The face that stared back at him, framed within, was his own.
afternoon dreams
——
After a moment he laughed, though without much humour. It was not a photograph at all. It was a mirror, the text painted on to the reflecting surface. What did he expect to see there? Longshott, he thought. Or a man with a long beard and clear, penetrating eyes, the hero of pulp thrillers and suicide killers. Instead all he got was himself. He stared at his own face staring back at him. Did he even know that face? There was a name that went with it, an occupation, but were they themselves real, or were they, too, mere fabriques, as fake as a passport could be faked? He shook his head, and the face in the mirror mimicked the movement.
He turned away. Went to the desk. Again, he felt the urge to touch, to feel. He picked up each object in turn, examined it, replaced it on the desk. Pens, blue and black and red. A child’s pencil sharpener. He lifted it to his nose and smelled it, but there was no sign of recent wood shavings, no sign of recent use. Stones, pebbles made smooth by water. Seashells that must have come from somewhere else, from a far and distant sea. Their colours were the hues of sunset. He smoothed a feather with his finger. He weighed coins in his hand. Faces etched into the metal regarded him back with haughty expressions, kings and queens and emperors and presidents. He pulled open the drawers, one by one. They were mostly empty. In the second of three drawers he found a single item. A thin, unadorned gold ring, a woman’s size. It felt heavy in his hand and he put it back, carefully, and closed the drawer. As he did so, a sheet of paper fluttered down to the ground. He picked it up. A few lines, scribbled – hastily, it seemed – in blue ink that had somewhat smudged on the page. The handwriting was untidy. It took him a while to untangle it. It said:
we had ankle-length boots
that let us wade in shallow pools
like resolute explorers
impervious to rainwater, mud or frogspawn
or those tired warnings, seldom heeded,
not to go into the puddles on purpose.
that winter I could read the map
the water charted
and knew the purpose in a snail’s
slow, slimy track as it slid along a window pane.
then the sun came and brought with it
the end of winter
and meaning dried away
and was gone with the last of the rains.
The poem vaguely disturbed him. He didn’t know why. He put the sheet back on the desk, face down. Next, he looked through the books on the desk. To the left of the typewriter were the four Vigilante books. He picked up the uppermost one, the earliest in the series, Assignment: Africa. The binding was worn, the spine cracked in places. He leafed through it and saw that it was annotated, in a mix of pencil and red ink, words crossed out and others written in, punctuation examined and found lacking, typos circled in patient, careful loops and rings.
He put it down, and as he did he upset some invisible balance, some delicate equilibrium that had been suddenly disturbed. There was a cascade of papers, pebbles, pens, seashells and coins and the sudden unexpected noise made Joe’s palms wet with sweat, made his heart beat faster. He stepped back, tried to calm his breathing. Debris settled on the floor. Silence returned. The air itself was still, the tiny breeze he’d felt before had already departed. The air was thick with afternoon heat, afternoon dreams.
Joe examined the fallout. On the desk a seismic shift had taken place, a clash of tectonic plates creating a new pattern across the surface. Underneath what had been a miniature mountain of books a stack of pages was revealed.
They were stacked neatly one on top of the other. White pages, edges aligned, the typewritten lines running left to right in single-space. On the first page, centred, surrounded by blank space, a title: The Last Stand. Below it, a familiar sub-title: An Osama Bin Laden: Vigilante Novel.
Below, stilclass="underline" By Mike Longshott.
Adjacent to the manuscript was a book open face-down on the desk. The title was familiar, but it took Joe a moment to realise it was the same title he had picked up, briefly, at the market in town.
A Tourist Guide to theToraBoraCaves. He picked it up, leafed through it. Pictures of mountains, pine trees, cave openings in the bedrock. The place looked quiet and peaceful, the pictures exuding a faint air of disuse.
He moved his gaze to the typewriter. A new sheet of paper was inserted into the machine. It was partially typed. Joe reached for it, pulled it out, gently, his fingers leaving damp prints on the paper.
black dust
… in the White Mountains. In Pashto its name meant
Kabul had fallen. As the tanks rolled into the city Osama Bin Laden’s fighters had already left. They went into the mountains, amassing at last in the caves of the
It should have been the last stand of Osama Bin Laden. In the event, it was nothing more than one more battle in an
US Air Force B-52H Stratofortress strategic bombers were deployed, fresh from the battle of Kabul. They dropped a steady barrage of
As the fighting ended, and the caves had been swept clean, no trace could be found of Osama Bin Laden, nor of the bulk of his fighters. The Emir had disappeared into the snowy mountain paths, to regroup and continue the fi –
Longshott
——
Joe jumped. The sound was unexpected, loud in the silence. He had been staring at the page for some time. The rest of it was blank. It had been left off in mid-sentence. Joe looked around wildly but could see no source for the sound, which was, unarguably, a cough. He put the page down on the desk, his heart beating sickeningly fast. He heard a sort of rustling sound, coming from the direction of what he had assumed was the kitchen, the cough again, and light footsteps. Outside a bird, perhaps similarly disturbed, was chattering manically in a rapid percussion. Joe took a step back from the desk.