Hanck would never forget that trip, even though he found it hard to describe. He didn’t recall a single word that was exchanged. Perhaps that was simply because not a word was actually said. On the other hand, he distinctly remembered how he felt. He assumed that it had something to do with the concept of ‘shock’, a word without meaning, worn out and exhausted, a term that had been emptied of all value, plundered and stripped bare, just as these buildings once had been.
Eventually they arrived at the ‘Asylum’, an old car park, isolated from its surroundings by a zone of demolished structures with big open spaces of asphalt and more razed building sites that had been plundered of everything usable. The entire place was enclosed behind a high fence. The lavender van passed through a guarded gate, drove up to the main entrance and stopped.
‘Go in and give them your name,’ said the man with the clipboard. He slammed the door behind Hanck, and the vehicle turned and drove back out through the gate, on its way to the next victim.
The ‘Asylum’ had been used during an epidemic and after that had served mainly as a collection site for the dying and already deceased. When the Wave had ebbed away, a company within the healthcare sector had taken over the facilities. Its operating costs were financed by charities, private donations, minor subsidies from the Administration and large contributions from the Clan. The names of many prominent members were listed on a plaque posted in the lobby. It promoted goodwill.
Hanck entered a reception area with an asphalt floor and fluorescent lights on the ceiling. Sick people sat on benches or lay on the floor, waiting for help. Many were coughing. Some who were on their way out and regarded as cured were received by relatives beaming with joy. But they all spoke in low voices and without undue fuss. It was conspicuously quiet.
He gave his name at the reception desk. A woman dressed in blue sitting behind a window checked a monitor and gave him directions. He went up to a department on the third level, found another small window, and gave his name again, to another blue-clad woman. He was told to wait in a windowless room.
After a short wait a young person of indeterminate sex came over and asked for his name and ID number, then checked to see that this agreed with the information on a filthy piece of paper. Since it did, Hanck was asked to provide a blood sample. He didn’t understand why, but he realised it would be pointless to object. He gave the sample, and the young person thanked him for his co-operation and left.
Half an hour later a woman wearing a blue coat over her blue garb came to the waiting room and asked for Hanck. He got up and shook hands. She introduced herself as a doctor and asked him to follow her into an office.
Hanck sat down on a visitor’s chair with a worn seat cushion. The doctor sat down on the other side of a desk that was covered with computers, piles of loose, dirty papers and well-thumbed case-books.
She took a moment to check the monitor, looking at the results of his blood test. It was apparently sufficiently reassuring for her to take off her face mask. She had a little sore on her lip that she had tried to conceal with some cream.
‘Well . . .’ she said. ‘I suppose you’re wondering why we’ve asked you to come here.’
I wouldn’t exactly call it ‘asked’, thought Hanck. But he didn’t want to make trouble with these people unnecessarily. He said, ‘Yes, I did wonder.’
‘So you have no idea?’
‘No,’ said Hanck. ‘Should I?’
The doctor checked the monitor again, as if looking for some sort of final confirmation. She said, ‘You have a child here with us. He’s about three days old.’
That much Hanck could tell Toby without having to stop and think, to make sure he didn’t say anything that might prove painful. He could also tell him, completely truthfully, how the child had ended up at the ‘Asylum’. They said that the baby simply showed up there one morning, wrapped in swaddling clothes, dumped, or ‘discarded’, as they expressed it. A business card with Hanck’s name and address was stuck in among the wrappings. Clumsily printed on the back were the words: ‘Mother dead.’
But as for the rest, Hanck had to watch what he said. He felt ashamed about the fact that he had been unsympathetic and refused to acknowledge any sort of paternity, in spite of the proof. He hadn’t been especially co-operative even when the evidence was presented to him.
But that wasn’t all. The child was injured. An operation was required to save the child’s life, an extensive and expensive procedure. Hanck had claimed that he didn’t have the money to pay for the costs. The doctor had recommended that he take out a loan. Hanck had then implied that his application for credit would be rejected, since he was officially unemployed. He was a destitute has-been.
The doctor had listened to him, displaying a perfunctory composure and neutral expression. She had heard those excuses before.
‘So,’ she said, ‘what are you getting at?’
Hanck said, ‘I . . . I don’t know.’ That was the truth. He was confused.
‘As for the financial matter,’ said the doctor, ‘that can always be solved. You’re not alone. There’s a boom going on. Presumably it has something to do with the organ music.’ She gave Hanck an interested, almost searching look. Maybe she had her own memories from that night.
But he was in no mood for such things. ‘I can’t decide,’ he said. ‘How is he? What’s going to happen to him?’
The doctor assured Hanck that with a little luck the boy would be restored to full health. She cited a diagnosis in Latin, said that the boy was fragile and exhausted, that ‘he should have been dead’. But he wasn’t. ‘We’ve found infants that have lived for weeks in landslides after an earthquake. With no water and hardly any oxygen. All the adults die, but the newborns survive. They want to live.’
