Craig Harrison - The Quiet Earth

Api swivels in his chair, his arm extended, finger tracing an arc across the dust on the table top. His face is back in shadow.

‘This is all real, isn’t it?’ he asks suddenly.

‘As far as we know, yes.’

‘I mean, what if it’s a very good fake? Just like the real thing?’

‘And we wouldn’t be able to tell? Like the reversed polarity. Is that what you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘What for? Why?’

‘To watch us. See what we do.’

I shake my head, taking the chance to make the denial I missed before.

‘We’re not that important.’

‘It may only be real to us.’ He taps the table.

I sigh.

‘You’re saying that we’re the odd ones out. That everybody else is safe in the real world and they’re wondering what happened to us. Because we’re missing from the real world. Is that it?’

‘Yes.’ The voice is soft behind the column of light. ‘Well, you know; people go missing. They just vanish. What happens to them?’

I can’t see it’s any use wasting time on this line of thinking, so I say, off-handedly, ‘If this is a replica world, then it’ll have enough anomalies to be detectable by the kind of scientific tests I’m going to run.’

‘You reckon?’ His voice is almost toneless.

‘Yes.’

‘It is important.’ He moves his arms from the tabletop so there is only the black submachine gun lying there with the sun fixed on it like a spotlight. ‘Either we find out what happened to them,’ he says, ‘and find how we can get them back…or we find out what we missed last Saturday…and how we can join them. The second way might be easier.’

I sit impassive. In a way I feel sorry for him because I can understand how he has missed drawing the correct conclusion from what has happened, in particular my description of the crashed plane in Auckland. There is something pitiful about his idea, and it relates to his childhood terror of being abandoned; a pathetic survival of the wish to ransack empty space for the people who ought to be there, to conjure them into existence, combined with the other deeper need to run to the crowd and be forgiven. That is all this means. And he still doesn’t know.

He makes a move to get up.

‘Do you mind if I ask something?’ I say, rather formally.

‘No. Go on.’

‘Why did you join the army?’

There is a short laugh.

‘Oh. Dunno really. Maybe I thought I was a real tough guy after all that. Or…maybe, nothing could be worse.’ He pauses. ‘And, like I said, I’m a bit dumb.’

He deliberately undermines the reply by the last phrase, using something we both know to be untrue to let me know that he will not answer my question, it’s forbidden territory. Perhaps he wants me to deduce that it’s all untrue, and hence an oblique warning: his toughness is an illusion, and there were worse experiences after that. It’s like the Maori warrior making a ritual scary face as you put a foot forward onto his ground and at the same time placing a stick at your feet which you may pick up if you want to go further. The snag being, that to pick it up, you have to lean over and expose your neck to danger.

We are outside, in the sun, and as I unlock the boot of the car to put back the hammer and tyre lever, I see a glint of steel. Perrin’s metal box. I’d forgotten about that. I shall have to find some way of opening it. But not when Apirana is around.

We make an illusion for ourselves. We seem to be in control of the world but it means nothing. So we hurry through the emptiness like animals that have to keep moving to live. For more than a week we keep ourselves working hard.

To make sure there is nobody else, we drive round bleating the car horn through the suburbs and the Hutt Valley. They are graveyards without bodies. The wind blows over the hills and shakes the grass and trees. Bright plastic flags snap in the air above used car lots. The world is a heap of dead machinery and closed rooms.

We rob shops when we get hungry, eating cold canned food; then speed back to the city, the silence unzipped by the motor then fastening up close behind us all the way.

Apirana fixes a radio transmitter and receiver. We transmit words and morse; we receive nothing. I work at the university, wandering around the various laboratories of the science buildings, visiting the observatory on the hill, checking books in the library, always with Api hovering around to make machines work, to link diesel generators to transformers and power circuits. He insists on installing a generator in the basement car park of the hotel, and we have lights, refrigeration and hot water again. The generators replace the silence with a constant humming and vibrating beneath us, a machine noise like the engines of an ocean liner. We switch off when we want to sleep.

So there is the illusion of meaning and power, centred on us, made by us for ourselves.

With the help of books I delve into areas of physics I can remember little about. I dutifully make checks on radiation levels, the various wavebands of radiation, the positions of fixed stars and constellations, even the cellular structure of plants. All appear to be normal, except for a slightly above-average level of radioactivity around me, no doubt a result of the time I spent in the research centre. I conceal this from Apirana. It would only make him unnecessarily nervous.

In the evenings after work we read from a heap of books and magazines looted fairly randomly from shops and the library. We talk about small things from the past, avoiding what might be dangerous, or deep, by some unspoken consent, except that one evening he drinks several cans of beer and tells me, or the room in which I happen to be sitting, about his woman and how she had promised to wait for him when he was sent overseas; then, after he got back, neither of them were really the same any more, she had changed, couldn’t understand him, had rejected him. As far as I can tell, most of the bitterness of this came from the admitted fact that the woman had been faithful and waited for him; and I think he is aware that he must have been the one who had changed, though of course he will not say this. I only half-listen; but I wonder what had happened to him that she could not understand or live with.

He wakes with a headache and says he won’t drink beer anymore. It isn’t good for him. He will drink other things he doesn’t like too much.

These trivialities are embedded in our existence, changing focus and dimensions according to our moods or our sense of our own importance. At one level we still seem to want to behave like stranded travellers waiting for normal services to resume, exchanging small talk, thinking: This can’t continue much longer; or even: If we behave in any other way, it implies a longer wait. On what would be the Friday of the second week, it occurs to me that Crusoe was alone on his island for more than twenty years. And I think: Dear God, no ; but without any feeling of being heard or watched. The sense of absence is too powerful for that.

On a second trip to the Hutt Valley, Apirana breaks into the television centre at Avalon and removes a videotape playback unit and a large box of canisters. He sets up this unit in the dining room at the hotel and plugs it into his power supply. The programmes in the canisters seem to be capsules of the most mind-corroding Californian serials. Large cars pursue each other and explode in colour. Guns are fired, biro-red blood squirts from white shirts. Comedies erupt with pre-recorded howls of laughter every eight seconds. Api watches for a while, then switches off. It seems to have made a mockery of all his technological expertise; worse, for both of us, it’s too disturbing a reminder of the old world, it stirs up an unnerving mixture of contradictory feelings. In between looting, we are caretakers. We have enough power to feel we may be the guardians of everything, and if we could remake the world I suppose we would want it to be better. What had he said?—‘There are some bastards I wouldn’t want back,’ or words to that effect. We don’t say anything more about it. But in fact there is a hell of a lot we would not want back. We’re in limbo, stuck between a gone world which presses threats and memories in on us, vividly, one moment, then falls away into a sullen gulf of ages ago; and a future which is nothing. Which we must not think about. Or speak about. We make each day out of nothing. It is like leaning into space, blindfold. We are powerless to do anything else.