The Gone-Away World

Chapter Ten

IT IS the day after, and the world is new. Everything is clear and crisp, and the colours are very bright. I am alive, and so is everyone I love. This simple fact amazes me, and makes me giggle, so that Gonzo, who is not a giggling sort of a person, pointedly ignores me as we drive along. I feel brand-new, washed and somehow reconnected. My memories and my present are all shook up and have fallen somehow the right way around. I am me. It’s terribly exciting, and I giggle again.

Gonzo has sustained a minor (heroic) injury. I have none. Despite all the funny looks and the obvious concern, I am unscathed. I have not grown demonwings or turned green or become a monster. In fact, I suspect this very immunity is what is making everyone so nervous. I am the guy who took a gazillion volts through the palms of his hands, and they earthed in the soil at his feet without as much as making his hair stand on end. I am the woman who fell from a plane and walked away unscathed. It happens. Not often, not reliably and not when you want it to. But miracle escapes do take place, and I have had one. So, in truth, has Gonzo, although his arm is angry and bruised and burned, and his ribs are taped up and he looks like a thundercloud. Gonzo is always angry after being afraid, possibly to distract you.

So, a day of rest. By tacit agreement, Gonzo is taking me home.

Heaven’s gates are getting on a bit, and the wood has peeled around the top. I painted them years ago in response to Leah’s need for a white fence, but neither of us liked the effect, so we chipped and scraped the paint off and let the moss grow. Now, wind and sun and water have contributed to the mossy assault, and the remaining glossy white has rolled up and flaked. Shove the gates roughly and a little snowfall of dry paint tumbles to the ground. Gonzo batters them open with an accustomed hand, and they bounce to a halt in the rut left by previous shuntings, winging and wanging as the ripples of the impact exert torsion on their fabric and test their remaining strength. Sometime soon they will break, and I will have to get new gates. Perhaps I should buy new gates now, and leave them in the open for a while before I put them up so we never actually have new wood at this entrance.

Climbing back into the driving seat, Gonzo dances the cab through the narrow gate. It’s actually delicate, what he does to sneak the thing between those posts without scraping the cab or knocking down my uprights. He sort of shimmies it through. He takes the long drive slowly, concentrating, and I know every bump. There’s the twin dips first, rainwater puddles made worse by taking a car over them while they were wet. Then there’s the channel, an iron watercourse set into the road and preceded by a drift of gravel. It makes a hump, and on the other side there’s a dip where water flowing along the upper lip has washed away the soil. The whole thing produces a combined height differential of several inches. Gonzo takes the cab over it one wheel at a time, and we rock gently. After that, the puddles, the dip (where a dirt track from the old contruction days crosses the drive), the footsteps (which I will tell my children, when we have some, are the footsteps of giants, because they have grown in magnitude since I carried Leah through a rainstorm and lost my left boot to the suction) and the lintel, where a single slab of stone marks the entrance to our forecourt. Gonzo takes them all gently, preserving my history as well as ever I could.

Any moment now she will open the door. She will not fling it wide because boldness is sometimes rewarded with a travelling salesman or someone late and lost upon the road. Once it was a burglar, although that is a charitable description of the creature who approached her, a creepy, wheedling sociopath with more than theft on his mind and a sack of convictions for crimes murky and unpleasant; but Leah is not some troubled urban incapable. She can take care of herself, and she knocked him on his back and waited with him until the gendarmes came and carted him away.

So she will open the door just a crack, to be sure there’s no disappointment in store. She will peer. She will see the truck, but it will be unfamiliar—something she already knew from the foreign engine noise and the sound of the tyres on the lane. So she will look through the tinted windscreen, and she will see us, or perhaps not until we open the doors. And then she will be unleashed, and throw wide the big front door and walk down, not quite scampering, to meet me. Arms about me, no deep kisses because the heart must be satisfied first, and her eyes will pick out any new scratches on me. I have been away for over a week. Leah is a member of the Free Company. Sometimes she rides out with the rest of us, medic and shift driver, but she hates to watch me in action, so often she works from the house, fielding calls and quartermastering. When we are separated, we count hours. When we are together, we never do. Tonight there will be drinking and celebration, and finally to bed, to hold and to have and to be had.

