Not the End of the World (9 page)

‘Mr Kramer,’ he told him, ‘you are correct in saying that your findings do not support my theory, but I believe that your research does. Now, I’m not going to present your research to anybody, anybody. Don’t you worry about that. The difference between you and me is that I’m not trying to prove a scientific point. This isn’t about science, Mr Kramer, this is about faith. If I could present a catalogue of evidence that scientifically proved the threat of what I’ve predicted, people would believe it, but they’d believe it because they could explain it all away, account for it within their rules, their indifferent values. They could weigh up the probabilities, decide whether to ship out, make plans, contingencies. It’d be their rational response to a rationally evaluated possibility. But I’m not saying this is going to happen because science has told me so. So even if your findings did support what I’m saying, it would be you and not me who would be taking it to the networks.

‘You look at this research with your scientific mind, seeing how it fits your scientific models and your scientific laws, and within that framework, sure, there’s nothing to substantiate what I have foretold. We both look at these rocks, these mountains and plains beneath the ocean, and you see the work of nature, Mr Kramer. The physicality, the facts, the equations, the history, the development. You understand that, you and your people, you understand those things well, to a sophistication far beyond what an ordinary man could comprehend. That’s your gift. But I see the work of God, and that’s mine.’

Then he had looked Mitch in the eye and said: ‘We’re two men from different fields approaching the same body of research, the same raw materials. I would not pretend to intrude upon your area of expertise, Mr Kramer. Do not presume to intrude upon mine.’

Maria had been called in to authenticate the content of the scrolls’ later passages, but if anyone doubted the accuracy of the texts that preceded them, she reckoned Jerry should just wheel out Luther St John as exhibit A. The big myth about the Minoans was that they were like some kind of prehistoric flower‐
power people, beating their swords into jewellery, lounging around pastoral idylls and generally being beautiful. There was a bit of that going on, sure, but when you’re at the heart of the world’s biggest trading empire, expanded and defended by the world’s most powerful fleet, you can spend your leisure time how you like. The Minoans built their empire on two foundations: unrivalled cultural advancement and unmatched maritime prowess. Baubles and trinkets, yeah, and if you fucked with them, they sealed your fate. They loved colour and spectacle, but they were obsessed with blood. They took time and pleasure in their costume but they dressed to kill. Art and savagery, aesthetics and violence. Were they contradictory or symbiotic?

And in its dark reflection is the wish to paint in gushing streams of a precious red. Finery and brutality. Beauty and blood. Certainly there was a tension between the two, and according to the scrolls it lay at the centre of a great turmoil during those final, earthquake‐
haunted days. There were those who saw their compatriots as effete and decadent, spending too much time making new shiny playthings and looking in the mirror when they could be out kicking new, undiscovered asses with their warships. Kind of like a bronze‐
age Republican Party.

Plus ca change. Maria almost jumped out of her chair when she felt a hand on her shoulder, her reaction giving Chico an equally big fright. ‘Shit, sorry Maria,’ he said, putting a hand on his chest. ‘Guess you were pretty far away. Maria looked at the monitor. It still showed the envelope icon, unopened. She didn’t know how long she’d been staring blankly at the computer screen. The screen‐
saver was set to kick in after half an hour, so it was less than that, but she suspected not by much. ‘Wish I was, Chico. But I’m here, so what’s up?’ The lab technician sat down on the worktop a few feet from her computer. ‘Got a phone call. From the Coast Guard. They want … I mean, they said it can wait until somebody’s … They want someone to take a look around the Gazes, see if anything’s – I dunno – not as it should be. Maybe help figure out what happened.’ She nodded. ‘I mean, I’d go, but I don’t know the boat so good and I’m not sure that I’d be able to …’

‘It’s okay, Chico. I’ll do it.’

‘They said just as soon as somebody feels up to it, you know? You don’t have to…’

‘I’ll go this afternoon,’ she said, telling herself more than him. ‘I’m not gonna be much use around here anyway.’

