We Are Now Beginning Our Descent

by James Meek

  ‘Don’t be hard on yourself. You haven’t done a bad thing, yet.’

  ‘You don’t think I should come to the island.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You can’t tell me why.’

  ‘I’m not going to do that. But now you know you weren’t invited.’

  ‘Has Astrid ever said to you, “I don’t want to see Adam Kellas again?”’

  Bastian blinked. ‘There are four people involved here,’ he said. ‘One of them being you.’

  ‘Has she ever said it, or anything like it, about me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’d like to see Astrid,’ said Kellas. He blinked. He was lightheaded and his wrist ached. ‘I’ve travelled a long way. Whatever the situation between the three of you, I’d like to see her, and if there’s room for me, to stay tonight.’

  ‘There is room,’ said Bastian. He handed Naomi to Kellas, who took her warm, soft weight under her arms. He cupped his right hand under her bottom and put his left hand on her back and let her lie back against his left shoulder, feeling her springy arms hook onto it. Kellas moved her up and down but it didn’t stop her crying, only made intervals of silence.

  Bastian drove onto the causeway, which ran for several miles through an expanse of khaki reed beds and creeks. The island lay on the eastern horizon and the sun was coming up behind it, making the coarse short reeds glow bronze. The view to the north was partly obstructed by a succession of painted, cabin-sized signs, advertising food and lodging for tourists on Chincoteague.

  While they drove, Bastian told him that Astrid had become pregnant before she left for Afghanistan, in September, before, in fact, the Twin Towers came down. It came from a one-night affair; the father was an Australian scientist on a short visit to the Nasa facility opposite Chincoteague who’d since gone back to Melbourne. Yeah, Melbourne. They weren’t in touch. The house had belonged to Bastian since the Seventies, when he’d bought it with the proceeds of a book deal he’d done with the government. It was too big for one. It was a family-sized house. Jack and Astrid and the other Walshes would visit all the time and after Jack retired he and Astrid moved in.

  ‘After Jack’s wife killed herself, and his son went away to the north-west, Jack and Astrid looked out for each other, and I looked out for them. The suicide made Jack very hard. He made a cult of hardness. Reticence and obstinacy was all there was. He wasn’t cranky, he wasn’t even grouchy, but he hated a conversation. Anything that he could answer “Yes” to was a waste of time as far as he was concerned. He liked to stop you talking by saying “No”. If you got a “Maybe” out of him, you were doing well. Astrid could get him to talk, I think, but then she was away a lot of the time. So now Jack’s gone, and I’m looking after Astrid, and helping take care of the kid. You all right there? We’ll be home in ten minutes.’

  ‘Does Astrid need looking after?’

  Bastian didn’t answer at once. He kept looking straight ahead while they crossed a humped swing bridge over the last deep channel before the island itself. ‘I don’t speak for Astrid,’ he said.

  They turned left off the bridge and drove for about a mile along a street of shops, hotels and restaurants. It was narrow for America, a small shoreline town main street with a cinema and a petrol station and a sculpture of a horse. The buildings were two-storey affairs of brick or clapboard. A dozen old trees, winter-bare, opened out above the roof line. Green Christmas garlands, wreaths and scarlet bows were strung between wooden telegraph poles. Some of the houses had verandas enclosed by wooden latticework arches but nothing looked as old as a town on Virginia’s east coast must be. Kellas asked about storms.

  ‘Storms, fire, floods, we’ve had them all. The snow’ll be gone by noon, though,’ said Bastian. ‘There now, honey, soon be home now.’ He stroked the screaming Naomi’s cheek with the second joint of his index finger. ‘She’s hungry. You must be, too.’

