Six Degrees of Freedom

by Nicolas Dickner

  “Excuse me…”

  Jay looks up from her reading and finds an exhausted Alex Onassis. To all appearances, the poor man is having more and more trouble conceptualizing the duplex.

  “The visits are over for tonight.”

  Without waiting for an answer, he gives a little wave and, as he goes out, walks under the intermittently blinking light fixture. Dramatic music, roll credits.

  Jay stretches and thinks she ought to tackle the mountain of filthy dishes. There’s no reason to nurture disorder now that the visits are over. But then she thinks better of it. There may be more visitors tomorrow and, if so, she won’t have time to dirty enough plates to make a bad impression.

  What’s more, she has something more pressing to do. She has just recalled Laura’s recommendation to read the articles about a certain Amir so-and-so, from October 2001.

  First surprise: the file on this guy—Amir Farid Rizk is his name—is a good centimetre thick, some fifty documents in all. The beginning of the story is unremarkable: a man gets caught at the Gioia Tauro terminal in Italy aboard a container newly arrived from Cairo. A longshoreman heard someone yelling and banging against the sides. Not the first time a stowaway lacked air. Some had suffocated.

  The security people were called and immediately came to cut the seals and open the doors. The poor wretch staggered into the open air blinking his eyes, a little dazed but in good health. A quick look was enough to conclude this was not a typical stowaway; he was fitted out like a secret agent. The police dispatched to the scene discovered a satellite telephone, fake credit cards, access cards for Canadian, Egyptian and Thai airports, and a Rome–Montreal plane ticket.

  The individual’s name was Amir Farid Rizk—with a z, he insisted—and he was a Canadian-Egyptian national. Yes, fine, okay, but what was he doing in the container? That part was not so clear. Grilled about this, Rizk launched into a sketchy account. He asserted he was the victim of religious persecution, claimed that his powerful brother-in-law had made threats against his life. He was looking for an unobtrusive way to return to Canada.

  The attacks against the World Trade Center were still front-page news, and Rizk became an overnight micro-phenomenon in the media. Airport surveillance had been boosted threefold, but what about seaport facilities? In the United States, some observers predicted terrorist attacks involving ships, speculated about the existence of a clandestine intermodal network for the conveyance of Taliban kamikazes and bacteriological bombs. Amir Farid Rizk, they said, was quite simply a sign of things to come.

  Except that, having completed their investigation, the authorities acknowledged that Rizk did not belong to any terrorist cell and was not preparing any attacks. He was, in short, and despite appearances, a harmless stowaway. Immediately on being released, the fellow vanished from Italy, from the media and from the face of the planet.

  Jay skims through the articles. This character was a unique case. As a rule, stowaways move in more or less disorganized groups. Rizk travelled alone and was well equipped: in addition to a satellite phone and an assortment of tickets and passes, he had brought provisions and drinking water, a bed, a bucket that served as a toilet, a laptop computer, clothes and a dishwasher.

  Rizk was so well prepared, in fact, that he easily might have reached Canada without a hitch had he not run out of air. Even the most organized travellers can neglect a detail such as breathing.

  Jay wonders if Élisabeth thought of it.

  SEVEN WEEKS HAVE ELAPSED AND, apart from the weekly runs to Saint-Anicet-de-Kostka, Lisa devotes herself body and soul to fitting out the container. The passenger compartment is taking shape, and the workshop of Autocars Mondiaux is full of studs. The floor is strewn with blond shavings, and the atmosphere is saturated with a fine mist of sawdust streaked with the sunrays passing through the skylights.

  Lisa is touching up a plank. She measures the depth of the tenons for the third time and climbs into the container. A hook scale and the computer, showing an Excel spreadsheet, have been placed inside the doorway. Having weighed her plank, Lisa keys in the result. Everything that enters the container must be weighed, from the wood and hardware to the electrical appliances, the mattress, the food and drinking water, the teapot and teabags, right down to the slightest pompommed cushion, not to mention Lisa herself. The net weight must not exceed twenty-five tons, otherwise the container will start to groan and bend. According to Lisa’s calculations, the final structure (including the drinking water) should amount to about ten thousand kilos, but everything has to be weighed all the same because the merchandise weight must be specified on the forms.

