by Adam Roberts
But I held bak, for reasons that were not altogether clear to me. In retrospect it is clear that I was grieving the death of the son I did not have; and that the physical presence of the two sons I did, the two boys who were mine (who were not mine) would have been too astringent an irritant to my soul. But I distracted myself with exaggerated memories of the oppression of gravity. Besides, Gradi had a sort of Upland victory tour to embark upon, travelling from house to house, addressing rooms filled with alarmingly hyper-happy Uplanders — looking as ill-kempt and cadaverous as tramps but possessed by an almost religious fervour aggravated to near-mania by the delight of victory at last after long months in which the only certainty had been the certainty of defeat. They chanted her name so loud, so long, with such perfect rhythmic co-ordination that the meaning drained from the word and it became as random a sound as the echo of surf sounding against the smooth curved interior of a coastal cave.
Grah-di, Grah-di!
Grah-di, Grah-di!
Grah-di, Grah-di!
I asked her: did you know all along that we were going to win this war?
‘Know,’ she said, in a twisty voice. ‘I wouldn’t say “know” is the right word.’
‘I thought we would lose,’ I said. ‘I thought it before the war started. And when it did start I thought we had lost. I thought it was just a matter of time.’
‘Nobody seemed to figure,’ she explained, glibly, as if this was something she had said many times over to many people (as it probably was) ‘just how vulnerable these big US bases were. Pressurised canisters in vacuum - a little jab would explode them. Nobody seemed to consider that we weren’t in the same predicament.’
‘So you knew,’ I said, speaking very low, very quietly. She sensed something in my tone, and her body language settled down, began mimiking the depressed hunch and inward curl of mine. ‘You knew,’ I pressed, ‘that the counterattak would be devastating.’
She paused before replying. ‘We had to time it right,’ she said, eventually.
‘And the best part of a year went by — ’
‘It was the time necessary to lull the Americans into a sense,’ she interrupted. But then she changed tak: ‘It served several purposes. It bonded us, as a nation. Those Uplanders who lived through that time have been changed by it, because of the suffering, turned from individuals, selfish and rich, into citizens of something larger. It involved pain, I know, but when you’re giving birth to a new nation there are bound to be labor pains — ’ and she stopped speaking, because that, of course, was my point.
I opened my mouth to speak, but she knew wat I was going to say, so there was little point in my saying it out loud, so I shut my mouth again. You, Gradi, decided not to fight a war pregnant, or with a new baby. You, Gradi, waited until the child in you had died, and only after that did you strike bak. The timing of your pregnancy, Gradi — which is to say, the life of my only child - was an inconvenience to your political nation-building, so you sacrificed the child. Did I make an effort, in myself, to surmount my resentment and forgive her? I did not. It was all part of that same spiritual lethargy, which is sometimes called depression, which had filled me toe to crown. I was pressurised with it, as if it kept seeping out of my bones and inner organs, bloating me with misery. I lived with that stuk, agonised sensation of a pressure waiting to be relieved in some great bursting-out, although it did not come in the Uplands. Instead I lived on in that crepuscular state, eating, sleeping, watching the screen. I accompanied Gradi on the first few of her victory visits to the interminable succession of crowded, dim, malodorous halls, but I suppose it became obvious to those around the Leader that her grey-faced, glum-faced husband floating silently in the bakground was doing nothing more than weakening the more general mood of triumph. I was not asked to cease my attendance. I just stopped going along with her.
Much of wat happened even in the Uplands, then, struk me only at second hand. It is true as far as I know that there was a delighted influx of those Uplanders who had been trapped downbelow by the war, together with a press of excited groundlings whose imagination had been captured by our heroic struggle against the superpower and wanted to move up - to be part of Gradi’s clean new style of nation. I did not meet these people personally, although the EU news media celebrated them as new pilgrim-emigrants, leaving compromised terra for a better life in the sky.
It all meant very little to me.
