The Unknown Terrorist (8 page)

Everything seemed to slow down and grow distant—their dancing, the noise and music, the countless thousands of other people, the floats, the carnival, even Sydney itself—as she caught his eyes, and then so casually looked into the night sky, casting him and whatever feelings she was arousing within him away as if they were nothing to her, only to return a short time later with another look, another way of letting her body rest on his, an arm, her breasts; the way, when her nose came close to his mouth, she made a point of closing her eyes and inhaling. She thought she heard him say his name was Tariq. But later, when she thought about it, she wondered if she hadn’t got that wrong too.

21

After the parade ended, the Doll found herself walking through the Cross with Tariq. Heading up Darlinghurst Road, the evening was beautiful, and the Cross seemed
uncharacteristically upbeat, as they wandered past the he-males and she-males, the offers of cheap pills, tit jobs and blow jobs and quickies down the lane, the tottering junkies and pissed Abos and passing paddy vans and parading trannies, the schizzos and touts and tourists.

One spruiker broke from his established patter and yelled out to some passing young men in rugby tops:

“Carn, boys! Look, gentlemen—” and here he extended an arm toward a dark doorway “—not a great fuck but a cheap one, and I can’t be more honest than that, can I?”

They kicked on for a while at Baron’s, a pub in the Cross composed of a series of small, oddly angled rooms whose cave-like feeling was accentuated by the dullest of lighting and walls painted a dun yellow trimmed in ochre.

It was a wild, bizarre crush. The crowd surged back and forth, spilling drinks on each other and the hapless sitting on the red leather Chesterfield lounges. There were weary drag queens, stubbled and sweaty, two fat men in rubber masks drinking blue curaçaos, and a man wearing a string vest and no trousers leaning against the wall with his cock out, smoking, looking at the melee, while another man leant in on him and stroked him in a dutiful sort of way.

Tariq said if the Doll liked she could come back to his apartment for a coffee.

“What’s the time?” asked the Doll.

Tariq lifted his arm and looked at his watch for some moments. It was hard to know whether he was looking at it for so long just to read it, or so that the Doll might see what a beautiful, expensive watch he had, a Bulgari Ipno.

The Doll looked away and upwards, to where all that
seemed to be preventing the sagging ceiling from collapse was a fan staggering through the smoky babble.

“It’s Sunday,” she heard Tariq say above the din, “and it’s only just beginning.”

SUNDAY

22

NICK LOUKAKIS STOOD IN THE DOORWAY
of his youngest son’s bedroom, listening to the sound of his breathing as he slept. Nick Loukakis had had an affair. Maybe he meant something by it, or maybe he didn’t. Standing there, he could smell his son’s wild dog-like smell, and it was hard to remember. Maybe he’d wanted a way out of his marriage. Or maybe he just wasn’t thinking. Maybe the affair ended the marriage. Or maybe the marriage was over when the affair began. The affair lasted several years. He believed it would fall apart each time he saw her again, fearing that she would no longer want him.

Nick Loukakis fell in love with the woman he had the affair with. Maybe he was in love with her from the beginning. Maybe he was still in love with her. His wife never
found out. She always knew, but her knowing grew from a vague awareness easily put away, to a bitter knowledge she could still deny, to an enraged desolation when she one day told him she knew, that she had always known, did he think she was such a fool? And he felt his world collapse into a terrifying white hole into which he fell and in which he was still falling.

They stayed together and watched each other slowly become strangers, watched their love die as you watch a great old gum tree succumb to dieback. The affair was over for him, but it was just beginning for her. She never found out then, but it was as if each day now she lived another day of those years of lies and deceit; and his punishment was to witness her suffering. First just the leaf tips in the distant crown brown a little at the edges, then whole leaves, then a branch here and there. Still the tree lives, and everyone says it will be fine, that it is the weather, or one of those things, or anything but the death of something as natural and as seemingly permanent as a tree. But when his marriage began dying back, Nick Loukakis discovered nothing is fine.

