We Are Now Beginning Our Descent

by James Meek

  ‘Concentrate,’ he said into the wind.

  Lengthen your stride. Rapid march. Forward. On. Imagine you are carrying someone sicker than you, someone you care for. Someone you care for more than you care for yourself. On with the loved one, on to safety. Think thoughts with ends and destinations. Think of making a case to the woman you’ve crossed the ocean to see. Don’t think of the case itself, only of making it. Bombard her with words. One will get through. On now. Although certainly ten miles was a hell of a way to walk in a snowstorm. Two and a half hours at a fair pace on the flat. He was not dressed for this weather. It was not so much the thought of dying as the thought of embarrassing his father which might force him to knock on strange doors and seek help. Scot Found Dead On American Road. Father Critiques Footwear, Lack Of Coat. But he did not want to knock on those strange doors. The whole countryside was armed to the teeth, jaundiced at the very rumour of bums and footpads. He needed to keep moving. It would warm him up.

  It would be sunrise in an hour, he supposed, already the middle of the morning in Dumfries. The post would have been delivered. It was Tuesday. It was due. One of the children would have found the letter, perhaps, the strange small communication sealed with a second stamp, fluttering through the slot onto the rug in the hall, along with the weight and bright colours of the junk mail, carried further by the tiny extra puff of air as the heavier letters struck the floor. Kellas couldn’t unsend it, however much he longed to. Perhaps Fergus would have found it. The boy would have been intrigued and taken it to his mother. Five of them around the breakfast table, snatching, pouring, drinking and squabbling. Sophie would have opened it, curious, but with foreboding. M’Gurgan would have noticed the hand-scrawled address on an Ikea receipt, looked at Sophie’s face, and wondered whether his wife was being stalked; whether she was having an affair. What she knew about him that he didn’t know she knew. Sophie would have dropped the letter, put her hands to her mouth and rushed out of the room, weeping. No, that was a film. What would she really have done? Read it carefully, trying not to show what she was thinking, although M’Gurgan would have seen. She would have folded the piece of paper very small, running her nails along the folds, and closed her fist around it, and she would have looked at M’Gurgan without saying anything, and he would have known that she had received information prejudicial to his good character in that home. Perhaps there would have been a moistness in her eyes, and certainly by this time Angela and Carrie would have realised that something was wrong. At the same moment, Angela would have said: ‘What’s wrong, Mum?’ and Carrie would have said ‘What does it say, Mum?’ And Sophie would have said ‘Nothing’, and chased them out to school. M’Gurgan, sitting at the table, would have heard the front door close and Sophie striding back down the hall with her shoes hitting the floor hard and he would have got to his feet, ready for the fight. A possibility: they’d been worried about their friend Kellas. M’Gurgan might have recognised the handwriting and thought that it was a suicide note. What a good man, to care so much! And how much harder then to find out that Kellas had not killed himself, but had betrayed him, and betrayed Sophie, the ordinary woman who got things done. They would be fighting now, in the day of the east. By the evening Kellas would have blown his friends’ family to fragments.

  Kellas slipped and tumbled into a patch of snow. He jumped up and brushed the snow off his jacket and trousers in a frenzy, as if it was a mass of poisonous insects. Light dazzled him and he put his right hand over his eyes. A vehicle had stopped a few yards away. It was pointed in the direction of Chincoteague. After a few moments, it rolled forward till the open driver’s window was level with Kellas. It was a pick-up truck with lines of ten year’s antiquity. A man in his fifties or sixties, white-haired, in an old ski jacket, looked at Kellas over his elbow.

  ‘Where are you going?’ asked the man.

  ‘Chincoteague.’

  ‘You drunk?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you high?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is there some medication you should be high on, and you skipped your dose?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Get in. Quietly. The baby’s sleeping.’ Kellas walked round to the passenger side, climbed in and closed the door. A single seat ran the width of the cab, in the American style, and in the middle, between Kellas and the driver, was a sturdy white carry cot, with a baby’s puckered face poking out of folds of wool.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Kellas quietly. ‘I’m soaking. It’s good to be out of the snow.’ He tilted the vents with his finger and felt hot air blow onto him. ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Where are you heading?’

