by Greg Egan
‘One.’ She hesitated. ‘There’s that place just down the road … next to the hardware store?’
‘That would be great.’
Julia smiled. ‘Then I’ll meet you there. About ten-past. OK?’
I nodded. She turned and walked out. I stared after her, dazed, terrified, elated. I thought: This is simple. Anyone in the world can do it. It’s like breathing.
I started hyperventilating. I was an emotionally retarded teenager, and she’d discover that in five minutes flat. Or, worse, discover the 4,000 grown men in my head offering advice.
I went into the toilet to throw up.
* * *
Julia told me that she managed a dress shop a few blocks away. ‘You’re new at the bookshop, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘So what were you doing before that?’
‘I was unemployed. For a long time.’
‘How long?’
‘Since I was a student.’
She grimaced. ‘It’s criminal, isn’t it? Well, I’m doing my bit. I’m job-sharing, half-time only.’
‘Really? How are you finding it?’
‘It’s wonderful. I mean, I’m lucky, the position’s well enough paid that I can get by on half a salary.’ She laughed. ‘Most people assume I must be raising a family. As if that’s the only possible reason.’
‘You just like to have the time?’
‘Yes. Time’s important. I hate being rushed.’
We had lunch again two days later, and then twice again the next week. She talked about the shop, a trip she’d made to South America, a sister recovering from breast cancer. I almost mentioned my own long-vanquished tumour, but apart from fears about where that might lead, it would have sounded too much like a plea for sympathy. At home, I sat riveted to the phone – not waiting for a call, but watching news broadcasts, to be sure I’d have something to talk about besides myself. Who’s your favourite singer/author/artist/ actor? I have no idea.
Visions of Julia filled my head. I wanted to know what she was doing every second of the day; I wanted her to be happy, I wanted her to be safe. Why? Because I’d chosen her. But … why had I felt compelled to choose anyone? Because, in the end, the one thing that most of the donors must have had in common was the fact that they’d desired, and cared about, one person above all others. Why? That came down to evolution. You could no more help and protect everyone in sight than you could fuck them, and a judicious combination of the two had obviously proved effective at passing down genes. So my emotions had the same ancestry as everyone else’s; what more could I ask?
But how could I pretend that I felt anything real for Julia, when I could shift a few buttons in my head, anytime, and make those feelings vanish? Even if what I felt was strong enough to keep me from wanting to touch that dial …
Some days I thought: it must be like this for everyone. People make a decision, half shaped by chance, to get to know someone; everything starts from there. Some nights I sat awake for hours, wondering if I was turning myself into a pathetic slave, or a dangerous obsessive. Could anything I discovered about Julia drive me away, now that I’d chosen her? Or even trigger the slightest disapproval? And if, when, she decided to break things off, how would I take it?
We went out to dinner, then shared a taxi home. I kissed her goodnight on her doorstep. Back in my flat, I flipped through sex manuals on the net, wondering how I could ever hope to conceal my complete lack of experience. Everything looked anatomically impossible; I’d need six years of gymnastics training just to achieve the missionary position. I’d refused to masturbate since I’d met her; to fantasise about her, to imagine her without consent, seemed outrageous, unforgivable. After I gave in, I lay awake until dawn trying to comprehend the trap I’d dug for myself, and trying to understand why I didn’t want to be free.
* * *
Julia bent down and kissed me, sweatily. ‘That was a nice idea.’ She climbed off me and flopped onto the bed.
I’d spent the last ten minutes riding the blue control, trying to keep myself from coming without losing my erection. I’d heard of computer games involving exactly the same thing. Now I turned up the indigo for a stronger glow of intimacy, and when I looked into her eyes I knew that she could see the effect on me. She brushed my cheek with her hand. ‘You’re a sweet man. Did you know that?’
I said, ‘I have to tell you something.’ Sweet? I’m a puppet, I’m a robot, I’m a freak.
‘What?’