Each day some small thing—a joke, a shared intimacy, a sweet memory—he found to have withered and died. Caresses fell like dead leaves. Conversations cracked and then broke. And in the end there was nothing to quicken the trunk with the rising sap that fed and was fed in return by the branches, by the twigs, by the leaves. And in the end what remained, Nick Loukakis discovered, was nothing; nothing to keep it going, just a large thing still standing erect and proud, only everything about it had withered and died.

Nick Loukakis realised that for a long time there had been
something about his life that he now saw as innocence. He would wait up at night until his family was asleep, then walk up and down the corridor of his small home looking into each of their rooms, glad simply to watch them sleeping, knowing they were warm and safe, knowing they were at peace. Sometimes he would pull their covers up, graze their foreheads with the lightest of kisses, and be grateful. Then he would sleep, and in the morning he would rise before anyone, so that he might be awake, sipping his coffee, when they came one by one into the kitchen, sleepy, dishevelled, and he could simply marvel that this joy had been allowed him.

But then this thing happened—something broke and he came to realise he had broken it and that it could not be put back together, not his family nor his life. He realised he could never again be that man, standing in doorways or sipping coffee in the kitchen, that he had been allowed a kind of paradise on earth in his little fibro cottage in Panania, but it was all over, and he could never again be that man waiting to marvel at his life.

Now whenever he tried to hold or hug his wife, she would say,

“Not like that, I don’t like it like that. You know that.”

Or she would say nothing, and he would fold and unfold her limbs as if she were an inflatable woman. When he tried to make love she made no response. It felt like rape, and he guessed it amounted to much the same thing. He felt the sadness overwhelming him. It clutched at him like death. It dragged him down into the earth. There seemed no good thing left in this life. He drove to an abandoned road with a garden hose, then drove back home. He felt for his children,
and he could not escape the sense that it would have been a crime to do such a thing to children, an act for which there would be no forgiveness.

And yet he knew his wife loved him, and he loved her. But something had happened, something had broken and he knew neither how to fix it nor end it. They had continued living together, losing themselves in the dream that is life, because they didn’t know what else they could do. The world was large, their troubles insoluble, and they waited together as strangers might huddle together in a shelter biding their time until a storm has passed. He hoped for a sign, a gesture, a moment.

He discovered things he had not known about himself: that after twenty-five years he now preferred to sleep alone; that after half a lifetime of his wife with a sound of frustration pushing away his foot, thigh, hand, he no longer wanted to be rejected every night. The sex was absurd, pointless; an affirmation only of what they didn’t have—the affection, tenderness, hope and dreams that had once been theirs. It was a dismal affair of penetration and her body moving only where it was shoved by his thrusts. But the absence of sex he could adjust to as a price, a penance, perhaps. It was the absence of touch, of warmth, of animal connection. She had not let him kiss her for over ten years. When he held her, embraced her, cuddled her, she pushed him away. And yet he knew she loved him and would always love him.

How was it possible to live with another human being so closely, to eat with them, sleep with them, smell their breath, and yet be so unspeakably alone? She rarely talked. She would say:

“That’s just me. Take me or leave me.”

And if he drove her to talk, she would grow enraged and anguished. She would tell him to go and live with Wilder, because, she would yell,

“That’s what you want!”

Never knowing what he wanted, what he craved, what he had not known for so many years was company, the warmth and stimulation of sharing the everyday, a sight one recalled, an idea, a story, a joke—the comfort of intimacy. He came to realise little, perhaps nothing, about him now gave her pleasure and much about him drove her to a silent contempt.

Her passions were her work as an accounts manager at a medical centre, and their two sons, whom she showed all the warmth that she withheld from him. He envied them and he admired her; they were a picture, a beautiful picture in which he did not exist. Outside he knew there was horror, corpses floating in the harbour, bones mortared into dank flats’ walls, flesh raked with gunfire; outside there was violence and evil, people waiting to hurt each other, hurting each other at that very moment. As a policeman he had learnt that. It was inescapable. It was unstoppable. In his working life as a detective sergeant with the Kings Cross drug squad he embraced the evil, the horror. He believed it would make him feel better to meet and deal with people whose problems were worse than his own. It didn’t. For the same reason, he read books about Hitler and Stalin, about genocides and totalitarian states. That didn’t help either.

