IRON GODS: PALIMPSEST Excerpt #2
Ashok Banker
4 September 2008, 07:49© ASHOK K. BANKER 2006-08. PLEASE DO NOT COPY, FORWARD, PRINT, OR OTHERWISE PASS ON THIS COPYRIGHTED EXCERPT AS THIS IS A DRAFT IN PROGRESS FROM AN UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPT AND MAY BE MISUSED WITHOUT YOUR KNOWLEDGE. THIS EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT IS MEANT ONLY FOR YOUR PERSONAL READING PLEASURE. THANKS AND BEST WISHES, ASHOK K. BANKER, SEPTEMBER 2008. © ASHOK K. BANKER 2006-08. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
2. WOTS UH THE DEAL
THE CLOUDSWARM
When Santosh saw the black cloud erupting directly from the Jewel itself, in fact, what he was seeing was two separate clouds emerging from the Jewel. From Santosh’s vantage point, at that great distance, they appeared to be a single cloud. The two masses approached the earth close enough together to be indistinguishable from one another, until they reached the earth’s ionosphere. At this point, they punched their way through two tiny holes in that invisible protective shield and passed through in two distinct streams. But when they emerged on the Earthside of the ionosphere, they appeared as a constant series of overlapping waves, which was how Ruth saw them. Not being a quantum physicist, of course, any larger meaning this might have completely escaped her.
One minute and 32 seconds after the cloud reached Earth orbit, it had dispersed its entire volume across the surface of the planet. For those on the ground, the resulting darkening of the sky was more complete than a full solar eclipse, since, unlike an eclipse, the cloud also blocked out the reflected light from the atmosphere that one normally saw from the ground. With no artificial satellites remaining, it was impossible to view the phenomenon from the vantage point of space. However, an observer watching from say, 397,665 kms away, on the surface of the Mon, would have seen the blue-green planet being enveloped by a rippling black chaddar, like a crystal ball being covered by glossy satincloth.
The chaddar seethed with ripples for several moments before settling briefly. Enormous sinkholes began dimpling its surface. To everyone planetside, these manifested as enormous funnel-like formations, tornadoes to Ruth, dervishes to Salim. As the funnels descended, the same hypothetical lunar observer might also have noted that the funnels in the northern hemisphere whirled in a counter-clockwise direction, while those in the southern hemisphere whirled clockwise. Whether this was due to the earth’s coriolis effect, or simply the way the cloudswarm was designed to act, it was impossible to say. But the lunar observer, had she been scientifically knowledgable and equipped with the appropriate equipment, would have been puzzled to note that neither the velocity, acceleration, nor the inward-outward directions of the spin followed the usual vectors; if anything, they defied all known equations that could conceivably be applied under the circumstances. A quantum physicist, had one been accessible to that same observer, might have offered the arguable hypothesis that this could only be explained by the theory that the vortexes were acting according to neither 2-d nor 3-d vectors, but in fact corresponded to a 4-d vector! Which would imply that the vortexes were spinning not only in the three observable dimensions, but in the fourth one, time, as well. What that meant, even the quantum physicist would probably have been hard-pressed to explain.
As the vortexes touched the surface of the planet, all the swirling haze of the cloudmass drained downwards. The black chaddar effectively dissipated, fading from view. But here, a curious thing transpired. Instead of the black cloudswarm settling on the surface, to lie there like a rippling sheet upon the ground, it simply vanished. Two seconds short of nine minutes after the arrival of the two cloudswarms, every last component particle had disappeared from view. As the atomic clock in the Royal Observatory Greenwich in East London marked the time as 5:14:23 GMT, the last particles evaporated like the powdery remains of a staked vampire on an American TV horror show.
Not a trace remained of the cloud, or clouds, or of the tiny flying things that they were made up of. It was as if the entire event had never taken place at all. The sun blazed down on Earth, the rest of the planets and their coteries of satellites danced the perpetual gravity tango, and the Jewel remained suspended in the solar sky, resplendent, opalesque, inscrutable, for another second. Then—blink—the clock showed 5:14:24, and the Jewel too was gone from the sky.
BOMBAY, INDIA
Santosh shivered awake.
Utter blackness engulfed him.
He knew at once where he was. In his cot, in the kholi, back at the chawl.
Home.
He could feel the rickety wooden frame of the cot, the hemp rope webbing digging into his shoulder blades—it had needed replacing for months and he seemed to sink a little deeper into it each night—the rough worn-out covering sheet, the musky fragrance of agarbattis wafting from the puja corner, the mingled odours of talcum powder, mogra flowers, stale beedi smoke, and rancid sweat. It took him a moment to realize that the last was coming from his own body. From the stiff patches in the covering sheet, he could tell that he had sweated into it repeatedly and the sweat had dried out. He never sweated like that, even on the hottest nights of summer when the weather report on Star News channel showed 40 degrees. He must have had fever. He felt his own forehead with the back of his hand as his mother always did, but it felt cool. Maybe he had had fever and it had broken in the night. Or the day before. He couldn’t remember how long he had been sick. His memory was fuzzy. Wasn’t today Ganpati Immersion Day? Or had that already happened?
