Star Sailors

by James McNaughton

  Bill is watching one of these demonstrations in Tokyo while lying on his king-size bed in front of the widescreen TV and listening to Mozart with headphones. The TV is muted and he can’t read the Japanese characters on the placards but he gets the gist. He raises his tumbler of whisky to the screen in salute. He smoked a joint on the fire escape before, crouched below the wall, out of view as if under threat from snipers with night-vision sights, and is now willing his senses to sprout and rearrange, to tap into a rich vein of sound and vision.

  The ‘Don’t Disturb’ sign is displayed outside and his phone is muted, but rather than feeling spoiled he has the sense of being a fugitive, because his solitude is not a choice but a necessity. He simply can’t look his colleagues in the eyes anymore. He can’t bear seeing their respect, let alone veneration. The off-duty meals and drinks in the Grand with his professional fans are over. The hotel room has become his new office and he takes room service three times a day. On the phone to Trix he sells his guilt as inexpressible joy and she seems to accept that he would struggle to express his happiness in words. Yet he does feel happiness of a sort when seeing the voiceless express themselves on TV, like now in Tokyo, as the demonstrators march past smoking piles of rubble, having suspended riots to reach out to Sam. It seems fair, he tells himself, that Sam should get a second hearing. After all, the messages are essentially words Sam actually communicated 62 years ago. Yet Bill can’t feel self-righteous about bending the truth. And he worries about the precedent the messages have set for Venture Group, about the beast he’s awoken.

  The board are prepared to accept his hotel room as his new base on the strict proviso that he visits the hospital daily for vigils. So he has to leave his room once a day and front up to people with searching eyes and cameras. He hates the bedside visits. The dead hand in his, the technicians with their heads down over their fake procedures (which, surely, they are); his chatting to the corpse-like thing over the classical music which Sam is supposedly avidly listening to (it’s like playing Mozart to sausages). They’ve moved the vigils to 1 pm to accommodate his hangovers.

  Because he needs a drink to get through the vigils, he is picked up from his hotel and driven to the hospital in a limousine with a bar, from which strictly one 25-year-old triple whisky is served to him (the philosophy being that it’s better to control his intake than drive it underground). From the back seat he sees crowds of people watching him drive by. They wave. Thankfully, the car windows are tinted. Crowds gather outside the hospital and even outside his hotel. People of all ages from all over New Zealand are descending on New Hokitika, sleeping rough in the rain because the hotels are all full, and watching Bill’s daily drive to and from the hospital. Being here. Being close. Being the first to know. And he sees hope in the faces in the rain as he drives by. Joy, even. The genuine speechless joy he fakes with Trix.

  The first three messages were easy; they wrote themselves. The world waits for the fourth. Daylight and coffee didn’t work today. Perhaps night, weed and whisky will. He’s counting on it, actually, because there’s no Plan B. It’s time to act, he tells himself, in the first rush of THC before self-consciousness and paranoia set in. He unplugs his earphones and removes them, swings his legs off the bed and takes his whisky to the desk, where he opens the hotel stationery pad, picks up the hotel pen and then puts it down again. The Mozart sounds woefully thin through his laptop speakers. So be it.

  He puts on his reading glasses and confirms that the text before him is in fact the original Sam Starsailor version, the one first published all those years ago in The Evening Star. The original has been massaged and embellished over the years by anonymous writers, and the most popular versions floating around now are three times longer than the original. Indeed, some of Sam’s most quoted lines were written by someone else. He gets up to refill his tumbler and stands over the table with his drink.

  There are four paragraphs, four seeds for four ‘new’ messages to feed the waiting world, which will in essence be truthful. Any more after that will be speculation. After those four variations, he will be finished. He will ventriloquise for the dead no more. He drinks to his exit strategy, sits down, takes a deep breath and reads the first paragraph:

  English is not my language and this place is not my home. I am a grateful guest here and it is not polite to criticise a generous host, but I see and hear many things that force me to a decision: Should I stay and speak my mind, or should I be polite and silently move on?

