He went totally silent, but the other side, too, held its breath. But he was sure. Behind a gravestone of night, a bundle of blonde locks.
He had been talking to himself on and off, and now he raised his voice. He spoke to his relatives, lamenting his fate, said goodbye to his father and mother, and fell into the water sobbing theatrically. Dramatic blubbering underwater. He thrashed his arms and legs, stopped thrashing them and lifted his head silently. And breathed. It took all his strength not to groan, not to gasp and not to move. His trembling caused tiny ripples in the water. He heard them lap against the bank and heard the echo of them lapping against the bank and then the echo of the echo of them lapping against the bank. And nothing else. Nobody appeared. He repeated the experiment a few more times and forgot it was an experiment. He was really speaking to his father now, and his father put his hand on his neck and led him down a long tiled hallway that smelled of chlorine. A white terrycloth towel sat folded atop the radiator. Two girls in blue bathing suits stood by the railing of the diving board and looked at him with exaggerated indifference. One of them was going into the eighth grade and was the love of his life. He spat water, came briefly to his senses, and screamed and snorted that he knew what they wanted to know. He had always known, and the cartridges from the pen hadn’t been stolen from him after all, he had them in a hole in his tooth, they didn’t need to wait until tomorrow.
“Until tomorrow!” droned the echo.
63
Spatial Orientation
And be constant in praying at the beginning and the end of the day, as well as during the early watches of the night. For, verily, good deeds drive away evil deeds. This is a reminder to all who bear God in mind.
SURAH 11: 114
THE NEXT DAY he was still alive. He didn’t know how he had managed it, he didn’t know whether to be happy about it, but he felt no sense of relief when he heard the footsteps of several people. He felt nothing aside from thirst and pain. A piece of excrement floated somewhere beside him in the water. His face was swollen and flecked with mud. If it was true, as one of the voices hidden behind a light claimed, that they had left him for only one night, then his sense of time had slowed down by a factor of five or six.
Beneath the light he saw three pairs of shoes. Brown shoes, brown shoes, women’s shoes. Nobody with rolled-up pant legs.
“Unfortunately Carthage took the key with him. But we have this.”
Cockcroft squatted down on the bank. Helen’s hand held a bolt-cutter. A huge, peaceful sheep floated through the cave and nibbled at Carl’s back.
“Ksch,” he said.
“And has it occurred to you now what you want to say? No? Because we’re winding up this post, and it could be a few years or even decades before a human being makes it down to this cave again. So get it off your chest: want to give us something for the road? Nothing? Do you think this is funny? It’s unfortunate. Very unfortunate.”
Cockcroft talked, Helen talked, and then Cockcroft talked some more. But as for answering any more questions, Carl felt capable of doing that only underwater. At one point they said they were going to leave him there alone. Then they said they’d give him another chance. Helen put the bolt-cutters down next to her on the bank of the pool. He drank a little of the muddy water. The three silhouettes sat there motionless, watching him.
“Think it over.” Helen leaned forward and splashed a little water at him with her finger.
“I’m dying,” he said.
“You’re not dying. You know the story about the rat that was thrown into a barrel? It can take days.”
“Fuck the rat. Shit. Fucking rat.” He tried to splash back but was unable to bridge the three meters that separated him from Helen.
“You should at least have enough sense to use your last conversation to make a statement that isn’t completely meaningless.”
He thought for a moment and then said: “You make me want to throw up.”
The silhouettes stood up. The beams of the swaying lamps caused shadow boulders to swell in the room. Footsteps. Goats. Darkness. He waited.
He had imprinted in his mind the location where the bolt-cutters had been left. Three and a half, maybe four meters away from his outstretched arm on a flat rock on the bank.
In order to take off his pants he had to keep submerging in the water. He shoved them over his hips with both hands. His left hand, which the ouz had bitten, hurt much worse than the right, which Bassir had stabbed the letter-opener into. Mud stuck his eyes together. He hoped it was mud.
He ripped his sweater over his head and tied an arm to a leg of his pants. It was an exhausting tug of war, which probably had to do with the fact that his mind was already running on emergency power, or the fact that his sense of spatial orientation was once again greatly diminished by the darkness; either way it took for ever for him to realize the sweater was stuck on the chain and was unusable for his purposes. He untied the pants and pulled the sweater back and forth. He tried to rip it lengthwise but his fingers couldn’t hold it tightly enough. Wafts of mist were drawing over his eyes. He screamed, and some sort of synesthetic foul-up transformed his scream into colors. He knew he didn’t have much more time. So he let his sweater be a sweater and tried it with just the pants.
He knotted one leg closed and put some mud into it, then tested the weight. Then he measured the distance. He figured: maybe thirty centimeters of chain plus half the breadth of his shoulders plus an outstretched arm plus the length of the pants, which was about a meter and a half. All together a maximum of three meters. It wouldn’t reach.
He swung the pants forward by one leg, lasso-style, and heard the other end smack down on water. Same thing on the second and third attempts. He didn’t even reach the edge of the bank. Maybe it had something to do with his throwing technique: resting on his left elbow, half lying down; prior to each throw the pants hung in the water somewhere behind his right shoulder and came out crumpled and sloshing. Once he even swung the weighted leg into his head.
