By Light Alone

by Adam Roberts

  The commissioner climbed out of the car, telling everybody else to stay where they were. George watched proceedings through the tinted window. The commissioner was standing in the sunlight, talking to two bulky men, one long-haired, one fuzz-headed. The conversation went on for many minutes. That insectile look of a human head wearing dark glasses. Abruptly the exchange became more heated. The commissioner threw both his arms in the air, and strode back to the iCar. When he opened the door, a palpable wash of heat poured inside.

  The door closed with the thud of a guillotine blade hitting its stock.

  ‘My apologies,’ he said, calmly, to George, meeting his eye. ‘This has proved to be – the English, I think, is wild-goose chase. We have chased the wild goose.’

  From where he was sitting, in the back of the iCar, George could see the flicker of text upon the inside of the commissioner’s dark glasses, as his AI fed him appropriate English idioms.

  Nobody said anything as they backed out of Khoduz, and drove the half-hour back to the flitter.

  11

  George stuck it at the hotel for one more week. Time had rusted. The week took a month to pass. The final day stretched and stretched.

  It was all about the waiting. Everything becomes boring in time: happiness does, but so does unhappiness. The glamour of his tragic eminence had rubbed away, and now he was only conscious of how horrible and demeaning and unrelenting his misery was. From time to time thoughts of actual self-harm would pop into his head, but he made no effort to act upon them. The making no effort, in fact, was his way of countering the temptation of suicide. The essence of suicide is impatience: for after all, if you want to die, all you need do is wait. But insofar as suicide is the purest form of depression – depression compressed to its logical extreme, as it were – then clearly depression is a function of impatience too. George held his drink in front of him such that the sunlight made white bobbles on the surface of the fluid, like suds. The sunlight passed incompletely through the body of the liquid, to cast a trembling oval of shadow on the white tablecloth.

  Finally George took the schedule flitter to Tabriz, and there he boarded a scruffy-looking gelderm plane. There was a ramjet at noon, but he chose not to wait for it. Now that he was going back to the States he felt a kindling of urgency: not to see Marie again, not even to hold Ezra in his arms, but simply to get out of that place.

  He watched the news the whole flight. He had gotten into the habit, during his sojourn at the hotel, of watching several hours of news every day. He found something queerly reassuring about it: the open-endedness of the situation in Triunion, or the latest upheavals in the Eastern Indian Federation, or the riots at the Sahara Games. Great mobs of the disaffected, the machinic efficiency of the modes of security containment. So much hurly-burly in the service of stasis. Everything constantly changing to stay the same.

  As the plane descended, and did that horrid vibration-thing gelderms do, George looked down at the hoar-grey glints that sunlight spread over the Atlantic. He saw the ripple the plane’s descent approach caused in the surface of the waters, a thin, almost spectral parabola line that chased after them until it splashed against the bulk of the Hough Wall. On the other side the Hudson lagoon was dotted with pleasure craft, and then the cogteeth towers of Old New York rose up to greet him. And finally he was back in the cool of a New York fall, and he was walking from the taxi up his own ramp, and walking through the lobby of his own building, and finally stepping into the familiar odour and ambience of his home, rendered strange by a two months’ absence.

  He waved the bagman away, tipless, and closed the front door behind him. Marie came out of her study. All she did, for a while, was stand at the far end of the hall with her arms hung loosely from her side. As he stepped over towards her she bestirred herself and came to meet him halfway, such that they embraced and held one another. And yet, for long marriage brings with it a telepathic form of incipient communication that is as much curse as blessing, George knew, as his arms snaked around his wife like a seatbelt finding its way to its socket, that she considered him to blame. He knew that she understood this to be irrational, but that she didn’t care. Of course she was not about to rebuke him openly, or accuse him, or bring her resentment into any arena where it might be rationally disproved. She found a perverse source of emotional sustenance from her blame. But it was there, and it would not go away.

  ‘I did miss you,’ he told her.

