by Ken MacLeod
Geena blinked and walked on. So much, then, for perception and common sense. What you see is not what you get. And what you think is not necessarily what you think. The internal monologue may seem like a pure subjective self, and it is, but that little voice in your head is speaking in a language, and language can only be social, which means it’s ideological from the get-go. Your subjectivity is a subject position, a node in your real relations lived as an origin in your imaginary relations. It’s not just that your thinking is ideological, but that your ideology thinks you. Your flights of fancy come with a flight-number tag.
The theoretical problem with Hope Morrison was that she refused, or was unable, to articulate her subject position. If she were to appeal to her rights, or ascribe her views to some belief or ideology that had inscribed itself on her mind, her subject position would be clear. Instead she persisted in her wordless objection.
An enigma.
Geena had now walked past the wide open space and into one of the streets off Hillingdon Road, part of her zigzag course towards where she lived in Uxbridge. As she passed one corner, she found herself glancing with idle curiosity toward a section of low garden wall that she’d noticed the previous evening. Quite unmarked to the naked eye, through her glasses (and, presumably, through those of anyone who passed with glasses on) it displayed a string of glowing letters, about half a metre high, that looked as if they’d been spray-painted in fluorescent ink.
The string spelled out the word ‘NAXAL’, with a swastika in the place of the ‘X’. Geena smiled faintly to herself at the virtual graffiti. Put there – well, a tiny and almost undetectable transmitter dropped nearby, a speck amid the dirt at the foot of the wall – by some Indian old-line supporter, she guessed, maybe some kid whose family kept up a loyalty to one of the many parties of the Left on the subcontinent who opposed the Naxal insurrection and who often enough were the first in its line of fire.
Geena walked on, vaguely troubled. Something about the slogan rang false. It seemed to be making a simplistic equation: Naxal = Nazi. And that wasn’t right. She half-smiled again, recalling the line from The Big Lebowski. Nazis, whatever else might be said about them, at least weren’t nihilists.
You couldn’t say that about the Naxals. In all she knew of history, Geena could think of only one parallel, and it terrified her. Way back in the thirteenth century BCE there had for many more centuries than thirteen been civilisation right across the Middle East. It had been brought down in the brief span of twenty-seven years, by people who had come out of nowhere and burned down every city in their known world. If, in any heap of ruins, enough survivors were left to begin rebuilding, the City Burners came back after a few years and sacked it again. With equal thoroughness they’d destroyed every record. The City Burners had come from the plains, the deserts, the mountains, the sea. They had completed their task, and then vanished from history. It wasn’t even clear whether they were invaders from without or rebels from below. No history was written about them, because by the time they’d finished, there wasn’t a person alive within a thousand miles who could write.
The Naxals were like that. They’d started out as some kind of Maoists, but their ideology had mutated into what seemed like sheer nihilism, fuelled by a hatred of industrial civilisation itself, with a strategy to bring it down. Her supervisor, Dr Ahmed Estraguel, whom she was vaguely planning to see tomorrow morning, had said that People’s War resembled the Naxal strategy the way a protein resembled a prion. The movement was a pure self-replicator, recruiting new cadre out of the very devastation that their actions and the state’s counteractions brought about. Decades of fighting across an ever-increasing range – far beyond the original ‘Red Corridor’ that they’d vaunted when it had merely extended the length of India, and by now well to the north into central Asia and southern Russia and as far south as Indonesia – had turned them into an engine of destruction that would have made the Khmer Rouge shudder. (Say what you like about the tenets of the Angkar, dude…) They’d merged with and absorbed the defeated remnants of older, lesser movements – the Taliban, al-Qaeda, the rebels in Chechnya and Uzbekistan – and taken over what remained of their tattered, though still far-flung, networks. But the Naxals’ longest reach was in inspiration and ideology, and in the virtual. They’d gone viral, inspiring popups, usually but not always in communities of south Asian origin – including in Southall, a few kilometres away.
Which was why Geena had, in the two years she’d lived in Uxbridge, been stopped in the street five times and questioned by the police. Each time, a simple ID check and a few polite answers had seen her on her way. So when, half an hour after she’d seen the slogan, and just as she was a few streets away from where she lived, she turned a corner to find a police van parked at the wayside and three armoured cops blocking her path, she felt barely more than annoyed.
