by Ian McDonald
Five days later, after everyone telling him she was a cow and how well he was doing and he would get over it and he would be happy again and there’s always your work/friends/self, Thomas Lull walked out of the worlds real and virtual without a word, without a warning. Lisa Durnau never saw him again.
‘You’ll forgive me, but this seems a somewhat unorthodox way of curing asthma,’ says Dr Ghotse. Aj’s face is red, her eyes bulge, her fingers twitch. Her tilak seems to throb.
‘Couple of seconds longer,’ Thomas Lull says. He waits until she can take no more, and one second beyond. ‘Okay, and in.’ Aj opens her mouth in an ecstatic, whooping inhalation. Thomas Lull clamps his hand over it. ‘Through the nose. Always through the nose. Remember, the nose for breathing, the mouth for talking.’
He removes his hand, watches the slow belling out of her little round belly.
‘Would it not be simpler taking medication?’ Dr Ghotse opines. He holds a little coffee cup very delicately in his two hands.
‘The whole point of this method,’ says Thomas Lull, ‘is that you don’t need medication, ever again. And hold.’
Dr Ghotse studies Aj as she again empties her lungs in a long, whistling exhalation through her nostrils and holds.
‘This is very like a pranayama technique.’
‘It’s Russian; from the days when they had no money to buy anti-asthma drugs. Okay, and out.’ Thomas Lull watches Aj exhale. ‘And hold again. It’s a very simple theory if you accept that everything you’ve been taught about how to breathe is dead wrong. According to Dr Buteyko, oxygen is poison. We rust from the moment we’re born. Asthma is your body’s reaction to try to stop you taking in this poison gas. But we go around like big whales with our mouths open taking great searing lungfuls of O2 and tell ourselves it’s doing us good. The Buteyko method is simply balancing your O2 and your CO2, and if that means you have to starve your lungs of oxygen to build up a healthy supply of carbon dioxide, then you do what Aj here is doing. And in.’ Aj, face pale, throws her head back and expands her belly as she inhales. ‘Okay, breathe normally, but through the nose. If you feel panicky, do a couple of rounds of breath retention, but don’t open your mouth. The nose, always the nose.’
‘It seems suspiciously simple,’ Dr Ghotse says.
‘The best ideas are always the simplest,’ Thomas Lull says, the Barnum of breathology.
After he has seen Dr Ghotse creaking off on his tricycle, Thomas Lull walks Aj back to her hotel. Trucks and Maruti micro-buses roll along the straight white road tootling their multiple horns. Thomas Lull raises a hand to the drivers he recognises. He should not be here. He should have sent her off with a wave and a smile and when she was out of sight taken his bag straight to the bus station. And why does he say, ‘You should come back tomorrow for another session. It takes a while to get the technique right.’
‘I don’t think so, Professor Lull.’
‘Why?’
‘I do not think you will be here. I saw the case on your bed, I think you will be leaving today.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘Because I found you.’
Thomas Lull says nothing. He thinks, can you read my mind? A dug-out carrying neatly dressed schoolchildren crosses the backwater to the landing, alcofuel engine burbling.
‘I think you want to know how I found you,’ Aj says mildly.
‘You do?’
‘Yes, because it would always have been easier for you to leave, but you are still here.’ She stops, head following a dagger-billed, wild-eyed bird that glides down from the pastel blue Church of St Thomas through the palms, their trunks banded red and white to warn traffic, to settle at the edge of a raft of copra husks softening in the water. Paddy-bird, Indian pond-heron, Ardeola greyii,’ she says, as if hearing the words for the first time. ‘Hm.’ She moves on.
‘You obviously want me to ask,’ says Thomas Lull.
‘If that is a question, the answer is, I saw you. I wanted to find you but I did not know where you were, so the gods showed me you here in Thekaddy.’
‘I’m in Thekaddy because I don’t want to be found by gods or anyone.’
‘I am aware of that, but I did not want to find you because of who you were, Professor Lull. I wanted to find you because of this photograph.’
