Gnomon

  Grant has set me homework. I must run a given distance every day I do not see him. If I do not do this I will be unable to keep up with his regimen, which is fierce. Every day I must record my time. I have no idea why I thought this was a good idea, or how much it is costing me to experience pain and nausea, I know only that my insurance company rep tells me he will add years to my life and take thousands off my premiums. So fine. I will acknowledge that I do actually feel better than I did a few months ago.

  I run. I run for half an hour, out and around and up and down, taking no particular route. I choose roads that are strenuous, roads that are pretty, roads that go in the right direction to bring me around towards my home, and at the thirty-five-minute mark, I hear the sound of bees.

  Once, when I was a child in Thessaloníki, I made the mistake of getting too close to a swarm. They didn’t seem to notice me and I was fascinated, and then all of a sudden they did notice me and the swarm was a single thing that rose up off the flowers and roared at me, reached out for me with arms and teeth, and I ran. This time when I hear the noise I start running immediately, and of course I am perfectly dressed for it, so I make pretty good time for a guy who is maybe not built for the kind of life Grant envisions.

  I can hear the noise get louder behind me, and then I can hear it to one side as well and I’m thinking some bee farm on someone’s roof must have been set on fire, because these bees are pissed as all hell and I can smell the smoke but it’s obviously not calming them down.

  What does burning honey smell like? Does a beehive work like a candle with all that wax?

  The swarm steps into being at the crossroads and it’s not bees at all but people, and furious people, and so very, very many of them. Not just behind and to one side, but all around, all converging on this little bit of Athens with the too-nice houses. And I think: Oh, motherfuck, because it’s really happening.

  If they knew what I know, they would tear me apart and eat me.

  *

  I stand in the middle of the road and it’s like the dive. It’s exactly the same thing. There’s just nothing I can do, nowhere to go. If this is going to kill me then I’m already dead, but I can feel the empty space on my arm where I used to wear my wristwatch and I know this was foreseen, it was planned. God is with me. My god, the one I can’t get rid of. The shark.

  The edge of the mob gets closer, and I keep waiting for the moment when I become the target. I should be the target, me more than maybe anyone else. Maybe those fourteen hundred and ninety-nine other guys first, but definitely me.

  Instead as the riot reaches me I am swallowed up, even embraced. A man offers me a beer, a woman gives me a rag and tells me to wet it and tie it around my face. The boy behind her passes me a cardboard box the size of a couple of tennis balls. ‘Ski goggles!’ he shouts. ‘From the department store! Long live the revolution, man!’

  Oh.

  Look at me: I’m in disguise.

  It’s not a very clever disguise, but that’s why it works. I was running, so I’m covered in perspiration and grime. My workout gear is not expensive: trainers, sweatpants, an old T-shirt. I am a fat, sweating man in cheap clothes with no watch. I’m one of them, and maybe even a little further down on my luck.

  I walk with the mob.

  It had never occurred to me that a riot was a community, but it is. It is a spontaneous, weirdly self-organising thing that is, within certain very specific and obvious limits, kindly and helpful. In the middle are a lot of women, rioting mothers with their sons and husbands. It’s not that they don’t throw things or break things, but they keep an eye on their loved ones and they settle disputes over who has a claim on bits of looted property. Where the men would fight, the women scream and negotiate and tug, and somehow some sort of consensus emerges and debts are acknowledged and the thing is settled without the mob turning in on itself. When we meet the police, though, the mothers become Furies. One grey old woman lunges through to the front lines, hands outstretched and clawing, rips the Lexan visor from the face of the nearest one and tears a piece out of his cheek, has to be pulled away before his mates can bring her down. She’s shouting something about bloody bastards, bastards, bastards. ‘Her son died in custody,’ another woman tells me.

  ‘They killed him?’

  ‘He was a junkie. Choked on his own puke. It was in … oh, I don’t know. Before Ntoltse Vita.’ She shrugs.

  A three-decade rage, come due today.