Before the fourth attempt he draped the cloth carefully over his right shoulder and then tried to shot-put the weight in the tied leg instead of throwing it; it was risky. Because he had not only to shot-put the weight but also hold onto the second, slippery leg with one and the same injured hand. If that end got away from him it spelled his certain death.
He concentrated for a long time and then shoved his arm out in the dark. Immediately there was a sound of impact on the bank, a wet smack on rock. He pulled the lasso in and shot-put it four or five more times in slightly different directions. He hit the bank each time. But nothing more. He lay flat in the water, pulled the chain taut and believed himself capable of freeing himself from this misery by working systematically. The series of impact sounds on the bank organized themselves in his head into a sort of rescue map that he just needed to carefully go over, grid square by grid square, and he’d be sure to hit the bolt-cutters at some point. These moments were displaced by an inkling that the bolt-cutters were far beyond his range. Then he also thought he’d lost his sense of orientation again in the dark. He turned himself like the minute hand of a clock and threw the pants in all directions, only to realize that in three-quarters of the cases he was unable to reach the bank.
Even so, the direction that he had originally thought to be the correct one was still vaguely recognizable as a result. The bank where Helen had stood, spoken to him and put down the bolt-cutters was the closest.
He continued to try, but the sound of a sand-filled pant leg hitting a metal tool continue to elude him. From time to time he yanked on the chain around his neck, as if he might magically be able to conjure up the sound of clanging metal. He talked to himself, and at some point the mist before his eyes suddenly lifted and he could see dark trees around the pool. The trees stretched their leafless branches into a gray sky; snowflakes fell from above. The pool froze over. He slid across it and away. His mother scolded him to be more careful, a young woman with brown eyes. And then the do
g showed up. The dog leaped on him like a huge woolen glove. The Christmas tree lit up and caught fire and tipped over. A doctor examined him, putting a wooden tongue-depressor in his mouth. He was allowed to keep the tongue-depressor afterward. Candies sat in a glass bowl as a thank-you, the teacher demanded an explanation of prime numbers, and at the edge of the jungle lived talking apes who hunted people, stuffed them and exhibited them in museums. He remembered the Statue of Liberty on the beach, in the sky above, a twitching piece of lint on the camera lens, snake-like greetings from the realm of the dead. Forty-eight hours with no sleep.
Carl came back to his senses because he had choked on water. He coughed, spat out slime and began an idiosyncratic act. His elbows swung back with momentum, the hands balled into fists, then with the fingers spread, forward, an upward shovel motion at the end. Again and again. The two, the three… and the seventeen.
He looked once again at the blackbird that had strayed into his nightly room, and a man with a gold wristwatch opened the window and let it out. The smell of a burned cake. A young man who shoved the wrong end of a cigarette into his mouth and then, engrossed in conversation, lit the filter. The grandfather, washing the car, frozen for ever in faded colors, except the water continuously spraying out of the hose for all eternity, silver on the hood of the car.
He mechanically gathered the drenched pants. He wondered what they had done with Hakim of the Mountains. Shivering-cold, he tried to pull the sweater back off the chain and onto his body. After many futile attempts he finally succeeded in squeezing himself into the wet clump and pulling it down over his head.
The noises fell silent for a moment and a thought staggered toward him, club-footed: if it was possible to get this bit of cloth over his head—wouldn’t it be possible to push it all the way down his body and pull it off below his feet? There in the dark he didn’t dare to answer the question. His ability to think spatially had shut down.
He saw himself as a comic figure attached by his neck to a huge weight that had the shape and size of the earth. It wouldn’t work this way. But the other way? Out of the two to four holes that in his mind made up a sweater, out of how many would he have to extricate the numb, swollen lump of flesh that he himself was in order to make use of the cloth? He didn’t know. He’d just have to do the experiment.
Lying down underwater, he shoved an arm up past his throat. That was easy. But the trouble began with the second arm. It got stuck in the neck opening just below the elbow. His body was as inflexible as the sweater was resistant to being ripped. Carl tried to free himself again but he couldn’t get his arm any further or get it back out. He sank into the mud in his straitjacket, floundering around like a fish out of water. He gasped for air. He plunged. And all of a sudden his other elbow shot past his face. Snorting, he writhed up out of the water. Both of his arms were pressed together above his head, and his forearms danced as if imitating a rabbit’s ears. He struggled. He fell over. Then the sweater jerked down over his chest and stole his breath. With a last muster of strength he ripped the sweater down over his hips while still underwater. The rest was easy. With the sweater in his hands, he paused for a moment and tried to relax.
Then he searched for his pants so he could tie them to the sweater, but the pants had disappeared. Three, four times Carl crawled around the iron rod without locating the pants, and when he finally found them the weight had disappeared and the knot in the one leg had untied.