The porch light is on because it gets dark suddenly up here: the sun hits the mountain ridge behind us and a shadow rises from the valley, bringing on night like a blindfold. You don’t realise, until you have lived somewhere where this happens, how long twilight is or how much of it relies on reflections from the landscape all around. No twilight here, to speak of—just a dusky glimmer off the peaks and the smell of trees in darkness. We got the place cheap because it’s on the fringes of the Livable Zone. Look down the valley to the very end, and you can see into the Border and what lies beyond.

When the grateful nations—mayoralties by then, but they hadn’t acknowledged yet how small they had become, and Jorgmund was barely born—were handing out space, they parcelled land according to a complicated system of pluses and minuses so that everyone could have a bit to call their own. Land in the city was at a premium, and you could just about get a share in a new apartment block with your allocation. My bonuses from the Pipe were pretty hefty, and if we hadn’t needed a place to live we could have bought ourselves a plane or a diamond the size of your fist. But we did.

We looked at Tallacre Lofts, which was the sort of Boho of the new world, a long agglomerated mess of construction, quasi-random and intricate, designed to make a home in not very much room. Tallacre sites were typically on the edge of town but well inside the Livable Zone and so thought to be a safe, secure, inexpensive place to be. We walked around one: default beige and lifestyled interior (I have no idea what that means) and cream leather sofas, and you had to look hard before you could find the stitching where someone had reconstituted the hides of a lot of smallish sheep from the war zones. There was a built-in kitchen and a little balcony looking over New Paris (which was being built by a company from what had been Grand Cayman in the teeth of furious opposition from the French) and recessed lighting and a power shower. Everything matched, and the lines were cool and enduring. It was a great flat. Leah was weeping by the time we got in the car. She hated it so much she could barely move. Every muscle in her body was rock hard, and her hand gripped mine on the gear stick. The flat was mean and empty and it was a coffin waiting to bury her. She hated everyone who told her it was a good place; she wanted to burn it down, to make them swallow the damn couch.

I promised we would never have to live anywhere like that. I told the agent we’d get back to him. He urged me to be quick. I waited half an hour, then rang back and told him we had a better site in mind. I said it with a ringing certainty, and I heard him freeze, heard him wonder where the hell I was going and how could he get there too. Then I cradled the phone and held my wife as she shuddered, and wondered what the hell I was going to do now.

We lived on friends’ sofas and in their lofts and woodsheds. We slept in the parking lot of the Nameless Bar and got so cold we nearly froze. And then, two weeks later, Jim Hepsobah walked me along a mountain a couple of hours out of Exmoor and told me he was building his place twenty miles further along the Pipe, but he’d had to toss a coin to decide. In the evenings you could see the storms beyond the Border, but that didn’t worry Jim and he didn’t reckon it’d worry me. We’d both been a lot closer than that. You couldn’t see the Pipe running behind the escarpment at the back of the plot, pumping its good juju into the air all around. There was silence and dew, and birds. Probably badgers, Jim said, if you knew where to look. And then we sat there and didn’t talk, and after a bit I borrowed his phone and called Leah, and she and Sally Culpepper came over from Jim’s plot and Leah and I called the local guy and said this was ours, and he fell over himself trying to get it all done because no one wanted these old isolated places on the Pipe and the Border, not now, and maybe not ever again. So we got about a gazillion hectares or acres or whatever it is thrown in, useless and pretty and full of badgers. The house is part log cabin and part stone manse, and it’s part Frank Lloyd Wright A-frame and part Bauhaus, and the gates are flaky. That’s what heaven is. A place where none of that matters.

