by Adam Roberts
But, anyway, and after all, it didn’t matter. He had her back, all of her, and that was the centre of the target. Perhaps there were minuscule alterations in her mode of speaking English; or in her body language, or her brief bursts of thrilled excitement at trivial things, or the very un-Leah way she continually fiddled her long, knuckled fingers in amongst her short hair. But if George dedicated any thought as to why these miniature things bothered him at all (and, really, mostly, he told himself, they did not bother him) then the conclusion he came to was: they were indices of how deep the trauma of her abduction went. They were markers, subtle but unmistakable, of the horrors she had suffered for eleven long months. And as Wu put it, the fact that she was able to resume so much of her previous manner, proportionately much more, was a marker of something more hopeful, something more enduring. The fact that she had been taken away and then restored gave a boost to that force in his soul, that great thread, or cable of many threads, linking him to his daughter: that thing bracketed under the word love. Such a capacious word! Such a where-opposites-meet kind of location! He had been maimed and not known it; he was cured by the action of chance, without his will, without deserving it.
The other thing, of course, was that Leah was growing up. This additional complication inflected the restoration of her previous personality in unpredictable ways. If we look to children to ‘be themselves’, we must also acknowledge that the essence of childhood is a process of continually growing out of one self into a new self. Leah soon enough went back to being schooled, and for a month or two she did not properly interact with her half-dozen classmates – the bounds of ‘proper’ interaction being defined by pedagogic targets and philosophies established by established paedopsychological discourse. But, after a while, she befriended two of the six fellow pupils, and one of those two became her friend in that special way in which eleven-year-olds – going on twelve – are so skilled. And George found this development really touching: deeply, authentically moved in a way that startled him. When he turned the emotion over in order to examine and understand it, he saw its nature. It was relief. And with this key, relief, gifted to him from nowhere, he bleeped the locked casket of his soul and popped the lid open. He could look inside, and know himself. As he did so he wondered, ‘But how have I never looked inside before? How could I be so uncurious?’ What he discovered was that all the pleasures he thought he had valued, and which he had expended such energy chasing, were not only unimportant, they were in fact positive irritants to his well-being. What he wanted, more than anything, was the pressure inside the existential abscess to be released. He had not comprehended how anxious he was about little Leah until that anxiety was assuaged. When he put his head in at the schoolchamber and saw her cheerily chatting with little Marthe, he experienced so profound a shift in his heart from pain to relief that it was almost religious.
‘Leah seems to have settled well into her new class,’ he observed to Marie.
‘At last,’ his wife replied, her eyes on the screen in front of her. ‘Infuriating that it took so long, really.’
‘Well,’ said George. ‘Sure.’ But infuriated was the opposite of what he felt. What he felt was more like a Pauline bright light, the snowbike bursting rapidly straight into the dark spaces of his soul and driving the long spear of its headlight through the night. But it was hardly news that he and Marie were different creatures. What Marie wanted was a return to the status quo, when Leah and her small-scale dramas became the background noise of a life in which she, Marie, was centre-stage. George had been more thoroughly changed by his experience. Now he saw that it was his own life that was the background. This was what he had learned, by having his girl stolen away and returned to him. Leah had proved, quite apart from anything else, a mode of freeing him from himself. She was not one more thing to be fitted, somehow, into a busy schedule. The conversational way of putting this might be ‘it had taken her loss for George to understand how attached he was to Leah’; but, actually, that wasn’t quite it. What was revealed was something even more core than that. The attachment he felt to Leah was so completely different to the ‘attachment’ he felt to his collection, or his routine, or his little luxuries that it deserved to have a different name. It was an attachment that freed. It thinned the self, rather than coagulating it. It was a way out.
Month followed month, and the sense of something new stretched its roots inside George: he was a waking man yawning, lengthening arms and legs to their full, joint-popping extent. At no point did he ever, quite, recapture the transcendental state of mind he had known on the flitter coming away from the village of Öcalan, when he had first retrieved his beautiful girl. But there were days when he almost recovered that insight of soul, when the soot clogging his spirit got shaken away again. There was for example the first time since recovering her that Leah looked up at him and called him Daddy (looking back, George couldn’t remember if pre-kidnap Leah had ever called him Daddy). Taking Marthe and Leah to the park together, and observing the two girls’ absolute delight at the black swans. Marthe, Leah’s best friend. ‘I thought swans were white,’ Marthe said, several times, with a little dent of puzzlement in her perfect white brow. ‘How red his beak is!’ Leah squealed. The huge black wings lifted, slowly, from the beast’s back, like a giant beetle opening his shell-casings, and the girls watched hypnotized – until it starting shaking the two great black sheets in the air and they ran away laughing and squealing. Oh, George’s heart might have burst with happiness.
Occasionally he would get echoes of his previous eminence; that tragic fame, from the period of deprivation, when he had drifted about the Ararat hotel with a turquoise soul and sorrowfully composed features, and people had whispered together at his passing. He told himself that what he felt now was a completely other thing: that had been a lack, and now he was experiencing a kind of fullness. But there were moments when he acknowledged that the two emotional states had more in common than he liked to think.