Policemen, he came to believe, were just the journalists of evil; they described it with reports, photos, videos, forensic reports; they were to their horror what the historians and biographers were to the Holocaust and Hitler. They could
not change anything. He could only keep his family safe, while outside, wolves roamed.

He wandered the small house late of an evening when everyone was sleeping, standing in the doorway of each of the bedrooms, listening to the sound of his wife breathing, of his sons breathing, gently, in and out, praying, hoping; waiting for a sign, a gesture, a moment, listening to the human sound of breathing. He was trying not to think that he was falling, that everything was turning to white; trying not to think that the wolf might already be inside, waiting, hoping, listening.

23

Only after she saw him dead did the Doll realise that she had never asked Tariq who he worked for, or where he worked. He had seemed in some way fundamentally bored by what he said he did: talking about it the way students do a subject the night before an exam. Sitting in his apartment early that morning, it hadn’t seemed right to ask the questions that later everyone would presume she had the answers to.

“The thing about raster graphics,” Tariq was saying, “is that you can precisely manipulate an image by altering a single dot at a time—like when Elvis morphs into an ostrich, that sort of thing.” He halted, as if thinking about something entirely different, then said, “What they’d like to do with real people if they could.”

“They?” asked the Doll.

“Oh, I dunno,” said Tariq. “Governments, corporations—whoever runs the place, I guess, powerful people.”

Sydney seemed hushed and calm from Tariq’s apartment. He had promised to make her coffee there, but it was too hot; instead they had some chilled Pellegrino he found. They sat on bar chairs at an elevated table positioned in front of a window, watching Sydney’s snakeskin scales shifting and glinting far below, talking, sipping their drinks.

The apartment was in Potts Point, a short distance from Baron’s in the Cross but a world apart in every other way. They had walked down a road lined with luxury European cars, and then into a flash apartment block foyer. They had taken a coded-card elevator up several storeys, and when the lift stopped, the doors opened directly onto a recently refurbished apartment, white walled and Euro-applianced.

Tariq dimmed the lights that had sprung on as they entered, so that the main sources of illumination were the lights of Woolloomooloo, over which the apartment looked, and, beyond it, Sydney itself. Far below, trains occasionally rushed silently around like toys, making streams of moving light, while car headlights formed thick, dappling lines. It was so different from the rough, stinking streets the Doll knew—a city transformed; a seductive darkness confettied with spots of glowing yellow and white, here and there given more definite form by the red and blue signage of great corporations.

“It’s the way computers store an image as individual dots,” Tariq continued. The Doll looked away from the city and at him. He was moving his hands around, as though he were a blind man searching for something. “Each pixel is encoded in the computer’s memory as a binary digit—what we call bits.”

Despite trying to be interested, the Doll found what he
said boring. It was as if he were compelled to say it, although it held no interest for him either. She looked back out over this strange, subdued Sydney. It all seemed so exquisite. The opera house’s school of dorsal fins sat on the breast of the city like a brazen brooch on an old tart; the illuminated iron work of the bridge looked like a filigree choker, and the tower blocks studded with their endless little lights reminded the Doll of the most intricate black lacework. She could have stared at this Sydney all night as Tariq continued on about his job in raster graphics, no longer full of fun, but for as long as he talked about his work a rather dull and serious man.

“Together all the bits make up a bitmap,” he went on. “I work on software to make better bitmaps to make better pictures. That’s raster graphics.”

“Bob Marley graphics,” joked the Doll, and he spoke no more about it.

What else did they talk about? Later, when the Doll tried to get a better idea of who Tariq had really been, she was unable to remember anything of interest. They talked about some serious things and some trivial things, some general things, some intimate things. Other than when he was talking about computing, he was easy to be with, that was all.