Hari Kunzru - Transmission

‘No. Well, yes. We went to the movies. Mostly I gave him driving lessons.’

‘In your white Honda Civic.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Did you ever allow him to drive the vehicle when you weren’t present?’

‘No.’

‘Did he often visit at the house you share with your — your boyfriend, Nicolai Peet — Pit —’

‘Petkanov.’

‘Nicolai Petkanov.’

‘Once or twice.’

‘Did you on any of these occasions have sexual intercourse with Arjun Mehta?’

‘What? What kind of question is that? Look, Dragnet, that is none of your damn business.’

‘I’ll thank you not to use profanity, Miss Schnorr.’

‘Profanity? Christ, where did you grow up? Sesame Street?’

‘Or to take the Lord’s name in vain. And as an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation it is entirely my business. Did you or did you not have sexual intercourse with Arjun Mehta?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure about that?’

‘I said so, didn’t I?’

‘Did you or Mr Petkanov conspire with Mr Mehta to intentionally damage information systems by writing and spreading a computer virus?’

‘What?’

The worst of it was how it looked. As she realized what they were inching towards, Chris started to feel faint. At the beginning of the interview she had experienced equal parts confidence and irritation, angry at the way her boss had sprung this ‘informal chat’ on her but satisfied that whatever the Bureau wanted, she had done nothing wrong. Now she was not so sure. It seemed Arjun had failed to appear for work since the day her car went missing. Someone from the Virugenix personnel department had gone over to his apartment to talk to him about vacating it, and discovered the door unlocked and most of his computer equipment smashed up. The police were called and initially recorded him as a missing person. After they searched the place they changed their minds. Now they were treating him as a fugitive.

The problem was Nic. Nowadays he was just another engineer, setting up and maintaining data-storage systems, but once upon a time, back in the prehistoric days of computing before the worldwide web and dotcoms and all the rest of it, he had been a very bad Eastern bloc boy indeed. As a high-school student in Bulgaria he had learned to use a machine called a Pravetz 82, mass produced by the state computer company from shamelessly reverse-engineered Apple IIe components. He and his friends from the National Mathematics High School in Sofia had fooled around, doing a lot of stuff they weren’t supposed to, and when his parents brought him to the US he had carried on, eventually earning himself a minor place in American criminal history as one of the first kids to be prosecuted for breaking into computer systems. That was all a long time ago, but you could see the way these people’s minds were working. Whatever Arjun had been cooking up in his apartment, they thought she and Nic had had a hand in it.

‘Miss Schnorr, your car wasn’t stolen at all, was it? You gave it to Mehta so he could escape justice.’

‘That’s not true. If it was Arjun who took the car, he did it without my knowledge. And besides, Nic has never even met him.’

‘We’ll find that out from Mr Petkanov. Now, to return to these so-called driving lessons…’

His head ached and he felt very tired. Sometimes he thought he would vomit. He was not sure how long he had been walking. He just knew it was important to go on.

Headlights came screaming up the highway, making him squint and throw up a hand to shield his eyes. Once a car slowed down, but the driver took a look at him and changed his mind about stopping. He had a brief vision of the man’s face, the mouth a black O of shock. The car spat gravel, sped away.

The sticky stuff was blood.

His mouth was dry The bag was heavy. He could not remember what was in it, could not to be honest remember why he was dragging it down the gritty margin of this road. They were coming for him. They were coming for him and he had to get home. Where home was he could not have said precisely. Up ahead somewhere. At the end of the road.

For a while he lay in a drainage ditch and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the sky was light and the invisible night-time world had retreated behind parched yellow grass and a line of scrubby conifers. He tried to sit up and felt as if his head would crack. He was sitting in a litter of food wrappers and beer cans. His face was caked with dried blood.

He carried on.

Things came back. The car, the slow-motion lurch off the curve. Canada had been the point of it. Leave the country before they found out. The taxi had dropped him on the corner, and he had stood and listened to the sounds of the suburban night, trying to think of reasons not to follow through with his plan. What alternative did he have? There was nothing left for him in America. Every day he stayed would bring the pursuers closer, and if they found him they would never let him go.

He had thought about leaving her a note. Sorry. So sorry. Another in his list of apologies. Then he decided it would be better to write to her from Canada. He imagined himself sitting at a table outside a log cabin, describing the parking lot where he had left the little Honda, nicely washed and valeted, maybe with a present in the glove compartment. Flowers would perish, Perhaps chocolates. With a card. On the map it had looked like a short drive. A lot further than he had ever driven before and the first time he had driven at night. But possible.

dear chris there was no other way to do it the only way was by car and the only car i can drive is yours i hope you are not having too much inconvenience from this — arjunm

He had not counted on needing gas. But there it was, the needle in the red, the warning light flickering. She always forgot to fill it up. So three times lost, twenty-five miles north of the city, two narrowly avoided rear ends and one almost ex-passing motorcyclist later, he was peering nervously into the blackness, looking for a gas station. He spotted the sign too late, nearly missed the exit, tried to make the turn anyway, pulled the wheel too hard…

And now he was on foot. He counted his paces in hundreds, tried to concentrate on the discrete, the knowable, instead of spiralling out into the dark. Off among the trees there was water. He left the road and picked his way towards it: a pond, half evaporated, muddy and brackish, clogged with blue plastic and rusting iron siding. He took off his shirt, dipped it in the dirty water and used it to clean his face and hands. Then he bunched it up and threw it out into the middle, where it spread out its arms as if imploring him not to abandon it in such a place.

Three thousand two hundred.

Three thousand three hundred

Three thousand four hundred…

There was an exit. Near the off-ramp was a gas station, located in the middle of a little retail strip between a fast-food franchise and a place selling wooden patio furniture. As casually as he could he walked across the parking lot into the store, where he bought a bag of chips, a bottle of Sprite and some Band-Aids, and asked the clerk for the key to the bathroom. No gas? He shook his head. She looked uneasily at him, then out of the window for his car. Finally she gave him the key, sliding the enormous wooden fob over the counter very slowly, as if he might steal it or use it to assault her.

He changed clothes, brushed his teeth and cleaned himself up properly, removing streaks of mud from his face and pulling a comb through his hair, careful to avoid the big gash on his crown. There was nothing he could do about the bruise on his cheek, or the cuts above his left eye. Feeling dizzy he sat down on the toilet, leaning his head against the dirty plaster wall. He must have fallen asleep because the next thing he knew the clerk was banging on the door. Hurriedly he zipped up his bag and made his escape. As he walked purposefully out on to the highway, he was all too aware of the scowling woman watching him through the window, clutching the key in her hand.