  The colon, he remembers, was not Sam’s, and neither were the commas. The words ‘grateful’ and ‘generous’ were added after the editor said the message was a little blunt. Yes, they had gone for alliteration, the double ‘g’ of grateful and generous. And Sam had written something like ‘I understand many things’, rather than the humbler rewrite, ‘I see and hear many things’. There may have been a couple of other minor tweaks.

  Bill folds the paper over, forcing himself to focus on the first paragraph for its essence, and takes another drink.

  18

  Always one to sit up straight and be mindful of posture, Jeremiah makes a point of sitting even straighter than usual in Venture Group’s number one boardroom in New Hokitika. But to be seated at the head of the table, flanked by Bill and Mr Gully? His spine cannot uncurl enough. The honour of it! Joy fills him. It feels like he might lift off at any second and float up to the ceiling.

  Just a few minutes ago Mr Gully welcomed Jeremiah to the A team as a high-stakes corporate law-programmer. The A team. The A team. The A team! That means head office in Masterton and a residence in the Golden Gate. It means he will no longer be paid a salary but receive compensation. The promotion will be formalised in a month but compensation takes effect from today. Compensation.

  Jeremiah fluffs the password as he logs on to the secure net which Bill and Mr Gully consult on their laptops on either side of him. A Golden Gator, he thinks. Me. We’ll have the best that life can offer. Manny can have everything. Karen can do anything.

  He feels blessed, as if a ray of holy light is shining down into the number-one boardroom and illuminating him, Jeremiah Broderick, Golden Gator, ensconsed at the head of the long rimu table. He’s different now. He cannot be seen to be wrong when interacting with Outers and lowly Inners at Venture Tower. They will have to scramble to make his way fit, even if it clearly doesn’t. His blunders will be discreetly repaired or erased behind the scenes and described as ‘visionary’ or ‘later stage’.

  He replays Gully’s comment about crucial support for his promotion coming from an unexpected quarter in Comms. That was important, Wire advised him, given that the heavy lifting in New Hokitika is primarily Comms-related, rather than corporate law per se.

  It’s the most profound kind of satisfaction, Jeremiah thinks, when hard and smart work like Comms-grooming pays off. Everything has paid off. The long years of toil in Newlands and Broadmeadows. He never gave up, never surrendered to the haters and the trolls. Every day, he woke up, brushed his teeth, looked in the mirror and aimed for the impossible. His buttocks clench at the thought of Masterton and the money and prestige and power. He feels the future flood through him. To come are Sky Park in the Golden Gate, the dream house and housewarming party welcoming him into the world’s elite. But celebrations will have to wait, he tells himself. He must concentrate on the task at hand. But it’s not easy!

  Fortunately, this first meeting is easy, easy enough for him to be symbolically seated at the head of the table with only two other colleagues in attendance. But he’s thrilled by Wire’s friendly gesture, loves him for it. Alternate gouts of satisfaction and relief course through him as he focusses on the bios of those attending the meeting.

  The informal meeting is about Sam’s next message. After the international reaction to his question ‘What kind of place is this?’, powerful religious, social and corporate organisations privately expressed grave concerns to Venture Group about the potentially destabilising nature of forthcoming messages. There was
a concerning unity of purpose around the global demonstrations, which have hitherto been local and fragmented in nature. The purpose of this meeting is to gather representatives from these major stakeholders to propose a statement amenable to all parties which can be run past Sam, one which he can approve or edit rather than compose himself from scratch, given that communication for him through the yes/no cortex-stimulation alphabet system is so painstaking.

  Providing a basic foundation message for Sam to build on, improve or reject as he sees fit, is how Wire described it. The meeting is just a friendly chat at this stage, to confirm where everyone stands, broadly speaking, regarding the preservation of global stability and what a message for Sam to check might possibly look like, in the broadest possible terms. Given the casual nature of the meeting, Jeremiah will be the only lawyer present and there will be no minutes. It’s all strictly off the record. A discreet coffee with concerned colleagues.

