Our Future is in the Air

by Corballis, Tim

  ‘There’s no fugitive here. Only my family.’

  ‘Your family? Your big, big family? Your family of everyone and anyone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who is here?’

  ‘Me, my husband and my daughters.’ Then, ‘If you knew about Peter, surely you knew that.’

  ‘I only know some things. Oh, oh yes. I knew they aren’t here. Grey, either. I knew that.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘But I don’t know where they are.’

  ‘Nor do we.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  A pause. ‘You’re Shanks.’

  ‘Yes, yes. Maybe you should be the detective.’

  Was it, in a sense, as if he had been SUMMONED BY THEIR FEELING? Didn’t he have Pen’s body, hidden away somewhere? Lilly felt herself regarding him. He didn’t seem dangerous. In fact, in his current state, he seemed fragile, with a child’s thin belligerence. She also had a sense that he wasn’t going to go away—but yes, that she wanted him to stay, that she wanted him to understand their need. ‘Fuck it. Come in.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Have you eaten? We have enough.’

  So Shanks sat at the table with the girls while Marcus and Lilly finished cooking. He eyed them. Dani said, ‘Are you moving in?’

  ‘No, dearie.’

  Lilly laughed, unvoiced but noticeable enough, at his response.

  He said, ‘I suppose you go to school.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Sarah said, ‘I don’t. I’ll go to school when I’m five.’

  Dani said, ‘Are you a policeman?’

  ‘What? Why do you ask?’

  ‘You seem like a policeman.’

  He laughed now, a high chuckle. ‘I am.’

  Sarah said, ‘You look like Mr Muldoon.’

  They ate, and the children kept up a minor banter. Finally, Lilly said, ‘Bed.’

  ‘You never tell us to go to bed!’

  ‘It’s too early!’

  ‘Well, you don’t have to sleep. But we have to talk to Mr Shanks. Go and play, and get yourselves ready to sleep. We’ll come upstairs in a while.’

  Was this largely for Shanks’s sake—the feeling that he would not speak unless the children’s eyes were off him? They cast some reproachful looks then ran out. Marcus stood and poured some cups from a cask of wine, shrugging to Lilly as he did so. Shanks drank deeply and unselfconsciously.

  ‘So where are they?’

  ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘I don’t even know if we’ll arrest him. We should, yes, but I don’t have complete authority. We should arrest the lot of you. Ha! And Grey. Arrest him, too.’

  ‘You seem to like arresting people.’

  ‘One of the few pleasures.’ Shanks was slumping lower on his chair. ‘I guess you have a whole story now. The whole story, I mean. I didn’t want it to come to this.’

  Marcus said, ‘What has it come to?’

  Shanks raised his eyes to him, then to Lilly. ‘Really? Oh god.’ Then, ‘That man, Kim Denby. I imagine he’s told you things. I’m tempted to say don’t believe him—but that’ll make you believe him even more. I have to deal with you people.’

  Marcus and Lilly shifted in their seats.

  ‘It’s not South America. I can’t just disappear people.’ He reached into his clothes and pulled out an object: a gun.

  ‘Holy shit!’

  Shanks waved it at them.

  Lilly said, ‘You’re allowed that?’

  ‘No. I’m not.’ He put it on the table. ‘I haven’t got any bullets for it anyway. See, I wouldn’t mind. I’d like to be able to pull this out and… but there are things I can’t do.’

  ‘You’ve hidden Pen’s body.’

  ‘He was dead anyway. He was up to something, though. What was it? Kim Denby knew. I know he did. They’re dangerous. They want to change everything. They don’t know what they’re doing. All their jaunts to the future. The banks! They’re worried about banks now. I know they were going to do something. And it got your friend killed, didn’t it? It was stupid to think I could keep a lid on Denby. Just keep him under… I thought that’s where he wanted to be. He did, he did. And Grey. Idiot.’ He picked up the gun again, pointed it at Marcus.

  ‘That makes me nervous.’ He reached out and took the gun from Shanks. He held it with the tips of his fingers.

