‘Hanck Orn?’ It was a Communicator’s voice, weary and dull.
When Hanck replied affirmatively to the question and gave his personal code, the next question came: ‘Are you the guardian of Toby Orn?’
Hanck of course said, ‘Yes.’
Without changing his tone of voice, the Communicator said, as if he were rambling off some sort of litany, a formula that had long ago become hackneyed and in which only the individual’s name ever varied: ‘It is my duty to inform you that Toby Orn is dead. I’m sorry. There is no further information. May I ask you for a signature?’
The Hurricane Party
The boat out to the archipelago left from a terminal that had once been used for ferry routes to the countries in the east. The traffic was safeguarded by strict security controls. Each passenger had to go through a harshly lit sluice with armed guards who were more intent on inspecting permits and passes than tickets.
The channel eastward was traversed only by regular routes between the city and the outer archipelago. People who lived out on the islands were allowed free passage and were known to the guards. They greeted each other in a familiar fashion, and they rarely had to show any documentation. Others, occasional travellers, had to bring permits that were stamped with the date and time of their departure.
Hanck Orn stood in the queue and watched well-dressed people chatting with the guards who fawned and grinned a bit more than usual. Wealthy individuals had lived out on the islands in the archipelago since time immemorial, at first as seasonal visitors, later as permanent residents, when conditions in the city grew worse. Now they lived in enclosed, guarded reserves, in huge villas with their own climate controls. Gases from the silted-up coves were horrible, and at times toxic to breathe.
But now, during the rainy period, it was better. The channel and the coves were mud-filled, and the growth of algae and grass had stopped for the season.
Hanck tried to offer a friendly smile to the guard who took his documents. The same guard had just laughed and pounded the back of a gentleman with a grey ponytail. Perhaps one of the more well-to-do set, with whom it would be wise to stay on good terms. The guard’s grin changed to a stiff, arrogant expression as soon as he turned to Hanck, an unknown traveller with a permit that was much too fresh.
Two days earlier Hanck had visited the public office that processed permits. He had taken along a large banknote in one pocket and a firearm in the other. If any obstacles should arise, he would first try the banknote, but if the bribe didn’t work, and his prospects of ever getting the permit seemed slim or non-existent (such news was sometimes handed out quite arbitrarily), then he was going to blow off the head of every single person in that public office. He had enough ammunition for the whole staff. No one would be exempt. He knew precisely how those sorts of civil servants reacted, how they thought, how they would seek shelter.
He’d been one of them himself, and just as unimaginative, an equally faithful protector of laws and ordinances. So he knew exactly how the woman with the blue wig, whose job description concerned the importance of maintaining the proper level of humidity in the ink pads and sponge cups, would react at the first shot. She would give a start, throw herself to the floor behind an old metal filing cabinet, and in this immediately life-threatening situation, she would be forced to stretch her imagination so far that she would take on the same colour and shape of that cabinet.
The thin-haired younger man next to her would also end up on the floor, but he would start to crawl and slither over to the corridor that led to the inner offices, a confusing labyrinth where he would be swallowed up and turn himself into a rejection slip.
The man at the counter window in front of Hanck would never need to denigrate himself in that way. He would simply – suddenly, like a receipt for his own misuse of power – feel an honourable old projectile, nine millimetres in diameter, tear through the convolutions of his brain and perhaps rip a hole in the back of his neck where – robbed of all force by that thick skull – it would slip out and settle into the sweaty crease between his neck and his shirt collar. Maybe that would be his last thought, the very last reflection of a soon-to-be-extinguished brain: ‘I’ve got a tick on my neck, help, I’ve got a tick!’
But that was not a good plan. Hanck was a poor shot; he didn’t know whether he could hit anything even at arm’s length. Yet he still needed to be prepared that it might happen, at any time, at any place. That a connection might arise, a logical link, a clear and distinct pattern in which this gun and its use made up a very necessary consequence. It might happen anywhere at all, in any sort of context, and he would have to act accordingly, be prepared, have the gun to hand.
So he’d been carrying the weapon in his pocket for several days, even at home, inside his flat, behind three locks and a bolted wrought-iron gate. Not because he was expecting any sort of attack or assault. He didn’t know if he even had any enemies; the fact that he was feeling hostile didn’t mean that he had enemies. But he was on the alert. All of his perceptions were heightened. He thought he could hear conversations that were taking place at a great distance, could see what was going on behind his back, and could sense smells, waves of heat from living creatures in the most desolate of places.
Whoever looked at him had no idea about any of this. The man who processed his application saw a completely ordinary, grey citizen who had business in the outer archipelago. There was no reason to investigate the matter further. The application was approved and furnished with a valid stamp.
Where that stamp would lead him, Hanck had no idea. He was fumbling his way forward, at the mercy of instincts and whims, tormented and largely confused, but at times clearheaded and capable of thinking rationally.
At such a moment he had rung his son’s boss, the innkeeper out in the archipelago, to straighten out what had to be a misunderstanding. Already annoyed by the power outage and the silenced organ, Hanck had done his duty as a citizen and signed the soiled piece of paper that the Communicator had held out, thereby confirming that he had received the news which must have been erroneous yet still required a receipt.
