And he had known it too. He just hadn’t had the time. But in reality the opposite was true, he’d wasted valuable time by not doing it, he’d stood there before all the printouts and told himself that it would work all the same, but deep down he’d known.
His pen danced across the pages, and every time he felt a similarity or recurrence he stopped and moved back to an earlier sheet, compared and checked and made intuitive calculations in his head, calculations that weren’t really that but rather images in his mind.
Behind him stood Janine.
Listened, read, waited as William walked around, sometimes around the room and sometimes inside himself, waited while he did whatever it was he was doing until he asked her to read the next sequence.
Leo and Albert watched from the lounge.
They sat in the armchairs without speaking, fascinated by the process but not understanding what he did, what patterns he seemed to be seeing and how he could possibly hold it all inside his head.
Page after page were torn from the pad, filled with new rows of numbers, and he pinned them up one after the other and went on to the next as Janine continued to read.
The pad got thinner and thinner.
And when he ran out of pages he took the second pad from the table, and the process went on and numbers were read and William wrote and drew lines and wandered around the room.
And then the time came to switch pads again.
And he fumbled with his hand on the table.
There was nothing there.
‘Pad,’ he said. Not demandingly, not stressed, just anxious to go on and with thousands of thoughts that he didn’t want to lose track of.
Janine looked around. Couldn’t see them.
‘Pad,’ he said again. ‘Please. Give me another one.’
His drummed with his fingers in the air, as if that would magically make a notepad materialise out of nothing. He didn’t want to risk taking his eyes off the wall.
Somewhere up there the answer was hiding, he knew it. Somewhere between all the rows and sequences that meant nothing to him, not yet, but that might just as easily transform right in front of him, take a sudden step right out of the chaos and become clear. It had happened before. And he hoped that it would happen again.
He couldn’t afford to lose his flow. Not now. He hesitated, but only for a second; he still had the black book in his pocket, Sara’s black book.
And he took it out. Flipped past his diary entries. And told Janine to continue the process where they’d left off.
Again, numbers were read. Pages torn out and pinned to the wall. And he was several pages into the dry, leathery notebook when he realised everything was exactly the way it should be.
Here he was, working, his daughter a part of his life even though he was busy. Just as she had planned, only several years too late.
And he was right where he loved to be, surrounded by a chaos he couldn’t understand but that he knew how to attack, where he could use his logic, provoke himself to disregard any preconceived notions, force himself to search for something even though he didn’t know what it looked like and to trust that he would know it when he saw it.
The one tiny detail that would turn everything on its head.
The one that would be there, somewhere deep inside the sea of numbers, the one that he’d missed but that he mustn’t search for, because it was hiding in the whole picture; it was that whole picture he needed to find, and he forced himself to take a step back and look at it all from a distance —
And then he stopped dead.
The detail. In the whole picture.
The tiny, insignificant thing you didn’t see for all the big ones.
I’ll be damned.
It was just a thought, a vague and abstract thought, and he shook his head. No, it couldn’t be.
Or could it?
He was still a moment. Then took a step back.
Looked at the wall from a distance.
Looked at the book in his hands, Sara’s beloved black notebook with its unwritten pages, and that was it, of course it was, this was what it had been about from the beginning. To see the context. How many times had he said so himself ? Or heard it said? The whole picture?
When he looked at Janine again he realised he couldn’t hold back his laughter. He laughed, loud and uncontrollably, and it was the first time in as long as he could remember.
It was as if he’d been trying to open a jar for weeks and now he suddenly turned the jar over, looked at it from the other direction and saw that the label said open here, and now that he’d seen it, it was obvious, of course it was supposed to be opened there.
It was the very feeling he’d been yearning for, the one he’d tried to find in front of his wall at the castle, and now that it came to him it filled him with emotions he’d almost forgotten. Relief. Excitement. And hell if it didn’t fill him with happiness, too.
And all of that came to him in one single blow.
Janine stared at him.
‘What is it?’ she said.
He was still facing the wall, but his eyes were closed, he breathed with long, deep breaths as if he’d suddenly come to some deeper insight, as if he’d suddenly found inner peace.
She’d never seen him behave this way. And it scared her.
He looked as if he’d come to understand what was happening, and as if he accepted it, as if the fight was over because he’d seen the logic and realised it couldn’t be escaped.
As if he was ready.
No, as if he enjoyed it.
‘William?’ she asked. There was fear in her voice, but she did her best to mask it. Tried to collect herself. Again: ‘William?’
He turned towards her. Opened his eyes.
‘It’s over?’ she said. ‘Is that it?’
She felt as if she already knew the answer, but she asked him all the same, just for an extra second of hope that he’d say no.
‘It really is over, isn’t it?’
