A Kind of Compass

by McKeon, Belinda; Rahill, Elske;

  ‘But you don’t want to come with me.’

  ‘I do.’

  It strikes her that this is the solution. It’s simple.

  ‘No, dear darling. You went to Finland. You cut the grass. And you’ve planted those … scraggy things!’

  ‘New Zealand flax.’

  He laughs.

  ‘Yes, New Zealand flax! You’ve got to look after the New Zealand flax, and make sure it grows big and beautiful.’

  Frida doesn’t know why it has that name; probably some sort of cloth can be made from it. But it looks nothing like ordinary flax, that misty blue corn which you never see any more and from which rare and lovely linen is made. New Zealand flax is not blue, and the flowers it gets look like brown withered prunes. It seldom flowers in this climate, and the leaves look like green spears, rusty from the west wind, with pointed tips that cut you if you touch them. There’s only one reason for planting it.

  ‘It survived the winter!’

  ‘Yes, my darling, it survived the winter.’

  He gets up.

  ‘Don’t go.’

  Please don’t go.

  ‘Yes, I must go. Before the sun rises. You know the rules!’

  He walks towards the door.

  ‘The sun won’t rise for ages.’

  ‘It has already risen in Finland.’

  She runs after him.

  ‘Will you come back?’

  He turns.

  ‘One of us had to go first. That’s the way it is.’

  They warn you. Till death do us part. You hear it but you don’t take it in. The small print. You throw it away, into the bin, like the wrapping paper on a beautiful present.

  He puts a hand towards her shoulder, but not on it. If only he could hold her in his arms for one second!

  ‘Make the most of the time you have left. It will be over soon enough. There’s plenty of work to do.’ He winks. ‘You can do mine, if you don’t want to do your own.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I will.’

  He always gives good advice.

  Imagination is supposed to be a great thing. A gift. It can conjure up, it can invent. But its creations are as nothing, really, compared to the real thing.

  The man on the pier didn’t reverse into the water. He attached a rope, which was dangling from the back of his car, to a small boat in which he must have been out before she came, fishing for the crabs. And he pulled it up after him, to dry land.

  TRANSITION

  Maria Takolander

  Nothing could have prepared her for this. The blackness is rich and thick, like velvet. The sun is a white star and the earth an immense orb revolving silently around it. The moon hovers nearby. It is a rock, but also the ghost of a rock. Everything is still but at the same time in motion.

  Dawn, when it falls upon the planet, appears as an arc of blue so vivid that it is shocking. Then the sunlight chases the darkness over the sphere, revealing the white arteries of rivers, luminous oceans, bleeding deserts, the geometric scars of farmlands and cities; all protected by a radiant layer of atmosphere.

  She had seen images of it, but the reality is altogether different. It is as if she had been watching a lion on a screen and then the creature itself was suddenly panting in her living room, its fur framed by muscle and bone, its breath heavy with the odour of flesh, its yellow eyes inhuman.

  Things have never seemed so real, but at the same time unreal. Floating near the transparent ceiling of the cupola, she feels like she is dreaming. She has broken free. She has escaped the sordid weight of herself. She is a pure spectator, akin to a heavenly spirit. She approaches the camera fixed at the apex of the cupola and observes her likeness in the depthless surface of the lens. It is this disembodied image of herself that she wants beamed back to the earth.

  She presses her hands against the cold glass. She sees where topsoil has stained the ocean alongside the deforested island of Madagascar. The depleted body of the Aral Sea is exposed to her, as is the smog over Beijing. A vast cyclone covers the north-western coast of Australia, the outer areas of cloud pocked by soundless bursts of light. Then the world falls into darkness again, its cities like the embers of smouldering fires.

  It is then she remembers why she is here. She will be the first to leave all earthly problems behind. She will make a clean start. It is time to quit orbit. It is time for her transition to the new world.