  The policemen surge. The crowd pushes back. It becomes almost hypnotic: five feet that way, ten, now back. Now twenty back. Now ten, ten forward. Rioters go down, bleed, scream. Truncheons rise and fall. And stop.

  The riot’s own heavy mob has arrived, construction workers in red flag pea jackets with armour of their own, motorcycle helmets and heavy-duty gloves. One of them has a nail gun, the pneumatic tank slung on his back. Pause for effect.

  And begin.

  Choi-chonkk! Choi-choi-choi-choi-choi-CHONKKKK!

  Policemen sprout metal spines. Screaming and rout: ‘We are Spartoi! Fuck you, pigs! Protectors of politicians and bankers and immigrants!’ This mob doesn’t agree on everything, but it knows what it doesn’t like. The police line breaks, and the mob moves on. No interest in staying to torment the cops. Obstacle removed. Nearby, someone sets fire to a car by way of celebration. It’s a Bentley. I know the man who owns it, an Austrian who claims some sort of hereditary title but can’t get the courts to acknowledge it at home. The flames are orange and grey, a wicked nacreous silver that speaks of bad chemicals. And that’s a new phase, a burning phase, and the mob upgrades. I am washed in it, carried on the flood. What else should I do? At the edges there are fires burning, accelerants and bonfires.

  Twenty minutes later, Athens is in flames.

  After the nail gun incident, the serious riot police arrive, and the army with them. You’d think that would end it, but in fact it just stokes the blaze. The police deploy teargas, water cannons. The mob bites back. Staging posts emerge, new fronts open. Hours pass like fever, a thousand mini-battles are fought on a hundred street corners. The mob swells and roams, rages, burns. Sometimes it seems to want to destroy the houses of the rich, overturn cars. Sometimes it looks. Then abruptly it goes to Omonia Square and into the poor quarter and seethes with hate. ‘Junkies! Immigrants! Scroungers! Poofs and whores and lefties and criminal scum! Get out, fuck off! Fuck off back to Russia! Back to Ethiopia and Egypt! There are decent people here! Without your dead weight we’d be fine!’ How did that happen, and how did we get here so fast, unopposed? Are those police boots there, are those regulation haircuts at the front? Of course they are. Even cops have feelings, don’t they, and political views? It’s opposite day, or if you want to be a bit traditional it’s the Day of Misrule. The lowest now is high, and high as a kite. When the mob’s in town, everyone gets a turn.

  I touch nothing. I throw nothing, steal nothing, hurt no one. I am washed around in the body of the beast. Everyone smiles at me. Everyone cheers. I’m a brother, a fellow traveller, because I’m here and I don’t object.

  I want to be sick.

  We wander, we thrash and we burn. We beat. The outer limbs do the dirty work, but the body of the beast is ballast and refuge and support. Even washed along, I am culpable to some degree. I do not raise my voice for reason and tolerance, because I am afraid. And then somehow I am spat out, in a little knot of tired people going home as if from the office, and it’s all very polite. We’re off shift, see you later, break a few windows for me.

  My little crowd splits up at a crossroads. I daren’t go directly home. No good rioter goes back to a flat in Glyfada. So I sit in a doorway and watch them fade away, and before I know it I’m asleep, with my head resting on the stone wall beside me.

  I wake cold and stiff. I have no idea what time it is, but it’s dark.

  The streets are clearer now, in the sense that the main body of destruction has moved away. There’s no attempt to restore order. I walk down my street in the s
moke of burning premier-marque vehicles and listen to the sound of the world breaking. My building isn’t on fire, although it has been. Of course the fire service has been here, and they were not having issues with water. More waste, more thirst in the making. The riot has flushed the gutters of Athens with the very thing it was demanding. Wouldn’t it just have been easier if the fire services had hosed that water straight into bottles and handed them out? But perhaps Perrier and Evian managed to block that at a national level. Maybe that’s what we’re talking about, maybe my colleagues at the bank have found a last hurrah to make their own small (very small) retirement funds. Because sure as shit they are not going to work for me when I own the bank. Most of them shouldn’t have jobs now, they’re so bad at what they do, but very few people understand what they do so quality control is poor.