  Let’s say tragedy is about death, so that we can ask ourselves: what dies? Or to put it another way: what can die? The first answer to come to mind, of course, is – people. And it is the death of people that most often informs tragedy. But other things can die too: hope, for instance. A marriage can die. A community can die. Then again: does it seem odd to you that we never use that idiom to describe recovery? ‘My depression died, I am happy to say.’ ‘My cancer died, leaving me healthy again.’ Why not? Fall, because that’s what the leaves do. Or because that’s what the whole year is doing. And down we go.

  12

  New York fall mutated incrementally into winter, and snow fell without the ordered restraint of Ararat, where clouds were seeded at night and cleared away during the day, so as not to interfere with the enjoyment of guests. The snow here did not lie pristine. It was veined with grime. The cubist imitations of mountain gorges echoed more dully than Araratian valleys.

  George and Marie continued in their usual round. But isn’t ‘round’ a strange way of putting it? Their lives, though in every respect metaphorically upholstered, lacked precisely the three-dimensionality implied by that idiom. Day replaced day, each sliding along to knock the night off its perch; and in turn dark crept up on day, approaching from exactly the same direction every evening, and with the same surreptitious intent, upon a day sky that never seemed to learn from the unbroken string of previous assaults. And with one sharp knock, the light went out, and post-concussive pin-prickle stars filled the darkness.

  What sort of thing did they do, George and Marie? They did what the affluent did. Once, George and Marie went to a smoke-sculpture opening night; but Marie insisted their new carer (her name was Wharton, and she was a liquorice-skinned nineteen-year-old from Missouri) also came, and sat in an adjacent room with the sleeping Ezra in a portacot. George didn’t want to say ‘this is America’, because, as he discovered by prowling online, it turned out children were stolen almost as frequently in the US as elsewhere in the world. He’d had no idea. But why should he have had an idea, before this terrible thing happened to him? At any rate, he didn’t rebuke his wife’s over-protectiveness. In fact he was grateful for it, since it excused him from voicing his own persistent anxiety.

  At the exhibition he got into conversation with a nicely plump woman called Stephanie: a round face white as marshmallow and two large green eyes. Her short hair had been treated with some genagent to give it a very striking gold-metallic texture. The news was playing, silently, across the fabric of her wraparound dress: quadpods stomping deliberately in amongst swarming crowds. George felt some click, some subliminal pseudoelectric spark between them as they chatted. For the first time in months – for, in fact, the first time since Ysabelle, on the mountain – it was the old excitement stirring. She chattered at his jokes; he leant in towards her. ‘So, you like the news? I do too!’ ‘How marvellous!’ At one point in the evening, whilst the artist expatiated about the precision required in nudging magnetized particulates in the holding field into exactly the right position, Marie caught George’s eye. He was standing next to this new woman, this Stephanie, and he smiled at his wife with a little flick of the head in his new friend’s direction. But Marie only scowled. After the artist had finished yapping, when people were circulating again, she came over to him.

  ‘That dumpy creature?’ she said, in a boiled-hard voice. ‘Better to bleach the thought completely out of your thoughts.’

  He couldn’t think of a response to this. All he said was: ‘What?’ He opened and closed his mouth
with fishlike idiocy. His desire had shrivelled to a flaccid stump in the teeth of her hostility.

  ‘You have heard me.’

  He might have said: But why is it a problem now? Except that, of course, he knew straight away why it was a problem now. Which is to say, he knew that things had changed. He could have said: I won’t mind if you do or but it’s just play! It’s our game! In Marie’s head, the time for games was over. Out of the swirl of this complex intuition, the only phrase that came out was: ‘I don’t understand.’ His tone of voice, unpremeditated though it was, seemed to irritate her further.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ she repeated. She walked away from him. This might have been meant as simple sarcasm, or scornful reiteration of his ignorance, or conceivably as a statement of solidarity in his anchorlessness. He didn’t know. In the days that followed the phrase came back to him at odd moments. He didn’t like the sour scent it wafted over his thoughts. It was really very simple, actually; he had lived a childishly spoilt existence in which every whim was indulged and which no actual hardship had interrupted until this had happened. Marie had misunderstood. His I don’t understand was his response to a deep change in his world. It was the largest of questions. It was the question that defined humans.

