The Abrupt Physics of Dying Read online

  Clay stood and walked to the secretary’s desk. A bone-thin man with a black moustache hunched over a yellowing 1980s keyboard.

  ‘Please tell Ali that it’s urgent.’

  ‘Mister Jabr not to disturb,’ said the man.

  ‘Please. Very important.’

  The man picked up the phone, turned a single number on the rotary dial, spoke into the receiver, paused to listen, and replaced the handset in the cradle.

  ‘Wait,’ he said.

  Zdravko could show up at any time. Perhaps he was already here, climbing the stairs, walking down the yellowing corridor. He was surprised Zdravko hadn’t figured it out already. Not too bright.

  Clay turned and walked across the waiting room and opened the office door. Three men in business suits sat examining a chart spread across Ali’s desk. They spun around in their chairs to face him.

  Ali stood and stared, eyes red and bulging. The secretary yelled something in Arabic. Clay kicked the door closed behind him and marched to the desk. ‘I need to speak with you, Ali. Now.’

  ‘Excuse, gentlemen.’ Ali walked over and took him by the arm, guiding him out of the office. ‘Doctor, please,’ he whispered. ‘I have good business here.’

  ‘I don’t have much time.’

  Ali closed the office door and waved the secretary from the waiting room. They were alone.

  ‘The water at Al Urush is being poisoned Ali. It’s ugly – dead and dying children, miscarriages.’

  ‘What is the cause?’

  ‘Produced water discharge at the CPF.’

  ‘Salt does not make people ill.’

  ‘What is causing the illness is coming with the salt.’

  ‘Oil?’

  ‘Look, I’m not sure. Could be heavy metals, carcinogenic organics like benzene, I’m not sure yet.’

  Ali coughed and looked up at Clay. ‘How can this be?’

  ‘A whole range of compounds can exist naturally within oil reservoirs, deep in the ground. They come out with the oil and the produced water, concentrate by evaporation and other processes. You can see it in the data I’ve collected. I don’t have time to go into the technical details.’ Clay reached into the breast pocket of his jacket, pulled out the addressed sheaf of notebook pages. ‘It’s all in here, Ali. Read the report I gave you too, read it carefully.’

  Ali pressed his palms together and raised his hands to his mouth. He looked like a Christian child saying his prayers. Ali glanced back at the office door. Sweat beaded on his forehead. A drop ran along one of the deep fissures that framed his mouth and fell to the floor.

  ‘Please, Doctor. You must leave now.’

  ‘Do you understand what I’m saying, Ali? People are dying.’

  ‘Please Doctor, this is for the Health Department. There is a disease, a fever.’

  Clay grabbed Ali by the shoulders. ‘No, Ali. Not disease. Not fever.’

  Ali shook his head. ‘No. No. Please go. Do not come back. This is closed, finished.’ Ali reached for the phone.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I must.’ Ali started dialling.

  Clay put his hand over the phone, killed the line. ‘Please, Ali.’

  Ali stood with the receiver to his ear. A river of fear ran in his eyes, thick and deep. ‘I must.’

  ‘Give me five minutes at least.’

  Ali nodded.

  Clay shouldered his bag and walked to the door. ‘These are your people, Ali. Don’t forget that. They need your help.’ And then he turned away and double paced down the corridor to the far wing of the building and down the back fire escape into the alleyway.

  The back streets of Aden steamed under a tropic sun. He threaded his way through the turbulence of the suq, spices swirling in the thickened atmosphere, children’s clothes flapping on hangers from overhead cables, a river of people, him separate, foreign, just one more particle swimming in the disorder.

  The Air Egypt office was just off Nasser Avenue, not far from the 25th October roundabout. AC units hummed like dripping hives studded across the back of the building. The rear service door was ajar. Inside, it was dark and cold. He made his way through the back offices and emerged into the marble foyer. A uniformed agent sat behind the counter working at a computer terminal. The agent looked up and rocked back in his chair. Clay could feel the man’s gaze tracing over the cuts on his face.

  ‘We …’ the agent began, and fell silent. ‘We are closed.’

