Tomorrow

by Chris Beckett

  I exhale. Actually, it’s not like doing a jigsaw, I decide, and in my mind I’m moving pieces around and trying to fit them together. It’s more like watching a jigsaw being done.

  I inhale. Actually, no, it’s nothing like doing jigsaws or watching jigsaws.

  I exhale. It’s like . . . What is it like? I don’t know – and why does it have to be ‘like’ something, anyway? – but . . . well . . . my generation rightly distrusts the distinction my grandparents made between ‘serious’ novels and popular ‘trash’, yet there surely is still a distinction between stories that make you feel more alive and stories that just pass the time by tapping, like a fruit machine does, into your infantile need for resolution.

  I inhale. The resinous smoke reminds me of incense in a church and makes me think of the elaborately carved columns and arches of that unexpectedly impressive cathedral that always puts me in mind of coral, a word that in turn evokes . . .

  I breathe out. Some white object is floating down the river. On an impulse, I go inside to recover my pistol from its hiding place so I can take aim at whatever it is as it drifts past, some twenty metres out from the bank. I pull the trigger – bull’s-eye! – I hit it on the very first shot. But a spurt of red shoots up and something pale half-emerges from the water, threshing violently, and briefly reveals eyes, a gaping mouth, and a single fin or flipper that reaches up as if appealing for help, before the whole thing sinks down again, leaving only a wine-dark stain.

  Oh God, it was alive. I feel simultaneously sick and proud as I flip on the safety catch and return to my seat, caressing the warm gun in my hands. I relight my joint and inhale deeply with my eyes closed, not wishing to look at the river again until I’m quite sure that the pale thing will have drifted out of sight. What are those creatures? I mean, I know they’re called naiads, but what actually are they? It looked like a small whale, but do you find whales in rivers, a thousand kilometres from the sea? I honestly don’t know. And whales don’t really have faces, do they, and that thing did, though I only glimpsed it, a big doughy lugubrious face, staring across at the small brown creature that had wounded it for no obvious reason at all. But perhaps I just imagined that.

  I know very little about animals – my father taught so many people about the natural world that it became almost a matter of pride for me to remain ignorant – but I can’t help myself from wondering if such animals have partners that feel attached to them, or young that depend on them, and if so what kind of calamity my single foolish bullet may have brought about beneath the surface of the river, as if some clueless alien, simply on a whim, had descended to Earth and fired its ray gun at what it imagined to be a colourful piece of cloth, killing the beloved lone mother of six children who earns the money that feeds them and pays the rent for the little apartment they call home.

  I exhale. Obviously there has to be some movement in a story, I think – there has to be something driving things forward – but my problem with the engine of plot is that it is nothing like what drives things forward in real life. A story driven by plot emphasizes intention and purpose far too much, when the way real life moves is more like this river, whose driving force is the weight of the water that has no choice but to run downhill towards the ocean by whatever route lies open in front of it. Human intentions and purposes are details, like the little patterns of waves and turbulence on the river’s surface, and if you examined them closely enough, under (so to speak) a very powerful microscope, even they would turn out to be just more rivers flowing downhill to their own small seas.

  And time doesn’t work in the way a plot implies. Neatly tied-up strands at the end of a rich and complex book always seem to me an act of vandalism, like ending a symphony with dum-diddlyumtum-tum-tum. I don’t want my book to have an ending in that sense. I want it to be like . . . What? I can’t really say exactly, but into my mind comes the image of a stained-glass window, in which all the stages of a story are presented at the same time, each in its own little panel, so that we see (for instance), depicted in bright colours, the birth of the saint, her early life, her miracles, her persecution at the hands of a savage pagan king, her martyrdom on an iron wheel, her ascension to heaven – side by side and all at once, the saint helpfully identified for us in each panel by her distinctive green clothing, and each scene separated from the others, perhaps by organic forms such as branches or leaves, to show that, from the viewpoint of eternity, all of time is happening simultaneously in, as it were, adjacent clearings of a single forest, or the many rooms of a single building.

