“WE HAVE a gun mountain,” says Freeman ibn Solomon. “You people are cursed with milk lakes and grain plains and all the rest. We have a gun mountain. We don’t really mind having all your spare guns,” adds Freeman ibn Solomon. “We just wish you’d put them right on the pile. They come into our country in little dribs and drabs. They go to Erwin Kumar and he loses them or he sells them and they show up all over the place. Only a week ago I found a whole crate of them in my kitchen, under the broccoli. And of course,” he adds, without a trace of anger or irony, “very occasionally someone gets shot with them, which is so upsetting.”
Iggy comes to the defence of the international system. It’s very strange. Most of the time Iggy and the others bemoan the iniquity of the capitalist hegemony (that is, everything in the world). Now here is Freeman ibn Solomon, saying things they often say, but they are trying to persuade him it’s not all that bad. This is probably because, when Freeman ibn Solomon says it, and puts it in context, you can’t help but feel it could be your fault.
“You’re not exactly representative, though, are you?”
“Good God, no,” Freeman says, “we don’t represent at all.”
Iggy leans back, having established the fly in this dangerously perfect ointment.
“No,” Freeman ibn Solomon continues, “we are a participant democracy. Everyone takes part of every decision, if there’s time. Otherwise, of course, the Bey is afforded an executive right of action, so that we can’t be caught sleeping. But we have no laws.”
Iggy stares at him. Sebastian, behind a vodka tonic, opens his eyes and looks on with interest. Aline sputters.
“No laws?” she demands.
“No,” says Freeman ibn Solomon. “Law is error, you see. It’s an attempt to write down a lot of things everyone ought to know anyway. We don’t have that. Every one of us is expected to act within the constraints of right thinking, and to be prepared to stand by the consequences of those actions. That is,” he adds, “not as comfortable a position as you might think.” And he takes another sip of his whisky.
“Doesn’t that lead to corruption?” Aline wants to know.
“Oh yes,” says Freeman ibn Solomon. “I mean, in a sense it’s hard to tell. We’re a pirate nation, so we have less formal administration. But yes, everyone feathers his own nest to some degree. On the other hand, anyone can be held accountable. There’s always a person you can argue with.” He shrugs. “With governments,” he says, “you choose your poison. This is ours.”
He looks so crestfallen that the discussion turns to other things, and then Quippe strikes up at the piano, and we are privileged to watch the Ambassador Plenipotentiary dance the cancan with Aline and a girl named Yolande who shaves one half of her head.
Once it gets out that we had a man from Addeh Katir on the campus, every other far-flung cause and dissident voice in the spectrum suddenly recognises our seriousness, and our importance as a free-thinking zone. I bring new causes to Cork, and new speakers, and some are friendly and some aren’t, but I’m totally the man, and each speaker seems to make Aline randier and we all but wear out the oppressive manacles of the state oppressor and it’s getting to the point where we’ll have to pinch some new ones. Addeh Katir fades from the public view because the negotiations there are somewhat bogged down. The United Nations Security Council refuses to accept the request of Zaher Bey to send a peacekeeping force. Cork goes practically schismatic over whether this is a step in the right direction (away from quasi-totalitarian cultural hegemonising) or the wrong one (towards an isolationist economic imperium), but finally settles on having a foam party. Life goes on.
In Erwinville the great president continues his thirty-year rampage through the Kama Sutra.
Around Lake Addeh, Zaher Bey’s faction maintains a semblance of order and infrastructure through a black market more efficient and humane than the legal economy.
Aline shaves her pubic region in protest against the fur trade. Despite this distraction, I manage to stagger through my exams.
Gonzo receives a care package from Ma Lubitsch which contains so much food and drink of such staggering richness that he can barely store it all in his accommodation. I am particularly fond of the oatmeal meringue with raspberries.
