The Abrupt Physics of Dying Read online

  ‘No papers,’ said the attendant.

  Of course they had nothing. No address, no identity cards. They didn’t even exist as far as the government was concerned. The woman was sobbing now, trying to pull her son from Clay’s arms. She wanted to leave. Clay tried to calm her but every time he spoke, she only shrieked louder. Mohamed was awake now, just, moaning softly for his mother. Everyone was watching. The soldier was standing, moving towards them. Clay could feel the situation unravelling. He hefted the boy up onto his hip and slammed his right fist down hard on the desk. The attendant backed away, glanced past Clay at the approaching soldier, then put the pen on the desk, pushed the papers aside, flopped back into his chair and crossed his arms. The oily face creased open to reveal a mouthful of straight yellow teeth. The bastard was smiling.

  Something deep inside Clay ruptured. He could feel it go, like a ligament tearing from bone. Clay hoisted the boy over his shoulder, grabbed the woman by the forearm and before she or the attendant could react he wheeled left and strode past the desk and led her through the double doors and into the bowels of the hospital.

  The hallway was long and poorly lit, every third overhead light tube dead, half of the rest flickering and buzzing, the tile floor wet in places, as if it had just been randomly mopped. An orderly in a sick-green smock looked up as they passed, a burning cigarette dangling from his mouth. They were halfway down the main corridor, past a couple of sidelined gantries, when he heard the shouting. He glanced back over his shoulder. The attendant was standing at the end of the corridor, one hand bracing open the door, pointing. The orderly paid no attention, kept smoking. A moment later the soldier appeared and the pair started down the hallway. Clay quickened his pace, dragging the woman behind. The attendant and the soldier were running now, their footfall echoing along the tile, gaining ground, pushing past green-clad staff emerged from doorways, peering left and right.

  Up ahead another set of double doors and on the right an alcove, a sign, someone’s name. Clay turned into the alcove and flung open the door. It was a consultation room. Small. A window onto the courtyard. An elderly patient in a greying hospital gown was sitting on the edge of an examination table, bony legs and darkly tanned feet dangling free, a man in a white lab coat pushing a tongue depressor into his mouth. Both men looked up as Clay burst in, frozen in the act, open-mouthed.

  Clay pulled the woman into the office, closed and locked the door, laid Mohamed on the examination table next to the old man. Mohamed’s mother went immediately to her son’s side and bent over him, wiping his brow, whispering to him. Neither man said a word, just stood there gaping at him as if he’d just shown up in the Masjid Al-Haram battle bloody and carrying an R4.

  ‘Are you a doctor?’ Clay asked the man in the white coat.

  ‘I am,’ replied the man in English, glancing at the boy. ‘And this is my office. You have intruded on a private examination. You must leave immediately. Make an appointment at admissions.’ He spoke fluently, with an accent that sounded Lebanese, Egyptian perhaps.

  Clay knew he didn’t have long. ‘I’m sorry, doctor, but this is an emergency. This boy is very sick. These people are poor, they have no identification, no way of completing the paperwork. Please, have a look at him. I can …’

  A sharp rap on the door cut him short, voices from the other side throwing agitated Arabic. The doctor looked at Clay through narrowed eyes. He had a dark moustache and brown heavily lidded eyes underscored by dark circles. He looked weary. ‘There are many poor here, many who do not have papers. There are procedures. You must leave.’

  Clay looked over at Mohamed, his mother weeping silently. The banging on the door was louder now, insistent flat-palmed hammering. He took a deep breath, then took the doctor by the elbow, guided him to the far side of the room, hemmed him into the corner. Clay leaned in close, towering over the man, and still holding his elbow, said into his ear: ‘Look, any minute the Army is going to come in here and take me away. Please, I’m begging you, examine the boy.’

  Clay reached into his trouser pocket and pressed three hundred-dollar bills into the man’s hand, two week’s wages, more. The doctor opened his hand, looked down at the money, up at Clay, blinked twice, then nodded.

  ‘Thank you,’ Clay said, releasing the doctor’s elbow and backing away. ‘His name is Mohamed, from Al Urush. Please make sure they get home safely afterwards.’ Then he turned and walked to the door and unlocked the bolt and pulled it open. The attendant and two soldiers almost fell in on top of him. ‘Hello gents,’ he said.