He looked at her. Wanted to explain, but didn’t know how.
Instead what he heard himself say was:
‘Call me vain if you want to. But I’ll be really disappointed if you don’t name him William.’
He was already out of the room when Janine got what he meant.
56
Janine caught up with him on the street.
It was blisteringly cold, snowflakes had started to fall, thin and white and floating silently in the windless afternoon air, settling like icing sugar over the landscape as if the village was a wedding cake and they were two figurines standing between the houses.
William was still holding the notepad. He’d stepped straight out from the dining room where they’d stood with the papers and numbers, he was only in his shirts and his sweater but his thoughts were too many to let him feel the cold.
His breath played in front of him. Swirling clouds, suspended for a moment before breaking up and fading away. One moment he stood there, motionless and with his gaze towards the mountain behind the houses. And the next he hurried down the village street, as if to get a better view, a different angle, as if he was looking for something.
‘Where do you think it is?’ he said.
He paused again. Looked. Kept walking down the street, his eyes fixed on the peaks in the distance.
Janine walked after him, long strides, trying to keep up.
‘The castle?’ she asked. ‘I don’t know. What difference does it make?’
She wanted to brush aside the irrelevant question, get back on to the subject of whatever it was he’d discovered.
‘The road has to be over there. Right?’
He pointed towards the valley, past the houses, past the slopes, and Janine nodded, somewhere over there it had to be. The single-track asphalt road, the one that had led them away from the large gate in the mountain, the one they had run along in the middle of the night, when they still believed their escape had gone well.
‘What are you thinking?’ she asked.
‘We need to get in.’
‘So you know how to stop it?’
She was almost side by side with him now, walking with quick steps, staring at his profile and not taking her eyes off him for a minute.
Waiting for him to nod in reply.
Waiting for him to put an end to her fear, waiting for him to explain what they’d been missing. Whatever it was he’d discovered, whether it was the key or some other detail they’d overlooked, she wanted him to tell her.
But he just shook his head.
‘No,’ he said. ‘What happens, happens. There’s nothing we can do about it.’
Disappointment sapped the energy from her. She slowed down. Watched him walk on in front of her.
And William sensed it, slowed down too, turned around.
Still walking, but backwards, down the street away from her.
Still throwing glances up at the mountains.
The distance growing between them, growing until he had to shout:
‘We have other things to do.’
And then he came to a halt and shouted:
‘I think they’re going to prove much more important.’
They sat around the large wooden table in the kitchen of their adopted home.
Dinner consisted of dried and canned foods, a fire burned in the grate, a slice of everyday in the midst of everything, weird and strange and wrong but also just the way things were.
A strange calm had settled over them.
Albert and Leo sat across from each other. Sitting in silence, like spectators, listening to a conversation they didn’t understand but dearly wanted to. Listening to Janine and to William. To the questions and the answers. To fear and to confidence, sitting on opposite sides of the table.
She couldn’t understand. Wouldn’t understand his calm, his pride, his happiness. There he sat, telling her again that he hadn’t found a key. Not only that, but the key wasn’t the point, they had been looking for the wrong things, staring at details and missing the context.
‘Then how are we going to survive?’ she asked. ‘If we don’t have a key, if we can’t change the future. How are we supposed to stop it?’
‘We don’t need to stop it,’ he told her, his voice serene, untroubled.
She started to protest, but he cut her off before she could get a word out:
‘The Black Death.’
This drew a blank look. She shrugged, urged him to continue.
‘The prophecy you showed me. The one from the fourteenth century. The one you compared to what’s happening now.’
She didn’t need him to remind her, she knew perfectly well what she’d said.
‘You compared it to the verse on the end, and they both had the same word, the word that once described the Black Death.’
‘Yes?’ she said. More and more restless. Plague. That was the word. So what?
William leaned towards her.
‘We didn’t die, did we?’ He gave her a faint smile. ‘Many did,’ he said. ‘But the human race didn’t die. We didn’t die out.’
She was about to protest when her brain caught up. Suddenly she got it too.
It was as obvious as it was surprising.
It was a thought she’d forgotten to think.
‘We’ve survived epidemics before,’ he continued. ‘And we will do it again. And a lot of people will die but not everyone. Eventually the virus will become weaker and enough people will develop resistance or perhaps someone will come up with a vaccine. And until that happens, it’s going to be brutal and tragic and horrible. But it’s not going to be the end. Not the end of everything.’
She stared back at him. Stared for a long, long time.
Hoped that he was right but couldn’t be sure. What if he was only saying what she wanted to hear – no, what they all wanted to hear? What if he was clutching at straws and making it sound believable enough to comfort her?
‘How?’ she asked him. ‘How could it be anything else? How could it be anything but the end, if there is no future left?’
‘I think there is,’ he said.
