Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway

  I feel fingers of subtle impact along the hull, the tap tap tapping at my chamber door. A fleeting contact, a flash of sunlight on a cloudy day. Nothing to be worried about. Somewhere, one of the crew murmurs: ‘Active sonar.’

  I hold my breath and wait. Let the motion of the boat slide us away from the contact, away and down.

  Better to stick to the rules, and let the beam slide over us, and fade away. Just a whale. Just a shadow in the thermocline, a reef, a wreck. Nothing to see here. Rebus knows how to hide.

  The tea tastes of mountainsides and warm wind.

  *

  Once, I saw a remarkable series of photographs which showed the different compositions of human tears. It had not ever occurred to me until that moment that tears of joy might be measurably different from tears of anger or sorrow, but they are. Cause matters. If you cry from slicing an onion, the structure of your tears resembles the undergrowth in a pine forest. Remembrance is a grid pattern, like the map of New York City, but from each block emerge soft, questing tendrils, as if the body of the tear itself reaches out for what is lost. By comparison, other tears are plain. Elation is etiolated and fragile, grief is sparse, rage is linear, horror is jagged. Of all the pictures in the collection, only remembrance was complex.

  So what tears, now, is my body crying up above in the daylight? What complexity measures my situation; what wild, improbable blending of snowflake patterns can do justice to this?

  And: if I could put my tears under a microscope here and now, inside my refuge, what would I see? My world in pieces, or my house full of police, or a burning man in a room full of ghosts? The mobile that used to hang over my bed when I was a child? What should I decide to see?

  There’s probably no category for a woman in my position, no word in the lexicon to describe the emotions I feel. Perhaps my tears are unique, the information they contain dense and unanticipated and full of newness. They should be scooped up and preserved, at least analysed. Perhaps the pattern of them expresses who I am, or where, and something strange could come of looking at them.

  *

  Say it gently, even here. Write it without all its letters, so that the thing named cannot hear you – not Gnomon, but Gn m n.

  It was supposed to mean something else, I know it was – but the recollection is up there on the surface, in some hidden corner I can only hope they have not found. Perhaps it’s floating on the water amid the burned wreckage of my singing. Perhaps it’s in a pirate’s treasure chest on a desert island somewhere, and there’s a map in a leather tube that shows you how to get there, how to avoid the monsters and the traps.

  It was supposed to mean something important, that’s why it was in every story. The word means that which is perpendicular to everything else, something that stands apart. It is the part of a sundial that casts a shadow – the thing that gives meaning to the clockface. It is that which, added to something, produces a new entity similar to the original. Is that a hint? Was Gn m n my salvation of self, at the end of this? A way back past the brain damage to something I would know as being fundamentally me?

  We used to talk about this. Me and Robert. I can say that down here without fear of being overheard. We used to talk about a thing called a Reboot Box.

  It comes from the plasticity of the human notion of death. Once, we thought death was what happened when your heart stopped and your brain flatlined. Now we know you can be brought back from that. In fact we use that state in combination with cooling to allow for explantation surgery, where an organ is removed from the body and treated for disease in a way which would not be possible if it was still in place, and then returned to the cavity, the damage repaired around it. Without surgical stasis techniques, there would be no time: the patient would bleed out. With a proper stasis chamber one might have as long as half a day. That’s long enough to do impossible things, to repair someone who is emphatically dead and return them to life. It can even be used to treat massive organ failure resulting from poisoning – that opposition politician in Kazakhstan, they changed his blood and sluiced out his system seven times, then had to graft cloned cells on to his organs and keep him in a medical coma for a month, but he lived. He plays tennis now.

  How can I remember all that, but not what I wanted to achieve by all this? Is that some sort of joke?

  But what if, even so, you’re damaged. If the paramedics don’t get to you fast enough; if what needs to be done exceeds even our capacity for perfect repair; if your brain is just bluntly smashed up, the information in it gone however functional the repair may be. You’re never going to be the same person. No one is the same person from one day to the next, and an event like that will change you and that should be okay. But you will want continuity, and of course, it’s in the interest of the person you are now to reach out to that person and try to achieve some measure of continuance into them. Serial selfhood.

  Hence: a Reboot Box. A decent-sized container into which you put your favourite books, your favourite music; the things that spoke to you as a child, as an adult; your diary, your confessions, your desires; your oldest T-shirt and your most-treasured piece of jewellery. Anything that symbolises your identity now, that says, in ways that a straightforward verbal statement of self never could, who you are. Ideally, you’d put places in your Reboot Box, too, but of course they’d never fit inside, so you put a list in, along with a list of smells and times of day, favourite foods and any other things that matter, that mean you and the things you love most profoundly.

  We had a plan. Or I did. Or I dreamed that I did. The Rebus is an escape, a crisis option. It leaves a great deal of me behind.

  But I must have had a plan if I had this submarine ready and waiting. Unless I created it spontaneously and now I’m kidding myself. When you drown, sometimes you have what’s called a laryngospasm. Your throat closes autonomically, refusing to inhale water. If it doesn’t unlock, you can die of asphyxiation even after someone pulls you from the sea. Perhaps that’s happening to me: this whole situation is my brain’s equivalent of a laryngospasm, post-justified by false memories.

