When he saw the person standing on his own bottom step he stopped dead, lowered his rifle, slowly. In the glow of the outside lighting it looked like it was a woman. She was standing on the steps, pulling her coat tightly round her in the cold, waiting, as though she had just knocked. She was tall, he noticed. Young. And as far as he could make out, she had no hair.
When she heard his steps coming across the gravel, Rebecca turned around.
‘Dawid?’ she said. ‘Dawid, it’s me.’
64
William awoke to a tight grip around his neck. Outside the large windows it was getting light, big HGVs stood at the pumps filling up with diesel, the rain had come to its senses and gone back to swathing reality in a wet, colourless mist. And above William was a tall, muscular man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the petrol station’s logo.
He said something in Polish, and it wasn’t friendly.
‘I’m really sorry,’ said William, far from certain where he was, or why. How long had he been asleep? He struggled with himself to wake up, a feverish effort to move his inner switch from off to on. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t speak Polish.’
‘You have been sleeping for three hours,’ said the man with the logo. ‘Andrzej was scared to wake you on his own.’
Behind the till, the man who had sold him the hot dog and the drink was avoiding eye contact with William. And so, when William didn’t say anything, the muscleman renewed his neck grip and pushed his other hand into William’s armpit, helping him to a standing position whether he liked it or not. He pushed William’s chair back under the bench, picked up the half-empty bottle and thrust it into his hand, and then led him towards the exit.
William felt the chill air hit him, the damp in his clothes, and realised now how cold he was. The rain was coming down, and the air smelled of petrol and hummed with engine sound.
‘Wait,’ he said, doing his best to apply the brakes. ‘I’m sorry I fell asleep, I’ve had a really messy night. But just let me buy something from the shop.’
The only response was a raised eyebrow and a smile that verged on mocking.
‘I promise.’ With great exertion he managed to shove his free hand into his jacket pocket, dig out his wallet, and hold it up. ‘I need something to eat. Something to wear. That’s all.’
He felt the grip under his arm relax ever so slightly.
‘But then you leave,’ the petrol man said over the engine noise. ‘Agreed?’
‘I’ll leave as soon as you say so,’ said William.
The man spun it out for another few seconds, as though he didn’t want William to be getting cocky. Then he backed away, nodding towards the shop, as though he had just made a rare exception to an important, universal rule, and as though William should be incredibly grateful.
Truth be told though, he was.
In the shop he found toiletries as well as a reasonable breakfast, and from amongst the car accessories he picked out a pair of workwear trousers, a fleece and a T-shirt. Hopefully they’d let him get changed before he left.
Once he’d done that he managed to negotiate another hour’s worth of surfing while he ate–in return for solemn promises not to fall asleep again, this isn’t a fucking hostel–and when he returned to the spot where he’d just woken up he could feel the stares from both the staff and his fellow customers.
He hadn’t seen it until now, but of course in their eyes he was an undesirable, a bloody vagrant, perhaps even a criminal. He’d shown up on foot in the middle of the night, paid with crumpled notes, and slept on a chair on their premises until someone dared to challenge him. He was his own daughter. The person she had been for years.
Overnight most of the papers had updated their headlines, and while he felt the coffee slowly spreading its warmth throughout his body he read through all the main outlets, the same ones he’d looked at during the night, and then a few others, all of them full of detailed articles about the situation. Illustrations and sophisticated graphics showed how the nuclear power stations’ systems were constructed, what a meltdown looked like, and how long they had left before the reactions had gone so far that they could not be saved.
The hijacked reactors were of various types, using differing technologies, but all had a tipping point after which the process could no longer be reversed. A point at which such high temperatures were reached that a meltdown was inevitable, after which it would be impossible to do anything even if control was regained. In some of the reactors, he read, that point was less than twenty-four hours away.
The more he read, the more the emptiness grew inside him. It was as though someone was draining the hope out of him, as though he was staring into an abyss of fear that just kept growing. He had to do something. He wanted to do something. But what?
He was stranded in the Polish countryside, somewhere north of Warsaw, and all he could do was what everyone else in the world was doing: wait, hope, and place his fate in the hands of others.
He should get going. Maybe he’d find a motel along the way, somewhere he could grab a few hours’ sleep, then maybe he’d wake up brimming with new energy, new insights and knowing exactly what to do next. Then again, if not, he would just have slept away the very last hours of the world he knew, slept himself closer to the apocalypse and woken up in a future he could not even begin to imagine.
He gathered his leftovers and cardboard wrappers from the table and was just getting up to leave, when he changed his mind. Just what it was that made him take one last look at Christina’s paper’s website, he didn’t know. But as soon as the browser refreshed in front of him, he saw the message out of the corner of his eye. Within a second it had cut at him, made him remember, wounded his heart.
The eyes he was staring into were Christina’s. She stood motionless at the top of the screen, serious and distant at the same time, the byline picture that she had never been happy with but which he’d always thought captured her perfectly.
