By Light Alone (10 page)

‘Why can’t we go by flitter?’ George asked. His heart was thundering.

‘It is not so safe, where we are going, to fly’ said Captain Afkhani.

‘Have you found her? Are you taking me to her?’

‘It is more safe to go within a car,’ said the commissioner. ‘We have this iCar Armoured, it is plated, it is very safe.’

‘Flitters are more vulnerable to small weapon fire,’ said Afkhami, smilingly, as she walked briskly alongside him. ‘They cannot fly high enough to evade evil people and their weapons.’

‘Is it a war zone?’ barked George, his chest tinkling with excitement, or fear (as if there is really any difference between
those
two emotions!). He no longer knew what he was saying, exactly. Standing in the direct sunlight. The iCar Armoured pulled up in front of him and the nearside passenger door clicked open and swung wide. Sweat was needling his face and torso. ‘Is that why she was kidnapped? Is it something to do with war?’

‘It is nothing to do with war,’ said the commissioner, climbing into the iCar. ‘There is no war here, although there are some bad people, and some of them have guns.’

‘Leah is in Khoduz?’

‘Let us get into the Car please,’ said the Captain.

George stood looking at the cavernous cavemouth of the open passenger door. The whole machine was twice the length of a flitter, massy and ponderous, more like a house than a vehicle, from its broad domed snout to its room-sized trunk. Its paintwork was white as snow. It hurt the eyes to look directly at it, even through shades. George got in. The inside was cool, and the seat adjusted itself beneath him.

‘Away!’ said the commissioner.

They rolled for ten minutes along a rod-straight road of spongy tarmac; and then turned off onto a road of compressed dirt. An angled plume of pale dust shot from the back of the vehicle, like a rocket exhaust. George stared through the tinted glass. Where the canals ran, the land was scrubby with weeds. In between the zones of irrigation, sun and dryness had extirpated all life. The mountain dominated the distance, one big peak and an eastward downward slope to another, smaller peak. It looked like the profile of a mighty crocodile basking on the horizon. Objects near-to – parched trees, solitary buildings, discarded tractors – bulleted by, but the mountain was too huge and solid to move so much as a centimetre.

George peered through his window. He pressed his face to it, to look ahead. The road was taking them towards a small hill, scaled all over with single-storey buildings. They were in the outskirts already. People lounged on the ground, or sat on the roofs, with their hair out.

At a bend in the road just outside this village the car slowed to take the turn, and George saw two women in a dusty field, digging a trench, their arms glisteningly bare, their long black hair swaying with the motion of the spades.

Supine on the ground, a few metres from them, was a line of half a dozen shop-front dummies: every brown head bald as an egg, and far too skinny to be actual human bodies. George might have speculated on what these manikins were doing in this remote village, or why the women were burying them, but his mind was too agitated by the thought that Leah was in one of these very houses! That he was only moments from being reunited!

‘This is Khoduz?’ he asked.

They rolled through the place. The car pulled up in a narrow town square, with a central drinking fountain the shape of a rocket, and a couple of bang-haired palm trees. Men and children sat on the unshaded side of the square, letting the sunlight get to their hair.

The commissioner climbed out of the car, telling everybody else to stay where they were. George watched proceedings through the tinted window. The commissioner was standing in the sunlight, talking to two bulky men, one long-haired, one fuzz-headed. The conversation went on for many minutes. That
insectile
look of a human head wearing dark glasses. Abruptly the exchange became more heated. The commissioner threw both his arms in the air, and strode back to the iCar. When he opened the door, a palpable wash of heat poured inside.

The door closed with the thud of a guillotine blade hitting its stock.

‘My apologies,’ he said, calmly, to George, meeting his eye. ‘This has proved to be – the English, I think, is
wild-goose chase
. We have chased the wild goose.’

From where he was sitting, in the back of the iCar, George could see the flicker of text upon the inside of the commissioner’s dark glasses, as his AI fed him appropriate English idioms.

Nobody said anything as they backed out of Khoduz, and drove the half-hour back to the flitter.

11

George stuck it at the hotel for one more week. Time had rusted. The week took a month to pass. The final day stretched and stretched.

It was all about the waiting. Everything becomes boring in time: happiness does, but so does unhappiness. The glamour of his tragic eminence had rubbed away, and now he was only conscious of how horrible and demeaning and unrelenting his misery was. From time to time thoughts of actual self-harm would pop into his head, but he made no effort to act upon them. The making no effort, in fact, was his way of countering the temptation of suicide. The essence of suicide is impatience: for after all, if you want to die, all you need do is
wait
. But insofar as suicide is the purest form of depression – depression compressed to its logical extreme, as it were – then clearly depression is a function of impatience too. George held his drink in front of him such that the sunlight made white bobbles on the surface of the fluid, like suds. The sunlight passed incompletely through the body of the liquid, to cast a trembling oval of shadow on the white tablecloth.

