Spares (33 page)

I believe The Gap is made up of all of the places where no one is, of all the sights no one sees. It comes from silence, and lack, and the deleted and unread; it is the gap between what you want and what you have, between love and affection, between hope and truth. It’s the place where crooked cues come from, and it’s the answer to a question: Does a tree exist when there’s no one there to perceive it?

It exists all right, but it’s in The Gap. And there will be many more of them, and they will not shade you from anything and they will not be your friends.
A flash of images: hydraulic stumps; bloody necks; weapon jam; fear. None of it real, just a spasm of remembrance.

Then Ghuaji in front of us, but not completely there; only his clothes running off between the trees, banking and dodging as if under heavy fire. The truck roaring in the silence. And the trees. All the trees were there.

Flash again, but real: a sharp crack as the truck ran into a bank of trunks, Vinaldi and I flung forward to collide with the windshield. It cracked, but not enough; we spent the first seconds back in The Gap barely conscious.

Then it cleared and I swirled my head up and saw the clothes still floating into the distance, like a runaway laundry basket. I felt a moment of dismay—as if entering once more a recurrent nightmare, barely remembered during the day, but like an old soiled glove at night. An incommunicable dread; of half-turns and stares, of screams in the shelves and shoes poking out from beneath curtains in the middle of the night. “Come and see me,” the shoes say, but you know the person they belong to is dead and the shoes shouldn’t be there at all.

When I could still see the clothes half a mile away, I knew it was really so. It is so dark there, silky dark, and yet that doesn’t stop you seeing. You can’t imagine it unless you’ve been there, and when you’ve been there you can’t forget. The quiet, an ultimate stillness; but once you notice the silence you spend an eternity covering your ears against the noise.

It’s not a nightmare. However you explain it, it is not a dream of any kind. It is all simply there. And so were we.

Vinaldi slumped in his seat, shaking his head, whether against the crash or Rapt or The Gap I couldn’t tell.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“No,” he replied. “No, I’m not fucking all right.”

I shook his shoulder gently. “We’ve got to go now or
well never catch up with him.” Vinaldi reached blindly for the gearshift and pushed at it, but it was like moving a rotting stick in a stream; it didn’t make any difference to anything. “I don’t think the truck is really here,” I added. “Come on. Get out.”

I grabbed as much ammunition as I could fit in my pockets, together with one of the pump-actions Vinaldi had thoughtfully provided, opened my door, and climbed down from the truck. On the other side Vinaldi did the same, and we stood for a moment, looking around us.

The darkness in The Gap is strange. It is like the lack of any light at all, because our sun has never shone on it, and yet sometimes it is like a slanting sunset or twilight in the corner of your eye. As you move your head you see different things, changing lights. For a moment I thought I saw late-afternoon sun glinting off the roof of the truck, and then all was silky evening and the truck was only colored space in front of me. The light in there is blue, for the most part, a blue which I have only seen in one place since.

In all directions, as far as the eye could see, were the trees. A forest of unimaginable age, rank upon rank of thick trunks shooting up into infinity. Sometimes it seems as if they are entirely separate from each other, at others as if they were all extrusions of the same thing. The forest floor was covered with leaves so densely that it seemed like there were no individual leaves at all but only a carpet of moleskin, covered with a fine and shifting mist.

“Which way did he go?” Vinaldi asked, rubbing his hand across his face. “Not that it makes much difference.”

“That way,” I said, joining him. “I think I can still see the clothes, out in the distance.” I couldn’t, but we needed some impetus. To stand still in The Gap is to stop swimming for a shark. You sink to the bottom, and can’t start moving again.

We started off quickly, both of us giving the vehicle
a backward glance after a few yards, as if we knew that leaving it would commit us to being here. The truck was gone, which didn’t surprise me. You can’t carry large objects across all in one go. The vehicles used in the war—which were in any event few and far between—all had to be ferried across piecemeal and assembled in The Gap; even the machines which ultimately enabled us to be sideslipped back again.

“Are you Rapt yet?” Vinaldi asked.

“No, but it’s coming,” I said.

“Good. It had better. Because I’m getting The Fear.”

“Perhaps we’d better run.”

“You know something? I think you could be right.”

We started trotting then, hopefully in the direction Ghuaji had gone, but I was already none too sure. For now the forest seemed quiet; as if ignoring us, but we both knew that wouldn’t last. Leaves started running beside us then, like children playing. Vinaldi kicked out at them, but I stopped him.

“Little fuckers,” he said.

“Better them than the trees.”

We ran, faster and faster, as The Fear came. Its coming was like a return to everything you thought you’d left behind. Not just our memories, but everyone’s, until we were no longer really following Ghuaji but just fleeing from everyone and everything. Men, dead and wounded, spread in pieces around the floor and their blood not lying still yet. Children, jerking spastically toward us. None of this was here now, but it had been, and The Gap remembered. The Gap was full of ghosts, of the thousands whose bodies had disappeared before anyone had a chance to grieve or offer thanks.

Vinaldi’s face flashed white beside me, our breaths labored and ragged; both of us had been smoking far too long to enjoy this kind of shit. The feeling of having a hand squeezed round my temples grew stronger and stronger as The Fear froze into my bones, and still we ran.

“I can’t stay in here long,” Vinaldi panted. “I can’t do this for very long at all.”

“Me, neither,” I said, as terror found yet more speed in our legs and we sprinted between the trees, a trail of leaves following us enthusiastically, pretending they couldn’t keep up but not getting left behind. The bark on the trees sniggered at us, but that was all right. It couldn’t move quickly enough to do any real damage.

“Where are we going?”