‘You sure you’re gonna be all right?’ She nodded again, trying to give him a smile. ‘Can I get you anything?’ he asked. ‘A Coke maybe?’

‘Got any morphine?’

‘Not today.’

‘Coke’ll be fine. Thanks, Chico.’ Maria sighed and sat back in her seat, running both hands through her hair for the hundredth time. Keep this up and she was going to look like something out of a metal video. She took hold of the mouse and shut down the database program. She wasn’t going to get any work done today, why pretend? Chico came back and handed her a cold can from the machine. She opened it, took a sip and double‐
clicked on the envelope.

‘Save the world,’ it said. Or rather, he thought it said. It was only as Steff neared the corner that he could see the remainder of the banner, which ran perpendicular to the first part along the high fence. There hadn’t been a parking space to be found in Santa Monica. This had come as little surprise as there hadn’t been a hotel room to be found either. It had soon reached the stage where Steff felt embarrassed asking at the desks, like it wasn’t enough that he was a big, weird‐
looking guy from way out of town with a funny accent, he had to advertise his ignorance by the gaucherie of asking for a room in Santa Monica this week. He wondered if the hotel management courses in Californian colleges actually tested candidates on that ‘of course not, you fucking idiot’ look they all gave you. ‘This is going to sound like a daft question,’ he had said at the last place, ‘with the AFFM going on this week and everything, but would you happen to have any free rooms?’ The girl at that particular reception desk had been more courteous than the others. Perhaps making an open declaration of being an arse meant they didn’t feel so obliged to point it out to you. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she said with an apologetic smile. ‘And most years it wouldn’t be such a dumb question. The AFFM doesn’t usually fill us up, but with this Festival of Light thing happening at the same time, we’re just bursting at the seams.’

‘Festival of Light? What’s that?’

