By Light Alone (29 page)

That was the end of her association with G
ē
nUp, and no regrets. Ghastly corporation. Most of its customers worked for a living. She felt stupid that she’d ever retained them at all.

She was happier? Of course she was happier.

She retained a different company – CellMech – with a much better-mannered personal agent, and tried a different regimen, which helped a little. Not anti-melancholics (because, as Marie explained with brittle emphasis, she had
nothing to feel melancholy about
), but an older model of mood stabilizer. She had a greater proportion of good nights. Her joy at being able to spend time with Leah– literally that, at just being able to spend time with her – was so intense that often it manifested as a kind of jagged snappishness. But Leah never cried, or complained, or rebuked her mother for ill temper, so presumably she understood the intensity and complexity of the emotions involved.

And then, as the year turned around, she finally broke it off with George. Dear, foolish, hopeless George – sweet-natured, but hopeless. Incapable of deep feeling, that was the truth. A shallow individual. And divorce was like a new injection of youth. She really felt now, what was it the characters in that book said, when the earth stood all before them – or whatever the line was. Her life was getting better in every way. It was the very perversity of life that this development brought with it whole days – sometimes whole
stretches
of several days together – when she couldn’t get out of her bed. She felt so drained of life-force. Whatever this experience was, it wasn’t unhappiness. She was honest with herself, over a solitary bottle of grape vodka. There was no point in anything except honesty, after all. If divorcing George made her miserable, then the logical thing would be to bring George back into her life. But when she contemplated such a move, her spirit sagged within her. And when she looked at her prospects without him, she felt only a sort of spacious gladness. It wasn’t that the divorce had made her unhappy.

It was her new medic who provided her with the answer to this horrible, counterintuitive tangle. Wiczek was her name, a compact, pleasingly fleshy woman with the scent of ginger about her. She explained something to Marie that had simply not occurred to her before. Coming to Marie’s new apartment, listening to the narrative of the previous three years, she nodded very slowly at Marie’s insistence on her happiness and her repudiation of the need for anti-melancholics; and eventually she spoke:

‘People don’t understand it, and – if you’ll permit me – you haven’t understood it yourself yet. But happiness is a trauma. Especially a great and sudden happiness. It is as disorienting to the psyche as great sorrow.’

With a gusty feeling of sudden comprehension, the dark side of Marie’s moon became suddenly bright. Finally, she understood. ‘Of course!’

‘Yes,’ said Wiczek, and nodded again, thoughtfully. Oh, the force of her explanation zigged and then zagged through Marie’s consciousness. ‘Of
course
!’ she said. ‘That’s why being reunited with my daughter has brought me so many – tears.’

‘If we say
tears of happiness
, then we don’t get it quite right,’ Wiczek said. ‘For the tears do not feel happy as we cry them. But it is happiness that is behind then, nonetheless. The happiness that works like an earthquake in our lives, toppling our old architecture.’

This described Marie’s situation so perfectly her mouth fell open. It was as if this person had opened the blast doors and peered into the heart of Marie’s life. ‘Exactly,’ she said, in a soft voice. ‘Exactly.’

Wiczek prescribed a new regimen. ‘If you look up the serial codes, which you can do in a breath on your Fwn – your Helios, rather’ (this correction offered with a self-deprecating smile that was perfectly winning) ‘—if you look it up, you’ll find it’s described in the same terms of the most common anti-melancholics. But don’t let the superficial similarities fool you! This prescription is individually tailored to address the excesses of
happiness
in your recent life.’

‘I trust you completely,’ said Marie.

And the regimen did help! Of course it did. The number of sleepless nights was reduced, and she was better able to
enjoy
her newfound joy. In one of the follow-up sessions, Wiczek mentioned assertivism as an avenue worth exploring. Marie’s reaction surprised even her with its vehemence: ‘My ex-husband was an assertivist – a lot of toxic nonsense! The least assertive person I have ever met, and assertivism just bedded in his inertia.’