“I don’t know,” I answered, and then suddenly the light went out Vinaldi moaned beside me and we found ourselves in a huge bush, slicing against needles and spines. We kicked and thrashed our way through it, but the bush got thicker and thicker, and the worst part was that I knew that if we ever got through it then the other side would be even less fun.

We found ourselves in the middle, face-to-face, unable to move or to see each other’s eyes. All we could hear was each other’s breathing, the sound sinister and loud. Vinaldi wanted to kill me, I knew. He wanted to reach out and pull the eyes from my head and chew them while he clawed the skin from my face. I wanted to do the same to him, but then suddenly the bush was no longer there, and the light was back—but it was yellow now, curdled and old.

Vinaldi stared at me, stricken. “This Rapt isn’t strong enough, Jack. It isn’t helping at all. I was going to—”

“Yeah, I know. But it’s all we’ve got.”

“This is a mistake. We shouldn’t have come back.” “What the fuck’s that?”

Vinaldi whirled to follow my gaze, and I realized: It was Ghuaji’s jacket The bush we’d clawed through was now several yards away and a bloodstained fatigue jacket was hung across it The cotton started unraveling itself, and the dried blood revivified in midair to form a small hanging droplet A twig from a nearby tree reached out and greedily sucked it up.

Then Vinaldi grabbed my arm and pointed behind me.

Ghuaji’s remaining clothes were standing fifty yards away, facing us. The clothes turned slowly, as if on a revolving pedestal, and then quickly glided away into the gloom.

We ran after them through more trees, more shadows, until there were so many leaves around us that it was like falling into a tunnel of dryness. And finally the Rapt kicked in with a vengeance, and for a while we didn’t know where we were, or what we were doing, or who we were chasing after. For a little while, I don’t know how long, we were just two shadows in motion toward nothing, and it was exactly like it had been back then.

I don’t think I could describe the war in The Gap reliably, not a single tree or village or death, despite the fact that I still see them in dreams and probably always will. I see the ferns and leaves, the blue light which sifted between the trees; I see the little towns, nestled amidst them like fairy-tale villages. But that’s not the way it really was. Part of being there at all was a knowledge that we weren’t really seeing what things were like, however hard we looked. Somehow the reality of it was always just round the corner, or hidden under a layer of light. We couldn’t trust the people, we couldn’t trust the land, and in the end we couldn’t even trust ourselves. We were like baffled, terrified children alone in a dark multi-story parking garage full of sadists.

Partly it was the drugs. Eight out of ten people were off their face all the time. It was encouraged. It meant you coped better with The Fear. The other two out of ten were either drunk or crazy.

I realized this within minutes of being sideslipped into The Gap, and made a pact with myself. I was going to do this thing straight, scared though I was. From the moment you set foot in The Gap you knew something was wrong, and every breath you took confirmed that knowledge and made it a part of your very metabolism. Fear ran through people like blood. Whether you were
looking at someone huddled shaking into the roots of a tree, or standing proud with shoulders back and gun spitting, you were looking at someone who was mortally afraid. As I stood in the base camp on that first day and saw the shells of men around me, I hoped to God that I had slipped into some dream and would wake up very soon. “This can’t be the way it is,” I said to myself, already shaking. “They can’t all be like this, and even if they are I’m not going to join them. If I’m going to be this scared, I need to know what I’m doing.”

Within hours a horrified dread began to fill every extremity of my body, slowly flowing toward my core. It was like the “Oh no,” moment, the moment when you realize that you’ve been caught doing something bad, when you’ve made a mistake that will have disastrous consequences, or when you hear someone close to you has died. For a moment, your mind becomes cold liquid, and a calm denial is the only thing you can feel.

That’s the way it stayed. The feeling didn’t pass. It just kept growing. That’s why my resolution lasted four days. I got respect for that, of a grudging kind. Four days was a long time to hold out, and it set me apart from some of the other men. One of the things men will fight hardest to hide from each other is fear. You just don’t show it. In The Gap it was different. Fear couldn’t be hidden, and so all the time you were surrounded by the most childlike, vulnerable, desperate part of everybody else. There were people in The Gap, and that’s whom we were supposed to be fighting; but they were the very least of our problems. The children, dead but with hydraulic frames nailed through their bones so they could scamper poison-laden toward us; the blankets of fire which appeared from your pockets and swept up to incinerate your skin; these were fears, but nothing like The Fear of The Gap itself, which was all of this and the promise of everything more.

In the end, I recognized that I was endangering the rest of the men in my unit. I was simply too terrified
all the time
. It felt as if each individual cell in my body were
cold; as if someone were constantly running a killing knife over the hairs on the back of my neck; as if I were lying asleep, the plank of my back exposed and bare and waiting for an ax which would surely come. The fourth day I was there I followed a couple of the guys to the tent where it all happened. I’d never taken drugs at that time. I was frightened of doing it. I was frightened of not doing it. I was frightened of everything.

What Rapt did was intensify reality to the point of blindness. It pushed everything up into the stratosphere, made the light behind the leaves even darker, made height so tall it disappeared, warmth so hot it became cold. It made everything so intense you could only repress it. Every hour was a series of blackouts, of forget-tings. You’d find yourself half a mile down the track and have no recollection of having got there. You’d look at some guy you’d been talking to and realize you had no idea what the conversation was about. You’d look down at yourself and realize you were holding a man’s head by the hair, and that you’d blown it off the body with repeated rounds from your gun, and you had no idea of how it had all happened.

The mind pushed it away, blanked it in real time minute by minute, but all the while there was this voice which knew what was going on. However much Rapt you took, this voice drip-fed the truth to you second by second like a string of filthy lies told to himself by a psychopathic schizophrenic. So what did you do? You took more Rapt to shut the voice up.