  Clay looked at his watch and then walked to the front door, pulled it open, glanced deliberately at the opening hours sign on the front window, closed the door again and walked back to the counter. ‘I fell, that’s all.’ Clay ran his hands across his face. Plasma smeared his fingertips, the colour and viscosity of mineral oil. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the last of his cash. ‘I need a ticket to Cairo.’

  The agent tapped on the keyboard. ‘Next flight in six hours.’

  ‘Fine.’ Clay sat in one of the chairs provided for customers and watched the man flick the keys, scan the monitor. He hunched down, back to the windows, feeling the traffic flow past, the eyes looking in. He still couldn’t quite believe that Ali had picked up the phone, dialled the number. Right until that moment he had been sure that Ali, in the end, would come through. He was naïve. What a joke, after all this time. And now they were out there, and they were looking for him – Zdravko, the Ministry of Oil, the PSO, any of them, all of them for Christ’s sake.

  He watched the agent type his name into the keyboard. In a few hours he could be out – he was pretty sure that Zdravko would be watching the airport, but the PSO would be glad to see him go. Even Zdravko wasn’t stupid enough to try to take him out in the airport itself, with so many soldiers and security people around. All he had to do was get there. He had done what Al Shams had asked. He’d determined the source of the illness, if not the precise nature of the cause. All the data he’d managed to collect was included in the report he’d submitted to the authorities. It was their responsibility, not his. He’d call Rania from the airport, dictate the information to her. She’d get the piece published tomorrow, the day of the new moon. Al Shams would hear of it, he was sure of it, and Abdulkader would be released. There was nothing more he could do. He was done fighting.

  The agent pulled a docket from a drawer and started to write out a ticket by hand. ‘That will be 850 US dollars.’

  Clay started to peel off the bills, lay them on the counter, so normal now, a hundred, automatic almost, two hundred, buy your way out, three, buy their acquiescence, four, their cooperation, four-fifty, their silence. He stopped, his fist tightening around the wad of cash. Their end. He stood. His whole body was shaking, from the qat, the booze, the fear, the recognition of what he was doing, what he had become. He looked down at the agent, at the ticket now complete and sitting on the counter next to the bills. Then he grabbed the cash, crumpled it in his hand, drove it down into his pocket, and walked through to the back of the office and out the way he had come.

  Clay jumped in a taxi and sank down low in the seat, his keffiyeh wrapped around his face. He asked the driver to take him to an old corner of the city on the other side of the crater, where the buildings hung onto the side of the volcano with fingernail foundations, a slum of steaming alleyways and sagging cables. Within the warren of narrow streets he found one of the cheap local hotels, booked in, paid cash, gave a false name. He bolted and chained the door, flicked on the ceiling fan, threw his pack on the bed and pulled the last bottle of vodka from his duffel bag. He threw open the wood-frame window and stood looking out over the harbour.

  Ali was a good man, but Clay had pushed him past his limit. People were creatures of physics, nothing more. Each man had his threshold, each woman her breaking point. The fundamental laws of cause and effect were absolute. Action and reaction. Pull the trigger, fire the gun. The SWAPO bullet that had torn through Eben’s head had taken away part of his brain. ‘Vrek, broer. Leave him be,’ the old parabats had sa
id, the ones who had seen it before. ‘He’d thank you.’ But Eben had lived because Clay had helped stretcher him back to the chana, put him on the Puma. And now for Abdulkader to live, Clay had to act. It wouldn’t help Mohamed, but perhaps if he could find the cause of this, Al Urush could recover to mourn its dead, and one day he might be welcomed back in Yemen to do good and real work like he had wanted to do before he had been swallowed up by the irreversibility that makes people what they are.

  He picked up the phone and spoke with the operator. Were the lines to the North still open? He recited the number slowly in Arabic. The ancient Yemeni telephone line hissed and cracked.

  ‘Allo,’ she answered in the French way, as a question.

  ‘Rania, it’s me.’

