By Light Alone

by Adam Roberts

  ‘People don’t understand it, and – if you’ll permit me – you haven’t understood it yourself yet. But happiness is a trauma. Especially a great and sudden happiness. It is as disorienting to the psyche as great sorrow.’

  With a gusty feeling of sudden comprehension, the dark side of Marie’s moon became suddenly bright. Finally, she understood. ‘Of course!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Wiczek, and nodded again, thoughtfully. Oh, the force of her explanation zigged and then zagged through Marie’s consciousness. ‘Of course!’ she said. ‘That’s why being reunited with my daughter has brought me so many – tears.’

  ‘If we say tears of happiness, then we don’t get it quite right,’ Wiczek said. ‘For the tears do not feel happy as we cry them. But it is happiness that is behind then, nonetheless. The happiness that works like an earthquake in our lives, toppling our old architecture.’

  This described Marie’s situation so perfectly her mouth fell open. It was as if this person had opened the blast doors and peered into the heart of Marie’s life. ‘Exactly,’ she said, in a soft voice. ‘Exactly.’

  Wiczek prescribed a new regimen. ‘If you look up the serial codes, which you can do in a breath on your Fwn – your Helios, rather’ (this correction offered with a self-deprecating smile that was perfectly winning) ‘—if you look it up, you’ll find it’s described in the same terms of the most common anti-melancholics. But don’t let the superficial similarities fool you! This prescription is individually tailored to address the excesses of happiness in your recent life.’

  ‘I trust you completely,’ said Marie.

  And the regimen did help! Of course it did. The number of sleepless nights was reduced, and she was better able to enjoy her newfound joy. In one of the follow-up sessions, Wiczek mentioned assertivism as an avenue worth exploring. Marie’s reaction surprised even her with its vehemence: ‘My ex-husband was an assertivist – a lot of toxic nonsense! The least assertive person I have ever met, and assertivism just bedded in his inertia.’

  ‘I quite agree,’ said Wiczek, smoothly. ‘I was not about to suggest actual assertivism, but rather to quote some of the wisest words ever uttered on the subject of living with the aftermath of trauma. You know Voltaire?’

  ‘The electricity inventor?’

  ‘Writer, philosopher. Voltaire said: We must cultivate our gardens. Do not fret and internalize, but rather busy yourself with pleasurable, creative activity.’

  Once again, her words connected immediately, profoundly, with Marie’s soul. How could Wiczek possibly have known about her love for gardens? Conceivably she meant the phrase metaphorically – or this old Voltaire fellow did. But gardens were amongst the places where Marie felt happiest. And she’d been involved in the Queens Rewilding Project from early on. Losing the seaside portions of Brooklyn and Queens to the rising waters, and the possibility of further incursion by the sea, had driven the better off out of the area anyway. There’d been some talk of extending the Hough Wall all round the coast, build up the dykes properly, but that was never going to be cost-effective. So the area was already in the process of dereliction, and there wasn’t as much difficulty in moving the last real people out – those workers who still clung to their respectability, and ate food however expensive it was. Naturally there was some trouble, and the QRWP Coordinating Committee – the cabal – had to hire a couple of quadpods and a platoon of riot police to clear them away. Quite apart from anything else, there were lots and lots of longhairs, although in the end they all got moved on easily enough.

  None of the real-estate management stuff really interested Marie. She joined the cabal, and put her money forward, with a view to the actual rewilding itself; the planning and gardening itself. And it so happened, thank Providence, or thank Happiness, that the clearances were pretty much completed, and spiderfencing erected to keep out itinerants, before she began her treatment under Wiczek. That was one reason why her words struck so powerfully. This Voltaire had it right; the garden would heal the land over on Queens and Brooklyn, and heal her traumatized spirit too!

  Whatever else was true, she had the garden. Something to work for. Something to work in.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. Who was she thanking?

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Thank you!’