  They took a right onto a wider street. Maddox Boulevard, the street sign read. They passed an old whitewashed garage with a larger-than-life carving of a fisherman in yellow oilskins at the door. A sign on the wall read ‘Island Decoy’s’, with two Canada geese in flight fixed alongside. They were heading east again, towards the Atlantic, and the sun ahead of them looked as if it might tip out of the sky and come bowling down the street. Here the houses were smaller and lower, the souvenir shops and motels bigger and louder. There were cycle rentals, a Chinese restaurant, drive-through banks and a shack called His & Her Seafood And Bait Shop. Bastian had been right about the weather. Although the grass verges were still dotted with clumps of snow, the roads and gardens and parking lots were already melted clear. The neck of a fibreglass giraffe in a pocket amusement park, and the ears of an African elephant, glistened where the sun caught the wetness. The park’s palm trees were shrinkwrapped for the close season. After another mile the road crossed a further stretch of reeds and creeks. They reached a roundabout. Bastian took a left off it by a Family Dollar store and turned right at a church like a factory unit, with gothic arch windows cut in the vinyl siding in the gable ends and a thin white fibreglass spire fixed on top. Here the houses were larger and lay in groves of tall pine trees. Bastian turned off onto a potholed road covered in a layer of redbrown pine needles. The trees cast strips of shadow across the road. On the right, through the trees and beyond the houses, Kellas could see more reeds, water, and the green line of a second island.

  ‘That’s Assateague Island,’ said Bastian. ‘On the far side of that’s the ocean. And this is where we live. I’m sorry Astrid couldn’t welcome you herself.’

  The house was closely encircled by a stand of forty-foot pines, with slender trunks and high crowns of bright green. It was a two-storey building, counting the rooms under the roof as an upper storey, with walls faced in lengths of unpainted, treated wood and a screened-in veranda projecting from the front. A stone extension had been added, with a chimney. A pile of logs lay under sacking at one end. The house sat on raised foundations and a short flight of wooden steps led up to the front door. The roof was streaked with snow, melting in the sun. An old bicycle with rusting chopper handlebars and white walled tyres stood leaned up against the wall by the door.

  Bastian took Naomi from Kellas – she had stopped crying – and they walked over the patches of snow and the thick covering of fallen needles to the door. It was not locked. Water pattered from the trees around them and trickled in the drainpipes. In the porch Kellas recognised Astrid’s pointed boots, carelessly left, one upright, the other on its side. He followed Bastian, took his own boots off when Bastian removed his in the porch, and found himself sitting at the table in the kitchen, which smelled of toast and coffee from an earlier breakfast.

  ‘I have to change and feed Naomi,’ said Bastian. ‘I won’t be going to pick Astrid up for a few hours yet. You don’t have any luggage, right? I guess we can fix you up with a change of clothes. You’ll be sleeping upstairs. Take a shower, if you like, or you can fix yourself some breakfast – coffee’s there, fridge is full.’

  ‘You’re very kind,’ said Kellas. ‘I’ll rest and wash later.’

  It was warm in the house. He hung his jacket on the back of a chair, rolled up his sleeves, and set the coffeemaker going. He melted some butter in a frying pan and broke a couple of eggs in, with a few rashers of bacon. He offered to fry for Bastian but Bastian said he had already eaten. The two men worked without speaking, Kellas frying and Bastian changing Naomi’s nappy and using gadgets to sterilise her bottles and heat her milk. Inside the fridge Kellas had checked, while he got the food, for items distinctively Astrid, but how could he tell? A packet of raisin bagels? Spring onions? Chipotle sauce? The kitchen was neat and clean. Along a tiled ledge under the uncurtained window, which looked out of the back towards a wooden shed and a pear tree, were bleached gleanings from the foreshore, shells, the bobbled, spherical integument of a sea urchin, a green crabshell and the long delicate skull of a bird. There was information on the fridge door: a scr
ap of paper with ‘Call doctor’ written on, fixed with a leaping salmon fridge magnet, a table of hunting areas and dates, and a grainy black-and-white photograph of a stone tablet with letters carved on it in two different alphabets; the upper alphabet looked like Greek.

