We Are Now Beginning Our Descent

by James Meek

  ‘I’m still—’ Kellas cleared his throat and started again. ‘I’m still in this world without it.’

  ‘Don’t blame me, Adam. You don’t mind if I call you Adam? I had a long talk with your agent. She was pretty upset. She was worried about you. She didn’t understand why you were coming here.’

  ‘Did she say anything about a dinner last night?’

  Baker-Koontz shook her head and told Kellas that she’d been called at two-thirty a.m. by a friend at Éditions Perombelon in Paris, saying that the company, with all its foreign subsidiaries, including Karpaty Knox, had been taken over by a French industrial conglomerate called DDG. ‘I’ve never heard of them before, have you?’ she said. ‘Apparently they’re huge. They make nuclear reactors and yoghurt. They saw a synergy.’ The chief executive of DDG, Luc Vichinsqij, a graduate of one of the grandes écoles and of Harvard, had held a press conference in Paris at eight a.m., looked in on the Perombelon offices, got on a plane and flown to New York. At noon, chin smooth and eyes clear, without a crease in his black suit, with a sapphire tie pin in a metallic pink tie and smelling of sandalwood, he’d turned up at Karpaty Knox to meet the staff, and personally fire three of them.

  ‘Including you,’ said Kellas.

  ‘No, I told you, I quit. I quit when Luc told us the company wasn’t going to sign the contract with you. I could have kept my job. In fact, I probably would’ve got a promotion. But I asked. I said “What about the Kellas book?” – because I was going to be your English-language editor, and I knew he’d already got rid of the guy in Paris who was so keen for us to buy it, you know, the old chief, Didier. And Luc said “We don’t need another piece of anti-American bullshit now.” And that was when I knew I was going to have to quit. Because I really, really hated your book, and I never had the guts to say so. I’m a liberal, and I don’t like a lot of what this country does, but when I read your novel, that was exactly what I thought. Another piece of anti-American bullshit.’ Baker-Koontz paused and looked at Kellas closely, as if waiting for him to respond. Kellas had too many ways to go. He couldn’t choose, and he couldn’t speak. He felt weightless, cut loose from the certainty gravity provides, and at the same time his chest was filled with a pulsing and a thrumming, waves of numbing force, like the first seconds of a general anaesthetic. Baker-Koontz began speaking again. ‘When I heard this French guy say out loud what I’d been too afraid to say, I started to despise myself. I was ashamed. It’s Monday today. If you’d come here on Friday, you would have signed the contract, and got your advance, and I would have taken you out to lunch and I would have lied to your face. I would have said how excited I was, how excited we all were, what an honour, what a privilege, the whole phoney spiel. It’s just loathsome to contemplate. I had to get out and clear my head.’

  ‘It must have been tough for you.’

  Baker-Koontz laughed again. ‘I mean, what were you thinking? The ashes at Ground Zero are barely cold and you’re bringing a sick fairy tale to Manhattan about Americans butchering Arabs and having gunfights with bobbies in English country lanes?’

  ‘Iranians, not Arabs.’

  ‘Whatever. Jesus. Anyway, it’s over. Here, I brought along my copy of the manuscript. Got to try and recycle. Rogue Eagle Rising—’ she did air quotes, rocked her head and put on a British accent ‘—is trash. If you’d put in even one sympathetic American character! One character with more depth and substance than a Post-it note. You thought you were dumbing it down for the masses, but the masses are smarter than you. One or two of the Europeans have a trace of reality about them, but with the American characters, it’s like you deliberately pinched out any flame of humanity or sympathy you saw. Even the good ones are dolts. Obnoxious, pompous, humourless clods. I read it through again, just to check this, because I couldn’t believe it, but it’s true. There’s not a single humorous word out of the mouths of an American character in your book. Not one funny word. Americans aren’t like that, Adam. We’re funny!’ She laughed,meeting his eyes for a second then turning them away and down, as if she was sharing her laughter with another person who wasn’t there. ‘Write what you like about us but you mustn’t ever forget our wry sense of humour. You can’t go charging around the world, expecting to sell your shallow cultural stereotypes to the same people you’re stereotyping. It won’t wash. You’ve no right.’

