Irregular Verbs (36 page)

“Can I come in?”

He fixed her a long stare, shrugged, turned to go inside. “I had hair,” he said. “You know that stuff the yuppies use to fill in their bald spots? I invented it.”

She closed the door behind her, tapped the toes of her boots against the floor to knock the snow off. “So what happened?”

“Well, I used the good stuff—what the doctors can prescribe is just a taste, to hook people on the real thing. That’s where the money is. Anyway, I had the healthiest head of red hair you’ve ever seen.”

“And then?”

He tapped the crocheted cap. “Cancer. Chemo.”

“I’m sorry.” She summoned an expression of concern. “How’s it going?”

“Ehh.” He went on into the kitchen, poured himself a cup of coffee. “I’m alive. You want?”

She shook her head. “No, thanks. Is that why they let you out of jail, the cancer?”

“Nah, I’m a parolee. It was always attempted whatever, thanks to him, and I never really did anything that bad—never even tried to kill anyone but him, and they couldn’t even charge me with attempted murder without admitting the existence of you-know-what on public record.” The bald man took a sip of his coffee, frowned, put down the cup. “So, you’ve tracked me down, and it wasn’t just to catch up on old times. What do you want?”

“You know what.”

He tilted his head curiously. “I don’t, really.”

She took a breath. “What you called it. You-know-what.”

“Ah,” he said, understanding dawning on his face. “Trouble in paradise?”

Her face flushed with anger. “None of your business,” she said.

His eyebrows rose in amusement. “Too bad. You know I’m always at your service . . . all you have to do is ask.”

“He’s—he’s very sick,” she said, swallowing bile. “And his body, it—He’s too strong. It won’t let him die.”

He gave a barking laugh, broke into a cough. “Why . . . even if I had some—which I don’t—why should I give it to you?” He picked up his coffee, took a long sip and swallowed. “I spent half my life trying to make him miserable. Why should I put him out of his misery now?”

“I can pay you,” she said, her knuckles whitening as she gripped her purse strap. She took a step closer to him, reached in for her wallet.

“Pay me? Anyway, I told you, I don’t have any.”

She smiled inwardly. An old interviewing trick, move the conversation along the path of least resistance: not whether he would but whether he could. “I don’t believe it. You’d never go without at least one piece, just in case.”

He shrugged, smiling broadly. “Sorry. It’s a condition of my parole—no owning any radioactive materials of any kind.”

“Uh huh.” She took a step closer, nodded sadly, and reached for the lump in his right pocket. His hand shot out, quicker than she had expected, grabbed her wrist; she grabbed his other arm and they froze, each unwilling to back down but neither able to risk a struggle and the fall that might follow. She locked eyes with him, felt a blast of pure hate. She fought to hold his gaze, forcing herself to remember everything he had ever done to her, to him.

After a long moment his eyes dimmed; deflated, he looked away, released her arm and reached into his right pocket. There it was, in a nest of tissues and rubber bands: a rough crystal, about an inch around.

“If you want this,” he said, “You have to do something for me.”

She nodded; there would be a price, of course. There had to be. “What do you want?”

His shoulders slumped, his body curling protectively around the glowing stone. “It should have been me,” he said. “Not just . . . time. When it—happens—” She felt a moment’s absurd pity for him: he had, she realized, been as bound to her husband as she was. “Tell them it was me.”

He snuffled loudly, turned away, wiped his nose with his sleeve.

“Tell them I won . . .”

When she returned to the hospital she was told her husband had moved to a different room, in the isolation wing; the woman at the desk couldn’t tell her why. An orderly stopped her as she got off the elevator, directed her to a room where white quarantine suits hung in a row from hooks on the wall. A sign opposite said
SUIT UP BEFORE ENTERING!
She looked around, went back out into the hall and to the nurse’s station.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

The nurse, an Asian woman she hadn’t seen before, shrugged. “Which patient are you here to see?” She told her, and the nurse flipped through a pile of charts. “Your husband’s in quarantine. You can visit, but you need to put on one of those suits and follow procedure.”

“I know that,” she said, her voice raspy from the cold dry air she’d been breathing. “Why is he in quarantine?”

“You’ll have to ask Dr. Weller.”

“Where is he?”

“I’ll page him for you.”

She pretended to read a magazine for twenty minutes before the doctor arrived. “What’s the matter?” he asked the nurse.

“Your patient’s wife is here,” the nurse said, pointing her out.

“Ah. How are you?” Dr. Weller asked, stepping over to her.

“What’s going on? Why is he isolated?”

“It’s his immune system. We had some outbreaks on the floor he was on—we think bacteria in his system may have been mutating for a long time. Adapting to match him—they evolve so much more quickly than we do. So long as he was healthy his immune system would have kept them from getting out into the population, but . . .”

