The Unknown Terrorist (31 page)

“Is it true that this profile fits with someone who could execute a major attack on civilians,” Richard Cody asked when Ray Ettslinger finished, “and have no feeling for the loss of innocent life?”

“Sadly,” said Ray Ettslinger, “yes.”

“It is, of course, Professor Ettslinger, a large leap from a profile to a terrorist—is it not?”

“Of course. We need to recognise this is not a mad-woman. These are the rational acts of a rational human
being. In understanding one woman’s history we can better understand why these terrible atrocities occur.”

“But in your professional opinion such a woman could become a terrorist?”

“If that is the form she wished to channel such sociopatho-logical behaviour.” Ray Ettslinger paused. The Doll thought she caught his lips counting two beats like a good professional. “And it does appear that is the direction she wishes to go.”

“Is Gina Davies our very own black widow?” Richard Cody asked.

Before he could answer, the Doll changed stations.

A man with a mike was walking back and forth in front of a studio audience, with the happy authority and plasticised hair of a tv evangelist.

“And tonight,” he said, “we’ll be using the Worm, a line running across the bottom of your screens which rises when you feel frightened, and falls when you feel reassured.”

Two SMS numbers appeared at the top of the screen, one titled “NOT FEARFUL”, the other, “FEARFUL”, and the screen cut to people crying outside the forever burning Sari Club in Bali.

“Let’s start,” he said.

It was as if some invisible force were ripping open the heavens and splitting the earth and leaving everyone somehow outside of themselves, unknown to each other, frightened of shadows on cave walls. And shaping the lightning bolts breaking the world apart were the new gods—the pollies and journos, the spinners and shock jocks and op page parasites—playing with the fate of mortals, pointing at shadows of fear and hate on the wall to keep everyone in the cave.

The chorus of radio and television, the slow build of plasma image and newspaper and magazine photograph, the rising leafstorm of banners and newsflashes not only made any error impossible to rectify, they made errors the truth, the truth became of no consequence, and the world a hell for those whom it randomly chose to persecute.

The Doll pressed the remote.

She pressed it and pressed it and kept on pressing it.

But the next channel was the same, and the channel after, and after that, everywhere, all the Doll could sense was the same darkness amplified a millionfold, unavoidable, a mudslide of binary signals brought on by the ceaseless rain of fear. All the Doll knew was that they had taken not only her money, but stolen her very soul, and all the Doll could see were more bombs armed police Tariq’s apartment block bearded man Tariq the Doll children’s bodies man woman black machine gun the Doll naked New York Bali Madrid Beslan London Baghdad Sydney the Doll dancing uniforms suits missiles robes blood dead children’s bodies herself disintegrating, smiling a smile that was never hers.

86

The Doll continued sitting on her bed in her miserable hotel room for a long time. The Panasonic portable continued on, and she continued staring at it, but none of what was on registered with her any longer. She listened to the rising wind occasionally bumping the window like a drunk pinballing down the street. Everything felt to the Doll to be waiting for her—her moment, her action, her response, her
statement, her guilt, her punishment, her hair-shaving, her ritual death.

For the first time she sensed her wretched fate was as accidental as winning a lottery and, like winning a lottery, as undeniable. The only thing that puzzled her now was why she had never seen signs of her impending fate, when all around her every day there were people suffering similarly. Why had she not realised this was the real nature of the world, that everything else was an illusion? Why had she not understood that everyone was allotted a part to play in such tragedies, whether they were Richard Cody or the pollies or the cops or her?

People chose not to care and not to see and not to think. And the Doll could now see that she, while thinking she was a good person, had actually been the same.

After all, every new attempt at a new life—the baby, the move to Melbourne, the move back, the hundred-dollar notes—she now saw was just a different way of agreeing with what the world was, one more attempt at getting on with that very power that was now turned on her. On her, who had always agreed that those who were judged as evil were indeed evil! On her, who had never questioned the right of those who made the judgements to be the judges!

