He turned back to Rachel. “Yep,” he said. “This is the last major land-based information hub. Before anyone makes a penny in Hong Kong or Sydney or Rome, it goes through us. You never would have suspected it, would you?” Rachel had nodded, stirring her drink. She was puzzled by the plural pronoun but didn’t ask the ambassador to explain. As far as she knew, Ø was a private corporation that had nothing to do with the Empire beyond a few subsidies.
The ambassador must have meant only that the money passed through the island itself, she reflected, its physical coordinates…
Her ice cubes were melting fast, from the inside out. The ambassador raised his glass. After only a moment’s hesitation, Rachel raised hers, too.
It was important to remain as neutral as possible, she reminded herself—especially when it came to subjects she didn’t fully understand. This was the whole point of diplomacy. If the ambassador had forgotten it, perhaps her own behaviour would serve to remind him. Yes, she thought. Despite, or because of, what one didn’t understand, it was important to assert, and as much as possible adhere to, certain previously-agreed-upon codes.
She swallowed her drink and sat back—tried to relax. She made an offhand comment about the weather and decided, in advance, that she would not refuse a second drink if asked. It was hard not to suspect that it was all a bit far-fetched—an attempt, perhaps, on the part of the ambassador and Phil Mercer (who, though certainly companionable, was altogether unimpressive; pot-bellied with bad teeth) at positioning within the sphere of influence a corner of the world best known as the planet’s largest floating garbage patch.
They were sitting on the roof patio of the Bella Vista Hotel and Rachel could see, from that perspective, not only the entire town centre—a network of low concrete buildings, rutted streets, and leaning telephone wires—but the point at which the centre gave way to the periphery. To her left, she could see the rusted iron gates of the main station and, beyond that, the blank, uneven landscape. To her right: the wharf, the breakers, the endless sea. She understood the island’s strategic importance, of course, but “the centre of the action,” indeed! It was certainly possible, she concluded, to lose one’s perspective.
Grigor made a U-turn around the treed median in front of Josie’s canteen. They were only a minute or so away from the embassy now. “Well, say hello to the mister,” Grigor said. “And to the little miss, too.” Then he looked up so that his and Rachel’s eyes met briefly in the rear-view mirror, and he winked. “Nothing else matters, right?”
The sun splashed through the window, filtering through the leaves of the lead trees. Rachel felt her neck and shoulders relax. She hadn’t even been aware that she’d been leaning forward—braced against Grigor’s driving, against Ray, against her own memories, against whatever was coming next.
What was she afraid of?
She leaned back, watched the light flicker and dance on the leather upholstery. “That’s right,” she said to Grigor in the mirror.
She felt happy. For the first time in weeks, months—in who knew how long. In fact, she felt positively elated. She’d been anticipating this moment for what felt like forever, but until now it had hardly felt real.
She was going home! To Ray. To Zoe. “Nothing else mattered.” It was impossible to put a finer spin on it. Rachel could have kissed Grigor for reminding her.
“Grigor. Pull over, would you?”
“What?”
In the rear-view, Rachel could see Grigor’s eyebrows raised, but he swerved toward the curb and hit the brake. An old man sipping tea in front of Josie’s canteen looked up.
Grigor swung around in his seat. “Mrs. Rachel?”
But Rachel waved away his bewildered concern. She let herself out of the car and stepped onto the curb. The heat pressed against her; it was like another body beside her own. She made her way around to the back of the canteen, where the owner kept a motley array of souvenirs on a rickety table. Rachel had glanced at them once or twice before—careful not to let her eyes linger. She’d wondered where they’d come from, and if anyone had ever purchased anything. Except for a handful of nuclear-history buffs, the island was almost completely untouristed. It was not known for anything except getting literally blown off the map and, because it could claim no original peoples, had never had any authentic traditions of its own.
This fact became even clearer to Rachel as she sorted through the collection of mismatched objects on the display table. There were key chains shaped like the island, mushroom-cloud magnets, inexplicably a few Rastafarian badges, and an assortment of beaded hemp necklaces. She felt a little sheepish as she combed through the sad little display. She’d hoped, briefly, that there might be something that could be taken away. But there was nothing. No symbol, no simple souvenir.
She was just about to go when something caught her eye. A snake, curled in the shape of—yes, she was not mistaken—the Rutherford-Bohr model of the hydrogen atom. The symbol had been stamped or carved onto a circle of rough wood and strung onto a braided chain. Rachel picked it up and turned it between her fingers.
“Excuse me…” she said, generally. It was not immediately clear which, if any, of the old men lined up outside the canteen she should be asking. “Excuse me…How much for the necklace?” A long moment passed before there was any reply. She may have been the souvenir shop’s very first customer, but no one seemed too eager to make a sale.
“Twenty,” one of the old men said finally, without looking at her.
“I’ll give you ten.”
“Twenty,” the man repeated.
