. But right now you must understand we happen to have a pressing priority. We need the code to the system. The system owned and operated by Ø, the company for which you personally serve as the chief information officer.” Kurtz paused. Only the tip-tip-tap of the prisoner’s shoes could be heard in the silence. “But you,” Kurtz continued, “you, the chief information officer, claim that you do not have access to this code. Put yourself in our shoes for a second, please. Would you believe yourself, if you were us?”

  The prisoner had stopped spinning. His feet tapped insistently, in order to keep himself in place. “The operation of this system,” he replied slowly, “has nothing…to do with me. This place”—he spat out the word like a tooth—“has nothing to do with me. With us. That must be obvious, even to you! Since when,” he spat, “do telecommunications companies detain international criminals? You can see for yourself…There’ve been certain compromises. There’ve been…”

  Another short screech interrupted the prisoner. As if on cue, he began to dance again—only now there was nothing for him to dance on. The prisoner’s feet were suspended an inch or so above the floor. He howled. For a moment it was impossible to hear anything at all above the noise.

  “I’m sure you’ll agree,” Kurtz said when he was quiet again, “it will be easier on all of us if you simply give us the information we need.”

  “I-don’t-know-the-code!” the prisoner shouted. “I promise you, I don’t. I’m just a—an HR guy, at the end of the day. I promise you. I have nothing to do with the code. I have nothing to do with the actual system!”

  Hal took a step toward the prisoner. He removed a police baton from his back pocket and hit the prisoner once with it, just above the hip. He did not hit hard, but the impact caused the prisoner to spin first one way, and then the other—and, again, to howl.

  When he stopped spinning he stopped howling. “Look,” he said in a tired voice, as if he’d suddenly grown terribly bored. “I work for Ø, yes. But who, do you wonder, is Ø working for? Go ask your friends at the embassy!” He jerked his head strangely. “I’ve got nothing! Nothing! I promise you. Which is why…why I’m telling you”—his voice rose, became a strangled cry, then levelled itself again—“I want to work with you, I honestly do. I think the two of us”—his eyes had focused again, were fixed directly on Kurtz—“have more in common than you might think. That we could, in fact, get on very well. After all, we both want…what?” Again, his head jerked strangely. “A certain amount of autonomy. A certain amount of independence…The right to pursue our own interests. Isn’t that right? Our own ends?”

  There was a long pause. Then a creaking sound; the prisoner was being lowered gradually. When he hit the floor, his legs buckled. At first, he was unable to stand. Then something in him seemed to settle. He regained his balance; his head stopped twitching.

  “I want you to understand something,” Kurtz said. “If we don’t manage to get the code from you…or from your friends at the embassy—”

  “They’re not my friends.”

  “—if we don’t manage to get the code,” Kurtz repeated, “from you or from your friends, you know we’ll find some other way. You know we can simply cut the wire.”

  The prisoner’s knees buckled again. His eyes flanked. “No!” he burst out. “No, that would be bad—very bad—for everyone! I don’t think you quite understand.”

  Kurtz laughed. “Oh,” she said, “but I do! It would be bad—very bad, indeed. For those, that is, who have something to lose.”

  “Work with me!” the prisoner begged. “I don’t know the code, but I do know…other things. And I don’t want to work with Vollman—or the Empire—any more than you do! What you said just now, see, if we work together, it’s just not true. On the contrary, you and I mo
re than anyone right now have something to lose. As well as something, potentially, to gain.”

  There was another long pause. Kurtz shifted in her seat, motioned to someone—Norma or Hal. “All right,” she said finally. “So what do you know?”

  “There are maps,” the prisoner said.

  Kurtz shrugged. “Okay. Maps.”

  “Thirteen terabytes’ worth of side-scan sonar data,” the prisoner said, more urgently. “A complete chart of the seafloor from here to each coast. The work was all commissioned by the Empire. Military operations. All highly confidential. The charts were never intended for us. It took years for us to convince them of any connection between our work and theirs. We can use those maps, I told them. If we work together, we can take our cables where no one’s ever gone, chart a whole new course across the Pacific, reduce the time it takes to transmit information from coast to coast by more than half! It took a while, but we got there. Did we ever! At this point, even the president has a personal investment in the project. And we were all set to move forward with it until…” The prisoner was beginning to relax. He swung his neck as he spoke, as though addressing a large audience. “Vollman. He speaks up. For once in his life he speaks up. Doesn’t want to give the land base up, he says. And the Empire, you know…They’re attempting to negotiate!” Spit flew from the corners of his mouth and hung suspended for a moment, glistening. “I’ve tried to talk to Vollman myself. Tried to make him see. I’ve told him, We keep going like this, we both lose, but he doesn’t listen, doesn’t seem to understand.”

  Hal stepped forward, his baton raised. “We need the code.”

  The prisoner reeled back. “No!” he cried. “You don’t! You just think you need the code! What you need”—his voice adjusted to a more reasonable note—“is to get your hands on those charts. If you managed that—I promise you—you’d have a whole lot more than access to the existing cable. You’d be holding—and I’m not exaggerating—the entire future in your hands!”