Borderless Deceit (51 page)

“I see you've thought about him,” Rachel laughed. She paused, her expression becoming spicier. “Tell me, Carson, have you thought about him and me?”

“Rachel,” I chided. “It's not my right.”

“Why not? You did it before.”

“I've apologised for that. I won't do it again.”

“Actually, I'm not asking for voyeurism. I'm asking for extrapolation. How do you think things will develop between him and me?”

I shifted position, coming upright, and sitting cross-legged, looking down at Rachel who was again stretched full-out. How would her life develop? I didn't have a fortune teller's aids, but all the same I plunged in. “You and Ian? Well, I see conventionality. I see you being happy with that because you've had all the experiences anyone could possibly want and you have that in the bank. Good memories carry a very decent rate of interest and you can live off them. Iain will adopt your baby so it will have a legal father and soon enough you'll have a second child. You'll be here in Turrialba for a few years and when the
question of the children's education looms you'll move. To the Scottish Highlands is my prediction. Iain will convince you it will be good there for the children. He'll buy a farm on the shore of a loch. There will be dogs, cats, ponies, all that. He'll run the household; you'll become active on local committees. Your children will grow up a little bit wild. And all of you will love the absence of boundaries in life.”

“Scotland?” Rachel said, “The Highlands?” The thought seemed to please her. “Why not?” She mulled it over for a while. “My great-grandmother came from there. Did you know that?”

I replied that Anne-Marie mentioned it once.

“Her name was Grace. She left for the prairies because she wanted to raise her children on land she owned. If I returned it would mean the completion of a circle.” Rachel's voice became purpose-filled. Having her children go through their formative years in the place her ancestors once lived appealed to her. “My mother always claimed that Grace had taken her roots out of the Scottish earth and replanted them on the prairies. We were now a prairie family full stop. But I always thought it wasn't that simple. Just because my great-grandmother left Scotland, shouldn't mean Scotland left the family. I think Grace would understand that.” Rachel fell silent. Then she added brightly, “Thank you for all that, Carson. It makes perfect sense. I think it will be like that.” She closed her eyes and once more stroked her belly. “I've never told you my family story.” Her voice was intimate. “It's so pleasant here. Would you like to hear it?”

And so it was at Guyabo, that once lively city, that Rachel manoeuvred me into determining
her
new direction. That done – she first fixing my future, then orchestrating me to do hers – the last vestiges of tension between us disappeared.

Diego was always patient, but this time we had pushed him to the limits. When, in the late afternoon the sun had moved around and our shade had crept away and Rachel and I returned to the car, he muttered accusingly, “You talk whole time?” I shrugged, as if to ask, what do you think we did? “You talk talk,” he repeated grimly. “You talk talk through siesta. Why you no take siesta?”

Rachel intervened sweetly, explaining that stopping for a siesta was
a practice we should learn from him.

“Okay.” He wagged the finger of a parent. “I say, siesta, then you take siesta.” His dark mood dissolved. Grinning, he added, “
Como mamá y los niños
.” Like a mother and her children.

Some days later, Diego was driving me to Turrialba and I announced I would be going to an Internet café. He repeated the phrase, “Eenternet café?” His hand came off the steering wheel and the finger again did its wagging. As if disciplining a child, he said, “Señor, Eenternet café ees for buoys. You no buoy. Why you go?”

I explained that people use it to communicate with others far away and to check up on what's happening in the world.

“
No se
. I no know that. Ees good? You take me?”

Diego was soon installed before a monitor and navigating his enthusiastic way through news he'd read earlier in the newspaper. I began my own session. After months away from this I had an urge to look at my affairs, but I refrained. I ought to remain off the big screen for a little longer still. I clicked my way through some random sites, then innocuously typed in the web address Jaime gave me when she left. A Spanish text appeared saying the site could not be found. I clicked the message closed, waited and pressed
Enter
to reinitiate a search. Again it ended in failure. I repeated this operation twice more. With Jaime's instructions fulfilled, I reviewed a few other general information sites and ended the session. Diego continued to be deeply engaged. “
Momento
,” he said, waving me away. He was reading a text accompanying photographs of the destruction of a city in the Middle East. “
Fascinante
,” he said when finished. When we departed he sent an authoritative “
Adios!
” in the direction of the attendant by the front door. “
Hasta pronto
.” Until next time.