And now the door is opening a little, and now a lot, and then she comes out in a bustle and a swirl, and we are climbing out of the truck. But something is wrong, and more than wrong. She comes down the steps and across the forecourt, but her trajectory is off along the gravel, and when she takes flight, she lands squarely on Gonzo and clings to him, and stares into his eyes rather than mine. It is Gonzo she has missed, and Gonzo alone, and she glances over at me with moderate curiosity only when she has drunk him in and patted him in a familiar way and grabbed him along various dimensions to be sure it is all still there. Then, to my endless horror, she sticks out her hand as if we’ve never met. And I, idiot that I am, shake it, and Gonzo looks relieved and pats her on the hips, and she leads us into the house.

GONZO IS screwing my wife. More than that. He has stolen her love. It is in this weird and awful manner that I am learning of a long-running affair, a thing of months and years. I am being replaced. I have been.

I follow the lovebirds indoors, wondering why I don’t want to kill them. I ought to want to. It is my genetic and cultural right—not to do it, but at least to feel the desire. Perhaps it is simply too enormous, and the affair itself too much an enormity, and I cannot see the edges of my anger because I am so far within. Perhaps, but seemingly not. Mostly what I feel is a desire to melt away and vanish, to un-be. I am a needless thing, and I am embarrassing only myself. Gonzo and Leah seem unbothered.

Inside, she has redecorated. It’s odd. She has (understandably) removed all my things. They are probably in the garage, stuffed into a vagabond’s kettle and a red hanky on a stick. She has replaced them, not with new, but with old. My comfy armchair, ragged and tumbledown and had from an artist’s studio in Berlton, in which I used to sit and in which on more than one occasion we have made precarious love, has gone. In its place there is one of those weird wicker things which look infinitely more cosy than they are, which creak when you sit on them, and smell of grass in damp weather. Gonzo slumps into it and reaches, blind, for a pair of furry indoor boots which wait alongside. At some point they have been chewed by a dog, which is mysterious because we don’t have one. But Gonzo does have one. A faithful hound comes lolloping in from elsewhere (a room which ought to be the kitchen, but it appears in fact to be a den, a plush Gonzo-space of spice and sandalwood, off-limits without special invitation to women of any kind).

In my mind I can see one home—mine—and with my eyes I see another. This corner is empty because the ghastly vase we put in it broke—but it’s not empty. There is a set of shelves jammed into it, covered in old sporting trophies and yearbooks from the Soames School, all bound between hard covers to preserve them. Here there was a little occasional table (although it was really a perpetual table, in that we never moved it or thought about putting it away) on which were Leah’s photographs from her nursing days and my pictures of us. Now, there is a faux-mahogany tallboy displaying garish red and gold china, slightly chipped. At one end, a ghastly stuffed toy wearing a T-shirt saying “Love Me Like a Bunny, Baby!!!” is scrunched up against the wood. I seem to remember Gonzo winning it from one of those machines with a claw which supposedly reaches down into the box and retrieves a prize, but which actually rummages around limply before dropping anything heavier than a weaselfart and coming up empty. It took him seventeen goes, I think, and then he won the bunny rather than the cow. The cow was wearing a shirt which said “Got Horn?”

Leah brings beers, and we talk inconsequences until I can’t stand it, and I excuse myself and stand on the veranda wondering what on Earth to do. Should I storm out? Confront them both? Confront them singly? Talk to Leah in a forgiving, husbandly way, or with wrathful, god-like disdain? Could I manage either? I have no idea.

Inside, Gonzo is telling her about the day, the accident, the plink and the fear. I can’t hear the words, but I know the tone, the awestruck “How in the hell we lived, I’ll never know,” and then his voice deepens, and I know he’s telling her about the torrent of vile, impossible crap which fell on us and what happened or didn’t happen. She glances out at me, pale with worry. I see her lips move in a question: “Is he . . .” And I turn away before I can see her ask if I am okay, because no, I am not okay, I am in hell.

