Craig Harrison - The Quiet Earth

The Maori clenched his fists. I moved the wine glass to my mouth and tipped some of the cold liquid between my lips and teeth. He closed his eyes tight. ‘I think that was one of the worst things I ever did: I still dream about it. They thought I was a spooky kind of kid. I had dreams. But that was real . It wasn’t a dream. I know who he was and what I said. For people who’re alive you can go back another day and say, “Look I’m sorry I hurt you.” And explain, and get it right in your mind. But this was forever. It was worse than if I’d killed him. The look on his face.’

I wished he would stop. It was not the kind of thing I wanted to hear. I hadn’t found the only other person perhaps in the world in order to listen to this kind of thing. He stood up and put the empty wine bottle back in the jeep and then faced me again, holding his hands up.

‘That’s like the feeling I’ve had this week,’ he said; ‘something bad, weird, just trying to get through to me, not far off. And I don’t want to know.’

‘Neither do I,’ I said. He seemed to sense the tone of my dismissal, and lay down on a groundsheet, his head propped up on a rucksack. After a silence he said quietly, ‘You missed the point.’

‘What do you mean?’

There was another pause, and he toyed with a piece of fern with a sad intentness before replying. ‘I mean, what side of the window are we on? What if we’re the ones who don’t know, and we have to be told?’

I looked away. My stomach was churning.

‘For Christ’s sake—’ I said.

‘You must have thought of it.’ His words were soft and slow-spoken, with an odd insinuating quality. I resented the way he had somehow placed me on the defensive and pushed these words and ideas so easily through my defences.

‘We eat and sleep and breathe,’ I said, with as much force as I could, ‘and when we get cut, we bleed’—I held up my fingers, sealed with pink sticking plaster—‘and the wound heals. And you think we may be dead?’

He avoided looking at me.

‘How often you been dead, then?’ he said.

‘Alright. What do we do? Dig a couple of holes, crawl in, and lie there till we go cold?’

He didn’t answer; he threw the fern aside and stared gloomily at the ground. I felt I had to assert myself, as much for my own sake as for his.

‘Apirana,’ I said. He looked up. ‘I don’t know what being dead is like, but I do know about being alive, and this is it.’

The statement, packed with ironies as it was, swelling into a massive lie, still had a power to it as though the words could harden in the air and make their own reality in the same way that an exorcism might have strength to push against a manifest threat.

‘We are both alive,’ I said deliberately; ‘don’t fool yourself.’

A trace of smiling went into the expression of his lips and he nodded.

‘Okay. Sorry.’

‘You don’t believe New Zealand really is heaven do you?’ I asked, anxious to break the mood. His teeth showed. We laughed.

‘I reckon not,’ he said, then pretended to sniff the air in the direction of the sulphur pools; ‘could be the other place, though.’

I was slightly drunk, which made it easier for me to play the part of somebody with a fairly developed sense of humour. I held up the glass.

‘No, it couldn’t be hell. They wouldn’t do a good riesling.’ And we laughed some more. He relaxed.

‘It’s three dollars a bottle,’ he declared.

‘Did you pay cash?’ I asked. His face clouded for a moment and he nodded.

‘Habit,’ he said, curtly. I hadn’t meant to suggest anything. This was treacherous. My experience of talking to Maoris was almost zero. All the time there were sharp points and bad patches, like walking barefoot over a lawn with bits of broken glass hidden ready to draw blood.

‘I left cheques,’ I said lamely.

‘You put your address on the back?’ he asked.

‘Of course.’ A pause. ‘I’m a good keen bloke.’

He leaned back and folded his arms, pushing his head against the rucksack so that his black woollen hat tipped down his forehead and shaded his eyes. The teeth appeared again.

‘Good,’ he said; ‘makes me feel safe.’ And he laughed in a very Maori way, his chest heaving and expelling deep throaty noises. It sounded like the kind of laugh that would be shared amongst friends and directed outwards at other people.

‘I’m the one’s been doing all the talking,’ he went on, after a pause, becoming more assertive; ‘how about you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well. Job? Family? All that.’

The chance to strike back was there, and I took it.

‘I’m a research scientist. My wife left me last year. We had an eight-year-old boy. He drowned…in an accident. She blamed me. So, no, no family. My parents died when I was a kid. No brothers or sisters. I didn’t have anybody to go looking for.’

He lifted his hat and sat up, staring at me.

‘Nobody?’

‘Nobody.’

‘Hell. I’m sorry, man.’

It looked and sounded like genuine sympathy, and I was taken unawares again. He accepted what I told him without question, and seemed to be affected by it as though he’d known me for ages.

I covered my confusion by giving an account of what happened to me since Saturday, describing the crashed plane but not my escape from the research centre or Perrin being dead in there, and only giving the briefest summary of our research in terms which I hoped he wouldn’t understand. And whilst I was telling this, I was trying to cope with the way Lance Corporal Apirarna Maketu had pushed his naïve pity onto me like a condescending social worker—and I’d known a few—looming into a personal crisis for a bit of emotional indulgence, the voyeur at somebody else’s accident handing out pity like paper handkerchiefs. Luckily my isolation had spared me most of this during the worst times. Now, after everything I’d been through, I was faced with the casual presumption of this particular perfect stranger doing me the honour of being sorry for me. And in any case, all I had told him was that I had nobody to lose. If he pushed his flat nose into the implications of that, then he might realise it could be strength now, not something to be sorry about. He should consider that.

He interrupted me to ask what kind of research I did.

‘You use radioactive stuff?’

‘Well, yes. But I’m in biological science. I don’t know anything about radioactivity as such; that’s another area, that’s physical science.’

‘No theories about what’s happened, then?’

‘I don’t think it’s anything like a neutron bomb—’ ‘Nah.’ He shook his head. ‘Not so simple, is it?’

‘We have to get all the evidence together. There was a power surge, it knocked out electrical equipment, it stopped clocks, but it didn’t reverse the polarities or anything like that—’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, if you restart electrical equipment, generators, batteries, and so on, it still works. Radios still work but don’t pick up anything.’

‘Because nobody’s transmitting.’

‘Or because the ionosphere’s been mucked up, or the wavebands have been jammed by some force. What else do we know? It didn’t affect insects and worms below ground level, or anything beneath water, sea level—’

He sat up again, inspired, suddenly.

‘What about blokes down mines? Or in submarines?’

‘I doubt it. Rats and mice could have been underground and survived, but I haven’t seen any. My guess is that only small things escaped.’

‘We don’t know for sure, though.’

‘Submarines…it’s possible.’

My idea of a world magically disarmed by the Effect had been weakened by the survival of the lance corporal and his gun. The thought of fully manned nuclear missile submarines bursting through the level of the sea on panic red alerts was hard to take. But the universe was obviously in the mood for grotesque jokes.