Our Future is in the Air
Page 21
‘Oh.’ She said, ‘Where is it?’
‘We’ve known about it a long time—I just didn’t know it was Kim operating it.’
‘Where?’
‘The old airport.’
‘Oh my. What is it with these secrets? They’re all coming out.’
‘What do you—?’
‘Marcus has been going there. He’s been travelling, looking for Pen.’
‘I see. I wondered what he’d been up to.’
‘Why would he kill Pen? Was Marcus in danger too? Is the guy a—’
‘I never met him. I don’t know what to think anymore. We thought of him as a kind of wild card, a potential danger—him and his group. We didn’t know what they were thinking. That’s dangerous.’
She said, ‘Do you know what I’m thinking?’
He said, ‘No.’
He did look, all of a sudden, scared. Of her? She sat, one shoe in her hand, one still on her foot. ‘I don’t know what you’re thinking either. It sounds like they just had some ideas.’
‘They certainly did.’
‘You’re so scared of ideas?’
‘We thought ideas were dangerous.’
‘We?’ Then, ‘And now?’
A silence.
She said, ‘Your man, Kim—he’s been funny around Marcus. He was acting strangely, like he’s scared of being spied on. Then he said he didn’t want Marcus to come back to him.’
‘I imagine anyone running an illegal operation would develop some paranoid thoughts. Not unjustified. What was Marcus… ?’
‘Looking for Pen, like I said. But not with any success. And I don’t know, maybe something else too. He wasn’t just looking for Pen after a while. He had other things going on.’
Some action seemed necessary, but as it was they both sat silent for a moment, Lilly still holding the shoe and Kenneth looking down at the tabletop. What action did this situation call for? And what kind of result did they each require? Was there an outcome that might COLLECTIVELY satisfy them? Did each, in their own way, yearn for some COMING TOGETHER as an answer to the situation Pen’s death had thrown them into?
A strange committee. ‘We should go to him.’
Marcus said, ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea. He’s scared of something. It’ll terrify him more.’
‘What else can we do?’
Silence.
Marcus said, ‘He did tell me not to come back.’
Janet said, ‘I want to see him. I want to talk to him. He sent Pen off too, not just you, Marcus. He saw Pen. Maybe he was the last one. He has to know something. Doesn’t he?’
Kenneth said, ‘He’s the best lead we have. I would like to make contact with Shanks, my colleague in the police, but I haven’t been able to lately. I think he’s avoiding me.’
Lilly said, ‘I know what you mean, Marcus. I do, but I’m losing my sympathy with him. If I ever had it. All the games men play with each other—he’s as bad as, well…’ Pointing a finger at Kenneth, then shrugging. ‘I’m sick of having to keep talking like this. Is it only me who notices that it’s men who do all this, who mess up the world? Sorry, Marcus. Sorry, um, Kenneth. No, not sorry. I mean you’re trying, that’s good. But he’s involved in some way and we have to go and see him.’
Kenneth said, ‘I thought he was on your side?’
‘I thought you were on our side.’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘But that’s it, this whole thing about sides—men beating their chests. This guy sounds like he might be just another male ego.’
Marcus said, ‘I think you’re right. But we also have to give him the benefit of the doubt.’
‘Then we have to talk to him.’
After a pause, Marcus nodded. ‘I’ve been calling him first. I don’t know what happens if we just show up at the facility. I don’t know if he would be there. He wouldn’t like me phoning—he’d turn me down, I think. He also wouldn’t respond to a call from someone he doesn’t know.’
Kenneth said, ‘Then we have to go there. We observe the facility.’
Janet said, ‘No! I don’t want to spy on him—I want to talk to him. I want it out in the open.’
Lilly said, ‘Yes.’
Janet: ‘I’ll go.’
‘Not on your own.’
‘Yeah, just me. He’s not dangerous, is he? What will he do? I’ll go and talk to him.’
Silence.
