The Great Wheel (22 page)

“I just liked watching you.” He smiled at her, and she smiled back at him with her green eyes. Then she kissed him.

Just watching you.
Was this, he wondered, the first lie?

It was not like any other morning as they carried their bags down through Tiir’s tumbling, hay-scented streets to the van; it was brighter, the wind seemed sharper, with Laurie walking beside him. And as she hummed, and her eyes followed a kitten in a handcart, and she spoke to the guard at the walled gate and jumped the low stone wall of the field where the van was parked, he felt the tug of part of him moving with her.

After an hour of rattling and banging along the ill-made road, Laurie stopped the van for him to take over the driving. Later, he stopped for her. The rhythm of the journey began. Black dead trees surrounded them, and the reek of old fires. The burnt-out forest seemed endless, but they pushed on, neither of them wanting to spend the night in this place. Finally the trees faded to ashen scrub, and John and Laurie rejoined the bigger highway where the trucks and the grainy lights of the phosphate mines streamed in the distance. Reaching Sadiir after dark, they were stared at and followed by the same children, shown the same room in the same and only hotel by the same hotelkeeper.

A large and amazingly ugly insect scuttled into the wall when John and Laurie pushed the mattresses together. But there was an appealing domesticity about rearranging this filthy room. Here, far from anything, he almost wanted people to know. And the bed-making process was arousing, too. Laurie noticed and laughed. He hugged her, and the room seemed to brighten.

After they made love and all the lights went off, he lay tracing his tongue from the tip of her left breast to her shoulder, tasting her sweat and the charcoal of the forest. Finally she rolled away from him and padded out of the room and along the corridor to wash herself. He sat up and shook a few dead bugs off the sheets, hoping that this time his own phylum-specific secretions would be enough protection for both of them. This truly was a different life, a different way of seeing. Then she came back and lay beside him, propped on one elbow, smelling of soap.

“You’re not entirely new to this,” she said.

“There were times before I was a priest. A girl called Jan-is…” He frowned, unable to think of her last name. “She had a sense of the ridiculous, a sense of humor. It made up, I suppose, for what I didn’t have myself. She was just someone I knew. We had the same friends and went to the same parties and dances. She’d look at me, and we’d share a joke at the stupidity of it all, which no one else saw. We’d be sniggering, and everyone would wonder why…”

He smiled, gazing up. Feeling, even now in this distant room, a ticklish, silvery bubble of mirth ready to rise and break inside him. “So we used to dance together, and of course people started thinking of us as a pair. And we began to kiss outside in the dusk the way the other kids did.” He paused. This was at the same time—it had to be—that he was seeing Father Gulvenny at the church, debating the meaning of existence, looking for the fire within. Also the time when he lost hope that Hal would ever recover. He wondered how it was that your life became arranged into these fragments. “I’d go around to her house in the evenings. We’d walk out down the drive holding hands, in our best clothes. I don’t know…” he said, trying hard to remember those pastel evenings, Janis with her long chin and that gleam in her eye. But, along with her last name, so much had slipped from his memory.

“You made love with her?”

“Yes, but it was never serious. The joke was that we probably had more fun, physically, than the others who were so fumbling and intense, so ashamed to say what they wanted out of fear they might lose the person they wanted to do it with…” He smiled. “But I only realized that much later on, when I had to listen to people’s problems as a priest. Janis and I drifted apart. We made love, but we were never really lovers. There wasn’t much to keep us together.”

“And Hal? Was he in a coma then, when you were seeing Janis?”

“Hal was pretty much then as he is now.” John took a breath, feeling the tensions of his flesh where it touched Laurie’s, the cramp that was coming into his muscles, the itch of some insect dying in the sweat that had pooled beneath his spine.

“Did he mean to kill himself?”

“I don’t know.”

“If not suicide, what would you call it?”

“An accident—that’s what we always called it. Hal’s still alive, and it was an accident. No one’s ever thought of a better word. My mother’s holding on, still hoping—and hope can become a kind of addiction. She’s like me, I suppose. She still wants to know why…”

“Perhaps he just gave up.”

“But if someone like Hal gives up,” John said, “how are the rest of us supposed to keep going?”

