CHAPTER EIGHT
‘Kim speaking.’
‘Hello again.’
‘Who is this?—Oh.’
‘Yes.’
‘Shanks. I thought I’d never hear from you again.’
‘Yes. We know about him.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘No, that’s all right, you don’t need to give anything away. That’s probably the right thing for you.’
‘I don’t—’
‘I understand. You’re not going to admit anything.’
‘There’s nothing to—’
‘So actually, you know, that’s what I was calling about. To advise you, I suppose. But good, yes, you’re already on the right track. Keep it all sewn up in there. Keep it secret. You wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.’
Silence.
‘Yes, good. I know… and we’re coming up with more evidence all the time. So, I know. And now you know too. And, really, no one else knows. No one at all. That’s good for you.’
Silence.
‘I’m glad you’re still listening. It’s bad for you that I know. It’ll be worse, if anyone else finds out. Anyone. Do you know what I mean? Anyone at all… because it’s just possible someone might be asking questions at some point. So, given that we can raid you at any time, given that we can show you’re implicated in his death, it might be good to think about a story. We need a good ending, something to make it all go away.’
‘His death?’
‘Yes.’
‘Whose death? This is all very mysterious.’
‘Isn’t it?’
Whispered, in the kitchen: ‘He’s interpreting the situation as if he’s a defector from enemy territory.’
Janet said, ‘I know. His way of seeing the world… ’
Marcus said, ‘And the world he’s been in.’
‘So maybe he is a kind of defector.’
Lilly said, ‘Why didn’t you tell us about him?’
‘Oh… Lilly. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Once I was in touch with him, I couldn’t say anything. There was an aura of mystery… ’
Marcus said, ‘Maybe you couldn’t explain it to yourself.’
‘Maybe. Yes.’
Could the same be said for Kenneth? Did he also suffer an inability to speak externally what he could not represent to himself? Or were some things utterable only in certain situations?
Janet said, ‘What did he say last night? What else?’
‘Nothing. He wanted to talk to you.’
Lilly said, ‘Pen… it must be hard to hear him say that.’
‘Yes. I don’t know if I still hoped to see him again. Maybe it’s good to know.’
‘I suppose a funeral, now.’
‘Yes.’
A pause. ‘That might help.’
‘Yes.’
And the question: would Janet and Peter remain in the house? Would the news, the funeral, give them the impetus to set out, independent of them? Marcus and Lilly, each in their different ways, would be disappointed. Would Janet also? Had she become, in some way, part of it?
Now the children came in, the three of them involved in some game. Peter was walking with no sign of a limp. The three parents exchanged looks as they busied themselves with breakfasts. Dani said, ‘Is there someone new staying?’
‘Yes.’
She skipped a little and smiled. Finally Marcus hustled Dani and Peter out the door.
Lilly said, ‘Should we get him some clothes? He doesn’t have anything.’
Janet was silent.
Sarah said, ‘Who doesn’t have anything?’
‘We have another flatmate—just for a while.’
‘Why doesn’t he have anything? Is he poor?’
Janet said, ‘No.’
Sarah said, ‘He has us now. Doesn’t he?’
Lilly said, ‘Yes. For a while.’
But outside, Marcus, with the other two children, was walking too quickly. He stopped from time to time to let them catch up. There was time before his afternoon ward round. He noticed his thoughts turning towards the opportunity to travel, today—why? He wouldn’t have the car at work, so it would be slow to get to the facility and back. The SIS man’s appearance, though he had (he thought) ‘managed’ it, had unsettled him. His sleeping form—a blanket thrown over him on the sofa—was a heavy presence in the house. He had fallen asleep in his suit. He was a problem to be solved. But instead Marcus was engaging in this too-fast walking, and the children called out to him to stop, before they took it on themselves to race him after all and ran alongside and ahead. Marcus enjoyed this shared, headlong rush while it lasted.
He leant down and kissed the children, one by one. They ran into the school building. Dani stopped to wave again, then disappeared. When he was alone he realised he had no desire to travel. The chamber, the fluid, the waiting, the upset of the transition and the strangeness of the experience as a whole—all of this put him off, and he yearned to go back, pick up the children again, and go home. But he kept going. Did travelling offer Marcus a way to solve problems—a form of thinking? Was it, rather, an escape from time itself? Joanie had used it to wipe away the present from the home she lived in, and didn’t live in, and escaped from. Were other things intolerable in Marcus’s present? TCF users were increasingly regarded as pathological by his colleagues. All the talk of addiction, could it be really right? Why was he still going, still thinking about it, even as he seemed to be plunging himself into a kind of horror? It was certainly habit-forming—people seemed to have some trouble stopping. The man, Kenneth, represented a tension. Did he know why Pen was dead? And: what could the death itself mean? Was death ever, really, for anything? The man (Kenneth) was—partly because of all the unanswered questions—a figure of death. This had been introduced to the house by Janet, also. A structure was collapsing, one that held the house together. It was the failure of an internal structure—an imagined community within the house—to correspond to reality. But weren’t his own secrets part of the same problem? What machinery kept going in his body, what processes, as if, like Peter, he simply had some physical error in him that caused—?