  I don’t really mind that my home has been burned and flooded. There wasn’t anything important in there. OId me. Old, alien me. Not new me. I’m Constantine Kyriakos. Whatever I’ve lost, I can have two. Ten. A thousand. I can have anything.

  Since there’s no one there to stop me, I go inside. The stairs are covered in a treacherous slime of water and char.

  *

  I start to pack a bag and then realise that there’s no need. Packing belongs to oId me. The only things I need are the things that matter, that exist in only one place. I lean down to pick up the family picture by my bed, and then I hear the sound of my own front door opening. A voice says: ‘Hey, Constantine Kyriakos!’

  I turn, and it is a girl.

  She’s tall and slender. She has very white skin, black hair and very dark eyes, and those eyes are full to the brim with me. They are soaking me up as if I’m made of water and she’s a desert. She’s very attractive. There’s no reason why I wouldn’t stare at her, walking into my flat, wearing a black suit and murmuring my name. There’s no reason to call it anything other than sex, and the fact that the last time I saw her I dreamed she had the teeth of a shark set in that perfect face. I never even knew her name and I didn’t talk to her for any length of time, or I’d have noticed.

  There’s nothing to notice. It’s an illusion, a trick of the light.

  Fuck it. All right. She looks like Stella.

  Stella died of cancer, ridiculously. She went to the doctor and said: ‘I have a headache,’ and he looked in her eyes and asked her about poor balance and flickering in the edges of her vision and she said that she did sometimes have those things and then he ordered a scan and that afternoon she went into hospital and they told her she had cancer and she called me and before I got there she had a seizure and she just died and that was all and I loved her and I miss her and I always will.

  It is not Stella, because Stella is dead.

  This woman is like her, but she is a decade older than Stella was when she died. The right age for Stella now. She is leaner, more muscular. She is Stella evolved, Stella grown and changed and yet the same. They could be sisters, or cousins. They could be strangers with that uncanny sameness, meeting in the street and staring, laughing, becoming friends.

  My Stella.

  ‘Hi!’ I say. You have to say something when your dead ex-girlfriend appears in your flat just after you wreck the economy.

  I don’t want to ask her what she’s doing in my place, just in case I invited her. She doesn’t say ‘hi’ back, and the silence stretches. Well: boldness, be my friend. ‘I’m leaving Glyfada because the country’s about to go to shit and I’ve just become richer than pretty much everyone else in the entire world and I have absolutely no clue what to do about that or how I feel about it. The important thing is that I’m about to go to the airport and get on a plane – or buy one, actually, if they have one ready to go – and fly somewhere luxurious. So would you like to come with me and lie on the beach naked and drink drinks with umbrellas in them and have a lot of very dirty sex?’

  She laughs out loud, not in a nice way but in a way that suddenly I recognise and I realise that I was wrong. She wasn’t looking at me in that way because she adores me. The emotion in her face is not soft at all. Her eyes are open because she wants to see me suffer, or she wants to – what? To own me, the way you might own a beef cow. She is shaking because she hates me. On some fundamental level that even she is not entirely aware of, Not Stella thinks I am the ugliest thing she has ever seen, the worst person in the world. She loathes me and wants to hurt me in a very personal way. And then someone slaps me on the back and I stumble into the bedroom, and when I fall partway down and I stretch out towards her for support, she steps to one side and puts a sack over my head and some sort of chemical pad over the sack that smells of trombone solos and broken bagpipes, and I can see a ring of shadows like the entrance to a very irritating nightclub.

  ‘Hierophant,’ the girl who looks like Stella says through the sack. ‘You will bring us the god, and Greece shall be torn no longer.’

  Oh shit.