Hanck said, ‘And he does too?’
The doctor unconsciously poked at the little sore on her lip. ‘You haven’t seen him?’
‘No,’ said Hanck. With a candour that would later make him ashamed, and that he would prefer to keep secret, he said, ‘I don’t know if I want to.’
‘Okay,’ said the doctor. She pulled out a file drawer from her desk and took out a form, an old-fashioned bureaucratic questionnaire. That meant that the case was considered of high importance. ‘We need to make sure the child receives the proper attention,’ she said. ‘You can relinquish all responsibility and leave here at once. There are plenty of people in this city who would be more than happy to take care of a child. They don’t care about minor defects. They probably have much worse ones themselves.’
She placed the form on the desk and pushed it towards Hanck. It was simply designed, with information listed next to a couple of boxes that he was supposed to tick off and then sign his name underneath. No enquiries or investigations were required. Five X’s and a tick in the corner, and Hanck could forget about the whole thing.
The fact that he sat there and even considered such a possibility was not something that he wanted to confess to his son, of course. The doctor was businesslike and dispassionate in her demeanour, making no attempt to influence him in either direction. She presented the facts, and if Hanck wanted to leave and continue on with his life as if nothing had happened, he was free to do so. No one would blame him.
‘So how did she die?’ he asked. ‘Rachel.’
‘The mother?’ said the doctor. ‘Was her name Rachel?’ Hanck nodded. ‘Do you have her last name?’
‘No,’ said Hanck. ‘It was just a chance encounter.’
The doctor made note of this, still without displaying the least sign of involvement or any of her own personal views.
Maybe it was the thought of Rachel, the thought of what had happened at that remote field, that made him hesitate before the seductively simple design of the form.
He had left there on a scorchingly hot day, driving a transport filled with old typewriters. He had actually caught a glimpse of her in the rear-view mirror as she slowly plodded across the cracked ground, on her way home, pregnant,
and by all accounts unconcerned about the fact that her child had a father, a real father. But clearly he wasn’t needed any more. They undoubtedly had enough people to fill the position, men of the proper persuasion.
He and Rachel had shared a major second together. That was enough. That was his role. She and her people would take care of the rest. That was how he had perceived the situation.
Obviously something had happened. Otherwise they would never have let the child go.
‘What if I . . . ?’ said Hanck. ‘What if I were to see him first?’
The doctor sat and waited, her expression blank. Not even blinking her eyes. Maybe that too was part of her routine, to sit there quietly and wait for things to happen. Her voice low, ordinary, the way people talk when it’s a matter of life and death.
‘What if I should . . . ? Would . . . ? What if I . . . ?’ He couldn’t say it. The thought was so overwhelming. ‘What if I . . . ? Suppose that . . .’
Finally the doctor intervened. ‘What if you wanted to take care of him?’
‘Yes,’ said Hanck, relieved. It was difficult to think about it, impossible to say. ‘What would happen then?’ he said.
For the first time the doctor smiled. She said, ‘How the hell would I know? Presumably he would grow up big and strong.’
A bit of sarcasm. It lightened the mood. Hanck was not prepared to make the choice that had been presented to him; he was having a hard time thinking clearly. He was prepared to let someone else do it for him. Although he didn’t know who that might be. One of these godlike doctors had already saved the child from death. They had already made that decision. Now they had left the rest up to him.
He hadn’t yet seen him, the boy who would make the choice for him, the boy who would make the whole matter so simple that he would grow hot, sweaty and deeply troubled at the very thought that it had ever come into question. His only defence was to say to himself: ‘I was actually a different person back them. I didn’t really exist . . .’
The doctor had put on her mask; she handed Hanck a blue smock, cap and mask, and then led him down a corridor with an asphalt floor and strangely dry air.
Through a swinging door they entered the intensive care department. In a small room filled with apparatuses and machines that blinked on and off and emitted beeping sounds, amid a steady huffing and hissing, a row of incubators stood on tall legs.
The doctor pulled on a pair of latex gloves and handed Hanck a pair, showing him how to put them on. She stood close, almost indecently close, pulling the latex over his splayed fingers. He met her glance and realised that she was smiling behind the mask. As if she knew something about him, something that pleased her.
Then she turned round, stepped over to an incubator, and nodded meaningfully at what was inside. ‘This is your son,’ she said. ‘He’s asleep.’
Hanck looked down into the incubator. It took a moment before he understood what he saw.
A little more than twenty years later the Affect Commission was ready with its seventh volume, which by all accounts would be the most comprehensive to date. The work had involved practically all the scholars that could be found, both those who were officially recognised and those who were self-proclaimed. Over the years the editorial staff had changed; people had died and been replaced, articles had been written by hundreds of co-workers, and the mood that enveloped the project was thought to have revived the spirit from the time of the great encyclopedias.
Attempts had been made to bridge the age-old antagonism between the natural sciences and the humanities. Engineers and skalds were to be brought together between the same covers. Even the idea of establishing a periodic table for emotions had been favourably received.