  Two hours later he reached Idim and the pass up to the plateau. Still buzzing from the encounter at the hospital, he drove almost without thinking, without registering the road, the miles slipping away unnoticed, as if they had never existed. All it had taken was money. After a few tense minutes, marched out to the back of the hospital to stand under the sun in the dirt, squadrons of flies swarming around overflowing bins of medical waste, the attendant and the two soldiers had accepted a fifty each.

  The events of the past days played like a dream before his eyes, a waking nightmare where nothing is resolved, where every fragment of clarity loops back on itself and is lost. It took him most of the rest of the day to reach the turnoff from the trunk road, and another hour to find the track that led off towards the hidden wadi. He stopped the car, turned off the engine, and stepped down onto the pulverised gravel. The engine tapped in the heat. Far to the west, a tendril of purple dust rose oblique into the sky, a vehicle tracking towards Marib. Otherwise the horizon was an empty, shimmering mirage. He waited, scanning the plateau for any sign he was being followed, the flat stone strewn uplands, the hogback mesas, the thermal blur of the edge of the world, but there was nothing, no one.

  He climbed back into the Land Cruiser, kept to the trunk road, watching the odometer click over. Ten kilometres on, he pulled over, climbed up onto the roof rack and scanned the horizon through binoculars. Stone, heat, sand. He jumped down to the ground, turned the vehicle around and sped back towards the track.

  By the time he came to the maw of the canyon, the cliff tops were glowing with the last of the day’s light. He left the Land Cruiser and made his way through the narrowing defile, everything darkening quickly now, familiar. Adrenaline surged into his system. Every sense tingled. He was walking point again. At any moment he would hear the sonic tear of bullets, the crash of gunfire. He found the opening in the rockslide and started to thread his way through the labyrinth, moving by feel and memory in the gloom. Twice he dead-ended and had to backtrack, slithering along the rough sandstone surfaces, twisting around corners, finding the route again.

  When he finally emerged, the first stars were shining in a moonless sky. He stood in the wadi floor, just below the ledge where he and Abdulkader had spent the night, where he had last seen him, and listened to the silence of the whispering cliffs. He was about to move down-wadi when a sound broke the quiet, a tap, a scratch. He froze, listened. There it was again, more like crunching, footfall, perhaps. He swivelled his head, tried to triangulate. Again, tap. It was coming from the ledge. Someone was up there.

  Clay moved across the sand of the wadi floor towards the canyon wall, heel to toe, as quietly as he could. The noise had stopped. He waited for a long time at the base of the ledge, straining to hear over the surging blood in his veins. Nothing. Then he crept up to the ledge and peered over the lip.

  The fire ring was gone, the ashes swept away. A desert pigeon pecked at the rock. He could just make out the noise it made, the little taps of its beak against the sandstone. Clay looked up at the concave overhang, the inside of a curling wave. Any sound made here on the ledge was gathered and projected back down into the wadi below. Al Shams had heard every word he and Abdulkader had exchanged that night. He had heard them plotting escape, heard Clay’s accusations, his blaspheming. Clay shivered, so close to oblivion again.

  Clay continued down wadi, knowing now that Al Shams was long gone. Fifty metres on he reached a clutch
of ancient stunted trees, a spring welling from a fissure in the base of the cliff, traces of a camp nestled there. Flattened shoals of sand and a partially burnt tree limb stumped into a blackened fire pit were the only testaments to recent occupation.

  It was gone nine when he reached the Land Cruiser. He opened the driver’s side door and reached into the vehicle to retrieve his water bottle. Standing in the glow of the interior light, he took a long drink, wet a corner of his headcloth and dabbed at the scrapes and cuts on his arms and legs. He had just rinsed the cloth when something hard jabbed into his back.

  ‘Do not turn around.’

  Clay froze, heart hammering.

  ‘You were followed.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I was careful.’

  ‘The PSO followed you.’ He knew the voice, the diction. ‘I followed them.’

  Jesus Christ.

  ‘Why did you return?’