  ‘Will you find another job?’ said Kellas. An anxiousness came into him that Baker-Koontz would get up and leave. He wanted her to stay. He would rather be abused than be alone.

  Baker-Koontz shrugged and folded her arms tightly across her bosom. ‘I was talking to Corriman before all this happened,’ she said. ‘There could be openings there.’

  ‘Corriman. They’re doing a book by a friend of mine. The Book of Form.’

  ‘My God, you know Patrick M’Gurgan?’ Baker-Koontz pressed her hands on the edge of the table and leaned forward as if she was about to spring at Kellas and bite his chin. Her eyes were big.

  ‘He’s my closest friend. We were at school together.’

  ‘I so loved that book.’ Baker-Koontz pressed her hand to her heart and shook her head from side to side. ‘Oh. God. It transported me.’ She seemed to be having trouble breathing.

  ‘I saw him last night at dinner. That’s when I got this.’ Kellas held up his left arm. The jacket cuff slipped back, exposing the bandage. The cleaner at Heathrow had done an excellent job. The dressing was still firmly in place and there was no sign that any blood had leaked through.

  ‘You had a fight with Patrick M’Gurgan?’ said Baker-Koontz.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Kellas. ‘I was denouncing America at an elitist dinner party and he stood up and said he couldn’t bear to hear the land of the free being insulted any longer.’

  Baker-Koontz watched him without moving for a moment. She said: ‘Do you really think I don’t know you’re kidding? You do, don’t you? You don’t think we know what kidding is. Mr Kellas, we invented kidding.’

  ‘He gave me a sound thrashing.’

  She was buttoned up, bag hoisted. ‘All I have to say is, try to learn from this.’ She held out her hand for him to shake. It was cool and dry, the bones in it like keys in a half-filled purse.

  ‘I suppose you have to go,’ said Kellas. His eyes and the inside of his nose itched and he swallowed.

  ‘Switch your phone on,’ said Baker-Koontz. ‘Talk to your agent. Talk to your friends. Ciao.’ She left.

  Kellas asked the waitress for more coffee and ordered a steak and fries. The warmth of the diner was grand and generous now that he had less than no money. He did not feel poor. That would come on the road. The certainty of being poor next week made him feel richer now, with two hundred dollars in his wallet and a plate of hot food on the way, than he had shooting the breeze with Elizabeth Chang and the rest of the high-rollers up in the jet stream.

  Didier would be fine, Kellas supposed. He should never have pretended to go along with the old French patriot’s enthusiasm for his fictional Europe, united in a just, bloody war against America. Kellas had taken a workmanlike satisfaction in engineering the book but hadn’t expected it to be taken by an eminent publisher like Didier as anything other than entertainment. Not that Didier had mistaken it for literature; more as a necessary exercise in dreaming, to inspire the young. Such a courteous, paternalistic man, he’d set his enthusiasm at a low level of intensity, the slightest of smiles, shifts of the eyebrow and inclinations of the head to indicate approval, as if modelling himself on some imaginary mode of English gentlemanly restraint that had long since ceased to exist but in his expression of it could not avoid, like an Italian in tweeds, being more elegant than the original. All this, and so titillated by thoughts of war. Kellas had felt like a child who’d poked a stuffed lion in a museum and seen its eyes open.

  In Paris he’d been taken straight from the station to a pristine arrondissement and a temple of gastronomy where the waiters, like Didier, were in their mid-sixties, and quivered with the
effort of keeping their instincts of deference and contempt in equilibrium. Didier, tall and thin and slightly stooped, with a nose like a fin, had risen to shake his hand. He’d watched Kellas drinking, rather than sipping, the wine; had ordered another bottle; had listened carefully while Kellas, slightly drunk, began explaining, then defending, then apologising for, his book, completely losing his way in the process and, without noticing until afterwards, using the side of his hand to shepherd a tiny flock of breadcrumbs across the tablecloth so that they formed a precise circular pattern halfway between two yellow spots of soup he’d spilled earlier; only then had Didier explained, over coffee, why he wanted Rogue Eagle Rising to be published. Kellas had forgotten the details. He remembered Didier saying ‘We need this, and we need more like it’, and Kellas saying he wasn’t sure what Didier meant by ‘we’, and Didier saying ‘Europe.’ Kellas should have declared that he cared much less about Europe than about euros, and had cynically couched his commercialism in terms of European patriotism in order not to alienate his friends. Yet Didier had looked so noble in his well-fitting grey suit, and a hundred thousand pounds was so much money, that Kellas had held his tongue.

