Trix turns the screen off. And as the silence continues, in which she can hear her heart bang in her ears and feel her face flaming, she realises that no one is saying anything to the contrary. They believe Sam’s a fake, she thinks, and Bill’s a liar. Gustave and Pozninka’s eyes drift from the blank screen down to the table. Only Karen looks her full in the eye. And as Karen stands and pulls Trix into an embrace, she thinks, What am I? Some dumb mutt being strung along for the ride?
‘I guess the party’s off,’ Gustave says.
She replies into Karen’s shoulder, ‘Damn right it is!’
Karen releases her. Pozninka quietly stands and shoulders her handbag. She’s back to being an unimpressed teenager.
‘Bill wouldn’t lie about this,’ Trix says.
Gustave raises his hands and stands. He says nothing when he’s confident he’s right.
She demands an answer. ‘You think Bill’s lying?’
‘No. Not Bill. But something’s wrong, Trix. Venture Group bought New Hokitika. The money’s pouring in and nothing comes out but what they let out. Like broad summaries of ‘commercially sensitive’ DNA. Theories about his diet and… and… entropic nervous systems. His secret brain. It’s in a coma. No, it’s hibernating. In a continuous heavy sleep cycle. All those doctors in the rain, reading autocues. Are they even doctors?’
‘Bill spends time with Sam every day.’
‘Poor Bill!’ Gustave’s voice breaks. ‘He has to sit by that thing in a bubble and hold its hand day after day. He wants it to be true. More than anyone. But it’s not. Sorry, Trix. I’m really sorry.’
‘Go!’
Gustave knows her well enough to leave immediately.
She tolerates a nervous hug from Pozninka and finds herself holding on to Karen after the heavy door has slammed shut. All the empty conversations make sense now. He’s been lying! Horror mixes with humiliation. It can’t be true, she thinks. He wouldn’t do that, could he? Sacrifice everything he believes in? For what? Money?
She turns to Karen. They are united when it comes to Sam, temporarily widowed by him. Her opinion is what really counts and she’s afraid of hearing it. ‘Tell me the truth. Do you think Sam’s a fake?’
‘Jeremiah hasn’t dropped the slightest hint that it’s a fake.’
‘But do you think he’s a fake?’
‘I’m keeping an open mind, to be honest. I don’t think Jeremiah and Bill necessarily know.’
‘You’d tell me if you heard anything.’
‘Yes. Let’s ask them outright. I mean, you know, they can’t say directly, but they can hint. We can compare notes.’
‘Okay.’ It’s funny how quickly Bill has slipped, or she’s allowed him to slip, from the highest pinnacle of journalistic achievement and integrity to a reporter who might be in on something rotten—unwittingly or not. For a second she suspects he’s like the old Marlborough Man, the cowboy famous for doing nothing but looking good and smoking.
‘If Jeremiah is lying,’ says Karen in a steely tone, ‘it’ll be the last straw, as far as I’m concerned. It’ll be over. And I’ll take Mandela.’
She can see that Karen has accepted the possibility of the story being a money-spinner long ago, but not the actual probability of it until now. For Karen it’s partly an intriguing opportunity to express her new-found strength and independence. Trix feels naïve by comparison, fearfully wounded and deeply embarrassed. I’ve been blind when it comes to Bill, she thinks. Well, now my eyes are open again. That dream is over.
The lily on the windowsill is hard to see through her tears. It’s still beautiful, she tells herself. It’ll be bright in the sun once again.
16
Jeremiah’s hotel room is small and dark and has, today, the feeling of a cosy refuge rather than a large cupboard. The virtual window is blank, the wall screen off and the open laptop at his cramped work station shut down. A little glowing rectangle from the back-lit e-reader he reads on the made-up bed is the room’s only light source. A frown appears. The frown goes away. Time passes. The frown returns, deeper.
Expelling air and throwing his left arm out, he checks his new wristwatch—a treat he bought himself for being sent to New Hokitika. It’s Zen’s Executive III model, with a retro look and six basic functions indicated by the watch’s hands in different modes: time, altimeter, barometer, thermometer, stopwatch and compass. He’s very pleased by it. He drops the e-reader on the bed and activates his watch’s barometer. The hands obediently come together as if in prayer, revolve and settle left of 12. The low pressure reading indicates a high likelihood of rain. He stands and the room brightens. A glance at the window activates a real-time view of the street below. His watch’s accuracy is gratifying: it’s raining.
