by Hari Kunzru
There was a silence. Guy tried to fill it.
‘You have to go under the surface and think about why people play golf. Golf means freedom. Golf means, um, style. The way Tomorrow* sees it, the Al-Rahman “faithful” should become the Al-Rahman “rangers”. Rangers, that’s our heading, right? For being able to get out there and do your thing. Anyhow – the basic thrust of our plan is to take Al-Rahman beyond golf and into the realm of total leisure experience. That way your employees, golfers or not, will have feelings of greater identification and inclusivity about the Al-Rahman brand. Your consumers too.’
Mr Al-Rahman looked at Guy, then called Shahid aside and whispered something in his ear. Shahid nodded and whispered something to Abdullah, who made a phone call.
‘Mr Swift,’ said Al-Rahman, shaking Guy’s hand, ‘I am very grateful to you for taking the trouble to come out here and share with us the benefit of your experience.’
‘Thanks very much. No problem. I just hope that later on I can show you the creative work we’ve done.’
That won’t be necessary,’ said Shahid. Al-Rahman walked away and started to settle himself in his cart.
Guy opened his mouth, and closed it again. Al-Rahman steered the cart in a wide arc, drawing up next to Guy. Shahid put his bag of clubs in the back and got in beside his boss. Al-Rahman, for the first time during the meeting, removed his thick black sunglasses to reveal a pair of weary heavy-lidded eyes.
‘Mr Swift,’ he said, ‘the green fees on this course are the highest in the Middle East. We have a driving range which can accommodate up to 200 people at once. We have a swing-analysis lab which utilizes software developed by our own experts. It is a question of respect, Mr Swift. I like to do business with people who respect the things I do. You, I suppose, respect other things, such as your circles and maps. So I say to you, go and do business with men who like circles and maps. In the meantime please accept the hospitality of the beach resort. Abdullah will be pleased to dine with you and perhaps share with you the appreciation of some of our world-famous nightlife. I wish you a safe flight home.’
With that, he drove away.
Sometimes there is fear ahead of the curve. Sometimes in a hotel bathroom you may visualize an immense white-capped wave bearing down on you. Then there is nothing for it but the minibar, the crawl towards the red dot of the television, the dissected room-service tray silhouetted by the open refrigerator door. Guy poured vodka miniatures over ice and sat on the end of the bed, trying to work out what to do. He was fucked. That was all there was to it. Yves had phoned, asking for confirmation that Al-Rahman and PEBA were the only two pitches they were working on. ‘I really hope they happen for you,’ he had said. That was clear enough.
Next door there was a party. Through the wall he could hear music and the sound of laughter. There were people out on the balcony. He took his drink to the window and furtively looked out. They were women, five, maybe six of them, all beautiful; European and Asian women in evening dresses. Thigh and cleavage. High heels. A short middle-aged man was among them, a cellphone in one hand, the other kneading the breast of a tall blonde in a silver sheath dress. She looked down at him indulgently. The others seemed either not to notice or not to care. The man’s white dress shirt was unbuttoned almost to the waist, showing a brown expanse of hairy chest and belly. As Guy watched, he took the blonde’s wrist and pulled her inside.
The vodka ran out and he started on the gin. A repetitive bass thud came through the wall, like an amplified racing heart. His life appeared to him as a web or a suspension bridge, each tensed element related to the next. Remove Tomorrow* and what would be left? Downstairs the lobby opened out on to an atrium which reached a giddy twenty storeys up towards the little box in which he sat, finishing the gin and moving on to the whisky. A structure wrapped around a vast emptiness. It all seemed part of the same improbable joke, the atrium, the rows of balconies, the restaurants; 2,000 rooms full of people like himself breathing freeze-dried artificial air and watching cubes of desalinated water melt in their glasses. And beneath their feet, somewhere under the foundations, the red shifting desert.
The bass line thudded. And another sound, high pitched and intermittent. A human sound. Either sex or pain.