Then Lilly said, ‘Yeah. That’s good.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
‘By 1975, we were beginning to discover that time just carried on. Certainly, after all the upheavals and protests, we had expected something new, but time barrelled on in ways we didn’t quite expect—things staying the same in some ways, changing in others. The world seemed to have its own inertia and its own momentum. It was difficult for people to steer. A lot of people were disappointed by that. Others were happy that there was a feeling of stability again, that the disruptions were not as profound as they seemed.’
‘We were afraid, though.’
‘Oh, yes, we were afraid. We were still afraid. We were afraid that the world might just end—that it might be bombed out of existence. We were afraid that nature was being torn to pieces. That’s the kind of thing we became afraid of. The images of the future provided by temporal contour technology didn’t even reassure us that the world would continue. It barrelled on, in its eternal, day-by-day present, but its future—that became a dark, distant thing. Maybe that was why the excitement over TCF and so on died down. It was another unfulfilled promise. It was more evidence that, no matter what upheavals affected us, there was another morning, another day to work through: a blank, difficult day. We had wanted answers and transformations but there was still another day, and another, and that was all.’
‘That was time?’
‘That was a version of time. The status of the future was uncertain. It sometimes seemed like something that was processed in machines and dissected by experts, but which was, generally speaking, unavailable to us.’
‘TCF promised to make the future part of our lives.’
‘The opposite happened.’
‘Why?’
‘Powerful interests made sure of it.’
Sketch of a semiotics of the future
Janet had teaching again for the next week, so she couldn’t go to see Kim straight away. Lilly had a plan of her own. Marcus kissed her when she mentioned it to him. ‘It’s something small,’ she said.
The address was in the telephone book. Should she have been surprised? She took Sarah with her; Dani and Peter were at school. Peter, thankfully, seemed to be fine, walking and running without any apparent pain.
Yvonne was at home. She said, ‘Was it you?’
Lilly said, ‘No, not me. Here… ’
‘A cake?’
Lilly laughed. ‘Yeah.’
Yvonne laughed too. ‘All right. Where is he?’
‘He’s been staying at our place.’
Yvonne looked at her. ‘Oh, boy.’
‘We’re not so bad.’
‘Who’s this one?’
Sarah said her name. Behind Yvonne, a boy’s head appeared from out of a doorway. The adults watched the children watch one another.
‘David, go back in!’
Lilly said, ‘Why?’
‘He doesn’t need any more… ’
‘He’ll cope—’
‘How can you… ?’
‘Okay. Sorry. Take it?’ Yvonne took the cake, and Lilly said, ‘We wanted to reach out to you. To include you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Kenneth is staying with us for now. He shouldn’t be ignoring you like this—treating you like you don’t exist.’
Yvonne looked down. ‘No.’
‘Has he done something like this before?’
‘Yes.’
Lilly sighed. ‘Oh.’
‘He gets so… he gets very funny about things.’
‘Are you okay without him?’
‘You don’t have to. It’s just—I don’t like taking sides. And I certainly don’t want to be just on his side. If there are sides. Are there sides?’
‘He just didn’t come home. It isn’t the first time, but it’s definitely the longest. He used to say it was his job, but I know it wasn’t. Was it Janet?’
‘What?’
‘Janet. Janet Evans. Are you one of her friends? He was observing her. I knew something like that would happen.’
‘He told you about his work?’
‘He wasn’t supposed to.’
‘I think something happened between him and Janet. Yes. Probably.’
‘Fuck. Oh… sorry, darling.’ Looking down at Sarah, who laughed up at her. ‘I mean, I know. A wife knows. Right? The house is just the same—it’s quiet—except he’s not here. The boys are with me. I’m just waiting, I guess. We’re all just waiting, to see if he comes back.’
‘When will you stop waiting?’
‘I don’t know. When do you? Is he coming back? Can you ask him for me?’
‘Okay.’
‘I can always go to my mum’s for a while.’
‘Here’s our phone number.’ Lilly reached to her pocket for a piece of paper.
‘I don’t want it!’
