by Greg Egan
Prabir held his notepad up to the moonlight. The map showed them less than ten kilometres from their destination. Instead of heading straight for the northernmost island, he decided to aim slightly to the west of it. If the map turned out to be perfect he’d still spot the land, and then he could turn towards it. But he couldn’t trust the map to be accurate down to the last kilometre, so it seemed safer to risk missing their target by veering too far west; they’d still hit the main island of the group, Yamdena, in another fifty kilometres. Going too far east would send them down through the Arafura Sea, towards the northern coast of Australia, six hundred kilometres away. The error would eventually become obvious, but he didn’t have the fuel for much backtracking.
When the cliffs came into view, Prabir wondered if he was hallucinating, conjuring up the sight out of sheer need. But the land was real; the journey was almost over. He checked the notepad: the software showed the boat north-west of the island … but the cliffs were to his right. If he’d aimed true, they would have missed the islands completely.
As they drew nearer, Prabir saw that the cliffs didn’t quite meet the water; there was a narrow, rocky beach below. He had no idea whether this island was inhabited, but he felt sure that his parents would be waiting here: it was the nearest land, the simplest possible choice. He thought of circumnavigating the island, looking for the boat they’d used to make the crossing, but he didn’t trust himself to spot it in the dark. If he’d had any reason to believe that there was a harbour or a jetty he would have searched for that, but he wasn’t prepared to chase after the mere possibility.
He steered straight for the beach.
There was a grinding sound at his feet and the boat came to a shuddering halt. Madhusree rolled off the bench where she’d been sleeping, into the gap between the bench and the bow. Prabir grabbed the food bag beside him, dropped his notepad in, zipped it closed and draped the handle around his neck. Then he leapt forward and reached for Madhusree; she was only just waking, whimpering and confused. He lifted her up, wrapped his arms around her, and jumped into the water.
His feet touched rock. The water was waist high.
Prabir started crying, shaking with relief and unused adrenaline. Madhusree gazed at him uncertainly, as if trying to decide between a show of sympathy and a competitive display of tears.
She said tentatively, ‘I bumped my head.’
Prabir wiped his eyes with the heel of one palm. ‘Did you, darling? I’m sorry.’
He waded to the shore and put her down, then went back for the other two bags, then again for the unopened water can. The boat was dented, but the floor appeared dry; the composite hull was tougher than he’d realised.
He rested on the pebble-strewn beach, using the clothes bag as a pillow, cradling Madhusree on top of him. They were both still wearing their life jackets; when he closed his eyes, the universe shrank to the smell and squeak of plastic.
Prabir was woken by someone shouting a single word, far away. He listened for a while, but there was nothing more. Maybe he’d dreamt it.
It was still dark. He manoeuvred Madhusree on to one side, and checked his watch. It was just after four.
He’d dreamt that his father was standing at the top of the cliffs, calling his name. But if the image had only been a dream, the sound might still have been real.
Prabir rose to his feet, leaving Madhusree lying where he’d been. He’d have to take her with him if he explored the top of the cliffs. He couldn’t bring much else, though. He’d make do with a canteen of water.
He urinated into the sea, shivering. The stones were cold beneath his feet. He’d forgotten to bring shoes.
He walked along the beach for fifteen minutes before he found a break in the cliff wall, with a steep rocky path to the top. He scrambled up, nearly losing his footing half a dozen times. Madhusree slept on in his arms, oblivious.
There was thick coarse grass at the top of the cliff, and what he guessed was dense jungle in the distance. There was no fire, no light, no sign of life. The moonlight seemed to reveal that there was no one but the two of them from the cliff edge to the jungle, but then Prabir heard the voice again.
It was a man’s voice, but it wasn’t his father. The word he was shouting was ‘Allah!’
Prabir walked towards the sound, aware of the danger but tired of thinking of nothing else. His parents should have been there to meet him on the beach. He’d done all he could to get Madhusree to safety; anything that happened now was their fault.