He pushed the sheet off himself and sat upright. The cot creaked loudly.
Through the soles of his bare feet he could feel the familiar cracks in the cold stone floor. His eyes adjusted to the faint light seeping in through the cracks in the frayed curtain at the tiny barred window and between the jamb and frame of the misaligned partition door that divided the 8×10 kholi into two tiny rooms in which his entire 7 member family lived. He could see the outlines of the sparse worn furniture crammed into the tiny space, and from the shapes of the cots on which his grandfather and uncle slept, and the lack of sounds from the next room, he could tell that he was alone in the kholi. From the bleakness of the light, he guessed that it must be very early morning, perhaps even before sunrise. If that was so, then there should have been a lot of hustle and bustle in the chawl. The BMC water supply ran from 4 to 6 in this locality, and the sound of water gushing, aluminium buckets clanking and the hollow booming of plastic barrels been filled should have been louder than the pounding of his heart, which was all he could hear right now.
His head felt woozy, and he felt vaguely nauseous, as if recovering from a stomach upset. He called out tentatively, “Aai,” and waited several moments. No reply came. He got up finally, took a tentative step or two. His stomach churned briefly, a faint wave of vertigo made him lurch and reach out to grasp the handle of the old Ulhasnagar-Godrej cupboard, and he stood for a moment, waiting for the wave to pass.
He realized he could hear something now. It had been there from the moment he awoke, but he had ignored it at first thinking it to be the perpetual hum of one of the countless earthmovers or other heavy machinery in use at some building site nearby—or one of the never-ending road-digging projects that went on endlessly. His father had joked once, on a Sunday trip to Gateway of India, that the roads of Bombay were paved with gold, that was why the public works departments were always digging them up.
The hum was louder at the doorway. He pushed aside the frail curtain and went out of the kholi. There was a narrow alleyway, some three feet wide, between one row of kholis and the next, and he could see into almost all the kholis on both sides from here itself. Every house seemed to be empty. That was odd. People in the chawl worked all shifts, and there was always someone leaving for work or coming home, or cooking, or cleaning, or fighting, or drinking. And whatever else went on in each house, the TVs were always on. Some people kept their TVs on round the clock, only turning the sound off during the few hours of sleep. He couldn’t remember a time when the chawl had been so empty, so silent.
No, not silent. The humming grew louder as he walked shakily to the end of the alleyway, turned right, passed another two rows of kholis—also empty and silent, not so much as a TV on which was really strange—and stepped out into the large open rectangular space at the heart of the chawl. Here he found the source of the humming and the reason for all the empty houses.
The open space backed into an eight-foot high stone wall at the rear of B.R. Ambedkar chawl, separating it from the bottom of Pali Hill. During festival times, a stage was usually erected against that eight-foot high stone wall, and local politicians stood there and rattled speeches into microphones that gave off awful squeals of feedback in protest, and sometimes, a large screen was erected, and films would be shown. In the past, they had hired real projectors, with those big aluminium cans filled with reels of film, but nowadays, they used DVD players and a digital projection screen. They had shown the new Munnabhai film here the last night of Ganpati, and he and his chawl friends had whistled and cheered raucously as Sunjay Dutt preached Gandhigiri. Santosh’s mother always grumbled about Sunjay Dutt, saying that he was a criminal and how could a criminal-filmstar be spouting Gandhisms was beyond her understanding, but Santosh liked the musclebound droopy-eyed movie star, and took secret pleasure in the knowledge that he lived just around the corner, like so many other film stars and millionaires, in the prestigious Pali Hill area. Santosh had seen him any number of time, driving or being driven past in one of his several plush phoren cars. Apparently, the rest of the chawl liked him as well, for they turned out in record numbers to view the film.
But even that crowd hadn’t been anywhere near as large as the one that was gathered there now. Santosh sucked in his breath, eyes widening with astonishment as he saw the backs of heads of men, women, children, all seated cross-legged on the ground, facing the mandap at the rear. There was no screen there now, no film being projected, no politicians giving boring baashans and spewing spittle, but yet the crowd sat staring in that direction, as transfixed as if they were watching the climax of a really gripping Bollywood film.
He recognized several familiar faces in the crowd as he walked alongside the square, taking care not to step on anyone. He saw the entire More family, Mausi and her sons, the Welkars, the Abrahams, the Siddiquis, the Parker brothers and their chacha with the face disfigured by acid in a workshop accident, divorcee Sheila Joglekar and her teenage daughter that all the young men in the chawl went gaga over—everyone was here. He could even see his mother and sisters, uncle and grandfather, sitting several rows away, towards the front right side of the assembly. He called out to them, but they continued to stare ahead with the same fixed glassy.