The street was otherwise deserted. Semis, bungalows, villas, New Trees. Smell of goats and chickens. Cars and bike racks. No kids running about. A policeman stepped forward, raising a Kevlar-gloved palm. The other two held back, hands lightly resting on holsters and batons at their belts. Geena stopped. She said nothing.
‘Your ID, please.’
Geena handed over the card. The policeman held it in front of the scanner on his helmet. Mirrored text scrolled on his visor. He asked her name, her address, her place of work, her…
Wearily but promptly, she complied.
The policeman stepped back, still holding Geena’s card, and with his other hand beckoned behind him. One of his colleagues took his place – a woman, Geena now saw, more slightly built and more heavily armoured than the others.
‘Last night,’ the policewoman said, ‘you passed a piece of virtual graffiti, near the junction of Hillingdon Road and Huxley Drive. Could you describe it?’
‘It was the word “Naxal” with a swastika in place of the “x”.’
‘Uh-huh.’ A nod. ‘And tonight you noticed it again?’
‘Yes,’ said Geena. ‘About twenty minutes ago?’ ‘Yes,’ said Geena, puzzled. ‘I suppose so.’
‘Plenty of time to report it, then.’
Geena felt baffled. ‘Report it? Why?’
‘It’s a serious offence.’
‘What? It’s virtual graffiti!’ Geena waved a hand around, indicating other samples of the art. ‘I don’t think there’s even a law against it yet; you couldn’t get them for anything apart from littering, and that’s Council, that’s—’
‘The content,’ the policewoman interrupted, her voice hardening. ‘Glorifying terrorism. Written support of an illegal organisation. Aid and comfort to the enemy.’
‘But… but…’ Geena floundered, disoriented by the absurdity of the claim. ‘It’s against the Naxals! It’s saying they’re Nazis!’
‘Ms Fernandez,’ the policewoman said, with sarcastic patience, ‘I do understand that you’re from a Catholic background. But you must have celebrated Diwali at school, yes?’
‘Yes,’ said Geena, with a sudden lift-shaft feeling as she realised where this line of questioning was going.
‘Then I take it you recognise the significance of the swastika in Hindu culture?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘So what this graffiti is really saying is something like “Hail the Naxals! Good luck to the Naxals!” Isn’t that right?’
‘Well, maybe,’ said Geena, trying to keep a tremor out of her voice, and to sound like she was just thinking aloud. ‘I suppose it could be read that way, but in a political context the significance of the symbol changes, and I’m sure most people would read it the way I did.’
‘The way you say you did,’ said the policewoman, also as if turning things over in her mind. She seemed to come to a decision. ‘I’m afraid we’re going to have to be a little more certain than that.’ She waved towards the van. ‘Would you step inside the van for a moment, please?’
‘No!’ Geena looked from side to side. Nobody around. Somewhere a dog barked. Blue flicker of pla
sma telly on curtains. Bleats and clucks. She wanted to run, even though she knew it was hopeless. Her legs wouldn’t move. Her knees shook.
The policewoman took another step forward, hand reaching out, not yet touching her.
‘No, please, no!’ It came out as a wail.
Grabbed. The other two leapt forward, surrounding her. One of them wrenched away her bag. The other deftly pulled her glasses from her face. Her feet were off the ground. Bundled around the back of the van. In. Slam, muffled, like a bank vault.
The interior of the van had half a dozen seats with head and limb restraints. Geena thrashed like a child, and with as little effect. Before she had time to do anything, she was being held down, then fixed in. The restraints were syn bio stuff, soft on the skin, unyielding.
The policewoman lifted off her helmet, revealing a pleasant young face and a heap of tied-up hair. She held out a cupped hand. One of her colleagues, still visored, tossed her a small metal object that looked like a miniature grenade. She flipped the top off, pressed down a switch. An inch-long jet of flame shot up, blue and white. Geena couldn’t take her eyes off it.
The policewoman reached for a seam in her jacket and pulled out a pin. She played the flame up and down it.
‘This is to sterilise the pin,’ she explained, kindly. The flame vanished with a click, and she passed the lighter back and leaned forward.
Geena clenched her fists on top of the armrests, straining against the clamps around her forearms. The policewoman prised up the middle finger of Geena’s left hand, and pushed the pin under the fingernail.
