Transmission

by Hari Kunzru

  It could not last long now. How many hours of freedom did he have?

  When the bus arrived in San Diego, it was getting dark. He knew from films like Inspector 2000 and Run Arundhati Run that speed is of the essence for a fugitive, but something fatalistic had kicked in, some religious aspect of his nature which whispered that whatever would be would be, that his chances were so small he might as well take the opportunity to sleep for an hour or two before he faced the future.

  He walked away from the bus-station as quickly as he could, putting two or three blocks between himself and the bustle before turning randomly on to a side street with a convenience store on the corner. He had a momentary glimpse of the interior, the Sikh proprietor bagging up groceries for a customer. Behind him on the wall was a calendar and an American flag and a garlanded portrait of Guru Nanak. In that store and the apartment above it would be rice and paan parag and tapes of Lata Mangeshkar and paper-wrapped cones of incense and steel dishes and Star TV on cable and pairs of worn leather chappals and soaking chickpeas and a family talking a language close to his own, words to go with the faraway smells of ghee and dust and petrol and cooking fires. His heart felt empty, a deflated paper bag.

  There was a motel at the end of the block, its tall sign flashing intermittently. Lucky’s Motor Lodge: Color Cable TV Direct Dial Phone Aircon Parking Guests Only. A bored Chinese woman took his money and gave him a lecture in the same unpunctuated monotone as the sign, check-out at noon ice-machine under stairs you break you pay no parties. The room smelled of cigarette smoke and pine disinfectant. He went to the bathroom and broke the heat-sealed wrapper on a plastic cup, filled it with water. It tasted terrible. He considered going back to the convenience store to buy a soda, but suddenly felt so tired it was all he could do to lay himself down on the padded nylon bedspread and close his eyes.

  He tried to picture the border, but could see it only as an abstraction, a thick black line across the earth.

  When he woke he was disoriented but not scared. At least not at first. The distant traffic noise was soothing and the sound of a TV filtering through the thin partition behind his head was comfortingly familiar, reminding him of his studio at Berry Acres. He sank back against the pillow. Then there was a loud crash outside his door. Instantly he sat upright, every muscle tensed in expectation of the Kevlar-armoured stormtroopers about to burst in. But the crash was followed by laughter, two women holding a joky argument as they kneeled down on the walkway to pick up whatever they had dropped.

  The truth of his situation returned, dropping down over him like a bell-jar. He swung his legs on to the floor and rubbed his eyes. Having no idea of the time, he took a peek through the curtains. The sky above the roofline of the motel court was grey and overcast. Dawn or dusk. It didn’t really seem to matter which.

  Struck by a sudden urgency, he pulled his laptop from his bag and dug around among socks and undershorts for a little golf-ball camera whose flex he untangled with shaking fingers. He plugged it in and, while he waited for the computer to boot up, placed an upturned waste-paper basket on the bedside table and set the camera on top of it, angling it to capture his image as he sat in a chair in the corner. It was time to explain himself, to face the public.

  An hour later he left the motel, a handwritten map in his hand giving directions to a gamer’s café called Boba Fett’s, which looked, according to the Yellow Pages, like the nearest place with a fast public internet connection. Going out on to the street was risky, but the files he had created were large; from the motel they would take too long to upload. It was, he had discovered, early evening. A lurid petrochemical sunset was subsiding into darkness. The air was still warm, and, as he followed his map through the grid of downtown streets, bass lines pulsed out of open car windows and knots of people stood on corners. Happy, relaxed people. Citizens. Consumers. He hurried past.

  Outside Boba Fett’s it was all about the sportswear. Also the gold chains, the steroid cream and the hair gel. A huge group of teenage boys were clustered around a double line of cars, smoking cigarettes and conducting arguments in a variety of South-East Asian languages. They kneeled down to check out wheel rims, played with pagers and cellphones, opened doors and trunks to display throbbing sound systems, struck gangsta poses and checked out Arjun suspiciously. They were blocking the sidewalk, and, as he shouldered through them to get to the café, he was stared at, coldly appraised. He realized nervously that he had blundered on to well-marked territory.

