Submergence

by Ledgard, J. M.

  The fear that most often accompanies the presence of jinn is the fear of losing the faculty of reason. That is exactly what he felt; the rock giving way under him, something trying to pick him up and twirl him in the air. There were voices, movements. He was frightened and yet curiously happy, because the fear did not belong to his captivity.

  Saif tried to say a prayer aloud at the cave entrance, but stumbled on the words and did not finish the last verse. The other fighters were shouting further down the hill. They had convinced themselves jinn were scavenging bones around them. Saif took the safety off his gun and ran down the hill. He followed; it was a moment when he was the same as Saif, sharing the same uncertainty.

  *

  Saif believed in jinn. The CIA was a jinn agency. So was James’s true employer. There were also righteous jinn, Saif said, who whispered into the breasts of those about to die in battle.

  ‘You know, Water, the Jews control jinn,’ Saif said, the next day.

  ‘How is that?’

  ‘It has always been so. You think Jews gain wealth and power through work alone? No, no. Solomon himself used jinn to build up the temple in Jerusalem. If you were ever to find a lamp in which a jinn is trapped, you will see that the magic spell on the lamp is written in Hebrew, yes, not Arabic.’

  If jinn were manifestations of thoughts that were in the world before the existence of man – ursine, monstrous to behold – what would the creatures of the thoughts left by man look like?

  He made love to her in his room. He placed her on her knees on the Turcoman rug. She was heaved forward, holding onto nothing.

  It was his last night at the Hotel Atlantic. He insisted she share his bed. She fell asleep in his arms immediately. The weight of her was on his chest. He could not sleep – it was the food, the caffeine, also the taking leave – and as he lay there, in spite of the Christmas cheer and the sinking of the evening to the slave ship, he could not get out of his mind his own body, how his muscles were only holding in liquids.

  They lay in bed all morning. She rode him rhythmically. She felt run through, defeated; the turning that had thrown them together was about to pull them apart. It was a hotel. You came, you left.

  ‘I’ll swim in the sea this afternoon,’ she said, when she was dressing.

  ‘Not by yourself.’

  ‘I’m strong. I’ll keep to the shore.’ She hesitated, she was nervous. ‘What if I came to visit you in Nairobi?’

  ‘Don’t say it if you don’t mean it,’ he said. He smiled, but at the same time he was thinking, she can’t. ‘I’ll take you to Lamu.’

  ‘I want to swim in your pool.’

  He left after lunch. He was meant to catch the evening Eurostar from Paris to Leeds. The same taxi driver was waiting for him. The same Mercedes.

  She stood on the steps. The sign spelling Hotel Atlantic looked suddenly clownish. She was a stranger to him. He did not know her. Everything was running in reverse, the opposite of when they met on the beach. The sun broke through the clouds in such a way that even the snow appeared to drift up. He was walking backwards down the steps. Then something strange happened to the light, the colours shifted, the parkland went blue, and she walked down the steps and put her arms around him and he kissed her tenderly on the lips and they understood they were in love. He knew her, had known her, would know her. Nothing was in reverse – not the snow, not them – everything was as it was meant to be.

  She pushed him away and pulled down her sweater sleeves over her hands. She folded her arms across her chest.

  He looked at her once more. Took her in. She was different. The space between places had collapsed, people were propelled through the sky in pressurised cabins, but she was opening up another world in the world.

  He got in the taxi and closed the door. She waved once and walked back into the hotel. The Algerian gave him a warm greeting and he returned pleasantries, enough to warm the cab.

  The local train stations were all snowed in so they had to drive for an hour to a larger town that was on the main line. At one point in the journey they came up a steep hill and the car slid across the road into a ditch. He got out and pushed. It gave easily. He followed the car up the hill. When he was at the top, the car ahead of him, the brake lights, the exhaust, he found himself at the edge of a cliff and saw the Atlantic breaking on the rocks below.

  A few kilometres further on, his mobile rang.