  I inhale again. The fire crackles eagerly through the dried leaves. I caress the gun in my lap. It is undoubtedly my favourite possession. It’s pleasingly heavy, it fits perfectly into my hand, and it gives me the truly magical power of being able to do great damage at a distance, almost instantaneously. I release the safety catch again and fire at random into the river, throwing up a column of water twenty metres away. Then I take one last drag on my joint and discard the butt.

  I didn’t sleep well last night, and the smoke and the heat have made me drowsy. As I close my eyes, with the gun still cradled in my lap, I remember once visiting the cathedral back in the city when the afternoon sun was throwing bands of colour across the flagstones – the big national cathedral, I mean, four times the size of the one in the town just down the river. I remember how, as I stood in the middle of the nave, my long dark shadow was a kind of absence, surrounded by patterns of blue and red light. And now, in my mind, the shadow becomes more and more indistinct until there is only light. (Can a shadow fade? Can you fade into light?) I’m asleep now and having an uncomfortable dream in which Amanda is calling out my name from her apartment in the town and somehow, although the whole point of being in this place is to be out of reach of other voices, I can hear her all this way up the river. And then I’m woken very suddenly by the shocking sound of booted human feet on the wooden steps that come up to the end of the veranda from the riverbank.

  I jump up, my gun clattering on the wooden floor at the exact moment that I remember, too late, that it was on my lap.

  I travel for five hours far above the ocean, having food and drink brought to me from time to time on a trolley rolled along a corridor with ten vertical kilometres of air beneath it, all at the expense of my employer and all so that I can deliver a paper – ‘De-Sire: Towards a Nongendered Erotics’ – at an international conference in a beautiful old university in a foreign country, and listen to the papers of others, and engage in formal and informal discussions over more drink and rather delicious food provided by the organizers and also paid for by my employer, along with other bright and interesting young people who are working on the same kind of topics as myself, but come from many countries in (I count them with satisfaction) no fewer than five different continents.

  I know quite a few of the others from previous events in other countries. There are friends and allies of mine, and also rivals, such as the formidable Zoe of whom my friends and I privately like to make fun. But rivals are necessary, after all, to give your own position meaning, in much the same way that an opposing team is necessary in sport. And actually, just as two sporting teams both accept the rules of the game, my group and Zoe’s don’t disagree in terms of underlying principles. All the disagreement is about how those principles should correctly be applied in the case of the specific texts that our various papers discuss. In our polite way, we try to demonstrate that our opponents have failed to apply those principles correctly, thus raising questions about whether they understand them as well as we do or, much worse, whether they really subscribe to them in the way they claim. For instance, we might show that they have failed to recognize the ‘problematic’ nature of certain texts that they admire. Or we might, on the contrary, demonstrate that they have failed to understand that the material they themselves have identified as problematic is in fact quite the opposite and doesn’t at all perpetrate the oppressive or discriminatory attitudes that, so they claim, are deeply ‘inscribed�
�� there, but rather ‘subverts’, ‘disrupts’ or ‘interrogates’ them, perhaps by using ‘ludic’ or ‘coded’ strategies that our rivals have taken at face value and so failed to recognize.

  The undergraduates of the university are away at the moment because in this northern part of the world, rather exotically, it’s the summer vacation, so we are being put up in their very charming quarters. In the evening, after the last paper has been delivered and we’ve all drunk a fair amount of red wine over a nice three-course meal, we split into groups and spread ourselves out, some inside the building, some outside, and a few heading off on expeditions into the beautiful old quarter of the city, in each case for the purposes of drinking and talking more. And now the conversation wanders from the subject of the conference itself and moves on to wider topics. We talk a fair amount about academic politics, and the many frustrating demands and constraints placed upon us (seemingly regardless of which country we come from) by short-sighted and politically compromised administrators that prevent us from doing what we would like to do, which of course would also be the best thing to do, both for our vitally important work and for society as a whole.

