One Billion Drops of Happiness (23 page)

‘Tell me everything,’ he demanded, motioning authoritatively into the corner. ‘I’ve been racking my brains for days but haven’t been able to come up with anything.’ For a man who was at the mercy of someone else’s news, he was still indomitably in control.

Bathsheba Ermez sat close to him and in hushed tones, filled Henry in on the news. When she was finished he was gazing at her with his steely blue eyes. Then quite suddenly and without warning, he leaned forward and kissed her.

* * *

‘The prisoners!’

‘…waking them up!’

‘…Using them for all sorts…’

‘Thousands of them…’

‘…sleeping for decades.’

‘…will never be normal.’

‘…good enough for war…’

‘War? What war?’

‘Shut up, immigrant.’

* * *

She was dreaming vividly at night. Sometimes she returned back to that boat that day; she was laughing again for the very first time. But then a storm would break out quite suddenly and she would tip headfirst into the icy water. Lars’ hand would be somewhere in the mist, seeking desperately to haul her out, but the lake would mercilessly clamp down on her head with every struggle she made. She was calling his name, calling, calling…

She always awoke up drenched in sweat, her hand habitually flying to her neck before remembering that there was no use. It was dead.

Oh Lars, she prayed, wherever you are, keep your noble heart intact.

* * *

Man who lives on the ledge of the world, so far flung from sun’s noble solace.

Who keeps you warm when your fires are smothered? Who reignites the tired embers in your furnace?

Who is your light when your lamp has perished, and none but the stars can guide your humble trail?

In my dreams I join you. We gaze beyond the frontier and capture both forever and a void.

* * *

She went walking out in the fields one night. The night was beautifully calm. The moon cast a light across all the patchwork fields in the horizon, as far as the eye could see. She stared up at its globular shape and remembered her mother.

I love you.

If only she could see her now. Xandria would never know if she was still alive, but she liked to think so. Perhaps they had found another world; a better place to live in.

Suddenly there emerged a dark silhouette in the distance; it was moving towards her with great purpose. She knew that gait anywhere. She had watched that gait, walked alongside its owner hour after hour.

Could it be?

Her heart quickened in her chest, squirting adrenaline into her trembling legs. It was cold out there.

The figure came closer – it was him! Him! Her Lars! Oh, she could have wept a thousand times. He had returned to her, she knew he would.

So there was a God!

She could see his face now; it looked ethereal. He was gazing into her eyes with a small smile on that perfect face. If she could bottle that moment, she would never need her Suppressitor again.

She was bewitched by this hazy, astral dream He was drawing up to her now; her happiness could not be described. Was this not the most beautiful night the Earth had ever seen?

She could finally tell him, she had been waiting so long.

I’m sorry Lars. I’m so sorry.

His face was shining and he still said nothing. In one fluid motion he swept her up into his arms, holding her tightly for what seemed like eternity. She was weeping with joy; this was the moment she had been waiting for.

This was without a doubt the single happiest moment in her life. She and her Lars finally reunited beneath the stars.

But the next morning when she awoke, her world ended.

* * *

The scientists working for Excelsior Incorporated had hit the jackpot. Henry scrupulously ensured that the team was full of the strongest minded individuals who had no chance of losing their heads when their Suppressitors died out. His efforts paid off handsomely.

He had quite forgotten their existence. They were like the street-sweepers whose job you took entirely for granted. Amid the drama of all the riots and protests exploding into action across the country, the small team of scientists had continued working solidly, completely unscathed and uninformed of the outside world. They were working towards something incredible; a tweak in an already existing invention which would make their lives so much easier.

Of course every invention has the potential to be abused, but the scientists had enlisted the government’s legal team to work alongside them and enshrine their creation in law at the exactly the same moment it was unveiled.

Up until now the use of the Vapour, as invented by Alfred Reinhardt - that vermin pariah of New America, may his soul rot in chaos - had required a completely closed environment to function. It had been largely without fault; Signing Off those who had come of age had required only the white clad team of five to pop round to an address and drag the poor citizen back to headquarters. It had not been difficult.

However, since the incident of the millions of trampled protestors adorning the city streets, there had been uncomfortable questions over how to avoid such a calamitous situation in the future. The citizens had made the place look untidy. They had stayed there until two days later, when the very last body was scraped off the street and rounded up to be Signed Off. It had been an exhausting job, drawing on many workers to work up to two days continuously without break. The fact that the bodies were there for so long was not efficient. With every hour that passed it was an ugly reminder of the country’s weaknesses. It triggered fresh spates of panic in other areas of the city, although people no longer voiced their anguish in large groups, fearful that they too would be Signed Off like Effie Brigham’s mother. Their new President was harsh, but she was fair.

Therefore, the timely news that the scientists had invented a way for the Vapour to function reasonably well in an open environment was the news that made the government realise the war was won.

Forget the prisoners. That had been a faltering idea from Ernesta Wan in the days of uncertainty, largely circulated by herself to gain self support. Henry and Bathsheba had barely taken notice of it; it would have been a logistical nightmare.

The news that they could finally adapt the Vapour caused a surge of extreme happiness which even the impassable Henry had to click to suppress. That single piece of information prompted him and Bathsheba Ermez to call an urgent meeting of mirages. After several hours of fervent discussion, all attendees of the meeting went away satisfied.

The future of the planet was theirs.

* * *

That night, according to rigorous instruction and strictest secrecy punishable by death, several hundred airplanes were promptly dispatched to the Old World under the cover of darkness. The New American planes sliced noiselessly through the silent night air, briskly arriving at their destinations and hovering over them like the horrifying spectres they were. Each soldier camp on each continent was surrounded by these floating enemies, utterly unbeknownst to them in their fearless sleep.

