by Jay Martel
‘I would love to see him survive one year out in the world he loves so much,’ the old man murmured. ‘One year.’
‘Listen to me,’ Perry said with urgency. ‘I am not a terrorist.’
The young man, who still seemed agitated about Perry’s ideas concerning gold, leaned over and punched him just below the sternum. Perry doubled over, gasping for air.
‘Careful,’ Drummond Nash said drolly. ‘Let’s not get too enhanced too quickly.’
The young man snatched up pages from the table, grabbed a fistful of Perry’s hair and yanked his head back. ‘We want to know who helped you write this and who helped you get it into the Oval Office.’
‘I did it myself,’ Perry said.
‘A lot of this information is classified.’
‘You can get it all on the internet.’
‘Exactly,’ the young man said. ‘Who’s helping you?’
‘I told you, I did it myself.’
The young man stomped on Perry’s foot. Perry saw stars and screamed.
‘You came to the White House with an Amanda Mundo. What’s her real name?’
‘That is her real name.’
‘It’s not. We have no record of her. Where is she now?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Who helped you?’
‘No one.’ This time it was a blast to the ribs. ‘Where is Amanda Mundo?’ The questioning continued in this repetitive vein for a time until, just as Perry was convinced that the young man was going to beat him to death right there, Drummond Nash said, ‘Let the Gardener have him,’ and Perry was carried back to his cell, bruised and bleeding. There the soldiers laid him out on the concrete floor between the other orange-clad men like a corpse on a slab, locked his leg shackles to the floor, and left him.
‘Can I have some water?’ Perry muttered before he realised the soldiers had already left. He lay there, a human pulp on the cement, marvelling at the fact that no matter how many times you were beaten, the most recent beating was always the worst. His addled mind recalled his grandfather, who declared every year’s Christmas tree the best tree ever. Perry and his parents had called this ‘the Christmas tree paradox’. Now he was experiencing an inverse Christmas tree paradox: every beating was the worst ever, and somehow each new one was worst still.
He passed in and out of consciousness until he was forced awake by a sound that made his parched throat and dry mouth seem unbearable: drips of water. He opened his swollen eyes and saw, on the ceiling, beyond the fluorescent light, a crystalline drop of water form slowly, then fall. PLOP. Another drop began to accumulate from moisture on the ceiling. Was it dripping like that before? He may have missed it because of the chanting. With great effort, he sat up and traced the drop’s fall. The dripping formed a puddle between two prisoners on the opposite side of the room, which in turn became a rivulet that ran across the floor to a crack, where the water disappeared.
No, Perry thought. It can’t be. He examined the ceiling carefully for the first time, squinting his eyes to peer past the fluorescent light into the shadows above it. There he saw what he was dreading: the dimpling a stonecutter makes when it cuts through solid rock.
‘Jesus,’ he said aloud. ‘We’re underground.’
CHANNEL 30
THE TRUE BELIEVER
The bearded men around Perry turned with a clatter of chains and surveyed him curiously. Seeing these helpless prisoners underscored the ridiculous futility of his mission.
‘No flies!’ Perry shouted to no one in particular. ‘And no satellites can reach us! No one can see this! There’s no show! We’re totally fucked!’ The prisoners continued to stare at him curiously. ‘Do you understand? No god, not yours or anyone else’s, can save us.’
His cellmates muttered to each other and turned away, leaving Perry alone in his despair. Or so he thought.
‘You’re lucky they don’t speak English,’ said a clipped English accent. Perry looked over to the bearded olive-skinned man lying on the cement floor, two detainees away from him. He lay motionless, his eyes closed as if he were conserving energy. ‘I, however, am not so lucky. What drivel. Flies and satellites, dear God.’
‘You speak English very well,’ Perry said.
‘Because I’m English,’ the prisoner replied. ‘Unlike you.’ He did a dead-on imitation of Perry. ‘We’re totally fucked!’ He chuckled joylessly. ‘If the Queen were here she’d want her language back. Which would be wonderful, because she could take me home with it.’
