Occupy Me

by Tricia Sullivan

  Yeah, um. No.

  The big decisions make themselves, Pearl.

  I can still feel her fingerprint against mine.

  Oh, shit. I think I’m going to do this thing.

  Mothers. You want to help us? You’re waveform artists? Use the open seam to merge my waveform with the pterosaur. Put us together. I can’t carry you but I can carry your work.

  –Work is all there is.

  It all comes down to why I’m here. I’m here for love. That’s why I’m about the heavy lifting. Because that’s what love is. I learned that much from the angels in the Resistance. Love is anti-brinksmanship. It’s pulling back from the slippery slope of war with every microgram of self-mastery you can scrape up from the dirty leftovers of anger. Love is sweat. Love happens in the small hours, when you’re half-dead with exhaustion, when you’re mopping someone’s fevered brow and praying. That’s when the world starts to bend.

  Love is pushing through the material to see what’s on the other side. To become something more than you knew. Or less. It’s chanting the same nonsense words over and over because that’s what it takes to cross the bridge of this terrible moment. Love is small change that you really needed, but you gave it away.

  And love’s what the Resistance is really made of, internally, where it’s warm and dark.

  I didn’t keep the receipt

  They put you in a car. It’s not a police car. It’s a high end Land Rover. The man who sits beside you in back is much bigger than you are. He seems excessive.

  You have always been good at remembering things. Medical school. Memorising names of bones. Now it would behove you to forget what you know about IIF and Pace and Austen Stevens, but you can’t. It would be cathartic to tell everything, get it all out. Maybe if you did, the crack that the other one travels through would finally close. Maybe. But there is no one worth telling. You wish for a cigarette even though you don’t smoke. Anything to give the situation some gravitas.

  The Land Rover glides north, past heather and brackish marsh, past other cars driven by people going about their business as if your problems don’t signify. No one speaks.

  You remember the day you graduated, how everyone sweated in their gowns. You’d met Ayeisha by then, and she’d sworn she was going commando under her robes. She proved it to you later in the bar. The oil company paid for that. Austen Stevens paid off your mortgage on the Northport house. So?

  The sea up here is always cold. Nothing poetic about those clouds, though you wish you could find something poetic about something, somewhere. This feels all wrong. Surely they wouldn’t drive all this way just to stuff your body in an oil barrel and dump you?

  They make for Aberdeen. Airport, you think, but it’s not that. It’s a helipad. The pilot is as cheerful as his accent is incomprehensible, and he shakes your hand. They have loaded some boxes in the back of the helicopter, looks like gourmet biscuits in bulk. The pilot seems completely unaware of what is going on here, and it’s hard not to wonder what would happen if you just gave in. Told them what they want to know.

  Would it be so bad?

  Surely you would be of more value in the world alive than dead.

  The girls will be missing their soccer practice. Ayeisha would want you to make a compromise, because you are needed there – even in a broken condition, you are needed. The world is moving. The helicopter is flying despite the ghost voices in its tank. And when you see the rig – not the largest you’ve known, but surely the newest – it seems to you that everything you’ve done, everything you’ve stood for to the degree that you’ve ever managed to stand, everything is pretty fucking insignificant.

  Your specialty is orthopaedic surgery. Bones are not simple: they are both mechanical and alive. You worked on rugby players. You replaced hips for grandparents. It was satisfying work. Now you study the structure of the rig. The thing is a tribute to size. It’s staggering. Here is the derrick, the pontoons, here are the layers of deck, the crane arms, the specialist equipment as big as houses on deck. Men look like Lego in their hi-vis suits. Only a few of them; they seem superfluous compared to the machinery. The rig is like one enormous body. Its mechanics are classical, not hard to understand; the only thing that’s changed about these structures in a hundred years is their size, the depth of their daring, and the ingenuity of their safety features.

  In its dedication to purpose you find the rig obscene and impressively beautiful at once.

