Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway

  Second: wherever and however I placed the Emperor, he should be accompanied by lions.

  Third, and finally: His Imperial Majesty should be painted full-face at least once in the image. In traditional Ethiopian art, the unrighteous may be known by the fact that they cannot look the viewer in the eye but must turn away, shame reaching them even in so faint an echo as pigment. The Emperor being of the Solomonic line and the Elect of God, it followed that his portrait must know no such fear.

  For some time I found I was consumed by the kind of dithering that professional tennis players call ‘the yips’. I could start – did start – any number of paintings of Haile Selassie, and set him amongst any number of strange landscapes, but I could not find one that was both utterly foreign and still entirely appropriate to the man. I was blocked, and not all the meditation or medication or sex that I could put together seemed to unblock me. I painted, recanted, scraped away oil and started again – and again, and again. I knew the contours of my Emperor’s face better than I knew my own, knew his modes and moods, his action and hesitation; I could draw him a thousand different ways and each of them was perfect. But the rest! The rest was dross. The background overwhelmed the heart of any image I put together, and I knew that that penetrating gaze would see a less-than-sincere effort for what it was, and – at best – dismiss me.

  I kept going. I knew by now that creation was a game of stamina as much as inspiration, and that each failed effort would eventually teach in combination with some stray additional thought the answer that I needed. Finally, in despair and exhaustion one night, I realised between breaths that my difficulty was in itself a boundary condition, an inherent edge of the work. There was nothing I could imagine that would set off or expose a truth about the Emperor beyond what was the man himself. He was like the notional neutronium: a state of political matter so dense as to be irreducible. He was not to be embellished in the way of any other project, but was rather fundament from which the rest of the picture must derive. I began, therefore, with lions, faint ghost images buried beneath the paint so that they seemed to hang in the air, and sketched in the outline of the throne room and the window beyond. The Emperor I painted last, heavy and opaque, in an almost traditional Venetian style, so that it seemed Haile Selassie was the only thing in the world made of real substance and everything else was mist. He fairly shone upon the viewer, a black demiurge in dark gold whose eyes encompassed a nation of rising modernity and sparkling towers, a space which existed first and foremost in his mind. In my own tradition now, upon my other canvases I presented details of his body – a curled hand, a commanding mouth, a shining eye – and visions of his vision, exploring more fully all that was suggested beyond the window. I rendered it as something flavoured with America, Russia and Europe that was itself their ancient parent and their natural progeny: a striving and baroque contra-Corbusier landscape with whispers of NASA’s bold orbital homesteads, not carving the land but made gentle and irregular by the contours of the great Simien Mountains. Five pieces in all, creating a single truth: the August One’s gaze, as I saw it in my mind, emerging from the flat surface at right angles and penetrating the real space before it, not judged by the viewer but weighing and assessing them instead. I called it Tewahedo, which is not only the Ethiopian Church but also the Ge’ez word meaning ‘unified’. At length I delivered it, and the Emperor hung all five parts alone on the wall of the grand receiving room. He commissioned pictures of it for release to the global press. Newsweek ran it as part of a feature on the Land of the Rising Lion, and the opinion column of the New York Times nodded sagely and heralded my talent amid the other stars of a burgeoning continental renaissance. London’s Daily Mail called it fallacious and bombastic, which meant that the Guardian asserted it was the product of genius. Later, when I saw the poster campaign for that first Star Wars film – the one that is now heretically referred to as the fourth – I thought I recognised the traces of my work in its composition, and was delighted at the idea.

  All in all, it’s a great shame the Derg got hold of that portrait and burned it on the tarmac of the Churchill Road. It may not have been the best or the most authentic thing I ever did, but it didn’t deserve that.

  *

  I was all right, in those first few days after the fall. It had been a drawn-out dying, the end of empire, starting in February 1974, just a few days after I began my work, and culminating in that loud and angry September. Haile Selassie himself did not die until 1975, when it is commonly assumed that Mengistu murdered him with his own hand. If that had been done in those September days, I think I would have fled. I could probably have done it: a short trip to the airport and an exchange of goods for services. I had friends, of course, who protected me and might have helped me: old drinking buddies from the university who now found themselves appointed to the Cadre for People’s Artistic Expression by a Derg scrambling to locate and project a coherent identity from an opportunistic eruption. I even knew a few career soldiers who were belated members of the revolutionary vanguard. I was a painter, after all, and I mixed with all sorts. No one could seriously have imagined me as political, though of course I had political value as an object to be smashed.

  In fact, I should have left, by whatever means I could, but I honestly believed – and my friends told me – that things would settle down. It was not that kind of revolution, they said, not the Russian kind where the Tsar and his family are put against the wall. It was the other kind, in which one mode of production supersedes another in the orderly progress of historical materialism. I should stay indoors and I should occupy myself and I should paint, but little by little the mood would calm and I would be a national treasure, a perfect example of a man who had freed himself from the oppressive system by the exercise of his mind. My work, after all, had flavours that might have been Soviet. A little careful construction could make me a hero, or at least a secret sympathiser. I need only wait, and pay no attention to what was happening outside my window; to the cries of men clubbed down in the street and the noise of bones breaking; to the wailing of women carried off to answer for their husbands’ imagined crimes; to the small shuffle of children too young for the task, picking their way down the alleys in search of missing parents.