He picks up the e-reader.Heart of Darkness is three per cent done. He drops it back on the bed. It’s required reading for Le Stratton’s half-serious ‘build a bridge’ project with the Comms managers, Radley and Hodge, also known as the Killers. This money and influence-bearing structure of Le Stratton’s can be built, he insists, by reading and discussing just a couple of old books. All that’s needed is to say something original to the Killers about the novels over a game of pool down at the Grand, with original being the keyword, even if it’s just a minor observation that won’t be found online, and then get out quick. Le Stratton swears that easy overtime-paying Comms work (for all Comms work is easy) will surely follow.
Easy? Heart of Darkness, when Jeremiah first sat down with it, didn’t make sense. The text had the characteristic of chainmail or old embroidery: there was clearly craft in its construction but no ‘meaning’. It took a sustained effort, a Legal effort, to even enter the story. Then he was in: on the River Thames, waiting in a boat for the tide to turn in falling light. Men were about to set off on a journey. Jeremiah’s stay in the boat was brief. One of the characters started talking, and the change of gear felt like a slap in the face. The footnotes needed footnotes. Heart of Darkness reverted to chainmail and he gave up. Finding respectable online summaries from study-cheat sites pay-walled, he took a quick look at blogs and chats and decided to pass. Animal Farm,the other text set for him by Le Stratton, was much more readable. He’d knocked that off in three sessions and come up with an original interpretation, judging by online blather about the dangers of totalitarianism and the author’s disenchantment with mid-20th century communism. His position will be defendable, at least briefly, with textual examples. It will allow the Killers the opportunity to school him and be superior.
While he would have preferred both the books Le Stratton recommended under his belt in order to create the illusion for the Killers of an interest in old novels, at the end of the day it’s not a big deal. Jeremiah never goes into anything unprepared, but this is different because he already has Comms work with Bill. This is Le Stratton’s pet project and he can do the heavy lifting.
A solo walker comes into view through the window, blurred through the transparent rain awning which shelters the main footpaths in town, built years ago for Australian rain tourists. It could almost be Bill hurrying along, Jeremiah thinks, but this walker has a hood up, which Bill can’t do because he must show his trademark white hair in New Hokitika at all times or pay a considerable fine. Jeremiah signed off that non-hat clause in Bill’s contract himself, because one of Bill’s key roles is to help create a buzz around town as the human face of the story, the living link between the alien arrivals. The walker exits the window and the street is empty again. It’s a wet and gloomy 4 pm, the dead hour before pre-dinner drinks.
Waiting. The beginning of Heart of Darkness comes to mind. There was the Director on the ‘cruising yawl’ awaiting the ‘flood’, and the Lawyer and the Accountant, as well as Marlow, who wasn’t known as the Sailor, apparently, because he wasn’t a typical sailor. Bill would be the Journalist, Jeremiah thinks, or the Old Journalist, and himself the Young Lawyer. All this loose talk in bars about Sam redefining humanity, he thinks, doesn’t hold water. In the really old days, too, people
were identified and named by their job, like Smith or Tailor. It’s a constant. People will still have to work if Sam wakes up, and when that happens the job they have and continue to do is what will define them.
Yet not always, he thinks. Many of the journalists in the Grand from the Americas, the UK, Southeast Asia, Australia and Northern Europe have covered failed states where there are no proper jobs anymore, no banks, no police; nothing. The journalists talk about real failed states, not just states declared failed for business reasons (indentured labour along with land and property seizure in return for transnational supplies of food and medicine). They say there is no such thing as consumers, just survivors. It seems to Jeremiah that the new names forged in the rubble would be Strong, Cunning, Killer and Thief. Some drunk journalists, speaking strictly off the record, worry that global civilisation could collapse in a matter of weeks after the inevitable demise of international finance. They claim that too much debt has been defaulted. Debt-ridden countries (meaning all of them, according to a reporter from New York, because defaulting on loans has become de rigueur) are struggling to pay their police and armies.
