peat ([info]peat) rakstīja,
@ 2018-05-16 16:33:00

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10
"Clever cunt, that Kapsars, though full of shit most of the time.” I say, but Nuchi doesn’t reply – just lets my erudite analysis hang there for the 20-minute drive over the silt-laden Teka till I adorn it with the observation “though I suppose it depends how you look at it.”

Once through their customs, Norland lets you have it straight away: the roads are wide and smooth; every pedestrian walkway is densely planted with elegantly curved street lamps; the cycle lanes are set low in a brick-red colour, and the cyclists all wear helmets; the verges are trimmed low; and, when we stop at a zebra crossing to let a young family cross, the mother turns and smiles at us in a practiced happy sort of way – at least that’s the way it seems to me, but, as I say, it depends how you look at it.

We look at her, and we both smile back.

“Who was that guy who cloned the first human?” I ask Nuchi.

“Why?”

“Wasn’t he the one who had that theory about all of creation being a product of our senses?”

“Well?”

“Just can’t remember, that’s all. Since they fenced the network off…”

“Yes, we aren’t as clever as we once were, are we?”

Vannuchi heads towards the port, and pretty soon we’re driving past the massive neat uniform blocks of brightly coloured warehouses.

I never really read about it when I had the chance, but my feeling was that there was something wrong with that theory. I mean was it just my senses that perceive the electricity bill and the impersonalised passive-voice warnings from the fund over the bondgrip? Is it just a peculiar misfunction of the brain? Some rerouted wiring in the cortex that places these impressions in front of my eyes and under my nose? Can’t be… still, what the fuck would I know? He’s the clever bastard who started issuing the copies of us, while I’m over here just ferreting about for a living.

What is it we want? Peace it’s supposed to be, isn’t it? Peace and harmony. So if that’s what we want, and if reality is just a product of our consciousness, why does my consciousness throw up this reality? Nah, it doesn’t make any sense. The universe, this planet, this van can’t be a product of my consciousness. I mean, there have to be dead rotting birches in the swamps sidling over in exhausted fashion. And when they drop they have for their death rattle the shaking and scraping of their neighbouring flora. And soon the fungi will draw on the death – the dead culture. And I don’t have to see it, or even imagine it for it to exist. It has to – for God’s sake, it has to be independent of me.

”He’s just a figment of your imagination, anyway. You created him when you read about him on the network, which by the way, you only think used to exist because I, whatever I am, happen to agree with you that it doesn’t exist anymore.” says Vannuchi smirking.

“But if you can clone consciousness?”

“Eh?”

Vannuchi pulls up between two HGV’s, both with their engines running, and passes me the envelope from the inside of his jacket. I get out of the van, fish out the backpack from under the seat, walk towards the cream-coloured one-story box-shaped warehouse annex, and push open the double doors.

Well he, what’s his face, exists, but my senses distort what he is. Unless it’s just a story, of course. Can’t trust everything you read, can you? Can you? It must all be out there crashing about when I am not looking, but not as my observatory senses would have it. I mean my perception distorts what it is. Wasn’t that what those scientists thought that they had proved with those sub-atomic particles? You know, when they fired them at two holes, they have to go through one hole. They can’t go through both.

As I walk towards the logistics office, I take out the 200 Kaposta from the envelope and start sorting them so they are herring fleet and seagull side up. That’s the way he likes it, and as he’s the only one we know willing to trade for anything near what a normal person would consider a fair rate that’s the way he gets it.

So, when they were observed that’s what happened, but when they weren’t observed, they behaved differently – they went through both holes. I mean each individual particle went through both holes like a wave. Ah, who am I talking to? You are all clever so and so’s. Maybe you have access to the Network, and you can look it up, and then marvel at my fumbling ignorance.

I give a quick knock and push open the door. There he is: fat, balding Per tapping his calculator on his paper-laden desk. He motions for me to sit, which I do. I take a look around while he finishes his calculations. The office, which he shares with a female colleague, is grey and neat with a dock machinery calendar on the wall behind him, and a whiteboard bearing a flowchart outlining logical pathways annotated in abbreviations in the Norvik alphabet on the wall facing him. The window is open, and you can hear the HGVs in the yard outside: the subdued hammering of their motors reverberating and repeating against each other and the high walls of the adjacent warehouse, the beats disappearing on diminishing waves of sound at more or less the same rate as they produced – the difference marking the fluctuations in noise.

I look at the red high-heeled shoes of his colleague. Although she is mostly hidden from my view behind her computer terminal, I can see up her slender calf right up to her knee, which is tilted towards the floor. She is staring at the computer screen while talking on the telephone.