  Jeremiah rolls his sleeves up, clenches his fists a few times and scrolls down the list of attendees. Some are famous; big players who have transcended their fields in business to become household names. He clenches his fists again, making the ropy muscles on his forearms jump. He is like a knight. He shall stand guard for Venture Group, like King Arthur stood guard above the drawbridge at Camelot for three days and nights following his dream of a marauding dragon. He scans the bio of Leaf Garland, the wheelchair-bound CEO of Microsoft, who speaks through an electronic speech generating device and has a huge following in his secondary career as a motivational speaker. The briefing notes predict he will advocate a new Microsoft Genius screen for every single person on Earth. The head of Venture Group’s Christian Church, ‘Handsome’ Luke Pootley, represents Venture Group’s prosperity shareholders as well as certain mainstream spiritual interests in North America, and is keen to establish a clear secular path for Sam.

  Too excited to concentrate for long, Jeremiah skips over the other names. Mr Gully, who is representing Venture Group’s news arm, holds the reins. Bill will facilitate. They are in the box seat, receiving offerings. Receivingcompensation. All he has to do is deal with consents in the extremely unlikely event that an agreement be reached, and confirm nondisclosure. It occurs to him, as he skims sightlessly over the other bios, that he will earn more in this two-hour meeting than he previously earned in two days. It’s fantastic. Karen won’t believe it.

  As the door opens to admit the stakeholders, he flexes the muscles on his arms and chest. The famously slumped form of Leaf Garland comes first, pushed by Tiroli from HR. Her eyebrows shoot up and her mouth opens when she sees Jeremiah at the head of the table, but her surprise rapidly gives way to delight and she flashes him a bright smile. His nuts buzz in response. Yes, he thinks. I’m back!

  It’s very late when Jeremiah gets back to his hotel. Lights are out beneath the doors down the corridor. Even the Spanish insomniac next door has succumbed to sleep, or at least surrendered to darkness.

  Jeremiah leaves the light off and sits on his bed. He rubs his face. The ‘coffee and a catch-up’ dragged on for hours and hours, and towards the end felt like a nightmare from which he could not wake up. Bill ended up in hospital. And he suspects Leaf Garland will lodge a complaint about him for being underprepared and poorly qualified. For the first time since he’s been in New Hokitika, Jeremiah takes a little bottle from the minibar. He unscrews the top and knocks it back in one. Gin. He coughs, sits on the end of his bed, removes his tie, throws it in the corner and rubs his head between his hands. His keen sense of failure in his first high-stakes role is gathering weight rather than retreating.

  Bill was run over while crossing the road with a couple of bottles of wine for the meeting’s remaining attendees, having forgotten, he said—while propped up on a pile of pillows in his hospital bed and surrounded by well-wishers—that electric cars are soundless.

  Mr Gully had left the meeting hours before Bill was hit, and it had fallen to Jeremiah to facilitate proceedings while Bill, white-faced and silent, popped out for wine and then mysteriously failed to return. It wasn’t until an excruciating hour had passed that news came of Bill’s accident. Nothing had been resolved in the increasingly acrimonious meeting by the time it was abandoned.

  The mood in Bill’s hospital room had been strangely jolly, with everyone on their best, most cheerful behaviour. Luke Pootley pushed Leaf Garland’s wheelchair as if they were the best of friends, even though Pootley had implied in the meeting proper that Garland’s physical disabilities were a righteous judgement from God. The laughter around the bed, brought on by Garland’s suggestion that Bill had thrown himself under the car to get away from the meeting, struck Jeremiah as the hollowest he’d ever heard. (Because Garland’s electronic voice lacks humorous inflection, it was only when he added the post script—‘I’m joking’—that everyone ‘erupted’ with laughter.) Nervous tension had to be released somehow after such a toxic encounter. (Garland had called Jeremiah ‘brainless’ in the meeting and then apologised and amended the insult to ‘lacking in curiosity’; and Shannon Chong from Women’s Space had called Pootley a ‘sexist pig’. Garland had apologised on her behalf and amended that judgement to a ‘medieval moralist’.) Trenches had been dug and many shots fired after Bill and Mr Gully had left, with Jeremiah caught helplessly in the crossfire. But late at night, in hospital, after some cool-down time, everyone could express gratitude that Bill had suffered only soft tissue damage, albeit serious soft tissue damage: a badly bruised leg and twisted knee. Everyone could agree with unqualified enthusiasm that it was lucky the car had been going slowly.

