“The thing about raster graphics,” Tariq was saying, “is that you can precisely manipulate an image by altering a single dot at a time—like when Elvis morphs into an ostrich, that sort of thing.” He halted, as if thinking about something entirely different, then said, “What they’d like to do with real people if they could.”
“They?” asked the Doll.
“Oh, I dunno,” said Tariq. “Governments, corporations—whoever runs the place, I guess, powerful people.”
Sydney seemed hushed and calm from Tariq’s apartment. He had promised to make her coffee there, but it was too hot; instead they had some chilled Pellegrino he found. They sat on bar chairs at an elevated table positioned in front of a window, watching Sydney’s snakeskin scales shifting and glinting far below, talking, sipping their drinks.
The apartment was in Potts Point, a short distance from Baron’s in the Cross but a world apart in every other way. They had walked down a road lined with luxury European cars, and then into a flash apartment block foyer. They had taken a coded-card elevator up several storeys, and when the lift stopped, the doors opened directly onto a recently refurbished apartment, white walled and Euro-applianced.
Tariq dimmed the lights that had sprung on as they entered, so that the main sources of illumination were the lights of Woolloomooloo, over which the apartment looked, and, beyond it, Sydney itself. Far below, trains occasionally rushed silently around like toys, making streams of moving light, while car headlights formed thick, dappling lines. It was so different from the rough, stinking streets the Doll knew—a city transformed; a seductive darkness confettied with spots of glowing yellow and white, here and there given more definite form by the red and blue signage of great corporations.
“It’s the way computers store an image as individual dots,” Tariq continued. The Doll looked away from the city and at him. He was moving his hands around, as though he were a blind man searching for something. “Each pixel is encoded in the computer’s memory as a binary digit—what we call bits.”
Despite trying to be interested, the Doll found what he said boring. It was as if he were compelled to say it, although it held no interest for him either. She looked back out over this strange, subdued Sydney. It all seemed so exquisite. The opera house’s school of dorsal fins sat on the breast of the city like a brazen brooch on an old tart; the illuminated iron work of the bridge looked like a filigree choker, and the tower blocks studded with their endless little lights reminded the Doll of the most intricate black lacework. She could have stared at this Sydney all night as Tariq continued on about his job in raster graphics, no longer full of fun, but for as long as he talked about his work a rather dull and serious man.
“Together all the bits make up a bitmap,” he went on. “I work on software to make better bitmaps to make better pictures. That’s raster graphics.”
“Bob Marley graphics,” joked the Doll, and he spoke no more about it.
What else did they talk about? Later, when the Doll tried to get a better idea of who Tariq had really been, she was unable to remember anything of interest. They talked about some serious things and some trivial things, some general things, some intimate things. Other than when he was talking about computing, he was easy to be with, that was all.
They decided to swap phone numbers. Tariq went searching for a piece of paper and returned with a takeaway menu, wrote a number on it in green felt pen, and passed it to the Doll. She was about to write hers down when he got up again, this time coming back with a mobile phone. It was an expensive looking unit.
“Cool, eh?” Tariq said, holding out a stainless-steel handset. “Got it in KL. It’s a Nokia P99 with an MP-3 player. It’s even got its own specially composed Yun Chung Hee mini-symphony ring tones.”
When the Doll made no reply, Tariq seemed lost in thought for a moment, as if unsure what to say next. He slid the Nokia P99 open and shut several times. Then he looked up and smiled at the Doll.
“Fuck Yun Chung Hee mini-symphonies. They sound like shit anyway. I found this great site for downloading music for call tones. You can be anyone.” He held the phone out in front of her and hit a button. “So, like, when my boss rings this is what happens.” And up came a short video of Gollum from Lord of the Rings while Tupac Shakur’s “Thugs Get Lonely Too” played as the ring tone.
The Doll laughed, because it was vaguely funny and because anything was better than raster graphics. She told Tariq her number and as he entered it he once more asked who she would like to be. The Doll didn’t know.