  Now he’d been sacked. Kellas found it hard to imagine the life of a wealthy, patrician, elderly Frenchman in retirement. What confidence Kellas had brought to imagining the lives and deaths of young Iranian girls, when he’d never been to Iran. And with Didier his imagination kept getting stuck on Fernando Rey in the films of Luis Buñuel; discreet charms and obscure objects. When it was hard to live that life any more, outside the restaurants with old career waiters, all of them dying off and not being replaced. In Europe, as in America, there was no longer either deference or contempt, only hourly billing.

  It must have been that the food in that restaurant in Paris was of the finest quality. Something extraordinary. Yet Kellas could not remember what he’d eaten. The ten-dollar steak on the plate in front of him had a seam of gristle shining along its length, the fries were chewy and the coffee was stewed and bitter, and despite that, the meal was giving him a sweet sense of refuge such as he hadn’t known for a long time.

  The sense of well-being, which Kellas made stretch to another coffee, began to subside. He was overwhelmed by his own lack of involvement in the great business of this city. There was only Astrid left. He paid, asked for directions to the bus terminal, and left the diner. It was already almost dark.

  He walked quickly to get some heat into his body. A decent coat wouldn’t leave him with much change out of a hundred dollars and the subway was only a few blocks away. It was frosty, all right. The paving was beginning to sparkle and the steam was boiling up from the vents in good thick columns. Shoppers walked by him, sealed in brightly dyed wool and Gore-Tex, with a prancing, anticipatory gait; the colder it got, the more they earned hot treats just by breathing. He would skip the coat purchase. The subway was heated, the bus was heated, the south was warm, and he didn’t know how much the ticket would cost. He’d taken the book with him, intending to sling it into a trash can in the street, but the 400-page manuscript, packed in a padded envelope, made excellent insulation, slipped inside his buttoned-up jacket and held in place by his tightly folded arms. He caught the eye of a homeless man squatting like an owl next to a heating vent, half obscured by vapour. The man was holding a paper cup, begging out loud. When he saw Kellas, he quickly looked away. As a rule homeless people, like dogs and small children, saw Kellas as a mark from a long way off. That Kellas was inadequately dressed for the season, was not trying to hail a cab and hadn’t shaved since the previous morning must have tagged him as a loser. The suit and shoes were plain enough warning in themselves that here was someone in the midst of their descent from security to insecurity, a man yet to settle in his new location on the bottom. The bandage wouldn’t help. Another reason not to buy a coat was that he might need to pay a doctor to look at his arm. He had no insurance.

  When Kellas tried to buy a ticket to Chincoteague at the Greyhound counter, nobody had heard of it. The clerk spent time searching in her computer before she told him that, if such a town existed, no bus went there. Kellas went out into the cold again, into the fever of Times Square, where it seemed impossible there could be so much light and power and no heat, yet it was so. In a branch of one of the big book chains he found the travel section and worked out, after picking up and putting back several guides, that the closest bus stop to Chincoteague was ten miles away from the town, in a place called Oak Hall, on the highway to Norfolk.

  Before leaving the book store, he went to the section where they kept militaristic thrillers on display. He took out the envelope containing his manuscript and buried it carefully in a stack of Tom Clancys. He began walking to the door and was almost out when a security guard caught him and gave the manuscript back. Kellas thanked him. The security guard opened the door for him and closed it behind him and stood there with his arms folded while Kellas walked away.

  The ticket for the eight-forty-five bus to Norfolk cost seventy-five dollars. Kellas joined a queue of passengers waiting in a chicane of blue nylon ropes in the departure hall in the bus station basement. It was eight-thirty. Somebody had written in small, shy letters in marker pen on the wall ‘OSAMA IS A BUSH’. There were no seats in the line. There were no seats anywhere. The passengers, all of them black except Kellas and a young man with prominent cheekbones and a shaved head, looked tired and used to waiting. An old man with bad knees, who walked with a stick, hobbled away and came back dragging a plastic milk crate, which he upended and sat down on. Further up the queue a younger man had already found his crate and was sleeping on it, his back against the wall, the hood of his top stretched over his head to keep out the light. There was a stoicism, a quietness and a gentility about the line, which resembled the true face of some much admired founder generation whose reality had been obliterated by the earnestness of the modern actors hired to portray it. Kellas sensed that his fellow passengers would have considered it ridiculous to make this journey in any other way than straight from work and at any other time than the hours allotted for rest.

