He dreamt that his father was standing in the doorway, looking in. Prabir couldn’t see his face in the darkness, and struggled to decide whether his stare was reproachful. Everything he knew about Rajendra suggested that he wouldn’t have been angry, but Prabir was still ashamed that he’d let his father stumble upon him like this, without warning.
But as the silhouette in the doorway took on more detail, Prabir realised that his father was oblivious to Felix. There were more important things on his mind. Rajendra was holding an infant in his arms, rag-doll limp. He was rocking her back and forth, weeping inconsolably with grief.
Prabir lay in the bath so long that he ran out of room to add hot water. He climbed out, shivering, and pulled the plug.
As the bath refilled, he picked up the paper knife, closed his eyes, rehearsed the strokes. He’d deliberately avoided testing the blade on his skin; the only part of the knife he’d touched was the plastic handle. Anyone who could stick a kebab skewer through his cheeks ought to be able to lull the relevant part of his brain into believing that there was no real threat from a couple of scrapes with this toy.
He stepped into the bath again, scalding his legs, swearing irritably. He didn’t want to feel any discomfort at all now; he wanted to die as pleasantly as possible. But every kind of potentially lethal legal pharmaceutical he could imagine getting his hands on came with a dose-limiting enzyme, and he couldn’t bring himself to buy street drugs that would turn him into a stranger as he went. Drain cleaner was even less attractive, and he didn’t trust himself to have the courage to jump from a bridge.
He lay down in the bath, submerged up to his chin. He went over the message to Felix and Madhusree one more time; it was sitting in his notepad in the kitchen, waiting to be sent, but Prabir knew it by heart. He was happy with the wording, he decided. Neither of them were idiots: they’d understand his reasons, and they wouldn’t blame themselves.
He’d done what he’d set out to do: he’d carried her to safety. He was proud of that. But it wouldn’t do either of them much good if he kept on going through the motions for another fifty years, just because it was the only thing that felt worthwhile to him.
He’d very nearly kept her from joining the expedition, which would have ruined her whole career. Two days after she’d left, he’d almost followed her, which would have humiliated her in front of all her colleagues. And though he knew that she’d be safe, there was nothing he could do, nothing he could tell himself, to banish the feeling that he was standing idly by while she walked across a minefield.
There was only one way to cut the knot.
Prabir dragged the blade across his left wrist. He barely felt it pierce the skin; he opened his eyes to check the extent of the wound.
A red plume, already wider than his hand, was spreading through the water. The dark core looked almost solid, like some tightly packed blood-rich membrane uncoiling from the space beneath his skin. For several long seconds he lay motionless and watched the plume growing, observing the effect of his heartbeat on the flow, following the tongues of fluid at the edges as they diffused into the water.
Then he declaimed loudly, to remove all doubt, ‘I don’t want to do this. I’m not going to do this.’
He scrambled to his feet and reached for a towel. The wound was even more shocking when it hit the air, spraying blood down over his chest and legs. He wrapped it in the towel, almost slipping on the floor of the bath, his paralysis turning to panic.
He stumbled out of the bathroom. It was only a cut, a paper-thin slit. There had to be something he could do to stop the bleeding. Tie a tourniquet. But where, exactly? And how tight? If he got it wrong, he could still bleed to death. Or lose his arm.
He knelt in front of the TV. ‘Search: emergency first aid.’
The entire screen was filled instantly with tiny icons; there must have been thirty thousand of them. It looked like a garden of mutated red crosses, stylised flowers in some toy-world evolution program. Prabir swayed on his knees, appalled but mesmerised, trying to think what to do next. Help me, Baba.
‘No sacred, no mystic, no spiritual.’ The garden thinned visibly. ‘No alternative. No holistic.’ The towel was turning red. ‘No yin, no yang, no chi, no karma. No nurturing, no nourishing, no numinous…’
The TV remarked smugly, ‘Your filtering strategy is redundant,’ and displayed a Venn diagram to prove its point. The first three words he’d excluded had eliminated about a quarter of the icons, but after that he’d just been relassoing various sub-sets of the New Age charlatans he’d already tossed out. Whatever pathology had spawned the remainder of the noise employed an entirely different vocabulary.
Prabir was at a loss as to how to proceed. He pointed to an icon at random; a pleasant, neuter face appeared and began to speak. ‘If the body is a text, as Derrida and Foucault taught us—’
Prabir closed the site then fell forward laughing, burying his face between his forearms, pressing down on the wound with his forehead. ‘Thank you, Amita! Thank you, Keith!’ How could he have forgotten everything they’d taught him?
‘No transgressive.’
He looked up. Thousands of icons had vanished, but tens of thousand remained. Half a dozen new fads had swept the antiscience world since Amita’s day. Liberation Prosody. Abbess Logic. Faustian Analysis. Dryad Theory. Prabir hadn’t bothered to track their ascent or learn their jargon; he was free of all that shit, it couldn’t touch him any more.
He stared at the screen, light-headed. There had to be genuine help, genuine knowledge, buried in there somewhere. But he’d die before he found it.
As he’d meant to. So why fight it?There was a comforting drowsiness spreading through his body, a beautifully numbing absence flowing in through the wound. He’d made the whole business messier than it might have been, but in a way it seemed far less bleak, far less austere, to die like this—absurdly and incompetently—than if he’d done it in the bath without a hitch. It wasn’t too late to curl up on the floor and close his eyes.
No, but it was almost too late to do anything else.
He staggered to his feet and bellowed, ‘Call an ambulance!’
‘You might not find her,’ Felix warned him. ‘Are you prepared for that?’
Prabir glanced up nervously at the departure list; he’d be boarding the flight to Sydney in five minutes. Madhusree had covered her tracks well, and no one at the university had been willing to provide him with the expedition’s itinerary. All he could do was fly to Ambon, then start asking around.
He said, ‘I’m doing this to satisfy my own curiosity. It was my parents’ work; I want to know where it would have led them. If I happen to run into my sister while I’m there, that will be a pleasant coincidence, nothing more.’
Felix replied drily, ‘That’s right: stick to the cover story, even under torture.’
Prabir turned to him. ‘You know what I hate most about you, Menéndez?’
‘No.’
‘Everything that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Everything that doesn’t kill mejust fucks me up a bit more.’
Felix grimaced sympathetically. ‘Irritating, isn’t it? I’ll see if I can cultivate a few more neuroses while you’re away, just to even things out a bit.’ He took hold of Prabir’s hand between the seats, and stroked the all-but-vanished scar. ‘But if I’d met you when I was fucked up myself, it probably would have killed us both.’
‘Yeah.’ Prabir’s chest tightened. He said, ‘I won’t always be like this. I won’t always be dragging you down.’
Felix looked him in the eye and said plainly, ‘You don’t drag me down.’
Prabir’s flight was called. He said, ‘I’ll bring you back a souvenir. Do you want anything particular?’