“You can be, like, rap or techno, you can be whatever.”
“Maybe classical,” the Doll said.
“Cool, classical,” said Tariq, who seemed somehow oddly impressed by such a bizarre call. “Wow.”
“Do they do, like, Chopin?”
Tariq asked her to spell it, stared at the phone screen a moment, then said, “There’s a heap of Chopin here—do you have a favourite? Otherwise every time you call it will be a Chopin concert.”
“A Nocturne,” the Doll said. “Find his Nocturne in F Minor.”
The phone chirruped as Tariq ran his thumbs over the keypad, then quickly took a photo of the Doll.
“Now watch—when you call, this is what happens.”
And on the phone’s screen up popped a photo of the Doll laughing and with it a tinny version of Chopin’s Nocturne in F Minor.
“You actually like that shit?” Tariq asked.
“Sometimes,” said the Doll.
Another hour passed pleasantly enough, but the Doll began to wonder what, if anything, was going to happen. It was nice, but that, apparently, was that. Perhaps he really was gay—she had, after all, met him at the Mardi Gras. ‘Just my luck,’ she thought as she stood up, apologised for having stayed so long and told Tariq she would head off.
She leant in and gave him a hug and a kiss on the cheek to say goodbye. She envisaged the kiss and embrace of friendship. It would be firm, warm, fleeting. It would be final. Only it didn’t feel like goodbye.
An ocean wind rose from the harbour, shuddered the apartment’s window glass, and then the night was once more still.
24
Tariq rolled over to the side of the large bed on which they both now lay naked and took out a small square plastic bag from his trousers on the floor. Getting up onto his knees, he opened the bag’s zip lock, then with one hand pushed his erect cock down so that it was roughly level, and with his other hand ran an unruly line of white powder up its shaft, losing much of the powder in the process. With a finger he shaped the powder into a white windrow as best he could, then passed the Doll a fifty-dollar note.
The Doll rolled the note, put an end in one nostril, and flattened the other. She leant down close to his cock and snorted back. Almost immediately she felt her jaw tighten and her teeth pull together, and then … so strong, she felt, so strong and so fresh, and so good.
She fell back onto the bed. Tariq leant over her and ran circles of coke around her nipples. He kissed her, then, after snorting the powdery circles, softly drew each nipple in turn into his mouth and ran his tongue around and around them. He sat back up and handed the small plastic bag to the Doll. There was still a good amount of coke left, more than a normal deal.
“Keep it,” Tariq said.
“Sure?” the Doll asked.
“Sure,” Tariq said. “Plenty more where that came from.”
The Doll thanked him and threw the little bag on top of the pile that was her clothes.
As Tariq then lightly licked the cleft from her anus to her labia, as he gently took her lips into his mouth and then found her clitoris with his tongue tip, the idea that she had a soul, that a soul had innate dignity and needs as fundamental and profound as the body, and that some force compelled souls to find others in order not to perish—that idea would have been for the Doll unbearable. People fucked, that was all.
The Doll’s head rose and then fell back onto the pillow. Her legs stiffened. She made a sma
ll repetitive moaning noise. She frantically pushed Tariq’s head out of her thighs as she began coming for the first time and the swirling of his tongue tip around her clitoris became intolerable.
Then she was on her knees, her head resting in the pillow, pushing her arse up, for now she wanted him inside her. She reached between her legs, grabbed his still slightly powdery cock, and pulled it into her while pushing herself back onto him.
They began to rock back and forth, each to a slightly different yet related rhythm. Like their dance, they were spiralling out and then back in to meet each other in strange, shared sensation: unrepeatable, unsayable, her cunt tingling from the coke remnants on his cock, his thumb deep in her puckering arse as if it were a juicy orange, and the Doll felt her body respond as a beast being ridden in a rodeo. As she bucked beneath him, Tariq ran his other hand up her side. For a moment he snared one of her swaying breasts in a loose hold, and she felt it swooning in his palm, her erect nipple brushing back and forth between his forked fingers. Then his hand found her lips and the Doll kissed his fingers, his rough fingers, his gentle fingers, and she took them into her mouth and imagined they were his cock.
