by Giles Foden
His toes fidgeted with the pile of the rug. When would he be free of this feeling of being at war with himself? With the past that had made him – with certain actions, secretly done in the name of duty, about which he now had doubts?
The bird outside piped up again.
He was in conflict on several fronts, also carrying a powerful consciousness of neglect, which he connected to his wife’s illness. He felt she might not have got cancer if he’d been at home more. It was, he knew, nonsense in medical terms. But he felt it all the same, and the feeling fed a deeper sense of insecurity about whether he had ever done any good in the world.
Survivor’s guilt, the agency shrink had said. It wasn’t as simple as that. For some time, Queller had felt he was on a penitential journey. He looked at his stump. The scar tissue was like a map.
3
1998. One year on, and another glorious blue day is born on the day of fools. It was, considering the state of Florida, the kind of day when the sky might be glad to see itself anew on the sea beach – in the silvery surface of the water, in mother-of-pearl, in gum foil even.
Nick Karolides didn’t see any of this. He was in the kitchen, making his breakfast, pouring milk into a bowl of Cheerios. Pouring from the carton as he stood, bare feet on the floor tiles … A tall, dark-haired young man in boxer shorts, he was fit and well-proportioned; but not handsome, not exactly. The milk made a thin white snake into the bowl.
He sat down and ate them slowly, those ‘one and only Cheerios’, listening to the radio and reading the cereal box as he chewed: ‘Cheerios has been an important part of all our lives for nearly 60 years. It’s your kids’ energy fuel, one of baby’s first finger foods, and the perfect wholesome goodness for the whole family.’
An only child, even now he found this insistence on the triumphant healthy family, which he saw a lot in advertisements, kind of alienating. It wasn’t that he’d had an unhappy childhood – the contrary in fact, at least until his father’s death – but the way these ads made him feel he was lacking somehow. As if all those smiling faces on the packet or TV screen were America’s normality and his family something else.
In his case, the whole thing was compounded by Sarasota’s Greek community being relatively insular and he himself something of a loner. People always thought if you were a member of an ethnic community like that, it was close-knit. That was true up to a point, but he hadn’t kept in contact with many of his childhood friends. Quite a few had drifted away and not even kept in touch with their own relations.
The radio announcer was prattling on about the Lewinsky thing. Again. He turned it off, a trace of anger on his brow. All that stuff depressed him. A lot depressed him. The one and only Cheerios depressed him. Familiar items in the kitchen – things he had seen since childhood, such as his mother’s chrome juicer or, mainly and massively, the slightly curved door of the refrigerator – they depressed him, too. These days the letter magnets spelled ‘Fiery Furnace’, or ‘It Is Written.’ Or something else along those lines.
After finishing up his breakfast, he went back to his room, his long, toned limbs – he swam every day – moving with an easy grace that belied his spiky mood. He changed for work, putting on what Absal called his uniform: black jeans, elastic-sided boots, white T-shirt, black leather jacket. She said it was how the gangsters dressed back home.
As his head came through the neck of the T-shirt, he caught a sound that had become familiar in the household since his father’s death. It was a muttering that rose in pitch once in a while, then fell again. He grimaced, raising his eyes to heaven. In the corridor, the muttering grew louder. He put his head round the door of her room. Inside, flickering under the light of a row of electric candles, he could see her back.
Blonde – rare for a Greek – and with a well-kept figure, still a source of pride for her, in spite of a temperament much altered since widowhood, she rocked to and fro as she mumbled. In front of her, above the row of candles and a heap of religious paraphernalia, was a large picture of Christ on the cross, surrounded by a ring of fire. Flashed across one corner were letters licked with flame: ‘Holy Spirit Fire Church.’
He heard her intone: ‘The day is thine, the night is thine, thou has prepared the light and the sun.’
Next to his mother, as she prayed – if it truly was praying: a suggestion that was offensive to some residual religious feeling in him – a cigarette burned in a green ashtray.
