The Ministry of Time, page 7
He stretches his fingers wide, as if trying to span an octave on a pianoforte. Hot, dark pain gels the bandages together.
This old wound, formerly healed, he’d received in Australia with Captain Stokes. A gun had exploded in his hands. They were rowing up a river in the captain’s gig, charting its course. The cockatoos they’d spotted on the opposite bank were so dense as to be cloudlike, billowing from tree to tree. He’d taken up his fowling piece and sighted along the barrel.
“Bird for dinner,” said one of the men.
“If Gore doesn’t miss,” said Stokes.
“I don’t miss.”
After that, there’s a gap in his memory. There was a thunderous report. He’s sure he saw a bird drop. Then the sky, hysterically blue. He was on his back in the bottom of the boat. It seemed like his hand hurt, but he wasn’t sure. It felt wet. He sat up. Stokes was blanched, reaching for him with shaking hands.
“Killed the bird,” Gore had remarked quietly.
Stokes had started laughing.
He misses Stokes. He misses Australia. He’d like to feel the amniotic swelter of the continent’s interior. He can’t even summon the memory of what it was like to be comfortably warm, let alone perishingly hot. He misses newness, freshness. He’d like to look at a tree or pick his way through undergrowth. Even accidentally giving himself a digestive complaint by eating the wrong berry seems like a lark from this position. There’s nothing here but the most barren and desolate country imaginable. He supposes he’d like to see his family too, in New South Wales, but he doesn’t dwell on that, the same way he doesn’t examine the wound in his palm.
He shifts on the narrow bunk. He’s thinner these days. His hip bones are real architectural features. His skeleton has become navigable below his skin, which he dislikes, because he doesn’t like to think overmuch about his body, in case it remembers him and begins to make demands. But he has always been thin. No use in lamenting that God did not see fit to build him in the Apollonian mold of James Fitzjames and James Fairholme.
No use, either, in lamenting the day’s poor takings. He’ll go out again tomorrow and find bigger game. The last time he was in the North, he killed a reindeer on his hands and knees. The beast was served at Christmas dinner. He’d been six-and-twenty at the time. Robert McClure had been a mate alongside him. Still handsome then, Robbie. His hairline just beginning its uphill scarper. Those big sad blue eyes when Captain Back raised a glass to give the Sunday toast for absent friends. Robbie, who never wrote, who would have heard the news about the expedition in a months-old newspaper on whatever godforsaken Canadian station he’d been tossed on. Absent friends indeed.
Yes, tomorrow Gore will go out hunting again. One thing God has granted him is an excellent aim. He is very good at killing things. Things, sometimes people. He pulls a trigger and knows himself loved.
CHAPTER THREE
I grew up in a house full of paperwork. My bedroom had a shifting floor of invoices and parking ticket disputes, some of them older than me. There was documentation for long-canceled magazine subscriptions, savings funds since drained, school reports full of pleasures to have in class. My mother, a British citizen, had a Cambodian passport wedged in the bottom of a drawer. The picture in it showed a young woman with black hair cut in a beautiful helmet. I never knew this woman, though my mother thought of her with pity and a little scorn. There were things the young woman forgot to do, or didn’t think were necessary, and my mother had to live with her mistakes for the rest of her life.
My family lived inside proof of ourselves like crabs in shells. It could be suffocating—literally: the dust, the dry rustle in the summer heat. But no one was going to tell us what we weren’t entitled to or had failed to file. Not with duplicates, “your supervisor in copy.”
Growing up in a house like that made me obsessive about archiving. It made me an excellent civil servant and my sister a meticulous copy editor. I adored the world in a reducible format. There wasn’t a man so special that he might not one day find himself in a footnote or one of my green hanging files. With my hand over the archives, I had control over the system. It didn’t matter that it was only the filing system. It was control, and that was what I wanted.
It’s surprising, then, that I allowed Graham’s drawing of the projection device to enter my files as a joke, like a coin minted 70 BC. I thought it was a form of juvenilia, drawn in his earliest years as a modern man, something to remind him of on a significant anniversary of his arrival here; and not, as it would turn out to be, a red letter from another era.