  It was not the worst revolution in the history of the world. It was no more ignoble, I think, than the ones in England or America, in their day. Every nation has its sorrows and shames, its times of frenzy, and this was ours. Whatever is the root of human violence, be it imperfect economic organisation, timor mortis or original sin, it bore full fruit in Addis Ababa that autumn.

  My friends were wrong, of course: that damned appointments book, sourced from the same binder who made the members’ journal at London’s haughty Athenaeum, was too heavy with the name Berihun Bekele for me to be passed over. I was instead raised up: the perfect quisling, the perfect decadent product of a misshaped society, the perfect whore to the aristocracy of court and the exploiters of Texas and Birmingham. How was I different from an Italian Fascist, from a collaborator of the occupation? My jackbooted foot was on the neck of the poor. Men came, led by a little surgeon with a grave face and hands that looked a great deal like my own. He had a birthmark on his cheek, like a burning torch.

  I could have painted that scene for them, and beautifully. I wonder whether, if I had offered, I might have found another way out, might have survived by my brush at the whim of another fiat power. I did not. I went dumbly as a penitent, in a car that had been one of the palace fleet, its roof cut open now and bars welded to the upright pillars of the frame so that it was somewhere between a flatbed truck and a mobile stocks. I thought they would bring me to trial or simply send me to the border – the way they talked, it seemed as if I might be exiled, and the idea was more terrible than I would have thought. To leave, knowing one will return, is exciting. To leave and hear the key turn in the lock is banishment, and a blade in the soul. Exile, though, was better than I deserved.

  Instead, they took me to Al
em Bekagn, and they lined the route with a mob.

  *

  London, decades later in those days of Georgian rage, was not the same, and I let the difference deceive me into believing we were safe.

  That’s not to say we took no precautions. We shifted all my communications to the Spine, which was by now comfortable with me and able to recognise what Annie called my etic connectome: what my consciousness appeared to be from an observer’s viewpoint. I also asked Tom Hayes, the head of personal security at my – now Michael’s – company, to come and advise us on safety. Tom suggested close protection for all of us in the short term, but Annie wouldn’t have it and I generally agreed. He had expected that, I think, and argued strongly for a perimeter team – a fast-response group watching from a reasonable and unintrusive distance. Annie said no to that too, and I equivocated, but if I’m luckier than I ought to be Michael will have done it anyway, on the company’s behalf.

  We carried on. Annie and Colson had meetings around the film tie-in for Witnessed, all this publicity doing the development process no harm whatsoever. There also was the first expansion pack to consider (new characters and new environments, new murders and plots). In his spare time, Colson was building my app, concentrating on the back end, which was evidently complex but happily the sort of thing which could be put together fast from existing code. The newspapers, of course, had picked up on my announcement, and opinion was split on the Left as to whether this was a grass-roots effort against casual racism or the beginnings of a Foucauldian nightmare of technocratic peer-to-peer surveillance. On the Right, there was a general sense of aggrieved dignity at the idea that Britain could possibly be systemically and institutionally racist, shading at the Kentish and Home Counties edges into a suspicion that my project somehow amounted to the de facto establishment of sharia law. Crypto-Islamism, apparently, was a concern to be taken seriously at the highest levels of government, because it was certainly taken seriously in Gravesend.

  On Monday, the police came to see me, and I was glad that they should. The local station had been very supportive of us, taking seriously the threats against Annie and myself, and being sure that anything we could offer about those making them was carefully noted down. They kept us up to date while the Cybercrime team untangled the inevitable web of anonymous email accounts and virtual-presence networks. One of Annie’s most persistent abusers turned out to be a church warden from Somerset; another was a teenager living in New Mexico. The majority were young, stupid men living with their parents in houses from Southampton to Glasgow, who had taken for whatever reason against the idea that my granddaughter should speak her mind. Some had been cautioned, some arrested, and some had mended their ways so far as to apologise – dragged by one ear to the telephone, I rather thought, hearing the unmistakable suffused silence of maternal rage at the far end of the line – and some had seen the inside of a cell. Celebrity, I knew, was having an effect on our treatment. Most of the time such things go largely unanswered.

  These officers were not local. There was a huge fellow with small hands who stood at the back and didn’t speak, and I recognised him as the implicit threat. I am old, but I did not get this far without the occasional dust-up, especially in my early London years, and I found myself looking from each to the next and wondering how I would fare if I must fight them. The big one caught me at it and shifted pointedly in his seat. I gave him an unrepentant look and settled to a more dignified appraisal, but no man likes to be made to feel second in his own house.