Nobody seemed to notice him, or respond to his calls or queries. He couldn’t understand it. What was going on? Was this some kind of prayer meeting? A multi-community peace prayer meeting like the one held in the wake of the train bomb blasts in July? No. There were no mullahs, Catholic priests or Hindu pundits on the stage preaching love and tolerance. But then what was that humming? It was clearly coming from the people seated here, and when he bent to peer closely at a middle-aged man with a barrel belly—drunkard Ashutosh who had lost his job as an office peon two years ago and who mostly sat home and drank and beat his wife, who worked in a bank and supported the whole family—he could see that though the man’s mouth was closed, his adam’s apple was vibrating as if he was humming subvocally. It was like the chanting of ‘Om’ but with the open-mouth first syllable left out—or, it struck him with sudden inspiration—as if they had already chanted the ‘O’ part and were now sustaining the ‘Mmm’ section of the sacred word.
Yes. That was it. The entire 2300-something population of the chawl was seated cross-legged, facing an empty stage and, beyond that, the dark, featureless overgrown rearside of Pali Hill at around 5 a.m. in the morning, chanting ‘Om’ together. The sound was low-pitched but still vibrating deeply enough to tickle his funny bone and make the hair on the nape of his neck prickle. They were all so engrossed in the chanting that none of them could be distracted. Not even the little infants, like tiny Meghaa who was barely a year old. Even the babies were lying in their mother’s laps, staring sideways in the direction of the stage, motionless, their little stubby legs folded securely. He couldn’t see their lips or mouths moving, but as far as he could tell, they were chanting too!And, if he was right, then the entire crowd had sustained the chant for the past several minutes, because since he had awoken, he he hadn’t heard so much as a pause in the reverberating subvocalization. Which would mean that none of them had breathed since then. He had been staring at bevdaabaaz Ashutosh’s face from barely inches away for the past several minutes now, and he hadn’t seen the man move a muscle or twitch a nerve apart from the vibrating adam’s apple in his throat. And this was a drunkard whose face, arms, legs kept twitching, who had a nasty habit of shrugging his shoulders and jerking his head to the right repeatedly, helplessly, all day and night long. He was said to do it even while sleeping, and Santosh’s second-eldest sister who worked as a nurse in a maternity and abortion clinic said it was a sign of brain damage. Ashutosh was stone-still now, alongwith everyone else. And what about the babies? How could babies lie so still, with their eyes wide open, without stirring for so long?
Something about the way they were all sitting, staring westwards, producing that impossibly sustained humming vibration, made his gorge rise.
He turned suddenly, cupping a hand over his mouth. Not wanting to vomit onto Ashutosh—or anyone else, he lurched to the nearest support, the lime-painted brick wall of a kholi. A wave of hot, acid-bitter bile rose up, searing his throat and tonsils, and he bent over, crouching, and began to unburden himself. He felt like he was regurgitating unchewed watana, hard grams that had gone down uncrushed and undigested. It spewed up in a long hot slimy stream, spattering and staining the whitewashed wall.
It took him several moments to realize what exactly he was vomitting out, and when he understood, he tried to shout, in panic, in dread.
Only a choked, gurgling sound issued from his open malodorous mouth.
DESSEN, NEW JERSEY
The last time Ruth had gone on a bender was two summers ago, and she’d had company then.
An impromptu binge while on holiday with Amy in Atlantic City had nearly landed them in deep kaka with a bunch of crackers from Savannah. Said crackers had been pissed off about their overly demonstrative behaviour at the casino bar, which had only made Amy and Ruth get even more in-their-face. As the evening progressed, the crackers had gone from p’d-off to boiling mad to apoplectic, and Amy’s caustic comments, peppered with references like the “Klu Klutz Klan” and “different-but-same-sex marriages” hadn’t helped. She could really get gnarly once she got going, shedding her normally immaculately controlled orientally inscrutable exterior for a bitchin’ lash-tongued let-loose Lucy-Liu-in-Charlie’s-Angels alter ego when she got sloshed.
They had ended up being followed out to the parking lot by the crackers, all five of them weighing no less than 300 pounds apiece clad in full black with oversized silver crosses dangling around their wattled necks. Clearly they had more than affectionate driving on their minds. Even the two women in the group had cracked their knuckles and called out hoarse challenges to ‘you dykes’. Disaster had been narrowly averted by the arrival of Atlantic City PD cruisers, sirens whooping, coordinating a Homeland Security search for some raghead terrorist suspect involved in some new plot to hijack planes in London, UK.
After the vehicle search, which the Georgia crackers unwisely resisted, costing them a hard-jawed talking-to in the back of a DHS van, she and Amy had had the sense to get in their rental Corolla and drive back to the motel, where they collapsed into hapless gelid states, woke up the next afternoon to skull-splitting migraines and ran to puke into the toilet bowl together. ‘Couple that curls together, hurls together,’ Amy had croaked as they sat there on the cold tiled floor, bleary-eyed and wretched. They had laughed like jackasses till their raw throats hurt. After that, Ruth had never let herself take more than the occasional beer or two, and Amy had preferred to stay ‘toxin-free’ as she put it.