Rachel shrugged and put the necklace down. But she knew that even if the man didn’t relax on the price she would buy it. It appeared to her like her own time on the island—both treacherous and absurd. The perfect souvenir from a place whose history was a complicated knot of competing and often conflicting traditions: a place where the Dreamtime stories of Australian Aborigines, Confucianism, Islam, and Darwin’s Origin of Species wove seamlessly into Catholicism and an adapted theory of nuclear fission…
“Fifteen?” Rachel asked hopefully. She’d never been much good at bargaining but felt she at least had to try.
There was no answer. Grigor had got out of the car but had kept it idling. Rachel was already late—and now she’d be even later. She picked up the necklace again and turned it over in her hands. She knew that the creation story told on the island was similar to the Aboriginal Dreamtime story that described another world, or dimension, where the sun and the moon, all the islands and stars, and every animal, plant, insect, and stone, had come into being. This Dreamtime included everything good and bad and made no distinctions between giving and taking away. It was a time outside of time, where every living thing on earth had already been born and died, where nations had already fashioned and destroyed each other, where every story had already been told.
How, Rachel wondered, had everything unravelled from there? Become fragmented and distinct? She wasn’t certain if the dream stories ever properly explained that. According to one account she’d read, the ancestral spirits had begun to struggle with one another in a sort of spiritual survival of the fittest. But then another account depicted the Dreamtime’s demise as a slow, degenerative process, more along the lines of radioactive decay.
What was certain was that the world had been cast adrift; that difference had been introduced; that the past had been separated from the present, the present from the future, and so on; that conflicts had erupted; that fire was born, and floods; that bombs were invented, and wars, and gambling, and drug addiction…What was certain was that the process was irreversible and ongoing—and would eventually result in the complete annihilation of the human race.
She fished her wallet from her purse. “All right, twenty,” she said. She extended a bill in the direction of the man who’d named the price. The old man made no move to accept it, however, and Rachel hesitated for a moment—the bill flapping between her fingers a little in the very slight breeze—before
taking a few steps forward and pressing it into his hand.
Grigor opened the door for her and Rachel slid into the back seat.
“Well, I didn’t manage to get much of a deal,” she said, but in fact she felt pleased. She examined the necklace again—traced the loop of the serpent’s neck as it curved into the atomic spiral. Birth and Death. Creation and Destruction. It was all hopelessly entangled in the stories that were told on the island. It made her think of Ray, too—of his upbringing. Because just as in the tradition in which he’d been raised, the impending destruction of the world came with a promise: an original wholeness would eventually be restored. In some versions, the restoration of this original time really did resemble resurrection, but in others it looked more like the singularity: a total breakdown of general relativity, wherein all matter began to flow toward a single point, finally disappearing beyond the event horizon and eradicating space and time.
Grigor revved the motor and jolted his way down the main avenue, braking sharply at every stop sign without ever really coming to a stop. A few minutes later and they’d pulled up in front of the embassy’s gates. It was a modest enough building, even for the island. A three-storey concrete structure painted rust pink. A small lawn was kept clipped and tended by the single caretaker, the ancient ex-cableman Coco Fen. It was one of only a handful of tended gardens on the island, and it made the building appear optimistic in a way that no one who had worked longer than a week or two inside the building actually was. Despite the presence of Ø Com and the ambassador’s attempts to see things differently, there was no other way to spin it: the island existed beyond every imaginable sphere of influence—and every hope.
Rachel grabbed her purse, handed Grigor a significant tip, and shut the door behind her.
It made her sad, of course. Ray, too. “It would be one thing,” she’d said sometimes, at the beginning, “if there was something we could do. But—there’s not, is there?”
It surprised her to discover just how surprising the idea was. There being nothing they could do jarred sharply, she realized, with her understanding of the world as a logical series of steps that one could progress along, potentially endlessly. With her sense that, given the proper combination of positive thinking and sheer determination, nothing was ever entirely out of reach.
She knew that things didn’t really work like that, of course, and had—ever since meeting Ray, perhaps—a certain appreciation for the way things just happened, were beyond anyone’s control. But appreciating this did not make her any better a diplomat. Or any better a person. She still cringed—out of pity or fear, she didn’t know—every time the young men whooped at her or she passed one of the old-timers on the street.
And yet somehow, especially in these last months, ever since she’d been alone on the island, the place had begun to feel almost familiar. Her father had been a local politician, a notorious ladies’ man, and something of a drunk. Her mother, predictably, a repressed and brittle woman. She’d done everything she could to disguise this, of course, but still Rachel caught glimpses of her mother in the faces of the battered island women: the same vacant stare, as if the body’s last defence was to leave itself more or less uninhabited.
And her father—Rachel caught glimpses of him, too. In the studied nonchalance of the older men. In all that stunted ambition, false bravado, angry desire…It was only ever just the briefest wave of recognition, then it would be gone. But the feeling unsettled, even embarrassed her. Because, of course, in point of fact, her past—not to mention her future—had nothing to do with the island. And even for a moment to imagine that it did…Well it was disrespectful, at best—both of the islanders, and what they’d suffered, and of her own privilege. But somehow, the more she tried to push the resemblances from her mind, the more they occurred to her. She would grit her teeth, think almost angrily of Zoe and Ray—of everything that she was moving toward, and everything she was leaving behind.