Nick watched the rocking figure for a few seconds, then – breaking into the Greek that remained the language of emotion in his rended family – whispered goodbye and shut the door behind him. He passed a cardboard box crammed with more religious items, mostly icons. Some, he knew, were quite valuable, but she had just chucked them in there. There was even an ancient wooden pyx, the small box in which the priest carries Holy Communion to the sick in their homes. He frowned, not so much at the way in which his mother had discarded these accoutrements of the old religion, as at the contents of the next box in the corridor. It was filled with materials for making artificial flowers, a hobby that had once made her happy.
Outside, he wheeled his motorbike from the garage, put on his helmet and sped away. He drove fast to clear his mind, weaving in and out of the traffic. A garbage truck was belching clouds of black fumes; he pulled down his visor. Swooping past a bright red hatchback, he saw the driver check her hair in the rear-view mirror. Next, the driver of an executive sedan was thumping the steering wheel in frustration at having to slacken his course for the pungent dumpster truck.
He made his way out of the suburbs. Past small-town lots and shops. Posters on steel shutters. Commercial signs – Belaion Bakery – and civic blunders: a bed of wilting flowers, laid out in curious knots. Once part of the mayor’s regeneration programme, it was now a dumping ground for syringes.
Mr Belaion, a Libyan, had a daughter Nick went out with for a year. She was wild. Wearing a baker’s white coat in the day, she wore ripped jeans and braided her hair with beads when they went out at night. Smelling of bread, she kneaded him like dough. She left him for a Cuban in the end, saying she would have married him, if only he’d let her inside his head. He knew it was a cliché of male puzzlement, but it was still strange how women put such a premium on opening up like that. Surely, he thought, the stronger bond would be the one without words. Having a person say ‘I love you’ over and over again, even in Arabic, made you question whether it was true.
Torrance Dry Cleaners. He was in the fire church: Mr Torrance who came with evangelical papers to the house, chewing odorous gum. Nick’s mother would put the papers in envelopes for mailing to Africa, where – in common with other apocalyptic sects – the fire church was expanding in a big way. One day, Mr Torrance will go evangelise in Africa, his mother said.
He took a short cut near the railroad, and came down a ramp by the coal depot. Passing an Army surplus store and a joke shop, finally he hit the freeway, rejoining the line of commuters. He despised these people in their cars, already angry about something before they had even got to work. But he knew that also applied to him. He had that much self-knowledge, Nick Karolides.
A guy in a red convertible cut him up. He accelerated, followed, and – glancing back – passed the convertible at speed. On a bike the helmet can be expressive. Particular angles. Articulations of the neck. These can be used as insults. For an emotionally stunted person, for a fortified person, for a person who doesn’t want to engage with the world directly, wearing a helmet can be liberating.
All this had to change. He knew that, too. Dino had said this. What he was doing now, it wasn’t living, it was resisting. Not against the enemies of times long ago – like the men who forced his father to leave his homeland – but against a creeping enclosure, an oppression that shut down freedom in your head just as effectively. What made it all the worse was that people wanted it. They desired it. Given the appearance of choice, and a dependable stream of stimulating experiences, they were willing to be manipula
ted like a child’s toy.
He twisted his hand on the throttle, powering up to overtake a Fedex van. A toy with movable limbs. Action Man. Barbie and Ken. My little fucking pony. Or some electronic gizmo: Tamagotchi, as promoted on Fox Kids. Fox Kids. That just about sums it up.
Nick Karolides very much wanted to isolate himself from all this. Perhaps it was a desire to affirm his Greekness – to forge a connection with that fallen land of lost gods and godlike men which his father left behind. Or maybe it was just a kind of condescension towards ordinary folk, some sense he’d been otherwise chosen. But he had too much self-doubt for that …
No, it could be, rather, that he simply felt there had to be more to life than a shimmering hurry of days, which sometimes he could hardly persuade himself had any reality at all. The whole thing sometimes seemed to him like a kind of fairground machine, operated from behind by pulleys and ropes. It was a suspicion that applied as much to his inward as to his outward experiences. Now and then he thought he presented a false self to the world, then found himself shocked to have been one of the observers who had taken it as real.