The idyll lasts until one morning, when I am sitting at the coffee table working on my biology coursework and not really listening to Sebastian telling Quippe that “the freedom of movement and the speed of communication intrinsic to the Late-Modern period entails but does not legitimate the demise of the Age of Presence,” when guys in balaclavas explode—literally, explode, because their arrival is preceded by a blast of light and sound which makes my nose itch and my ears bleed—through the butler’s pantry and the honour bar, and throw us all violently down to the floor and grind our faces into the threadbare carpet, so that I inhale an almost uncountable number of dust mites and the faintest odour of sexual congress. One of the balaclava guys yells somewhat redundantly that this is a raid.
I lift my head up. Aline is just across from me, dark hair charmingly and sexily askew, face utterly shell-shocked and afraid, and this in turn makes me afraid, because she’s been through more revolution than I have and she never mentioned anything like this. I gasp her name and she doesn’t look at me, and one of the shouting men comes and shouts into my face and I get lifted up and carted off alone because I am clearly more of a subversive than the others, or possibly because I have—equally clearly—been doinking the cute subversive in the skintight jeans and this is a very good reason for me to suffer.
The interior of a security services truck is a very bad place. It smells of fear and unwashed or unperfumed individuals and there aren’t any cushions. My cuffs are linked to a big hoop in the floor and I envisage a sort of built-in padlock mechanism and wonder what would happen if the truck were to fall into one of the many rivers around Jarndice and conclude that there must be some kind of auto-release and then conclude that there probably isn’t. I place my trust, and my hope, in the shaven head which is visible through the grillework, and try very hard to be a good convict and not a danger to society and also not to throw up, because being in the back of a windowless truck with your head between your knees in the Jarndice heat is conducive to nausea.
From the chatter on the radio and the exchange of monosyllables between the driver and his fellows, I glean the information that the guys in balaclavas are not technically soldiers. They are a nominally non-military task force for civilian defence and counter-terror. They are in fact an internal hire; the armed forces have loaned them to the security arm of the government, so for the duration of their present employment they are functioning as civilians. This means that they are trained as soldiers, beweaponed as soldiers, can fight and if need be kill like soldiers, but can be deployed at home and abroad without reference to annoying statutes like Posse Comitatus or the UIK’s Bill of Rights. Curiously, not being soldiers frees them to be more unpleasant to people who are also not soldiers.
They march up and down the lines of hangdog detainees and scream that we are quislings, which seems like a particularly arcane thing to be upset about. Every now and again, they slap someone across the back of the head, or a detainee rashly objects and is silenced with a kick or a closed fist. Then they shout some more. We are backstabbers, treasonists, collaborators, fifth columnists, turncoats and copperheads. After we have been processed—this basically means taking our names, addresses and any confirmatory ID, and then sequestering our belts and shoelaces—a junior officer drops in to our cells to add that we may well be Arnolds and Haw Haws. I wonder, briefly, whether they’re working from a thesaurus.
The holding cells are not high-tech. In some part of my head I was expecting gleaming corridors and bio-monitors and polygraphs. I was not expecting ad hoc detention facilities made by running chicken wire in a grid through the middle of a warehouse. I was not expecting single-bulb lighting and iron buckets to pee in. This place does not feel like my country. It feels like countrie
s I have read about where things are very bad. It feels, in fact, like exactly the kind of thing we were protesting against, but we thought it was elsewhere. It is not heartening to find that it has come to us.
I am sharing my cell with Iggy and Sebastian and two or three persons I do not know who are obviously not students, because they are older and crustier and work for a living. They are unionists in the real sense, men who organise their work colleagues to stand up together to demand proper—but not outrageous—remuneration and safety codes. They are scared, which is scary, because they know more about this kind of thing than we do.
“Fucking Nazis,” Sebastian says. Iggy isn’t at all sure that’s what they are—the frequent invocation of Holocaust imagery is counter-constructive because—
“If it puts you in a chicken-wire box,” Sebastian says firmly, “and treats you like a sub-human, and it wears a sexy uniform and claims all this is for the greater good, it’s a Nazi.”