And it seemed to the Doll that she finally understood what had happened, for the world was this way because she was this way; and the world’s judgement of her was only as stupid and cruel as her judgement of others had been. Wasn’t it she who had said they should be hunted down like dogs? And once more a voice rose within her, telling her she had killed Fung by failing to warn her of Mr Moon’s visit to the Chairman’s
Lounge. Only, this time the Doll didn’t deny it. She had, she knew, betrayed and killed Fung as surely as the hitman.

She remembered how the beggar had caught her eye when she abandoned him, and how he had seemed to be saying with his eyes,
I am so sorry, but that is how it is, you see. People are cruel to one another. I can’t change them
. And she realised that it was his pity—his pity for her, for all people and their hopeless, inescapable cruelty, his rotten pity for all their stupid, necessary deceptions, his foul, stinking, vile fucking pity—that it was this she had hated above all.

The air con continued to rattle and wheeze. The world pressed in on the Doll from everywhere. The room felt tight, fit to burst with humidity and a heat which did not move but seemed to slowly set like glue over her body. She wished it could be a night like it had once been—another night pulling money at the club. She remembered Jodie telling her how Richard Cody had taken to visiting the Chairman’s Lounge early Tuesday evenings. Perhaps he would be there tonight. And then, in the stupor of the room, a new thought took form in the Doll’s exhausted mind.

She got up from the bed, found her handbag, took out the roll of foil, shook the coke onto the woodgrain Laminex side table, and shaped it into a line between the black micro-craters formed by cigarette burns.

The Doll knew what they would say afterwards—hadn’t they said it before? It made no difference. It would help, that was all. There was truth, but it would never be told. She found her Prada Saffiano leather wallet, took out the last hundred-dollar note she had left and rolled it into a straw. There was truth, but perhaps the world needed lies. The Doll
leant in to the table and flattened a nostril. Perhaps it was ever so, she thought. She put her nose down, and snorted back.

Everything ran away from her and everything came together; everything broken was joined, and family and home and past and future and her father and her son, Tariq in bed and Tariq in the boot, all were finally one. She was spinning around the brass pole and life was spinning beyond her—life itself, miraculous life—and everything was as it should be, the approaching night, Sydney, her thoughts and her feelings, the past few days, the sounds of cars, radios, laughter and the cough of Ferdy and the sight of him standing there at the edge of the table, wanting to speak to her, the inevitable summons:

“Krystal,” he was saying in a low voice, “dance, just dance.”

But the Doll no longer wanted to dance.

87

The elevator doors opened and the Doll strode out into the hotel’s ground floor. She was heading through a large open entrance in one side of the foyer into the café next door when she sensed the police moving into the hotel foyer behind her. But she was already moving again, in control, walking out of the café, smiling at one of the grim-faced cops as he bustled past her. So dopey, the cops now seemed to her, almost childlike, like Maxie playing, and—if only for a moment—they weren’t frightening in the least.

And with this coked-up confidence and purpose that both dazzled and perplexed her, the Doll headed down the
street, while inside the hotel and inside her heart everything was turmoil and confusion.

For the Doll was remembering how she had once believed it was possible to remake her world again and again. But now walking up Pitt Street, sensing the police cars massing behind her, festooning the hotel with their flickering lights, it was clear to her that all this was just a dream, and that life had always been there waiting for its revenge on those who think they can shape it. As the traffic tensed then halted because of the raid, she saw that any attempt to shape life, to make of herself something new, all of that was just so much crap. There was no end to this world, and no end and no reason to its sufferings, its joys, its senselessness.

At the first cross-street that had flowing traffic, the Doll dropped the postcard in a letterbox, then put her hand out for a taxi. As she waited, she became aware of a noise rising to compete with the industrial moan of the city, a distant rumbling she recognised as the roar of a hailstorm some kilometres away. In the gap above her a darkening steel blue cloud filled the city with a strange, new light. She could feel a slight breeze, the first wind in weeks, and sensed this new air cooling her shaven head.

A taxi halted and the Doll got in. She was mildly annoyed to see an Asian driver, for in addition to not trusting Asians, they always now reminded her of Fung. Instead of the normal radio talkback of most taxis, piano music was playing. The almost hesitant, shy piano notes seemed familiar; the way they rose to some strange assertion of their own beauty reminded her of something—what was it? The mysterious tinkling sounds and the awkward moments of revelatory
silence between notes, together reaching some dark, terrible truth—but what was it? What?