I couldn’t speak. She seemed amused, then she kissed me. ‘I know you’re gay. That’s all right; I don’t mind.’
‘I’m not gay.’ Any more? ‘Though I might have been.’
Julia frowned. ‘Gay, bisexual … I don’t care. Honestly.’
I wouldn’t have to manipulate my responses much longer; the prosthesis was being shaped by all of this, and in a few weeks I’d be able to leave it to its own devices. Then I’d feel, as naturally as anyone, all the things I was now having to choose.
I said, ‘When I was twelve, I had cancer.’
I told her everything. I watched her face, and saw horror, then growing doubt. ‘You don’t believe me?’
She replied haltingly, ‘You sound so matter-of-fact. Eighteen years? How can you just say, ‘‘I lost eighteen years’’?’
‘How do you want me to say it? I’m not trying to make you pity me. I just want you to understand.’
When I came to the day I met her my stomach tightened with fear, but I kept on talking. After a few seconds I saw tears in her eyes, and I felt like I’d been knifed.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.’ I didn’t know whether to try to hold her, or to leave right then. I kept my eyes fixed on her, but the room swam.
She smiled. ‘What are you sorry about? You chose me. I chose you. It could have been different for both of us. But it wasn’t.’ She reached down under the sheet and took my hand. ‘It wasn’t.’
* * *
Julia had Saturdays off, but I had to start work at eight. She kissed me goodbye sleepily when I left at six; I walked all the way home, weightless.
I must have grinned inanely at everyone who came into the shop, but I hardly saw them. I was picturing the future. I hadn’t spoken to either of my parents for nine years; they didn’t even know about the Durrani treatment. But now it seemed possible to repair anything. I could go to them now and say: This is your son, back from the dead. You did save my life, all those years ago.
There was a message on the phone from Julia when I arrived home. I resisted viewing it until I’d started things cooking on the stove; there was something perversely pleasurable about forcing myself to wait, imagining her face and her voice in anticipation.
I hit the Play button. Her face wasn’t quite as I’d pictured it.
I kept missing things and stopping to rewind. Isolated phrases stuck in my mind. Too strange. Too sick. No one’s fault. My explanation hadn’t really sunk in the night before. But now she’d had time to think about it, and she wasn’t prepared to carry on a relationship with 4,000 dead men.
I sat on the floor, trying to decide what to feel: the wave of pain crashing over me, or something better, by choice. I knew I could summon up the controls of the prosthesis and make myself happy – happy because I was ‘free’ again, happy because I was better off without her, happy because Julia was better off without me. Or even just happy because happiness meant nothing, and all I had to do to attain it was flood my brain with Leu-enkephalin.
I sat there wiping tears and mucus off my face while the vegetables burned. The smell made me think of cauterisation, sealing off a wound.
I let things run their course, I didn’t touch the controls, but just knowing that I could have changed everything. And I realised then that, even if I went to Luke De Vries and said, ‘I’m cured now, take the software away, I don’t want the power to choose anymore,’ I’d never be able to forget where everything I felt had come from.
* * *
My father came to the flat yesterday. We didn’t talk much, but he hasn’t remarried yet, and he made a joke about us going nightclub-hopping together.
At least I hope it was a joke.
Watching him, I thought: he’s there inside my head, and my mother too, and ten million ancestors, human, proto-human, remote beyond imagining. What difference did 4,000 more make? Everyone had to carve a life out of the same legacy: half universal, half particular; half sharpened by relentless natural selection, half softened by the freedom of chance. I’d just had to face the details a little more starkly.
And I could go on doing it, walking the convoluted border between meaningless happiness and meaningless despair. Maybe I was lucky; maybe the best way to cling to that narrow zone was to see clearly what lay on either side.
When my father was leaving, he looked out from the balcony across the crowded suburb, down towards the Parramatta river, where a storm drain was discharging a visible plume of oil, street litter, and garden run-off into the water.
