Owen Sheers - I Saw a Man

“Don’t worry about them,” Josh said, as they’d collected their coats from the cloakroom. “They’re big boys. They can look after themselves.”

The next time Michael saw Josh after that night had been in his kitchen, a few days later. Samantha was giving the girls their dinner. Lucy, as she ate, was overseeing another battle of wills between Molly and Dolly, both of whom had received recent and drastic haircuts. Michael had come round to give Sam a couple of books — a treatise on photography and the proof of a friend’s new novel. They were sharing a pot of tea when Josh entered, dropping his briefcase in the hall and giving each of the girls a peck on their heads. Drawing a bottle of red from the wine rack, he began to open it.

“So what did you think of those Mexicans?” he asked Michael as he’d poured the wine. “Pretty interesting guys eh?”

“Certainly more lively than my old professors,” Michael said.

“You bet they are,” Josh said. “Very interesting guys. Very interesting. And smart businessmen, too.”

“Did it work out?” Michael asked, as Josh pulled up a chair between his two daughters. “The bank side of things?”

“Too early to say,” he’d replied, reaching out and stroking Lucy’s hair. “But that’s where it’ll be coming from soon enough. Mexico, Brazil. They’re bucking the global trend. Christ knows, they’re doing it better than us.”

Whether Samantha had picked up on the subtext of Josh’s comments, or whether she’d just chosen to ignore it, Michael couldn’t tell. But whichever, Josh had seemed to enjoy the private knowledge he and Michael were sharing in his home. As if, in however small a way, he’d initiated him into his life beyond this kitchen, this house, and in doing so had carved out a bit of Michael for himself alone.

Josh’s reaction a week later, when Michael came across him and Maddy at a wine bar in Belsize Park, couldn’t have been more different. There had been, in itself, nothing suspicious about what Michael had seen. He’d been returning from the supermarket with a couple of bags of shopping when he’d seen them through the bar’s window. Had Josh not been looking directly at him, he wouldn’t have disturbed them. But as it was, their eyes met and Josh had waved him inside. They were just finishing up, so Michael sat with them only long enough to ask Maddy how she and Tony were settling in, and for her to enquire after the progress of his new book.

Throughout the conversation Josh seemed on edge, looking at his watch twice in the same minute. Maddy, however, maintained the same distanced interest she’d always held on every occasion Michael had met her. As if the person with whom she was speaking was just one of many in an invisible receiving line on either side of her.

When Michael picked up his bags to leave, Josh waved him off casually enough. “Sure, I’ll be there,” he’d said, confirming their jog on the Heath the next day. “See you by the ponds at eight.” But when they’d gone for that jog the following morning, it was as if their meeting in the bar had never happened. Michael wouldn’t have expected Josh to bring it up, but he’d interviewed enough people to know when the omission of a subject was enough to conjure it.

At the end of that jog, as they’d sat on their regular bench on Parliament Hill, Michael had thought Josh was about to mention his drink with Maddy. He’d taken an intake of breath like the beginning of an explanation, or perhaps a request for Michael to keep what he’d seen to himself. But no such request had come. Instead, he’d just leant back against the bench and stared out over the city, as if, after all these years of working at its heart, he was still trying to figure it out.

―

Sitting on that same bench, months later, Michael folded Daniel’s letter back into the pocket of his shorts. As he did, a couple of girls jogged past on the path behind them. They wore hats, fluorescent bibs, and Lycra leggings. Josh followed them with his eyes for a moment, then, as if taking his cue from their dropping below the hill, put his hands on his knees, took a deep breath, and stood up. “I’d better get home,” he said. “I gotta be in the office at ten.”

Together they’d walked down the path in the direction of the jogging girls. Neither of them spoke. From thousands of miles away, Daniel and his letter had silenced them both. Turning off the path, they’d passed through a copse of young ash and a huddle of blackberry bushes and onto a track that met the nearest street, its tarmac starting abruptly at the Heath’s edge.

As they’d walked on between the terraced houses, morning lives stirring within them, Josh had begun to talk again. Michael heard little of what he said. The letter in his pocket was rubbing at his mind as it had against his leg during their run. A white noise behind his temples. He felt isolated by its words. Underwater in a vast and darkening ocean. And yet at the same time he felt strangely connected by them, in the most intimate of ways, to the man who’d written them. As if they’d eaten from the same plate, or shared the same woman.

Turning into a narrow alleyway, they came out into South Hill Drive and walked down its incline, past the gardens and gates of the houses higher up the street. Michael tried to catch the drift of what Josh was saying. For some reason he couldn’t fathom, Josh was angry with the Lehman’s Manhattan office. Something about real estate, sub-prime and toxic derivatives, college boys making bonds bets that had left him “fucking exposed with my balls on the wire.”

At times, when Josh talked about his bank like this, Michael wanted to stop him, there and then in the street, and tell him about the missile that had killed Caroline. Its name, he wanted to tell him, was the AGM-114 Hellfire, a “fire and forget” weapon manufactured by Lockheed Martin. Since 1999, he’d explain, the Hellfire has been the Predator’s missile of choice. In 1997, two years before the first pair were fitted to a Predator’s wings, a limited partnership led by his employers, Lehman Brothers Holdings, bought a 50 percent stake in a new company called L-3 Communications. L-3, in turn, had been formed from ten high-tech Lockheed Martin units. L-3 became the manufacturers of the Predator’s sensor and optic equipment, the same equipment that had, in all likelihood, filmed Caroline from 20,000 feet as she’d sat in the back of that white minivan. And it was L-3 equipment, too, that would have fired a targeting laser at that minivan’s hood.

This is what Michael wanted to tell Josh. How with every drone flown, L-3’s profits had soared. How his wages and bonuses, along with the wages and bonuses of banks and companies across the world, were fuelled by deaths in faraway places, out of any conventional camera’s focus. How Caroline, in doing her job, had also been “fucking exposed,” sitting as she had been at the brilliant centre of that Hellfire’s 5,000-degree thermobaric blast. How, at that heat, flesh melts instantly, bone is vaporised, and the person you love goes, in less than a second, from being to not. How, despite its “fire and forget” name tag, once a Hellfire had been released there would always be someone who never would.

But Michael didn’t stop Josh, and he didn’t say anything. Daniel’s letter had pulled his world tight, drawn in its threads so that once again, like a man gifted with X-ray vision, he could see the full array of the causal web spiralling towards Caroline’s death. But he no longer wanted to see. He no longer wanted to be sensitive to how lives rubbed against lives, and greed rubbed against death, across the distances of oceans and continents. So instead of exposing Josh to his thoughts, he’d just carried on listening to him as they’d walked on down South Hill Drive, its sycamores budding above them. When they reached their homes, side by side in the street, Michael had turned towards his front door, pulling out his keys from a string round his neck.