“I thought you were going to call me if anything changed.”

“Ah. Well.” He looked away. “Nothing has changed. My prognosis is still the same.”

“So he’s still . . .”

“Yes.”

She nodded to herself. “Can I see him?”

“Sure. Just put a suit on—there’s instructions—”

“I saw them.”

“Okay. You might need a little help getting into the suit.”

She had thought, when she saw them on the wall, that they looked like spacesuits, but they were actually very thin. She stepped into the legs, glad to be wearing pants rather than a skirt, and Dr. Weller helped her with the arms and hood. He led her to the room; the first door led into a little antechamber, with a garbage can and a sign over it saying
DISPOSE OF SUITS HERE BEFORE LEAVING.
The first door closed behind her and she shouldered the next open, went into the room.

The room was dark and nearly empty, with even the few comforts of a regular hospital room gone: no bedside table, no chairs. Just the bed where he lay, breathing shallowly, and the heart monitor. Round adhesive ghosts on his forehead showed he’d had an EEG put on and then removed. She could see why: he was twitching in his sleep, tiny seizures passing over him every few seconds. Loose restraints over his chest and legs kept him from floating more than a few inches from the bed.

“It’s okay,” she said, stroking his forehead with gloved fingers. “I’m here.”

Another twitch went through him, then he seemed to calm. His eyelids fluttered.

She felt her resolve weakening. “I’m sorry I had to leave you. I won’t go again.”

His lips, dry and cracked, opened slightly; she held her breath. “Luh . . .” He spoke just over a whisper, so quiet she wondered if she had really heard him. His head pitched to the side, as though fighting a nightmare. “Let me go.”

“I can’t,” she said, her voice breaking. “I still need you here.”

Another tremor went through him, and his hands clawed convulsively.

“I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry . . . “ she said. He said nothing.

This wasn’t fair. Why should she be the one to have to do this?

Because she could. Because she would.

Opening her left hand she took out the tissue she had palmed while putting on the suit, unwrapped it. She looked quickly over her shoulder, through the windows of the two doors: no-one was paying attention, as usual. The rock in her hand felt heavier now that she could see it. She waited for one of his spasmed hands to open, fitted the rock into his palm. Its glow peered through his fingers, cast shadows across the room that quivered as the seizures took him.

She sat with him for a long time, until he was still.

Saufatu stood neck-deep in the water, watching the dawn arrive over the great empty ocean to the east. He raised the coconut shard in his right hand to his mouth and nibbled on the flesh, enjoying the mixture of sweet and salty flavours, then quickly glanced over his shoulder at the shore. He knew before looking that there would be no-one there: even Funafuti, the biggest of the Eight Islands, was nearly always empty except on Independence Day. Here on Niulakiti, the first of the islands to sink, he had never seen another soul.

He turned back to the sea, took another bite of his coconut and frowned. Something was out there. He squinted, trying to make out the dark smudge perhaps a half kilometre out towards the horizon. It looked like someone swimming, or rather thrashing at the surface; suddenly he remembered what he had put out there, realized what was happening, and pushed himself out into the waves.

It had been a long time since he had been swimming, but a childhood spent in the sea had inscribed his muscles with the necessary motions. He inhaled and exhaled salt spray with each stroke, getting nearer and nearer to the man—for he could now see that it was a man, dark-haired and tanned but unmistakably White—a tourist, who was struggling for his life. The snout and fin of the grey reef shark, rising and falling from the water as it fought to draw the man down, completed the picture.

“Bop it on the snout!” Saufatu called as he got closer, hoping the man spoke English.

The man, who to this point had not yet noticed him, looked his way and tilted his head.

“Bop it on the snout!” Saufatu shouted again. He slowed to tread water for a moment, raised his left hand out of the water and smacked it against his nose twice.

The man turned back to the shark, which was working to fasten its jaws on his leg, and tapped it gingerly. A moment later he smacked it harder, and the shark turned its head away; another hit and it thrashed its head from side to side, snapped its jaws on empty air and dove under the surface.

Saufatu reached the man a few minutes later, closing his mouth to avoid inhaling the bloody water. The man looked pale, but surprisingly composed given what he had just been through. He put his right arm around Saufatu’s shoulder and kicked his legs weakly.

“Not that way,” Saufatu said, shaking his head. “Past here it’s all algorithmic. Just let me pull you.”

The man nodded and then coughed, spitting out seawater. “Thanks,” he said.

Saufatu said nothing, concentrating on his strokes as he drew the man back to shore. He helped the man out onto the beach, watching him carefully to make sure he did not have any more water in his lungs, and then leaned him against a tree. Saufatu picked up his clothes from where he had left them, and the jug of toddy he had left there as well. He went back to the man, handed him the jug, and set to work tearing up his shirt into bandages for the wounds on the man’s leg. Luckily they were not deep, and had already been cleaned by the seawater; he was unlikely to carry them with him when he left.

