The Ministry for the Future

74

Days passed for Frank one like the next. He didn’t mark a calendar, or keep track of the day of the week. Every once in a while Syrine and her younger girl would come by to visit; seemed like once a month or so. He got the impression the older girl was too mad at him to come. Mary Murphy came by more like every week or two. She worked nearby, he thought.

The meals in the prison dining hall were solid Swiss food. He was gaining a little weight on it. He read over his bowl or plate, books from the library. Occasionally an English-language newspaper, published weekly in Paris. The prison library had a lot of books in English, and he made his way through them unmethodically. John le Carré, George Eliot, Dickens, Joyce Cary, Simenon, Daniel Defoe. Robinson Crusoe was funny. Lucky to have been able to ransack the wreck of his ship like that. All that stuff he saved had given him a good life. Not unlike Frank’s in some ways. He too was stranded on an island, getting by.

Most days he got on the 8 AM van that ran prisoners around the city. He kept getting off at the refugee camps. This was always a little disturbing, but he did it anyway. Maybe it was what one of the therapists had called habituation. Go right at what bothers you, face up to it. One of the books in the prison library had been written by an African man who had traveled up the coast of Greenland in the early twentieth century, staying in Inuit villages. Eskimaux, he called them. He wrote that they had a saying in their cold little villages, to deal with the times when fishermen went out and never came back, or when children died. Hunger, disease, drowning, freezing, death by polar bear and so on; they had a lot of traumas. Nevertheless the Eskimaux were cheerful, the man wrote. Their storm god was called Nartsuk. So their saying was, You have to face up to Nartsuk. This meant staying cheerful despite all. No matter how bad things got, the Inuit felt it was inappropriate to be sad or express grief. They laughed at misfortunes, made jokes about things that went wrong. They were facing up to Nartsuk.

Which they all had to do. One day, working a camp food line and seeing a distraught refugee’s face out of the corner of his eye, he understood that eventually everyone was post-traumatic, or even still mid-trauma. These people he served had been variously beaten, shot at, bombed, driven out of their homes, seen people killed; all had made desperate journeys to get here, sleeping on the ground, hungry. Now they were in a new place where possibly new things could happen, different things, good things. It was a matter of being patient, of focusing on the people right in front of your face. Possibly they could get past their traumas, eventually. You had to talk to people.

Frank seldom talked to anyone, but sometimes he did, and then he found himself babbling a little. But asking questions too, and listening to what people said to him. No matter how bad their English was, it was always better than his attempts at their language. They used English like a hammer to get their meaning across, they banged in nails of meaning. Strangely articulate and expressive sentences often emerged from them. Sometimes they sounded like Defoe’s characters. The situation has become urgently urgent, someone said to him one day. I blue the sky! one little girl exclaimed.

The news often disturbed him. Heat waves, terrorist attacks. All the militaries of the world were focused on counter-terrorism. There weren’t any state-on-state clashes serious enough to distract the militaries from trying to discover and root out terrorists. But with limited success, it seemed. A hydra-headed foe, someone called it. And to Frank it seemed different than it had when he was a child, when terrorists were universally abhorred. Now it felt different. Many attacks now were on carbon burners, especially those rich enough to burn it conspicuously. Car races and private jets. Yachts and container ships. So now the terrorists involved were perhaps saboteurs, or even resistance warriors, fighting for the Earth itself. Gaia’s Shock Troops, Children of Kali, Defenders of Mother Earth, Earth First, and so on. People read about their violent acts and the frequent resulting deaths, and shrugged. What did people expect? Who owned private jets anymore? There were blimps now that flew carbon negative, as the solar panels on their top sides collected more electricity than needed for the flight, so that they could microwave it down to receivers they passed over. Air travel could now also be power generation—so, a jet? No. If a few people got killed for flying, no one felt much sympathy. Fools conspicuously burning carbon, killed from out of the sky somehow? So what. Death from the sky had been the American way ever since Clinton and Bush and Obama, which was to say ever since it became technologically feasible. People were angry, people were scared. People were not fastidious. The world was trembling on the brink, something had to be done. The state monopoly on violence had probably been a good idea while it lasted, but no one could believe it would ever come back. Only in some better time. Meanwhile hunker down. Try to stay lucky. Don’t fly on private jets, or maybe any kind of jet. It was like eating beef; some things were just too dangerous to continue doing. When your veggie burger tasted just as good, while your beef package proclaimed Guaranteed Safe! with a liability waiver in small print at the bottom, you knew a different time had come.