  Bill had avoided Jeremiah’s eyes throughout the ‘banter’, because it was clear to them both that Bill really had thrown himself under the car to get out of the meeting and out of New Hokitika. Bill’s laughter had not been merely hollow like everyone else’s, but strangled. Jeremiah had braced himself for the worst when Bill asked him to remain behind after the others left (their brief truce over, Pootley left Garland to wheel himself out of the room), half-expecting to assist Bill’s suicide. Bill’s smile fell away the very second they were alone. He looked haunted and exhausted, as if dug out of a collapsed building with a plaster-dusted face three days after an earthquake.

  ‘Finish it up, Jeremiah.’

  ‘Pardon me, Bill?’

  ‘The message for Sam.’

  ‘But it was only a preliminary chat and there was no agreement about anything, Bill. Not even, you know, the definition of love for a love message.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Disinterested opposed to uninterested?’ Leaf Garland had come down hard on Jeremiah over that distinction. It was all Greek to him. Love as a mode of knowledge? As an act of will? ‘“Love without object is the highest and most divine form of love”? I thought it was an emotion.’

  ‘I know, I know.’

  ‘But if love’s the central tenant of Christianity—’

  ‘Central tenet.’

  ‘Right, central tenet. How can they base a global organisation on such a poorly defined term? Even the simplest procurement contract has clearly defined terms, and this is an organisation with a membership of tens of millions, with billions of dollars in assets and holdings.’

  ‘I know, I know. Look, Leaf was pushing hard for truth and communication because he wants to move the Genius screen. That’s why he quibbled on love and said it was unworkable because it’s undefinable. But love won’t hurt anyone’s profits, including Microsoft’s. Never has, never will. Write something positive and snappy, a yes/no we can run past Sam. Send it to Wire tonight and copy me in. Things have changed, Jeremiah. We need this done now. Sorry, the painkillers are kicking in. I’m out.’

  Black bags hung below Bill’s closed eyes. Everything else was white: his exhausted, ghastly white face and white hair, against the pile of white pillows. Jeremiah was tempted to touch one of the bags. The things have blown up in the last week or so, and will need to be surgically removed for the camera.

  Jeremiah knows h
e can’t sit still in his tiny hotel room and nut out a message about love that will satisfy all stakeholders. He needs to go out to have any chance. He changes into his light waterproofs. ‘Love,’ he says to himself. In the corridor, light shines from under his neighbour’s door. The insomniac Spaniard’s awake again. He considers softly knocking and asking him for help. He stands at the Spaniard’s door, fists clenched, afraid of hearing something.

  He runs fast out of New Hokitika. His responsibility follows. It’s high stakes. High stakes now. A message must be written and sent to Wire before dawn. He can’t fail. He can’t lose the promotion, the house in Masterton, the money, the power and the glory. My life, he thinks, is in the balance. Right here. Right now. He accelerates and spurs himself on with thoughts of failure. To fail will mean being stuck in the tiny flat on Mt Victoria. Being stuck on the third floor at Venture Tower, watching the young guns come in and climb past him on the ladder. Have Le Stratton lord over him. Drive an old car, ride an old racing bike, paddle an old kayak, have Mandela go to second-tier schools, have Karen tighten her budget further. Not possible!She will leave him for some wealthy arts philanthropist or something, and take Mandela. That’s the worst of it: losing his family. And having to carry on. Light rain begins to fall. He runs faster.

  Something about love, he tells himself, something positive and snappy, that will please millions and satisfy the corporate stakeholders and their shareholders. And save my life. What? What? What?