Our Future is in the Air

by Corballis, Tim

  A call at the hospital: ‘My name is Shanks.’

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘I’m with the police. Well, in a way. One of your employees, Marcus Milne. Could I talk to you about him?’

  ‘Is he in trouble?’

  ‘Yes, oh, yes I think so.’

  ‘Well, he has been erratic lately, and absent. He’s suffered a bereavement of sorts, though it’s not a family member and he’s taking it very…. We’ve been wondering what to do about him. How bad… ? What is it he’s… ?’

  ‘How bad? How bad a situation has he got himself into? I can’t tell you that. It’s just something I’m keeping an eye on.’

  ‘Some of the staff would—I shouldn’t say this. But there are plenty of staff who disagree with his ideas.’

  ‘People want him gone?’

  ‘I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say that. Possibly, though, yes—’

  ‘You have to keep him on. Please make sure he retains his position.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘The trouble he’s going through—I want to solve that with minimal fuss.’

  ‘Is it bad?’

  ‘My job is just to make sure things run smoothly. There are unknowns, so that’s always a problem.’

  ‘We don’t want him becoming disruptive, to patients and other staff.’

  ‘Has he been disruptive?’

  ‘No. No, but he has—’

  ‘We can find ways to accommodate or compensate for any disruption. We do have certain resources.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And, ultimately, if nothing changes too radically, the trouble will stop. It’ll be a journey, if you like, a story with a good ending, and then it will be over. But if he loses his position, I’m not sure what would be unleashed. What he would do instead, who he would do it with. It just might be a greater problem for us.’

  ‘For us?’

  ‘For our way of life.’

  ‘The perspective of becoming-object is, according to some accounts, a perspective of pure objectivity. The challenge offered by those accounts is of how to make use of such an objectivity if it cannot be given subjective voice. It is not a simple matter of translation, the always imperfect meeting of one language or indeed one subjectivity by another. It is, rather, a question of the impossible meeting of subject and object—or rather their fusion. The task would be something like the production of a non-language language. Some have argued that it would be the production of language at its purest and most objective—language itself as the object to which meaning is brought by the subject. The most comprehensive experiment with these possibilities is found in the ongoing work of the “Contour” poets based in the Bay Area of California. Some of those poets have experimented with TCF, but emphasised not the “romantic” experience of arrival at the future, but the state or non-state of transition or contradiction as such. They argued that it was a state that could not, strictly speaking, be experienced and therefore could not be the prompt for lyrical expression. The challenge was to isolate, within that non-state, a non-subjective procedure for writing.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  It was the evening of the election. It was also Leonard’s eighteenth birthday, and he was able to vote for the first time. The radio was on in the kitchen. Leonard said, ‘Fuck, maybe it’s true that when things get worse they get better.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  Silence.

  Someone said, ‘Muldoon’s victory is a good thing?’

  And someone else: ‘Labour took our movement from us. You know, they funnelled all that radical energy into liberal policies… now, now we can take it back.’

  The occupants and a sizeable gathering of guests were in the downstairs rooms of the house. Music audible from the lounge. Children upstairs, involved in their own games. The adults made efforts to understand the situation. Everyone in the house had his or her own take on the result.

  ‘… Labour’s campaign! All they could do was whine about the Tories being divisive.’

  ‘They are.’

  ‘And their only alternative, you know, the only thing they can think of… warm fuzzy reasonable inclusion… ’

  Janet, Lilly and Marcus were all stoned.

  ‘Nothing will actually change.’

  ‘They will tinker with superannuation until they’re—’

  ‘Easy for someone in his twenties to be so dismissive… ’

  And: ‘God—politics is HERE! Forget it all. It’s here in this house and in this community.’

  ‘And it’s in the factories.’

  ‘Yes, yes, in the factories, the gardens, the hospitals. Right, Marcus?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Ha. We’re all young. You know, superannuation, all that… ’

  A silence.

  ‘Every time some Tory talks about our way of life I feel sick.’

  As the postmortem started up again, Marcus said to Janet, ‘How long has Pen been gone?’

  ‘Five months.’

  He hugged her. She shook her head and went out the back door. Marcus followed her.

  ‘Stop.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘You’ve been really nice. I know we haven’t talked about him much lately.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And that’s good. I don’t want to talk about him. I don’t want my life to be, um.’

  ‘Just all about Pen.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I… ’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Um. I forgot.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Did something unsaid hang over their forgetting?

  Janet said, ‘Fuck, I miss sex though.’

  Another silence—and again a forgetting, though now with more charge. Lilly joined them, holding Marcus around the waist and bringing Janet close too. Lilly said, ‘I heard that.’

  ‘Well? Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘We could find someone for you tonight, I bet?’

