by Warren Ellis
The chaos outside sounded like a flock of tornadoes all touching the earth at once. Everyone in the building was throwing themselves outside into the storm. Adam had a sudden vision of lemmings dressed up like cliché Midwestern farmers, hurling themselves into a twister. Comedy cinema suicide. He chuckled a little as he sidled into the abandoned medical storeroom, lifting a part-drunk water bottle off the countertop on his way. It was a nice thought to end on. He closed the storeroom door behind him.
Bouncing the bottle between his hands, Adam scanned the shelves. He was shopping, he told himself. Nothing more important than browsing the aisles at a supermarket. Some of the names on the labels meant nothing to him. He picked up one or two, to discover they were trademarked terms for medications he knew by original or generic names. Nothing useful. Light sleeping pills here, levelers for bipolar disorder there. He stretched up on his tiptoes to peer at the highest shelves.
There it was. Something he’d heard and read of, in the same way one hears and reads of a great band who never plays your town. Adam reached out for the bottle and then sat on the floor with it and his stolen water, with his back to the door. He read the tiny print on the back of the bottle’s label as if it were the sleeve notes to a rare vinyl album. Not, it occurred to him, that anyone really wrote sleeve notes anymore. He knew, from long website essays, that sleeve notes had pretty much gone away by the end of the eighties. Adam searched for the word to describe the nostalgia for things you never knew. He was sure there was one, and that he’d once known it. Nostalgia for a word you once knew. Adam chuckled again, and forced the childproof lid off the plastic canister of pills.
Saudade? No, but it was similar. Adam cast around in his memory as he shook some of the contents into his palm. Red capsules. Sleeve notes were an important thing, he decided. They came from a time when music had something to say, and was supposed to mean something. Even the meaningless and indecipherable stuff, like prog rock, had something to say about aesthetic and form. It was an intensely civilized thing, the provision of sleeve notes. What was wrong with him, that he’d thought it was okay to live in a world without sleeve notes?
Adam ate six of the capsules and washed them down with a slug of water. The water was a little warm, and the mouth of the bottle tasted faintly of lipstick.
When was the last time he’d tasted lipstick? Adam paused, bottles in his lap, to hunt for it for a moment. A year? Probably a couple of years. It was different for a while, when he changed jobs. The surge of enthusiasm, the sudden lightness of a new life had made him more willing to take small chances and engage with people. It had, he reflected, probably made him more fun to be around. For a short period. It had definitely been a couple of years. He hadn’t noticed, it seemed. Maybe everyone else had. Maybe everyone else saw that he had the fog of the abyss around his shoulders and kept their distance, and he really was just the last one to see it.
That said, Adam acknowledged with a shrug and a wry smile, Nanfrid was also right. He just wasn’t very attractive. He shook out and ate another six Seconal, drank them back with the water. He shyly traced his tongue over his lips afterward, to taste the lipstick again, with slow consciousness.
Sehnsucht. That was the word, wasn’t it? Unusually short for a German compound word with a complex meaning. Nostalgia for a distant country to which we have never been, but which nonetheless may be home. An intense yearning for a comforting alien perfection. Lipstick traces with no owner. Adam turned the word over in his head, as the taste faded on his tongue. Another sad futurist, he thought, trying to summon an ideal world from its island moorings in tomorrow. Ridiculous way to live.
He wondered why he was eating the capsules six at a time. He knew from school that six was a perfect number, though he couldn’t for the life of him remember why. He swallowed another six. It took two sips of water to get them down, this time. He supposed his body was getting sluggish. God knows it was more comfortable, sitting on the floor and leaning against the door, than it had any right to be. This was, he decided, really the most pleasant time he’d had since arriving in Normal Head. Possibly the most pleasant time he’d had this year. A quiet room. Nobody watching or listening. Adam could find it in himself to feel bad for the people outside this room. Nobody outside this room would ever again be alone in the way that he was alone in that moment. Nobody was ever going to be safe again. The tipping point had been found and operated. He didn’t find that these conclusions were especially affecting his mood. They were just there.