One afternoon after he returned from the big camp in Winterthur, Mary Murphy came by. They crossed the street and sat down at a table in a café. Nice afternoon, still in the sun. Kafi fertig, its attractive little clash of bitternesses, clash of effects. This strange woman watching him. Life in prison not so bad. Indeed at the next table another pair of prisoners were sharing a spliff. The prison wardens approved of prisoners using cannabis, it kept them calmer. Wardens looked the other way even when it was smoked in the prison’s smoking yard, much less across the street. They were right about the calming effect, so it was just being sensible. And the Swiss were all about being sensible.

Frank said to Mary, “These attacks on carbon burners. There’s a lot of them now.”

“Yes.” She looked at her glass.

“Do you think some of them are done by your people?” he asked.

“No. We don’t do that kind of thing.”

She was never going to admit anything to him. She had no reason to. They had once or twice passed through certain elusive moments of closeness, starting even that very first night in her apartment, but now they seemed to have drifted apart and come to rest in something more distant, more formal. He didn’t know why she visited him anymore.

“Why do you visit me?” he asked.

“I like to see how you’re doing.” She paused, sipped her drink. “Also I like knowing where you are.”

“Ah yeah.”

“You seem calmer, but…”

“But what?”

“Not quite here. Not happy.”

He blew out a breath, a poof of dismissal. “I’m not.”

“It’s been a long time,” she said.

“Since when?”

“Since the bad things happened.”

He shrugged. “They’re still happening.”

She seemed to lose patience. “You can’t take on the whole world’s troubles. No one should try to do that.”

“It happens without trying.”

“Maybe you should stop reading the news. Stop watching the screens.”

“I’m reading Moll Flanders. It was the same for her.”

“Who’s she again?”

“A character in Defoe. Sister to Robinson Crusoe.”

“Oh yeah. I sort of remember.” She smiled briefly. “A survivor.”

“For sure. They didn’t worry like we do. They faced up to Nartsuk. There was no such thing as post-traumatic stress disorder.”

“Or else it was everywhere. Just the water they swam in.”

“That’s still a difference.”

“Maybe. But Moll Flanders didn’t try to take on the whole world’s trauma, as I recall. People weren’t so worried about other people.”

“But we should be, right? For them, people dropped dead all the time. You had to move on. Could be your partner, your kid. Now it feels different. You and yours probably won’t drop dead, not today.”

“Mine did,” Mary said shortly.

That startled him, and he looked at her more closely. She watched her drink. He recalled a moment that first night, when he had asked her about her life, how she had flared up at him. Angrier at a personal question than being kidnapped, almost. “Okay,” he said, “but still somehow it’s different. Maybe what we know now. We know we all live in a village of eight billion neighbors. That’s our now. It’s all of us succeed or none of us is safe. So we take an interest in how the others are doing.”

“If that’s all true.”

“Isn’t it?”

“I think a lot of people don’t do the global village part. Janus Athena says village is the wrong idea. And nationalism has come back big time. Your language is your family. Pull in the perimeter like that and it gets easier. You still get to have your us and them.”

“But it’s wrong.”

“Maybe.”

He felt a little jolt of irritation. “Of course it’s wrong. Why do you say that, are you trying to tweak me?”

“Maybe.”

He glared at her.

