TWICE

by Susanna Kleeman

  ‘What did they cut off,’ I asked, nodding at the stump of his index finger, ‘how not to bullshit?’

  He laughed. ‘It talks.’

  We drove for ages beside a long sandstone cliff, him telling me about the old cargo. Slaves, leather, fur and swords from the north, gold and medicine from the south, from the rich coast jungles of what I’d know as Nigeria and Benin where the Atlantic cracked first and metal bubbled up to make powerful plants. Down there were ruined overgrown jungle cities no one excavates, massive earthworks, Jewish Africans in Indonesian fabrics playing Malaysian xylophones, south-east Asian palms and yams, mountains of pure gold. He told me about kola nuts from down there brought north by donkeys and later camels to stimulate the brains of pharaohs and emperors, ground up and mixed with South American cocaine to make a royal potion which became the basis of Coca-Cola.

  Cold bubbles I longed for in my throat.

  The sun began to wane, the feeling around us in the nothing changed. The blue went pale, the cliffs darkened, for the first time there were clouds, stretched out long at the horizon. The air became crisp. The men talked.

  ‘We’ll stop in a while,’ he said. ‘Something to eat.’ Flocks of birds flew overhead. ‘We won’t camp, not tonight. They want to head on. Make it past the mountain by tomorrow morning.’

  He whispered in my ear about the mountain: a huge solid block of iron in the gravel not far from here. A massive magnetic chunk whose force fritzed Don’s signal, wiped nanocams, bankcards, computers, a place where even compasses didn’t work. Natural defence and beyond it more defence: the big blank cam-free nothing of true desert where we could talk freely at last and he’d tell me everything, where people like Ahmed camped and shot down whatever came from land or sky.

  ‘Plenty goes on that you know nothing about. Everything, in fact.’

  We stopped at the end of the cliffs, got uncuffed from our guards, stayed cuffed together, got out of the jeep. I wrapped an invisible force round myself, separate from him. They made a fire in a sand hollow from a dry bush and snatches of yellow grass from the cliff side. The driver slept on cloth under the cliff shade, the old man got busy with pots and flour sacks. We pulled down our face cloths and drank water from a big plastic vat from the jeep roof.

  The men smoked. They had long thin fluttering hands. We stood cuffed together as light wind swirled sand round our ankles and canvas shoes. The whole ground moved in the wind when you looked. Coarse grains, small rocks. Unstable. The men had guns, long old-looking rifles slung round their shoulders.

  ‘Is this the Sahara? Who are these people?’ I said. The sun went down in red hazy clouds. Everything was changing. ‘Am I on drugs? Is this real? Where are we?’

  ‘This is the Sahara. It’s real. You can always tell,’ he said. ‘The tech will never match.’

  But was that true? Things had moved on without me realising, without most people realising, even him perhaps, it seemed.

  ‘Maybe we never escaped.’ He’d bruised and burnt me and it had hurt, but maybe these days you could feel pain and still be inside one of their concoctions. Maybe we were both still Don’s prisoners in headsets wounding each other in some bare cell.

  ‘Why did you pretend to be Chris? What do you want? How come you knew everything about Chris and me and Scritch? If nanocams then how come we could go anywhere in Britain and they didn’t find us till Barrow? Where’s Alan?’

  ‘Not here. Not yet. Get beyond your sulk. Have some faith.’

  I laughed and turned away.

  I built my wall higher and wouldn’t look at him. It got dark. They draped an itchy brown blanket round us and we sat cuffed by the fire under the massive black starry sky. We ate flatbread and dry salty cheese and drank very sweet black coffee poured into glass tumblers from a silver pot. My burn hurt. The moon was nearly full. The men muttered beside the flames and smoked. Birds flew overhead, outlined in the Milky Way.

  It got cold. We went back into the jeep with the blanket, still cuffed, me still not looking at him but using his heat. They didn’t bother cuffing us back to our guards. Jolting along in the empty desert at night: where were we going to run, where was I going to run with him chained to me? I fed the blanket between my cuff and the burn gauze. I slept a bit, we stopped a few times to wee and for the men to smoke. The sun rose through the windscreen: we were heading east. He traced the patterns on the blanket, told me the patterns meant things, were maps and coded info, like bibles, tarot cards, stone circles, cables knitted into fishermen’s jumpers: all transmitting bits of the knowledge.