Perhaps that’s it! Perhaps I have not been betrayed; I have been cast away. Perhaps I was transported to a parallel world in that moment. A vast rift of energy and broken matter threw me, Buck Rogers style, into a realm unfamiliar and fearsomely strange. Except that I know it didn’t. I just got damp. And so I weep because it seems like the only thing to do, and after a bit I can feel Gonzo’s eyes on me through the window, but when I look round, he is climbing the stairs to bed. To my bed, no doubt. The big one made from giant slices of local trees and sanded by hand in the forecourt. My marriage bed. And then, in the doorway, there is Leah, and I wait for her to say something to make it all all right. Perhaps we are in some weird, impossible plot, an undercover operation by trained professionals, and they have asked her to play this role to defray suspicion, because Gonzo, Special Operations Gonzo, is being put into play against some threat to the world. I will be the ace in the hole, the secret, and Gonzo will be invulnerable because of me and this bizarre deception.

Leah looks at me but she does not explain. Worse, her face is filled with a terrible sympathy. She knows what I am hoping for, but she cannot give it, cannot offer me anything at all. Except pity. And this she does, in a breaking voice, as she steps close to me and kisses me lightly on the cheek.

“I’m so sorry,” Leah whispers. “There’s a bed in the den.” And she goes inside and follows Gonzo upstairs.

I sleep in a Zedbed in my own unrecognisable house. I sleep quite well, which is infuriating. The following morning Leah brings me toast. She smells of jasmine and Gonzo. I find reasons to be busy until ten, when Gonzo and I climb into the truck. We are taking it to see Malevolent Pete the mechanic before we rejoin Sally and Jim. All trucks in the company pool must be approved and frequently serviced by Malevolent Pete. It is our law. And I cannot help feeling that Gonzo wants some us-time, which is definitely in order.

Leah waves us off.

I have decided two things: the first, that it is impossible for me to hate two people I love for loving one another (quite untrue); the second, that I am less frightened of talking to Gonzo about this than I am of hearing it from my wife. The conversation I have with Gonzo will be hurtful and there will probably be shouting. The one I have with Leah could twist my ribs apart and burst my heart like a water balloon. And so I wave through the passenger-side window at Leah, and she waves back at both of us, biting her lower lip. Gonzo takes us out of heaven and back into the world. The feeling of relief is the worst good feeling I have ever had.

Pete’s garage is in a town called Baggin. It’s a frontiersy kind of place, gunslinging and macho but basically okay, and they make their own branded cigars there for added grit. The town smells of tobacco all day and all night, and the western end has a brewery too. Baggin is about a day away along the Pipe, but there’s a short cut: a more-or-less stable road through the Border, takes about two hours. Gonzo and I have pretty much waltzed through the worst thing that can happen to you in terms of Stuff exposure, and we’re okay, so it’s just a question of dangerous men out there, and we’re officially dangerous too. The weather forecast is fine, anyway—good winds driving the Stuff away from us. So the fork in the road gives Gonzo no pause, and he takes us into the Border. He doesn’t have to glance my way. He knows what I would say. He must also know that I am trying to frame my questions, get away from my (hate, horror, fury, screaming hideous gut-eating devils of pain) emotions so I can ask what’s going on in a clear, gentle way, as between men of good character and intent. And so it must come as a surprise to him—as it does to me—when it boils out of me at the fifty-mile marker when I spill my drink.

Slick, sickly goo glugs down over my stomach, and I can feel it soak the material and prickle against my skin. It is loathsome. It feels vile. It feels like yesterday. I hate it.

But instead of yelling about the fizzy sugar stuff on my shirt and trousers, I turn on Gonzo and I yell incoherently at him, and then it all comes out. Everything I love, he has taken, and he is my friend, but there are some sacrifices he should not ask, how long has it been going on? Does Leah love him, or have I been perpetrating some terrible sexual inadequacy I have no notion of? Did I skip a lesson at the Soames School? Doze off during a lecture on erogenousnesses vital to the maintenance of faithful relationships? Or was there a class on post-ethical friendship which I somehow did not attend? What, in short, does Gonzo William Lubitsch think he is doing sharing mattress-whoopee with my wife?

And it is only when I say these words, which are after all magic words, that Gonzo seems to pay any attention at all. It is at this point that he half-turns to look at me with a kind of sick curiosity. I say them again in case he has not understood. And Gonzo flinches. This result pleases me, and I say it over and over and watch him shrink like the lying sod he is, until finally I am raw enough that I pause to gulp some air, and he says:

“So. You want a beer?”