One by one, the undetected aircrafts released a substance, a terrible Vapour unto the innocent, slumbering masses hundreds of feet below. It was timed with military precision, calculated with the cold mind of a tyrant so that at the precise moment of impact, millions upon millions of defenceless members of the human race would be Signed Off. This was an act so reprehensible that even the pilots of the aircrafts were simultaneously filled with an indescribable revulsion at what they had just done. They watched in horror, sobbing as their unnamed targets, murdered by their brothers from the same planet, completely disappeared into smoke as if they had never existed. In that moment, a large fraction of mankind was snuffed out so mercilessly, so silently, that the gods must have surely fallen out of their skies, forever broken by the tragedy.

Later it emerged that the pilots, completely independently and of their own accord, had simultaneously nosedived their aircrafts into the swarming Vapour, begging also to be Signed Off and erased of the searing evil they had just inflicted. They too joined the millions of humans who would never be going home. As the Vapour enveloped them and wordlessly rid them of their sins, the Earth became deathly quiet. The Vapour spread thinly for miles, deleting everything in its path until it came to a stop and the mist lifted once more.

New America had coldly calculated that if the Old World soldiers were out of the way, they could swiftly build turbines across the whole planet and heighten the power of Ophelium to dizzying levels. There would be no more strife; in fact they would be responsible for finally achieving world peace.

Why not delete the whole of the Old World, some of the government had said. We can start again from scratch. Build an empire. But Bathsheba Ermez, remembering her parents for the first time in months, had put her foot down on this matter. She explained that once the people were sufficiently suppressed by Ophelium, they would be useful tools in rebuilding the world however New America so desired.

Alas, the world had been dealt a wound it would never heal from. From the outer echelons of space, the stars swirled and frowned. The people who had gazed at them in wonderment would soon be joining them in the night sky, never to speak again, never to smile, but instead to shine brightly and anonymously at those they had left behind.

As long as the grasses continued to be blown by the midnight wind and as long as the spheres rotated in the sky, those stars would be there consoling the grieving forever more.

* * *

The next day the world awoke to darkness.

The realisation of what had been done was too much to bear; the shock too profound for anybody to attempt to put words to. It was the saddest day the Earth had ever seen.

That poor grievous planet. She most surely ceased her spiral, crept off her axis and watched glassy-eyed, trapped in broken reverie. And as for the poor remaining souls; ablaze, they stood frozen. In one moment every single heart in the Old World had been strangled, and all hope lost for eternity.

Dead!

Dear Lars dead!

Dead!

Dead!

Dead!

The terrible truth screeched at her from within, and with each millisecond it paused for breath, the harsh cry was renewed louder and stronger and more painful than before.

She knew the pain would never subside. It fed off itself. Each second brought cascade upon cascade of searing knives hammering down and impaling, no, slicing her core apart. If only it would kill her it would end this grief. The blood would run warm with tears, such an endless supply of water oozing from her eyes.

There was no Suppressitor to calm her; she was entirely alone with every human fibre, every raw nerve singed with the inexhaustible, insatiable fires of anguish.

She couldn’t breathe. Choking on the very oxygen that fed her life. Her body convulsed. She alternated between gasping and suffocating.

Oh God, she pleaded inwardly as her body shook violently, if you exist, if you exist as Lars said you did, then please spare me, spare me, spare me, spare me, spare me! Me! Me!

Me! Me! Me!

ENOUGH!

Yes! It is I!

I!

It is I who write this wretched soliloquy!

It was I all along!

I cannot maintain this dreadful pretence! I cannot be calm to write coherent prose as I ought to.

I am intractably sad!

I can only write to ease this gaping hole in my heart. I can only continue telling this story and apologise that I could not maintain my feeble cover.

There is a permanent rock in my chest. It hangs heavy and it bruises me afresh with every movement I make. There is no forgetting. Each remembrance is worse than the last. Each realisation that there is no going back; that what has been done is irrevocably final. I am scared by the enormity of my grief.

He is never coming back. I will never see those beautiful, unusual eyes again. Never hear his words of infinite wisdom. Never glimpse his unrequited smile.

He had not even the dignity of a natural human death.

I am so, so sad!

* * *

He came to me in a dream.

‘But how will I go on without you?’ I said.

He just smiled. He always smiled.

* * *

In the next few weeks I went to the chapel and cried. Over and over, I must have shed enough tears to drown out Ophelium from its very turbines. I barely spoke to anyone. Mrs. Olsen had secluded herself in her pain and I could not face her. She who loved him from the day he was born without jarring for a single moment. And then there was I.

I carried so much guilt I could not look at anybody through these great sullied holes for eyes. It was my country who had done this to them. My country whom I had proudly and arrogantly flaunted in their faces since the day I arrived, and now even in a time when they could reasonably forsake me, I was silently welcomed into the fold of the nation, of the Old World, as a fellow mourner who had lost someone so terribly dear.

I was both touched and revulsed by the kindness. It reminded me of who I had once been, and who I would soon become again. A few days after the unspeakable, I came across Magritte outside the chapel, and she had embraced me whispering into my ear, ‘free at last, free at last’, and I did not know if she was referring to myself or Lars.

Oh where does a great soul like his roam? Everything was so silent. I heard slithers about how being Signed Off was the ultimate in human horrors; the ultimate in human ends. Death had been robbed, not just for Lars, but for the millions of Old World soldiers who went to fight for what was human.

There was a silence in the world which I could not bear. This was the biggest human catastrophe since the Earth began. The greatest human crime with the greatest human loss. An unspeakable, despicable act that nobody could get their head around. But soon they wouldn’t have to.

Soon the gas will come and hush the planet. It will rob us once again of our feelings, of this torment which although ghastly, is rightly ours to bear. The pain belongs to us.