Beacons

by Gregory Norminton

  ‘I got down here in the mid-seventies,’ Zeke told us after a supper of vegetarian chilli. ‘Lots of old road-warriors headed this way. There’s a bunch around Telluride. It was a terrible time to be out of the mainstream. A lot of guys just gave up but Mike and I came down here to Taos. He was trying to get these places built. I told him I’d get one up.’ He gave the floor a wry smile. ‘Hippies were practical. A lot of people forget that. You want someone who can get a VW Microbus over the Andes, ask a hippy. You want to build a house out of garbage, same. Me and him threw this place up in about three months. Then we fell out.’

  We were sitting with the dirty plates on a low table between us. Al had leaned closer and closer during this account and now was sitting on the edge of her seat, elbows propped on her knees, hands clasped under her chin. I wondered if Zeke could see her breasts but he was sat back looking out of the window where the sunset was striating the sky into an unfeasible number of dark pink and red bands.

  ‘Mike wanted to put up more of these things,’ Zeke went on. ‘Grow ’em like mushrooms and get the township to zone it. Pay tax. I don’t know. Anyway, we haven’t spoken since.’

  ‘They told us you were crazy,’ Al said.

  ‘Slightly crazy,’ I chipped in, alarmed at Al’s candour. But Zeke just nodded.

  ‘I guess,’ he said. ‘If crazy puts you the other side of the fence from everyone else.’

  There was a slightly uncomfortable silence. ‘I suppose so,’ I said.

  ‘There is no crazy,’ Zeke said as if I hadn’t spoken. It was a trick I’d see him play later on the various politicos and CEOs who splashed a course to his door hoping for some kind of endorsement to shore up their dissolving bastions … Or maybe it was uncalculated on Zeke’s part. Maybe he just spoke as the thoughts washed through. ‘Can’t be,’ he went on. ‘Not if there’s no fence.’

  Here it comes, I thought. Alien abduction. Area 51. I adopted my ‘It’s a point of view’ expression, well rehearsed from theory seminars when (for example) other participants implied that characters in novels were representations of actual people rather than rhetorical figures. Al, however, nodded enthusiastically.

  ‘It’s not enough to be off-grid,’ Zeke said. ‘That’s what these places were meant to prove. What if there was no grid?’

  ‘There has to be a grid,’ I said, more curious than challenging. I genuinely wondered what Zeke meant.

  ‘Does there?’ asked Al. That startled me.

  ‘This is a liquid planet,’ said Zeke. ‘Seven-eighths of the surface is water. The core is molten. It’s meant to be dynamic.’

  ‘Dynamic systems are unstable,’ I said. Then, to Al’s surprised look, I added, ‘I used to study fluid dynamics. In math.’

  ‘That sounds like a smart thing to study,’ said Zeke.

  I was gearing up to say something else about fluidity but Al spoke first.

  ‘Then you have to change the conditions.’

  ‘Right,’ said Zeke. ‘But how?’

  It wasn’t rhetorical. He was actually asking.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Al said at last.

  She was gazing at him – there is no other word – raptly. But Zeke looked away out the window where I now noticed that the dark pink sky-bands were more clouds.

  ■

  A milky film covered the sky the next day. The sun would burn it off, I thought, but as the morning wore on it seemed to thicken. It was what the weathermen called an occluded warm front, Zeke told us. Pretty rare out here. This was a big one too. Most of the south-west was under it. Apparently it was raining in parts of Nevada.

  He showed us how the place worked, tracing pipe runs and cabling, tapping the bright red fruit dangling from his chilli plants, opening hatches and staring down into cisterns. It was like a regular house, just self-contained. The electrics were the most complex, with transformers and different kinds of circuits. Al asked questions and pretended she understood the answers.

  We took a walk that afternoon. We didn’t want to venture back into the Great World Community so we headed into the ravine, scrambling under the concrete hull and then following the slope down to the Rio Grande. The descent was gentle enough but the sides of the ravine soon rose steeply on either side. In the shade it was, if not quite cold, at least not hot. Nothing like yesterday. When we reached the bottom the river had changed character too.

