The Gone-Away World (15 page)

I reel from lecture to Cork to party to demonstration and the faces blur until the police are more familiar than the demonstrators, because although our comrades in linked arms and flowers are drawn from the same pool, we are always at the front, and spend more time looking through riot shields than back at our fellows. At one rally I am gashed by a falling stone, flung most probably from the back, but I am hailed as a hero and make the cover of the local news, and a genial letter arrives from the police superintendent saying he hopes I have sustained no lasting injury. To Aline's momentary disgust I reply chirpily that I am well and hope that he is too. She forgives me only when I point out that he has admitted tacit responsibility for something he almost certainly did not do, and when the scores are tallied this will count against him. I place telephone calls to Sweden and ask them to send a speaker to Cork, and when they agree (a tedious little man shows up from the embassy and tells us about mineral rights in the North Sea until we get him drunk and send him home with an ostrich feather in the back of his trousers) I call Moscow, Sydney, Rome (and the Vatican), Poland and even Addeh Katir in the hope of further coups.

Calling Addeh Katir is exciting and difficult because the dialling code is not listed and eventually I have to ask the caretaker at Cork, who once dated a woman from the Red Cross and knows a guy at the UN who has a number for the office the Katiri Provisional Authority maintains in New York, but when I ring, the receptionist tells me she hasn't been paid since November and she's damned if she's taking my message. I tell her she's doing a great deal for international relations, but she has already gone. I hang up and try something more daring.

I call a man who knows a man who once dated this girl whose address book contains reference to a person (gender unknown) who apparently has contact with a certain scholar. The scholar is close to the great Colossus, the destroyer of sound economic practice and layer-waste of treaty obligations; the ravisher of coyly willing maidens (and matrons); the master swordsman and gargantuan, fearless, indestructible freak of nature; the titanic warrior Fred Astaire of Addeh Katir himself, Zaher Bey.

This chain of loose acquaintance yields a cell-phone number with a Swiss area code, which is answered by a querulous individual of indeterminate sex.

“Konditorei Lauener, hello?”

“Hello? I'm looking for Zaher Bey.”

“We have none. Only the hotel is now permitted to make it.”

This response confuses me. I was not prepared for an exchange of sign and countersign. I grope for something suitably espiocratic, but the other person interrupts before I can assemble the requisite parts.

“There was a legal case, you see. The people at the hotel required an adjudication. It is their mark, you see. Anyone can make a chocolate cake
in the Sacher style,
ne? But only they can make
Sachertorte.
It's the law. But in any case,” the personage adds, with some satisfaction, “we have none.”

It appears that my interlocutor has misconstrued “Zaher Bey” as “Sacher Cake.” I explain that I am in fact looking for the leader of a political movement arising in response to foreign economic imperialism and a puppet regime predicated on the lust of Erwin Kumar. There is something of a pause.

“You know that it's a cake shop?” the personage says at last, probably uncertain about whether to continue the discussion.

“This is the number I was given,” I explain. My voice has slipped from professional and commanding to apologetic.

“You should give it back!” This with some amusement. “You have a bad number. This number, it's a cake shop. In Basel. That's in the north, huh? We have lots of cake. But no revolutionaries. Revolution, the shouting and breaking things. It's un-Swiss.”

This information delivered, the personage politely disengages, and I sit by the phone trying to figure out what to do next.

Two days later, a dapper gentleman in his forties sits down at my table in Cork. How he has secured entrance I do not know, but he is carrying a glass of single malt from the bar and gives every evidence of being comfortable with his surroundings. Mr. ibn Solomon (such being the name he gives me) has an almost unnoticeable pot belly and a fine blue suit. His skin is clear and fairly dark. He looks as you might imagine a Phoenician merchant or a Moorish market trader. He is clean-shaven and twinkly, and has well-kept hands. His voice is soft, and it is something of a surprise when he reveals that his full accorded title is Freeman ibn Solomon, Ambassador Plenipotentiary of the Bey's forces in Free Addeh Katir. Will he speak to the assembled thinkers and drinkers of the club? You betcha. It is his pleasure and his vocation. But Freeman ibn Solomon is a strict believer in single-level discussion and negotiation. No dais and no lectern; he will sit in this fine lounge and he will share in our conversation like one of us. And to demonstrate his willingness to be like us, he knocks back his Bruichladdich and obligingly fetches himself another.

