It’s always like this, here.
When I first met Marquita I asked her what the Resistance resisted, exactly, and she said, ‘Entropy.’ Talk about a lost cause. Filippe files one paper and four others pop into existence somewhere else. I don’t know where it all comes from. He’s always filing and organising and straightening, and yet this room is always a wreck. And he’s usually grumpy about it, but this time his ire was pointed at me.
‘What’s going to happen now?’ I said.
He tapped his pen against his front teeth and looked up, into the blur of light that is the top of the tower shaft.
‘You’re not one of us,’ he said.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘I told you when Marquita first brought you here that we’ve never had an angel with . . . all of that.’ He waved his hands around, ending with a flourish at me. He was like an overwrought theatre director. ‘The wings. You have no records.’ He nodded at the archives all around. ‘Believe me, I looked. You have no records and you have no mission.’
‘So? So what I have no mission?’
‘All angels have missions,’ Filippe said. ‘It’s the definition of being an angel. Think of yourself like a delivery system.’
‘Delivering what? And on whose behalf?’
He threw his hands in the air. ‘Causality again! You keep tripping over it. The Resistance is an acausal system.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Help me to not trip, then. You say all angels have missions. I have no mission. Ergo, I must not be an angel. Is that how your head is working?’
‘Technically, I don’t have a head. What you see here is just a sideshow.’
I sighed. He was worse than usual. Seemed to be working himself up to something.
‘I did the best I could for you. That was a good job Marquita gave you. Travel the world. Make something of yourself. All you had to do was sit tight and wait for instructions, like every other member of the Resistance. But I knew it was futile. I told Marquita you would never work out.’
I don’t think my jaw actually hit the floor, but the fact that he refused to look at me meant it wouldn’t have mattered what expression I had on my face. I felt my mouth working as I tried to figure out how to respond.
‘Wait,’ I said at last. ‘Don’t you get that I saved that plane? That passenger was up to no good. The guy hijacked me and brought me here and he’s got a piece of equipment that screams of HD. Did Marquita tell you what came out of that so-called briefcase?’
‘She said you saw a dinosaur.’
‘Pterosaur. And I’ll tell you something else. I’m wasted up there serving coffee.’
‘You’re an angel, Pearl. You’re here to serve. The whole purpose of the Resistance is to keep it low. Our angels don’t do pyrotechnics. They don’t fly around performing stunts! They are ordinary janitors and health care workers and truck drivers and waitresses. The whole point of what we do is to tweak causal nature in small ways. Small, unobtrusive ways, Pearl, because that’s how the work of the world gets done. But look at you!’
He stood up and came around the desk, planting himself before me, hands on hips. He looked me up and down.
‘There’s nothing small about you. You’re decidedly conspicuous. And it’s not just your appearance. People who have met you don’t forget you. You have that way of gazing in people’s eyes – you’re doing it right now. Cut it out! You make me feel like you’re looking into my soul.’
‘I am,’ I said.
‘But I don’t have a soul. And you know that. No, Pearl, I don’t know what you are or where you come from, but you are not one of us and I can’t afford to keep you anymore. There was a lot of damage control involved in that flight. Recordings can be fixed, but it’s not easy to handwave a hole in the fuselage away.’
‘So you’re saying . . . ?’
‘We’re done here.’
I felt myself stagger. Maybe it was just the minuscule movements of the floor beneath me all adding up to unbalance me, but I don’t think so.
‘Does Marquita know?’ I whispered.
‘I thought you might want to tell her.’ He turned his back on me, stepping over papers to get to his desk, and sat down with a heavy sigh. He licked his forefinger and turned a page.
Coward.
‘What is the matter with you?’ I cried. ‘I believed in you. I believed we were doing something meaningful. I thought we were on the same team.’
Filippe selected one of his official stamps, a large one with a worn wooden handle. He rolled it across a pad of red ink.