She opens her palmer. The sunlight is very strong even through the palm-dapple, the picture is washed-out. It is taken on a day as bright as this, three Westerners squinting in front of the Padmanabhaswamy temple in Thiruvananthapuram. There is a slight sallow-skinned man and a South Indian woman. The man’s arm is around the woman’s waist. The other is Thomas Lull, grinning in Hawaiian shirt and terrible shorts. He knows the picture. It was taken seven years ago, after a conference in New Delhi when he took a month to travel the states of newly sundered India, a landmass that had always fascinated, appalled and attracted him in equal measures. Kerala’s contradictions held him a week longer than planned; its perfume of dust, musk and sun-seared coconut matting, its sense of ancient superiority to the caste-ridden north, its dark, fetid chaotic gods and their bloody rituals, its long and successful realisation of the political truth that Communism was a politics of abundance not scarcity; its ever-shifting flotsam of treasures and travellers.
‘Can’t deny it, that’s me,’ Thomas Lull confesses.
‘The other couple, do you recognise them?’
Thomas Lull’s heart kicks.
‘Just tourists,’ he lies. ‘They’ve probably got a photograph exactly the same. Should I?’
‘I believe they may be my natural parents. It is them I am trying to find; it is because of them that I asked the gods to show me you, Professor Lull.’
Now Thomas Lull stops up short. A truck decorated with images of Siva and his wife and sons rolls past in a wave of dust and Chennai filmi music.
‘How did you come by this photograph?’
‘It was sent to me on my eighteenth birthday by a firm of lawyers in Varanasi, in Bharat.’
‘And your adoptive parents?’
‘They are from Bangalore. They know what I am doing. They gave me their blessing. I always knew I had been adopted.’
‘Have you any photographs of them?’
She scrolls up an image of a coltish teen sitting on a verandah step, knees pressed chastely together, hands wrapped around shins, barricading virginity. She doesn’t wear the Vishnu tilak. Behind her stand a South Indian man and woman in their late forties, dressed in the western style. They look like people who would be always open and honest and western with their daughter and never try to interfere with her journey of self-discovery. He thumbs back to the temple photograph.
‘And these you say are your natural parents?’
‘I believe so.’
Impossible, Thomas Lull wants to say. He keeps silent, though silence binds him in lies. No, you bind yourself in lies wherever you turn, Thomas Lull. Your life is all lies.
‘I have no recollection of them,’ Aj says. Her voice is flat and neutral, like the shade she wears. She might be describing a tax return. ‘When I received the photograph, I felt nothing. But I do have one memory; so old it is almost like a dream. It is of a white horse galloping. It comes to me and then it rears up with its hooves in the air, as if it is dancing, just for me. Oh, I can see it. I love that horse very much. I think it is the only thing I have from that time.’
‘No explanation from these lawyers?’
‘That is correct. I had hoped that you could help me. But it seems you cannot, so I will go now to Varanasi and find these lawyers.’
‘They’re about to start a war up there.’
Aj frowns. Her tilak creases. Thomas Lull feels his heart turn.
‘Then I shall trust the gods to keep me safe from harm,’ she declares. ‘They showed me where you were from this photograph, they will guide me in Varanasi.’
‘These are mighty handy gods.’
‘Oh yes, Professor Lull. They have never failed me yet. They are
like an aura around people and things. Of course, it took some time before I realised that not everyone could see them. I just thought it was manners, that they had all been taught not to say what they knew, and that I was a very rude and unmannerly girl who blurted out everything she saw. Then I understood that they couldn’t see and didn’t know.’
As a ragged-assed seven year-old William Blake had seen a London plane tree churning with angels. Only his mother’s intercession prevented a thrashing from his father. Presumptions and lies. A lifetime later the visionary had looked into the eye of the sun and seen an innumerable company of the Heavenly Host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty. Thomas Lull had squinted at the Kansas sun every morning of his working life and seen nothing but nuclear fusion and the uncertainties of quantum theory. Tension coils at the base of Thomas Lull’s stomach but it is not the old serpent of sexual anticipation he knows from the affairs and the sun-warmed backpacker girls. It is something other. Fascination. Fear.
