Mappa Mundi (4 page)

But neither of them would have seen this if Ivanov had not once been Hilel and all those men after. Because that was the story that gave him his clue and conviction.

Kropotkin and Ivanov put together the physiology and the psychology and assembled them with memetic theory and they realized—although, like all revelations, it was only a hypothesis and not the whole truth—that the master of man is the idea of progress and improvement and betterment and ease, and that this whole memeplex, which is the fancy articulation of survival itself, has us all enslaved. To put it another way, the development of Mappa Mundi, as all such developments, was a necessary result of our own nature, as irresistible as evolution itself. What we can change, we shall change. What comes to hand, we shall use. What we see, we presume to understand. When the basic needs are satisfied, the restless mind turns itself towards improvements.

Yuri Ivanov saw the whole cultural flow of those days—the self-absorption, the self-examination, and the constant self-flagellation towards the perfection of our physical bodies and our “holistic” persons—as exactly the same impulse as the drive to religious exactitude and national fervour that had made Ain and his unremembered father so damned irritable and so impossible to reason with or placate.

If we are right, we shall be saved. If we are good, we shall be saved. If this, that, and the other, then we shall be saved. Perfection and purity, fame and the life everlasting. What was the difference?

And, as Ivanov only suspected then, there was nothing you could do that would save you. Death, like taxes, was certain. Nothing survived. It was the final, unbelievable insult.

Ivanov and Kropotkin knew there'd be no solving death in their lifetimes. So, they reckoned, they might as well forget about it. Meanwhile there might be something in trying to free human life from the slavery of survival.

Their work was not received gladly. Soon Kropotkin moved to
richer projects back in the motherland and the CIA approached Ivanov and suggested that a new country with greater wealth might suit him, if he would only assist them in a few military projects. But although he did go and became a US citizen, he maintained all his old contacts and told them it was merely a front, a double act, another face to add to his collection.

Because they knew some of his story, they believed him.

Mary was thirteen when she visited what had once been the old family home in Centralia, Pennsylvania. Her sister, Shelagh, was with her. They hadn't wanted to come, but the funeral arrangements for Gerry Delaney had specified a ceremony to take place on the old site of St. Ignatius's, beside the cemetery where his parents had been laid to rest.

The Trailways bus moved slowly, in an endless grumble, through places of passing familiarity to both girls—Washington, DC, Philadelphia—and then, much later, through towns Mary had never heard of, with names like Frackville and Shenandoah.

In between the towns, each smaller and more grindingly stricken by economic failure than the last, the road meandered along hills lined with the soft grey-brown of winter trees stitching a white sky to the ground. Mary tried to see through the masses of narrow trunks, but at that time of year the light was poor even under their leafless branches and within a few yards a greyness became blackness, became nothing at all, until the bus seemed to move on a narrow belt of solid ground between two gulfs of unknown space.

Gerry had been their uncle. He had died in Allentown, another name on a map that Mary had to fill in for herself, like a blank outline in a colouring book. She imagined small houses of gray clapboard outers and white window frames, streets traced with the black nets of
electric lines and punctuated with tough, upright telegraph poles, occasional garish notices for McDonald's and the laundromat, but it was vague and flat in her head like a packed-up film set. The only 3-D image she had was that of Gerry himself, a heavyweight man who might have been a boxer in other lives, dying at the gas station where he worked, lying in a pool of unleaded as the tanker hose he'd failed to lock down bled copiously over him until the vapour-autoback system shut off the flow. The coronary had started as he'd bent to fix it in place.

“They were lucky there wasn't a spark,” Mary's mother had said, her first words after some moments of reflection on the news. Mary'd looked at her in appalled silence. So they were, but was that the only thing to say?

Gerry was the hallmark of the Delaney clan. He'd served in the army, then got the GI Bill and studied to be a realtor, making the mistake of remaining in the old mining towns of his youth, where property and goodwill both came cheaper than usual. The business had fallen through because Gerry didn't have any skill as a negotiator. He was a nice guy. He'd then moved into insurance, but hadn't the heart to press his policies on people already stranded by life's high tide up in the hills. He ran a bar and diner for a while in Jim Thorpe, the Switzerland of America, but had to leave after a New York ski instructress accused him of sexual harassment. He ended up in Allentown, dispensing gas, working late nights, building up the gutful of fat and disappointments that had smothered him.

