by Hari Kunzru
The earth is also behind Guy’s post life-change career choice. The pots on the windowsill are his. One room of the cottage has been converted into a workshop, complete with a wheel and a small electric kiln. At the drop of a hat he will demonstrate his throwing technique, or offer to share the secrets of a favourite blue glaze. Despite his enthusiasm, he is not the most talented potter, but, though they may be lumpy and erratic, his pieces have a certain charm. They are sincere pots. The new Guy Swift is a sincere man.
Ragdale Scar, the escarpment behind the cottage, plays an iconic role in Guy’s life. It is the source, he says, of his healing power. Somehow it seems best to skirt the question of his having a healing power in the first place. He has had little success in selling his ceramics, and, though he put up a notice in a nearby village pub, no one has yet come to him to be geopathically realigned, despite the conditional refund offer. Recently he has started to supplement his dole money by helping a crew of local men repair field walls.
His most treasured possession is a small bottle of sand. It comes from the beach in Puglia where he was found by cara-binieri in what the British Consul in Naples drily terms ‘a state of distress’, having been dumped from a dinghy into the sea some distance from shore by a crew of Albanian people-smugglers. The story he told the police was barely credible, and when it was confirmed caused ripples throughout the European Union, not least in the offices of the nascent Pan European Border Authority, which was later held directly accountable.
He was, he thinks, partly to blame. Blind drunk and heinously misaligned, he allowed himself to be taken to an unknown suburb of a strange city by a woman of easy virtue. He describes himself now, with a certain prim disgust, as a ‘drinker and substance abuser’, though these traits were, he accepts, evidence of the distorted geomagnetism of his living and working environment. He has no distinct memory of what happened to him between leaving the lapdancing club with the woman he knew as Irina and waking up some time later, lying on a bed in a small room with green bamboo-patterned wallpaper. Black plastic had been taped over the window. Apart from the bed and a chipped melamine dresser, the room was empty.
His head ached and he was naked apart from his tie, which was tied round his head like a Japanese headband. He was still wearing his watch, which told him it was 5.10 a.m., news that threw him into a panic because of the pitch meeting later that day He found his clothes under the bed and stumbled out of the door to find himself looking down the stairwell of some kind of apartment building. The door on the other side of the landing was open and through it he could see a bedroom full of Chinese men, sitting two or three to a bunk, smoking and playing cards beneath lines of drying washing. He wondered if he was in some kind of hostel.
A bell rang. Someone must have opened the front door, because the next thing he heard was the sound of shouting, and heavy boots coming up the stairs. Half awake and hung over, he reacted slowly All around him chaos was erupting. Chinese men were running by, clutching trousers and cigarette cartons and pairs of trainers. A pair of young East African women, one carrying a baby in a sling, ran on to the landing, then turned round and fled back inside. Guy decided to return to his room. Whatever was happening had nothing to do with him. A moment later he was gripped in a head-lock by a man dressed in a dark blue Belgian police uniform.
‘All right,’ he remembers calling out in English. ‘Christ. Take it easy.’
The policeman forced him to the ground and kneeled on his neck. ‘English,’ Guy gurgled. ‘I’m fucking English.’ By that time he had worked out what was happening. He was in the middle of an immigration raid.
He did not make the connection with Operation Atomium until he was already in the police van. He had been squeezed in with the East African women, several Chinese still in their underwear and a shaven-headed gendarme who looked blankly at him when he tried to talk to him in English. Going through his pockets, he realized his wallet and phone were missing. He supposed Irina had stolen them. At least she had left his watch. It was a good watch. It was water resistant to 200 metres.