Sometimes he had bad dreams.
Sometimes he didn’t dream at all, and days would pass without him being bothered by flashes of unwanted memory, or vision. The man’s hands were together in prayer. His eyes were closed in meditation. The shape of his holy thoughts leapt from his forehead in a limb of red, like a Greek god born from his brow. The name of this god was Thanatos. Mortality collided into him. And he began to fall, under the influence of gravity, turning about the pivot of his feet.
And down we go.
Slower, and
Slower and slower and
It was an exponential sequence. It took him a minute to fall ten centimetres, and then another minute to fall five. A minute to fall two. A minute to fall one.
He’s never going to hit the ground at this rate.
He had an insight one lunchtime, over his second glass of wine. Here’s what it was: George had been hurtling along through his life, propelled by the thrilling acceleration of wealth and privilege, maybe a little anxious at the prospect of his life crashing into something, but not really, because it was all just so exciting. But now he had learned something: it wasn’t that at all. He had never been in motion. Life had been moving, not him. He’d been the fly hovering over the freeway, watching each of the separate tonnage-lumps of plasmetal howling past him, every screaming block of death multiplied many times in the honeycomb of his compound eyes. He’d been waiting for life to crash into him. He had dangled, a knot of pure passive anxiety. It was not even as if the cars meant to eat him, howsoever mouth-like their grilles, however intent their eyelights. There was no stomach in these creatures. They were just going through the motions of hunting and devouring.
Shut your eyes. And – bang!
The girls, Marthe and Leah, liked wandering in the park. Though, look how peaceful! The black swan was a beautiful creature. George sat on the bench and frankly gawped at it. Its beak was so very red it looked as if it had been coated with scarlet lipstick. It sat motionless on the taut water, neck curved like a 2, perfect
ly balanced on its reflection like a Rorschach picture of a black butterfly with gigantic antennae. It made up the number 38. To the right, on a clear expanse of green, the girls were playing tag. George saw Rodion, his neighbour in the building, talking to them. As the little beings rushed past, Rodion would incline his head and call something to them – replying to their questions, or asking questions of his own, George couldn’t tell.
George looked about him, at the familiar paraphernalia of the park. It was all new to him. A coiffured tree was a tongue stuck out at the sky.
It surprised him that Rodion had made friends with Leah, not because he considered Rodion incapable of striking up friendships (he was after all a perfectly amiable, if slightly detached, old man) but because George was in that state of pure bogglement at the wonderfulness of his new attachment to his daughter. It seemed to him that his connection with her must be a unique thing.
George wandered over and said hello, and Rodion hunched his shoulders a little, as he tended to do when talking to another adult. Then he smiled wryly. Because their usual mode of interaction was to talk about the news, he said: ‘The situation in Mexico is worse than it was before.’
‘I saw that,’ agreed George. ‘Fires and rioting all through the central zone.’
The two men stood side by side, watching the girls chase one another around through the sculptures.
‘It is a wonderful thing to have a child,’ Rodion noted, shyly.
‘OK,’ said George. ‘Sure.’ Then, prompted by he-knew-not-what: ‘You have any?’
‘No,’ said Rodion.
‘OK,’ said George.
‘My wife sadly died. She perished of medical complications.’
‘Good grief.’ This was a shock! It was as if he had said my wife was eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger. Medical complications? How old was he? ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ Had he married in the nineteenth century?
‘It was very many years ago,’ said Rodion. ‘I never cared to remarry.’
After this extraordinary intimacy, the conversation wilted away again. George really didn’t know what to say to him.
The sparseness of life.
That afternoon, back home, George watched a long, ill-tempered recorded message from his assertiveness therapist. The gist of the message was: Why have you stopped attending sessions? ‘You are of course aware of the profound danger of a half-completed training in assertivity. You are, of course, aware how easily the cruder strategies of assertivity can manifest as violence in the soul. You may feel yourself ready to face the world, but I assure you, George, you are not. I insist you come back. There will be resistance to this inside you, I know. As you listen to this message you will be experiencing fear. Whether you realize it or not, you are afraid, and that is why you are avoiding me. This fear is like a disease in your blood, and you may think of yourself as somebody who has not yet been loaded with the gWhites to keep yourself healthy. I won’t lie to you, George, when you come back – because you have absented yourself – it will go hard for a week or two. I will have to go hard with you. I am angry, and you deserve to take the brunt of it. But as a professional I anticipate we can drive this fear out of you, and continue. You need not reply to this message. Simply be sure and turn up, at my therapy suite, tomorrow on time.’ That was the message.
The following evening George invited Rodion to join him, and Leah, on the roof to watch the moonlights. Ezra was in bed. Marie was doing whatever she did with her time these days. George really had no idea. A rust-coloured sun had just gone over the western skyline, and the sky’s diffraction grating began its slow, enormous tune-down to dark. Rodion came up carrying a little silk bag of flavour-sweets, and passed the pastilles, one at a time, to Leah. The three of them settled into three chairs.
‘I’m missing The Magic Shell,’ Leah said.
‘Watch it tomorrow instead,’ advised George.