  Kellas named the street.

  The man watched the road ahead for a while. In the cone of the lights the snow seemed to part and show the way at the same time, like the crowd around a body when the police arrive.

  ‘Are they expecting you there?’ asked the man.

  ‘Expecting me?’ repeated Kellas. He looked down at the baby. It was more tightly asleep than anything he had ever seen. Two small fists a-curl. It was unreprieved darkness outside, and the truck hammered forward, towards the island, with an old man at the wheel and a baby asleep beside him.

  ‘She’s six months old,’ said the driver. He glanced at Kellas and turned back to the road. ‘She’s not yours.’

  Kellas didn’t reply, unsure whether he’d misheard, or whether the driver had said something so strange that it would signify Kellas’s departure from one life and his entry into another, more real and secret. He looked at the old man. He was tall, as far as Kellas could tell; he would be well over six foot standing. He didn’t appear to be carrying much fat under the ski jacket, which was unzipped. Underneath he wore a checked shirt and a white vest. He had a long, narrow face with a mark under his left eye, hidden from Kellas while he watched the road. His hair was cropped closely at the sides. Had it not been thicker and looser on top, he would have looked military. Two long, sharp lines, like cuts, ran down the sides of his face, from cheekbone to jaw. There was a generic quality to his handsomeness, as if, when younger, he had begun to will himself into having a particular set of features at sixty, drawing for models on the likes of police chiefs, presidents and generals as portrayed on American TV specials, and it was difficult for Kellas to identify what it was about him that took him beyond performance and gave him gravity. It was, Kellas realised, that he seemed to have no tension in him, neither the fake forms of bad actorsiness of purpose, nor the wound-up tautness of anxious western men and women of affairs who fretted, who exercised too much without having anything real to do with the strength they gained, ending up in the course of a day unconsciously tightening their muscles, ready to leap at and strangle the monster of their disaffection, which never appeared. This man was brooding over something, something that in a way Kellas dared not guess involved him, but he wasn’t brooding with his body.

  The man turned his face to look at Kellas. He had grey eyes. Under the left eye the mark, Kellas saw now, was a tattooed tear. ‘My name is Bastian,’ he said. ‘Do you recognise it?’

  Kellas shook his head, and began to introduce himself, but Bastian interrupted. ‘I know your name,’ he said. ‘You’re Adam Kellas.’

  The tear was so out of place, seemed such a ridiculous mistake, that at first Kellas found it impossible to focus on what Bastian was saying. He wanted to ask about the tear, and couldn’t. Gradually the strangenesss of Bastian recognising him and asking whether he was expected asserted themselves over the oddness of the tattoo. The real and secret life was, after all, beginning, now, when Kellas was filthy and exhausted; the information that the baby was not his was an act of joining of things so dizzying that Kellas involuntarily pushed his hands through his hair. The baby gurgled.

  ‘My side of things is not as strange as it might appear, I should tell you,’ said Bastian. ‘What’s strange isn’t that I should happen to pick you up. I dropped Astrid off at the hunt site a few minutes ago. She makes an earl
y start on hunt days. And I couldn’t leave Naomi alone in the house. Went to the store for milk, and Renee was chewing her braids and swivelling from side to side, and I asked her what she’d done, and she said she’d directed a funny-looking guy in nothing but a light jacket down the road to Chincoteague, ten miles with the snow coming down, and only after he’d gone did she realise he’d come in on the bus and he didn’t have a car. She was trying to work out whether to call police or ambulance and I said since I was going that way I’d see what was up. I thought there was something familiar about your face but it was only when you got in the car that I recognised you.’

  ‘Have we met?’

  ‘“Someone should have tipped Paris McIntyre off that he was about to be arrested, for he had many friends in the police who owed him favours, yet when the time came, each of them found their own way to forget that he had ever existed.” Your picture was on the jacket. When Astrid came back from Afghanistan, she told me about you. She said that you’d written books. I tracked The Maintenance of Fury down on the Internet. Took a long time. I liked it. I have a good memory for first lines, and I liked that one. Echoes of Kafka and Tolstoy.’