The next day we were back and Diego scurried directly to the same monitor. “
Tómase el tiempo que quiera
. Take your time,” he advised me. The end to the previous day's session had come too quick.

How long would it take today? If my probe to Jaime's site hadn't worked I'd want to get back to Rachel at the casa quickly. First, I created a veil of normalcy. Again I clicked randomly through standard web sites – hotels, resorts, adventure holidays, those kinds of things. I looked into the cost of descending into oceanic depths and of climbing the peaks of the world's high mountains. After ten minutes of this I
casually typed in the place designated by Jaime as our web hangout. As she had explained, the first day I knocked on the door I would be told it didn't exist. But what was to happen the second day? This time the monitor's response startled me. It went black with a thud. A shark could have been waiting behind the screen to end my session in one great gulp. Or, an avalanche had swept me clean off a mountain. All around other screens were functioning. No power failure. Was this Jaime playing? Was this her re-enactment of the plague? Was it a parody of the day when Service monitors on a global scale went dead? Or was she prodding me? Did she want me to recall that the plague had launched transformations which had caused me to find myself. Was the screen going lifeless Jaime's way of saying:
It's my turn now. Find me…if you can
.

I began to laugh. Diego looked up. When he saw it was directed at a monitor gone dead, he ran to the attendant who came quickly. He checked the fuse. No problem. He offered me a place in another aisle. “No, no,” I responded, still smirking. “It only looks as if it isn't functioning.”

“
Señor!
” Diego pleaded. He was embarrassed.

The attendant began working at the back of the monitor to disconnect it, but I stopped him. “Five minutes,” I said. “Leave it alone that long. I'm sure there's some trick.”

He and Diego moved off. I heard some muttering in Spanish.
Gringos. Locos
. No matter where you go in the world it's always the foreigners who are crazy.

I closed my eyes. What was Jaime's play? What scene was in her mind when she decided to hide behind a lifeless screen? What key would dispel darkness? Should I think of the monastery roof in Transylvania where Benedictus pushed the button and sent the plague on its way? Or of Corioanu's bogus death certificate which she'd located in the Zurich archives with my digital fingerprint all over it? Or was this too literal? Could she be saying something philosophic? Could the vacant screen be representing the state of things before the current universe began? If so, was there a tiny spot of tension, a point, a pixel with full potentiality which in an instant could go bang? I studied the screen's inert covering pane. It had dust all over it. Absent-mindedly I wiped it to the sides. In a lower corner one mark, very slight, wasn't budging. I
rubbed at it. Then I saw the blemish wasn't on the glass cover, it was on the screen behind. Bending forward, I saw it was actually a minuscule picture of two columns supporting a triangular cornice. A portal! No bigger than a speck of dust. Camouflage. Grinning, I placed the pointer and clicked.

Instantly the screen became the opposite of what it was, volley after volley of colour, waves of it overtaking previous waves, energy rising from a centre and roiling outwards, like a big bang ceaselessly expanding. In the background, there was a periodic short faint flash not easily perceived. Eventually I saw it portrayed the same structure as had been on the black screen in microscopic size. Two columns propping up a cornice on which two words were engraved:
Zadokite Port
.

Diego came over. “You fix. Ees nice.”

“Some dust, Diego.”

“Dust?
Ah, si. Polvo
. Polvo ees bad.
Siempre
. Always.”

“Sometimes it does marvellous things. I need more time now, Diego.”

“
Si, si. Tómase el tiempo que quiera
. I say that before. You no hear?”

He returned to his on-line magazine.