“Have you…?” says Per in his halting Letzonian, but he doesn’t have to finish the question. Smiling, I give him a nod and after a little rooting around in my backpack, I show him the top of the klebnaya – moonshine from the East.

“Oh!” he flushes with a shy sort of exuberance. “Is for … for remember.”

“For remembering?”

Per had been over our side of the river about twenty years ago for a summer or so. What for precisely, he’s never said, but I’m guessing there was a woman. I pass him the plastic bottle, shielding it from his colleague with pointless but extravagant discreetness.

“We will have to have a drink sometime and you can tell me all about her.”

“Drink?”

I’d been talking too fast, “No not now, I mean…”

He has a smile, which is a little stuck there – waiting either for an explanation; or, what would do just as well, no explanation.

“Me… you…. drink, and you (I point) and you tell me about her.”

“Drink … Her?“ He says, turning to look at his colleague, who is now staring at the screen and drawing in her tanned cheeks in thought.

“No…”

“No shy! No shy!” He bellows, his face on full beam. He turns to his colleague lets a stream of Norvik go. As he is relaying the message, she looks at me and laughs soundlessly. Then muttering a reply, she casts her shoulders back and with a little smirk resumes her previous pose.

“OK, OK, so she busy. She work now with system.”

“System?”

“Oh Ja! A very demanding system, is it not, Nora?” says Per smiling, switching to Norvik, of which I have a middling grasp.

He sits down at his desk and takes the Kaposta I have just handed him. Then he leans down to his left to extract a small envelope from a drawer. Then as he’s counting, he says, “… which must run like servetoll.”

“Like what?”

“Ah, sorry – yes, like … Tick tock, tick tock.”

“Ah”

He taps the calculator, and smiles “Ah, he understands…” and with each swift tap of the the little reckoning button the little words “tick tock tick tock” trip out from tounge and teeth.

“Timework?” I offer.

“Servetoll – like a clock – you say what - ‘clockwork’, yes?”, and holds up the number he’s scribbled down on the back of the envelope.

“Sure.”

“But, Jani – maybe ‘timework‘. I like it better. Time and space – yes. That is the system.”

“Like the …” I look for the word to come to me – slipping over the membrane of globules of foreign word groups and associations. “Like the … ‘terora’?”

“Terror?” mutters Per, his surprise at my odd choice of word dulled for the moment with the routine of counting the Realia.

“Ah, I mean the th…” I catch Nora’s eye, fail to understand a thing, and wonder why those two motors in the yard have to be kept running.

“Ah the theory!” exclaims Per knocking and squaring the wad on his desk.

“Yes, the theory of rel… umm relationships… No, not relations – um... what the word is?”

Nora contains her snigger politely and then returns to the screen. Per laughs, and walks out from behind his station to pass me the wad, and as he does so he puts his hand on my shoulder – which other than shaking hands is the first time he has ever touched me.

“’Relativity’, but OK, the theory of relationships - it could be. I like it. Space and time. Hmm. She had no time, and I was in the wrong space – the wrong place. A useful stragedy, no?”

“Uh, a useful ‘strategy‘?”.­

“Maybe – check it, please” he says motioning to the Realia, “but I said ‘tragedy’ because…” and here he smiles broadly and places both hands on my shoulders staring down at me, “because we ourselves are not usually really clever enough to be trusted with strategies, are we?”

“Per?”
“OK.” He draws himself up to his full height and rubs his hands. “I will show you. Give me the money. Look…”

He sits at the corner of his desk, and in one hand takes the wad of Realia, and in the other hand the Kaposta. Then, he moves them in opposite directions on lines parallel to each other.

“Like…?” He looks at me.

“Like sheeps in the night?” I smile, quite pleased with myself, and immediately both Per and Nora explode: snorting, groaning and then whimpering in pleasure. After a little pause, where I mutter “OK ship, ships, yes, yes…”, Per starts wiping his eyes with his fat fingers, “So, then we need a shepherd, no?”

“Per, what you talking about?”

“I mean, sorry, look I will speak simply.” He hands me back the money, and walks over to his chart. “It is important that this here (he points to the window and the top of the HGV cabin outside) is here now, and there (he slides his thumb down the chart) here, at this time – and nowhere else. So, there must be control. It must be controlled – Oh, we must be controlled to control, whatever we think about it. However we look at it.”

