by Adam Roberts
8
That evening George saw wife and son off at the flitter park. Ezra was in the care of a new young woman called Janet Devault, and Marie stared past George and past the hotel and stared into the distance with unthawed eyes. Then the flitter did its salmon-leap thing and shrank away in the sky, heading east.
George stayed for a while, unsure what to do with himself. He scanned the sky. The sun like a neon coin. The moon its own ghost. As he made his way back to the hotel, he became conscious for the first time of a weird, dark dignity in himself. Of course he was sad his daughter had been taken – for ransom, of course, whatever the police captain lady said. It must be that. He was sad. How could he not be sad? But it was not a demeaning sadness. This thought occurred to him as he walked. For circumstances had gifted him with a type of tragic dignity. It was entirely new to him, this hollow grandeur. He liked it. He imagined the hotel staff looking at him with a new respect. It was sad, but sadly serious. It was a painful absence in his life naturally; but it was an absence like a zero added to a number: it turned him from inconsequential 1 to notable 10. He was conscious of that unnerving tingle, like an itch inside the web of his nerves. It felt like the great wall was about to crumble, the dam was about to give way, and just behind the barrier was something huge, and important, and sublime, balanced on the threshold of flooding down into the cosmos.
But even the most transcendent sensations of tragic dignity don’t excuse us from the need to fill our hours with something. For lack of anything better to do, George went to the Fitzgerald Bar and started drinking. His new friends did not abandon him: Peter and Ysabella both found him there, and Ergaste too – even Emma put in a brief appearance, drank a single pomegranate-vodka and went off to bed, squeezing George’s shoulder as she passed him. ‘They’ll find her,’ Peter kept saying. Iteration robbed the words of weight. ‘They’ll find her, old man. Don’t worry. They’ll find her.’ George pondered that to say a word once is communicative, and to say it twice is emphatic, but to say it twenty times turns it into a trippy floating nothing. Utterance was strange like that. Was there something corroding his sense of dark eminence, his new tragic significance? Was something eating away at it from the inside? He knew what that was, intuitively. It was the true misery of the situation. But he didn’t want to experience that. This dignified centre-of-attention role-playing was much more agreeable. Keep that at arm’s length. The more Peter said ‘they’ll find her, boyo’ and ‘they’ll find her’ the more the fear was actualized that he would never see his Leah again. That sentiment was not the stuff of dignified tragedy. That sentiment was demeaning, red-eyed, wailing, snotty, unbearable loss of everything, and tears flowing, and choking, and intolerable, intolerable. ‘They’ll find her,’ said Peter.
Peter was a little drunk.
George kept drinking, but the booze all vanished into some inner void. It went into his inner cavities without so much as touching the sides. He sat straight up and stiffly. Misery-as-dignity, to keep a lid on his panicking soul.
After a while they all went through to the Jazz Bar. A musician typed frantically at his piano keyboard. Tinkle tinkle tonk. This chappie wore a look of almost unhinged concentration on his face, the point of his tongue visible in the corner of his lips. George couldn’t decide whether or not he liked the fiddliness of it all. The open whale-mouth of the piano lid emitted filigree, unpredictable structures of sound. So big a mouth deserved a grander song. Ergaste was drinking Cognac. Peter and Ysabella both had glasses of Afghani fruit beer. Lights shimmered in waves across the ceiling, the fabric of the room imitating – what? – the pelt of a deep-sea squid. Two tables along a pokemon card game was in progress. Barks and whistles of surprise or pleasure erupted at irregular intervals from the players.
George levered his right shoe off, and pushed his bare toes through the pile of the carpet. It was soft as sand. The pattern was one of those fat-pixel Persian carpet sorts: stepped triangles, blocky swirls, like images from the very dawn of the computer age.
‘Put your shoe on, man,’ boomed Ergaste, indulgently.
George tucked his foot back in his shoe. He muttered the word ‘never’. He did this as though trying it for size on his tongue. ‘Never.’ Sour. ‘Never never never.’ It was a pulse. ‘Never never never.’ Say it enough and it flipped about: vernev, ver-nev, ver-nev. Repetition really did drain the word of all its bitterness. Here was the very cornerstone of magic.
His wine tasted of jam.
‘I don’t blame Marie for pushing off,’ said Ergaste. ‘Traumatic environment for her.’ He fiddled a c:snuff dispenser up a nostril large as an eye-socket, and sniffed.
‘You’re bearing up, George. More power to you, though,’ said Peter, in his horrid Canadian voice, with its whining, ski-jump inflection. I could take this wine glass, George thought. I could take the glass and crenellate its rim to jags with my teeth, and I could grind it into your eye. But of course he did no such thing. Of course he smiled wearily and mumbled his thank yous. ‘No seriously,’ said Peter. ‘I know it’s not easy. But you’re doing the right thing. By staying behind, I mean. Something as important as this, you don’t want to leave it to underlings.’
The blood would leap out of the wound in a cascade of fire-red droplets.
