Midmorning I called around the hospitals to ask about unidentified admissions. They told me to contact Missing Persons, but that would be a job for Patricia if it came to it. Instead, I searched the Internet for Peter. I sought him here. I sought him there. But he eluded me. There were so many Peter Whites, enough to fill a football stadium, and although I peered among their ranks, I could not find the distinguishing mark that would identify my own. Nor was I surprised. Peter had given me his views on social media, on “maintaining an online presence” during a stroll by the river a few years before.
“You’ve heard of Bentham?”
“’Fraid not, Peter.”
“He was one of those eighteenth-century types. Did a bit of everything, philosophy, law, social reform. When he died, they stuffed him and put him on display at UCL.”
“Seems a bit harsh.”
“Oh, it was what he wanted.”
The Thames hurried past like a man on urgent business. The rain and wind were coming every whichaway and had deterred most other strollers. I had come out without an umbrella, so Peter was trying to shield both of us with his.
“I think you’re digressing. Tell me how Bentham has prevented you from posting updates about your cats on Facebook,” I said. “Mittens seems a bit sad today. Or, Mittens stole my sandwich.”
“Jeremy had a dream. It was for a prison. But being a progressive, kindhearted man, Bentham shied away from the kind of dungeon intended to either kill you or terrify you into behaving yourself for the rest of your life. He envisioned a Panopticon Penitentiary, a prison built in such a way that the inmates would all be visible from a central watch post, but would be unable to tell if they were being watched. They might be being watched all the time; they might not be watched at all. He believed that even the possibility of being observed would change the behavior of even the most hardened of sinners. He said it was a new mode of obtaining power over people in a quantity ‘hitherto without example.’ But even his ambitions pale into insignificance now.”
“Not even LinkedIn, Peter? It’s for business.” He shuddered visibly. We were both wet. There were tiny droplets on his glasses, and his face was gleaming not only from the rain but with the come-to-life quality he took on when speaking about something he was interested in. I didn’t quite believe him, was sure there was a Romeo or Grindr account somewhere with his profile picture on it, if not his name. But perhaps not. For some reason, I found myself thinking of Peter’s angel.
By lunchtime, my insides hurt, as though something within me was rupturing, perhaps the place in which I kept the past safely lidded. I gave up on getting anything done. Instead, I googled Jeremy Bentham and read that along with his other achievements, he had coined the term “deep play,” which he defined as a game with stakes so high that no rational person would engage in it. There was a portrait of him, a fleshy man, with shoulder-length white hair and a bald pate. His face wore the expression of someone eminently capable of filling heavy books of tissue-thin paper with minuscule print, the kind that with a pistol pressed against your head and forced to choose, you’d rather eat than read.
The news websites were full of atrocities and celebrities. There was more about the endless rain, and on a couple of sites these stories ran side by side with updates on the latest leaks, as though there was a connection between them, the falling rain, and the drip of confidential information about offshore bank accounts and secret payments and highly prominent world figures. It was all there, from tax avoidance by famous actors known for their public moralizing, to billion-dollar money laundering schemes run on behalf of criminal empires. And the corruption and embezzlement and outright theft were on such dizzying scales that the celebrity articles were a relief, a mildly poisonous anesthesia with which I tried to obliterate the feeling of helplessness.
I sought to lose myself in clicking, like a child following bread crumbs in the forest, not even looking for Peter anymore, but still possessed by the sense that I was somehow following a trail, a trail with an end to it. And I thought that perhaps that was what everything in my life had in common: work, and buying things, and going to the gym, and eating meals, and looking at things on the Internet, that they felt like necessary work, resulting in progress toward an unspecified goal.
I bought a coat, some cosmetics, a pair of flip-flops, a bottle of high-end vitamins, spending £400 before I knew what I was doing. I accidentally saw a photo of a man moments before his beheading, eyes wide, head pulled back. And so the day passed.
Everyone else started to go home. Nothing had been achieved. I had a trapped and hopeless feeling. The last thing I watched, before finally leaving around seven, were a few unboxing videos. I had stumbled on this particular series a while ago. They were oddly calming. In each one, a pair of smooth white hands, employing a small pair of scissors and occasionally a craft knife, opened a package containing a desirable consumer item, usually something electronic. The unboxing was always done against the background of a blue cloth and the maker of the video had added an unobtrusive soundtrack, over which the occasional small sigh could be heard when the pair of hands encountered an obstacle—a particularly resistant flap or bit of tape. The process was neither rushed nor unduly lingered over. In each video, the sequence happened in the same order: First the exterior packaging was opened and discarded, then any accompanying information, instructions, and so forth were extracted and held up to the camera, then came the turn of the accessories—chargers, batteries, and so forth—if they existed. Finally, the interior packaging was inspected and the product itself withdrawn, cleared of any protective sleeves and displayed by the hands from each angle. And every time, when the moment finally came, I wondered if the hundreds of thousands of other people who watched these videos felt the same as I did, the same anticipation, the same surprise, and ultimately the same disappointment—that what was inside the box was just a thing.
CHAPTER 6
APOCALYPSE III
I could say it gave me a moment’s pause, going back out to the manor on my own to meet David, but that would be a lie. I was sour at the others for leaving me to spend the apocalypse with my mother, as though they had conspired to make my worst nightmare come true—me and my mother, the last people on earth, locked in battle.
She called out my name a couple of times. Her voice was plaintive. I was in the bathroom, door bolted, and didn’t answer. Soon she went away. I didn’t want to fight with her, but I just couldn’t find it inside myself, a kind word, a peace offering of any sort, even as I forced myself to think that it was the last chance I would ever have. Later, when I found out she’d eaten all the bread from the bread bin, a whole loaf that I had bought and paid for because she spent most of her giro on cans, I would be glad.
I ran a bath and slipped into the water. It was lukewarm and three inches deep. I got a washcloth and ran it over myself, climbed out and fought my hair back into a plait while looking in the bit of mirror we kept propped against the window, and in which I saw only pieces of myself, rubber lips, small chin, round grayish eyes. In the pane I could see a second reflection, whole, colorless, a mere outline superimposed over the field. In the twilight the barley was fawn and swaying where the breeze touched it. I waited there, watching, and it seemed that they were playing, the barley bowing to the breeze, the breeze gusting then abating. When it was gone, the barley seemed to wait, to tremble for it. It was like watching lovers.