I did not think I should stop. After a while I saw a police car which had trundled to a halt off the road; and for the first time I thought about the emptiness of the jails. Had that happened everywhere, too? Even in the worst places? No one in the world being tortured or murdered; all the armies and secret police vanished… The world wiped clean. And then: what if there were survivors in jails? Why should I think that might not have happened? Because criminals wouldn’t have qualified for survival? That the Effect had moral scruples, an ethical mechanism? It couldn’t have, or I wouldn’t exist. I might have been in jail myself. Less than a year ago I had lied my way through an inquest on a very strange death, afraid to be worried too much by my skill at deception and the confidence of the face that answered every question. It should have been harder to do.
I glanced in the rear-view mirror, briefly, for reassurance. The road receded behind my face. Rotorua had been absorbed behind my image, a patch of weakness on the earth’s surface, a singularity, a local aberration. Was the world so much better now, all cleaned and redeemed? My face – I looked again – was pale, and the skin seemed stuck to the bone by the pressure of the light. No assurance at all. What kind of unstained world would forget or release that?
The trees stood back on each side of the road like armies of dead soldiers standing to attention.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The river was clear and deep, shading to a dark green by the far banks. It swirled past in a heavy silence. Every few minutes the suck and slap of ripples breaking the surface from deep uncoilings gave the only hint of movement around the island. Beneath the water by the bridge the riverbed was visible, with small stones rolling along under the mass of transparent liquid.
Taupo was dazzling in its emptiness, the sun hot on tarmac and car metal, the shop windows blinded, doors locked. The light beat back from the lake fading all the colours and fading the hills even further away. Chip shops and burger bars stood unattended along the street smelling of grease and dead meat, and ranks of motels faced the lake with NO VACANCY signs raised for last weekend. I didn’t want to invade a room, but I was tired of driving and decided not to go further. A street map at the public relations office revealed the ideal place: a small island in the river to the north which had been developed as a tourist attraction. There were a few souvenir shops and a restaurant next to a bird sanctuary. The island was connected to the riverbank by a narrow footbridge. I stood on the bridge and thought about the old superstition that evil spirits were supposed to be unable to cross flowing water. Then, as I looked down, I saw a swarm of fish glint in the river, all moving against the sunlight for a moment and then darting away. They were only a few centimetres long, quite small, but brilliantly alive. They had survived! The Effect had not gone below the surface of water!
I hung onto the railing of the bridge and gazed into the water trying to see them. Yes! Again! The points of light flashed up all at once. How could I have racked my brain, driven all over the place, looked for everywhere, considered every aspect of the mystery, and not once wondered about the sea or the rivers?
It was a long time before I could walk onto the island. The sudden excitement drove the tiredness away. Then it came back, heavier. I couldn’t make any more sense of the Effect with the new information. Perhaps, if there was some significance, I would see it later. At least it was reassuring, to see living creatures and realise that lots of life still existed and went on existing as if nothing had ever happened. There was something defiant about the quickness of the fish, the way they caught the light in the clear water and flicked round all together in a crowd.
I broke into the small restaurant building on the island, went upstairs, and spread my sleeping bag on cushions on the floor after carrying in some of the equipment from the car. There was a handy kitchen in which I set up the gas-operated cooking unit and warmed up a few tins of food. After eating, before going to sleep, I cut the mould from a loaf of bread I discovered in the kitchen, and went back to the bridge. The loaf was dry and hard, but I pulled it apart and dropped the pieces into the river. The fish lunged at them. My hands were trembling.
I had a completely unconscious sleep, dreamless. It was early evening when I woke and the sun was saturating the air with a powerful golden radiation. I took the gun and crossed the river, drove back up to the town, and parked by the lakefront. The hills were slate-grey and purple, the sky an intense green towards the horizon. The sun went down with its light on the landscape like a nuclear forge throwing out a spectrum of all the elements: strontium reds, barium and copper greens, sodium yellow, silver chromates, blue cobalt, quicklime whites of calcium and magnesium, and brown ferrous oxides. And from the west the shadows spread out like heaps of carbon black tipped beneath the hills. My senses had extended and become more acute in the isolation of the last week, and visual images had taken on an energy of their own as well as the power to break into heightened perceptions from other senses. The force of the chemistry of these colours gave me the taste, scent, and touch of each separate element. The whites were hot and crumbling, the greens sharp, pungent, acid, the carbon soft and slippery like powdered pencil lead with its smell of sweat. Only my hearing had retreated from lack of work. The soundlessness of the beast that had slithered across the forest road had been as frightening as the sight. It might almost have been formed out of the solid silence which was squatting everywhere.
I turned to get back in the car to return to the island for the night, when I thought I heard something. From a long way off, seeming to come from as far away as the mountains at the southern end of the lake, there was a long booming noise, vibrating and changing pitch. It was impossible to tell what it was. The bellowing of a machine; an indecipherable compound of tones. Then it sounded again, or perhaps echoed, either from the hills or inside the drums and canals of my ears; I was straining hard to listen. It was mournful and weird. When it died away, the silence stood even thicker until a slight breeze began to ruffle the lake and hiss in the leaves of the taller trees by the shore. Perhaps it had been the movement of air, setting up a resonance, seeming further away than it was. Or even a volcanic, or a thermal noise; this was all an unstable area. Or maybe I had imagined it. I listened for several minutes, then, as the sun fell and the darkness began to grow, I got in the car and drove back to the sanctuary of the island. The river was like cold metal, the liquid of dead hills.
I had never considered what it would be like to become insane. The worst thing would be knowing it, being aware that it was happening. It would be gradual. The little rituals of sanity, the small items, would slip away. Lucid patches would contract and the light go thin until there would be huge areas of uncertainty. It seemed to me to be extremely sad and at the same time in the whole mystery of the world amazingly trivial that I should be insane.