He made a new knot and realized how short his lasso had suddenly become. He untied the knot and re-did it closer to the end, but it was still too short. Groaning, he felt from one end to the other and it became even more confusing. Something seemed to be missing from the pants, and there was a big cloth hanging in the middle. Writhing around on the pants couldn’t have ripped them, could it?
Searching for unseen overlooked knots, tangles or pant legs, he let the cloth slide through his hands. But he couldn’t feel anything else. He thought he had lost his mind. He pounded on his blind eyes. And only when he pushed the cloth up his face and ran his tongue over it did he feel what his numbed hands could no longer feel, that it wasn’t the cloth of his pants but something knitted. The sweater. He had been holding his sweater the entire time.
“This time let’s keep track,” he muttered to himself, and because the sound of his own voice had a calming effect on him, an effect like being addressed by someone whose sanity remained less impaired than his own, he continued to talk to himself.
“First let’s put the sweater here,” he said, laying it over his shoulder. Then he felt around. He was still unable to find the pants and said: “No problem. No problem at all. If they’re not over here, then they are over here. Or here. Or here.”
He laid himself out as flat as possible on his stomach and used his foot as a hook, stretching it out and dragging it around the iron rod in a circle. And sure enough, a long piece of cloth did get tangled around his ankle, at which point he immediately assured himself that the sweater was still on his shoulder. It was.
“Great,” he said, “terrific.” He tied the sweater to a leg of the pants.
Then he measured the length of his lasso and was disappointed. It was barely one and a half times his arm span. The knot took too much cloth. But he didn’t dare make a riskier knot. If it came apart and one of the two pieces of clothing flew off, he was doomed.
Before he undertook the first attempt, he took a short, solemn break. Then concentration and the proven shot-put method: with the familiar smacking sound, the wet cloth struck rock.
But he had now lost all sense of orientation. For the next attempt he turned ninety degrees to the right: the same wet smack. The third try was a mistake; he had forgotten to turn. Another wet smack… and this time mixed with a light metallic clang. Frozen in shock, he held his throwing arm outstretched for several seconds in the dark before he dared to start slowly pulling in the lasso. Slowly, then even more slowly. He heard the scrape of metal against stone. Then the sound lost its metal component.
Carl weighted the leg with additional mud and took another throw. This time he missed the bolt-cutters. But that was no problem. His pains had disappeared. Strange chemical transmitters held back by the body until the last moment suddenly surged through his brain.
With new strength and confidence Carl shot-put the weight into the dark and felt at the last second the end of the arm of the sweater, which he was supposed to hold onto, slip through his clammy fingers. Silence for a moment. Then he heard the slosh of wet cloth landing, accompanied by a taunting clang.
It didn’t take Carl even ten seconds this time to confirm that the pants and sweater were completely beyond the reach of either his hands or feet out there in the infinite dark distance of the rocks, further than the bank of the pool, further than his own life.
He realized that until this moment he had believed himself immortal. He wrapped the chain around his neck. He pushed his face into the mud. He banged his head against the iron rod. With a scream he shot back out of the water. He screamed the name that had been on the tip of his tongue the whole time. Now it echoed off the walls into the void.
64
Aéroport de la Liberté
Blond hair actually bestows cleverness; the less that is sent into the eyes, the more remains in the brain with its fluid nourishment and endows it with cleverness. The brown-haired and brown-eyed, and the black-haired and black-eyed, they force that which the blonds push into the brain, into the eyes and hair.
RUDOLF STEINER
THEY’D ARRANGED A TICKET for her on the eleven o’clock flight. The others had already left the evening before. Helen packed her things, took a taxi and reached the airport in the north of Targat at eight. There she learned that because of technical difficulties the flight had been canceled. There were seats left on two Air France flights leaving soon afterward, one to Spain and one to the south of France, but she had to rule them out because her weapon made her dependent on flying aboard an American airline.
; After a bit of back and forth (and protests from other passengers, who didn’t have as much luck), she was rebooked on the night flight. Now she had twelve hours. She deposited her baggage in a locker and found a nice, exotic-style European café on the upper floor of the airport building. She read the Herald Tribune and a French newspaper that someone had left behind on a table. She was relieved not to stumble upon anything familiar while flipping through either paper.
The cup in which her coffee had been served was white porcelain and had a pattern around the rim of tiny blue sickles alternating with stars. It was the same make as the ones in the kitchen cabinet of bungalow 581d, the same make she had put out on the breakfast table each morning for several days. Two settings. She stared into space for a while and wondered what her life would be like in thirty or forty years. Her life, the extent of her happiness and, potentially, how she might remember this current episode, how she might remember this backward, half-civilized, violent, dirty country in North Africa that she hoped to leave behind for ever in a few hours.
The probability that the nameless man was still alive was close to zero. He had already looked bad the last time they checked on him. And since then another thirty-six hours had passed. You didn’t have to be a pessimist to predict that the surface of the water had settled above him for ever by this point.
The airport loudspeaker paged Mr and Mrs Wells to the Air France ticket counter. Helen peered out of the panorama window and saw among the swarm of white, blue and sand-colored Arab buildings around the airport a neon sign that held her attention.
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