The truth was, Nick wasn’t a man to analyse such things in depth. He was a marine biologist. He just knew he wanted out. He would be thirty-one next year. His hopes and anticipations were not unusual; they mainly involved escape. From, for instance, the smell of exhaust fumes seeping in through his visor.
Or – look! – these signs on the edge of the freeway, raised on poles and platforms so you couldn’t miss them. Especially prominent that morning were a host of ones with an apocalyptic theme. They all had the familiar fiery writing of his mother’s poster: Then the fire of the Lord fell, and consumed the burnt sacrifice, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench.
He was weaving in and out with more abandon now. The signs were pissing him off. He could do himself an injury. He could do others an injury – like this guy in the Fedex van, who’d caught up and just given him the bird. Then he shall say also unto them on the left hand, depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.
And so on, all the way down to hell. Finally, when it seemed the freeway might run out of poles on which to speak the name of the Lord, by which time the text was written in Nick’s speeding body as a burning fire shut up in his bones and he was so angered by the posters he felt he couldn’t stay on his bike a moment longer, the pay-off came, the chosen ones’ come-on-inside: Holy Spirit Fire Church – join before the day comes … call toll-free F-I-E-R-Y.
The next intersection brought, at last, another sign, its picture of snook and starfish and shells overlaid with the words: Welcome to the Florida Institute of Marine Sciences, a partner in the National Estuary Program. Sarasota Bay: Reclaiming Paradise.
He turned in and parked the bike near the entrance, setting it up on its stand and locking his helmet in the pillion box. As he walked across the quadrangle it struck him how much he had grown to resent this place, how quickly its mission had lost all its meaning for him. There was a pool with dolphins, and a little aquarium where skates and sharks skimmed the glass. He liked the skates, he hated the sharks. It wasn’t a place that people visited. There were other places for that. This was a place for tests.
Someone called his name. It was Absal at reception, springing up from her revolving chair. He waved, and moved on, before she could engage him in conversation. Sometimes he enjoyed doing this kind of thing, giving people the slip, refusing to be anchored. It was probably a bad characteristic, one that didn’t let much warmth into his life, but it was also protective. If you made yourself like an island, you couldn’t be hurt.
It was true he hadn’t a girlfriend right now and he’d thought about Absal. She was good-looking, but she wasn’t his type. Absal was from Tajikistan and had a beautiful accent, but she wore too much make-up.
Woe unto those that striveth with their Maker!
It was that stuff again, getting inside his head. Those placards his ma had up around the house, the phrases she whispered while watching TV. Let the potsherd strive with the potsherds of the earth. Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, what makest thou? Or thy work, he hath no hands? Look unto me …
Christ. He went in, pulled on his lab coat, and spent the morning analysing samples of seawater from Sarasota Bay. It was part of a sewage control initiative. Septic systems played a significant role in nitrogen loading in the bay. More shit from the City of Sarasota meant more nitrogen in the ocean. More nitrogen meant increased levels of phytoplankton and epiphytic algae. More phytoplankton and algae meant more shading for seagrass blades. More shading for seagrass blades meant lower oxygen levels. And that, that left fish and other creatures gasping.
There were other problems. Stormwater run-off full of pollutants. Grow-fast from lawn care. Fertiliser from agriculture. Heavy metals in the creeks and bayous. But trying to stop or reverse all this, though a noble cause, didn’t make him happy. During his training, he hadn’t expected to end up here. He’d wanted to be out on the ocean. He’d wanted to be free.
*
At 1 o’clock he got back on his motorbike, picked up a pastrami, Emmental and mustard sandwich from the deli, and drove over to Dino’s. This was the usual pattern for his lunch hour. Dino had been a Navy Seal with Nick’s father, whose own father the Colonels’ men had shot down in the street – which was why Georgiou Karolides had left. Dino had come with him. Before that, again with Nick’s father, Dino had been in the Greek merchant service, shipping out of Piraeus.
Dino’s Dive Shop. The owner, a wiry sixty-year-old with bushy eyebrows, was fiddling with a regulator when Nick came in. Head bent over the counter, under a fantastic array of masks, flippers and spear-guns, he just nodded, and carried on working. Nick munched on his sandwich.
