Tiger Work, page 3
Once upon a time there was a planet with vast seas, polar regions, abundant forests, and splendid continents.
Its civilisation had evolved from the age of stone to the age of artificial intelligence.
Those who lived on the planet thought that no matter what they did life would continue. In less than ten thousand years, they transformed their societies from rough conditions to ways of life so sophisticated that everything they did directly or indirectly contributed to the death of their planet and to their own annihilation.
They had ample evidence of the daily destruction they were wreaking on themselves and on their environment, but they did not heed it.
They fell into the ‘invisible effects’ fallacy. This holds that though we do things which add up to a catastrophe, we are unable from moment to moment to see the effect of our actions. And because we don’t see the effect from moment to moment, we therefore think that there isn’t an effect.
This blindness enabled people to continue their suicidal relationship with the earth right up to the very last moment.
*
According to our calculations, the earth has been silent now for twenty thousand years. It is at last showing signs of the regeneration of its forests and its seas after its utter destruction.
On our journey across the earth we came upon scattered notes and half-worked stories left behind by the last human beings in the very twilight of their history.
It seems that their gods died a long time ago. Then towards the end, they declared the final death of God and ascended the throne. The results are unedifying. These notes show that it is easier to kill off gods or dethrone them than it is to be one.
What is strange is that in their last days they carried on exactly as they had done over their final decades. They altered nothing in their lives to try to avert the disaster that they saw coming and which was evident every day.
What destroyed them ultimately was not some momentous event, the collision of asteroids, the drowning of their cities, the poisoning of their air, the detonation of nuclear bombs. The suicide of humanity was in their mesmerism. They were chained to the past.
It was also in their fatalism. They accepted, for centuries, that they were fundamentally unable to change. They were unable to create a new future.
In this they were consistent. They were killing themselves little by little every day and it didn’t seem to trouble them.
Of all the tragic stories of vanished species we encountered across the innumerable galaxies, theirs was the most unheroic.
THE LAST SOLITUDE
The first story was found in a half-submerged house in a city that was once so flooded only spires remained visible above the waterline. We surmise that over the next three thousand years the waters receded, as the earth, with its unerring instincts, rebalanced itself in a world without humans.
The manuscript was found intact, with some pages missing. It showed no evidence of having suffered from being submerged. Perhaps some members of the species had perfected the art of writing on a kind of paper that resisted water erosion.
*
Today I woke late and observed the light fading early into the darkness. I spend my days reading. On the television it seems the masters of the earth have won complete control of the world. Everywhere they have gained power. They now form one unified chain of control across the main centres of the Western world. They control the news channels, most of the newspapers, and have penetrated our digital life and spy on our every move and listen in on our every conversation. And how did I vote in the last election? Did I vote against their candidate? Did I vote for the other candidate who wanted to make modern life more transparent and had a good programme for the environment? No. And why not? Well, all the newspapers made any alternative sound like the end of the world. They frightened me. So I voted with my fear. Afterwards I regretted it. But if it were to happen again, they would get to me again. I now accept that I am a prisoner of something, but I don’t know what it is.
I wake up and drink green tea and go to the gym. I work out to keep my body fit and my weight down. I starve through the day. I rigorously monitor my calorie intake. I do a little yoga and breathe deeply by the window.
I also breathe in the daily death of the world. I try to avoid the news. It seems to me now that every news item brings me closer to death. I don’t think they mean to, but every story they report seems to help us die a little. Sometimes it is death by hopelessness. Other times it is death by despair, or indifference, or obsession.
For a hundred years now, they have been saying there are too many people on the planet. At night I cannot sleep. I wonder where we will fit all the people on the limited space of this earth. In my dreams I sometimes see them crowding over me, standing side by side with nowhere to move and no air to breathe. I eat less each day because I fear that there won’t be enough food to go round. I am aware that this does not help the situation one bit, but I can’t help it.
I work at home. There are days when I do not speak to another human being. I find human beings frightening. I think that they are the most frightening things in the whole world. They are scarier than cancer, disease, wild animals, ghosts, or monsters. I can’t think of anything scarier than us.
The world existed for hundreds of thousands of years before we came along. Then we evolved and created civilisations, and in the last hundred years we have done more to destroy our habitat than malevolent aliens could ever have done to us.
You meet a human being and they seem normal and fine and even quite harmless. But all the evil in the world has come from humans. It didn’t come from anywhere else. We hate our own kind and would leave them to die if they threatened us. We hate those who are different to us and would get rid of them if they intimidated us in any way.
We have eaten this planet to extinction. I joined an organisation to help save the earth not that long ago, but found many of the people so quietly obnoxious and judgemental that they seemed to me part of the problem too.
Now when I meet human beings, something in me flinches. I do not know who I am meeting. I do not know their heart. People frighten me because of the things they passively allow to happen, the things they turn a blind eye to, the things they can’t be bothered to care about. We should be the blessing of the planet, should add our beauty to the earth’s beauty. But all we have done is add pollution, and waste, and evil, and destruction.