  Without the sunlight glinting off the surface, the body of the river seemed more solid, more opaque, with deep eddies opening and closing and the water ramping up in ridges. Al had mentioned maybe having a swim but there was no question of that. It was darker and colder. Even so she stripped off to wash. I admired her white skin as she splashed about in the shallows. Then she beckoned and I stripped off too.

  Drying off took longer than we anticipated. A cool breeze was drifting down the canyon and we actually shivered once or twice before Al and I pulled on our shirts and jeans. Hauling each other back up the ravine to Zeke’s place, Al began talking about getting back to Taos. She wanted to take the Sandia Peak Tramway. A friend of hers had told her about a supposedly lucky payphone at the top. Anyone who dialled their voicemail got good news. She would finish her novel and head for Las Vegas or get a job as a cocktail waitress in the bar in Flagstaff where they filmed the Rick’s Bar scenes in Casablanca … I made encouraging noises. None of this was really going to happen. Not in this world anyway. It was only as we neared the top and the concrete prow of Zeke’s home loomed above us, its dark V-shaped jut cutting the still-luminous sky like the zipper opening on Al’s jeans, that I realized something obvious.

  None of these plans included me. Pulling ourselves up the last yards and wriggling over the lip of the concrete, the sky darkened further and just as we reached the door, the rain began.

  Anyone reading of these events now, almost thirty years after they happened, will know much of what follows. The first Rise, the raft movement, the so-called First and Second Water Wars, the Floating Federation and its wackier fringes, the Pilot Cults, Nova Terrans and so on. All of it started when the first raindrop hit the ground that afternoon. Obviously much of Zeke and Al’s conversation from the previous evening might seem, with hindsight, impossibly portentous and prescient, as if they saw the whole thing coming. I must have forgotten most of it – I mean, we talked for most of the evening – and maybe only those parts stuck. I don’t think they foresaw anything really. They were just ready.

  It wasn’t the Rise itself of course – that was still years away – it was just the biggest flood in New Mexico’s history which gathered up rainfall from both sides of the Rockies and reunited it at their foot, sending a great broad swell fanning out over the plain below. The famous poster of Zeke and Al’s launch, with the earthship plunging down the ravine into the Rio Grande far below, both of them with one arm raised as if they were riding a bucking horse, that was all nonsense. Al wasn’t wearing a halter-top either. She still had my shirt. The water simply rose and rose until it filled the Rio Grande canyon then lifted the concrete hull of Zeke’s earthship and floated it clear. Zeke and Al were aboard. I was not. I could report that Zeke made a grab to pull me back as I flipped over the side or that Al implored me to stay, rain running down her face and so on. The truth was more prosaic. I wasn’t prepared to set myself adrift. Al was. So I watched her float away.

  I waded back to the GWC. The other earthships had been evacuated. All were flooded except Mike’s. I climbed the berm and made myself at home. A week later a state trooper, after deciding not to shoot me, gave me a lift back to the Buick. The whole of New Mexico steamed. There was no news of Al and with everything else going on no one was looking either. After a week more or less underwater, the Buick started first time. The earlier mechanical problem turned out to be Al’s not having disengaged the foot brake. To this day I wonder if she did it on purpose.

  I never got to ask her. I never saw Al again. Not in the flesh. Obviously, she was on the TV plenty as her and Zeke moored themselves to the mo
st inconvenient objects they could think of and dared the authorities to sink them. Then, after the Rise, they basically became the icons they are now. We couldn’t continue the way we were going. Zeke got hold of that early and then, with the help of a few trillion tons of water, so did everyone else. I don’t mean driving and the ozone layer and so on. I mean the way we thought. The way I thought.