‘Please take it?’
‘No.’
‘I’ll leave it in the letterbox.’
Yvonne said nothing. Then, ‘I won’t use it. You be my messenger instead. Ask him if he’s coming back. He doesn’t even need to reply, just show up.’
‘He’s probably terrified to.’
‘He should be.’
There had been a few times, in the months before she met Pen. The facility was at a house she visited to smoke cannabis and have sex. It was, like many early amateur facilities, in a modified bathtub. Had she mentioned the travelling to him? Now, going to the facility, she had a pang of nostalgia and a quick desire to do it again—to ask the man to put her in the chamber and send her to the future. Pen had been scathing about it, but he had done it himself. The thought gave her a wild anger, a desire to throw herself at things. Pen! She had travelled, back then, in that same spirit, fixated not on any wrong done to her but on the world’s inertness. She had liked Pen because he wanted to shake the world up. Now she was chasing him here—his corpse, or hints of him, his lies. It was, we could say, a profound disappointment to her.
Sometimes her sense of wildness scared her—it made her forget Peter for a moment. The travelling, though, had been a strange and slightly frightening wildness. The waiting and the uncertainty of it, the sense of herself somehow removed from herself, removed because she was removed from everything around her that constituted her. The strangeness of the transition heightened that sense, so that by the time she arrived, she would no longer feel like plunging herself bodily into the future. Instead, she remained wild in her MIND only; she watched, stayed still and relaxed, but felt words and thoughts well up in her. Had the experience given her a kind of sharpness? At the same time, had it made her even less inclined to commit to anything? And now, when all this with Pen, with his body and his secrets, when it was resolved—what then?
From the outside, the building appeared abandoned, and was partly obscured behind prefabricated buildings on the former runway. Should she knock?
She opened the door to a hangar space occupied by the carcasses of three jets—the facility was, Marcus had said, in the leftmost one. It was not clear where there was an opening into the jet body. Stacks of building materials made a minor maze of the floor. There were no obvious signs of movement. Finally, by sidling close to the wall, she made her way around the truncated and welded-shut end of the fuselage to where the plane’s old doorway was empty, close to the side of the hangar. Some crates were stacked roughly to form a staircase. Inside there was a floor of boards, stretching some way down the length of body. A tarpaulin covered something, and wires protruded from under it. There seemed to be more on the other side of the shape.
She stood, unsure of what to do. This dim secretive space, it held none of the convivial feeling of the old house with its modified claw-foot bathtub.
Then there was someone behind her, on the floor by the hangar wall. She turned and said, straight away, ‘It’s all right.’ Why did she say that? Did she register some flightiness in the man’s posture? He stood there, unmoving. ‘Kim?’
‘Fuck.’ Then, ‘What’s going on?’
She looked down at herself. No, she didn’t look like police.
‘You looking to plug in?’
She paused. ‘I don’t know.’
He turned, turned back, shook his head with a pleading expression in his eyes. He mouthed something at her, then again, when she didn’t get it, whispered so it was faintly audible. ‘I can’t talk.’
She stared at him. ‘What’s wrong?’
He stared back. Something worked in him. After a time, he shrugged and said out loud, ‘God. Okay. I don’t like it that you’re here. Who are you?’
‘Pen’s wife.’
‘Shit. Oh, no. Marcus sent you? I knew I shouldn’t have… ’
‘It’s okay. You’re Kim?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I just want to know what happened. What were you up to?’
‘Me? Nothing, I… ’
Silence. She said, ‘Can we sit down or something?’
‘There’s a sofa.’
‘Thanks.’ Inside, past the shape under its tarpaulin (presumably the chamber) they sat side by side on a sofa. Opposite them was a crude workbench with some locked metal cases underneath. ‘I only just found out about your group. It took Pen dying before I found out about it.’
‘The Fedorovians? That hasn’t existed for a few years.’
‘So I keep hearing. But you were up to something, weren’t you? And Pen?’
‘Is this why Marcus was coming to me?’
