‘I’ve seen worse,’ Joe said. ‘Don’t think much of the management, though.’

‘Get used to it,’ the man said.

Joe shrugged.

‘I did warn you,’ the man with the grey hair said. There almost seemed to be an apologetic note in his voice; it could have just been an approaching cold.

‘Something about not opening doors, right?’ Joe said.

It was the man’s turn to shrug. ‘Too late for that,’ he said.

Joe sat down on the edge of the bed. The thin mattress felt like a plank of wood. He dribbled smoke, tapped ashed on to the floor. ‘What’s the CPD?’ he said.

‘A committee,’ the man said.

‘A committee,’ Joe said.

‘Yes.’

‘I see.’ He didn’t.

‘It is a bi-partisan committee on the Present Danger –’ the capitals felt as heavy as lead weights. ‘It was set up to identify and counter the clear and present danger facing our country’s peace.’

‘What if there is no clear and present danger?’ Joe said. The man with grey hair shook his head. ‘There is always a clear and present danger,’ he said. ‘And right now, it’s you.’

‘Me? I’m only one man.’

‘John Wilkes Booth was only one man,’ the man from the CPD said. ‘But no, not you specifically. You, plural.’

Joe’s cigarette had burned down to a stub. He let it fall to the floor. A look of distaste crossed the man’s face. ‘Refugees,’ he said. ‘Fuzzy-wuzzies. Ghosts. Whatever.’ He looked at Joe steadily. ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ he said. ‘You should not have come.’

The silence was back between them, a flat trampoline, needing only the smallest weight to fall to upset its perfect stillness. The man from the CPD said, ‘This is not your place.’

Joe sat back on the bed, his back against the wall. He regarded the man from the CPD through half-closed eyes. The words seemed to come from a long way down, somewhere deep inside him. ‘Maybe we had nowhere else to go,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry,’ the man from the CPD said. ‘I really am.’

‘So am I,’ Joe said. It felt as if he spoke into a vast and empty chasm, his words falling like pieces of torn paper down into nothing.

The man from the CPD nodded his head, once. Then he walked out of the cell and closed the door behind him. Joe heard locks slide into place.

Then there was only a solitary silence.

cell

——

Time did not exist here. Twice a day a grille would open in the door and a tray would be pushed through. The tray was made of metal, with three cavities forming the shape of a cross. There was food on the tray and water in the basin. The prisoner drank the water and washed himself in it, splashing it onto his armpits, over his face, like a man with a long stop-over at an airport. The food had a chemical aftertaste. When he used the toilet the cell stank. After a while the prisoner stopped noticing the smell.

His thoughts in that time of solitary confinement were not quite thoughts. They were fragments, like a jigsaw puzzle made of torn-up photos all mixed-up together. They never seemed to fit. There were memories in there but he could no longer tell which had been real, which hadn’t. There was, for instance, a man in a beaver hat, creeping around with a lantern held high in his hand. Bits of dialogue from a silent film’s title card, shining-white floating over black screen: You mean a ghost?

Not a ghost. Worse…

There was a girl with slightly-slanted eyes and brown hair and pinned-back, pointed ears, but she had no name. There was an airport, fog, a plane waiting to take off. They were not quite dreams, because he never dreamed any more. They were just the fragments of snapshots assembled from somewhere, somewhen else. The plane was going to a land over the rainbow. The girl was getting on the plane. There was an argument. He had on the wide-brimmed hat he’d bought in Paris and lost somewhere on the way.

You must get on that plane, he kept saying. You must get on the plane. She called his name, but it wasn’t his name. Maybe not today, he kept saying. Maybe not today.

Sometimes the door would open and they would come in. At first he fought them but they always overpowered him, easily, and then there would be the quick cold pain in his neck where the carotid artery was and then the numbness. Most of the time he didn’t know what they did. Sometimes they stripped him, gloved hands prodded and poked and measured. Sometimes they stripped him and took photos. Sometimes he was back in the chair and there were questions. The man with the grey hair was back, standing with his back to the wall, his face in silhouette. He was asking questions about what the people in the Hotel Kandahar called the Osamaverse. It was like an endless quiz about Mike Longshott’s novels. The prisoner said, ‘I don’t know,’ until it became a mantra, releasing him from imprisonment, so that while his body was still there his mind was far away, hovering over the abyss where the next world was, or the next, or the next. ‘Why don’t you arrest him?’ he said once.

‘Arrest who?’ the man with the grey hair said.

‘Longshott.’

The man said something about containable risks, and managing information distribution. The prisoner took it to mean they didn’t know where Longshott was. ‘We could shut down his publisher,’ the man from the CPD pointed out. Sometimes it was as if he were inside the prisoner’s head. The prisoner said, ‘Why don’t you?’

‘He’s more useful this way,’ the man from the CPD said.

Sometimes they stuck needles inside him, drew blood. Sometimes they attached electrodes to his temples, to his chest, took his pulse, measured his heart beat, his brain waves, the phrenological proportions of his skull.

‘Tell me the truth, Doc,’ the prisoner once said. ‘Give it to me straight. Am I going to live?’

The man with the grey hair shook his head with slow, precise movements. ‘You’re already dead,’ he said tiredly. ‘You just don’t know it yet.’

But the prisoner did. The prisoner drifted in the blackness that wasn’t sleep, and as he did he dreamed of doors in films.

doors in films

——

Always, they were asking him questions. The questions made no sense to the prisoner. The questions were: ‘How do cell phones work? What is an iPod? What is in Area 51?’ The prisoner didn’t know the answers to these questions. They asked him: ‘How do you make a computer the size of a briefcase? What is the meaning of flash mobs and how do you control them? What is DRM? What is Asian fusion? Is it nuclear technology?’

There was some confusion as to that last point, but the prisoner couldn’t enlighten them.

‘What is Star Wars?’ They had been very worried about that one.

He understood from them that he was not the first refugee they had interviewed this way. But he had no answers.

Not even – particularly for – himself.

Who was he? Where had he come from? Increasingly, the prisoner felt this world fading away around the corners while he floated in the great peaceful darkness. More and more it seemed to him there were other voices there, the silence broken by half-whispers and mutterings, mumbling, singing, voices etching words into the darkness as if they could leave them there forever.

But they always pulled him back: measuring his sweat secretion, his blood properties, his pupils, his hair, his fingernails, his body temperature inside and out, and they kept asking him questions.

‘What is a modem? Who is James Bond? What are smart cars? What is Al-Jazeera?’

They had been very worried about that last one, too.

Sometimes they were gone, just like that, fleeting from the edges of his cell like ghosts, fading away like mist, and he was alone. Twice a day a grille would open in the door and a tray would be pushed through. There was food on the tray and water in the basin. The prisoner drank the water, but he no longer washed. The water tasted like cough medicine. He would ask himself questions. Where do you come from? Where are you going? What is your name? When he pictured the girl he felt better, then worse. She had moved her hand over his, and there was something terribly intimate and familiar about the gesture.