  Or perhaps that whisper is the pressure of Smith’s efforts on the outer layer of my defences. No point trying to reason it out. Reason folds back on itself here, endlessly recursive. What do I feel?

  But feeling is the pre-verbal appreciation of stored self, and I’m not complete. I’m down here in the dark with just the barest knowledge of who I am and how I think to keep me going, and if I want more than that I must surface.

  I trust. I trust that I had a plan. But I cannot imagine what it might have been. I mean, seriously: what possible positive outcome is there for me here? I cannot, in the long term, win this fight. Eventually they will either damage my brain so badly that I will die, either actually or effectively, or they will have what they want from me. Presumably, then, I contain a lie. In amid the many true things they will discover in this interrogation, they will find one lie which will hurt them. They will act upon it and in some way it will cause them trouble. I must have believed it would be worth it.

  I wonder what it might be?

  Perhaps, if I can work that out, I can push it towards them, and once they’ve swallowed it I can relax a little, let them have the rest of me without causing my own death. Perhaps, after that, I can even be a happy moron for them, live a well-adjusted life and not have to worry about all this crap any more. I’ll be a hero, and all the while I’ll be happy as well. I won’t even have to know I’m a hero. Although it would be very upsetting if my secret then brought the whole thing tumbling down and I was horribly unhappy and didn’t know it was what I wanted all along.

  Jesus, this business is shit all ways up. What can have possessed me?

  Well, that’s an unpleasant question, under the circumstances.

  require me to pretend

  IT MAY SOUND absurd now, but walking through walls was the trick du jour in 1974, in Addis Ababa quite as much as in Boston or Madrid. Just as aliens lined the hedgerows and made love to st
rayed Brazilians, so psionic studies were the currency of high science and popular passion. The capacity of our minds to effect direct change to the physical realm was a known truth only awaiting pro forma empirical confirmation, and no spoon was safe from the determined psychokinetic stares of mothers and postmen, rock stars and thieves. LSD and parapsychology were transforming our understanding of ourselves, unleashing capacities far beyond those conventionally attributed to mortal men – even if those capacities were more widely spoken of than observed. In the far future, all humans would become like gods, and perhaps we were from that atemporal state already reaching back to our own early, larval selves and teaching the skills we would need to reach our potential: causality, after all, was an artefact of the limited mind, not the boundless one, and so the most enlightened among us now might in great need reach for and find the coming godhead somewhat early in our evolution. Timothy Leary had done it, to the consternation of the FBI, and even worse so had the inventor of the orgone accumulator, that accursèd post-Freudian who had had the temerity to try to teach good American boys and girls about sex – and worse yet, to encourage them to talk about it as if there was in all the world nothing wrong with the casual discussion of fellatio. Jim Channon’s First Earth Battalion Manual was going to teach soldiers to be more than human, and – because Channon served not Eros but the Pentagon – how to kill with their minds and levitate over the Iron Curtain. The Russians for their part claimed they’d had agents who could do all that and other things stranger and more alarming since the days of the tsars, and they mocked the feeble efforts of an arriviste West now set on catching up in the magical arms race. Baba Yaga was Russian, and so were Rasputin and Kalugina, and the East had always understood, wrapped in the icy wind of the Steppes, that there was more to the mind than a robot and a poet fighting for control of a beast. The whole world, in other words, was in the grip of the most marvellous psychic bullshit, and we were primed to believe in almost anything, so long as it was terrible and wondrous and might conceivably be done by force of will alone.

  When my moment came, it could have been designed to trigger a spiritual fugue. My chapel perilous was a cell in Alem Bekagn, the infamous prison of Addis Ababa whose name means ‘farewell to the world’. It was a clever variation upon the perfect Benthamite concept: the prison was a ring of cells around a central courtyard where we washed and exercised, in so far as either was allowed, and while we could be at all times observed, and could look deeper into the prison itself, there was no view of anything beyond the walls. I think that last was diabolically clever. It made everything feel absolute and the possibility of release or escape faded away into the dull bricks. I won’t claim it was a particular torture for an artist: I sketched with a bit of charcoal on scraps of paper. I drew other prisoners, and landscapes from memory. My cell had windows on the Alps, the Italian lakes, the Cornish coast. They became my currency, my way to bribe the guards for food, sleep and indulgence. For secret pleas to my old friends, now vanished into hiding.

  It is rumoured now in academic circles that the name came from that sense of isolation, but I tell you: they called it ‘Farewell’ simply because for many people it was the actual gate of death.

  Well, so what? The place itself is a ghost now, bricked over for the African Union’s new headquarters, and good riddance – but to me it still will exist, for ever, and for all that I know it is gone I will never stop thinking of it as a thing that exists in the world. Somewhere there is always Alem Bekagn, be it in Syria or Poland or somewhere with no name or notoriety, and it will always be waiting for me. I would rather die picking a fight than go there again – but in September 1974, I was a half-mad prisoner in a hot, square box, listening to the screams of the Sixty and wondering how I of all people could possibly be the sixty-first.