It was possible he could walk to the facility, though that would mean a longer absence from the hospital. Would he be able to account for that? He alternated between the scheming, the unexamined desire to travel—in search of Pen?—and a troubled state of mind. Why was this necessary? How obvious were the injection marks on his arm? He thought about the almost automatic nature of his visits to the facility, after only three trips. This would be his last. But had he said that already the previous time? This would certainly be the last, but of course, it wouldn’t. So why not stop now? He would stop. But his feet kept him walking with the same urgency. Was it as if he was walking fast from something intolerable about his present? From the impossible absence of Pen?
He could catch a bus close enough, after the end of his ward rounds. He was recreating a household in which the father was absent. Of course, they had deliberately made their household complicated—opening it up to the world, even to this newcomer. But was he still filling that role, the ‘absent father’, through his search? Janet had also been secretive about her searching, her investigations. Pen! What POWER OF SECRECY did Pen have? His secrets spun other secrets from themselves. But surely Pen himself was also on the trail of something. Kenneth was sure that Pen was dead. Where was the body? Kenneth had refused to tell them. Why had he died? What now? What? Wh? Wasn’t it necessary, not to find Pen, but to find a reason, a cause—to understand? What dangerous places had Pen found himself in? Secrets were held, because revealing them was dangerous. Was Marcus trying to protect the household from what he might find? In truth, he was finding nothing.
Later, he said to the man at the facility, ‘I want to know about computers. What can they do?’
‘They can do anything.’
‘Find someone?�
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‘You’re still looking for your man.’
‘Yes.’ Then: ‘I’m not sure.’
‘They’re useful. Get hold of a computer, you can find out all kinds of things.’
There was something about the man today—he avoided eye contact and hunched his shoulders against Marcus’s conversation, speaking quickly down into himself. It was usually not worthwhile to over-interpret body language. The man was at the bench while Marcus sat and administered the fluid. Then Marcus realised the man was writing something. He handed over the note. I’ll send you to someone.
Marcus looked up. The man had a hand out, a finger up in a silencing gesture, but questioning eyes raised. Marcus looked at him. He wanted to speak, but just nodded. Impassive again, the man nodded back. He took the note again from Marcus and held it as if it might burn his fingers. Then he turned to the bench and added something. He brought it back and held it out to Marcus: Room 1012. He stood back again and waved the note around, looking around the space inside the fuselage. He took some steps, then turned and stepped back, casting his eyes about—for some way to destroy the note? Yes, finally he located a lighter on a shelf above the bench and lit it, allowing the ashes to fall to the ground. He still avoided Marcus’s eyes. He sat at the bench, his head propped in his hands. Marcus was bound by a kind of contract. Silence, then, settled, while the fluid worked its way into his system. Abruptly, the man stood and fetched the overalls for Marcus and threw them to him, with a spray bottle of fluid for his hair. While Marcus changed and sprayed himself, the man sat again, head in hands, folded away.
Why the precautions now? Was it especially dangerous or illegal to be sending Marcus directly into contact with someone? If the authorities knew about the man’s operation, wouldn’t they simply arrest him rather than listening in to it? The darkness of the chamber gave him the usual sense of floating. A chill about his damp hair and beard. A completeness of the sense, the chill, the darkness, the sense of his body and the faintest hum of generators carrying him. He was becoming more used to the transition—to its onset, at least. Arrival tended to give him a lurch, a misstep and a momentary sense of dread: a LOSS OF SITUATION. Before anything, however, a small charge. Was that charge what was ‘addictive’ about TCF? The hope, the desire to have it carried over, not only into the future, but also back across the reverse transition into the present, to infect everyday life?
The structure of addiction was this: that this charge, this surge of feeling that underlay everything for a time, also worked to drain any charge from the rest of life, making the yearning for it all the stronger. Was Marcus thinking this? Could it be said that life was drained—that the future had drained the present of its joy? Now, a tear came to his eye. It was only here that he could feel something of Pen’s death. He was certain that Kenneth was telling the truth. The loss was palpable in the dark chamber in a way that had been absent in the house, with its dealings, its complications and negotiations—still not resolved (Kenneth, sleeping on and on, that morning). Was the ‘charge’ then just a result of being alone, without others, without stimulation, without—. It crept through him, also fluid in his veins. Extending veins out, a charge charged changed. He welcomed it. It was practice, at least, for opening one’s mind, for learning how to—. It had its rhythm and surge, it had—. It was movable and changeable, the charge and flow and movement. Why not? He would tell them. When? How could he tell them about a world in which—. They were absent. No, charge, nocharge nohope so nothing and they. He reached—. Reach to, and without so nothing, impossible nothing and no. Nobody, a body. This then, repetition repetition repetitionrepetition. Over soon—. Nonmovement fadingmask. ‘Movement in time but time itself is the principle of movement, not a space to be moved through.’ ‘Actually I think I’ll—.’ No, no turning—. No—. The fall and falling, always, so, this, this, what? Novoice, and. No one to find. Only through, only away and dark, no, nodark nolight. ‘Certain paradoxes.’ ‘Quiet!’ Division. Div is ion. D—. Just when you. Think. There’s. Light. After all. ‘Wait for me.’ Is there? Soundlight, lightsound, hard to. Body dis trib ut ed across unlikely fields. Certainly. ‘Sorry.’ Yes. The sound of voices—the emergence in the midst of people! Or not. No, nomidst. But there, shapes of them and sounds, almost—. Touchable. Standing. Crowded with the surprise of taller buildings. He can’t say he’s been quite there. This, uncertainty, uncertainly. Are they… watching him? Silhouettes. No, backs turned, or looking off in other directions, a small group of people. He’s in a gap between two buildings—a strange place to arrive. It is the university. He falls against one of the buildings, just leaning. There’s a door nearby—a side door of the larger building, whose wall reaches up, how many floors? He straightens, blinks, pulls the door open. 1012?
