“So…” she said. Coolly. As though without interest, or concern. “You’ve heard of us? You know what we do?”
Lota blinked, nodded. “Yes,” she said—suddenly uncertain. “Something.”
The woman was not really looking at Lota anymore, but Lota felt her eyes burning into her anyway. She’d never felt more exposed.
“You’re very young,” the woman said. “Only—what? Sixteen?”
Lota shook her head but didn’t correct her. (She was seventeen—eighteen, come fall.)
“You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.” The woman had begun walking again; Lota followed. “You could get married next year. Fat. A couple of babies by spring. Or, what? I get it. You’re too smart for that. So win a scholarship. Study literature in England, why don’t you? Go see London, go see Paris, France.”
It seemed that the woman had quickened her pace; in any case, Lota was having difficulty keeping up. Again she double-stepped and they walked nearly to the clock tower in silence before the woman stopped. She turned and looked directly at Lota for the first time, and so fiercely that for a moment Lota thought she might strike.
“Are you prepared to give that up?” The woman’s teeth were bared and clenched. She practically hissed out the words. “Are you prepared to give up everything for something that might not even happen? For something you might not even see?”
Lota’s heart beat quickly, and her mind raced as she tried desperately to understand what was being asked.
“Think about it,” the woman said. “Think about it three weeks, and if—after three weeks—the answer is yes, then you come find me.”
Three weeks passed. Then three months. Then three years. Lota got up slowly and pushed her chair back into position under the table. She touched her hip, feeling automatically for her weapon. Then she turned toward the exit, following the direction of Kurtz’s gaze. In another moment, Bruno would push the depot door open wide, she would walk out of the building, and everything would change.
FOUR
How, Rachel wondered as she made her way down the stairs to the lobby, could Phil seriously expect her to tell Vollman to let go of the past? It was all the islanders had ever had. Until recently, they hadn’t even had an island: a nuclear test had rendered it completely uninhabitable back in 1965. The local population had immediately been evacuated. The plants had withered, the buildings had crumbled, the beaches had been blanketed in a thick layer of radioactive dust and ash. In all likelihood, no one would have ever heard of the island again except that, in the mid-1970s, its dispossessed people began campaigning to move back home. Protests and demonstrations had briefly garnered international attention. Even Rachel’s father, who’d never been, as he put it, “political” exactly, remembered.
Had he been in support of the island? Rachel once asked. Well, of course! Who would not be in support of a people who, having lost everything, asked for literally nothing in return?
Images of the ruined island had been circulated widely, accompanied by portraits of islanders looking by turns lost, angry, defeated, and confused. They’d lived as refugees in the Philippines for a generation, were adrift there—haunted by nightmares, by demons. There’d been a rash of suicides; alcoholism had become endemic; domestic violence accounted for more than half of all local hospital records. Without a homeland, the islanders said, there could be no way of imagining the future. Without a homeland, they were disconnected from time itself—stuck somewhere between the present and the past.
No one who became involved in the matter at the level of diplomacy—as many soon did; the whole thing quickly became a public relations nightmare—had felt that it was in anyone’s best interest to point out that, as far as anyone knew, the island (which had never really been an island at all, but an atoll, in the very last stages of its geologic existence) had no native inhabitants, that the dispossessed population had never properly belonged anywhere, or that the island was now so heavily contaminated with radioactive waste that any natural matter that still existed above sea level would need to be sealed under a protective layer of concrete and wire before anyone set foot on it again.
But where did that leave them? Even the islanders must sense it now, Rachel thought, that whatever energy had drawn them back—whatever they’d hoped to redeem or be redeemed by—had all but disappeared. A deep apathy had settled in. You could almost feel it—the way it clung, like the damp air. Rachel remembered getting off the plane for the first time, a sinking feeling in her gut. Disgust mixed with a sort of visceral dread.
No, she wouldn’t be at all sorry to leave the island behind. It had started to get to her, to get under her skin. Time moved strangely. It was as if there was no way backward, or forward. No future, “liquid” or otherwise, no past—and so no possible way of letting go. Once, the old people on the island said, time had been balanced and whole, but now the demons had begun to slowly chip away at it; time itself, and everything suspended within it, had begun to fracture. There was less and less to grab hold of, more cracks to slip into, more ways to disappear…
Rachel pushed through the hotel door and her own image reflected back at her strangely. The horrible thought occurred to her that in the months she’d spent alone on the island, time really had been standing still. Or else progressing backward. That by the time she returned to the mainland it might already be too late: her career over, Ray having long ago forgotten her, Zoe grown.
The morning sun greeted her with its indifferent glare; Rachel winced. It was a ridiculous idea. She pushed it away and gave Grigor a quick wave. The island had certainly been getting to her.