  Winter deepened. The overhang of their building entrance sported two, and only two, icicles, large as sabre-teeth: one on either side – presumably the others had been snapped off by the building staff. Municipal drones trundled about the slippery sidewalks carving interlocking grooves into the ice. You could tell which pigeons had been genengineered to withstand the cold, because they bullied the unmodified pigeons, pecking them, harassing them, and in some cases cannibalizing them.

  Some days George did nothing more with his day than watch the winter sun slide a tray of light over the bedroom carpet, and angle it up the wall.

  From time to time they spoke to Ergaste and Emma, by Lance; or, less frequently, to Ysabelle and Peter. Ergaste said that he’d talked to ZeeYZee, but that it seemed child-theft was a ten-a-cent occurrence, and there wasn’t any media publishing interest. ‘Even when it happens to a person of means, such as yourself! On the other hand,’ he went on, as sunspots, or ramjets, or whatever it was that causes those occasional flickers of interference, sent random barcodes of black lines through his image, ‘on the other hand, I have the details of the best lawyer in Europe. When the time comes to sue the hotel – not now, too painful, too soon, yah-yah . . . but when the time comes . . .’

  At the beginning of December George flew back to the mountain. Marie did not come. ‘I will never again go to that God-cursed place,’ she said. ‘I vow never again to go there.’ What could George do but agree?

  Back in the hotel, feeling as if he had never really left it, George had a three-quarter-hour meeting with Captain Afkhani. She detailed the lines of enquiry pursued by the hotel security, and the separate lines undertaken by the police at Doğubayazit, and explained in many superfluous words, and with much hedging about, that they had all been fruitless. Of Arsinée she said, with an inflection that suggested she expected George to be happy at the news: ‘She has been sentenced to a prison term.’ There were no prisons locally, and the women’s prison at Tehran had refused to take her (Why? George asked. Oh, because there was no actual evidence against her; although her guilt had been established to the necessary legal tolerances.) This meant that she was doing time at Ankara. ‘It is by way of a strategy,’ said the captain. ‘It applies pressure. When she gives up details of her accomplices, we shall shorten the sentence.’

  ‘And you’re sure she’s involved?’ George asked, wondering if the little lump nestling visibly between Afkhani’s pelvis and ribcage was pregnancy, or just weight gain, unable to think of a polite way of asking.

  ‘It is our experience that such child theft almost always employs an insider,’ the captain replied blandly.

  So George came home again. There was nothing to stay for. Boarding the ramjet at Tabriz it suddenly occurred to George, like a knifeblade being abruptly sheathed in his heart, that he would never see Leah again. She was dead; it was not a kidnapping but a murder trial. Or if she was not dead, then she had been taken so far from the usual routes of life as for it to amount to the same thing. He sat in his seat, trying to visualize his daughter’s face, unable to do it.

  13

  Back in NY, George started going again to his assertiveness therapist. He had attended sporadically for a number of years, but let it slide after the birth of Ezra. Now he signed on again, and the thrice-weekly sessions gave a structure to his days. Part of the process was dream-reading. What this entailed was not interpretation, according to the assertiveness orthodoxy: it consisted of strategies of reappropriation of dream narratives. The theory was that dreaming was the chaos of the mind; and that assertiveness, as a holistic life philosophy, was about the seizure of agency in all aspects of the self. Dreams were related in such a way as to make the mulch and mess of symbols and surrealism part of a coherent story at the control of the dreamer. To put the orts and scraps of daytime experience back into the grid of narrative.

  He and Marie and (of course) Ezra, with Wharton, went to a new seafood place called McAlmont’s. George amused the boy by dangling squid tentacles from his mouth like fangs, and from his nostrils like boogers, and pretending to whip the table with them. Naughty table!

