The Forcing, page 17
I jumped back and stumbled on the step. I stood there a moment, listening, trying to stare through the walls into the house. A minute passed, maybe more. I stayed perfectly still, not daring to move. The house was quiet. I was about to turn and retrace my steps back through the yard to the alley when I heard a creak from beyond the door. I froze. Another creak. And then another. Someone was moving towards the door, slowly, carefully.
I unsheathed my knife, stepped to the latch side of the door and flattened myself against the vinyl siding, an arm’s length from the edge of the doorframe. The handle started to turn and there was a muffled click as the lock was released. The door eased open. I held my breath. Someone was standing just inside the threshold, looking out through the screen door. A hand reached out, pushed it open. I crouched low and stepped out, ready to strike.
It was May.
She gasped, staggered back. Even in the darkness I could see the fear in her eyes. ‘What are you doing here?’ she gasped.
‘May…’ I began. ‘I can’t…’
She glanced at the knife.
‘I love you,’ I said, lowering the weapon.
‘Go away,’ she whispered. ‘If Derek sees you—’
‘He’ll what?’ said Argent, appearing behind her.
‘Derek, please,’ said May.
He glanced at the knife in my hand. ‘Did you really think that you could just walk in here and what, kill me? How stupid do you think I am?’
‘I just want my wife back, Argent. I have nothing against you.’
A smile curled across Argent’s lips. ‘Then why don’t you just ask me nicely? I’m a reasonable man. Just ask. Please Mr Argent, if you have finished fucking my wife and don’t want her anymore, can I have her back?’
‘Derek,’ said May.
‘Shut up, bitch.’ His voice was pitched, jittery.
I couldn’t see her face clearly, but I knew this had hurt her.
‘Fuck you, Argent.’ It is not what I wanted to say, but it was all I could think of. ‘He doesn’t give a damn about you, May. He’s just using you to get out of here.’
‘That’s not true,’ she shouted. ‘Go away. You are ruining everything.’
I couldn’t see his gun but I knew he had it. To my surprise, I was not afraid. I was in the beginning, but not anymore. As he stepped forward to grab the door, I saw my chance. I lunged at him with the knife, aiming for his stomach.
It was over in a matter of seconds. I lay on the ground, my arm twisted under me. Argent stood above me holding a crowbar. I tried to move my arm. A bright bolt shot from my forearm up though my shoulder.
‘That’s a nice break you have there, asshole,’ said Argent. He reached down and grabbed my upper arm, just below the shoulder, and pulled me to my feet. I grimaced in pain but managed to stifle the cry.
‘Now, here is what you are going to do, Teach. You are going to go back to the apartment and lie low for the day. Tell Miss Frenchkiss to get herself and those big tits of hers ready to go – food, clothes, as much water as she can carry. She’s good at that. Wait at the apartment. I’ll be there by nightfall. I’m assuming the plan is for late. Is that right?’
I cradled my right forearm, nodded. A big welt had risen just above the wrist.
‘Good. I’ll bring your wife. You get us out, and you can have her back.’
May turned to face him. ‘Derek, what are you—?’
But before she could finish, Argent grabbed her by the wrist and jerked her back hard. ‘Get back inside,’ he snarled. And then to me: ‘We split up as soon as we get through the wire. I’ll take Frenchy.’ He leaned forward and brought his face close to mine. ‘You two wouldn’t stand a hope in hell getting out of here without me. You need me.’ Then he laughed and stepped back inside. ‘Now fuck off.’
The door slammed closed.
I stood there amidst the wreckage and watched the spike of the moon rise over the rooftops and tried not to think about any of it.
Walk Right
Beyond the threshold, the unknown beckons. Rules no longer apply. Convention is upended. And all that you think you know about how things work turns out to be wrong. Once you cross the line, there is no return. I have learned, painfully and over years, that chaos has no degrees, and, despite the fractal mathematics, for human purposes, no dimensions. Once invoked, it is complete and absolute. It either exists, or it does not. Chaos can take many forms, of course, and destroy in infinitely many ways. We chose but one.