And yet, she thought, as she made her way to the car, it was impolitic to mention what everyone, including the islanders, must have already secretly acknowledged to themselves: the main problem was that the island existed at all. She was sorry to admit it even to herself, but it was simply true. The island never should have been rebuilt; the project never should have got off the ground. Because, when it came down to it, all anyone was doing was waiting for it to disappear again. A clause in the relocation agreement, drawn up in 1981, stipulated that if and when—according to natural causes or an unforeseeable act of God—the island should once again be covered by waves, territorial rights would immediately revert to the Empire. It was only, therefore, a matter of time. Even those islanders ignorant of the clause had to know that at some level. The island, and their existence on it, had only ever been provisional. Their return to it—like their exile—a temporary measure that served not their own interests but those of people and forces beyond them.
There’d been a lot of talk about accountability, of course, in the early eighties, but like most things it was all a matter of perspective. Rachel’s profession had taught her that much. It was all a matter of how you looked at the thing, and from what angle, and how far you were willing to peer either forward or back.
She reached the rear passenger side door, which Grigor had left open for her.
After all, she considered, as she slid inside the car, it was one thing to identify—as her father’s generation had done—who and what was responsible for the islanders having been displaced. It was quite another thing to identify those responsible for their having arrived on the island at all—or to know who was responsible now.
Except for a handful of colonial overseers, almost no one had come to the island willingly. They’d arrived in waves, following one industry or another—all of which had eventually pulled up stakes, leaving their imported workforces behind.
The only legitimate industry that had ever flourished on the island was the cable industry. The island was located exactly halfway between Los Angeles and Tokyo, making it an obvious choice for a stopping point along the first trans-Pacific section of the All Red Line in 1907—as well as for the first coaxial cable system, implemented in 1963. After the island was evacuated two years later, cable companies were forced to redirect their lines, using older and more circuitous routes. But the station, which had bee
n built like a bomb shelter, remained intact, and the lines had already been laid. At the first rumblings of a possible return to the island, Ø purchased the station for a song and—before the islanders had even moved into their government-built homes—the most strategic Pacific cable hub had been instantly reborn.
But nothing else had been. Countless voices, numbers, data, stocks, bonds, news items, petitions, memos, advertisements, and petty observations whispered through the cable lines beneath the island all day long, but the island itself remained nothing but a hollowed bone. How, Rachel wondered again, could Vollman, or any of the islanders, “let go of the past” when there was nothing else to grab hold of? The nearest land mass was over one hundred kilometres away…
“Sorry. I got hung up,” she said to Grigor. “Telephone call.”
“Ahh!” Grigor grinned at her. “Raay! How is he?”
Now that she’d arrived, Grigor didn’t appear to be in any particular hurry. He was sucking on a cigarette and leaning out the car’s front window (a compromise; he knew it was not permitted to smoke in the car). His shirt was already sticking to him in the early-May heat.
“Good, good,” Rachel said.
“And the little one? Isn’t missing me too much?”
“It’s difficult, of course…”
“Of course.” Grigor dropped his cigarette and turned the key in the ignition. The car lurched forward; Rachel’s stomach dropped. The ground seemed to shift beneath her and she had an uncanny sensation that she would never see either Ray, or Zoe, again. That she was moving steadily away from, rather than toward, them.
But why should she feel that way? She could count the distance between herself and her family in hours now, not months or weeks, or even days.
Her recent conversation with Phil returned to her—unbidden. “No offence intended,” Phil had said. “It’s an advantage.”
An advantage. The word stuck like a fishbone. Rachel tried to pry it out—to identify its sharp end. The comment had been ignorant, of course, but that was nothing new, coming from Phil. What bothered Rachel was something else. Something she couldn’t exactly put her finger on. She repeated the phrase a third and then a fourth time before it hit her. When the words ran through her mind, almost automatically now, it was Ray’s voice she heard speaking them. That was the thing that stuck, that Rachel found difficult to swallow: ever since they’d arrived on the island, Ray had considered her to be at an “advantage.” He’d begun to resent her for it. She’d felt it—undeniably. Without ever exactly putting it in those terms. It had begun slowly, at first—apologetically. But somewhere along the way, the resentment had become real, and (if Rachel was completely honest with herself) she couldn’t exactly blame him.
Grigor made a sharp left and Rachel slid into the door, her shoulder banging heavily against the glass. Grigor glanced up and grinned at her in the mirror.
“Sorry!”
Rachel managed a hard smile.
But was it really too much to ask, she was thinking, for Ray to have been genuinely happy for her—proud, even? Just as she’d been—for the most part—every time he’d received recognition instead of, or ahead of, her? Why, she wondered, was it a woman’s lot to be made to feel like this, even in her own marriage—with the one person to whom she’d ever felt close? Ashamed of her own success?
Grigor made another sharp left; Rachel braced herself. They pulled up sharply in front of the island’s single set of traffic lights.
Of course, she wasn’t being fair—she knew that. It had, after all, been Ray who’d insisted that she take the job. “You’d be crazy not to,” he’d said simply, with a shrug. “I honestly don’t even know why we’re talking about it.”
She tried to calm herself by keeping her eyes fixed, straight ahead, on the light. She dared herself not to look away until it changed from red to green, but almost instantly her eyes stung. She fought hard not to blink or look away. It was remarkable, she thought, how hard it was to concentrate on a single thing for something less than a minute and a half—to actually register the difference between one thing and the next.