Well, that was how Mary imagined it from the news she heard at the dinner table. In fact, her mother insisted that Gerry
liked
it up there in the middle of nowhere, had friends, and didn't miss the money or the success that he'd once hoped for.

Driving up in the bus, however, Mary couldn't see it that way. Here it would be an event if a cat crossed the road, she thought, looking out the window at the remains of an old post office, the tatty flag outside swinging listlessly in a cold breeze, the columns of its once
fancy wooden portico flaking green paint into the wind. A few yards further on, outside a bar called The Blue Moon, a yellowed sign advertised a Saturday clam bake to a broken-down old Chevy that had died next to it.

Clam bakes. For God's sake. Everything about these mountains was creepy. The places were choked with weeds and man-made remains: machinery rusted in stacks, tractors sank into the fields they'd once worked, farmhouses slumped into the earth, tiles, tires, old iron, gut lengths of electric cable, rubble, kids' toys, plastic containers, and household rubbish sat everywhere in hillocks, grave mounds for the spirit of the coal industry. She couldn't stand looking at it all. What a mess. What a God-awful, pitiful, shit heap. And in its midst, scratches of life—a hair salon, a car wash. A clam bake. Pennsylvania and Transylvania had more in common than a few syllables.

In the valley below the place with the post office, which once had been pretty, the scars of old rough-cut clearance were growing new coats of healthy trees. A little white church and a few headstones stood alone there, overlooking the wealth of empty silence in a long, narrow valley. Nobody was about. Mary hoped that Gerry would get to rest somewhere like that, decent and forgotten. She wanted to forget him and intended to, instantly, as soon as the return bus hit Pittsburgh.

She glanced at Shelagh, who was humming the aimless repeated phrase of a chart song, her dreamy gaze focused inwardly on Mack, no doubt; Mack of the surveyor's building downtown, who had to stay in the office over the weekend and was going to pay for their wedding on a loan he'd work off for the next three years. Mack and Shelagh were going to have children (raise a family, as Shelagh put it) and settle down to obscure deaths on carefully paid-up Medical Plans, which Mack would have already set in place at some pathetic weekly rate of pay under the names Mr. and Mrs. M. Smith. Shelagh had Gerry stamped in her soul.

Mary looked at her sister with suppressed anger and resentment,
with a pity that robbed her of the power of speech. She felt the same when she looked at her mother, her father, their house and their neighbourhood with its credit-card debt and its small-time dreams and its grinding sense of dead ends, as though everyone who'd come to live there was the losing player in a game where they'd never figured out the rules. She wanted to forget them all.

The bus came to a halt at last with a toad's-death croak of brakes, and Mary and Shelagh stepped out for the first time onto the steaming hot asphalt of Centralia, Pennsylvania. The journey had taken almost a day and they were exhausted and aching, but they forgot that in the first moment that they set eyes on the place: Centralia had burned out, big-style and long ago, and it was still burning.

Aware of the danger it was in, the bus hastily turned around and left them on the town's edge, where a large yellow sign advised: Public Notice—Danger from Subsidence and Toxic Gases, State Liability Ends Past This Point. Two black cars were parked a little further along beside an empty space where the church of St. Ignatius had stood, before it was torn down for its own safety. Anxiously waiting were the rest of the family, who'd travelled up to stay for a few days, and the priest. Mary saw them jigging from foot to foot on the scalding earth, their figures mere shadows wreathed in flitting smoke as the listless breeze sent sulphur vapour and other poisons on a tour of the town.

There were no buildings at all. Mary looked across the cracked tarmac and then across a narrow slot of grass, pitted with holes where smoke and steam rose. The grass was nearly all dead. By the church's old site the blackened and bleached trunks of birches leaned sideways in all directions and Mary saw that the gravestones had nearly all fallen and been absorbed into the fire below.

She knew then that she could do whatever she wanted in her life and not have to feel guilty. The dues had already been paid in this wasteland through the immolated lives of the living dead.

Shelagh took a tentative step towards the others and Mary followed
her into the stinking steam. She tucked her face behind her coat collar, pretending not to like the egg-reeking smell but really hiding the fact from the others that she was grinning fiercely from ear to ear.