We make filth everywhere with our aspirations. Everest was pristine till, with our ambition for conquest, we turned those rare heights into one of the dustbins of the world. Dolphins gag on our plastic waste. Sea turtles choke on it. The radioactive stuff we have accumulated will be toxic for thousands of years after we have vacated the earth. Day by day we believe in less and less.
My father had nothing to teach me about life except getting ahead and putting myself first. I grew up in the aridity of that philosophy. Then a day came when I had no reason to go on living. I did not care enough about looking after myself, and it got too stressful living only to get ahead.
It was exhausting always trying to be number one. I had doubts about referring to myself that way. Why should I put myself ahead of others? Isn’t that what everyone else is doing, making the world a constant battleground between individuals, states, races, religions, classes, genders? We are raised with war in our hearts, with war at the depth of our dreams. And war is what we reap every day.
I watched my father grow old in the dryness of his philosophy. Nothing flowered in him. His insight didn’t get richer. He said the same things at eighty that he had said at thirty-five. He seemed to have learned little in his long sojourn on this planet.
I think the philosophy we are living by is choking the life out of us. We are now barely alive as people. This is perhaps why it is easier for us to spread death in our politics and our foreign policies.
I watch the world every day and wonder what went wrong with those fine dreams that the race had in its infancy. We have overcomplicated ourselves. I have more allergies now than I had when I was a child. There are more sicknesses around, more than there ever were fifty years ago. Where are they coming from?
We are proliferating disease and illness. I think it is nature’s revenge for strangling her, for tampering with her, and for being divorced from her. We are isolated and rootless in our lack of belief in anything. Our world is ripe only for rapists and serial killers and mass murderers and the murderers of children in their schools and people in their mosques and churches. The murder at the heart of our culture has been unknowingly sanctioned by our philosophy.
Meanwhile we refine our food and our tastes, we kill ourselves trying to join the rich one per cent, and we despise the poor. And if we are poor ourselves, we live without hope, in council estates, succumbing to the consolation of drugs and too many children.
It’s why I decided not to have children. Whenever I see a child, I can’t stop myself crying afterwards. I love them so much. There’s nothing I want more than a child.
We human beings have abdicated the responsibility of being human. We claim the status of gods without being as wise as horses or as intelligent as flowers. Our bloated egos make us stupid. How can one entrust a child to such a species? How can I bring such a precious being into—
CHILDREN’S GAMES
This one was found in a house in a big city, among the pages of a disintegrating book.
*
My daughter came home from nursery today and wanted to share the song she had learned that morning. It was evening and we were in the living room, my husband and I. He was trying to read, but a persistent drill somewhere outside kept making him look up. Then our daughter bounded into the living room and said:
‘Shall I tell you what I learned today?’
‘Yes,’ I said, thinking it was time for her to be in bed. It was nine o’clock, and still she showed no signs of slowing down.
‘Okay,’ she said, bright as a bell. She’s only three and has the linguistic skills of a six-year-old and more imagination than one thinks possible. Sometimes with terror I look upon her and wonder if she’s a genius who’s been born to us, some kind of freak of the mind, the blessing and the judgement of a new generation, whom we have brought forth at the most perilous time in the history of the world.
‘I’ll be the teacher and you the student,’ she said, and my husband and I exchanged glances. It is like this every day. Each new day she does something strange and unusually intelligent for her age, and sometimes she says something that makes us wonder if it isn’t a god speaking through her.
‘All right,’ my husband and I said.
Then she held a rattle in her hand. It was a blue rattle. She was smiling. She shook the rattle and started to sing. She sang with a curious smile on her face, as if she knew what she was doing, as if there was going to be a twist in it, and we had no choice but to follow.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked her father.
‘Daddy,’ he said.
‘Daddy came to school today,
Daddy came to school today,
Daddy came to school today.’
She sang the same song for me, for Mummy. She looked around and saw a favourite doll whose name is Doby. Then Doby entered the song, and came to school today. She expanded the game, and Mozart came to school today. Then it was Da Vinci and Che Guevara. These figures ‘came to school’ because books with their names or faces were all around the room.
She would pick up a book and put it beside me and go back to her spot and shake the rattle and incorporate the new figure into the song. In this way Shakespeare came to school today, and van Gogh, Alice in her wonderland, Frida Kahlo, Winnie the Pooh, Paddington Bear, Picasso, and Vermeer. She stood there with an odd look in her eye, shaking the rattle and singing.
‘I like this school,’ I said, ‘with all these wonderful people attending.’
But she paid me no mind. With a strangely stubborn will, she went on shaking the rattle. Then ‘ballet came to school’. Then her twelve imaginary friends.
I delight in these precocious displays of my daughter, for they confirm the sense that she is a phenomenon of some indefinable kind.