The man took a swig of toddy, and then another. “Thanks again,” the man said. “I’m Craig, by the way. Craig Kettner.”

“Saufatu Pelesala,” Saufatu said. He glanced out at the sea. “We don’t get many visitors here.”

“I can see that,” Craig said, “what with the welcoming committee and all. You really should put a sign up or something, warn people before they go swimming.”

“It’s only instanced in that spot,” Saufatu said. “People know not to go there unless they want to experience it.”

Craig frowned. “Why would they want to?”

“It’s a memory. That’s where it happened.” He gestured out towards the sea. “Or so I’m told. Apisai Lotoala, he was one of the last people to grow up here—he was attacked by a shark right out there, so that’s where I put the memory.”

“And that’s how he got out of it? By hitting the shark on the nose?”

Saufatu shrugged. “That’s what he always said. All I know is, I’ve seen the scars.”

Craig nodded slowly. “So—what is this place, anyway?”

“You came here. Didn’t you know where you were going?”

He shook his head. “I just picked it by random, pretty much. I look for . . . low-traffic sites. Mostly places that are basically empty, or abandoned. I didn’t expect anybody else to be here, to be honest with you.”

“Neither did I.”

“So—what is this place? Why are you encoding instanced shark attacks?”

“This is my home,” Saufatu said. “The Eight Islands were very very low, too low when the waters rose. So my family was given the
salanga
of taking a record of them, as best we could.”

Craig looked along the beach from left to right, his head nodding slightly. “And it’s all like this, full immersive dreaming?”

Saufatu shook his head. “We were able to record some of the other islands immersively, but this one is mostly 2-D. I was able to convert some of it, like this beach, but the algorithms are expensive.”

“What did you use?” Craig asked, crouching down and running his hand over the white, fine-grained sand appraisingly.

“Extrapolator 7,” Saufatu said. “Price was an issue,” he added, shrugging slightly.

“What about the shark attack? How did you record that?”

“I build the instanced events myself based on stories people tell me, or records in the old newspapers.”

“Why?” Craig broke into a grin, held up a hand. “Sorry, I don’t mean to be rude.”

“We do it to remember,” Saufatu said. “So there would be a record of our home.”

Craig looked up and down the beach. “So where is everybody?”

“They have their own lives,” Saufatu said. “They know it is here, and they tell me their stories to help build it.”

“And who pays for it? This must all take up a lot of headspace.”

Saufatu sighed. “There is some money. A fund—we had a lucky name, when they handed out the Web addresses, that other people wanted to buy. Of course most of it went to resettle our people, but there is enough left to do a little, for a little while.”

Craig nodded. “Listen, I run this—it’s like a guide, to interesting places in the Web, places my scouts and I find that not too many people know about. I think people would be really interested in a place like this.”

“I don’t know,” Saufatu said. “We never had many tourists, even when we were above water.”

“But that’s just it. This place is real, you know, not just another dream with the same old tricks. If people were coming here you could maybe get funding from UNESCO, or the WikiHistory Foundation. Not just to keep the place going but make it better—emotion-encode the events, get custom algorithms.” He took a breath, shook his head. “Listen, just think about it. If you decide you’re interested, let me know.”

Craig held out his right hand, and after a moment Saufatu took it: Craig’s PID crossed the handshake, to be logged in Saufatu’s terminal. Then Craig gave a small wave, and turned to walk back to the entry portal at the edge of the beach; Saufatu waited until he had gone, and then woke up.

Losi was already gone when Saufatu emerged from his room, so he boiled a kipper, cut it out of the plastic and put it on his plate next to a half-can of
pulaka
. They had been close when she had been younger—mother-uncles and sister-nieces typically were, compared to the more formal relationships between parents and children and the taboo on cousins mixing—but since she had entered her teens she spent nearly all her time in her room or out of the house.

When he went outside he saw that she had left the truck. That was good for him, since it meant he didn’t have to face the long bus ride from Waitakere down to his shift at the Auckland airport, but he couldn’t help wondering who she had caught a ride with. He sent her a text, offering to pick her up when his shift was done, then got into the truck.

Traffic was worse than usual that morning, spreading out from downtown as far as the Mangere Bridge. It was still faster than the bus, though, and he had time for a coffee-and-toddy with a gang of the other Islanders before his shift started. There were maybe a dozen of them who worked at the airport, though the precise numbers shifted fairly often. Mostly they talked about nothing—work and fishing and the
kilikiti
matches—and sometimes, when Saufatu closed his eyes, he almost felt the water around him, like they were all standing hip-deep in the Funafala lagoon.

They all finished their coffee before it began to get cold and queued up at the security check. Saufatu’s heart sank when he saw a new officer at the security kiosk, and he moved ahead of the others. When he got to the kiosk he took out his DP card and held it out.