  She feels a muddying confusion, almost like panic, as if she has forgotten something of utmost importance – but the opportunity for hesitation is long gone. There is no choice anymore. She leaves the cupola and floats back to her operation seat in the illuminated alcove of the control room. She straps herself down.

  To escape the pull of the earth, there is an acceleration, both mysterious and atrocious. The lights are extinguished, and she is pressed deep into herself in the inscrutable darkness, becoming heavier than she thinks she can endure. She is almost sure that she falls unconscious. Certainly she drifts into a kind of sleep, although there are no memories or dreams. The emergence back into wakefulness is marked by a feeling of disease or disgust, abiding in her flesh and bones. It is not what she had expected.

  The lights flicker on. She squints at the shining ceiling. She sees the glassy eye of the camera lens embedded there and makes out her reflection. She is bound to the padded chair in her pale jumpsuit, some grotesque unfortunate from a bygone age. She is a blight in the immaculate space. This is not what she had envisioned.

  She allows herself time to recoup. She remains in the reclined seat, her head cushioned in a stout brace. With the pressure against her ears, she can hear a fleshy percussive noise, her heart sounding like something unborn. She lifts her head and observes the undulating zipper down the front of her suit, rising and falling with each breath. Something has gone wrong.

  She unbuckles herself and gets to her feet on the gleaming floor. Her weight is cumbersome in the new semblance of gravity. She listens to the reverberation of the ventilation fans and takes in the metallic taste of the air, like the vile residue in her mouth when she coughs sometimes. Her nausea is strong. She feels as if she is standing still, but in fact she is being spun and hurled through endless space and time. She had understood the plan, the mechanics of it all, how she would be sent on her way, but now she feels only as if she is in a carnival ride gone wrong.

  She looks around her. The space is so white that at first it is hard to distinguish anything. Then she makes out the circular walls of the control room. There are a number of doors. One of them returns her to the cupola. There she sees instantly that the view has changed. It is all gone. Looking at the hemisphere of glass above her she sees only blackness, unbroken by any stars.

  The dome looks close, much closer than before, its blackness like morbid ceiling paint. The radiation shield has closed over the craft. Beyond is eternity, silent as an iceberg. She will never see the earth again.

  Her nausea settles into a dead weight in the pit of her stomach. She leans against the wall of the cupola, triggering the release for the door. The door slides shut, and she is sealed in. The blackness is so dense that it is like blindness. She cannot even see herself. She lowers herself cross-legged to the floor, heavier and sicker than she has ever felt before.

  How brief her life on earth had been, she thinks. It is as though it had never happened.

  She should be looking ahead – it is what she has been trained to do, a habit in which she has come to trust – but sitting in the dark she finds herself almost paralysed. She ought to be following a new routine, enacting life, this afterlife, as it is to be from now on, but she has no wish to move. She is not even sure that she can. It feels as if the hardness and coldness of the floor is merging with her legs. Her chest and throat are becoming rigid too.

  Looking up, she notes the green glow at the centre of the ceiling. It is the power signal on the rim of the camera lens. The light is too weak to provide illumination, but it lends the blackness around her its texture. She is a st
atue buried in a catacomb.

  She should open the door to the control room and let its light enter the cupola, this sole room exposed to the elements, but she has no desire to do this. She has been cast into an abyss. This is no fantasy of starlight and glittering dust. Let people see what awaits them after life on earth. Let them cleave to each other. Let them cleave to their home in fear.

  The anger is irrational and strong, a resurgence of life, but it leaves as quickly as it comes. In the blackness her body becomes frigid again. She thinks of her own home, remembering not her apartment in Moscow but the farming town in Finland where she grew up. It was less a town than a collection of timber houses built in fields hard-won from the taiga forest and, in times gone by, from their Russian neighbours.