He asked dubiously, ‘You happy with this area?’
I said, ‘I like it here.’
OUR LADY OF CHERNOBYL
We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth, for surely there is no such splendour or beauty anywhere upon earth.
The envoy of Prince Vladimir of Kiev, describing the Church of the Divine Wisdom in Constantinople, 987.
It is the rustiest old barn in heathendom.
– S. L. Clemens, ditto, 1867.
Luciano Masini had the haunted demeanour and puffy complexion of an insomniac. I’d picked him as a man who’d begun to ask himself, around two a.m. nightly, if his twenty-year-old wife really had found the lover of her dreams in an industrialist three times her age – however witty, however erudite, however wealthy. I hadn’t followed his career in any detail, but his most famous move had been to buy the entire superconducting cables division of Pirelli, when the parent company was dismembered in ’09. He was impeccably dressed in a grey silk suit, the cut precisely old fashioned enough to be stylish, and he looked as if he’d once been strikingly handsome. A perfect candidate, I decided, for vain self-delusion and belated second thoughts.
I was wrong. What he said was: ‘I want you to locate a package for me.’
‘A package?’ I did my best to sound fascinated – although if adultery was stultifying, lost property was worse. ‘Missing en route from—?’
‘Zürich.’
‘To Milan?’
‘Of course!’ Masini almost flinched, as if the idea that he might have been shipping his precious cargo elsewhere, intentionally, caused him physical pain.
I said carefully, ‘Nothing is ever really lost. You might find that a strongly worded letter from your lawyers to the courier is enough to work miracles.’
Masini smiled humourlessly. ‘I don’t think so. The courier is dead.’
Afternoon light filled the room; the window faced east, away from the sun, but the sky itself was dazzling. I suffered a moment of strange clarity, a compelling sense of having just shaken off a lingering drowsiness, as if I’d begun the conversation half asleep and only now fully woken. Masini let the copper orrery on the wall behind me beat twice, each tick a soft, complicated meshing of a thousand tiny gears. Then he said, ‘She was found in a hotel room in Vienna three days ago. She’d been shot in the head at close range. And no, she was not meant to take any such detour.’
‘What was in the package?’
‘A small icon.’ He indicated a height of some thirty centimetres. ‘An eighteenth-century depiction of the Madonna. Originally from the Ukraine.’
‘The Ukraine? Do you know how it came to be in Zürich?’ I’d heard that the Ukrainian government had recently launched a renewed campaign to persuade certain countries to get serious about the return of stolen artwork. Crateloads had been smuggled out during the turmoil and corruption of the eighties and nineties.
‘It was part of the estate of a well-known collector, a man with an impeccable reputation. My own art dealer examined all the paperwork, the bills of sale, the export licences, before giving his blessing to the deal.’
‘Paperwork can be forged.’
Masini struggled visibly to control his impatience. ‘Anything can be forged. What do you want me to say? I have no reason to suspect that this was stolen property. I’m not a criminal, Signor Fabrizio.’
‘I’m not suggesting that you are. So … money and goods changed hands in Zürich? The icon was yours when it was stolen?’
‘Yes.’
‘May I ask how much you paid for it?’
‘Five million Swiss francs.’
I let that pass without comment, although for a moment I wondered if I’d heard correctly. I was no expert, but I did know that Orthodox icons were usually painted by anonymous artists, and were intended to be as far from unique as individual copies of the Bible. There were exceptions, of course – a few treasured, definitive examples of each type – but they were a great deal older than eighteenth-century. However fine the craftsmanship, however well preserved, five million sounded far too high.
I said, ‘Surely you insured—?’
‘Of course! And in a year or two, I may even get my money back. But I’d much prefer to have the icon. That’s why I purchased it in the first place.’
‘And your insurers will agree. They’ll be doing their best to find it.’ If another investigator had a head start on me, I didn’t want to waste my time – least of all if I’d be competing against a Swiss insurance firm on their home ground.