* * *
By the start of that summer, Graham was practically a native of the era. He wore button-ups and was clean-shaven to his cheekbones. He had a preferred washing-machine cycle. Most mornings he rose—hours before me—and went for a run. He would sometimes wake me up with a juicy smoker’s wheeze on his return to the house. He started giving me custody of his cigarettes and enforced a predinner smoking ban.
There were others times when it felt as if Graham deliberately disliked the twenty-first century, as if assimilation was a form of treachery to his past. I was prickly and defensive about this; I could not look at why directly. I heard the way I spoke to him about it: adjustment, reasonable, citizen, responsibility, values. He blew a lot of pensive cigarette smoke at me.
I couldn’t make him interested in films. He would often fall asleep if I showed him something after dinner; he could sleep through The Blues Brothers as easily as he could The Third Man. Later, I learned his lack of interest in cinema was as baffling to the other expats as it was to me. They all regarded it as my era’s greatest artistic achievement. (Even later than this, Sixteen-sixty-five—Margaret Kemble—would persuade him to watch 1917 with her, and he would be shocked into wakefulness. “Poor Arthur,” he would tell me. “I had no idea.”)
He was, however, enamored of the concept of endless music, disseminated into any room. It was how he started to learn to type, carefully pecking in the names of symphonies and taking a full minute to find the letter “M.” He said that, in his own time, he had hunted and drilled and drawn up watches to a fragmented gurgle of internal music, like Joan of Arc with a Walkman; now, at last, he could play the music he had always half remembered.
He listened to a lot of Bach, which I enjoyed, and Mozart, which I tolerated. He liked Tchaikovsky, didn’t mind Elgar, was intrigued by Vaughan Williams and Purcell, but couldn’t stand Stravinsky. Having failed with film, I tried pop music. I tested some early rock ’n’ roll on him, and he shrugged; I experimented with eighties power ballads, and he was exasperatingly polite about it. My attempts to interest him in non-orchestral music fell on deaf ears until he suddenly, inexplicably, independently developed a liking for Motown.
Once a week, the expats were examined for empathy and the bridges were examined for honesty—or so the joke ran. Another hypothesis about time-travel was that it might reduce a person’s capacity to feel compassion. Forcibly removed to a new epoch, meeting all places and people therein as foreign, would lead the expats to defensively “other” the people around them; worse still, these “others” could not be psychologically processed because the expat hadn’t experienced a normative passing of historical time. The empathy theory drew on sleep science. When we sleep, we enter the hadal valley of REM, and through our dreams we process the day’s events. But people with disrupted, nonlinear sleep cycles—for example, people suffering from PTSD, whose excessively high levels of noradrenaline blocked REM-level dreams—couldn’t enter deep sleep to process their memories and chemically defang them, so their recollections of unprocessed violence and fear leaked into their waking world. Just as the right continuous conditions were required to experience good sleep, the right continuous conditions were required to experience temporal actuality with the requisite level of empathy.
Thus, on a weekly basis, the expats were subjected to tests designed to trigger empathy or disgust, and scrutinized. The first tests were conducted in the laboratory booths, but they resembled the Ministry hospital wards so strongly that the expats had tremendous anxiety reactions and it was difficult to get serviceable data from them. Graham, for example, kept asking to be excused for a smoke—heart rate elevated—and struggled to focus on the tests—eyes moving rapidly. I once found him the sole occupant of the fifth-floor smoking area (a pigeon-shit-encrusted balcony), methodically shredding a filter of a finished cigarette. I watched him for a while, interested in the way that only his fingers moved. Most people ripple with surplus motion unless they are concentrating, but Graham only ever moved the parts of him that he wanted to move.
In the end, we converted one of the wood-paneled rooms in the Ministry into a “library” where the tests would be conducted. The Secretary for Expatriation personally paid for the addition of dozens of leather-bound volumes of Enlightenment-era science and travel to the shelves. One of the administrators, who had a master’s degree in art history, bought some framed Canaletto prints on the tech supply budget, which caused a brief fracas, but the Secretary liked those too, so it got signed off.