‘Quite,’ agreed Ysabelle. She was acting rather weirdly; spending a period of time in intense scrutiny of George’s face – an unnervingly close attentiveness – and then spending a longer period in embarrassed looking-away and a refusal to meet his eye.
Pull himself together. He sat up in his seat, or tried to.
‘It’s awfully good of you all,’ George said, in a crumpled voice. Away in the corner the card-players began a three-part braying laughter-fugue. What could possibly be so horribly hilarious? No sane human being could be provoked to laughter of such profanity. And George had the sudden comprehension that nobody here was sane, that they were all mad, and the world itself mad to the core. It was one of those crystalline insights that come to us, suddenly, all of a bundle, when we are adolescent; but which, of course, become less and less frequent the older we get. But here’s the thing: an absence is a harder thing to hold in one’s head than a presence. Leah was less to him than this mouthful of gluey red wine, because the latter was inside his mouth right now; the fluid washing between his teeth and staining his striated tongue Persian-carpet-colours. The wine was actually there. Leah was – notionally – somewhere else. And feeling this disparity, on some level – although, to give him credit, without being fully consciously aware of it – George was prompted to stress the magnitude of his loss. Talk it up from its nothingness. Put a figure on it.
‘Ten years,’ he said, to the others. ‘Ten years is a long time. Little Leah, my,’ and he had to rummage mentally for an appropriate word, ‘princess, for ten years. It’s an investment of time, ten years.’
‘Mmm,’ grunted Ergaste, from his belly. Investment was vocabulary he understood.
‘I mean an investment of the heart,’ George clarified, although, of course, he didn’t. ‘Ah! My lovely Leah! She had—’ and, still, moved by impulses of which he was consciously unaware, he proceeded to itemize his daughter as a physical being. ‘The brown eyes. Such lovely dark brown hair – she wanted to grow it long, though Marie wouldn’t let her.’ With an unpleasant jolt in his breast, he realized that he was talking about her in the past tense. There is a horror barely concealed in the past tense. We all feel it. We treat that tense with wary respect, it and its myriad complicated grammatical variants. That tense is where all the misery of the universe is cached.
George began to weep. The tears surprised him, dribbling from his eyes.
‘They’ll find her,’ said Peter, looking away. ‘They’ll find her, for sure.’
You’re thinking: but when a person cries it is a ticklish calculation as to what proportion of tears are for the putative object of grief, and what is simply drawn from the infinite well of self-pity we all carry within us. Alcohol facilitates
the emission of tears. That’s right.
Ach! Ach! Ach!
Afterwards Ergaste, with hitherto-unsuspected tenderness, linked arms with George and walked him up and down the balcony outside. As they strolled, the Englishman gave him – for some reason – a detailed account of the rituals of the Catholic Church. George didn’t understand why, but he listened as attentively as his drunkenness permitted, and found a strange comfort in the older man’s chatter. The eating of little coins made of bread, the drinking of wine, which is after all only a sort of investment of grapes over time from which the compound interest of alcohol has been earned. Prayers that are said. The priest in his expensive robes. George breathed the chill air, and watched the various artificial lights blur and smear as his gummy eyelids opened and closed. An unoccupied row of chair lined the space, pretzel-seats and double- logo-shaped backs.
A snowbike roared and sped over the snow beneath them, from left to right. It carried before itself, jutting from its headlamp, a jouster’s lance of light.
9
Day succeeded night. The following morning, waking alone in his room, George lay in bed, ill as ill could be. Not virus-ill, of course; hangover ill. For a while all he did was let his eyes rest on the large, planed flank of sunlight that fell through his wide window. The brightness shook colour from the carpet. Everything shimmered. He was alone. Everything trembled. He got himself to the shower room somehow, and stood for a long time inside the teepee-shaped zone of falling water. What he felt, he thought, was not depression. Because depression was something that had always seemed to him to be a mind-state of enormous complexity, compounded of anger and repression and ornate tourbillons of soured self- and other-relations. Despite superficial similarities, what he felt right now was something much simpler, purer almost. It was a kind of default inertia. A body at rest resisting the efforts of the outside universe to dislodge it. After a while he sat down on the ceramic pimples of the shower floor. He leaned his back against the tiled wall and let the water fall noisily into his lap.
What did the day hold?
Today he was to go to Doğubayazit, the nearest sizeable town, and meet some bigwig policeman to receive a report on the investigation into Leah’s disappearance. George shut his eyes. He imagined stepping into a broad, cool room with shutters on the window, and a perfectly rectangular desk in the middle. He imagined a moustached policeman saying, ‘We have found your daughter – here she is.’ Then – what? Turning to see a door being opened by a functionary, and there Leah would be standing, with a beaming smile on her face (but Leah never smiled!), tripping and trotting across the floor to – but this was no good, he couldn’t remember what she looked like. He closed his eyelids tighter, as if the memory could be physically squeezed out of his eyes. He remembered Marie’s serene face.
George opened his eyes.