As the van made its way through the streets of Brussels, the Chinese men started to smoke and talk in low unconcerned voices, as if this were just another confined space, just the latest in a series. The police van filled up with a blue tobacco haze, and Guy tried to work out the quickest way of extricating himself. With no ID it would, he supposed, take an hour or two to establish his identity. He would be short of sleep, but he should still make the meeting. He might get time to have an hour’s nap. There was even a potential upside to what was happening. In a certain light, being picked up in PEBA’s first coordinated sweep could be viewed as a work-related activity. He was seeing the system in operation. His misadventure was actually research. Mentally he started to script a new section of his presentation. At Tomorrow* we believe in getting our hands dirty. We believe in firsthand knowledge of the brand in action… He settled down on the metal bench and smiled at the people opposite him. All he needed was Nurofen and access to a phone. Everything was going to be fine.
A temporary processing centre had been set up by Belgian immigration in a hangar at Zaventem Airport. The van parked at a side entrance and, still smiling, Guy was given a number and led into a holding area. Sitting on plastic seats were tall Somalis and tiny Latinos, Nigerians and Byelorussians, Filipinos and Kazakhs. Groups of young men conferred in huddles. Parents comforted crying babies. There were more illegals than Guy had expected. It looked as if they had turned the city upside down and shaken it. An impressive operation.
After a few minutes of relatively interesting observational research, his good mood began to fray. His chair was uncomfortable, and the elderly Arab next to him kept falling asleep on his shoulder. Though he tried to attract the attention of the guards, none seemed interested in talking to him. He spoke loudly and clearly. I am EU cit-i-zen. I need ta-xi to my ho-tel. As the minutes lengthened, his serenity waned to irritation.
He tried to snatch some sleep, but was kept awake by the noise and the brightness of the hangar’s halogen lights. One by one the detainees were being interrogated in a row of roofless cubicles at the far end of the hangar. Afterwards, most were returned to the holding area. At 7.45 a.m. his number was finally called. He went in shouting, giving full vent to several hours’ worth of indignation. Leaning across her ugly little desk, he berated the immigration officer, demanding instant access to the British Consul and throwing around phrases like ‘wrongful arrest’ and ‘unlawful detention’ with all the righteous anger of a man whose free passing has been subject to both let and hindrance, and who reckons that local standards of assistance and protection have fallen well below what Her Britannic Majesty would expect.
Though factually he was probably justified in most of the points he made, his approach was unhelpful. The officer appeared unruffled, addressing him first in French and then (when he screamed at her that she was a stupid deaf bitch who would lose her job in two minutes if she didn’t fucking call him a cab) switching to English to ask in a flat monotone, ‘What is your name?’
He told her his name. She asked his real name. He told her his name again, and then told her to fuck off.
‘You speak very good English,’ she said. ‘What is your first language?’
‘English, you idiotic tart.’
Banging the table was a bad idea. She must have pressed some kind of panic button, because two policemen ran into the room, threw him to the floor and sat on his back, cracking his head against the concrete a couple of times to make sure he got the point. Only when they judged that he was calm did they let him sit back down on the chair. Each time he spoke he was told to be silent. The third time he opened his mouth one of the policemen casually slapped him round the face. He was too stunned to be angry.
The immigration officer had no further questions for him. He made conciliatory faces at her, increasingly desperate faces intended to convey strong European fellow feeling. She supervised as the policemen took his fingerprints and
would not meet his eye as he was frogmarched out of the room towards a part of the hangar he supposed was the secure area, a screened-off wire-mesh enclosure patrolled by policemen carrying semiautomatic weapons.
The enclosure held about a dozen men, who eyed him suspiciously. He looked at his watch. It was just after 8 a.m. At 8.30 a.m. he finally gave in to the crushing realization that none of his fellow prisoners had a mobile. He had repeated the world telephone in various accents, spreading out the fingers of one hand and making circling motions with the other. He was stuck. He decided to try to get some sleep.
At 9.15 a.m. two Afghans tried to steal his watch. They were prevented by the guards. After that he tried to stay awake.
At 10.20 a.m. he was called into a second interview room. Two men sat behind a desk. There were no other chairs. His police escorts stayed at his side. As one man addressed him in bursts of rapid French, the second translated into a strange, guttural language full of z’s and j’s. Guy kept asking them to speak English, repeating that he did not understand, that there had been a mistake, until the interviewer threw up his hands in an expression of mock-despair and said something which made everyone else in the room burst out laughing. A formal declaration of some kind was read out, in which he was addressed as Monsieur Georges something or other. ‘Please,’ he told them, ‘je ne comprends. I’m not that person. I’m British. Moi Guy Swift, citeezahn Breeteesh.’