‘I quite agree,’ said Wiczek, smoothly. ‘I was not about to suggest actual assertivism, but rather to quote some of the wisest words ever uttered on the subject of living with the aftermath of trauma. You know Voltaire?’

‘The electricity inventor?’

‘Writer, philosopher. Voltaire said: We must cultivate our gardens. Do not fret and internalize, but rather busy yourself with pleasurable, creative activity.’

Once again, her words connected immediately, profoundly, with Marie’s soul. How could Wiczek possibly have known about her love for gardens? Conceivably she meant the phrase metaphorically – or this old Voltaire fellow did. But gardens were amongst the places where Marie felt happiest. And she’d been involved in the Queens Rewilding Project from early on. Losing the seaside portions of Brooklyn and Queens to the rising waters, and the possibility of further incursion by the sea, had driven the better off out of the area anyway. There’d been some talk of extending the Hough Wall all round the coast, build up the dykes properly, but that was never going to be cost-effective. So the area was already in the process of dereliction, and there wasn’t as much difficulty in moving the last real people out – those workers who still clung to their respectability, and ate food however expensive it was. Naturally there was some trouble, and the QRWP Coordinating Committee – the cabal – had to hire a couple of quadpods and a platoon of riot police to clear them away. Quite apart from anything else, there were lots and lots of longhairs, although in the end they all got moved on easily enough.

None of the real-estate management stuff really interested Marie. She joined the cabal, and put her money forward, with a view to the actual rewilding itself; the planning and gardening itself. And it so happened, thank Providence, or thank Happiness, that the clearances were pretty much completed, and spiderfencing erected to keep out itinerants, before she began her treatment under Wiczek. That was one reason why her words struck so powerfully. This Voltaire had it right; the garden would heal the land over on Queens and Brooklyn, and heal her traumatized spirit too!

Whatever else was true, she had the garden. Something to work for. Something to work in.

‘Thank you,’ she said. Who was she thanking?

‘Thank you.’

‘Thank you!’

The cabal met several times and scanned through hundreds of VR possibilities for how the completed project was going to look. It was going to be a thing of real beauty. Marie liked the meetings; she liked the feeling of godlike omnipotence. But she liked being actually in the zone better – to see it happening around her, to watch the groundworkers toiling away. See it taking shape.
Shape
, she thought to herself, sitting beneath one of the project sunshades and drinking a Gap cocktail, was the secret of the universe.

To be
doing
something! She was happier than she’d ever been.

She brought Ezra fairly often into the project zone. To him it was a giant playground, and no sooner would the flitter door open than he’d run off, whooping and hallooing like a gibbon. She brought Leah sometimes too, but the girl was going through a difficult phase. Marie sometimes thought, honest to Providence, that Leah preferred books to real life. She’d find some stump to sit on and unroll yet another brightly coloured book. Marie just couldn’t get her interested in the great design. ‘It’s the grand project of our age, sweetie,’ she would explain, and Leah would look up with her ‘whatever’ expression. Often it was simpler not to bring her into the zone. It would only result in Marie losing her temper with the child.

And then there was Arto, who shared her belief in the importance of the rewilding, and whose sly, knowing glances acted as catalyst to her new life.

It was about her happiness. She had never been so happy! But it was more than that, it was about the careful management of her happiness, the keeping of her happiness within manageable bounds. So much of her joy was tied up with the garden. Making the new world new again. Was it fair to ask her – she who had been through such a lot, who had suffered so much trauma – to ask her to
contaminate
her good feeling? And Leah’s sulky dumb-insolence
was
a mode of contamination. Ezra couldn’t care less about the aesthetic possibilities, of course; but at least he took a primordial joy in the environment. Leah always had this fish-out-of-water look in the wilderness, as if she couldn’t wait to get back to the city. She had no larger vision. Took after her father, of course. That had been the fundamental incompatibility between the two of them, Marie now saw: his inwardness, as opposed to her receptiveness to the world outside. She did not pretend never to have loved him. Obviously she
had
loved him, once: and not just for his good looks and louchely attentive sensuality. But he was a radically
passive
individual, content to let things happen to him. Where she, of course, was radically
active
. She was a doer, a go-getter, a maker. Once upon a time, perhaps, she had found his inertial being-in-the-world oddly charming. She had believed it complemented her own more assertive nature. She could hardly have coexisted with another such as herself. But it was too much, in the long run. It was too provoking. She couldn’t be with him any more. It turned out he really wasn’t very interested in
her
.