T
HE FIRST MORNING BACK
, he was up early. Bella gave him breakfast before Felipe came down, and he had time to cycle up to Santa Cristina before going to the clinic. There was no service until that evening, but he was grateful for the cool transparency, beneath a sky already glowing like hot iron, of the air inside the decrepit church. It smelled faintly of the incense that Felipe had used in the few services that he had given, clanking up here in his cart and on his leghelpers, while John was away. And the Inmaculada, John saw, had gained a few new ornaments in his absence. He played the cards that had been left in the tray, refraining, as he always did, from using the translat until he tried to decipher the words himself. But either way, they made little sense to him.

He arrived at the clinic to find a queue stretching around the block. Nuru, his feet up on the desk in the backroom, wore a new white coat and an air of importance.

“Fatoo find the mountains?” he asked.

John, already feeling tired and hot, disliked Nuru’s newly proprietary attitude to his desk, and the reek of disinfectant had begun to sting his eyes. “Let’s just see how you managed, shall we?”

Nuru raised his hands to shrug, then pointed at the doctor’s screen, which was already on. He remained seated at the desk and watched as John scrolled through new records that detailed a treatment rate that was almost double anything he’d ever achieved.

He was out of the church quickly after Mass that evening and cycling down Corpus Vali in oddly mercurial light. Kassi Moss hadn’t been in her usual spot midway back in the pews, and although he had no pickups or deliveries to make, he felt vaguely worried about her. Days in the Endless City were longer now. Places he was used to seeing only in darkness were exposed in flickering light. And the heat was everywhere, pushed and sucked by the wind, as if the air too was trying to settle somewhere in the coolness that never came. He saw a woman’s face in the crowd that had gathered around an ice seller. She was jostled by those near her, and the drifting smoke revealed the brown flesh of a narrow cheekbone, strands of dark hair tucked behind one ear. She sensed his gaze, turned and looked at him, and quickly made the sign against the evil eye. She was older, thinner, not Laurie. A beggar called to him as he cycled past. But today he had no money. He’d forgotten his pouch—his translat too, he now realized, which lay with the pouch on the rail by the Inmaculada; a new and unplanned addition to the tributes to Our Lady. And the cassock he was wearing, in this heat, was absurd. He should have gone back to the presbytery after Mass and changed.

Mokifa now seemed just another part of the sprawl. The only difference he could see amid the buildings beyond the shock-wire was that the windows were closed. He imagined the people sheltering inside from the heat, clustered around coolers and purifiers. He dismounted in front of the Cresta Motel and walked under the archway into the shadow of the courtyard’s walls, picking his way between bags of soiled laundry and rubbish, brushing away the flies that, too sluggish to rise into the air, crawled over his cassock.

As always, Kassi’s office was open. But, pushing through the hot beads of the curtain, blinking in the windowless halogen-lit room, he saw that another woman was sitting at Kassi’s desk. She was youngish, one of Kassi’s helpers, her face scarred by the burrowings of the skin parasite for which she’d been treated here. John had seen her wandering in the background on his visits, emptying buckets and bundling up sheets as Kassi showed him from patient to patient along the dimming corridors and asked if it was all right to bring an end. But he and the woman had never spoken, and now she stared at him, her hands pressed to her narrow chest as if she’d never seen him or any other European before.

He reached to his belt and touched the space where the translat should have been.

“Where’s Kassi?”

The woman shook her head.

He pointed. “Is she upstairs in the wards?”

The woman moved her lips. He waited while she swallowed. “
Kassi vendu
,” she said eventually.

Vendu?
Gone—going? He wasn’t sure. It was one of those context-dependent words.

“So she’s not here?”

The woman shook her head.

John rubbed his gloved fingertips together, plastic on plastic with the sodden flesh trapped beneath, as he looked around at the tiny office. It seemed oddly empty without Kassi, and the halogen lamp threw everything out of proportion, made holes of the shadows. The cheap plastic Christ was on the wall above the desk, a clear presence in the darkness and the stink.

He said
gonenanh
and left. A family of rats watched him from a broken outflow in the courtyard, their paws delicately raised as they picked at something long and pale. Irritated, he walked towards them. After a moment of hesitation, they retreated.