She did so now. Yes, she instructed herself as she made her way down the short walk to the embassy, she needed to concentrate on closing the distance rather than widening it again. Because, whatever the island people said, there was really only one direction for time to move in, and that was steadily forward. Every day, every hour now, brought her closer to home, to her husband, her child. Even now, for example (she pushed open the embassy doors, slipped into the empty hall), she was getting closer. Yes, this time tomorrow morning, Rachel thought, mounting the stairs, I’ll be in an air-conditioned cubicle, high in the sky—well out of all of this.
FIVE
Lota was sitting in the van behind Bruno, the engine on. They were about a block from the embassy—could just make out the entrance. Could just make out Kurtz, approaching the embassy along the narrow walk. She appeared to be in no particular hurry, as if she had all the time in the world.
Well, what did she have to worry about? Christine was on duty that morning—one of their own. She’d landed the job a couple years back; a cinch.
In less than two minutes—Lota watched the clock on the dash—Alien would follow. With Christine’s help, he and Kurtz would disable the guards. Three minutes after that, Lota herself, along with Bruno, Verbal, Hannibal, Joker, Alex DeLarge, Norma, and Baby Jane, would stream in through the unguarded embassy doors. Lota would follow Verbal up the main stairs to the minister’s office, then to the first secretary’s. They would restrain the foreign officers, using force when necessary, but at all costs refraining from violence.
Kurtz had been firm on this point. “This civilization is such,” she’d proclaimed at the beginning of one of their final sessions, “that one has only to be patient and it will be self-destroyed.” Her eyes had been fixed on the ceiling, as though waiting for something, or someone, to descend. But then she shifted her gaze so that she seemed to be staring directly at Lota. “Who said that?”
Lota didn’t know.
Kurtz held her gaze. “Something diseased,” she continued, “something poisonous has been ‘eating into the vitals’ of the nation.” Her eyes drifted. “Congresses and parliaments are still ‘emblems of slavery.’ ” They settled, purposely, on Verbal this time. “Who said that?”
Verbal blinked.
“Mahatma Gandhi,” Kurtz declared. “The leader of the Indian independence movement that ended eighty-nine years of official British rule. Gandhi said, If you will sufficiently think over how poisonous and self-defeating the cultures and policies of the dominant civilization have become—you will cease to blame them for it. They rather deserve our sympathy, he said.”
“Sympathy!” Norma spat. She was seated in front of Lota, perched in an excessively upright position at the edge of her chair. Her oversized clothing disguised her thin frame, and her newsboy cap was, as usual, pulled down low over her eyes. The only part of her body that was clearly visible was her hair, which she wore in two thick braids down the middle of her back.
Norma was only a few years older than Lota, and Lota remembered her well from elementary school and junior high. She’d always been small, as well as smart, stubborn, and pretty in a way that made Lota feel shy.
Later, Norma hung out with some of the mainland kids. She became sarcastic, was notoriously impudent with both students and teachers, and managed somehow—just months before graduating—to get herself kicked out of school. It was rumoured that she’d spent a few years on the mainland after that, living with a much older friend of hers. In any case, Lota never saw her again until she showed up one day out of the blue in the basement of the police depot. She’d become aggressively thin in the interim—and introverted in a way that seemed belligerent rather than natural or essential now.
“Sympathy!” Norma spat again, in a voice that exploded from somewhere at the back of her throat.
“Yes,” Kurtz said coolly. “Yes, sympathy—above all.”
Norma exhaled loudly in order to register her complaint.
“Because if we allow ourselves to be angry,” Kurtz continued, as if she hadn’t h
eard, “if we imagine we might somehow avenge ourselves against the mistakes of the past, we’ll remain there. The future will be closed to us—a fait accompli.”
Norma’s voice cracked out like a bullet. “But violence,” she said. “Violence is inevitable, is a cleansing force. You’ve said so yourself. And how many times has it been used against us? You ask us to sympathize?”
Kurtz seemed to lengthen before them. “You haven’t been listening,” she said. She was staring hard in Norma’s direction, but then her eyes lifted; she looked at each of them in turn. “Our power,” she said, “does not consist in the mere repetition of actions or phrases. What we need is not to simply give back what’s been given to us but to effect an actual reversal. To be ironic in the true, rather than the more common, sense of the word. We can’t, you see”—she stepped forward—“simply employ the same terms, only this time in an unexpected way. We need to actually undo them—to defuse them from the inside, to make them ignorant again! We need,” Kurtz said—she took another step—“to wrest irony from fate. We need not to know, any longer, where we’re headed. We need”—she took a third step, was standing almost directly above Norma now—“to refuse their histories, their violences.” She had her arms raised slightly, for balance or effect. “We need to refuse their expectations,” she continued, “no, their knowledge of the way things will end!”
Her arms dropped. She stood looking at them—for the first time, Lota thought, as if she truly didn’t know what would, or should, happen next.
Norma was silent. No one else risked even a sideways glance.
“Of course,” Kurtz said, “when it comes to the station, it will be a different story.” There, Kurtz explained, if they held their fire, they’d be annihilated in less than a minute. “So you can relax,” she told Norma. “You’ll have your chance to use a gun.”
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