She could feel him coming up so deep inside her, in her and in her mouth. For a moment they formed one strange animal pushing back and forth in wild movement and rhythm neither his nor hers, but theirs. They were sweating so much now their bodies slid back and forth on the wet film that arose between them, riding their own moisture as if it were a wave. For a moment the Doll felt that she was that wave, that she was dissolving into pieces that were floating around that strange apartment, that there were no longer two bodies, but only sensations that belonged to them both. The Doll was no longer sure if it was her cries or his, if what she was feeling was his cunt or her cock as she heard the sound of his panting and her moaning at one with the drone of the Sydney night.
At the last moment Tariq pulled out, climbed up her body, and brought his cock up to her face. The Doll noticed how the veins in it glistened. Way above she glimpsed his face, no longer charmingly boyish, but full of blood, twisted in a violent grimace, and the savagery of his desire momentarily frightened her. His body jolted, tears of come ran down her cheeks, and from Tariq’s lips she heard an odd, not entirely pleasant sound like the groan of a dead man.
25
The sun pressed on the Doll’s face, at first curious, then insistent, and finally with a hard heat that felt like a burning flame. She got up, trying to stay asleep, and went to the bedroom window. The glass of the Deutsche Bank tower block was reflecting the rising sun as a golden fireball straight into Tariq’s bedroom. It was blinding. It was as if the sun had fallen to earth and Sydney was being consumed by a brilliant gold flame.
With screwed-up eyes and groggy hands the Doll groped around until she found a toggled cord and somewhat awkwardly dropped what turned out to be Venetian blinds. She flopped back into bed and rolled onto her stomach. Even through the blinds she could feel the sun’s power pressing into the room, only now it was a pleasant sensation, falling onto her back and warming her weary body, and even without Temazepam she quickly fell back asleep.
When the Doll next woke and looked across the bed there was no one there. The room was unpleasantly warm and airless. Perhaps there had been no one there before. It was hard to know. But it was clear now: she was alone in the bedroom.
“Tariq?” the Doll said and then, a little louder, so that he would hear her wherever he was, she called, “Oh God, Tariq. What a night.”
There was no reply.
The bedroom was an inferno. The Doll found her watch. It was almost midday. Her mouth felt furry. She could feel the dull, unpleasant sensation of dried sweat on her skin. The sheets smelt. She smelt.
The Doll got up. Naked, she wandered through the large apartment. There was no one anywhere. There was nothing personal anywhere. It was featureless, as if it had only just been moved in to. Or borrowed. It added up to nothing beyond an idea of taste.
Unlike her flat, in Tariq’s apartment everything was new, and the appliances were all of the best quality. Everything was white, as white as sugar. The walls were white. The wooden Venetian blinds were white-limed. The furniture, the fittings, the frames of pictures were variations of white: ivory, chalk, bone. On a white dining table there was an artfully placed vase with chocolate-coloured roses, but it was as if this was only there to accentuate the whiteness of everything else.
The apartment seemed made not for life, but for photographs in decorating magazines of the type that cluttered the Doll’s flat in teetering piles. The apartment was everything the Doll desired, but it no longer seemed to her desirable at all. It felt, if anything, slightly weird. Still, she told herself, disturbed at how all that she wanted now seemed somehow so offputting, it’s a cool place.
“It is, it is, it is,” she muttered to herself; but deep within her heart—which had fallen and risen with the dramas of a hundred renovating makeovers and a thousand special magazine features—there arose a new unworded suspicion that taste might just be an evasion of life.