Now, she puked herself awake with a stomach-spasming intensity that made the Atlantic City purge seem like a casual hawk and spit. Rolling over onto her side, she managed to direct (most of) the hot putrid effusion toward the floor instead of into the bed. A noxious odour overwhelmed her nostrils, reminding her of the time she had puked out a whole bowl of the spiciest chili she had ever eaten and gotten some up her sinus: everything had smelled of regurgitated chili for the next day or two. She hadn’t eaten chili since. But somehow, this was worse. Her throat constricted as a viscous granular stream forced its way out of her system. She could actually feel the little beads of undigested material as it rushed up through that narrow sheath of flesh. What was that? Porridge? Granola bars? Stale bar peanuts? Where was she anyway? This wasn’t her bed in the trailer. It was…it was…she brought up one last hitching burp, thought that was it for now, sucked in a slow cautious deep breath of relief, and raised her head to glance around blearily.
She was in her father’s house in Dessen. She recognized the old chintz bedcover and paisley curtains, still unchanged since Mum’s passing four years ago. The fuck had she gotten here? She tried to sit up, felt a woodpecker beat a quick one-two on the back of her skull, and lay back, staring up at the wallpapered ceiling. Vague memories came to her in glimpses: her running a high fever, driving down a deserted highway en route here to her father’s place, a memory of sickening nausea, nursing a mug of coffee and staring glumly at a stack of flapjacks at a truckstop in Hoboken, listening to some crackpot on the radio ranting about alien jihadis in the White House—hey, bud, where’ve you been the past decade? We’ve had alien jihadis in the White House for years now! Crunching a handful of Excedrin to get rid of the skull-yammering headache, walking up the driveway to the front door where her father stood backlit by the hall light, air-kissing him and feeling her cheek briefly brush against the shadow of his day’s growth—one of those little things she’d always hated about men, in this room, changing into her old butterfly pj’s, the very ones she had on right now, of tossing and turning in the night with a blazing fever, dad making her sit up and drink water, wiping away her sweat. Those things she remembered, but they were like half-glimpsed images seen on a TV screen in a shopfront when walking past with something else on your mind.
Amy. She also remembered calling Amy. From where, when, and what had followed, she had no idea. She tried hard to focus, to remember more, but when nothing came, she cut her losses and focussed on feeling better.
The nausea passed. After waiting several more minutes for the woodpecker to haul his ass off to another tree, she thought it safe to sit up… slowly.
Miracle. No yammering, nausea, or spinning dizzies.
After another few minutes, she got out of bed. She felt thirsty as hell. She poured herself a glass of water from the jug on the bedside table—it tasted indescribably sweet and cool, and felt wonderful going down, better than a watermelon slushie on a hot summer’s day. She was careful not to drink too much at one time, forcing her hand to put down the two-thirds full glass that her aching throat wanted to consume entirely. Her throat felt like she’d thrown up a bellyful of pellets, or something. She thought of looking at the mess she’d hurled up by the bedside, then thought better of it, and moved toward the door.
The house felt empty. She called out for Pop, had to clear her throat the first time before she could manage more than a croak, but there was no answer.
She stopped on the first floor of the clapboard house, and leaned against the jamb of the window in her father’s room. The room itself looked neat, perfect, as it always did. Her mother had been the messy one, not awful-messy, just normal-messy, but enough to drive her father bananas when he wanted to find something she’d put in the wrong place. Her father was a compulsive neatnik; an ex-Corps man to the core. He wasn’t in the house, and she didn’t think he would have left her alone, unconscious and sick, unless something really important had taken him away. But what was curious was that she was looking out the window of his bedroom now, and she could see most of the street from here. Sure, it was a quiet street, mostly pensioners, several of them marine vets like her dad, but even so, it was unusually quiet for…she checked the bedside clock…for 9:41 a.m. on a weekday. She could see the line of near-identical houses marching down the lane, fronted by their little matchbook-sized front lawns, a few cars parked in driveways, a couple of kids’ bikes on lawns, one of those inflatable rubber pools that she had had when she was little too, and the usual paraphernalia of Jersey suburban hell. But not a living soul.
Exitting the front door, she felt better. The sun was warm and felt good on her face and arms, like she’d been indoors too long and needed the vitamins. Her body worked well enough, though she thought she might have lost a couple of pounds during the illness, and walking down to the street felt good, the blood circulating through her body invigorating her. The headache had vanished, as had the nausea. She felt as if whatever it was, it had left her system with that noxious tripe she had hurled up in the bedroom—speaking of which, she would have to clean that up when she got back.
The street remained stubbornly empty. A soft wind began to stir, rustling a bunch of dried leaves sprawled across someone’s otherwise immaculate front lawn. She glanced up at the windows of houses she passed, expecting at any moment to see a face staring out. But the windows remained as deserted as the street. Not so much as a cycle rolled down the blacktop; she couldn’t hear so much as a radio, TV set, kids. It was starting to get eeiry now. She wondered very briefly if she could possibly be dreaming this, but shook her head slightly, shrugging off the notion. Everything felt too real, the aching muscles in her abdomen from the vomitting, the grainy sensation of that undigested stuff passing up through her oesophagus, the noxious after-stench, the taste of the water she’d sipped, the warm sunlight on her skin, the wind… She had a sudden urge to peel off the top of her pj’s and leap into the inflatable baby pool in the yard to the right, but topless bathing didn’t seem like a particularly good idea on a morning when the entire population of Dessen, NJ, had gone unexpectedly AWOL.