It wasn’t that, though, that caused his reaction. It was the headline beside it, squeezed into the top corner in the hope of tempting readers to click through to a feature column. He sat down again, looking at the time, hoping that his four zloty weren’t about to run out. He let the pointer hover over the words that made up the headline. Their words.
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Sitting in front of the old spare laptop, Christina refreshed the browser for the umpteenth time, hoping to see changes that stubbornly refused to materialise.
It was light now, but when Tetrapak had returned from Palmgren’s car three hours earlier the dawn had still been a long way off. Without a word, he had unpacked the equipment from his dark grey box, placed all of it on William’s desk, and connected the devices with hands now grown all too used to the task.
When he then opened the window and clambered out onto the slippery metal roof, she had tried to object. That, though, was futile, and instead she’d parked herself over by another window, with Palmgren standing alongside her. They had seen him balancing on the snow-covered rooftop gangway, back and forth between chimney pots and dormer windows, precarious steps as he made his way around firewalls and chimneys that separated one building from the next. She knew that she’d screamed out loud on at least one occasion, when Tetrapak lost his footing and started gliding down the roof towards the deep courtyard, before managing to grab hold of a vent and smiling towards them with terrified eyes.
It took him just under an hour to finish the whole thing. By then, he had attached long copper wires along the length of the roof, repeating in parallel lines like a big, copper-coloured musical stave, and stretching in a taut line over to a similar stave on the neighbouring roof. When he came back in, he sat down by the radio, hooked it up to his temporary antenna, and held his breath.
‘How long have you been able to do this sort of thing?’ Christina said from behind him.
‘If this works…’ he said with a nervous smile. ‘Since now.’
When a crackling voice had fi
nally introduced itself as coming from Warsaw, she couldn’t hold back and hugged him from behind, hard and long enough to force him to finally drop the microphone and plead to be allowed to breathe.
The voice had turned out to belong to one of the amateur enthusiasts who had helped to locate the strange number stations, and while Tetrapak explained with careful adjustments what he needed help with now, Christina had wandered off into the kitchen. Lying in one of the drawers was a retired, ancient laptop that had been handed down through the entire family until no one wanted to inherit it any more, and she’d taken it out into the living room, sat down on the sofa and waited for it to be ready for use. With Tetrapak’s permission she had borrowed Palmgren’s phone and logged in to the newspaper’s publishing utility. After that she’d ended up sitting on one of the sofas, with Palmgren opposite, and the sound from the radio in William’s study drifting through.
In the middle of everything, it gave a strange sense of calm.
‘What are you going to do?’ asked Palmgren.
‘I’m going to do what Tetrapak said. I’m going to create some news.’
She had smiled a sad smile, glanced down at the screen and placed her fingers on the keyboard. And as she typed the headline, the tears began to flow.
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Now she was sitting there in the early morning light, reading the words over and over again, pressing the key to refresh, with her eyes fixed on the same point on the screen throughout: the counter, the little graphic that showed how many people had read her article, and their locations.
She watched it click upwards as people woke up and read her column on their tablets over breakfast, on their phones on the way to work, in the office before the working day got started. Hundreds, thousands of readers from all over the country. And she didn’t care about any of them.
By the time Tetrapak came in and said he was finished, Palmgren had already fallen asleep on one of the sofas.
‘I don’t know what we’ve got in,’ she said quietly, ‘I haven’t been here for a while. But if there’s tea, would you like some?’
Tetrapak nodded his yes please, and then closed the lid on the laptop, stood up, and followed her to the kitchen. Had she stayed where she was, she would have seen the counter tick up another digit. And that the reader who’d just clicked was in Poland.
William closed the toilet door behind him, lined up the toiletries on the dirty washbasin and looked at himself in the mirror. Only then did he perceive that he was shaking. It could be the sleep deprivation of course. It wasn’t inconceivable that it was down to the jet-black coffee he’d forced down along with his breakfast. Above all though, it was because of the feeling of hope. The restlessness, the desire to get somewhere, the sensation that three and a half seconds spent in this place was four seconds too long.
He’d read the article twice before he caught on. It had turned out to be an editorial, a calm, sorrowful reflection on life, an open-hearted account of how Christina Sandberg had lost her daughter, and how much it hurts when a life comes to an end.
At first he hadn’t been sure whether to be angry, or hurt, or both. Here he was, in a foreign country, reading about them, about her and Sara and himself, about their shared misfortune, and how long had it been? A bit more than twenty-four hours? Could she not have let the wounds heal for a bit longer, tried to quell her hunger for clicks, just for a little while?
The major part of the article concerned their trip to Warsaw. She mentioned no names, and she blamed herself at least as much as she blamed him, but what surprised him was that their trip had been embellished. Details had been added–details that, for a start, were not true, and what’s more added nothing to the story–and she named places and times that didn’t match, almost as though she’d thrown the article together on the fly without bothering to check what had actually happened.
