He hid from me about how long he’d been in the army. In war, yes, they’d obey orders. Shoot. There were no clear battlelines. I know that much. But what’s that got to do with those…obscenities? What would make them do that? And pose themselves in pictures of it? Who would keep such things?
What if he wanted me to find them? He could have locked them away somewhere, more secure. I might have done exactly what he expected me to do. He wanted to confess all along. But he couldn’t. No, that doesn’t make sense. But insane people don’t make sense.
I get up and open the top windows. The air is humid, unmoving. A white haze hides the distance. The hills look like piles of waste by a pool.
Before, the land had threatened or unsettled me by its nothingness, it had seemed to want to suck living and moving identities dry of life and absorb them into the vacuum. Now I can sense a more active vibration emanating very faintly from beyond the temporary structures of these rooms and blocks. As if it had detected after a huge spread of time spent silent and waiting, a hint, finally, of complete triumph; and now it was daring to stir itself for the kill. Softly, like a thing furred with decay, something immensely ancient becomes intent and flexes its death-energy. It has been there forever. The Maoris must have absorbed it for ages without fully knowing, like inhaling the spores of a mould or a bone-marrowing radiation. Those carvings, the masks of faces howling outwards from their shelters, must have been meant to repel it. Or to want to throw it out, like vomit. That braying sound I thought I heard by Taupo as the sun went down the night before I met the Maori, that might have been its signal. It wanted an answer, an echo from the base of our brains. It knows what is inside.
I stand there, firm against it, my mind forcing back the hostile resonance. The rancour is almost a perceptible taste. It will be cheated of me. It will not win.
A screech of noise echoes round the towers like an animal trapped in machinery. My heart stops, in shock, then pounds away at double speed.
There is a shout. I look down from an open window. The figure is standing by a bright red car, waving and sounding the klaxon horn.
‘Come on down!’
I get the shotgun. At the top of the stairs I stand and pause, taking deep breaths. I must keep control.
Below, he is leaning on the car, excited, one arm extended across the roof above the windscreen, the owner embracing his new toy. Posing for a photograph. The images blur in front of me.
‘Well?’ he asks.
‘Where did you go?’ is all I can say.
‘Motorway to Porirua and back, then on the Hutt motorway.’ He seems impatient, and taps the top of the windscreen. ‘See anything?’
‘What?’
‘Look.’ He points. I move closer, puzzled. The windscreen slopes back, reflecting a distorted stretch of the concrete block and the white sky. A long smear extends up the centre of the glass on the outer surface. I lean over, glancing at him. He is on the other side of the car, nodding, eyes very bright.
The smear is what is left of a disintegrated fly or wasp obliterated at high speed, a blotch of pulpy yellow pus and dark red blood flecked with bits of black. I draw in breath, my teeth and lips clenched tight.
‘A fly,’ he says, triumphantly. I straighten up. The butcher’s red of the car burns into my retina. ‘It means they’re still around,’ he goes on. ‘You know what you said.’
‘It means you killed an insect,’ I reply.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘It doesn’t make sense.’
‘Why not?’
‘Just one? After three weeks?’
‘There’ll be others. I mean—’ He stops.
‘There would have been more. The rate they breed.’
‘We might not have seen them.’
‘We’d have seen them all right.’
‘It was when I was coming back, along the motorway, just now.’ He turns, points, and turns back. Then, uncertain, the excitement gone, he stares at me. ‘Well what does it mean, then?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You must bloody know. You said, when we—you must bloody well know.’
‘I said if there were any left, they’d breed if they weren’t sterile.’ He closes his eyes, suddenly, and bangs his hand on the roof of the car. ‘Maybe there was only one left. And you killed it. Or maybe—’
‘Maybe what?’
‘Somebody’s playing a joke.’
He opens his eyes.
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ There must be something about my manner which for the first time, as his excitement subsides, strikes him as different. He detects a change.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ he says. ‘Anything happen, while I was—’
‘I don’t feel so good today. That’s all.’
‘How? How d’you feel?’
‘It’s nothing.’
‘Oh, come on, man, if you get sick—’
‘It’s just a…stomach ache.’
‘Bad?’
‘No. It’s okay.’
‘We both ate the same stuff. I’m okay. You didn’t drink any water?’
‘No.’ I move back towards the hotel. ‘I’ll just take it easy for a while.’
He stands by the elegant machine with the death-mark smeared down its face. Brave soldier. You expect a medal?
‘I’ll clean it off then,’ he says. A pause. ‘There’ll be others. They’ll start to come back.’
I turn, holding the glass door, and look at him. Not very long ago I would have taken a scientific view of the phenomenon. Now the structure of objects which compose this scene and have blended into the making of this event seem malevolently organised. I have been too naïve.
I say nothing. I nod, and go inside.
He spends the rest of the day tinkering with the car engine. I sit upstairs pretending to read one of the books, a Koestler theory about synchronicity. I can’t eat in the evening. He has a meal alone at the far end of the room. We make small talk.
The blocked panic inside me makes a pain like acid dammed against nerve endings. I start to see strange objects. There are bits of litter scattered here and there on the carpet. Scraps of paper, wrappers, corks, cellophane glinting in the light, dark marks, shadows, things half-seen under chairs and tables. From the corner of my eyes they change. The carpet is dark green. There are stains. White bits of raw bone. Human segments. A red edge on flesh. An eye knocked from its socket. I can’t look directly. The book trembles. I steady it on the chair arm. The pain has narrowed my range of vision so I can only look ahead, and my spine seems fixed to prevent efforts to move.
He comes and sits opposite, still chewing, and puts his feet up on another chair. The bones and muscles work beneath the surface of his face. He drinks dark red wine. And even jokes about the insect.
‘What if there was only one, eh? And I had to hit it. I mean, kill the only one left!’
He clasps his arms on his chest, holding the stem of the wine glass. His eyes glance at his wrist, then at me, then back at his wrist after a pause. The action is nothing. But it happens at the dangerous corner of my sight. It’s not ordinary. Not at all. I know what he is doing. He can detect my pulse rate from the vein next to the carotid artery in my neck, he’s timing it for sixty seconds by his watch. Abnormal. Extremely abnormal.
Was that really his face in the photograph? The inner muscles slide around deviously. I try to connect the images. He swallows; the face skin goes slack as though hanging from the upper bones of the skull. I remember my own face in the mirror and how something has the power to change what is familiar and remould it beyond recognition.