‘Marcus was doing his own thing. I don’t know why he was coming here.’
Kim nodded. ‘I’m so, so sorry. You lost your husband.’
Janet looked at him. Was it the time to cry, here, now? ‘My life has changed completely. In some ways it’s better. But… of course…’ She shook her head. She blinked.
Kim looked at her and then down, then pinched a hand over his eyes. ‘Fuck.’ He looked around. He was, it seemed, still deciding something. He whispered again. ‘I don’t know how much I can say.’
She leaned closer to him, strangely intimate, and whispered too, though with urgency. ‘I need to know.’
‘I know. I’m…’ A pause. ‘Implicated.’
‘In his death?’
A nod.
‘Tell me. Did he come back dead? From a trip?’
Kim looked at her closely. Something worked at itself, behind his eyes. The shadow of a smile? Something was dawning on him? ‘Yes. It happened here. No, it didn’t happen here, but it… it wasn’t us, it wasn’t… it was his own thing he was doing.’
There was a loud noise across the hangar. Kim stood. There was a shout, indistinct. He said, ‘Have you done something?’
‘What?’ Janet was staring up at him.
‘What is this? Who is that?’
A shout again, comprehensible this time: ‘They’re coming! Clear out.’
He was staring back at her. ‘Who is that?’
‘I don’t know.’ But, actually, she did. She said, ‘Oh, fuck.’
Kim took a key and quickly unlocked one of the boxes. ‘Get the fuck out of here.’ She stayed seated, immobilised. ‘Go on!’ He was putting bottles into a duffel bag, wrapping each one in a scrap of fabric as it went in. Then, heavy footsteps on the makeshift stairs.
‘For God’s sake, leave all that! The police are here.’
At that moment they could hear the sound of two or three cars coming to a halt outside.
‘Grey?’
&nb
sp; ‘Oh, no, keep calling me Kenneth?’
‘Not on your—’
‘Come on, Kim, forget all that. Janet, get up off the sofa.’
Kim said, ‘Who’s he?’
Janet said, ‘Much as I hate to say it, we should probably listen to him.’
‘All right.’ He was struggling with a padlock on another one of the chests. ‘I really want to bring the solenoids and inclination plates.’
Kenneth said, ‘No way. Come on.’
‘Are you arresting me or something?’
‘Just the opposite.’ He pulled Kim away from the box by the shoulder. Kim stood, looked from Janet to Kenneth and back. He grabbed the bag he had already half filled and bolted, as best he could, for the plane’s entrance. Janet and Kenneth followed. There was the sound of the hangar door opening roughly, then a voice amplified by megaphone. It was too echoey and distorted to make out clearly, but they heard the word police, and the intent was clear enough. Other sounds clattered about the open space and came down from the ceiling. Footfalls, heavy, slow or fast—it was difficult to tell. How many people had entered? Were they running or patiently searching? The megaphone sounded again but none of the three paid any attention to its meanings. Kim was moving the crates that made up the stairs to the aircraft body. Kenneth and Janet were left standing with an awkward drop beneath them.
Janet said, ‘Kim!’
He looked up at them then down to his task.
Kenneth said, ‘There isn’t time.’
Kim was pushing the crates roughly. Janet said, ‘Kim, we can still get down.’
‘I know!’ Kim pushed one more crate aside to reveal, under them, a rough opening hacked out of the concrete floor.
Janet said, ‘Oh. Oh!’
Kenneth said, ‘He’ll know about it already.’
Kim was already down. Janet jumped down from the plane, landing next to the hole. Kenneth jumped too as Janet let herself into the hole. Kenneth said, ‘He knows about this. He knows about it. They’ll be waiting on the other side.’
The bottom of the hole was filled with muddy water. A very short tunnel, low, necessitating a half crawl, hands dipping into the sludge, meeting clay and sharp rock. Kim climbed a ladder at the far end.
Kenneth said, ‘He already knows. Kim! No! He’s waiting. There’ll be someone standing there—’