She was still in the centre of the living room, the rattle shaking less and less, as she found more people who were coming to school. Her father watched nervously. He always felt she had a magical condition. There were times he watched her as nervously as you might watch a seismograph recording unprecedented activity. Her sensitivity to unexpected impulses was a regular part of her personality. Every day she absorbed into her mythology all the people she met and all the characters in books she encountered. She became them, she took on their names.
*
My husband watched her with a mixture of wonder and nervousness that kept him on tenterhooks. Then it seemed she had run out of people who came to school that morning. She paused.
‘Guess who else came to school today?’ she said, with a smile that had become more mysterious.
‘Who else came to school today, sweetie?’ my husband and I asked with one voice, sitting on the edge of our seats.
‘Death came to school today,
Death came to school today.’
My husband and I looked at one another, in consternation. She was shaking her rattle, with that odd look, that sly smile on her face. She raised her hands up, and the rattle now seemed to sound from above. We looked up at the ceiling.
‘The death of the world came to school today,
The end of the world came to school today…’
‘Honey, dear one,’ I said, with a strangled note of distress in my voice, ‘who taught you to say that?’
‘Yes, darling, who taught you that?’ my husband said, standing up.
Then she held out her arms, palms facing us, commanding us to stop. We froze. It was as if she were the teacher and we the students.
‘No one is going to school again,
No one is going to sch—’
We stopped her and carried her off to bed. It was the sense that she was talking prophecy that got to us. You know, out of the mouth of babes…
Two days later the flooding began in the city. Water rose suddenly, flooding the first floors. On television the politicians still denied that climate change had anything to do with it and blamed it all on terrorists and socialists—
SUDDENLY IN VENICE THE RAVENS SING
This was found in a house in a place once called Venice. Some pages are missing.
*
—the barriers came down, and the waters of the world crowded in upon us. And above the ravens were wheeling.
Officially the city is closed to the outside world. The lagoon is swollen high. It is no longer its famous blue. It is now the colour of corpses and dead animals.
We watch the lagoon invade the streets, conquering our houses. The bells are tolling for the bodies found. Our deaths are lonely. We are shut up in our houses, without electricity, or water. Nothing to eat. I watch the water rising high up the buildings.
It has been rising for years, but we did not pay attention. We have been like the frog in the story, the frog in the pot of water who was slowly boiled to death without knowing it.
Every day the city got hotter, the water rose micro-inch by micro-inch, and still we said there was no conclusive evidence of anything we should worry about. The scientists were divided. Their interpretations varied depending on who was sponsoring their research. I took no interest in these things. I had ceased watching the news, not wanting to be depressed by the negative things that helped sell newspapers and television programmes. I thought the whole climate business was above my head, and I left it to the specialists.
But even I could see that the temperature in Venice wasn’t right. When I walked across the piazza to see my boyfriend, pigeons dropped from the air, in mid-flight. I saw a woman collapse near the door of San Marco. The heat was sometimes so unbearable that I wondered if I had been transported to the Sahara Desert. I couldn’t make sense of the apocalyptic paradox of things: the sluggish water rising, the heat becoming muggier. Priests expired in the midst of their sermons, and were carried out feet first to the vestibule.
Last June it snowed for a whole day. Gondoliers stared in amazement at the frozen canals. The hospitals received at least a hundred cases of pneumonia. Two days later it was boiling again, and many old women perished, and old men were seen crumpling over their walking sticks all across the city. One day, not long ago, fish appeared belly up in the canals and the lagoons. The fishermen’s nets were crammed with fish that had been dead for some time. The odour of the lagoons became unbearable, and still no one believed that these biblical signs were in any way sinister.
Our capacity for denial is stronger than our capacity for belief. We find it easier to not face the truth. We go on living our ordinary lives while refusing to believe the overwhelming evidence that our way of life is destroying us. Prisoners of the past, we go on doing things that we know are killing us. Worse, we believe that the inevitable conclusion of all our deeds will not come to pass. We think that somehow, at the last minute, there will be a miracle, a magical solution. We possibly even hope that factors in nature we hadn’t considered will somehow wipe clean the slate of our environmental crimes.
The trouble is that there were normal days followed by flashes of abnormality. There were more normal than abnormal days. So we went on believing that normality was the norm, and that anything abnormal was a minor aberration. We didn’t realise that normality was an unseen equilibrium whose condition had altered. The dire results of that alteration weren’t apparent to us yet.
In those normal times, we watched weddings in the square. We watched brides skipping over the rising runnels of water, their white bridal dresses hitched high.
As the months went past, fewer tourists came to the city. Solitude surrounded us. Day by day the sea levels rose. At first our politicians denied it. Then they hinted that it was all the work of terrorists. Rats grew bigger and bolder. They scuttled around in daylight and didn’t run away when people appeared. It was as if they had finally claimed possession of the city. But they were not the real menace. The real menace were the politicians smoothly denying there was anything to fear. But we were the worst menace of all. The way we kept trying to live normally.