Sitting there, he conceived of the notion that a good futurist should know when to quit. A good futurist should know when the game is over, and bail out. The game he helped invent. What the hell else can you do, when there’s no future left to forecast and nothing to strategize for or against? A done deal. The end of history.
Adam ate some more capsules. He wasn’t sure how many he’d had, but his intent was to swallow them until he couldn’t swallow any more. He had the feeling he hadn’t taken enough yet, but he couldn’t remember how many he’d taken, so “enough” was turning into a bit of a bullshit metric. He swore he could hear thunder outside. Maybe a real storm had touched down. He swallowed a couple more. Swallowing was getting hard now. He dropped his hands in his lap. His legs were wet. Adam leaned his head down, which was a project in itself at this point. The water bottle hadn’t spilled. He was amused to discover that he’d pissed himself without noticing.
“Fuck you all,” he muttered. “I piss on all of you on behalf of the future.”
Thunder rolled. It was a lovely sound. The only thing he was missing was some music, and thunder was close enough. Adam closed his eyes and listened to the invisible storm.
* * *
Ten days later, Adam was still furious. No bastard had told him Normal Head had emergency room facilities on the grounds. He ached from asshole to breakfast-time from the stomach pump, his throat was raw from intubation, and his arms were still livid from the shots of God-knows-what that they’d fired into him. He had sore spots all over the rest of his body, and he felt like he was still learning to walk again. Adam was determined not to apologize to Dickson for the split lip he’d given the orderly at some point over the last few days. He felt sure that Dickson had done something to deserve it, even though he couldn’t prove it, and was secretly quite proud that he’d somehow summoned the strength to cause it. Most of the time he didn’t have the energy to claw his way through standing air.
Dickson was with him now, patiently accompanying Adam on an endless shuffle toward Dr. Murgu’s office. Every now and then Dickson would turn those hurt puppy eyes on Adam. Adam ignored them as completely as he could. Adam wanted to strangle him. Wanted to dig his fingers into that chubby little neck until he found something hard that he could break.
They reached Murgu’s door. Dickson tapped on it and said to Adam, “I’ll be back for you when you’re done, okay? It’s not too bad out on the patio today. And people have been asking after you.”
“Fuck off,” Adam said.
Dr. Murgu opened the door, and Dickson left, chewing his split lip.
“Adam,” Dr. Murgu said, “I do wish you hadn’t said that to poor Dickson.”
“I blame him,” Adam said. “He’s been fucking haunting me since I got here. It must have been him who found me.”
“Actually, it wasn’t. It was him who carried you to the emergency medical facility. He collapsed, himself, a little while later. He’d been overdoing it, and hadn’t slept in too long. Come in.”
She put a hand to Adam’s elbow, the way Dickson would, and guided him over to the chair in measured steps. Adam winced from a dozen complaining components as he sat. She took her own chair and her clipboard and looked at him with a smile that radiated, in Adam’s view, a horrible pity.
Dr. Murgu paused and sighed to see him. She inhaled, then, through her nose, sharply, as she straightened her spine. Adam saw that she wasn’t looking forward to this.
“So,” she said. “I don’t know how muc
h you’ve been told. It was close. I was told that another ten minutes and you would have been dead.”
“Better luck next time, I suppose.”
“Actually, the attending doctor said you were quite bad at it, even for a first-timer, and should take up another hobby. She suggested…” Dr. Murgu peered at her notes. “I think this says ‘violent masturbation.’ With an additional note indicating that she’s prepared to study that. Medically, I presume.”
Adam almost smiled.
“You were doing so well, Adam. Given the condition that led to you being sent here, and the way you first presented to me, and then the whole thing with Mansfield. The meds and the nutrients had you functional so fast. I mean, you were far from fixed, as it were. But I really had high hopes. There was only one thing that was bothering me, that I had concerns that we might not get to quickly.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah. The inciting event. I had a feeling that you might not have been able to talk about it even after you were on a steady keel in other respects. Contrary to what others may have said to you, we really don’t like the idea of people having to live in Staging for the rest of their lives.”