At which point they storm into the cell and pull him out and hood him, and Sebastian looks steadfast except that as he reaches the door I hear him start to cry. It’s probably not the case that they “storm,” not really. We can see them coming. They walk with purpose, and there are several of them looking muscular in their spiffy uniforms, but while they fling open the door, it is nothing when compared with their earlier entrance through the butler’s pantry at Cork. They do not shout. There’s no flash grenade, no barging and shoving. Still and all, they do what they do with the ease of long practice and a powerful kinetic energy, an odour of power which hurls us back from Sebastian and allows them to scoop him up as if weightless and carry him away. They do not bring him back. We keep expecting them to, but they don’t. They do not bring anyone back, and gradually our warehouse gets quieter and emptier and more afraid.
I find myself talking. Almost everyone else is quiet, and most of them are sitting or leaning, but I cannot stop pacing and my mouth seems to be running by itself. I want to know if this can possibly be lawful, and if it isn’t, whether that’s better or worse for us. I ask if anyone has any experience with arrest, or any legal training, and Barry (the second unionist) points out that anyone who does might not wish to say so in a detention area which might well be monitored. That stops me asking questions for a while, but inspires me to search for listening devices until Iggy points out that they wouldn’t have to be visible. I keep searching, in case they’re there and I’m supposed to be able to find them, and Iggy starts to tell me to be quiet and sit the fuck down when the men come again. Barry walks towards them, offering his hands, but they ward him off. They step around him and past me, and they draw Iggy firmly out and cover him up, and when he stumbles they drag him along until his feet catch up.
“Not good,” Barry says.
“Why not?”
“Well, if they want us in order, it follows they know who we are, doesn’t it?”
And if they know who we are, or think they know, then this is at least not a simple mistake. They believe they have something. Barry shrugs and sits down. Clearly, he says, the ones they take away are simply placed in a separate area of confinement, so that they will not be able to prepare us for what’s to come. It’ll be fine. May take a bit longer to untangle, but it’ll turn out right.
I preferred it when he wasn’t worried enough to reassure me, and I wish he weren’t shaking so much. I worry that I’m going to die here, disappear for ever. I tell myself this is part of the interrogation. It doesn’t help.
The men come back, and the officer’s boots are leaving little dark red prints. I hope to God he has walked through a freshly painted road sign, but know that he has not. They take Barry and he gives me a nod and says “Bear up” and this annoys them so they gag him before they hood him. Twenty minutes of eternity later there is canvas sliding roughly over my skin and it smells strongly of someone else’s cheap cologne.
Walking hooded is a curious thing. I cannot see, cannot hear properly. The not-soldiers must hold my arms to guide me. I am dependent on them, but they in turn have to take care of me to this small degree. They are in loco parentis, and I am their ward for the journey from where I was to where I am going. The one on my left leans close. Couple of steps, one, two, all right, stop . . . there’s a good lad. He seems genuinely pleased. Turn around . . . now. Sit. There we go . . .
They put me in a chair. It is uncomfortable, and it is damp. Someone has sweated a great deal in this chair, and possibly more—there is a lingering smell of bleach. They leave the hood on. The guy on the left—he’s moved, actually, but it’s the same voice—murmurs again: Now then. You be well-behaved, all right? Much better off that way. In the background, someone laughs at him and calls him Mr. Nice. Yes, he says, yes, I fucking am. From which I deduce that there is also a Mr. Nasty. Mr. Nice draws back from my shoulder. The air is just a little cooler without him. I wait.
Then I hear a loud scraping noise. The floor beneath my feet is your standard warehouse concrete, rough and porous, and so I realise that someone has drawn up a chair opposite my own. It is a moderately heavy chair, an office chair without wheels rather than one of those plastic disposable chairs they put in conference centres. The hood is whipped off with disdain for my nose and chin, which suffer minor friction burns, and I am eye to eye with a relaxed, bucolic geezer in a grubby general’s jacket who seems to be in charge.