  Kellas set down his plate and coffee and began to eat. Bastian was feeding Naomi from a bottle and Kellas watched her, trying to find Astrid in her chubby head and new eyes. The sounds in the kitchen were Naomi’s gurgles, Bastian murmuring words of endearment, Kellas’s cutlery on the plate and the hum of the extractor fan he’d switched on over the hob. He felt more cheated of immediate reunion with Astrid, more indignant that there were not more signs of her life in the house for him to read, than he felt anxious about Naomi or Bastian, even though he hadn’t expected to find either of them here. There was a docility in Bastian’s manliness. If it came to it, Kellas couldn’t imagine him fighting for Astrid. Naomi was more complicated. Of the two interpretations of Astrid going to Afghanistan while pregnant, the reckless and the defiant, Kellas liked both. He was moved by the thought of having slept with Astrid while Naomi was growing inside her. He didn’t want her to be careworn and cradlebound, but the child gave Kellas more time, must slow Astrid down enough for Kellas to walk alongside her for longer. The implicit offer of stepfatherhood lay in his chase and he could surely coo as sweetly as the big old man on the far side of the kitchen table, who was poking his nose into Naomi’s giggling face and getting it repeatedly clapped between the pink stars of her hands.

  There was, still, the question of money.

  ‘What’s the inscription in the photo on the fridge?’ asked Kellas.

  ‘It’s a tablet from the second century before Christ. An edict of King Ashoka, carved in Greek and Aramaic. It was found in Kandahar and put in the archaeological museum in Kabul until the civil war in Afghanistan in the Nineties. It disappeared.’

  ‘Did Astrid put the picture up?’

  ‘I put it up. Before she went out there, I asked her to see if she could find out anything about where it had gotten to. I leave it up there, hoping she’ll write something, because although she never got to the bottom of it, she did the interviews. You know how it is. People who aren’t reporters always think they have some idea that’ll make a great article. Do you read Greek?’

  ‘No,’ said Kellas. ‘I didn’t know there were people speaking Greek living in Kandahar two thousand years ago.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. After Alexander the Great. There were big Greek settlements in Afghanistan. That was where Aristotle met the Buddha. Not literally, I mean that’s where Greek philosophy met Buddhism. That’s what the inscription is about. It was the Greeks who first gave Buddha a face and a body, his corporeal image. Every Buddha statue comes from the Greeks of Afghanistan and India.’ Bastian gave his short laugh. ‘I recognise that expression on your face. You’re thinking that time is going the wrong way, aren’t you? That ancient Kandahar had Plato and the Dharma, modern Kandahar has Jehovah slugging it out with Allah, the Old Testament versus the Caliphate. You want to play, pumpkin? You want to go fishing with Bastian?’ Bastian, who had been holding Naomi on his knee, lifted her up in the air and had a short discussion with her about tides and lures. He set her down again and jiggled her. ‘When I moved east from California, that was what I was going to write about. I became fascinated by the notion – for which there is nothing except circumstantial evidence – that Jesus and the disciples were Buddhists without the name, that a Greek Buddhist from somewhere between Kabul and Peshawar made the journey to the Greeks of Palestine and taught the young Jesus self-denial, non-violence, the virtues of poverty, chastity and humility.’

  ‘A novel?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the hero was to be that ancient Greek Buddhist?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Kellas felt the vertigo of the millennia and the lust of the billions for the revelation of hidden truths. ‘That could have been…’

  ‘I almost finished it,’ said Bastian. ‘Then I sold it to a government agency. They won’t let it see the light of day for a long time. The act of corporate stupidity they committed by buying it was more embarrassing than anything in the text.’ He looked down at the floor and stroked Naomi’s head softly. ‘I’d like to tell you what happened. I can see you’re curious. It’s an act of atonement to tell it.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Kellas.

  ‘My life would have been different if I’d been British or French,’ said Bastian, ‘where London and Paris are the centre of everything. But I began to feel, after I moved to New York, that I was trying to stay upright on a steep slope that had Washington at the bottom.’ What tugged at Bastian was the notion of service, not to be one who served, but to be in the polis where others did. He was a free thinker. ‘I don’t mean to brag,’ he said to Kellas, ‘but I was on a different plane from the hippies and the anti-war crowd, the anti-government radicals, the amateur American terrorists.’ Antigovernment, as Bastian saw it, defined itself by what it opposed. Bastian was lured by the notion of a city of eternal government that existed just beyond the Washington of four-year electoral cycles and drum-and-cymbals battles over money, war and race. At the time, he was ashamed of the visions that took him suddenly on his walks through the Village, of men in white shirts and black ties, gathered on green grass among white buildings reading through stacks of figures typed on crisp white paper, not to serve a cause or party but for the virtue of service itself; that the rituals were pleasing, and honourable, and good. He was ashamed; his girlfriend was a feminist activist, his friends were leather-panted musicians, campus warriors and civil rights fighters. It was to guard against the temptations of offices, shirts and ties that he’d put the permanent tear on his face. He was ashamed, until he reasoned that his conceptual Washington was more subversive than his friends’. They wanted to change it; he only anticipated its eventual disappearance into another age. The Washington that lured him was a Washington as it might be seen thousands of years hence, mysterious, coded, costumed, like ancient, imperial China seen from now, far enough away for its specifics to be invisible and the beauty of repeating patterns to emerge. Its achievements, virtues and cruelties, in so far as they would be remembered, wouldn’t impress or horrify, only amuse. With this in his head, in 1975, Bastian moved to DC.