“Excuse me,” the Doll asked. “What are you playing?”

“Chopin,” the taxi driver replied. “His Nocturne in F Minor. Very beautiful.”

‘How could I have forgotten?’ wondered the Doll. And as she continued listening, the piece began affecting her in a new and entirely unexpected way. How was it possible that for so long she had believed that in comfort and ease was to be found life? Hearing Chopin as if for the first time, such an idea struck her as being as dumb as searching a real estate guide for love.

As they pulled to a stop at a red light, the Doll looked out of the window into the shadowed ravines of Sydney’s CBD. An old man sat on a bench, ranting at the passing cars and pedestrians. He dropped his head between his knees, vomited on the pavement, quickly looking back up in order to keep on yelling at the stationary traffic, strands of loosely plaiting puke slowly falling from his mouth, long vomit tendrils stretching and breaking, then forming all over again. He would occasionally stop yelling to gulp silently, like a landed fish fighting death.

And as the taxi pulled away and the man disappeared from her view, it suddenly seemed to the Doll that there was ranting everywhere, that it fell out of the opinion pages, the radio airwaves, the tv current affairs programs. It was the vomit of journos and pollies and shock jocks thinking life could be theirs, and it was as vile and stupid and pitiful as the man on the street corner yelling at the world as it went by.

But here in the taxi, thankfully, was something else in these strange piano notes; something that spoke of truth, something that seemed to grab her soul and explain what it was that had happened to her, what it was that she felt, and the music clarified in her mind what she now must do, something as terrible as it was unavoidable.

“In Saigon I train as pianist,” the taxi driver was saying. “I love Chopin most.”

The Doll leant forward.

“We’re going to the Cross, my friend,” she said. “The Chairman’s Lounge.”

88

“I want play Chopin to people,” the taxi driver continued, nodding his assent. “I want play love. But here Australia—what can do? Drive, is all.”

But all the Doll was hearing was the music, as it told her about life in a way she had never known and had no wish to know, but having realised it, her world was shaken to its very foundations and nothing could be as it was ever again.

“Drive and make money and back up next morning and drive again. Make more and drive more to make more—why?”

And still Chopin continued playing and the music was terrifying to her now, it was insane, it would not stop reaching into her, it would not stop telling her it knew everything about her. And then the Doll hated the music, feared how it was cutting into her and through her, how it was taking away all the things she had set up to defend herself.

“Australia,” murmured the taxi driver, as if answering his own question.

The temperature was plummeting. The roar of the approaching hailstorm grew louder and louder, and the Doll could no longer hear the city, the traffic, only a growing drumming coming up over the piano. The taxi driver’s only response was to turn up the volume.

Hail began to fall, not just ordinary hail, but hailstones the size of golf balls. They pounded the taxi’s roof so loudly it sounded as if it were being hit by hammers. The traffic slowed to a crawl, headlights and streetlights came on, then there was a slow screech and the sounds of metal crumpling, glass smashing, a car alarm wailing, yet all these sounds formed only the dullest background to the drumming fists of hail on the taxi roof. The taxi driver turned up the Chopin once more, though now it was to no audible effect for the music was drowned out. The Doll was grateful to no longer be able to hear that terrible music. And then there was an odd deafening stretching sound, and the windscreen went white as hailstones smashed the glass.

“I so sorry,” the Vietnamese driver yelled in order to be heard. He pointed to the side of road. “Must stop.”

Not far ahead, prominently sited on a crest at the intersection of several roads, the Doll could see the massive Coca-Cola sign looming ominously, the hailstorm having brought the dirty sky so low the red American sign was supporting black clouds along its ridge. Of a day it looked as beaten up and washed out as the junkies who passed beneath it. But of a night it transformed into a latter-day Lighthouse of Alexandria, a small sea of roiling red and
white neon waves announcing the way to the Wall and its rent boys on one side and the entrance to the Cross on the other. The Doll yelled back that she would walk the last few blocks.