The foreigners are weird. With air travel being so expensive, the only ones Jeremiah had previously met were elderly elites visiting New Zealand (like most Kiwis his age born Outer, Jeremiah hasn’t been overseas because of the cost of flying and the social problems other countries have). The foreign journalists are younger and many are like him: Outers made good, or Outers making good. But that’s where the similarities end. They get drunk and screw around a lot. They’re cynical and express themselves recklessly. On the one night he spent in the Grand with Le Stratton and other Venture Group employees, the talk was so scandalous that he had immediately disabled his screen.
One impression Jeremiah had, while listening to the passionate and totally uncensored arguments roaring all around him (people actually yelled to have their subversive opinions heard over the noise), was that the important questions about human identity at the moment had nothing to do with Sam and biological comparisons, and everything to do with protecting democracy and the current systems at whatever cost, because when civilisation collapses so does human identity. Journalists confirmed the horror of the failed states all over the news with harrowing examples of things they’ve seen with their own eyes. It seemed to Jeremiah then, and occasionally still does, that the one per cent must surrender some capital, wipe a substantial amount of debt, raise the standard of living for Outers and end carbon emissions entirely, otherwise all their money is in danger of becoming worthless, and the infrastructure that supports them destroyed.
He looks out at the rainy street. Such thoughts are not to be shared with anyone, not even drunk South Americans, but he does find himself still agreeing with some points he heard in the Grand, such as the idea that personal debt (a cause of much civil unrest for Outers) could be relieved partly in the form of higher wages. Not only could big business afford to pay more in wages, they could also afford to pay a lot more tax on their earnings and capital, which could be used to improve quality of life for Outers and provide them with a sense of choice and agency. He believes with increasing certainty, as time goes on, that on the whole their rioting is born out of frustration and genuine desperation, rather than moral failure and laziness.
One red-faced German journalist in the Grand spoke loudly of her shock at visiting a secure, organised and self-sufficient rural community in Hungary, whose members clearly considered life in their failed state to be a vast improvement over cramped urban life at the bottom of a stable neoliberal democracy, even though they had little in the way of food (only what they grew or traded), medicine and advanced technology. Subsistence living, someone said, is not a dirty word. It does not denote failure or imminent death. It should be celebrated as sensible sustainable living. Romantic, someone had snorted in reply. Go back and see them in a month after they’ve had a crop fail, been raped and pillaged or had a child die, and then see what they say.
But Jeremiah (crushed, sweating and uneasy though he was) wasn’t surprised to hear that those Hungarians felt their lot had improved, because for him personally to return to life as a bog-standard Outer (in any country) would be a kind of living death. Outers can’t afford to eat well, exercise safely or take NST, which are essentials in his life, the foundations from which all else stems. A free subsistence-level existence involving organic, unprocessed food and regular daily exercise in the form of labour would be preferable to a debt-ridden life in a functioning state reliant on junk food, screens and drugs, while holed up in a tiny apartment paid for by distasteful and often illegal part-time work.
Spurred on by the examples of free speech around him (though not by fellow Venture Group employees, who looked stunned for the most part), Jeremiah decided to offer an opinion of his own to these ferocious foreign journalists (once Manu from IT security had gone for another round): that the food and exercise for Outers in a failed state could well be preferable to their current unhealthy situation. The red-faced German woman replied, ‘My God, do you realise what is at stake here?’ (‘What did that red-faced chick say to you?’ Le Stratton asked him later). It was the first and last political opinion that Jeremiah dared to venture in the Grand and he has not gone back. As he finished the drink Manu bought him, the conversation moved to the subject of fear, and how fear of demotion drives Inners all over the world. It was suggested that being primarily motivated by the fear of living simply is proof in itself—no more is needed—that the current system is flawed. A loud argument about fear throughout history as a social control ensued. Jeremiah quietly left. When he stepped out from the raucous heat of the Grand into rain, he felt that the world had shifted, at least a little. Yet by the time he got back to the hotel, human identity no longer seemed imperilled, as it had in the Grand. Rather, it was the human identity of Outers that was in peril.