  ‘It’s me, it’s Danny,’ she said. ‘I just wanted to say I miss you already.’

  ‘Let me turn around.’

  He would have done. She did not reply immediately. He could hear the wind. Then her voice was clearer. She must have cupped her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘I’m going for my swim now. Merry Christmas.’

  ‘Merry Christmas, Danny.’

  In the last scene of August Strindberg’s novella By the Open Sea, an arrogant and maniacal fishing inspector, Axel Borg, breaks down when confronted with his own mediocrity, something he has despised in almost everyone else.

  A steamer is wrecked on Huvudskär, the island in the Stockholm archipelago to which he has been posted. It is laying on its side just offshore, its white and black funnel broken and its vermilion bottom shining like a blood-stained, shattered breast. He is feverish, half-mad. He staggers along the treeless shore, slipping on the red gneiss scraped clean of lichen by pack ice, and sees dark figures floating and twisted like worms on hooks among the masts and yards of the steamer.

  He wades out into the icy waters, the waves slopping over him, and gathers in armfuls of gaily dressed children:

  Some had fair fringes on their foreheads, others dark. Their cheeks were rosy and white, and their large, wide-open blue eyes stared straight up at the black sky and neither moved nor blinked.

  They were a consignment of dolls.

  There is another world in our world, but we have to live in this one. Jellies we are, washed up on the shore.

  He knew he had to keep his wits about him. He had resisted the Stockholm syndrome. He was repelled by the Muslim men around him, who chained and beat him, who called him miisteer watir and yet saw him as unclean – monkey, rat, waste – and would not touch him except in violence and gave him drink and food on a plate and cup which were his alone and considered dirty and not to be touched by anyone else, and they would not endow a smile on him. He spat at them when they were knelt in prayer with their backs turned. They were not worth more than spit to him. He spat at them the way he had masturbated in his jail in Kismayo, to invigorate and separate himself from them. It was all the sordid means he had available.

  Their minds were weak. They misrepresented their religion. The jihad had trammelled them. They lied to others and to themselves. They had no strategy. Their choice was to fight on and kill more innocents or be annihilated. It was obvious they would choose oblivion over surrender. There was an emptiness in their expressions, which came from not entertaining any doubts. Some of the Somali boys had already died to the world the way Saif had. They were like the bleached and opened badlands. Not dead, not alive. Scarred. They recorded their martyrdom videos outside the shepherd’s hut, with the cypress tree in the background.

  They were copying the Heaven’s Gate cult in America, the first group to document suicides with video testimony. Its members found a collective determination to take their own lives having visited a funfair earlier in the day. They made their video testimony and jumped the earth to a shooting star, so they believed, while their bodies remained on the bunks in California; the bodies, flesh, hair, the mint $5 bill they each had folded in their pocket, their brand new running shoes. They died in shifts, assisting each other. The last members had no one to clean up the vomit from the phenobarbital and vodka they drank, or to remove the plastic bags from their heads which suffocated them.

  He stopped. Maybe he had the same dullness in him, maybe he had fallen in a crack. His stories always circled back to death rites. The tap of an axe on a boy’s spine.

  They drove for a day withou
t stopping and the lorry set them down in a village on the coast south of Kismayo. He was shackled to the wooden railing of a shark-fishing dhow. They sailed south through a night and into the day. The wind was against them. The sea was rough. The fishermen moved barefoot on the dhow, adjusting and readjusting the lateen sail. He was sure they were sailing south to the al-Qaeda training camps in the mangrove swamps around Ras Kamboni, on the border with Kenya.

  His shackles had enough play for him to lean out over the water and catch the sea spray. He could also move out of the sun, but it was not possible to stop himself from being rubbed raw. They were far enough from the land for him to wonder at the depth of the water. His guards brought him a bucket to wash himself and looked away when he performed (there was no other word) his toilet.

  The boat listed under its unseemly cargo. There were more men at arms now, and the shark men, there were goats, nets and hooks, a brazier on which fish were cooked, and a basket of rice, bananas and mangoes. The arms in the hold were covered with the bodies of black fin sharks and lemon sharks.