  He found it tough to get a salaried job with the tattoo, but his experience and a few published short stories eventually got him a post as a roving creative writing tutor in some of the city’s tougher neighbourhoods. He met Jack Walsh through a charity working with the homeless. Astrid’s father sat on the board of trustees. He invited Bastian to dinner at the Walsh home in McLean, a western suburb of Washington, over the line in Virginia. Kellas worked out that Astrid would have been about eight at the time, and Bastian thirty-three. Kellas lost concentration for a few sentences. Men and women around a table, hair curling over the men’s ears, big ties and big collars. Abundant eye shadow. A serious child in the doorway comes to say goodnight. All the faces turn. A man with a tear tattooed on his face. She remembers him.

  ‘I knew that the main industry in McLean was the CIA. The front gate is right there, across the highway, in the trees. So I wondered if any of the students would be from the agency, or married into it.’ Kellas frowned and apologised and asked Bastian to back up. Bastian repeated what he’d just said; he had got on well with the Walshes and their set in McLean, which was middle class enough, but not such a sought-after place as now. The tattoo, in this case, was just what they wanted – a badge of Bohemia on someone who was not dangerous, stoned or out to fling Society in their faces. They didn’t want to embrace the counter-culture, but they wanted to shake its hand, be able to say they had it as an acquaintance. A white man with a tattoo on his face was less of a commitment than making the acquaintance of somebody black. The consequence was that Bastian got a gig taking a creative writing class in McLean, one evening a week, alongside others teaching conversational French and basket-weaving to bored and confi
ned burghers.

  There were about twenty-five regulars, mostly women. In the first class, Bastian read extracts from his own work in progress, about the Greek Buddhist from Kandahar who travelled to ancient Palestine, and encouraged the students to criticise it. Over subsequent weeks there was a rotation. Each week, a pair of students would read out their efforts, talk about the other’s writing, then be subject to questions and comments from the floor. At the end of the ninth class, one of the students lingered to talk to Bastian while he was packing up. His name was Crowpucker. He was younger than Bastian, barely thirty, and pale, with pouchy cheeks. Crowpucker told Bastian that it was his turn to read-and-be-read the following week, and that he would, to his regret, have to quit the class, since the nature of his work for the government made it impossible for the material concerned to be made public.

  ‘I can imagine the kind of work you do,’ said Bastian to Crowpucker. ‘But it doesn’t have anything to do with what we’re doing here. You’re dealing, I guess, with secret government information during your working hours. Here, this is about you writing fiction and poetry in your spare time. You can keep those things separate. Nobody, least of all me, wants you to come in here and read classified material.’

  Crowpucker smiled, shook his head, shifted his feet and looked around. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘D’you want to talk about this over a beer?’

  They went to a Chinese restaurant and talked for several hours. Crowpucker said that he didn’t want to be a novelist, a screenwriter or a poet; what he had was an interest in the imagination. He picked up on what Bastian had said: ‘I can imagine the kind of work you do.’ Perhaps Bastian could. There were techniques a government agency was interested in examining. Crowpucker and a group of other like-minded young administrators had backing to find specialists in these techniques. It was not a question of making things up. There would be no fabrication of facts. Rather it was the space between the facts, the assembly of the facts into a recognisable shape, and the direction the shape was pointed, that was the concern. It was a matter, in the end, of national security. Too much important information was being wasted because it was being passed to those with the power to use it in a fashion that was shapeless, untidy, confusing. Or dull! Dullness could also harm the national interest.