Finally George took the schedule flitter to Tabriz, and there he boarded a scruffy-looking gelderm plane. There was a ramjet at noon, but he chose not to wait for it. Now that he was going back to the States he felt a kindling of urgency: not to see Marie again, not even to hold Ezra in his arms, but simply to
get out of that place
.

He watched the news the whole flight. He had gotten into the habit, during his sojourn at the hotel, of watching several hours of news every day. He found something queerly reassuring about it: the open-endedness of the situation in Triunion, or the latest upheavals in the Eastern Indian Federation, or the riots at the Sahara Games. Great mobs of the disaffected, the machinic efficiency of the modes of security containment. So much hurly-burly in the service of stasis. Everything constantly changing to stay the same.

As the plane descended, and did that horrid vibration-thing gelderms do, George looked down at the hoar-grey glints that sunlight spread over the Atlantic. He saw the ripple the plane’s descent approach caused in the surface of the waters, a thin, almost spectral parabola line that chased after them until it splashed against the bulk of the Hough Wall. On the other side the Hudson lagoon was dotted with pleasure craft, and then the cogteeth towers of Old New York rose up to greet him. And finally he was back in the cool of a New York fall, and he was walking from the taxi up his own ramp, and walking through the lobby of his own building, and finally stepping into the familiar odour and ambience of his home, rendered strange by a two months’ absence.

He waved the bagman away, tipless, and closed the front door behind him. Marie came out of her study. All she did, for a while, was stand at the far end of the hall with her arms hung loosely from her side. As he stepped over towards her she bestirred herself and came to meet him halfway, such that they embraced and held one another. And yet, for long marriage brings with it a telepathic form of incipient communication that is as much curse as blessing, George knew, as his arms snaked around his wife like a seatbelt finding its way to its socket, that she considered him to blame. He knew that she understood this to be irrational, but that she didn’t care. Of course she was not about to rebuke him openly, or accuse him, or bring her resentment into any arena where it might be rationally disproved. She found a perverse source of emotional sustenance from her blame. But it was there, and it would not go away.

‘I did miss you,’ he told her.

Let’s say tragedy is about death, so that we can ask ourselves: what dies? Or to put it another way: what can die? The first answer to come to mind, of course, is – people. And it is the death of people that most often informs tragedy. But other things can die too: hope, for instance. A marriage can die. A community can die. Then again: does it seem odd to you that we never use that idiom to describe recovery? ‘My depression died, I am happy to say.’ ‘My cancer died, leaving me healthy again.’ Why not? Fall, because that’s what the leaves do. Or because that’s what the whole year is doing. And down we go.

12

New York fall mutated incrementally into winter, and snow fell without the ordered restraint of Ararat, where clouds were seeded at night and cleared away during the day, so as not to interfere with the enjoyment of guests. The snow here did not lie pristine. It was veined with grime. The cubist imitations of mountain gorges echoed more dully than Araratian valleys.

George and Marie continued in their usual round. But isn’t ‘round’ a strange way of putting it? Their lives, though in every respect metaphorically upholstered, lacked precisely the three-dimensionality implied by that idiom. Day replaced day, each sliding along to knock the night off its perch; and in turn dark crept up on day, approaching from exactly the same direction every evening, and with the same surreptitious intent, upon a day sky that never seemed to learn from the unbroken string of previous assaults. And with one sharp knock, the light went out, and post-concussive pin-prickle stars filled the darkness.

What sort of thing did they do, George and Marie? They did what the affluent did. Once, George and Marie went to a smoke-sculpture opening night; but Marie insisted their new carer (her name was Wharton, and she was a liquorice-skinned nineteen-year-old from Missouri) also came, and sat in an adjacent room with the sleeping Ezra in a portacot. George didn’t want to say ‘this is America’, because, as he discovered by prowling online, it turned out children were stolen almost as frequently in the US as elsewhere in the world. He’d had no idea. But why
should
he have had an idea, before this terrible thing happened to him? At any rate, he didn’t rebuke his wife’s over-protectiveness. In fact he was grateful for it, since it excused him from voicing his own persistent anxiety.

At the exhibition he got into conversation with a nicely plump woman called Stephanie: a round face white as marshmallow and two large green eyes. Her short hair had been treated with some genagent to give it a
very
striking gold-metallic texture. The news was playing, silently, across the fabric of her wraparound dress: quadpods stomping deliberately in amongst swarming crowds. George felt some click, some subliminal pseudoelectric spark between them as they chatted. For the first time in months – for, in fact, the first time since Ysabelle, on the mountain – it was the old excitement stirring. She chattered at his jokes; he leant in towards her. ‘So, you like the news? I do too!’ ‘How marvellous!’ At one point in the evening, whilst the artist expatiated about the precision required in nudging magnetized particulates in the holding field into exactly the right position, Marie caught George’s eye. He was standing next to this new woman, this Stephanie, and he smiled at his wife with a little flick of the head in his new friend’s direction. But Marie only scowled. After the artist had finished yapping, when people were circulating again, she came over to him.