by Declan Burke
‘It’s no picnic for Cassie, either.’
The Growler coughs. Sallow Guy announces for the benefit of the tape that he’s terminating the interview, then switches off the recorder. He says, ‘Get this guy signed out.’
The Growler leaves. Sallow says, ‘This book.’
‘Which book?’
‘The one about the hospital. We’ll need to see it.’
‘Sure thing.’
He stands up. ‘By the way,’ he says, ‘where’d you get your hands on that dope you smoked on Saturday night?’
My line for today is, A genius working alone is invariably ignored as a lunatic. (Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard)
The protocols must be observed. Cassie must now be questioned as to the motives behind her allegation of rape. The issue of illicit drug-taking will be raised. Her ability to remember details as basic as the ownership of her own property will be queried.
For my part, and given my position in a public health institution, my employers must be notified of my illicit drug-taking. The police will also make enquiries as to my previous behaviour in the workplace, in particular the possibility that I have been chastised for sexual harassment, improper suggestions, or a malignant attitude towards women in general. This represents the opportunity my supervisor has been praying for. This is manna indeed.
He stands behind his desk rocking on his heels. He makes no attempt to appear caring, understanding or compassionate about my situation. This is progress. This is the instinctive outworking of the selfish gene that propelled the Homo sapiens species to the top of evolution’s queue. This is the human race winning a game defined and understood only by the human race.
‘There’s rules, Karlsson. Even if this was not a multi-gendered workplace environment it would still be necessary to suspend you pending the outcome of this investigation.’ A December dawn glows in his prematurely grey eyes. ‘Don’t consider it as a vote of confidence or otherwise. Try to see it as an opportunity we’re affording you, to take some time out in order to deal with what must be a difficult situation.’
‘Joe, that thing I said about your kid . . .’
He waves me off. ‘Karlsson, you and I both know you said what you said at a time of great personal stress.’ He bares his teeth in a dry canine smile. ‘I’ve told you before, anything said in this office stays in this office. You and I, we have a confidential relationship.’
‘You’re missing the point, Joe.’
A smirk. ‘About what, the Polynesians?’
‘The point is, even if you tell the cops about our conversation, and even if they arrest me, I’ll be back out on bail inside twelve hours. Don’t doubt it. I’m thinking of your kid here, Joe. What you have to do is decide what’s more important, personal revenge or a daughter growing up with a face like torched chip wrappers.’
He leans on the back of the orthopaedic chair. He seems to sag. He tries to work the canine smile again but winds up looking like a sick puppy.
‘Karlsson . . .’
‘You’re out of your depth, Joe. Get back to the shallow end where the kiddies play. The big boys play by different rules and even the rules would make you vomit. Joe,’ I say, ‘when you write that report for the cops, imagine you’re writing it on scorched chip wrappers.’
His eyes glaze over.
‘If you want my advice,’ I say, ‘then you’ll tell the cops that I’m innocent until proven otherwise, and you’d be setting up the hospital for bankruptcy if anyone here so much as looks crooked at me over these outrageous allegations. Trust me, you’ll sleep better.’
I leave, closing his door quietly behind me. The blood roars in my ears. Tomorrow I rouse the Mongol hordes from hibernation and point them south-west, complete with the Black Plague fleas that infest their horses.
•
‘You don’t look convinced,’ I say.
‘I’m not.’ Billy scratches under his chin. ‘To be honest, I don’t like the idea of Cass being even allegedly raped.’
‘It’s better than killing her off.’
‘Sure, yeah. But still . . .’
‘What?’
‘She’s going to look a fool, isn’t she? Humiliated. She’s gone to all the bother of reporting it, and that couldn’t have been easy. Now it’s looking like the cops aren’t going to take her seriously.’
He’s been a moody sod all day. ‘What’s on your mind, Billy? I mean really.’
He shrugs. ‘Would it have been so difficult,’ he says, ‘I mean the first time around, to have written a story about K and Cass just sailing a yacht in the Greek islands? People like happy endings in the Greek islands. Look at Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.’
‘I can’t write fat books, man.’
‘It wouldn’t have had to have been a whole novel,’ he says. ‘A short story would have done the trick.’
‘What’s done is done, Billy.’
‘Except,’ he says, ‘Karlsson was never Karlsson, was he? He was you. You without the choice to be you or not.’
‘Choice?’
‘Sure. The freedom to be whatever he wanted to be.’
I laugh. ‘And what makes you think I have free will?’
‘You’ve a lot more of it than K had.’
‘I’m just a character in everyone else’s story, Billy. They’re just characters in mine.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘Read up on your Buddha, man. The whole world, the whole universe, it’s all just an illusion.’
He pats the table. ‘Seems a solid enough illusion to me,’ he says.
‘Let me put it this way,’ I say. ‘If I had free will, I’d be the one sailing a yacht around the Greek islands. Except I’m sitting here talking to you.’
He makes a fist and pounds the table. ‘You made a choice, man. That’s different. That’s my whole point.’