  These problems are caused by capitalism. We all agree on that, even though I can’t entirely avoid noticing that our actual political affiliations would suggest otherwise. I, for instance, give my support to a political party that considers itself considerably to the left of the centre-left party of which my parents are prominent members, but actually doesn’t advocate dismantling capitalism or propose an alternative but rather demands higher taxes, improved public services and free tertiary education. But this evening’s about solidarity, and, coming as we do from so many different parts of the world, we all find it reassuring to be in agreement that the very same force that oppresses the poor and endangers the planet is also the one that makes it difficult to obtain tenure and gives us too much teaching. This isn’t the time for pedantic details.

  In any case, I have other priorities. For all our fancy talk, we humans are animals, and my main preoccupation at the moment is the sweet pheromones drifting towards me from a particular scholar who I’ve met on two previous occasions, and who is now sitting no more than a metre and a half away from me on the opposite side of the table. Although we come from different continents, so there is very little scope for developing a relationship outside of these events – and perhaps, to be perfectly honest, because of that fact – we are definitely attracted to one another, glancing across at each other frequently with bright, smiling eyes as we sit among a larger group around a table in the college bar, and it seems to me entirely possible that we may share a bed tonight, if we can just negotiate a way through this situation that will allow us a little time to talk without the rest of them. One of the side benefits of a conference entitled ‘Desire under Late Capitalism’ is that such possibilities are constantly being discussed and rehearsed.

  For long periods I’m alone in my cage, the only light coming from the constantly hissing gas lamp of my captors some metres away up the cavern. I lie on my mattress, slowly surveying the few things I can see and hear: the bumps and cracks on the ceiling far above me, just visible in the orange light; the dark hexagonal pattern of the chicken wire; the drip drip drip of water into a pool some way off down into the cave; the sharp whiff of bat shit; the rough backwoods accents of the guerrillas as they talk or horse around or quarrel over cards. The combination of tedium and fear and helplessness feels at times too much to bear, when I have no end date to aim at and no control over my own future, yet I have no choice but to bear it and have learnt that indulging my claustrophobia by banging on the wire or screaming will not be tolerated. I try to remember that, not so very long ago, I sat for hours and days quite happily in the small confines of my veranda with only a limited range of sights and sounds to occupy me and didn’t feel constrained at all.

  I have a pack of playing cards, a very cheap one, the kind with old-fashioned suits, rather than the modern international ones, and only forty-eight cards. I bought it in the sparse little shop in the village downriver from my cabin, and, because it happened to be in my pocket when they seized me, it’s the one possession I still have with me, apart from the clothes I wear. When I feel that my sense of helplessness is in danger of getting out of control, and becoming a kind of panic, I use the cards to calm myself. Sometimes I play a game of patience, but more often I simply shuffle the cards, deal out a few of them, see what kind of stories they seem to tell, and then shuffle and deal again.

  The Two of Coins, the Nine of Coins, the King of Swords, the Queen of Leaves.

  The Three of Leaves, the Seven of Leaves, the Four of Leaves, the Ace of Swords.

  The Prince of Coins, the King of Leaves, the Two of Swords, the Ace of Cups . . .

  It’s surprisingly soothing.

  Guinevere doesn’t come to talk to me these days, just brings me my food with a gruff ‘here you are’. She sometimes accompanies me on my brief ‘walks’ a few metres up and down the cave, but there’s always one of the others there too, and she makes a point of speaking to them and not to me. I wonder if I’ve offended her? I think it more likely that Carlo has told her to leave me alone, or perhaps just teased her about her obvious affinity with me. I can’t very often make out the words they say to one another over there by their lamp, and I seldom hear Guinevere speak at all. When I do hear her, I notice, or think I do, that she is trying to adjust her speech to make it sound more like theirs.