  As he opened the door, wistful memories of Aamir and Gabbar Singh’s Internet Shack were blown away. He was hit by a wall of electronic sound, a terrifying amalgam of soundtrack music, gunfire and simulated v8 engines. Boys, Vietnamese and Korean for the most part, were engaged in combat with rail guns and lasers and flails and alien pulse weapons. They were decapitating one another, forcing each other off the road, razing their enemy’s cities with balls of flame and devastating his crack divisions with tactical nuclear weaponry. Some wore headphones, lost in solo trance. Others were the centre of knots of excited spectators. At the far end of the room a counter served bubble tea and snackfoods, the twenty-something manager going about his work wearing a pair of yellow foam earplugs. Apart from the board displaying drinks prices and hourly terminal rates, Boba Fett’s was undecorated, a grey cinderblock box with a silvered plate-glass front and an air-conditioning unit bolted to the back wall. Life here took place on screen.

  Arjun rented a free terminal and sat down with a beaker of chocolate-flavoured tea. On either side, kids were playing the same first-person shooter game, charging through a complex maze as they twitch-fired at one another, their screens filling with static as their avatars took hits, fading to white when they died. Arjun uploaded his home-made videos to his secret space on the NOIT server, then created an account on a free email service and used it to send messages containing the location to the people he wanted to watch them: Priti, Chris, the FBI and Leela Zahir. Not having an address for Leela, he posted to several newsgroups and discussion forums, and for good measure copied Aamir.

  so sis i don’t know where to begin

  dear federal bureau is that the correct form of address?

  chris i was going to return it but

  this is for you leela zahir as a way of saying sorry for all that has happened i have always loved you would never do anything to hurt you but you see I was desperate

  When he was finished, he took his disk and left, not looking behind him. He did not spot the pair of boys, perhaps thirteen or fourteen years old, who detached themselves from the crowd outside the café. As he headed back to the motel, they walked up the street after him, keeping their distance yet careful not to fall too far behind.

  We don’t lose.

  That was the first principle, the only one that mattered. Whether it was university entrance or getting on to the guest list, people like us don’t lose. In private, his father would have linked it to breeding or something equally dogs-and-horses sounding. In public, unless someone had given him spirits (drink made him belligerent), Mr Swift would consent to put it down to grit or manners or some other factor unique to English upper-middle-class-occasional-churchgoers resident outside London. As far as Guy was concerned, his parents’ parochialism, their belief in the virtue of moderation, their suspicion of pleasure and their obsessive thrift were all so much self-denying rubbish. As if holidaying in Devon and driving a battered Rover made them morally superior! Luckily all the horrible fifties austerity which had produced them, all that dullness still hanging around when he was growing up, had been wiped away. There was money now. Money and balsamic vinegar and Design. Yet despite his subsitution of the future for the past, long boom for stiff upper lip, he still secretly agreed with that basic handed-down premise: We are better than other people. We don’t lose.

  Guy’s ‘we’ was different from his father’s, though it would be hard to specify who other than himself was included. He had been through a phase of reading popular-science paperbacks and
thought of his success as the outcome of a process of natural selection. We were on top because we were better adapted to the environment of the global city. We took chances and made opportunities for ourselves. We knew how to network, how to manipulate the flows of money and information to produce Results.

