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He said, gently and calm, “Every human grief you will ever experience has been experienced by humans living and humans yet to come. There is no readiness for it, nor no easing of the pain, but ma’am, for what it’s worth, I think you should know that all of humanity that was, is and will be is with you now, by your side.”
He said, gently and calm, “Every human grief you will ever experience has been experienced by humans living and humans yet to come. There is no readiness for it, nor no easing of the pain, but ma’am, for what it’s worth, I think you should know that all of humanity that was, is and will be is with you now, by your side.”
Leena is happy, she wrote. She is incredibly happy. She is stupid, and lazy, and spoilt, and dull, and perhaps at some time knew it, and then found a way to forget that she knew anything at all.
Leena is happy, she wrote. She is incredibly happy. She is stupid, and lazy, and spoilt, and dull, and perhaps at some time knew it, and then found a way to forget that she knew anything at all.
The only thief I saw was seventeen years old, and even though I was just fourteen, he looked young to me. He was pale as a pillow, skinny as a stick, and he swung between inaction and violence like a weathervane in a tornado.
The only thief I saw was seventeen years old, and even though I was just fourteen, he looked young to me. He was pale as a pillow, skinny as a stick, and he swung between inaction and violence like a weathervane in a tornado.
The year I was born, my mother’s sister, left behind in Sudan, also gave birth and called her child Sorrow. My mother, unaware of this, or even that her sister was alive, called me Hope. Her family were Neur, but to advance their lot in life, my grandfather had insisted they all learned Arabic, in the hope his children would one day enter the civil service.
The year I was born, my mother’s sister, left behind in Sudan, also gave birth and called her child Sorrow. My mother, unaware of this, or even that her sister was alive, called me Hope. Her family were Neur, but to advance their lot in life, my grandfather had insisted they all learned Arabic, in the hope his children would one day enter the civil service.
When she turned away, I said, “If you knew I was on this flight, why not simply wait until I reached Istanbul?” “Pressures of time.” “You’re playing catch-up.” A shrug: he’s here, isn’t he? “You brought guns to our meeting in Muscat.” “You sent a prostitute.” “Guns,” I repeated. “Sometimes it’s not paranoia.” He shrugged, a busy man in a busy world.
I am goosebumps. I am a fusion of flesh. My arms are my legs, my legs are my chest, my head is my neck, my neck is my knees. I doubt I shall ever move again. Why do these men not find me? Because they are not looking. Footsteps in the workshop. A door shutting. A car driving away. I wait. I wait.
But I have one thought that I cling to in this present time: that at the end of that week we spent together, I had acquired a taste for comedy. He is forgotten, but I am changed. I have no words to express how wondrous this is.
“Where are the poor people now?” I asked. She shrugged. “Tokyo too expensive for them. Leave city; go somewhere cheap. Hard, hard. Can’t get work in cheap places. Can’t live in expensive ones. No way up.”
I want Luca Evard here to hold me, I want Gauguin staring in surprise, I want Filipa Pereyra looking at me in wonder, I want my mum who crossed the desert, my dad who told me never to turn to crime. I want Parker from New York, the one I can’t remember; Byron14, I want Reina bint Badr al Mustakfi, I want someone to say my name. Gauguin didn’t even remember me long enough to chase after me when I fled from his sight. Filipa will not remember eating noodles with me. I am dead in all but deed. My deeds are worthless.
And again, lying in Luca Evard’s arms that night in Hong Kong, letting his breathing push my head up and down as it lay on his chest, the happiest I think I’d ever been, the happiest I can remember ever being.
Intensive courses: I thought learning how to use a gun would be hard, but in America it was forty bucks and a smile. They waited; I waited.
My name is Hope. I am the queen of the fucking universe. I am the best thief ever to walk this fucking earth. I am… … I am fine. I’m… … fucking great, just, amazing, I’m… … professional. Disciplined.
The old folks never remembered me, save one, who had gently encroaching dementia, who always exclaimed, “It’s Hope! Hope’s come to visit us again!”
I lie awake, and do not sleep. I count down from a thousand. In my dreams Luca Evard is dead, and I killed him.
Plan, backup plan, backup for the backup. Stick too rigidly to a plan, and you may drown in it, but fail to plan ahead, and you will drown for certain.
In 1789 the French rebelled and found an emperor. The Americans found freedom from the British and enslaved the Africans. The Arab Spring bloomed and the military and the jihadists seized power. The internet gave us all the power of speech, and what did we discover? That victory goes to he who shouts the loudest, and that reason does not sell.
Perfection is the self-hatred an overweight woman feels when she sees a slim model on TV; perfection is the resentment the well-paid man experiences when he beholds a miserable millionaire. Perfection kills. Perfection destroys the soul.”
