by Adam Roberts
‘Yes—’
He was moving like a man in a trance, walking back towards his wife and daughter.
‘The extra money is to cover the justice,’ Dot called after him. But none of her words made sense. None of the world she represented had any bearing. He put his arm around his wife’s shoulder, as she in turn shielded Leah with her body, and, together all three, they moved back towards the iCar. Only when they reached the vehicle did George look back, like Lot’s wife. The Russian was shaking the sailor-hatted man’s hands. Here he was, the new village boss, and he was shaking the Russian’s hand. He was smiling, and half-nodding, half-shaking his head. Dot was walking away, strolling briskly towards them across the square. Job done. The sunlight, falling with its preternatural brightness from directly above, gave the scene an unreal vividness.
The prisoner closed his eyes. His wrists were tied so tightly that the fingers (George could see) were turning blue. As he closed his eyes, the new boss came over to him and tapped him on the chest. One of the henchmen, standing behind the victim’s left shoulder, drew out a gun. It all happened in a single fluid, hyperreal, continuous take; and as it happened, George – however jangled his mind might have been by the extraordinary events of the day – as it happened George understood that it was being staged specifically for his benefit.
The henchman pressed his gun against his captive’s head. With a cacophonous report the gun blew a megaphone of blood and matter out of the man’s right temple.
George shrieked at the brutality of this sound, at the hurt it inflicted upon his eardrums. Drew his head down into his shoulders. Marie and Leah flinched in unison. But the three of them did not stop, the three of them kept walking, picked up their pace. The open door of the iCar Armoured drew them; the portal into the haven of their transport; their means of escaping that place and getting home to New York, mother, father and daughter. The horrible loudness of the pistol shot had buckled the air, dented it like sheet metal. The sound had tossed a dozen screeching birds into the air. The sound bounced from the roofs of the surrounding buildings. Its din echoed, belatedly, off the slopes of the hill under which the village was located.
In the space immediately beside the victim’s head a limb of cloudy scarlet opened up. It spread into an oval. It drifted downward through the hot air.
The felled man slumped, his hands held together in front of him tight as prayer. He fell sideways, spine straight, and he hit the ground with an audible thump. The ground gave up a ghost of dust. The second henchman was stepping nimbly backwards, out of his way.
‘Inside,’ said Marie, pushing Leah into the vehicle.
George could not bring his head back round. The tableau struck him with great force: the people standing around the prone man; the tree’s drooping palm leaves; the bone-yellow ground; the grubby plaster of the walls behind. But he put his head down and inserted himself into the car, and behind him came Dot, and close behind her Indrikov. ‘It is done,’ said the Russian, in a basso profundo voice, like a preacher. Treading upon the toes of this statement came Dot’s low-toned, ‘Fuck that.’
George saw that the driver had previously pulled down his window, and was resting his chain-pistol on the ledge of it, aimed at the tree. Now he hoiked his weapon back onto his lap, revved the car and they drove straight out of the village. Air poured in through the driver’s open window, gushed hot against George’s face. ‘We’ve got her back,’ said Marie, in a clear voice, speaking perhaps to the whole cosmos. ‘We’ve got her back.’
