Nick Harkaway - The Gone-Away World

Gonzo was suggestible. This was anticipated. The plan anticipated everything—except me.

It’s all in the file.

The room in which Humbert Pestle seduced Gonzo to the Dark Side was dressed for the occasion.

Humbert Pestle: Mr. Lubitsch.

Gonzo: Mr. Pestle.

( Handshake, mighty muscles straining, mutuality of testicular steeliness tested and acknowledged. )

H.P.: We’re not children in this room.

Gonzo: I should say not.

H.P.: I hope you’re well.

Gonzo: ( who clearly isn’t ) Yes, sir. Tip top.

H.P.: Only I have a problem, Mr. Lubitsch, and it’s a big one. It’s more your kind of problem than mine, these days. It’s a young man’s problem, and I am an old fart.

Gonzo: I wouldn’t say that.

H.P.: Fercrissakes, Mr. Lubitsch, I am an old fart. I am powerful and dangerous and sexually potent. I do not have a problem with my old-fartness. Let’s not get into how I am in the prime of my life. I know I am in the prime of my life. I am also an old fart. Okay?

( Beat )

Gonzo: What can I do for you, Mr. Pestle?

H.P.: I would like you to look around this room and tell me what you see.

( Gonzo looks. What he sees is a forest of maps and pictures. Drowned Cross. Miserichord. Horrisham. Templeton. He is looking at the Vanishings. He has never seen them laid out like this before. They seem to make a sort of pattern around the Pipe. )

H.P.: What do you see, son?

Gonzo: I’m not sure. The Vanishings.

H.P.: Let me help you out.

( Humbert Pestle turns on an overhead projector. It is an old one, with sheets of transparent plastic and wipe-clean pens. It is the kind Ms. Poynter used to sketch the erogenous zones in biology, a moment Gonzo remembers with burning intensity as he has had frequent cause to recall it since. Humbert Pestle knows this, because he has done his homework, or rather someone has done it for him. He knows that Gonzo likes this particular model of OHP, that it makes a hum he finds, without realising it, reassuring and just a little bit sexy. Ms. Poynter was a babe and reputedly also a serious love machine, and Gonzo once, during a particularly vexing test, found her leaning down to study his answers, and caught a glimpse of what he could only assume was a breast. This projector is inextricably bound up with Gonzo’s early orgasms. Today, though, Humbert Pestle projects not erogenous zones but something quite the opposite. He shows Gonzo that the Vanishings could be taken as a fence, a scar around the Pipe and the people who live within its benevolent fog. )

Gonzo: I don’t—quite—understand.

H.P.: Well, Mr. Lubitsch, it’s like this. We have encircled the Earth, and we have created a little area of civilisation and safety and good commerce. But all around us there is a wild place of monsters. You are personally well aware of this. There are things that look human, and things which don’t, and they want to eat us all up. Our house is made of bricks, so they can’t just huff and puff us into the open. But they can chisel away. They can strangle us. And that is what they are doing. Every finger we put outside a certain distance from the Pipe, they cut off. And that distance is shrinking, Mr. Lubitsch. It takes less time to make a town vanish than it does to build one. We are encircled. We are under siege. And we are losing.

( Humbert Pestle is a better orator than Dick Washburn. He does not attempt the rhetorical ellipsis overtly. He does not trail off, awed by the awfulness of the awesome thing he is trying to convey. His ellipsis is tacit. He does not say “And if we lose . . .” He knows Gonzo will say that to himself, and your own ellipses are infinitely more persuasive than someone else’s. )

Gonzo: That is—well—that is quite a problem, Mr. Pestle.

H.P.: Yes, Mr. Lubitsch. That is quite a problem. It is a real problem in the real world. A grown-up problem. This is why I asked—because I know damn well that the answer is yes—if we were all adults here. Because we’re in a very adult place right now. We have no time for niceties.

( Beat )

H.P.: May I ask you a question?

Gonzo: Of course.

H.P.: If you could do something about it—something only you had a really good shot at—would you do it?

Gonzo: Yes, I would.

H.P.: Even if it was basically a bad thing? A wrong thing?

Gonzo: How wrong?

H.P.: Wrong. A bad thing. But . . . effective. One bad thing to stop more bad things from happening.

Gonzo: ( he considers ) Sometimes you have to do those things.

H.P.: Sometimes you do.

( Beat )

H.P.: But not always, of course.

( Humbert Pestle removes from a folder an image of Zaher Bey and places it on the table between them. )

H.P.: I believe you know Zaher Bey. He has made his life with the monsters.

( Gonzo nods. )

H.P.: The Found Thousand, Mr. Lubitsch. The unreal people. They want our world. They want our lives.

( And Gonzo, of course, knows first-hand that this is true. Because I tried to take his wife. )

H.P.: I need to have a talk with this good gentleman. I need him to come to me to discuss this situation. I need to have a free hand at those discussions.

Gonzo: I see.

H.P.: Now, the Bey won’t come out to play. But I have reason to believe that if you went and asked him, he might reconsider. You knew him in the Reification, I gather.

Gonzo: Yes, I did.

H.P.: He trusts your word, Mr. Lubitsch. If he has your assurance of his safety, I believe he would come.

Gonzo: And then you would talk to him.

H.P.: You would not be required to be part of the conversation, Mr. Lubitsch. Only to bring him to me.

( And Gonzo knows, really, that he is being invited to weasel. His responsibility is sharply bounded. Get the Bey. Bring him to the place. That is all he will have done. This is the seduction of Humbert Pestle’s proposition: the idea of limited consequence. The dark deeds which will be done after Gonzo hands over his trusting companion will be someone else’s burden. He cannot know, not really, that they will take place. Humbert Pestle—a very respectable man—is requesting a specific task of him, a noble task. He has no reason to doubt. And even if these dark deeds are done, would that be so bad? Certain prices must be paid, after all. We’re all grown-ups here. )

Gonzo: All right, then.

Because this was always the plan. Humbert Pestle sent Moustache the ninja to set the Pipe on fire, dispatched Dick Washburn to hire the Free Company to put it out. He had Moustache wait and try to kill us, knowing the ninja could not possibly succeed. He sent men to kill Gonzo’s parents and Leah. All to destabilise Gonzo, to make him so angry that Pestle could throw the blame at Zaher Bey and let fear and panic make it stick. The Found Thousand are coming! The enemy is at the gate! Fight them! Kill them! Hesitation is death to those you love. And then offer this grimy solution, a sordid, appealing little deal to take away the fear. Leave it all to Humbert.

Pestle must have been thrilled when he heard about me. The ideal whip to drive Gonzo with. The perfect cat’s paw. They want our lives.

Gonzo will bring the Bey, and Humbert Pestle will kill him. I cannot allow it. It will damn Gonzo, of course. He will not recover from having lent himself to such a thing. He will become, gradually, a pencilneck, and he will lend himself to more and more until finally he is no one I know. But more, I cannot allow it because the Bey is not really trusting Gonzo. He is trusting the portable Gonzo he carries in his head, the image of the person who brought him to Caucus and hung on his every word; of the castaway who washed up on his shore with a broken hand and confessed his part in the Go Away War, and who became part of the Bey’s extended family in Shangri-La. And that person is not Gonzo Lubitsch. It is me. If Gonzo delivers Zaher Bey to Humbert Pestle, he will do it in my colours.