‘Where are we?’
‘Well, lying here in my own filth, going over in my mind everything I know about secret prisons that are no longer supposed to exist, I’ve narrowed it down to Cuba, Belarus or Israel.’
‘Are we underground?’
‘I’m no geologist, but if your walls and ceiling are carved out of solid bedrock, you’re not in the penthouse of the Savoy.’
Perry pulled himself up to his feet, balancing himself against the chains of his shackles. ‘I’ve got to get out of here.’
‘Congratulations. You are the very first person here to have had that thought.’ The prisoner laughed. ‘The very first.’
‘I’m not a terrorist.’
‘Of course you aren’t. Terrorists never admit to being terrorists.’
‘You don’t understand. I’m trying to save the world.’
‘Now that is exactly the sort of thing a terrorist would admit to.’
Perry regarded his cellmate, who continued to lie on the cement with his eyes closed. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Alistair Alexander of London. And yours?’
‘Perry Bunt. Of Los Angeles.’
The man’s eyes opened. They were a striking shade of olive green. ‘And how were you planning to save the world, Perry Bunt of Los Angeles?’
Perry told Alistair everything, from his discovery of the existence of Channel Blue to his most recent efforts to save Earth. Alistair seemed to take the story at face value, only bursting into laughter two or three times. ‘Well, it is rather inconvenient that you’re underground,’ he said when Perry had finished. ‘But look on the bright side – if you’re right, we might survive a bit longer down here when the rest of the world ends.’
‘How about you?’ Perry asked. ‘Why are you here?’
In his quiet, measured voice, Alistair began telling Perry the story of his life. The child of Yemeni immigrants, fluent in five languages at the age of ten, he had grown up loving language and books. He was now a student of comparative literature at Cambridge University, working on his doctorate. His thesis was tentatively titled ‘Voyages Toward Fathers: Sailing Away from Infanticide and Patricide in Literature’. Alistair had chosen this topic as a reaction to the prevailing archetypes of the father–son relationship. His own relationship with his father, a domineering workaholic who had passed away when Alistair was twelve, was troubled at best. When Alistair had sought out his beloved books to understand it, he was chagrined to discover that the iconic stories of fathers and sons in Western civilisation roughly broke down into two categories: either the father offered the son up for sacrifice (Abraham and Isaac in the Old Testament; God and Jesus in the New) or the son killed the father (Kronos poisoned by Zeus, Oedipus Rex, Hamlet).
The critical deviation from this kill-or-be-killed dynamic was The Odyssey, which happened to be Alistair’s favourite work. The Odyssey tracks both Ulysses’ voyage home to Crete from the Trojan Wars and the voyage of Telemachus, Ulysses’ son, to find his father.
One day around six months ago (as far as he could tell), Alistair felt inspired by a recent re-reading of The Odyssey to fly impulsively to New York City for the weekend. The happiest experience of his father’s unhappy life had been a short visit to New York in the early sixties, during which he’d attended a performance at Radio City Music Hall. Alistair’s earliest memory of his father was hearing him talk about ‘the Rockettes of Radio City’. For his father, the dancing of the Rockettes – their beauty, their seemingly
effortless grace – was the quintessence of everything that was magnificent about the world. The Rockettes were the Sirens of his father’s Odyssey.
So, in the spirit of Telemachus, Alistair hoped to discover something new about his father by recreating the journey. Everything had gone smoothly until he arrived at passport control in JFK International Airport. When the customs agent asked Alistair to describe the purpose of his visit, he said – with what he realises now was a tad too much whimsicality – ‘The Rockettes’. As a matter of course, the agent sent the Yemeni-born tourist interested in America’s rockets to another agent for more questioning, who in turn referred him to the FBI.
Alistair quickly discovered a truth about the self-fulfilling nature of criminal suspicion: the longer you stay in custody, the harder it is to get out. The security apparatus is set up to justify itself, and as long as you’re inside it, there must be a reason that you are.