  The recalcitrance of the inanimate.

  There was a fire in the building. Municipal fireblimps bumped their noses against the side of the building as they sprayed the relevant portion of the structure with smartfoam.

  The year turned.

  There was a week in January during which George and Marie exchanged literally no conversational words whatsoever.

  The clouds are icebergs, and the day repeatedly crashes against them and eventually it goes down in flame-coloured splendour.

  At the beginning of February Ergaste called on the Lance. ‘Can you come to London?’

  ‘London,’ said George, in a watery voice.

  ‘Just so. Right now – today?’

  He was a shove-ball, and the universe kept firing bullet-pegs at him. With a click and a roll. A taxi brought him to the midmorning ramjet, and by noon he was sitting in a central London eatery, with views of the swollen Thames, that ancient river. But all rivers are ancient, he thought. Flowing like bands of hair from the cranium of the land. Ergaste came, even more boisterously present here, in his homeland, than he had been on Ararat. With him came a slim woman of indeterminate age, dressed in dark blue and wearing a bulky headdress. ‘This is Dot Mennel,’ said Ergaste, as they all took their seats.

  ‘Dorothy?’ George tried.

  ‘Dot,’ she said.

  They drank high-proof beer from tubular glasses, and ate little pots of creamed eel, with neat, origami-like structures made of folded slices of ham balanced on the top. ‘Dot knows all about your situation,’ Ergaste said. ‘I took the liberty of retaining her services. Consider it my gift to you.’

  George was past the stage when the events of the world surprised him. ‘Kind.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘And what are your services?’ he asked her.

  ‘I can help you find your daughter,’ she said. Those seven words might as well have been Sanskrit for the impact they had on George’s comprehension. Nominative, accusative, dative. Some notional sense could be derived from them, of course; but translated out of their uttered alternate-reality idiom they acquired the quality of words spoken long, long ago. ‘OK,’ George said, and took another sip of the strange, yeasty, sour little drink. OK covered most things, he thought.

  ‘Can you come with me?’ she asked.

  ‘Come with you?’ Something wriggled inside George’s soul at this offer, as if to show that it wasn’t entirely dead. But she didn’t mean it in that way.

  ‘We can be at Ararat by three,’ she said.

  George, distantly, considered this possibility. He tried to conjure reasons to say no, but couldn
’t produce any. He did not remember if he had mentioned to Marie that he was coming to London that morning. He did not remember, indeed, if he’d spoken to her for days.

  ‘OK,’ he said.

  ‘Let’s finish lunch, though, eh?’ said Ergaste.

  ‘OK.’

  So, buoyed by the alcohol, he sat through the rest of the meal. Ergaste kept talking, in his absurd high-volume voice. George took in perhaps a third of what he said; the rest was just English-accented babble and bluster. Dot, whoever she was, mostly kept her own counsel. The flesh on Ergaste’s face, George thought, looked like a layer of something painted thickly on. His jowls wobbled asynchronously as he spoke. His neck, though tightened by the usual treatments, trembled as if with a life of its own. He was a large man; a swollen man. He was a man with something fierce exerting pressure from within, and pushing his skin out in all directions. He was talking now about his business – about the need to engineer quicker and quicker growing cycles for certain food plants so as to keep up with the rapidly oscillating fashions for luxury eating. ‘Staples are all gone now; no market for them. But the rich do like their tidbits, so I’ll always have a business. They’re flibbertigibbet though!’

  George didn’t know this word. ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘The rich are,’ said Ergaste, boomingly. ‘No point in me spending six months growing and processing – let’s say – lamb smoothie, if by the time I bring it to market the fashion’s shifted to red snapper chocolate!’

  ‘Lamb smoothie was very last season,’ George agreed, vaguely. He couldn’t decide if the salt odour he could smell was the beer or the river. He moved his glass away from him. The salt smell did not diminish. Presumably it was the river, then. He looked out over the waterway. The old riverside roads were visible under the tinted waters. Big fish, trout maybe, swam windingly around lampposts.