  You are making rough calculations of the money that you know about, how it will have multiplied in the years since it was taken. And the money that you don’t know about but can infer. How many of these rigs would that money buy?

  How much of it should have gone to repair the damage to the land and the people who lived over the onshore gas and oil deposits claimed by Pace?

  How much was your medical school and your mortgage?

  You were paid off and that’s why you can’t quite condemn the other one for slipping inside your cells and brainwaves and wreaking the havoc that he does. You can’t blame him for despising your weakness.

  What the other one doesn’t understand is that you may not be strong like him, but you are the one who survived.

  There has to be a way. There has to be a way. So much emotion. You need to think clearly, but you have emotion running through you like wind and rain. Flights of insects under your skin.

  The helipad is enormous. It juts out over the sea on the north-east side of the platform, octagonal with sharp unweathered paint. You can see white caps and there’s a rigid breeze driving against the helicopter, but the pilot has no trouble. The rig itself will be solid as a rock, imperturbable.

  If only the same could be said of you.

  * * *

  Liam Forbes is in a conference room on the top level. The boxes of gourmet biscuits are wheeled in on a dolly beside you. As you move through the building there is nothing to indicate that you aren’t in a corporate headquarters on land. In the hallways you pass employees and contractors, all of whom are pleasant, and it’s only when you get into the conference room itself with its plate-glass windows that you are reminded you’re on a platform. There’s a view of the decks below and you find yourself making a game of identifying the various kinds of equipment in its steel casings. Plenty is unfamiliar; the industry has evolved a lot in the twenty years since you handled Austen Stevens’ business in West Africa. The floor hums subliminally. For all the surface swank, there is a smell of new paint and brine.

  When you first come in, Liam glances at you sullenly, but he says nothing until the handlers have left. He is even more weaselly in person. Also nervous. He’s picked his cuticles to bleeding.

  ‘Why here?’ you say. ‘What are they thinking?’

  He shrugs. ‘It’s private. Security footage all under control. No problem if there’s noise. You can’t easily escape.’

  It’s a reminder of your past. If they are that subtle. They probably aren’t.

  Who are they, anyway? It’s a long time since you were involved in Pace in any way. The big players have retired. You haven’t kept up with developments in the company because you wanted to put all that behind you. You know more about what goes on with IIF through attending Austen Stevens these last months than you know about Pace.

  There’s one thing, though.

  The fact that you’re on an oil platform makes it easy to shove you in a barrel and throw you in the sea, and you’d just disappear. They must think they can get the information out of you before they get rid of you. Your mind plays James Bond scenarios of torture chambers in the depths of the rig. You see yourself strapped to the kelly, lowered into the water upside down . . . It’s all a bit silly. This is a working rig. Nobody will want any sort of a scene here.

  It will be done economically, simply, and at the end there will be no trace of you.

  The man they send to deal with you is much taller than you are, impossibly handsome in the blandest possible way. Ayeisha would say you could eat off him.
You can’t help picturing her faint sneer at all of this palaver. Ayeisha has a way of making people cut to the chase. You always admired it. If she were here, it would all be different somehow. You are the quiet one, the thoughtful one, the patient one. No wonder the other self steps into you like you’re just a sock or a condom, uses you, rolls you up, casts you off. Where is the fucker when you really need him?

  ‘Carl Anderson,’ he says to you, shaking your hand. ‘I am in charge of global security for Pace. I have been asked to interview you about your work for Austen Stevens in the past.’

  * * *

  Anderson turns on the video and you see the interior of a corrugated shed, rusty and lightshot from outside. The faces of the people are cast in darkness so that most of what you can see is their eye whites, snatches of their clothing.

  ‘Move the camera,’ Anderson says in his clipped voice. ‘We can’t see the people.’

  But you don’t have to see them to guess who they are. The realisation corkscrews through you. Fool not to have expected this. It’s so obvious.