Finally we flew down, Gradi and I, to the strip outside Helsinki. Re-entering gravity was much harder than I had anticipated, even though, in the pessimism of my depression, I had anticipated wat I thought the worst. But this was continual bone-pain, and the crushing asthmatic inability to breathe properly as if my lungs were swaddled with metal hoops. It was that dispiriting inability to do so much as lift a hand to my face to scratch my itchy nose — to struggle pathetically with the hand ten centimetres above the armrest as if trying to break the cord that holds it down, before eventually giving up and letting it collapse bak down. Pphhh. We rode in chairs, slotted in the passenger section of our energCar, bak to the Helsinki house to find our sons waiting for us in the front room. They were both rather oddly still, as if not knowing wat to make of us. They had not seen us for the best part of a year, and during that time their intermittent but real, physical apprehension of father and mother had been supplanted by the virtual figures of Gradisil and Paul who appeared in the news media (Gradisil appearing a great deal more than Paul, of course). So they did not know to whom to address themselves; their fleshly progenitors eclipsed by the more real light-and-information simulacra that haunted screen media and virtualities.
I am trying to anticipate the sorts of questions you might want to ask me, since this antique medium is not one that permits exchange between compositor and audience. But I am also trying to give you credit. The obvious handful of related questions - at wat point did you decide to betray Gradisil? Was there a proximate cause, a trigger that pushed you over the edge, or was it a longer-term build-up of resentment? Did you not think of us, when you did this? Did you approach the Americans or did they approach you? — are in fact trivial variations of the more essential question - why betray Gradisil to the Americans? - and that is a question that concedes its banality and pointlessness as soon as it is asked. Can you really think of an answer to it that will satisfy you? All betrayal is the same quantity. Faced with sexual infidelity, the wounded husband will ask the wife ‘did you think of me when you were with him?’ The only acceptable answer (though few realise this) is yes — I only fuked him to get at you, because this leaves us free, if we are strong enough, to believe that we still occupy the important parts of our lover’s mind. But the truth is always no, the unspeakable no; the truth is always I was so caught up in my passion with him, I had no thoughts except for him and in fact hardly any thoughts at all. That’s the acid of betrayal. It is not to do with losing unique possession of the lover’s body; it is to do with a much more primal terror, of being ignored. The impossibility of coming to terms with the fact that her mind is elsewhere than where you are. And that is why betrayal, to the betrayed, always feels so monstrously unequal. For I could not put my mind elsewhere than where Gradi was: she was the whole circular horizon of my life, the sun rose and the sun set and never left where she was. I thought about her all the time; I still do. But the pain was understanding that this complete location within the love object was not reciprocal. Gradi was kind to me, and even sometimes I suppose loving, but only when she was reminded that I existed.
Of course, in another sense, the more specific questions are truer to the heart’s experience of being betrayed. Wat haunts the mind of the cukolded man is not the windy philosophic generalisations about the importance of being true and the wikedness of living the lie: it is the horrid specificities: it is the eagerness with which she got onto all fours to allow him access; or the precise way she lifted her knees up to her shoulders as she lay on her bak; or the crumpled, gasping expression of ecstasy she surely adopted
underneath his pounding body; her kissing him right there, or begging him to slide his tongue forcefully into her just there. It is the plague of details that collapses the mind. I fretted and wept over the specifics of wat Liu and Gradi did in their fuking; and fretted and wept over wat Mat and Gradi did in their fuking. But I endured it, because I knew in my heart that neither of these men had supplanted me in Gradi’s heart; on the contrary, their positions were precisely as precarious as was my own, and strange to say, there was a certain miserable consolation in that fact.
But the Uplands themselves, the idea of the Uplands, was a different sort of rival. I think I had fooled myself into thinking that it was as much my dream as Gradi’s, a new nation that was a new sort of nation, and so on (and so on and so on and so on). But I didn’t really care. No man, I’m tempted to suggest, can ever really care for something as non-specific as nation. Men don’t live and die for ideas. Men are simple creatures; we fixate on individuals, and measure our triumphs in individual terms (I have fuked this many individuals, I can see from their faces that these individuals esteem me). Women may be different. Wat might we say? That they are better tuned to the hazy indistinctness of futurity, because they carry inside them fleshly kernels that need to be seed-bedded in that realm? They think with their hearts of abstracts like home, land, nation, the various manifestations of the nest they crave hard enough to construct for themselves. This flirts with essentialism, of course; but although pharmakos can swap straight for gay and gay for straight, which is just a matter of taste, nobody has yet concocted a pharmakos that actually interchanges male and female, and I don’t believe they will, for this is not taste but essence.