  Inside, there are three white-hot floods casting a harsh light, but the ventilation makes the atmosphere bearable. Lisa catches herself appreciating the narrowness of the box. The great discovery of the summer: you can’t suffer from claustrophobia in a cell you build yourself. The partitions are already up, and Lisa has moved on to assembling the cabinets. Furnishing the container is probably overdoing it, but Robert Routier’s daughter won’t settle for plastic crates stacked on shelves made of two-by-fours.

  The project is a little behind schedule, but this is not entirely due to familial tendencies. The fact is, Lisa had to revise her plans to take into account certain unforeseen properties of containers.

  —

  It all started when Lisa noticed that some studs were slightly twisted. The wood warped in the damp heat of the workshop. In itself, this was in no way surprising. Everything in the universe warps and changes: wood bends and twists, concrete buckles, plastic cracks and sags, bones grow porous and muscles stiffen, polymers decompose, steel rusts—come to think of it, Lisa wondered, wasn’t the container itself apt to crumple? The heat and cold aren’t likely to cause significant fluctuations, but what about the handling?

  Two minutes on Google was all it took for her to learn about the mysterious and terrifying deflection factor.

  The attachment points of intermodal containers are located at the corners, and when the cranes take hold of the big boxes—the forty-footers in particular—they sag in the middle somewhat and undergo all kinds of torsion of varying degrees of severity. Lisa hadn’t considered this. She had designed the passenger compartment as one long unit, like a tree house. If the container twisted even a little, the whole thing could collapse.

  Lisa saw herself again at the age of eight, perched on a trestle, watching her father assemble a kitchen cabinet with dowels and a wooden mallet.

  “Why don’t you use glue? Wouldn’t it be faster?”

  “To allow the cabinet to breathe.”

  “Cabinets breathe?”

  “Cabinets breathe, the walls breathe…the whole house breathes. When you put a piece of wood under the microscope, it looks like a sponge. It’s full of air cells.”

  Dowel. Three strokes of the mallet.

  “When the wood absorbs humidity, it changes shape, and size. In summer, when the air is warm and damp, houses expand. In winter, they shrink. Like a lung. It breathes in then breathes out.”

  Lisa was a big girl now; she was the one wielding the tools and drawing the plans, and she had to ensure that her container could breathe.

  She immediately sat down at her computer and modified plans D, E and F; the different sections of the passenger compartment would be independent, separated by expansion joints, and all the parts would be assembled à la Robert Routier: no screws or glue, but wooden dowels, which would allow the parts to give. (The new plans were immediately sent to Éric, for the archives.)

  —

  Lisa positions the plank. The tenons are a little wide and she has to work them into place. Once the piece is properly fitted together, she tests the four corners of the cabinet with a square. She drills the holes and inserts the dowels. Each dowel gets five strokes of the mallet. It’s solid.

  Just as she drives home the last dowel, Lisa realizes she is using the very mallet her father used twelve years earlier when he explained to her that houses breathe. She wipes
her eyes with the back of her sleeve. Damned sawdust.

  At midnight, her computer bleeps. Video call from Copenhagen. Éric obviously still has some time to spare between programming blitzes, as he has solved the enigma of the spider found in the refrigeration unit: it’s a Nephila clavipes.

  “Poisonous?”

  “It would seem so.”

  “And what if it laid eggs somewhere before dying?”

  “Vacuum extra carefully.”

  “Already have.”

  “Then there’s nothing to worry about. But wait, it gets better. Do you know where Nephila clavipes is found? In banana shipments. I was intrigued, so I did some research on the container. Interested?”

  “I’m listening.”

  He flips through a bunch of papers, off-camera. “Let’s see, now. It was assembled in mainland China by the AC Teng company and registered with the International Container Bureau on March 19, 1997 by A.P. Møller—Maersk Gruppen. It travelled between Central America and the east coast of the US, Honduras, Venezuela, Guatemala…”

  Micro-pause while he sips his coffee.