“Control – okay. Is needed for system. I understand.”
“Okay” says Per, straightening up. He then squints a little and breathes in slowly: his bridge to his next question
“So, what will you do?”
“Oh – well – no choose, yes?”
“’Choice’. No, I mean. I will miss this.” He says gesturing to the bottle by the foot of his desk.
“Miss it? No, I bring. I bring!”
Per smiles and shakes his head, “Okay, Jani, let’s see, yes? For sure, maybe – okay ‘davai’ old man – ‘save yourself’ yes?” He says rubbing my shoulder.
“Oh – we just say ‘look after yourself’”
“I know, Jani, I know, but really – ‘thank you for all’.” And he shakes my hand, sees me to the door and watches me walk off down the corridor.

It’s only 15 minutes or so to our first port of call: a SPARI shopping centre on the A7, just a few kilometres out of Trance. We pull up not far from the loading bays and Nuchi takes his patch to call Thomas, his contact. It’s a new place, cubes of space laid out in a zig-zag fashion, tarted up with architectural bushwork still virgin enough to resemble the architect’s plan.

A couple of young woman stand having a smoke by the freight bays, their left arms tucked under the bulge of their red jackets supporting the elbows of their right arms which shoot straight up to the lip. They look at us without saying anything for a while, drawing occasionally on the nicotine and maintaining their position until the short brunette mutters something to her young silver-haired colleague, who smirks, shuffles her feet and lets her smoker’s arm drop to her side, shaking ash on to the bay floor.

“He says to wait.”

“OK”

“Which one?”

“Oh the saints!”

“Well I need a cigarette,” aays Nuchi, and takes his half-full pack of Troika out of his jacket pocket and places it under the driver’s seat. “Come on! No need to be shy – I will talk for the both of us – you just stand there. You are good at that.”

We both open the doors and Nuchi makes his way, speaking Norvik in his heavy Roman way.

“Excuse – ladies… or damsels, if I can … would you?”

They look at him with pleasant nerves, their giggles dancing atop their mock contempt.

“Nuchi, I’m going for a walk.”

“Go, go.” He says, and then taking a stick from the proffered pack of the brunette, he explains in the low register of confidence, “he is shy depressive tip – always go for walk in such situations.”

Round the back of the warehouse, the buddleia is in full fragrance, standing there, bursting in no discernible person’s property. There is still something of the calm chaos of nature. Nah - what am I thinking? Why is nature chaos? Isn’t there supposed to be a grand design? I’m just thinking about the feel of places just out of the city – more ramshackle, as if they have more room to fall into their own order. And here, where I’ve been dozens of times, I always think of the same thing – like a scent has been laid here to spark off specific memory. You must know what I mean.

Ah, maybe you have no clue.

So listen, it is the case that every time I wander around the back of this very specific place waiting for Tomas to come out, I remember a conversation I had with my eldest daughter a few years back. “Daddy” she‘d asked, gently waving her ice stick, as we walk back home, “Daddy, if you were a cosmonaut, what would you dream of?”

“What would I dream of – you mean in space?”

“Yeah – you know in space – what would be your dream?”

As I get to the corner, I see the darkly tanned bearded guy in his wheelchair roll his way around towards where I am standing. I’d clocked him being wheeled out of the entrance by a security guard as we pulled in. He must be in an orbit: handouts the gravitational centres. He eyes me and I stand there and look away. I’ve no change – just some folding. He comes closer. I look around and see he that his heavy trousers shined with smear enfold no leg below the knees. I give the weak smile and give a minimal shake of head, to which he responds by contemplating me for a few moments before he shifts the wheels back and around and resumes his silent route.

“I don’t know – you think we would have different dreams in the cosmos?” I’d asked.

“No, well… maybe. But what would be your dream? Where would you want to go?”

“Everything is so far away. You can’t just decide. You are limited even if you are a cosmonaut. There are only so many places that we could get to in our own lifetime.”

“Daddy!” she’d exclaimed, and gave me a playful kick to the calf, ice stick held thoughtfully to her bottom lip.

“OK, maybe Helena: there are big storms, but there is water I think.”

“Hmm – if you could live there, would you?”

“I think we were designed for here, don’t you?”

“Mmm.”

Vannuchi gives a sharp whistle, and mimes frustration in the Latin style. By the time I get there Tomas is carting out the crates of so-called expired rolls, mostly bread filled with poultry meat from the far east and frozen lettuce from the flat lands to the south west – all given a fake expiry date to give the impression of not having been thoroughly dosed and impregnated with preservatives. There are seven crates of them, but Tomas, wiping his young forehead with the back of his regulation red SPARI overall, says there are another three or four if we want them.

