The Gone-Away World (22 page)

By this strange logic, it seems reasonable that Gonzo would opt for a military life, and inevitable, once that decision was made, that he should seek the special forces and the dirty deeds done dirt cheap for the good of those who must never know. Gonzo could never be a line officer or a grunt. Gonzo could only ever be a Mysterious Stranger, dispensing justice and retribution in alleys all around the globe.

And with that, he orders another round and refuses to talk about it any more, because he has not, as yet, done any of these things, he has only trained for them, and Gonzo hates to talk about himself in anticipation—it does not suit him to say he is, as yet, a rookie.

In my memory there are no strippers. Gonzo swears, the day after, that there were dozens.

Chapter Five

Un-war, hells, and cakes;
a date; the red phone rings.

G
REY-BROWN EARTH
and green mountainsides; misty air. In the distance one of the lakes of Addeh is giving up its moisture to the heat. When the wind comes from that direction, there's a smell of water, and diesel. When it flicks listlessly round, it comes off the Katir mountains, and carries pine and some kind of flower. Whatever direction it blows from, it doesn't make my tent any cooler or any less isolated in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by other tents and men and women just as lonely.

This is Freeman ibn Solomon's homeland, and the gun-mountain he was so unhapppy about has turned out to be a volcano. The country is no longer even known as Addeh Katir; mostly people call it the Elective Theatre, which suggests in some way that there is a clear decision-making process behind what is happening here. That suggestion is extremely debatable.

In the distant past, in what might be described as the Golden Days of War, the business of wreaking havoc on your neighbours (these being the only people you could logistically expect to wreak havoc upon) was uncomplicated. You—the King—pointed at the next-door country and said, “I want me one of those!” Your vassals—stalwart fellows selected for heft and musculature rather than brain—said, “Yes, my liege,” or sometimes, “What's in it for me?” but broadly speaking they rode off and burned, pillaged, slaughtered and hacked until either you were richer by a few hundred square miles of forest and farmland, or you were rudely arrested by heathens from the other side who wanted a word in your shell-like ear about cross-border aggression. It was a personal thing, and there was little doubt about who was responsible for kicking it off, because that person was to be found in the nicest room of a big stone house wearing a very expensive hat.

Modern war is distinguished by the fact that all the participants are ostensibly unwilling. We are swept towards one another like colonies of heavily armed penguins on an ice floe. Every speech on the subject given by any involved party begins by deploring even the idea of war. A war here would not be legal or useful. It is not necessary or appropriate. It must be avoided. Immediately following this proud declamation comes a series of circumlocutions, circumventions and rhetoricocircumambulations which make it clear that we
will
go to war, but
not really,
because we don't want to and aren't allowed to, so what we're doing is in fact some kind of hyper-violent peace in which people will die. We are going to
un-war.

The first rumbling of un-war was nearly a year ago, when I was back in Project Albumen learning how to kill a car. Erwin Mohander Kumar, priapic president of Addeh Katir and stooge to the international financial system, defaulted on his obligations regarding the nation's debt. Rumour has it that he spent the last hundred million in Addeh Katir's bank account to obtain the services of every employee of a noted Dutch sex establishment for a three-year period. Almost everyone in the world now acknowledges that Erwin Kumar is unfit for dog ownership, let alone government. So much is obvious.

The difficulty is what happens next, which is that various nations and groups of nations who are notionally friendly to one another and here for identical, similar or compatible purposes get into disagreements. The good kind of disagreement comes to an end with harsh words and apologies, but disagreements between men and women trained to kill and armed with the best weapons available, who know that they are disagreeing with people who are similarly trained and equipped, are generally the other sort. Giving someone a jolly good talking-to becomes an exchange of warning shots and suddenly there's a minor battle going on. Minor battles become international incidents; international incidents foster distrust; distrust fosters conflict.

As a consequence of several small disagreements, we are now at unwar with:

It's almost as if, now that this place exists as a war zone, everyone feels it would be rude not to use it.

W
HEN
I
WAS
studying with Master Wu, I learned that his grandmother believed in a truly enormous collection of hells. In her mind the netherworld was like a great vizier's palace or hall of government, and every floor was given over to a different aspect of suffering. There was a Hell of Crawling Flies and a Hell of Scratchy Undergarments and a Hell of Lukewarm Soup and just about every hell, however vile or trivial, that you could imagine. There was a Hell of Standing in Line and a Hell of Loneliness and a Hell of Chattering Neighbours and a Hell of Silent Grief, all the way to a Hell of Boiling Pitch and a Hell of Smashed Fingers and other hells she declined to detail but delineated with significant noddings and rolling of eyes. These hells were arranged in no apparent order (except for a sequence of hells defined by their orderliness), presided over by guards of utmost probity and administered by sadists and reformers and all manner of intransigent folk, who absolutely would not be deterred from hauling or heaving or leading or shoving you into your appointed hell. There was even a Hell of Uncertain Anticipation where you simply sat around waiting to find out which hell you were eventually going to. For ever.

If there can be such a thing as the Hell of Not Getting Shot, I am in it. There is a war going on (or at least an un-war so much like a war as to be indistinguishable from the thing itself) and I am left out. I am in the thick of it, and yet I am not part of it. Men I know and men I do not are marching, patrolling, sometimes getting killed. I have trained and prepared for this, and still I am, as Ronnie Cheung would have it, a spare prick at an orgy. My moment has not come. I have been given subsidiary moments, auxiliary roles, because George Copsen does not waste resources, but these are sporadic and unsatisfying. Thus I wait and think about great and weighty matters. I am doing this now.