  ‘I told you, Claymore. Do not. Please. ‘

  ‘Look Rania, I don’t have much time. Mohamed, that little boy I told you about, he’s …’ Clay steadied himself. ‘He’s dead. Others besides. I’ve gone to the regulators, but they don’t want to know. I’ve been sacked. I need your help, Rania. Please.’

  The line went quiet. After a while she said: ‘I am so sorry, Claymore, about the boy.’

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘The situation is very bad here,’ she said. ‘The government speaks of nothing but war. The whole country is about to explode.’

  ‘My time’s up, Rania. I need you to write that story. Tonight. If you don’t, Abdulkader dies.’

  Silence on the end of the line.

  ‘I have all the data with me. It’s the water, Rania, like I thought. It’s being poisoned somehow. I’m not sure how, exactly, or by what, but the people need to know. All you have to do is write it. Say “investigations are ongoing” or something like that, so Al Shams knows I’m still working on it. He’ll understand.’

  ‘No, Clay. Even if there was time to get something out in tomorrow’s run, which there is not, my editor in Paris would never accept the story. There is not enough in it.’

  ‘Include the massacre, then.’

  ‘We already discussed that, Clay. I cannot.’

  Clay tried to breathe, concentrated hard. The old line hissed empty between them.

  ‘There is one way,’ she said finally.

  Clay waited for her to continue, swallowed hard.

  ‘I know the editor of the Yemen Times, here in Sana’a. He is a good friend. I might be able to get something in with him.’

  ‘That would do it, Rania.’

  ‘I will do my best, Clay. But I cannot promise. You understand?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Our best chance would be if you could meet him – the editor, I mean. You could explain the situation, tell him what you have seen.’ Another pause. She was thinking it through. ‘The border could close at any time.’

  He didn’t have a vehicle. Taxi would be his only option. He looked at his watch. Curfew was already down. ‘Meet me at Dhamar, halfway. I’ll be in the lobby of the al-Dhubay Hotel tomorrow morning. I should be there by ten.’

  ‘Dhamar,’ she said. ‘Oui.’

  ‘I like it when you say that.’

  Could he hear her smile, just for an instant?

  ‘Oh and Clay,’ she breathed down the line. ‘Bring the photos.’

  He put down the phone and stood by the window for a long time, looking out across the bay, watching the ships swing at anchor, their lights coming on one by one as night fell. A pair of jet fighters streaked low across the bay, east to west, navigation lights blinking. Clay watched as they climbed away into the distance, the moon almost gone now, the unlit side grey and cold, the faintest rim of light kissing its edge like the hope of day. He drank, thought about Rania, about Eben, about little Mohamed, about what a mess he’d made of his life. After a while he lay on his back on the single bed, fully dressed, and folded his hands across his chest and closed his eyes and listened to the sounds of the city.

  She was running along the beach in that bikini he had first seen her in, breasts rising and falling like the waves. Someone was chasing her. He called out but she could not hear him. A small boat, wood, mast split and hanging in the water, sail canvas flying in strips, drifted close to the shore. Someone, an old man, crouched inside the hull. He raised a hammer, a blunt thing, iron, and brought it down. A sharp crack echoed across the water. Splinters flew. Planking split. Shouting. Crashing.

  He awoke heart pounding. A bright light blinded him. Someone grabbed his wrist and wrenched him to the floor. He landed with a jolt. Carpet, the legs of a chair, a pair of boots, black trousers, black shirt. Another man behind, picking up his duffel bag and shaking his stuff out onto the bed. Jesus Christ. He made to get up but was driven back to the floor by a withering kick to the ribs. The other man was picking through the contents of his bag, clothes, field instruments, a couple of books.

  ‘What the hell?’ he yelled, pulling himself up onto all fours.

  The man in black jammed his boot into Clay’s back, pinning him face down to the ground. His spine twisted under the weight. He turned his neck to face his attacker and looked straight down the barrel of a handgun.

  ‘Take whatever you want,’ Clay breathed.

  Black’s boot smashed into his face, driving his upper lip back into his teeth. His mouth filled with the haemic taste of blood.

  ‘Mafi mushkilla,’ Clay spat. ‘No problem.’

  Another blow snapped his head back.

