Chapter 1 here
Back inside the terminal, he knew his next move would have to be to
find a bathroom and take a proper look at his features. He lacked a
mental image of his face, and this blank space where his thoughts
were lodged unnerved him so much that he was reluctant even to touch
it. But he had to look – if anything at all could jog his memory,
it was surely his face.
Nothing, it turned out, was easily found in the peculiar geometry of
the terminal. The persistent curvature of its design made him feel
like an infant orbiting a new kind of womb which had been designed by
mathematicians and sculptors. All its lines were curvilinear, and
all its structures nestled neatly into the whole in a manner which
suggested an aesthetic abstraction of the beehive or wasp's nest.
Here and there, long corridors branched off from the main building.
Their carpets were a rich, fleshy red, and the smooth, white arch of
the ceilings gave the whole the appearance of a whale or shark's
famished gullet, through which the people moved like snacks fleeing
the digestive track.
Finally, in the atrium of one of these corridors, he found a
bathroom. The bathroom was long and narrow, and smelled of a citrus
disinfectant. The people at the basins all seemed to pause in their
ablutions, and regard their reflections with a melancholy warmth, as
though the images in the mirror were people to whom they were bidding a fond
farewell, after long, tumultuous shared adventures. A jaunty,
repetitious melody was piped into the bathroom, but he found that
there was a peculiar sense of irresolution or absence in the
culmination of the figure, such that the melody created in his
mind the looping image of a beautiful face slowly brighten to a wide
smile, only at the last to reveal a toothless and cankerous mouth.
Having paused for some time at the cubicles, he edged nervously to
one of the wash-hand basins, and regarded his appearance in the
mirror. He was, he guessed, about thirty-five. He had brown curly
hair, short and untidy, and large blue eyes which he thought were the
colour of a declining evening sky, reflected in cold water. Besides
the slightly piercing quality of the eyes, his appearance struck him
as unremarkable. He was pale and slender, with the look of one of
those introverts who strike most people as passive and emotionally
neutral, an impression owing not to a lack of passion but rather a
certain waxen, inexpressive quality about the physicality. He knew
that type of person vaguely in his own memories: the type who smiled
detachedly and kept their own counsel, having seemingly resolved that
life was a boisterous party at which they knew nobody.
It was not mere disappointment in his looks, however, which troubled
him so sorely. It was that his reflection stirred neither the
slightest memory, nor inspired in him any discernible emotion
whatever. He knew that the reflection in the mirror was his own,
that the appearance which returned his searching looks was in some
vital sense himself, only by a logical necessity of spatial
correlation. Beyond that, his physical body was a stranger to him,
and looking at his face elicited no greater connection than that of a
passer-by on a busy street. Had his reflection abruptly turned its
back, and proceeded towards the door of the bathroom, it would have
had engendered no great shock of dissociation.
This estrangement from his body filled him with a sorrow which felt
unprecedented to his dim recollections. They had taken everything
from him – his entire past, and any connection to his physical
selfhood, was utterly lost. All that he had to hold onto were his
present stream of thoughts, knotted as they were in the unravelling
of a pervasive nightmare logic. In the mirror, his body was
convulsing slightly, and tears streamed down its face. An elderly
Japanese man, dressed in a funereal suit, patted his shoulder gently
– that gesture again. He turned and glared at him.
He made his way up to to one of the elevated footbridges that
spanned the perimeter of the terminal. Observing the scene from this
particular vantage point, it was clear that the crowd broke down into
two separate groups. There was a smaller minority of people like
himself whom he called “New Arrivals.” The New Arrivals all
exhibited varying symptoms of extreme disorientation and anxiety. He
had to assume that they were all in the same position – that their
memories had been wiped and they had no idea where they were. The
second group he called the “Departees” and the “Comforters.”
The Departees had come to be at peace with the circumstances of their
abduction and were now leaving Intermundia Airport – back to their
old lives? They all had that peculiar, almost mystic placidity which
they tried to impart on the New Arrivals, by way of reassuring
glances and that insufferable petting.
Clearly, there was some kind of process at work whereby frightened
New Arrivals were gradually transformed into contented Departees.
