By Light Alone

by Adam Roberts

  Superfast, superfast, superfast

  But it was not like stepping off a precipice. Of course it wasn’t. Most of his life carried on in its well-oiled grooves. They hired people to sort out the details, as they did with everything and anything. They continued co-habitation for a short time, barely crossing paths, which was pretty much as it had been before. The fizzing in his gut passed away. George found himself thinking: and how am I supposed to feel? He asked himself: what is the standard thing, in a situation like this?

  He played Reversi with Rodion, and lost the first game, and the second also; because he could not keep his attention on the pieces. His gaze slid too easily from the board to the old man’s face: the woollen strips of eyebrow, the brittle-looking skin, the vermicelli of lines in at the corner of his elderly eyes. His ears were very big, curls and flaps of pink flesh like Danish pastries. His hair was close-trimmed and covered his whole head. This man had been married, and lost his wife. Though the circumstances were different (and of course George was not sure what the circumstances of Rodion’s bereavement were, precisely) yet surely there was a kind of bond between them. George turned his line the entire diagonal length of the board, and, on a whim, he said: ‘And it’s bad news for me, Rodion.’ And when the old fellow politely enquired what the matter was, he told him the whole story. The story entire. And Rodion was perfectly old-school about it, and listened with softened eyes, nodding occasionally but at no point interrupting him. And when George had finished, he said: ‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’

  ‘I’ll tell you,’ said George, feeling himself lightened. ‘It’s not too bad. I guess people’s marriages break down all the time? And for most people it is simply loss, and just loss, and nothing else. But, see, not me. But if you ask me, I have to say – I’m . . . content with the exchange.’

  ‘Exchange?’

  ‘I lost my daughter, you know,’ George explained. ‘She was kidnapped.’

  ‘Of course,’ Rodion said. ‘I heard about that.’

  ‘But losing her was needful,’ George said. ‘I couldn’t get her back if I didn’t lose her first. And getting her back is a joy I never knew before in my life.’ He picked up a piece and flipped it over. At Rodion’s cough he comprehended that it was not yet his move, and he replaced it on its original square with an apology.

  ‘I’ve never been religious,’ George said.

  ‘No more have I,’ said Rodion. ‘Though my wife used to pray to Jesus.’

  ‘But it is precisely the religious equation. Isn’t it, though? You cannot love something unless you lose it first. Can you? No, you can’t. Rodion, my friend, I shall tell you something I have told nobody else.’

  At this the old man’s Grouchoesque eyebrows slid up his forehead. But he slotted his two hands together, fingers interlocking, and readied himself to hear.

  ‘Getting Leah,’ said George. ‘I mean, getting her back. What I mean to tell you is – something about that. You see, we went to this tiny dirt-poor village somewhere in – Armenia, Turkey, Iran, I don’t know. That’s where she had been taken, after the kidnapping. We couldn’t even flitter to this place because it was too dangerous to be in the sky. Longhairs might shoot at us with guns simply for being aloft. And when we got there we paid money to the boss who ran the village, and they executed the man responsible – apparently responsible – right in front of our eyes! I’d never seen a man killed before. In real life, I mean. Have you?’

  ‘Once,’ said Rodion, sombrely.

  They both looked at the Reversi pieces. Were they sharing something important? Was that what this was? The more money you have, the harder it is to do so. I don’t need to tell you that. You know that already.

  ‘Wow,’ said George.

  ‘I don’t mean to, ah, upstage your—’ Rodion said.

  ‘No, not at all, not at all, no,’ George said, speaking across him.

  There was a moment of silence.

  ‘It was my best friend, you know,’ Rodion continued. ‘He was standing as close as you are now, and – well, some soldiers actually, it was some soldiers, and they shot him in the body.’

  ‘Man,’ said George. ‘That’s a terrible thing!’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Why did the soldiers shoot him? Was it an execution?’

  ‘As to that, I don’t know. He was being arrested, you see, and he pulled out a handgun, which was not a clever thing to do. I’ve heard people argue that the soldiers had orders to shoot him anyway. I didn’t use to think so. But now I wonder.’

  George picked up one of the Reversi pieces, held it lightly between the thumb and finger of his left hand, and flicked it with his right forefinger, so that it spun gyroscopically.

  ‘Please continue with your story,’ said Rodion.

  The thing is, George wasn’t sure he wanted to. This conversation seemed to have magically unlocked itself, turned into a dangerously intimate thing. But he couldn’t think how to shut it down. So he said: ‘When I came back from that village, I felt – I don’t know how to put it into words. I felt extraordinary. I was floating above the world. It was the purest joy I have ever known.’

  Rodion considered this statement for several long seconds, and then he nodded, very slowly. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘To see somebody killed, before your very eyes—’

  ‘Oh no,’ said George. ‘Oh, you misunderstand. Oh, no. I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘That’s not what produced the great gush of Joy in me. Not that! It was being reunited with my daughter that did it.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Rodion. And George couldn’t be sure if his tone of voice was actively sceptical or merely reserved.

