What had happened had happened. Things rolled on. There was nothing in the constitution of the universe that said Alex was meant to be with Carey. Nobody would insulate him against failure, and nothing would indemnify him against loss. He had had an idea about the way his future went that had turned out to be wrong. He had had his chance. He was, after all, alone.
Alex had driven out of Las Vegas in the early morning, when the sun was starting to sear the tarmac and gamblers were emerging caffeinated and shuddering and broke into the bleak light of Fremont Street, on their way to bed, those of them that had beds to go to. The last thing he wanted to do was to say goodbye.
Everything had gone its separate way. He wanted to go home. But he wanted to make a gesture, just to himself – wanted to go somewhere where nobody was looking for him.
He drove up and out of the city towards the west. He had the idea to go to Death Valley. He wanted to be somewhere where he would be a small figure in the landscape.
He drove for an hour, maybe two – the same sort of trance descending on him as the city thinned and disappeared behind him as he had felt in the desert on his way in from the east. His sadness was for a short time something objective, something outside himself. It shared with him, but it wasn’t the whole of him. Some version of him would go home on a plane, would wonder how to persuade the stewardess to give him an extra bottle of red wine with his meal, would look gritty-eyed at Heathrow from the window of a taxiing plane and see familiar greys and all the mundane apparatus of normality. Las Vegas would be a gaudy dream. He and Carey would avoid each other, would have the odd awkward conversation, would pretend to be friends, then eventually would stop needing to pretend and would actually be friends, or at least would be friendly with each other. And at that point it really would have died and no force on earth would be able to magic it back.
Trucks and cars came and went. Traffic was sparse. A police patrol car sat angled in the wide patchwork of dirt and tarmac between the carriageways, waiting for something to happen. Sunshine made the windscreen opaque, then momentarily the angle was right. The patrolman inside had on a wide-brimmed hat, and his head was held unmoving, like a lizard holds its head.
The ring. No need for theatrics. He kept one hand on the steering wheel, sliding it round to the top, where the plastic was sun-hot under his palm. With the other he thumbed the rocker on the door. The window slid down and dusty heat entered the car. To either side and all around the desert was dry heat, marked with dark green foliage and white sticks, dead scrub. Low hills rose on the horizon line, and above them was white, and above that was blue. High thin clouds stood in the air, wisps of smoke rolled into miserly cigarettes.
A large truck came out of the haze, swelled, and closed the gap between them, then whooshed past, guffing hot smoke and turbulent air through the open window into the car. Its canvas back panels, retreating in Alex’s rear-view mirror, said XGS in black-on-white capitals. It thundered away to its destination.
Alex’s window was still down. He pulled the ring out of his pocket and with a single movement threw it out of the open window, high and out to the side of the road. It turned in the air, and the wind was going too loud and the car was too far forward for Alex to hear the high ‘tink’ as the ring hit a rock and skittered into the desert where the chances were that nobody would ever find it again.
Much later, Bree called Red Queen from the airport.
‘There never was a coincidence engine,’ said Bree. ‘Was there? You did it yourself, didn’t you? The whole lot.’
‘You think?’ said Red Queen, ignoring the second half of what Bree said. ‘How do you explain this?’
Bree was in the airport. Red Queen was where – New York?
‘Explain what?’
‘All of this. Everything that happened.’
‘Nothing happened,’ said Bree. ‘You did it – at least until it got out of your control.’
‘Huh?’
‘You knew the Directorate was leaking,’ said Bree. She was testing a theory. She needed to know. ‘You knew MIC would overextend themselves looking for it. The satellite image of the plane, that was you: you cooked it up. Easily done: you control the flow of data; we all know that. The guy in the hospital – what was he, an actor? And the Intercept: to make your photo of the plane plausible; or the photo of the plane, to make the Intercept plausible. The boy knew nothing. Nothing. And the rest of it was just chance.’
‘No,’ said Red Queen. ‘I did cook up the plane – the photograph of the plane, anyway. That was where it started from. Flying a kite. No more than that. But I don’t know anything about the guy in the hospital. And the Intercept was real.’
A pause.
‘Sort of. Took a long while to unravel what had happened to it. It was part of a crappy story this guy was writing. Professor up at MIT. He wrote it as some sort of therapy, is my theory, if you can get therapy for being a very irritating individual. There was a New York agent he’d sent the manuscript too. A guy called Duck. Duck and Hands. Weird. I guess he was using it as scrap paper, anyhow. He happened to fax something the wrong way up – Professor Hands’s golden words. And that was how it came to us. But then it was that same professor I called in to look at the Banacharski material.’