  ‘No!’ They laughed. ‘I don’t want some… ’

  Peter came by, limping a little; he stopped and kissed Janet on the hand before carrying on.

  ‘Right on cue.’

  ‘What’s he up to?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter if he hears me talk about sex.’

  Janet realised for a moment that she couldn’t talk about Pen because she couldn’t talk about Grey. Why couldn’t they know about him? She didn’t want their anger. She didn’t want to have to process it—and she didn’t want to have their whole alternative world disturbed just as she was entering it. What would it mean to them that Pen had been also working with Grey? She wanted to know more. She was curious about what was under the surface of her life that whole time. Pen? He had disappeared under that surface. He was gone. She missed him, but she was aware that it was a facade she missed.

  Marcus said, ‘Who are all these people?’

  A laugh. Janet: ‘You know most of them.’

  ‘I guess so.’

  Someone, in fact, was eyeing Janet. They all agreed they didn’t know him. She said, ‘Fuck it. I’m not going to have sex with him though.’

  Lilly said, ‘Why not?’

  ‘No!’

  Marcus said to Lilly, ‘He’s no oil painting.’

  Janet was moving away. ‘I heard that!’—in a stage whisper. She took the man aside. ‘Whose friend are you?’

  ‘I don’t really know anyone here. No, I saw some faces I recognised.’

  ‘You just came in off the street.’

  ‘Not quite.’

  He was standing at a respectful distance, looking serious now. She frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I was told about this party, a week or so ago.’

  ‘We didn’t plan it a week ago.’

  ‘Oh.’

  She looked at him. She said, ‘Grey.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘How does he… ’

  ‘He’s a spy. He knows stuff I suppose.’

  ‘Shit. He sent you? Are you a spy too?’

  ‘Na
h. He said I should talk to you. Said you’d be having a party, and maybe I could go along.’

  ‘Did you know Pen?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re… ’

  ‘I was with him in the Fedorovians, yeah.’

  ‘Far out. That’s… I wish I wasn’t so out of it.’

  A laugh. ‘Maybe it’s good you are.’

  Silence. ‘Is it… I don’t know. Is there something heavy here? Should I sit down?’

  ‘No. No, it’s okay. I don’t really know anything. Grey just thought you’d like to talk to me.’

  ‘Why? If you don’t… you don’t know anything about Pen?’

  ‘I don’t know where he is, if that’s what you mean. I don’t know what happened.’

  ‘When did you last see him?’

  ‘A couple of years ago. Maybe more.’

  ‘That was with… them.’

  ‘Yeah. We all knew he was a spy.’

  ‘Oh. No, but. No. He wasn’t actually a spy… ’

  ‘Or whatever they call them. Informer?’

  ‘He was—he was confused.’ A strange word to apply to Pen.

  A silence. ‘He contacted us out of nowhere. That’s enough to raise suspicions right from the start. It’s not like we advertised in the newspaper. Grey—I guess it was Grey—he’s a spy, but he’s also a bit of an idiot. They all are, bumbling around with their binoculars and wiretaps.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I knew Pen from the start, but not that well. He never completely opened up. You can kind of tell.’

  ‘I thought he was completely open with me.’

  ‘Oh. Sorry.’

  ‘So you can’t tell.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘We travelled. We were interested in future technology, what we could—’

  ‘Wait… are you still… ?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘I mean are they still around? Are you still with them?’

  ‘I’m not with them. I don’t know if they’re around.’

  ‘Why can’t anyone tell me?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Pen—Pen might still be… ’

  ‘I haven’t seen him for ages. And you know, I don’t think anyone was doing anything, any research, after about, um… seventy-two?’

  Janet said, ‘Research.’

  ‘We wanted to know what’s possible in the future. What machines are capable of. What we could learn and bring back. I mean you can’t bring things back literally, but… ’

  ‘Did you travel further?’

  ‘I don’t think anyone ever found a TCF facility in the future. We looked. We wanted to.’

  Silence, with a background of the party’s music and voices. They were leaning against a retaining wall at the back of the house, side by side. Marcus and Lilly were still outside, and a few others too, at some distance, talking and smoking. The man said, ‘You know the wildest thing I ever heard?’ He was looking up at the sky. ‘Someone in the States managed to, I don’t know, find or steal an old spacesuit, from the early NASA programmes. They dismantled it and impregnated it as much as they could with the fluid. Pumped the fluid into every cavity, coated the faceplate with some fluid-treated polymer, I don’t know. They must have been able to access some heavy industry for it all. Then they’d get in the chamber and point the kit in some random direction so the tunnel would open up far, far from anything. They’d just float in space, I mean really random deep nowhere kind of space… they’d float there for twenty minutes. Fuck. Earth, long, long gone from anywhere near. That’s something. Isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Fedorov believed in it… travelling in space, colonising the universe. They wanted to, all those Russians. They designed rockets for it. Malevich’s Black Square… that was just a picture of space. They just wanted to head off into space. As far from the human sun as possible.’