  ‘I don’t need to see a video of my family,’ you say. ‘I’ve said I’ll cooperate.’

  ‘There is no need to worry,’ Anderson tells you. Like his body, his willpower is a moving wall. A mechanical thing that will make its inexorable progress no matter what anyone does. You can feel this in the room like a cartoon presence. The will of Anderson. He goes through life exerting it on the smaller ones. This would be you. For a moment you close your eyes, simply because this makes it easier to really see what is happening.

  ‘Please consider me at your disposal,’ you say. ‘What can I do for you?’

  When you open your eyes, the camera has moved. There is your mother, looking no different to how she looked last year when you brought the kids to see her in the same river village where your ancestors have lived for hundreds of years. Her wrapper is new and her face is as wide and strong and as profoundly peaceful as ever. Her teeth flash in a big smile when she sees you.

  ‘I’m told you receive an honour,’ she says, throwing out her arms. ‘You make me so proud. I have brought the young cousins to congratulate you. Tito will go to school in London next year if he does well on exams. Ifé wants to go to Ghana to study. You must talk to her. New York will be better for her, then she can stay with you.’

  You clear your throat, wondering how she cannot notice how rattled you look. Or is she just playing along? Your mother has seen plenty in her lifetime.

  ‘It depends what she wants,’ you say. It’s an old disagreement, many times chewed already. ‘The University of Ghana has something to offer her. Either way, you know I will help with living costs but she must win the scholarship herself.’

  The conversation goes on for some time, ordinary stuff like you always talk about. You even argue with her a little because when you agree too readily on matters where she knows your opinion differs, she asks whether you are drunk. Finally, she asks to be remembered to her grandchildren and Ayeisha, exacts a promise for another visit, and Anderson ends the call.

  ‘That wasn’t necessary,’ you tell him.

  ‘It was my kindness to your family,’ he says. Coming on the heels of your mother’s straight talk, this statement is hard to follow. Then you understand what he means. You will not talk to your family again because Anderson will take your information and after they have verified it they will kill you. They are so confident that they even tell you up front what they will do before they do it.

  Liam you cocksucker, you think.

  * * *

  When you try to summon hate, all you get is sorrow. In your heart you can’t even imagine a world where the powerful don’t determine everyone’s fate by thuggery and domination. You realise that you’ve never even really tried. You wanted to build something in Kuè, and it would only ever have been a token, but it was what you thought you could do in one lifetime. Pace Industries is such a huge, godlike force that the idea that it could collapse never once crossed your mind. Not once. Not even when the ancestors came to you in the smoke and fume. And they did come; you are sure of this. Maybe they didn’t speak with voices you could hear. Maybe they didn’t manifest as beings that you could clearly see. But they were there, and you felt them, and you let yourself be guided by their wisdom. They must know more than you.

  But where are they now?

  Here you are, on the rig that pulls oil from the earth and there is oil everywhere here, sequestered by steel but it is here, yet you can’t sense the ancestors. Not yours, not anybody’s. You can’t feel their power. You don’t know what you are meant to do.

  * * *

  The interview with Anderson takes most of the day. It’s all discreetly recorded. Sandwiches are provided. Bathroom breaks. The vibe is corporate and serene, except for Liam Forbes, who is present but has the air of a disgruntled rock star. He keeps sighing and fidgeting, but you can see from the body language between Anderson and Forbes that Forbes has been instructed not to interrupt.

  As you unspool your story for them you wonder at the way your life is measured in knowledge. Your worth lies in these words, and when they have all spun out you will be good for nothing but killing. Because of this, you thought it would feel bad to spill out the whole truth, like spilling blood. But it doesn’t. It feels good to finally say it, even to these assholes who will do only harm with the information. It feels good to get it out.