I open up the back doors of the transit and start loading. As I turn around to jump out for the rest I see the guy has wheeled himself round to the end of the loading bay – sitting there: his motionless powerful passive question framed by the opened back doors of the van – his visage clear in the daylight just outside the entrance to the loading bay.

I come out with a little crouched jump. He’s there about 10 yards away, staring at me through his tough burnt face: lips full and cracked, nose and forehead anointed with dried blood.

I pick up the rest and as I turn to load them I see he has wheeled himself closer. I give him a short nod, and push the crates across the metal of the transit floor.

“You can fuck off.” Tomas matter-of-factly instructs the beggar as he counts the Realia Vanuchi has handed him. “This is a business, not a charity.”

This information is received with a slight widening of the eyes, and he opens his mouth and says “bread”.

“20, 30, 40, they pay, so they get the bread, 45, another 10 and you can have 2 dozen Centime beers – just a week out.”

“You must have to pay us in order we take that piss.” I say.

“He’s right – seriously – but maybe we can help you, maybe we find some space – after all we are charity now.” Says Vanuchi.

“Five Realia” offers Tomas in a monotone.

“OK – five.”

Once he’s left to go for the piss beer, Vanuchi takes the customs document from his shirt pocket and shrugs.

“Might as well try.” I say.

“Brothers! Some bread, may God be a balm to your souls.“ pleads the beggar in eastern Letzonian, his voice rolling rough over the gravel of his throat.

Nuchi nods, a little surprised and we manage to mutter in tandem “okay, okay.”

Tomas comes out with the booze, sees us, and starts barking “You, fuck off! You want charity? There are places to go – not here. WE ARE NOT A FUCKING CHARITY!”

“Khmm, Tomas, please.” Says Vanuchi, and starts apologetically waving the customs document.

“Bread, brothers, some bread… and one can of that crap, too – if you can spare it.”

“What is he saying?” asks Tomas, his face now flushed perplexed.

“Nothing – it is OK – we will feed him.” says Vannuchi.

“Do what you fucking want, but not here, for the saints… this is a place of business, not a…. What is this?”

“You can sign here?” asks Vanuchi.

“ ‘Sign’? Are you insane?“

“Um” I interject, “You see we are charity now.” I take the document from Nuchi and point to the title –“it means umm ‘Hold … people who have need … healthily’, I think.”

“What?”

I turn to Nuchi “How do you say in Norvik ‘Keeping the needy healthy‘?”

Nuchi rolls his eyes, and I’m about to have another bash when I feel the wheel of the chair brush my leg. I turn down to see the beggar gesture to me to let him see the document. He reaches out to grab it, but I flick it out past his grasp, and then hold it out in front of him, telling him to read but not touch.

He leans forward and it seems to me that as he quietly mouths what is written there each word pounds down inside him like a hammered tip of a borehole looking for water. His eyes get wider and wider, expression gradually unfurling on his previously passive visage until in gleeful imitation of shock he pivots the widened whites of his eyes up at Tomas:

„Not a fucking charity. Ha! Your sister’s CUNT!! You … Ha ha! You…“ he is pointing at Tomas and lets him have it in peculiarly fluent Norvik: “May Lucifer fuck the arse of your sister! In front of you – for eternity!! You take money from a charity!!! NOT A FUCKING CHARITY!” he gleefully gasps.

Tomas then goes to swipe the document from me, but only succeeds in ripping off the top half, leaving me with the futile stump. He then balls his torn half up and tosses it away. Meanwhile, no doubt detecting a tilt into violence, the beggar is already wheeling himself backwards with alacrity. Tomas sets off for him. He doesn’t need much time to grab the handles, violently pulling them down and around by the back of the van. The beggar begins to wail as his source of motion is wrested from his control. For a second, it seems Tomas is for tipping him out right there, but he steadies him and lines him up to be pushed out in a straight line towards the buddleia shrubs. Tomas does this with increasingly velocity, building up to a sprint, his flared SPARI trousers frenziedly whipping against each other.

We get in and I reverse the van out. After I have arced it back to pull away, I stop and watch Tomas return to the bay. He’s worked up, walking back in with a stiff violence. I lean the window down, ready to try and tell him what I think, but he beats me to the swing, his sharp, hurt, indignant voice rising with each step.

“He is always here – always. He shouldn’t be here. I do this everyday – almost everyday. He should be taken away – I should call the police. He is one of yours, of course. I’m sorry if you don’t like it. I am sorry – next time, I will let a customer report him for his activity, and then they can deport him – they can go through proper procedures. You will be happy, then? Do you lot give to those as him? Don’t answer: we know about you people.”

“Just go,” urges Vanuchi softly, and so I do, putting it into first and pulling away.


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