Craig Harrison - The Quiet Earth

‘People might start to come back just a few at a time. Not everyone all at once.’

He says this unconvincingly. We are standing by the bed. I am about to reply when the woman opens her eyes and gazes up at us. We both start. It’s like a corpse come to life. Her eyes widen, she focuses on us, her face reacts in terror. A moan becomes a whimpering attempt to scream, a dreadful noise. She tries to push back with her hands. Then the noise chokes, the eyelids fall, and she is unconscious again. It all happens in an instant, like a convulsion, as though a swimmer floating in deep water had turned over in a sudden cramp and found she was facing down into death liquid, eyes pressed open by the depth looking down, air gone.

We stare at each other. Apirana puts his knuckles against his teeth.

‘What’s happening?’ he says, through his teeth.

‘The morphine might be wearing off.’

‘No. Can’t be. Any more would kill her.’

We watch. She is becoming agitated again, taking deep breaths. He paces by the bedside.

‘Why did she scream? When she saw us?’

‘She must have been alone for three weeks,’ I say. ‘It must have affected her. We had less than a week.’

He stops.

‘Yes. Jesus! What she must have been through.’ He turns and points at me. ‘ You checked Auckland. You were there for days . You said there was nobody.’

‘I couldn’t go down every street. Don’t start that . She could have been anywhere. Don’t start on at me about bloody Auckland.’

The moans are getting louder. Her lips try to form words again, and then the face contorts with hurt. She begins to make a series of gasping noises which rise one after the other into cries of pain, wrenched out, agonising, unstoppable.

The Maori clenches his hands over his ears, closes his eyes tight.

‘Oh, God. What can we do? Oh, Christ—’ He comes at me, his face glittering with sweat.

‘Give her anaesthetic. For Christ’s sake.’

I draw back. He gets the bottle and some cotton wool and pushes it at me, trembling. He is going to pieces very badly. I feel afraid. The rising moans and cries go on and on, unbearable.

‘You see, I told you,’ he shouts. ‘What do we do? Stop it, we’ve got to.’

I pour some chloroform onto a wad of cotton wool; the smell fills the room. As I hold the wad near the woman’s face, Apirana slumps at the edge of the bed and reaches out towards her, plucking at the bedclothes, whispering, I’m sorry, please, please , tears thickening his eyes.

The cries subside. His head goes face down onto the bedspread, hands outstretched. He mutters in Maori.

The chloroform forces a sick dizziness into my face and throat. I get up and wander along the room and drop into a chair.

Time slides sideways. Where am I going?

‘Where are you going, then?’

Atkinson smiles, head round the door of my room.

‘Oh. Coromandel. Couple of weeks.’

‘Very nice. Hope the weather holds.’

I gaze at the door after he goes. We take no notice of the weather in the research centre. I have noticed that the sun has been hot and the sky clear on my way to work. I look at the door. Where am I going. My chair swivels gently to one side. I open the desk drawer, take out the sleeping pills prescribed after the accident; still nearly a full bottle. The brown glass is cold in my hand. I shall go to a motel.

Another knock at the door. Perrin, now. I pretend to be busy with papers.

‘Just clearing up,’ I say.

‘Yes. Er…’ he pauses, pushing his glasses back, deciding not to say whatever he came to say. ‘Well, I’m going over to Eric Thompson’s for a few drinks. Usual Friday conference. Did you give Hibbert the computer programmes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Right. Well, ah, have a good time.’

The door closes. I speak after he has gone; just, ‘Goodbye.’

By seven o’clock the centre is deserted. I walk down the corridor and knock on one or two doors. Nobody. Then I descend to the radiation unit. The levels are normal. My identity card slots into the decoder and the steel door opens. I wait to make sure I’m alone. Then I go in behind the sound modulator. The panel at the back lifts out. Inside are the wires leading from the frequency controls to the dials on the front of the generator. Very carefully I reach in and tug the red wire loose from the B12 circuit. Then I replace the rear panel and clip it back into place. As I go out and close the door I can feel a vestigial smile pulling at the corners of my mouth over my tightly set teeth and neutral expression. I could tell by Perrin’s shifty manner that he intends to return later or perhaps early tomorrow, Saturday, when nobody’s here, and give the B12 programme a short trial run. I know he’s insatiably curious. Well, when he tries it, the machine will overload and blow its circuits. The frequency will go higher without registering on the dials. There won’t be any danger because the circuit breakers should cut power at a certain point. At the very least the resonance might give him a headache for an hour or two. But the modulator will be out of action for at least a fortnight, and by then I shall be back.

The door closes and the word I have already spoken seems to still hang in the air with the staying power of formaldehyde.

Goodbye.

Have I done everything? Shredded my papers. Yes. I walk through the main laboratory dehydrated by the fluorescent light. A white rat stands against the wire of a cage twitching its pink nose, finding me in the sky of its albino eyes. The rats always struggled worst. Goodbye, Drosophila . The light goes out on the double helix, the billion-year helter-skelter, the tangle of threads on the genetic chart.

I think how strangely the water untangled and floated the hair apart as the surface combed it upward into every separate filament. Goodbye is forever. Peter; Joanne.

The light is clear, dry, an empire of another element. Perrin will open the doors, and do what he has always wanted, tap on the barrier, push his way into the next billion years. All by himself.

We may even go at about the same time. Not a good thought for such a long journey. An adverse conclusion.

I am driving with my back to the west and behind in the mirror the earth is tilting its mass of hills up to bury the last of the sun. The gold on the land ahead goes quick. I am moving towards the darkest part of the sky. The car seems to lift and rush on through the warm air. To Coromandel. And the stars—

The echo of a great rending in the air, a vibration which elongates into a sound like a scream, tears from one memory to another, dragging images from different times together, then apart, into pieces.

The Maori is shaking me awake. The room reconstructs itself. Once more the screaming and moaning from the figure on the bed, and the chloroform to daze the sounds.

He lifts the edge of the sheets. ‘Look.’

Her leg is bluish-black, grotesquely swollen. I stare.

He drops the sheet, turns away and looks out of the window, arms folded in a tense clasp.

‘It may be broken,’ I say.

‘The blood’s not circulating.’

‘It could just be very bad bruising.’

He sighs. ‘The car hit her. It’s broken inside, somewhere.’

‘Should we put a splint on it, then?’

‘No point, unless it’s reset.’ He leans his forehead against the window. It seems to be afternoon. It is hard to tell. ‘Gangrene,’ he says. I lift the sheets cautiously and look again. ‘If only we could work the X-ray.’

‘Can you reset bones? Even if you can see on an X-ray where it’s broken?’

He doesn’t answer.

‘Well, I can’t,’ I say.