The security guard, a ruddy-faced man in his twenties with buzz-cut hair, squinted at the card. Finally he shook his head. “Refugee card’s not ID,” he said.

“I’m not a refugee, it’s a displaced persons card,” Saufatu said. He jerked his head to indicate the row of islanders behind him. “We all have them.”

The guard frowned. “I have to call this in,” he said. He picked up his phone and dialled it carefully, keeping a close watch on Saufatu as he whispered urgently to whoever was at the other end of the line.

Saufatu sighed. It was like this every time someone new came on at the security desk. There were more Islanders living in Auckland than anywhere else in the world, but they were still just a drop in a tremendous bucket. The city was home to thousands of migrants from all across the Pacific, all there for different reasons: guest workers on visas, refugees from the political violence on Tonga and Fiji, second- and third-generation residents and citizens, native Maori, and people like him, whom the UN had provisionally declared Displaced Persons.

Finally the guard put down his telephone and waved Saufatu through. The other islanders followed slowly, as the guard took each one’s DP card and scrutinized it carefully before letting him pass. When they were all through Saufatu headed towards the baggage terminal, noticing when he saw the Arrivals board that he was fully ten minutes late for his shift—half an hour’s pay gone thanks to the new man at the security desk. He kept his pace up all morning, so that by noon he was ahead of schedule and could take a few minutes to watch the planes take off.

That was how he had gotten into the business: as a boy he had watched the flights that landed and took off from Funafuti’s airstrip every day, watching the planes get smaller and smaller until they looked like frigate birds. Even when he was grown and working at the tiny airport he would sometimes think about flying away on one, visiting all of the places he had seen in the travel magazines visitors left behind. When the time finally came for everyone to leave, though, the airstrip was under water and they all went on old freighters that stank like septic pits and crawled like snails across the ocean. Then, when his sister and brother-in-law had left Auckland to join the Extraterritorial Government in New York, he had stayed to carry out the family’s
salanga
, gathering stories and memories from the expats to build the virtual islands. Only Losi, just ten at the time, had stayed with him: “The surfing sucks in New York,” she had said.

She was surfing when he came to pick her up, off a beach in Maori Bay that was studded with black volcanic rock. The road ended at the beach, no parking lot, so he just set the parking brake and leaned out the door, watching as she rode her board into the oncoming breakers, a little bit differently each time—hitting the waves a bit higher or lower, cutting left or right once she was riding a swell. It didn’t look much like fun to him, but perhaps the fun part had been earlier in the day. The sun was low on the horizon behind her, and as it turned to red Saufatu began to get a headache; finally he honked the truck’s horn, twice, and a few minutes after that he could see her paddling her board back to shore.

Once Losi was out of the water she unzipped her wetsuit, peeled it off and rolled it into a messy ball. She stood on the beach in her black one-piece as a man with knee-length shorts and a ball-cap came to meet her; she reached up to the back of her neck, detached the recording module from her ’jack and handed it to him. The man touched his pico to the module, downloading everything she had experienced that day so it could be cut up in bits, stripped to pure sensation and plugged into surfing dreams.

A blond-haired boy wearing a wetsuit that was unzipped to the waist came up and gave Losi a hug; she leaned close to say something to him, said goodbyes to all the other Kiwis crowded around them and then finally gave a wave to Saufatu and started towards the truck.

“Good day?” he asked as she climbed into the truck, shoving her crumpled wetsuit under her seat.

She shrugged. “Caught some good waves this morning.”

Saufatu started the truck, shifted gears and worked at getting it turned around. He noticed a long scrape down her left shoulder. “Looks more like they caught you.”

“I spent a little time up at the north end of the beach, getting knocked into the rocks.”

“On purpose?”

“Someone’s gotta do it.”

“I didn’t see that white boy doing it,” he said, looking straight ahead.

She laughed. “Are you kidding? He got bashed twice as hard.”

“If you say so.” Saufatu was quiet for a few moments, watching for the turn back to the highway from Muriwai Road. “That reminds me, I met a fella last night who made me think of you—he was out swimming and ran into Apisai Lotoala’s shark attack.”

“What, a tourist?”

“Not exactly, I don’t think. He said he goes looking for low-traffic places—his name was Craig Kemper, I think. Heard of him?”

She shook her head, then stopped. “Wait. Craig Kettner?”

“Yes. Yes, that’s it.”

“How can you not know who that is?” Losi asked. “What was he doing in the Islands, anyway?”

Saufatu shrugged. “He said people would like to visit them. Do a lot of people follow him?”

“Enough to crash your server,” she said. “God, I can’t believe you sometimes.”

“Well, he asked to see the rest of the Islands—you can come if you want, show him yourself.”