The immigration officer smiled. ‘Of course, Mr Swift,’ he said sarcastically. The policemen led him out of the room.
It was the man’s smug expression that made Guy panic. Certainty in a job well done, good riddance to bad rubbish. He started to scream that he needed a lawyer, was being kidnapped, had to get to an important meeting. A policeman winded him with a swift blow to the stomach, which stopped him struggling long enough to be handcuffed and thrown back into the wire-mesh pen. He shook the wire, shouting for help and banging the fence posts with the heel of his shoe in the vain hope that someone else in the room, some British police observer perhaps, would hear his accent and come to his rescue. He made so much trouble that he was taken across the tarmac on to the specially chartered plane with his hands and legs cuffed to a wheelchair. Tape was stuck over his mouth to stop him shouting, and a motorcycle helmet was shoved down over his head to prevent him biting his escorts or knocking himself out, both of which he had been seriously considering as options. At 2 p.m., when he was supposed to be sitting down with Director Becker and the other members of the PEBA public presentation working group, he was at 35,000 feet, flying deportation class en route to Tiranë, Albania.
How Guy Swift, young marketeer, British national and vocal speaker of English came to be identified as Gjergj Ruli, Albanian national, suspected pyramid fraudster and failed asylum seeker in Germany was one of the more bizarre stories to result from the infection of the Schengen Information System by what is now known as Variant Eight Leela, the so-called transpositional worm. The ‘shuffling’ action of Leela08, which randomly reassociates database attributes, was responsible for the destruction of a huge number of EU immigration records before it was finally spotted and the system closed down some thirty-six hours after Guy Swift’s deportation. The same infection in machines hosting the Eurodac fingerprint database produced a number of false positives, identifying innocent people as known criminals, failed asylum seekers or persons being monitored by European intelligence services. Combinations of the two types of infection led (at a conservative estimate) to some thirty mistaken deportations. Since Operation Atomium relied almost entirely on two bullet-pointed strengths – [slide 1] the fast identification of deportation candidates through Eurodac and the SIS; and [slide 2] special powers to accelerate processing of deportation candidates – it led to a situation in which (among other abuses) people were plucked from their homes at night and deposited in some of the world’s more troubled places without so much as a change of clothes, let alone money or a way of contacting home. Ukrainian brothers Pyotr and Yuri Kozak made contact with members of a Russian oil-exploration team who spotted them begging outside a bar in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. A Pakistani grandmother, 71-year-old Noor Begum, who had been visiting her family in Bradford, was repatriated from the Yemen via a religious charity.
Asked to describe Tiranë, Guy Swift just shakes his head. ‘I won’t talk about that place,’ he mutters. On his return, doctors described him as being ‘in poor physical condition’. The nature of the twenty-six days he spent in Tiranë can only be guessed at from the testimony of Albanians who saw a man fitting his description foraging for scraps behind restaurants in the city centre.
The only aspect of his time in Albania that Guy is prepared to discuss is the kindness shown to him by someone called Rudolph, a seventeen-year-old Liberian he met near the ferry dock at the port of Durrës. It was Rudolph who helped him sell his watch, which he had miraculously managed to keep safe, in return for a berth on one of the regular powerboat runs which took would-be Europeans to the Italian coast.
The boat was a small inflatable dinghy, carrying two crewmen and four other passengers, a Bangladeshi couple and their two children. The sea was choppy and visibility was poor. When the lights of a customs launch were spotted in the distance, the two traffickers immediately pitched all five of them into the sea. As Guy fell overboard, he remembers his absolute sense of certainty that he would drown. Asked what passed through his mind, he refuses to answer. It was, he says, ‘just luck’ that he swam in the right direction. He was washed ashore just before dawn on a tourist beach south of Bari. At first light he was found, semiconscious, muttering incoherently and clutching handfuls of European sand. He has, he says, no idea what happened to the Bangladeshis.