‘Any person or thing?’ Aj cocks her head, a gesture between a western nod and an Indian head-roll. ‘Who’s that, then?’ Thomas Lull points to the tin toddy-stall where Mr Sooppy sits waving away flies with a tattered copy of the Thiruvananthapuram Times.
‘That is Sandeep Sooppy. He is a toddy-seller and he lives at number 1128 Joy of the People Road.’
Thomas Lull feels his scrotum slowly contract in fear.
‘And you’ve never met him before in your life.’
‘I have never met him at all. I never met your friend Dr Ghotse before, either.’
A green and yellow bus rolls past. Aj does the head-cock thing again, frowning at the hand-painted licence number. ‘And that bus belongs to Nalakath Mohanan, but it could be someone else driving. The bus is well past its service date. I would not recommend riding on it.’
‘It’ll be Nalakath,’ Thomas Lull says. His head is wheeling as if he had taken an eighth of the Nepali that Mr Sooppy sells out the back of his toddy stand. ‘So, how come these gods of yours can tell the state of Nal’s brakes just by glancing at his licence-plate, but they can’t tell the first thing about these people you say are your natural parents?’
‘I can’t see them,’ Aj says. ‘They are like a blind spot in my vision, every time I look at them, everything closes up around them, and I can’t see them.’
‘Whoa,’ says Thomas Lull. Magic is spooky, but a hole in the magic; that’s scary. ‘What do you mean, you can’t see them?’
‘I can see them as human beings but I can’t see the aura around them, the gods, the information about them and their lives.’
A rising wind rattles the palm blades, rattles Thomas Lull in his spirit. Forces are drawing around him, penning him inside a mandala of lives and coincidences. Blow on, away out of here, man. Don’t get involved in this woman and her mysteries. You’ve lied to her, what you could not bear is if she is not lying to you.
‘I can’t help you,’ Thomas Lull says. They are at the gate of the Palm Imperial. He can hear the satisfying crisp twang of a tennis rally. The wind confesses in the bamboo, the surf is high again. He will hate to leave this place. ‘I’m sorry your trip has been wasted.’
Lull leaves her in the lobby. When she has gone to her room he calls in a long-term favour from Achuthanandan the hotel manager and pulls her account details from the register. Ajmer Rao. 385 Valahanka Road, Silver Oak Development, Rajankunte, Bangalore. Eighteen years young. Paid for with an industrial-grade Bank of Bharat black card. A high-calibre financial weapon for a girl working the Kerala Bhati-club circuit. Bank of Bharat. Why not First Karnatic or Allied Southern? A small mystery among the hosts of luminous gods. He tries to spy them as he trails back the straight white road to his home, catch them out of the corner of his eye, fix them in his fleeting vision like floaters. The trees remain trees, the trucks obdurately trucks and the Indian pond-heron stalks among the floating coir husks.
Aboard Salve Vagina Thomas Lull swiftly sets a stack of folded beach-shirts on top of Blake and closes the bag. Leave and don’t look back. The ones who look back are turned to salt. He leaves a note and some money for Dr Ghotse to find a local woman and pack the rest into boxes. When he arrives where he’s meant to be he’ll send for his stuff.
On the road he flags down a phatphat and rides in to the bus station, bag clutched on his lap. Bus station is a generosity: the battered Tatas use a wide spot in the road as a turning circle, which they do without regard for buildings, pedestrians or any other road user. The gaudily decorated buses lounge beside sewing repair stalls and hot snack vendors and the ubiquitous toddy-men. Marutis with interior fans rattling and open-back Mahindra pick-ups honk their way through the bustle. Five bus sound-systems compete with hits from the movies.
The bus for Nagercoil won’t leave for an hour so Thomas Lull buys himself a toddy and squats on the oily soil under the seller’s umbrella to watch the driver and conductor argue with their passengers and grudgingly wedge their luggage on to the roof rack. The Palm Imperial’s microbus arrives at its usual breakneck speed. The side door slams open and Aj steps out. She has a small, grey bag with her and wears shades and a wrap-round over her pants. Boys mob her, clutching at her bag; informal porters. Thomas Lull gets up from under his shady umbrella, strolls over to her and lifts her bag.