  Sitting in the plane on the way back from Dubai, he found strength and comfort in this idea. His meal untouched on its tray in front of him, he fidgeted and thought about adversity. So what if he was looking financial ruin in the face? So what if Gabriella might be about to leave him? It was just a question of digging deeper, finding his hidden reserves. When the stewardess took away his tray, he opened up his laptop and began to type, pressing down keys with slow rigid forefingers. This was what you did when things went wrong. You pushed harder. It was another of his father’s traits. If the world is not doing what we want, we have to bend it to our will. Ignoring the tiny figures drifting around on the armrest TV, he typed a new mission statement, a plan of action for his next twenty-four hours. He worked and reworked it until it had been whittled down first to short paragraphs, then sentences, then bullet-pointed phrases and finally four single words. Extreme concision. Total summary:

  Jamal

  Gift

  Office

  Eurobastard

  JGOE. Jay-go. He started putting it into operation as soon as he landed at Heathrow.

  Jamal was an elegant young man who, growing up on the Stonebridge Park Estate in Harlesden, started out in life with fewer options than Guy when it came to demonstrating fitness for survival in a global city. The decision to sell powder rather than rock brought him into contact with an upmarket clientele, and this access, combined with his unthreatening manner and natural business acumen, had allowed him to develop a thriving retail operation catering to the media, advertising, music industry and legal sectors. These days Jamal lived in a windswept gated development in the Docklands, wore Prada and Armani and drove a silver Audi TT. Guy took a taxi from the airport and kept it waiting while he made a short trip up to Jamal’s place, where he found him relaxing with a few friends around a coffee table on which was scattered perhaps £10,000 in cash. After concluding his transaction and saying goodbye to Jamal’s friends (most of whom appeared to be Austrian aircrew), Guy told the driver to take him home.

  The cabby droned on about the power cut, traffic jams, Leela Zahir and Chelsea Football Club, folding in his own theories about cybercrime and ‘the al-Qaidas’. Guy leaned forward and closed the glass partition. As usual the sight of the sun glinting on In Vitro’s curved glass façade was hopeful and affirming. He paid off the cab, acknowledged the salute of the moon-faced Eastern European concierge, made his way across the lobby into the lift and after a short vertical interlude (during which he imagined himself travelling all the way up to the still-untenanted penthouse at the top of the building) strode into his flat, ready to get to work. After a few minutes in the kitchen with Jamal’s coke, he felt he had rediscovered the positive self-image drained away by the previous few days. Once again he had the will to win.

  Gift. It had to be impressive. Impressive was the only way. Subconsciously Guy tended to think of Gabriella as less a partner than a situation to be managed. Often when he was with her he felt like a pilot steering a ship through a narrow channel, or a policeman facing an angry sports crowd. Though he found her emotions opaque, he had gradually turned that into a virtue, imagining her privately as ‘elemental’ or ‘inscrutable’, words with an erotic ring. He once tried to explain this to her, drunkenly kissing her and telling her she was ‘kind of Japanese’. Instead of confirming it, she gave him one of her looks. Management tools which worked on Gabriella were hard to come by. Pleading, for example, was not wise. Temporarily lacking imagination (though surging with confidence), he reverted to his default setting, which was to throw money at the problem. Money, he reasoned, was something she understood. If she was thinking of breaking up with him, perhaps a display of economic confidence stood a chance of changing her mind.

  He paced up and down thinking of the possibilities, and when he found he was concentrating on the pacing rather than the thinking, went to the computer for inspiration and typed ‘expensive gift’ into a search engine. After a period examining Dom Pérignon presentation baskets, mother-of-pearl inlaid humidors, monogrammed desk sets and space vacation packages, he pushed the mouse away in disgust. None of it seemed appropriate. One company would deliver a top-of-the-range jet ski to her door. Interesting. But wrong. He returned to the kitchen, did another line, drank some mineral water, switched on MTV.

  There it was. Bling bling. Shaking it in his face.

  And so to Bond Street. More taxis. Sometimes, he mused, life was just a string of taxis. Hop out of one and into another, like a sequence from a Beatles movie. Maybe if there were four Guys, all identical, getting into a taxi one after the other, it would look cool, visually. As he paid the driver, he wondered whether he should make a note of this idea. He was feeling creative today. It would be a shame to lose anything.