He needed to speak to Gabriella. He could tell her how things were, how important she was now everything else was going to hell. Maybe she would be kind. It was a risk letting her hear him like this, but then again she was his girlfriend. She was supposed to make things better. He dialled her number on the hotel phone, drunk enough not to worry about the cost. It diverted to voice-mail, so he tried international directory inquiries, which was down. Finally he got the concierge to look up the number of her hotel and patch him through.
A Scottish-accented voice confirmed that Miss Caro was in 106.
The phone rang eight times. Just as he was about to give up, she answered. Her hello was breathy, distracted. Mixed in with it was some artefact of the telephone system, a strange electronic rushing noise. It sounded like splintering information, communication space.
‘Hello? Hello?’
‘Yes?’
‘Gaby it’s me.’
‘Oh, God. Guy.’
The voice at the other end was muffled, and for a moment he was left alone with the interstellar howl. He had an idea she had placed a hand over the receiver.
‘Gaby. Hello?’
‘Guy – I’m –’
‘Is this not a good time?’
‘No. No. Yes, of course it is. What do you mean?’ She sounded agitated. Gaby was usually so calm. ‘I thought you were in Dubai.’
‘I am, sweetie. I just wanted to hear your voice.’
‘Why are you calling? I mean, it’s very late, you know.’
‘Not that late, surely. I looked. It’s ten o’clock where you are.’
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Right.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘There’s nothing wrong. Christ, Guy, why are you always like this? What’s wrong. Nothing’s wrong, OK?’
The volume of the electronic interference increased. Part of it detached to become a feedback whine, a tone rising and falling through the shards of her voice.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello?’
‘Gaby, I just wanted to talk to you. Things aren’t so good here.’ There was no response. ‘Gaby? Hello?’
‘I hope you didn’t call just to talk to me about your work. Because, you know, I’m just not going to be able to do that right now. I have my own world, Guy. I’m working here too, remember?’
The rushing reached a crescendo and fell away again. Through the bedroom wall the boom of the party seemed to grow louder. Weirdly the party sounds seemed to be coming out of the receiver as well. He felt he could not be sure of the source of anything he was hearing. Then the muffling descended, but too late to block out the sound of a man’s voice. Was someone there with her?
‘Who is that, Gaby?’
Silence.
‘Gaby? Gaby, can you hear me?’
‘Guy, I can’t talk now. We need to talk, but this is not the right time, OK?’
A little stone formed in the pit of his stomach. ‘Gaby? What are you talking about?’
‘I can’t do this now. Not over the phone.’
‘What’s wrong? What do you mean not over the phone?’
‘Call me when you get back. Call me when you get to the airport.’
‘Gaby? Hello?’
Abruptly the noise ceased.
The first Chris knew of it was when the cops phoned. It was very early in the morning and the formal tone of the voice freaked her out. ‘Are you Ms Christine Rebecca Schnorr?’ Chris never dealt well with authority, especially on a hangover. Nic was sacked out beside her in the bed, one arm thrown over her chest. She pushed it off and sat up, rubbing her face.
‘Yes, this is she.’
‘This is Deputy Janine Foster, calling from Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office. Are you the owner of a whit
e Honda Civic licence plate 141-JPC?’
‘Yeah. I mean yes, I am.’
‘Are you aware of the location of your vehicle?’
‘Pardon me?’
‘Are you aware of the location of your vehicle at this time?’
‘Far as I know it’s parked outside.’
‘I see. When did you last utilize the vehicle?’
‘Yesterday evening. I got in around eleven.’
‘So you say you drove the vehicle home around eleven.’
‘Uh, yes. What’s this regarding?’