At which point his anger gave way to doubt.
Christina Sandberg? It couldn’t be. The woman with a whole shelf full of prizes, who lectured at universities and delivered talks to other journalists… if there was one thing she clung to, above all else, it was facts. Of course they argued sometimes, she and William, about the tabloid culture and her constant search for angles and drama. But the foundation was always the truth, and facts were something that could not be knowingly got wrong.
In spite of that, she had written an editorial that was full of make-believe.
He and Christina had certainly not arranged an important meeting in Warsaw. Not with–as she put it–a man who would have a great impact on their lives. That had just happened. Had she forgotten that? And even if they had arranged to meet, there was no way it could have been on a Wednesday, since they were only there for one weekend. Why, then, was she writing that stuff? Meaningless details that didn’t add anything for the reader, but that stuck out as irritating errors for one single person in the entire world.
As soon as he’d voiced that question inside his head, he realised what the answer was. After reading it for the third time, he could feel his heart pounding. Now, it all made perfect sense. What he was reading wasn’t an editorial at all, and the factual errors were not irrelevant details. What she’d written was a message, and now he loved her again, or at least knew why he once had.
Christina Sandberg hadn’t written about a meeting that had taken place. She’d written about a meeting that was about to.
Once William had managed to wet his hair in the sink and to work the cheap hand soap into something resembling a lather, he grasped his greying locks and tugged the razor blade through the taut tufts. Each new cut chafed his scalp, and when he’d finally made it all the way from one side of his head to the other he opened a new, sharp razor and pulled it across his head in long, deliberate strokes. Finally, he put it down on the edge of the washbasin. He stood there looking at his own reflection for a long time. The eyes were his, but their setting was all wrong, and for a moment he realised he felt like he was observing someone else. That made him feel calmer.
He was being pursued from two directions: the police, first of all, and then a Consciousness that was everywhere and nowhere, and whatever awaited him in Warsaw he wanted to be able to get to it without being discovered. He put on his new workwear, and on his way out past the till he invested twenty-five zloty in a pair of reading glasses that could hopefully be passed off as something you might wear all the time.
Just after eleven, a German family stopped at a petrol station just south of Przasnysz, and they left with a shaven-headed hitchhiker in specs. He sat there in the back seat for over an hour, in between two child strangers, their nervous parents facing backwards in the front seats singing nursery rhymes to divert their thoughts from the impending catastrophe. We’re going on holiday, they said, but it wasn’t the truth. Theirs was a trip to wherever, to any land without nuclear power.
He, meanwhile, was on his way to a meeting that his wife had arranged via a coded message that only he could have deciphered.
65
Christina sat by the kitchen window and looked out over the rooftops, a view she’d seen so many times before. An icy blue sky tried to force its way through the clouds for the first time for longer than she could remember, bringing warm rays of light that made the thin blanket of snow glisten.
She’d done what she could. The discs had been found, the content sent to Warsaw. Hopefully it would reach William in time, but now there was nothing she could do to change anything. It was as though that struggle had kept her going, she’d been driven by it, and now, when she was done, she was left with just the hole and the memories.
When Palmgren came into the kitchen and apologised for having fallen asleep, it was already getting on for mid-afternoon.
‘Are you going to work?’ she asked, and felt her heart stir as she spoke. It was the question she’d asked many thousands of times before, to a man standing on that very spot. A completely different man, and a different time.
‘I think th
ey’d probably appreciate that,’ said Palmgren. And then he turned to include Strandell before he went on: ‘Thank you. Thanks for a job well done. And I mean it this time.’
Everywhere you looked, there were signs of a world on the edge. The pavements in central Warsaw were all but empty, just the odd person here and there, rapid footsteps away from the rain and the cold and the fear that were hanging in the air. Police cars were stationed at crossroads and in car parks, blue lights flashing to advertise their presence, uniformed officers patrolling quietly in the wet, all looking for the tiniest deviation from normality.
The deviation stood at the top of the round steps leading up to the congress hall. There he was, William Sandberg, waiting between two of the Palace of Culture and Sport’s monumental pillars, watching his own reflection in the glass doors, tall and locked and dark and with the large foyer beyond them screened off by heavy curtains.
It was like a memory coming back to you long after the party was over. As though summer and joy and complimentary buffets were still in there somewhere, as if time was something you could move around in freely, and he had just happened to pick the wrong door. Somewhere was another reality going on, one where he was wearing sunglasses and an unbuttoned shirt, where Christina was at his side, Sara a couple of steps behind, and everything could still turn out okay.
But the reality where William found himself was strikingly cold. The daylight, in as much as there had been any, had already begun to sink away. It was ten past three, and that made him feel uneasy. Unless he’d completely misinterpreted Christina’s message, that meant that the appointed time had been and gone, and it was fair to say that William had bad experiences of waiting to meet people when he didn’t know who was going to turn up.
Acts of Vanishing Page 36