  The blank grey desert was full of things, if you knew where to dig. Stone goddesses with multiple tits, guns, drugs, ancient books and maps preserved in the dryness. Gold panther harnesses, gold Bantama fetishes from the Ashanti kings of Ghana. Ghana, Guinea, New Guinea, Guyana: all the same word. It means ‘gold’. Pure, beautiful, untarnished. Made by the sun, formed in supernovas, like we all are, folded into planets, seeping up from cracks. Immortality is gold, it’s in the Hindu Vedas. And who wrote them and how old are they and where do they really come from? The old religion, Hinduism. Carved stories from before.

  We stopped by a brick well and an old rusty bathtub he said was for goats and camels to drink from. The men knelt and prayed and made a fire, gave us coffee, salty cheese and a kind of porridge. We sat on carpet and huddled in our blanket. The men smoked. A tiny lizard scurried by, left delicate marks in the sand.

  ‘Ten minutes in its body, the things you’d know,’ he said. He got up, shrugged off the blanket, did his fancy stretching and meditation with deadweight me cuffed to him. Everything was rough sand and stones, small shrubs, a few tiny white flowers, the large blue sky turning hot.

  The men drew deep cold water up from the well in buckets, poured it into their plastic vats, poured some into leather pouches and wooden bowls for us to drink. He poured his over my head, drenching me, sticking my white cotton clothes to me. I kicked him hard. He laughed.

  ‘Just cooling you down. Celebrating. We’re free. Past the wall now, the iron mountain. We can talk, don’t need to pinch. Don’s stuff doesn’t work here, no machines.’

  ‘What about the jeep?’

  ‘Just oil from their own wells and local mechanical parts.’

  But if Don was so big like he said then surely Don had mixed cams into every metal. How could we be sure about any machine, shouldn’t we be on camels, couldn’t they cam camels too? And one iron mountain couldn’t block off everything beyond it, after a while the force-field would weaken. Ahmed must control some very tiny area.

  ‘Don’t say his name.’

  ‘I thought no one can hear us now?’

  ‘They can hear us,’ nodding at the men who were looking at us. ‘There’s lots of mountains and lots of ore all round here. Easy to find deposits in deserts, use them like you have no clue. Flex back against Don. The silicon sand. And the salt—salt can do lots of things. So much salt here, dried out from way before when all this was under the sea.’

  Before or after it was green?

  ‘So glad, to be stuck in this with someone truly knowledgeable,’ I said. And since we were beyond magic mountains now, in the safe zone, where old Don could no longer hear us, I now wanted some basic info. Like: where were we going, who was Ahmed, where was Alan, what exactly were we up to, what was the basic gist of what was going on?

  ‘When we’re away from them,’ nodding at the men. ‘You never know what they might be able to understand. Have faith. Later.’

  I broiled next to him, watched the men lash the water-filled vats back up to the roof, sit down for one last smoke. Sean pulled me over to them, sat chatting with them.

  ‘They’re saying we won’t make it to A, that we’re not going there any more,’ he smiled.

  ‘Why are you smiling? So where are we going?’ Cold dread. The whole twist after all. I didn’t believe in ‘Ahmed’, didn’t like the sound of him. Yet now I wanted to get to him.

  ‘Don’t worry, that’
s just how they talk. Warding off the evil eye. To fool their spirits, the old-school Dons. You say you won’t make it somewhere so the spirits don’t step in to spite you. Pretty vicious, their spirits. Super keen to spite you. We’re going to A, don’t worry. Or else we’re not.’ He put his head close to me and whispered. ‘Their eyes and hands are telling me. Look, can you see the gestures?’ The men rolling their eyes, maybe doing things with the tips of their long fingers. ‘That’s what they use for the real stuff they want to smuggle past spirits and animals. Sign language, like your pinching. In the end it’s all the same.’

  We got back into the jeep, the driver came to sleep next to us in the back, Grandpa still in front. My guard drove.

  It got hotter. We drove and drove across a plain. For hours there was nothing except this plain. No mountains, no land going up at any point on the horizon. Just miles and miles of endless loop of stony identical desert, me sat there with those men round me, driving where? Once we saw a tiny tree.