“Some of them seem to like it,” Adam said. “Colegrave is positively thriving over there. I think Jasmin Bulat likes it here too. Being close to the forest.”
“Colegrave will never be mentally robust enough to live in the outside world. If he wasn’t producing work from Staging, his employers and sponsors would long ago have cut off the funding for him to stay here. And he permanently occupies an off-site habitation, which means one less person we can comfortably cycle into Staging. For every long-term Staging resident, the Director has to go hunting for more money to build more micro-homes and clear more land to set them down in, and connect them to water, internet, and electricity. Yes, I know those buildings can generate a lot of that, but it’s not perfect, and health guidelines mean we have to connect them up. This isn’t a magic village. Everything costs money.”
“I suppose so,” Adam said.
“Sad but true,” Dr. Murgu said. “Jasmin’s a different case entirely. In a lot of ways, she’s healthier than Colegrave will ever be. But her depression is close to unmanageable. She’s much too functional to live anywhere but Staging, but living anywhere other than Staging would, we all agree, kill her within a month. It’s horrible, but we can’t take the risk of releasing her. Again, we’re all lucky she can produce useful work for her people outside.”
Adam didn’t know how to respond to that, or if he should, or if he even cared.
She watched his face.
“Adam, I’m being direct with you. Staging is sounding good to you right now. You need to know that you are months away from Staging, now. At best. There is one thing I can put in your file that might, might speed that process up. Because it might give me the tools I need to start helping you get better. I’m not bullshitting you or trying to trick you. It’s my professional opinion that this thing needs to happen, and my professional experience telling me that the people I report to, who control the pace at which everything happens here, need to see this in your file. Do you believe me?”
“Sure.”
“We need to talk about Windhoek, Adam. You came apart in Rotterdam, but the damage was done in Windhoek, in Namibia. I want you to tell me, as best you can, what happened there that hurt you.”
Tears prickled Adam’s eyes. “I don’t want to.”
“I know. But I think you have to, now. I think now is the absolute best time to do it.”
“Has this room been cleaned? I mean, of insects or anything else? Did you see them do it?”
“This room has been cleaned five times since we found out, Adam. I saw the first, third, and final cleanings. You should feel good about that. Everything’s fine here now.”
“Okay. Okay.”
“Why were you in Windhoek, Adam?”
“Okay.” Adam rubbed his face with both hands, hard enough to make his skin sting. “I’ve been doing field research on subjects around ad hoc community generation in urban contexts. It’s not new. People have been picking at it since the days of flash mobs. Occupy Wall Street was a thing, too. European protesters using BlackBerry Messenger to organize. Every now and then, some interested party will drop researchers into the field to see how it’s all changing and evolving. Usually, for me, it’s people who want to see how groups come together, how they can be supported, why the groups have the lives of mayflies, what kind of digital systems they use. You get the idea. One time I had to follow protesters for a company who wanted to put a mesh networking app on their phones so the protesters could crowdfund health insurance payments on the go. Insane.”
Adam found a little chuckle at his calling that insane.
“Is that what you were doing in Windhoek?” Dr. Murgu asked.
Adam’s little chuckle died as a rasp in his throat.
He took a deep breath.
“There’s been a slow burn of unrest in Namibia for the last few years. A protester got shot dead the other summer. The elections that winter didn’t do much for it. High unemployment, lots of weird sociopolitical tensions. There’s a whole subsection of youth who were orphaned during their war for independence, and they weren’t being looked after by the state. The U.S. State Department calls it a ‘critical crime threat location,’ which always kind of stuck in my head as a great piece of, you know, official language.”
Adam paused. Dr. Murgu said, “Namibia’s one of those places I know next to nothing about.”