‘You don’t even know what you are, Pearl. How can you possibly know what team you’re on? Be glad I didn’t just have you taken out.’
He brought the stamp down on the page with a small, clean thump.
I’d prefer your kayak
The woods gather around you like a winter coat. The fir trees grow right down to the shoreline, and here among them the susurrus of their movement is broken by high-register birdsong dispensing tiny droplets of golden sound. Light-shot clouds of mosquitoes jumble in the weeds that were crushed where something barrelled through the undergrowth at the water’s edge, scoring trees and snapping their branches. You remember pain. You remember fear. When you think hard, you remember the briefcase falling open. You were nearly unconscious by then. You remember fire.
Since then, you have been someplace. A kind of cavern or room or hall, a holding pattern; but you can’t recall exactly. It’s all nebulous. Were you in a cage of blood vessels or were they nerves? A red-hot womb, a star nursery, an array of crystalline forms suspended in gel, a Bayesian probability array. Whatever it was, now there’s just nausea and the wreaked-horror aftermath of every particle of yourself having been rendered void and then rewritten in the world.
This is so confusing. If you died out there over the ocean, are you returning to the world in a new body? Aren’t people supposed to reincarnate as babies? It’s what you always heard.
Between you and the water’s edge you see a purplish-brown trail of what might be the faeces of a large animal. No sign of that animal now. It’s just you and the briefcase.
Except it isn’t you, after all. It’s him. Other you.
He stands right up inside your skin, confident. He finds the phone in your pocket – yes, it’s still there! Ah! What a mockery of all you’ve been through, that a phone is in your pocket after falling thousands of feet.
The other one who lives in your skin doesn’t power the phone up. He removes the card and tucks it into a hollow space in a rotten stump. Then he throws the casing into the dark water. It flashes twice in the air, then goes under.
There are rocky islands out there, crowned with more fir trees. No boats. No docks. No buildings. The geography looks like Nova Scotia but the light is weak. Scandinavia?
So tempting to dismiss everything as unreal. You can feel the weight of the briefcase dragging on your arm. He is stronger than you ever were. He has more muscle and he has more nerve. Your sweat doesn’t even smell of fear. You smell like a man with a purpose: his purpose.
* * *
He prowls up and down the shoreline, stumbling over granite boulders in your comfortable loafers. You think of the phone, its GPS. He threw it away before trying to find out where you are.
After a time, he sets off into the woods. You feel it all. Your heart pounds. Your legs work. They are good legs, better than the ones you had when he climbed into you; even so, you are soon weary, yet he keeps going. The light goes slate-coloured but doesn’t fade completely. It’s getting chilly. He goes on and on, and you feel sure he’s going in circles until, ahead, a yellow square of light shows up, broken by trees. He quickens his pace, and your chest burns, and sweat is pouring off you. There is a cabin with a light burning in the twilight, and a break in the trees, and beyond this you see water. You approach. There’s a dock, a boat with an outboard motor. A couple of kayaks pulled up on the shore. But no truck, no car. No road, no visible power line.
He moves slowly now in the blue-grey light. There are voices. Children in the cabin, and a woman’s voice.
He goes to the cabin and puts your back to the wall. You begin to be scared of what he will do. You want to scream out a warning to these people. But you can’t make a sound.
He turns your head and then he leaves you, just like that. He’s gone.
With one eye you look in.
The light comes from a kerosene lamp. Inside, children are lighting a fire. They are talking in Swedish.
You wait. Now that you are allowed to move, you are afraid to move. What if he comes back? What if he massacres them? But he has no weapons, and what reason would he have to bludgeon some random family to death?
What makes you think he needs a reason?
You feel, though, that he has left this one to you because it suits him to let you do the talking.
How unprepared you feel for all of this. You have been seeing ghosts all your life, and now it is as though you are haunted. You should have known they would not let Austen Stevens die without raising their grievances.
They used to whisper to you.