  If one is retrospect, or merely stands far enough away from things, it’s easy to see that the guiding pattern of my life has been Ethiopia. When I was a painter, I painted our modern transformation – the blending of our old country and the sudden and disconcerting arrival of the new – and gave it to the wider world. When art abandoned me, I became a purveyor of that commodity most sought and least available in the city where I was born: security. And now, in what must likely be the last act of my age, I have returned to art and am designing the future, as the Emperor did – though with the obliquity of the millennium, I have built a future to be avoided, and hidden within it hints of the one to be desired. I am the sum of my country, however tenuous our lingering connection, and even if my Ethiopia travelled down a path at an angle to the rest of the world, and was replaced by one that does not welcome me, and that I have never seen.

  Even the gauntlet that I cast into the teeth of those Georgians – the worthless men and pustulant boys who were so brave as to call my granddaughter foul names from behind digital masks, who threw around threats of sexual assault and murder as if these things were not the ugliest depth to which a man may fall – even my fictitious software application was a cry of rage at Ethiopia, in a way. I was furious at the arrival in London of the vicious madnesses of leba shay and fatasha, the ancient and modern faces of the same coin that is in English called, so very benignly, stop and search. When Haile Selassie, long ago, took over a realm in which the buying and selling of persons was yet legal and mob execution commonplace, he brought in the first printing presses, the first modern machines for transport and construction, the first real sanitation, and the first banks. It took him, I’m afraid, until 1942 to outlaw slavery, which was an old and established tradition in the country, the auction block being a common fate for the very poor from the south and for prisoners of war. But leba shay – in which a young boy is drugged and made to run through his village guided by spirits, and supposedly picks out any thief who may be lurking there for summary justice – that he did away with, and good riddance.

  Alas, it is a persistent folly: when eventually the Emperor was deposed for good, his reign was followed by a resurgence in the ugly shape of fatasha: soldiers of the Derg prowled and pounced, arresting, interrogating and executing anyone who was thought to be insufficiently fervent in support of the new order. Since the World Trade Center fell, these same vices have come to the so-very-modern worlds of London and Washington. How many harmless young black men have been injured or killed in modern cities in white countries this year, for the crime of exciting someone else’s racism? Too many, and it must end.

  When I came down off the stage that night, Michael was there, laughing and crying and calling me a mad old fool, and then he embraced me, and I knew that I had accidentally done something else in my anger: I had made good the old rift between us, the stupid fight we had years back that had never gone away.

  It had come from nowhere, in my living room. How we got into the slave trade, I cannot now imagine, but I became furious with him for setting Ethiopia alongside countries that had been colonised by the European powers. The Ethiopian experience was different, I said. Not morally superior, but different. Our country – I called it that, for the first time since I stepped on to the dock at Calais – our country was not conquered, not even when it was occupied by the Fascists and Haile Selassie returned in 1941 at the head of an army. He raised the standard of the Lion of Judah and by the grace of God and the support of one Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill he took back what was always ours. What did Michael know, anyway, of what it meant to be a black man in a white country? Had he come here as a refugee? With literally nothing but the clothes on his back? (Well, in honesty, nor had I: I left my possessions in Addis Ababa, true enough, but much of my bank balance came with me, courtesy of the modern banking system and my international sales.) Had Michael been told by a jazz man, ten days after buying a small apartment in Soho, that he must never put bananas in the fruit bowl? He had not. No, he had not. I’d never told that story, but I told it then, and I made him sit and listen to every word with all of my parental authority.

  The jazz man was a trumpeter called Donny ‘Zulu’ Stevens.
Donny was not, of course, a Zulu. His family was Caribbean and before that, in so far as anyone could guess, they’d been Fula. The name of the Zulu, however, is so rooted in British mythology that you’d think they were almost the only Africans, ubiquitous across the entire continent and ready to take on at any moment another army under the command of Michael Caine. Any black man who was seen to do anything other than play cricket, deliver letters or drive a taxi was clearly of that fabled race who fought the redcoats and beat them down. Donny wore the label without blinking because he was first of all a performer and he knew when not to buck a legend – which is not to say that it did not anger him, because it did, every day and every time he saw it written on a poster next to his own face.

  In Donny’s backstage room that night was laid out a great platter of drinks and fruit, Donny having forbidden biscuits before the performance as they leave a layer of sugar and crumbs in the mouth and interfere with the music. I’m not sure Joan, the vocalist, ever truly forgave him for that even after she married him, although Donny kept her in biscuits for the rest of her life, and she buried him last year with a packet of Bourbons and a farewell song that would break your heart in two. Fruit, though: fruit was allowed and even encouraged to keep the energy levels up on stage, and since I was a guest I was encouraged to partake. I had just finished an apple and realised as the whisky came out that I might want something a little more substantial in my stomach, so I reached for a banana, an exotic import then in London, and something of a delicacy.