He finds the room near the top of the building. The woman who opens the door gives him a look. ‘I haven’t seen you before.’ She smiles. ‘The others usually wear ordinary clothes… come in.’ A view over the city, but placed under the window is a desk with a computer.
‘How many others are there?’
‘You don’t know? Oh, just three or four. The overalls make you a little conspicuous, but I guess no one’s paying any attention.’
‘You have a computer.’
‘Yes. Oh, yes, most people have them.’ She looks at him more closely. ‘I’m always surprised by what I need to explain.’
‘I can see that. A lot has changed.’
‘Yes!’ She smiles again. ‘Do you want to see? Sit down here, if you like.’
He sits in front of the machine, and she moves an object on the desk so that its screen comes to life, white, with words in black. He says, ‘There’s so little time.’
‘You can always come back.’
‘It’s not so easy… ’
‘I know.’ Then: ‘Here. This is a good place to start.’ The words disappear and in their place is a map of New Zealand. She is standing, leaning next to him, her hand on the controller. She flicks or presses something on it—an expert gesture—and the map shrinks, recedes, bringing the wider ocean, then the world with all its curvature, into view.
‘You can see everything?’
She rotates it somehow, then brings it close again, and closer, allowing a view over somewhere in Asia. It rushes forward, becomes a haze of colour.
‘What is it?’
‘Oh, nothing. I don’t know. I’m just showing you this—maps of places.’
Piece by piece the colour field on the screen lets itself be dismantled, and a land builds up in its place. This is no map—but the thing itself, the globe, its detail, its various greens torn by rivers. It comes close and patches are visible—rice paddies?
‘At the same time, though, nothing much has changed. Basically nothing. Nothing important.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The world is just as it was. That’s the conclusion I’ve come to. What would you like to see?’
‘How is all this possible? How does it work?’
‘I don’t know the details. Computers are so normal now that no one really questions how they work.’
‘Other people have them too? Other people you know?’
‘Yes. Most offices in this building have a computer like this one.’
‘They can all do this?’
‘Yes. They’re linked up together.’
‘How can you say nothing has changed?’
‘The pictures come from satellites. It’s just put together to make it seem like a world. But you can look almost anywhere.’ She pulls the world back and moves it around, centering it back on New Zealand again, then allows it to come close so that Wellington is in view. Then she pulls it in closer: buildings in the city, their roofs.
‘You can see so much.’
She comes closer.
‘Nothing is moving. It’s all moving around, I mean, but nothing is moving. People aren’t walking… ?’
‘It’s just photos. They update them sometimes—but we’re not look
ing at what’s happening right now.’
‘Oh.’
‘I thought you’d be interested.’
‘Could I see my house?’
‘What’s the address?’
Marcus tells her, and she pulls the city back up, and then brings it close to where the house is. The roof is in need of a coat of paint, and there is no sign of the garden terracing. Instead there is a mess of what might be nasturtium. The fence is gone, and the lawn in front seems patchy. ‘Who lives there?’
‘I can’t tell you that.’
‘You can’t find out?’
‘No.’
A silence. Then: ‘People are the mystery. There are so many new things, but people—they elude me. Where are they?’
‘There’s no shortage of people.’
‘I know. Of course, I can see them. But I can’t work out what they do, what’s become of them.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s just a feeling. Why doesn’t everyone in my time know about this? The computers, the possibilities… this?’ Indicating the image of the house.
‘I’m sure people know about it. I’m sure you could read about it if you looked in the right places.’
‘There’s plenty of stuff, you know, about the wonderful technology of the future—but it’s not this. It’s not this box, this view of the world. Satellites?’
‘Yes.’
‘We don’t hear about satellites.’
‘The aerospace industry took a hit, that’s for sure—but it all got going again. The military, in the big nations, they encouraged continual redevelopment. The planes and the airports… it’s all there.’
Our Future is in the Air Page 16