Bree felt, as the conversation went on, an ebbing sense of Red Queen’s responsibility. Did the hurricane do that? Could that have been possible? But even as Bree was pushing the line she had been determined to push, she felt differently. She wanted to know if Red Queen believed, and going on the attack was the way to do it. But she herself felt different. The machine was real, and it had brushed against her. She couldn’t not believe, not now, in the miracle. And the details mattered less and less.
‘So the photograph was fake.’
‘Yes,’ Red Queen said.
‘The plane didn’t appear.’
‘It might have done,’ said Red Queen. ‘Actually, it might have done. But we didn’t photograph it if it did.’ Red Queen said nothing for a bit. Then: ‘We thought the machine didn’t exist, but then we started to worry that perhaps it did. It was the Intercept that made me change my mind. The fact that it had nothing to do with the operation I was running, yet described it so perfectly. And the stripper in the pilot’s outfit? I had nothing to do with him either, if he had anything to do with this. So then I needed to see Hands – who didn’t know anything, as it turned out.’
Bree felt deeply, deeply confused. She formed a mental picture of a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
‘But Hands was helpful. Accidentally helpful. He explained that if it could be thought of, it could perhaps exist. Not here – not in this parallel, the chances against that would be inordinately high – but somewhere else. Another parallel where it could have been possible. It could exist. And if it could exist there – it could affect us, it could bleed through. Assuming that here is where we think we are, anyway.’
‘I don’t follow,’ said Bree.
‘There’s any number of universes where none of this ever happened. Where none of us even existed. A majority, if I understand it right. There are universes where your favourite food, Bree, is chef salad.’
‘I doubt it,’ said Bree.
‘Believe,’ said Red Queen.
‘The boy knew nothing,’ Bree said again. ‘But that ring -’
‘ “AB” could be anyone,’ said Red Queen. Then, after another longish pause and an exhalation of breath: ‘I think you’re right. For what it’s worth, and with no evidence at hand, I think you’re right. But there. It’s gone now.’
‘It killed people,’ said Bree, ‘if I’m right.’
‘Uh-huh. It did. It killed Jones.’ The pause hung there on the line between them. ‘You liked him, didn’t you?’ Red Queen sounded almost solicitous.
‘Not like that,’ said Bree. ‘Not at all. I felt sorry for him. His aysiwhotsis -’
‘Apsychosis.’
‘- apsychosis didn’t do him a whole heap of good, in the end, did it?’ Bree didn’t let herself think about the likelihood that after the killing of that man in the parking lot, from Red Queen’s point of view Jones’s death was in some ways convenient.
Didn’t let herself admit, either, that from her point of view, also, at one level, it felt like – like a weight somehow off her mind. She hadn’t been able to judge what Jones had done, and she had felt that she needed to judge it. And with Jones dead… it was one less knot in the world.
‘No,’ Red Queen was saying. ‘It didn’t. But the boy, knowing nothing – nothing happened to him, did it? It’s no use to us, this thing. And there’s barely an MIC for it to be any use to, or danger to. Forgetting it exists, or not believing it exists, is probably the safest way to deal with it.’
‘That’s the way the kid dealt with it,’ said Bree, scratching her leg with her right hand. ‘Kind of by accident.’
‘Test subject number one,’ said Red Queen. ‘Imagine if he’d known what he had in his pocket. I’ve spoken to people. Full discretion. You were right to let him go.’
‘Jones?’
‘Dealt with,’ said Red Queen.
Bree thought of Alex: gormless, broken-hearted, clearly so far out of his depth that no harm could come to him. In some other life, she thought, he could have ended up her son-in-law.
‘Well,’ said Bree. There was a long enough pause. Bree rubbed the telephone receiver with one pudgy thumb. It was all she knew of her boss. Bree had never met Red Queen face to face. ‘RQ,’ she said, ‘I’d like some time off.’
‘Huh?’ Red Queen sounded surprised. Bree had never asked for time off.
‘I get time off, or I quit,’ said Bree.
‘Don’t quit,’ said Red Queen. ‘Sure. What time off do you need?’
‘A sabbatical,’ said Bree. ‘I want to spend some time with my daughter.’
Red Queen, at the other end of the phone, made a sound like an exclamation mark, and then smiled.
Alex drove on, towards the coast and the big city and the airport. When he could see the city rising in his windscreen, he called Saul.