  She closes her eyes – it is easy in the darkness – and sees the skeletal trunks of the birch, pretending to the winter that they do not exist. The pine and spruce are burdened by snow. She hears the sliding of her skis, smells the freezing air, feels the weight of ice on her eyelashes. The sky is only half-lit. She spies a lone elk in a white clearing, its antlers stark as an outcrop of rock. The wings of a black grouse break the silence.

  She used to ski for kilometres through the forest to get to school.

  In spring the snow ruptures and thumps from the trees, melting into slurries of earth, releasing the stench of things dead and buried. Summer crawls out as if it had been waiting. The mosquitoes come in swarms, rising from the soupy ground. She feels the sticky grass on her calves, smells the pine needles and soil, hears the sucking sounds of a creek somewhere. The sun is eternal. In her bedroom fox-skins hang from the wall. Even there she cannot escape the reek from the barn of her father’s pigs, sulphurous and cadaverous.

  That stink had followed her everywhere.

  She opens her eyes to the void. The ventilation system hums like a refrigerator. She had hated everything about her home, she recalls. At least she could admit it. Everyone who lived there hated the place, though they kept silent as if it was a national virtue.

  In the warmer months farmers dragged what they could from the earth to feed themselves and their beasts; in winter they cut down trees with calamitous machines. Drinking was another kind of labour. People took to it early and stuck with it until the end. Every Sunday they gathered to receive the promise of another life from an old man whose hands, as he raised a chalice of wine towards the pine ceiling, trembled as much as those of his parishioners. The age of pagan worship had well and truly passed. Still, child after child was born onto that patch of earth. People were no better than animals.

  She crosses her arms over her abdomen. There is a faint scar on her torso, shaped like an inverted crucifix, a reminder of her own sordid mistake, when life briefly had its way with her. It does not require her attention.

  She stares until she feels as though the black air is silting into her eye sockets, into the cavity in her skull. Life, she thinks, never cared about anyone. It was the biggest animal of all.

  Immersed in the darkness, she knows that she has escaped. But it does not feel as it should.

  Something has gone wrong, but she does not understand what it is. Her body is cold, like stone, though she feels sick to her core. She wants nothing more than to lie down and retreat from it all. It happens, she knows. Back home, men were found under bridges every winter. Her father was one of them. Drunk on cheap alcohol, cowering from the night like some kind of ape-man, he drowned in his vomit.

  He had been too weak to survive. The Finns had a word for his kind: nassu. She remembers how he showed up at her confirmation, lurching into the pine church in his funeral suit. His blonde hair was sticking up in tufts. The stink of him was faint but nevertheless present: pig-shit, sweat, alcohol. She and her mother had not seen him for days. Steadying himself at the end of her pew, he had begun stroking her hair, the colour of his own, his fingers clumsy on her skull. ‘Niin kuin vauvan,’ he had mumbled to the old pastor at the altar. Like a baby’s. She had been fifteen.

  She liked to think that she had never believed the earth was anything other than a rock circling the sun, but the truth was, dressed in her white gown that day, she had hoped to be one of God’s children. She had turned to look at her mother in a pew behind, the lights from the ceiling burnishing her hair, which in those years was brown as soil. ‘Anna hänen olla,’ her mother had said to her and then to those around them. Let him be. The pastor had continued with the service, and she had pretended that her father’s hand was not upon her, that his stench was not contaminating everything. When she got home, she had fled to the sauna and washed. She never went to a service again.

  She is not the daughter of such men. She rises in the black pit of the cupola and fumbles along the wall for the release to the door. The white control room appears in front of her, a floodlit bank of snow. She raises her arm to defend herself. When her eyes adjust to the gleaming light, she observes her chair, with its abandoned padding and bindings. It looks like a thing thrown clear from a crash site.

  She assesses her body. She is colder than she has ever been, though there is no shivering. The nausea is enduring. There is a weight in her chest, as though a fist is pressing against her sternum, and there is a pressure in her throat. It is as if something powerful is trying to erupt from her flesh.