  ‘I don’t need the fact I’ve been travelling for more than twenty-four hours as an excuse,’ said Kellas slowly. ‘I feel very awake now. But I could write hundreds of first lines to books and still not know how to begin asking all the things I want to ask.’

  ‘Try picking the first question that comes into your head.’

  ‘Why did you have a tear tattooed on your face?’

  The snow had slackened and a watery blue was lightening the eastern horizon.

  ‘Up ahead’s the causeway that takes me and Naomi to Chincoteague,’ said Bastian. ‘I can take you across to the island, to our home. I will do that, gladly, and you’ll be very welcome, and you’ll see Astrid, which I guess is why you’re here. Or, if you ask me to, I’ll just as gladly drive you to Baltimore or DC, right now. Think about it. Of the two ways, my advice to you would be: go back. Don’t come to the island. Think about that while I answer your question.’

  ‘OK,’ said Kellas.

  ‘It was after I dropped out of college. I used to have a smallholding in the hills near San Francisco. I raised marijuana there, supplied the local musicians. It brought in a little cash and I read and wrote and collected books. I spent a lot of time in the woods, smoking and listening to the trees and the water. One year, I guess it would have been ’68, this guy turned up and stayed. He was a little younger than me. He might have been dodging the draft, I don’t remember.’

  The car went over a bump. Some roadkill, presumably, a rabbit or large bird.

  ‘He wore a fringed buckskin jacket and jeans and had a beard he thought made him look like Anton Chekhov, although to me he looked more like General Custer. He didn’t bother me at first but after a while I noticed that wherever I was, and whatever I was doing, he was there, doing it too. I’d go into the library to read and he’d come along, take out a book and start reading. He’d go to bed when I went. If I went for a walk, he’d tag along. He wouldn’t help out with the plants unless I took the lead. His name was Edwin. For a while I thought he was a narc. Then I thought he was a puppy. But it was something else. He wouldn’t do, and he wouldn’t learn; each time he followed me he did it so that he could watch himself. He was his own spectator. He was amazed at the quaintness of his own life. It was as if the actual him was in some other space, sitting on some soft chair, shovelling popcorn into his mouth, watching and commentating while the material Edwin experimented with living. I’d light a joint, and he’d come up and wait till I handed it to him, and he’d say: “I am going to get so stoned today.” It would have made more sense to me if I’d heard him say “They are going to get so stoned today.” He’d be twitchy in the woods. It wasn’t in his nature just to be there. He had to be telling himself, and me, that we were there, and that it was a good thing, a great thing.’

  Between the men, Naomi slept. She threw a couple of punches in the air, moved her head and blew a bubble. Kellas tried to listen to what Bastian was saying. He had a yearning to see Astrid and a cowardly yearning for delay. He felt as he had felt when the deafening motors of the lizard-coloured transport plane had changed their note on the descent to Faizabad, and he had longed to land and step out into Afghanistan, and at the same time feared the end of the clarity of journeying.

  ‘One day in winter I got up early, had some coffee alone in the kitchen, and went out to see the sun come up,’ said Bastian. ‘Right then, Edwin was next to me, coffee in hand. And he started his commentating about how beautiful it was, and how he felt at one with the world, how he pitied the office workers and their bourgeois routines. It had a power on me, his incantation, I began to feel that the sun had been designed, made and marketed, and that I was buying it just by standing there and watching it and listening to Edwin. And Edwin said wasn’t it a great life we had, and I said I supposed it was, even though him saying it made me doubt it. Edwin asked what I was going to do in the future and I said I didn’t know, maybe the same as whatever I was doing now. And Edwin nodded and said he felt exactly the same way. He said: “If I ever come down off this hill and get a straight job in the land of white bread and adding machines, Bastian, will you please come and find me and shoot me?” I looked at him, and I thought about it. I thought about it seriously. I was sure he’d get that job and I believed in that moment that it was a real possible future for me to kill him as he’d asked. I saw myself walking into his office in some small-town real estate firm and him rising to greet me, with his tie tight in the folds of his neck, and saying “Hey Bastian! Long time, no see!” And me drilling him with twelve-gauge. But then I thought about myself and my own weakness. I could kill the future Edwin, but I didn’t want to, I wasn’t a killer, and what about me? I’d been afflicted by his shadow so easily. I needed to get back into the world, but I needed to change myself. I needed something to stop the world from swallowing me up.