  All the accusations that Al manipulated Zeke in his declining years remain just that; I have no more insight than anyone else. Zeke’s dead now, of course. The earthship’s a floating museum. But Al is still pretty much head of the off-shore Fed, that is if a couple of million earthships on rafts could be said to have anything so structured as a top and bottom.

  As for me, I decided to finish our road trip. Of course there aren’t actually any roads there. Nearly all of New Mexico is now under two hundred feet of water. I’m doing the Andes Loop instead. I know. It’s a cliché. Every old-lander does it. You can hardly move off Durango Point for hi-spec rafts and the silver-heads carving out their own patch of the wide blue yonder. All the same I’ve traded my share in a condo on the Spines for a long-drift raft with all mod cons (as they used to say): on-board krill-processing, full solar array, veg tanks, cisterns, the lot (I had gone back to math like Zeke advised, and fluid dynamics proved a good business to be in, post-Rise). The rafts are the descendants of Zeke’s earthship, of course, even though some of the big ones weigh a couple of thousand tons.

  Mine’s a domestic, about fifty feet across. I’ve joined a hitch of drifters. Just a couple of dozen. We’re setting off in a few weeks to jiggle around feeling wavesick and crunch shrimp together. I’ll see how that goes. Then I’ll cut loose. In the end you need a purpose even if everything else is floating about. Which is to say I’m looking forward to this voyage, more than anything I’ve done in a very long time. I’m ready. The only thing left to do is to give my raft a name. I thought ‘Regal’ at first. Now I’m drifting towards ‘Al’.

  ‌The Spiral Staircase

  A true story

  ‌Jay Griffiths

  It happened in Bristol, during the Blitz. Every night, Len drove an ambulance to collect the dead and the injured. He would be given a slip of paper with a typed address, a message sending him across the city to houses bombed with explosives or incendiary devices. His job was to find whatever remained.

  One night, having done several journeys through the siren-scarred night, he returned to base and went to the control room. The controller was a slow, careful woman. He held out his hand impatiently for the next message slip with the next address on it. The address he was given was his own.

  ■

  The sky is falling, the sky is falling, the sky is falling. He had often read this story to his daughter at bedtime. He couldn’t get the line out of his head now.

  ‘Does the sky ever fall in real life?’ she had asked.

  ‘Never, my little princess, never.’

  He had stroked her silky hand. She put all her small fist in his and her trust made him a lion, he carried her up the cast-iron spiral staircase to her bedroom, with a window to the stars.

  ■

  Now he holds the message slip in his hand. Motionless, he stares at the controller. She doesn’t know that where a stranger’s address should be, he sees his own. He is seized by an agony of heroism which turns his mouth to metal in a moment. He says nothing but takes the paper and walks to the ambulance. His knees don’t shake but they don’t bend either.

  Anti-aircraft lights are scoring his deep, dark veins and all his lovely inner night is torn open.

  All sounds recede. The fall of information on deafened ears. The typed letters indent the paper like the beloved marks of baby teeth on the books in his study.

  Then panic. The siren, screaming itself white in the black night, is screaming inside his silence.

  Dry-mouthed, he wants to take the message back to the controller and tell her she’s an idiot, that she made a stupid mistake. Then he wants to rip up the message, tear it to shreds, burn it and stamp on the ashes. But even if he does, the message won’t go away. The writing is on the wall. A written warning. It is written, it is written, it is written.

  Suddenly, the paper seems alive to him and he clutches at it, fearing to drop it. He twists the paper between two fingers as he pushes his round glasses up over his nose and grasps the wheel. Why am I holding onto it? Am I likely to forget, for God’s sake – and his mind swings with his hands on the wheel turning the corner as fast as he can – am I likely to forget what it says? It is my most precious memento. All I will have left of my world is the little scrap of paper which denotes it.

  He grips it for dear life. The message is now an icon, the print of an address burnt onto his mind like the print of a dress which will be burnt onto the body of a small girl in Hiroshima. The future is in the present. East is West and the girl is his own daughter. Lateral explosions. Collateral damage. East of the sun and West of the moon, he hums, madly. ‘Love… makes one little room an everywhere’, and his whole world is in that address.