‘Good morning, little brother,’ Saul said. ‘Are we married? Have we eloped with a stripper? Are we -’
‘Nothing, Saul. Nothing at all. I’m coming home,’ he said.
There was no coincidence engine. Not in this world. It existed only in Banacharski’s imagination and in the imaginations he touched. But there was a world in which it worked, and this world was no further than a metre from our own. Its effect spilled across, like light through a lampshade.
And with that light there spilled, unappeased and peregrine, fragments of any number of versions of an old mathematician who had become his own ghost. Banacharski was neither quite alive nor quite dead, if you want the truth of it. He was a displaced person again, and nowhere was his home.
He had been driven to madness by long life, and time’s arrow, and the permanence of loss, and now he was searching ceaselessly for all the versions of everything he loved: here, there, now, then, once and future, everywhere. He was looking for a second chance. Whether he was in heaven or hell was open to question.
Chickens pecking in the wet grass. A smell of dust and pine. A woman’s cough. Asphalt. A road going nowhere. The clatter and slap of rain under thunderheads. A figure glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, encountered unexpectedly in an empty room, possessing – momentarily – a stranger’s face with something you recognise.
Nobody’s here but us.
At ten minutes past ten on a blank grey morning, some weeks after the events of this story took place, Maeve Bannister, at home in Esher, heard the letter box snap shut. She tipped the iron onto its heel, reflexively patted the neat hair on the side of her head, and walked down a carpeted corridor to the front door of the half-timbered house where the man nicknamed Davidoff had grown up.
There were two letters there. One of them was a shiny envelope with slogans printed in colour on the outside. She turned it over, and, as she began to walk back down the corridor, paused, turned it over again, and then let it fall unopened into the wicker basket by the coat stand.
The other letter intrigued her. It was a brown envelope, crumpled and water-stained at one edge. ‘PLEASE FORWARD’ was double-underlined at the top-left corner, and she could see where it had originally been hand-addressed in the same black block capitals. All but the edges of them had been obscured by a sticky label pasted on – just the address of the house on it – by a dot-matrix printer. There was an American stamp, cancelled, on the shoulder of the envelope and a scrawl of post-office biro beside it.
She walked back to the ironing board and slipped a thumbnail under the flap of the envelope.
Dear Mrs Noone,
I hope this letter reaches you. It is about your son, Frederick. I am very sorry to inform you that Frederick has passed away. I don’t know if you will have been told, but I know that waiting is difficult and I wanted to make sure that somebody informed you.
I am sorry I cannot come to tell you in person, Mrs Noone, but my situation is very difficult at the moment and I am not at liberty to travel. I hope to visit you with my condolences at my earliest convenience.
I served with Frederick in the Parachute Regiment, perhaps he mentioned me? My name is Edward Otis, but in the regiment I was always called ‘Sherman’ just like he was known as ‘Davidoff’. Perhaps you knew that?
I wanted to say to you that he was a good mate and a brave soldier. Without him I would probably not be here now, and I know he died doing what he loved.
He always talked about you. I wanted you to know, he wasn’t alone when he died.
The letter was signed ‘Sherman’. There was no return address.
Mrs Bannister, who had bought the house after Mrs Noone’s death the previous summer, felt a moment of abstract sorrow, then put the letter to one side and got on with her ironing.
In the desert between Indian Springs and Desert Rock, the heat haze cleared to glass as evening arrived. An old man shuffled along the side of the road. He was bare-chested and smeared with dirt. A shapeless grey felt hat kept the sun from his eyes. His shoulders were tanned to leather by the sun. He was muttering to himself.
You couldn’t see where he had come from. He was not here, and then he was here. He scanned the horizon, raised one hand to scratch the side of his face. He had the sense of having been followed, but when he looked around him he could see nothing.
‘Waiting for me,’ he said. ‘Just the other side in the churn. Damn liberals.’
There was something sad about the look of this old man – something in the set of his shoulders that suggested long searching, a habit of disappointment. He shuffled on. His legs were tired, and his worn old toenails chafed through the leather of his shoes.
He walked out from the road into the scrub desert, then bent down, from the waist. His knees bowed out a little and he emitted a grunt. He picked something up off the ground and straightened up. He raised it to his lips, and blew across it.
‘Hmm,’ he said. He polished it with his thumb and held it up to the light. It winked. He put it in one of his pockets and walked on.
The sky was blank as bone. A few fat drops of rain slapped the faded tarmac. The dust began to rise.