  ‘To find my friend, ask for his release. He is a good man. He does not deserve this.’

  The object jammed harder into his back. ‘Only Allah decides what we deserve.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘You delivered our message.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And now you have seen the evil.’

  ‘At Al Urush, yes.’

  ‘The boy, Mohamed. You are his friend.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘Of course. What afflicts him?’

  ‘It’s some kind of disease. An illness.’

  ‘Our people are being poisoned.’

  ‘I think …’ Clay stopped himself, filled his lungs, exhaled long.

  ‘You think it’s from the CPF.’

  ‘That is what you must determine.’

  ‘I have done what you asked. Let Abdulkader go.’

  ‘I must know the truth. You must help us.’

  Clay pivoted on one foot but a firm hand grabbed his shoulder before he could turn and face his assailant. He steadied himself against the car door. Suddenly he felt very tired. ‘We had an agreement.’

  The pressure in his back was gone, the hand removed. He could hear footsteps in the sand moving away.

  ‘Turn around.’ Al Shams was alone, a carved walking stick at his side. ‘You are trained, you are a scientist, so you told me the first time we met. You must find the truth. We cannot protect ourselves if we do not know what is happening.’

  Clay looked up at the night sky and back at the misshapen face. ‘It’s going to take time. Dozens of air and water samples, chemical analysis. And money. Thousands of dollars in lab work alone.’

  Al Shams stood unmoving. ‘Then you must begin now. But do it quickly, Mister Claymore. You have until the moon is new. Eight days, no more. When you have the answers we need, go to Al Bawazir, find the young chief there. He is my nephew. He will give you instructions. But I warn you, if you bring the Army or the PSO, it will end very badly for your friend.’

  ‘You’re not listening to me, god damn you. It can’t be done. Not in a week. The company won’t have it.’

  Al Shams sighed and shook his head. ‘We each have our concerns, our priorities. You have yours, I have mine. My duty is to the people of the Masila. You have seen with your own eyes the tragedy that befalls them. Without knowing the cause of this illness, we are powerless to protect ourselves. No one else can help us. I will do what I must, Mister Clay.’

  ‘Like killing Thierry Champard.’

  ‘I have only one eye, Mister Claymore, but you are blind.’

  Clay baulked, stepped back. ‘Abdulkader is one of your own people, for god’s sake.’

  ‘That makes his complicity worse.’ Al Shams sighed and stepped back into star shadow.

  ‘Do you know what I think?’

  ‘Go on, Mister Claymore. Be frank.’

  Clay was shaking now, the words coming on their own. ‘I think you’re a fucking hypocrite. You talk about caring, about justice. All I see is kidnapping, murder, and greed.’

  Al Shams drew a dollar symbol in the sand with his stick. ‘Greed.’

  ‘You want the oil money. That’s what this is about.’

  Al Shams looked down at the ground, erased the symbol with his sandalled foot.

  ‘Do you know Sharia law, Mister Claymore?’

  Clay nodded.

  ‘From those who take, something is taken.’ Al Shams looked up to the sky. Then he reached into the satchel at his side, pulled out a small bundle of rough cloth and tossed it to Clay.

  Clay caught it with both hands. ‘What’s this?’

  Al Shams said nothing, just stood staring at him with that dark eye. Clay folded back the sack cloth, damp and tacky in his fingers. A stale odour flooded his nostrils. It was a human hand, withered and dark, crisped into a half-formed fist, severed at the wrist.

  Clay let out a groan and dropped the hand into the sand. He looked down at Abdulkader’s silver ring. For a moment he stood, unable to breathe, leaning against the side of the car, trying to process this information. Rage rose in his chest. He stood to his full height and moved towards Al Shams, fists closing. ‘You bastard,’ he shouted, closing on the Arab, crouching into an attack stance. He was within striking distance when Al Shams levelled a pistol at his abdomen.

  ‘Please, Mister Claymore. You are no good to me, or to your friend, dead.’

  Clay jerked to a stop and stood fists clenched, the straight right kick to the torso now just an imagined echo. ‘You’d do it, wouldn’t you, you heartless bastard. You’d kill him. Maybe you already have.’