There was no language. There were no words.
* * *
Sheet of paper. Small print; boxes to tick.
‘Sign this.’
A smile. Another sheet of paper: smaller, folded in three, with coloured font.
‘Take this.’
Geena looked down at it.
Trauma counselling. Helplines.
They returned her glasses and her bag. She stuck the leaflet in the outer pocket.
They opened the doors.
She went home.
9. Paper Tigers
The following morning Geena awoke sobbing. Her boyfriend, Liam, sat up and leaned over. His face interrupted her fixed gaze at the ceiling. Hair tousled, cheeks bristled, eyes bleary; breath garlicky from last night’s chicken curry. She shut her eyes on his anxious gaze.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, from far away.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Just a bad dream, that’s all.’
‘Aw…’
He laid a hand on her shoulder, pulling her towards him. She shrugged him away and rolled over, hauling the duvet.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing,’ she said, muffled. ‘Just let me get back to sleep.’
She heard his breathing above her head for a minute, then a sigh as he turned away. He heaved himself under the covers, his back to her, and lay there until the alarm beeped. Then he got up. Geena heard him in the bathroom, in the shower, getting dressed, in the next room making his breakfast.
He came back into the room and kissed the top of her head.
‘I’ve made you some coffee,’ he said.
‘Thanks,’ she said, her face still to the pillow. ‘Have a good day.’
He waited, then:
‘You too. Bye.’
‘Bye.’
As soon as the outside door closed, she jumped out of bed and hurried through to the front-room bay window just in time to see Liam go up the street. Tall and thin, he walked with his hands in his jacket pockets and his elbows out, shoulders moving in sync with his stride, as he always did. And as always, he turned at the corner, smiled and waved, though he probably couldn’t see her. Geena waved back, slightly self-conscious at still being in her pyjamas.
When he’d gone, she sat down in one of the two old rug-thrown armchairs that faced each other across where a fireplace had once been. She held up her left hand. It shook a little. The dull pewter of the monitor ring on her wedding finger gleamed in the early sunlight. The blue sticking-plaster around her middle fingernail reflected more brightly, a jade satin ribbon of SynBioTech manufacture, its pad still dispensing antisepsis and analgesia in calibrated dosage. Adhesion, calculated too: when the plaster had done its job, it would drop off, like a scab.
The smell of coffee called her to her feet. She stepped barefoot across raffia to the corner with the table and the cooker and the sink, and pushed down the plunger of the one-shot cafetière. The monitor ring gave her its usual morning warning twinge about the caffeine. She ignored it, filled a mug, and sat down to sip, wrapping the injured hand around the hot china.
The obvious thing would be to call Maya. Geena flinched from the thought. She’d named Maya, she was sure of that. Fairly sure. She didn’t remember all she’d said, blabbed, blubbered. Everything. Everyone. What a little sneak she had been. And it wasn’t even as if she had suffered real torture. Just the clinical, sterile application of pain. Routine. Helping with enquiries. Nothing to write to Amnesty about. She must be weak, far weaker than she’d ever imagined.
Then, as her thoughts circled, like crows over roadkill, and her self-incriminations yelled accusations at her, she realised that this too was part of the ordeal. The aftershock was an intended result.
But they’d given her the trauma counselling leaflet! They must understand! They’d agreed she was innocent! They didn’t intend her to feel like this. Or if they did, they’d provided a helpline. No doubt there was a call centre. Probably in China. Or, if the leaflet was personalised, Brazil. They spoke Portuguese there. A sympathetic shoulder, a familiar idiom, a friendly female voice and face on the phone. She could feel it now like a hug. It would be like calling her mother, whom she couldn’t call because she didn’t want to drag her into this, and because her mother would be ashamed.
No. This too. Trauma counselling was part of the process. Proactive prophylaxis against the possible disarticulation of the subject position. Or, to put it in plain English, they didn’t want people just going to pieces. That wouldn’t do at all. How many people, Geena wondered, had been through this and never spoken about it, except to a trauma counsellor? Nobody had ever told her about it. Not in so many words. So why had she panicked at the prospect of going into the van? A lifetime of glances, shaken parental fingers, averted looks, dropped hints, sick jokes in the playground. She had known, all right. She had known what went on in police vans. She had known more.