“W
E HAVE
a gun mountain,” says Freeman ibn Solomon. “You people are cursed with milk lakes and grain plains and all the rest. We have a gun mountain. We don't really mind having all your spare guns,” adds Freeman ibn Solomon. “We just wish you'd put them right on the pile. They come into our country in little dribs and drabs. They go to Erwin Kumar and he loses them or he sells them and they show up all over the place. Only a week ago I found a whole crate of them in my kitchen, under the broccoli. And of course,” he adds, without a trace of anger or irony, “very occasionally someone gets shot with them, which is so upsetting.”

Iggy comes to the defence of the international system. It's very strange. Most of the time Iggy and the others bemoan the iniquity of the capitalist hegemony (that is, everything in the world). Now here is Freeman ibn Solomon, saying things they often say, but they are trying to persuade him it's not all that bad. This is probably because, when Freeman ibn Solomon says it, and puts it in context, you can't help but feel it could be your fault.

“You're not exactly representative, though, are you?”

“Good God, no,” Freeman says, “we don't represent at all.”

Iggy leans back, having established the fly in this dangerously perfect ointment.

“No,” Freeman ibn Solomon continues, “we are a participant democracy. Everyone takes part of every decision, if there's time. Otherwise, of course, the Bey is afforded an executive right of action, so that we can't be caught sleeping. But we have no laws.”

Iggy stares at him. Sebastian, behind a vodka tonic, opens his eyes and looks on with interest. Aline sputters.

“No laws?” she demands.

“No,” says Freeman ibn Solomon. “Law is error, you see. It's an attempt to write down a lot of things everyone ought to know anyway. We don't have that. Every one of us is expected to act within the constraints of right thinking, and to be prepared to stand by the consequences of those actions. That is,” he adds, “not as comfortable a position as you might think.” And he takes another sip of his whisky.

“Doesn't that lead to corruption?” Aline wants to know.

“Oh yes,” says Freeman ibn Solomon. “I mean, in a sense it's hard to tell. We're a pirate nation, so we have less formal administration. But yes, everyone feathers his own nest to some degree. On the other hand, anyone can be held accountable. There's always a person you can argue with.” He shrugs. “With governments,” he says, “you choose your poison. This is ours.”

He looks so crestfallen that the discussion turns to other things, and then Quippe strikes up at the piano, and we are privileged to watch the Ambassador Plenipotentiary dance the cancan with Aline and a girl named Yolande who shaves one half of her head.

Once it gets out that we had a man from Addeh Katir on the campus, every other far-flung cause and dissident voice in the spectrum suddenly recognises our seriousness, and our importance as a free-thinking zone. I bring new causes to Cork, and new speakers, and some are friendly and some aren't, but I'm totally the man, and each speaker seems to make Aline randier and we all but wear out the oppressive manacles of the state oppressor and it's getting to the point where we'll have to pinch some new ones. Addeh Katir fades from the public view because the negotiations there are somewhat bogged down. The United Nations Security Council refuses to accept the request of Zaher Bey to send a peacekeeping force. Cork goes practically schismatic over whether this is a step in the right direction (away from quasi-totalitarian cultural hegemonising) or the wrong one (towards an isolationist economic imperium), but finally settles on having a foam party. Life goes on.

In Erwinville the great president continues his thirty-year rampage through the Kama Sutra.

Around Lake Addeh, Zaher Bey's faction maintains a semblance of order and infrastructure through a black market more efficient and humane than the legal economy.

Aline shaves her pubic region in protest against the fur trade. Despite this distraction, I manage to stagger through my exams.