‘I don’t know, myself. I just heard a lot of the guests say that’s why they’re in town.’ He had called Jo Mooney for advice, and she suggested he backtrack to West Hollywood, which was only a half‐
hour along Santa Monica Boulevard depending on traffic, and, she assured him, ‘a lot more fun’. She had recommended he try the Armada, near the junction with La Cienega. It was a huge pink affair, vaguely suggestive of an aircraft hangar. He had walked into the antiseptically tasteful lobby in the late afternoon, when the place appeared to be deserted, and booked a room. By the time he had unpacked, showered and shaved, darkness had fallen with a speed he’d really need to get used to. Back home, dusk could be a process of slow hours and changing colours. Here, it was like someone just reached up and switched off the sun. It was when he wandered downstairs to check out the hotel bar that he realised the guest register probably included zero females and one heterosexual (Kennedy, S.). Jo Mooney, he decided, had less than twenty‐
four hours to live. He had driven in from West Hollywood, his route taking him past the Beverly Hills signs and that avenue of palm trees so familiar from TV, depicted always as a gateway to mythical splendour. Unfortunately there was fuck‐
all at the end of it, just more grey tarmac, glass towers and shopping malls. He had felt a wee tingle upon catching sight of that building from Die Hard, right enough. It was south of the road he was on, and it had just peeked into view for a moment as he drove through a crossroads. He thought he should go and check it out close up at some point, then decided that would spoil it. Better for it to have winked at him as he passed, like a girl in the street who might have nothing to say to him if he actually stopped to talk. After an hour of circling Santa Monica’s town centre, he had finally spotted a neon parking sign with the Spaces part lit up underneath. It turned out to be a shopping mall, and it was going to cost him about eight dollars to leave the hire car there all day unless he was ‘validated’, which he took to be a euphemism for ‘spent enough money’. This didn’t work out quite so badly as he feared, as it provided a fine excuse to have a quorate five dollars’ worth of hamburgers for breakfast. Then he had walked down towards the ocean, unmolested by the constabulary this time, Santa Monica apparently not having outlawed Shanks’s Pony as a form of transport. Up in Hollywood, the words pedestrian and pederast didn’t just sound alike: they invited comparable disdain. The big banner was clearly a gimmick. You saw it from a distance, ‘Save the world’, then the punchline was delivered when you reached the corner: ‘from our sins’. Boom boom. He had heard the music from about a block back, the sound of a crowd and the smells of outdoor catering carrying through the air. A lot like a summer fairground down the local public park, except without the three feet of mud and the twelve‐
year‐
olds smoking menthols and demanding money with menaces. The architectural acid trip that was the Pacific Vista sat across the road, about two hundred yards away, looking from Steff’s angle like a big engagement ring: a giant glinting jewel flanked by opaque bands on either side. Draped banners with understated colour schemes and a tidy logo announced that the 1999 AFFM was taking place there. Opposite, markedly less understated banners announced that the 1999 Festival of Light was taking place there. They announced also the presence of something called the American Legion of Decency, and advertised that a Mission of Purity was being undertaken, as well as, of course, urging onlookers to ‘save the world from our sins’. He figured the banners’ authors were (just a mite presumptuously) including the entire global population in the ranks of the implied sinners, rather than just those attending the Festival of Light. The possibility of any such ironic interpretation of ‘our’ was unlikely to have occurred to them; or if it had, they were probably confident that it wouldn’t occur to their target audience. Steff checked his watch. He had a loose arrangement to meet up with Jo ‘around lunch‐
time’ – a less specific time frame it was almost impossible to define. He was supposed to give her a call on her mobile when he got inside the Pacific Vista, and they’d take it from there. It was half eleven. He grinned to himself and popped open a new tub of film. Time enough to find Jesus. He paid five dollars at the gate, trying not to think about what ideologically distasteful project he might be indirectly funding, and had a date stamped on the back of his hand, allowing him to ‘just walk right in and out, many times as you like, all day’. He resisted asking the Colgate advert who had taken his money whether it counted towards the validation of any future parking tickets, and ‘just walked right in’. It was worse than the Barras. He estimated there were close to three thousand people thronging the place, an area about the size of the pitch at Fir Park. There was no doubt room for more, but the sense of constant motion as the crowd moved around the stalls and platforms gave the impression of a greater host. The comparison with Glasgow’s famous market ended with the teeming bustle of the place. For a start, by some meteorological phenomenon, it was always raining when you went to the Barras, and the resultant smell of two thousand damp jackets in a confined space was just one of the olfactory delights the experience offered. The clientele were a little different, too. The Festival of Light was like a Californian shininess convention. It was easy to believe he was the only person in the enclosure who had ever farted. The omnipresent Barras paranoia of having your pocket picked was unlikely to set in either: Steff felt pretty confident of being the poorest person present. All around him were shiny adults dragging along shiny kids, miraculously born of these shiny parents who simply looked far too wholesome ever to have shagged. More disturbingly, there were shiny teens and shiny adolescents in attendance of their own free will, in blatant defiance of the aeons of evolution that dictated they should be out getting pissed on sweet cider, or locked in their bedrooms wanking themselves to death. Once he started moving around the place, he was able to glean some idea of the format. The crowd, seemingly amorphous upon first impression, was in fact divided up into groups around each stall or platform, with a rectangular hub of food and drink stands in the centre of the concourse. On closer inspection, he saw that some of the canopied stalls were actually entrances to tents, inside which a selection of meetings and activities was taking place, from biblical puppet shows to your basic, bog‐
standard sermonising. At the far end there was a wide stage, raised about seven feet, upon which stood a small choir singing excruciatingly hoaky countrified hymns to the accompaniment of a woman strumming a steel guitar, which Steff thought should be confiscated with the instruction that she’d get it back when she had learned what such a fine instrument should really be used for. Behind the choir, the world’s cleanest‐
looking roadie was assembling a drum kit. Steff felt a blow to the ribs and looked down to see a face‐
painted child reel away dazed, now moving with less rabid enthusiasm towards the candy floss stall, or ‘Manna on a Stick’, as it was advertised.