The number of emotions was estimated to be largely equal to the known elements, and their systematisation had been done in accordance with similar principles. While the properties of the elements were determined by atomic nuclei and the number of electrons, each emotion received its place in the system based on its innermost charge and its ability to combine with others. According to this approach you might perceive an emotion such as ‘self-satisfaction’, for example, as an appropriate entry in the column corresponding to copper, silver and gold. Consequently, ‘desire’, on the other hand, would be characterised by less stable isotopes and would exist only in compounds, or decay in toxic spirals.
A great deal of effort was invested in the experiments, and a certain optimism reigned until the system was applied in practice and tested against a number of examples. Then it was determined that almost every single emotion appeared in the wrong classification, and in the most unexpected contexts and combinations, so that its place in the periodic table was questioned, if not refuted. The system proved to be unreliable.
The primary word of the present volume from this period was ‘Love’, and for reasons that will later become apparent, Hanck felt called upon to contribute an article. When the attempts at a more conventional systematisation came to naught, a method had been devised in which every emotion was defined, based on a loose number of main categories, or ‘families’. The emotion was described as clinically as possible, demarcated from other feelings, and presented in its purest possible form. Then it was illustrated with a number of examples, old as well as new. The confusion that subsequently arose was something that people simply had to accept.
And confusion did arise. Lengthy public debates raged over whether love could even appear in a pure state, or whether it existed only in combinations, in relation to one or more exponents, whether it presupposed a motive, regardless of whether this consisted of a subject or an object or a more comprehensive category.
Despite an entire epoch of devastation, a great deal of material was still available. Love had served as the basis for religious and political movements; it had provided, in particular, the incentive for a large share of historical art. It might appear as the motive for a cult. Preserved recordings and textual fragments from the period around the advent of the third millennium showed a widespread invocation of love as the only meaningful aspect of life. And examinations of political programmes indicated that love had been put into practice more or less successfully.
Other aspects characterised love as a source of energy, as a natural resource. Everyone agreed that love was strong and difficult to control, and that it most likely could influence anything and anyone. On the other hand, there was disagreement over whether it constituted an infinite resource or not.
When it came to the section of illustrations – examples of the expression of love – the public was invited to participate with personal contributions. These were reviewed by a special commission, and the ones that were deemed interesting were passed on; in many cases they ended up in the actual volume.
Hanck could attest that a grown man with an orderly life, a home and work, a man who absolutely did not belong to the ‘seekers’ and who, on the contrary, fended off any idea of big, drastic changes, could suddenly and quite unexpectedly be struck by love with such devastating force that all prevailing patterns and customs would cease to apply. That experience formed the basis of his expertise. He didn’t need to offer any assessments, or determine whether this overwhelming event conveyed anything positive or negative. He could make do with stating that it had happened, that it was involuntary, and that it established a ‘before’ that was irretrievably lost, and an ‘after’ that was decisive and absolute. A demarcation which, in a number of respects, was a more distinct borderline than that between life and death.
Hanck’s love had a very clearly defined object, even though, at first glance, it took him a long time to comprehend what he was actually facing.
It was a small room, not a hall by any means, in the department labelled ‘Recovery’. The air inside was warm and dry. The floor consisted of stained asphalt. In the very spot where the incubator stood, cars had once been parked long ago. Motor oil and petrol had leaked grease into the foundation. Through a narrow window there was a view of a cemetery. Prostit
utes who had attended to customers in the cars had looked at the same view, while for those who were beaten or murdered here, this floor and this view were the last things they would ever see in this world.
Hanck had looked at the contents of the incubator for a long time before he realised what it was: a three-day-old boy, weighing barely more than two kilos, with thick tubes and hoses sticking out of his body. His legs were as thin as sticks, his arms even skinnier. All subcutaneous fat had been consumed, tiny blood vessels branched out, making a delicate network that gave the boy’s skin a bluish tinge, like old, cracked porcelain.
‘Isn’t he lovely?’
Hanck had a hard time saying anything. He heard the doctor explaining what sort of hoses were hooked up to the infant’s body: providing a nutrient solution, measuring the oxygen supply, and ensuring various types of drainage. He didn’t understand half of it. But he did understand this: ‘You can put your hand inside and touch him.’
Hanck took this as an exhortation to conquer the respect or fear that couldn’t have been greater if he’d been faced with a terrarium filled with poisonous snakes. In spite of all his objections, whether they were rooted in fear of the unknown or a feeling of being inadequate, he felt prompted to stick his hand through the hatch in the incubator to touch the child. First he stroked his index finger along the gaunt cheek, then he cupped his hand around the boy’s head. His hand covered the head from ear to ear. The child’s pulse filled his whole palm.
Then the boy opened his eyes. If Hanck, up until that moment, had been attempting to fend off any feelings of attachment, he was instantly forced into a position of involuntary capitulation. He looked into the boy’s eyes and was transformed.
The Hurricane Party Page 8