After that, the “empathy exams” returned more useful results—though there were other issues. A controversial test used pictures of soldiers from the First World War, caved and razed by new weapons. The disruption was terrible. Nineteen-sixteen had to be sedated. The other expats were horrified too. Even Sixteen-forty-five and Graham, who had fought in large-scale battles, were laid out by the ultramodern scope of the harm. They began to resist the exams psychologically, spoiling our hard-won data. It was agreed that we’d delay introducing them to Hiroshima, Auschwitz, and the Twin Towers. Control promised to provide a timeline for the revelations, but it hadn’t materialized.
As to the bridge “honesty exams,” these were like something out of a 1960s Cold War spy thriller. It involved a polygraph and everything. Operators squished on electroencephalograms and asked us about how we were feeling. Unlike the Ministry-funded therapy, these sessions were mandatory. Our progress was charted against an enormous file sustained by Control—although where they came up with their benchmarks was anyone’s guess.
Adela was always present at the honesty exams, often intervening in them. I got the impression that she was listening to offstage prompts that only she could hear, being the only one among us who was aware she was on a stage, and was trying to chivvy us along the right course of action.
One day she asked me, “How would you describe your work?”
“Meaningful,” I said promptly. (This was a regular question.)
“Anything else?”
“Challenging. Unusual.”
“Anything else?”
“Uh. Sometimes I feel like I’m a bit in the dark? Like. What are we going to do with the time-door if it works?”
“Would you say that you found your work erotic?” asked Adela.
The operator sucked his teeth and made some rapid notes about whatever my readings had just done. I don’t think he expected the question any more than I did. I visualized sinking backward into black mud.
“No,” I said, very placidly.
“Are you sure?”
“I don’t know, ma’am, am I?”
Adela smiled with about a third of her mouth. Her face had changed again. She looked pinched and hungry, and hauntingly as if her skin was held in place by a bulldog clip at the back of her skull.
“No. You’re not,” she said. “I don’t need to look at your readings to check that.”
“I suppose it depends on what you mean by ‘erotic.’ ”
“No. It doesn’t. What do you think of Commander Gore?”
“I think he’s an interesting man.”
Adela looked at my readings and increased the percentage of her smile. “That will do. Unhook her, Aaron.”
Not all of my job was this confrontational. Going through Graham’s proficiencies with Quentin was fun. Today my overgrown son told a man on an e-scooter he was riding a coward’s vehicle. Today my overgrown son tore off his headphones and gave me a blow-by-blow account of the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb because he’d been listening to a podcast about ancient Egypt. Today my overgrown son put metal in the microwave, deliberately, even though I had told him not to do that, because he wanted to see what would happen. We’d sit there trying to decide if his actions demonstrated alienation or acclimatization. Often I thought that they demonstrated that he was Graham Gore. I began to think of him as his own benchmark, which was dangerous. Adela had spotted something in me that I hadn’t, not yet, and if I’d been less charmed by my own levity, then I might have been moved to wonder why she wasn’t trying to stop me.
I gave Quentin Graham’s drawing at one of our regular meetings. I thought that he would find it as charming as I had.
“What do you reckon he actually saw?” I said. “Game console? Stroboscope? My money’s on a handheld umbrella that opened fast enough to startle him, by the way.”
But Quentin gawked at the drawing—his complexion growing fungal—then crumpled it in his fist and shoved it up his sleeve. He smacked at his desktop keyboard until, on the other end of the office, the belligerent laser printer started up. He pulled me over to it.
“Why are you printing the Wikipedia page for”—I craned my head—“the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event?”
“Because this printer is noisy,” hissed Quentin, “and I’m fairly sure all the offices are bugged.”
I smiled at him. “Are you sure, Quentin?”
The printer hummed itself into silence. Quentin’s mouth writhed about under his nose. “Am I sure about what?” he said, with strained lightness.