  ‘The human sun.’

  ‘It’s the wildest thing. I’d get into that spacesuit. How would it make you feel?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Yeah, you can’t. You can’t know.’

  ‘Was Pen all right? Last time you saw him.’

  ‘He was fine.’

  ‘Do you know what might have happened to him? Is it something to do with the Fedorovians? Did they do something to him?’

  ‘No. Just the usual. Travelling. You knew about that?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘We didn’t mind him being a spy. It didn’t matter. We didn’t… ’

  ‘Did he believe in it all?’

  ‘I don’t know if it matters. I don’t know if it’s about belief. It’s about wanting something. Wanting something badly enough… ’

  ‘Yeah.’ And she wondered whether, if something happened to him, was it then something he did to himself? Did he want something too much? This was the possibility of a DESIRING MECHANISM in Pen, something that spun out of control and loosened his ties to his own place and time. How was it possible to regulate such a mechanism. Janet looked at the man next to her. No—no oil painting, and he seemed lost in his own world for a second, looking up as if imagining the stars, unimpeded by any peripheral view of Earth’s outgrowths. What about her own desires? What were they tethered to? No longer to Pen—and this filled her with a floating sense of loss, a melancholy that itself threatened to take her drifting away from everything. It might, of course, have been the cannabis. A loss, also, for Peter—but he would forget his father almost completely, so that the loss, the melancholy was even more complete. This—looking up at the stars herself, now—this was the run of things; it was earthly chaos of loss and hurt. No wonder this man (and Pen?) had believed in bringing back the dead. The Fedorovians cleaved to a great redemption, a reconciliation between humanity and the universe? A triumph over nature and decay? It was pleasant enough to feel herself spinning up there, the stars spinning with her. It was hard to imagine Grey taking them seriously. It was hard to establish whether they were a dangerous terrorist group or a collection of lunatics. Their talk was so far from this world. Was that, in itself, dangerous to someone like Grey? Then again, maybe they did have activities and plans, something Janet had not quite been able to put her finger on.

  ‘No,’ the man said, out of his reverie. ‘We didn’t kill him.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You must be thinking about that—that we knew he was a spy, so we killed him? No.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking that. Not in so many… ’

  ‘Yeah.’

  And he was off again. But now his thought-drifting—was he stoned too?—had a different feel to it. The mention of murder, even its denial, made his face more compact, less legible. The other thing affirmed in its denial—the thought that she might have sex with this man—now vanished entirely, the negation of a negation, releasing her into…. She stood forward.

  ‘Could you leave?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You weren’t invited. At least, not by any of us.’

  ‘I didn’t know it was that kind of party.’ A laugh.

  ‘It’s not. But you can still be uninvited.’

  ‘Okay. Sorry. Did I upset you?’

  ‘You sure did.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to.’

  ‘Good. Excellent. Now you’ve done your job, you’ve talked to me. Go back to Grey and tell him so you can get your reward.’

  ‘He’s not paying me.’

  ‘I’m suddenly not sure I want to hear any more. I don’t want—’

  ‘Okay.’ He started to go.

  Then: ‘Wait.’

  ‘I thought—’

  ‘The Fedorovians. Are you, they… do they still exist?’

  ‘I already told you—’

  ‘Do they still exist? Tell me.’

  ‘No group with that name currently exists. Not in this country.’

  He left, walking around the side of the house.

  On Sunday morning, the day after the electio
n: ‘Grey?’

  ‘Oh. Shanks?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s been a long time. How have you been?’

  ‘Grey, listen to me.’

  ‘Oh, all right.’

  ‘We’ve found something. I can’t say over the phone.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Grey, you really are the most—’

  ‘Right. Yes. Of course.’

  ‘Can you meet me in Strathmore?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Now.’

  ‘Ah, I—’

  ‘Now. It’s important. You’ll want to come.’

  ‘Will I? Okay. Shanks, I wish I—’

  ‘Grey.’

  ‘Why do we still call each other by our surnames?’

  ‘Grey!’

  ‘Okay, give me the address.’

  And then, Grey and Shanks met. There was what seemed like a body nearby. Shanks had been busy. He said, ‘There’s an investigation of course, but it has to be controlled a little.’

  Grey said, ‘Shit shit. Shit. Fuck shit shit. This is… ’

  ‘You’re the least self-controlled spy.’

  ‘This is what I didn’t want to happen.’