  Boarding depended on a tall, paunchy man in a dark blue uniform, with a synthetic blue fur hat, who guarded the glass doors that led to the buses. Eight-forty-five came and went. At nine, Kellas stepped out of the queue and asked the hat about the bus.

  ‘It’s gone,’ said the hat. ‘The driver was here. He’s gone.’ He looked at Kellas’s ticket, held it further away from his eyes, then up to his face. ‘You should have been here on time. I just put fifty-five passengers on that bus.’

  ‘I was here!’

  ‘You should have waited in line like everybody else. Like these folks here.’

  ‘I did!’

  ‘Sir. Sir. Don’t touch me.’

  ‘I’m not being aggressive. I just—’

  ‘You touched me.’

  ‘I just—’

  ‘If you want to get on the bus, wait in the line.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Tell me this. Are you in the line now?’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Are you in the line now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then how you going to catch the bus?’

  ‘I didn’t. I missed it.’

  ‘Exactly. Exactly. That’s what I’ve been saying. So if you go back in the line now, you won’t miss the next one. There’s a bus to Norfolk at ten. The driver’ll let you off at Oak Hall.’

  Kellas went back to his place in the line. Robert Mickens, the arrested bus driver, had, it was to be assumed, been joking about driving his passengers to the Taliban. It would be tough to get a Greyhound bus there, together with those on board. You’d have to ship the bus and passengers onto a freighter somewhere on the east coast, sail across the Atlantic, through the Mediterranean, down the Suez Canal, down the Red Sea, across the Arabian Sea to Karachi. That would take several weeks. Once in Karachi, it would be a straightforward enough drive north to the areas close to the Afghan frontier, where the T
aliban were the strongest. No scheduled stops. The Pakistani police would probably prevent them crossing into the tribal regions, of course, so the journey would in all likelihood be a wasted one. It was too bad. These people ought to have met each other.

  Astrid had been upset after the deaths of the truck drivers at Bagram. Sitting in the tight, dark humming space inside the tank, she had helped Sardar load the shells into the breech of the gun. She’d only realised after the truck was hit that her friend wasn’t shooting at the tree trunk. That was about all she told Kellas, after he’d told her what had happened to him. Her car came and took her away, and it was a long time before Kellas saw her again. She had been upset. She made a show of being tough about it. Some shaky words about responsibility, and not pretending to be detached, and her eyes glistening with tears that never quite fell, and her face white. Just before they parted at Bagram, he remembered, a different look had come over her, as the colour came back and her eyes dried. A look of acceptance, almost comfort, as if the corrosiveness of the shock had been familiar, as well as painful.

  Soon afterwards, with Astrid’s whereabouts unknown to anyone at the Jabal guesthouse, Kellas had driven to Kabul with Mohamed, walked into the city on the morning of its liberation, found it busy with yellow cabs and bicycles as if the war had been a fable of country folk. They’d sat down to a late breakfast of chicken and chips in a restaurant where, the waiters informed them, Arab jihadis fighting for the Taliban had eaten the previous night, unaware that their Afghan allies had already fled. Here and there about the city crowds of laughing Afghan flâneurs milled around Taliban corpses. A couple of such fatalities lay bloated on the pavement not far from the restaurant, their clothes half scorched off, their skin already spoiled blue-grey. Small boys hopped around them, grinning, entranced by the notion of men who had lost the ability to respond to any abuse or humiliation, since they were dead. Witnesses said the men had been delicately killed in the middle of the night by an American helicopter that had picked off their Toyota pick-up in the middle of the street without damaging anything else around it. Sure enough, the remains of the Toyota lay where it had been struck, the tyres partly fused to the road, the twin barrels of the cannon on the back blackened and lumpy like burned-out sparklers.