‘All connections to Varanasi this way, ma’am.’
The Nagercoil bus driver sounds his horn. Last call for the south. Last call for peace and dive schools. Thomas Lull steers Aj through the skinny boys towards the Thiruvananthapuram express coach, firing up its biodiesels.
‘You have changed your mind?’
‘Gentleman’s prerogative. And I’ve always wanted to see a war close up.’
He jumps up on to the steps, pulls Aj up after him. They squeeze down the aisle, find the back seat. Thomas Lull puts Aj by the window grille. Shadows bar her face. The heat is incredible. The driver sounds his horns a last time, then the bus for the north draws away.
‘Professor Lull, I do not understand.’ Aj’s short hair stirs as the bus picks up speed.
‘Nor do I,’ Thomas Lull says, looking at the cramped bus seat with distaste. A goat squirms against him. ‘But I do know if sharks ever stop moving they drown. And sometime gods are not enough to keep you right. Come on.’
‘Where are you going?’ Aj says.
‘I’m not spending five hours cooped up in here on a day like this.’ Thomas Lull raps on the driver’s glass partition. He rolls his paan into his left cheek, nods, stops the bus. ‘Come on, and bring your bag. They’ll have everything out of it.’
Thomas Lull climbs the roof ladder, extends a hand down to Aj.
‘Throw that up here.’
Aj slings the bag up. Two roof-rider boys grab it and stash it safe among the bales of sari fabric. One hand holding her dark glasses in place, Aj scrambles up on to the roof and sits down beside Thomas Lull.
‘Oh, this is wonderful!’ she exclaims. ‘I can see everything!’
Thomas Lull bangs on the roof. ‘To the north!’ With a fresh gust of vile black biodiesel smoke, the driver draws off. ‘Now, Buteyko method, advanced class.’
Lisa Durnau’s not sure how many times Captain Pilot Beth’s called her but the board is lit up, there’s chatter on the com channels and an air of imminence in the atmosphere.
‘Are we coming in?’
‘Final approach adjustments,’ the little shave-headed woman says. Lisa feels a soft nudge; the attitude jets burping.
‘Can you patch this up on my ’hoek?’ She’s not going in blind to a rendezvous with a certified, genuine Mysterious Alien Artefact. Captain Pilot Beth hooks the device behind the immobilised Lisa’s ear, seeks the sweet spot in the skull, then touches a few lighted panels on the board. Lisa Durnau’s consciousness explodes into space. Under full prope, the sensation that her body is the ship, that she is flying skin to vacuum, is overwhelming. Lisa Durnau hovers like an angel in the midst of a slowly rotating ballet of space engineering: the ladder
ed wings of a solar power array, a rosette of film- mirrors like a halo of miniature suns; a high-gain antenna loops over her head, an outbound shuttle flashes past. The whole array basks in baking light, webbed by cable to the spider at the dark heart, Darnley 285. Millions of years of accumulated dust have coloured the asteroid only a shade less black than space itself. Then the mirrors shift and Lisa Durnau gasps as a rayed trefoil blazes silver on the surface. Astonishment turns to laughter; someone has stuck a Mercedes logo on a space rock. Someone not human. The triskelion is vast, two hundred metres along an arm. The huge waltz slows as Pilot Captain Beth matches rotation with the rock and Lisa Durnau forces a mental reorientation. She no longer drifts face-forward toward a crushing dark mass. The asteroid is under her feet and she settles like an angel on to it. Half a kilometre off touchdown, Lisa picks out the clusters of lights of the human base. The domes and converted drop-off tanks are coated in a thick layer of dust attracted by the static thrown up by the construction. The alien triskelion alone shines clear. The shuttle settles towards a cross-target of red navigation beacons. A procession of manipulator arms works diligently dusting the lamps and the launch laser lens. Looking up, she can see them marching hand-over-hand up and down the power and com cables. Preacherman’s daughter Durnau thinks of bible stories of Jacob’s ladder.