  I am the only one who knows what this message means. And what it means is that I am alone in a world deworlded. He can read the message forwards and backwards, from the present into the future and from the future into the past. This is the message of infinite destruction and he will carry the message wherever he must.

  Driving across Bristol, he is driving from the world of the living to the world of the dead. Tension fuses his hands onto the steering wheel as the skies, prised apart from the heavens, crash to earth.

  The sky is falling now. On all my world.

  Of all the houses in all of Bristol, you had to drop bombs on mine. That house was my whole world, you bastards. You bastards, you bombed my whole, entire world.

  His round-toed shoes gun the accelerator, when suddenly a tabby cat runs into the low headlights and he slams on the brakes. Damn it to hell, must this war take everything? Even a little pussy cat?

  He is there. He is there. He is there.

  Part of the roof is on fire.

  The house is still standing.

  Hope corkscrews through him, hurting him.

  He pulls open the door and then he sees.

  His whole world is trembling in the balance.

  All the glad world held to ransom in that moment.

  Hanging by a thread.

  For an incendiary bomb has fallen on the house but – by all the angels who ever loved me – he gasps, the bomb has fallen in the dead centre of the cast-iron stairwell.

  There it burns. Caught, burning its fury, exquisitely, caught in the nick of time, in the nick of place. Tucked in the spiral banisters, the bomb rocks and fizzes.

  Underneath it, deep in the cellar, dark and implicit as a womb, his wife and children are tucked together: his world and worlds to come. The children are whimpering: he sees his daughter first, her eyes full of fear and fireworks, transfixed by the bomb. It is seared onto her retina and I know that for the rest of her life she will never understand how people can actually like fireworks.

  ‘Dad is here, Dad is here, Dad is here,’ her brother shouts out, breaking the spell, and she sees him as never before. Hero. Mountain. Tree. Lion. Dad.

  His wife is calculating if it is safe to edge out of the cellar now. The children don’t think: they run to their father, he lifts them to kiss them, but they are not kissable children now, they are small, frightened animals, and they burrow into his body, tucking themselves into the deep dark of his overcoat.

  ‘You’ll be right as ninepence, my darlings, right as a trivet, right as rain, right as…’ and his voice was too choked to go on.

  ■

  ‘The sky did fall, Dad. Might it ever fall again?’

  ‘Never, my little princess, never.’

  It was months later. He was taking his little daughter up the stairs to her bedroom with a window to the stars. Memory turns in spirals, like a staircase, like the double helix of DNA, like whorls of galaxies. As he carried h
er, he remembered not only her near-death but also her conception.

  His wife was looking sternly at him, telling him he was a bit tipsy. So he tickled her. And tickled her again till she giggled. I imagine them giggling when a little spurt of starlight shot out of him, giggling seeds which laughed their way into her earth-night and one shooting star, with perfect aim, found its way right into the centre of her whorls and inner spiral stairwells, exploding on the scene, a tiny bomb of life: sherbet, yeast, champagne, fireworks, star-works. Ping! My mother.

  ‌Afterword

  ‌Mike Robinson

  A huge body of science has been built up over the last fifty years which unequivocally demonstrates the reality of anthropogenic (man-made) climate change. But many people don’t seem to be listening or are just hoping it will go away. Others see nothing but a threat to their short-term interests. And although governments the world over have understood the dangers, they have yet to take credible action.

  The amount of CO2 we humans have pumped into the atmosphere over the past two centuries, at the same time as chopping down the planet’s capacity to absorb the excess, is bringing about an increase in global temperature which will continue to worsen. This is affecting the balance of nature – a balance which took four and a half billion years to develop before conditions allowed for the arrival of humans. For 99.99% of earth’s history, modern human beings have been absent. If we want to be part of earth’s future, we need to wake up to the fact that the earth is a closed system and its resources are finite.