“Why not kill Filipa?” I asked. “She built Perfection.” “Better to kill Rafe – he turned it from a science project into something he could sell. Filipa has always been a frightened infant; she thought she could program people to be smarter, kinder, braver, because these are all the things she is not. Rafe saw her work and transformed it into an algorithm that makes rich people richer, poor people poorer; that divides the ‘them’ from the ‘us’ and profits from the self-doubt of humanity. He made the 106.”
“The treatments were created by Filipa Pereyra. An awkward child punished for being awkward which of course made her more awkward. She has learned a degree of skill in covering it now, but it is only an… algorithm, shall we say. A routine learned by the numbers, as she tries to compute her way through life. I would say that she is very lonely.” I think she is. (You are a stranger to me. Is it you?) (How excited she had been to meet me, that last time.)
People fill in the gaps, find a way to meet me without being afraid, but it’s all lies, all of it, my parents forgot me, you forgot me, the world forgot and what if it’s me, what if it’s my fault? The power is within you!! Beneath the starlight of the Korean night, with the sand of the desert beneath her bare feet, my mum laughed. So what? she asked. You going to shout at the sun for shining and the wind for blowing? You gonna curse the sea for rolling with the tide, the fire for being hot? Hope Arden, I thought I taught you better than that. Now pull your socks up, and get on.
“You are astonishing,” she breathed, and her hand reached up, and brushed my cheek, feeling the reality of my skin, a mother soothing a child perhaps. Or perhaps another thought – a master comforting a much-loved pet. “You are incredible.”
and I wondered if animals remembered me in a way humans did not, if perhaps their brains were wired differently. Should I tell Byron? Would she then cut open a dog’s brain, as well as mine, to see how it ticked? I gave the woman twenty bucks and squatted for a while on the path while Sally put her paws in my hands, and licked my fingers, and wondered if I could stay there for ever, and couldn’t, and kept on walking.
Tests. More tests. Three weeks in and out of labs and hospitals in California. Scans, chemicals, swabs, injections. I tried talking to Byron, but couldn’t get anything from her. She couldn’t remember building a relationship with me, and so she couldn’t trust. So we idled along in quiet, business-like efficiency,
What they couldn’t do, it appeared, was make me memorable, and the next day when we went back they held the wand over my skull again and said, “Count up to ten!” and found it exactly as funny as it had been the day before.
was an unmarked single-storey white building which had once been a dentist’s clinic, and which was now the property of Hydroponic Fertilizers Ltd., Water Is Our Future, a shell company whose shell was so fragile a sea anemone could have brushed it away.
“I used to love creating companies,” mused Byron as we tramped up the path to the locked and bolted front door. “My proudest achievement was a pumpkin-pie company in Israel. Did so well I often thought I’d retire and do it for real.”
Headaches. A doctor who’d seen me eleven times already said, “Ah, you’re new here!” Yes, I’m new here. I’m always new here. Blood drawn; how much blood did I have left to take? Brains, brains scanned, students brought in, introduced, Hello, you’re new here, still new, still always new, always and for ever just like yesterday, like tomorrow, goodbye, hello; hello, goodbye.
The man stared at me, physically pulling his head back on his neck, like a bird recoiling from a potential predator, and he was beautiful, and he’d had treatments – of course he’d had treatments, look at him, charisma, confidence, the sense of his own worth, worth, to be worthy – of a quality that is commendable, admirable, respected, and he said, “Wow, that is so deep.” He meant it, of course. “You’re really real,” he added breathily. “Say something else.” I decided he wasn’t worth punching, and walked away.
I buried $5,000 in a plastic bag beneath a cypress tree up the hill from Marin City. Would I need it? Didn’t know. Never hurts to have a backup plan.
Without the code word, frequency analysis would take time, but Byron had written a great deal of material and, usefully, hadn’t bothered to break her words down into five- or six-letter groups, but left all the grammar and spacing in, as thus: bwuwm xi sw ehtjaur pjcfv xdlmcknbn sfvcey adbam. There is no problem human ingenuity cannot solve.
Standing at JFK waiting for the plane, I saw a woman with a beautiful silver bracelet set with amber, and I went to steal it, and then stopped myself, and didn’t, and sat back down, and when a few minutes later she saw me, and I smiled, she smiled back, and her day was fine.
Does he remember me? No, but like Byron perhaps he has words filed away in the back of his mind, mantras, repeated actions and hazy concepts which declare, there is a woman you cannot remember, these are her qualities… If this were a hospital in Iceland, or rural Russia, he would absolutely be asking those questions now, wondering how a woman of my description came to be in this place. But this is Nîmes, and the French have a colonial history as long and ignoble as the British, and the south is full exiles who crossed the waters from Algeria in the 1960s, of travellers from the west coast of
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Easier, because digital codes and electric locks, once beaten, make it easier to do everything clean, a press of a button, a flick of a switch and hello those open doors, those warm, running engines. There is nothing human ingenuity cannot make which human ingenuity cannot break.
