Solomon's Keepers (31 page)

All your life you’ve been running. You couldn’t reach Brett, you weren’t strong enough, weren’t fast enough. All that running, all that work was just to bring you to this? Are all those hookies still attached to this? There is only one thing to do, one last experience to bring to them, one last act of education that you can perform.

‘Rees, can you hear me? Rees, this is Eva.’

Wow! – Still a shock factor left in the cans. Her voice in your ears, that familiar timbre, its warm freight of music, syllables like carriages, memories disembarking in your mind; the smile, the smells, the press of her, the world she brings, the feeling of her…

But now a rolling and tumbling off Solomon. On to the thoughts like a cat on a mouse that can suddenly run. It’s not what it seems. It’s not her – and what if it is? She’s lying. She wants to confuse you, to wreck your last chance to deliver. Bitch! She knows it’s the big one, the mission, the moment, and she wants to fuck it up. All over again. Another fuck up. Too little too late, too weak, too indecisive…But you’d need to have interest, excitement, desire – and something inside you has gone on strike. There isn’t enough meaning or worth or truth in the whole world to stop now. Layers of nothing. Leave it to the Sensomondo jerks and the next generation of idiots. It has all been a waste. It lacks integrity. You can feel yourself giving up on it – stick with the plan – better to die. The right thing. Didn’t need to think before and don’t now. Need to act. Don’t even need to land. Waste of time. You tilt the stick forward and take her down. The night sky comes suddenly alive as buffeting wind. The chopper lurches.

‘I don’t have much time now – just a few words – a few words in the middle of all this other noise. I hope you can hear me, Rees. I’m sitting here with all these computer screens going and televisions, telephones, and wires everywhere…and these people in uniform who I don’t know. And I’m wondering what has just happened and watching you out there. I don’t really know what to say…I thought you were dead. All that time. They told me you had been killed. And I believed them. But they were wrong, Rees and I found out the truth. You were alive. Can you hear me Rees?

You know how you felt you’d let Brett down, how you could have saved him – well now I’m hoping I have a chance to save you and I won’t let you down.

Brodzky told me about the chip. He said that they can turn it against you. That it’s making you turn against yourself, making you want to destroy yourself. Is that right, cariño? Is that what this is?’

You turn aside and headbutt the doorframe – once, twice. You can feel the warmth of blood streaming down your forehead. You tell yourself this is a joke but you’re not laughing. There are tears in your eyes. There is no point. There is nothing but dying. There is nothing but the decline, the realisation and the ultimate death. The brave thing, the urgent thing, the only thing is to bring that on. This brings it all together, makes it all worthwhile. Service. Only you can do it. The moment has come. There is no point; the whole of life is a continuous thread of futility. Let’s not dignify the thing with any more bullshit about where it might lead or at what point some fucking sense in it all emerges. There is only the choice of where to cut it.

You’ve fucked it all up – you don’t know…how much – it could have been a wonder – the best the world could offer –something beautiful – a bridge…but it’s no good now – it’s too late ‘I’m fucked – get yourself another guy – one that’s got a whole brain of his own – one who hasn’t screwed around with his mind – one with some sense – a future – one who you can trust…’

Of course. Good point, she’ll have been fucking someone else, right? Of course she will…What’s that?

‘You went away, remember? You left me. Then I thought you were dead. But now I’m trying to reach you again.’

Well you’re crazy then – why have you come back? How does that make any sense? Stupid cow!

‘I’ve stopped thinking, Rees. I’ve stopped trying to make sense of all this craziness. It made sense to me when we were together, didn’t it?…Didn’t it for you?’

Forget the clever bitch. Do it for your mother and father, waiting at home, believing you dead. Do it for Brett. This is your destiny. Your task will be done, is done, in his name. Use this moment. Draw together all the rest – all the striving, the training, the running. It leads to this. Completes. All your useful work is done. The power and the glory is theirs. Your time is done. There is a beautiful possibility at last, a final release, the closure you deserve. The right and only thing. So easy to drive it to oblivion. The wind is flinging you ahead of the storm, down to the blackness, the welcoming well of the sea.

Picture the quiet millions below, the tiny spheres of their helmets where all that consciousness is housed, and all the shared experience – are they getting THIS that you are seeing and doing? Down there it is all being played out. All the hanging on, suckling, living off your senses, your power, a push away from the experience of death. You feel the energy draining away. There is no need to fight on. The lights on the horizon are the merest filament of gold and will soon be gone.

It’s been too long. Everyone has their threshold. All the striving, all the training, all the anticipation can’t take away the human weakness. Brett in the water, only a reach away. They’re all waiting down below. You’re going down. You MUST go down. You are happy to end it now.

‘So listen to me, Rees. They keep telling me facts but I never got the truth. I should never have believed them, not when they said you were dead…not when they said I couldn’t reach you. I should never have believed them because those lies controlled me and now I have stepped beyond their lies to find you and if they say that this thing can’t be beaten – then I don’t believe that either. It will try to take you away, will take you away if you let it, but you can beat it.’

Still trying to fool you – easy to play games – conniving cunt trying a last trick.

‘Rees, I’ve tried to make sense of things too and it doesn’t work. Losing you and then finding you again – sharing your senses for an hour or two here and there while you…mess around. It doesn’t make any sense. And all the time wanting you back. Can you hear me, Rees? The only thing I know is that you’ve been running away too long.’

Lips moving. No new sound. The darkness of the river swelling below. A grave of black mud. This life is over; maybe she’s there in another. Don’t wish for another. Get this one over.