  ‘But, as they went farther,’ Thomas More continues, in Utopia, ‘a new scene opened, all things grew milder, the air less burning, the soil more verdant, and even the beasts were less wild.’

  The dhow had no motor. There was just the slop of the Indian Ocean as it gave, and the stink of the sharks and the shark oil used to caulk the hull. The fishermen had been at sea for a month. They had smoked the shark and marlins over fires on uninhabited islands, where they also made lime from the coral, burning it to such a temperature that it burst when they poured sea water on it.

  The next night his shitting was endless. They gave him a can of Fanta. The heavens were hidden behind the clouds. They aimed the dhow out to sea to avoid the reefs and the shallows that would ground a boat in the finest mud. It began to howl. Rain swept in. He slid about on the deck and banged against the sides. Saif and the others were curled up like insects about to die, all armoured and repentant. He heard their prayers issuing forth and could not help but think of the disciples on the Sea of Galilee in a storm. There was only one last living shark aboard, slapping its tail against the deck. The coast lay far away in the night, hot, unlit, as the badlands had been unlit. It was not the winter grey of the French coast, it was another coast entirely; which for centuries a mongrel mix of shark men, traders and clerics had sailed up and down. The Bajunis, keeping close to their unknown islands, the Somalis, the Swahili peoples from as far south as Mozambique, the Comorians, Malagasy, Portuguese and Omanis, the Chinese fleet, the Yemenis, Persians, Gujaratis and Malays.

  The pirate Edward England captured treasure from a pilgrim ship sailing to Jeddah and buried it on the Somali coast. England had dug a hole in a dry ravine and laid the treasure chest under a rock there. It was never found. The captain’s crew mutinied and put him ashore on a desert island off Madagascar, on account of his uncommon sense of mercy (for a pirate), and England circled there, searching for water and something to eat. His thinking must have been much more depressed than that of a conman beaten and left in a ditch outside Verona, who, with a ducat stitched in his dress, dusted himself down and walked back over the Alps to Munich in the spring sunshine.

  He looked across the raging sea. Somewhere was the gold and jewels meant for Mecca, unopened, without glitter. Oh, the scale of things was planetary for him then, Somalia was mighty, yet just a piece of the main, the sea larger still; the ocean sank away under him.

  James cradled his drink, sipped it like life. Fanta, fanta, fantasy, fantastic, it was orange nectar, a bubbling drink of New Atlantis, and though he was in mortal peril, or because he was, he had a rising sense of excitement, as if buoyed into the Arabian Nights, and it comforted him to place the seasick holy warriors of al-Qaeda not a clash of civilisations, but a bunch of brigands who would get what was coming to them.

  Professor Danielle Flinders, biomathematics, self-organisation, was what it said on her official Imperial College webpage. She was one of the world’s leading researchers on population dynamics of microbial life in the oceans. The microscopic was phantom and massive to her and her lectures were popular because they ranged widely beyond maths to take in biology, physics, geology; even philosophy and literature.

  She had written him a letter in which she very seriously claimed that an understanding of microbial life in the deep was necessary for human survival on the planet:

  Without that knowledge, we will not be able to comprehend the scale of life on earth, or its ability to regenerate. The fact that life can exist in the darkness, on chemicals, changes our understanding about life everywhere else in the universe.

  She was a senior scientist, not the chief scientist. That was perfect. She had responsibility for her work, with none of the bureaucratic burdens of the chief scientist, whose job it was to balance the personalities and goals of those who want sediment core samples, those who want sweeping measurement of the water column, and those who are after one particular deep-sea fish. She had been a chief scientist once. It had been a disaster. She had her father’s brains, not his easygoing charm. She was brittle. She excelled, but suffered no fools. That was one problem. The other had been with politically correct individuals. She was black to them, carrying the burden of black history, the meagreness of black science, and they could not bear to criticise her openly. That had led to miscommunication, passive-aggressive behaviour, and recriminations when the expedition failed. It was easier with the French. They appreciated her fluency. They perceived her coolness as elegance and warmed to the intensity she brought to her work.