  Bond Street sounded like the coming of autumn, the susurrus of shopping bags filling the air as expensively remodelled matrons made their way between boutiques with terrifying speed and efficiency, like customs dogs searching a cargo hold. Guy spotted a young couple hesitating outside one retail bunker, intimidated by its whiteness, the three pairs of shoes on display in the window. They took a step forward, then bustled away as if signalling to the world that they had never really been tempted to go inside.

  At the entrance to the jeweller’s stood a uniformed doorman wearing an earpiece. Guy focused (it was important to retain focus) and dived past him into the theatrical gloom of the shop. Narrow spotlights illuminated glass-covered trays of gems, leaving their human attendants veiled in mystic darkness.

  ‘Impressive,’ he affirmed, from between clenched teeth.

  The staff seemed taken aback by the forcefulness of his purchasing style. A young assistant in a cheongsam showed him some loose stones. He kept repeating impressive to her, until she vanished and the manager took over. Together they looked at diamond necklaces and bracelets and studs. There was a great deal of technical detail to do with weights and settings. Guy tried to get the manager to dispense with this. Couldn’t the man see he was pressed for time?

  The manager obviously conceptualized his role as a cross between door picker and guardian of a very exclusive religious shrine. This, he intoned in a High Church voice, is a very important decision. Guy raised his eyes to the ceiling. Too right it was important. The bitch was going to leave him if it didn’t work. Impressive, he reminded him, exasperated. Really impressive. Dripping disapproval, the manager shot his cuffs, suggesting that perhaps Guy would like to give the matter some thought. It was, after all, a major purchase. With poorly concealed impatience, Guy explained that no one had a clearer idea of what was at stake than him.

  It was like wading through treacle, but eventually he left with what he wanted, a ruinously expensive collar that maxed out his credit card and nestled in a tiny leather case in his jacket pocket. The manager appeared reluctant to let the item go. Guy almost had to snatch it out of his hands.

  Office. He entered the Tomorrow* building feeling deflated. The battle for the collar had drained him, and he was apprehensive that fresh troubles might be waiting at work. People would want to know about Dubai. There was a risk of negatively impacting morale. Putting on his best CEO face (breezy, competent), he accelerated purposefully as he walked into reception, greeting the girl at front desk with a big smile.

  ‘Hi, Nicky. Holding the fort OK?’

  ‘Charlotte.’

  ‘Are you new?’

  ‘No. You have messages.’

  ‘Later.’ He held up a hand and turned towards the stairs. Unfortunately he had been spotted. People were already converging on him with documents and questioning expressions. For all his study of management theory, Guy had never quite got the hang of delegation. Since Tomorrow* was supposed (according to its m
ission statement) to be a ‘seamless extension of his personal creativity’, he felt justified in taking an intuitive approach to the day-to-day running of the company. His staff were used to meetings where goals were suddenly redefined, new work magically created, and old work made irrelevant. As a result, they tended to check with him at least twice before embarking on anything time-consuming. He had not been in touch since he left for the Gulf. There was a backlog.

  Brushing off the questioners, he locked himself in his creative space and did some more coke. His life-work balance restored, he called in Kika and told her to organize a Village Council meeting for later in the afternoon. The whole office. Attendance mandatory.

  ‘Does that mean you’ve got some good news?’ Kika asked.

  ‘Have you done something to your hair?’

  ‘Jesus, Guy The pitch. Did we get the work?’

  ‘It wasn’t right for us. They weren’t ready for what we were offering. You’ve done a kind of – what have you done to it?’

  ‘Oh, hell.’ She looked crestfallen.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said brightly, ‘it’s under control.’ He took the collar out of his pocket. ‘Could you get this couriered to Gabriella? She’s in Scotland. I’ll forward you a mail with the address.’

  Kika looked at the name of the firm engraved on the box.

  ‘Just this?’

  ‘Yes. And it has to get there ASAP. By tonight if at all possible. Assuming their service isn’t fucked, like everything else.’