We now know, all of us who yet survive, that a descent into chaos is more than a loss of order, or the collapse of a certain cherished equilibrium. Reason itself is annihilated, and any notion of control rendered meaningless. We can no sooner govern a typhoon or a blizzard than we can an earthquake, or the deep collision of abducting plates, or the distant implosion of stars and vaporisation of planets. The scale of destruction matters little, in fact not at all, be it the death of individuals, insects, birds, fish, people, or the killing of multitudes, entire species even. I suppose if you want to call it hell, you wouldn’t be far off.
It was something Liberty said not long after we had first arrived – a couple of years perhaps – that started putting it into perspective for me, although I didn’t realise it at the time. We were sitting out on the point one evening after the birth of his son. He and my wife had just returned from his camp after a day’s walk through the bush.
He looked across the water towards the hills where his people were. Our boys, they’ll walk this country together, he said.
It’s good to think so, I replied.
He looked at me sidelong, stroked his beard, gripped the rock with his toes, once, twice, clenching them down onto the granite. Country’s been here a long time.
I nodded. These rocks are very old. More than a billion years. The scientist talking.
Like I said. Be here a lot longer again, too. Liberty stood, tapped the base of his spear on the bedrock. Country doesn’t need our boys, mind. Our job as fathers to teach them that. He gave me that look again, harder this time and very clear, looking right into my eyes. Then he turned and started back towards the dark-green edge of the bush. I stayed up there on the point and watched him go. He’d walk all night now, back to his people, back to his woman and newborn son. Just as he reached the trees, he turned and faced me. Teach them to walk right, he said. And then he disappeared into the gathering darkness. I didn’t see him again for over three years.
31
By the time I arrive back at the Hamptons, dawn is exploding in a helium fireball. Every particle of sulphur and soot, the radionuclides from Delhi, the strontium-90 that will one day be found in our dried-up bones, all of it ripping apart the sun’s fragile spectrum. The building’s remaining windows refract gold, arterial red, pulsing caesium. Blinded, I shield my eyes against the glare. As I near the front doors, I can see that someone has dumped a pile of garbage at the entrance, four or five big bags of it, lumped up against the glass. Except the bags aren’t bags at all. There is a hand, rigid, upright, crisped into a claw. Feet, legs. The bodies of two men, naked, entwined. One is face down on the pavement, legs spread. The other has been positioned with his chest against the other’s back. A piece of paper flutters between his shoulder blades. I have seen such horror in the last few days, and yet at this I flinch, shut my eyes. I move closer, peer down at the paper. It is a poster, like the one Lan showed us a lifetime ago. It is stapled to his back in four places. His friend Dave lies beneath him.
I laid them out together, face to face on their sides, not far from Kwesi. I was spreading the last shovelfuls of dirt over them when Francoise appeared. I told her how I had found them. She cried.
‘We should say something,’ she said when I was finished.
We didn’t known Lan well. His friend not at all. What was there to say? He lived his life the best way he could, tried to find happiness, whatever that meant to him. And now he was gone, like so many others, all of us reaping this poisoned profit, the living and the dead, angels and sinners alike.
Francoise set my arm, splinted it, fashioned a sling from a bedsheet. ‘It’s not so bad,’ she said, ‘a hairline fracture that should heal soon.’ She didn’t ask me how I got it, and I didn’t say. I didn’t tell her about Argent’s plan. I had a plan of my own.
We spent the rest of the day preparing, packing food, water, clothes, tools, wondering if outside, somewhere, we might find a world somehow undamaged, liveable. Then Francoise cut the microchips from our hands, applied one deft stitch to each incision, and we were ready. I told her about Lachie’s advice to go south, towards the tropics, to the Southern Hemisphere, where conditions were supposed to be better, and rumour had it that the old were not being persecuted, that there was still food. But I had decided to reveal the details of the escape plan to no one.
May and Argent appeared at the apartment just after dark. We checked our gear, blackened our faces with charcoal, and set out together. I had planned the route carefully. Initially, we headed west, keeping to the darkness. Argent stayed close. I tried to catch May’s eye, but she kept her gaze averted. We stopped in a small park near what used to be a movie theatre. Here the garden was still relatively intact and we could crouch in a thicket of shrubs, perfectly hidden from the road. I didn’t trust Argent, that he hadn’t arranged to have us followed. I checked my watch, scanned the road.
