Richard House - The Kills

‘The road? I wouldn’t know about the road. That’s out of my scope. It’s not my problem. I was contracted to undertake a geological assessment, and I’ve completed the work that was requested.’ It’s a bald-faced lie. He knows it, the person he’s speaking with knows it. HOSCO published the pre-solicitation (PS), then the specific General Procurement Notice (GPN). MasterWork-Roadways (MW-R) submitted the successful Statement of Work (SOW), and subcontracted Whitby Earth Science Services (WESS) to undertake the surveys. That’s fact. After this the whole idea becomes abstract. WESS didn’t complete the survey, because MW-R didn’t intend to build the highway, because not one person in Iraq would actually ever need to drive along the entire border with Saudi and Syria. ‘Let’s make that clear,’ he says. ‘Not. One. Person.’

Whitby catches his in-caution. You can’t speak like this on a satphone. It’s not wise. Signals bounce off the ether, travel for millennia. NASA will capture it in echoes, crawlers on Mars will forward the information to god knows who, because who knows when this is coming back at you? You have to shut your mouth these days.

Against his better judgement he has to spell it out. ‘I know how this works. OK? I know. When I worked for you we built bypasses around towns that weren’t much more than encampments, bridges over dry wadis, turns in roads that didn’t need turns.’ He needs to be emphatic. ‘You’re forgetting. I. Know.’

He decides he can’t hear the caller, the signal, he says, it’s just not there. Nope, can’t hear you. Then cancels the call. It’s a small joy to imagine that frustration. The situation doesn’t need managing, not in its entirety. He just needs to look after his own part.

Whitby drives with the satisfaction of another man’s frustration chasing after him. He likes the idea that the burn of this conversation is making someone ache. He’s had the last word. As if to confirm this finality the signal for the satphone properly dies.

And the road. On the surface it looks the same now as it did when he started. Yellow to white plates of broken stone. Something that looks like a raw landscaped lot. Running under the surface it’s a whole other story. He can take core samples here, where the schist breaks through. In one or two miles the road curls as close as it’s going to get to the Syrian border. You could take samples at any point along here because there’s just the right concentration of fossil matter and silicates and gypsum, and say they came from anywhere along the entire length.

He has to get out of his car. He has a core-sampler with him. Needs to pick a spot that’s going to provide him with enough material. He slams the door and hears it automatically lock. Which isn’t right.

This is the first thing that goes wrong.

The keys won’t work. That’s great. The key is a hard plastic button. Something about it makes him think of Sweden. The pure design of it. A black button the size of a thumb print. A man’s thumb print. You press this button and the car unlocks, the engine starts, the vehicle adjusts to the driver, seats move, lower, lengthen. Air flows and temperatures alter. You can set the audio for your listening pleasure. He likes Caruso to greet him. ‘Una Furtiva Lagrima’. He hears the music and he’s in the movie. The keys won’t work and the door won’t open.

Fantastic.

He’s in the desert, thirty-something miles from the Syrian border. His vehicle has locked him out, and it’s playing Caruso. He has to listen to it, because you have to. The way the music steps, a little up, a little down. You know exactly where it’s heading. That tender baritone and the knowledge that singing this, his final aria, caused his throat to bleed. Caruso dead at forty-eight at the Hotel Vesuvio, beloved Naples. And here, in the desert, with the ground undulating in the white heat, it just makes perfect sense. His car has locked him out, and now it’s humming to itself.

He stands in the desert. Gives the car a look of hate, turns a whole 360, and lets out a sigh as the aria starts up a third time. No choice but to smash a window.

The thing is, and now he remembers, any damage and the vehicle goes into ‘alert’. The system locks down, the alarm sounds, a signal is sent across the world, supposing a signal can be sent. Only, wasn’t that removed? The man he bought the vehicle from had made some adjustments because he didn’t want to be tracked by some CIA car dealership.

It comes to him piece by piece. Locked out. Car in lockdown. No power to the phone. By his calculation he’s sixty miles from the nearest garage. From what he remembers the closest village is actually across the border in Syria. It won’t come to that. Not yet. All you do is wait. The goddamned thing will reset itself. The alarm will have to stop sometime soon. Just leave it alone and the codes automatically reset.

He waits an hour. Sits on the road with his knees up, and his suit jacket hitched over his head. With his fingers in his ears. It’s unnerving just how bleak it is, and how can there be flies out here when there is no other living creature? He sits on the tarmac with his back against the car and hides from the sun. The car, while it provides shade, becomes much too hot. For all of the expense, those self-adjusting seats, the assisted steering, the brakes, the interface between computer and vehicle — it’s nothing more than a heat-attracting can.

10.1

While in Naples Berens tells this story about William Tecumseh Sherman to Paul Geezler as distraction and example: the great general, in an early posting, was sent to Florida, and for almost a year he spent much of his time fishing in the company of a Sergeant Ashlock. This sergeant was sent to accompany a man on a court martial, and when he returned he brought with him a young wife. The breakers that day were rougher than usual, and while the first boat crossed the bar without trouble, the others, including Ashlock’s, were overturned. Ashlock’s wife had made the first safe trip, and stood on the shoreline with her sister and watched as the other boats fell into trouble. A nice day but a rough sea. The boats, caught in the surf, were quickly swamped and broken, and the men set upon by sharks. The next morning Sherman had the unpleasant task of walking the surf-line to identify the washed-up pieces of bodies, and the later duty of confirming the sergeant’s death to his young wife. It’s a small event in a larger life, but in writing it, Sherman expresses regret. As if this need not have happened.

Berens likes to imagine what it would be like to meet the general, say before the Civil War, on his way to an earlier campaign, travelling around Cape Horn, on the long voyage from East to West America prior to the Panama Canal. It would be interesting to meet the man, before he knew himself who he was. He’d like to meet Grant as well. Although he’d choose a later period, days before his death, when he’d given up eating, and worked to complete his manuscript for no less a publisher than Mark Twain. Berens would sit on the porch and watch the great man labour over words during his final days. This is what he’d like to see. Sherman before the conflict, and Grant long after.

Aside from this desire, Berens finds Sherman’s Ashlock tale instructive: at any given time you don’t know what’s coming at you. You really don’t. Ashlock single. Ashlock married. Ashlock in pieces along the shore. After the fact there is a certainty to this progression. Before, there’s only unknowing. Berens uses this story as a stall when he doesn’t want to give an immediate response, when he wants an idea to penetrate.