  None of them will tell me what’s going on in the world outside. Sometimes I imagine a national effort to find me, the army and the police scouring the Upper River region with patrols and helicopters, daily reports on the TV, regular updates to the National Assembly from the Minister of National Security. The insurrection has had a steady trickle of victims of one kind or another, of course, and these are usually reported in the form of statistics, but I am, so to speak, one of the real people, one of the differentiated people, whose personal situation is assumed to be of national interest and importance when caught up in something like this. My famous parents would ensure that, as would my friends in the city, who all belong to a certain section of society that expects to be able to get the attention of the authorities, and has contacts of one kind or another in the political and administrative classes, and in the media.

  It’s interesting – or it would be interesting if I was in the mood to be ‘interested’ by things – the extent to which I take all this for granted. If someone my age had been kidnapped from that village just down the river from my cabin, I doubt it would have made the national news at all, and, even if it did, back in the city I certainly wouldn’t have paid any attention to the story. My position back there was, as indeed I recall once writing in a social media post about a similar case, that ‘there are millions of people in this country. If I were to be introduced to one of my compatriots every single minute of my life I still wouldn’t meet them all. And every day, people are killed, exploited, abused. It’s sentimental at best to focus on individual cases, and when the media focuses exclusively on the victims of the insurgents, it’s something worse than that, something more cynical and deliberate. It’s a way of deflecting attention from the structural injustices that caused the insurrection in the first place, and a way of erasing the many victims of a regime that refuses to provide sufficient hospitals for the poor, or make decent provision for those who can’t work.’

  Another possibility is that there is no search going on, and no media coverage, due to a deal that has been struck between my captors and my parents while negotiations are underway. I try to work out what kind of ransom my parents would be able to pay. Would it be enough? The guerrillas clearly hope to make a fair amount out of me, given the effort they are putting in to holding me prisoner. That said, though, I don’t know if it’s money they’re after, or some other objective, like the release of one of their own from the government’s prisons? If the latter, I hope my parents have been able to persuade the government to relax its of
ten-stated policy of never giving in to terrorists. They are very well-connected, after all. My father is a national figure, and my mother used to go out with the Minister for Foreign Affairs during their university days: they still send each other Christmas cards.

  But what I fear most is that my absence hasn’t even been noticed. Perhaps the guerrillas haven’t been able to decide how to handle this kidnapping. Perhaps they’re arguing amongst themselves – Carlo often heads off to meetings elsewhere to discuss strategy – or waiting for the moment when this particular bargaining chip can be played to maximum effect. My friends and family know that I’m upriver by my own choice in a place with no connection to the phone network or the internet. It could be months before anyone misses me. I find that the hardest to bear: the idea that I’m trapped in the dark, and no one even knows I’m here.

  Light falls on my face. Guinevere and Rubia are outside, Rubia carrying the gas lamp, Guinevere cradling a sub-machine gun.

  ‘Time for your walk,’ says Guinevere, and yes, she is definitely trying to suppress her metropolitan accent.

  ‘Any news about my case?’ I ask as I scramble to my feet.

  Neither of them answers me. They open the two padlocks and let me out. Rubia lays down the lamp so she can fix the cuffs to my wrists and ankles. Then she picks up the lamp, and I begin to shuffle down the cave.

  I say waterfall but it isn’t a sheer drop, more a series of cascades coming down a rocky slope. And, although we are only wearing swimming things and our feet are bare, I suggest to Amanda that we climb beside it at least a bit of the way to see if we can reach the source. It’s more of a scramble than a climb, in truth, and the warm brown rock is smooth and easy on the feet, its surface just rough enough to provide grip, with little patches of soft peaty soil from time to time where small plants have taken root, some with little white flowers like bells, some with crinkly yellow ones. In fifteen minutes we find the boiling pool where the water comes spitting and steaming out of the rock. It’s a dramatic sight and a good viewpoint too – we’re already high enough to see the river and the forest beyond it stretching all the way to the distant mountains in the west – but the pool itself is just too violent and deadly to be a restful place to stop, so we climb on to a flat ledge another thirty metres above it to rest and admire the view.