  She glimpses the reflective lens at the apex of the white room. She must take care of herself. She crosses the lustrous floor and presses the release to her sleeping cubicle. She falls to her knees at the side of the bunk inside and unlatches a drawer beneath it. The medical supplies are kept there. She removes a transparent tube of pills.

  She has never had a sedative before. They have always struck her as dangerous. She watched her father, night after night, drink himself into oblivion. He would sit in the kitchen alone, tipping the liquid from one bottle after another into his mouth, until he was bleary-eyed and could no longer see.

  She saw him, though, when she crept past in the hallway to go to the bathroom: slumped and snoring on the wooden chair. She saw her mother too, tending to the pigs in the morning when her father was too wretched to get out of bed, or on those occasions when he simply disappeared. Her mother, a midwife, had her own work to do, but the pigs made such a racket when ignored. Their grunts and shrieks rose from their hidden sties like the noises of the damned.

  Her mother might have accepted life as it came – she helped the pigs give birth as much as she helped women do the same – but, unlike her mother, she refused to even enter the barn. It was the eyes of the animals that bothered her more than anything: the way they looked at her from beneath their pale lashes, their snouts hovering just above their own shit on the earth. Not that it mattered. They were bred to be killed.

  She thrusts the chalky pills into her mouth and forces herself to swallow. Then she dims the white lights in the cubicle and curls up on her side on the thin mattress. The room is still too bright for her liking. It reminds her of the witching hours of summer, those hours after midnight when the sun cannot be seen but its light silhouettes the creatures of the forest that ought to be in darkness, that ought to have their time in hiding. She stares at the pallid wall and focuses on the cold surface of the pillowcase against her cheek, waiting for her body to become numb.

  The bed grows soft. The tension in her chest and throat releases, and her respiration finds a rhythm in the steady reverberations of the ventilation system. She is breathing easily, as if breathing is the easiest thing to do. She is barely responsible.

  There is horror at her failure, at the miscarriage of her transition, but it is a distant feeling, as if she might have dreamed the whole ordeal. She is aware of the space outside the vessel and her distance from the earth, vaster than anything she can imagine, but her horror of that has subsided too.

  There is no pain. She can remember everything without fear: even that she once fell pregnant and lost a child. She had been in a science laboratory at the university in Moscow, when a burning pressure had grown in her abdomen.
She had walked to the hospital in her white coat, along streets wet with spring melt. The pain had become excruciating. It was a long walk; that is what she remembers most. Yet it also feels as if it took no time at all.

  She was lucky not to be killed by the child. After the operation, with the scar fresh and sore, the nurse had led her downstairs to the morgue, pulling out a single drawer in a wall lined with steel cabinets. The stored foetus looked prosthetic, a prop for a film. Days later, in the hospital chapel, a priest, in a grotesquely extravagant gown, conducted a group funeral. There were no fewer than six small coffins arranged at the base of the golden crucifix. The corpses had already been cremated in the hospital incinerator, and the white coffins at the front of the room were empty, ready to be used again. Still, the would-be parents, hunched on the pews, had cried as if those babies were there.

  The father of her baby had sobbed with them, a sound like her father made when he was drunk sometimes, loose-lipped and wretched. Some time later in her apartment, drunk himself, he sat opposite her at the dining table, flicking the stubs of one lit cigarette after another in her direction. It was a novel kind of violence. When the cigarettes came close, she simply batted them away. Soon he got up and left. She was glad not to see him again. It had all been a mistake, her body leading her astray, as it had done from time to time in those days.

  The wall in her cubicle begins to look thick and blurry. Her body on the mattress is barely present to her anymore. She remembers how she and her friends, as teenagers, thought that sex might save them. That feeling of power made the world momentarily seem larger than it was. The romance, though, was short-lived. Her friends began to have children, who would grow up and have their own children, and so on – all on the same patch of earth. Life was using them. It wanted to live, just for the reckless sake of it, at the cost of anything, of anyone.