The Universe of Things

by Gwyneth Jones

  There was a banquet that night in the Leonid Brezhnev suite: a bowl of tinned grapefruit segments with a cherry at every place. One of my neighbors was another journalist, a silly Japanese woman. On the other side I found a Major Derek Whynton, military observer for NATO: a chiseled-profile, blue-eyed, very British type. I was foolish enough to remark — between the grapefruit and the fried grasscutter — that I’d thought the evidence was conclusively against the kind of activity he’d be interested in. I triggered an interminable lecture, and worse. Some men will take absolutely anything for a sexual invitation — and of course this was Africa, where you can’t be too careful. In the middle of the monitoring-industry PR he smiled archly, laid a hand on my knee, and asked me if I was married.

  “Yes, twice.”

  He angled himself so he could count my rings and blenched visibly. “Two husbands?” He sounded seriously alarmed.

  “One husband, two wives.”

  The major was relieved, but mildly disgusted. “Polygamy, eh? That’s a remarkable regression. I don’t mean to be offensive, but it seems odd that any modern young woman can accept that arrangement.”

  “If that was the arrangement, I wouldn’t accept it.”

  There was a big darn at my place. I studied it, intensely bored. A clean white tablecloth is a lovely thing. But when a thing gets to be more trouble than it is worth you throw it out. Or put it in a museum. There is no human artifact so sacred it deserves to stay in circulation forever.

  At least I’d got rid of the hand. Major Derek marked me down as emergency rations, only slightly less dodgy than the local whores. He discovered he had to hurry away somewhere, between the ice cream and the speeches.

  Spiky electric candelabra hung low over the crowd, like spiders in ambush. Some bulbs were brilliant, some dark, making a broken pattern that was repeated as if continuously by the glass doors to the roof terrace. It looked as if something out there was eating up the stars in random mouthfuls.

  Johnny was at the bar, with Brae. She wore a pricey little khaki number, Islamically modest. Johnny probably thought it was her old school uniform. She was regaling him with bad-taste stories about the African notables. Johnny didn’t mind this too much. They were only politicians.

  “What about that guy Obofun Ade, in the white with the kind of hippie embroidery?” Nigerian pharmaceuticals billionaire, vocal backer of the West Africa Federation Initiative. The African contingent at this gathering was alarming — almost as if something really important had happened. “A lot of what he says makes sense.”

  “True enough. But you know where the money comes from?”

  “Cheap neuro-drugs, undercutting the fat-cat multinationals —”

  “They say his family’s plant is based on kidnapped street kids.”

  “Aaah —”

  “Rows of them. Kept alive in vats…”

  “Aaah, Brae…”

  I was listening before they saw me; they were being loud.

  “I don’t want to hear any more of your dirty jokes. You’ll get us thrown out.”

  “Jokes?” said Brae. Her eyes slid contemptuously around the colorful gathering; her fingers tightened around her glass. I could see the indigo shade in her unpolished nails, a sign that Johnny was unlikely to notice. “Who’s joking? They were always like it. As we neared the city we passed several human sacrifices, live women slaves gagged and pegged on their backs to the ground, the abdominal wall being cut in the form of a cross and the uninjured gut hanging out. These poor women were allowed to die like this in the sun… Sacrificed human beings were lying in the path and bush — even in the King’s compound the sight and stench of them was awful. Dead and mutilated bodies seemed to be everywhere — by God! may I never see such sights again! I memorize a lot of stuff. It’s handy to have it on tap when I’m recording. That’s from The Diary of a Surgeon with the Benin Punitive Expedition, 1897. The Benin were losing a war of worlds at the time, and I suppose they still are, in which situation people seem to think that anything goes.”

  I suppose I looked unhappy. Brae smiled at me serenely, with that warning in her eyes. Johnny decided to ignore this last weird assault on his liberal conscience.

  “Hi Anna. Having fun?”

  I was annoyed over his defection, especially since I had the impression, even more clearly than at the desert airport, that Brae was wishing that I would vanish. So I just shrugged.