17
The drive back to the flitter, the flight back to Tbilisi, the wait for the New York ramjet – all this took place in some new variety of time, a mode of experience George had, up to that precise moment, never encountered. It felt hallowed, a solidified, brighter version of the dull flow of moment to moment. More than that, ‘moment’ was an incompatible concept: this new time could not be chopped or shaved into slivers. It was a glowing unity, a sense of the most profound belonging, as if George – as if even George – were an essential aspect of a work of art, exactly placed according to the logic of aesthetic perfection. The idea that the world was divisible into individual atoms became, under this new dispensation, a kind of monstrous error, akin to believing that the thunder was gods rolling boulders around the palace of heaven, or that the sun only rose because humans excavated hearts from the living chests of other humans. There were, George understood, no such things as atoms. There was one atom, the fertile dot, and it flowed to the end of time and back again to the beginning in a gleamingly simple, supple, infinitely replicated motion. Out of this motion only, and not from anything grossly material, the stuff of the universe was fabricated, and this meant that there was literally no difference between George and his daughter, it meant that they were literally and actually the same real presence. Her trembling, skinny frame was the same as his corpulent body. The tears that were squeezing between her shut eyelids as she clasped her mother were the same salt that made his neurons fire and nerves thrum. And the spray of that mist of red from the broken skull of the man slain in the village was no dissolution. On the contrary, each of those myriad dots of red was a spark of the essential flame of the universe. The idea of death was impossible, because death was a discontinuity, and discontinuity was not part of the grammar of the cosmos. George had – before – felt himself to be cut off from his daughter, but this had been a misunderstanding, an error, for she and he had never been separated. He pressed his arms around her now, and around his wife, and it reaffirmed what had always been. It would have distorted his state of mind to call it happy. It was something more than that. It was a kind of holiness. In the flitter, Marie kept saying: ‘Oh how thin you are. How thin, my darling.’
‘Her stomach is small, now,’ said Indrikov.
‘You will need to have a care when reintroducing her to food,’ said Dot.
But those sorts of practicalities were so bizarre and alien to the unifying sanctity of George’s perceptions that all he could do was shake his head. He shook his head hard, as if to shed the words from his sensorium. Everything that had happened that day existed in a sort of sanctifying superposition. It was all inviolate and imperishable: the granular landscape; the trench being laboriously opened up in the compacted dust by those labouring females. The woman passing her moist sponge over the naked torso of the man, briefly glimpsed down a secret passageway into the heart of an otherwise closed-off building. The red life of the old boss spilling promiscuously into the hot air, in the village square. George’s arms around Marie, and her arms around Leah, and the three of them fitting naturally and seamlessly together,
‘There are medical experts,’ Dot was saying, ‘who know how best to handle this sort of situation.’
And the flitter banked over the yellow-brown hills, made molten on one side by the sunlight. The sprawl of outer Tbilisi was not urban mess, but the hieroglyph of some profound unity. Bulbous clouds were made of pure white light, not water vapour. The ground below was a topography of light. Superfast, he thought. Miracle engineering, and a thread running through every single distinct thing, like a strand of hair.
18
They parted from Indrikov at Tbilisi; but Dot came back with them to New York. She arranged, whilst airborne, for an immigration official to meet them at Ronald Reagan; and after that she accompanied them back to their building. By the time they were driving through the cubist canyons of the city, Leah had stopped sobbing. She was looking with wonder at her surroundings; an expression compounded of bewilderment at the rapidity of her rescue and the incipient awakening of recognitions. ‘You wait until you see Ezra,’ Marie told her. ‘You wait until you see how he has grown. Wait till you see your brother!’
Home, home, home.
For George, though, the coming back to New York was tinged with a strange, not unpleasant, sense of disenchantment. The pure state of heightened Being he had experienced in the air started to fade. The reality of day-to-day existence began to reassert itself. This w
as mournful, but also, he saw, needful. A human could no more live at that peak of metaphysical insight than they could live under the regime of a continually sustained orgasm. And the afterglow of the illumination was not unpleasant. There was nothing harsh or assonant to it. It was a gentle slide down towards the bottom of the mountain. ‘It’s not going to be the same now,’ he said to his wife, as they got out of the car. Marie, carrying Leah’s emaciated frame easily, did not reply.
Behind him, and across the road, some kids in the latest teen shockwear, genitals exposed but legs and upper body, including their heads, clad in tight cloth, ran down the sidewalk, perhaps fleeing the police, or perhaps just for the lark of it. One threw a handball at the side of a Granville Wagon as they passed it, and the sphere rebounded with a sharp crack. George ducked despite himself, and nearly stumbled, as he stepped over his own threshold. The image of a man, his life blowing away in a tomato-red cloud from the side of his head, appeared vividly before him. He saw the man flinch away from this blow, and saw him rotate his whole body about the pivot of the side of his right foot, turning through ninety degrees until intersecting the floor. And then the door to his building flashed brightly, a momentary angle of reflected sunlight as it opened, and the image was banished from George’s sensorium.