After the very brief ceremony, and the subsequent undignified and hasty exit from hell, Mary found herself taking a liking to the area, although her plans to go skiing and whitewater rafting there would never come to anything. At the lawyer's offices in Mount Carmel she found to her surprise that Gerry had left her something personal, something of his own, besides the insurance and compensation payouts from the gas company that were going to send her to college. She received it by post a few days later on her return to Charlottesville—a small, lead-crystal replica of the space shuttle
Columbia
, the one and only remaining element of Gerry's once-powerful ambition.

She kept it close always.

Ian was a casual believer leading a relatively unexamined life. He attended church three times, once when he was christened, once when he was married, and at his parents' funeral. His own small family of self, wife Dervla, and daughter Christine struggled most of the time against debts for the car and the house and a yearly holiday. But they didn't struggle too hard and by the time he was forty Ian had paid off most of his troubles except for a vague dissatisfaction with life that religion might palliate but wouldn't solve. He didn't want a sop for his soul. He wanted something more permanent and genuine. Sometimes he lay awake as Dervla snored quietly at his side, thinking, trying to figure out if there was more to life than market-town living somewhere out beyond the galactic rim of Halifax, Huddersfield, Batley, and Dewsbury where his building work took him on regular tours of lives like his own.

Ian drank a bit. He liked an occasion. He wanted to find something that he could only describe as “grand.” “Grand” was a day out at the seaside of his boyhood, kite in hand on the beach, running in the thin surf and splashing his legs with icy salt water as the kite string tugged him on, up, towards the sky.

Dervla watched television. Soaps mostly. She had a life inside the box, Ian always said. He'd come in from work and find her glued to it, making tea or ironing, her movements dreamy, remote-controlled. He
couldn't get into that stuff. It was simply more of the same that he'd already had. House and car, buy the shopping, out with the lads on Friday and Saturday, rugby on the Sunday, a fortnight in Lanzarote, watching his belly grow year after year, inch by inch, keeping the books and putting up and pulling down pieces of homes; he tried to understand what it meant, because it had to mean something.

Christine liked to read. When Dervla watched the screen Christine had her face stuck between the pages, pushing her glasses up her nose with regular, precise movements of her index finger every two or three minutes. She told him all about her books. Fairies and elves, pixies and witches, some boy who was a wizard and had adventures at school. Ian didn't understand her either, although he thought he understood that both of them, each in their own way, was trying to fill in that vague empty place inside, the one they'd brought with them from wherever they came from, the one that never had quite enough.

When he was a lad Ian had wanted to be an astronaut, or fly a hang-glider—something that took you out there where freedom was. One wet Wednesday night, when Dervla was at her sister's, he saw a documentary on climbing Everest without oxygen. A reporter asked the man, “Why did you go up there to die?”

Dervla would say that.

“I didn't, I went up there to live.”

Ian wanted to be the person who would say
that.
As soon as he heard it said, he knew that the man on the mountain was filling up the dissatisfaction with real, solid stuff. Ian wanted to be a better, braver, more useful person. Someone who could say, “I have lived.”

Meanwhile, outside in the rain, the gales were only warming up to their night's performance, lashing the windows and bending his cypresses into sickles of writhing green. Tonight a slate will break and slip.

Tomorrow Ian will get out the ladders and climb up to fix it. The rain will make the slates and their slimy load of lime-tree sap as slippery as an ice rink.

Ian's used to roofs. But tomorrow he'll be thinking about climbing Everest as he reaches the top of the ladder and tests the guttering's mettle before trusting his feet to the tiles. The first slip is the failure of a crampon in the ice. Has he the resolve to continue in such harsh conditions? The camera crew and narrator standing behind him relay their feeble doubts to the awestruck audiences in a million homes. Ian sticks to the task.

The audience gasp at his daring.

As Ian places the slate and reaches for a new pin to hold it down, he's really fixing a bucking tent to the sheer North Face in a howling gale. Mallory's ghost has risen from its rocky cairn to give Ian a thump on the back for his courage in the teeth of the storm.

As it happens, however, Ian will place a foot on a mossy chunk stuck between two slates, lean down, and then feel a huge crevasse open up beneath him.

As he falls he'll look up and think, “I wish I—”