The walls of my tent are blue. It is possible for me, lying on my back on my bed, to reach up with my left big toe and snag a little silky thread which hangs from the roof liner and tug on it. My right foot is somehow just out of reach. I have concluded that this is owing to the angle of approach, and not to a disparity in leg lengths, although I know that my legs, like everyone else's,
are
of slightly different lengths; it just seems more likely that it's about angle. Yesterday I had reached the opposite conclusion. Then I changed my bed around so that the head end was the foot end, and now I'm sure it's about angle. I have developed this discussion as a defence against boredom. It doesn't work.

Some days I get sent on idiot missions to keep me sane. These missions impress upon me that this entire situation is irrational and incomprehensible, and that the only logical response to it is madness. I wonder how I will know when I go mad.

In half an hour I will get up and run to my station, where I will spend four hours attempting to stay alive and feeling guilty because I have not been shot.

In the meantime I read my letters. Two weeks ago, I wrote a little packet of letters home. I wrote to the Evangelist. I wrote to Ma Lubitsch and Old Man Lubitsch both at once, though I had to be very careful not to talk too much about Gonzo, who is doing something dangerous and secret which cannot be trusted to paper. I wrote to Dr. Fortismeer and I wrote short postcards to a lot of people I don't really care about, in the hope that one of them will care about me. I did not write to Elisabeth Soames because I do not want her to see me here, doing this. She belongs to Cricklewood Cove, and while she's there, so am I and so is Master Wu, and a little piece of my life before Jarndice will survive. Also, I am embarrassed about the “not getting shot” thing.

Old Man Lubitsch wrote back to tell me Ma Lubitsch has lost several pounds owing to worry, but she appended a denial in capital letters. She told me she has sent a food package, but it has not arrived. Dr. Fortismeer wrote, urging me to maintain good personal hygiene and stand tall in the face of adversity, and giving me news of home, which apparently is getting on jolly well without me. He enclosed a request from the university for money to build new facilities for the ladies' water polo team, about which he is very enthusiastic, and appended a cheery
postscript
that I should look out for any interesting examples of
foreign spice,
which I take to be a request for Katiri pornography, if there is such a thing.

Elisabeth Soames sent me a note via local military post to tell me she is also out here in the Elective Theatre. She is working as a journalist, writing a human interest story about the UN mission at Corvid's Field. She will be gone in a few days. She sent love. She did not suggest I visit, perhaps because I am a soldier or perhaps just because people in the Elective Theatre do not pay house calls.

The Evangelist wrote too, but only the date and the signature have survived the censor's knife. The rest of her communication has been removed with a razor blade, leaving me holding a limp carcass of eviscerated notepaper. It is a little spooky. It is a
zombie
letter. In the middle of the night it will rise from the grave and eat the other letters, starting with the headings. Then it will crawl out into the camp and begin its rampage, and some of the scraps it leaves behind will also reanimate. The undead paper plague will spread until nothing can stop it . . . bwha-hahaha!

I put the zombie letter away and shake out my shoes.

The fact that I have not been shot is preying upon me like a personal failing. I imagine that, back home, cake-baking ladies of a certain age, monitoring the progress of the conflict, are sitting around tutting over this as if I had farted in church or made free with the barmaid at the Angler's Arms. Missus Laraby and Miz Constance and Biddy Henschler and their friends, a fantasy bingo club of lorgnetted censure, are all sitting there, china cup and macaroon in hand, commiserating with one another and agreeing that I don't know how these things are done. Men like me are the reason why we haven't gotten home by Christmas. We lack the basic moral fibre which was so entirely a part of the men of their own generation that it was impossible for them to pass it on; they never knew how they did it or expressed in words that it must be done; rather, they
were
it and it was them and that is all anyone need say to convey the absolute failure which is me and all my ilk. And no, I will not be getting a care package full of cake, which was what they did for the real men of yesteryear, because in the first place I do not deserve it, and in the second because this war is taking place in a ludicrous far-off land where cakes go bad before the mail can deliver them (a consequence of the absence of fibre in postmen), and in the third place (no one ever needed a third place in the old days, two points of significant reason were enough back then, on account of the fibre) because the military machine had some bad experiences early on in this war with externally baked cakes, including cakes with messages on them which were not good for morale. There were cakes which said “I miss you” and “stupid war” and even, on one particularly radical gâteau, “Geopolitical cat's paw for entrenched interests, rebel!,” a cake I personally saw with my own eyes when I was charged by George Copsen with its humane and most secret destruction in the name of discipline.

There were also cakes which contained instructions on how to fake sickness to avoid combat, and a vanishingly small but paranoia-inducing number of un-cakes which were sent by more unpleasant and violent disapprovers of the war effort, who sought to introduce poisons and even explosives into their baking, and thus strike a blow against the hegemonic cryptofascists. I have never seen any of these (cryptofascists, that is; botulinum poison cakes, alas, I can bear witness to) and don't know anyone who would own up to being one. The problem, no doubt, is that the cryptofascists of yesteryear were a better sort of cryptofascist who went out and fought and colonised and were a bit less crypto about the whole thing and said what they meant, whereas modern cryptofascists have
no standards.

I put on my shirt. It is too hot. It is better than sunburn. I have a flak jacket too, in case I get shot. I have not been shot.

While I have not been shot
(Shame! Boo, hiss!)
that is not to say I have not been injured. Addeh Katir breeds injury. For an earthly paradise, the whole place is shockingly inimical. The fruit is beautiful and juicy and will, given a window of opportunity, lead a commando raid into your intestine which results in total evacuation. A local rodent has developed a taste for the rubber soles of our boots, and a variety of fire ant has taken to laying its eggs in the seams of servicemen's standard-issue trousers. All this before we contemplate the un-war which is going on all around and is possessed of an irrational and powerful volition all its own.