  “It sat idle for about ten months at the Newark terminal during the financial crisis. After that, it shuttled between Guayaquil and St. Petersburg, with a dozen ports of call throughout the Caribbean and Western Europe.”

  “Guayaquil?”

  “Ecuador.”

  “There’s a shipping service between Ecuador and Russia?”

  “Ecubex. Seven Class N container ships that do the round trip in forty-nine days. Weekly sailings. Total capacity, ten thousand containers like yours.”

  Lisa tries to imagine the volume represented by ten thousand containers stacked one atop the other, linked end to end, piled sky-high. You could fit St. Peter’s Basilica in there and still have some room left over for a few hands of bananas. A knock-down St. Peter’s, with the parts spread out between Guayaquil and Russia.

  Éric continues to rummage through his papers. “It stayed with Ecubex for five or six months before being decommissioned last January, when Maersk modernized its stock. The old boxes were replaced by controlled-atmosphere StarCare models. Yours was part of a batch put up for sale by a Russian wholesaler and bought by a Ukrainian Canadian who went bankrupt. The containers were resold all over the map.”

  “Where did you get this information?”

  “I have my sources.”

  Lisa yawns. She’s had a long day and it’s time for bed.

  “Already?”

  “It’s midnight here. Was there something else you wanted to tell me?”

  “Yes, actually. I have a confession to make.”

  “A confession?”

  “I’ve been trying to figure out how to say it for weeks.”

  Lisa wavers between curiosity and apprehension. She sits back to get comfortable.

  “I’m listening.”

  “It’s about the balloon.”

  “Which balloon?”

  “The balloon we launched into the stratosphere.”

  “Oh, yeah, I remember you had a funny expression when I sent you the pictures.”

  “I had a funny expression?”

  “The same one you have now.”

  Éric pauses as if to think about the expression he’s wearing. He takes a long sip of coffee. “Right. Do you remember when we waited for the GPS to send us its coordinates?”

  “Yeah. The three longest weeks of my adolescence. We wondered if the GPS was to blame or the batteries.”

  “It was neither.”

  “Oh?”

  “The GPS beacon was working fine. I was the one who changed the phone number at the last moment.”

  Silence.

  “Which number did you enter?”

  “No idea. I punched in a random number. It didn’t matter.”

  More silence, but longer, interspersed with distortions from the software, crunching and encoding tiny background noises. Lisa finally waves it off; she understands. There’s nothing more to say.

  After they sign off, Lisa gets up and, among the boxes of screws and rivets, fishes out the pill bottle with the dead spider. She takes a marker and writes Nephila clavipes on the cap in neat cursive script.

  MORNING RUSH HOUR ON THE Orange Line, and the density level is nearing five humans per square metre.

  Compressed into a corner of the metro car, Jay focuses on her reading. She spent the night reading about stowaways and was unable to sleep, one thing having no doubt led to the other.

  Her first intuition was borne out: media coverage over the years doesn’t rise just because of the growing number of stowaways but also because of the cultural ubiquity of containers. Containers gradually become more commonplace, and this acts as a filter; with the passage of time, the media increasingly regard only the most spectacular cases as newsworthy: Chinese dead of hypothermia, asphyxiated Moroccans, dehydrated Filipinos, Guineans thrown overboard by the crew, catatonic Guatemalans crammed pell-mell amid clothes, dead bodies and garbage. And the Ivorians poisoned by the rodent control products sprayed between the containers. The Colombians whose flashlights went out one after the other and who had to live for ten days in absolute darkness. The Dominicans who, having bored a tiny hole in the side of the container, literally killed each other for a breath of air. The young Americans roasted alive in an overheated container. Jay tried to take a peek at the appended photos, but she quickly gave up. She doesn’t have the stomach for it.

  The train stops at Bonaventure station. Three people get out, five get in. The car smells of bacon and deodorant.

  Jay realizes there is one question to which Laura’s press clippings binder has no answer: how many stowaways make it to their destination alive and undetected?

