the chill air, and watched the various artificial lights blur and smear as his gummy eyelids opened and closed. An unoccupied row of chair lined the space, pretzel-seats and double-logo-shaped backs.
A snowbike roared and sped over the snow beneath them, from left to right. It carried before itself, jutting from its headlamp, a jouster’s lance of light.
9
Day succeeded night. The following morning, waking alone in his room, George lay in bed, ill as ill could be. Not virus-ill, of course; hangover ill. For a while all he did was let his eyes rest on the large, planed flank of sunlight that fell through his wide window. The brightness shook colour from the carpet. Everything shimmered. He was alone. Everything trembled. He got himself to the shower room somehow, and stood for a long time inside the teepee-shaped zone of falling water. What he felt, he thought, was not depression. Because depression was something that had always seemed to him to be a mind-state of enormous complexity, compounded of anger and repression and ornate tourbillons of soured self- and other-relations. Despite superficial similarities, what he felt right now was something much simpler, purer almost. It was a kind of default inertia. A body at rest resisting the efforts of the outside universe to dislodge it. After a while he sat down on the ceramic pimples of the shower floor. He leaned his back against the tiled wall and let the water fall noisily into his lap.
What did the day hold?
Today he was to go to Do ğ ubayazit, the nearest sizeable town, and meet some bigwig policeman to receive a report on the investigation into Leah’s disappearance. George shut his eyes. He imagined stepping into a broad, cool room with shutters on the window, and a perfectly rectangular desk in the middle. He imagined a moustached policeman saying, ‘We have found your daughter – here she is.’ Then – what? Turning to see a door being opened by a functionary, and there Leah would be standing, with a beaming smile on her face (but Leah never smiled!), tripping and trotting across the floor to – but this was no good, he couldn’t remember what she looked like. He closed his eyelids tighter, as if the memory could be physically squeezed out of his eyes. He remembered Marie’s serene face.
George opened his eyes.
Captain Afkhami accompanied him in a hotel flitter. Flying twenty metres or so above the ground, they swept down the mountainside and passed from the white clarity of the snowfields to a dusty, grubby-looking scrub. The beige was occasionally intersected by dark-water canals, or roads running straight as ruled lines. It was easy to make out the giant rectangles that had once been farmers’ fields, each one now a mass of scribbly weed and low bushes scattered upon mustard dust. Occasionally a tractor, rusted to the colour of dark chocolate, stood up to its hips in undergrowth. Barns stood roofless.
Occasionally, George saw people, of course: sitting mostly, occasionally loping slowly along the side of the overgrown road, their long black hair marking them as have-nothings.
The sun sparkled upon the curved window of the flitter. The sun pressed the landscape flat.
Soon enough the low rise sprawl of Do ğ ubayazit emerged over the horizon; and almost at once George began to see sunbathers in proper numbers. A week at the hotel, insulated from the baseline fact of existence, you might have thought they were a rare breed. But, no, here they were: the life of the ordinary man and woman in the raw. People lay in recliners, or on their backs on the ground, long arcs of black hair fanned out. George began to count them in rough tens, but soon – as the flitter passed over a wide municipal park – there were too many to process numerically. Every roof contained a number of indolent human beings, lying perfectly still, hair carefully spread like lizard cowls.
‘Lots of Ra-worshipping,’ he said to the captain.
‘Sunny day,’ she
A snowbike roared and sped over the snow beneath them, from left to right. It carried before itself, jutting from its headlamp, a jouster’s lance of light.
9
Day succeeded night. The following morning, waking alone in his room, George lay in bed, ill as ill could be. Not virus-ill, of course; hangover ill. For a while all he did was let his eyes rest on the large, planed flank of sunlight that fell through his wide window. The brightness shook colour from the carpet. Everything shimmered. He was alone. Everything trembled. He got himself to the shower room somehow, and stood for a long time inside the teepee-shaped zone of falling water. What he felt, he thought, was not depression. Because depression was something that had always seemed to him to be a mind-state of enormous complexity, compounded of anger and repression and ornate tourbillons of soured self- and other-relations. Despite superficial similarities, what he felt right now was something much simpler, purer almost. It was a kind of default inertia. A body at rest resisting the efforts of the outside universe to dislodge it. After a while he sat down on the ceramic pimples of the shower floor. He leaned his back against the tiled wall and let the water fall noisily into his lap.
What did the day hold?
Today he was to go to Do ğ ubayazit, the nearest sizeable town, and meet some bigwig policeman to receive a report on the investigation into Leah’s disappearance. George shut his eyes. He imagined stepping into a broad, cool room with shutters on the window, and a perfectly rectangular desk in the middle. He imagined a moustached policeman saying, ‘We have found your daughter – here she is.’ Then – what? Turning to see a door being opened by a functionary, and there Leah would be standing, with a beaming smile on her face (but Leah never smiled!), tripping and trotting across the floor to – but this was no good, he couldn’t remember what she looked like. He closed his eyelids tighter, as if the memory could be physically squeezed out of his eyes. He remembered Marie’s serene face.
George opened his eyes.
Captain Afkhami accompanied him in a hotel flitter. Flying twenty metres or so above the ground, they swept down the mountainside and passed from the white clarity of the snowfields to a dusty, grubby-looking scrub. The beige was occasionally intersected by dark-water canals, or roads running straight as ruled lines. It was easy to make out the giant rectangles that had once been farmers’ fields, each one now a mass of scribbly weed and low bushes scattered upon mustard dust. Occasionally a tractor, rusted to the colour of dark chocolate, stood up to its hips in undergrowth. Barns stood roofless.
Occasionally, George saw people, of course: sitting mostly, occasionally loping slowly along the side of the overgrown road, their long black hair marking them as have-nothings.
The sun sparkled upon the curved window of the flitter. The sun pressed the landscape flat.
Soon enough the low rise sprawl of Do ğ ubayazit emerged over the horizon; and almost at once George began to see sunbathers in proper numbers. A week at the hotel, insulated from the baseline fact of existence, you might have thought they were a rare breed. But, no, here they were: the life of the ordinary man and woman in the raw. People lay in recliners, or on their backs on the ground, long arcs of black hair fanned out. George began to count them in rough tens, but soon – as the flitter passed over a wide municipal park – there were too many to process numerically. Every roof contained a number of indolent human beings, lying perfectly still, hair carefully spread like lizard cowls.
‘Lots of Ra-worshipping,’ he said to the captain.
‘Sunny day,’ she
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