He found the man lying on his back in the grass. He was an Indonesian soldier, almost shaven-headed, dressed in neat green camouflage and combat boots. He looked about nineteen. Some kind of long-barrelled weapon lay by his side.
Prabir said, in his halting Indonesian, ‘We’re friends, we won’t hurt you.’
The man turned on his side, fear in his eyes, clutching at his weapon. His face shone with sweat. There was a huge dark stain in his shirt over his abdomen.
Prabir said, ‘I’ll get help. Tell me where to go.’
The man stared at him mistrustfully. Finally he said, ‘I don’t know where they are. I don’t know where to send you.’
Prabir squatted down and offered him the canteen. The man hesitated, then took it and drank from it. When he offered it back, Prabir said, ‘Keep it.’ He still had ten litres on the beach.
It was hard to know how to talk to the soldier without angering him, but Prabir suggested tentatively, ‘The local people might help you.’
The man shook his head, grimacing, closing his eyes against the pain.
Madhusree woke, yawning and befuddled. She took in her new surroundings, then gazed at Prabir with intense disappointment. ‘I want Ma!’
The man opened his eyes and smiled at her. He propped himself up and held out his arms. Madhusree shook her head, unafraid but unwilling to indulge this stranger. He gave an understanding shrug, then screwed up his face suddenly and cried out again, ‘Allah!’ Tears escaped his eyelids and flowed down his cheeks.
Prabir felt his legs grow weak. He sat down in the grass, clutching Madhusree to his chest. There were so many things he’d forgotten to bring from the island: bandages, painkillers, antibiotics.
Madhusree dozed off again. The man fell silent; he seemed to have lost consciousness, though he was still breathing loudly. Prabir wondered if he really believed in Allah – an Allah who could send his comrades back to help him, or at least welcome him into Paradise – or if he’d merely been shouting the word from habit, like a curse. When Prabir had asked his father why so many people believed in gods, his father had said, ‘When things are hard, there’s a part of everyone that wants to believe there’s someone watching over them. Someone ready to help, or even just to judge their actions and acknowledge that they’ve done their best. But that’s not the way the world is.’
Prabir put Madhusree down on the grass; she stirred unhappily, but didn’t wake. He walked over to the soldier and sat beside him, cradling the dying man’s head in his arms.
Just before dawn, with birds screaming in the jungle, two heavily bearded men in ragged clothes approached.
Prabir said, ‘Don’t kill us. He won’t hurt anyone. He just needs a doctor. He can still be saved.’
One of the men lifted Madhusree into his arms, then grabbed Prabir by the shoulder and jerked him to his feet.
The other man squatted by the soldier and drew a knife. As Prabir was being led away, he heard a choking sound, like a swimmer coughing up sea water. He didn’t look back, and after a few seconds it stopped.
PART TWO
5
The detention camp was ten kilometres out of Exmouth, a small town on the north-west coast of Australia. Prabir found this puzzling, because almost everyone in the camp had come ashore at least a thousand kilometres further north. He knew that Darwin was home to a large community of Indonesian exiles, sympathetic people with invaluable local knowledge who would have happily visited the camp and offered advice, if it had
only been closer. And though the government provided legal aid to help the detainees apply for refugee status, there were no lawyers in Exmouth, so they all had to travel great distances from Perth or Darwin. The camp had only one phone for twelve hundred inmates, so the lawyers had little choice but to make the trip in person, and this ate away at the time they might otherwise have spent on actual casework – not least because the cost of travel came out of each applicant’s legal aid allocation.
It was several weeks before it occurred to him that the location had been chosen for precisely these reasons.
The ABRMS guerrillas had dumped Prabir and Madhusree on Yamdena, where a Chinese woman from eastern Java had taken pity on them and paid for them to join her family on a boat south. But the family had relatives in Sydney to sponsor them, and they’d left the camp after a month.
Six months later, Prabir overheard a social worker telling one of the guards, ‘I’m sure we can adopt out the girl; she’s young enough, and she’s pretty cute. But her brother’s a complete basket case. You’re going to be stuck with him for years.’