‘Billy,’ I say, ‘the whole idea of free will, it’s pie in the sky. The Hindus, the Muslims, the Buddhists, the Christians – they all believe it’s all pre-ordained. And they can’t all be wrong.’
‘They can, y’know,’ he says. ‘I mean, if it’s all mapped out, what’s the bloody point of being alive in the first place?’
‘Maybe so you can accept that it’s all pre-ordained and acknowledge your place in the grand scheme. Appreciate the beauty of the design. Imagine for a second you’re a single tiny tile in a huge mosaic and you’re––’
‘Gimme a break,’ he groans. ‘What’re you on, PCP?’
‘Hey, Hemingway?’ Deborah steps out onto the patio, shading her eyes with one hand. ‘It’s nearly ten-past and your parents are expecting us for seven. Can you get Rosie changed and put her in the car?’
‘Sure thing, hon.’ Tonight is a rare night for us, dinner for two over flickering candles, and Debs doesn’t want to lose a single second of it. ‘Be right with you.’
She raises a sardonic eyebrow, then taps her wrist with one finger and goes back inside.
‘There you go,’ I say. ‘That’s how much free will I have.’
‘You could have said no,’ he says. ‘Told her you were too busy.’
‘To Debs?’ I laugh as I stand up. ‘Free will’s a marvellous idea, Billy, but I’d rather keep both balls, cheers all the same.’
He grins, then gathers his notes together. ‘If you’re going to be out and about,’ he says, ‘d’you fancy a pint later on, after dinner?’
‘Yeah, maybe. I’ll see how it goes. Debs might be tired.’
‘I’ll text you, we can take it from there.’
‘Do that.’
•
We need to think Greek, people. We need to think Egyptian and Roman. Who now speaks the language of Cheops, Aristotle or Julius Caesar? Who today worships Amun-Re, Athena or Vulcan?
Think instead of the pyramids, the Parthenon, the Coliseum. A civilisation defines itself by its buildings. Eras are marked – literally and figuratively – by their physical constructs.
Forget literature, language, religion. If you want
to be remembered, become an architect. A civilisation leaves behind nothing but its buildings and its prejudices. If you start taking down their buildings, they’re going to sit up and take notice.
There’s nothing to pique the imagination quite like a missing hospital.
My line for today is, Politicians, buildings and whores achieve respectability if they survive for long enough. (Robert Towne, Chinatown)
September 14th
Dear Mrs Kerins –
There is a bomb planted on the third or fourth floor of the hospital, depending on whether you count the basement as an actual floor. This bomb is of a sensitive nature. Any attempt to defuse it will result in premature detonation. It is timed to explode at precisely 22.55 on Saturday night, September 17th. I advise you to sign your husband out of the hospital before that time on that date.
Yours sincerely,
A Friend
Naturally, I do not choose Mrs Kerins at random. According to the files, Mrs Kerins is the young wife of a long-term in-patient with a pancreatic tumour. By a stroke of good fortune, however, when cross-referencing the files, I discover that Mrs Kerins is seven months pregnant.
This represents instant pathos. This ensures that Mrs Kerins will not spend very long wondering if my note is a hoax. It ensures that she will immediately panic and then attempt to dilute her misery by telling anyone who will listen to her dreadful news.
Inevitably, news of the bomb warning will reach the ever-twitching antennae of the Fourth Estate. This in turn ensures that the Health Service Executive will not have the luxury of presuming that the warning is a hoax, or of quietly searching the third and fourth floors in order to establish the validity of the warning before evacuating the hospital. Further, it ensures that the HSE will not be responsible for the premature explosion of a bomb, and thus will not have the blood of innocent civilians on its hands, or no more than it currently has.
I hope you are not disappointed. Perhaps you presumed I would incinerate all patients, staff and visitors along with the hospital building itself. But this would not be a logical move. The point of a terrorist bomb, as is the case with a land mine, is not to kill per se. A good novel and the terrorist bomb have this much in common: they are about questions, not answers.
The terrorist bomb is the first wave of paratroopers parachuted in to establish a bridgehead on a front page near you, behind whom arrive the justifications, the context and the irresistible moral relativism. The point of the terrorist bomb is to force a crack in the façade of the status quo, through which trickles those all-essential rumours of suffering, agony and victimhood.
I have no desire to annihilate those who are already suffering. If I had I would have helped the ex-mechanic to die. I would have bludgeoned the non-contributing homeless with lump hammers. I would have suffocated old Mrs McCaffrey with her embroidered pillow. But I did not.
It is my fervent wish that the hospital is evacuated before the silane rips through the superstructure, igniting every atom of oxygen it encounters. It would be utterly illogical to create a pantheon of counter-martyrs to my cause.
Of course, the hasty evacuation of the hospital may result in collateral damage, a.k.a. the untimely demise of certain patients who are currently hooked up to the various machines sustaining them. This is unfortunate and regrettable, although in time those men and women may come to be revered as the first martyrs in the cause of rejuvenating the ruthless streak that has sustained the human race for over a million years now.
I expect no thanks for this.
No thanks, please.