I now placed the pointer on the cornice. It caused
Zadokite Port
to stand out clear and when I clicked, the screen went grey. But this was not a return to the black void of before. This was a prelude to a show. For letters, numbers, symbols came tumbling in – as in an acrobatic circus act – from the back, from the side, from the top and bottom, all of them scrambling about, a wild free-for-all, a melee. Finally it thinned until only seven letters remained. They formed a statement –
NO TABUS
. It dissolved too, replaced by two pulsating phrases: jam4me and car4you. Such an entertaining little show, impish, typically Jaime. I assumed the two remaining phrases were our addresses to use for e-mail. I clicked hers, which produced an empty box. I tried to fill it with a message, but it refused to accept my keystrokes. I clicked the second address, mine, and it produced a similar box, except there were numbers in it. Then I recalled Jaime's instructions.
Crime and Punishment
. Our key. The print-out she gave me, long forgotten, was probably still stuck in a side pocket of my pack.

I went to the front and asked the attendant for a pencil and a sheet of paper.
Papel
? Paper? In his café? His blank stare said that the foolishness of gringos truly had no limits. After rummaging in some cupboards
he located a brownish pad. Back at the monitor, I began transcribing the contents of the box.

Diego came to watch, puzzled. “What you do?”

“Lottery numbers, Diego. A jackpot. This could be one.”

“
Loteria?
” He shook his head. “You loco. No
loteria
.” Diego knew the lotteries. He studied the stream of little digits on my screen. When he spoke again it was with concern. “No
loteria
.” He pointed at the monitor. “
Polvo
. You count
polvo
.” He shook his head. “Today, you loco. Why? Eenternet café ees bad for you.” He took my shoulder. “You come.” Carefully he steered me to the door. “I take you to casa. You take siesta. Then you okay.”

At the casa I excused myself from the afternoon tea with Rachel as quickly as I could. In my room I pulled out the sheets of
Crime and Punishment
and turned to chapter three. I began matching the numbers in the car4me box with letters. It didn't take long.

Yo, road dawg. Whoa. Did I trace right? Turrialba Costa Rica? Lost your marbles? How come you're not in Tenerife, or Acapulco, or some place fab and famous? Has ho-hum made you dum-dum? Me? San Fran. Job. Mullah too. By the way, my brother's not here. Never saw him. Oh well. Drop by. Super spot to razz the world. Jam. P.S. Pretty sure Irv's off your case
.

I read the message twice, three times, loving every word, loving the energy. San Francisco? I pictured Jaime settled there in a vagabond kind of way on some not-yet-fashionable backstreet in a warehouse district with a cheap diner for truckers down the street and a fortified convenience store a block or two away.
Drop by to razz the world
. What would that entail? I turned to Dostoevsky's second chapter and lifted out the numbers I needed:

Well, Jam. Have I lost my marbles? Some say so. The local word is loco. Not there yet though. Need your help. Why not get it done once and for all in San Fran? Am free. Can travel. As ever, Car. P.S. Sorry your older brother didn't work out. Me, I found a sister. Balances things out, right? P.P.S. What did you do to Irv? Gave him a printer and he died in an avalanche of paper?

During the next weeks Diego got used to me sitting at the monitor with the steadily more dog-eared printouts of Dostoevsky's chapters, a pencil, and a notepad. He stuck to his surfing of the news and became steadily better at explaining what was wrong with the world.

jam4me. car4you. The messaging back and forth was steady.

At the casa when I was away Rachel was learning how to knit. Unimaginably calming, she said, adding she should have started doing it years ago. Click, click, click went the needles, faster every day. With a brow slightly furrowed by deep concentration, she'd casually ask what Jaime had written. She was in touch with the outside world too. Once a week she sent a postcard to Anne-Marie. I once added a sentence. It started at the bottom and then curled up the side.
Hi, Anne-Marie. Everything is well. It's lovely here, but not at all like in Berlin
.

One day a note arrived from Iain. Rachel read it to me. He would be arriving on Thursday in two weeks. Not pausing, as if it was part of the message, she added, “You don't have to leave. Not right away. I'd like you to meet him.”

I shook my head, explaining I'd been on this holiday too long. It was time to do some work again.