I walked with callipers, dolefully shepherding my boys to the park to play, sitting exhausted with the physical effort on the park bench. Gradi was more knoked over than I had ever seen her, she spent a week in bed. Klara was there, beaming and exentric with a sheer happiness I had never seen before. ‘I’m proud of you!’ she cried, more than once. ‘You took on America and you defeated them! I’m proud of you!’
Wat happened next, after an indeterminate length of time, is that I was approached by two American agents. Helsinki was, suddenly, verminous with Americans in that summer and autumn, immediately after the victory. This was the summer of the elongated negotiations between US and EU, held in Paris, from which city many Americans decided, despite the distance and lak of obvious touristas appeal, to ‘pop over’ to Helsinki. In fact the main tourist attraction was Gradi herself; so much so that she was compelled to move out of our house altogether, and instead took up a ground-based version of her Upland house-to-house existence. She stayed with a number of different friends, in Finland-EU and Russia-EU, and soon she was commuting, on a deliberately unpredictable schedule, between the ground and the Uplands once more. ‘This,’ she conceded in one of the few conversations à deux we had during that time, ‘is harder than the war, in some ways. The really crucial thing is not to lose the momentum. There isn’t the intense US pressure there was during the war.’
‘Which is a good thing,’ I tried.
‘You can’t make diamonds out of coal without pressure,’ she bounced bak, beamingly. ‘And now the only person who can keep applying that pressure is me.’ She was explaining why she had to return to the Uplands, without me, so soon after touching down. I didn’t fight it. Wat should I resent?
So she flew up, like a monkey rattling expertly up through the branches of the tallest tree, up to where the sky goes cobalt, and purple, and blak, and she was turned into her screen image, beaming into the camera lens and talking fluently about her new nation, her new kind of nation.
We still had gawkers outside the Helsinki house, even though it was very publicly known that Gradi was not in residence. Finnish authorities erected a fence, but I didn’t much care one way or the other. The days laked a sharp enough leading edge to separate themselves one from another in my grey brain.
And then, abruptly (it seemed to me) it was summer. Scrub had become grass, green as money and much more communal. Flies dangled from a million incredibly slender threads and swung their endless pendulum trajectories in the air. The winter (where had it gone so suddenly?) had shrunken to a perfect circle of ice and transformed itself into the sun, fat and white in the sky, the blue-grey depth, the Atlantic swell of blue; and the heat was coming not from that pale disk but seemingly from the air itself, from all around.
I would take the boys to school, for they were now of school age. To be honest (and if I am not honest then there is little point of these memories) it was rarely I who took them to school: Kirsi did, or else Kimoko Hahn, a slender but muscular bodyguard we hired on our return to Finland. But on occasion I grew so weary of the indoors that I would walk the pavements to the nearest Anglophone school. After seeing them off at the gates I might sit in a coffee shop and seek to compensate for the slakness of my mood with caffeine.
One morning, in the late autumn, a woman approached me: slim-bodied, dark haired, with tiny, precise features of the sort that looked prettier in photographs than they did in real life. She asked ‘Do you mind if I sit with you?’ in an East Coast US accent, and I was so habituated to my misery that I could not think of a way of brushing her off. So she settled in the seat opposite me and nursed her latte in silence for a while. Then she sat bak, rather too obviously selecting gambit number eight (or watever) from her mental palmcomp, and said:
‘I could pretend to be an innocent tourist and start up a conversation, ’ she said, setting her features into an expression that almost managed ironic-pleasant. She smiled at me. Had she studied flirting at the State University of New York her play could not have been more obvious. I looked for a while at her face, and thought to myself that I must be a blank page in watever file American Intelligence kept on the Uplands if this was wat they thought would be likely to seduce me. There was no heat emanating from her white-rose skin, her mint-blue eyes, her complete calmness in the face of the enemy sitting opposite the table.