  Of course. Rodion had assumed his euphoria was a result of seeing a man killed, when in fact it had been a function of being reunited with his daughter. Over the following few days this misunderstanding of what he was saying started to niggle. And after a night’s sleep, and a morning talking to half a dozen lawyers on the Lance, about divorce matters, the niggle returned. Every time he entertained the thought it enlarged in his mind, like a hole in a sheet out of which he just can’t keep a poking, exploratory finger, knowing full well that to continue probing is to widen the rip further and further. George’s itch was that Rodion might, however inadvertently, have said something true. He found himself thinking back to the flight in the flitter; to the journey by ramjet, with Leah worn out by sobbing and asleep in her seat. What had he felt? Uncomplicated Joy. Or so he had thought. But, now that he came to resolve the matter in his thoughts, he found that he doubted if such a thing as uncomplicated Joy existed. Uncomplicated Joy, as much the impossible unicorn of the emotions as uncomplicated Grief. What had the thrill been? The transcendence of it. He had reclaimed his daughter, and for the first time in a year – more, the first time in his life – he had felt alive. And we all know that it is not restoration but death that throws life into the sharpest relief. Was it that he had felt alive because that other, nameless man had died? Perhaps reclaiming his daughter had been only a coincidental matter. Getting Leah back would surely make him happy; but the extraordinary plenum of joy he had known drew from something more profound. More profound, in the final analysis, than the petty resources of his own soul, and that soul’s extremely ordinary capacity for relief.

  He thought again about the summary execution he had witnessed. For your benefit, Dot had said. Justice, or something. The fellow’s unguessable life all behind him, the bullet preparing to dive from its chamber and thread him through, to knock out his lights. What Leah had said, about going back to Ararat: my father was a boss. Oh. Would you, knowing that in a few moments all sight would be removed from you for ever, close your eyes? Wouldn’t you keep them open as long as possible, suck in as much of the world as you could until the very last instant?

  And then, what could it feel like? A blow to the head, like a punch; but with a fist inhumanely hard and forceful. Would you feel the bone of your forehead cave in? Would you feel it
burst out, on the far side? Perhaps you would feel one but not the other. A brain is a fantastically complicated pattern of cells, after all, and that settles, as one lives on, into increasingly elaborate snowflake patterns along which the body sprinkles electrical charge. A jelly in which fine structure nets, like those thready, flossy fractures you see inside an ice-cube. Pastried about with a globe of bone. The thing itself, unaccommodated man; the horizon of everything that is. And here, tic, the trigger clicks. And there, clac, the bullet releases an explosive puff-puff of its complicated gases. Rush, and the pellet moves superfast down the pipe, the dot of light at the end swooping up into a blinding surround and the flush of air, and superfast through the cardboard of human bone, and the unilluminated mousse of cerebral matter, and, pop, out again into brightness. Superfast.

  The crack. The gush of red from the side of the skull. And down he goes.

  It is as it was. Or put it this way: that red particulate mist was the man. It was his mind, brain, soul – strung out of his head like a great red quiff. And time stopped at that precise moment: the man would never hit the ground. His body would, but he never would. He would hang there for ever, his soul literalized as a bulging scarlet excrescence pendant from his scalp. Perhaps he had been a bad man; or perhaps he had been good, by the mores of his place and time. Either circumstance was as likely as the other, or so it seemed to George. The indeterminacy of life had distilled into that moment. It stayed with George. He could not rid his mind of the image of it.

  24

  He moved out of the park house and into one of those apartments built into the Chelsea Seawall – smaller, obviously, but with fine views over the Hudson lagoon. Rodion was sorry to see him go, he said. As they played one last game of Reversi, George promised that he would call by and visit often; but over the weeks that followed he only ever met Rodion in the park, never at his house. He was not purposefully avoiding the old house, and of course he had still to deal with Marie (or Marie’s representatives) where the children, and financial matters, were concerned. But he was aware that his life had changed in more than mere topographical externals. He was a new man.

  The complex he now inhabited was divided into two sets, West and Twelfth, and although George’s place was in the southern section he decided – after attending a few West meetings – that he felt more at home with the Twelfth crowd. Their building meetings were more diverse, their exchanges more spiky. Notionally, the idea in meeting was to sort out any problems with the complex, but of course there were no problems. Instead, people met to talk about anything, to preen themselves, to clown about with the grim-faced servants, tripping them as they served coffee, wrapping them in cloth, singing right in their faces – to turn the meeting, in effect, into a café des artistes. The West group was all conventional wealth; but – most excitingly, for George – there were several individuals in the Twelfth group who wore their hair ostentatiously long. It took George a few weeks to summon the courage to ask one such, a thin elderly man called Johan Hartley Walliam, whether his was ordinary hair or the new kind. It seemed terribly rude. But Walliam was unembarrassed: sure he’d taken the hair bug. It was a statement. It was marvellous to see how much it discombobulated his east-side friends. It didn’t mean that he couldn’t eat, of course – he still ate, of course. But it was, he said, a splendid show. To walk the city streets with his hair fanned splendidly behind and his matelot trousers and his pepperpot hat and silver beard visor.