Where could they have gone anyway? She could have checked a few houses, knocked on a few doors, but she had the powerful intuition that she would find only empty homes.
Several moments later, she paused at the end of the lane, unsure whether to go on, or go back. She looked at a car parked in a driveway. It looked dusty, like it hadn’t been washed in a couple of days, and there was a splatter of birdshit right on the driver’s side of the windshield that would have enfuriated Amy if she was driving—Amy needed the windshield to be clean enough to eat off before she would drive a car. Ruth frowned. She recalled the other cars in the lane also looking similarly neglected. And those leaves rustling about that yard—they had been raked up a good two or three days ago, if she guessed correctly, and had been blown around by the wind since then, judging from the state they were in now. Other little hints and signs came together then to form a more complete picture and she thought that was about right: it had been at least two or three days since everyone vanished.
The only question was: Where the hell had they all gone?
The wind blew again, coming to her more forcefully this time, from down the curve of the street, and her feet began to move forward of their own accord. A sound came to her with the wind, a sound that she had heard before, though not in Dessen, New Jersey. Suddenly, she had a notion she might know where the population of the town had gone to, and she began walking faster, then breaking into a loping jog, and finally a brisk sprint. She went around the curve in the lane, and came out into the three-way split that bordered the northern edge of the public field where the townsfolk gathered for their Fourth of July fireworks show each year. It was a squarish ground a bit less than a hundred metres on each side, and could accommodate the town’s 700-something population quite easily. Even a couple hundred more visiting relatives and friends, if they were all seated crosslegged on the turfed ground, packed in close together like a congregation at church.
As they were right now. Staring glassy eyed, and chanting in perfect unison.
BIRMINGHAM, UK
After nearly two hours of alternately trying to rouse people, and waiting around in the hope that they would snap out of the eeiry trance-like state, it finally dawned on Salim that their condition might be more than temporary.
He backed away from the crowd, clasping his hands behind his neck, fingers intertwined, as he did when he was tense or frustrated. He could still spot his family as well as several dozen other familiar faces from the Jewellery district where he worked, the Celebrity Balti Restaurant where he took visiting business associates for meals, and sundry other Brummies from all over—they were peppered throughout the congregration, if you could call it that. He had no idea what this was really: this massive gathering of people sitting literally on the street in front of Selfridges. At first, he’d thought their attention was directed at the exotic futuristic structure of the departmental store, but he had soon realized that their glassy gazes were aimed at a point above and slightly beyond the gleaming speckled dome. He walked around the fringes of the crowd, marvelling at the motivation that had united such a polyglot of religious groups, ages, classes, into one enormous multi-denominational congress. At the same time, he was unnerved by the marbled inscrutability of their features. And what was that reverberating humming or wordless chanting issuing from their throats? It sounded so damnably familiar, and yet he couldn’t quite place it. It definitely wasn’t Islamic, he felt reasonably certain of that. Besides, they were sitting cross-legged on the ground, not on their haunches the way a Mohemmadan Brummie would when offering namaz.
He sighed, frustrated at being unable to dislodge anyone from their rapture, unable to understand why he hadn’t been affected by the same phenomenon. He was also confused, unable to remember exactly why and how he had gotten here. All he knew was that he had woken in a pool of his own vomit, after a series of violent oral ejaculations of copious quantities of some vile brackish effusion that stank to high heaven, to find himself in the back of his brother Majid’s Mercedes van. He had no recollection of how he might have gotten in the van, or what had transpired before that. He had vague recollections of a night spent in delirium, tossing with high fever, and Mumtaz nursing him, of Shariyar’s voice raised in shrill anger, and a Black Sabbath track blasting in the background somewhere—ever since Shariyar had discovered that Birmingham was the birthplace of heavy metal, Brummie groups Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Led Zepellin had become the ear-splitters of choice of their son’s teen angst-ridden existence. Salim wasn’t sure if he preferred this retro-throwback to the headbanger anthems of his own generation to the hip-hop profanities of most other youngsters.
Even as Ozzy belted out War Pigs, evoking memories of Salim’s own not entirely angst-free youth in the backlanes of Redbrick Alley and a brusque encounter with a red-haired whore who gave him syphilis at age 19, Salim had an awareness of something momentous having occurred outside the drawn paisley-print curtains of his suburban bedroom. He was haunted by visions of tornadoes, great black twisters funnelling down to earth, corkscrewing their way with an elemental power that seemed bent on drilling through to China—or his own birthplace, Pakistan, more likely. He had put it down to residual anxiety caused by memories of sightings of the tornadoes that had struck Birmingham in 2005—those had been real enough and historically noted in a country not generally known for that particular breed of natural disaster. But there was something frighteningly immediate about that nightmare—or was it a memory? He had some vestige of memory of something seen much more recently, but each time he tried to focus on it, it kept slipping away, like a fist trying to grasp a wet bar of Lux too tightly. What had happened two, or three days, earlier? Something he had seen or heard outside the mosque, something that happened after the end of namaz…but the harder he tried to remember, the more slippery the memory became.