  ‘Your kids could play with it if they want.’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  Lilly said, ‘That’s what makes people grow up to be like you.’

  Shanks nodded, slowly. ‘Probably.’

  Lilly said, ‘You don’t know, do you? You haven’t got a clue what’s going on.’

  Shanks shook his head, with the same heavy motion. ‘Mostly, I want it to go away. Whatever they were doing. I can’t have that knowledge out there, those ideas. And now, there’s Denby on the loose. He knows. He knows what Pen knew. Doesn’t he?’

  A silence. Lilly said, ‘I don’t think he knows anything.’

  ‘We haven’t even got protocols for when a crime is committed in the future. How can I cope with that? I have no idea what the Americans do. They won’t answer my calls. Their intelligence agencies won’t answer either. Here I am then. What do I do? Stuck here in this arse end of the earth, can’t even jump on a plane anymore and take off. Fuck it, this place.’ Then, ‘I mean, do the police have jurisdiction over the future?’ And, ‘I think any action is justified if there’s a terrorist threat.’ And then, ‘Is there more wine?’ When Marcus poured it, he said, ‘Thanks. It’s disgusting, by the way.’ He took a large gulp.

  ‘What will you do when you find them?’

  ‘I don’t know. You’ve taken my gun away from me.’ He laughed. ‘I guess we have to arrest Denby for dealing. He really doesn’t know anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’d kind of hoped…’ He sighed. ‘This place is such a shithole. Here we are, forgotten here. Edge of the fucking world. If we were in America, this would be something. Or even goddamn Russia. I kind of hoped your friend might be on to something. Wouldn’t it be grand? Some conspiracy, here in New Zealand?’

  ‘We want his body.’

  ‘You might as well have it. Keep quiet about it. About what happened to it.’

  They looked at him. ‘Okay.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Peter’s condition failed to improve overnight, though the consultant considered him to be stable. Finally, at some time after midnight, Janet came home. She looked in on the lounge, where someone was asleep on the sofa—not, she thought, Kenneth. Who was here? In any case, she continued automatically to her bed. It was that kind of house. She wanted to reach out to something. Pen/Peter. No, no, she knew there was no connection—but that made it worse, the sense of coincidence, of mere bad luck. Peter’s condition was stable/serious. Some complication of Still’s Disease. The paediatrician had seemed uncertain exactly what to do. The disease had only been described in the last few years. There was nothing, no cause, no greater power to appeal to, or to rail against.

  She followed the motions of getting into bed, but she knew she wouldn’t sleep. This house—how could such strange, uncaused misfortune occur here? She was tired. No doubt she knew that, and that in such a state she couldn’t trust her thoughts. She wanted something. She wanted something. What? To be with the children was always to be torn—wasn’t it?—between existence in their present and impatience for their lives, their whole lives, their adulthood and flourishing. Peter, Sarah, Dani, and of course all of the children at the school—they were complete and incomplete. She couldn’t say that Peter was denied a future, not yet. She was tired, and there was no reason to think that he wouldn’t recover. And not only children, but all of them, all people—could she think that?—existed in a state of such division, between what they were and what they might be, what might come next. They yearned for a future. She yearned for Peter’s future. And her own? What took it from them? No, no, Peter’s illness couldn’t beco
me a metaphor. Had their futures been stolen from them by technology, in the way that made it akin to death? No. She remembered it, the travelling she had done, and the feeling it had given her—of falling into something, some finality, WHAT IS and WHAT WILL BE coinciding with an impression of completeness without tension. Death, after all? But lived, a whole sensory world played out with colours and people. No; where anyway would she go? It had, those few times back then, solved something for her—the same yearning she felt now?

  Except for Peter, for the fact of him there in hospital. He shared a ward with three other children, all quiet and only seemingly half aware of their surroundings, even when awake. Peter was on a drip, and slept much of the time, but when he was awake he talked cheerfully enough. His face felt, and looked, hot.