He picks up his tablet and runs over his notes for Animal Farm one last time. After the game of pool he plans to call Karen and Mandela. His first, horrible call home upon arriving in New Hokitika seems a long time ago. He’d recorded the conversation, hoping to goad Karen into a response that could be described in a child custody case as ‘erratic’. When he’d suggested to her that she was a better mother on meds, more stable and reliable, she had simply hung up and not answered his next three calls. Embarrassed and ashamed, he sent her a bunch of flowers. The calls have improved markedly since then.
He takes the elevator down alone. A rare feeling. It’s the calm before the Saturday night storm, which will rage to a point of frenzy by the sense of history being made. The functioning world is watching New Hokitika, and everyone lucky enough to be here (meaning talented, beautiful, rich or ambitious enough) feels their place in history and the imprint they are making. It is the time of their professional lives they will look back on, the peak of their careers, so everything they do must be bigger and more memorable than usual. He steps into the empty foyer, pauses at the entrance and looks out at the rain. A Brazilian media truck drives down the middle of the street, creating a wake as it passes. The ‘story of the century’ tag is accurate. The people here now will be telling their grandchildren about it. The chosen few. They’ll be dining out on it for the rest of their lives.
Despite the continuous rain it’s warm enough, as if the excitement in the air were having a molecular effect and raising the temperature. Rain patters and runs on the curved awning above him. He has taken to carrying an umbrella for uncovered road crossings. The pleasant lack of wind in New Hokitika makes the curiously comforting contraption enveloping his head feasible. It lends a sense of anonymity that allows him to do something he never usually does in public: reflect on how well work is going. While Consolidated is not exactly dead and buried, it’s certainly no longer a pressing issue. He’s gained much ground on Le Stratton by securing work with Bill, who is the hottest property in Venture Group now.
But his much hoped-for increased contact with senior management while they are off-duty
and vulnerable due to alcohol consumption has not yet happened. High visibility has been proven to increase job security, but Bill is in so much demand that he’s not around to be seen with, and the managers who come out for a drink after work take on a pack-like mentality in their ‘history-making’, so there’s no place at the table for juniors like himself after about 10 pm—the time he usually finishes work for the day—because the managers are focussed to the point of obsession on getting laid. It’s part of this ‘work hard, play hard’, living-legends in history thing. Everyone is trying to screw the hot young reporters that Big News favours in the field, be they from Estonia, Canada, Japan or Brazil. And then there are the second-tier producers and technicians (also invariably glamorous). It’s a point of honour not to pay for sex. It’s all about passion and chanelling the electricity in the air. Le Stratton, of course, scores the presenters who do nothing more than read electronic cues. As for female managers, Jeremiah has found them more accessible and sensible than their male counterparts when drinking—up to a point. While they don’t want stand-up sex in the car park in the rain, they do want a brief and vivid affair, and he is, he has discovered, a desirable enough candidate. This is very awkward for him. So he avoids drinking with managers now. Late on weeknights, while passing bars and restaurants on the way back to his hotel after work, he occasionally sees one of his managers, looking over a candle with bloodshot eyes at a paramour. By Thursday most affairs will have ended by common agreement, apparently, clearing the way for someone new and exciting on the weekend.
Jeremiah knows that his stand of iron-clad fidelity is isolating him, but the truth is that he can’t get a decent hard-on and hasn’t been able to since the gun show. It’s vastly preferable, he knows, to be considered faithful and boringly sober by the mob than impotent.
The rhythmic drumming of rain on his umbrella has a relaxing effect, and thoughts of his penis subside. He recalls the run in the rain with Le Stratton shortly after arriving in New Hokitika three weeks ago. It was dark, their first run. They’d set a fast pace down the coast road, heading south until the lights ran out. The twin devils of Consolidated and Karen’s imminent departure if or when he lost his job battered at his mind. A big swell was breaking trees below the road. It felt eerie and dangerous, as if they were running to the very end of the Earth. He would have turned back long ago, if alone, but the desire to beat Le Stratton at something drove him on through the darkness. A nearby tree cracked as if detonated. It sounded like the sea was boiling. They stopped simultaneously in unspoken fearful agreement.
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