Which is the most weirdly comforting thing I have ever heard. Of course I want a beer. Clearly, he has an explanation. He is unfussed by what he has heard. This whole business is some ill-conceived prank gone wrong, or yes, that strange undercover operation I could not be warned of in advance. It is a test, and I/we have passed, and George Copsen, who is not dead at all, will now appear from behind the curtain to make sense of everything. Gonzo reaches in the back for the beer, must have stashed some there before we left the house. I am still feverishly seeking Copsen’s hiding place, and I conclude that it must be extra-dimensional: Professor Derek has been at his tricks again, in some even more remarkable way. And indeed we have crossed into some kind of weird, inappropriate place, because when Gonzo’s hand emerges from behind the seat, he is holding not a beer but a decent-sized gun. It is a handgun in workman-like grey, and he does not offer it to me but compounds his error by pointing it at my head.

In fact, he does not point it at my head. He just generally points it at me, but when I look into its one good eye, and catch the glint of the nominally soft-nosed (but actually irretrievably solid and lethal) slug in the chamber, all I can imagine is the thing going off and my brain sluicing backwards onto the expensive upholstery. And hence I think of it as at my head, despite its being aimed loosely at my torso.

Twenty hours ago Gonzo was a cartoonish hero-lout, a perpetual boychild with the body of a Hercules. He drank beer from the bottle, liked his steaks and his women raw, and would have stepped without hesitation between a puppy and a speeding truck for no better reason than a fuzzy sense of the way things oughta be. This Gonzo is a new deal: a nervous, glazed bastard with designer shakes and a greasy, halfregretful expression which tells you he doesn’t really care a damn. This Gonzo is not your friend, he’s just this guy you met a few times; granted, you like one another, but in the final analysis, if there’s a shark in the water he hopes you get eaten whole, and that you’re fat enough to satisfy the fish or stick in its salty white throat and choke it with your masticated leg. This is a guy who will kill you on the off-chance that sharks cannot vomit.

“Get out of the truck,” Gonzo tells me. He waves the gun, eyes mostly on the road. His peripheral vision will tell him if I move, those old biological hardwirings spotting muscles and hinges moving relative to one another and producing the basic response: he’ll fire the gun. And so I stay extremely still. The gun wobbles anyway, and for a moment it is pointed down and a little behind me. Now, instead of imagining my head bursting open, I see what will happen if he discharges the gun in that direction: the slug penetrating the enormous fuel tank, stimulating the stored chemical energy into a bright gasp of heat. For a fraction of a second the whole thing will look like one of those weird little static globes the hippie scions had at Jarndice, and then it will look like the beginning of a model sun. We will not actually witness this, because our eyes will be burned from their sockets and our brains will follow them into oblivion before ever we have a chance to apprehend the mechanism by which we die.

Thinking this, I am willing or even eager to leave the truck. It seems this will resolve what has become a rather twitchy situation. I feel somewhat hard done by; it is I, after all, who has been grievously wronged. Gonzo is guilty (and if I had any doubts on that score, they have rather faded away) and by rights ought to be contrite. Although perhaps that is how it goes: anger is easier, after all. I must have sinned against Gonzo in the past. Everyone distractedly injures their friends from time to time. I wonder briefly which of my unknown transgressions so deeply offended him as to bring us here. It must have been a howler. Or perhaps he is in love with Leah, and she with him, in the tradition of weak-ass romance Jim Hepsobah so abhors. I remember Leah’s apology last night, her discomfort. “I’m so sorry.” But not sorry enough to repent, to abjure. No. There is more to this. Please, God, it is more than it seems.

In this brief meditation I have lost the opportunity to assail Gonzo in a fast-moving truck while he is driving with one hand and holding a pistol in the other, and this is not entirely a matter for regret. He speaks again:

“Get out.”

All Gonzo needs to do to achieve my departure is stop the truck, or at least bring it to a speed where I won’t splinter anything more vital than the grommets on my shoelaces when I hit the ground running. I tell him so. It is possible that I am unclear. For answer, he points the gun at my body and pulls the trigger more times than I would have thought possible.