  Already, though, she was separate from him. She already felt the absence of his body near her. And this strange sense: that she could cure him. Not likely. Could she take him through and into the future, fuse him, complete him, make him, if only for those twenty minutes, whole and present to himself, so that no sickness could touch him? It would be some life, a small portion of it, some time relieved of the need for a future. No. Though if she had been, might still be willing to send her own body hurtling through time in that way, why not her boy’s as well? Actually she was exhausted. The day—she had evaded the police! All of that—she needed it to go away. There was nowhere left, in any case, for travelling. It was all in the hands of the police. Was she safe, even now? And Peter? Drift. A drift, could she? Could she sleep? She held on to consciousness and was desperate for sleep. The result was a sliding sense of herself, a sideways and circular motion, simultaneous with yearning, an extension of her. Did people ever travel together? More than one person in the chamber? She thought they did. A drift, sideways and on and out.

  Marcus sat with Peter for an hour the next day. He was still stable, but his fever was high and he was in a state somewhere between delirium and sleep. After that, he had outpatient clinic, and though there were no TCF users that he knew of among the patients today, he was thinking about the facility. The users he saw from time to time—where did they go to travel? Did they use Kim, or were there other places? He couldn’t tell what effect the closure of the facility would have. He felt its pull, and a small pain that he couldn’t now go there. Other users would no doubt feel the same, when they found it closed. There would, of course, have to be adjustments. They (he) would be thrown back onto their lives, their households and whatever other arrangements they made with their worlds in order to survive, physically and psychically.

  There had been no word from Kim and Kenneth this morning; Shanks had woken just before Marcus left for work. Was he still in their house?

  The commune’s valley was warm today—for the first time that season, according to the residents. Kim had visited Marianne there a few times, but not for some years now. If anything, it was shabbier than he remembered it: a Buckminster Fuller dome had been added, and its ply was already warped, its interior showing signs of leaking. Still, he quite liked the structure, and found himself hiding away in it—perhaps because it was the one space that was generally unoccupied during the day. Who knew where Grey spent his hours? Perhaps somewhere in the main house, trying to engage the communards in conversation. They were both staying here for now, but it felt uncomfortable, a temporary solution to an unknown problem.

  Kim wanted to travel. Grey had driven out to the coast and called Janet on a payphone this morning, and had found Kim afterward to report on the sick boy’s condition. There had been no improvement for days.

  Kim hadn’t been in the chamber for a few months. Marianne would agree to let him do it. And Grey?

  In the end, though, he talked to another member of the commune, a man whose name he had already forgotten, without Marianne or Grey present. They did a quiet deal—some of his leftover tracing fluid in exchange for using their chamber.

  ‘We don’t even use it during the day.’

  ‘Will people notice the generators running?’

  ‘They won’t care. Need me to hook you up?’

  ‘Oh no. I can do it myself.’

  How many trips would he take? He had, for some reason, a small sense of certainty, something that he realised he had not felt for a long time. The future could offer something. The kit was in a shed at the back of the main house, with the generators behind so that the noise gave minimal disruption. There were old machine parts and tools in there too, hung and stacked against the opposite wall, but nothing that seemed like it would be required by anyone. The daily life of the commune was out there on the fields or in their small ‘schoolhouse’. Would they be sympathetic to his task? The presence of the kit on this property linked them, however tenuously, to the future. Could it be said to represent hope? He applied the fluid. Actually he had always hated injecting himself. He had tended to look away and let others in the group apply it to him. While he waited he consulted the topographical maps and orientation tables and moved the kit’s plates into position. There was an old wooden chair next to the kit where he could wait, and on the ground some rugs and cushions. The future was always accessed from squalid corners like this one. Were they like the hidden corners of the mind—secret thoughts, driven into ever more secret places? He had his own secret knowledge: lies, yes. But no, in the TCF community it was illegality that left them all sequestered there, but also maybe some more general forgetting, as if the future itself was slowly fading, having been opened up and encapsulated by the machine. It produced only dull images, constantly repeating, even at their most spectacular. Their chapter of the Fedorovians had simply been part of it, their wonderful, outrageous hope pushed underground into just another small dusty room. That household where Pen’s wife had moved in—another part, a different, failing enclave with its own eyes on the future, but becoming similarly irrelevant to all that went on. This, then: one last chance, one last push out to the future itself, in all its brightness. Duck heads and step through the low, dark tunnel full of faith as to what might be found on the other side. A faith not in gods but in his fellow people. If only he hadn’t become tied up with Shanks. The chair creaked under him. He was becoming cold in the dampened clothes and the biting air of the commune’s valley. He started the kit, letting the field slowly develop, and immediately clambered into the chamber, bringing its lid shut over him. It was a recumbent kit, so he lay down on the metal inner surface to wait for the tunnel to form.