I cleared my throat. ‘You obviously know who I am.’
‘You’ve obviously guessed who I am,’ she countered, and hazarded a smile. It was the smile equivalent of a chord combined of C, D flat and G sharp. I did not believe her - I don’t mean believe wat she said, I mean simply, believe in her.
‘Wat do you want?’ I asked.
‘Just to talk,’ she said, leaning in a little. It occurred to me to wonder how far she had been briefed to go with me; to wat extent actual intelligence operatives resembled their screen imitators - physical seduction? Drugs? Money? It was too absurd even to contemplate. I couldn’t believe I was in this situation. I sniffed.
‘You’re really not interested in me,’ I said, sounding sulkier and more resentful than I intended. ‘Really, you’re interested in Gradi, and only her.’
‘Do you want me to be interested in you?’
I swallowed. ‘That’s a little over-obvious of you.’
‘Gradisil is an interesting woman,’ she said ingenuously. ‘But then again’ (the smile again) ‘you’re an interesting man.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m not. I’m dull, far too dull, to be of interest to you, and too dull even to betray Gradisil. That’s how dull I am.’
‘Betrayal?’ She pushed her top lip up and squeezed her thin, proportionate nose into a series of waxy wrinkles. ‘You’re not reading me right. That’s not wat I want to talk to you about — at all. Look, there’s somebody I’d like you to meet, right here, right now.’
I stood up. I hadn’t even tasted my coffee; it was still cooling. I had comme d’habitude over-estimated the amount of muscular effort required by the action of ‘rising from a chair’ under the soggy omnipresence of this oppressive gravity, and I ended up bouncing ridiculously on my heels. I wished I had a witty rejoinder with which to sting the smile from her face, but I could think of nothing.
‘Paul,’ she said as I left; not entreating, or wheedling, but simply saying my name. I walked out. I walked along Bul
evarden in a daze. The fashion for advertising automata had only just reached Finland, a decade out of synch with the rest of the consumerist world; so the boulevard looked strange, busy with pink humanoid figures bustling and bowing and spouting their pre-recorded spiels in the universal language of advertising, Why not visit Florida where tourists are welcome? Discovered by Ponce de Leon in the early sixteenth century, it is — Not all vatgrown and seacultured foodstuffs are revolting! Talk to me for further information on an exciting new development in food technology and — This season’s ‘must-have’, tailored books, sensitively crafted by the finest AIs, the classics of literature are now available with yourself and your loved one written in, replacing the original characters, including physical description and bakstory details — Midget toys, guaranteed safe for all children, why not ask me about — Pharmakos can’t solve everything; ask me about Dr Nik’s Traditional Drug Remedies from the twentieth century — Have you tried the new hydrodynamic telephones? Ask me about their new features — and so on. Their voices were modulated and pleasant, and the programmed gestures timidly imploring. In France, where they had long since ceased to be intriguing novelties, passers-by did more than ignore these dolls, with their candy-pink and chocolate-brown complexions and lit-up eyes: they shoved past them, cuffed or kiked them, and some people went out of their way to assault them, punching and wrenching them, pulling off their heads. To watch the Finns treat these machines with startled courtesy was peculiarly touching, and rather saddening; because, of course, the machines no more deserved courtesy than did any piece of advertising. I felt disgust inside at the stupidity of this: the same human failure to distinguish the valuable from the valueless. People who reflexively blinker their minds to the sufferings of millions of human beings but who will expend prodigious energy on the discomfort of their pet dog. People who believe their car is alive ‘in a practical sense’. Anybody, in fact, who prioritises an ideal which is actually nothing more than a externalisation of some inner yearning or regard onto an outer figment, over an actual: anybody selfish enough to devote their precious human empathy and love and passion to anything inert at all. You can see, of course, of whom I was thinking. For wat is more inert than the idea of a nation?