“I sometimes think,” Adam said, “that places like Namibia are one of those dark funhouse mirrors for Americans. Americans are all about ‘supporting our troops,’ until those troops come home, and the best those troops can expect is some idiot mouthing ‘Thank you for your service.’ Because the moment they come home, they’re abandoned and forgotten by the system. Unless there’s a VA hospital available to kill them in. Now look at Namibia. Those kids should have the trump card. The children of fallen independence fighters. Any of us would say that they should be sitting on fucking thrones. But it’s America’s abandonment of its troops multiplied by a hundred. Makes me wonder how the children of the Confederate and Union Armies got along after the Civil War. Probably not much better, I suppose.”
“So it was dangerous in Windhoek?”
“Petty street crime, mostly. Even the street protests are largely unarmed beyond sticks and stones and whatever they can pick up along the way.”
“And you were there to watch the protests?”
“Internet access in Namibia mostly comes through other countries, and there are still a lot of GSM phones. The way people use phones, texts, messaging, and email … Well, anyway, there were interested companies. You get a lot of user experience designers interested in this stuff, which always seems odd to other people. I was there to hang around the city for a few days, talk to people, watch how communication happened on the street.”
“So you were in the middle of a protest.”
“The last night I was there. A big one kicked off in central Windhoek. It was, um…”
“Don’t disappear into visualizing it, Adam. Keep talking to me. Tell me what it was like. Hot? Cold?”
“Foggy. Very foggy night. The fog blows in off the desert, I think. I’m told it’s been getting worse over the last few years. Big fogs at the wrong time of year. Usual story. City gets smacked by fog at an unseasonable time of year, and some idiot politician says, ‘Ho ho, it’s cold in summer, so much for this global warming people talk about, eh?’ But, yeah. Cold and foggy. Which never stopped any decent protester. So people were out on the streets in force.”
“What was their mood? Angry? Aggressive?”
“Angry, sure. You don’t organize a protest unless you’re pissed off at some level. Also nervous. There’d been a lot of talk about the Windhoek City Police falling back in favor of the Special Field Force, and they don’t have a great history when it comes to peacekeeping, understanding c
ity folk, or being smart enough to climb out of a paper bag without using guns. They wear masks. You’d be nervous.”
“I would be. Were you?”
“I was … edgy? I’d had a weird few months. Cryptic emails and subtweets about some of my old work. One of the other guys at the nonprofit I work for lost his shit about eight weeks before I went to Windhoek.”
Dr. Murgu looked at the top sheet of Adam’s file again, frowning. “Is he here?”
“No. He disappeared. Everyone thought he’d killed himself or was wandering the streets. Turned out he pulled a geographic. Attended some tiny conference in Mount Vernon, left all his stuff in the motel room, rented a car, and drove an hour up I-5 to the Canadian border crossing at Sumas. It’s another hour from there to Vancouver, and by evening he was on a plane to Holland, where waiting for him was a schizophrenic teenage girl who thought he was Nostradamus. There was no chance of getting him here, and by that point nobody was really that into the idea anymore. I understand he’s selling his blood for spending money at this point, but…”
“But,” Dr. Murgu said, with a gentle smile, “that’s not why we’re here today.”
“I guess not,” Adam said. “I was edgy. Something just felt wrong, and I couldn’t put a finger on it. General low-level anxiety, I suppose, would be a fair way to describe it.”
“You were in the middle of the protest,” she prompted.
“No, actually. I was on the edge of it, when it happened. The core of it was moving fast, and I’d come into the group from the wrong side. So, between the fog, and stragglers, and not knowing the streets that well, I was falling behind a little bit. I’m usually better with street layout. I usually plan better, I mean. I learn the layout off maps. But I wasn’t feeling that great, and there wasn’t signal to run a map app on my phone, and in any case taking an expensive smartphone out in that kind of place and situation is pretty stupid. I wasn’t quite bumping around, lost in the fog, but, you know … a bit. And … that’s when it happened.”