  George sat in his lounge looking through the glass at the myriad little puckerings on the surface of the lagoon, and seeing how the sunlight took these simple shapes and parlayed them into a thousand different tones and shades of white and grey and blue and silver. The watersprinters folded little creases into the water’s surface. A yacht unwound its kite-cable and sped smoothly on. At sunset there was a five-minute window when the water acquired skin-tints, and the million little dints attached to each wavelet looked momentarily like the pores of a giant. And the sun moved closer to the mainland, and the water became darkened and lacquered and mysterious. It was the East lagoon, of course, that had all the wildlife – those ramped-up swan-hawks and the different kinds of fishes. But the Hudson lagoon was where all the sporting events took place, and George had a splendid vantage on that.

  On alternate weeks Ezra and Leah came to stay, each with their respective carers. The first few times things were a little stilted, but soon enough George established the thing children value above all others, a routine. Not seeing them for a week meant that each re-encounter was kicked off with George’s quasi-grandparental astonishment at how quickly the two of them were growing.

  They would do all the things they would do. And Ezra was up for almost anything; fearless, and adventurous, and keen to climb and swim and so on. George delighted in his vivacity.

  But with Leah it was something different. With Leah it was more than the conventional, upholstered pleasures of parenthood, and the little thrills, and the comfortable surprises. With Leah he felt some more powerful tug in his soul. It was because, not despite, the fact that his love for her, its almost edible sweetness, was mixed with the memories of fear and bereavement. It was, as he knew on some deep level, the difference between the pleasure of taking a lungful of fragrant air in the sunshine, and taking that same breath in that same sunshine after surviving a round of Russian Roulette. The latter took pleasure and made it profound. He wouldn’t have put it in such terms, but he understood the truth of it instinctively: his experience with Leah had showed him that the heart is an abyss.

  He began growing his hair.

  Marie would never have tolerated it, of course; but he never saw her any more. At first he only let his hair grow unfashionably long; he looked disreputable, but it was just ordinary hair. But he woke up one morning, and was aware of a desire to get hold of the Bug, the Neocles Bug, and swallow it. It wasn’t hard to get hold of. On the contrary. It was perfectly legal, however infra dig. It would only be a matter of time. He didn’t autoanalyse this impulse, not being in the habit of such psychological indulgence. But, instinctively, he knew it was something to do with his daughter. He did not think to himself: it will make me an outcast, somebody seen as an eccentric at best and treacherously insane at worst. But there was some tidal force pulling his soul all in one direction, where the inner waters bunched together in his hollow-earth cranium. It is one of the most persistent and widely believed errors of human life that violence simplifies situations. In fact, of course, the reverse is almost always the case: violence complexifies, sometimes monstrously. But it’s only natural that we cling to the former belief, the lie of the Gordian knot, because of course we crave simplicity and we find the prospect of violence exciting and libidinous. It takes courage to see things truly.

  George was perhaps the least courageous man in the world. But there are times when even the least courageous surprise themselves.

  25

  It was Walliam who introduced George to Raphael. But although friends assumed the hair-growing thing followed on from his attending Raphael’s performance art, in fact, George knew that his radicalization – if we want to call it that – preceded Raphael by months. Not that Raphael wasn’t important too. Which is to say: George’s experience was one of resistance to what Raphael was saying, followed by slow acceptance, and culminating in a kind of adrenalized intoxication. It’s just that the changes in George’s life predated these experiences. What Raphael revealed to him was confirmation, not revelation.

  What it was: an extension of his interest in news. That’s how he put it to himself when he started attending: he was logging-on to the news in a more than merely contemporary sense. And many of the satisfactions he experienced were just the same as offered to him by the news channels. But there was something more, and that extra quality was something the news never gave him. Belief.

  Believing Raphael wasn’t a question of content; it was a matter of form. It wasn’t about whether he agreed with what he said, or not. It was about whether
he was ready to become one of those sorts of people . . . the earnest people; the laughably genuine people; the religious people; the political people; the believers. If Raphael had looked more professorial, he might have been able to tell himself that he had been overawed by the man’s aura of knowledge. But he was a lanky, painfully skinny guy, who wore his long hair ostentatiously fanned out at the back in a belt-loom. It was a statement. It was food, also, of course; although from time to time George saw him supplement his diet with little pastries, protein gum, and even little snorts of c:snuff.

  On the other hand, what he spoke was sense. George couldn’t deny it. Raph would sync everyone’s Fwns and then run them through a lecture – great sprawling lectures, fifteen or twenty minutes long – about history. ‘There’s only one subject for history,’ he told them. ‘Power has told you otherwise, but that’s a lie.’ (Power was his catch-all for the people and institutions and structures in charge of the world: the privileged, the banks, the militarily well-equipped.) ‘Power tells you that history is a million little individual stories of people doing this and that, princes and kings, queens and princesses, generals and captains of industry. But looked at properly they all go into the dark.’