Craig Harrison - The Quiet Earth

For a moment, unlocking the door, I had let myself believe from the tone of his voice that there might have been an answer. Now I look down at the carpet and feel the old weariness, the anger flattened by disappointment.

‘Don’t you see?’ he says.

A new voice suddenly pronounces a sentence, what sounds like a whole coherent sentence in Samoan, a question. The woman’s eyes have opened. They stare vividly black against white; large, shining in the electric light. She speaks the sentence again, not looking at us. Apirana moves across to her, still clutching the Bible. I follow and stand behind him as he sits on the edge of the bed. Of course we don’t understand what she is demanding. Her lips seem dry.

‘I’ll get some water,’ I say, turning.

‘In the jug. Glass over there.’

Awkward, with the gun still clasped beneath the jacket, I fumble to pour a glass of water. The two Polynesians, he with his back to me, she whispering the important sentence again, are together in the pool of light by the bed; and for the first time I realise what must be at the centre of his own solitary horror: of not being able to understand a single word, not able to help her even by speaking. Everything is a total, closed, secret. It seems like a cruelty meant precisely for him. And I think: he must be insane by now.

I return to the bed. Just as I move to the edge of the light, the woman dies. Her head goes slack and lolls sideways, her eyes half close in a still look at nothing. The movement of the head spills a trace of liquid from the corners of the eyes and this runs slowly down the face. In the final instant, when her eyes lose the room, her features seem to collect in a softening of skin the memory of the settled expression which had once been possible. The effect is beautiful even though I know it means nothing more than the death of nerves and tendons moving through the structure of her face and the golden colour is only the shade of the light.

The Maori reaches out towards her left hand, clutching at her and staring. When I go to take her pulse, to make sure, he shoves me away fiercely. No words are spoken.

I wait, then leave him sitting there, staring, numb.

From the next room I hear him begin to howl in Maori, a dirge, the kind of wounded cries that they sing at death. It breaks across a range of piercing tones marking weakness and pain, then moves to a different level, more powerful and defiant. I have never heard anything as unnerving. It violates the boundaries between human and inhuman, like the echo of a voice returning from darkness amplified and changed in tone by the enormities which have repelled it. The sound that goes furthest into my head suggests the scraping of insolence against a hard edge of terror. There are others, less recognisable, so clenched in intensity that in the end there is no way of separating the worship of death from the struggle against it.

In spite of this, in an uncontrollable rush from consciousness I drift into a sleep. I am lifted a long way above the abandoned city and all its houses and blocks of towers are laid out dead below, miles of dark stone and glass and ribbed iron. And in the centre, a tower with one speck of light, a solitary dot. The only sounds on earth come from this; a diesel feeding energy into the concrete space, and the wail of a prehistoric death chant. When this fades I hear the whispering in the distance of the old dream I’ve had many times, indecipherable; the voices I will not hear.

At light I wake, rise, and listen. The place is very quiet. Again I fold the jacket over my arm and go into the room slowly, holding the gun hidden. He is still in the same place, sitting upright, head lowered, chin on his chest. I stand opposite. His face comes up. Has he been asleep? His eyes point in my direction. There is no response when I speak his name. I say it several times. Then he says, ‘Get out.’

The corpse is pale, like a shell; an arm is extended and the empty eyes are half open. A smell of antiseptic and dead sweat presses into my throat. I walk round the bed and pause as I go by him. Without looking at me he reaches his left arm up and makes a pushing gesture to get rid of me. The jacket slips and my sudden grab at it makes him turn and stare. He sees the gun. I step back.

He does not seem surprised, he just looks slowly up from the gun to my face and back down to the gun again.

‘Go on,’ he says. He turns so that he is facing me, very passive and without any expression. His left hand moves gradually through the air towards his face and the forefinger extends until it almost touches the centre of his forehead. Then he says, ‘Here.’ And there is a silence. ‘Go on. Do it.’ I am back in the next room, leaning again on the door, knowing that within minutes I must understand my life, I must force my memory to the very centre, the holding power of every defence. I must remember. He told me that, days ago, when he heard me shouting in the dream. Then, in there, he said the opposite. Forget , don’t remember, blot it out, it does no good. I still have no choice. I can’t—

Cells tense inside my head. I feel the pain, of what he pointed for me to do, through my own skull.

When I look again into the room only moments later he has vanished. I stand in a stupor. I heard nothing. But the door to the corridor is half open. I stride to it and glance along the passage into the grey light. The door to the stairs is squeezing shut furtively with a faint hiss of its automatic lever.

Quick . Will he have gone up to the rooms where the guns are, or down to the car park, to his jeep? I run along, haul the door open and look up and down the stairwell. No sign of him. So he must have gone down, out on the top floor of the car park building. Still clutching the revolver, I jump down the stairs three at a time, kick open the exit door and run out into the great cavern of the car park. The generator is humming in the lower level, the basement. I flick on the fluorescent lights and run behind the nearest row of cars, crouching. The jeep is parked next to my car against the far wall. I stop and look. The noise of the generator makes it hard to hear. Damn . I was wrong. He isn’t here. He tricked me. He must have gone up one floor, then left the stairwell and run along the corridor to the other set of stairs. Now he’ll be up on the eighth floor with his weapons.

I dash to the jeep and pull the tarpaulin back. What did he leave here? Boxes of ammunition. The practice grenades. Some real ones. I take two out and slip one into each pocket, making sure the rings connected to the release catches don’t snag.

He will come down after me. I won’t be able to hear because of the generator. I run along to the ramp which leads down to the next level. The machine noise gets louder as I descend. Along, and down again. There it is. I pause, then crouch behind the generator, glancing all around. When I switch it off, the sound falls into a long drone and the lights shrink. The machine dies with an animal-like convulsion, then the lights seem to be blotted out by silence. Enough grey light is coming in through the open side of the parking building to show the exit doors from the hotel staircase about ten metres away. I dodge across and get on the far side of a concrete pillar. By looking at the reflection on the side of a black car standing to the right, I can still see the exit door I think he will come through on the left.

The silence solidifies. I can hear nothing but my own breathing and my heart thudding like mad. I still can’t think what’s happening.

There’s a very faint sound, somewhere above. A clicking, and a rustle. Silence, then more rustling, and silence again. He must be on the upper floor, with the jeep. What will he expect me to do next? Or least expect me to do? Is it any use trying to reason with him? I don’t even know if this is the real thing. Are we trying to kill each other?