The next time the lawyers made their trek into the wilderness, Prabir spoke his first words to anyone but Madhusree since the Chinese family had left.
He said, ‘I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want asylum here. We have to go to my mother’s cousin Amita, in Toronto.’
The lawyer said, ‘Cousin Amita? Do you know her full name?’
Prabir shook his head. ‘But she teaches at a university there. She’ll be in their directory. You could find her email address in no time.’
The lawyer looked sceptical, but she slid her notepad across the desk to Prabir. ‘Why don’t you do the honours?’
He stared down at the machine. ‘I’ll look up her address, but would you talk to her, please?’ Prabir had never met Amita, or even spoken to her. ‘I might say something foolish and ruin everything.’
Amita and her partner Keith met them at the airport, signing for them and taking them from the social worker. Madhusree allowed them each a turn at holding her and pulling baby faces; Prabir had lectured her for hours on the need to make a good impression.
In the car, Keith drove, and Amita rode in the back with them. Madhusree – who’d stayed awake for all five flights, entranced by the views – fell asleep in Prabir’s arms. Keith pointed out Toronto’s landmarks, and seemed to expect Prabir to be amazed by every large building.
Amita said, ‘I have something for you, Prabir.’ She handed him a small, moulded plastic object that looked like a hearing aid.
Prabir said, ‘Thank you.’ He was too nervous to ask what it was. He slipped it into his pocket.
Amita smiled indulgently. ‘Put it in your ear, darling. That’s what it’s for.’
Reluctantly, Prabir fished it out and complied. A woman’s voice said, ‘Don’t be sad.’ What was it, a radio? He waited for something more. After a few seconds, the voice repeated, ‘Don’t be sad.’
Amita was watching him expectantly. Prabir thought it best to tell her straight away, lest he be blamed for damaging the gift. ‘I think it’s broken. It just keeps repeating itself.’
Amita laughed. ‘That’s what it’s meant to do. It’s a sample mantra: it reads your mood, and gives you a message to cheer you up, whenever you need it.’
‘Don’t be sad,’ said the earpiece.
‘I chose the sample myself,’ Amita explained proudly. ‘It’s taken from an old Sonic Youth song. But of course you can reprogram it with anything you like.’
Prabir tried hard to look grateful. ‘Thank you, Amita. It’s wonderful.’ He had to wait until they were home and he was safely in the toilet with the door locked before he could free himself from the inane chant. He unscrewed the device easily, and his first thought was to drop the battery into the toilet bowl, but then he feared it might resist flushing, or Amita might ask for the device back to show him how to load a new sample, and realise what he’d done from its diminished weight.
Inspiration struck: he reversed the button-shaped cell, swapping positive for negative, and re-assembled the earpiece. It was mute. It also rendered him partially deaf, but that was a small price to pay. He could find out later how to wipe the sample while still running the circuitry that let him hear normally.
Prabir stared down at his shoes. He was shaking with anger, but he had to be polite to Amita and Keith, or they’d separate him from Madhusree.
The house was an endless succession of cavernous rooms painted white; it made him feel disembodied. Amita had put Madhusree down to sleep, in a room all her own. Now she showed Prabir his room; it was even larger than Madhusree’s, and despite all the furniture and gadgets it contained, there was a vast amount of unused floor space. Prabir thanked Amita for everything – struggling to conceal his dismay at the sense of debt he felt from being showered with gifts like this – before suggesting that they move Madhusree in with him. ‘She’s not used to being alone.’
Amita and Keith exchanged glances. Amita said, ‘All right. Maybe for a week or two.’
After dinner, Keith bade them goodnight and drove away. Prabir was confused. ‘Doesn’t he live here?’
Amita shook her head. ‘We’re separated. But we’re still good friends, and he’s agreed to spend some time here now that you and Madhusree have arrived.’
‘But why?’ Prabir wanted to kick himself as soon as the words escaped his lips. Amita had made great sacrifices for his sake; he had to put things more diplomatically.