Their minds were first wiped clean, and then remade so as to
completely acquiesce to the process whereby their identities had been
stolen, and remoulded as self-effacing model citizens. Perhaps
Intermundia Airport was a kind of re-education camp were everyday
people were indoctrinated, and then sent back into the world as the
hidden operatives of an ideology or agenda so vast and esoteric that
their activities went everywhere unnoticed. Whatever the case, he
had now at least acquired a goal and a purpose: to resist this
process with every fibre of his being. They had made him forget
everything, and that fact alone he would not forget. To have
found a goal and a provisional plan, even one composed entirely of
rage and opposition, brought on a mild cessation of his churning
nerves. A fire which had blazed in his nervous system cooled to to a
more patient simmer.
He then felt yet another pat on his shoulder, this time with a
considerably less friendly import. Turning from the railing, he
found that he was accosted by two security guards. The guards were
an odd couple indeed. One was middle-aged, small and paunchy; the
other youthful, tall and lean. The middle-aged guard was balding,
with grey, wet-looking hair. The sides had been scrupulously combed
back, and the remainder on top formed a near perfect rectangular peak
at the dead-centre of his forehead. His face, closely-shaven and
filmed with perspiration, was plump, boyish, frog-like and endearing.
He had the air of a perpetually harried yet good-humoured uncle.
The younger man had a shaved head, tanned complexion and handsome
Latin features. He looked sleepy and arrogant. They stood facing
him for a moment, the older shifting nervously, the younger man's
body immobile, his eyelids flickering as though he was falling
asleep.
'Hello, sir', the older one finally began, 'if you'll excuse me,
sir. My name is Eddie. This is my colleague Giacomo. Your case
officer, sir, would like to see you now, and it is our privilege to
accompany you to his office.'
'What if I don't want to go?'
Giacomo edged closer to him, his manner more languorous than
insistent.
'You'll see your case officer,' he said, 'one way or another. Don't
want to go now is fine with us. We get to take an hour off. You
wanna make life difficult for yourself, and easier for us, you're
welcome to.'
Eddie cast a reproachful glance at Giacomo.
'What my colleague means to say is that you can see your case
officer any time you please! There's no obligation, none whatever.
It's up to you! The thing is, though, it's really better – better
for you – if you see him sooner rather than later. It's
like – like the dentist! Nobody really wants to go to the dentist.
They put if off! And the rotten tooth, the pain, you see, it just
gets worse. So eventually they have to go. And then – just a
little prick, a bit of yank, and all the pain is gone! And then
they're kicking themselves, saying “I should have to the dentist
ages ago!”'
'I don't have a toothache.'
Giacomo seemed to approve of this remark. He looked at Eddie with
a smirk.
'You see? He doesn't have a toothache. Why would he want to go to
a dentist?'
'That's not the point. I didn't say he should go to a dentist, I
was simply drawing an analogy - '
'You and your analogies, you're just confusing the issue! The man
is disorientated, he needs to get his bearings, and you're telling
him he has a rotten tooth, he needs to go to the dentist - '
Eddie turned away from Giacomo, and looked at him imploringly.
'You see what he's trying to do? He doesn't want you to go! He
just wants to take an hour off. I'm only trying to give you good
advice! I have your feelings at heart. He just wants to have a
drink.'
Eddie and Giacomo continued to bicker in this farcical manner,
eventually wearing his patience to the point where he submitted to
attend the interview. Eddie beamed. Giacomo shrugged and gave a
little yawn. They sauntered off briskly and he followed them down
the steps. They seemed to forget about him instantly, becoming
absorbed in their own conversation.
'Did you know,' Eddie was saying, 'that dentists have the highest
rate of suicide among all the professions?'
Giacomo shrugged.
'They do. Its a very strange thing, if you think about about it. I
mean, it's a respectable middle-class profession, well-paid, secure,
steady. Not as respected as the doctor, but less pressure! The
dentist never has to tell anybody they've got a month to live, or
that they'll never walk again. So why do they do it?'
Eddie glared at him.
'Do what?'
'Kill themselves!'
'All the bad breath seeps into their brains?'
'You make a joke out of everything, but it's an interesting
conundrum. I have a theory about the whole thing. There is
something, I suspect, in the mouth, that only dentists see. Think
about it, how often do you actually look into the inside of your
mouth? Nobody does! It's like this undiscovered country, you know,
that we carry around inside our faces, this landscape of pink flesh
and naked bone and rotting chunks of grizzle and the calcified
residuum of an endless stream of words, a lifetime of words that flow
profusely out like bile but never really say anything at all.