Finally, a terrible coincidence doomed Alistair: he was similar in appearance to the only known photograph of a fugitive Yemeni terrorist named Ali al-Zander, a mysterious figure who had introduced rocket technology to the Taliban in Afghanistan. Nothing Alistair Alexander could tell the FBI agents would convince them he wasn’t Ali al-Zander, even the obvious argument that no terrorist would be so stupid as to adopt an alias so close to his own name. Since the terrorist al-Zander had never been courteous enough to furnish the FBI with fingerprints or a DNA sample or anything other than the single photo, they were convinced he was Alistair. The British student soon found himself in his present surroundings without a chance to contact his mother or girlfriend, much less a lawyer.
‘That’s terrible,’ Perry said. He had perversely enjoyed Alistair’s story in that it had distracted him from his own misery. Now that it was over, though, his thoughts wandered to Amanda. If only he could be sure that she was safe somewhere far away. How terrible to die down here with that uncertainty.
Alistair shrugged. ‘It seems somehow fitting that all this happened while I was trying to understand my father. I think one of the reasons he was so cruel to me was that he had a morbid fear of authority. He lived in terror of being picked up and deported back to Yemen. Well, now I’ve realised his worst fear to the nth degree. In some ways, this is all part of the voyage.’ He surveyed the cell around him. ‘I have my doubts, however, that everyone here will be this philosophical. It no longer matters if they were innocent coming in, they’ll all be guilty going out.’ He chuckled. ‘Who says America no longer makes anything? You make terrorists – with the quality and efficiency with which you once made automobiles. And I’m afraid you’ll have many opportunities to sample your fine product in the next decades.’ He glanced over at Perry. ‘I’m sorry. I forgot that the world is ending soon. Never mind, then.’
‘This is exactly why the world is ending,’ Perry said. ‘Galaxy Entertainment set up our planet so that we’d distrust and hurt each other. Terrorism is all about one thing: ratings. It’s what they wanted to see, until they got too much of it and decided to kill the monster they’d created.’
‘Interesting theory,’ Alistair said. ‘If I were considering insanity as a lifestyle, I might subscribe to it.’
Perry leaned over and shook the chains around his shackles. ‘Has anyone ever escaped from here?’
‘I’m afraid you may have read too many boys’ adventures: Count of Monte Cristo and the like. No one escapes from places like this. We’re chained to solid rock, for God’s sake.’
One of the prisoners in the far corner of the cell began chanting loudly. Suddenly, fervent chanting filled the air and the prisoners, except for Perry and Alistair, stood, knelt and bowed in all different directions.
‘We never know what time it is, so when one man starts praying, everyone starts!’ Alistair shouted over the cacophony. ‘And since no one knows where Mecca is, everyone faces in different directions!’ He smiled wryly. ‘I’m so glad I lived to see the day when I could appreciate being C of E.’
Perry took in the spectacle of the men fervently praying, his heart heavy. Is this how the world ends? Shouldn’t someone at least know which way to pray? He felt tears running down his face before he realised that he was crying. Alistair noticed this.
‘I have to be honest with you, Perry Bunt,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe anything you’ve told me. But if any of it is true, and if you are indeed a writer trying to rewrite the end of the world, then the story isn’t over. It’s still your story to write, yes?’
The lock turned in the massive steel door and it swung open. The two soldiers entered and walked down the centre of the cell. The prisoners stopped praying. Perry sensed them tense up around him, waiting to see where the guards were going. When they stopped over Perry and unlocked his shackles, it was almost as if the entire cell sighed with relief.
Alistair, however, sat up. ‘What are you taking him again for?’ he said. ‘He just returned from one of your sessions. Look at him – the blood on his face is still damp!’
The guards didn’t seem to hear Alistair as they pulled Perry up to standing. ‘He’s got nothing for you,’ Alistair continued. ‘He’s a complete lunatic! He should be in a mental institution, not this hellhole!’