At long last, I get shot.

I wonder briefly whether it counts if you get shot by a friend instead of by an enemy, and then I realise that those definitions have now become confused.

The experience of repeatedly getting shot in the gut at close range is pretty much as advertised. The only thing is I don’t pass out. Having finally gotten shot, I am damn well going to live the experience. I am thrown from the truck, Gonzo’s boot striking my chest above the entry wounds, exquisite pain. I catch the wind, billow like a kite. My back bends limply forward until my spine is at maximum arc, my arms are out beyond my shoulders and head, the new orifice in my stomach creased, agony beyond nausea. I am totally and utterly one of those weird images by Warhol: Silhouette of a Gunshot Victim, silkscreen print, one in a series intended to mimic the fractional motion of twenty-four frames of cinematic film. I am printed in black on yellow, reproduced as a T-shirt. I am this year’s Che Guevara. A single second separates me from the asphalt.

I do not pass out.

I strike like a break-dancer doing one of those impossible belly flips. I bounce. My eyelashes brush the ground, frail antenna sensing so much: dry, dry road, dust and gravel, a kernel of wheat, the slight tackiness of the surface. I smell oil and heat, desert grass and something cloying and rich which I cannot name. Then I am standing upright, flying in that position towards the accelerating truck. The pain rides my shadow, my angel’s wings. Bones have broken somewhere, I know it, but I am totally unable to say which ones. My legs touch the road, pass through the surface, fall into the ground. The earth is too soft to support my weight. It is candyfloss. I am a titan. Only if I lie down can it hold me, the greater surface area compensating for my remarkable weight.

I lie down, but I do not pass out. It seems to me that it would be okay to do that now, because the bouncing is over, but I have forgotten how. There ought to be a darkness waiting, a coma, perhaps a merciful death. If these things are present they are on strike or lazy, or I’m a second-class passenger and the unconsciousness car is currently occupied by premium travellers.

I lie with my face pressed to the uncomfortable heat of the asphalt and a small stone pricking my ear. It annoys me more than I can say. And as if this wasn’t bad enough, now I am hallucinating. A person in a top hat is screaming at me to wake up, which is ludicrous because I am awake and fully aware of this awful mess. The person shakes his head and actually goes as far as to slap me to get my attention. He slaps like a girl. Hah! I have been shot. Mere slapping cannot harm me! I feel no pain. I tell him so. He has big round eyes like a cow. Perhaps he is a cow. Most likely, a friendly cow has come to sit with me while I die. He is not weeping on my face, he is licking it with bovine simplicity. He is desirous of conversation or a biscuit, or maybe he just wants to help a fellow mammal. A comradely cow. I wonder if it will make him sad when I expire. Perhaps I should wait a bit, until he is gone. Shall I wait, Comrade Cow? Yes, the cow says. Wait. Wait.

I wait. It is cold here, in the sun. I shiver. The cow wraps me in slender arms (my hallucination, my rules, nyahh) and lays me in her cow lap. All cows are girls, or at least, all cows with laps. Boy cows have no available lap space, owing to their masculine construction. Wait, says Comrade Cow. Just wait.

I lie there in this damned uncomfortable position for seven hours, nine minutes and eight seconds. I know this because I count them. Comrade Cow sits with me all the way through, does not stop talking that entire time, and does not let me fall asleep, which I would love to do. I become a Cow-ist (to rhyme with Mao-ist and Dao-ist). I live for Comrade Cow. And then finally a bulbous, carrot-shaped silver Airstream bus appears in my field of vision like a road-going whale, and from its belly—via the mouth or driver’s-side door—out jumps Jonah, and starts shouting and giving orders, although he is very fat and appears to be wearing a sarong, and they roll me over onto a stretcher and do magic things to make me better, but these, alas, I do not get to observe, because when Jonah sees that I am fully conscious he starts swearing and they fill my body with a fearsome, blue-white cold which proceeds from my hand to the rest of my body, and I realise, from the sudden lack, that the pain has been with me all the time.

I pass out.