Gonzo receives a care package from Ma Lubitsch which contains so much food and drink of such staggering richness that he can barely store it all in his accommodation. I am particularly fond of the oatmeal meringue with raspberries.

The idyll lasts until one morning, when I am sitting at the coffee table working on my biology coursework and not really listening to Sebastian telling Quippe that “the freedom of movement and the speed of communication intrinsic to the Late-Modern period entails but does not legitimate the demise of the Age of Presence,” when guys in balaclavas explode—literally, explode, because their arrival is preceded by a blast of light and sound which makes my nose itch and my ears bleed—through the butler's pantry and the honour bar, and throw us all violently down to the floor and grind our faces into the threadbare carpet, so that I inhale an almost uncountable number of dust mites and the faintest odour of sexual congress. One of the balaclava guys yells somewhat redundantly that this is a raid.

I lift my head up. Aline is just across from me, dark hair charmingly and sexily askew, face utterly shell-shocked and afraid, and this in turn makes me afraid, because she's been through more revolution than I have and she never mentioned anything like this. I gasp her name and she doesn't look at me, and one of the shouting men comes and shouts into my face and I get lifted up and carted off alone because I am clearly more of a subversive than the others, or possibly because I have—equally clearly—been doinking the cute subversive in the skintight jeans and this is a very good reason for me to suffer.

The interior of a security services truck is a very bad place. It smells of fear and unwashed or unperfumed individuals and there aren't any cushions. My cuffs are linked to a big hoop in the floor and I envisage a sort of built-in padlock mechanism and wonder what would happen if the truck were to fall into one of the many rivers around Jarndice and conclude that there must be some kind of auto-release and then conclude that there probably isn't. I place my trust, and my hope, in the shaven head which is visible through the grillework, and try very hard to be a good convict and not a danger to society and also not to throw up, because being in the back of a windowless truck with your head between your knees in the Jarndice heat is conducive to nausea.

From the chatter on the radio and the exchange of monosyllables between the driver and his fellows, I glean the information that the guys in balaclavas are not technically soldiers. They are a nominally non-military task force for civilian defence and counter-terror. They are in fact an internal hire; the armed forces have loaned them to the security arm of the government, so for the duration of their present employment they are functioning as civilians. This means that they are trained as soldiers, beweaponed as soldiers, can fight and if need be
kill
like soldiers, but can be deployed at home and abroad without reference to annoying statutes like Posse Comitatus or the UIK's Bill of Rights. Curiously,
not
being soldiers frees them to be more unpleasant to people who are also not soldiers.

They march up and down the lines of hangdog detainees and scream that we are
quislings,
which seems like a particularly arcane thing to be upset about. Every now and again, they slap someone across the back of the head, or a detainee rashly objects and is silenced with a kick or a closed fist. Then they shout some more. We are
backstabbers, treasonists, collaborators, fifth columnists, turncoats
and
copperheads.
After we have been processed—this basically means taking our names, addresses and any confirmatory ID, and then sequestering our belts and shoelaces—a junior officer drops in to our cells to add that we may well be
Arnolds
and
Haw Haws.
I wonder, briefly, whether they're working from a thesaurus.

The holding cells are not high-tech. In some part of my head I was expecting gleaming corridors and bio-monitors and polygraphs. I was not expecting ad hoc detention facilities made by running chicken wire in a grid through the middle of a warehouse. I was not expecting single-bulb lighting and iron buckets to pee in. This place does not feel like my country. It feels like countries I have read about where things are very bad. It feels, in fact, like exactly the kind of thing we were protesting against, but we thought it was elsewhere. It is not heartening to find that it has come to us.

I am sharing my cell with Iggy and Sebastian and two or three persons I do not know who are obviously not students, because they are older and crustier and work for a living. They are unionists in the real sense, men who organise their work colleagues to stand up together to demand proper—but not outrageous—remuneration and safety codes. They are scared, which is scary, because they know more about this kind of thing than we do.