In the lobby he put his hand on Marie’s shoulder. ‘Everything will be different now.’
And things did change. One way of putting it would be to say: the renewal of the terms of their family life manifested itself as a studied effort to return everything to mundanity. The key was repetition. The thing to do was to rehabituate Leah to her NY life. Obviously she could not go straight back to school. That very afternoon, as she napped, in her own bed for the first time in eleven months, Marie and George discussed the matter, and agreed that it might be weeks, or even months, before she could pick up where she had left off before the Ararat holiday. Dot had left them, to represent the case to the authorities in person, and explain Leah’s reappearance. She had also sent a spreadsheet of the sorts of professionals she considered, in her opinion, competent to help Leah readjust. One was a physical doctor with a specialism in resuming regular eating after a long New Hair fast. Another was a mental doctor – an assertivist, of course (for Dot knew her employer’s quirks) – to help Leah mentally. Then there would have to be a teacher to address, one-to-one, the hole in her schooling, and of course a dedicated carer –– for there were several reasons why it would be unwise to go back to employing only one person to look after both children. Finally, Dot recommended the employment of three lawyers, one for US law, one for international and one with a portfolio in kidnap victims, in order to cover the bases in locking down the lawsuit; as well as a netchecker, to police any and all references to the affair on the feeds. To all this Marie, looking beautiful for the first time in many months, agreed, excepting only the specific physical doctor suggested. ‘There’s no reason to bring in a stranger,’ she said. ‘Dr Baldwin is perfectly competent, and Leah knows him.’
‘Agreed.’
Everything seemed possible. The agency sent three possible carers within a quarter hour, and Marie had chosen one before Leah woke up – a short young man called Wilson. Even the alliterative coincidence of their carers’ two names seemed to George freighted with a larger truth. That evening, Wharton washed a laughing, thrashing Ezra at one end of the bath, and Wilson carefully soaped Leah’s new hair, almost strand by strand it seemed, at the other. Leah sat in the water wide-eyed, staring as if in incomprehension at the people in the bathroom: at the teenager attending her; at her parents standing behind, watching this first ritual performance of the restored family almost greedily. To end her day, Leah was tucked into bed with one of her favourite books. She fixed her eyes on the screen with a familiar avidity that gladdened George’s heart.
The following day Dr Baldwin called, and gave Leah a comprehensive physical examination. George watched: Leah was so shellshocked that she could not properly respond to gently uttered medical instruction to raise her arms, to breathe in or to lie down on the settee. An enormous tenderness blossomed in George’s heart at the sight. Leah stared into space as if only emptiness interested her any more. Light instead of food, the abstracted aerial existence that had been forced upon her. She was so thin! Eventually, it occurred to George, a little belatedly, that his presence might be some kind of impediment to the interaction of patient and medic. He left Baldwin to it.
When the consultation was finished, Marie came through with a hair-sculptor; or (since that term hardly does her justice) with Seylon herself, the medal-winning hair-sculptor. As she sat her subject in a chair, preparatory to removing the vulgar long longhair tresses, Leah showed emotion for the first time since her arrival back in New York. She widened her eyes and emitted a series of yelping little sobs; and Marie had to hold her, and reassure her over and over, just to permit Seylon to crop away the hair.
As this was going on, Dr Baldwin touched George’s arm. ‘Through here?’
The two men withdrew into an adjacent room.
‘She’s physically fine. Weak, which is of course what we’d expect. But fine.’
‘Thank goodness,’ said George. He could hear the hum of the haircutting through the wall, and he could hear little gulping sounds as well, that could have been Leah sobbing. Or perhaps were something else.
The doctor’s bland voice continued. ‘Reintroducing her to food should be unproblematic.’