  I go down into black water. It is dark and silent, but not – never, any more – deserted.

  ineffective strategy

  THE INSPECTOR WAKES, smelling antiseptic and hospital sheets. She is uncomfortable and thirsty. She knows she should drink something, but devious sleep ambushes her in the instant of decision. Her hand twitches, but does not lift from the pillow. A passing nurse checks her vital signs, and is content. She tries to speak, but her mouth is dry and swollen.

  On the plastic arm of the bed, beside the cup of water and some sort of lozenge which is not only tangy and cleansing but also lightly soothing, she finds her glasses. She taps once to wake them and twice more to engage audio, feeling the bud extrude delicately to touch the inner surfaces of her ear. This is the Witness model, intended for a variety of situations, including those where speech may not be desirable. She need only form the words as if she intended to speak them, and the software will read her neck and mouth and understand.

  ‘Not possible.’ The words don’t come out properly, but that doesn’t matter. She just wants to say it: Kyriakos does not belong in Hunter’s head. ‘How?’

  The machine speaks inside her head, using the voice preference stored in her settings: a neutral male tenor, very soft, with the affect dialled down low so that it sounds placid and empty – appropriately like a machine rather than a lover whispering pillow talk. She recalls reading about the early experiments in aural interfaces, a German car manufacturer working through different tones for a satnav persona to please its clients. The hearty executives of the Rhineland did not enjoy being addressed by a superior male. The company tested a soothing feminine voice, and established that they liked this even less. Apparently felt they were being babied. A sultry tone translated as mocking, a professional one as nagging. In the end, it wasn’t the tone that mattered, but the humanity of the voice. It needed to be, very clearly, a machine.

  – Narrative blockade. You are not supposed to be working.

  ‘I’m awake. I want to work. What’s a narrative blockade?’

  – An ineffective strategy for defeating direct neural interrogation.

  ‘Expand.’

  A brief flicker. Somewhere, the Witness is assessing her physical situation against a series of charts.

  – You will tire quickly and forget. You have a mild concussion. Conceptual work will wait.

  Which is not a refusal, but it’s a good point. There’s something more immediate, which may be affected by delay. ‘Search, most recent image. Full file.’ The picture of Lönnrot she took in Hunter’s house.

  – No match.

  ‘What?’

  – The image is insufficient.

  In her vision, a generic human head speckled with dots and lines.

  – The recognition system uses a gridwork of three-dimensional contours.

  Her photograph hangs in the air, Lönnrot’s face. It shifts slightly, becoming a pattern of white and black like a Rorschach blot.

  – In this case, the single sample capture contains very little three-dimensional detail. The combination
of low light and the subject’s extremely pale skin is problematic. Additional captures would resolve the issue.

  ‘Check before and after my arrival at the house, local area. Seventy-two-hour window.’

  – No match. The local cameras are frequently rendered useless by children.

  ‘Vandalism.’

  – A variant of basketball. It is possible Hunter may have encouraged this behaviour.

  ‘Can you extrapolate? Thin face, androgynous, mid thirties.’

  – Yes.

  A map of the whole country, covered in markers.

  – Approximately seven million matches found.

  ‘Cross-reference, name: Regno Lönnrot,’ she says.

  – No match.

  She sighs. ‘Save the query and refine it as we go. Give me meaning and context.’

  – Lönnrot, general and preliminary results: literally ‘red maple’. National emblem of Canada, symbolising practicality and renewal. In some parts of South East Asia it is also associated with romance. Best-known individual bearing the name: Elias Lönnrot, a Finnish medical doctor and philologist celebrated for collating the epic Kalevala, whose structure and content have been proposed as factors in Finland’s success in modern digital design. Also Eric Lönnrot, a fictional detective confronted by an unanticipated adversary. ‘Regno’ is anomalous. It is an Italian or Latin word meaning both a nation and the present action of rulership in the first person. It is not conventionally used as a name, so the superficial grammatical masculinity of the word is not strongly indicative of gender. A nickname or title is a possibility. In the latter case it might be ceremonial or religious, indicating a high position within a hierarchy, although some Christian and other religious orders denote their highest offices with expressions of servitude, in which case ‘Regno’ would be an initiate.