‘The codes!’ she said. ‘The texts! We’ve seen it ourselves.’
‘We’ve seen what, exactly?’
‘We’ve seen them end.’
‘No,’ he said.
He felt the calm of his own thoughts, felt the comforting warmth as he chose the right words to explain. Warmth that could only mean one thing. That he knew he was right.
‘We’ve done a whole lot of things,’ he said after a while. ‘But we didn’t see.’
57
Franquin could still taste the Atlantic as he climbed the metal steps past the whining jet engines, walked down the aisle between the light-brown leather armchairs and sat down in one of them.
It was far from ideal. What he was undertaking could endanger the whole project.
One of the carrier’s helicopters had flown them from the ship to the Portuguese NATO base where their jet temporarily resided, and with each journey they made, with each new landing and each person they introduced themselves to, they risked exposure to the disease.
But it was almost worth it just to have a few hours away from the boat.
The plane taxied on to the runway and he closed his eyes, trying to anticipate what he would find.
He couldn’t rest until he knew where Connors had gone.
And the helicopter.
And whether it had followed his orders.
He leaned back in his seat and counted in his head.
In a few hours they’d be back at the castle.
Then he’d know.
58
‘The context,’ said William.
He said it as an answer to the question that lingered, the question in all their minds and that Janine had asked aloud, and that still didn’t seem to have a plausible answer.
How could there be a future when everything was about to end.
That little question.
‘The whole picture,’ he said again. ‘We always knew we needed the whole picture.’
They were still sitting at the kitchen table. And he turned to Janine as he spoke:
‘You kept telling them we needed context, and then I said the same thing. And it turns out we had it all along. We had the whole picture right there in front of us, we just didn’t see it. Because we were too busy looking at ourselves.’
Her impatience bordered on anger.
‘What whole picture?’ she said.
And then he told her.
He’d been up in the drawing room when everything fell into place. Janine was reading from Watkins’ papers, reciting the numbers and the codes, and he was writing them down and pinning them up, thinking and looking for patterns just the way he thought that he should.
And when the second pad ran out, it dawned on him.
When he pinned the paper on to the wall, when he didn’t have anything to write on, when he took out Sara’s notebook and carried on working.
That’s what he told her across the empty plates and the saucepans with pasta and with Leo and Albert observing him from the side.
‘I needed another pad,’ he said.
Janine peered back at him. So?
‘Page up and page down, you read the numbers and I wrote them down, and then I suddenly had nowhere to write – and then what do you do?’ He answered his own question. ‘You get yourself another pad. You go get something else to write on, and keep writing there.’
She hesitated.
And he saw that she did. Nodded in encouragement, willing her to keep thinking the thoughts she was thinking. And the moment she threw a glance out the window, he knew she’d understood.
There. Outside.
‘You can’t be serious,’ she said.
William nodded. He was.
And next to them sat Albert and Leo and they didn’t understand a thing.
William gave them an apologetic smile, turned towards them and tried to formulate an explanation that wouldn’t s
ound corny and naïve. Having found the solution that had confounded experts for the last fifty years, he didn’t want to sound banal.
But the truth was simple.
So he told it like it was.
Humanity was just a pad.
And all around us there were other pads, countless species with endless reams of DNA, billions upon billions of lines of junk DNA that wasn’t really junk and that ran from species to species, making our genome one single chapter in an infinite book.
The context.
It really was that simple.
The history in humanity’s DNA didn’t just belong to humans. It never had. It belonged to the world. Mankind wasn’t the whole picture: she was a part of it. She carried one single episode in a shared, eternal story, and the whole picture started before us and went on after us and if the world’s future was indeed already chronicled that didn’t mean it would end because one of the notepads ran out of pages.
And that was all we were.
‘A notepad on a shelf,’ he said. ‘Or a page in a pad. A fraction of a whole that we had around us the whole time but that we forgot, that Franquin and Connors forgot and an entire Organisation before them, all because we were so terribly busy staring at our navels, so damned short-sighted that we forgot that nothing begins or ends with us. Nothing.’
And they all looked at him.
Knew what he meant but needed to make the words their own.
‘It wasn’t the future that ended,’ said Janine. ‘It was the paper.’
She said it with a smile; it sounded as ridiculous as it was, and yet it made perfect sense.
And William looked back. And smiled, too.
They stayed at the table for a while, deep in a silence that none of them tried to break. Each of them too busy trying to absorb it all.
And time passed, but time wasn’t their responsibility any more. There was nothing they could do to change the course of events. And nothing could be more of a relief.
The first person to speak was Janine.
‘Does that mean, then, that what we’re seeing now… that all the things that are happening, that unstoppable plague out there? It only happened because they read that it would?’
Chain of Events Page 42