There had been that time, in Southall, when she’d carried a fragrant paper bag of coconut barfi out of a café, and stepped out on the pavement, and a man a few metres away had exploded in a red mist. Next thing she knew, she was sitting on the parapet of the bridge over the canal, by the pub, looking down at a paper bag butcher-shop-splattered on the outside and with a few yellow crumbs in the bottom corners, and all the front of her clothes sticking to her skin.
She should have had trauma counselling for that, Geena thought, as she drained the mug. Hah. She rinsed it in the sink and went to have a shower, ready to face the day. She knew who to talk to.
The Institute for Science Studies offices, all five of them, were in the Mechanical Engineering block, somewhat to the annoyance of the remaining Mech. Eng. lecturers, not one of whom didn’t still think the taunt that if you lot think science is ideology why don’t you step off the roof? was to the point. Geena spared a glance as always for the vast blue-painted cylindrical machine, a turbine she guessed, whose function she had never got around to enquiring about, that dominated the entrance hall, and hurried up the broad concrete stairs. Around and around, to the fourth floor. At each landing a helpful notice informed her how high a mountain a daily ascent to that level would represent over an academic year. This had never struck Geena as a sensible yardstick. Her Goan great-grandmother could climb Mount Snowdon if given three-hundred-odd days to do it, and look at her.
The door of Geena’s supervisor’s office was open. Geena leaned in and kno
cked sideways.
‘Uh, Ahmed…’
‘Ah, good morning, Geena! Come on in.’
Dr Ahmed Estraguel was a man in his mid-thirties, of short and agile build, with a walk like a dancer or a bantamweight boxer, and an alert, darting gaze. Black hair to the collar of his open denim shirt, pointed black beard, skin somewhat lighter than Geena’s own. He stood for a moment, half-bowing to shake hands across the cluttered desk, and waved to the low-slung armchair in front of it. Geena settled, screwing up her eyes slightly against the sunlight slanting through the window over his left shoulder.
‘How’s things?’ Ahmed asked. This meeting was one pencilled in, just a quick update on how her work was going, but it hadn’t been definite, so he looked mildly surprised and pleased to see her.
‘Things are fine,’ said Geena. ‘At SynBioTech.’ She gestured a heap. ‘Lots of notes. Good obs and some… you know, the ideas are coming along.’
‘Good, good. I’ve been following them on the doc space, and I agree it’s coming along fine, but it’s good to hear it from you.’
He shot her a quick, tight smile, as if to say she should drop in more often.
She acknowledged this with a glance down and a nod. Then she looked up.
‘But apart from that… uh, there’s something I’d like to talk about. Privately.’
Ahmed’s black eyebrows lifted. ‘How privately?’
Geena looked over her shoulder at the door. ‘Off the record. Personal logs only.’
His lips compressed and twitched sideways. ‘Hmm. Very well. I’d better fix us some coffee. Usual?’
‘Black, no sugar, thanks.’
Ahmed sidled past, and out into the corridor. As she waited for his return, Geena scanned from the low vantage of her chair the books on the shelves that lined the walls. Despite all advances in information technology – every title she could see was easily accessible on her glasses – most academics persisted in stockpiling hard copy, as if in anticipation of the day when some Naxal software worm or other global disaster brought down the Net. So Dr Estraguel had his own thesis (Fictitious Capital and the Political Economy of Promise) at floor level, then the sociology textbooks he’d read as an undergraduate – Giddens, Parsons, Habermas – and the theoretical works with which he’d supplemented them – Foucault, Lacan, Derrida; Marx’s Capital (three faded-brown-dust-jacketed hardback volumes in the antique Moscow edition, as well as the more familiar Penguin Classics in battered paperback), with commentaries thereon by Althusser, Dunayevskaya, Fine and Saad-Filho, Ticktin, Mandel and Rosdolsky; early science studies by Popper, Kuhn, Latour, Lakatos, Bloor, Baskhar; rows and rows of monographs and recent books, fiction and non-fiction; on higher shelves the current sociology textbooks, including the latest, to which he’d contributed a chapter himself. But upon them all, as far as Geena could see, dust was gathering. Like almost everyone else with shelved books, when Ahmed wanted to read one he’d glance at its title and summon it on his glasses rather than haul it down.