‘But Marthe is watching it tonight. All my friends are watching it right now.’ Leah took another pastille. ‘They’ll talk about it in school tomorrow, and I won’t have seen it.’
‘Perhaps you might watch it later, in bed?’ suggested Rodion, tentatively, looking at George to see if this was a permissible compromise. ‘The moonlights are definitely worth seeing, though.’
‘You can tell your friends tomorrow,’ said George, ‘that you saw the moonlights with your own eyes. They won’t be able to boast anything like that. Won’t that be good?’
Leah pondered this, her little chin creasing and smoothing as she worked the pastille. The night was fragrant with New York summer. Away over to the south, a sunkite drifting out towards the sea, a double-diamond shape of blackness against the darkening sky. The masonry of the buildings around them grew more purple, the windows grew more golden. The sounds were of people passing in all directions below them, along all the roads and alleyways, driving and flitting, the city purring. Behind all this noise was the restful and delicate boom and shush of the Hough Wall.
‘What are moonlights?’ Leah asked.
‘We’re working up there,’ said George. ‘Blasting – it is blasting, is it, Rode?’
‘A form of blasting,’ agreed the old man.
‘You say, we’re working up there?’
‘That’s it,’ said George.
‘We are not there,’ Leah said, looking from George to Rodion.
‘I mean the US. I mean we in that sense.’
Leah put her lips into the shape of saying ‘ah!’ Then she asked: ‘Up at the moon?’
‘Sure.’
‘How did we get there?’
‘How did we get there? We flew up there, of course.’
‘In a flitter?’
It was one of ‘those’ conversations. Leah was either playing some girlish game, pretending to be ignorant of absolutely basic things about the world, or else this was some late manifestation of the kidnapping trauma, some hole in her memory traceable to that event. Either way, George had long ago decided the best way to handle it was to answer her questions simply and to register no surprise.
‘A flitter couldn’t fly so high! No, they flew up in a spaceship.’
‘Leah,’ asked Rodion in his creaky old voice, ‘do you know what the moon is?’
Leah contemplated this question for a long time, her jaws moving in a figure of eight, until she had finished the pastille. Then she said: ‘Is it a mountain?’
‘It is a whole other world, child,’ Rodion said.
‘A mountain world?’
‘A big round ball in space,’ he explained in his patient voice, ‘just like the earth is a big round ball in space.’
The increasing darkness made it hard to read her expression; but she looked at Rodion for a long time, as if weighing the likelihood that this was an incomprehensible adult joke. But she said: ‘OK.’ She uttered these two letters with a perfect George-like inflection, and that gave him a twinge of pleasure.
‘Anyhow,’ he said. ‘The US is building big things – up there. On the moon, I mean. And from time to time they blast the ground. Levelling,’ he went on, realizing how little he knew about the process or infrastructure, ‘mountains, or, I don’t know. Filling craters. I don’t know precisely.’
‘There are specialist feeds,’ George said. ‘They post the timings. Some people like to watch.’
‘If it’s on the feeds,’ Leah said, ‘then why can’t we watch it on the feeds? Then I could watch The Magic Shell after.’
George’s Fwn bleeped. ‘It’s time!’ he said, and reclined his chair. Leah and Rodion followed suit, and the three of them stared at the moon.
‘We’re on the roof looking at the moon,’ Leah announced. ‘I think the moon is a roof.’
‘How do you mean, my love?’ George asked.
‘Are the people up there looking at us?’ Leah wanted to know.
‘Use your scope, Leah,’ Rodion advised.
‘I am using my scope.’ Leah replied, although she had in fact been fiddling with it in her lap. But
she fitted it back over her eyes, and lay there. George put his on too. Magnified, the moon’s frost-grey surface revealed all manner of peculiar porelike detail: interlocking circles like the Olympics Logo, or starburst spreads of lines, frills of ink-black shadow with ragged edges like torn paper. White and cream, pale grey and dark, silver-black. Wrinkles and creases, patches of smoothness. ‘Where are they? I can’t see them.’
‘The big crater near the bottom, to the right.’
‘What’s crader?’
‘Those circles on the face of the moon. Those are craters.’
‘You should say circles then. Why say crader?’
‘Crater,’ said Rodion gravely, ‘is the proper term.’
‘I don’t like the proper term,’ Leah said, haughtily. ‘Marthe and I, we’re going to make our own language. When we do there will be no proper in it. Marthe speaks some German, you know. I said she and I will-would make our own language. It will-would be a new language, just for the two of us.’
‘What a splendid idea!’ said Rodion. ‘If you have your own private language, you and Marthe can tell one another secrets and nobody else will know what they are.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Leah, with splendid force and simplicity.
‘There,’ said George. They all fell silent. A button-mushroom of sharp brightness appeared on the crater wall, intense, an extraordinary focusing of the moon’s own silver light. And then, again, a second blister of bright whiteness. And in quick succession, a string of bright dots ignited soundlessly round the arc of the crater’s limit. The first explosion was a glass of light. A string of bubbles. And as the cascade of expansion swelled each in turn, the first began to dim, and little streaks of detail emerged in its orbit, puffs of outward-thrust dust and dirt.