Nic had woken up and was propped on one elbow, listening groggily as the cop told her what had happened. It seemed that some time after they got back from the Brewhouse, somebody stole her car from the driveway, drove it north on I-5 and then just before four in the morning ran it off an exit ramp near a place called Smokey Point, about twenty-five miles away. A tree branch had gone through the radiator and it wasn’t drivable, but apart from a few dents and a smashed windshield, it was OK. Whoever did it must have walked away, but it looked as if they had been hurt in the crash, since the highway patrol had found blood on the dash and the upholstery.
‘How much blood?’ asked Chris. ‘Like, a lot?’ A new radiator and windshield would probably already come to more than the battered twelve-year-old Honda was worth. With mystery car-thief bloodstains thrown in, she was not entirely sure she wanted the old rice-cooker back. She promised the cop that she’d call later to arrange for the car to be picked up and went into the kitchen to make coffee. Two minutes later she was back.
‘Nic, where did I put the car keys last night?’
‘What? I don’t know. Where you usually put them?’
‘In the bowl. I always put them in the bowl. But did you actually see me put them there last night?’
‘Come on, Chris. How should I remember?’
‘Nic.’
‘I don’t know, Chris. Sorry.’
‘Well, they’re not there now.’
Nic looked at her sceptically Then he swung his legs out of bed and started to look for the keys. The two of them hunted for over an hour. Chris had to call a taxi to get to work, and she left him still opening cabinets and pulling out appliances to squint behind them. He emailed her mid morning. The keys were definitely gone. There was only one possible explanation: whoever stole the car had come into their house and taken them. The thought made Chris feel sick. Someone creeping around their kitchen while she was asleep upstairs. She and Nic had gotten out of the habit of locking the door. It was a safe neighbourhood. Nothing ever happened. She left a message for Deputy Foster, and that night slept with her softball bat by the bed. The next morning she called a salvage yard about the car, and sat all day at her desk imagining the same thing over and over again, the unknown person coming up the steps, opening the screen door, slipping into the darkened house… Beyond the basic spookiness of it, there was something uncanny about the intrusion, something just beyond her comprehension. It came into focus only on the third morning, when her boss at Virugenix called her into a meeting and she found to her astonishment that the FBI was there to interview her.
‘What is the nature of your relationship with Arjun Mehta?’
The agent looked blandly over the desk, successfully performing that cop trick of inducing feelings of guilt without doing anything obvious with his face or eyes. He had a bushy brown cop moustache, square metal-framed glasses, and the kind of chunky bracelet watch which works eight miles under water and tells you the time on Venus. He probably divided his leisure time between mending his boat and looking at coprophiliac pictures of cheerleaders.
‘He’s a friend.’
‘What kind of friend?’
‘You know, like a friend? You have those, right?’
‘I don’t appreciate your attitude, Miss Schnorr. I say again, what kind of friend? Did you, for example, go on dates with Mr Mehta?’
‘No. Well, yes. We went to the movies. Mostly I gave him driving lessons.’
‘In your white Honda Civic.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Did you ever allow him to drive the vehicle when you weren’t present?’
‘No.’
‘Did he often visit at the house you share with your – your boyfriend, Nicolai Peet – Pit –’
‘Petkanov.’
‘Nicolai Petkanov.’
‘Once or twice.’
‘Did you on any of these occasions have sexual intercourse with Arjun Mehta?’
‘What? What kind of question is that? Look, Dragnet, that is none of your damn business.’
‘I’ll thank you not to use profanity, Miss Schnorr.’
‘Profanity? Christ, where did you grow up? Sesame Street?’
‘Or to take the Lord’s name in vain. And as an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation it is entirely my business. Did you or did you not have sexual intercourse with Arjun Mehta?’
‘No.’
‘Are you sure about that?’
‘I said so, didn’t I?’
‘Did you or Mr Petkanov conspire with Mr Mehta to intentionally damage information systems by writing and spreading a computer virus?’
‘What?’