Masini fixed his bloodshot eyes on me. ‘Their best is not good enough! Yes, they’ll want to save themselves the money, and they’ll treat this potential loss with great seriousness … like the accountants they are. And the Austrian police will try very hard to find the murderer, no doubt. Neither are moved by any sense of urgency. Neither would be greatly troubled if nothing were resolved for months. Or years.’
If I’d been wrong about Masini’s nocturnal visions of adultery, I’d been right about one thing: there was a passion, an obsession, driving him which ran as deep as jealousy, as deep as pride, as deep as sex. He leant forward across the desk, restraining himself from seizing my shirtfront, but commanding and imploring me with as much arrogance and pathos as if he had.
‘Two weeks! I’ll give you two weeks – and you can name your fee! Deliver the icon to me within a fortnight … and everything I have is yours for the asking!’
* * *
I treated Masini’s extravagant offer with as much seriousness as it deserved, but I accepted the case. There were worse ways to spend a fortnight, I decided, than consulting with informants on the fringes of the black market over long lunches in restaurants fit for connoisseurs of fine art.
The obvious starting point, though, was the courier. Her name was Gianna De Angelis: twenty-seven years old, five years in the business, with a spotless reputation; according to the regulatory authorities, not a single complaint had ever been lodged against her, by customer or employer. She’d been working for a small Milanese firm with an equally good record: this was their first loss, in twenty years, of either merchandise or personnel.
I spoke to two of her colleagues; they gave me the barest facts, but wouldn’t be drawn into speculation. The transaction had taken place in a Zürich bank vault, then De Angelis had taken a taxi straight to the airport. She’d phoned head office to say that all was well, less than five minutes before she was due to board the flight home. The plane had left on time, but she hadn’t been on it. She’d bought a ticket from Tyrolean Airlines – using her own credit card – and flown straight to Vienna, carrying the attaché case containing the icon as hand luggage. Six hours later, she was dead.
I tracked down her fiancé, a TV sound technician, to the apartment they’d shared. He was red-eyed, unshaven, hungover. Still in shock, or I doubt he would have let me through the door. I offered my condolences, helped him finish a bottle of wine, then gently inquired whether Gianna had received
any unusual phone calls, made plans to spend extravagant sums of money, or had appeared uncharacteristically nervous or excited in recent weeks. I had to cut the interview short when he began trying to crack my skull open with the empty bottle.
I returned to the office and began trawling the databases, from the official public records right down to the patchwork collections of mailing lists and crudely collated electronic debris purveyed by assorted cyberpimps. One system, operating out of Tokyo, could search the world’s digitised newspapers, and key frames from TV news reports, looking for a matching face – whether or not the subject’s name was mentioned in the caption or commentary. I found a near-twin walking arm in arm with a gangster outside a Buenos Aires courthouse in 2007, and another weeping in the wreckage of a village in the Philippines, her family killed in a typhoon, in 2010, but there were no genuine sightings. A text-based search of local media yielded exactly two entries; she’d only made it into the papers at birth and at death.
So far as I could discover, her financial position had been perfectly sound. No one had any kind of dirt on her, and there wasn’t the faintest whiff of an association with organised crime. The icon would have been far from the most valuable item she’d ever laid her hands on – and I still thought Masini had paid a vastly inflated price for it. Artwork, anonymous or not, wasn’t exactly the most liquid of assets. So why had she sold out, on this particular job, when there must have been a hundred opportunities which had been far more tempting?
Maybe she hadn’t been trying to sell the icon in Vienna. Maybe she’d been coerced into going there. I couldn’t imagine anyone ‘kidnapping’ her in the middle of the airport, marching her over to the ticket office, through the security scanners and onto the plane. She’d been armed, highly trained, and carrying all the electronics she could possibly need to summon immediate assistance. But even if she hadn’t had an X-ray-transparent gun pointed at her heart every step of the way, maybe a more subtle threat had compelled her.