Your father would take you with him on his river taxi. And sometimes he would take oil men. Men in suits and men with boots that looked like they’d never seen a day’s work. Nervous over the lack of cellphone signal. They would go to the places where the sump lay in the forest. No one would smoke there. Five miles in the other direction was a village where gas spewed out of a broken pipe and flames burned all the time and on the way you’d pass abandoned villages, places that had been ruined by Pace Industries and the wars it funded, places left behind when people had packed up and moved away.
Up the river in an outboard, and the trees with their overhang of sunbuilt structure over you; they felt just like the school library. Stuffed with possibilities. Shot through with soft, soft light. And full of ghosts, you knew.
Standing near the ponds of oil you’d hear them sometimes, like when you put two plastic cups on a string and talked to your friend: maybe the details were half imagination, but there was a vibration on that string. And there were ghosts in that oil.
‘You must help us,’ they’d say. ‘Don’t let us be burned alive. We have knowledge you can’t imagine. Make it stop.’
You turned your face down to your hand-me-down trainers, the grime on your legs, the scratches; you looked right through yourself, through the ground and in your imagination it was as if you were looking through the Earth, into the deep places. Out the other side, even, and into space.
The oil company, the soldiers, the journalists, the sickness. The endless fighting. There was something bigger beneath it all.
You thought, when the recruiters came, that joining the militia was the way you could honour the ancestors – for who else could these voices belong to? You never told anyone what you heard. You never told your mother, even when she begged you not to join the fighting. You never told your friends.
But ever since then, even after the war and the near-death experience when the great crow came for you – even after your rescue by the oil company, you hear the spirits: animal spirits, human spirits, things that aren’t even from this Earth. When you’re near a petrol station or an oil tank or even a coal fire, they whisper to you.
You became a physician to get as far from violence and destruction as you could. You’ve planned for years to go back, to rebuild, to live well as the best revenge. You made friends who shared your vision, and together you’ve talked of the teaching hospital you’d create in Kuè as fine as anything in Europe or the States. The fundraising you did. The times it almost came together, and then didn’t. The wasted effort, trying to get others to put up the money for your dream.
You tell yourself that was the reason you fell for the old man’s job offer: the money. It’s always money in this world. The money meant you wouldn’t have to wait until you were fifty-five or sixty to get the project off the ground. The thing could be begun now, and you’d be able to do it right. You knew he had his reasons for choosing you; after all, there are things you know about his business, secrets of his. It’s not that you kept them quiet out of loyalty. You simply turned your back on that whole mess.
And now here you are. In the middle of a steaming pile of shit. Being framed somehow, for a crime you don’t even understand.
You stand by the door, gathering yourself for a while. The briefcase is too suspicious. You leave it outside. Then, feeling like you’re in a fairy tale, you go around the front and knock on the door.
* * *
They all have green eyes. The grandmother’s hair is silver, plaited on one side. The kids have black hair and skin the colour of the walls in detention centres. When you ask the grandmother if she speaks English, she says warily, ‘You are a long way from the holiday cabins. Who else is with you?’
‘I was fishing with a friend,’ you say. ‘We came on shore. I fell asleep on the rocks and he must have left.’
‘Your friend left you here alone?’
You try to sound lighthearted. ‘He’s a joker. He’s crazy. I thought he would come right back, but it’s dark now and I wondered if you have a phone I could use.’
‘Phone? No. No phone. No electricity.’
‘Cellphone?’
‘You won’t get a signal.’
They are stiff, watching you with bottleglass eyes. You have seen this look before. The grandmother is thinking that if you can’t call for help, neither can she.
‘This is embarrassing,’ you say. You open your wallet. Your familiar US dollars are still there, which adds an extra layer of strange. Your credit cards will have been cancelled by now but you still have the cash you withdrew at JFK.
‘Can I buy your kayak? I have to get . . . back.’
You are trying to work out what a kayak costs and at the same time guess where you have to get back to. The woman is stiff and you can hear her swallow. You look down at your shoes and it’s obvious you aren’t dressed for fishing.