  You know about the skimming. You know who was bribed and how much. You know the pathways for the stolen oil, where it was processed, to whom it was sold, how much was paid. You know where the guns were sent during the war years and you even understand, marginally, how Stevens made the transition from oil executive to financial wizard. The truth is there was very little wizardry involved, because it had been Liam who had masterminded the sleights of hand that had built Stevens’ fortune. When Liam advised clients to do this thing or that thing with their money and it all went wrong, he simply doctored the books to cover up the losses. He dipped into IIF’s capital to make up shortfalls and keep clients happy – not the sort of trick anyone would look out for since clients guarded against money being removed illegally – not paid in. IIF was all front for the vast underground fortune Stevens kept, wealth that had been grown over a forty-year period. Stevens had never needed IIF’s clients, just its official banner.

  ‘You claim to have only been his physician, but this is privileged information,’ Anderson remarks.

  You shrug. ‘I already knew all about the skimming. When I was looking after him in the last months of his life, he was quite open about his business. I think he wanted me to know. He knew it would bother me, but he also knew I wouldn’t do anything about it.’

  Anderson’s face rumpled in what looked like sincere concern.

  ‘Why not, Doctor? Why did you report nothing?’

  You have no intention of letting him into your head.

  ‘He paid me well,’ you say.

  He seems to buy it. You marvel at the stupidity of people when it comes to accepting information just because it already lies close to their own assumptions of how things are.

  If you told him that aggression and revenge impede spiritual growth then you would be giving him some really valuable information. And you have no wish to do this. Not when he’s going to order your execution.

  ‘Tell me about the briefcase. Where did you get it?’

  You laugh. ‘Short Hills Mall. I didn’t keep the receipt.’

  You wonder where it really did come from. Did it just materialise, like the gun? Did it come from the place where your love handles go when the other Kisi is inside you? Some existential hiding place? You’ll probably never know.

  ‘The scans show it as empty. Its weight keeps changing. Whatever this piece of technology is, clearly it is more than, shall we say, a prop from a James Bond film.’

  This is supposed to be humorous.

  ‘I don’t know anything about it,’ you tell him. ‘Now I’ve told you how the skimming wa
s done. I’ve named names. I’ve told you what banks and what countries and where to look. That’s all I have to say on the matter.’

  ‘Ah, yes, of course . . .’ Carl Anderson consults his screen and then turns back to you. ‘We are going out on deck now. I hope you don’t mind. There is a little experiment I would like to conduct.’

  ‘That’s a bad, bad, bad idea,’ Liam is saying. Sweat is running along his hairline and blooming in the armpits of his shirt. ‘Whatever happened when he opened it at my house, it blew out the security cameras and wrecked the room. Take it to a rock in the middle of nowhere, or an empty warehouse. Treat it like an unexploded bomb.’

  Anderson and Kang put their heads together briefly. Anderson’s glance flashes across you.

  ‘We’ll take it down to the deck,’ he says. Kang doesn’t look happy, but he makes a call and you all walk out together, Anderson struggling a little under the weight of the briefcase. You wonder what would happen if it suddenly lightened the way it did on the plane, lifted him up in the air like Mary Poppins’ umbrella. You imagine him sailing off the gangway and over the mud filtration plant, over the reel of spare hose, the guard rail, and into the North Sea sky.

  A muddle of clouds blocks the horizon as the sun goes down but, high up, the air glows faintly cerulean and you breathe in a subliminal oil fume. The outlines of sea birds adorn the rails and you watch and listen for any sign of your ancestors here. Nothing. Maybe you are too far from home.

  Everyone stands around in the wind. Grinding noises come from the mud tank, and one panel of filtration unit lies open to the sky where workmen are doing maintenance. The system is still running, and occasionally a fleck of dark liquid flies out, or a bit of sand. The workers have gone by the time you arrive, cleared away by Kang and his headset. You all must look like technical advisers or maybe colleagues from another division come to tour the rig. You try not to watch Anderson set down the briefcase but it’s hard. It’s as though this object should have its own agency by now, but it just sits there mute.