  Braemar took out a cigarette and lit it. Johnny was astonished. Maybe he’d never seen a lady smoking before. She smelled of something as unsophisticated as a chocolate bar, most unlike the taste of the Brae I knew. The sweetness and the tomboy plain frock made a stunning combination. Braemar was pushing middle-age and too clever to lie about it overtly. But she’d done an expert job of confusing the issue tonight. Poor Johnny! In her way, she was as much an armaments expert as Major Whynton.

  She turned, drawing stagily on the cigarette, to survey the room. “Isn’t this place wonderful? I feel like Bette Davis on a liner. Or Marlene Dietrich in a saloon. I think this must be the restaurant at the end of the universe.”

  Something was chewing up the stars outside. Johnny laughed. “Ah, c’mon, Brae. Life will go on. Let’s face it, the overwhelming majority of human beings couldn’t give a shit, even suppose — which I doubt — that we find the real thing lurking up in them there swamps… Hell, some of them work here. We might as well be dentists as far as he’s concerned.”

  The barman grinned.

  “But we need the aliens, Johnny. And we need them to be out of reach. The futuristic encounter with otherness has been our afterlife, for as long as our culture can remember (which isn’t very long). What else can it be — that other world of spiritually etiolated lifestyles, reduced surfaces: cleanliness, order, protein pills for food? Where did the first crude practitioners of the sf genre conceive these images of white-garbed citizens thronging the shining corridors? There is only one other world, Johnny, one theatre of eternal mysteries and unreachable solutions. We go there when we die. What we’re doing here is enacting one of those stories where some champion unwisely takes on Death as an opponent. If the meeting that belongs on, that essentially is, for us, the other side of things; if that event invades the world of experience — then what can happen next?”

  Johnny smiled indulgently; but it was time to show some muscle. In conversations of this kind he expected to be the one quoting himself in wild skeins of logorrhea.

  “Crap,” he said. “You know as well as I do there’s nothing going on here. It’s just a good gig: plane tickets, free drinks, and some kind of copy. I’m planning to write it up for the National Enquirer.”

  Braemar grinned slyly.

  “I have heard,” she remarked, “that ufology is the nearest thing the US has developed to an ethnic religion. You know, like Hinduism or Islam. The poor kill animals and wear posies. The intellectuals pretend that’s all crap. But you still catch them making puja sometimes.”

  The brown river was huge; it looked vast as a continent. A river like that impresses on you sharply the scale of Africa. There were market stalls along the waterfront, customs booths, warehouses, and a long open shed through which I could see the boat pier. Two black limos and a jeep had pulled up beside our shiny bus. A man in a sober white man’s suit — it was the Minister for Culture, I had spoken to him briefly at the banquet — was talking heatedly to a group of river policemen. His aides hung back, hands dangling by their sides. The inevitable bodyguard (there was a war somewhere about: there always is, in Africa) stood at attention, rifles butts along their trouser seams.

  Our state-visitors’ cruiser had dematerialized. There was only the regular riverboat. It stood at the pier now, stuffed with people. I hadn’t let them put anything of mine in the bus’s baggage compartment (I’ve played this game before). I shouldered my gear and quietly got down. I bought myself a cold coke, the bottle decanted over a fistful of ice into a small plastic bag with a straw. Soon Johnny and Brae drifted up.
<
br />   “You reckon that ice is okay?”

  “No,” I said, my belly instantly beginning to gripe.

  So he bought a drink and stood grimly sucking, as if he was showing some kind of solidarity by courting diarrhea. Braemar declined.

  “I think we’ve entered the Zone,” she said.

  Johnny brightened a little. “Yeah, the situation’s hopeless. Pods all around us. Don’t you think that guy in the suit has a kind of pod-ish look too?”

  We sat on a decaying wooden bench by the entrance to the pier. The bus slowly emptied: our gang prowled uneasily. What happened next was perhaps inevitable. An English journalist lost his head and tried to shove his way through to the boat. The soldiers hurried over…

  Johnny jumped up on the bench, waving his plastic of ice and cola. “The aliens are among us!” he yelled. “They’ve taken over these peoples’ minds! Are you gonna let them get you too? Come on, you guys! Where’s your journalistic integrity? This is the greatest story ever told!”