  ‘That day I went and got the tear tattooed. A tattoo on your cheek is hard to hide. It sets you apart. I didn’t trust myself to avoid law school or advertising or journalism – sorry, Mr Kellas—’

  ‘It’s OK,’ said Kellas.

  ‘I didn’t trust myself. And I didn’t want to ask somebody to kill me, like Edwin. So the tear was my safeguard. Not to destroy me, only to fence parts of the world off, put it out of bounds. No country club for me. No golf club for me. No brokerage house for me.’ He laughed a single, short laugh. ‘Not in the Sixties, anyway. So that’s what the tear is, it’s to ward against possible weakness.’

  ‘It could also be—’

  ‘An excuse for failure, I know. But I’m not one. That same day I had the tear done, I threw Edwin out of the house and dug up the marijuana. A few weeks later I was in New York, looking for teaching work, writing short stories, trying to earn a wage. I owe the tattoo a lot. It put me back in the world by setting a limit on how worldly I could become.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ said Kellas.

  ‘And now. Now…’ Bastian lightly rocked Naomi’s cot. After a second of silence he glanced at Kellas. ‘Now I think it’s better that those who have weaknesses are constrained, or constrain themselves, by means of quiet but tangible barriers like this.’ He touched the tear. ‘Like deliberately moving to a place where their weaknesses are outlawed. Or by…’ he sighed, a deep inhalation followed by an equally full breathing out ‘…submitting to the rule of a warden. The flaw in barriers like that is, of course, that they’re so easily breached. A pair of sunglasses and the tattoo’s hidden. A causeway and a car—’

  Naomi woke up and began to cry. They had reached the water and the causeway. Bastian pulled over to the side of the road, lifted her out of the cot and held her against his shoulder. He murmured soothing words to her and jigged her softly up and down and the bawling eased. It was light outside. The sky was clearing, although the sun wasn’t yet up.

  ‘Are you Astrid’s father?�
� asked Kellas.

  ‘No. Did you think I was?’

  ‘To begin with, yes. She said that they lived together.’

  ‘Jack Walsh died in summer. He was a good friend of mine. Listen, I have to get Naomi home. I can drop you at T’s Corner, pick you up later and drive you to Baltimore or DC, or you can come home with us. I have to ask you to decide. Keeping in mind that I recommend very strongly that you do not come to the island.’

  ‘I’ll be welcome if I come, but you think I’d be better to leave?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Why shouldn’t I come?’

  ‘That concerns a third party who is not here to speak for herself.’

  ‘But she invited me. She sent me an email.’

  Bastian looked carefully at Kellas. His head was tilted slightly to one side. He was stroking Naomi’s back.

  ‘Did it say “I want to see you now. I want you to come to me…” Yes? I can see from your face now that you get it. It’s too bad. You might have known better. Those emails are flying around all the time. Did you really think it was genuine? When did it come in? Because she sent out messages to everyone yesterday apologising.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ said Kellas.

  ‘As far as I know, the virus sent that email out to everyone in her address book.’

  Kellas rubbed his forehead with his fingertips. The news was bad, grievously bad. Yet in some last-ditch redoubt of nothing-to-lose synapses he thought: she had my email address in her list.

  ‘So you’re saying I’ve travelled here from London on the strength of a few words fabricated by a piece of malicious software?’ he said. ‘Astrid didn’t contact me at all.’

  ‘It looks that way. I’m sorry.’

  Kellas nodded while he thought. ‘I always liked that word of yours, “dumb”,’ he said. ‘It means “stupid” and “ignorant” at the same time.’