It had even occurred to him that he was actually unique in receiving an incorrect message from these grave-diggers.
The innkeeper had refused to pick up; the phone sometimes produced a busy signal, sometimes emitted long ringtones that went unanswered. Hanck waited, listening to it ring and ring. He kept trying for nearly an hour until a woman’s voice from the outer archipelago finally answered.
Hanck explained what he wanted, calmly and matter-of-factly, saying that he was the father of Toby who worked out there as a chef. He wanted to speak to his son; the boy should have come home long ago, and Hanck was starting to get a bit worried since he hadn’t heard from him; his son usually rang. He asked, calmly and politely, whether anyone out there knew what had happened.
‘Just a minute . . .’ said the woman’s voice. Hanck heard a clattering sound, as if the phone had been placed on its side. In the background he heard voices, annoyed voices, harsh tones.
This went on for a quite a while, and then the receiver was evidently picked up by the innkeeper himself. ‘Hello?’ It was a rough voice. Hanck repeated what he had previously said, adding that he’d received a confusing visit from a couple of Communicators. He intimated, sounding strangely unconcerned, that the innkeeper might be able to straighten out this misunderstanding.
‘Unfortunately . . .’ he heard, ‘it’s correct.’
‘What?’ said Hanck. ‘What’s correct?’
‘That he’s dead,’ said the innkeeper.
‘Who?’ said Hanck.
‘Toby. Didn’t you say that he was your son?’
‘Yes, I did,’ said Hanck. ‘He is . . . he’s my son.’
‘He just dropped dead.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Hanck. ‘Dropped dead?’
‘Maybe it was his heart,’ he heard. ‘He worked hard.’
When Hanck didn’t reply, the innkeeper had time
to collect himself. He went on, unchallenged. ‘He was a fine lad. Everyone applauded. The best chef I’ve had in years . . .’
Hanck apprehended these remarks the way he might receive news about some total stranger. ‘What do you mean he dropped dead?’ he said at last. ‘He’s twenty years old and perfectly healthy.’
‘Unfortunately,’ said the innkeeper, ‘that’s all I have to say. Once again, I’m very sorry.’
‘I don’t give a damn about that,’ said Hanck. ‘Where is he?’
The innkeeper removed the receiver from his ear, and Hanck heard him confer with someone else. ‘He’s no longer here. They usually . . .’ He caught himself, perhaps so as not to say too much. ‘They took him away.’
‘Who?’
‘The guests.’ The innkeeper may have been drunk, because he said, ‘We don’t usually . . .’ but was cut off, possibly because someone had kicked him in the shin. He said, ‘Ow, what the hell . . . ?!’
Hanck said, ‘What guests?’
‘Unfortunately,’ the innkeeper repeated, ‘we can’t give out that information.’
‘Was it someone from the Clan?’
Now the innkeeper started coughing. Long, solid, racking coughs that came from deep inside. ‘Sorry,’ he managed to gasp. ‘You’ll have to excuse me.’
Hanck heard the man in the outer archipelago coughing, and he had time to think, to pull himself together, to try and understand something that he knew he never would.
The coughing into the receiver stopped. Hanck thought he could hear heavy panting. It was probably the innkeeper listening.
‘I don’t know what you’re up to out there,’ said Hanck. ‘But I intend to find out.’
The innkeeper understood. He said, ‘If I were you, I’d let it be.’ In the midst of all the confusion, Hanck perceived something that resembled genuinely good intentions. ‘Let it be.’
‘Like hell I will.’
The innkeeper took a deep breath. He was forced to change his tone. ‘You’re a little shit. You’re not going to get anywhere.’
‘You know that, do you?’
‘Believe me, I know.’ The coughing had stopped. He sounded quite convincing.
‘So someone from the Clan was out there?’
‘No,’ said the innkeeper. He was silent for a moment, considering what to say, and finally decided that an admission might make the tormented and confused father give in. ‘No,’ he repeated. ‘It was the entire Clan.’
He was awakened, whether it was in the middle of the day or the middle of the night made no difference, by the sound of a key turning in the lock of the front door. It was a very distinct sound. He had waited for it so many times before, after he had gone to bed even though Toby hadn’t yet come home. Sleeping uneasily, waking at the smallest sound and never falling asleep properly until he heard that sound of the key in the door, footsteps, the sound of wet outer garments being tossed in a heap.
He would lie there in a sort of torpor and hear that longed-for sound, and come a bit more awake and sit up on the edge of the bed. Still dazed with sleep, he would stagger out to the hall, convinced that the nightmare was about to be over – then he would come to his senses in front of a locked front door, standing alone in the hall, forced to acknowledge that he had only been dreaming.
Unable to sleep, he might go out in the middle of the night, aimlessly searching. He might meet a gang of boys on the street, and after they’d gone past, he’d suddenly think that Toby was among them.
He would stop, turn around, and shout, ‘Toby?!’ No one reacted, no one turned around. But boys were often ashamed of their fathers. He was forced to run after them, pass them, and then turn around to confront them once again to make sure.