Rees, don’t try to make sense of what I’m saying, don’t fit it into anything. There’s no pattern, no logic no instruction to act on. Just listen. Okay, Rees? If this thing can store your experience and use it against you, if it can warp the pattern of your thinking, use your organising mind against you, then…don’t think any more. Brodzky said it was like a stationmaster – running everything to its rules and timetables. I’m a biologist and I say human life isn’t like that. We’re way bigger than that. We’re a billion years older than that. Listen to your heart.

Yeah right, let’s go for sentiment and weakness and indecision where there should be logic and ACTION.

‘Rees? Are you there? I…I love you, Rees…I love the real you, in real life…don’t make me lose you twice. Once you said to me that all you wanted was to be worth something to someone you cared about. You’re worth everything to me, Rees. Don’t try to reason when reason is stacked against you. Act on your deepest feelings. We have to sort this out and the world needs you for that. The world needs you, I need you, darling, and our children will need you.’

What? A surge of nausea has you retching. Fuck them; fuck them all with their money and their promises and their lies. You can taste the earth in the water. Below in the darkness the same earth and water and the same stench that has never left you is waiting. Brett, Martinez…Matzov: Like any cause, some will die for it, some will rise above it. Very very occasionally you actually can make the choice yourself.

The headset comes off in a single wrench; a sharp pull of the handle has the door open and lets in the snatching wind and the mad churn of the rotors. You are free of the seatbelt. A stab on the pedal to turn the nose and a last glimpse of the altimeter whirring to zero.

You can’t see but you can smell the water, close now, below. The rotor wind howls in your ears as you gather yourself in the doorframe, take a last deep breath and drop.

At the edge of intensity the rules break down. A few seconds are an eternity – sliding between darkness and light. In that space inside space and time inside time the world rushes up in an instant but a lifetime unravels. Life not as a sequence but a pattern, instantly intelligible in its entirety. No coming, no going; no me, no you; only being in shades of love and fear.

Eva has broken down into sobs, she can’t speak, she doesn’t know if he has heard her, understood what she’s said. She daren’t look at the faces around her. She feels she’s let them down, babbled only nonsense when sense was needed – let herself down. She has no more to give. The electronics and the voices are a hum in the background. She watches on the huge television screen as the news pictures track the chopper. There, in the middle of the screen the blurry dragonfly slows, shadow in shadow, its tail sinks and it starts to bank, to roll over. Time stops and the chopper body hangs in the dark fuzz of the screen. In the madness of her desperation, she wants to believe she can see something separating from the fuselage before it hits the water, a smaller shadow, stiff like a coffin, entering feet first into the water. All she is sure of is the rotors threshing for several dying swimming strokes before the screen goes orange and the helicopter spouts black smoke and scraps. No one speaks. The TV picture is unsteady now. The TV news commentator is loud but around her the voices are suddenly solemn. No one is moving. Shaw has an arm around her. What’s he saying? What has she done?

The shock of the surface unlocks your heels and has your legs cycling as you plunge through water that stabs ice into your body but boils at your ears. Down through the layers and years until your movement slows to a foetal tread and then buoyancy is remembered and the slow ascent begins, an unhurried paddling and arms trailing like angel wings, rising through bubbles to the vague light above.

The world you break into at the surface is gasoline and salt water, belts of black smoke and the sounds of breathing and burning.

When you turn, arms pumping now against the cold, another blur looms; a boat and a figure reaching out of the shadows towards you. Familiar bulk, familiar voice: ‘About fucking time. You done fooling around, Candy Ass?’

He reaches out to touch you. He’s pulling you gently, examining your face and trying to read your state of mind. You okay? He’s looking you over as he pulls you steadily. But he doesn’t pull you out. He just checks you over quickly and says ‘I’ll take this,’ pulling off the balaclava. You watch as he takes out a lighter and holds a flame to the front of the hood. You pull yourself up to the rim as though to swing in but he shakes his head. The KomViva logo buckles and burns. He lets half of it go up and then shakes it and bangs the flame out in the bottom of the boat. He’s holding the smoking remnant up.

‘All that’s left,’ he says. ‘Rees, buddy, you look like shit but I’d say you can swim. So now’s your chance if you want it, to take off for good. And I’ll just say we’re even. If it’s what you want I’ll run you clear and then fuck off – and – this time – stay out of trouble. Or – I’ll take you back and you can put that bastard Matzov that just tried to kill you behind bars and do something useful for yourself, for the world and that girl that seems to think you’re worth chasing through hell and high water. What’s it gonna be?’

But you’re not listening any more. You’re rerunning what you think you heard from Eva. The world has changed.

‘Take me home.’

His big mitt reaches out and you clasp hands. He hauls you in and then guns the engine. The city swings around. Somewhere in the thickening atmosphere you can still hear rotors whirling. Your vision steadies. You feel elated. The city shines in blurred purple and orange along the shore. What a ride! Something has shifted in your mind – the relief has you laughing and the laugh turns into a cough. You turn to spit a stream of black muddy water back into the river. All the running is over. All the moments, the living in the moment, the creating of moments…is over. There’s a new responsibility now. The horizon moves on the swell. The river will soon be busy with craft – spotlights, spray, fire-fighters. The distant bank is blue sirens. The sound of a crowd carries in like a tide; a wave of attention, and behind it so many disparate lives and loves, so many purposes, so many fragile threads of truth and beauty waiting to entangle the world in exuberant possibilities.

Author’s note

I sincerely hope you enjoyed this book. If you believe it’s worth sharing, would you take a moment to let your friends know about it? Nothing beats a friend’s recommendation.

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