He realized he was pressing down extremely hard on his own neck. Too hard. Mumtaz had once remarked about this habit, “Self-hanging is also a crime under Shiarat, zaidi.” With an effort, he unlaced his fingers and let his hands slide down the front of his kurta, the yoke of which was still damp. He shivered at the memory of Mumtaz’s voice; that husky quiet tone had been the first thing about her that had attracted him at their first chaperoned meeting in Karachi at her father’s farm-house; with the rest of her concealed by the burqha and veil, that voice had been more than mere auditory accompaniment, it had expressed her entire personality to him. Even today, twenty three years after that first assignation, it was her voice that represented her more tangibly than any visual representation. It was what he called her ‘Scheherezade voice’ in bed. It was unnerving to see her now, sitting crosslegged in the midst of a crowd of strangers in front of Selfridges like a member of some bizarre peace protest, immune to his most energetic attempts to rouse her, this woman who had partnered him for almost the entirety of his adult life. To make it all even more unsettling, she was seated in the thick of what appeared to be a large group of football hooligans, complete with Union Jack-painted faces and bristly crews. It put him in mind of a moment in a terribly violent film named Romper Stomper that he’d viewed a long time ago, about a gang of Australian dot-busters led by a very thin, shaven-headed Russell Crowe in his first featured performance. It was only one of many similarly incongruous groupings in the large congregation laid out before him. Out of sheer curiosity, he had tried tugging at an arm or two, of people on the outer edges of the crowd, and met the same stiff resistence of a corpse, except for an unpleasant burring sensation that had made him drop the limbs in question at once. It was like touching an appliance that had been ineffectively grounded and through which live electricity was flowing—great quantities of electricity. He had no idea what that meant. He hadn’t tried to touch anyone else since.
As he sat in the quite normal and warm sunshine, he became aware of other things that were unnatural, things that he had failed to notice these past two hours since awakening in the van because of his initial disorientation from the vomitting, and the shock at finding his family transformed into these frozen humming things. He didn’t think he had heard any birds since he had regained consciousness. No dogs barking. No vehicles, nor any air traffic at all, even though flights out of the commercial airport surely passed over this locality all the time. He even felt certain that there were no boats traversing the entire length of Birmingham’s 60 kms of navigable canals—yes, more than Venice, as he had grown wearily proud of informing tourist-friends. It was as if all Birmingham had shut down, every single resident gathered in public areas much like this one, frozen into this same glassy-eyed state of mesmerism. He could literallyhear the silence; the birdless and airplane-free skies added its own white noise.
What was worse, he sensed that the phenomenon wasn’t restricted to Birmingham. How could it be? This was something atavistic, beyond the reach of human control, wasn’t it? There was nothing natural about this…unnatural disaster. It was probably the same across this part of the country—or, come to think of it, the whole country. Or even… He shook his head. This line of thought was getting beyond the capacity of a mild-mannered jewellery designer and gem-setter Paki-Brummie from Woodsdale.
He was sitting there, thinking nothing in particular, merely struggling not to surrender to the wholesale panic that was threatening to overwhelm him, barely aware that he was fingering the taveez hanging on the chain around his neck, and subvocalizing a nafl salat for himself and his family, when he heard the sound. Strictly speaking, he ought not have been offering the supererogatory prayer in his current state of pollution; under normal circumstances, he would have been at pains to have performed wudu, or even ghusl preferably. It was a testament to his harried state of mind, and so displaced was he that the sound barely registered on his hearing.
At first, it was barely background noise, almost obscured by the reverberating humming/chanting of the congregation, too low in decibel count to to even be noticed even on a Sunday. He was increasingly absorbed in the nafl salat, his unsettled mind instinctively seeking to soothe his ragged nerves with the comfort of the old ritual. By the time he grew aware of the auditory intrusion, it had risen to the level of a deep nasal whine, not unlike the sound of the engine on the tugboat his third cousin Ashfaque-bhaijaan hired out for goods delivery on the canals.
He started to his feet. Without consciously realizing he was doing it, he turned instinctively to Mecca, as if asking for aid and strength, then sought out the source of the disturbance. It was not hard to find on this sterile street.
He walked slowly towards his brother’s van, the silver vehicle gleaming in the morning sunlight, and his right hand trembled once, as he released the locket with the tiny image of the Ka’bah within, to reach for the van’s handle. The disturbance within grew more agitated, and he could now hear a succession of tiny pinging sounds from inside the van, as if whatever was causing that noise was striking against the interior of the van’s metal walls and door. It was as if something was desperately seeking to get out of the van…or several somethings, for the sound was more an accumulation of numerous miniscule sounds from multiple sources than a single-source sound. It sounded like…what was that word? He had heard or read it somewhere—no, wait, he had heard it used on a documentary he had seen once on insects. It meant the sound of insects buzzing, if he recalled correctly. That was what this sounded like now. As if a small swarm of tiny insects had been trapped within the van and was seeking to free itself.
