By Light Alone (11 page)

‘That dumpy creature?’ she said, in a boiled-hard voice. ‘Better to bleach the thought
completely
out of your thoughts.’

He couldn’t think of a response to this. All he said was: ‘What?’ He opened and closed his mouth with fishlike idiocy. His desire had shrivelled to a flaccid stump in the teeth of her hostility.

‘You have heard me.’

He might have said:
But why is it a problem now
? Except that, of course, he knew straight away why it was a problem now. Which is to say, he knew that things had changed. He could have said:
I won’t mind if you do or but it’s just play! It’s our game
! In Marie’s head, the time for games was over. Out of the swirl of this complex intuition, the only phrase that came out was: ‘I don’t understand.’ His tone of voice, unpremeditated though it was, seemed to irritate her further.

‘You don’t understand,’ she repeated. She walked away from him. This might have been meant as simple sarcasm, or scornful reiteration of his ignorance, or conceivably as a statement of solidarity in his anchorlessness. He didn’t know. In the days that followed the phrase came back to him at odd moments. He didn’t like the sour scent it wafted over his thoughts. It was really very simple, actually; he had lived a childishly spoilt existence in which every whim was indulged and which no actual hardship had interrupted until
this
had happened. Marie had misunderstood. His
I don’t understand
was his response to a deep change in his world. It was the largest of questions. It was the question that defined humans.

Winter deepened. The overhang of their building entrance sported two, and only two, icicles, large as sabre-teeth: one on either side – presumably the others had been snapped off by the building staff. Municipal drones trundled about the slippery sidewalks carving interlocking grooves into the ice. You could tell which pigeons had been genengineered to withstand the cold, because they bullied the unmodified pigeons, pecking them, harassing them, and in some cases cannibalizing them.

Some days George did nothing more with his day than watch the winter sun slide a tray of light over the bedroom carpet, and angle it up the wall.

From time to time they spoke to Ergaste and Emma, by Lance; or, less frequently, to Ysabelle and Peter. Ergaste said that he’d talked to ZeeYZee, but that it seemed child-theft was a ten-a-cent occurrence, and there wasn’t any media publishing interest. ‘Even when it happens to a person of means, such as yourself! On the other hand,’ he went on, as sunspots, or ramjets, or whatever it was that causes those occasional flickers of interference, sent random barcodes of black lines through his image, ‘on the
other
hand, I have the details of the
best lawyer in Europe
. When the time comes to sue the hotel – not now, too painful, too soon, yah-yah . . . but when the
time comes
. . .’

At the beginning of December George flew back to the mountain. Marie did not come. ‘I will never again go to that God-cursed place,’ she said. ‘I vow never again to go there.’ What could George do but agree?

Back in the hotel, feeling as if he had never really left it, George had a three-quarter-hour meeting with Captain Afkhani. She detailed the lines of enquiry pursued by the hotel security, and the separate lines undertaken by the police at Do
ğ
ubayazit, and explained in many superfluous words, and with much hedging about, that they had all been fruitless. Of Arsinée she said, with an inflection that suggested she expected George to be happy at the news: ‘She has been sentenced to a prison term.’ There were no prisons locally, and the women’s prison at Tehran had refused to take her (Why? George asked. Oh, because there was no actual evidence against her; although her guilt had been established to the necessary legal tolerances.) This meant that she was doing time at Ankara. ‘It is by way of a strategy,’ said the captain. ‘It applies pressure. When she gives up details of her accomplices, we shall shorten the sentence.’

‘And you’re sure she’s involved?’ George asked, wondering if the little lump nestling visibly between Afkhani’s pelvis and ribcage was pregnancy, or just weight gain, unable to think of a polite way of asking.

‘It is our experience that such child theft almost always employs an insider,’ the captain replied blandly.

So George came home again. There was nothing to stay for. Boarding the ramjet at Tabriz it suddenly occurred to George, like a knifeblade being abruptly sheathed in his heart, that he would never see Leah again. She was dead; it was not a kidnapping but a murder trial. Or if she was not dead, then she had been taken so far from the usual routes of life as for it to amount to the same thing. He sat in his seat, trying to visualize his daughter’s face, unable to do it.

13

Back in NY, George started going again to his assertiveness therapist. He had attended sporadically for a number of years, but let it slide after the birth of Ezra. Now he signed on again, and the thrice-weekly sessions gave a structure to his days. Part of the process was dream-reading. What this entailed was not interpretation, according to the assertiveness orthodoxy: it consisted of
strategies of reappropriation of dream narratives
. The theory was that dreaming was the chaos of the mind; and that assertiveness, as a holistic life philosophy, was about the seizure of agency in all aspects of the self. Dreams were related in such a way as to make the mulch and mess of symbols and surrealism part of a coherent story at the control of the dreamer. To put the orts and scraps of daytime experience back into the grid of narrative.

He and Marie and (of course) Ezra, with Wharton, went to a new seafood place called McAlmont’s. George amused the boy by dangling squid tentacles from his mouth like fangs, and from his nostrils like boogers, and pretending to whip the table with them. Naughty table!

The recalcitrance of the inanimate.

There was a fire in the building. Municipal fireblimps bumped their noses against the side of the building as they sprayed the relevant portion of the structure with smartfoam.

The year turned.

There was a week in January during which George and Marie exchanged literally no conversational words whatsoever.

The clouds are icebergs, and the day repeatedly crashes against them and eventually it goes down in flame-coloured splendour.

At the beginning of February Ergaste called on the Lance. ‘Can you come to London?’

‘London,’ said George, in a watery voice.