  I don’t believe he realized that people might get killed. I did, and it didn’t slow me down. The pack surged. A mindless, media person greed possessed me. I burrowed, kicked, shoved, elbowed…until a shot was fired, and everything went quiet. Someone got hold of my arm. It was one of the soldiers. My bowels turned to water. I saw them going after another figure: couldn’t see who. Everyone else was being rifle-prodded back through the shed.

  “Vous devez payer, madame —”

  I must pay, with a bullet in the back of the neck, the death of all my nightmares…

  “Pay for your fare!” repeated the soldier, thrusting me further up the gangway. “First class aircon!”

  The Minister for Culture didn’t speak to the arbitrarily chosen few. Presumably the gesture alone satisfied, proving that his government had done its best, and the debacle was our fault. Dazed with gratitude, I turned to see who had shared my luck. First come, first served: Johnny was through, and Brae. So was Major Derek Whynton.

  On the fabled state cruiser there would have been a satellite dish and a powerful radio link. On the riverboat there was a primitive radio room, available only for emergencies. We were lost in space. But we were still in the game.

  At sunset the four of us stood in a line at the first-class rail. A vast swathe of brown water had opened between us and the shore. The red ball of the sun was sliding down behind a row of smokestacks on the bare horizon.

  “We call this the post-holocaust,” said Brae, “not because of something that won’t happen — it might still, just a different ideology’s finger on the button — but because of what’s happened already. That famous clichéd scenario is all here. The poisoned land, mutated weather systems, birth defects, and famines. The cities weirdly transformed into festering sores. Global nuclear conflict, it’s obvious now, was a schizophrenic’s coded warning of the real disaster we were in the process of inflicting on ourselves.”

  Johnny gave her a long look, which said he understood that this small-talk was customized for his benefit. Silence lengthened, the chant of insects receding as we entered deep water.

  “These Thirdworlders are all crazy,” said Johnny after a while, perhaps by way of apology for his stunt at the pier. “Their minds are fixed on prestige and not being seen to fuck up. Sometimes you have to cut through it.”

  “I expect the others are pods by now,” sighed Brae. “Poor things. I wonder will any of us survive to the end of the movie.”

  Major Derek was gazing ashore with a soldier-like air designed to convey that he was thinking about something very important. I almost sympathized; I felt a little de trop myself. On Braemar’s bare forearm, which rested on the rail, I noticed what appeared to be a tattoo, though that seemed unlikely. It was new to me, whatever it was. It said CAVEAT EMPTOR.

  Johnny looked down, and grinned.

  “Braemar, is that a real tattoo? Or did you just write that there with blue ballpoint in the toilet at L’Icberg?”

  She looked up at him — she’s not a particularly small woman, but Braemar always manages to look up.

  “Well, Johnny. You know what they say.”

  Johnny leaned down and thoughtfully applied the test to Braemar’s tanned and downy flesh. Suck it and see.

  In her cabin, Braemar stowed away certain supplies with finicky care and arranged a few items on display. Expensive and immoral Swiss cosmetics; a handful of delicate underwear tossed over an e-reader by her bunk. “All that can be said, can be said clearly,” she murmured, studying the effect. “What cannot be said must be passed over in silence.” She started to eat fried plantain from a newspaper package; removing the square of banana leaf in the bottom she read a report of demonstrations in Washington, DC. The police are joining the blacks in protest against corruption and… “How touching —” Her fingertips gently brushed the blurred faces. She licked her fingers and stripped off her shirt and shorts. If you look down with your back straight and you can’t see your navel, you are in bikini trim. Braemar put her heels together and looked down. Fine. But the mirror, lit by a brutal fluorescent tube, pulled out her bones and gave her the face of a famine victim, a toothless, flat-dugged grandmother in a ragged sari. She gazed at the naked death’s head for a sad moment: everything vanishes. She made corrections.