‘We wait here,’ I said.
Three pairs of eyes peered out at me in the darkness.
‘Why here?’ said Argent.
I didn’t bother to reply.
After twenty minutes we started out again, through the park to the side road behind the cinema, north four blocks and then doubling back to the east along a back alley between two rows of houses, fenced, dark, quiet. We made good time. When we reached the waste plant it was just gone midnight. I knew this place well enough. It didn’t take me long to manoeuvre the group across the boneyard and into a narrow depression just beyond the end of the loading dock. ‘Everyone okay?’ I whispered. Three pairs of eyes nodded back at me in the darkness. ‘Now we wait.’
I peered out across the smoking piles of garbage. The glow from the incinerator sent shadows dancing. Shapes rose and caught the light before skulking away across the wasteland. May crouched beside me, her face streaked with char, all its prettiness gone, her hair bundled up under a scarf. She glanced over at me but did not smile. After a moment I felt her hand slide into mine and hold tight. She was frightened. I caressed the knuckle of her index finger with my thumb, an old reassurance. And I remember thinking then that, finally, she knew I loved her still, and that Argent never had.
I glanced at my watch. Anytime now the truck should be arriving. According to Lachie’s letter it would unload fuel and food first, and then take on its outbound cargo of recyclables – metals mostly: aluminium, gold and platinum, silicon from circuit boards and computer components, stuff Kwesi and I had harvested. The truck would be in the easternmost bay, the one closest to the boneyard where we now waited. Once the materials were loaded, the driver would open the passenger’s side cab door. That would be the signal for us to climb in. We were to hide in the sleeping compartment, in a false bottom under the mattress. I could not imagine how this would work with four instead of two, but I couldn’t worry about that now. Just after one o’clock, an eighteen-wheeler pulled into the compound and backed into the bay closest to us. The truck’s headlights swept the darkness, forcing us down into the bottom of the trench. I looked over at the blackened faces pushed into the crumbling siltstone, the whites of their eyes shining in the darkness. I signalled ‘stay down’ and put my finger to my lips. They pushed themselves deeper as the shouts of the men and the clanging of the big cargo doors echoed from the walls of the loading bay.
Unloading the trailer seemed to take forever. By the time the pallets of recyclables were being forklifted into the truck, it was gone two o’clock. We were already behind schedule. Every few minutes I pushed my head up over the lip of the trench and checked the loading bay and the cab, watched the truck sink slowly onto its suspension. May hadn’t let go of my hand.
‘What’s going on?’ hissed Argent. ‘What are we waiting for?’
‘For the truck to finish loading,’ I said. ‘Sit tight.’
Argent eased his head up, looked both ways, and crouched back down. I watched him reach behind his back and pull out the pistol he’d threatened me with before.
‘Put that away, for Christ’s sake,’ I said, too loud. ‘If that thing goes off, we’ll have every cop in the place on us.’
Argent glared at me, but he pushed the handgun back into his belt.
Just then the trailer’s rear doors slammed shut. The voices of the men receded, down along the bay towards a second truck that was waiting to be loaded. The Peterbilt’s diesel engine started up with a cough. Smoke belched from the twin vertical stacks as the driver revved the engine. The truck lurched forward.
Something had happened. He wasn’t going to take us. It was the wrong truck, the wrong night. I racked my memory. Maybe I’d mixed up the time, the place. I should never have burned the letter. Or perhaps the deal had fallen through: someone had baulked, lost his nerve. May looked up at me, questioning. The base of my stomach fell away.
The truck rolled forward and then stopped with a hiss of air brakes. The passenger side door swung open and hung there in the dark. The signal.
‘Come on.’ I clambered out of the trench, pulled May up after me.
Argent followed with Francoise right behind. I grabbed the door handle and swung myself up to the cab step and looked inside.
A flabby-faced man in a stained T-shirt and baseball cap stared at me from behind the wheel, a cigarette burning in his mouth. ‘You have something for me, asshole?’
‘Magellan,’ I said – the codeword.