‘Just so. Right now – today?’

He was a shove-ball, and the universe kept firing bullet-pegs at him. With a click and a roll. A taxi brought him to the midmorning ramjet, and by noon he was sitting in a central London eatery, with views of the swollen Thames, that ancient river. But all rivers are ancient, he thought. Flowing like bands of hair from the cranium of the land. Ergaste came, even more boisterously
present
here, in his homeland, than he had been on Ararat. With him came a slim woman of indeterminate age, dressed in dark blue and wearing a bulky headdress. ‘This is Dot Mennel,’ said Ergaste, as they all took their seats.

‘Dorothy?’ George tried.

‘Dot,’ she said.

They drank high-proof beer from tubular glasses, and ate little pots of creamed eel, with neat, origami-like structures made of folded slices of ham balanced on the top. ‘Dot knows all about your situation,’ Ergaste said. ‘I took the liberty of retaining her services. Consider it my gift to you.’

George was past the stage when the events of the world surprised him. ‘Kind.’

‘Not at all.’

‘And what
are
your services?’ he asked her.

‘I can help you find your daughter,’ she said. Those seven words might as well have been Sanskrit for the impact they had on George’s comprehension. Nominative, accusative, dative. Some notional sense could be derived from them, of course; but translated out of their uttered alternate-reality idiom they acquired the quality of words spoken long, long ago. ‘OK,’ George said, and took another sip of the strange, yeasty, sour little drink.
OK
covered most things, he thought.

‘Can you come with me?’ she asked.

‘Come with you?’ Something wriggled inside George’s soul at this offer, as if to show that it wasn’t entirely dead. But she didn’t mean it in that way.

‘We can be at Ararat by three,’ she said.

George, distantly, considered this possibility. He tried to conjure reasons to say no, but couldn’t produce any. He did not remember if he had mentioned to Marie that he was coming to London that morning. He did not remember, indeed, if he’d spoken to her for days.

‘OK,’ he said.

‘Let’s finish lunch, though, eh?’ said Ergaste.

‘OK.’

So, buoyed by the alcohol, he sat through the rest of the meal. Ergaste kept talking, in his absurd high-volume voice. George took in perhaps a third of what he said; the rest was just English-accented babble and bluster. Dot, whoever she was, mostly kept her own counsel. The flesh on Ergaste’s face, George thought, looked like a layer of something painted thickly on. His jowls wobbled asynchronously as he spoke. His neck, though tightened by the usual treatments, trembled as if with a life of its own. He was a large man; a swollen man. He was a man with something fierce exerting pressure from within, and pushing his skin out in all directions. He was talking now about his business – about the need to engineer quicker and quicker growing cycles for certain food plants so as to keep up with the rapidly oscillating fashions for luxury eating. ‘Staples are all gone now; no market for them. But the rich
do
like their tidbits, so I’ll always have a business. They’re flibbertigibbet though!’

George didn’t know this word. ‘What?’ he asked.

‘The
rich
are,’ said Ergaste, boomingly. ‘No point in me spending six months growing and processing – let’s say – lamb smoothie, if by the
time
I bring it to market the fashion’s shifted to red snapper chocolate!’

‘Lamb smoothie was very last season,’ George agreed, vaguely. He couldn’t decide if the salt odour he could smell was the beer or the river. He moved his glass away from him. The salt smell did not diminish. Presumably it was the river, then. He looked out over the waterway. The old riverside roads were visible under the tinted waters. Big fish, trout maybe, swam windingly around lampposts.

‘George,’ Ergaste said, changing the subject abruptly and fixing him with his fierce eye. ‘It’s time to light a fire underneath them. Not been properly
trying
to recover your girl, have they. Not
incentivized
.’

‘I’ve visited the area,’ said Dot, coming to life like a robot. ‘It’s an area I know. They’re following the official lines, with an eye on the lawsuit they know is coming – everything they do is so that they have a case for court. But actually finding your daughter is not part of that strategy.’ She had one of those opaque, matt, whiny London accents.

George gave voice to his new catchphrase. ‘I don’t understand.’ Oh, but it’s
always
sincerely meant. It always is.

‘Dot knows the zone,’ boomed Ergaste. ‘She’ll sort it, if anyone will. Her help is
my gift
to you.’

‘You are very,’ said George, staring dreamily at Ergaste’s large face. ‘Fat,’ he said.

Ergaste cleared his throat. There was a pause. Then, visibly, he decided that George had just said
kind
. ‘Don’t mention it,’ he said. ‘You’ve been to hell.
Least
I couldoo.’

‘There’s a flitter on the roof,’ said Dot, standing up.

They flew over west London; grey black roofs and the myriad glints of many pools. Standing water, mostly. At Heathrow they boarded a ramjet to Tbilisi. Dot sat with ninja stillness in the seat opposite George the whole way. ‘Have you,’ he asked, alternately licking and sucking an orange-vodka lolly, ‘worked kidnapping cases often?’

‘Crime paradigms have changed,’ she said. ‘The New Hair changed the nature of crime.’

‘Well,’ said George, watching the clouds bob past. ‘The New Hair changed everything, I suppose.’

Dot seemed not to blink as she watched his face. There was something discomfiting about her gaze. George tried meeting it, but he ended up looking away. He knew what that gaze meant. It meant:
nothing changed for you
. It meant:
that’s a definition of rich. Wealth is mankind’s oldest buffer against change. It meant: you have no idea
. But that’s not true! He thought those words to himself. I do have an idea. I have several ideas. They’re just not my ideas. I have acquired them from others, as is the case for all my possessions.