As the impervious guards escorted him to the doorway, Perry remembered the elderly interrogator’s last words. He turned back to Alistair. ‘Who’s the Gardener?’ he asked.
Again, he sensed the prisoners tense around him. Alistair appeared distraught. The soldiers pulled Perry into the dank hallway as he heard the English student call after him. ‘Write yourself a happy ending, Perry Bunt of Los Angeles! Write yourself a good one!’
Perry was again taken down the cavernous hallway. He tried to keep track of where he was but then realised that he had lost all sense of direction. There was one cave after another, all lined with the same fluorescent lights.
‘I’m so thirsty,’ he said to his guards. ‘Can I please have some water?’
The soldiers laughed. ‘Oh yes,’ one of them said. They escorted Perry into a bright small room. A doughy woman in glasses and an apron stood next to an examination table. If it wasn’t for the setting, she could’ve been a nursery school teacher. On the floor were a stack of folded towels and two watering cans.
‘Perry Bunt?’ the woman said cheerfully.
‘Yes?’ Perry answered, disarmed.
‘I’m the Gardener,’ the woman said. There was an awkward pause. She reached over and absentmindedly opened a buckle on a strap attached to the table. ‘Is there anything you’d like to tell me before we begin?’
‘Begin what?’ Perry said.
The Gardener gave him a plump-cheeked smile. The soldiers pulled a hood down over his head and strapped him onto the table. He felt a tightening tug on the straps, followed by a falling sensation as the table was tilted at a downward angle. A folded towel was placed over his face, closing off any light that he’d been able to sense through the hood. He had a chance to take two laboured inhalations before he realised that water was running up his nose.
He held his breath. He knew now what was happening to him, knew that it was called ‘waterboarding’ and had been used on suspected terrorists, had heard the debate between civil-liberties groups who claimed it was torture and national-security advocates who claimed it was an interrogation technique, which he frankly had not really cared that much about because what it really sounded like was a water sport. Now he not so much regretted his lack of interest in the practice as his inability to take a deeper breath before it began happening to him. He was already out of air and the water was still pouring onto his face. His lungs throbbed, pulsing with carbon dioxide desperate to be exhaled.
When he could no longer stand the pressure, when the breath shot out of his mouth and he was forced to take an immediate breath in and the wet cloth sucked up against his mouth, effectively cutting off his air, he realised that the civil-liberties groups and the national-security advocates were both wrong. What waterboarding really turned out to be was dr
owning. And while Perry had become somewhat inured to thoughts of death since learning of Channel Blue’s cancellation, this kind of death was not as abstract as he would have liked. It was terrible and painful and it was happening to him now.
Moments before lapsing into a troubled unconsciousness, Perry found himself flipped upright, the layers of soaked cloth on his face, now as heavy as a wet hippo’s ass, peeled away. He blinked into the fluorescent light and coughed, sucking in breath only to cough some more.
The Gardener observed this benignly, a small half-smile on her wide face. ‘Now do you have anything to tell me?’ she said.
Yes! Perry tried to say. Noah Overton. It was all his fault, he gave me those terrorist ideas, he put me up to it. And Amanda Mundo, it was all her plan, she was the mastermind, she got us into the White House. I don’t know if that’s her real name – I was just following orders, I’m a nobody, I’m just a teacher at a community college, for God’s sake! But when he tried to speak, he could only cough. ‘Noah,’ was all he managed to choke out. ‘Noah,’ he rasped. ‘Noah.’
‘Oh well,’ the Gardener said, shrugging. The wet hood was shoved down over Perry’s face.
‘No!’ he managed to scream, realising too late that, in his croaky voice, it sounded a lot like ‘Noah’. Tilted back again with the wet towel over his face, he managed one gasping breath before he felt water surging once more up his nose. This was never meant to be an interrogation, he thought. This is an execution. He started to panic and his chest bucked.