I said at last, “I stole it. I didn’t… do this.” My words, dead even before they were spoken. “That’s okay.” She shrugged. “I think what you’re doing makes sense.” “You do?” “Of course. Perfection destroys the human soul. You know I used to help kids with brain damage find their voice? That was before Rafe made me a monster.” “You’re not…” “I killed humanity,” she corrected, light as a feather, before I could speak. “I gave people the tool to suck out everything that was flawed, ugly and bitter, and it turns out that all that is left is a piece of marketing.
He wants to show that you’re real. If he finds you – if Rafe finds you – I think you may end up on the dissection table. Please be careful.” I stopped, fingers on the doorhandle. “Don’t you want to know how I work too?” “Yes. Of course I do. But you’re human, whole and true, and whether your condition is artificial or naturally induced, it is… extraordinary. In Tokyo I gave you my bracelet. I have no memories of you, but I can conjecture based upon the data that is given. Sometimes there is cognition without words; a reading of a situation that cannot be rationalised by the artificial merits
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I tried picking a couple of pockets in the crowded, twisting streets around San Marco, but had only pulled two wallets before a rival team, a boy and a girl, barely teenagers, made a bad pass in a nearby alley and someone called out thief, thief, thief, and the police came running, damn amateurs getting in my way.
Do I care that the only way to be free from the fear of surveillance is to be absolutely harmless? To conform to a sociological norm, and never say anything that is personal, or real, or half thought through, or challenging?
“I’m not sure if that’s the sentiment of a hero or a sociopath.” “Judge me by my actions,” I replied with a shrug, “if that’s all you’ve got going for you.” “Hotel Madellena…” he began, a note of caution in his voice. “Shut it down.” “I may not be able to.” “Then Byron will come. She will destroy everything.” “Perhaps I want her to try; perhaps the 206 can serve as bait?” “She’s smarter than you, don’t try and make this into a stupid bloody trap, Jesus that’d be dumb. Cancel the event. Stop the treatments. I’m helping you now; I don’t have to be co-operative.” “You’re threatening me?” “My
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I threw the laptop across the room with a gasp of rage, and sat on the bed, shaking, sweating. Where is your knowledge now, thief, where is your stillness, where your honour, your worth, your code, you nothing, forgettable nothing, having a temper tantrum in your room, little girl, cross that desert. The desert will eat you whole, hey, hey hey, hey Macarena!
Need a friend to talk to, need Luca, need Filipa, need to clear my head, go for a run, go to a bar and pick up a guy, tell him everything, and he’ll nod and smile and say, “Wow, that’s so deep” and we’ll fuck and he’ll forget and it’ll be fine, it won’t mean anything but it’ll be good, it’ll be great, it’ll be me, my power, me, in control, me, using the world to steal, to speak, to live, to survive to live fuck you, fuck you all! On the balcony, shaking with rage, tears in my eyes.
Headpieces: in the 1700s, how many women died when their great wigs and beehive heads got caught in the flaming wax of the chandeliers? These days the only threats to some of the hair on display were low doors, the insides of cars, and the inability of anyone with that hairdo to nod.
but maybe Byron hadn’t intended to kill after all. The knife had gone in, and the knife had come out, and a dark puckering remained, stitched tight shut with self-dissolving thread, no more than an inch across. More spectacular was the bruising, the swelling, the purple-redness around, as the flesh in the vicinity of the perforation had tried to work out what this change in status meant, and was confused to discover it meant very little at all.
“I know of course that it’s you, as you sit here before me, but had to reacquaint myself with your features again. I’ve said this before, haven’t I?” “It’s nothing new.” “You must tell me if I repeat myself.” “I wouldn’t make many friends if I did that.” “Do you have many friends?” I didn’t answer. “Sorry – that was rude.” “Rude doesn’t bother me.”
“She spoke about you,” he said at last. “She felt sure she’d seen you everywhere. Not just in Tokyo, she said. She felt like you were always there, in her life, whispering to her. She couldn’t remember you, but in Nîmes she found her bracelet again, the one her mother had given her, and she said… she said she thought you were a friend, perhaps the best she ever had, if only she could remember you.
In Leith, a man with deep, dark south Asian skin and a turban on his head tuts and says, “Ah, a missing woman. My mother vanished some years ago, but alas, we found her again.”
The accents along the border, in Lindsay and Jedburgh, are thicker and harder to penetrate than in Edinburgh, as if, so close to England, these little Scottish villages have sworn to be more Scottish than the Scots, wearing their cultural identity like a sword and shield. Up yours, English!