  The sun was at its highest when a black blip appeared on the horizon.

  ‘A’s base? A mirage?’ I remembered that in deserts you saw things, especially when there was nothing and you were half-crazed like I was.

  But it was a stone, a huge black stone, the sole feature in the landscape.

  We drove towards it. He was chatting to the men.

  ‘They say it’s a holy place. Gramps wants to go there. A detour. It’s fine. You’ll see. We’re still en route. They got a different sense of time.’

  Did they? I didn’t like it but had zero say.

  The stone was big. It took a long time to reach it, the strange black blob growing and growing in front of us. It was weird: huge, smooth, jutting up through grey-yellow shingly sand in the middle of nowhere, the black mouth of a tunnel.

  About a hundred metres away they stopped the jeep. Gramps got out, went down on his knees in the shingle then sat back up doing weird clicks at the back of his throat and started wailing at the stone, praying to it.

  We got out too. You could feel the stone’s black heat bouncing at you, shimmering in the sun’s sizzle. Apart from that there was nothing at all on all sides, a light wind, huge horizons. The two guards sat next to Gramps facing the stone.

  We stood behind. I started to sweat. The sky blanched and began to drain of heat. A sudden fierce wind whipped sand at us so I had to turn away, crouch down, wrap the black cloth round my head.

  He drew me up. It had been hot, it was now cold, something was happening to the sky and our shadows, the edges blurring. It was early afternoon but night was coming everywhere, rosy sunset at three hundred and sixty degrees around us. Birds shrieked, the wind dropped, there was silence, an immense eeriness. I clutched him.

  IS OK as the sun changed.

  40

  ‘An eclipse,’ he said, the black moon eating the sun above the huge black stone in bare desert in front of us. The edges of everything caving in, the wrong world, my poor brain scabbling for sense in the odd light.

  ‘Is this real?’

  ‘I think.’ He shrugged. ‘We’re lucky. It feels real. To me.’

  Gramps wailed at the sky. The men knelt next to him. We stood behind them facing it. You shouldn’t look at eclipses full-on, I remembered, even if they weren’t real.

  ‘Don’t look. Feel it,’ the Sean said.

  We looked down, cuffed together, at our disappearing shadows, experiencing slow maths, the blot we’d chanced on, that he felt was real. He said. They must have known this would happen, have timed our journey, for some reason.

  ‘It’s weird, isn’t it,’ he said. ‘The sun and moon being exactly the same size.’

  ‘They aren’t the same size.’

  ‘But they look like they are, for us on Earth. That’s how total eclipses can happen, right? Don’t you think it’s an amazing coincidence: that the sun and moon can seem to match up so exactly? Given how you’ve been taught things are just random?’

  Out there in the eclipse in the desert by the rock my brain felt different: slow and empty. ‘What does it mean?’

  He smiled. ‘That something’s winking at us. Giving us a hint. That it’s all a set-up. That we’re in something that was made for us. The lovely patterns in the sky, encoded in pyramids, worked out ages ago, deliberately kept from you.’

  ‘How deep does this Don conspiracy go?’

  ‘You’d be surprised. Do you see? The bite in the apple, the forbidden knowledge? Their logo, from wayback. Maybe the sun and moon are the same size. Have you measured them recently? You take a lot of stuff on faith. But what do you really know? Above and beyond whatever we’re fucked up in?’

  Not much. It was getting darker. Grandpa went silent. We watched strange shadows on the shingle as the moon passed between us and the sun, disc on disc, the perfect match.

  ‘The peak,’ he said. ‘You can look, when it’s totally covered. It’s safe.’

  Or I’d go blind. But I trusted him: raised my head, looked straight up at the pure black hole of the moon blotting the sun above the rock, watched gold rays like petals flit and grow in the silence. The sky went darkest blue, or rather it went transparent: the stars and satellites peeping through the trick of daylight. Then it started to feel lighter.

  ‘The rebirth,’ he said. ‘Look down.’

  He looked down and pulled me down to the shingle with him, lay on his back on the ground with his eyes closed and soaked up the returning sun. I knelt there, looking at shadows and ripples. Grandpa sang, then made a fire and burnt sweet-smelling wood in a small pan and came round wafting it to each of us as the light and heat returned.