  Which gets her thinking again about the young Élisabeth Routier-Savoie.

  Everyone is trying to locate Papa Zulu—the RCMP, the CIA, Homeland Security, CISC, not to mention the database administrators of all the ports of Southeast Asia—but no one actually knows what the object of this vast hunt really is. Only Éric Le Blanc, in his Copenhagen bunker, and Jay, in a metro car beneath downtown Montreal, know the truth: a young woman is hiding aboard Papa Zulu.

  Lucien-L’Allier station. A man is determined to get on with a double baby stroller. The interior pressure climbs to nearly 30 psi. Jay feels her eardrums are about to burst. There are sure to be some strokes when the doors open. She resigns herself to closing her notebook—anyway, it’s just two more stations. She twists her body and dips her hand into her coat pocket in the hope of discovering a scrap of paper that might serve as a bookmark. She fishes out the receipt from the Colmado Real dépanneur: a medium coffee and a box of Whippets for the modest sum of $42.12.

  Jay would jump if she had enough room. Whippets at $39.90?! Colmado Real has blown a fuse. Forty dollars a box works out to $1.25 a bite. At that price, they should have been hand-painted by Jackson Pollock.

  She shakes her head in disbelief. Not even a scammer would dare to jack prices up that much. It must have been a mistake. She tries to reconstruct the chain of events. The box was supposed to cost $3.99, but someone must have entered the wrong price in the inventory. Zero is next to 9. The person had large fingers. The mistake went unnoticed and the item ended up with two prices: $3.99 on the shelf and $39.90 in the database. The cashier was half asleep and swiped the bar code without even glancing at the screen; come to think of it, she didn’t say the total amount out loud. To top off this long series of blunders, Jay signed the credit card receipt without paying much attention. A typical blend of inattentiveness, human error and faith in the system.

  Horacio always liked to say that love and faith are blind, but at least love serves a purpose.

  Absorbed by this problem, Jay almost misses her stop. She alights from the car at the very last moment, the notebook pressed against her chest, and drops the receipt in the rush. ¡Adiós! Real. She mutters as she ascends the hill to C Division. After all those rented cars, Jay is starting to go soft. The process of a
ging happens one capitulation at a time.

  The only one at his station is Mahesh, who leans toward his screen, engrossed in a manual for an intermodal management system. The cross-section of a container ship shows the various boxes nested in their cells like Lego blocks. He turns toward Jay.

  “Ah, finally!”

  “You wanted to see me?”

  “I’d like your opinion.”

  Caught off guard, Jay freezes. In the seven years they have shared this space, she does not recall a single instance of Mahesh asking for her opinion, except perhaps on the freshness of the buns in the cafeteria.

  “My opinion?”

  “I think I’ve discovered the secret of Papa Zulu.”

  THE SUN IS SETTING OVER Montreal, and in three hours summer will be officially over.

  Lisa has started the camouflage operation: having covered the tools and the floor with plastic tarps, she sealed the openings of the container, slipped into a coverall, duct-taped her wrists and ankles, pulled on a pair of rubber gloves, put on goggles and a dust mask, and set to work on the container with a belt sander. The old paint is tenacious, and the belt needs to be changed every five minutes, but that’s not a problem—Lisa allotted a specific budget item to sandpaper, and as she grinds away, the white gradually disintegrates, the alphanumerical codes disappear, the big seven-pointed star fades. An immaculate dust rises into the air, like the pulverized memory of the container. The industrial brown of anonymous containers peeps out here and there on the steel.

  Then, after washing the sides and letting the dust settle, Lisa sprays on two coats of paint.

  As she sweeps a fine mist of titanium white over the steel, she wonders if it might be appropriate to name this, um…vehicle? After all, sailors give names to their boats. And truckers, their trucks. Lindbergh, his Spirit of St. Louis. The aerospace industry christens its orbiters, probes and satellites. So why not this container? She toys with various names—Stratos, Houdini, Seventh Continent, Lego—but none of them really fit. Containers aren’t given names, but numbers.