The worst of it was how it looked. As she realized what they were inching towards, Chris started to feel faint. At the beginning of the interview she had experienced equal parts confidence and irritation, angry at the way her boss had sprung this ‘informal chat’ on her but satisfied that whatever the Bureau wanted, she had done nothing wrong. Now she was not so sure. It seemed Arjun had failed to appear for work since the day her car went missing. Someone from the Virugenix personnel department had gone over to his apartment to talk to him about vacating it, and discovered the door unlocked and most of his computer equipment smashed up. The police were called and initially recorded him as a missing person. After they searched the place they changed their minds. Now they were treating him as a fugitive.
The problem was Nic. Nowadays he was just another engineer, setting up and maintaining data-storage systems, but once upon a time, back in the prehistoric days of computing before the worldwide web and dotcoms and all the rest of it, he had been a very bad Eastern bloc boy indeed. As a high-school student in Bulgaria he had learned to use a machine called a Pravetz 82, mass produced by the state computer company from shamelessly reverse-engineered Apple IIe components. He and his friends from the National Mathematics High School in Sofia had fooled around, doing a lot of stuff they weren’t supposed to, and when his parents brought him to the US he had carried on, eventually earning himself a minor place in American criminal history as one of the first kids to be prosecuted for breaking into computer systems. That was all a long time ago, but you could see the way these people’s minds were working. Whatever Arjun had been cooking up in his apartment, they thought she and Nic had had a hand in it.
‘Miss Schnorr, your car wasn’t stolen at all, was it? You gave it to Mehta so he could escape justice.’
‘That’s not true. If it was Arjun who took the car, he did it without my knowledge. And besides, Nic has never even met him.’
‘We’ll find that out from Mr Petkanov. Now, to return to these so-called driving lessons…’
His head ached and he felt very tired. Sometimes he thought he would vomit. He was not sure how long he had been walking. He just knew it was important to go on.
Headlights came screaming up the highway, making him squint and throw up a hand to shield his eyes. Once a car slowed down, but the driver took a look at him and changed his mind about stopping. He had a brief vision of the man’s face, the mouth a black O of shock. The car spat gravel, sped away.
The sticky stuff was blood.
His mouth was dry The bag was heavy. He could not remember what was in it, could not to be honest remember why he was dragging it down the gritty margin of this road. They were coming for him. They were coming for him and he had to get home. Where home was he could not have said precisely. Up ahead somewhere
. At the end of the road.
For a while he lay in a drainage ditch and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the sky was light and the invisible night-time world had retreated behind parched yellow grass and a line of scrubby conifers. He tried to sit up and felt as if his head would crack. He was sitting in a litter of food wrappers and beer cans. His face was caked with dried blood.
He carried on.
Things came back. The car, the slow-motion lurch off the curve. Canada had been the point of it. Leave the country before they found out. The taxi had dropped him on the corner, and he had stood and listened to the sounds of the suburban night, trying to think of reasons not to follow through with his plan. What alternative did he have? There was nothing left for him in America. Every day he stayed would bring the pursuers closer, and if they found him they would never let him go.
He had thought about leaving her a note. Sorry. So sorry. Another in his list of apologies. Then he decided it would be better to write to her from Canada. He imagined himself sitting at a table outside a log cabin, describing the parking lot where he had left the little Honda, nicely washed and valeted, maybe with a present in the glove compartment. Flowers would perish, Perhaps chocolates. With a card. On the map it had looked like a short drive. A lot further than he had ever driven before and the first time he had driven at night. But possible.
dear chris there was no other way to do it the only way was by car and the only car i can drive is yours i hope you are not having too much inconvenience from this – arjunm
He had not counted on needing gas. But there it was, the needle in the red, the warning light flickering. She always forgot to fill it up. So three times lost, twenty-five miles north of the city, two narrowly avoided rear ends and one almost ex-passing motorcyclist later, he was peering nervously into the blackness, looking for a gas station. He spotted the sign too late, nearly missed the exit, tried to make the turn anyway, pulled the wheel too hard…