He grasped the metal handle, feeling a bulb of sweat blister on his forehead and trickle slowly down the side of his face. The sound grew louder, more frenetic, as if the swarm sensed his closeness and their impending release, and he braced himself mentally before throwing open the door.
TOKYO, JAPAN
Yoshi scrabbled backwards on his butt. The smooth polished metal of the subway car aided his flight. He slid back until his back connected with the doorway of the car, where he half-fell, half-twisted and writhed out onto the platform, raising himself to his feet like a clumsy runner at the start of a race. The door hissed shut softly, just as the swarm reached it. They battered themselves against the plexiglass door, raising a succession of pinging sounds, reminding him of the sound of hailstones falling on the roof of the old Subaru his father used to drive back when he was a boy, and on which both he and Yoshi had first learned to drive at the precocious age of 9. Except that these hailstones didn’t just hit the glass and fall down; they kept on flying back and forth, testing the invisible barrier, buzzing around madly.
As he watched, they seemed to grow more frantic, sensing that they were trapped and flew to and fro in a succession of increasingly agitated manoevres. He backed away further, unsure whether or not they could break their way out violently. He tried to focus on the flying objects, squinting to try to see them more clearly. But they were flying too rapidly, and too erratically, and were much too small to be seen clearly with the naked eye. All he could tell was that they were very tiny, perhaps the size of a full stop punctuation mark, and flew under their own power. Each of them seemed independent but they were clearly sentient and could coordinate their movements with the rest of the swarm. Though they behaved similarly to insects, they were clearly artificial, machines of some sort. Nano-machines, to be precise. They buzzed around madly now, swooping en masse from one end of the subway car to another, pinging against the metal walls and glass doors and windows in a search for the way out, but clearly that was all they could do. Still, it was gut-churning, to think that those things had come out of his own innards. If he hadn’t vomitted them up, they would still be in there. He tried to imagine them flying about inside his body and shuddered. That was an image better suited to the films of Takeshi Miike than his own creative imagination.
To divert his mind, he took stock of his surroundings. The car in which he had regained consciousness several moments earlier, and before which he now stood, was a roku-tobira-sha, a typical six door ‘cattle car’, of the new E231-500 EMU series subway trains that had been introduced fairly recently. He knew this because he had had to draw one of them for an issue of ‘Sashi in which the eponymous hero was kicked back in time by an overly aggressive spacetime-eating dinodrone. Glancing around the deserted subway station, eeirily silent and devoid of any sign of human presence, he concluded that he was at a station on the Yamanote Line, which his mother still insisted on calling the Yamate-sen line. At Yoyogi Station, to be precise. The artificial illumination of the underground made it impossible to tell time and he never wore a watch, but the bench seats in the car he had just evacuated were folded up for rush hour, which suggested that it was before 10 a.m. A peculiar rush hour, with not a single soul in sight. He walked a little way down the platform, examining the train to be sure, even calling out tentatively several times: yes, quite definitely, there was nobody here in this place, or at least in any of the eleven cars of the train parked at the station.
When he approached the door of one of the 4 door cars, it refused to open, which was abnormal. But somehow he sensed that ‘normal’ had been suspended and given the day off. Pressing his face against the glass door, which felt cool to his hands and nose and forehead, he saw that the twin LCD monitors above the farside door which usually displayed commercials, news, weather reports and information on the route stops, were both offline, not displaying fuzz but simply blank, switched off.
Several cars down, the tiny nano-insects from his stomach were still pinging against the glass of the car to produce their own tiny metal symphony. The sound made him uneasy. The absence of any other sound filled him with dread.
He began walking toward the exit stairway.
Something told him that sooner or later, those little nano-things would find their way out of the car, and he had no desire to be present when that happened.
Akechi’s first thought was that Tokyo had been attacked by Aleph again. Or Aum Shinrikyo, as they were better known. He might not have thought of the extremist terrorist group at all, if not for the fact that Shoko Asahara, the group’s founder and the mastermind behind the 1995 poison gas attacks, had been executed recently. Under Japanese law, the execution dates of condemned criminals were not made public until after the event, so, like the rest of his countryfolk he had only learned of the terrorist’s execution after it took place.
From the moment of his awakening when he found himself sprawled on the steps leading up to the street from Aoyama-itchome station, this was the first thought that struck him. But he quickly dispelled the notion when he lurched down the steps to find the station itself eeirly deserted. The sight of a unpeopled subway station was too unnerving for him, and he quickly scrabbled back up the stairs. Stepping cautiously past his own pool of stinky vomit, he was started by the odd, buzzsaw sound coming from near his feet. The sight of the black nano-insects detaching themselves from the brackish fluid ejected from his own stomach shocked him into racing up the stairs. He hardly noticed the equally weird emptiness of Aoyama-dori Avenue, normally bustling at this (or any other) time of day, stopping only when he reached Kita-Aoyama’s ginkgo-lined road. He turned himself around, while still walking, once, then yet again, till he was certain that the creepy insects hadn’t followed him. Apparently not. What were those things? He had a vague memory of having encountered them before, somewhere, but couldn’t recall whether that was a real-world incident or one from his own imagination.