And nobody looks into this world for any sustained length of time,
nobody except the dentist. But he looks! Day in and day out, he
wrestles with the ungovernable tongue and probes the private parts of
a thousand faces, until humanity becomes in his dreams a single
gaping mouth! What does he see in there?'
They were passing the bench where he had woken up. The old woman
was awake now, sitting up and shaking with a piteous expression of
terror on her face. Two other New Arrivals, a man and woman, sat
either side. The woman cradled the older woman in her arms like a
child, and whispered close to her ear. The man looked like he had
suppressed his fear in deference to the older woman's worse plight,
but his eyes, wide and bird-like, darted frantically. Both looked at
him suspiciously as he passed with Eddie and Giacomo. It occurred to
him that he must already look more acclimatized to Intermundia
Airport, a change in his appearance perhaps brought about by his
first concession to the security guards.
Giacomo regarded Eddie with a look half indulgent and half
exasperated.
'Do you say this shit to your wife?'
'No, no, of course not. She's a wise woman in her own way, but not
intellectual. She likes her creature comforts, and no noise or
stress. That's wiser than most women, I can tell you. But this
stuff would be far too deep for her. I only share this stuff with
you, Giacomo, because I sense that there are deep, deep currents
hidden beneath your boorish veneer.'
'Nope, no currents here. Please don't.'
They turned into one of the corridors that branched off from the
main terminal. The corridor was empty, and its peculiar acoustics
seemed to amplify the absurd conversation of the security guards.
'There are currents, yes, I can tell. You are a thoughtful man.
Now – where was I? Yes, what is it that the dentists see? It
seems to me that there could be something in the mouth – some
hideous asymmetry – that points to a greater truth about the human
condition. Perhaps the mark – the scrawled initials – of a cruel
or senile creator. And the dentist, by virtue of the nature of his
profession, is forced to face this mortally dispiriting truth every
day of his professional life, along with a rouge's gallery of
misshapen and rotten molars, swimming in a dank miasma of the
halitosis. It drives him to despair, you see. He begins to question
the whole premise of his profession – that one should fix that
which was designed, after all, only to give pain and yield to decay.'
Giacomo snorted.
'Your brain is a hideous asymmetry.'
'Did I ever tell you my theory about why plumbers and pipe-layers
tend to be extremely fertile?'
'Please don't.'
They paused at a stairwell. Eddie turned to him. “We're going
out to the Central Command Complex, so we have to get a train.”
They proceeded down the first of several stairwells. A crowd started
to mill around them again, like a tumbling stream. He glanced at the
posters on the wall while they descended. They were advertisements
composed of a mishmash of religious, historical and commercial
iconography. A jolly, rotund Oriental sage demonstrated the virtues
of a water-resistant wrist watch. A benevolent, bearded youth
enjoyed a carbonated beverage after he had been scourged by a group
of soldiers. A collapsing tower emphasized the importance of
comprehensive life insurance. Others suggested political and
militaristic themes: mobilization of war efforts and nationalistic
projects, fomentation of xenophobic panics, evocations of the
transcendent power of vast crowds, or a single, abstracted fist
clenched in the manic idolatry of an idea. Some of the posters were
more abstract or elusive in intention. “TODAY IS TOMORROW'S
YESTERDAY” announced one, over an image of a family of skeletons
enjoying a summer picnic.
Finally, they arrived at the concourse of a vast underground rail
network. As they descended a stately granite staircase, his senses
were once again overwhelmed by the scope and bustle of Intermundia
Airport. There were five separate train tracks, linked by a system
of overpasses. People ascended to the footbridges on escalators, and
were then carried smoothly across on mobile walkways, giving the
overpasses the appearance of relentless conveyor belts. The tracks
moved to a similarly breakneck pace: it seemed as though there was
always a train either departing or arriving at each track, producing
a vertiginous feeling of panic like that of the old variety show
gimmick of spinning plates. He noticed with a kind of sickening jolt
that a huge percentage of the crowd was made up of New Arrivals
accompanied by one or two security guards. They were hundreds,
perhaps thousands of these groups in the underground.
He was momentarily stunned. 'Are all those...?'
Eddie nodded, grinning with fond awe. 'Yes, all new-comers, just
like yourself. It never stops. The turn-over is amazing.'
Giacomo regarded him smugly.
'Not so special now, eh?'
Continued shortly.