This happened several times. Occasionally he might hear, ‘Get the hell out of here, you fucking homo!’
After a few days he understood only one thing: shock.
It was as if the word had regained its original meaning. It had been worn out for so long, stripped away by much too frequent use in an epoch of alarms, shrieking horns and flashing lights that indicated an uninterrupted increase in destruction: deserts expanding, glaciers shrinking, forests dying, animals becoming extinct, clouds of gas piling up over entire continents, ozone holes making the sun deadly, multi-resistant bacteria and pandemics eradicating entire nations.
Then the alarms had finally fallen silent, the temperature and humidity had ceased to rise, reached a peak, stopped and stayed there.
The time of shocks was over. A cautious restoration began. The public was admonished: ‘Don’t rock the boat!’
No one was allowed to touch a button, every single lever was allowed to stay where it was. The world held its breath. The globe hibernated, its pulse was low, its respiration barely noticeable.
People stayed indoors when the sun shone, transport took place in the night, queues formed and became permanent, a way of life. At least they offered some sense of direction.
Industries in isolated locations, as if sleepwalking, ground out their products, vital goods according to a priority list that had taken an entire generation to negotiate and another to implement. The availability of anything beyond life-sustaining articles was erratic and unreliable. Suddenly supplies would be announced in some suburb, and the whole city would be on its feet to go out there and queue up. The City Under the Roof produced a surplus that was sold off in draughty hangars.
Those were muted days in a muted time. But the nights were different. The relentless sun was gone, the times seemed to have entered into a general state of emergency, a concept which from the start had meant that old laws and ordinances were cast aside, that the order of the day emanated from provisional agencies, crisis commands of military men and scientists, more or less haphazardly put together, regimes that in turn became corrupted and undermined and lost their power, just as their states of emergency and curfews did, and consequently the night became an exception unto itself, the darkness a part of an ungovernable eternity, as if untouched and unsullied in its pure blackness, an empty space that could be filled with anything at all, especially the desperation that always chose to persevere under its shroud.
It was the same as when the nights offered amnesty to the lawless and the lovers, as well as their slanderers, those doomsday prophets who stood on the street corners offering salvation from eternal damnation. They were always standing there. You could ask them to watch a child while you had a drink at the nearest brothel.
They never let up. When one of the old guys fell to the ground dead and a lavender delivery van transported him away, the spot would be vacant for only a brief time before it was occupied again. A new voice, younger and more powerful, would take up where the old one had left off. All the phases of hell would be described with new enthusiasm.
Hanck had seen and heard them all his life; their threats and promises were part of the daily roar of the city, but they had always been drowned out by others. He had perceived other signals that were stronger, had other things on his mind, just like most people. But now, cast into this darkness, he couldn’t defend himself. He thought that they were speaking to him, directly to him.
Like the prostitutes, little Asian girls who pulled him into a doorway and said, ‘Want some lucky, lucky mister?’ He had to forcefully tear himself away, only to leap right into the arms of another type: an obese woman with giant udders under an angora jumper who drew him into a soft, moist embrace and said, ‘That’s right, come to mamma . . .’
Like the receivers of stolen goods who unabashedly lined up their wares on a bar counter – a few pieces of jewellery, a pile of gold teeth, tools, a container of paint – and then held a quick auction before a gathering of ordinary, decent citizens who were setting up house or courting someone in the old-fashioned way, exhibiting some form of decorum in broad daylight, with gear purchased in the lawless dark.
Like the smouldering fire-pits in the middle of the street where food was prepared from ingredients of unknown origin, that at
times smelled familiar, at times foreign, that required strong chemicals to make them edible, noxious liquids that billowed out of the pit where only the tops of the heads were visible of the bowed, sweaty cooks who were so quick with their knives that no one managed to see what it was they were carving.
Like the begging women and children, filthy, deformed, who had deliberately maimed themselves in the hope of arousing some ancient residue of sympathy, an expression of a naïveté that denied everything that humanity had endured, almost touching in its hopefulness. Hanck would regard the children dispassionately, as if in this new life he had reclaimed something of his insurance-man distrust towards everything that was meant to arouse the emotions, as if his two decades as a father to his own child had been merely a parenthesis, yet another exception.
Like the chemical dealers, those barefoot pharmacists with substances for every possible purpose. In black briefcases with well-oiled locks that soundlessly opened with minutely practised manipulations and then revealed a whole world, divided into two parts, with rows of jars filled with pills in all the colours of the rainbow, pills for trips to all points of the compass, as well as those that would arise in the future, dimensions of existence that were constantly explored and discovered by smiling consumers, even if it was the last discovery they ever made. Hanck had supplied himself with enough substances for so many long trips that he never needed to worry about coming home again.
Because the denial phase was over. All that remained of it were fragments of a conversation that he muttered like a mantra, sometimes loudly and audibly into the air, directed at whoever happened to be in front of him.
A smugly grinning cook in a pit might hear: ‘You’re a little shit. You’ll never get anywhere!’
A completely uncomprehending girl with her hand jammed into his crotch might hear: ‘If I were you, I wouldn’t do that!’
The Hurricane Party Page 11