  Al Shams moved back further into shadow and lowered the weapon. He stood for a moment, there beneath the cliff tops, a grey shape in the darkness. ‘One man’s life is nothing. Not yours, nor mine. Eight days, Mister Claymore.’ And then he was gone, vanished into the rock itself.

  The Rest of Your Life

  The next day, Clay stood at the edge of a cluster of brown mud huts huddled against the cliffs and looked down into the gaping sinkhole in the limestone caprock, the dark surface of the water ten metres below: the ghayl at Al Bawazir. Above, an empty sky stretched away to the edges of the universe. Looking up, he could almost feel eternity.

  Beside him stood the chief of Al Bawazir, the same man who had spoken from the back of the room during the audience with the mashayikh two days ago, the mashayikh’s son, Al Shams’ nephew. He was dressed in the same flowing white robes as before. Close up he looked much younger than Clay remembered, late twenties perhaps, his face almost girlish, with razor cheekbones, dark eyes and thick black lashes. ‘You have been speaking with my father,’ he said in near-perfect English, his voice deep, almost musical.

  Clay nodded.

  The chief’s eyes flashed. ‘My father is a fool. Do not interpret his weakness as mine.’

  Clay said nothing.

  ‘My allegiance is only to those who fill my hands with silver coins …’

  Clay looked at the chief, a question.

  ‘An old Yemeni verse. My country will never progress so long as it sells itself to the highest bidder. We must stop fighting each other and turn our energies to the true path. Only then can we take back our country.’

  ‘You speak like your uncle.’

  ‘I have many uncles.’

  Clay paused, looked into the man’s eyes. ‘I meant the one who is threatening to kill my friend.’

  The chief looked up at the sky. ‘I agree with his aims, not his methods.’

  ‘Then help me,’ said Clay. ‘Ask him to release my friend.’

  The chief turned and faced him. His dark eyes reflected the water below, ripples of sky. ‘It seems we need each other. My village, my family, are also threatened with this poisoning. Help me to protect them, and I promise to do what I can for your friend.’

  Clay didn’t have many options, and he needed allies. He offered his hand.

  The chief blinked twice, shook Clay’s hand. His grip was strong, sure. ‘Inshallah,’ he said.

  Yes. God willing. It could be no other way. Like so much
in this place, even trust was subject to divine approval, and, as so often happened, instant and random repudiation. What else could it be in a country that, until the year Clay was born, was known as the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen: the Kingdom that depends on God?

  The chief extended a long finger towards the ghayl below. ‘Look. The water in the ghayl has fallen. You can see from the lines on the rock. The old men say never has it been this low. It began falling after the new oil well was drilled.’ He pointed up towards the escarpment and the plateau beyond. ‘There, at the CPF, near to the wadi. We have seen it.’

  Clay rubbed his thumb over the embossed calligraphy of the ring weighing on the baby finger of his right hand. ‘Who has seen it?’

  ‘My son.’

  Clay hadn’t heard about any oil discoveries at the CPF itself. The facility had been positioned midway between the two original fields, Kamar and Haya, over 150 kilometres apart. The new discovery, the one that was driving the expansion, was even further away. He doubted the man’s son could have seen anything. The plant itself was locked down, heavily guarded, ringed by electric fences and barbed wire. Locals were strictly forbidden anywhere near. Even he, a contractor, had been allowed access only once, early in the development programme last year. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘He has seen the drill.’

  ‘It must have been an exploration well.’

  ‘No,’ said the chief. ‘There is a pipeline to the well now, a generator.’

  ‘How did he see this?’

  ‘He is a small boy, but strong. He has found a way through the fence, near the Bedou well in Wadi Urush, close to the facility.’ The chief motioned towards the ghayl. ‘Fa’ddar,’ he said. Please. Clay thought now how much he looked like Al Shams, how Al Shams might have looked if God had been kinder.

  Clay descended the steep, time-worn track down to the water, the steps hewn from the rock, worn concave smooth by the feet of generations. He reached a wide, flat ledge where the trail ended. The porous cave-ridden walls of the sinkhole were stained black from this point down to the water level more than a metre below, like exposed rock at low tide. He tied a length of rope to a bailer and dropped it into the water, retrieved it full.