Amita explained, ‘I decided that you and your sister should be exposed to both male and female narratives.’
‘You mean … he’ll help you read to us?’ Prabir didn’t want to sound ungrateful, but surely Amita would be relieved to hear that there was no need to have her ex-lover hanging around just to do the male voices in bedtime stories. ‘I can read for myself. And we could take turns reading to Madhusree.’
Madhusree interjected. ‘I can read, too!’ This wasn’t true, but Prabir had taught her the Latin alphabet in the camp, and her spoken English was already as good as her Bengali.
Amita sighed with amusement and tousled Prabir’s hair. ‘I meant our personal narratives, funny boy. Though all such texts are fluidly gendered, in order to decode and contextualise your own experiences you’ll benefit from familiarity with at least the fundamental binary templates.’
Prabir glanced discreetly at the wine bottle in the middle of the table.
In bed, he lay awake for hours, cocooned in crisp sheets and a heavy blanket. It was cold, he needed the bedclothes, but he felt like he was in a straitjacket. He wasn’t troubled by the unfamiliar shadows in the room, or the faint traffic sounds that faded into silence, though he’d grown used to listening to the chain-smoking men in the camp hawking up mucus all night. It wasn’t just pointless feeling homesick, it was meaningless: there was no right way the room could have looked, no comfort the sounds of the night could have delivered. From his hammock on the island, or his bed in Calcutta, his parents would still have been dead.
He watched Madhusree sleeping. They would never reach the shore, they would never reach safety. There was no such thing. It had all been in his head.
The next time Keith was in the house, Prabir took the opportunity to interrogate him.
‘How did you meet Amita?’ he asked innocently. Amita was out on some errand, so they were alone in the living room with Madhusree, who was playing delightedly with the puppy Keith had brought for her.
‘It was at a performance space in the city,’ Keith began tentatively. ‘Twelve years ago.’ He frowned, struggling to dredge up details. ‘The Anorexic Androgynes were reciting the Unabomber Manifesto, with backing music by Egregious Beards.’ He added helpfully, ‘They were a Country Dada band, but they broke up years ago.’
Prabir wasn’t interested in any of this; he wanted to hear about the couple’s passion for knowledge. ‘So how did you end up working at the university together?’
‘Well, I’d already done a PhD in
X-Files Theory at UCLA, and Amita was just starting her Masters in Diana Studies with the University of Leeds, via the net. U Toronto was in the process of opening its own Department of Transgressive Discourse – at last! – so it was only natural that we both applied for positions.’
When Prabir pressed Keith for explanations of all the phrases he didn’t understand in this account, his heart sank. ‘And this is what Amita has done for the last twelve years?’
Keith laughed. ‘No, no, of course not! That was just her Masters; she’s moved on. For her doctorate she tackled an entirely different subject: developing an interactive graphic novel of Conrad’s Nostromo, as an exercise in post-colonial transliteracy. Nostromo becomes a comic-book superhero in Lycra, who loses his powers whenever he’s exposed to radiation from silver ingots. This ironises and recontextualises Conrad’s own highly ambiguous relationship with the economic benefits of imperialism, and cleverly undermines the whole myth of the artist as quasi-divine standard-bearer for transcendent morality.’
Prabir was beginning to wonder if Keith was playing an elaborate joke on him. ‘And what is she studying now?’
Keith smiled proudly. ‘For the past four years, she’s been working on a radical new paradigm in computing. She’s still had no luck getting funding to build a prototype, but that can only be a matter of time.’
‘Amita has designed a computer?’ Now Prabir knew he was being taken for a ride. ‘When did she find time to study engineering?’
‘Oh, she’ll hire an engineer when she gets funding.’ Keith waved a hand dismissively. ‘Her contribution is purely intellectual. Mathematical.’
‘Mathematical?’
Keith regarded him dubiously. ‘You might be a bit young to understand this. Do you know how computers work, Prabir?’
‘More or less.’