  How many times had he done this? This. He had lost most of his contacts—but it had been all about talking, finding out about possibilities and technologies and what might be brought back so that the loop of history could be kick-started, past and future feeding into one another, ever ever ever ever accelerating. What great leaps might have occurred. Occurred. Occ. This by contrast, after the disappointment, after. After they had drifted. Seemed remedial. Did it? Remedial. It always came to him in stutters of time. No. Time. Not stutters. Folds and confusions. And. Small enclaves. Life struggling to realise itself. Thick walls decorated with bright colour. Colour. Col. Paint over squalor. Life struggling in enclaves. Thick walls and struggle inside. Breathable atmospheres. The stars reduced. Impassable distances. Dist. As interesting as. Ever. The. The. What? World as squalor, futureless. Less. No. World as corner of itself. Blue painted wall. Behind. Only. Only. Dust blown. No. Future a pencil out. What? Only lines. What time. What? He. No he. Rolled in. A finger out pencil out and view to dust. Unlikelyout. Nonono no he. You read that wrong. Didn’t you? What can. The questions questions. Think. Think more so. Think out a thought to stars, grasp them. How else? What else? Well. Stair. Wellstair? Wwwwst. St… w… Good. No keep it up keep it. Nonthought the nonperson the nonstair the nonwell the spiral out of time and around Earth’s spin but nowhere and nothing and nonthing what delicate nonthought. The child’s own self driven out of time left behind but driven. His? Peter’s? Array of life. Particles accelerated, time, time. Pen’s body. A world surrounded. What can be done? What
. Stairwell. Good. Oh good, yes good. He is good. And squalid places here too in the future. Someone coming up the stairs—‘Oh, you surprised me.’ ‘Sorry.’ He moves away, down the stairs, quickly, takes the door, stands, then back in and up, making sure they’re empty now. Then he comes out into the corridor on the next floor up, and knocks at Susan Whitstone’s office door. Door. He stands for a second. No answer. No. No! He knocks again. What can he do? What did they do in the case of a failed rendezvous? It’s been a while. It must have happened—she doesn’t just wait there for travellers to show up. Has she ever been absent? He stands and waits. The time is precious—this future. He stands longer then walks off down the corridor. This place, still familiar to him. It’s been a year, slightly longer? This building seems to be its own small enclosed world. He has seen planes from its window though, flying over the harbour towards the city’s airport. Everyone who has travelled has these questions—how planes can exist, how futures consciously avoided can nonetheless exist. Their contact here in the university believes that the planes, the buildings, were simply rebuilt at some time—

  ‘It’s you.’ Susan emerges from another door—a small kitchen as he remembers. They look at each other. ‘Come on, let’s get in my office.’

  Inside, she smiles. He says, ‘It’s been a while.’

  ‘Yes.’ She holds him by the shoulders, then hugs him lightly and kisses him on the cheek. ‘Yuck. That fluid.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I haven’t seen Pen either.’

  ‘… You don’t know. I thought, wait.’

  ‘What?’

  Will he tell her? He says, ‘He’s, um.’ He hesitates then says, ‘He’s dead. He came back dead.’

  She is unable to speak. She says, ‘Have you been to where he was? To find out what happened?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re scared… ’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Where was he?’

  ‘I can’t… ’

  ‘I don’t want to know.’

  ‘No.’