  The cabal met several times and scanned through hundreds of VR possibilities for how the completed project was going to look. It was going to be a thing of real beauty. Marie liked the meetings; she liked the feeling of godlike omnipotence. But she liked being actually in the zone better – to see it happening around her, to watch the groundworkers toiling away. See it taking shape. Shape, she thought to herself, sitting beneath one of the project sunshades and drinking a Gap cocktail, was the secret of the universe.

  To be doing something! She was happier than she’d ever been.

  She brought Ezra fairly often into the project zone. To him it was a giant playground, and no sooner would the flitter door open than he’d run off, whooping and hallooing like a gibbon. She brought Leah sometimes too, but the girl was going through a difficult phase. Marie sometimes thought, honest to Providence, that Leah preferred books to real life. She’d find some stump to sit on and unroll yet another brightly coloured book. Marie just couldn’t get her interested in the great design. ‘It’s the grand project of our age, sweetie,’ she would explain, and Leah would look up with her ‘whatever’ expression. Often it was simpler not to bring her into the zone. It would only result in Marie losing her temper with the child.

  And then there was Arto, who shared her belief in the importance of the rewilding, and whose sly, knowing glances acted as catalyst to her new life.

  It was about her happiness. She had never been so happy! But it was more than that, it was about the careful management of her happiness, the keeping of her happiness within manageable bounds. So much of her joy was tied up with the garden. Making the new world new again. Was it fair to ask her – she who had been through such a lot, who had suffered so much trauma – to ask her to contaminate her good feeling? And Leah’s sulky dumb-insolence was a mode of contamination. Ezra couldn’t care less about the aesthetic possibilities, of course; but at least he took a primordial joy in the environment. Leah always had this fish-out-of-water look in the wilderness, as if she couldn’t wait to get back to the city. She had no larger vision. Took after her father, of course. That had been the fundamental incompatibility between the two of them, Marie now saw: his inwardness, as opposed to her receptiveness to the world outside. She did not pretend never to have loved him. Obviously she had loved him, once: and not just for his good looks and louchely attentive sensuality. But he was a radically passive individual, content to let things happen to him. Where she, of course, was radically active. She was a doer, a go-getter, a maker. Once upon a time, perhaps, she had found his inertial being-in-the-world oddly charming. She had believed it complemented her own more assertive nature. She could hardly have coexisted with another such as herself. But it was too much, in the long run. It was too provoking. She couldn’t be with him any more. It turned out he really wasn’t very interested in her.

  Now, the thing about Arto was that he was actually interested in her life. ‘So you’ve got two children?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Tell me about them?’

  ‘Ezra – my boy – is shaping up to be a sportsman. He loves any kind of running, or kicking, or climbing, or jumping. Brom – that’s his carer – took him underwater last week, and he loved it. I’ve never seen him so excited! And he gets excited, you know? These waterlungs . . . we never had them when I was a child.’

  ‘Oho,’ said Arto. ‘They’re all the rage, though, aren’t they?’

  ‘Aren’t they though? I think they look daft – stomping around the bottom of the pool in weighted shoes with those things flapping after you like loose sheets! But Ez loves them. He says he wants to do the lagoon race – I mean, the footrace across the Hudson basin, not the Murd
och event. Waterlungers running in slow motion the whole way! I’ve told him next year, maybe.’

  ‘How old is he, though?’

  ‘He’s nearly eight.’

  ‘And your daughter?’

  ‘My lovely Leah,’ said Marie. But the tingling in her heart was a chill. It was a sort of contraction. It was a puzzle, but that must be because she was a puzzle. ‘She’s not so physically active, I’m afraid. But she loves her books!’

  ‘I heard the terrible story—’

  ‘Oh,’ said Marie, briskly (for there was no point in being evasive). ‘Yes, it was a horrible thing. We were on holiday at the Ararat resort, and she was snatched. They just grabbed her. And the police were worse than useless.’

  ‘Corrupt?’ Arto prompted.

  ‘Take that for granted. I had to hire a private agent to locate her. She was gone for ages! The poor thing, I shudder to think . . . but she’s back now.’ The way happiness, in its proper home in the heart, burns like anger. That’s the truer joy.

  ‘Your husband?’