Captain Afkhami accompanied him in a hotel flitter. Flying twenty metres or so above the ground, they swept down the mountainside and passed from the white clarity of the snowfields to a dusty, grubby-looking scrub. The beige was occasionally intersected by dark-water canals, or roads running straight as ruled lines. It was easy to make out the giant rectangles that had once been farmers’ fields, each one now a mass of scribbly weed and low bushes scattered upon mustard dust. Occasionally a tractor, rusted to the colour of dark chocolate, stood up to its hips in undergrowth. Barns stood roofless.
Occasionally, George saw people, of course: sitting mostly, occasionally loping slowly along the side of the overgrown road, their long black hair marking them as have-nothings.
The sun sparkled upon the curved window of the flitter. The sun pressed the landscape flat.
Soon enough the low rise sprawl of Doğubayazit emerged over the horizon; and almost at once George began to see sunbathers in proper numbers. A week at the hotel, insulated from the baseline fact of existence, you might have thought they were a rare breed. But, no, here they were: the life of the ordinary man and woman in the raw. People lay in recliners, or on their backs on the ground, long arcs of black hair fanned out. George began to count them in rough tens, but soon – as the flitter passed over a wide municipal park – there were too many to process numerically. Every roof contained a number of indolent human beings, lying perfectly still, hair carefully spread like lizard cowls.
‘Lots of Ra-worshipping,’ he said to the captain.
‘Sunny day,’ she replied.
Moments later they landed in a parkyard and George climbed out of the flit into a pliable wall of heat. ‘This way,’ said Afkhami. ‘Here we are.’
They were parked alongside a three-storey block building, with Doğubayazit Polis upon its plate-glass frontage. There were four other flitters in the park, none of them in very good condition.
Antique traffic thundered along the nearby road.
‘Shall we go in?’ The captain smiled, and the sunlight burst in little stars upon her dark lenses, and that was the moment George understood that her confidence had deserted her. Her distraction during the flight here, the various little hints of her body language, and her tone of voice as she said shall we go in? – it passed a tipping point in George’s mind. It occurred to him that, beyond the borders of her specific domain, she was as out of her depth as he was himself.
They made their way round to the main building entrance. Reflected cars and vans hurtled left–right and right–left within the glass of the Police Station frontage. There was such violence in the wheeled rush of their passage it seemed amazing they didn’t shake the glass to shivers. When George pushed the swing-door open this frenzy of motorized movement tipped, alarmingly, as if to pour itself inside with them. But inside was quiet, and cool: a marble lobby, and the clacking of their shoes over the cold floor. They announced themselves to the man behind the desk, and then they waited in leather chairs for a quarter of an hour. George found he had no conversation at all; nothing to say to Afkhami. He ought to have been able to conjure some pleasantry, or benign question, or bland observation, but he literally could think of nothing. Finally a functionary led them through to a spacious marble office, and they sat down opposite the police chief.
Police chief. He was a canny-faced man of fifty or so: two earth-brown eyes, a neat grey moustache the shape of an orange segment on his top lip. There were lines running vertically, fanning across both cheeks, perhaps up-down knife-scars from some youthful criminal investigation, perhaps simply the creases where his flesh folded as he pressed it into the pillow as he slept.
‘I am Commissioner Mehmet Sahim,’ he said. His accent was more noticeable than Afkhami’s.
‘My name is George Denoone,’ George said. ‘I am the man whose daughter has been kidnapped.’ It felt strange stating this fact so baldly, for it had not previously struck George that this would now, in all likelihood, be the horizon of people’s knowledge of him from this point on: Oh, he’s the man whose daughter was kidnapped at Ararat. But Commissioner Sahim’s reaction surprised him.
‘You are one of very many,’ he said.
George’s eyes clicked wide open. ‘Many?’
‘I deal with dozens every week.’
‘Dozens of kidnappings?’
‘Dozens of children taken.’
‘Dozens?’
‘Of course, rarely from the tourist resorts, such as your hotel. But dozens, weekly.’
‘Oh.’ George said. Dozens? He pondered how this piece of news made him feel; but the truth was that it made him feel resentful. Losing his daughter was bad enough; must he now lose his sense of the uniqueness of his loss? Nobody likes to discover that they’re not as special as they thought; even if their specialness was of a tragic cast. ‘Dozens? That’s a lot.’
‘The number,’ said the commissioner, ‘is perhaps larger.’
The best George could do with this information was to look at Afkhami, and then back at the commissioner, and then back at Afkhami. ‘I had no idea,’ he said, uncertainly.
‘Mr Denoone,’ said the commissioner. ‘Chi
ld theft is the main business of the police. The bosses control most other crime effectively enough, in their villages I mean. But they close their eyes to child theft – for obvious reasons.’
‘The bosses?’
‘The village bosses.’
‘They close their eyes to child theft for reasons that are – obvious?’ George said, meaning it as a question. But the commissioner took it as agreement.
‘Indeed. You can understand why. Naturally it makes my job very difficult, for without the partnership of the bosses the investigation of crime is almost impossible.’ He pronounced this last word the French way. ‘I do not mean to discourage your heart, Mr Denoone,’ he went on, smoothing his hand across the immaculate and polished desktop. ‘You are an unusual case.’