  She kept fit in London, and more so at sea. When it was said she punched her way through a science cruise, it was only the punishment she delivered to the punch-bag in the boat’s gym. She built up her cardiovascular strength. When her work was finished she had in the past fallen in with a scientist or a deckhand. Whatever the stolen pleasures of the bunk, she would end the arrangement directly when the ship returned to port.

  Though the Fanta was warm and he was chained like a dog and the sharks in the hold were buried in salt, there was something alive and enormous in being set sail on the ocean, something about the flight of the dhow in the wind and no other force, and the smoothness of the deck, where shoes were forbidden, and the planking had been polished by bare feet over a long time.

  To set sail was another of the smaller truths. There was landlessness, rocking. The harpooner’s cry of thar she blows! was another way of saying there she breathes. He lived in a time when no ships sailed the line, when there was no sail cloth, no rope, no horses or carts in the ports, while aboard the supertankers were freezers the size of an admiral’s state rooms, filled with meats and fruits; metal cupboards with cartons of treated milk wrapped in plastic, which were a long way advanced from the crates of spring water, wines, almonds, lemons, dry bread and all manner of sauces for salted meat in the stores of eighteenth-century vessels.

  The storm abated. The prayers and mutterings continued. There was the rhythmic dousing of barnacles encrusted on the hull and a noise of the planking giving under the weight of the water.

  Then it was day, the sun struck the sea. He watched the seabirds touch the crest of the swells, always on the wing. He saw a whale shark big enough to swallow a Jonah, hoovering the life that was invisible to the naked eye. There were gold markings on its back, which the fishermen believed were coins sprinkled by Allah as a reward to the fish for being toothless and having no appetite for meat.

  A recent top secret United States Army report predicts mass death for Africans in the coming years. The report’s main points will be leaked to the press, and placed alongside the headline points of other similarly depressing reports made by diplomats, spies and political scientists; including those which speak of death by famine, new epidemics, climate change, infestations of insects, methane gas bubbles, or even by meteors. In this context it is a relief to read again the writings of the Russian anarchist Prince Pyotr Kropotkin.

  As a child, Py
otr served in the Corps of Pages in St Petersburg; his father owned a thousand souls on the family estate. Pyotr escaped a life in court by enlisting in a Cossack regiment in the wild Amur region of Siberia. Later, as an anarchist in exile, he sought to use a study of the animal kingdom to resolve the two great movements of his day: the liberty of the individual, and the cooperation of the community. Darwin’s survival of the fittest theory was brilliant, Kropotkin said, but it did not explain everything. Revolution required other considerations.

  Kropotkin believed in the pre-human origin of moral instincts, a mutual aid that draws us together:

  Whenever I saw animal life in abundance, as, for instance, on the lakes where scores of species and millions of individuals came together to rear their progeny; in the colonies of rodents; in the migrations of birds which took place at that time on a truly American scale along the Usuri; and especially in a migration of fallow-deer which I witnessed on the Amur, and during which scores of thousands of these intelligent animals came together from an immense territory, flying before the coming deep snow, in order to cross the Amur where it is narrowest, in all these scenes of animal which passed before my eyes, I saw mutual aid and mutual support carried on to an extent which made me suspect in it a feature of the greatest importance for the maintenance of life, the preservation of each species, and its further evolution.

  In other words, the unsociable species is doomed. Kropotkin’s example of the deer crossing the Amur still intrigues. How did the deer understand their common cause was to cross the Amur River in greatest numbers at its narrowest point? How many of them were swept away in discovering the narrowest point? Did the birds give the deer a clue? When the deer found the narrowest point how did they agree upon it? Were there deer who refused to support the decision? Dissenters? Mutual aid extends to man. In exile, Kropotkin interviewed a Kentish boatman who risked his life to save some drowning souls. What had made him row out into the storm?