She relented a bit. “What is it they say about us only really knowing a few score people? Like back in the ice ages?”

“It’s different now,” he insisted. “We know more now. Those people in the caves, they only knew there were a few hundred people alive. Now we know better, and we feel it.”

She nodded. “I suppose it could be. Eight billion people, all stuffed in here.” She tapped her chest. “No wonder if feels so crowded. All smashed into one big mass. The everything feeling.”

Frank nodded, trying that on. That feeling of pressure in his chest. The headaches. Call it the everything feeling. A new feeling, or a new blend of feelings, bitter and dark. Caffeine and alcohol. Uppers and downers. Lots of everything. The everything feeling. Made sense that it resembled being somewhat stunned. Not unlike despair.

“Maybe,” he said, mimicking her.

She grimaced, acknowledging that she had been annoying. “Oceans of clouds in my chest. Some poet said that. So, say we feel the global village, but in a mixed-up way. Is that what you’re saying you are, mixed up? Mashed together?”

“No. Yes.” He glanced at her, looked down again. “Maybe.”

She was regarding him with a very curious look. “You should go up to the Alps, have a walk around. I found it very clarifying, even though I was up there for bad reasons. It could be a day trip from here, you could be home by curfew.”

“Maybe.”

Later he considered what she had said. That he was not all there: true. That he was mashed together into a thing he couldn’t grasp: true. The everything feeling. But the project was to face up to Nartsuk. That wasn’t just acceptance, but defiance. You had to laugh at whatever the world threw at you, that was good Inuit style.

He took the train to Luzern, a bus to the forest under Pilatus. Hiked up one of the trails through a strange parklike forest, then up onto the big clean grassy alp above the forest and below the gray peak. Cable car high above, swinging up and down across a giant gap of air. He ignored it and contoured around the peak until he couldn’t see it anymore. He only had a couple hours before he would have to head back, so it was kind of an exercise in getting as high as possible on this trail and then turning back.

Still mid-alp, crossing a tilted rumpled lawn of immense size, he came over a small vertical ridge in the trail and there was an animal standing there. Ah—four of them. Chamois or ibex, he didn’t know, he was just guessing. He had heard they were up here. This group was maybe a male and female, and two youngsters, but not too young; he couldn’t really tell.

They didn’t seem disturbed by his presence. They were aware of him, alert, heads up, sniffing; but they were chewing their cuds, it looked like. Slow and regular chewing, a lump inside their cheeks, had to be a cud being chewed, or so it seemed.

Their bodies were rounded and full, they looked well-fed. If they ate grass, he could see why that would be so. Their heads looked like goats’ heads. They had short horns, slightly curved back but mainly straight. Horizontal ridges ringed the horns, possibly annual growth; looked like that made for strong horns, could really stick you if they tilted their head down. Although they’d have to be looking back between their forelegs to have their horns pointing forward, so that was a mystery. Short brown hair over most of their bodies, but finer beige hair, like fur, on their bellies, with a dark band separating brown from beige.

The biggest one was looking at him. Then Frank saw it: the creature’s irises were rectangular. Like a goat, then? It gave him a little shock to see it. Rectangular irises, how could that be? Why? Was it really looking at him?

Seemed like it was. Steady regard of another animal, chewing as it watched him. What would this person do? Was he a problem?

The creature did not seem to think so. It was more a case of interest. Frank, standing there in his windbreaker. They looked at each other. Frank mimed chewing a cud of his own. The creature tilted its head to the side, interested at this, perhaps. It blinked from time to time. A gust of wind ruffled the hair on its back, then Frank’s beard. Frank smiled to feel it.

Something reminded him to look at his watch. It was late! Apparently he had been locked in a gaze with this chamois or ibex or mountain goat, this person of the alps, for around twenty minutes! It had felt like two or three.

He stirred, raised his hand uncertainly, waved weakly at the beast. Turned and headed back.