She needed to think of something else and she found it in a note that had been left on a smoked glass table. It read simply:
Back soon.
T xxx
She washed in an ornate white-tiled bathroom beneath an elaborate shower that had not one but multiple heads nippling a long pole, so that water flowed in tender thrusts from several angles over her weary body.
After, she went out on the small balcony. There were several grey navy ships berthed in Woolloomooloo Bay, their PAs occasionally sounding a desultory sentence, rasped and choked, that twanged around the bay like a rubber band. She looked out over Sydney Harbour, and thought how it really was a beautiful city, and she felt lucky to live where she did. But she couldn’t rid herself of an odd unease.
She went back inside.
“Tariq?” she called. “Tariq?”
She felt a little jumpy. Below Tariq’s note the Doll wrote:
Had to fly. Call you soon.
And following his example she signed herself simply with the capital letter of her name:
Gxxx
Though it was hot she shivered. She found her handbag, stashed the coke away, and to steady herself dropped a Stemetil and a Zoloft. It was all good. Then the Doll dressed and left.
26
Before her macchiato was ready to take away, the police had begun arriving. At first the Doll wasn’t really aware of anything loud or dramatic but the opposite: a lessening of noise, of traffic—an eerie, spreading peace. The radio in the café, formerly a burr lost in the noise of the city, seemed to be growing in volume.
The radio said: “Can anyone explain why we let them in? Can you?”
The Doll was humming “Crazy in Love”, and her belly gave a little flip when she thought back on Tariq’s head between her legs. She closed her eyes: she could smell his musky odour, even feel him sweetly pressing inside her still.
“Short mac!” a waiter cried. Her eyes jolted open to see police swarming around the apartment block where she had spent the night with Tariq, and blocking off the street between the apartment building and the café in which the Doll now waited.
Outside no cars moved. Uniformed police were running up barricades of fluttering blue and white plastic streamers. Paddy wagons, trucks, a police bus had appeared as if by magic. Men in black uniforms with helmets and bulletproof vests and automatic rifles were running into positions behind parked cars, skips, the corners of buildings. It was like a war. Whoever the enemy was, it was clear they were in the apartment block the Doll had just left.
Inside the coffee shop, people were at first excited, and also a little frightened, particularly after a cop came in and spoke to them. He told them that no one was to leave until they were given the all-clear. He said there was nothing to worry about, but that everyone had to keep away from windows. Well away.
The cop turned on his heel and left. There rose in his wake a low murmur of speculation
. A waiter claimed to have heard from friends in the force that a man had taken his family hostage and was threatening to kill them. The Doll overheard a woman say it was well known that a prominent drug dealer used an apartment in the building, and that this was some sort of bust. A few were convinced they had found more bombs and some moved as far back into the bowels of the café as they could in case one went off. An older man turned to the Doll and said it was a terrorist they were after.
“They should shoot the bastards,” the Doll said, because it’s what you said, and in so far as she thought about such things, it was more or less what she thought. But all she could feel was Tariq’s flesh on her flesh, his arms around her body, his smell and his touch and his sound. It was as if his body had imprinted itself so strongly on the Doll’s that he was still there with her.
Finally people grew bored. Some began talking once more about the Mardi Gras and what they had got up to. Others went back to reading another of the endless supplements that fell like so many dead foetuses out of the Sunday papers. The Doll found the takeaway menu in her handbag and went to call Tariq to see what he might know, but his number rang out to a voicemail box that had no message, only a bleep. She hung up.
The Doll sat down at a table, drank her coffee, ordered another and drank that too, while flicking through a newspaper that was lying there. She skipped past the front pages linking the bombs at Homebush with an al-Qa’ida website threat to bomb Sydney, ignored a story on a gruesome child murder, a feature about another attempt to bomb the Australian embassy in Jakarta, a found dog, a lost British backpacker, until at last she stopped at a spread about Princess Mary and her son.
The Unknown Terrorist Page 7