Avoiding the temptation of shortcuts, he cycled back along Corpus Vali, then across the Plaza El-Halili to the Cruz de Marcenado. There was no discernible smoke rising from Martínez’s gabled house, and light glowed from only one of the top windows. A wounded caroni bird disentangled itself from an alleyway and, mewing, dragged itself across the street as John knocked at the door. He waited.

When the door finally swung open, the sour gust of ill-smelling air and Kailu’s face told him that Martínez was worse. John felt again for his forgotten translat, unable to remember whether Kailu spoke any European.

“How is he—
ice uhe?
”

With an odd, quick motion, Kailu shook her head.

“Look, if I…”

He made to step inside, but her face twisted. She spat at him.

“
Inutel mal! Comma…
”

He stumbled back as she lunged forward, her hands clawing for his silver eyes. She was yelling in Borderer, her voice clamoring down the hot dark street where the wounded caroni bird was still mewing, trailing blood in the dust. Shutters swung open, figures stood in doorways. Kailu was saying,
Fatoo-baraka,
you’re killing him, you’ve made him ill! She lunged again. It was an awkward dance, and he sensed that she didn’t quite have the final twist of whatever it took to actually touch him. Eventually a neighbor emerged, gripped her shoulders, muttered crooning words, and drew her away.

Breathless, weary, covered with sweat, John cycled back up to Gran Vía and left his bicycle in the presbytery hall. Peeling off his gloves, pulling the thread, and tossing them on the floor to curl and flare, he climbed the stairs and picked up and ignited a foline lamp. He worked open a damp-swollen door and stepped around the soggy piles of analogue books, paper printouts, unlabeled tapes, disks, and cards to get to the transmitter.

Sitting down on the old leather stool, he turned on the flat screen. Static buzzed as he scanned. There were faces and voices, rippling shapes from all the weird, cheap, faulty 2-D and half-encoded transmissions that flooded the Magulf, then the big winged silver H of the Halcycon logo demanding identification and his personal password. Entering the sudden order of the net, he called up Laurie. Her face smiled at him from the airwave’s screen.

“Hello, Father John.” Silver-eyed, she tilted her head. “How are you?” But even before she spoke, he knew it was the answerer.

“I want to speak to Laurie.”

“I’m afraid she’s busy at the moment. Can I help you?”

“Tell her I’d like to see her tomorrow. I’ll be coming into the Zone.”

The answerer nodded. “Of course.” She waited, looking at him, amused.

“How well do you speak Borderer?” he asked.

“As well as you like.” She blinked and pursed her lips. “Do you want me to talk—”

“No. I mean, I’m unsure about one particular word.
Vendu
—what does that mean. Gone? Away?”

“It all depends,” the answerer said, still smiling, “on the context.”

Next morning in the Zone, the tires of the cars and trucks ticked as they passed over the sticky roads. And the vans, sagging to wait at crossroads, their vents shimmering, seemed unlikely ever to rise again. Things worked at this time of year in the Magulf—but barely. The machines had all been designed for cooler, more generous skies, and the cost of fashioning anything specifically for so limited a market would have been prohibitive.

Beyond the admin blocks leading to the medical center, the people wandering through the haze that hung above the lawns were lightly dressed, in shortsleeves, cotton frocks, and shorts. A purplish scum had glazed the wind-rippled lake, and a Halcycon engineer crouched by the outfall and maneuvered a cleaning crab with helmet and joystick. He was watched from the water’s edge by a line of ruffled and impatient ducks.

Entering the air-conditioned medical center, John felt his flesh tauten with the shock. Tim jumped up when he entered the office, seemingly surprised to see him despite the appointment John had made.

“So. The wanderer returns.”

“Well,” John said, sitting down, realizing as he did so that he was moving his hands as Borderers did when they shrugged. “Here I am.”

With his usual eagerness to get things over and done with, Tim had already begun to tap commands into the screen on his desk. He’d had his hair cut while John was away; the fringe was a little shorter. When he leaned forward to peer at a corner of the display, John saw that the hair was combed and woven to hide its thinning. Funny, he thought, that we still can’t do much about that. In the corner, the doctor hissed and clicked, reconfiguring its receivers and probes to Tim’s commands, making minor adjustments. It looked sleek and predatory.