It is so tiring and ironic, their fear. No matter how many African people the white people robbed of their lives, still they will be afraid of you. You fish around in your wallet, come up with your hospital ID card. You show it to her.
‘Dr Kisi Sorle,’ she says stiffly. And now she leans against the door frame. You aren’t a black man loose in the woods anymore. You are a doctor.
Silently you offer the money again.
‘Come in,’ she says. ‘We are just about to have our meal. You are on holiday?’
‘Business trip. I won’t come in, thank you, I don’t want to impose. I just want to get back.’
‘That old boat, it isn’t worth much,’ she tells you. ‘But it’s a long way to town. If you go a half-mile that way, you’ll come to Gustav’s house. He has a phone signal.’
If Gustav has a signal he’ll have a news feed. You smile and say, ‘I’d prefer your kayak.’
Tool
‘The Resistance moves in mysterious ways,’ the nurse at Queens Hospital told me after my near-miss with the IIF helicopter. I’d been dragged from the water unconscious by a couple of men walking their dog on the beach. When I awakened, my wings were stowed in HD. The nurse, Chona Navarro, said, ‘Your bill has been covered, so that’s one thing you don’t have to worry about. Do you have a place to go after we release you?’
‘I guess . . . I don’t actually know Akele’s number, but he works at Dubowski’s Recycling . . . Wait a minute. Who paid my bill?’
Chona handed me a business card. On one side it had a picture of an open suitcase with vacation snapshots spilling out. On the other was printed
Destiny Destinations
Marquita Roumain
‘That’s not the logo I saw on the helicopter.’
‘The helicopter? Oh, right. You fell out of a corporate helicopter. IIF, was that it? We informed the police. They’ll probably come talk to you soon.’
/> I was still bleary. The bed was too small, and the room was hot and cramped, and I could feel the pain and distress of people in beds on either side, and in the hallway, and across the room. I thought of the hijacker, so dapper and contained, with his gimpy leg and his misshapen waveform. He had told me to fly and I had flown. I had seen the passenger in the helicopter: an old man. The bags under his eyes. I’d felt his spiritual frailty like a quaking feather touch. The downdraft off the helicopter blades caught me. Then the iron-dark sea.
‘I don’t understand,’ I whispered. ‘What’s going on here?’
She put her hand on my wrist. I felt her compassion. Her embarrassment.
‘I’m not supposed to say.’
‘Why not? What’s the big secret?’
‘We’re just ordinary people,’ she said, smiling. ‘We do really simple things. Say you shared your computer out to solve a big problem. Well, this is like sharing yourself out. Letting yourself be guided on a time-share basis.’
Then she closed her mouth and pretended to look at my chart.
* * *
Now I was sitting on the edge of a hotel bed while the Parisian dawn melted over the plate-glass window. The glass was almost soundproof. Everything outside this room seemed remote.
‘Taken out.’
I said it to Tsubota, Marquita’s snake.
‘Filippe said he could have had me taken out. Does that mean taken out like you take out the trash? Or does it mean taken out, like, off-with-your head? Because if it’s the second one, he’s kidding himself. I’m not that easy to take out. Who is he to say that to me?’
Tsubota was stretched along the climate vent that formed a ledge at the bottom of the window, basking in its warmth while his tongue tried and failed to taste the view of Notre Dame.
Marquita was sleeping, sprawled on her back with her mouth open, a slug trail of saliva tracing gravity’s vector from the corner of her mouth. Her brightly-beaded braids were splayed around her in a semi-circle like the head of a paintbrush that’s been jammed against the paper. Or a halo. The hotel’s Egyptian cotton sheets were tangled with her legs, but one foot had managed to escape and its painted toes twitched in her dreaming. She wore a shell necklace that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a mermaid and, even though the fine wrinkles on her neck and around her eyes showed the drag of the years, she had fucked like a storm all night.
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