But she wasn’t making it up, either—she was fairly certain of that. There was an accusation in there, somewhere. In the shrug; in the way that, as Ray spoke, he hadn’t exactly been able to look her in the eye: “I honestly don’t even know why we’re talking about it.”
So maybe it was unfair! She’d certainly never said it wasn’t. They were equally qualified—that went without saying. Their careers had followed almost exactly the same course. Ray had worked harder, no doubt. He was always so anxious to please, that was why. Success mattered to him more, on account of his upbringing. He was a black kid, adopted at birth by white Southern Baptists. Practically speaking, as Rachel liked to say, he’d been raised by wolves.
She realized that it hurt him when she said this; knew that, despite everything, he could never bring himself to fault his parents. They were good people, after all (even Rachel had to grudgingly admit that). Uneducated and short-sighted, perhaps, and as confused as anyone when it came to separating self-sacrifice from private desire, but good people, nevertheless.
Because of it—as Ray mentioned often, in their defence—he’d never, growing up, been made to feel anything less than worthy.
But that was precisely it—what Rachel had always found so disturbing. Ray had been “different” growing up, sure, but he’d also been “chosen.” To be cut off from the past was, he’d learned early on, the only possible beginning, the only way he might one day be “saved.” It had been a chance in a million, his parents had told him, but the chance was his, and he had every right to take it.
Of course, an ability to readily perceive what was so preposterous—and potentially dangerous—about the kind of assumptions Ray’s parents had always made (assumptions which, to a certain extent, had become Ray’s own) did not bring Rachel any closer to an actual understanding of Ray’s experience in the world, she knew this. But until now, the implicit distance—or difference—that existed between them had never really seemed to get in the way. It had instead (or so Rachel had always thought) offered them a way of looking at each other and themselves—at the world, even—in a way that didn’t just presume that difference could be swallowed up, absorbed within a single point of view.
And besides. As she was fond of informing Zoe whenever they failed to see eye to eye: like it or not, “understanding” was not the only perspective on a situation a person was entitled to have.
The light had changed to green without Rachel’s noticing. They’d already lurched forward, were dodging motorbikes and stray dogs on the main avenue, only a few blocks from the embassy.
She would call Vollman the moment she got in—get that out of the way. “Us old guys,” Phil had said, “we all look and sound alike, but you…”
Really, she should be offended—and would be, except that Phil never offended anyone. He was just like that. The perfect businessman. The type that, even when he said outrageous things, everyone, including Rachel, would just shrug or laugh.
She could play out the whole conversation in her head, knowing pretty much exactly how it would go.
“Darling!” Vollman would say (because everyone related to her professional career had always called her by her last name). “How are youuuuuuu?” (Vollman knew that, in the eyes of both the people and the foreign governments, his strength lay in his impeccable manners, his laid-back island charm.) “Oh, that thing with Mercer,” he would drawl. “Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about it!” And, after saying her piece, Rachel would put down the phone and take Vollman at his word.
She would not worry about it. That’s right. Not even one little bit. After saying her piece, Rachel would put down the phone, gather odds and ends from her desk, make a few final telephone calls, do the rounds in the corridor, and finish the day off with a quick visit to the ambassador’s office, where they’d spend a few minutes congratulating each other for the way things had—more or less—�
�worked out for everyone.”
Yes. Things had worked out—they really had. She hoped Ray could appreciate that—if not immediately, then soon. She hoped he’d see how her remaining on the island really had made sense, that he could appreciate that the connections she’d made, even during her brief tenure on the island, would, very shortly, move them both well ahead. What made the island so inhospitable on a human level was, after all, what made it so significant on a global one. It had even been proposed by no less a figure than the Empire’s chief security officer that the entire world would one day be controlled from the island precisely because it was exactly what it appeared to be: a near-people-less state that did not even have a natural land mass. Like money, government was becoming—had no choice but to become—increasingly invisible. Very soon, the officer opined, it would disperse itself completely—like data over the internet or “a fart in the wind.”
Rachel remembered feeling increasingly uncomfortable as the officer spoke. It was like watching one’s own place in the universe being methodically edited out. According to the ambassador, however, things had never been more exciting. “Just when you thought you’d been taken to a remote little outpost in the Western Pacific to wither away and die,” he’d said to Rachel the first time she’d met him and Phil Mercer together, “you’re actually right smack dab in the centre of the action.” They’d talked fibre optics, global communication. A lot of it, frankly, had gone over Rachel’s head. She’d felt only slightly better when, after Mercer had left, the ambassador admitted that he wasn’t too clear on the details either, felt generally uneasy about a global telecommunications monopoly, and that much “remained to be seen.” In any event, he assured her, there was nothing to worry about: they’d benefit either way. “If Ø goes all the way, we go all the way,” the ambassador had said. “And if it doesn’t—we still get a hell of a lot further than we are now.” He leaned back, smoothed the lapels of his linen suit, and motioned for the cheque. He was a large man, impressive in his way. Kept himself fit, was naturally tanned, seemed not to sweat even in the late-September sun.
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