  Braemar had to have a victim. I suppose she’d have made Derek over into a pacifist for the duration, if he’d been the one. Maybe she’d have preferred the clean-cut soldier, but he was impervious. Bit of an old boiler, one saw him thinking. And been around… You couldn’t distract Major Derek from the main point by any intellectual fancywork. So Johnny learned to laugh at her dirty jokes and appreciate her olde-worlde coquetries, while the poor gazed at us across pipeclayed hawsers, and the river oozed by. After a day or two she shucked off the tomboy and took to tiny plastique sun suits that made her look like Doris Day on Mars. I thought that was a big mistake, but Brae knew better. She had Johnny jumping. Once he caught her in low company, tête-à-tête with an African down by the lifeboats. The black man fled. I heard racist assumption and that awful note of ownership in my poor friend’s voice.

  “Hey! How come you suddenly speak their lingo?”

  Brae gave me one of her swift and deadly glances — and swooped like a mother hen on the loose cuff of his shirt. “Is that a fashion point, Johnny? You might catch that on something and hurt yourself.”

  He melted like ice cream. “Sorry mama.”

  “Well, well. Leave it around somewhere in the saloon, and we’ll see what the button fairy can do.”

  The button fairy! Oh, Johnny.

  He cornered me on the twilit deck after dinner, demanding information. I told him nothing, of course. He was very suspicious. He hated her makeup. What was the point in painting herself like that, here in the middle of nowhere? I was in no mood for his intimate confessions.

  “Johnny,” I said. “You know exactly what the point is.”

  He grinned, he blushed. He’d never had anyone daub herself in the blood of tortured animals for his sake before. He loved it.

  There were no longer tin-roofed markets at the piers or smokestacks along the horizon. Tall trees began to emerge, back where the swamp became solid ground. The mosquitoes, not much of a threat while the river was wide, became as horrible as the stagnant heat. At every halt Johnny and I would disembark, I to record my forward echoes and Johnny to smell the air. What did you see in the sky that night? What have you heard? It felt like the progress of the Magi. My French barely penetrated the local patois: maybe that was why we never got anything but blank stares. We returned with parcels of fruit and strange sticky food, sheepish under the cat-calls of the boat’s whores, who leaned out from the second-class saloon and shouted for us to film them and make them famous. Braemar didn’t interfere with these trips. But by staying on board, taking no pictures, doing no work of her own, she managed to devalue them.

  I wasn’t feeling well. The boat food was horrible. Travel and stress had messed up my menstrual cycle, l
eaving me with a heaviness that lay on my mind like unfocused guilt or grief. Johnny and Braemar baited Major Derek and played their “death by science fiction” game. Telepathy quizzes, impenetrable allusions. How would we four survive under the tentacled master-race? Derek they had down as a collaborator; I was to join the resistance… I just became more depressed. She couldn’t even leave our fantasy quest alone. Any wild-eyed hope of friendly aliens seemed ludicrous, in competition with the crude realism of what she was doing to Johnny.

  Our cabin showers had ceased to function. I was queuing at the only working ladies’ washroom, down in the teeming hold. The women were friendly enough, but as I reached the door a crewman appeared and grabbed me. “Madame, douche, douche privee: le cap’tan wants…”

  The cabin was tiny and hot as an oven. A huge woman sat in the curtained bunk, robed in green and indigo, with an intricate indigo head cloth. Her full lips looked not painted but naturally, deeply red. She gestured toward the shower. The bunk curtains twitched. Did she have someone hidden there? I stepped into the stall, dropped my sarong and began to wash, the relief of cool water on my skin so intense I didn’t care who was watching. When the water stopped, somebody pulled open the door.

  “Haoi, Haoi —” shouted the little man, as I grabbed my wrap.

  He wore an immaculate white shirt and trousers, his plum-dark face was bloomed and fissured with age. The woman held something bright that moved: a toy of some kind. The captain was brandishing a bag of shrimp crackers.

  Oh, Hanoi —

  “You were in Vietnam?”

  “Oue, Oue. Hanoi. Saigon. Long time ago.”

  I wanted to rush away and get my gear. A retired foreign legionnaire: this was wonderful. The captain beamed, satisfied that he had established credentials. “English — moi, non.” He gesticulated further. I gathered that the woman was his interpreter. I was about to launch into French, but she spoke first.