•
While Debs adds a few more strokes of blusher to the masterpiece-in-progress that is her perception of herself, I get Rosie settled in the spare room of my parents’ house. I powder her bum and apply a little cream to a red patch, then get her nappy on snug and slip her into the one-piece with the picture of Pooh Bear and Piglet on the chest. Then I sit on the edge of the bed and cradle her, her head nestling in the crook of my arm, and bounce gently left and right while she sucks on her bottle. Some nights it can take ages to send her off, as Rosie struggles to drink her bottle on a wheezy chest. Tonight, though, it’s as if she senses that her Mum and Dad need her to go down quietly. She lies in my arms virtually inert, her blue eyes unblinking, while I croon my version of the lullaby:
Rock-a-bye baby, in the tree-top
When the wind blows, the cradle will rock.
If the bough breaks, the cradle will fall,
And down will come baby, Daddy break your fall.
Halfway through the fifteenth rendition, her eyes finally close and the almost empty bottle falls away from the tiny pink lips. I raise her up in my arms to allow my nose to touch the warm peach of her cheek, listening for any sound of wheezing, but tonight she is calm, untroubled.
I lay her in the cot and place Sleepy Bear beside her, outside the blanket so that its weight prevents her from tossing the covering off, but close enough for a snuggle if she reaches out in her sleep.
Then I watch her until Debs decides we are fashionably late for our own date. I decide that the childless ascetics may preach until their tongues fall out, but a sleeping baby is the warm lie to their truth of free will.
•
One of the benefits of being a hospital porter is the freedom that comes with being systematically underestimated. Thus, for example, no one will suspect that a hospital porter might possess two computers, the better to hide incriminating material, such as evidence of a hasty departure from the country. Thus no one suspects that a hospital porter might have the wit and wherewithal to secure two passports, one of which he can hand in to the police when requested to do so.
I ring Yasmin.
‘Hello?’
‘It’s me,’ I say.
‘Shit.’
‘We have a problem.’
‘What’s wrong?’
There’s a faint sibilance, a slight slurring, that suggests Yasmin has been drinking.
‘It’s your laptop,’ I say.
‘What about it?’
‘I hid it at work where no one would find it. At the hospital, I mean. Down in the basement.’
‘So?’
‘They’re about to find it.’
‘Fuck.’
‘You heard about the hospital?’
‘No. What about it?’
‘There’s some kind of bomb alert.’
A low moan. ‘A fucking bomb?’
‘They’re pretty sure it’s a hoax but they’re evacuating everyone anyway. Then they’re going to search the whole building.’
‘Fuck. Fuck-fuck-fuck.’
‘I want that laptop, Yasmin. And you’re going to get it.’
‘But if they’re evacuating the––’
‘Who’s going to notice you? One more guy in all that confusion.’
Right now, if I were Yasmin, I’d be weighing the pros and cons. The main con, obviously, being that the bomb is real. The main pro being the opportunity to destroy all evidence of his life-ruining perversion.
It is all I can do not to murmur that it’s all a con.
‘But how would I get in?’ he says.
‘That’s the easy bit, Yasmin.’
‘Stop fucking calling me that.’
‘You’d rather I called the cops instead, left an anonymous tip?’
Even over the phone I can hear his teeth grinding.
‘So where is it?’ he says.
‘A janitor’s cubbyhole, in the basement, it looks like some kind of old bunker. There’s a light-switch to the left when you go in. The laptop’s on the top shelf, the shelves against the back wall. Look for the cardboard box with Granny Smith apples on it. Got it?’
‘Granny Smith, yeah.’
‘Good. Now listen, this is how we get you in . . .’
September 15th
Dear Cass –
I appreciate that you will understand my suicide to be an admission of guilt, as will the police. But I did not rape you.
> Yes, I took advantage of your generous nature, and yes, I undressed you and placed you naked in the bed that was once ours. Yes, it is true I forced you against your will to become my unwitting accomplice. But I did not do anything else you might construe as immoral, physically invasive or humiliating.
You should also know that my suicide has nothing to do with the failure of our relationship. Neither has it anything to do with the hospital.
I choose suicide as the only logical option open to a sentient creature in a meaningless universe. By the time you read this I will have already chosen suicide. In effect, you are reading the words of a dead man.
There is no reason you should consider this a ghoulish experience. The novels of Durrell, Golding, Hemingway and Joyce are all suicide notes written by dead men. Words only truly come alive, if they ever do come alive, when their author is dead.
To paraphrase Norman Mailer, it’s tough to dance when your father is watching.
At this point I would like to apologise for all those actions of mine that caused you pain and grief. Unfortunately, I can’t. I say this knowing that honesty is wasted on the living. It is possible to be truly honest only to the dead, and the dead could care less about what we believe to be truth.
I say these things because I know that your narcissism will not allow you to leave this letter unopened. Yours is the narcissism of the age, which demands that everyone see their reflection in everyone else’s mirror too. It is the narcissism that has stunted the collective imagination to the point where you cannot envisage the world existing without your presence to inspire it. In every mirror you see the fulcrum upon which the universe turns.