‘Yeah, what the fuck. Get in and make it quick.’
I turned to help May, but Argent clambered up and pushed his way past me and into the cab beside the driver.
‘What the fuck is he doing here?’ said the driver. ‘I was told one man and one woman.’
‘Plans change,’ said Argent. ‘There are four of us.’
‘No way,’ said the driver, shaking his head from side to side. ‘There isn’t room back there. The deal was two. That’s it. The guards will find you and I’ll be up shit creek.’
‘Please,’ I said. ‘We have two women with us. We can’t leave them.’
The driver contemplated this new information for a moment. ‘Tell you what, I’ll take the girls. You two stay behind.’ A nicotine smile creased his face.
‘We can pay extra,’ I said, dropping two of the gold coins that Lachie had given me onto the seat.
The driver glanced at the coins. ‘There isn’t room, I’m tellin’ ya, mister. You won’t make it. And if you don’t, I don’t.’ The driver put the truck into gear. ‘Now either two of you get in and close the door or fuck off.’
Argent shoved his pistol into the man’s side. ‘You’ll do exactly what I tell you, boy, or you’ll end up with a hole the size of my dick in your fucking ribs.’ And then to me: ‘Get in the back.’
I helped up May and then Francoise, who squeezed into the back of the cab. I closed the door.
‘Now get going,’ said Argent. ‘Just as planned.’
I scrambled into the rear of the cab, which was laid out as a personal sleeping compartment.
‘Get out of sight,’ the driver called back to us. ‘The bed opens up, there is a space underneath. Pull the latch at the front.’
The truck lurched forward, sending May and Francoise tumbling onto the bed.
‘Quick,’ I said. ‘It’s less than a kilometre to the first gate. Help me find the latch.’
We fumbled around in the darkness as the truck gained the main road and turned south. I ran my fingers from one end of the metal frame to the other. It was smooth and regular. ‘I can’t find it,’ I shouted out over the diesel. ‘For Christ’s sake, where is it?’
‘Lower,’ yelled back the driver. ‘Right up under the frame.’
I crouched and pushed my arm up under the steel rib. The rubber sheathed handle was dead centre. I pulled it hard and the latch sprung and one side of the bed jumped free. Francoise was already reaching under the other end. We pushed it open.
The cavity was about as deep as a man’s shin bone, and as wide as a pair of outstretched arms. Francoise climbed in and slid to the rear, lying on her back with her arms folded across her chest.
‘What about air?’ I said.
‘Vents on each side,’ said the driver. He had clearly done this before.
May crouched beside the box, looking back at Argent.
‘Get in,’ said Argent. ‘I’m staying right here to keep our friend honest.’ Argent pulled his cap down close over his eyes, and thrust his hand back over the seat rest, fist closed. ‘Here, Teacher-man. You’ll be needing these.’
I cupped my hand beneath Argent’s fist. Two heavy, gold Maple Leaf coins fell into my palm. White light flooded the cab.
‘Get the fuck down and close the lid,’ said the driver. ‘We’re almost at the main gate.’
May was lying on her back next to Francoise. It left a space barely large enough for me to lie on my side. I wedged myself in next to May. I hadn’t been this close to her for a long time. I grabbed the handle and closed the lid with a click.
A Desert River
She told me once, when we were first married, that she could only see with her eyes closed.
There, just like in her dreams, the world was so full of colour and pattern that she had to force herself not to process it all, to move back and away so that the terrible detail, the pointillism of a Seurat or the vertigo of a dotted Aboriginal landscape, did not overwhelm her. And she could not wait for the dreams to end so that she could put it all down, pour it out like some waterfall that burst from behind her eyes, each detail flowing down through her arms and her fingertips to the point of her brush, freed somehow from the holding cell of her brain. She did not know where it came from, or why, and when it stopped, drying up like a desert river, she never understood the reasons for her punishment. It was something entirely beyond her control, and contrary to what she had been taught all her life by doting only-child parents, it had no relation to the amount of effort or dedication she afforded it. The paintings, the good ones, the ones she loved and that others sometimes paid for, had always seemed to make themselves, as if she was simply a conduit, a medium.