Now, the thing about Arto was that he was
actually
interested in her life. ‘So you’ve got
two
children?’ he asked.

‘That’s right.’

‘Tell me about them?’

‘Ezra – my boy – is shaping up to be a sportsman. He loves any kind of running, or kicking, or climbing, or jumping. Brom – that’s his carer – took him underwater last week, and he loved it. I’ve never seen him so excited! And he gets excited, you know? These waterlungs . . . we never had them when I was a child.’

‘Oho,’ said Arto. ‘They’re all the rage, though, aren’t they?’

‘Aren’t they though? I think they look daft – stomping around the bottom of the pool in weighted shoes with those things flapping after you like loose sheets! But Ez loves them. He says he wants to do the lagoon race – I mean, the footrace across the Hudson basin, not the Murdoch event. Waterlungers running in slow motion the whole way! I’ve told him next year, maybe.’

‘How old is he, though?’

‘He’s nearly eight.’

‘And your daughter?’

‘My lovely Leah,’ said Marie. But the tingling in her heart was a chill. It was a sort of contraction. It was a puzzle, but that must be because
she
was a puzzle. ‘She’s not so physically active, I’m afraid. But she loves her books!’

‘I heard the terrible story—’

‘Oh,’ said Marie, briskly (for there was no point in being evasive). ‘Yes, it was a horrible thing. We were on holiday at the Ararat resort, and she was snatched. They just grabbed her. And the police were worse than useless.’

‘Corrupt?’ Arto prompted.

‘Take
that
for granted. I had to hire a private agent to locate her. She was gone for ages! The poor thing, I shudder to think . . . but she’s back now.’ The way happiness, in its proper home in the heart, burns like anger. That’s the truer joy.

‘Your husband?’

‘We’re separated now. I’ll tell you the truth, Arto.’ She leant in a little closer, feeling the pleasing anticipatory tingle. ‘I don’t think he has ever quite recovered from losing Leah for those months.’

‘Months!’

‘Oh yes, it took
months
to recover her. It caved him in, I’m afraid. He’s tender-hearted but weak, you see.’

‘I can see you’re
not
weak, though,’ smiled Arto.

She took this in her stride. ‘Caved him in,’ she said. ‘He hasn’t been the same. He lives pretty much as a hermit, now. Do you know he’s taken the Bug?’

‘The Bug?’

‘The hair thing, I mean’

‘Gracious. Really?’

‘It’s some obscure form of self-punishment, I think. Grown his do out like a longhair. It’s a bit tragic, really.’

‘He still sees the children?’

Having painted George as a mild lunatic, this question rather incommoded Leah. She had to say, ‘oh, yes,’ of course; but she didn’t want it to sound like she was abandoning her beloveds to the care of an insane man. ‘He’s harmless. He’s good with the kids, actually.’

‘Won’t Leah be fourteen next year?’

How did he know that? Perhaps she’d told him on some other occasion. ‘Yes.’

‘She could decide to live with him full time?’

The thought of this had never crossed Marie’s mind. ‘Oh she wouldn’t do that.’

‘She’s friends with a man called Rodion?’

This was when the warning bing-bing sounded, as it were, inside Marie’s head. ‘What?’

‘Rodion VanderMolen – I believe he used to live in the other half of your parkfront building? Before you moved, I mean.’