His face is not a surprising face, in the sense that it is big and red and somewhat covered with pale spiky stubble. His eyes are narrow and seem small because they are turned down at the outer corners, as if someone has stitched his eyebrow to his cheek. Part of me recognises this feature as an epicanthic fold, and helpfully supplies the information that it is common in persons of Asian descent, but rare in Europeans (what most Americans call Caucasians despite the fact that the peoples of the Caucasus mountains are a diverse bunch, and certainly not Anglo-Saxon) and sometimes associated with Down’s syndrome. Since the man in front of me is clearly and inescapably not Asian, and since it is profoundly unlikely that a person with Down’s syndrome could rise to this rank in the services, it seems the general is a minor biological curiosity—but that also is not the cause of the shock I experience on seeing him. I am surprised, even stunned, by the visage of this individual because his name is George Lourdes Copsen, and he is the father of Gonzo’s donkey-loving princess bride, Lydia, and I know him and I know that he knows me. I last saw him across the table of a “guess the number of sweeties” stand at the Soames School fete. George Copsen did not guess well. He did not guess at all. Using a pocket calculator, he collated the guesses of the three hundred or so other entrants and produced an answer that was accurate to within the margin of error (i.e., when we came to count them we were unable to prevent one of the first-years from eating between five and ten sweeties). He eyes me with the air of a man who has already been briefed, has seen the file, knows the score, isn’t tied to a soggy cushion and who holds a small remote control with a significant red button on it, all of which he is.
“How are ya?” says George Copsen conversationally, and I essay an insouciant nod to demonstrate how much I am in control of the situation despite the fact that I have just been abducted from a dining club by a paramilitary force and strapped to a chair. Unfortunately they have secured my head in some fashion and so I pull some muscles in my neck and look like an idiot. George Copsen grins in a friendly way and suggests I use words, so I tell him I’m fine. Good. A bit nervous, actually, and George Copsen says that I probably should be, but he’s going to sort all that out now.
“All you need to do,” George Copsen says, “is tell us who recruited you, and what the cell talked about, and what actions they engaged in, and who the others were.” And he grins again.
Which is a problem for me because I was never actually recruited. I was signed up sight unseen and I was boned by a wild Italianate activist and I fell in love with her for what I now perceive to be less-than-highbrow reasons, but I was not in fact ever a member of anything more r
adical than a fraternity of windy drinkers and the rather large club of young men who have acquired radical opinions as a way of getting laid. George Copsen produces a file from somewhere out of my field of vision and leans close. He opens the file like a family Bible and proceeds. His voice is filled with reproach, as if I am a new puppy which has peed on his carpet.
“It seems many of you boys and girls of good family were very much influenced by one particular character. Let’s call that person Mr. A, shall we? Hell of a man.”
Sebastian. Christ. You are so fucked. And they want me to add to it. And what would Gonzo do? Gonzo would never be here. Gonzo is a track and field star, a footballer, a hero to the masses and a lover of profoundly conventional college girls. Gonzo is a free market, entrepreneurial, registered good guy. But Gonzo would never turn on a friend. Not now, not ever, not for any price and not under someone’s guns.
“‘Mr. A was central to all actions carried out by the cadre at Cork.’” Since when did we have a cadre? I’m not even sure what one is. “‘He was a leader to us and a confessor to any who wavered. Without Mr. A, the thing could not have existed.’ That’s the one called Iggy. What’s his real name?”
It’s a harmless question. Iggy’s clothes still have name tags from his schooldays. “Andrew,” I tell George Copsen.
“Here’s your man Quippe: ‘A taught us various techniques of subversion ranging from bribery and blackmail to sexual procurement and demolitions.’ ”
Quippe has clearly gone to town on fantasy. Mind you, perhaps he was encouraged.
“And then there’s this little lady: ‘I was recruited by one of my fellow students. I cannot overstate the power of his convictions or his resolve. In my case the avenue of approach was sexual; he seduced me and effectively addicted me to his physical presence. He inscribed himself upon my opinions at the same time, and introduced me to the club known as Caucus, which as I have already stated is a front organisation for the indoctrination and training of terroristic elements. I feel now that I lived between sexual obsession and physical fear of this man at all times. Thank you for’ ”—and here George Copsen’s voice is suffused with some emotion which I take to be pity but which might in another setting be hilarity—“ ‘for rescuing me.’ Sounds like quite a trip.”