‘Good,’ said George. ‘Good.’
‘There’s been some work on it – research, I mean. Reintroducing photophages to – to the business of eating hard food, I mean. Another thing. Her hymen is intact.’
‘It – what?’
‘You will, I do not doubt, be relieved to hear it.’
George looked at the medic. ‘Of course.’
‘Now, she may be suffering from the effects of psychological trauma,’ murmured Baldwin. ‘Now—’ he added. ‘To be clear. What I mean is: she is not responsive in the ways you would expect an eleven-year-old to be. Responsive to verbal instruction, say.’
‘She’s been through a lot,’ said George.
‘Of course she has. That’s what I’m talking about. Children are often more resilient in the face of, eh, massive trauma, than, eh. Adults. You’ll have arranged for a psychological specialist, of course. But I’ll note that she has learnt to speak some of the local language.’
‘She was over there for eleven months,’ George said. ‘It’s to be expected.’
‘Naturally. Now, Mr Denoone, eh, I’ve no desire to anticipate what your psychological specialist will say. But this sort of trauma—’ Baldwin didn’t so much break off his speech at this point as slide it from spoken words into a big beamy smile. He held this grin for some seconds, and then added the umlauts to the U by flashing his eyes wide open. George was a little startled, until, nudged by the persistence of the doctor’s smile, he returned it.
‘Let me put it this way,’ said Baldwin. ‘I have been your family’s doctor for some years.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m grateful, Mr Denoone. Grateful for your trust, and, eh, employment. Of course I am compelled by the terms of the contract I signed to secure my medical school place to – I don’t mean to bore you, George.’ (Oh, but there was something jarring in this new intimacy of ‘George’.) ‘Law’s law, and of course I’m compelled to take a percentage of patients who pay me little or nothing, sometimes through no fault of theirs – sometimes for mortal causes. What I’m saying, what I’m trying in my very clumsy way to say is that, is that I’m grateful to you—’ And he broke off again, this time in order to laugh a squealy little laugh. George’s puzzlement suddenly resolved, in the way an optic-illusory picture can magically cohere as sense, into the comprehension that Baldwin was nervous. It hadn’t occurred to him to think it, because he had never known this smooth and professionally accomplished man even had the capacity for nerves. But here he was.
Trying to reassure him, more to
remove the awkwardness of the man’s embarrassment and so relieve his own discomfort, George said: ‘It’s all right, Ball,’ (searching his memory for a first name and not finding it) ‘Baldwin, Dr Baldwin.’
‘Never talk money to the rich,’ laughed Baldwin, as if reciting some celebrated proverb. ‘It’s a grubby business, I know. And no human, rich or otherwise, wants to think that the respect of others is mediated only by money.’
‘I don’t see,’ said George. ‘You sound like you’re talking your way round to something—’
Baldwin waited several saggy seconds before picking up the hint. ‘Talking my way, you mean, out of my medical purview? Well, George, if I may call you George, I suppose I am – I am, I mean, delighted at your good fortune. Delighted you’ve got your daughter back! Not as somebody financially beholden to you, but as one human to another. At this fortunate turn up. I mean, the return of. The return.’
‘Well thank you,’ George put in, positively pained now by the man’s embarrassment and wanting the interview to stop.
‘You have brought me in today, you have paid me to perform a medical examination on the girl,’ said Baldwin. ‘You want to hear my medical opinion. You want, in fact, to hear me tell you that your daughter is in sound health, good health, as good as can be expected.’
‘I do,’ confirmed George. He could not fathom why Baldwin had spun the conversation in this peculiar manner.
‘That’s what – anyway. And I’m very happy to be able to confirm.’ He pinched his chin between thumb and forefinger, as if selecting legally precise phraseology. ‘Physically speaking, and considering the circumstances, she is healthy and well.’
There was a pause. The hum of the haircutting was no longer audible from the next room. Presumably it was finished. The light coming through the main window threw a Z-shaped area of brightness across an edge of table and the adjacent patch of carpet.