  ‘We’re separated now. I’ll tell you the truth, Arto.’ She leant in a little closer, feeling the pleasing anticipatory tingle. ‘I don’t think he has ever quite recovered from losing Leah for those months.’

  ‘Months!’

  ‘Oh yes, it took months to recover her. It caved him in, I’m afraid. He’s tender-hearted but weak, you see.’

  ‘I can see you’re not weak, though,’ smiled Arto.

  She took this in her stride. ‘Caved him in,’ she said. ‘He hasn’t been the same. He lives pretty much as a hermit, now. Do you know he’s taken the Bug?’

  ‘The Bug?’

  ‘The hair thing, I mean’

  ‘Gracious. Really?’

  ‘It’s some obscure form of self-punishment, I think. Grown his do out like a longhair. It’s a bit tragic, really.’

  ‘He still sees the children?’

  Having painted George as a mild lunatic, this question rather incommoded Leah. She had to say, ‘oh, yes,’ of course; but she didn’t want it to sound like she was abandoning her beloveds to the care of an insane man. ‘He’s harmless. He’s good with the kids, actually.’

  ‘Won’t Leah be fourteen next year?’

  How did he know that? Perhaps she’d told him on some other occasion. ‘Yes.’

  ‘She could decide to live with him full time?’

  The thought of this had never crossed Marie’s mind. ‘Oh she wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘She’s friends with a man called Rodion?’

  This was when the warning bing-bing sounded, as it were, inside Marie’s head. ‘What?’

  ‘Rodion VanderMolen – I believe he used to live in the other half of your parkfront building? Before you moved, I mean.’

  She scowled at him. ‘What are you getting at? How could you possibly know?’

  He returned a perfectly shaped smile. ‘Can I let you into a secret, Marie ? I’m a spy.’

  ‘You certainly sound like one.’

  ‘I’m not joking.’

  She eyed him. The pause was just long enough for a crinkly smile to come into being on his face, and the moment dissolved into bonhomie. ‘Nobody’s tried this hard to get me into bed since I was fifteen!’ she said. ‘I mean – seriously! Don’t you think that maybe you’re working too hard to impress me?’

  He took hold of her right hand, and kissed the knuckles with an exaggerated smooching sound.

  3

  That autumn there was trouble along the south stretch of the project, up and down the seafront and in Jamaica Bay. The monthly project security budget doubled. Longhairs were everywhere. The root problem: many of them had taken to living on rafts. As Arto explained, with grim satisfaction, it was perfect for them. With a simple desalination unit for their water they could live a completely open-ended, floating existence. This was a relatively recent development, at least off the US coast, though Arto said that the Indian Ocean had been lousy with longhairs for decades. But it was a problem, a real and present one. They’d walled the Nassau boundary with spiderfence – at vast expense. They could hardly fence the entire coastline as well. The coastal dykes could perhaps be raised, but that wouldn’t be that much cheaper, and probably wouldn’t keep them out either. What to do? ‘Exterminate all the brutes,’ was Arto’s grin-flashing solution. Obviously something a little more practical was required. Some of the longhairs had actual boats – Marie had to wonder how they got hold of them, not legally she supposed – but most of them had cobbled together makeshift rafts from anything that could float, loosely roped together, planked or covered with plasmetal sheeting, junkyard junks, rubbish heaps.

  To look at a map of the whole of Long Island was to think: oh, but the Rewilding Project is a modest undertaking! But, here, on the ground, she was continually struck by how huge the job was. So much human clutter had been squeezed into such a small space! Uncovering some of the hills that urbanization had overwritten. Where giant subterranean knuckles pushed up the latex. Supine profiles, hawk nose and snub. The detritus of centuries of human habitation.

  Important milestones were reached. Forest Hill was fully reforested! The entire cabal flittered in, personally, to enjoy a feast. The theme was greatness; the food (cherries the size of a beachballs; toast you could shelter under; sugar grains big as dice) appropriately gigantic.

  The problem with the seaborne longhairs kept pressing. They hired a dozen wardens to patrol the southern coastline, to keep the longhairs from landing, but the work required endless vigilance. Workers, machinic or human, kept stumbling across vagrants living in the shells of as-yet-undestroyed buildings; or clinging to the tops of trees like monkeys. The sea-approach was the tricky one.

