Hari Kunzru - My Revolutions

The smells of hash and vegetable stew mingled against a humid background of rotting wood. We ate, squatting on the floor by a heater. I asked Sean what was happening. When was the meeting? “Tomorrow,” he said. So why had it been so important to drive two hours through the rain to get here? He shrugged and carried on spooning stew into his mouth. “We wanted everyone in place,” he said. I caught an officious note in his voice, one of Anna’s inflections. Someone handed me a glass of water. People moved through the room, materializing like wraiths out of the shadows. Leo’s friend Quinn, a couple of others I didn’t know. No one introduced me.

“Is Anna all right?” I asked. “Nothing’s happened to Anna?”

“Why do you say that?” asked Sean, sharply. After that no one made conversation. We just sat there in the half-darkness and waited.

“Is something about to happen?” I asked.

“Do you think it is?”

I turned round. It was Anna, dressed in jeans and a torn sweater. Even by the light of the oil lamp I could see how gaunt she was. Giacometti body, polished-bone head. She looked elevated, somehow achieved , as if she’d burned some final layer of indecision away from herself.

“Hello, Anna. I was worried about you.”

“No real names, please. Call me Christine, if you must call me anything.”

It wasn’t just physical, what Anna had erased. She sounded

uncannily detached, as if communicating from a great distance.

“If that’s how you want it.”

“It’s not a question of how I want it.”

“No, of course not. I’m sorry.”

I was beginning to feel uncomfortable; the atmosphere in the

room was a physical weight pressing down on my shoulders.

“Are you expecting someone, Michael? You keep looking over

my shoulder.”

“I can’t see who’s here.”

“Who’s going to come through the door?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m sure you do. Tell me, what have you been up to?”

“You know what I’ve been up to. Hanging about in

Manchester.”

“Hanging about in Manchester. What else?”

“I don’t understand. Is this the meeting? Are we having the

meeting now? Do you want to discuss targets?”

“I asked a simple question.”

I realized I was at the center of a circle. People sat in the shadows,

smoking, watching. “Are you interrogating me?”

My words dropped thickly off my tongue. Anna’s face was a

yellow blur. Around it the.ickering light had taken on an involuted

quality; the whole room was pointing toward her face.

“Why do you say that?”

“I’m asking you a question.”

“Who have you been talking to?”

“Is this an interrogation?”

“Tell me who.”

“Nobody.”

“That’s good, Michael.”

Is that what she said? Brie.y, her face looked gentle again. Oh,

Anna, I could have loved you. I could have tried to be perfect. I

listened to myself talking. What had I been talking about? Nothing.

Talking about nothing. Then I realized what was happening and

a tendril of fear crept up into my chest. “Did you spike me?”

I said the words and knew it was true. The dryness in my throat. The change in the quality of the shadows. My skin was tingling. My peripheral vision was just a puzzle, a palimpsest of sight. Suddenly I was very afraid. Please don’t let me be coming up, not here in this terrible place. But I was. I was coming up. What was it? The glass of water, brought without me asking. So this was what it felt like to be a traitor, to be Kavanagh in the woods. Anna was still talking, asking a stream of questions. God, how much had they given me? Just out of eyeshot, it was getting busier. Teeming shadows, a cacophony of vision. The questions became sharper. It wasn’t just Anna. They were all joining in. Are you sure? Sure of what? Is there anything you need to tell us ? I don’t think so. Think so or know so? We even had a name for it, a name from Criticism-Self-Criticism. They were bombing me. They were going to turn me inside out and pick over my head for the bad bits, like monkeys smashing a coconut to get at the flesh. How much had they given me? And why do it there, in that place? I said again, to them, to myself, that I had nothing to be scared of, nothing to hide. How much had they given me? Nothing to hide. I was a good person with nothing to hide. Who do you work for? Good, Chris. Do you work for Miles? Good, Mike. Who is Miles? Nothing to hide. And as I tried my best to fight my fear and answer their questions, reality slid away until there was no me, just a voice pleading with other voices. How many voices? Tell us how many other voices? They seemed to come from all sides asking what are your real beliefs an impossible question answer a human being for other human beings that’s no kind of answer a man only one way to free yourself michael you have to let it go this pretense say what you want it’s in your head in my head say it down with the pig system this miles who is he down with the pig system twelve thousand a day what is what twelve thousand people die every day twelve thousand every day do you care or do you hate perhaps you’re just a pig who wants a car holiday color tv no, that’s not it, not it at all come on pig sick pig let it all go pig sick pig pig pig.

Eventually they must have given me some kind of sedative, because the next thing I remember is waking in the late afternoon of the following day to find myself curled up in a sleeping bag, my mouth dry and my head thick and pounding. The world still wasn’t back to normal. It had an ugly slant to it, a sickening lean. Anna was kneeling down in front of me. She looked haggard and exhausted. I saw she had a cold sore on her bottom lip.

“Do you want some tea?”

I propped myself up on one elbow. I felt weak and slightly nauseous. The tea, which had a lot of sugar in it, tasted good. I noticed Anna’s hands as she passed it to me. The chewed nails, the line of black scabs on her knuckles.

“Well done, Mike. I was so worried about you.”

I couldn’t really speak, so I just nodded. She left me alone and I lay there, trying to piece together what had happened. Another hour or so passed. I could hear the sound of people moving around downstairs, birds singing outside the boarded-up window. I think I fell asleep again.

Later that night, as I lay awake in the dormitory, listening to people breathe and cough in the darkness, Anna came to crouch beside me. She smelled of the workhouse, of rotting wood and long-ago fear. She brought her face close to mine. “It’s good to have you back,” she whispered, kissing me.

What was this? A reward? Another interrogation? I traced with my fingers the winged ridges of her shoulder blades, her ribcage, and as I touched her I felt a rising tide of horror. “What would you have done?” I asked.

“What, baby?”

“If you’d found out I was a traitor.”

She tugged her T-shirt over her head. “I’d have killed you,” she said, lifting her leg to straddle my hips.

* * *

Slipping on loose gravel, I pick my way up the path to the tower, which glows inscrutably above me like something from a science fiction film. There’s a cold wind up here on the hill, shuddering through the bushes, catching at my arms and legs. I sit down against the tower’s blank stone wall and arrange myself into a comfortable position, straightening my back and resting my hands in my lap. There’s nothing I can do now but wait until morning. Gradually I start to become aware of my breathing. How long since I last meditated? For years, while I was living at the monastery, I practiced every day. I stopped as soon as I got back to Britain. The two things were connected, deciding to stop and going home. I was angry with the monks; that was part of it. I was sick of the pretense that I’d managed to renounce the world. Wat Tham Nok was a bustling place, a worldly place, for all the incense and chanting and saffron robes. I think the last straw was the ceremony the abbot performed to bless a certain Mr. Boonmee’s fleet of taxis. Boonmee was a gangster, as far as I could see, an oleaginous man who owned a brothel and a service station and various other businesses in the nearby town. I remember the gifts piling up, the vapid grin on Boonmee’s face as he accepted congratulations on his public act of piety.