Guy Swift dominated the media for two or three days after his return. Arjun Mehta, the ‘evil scientist’ (New York Post) whose ‘twisted genius’ (London Evening Standard) threatened the world with ‘techno meltdown’ (Sydney Daily Telegraph), has rarely been out of the headlines since the last confirmed sighting of him at the Riverside Motel in San Ysidro. Despite an immense investment of police time and resources, Mehta, whose image is now one of the most widely circulated in the world, has never been apprehended. The FBI believes he is no longer alive, a position they recently reaffirmed despite the negative outcome of DNA matches performed on a corpse, thought to be his, dredged out of the LA river.
The San Ysidro Factory Outlet Center has become a favourite pilgrimage site for conspiracy theorists, who take notes and photographs, speak into dictaphones and measure distances with pocket ultrasonic devices. Like the Zapruder footage or the Watergate Tapes, the mall’s surveillance record of Arjun Mehta’s seemingly aimless amble from the Timberland Store to Starbucks has been pored over, debated and scrutinized for signs of tampering by the police and security services. As Leela researchers try to forge connections, reaching into ever-more recondite areas of speculation, the other people on the tapes, the ‘pony-tailed man’, the ‘loving couple’ and the slight figures of Kim Sun Hong and Jordan Lee have all been the subject of intense research. So far the results are inconclusive. As time passes and the volume of secondary material increases, the true meaning of the Leela occlusions is becoming, if anything, more obscure.
Attention has focused on the $8.99 yellow-rimmed ‘Freebird’ plastic sunglasses purchased by Mehta during the so-called ‘coffee-walk’. Their conspicuousness invites speculation that they were some kind of signal, a position reaffirmed (or according to other Mehtologists, refuted) by the ethnicity of the clerk. Sunglasses manufactured in South Korea. Bought from a clerk of Vietnamese origin. On various Leela websites a photograph of the Seoul plant where model 206-y was manufactured is presented as evidence. Beside the company name is the Cho-Sun Plastics logo: a dancing female figure.
From Mehta’s behaviour on the tapes, it appears he was unaware that he was being followed. As he walked into Starbucks, he was picked up by the in-store camera, which recorded him putting down his bag, conspicuously polishing his new Freebi
rd model 206-y’s and fishing in his pocket for money. Some weeks after the coffee-walk a tape surfaced, purportedly made by a student sitting at a table near the cash register who was conducting an interview for a graduate history project. In the background of a conversation about the Little Landers, a Utopian agrarian community which existed in San Ysidro in the early years of the twentieth century, two voices can be heard. Spectrographic analysis has confirmed that they belong to Arjun Mehta and Ramona Luisa Velasquez, whose biography on the LeelaTruth site alleges that soon after the conversation she was fired, ostensibly for joining a union. It should be noted that even LeelaTruth’s floridly paranoid webmaster has failed to connect this to the main thrust of his Mehta-disappearance theory, which unites the Rosicrucians, CNN and the opening of the global pineal eye.
A transcript of the so-called Little Lander tape:
VOICE 1 [Arjun Mehta] : Latte to go please.
VOICE 2 [ Ramona Velasquez] : Regular or tall?
AM: Tall.
[ inaudible]
RV: There you go / That’ll be two thirty-five /
Sugar and lids are over there.
AM: Thanks.
RV: No problem / [ inaudible: on a ten?]/ Have a nice day.
AM: [ inaudible]
There is very little, short of cabbalistic letter substitution, that can be done to extract hidden meaning from this exchange. This has not stopped prominent Leela researchers from claiming variously that (a) Velasquez passed some kind of tool or document to Mehta in the coffee cup; (b) she was in the pay of a governmental agency (probably the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms); or (c) the drop-outs on the tape were caused by the high-frequency electronic data bursts which the Old Ones use in place of human speech.