  ‘He’s really into it,’ I said.

  ‘He can feel it, every pore in his body, have that experience. While you trundle round with your measuring sticks.’

  Back to normal. Still slow and empty, I watched the men make tea by crumbling flakes off a dark brown block into a blue teapot strung over the fire, adding mint leaves and sugar dust from a white cone, then bubble the liquid from high into glass tumblers from their leather box, pass the hot tumblers round on a brass tray. We drank them. It got warmer. We ate bread and dates, the men smoked. They kicked the fire in and set up cover for themselves with tarpaulin and sticks in the shade of the jeep, rolled out blankets, lay down and slept.

  Sean took a smallish leather water bottle and he and I walked cuffed slowly in the heat together across the shingle towards the huge stone and its shade. To see it up close, have that experience. Full-on heat, banishing everything except each footstep. That landscape: like we were on the moon, no room for other thoughts, no room for anything except the returned sun and the stone and its power.

  ‘Is this natural?’ I said, about the stone.

  ‘I think.’

  I took the water from him and drank. ‘Are we on drugs? Am I on drugs?’

  ‘They don’t drug.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Why? With what?’ He shook his head. ‘Except everything’s a drug, has an effect. Even landscape, if you use it right. And the psychedelics we make in our own heads. Maybe it’s all one big trip.’

  We reached the stone and shade. I touched the hot smooth surface, felt its heat enter my body. ‘Iron?’

  ‘Basalt,’ he said. ‘Kind of black granite, cooked down deep as goo, pushed up and hardened aeons ago, witness to all sorts. A massive natural sundial, must have been. Knowledge comes from deserts: stars, metal deposits. The world stripped bare. Silicon desert. You see everything clear.’

  ‘So weird,’ I said, touching the burning stone.

  ‘It’s not that weird. Intrusions. Happen everywhere, all over the world, in London, but you don’t notice because in other places they’re covered in soil, grass, trees, car parks. Here there’s no disguise, no carbon. No place to hide in the desert.’

  His epic crap.

  ‘Where’s Alan?’ I said.

  He shrugged.

  ‘Alive?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘What do y
ou know?’ Since we were now alone out here in the desert, the men asleep behind us.

  He nodded at the stone, put finger to lips, as if the stone might be cammed, listening to us.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ I said.

  ‘Everything’s alive,’ yanking my cuff, pulling me on and away from the stone into its shadow, the stone now directly between us and the jeep and sleeping men, in a straight line, eclipsing them. In front of us: nothing, more bare plain, tiny rocks and sand crystals that could also be listening—why not?—the heat of the black thing behind us.

  ‘Why did you pretend to be Chris? How come you knew everything? Where’s Alan? What the fuck is this?’

  ‘OK,’ walking out with me away from the stone in its growing afternoon shade. ‘If it still matters. If you’re still…locked into all that.’

  ‘Tell me,’ I said.

  He sighed. ‘I pretended to be Chris. I had to. No other way to get you to help me. What was I gonna say? “He’s evil, I’m his clone, please help?” Maybe if we’d had more time, we didn’t have time. Trying to get it before he did, they told me to.’

  ‘Who told you to?’

  ‘Tibet. They’re behind all this.’

  I laughed.

  ‘I got sent there, when I was young, part of my training.’

  We drank water.

  ‘You get sent there, to old places, where the knowledge is. Places to learn and pay your respects, stops on the heritage tour. And the old monks nod away. But turns out they were up to stuff. They knew what Don was up to: Project Jigsaw, trying to piece together the old knowledge. No way they’ll let Don reassemble that. That was Don’s mistake: not understanding he has powerful enemies up in the mountains, on the islands. Without tech and weapons but they have other ways. So he sends me to Tibet, to get me away from bad company, round me out. Instead it blows my mind. Chants, dances, holy dogs, deep libraries in hollow mountains at the top of the world, ancient carved stone warnings buried deep. Their coral and conch shells and headdresses like Pacific feather headdresses, their sea artefacts so far away from sea. Slowly, subtly, they snaffle me. Tell me about what Don’s really up to, his horror project, how I can help them. ‘Go back home, do nothing, be normal, forget us. Perhaps someday we’ll be in touch.’