He finally calmed down enough to stop for a moment. It was peaceful and quiet here in the shade of the ginkoes, almost unnervingly so with the utter absence of people. Where was everyone? The gingkoes were a tad darker than russet tipped with copper; in another month or so they would be completely golden. He had come here only last November with Tammy, who had oohed and awed at the sight of the golden ginkoes. At one point, she had wanted to know if they could get some gingko seeds—she had heard that they were eminently edible—and Akechi had said: “Not from these.”
“Why not?” she had asked in that Aussie twang that always unfurled his flag. He had grinned back, “Because they’re all male.”
They had been in the throes of a real hot flash, he and Tammy. He remembered saying something vaguely provocative to her and she had come leaping at him, chasing him yelling and yelping all the way to the Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery. They had rolled on the grass, play turning quickly to arousal, oblivious of the group of practising martial arts students, and he had wanted to take her straight to a Love Hotel right then, but she had wagged a finger at him and reminded him that he had promised to show her more of Tokyo than the inside of a hotel room this week.
They had spent the day walking around the Aayoma municipal cemetary. She had heard about the Tokyo foreign cemetary, the gaijin bochi, from her naval veteran grandfather, and wanted to see some of the famous gaijin graves. He pointed out Kanpo notices for endangered graves whose fees had not been paid by families of the deceased—as he walked past those same notices now, he realized that the notices had since expired. She had been thrilled when she found a grave dated 1873, just a year after the cemetary opened. Afterwards, they had sat in Yoyogi koen, in sight of Harajuku Station and Kenzo Tange’s ahead-of-their-time buildings from the ’64 Tokyo Olympics, which she insisted he sketch for her rather than click on her digicam. She had been baffled by the orderly calm in the homeless camps—‘Hoovervilles’ she called them. Later that same evening, they had burned their way through Shibuya, his favourite. After a quick browse through shops lining the narrow creeping uphill streets of Center Gai and the record shops where he often shopped for classic vinyl, they ate at an Izakaya restaurant where she insisted on ordering for herself with hilarious results.
Later, he took her to a small rabu hoteru at Dogenzaka he knew to be clean and decent (no groups, no singles, no crackheads, no s&m paraphernalia) where they spent an intense couple of hours relieving the sexual stress built up over the day. That night, he took her to Crunch, which was off the beaten track for tourists but which he loved for its small, cozy intimacy and Japanese DJs. She was a househead, like himself, which was how they’d met, of course—at Womb where they had both been with friends taking in a really hot new D&B act.
He was past the Shrine garden area, near the site of the planned new sports stadium—Governor Shintaro Ishihara had taken some flak for that proposal—when the buzzing finally intruded on his reverie. He turned to see the small cloudswarm hovering several metres high, not far behind him. When he stopped, it stopped as well. He took a few steps further and it moved with him. He feinted left, then right, and it followed his lead as perfectly as a ballroom dance partner. His own personal nano-cloudswarm, how delightful. He swallowed, suddenly aware of how alone he was, and how exposed. There was a cycle lying nearby and he picked it up without thinking and got on it, almost losing his balance when his calf-leather Italian shoe slipped out of the pedal stirrup, then gained control and began pedalling furiously. As he picked up speed, racing up the deserted tree-lined pathway, he could hear the buzzing follow with mechanical doggedness. “Leave me alone!” he shouted out. “What do you want?” He didn’t expect an answer, but he thought he detected a quizzical note in the buzzing.
He came around a curve, his view blocked by a large banyan tree, and almost crashed the bicycle. Swerving violently, he managed with some effort to get the bike stopped without sending himself flying like one of those jackasses on those TV reality videos. He discovered that the soles of expensive Italian leather shoes were highly unsuitable when used as friction brakes to halt a speeding bicycle. Coming to a halt, he raised a foot to let the cycle drop as he stared at the obstacle that had effected his sudden halt.
The crowd seated crosslegged on Aoyoma koen numbered in the thousands, maybe tens of thousands. All sitting silently, staring at—nothing. He couldn’t see the end of the crowd, but everyone was frozen in some kind of hypnotic trance-like state, mindless despite their open eyes.
Some part of him had already deduced that if the city was as empty as it seemed, the people had to have gone somewhere, gathered some place, and this was as logical a place as any. He took in their glassy, fixed concentration, and their apparent chanting—or were they humming?—as the bicycle crashed to the concrete pathway with a metallic clanking and rattling that was shockingly loud in a world gone deafeningly silent.
Behind him, the buzzing grew louder. His own personal nano-cloudswarm was about to catch up with him, and there was nowhere else left to run.
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Continued In Excerpt 3
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IRON GODS: PALIMPSEST Excerpt #1 IRON GODS: PALIMPSEST Excerpt #3