‘How is your mother, anyway?’ Dino said, eventually.
‘You mean Florida’s premier religious maniac?’ He pulled a face.
‘She wasn’t always like that, you know. Your ma was a very beautiful woman in her day. We all wanted her – us Greeks, I mean. Then I introduced her to your father…’
They both fell silent.
It was the day after his twenty-first birthday. A Sunday. Dino turned up at the door, grim-faced. He and Nick’s father had been diving. The shark had come out of nowhere, taken off his father’s arm. Still alive when Dino pulled him to the shore, he died on the way to the hospital.
‘I’ve been thinking about what you were saying the other day,’ continued Dino. ‘About wanting to go. It is time you got out of this place. You’re wasting your life. Dipping around in other people’s shit!’
Nick laughed, but he knew the old guy was racked with guilt about his father’s death. He didn’t blame him for what had happened. It was a source of sorrow for them both. Dino was like an uncle now, which was why he gave these lectures.
The eyes beneath Dino’s bushy brows were on him. They were surprisingly hard for a man with such a quiet voice. They seemed to know exactly what he was thinking: you are holding yourself back.
Or so Nick thought. His mind, too, had its cargo of guilt. Why was it his father, the hero, who’d been taken, not him – the failure, the stay-at-home?
‘Fact is, I’ve something I wanted to show you.’
Dino came round the counter and approached a rack of sub-aqua and other marine-related journals. Picking out Ocean magazine, he flicked through the pages till he found what he was looking for, then handed it to Nick.
‘I’ve marked it for you.’
In the middle of the page a recruitment advertisement had been ringed twice with a red felt-tip pen:
Ranger required for Zanzibar Reef Protection Scheme. USAID-funded project seeks trained marine conservator to take charge of coral and species-protected area management on islands in the Zanzibar archipelago. Apply soonest ZRPS, USAID, PO Box 331, NW Washington DC 20019
4
He sat on deck, on his bag, smoking and loo
king through the white rails at the ocean. The sun was fierce, and all around him were faces. People crossing his line of sight. Mouths talking a language he couldn’t understand. Swahili. Sawahil. Arabic for littoral folk, for islanders and coastlanders, people of the sea. He had read a little about it.
The books didn’t help him, though – he could have read every book on the subject and it wouldn’t have helped him – when out of fellow feeling he tried to strike up a conversation with one of his neighbours, a big lady, wearing a turban of brightly patterned cloth. She responded to the unintelligible stream of white man’s talk with a look of frank, self-assured incomprehension and not a little affront.
And then she uttered what he heard as: ‘Papabawa! P-P-Papabawa!’ – which he supposed to be a greeting.
He put a hand to his lips. A small patch of skin had come away, pulled by the filter. He had left the cigarette there to block out the smell of the diesel from the engines.
Tired of watching the sea through a forest of legs, he decided he ought to stand up. A slight wave of nausea passed through him as he did so. He leaned back against a throbbing bulkhead and looked up at the sky. The fumes were making him feel woozy. His mind felt as if it were floating off on the ocean breeze with the gulls, into some illusory world. He went over to the rail and, leaning over, let the cigarette drop from his fingers into the water.
The Smooth Hound gave a little jump. Operated by an Australian company (what were they doing here?), the hydrofoil belied its name. It was a far from comfortable ride, and he was beginning to wish he had taken another flight from Dar-es-Salaam. The port there had been hellish, and the Smooth Hound was not much better. Rather than gliding, the craft did something more like chew its way across the water.
One passenger near him, an old African with a white eyepatch, was chewing for real. Every now and then he spat a long, red thread onto the deck. This manoeuvre, which left a pattern of scarlet arabesques on the fibreglass, made Nick feel sicker than ever. Why couldn’t he spit over the side like everyone else? His nausea was intensified when the man cheerily offered him some of whatever it was he was chewing. Nick felt dizzy. Gestured-offering-by-man-with-patch was how his floating brain registered it. Some kind of nut. Wrapped up in a parcel of bright green leaves.