  Another man, pale with a redhead’s stubble, took notes, and finally there was a woman who seemed to be in charge. They were from a national task group, she told me, and they were not for the moment concerned with threats made against Annie or even against me. They were aware of those and others in their office were looking into the more serious ones. It was their task, she warned me with great solemnity, to investigate the possibility that I had myself broken the law.

  I laughed out loud. It was so preposterous that I assumed she was here pro forma, and that we would all share in the fun. No one else joined in, so I sobered and asked instead in what way I might have done so.

  The woman, Detective Sergeant Sykes, had the face of a country butcher. She rested her jowls on her collar and said that it was possible I had engaged in incitement to racial hatred.

  I had?

  Yes.

  I had?

  Yes.

  Surely that was the wrong way around. An administrative error, a misunderstanding.

  No.

  No?

  Sykes asked if I’d like to be reminded of my actions.

  I thought about that for a moment and decided I would not. If these people were in earnest then my temper was likely to get the better of me, and it was possible that would be a bad idea in this already upside-down situation. In any case, when a fellow is accused of anything that even if only in its most extreme extension requires the attention of the court, the first thing he does if he is sensible is call his lawyer.

  I excused myself for a moment and called my lawyer. Her name is Lindsey, and she is a senior partner at Graumann Gibb LLP, hard by Lincoln’s Inn. If ever you want to put your enemy’s feet to the fire in a legal tussle, I recommend her. Lindsey said she would come right over, and she would bring just the person to assist in the specific discussion. I went back to Detective Sykes and explained that there would now be a short delay. I invited the officers to wait. They elected not to. I had the distinct impression that calling lawyers was grounds for arrest in itself. It is a staple of crime dramas that only guilty people need lawyers before they discuss things with kindly policemen. The majority of crime dramas are written by middle-class white males with no actual experience of being accused of anything, and they are in any case about the brilliance of a particular detective. All the same, a surprising number of people – including police officers – believe what they see on the television screen without even wondering whether fact and fiction may not be entirely congruent.

  ‘You’ll hear from us shortly,’ Sykes said on the doorstep.

  ‘Can you give me a rough idea of when?’

  ‘You will,’ Sykes repeated, ‘hear from us shortly.’ To my amazement, she thrust her face in towards mine like a drunk in a bar. I wondered if her house was decked in the Cross of St George every day, or only for the last week of April.

  After a moment, with the muscular compression of a retreating snail, she took her face away again. I watched her turn and walk away from me with her minions, and didn’t step back from my door until I had seen her safely into the unmarked car on the other side of the road. She took the passenger seat and stared straight ahead, as if she was fixing her eyes on a future that did not offend her, and nothing on this side of the road existed at all.

  When she had gone, I went back inside and sat in silence for a while, feeling the heat of my fury wash out of me into the cool, rough fabric of my Kingcome sofa. It seemed to me the weave was just a little damp from the winter air.

  Then Annie called, and told me the government was trying to buy her company, and they weren’t taking no for an answer. I told her what had happened and she said the saddest thing you could ever hear from your grandchildren. She said it was almost enough to make her lose faith in people.

  ‘No, it’s all right,’ I said, very sure. ‘It’s the other way round. When people see us standing up: this is where they begin to have faith.’

  *

  ‘The entity is called Turnpike,’ Lindsey said, in the wood-panelled meeting room in Lincoln’s Inn where she hands out the Long Brown Envelope of Home Truths. In happier times, this notional envelope has contained a warning to the other side that they are about to get soundly thrashed – but not today. Today, we were at the mercy of a seventeenth-century jurist named Hugo Grotius, who penned in the year 1625 a learned treatise on the notion of compulsory purchase, known more grandly to our American cousins as ‘eminent domain’. This right of supreme lordship is vested in the monarch a
nd is now inevitably devolved upon the Prime Minster and any acting in the place of that executive. By it, the state is empowered to use, abstract and even destroy the property of any individual or collective if this action is necessary for the greater public good. The party upon whom the power is exerted must in turn be compensated to a reasonable value of what is thus taken. Britain being by tradition a place, like Grotius’s beloved Holland, where the power of the state is used sparingly upon a proud and independent populace – if recently afflicted with governments ever more nosy, inflexible and prurient – it is rare that the prerogative is exercised in any but the most exigent circumstance. It has been used in wartime to secure land for coastal defences, and in peace to preserve ancient monuments from destruction at the hands of besuited barbarians. It has been invoked by special Act of Parliament for railways and roads. Until this year, it has never even been suggested that it might be used to acquire a computer game company, and still less that such acquisition might stretch to include the services under contract of its principal employees.

  ‘And Turnpike is government?’

  ‘Up to a point, yes. It exists in the liminal ground between government and industry. A merger of state and corporate power.’

  Colson twitched, showed his teeth. ‘Nice.’

  ‘At this moment,’ Annie reported, ‘someone is launching a very sophisticated and very illegal attack on our computers. We’ve looked at the code, and it’s obfuscated.’

  She knew we’d passed the limit of my knowledge. I made a gesture with my hand: small explanation, short words. I wasn’t the only numpty in the room.