The metaphor was imperfect; the real process was neither as simple nor as passive as that. But it did include a hint of one potential pitfalclass="underline" a thousand acts of illumination from the same direction would reveal no more detail than a single flash. Nasim and her colleagues did not understand the process well enough to know in advance which images would be freshly revelatory and which would tell them nothing new. The only solution was to throw so many different scenes at him that the unavoidable dilution of their effectiveness would be overcome by sheer force of numbers.
Martin caught himself being distracted by these meta-thoughts and forced himself to attend more closely to the images themselves. Two boys in a parched rural landscape prodded an ants’ nest with a stick as their dog looked on dubiously. Two tearful women embraced on the steps of a courthouse. A drunken youth swung a punch at another man outside a nightclub while a woman sitting awkwardly on the pavement looked up at them, scowling. Martin struggled to keep his eyes open; he succeeded, but it felt like a superhuman task. A frail-looking child rode alone on a merry-go-round, seated on the back of a red horse with a garish green saddle. An elderly woman gazed sadly at a framed black-and-white portrait of a uniformed man. It was like being trapped in a never-ending Benetton advertisement. Martin thought about the contents of his freezer; Rana had brought them a meal the night before, and if he bought two more frozen meals on his way home he’d be fine until the weekend. Then he and Javeed could go to the bazaar together, and cook something in the afternoon. He loved chopping fresh dill; the scent was exhilarating.
Nasim said, ‘Martin, we’re taking you out.’
The goggles went blank; Martin waited for the servo to withdraw him from the scanner.
When his face was uncovered he sat up and turned to Nasim. He said, ‘I’m sorry, I know I lost focus. I didn’t get much sleep last night; maybe I just need some more coffee.’
‘I don’t think coffee will do it,’ Nasim replied. ‘Even when you’re attentive we’re getting nothing useful now. The rate’s been trailing off for days.’
Martin felt a chill of fear. ‘You’re not giving up?’
‘No, of course not!’ Nasim sighed. ‘This is my fault; I should have been on top of this sooner, but I’ve been a bit distracted by the inquisition.’
Apparently the investigation into Zendegi’s breach had been generating resentment and discontent among the staff; Bahador had made some acerbic comments about a return to Khomeini-era paranoia the last time he’d bumped into Martin.
‘We’ve pushed the current methods about as far as we can,’ Nasim continued, ‘but that’s not the end of it; it just means we have to change tack.’
Martin said, ‘Okay – but how close is the Proxy to completion right now?’
‘It’s improved a lot over the last few weeks,’ Nasim assured him. ‘Quantitatively, statistically, we can show that. But at this point it’s not…’
‘Foster parent material?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘What about mind-the-kid-while-I-duck-into-the-shops material?’
Nasim smiled uneasily. ‘We’ve got some way to go, but I’m not discouraged. We always knew this wasn’t going to be easy.’ Martin appreciated the way she declined to point out that she’d originally told him it would be impossible.
‘Is there still a chance we could complete this in six months?’ he asked. ‘If you find a new approach, that might even be faster than the old one, mightn’t it?’
Nasim didn’t answer him directly. ‘Give me a few days,’ she said. ‘Take a break from the scanner. I’ll talk to the people at Eikonometrics who’ve been working on some other side-loading projects. Between us, I’m sure we can come up with a better way to pick your brains.’
‘We won’t want the books!’ The man, Reza, laughed as incredulously as if Martin had offered him a good deal on a blacksmith’s forge. ‘We’ll take over the lease, but forget about the stock and the business. We want to use this space for a gym.’
Martin resisted the urge to throw Reza’s derisive laughter back at him. ‘A gym? Here?’ He gestured at the shop’s display windows stretching from floor to ceiling, just centimetres back from the pavement packed with pedestrians and motorbikes.
‘Exactly!’ Reza replied enthusiastically, as if Martin had been congratulating him on his visionary plans. ‘We’re taking more space upstairs and next door, but we need this place for the windows. We put the hot women just behind the glass. Free advertising.’
Women exercising, on display on Enqelab Avenue. Reza must have caught the hint of scepticism on Martin’s face, if not the undertone of dismay, because he declared with cheerful optimism, ‘This is a new country. Anything is possible.’
They used the real estate agent’s website to organise the transfer of the lease. Martin had three weeks to vacate the premises.
When Reza left, Martin put an advertisement online for his print-on-demand machine, then emailed the three students who’d worked for him in the past, to see if any of them could come in and do shifts for the closing down sale. He composed some posters on the office computer, then printed out versions proclaiming fifty, seventy-five, and ninety per cent off. He taped the first set to the windows.
Then he found an empty packing box and took it to the English language section. Javeed would have ten million electronic books to choose from, but Martin still wanted to pass on something from his own century. From the novels he picked out The Grapes of Wrath, Animal Farm, Catch-22, and Slaughterhouse-Five; from non-fiction, The Diary of Anne Frank, Down and Out in Paris and London, and The Gulag Archipelago. He was tempted to go on and fill the box to its rim, but once he started fretting over omissions he knew there’d be no end to it. Javeed wasn’t going to a desert island, and the weightier Martin made this package, the greater the risk that actually reading the books would seem like a daunting or oppressive prospect.
Would the Proxy have anything worthwhile to say about these works? Martin wasn’t sure that he remembered enough himself to discuss them in any detail. But anyone risked seeming like a lightweight to a teenager who’d just read Solzhenitsyn; it would be absurd to set the bar too high. Martin would be satisfied if the Proxy could share a laugh with Javeed at the mention of Major Major or Milo Minderbinder and bluff his way convincingly through the rest.
He stood by the sales counter and looked around the shop; in a strange symmetry, it had begun to smell of wood and glue, the way it had smelled when the carpenters had first been putting in the shelves.
Was there anything else he should set aside? He already had Mahnoosh’s bookshelf at home, stacked with her favourite works in Farsi; he wouldn’t know what to add to that. He taped up the box and wrote Javeed’s name on it in big letters, to be sure it wouldn’t get thrown out by mistake if something happened to him suddenly.
As he was putting the packing tape back in the storeroom, his notepad chimed.
The message from Nasim read: I think we’ve found something worth trying.
‘Martin, this is Dr Zahedi.’ Nasim stepped aside so they could shake hands.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ Martin said. His mouth was dry. Nasim had answered most of his questions on the phone, but he was still feeling anxious.
Dr Zahedi gestured at a chair in the corner of the MRI room, partly hidden behind a movable screen. ‘Take a seat, please,’ she said.
Nasim said, ‘I’ll give you some privacy.’