  The other man continued to take the room apart, drawers, mattress, backpack. Black grabbed Clay by the hair and pulled him to his feet. ‘Yallah,’ he barked.

  Childhood Drawings

  He was hustled down to a vehicle waiting in the lane behind the hotel, hands tied, something hard and mean jabbed into his back. One of the men got in beside him and pushed his head down between his knees, a vice grip around the back of his neck. For half an hour, maybe more, he watched an empty blue-plastic water bottle roll around on the floor of the truck. Then the sound of a jet taking off – they must be passing near the airport.

  After what felt like hours but could not have been more than a few minutes, the vehicle stopped. Doors were flung open and he was pushed out into the night. He glimpsed a two-storey building, half-finished, the brickwork un-rendered between concrete pillars, rebar sprouting from the roof beams, another vehicle parked in the dirt. He was about to turn and face his attackers when everything switched off.

  There was no light. It was hot. The air was thick with the smells of the ocean, bunker oil, human waste, his own blood. He was still in Aden, at least it smelled like Aden. He swivelled the weight of his head, a troglodyte whose eyes had long-since skinned over, evolution eliminating what was no longer required. If the sun was on the far side of the planet, or shining down on the harbour, here it made no difference. He looked at his watch, but the fluorescent dials did not show. He tapped his wrist where his watch should be. Abdulkader’s ring gone from his finger, too. He started to crawl across the stone floor, sweeping one hand before him, but a barbed spike of pain drove through his side and he collapsed to the floor.

  Without the sun or the stars for reference, time seemed to eddy and curl and lose cohesion. He had no concept of how long he had been in this place. Only the coagulant sealing the gash on the back of his head provided some measure; time reduced to a wattle of hair and blood, or the click of a stick across the spokes of a wheel that did not turn.

  He fell into a fractured sleep and awoke in a spasm of pain. He tried to swallow, but his mouth was dry, his throat swollen. Thirst gripped him like a panic. In stages, he managed to bring himself to his feet. He swayed in the darkness, hands fending the depths. He staggered forward, searching for some limit to his universe. Something hard now at his fingertips, vertical. A wall. With one palm flat on the surface and the other arm forward he paced to his right. One, two, three, another wall. Turn. One, two, and again. Turn and continue. And then a seam, a change of texture. A door. Around again. A cell, six square metres at most. He traced his fingers along the edge of the door. N
o light showed, no current of air pierced the gap.

  Fuck this. He pounded the door with his fist and called out, but was driven to his knees by a lance of pain. With the tips of his fingers he explored the swelling under his left arm. Cracked ribs, two at least, maybe three. The gash in his head had reopened and he could feel his scalp peeling back, the upright nails of ruptured sutures edging a budding flower of blood. He turned and rested his back against the wall and filled the void around him with every curse he had ever learned.

  Perhaps they had forgotten him. Surely Rania would have started looking for him after he failed to appear at the rendezvous in Dhamar. She had contacts; she could exert pressure. He imagined her headline: ‘Foreign oil worker disappears amidst accusations of poisoning’. He hoped that was exactly what she’d written, a clear message to Al Shams that he had kept his side of the agreement, enough to keep Abdulkader alive. They could not keep him indefinitely. He had heard stories of kidnappings that had lasted months, in the North, up towards Sa’da. Those had been tribal, mostly, the hostages treated with kindness, some leaving as friends with apologies all around. But this was different. Those men had been professionals, military perhaps. And this was a prison cell – not some stone goat shed up in the hills.

  There was no sound save that of the workings of his body and the scream of pain in his head that seemed to grow and grow. He could not remember ever being so thirsty. Surely they would bring him water.

  After a while he rose to his feet and faced the door as if it was a sparring partner. With all the focus he could gather he brought the edge of his fist down hard on the metal. I am a British citizen, he screamed. I want to speak to someone from the British Consulate. But there was no sound in reply, no light. He waited, panting in the heat, forehead pressed against the steel. Again he pushed away and hammered as hard as he could, repeating the words like a mantra, again and again until all that came forth was a rasp and he collapsed to the floor.