  Arto addressed the cabal with a proposition for a string of oceanic platforms and automatic guns. Program them to shoot anything that moved. Place them far enough out to sea that if they did malfunction they couldn’t shoot anybody on land. After some exemplary executions the ragtag longhair flotillas would get the message and stay away. But ‘malfunction’ was the wrong word to use in this context; it spooked the meeting. ‘What do you mean, malfunction?’ Arto tried his grin: ‘Well, nothing’s perfect.’ But the cabal didn’t like it.

  Leah and Ezra came back from the week with their father telling strange stories. George was now a fully tressed longhair. He had taken them to a radical Christian meeting, which (so far as she could tell from Leah’s sulky and unforthcoming summary) had proposed a solution to the problem of the longhairs via missionary work and Christian conversion. ‘So your father hasn’t become a Christian, has he?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Leah. ‘At least, I don’t think so. But he was talking about some hermit guy.’

  ‘What hermit?’

  ‘I don’t know his name,’ said Leah, with prodigious disdain.

  Ezra, bless his heart, was at least pleased to be back in Marie’s apartment. None of that mopy selfish sulking for him – he ran from room to room at top speed, his new carer, Moore, scurrying anxiously after him, fearful that something would get broken.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Leah, turning her flank to her mother and writhing as if all her joints had come undone under her skin.

  ‘Leah!’ Marie snapped. ‘Please act like a civilized human being, not a jellyfish.’

  Panting, Ezra smacked to a halt against the wall, turned to his sister and mother and said: ‘I say we ship all the longhairs to the moon! Plenty of sunlight up there, and water at the poles!’

  ‘Not very practical,’ said Leah.

  ‘We need some sort of radical solution,’ said Marie, putting her arm around her boy and squeezing him affectionately. ‘I couldn’t agree more.’

  4

  But, oh, the active engagement with the world! A midday with Arto, out on what had previously been the Brooklyn-Queens border. A roto had been through the whole district here, pushing over rubble and crushing it, and now a mulch machine was being guided through parallel sweeps of its sno
uty head, dragging a long waterpipe behind it. Two workers – longhairs, with their hair out behind them (women, of course) – were walking alongside, making sure the waterpipe didn’t snag, and that the mulch mouthparts didn’t choke on any unexpectedly large pieces of rubble. The raw mulch didn’t smell very nice.

  That was the autumn the poetry charts were dominated by Zuleika:

  And write out the words,

  and link them in art,

  that people might read them

  and break up their heart.

  It was Marie’s life! It was her life in a poem! The joy of heartbreak.

  The sky was motley: pale blue and pure to the west; a paintpot roil of purples and storm-blacks and dark grey to the east. ‘A rainstorm,’ Marie said, as if she were any sort of expert on weather. On weather!

  ‘There’s a storehouse a little way over there,’ said Arto, taking her hand. Taking her hand! Her heart was buzzing like a fly trapped behind a glass pane. Along they trotted together, like kids. Three hundred metres across yet-to-be-developed waste; then between low bushes, and over green grass, and past various splendid trees, and the stumps and chassis of old architecture, ivy and nettles, legumery. Sunlight spent itself prodigally amongst the leaves. The world so various, and beautiful and new. The corduroy of a fingerprint. A lacy girder, with diamond spaces punched out. This Jackson Pollock sprawl of tangled wiring. The unique pattern of swirls and line of a human face.

  Eastwards the sky was increasingly occupied by the coming stormcloud. It was solid shadow, tangled with the etching lines of distant rain.

  Clean odours of incoming storm.

  Marie stood, the wind fumbling and mussing her shirt about her body. The cloud moved visibly; the gods fitting the lid to the box of the world. The air was cooling, and the wind increasing in strength. On the roof of the building was a five-states banner, the asterisks-and-stripes. The wind was trying persistently to shake crumbs from this flag, the rope slapping the flagpole with a rattlesnake sound.