Far from wondering if I should have looked at the sketch more carefully, I thought about the semaphore flags of weakness visible in the facial muscles. Contractually, we could not be signed off from the time-travel project; we could only, mysteriously, be “reassigned” by Control. I’ve seen people burn out—not with drama and defiance but with the damp blue despair of something being cooked off for disposal—and I’ve seen how such a fire spreads to others if it isn’t contained. I patted Quentin on the shoulder, and told him to keep the drawing if he liked.
* * *
Graham continued to acclimatize to the concept of me. “You seem very busy,” he might say, almost shyly, watching me rattle at the laptop. Or: “That looks complicated,” and sound both teasing and wistful. He would nearly always follow up with a story that began, “When I was sailing with Captain Ringsabell, on the HMS Youshouldhaveheardofthis.” I don’t think he was boasting but rather trying to find a way to relate to me, a permutation of womanhood rendered sexless by authority. I came to understand that this bothered me, and I felt embarrassed about that, as if I’d been caught complaining that men on the street had stopped catcalling.
The Ministry provided the house we lived in, and we didn’t pay rent or bills. I finally had a savings account that looked like it might withstand a life emergency rather than crumple at a dentistry bill. I was in the economic bracket my parents had hoped I might enter, and having been brought up so thriftily among so many thirty-day-guarantee receipts, I had no idea what to do with the cash. So I bought a hand-sewn bag in the shape of a hen. It was the sort of purchase that would force him to recognize my girlishness, which I was, by this time, desperate for him to acknowledge.
I showed him the bag, distracting him from his seventh or eighth reread of Rogue Male.
“Look. Chicken bag.”
“I see that even in the future, women remain fascinated by impractical accessories.”
“It’s not impractical. It’s a bag.”
“Nothing will fit inside it. I do not think it could even carry this book.”
“I can put a coin purse in it. See.”
I reached inside the hen and pulled out the coin purse that came with it. It was in the shape of a small yellow chick. He smiled.
“I’ve changed my mind,” he said. “I think chicken bag is very good.”
What to do with money? Social media was full of stories of mothers keeping sewing kits in biscuit tins and filling childhoods with biscuit-related working-class/immigrant malaise. I’d laughed at all of them, of course, because they were aimed at people like me. Making do ceases to be habitual and becomes a matter of conscience. My mother had been a cleaner, I’d told Quentin, and I’d never had a cleaner until Graham refused to mop and I had to ask Quentin for one, because my own mother, my own mother—! What was I handwringing about? Sorrow, I suppose, that my parents hadn’t had easier lives. I kept thinking: I should save. I expected that it could all be taken from me. But wasn’t I safe? Wasn’t I Ministry?
* * *
It didn’t take us long to dash up against another issue with acclimatization, which was that the expats didn’t make sense to each other either. Nineteen-sixteen was as incomprehensible to Sixteen-forty-five as I was. Everyone was paddling in their own era-locked pool of loneliness.
Ed—Seventeen-ninety-three’s bridge—had a romantic solution: once or twice a week, the expats should all cook and eat together, temporarily commandeering one of the canteens for the purpose. This would encourage bonding. He cited sociological essays about immigrant community restaurants, oral traditions and the ancient banquet, the genesis of Homo sapiens as hunter-gatherers, the creation of the supper club. He sent an email with so many attachments that I immediately deleted it and emailed Quentin for the highlights.
People like to eat dinners that are nice, often together, Quentin wrote back.
I went along to one of the earliest dinners, chicken bag slung over my shoulder. Bridges tended not to eat at the Ministry canteen with administrative staff and the operators on the Wellness team—the office-based employees—and the decorous hostility with which the paper pushers met me was adorable. When I got to the kitchen itself, the first thing I saw was Graham leaning down to light a cigarette on the gas ring, his curls dangerously close to the hob. We’d had to disable smoke detectors in every Ministry room that Graham used. If he couldn’t have a cigarette, he’d throw whatever experiment he was strapped into.
